Freedom's Children by Ellen S. Levine

rulings. On May 4, 1961, thirteen people, seven blacks and six whites, left Washington, D.C., on buses headed for New Orleans, Louisiana. They sat wherever they wanted on the bus and planned to use all the local facilities along the way.
    Just outside Anniston, Alabama, some fifty miles from Birmingham, an armed mob of segregationists fire-bombed the first bus and beat several of the fleeing passengers. The second bus was surrounded by a raging mob at the Birmingham passenger terminal. Some of the riders were beaten so badly they suffered permanent physical damage. In a report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an informant stated that Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had agreed to give the mob fifteen minutes before he sent in the police. News coverage of the brutal attacks on the Freedom Riders horrified the American public. The attacks took place on Mother’s Day and became known as the “Mother’s Day Massacre.”
    After the attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, the Freedom Riders decided to end the bus trip and fly to New Orleans instead. But a group of young people, mostly college students, believed that the Freedom Rides should continue. Diane Nash, head of the Nashville Student Movement, said that if the Freedom Riders were stopped “as a result of violence ... the future of the movement was going to be cut short.” The students argued that integrated groups of passengers had to travel through the South until the system of segregation was broken. From a pool of volunteers, Nash carefully chose a new group of students to continue the rides. They all discussed the grave risk of physical danger, possibly death, that lay ahead.
    At first no bus driver was willing to continue the trip from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama. Finally, with pressure from United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the governor of Alabama agreed to provide state police protection on the route between the two cities. When the bus arrived in Montgomery, however, all police protection vanished, and the riders were viciously assaulted by segregationists at the bus station.
    The next night a mass meeting was held at First Baptist Church in Montgomery. A screaming white mob surrounded the church, trapping those inside. Federal marshals and the Alabama National Guard finally arrived to disperse the mob in the early morning hours, preventing massive bloodshed.
    The Freedom Rides continued throughout the summer of 1961. In Jackson, Mississippi, integrated groups of riders were routinely arrested for violating the local segregation laws at the bus station, and sent to prison. Finally in September the United States government issued additional regulations regarding integration at interstate bus stations, and the arrests stopped. The Freedom Riders had won.
    Thereafter civil rights workers throughout the South were often called Freedom Riders, regardless of the particular projects they worked on. In fact, the term became a badge of honor in the movement.

JAMES ROBERSON
    James Roberson was seventeen years old when the Freedom Riders came through Birmingham.
    It was in the afternoon when they started bringing the Freedom Riders to Bethel Church. White kids and black kids had been beaten. That was the first time I saw human blood being spilled for the cause. I actually saw people hurt and scared. They were holding handkerchiefs to their heads to stop the bleeding.
    These kids weren’t too much older than I. They were college kids. I knew that the police would beat up black people, so that was nothing unusual for me. But white people beating up white folks ... I did not believe a white would do that to their own kind. You have to realize the mind-set of a black from the South—white folks all stick together. Yet these were their own people they were beating up!
    I saw that they were bleeding just like we were bleeding. I realized then the connection was not racial. To see the