On this day 61 years ago, Freedom Riders working to integrate interstate bus terminals faced hours of vicious violence in Anniston, Alabama. Hank Thomas was certain he was going to die that day. 📷: jaspercolt
ANNISTON, Ala. – Hank Thomas sensed he was about to die.
Thomas folded his lanky frame into the narrow aisle, sweating through his plaid sports jacket as he tried to think. He was 19. A few weeks earlier, his death had not been entirely conceivable. Now, he wondered, would it come from the flames he felt at the back of his neck, or at the hands of the Klansmen outside? Hank Thomas, a Freedom Rider who survived the firebombing of a bus he was on in 1961, sits for a portrait in his home in Stone Mountain, Ga., on Aug. 15, 2021.
“I didn’t know anything about fear,” Thomas said. “But I came out of Anniston with a renewed sense of determination.”Sunday dawned sunny and clear as the Riders headed to Atlanta’s Greyhound and Trailways stations. They split up to take two staggered itineraries into Alabama. The Greyhound would leave first.
outlawed segregated seating and facilities in interstate bus travel, but Jim Crow practices still relegated Black people to sub-standard accommodations. director of Alabama’s Freedom Rides Museum.CORE aimed to train a multiracial, multigenerational group of Riders to carry out their “tests,” such as integrated seating, or sending an integrated pair into a station waiting room. , the greater the danger. CORE wouldn’t allow anyone younger than 21 to participate without parental permission.
In this photo from May 15, 1961, an unidentified white man sits in front of a Greyhound bus to prevent it from leaving the station with a load of Freedom Riders testing bus station segregation in the South in Anniston, Ala. The bus was stopped by a flat tire and surrounded by a white crowd outside Anniston, and burned a short time later.Blankenheim turned to Thomas, motioning for them to get off to test the station accommodations.
A mural and plaques adorn the alley beside the Greyhound station where Freedom Riders were met by an angry mob in 1961, now preserved as the Freedom Riders National Monument, in Anniston, Alabama.
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Today in history: May 14In 1961, Freedom Riders were attacked by violent mobs in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama.
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