TIME MAGAZINE

FREEDOM RIDERS

(May 17, 1963)

 Aboard two buses, 13 men and women, some Negro and some white, set out from Washington, D.C., in early May. They called themselves "Freedom Riders." They meant to demonstrate that segregated travel on interstate buses, even though banned by an I.C.C. ruling, is still enforced throughout much of the South. They were, in fact, hunting for trouble--and last week they found more of it than they wanted.

 "I could tell the difference when we teen-agers in this protest platoon were herded into a paddy wagon. In squads of 20, 30, and 40, more youngsters left the church, were shoved into paddy wagons and taken to jail. That night, to shouts of "Amen, brother, amen" a King aide cried: "War has been declared in Birmingham. War has been declared on segregation."

 The Negro leaders intended it to be a particular, pacific kind of war. King had preached Gandhi's nonviolent protest gospel ever since he arrived in Birmingham. But not every Negro remained so placid before Bull Connor's ferocity.

 So there was violence. It began shortly after noon the next day. Connor's cops were relaxed, eating sandwiches and sipping soft drinks. They were caught by surprise when the doors of the 16th Street church were flung open and 2,500 Negroes swarmed out. The Negroes surged across Kelly Ingram Park, burst through the police line, and descended on Birmingham. Yelling and singing, they charged in and out of department stores, jostled whites on the streets, paralyzed traffic.

 The riot ebbed--and then, an hour later, exploded again. In Kelly Ingram Park, hundreds of Negroes began lobbing bricks and bottles at the lawmen. A deputy sheriff fell to the pavement, shouting. "Those black apes!" For two hours, the battle raged, but slowly, inexorably, in trucks and cars, the police closed in on the park.

That night, Alabama's ultra-segregationist Governor George Wallace sent 600 men to reinforce Connor's weary cops. And Martin Luther King appeared before his followers to say: "We will turn America upside down in order that it turn right side up."