In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama on her way home from work Rosa Parks was asked to give up her seat on the bus so Caucasian passengers could sit down. She refused and was arrested. There was public backlash as some boycotted riding bus lines to show their support. Even though the incident with Rosa Parks took place way before The Freedom Riders were established she is thought by many to be the person that inspired The Freedom Riders.
What or who exactly where The Freedom Riders? Raymond Arsenault in his book “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice” sums them up perfectly in one paragraph. They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a fulllength history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America.
The Freedom Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church” Arsenault says. All of these things are correct but there is more detail with every event that he described. That was just a simple summary so to speak by Arsenault. In our textbook “African Americans a Concise History” they describe the Freedom Riders in great detail. The first ride ran into trouble on May 4, 1961 when John Lewis one of the seven black riders tried to enter the white waiting room of the Greyhound bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and was beaten by local white people in full view of the police” (Hine, Hine, Howard 487). They go on to say, “With the police offering no protection many abandoned the Freedom Rides and most of the original riders left, but students from Nashville along with John Lewis went to Birmingham. Awaiting them was more than 1,000 white people and no cops.
This time Lewis was knocked unconscious, and all the riders had to be hospitalized” (Hine, Hine, Howard 487). What a mob of people would do to twenty people for riding a bus is downright horrific. Without any bit of remorse they beat and bullied innocent people for doing nothing but ride a bus. On May 14th, 1961. It was mother’s day in Alabama. What’s usually thought of as a peaceful day across the country turned out to be an important day in American history. Thirteen African American and white civil rights activist traveled from Washington D. C. on two buses bound for the south. They established the Freedom Rides. There entire plan was to protest segregation on buses in the south. Marian Smith Holmes paints a vivid picture in his journal “The Freedom Riders”. “Angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama.
The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. Burn them alive,” somebody cried out” (Holmes 1). The public outrage was apparent. Cops had to keep civilians away from The Freedom Riders to ensure their safety. Brave souls is the best way to describe the 13 people who made up the group. Marian Smith Holmes describes them as “The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.
After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo” (Holmes 1). Although many people believed that violent acts against the Freedom Riders would put a stop to them it actually fueled the fire and helped the Freedom Riders grow. The Freedom Riders are mainly thought of as rebels that sat on segregated buses wherever they wanted, but they actually done a lot more than that. They ate in white only restaurants. They defied the segregation that was put in place.
Smith digs into that a little deeper “As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some buses to prevent violence. 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.
Most of the 300 riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets” (Holmes 1). Although they were normally jailed for using white only areas that sometimes wasn’t the only reason they were arrested. Sometimes rogue officers wanted to show their dominance. As the national Smithsonian magazine describes it “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,” she told Etheridge. “That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eyeopening. ” As crazy as it sounds in the 1960s you could be put in prison for going into white areas if you were African American or for failing to say sir to an officer. This country has made so much progress since then and The Freedom Riders are partly to thank for that. What can be done to stop a group that refuses to go down without a fight? Nothing. They weren’t afraid of jail.
As a matter of fact they enjoyed their “jail, no bail” system. They would flood local penal institutions and serve the time in jail. They hoped to fill jails full so that officers had a real problem on their hands. Even though they weren’t afraid of the government’s action or police officers they did face a lot of violence from others along the way. Susan Ecklemman describes the violence that was met in Alabama on encyclopedia of Alabama’s official website. “The riders were met with hostility and violence in a number of states, and they encountered some of the worst violence in Alabama” says Ecklemman.
The violence was remarkable as Ecklemman describes it, “On May 14, the Greyhound bus arrived at the terminal in Anniston, Calhoun County, where a white mob waited with clubs and bats. The crowd attacked the bus, breaking its windows and slashing tires, and then pursuing it until the driver was forced to stop because of flat tires several miles out of town. An attacker threw an incendiary bomb through a window, and the Freedom Riders and other passengers barely escaped the flames. E. L. Cowling, an Alabama undercover police officer, was aboard the bus and forced the attackers back at gunpoint.
As the bus burned, the white mob beat the Freedom Riders until the police arrived and ended the violence. ” The Freedom Riders were lucky to survive this incident. However it didn’t stop them from continuing on their path. As they continued on they met even more resistance from both the KKK and rogue people that informed mobs when the group would arrive. “The Trailway bus next stopped at the Birmingham bus terminal, where it was met by a large crowd of whitesmany belonging to the Ku Klux Klan-armed with pipes, chains, and baseball bats.
Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, a vocal opponent of desegregation, had informed Klan leaders that the police would delay their arrival at the bus station for 15 minutes and encouraged the Klan to attack the riders. When the riders attempted to resume their journey, they were unable to find a bus driver who was willing to take them to Montgomery” said Ecklemman as she explains the horrifying scene that they met. This would have stopped most normal people, but The Freedom Riders weren’t what I would consider normal people.
They had a goal that they wanted to accomplish and they would not stop no matter what backlash they faced. Eventually they accomplished their goal. Lisa Cozzens describes the final events that led up to their victory “Martin Luther King, Jr. , flew to Montgomery and held a mass meeting, surrounded by federal marshals, in support of the Freedom Riders. As night fell, a mob of several thousand whites surrounded the church. The blacks could not leave safely. At 3 AM, King called Robert Kennedy and Kennedy called Governor Patterson.
Patterson declared martial law and sent in state police and the National Guard. The mob dispersed and the blacks left safely. After the violence at the church, Robert Kennedy asked for a cooling-off period. The Freedom Riders, however, were intent on continuing. ” She goes on saying, “More Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson to continue the Freedom Ride, and they were arrested too. Freedom Riders continued to arrive in the South, and by the end of the summer, more than 300 had been arrested. The Freedom Riders never made it to New Orleans. Many spent their summer in jail.
Some were scarred for life from the beatings they received. But their efforts were not in vain. They forced the Kennedy administration to take a stand on civil rights, which was the intent of the Freedom Ride in the first place. In addition, the Interstate Commerce Commission, at the request of Robert Kennedy, outlawed segregation in interstate bus travel in a ruling, more specific than the original Supreme Court mandate, that took effect in September, 1961. ” The Freedom Riders faced so much adversity and violence on their quest, but they finally accomplished what they wanted more than anything.
No more segregation on buses. It was a big step forward for not only civil rights movement, but for this country as we moved toward the great country that the United States is today. Would segregation on buses have ended eventually even without The Freedom Riders? Possibly, but there’s no denying the huge role that The Freedom Riders played in shaping the world we live in today. They also showed everyone that even when you’re outnumbered by hundreds you can still make a difference if you don’t give up and continue to fight in a peaceful manner.
