Charles Person

“I never thought about dying. I just prayed a lot. In Birmingham, they beat anybody that they thought had any relationship with us, white, black or otherwise.”

Above: Klansmen attack Freedom Rider Charles Person (center, on the ground) in the Trailways Bus Station in Birmingham, Ala., on May 14, 1961.The photo helped identify Klansmen involved in the assault. (AP Photo/Birmingham Post-Herald, Tommy Langston

(The following article was published in The NY Daily News in 2016)

WILLIAM HARBOUR & CHARLES PERSON

They shed blood on the Freedom Rides

They grew up in neighboring states, about 90 miles apart; William Harbour, in rural Piedmont, Ala., and Charles Person in Atlanta. They’ve been friends for about 30 years; more than that, they’re blood brothers of a sort, each man having shed blood for the civil-rights movement in Alabama as participants in the Freedom Rides.

As children, both men passively accepted life in the Jim Crow South, and, although they encountered the same strictures placed on black members of society, it would be years before they’d envision an alternative. Person, 73, grew up in a historically black section of the city surrounding Auburn Ave., a thriving town within a town replete with banks, nightclubs and even a bowling alley, much of them owned or operated by blacks. “We didn’t know how bad it was until we got much older,” Person says, resting in a seated walker. “We felt we lived a good life. If you screwed up and a neighbor caught you, he’d tell your parents if he didn’t spank you himself. That’s the kind of community we had.”

Harbour’s childhood was starkly different. His father owned about 5 acres of land and their next-door neighbor was white. Harbour played with the white children and wore their hand-me-down clothes. “We didn’t have a major problem at that time,” says Harbour, 74. “As long as you stayed in line. Growing up in the South, you really didn’t understand segregation. It was a way of life, and we knew that.”

That way of life forced them to overcome the limitations of the segregated public schools, where they had to use tattered, secondhand textbooks that had been scribbled with racist insults by the white students who knew where the books were headed.

“The teachers brought in supplemental material (to help educate us),” Person says. “We took the same SAT and ACT as the white kids, and it astonished (white educators) that these black kids were able to have the qualifications to get into all these flagship universities.”

When it came time to choose a college, both men encountered roadblocks. Person, who was captivated by the space program and hoped to be a scientist, was accepted to MIT, but his father didn’t have the money to send him to the prestigious Massachusetts school. He would have liked staying home to attend Georgia Tech, but its segregationist admissions policy took that option off the table, so he settled on Morehouse. “We knew that we were being held back because a lot of us had good grades and were accepted at a lot of these flagship (Northern) schools,” he says. “You wonder, What’s the difference? Sharing this with others, you realize, It’s not me; it’s the system.”

Harbour lived about nine miles from Jacksonville State University, so going to the Alabama state school made certain sense. His mother worked in the cafeteria there, and he spent many days driving around the campus in his ’54 Ford, admiring the collegiate setting and resolving to become the first person in his family to attend college. One afternoon he went to the bursar’s office and dropped of his application, hoping to attend in the fall. There was just one problem: Jacksonville State was an all-white university.

“They took my application down to the factory where my father worked and said, ‘Your son made a mistake,’ ” Harbour recalls. “So, not only did they not let me in, they took it to my father, to intimidate (us).” Assuming he was going to be fired, Harbour’s father, who also owned Piedmont’s only black barbershop, let him hear about it later that night. “When he got home, he said, ‘Boy, what the hell’s wrong with you! Are you a fool? What you messing with these white folks for?’ ”

Harbour wound up at Nashville’s Tennessee State University in 1959, just as the sit-in movement was beginning to take shape. “Why did it take me getting to college to realize that I was in a segregated place?” Harbour says. “I never thought about demonstrating or doing anything different till I got to Nashville.”

There he met civil rights leader John Lewis, now the longtime Georgia congressman, and they began attending sit-in trainings in the back room of a nearby church. Two weeks after a group of North Carolina A&T students began the sit-in movement at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960, Nashville followed suit and began the largest campaign in the movement. “You start thinking, there’s a new world out there, a world I’d never thought about before,” Harbour says.

Also motivated by the sit-ins, Person began protesting around Atlanta with civil-rights leader Julian Bond in late February of 1960. The movement began to ripple through Atlanta’s black campuses. A year later, he joined the first Freedom Ride. He was only 18, the youngest to board the bus in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961.

Their paths never crossed, but they both felt the backlash of angry mobs when they reached Alabama. Person’s bus arrived in Anniston, hours after an earlier bus was firebombed there by Klansmen who stormed the bus and roughed up those on board. Person was punched in the face, and pushed to the back of the bus along with the others. “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes,” Person says. Another rider, Dr. Walter Bergman, a retired professor who was 61, was beaten so badly that he suffered a stroke 10 days later and never walked again.

When they arrived in Birmingham on May 14 — Mother’s Day — a mob was waiting with lead pipes. Person was beaten again, along with fellow rider James Peck. A photographer captured the scene of angry white men kicking Person as he lay on the floor of the bus station, and hitting him with pipes. “It was chaos,” Person says. “We went into the waiting room and the whole room came toward us. The police chief told (the mob) they could have 15 minutes to do whatever they wanted.”

Birmingham’s notorious police chief, Eugene (Bull) Connor, famously remarked the following day that all his officers had been with their mothers.

Person says he never felt any pain from the blows. “I never thought about (dying),” he says. “I just prayed a lot. In Birmingham, they beat anybody that they thought had any relationship with us, white, black or otherwise.”

He got to his feet and stumbled out into the street just as a city bus was pulling in. He asked the bus driver to take him somewhere, and the driver drove off, dropping him off near the railroad tracks — typically the start of the black part of town — where he called for help. Years later, he developed a knot at the base of his skull from a pipe blow after pus hardened underneath. He finally got relief through surgery in 1996.

After Harbour and others from Nashville learned of the horrific violence in Alabama, they decided to go there, joining a second wave of Freedom Riders on May 16. Because of the extreme danger, their bus left Birmingham with a police escort that included a helicopter flying overhead, but when they reached the Montgomery city limits, the escort vanished. A violent mob packing bats and hammers awaited them as their bus pulled into the depot.

“Blood ran down the street,” says Harbour, who was the first off the bus and still has a visible scar over his right eye where he was beaten. “That was tough. That was real tough. I got scars everywhere.”

The next day, he and hundreds of others, joined by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., took refuge at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery when another mob arrived and threatened to burn down the church. The National Guard arrived to intervene, and sent the mob home.

Weeks later, Harbour joined another group of Riders, who traveled from Nashville to Jackson, Miss.; there he was arrested and sent to Parchman State Penitentiary for 49 days. Upon his release he learned that he, along with 13 others, would be kicked out of Tennessee State, a state-run university.

Today, both men call Atlanta home. Looking back, more than half a century later, they’re able to laugh about their experiences, though at the time it was anything but humorous.

Person joined the Marines, looking to integrate what he called the most segregated of the four branches of the military, and became an officer after 10 years of duty. Harbour joined President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and took part in the Great Society program. In 2008, he received an honorary degree from Tennessee State University, an apology of sorts for having thrown him out all those years earlier.

And the apologies didn’t stop there. In 2011 — more than 50 years after the Alabama state school denied Harbour entry and its officials intimidated his father — Jacksonville State invited Harbour to be its commencement speaker. “And I told them, ‘Y’all refused me to come to this school,’ ” Harbour says. “But since that time, my brother graduated from Jacksonville State University, my other sister graduated from Jacksonville State University, my sister got a Masters degree from Jacksonville State University and I’ve got four or five cousins and nieces and nephews that graduated. And, I said, Finally, things have changed.”