Civil Rights Events

Freedom Rides

Mayhem in Montgomery

 

Governor Patterson agreed to meet with John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department aide and a native of Tennessee. In the meeting, Floyd Mann, head of the state highway patrol, agreed to protect the Freedom Riders in between Birmingham. Attorney General Robert Kennedy then pressured the Greyhound bus company, which finally agreed to carry the Riders. The Freedom Riders left Birmingham on Saturday, May 20. State police promised "that a private plane would fly over the bus, and there would be a state patrol car every fifteen or twenty miles along the highway between Birmingham and Montgomery -- about ninety miles," recalled Freedom Rider John Lewis. Police protection, however, disappeared as the Freedom Riders entered the Montgomery city limits (Cozzens 5).

 

Jim Zwerg would recall: After we had talked it out and I was one of those chosen to go, I went back to my room and spent a lot of time reading the bible and praying. Because of what had happened in Birmingham and in Aniston, because our phones were tapped... none of us honestly expected to live through this. I called my mother and I explained to her what I was going to be doing. My mother's comment was that this would kill my father - and he had a heart condition - and she basically hung up on me. That was very hard because these were the two people who taught me to love and when I was trying to live love, they didn't understand. Now that I'm a parent and a grandparent I can understand where they were coming from a bit more. I wrote them a letter to be mailed if I died. We had a little time to pack a suitcase and then we met to go down to the bus.

 

As we were going from Birmingham to Montgomery, we'd look out the windows and we were kind of overwhelmed with the show of force - police cars with sub-machine guns attached to the backseats, planes going overhead... We had a real entourage accompanying us. Then, as we hit the city limits, it all just disappeared. As we pulled into the bus station a squad car pulled out - a police squad car. The police later said they knew nothing about our coming, and they did not arrive until after 20 minutes of beatings had taken place. Later we discovered that the instigator of the violence was a police sergeant who took a day off and was a member of the Klan. They knew we were coming. It was a set-up.

 

The idea had been that cars from the community would meet us. We'd disperse into these cars, get out into the community, and avoid the possibility of violence. And the next morning we were to come back to the station and I would use the colored services and they would go to some of the white services -- the restroom, the water fountain, etc. And then you'd get on the bus and go to the next city. It was meant to be as non-violent as possible, to avoid confrontation as much as possible.

 

Well, before we got off the bus, we looked out and saw the crowd. You could see things in their hands -- hammers, chains, pipes... there was some conversation about it. As we got off the bus, there was some anxiety. We started looking for the cars. But the mob had surrounded the bus station so there was no way cars could get in and we realized at that moment that we were going to get it.

 

There was a fellow, a reporter, with an old boom mike and he was panning the crowd. And that's when this heavy-set fellow in a white T-shirt... he had a cigar as I remember... came out and grabbed the mike and jumped on it... just smashed it... basically telling the press, "Back off! You are not going to take any pictures of this. You better stay out or you're going to get it next." You could hear crowd yelling and of course a lot of them were, "Get the ******-lover!" I was the only white guy there.

 

Traditionally a white man got picked out for the violence first. That gave the rest of the folks a chance to get away. I was told that several tried to get into the bus terminal. I was knocked to the ground. I remember being kicked in the spine and hearing my back crack, and the pain. I fell on my back and a foot came down on my face. The next thing I remember is waking up in the back of a vehicle and John Lewis handing me a rag to wipe my face. I passed out again and when I woke up I was in another moving vehicle with some very southern-sounding whites. I figured I'm off to get lynched. I had no idea who they were. Again, I went unconscious and I woke up in the hospital. I was informed that I had been unconscious for a day and a half. One of the nurses told me that another little crowd were going to try and lynch me. They had come within a half block of the hospital. She said that she knocked me out in case they did make it, so that I would not be aware of what was happening. I mean, those pictures that appeared in the magazines, the interview... I don't remember them at all. I do remember a class of students -- I think they were high school age, coming to visit me one time (Simkin 8-12).

 

Yet in the midst of that savagery, Zwerg says he had the most beautiful experience in his life. "I bowed my head," he says. "I asked God to give me the strength to remain nonviolent and to forgive the people for what they might do. It was very brief, but in that instant, I felt an overwhelming presence. I don't know how else to describe it. A peace came over me. I knew that no matter what happened to me, it was going to be OK. Whether I lived or whether I died, I felt this incredible calm" (Blake 6).

 

Other Freedom Riders had their recollections recorded.

 

The bus terminal was quiet. "And then, all of a sudden, just like magic, white people everywhere," said Freedom Rider Frederick Leonard.  The Riders considered leaving by the back of the bus in hopes that the mob would not be quite as vicious. But Jim Zwerg, a white rider, bravely marched off the bus first. The other riders slipped off while the mob focused on pummeling Zwerg (Cozzens 6).

 

By the time the rides came along, getting arrested for demonstrating was old hat to Catherine Burks of Birmingham. As a student at Tennessee State University, she had been participating in Nashville sit-ins at movie theaters and “pray-ins” at churches.

 

“We would go to white people’s church on Sunday,” she said, “and some would let us in and some wouldn’t.”

 

She joined up with the rides in Birmingham, and she remembers dozing off because the trip was so uneventful. The Kennedy administration had negotiated with Alabama’s governor to supply the riders with escorts on the ground and in the air. But law enforcement mysteriously dropped off when the bus made it to the Montgomery city limits, turning the riders over to an awaiting mob, which was ready with pipes, chains and baseball bats.

 

As they stepped off the bus, [Catherine] Burks Brooks said the image that remains with her to this day is that of the young white women in the crowd “with their babies in their arms, screaming: ‘Kill them niggers. Kill them niggers’” (Colvin 7).

 

In Freedom Riders, she vividly recalls the assault on fellow Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg. "Some men held him while white women clawed his face with their nails. And they held up their little children --children who couldn't have been more than a couple years old -- to claw his face. I had to turn my head back because I just couldn't watch it."

 

A native of Piedmont, AL, William Harbour was the oldest of eight children and the first member of his family to go to college. At age 19, while a student at Tennessee State University, he had already participated in civil disobedience, traveling to Rock Hill, SC to serve jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in.

 

 One of the first to exit the bus when the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride arrived at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, Harbour encountered a mob of 200 people wielding lead pipes and baseball bats. Harbour survived the riot but after the end of the Freedom Rides, still faced hostility in his native Alabama. He was also one of 14 Freedom Riders expelled from Tennessee State University.

 

 "Be best for you not to come [home]," his mother warned him in 1961. With the exception of one brief visit, he stayed away from Piedmont for the next five years (Meet 4-6).

 

Frederick Leonard remembered: Jim Zwerg was a white fellow from Madison, Wisconsin. He had a lot of nerve. I think that is what saved me because Jim Zwerg walked off the bus in front of us. The crowd was possessed. They couldn't believe that there was a white man who would help us. They grabbed him and pulled him into the mob. Their attention was on him. It was as if they didn't see us (Simkin 7).

 

The passengers were attacked by a large mob. They were dragged from the bus and beaten by men with baseball bats and lead piping. Taylor Branch, the author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (1988) wrote: "One of the men grabbed Zwerg's suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg's head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage." James Zwerg later argued: "There was noting particularly heroic in what I did. If you want to talk about heroism, consider the black man who probably saved my life. This man in coveralls, just off of work, happened to walk by as my beating was going on and said 'Stop beating that kid. If you want to beat someone, beat me.' And they did. He was still unconscious when I left the hospital. I don't know if he lived or died."

 

According to Ann Bausum: "Zwerg was denied prompt medical attention at the end of the riot on the pretext that no white ambulances were available for transport. He remained unconscious in a Montgomery hospital for two-and-a-half days after the beating and stayed hospitalized for a total of five days. Only later did doctors diagnose that his injuries included a broken back."

 

Some of the Freedom Riders, including seven women, ran for safety. The women approached an African-American taxicab driver and asked him to take them to the First Baptist Church. However, he was unwilling to violate Jim Crow restrictions by taking any white women. He agreed to take the five African-Americans, but the two white women, Susan Wilbur and Susan Hermann, were left on the curb. They were then attacked by the white mob.

 

John Seigenthaler, who was driving past, stopped and got the two women in his car. According to Raymond Arsenault, the author of Freedom Riders (2006): "Suddenly, two rough-looking men dressed in overalls blocked his path to the car door, demanding to know who the hell he was. Seigenthaler replied that he was a federal agent and that they had better not challenge his authority. Before he could say any more, a third man struck him in the back of the head with a pipe. Unconscious, he fell to the pavement, where he was kicked in the ribs by other members of the mob. Pushed under the rear bumper of the car, his battered and motionless body remained there until discovered by a reporter twenty-five minutes later."

 

James Zwerg, who was badly beaten-up claimed from his hospital bed: "Segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us on the Freedom Ride will continue. No matter what happens we are dedicated to this. We will take the beatings. We are willing to accept death. We are going to keep coming until we can ride anywhere in the South" (Simkin 4-6).  Interviewed later, Zwerg could not recall speaking to a news crew.

Pictures of Jim Zwerg: https://www.google.com/search?q=Freedom+Ride%2C+Montgomery%2C+Jim+Zwerg%2C+picture&cref=&ie=utf-8&hl=&submit=Search&gws_rd=ssl
 

 

The most vocal opponent of the rides was Alabama governor John Patterson, who had won election on a strong segregationist platform but had also endorsed John F. Kennedy for president. When the Freedom Riders came to his state, and even within a few blocks of the governor’s mansion in Montgomery, Patterson stood by and watched the mayhem. “We can’t act as nursemaids to agitators,” he said at the time. “You just can’t guarantee the safety of a fool, and that’s what these folks are. Just fools” (Lifson 5).

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. had been on a speaking tour in Chicago. Upon learning of the violence, he returned to Montgomery, where he staged a rally at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. In his speech, King blamed Governor Patterson for “aiding and abetting the forces of violence” and called for federal intervention, declaring that “the federal government must not stand idly by while bloodthirsty mobs beat nonviolent students with impunity” ….  As King spoke, a threatening white mob gathered outside. From inside the church, King called Attorney General Kennedy, who assured him that the federal government would protect those inside the church (Freedom Stanford 6).

 

Again Governor Patterson failed to act - and at that point Attorney General Bobby Kennedy reluctantly sent in 400 U.S. marshals, a force that was later increased to 666. The marshals (mostly deputized Treasury agents) were led by Deputy Attorney General Byron ("Whizzer") White, who met with Patterson in a long and angry conference. White carefully explained that the U.S. was not sponsoring the Freedom Riders' movement, but that the Government was determined to protect the riders' legal rights. John Patterson was having no part of such explanations. Alabama, he cried, could maintain its own law and order, and the marshals were therefore unnecessary. He even threatened to arrest the marshals if they violated any local law.

 

Even as White and Patterson talked, Montgomery's radio stations broadcast the news that Negroes would hold a mass meeting that night at the First Baptist Church. All day long, carloads of grim-faced whites converged on Montgomery.

 

That night the church was packed with 1,200 Negroes. In the basement a group of young men and women clustered together and clasped hands like a football team about to take the field. They were the Freedom Riders. Everybody say "Freedom'" ordered one of the leaders. "Freedom," said the group. "Say it again," said the leader. "Freedom!" shouted the group. "Are we together?" asked the leader. "Yes, we are together," came the reply. With that, the young Negroes filed upstairs and reappeared behind the pulpit. "Ladies and gentlemen," cried the Rev. Ralph Abernathy as the crowd screamed to its feet, "the Freedom Riders."

 

"Give them a Grenade." Slowly, in twos and threes, the mob started to form outside the church. Men with shirts unbuttoned to the waist sauntered down North Ripley Street, soon were almost at the steep front steps of the church. "We want to integrate too," yelled a voice. Cried another: "We'll get those ******s." A barrage of bottles burst at the feet of some curious Negroes who peered out the church door. The worst racial battle in Montgomery's history was about to begin (Simkin 7-8).

 

Catherine Burks described the beginning of the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery by an angry segregationist mob on the following day. "I heard a rock hit the window. Some of us got up to look out the window and we got hit by more rocks. That's when a little fear came" (Meet 4).  

 

Despite the long and obvious buildup toward trouble, only a handful of Montgomery cops were present - and they looked the other way. Into the breach moved a squad of U.S. marshals - the men Patterson had said were not needed. Contrary to Justice Department statements, the hastily deputized marshals had no riot training. They moved uncertainly to their task until a mild-looking alcohol tax unit supervisor from Florida named William D. Behen took command. "If we're going to do it, let's do it!" he yelled. "What say, shall we give them a grenade?" Whereupon Behen lobbed a tear-gas grenade into the crowd (Simkin 9).  Afterward, the Federal marshals were replaced by the Alabama National Guard, who at dawn escorted the trapped Riders and church members out of the church.

 

After the violence at the church, Robert Kennedy asked for a cooling-off period.  James Farmer had flown in to rejoin the Riders.  The Freedom Riders, however, were intent on continuing.  Farmer explained, "[W]e'd been cooling off for 350 years, and . . . if we cooled off any more, we'd be in a deep freeze" (Cozzens 7).     

 

As the violence and federal intervention propelled the freedom riders to national prominence, King became one of the major spokesmen for the rides. Some activists, however, began to criticize King for his willingness to offer only moral and financial support but not his physical presence on the rides.  … In response to [Diane] Nash’s direct request that King join the rides, King replied that he was on probation and could not afford another arrest, a response many of the students found unacceptable (Freedom Stanford 7).

 

Years later Jim Zwerg attended a reunion at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Museum in Alabama. During a ceremony, Zwerg was walking with a crowd of Freedom Rider colleagues when he saw the famous pictures of his battered face in a video and displayed on the museum wall.

 

"I looked at it, and what it brings back to me more than anything else is that I got so much notoriety because I was white," he says. "I looked at that picture and I thought of all the people that never get their names in a book, never get interviewed but literally had given their lives. Who the hell am I to have my picture up there?"

 

He was suddenly flooded with guilt. He started bawling during the ceremony as startled people looked on. Then another Freedom Rider veteran, a strapping black man named Jim Davis, walked over to Zwerg.

 

Zwerg's voice trembles with emotion as he recalls what Davis said. "He said, 'Jim, you don't realize that it was your words from that hospital bed that were the call to arms for the rest of us.' "

 

And then, as Davis wrapped his big arms around Zwerg in front of the startled crowd, the two men cried together (Blake 7).  

 

 

Works cited:

 

Blake, John.  “Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family.”  CNN.  Web.  http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/16/Zwerg.freedom.rides/index.html

 

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

 

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

 

Lifson, Amy.  “Freedom Riders.”  Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  May/June 2011.  Web.  https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/mayjune/feature/freedom-riders

 

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

 

Simkin, John.  “Freedom Riders.”  Spartacus Educational.  August 2014.  Web.  https://spartacus-educational.com/USAfreedomR.htm



Civil Rights Events

Freedom Rides

SNCC to the Rescue

 

The survivors of the two Freedom Rides that began in Washington, D. C. were scattered about Birmingham.  James Farmer had arrived from the nation’s capitol.  The Riders wanted to continue their journey.  Farmer was apprehensive.  The Greyhound bus company “did not want to risk losing another bus to a bombing, and its drivers, who were all white, did not want to risk their lives” (Cozzens 4).  U. S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent Justice Department aide and native Tennesseean John Seigenthaler to Birmingham to negotiate air transportation of the Riders to New Orleans, the final destination of their journey.  Kennedy wanted the Freedom Rides ended.  Farmer declared the CORE project terminated. 

 

On the evening of May 15, the CORE Freedom Riders finally arrive in New Orleans aboard an airplane arranged for by John Seigenthaler ….On the airport tarmac, they are met by a crowd of white police officers in riot gear who shout racial epithets at the Riders as they make their way to the terminal and a small, welcoming group of CORE volunteers (Journey 1).

 

The decision to end the ride frustrated student activists, such as Diane Nash, who argued in a phone conversation with Farmer: “We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.” Under the auspices and organizational support of SNCC, the Freedom Rides would resume out of Nashville.  SNCC mentors were wary of this decision, including King, who had declined to join the rides when asked by Nash and Rodney Powell.  Farmer continued to express his reservations, questioning whether continuing the trip was “suicide” ((Freedom Stanford 4).

 

Diane Nash recognized “that if the Freedom Ride was ended right then after all that violence, southern white racists would think that they could stop a project by inflicting enough violence on it … and we wouldn’t have been able to have any kind of movement for voting rights, for buses, public accommodations or anything after that, without getting a lot of people killed first.”  Robert Kennedy instructed Seigenthaler to speak directly with Nash to get her to change her mind (Morgan 2).

 

Seigenthaler recalled their telephone conversation.

 

I felt my voice go up another decibel and another and soon I was shouting, ‘Young woman, do you understand what you are doing? You’re gonna get somebody . . . Do you understand you’re gonna get somebody killed?’ And there’s a pause, and she said, ‘Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night. . . . We know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome non-violence.’ That’s virtually a direct quote of the words that came out of that child’s mouth. Here I am an official of the United States government, representing the president and the attorney general, talking to a student at Fisk University. And she in a very quiet but strong way gave me a lecture (Lifson 4).

 

 

Jim Zwerg, whose subsequent Freedom Ride participation would make him famous, recalled the following.

 

Well, we got word on the CORE Freedom Ride, and we knew that John Lewis, a member of our organization, was going to be involved in it. We got word of the burning in Aniston... we had a meeting long into the night as soon as we heard about it. The feeling was that if we let those perpetrators of violence believe that people would stop if they were violent enough, then we would take serious steps backwards. Right away the feeling was that we needed to ride. We called Dr. King, we called James Farmer. There was an awareness that our phones were being tapped, so the feeling was that they knew what we were about to do. Our plan was different from CORE's. Whereas they chartered their buses, we were just going to get tickets and get on the bus. We felt that was even more important -- to buy a ticket just like any other traveler. We weren't getting a special bus, we were just going to get on the bus.

 

It was decided that we would send twelve people. I was one of 18 that volunteered to go. I've been asked why I volunteered to go... I would have to say, at that moment, it wasn't even a question. It was the right thing for me to do. I never second-guessed it (Simkin 3-4).

 

Zwerg was drawn to the Freedom Rides after he was assigned a black roommate while attending Beloit College in Wisconsin. He grew to admire his roommate and was shocked to see how the young man was treated by whites when they went out in public together. So he volunteered to be an exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville, an all-black college, for one semester. He wanted to know how it felt to be a minority.

 

Zwerg had gone to a city that had become a launching pad for the civil rights movement. He was swept up in the group of Nashville college students who were initiating sit-ins and Freedom Rides. He was awed by their commitment (Blake 5).

 

It was the dance craze “The Twist” that ushered Jim Zwerg of Gallup, N.M., into the civil rights movement.  At a party while attending Fisk University I was showing them what a poor twist dancer I was,” he said. “We were having such a good time and I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got time, why don’t we take in a movie this afternoon?’ ” That was when he learned that blacks and whites could not attend a movie together in Nashville. His involvement in efforts to desegregate local movie theaters led to his participation in the ride (Colvin 9).

 

Ten volunteers left Nashville for Birmingham May 17 on the 5:15 a.m. Greyhound bus; thirteen more got on a second bus the next day. Interviewed in 1995, Zwerg described the ride from Nashville to Birmingham and his subsequent incarceration.

 

We just got the tickets and got on the bus. I was going to sit in the front of the bus with Paul Brooks. [22, from East St. Louis, student at American Baptist Theological Seminary, would-be editor of Mississippi Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, 1962–1963]  Paul sat by the window; I sat by the aisle. The rest of the blacks and one white girl, Celine McMullen, were going to sit in the back.

 

It was an uneventful ride until we got to the Birmingham city limits. We were pulled over by the police... They came on the bus and said, "This is a Freedom Rider bus, who's on here from Nashville? And the bus driver pointed to Paul and myself. They came up and really started badgering Paul, you know, "Get up... why aren't you in the back of the bus?" And he said he was very comfortable where he was. So they placed him under arrest. And they asked me to move so they could get to him... and I said, "I'm very comfortable where I am too."

 

We were both placed under arrest, taken off the bus, seated in the squad car for I don' t know how long. Finally they took us to Birmingham Jail and fingerprinted us. They put me in solitary for a little while. Then they put me in with a fellow who was a felon. I mean, I'm in my suit and tie and I've got my pocket bible with me. I think he thought I was some clergyman making calls. Ultimately they threw me in a drunk tank, with about twenty guys in various states of inebriation, and announced in no uncertain terms that I was a ******-lover for the Freedom Riders. Here he is, boys, have at him! I didn't know what was going to happen and I kind of said, "How do you guys feel about this? Do you know what they're talking about?" And they started asking me some questions.

 

One of the things we agreed on is that if you were jailed, number one, you go on a hunger strike, because in our minds we were jailed illegally. You don't cop a plea, you don't pay the bail and jump. You stay. But here I was. One single white guy. And I didn't know what had happened to Paul. I didn't know what had happened to the rest of the people on the bus. I began to see the state that some of drunks were in, and I tried to get some towels and clean up the guys who were sick. I just got talking to some of them and none of them ever laid a hand on me. Basically, we talked about what I believed and what they believed.

 

I discovered that since the South was predominately Baptist, Catholics were kind of looked down on at the time. Surprisingly, 19 of the 20 guys in the drunk tank were Catholics! So we kind of had something more in common than they realized. (Simkin

 6-8).

 

The other Riders were placed under “protective custody.”   “Music was the way we communicated in jail.  … ‘Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.’  I sang it for my cellmates and they liked it. So I got probably ten of these guys singing with me. They had taken all the rest of the people on the bus into protective custody, and I had heard them singing. Now they could hear this group singing, and know I was okay.”

 

We still had to go to mess even though you didn't eat. One day a fellow came in who was quite sick and I smuggled a sandwich back to the cell for him. I didn't know that act was punishable by three months in jail. But by giving him a sandwich -- suddenly I was a good guy and nobody was going to lay a hand on me. So the two and a half days that we were in jail were fine. We got to know each other. We talked. When I was in court I was really pleased that a number of these guys came over to me and said, "Jim, we really don't agree with you, but we wish you all the best" (Simkin 6-10).

 

Seven Freedom Riders who had been arrested the previous day were transported from the Birmingham jail north to the Tennessee border.  Early in the morning of May 18, Bull Connor and other police officers drove the Riders under cover of darkness to Ardmore, Alabama., near the Alabama/Tennessee border.  

 

Birmingham, AL native, 21-year-old Catherine Burks was a student at Tennessee State University when she volunteered for the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride. On May 18, she bantered with the ultra-segregationist Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor as he drove the Nashville riders from jail back to the Tennessee state line.

 

 In Freedom Riders, Burks says she borrowed a line from the Westerns of the day, telling Connor, "We'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon” (Meet 2).

 

Left on the side of the road, the Riders were told to make their way back to Nashville.  The Riders found refuge in the home of an elderly black couple.  From Nashville, Diane Nash made arrangements for a car to transport the Riders back to Birmingham the following day.

 

Federal intervention began to take place behind the scenes as Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Greyhound Company and demanded that it find a driver.  Seeking to diffuse the dangerous situation, John Seigenthaler, a Department of Justice representative accompanying the freedom riders, met with a reluctant Alabama Governor John Patterson.  Seigenthaler’s maneuver resulted in the bus’s departure for Montgomery with a full police escort the next morning (Freedom Stanford 7).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Blake, John.  “Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family.”  CNN.  Web.  http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/16/Zwerg.freedom.rides/index.html

 

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

 

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

 

“The Journey to Freedom.”  Oprah.com.  Web.  http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/journey-to-freedom-retrace-the-freedom-rides/all

 

Lifson, Amy.  “Freedom Riders.”  Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  May/June 2011.  Web.  https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/mayjune/feature/freedom-riders

 

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

 

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

Simkin, John.  “Freedom Riders.”  Spartacus Educational.  August 2014.  Web.  https://spartacus-educational.com/USAfreedomR.htm



Civil Rights Events

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. Farmer devoted his career to civil rights and social justice causes, working for the NAACP and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), CORE's parent organization, prior to his February 1961 election as director of CORE. 

 

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 on the morning of May 14 to attend his father's funeral, Farmer was haunted by guilt.  Later, he would relate his emotions.  "There was, of course, the incomparable sorrow and pain," he said. "But frankly, there was also a sense of reprieve, for which I hated myself. Like everyone else, I was afraid of what lay in store for us in Alabama, and now that I was to be spared participation in it, I was relieved, which embarrassed me to tears" (Meet) 5).

 

The man who replaced Farmer in Atlanta was James Peck, the only activist among the Freedom Riders to have participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation.  Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War II as a conscientious objector.

 

 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; and Ike Reynolds, black, 27, a CORE field secretary.  Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief of Jet Magazine, and Ted Gaffney, Jet Magazine photographer, were seated in the rear of the bus.

 

Soon after the bus had left the Atlanta terminal, the rough-looking white men – Klansmen – began harassing the black Riders.  "You niggers will be taken care of once you get in Alabama," one of the Klansmen threatened.  The comments intensified, once the bus passed into Alabama (Gross/Arsenault 12-13). 

 

“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 police officers, leaped up the steps. To the occupants of the bus he announced: "We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads.  A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats."

 

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, and niggers ain't nothing here."  He then lunged toward Person, punched him in the face. A second Klansman then punched Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both non-violent black Riders refused to fight back.  They were dragged into the aisle, struck with fists, and repeatedly kicked.  Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back of the bus. “Can we talk about this?” Peck said.  One of the Klansmen struck Peck, sent him reeling across two rows of seats.  Bergman was then struck and fell to the floor.  Blood spurted from their faces.  The enraged Klansmen continued their assaults.  A pair of Klansmen lifted Peck's head, others punched him senseless.  Even though Bergman was unconscious, one Klansman kept stomping on his chest (Gross/Arsenault 14).

 

Behind them, Bergman's wife, Frances, 58, heard the sound of human flesh being brutally beaten for the first time in her life. Frances pleaded with the men to stop. She said later, "I had never before experienced the feeling of people all around hating me so... I kept thinking,‘How could these things be happening in 1961?'"

 

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, the driver used back roads heading west.  The Klansmen did not object.  The Freedom Riders were puzzled.  They didn’t know that the Klansmen were protecting them for a welcoming party that was gathering in downtown Birmingham (Gross/Arsenault 15-16). 

 

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.  Reaching the outskirts of the city, Peck and the other injured Riders had regained consciousness; but since the Klansmen were not allowing any of them to leave their seats or communicate, Peck could not attempt to prepare them for the horror of what most assuredly waited.

 

Peck and the other Trailways Riders had no detailed knowledge of what had happened to the Greyhound Riders in Anniston. They thought they were prepared for the worst, but were not.  They had no knowledge of how far Birmingham's extreme segregationists would go to preserve their way of life.  In Birmingham, collaboration between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement officials was absolute. The special agents in the Birmingham FBI field office, and their superiors in Washington, knew what was going to happen.  They could have warned the Freedom Riders but did not.

 

Worse, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe actively ensured in Birmingham that the Trailways Riders would be pummeled.  The plan agreed to between Klansmen and law enforcement had been to attack first the occupants of the Greyhound bus when it arrived at the Greyhound station.  News of the Anniston bombing did not reach Birmingham until midafternoon, minutes before the arrival of the Trailways bus.  Apprised by police headquarters, Rowe alerted the Klansmen waiting near the Greyhound station that the second bus of Freedom Riders was about to arrive at the Trailways station, three blocks away.  Years later Rowe recounted the frantic dash across downtown Birmingham: "We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area."

 

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, … we saw along the sidewalk … about… twenty men with pipes.  We saw no cop in sight.  And now I'll tell you what, how I remember the date.  The next day, Bull Connor, the notorious police chief was asked why there were no police on hand.  He said, he replied, it was Mother's Day and they were all visiting their mothers.  Uh, well we got out of the bus and Charles Person, the black student from Atlanta and I, had been designated to try to enter the lunch counter.  So we… of course we didn't [get] there (Interview 5).

 

Why had Charles Person, the eighteen-year-old black Morehouse College student from Georgia, chosen to be there?

 

The Russians had launched Sputnik, demonstrating a technological and scientific supremacy over the United States, and Person, of Atlanta, was ready to answer the call for more American students to become scientists. Accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he thought he would also apply to nearby Georgia Tech, which was cheaper. But he couldn’t get in there; the university was not integrated. And that’s what galvanized him.

 

“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 and later was chosen for the rides.

 

“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? You're a shame to the white race!"  They exited down the steps and quickly disappeared into the crowd.  Peck and the other Freedom Riders, peering at the crowd, saw no weapons.  They filed off the bus onto the unloading platform to retrieve their luggage.  Several rough-looking men were standing a few feet away giving no indication of impending violence.  Peck and Person walked toward the white waiting room. In his 1962 memoir, Peck recalled: “I did not want to put Person in a position of being forced to proceed if he thought the situation was too dangerous," but "when I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, 'Let's go.'"  Person knew the Deep South; he had been jailed for sixteen days for participating in the Atlanta sit-ins; hours earlier he had been beaten up.  Despite his and Peck’s past experiences, neither man was sufficiently prepared to anticipate what was about to occur.

 

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. No one was charged.

 

“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. Once there, staff refused to treat him. Only at Jefferson Hillman Hospital did Peck finally receive treatment, including some 53 stitches for his head wounds (Doyle 7).

 

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 Trailways Bus Station, as a vicious mob of Klansmen attacked the Freedom Riders and innocent bystanders alike with pipes and baseball bats. After the riot, Smith helped badly injured Riders Jim Peck and Walter Bergman to hail a cab. He also found three other injured black men after the melee, one of whom was Ike Reynolds. These men had agreed to do on camera interviews which Smith conducted with the men and was hopeful of airing that evening on CBS-TV. But “signal difficulties” from the local TV station – WAPI – prevented that from happening, though Smith suspected that the local owner there had vetoed such a broadcast.

 

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” (Doyle 8-9).   

 

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.  Spicer had been unaware of the melee inside the station until she and Webb were set upon by pipe-wielding Klansmen. Undercover FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, told Spicer: "Get the hell out of here," whereupon she fled into the street.  Rowe and three others, including an NSRP member, pummeled Webb, who fought back but succumbed after several other thugs surrounded him.  Dozens of bystanders watched, some yelling, "Kill the nigger."  One of the plainclothes detectives on the scene, Red Self, told Rowe: "Get the boys out of here.  I'm ready to give the signal for the police to move in."  When the police did arrive, most of the rioters had left.

 

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 mob scene were reprinted in newspapers across the country (Gross/Arsenault 19-22).

 

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 only a few hours before.” At that point, few people had heard of CORE, and fewer still knew what the term ‘Freedom Rider’ meant. But with reports like the one Smith made [and newspaper photographs and articles reprinted in local newspapers], more and more of the general population would soon understand what was taking place in the southern part of their country (Doyle 10).

 

 

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 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

 

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 Digital Gateway Texts.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/pec0015.0499.082jamespeck.html

 

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