Freedom Riders (1961)

Site: Greyhound bus station, 210 S. Court St., Montgomery, Ala.

Then: To test anti-segregation laws, 13 activists (initially seven blacks and six whites), left Washington, D.C., aboard two buses on May 4, 1961, bound for Southern cities. At each stop, the black riders planned to enter the terminal’s “whites-only” area. After sabotage and violence by Ku Klux Klansmen in Birmingham and Anniston, Ala., the activists, now numbering 21, rode a single bus into Montgomery.

On Saturday, May 20, about 300 white protesters – including baseball bat-wielding Klansmen – beat the Freedom Riders at the Greyhound terminal near the city’s center. Many activists and journalists were injured. Some were hospitalized. The next evening, at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and 1,500 others assembled to support the Freedom Riders. A white mob surrounded the church. King phoned U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who dispatched state police and National Guard troops to protect the church.

Photo: James Peck, one of the Freedom Riders, sitting on a hospital gurney in Birmingham, Ala., after an attack on a Freedom Riders bus in May 1961.