Yolanda Beckett, who spent time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement as a Freedom Rider and has spent her life fighting for equality, is coming to Port Washington this weekend to speak about those experiences.
Temple Beth Israel will host Beckett for a conversation on Sunday to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The event will be held at the temple and will begin at 10:15 a.m.
“It’s living history,” said Bob Epstein, who organized the event for the temple.
It is the second time that the temple has hosted a speaker involved in the Civil Rights Movement. A year ago, Temple Beth Israel held a similar event with a man who marched at Selma. Epstein said the event was well-received, and he wanted to do it again this year.
His meeting with Beckett was a complete accident. Epstein, who works at the Bronx district attorney’s office, met Beckett because she was a victim of a crime. Through the people she met at the DA’s office, Beckett was invited to speak at an event in the Bronx in January 2017. Epstein attended and immediately invited her to speak at the temple the next year.
“She’s a very powerful speaker and she was really enthusiastic about coming,” he said.
Beckett grew up in Atlanta and attended Morris Brown College. After graduating, she helped to train other civil rights activists in nonviolent tactics. After that, she chose to become a Freedom Rider.
The Freedom Riders traveled on interstate buses to provoke the federal government into enforcing the rulings of Morgan v. Virginia and Boynton v. Virginia, which said that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. Despite these rulings, many Southern states continued to segregate buses and the federal government was unwilling to challenge that.
As Epstein noted, this was a very dangerous undertaking.
“She put her life on the line a few times because speaking out then could be pretty dangerous,” he said. “The police in the South let mobs attack the buses and injure the riders.”
The rides lasted throughout the summer of 1961 and brought the enforcement of desegregation on public transportation in November of that year.
Beckett moved to New York City in 1967, Epstein said, where she worked for the New York City Human Resources Administration until 2002.
Epstein hoped the event would be a learning experience.
“I think she can teach people about tolerance,” he said. “I think the kids will see her as somebody who has come out of a situation where she was exposed to a lot of hate for no other reason than the color of her skin and came out of it feeling hopeful. People can learn to embrace their differences. She doesn’t have anger and bitterness from her experiences.”
Epstein does not yet have a civil rights event planned for 2019 but said he would like to continue hosting these events around MLK Day.
“I want to continue to do this because we’ve had such a good response,” he said. “It teaches the values that we want to instill in our younger folks.”
