This past Sunday May 14 was Mother’s Day. This is normally a time to recognize and give thanks for our mothers and/or other women who shared their self-sacrificial love and nurture with us. In 1961, Mother’s Day was also on May 14. Yet that day would go down in history for a much different and disturbing reason. Ten days before on May 4, a group of Black and white Freedom Riders started a journey on a Greyhound bus from Washington, DC headed to New Orleans. Their purpose was to test a federal law that outlawed segregation in interstate transportation. That law was routinely ignored throughout the South where bus stations and facilities continued to enforce racial segregation. When the bus reached Anniston, AL, it was met by a mob of white men many of whom belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. They surrounded the bus and slashed the tires. The driver tried to escape the mob by driving the crippled bus out of the station and back onto the highway. A few miles outside of town, the bus could not continue any further. A mob assembled there and threw firebombs into the bus that was still full of Freedom Riders. The riders managed to escape the fire and smoke but were beaten as they fled the bus. A photographer who followed the bus from the station captured some of the horrific scenes of that day, one of which is posted above. The short video posted below provides more background into the Freedom Rides and the violence of Mother’s Day 1961.
The hatred and violence directed at the Freedom Riders which destroyed that Greyhound bus did not end the Freedom Ride movement. Hundreds of additional Freedom Riders continued the rides, many of whom faced violence, arrest, and imprisonment while staying committed to nonviolence. By November 1961, their efforts led the federal government to enforce integrated interstate transportation in the South. During this month in which Mother’s Day 2023 fell on the same date as Mother’s Day 1961, it is especially important to remember and give thanks for the self-sacrifice of the Freedom Riders and to commit ourselves to continue their legacy of nonviolent witness for racial justice in 2023.