He remembers vividly when they were met by an angry white mob at a Greyhound bus station. “We got beaten twice that day,” said Charles Person, the youngest of the Freedom Riders and author of the memoir “Buses Are a Comin’.” They arrived in Alabama on May 14, Mother’s Day. They were met with more and more opposition the further South they got and the group’s strategy of civil disobedience would be tested. They rode through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia with New Orleans as a planned final destination.Ĭharles Person Charles Person still has the original copy of the two-week itinerary for the Freedom Rides created by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). on May 4, 1961, the group had a full itinerary that summer. When the Freedom Riders set out from Washington, D.C. “You've got to understand what your past was before you know what your future is,” she said. She rallied support among folks in her community – a mission she still embraces today as she encourages the next generation. Many who participated, see a throughline between those events and America’s current reckoning.ĭuring the Freedom Rides, Bassett led demonstrations at bus stations throughout her home state of Mississippi. The movement changed interstate travel for Black Americans and fortified the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Rides were originally supposed to last for about two weeks, but they went on for seven months. That event is one of many taking place across the South this month commemorating the bravery of hundreds of riders that summer. Now known as the Freedom Rides Museum, the bus station was one of the many stops the interracial group of civil rights activists made as they departed in 1961 to test the enforcement of an earlier Supreme Court ruling that made segregation illegal on interstate buses and bus stations. “Ain’t gonna let segregation turn me around,” she sang with a slight growl in her voice. Sixty years after the Freedom Riders began their journey into the South from the nation’s capital, Beverly Bassett belted out her favorite freedom song outside of the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery.
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