A single act of kindness becomes part of civil rights lore
On Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961, just outside of Anniston, a mob of around 200 white men, angry and chanting hate slogans, stopped the Greyhound bus carrying 13 Freedom Riders, in addition to other unsuspecting passengers. The men hammered the vehicle with sticks and pipes and slashed its tires. When the bus driver somehow managed to maneuver the bus free of the crowd, a convoy of cars followed it.
Riding on its rims with sparks flying, the bus finally could go no farther and stopped next to McKinney’s home and adjacent grocery store. As the angry mob surrounded the bus, the white bus driver ran off. Watching, McKinney saw a hand with a crowbar or heavy chain emerge above the crowd and smash out the back window of the bus. In the next moment, someone threw an incendiary device through the broken window, instantly filling the bus with roiling black smoke.“The people on the bus were gagging,” she recalled. While some of the passengers lay down on the bus floor in search of air to breathe, others, including an elderly black woman, panicked. Meanwhile, the crowd yelled out epithets, McKinney recalled. “They were saying things like, ‘Roast those n*****s alive.’” There were reports of people outside the bus holding the bus doors shut to prevent anyone from escaping. Then, something in the bus exploded, forcing the mob back and giving the passengers a chance to break out of the burning vehicle.