{"id":2313,"date":"2011-05-20T15:22:32","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T19:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/?p=2313"},"modified":"2011-05-20T19:05:16","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T23:05:16","slug":"letters-to-the-lab-from-a-freedom-rider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/?p=2313","title":{"rendered":"Letters to the Lab from a Freedom Rider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m taking a side trip from parapsychology today.  I watched a documentary on PBS the other night about the Freedom Riders.  I learned so much that I hadn&#8217;t known before, and I am now even more impressed by what they did.  They were just so mind-blowingly courageous.<\/p>\n<p>I bring this up because while I was researching the Lab&#8217;s archives at the Special Collections Library at Duke, I came across some letters between Gaither Pratt, one of the scientists at the lab, and his son Joe, who was a freedom rider.  Just 19 years old, Joe joined the Freedom Riders and was one of the people arrested in Mississippi and who spent more than a month in Parchman Prison, an experience I now know a lot more about.  It was not pretty.  I think it&#8217;s even more impressive when people like Joe, who was raised in the south, in a segregated state, got on those buses.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dear Joe, We had begun to despair of hearing directly from you,<\/em> one letter began.  <\/p>\n<p>A desperate father, Gaither had even written the prison and offered to take his son&#8217;s place.  But on the whole, Gaither doesn&#8217;t say much.  He&#8217;d learned that his letters weren&#8217;t getting through, so he had written accordingly.  <em>&#8220;I hope you appreciate the fact that I&#8217;ve been speaking carefully to make certain you get this,&#8221;<\/em> he said at the end of one.  In a letter to his other children he wrote how <em>&#8220;people like Joe are suffering a lot personally to make the rest of us wake up to the fact that a lot of our citizens are regularly denied the rights of citizenship.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I just wanted to note this.  You raised good kids, Mr. and Mrs. Pratt.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/Pratts.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/Pratts.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Pratts\" width=\"520\" height=\"566\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2315\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m taking a side trip from parapsychology today. I watched a documentary on PBS the other night about the Freedom Riders. I learned so much &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piV6u-Bj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2313"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2320,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313\/revisions\/2320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}