The Greyhound Station: Where the Mob Was Waiting
Near Montgomery, Alabama
The building you are near was once Montgomery's Greyhound bus station. It opened in nineteen fifty-one, a sleek streamline structure with a door in the back labeled Colored Entrance. On May twentieth, nineteen sixty-one, it became one of the most violent scenes of the civil rights movement.
The Freedom Riders had been traveling since May fourth, departing Washington in two buses, an interracial group of young activists determined to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, the nineteen sixty decision that declared segregation of interstate bus terminals unconstitutional. The federal government said the terminals had to be integrated. The Deep South disagreed.
In Anniston, Alabama, on May fourteenth, one of the buses was stopped by a mob and set on fire. The riders barely escaped. In Birmingham, riders were beaten at the terminal. Riders from SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, continued on to Montgomery.
State police who had escorted the bus dropped away at the Montgomery city limits. What was waiting at the Greyhound station was a mob of several hundred people carrying baseball bats, pipes, and hammers. John Lewis, a twenty-one-year-old SNCC leader who would later serve in Congress for thirty-three years, was beaten unconscious. Jim Zwerg, a white student from Wisconsin who had joined the rides, was singled out for particular savagery. His face was disfigured, several teeth knocked out. He lay on the pavement for forty-five minutes before anyone would call an ambulance.
The attack shocked the Kennedy administration and led it, for the first time, to take the side of civil rights protesters. The Interstate Commerce Commission was pressured to enforce the ruling. By November of nineteen sixty-one, Whites Only and Colored signs came down from terminals across the South.
The bus station closed in nineteen ninety-five. In two thousand eleven, on the fiftieth anniversary of the rides, the Alabama Historical Commission reopened it as the Freedom Rides Museum, restoring the waiting rooms, the Colored Entrance door, and the history of what happened here.
