The Second Wave

On May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama. In Birmingham, riders were beaten with pipes and chains while police stood absent. The original thirteen riders, organized by CORE director James Farmer, were too battered to continue. It appeared that violence had won — that segregation on interstate buses would stand unchallenged.

Then Diane Nash picked up the phone. The twenty-two-year-old Fisk University student in Nashville began recruiting volunteers to resume the rides. She insisted that if violence could stop the movement, the movement was finished. Within days, Nash assembled a group of students — including John Lewis — who boarded buses bound for Birmingham and onward to Montgomery and Jackson, Mississippi.

These young people knew exactly what awaited them. Some wrote last wills and testaments before they boarded. They had seen the photographs of the charred bus in Anniston and the bloodied faces in Birmingham. They went anyway.

Jesus told His disciples, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). The Freedom Riders lived that scripture not through death but through willingness — the deliberate choice to place their bodies in harm's way so that strangers they would never meet could one day travel in dignity.