Dr. Todd Lawrence, a professor at the University of St. Thomas College of Arts and Sciences, recently was quoted in The Washington Post regarding the Freedom Rides Museum. The building is currently owned by the federal government. In the process of reducing spending, DOGE placed the building on a list of buildings that could be sold as they were “not core to government operations.”
From the story:
The bus station’s “colored entrance” has vanished: door bricked over, scattered holes where a sign once hung. Though standing just inches away on the sidewalk, the students might not have even noticed it, had the museum director not highlighted the “ghost of segregation.”
The building, he explained, was telling them a story.
Some clues were more obvious. On a wall beside the high-schoolers, dozens of mug shots stared back. These were Freedom Riders, Alexander Strickland told the group, and most of those who came here in 1961 were only a few years older than the teens. Yet they drafted their wills before boarding buses heading south to protest segregated seating and services in interstate travel. ...
The Freedom Rides Museum draws visitors from across the country. On a sunny Thursday last month, David Todd Lawrence was back for a ninth year. Lawrence, an associate professor who teaches African American literature and culture, brought students from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. As always, the goal was to turn abstract lessons about racism into concrete experiences in places “where things actually happened,” he said.
