By Jim LittleThe Opelika-Auburn News

AUBURN, Ala. Bill Harbour and Charles Person were two of the young activists who sought to end segregation in the South by doing a simple thing taking a bus ride.

Those bus rides brought about bombings, beatings and imprisonment but also the eventual end of segregated transportation in the South.

Harbour and Person spoke at the Hotel at Auburn University on Wednesday night as part of a Black History Month program hosted by the Auburn Alumni Association.

Harbour and Person recounted their experiences during the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Person was the youngest of the 13 riders of the first Freedom Ride that left Washington D.C. to travel to New Orleans on May 4, 1961.

"All change begins with young people," Person said. "Young people want to see things happen. Older people, we rationalize things and make things seem OK."

Person described his arrival at the bus station in Anniston, learning that the other bus had been firebombed. Klansmen boarded and demanded they move to the back of the bus.

"Well being smart students, we said no, we weren't going to move," Person said. "So they began to punch us."

At that point, James Peck and Walter Bergman, two white Freedom Riders, tried to intervene.

"That really infuriated them to think that whites would come to aid black students," Person said.

The men beat Peck and Bergman and forced the rest of the group into the back of the bus, which continued on an alternate route to Birmingham bypassing the angry crowd that had burned the other bus.

When the bus arrived in Birmingham, Peck and Person went to test the desegregation at the bus station, but they were intercepted by another mob. Person suffered a severe injury to his head in the beating. A photographer snapped a photo and the crowd turned on him letting Person go.

The riders eventually boarded an airplane in Birmingham to reach their destination of New Orleans.

Person later went on to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam.

Harbour went on two Freedom Rides at the end of May 1961, including a bus ride from Nashville to Montgomery.

Harbour said the bus was met in Birmingham by the infamous Bull Conor, who put the group in jail "for their own protection."

After being driven out of town in cars, the group re-boarded a bus and made it through Birmingham with the protection of the state police.

"We pulled into Montgomery and everybody vanished," Harbour said. "No protection nowhere. Didn't see anybody. John Lewis said, 'Bill something's wrong.'"

Then an angry mob appeared in the station and attacked the Freedom Riders.

"It was rough," he said. "It was real real rough. I have scars now that happened at that bus station in Montgomery."

The group continued its ride after an intervention from the National Guard to Jackson, Mississippi where they were arrested.

"We went into the bus station and asked for a hamburger and Coke, and they put us straight in jail," Harbour said.

Students from across the country sought to take part in the Freedom Rides and 436 students were arrested, Harbour said.

"Fifty percent were black, and fifty percent were white," he said. "We're not sure how that happened, but it did."

Before the remarks from Person and Harbour, the Auburn University Moasic Theater company debuted a new work titled "There are no Free Rides," an interpretation of the history of the Freedom Rides.

"They were going to war armed only with their passion and freedom songs inherited from their ancestors," one actor said during the play.

Original post:

Freedom Riders recall 1961 bus rides - Gadsden Times