2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Newt Gingrich: Sandy Hook Shooting Tied To Godless Society [View all]CBHagman
(16,980 posts)Why were civil rights activists beaten and firebombed and shot? Way to let your light shine for Jesus, people!
[ur]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Freedom-Riders.html[/url]
On Sunday, May 14, 1961Mother's Dayscores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive," somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.
A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.
The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.