In recognition of Black History Month, the Auburn Alumni Association will host Freedom Riders Bill Harbour and Charles Person in a free public event Feb. 22, from 4-6 p.m., at The Hotel at Auburn University and Dixon Conference Center.

Harbour and Person will offer accounts of their experiences as civil rights activists who rode interstate buses through the segregated southern United States in the early 1960s.

The event will be streamed live on the Auburn Alumni Associations Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/AuburnAlumniAssociation/ for those who are unable to attend.

Harbour and Person endured beatings, bombings, harassment and imprisonmentbut they helped change the Civil Rights Movement and demonstrated the power of individual actions to transform the nation.

In 1961, Civil Rights activists organized by the Congress of Racial Equality rode interstate buses deep into the heart of segregated America to challenge local laws and customs that denied ordinary citizens basic freedoms because of the color of their skin.

The 1960 Supreme Court Decision Boynton v. Virginia granted them the legal right to buy tickets for buses and sit where theyd like, but all were aware they would face violence and vitriol in the fight to end white supremacy.

Harbour was only 19 when he traveled to Rock Hill, S.C., to serve jail time in solidarity with the Rock Hill Nine who were imprisoned for a lunch counter sit-in.

Harbour was the first to exit the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride when it arrived at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station. He was met immediately by a mob of more than 200 people wielding lead pipes and baseball bats, but escaped with his life. A native of Piedmont, Ala., Harbour lives in Atlanta and serves as the unofficial archivist of the Freedom Rider Movement.

Person, an Atlanta native, was the youngest member of the inaugural 1961 Freedom Ride at age 18. He was a gifted math and physics student who dreamed of a career as a scientist but who was refused admission to the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Person became active in civil disobedience around Atlanta while attending Morehouse College, serving a 16-day jail sentence for sitting at a segregated lunch counter. Person was one of the most severely beaten of the Freedom Riders at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station riot on May 14, 1961.

Person enlisted in the Marines in late 1961 and retired after two decades of military service. He now works in the Atlanta public school system as a technology supervisor.

On Jan. 12, 2017, then-President Barack Obama approved three Civil Rights monuments, including 5.6 acres of parkland in Alabama on the site of the historic Greyhound Bus Station in Anniston as the Freedom Riders National Monument, an official part of the National Park Service.

The park will be developed at the bus station where an angry mob attacked a Greyhound bus carrying seven Freedom Riders on Mothers Day, 1961, to the grocery store grounds where their bus was famously set on fire, strengthening the Freedom Riders resolve in the process. Planning and design for the Freedom Riders National Monument are now under way.

Jessica King is an employee of Auburn University.

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Former Freedom Riders to be speak at upcoming AU event - Opelika Auburn News