Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "hank-thomas"
Civil Rights Events -- Freedom Rides -- Greyhound Bus -- Anniston
Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing “freedom rides” through the region. They used as their model CORE’s 1946 “Journey of Reconciliation” where an interracial group rode interstate buses to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia which outlawed segregation in interstate travel. White southern segregationists resisted CORE’s efforts. When most of the demonstrators were arrested in North Carolina, the police effectively aborted the Journey of Reconciliation.
Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation (Mack 1).
"So that everything would be open and above board, I sent letters to the
President of the United States, President Kennedy; to the Attorney General,
Robert Kennedy; the Director of the FBI, Mr. Hoover; the Chairman of the
Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated interstate travel; to the
President of Greyhound Corporation; and the President of Trailways Corporation.
And I must say we got replies from none of those letters,” Farmer would state later (Freedom Quotes 1).
John F. Kennedy had been elected president, in large part due to widespread support among blacks who believed that Kennedy was more sympathetic to the civil rights movement than his opponent, Richard Nixon. Once in office, however, Kennedy proved less committed to the movement than he had appeared during the campaign. To test the president's commitment to civil rights, CORE would send two interracial groups on chartered buses into the deep South. The whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. "This was not civil disobedience, really," explained … Farmer, "because we [were] merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do." But the Freedom Riders expected to meet resistance. "We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law," said Farmer. "When we began the ride I think all of us were prepared for as much violence as could be thrown at us. We were prepared for the possibility of death" (Cozzens 1).
Half of the Freedom Riders would travel on a Greyhound bus and the other half on a Trailways bus. Their ultimate destination was New Orleans, Louisiana.
Prior to the 1960 decision, two students, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, integrated their bus ride home from college in Nashville, Tennessee, by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they saw CORE’s announcement recruiting volunteers to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to test the enforcement of Boynton. Lafayette’s parents would not permit him to participate, but Lewis joined 12 other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride (Freedom Stanford 1).
“One of the most remarkable things about the Freedom Rides is that …there was not a single incident of breaking the discipline,” Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, said. “It’s hard to think of anything more striking in American history than that.”
Even seemingly minor details were not overlooked. For the day of the rides, a dress code was implemented: women in dresses, skirts, and the men in sport coats. “They wanted to look like they had just come out of church or Sunday school,” Arsenault said (Colvin 1).
The Freedom Riders left Washington DC on May 4, 1961. It was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education decision.
The first significant confrontation with segregationists occurred in Charlotte, North Carolina. Joseph Perkins, twenty-seven year-old CORE Field Secretary, was arrested for trespassing for attempting to have his shoes shined at a whites-only shoe stand. Perkins refused to post bail and spent two nights (May 8 and 9) in jail. On May 10, Judge Howard B. Arbuckle found him innocent of the trespassing charge based on the precedent set in Boyton v. Virginia. Perkins would rejoin the riders May 11.
On May 10 several white men attacked a group of Freedom Riders at the Greyhound bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, as they attempted to enter the whites-only waiting room. John Lewis, Al Bigelow and Genevieve Hughes sustain injuries. Two men set upon Lewis, battered his face and kicked him in the ribs. The attack was broken up by local police.
Lewis received then a telegram inviting him to Philadelphia for an interview for a position with the Peace Corps. He decided to go, intending to rejoin the Freedom Riders in Birmingham.
The Freedom Riders arrived in Atlanta on May 13 and attended a reception hosted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They wanted King to join them on the buses, to become a Freedom Rider himself. King passed on a warning that the Klan had "quite a welcome" prepared for the Riders in Alabama. He urged them to reconsider traveling through the Deep South. He whispered prophetically to Jet Magazine reporter Simeon Booker, who was covering the story, “You will never make it through Alabama” (Freedom Stannford 2). Despite King’s warning, the CORE Freedom Riders left Atlanta on May 14, bound for Alabama.
Informed that his father had died unexpectedly, James Farmer needed to return to Washington, D.C. to attend his father’s funeral. James Peck replaced Farmer as leader of the perilous project. Peck phoned Fred Shuttlesworth, the pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church and the leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to give him the exact arrival times of the two Freedom Buses. Shuttlesworth told Peck that Birmingham was alive with rumors that a white mob planned to confront the Riders at the downtown bus stations. Peck calmly told his riders about Shuttlesworth’s warning. He also related a warning he had received about potential difficulties that might arise at Anniston, a rest stop on the bus route to Birmingham. To allay fears, he stated he had no reason to believe the Riders would encounter serious trouble prior to their arrival in downtown Birmingham. The four-hour ride would give them considerable time to prepare an effective nonviolent response to the waiting mob, should such an eventuality exist.
The Greyhound Bus
The two busses carrying the riders left Atlanta an hour apart. The Greyhound group, with Joe Perkins in charge, left first at 11:00 A.M. The bus was more than half empty. Fourteen passengers were on board: five regular passengers, seven Freedom Riders, and two journalists, Charlotte Devree and Moses Newson. The riders were Genevieve Hughes, white, 28, CORE field secretary; Al Bigelow, white, 55, retired naval officer; Hank Thomas, black, 19, Howard University student; Jimmy McDonald, black, 29, CORE volunteer; Mae Frances Moultrie, black, 24, Morris College student; Joe Perkins, black, 27, CORE field secretary; and Ed Blankenheim, white, 27, a carpenter. Three of the regular passengers were Roy Robinson, the manager of the Atlanta Greyhound station, and two undercover plainclothes agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol: Eli Cowling and Harry Sims. Following the orders of Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Cowling carried a hidden microphone to be used to eavesdrop on the Riders. Unsure of the Freedom Ride's itinerary, Mann and his boss, Governor John Patterson, wanted to know what the Riders planned.
Just south of Anniston, the driver of a northbound Greyhound motioned to the driver of the Freedom Riders' bus, O. T. Jones, to pull over to the side of the road. A white man then ran across the road and yelled to Jones through the window: "There's an angry and unruly crowd gathered at Anniston. There's a rumor that some people on this bus are going to stage a sit-in. The terminal has been closed. Be careful." With this message the Riders' worst fears seemed to be confirmed, but Joe Perkins — hoping that the warning was a bluff, or at least an exaggeration — urged the driver to keep going. A minute or two later, as the bus passed the city limits, several of the Riders couldn't help but notice that Anniston's sidewalks were lined with people, an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon in a Deep South town. "It seemed that everyone in the town was out to greet us," White Rider Genevieve Hughes, 28-year-old CORE Field Secretary, later commented.
Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas, who had joined the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride at the last minute after his Howard University roommate John Moody had dropped out with a bad case of the flu, remembered the strange feeling that he and the other Riders felt as the bus turned into the station parking lot. The station was locked shut. There was utter silence. Then, suddenly, a screaming mob, led by Anniston Klan leader William Chappell, surrounded the bus. Thomas thought he heard the driver, O. T. Jones say, "Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers."
An eighteen-year-old Klansman and ex-convict, Roger Couch, stretched himself out in front of the bus. The others, approximately fifty in number, carrying metal pipes, clubs, and chains — milled about, many screaming: "Dirty Communists! "Sieg heil!" No policemen were present, even though the manager of the Anniston Greyhound station, had warned local officials earlier that a potentially dangerous mob had assembled.
After the driver opened the door, Cowling and Sims hurried to the front and managed to close the door. Frenzied attackers began to smash windows, dent the sides of the bus, and slash tires. Genevieve Hughes watched a man walk by the side of the bus, saw him slip a pistol from his pocket, watched him stare at her for several minutes. She heard the sound of shattering glass. She shouted, "Duck, down everyone," thinking that a bullet had struck one of the windows. It had been a rock. A second man cracked the window above her seat with brass knuckles. Joe Perkins's window was also cracked. The assault continued for almost twenty minutes.
The Anniston police finally arrived. The officers examined the broken windows and slashed tires but made no attempt to arrest anybody. Eventually, the officers cleared a path in the crowd and motioned for the bus to leave the parking lot.
A police car led the Greyhound to the city limits and then turned back, leaving the bus to the mercy of the pursuing mob. A long line of cars and pickup trucks, plus one car carrying a news reporter and a photographer, followed. Two of the cars, ahead of the bus, forced it to slow down. The thirty or forty cars and trucks were occupied mostly by Klansmen, none wearing hoods or robes. Some had just come from church, wearing coats and ties and polished shoes. Some had children with them.
Two tires now flat, six miles southwest of Anniston, in front of the Forsyth and Son grocery store, the driver pulled over to the side of the road. Roy Robinson and the driver ran into the grocery store hoping to call a local garage that might have replacement tires. Back in the bus, Eli Cowling had retrieved his revolver from the baggage compartment. A teenage boy smashed a side window with a crowbar. A group of men and boys rocked the bus trying to turn it over on its side. A second group attempted to enter through the front door. Brandishing his gun, Cowling blocked them, retreated, locked the door behind him. For the next twenty minutes Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out. Two highway patrolmen arrived. Neither made an effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Harry Sims, and the Riders stayed inside.
One members of the mob, Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. The bundle exploded; dark gray smoke spread throughout the bus. Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought first that the bomb-thrower had thrown a smoke bomb. The smoke got blacker. The flames started to engulf several of the seats. Crouching in the middle of the bus, she screamed: "Is there any air up front?" No one answered. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled. She found an open window six rows from the front, thrusted out her head, and saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree. Seconds later the three Riders squeezed through their opened windows. Choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the road. They were afraid that the other passengers were trapped inside, but then they saw that several passengers had escaped through the front door on the other side.
Members of the mob were pressing against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank persuaded the mob that the whole bus would within seconds explode. The frightened mob retreated. Cowling pried open the door. The choking occupants escaped. Hank Thomas was the first Rider to exit the front of the bus. A white man rushed toward him, asked: "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man struck Thomas’s head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and remained barely conscious while the rest of the gasping Riders collapsed on the grass.
Several white families had gathered in front of the grocery store. Twelve-year-old Janie Miller gave choking victims water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket, ignoring the Klansmen’s insults (Gross/ Arsenault 3- 7)
“It was the worst suffering I’d ever heard,” Miller would recall in the PBS /American Experience film, Freedom Riders. “I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her, I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else.” For daring to help the injured riders, she and her family were later ostracized by the community and could no longer live in the county (Doyle 7).
Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only African-American CORE female on the bus. She had joined the Ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC. Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus" (Meet 3).
Cowling's pistol, the heat of the fire, and the acrid fumes from the burning seats kept the mob away. A second fuel tank explosion drove them farther back. Two warning shots by the highway patrolmen on the scene persuaded the Klansmen to slip away. Minutes passed. Cowling, Sims, and the patrolmen stood guard over the Riders, lying and sitting yards away from the shell of the bus. No one in a position of authority had attempted to make an arrest. Nobody had recorded the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks. No one attempted to call an ambulance. Finally, a white couple who lived close by permitted Genevieve Hughes to make a call. Nobody answered. The couple drove Hughes to the hospital. One of the state troopers called for an ambulance. Its driver refused to carry any of the black Riders. Already loaded, refusing to leave behind their black friends, the white Riders began to exit. Cowling spoke sternly to the driver. He relented. All who needed to be transported were driven to Anniston Memorial Hospital.
Genevieve Hughes discovered that only a nurse was at the hospital. The nurse gave her pure oxygen to breathe. It burned her throat, did not relieve her coughing. She was burning hot. Her clothes were a wet mess. After awhile Ed Blankenheim and Bert Bigelow were brought in. Laying on their beds, they continued to cough. Eventually a woman doctor arrived, having taken several minutes to reference smoke poisoning. A Negro man (not a Freedom rider) who had been in the back of the bus with Genevieve was brought in. She told the nurse and doctor to take care of him. They did not. They did nothing for Hank Thomas. Of the thirteen people brought to the hospital, only Ed Blankenheim, the Negro man and Genevieve had been admitted.
After awhile, having slept, Genevieve was questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent. She was unaware that he or another FBI agent on the scene had persuaded the medical staff to treat all of the injured passengers. Perhaps the cause of their failure to comply had not been entirely racial. A group of Klansmen made an unsuccessful attempt to block the entrance to the emergency room. The crowd outside swelled in numbers. Several Klansmen threatened to burn the building down. With nightfall approaching, recognizing that he had no police protection, the hospital superintendent ordered the Riders to leave.
Even though Hughes and several other Riders needed to stay, Joe Perkins had to comply. It took him more than an hour to arrange safe passage out of the hospital. The state troopers and the local police refused to provide the Riders transportation or escort even when they were transported. Bert Bigelow called friends in Washington hoping to receive help from the federal government. Perkins called Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth mobilized a fleet of eight cars. He reminded the volunteer drivers that they had to behave non-violently. “You mustn't carry any weapons. You must trust God and have faith." Out of sight, several of the deacons pulled out shotguns from beneath their seats.
Shuttlesworth's deacons made their way across the back roads toward Anniston. The hospital superintendent insisted that the interracial group could not stay the night. At last the rescue mission pulled into the parking lot. The police holding back the jeering crowd and the deacons showing their weapons, the Riders climbed into the cars. The cars left. One rescuer remarked: “You couldn't tell the deputies from the Ku Klux."
The Riders wanted to know the fate of the Trailways group. Perkins's phone conversation with Shuttlesworth earlier in the afternoon had informed him that the other bus had also run into trouble. The deacons knew few details of the story. Even so, it was evident to all that the defenders of white supremacy in Alabama had decided to smash the Freedom Ride with violence. They would not countenance the law, the U.S. Constitution, or anything else interfering with the preservation of racial segregation in their state (Gross/ Arsenault 8-11)
Works cited:
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/nation...
Cozzens, Lisa. “Freedom Rides.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...
Doyle, Jack. ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.” PopHistoryDig.com. June 24, 2014. Web. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/t...
“Freedom Rides: American Civil Rights Movement.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Free...
“Freedom Rides Quotes.” Uen.org. Web. https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/down...
“Freedom Rides.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...
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/2006/01/12/514966...
Mack, Dwayne. “Freedom Rides (1961).” BlackPast.org. Web. https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rid...
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation (Mack 1).
"So that everything would be open and above board, I sent letters to the
President of the United States, President Kennedy; to the Attorney General,
Robert Kennedy; the Director of the FBI, Mr. Hoover; the Chairman of the
Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated interstate travel; to the
President of Greyhound Corporation; and the President of Trailways Corporation.
And I must say we got replies from none of those letters,” Farmer would state later (Freedom Quotes 1).
John F. Kennedy had been elected president, in large part due to widespread support among blacks who believed that Kennedy was more sympathetic to the civil rights movement than his opponent, Richard Nixon. Once in office, however, Kennedy proved less committed to the movement than he had appeared during the campaign. To test the president's commitment to civil rights, CORE would send two interracial groups on chartered buses into the deep South. The whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. "This was not civil disobedience, really," explained … Farmer, "because we [were] merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do." But the Freedom Riders expected to meet resistance. "We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law," said Farmer. "When we began the ride I think all of us were prepared for as much violence as could be thrown at us. We were prepared for the possibility of death" (Cozzens 1).
Half of the Freedom Riders would travel on a Greyhound bus and the other half on a Trailways bus. Their ultimate destination was New Orleans, Louisiana.
Prior to the 1960 decision, two students, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, integrated their bus ride home from college in Nashville, Tennessee, by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they saw CORE’s announcement recruiting volunteers to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to test the enforcement of Boynton. Lafayette’s parents would not permit him to participate, but Lewis joined 12 other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride (Freedom Stanford 1).
“One of the most remarkable things about the Freedom Rides is that …there was not a single incident of breaking the discipline,” Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, said. “It’s hard to think of anything more striking in American history than that.”
Even seemingly minor details were not overlooked. For the day of the rides, a dress code was implemented: women in dresses, skirts, and the men in sport coats. “They wanted to look like they had just come out of church or Sunday school,” Arsenault said (Colvin 1).
The Freedom Riders left Washington DC on May 4, 1961. It was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education decision.
The first significant confrontation with segregationists occurred in Charlotte, North Carolina. Joseph Perkins, twenty-seven year-old CORE Field Secretary, was arrested for trespassing for attempting to have his shoes shined at a whites-only shoe stand. Perkins refused to post bail and spent two nights (May 8 and 9) in jail. On May 10, Judge Howard B. Arbuckle found him innocent of the trespassing charge based on the precedent set in Boyton v. Virginia. Perkins would rejoin the riders May 11.
On May 10 several white men attacked a group of Freedom Riders at the Greyhound bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, as they attempted to enter the whites-only waiting room. John Lewis, Al Bigelow and Genevieve Hughes sustain injuries. Two men set upon Lewis, battered his face and kicked him in the ribs. The attack was broken up by local police.
Lewis received then a telegram inviting him to Philadelphia for an interview for a position with the Peace Corps. He decided to go, intending to rejoin the Freedom Riders in Birmingham.
The Freedom Riders arrived in Atlanta on May 13 and attended a reception hosted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They wanted King to join them on the buses, to become a Freedom Rider himself. King passed on a warning that the Klan had "quite a welcome" prepared for the Riders in Alabama. He urged them to reconsider traveling through the Deep South. He whispered prophetically to Jet Magazine reporter Simeon Booker, who was covering the story, “You will never make it through Alabama” (Freedom Stannford 2). Despite King’s warning, the CORE Freedom Riders left Atlanta on May 14, bound for Alabama.
Informed that his father had died unexpectedly, James Farmer needed to return to Washington, D.C. to attend his father’s funeral. James Peck replaced Farmer as leader of the perilous project. Peck phoned Fred Shuttlesworth, the pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church and the leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to give him the exact arrival times of the two Freedom Buses. Shuttlesworth told Peck that Birmingham was alive with rumors that a white mob planned to confront the Riders at the downtown bus stations. Peck calmly told his riders about Shuttlesworth’s warning. He also related a warning he had received about potential difficulties that might arise at Anniston, a rest stop on the bus route to Birmingham. To allay fears, he stated he had no reason to believe the Riders would encounter serious trouble prior to their arrival in downtown Birmingham. The four-hour ride would give them considerable time to prepare an effective nonviolent response to the waiting mob, should such an eventuality exist.
The Greyhound Bus
The two busses carrying the riders left Atlanta an hour apart. The Greyhound group, with Joe Perkins in charge, left first at 11:00 A.M. The bus was more than half empty. Fourteen passengers were on board: five regular passengers, seven Freedom Riders, and two journalists, Charlotte Devree and Moses Newson. The riders were Genevieve Hughes, white, 28, CORE field secretary; Al Bigelow, white, 55, retired naval officer; Hank Thomas, black, 19, Howard University student; Jimmy McDonald, black, 29, CORE volunteer; Mae Frances Moultrie, black, 24, Morris College student; Joe Perkins, black, 27, CORE field secretary; and Ed Blankenheim, white, 27, a carpenter. Three of the regular passengers were Roy Robinson, the manager of the Atlanta Greyhound station, and two undercover plainclothes agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol: Eli Cowling and Harry Sims. Following the orders of Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Cowling carried a hidden microphone to be used to eavesdrop on the Riders. Unsure of the Freedom Ride's itinerary, Mann and his boss, Governor John Patterson, wanted to know what the Riders planned.
Just south of Anniston, the driver of a northbound Greyhound motioned to the driver of the Freedom Riders' bus, O. T. Jones, to pull over to the side of the road. A white man then ran across the road and yelled to Jones through the window: "There's an angry and unruly crowd gathered at Anniston. There's a rumor that some people on this bus are going to stage a sit-in. The terminal has been closed. Be careful." With this message the Riders' worst fears seemed to be confirmed, but Joe Perkins — hoping that the warning was a bluff, or at least an exaggeration — urged the driver to keep going. A minute or two later, as the bus passed the city limits, several of the Riders couldn't help but notice that Anniston's sidewalks were lined with people, an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon in a Deep South town. "It seemed that everyone in the town was out to greet us," White Rider Genevieve Hughes, 28-year-old CORE Field Secretary, later commented.
Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas, who had joined the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride at the last minute after his Howard University roommate John Moody had dropped out with a bad case of the flu, remembered the strange feeling that he and the other Riders felt as the bus turned into the station parking lot. The station was locked shut. There was utter silence. Then, suddenly, a screaming mob, led by Anniston Klan leader William Chappell, surrounded the bus. Thomas thought he heard the driver, O. T. Jones say, "Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers."
An eighteen-year-old Klansman and ex-convict, Roger Couch, stretched himself out in front of the bus. The others, approximately fifty in number, carrying metal pipes, clubs, and chains — milled about, many screaming: "Dirty Communists! "Sieg heil!" No policemen were present, even though the manager of the Anniston Greyhound station, had warned local officials earlier that a potentially dangerous mob had assembled.
After the driver opened the door, Cowling and Sims hurried to the front and managed to close the door. Frenzied attackers began to smash windows, dent the sides of the bus, and slash tires. Genevieve Hughes watched a man walk by the side of the bus, saw him slip a pistol from his pocket, watched him stare at her for several minutes. She heard the sound of shattering glass. She shouted, "Duck, down everyone," thinking that a bullet had struck one of the windows. It had been a rock. A second man cracked the window above her seat with brass knuckles. Joe Perkins's window was also cracked. The assault continued for almost twenty minutes.
The Anniston police finally arrived. The officers examined the broken windows and slashed tires but made no attempt to arrest anybody. Eventually, the officers cleared a path in the crowd and motioned for the bus to leave the parking lot.
A police car led the Greyhound to the city limits and then turned back, leaving the bus to the mercy of the pursuing mob. A long line of cars and pickup trucks, plus one car carrying a news reporter and a photographer, followed. Two of the cars, ahead of the bus, forced it to slow down. The thirty or forty cars and trucks were occupied mostly by Klansmen, none wearing hoods or robes. Some had just come from church, wearing coats and ties and polished shoes. Some had children with them.
Two tires now flat, six miles southwest of Anniston, in front of the Forsyth and Son grocery store, the driver pulled over to the side of the road. Roy Robinson and the driver ran into the grocery store hoping to call a local garage that might have replacement tires. Back in the bus, Eli Cowling had retrieved his revolver from the baggage compartment. A teenage boy smashed a side window with a crowbar. A group of men and boys rocked the bus trying to turn it over on its side. A second group attempted to enter through the front door. Brandishing his gun, Cowling blocked them, retreated, locked the door behind him. For the next twenty minutes Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out. Two highway patrolmen arrived. Neither made an effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Harry Sims, and the Riders stayed inside.
One members of the mob, Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. The bundle exploded; dark gray smoke spread throughout the bus. Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought first that the bomb-thrower had thrown a smoke bomb. The smoke got blacker. The flames started to engulf several of the seats. Crouching in the middle of the bus, she screamed: "Is there any air up front?" No one answered. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled. She found an open window six rows from the front, thrusted out her head, and saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree. Seconds later the three Riders squeezed through their opened windows. Choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the road. They were afraid that the other passengers were trapped inside, but then they saw that several passengers had escaped through the front door on the other side.
Members of the mob were pressing against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank persuaded the mob that the whole bus would within seconds explode. The frightened mob retreated. Cowling pried open the door. The choking occupants escaped. Hank Thomas was the first Rider to exit the front of the bus. A white man rushed toward him, asked: "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man struck Thomas’s head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and remained barely conscious while the rest of the gasping Riders collapsed on the grass.
Several white families had gathered in front of the grocery store. Twelve-year-old Janie Miller gave choking victims water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket, ignoring the Klansmen’s insults (Gross/ Arsenault 3- 7)
“It was the worst suffering I’d ever heard,” Miller would recall in the PBS /American Experience film, Freedom Riders. “I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her, I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else.” For daring to help the injured riders, she and her family were later ostracized by the community and could no longer live in the county (Doyle 7).
Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only African-American CORE female on the bus. She had joined the Ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC. Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus" (Meet 3).
Cowling's pistol, the heat of the fire, and the acrid fumes from the burning seats kept the mob away. A second fuel tank explosion drove them farther back. Two warning shots by the highway patrolmen on the scene persuaded the Klansmen to slip away. Minutes passed. Cowling, Sims, and the patrolmen stood guard over the Riders, lying and sitting yards away from the shell of the bus. No one in a position of authority had attempted to make an arrest. Nobody had recorded the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks. No one attempted to call an ambulance. Finally, a white couple who lived close by permitted Genevieve Hughes to make a call. Nobody answered. The couple drove Hughes to the hospital. One of the state troopers called for an ambulance. Its driver refused to carry any of the black Riders. Already loaded, refusing to leave behind their black friends, the white Riders began to exit. Cowling spoke sternly to the driver. He relented. All who needed to be transported were driven to Anniston Memorial Hospital.
Genevieve Hughes discovered that only a nurse was at the hospital. The nurse gave her pure oxygen to breathe. It burned her throat, did not relieve her coughing. She was burning hot. Her clothes were a wet mess. After awhile Ed Blankenheim and Bert Bigelow were brought in. Laying on their beds, they continued to cough. Eventually a woman doctor arrived, having taken several minutes to reference smoke poisoning. A Negro man (not a Freedom rider) who had been in the back of the bus with Genevieve was brought in. She told the nurse and doctor to take care of him. They did not. They did nothing for Hank Thomas. Of the thirteen people brought to the hospital, only Ed Blankenheim, the Negro man and Genevieve had been admitted.
After awhile, having slept, Genevieve was questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent. She was unaware that he or another FBI agent on the scene had persuaded the medical staff to treat all of the injured passengers. Perhaps the cause of their failure to comply had not been entirely racial. A group of Klansmen made an unsuccessful attempt to block the entrance to the emergency room. The crowd outside swelled in numbers. Several Klansmen threatened to burn the building down. With nightfall approaching, recognizing that he had no police protection, the hospital superintendent ordered the Riders to leave.
Even though Hughes and several other Riders needed to stay, Joe Perkins had to comply. It took him more than an hour to arrange safe passage out of the hospital. The state troopers and the local police refused to provide the Riders transportation or escort even when they were transported. Bert Bigelow called friends in Washington hoping to receive help from the federal government. Perkins called Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth mobilized a fleet of eight cars. He reminded the volunteer drivers that they had to behave non-violently. “You mustn't carry any weapons. You must trust God and have faith." Out of sight, several of the deacons pulled out shotguns from beneath their seats.
Shuttlesworth's deacons made their way across the back roads toward Anniston. The hospital superintendent insisted that the interracial group could not stay the night. At last the rescue mission pulled into the parking lot. The police holding back the jeering crowd and the deacons showing their weapons, the Riders climbed into the cars. The cars left. One rescuer remarked: “You couldn't tell the deputies from the Ku Klux."
The Riders wanted to know the fate of the Trailways group. Perkins's phone conversation with Shuttlesworth earlier in the afternoon had informed him that the other bus had also run into trouble. The deacons knew few details of the story. Even so, it was evident to all that the defenders of white supremacy in Alabama had decided to smash the Freedom Ride with violence. They would not countenance the law, the U.S. Constitution, or anything else interfering with the preservation of racial segregation in their state (Gross/ Arsenault 8-11)
Works cited:
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/nation...
Cozzens, Lisa. “Freedom Rides.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...
Doyle, Jack. ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.” PopHistoryDig.com. June 24, 2014. Web. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/t...
“Freedom Rides: American Civil Rights Movement.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Free...
“Freedom Rides Quotes.” Uen.org. Web. https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/down...
“Freedom Rides.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...
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/2006/01/12/514966...
Mack, Dwayne. “Freedom Rides (1961).” BlackPast.org. Web. https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rid...
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
Civil Rights -- Freedom Rides -- Jackson, Mississippi, Parchman State Prison
Robert Kennedy was a close friend of Governor John Patterson of Alabama. I had this long relationship with John Patterson …. He was our great pal in the South. So he was doubly exercised at me – who was his friend and pal – to have involved him with suddenly surrounding this church with marshals and having marshals descend with no authority, he felt, on his cities… He couldn’t understand why the Kennedys were doing this to him.” (Simkin 7).
Recognizing that previous and new Freedom Riders were adamant about traveling by bus to Jackson, Mississippi, the next city along the original route that ended at New Orleans, Kennedy, talking over the telephone “seven or eight or twelve times each day” (Simkin 8), with Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, reached a deal. Kennedy would use no federal forces if Eastland would ensure that the Riders would not suffer mob violence.
Interviewed in 1998, James Farmer, director of CORE, said this about the Kennedys.
The Kennedys meant well, but they did not feel it. They didn't know any blacks growing up - there were no blacks in their communities or going to their schools. But their inclinations were good. I had the impression in those years that Bobby was doing what had to be done for political reasons. He was very conscious of the fact that they had won a narrow election and he was afraid that if they antagonized the South, the Dixiecrats would cost them the next election. And he was found to be very, very cautious and very careful not to do that. But we changed the equation down there, so it became dangerous for him not to do anything (Simkin 9).
Two buses, a Greyhound and a Trailways, departed Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi, May 24. Rider William Mahoney, a nineteen-year-old black student at Howard University, observed:
Once across the (Mississippi) state line we passed a couple of police cars, which began to follow us. At our first stop the station was cordoned off a block in every direction. A police officer jumped on the bus and forbade anyone to move. One woman, who was a regular passenger, frantically tried to convince the police that she was not involved with us. After checking her ticket the police let her get off.
As we rolled toward Jackson, every blocked-off street, every back road taken, every change in speed caused our hearts to leap. Our arrival and speedy arrest in the white bus station in Jackson, when we refused to obey a policeman's order to move on, was a relief (Simkin 10).
They were given good protection as they entered the state, and no mob greeted them at the Jackson bus terminal. "As we walked through, the police just said, `Keep moving' and let us go through the white side," recalled Frederick Leonard. "We never got stopped. They just said `Keep moving,' and they passed us right on through the white terminal into the paddy wagon and into jail" (Cozzens 12).
Peter Ackerberg, white, 22, Antioch College student, interviewed years later, recalled his motivation and experience.
While he’d always talked a “big radical game,” he had never acted on his convictions. “What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?” he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, “I was pretty scared … The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives.” Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying “sir” to a jail official who was “pounding a blackjack.” Soon after, “I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian’s] head and him shrieking; I don’t think he ever said ‘sir.’”
When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used “colored” facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called “jail, no bail”—a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities
The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there,” said Hank Thomas, [black, 19] a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I’ll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point.” (Holmes 2-4).
The May 24 Freedom Riders were at the mercy of the local courts. On May 25, they were tried. As their attorney defended them, the judge turned his back. Once the attorney finished, he turned around and sentenced them to 60 days in the state penitentiary.
Using buses, planes, and trains, more Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson to continue the Freedom Ride, and they were arrested to, not under local or state segregation laws, but on charges of incitement to riot, breach of peace and failure to obey a police officer. Freedom Riders continued to arrive in the South, and by the end of the summer, more than 300 had been arrested (Cozzens 13).
Convicted of violating the law, each Rider was fined $200. Refusal to pay the fine brought each individual a sentence of 90 days in jail.
In an effort to intimidate the marchers, Mississippi officials transferred the now nearly one hundred men and women freedom riders to the state penitentiary at Parchman where they were subject to beatings and inedible food and repeatedly strip searched. Prison officials confiscated the blankets and mattresses of all of the activists. When other demonstrators arrived in Jackson they were also arrested and sent to Parchman where they faced similar conditions (Mack 3).
Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him “sir.” An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that “no one was beaten …. “That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening.” When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. “We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK,” [said] rider Carol Silver …. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs (Holmes 5).
The reputation of Parchman is that it’s a place that a lot of people get sent...and don’t come back,” former Freedom Rider Carol Ruth [later] told (Oprah] Winfrey. … The struggles of the Freedom Riders garnered nationwide publicity. Rather than intimidate other activists, however, the brutality the riders encountered inspired others to take up the cause. Before long, dozens of Americans were volunteering to travel on Freedom Rides. In the end, an estimated 436 people took such rides (Nittle 2).
One such individual was Pauline Knight. Part of the May 28 wave of Freedom Riders from the Nashville Student Movement, Pauline … escaped the violence of the earlier rides. Pauline Knight was a 20-year-old Tennessee State student when she was arrested in Jackson, MS. After being transferred to Hinds County Jail, she led a brief hunger strike among the female Riders.
"I got up one morning in May and I said to my folks at home, ‘I won't be back today because I am a Freedom Rider. … It was like a wave or a wind, and you didn't know where it was coming from but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me, nobody told me."
Another individual was Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. A 19-year-old white Duke University student and part-time secretary in the Washington office of Senator Clair Engle of California, Joan Trumpauer arrived in Jackson, MS by train from New Orleans, LA as part of the June 4, 1961 Mississippi Freedom Ride.
The group was promptly ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all nine Riders refused bail. Trumpauer was transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm.
In her interview for Freedom Riders, she recalls the harrowing conditions at Parchman, which included forced vaginal examinations used as a tactic to humiliate and terrorize female prisoners (Meet 6-7).
Out of her experience as a Freedom Rider, it is the memory of the rabbi who faithfully visited the jail that still moves her today. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland of Arlington, Va., joined the rides just in time for the fill-the-jails strategy in Mississippi. Volunteers from across the country began arriving in the South in waves and getting arrested, thus burdening the criminal justice system and bringing more focus to their cause. More than 300 riders were jailed that summer. Mulholland spent three months in jail, much of it at Mississippi’s Parchman Prison.
“We were down, we calculated, to less than three square feet of floor space for the prisoners in the white women’s cells,” she said. “That’s pretty crowded; that means you have to sleep underneath the bunks and things.”
Perry Nussbaum, a rabbi in the Jackson area, drove in weekly, like clockwork, to visit the riders, said Mulholland. This was no small gesture during that time and place, she says, pointing out that his routine made him an easy target for the Ku Klux Klan members who probably were watching.
Nussbaum would ask riders to call out their jail cell numbers if they wanted him to pray with them, and Mulholland always took him up on the offer. “He would start praying in Hebrew and get a nice cadence going, and sort of lull the guards, and then he would slip in little tidbits of news, like what was happening in the world, and baseball scores and stuff. And then he’d slip back to Hebrew,” she said. He would also write to their parents letting them know how the riders were faring.
She also recalls an underground network of church women in Jackson who secretly collected money to help the imprisoned riders purchase necessities such as shower shoes and toiletries.
A few years later, there was the moment of kindness from a hairdresser in Jackson who walked Mulholland and other women over to her salon to give them a shampoo after patrons had covered the demonstrators with condiments and spray paint during a Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in 1963.
“There were always people who were supporting you,” she said, “people to drive you down to the demonstrations and take you back . . . as crucial as those out there demonstrating, and usually more numerous.”
A retired teaching assistant for Arlington Public Schools, Mulholland hopes the new monument will remind Americans of the power in organizing for change (Colvin 11-15).
Notable riders who did time at Parchman included James Farmer, John Lewis, Catherine Burks, Bernard Lafayette Jr., Frederick Leonard, Henry “Hank” Thomas, James Bevel, David Dennis, David Paul, James Lawson, Doris Jean Castle, and John Moody.
Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation persisted; still, the “white” and “colored” signs in bus stations across the South began 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.C.C. order” (Holmes 6).
The Freedom Rides illuminated the courage of black and white youth and highlighted the leadership of Diane Nash. The Freedom Rides also inspired rural southern blacks to embrace civil disobedience as a strategy for regaining their civil rights. That inspiration would be seen in subsequent campaigns such as Mississippi’s Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Movement in 1965 as well as in dozens of much less heralded efforts to register to vote or to integrate the region’s public schools (Mack 4).
Segregation was unfair. It was wrong, morally, religiously. As a Southerner – a white Southerner – I felt that we should do what we could to make the South better and to rid ourselves of this evil” (Freedom 2).
~ Joan Mulholland, Activist
Works cited:
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/nation...
Cozzens, Lisa. “Freedom Rides.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...
“Freedom Rides Quotes.” Uen.org. Web. https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/down...
Holmes, Marian Smith. “The Freedom Riders, Then and Now.” Smithsonian Magazine. February 2009. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Mack, Dwayne. “Freedom Rides (1961).” BlackPast.org. Web. https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rid...
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
Nittle, Nadra Kareem. “How the Freedom Riders Movement Began.” ThoughtCo. March 18, 2017. Web. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-freedom...
Simkin, John. “Freedom Riders.” Spartacus Educational. August 2014. Web. https://spartacus-educational.com/USA...
Recognizing that previous and new Freedom Riders were adamant about traveling by bus to Jackson, Mississippi, the next city along the original route that ended at New Orleans, Kennedy, talking over the telephone “seven or eight or twelve times each day” (Simkin 8), with Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, reached a deal. Kennedy would use no federal forces if Eastland would ensure that the Riders would not suffer mob violence.
Interviewed in 1998, James Farmer, director of CORE, said this about the Kennedys.
The Kennedys meant well, but they did not feel it. They didn't know any blacks growing up - there were no blacks in their communities or going to their schools. But their inclinations were good. I had the impression in those years that Bobby was doing what had to be done for political reasons. He was very conscious of the fact that they had won a narrow election and he was afraid that if they antagonized the South, the Dixiecrats would cost them the next election. And he was found to be very, very cautious and very careful not to do that. But we changed the equation down there, so it became dangerous for him not to do anything (Simkin 9).
Two buses, a Greyhound and a Trailways, departed Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi, May 24. Rider William Mahoney, a nineteen-year-old black student at Howard University, observed:
Once across the (Mississippi) state line we passed a couple of police cars, which began to follow us. At our first stop the station was cordoned off a block in every direction. A police officer jumped on the bus and forbade anyone to move. One woman, who was a regular passenger, frantically tried to convince the police that she was not involved with us. After checking her ticket the police let her get off.
As we rolled toward Jackson, every blocked-off street, every back road taken, every change in speed caused our hearts to leap. Our arrival and speedy arrest in the white bus station in Jackson, when we refused to obey a policeman's order to move on, was a relief (Simkin 10).
They were given good protection as they entered the state, and no mob greeted them at the Jackson bus terminal. "As we walked through, the police just said, `Keep moving' and let us go through the white side," recalled Frederick Leonard. "We never got stopped. They just said `Keep moving,' and they passed us right on through the white terminal into the paddy wagon and into jail" (Cozzens 12).
Peter Ackerberg, white, 22, Antioch College student, interviewed years later, recalled his motivation and experience.
While he’d always talked a “big radical game,” he had never acted on his convictions. “What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?” he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, “I was pretty scared … The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives.” Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying “sir” to a jail official who was “pounding a blackjack.” Soon after, “I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian’s] head and him shrieking; I don’t think he ever said ‘sir.’”
When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used “colored” facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called “jail, no bail”—a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities
The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there,” said Hank Thomas, [black, 19] a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I’ll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point.” (Holmes 2-4).
The May 24 Freedom Riders were at the mercy of the local courts. On May 25, they were tried. As their attorney defended them, the judge turned his back. Once the attorney finished, he turned around and sentenced them to 60 days in the state penitentiary.
Using buses, planes, and trains, more Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson to continue the Freedom Ride, and they were arrested to, not under local or state segregation laws, but on charges of incitement to riot, breach of peace and failure to obey a police officer. Freedom Riders continued to arrive in the South, and by the end of the summer, more than 300 had been arrested (Cozzens 13).
Convicted of violating the law, each Rider was fined $200. Refusal to pay the fine brought each individual a sentence of 90 days in jail.
In an effort to intimidate the marchers, Mississippi officials transferred the now nearly one hundred men and women freedom riders to the state penitentiary at Parchman where they were subject to beatings and inedible food and repeatedly strip searched. Prison officials confiscated the blankets and mattresses of all of the activists. When other demonstrators arrived in Jackson they were also arrested and sent to Parchman where they faced similar conditions (Mack 3).
Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him “sir.” An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that “no one was beaten …. “That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening.” When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. “We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK,” [said] rider Carol Silver …. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs (Holmes 5).
The reputation of Parchman is that it’s a place that a lot of people get sent...and don’t come back,” former Freedom Rider Carol Ruth [later] told (Oprah] Winfrey. … The struggles of the Freedom Riders garnered nationwide publicity. Rather than intimidate other activists, however, the brutality the riders encountered inspired others to take up the cause. Before long, dozens of Americans were volunteering to travel on Freedom Rides. In the end, an estimated 436 people took such rides (Nittle 2).
One such individual was Pauline Knight. Part of the May 28 wave of Freedom Riders from the Nashville Student Movement, Pauline … escaped the violence of the earlier rides. Pauline Knight was a 20-year-old Tennessee State student when she was arrested in Jackson, MS. After being transferred to Hinds County Jail, she led a brief hunger strike among the female Riders.
"I got up one morning in May and I said to my folks at home, ‘I won't be back today because I am a Freedom Rider. … It was like a wave or a wind, and you didn't know where it was coming from but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me, nobody told me."
Another individual was Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. A 19-year-old white Duke University student and part-time secretary in the Washington office of Senator Clair Engle of California, Joan Trumpauer arrived in Jackson, MS by train from New Orleans, LA as part of the June 4, 1961 Mississippi Freedom Ride.
The group was promptly ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all nine Riders refused bail. Trumpauer was transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm.
In her interview for Freedom Riders, she recalls the harrowing conditions at Parchman, which included forced vaginal examinations used as a tactic to humiliate and terrorize female prisoners (Meet 6-7).
Out of her experience as a Freedom Rider, it is the memory of the rabbi who faithfully visited the jail that still moves her today. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland of Arlington, Va., joined the rides just in time for the fill-the-jails strategy in Mississippi. Volunteers from across the country began arriving in the South in waves and getting arrested, thus burdening the criminal justice system and bringing more focus to their cause. More than 300 riders were jailed that summer. Mulholland spent three months in jail, much of it at Mississippi’s Parchman Prison.
“We were down, we calculated, to less than three square feet of floor space for the prisoners in the white women’s cells,” she said. “That’s pretty crowded; that means you have to sleep underneath the bunks and things.”
Perry Nussbaum, a rabbi in the Jackson area, drove in weekly, like clockwork, to visit the riders, said Mulholland. This was no small gesture during that time and place, she says, pointing out that his routine made him an easy target for the Ku Klux Klan members who probably were watching.
Nussbaum would ask riders to call out their jail cell numbers if they wanted him to pray with them, and Mulholland always took him up on the offer. “He would start praying in Hebrew and get a nice cadence going, and sort of lull the guards, and then he would slip in little tidbits of news, like what was happening in the world, and baseball scores and stuff. And then he’d slip back to Hebrew,” she said. He would also write to their parents letting them know how the riders were faring.
She also recalls an underground network of church women in Jackson who secretly collected money to help the imprisoned riders purchase necessities such as shower shoes and toiletries.
A few years later, there was the moment of kindness from a hairdresser in Jackson who walked Mulholland and other women over to her salon to give them a shampoo after patrons had covered the demonstrators with condiments and spray paint during a Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in 1963.
“There were always people who were supporting you,” she said, “people to drive you down to the demonstrations and take you back . . . as crucial as those out there demonstrating, and usually more numerous.”
A retired teaching assistant for Arlington Public Schools, Mulholland hopes the new monument will remind Americans of the power in organizing for change (Colvin 11-15).
Notable riders who did time at Parchman included James Farmer, John Lewis, Catherine Burks, Bernard Lafayette Jr., Frederick Leonard, Henry “Hank” Thomas, James Bevel, David Dennis, David Paul, James Lawson, Doris Jean Castle, and John Moody.
Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation persisted; still, the “white” and “colored” signs in bus stations across the South began 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.C.C. order” (Holmes 6).
The Freedom Rides illuminated the courage of black and white youth and highlighted the leadership of Diane Nash. The Freedom Rides also inspired rural southern blacks to embrace civil disobedience as a strategy for regaining their civil rights. That inspiration would be seen in subsequent campaigns such as Mississippi’s Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Movement in 1965 as well as in dozens of much less heralded efforts to register to vote or to integrate the region’s public schools (Mack 4).
Segregation was unfair. It was wrong, morally, religiously. As a Southerner – a white Southerner – I felt that we should do what we could to make the South better and to rid ourselves of this evil” (Freedom 2).
~ Joan Mulholland, Activist
Works cited:
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/nation...
Cozzens, Lisa. “Freedom Rides.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...
“Freedom Rides Quotes.” Uen.org. Web. https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/down...
Holmes, Marian Smith. “The Freedom Riders, Then and Now.” Smithsonian Magazine. February 2009. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Mack, Dwayne. “Freedom Rides (1961).” BlackPast.org. Web. https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rid...
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
Nittle, Nadra Kareem. “How the Freedom Riders Movement Began.” ThoughtCo. March 18, 2017. Web. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-freedom...
Simkin, John. “Freedom Riders.” Spartacus Educational. August 2014. Web. https://spartacus-educational.com/USA...
