During the spring of 1961, student activists launched the Freedom Rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals. Traveling on buses from Washington, D.C., to Montgomery, Alabama, the riders met violent opposition in the Deep South, garnering extensive media attention and eventually forcing federal intervention from the Kennedy administration. Although eventually successful in securing an Interstate Commerce Commission ban on segregation in all facilities under their jurisdiction, the Freedom Rides aggravated tensions between student activists and Martin Luther King, Jr., who publicly supported the riders, but did not participate and privately questioned undertaking such a physically dangerous campaign.
The Freedom Rides were first conceived in 1947 when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) organized an interracial bus ride across state lines to test a Supreme Court decision that declared segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional. Called the Journey of Reconciliation, the ride only challenged segregation on buses and was limited to the upper South to avoid the more dangerous Deep South. The ride, however, failed to elicit much national attention or the results CORE had hoped for. Fourteen years later, in a new national context of sit-ins, boycotts, and the emergence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Freedom Rides were able to harness enough national attention to force federal enforcement and policy changes.
In 1960, the Supreme Court ruled in Boynton v. Virginia that segregation within interstate travel is illegal. This decision extended the 1947 ruling by also declaring segregation in bus terminals, waiting rooms, restaurants, rest rooms, and other interstate travel facilities unconstitutional. Shortly after the 1960 decision, two students from Nashville, Tennessee, ( John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette) tested the ruling by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they received a letter from CORE asking them to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to continue testing the enforcement of Boynton. While Lafayette could not participate because his parents refused to give permission, Lewis joined twelve other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride.
On 4 May 1961, the Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C., in two buses and headed to Virginia. While they met resistance and arrests in Virginia, it was not until the riders arrived in Rockhill, South Carolina, that they encountered violence. There, Lewis and another rider were beaten, and another rider was arrested for using a white restroom, attracting widespread media coverage. Days following this incident, the riders met with King and other civil rights leaders in Atlanta for dinner. During this meeting, King whispered prophetically to Jet reporter Simeon Booker, “You will never make it through Alabama.”
The ride continued to Anniston, Alabama, where on 14 May, riders were met by a violent mob of over 100 people. Before the arrival, Anniston local authorities had given permission to the Ku Klux Klan to strike against the Freedom Riders without fear of arrest. As the bus pulled up, the driver yelled outside, “Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers.” After a series of standoffs, one of the buses was firebombed, and its fleeing passengers were forced into the angry white mob. The violence continued at the Birmingham terminal where Eugene “Bull” Connor’s police force offered no protection. Although the violence garnered national media attention, the series of attacks prompted James Farmer of CORE to end the ride. The riders flew to New Orleans, the original destination, bringing to an end the first Freedom Ride of the 1960s.
The decision to end the ride frustrated some student activists. Diane Nash objected in a phone conversation with Farmer, arguing that “We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.” Under the auspices and organizational support of SNCC, the Freedom Rides continued. SNCC mentors were wary of this decision, including King, who had declined when asked by Nash and Rodney Powell to join the rides. Farmer maintained his doubts, questioning whether continuing the trip was “suicide.” With fractured support, the organizers had a difficult time securing financial resources.Nevertheless, on 17 May 1961, seven men and three women rode from Nashville to Birmingham to resume the Freedom Rides. Just before reaching Birmingham, the bus was pulled over and directed to the Birmingham station, where all the riders were arrested for defying segregation laws. These arrests, coupled with the difficulty of finding a bus driver and other logistical challenges, left the riders stranded in the city for several days.
Quiet federal intervention began to take place behind the scenes as Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Greyhound Company and demanded that it find a driver, and John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department representative accompanying the Freedom Riders, met with reluctant Alabama Governor John Patterson to try to diffuse the dangerous situation. This maneuvering resulted in the bus leaving for Montgomery the next morning with a full police escort.
At the Montgomery city line, as agreed, the state troopers left the buses; but the local police that had been ordered to meet the Freedom Riders in Montgomery never showed up. Unprotected when they reached the terminal, riders were beaten so severely by a white mob that some sustained permanent injuries. When the police finally arrived, they served the riders with an injunction barring them from continuing the Freedom Ride in Alabama.
During this time, King was on a speaking tour in Chicago; but upon learning of the violence, he returned to Montgomery, where he staged a rally at Ralph Abernathy’s church. In his speech to the rally, King blamed Governor Patterson for “aiding and abetting the forces of violence” and called for federal intervention, declaring that “the federal government must not stand idly by while b lood thirsty mobs beat nonviolent students with impunity.” As King spoke, a threatening white mob gathered outside. From inside the church, King called Attorney General Kennedy, who assured him that the federal government would protect those inside the church. Kennedy mobilized National Guardsmen, who used tear gas to disperse the mob.
King became one of the rides’ major spokesmen as the violence and federal intervention propelled the action to national prominence. Some activists, however, began to criticize King for his willingness to offer only moral and financial support and not his physical presence on the rides. In a telegram to King, the president of the Union County NAACP Branch in North Carolina, Robert F. Williams, urged King to “lead by example,” continuing that “If you lack the courage [to ride], remove yourself from the vanguard.” In response to Diane Nash when she confronted King at a meeting, King replied that he was on probation and could not afford another arrest. Many students did not accept this position, and as SNCC advisor Ella Baker later recalled, the incident caused some students to begin “to look at him as a man, and a man not with all the godlike qualities and capacities that had been, in some respects, attributed to him.”
On 29 May, the Kennedy administration announced that it had directed the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban segregation in all facilities under its jurisdiction, but the rides continued. Students from all over the country purchased bus tickets to the South and crowded into Mississippi jails. With the participation of northern students came even more press coverage. Although King’s involvement in the Freedom Rides waned after the federal intervention, the legacy of the rides remained with him. He, and all others involved in the campaign, saw how provoking white southern violence through nonviolent confrontations could attract national attention and force federal action. The Freedom Rides also exposed leadership and tactical rifts between King and more militant students and activists that would continue in nonviolent resistance campaigns that followed.