44 years after conviction, Freedom Rider Sala Udin is pardoned by Obama
... Among the recipients was former Pittsburgh City Council member Sala Udin, a onetime Freedom Rider who was beaten up registering voters in 1960s Mississippi. But Udin had been haunted for decades by a criminal charge that grew out of his youthful activism: Driving fellow protesters home from the South, he was stopped for speeding in Kentucky and arrested after police found an unloaded shotgun and a jug of moonshine in the car.
... His assignment was to register black voters in the Mississippi Delta. In doing so, he faced intimidation from local residents and hostility from all-white police forces. “I was beaten up pretty bad and thought I was going to die,” Udin said last year, describing an incident in which he was pulled over and ordered to “get out of the car, n*****!”
In 1970, while driving back from Mississippi, Udin was stopped for speeding outside Louisville, Ky. An unloaded rifle was found in the trunk of his car (along with that jug of Mississippi moonshine.) He was charged and convicted in 1972 of carrying a firearm across state lines and spent eight months in prison....
Udin always acknowledged his guilt, but with a proviso: “At that point, although I was previously committed to nonviolence, I concluded that if I was trapped on some lonely, dark road in the South and confronted by Klansmen who threatened to kill me, I would be prepared to defend my life,” he wrote in his petition for a pardon to the Justice Department. “I concluded that I would rather be caught by the police with defensive weapons than to be caught by the Klan without them.”
Whatever the explanation, there was little dispute that Udin had gone on to live an exemplary life: He founded an African-American Culture Center in Pittsburgh. He served three terms on the Pittsburgh City Council (from 1995 to 2006), spearheading the creation of the city’s police civilian review board....