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Ralph Abernathy, Montgomery, AL

Credit: Flip Schulke/Corbis

Rev. Ralph Abernathy was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
and beyond. As the young pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Al, he
and Martin Luther King, Jr. were among the leaders of the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus
Boycott organized in response to the arrest of Rosa Parks. 

In 1961, Abernathy's First Baptist Church was the site of the May 21 "siege"
where an angry mob of white segregationists surrounded 1,500 people inside the
sanctuary. At one point, the situation seemed so dire that Abernathy and King
considered giving themselves up to the mob to save the men, women, and children
in the sanctuary. 

When reporters asked Abernathy to respond to Robert Kennedy's complaint that the
Freedom Riders were embarrassing the United States in front of the world,
Abernathy responded, "Well, doesn't the Attorney General know we've been
embarrassed all our lives?" 

On May 25, Abernathy was arrested on breach of peace charges after escorting
William Sloane Coffin's Connecticut Freedom Ride to the Montgomery Greyhound Bus
Terminal, neither the first nor the last instance of civil disobedience in a
lifetime of activism. 

After Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968, Abernathy took up the
leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Poor People's
Campaign and led the 1968 March on Washington. Ralph Abernathy died in 1990.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Birmingham, AL

Birmingham, AL native, 21-year-old Catherine Burks was a student at Tennessee
State University when she volunteered for the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride.
On May 18, she bantered with the ultra-segregationist Birmingham Public Safety
Commissioner Bull Connor as he drove the Nashville riders from jail back to the
Tennessee state line. 

In Freedom Riders, Burks says she borrowed a line from the Westerns of the day,
telling Connor, "We'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon." 

Two days later, she found herself in a riot at the Montgonery Greyhound Bus
Station. In Freedom Riders, she vividly recalls the assault on fellow Freedom
Rider Jim Zwerg. "Some men held him while white women clawed his face with their
nails. And they held up their little children --children who couldn't have been
more than a couple years old -- to claw his face. I had to turn my head back
because I just couldn't watch it." 

She described the beginning of the siege of the First Baptist Church in
Montgomery by an angry segregationist mob on the following day. "I heard a rock
hit the window. Some of us got up to look out the window and we got hit by more
rocks. That's when a little fear came." 

In August 1961, she married fellow Freedom Rider Paul Brooks. They were later
active in the Mississippi voter registration movement, co-editing
the Mississippi Free Press from 1962-1963. In the decades following the Freedom
Rides, Burks owned a successful jewelry boutique and worked as a social worker,
teacher, and Avon cosmetics sales manager.

Stokely Carmichael, Bronx, NY

Credit: Mississippi Department of Archives & History

At the time of the Freedom Rides, Stokely Carmichael was a 19-year-old student
at Howard University, the son of West Indian immigrants to New York City.
Carmichael made the journey to Jackson, MS from New Orleans, LA on June 4, 1961
by train, along with eight other riders, including JOan Trumpauer.

The group was ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all Riders
refused bail. Carmichael was transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm, which
proved to be a crucible and testing ground for future Movement leaders. Other
Freedom Riders recalled his quick wit and hard-nosed political realism from
their shared time at Parchman. 

The acerbic Carmichael would go on to become one of the leading voices of the
Black Power Movement. In 1966 Carmichael became Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) chairman and, in 1967, honorary prime minister of the Black
Panther Party. He moved to West Africa in 1969, and changed his name to Kwame
Ture in honor of African leaders Kwame Nkruma and Sekou Toure, later traveling
the world as a proponent of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party. He died
in Conakry, Guinea in 1998 of prostate cancer at the age of 57. 

In his posthumously published autobiography, Carmichael spoke about the
significance of the Freedom Rides: "CORE would be sending an integrated
team-black and white together-from the nation's capital to New Orleans on public
transportation. That's all. Except, of course, that they would sit randomly on
the buses in integrated pairs and in the stations they would use waiting room
facilities casually, ignoring the white/colored signs. What could be more
harmless... in any even marginally healthy society?"

Benjamin Elton Cox, High Point, NC

Credit: BBC/CBS

Part of the original May 4 CORE Freedom Ride, the Rev. Benjamin Elton Cox was an
outspoken black minister based in High Point, NC who had traveled through the
region spreading the gospel of nonviolence during the spring and summer of 1960.
Cox also participated in the July 8-15, 1961 Missouri to Louisiana CORE Freedom
Ride. 

Defending the actions of the Freedom Riders, Cox argues in Freedom Riders, "If
men like Governor Patterson [of Alabama] and Governor Barnett of Mississippi...
would carry out the good oath of their office, then people would be able to
travel in this country. Then people in Tel Aviv and Moscow and London would not
pick up their newspaper for breakfast and realize that America is not living up
to the dream of liberty and justice for all." 

The preacher and longtime civil rights activist was arrested 17 times over the
course of several decades. Prior to retirement, he served as minister at Pilgrim
Congregational Church in High Point, NC, as chaplain at the VA Hospital in
Urbana, IL, and as a middle school counselor in Jackson, TN.

Glenda Gaither Davis, Great Falls, SC

Credit: WGBH

A student at Claflin College in Orangeburg, SC, 18-year-old Glenda Gaither
—sister of CORE field secretary Tom Gaither— was already a veteran of the
state's sit-in movement to end lunch counter segregation. On May 30, 1961, she
arrived in ackson, MS as part of the first group of eight Freedom Riders from
New Orleans, LA to conduct tests at a railway terminal. When they attempted to
use the white restrooms, they were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced
within the hour to a $200 fine and a 60-day jail term. 

In 1965 Gaither married her boyfriend Jim Davis, a participant in the same ride,
and later worked as a job placement director at Spelman College. 

She recalls in Freedom Riders, "Even though we came from many different places
and we had many different cultures and many different home environments, in some
ways we were very much unified because we had a common cause... we knew that we
had taken a stand and that there was something better out there for us."

Rabbi Israel "Si" Dresner, Springfield, NJ

Credit: WGBH

Later dubbed "the most arrested rabbi in America," the outspoken Rabbi Israel
"Si" Dresner participated in the June 13-16 Interfaith Freedom Ride from
Washington, DC to Tallahassee, FL. The son of a Brooklyn delicatessen owner, he
graduated from the University of Chicago (1950) and Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Theology. 

After successfully completing the Freedom Ride to Tallahassee, the Interfaith
Riders had planned to fly home. First, however, they decided to test whether or
not the group would be served in the segregated airport restaurant. As a result
10 Freedom Riders, later known as the Tallahassee Ten, were arrested for
unlawful assembly and taken to the city jail. They were convicted and sentenced
later that same month; legal appeal of the airport arrests continued for years.
Dresner returned along with 9 of the original riders to serve brief jail terms
in August 1964 - and ate triumphantly in the same airport restaurant that had
earlier refused them service. 

Dresner continued his civil rights activism and advocacy throughout his career
as a reform Jewish rabbi in northern New Jersey, participating in the 1962
Albany campaign to desegregate municipal facilities and in the 1965
Selma-to-Montgomery march. He retired in 1996.

James Farmer, New York, NY

Credit: Mississippi Department of Archives & History

Co-founder and National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
James "Jim" Farmer was the architect of the original CORE Freedom Ride of 1961.
He saw the significance of desegregating interstate travel and the potential of
repeating CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation as a movement tactic. He
endorsed a new name, "Freedom Ride," to win media attention and better
communicate the mission and goals of the trip. 

A child prodigy who earned early fame as a debater, Farmer grew up in Marshall,
Texas, where his father, James L. Farmer, Sr. was a professor at the
historically black Wiley College. Farmer devoted his career to civil rights and
social justice causes, working for the NAACP and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR), CORE's parent organization, prior to his February 1961
election as director of CORE. 

Farmer's signature initiative was the Freedom Rides, initiated just three months
after he took office. At that time, CORE was less well known than the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther
King's Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC) or the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Farmer envisioned the ride as a way to vault CORE
and its philosophy of nonviolent direct action to prominence on the national
stage, with attendant opportunities for policy-making and fundraising. 

Farmer took part in the ride, but returned to Washington, D.C. from Atlanta, GA
on the morning of May 14 for his father's funeral. He was haunted by guilt as a
result, especially since he was spared from some of the Rides' worst violence -
the May 14 Anniston, AL Greyhound bus burning and the Birmingham, AL Trailways
Bus Station Riot. 

Farmer later recalled his emotions upon learning of his father's death in
Atlanta. "There was, of course, the incomparable sorrow and pain," he said. "But
frankly, there was also a sense of reprieve, for which I hated myself. Like
everyone else, I was afraid of what lay in store for us in Alabama, and now that
I was to be spared participation in it, I was relieved, which embarrassed me to
tears." 

On May 21, Farmer flew to rejoin the riders in Montgomery, AL. Upon arriving in
Jackson, MS, three days later, Farmer was jailed for "breach of peace" and other
charges and later was transferred to Mississippi's notorious Parchman State
Prison Farm. 

Historians acknowledge Farmer's central visionary role in bringing the Freedom
Rides to fruition. 

In 1966, Farmer eventually left CORE and the Civil Rights Movement, citing its
growing acceptance of racial separation as his reason. He served in the Nixon
Administration as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, and co-founded the Fund for an Open Society in 1975. President Bill
Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. 

James Farmer died from complications of diabetes in 1999.

William Harbour, Piedmont, AL

A native of Piedmont, AL, William Harbour was the oldest of eight children and
the first member of his family to go to college. At age 19, while a student at
Tennessee State University, he had already participated in civil disobedience,
traveling to Rock Hill, SC to serve jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill
Nine" — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in. 

One of the first to exit the bus when the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride
arrived at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, Harbour encountered a mob of
200 people wielding lead pipes and baseball bats. Harbour survived the riot but
after the end of the Freedom Rides, still faced hostility in his native Alabama.
He was also one of 14 Freedom Riders expelled from Tennessee State University. 

"Be best for you not to come [home]," his mother warned him in 1961. With the
exception of one brief visit, he stayed away from Piedmont for the next five
years. 

After the Freedom Rides, Harbour taught school for several years, and eventually
became a civilian federal employee specializing in U.S. Army base closings.
Today, Harbour acts as the unofficial archivist of the Freedom Rider Movement.
He moved to Atlanta, GA in 1969.

Genevieve Hughes Houghton, Washington, DC

Credit: WGBH

One of two women participants in the original 13-person Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) Freedom Ride, 28-year-old CORE Field Secretary Genevieve Hughes
was a former financial analyst for Dun and Bradstreet. She became active in the
New York City chapter of CORE during the late 1950s, helping to organize a
boycott of dime stores affiliated with chains resisting desegregation in the
South. Alienated from the conservatism of Wall Street, she made the shift to
full-time activism in 1960. 

A Maryland native, Hughes explained her motivation for joining the Freedom Ride
by saying, "I figured Southern women should be represented so the South and the
nation would realize all Southern people don't think alike." 

During the original CORE Freedom Ride, Hughes survived the brutal May 14, 1961
attack on the Greyhound Bus near Anniston, Alabama. On May 15, when faced with
mounting threats and intimidation, the Riders could not find a bus driver
willing to take them further, and they flew from Birmingham, AL to New Orleans,
LA.

Pauline Knight-Ofusu, Nashville, TN

Credit: WGBH

Part of the May 28 wave of Freedom Riders from the Nashville Student Movement,
Pauline Knight-Ofusu escaped the violence of the earlier rides. Pauline Knight
was a 20-year-old Tennessee State student when she was arrested in Jackson, MS.
After being transferred to Hinds County Jail, she led a brief hunger strike
among the female Riders. 

"I got up one morning in May and I said to my folks at home, ‘I won't be back
today because I am a Freedom Rider,'" said Knight-Ofusu in her interview
for Freedom Riders. "It was like a wave or a wind, and you didn't know where it
was coming from but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me,
nobody told me."

Bernard Lafayette Jr., Tampa, FL

Twenty-year-old Bernard Lafayette hailed from Tampa, FL and was enrolled as an
undergraduate at Nashville's American Baptist Theological Seminary. A veteran of
the Nashville sit-ins, Lafayette had already staged a successful impromptu
Freedom Ride with his close friend and fellow student activist John Lewis in
1959, while traveling home for Christmas break, when they decided to exercise
their rights as interstate passengers by sitting in the front of a bus from
Nashville, TN to Birmingham, AL. 

As part of the May 17 Nashville Student Movement Ride, Lafayette endured jail
time in Birmingham, riots and firebombings in Montgomery, AL, an arrest in
Jackson, MS, and jail time at Parchman State Prison Farm during June 1961. 

After the end of the Freedom Riders campaign, he worked on voting rights and
helped to coordinate the 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign. He completed a doctorate in
Education at Harvard University and for several years was the Director of the
Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. He
currently teaches at Emory University and conducts nonviolent workshops
worldwide.

James Lawson, Nashville, TN

Thirty-two-year-old Rev. James Lawson introduced the principles of Gandhian
nonviolence to many future leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Born in
western Pennsylvania and raised in Ohio, he spent a year in prison as a
conscientious objector during the Korean War, as well as three years as a
Methodist missionary in India, where he was deeply influenced by the philosophy
and techniques of nonviolent resistance developed by Mohandas Gandhi and his
followers. 

While enrolled as a divinity student at Oberlin College, Lawson met Martin
Luther King, Jr., who urged Lawson to postpone his studies and take an active
role in the Civil Rights Movement. "We don't have anyone like you," King told
him. 

Following King's advice, Lawson headed South as a field secretary for the
Fellowship of Reconciliation. In Nashville, TN, he helped organize the Nashville
Student Movement's successful sit-in campaign of 1960 and was expelled from
Vanderbilt University School of Divinity as a result. He trained Diane Nash;
Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis and many others through his famous workshops on
the tactics of nonviolent direct action. 

When the original CORE Freedom Ride stalled in Birmingham, AL, Lawson urged the
Nashville Student Movement to continue the Freedom Rides. He conducted workshops
on nonviolent resistance while the Freedom Riders spent several days holed up in
the Montgomery, AL home of Dr. Richard Harris. During an impromptu press
conference on the National Guard-escorted bus that traveled from Montgomery to
Jackson, MS, he told reporters that the Freedom Riders "would rather risk
violence and be able to travel like ordinary passengers" than rely on armed
guards who did not understand their philosophy of combating "violence and hate"
by "absorbing it without returning it in kind." 

In 1968, Lawson chaired the strike committee for sanitation workers in Memphis,
TN. At Lawson's request, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the striking workers
on the day before his assassination. In 1974, Lawson moved to Los Angeles to
lead Holman United Methodist Church where he served as pastor for 25 years
before retiring in 1999. Throughout his career and into retirement, he has
remained active in various human rights advocacy campaigns, including immigrant
rights and opposition to war and militarism. In recent years he has been a
distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University.

Frederick Leonard, Chattanooga, TN

A student at Tennessee State University, Leonard was active in the Nashville
sit-in movement in 1960-61 before taking part in the May 17 Nashville Movement
Freedom Ride. He faced an angry, violent mob upon arriving at the Montgomery
Greyhound Bus Station on May 20, and was imprisoned at Parchman State Prison
Farm after reaching Jackson, MS. fter his release from Parchman in August 1961,
he traveled to participate in the effort to convert the militant black leader
Robert Williams to non-violence. 

He later married fellow Freedom Rider Joy Reagon.

John Lewis, Troy, AL

By the time 19-year-old John Lewis joined the 1961 CORE Freedom ride, he already
had five arrests under his belt as a veteran of the Nashville Student Movement.
The son of hardscrabble tenant farmers from Pike County, AL, he attended
American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, TN where he was deeply
influenced by Rev. Kelly Miller Smith and Rev. James Lawson.

On May 10, several days before the Riders crossed into Alabama, Lewis had left
the CORE Ride to interview for a fellowship. By chance, he was in Nashville on
May 14 when the news broke of the violent bus burning in Anniston, AL and the
riot at theBirmingham Trailways Bus Station. Lewis helped to convince his
friends and mentors from the Nashville Student Movement to get involved. He rode
to Birmingham with the Nashville cohort, endured the angry mob in Montgomery,
and was arrested in Jackson and served jail time at Mississippi's Parchman State
Prison Farm. 

Lewis would become the best-known among the youthful Freedom Riders, serving as
chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), speaking at
the 1963 March on Washington, and playing a pivotal role in the 1965 Selma —
Montgomery March. In 1986, John Lewis was elected to represent Georgia in the
U.S. House of Representatives where he currently is serving his 12th term.

Ivor "Jerry" Moore

Ivor "Jerry" Moore was part of the original 1961 Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) Freedom Ride, joining the ride in Sumter, SC on May 11. He was present at
the Klan-organized riot on May 14 at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station. The
son of a Baptist minister from the Bronx, Moore had already been involved in
several sit-ins and marches against segregation as a student at Morris College
in Sumter, South Carolina before participating in the Freedom Rides. 

After graduating from college in 1964, he became a folk and rock musician in
Greenwich Village and Woodstock, NY. Moore moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where
he conducted street ministry for drug addicts and the homeless, taught computer
skills, and coordinated church outreach activities.

Mae Francis Moultrie, Sumter, SC

Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only
African-American female on the original May 4 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Freedom Ride, joining the ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC. She suffered severe
smoke inhalation during the firebombing and burning of the Greyhound bus on May
14 by an angry Klan mob at the Forsyth Grocery Store outside  Anniston, AL. She
was taken to the hospital in Anniston along with the other injured Riders, but
the interracial group was not allowed to spend the night. 

Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she says in Freedom
Riders, that she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus." 

In October 1961, she moved to Philadelphia, PA to attend Cheyney State College.
She later received an M.S. in education from Temple University. Moultrie taught
school in Delaware from 1964-1990, after which she served as a missionary in
Liberia, Mexico, and Canada. Later, she taught Christian education at Sanctuary
Christian Academy in Philadelphia.

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Washington, DC

Credit: Mississippi Department of Archives & History

A 19-year-old Duke University student and part-time secretary in the Washington
office of Senator Clair Engle of California, Joan Trumpauer arrived in Jaskcon,
MS by train from New Orleans, LA as part of the June 4, 1961 Mississippi Freedom
Ride. 

The group was promptly ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all
nine Riders refused bail. Trumpauer was transferred to Parchman State Prison
Farm.

In her interview for Freedom Riders, she recalls the harrowing conditions at
Parchman, which included forced vaginal examinations used as a tactic to
humiliate and terrorize female prisoners. 

After the Freedom Rides, Trumpauer studied at Tougaloo College and was a Freedom
Summer organizer in 1964. She later worked at the Smithsonian with the Community
Relations Service and at the Departments of Commerce and Justice before teaching
English as a second language at an Arlington, VA elementary school.

Ernest "Rip" Patton, Jr., Nashville, TN

 

The 21-year-old Tennessee State student was the drum major in the University
marching band when, in 1961, he became involved in the Nashville Movement.
Patton arrived in Montgomery, AL on Tuesday, May 23 to help reinforce the riders
meeting at the home of Dr. Harris after the May 21 firebombing and siege of
Montgomery's First Baptist Church. 

Ernest "Rip" Patton, Jr. took part in the May 24, 1961 Greyhound Freedom Ride
to Jackson, MS, where he was arrested and later transferred to Mississippi's
notorious Parchman State Prison Farm.

Patton was one of 14 Tennessee State University students expelled for
participating in the Rides. Following the Freedom Rides, he worked as a jazz
musician, and later as a long-distance truck driver and community leader. For
the past three years, Patton has served as the Freedom Rider on an annual
university sponsored Civil Rights tour of the Deep South.

James Peck, Stamford, CT

Credit: Corbis

Radical journalist and pacifist James Peck was the only individual to
participate in both the Fellowship of Reconciliation's 1947 Journey of
Reconciliation and the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride. 

Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social
outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family
had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he
quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by
bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of
his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working
as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted
himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social
justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War
II as a conscientious objector. 

After his release from prison in 1945, he rededicated himself to pacifism and
militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s, Peck became increasingly involved in
issues of racial justice, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a
volunteer. 

On May 14, Peck assumed de facto leadership of the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride after
James Farmer returned to Washington for his father's funeral. Peck sustained
heavy injuries to the face and head during the Ku Klux Klan riot at the
Birmingham Trailways Bus Station. 

It took more than an hour for Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance
willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital, where staff
refused to treat him. Peck was finally able to see a doctor at Jefferson Hillman
Hospital, where he received 53 stitches. Undeterred by his injuries, he urged
the riders to continue. 

"If he could be beaten as he was and still go on, we certainly felt we could go
on," says Genevieve Hughes in Freedom Riders. 

In 1976, Peck, along with Walter Bergman, filed a lawsuit against the FBI,
seeking $100,000 in damages for the lasting injuries he sustained as a result of
the riot, in which paid FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was an active
participant. In 1983, he was awarded a partial settlement of $25,000. 

James Peck passed away in 1993.

Joseph Perkins, Owensboro, KY

Credit: Johnson Publishing Company

Twenty-seven year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Field Secretary Joe
Perkins hailed from Owensboro, KY. The oldest of six children, he spent four
years at Kentucky State University in Frankfort before enlisting for two years
in the army in 1954. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he
demonstrated on behalf of the Southern sit-in movement to end lunch counter
segregation. Recruited by CORE in August 1960, he gained a reputation as a bold
and skillful organizer. 

Perkins was the first member of the original 1961 CORE Freedom Ride to be
arrested, for requesting a shoeshine from a whites-only shoeshine chair during
an impromptu "shoe-in" in Charlotte, NC on May 9. After two days in a Charlotte
jail, he rejoined the group and served as leader of the Greyhound Riders on May
14, when their bus was burned in Anniston, AL.

Charles Person, Atlanta, GA

Credit: Johnson Publishing Company

The youngest member of the original 1961 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Freedom Ride, 18-year-old Charles Person was a freshman at Atlanta's Morehouse
College. Born and raised in Atlanta, Person had been surrounded by reminders of
segregation throughout his life. A gifted math and physics student who dreamed
of a career as a scientist, he was refused admission to the all-white Georgia
Institute of Technology. While at Morehouse, he became active in the Atlanta
sit-in movement to integrate segregated lunch counters in early 1961 and was
sentenced to 16 days in jail as a result. 

Along with Jim Peck and Walter Bergman, Person was one of the most badly beaten
of the Riders during the May 14, 1961 riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus
station.

After the Freedom Rides, Person joined the U.S. Marines in late 1961, retiring
after two decades of active service. He lived in Cuba from 1981-1984. Since
returning to Georgia, he has worked in Atlanta's public schools as a technology
supervisor.

Hank Thomas, Elton, FL

Credit: WGBH

Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas joined the 1961 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Freedom Ride at the last minute after his roommate John Moody dropped out with a
bad case of the flu. 

"When folks ask me what incident led me to ride," he said years later. "I can't
say it was one. When you grow up and face this humiliation every day, there is
no one thing. You always felt that way." 

Thomas overcame an impoverished childhood in southern Georgia and St. Augustine,
FL to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was active in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) affiliated Nonviolent Action
Group (NAG). 

After participating in the May 4 CORE Freedom Ride, Thomas returned to the Deep
South to participate in the May 24 Mississippi Freedom Ride from Montgomery, AL
to Jackson, MS, and was jailed at Parchman State Prison Farm. 

After being released on bail, he went on to participate in the July 14 New
Jersey to Arkansas CORE Freedom Ride. On August 22, 1961 Thomas became the first
Freedom Rider to appeal his conviction for breach of peace. He was released on
appeal, pending payment of a $2000 bond. 

Following the Freedom Rides, Thomas served in the Vietnam War, returning home
after being wounded in 1966. In recent years, Thomas has owned and operated
several hotel and fast food restaurant franchises in the Atlanta metro region.

C.T. Vivian, Chattanooga, TN

Credit: WGBH

A 36-year-old Baptist minister from Howard, MO, the Reverend Cordy "C.T." Vivian
was the oldest of the Nashville Riders. A close friend of James Lawson, he had
gained the trust of the students involved in the Nashville Movement by
participating in the 1960 Nashville sit-in campaign to end lunch counter
desegregation. On May 24, 1961, he was arrested in Jackson, MS on the formal
charge of breach of peace and imprisoned at Parchman State Prison Farm.

One of the Civil Rights Movement's most respected and revered figures, he was
named director of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) affiliates in
1963, and later founded and led several civil rights organizations, including
Vision, the National Anti-Klan Network, the Center of Democratic Renewal, and
Black Action Strategies and Information Center (BASIC).

Jim Zwerg, Appleton, WI

Credit: WGBH

Jim Zwerg was a 21-year-old exchange student from Beloit College in Wisconsin
who became active in the Nashville sit-in movement after attending one of James
Lawson's workshops on nonviolence. As one of the two whites selected for the May
17 Nashville Movement Freedom Ride, he expected that he would be targeted for
violence as a "race traitor." On May 20, his predictions proved accurate when he
was beaten savagely during the riot at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus
Station, Photographs of a bloodied, beaten Zwerg made headlines around the
world. 

"We will continue our journey one way or another. We are prepared to die," Zwerg
told reporters from his hospital bed in St. Jude's Catholic Hospital. After the
Freedom Rides, Zwerg worked as a United Church of Christ minister until 1975.
Later, he worked as a personnel manager for IBM and at a hospice in Tucson, AZ,
where he later retired. His close friendship with John Lewis is the subject of
Ann Bausum's award winning book for young adults, Freedom Riders (1986).

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