Word: anniston
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Joseph Perkins, field secretary of the Congress on Racial Equality and one of the original riders on the Greyhound bus that was burned at Anniston, Ala., said, "We don't feel we should stop our major offensive. We should continue until we have reached our objective." The audience, evenly divided between Negroes and whites, applauded loudly...
...Greyhound's trip through the Carolinas and Georgia as relatively peaceful, but he said, once the bus passed into Alabama, people began to taunt, "You ain't in Georgia now. You in Alabama." He told how a mob burned the bus after stopping it a few miles out of Anniston and throwing a fire bomb through a window...
...house on the left side of the road a white man said, 'Get off my property,'" Perkins related. "At the house on the right, a white woman offered aid. . . . Those burned or overcome by smoke were treated at Anniston Hospital, and immediately asked to leave. Once an emergency is over, local customs come right back...
Bombed Bus. "I could tell the difference when we crossed the state line into Alabama." recalls Negro Freedom Rider Charles Person, 18. "The atmosphere was tense." Outside Anniston, the first stop in Alabama, whites who had been pursuing in cars caught up with the Freedom Riders. An incendiary bomb was hurled through a broken window, setting the bus afire. "The bus soon filled with black, acrid smoke," recalls Freedom Rider Bigelow. "We had to get out somehow-there was no chance at all of surviving inside." The waiting toughs beat up some of the Freedom Riders who emerged first...
...Peaceful People." Just as bruising was the ordeal of the seven Freedom Riders aboard Bus No. 2, which had trailed several miles behind the lead bus coming into Anniston. In Anniston, eight whites climbed aboard, began roughing up the Freedom Riders before cops broke up the brawl. At Birmingham's Trailways Terminal, another mob charged the bus, swinging fists, blackjacks and lengths of pipe. Although the terminal is just two blocks from Birmingham's police headquarters, the cops were conspicuously absent when the blood began to flow. Said tough, bullfrog-voiced Police Commissioner Eugene ("Bull") Connor later...