They and a few white sympathizers as youthful and devoted as themselves have begun a social revolution in the South with their sit-ins and their Freedom Rides. Never has a tinier minority done more for the liberation of a whole people than these few youngsters of C.O.R.E. (Congress for Racial Equality) and S.N.C.C. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee).

When the Greyhound bus pulled into Anniston, it was immediately surrounded by an angry mob armed with iron bars. They set about the vehicle, denting the sides, breaking windows, and slashing tires. Finally, the police arrived and the bus managed to depart. But the mob pursued in cars. Within minutes, the pursuing mob was hitting the bus with iron bars. The rear window was broken and a bomb was hurled inside. All the passengers managed to escape before the bus burst into flames and was totally destroyed. Policemen, who had been standing by, belatedly came on the scene. A couple of them fired into the air. The mob dispersed and the injured were taken to a local hospital.

Jim Zwerg was a white fellow from Madison, Wisconsin. He had a lot of nerve. I think that is what saved me because Jim Zwerg walked off the bus in front of us. The crowd was possessed. They couldn't believe that there was a white man who would help us. They grabbed him and pulled him into the mob. Their attention was on him. It was as if they didn't see us.

Segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us on the Freedom Ride will continue. No matter what happens we are dedicated to this. We will take the beatings. We are willing to accept death. We are going to keep coming until we can ride anywhere in the South.

I was certain I was going to die. What kind of death would it be? Would they mutilate me first? What does it feel like to die? Then I grew panicky about the insurance. Had I paid the last installment? My wife and little girls - how would it be for them? Well, damn it, if I had to die, at least let the organization wring some use out of my death. I hoped the newspapers were out there. Plenty of them. With plenty of cameras.

At our first stop in Virginia I was confronted with what the Southern white has called "separate but equal." A modern rest station with gleaming counters and picture windows was labeled"White," and a small wooden shack beside it was tagged "Colored." The colored waiting room was filthy, in need of repair, and overcrowded. When we entered the white waiting room Frank Hunt was promptly but courteously, in the Southern manner, asked to leave. Because I am a fair-skinned Negro I was waited upon. I walked back to the bus through the cool night trembling and perspiring.

The Montgomery bus station was surrounded by Army jeeps, trucks, and the National Guard in battle gear. We found the people from the Christian Leadership Council who had been sent to meet us and drove away cautiously, realizing that the least traffic violation would be an excuse for our arrest.

Once across the (Mississippi) state line we passed a couple of police cars, which began to follow us. At our first stop the station was cordoned off a block in every direction. A police officer jumped on the bus and forbade anyone to move. One woman, who was a regular passenger, frantically tried to convince the police that she was not involved with us. After checking her ticket the police let her get off.

As we rolled toward Jackson, every blocked-off street, every back road taken, every change in speed caused our hearts to leap. Our arrival and speedy arrest in the white bus station in Jackson, when we refused to obey a policeman's order to move on, was a relief.

I was impressed by the fact that most of the activity thus far had been of local people working on their local problems-- Greensborans sitting-in in Greensboro and Atlantans sitting-in in Atlanta - and the pressure of the opposition against having outsiders come was very, very great. If any outsiders came in... "Get that outside agitator." . . . I thought that this was going to limit the growth of the Movement.... We somehow had to cut across states lines and establish the position that we were entitled to act any place in the country, no matter where we hung our hat and called home, because it was our country.

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."

They said, "Shit on that." 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. Intervened.

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.

The Freedom Ride didn't really get rough until we got down in the Deep South. Needless to say, Anniston, Alabama, I'm never gonna forget that, when I was on the bus that they threw some kind of incendiary device on.

I got real scared then. You know, I was thinking - I'm looking out the window there, and people are out there yelling and screaming. They just about broke every window out of the bus... I really thought that that was going to be the end of me.

They shot the tires out, and the bus driver was forced to stop... He got off, and man, he took off like a rabbit, and might well have. I couldn't very well blame him there. And we were trapped on the bus. They tried to board. Well, we did have two FBI men aboard the bus. All they were there to do were to observe and gather facts, but the crowd apparently recognized them as FBI men, and they did not try to hurt them.

It wasn't until the thing was shot on the bus and the bus caught afire that everything got out of control, and... when the bus was burning, I figured... panic did get a hold of me. Needless to say, I couldn't survive that burning bus. There was a possibility I could have survived the mob, but I was just so afraid of the mob that I was going to stay on that bus. I mean, I just got that much afraid. And when we got off the bus... first they closed the doors and wouldn't let us off. But then I'm pretty sure they realized, that somebody said, "Hey, the bus is going to explode," because it had just gassed up, and so they started scattering then, and I guess that's the way we got off the bus. Otherwise, we probably all would have been succumbed by the smoke, and not being able to get off, probably would have been burned alive or burned on there anyway. That's the only time I was really, really afraid. I got whacked over the head with a rock or I think some kind of a stick as I was coming off the bus.

We were taken to the hospital. The bus started exploding, and a lot of people were cut by flying glass. We were taken to the hospital, most of us, for smoke inhalation.... I think I was half out of it, half dazed, as a result of the smoke, and, gosh, I can still smell that stuff down in me now. You got to the point where you started having the dry heaves. Took us to the hospital, and it was incredible. The people at the hospital would not do anything for us. They would not. And I was saying, "You're doctors, you're medical personnel." They wouldn't. Governor Patterson got on statewide radio and said, "Any rioters in this state will not receive police protection." And then the crowd started forming outside the hospital, and the hospital told us to leave. And we said, "No, we're not going out there," and there we were. A caravan from Birmingham, about a fifteen-car caravan led by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, came up from Birmingham to get us out. . . .

Every one of those cars had a shotgun in it. And Fred Shuttlesworth had got on the radio and said--you know Fred, he's very dramatic--"I'm going to get my people." He said, "I'm a nonviolent man, but I'm going to get my people." And apparently a hell of a lot of people believed in him. Man, they came there and they were a welcome sight. And each one of 'em got out with their guns and everything and the state police were there, but I think they all realized that this was not a time to say anything because, I'm pretty sure, there would have been a lot of people killed. . . .

Oh, we did have one girl, Genevieve Hughes, a white girl, who had a busted lip. I remember a nurse applying something to that, but other than that, nothing. Now that I look back on it, man, we had some vicious people down there, wouldn't even so much as treat you. But that's the way it was. But strangely enough, even those bad things then don't stick in my mind that much. Not that I'm full of love and goodwill for everybody in my heart, but I chalk it off to part of the things that I'm going to be able to sit on my front porch in my rocking chair and tell my young'uns about, my grandchildren about.

I suppose you have been reading the papers and you know what I am doing in Jackson, Mississippi. It seems almost unbelievable that I could actually be in Mississippi. The trial was yesterday. Our lawyers were beautiful in their every word and action. They built up such a beautiful case that I did not believe even a Mississippi judge could do anything except acquit us. They dropped two of the charges which they originally charged us with; they were "inciting to riot" and "failure to obey an officer". The lawyers tried to prove that the Mississippi national guard had us under arrest from the time we passed the Alabama border.

The Alabama National Guard escorted us from Dr. Harris' to the bus station and then to the Mississippi line. The escort was composed of 35 squad cars of city policemen 36 motorcycles and truck loads of national guardsmen. We left Alabama in two buses. I was on the second.

The treatment down here has been so humane that we are suspicious of their every motive. We have finally decided that these people are so conscious of the negative reputation that the word "Mississippi" carries, that they want to do something to change that. They know that our message will reach the corners of the earth and they know that it is they, not us, who are on trial. They just don't know that they cannot win. I think that this trip will shake the foundations of their belief in themselves and eventually their whole myth will crumble.

We are now in cells, 6 to a cell the white fellows being in a cell on the end. We sing and sing and make up songs. We exercise and pray and read appropriate verses from the Bible. We almost has a little trouble this morning. One of the officers here cursed C. T. Vivian, who is a minister from Nashville, Tennessee, after he asked him to explain an order to "behave". Imagine, telling grown people to behave - what does that mean? Does it mean not to talk loudly, not to sing or not to count as we do?

These people actually believe that we are seeking publicity, that we are backed by NAACP & CORE! They do not believe that one can be deprived of freedom so long and that he can become so hungry for freedom and self expression that he would give his life or pay his own fare on a bus tour to Jackson, Mississippi. Before the "ride" these two were almost synonymous in the eyes of America. People feared Mississippi because they feared what would happen. They feared the mobs. We feared too - at least I did. But we came anyway - that is the important thing. This is one of the important things which I have been experiencing during the last year and what little I have done for the "movement" since then. I have grown inside. I am better for what I have done and the people who with whom I have had the opportunity to associate my actions and my ideas. We find that we have much in common. Much of what we have in common is common because we have faced a common enemy from birth - segregation, imprisoned mentally by a system so degrading as segregation.

Say hello to everyone. I am fine and will be as far as I can see. If anyone asks, tell them that being in jail in Mississippi is not the "hell" I thought it would be. I am praying that it remains this way, but if it doesn't, we are
prepared for that too. Tell Rev. Lewis, tell the church, tell it everywhere; & if the listeners can afford the time, tell them to come too.

We picked up rumors several weeks prior to them arriving in Alabama. Also it was a certain something that the state police had not been confronted with in the past. We'd had local demonstrations by local people and, but this was the first time we'd had an interstate movement on the part of people. It was testing such things as lunch counters, water fountains, restrooms, so we knew that it would be a in all probability a police problem....

At this point in time most people in Alabama, that you'd hear speaking about this, thought the freedom riders were a group of people that - outsiders that were coming into the state that was coming to the state to cause problems. That's what the average person was saying around in Alabama at that time.

In the 1958 Governor's election, the choices was Governor John Patterson or Governor George Wallace... I believe at that point in time in Alabama, to those candidates it was very important that they receive support from people who felt very strongly on this issue. And so you will know more of what I mean, I'm talking uh about groups like the Ku Klux Klan, that type of people, because you have to remember at that point in time, in Alabama politics, that was before the voting act, how other people felt at that time was not of a great concern of people running for Governor...

We knew that the bus was going to be coming into Alabama from Atlanta, we did not have any communications or any information from those people about what route they'd be taking in Alabama, so we decided that for the benefit of the state police and also to try to protect this bus and the people on the bus, it would be important for us to have some type of information. So we sent one of the state investigators, a Mr. L. Cowden to Atlanta to board that bus. This was on Sunday, I remember, New Years Day of 1961...

We knew that it would be very important for the state police to know what route these people were going to take when they arrived in Alabama. So we thought it would be a good idea to send a state investigator to Atlanta to board this bus. And Mothers Day 1961 was when they arrived in Alabama; Anniston, Alabama. While this bus was in Anniston, uh, the Ku Klux Klan and other members surrounded that bus and would not let the people off the bus. While it was in the bus station they also cut the tires on the bus. They knew that those tires would go down, so when the bus left Anniston toward Birmingham, the Klan followed the bus out on the highway....

Several miles out of Anniston, the tire went down on the bus. The bus stopped. The Klan had followed the bus to this point. At that point they set the bus on fire, the Klansmen did. Those people on the bus could not get off the bus, and if we had not had the state investigator on the bus, I think everyone on the bus would have burned to death. But the investigator unlocked the door and pulled his gun and showed his badge and made the people back up and got the people off the bus. From that point they scattered around where the bus was burning and the more troopers arrived and then another bus arrived and they took that group on into Birmingham, where another outbreak occurred...

Police Commissioner Bull Connor was in charge of the police department in Birmingham at that time... To my best recollection when the bus arrived in Birmingham, I was informed that there was either no policemen or too few policemen there to handle the situation. Many people were hurt, injured, some seriously and what happened after that at that point in time to the people on the bus, I do not know, but I think they were all at some point carried to a central location....

After what happened in Anniston, Alabama and Birmingham, as director of public safety, I certainly knew that we had a tremendous problem on our hands. So did the governor, so did Attorney General Kennedy apparently, because at that point in time, he began to send people into Alabama, like Mr. John Siegenthaler, also Mr. Whizzel White, who's now a member of the Supreme Court, and others. So we began to try to develop some plan to get those people in and out of Alabama into Montgomery and on into Mississippi. So there were several meetings held, one in the Governors office, where I, Mr. John Siegenthaler attended, where he wanted the assurance from the governor that law and order would prevail in the state. Governor Patterson had certainly been elected as a law and order candidate, and I felt at that point in time, even though the political situation was such that I understood the situation that Governor Patterson was in politically. I also felt that Governor Patterson felt that I would make sure law and order did prevail in Alabama. So I assured Mr. Siegenthaler at that point in time that I felt that we could keep law and order in Alabama...

Governor Patterson at that time was in my opinion was in a terrible political situation because the very people who had so actively supported him strongly and openly were some of the people that was really very critical of these people coming into Alabama, the freedom riders, so I felt like that in all probability, Governor Patterson was in a situation whereby, that he had rather not make a commitment to the Government, in view of the situation he was in in Alabama...

I think both President Kennedy and the Attorney General Robert Kennedy felt that Governor Patterson as Governor of Alabama, should have no hesitancy at that time in making that commitment but I really don't think either one of them understood the position that the governor was in in Alabama politically, with his own constituency...

The state police and Mr. Siegenthaler, along with other governmental officials, maybe some marshals, assistants, we determined that the best way and the safest way to get those people into Montgomery and on into Mississippi, was to make certain that uh, they were protected. So when they left Birmingham we had 16 highway patrol cars in front of that bus, and 16 patrol cars behind the bus, with troopers, also we had small aircraft running reconnaissance, watching for bridges, where someone might try to sabotage that bus. During that period of time, I received some confidential information that when they arrived at the bus station in Montgomery that the police had planned to take a holiday, there'd be no one present. So we made sure that we didn't want to get in that situation so we ordered a hundred state troopers into Montgomery immediately. And we quartered those troopers at the Alabama police academy because we didn't want to bring them into the bus station because at that point in time in Alabama the state police never entered a city unless they were invited. Either it became obvious that law and order had totally broken down… So at the time the bus arrived at the Montgomery bus station, only the assistant director Mr. W.R. Jones and myself was there when the bus arrived. As soon as the people began to get off the bus I noticed these strange people all around the bus which I knew immediately they were Klansmen. No sooner than they had gotten off the bus a riot evolved. At that point in time it certainly became obvious to me that law and order had broken down and there's no police around the bus station. So we immediately sent for those hundred state troopers that we had quartered at the police academy. And prior to them arriving there, several people hurt and we had to command cars to take some to the hospital...

Those freedom riders, some of them were being beaten with baseball bats, some of the newspeoples' cameras were being crushed. Therefore we did have to resort to pulling out weapons, to stop that and also to get some of those people to the hospital. I just put my pistol to the head of one or two of those folks who was using baseball bats and told them unless they stopped immediately, they was going to be hurt. And it did stop immediately....

After one of the freedom riders were knocked unconscious we got him to a car, sent him to the hospital. Then it was called to my attention that another person had been knocked unconscious and had been taken to the hospital and I retrieved his credentials and they, I think they had fallen out of his pocket in front of the bus station, and looking at those credentials I saw it was Mr. John Siegenthaler. After the troopers got things totally under control at the bus station, I then went to the hospital to verify if it was Mr. Siegenthaler and it was Mr. Siegenthaler and he'd been knocked unconscious.

The Kennedys meant well, but they did not feel it. They didn't know any blacks growing up - there were no blacks in their communities or going to their schools. But their inclinations were good. I had the impression in those years that Bobby was doing what had to be done for political reasons. He was very conscious of the fact that they had won a narrow election and he was afraid that if they antagonized the South, the Dixiecrats would cost them the next election. And he was found to be very, very cautious and very careful not to do that. But we changed the equation down there, so it became dangerous for him not to do anything.

We must recognize that we are merely in the prelude to revolution, the beginning, not the end, not even the middle. I do not wish to minimize the gains we have made thus far. But it would be well to recognize that we have been receiving concessions, not real changes. The sit-ins won concessions, not structural changes; the Freedom Rides won great concessions, but not real change.

There will be no revolution until we see Negro faces in all positions that help to mold public opinion, help to shape policy for America.

One federal judge in Mississippi will do more to bring revolution than sending 600 marshals to Alabama. We must never allow the President to substitute marshals for putting people into positions where they can affect public policy. . . .

Remember that the way to get this revolution off the ground is to forge the moral, spiritual and political pressure which the President, the nation and the world cannot ignore.

Q: You got involved in the Freedom Rides...

Zwerg: Well, we got word on the CORE Freedom Ride, and we knew that John Lewis, a member of our organization, was going to be involved in it. We got word of the burning in Anniston... we had a meeting long into the night as soon as we heard about it. The feeling was that if we let those perpetrators of violence believe that people would stop if they were violent enough, then we would take serious steps backwards. Right away the feeling was that we needed to ride. We called Dr. King, we called James Farmer. There was an awareness that our phones were being tapped, so the feeling was that they knew what we were about to do. Our plan was different from CORE's. Whereas they chartered their buses, we were just going to get tickets and get on the bus. We felt that was even more important -- to buy a ticket just like any other traveler. We weren't getting a special bus, we were just going to get on the bus.

It was decided that we would send twelve people. I was one of 18 that volunteered to go. I've been asked why I volunteered to go... I would have to say, at that moment, it wasn't even a question. It was the right thing for me to do. I never second-guessed it.

Q: How did you prepare?

Zwerg: After we had talked it out and I was one of those chosen to go, I went back to my room and spent a lot of time reading the bible and praying. Because of what had happened in Birmingham and in Anniston, because our phones were tapped... none of us honestly expected to live through this. I called my mother and I explained to her what I was going to be doing. My mother's comment was that this would kill my father - and he had a heart condition - and she basically hung up on me. That was very hard because these were the two people who taught me to love and when I was trying to live love, they didn't understand. Now that I'm a parent and a grandparent I can understand where they were coming from a bit more. I wrote them a letter to be mailed if I died. We had a little time to pack a suitcase and then we met to go down to the bus.

Q: What was the journey like?

Zwerg: We just got the tickets and got on the bus. I was going to sit in the front of the bus with Paul Brooks. Paul sat by the window; I sat by the aisle. The rest of the blacks and one white girl, Celine McMullen, were going to sit in the back.

It was an uneventful ride until we got to the Birmingham city limits. We were pulled over by the police... They came on the bus and said, "This is a Freedom Rider bus, who's on here from Nashville? And the bus driver pointed to Paul and myself. They came up and really started badgering Paul, you know, "Get up... why aren't you in the back of the bus?" And he said he was very comfortable where he was. So they placed him under arrest. And they asked me to move so they could get to him... and I said, "I'm very comfortable where I am too."

We were both placed under arrest, taken off the bus, seated in the squad car for I don' t know how long. Finally they took us to Birmingham Jail and fingerprinted us. They put me in solitary for a little while. Then they put me in with a fellow who was a felon. I mean, I'm in my suit and tie and I've got my pocket bible with me. I think he thought I was some clergyman making calls. Ultimately they threw me in a drunk tank, with about twenty guys in various states of inebriation, and announced in no uncertain terms that I was a member of the Freedom Riders. Here he is, boys, have at him! I didn't know what was going to happen and I kind of said, "How do you guys feel about this? Do you know what they're talking about?" And they started asking me some questions.

One of the things we agreed on is that if you were jailed, number one, you go on a hunger strike, because in our minds we were jailed illegally. You don't cop a plea, you don't pay the bail and jump. You stay. But here I was. One single white guy. And I didn't know what had happened to Paul. I didn't know what had happened to the rest of the people on the bus. I began to see the state that some of drunks were in, and I tried to get some towels and clean up the guys who were sick. I just got talking to some of them and none of them ever laid a hand on me. Basically, we talked about what I believed and what they believed.

I discovered that since the South was predominately Baptist, Catholics were kind of looked down on at the time. Surprisingly, 19 of the 20 guys in the drunk tank were Catholics! So we kind of had something more in common than they realized.

Q: Were you able to contact the other riders?

Zwerg: Frequently, music was the way we communicated in jail. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Hold On has beautifully lyrics...

Paul and Sylus bound in jail

got nobody to go our bail

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

I sang it for my cellmates and they liked it. So I got probably ten of these guys singing with me. They had taken all the rest of the people on the bus into protective custody, and I had heard them singing. Now they could hear this group singing, and know I was okay.

We still had to go to mess even though you didn't eat. One day a fellow came in who was quite sick and I smuggled a sandwich back to the cell for him. I didn't know that act was punishable by three months in jail. But by giving him a sandwich -- suddenly I was a good guy and nobody was going to lay a hand on me. So the two and a half days that we were in jail were fine. We got to know each other. We talked. When I was in court I was really pleased that a number of these guys came over to me and said, "Jim, we really don't agree with you, but we wish you all the best."

Q: What were your thoughts as you rode on the bus?

Zwerg: As we were going from Birmingham to Montgomery, we'd look out the windows and we were kind of overwhelmed with the show of force - police cars with sub-machine guns attached to the backseats, planes going overhead... We had a real entourage accompanying us. Then, as we hit the city limits, it all just disappeared. As we pulled into the bus station a squad car pulled out - a police squad car. The police later said they knew nothing about our coming, and they did not arrive until after 20 minutes of beatings had taken place. Later we discovered that the instigator of the violence was a police sergeant who took a day off and was a member of the Klan. They knew we were coming. It was a set-up.

Q: You were attacked when you arrived at the bus station?

Zwerg: The idea had been that cars from the community would meet us. We'd disperse into these cars, get out into the community, and avoid the possibility of violence. And the next morning we were to come back to the station and I would use the colored services and they would go to some of the white services -- the restroom, the water fountain, etc. And then you'd get on the bus and go to the next city. It was meant to be as non-violent as possible, to avoid confrontation as much as possible.

Well, before we got off the bus, we looked out and saw the crowd. You could see things in their hands -- hammers, chains, pipes... there was some conversation about it. As we got off the bus, there was some anxiety. We started looking for the cars. But the mob had surrounded the bus station so there was no way cars could get in and we realized at that moment that we were going to get it.

There was a fellow, a reporter, with an old boom mike and he was panning the crowd. And that's when this heavy-set fellow in a white T-shirt... he had a cigar as I remember... came out and grabbed the mike and jumped on it... just smashed it... basically telling the press, "Back off! You are not going to take any pictures of this. You better stay out or you're going to get it next."

I bowed my head and asked God to give me the strength and love that I would need, that I put my life in his hands, and to forgive them. And I had the most wonderful religious experience. I felt a presence as close to me as breath itself, if you will, that gave me peace knowing that whatever came, it was okay. Before I opened my eyes, I was grabbed. I was pulled over a railing and thrown to the ground. I remember trying to get up on all fours because you try to get back to your group.

One of the things that I alluded to earlier was the strength we got from one another. To this day I'm sure I'm not the most nonviolent person in the world, but the strength of those people with me gave me strength beyond my own capabilities. Just as when we would see someone else being beaten, our hearts went to them and our strength went to them.

Q: Were you hurt?

Zwerg: Traditionally a white man got picked out for the violence first. That gave the rest of the folks a chance to get away. I was told that several tried to get into the bus terminal. I was knocked to the ground. I remember being kicked in the spine and hearing my back crack, and the pain. I fell on my back and a foot came down on my face. The next thing I remember is waking up in the back of a vehicle and John Lewis handing me a rag to wipe my face. I passed out again and when I woke up I was in another moving vehicle with some very southern-sounding whites. I figured I'm off to get lynched. I had no idea who they were. Again, I went unconscious and I woke up in the hospital. I was informed that I had been unconscious for a day and a half. One of the nurses told me that another little crowd were going to try and lynch me. They had come within a half block of the hospital. She said that she knocked me out in case they did make it, so that I would not be aware of what was happening. I mean, those pictures that appeared in the magazines, the interview... I don't remember them at all. I do remember a class of students -- I think they were high school age, coming to visit me one time.

Q: What was your family's reaction to all this?

Zwerg: My dad did have a mild coronary and my mother came close to having a nervous breakdown. One of the things that I have discovered since, after having had a chance to really talk with several of the others, is that almost all of us had some form of real emotional problems with family or personally, in one way or another. Some people had a really hard time - after having had such a tremendous support group and atmosphere of love - having to readapt.

Others have encountered some medical problems, things like that. For years and years, I was never able to discuss it with my dad. He just... you could just see the blood pressure go up. I think my mother ultimately understood. I went through some psychotherapy when I was in seminary, just because of the anger that developed. Again, these people who loved me and taught me to love didn't love what I was doing when I put my life on the line. I had to wrestle with that and work it through.

On a bus traveling through the Deep South, a youthful Negro said calmly: "We can take anything the white man can dish out, but we want our rights. We know what they are - and we want them now." In the midst of a sleepless night in his Justice Department office in Washington, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 36, hung up his telephone and said wearily: "It's like playing Russian roulette." And in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the birthplace of the Confederacy, Governor John Patterson, 39, wearing a pure white carnation in his lapel, complained bitterly: "I'm getting tired of being called up in the middle of the night and being ordered to do this and ordered to do that."

The young Negro, the young Attorney General and the young Southern Governor were central figures last week in a national drama. It was a drama of conflict and violence. It saw U.S. marshals and martial law in Alabama. It saw cops with police dogs on patrol in Mississippi. It was the drama of the Freedom Riders, and it represented a new and massive assault against segregation in the U.S. South.

The assault was launched late last month when a band of six whites and seven Negroes set out to ride by bus from Washington to New Orleans. The integrated trip was sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, a Manhattan-based organization. Its purpose was to prove, by provoking trouble, that Southern interstate travel is still segregated in fact, although integrated by law. The original Freedom Riders passed with little incident through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Then they came to Alabama - where they found the trouble they wanted.

For that, they could in part thank Governor John Patterson. A militant segregationist who solicited Ku Klux Klan support in his election campaign, Patterson once said that integration would come to Alabama only "over my dead body." In his inaugural address Patterson declared: "I will oppose with every ounce of energy I possess and will use every power at my command to prevent any mixing of white and Negro races in the classrooms of this state." Said he as the Freedom Riders approached: "The people of Alabama are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers."

Thus confident that state authority would not stand in their way, Alabama mobs attacked the Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham. Battered and bruised, the original Freedom Riders decided to discontinue their bus trip and fly from Birmingham to New Orleans.

But what they had started was far from ended. Until then, little active support had been given the Freedom Riders by the Negro students who last year fought and won the sit-in battles against segregated Southern lunch counters. When the first Freedom Riders gave up, these students took over. They vowed that they would travel all the way to New Orleans by bus - or, literally, die trying. They were tactical disciples of Martin Luther King Jr., the Negro minister whose Gandhian methods of nonviolence won municipal bus integration in Montgomery in 1956. Willing to suffer beatings and endure jail, the students last week jumped onto regularly scheduled buses and headed south.

In Montgomery, the new Freedom Riders were mauled by another mob. Again Governor Patterson failed to act - and at that point Attorney General Bobby Kennedy reluctantly sent in 400 U.S. marshals, a force that was later increased to 666. The marshals (mostly deputized Treasury agents) were led by Deputy Attorney General Byron ("Whizzer") White, who met with Patterson in a long and angry conference. White carefully explained that the U.S. was not sponsoring the Freedom Riders' movement, but that the Government was determined to protect the riders' legal rights (see box). John Patterson was having no part of such explanations. Alabama, he cried, could maintain its own law and order, and the marshals were therefore unnecessary. He even threatened to arrest the marshals if they violated any local law.

Even as White and Patterson talked, Montgomery's radio stations broadcast the news that Negroes would hold a mass meeting that night at the First Baptist Church. All day long, carloads of grim-faced whites converged on Montgomery.

That night the church was packed with 1,200 Negroes. In the basement a group of young men and women clustered together and clasped hands like a football team about to take the field. They were the Freedom Riders. Everybody say "Freedom'" ordered one of the leaders. "Freedom," said the group. "Say it again," said the leader. "Freedom!" shouted the group. "Are we together?" asked the leader. "Yes. we are together," came the reply. With that, the young Negroes filed upstairs and reappeared behind the pulpit. "Ladies and gentlemen," cried the Rev. Ralph Abernathy as the crowd screamed to its feet, "the Freedom Riders."

"Give Them a Grenade." Slowly, in twos and threes, the mob started to form outside the church. Men with shirts unbuttoned to the waist sauntered down North Ripley Street, soon were almost at the steep front steps of the church. "We want to integrate too," yelled a voice. A barrage of bottles burst at the feet of some curious Negroes who peered out the church door. The worst racial battle in Montgomery's history was about to begin.

Despite the long and obvious buildup toward trouble, only a handful of Montgomery cops were present - and they looked the other way. Into the breach moved a squad of U.S. marshals - the men Patterson had said were not needed. Contrary to Justice Department statements, the hastily deputized marshals had no riot training. They moved uncertainly to their task until a mild-looking alcohol tax unit supervisor from Florida named William D. Behen took command. "If we're going to do it, let's do it!" he yelled. "What say, shall we give them a grenade?" Whereupon Behen lobbed a tear-gas grenade into the crowd.

A former "freedom rider" crippled after an attack by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama in 1961 filed suit to day in U.S. District Court here against FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley and other top bureau officials who were FBI agents in the South at the time for their alleged failure to stop Klan beatings of civil rights workers.

The Suit, sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, seeks $1 million in damages for Walter and Frances Bergman, who were part of a team of seven freedom riders beaten by white vigilantes at a rest stop in Anniston, Ala., May 14, 1961.

Bergman, 77, a former Wayne State University professor and Detroit school board official, and his wife, Frances, 73, were active civil rights workers who volunteered to be among the first to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision integrating facilities catering to travelers on interstate buses. The beating Bergman suffered left him partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.

The suit stems from testimony given in 1975 by Gary Thomas Rowe, a Klan infiltrator for the FBI, before the Senate intelligence committee that the FBi knew of Klan plans to attack the "freedom riders" but did nothing to stop the violence.

Bergman was knocked to the floor of the bus and kicked repeatedly in the head during a rest stop in Anniston by a mob that also set fire to a second bus, sending several freedom riders to the hospital. no one was ever convicted in connection with the beatings, according to the suit.

A third freedom rider on the Bergman's bus, James Peck, 61, an official with the War Resisters League in New York, has already sued the FBI for $600,000 in damages for the beating he suffered in Montgomery during that same May 14, 1961, ride.

Rowe told the Senate committee that he helped to negotiate an agreement with the Alabama state police and the Montgomery city police that gave Klansmen 15 uninterrupted minutes in Montgomery that day to beat civil rights workers with baseball bats, clubs and chains.

Rowe said his FBI superiors were kept informed of the progress of the negotiations and even sent observers to the bus station in Montgomery to take photographs.

Bergman was not beaten in the Montgomery incident, but his suit claims that the FBI knew that Alabama state police were tracking the bus and would not interfere with violence against its passengers anywhere in Alabama.

The FBI has responded by claiming it had no jurisdiction under federal law to intervene in what should have been a local police matter.

The Bergman's Detroit attorney, William Goodman, said today that he hopes to subpoena FBI Director Kelley, who was agent in charge of the Memphis FBI bureau at the time, and assistant director Richard Held, then in charge of the Mobile, Ala., office both are named in the suit along with Thomas Jenkins an associate director now and then in charge of the Birmingham office.

Dr. Walter Bergman, an indefatigable civil rights advocate who was savagely beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1961 as one of the first Freedom Riders and won compensation for the attack from the F.B.I. more than two decades later, died on Sept. 29 in a nursing home in Grand Rapids, Mich., his wife said. He was 100.

He suffered a stroke 10 days after the beating and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

In 1983, after an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation had testified that the agency had ignored warnings of the impending attack, Dr. Bergman won a damage suit against the Federal Government, though he was awarded only $35,000 of the $2 million he had sought.

''The suit righted the essential history of the period,'' said Howard L. Simon, who was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan when the suit was tried. ''It proved the Federal Government was not an ally of the civil rights worker, but in fact was in league with local law enforcement and the K.K.K.''

The attack and its aftermath were emblematic of a life lived at the barricades of social activism. By profession an educator, Dr. Bergman over the years took such controversial stands as declaring in a public debate in 1935 that the New Deal was too timid in its attack on poverty, and that the United Auto Workers was wrong to bar officials from claiming their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked about Communist leanings. He was a founder of both the Michigan chapter of the A.C.L.U. and the Michigan Federation of Teachers.

In 1953, the State Department seized his passport while he was teaching at the International People's College in Elsinore, Denmark. His wife, Patricia, said the reason was a trip he had made to the Soviet Union to study that country's educational system. After protests by civil liberties groups and education organizations, the passport was quickly restored.

Dr. Bergman, the son of a Swedish immigrant farmer, was the third of three siblings born in Youngsville, Pa. He graduated from high school at 15, and attended Greenville College in Greenville, Ill.

He was drafted into the Army during World War I and served in the Signal Corps, where he learned to fly. The war ended before he could participate in combat, and he was sent to Germany to help administer the Allied occupation. Seeing the devastation, he became a pacifist.

He returned to a factory job in Youngsville, then began teaching in Cherry Creek, N.Y. He moved to Detroit, where he taught high school classes and studied nights at the University of Michigan to earn a master's degree and then a doctorate in education. He rose to research director of the Detroit school system and taught education at the system's universities, which were later merged into Wayne State University.

During World War II, he received conscientious objector status, but later enlisted to participate in what he had come to believe was a moral war against Hitler. He participated in the Normandy landing. After the war he stayed on in Germany to work with the United Nations helping refugees.

On his return home, he continued working for the Detroit schools and universities.

He also continued to act on social and political beliefs. He was the first white to join a black Unitarian church, which then gradually became integrated. He formed a pacifist American Legion post.

When the Congress of Racial Equality began its Freedom Rides, with blacks and whites riding buses through the South to test the efficacy of a Supreme Court ruling that desegregated interstate transportation, he joined up. He and his first wife, Frances, were two of three whites in the first group of 14 to travel to the South, Mr. Simon said. Both were brutally attacked as the bus was parked in Anniston, Ala.

Less than two weeks later, Dr. Bergman suffered a severe stroke. He retained most of his speech, but had to learn to write and feed himself again. He never regained the ability to walk.

In 1975, Gary Thomas Rowe, an undercover informer for the F.B.I. who joined the Klan, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had told the agency about the planned attack on the Freedom Riders but that the agency had done nothing to stop it.

While testifying, Mr. Rowe wore a cotton hood that resembled a Klan headpiece without the point to protect his identity. He died in 1998, his death initially reported under another name.

Mr. Simon, now the A.C.L.U.'s executive director in Florida, said Mr. Rowe's testimony prompted Dr. Bergman to sue the F.B.I., and he won in 1983. After ruling in Dr. Bergman's favor, Judge Richard A. Enslen of Federal District Court in Kalamazoo, Mich., limited his award to $35,000 because his condition might have resulted in part from an appendectomy he had four months after the beating.

The estate of Frances Bergman, who had died in 1979, was awarded $15,000. All proceeds were donated to the A.C.L.U.

Dr. Bergman remained active in social causes until he entered the nursing home less than two years ago, said his second wife, who, as Patricia Verdier, met him and his first wife at a peace demonstration in 1970. They were married in 1982.

From his first marriage, Dr. Bergman has two surviving daughters, Margaret Dickson of Detroit and Barbara Boyd of Galesburg, Ill., as well as 10 grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren.

Years after he was beaten by Klansmen, Dr. Bergman revisited the Anniston bus station. He noticed four nail holes that had once been used to hold a sign segregating two drinking fountains; now both black and white people were drinking freely from the fountains.

''I had a part in pulling out those nails,'' he said.