“We were prepared for the possibility of death” Freedom Riders in the South, 1961
Another primary source from Archives Unbound, this collection is sourced from the FBI. It includes documents from 1961 when civil rights activists, “Freedom Riders”, rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960).
The first Freedom Ride began on May 5, 1961. Led by CORE Director James Farmer, 13 riders (seven black, six white) left Washington, D.C., on Greyhound and Trailways buses. Their plan was to ride through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, ending with a rally in New Orleans, Louisiana. Only minor trouble was encountered in Virginia and North Carolina, but some of the Riders were arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Winnsboro, South Carolina. Mob violence in Birmingham, Alabama would attempt to end this first Freedom Ride.
In this collection, researchers will find surveillance reports, chronologies, witness statements and more. Some materials have only recently been declassified.
The FBI materials that comprise this collection trace the gathering of the participants from all over America through local and state police reports to FBI field offices; assessments from FBI special agents on the “communist” or “fellow traveler” associations of the Freedom Riders; timelines of the rides into the Deep South; correspondence between the FBI, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the White House regarding the Freedom Rides and the concern for violence; informant reports from inside Ku Klux Klan organizations and much more.
Image – HQ157-387 Section 12, p. 56