Freedom Rides
Trailways Bus to Birmingham
James Farmer grew up
in Marshall, Texas, where his father, James L. Farmer, Sr. was a professor at
the historically black Wiley
College
In early 1961 CORE was
less well known than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership
Coalition (SCLC) or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Farmer envisioned the ride as a way to vault CORE and its philosophy of
nonviolent direct action to prominence on the national stage, with attendant
opportunities for policy-making and fundraising.
Returning
to Washington , D.C.
from Atlanta , GA
The
man who replaced Farmer in Atlanta Connecticut Europe and working as a merchant
seaman. Returning to the United
States
After his release from prison in 1945, he
rededicated himself to pacifism and militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s,
Peck became increasingly involved in issues of racial justice, joining the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a volunteer (Meet 7).
Waiting
in line at the Trailways bus station in Atlanta to purchase their tickets, Peck
and the other Riders noticed that several of the regular passengers that had
also been standing in the line left after they had been spoken to by a group of
white men. Afterward, these rough-looking white men – mostly in their twenties
and thirties – boarded the bus. The
Riders followed, scattered themselves throughout the seats. They were Walter and Frances Bergman, white,
61 and 58 respectively; Jim Peck, white, 46; Charles Person, black, 18, student
at Morehouse College ;
Herman Harris, black, 21, student at Morris
College ; Ivor Moore, black, 19,
student at Morris
College Washington
Soon
after the bus had left the Atlanta Alabama Alabama
“Kids knew something was going to happen to them, in most
cases it was not going to be good,” Charles Person would remark 56 years later
(Colvin 3).
The
bus arrived at the Anniston Trailways station approximately an hour after the
other Freedom Riders bus had pulled into the Greyhound station. The waiting room was eerily quiet. Several whites looked away as the Riders,
white and black, approached the lunch counter. They purchased sandwiches, then
returned to the bus. Waiting for the bus
to leave, they heard an ambulance siren. The bus driver, John Olan Patterson, after talking
to several Anniston
One
of the Riders told Patterson that they were interstate passengers, that they had
the right to sit wherever they wanted. Patterson exited the bus without uttering a
word. One of eight tough, beefy men that
had entered the bus behind Patterson answered.
"Niggers get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama
Behind them, Bergman's wife, Frances Frances
A reporter on the scene wrote:
"Bergman was battered into semi-consciousness and as he lay in the aisle,
one of the whites jumped up and down on his chest.... Peck's face and head bled
profusely, making the aisle a slippery, bloody path" (Bergman 1).
The
Klansman ignored her plea, called her a "nigger lover." However, another Klansman, seeing that Bergman
was about to be killed, interceded. "Don't
kill him," he said authoritatively (Gross/Arsenault 15).
Interviewed
by Eyes on the Prize years later,
Peck recalled the following:
Walter Bergman and I
were sitting the back seat so we decided to go up front and intercept, with our
bodies. We got clobbered on the
head. I didn't get it so bad. But
Bergman got it so bad that he later had a stroke and has been paralyzed ever
since. As, he has been in a wheelchair
ever since. And so, Walter and I are
both suing the F.B.I., Bergman for a million dollars and me for a half a
million dollars (Interview 3).
Several
Klansmen dragged Person and Harris, both semi-conscious, to the back of the
bus. They draped the two black men over
the passengers sitting in the backseat. They did the same with Peck and Bergman. Content with what they had accomplished, the
Klansmen sat in the middle of the bus. A
black woman who was not a Freedom Rider begged to be allowed to exit the bus. "Shut up, you black bitch," one of Klansmen
answered. "Ain't nobody but whites sitting up here. And them nigger lovers
. . . can just sit back there with their nigger friends."
The
bus driver, Patterson, returned with a police officer. Satisfied with what he saw, the officer
addressed the Klansmen. "Don't
worry about no lawsuits. I ain't seen a thing." He left
the bus. Knowing that a mob was waiting
on the main road to Birmingham Birmingham
They
also did not know that Birmingham Police
Chief Eugene “Bull” Conner had agreed to keep his police away from the
Trailways station for 15 minutes to give local whites and members of the Klan
time to beat up the arriving Freedom Riders.
Connor had reportedly cut a deal with the KKK giving them 15 minutes to
“burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a god-damn what you do” (Doyle 6).
During
the next two hours the Klansmen continued their intimidation. One man brandished a pistol, a second man
displayed his steel pipe, three others blocked access to the middle and front
sections of the bus. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker
recalled that one of the sentries was "a pop-eyed fellow who kept
taunting: 'Just tell Bobby [Kennedy] and we'll do him in, too.'" One of the Klansmen approached Booker ominously.
Booker gave the man a copy of Jet featuring an advance story on CORE's
sponsorship of the Freedom Ride. The
article was passed from Klansman to Klansman. "I'd like to choke all of
them," one of the thugs said.
Several others reiterated that the Riders were going to get what was
coming to them when they reached Birmingham
Peck
and the other Trailways Riders had no detailed knowledge of what had happened
to the Greyhound Riders in Anniston Birmingham Birmingham Washington
Worse,
FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe actively ensured in Birmingham Anniston
bombing did not reach Birmingham Birmingham : "We made an astounding
sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham
Police
dispatchers had cleared the area. For
the next fifteen minutes there would be no police presence at the Trailways
station, except for two plainclothes detectives in the crowd there to monitor what
occurred and make sure that the Klansmen left the station before the police was
subsequently dispatched (Gross/ Arsenault 16-18).
Interviewed
by Eyes on the Prize, James Peck
recalled: When we arrived in… Birmingham Atlanta
Why
had Charles Person, the eighteen-year-old black Morehouse
College student from Georgia
The Russians had launched Sputnik,
demonstrating a technological and scientific supremacy over the United States , and Person, of Atlanta
“When you do all the things your
parents ask you to do, you’re a pretty good student and you’re denied, it’s
hard for a child or a teenager to understand,” he said. He joined sit-ins in Atlanta
“Change always begins with the
young. As you get older you can rationalize things and can kind of live with
them,” Person said. “But as a child or young person, you don’t have that
rationalization, and you just want to see things change” (Colvin 5).
When
the bus pulled into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen on board rushed down
the aisle to be near the front door. One
man shouted: "You damn Communists, why don't you go back to Russia Atlanta
A Klansmen
pointed to the cuts on Peck's face and the caked blood on his shirt and shouted
that Person, walking in front of Peck, had attacked a white man. Peck responded, tried to explain that Person had
not attacked him, added: "You'll have to kill me before you hurt
him." This blatant breach of racial solidarity only served to incite the
crowd of Klansmen blocking their path. An enraged Klansman pushed Person toward the
colored waiting room. Person recovered,
proceeded toward the white lunch counter, was stopped by a second Klansman who
shoved him up against a concrete wall. Another segregationist, National States Rights
Party (NSRP) leader Edward Fields pointed at Peck, yelled: "Get that son
of a bitch." Several burly Klansmen
pummeled Person with their fists, bloodied his face and mouth, dropped him to
his knees. Peck rushed to help Person to
his feet. Several Klansmen pushed both
men into a dimly lit corridor that led to a loading platform. A dozen whites, armed with pipes or oversized
key rings, pounced. Person escaped into the street. Boarding a city bus, he made his way to
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's parsonage (Gross/Arsenault 18-19).
Person says he knows
of only one photograph that survived that melee: “It’s a picture of me. You’ll
see a guy in a blazer with a pipe. We figure he’s the one that gave the most
damaging blow,” he said. “He’s the only one who had a weapon that could make my
skull pop open the way it did.”
In late 2016, in the middle of a conversation with a
relative, Person suddenly passed out -- Collateral damage, almost 56 years
later. There’s that lingering damage — a CT scan found that there’s still
damage to his skull, “which was kind of disturbing to me because I thought that
was past me,” he said — but there is also lingering hope. He would like to have
a cup of coffee with the person who attacked him in Birmingham
“There’s no
resentment,” Person said. He simply wants to know why. “I don’t have time to be
hating anyone because I’ve adopted nonviolence as a way of life, not just a
tactic” (Colvin 6).
Meanwhile,
Peck took the worse of the attack. I was unconscious, I'd say, within a minute.
Uh… I woke up, I came to in an alley way. Nobody was there. A big pool of blood. I looked at that pool of blood, I said, I
wonder whether I'm going to live or die. But I was too tired to care. I lay down again. Finally I came too again, and I looked and a
white G.I. who had come up and said, you look in a bad way. Do you need help? And I looked the other way and [Walter] Bergman was coming so I said, no my friend
is coming, he'll help me out. So, uh, Bergman took me in a cab to
Shuttesworth's home, and when Shuttlesworth saw me, he said, man you need to go
to a hospital. And so he called the ambulance and they took me to the hospital
and … they took me to the hospital and put fifty-three stitches into my head
(Interview 6).
Rev. Fred
Shuttlesworth … would later say, “His head was split down to the skull.
Somebody had cracked him with a lead pipe. Peck was a bloody mess. . . .” It
took more than an hour for Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take
Peck to the all-white Carraway
Methodist Hospital Jefferson Hillman
Hospital
The attacks had been moved to the back corridor to avoid
reporters and news photographers stationed at the white waiting room. However, several newsmen, including national
CBS News correspondent Howard K. Smith, witnessed at least part of the attack.
Smith had been working
on a television documentary investigating allegations of lawlessness and racial
intimidation in the Southern city. Smith, a Southerner himself from Louisiana,
was trying to determine if the claims he and his network were hearing about
were exaggerated or true.
On the night of May
13, Smith [had] received a phone call
tipping him off that the downtown bus station was the place to be the next day
“if he wanted to see some real action.” Smith thus witnessed the May 14
“Mother’s Day” riot at the Birmingham
Smith did deliver news
accounts of the bus station melee over the CBS radio network that went out
nationally. He would make a series of live radio updates from his hotel room
that day. “The riots have not been spontaneous outbursts of anger,” he reported
in one broadcast, “but carefully planned and susceptible to having been easily
prevented or stopped had there been a wish to do so.” In another he explained:
“One passenger was knocked down at my feet by 12 of the hoodlums, and his face
was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.”[i.e., the Jim Peck
beating]. Smith reported the facts of
the incident for CBS. “When the bus arrived,” he explained in one report, “the
toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with
pipes, with key rings, and with fists,” But he was outraged by what he had
witnessed, and stated at one point that the “laws of the land and purposes of
the nation badly need a basic restatement.” Smith at the time also did a Sunday
radio commentary, during which he was more direct, “The script almost wrote
itself,” he would later recall. “I had the strange, disembodied sense of being
forced by conscience to write what I knew would be unacceptable.” In his
commentary, Smith laid the blame squarely on Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor,
whose officers had looked the other way during the attack. During that
commentary Smith also stated that the “rule of barbarism in Alabama ”
must bow to the “rule of law and order – and Justice – in America
The other Riders had sought refuge. Ivor Moore, 19, and Herman Harris, 21, both of
them black, somehow lost themselves in the crowd before the assaults started. Ordered to by her husband, Frances Bergman
boarded a city bus just after their arrival. Walter, woozy, blood dried on his clothing,
followed Peck and Person into the white waiting room.
Having witnessed Peck and Person’s beatings, he turned about
hoping to find a policeman. He, too, was
knocked to the floor by a raging Klansman. Jet
Magazine journalist Simeon Booker came upon him crawling on his hands and
knees. Booker withdrew to the street,
where he found a black cabdriver who was willing to transport him and photographer
Ted Gaffney to safety.
Several white men kicked and stomped Ike Reynolds, 27,
before dumping his semiconscious body into a curbside trash bin.
The mob also attacked bystanders that it misidentified as
Freedom Riders. A Klansman named L. B.
Earle had come out of the men's room at the wrong time. Earle suffered several deep head gashes and was
taken to a hospital. A second victim was twenty-nine-year-old black laborer
George Webb, who was attacked when he entered the baggage room with his
fiancée, Mary Spicer, who had been on a Trailways bus that had arrived from Atlanta
Several thugs, however, continued their attack on Web. A news photographer from the Birmingham Post-Herald, Tommy Langston, snapped
a picture of Rowe and the other Klansmen. The attackers, abandoning Webb, chased after
Langston. One man smashed the camera to
the ground. Rowe and others kicked and
punched, threatened to beat him with the pipes and baseball bats they had used
on Webb. Meanwhile, Webb ran into the
loading area, and was captured by different Klansmen. With the police arriving Webb and Langston receiving
several parting licks. Bleeding
profusely, Webb managed to find the car in which his fiancée and his aunt were waiting.
Langston staggered down the street to
the Post-Herald building, and collapsed
into the arms of a fellow employee. Later, another Post-Herald photographer returned to the terminal and recovered
Langston's broken camera. The roll of
film inside it was undamaged.
A grisly picture of the Webb beating appeared on the front
page of the Post-Herald the next
morning. It was one of the few pieces of
documentary evidence that survived the riot.
By Monday, May 15th, photographs of the burning “Freedom Bus” in Anniston as well as images of the Birmingham
According to historian
Raymond Arsenault, author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders, “[Howard] Smith’s remarkable broadcast opened the floodgates of public reaction.
By early Sunday evening, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of
Americans were aware of the violence that had descended upon Alabama
Works
cited:
Bergman,
Gerald. “Walter Gerald Bergman's Freedom
Ride
and
Brutal Government Violence.” Investigator 143. March 2012. Web. http://ed5015.tripod.com/ReligBergmanFreedomRide143.html
Colvin, Rhonda. “As Trump attacks John Lewis,
here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.” The Washington
Doyle, Jack. ““Buses
Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.” PopHistoryDig.com. June 24, 2014. Web. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/james-peck-freedom-rider/
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
“Interview with James Peck.”
Eyes on the Prize. Washington University
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American
Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/meet-players-freedom-riders/
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