The book, a collection of Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.Įtheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961.
Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.Īfter news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.Ī few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door.
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The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. When Governor John Patterson announced that he was unable to guarantee the safety of the Freedom Riders in Alabama, seventeen of the group were forced to fly to New Orleans, after enduring hours of delays because of bomb threats at the Birmingham airport.On Sunday, May 14, 1961-Mother's Day-scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The Freedom Riders were finally rescued by a convoy from the Black community in Birmingham organized by Civil Rights Leader, Rev.
A member of the crowd tossed a firebomb through a broken window, others tried to block the doors, forcing the Freedom Riders to escape through a window. The bus left Anniston but was soon abandoned by its police escort just six miles out of town on Route 202, where it was again surrounded by an angry white mob.
A mob organized by the Ku Klux Klan attacked the bus, smashing windows, slashing tires and denting the outside of the bus. When the Greyhound bus arrived in Anniston on that afternoon they found the terminal locked. The two buses (one a Greyhound bus and one a Trailways bus) that set out from Washington, DC arrived in Alabama on May 14, 1961, where they were met by members of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist mobs. Lewis, the legendary civil rights activist and a member of the United States House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020, was beaten up and imprisoned for 40 days while participating in the Freedom Rides. Among the original group of freedom riders was John Lewis (1940-2020). Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), two groups of riders left Washington, DC on May 4, 1961. The Freedom Riders planned to integrate bus terminal waiting rooms, restaurants, and other services at bus stops throughout the South, where local Jim Crow laws preserved racial segregation in defiance of federal law. Virginia that segregation of interstate transportation facilities, including bus terminals, was unconstitutional. In 1961, civil rights activists set out to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back." "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal.
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