King called Robert Kennedy who contacted Alabama’s Governor Patterson. Clearly, the use of federal marshals was seen as no threat. As night came, the church in which King was speaking was surrounded by a mob estimated at about 2,000.

Martin Luther King addressed a mass meeting in Montgomery in support of the Freedom Riders surrounded by federal marshals. Robert Kennedy expressed his outrage at what had gone on in Montgomery and ordered federal marshals to the city. Mann ordered in state troopers to re-establish law and order. Seigenthaler was beaten unconscious by the mob and Zwerg suffered a severe beating. Mann tried to help Zwerg, as did a Justice Department official called John Seigenthaler, sent to accompany the Riders by Robert Kennedy. Zwerg was white and the mob attacked him while other Riders managed to move away. One Rider, Jim Zwerg, left the bus first. The Riders initially thought that it would be less provocative to leave the bus from the back. Suddenly the Freedom Riders were attacked by a white mob – with a minimal police presence. The journey between the two cities was about 90 miles and Mann agreed that the route would have several patrol cars on it at any one time.Īll went well until the bus pulled into Montgomery bus station. The head of Alabama’s state highway patrol, Floyd Mann, agreed to give the Riders protection from Birmingham to Montgomery. He put pressure on the Greyhound Bus Company to carry the Riders.

The students determined that they would go back to Birmingham, regardless of the circumstances they had faced.īy now, what was happening in Birmingham had come to the attention of the Attorney-General, Robert (Bobby) Kennedy. On May 17th, they were arrested by the city’s police and put into ‘protective custody’, driven back to the Alabama/Tennessee state line and dumped there. The Nashville students went to Birmingham in an effort to persuade a bus company to let them have a bus. They believed that any perceived weakness in the civil rights movement would play into the hands of the racists – and giving in to violence was seen as a weakness by the students who decided to persevere with the bus ride. It was at this time that those students involved in the Nashville sit-ins decided to continue with the Freedom Ride. When a bus stopped, whites would use the rest areas reserved for blacks and blacks would attempt to use the rest rooms reserved for whites.ĬORE director James Farmer defended the motives of the Freedom Riders by stating quite simply that they were merely enforcing the law as laid down by America’s Supreme Court and that they were, in fact, upholding the law. In this protest, white passengers would sit in seats reserved for black passengers and vice versa. To test how committed Kennedy was to the civil rights issues, CORE planned another Freedom Ride. This did not initially happen in the young president’s time in office. To many in the civil rights movement, J F Kennedy brought hope that things would change for the better. With such intimidation the “Journey of Reconciliation” broke down and segregation in the South continued. The group met heavy resistance in North Carolina where some of the members of the Journey were arrested and made to work in chain gangs. The so-called Upper Southern states reacted very negatively to the fact that the accepted norm of the South (segregation) was being challenged. In 1947, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) planned to take a “Journey of Reconciliation” throughout the South to test the Supreme Court’s ruling.

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