Pearl River The last of the original Freedom Riders passed away. The obituary in the New York Times told the dramatic, violent story of the price Charles Person, his comrades, and many others were prepared to pay to fundamental social and racial change in America. Life teaches lessons, and Person’s life teaches lessons that it is worth all of us remembering in a time when some talk more about building a brand than doing the hard work to make change happen. I can’t help, but share this:
Charles Person, the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Ala., in 1961 in an effort to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South — and who were nearly beaten to death for doing so — died on Wednesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 82.
Mr. Person was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, 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 February 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 a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in bus terminals that served interstate travelers.
Because of his age, Mr. Person had to obtain his father’s permission to apply. (His mother flatly refused.) He was accepted, and after training in nonviolent techniques, he and the others — six other Black riders, including the future congressman John Lewis, and six white ones — left from Washington’s Greyhound station aboard two buses.
Mr. Person was paired with an older white rider, James Peck. Their job was to enter the terminals so Mr. Person could try to use the white restroom while Mr. Peck entered the Black restroom. Then they would order food at the designated white and Black lunch counters.
Their first test, in Fredericksburg, Va., was uneventful, save for a few ugly stares from white people in the depot. But in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Person was almost arrested when he tried to have his shoes shined in a white part of the terminal.
Things became tense in Atlanta, the last major stop before Alabama. Several white men boarded and sat among the Black riders, who, against custom in the Jim Crow South, were seated throughout the bus instead of in the back.
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. If they wanted to proceed, the Black riders would have to move to the back.
When they refused, he left the bus. The white men who had boarded in Atlanta, members of the Ku Klux Klan, then viciously attacked the riders; both Mr. Person and Mr. Peck were knocked unconscious before being dragged to the rear.
“They threw us to the back of the bus,” Mr. Person said in a 2021 interview on the podcast “Book Dreams.” “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes.”
With racial hierarchy restored, the bus proceeded to Birmingham. It was Sunday, May 14 — Mother’s Day. A crowd of white people, including scores of Klansmen, awaited the riders.