It was good to see Lula White again, on a recent morning at the New Haven Free Public Library.
I first met her at her home in Hamden in 2004 after somebody alerted me that a "Freedom Rider" was living in our area.
Picture this: at age 22 she got on a bus with a small group of other brave, idealistic and determined people and rode into the deep South to protest segregation laws.
She didn't tell her father she was going because she knew that "like most parents, he would not want me to risk my life. Later he told me, 'You should let boys do things like that.' I asked him, 'What if there aren't enough boys to do it?'"
White rode down into Mississippi in the summer of 1961, when "Freedom Riders" were being beaten by angry white mobs for speaking up on behalf of oppressed black people. Before they even got to Jackson, Miss., White's group had their bus surrounded by a large crowd of white men, who shouted at them and rocked the vehicle.
"We didn't know what would happen if the bus got turned over," she told me. Imagine that. Imagine being on that bus.
But the mob did not succeed in toppling the bus and the group continued to Jackson, where another mob awaited them. White and the eight others walked off that bus and walked past that mob and strode into the bus station, into a room that said "white only." (Despite her name, White is black.) And the police took them away and to jail, for "breach of peace."
She was behind bars for two months, having food slid into her cell. She was allowed out of that cell only to take a shower, which was carefully timed. Imagine that.
White was at our library on a recent Monday to promote a new book called "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders." It was written by Eric Etheridge, who had never heard of Lula White until after he finished the book.
But Etheridge will be in New Haven Oct. 29 for a luncheon fund-raiser to benefit the library. That night, at 6 p.m., he and White will be among the panelists at the library for a "civic engagement conversation" which is free and open to the public.
The idea is to encourage other people, including youths, to take a stand the way Lula White did in 1961. Find a cause and make a difference.
During her remarks at the library Oct. 6, White said that recounting her "Freedom Rider" days "reminds me of a time when I was more hopeful. I thought things would change drastically and quickly. But that's not the way things work."
She does not mean to discourage anybody, however. She wants people to get out there and do something.