David Brokaw 'Frankhauser' WAS NOT a Freedom Rider

David Fankhauser on the far left of this photo taken inside the Montgomery, AL Trailways bus station.


What an incredible sight that it took a turn out of the National Guard to protect the right of blacks and whites to sit where they wanted to sit on a bus and in a bus station. This was just 46 years ago.

My headline from a couple of days ago was wrong, but only by one letter. The man in the photo had an extra "r" added to his name either by the Jackson police department or the Sovereignty Commission, turning his last name from Fankhauser to Frankhauser. It's not much of a difference, but it made a world of difference when I was doing an internet search. Searching on the correct spelling brought up a wealth of information on Dr. Fankhauser including a paper with the title "Yogurt Making Illustrated".

While I'm a writer who loves to get off on tangents and yogurt making might be appealing to some, it is Dr. Fankhauser's website on the Freedom Rider's that should be of great interest to readers of this blog. It's very complete and it tells the story of the Freedom Rider's from both a historical perspective and a personal perspective. I highly recommend that you check out his website by clicking HERE.

Let me just add one personal note here. The Freedom Rider activity was in the summer of 1961 and I was 9 years old. One day I was downtown with my mother and probably one or more siblings, and we saw some Freedom Riders being arrested at the Trailways bus station. It must have been one of the later groups because there wasn't a big scene with a jeering crowd, just police officers arresting a few people and putting them in a squad car. Mother stopped and told me/us that the people being arrested were part of history and I think we understood what they were being arrested for if not why that was a reason to be arrested. I wish I had been more aware of worldly things when I was a kid because there were a lot of great learning experiences in my childhood.