Charles Person was the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961 in an effort to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South - and who were nearly beaten to death for doing so. He was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College, although he had been accepted at MIT, when he first became involved in the civil rights movement, joining the thousands of students across the South who were marching against Jim Crow laws and sitting in at segregated lunch counters.
His first arrest, during a sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant, was in 1961. When he returned to campus, he saw an ad from the Congress of Racial Equality looking for volunteers for a trip by commercial bus from Washington to New Orleans. Along the way, the ad said, they would test the December 5, 1960 US Supreme Court decision (Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454) banning segregation in bus terminals serving interstate travelers.
After training in nonviolent techniques, he and the others - including the future congressman John Lewis - left from Washington’s Greyhound station aboard two buses. Person was paired with an older white rider, James Peck. Their job was to enter the terminals so Person could try to use the white restroom while Peck entered the Black restroom. Then they would order food at the designated white and Black lunch counters. Their first test, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, just drew ugly stares from white people in the depot. In Charlotte, N.C., Person was almost arrested when he tried to have his shoes shined in a white part of the terminal.
The next stop was Anniston, a small town in eastern Alabama. The station was closed, but the driver stopped anyway. Another bus had been firebombed outside town, he said and if they wanted to proceed, the Black Riders would have to move to the back. When they refused, the driver left the bus. The white men who had boarded in Atlanta, members of the Ku Klux Klan, then viciously attacked the Riders; knocking Person and Peck unconscious before being dragged to the rear. “They threw us to the back of the bus,” Person said in a 2021 interview on the podcast “Book Dreams.” “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes.”
In Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, May 14, a crowd of white people, including scores of Klansmen, awaited the Riders. After the bus driver refused to carry them further, the Riders left the bus. In the station when Peck said the two of them were friends, several men pulled him into a hallway and began beating him with a pipe. Somebody grabbed Person, too, but after awhile he was able to escape. By then the Klansmen were beating up the Riders with abandon. Person managed to catch a city bus, and finally reached the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader in the city’s civil rights community. More Freedom Riders, including Peck, eventually made it to the home. Though most doctors did not want to treat them for fear of retribution, they eventually found medical care.
Around 400 people joined the bus campaign in total, many facing beatings and prison. But it worked: In November, 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s administration ordered the desegregation of all interstate bus terminals. "It really was the template for citizen politics in the 1960s,” said Ray Arsenault, the author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011. 320 pages. Paperback $18.99). “A lot of what came after - the antiwar protests, the women’s movement - all drew on these ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
After settling in Atlanta in the 1980s, Person became locally involved in civil rights activism. In 2022, he wrote Buses Are a Comin’: Memoirs of a Freedom Rider with Richard Rooker (304 pages. St. Martin's Press, 2021. Paperback $19.00).
