Minister inspired Freedom Riders
GEORGE HOUSER 1916-2015
George Houser, a white Methodist minister who helped lead an interracial bus trip across the segregated South in 1947, an act of nonviolent resistance that years later inspired the better known Freedom Rides that stirred the civil-rights movement, died Aug. 19 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 99.
He had congestive heart failure, said his son Steven Houser.
Houser was a pacifist and civil-rights activist who advocated racial equality across decades and continents. His seminary studies were interrupted by one of his first acts of peaceful protest: He declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to register for the draft during the Second World War. For that offence, he spent a year and a day in jail, his son said.
As a young activist, Houser joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization promoting peace and social justice. He later joined other black and white activists in founding the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, in 1942.
CORE became — along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee — a key institution in the movement for civil rights.
Among CORE’s most dramatic early actions was the bus trip designed in large part by Houser and Bayard Rustin, the activist who later became a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
They envisioned the trip shortly after the landmark 1946 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Irene Morgan, a black woman who was ordered to surrender her seat to a white person on a bus en route from Virginia to Maryland. Years would pass before the arrest of Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama
In Morgan v. Virginia — argued by future justice Thurgood Marshall, among other lawyers — the court ruled segregation on interstate transportation to be unconstitutional. Enforcement of the ruling was uncertain, however, particularly in the Jim Crow South.
Along with Rustin, Houser set out to test compliance with the ruling by organizing a group of 16 travellers, including eight blacks and eight whites, on a trip across several Southern states.
Houser regarded the issue of segregated transit as one of fundamental importance. It “touched virtually every black person, was demeaning in its effect and a source of frequent conflict,” he once observed, according to the book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by historian Raymond Arsenault.
Houser and Rustin laid the groundwork for the trip by arranging the route and recruiting NAACP and other activists to help the riders in case of difficulty.