His body is bruised and his soul is battered, but Lloyd Colar Jr. refuses to give up his personal journey to finish the “freedom tour.”
Colar, a 16-year-old from the South Side, was aboard a tour bus that plunged off Interstate Highway 95 into a murky river in southern Virginia. He was with a group that was retracing the historic path of the slavery era’s Underground Railroad as part of a program sponsored by civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.
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“I’ll go on because the slaves went on,” said a determined Colar, who broke his finger and scraped his forehead in the accident. “If they had given up every time they faced adversity, where would we be now?
“I’m not afraid. I want to finish what I started.”
Colar and his 13-year-old brother, Benjamin, returned home to Chicago Thursday after a journey that ended Tuesday when their tour bus careened into the chilly Nottoway River. Adisa Foluke, a tour leader considered an adopted grandson of Parks’, was killed. The 34 others aboard the bus were injured, three seriously.
Officials with the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute canceled the remainder of the national “freedom tour.” But some of the students vowed to travel to Detroit next week to complete a shorter version.
Lloyd Colar said the group was energized after meeting Wednesday with the 84-year-old Parks, who galvanized the civil rights movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus.
“Some of us are scared to get back on the bus, and a lot of people are still in shock, but we want to finish this for ourselves, for Adisa and for Ms. Parks,” said Colar, a junior at Chicago Vocational High School. “It’s our duty and our responsibility.”
Benjamin Colar, an 8th grader at Morgan Elementary School, said he hasn’t decided whether he’ll finish the tour. “I’m a little bit scared right now,” he acknowledged. “But I want to go. I just hope I can.”
The one-month Pathway to Freedom tour began July 10 in Detroit and traveled through Kansas, Tennessee and Alabama, stopping at sites important to the civil rights movement. The group had left Charleston, S.C., Monday on a 494-mile journey to Washington, when the accident occurred.
Transportation and police officials do not yet know what caused the bus to hurtle 30 feet down an embankment through a thicket of trees and into the 5-foot-deep river. Most of the passengers scrambled out, though rescuers had to pull out three people who were trapped, according to the Virginia State Police.