75 years later, a niece sees justice through for a Freedom Rider in NC

As a child, Amy Zowniriw’s uncle got arrested a lot. It first happened in the early 1940s, when he was a conscientious objector to World War II.

“He kind of wore it like a badge of honor,” Zowniriw says of her uncle, civil rights activist Igal Roodenko. “When you’re fighting for the right thing, you have to do some sacrificing, and he was willing to sacrifice.”

The second occurred in Chapel Hill in 1947. That was the year that Roodenko, Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin, and 14 other men sat next to each other on a bus traveling from Washington D.C. through four southern states. Half of the men were Black; half were white.

And on Friday afternoon in 2022, Roodenko, Rustin, and two other men had their convictions vacated by an Orange County judge. Roodenko, who died in 1991, was represented by his niece. Rustin, who died in 1987, was represented by his partner Walter Neagle over Zoom.

“Today’s hearing is perhaps the beginning of the effort to mitigate the damage to the human fabric,” Neagle told the room, the same one where his partner was sentenced 75 years prior.

The two-hour ceremony was held as the kickoff for Orange County’s weekend of Juneteenth celebrations. The idea for it came about last year, when the 60th anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Rides were commemorated. LaTarndra Strong, the president of the Northern Orange NAACP, said she didn’t know if the judicial process would actually take place when County Commissioner Renee Price came to her with the idea. When it did, she decided to learn more about the four men who were arrested.

“[They] are still teaching change agents today, and will forever teach generations of change agents,” Strong told the families.

While the 1961 Freedom Rides are well-known for the violence the activists were met with, they were not the first of their kind. The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, which went through Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina, took place directly after interstate buses were ordered to desegregate by the U.S. Supreme Court. The four arrests in Chapel Hill came when the group was getting ready to leave for another location, and angry cab drivers surrounded the car. Chapel Hill wasn’t the only place they were arrested; it was, however, the only city where their cases went through the court system, and their sentences were eventually upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue offered an apology from the department for their role in the event, as did Judge Allan Baddour on behalf of the court system. Part of why the convictions were vacated, instead of going to the governor for a pardon, was that Baddour found it important for the justice system to remedy the wrong it had caused.

Rustin was sentenced to 30 days on a chain gang; his journal entries about the experience were eventually published and influenced Rosa Parks and the 1961 Freedom Riders. Judge Henry Whitfield, noting that Roodenko was Jewish, decided he was more culpable than his Black counterparts; he was given 90 days instead of 30.

“Well, it’s about time you Jews from New York learned that you can’t come down bringing your [n-words] with you to upset the customs of the South,” Whitfield said during the first trial.

Zowniriw was born eight years after the incident, and says she didn’t truly comprehend what had happened in this arrest or others until she was around 11 years old. As an adult, she knew that the best way to honor her uncle was to be in Chapel Hill, giving a speech, the same way he did countless times in life. To her, Roodenko was more than a hero and ally in the fight for Civil Rights; he was Uncle Igal, her playmate who owned a print shop in New York City, who sent her postcards from his travels, who had a great recipe for blue cheese dressing.

“He was a mensch,” Zowniriw told me. “It’s a Yiddish word for a really great guy.”