Freedom Rides of 1961: The Anniston Firebomb, Bull Connor and Parchman

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The Supreme Court had ruled segregated interstate buses unconstitutional in Morgan v. Virginia in 1946 and extended that to terminal waiting rooms and restaurants in Boynton v. Virginia in 1960, yet the Interstate Commerce Commission and Southern states ignored the rulings. James Farmer's Congress of Racial Equality designed a test. On May 4, 1961, 13 volunteers, seven Black and six white, left Washington, D.C., for New Orleans on Greyhound and Trailways buses, sitting in interracial pairs with at least one Black rider up front. On each leg one rider obeyed segregation rules so they could stay free, call CORE and arrange bail. On Mother's Day, May 14, a mob in Anniston, Alabama, slashed a Greyhound bus's tires, firebombed it and held the doors shut. In Birmingham, FBI files later showed, Bull Connor had arranged to keep police away for 15 minutes while Klansmen beat the riders.

Diane Nash and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent fresh riders from Nashville. In Montgomery a mob beat Justice Department official John Seigenthaler unconscious, and the next night 3,000 people besieged a rally of 1,500 at First Baptist Church with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy until the National Guard arrived. When the Kennedy administration asked for a cooling off period, Farmer replied that Black Americans had been cooling off for 350 years. In Mississippi, riders were arrested in Jackson on purpose to fill the jails, and more than 300 were held at Parchman. In November 1961 the ICC ordered interstate travel and terminals desegregated.

• White rider James Peck needed more than 50 stitches to his head and was refused treatment at the first hospital.
• Bull Connor drove jailed Nashville students to the Tennessee line and left them on the highway, and they returned to Birmingham.
• At Parchman, guards took the riders' mattresses, sheets and toothbrushes when they kept singing freedom songs.
• Women Power Unlimited, founded by Clarie Collins Harvey in Jackson, supplied bail money, food and clothing to jailed riders.
• By summer's end there were more than 60 rides and about 450 participants, and Australian activists launched their own Freedom Ride in 1965.