TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

They saw the smoke of the firebombs, heard the screams, felt the outrage of injustice -- and they acted on it. Janie Forsythe McKinney, a white girl then just 12, rushed water to the victims of a bus bombing targeting civil rights activists in Anniston, Ala., in 1961. Claude Liggins, a black college student then 20, was so troubled by what he saw of the incident on television that he joined the Freedom Riders, a group that stood up to racial segregation by riding buses throughout the South -- and he spent a month and a half in a Jackson, Miss., jail for his trouble.

They will share their personal stories at 2 p.m. today as part of a Harlem & Beyond oral history presentation at Beale Memorial Library.

And, wouldn't you know it, they arrive on the heels of a prominent politician's misguided slight against the memory of the often-bloody battle over Jim Crow, the South's enforced system of uneven segregation. Last week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested the South could have settled the issue of black civil rights by simply putting a referendum on the ballot, as gay rights groups have done.

Howls of protest immediately erupted from all quarters. Did the governor of New Jersey flunk American history? "I don't know when people lost their sense of humor," Christie said by way of apology.

Liggins and McKinney weighed in by phone in advance of today's Harlem & Beyond event.

"That is bull----," McKinney said. "(Christie) is reducing it (in importance). It took bold action to confront what was going on in the South at that time. It didn't matter whose hands had the blood. It didn't matter what the Supreme Court said three times. It was states' rights, states' rights. And it was a travesty."

Not only would a referendum on black civil rights not have gotten off the ground in 1961, Liggins said, he's not sure it would fly in some parts of the country today.

"I don't think that (referendum) would have worked," Liggins said. "The attitudes were locked in, and of course there are some of the same attitudes here today that there were 50 years ago. The country had a deep resistance against what we did and about letting blacks into the mainstream.

"I think what people (like Christie) are doing is," Liggins said, "they're trying to please a lot of people who never wanted to see blacks get ahead in this country. Politicians don't really express what they feel sometimes; he probably knows the history."

He probably does. But slips of tongue, no matter how innocent or thoughtless, have a way of creeping into the national narrative. The true narrative is worth preserving -- which is why it's so important that Liggins and McKinney are in Bakersfield today.

Email Editorial Page Editor Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.