![]() He regrets that he's never had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the people who beat him, especially the man who attacked him with a pipe in Birmingham, shown in a widely published picture. you wonder how can a stranger generate that kind of hatred." How does an adult beat up on a youngster with his fists or a pipe? The anger on their faces. "We never got any counseling or anything, and there are still so many unanswered questions. "The pain hasn't gone away, because sometimes I'll be giving a lecture or seminar, and I'll be talking or someone asks a question, and if I'm not prepared for it I'll break into tears," he said. The emotional wounds never completely healed. The beatings caused a large knot at the base of his skull, which he was finally able to have removed in the late 1990s. Five months after they began, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued an order ending segregation in public transportation.įor Person, the emotional and physical effects persisted. Many Freedom Rides followed that year, and they were front-page news. Local doctors, fearing repercussions, refused to treat the black riders, so Person had his wounds dressed by a nurse who was a member of a local Baptist church where the riders stayed that night. When Person and the other riders entered the bus station, they were savagely attacked by the white mob, some armed with lead pipes. The bus rolled on to Birmingham, where another mob waited, abetted by a police department headed by the notorious segregationist Eugene "Bull" Connor. ![]() Person and three others were beaten by Klansmen and dragged to the back of the bus. When the second bus, with Person aboard, arrived in Anniston, the riders refused the driver's order to move to the back of the bus. Person said he "wasn't quite truthful" with his parents when he told them that he would be going to Washington for some CORE training, and would come back through Atlanta on a bus. The only hurdle was persuading his parents to sign a permission slip, required because he was under 21. His activism led to a 16-day jail sentence, which drew the attention of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) recruiters looking for a Freedom Rider to represent Atlanta. "I did my homework while I was at the lunch counter because they weren't going to serve me," he said. He enrolled in Atlanta's Morehouse College in the fall of 1960, where he participated in numerous sit-ins. "My dad worked two jobs and collectively he made less than $100 on the two jobs," Person told the AARP Bulletin in a telephone interview from his home in Atlanta. He had been accepted at MIT, but the tuition was out of reach for his financially strapped family of nine. The great-grandson of slaves, he was a gifted student who had dreamed of a career as a nuclear physicist, but was denied admission to the all-white Georgia Institute of Technology. The youngest to take a seat on a bus that day was 18-year-old Charles Person of Atlanta, a college freshman who had been active in the civil-rights movement since high school.
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