Freedom RidersBy Stacey, Hannah, Emma and

Hannah.

• On May 14, Mother's Day, in Anniston, a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen, some still in church attire, attacked the first of the two buses (the Greyhound).

• The driver tried to leave the station, but was blocked until KKK members slashed its tires. The mob forced the crippled bus to stop several miles outside of town and then firebombed it.

• As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, intending to burn the riders to death. Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank or an undercover state investigator brandishing a revolver caused the mob to retreat, and the riders escaped the bus.

• The mob beat the riders after they escaped the bus. Only warning shots fired into the air by highway patrolmen prevented the riders from being lynched.

• That night, the hospitalized Freedom Riders, most of whom had been refused care, were removed from the hospital at 2 AM, because the staff feared the mob outside the hospital. The local civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttles worth organized several cars of blacks to rescue the injured Freedom Riders in defiance of the mob.

May 14th 1961

At the bus station on South Court Street, a white mob awaited. They beat the Freedom Riders with baseball bats and iron pipes. The local police allowed the beatings to go on uninterrupted. Again, white Freedom Riders were singled out for particularly brutal beatings.

Reporters and news photographers were attacked first and their cameras destroyed, but one reporter took a photo later of Jim Zwerg in the hospital, showing how he was beaten and bruised.

Seigenthaler, a Justice Department official, was beaten and left unconscious lying in the street. Ambulances refused to take the wounded to the hospital. Local blacks rescued them, and a number of the Freedom Riders were hospitalized.

People showing honour to the freedom riders

• On Sunday, May 21,(the day after the attack at Montgomery) more than 1500 people packed in a Church to honour the Freedom Riders.

• One if the Speakers was Martin Luther King, Jr., who was newly based in Montgomery.

• But there was still hatred and hardy anybody for protection;

• Outside, a mob of more than 3,000 whites attacked blacks, with a handful of the United States Marshals Service protecting the church from assault and fire bombs.

• With city and state police making no effort to restore order, the civil rights leaders appealed to the president for protection.

Despite all the violence

• On may 22nd more freedom riders arrived in Montgomery to continue the freedom ride, despite all the violence and abuse these freedom riders have got already on their journey.• However when the bus arrived in Jackson without incident, the riders were immediately arrested when they tried to use the white-only facilities at the depot.

They were arrested !!!In Jackson, where they were arrested and jailed. Once the Jackson and Hinds County jails were filled to overflowing, the state transferred the Freedom Riders to the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary.Abusive treatment there included placement of Riders in the Maximum Security Unit (Death Row), issuance of only underwear, no exercise, and no mail. When the Freedom Riders refused to stop singing freedom songs, prison officials took away their mattresses, sheets, and toothbrushes. More Freedom Riders arrived from across the country, and at one time, more than 300 were held in the State Penitentiary.

A little summary…• Freedom Rides, in U.S. history, a series of political protests against

segregation by blacks and whites who rode buses together through the American South in 1961.

• In 1946 the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel. A year later the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation tested the ruling by staging the Journey of Reconciliation, on which an interracial group of activists rode together on a bus through the upper South, though fearful of journeying to the Deep South. Following this example and responding to the Supreme Court’s Boynton v. Virginia decision of 1960, which extended the earlier ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, on a Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. Convinced that segregationists in the South would violently protest this exercise of their constitutional right, the Freedom Riders hoped to provoke the federal government into enforcing the Boynton decision. When they stopped along the way, white riders used facilities designated for blacks and vice versa.