Freedom Rider is proud, but not boastful
A St. Petersburg woman's family challenged transit segregation laws in 1961.
By MARLON A. WALKER
Published February 28, 2006
ST. PETERSBURG - Kredelle Petway didn't want to go back to Jackson, Miss.
A decade ago, Links Inc., a social service group for black women of which she's a member, was holding a leadership conference in the city. She had journeyed there before, and it wasn't pleasant. Another Links member wanted to know why.
"I asked Kredelle if she was going," Shirley M. Davis said. "She says, "I know that jail. I've been in jail in Jackson."'
In 1961, Petway was one of 436 people who challenged transit segregation by bus, train or plane rides. She was a Freedom Rider.
Even close friends don't always know she helped make history in a civil rights effort plotted with the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.
"I just don't openly talk about what I've done," she said recently from the dinner table in her home in St. Petersburg's Pinellas Point neighborhood.
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In 1961, she was studying mathematics at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. Her summers were spent at home in Montgomery, Ala., where her father, Mathew, was a pastor. That summer, she was filling in for a secretary at the Montgomery Improvement Association. The group, started in 1955 in the wake of Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her city bus seat, was formed to improve race relations.
Earlier that year, 13 activists had boarded buses headed south from Washington on a mission to challenge segregation of interstate travel. During that trip, buses were torched and riders were beaten while trying to make it through Southern states.
Film footage and photos chronicling the events surrounding the Freedom Rides sparked interest from other groups and showed the world how black citizens were being treated in the South.
The Petway family was handpicked to participate in the Freedom Rides. She remembers sitting around a dinner table with King, Abernathy and her father to discuss the historic plane trip to Jackson.
Mathew Petway, his daughter Kredelle and son Alphonso were told they would depart Montgomery's airport and act like a family taking a regular trip. Cecil Thomas, a white Freedom Rider from Berkeley, Calif., also would go along.
"We were just travelers," said Alphonso Petway, now 61 and an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister in Mobile, Ala. "But in our process, we were gonna test the system."
The trip met opposition with every step.
Police were called in to remove the Petways from a lunch counter in the Montgomery airport after they were denied service and refused to leave. The police sided with the Petways. By then, it was time to board the plane.
There was no time to act when they got to Jackson. They were arrested and taken to jail minutes after arriving.
"When we landed in Jackson, they were waiting for us," Kredelle Petway said.
At 20, she found herself spending time in jail.
"It was very interesting," she said. "Because I knew we were going to get out, I was too excited to be nervous."
They stayed three days before being bailed out.
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Few people know of Kredelle Petway's involvement in the movement because she doesn't "wear her past on her sleeve," said Davis, 69, of St. Petersburg, who has known Petway for more than 15 years.
Virginia Murphy Arnao learned of Petway's Freedom Ride nearly 20 years after they had lived across the hall from each other at FAMU.
"She is modest, and I would think she wouldn't tell us all that happened," Arnao said. "I'm sure they had to be frightened, because I know I would have been. I told her, "God must've sent you there. He knew not to send me.' I wasn't into that. But she was.
"I'm very proud of her for what she did."
Professor Ray Arsenault, who researched the movement for his book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice , said the Freedom Rides did more than break down racial barriers.
"More broadly, I argue that it redefines American citizenship," said Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin professor of Southern history at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. "Ordinary people go out with no sort of institutional backing. ... they really had no business thinking they could change the world."
"The Flying Petways," as he calls them, were different, because they were the only family act in the movement who went by plane, as opposed to bus or train, to their destination.
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Petway moved to St. Petersburg with her first husband in 1964 shortly after being married, but left in 1973 after her father's death to be with her mother in Kentucky. The cold was too much, she said, and she returned to the area in 1986. She has kept busy since retiring from the Department of Veterans Affairs in 1999. A large chunk of her week is spent at the H&R Block she manages on 54th Avenue S.
She pitches in to help with her five grandchildren, ranging in age from 7 to 16, and she's the finance secretary at Traveler's Rest Missionary Baptist Church, which she has attended for several years.
"There was only so much dusting I can do," she said.
She said she's happy with how her life turned out.
"I have children who are of good character and had no real problems with them growing up - except sometimes their choices in boyfriends," she said.
While things are a far cry from the way they were when she was growing up, Petway still sees a need for activism.
"Racism is still alive and well," she said. "It's just more subtle."
Her biggest fear, she said, is that if a civil rights movement was deemed necessary today, the younger generation would not be able to lead it.She said: "They think life today is as great as it's gonna get."
--Marlon A. Walker can be reached at 727 893-8737 or mwalker@sptimes.com