The Freedom Riders: CORE's First Wave

In 1961, buses and terminals in the South were illegally segregated. The Civil Rights group CORE sent riders to test the law, riding from D.C., to New Orleans. However, no one was prepared for the violence that waited in Alabama. Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm doubling and chokoate boarding. And
you could be forgiven for thinking it's nineteen sixty one
again with all of the big civil rights anniversaries that

(00:23):
have been in the news this year, fiftieth anniversaries, that's
so true, um, most notably the fiftieth anniversary of the
Freedom Rides this past May, when more than four hundred
people of all ages, male, female, black, white, different religions
from all over the country decided to challenge the racial
segregation of interstate buses. Yeah, and the Freedom Rides have

(00:45):
been really well covered this year. There have been articles,
news stories, two reunions of riders, one in Jackson, Mississippi,
one in Chicago. I think that one was hosted by
Oprah herself. There was a fantastic American experience Dock and
Entery based on the book on the Freedom Writers by
Raymond Arsenal. There have been op eds and reflections from

(01:07):
the writers and national papers. But we are not ones
to let the May anniversary of the Freedom Ride stop
us from doing a podcast on them in September, because
September is also a really important date for the Freedom Rides.
It's when change actually happened, when the Interstate Commerce Commission
finally ruled that the sign segregating whites and blacks at

(01:31):
bus and train facilities had to come down and actually
backed up that ruling with a really hefty fine for offenders.
So that ruling validated the Riders in their tactics, and
that's worth pointing out before we get into this two
part episode on the Freedom Rides, and before we get
into how the ride started, because even though today the

(01:53):
riders are clearly celebrated as civil rights heroes, at the time,
what they were doing was extremely troversial, even within the
civil rights movement itself. So they didn't know what they
were what they were setting out to do. They just
knew they had to do it. Yeah, But before we
even get to the rides themselves, our story really starts
in nineteen forty four with a woman named Irene Morgan.

(02:15):
Now everyone knows Rosa Parks Right and her refusal to
give up her bus seat in the nineteen fifties, but
a decade earlier, Morgan refused to give up her seat
on a Greyhound traveling through Virginia, and Morgan, who made
World War Two bomber planes for a plant for a living,
was coming home to Baltimore after visiting her mother. So
after refusing to move, she kicked the sheriff's deputy who

(02:39):
tried to take her off the bus. And later she said, quote,
I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so
I couldn't bite him. So all I could do was
claw and tear his clothes. Yeah, and that and other
great quotes are from her New York Times obituary. But
Morgan was arrested and went ahead paid that one hundred
dollar fine for resisting arrest, but she refused to pay

(03:00):
a the ten dollar fine for violating a Virginia law
about segregated seating, So it was off to court she went,
and eventually the n double a c p. Took up
her case and appealed to the Supreme Court, and in
ninety the court actually ruled in her favor in Morgan
Versus Virginia, and um just the gist of the ruling here.

(03:21):
Seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel
require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.
Sounds simple enough. Basically, you can't make African Americans sit
in the back of the bus and white people sit
in the front, and nobody should be giving up their
seat unless just to an old person or something like that.

(03:42):
So it sounds simple, but it wasn't because Southern states
continued to flaunt the law with segregated seating, segregated waiting rooms, restrooms,
water fountains. So eventually somebody decided that they needed to
do something and actually test out this new law, and
that was a group organized by the Congress of Racial

(04:04):
Equality or CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They decided
to test the new ruling by staging the Journey of
Reconciliation through the Upper South. The Upper South. Yeah, and
that's important here, especially when we get into the later
Freedom Rides where they head into Alabama in Mississippi and
and things get a lot different. Back in nine seven,

(04:25):
they knew that wasn't an option, right, So basically this
is how it worked. Eight black men and eight white
men would ride on interstate buses and trains and see
if Morgan versus Virginia was a law in action or
in name only. So there was a catch though it
would be non violent. Even if they were faced with
arrests or beatings, the writers would not react. So while

(04:48):
Morgan had been the inspiration for this, she was obviously
not their non violent role model, with her attempted bites
and all of that. I think that makes Morgan such
an interesting character in this whole thing, too, which such
a famous non violent movement, that she is the inspiration
for it. But for that non violent inspiration, leaders instead
turned to Gandhi and he actually was the inspiration for

(05:11):
Courts Founding back in nineteen two. But the Journey of Reconciliation,
it sounds like it's gonna make waves. It sounds like
a big deal, but it really didn't have that much
of an impact. The writers did meet with violence, three
of them spent a month on a North Carolina chain
gang after violating segregation rules in Chapel Hill, but the

(05:32):
story wasn't really picked up by national media, and folks
just weren't that interested. So Arsenal writes that the ride
ultimately quote brought about little change and was soon forgotten
by all but a handful of non violent activists. So
a decade goes by, and then in nineteen sixties, some
important things start to happen to inspire a new wave

(05:53):
of freedom rides. One of those things is that JFK
is elected president. Another is that Nashville sit ins and
segregation at city lunch counters there. And also the Supreme
Court issues another decision related to interstate travel. This time
it's a point in versus Virginia, which made any racial
segregation illegal in interstate commerce. And that's anything. So not

(06:15):
only should a black person be able to take any
seat on the bus, he should also be able to
use any waiting room, restroom, coffee counter, and so on.
All Right, so there's a new Supreme Court decision and
this momentum going from the Nashville sit ins, and Core
and its director James Farmer decide, let's test this new
ruling boy in versus Virginia. So this time, not only

(06:38):
would the new writers keep that direct action movement of
the Siddens going, they would help promote CORE too on
this national scale, since it was, after all, less well
known than the N double A c P or SNIC
or the SCLC. And that's something, as we mentioned in
the beginning, that this was kind of controversial within the

(06:59):
movement that was something that added to the ambivalence or
sometimes outright hostility directed at the initial ride by much
of the movement um. But we've got to give you
a sense of how these initial core riders were picked,
because they weren't just willy nilly passengers on the bus.
They all had to be trained, they all had to

(07:20):
come with recommendations even and again they all kind of
came from different sort of facets of life. One member,
James Peck, was from Manhattan and he had participated in
the nineteen forties Journey of Reconciliation, so he had some
experience with this. The others were handpicked to maintain their
non violent directive. So in addition to having to get recommendations,

(07:42):
as Sarah said, the youngest of them also had to
get parental permission. They also underwent careful training to resist
that violent impulse, but really they only anticipated refusal of
service and possibly maybe arrest. You can see videos though,
of this training, and it's pretty fascinating to watch and
really uncomfortable because you know, it is a simulated situation

(08:03):
and these people actually all know each other. Well, there's
the man playing the antagonizer, the woman playing the waitress,
and it's it's strange to see. But as you mentioned,
they were from all different walks of life. They were
all ages, all professions, students, retirees, editors, was a folk singer,
and most were from the North or the Midwest, with

(08:24):
a few southern exceptions, including probably the most famous writer,
John Lewis, who was from Alabama. UM. But that's something
also to consider when we were mentioning earlier about the
hostility or ambivalence within the movement, that these people were
largely Northerners, were largely Midwesterners, and they were coming into
the South to to test these segregated Jim Crow rules.

(08:48):
So the first riders left May fourth, nineteen sixty one.
They were departing from Washington, d C. And ultimately the
final destination was going to be New Orleans, which it's
above thride. That was going to take a while, and
they didn't really know what they would encounter along the way.
But the bus started out winding its way through Virginia

(09:08):
and North Carolina. There were thirteen riders. They were taking
Greyhound and Trailways buses, so two different lines, just testing
out the whole range of the system. And at first
they really saw what they expected stations would sort of
reluctantly break from their segregationist policies just while the riders
were there, So just go ahead and let them sit

(09:31):
in the black sitting room or the white sitting room,
whatever race they weren't, let them use the wrong restroom,
whatever they were doing, and then just um let them be,
Let them get on their bus and move on through town,
get out of their hair, and presumably return to business
as usual, which was full on segregation. But by Charlotte,

(09:53):
North Carolina, that wasn't what was happening anymore. People weren't
just letting it slide until they were gone. Troubles arted.
There were arrests and beatings in rock Hill, South Carolina,
and by May thirteenth, the writers finally made it to Atlanta,
where they had this little get together sort of pause
in the ride planned with Dr Martin Luther King. Yeah,

(10:16):
and they were really hoping that when they got there
he would join in become a freedom writer with them,
but instead he took a very different attitude. He warned them,
He told them that he had heard bad news coming
out of Alabama and they should seriously reconsider continuing on
and even questioning the wisdom of what they were doing
in the first place, whether this was really helping the movement.

(10:39):
So this is pretty discouraging news to hear it their
Atlanta reception, and to make matters worse, James Farmer, the
leader of Core, gets word that his father has died
and has to pull out for a few days to
go home. Still though, May fourteen, Mother's Day, the leaderless
writer set off from Atlanta to Brmingham, Alabama, on Greyhound

(11:02):
and Trailways buses that are leaving one hour apart. And
sure enough, shortly after crossing the Alabama state line, one
of the buses runs into trouble. The Greyhound hits a
crowd of about two hundred men in Anniston. Yeah, and
it's all been planned. A klansman lies down in front
of the bus so that the other members of the

(11:23):
mob can slash the tires, and the bus maneuvers out
of town, but it's followed and hounded by a car.
Then finally the tires go flat. The driver gets out,
checks them and walks away, just leaves the people on
the bus. And there's this really harrowing scene in the
documentary where passenger may Francis Moultrie. Here someone shouting where
is the gas? Where is the gas? Yeah, I'd really

(11:45):
recommend to that documentary for seeing some of these freedom
writers reflect on it and and say what they heard
and what they experienced. But the mob attacks the bus
then and throws a firebomb in through the back window
and then block the door to prevent the people from
getting off. And also keep in mind there aren't just
freedom writers on this bus. They're regular passengers to who

(12:09):
are just trying to get to Birmingham or wherever and
are caught up in this. Two things ultimately saved the
riders and those unaffiliated bus passengers. The fuel tank explodes,
which makes the mob back away from the bus, and
then highway patrolman finally arrived, but not until the coughing,

(12:29):
choking passengers who have just escaped from the bus are
beaten by the crowd. There's one catch though with this,
With this violent scene, photographs are taken and it becomes
a major news story and they go worldwide, not just
a national news story, becomes worldwide news something terrible happening

(12:50):
in the United States. But meanwhile, that second bus is
still chugging on toward Birmingham. Yeah where, Little did they
know the city's Commissioner of Public Safety, Bowl Connor, has
made a deal with the KKK. The deal is that
when the bus comes to town, the clan will get
fifteen minutes without police interference to do whatever they want.

(13:13):
People on the bus, no arrests, no trouble at all.
And there's another catch to this too. The FBI had
an informant and the clan, and he knew the plan
to attack the bus. Jed Grew Hoover didn't report the
mob's plans to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The informant even
participated when the mob attacked and beat the writers as
they came into the station. And we're going to talk

(13:34):
about that a little more in the part two of
this episode, and and some of the legal battles that ensued.
But just like an Aniston, photographers get pictures of this
mob attacking the passengers coming from Atlanta, and this news
makes international headlines too. It's very disturbing to people, and

(13:56):
it's something that UM, the Federal administer ration, really can't ignore.
So Jim Peck, who has been unofficially in charge since
James Farmer left, makes the call to continue the ride
from the hospital. He has been severely beaten. And it's
worth noting here too that a lot of the white
riders would be targeted initially sort of as betrayers to

(14:19):
their race by the mobs. So Jim Peck was really
really bad off. Pictures of him are disturbing to see,
but he said that they felt, quote, they must not
surrender to violence. So let's not stop here. There's a
problem though, Like, I mean, that's a very noble, brave
thing to do to try to continue the ride, but
there's a problem. None of the drivers out of Birmingham

(14:42):
are willing to take them. Nobody wants to risk it.
Nobody wants to risk being on a firebomb bus or
attacked by a mob and and dragged down with the
rest of them. Yeah, I mean, you can hardly blame them.
But they finally decide that the ride has to end.
They'll fly to New Orleans instead, but even that proves
to be quite difficult. The mob follows them, a bomb

(15:03):
threat is called in on their plane, and it seems
that they're stuck in Alabama and definitely can't get out
of the Birmingham airport. So, like we said, by this
point that Kennedy's really have to get involved with this
story all over the world's papers, and the poor beaten
freedom riders stuck in the airport. They can't let things
get anywhere. So John Seigenthaler, who was the assistant to

(15:25):
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arranges the rider's flight and escorts
them to New Orleans. They're they're met by state police
at the plane who protect them but also curse them
as they walk to the terminal, and that ends the ride.
It's over. The Kennedy think that hopefully it's all over,
um they can get back to international pursuits, but it's

(15:49):
not because there is another wave setting out from Nashville.
The students in the Nashville Student Movement realized that they
could let Cores attempt and there end in violence. And
the leader of that movement, Diane Nash, who was a
student in the Nashville movement, told of Birmingham reverend quote,

(16:12):
if they stop us with violence, the movement is dead.
So there a little cliffhanger for this episode. Yeah, and
the next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more
about that Nashville movement as it picks up the baton
and as riots continue in Alabama and Mississippi plays hardball
with its state penitentiary, So just to give you a

(16:33):
little teaser there, but we're done with us for today.
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(16:53):
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