Obama '08! A2K Inauguration Party

OMG! I'm crying like a little baby. Pete Seeger just sang (Along with his grandson and Bruce Springstein) This Land is Your Land

It's just that you seem so normal, sometimes I honestly forget you are actually upside down.

He participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the struggle for civil rights Lewis became nationally known after his prominent role on the Selma to Montgomery marches, during the first march police attacked the the peaceful demonstrators and beat Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today.

It was widely understood that any African American who exercised his or her constitutional right to sit at the front of an interstate bus or use the previously whites-only facilities at a southern bus terminal would meet with a violent response. Understanding this, an interracial group of 13, including CORE National Director James Farmer, departed Washington, D.C., by bus. Farmer and his companions planned to make several stops en route to New Orleans. “If there is arrest, we will accept that arrest,” Farmer said. “And if there is violence, we are willing to receive that violence without responding in kind.”

Farmer was right to anticipate violence. Perhaps the worst of it occurred near Anniston, Alabama. Departing Atlanta, the Freedom Riders had split into two groups, one riding in a Greyhound bus, the other in a Trailways bus. When the Greyhound bus reached Anniston, the sidewalks, unusually, were lined with people. The reason soon became clear. When the bus reached the station parking lot, a mob set upon it, using rocks and brass knuckles to shatter some of the bus windows. Two white highway patrolmen in the bus, assigned to spy on the Riders, sealed the door and prevented the Ku Klux Klan-led mob from entering.


Freedom Riders traveling from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, are escorted by National Guardsmen.When the local police finally arrived, they bantered with the crowd, made no arrests, and escorted the bus to the city limits. The mob, by some accounts now about 200 strong, followed close behind in cars and pickup trucks. About 10 kilometers outside Anniston, flat tires brought the bus to a halt. A crowd of white men attempted to board the bus, and one threw a fire bomb through a bus window. As the historian Raymond Arsenault writes: “The Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode.” The bus was consumed by the blaze; the fleeing Freedom Riders, reported the Associated Press, “took a brief but bloody beating.” The second group of Freedom Riders shared their Trailways bus with a group of Klansmen who boarded at Atlanta. When the black Freedom Riders refused to sit at the back of the bus, more beatings ensued. The white Freedom Riders, among them 61-year-old educator Walter Bergman, were attacked with particular savagery. All of the Freedom Riders held to their Ghandian training; none fought back. When the bus at last arrived in Birmingham, matters only grew worse. CBS News commentator Howard K. Smith offered an eyewitness account: “When the bus arrived, the toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists.” Inside the segregated bus station, the Freedom Riders hesitated momentarily, then entered the whites-only waiting room. They, too, were beaten, some unconscious, while Birmingham’s police chief, Eugene “Bull” Connor, refused to restrain the Klansmen and their supporters.

Still, the Riders were determined to continue. In Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked Alabama Governor John Patterson to guarantee safe passage through his state. Patterson declined: “The citizens of the state are so enraged I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers.” A member of Alabama’s congressional delegation, Representative George Huddleston Jr., deemed the Freedom Riders “self-anointed merchants of racial hatred.” He said the firebombed Greyhound group “got just what they asked for.”

The Freedom Riders who had answered SNCC's call from across the Eastern US joined John Lewis and Hank Thomas, the two young SNCC members of the original Ride who had remained in Birmingham. On May 19, they attempted to resume the ride, but terrified by the howling mob surrounding the bus depot, the drivers refused. Harassed and besieged by the KKK mob, the riders waited all night for a bus.

Under intense public pressure from the Kennedy administration, Greyhound was forced to provide a driver and Alabama Governor John Patterson reluctantly promised to protect the bus from KKK mobs and snipers on the road between Birmingham and Montgomery, after direct intervention from Attorney General's office employee Byron White. On the morning of May 20, the Freedom Ride resumed, with the bus carrying the riders travelling toward Montgomery at 90 miles an hour protected by a contingent of the Alabama State Highway Patrol.

However, when they reached the Montgomery city limits, the Highway Patrol abandoned them. At the bus station, a huge white mob was waiting and viciously beat the Freedom Riders with baseball bats and iron pipes. The local police allowed the beatings to go on uninterrupted. Again, white Freedom Riders, branded "nigger-Lovers," were singled out for particularly brutal beatings. Reporters and news photographers were also attacked and their cameras destroyed, but there is a famous picture taken later of Jim Zwerg in the hospital, beaten and bruised. Justice Department official Seigenthaler was beaten and left unconscious lying in the street. Ambulances refused to take the wounded to the hospital. Local blacks rescued them, and a number of the Freedom Riders were hospitalized.

The following night, Sunday May 21st, more than 1200 people packed Reverend Ralph Abernathy's 1st Baptist church to honor the Freedom Riders. Among the speakers were Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Farmer. Outside, an enormous mob of more than 3,000 whites attacked blacks and the handful of federal marshals protecting the church from assault and fire bombs. With city and state police making no effort to restore order, President Kennedy threatened to commit federal troops, but Governor Patterson forestalled that by ordering the Alabama National Guard to disperse the mob.

You guys really, REALLY want a monarch, don't you? ...