Freedom Riders Firebombed in Anniston as Police Allow KKK Attack Without Intervention

On May 14, 1961, the first Freedom Ride bus—a Greyhound carrying civil rights activists challenging segregated interstate transportation—arrived in Anniston, Alabama, where an angry mob of approximately 200 white people, including Ku Klux Klan members, surrounded it. Local authorities had given the KKK explicit permission to attack the Freedom Riders without fear of arrest. The mob slashed the bus tires and followed it out of town in automobiles. When the tires blew out, someone threw a firebomb through a window, and the bus burst into flames. As the Freedom Riders escaped the burning vehicle, members of the mob brutally beat them with baseball bats and tire irons. This coordinated violence, enabled by law enforcement complicity, exposed the systematic institutional resistance to federal civil rights enforcement across the South.

The violence continued in Birmingham, where Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor later admitted that although he knew the Freedom Riders were arriving and that violence awaited them, he posted no police protection at the station because it was Mother’s Day—a statement that revealed the deliberate nature of police complicity. Connor had arranged for KKK members to have fifteen minutes to attack the riders before police would intervene. Southern states had ignored Supreme Court decisions ruling segregated public transportation unconstitutional, and the federal government had done nothing to enforce them. The Kennedy administration initially hesitated to intervene, concerned about political relationships with Southern congressmen and the potential impact on the president’s reelection prospects. When civil rights leaders asked for federal protection, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called for a “cooling off period,” prompting CORE head James Farmer to respond: “We have been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off any more, we’d be in a deep freeze.”

After mobs attacked riders in Montgomery and surrounded a church where Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking, threatening the lives of 1,500 people inside, President Kennedy finally sent 400 federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders. Attorney General Kennedy also urged the Interstate Commerce Commission to order desegregation of interstate travel. On May 29, 1961, the Kennedy administration directed the ICC to ban segregation in all facilities under its jurisdiction, with new policies taking effect on November 1, 1961. By December 1961, more than 400 people had joined the Freedom Rides, facing arrests for trespassing and violating Jim Crow laws while white mobs attacked them, often without police intervention. The Freedom Rides revealed the full extent of institutional corruption: local police departments coordinated with terrorist organizations to attack citizens exercising constitutional rights, Southern states refused to enforce federal court rulings, businesses maintained illegal segregation, and the federal government initially prioritized political calculations over civil rights enforcement—a pattern of systematic institutional failure that demonstrated how deeply white supremacy was embedded in government structures at every level.