Lydia Almarez thought she knew about the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. 

The Mt. San Antonio College student said her mother told her stories about the racial injustice of the 1950s and 60s when she was growing up, but watching a screening of the documentary “Freedom Riders” Tuesday night brought those stories to life for her.

“Very emotional,” she said of her reaction to the film.  “I thought I knew what they went through. I thought I had an understanding of what they went through. I had no idea.”

The live viewing party at the American Red Cross building across from Cal Poly Pomona was one of numerous similar events nationwide and three in California, said Danica Tisdale Fisher of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Tisdale Fisher’s husband, Damany Fisher, a Mt. SAC history professor, hosted the viewing.  The college’s ASPIRE Club also helped to organize the event.

He said after the film that his hope was to show his students the power of a movement, especially one where youth sacrificed their lives for change.

“There is power in organization. There is power in the collective struggle and unity,” he said.  “They too can be a catalyst for change. They too can apply pressure to elected officials.”

The screening of the PBS program included a USTREAM panel discussion from Howard University in Washington D.C. with several Freedom Riders moderated by Children’s Defense Fund founder and president Marian Wright Edelman. The event was to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1961 bus and train rides black and white youth took through the South to protest segregation.

The riders, most of them college students, were beaten, pelted with tear gas, and jailed for riding together on buses and trains through the Deep South for six months. When one group was jailed, another took to the roadways and railways in their place until more than 300 filled one prison in Mississippi. 

The two-hour documentary is based on Raymond Arsenault’s book “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” Both the book and the film show how the non-violent Freedom Riders, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, forced President John F. Kennedy and his administration to take notice of the injustices taking place through their protests.  Kennedy, new in office, was focused on the Cold War at the time and paid little attention to the inequalities of Jim Crow.

“It became clear that the civil rights leaders had to do something desperate, something dramatic to get Kennedy’s attention,” Arsenault said in the film.  “That was the idea behind the Freedom Rides – to dare the federal government to do what it was supposed to do, and see if their constitutional rights would be protected by the Kennedy administration.”

Some of the Freedom Riders also were not shy about criticizing the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The youth met with King on several occasions and wanted him to join them on the rides, but the civil right leader declined.  Several interviewed in the film cited several possible reasons why he didn’t go on the rides from safety concerns to probation issues.

Mt. SAC history professor Hal Hoffman said while King and Kennedy are often heralded for their role in the movement, the Freedom Riders deserve more credit than they typically get.  Hoffman, who has taught at the college for 20 years, said he was moved by their fearlessness.

“I thought ‘could I put myself in front of an angry crowd?’  I am not sure I could put myself on the line,” he said.

Fellow history professor Ralph Spaulding, who has taught at Mt. SAC for 42 years, said he remembers watching the accounts of the freedom rides on the news when he was a high school sophomore.

The film made Spaulding think of his father, who was involved in protest marches related to racial strife in his native San Francisco.

“As a white businessman, he had everything to lose and nothing to gain,” Spaulding said.  “This was moving, moving, moving stuff.”

Pat Cici, a history major at Mt. SAC and Cal State Fullerton, served five years in the U.S. Marines.  He compared the Freedom Riders, many of whom prepared their wills before boarding the buses, to soldiers readying themselves for war.

“They were like soldiers preparing for the D-Day invasion,” he said.  “I saw them as like the military out there fighting a war they needed to fight when nobody else would.”