On 4 May , the freedom riders left Washington, D. Although they faced resistance and arrests in Virginia, it was not until the riders arrived in Rock Hill, South Carolina, that they encountered violence.
The beating of Lewis and another rider, coupled with the arrest of one participant for using a whites-only restroom, attracted widespread media coverage.
In the days following the incident, the riders met King and other civil rights leaders in Atlanta for dinner. The ride continued to Anniston, Alabama, where, on 14 May, riders were met by a violent mob of over people.
One of the buses was firebombed, and its fleeing passengers were forced into the angry white mob. Although the violence garnered national media attention, the series of attacks prompted James Farmer of CORE to end the campaign. The riders flew to New Orleans, bringing to an end the first Freedom Ride of the s. With fractured support, the organizers had a difficult time securing financial resources. Nevertheless, on 17 May , seven men and three women rode from Nashville to Birmingham to resume the Freedom Rides.
Just before reaching Birmingham, the bus was pulled over and directed to the Birmingham station, where all of the riders were arrested for defying segregation laws. The arrests, coupled with the difficulty of finding a bus driver and other logistical challenges, left the riders stranded in the city for several days. 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. At the Montgomery city line, as agreed, the state troopers left the buses, but the local police that had been ordered to meet the freedom riders in Montgomery never appeared.
Unprotected when they entered the terminal, riders were beaten so severely by a white mob that some sustained permanent injuries. When the police finally arrived, they served the riders with an injunction barring them from continuing the Freedom Ride in Alabama. During this time, King was on a speaking tour in Chicago. 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. The Parchman Prison Farm was one of the most notorious prisons in America dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. We only want to break their spirits. The Freedom Riders at Parchman experienced psychological torture for up to sixty days at a time. They were sent off to chain gangs, beaten by prison guards, and were forced to live under extreme inhumane conditions.
Some Freedom Riders would be placed in a cells only a few feet away from the execution chamber on death row. As barbaric as Parchman was, hundreds of volunteers still took the Freedom Ride and were sent to Parchman. By July , more than Freedom Riders were incarcerated at one time.
The Freedom Rides were the first nationally known interracial civil rights demonstration in the South. As more and more volunteers took the Freedom Ride into the South, the Kennedy Administration slowly evolved into an ally for the Civil Rights Movement. Later that year, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy appealed to the Interstate Commerce Commission and filed a petition to end segregation in interstate travel.
It was declared unconstitutional on November 1, The Freedom Riders were victorious. The legacies of the Freedom Riders changed the world and inspired others to end racial discrimination in public life and will never be forgotten. John Lewis would become a member of the U.
Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called "jail, no bail"—a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities. Most of the riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets. And that was the whole point. Jean Thompson, then a year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him "sir.
It was eye-opening. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs. None of the riders Etheridge spoke with expressed regrets, even though some would be entangled for years in legal appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court which issued a ruling in that led to a reversal of the breach of peace convictions.
More than two dozen of the riders Etheridge interviewed went on to become teachers or professors, and there are eight ministers as well as lawyers, Peace Corps workers, journalists and politicians. Like Lewis, Bob Filner, of California, is a congressman. And few former Freedom Riders still practice civil disobedience. Theresa Walker, 80, was arrested in New York City in during a protest over the police killing there the year before of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea.
Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U. Supreme Court's mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, , hard-core segregation persisted; still, the "white" and "colored" signs in bus stations across the South be- gan to come down. The New York Times , which had earlier criticized the Freedom Riders' "incitement and provocation," acknowledged that they "started the chain of events which resulted in the new I.
The legacy of the rides "could not have been more poetic," says Robert Singleton, who connects those events to the election of Barack Obama as president. Obama was born in August , Singleton notes, just when the riders were languishing in Mississippi jails and prisons, trying to "break the back of segregation for all people, but especially for the children.
We put ourselves in harm's way for a child, at the very time he came into this world, who would become our first black president. Marian Smith Holmes is an associate editor.
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