Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- Images of a Peoples' Movement

The Freedom Rides

If you miss me at the back of the bus....

Organized by CORE, two integrated groups of Freedom Riders enter Alabama on May 14, 1961. One bus is ambushed and burned by a racist mob outside of Anniston.

[Birmingham Library photo]

The second bus arrives in Birmingham where another mob brutally assaults the riders.

Students from the Nashville Movement take up the ride.
Charles Butler and John Lewis arrested at Birmingham bus depot.
The Rev Fred Shuttlesworth with Freedom Riders Charles Butler, Catherine Burks, Lucretia Collins, and Salynn McCollum in the "white" Greyhound terminal waiting room.

[Photographer unknown]

When the buses pull into Montgomery the riders are viciously attacked by yet another waiting mob. Reporters and photographers are also brutally assaulted and their cameras smashed to prevent the rest of America from seeing pictures of the Klan assault on nonviolent young men and women. After the attack, Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg waits for transportation to a hospital (segregation laws prohibit Black taxi drivers from giving rides to whites, and white cabbies refuse to transport Freedom Riders of any race).

The next night Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy lead a mass-meeting in Abernathy's First Baptist Church to honor the riders. As darkness falls, a huge mob of white racists, numbering in the thousands, surrounds the church in a long night of violence and terror. Trapped inside the Church, the Freedom Riders and their supporters wait with steadfast courage for the dawn.

[Nashville Tennesean photo]

The Freedom Rider bus leaves Montgomery on the way to Mississippi.

Public opinion forces President Kennedy to call
out the National Guard to protect the riders.

Nashville Freedom Riders Rip Patton (left) and Bernard LaFayette (aisle) with Jim Lawson seated behind them on the bus headed into Jackson MS with National Guard troops standing guard.

Yale Chaplin William Sloan Coffin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Bernard Lee at the "white only" lunch counter in the Montgomery Trailways terminal just before they are arrested.

The Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson for violating local segregation laws. Many are sentenced to Parchman State Prison, where they are beaten and abused.

But more Freedom Riders follow, coming down from the North and rolling in from the West. All are imprisoned. More than 300 are jailed in Jackson alone. Similar arrests occur in other Southern towns. The rides only end when public outcry forces the Kennedy administration to enforce the laws and rulings prohibiting segregation in interstate commerce.

[Photographer unknown]

Note that this map shows only some of the many Freedom Rides.

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