Anniston High School students learn there’s significant civil rights history in their own backyard
More than 115 Anniston High School students got a history lesson in their own backyard recently when they visited the Freedom Riders National Monument and the former Greyhound bus station to learn about the racist attack on a commercial bus on Mother’s Day 1961.
Both sites are now managed by the National Park Service.
Kevin Chandler, a park ranger with the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Freedom Riders National Monument, spoke next to the large Greyhound bus mural about the violence and fear that marked a Sunday afternoon 63 years ago. A mob of white segregationists attacked the bus carrying mostly college students who were whites and Blacks sitting together on the bus. The bus’s tires were slashed at the bus station, and then, a couple of miles outside of town, the mob attacked the bus again and set it on fire with passengers still inside.
The attack on the Freedom Riders who were attempting to test newly passed desegregation laws came as news to many of the teenagers.
“None of these kids really knew the story,” Chandler said after he spoke to the group. “It’s interesting when you’ve got a national story, and it happened in your backyard, and you just don’t know about it.”
Chandler’s history lesson about the bus burning opened the eyes of the students. Maria Gason, an Anniston High junior, said, “I didn’t know we had history in Anniston. I didn’t know anything about this, and I feel like it was a good experience to learn about it. Something happened in 1961, I was reading the signs, and I learned that Martin Luther King was a part of it. I never knew that Martin Luther King was a part of this. I always thought it was just a speech.”
Another student, Jararco Rudolph, also a junior, was glad to learn about the event.
“Anniston has history; it’s pretty cool,” Rudolph said.
Before the kids loaded up into three school buses to visit the bus burning site, Dorothy Lange, an 11th-grade history teacher at Anniston High School, said the visit to the Greyhound station went well.
“Some of the students were familiar, but a lot of them did not know that this is a National Monument, which was very exhilarating for me as a history teacher for them to see that we have something of such historical significance here in Anniston,” she said.
Lange said that not enough people in the county know about the site.
“It’s been publicized, but not enough people have really delved into the historical aspects of it, and they just thought it was maybe just a mural instead of being an actual place to come and get a historical tour,” she said.
Up at the bus burning site six miles west of town along Alabama 202, Ty Karlovetz, a supervisory park ranger with the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Freedom Riders National Monument, gathered with the students in the vacant field that will be developed to pay homage to the Freedom Riders.
Karlovetz told the students about the Freedom Riders and their role during the 1960s and the importance of preserving their stories and honoring “our” history.
“How many of you guys knew about the Freedom Riders before today or even before we started learning about it in class?” Karlovetz asked.
Two students raised their hands.
“Two of you guys, that’s great. I didn’t learn about this until I was an adult. My parents never talked about it. It wasn’t taught in school, even locally,” he said.
“There’s been efforts to not tell the story, but if we want to honor what happened … we want to try to prevent something like this from happening again, we have to talk about it,” Karlovetz said.