May 14, 1961

A Greyhound bus carrying the racially integrated Freedom Riders arrived in Anniston. Testing the enforcement of a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the segregation of interstate buses, the riders were met by an angry mob at the terminal. The mob, including local Klansmen, attacked the bus with clubs, slashed its tires as it attempted to flee, and firebombed it miles down the road. As the passengers barely managed to escape the flames, the mob mercilessly attacked them until authorities arrived. A second bus, a Trailways, arrived at the terminal an hour later and its passengers were also viciously beaten. On May 17, a new set of riders set out from Nashville to continue the journey.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Fred Shuttlesworth, crouching center, and Freedom Riders discuss plans at the Birmingham Greyhound Terminal after drivers refused them service. Freedom Riders are, clockwise from left: Ed Blankenheim (kneeling), Charles Person, Theodore Gaffney, James Peck, Rev. Benjamin Cox, Moses Newson, and Simeon Booker. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of The Birmingham News. All rights reserved. Used with permission)

The burning Greyhound bus pictured here carried Freedom Riders into Anniston on May 14, 1961, as part of an effort to test a newly enacted integration law regarding bus stations in the South. After the riders were attacked at the station in Anniston, the bus was firebombed after breaking down several miles outside the city. Many of the riders were beaten, with several being severely injured, by a white mob as they departed the bus. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library Archives)

Freedom Riders, from left, John Lewis, Charles Butler, Catherine Burks Brooks, Lucretia Collins, and Salynn McCollum sit on a bench in the Birmingham Greyhound station on May 17, 1961. Soon after the photo was taken, the group was arrested and later released in a rural all-white area on the orders of Birmingham commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, Courtesy of The Birmingham News. All rights reserved. Used with permission)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.