Civil Rights Events

Freedom Rides

Greyhound Bus -- Anniston

 

Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing “freedom rides” through the region.  They used as their model CORE’s 1946 “Journey of Reconciliation” where an interracial group rode interstate buses to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia which outlawed segregation in interstate travel. White southern segregationists resisted CORE’s efforts. When most of the demonstrators were arrested in North Carolina, the police effectively aborted the Journey of Reconciliation.

 

Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation (Mack 1). 

 

"So that everything would be open and above board, I sent letters to the

President of the United States, President Kennedy; to the Attorney General,

Robert Kennedy; the Director of the FBI, Mr. Hoover; the Chairman of the

Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated interstate travel; to the

President of Greyhound Corporation; and the President of Trailways Corporation.

And I must say we got replies from none of those letters,” Farmer would state later (Freedom Quotes 1).

 

John F. Kennedy had been elected president, in large part due to widespread support among blacks who believed that Kennedy was more sympathetic to the civil rights movement than his opponent, Richard Nixon. Once in office, however, Kennedy proved less committed to the movement than he had appeared during the campaign. To test the president's commitment to civil rights, CORE would send two interracial groups on chartered buses into the deep South. The whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. "This was not civil disobedience, really," explained … Farmer, "because we [were] merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do." But the Freedom Riders expected to meet resistance. "We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law," said Farmer. "When we began the ride I think all of us were prepared for as much violence as could be thrown at us. We were prepared for the possibility of death" (Cozzens 1).

 

Half of the Freedom Riders would travel on a Greyhound bus and the other half on a Trailways bus.  Their ultimate destination was New Orleans, Louisiana. 

 

Prior to the 1960 decision, two students, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, integrated their bus ride home from college in Nashville, Tennessee, by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they saw CORE’s announcement recruiting volunteers to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to test the enforcement of Boynton. Lafayette’s parents would not permit him to participate, but Lewis joined 12 other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride (Freedom Stanford 1).

 

“One of the most remarkable things about the Freedom Rides is that …there was not a single incident of breaking the discipline,” Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, said.  “It’s hard to think of anything more striking in American history than that.”

 

Even seemingly minor details were not overlooked. For the day of the rides, a dress code was implemented: women in dresses, skirts, and the men in sport coats. “They wanted to look like they had just come out of church or Sunday school,” Arsenault said (Colvin 1).

 

The Freedom Riders left Washington DC on May 4, 1961. It was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education decision. 

 

The first significant confrontation with segregationists occurred in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Joseph Perkins, twenty-seven year-old CORE Field Secretary, was arrested for trespassing for attempting to have his shoes shined at a whites-only shoe stand.   Perkins refused to post bail and spent two nights (May 8 and 9) in jail. On May 10, Judge Howard B. Arbuckle found him innocent of the trespassing charge based on the precedent set in Boyton v. Virginia.  Perkins would rejoin the riders May 11.

 

On May 10 several white men attacked a group of Freedom Riders at the Greyhound bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, as they attempted to enter the whites-only waiting room. John Lewis, Al Bigelow and Genevieve Hughes sustain injuries.  Two men set upon Lewis, battered his face and kicked him in the ribs.  The attack was broken up by local police. 

 

Lewis received then a telegram inviting him to Philadelphia for an interview for a position with the Peace Corps. He decided to go, intending to rejoin the Freedom Riders in Birmingham. 

 

The Freedom Riders arrived in Atlanta on May 13 and attended a reception hosted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They wanted King to join them on the buses, to become a Freedom Rider himself. King passed on a warning that the Klan had "quite a welcome" prepared for the Riders in Alabama.  He urged them to reconsider traveling through the Deep South.  He whispered prophetically to Jet Magazine reporter Simeon Booker, who was covering the story, “You will never make it through Alabama” (Freedom Stannford 2).  Despite King’s warning, the CORE Freedom Riders left Atlanta on May 14, bound for Alabama.

 

Informed that his father had died unexpectedly, James Farmer needed to return to Washington, D.C. to attend his father’s funeral.  James Peck replaced Farmer as leader of the perilous project.  Peck phoned Fred Shuttlesworth, the pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church and the leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to give him the exact arrival times of the two Freedom Buses.  Shuttlesworth told Peck that Birmingham was alive with rumors that a white mob planned to confront the Riders at the downtown bus stations.  Peck calmly told his riders about Shuttlesworth’s warning.  He also related a warning he had received about potential difficulties that might arise at Anniston, a rest stop on the bus route to Birmingham.  To allay fears, he stated he had no reason to believe the Riders would encounter serious trouble prior to their arrival in downtown Birmingham.  The four-hour ride would give them considerable time to prepare an effective nonviolent response to the waiting mob, should such an eventuality exist.

 

The Greyhound Bus
 

The two busses carrying the riders left Atlanta an hour apart. The Greyhound group, with Joe Perkins in charge, left first at 11:00 A.M. The bus was more than half empty. Fourteen passengers were on board: five regular passengers, seven Freedom Riders, and two journalists, Charlotte Devree and Moses Newson.  The riders were Genevieve Hughes, white, 28, CORE field secretary;  Al Bigelow, white, 55, retired naval officer; Hank Thomas, black, 19, Howard University student; Jimmy McDonald, black, 29, CORE volunteer; Mae Frances Moultrie, black,  24, Morris College student; Joe Perkins, black, 27, CORE field secretary; and Ed Blankenheim, white, 27, a carpenter.  Three of the regular passengers were Roy Robinson, the manager of the Atlanta Greyhound station, and two undercover plainclothes agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol: Eli Cowling and Harry Sims.  Following the orders of Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Cowling carried a hidden microphone to be used to eavesdrop on the Riders. Unsure of the Freedom Ride's itinerary, Mann and his boss, Governor John Patterson, wanted to know what the Riders planned.

 

Just south of Anniston, the driver of a northbound Greyhound motioned to the driver of the Freedom Riders' bus, O. T. Jones, to pull over to the side of the road. A white man then ran across the road and yelled to Jones through the window: "There's an angry and unruly crowd gathered at Anniston. There's a rumor that some people on this bus are going to stage a sit-in. The terminal has been closed. Be careful." With this message the Riders' worst fears seemed to be confirmed, but Joe Perkins — hoping that the warning was a bluff, or at least an exaggeration — urged the driver to keep going. A minute or two later, as the bus passed the city limits, several of the Riders couldn't help but notice that Anniston's sidewalks were lined with people, an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon in a Deep South town. "It seemed that everyone in the town was out to greet us," White Rider Genevieve Hughes, 28-year-old CORE Field Secretary, later commented.

 

Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas, who had joined the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride at the last minute after his Howard University roommate John Moody had dropped out with a bad case of the flu, remembered the strange feeling that he and the other Riders felt as the bus turned into the station parking lot. The station was locked shut.  There was utter silence.  Then, suddenly, a screaming mob, led by Anniston Klan leader William Chappell, surrounded the bus. Thomas thought he heard the driver, O. T. Jones say, "Well, boys, here they are.  I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers."

 

An eighteen-year-old Klansman and ex-convict, Roger Couch, stretched himself out in front of the bus.  The others, approximately fifty in number, carrying metal pipes, clubs, and chains — milled about, many screaming: "Dirty Communists!  "Sieg heil!" No policemen were present, even though the manager of the Anniston Greyhound station, had warned local officials earlier that a potentially dangerous mob had assembled.

 

After the driver opened the door, Cowling and Sims hurried to the front and managed to close the door.  Frenzied attackers began to smash windows, dent the sides of the bus, and slash tires.  Genevieve Hughes watched a man walk by the side of the bus, saw him slip a pistol from his pocket, watched him stare at her for several minutes.  She heard the sound of shattering glass.  She shouted, "Duck, down everyone," thinking that a bullet had struck one of the windows.  It had been a rock.  A second man cracked the window above her seat with brass knuckles.  Joe Perkins's window was also cracked.  The assault continued for almost twenty minutes.

 

The Anniston police finally arrived.  The officers examined the broken windows and slashed tires but made no attempt to arrest anybody.  Eventually, the officers cleared a path in the crowd and motioned for the bus to leave the parking lot.

 

A police car led the Greyhound to the city limits and then turned back, leaving the bus to the mercy of the pursuing mob. A long line of cars and pickup trucks, plus one car carrying a news reporter and a photographer, followed.  Two of the cars, ahead of the bus, forced it to slow down.  The thirty or forty cars and trucks were occupied mostly by Klansmen, none wearing hoods or robes. Some had just come from church, wearing coats and ties and polished shoes.  Some had children with them.

 

Two tires now flat, six miles southwest of Anniston, in front of the Forsyth and Son grocery store, the driver pulled over to the side of the road.  Roy Robinson and the driver ran into the grocery store hoping to call a local garage that might have replacement tires.  Back in the bus, Eli Cowling had retrieved his revolver from the baggage compartment.  A teenage boy smashed a side window with a crowbar.  A group of men and boys rocked the bus trying to turn it over on its side.  A second group attempted to enter through the front door. Brandishing his gun, Cowling blocked them, retreated, locked the door behind him.  For the next twenty minutes Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out.  Two highway patrolmen arrived.  Neither made an effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Harry Sims, and the Riders stayed inside.

 

One members of the mob, Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window.  The bundle exploded; dark gray smoke spread throughout the bus.  Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought first that the bomb-thrower had thrown a smoke bomb.  The smoke got blacker.  The flames started to engulf several of the seats. Crouching in the middle of the bus, she screamed: "Is there any air up front?"  No one answered. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled.  She found an open window six rows from the front, thrusted out her head, and saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree.  Seconds later the three Riders squeezed through their opened windows.  Choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the road.  They were afraid that the other passengers were trapped inside, but then they saw that several passengers had escaped through the front door on the other side.

 

Members of the mob were pressing against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers."  An exploding fuel tank persuaded the mob that the whole bus would within seconds explode.  The frightened mob retreated.  Cowling pried open the door.  The choking occupants escaped.  Hank Thomas was the first Rider to exit the front of the bus.  A white man rushed toward him, asked: "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man struck Thomas’s head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and remained barely conscious while the rest of the gasping Riders collapsed on the grass.

 

Several white families had gathered in front of the grocery store.  Twelve-year-old Janie Miller gave choking victims water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket, ignoring the Klansmen’s insults (Gross/ Arsenault 3- 7)

. 

 

“It was the worst suffering I’d ever heard,” Miller would recall in the PBS /American Experience film, Freedom Riders. “I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her, I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else.” For daring to help the injured riders, she and her family were later ostracized by the community and could no longer live in the county (Doyle 7).

 

Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only African-American CORE female on the bus.  She had joined the Ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC.   Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus" (Meet 3).  

 

Cowling's pistol, the heat of the fire, and the acrid fumes from the burning seats kept the mob away.  A second fuel tank explosion drove them farther back.  Two warning shots by the highway patrolmen on the scene persuaded the Klansmen to slip away.  Minutes passed.  Cowling, Sims, and the patrolmen stood guard over the Riders, lying and sitting yards away from the shell of the bus.  No one in a position of authority had attempted to make an arrest.  Nobody had recorded the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks.  No one attempted to call an ambulance. Finally, a white couple who lived close by permitted Genevieve Hughes to make a call.  Nobody answered.  The couple drove Hughes to the hospital.  One of the state troopers called for an ambulance. Its driver refused to carry any of the black Riders. Already loaded, refusing to leave behind their black friends, the white Riders began to exit.  Cowling spoke sternly to the driver.  He relented.  All who needed to be transported were driven to Anniston Memorial Hospital.

 

Genevieve Hughes discovered that only a nurse was at the hospital.  The nurse gave her pure oxygen to breathe.  It burned her throat, did not relieve her coughing.  She was burning hot.  Her clothes were a wet mess. After awhile Ed Blankenheim and Bert Bigelow were brought in.  Laying on their beds, they continued to cough.  Eventually a woman doctor arrived, having taken several minutes to reference smoke poisoning.  A Negro man (not a Freedom rider) who had been in the back of the bus with Genevieve was brought in.  She told the nurse and doctor to take care of him.  They did not. They did nothing for Hank Thomas.  Of the thirteen people brought to the hospital, only Ed Blankenheim, the Negro man and Genevieve had been admitted.

 

After awhile, having slept, Genevieve was questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent.  She was unaware that he or another FBI agent on the scene had persuaded the medical staff to treat all of the injured passengers.  Perhaps the cause of their failure to comply had not been entirely racial.  A group of Klansmen made an unsuccessful attempt to block the entrance to the emergency room.  The crowd outside swelled in numbers.  Several Klansmen threatened to burn the building down.  With nightfall approaching, recognizing that he had no police protection, the hospital superintendent ordered the Riders to leave.

 

Even though Hughes and several other Riders needed to stay, Joe Perkins had to comply.  It took him more than an hour to arrange safe passage out of the hospital.  The state troopers and the local police refused to provide the Riders transportation or escort even when they were transported.  Bert Bigelow called friends in Washington hoping to receive help from the federal government.  Perkins called Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham.  Shuttlesworth mobilized a fleet of eight cars.  He reminded the volunteer drivers that they had to behave non-violently.  “You mustn't carry any weapons. You must trust God and have faith."  Out of sight, several of the deacons pulled out shotguns from beneath their seats.

 

Shuttlesworth's deacons made their way across the back roads toward Anniston.  The hospital superintendent insisted that the interracial group could not stay the night.  At last the rescue mission pulled into the parking lot.  The police holding back the jeering crowd and the deacons showing their weapons, the Riders climbed into the cars.  The cars left. One rescuer remarked: “You couldn't tell the deputies from the Ku Klux."

 

The Riders wanted to know the fate of the Trailways group.  Perkins's phone conversation with Shuttlesworth earlier in the afternoon had informed him that the other bus had also run into trouble.  The deacons knew few details of the story.  Even so, it was evident to all that the defenders of white supremacy in Alabama had decided to smash the Freedom Ride with violence.  They would not countenance the law, the U.S. Constitution, or anything else interfering with the preservation of racial segregation in their state (Gross/ Arsenault 8-11)

 

 

Works cited:

 

Colvin, Rhonda.  “As Trump attacks John Lewis, here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.”  The Washington Post.  January 15, 2017.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/we-were-soldiers-the-flesh-and-blood-behind-the-new-civil-rights-monument/2017/01/15/4d1c9edc-42dc-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html?utm_term=.3a43ab1ea4f6

 

Cozzens, Lisa.   “Freedom Rides.”  Watson.org. Web.   http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/freeride.html

 

Doyle, Jack.  ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.”  PopHistoryDig.com.  June 24, 2014.  Web.  http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/james-farmer-freedom-rider/

 

“Freedom Rides: American Civil Rights Movement.”  Encyclopedia Britannica.  Web.  https://www.britannica.com/event/Freedom-Rides

 

“Freedom Rides Quotes.”  Uen.org.  Web.  https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/downloads/Freedom_Rides_Quotes.pdf

 

“Freedom Rides.”  Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.  Web.   https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/freedom-rides

 

Gross, Terry.  “Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961,” containing excerpts from Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.  NPR.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/2006/01/12/5149667/get-on-the-bus-the-freedom-riders-of-1961

 

Mack, Dwayne.  “Freedom Rides (1961).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rides-1961

 

“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.”  American Experience.  Web.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/meet-players-freedom-riders/