February Breakfast Meeting Keynoter:
Dr. Ernest "Rip" Patton, Jr.
Will You Get on the Bus?
Hear Dr. Patton’s first-person account of his landmark historical role as a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s, when a group of courageous young people made history.
““The jailers would tell us to cut out the singing, using different words I can’t use here,” Patton explained. “And we said ‘what are you going to do, put us in jail? So we would sing a different verse, ‘Better get you ready, oh yes,’ and then ‘They are coming from Nashville, oh yes.’ It was a message to the authorities to get ready, more were coming.”
More than 50 years ago, Rip Patton, a 21-year-old college student, joined with 12 other young people to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Just a few hours later, Patton got off the bus in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was arrested.
This group, later to become known as the Freedom Riders, were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the then-segregated southern United States. Their purpose was to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in all interstate public facilities, such as bus stations, which often had separate drinking fountains, restrooms and lunch counters for blacks and whites.
Patton, a Tennessee State University (TSU) student, was the drum major in the University marching band when he became involved in the “Nashville Student Movement.” The Movement was a nonviolent civil disobedience group who participated in sit-ins at lunch counters and stand-ins at movie theaters. When the bus rides began, Patton traveled to Montgomery to help reinforce the riders after the firebombing and siege of Montgomery's First Baptist Church.
In Jackson, Patton was taken to the city jail and eventually transferred to Mississippi’s Parchman State Prison Farm. In total, Patton spent 39 days behind bars.
Following the Freedom Rides, Patton worked as a jazz musician, and later as a long-distance truck driver and community leader. Since his recent retirement, Rip Patton has received several honorary doctoral degrees, including one from his original school, Tennessee State University.