Freedom Rider Mae Frances Moultrie Howard stands outside the burning Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961.
Freedom Rider Mae Frances Moultrie Howard stands outside the burning Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961.
Fifty years ago, seven black and six white people boarded buses from Washington, D.C., and took the fight for civil rights to the Deep South in what would become the Freedom Rides.
In a new documentary, Freedom Riders, Stanley Nelson talks with the people who witnessed the rides first hand. It airs on PBS in May.
The rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. "The first group of freedom riders didn't really know what to expect," Nelson tells NPR's Neal Conan. They encountered angry mobs in the Jim Crow South, but remained steadfastly committed to nonviolence.
In Birmingham, for example, "Bull Connor gave the mob ... 15 minutes to do whatever they wanted to do to the Freedom Riders when they got to the bus station," says Nelson. One witness told Nelson he remembered Connor telling the assembled mob "I don't give a goddamn if you kill them. You got 15 minutes and nobody's going to get arrested."
Prior to the rides, the Supreme Court had twice outlawed segregation in interstate commerce, which applied to interstate bus travel. But the Southern bus stations and buses remained segregated.
Ernest "Ripp" Patton took part in the May 24, 1961 Greyhound Freedom Ride from Nashville to Jackson, Mississippi. It was one of the later Freedom Rides, so by that time, Patton knew what he was getting in to.
By the time he boarded the bus, "they had had the mob attacks in Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery," he remembers. But still he went to Nashville.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/05/136025553/freedom-riders-risked-their-lives-for-equality?ft=1&f=1015
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