Again, in 1961, fourteen years later, a Supreme Court decision—this time in the Boynton Case, extending desegregation from carriers themselves to terminal facilities—stimulated action. Early that year, Tom Gaither (mentioned previously as the CORE man in the Rock Hill sit-in) spoke to Gordon Carey, also of CORE, about a “Freedom Ride,” after which a national council meeting of CORE agreed to undertake it, and CORE’s new national director, James Farmer, issued a call on March 13. Farmer himself and James Feck were the first two volunteers, and on May 1, 1961, a group of thirteen, seven Negroes and six whites, assembled in Washington, D.C. for a briefing session on nonviolence. Part of the group riding a Greyhound bus and the others a Trailways bus, they started the long trip from Washington to New Orleans on May 4.
On the Greyhound bus was John Lewis of SNCC, who had participated in the Nashville sit-ins. They made it through Virginia and North Carolina with little trouble, but at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina (as James Peck relates the story in his gripping book, Freedom Ride) twenty toughs were waiting. John Lewis was the first to be slugged as he approached the white waiting room. Behind him was Albert Bigelow (famous as the pacifist skipper of the Golden Rule, which sailed into an atomic testing area in the Pacific to protest nuclear warfare), who was attacked by three men. Police first watched, then stopped the beatings, and the group entered the white waiting room. The two buses went on, through Augusta and Athens, Georgia, with long lay-overs en route, and on May 13 arrived in Atlanta, where they stopped for the night before heading into Alabama and Mississippi.
Sunday, May 14, when the buses left Atlanta and crossed into Alabama, was Mother’s Day. That day the Greyhound bus was stopped, its tires slashed, outside of Anniston, Alabama, and surrounded by a mob. An incendiary device hurled through a window set the bus on fire, and those on board had to make their way out, choking, through the dense smoke, while the bus burned to a charred iron skeleton. Twelve of the passengers were hospitalized briefly for smoke inhalation, but the riders assembled again and took another bus into Birmingham.
In the meantime, the Trailways bus, an hour behind the other, was arriving in Anniston, the driver insisting he would not go on unless the group sat segregated. Eight hoodlums climbed aboard the bus and began beating the Negroes in the front seats. When James Peck and retired professor Walter Bergman moved forward to try to dissuade them, Peck was knocked to the ground, bleeding, and Bergman received a crushing blow on the head. The whole group was forced to the back of the bus, which went on to Birmingham.
Peck tells of his group’s arrival in Birmingham, of the mob lined up on the sidewalk near the loading platform as they got off, with young men carrying iron bars following them as they went into the white waiting room and towards the lunch counter. Then the attack came. Peck and Charles Person, an Atlanta Negro student who had been in the sit-ins there, were dragged into an alleyway, six men working on Peck, five men on Person, with fists and pipes. Peck, battered into unconsciousness, awoke to find the alleyway empty, blood flowing down his face. His friend Bergman came along and they managed to get a cab to Rev. Fred L. Shuttleworth’s house, where they saw Person, a gash in the back of his head, his face swollen.
Peck was taken to the hospital and lay on an operating table for several hours while reporters plied him with questions and doctors sewed fifty-three stitches in his head. At 2:00 A.M. Peck was discharged from the hospital, and then a brief nightmarish episode followed. Waiting outside the hospital for Rev. Shuttlesworth to arrive in a car, he was told by police to get off the street or be arrested for vagrancy. Returning to the hospital, he was told by a guard that discharged patients were not permitted in the hospital. He went back into the street, and, fortunately, the car arrived to pick him up.
A Southern Regional Council report on the Freedom Rides, discussing the bus-burning and beatings in Anniston and Birmingham, commented that all this took place “while police were either inactive, not present, or strangely late in arrival.” Police knew in advance of the arrival of the buses in these cities, but they simply were not on hand as the violence unfolded. When Birmingham police chief Bull Connor was questioned on this, he replied that protection was not available because so many of his men were off for Mother’s Day.
The entire Freedom Ride group assembled in Birmingham the next afternoon, ready to go on to Montgomery. No bus driver would take them. They waited for an hour on the loading platform while a mob gathered, then sat down in the white waiting room. It became clear that they would not get out of Birmingham, so they decided to fly on to New Orleans to participate in a mass rally there marking the May 17, 1954, Supreme Court decision. A bomb threat cancelled their first plane, and another mob gathered at the airport. After six difficult hours, they finally left Birmingham at 11:00 P.M. and arrived in New Orleans at midnight.
That was the end of the first Freedom Ride. It was at this point that SNCC and the Nashville student movement entered the picture. A new phase of the Freedom Rides began.
Ruby Doris Smith, spending more of her sophomore year at Spelman in the SNCC office than with her books, recalls clearly the tension in Atlanta when news came of the Mother’s Day violence in Anniston and Birmingham.
I remember Diane Nash called the Department of Justice from Nashville, and Lonnie King—you know he was head of the Atlanta student movement—also called the Department. Both of them asked the federal government to give protection to the Freedom Riders on the rest of their journey. And in both cases the Justice Department said no, they couldn’t protect anyone, but if something happened, they would investigate. You know how they do.…
When the news came that the Riders could not go on by bus, that they were flying to New Orleans, an excited discussion went on over long distance between Nashville and Atlanta, the two centers where SNCC had its strongest contingents. The Ride, they decided, should continue. If it didn’t, it would prove that violence could overcome nonviolence.
The indomitable Diane Nash was quickly assembling a group of students in Nashville, determined to go to Birmingham and continue the Freedom Ride from there to Montgomery, then into Mississippi, then into New Orleans. They were joined by some members of the first Ride, including John Lewis and Henry Thomas. Ruby Doris Smith raced around Atlanta trying to raise money so that she could go along, but many Atlanta Negroes thought it was too dangerous, and tried to dissuade her from going.
Meanwhile the Nashville group had left, early in the morning of May 17, 1961. Eight Negroes and two whites were aboard a bus headed for Birmingham. Police got on the bus oh the outskirts of Birmingham, ordered two students to change their seats, and arrested them when they refused. The rest of the group was arrested (the reason given was “protective custody”) in the Birmingham terminal, after making their way through a crowd and trying in vain to get a bus driver to agree to take them on to Montgomery.
The Riders spent a night in jail. Then, early the next morning they were driven 120 miles to the Tennessee border by Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor, and let out in the middle of nowhere. Diane and the others made their way back to Nashville and started all over, joined by more students, including three whites, so that there were now seventeen in the group. That same afternoon they were back, by bus, in the Birmingham terminal. It was May 19. Five days had passed since Mother’s Day.
Ruby Doris Smith, her money finally in hand, flew from Atlanta to Birmingham to join the Nashville group:
I was alone.… When I got to Birmingham I went to the bus terminal and joined the seventeen from Nashville. We waited all night trying to get a bus to Montgomery. Every time we got on a bus the driver said no, he wouldn’t risk his life. The terminal kept crowding up with passengers who were stranded because the buses wouldn’t go on. The Justice Department then promised Diane that the driver of the 4:00 A.M. bus would go on to Montgomery. But when he arrived he came off the bus and said to us: “I have only one life to give, and I’m not going to give it to NAACP or CORE!”
The students sat outside on the ramp for three hours, and sang Freedom Songs as dawn broke over Birmingham. Then they were startled to see the same bus driver return and, still grumbling, begin to collect tickets for the trip to Montgomery. Joined by two Birmingham Negroes and some newspapermen, but with no other white passengers aboard, the bus headed for Montgomery.
That