By Reginald Stuart
When Pauline Knight was a student at Nashville’s Pearl High School and later at what was then known as Tennessee A & I State College, she never dreamed she would one day be recognized as a history-making icon of her generation.
She only knew she was unhappy about the racial segregation that permeated every aspect of life for the city and region’s Black people in her young generation in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Somewhere along the line, Knight decided feelings and talk about the racial barriers was not enough.
At age 21, Knight, then a junior at TSU, decided to do more to try to change what she saw and felt. She joined a determined group of TSU classmates and students from other colleges to peacefully protest. Known as the Freedom Riders. they boarded Greyhound and Trailways buses in Nashville destined for New Orleans and points in between to test whether state and local governments were honoring a U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring racial discrimination in interstate commerce.
The South was not to surrender its racial laws peacefully, as Knight and her fellow students learned. They were met by angry mobs of white protesters trying to stop their travels, local law enforcement officers who arrested and jailed them and expulsion from Tennessee State.
“I never understood what ‘called’ me, but I felt I had to do something,” Knight said in a 2008 interview about her participation in the Freedom Rides. “I didn’t ask to go,” she said, recalling she simply told her parents one day she was leaving and would not be back that evening. “I simply said `I am a Freedom Rider today.’ It was bigger than me.”
The Freedom Riders’ efforts succeeded after many rides, arrests and jailings. Knight and the other 13 TSU students expelled eventually regained admission to TSU after attorneys Z. Alexander Looby and Avon Williams filed suit on their behalf seeking reinstatement.
In 2008, TSU moved to `right’ what then TSU President Melvin Johnson called a “wrong.” The university and its supporters persuaded a reluctant Tennessee Board of Regents to honor the students with honorary doctorate degrees in humane letters from TSU, signaling the institution’s acknowledgment of the good for society of the actions by Knight, by then Pauline Knight Ofosu, and her peers. Ofosu wept wit joy before and after the honors program.
Pauline Knight Ofosu died Monday near her home in Rex, Georgia. She was 73.
“She came across as one of the most serious people in the movement,” said Congressman John Lewis who came to know Knight as a fellow Freedom Rider. “She was focused, steady, dependable, reliable,” said Lewis who said Knight was “always a lady in the way she carried herself, the way she spoke.”
“She was willing to go the last mile to help, especially the young,” said Dr. William “Bill” Harbour, one of the TSU Freedom Riders. Harbour, once a cell mate for more than a month of then student activist now Congressman Lewis, remained a close friend of Ofosu till death. In recent years, they had teamed up for talks about the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, Harbour said.
TSU history professor Elizabeth McClain, who knew Ofosu and participated in the historic `sit-ins’ in Nashville, characterized her as “ a beautiful person, daring, once she made up her mind it was something she had to.” McClain also helped in the effort to secure honorary degrees for all 21 TSU students who participated in the Freedom Rides.
Mary Jane Smith, one of the TSU Freedom Riders who was also honored with a doctorate, said many of the students honored in the 2008 ceremony used the occasion to renew their friendships.
“We have all been able to stay in touch since 2008…like we had never been apart all these years,” said Smith, referring to the fact that many of the original group of TSU Freedom Riders had not seen one another in years before the TSU event. “Pauline was about one of the sweetest people I know,” said Smith. “She was part of our family. She had a way with words that could move you.”
In her 2008 interview for The Tennessee Tribune, Ofuoso said she felt a mix of happiness and sadness.
“I’m happy history will record this event,” Ofosu said. “But, I’m still concerned I’ve never seen this many people hungry and this many people in the streets. I can’t understand our wealth and how people are treated. We’ve come a long way and yet we have to straighten p our act so we can go a little bit further.”
Ofosu, who had lived in Rex, Georgia since 1997, said in 2008 her visit to her home town (Nashville) was her first since 1961. During her career she held several positions with the federal government before retiring in 1994. Close friends say they understood she was to be cremated and they knew of no plans for a funeral.