Our bus, approaching Anniston, stopped while our driver conversed with the driver of an outgoing bus. A traveler from the bus leaving Anniston station. Outside, no police were in sight. During the fifteen minutes in Anniston, while the mob slashed tires and smashed windows, one policeman appeared in a brown uniform. He did nothing to stop vandalism but fraternized with the mob. A man in a white overall with a dark blue oval insignia on the breast was friendly with the policemen and consulted from time to time with the most active of the mob. Two policemen appeared and cleared a path. The bus left the station. There were no arrests.

A few miles out on the highway to Birmingham a tire blow and we pulled to the roadside, the mob after us in about 50 cars. They surrounded us again, yelling and smashing windows, brandishing clubs, chains and pipes; I saw all three. They surged around the bus, screamed obscenities and tried to board but were prevented by Eli Cowling of the State Highway police, in plainclothes, who with a pistol, held back the mob from inside our door. We had thought Cowling an ordinary passenger. This single-handed action showed that a mob can be held off.

We also felt that one of the weaknesses of the student sit-in movement of the South had been that as soon as arrested, the kids bailed out... This was not quite Gandhian and not the best tactic. A better tactic would be to remain in jail and to make the maintenance of segregation so expensive for the state and the city that they would hopefully come to the conclusion that they could no longer afford it. Fill up the jails, as Gandhi did in India, fill them to bursting if we had to. In other words, stay in without bail.

So those were the two things: cutting across state lines, putting the movement on wheels, so to speak, and remaining in jail, not only for its publicity value but for the financial pressure it would put upon the segregators. We decided that a good approach here would be to move away from restaurant lunch counters. That had been the Southern student sit-in movement, and anything we would do on that would be anticlimactic now. We would have to move into another area and so we decided to move into the transportation, interstate transportation...

So we, following the Gandhian technique, wrote to Washington. We wrote to the Justice Department, to the FBI, and to the President, and wrote to Greyhound Bus Company and Trailways Bus Company, and told them that on May first or May fourth - whatever the date was, I forget now - we were going to have a Freedom Ride. Blacks and whites were going to leave Washington, D.C., on Greyhound and Trailways, deliberately violating the segregated seating requirements and at each rest stop would violate the segregated use of facilities. And we would be nonviolent, absolutely nonviolent, throughout the campaign, and we would accept the consequences of our actions. This was a deliberate act of civil disobedience...

We got no reply from Justice. Bobby Kennedy (U.S. Attorney General) no reply. We got no reply from the FBI. We got no reply from the White House, from President Kennedy. We got no reply from Greyhound or Trailways. We got no replies...

We had some of the group of thirteen sit at a simulated counter asking for coffee. Somebody else refused them service, and then we'd have others come in as white hoodlums to beat 'em up and knock them off the counter and club 'em around and kick 'em in the ribs and stomp 'em, and they were quite realistic, I must say. I thought they bent over backwards to be realistic. I was aching all over. And then we'd go into a discussion as to how the roles were played, whether there was something that the Freedom Riders did that they shouldn't have done, said that they shouldn't have said, something that they didn't say or do that they should have, and so on. Then we'd reverse roles and play it over and over again and have lengthy discussions of it.

I felt, by the way, that by the time that group left Washington, they were prepared for anything, even death, and this was a possibility, and we knew it, when we got to the Deep South.

Through Virginia we had no problem. In fact they had heard we were coming, Greyhound and Trailways, and they had taken down the For Colored and For Whites signs, and we rode right through. Yep. The same was true in North Carolina. Signs had come down just the previous day, blacks told us. And so the letters in advance did something.

In South Carolina it was a different story.... John Lewis started into a white waiting room in some town in South Carolina... and there were several young white hoodlums, leather jackets, ducktail haircuts, standing there smoking, and they blocked the door and said, "You can't come in here." He said, "I have every right to enter this waiting room according to the Supreme Court of the United States in the Boynton case."

He tried to walk past, and they clubbed him, beat him, and knocked him down. One of the white Freedom Riders . . . Albert Bigelow, who had been a Navy captain during World War II, big, tall, strapping fellow, very impressive, from Connecticut - then stepped right between the hoodlums and John Lewis. Lewis had been absorbing more of the punishment. They then clubbed Bigelow and finally knocked him down, and that took some knocking because he was a pretty strapping fellow, and he didn't hit back at all. They knocked him down, and at this point police arrived and intervened. They didn't make any arrests.

Addressing the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, last September, Georgia congressman John Lewis recalled his first visit to the city - in 1961, as one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. Their bus trip was planned by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a journey from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to test a 1960 Supreme Court ruling banning racial discrimination in interstate public facilities. Just south of Charlotte, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Lewis and his seatmate, Albert Bigelow ’29, tried to enter a white waiting room. “We were met by an angry mob that beat us and left us lying in a pool of blood,” said Lewis. “Some police officers came up and asked us whether we wanted to press charges. We said no. We come in peace, love, and nonviolence.”

Lewis would later describe “Bert” Bigelow, born into a prominent Boston family steeped in Harvard connections, as “a big, rugged-looking guy from New England who looked as if he belonged on a sailing ship a century ago.” And several years before he boarded that bus, Bigelow had sailed, literally, into the annals of mid-twentieth-century nonviolent protest and political activism. In the spring of 1958, as skipper of a 30-foot ketch, the Golden Rule, he and four other men tried twice to navigate into the Pacific nuclear-bomb testing grounds at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands to protest nuclear proliferation. Each time, the voyage was foiled by the U.S. Coast Guard and Bigelow was eventually jailed for 60 days in Honolulu—but the attendant publicity provided him with a stage for his political views.

Bigelow explained the evolution of his activism in his 1959 book, The Voyage of the Golden Rule. “Later in World War II,” he wrote, “I was Captain of the destroyer escort Dale W. Peterson—DE 337—and I was on her bridge as we approached Pearl Harbor from San Diego when the first news arrived of the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Although I had no way of understanding what an atom bomb was I was absolutely awestruck, as I suppose all men were for a moment. Intuitively it was then that I realized for the first time that morally war is impossible.”

Bigelow described himself as he entered the navy as having “an enormous latent desire to conform, to ‘go along.’ ” He had studied architecture at MIT after Harvard and then worked at designing residences; he also helped design buildings for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Left a widower after a brief and tragic first marriage, he married Sylvia Weld, an actress, in 1931. After the war, he searched for “some sort of unified life-philosophy or religion,” and eventually followed his wife in joining the Quakers, in 1954. A year later, with their own two daughters grown, the Bigelows welcomed into their Greenwich, Connecticut, home two “Hiroshima Maidens,” young women who had been injured and disfigured by the A-bomb blast and then brought to the United States for plastic surgery. Bigelow’s experience with the two women, he wrote, “forced me to see that I had no choice but to make the commitment to live, as best I could, a life of nonviolence and reconciliation.”

In 1956, before the presidential election, he sent $300 to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and mentioned his plan to write in King’s name for president. In 1958, he became involved with an anti-nuclear-proliferation docudrama, Which Way the Wind, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee; he served as a producer and narrated performances after his Pacific expedition. One of the Golden Rule’s crew members, James Peck ’36, a union organizer, was also active in CORE projects and Bigelow later joined him in civil-rights causes, including that first Freedom Ride. He also continued to speak out tirelessly against the arms race in print and at rallies at home and abroad. Reflecting on his years of activism in 1964, he wrote, “I remain an optimist despite mounting evidence that, if we do not blow ourselves off the earth, we shall soon eat ourselves off the earth.” (Vegetable gardening, he added, had become a “principal side interest.”)

By the mid 1960s, his public activism quieted, though he still railed in lectures and letters against nuclear proliferation. He savored sailing and a longtime love—painting (the Mystic Seaport museum in Connecticut owns eight of his marine works)—and stayed involved in community affairs, at one point as “the sole male member of the [local] League of Women Voters.”

Although Bigelow’s prominence faded, his name and activism live on, in commemorations of the Freedom Rides and through the efforts of Veterans for Peace, a national organization of military veterans committed to the cause of world peace. The group is far along in its work to restore the Golden Rule (found derelict in a small California shipyard) and ultimately sail it as both a symbol and a classroom for instruction against the “manufacture and use of nuclear weapons.” The project serves as a fitting legacy for a man born to privilege who was jolted from complacency by the devastation wrought by war and committed himself to justice and peace.

“I sense that most of us feel overwhelmed by a disintegrating world, seemingly beyond our control,” he wrote in his fiftieth anniversary class report. “…At the same time, we have the potential to preserve and enhance our delicate, beautiful planet and create on it a society of respect, sharing, and caring—where love will not be considered a sign of weakness.”

Albert Smith Bigelow, a pacifist who tried several times to sail into a nuclear testing area near the Marshall Islands in 1958 in a protest against nuclear weapons, died on Wednesday at a retirement home in Walpole, Mass. He was 87.

His family said he had had a long illness.

Mr. Bigelow, who served as a Navy lieutenant commander aboard destroyer escorts in the Pacific theater in World War II, became a Quaker and a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi in 1954.

On Feb. 10, 1958, he and three fellow Quakers set sail from San Pedro, Calif., in a 30-foot ketch, the Golden Rule, for Eniwetok Atoll in the Western Pacific to try to halt nuclear tests that were to be held there two months later. After first being turned back by storms, they eventually reached Honolulu but were never able to reach their ultimate destination.

Three attempts to reach Eniwetok were intercepted by Coast Guard cutters enforcing a Federal court injunction against entering the testing grounds. After the final attempt, the crew was jailed for 60 days.

Mr. Bigelow, a graduate of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began his career as an architect in New York, helping to design buildings for the 1939 World's Fair. But he soon left architecture and became an artist, frequently painting seascapes and nautical scenes.

After the war he was appointed housing commissioner of Massachusetts by Gov. Robert Bradford and helped build low-cost housing for veterans.

But Mr. Bigelow's religious convictions led him to participate in a 1954 protest of chemical weapons at Fort Dietrich, Md., and later to take in, with his wife, two women who had been disfigured by the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in Aug. 6, 1945.

That experience, he later wrote, "forced me to see that I had no choice but to make the commitment to live, as best I could, a life of nonviolence."

Besides helping to organize and taking part in demonstrations against nuclear warfare, Mr. Bigelow was an ardent advocate of civil rights. In 1961, as a Freedom Rider in the South, he was one of several people who were badly beaten by segregationists at a bus stop in Rock Hill, S.C.

He is survived by his wife of 62 years, the former Sylvia Weld; two daughters, Lisa Roberts and Kate Benton, both of Manhattan, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.