1961: the Freedom Riders: fifty years ago, 13 people began a journey through the Deep South--and forever changed the nation.

• Author: Perlman, Merrill
• Position: TIMES PAST

On May 4, 1961, 13 people bound for New Orleans boarded two public buses in Washington, D.C.

Calling themselves the Freedom Riders, the interracial group--southern and northern men and women, many of them in their 20s--sought to test federal laws intended to help desegregate the Deep South.

For the next few weeks, the Freedom Riders traveled from one southern city to the next, trying to integrate "whites only" waiting rooms and lunch counters--and enduring arrests, beatings, and tire bombings along the way. By the time they headed home, some with black eyes and broken bones, the attention they had brought to just how widespread segregation still was in the South had energized the civil rights movement. And their actions culminated in landmark civil rights laws a few years later.

The Freedom Rides were "a key step in a whole chain of events that led to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Bill," says Brian Daugherity, who teaches history at Virginia Commonwealth University. They were "a motivating influence on a whole generation of young people"

In 1961, almost a century after the Civil War, segregation was still a way of life in the South. Changes had come steadily, but slowly: President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed forces after World War II, in 1948, (see timeline, p.26). And in the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" schools for blacks and whites were inherently unequal and unconstitutional.

But despite two Supreme Court rulings outlawing segregation in interstate rail and bus terminals as far back as 1946, many stations in the South maintained separate lunch counters, restrooms, and water fountains. States and cities in the South found ways to flout federal rulings through local custom and "Jim Crow" segregation laws.

The idea behind the Freedom Rides, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil tights group, was simple: At each segregated bus terminal, the interracial group would seek service in the whites-only area. If served, they would consider that place in compliance with federal law. If they were arrested for violating local law, they would go to jail without resisting. "And if there is violence, we are willing to accept that violence without responding in kind," said CORE's leader, James Farmer.

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But they expected--even hoped--that things wouldn't go smoothly: As Farmer put it, they were counting on "the racists of the South to create a crisis, so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce federal law."

Ku Klux Klan

As the Freedom Riders traveled through Virginia and North and South Carolina, they were served at most bus stations--even if the white waitresses sneered while pouring coffee or the black waitresses whispered to just let things be to avoid trouble. And if the counters and restrooms were again segregated once the Freedom Riders left, at least they had broken the taboos.

The real trouble started on day 11 as the buses arrived in Alabama, where the white-supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan had deep roots. The Freedom Riders could expect little help from police or other officials, since many were themselves K.K.K. members.

Outside Anniston, Alabama, racial slurs and rocks rained on one of the buses before someone threw a firebomb into it, with the Freedom Riders were beaten as they fled the bus.

"When I got off the bus, a man came up to me, and I'm coughing and strangling" Hank Thomas recalled years later. "He said, 'Boy, you all right." And I nodded my head. And the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. He had hit me with part of a baseball bat."

On their way to Birmingham, Alabama, whose police commissioner, Eugene...