The Freedom Riders at the Greyhound Station, May 1961
Near Montgomery, Alabama
On May twentieth, nineteen sixty-one, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Montgomery bus terminal at two hundred ten South Court Street. The Riders, an interracial group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, had been testing the Supreme Court's nineteen sixty ruling in Boynton versus Virginia, which had declared segregated interstate bus facilities unconstitutional. They had already survived an attack in Anniston and a firebombing in Birmingham.
Montgomery Public Safety Commissioner L.B. Sullivan had given the Ku Klux Klan a period of time to attack the arriving Riders without police interference. When the bus pulled in, a mob of more than three hundred people, armed with bats, pipes, and chains, met the Riders. There were no police.
Several people were seriously beaten, including Jim Zwerg, a white student from Fisk University, and John Lewis, who would represent Georgia in Congress for thirty-three years. John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department official sent by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to observe, was beaten unconscious and left in the street for twenty-five minutes before any official responded. He later said he had been lying there thinking he was going to die.
The Greyhound station building still stands and is now operated as the Freedom Rides Museum by the Alabama Department of Archives and History. The museum opened in twenty eleven on the fiftieth anniversary of the attacks.
On September twenty-second, nineteen sixty-one, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations banning segregated seating on all interstate carriers and requiring the removal of whites-only signs from all interstate terminals. The signs came down November first.
