It’s been 50 years now, but there are times when Charles Person still finds it hard to talk about the summer of 1961 without his voice breaking. The 68-year-old Atlanta man recalls the unfathomable hatred. The beatings. The constant reminders that blacks should stay in their place.
That summer, Person was a pioneer in what would come to be known as the Freedom Rides, an organized effort initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality to challenge the South’s segregation of passengers on interstate travel.
The months-long effort, seen as the first movement of its kind uniting blacks and whites from across the nation in a mass protest, would ultimately end segregated travel, but not without riots, bloodshed and arrests.
This month, the 50th anniversary of the rides will be marked by a new film, reunions and a re-enactment by college students. Person and other Atlantans who took part in the rides were college students themselves then. Today, among their number are ministers, academics, retirees and a businessman who owns restaurants and hotels in places that met him with violence 50 years ago. Most have made peace with the struggles they endured that summer, but their recollections are tinged with lingering pain.
“There are times I still have flashbacks and I’ll cry,” said Person, who harbors no hate for his attackers. “We need some reconciliation. When things happen nowadays they bring in psychologists. We never had that.”
Mobs and flames
Atlanta leaders were generally tolerant of the Freedom Riders. But most other stops on their route became battle zones.
Person, then an 18-year-old Morehouse College student, was among 13 Freedom Riders on the first buses to leave Washington, D.C., in early May. On Mothers Day, May 14, those buses arrived in Anniston, Ala., and Birmingham. Mobs in both cities attacked the buses.
In Anniston, a Greyhound bus was set on fire, the activists aboard barely escaping. Person, aboard a Trailways bus in Birmingham, watched as Walter Bergman and James Peck, two middle-aged white men in his group, were attacked and beaten when they came to the aid of black riders being forced to the rear.
Later that day, Bergman, Person and other riders were attacked and beaten again inside the bus terminal in Birmingham. Bergman would suffer a stroke that left him in a wheelchair the rest of his life. Person sustained a blow that left a large knot on the back of his head, a memento of the Freedom Rides he would carry with him for 35 years before finally having it removed.
Despite the hostilities those first activists endured, the ranks of the Freedom Riders would swell to more than 400 people before the bus rides ended, after the Kennedy administration convinced the Interstate Commerce Commission to effectively end segregation aboard interstate travel that September.
“The rides lasted long enough for people to see what was happening and have their consciousness raised to take action,” said Bernard LaFayette, a former Freedom Rider and distinguished senior scholar in residence at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. It also offered whites a way to participate en masse, he said.
The 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides holds a special lesson for young people, said John Seigenthaler, former administrative aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, whose work in Alabama involved the rides.
“What young people can learn today from the Freedom Riders is this: That despite what many people would judge to be their youth and immaturity, with resolve and with commitment they can right wrongs in this society.”
The rides have had other long-lasting effects, including spurring the political career of U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The Atlanta Democrat announced last week he would run again in 2012.
Met with violence
In theory at least, the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation on interstate travel a year before the Freedom Rides. The objective of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, was to test how state and federal authorities were enforcing the law in the Deep South.
At the time, most Southern whites clung to the belief that separation of the races was best for blacks and whites. The customs they had observed for decades were being threatened by college students and other protesters they viewed as outside agitators.
“The phenomenal thing was how what happened ran against every expectation of the racist leaders,” said Seigenthaler. “The last thing they thought was that you’d have the Freedom Riders literally flooding into the South to take up that cause.”
Charles Person’s role in this pivotal moment in America’s racial history began on May 4, 1961, when he joined one of the first groups recruited by CORE aboard buses departing Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans. Their itinerary included stops in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Like those who would follow them, these first Freedom Riders prepared by learning nonviolent strategies and techniques. They practiced how to respond when they were cursed at, spit on or slapped. They were coached on how to protect the most vulnerable parts of their bodies.
The timing of the rides was not convenient for the Kennedy administration, Seigenthaler recalled. President John F. Kennedy was preparing to go to Vienna to meet with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and hoped his administration could get through the year without a major conflict over civil rights laws.
The initial groups of riders encountered some problems in Rock Hill, S.C., but were greeted by city leaders in Atlanta with a reception in their honor. Atlanta officials took pride in the fact that civil rights protests here hadn’t turned violent.
Then the Freedom Riders arrived in Anniston, Ala. Howard University student Hank Thomas, now a businessman who lives in Stone Mountain, was among the riders aboard a Greyhound bus attacked by a mob. The attackers blocked the doors of the bus, broke its windows and threw in smoke bombs.
“Fortunately for us,” he recalled, “the fuel tank ignited and there was a large explosion. And that’s how we were able to get off the bus.”
Persistent memories
The violence in Alabama caused CORE to abort the rides. But students at Nashville’s historically black colleges, who had been demonstrating peacefully against segregated facilities for a year, were determined to finish what CORE had started, said Atlantan William Harbour, then 19 and a Tennessee State University student.
So the rides continued, with black college students teaming up with middle-aged whites from various parts of the country. By the time the rides ended, more than 60 buses carrying integrated teams of passengers had journeyed through the South.
The threats and intimidation continued, too. Mississippi authorities, determined not to have a repeat of the violence seen in Alabama, decided instead to jail Freedom Riders for “breach of the peace.”
They arrested more than 300 people. When they ran out of room for them in the city jail, they sent them to a state prison, where they were subjected to strip searches and filthy conditions. Harbour and other Tennessee State students who were arrested were expelled from school and had to sue for readmission.
A much different nation marks the 50th anniversary of the rides. But those who took part in the rides are quick to note that educational and employment disparities persist.
For Lewis and other riders, the painful memories of what they endured in the summer of 1961 are still fresh. Some have suffered from depression and nightmares. But forgiveness has come for most.
Hank Thomas now owns restaurants and hotels in cities where segregated facilities greeted him 50 years ago.
A few weeks ago, he had planned to travel to Anniston to meet with Cecil Lewallyn, one of the men charged with firebombing his Greyhound bus. (None of the attackers were ever convicted.) Lewallyn reneged at the last minute when he heard “The Oprah Winfrey Show” wanted to record the meeting.
Said Thomas: “They were cowards then and they are cowards now.”
“The courageous Freedom Riders won’t ever be the same,” wrote a newspaper journalist in 1961. “They left Washington, D.C., in good spirits with high hopes in their country and fellow men. But the beatings, the tensions, the shots, the depth of the hating, the open lawlessness took its toll. It will be a miracle if all their physical and psychological wounds ever heal. The Deep South was that tough.”
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