Convictions of Four Freedom Riders Overturned by Orange County After 75 Years

While more people may remember the Freedom Riders of 1961, 16 civil rights activists helped set the blueprint for the demonstrations against Jim Crow laws in the South a few years earlier in 1947. On Friday, decades-old punishments in Orange County against four of those activists were rescinded.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour formally vacated charges against members of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, who faced violence and arrests in Chapel Hill while journeying through the community. Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, Andrew Johnson and Joseph Felmet no longer have convictions for Disorderly Conduct based on their refusal to move from the front of a bus traveling from state to state.

The quartet and other Freedom Riders set out in 1947 to test the enforcement of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation on interstate travel unconstitutional by riding buses in different seats. The goal was to During their trip through cities in North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, the Black and white riders were often met with racism, resistance and occasionally violence. But none more so than an afternoon in Chapel Hill.

“We failed these men in Orange County, in Chapel Hill,” said judge Allen Baddour. “We failed their cause and we failed to deliver justice in our community. And for that, I apologize. So we’re doing this today to right a wrong, in public and on the record because these offenses, these events happened all over the country and very little documented evidence of the court process exists. I do not want to erase history, but we must shine a light on it.”

The June 17, 2022 program praised the activism and efforts of those four men, as well as the other Freedom Riders, while posthumously clearing their names in the Orange County records. Some surviving family members and friends of the four men joined the ceremony, both in-person and virtually.