During my eight year assignment in Silicon Valley, I had the opportunity to meet former San Francisco City Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver. Silver served in San Francisco City Hall from 1978 to 1989 and served with Supervisor Harvey Milk. Silver was a fearless political ally of Milk and she has a role in the Milk biopic.
Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by fellow Supervisor Dan White in 1978 and Silver escaped the same fate as she was away from City Hall at a morning meeting. In 2014, I interviewed Silver and, later, reviewed her civil rights memoir, Freedom Rider Diary, for the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Freedom-Rider-Diary-by-Carol-Ruth-Silver-5256987.php) after its release in 2014. The memoir is about Silver being jailed as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi in 1961. I highly commend Silver’s book so readers can learn of her important activist role in America’s civil rights struggle.
From my interviews and conversations with Silver, I learned she is fearless. Silver, a young United Nations staffer in the spring of 1961, made the fateful and fearless decision to join the Freedom Rides to racially segregated Jackson, Miss. Silver took time away from work and school to help desegregate buses, bus terminals and restrooms in Mississippi. Before she left, she told me, she signed a legal Last Will and Testament leaving her possessions, “mostly books,” to her mom.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional segregation of public facilities serving interstate transportation. Mississippi ignored the law. Fearless Carol Ruth Silver and other Freedom Riders traveled to Southern states to desegregate these facilities.
In Jackson, Miss., as expected, Silver and other Freedom Riders were arrested and sent to the dreaded Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, 130 miles away in northwestern Mississippi. Silver, who served 40 days at Parchman, relates being called the “white n-word” and other harrowing experiences in her remarkable memoir.
In 1961, I was an elementary student in a segregated Alabama school. My father, a Korean War veteran, served with the Alabama National Guard at two of the nation’s most historic civil rights events. In June 1963, Dad served at the integration of the University of Alabama.
Then-Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace defied an order by President John F. Kennedy to stay away from the registration of two Alabama African American students at the Tuscaloosa campus. Kennedy feared violence by the vicious Alabama Ku Klux Klan if Wallace went to the school to physically bar the students from registering. Facing hundreds of Alabama Guardsmen, Wallace moved away and segregation died a bit that day.
In March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson federalized the entire Alabama Guard for the third Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Due to my dad’s service with the Alabama Guard, I have a role as a reporter in the Golden Globe and Academy Award winning 2015 movie Selma.
As a youth in Alabama in the 1960s, I know firsthand how fearless and needed Carol Ruth Silver and the Freedom Riders were in the spring of 1961. Thanks to the fearless Freedom Riders segregation entered a terminal spiral.
Not long ago, during a business trip to New York, I went to the recently installed Fearless Girl statue at Bowling Green in the Financial District. I stood with a photograph of Fearless Carol Ruth Silver and stood with Fearless Girl for the accompanying photograph. I sent Silver a copy of the photo and she told me she is “showing it to everyone.”
Fearless Girl faces the famous Charging Bull of Wall Street. The statue was commissioned to challenge girls to leadership positions in business. The plaque with Fearless Girl reads: “Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference.”
Fearless Carol Ruth Silver, born in Boston and educated at the University of Chicago, made a big difference in Mississippi and across the racially segregated South by being a Freedom Rider. She made a big difference in the lives of many including me. I am forever grateful to the Fearless Carol Ruth Silver who, with her memoir, continues to make a difference in the lives of her readers.
Former San Francisco resident Jim Patterson is a member of the California State Society, a life member of the American Foreign Service Association, and a senior reviewer for the National Book Critics Circle. He writes from Washington DC. JEPDiplomat@gmail.com
