The Freedom Riders Bus Burning
Alabama
On this highway, on the fourteenth of May, nineteen sixty-one, a Greyhound bus burned in one of the most infamous attacks of the civil rights movement. The bus carried Freedom Riders, Black and white activists from the Congress of Racial Equality, testing a Supreme Court ruling that segregation on interstate travel was illegal. A mob had already attacked them at the Anniston station.
When the bus pulled out, the mob followed. About six miles out of town a slashed tire forced it to stop, and the crowd surrounded it and set it ablaze, holding the doors shut as smoke filled the cabin. The riders barely escaped before the bus exploded.
The images of that burning bus shocked the nation and pushed the federal government to act. Today the site and the old depot in Anniston are protected as the Freedom Riders National Monument.
