Jerome Smith, Freedom Rider Who Challenged Robert Kennedy, Dies at 87

By Penelope Green, New York times

He castigated Robert F. Kennedy for failing to protect civil rights activists, forcing the attorney general to reckon with the depth of Black anger.

Jerome Smith, who as a young Freedom Rider in 1961 was jailed and beaten for his efforts to desegregate transportation in the South, and who excoriated Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for not doing enough to protect him and the other riders during that harrowing year, died on Aug. 21 at his home in New Orleans. He was 87.

His daughter Farin Smith said the cause was cancer.

When the first Freedom Riders set forth in early May 1961, Mr. Smith was 21 and had dropped out of Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., to devote himself to the Congress of Racial Equality, the civil rights organization known as CORE.

It had been 15 years since the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated seating on interstate buses was unconstitutional. Yet the Southern states had largely ignored the decision. CORE organized a series of Freedom Rides — beginning with teams of Black and white activists who would travel by bus from Washington to New Orleans — to put the ruling to the test, challenging the federal government to finally enforce it.

Mr. Smith — who was stuck in jail in New Orleans, having been arrested after participating in a lunch-counter sit-in — was unable to join the first ride.

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On May 24, Mr. Smith, finally released from jail, boarded a Greyhound bus in Montgomery, Ala., for a ride to Jackson, Miss., where he was promptly arrested.

Continue reading about Smith’s life.

Learn more about other activists and organizations who fought for equal rights.

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