Charles Person, youngest of the Freedom Riders, dies at 82

Charles Person, the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders, who were battered, bloodied and nearly killed as they traveled across the South in 1961, helping the civil rights movement gain momentum as they protested segregation on interstate bus lines, died Jan. 8 at his home in Fayetteville, Georgia. He was 82.

The cause was complications from leukemia, said his daughter Keisha Person.

Mr. Person was 18 when he stepped aboard a Trailways bus in Washington on May 4, 1961, joining a dozen other Black and White activists bound for New Orleans. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, the group aimed to challenge segregation in interstate bus travel, which persisted even after it was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Bathrooms, waiting rooms and lunch counters at Southern bus terminals still bore signs reading “White” and “Colored,” and Black passengers were routinely forced to the back of the bus.

“We thought the worst that could happen was ketchup or condiments being thrown at us, or someone might spit on us,” Mr. Person recalled in a September interview with the Atlanta Voice. He was, he often said, “too young to be scared.”

Mr. Person was only a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta. But he had attracted the attention of CORE recruiters after spending 16 days in jail for participating in a sit-in — he said that when he joined the other incarcerated activists in protest songs, he sang so loudly he was sent to solitary confinement — and was invited on the original Freedom Ride as a representative of the Atlanta student movement, alongside activists that included future congressman John Lewis.

Traveling on two separate buses, the Freedom Riders passed through Virginia and North Carolina without issue, although Mr. Person was nearly arrested when he tried to get a shoe shine at the bus terminal in Charlotte. (He had sat down in a Whites-only chair, and left after a police officer threatened him with jail time.)

In South Carolina, Lewis and other activists were brutally attacked at the Greyhound terminal in Rock Hill. The Freedom Riders were met with further violence when they passed into Alabama on May 14, Mother’s Day. The first bus had its tires slashed in Anniston and was firebombed outside of town while a White mob held the doors closed. The riders were eventually able to flee and were beaten as they escaped.

Mr. Person was on the second bus. When it arrived in Anniston later that day, a group of Klansmen boarded and ordered Mr. Person and the other Black Freedom Riders to move to the back. When he refused, he was punched, kicked and dragged to the rear along with other riders. A police officer did nothing to halt the violence.

“Don’t worry about no lawsuits,” the officer told the Klansmen, according to historian Raymond Arsenault’s 2006 book “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” “I ain’t seen a thing.”

At 4:15 that afternoon, the bus reached the terminal in Birmingham, where the riders found themselves unprotected by commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s police force. Mr. Person recalled that he and a White Freedom Rider, James Peck, had been assigned to test segregation rules at the terminal. When they walked into the waiting room, “all hell broke loose.” The two men were bloodied by a group of White men wielding bats and pipes. Mr. Person’s head was bashed, and Peck would later need more than 50 stitches to close his wounds.

Mr. Person said he was able to escape when a news photographer snapped a picture of his attackers, distracting the men. He hurried out and made his way to the home of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a Baptist minister and civil rights organizer who offered shelter to the riders.

News coverage of the attacks horrified the nation. CORE leader James Farmer cut the campaign short, and the riders finished their trip to New Orleans by plane instead of bus. Over the next few months, hundreds of other activists took their place, taking buses into the South and helping place pressure on the Kennedy administration. The bus terminals and facilities were finally desegregated that November, when an Interstate Commerce Commission ruling went into effect.

For Mr. Person, the campaign was an illustration of the power of nonviolence and collective action. It was also a deeply traumatic experience that left him pained and wounded. Tissue damage from the beating in Birmingham created a lump on the back of his neck, which he had to have removed decades after the attack. Bad memories of Anniston and Birmingham lingered far longer.

“There are times I still have flashbacks and I’ll cry,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2011. “We need some reconciliation. When things happen nowadays they bring in psychologists. We never had that.”

For years, Mr. Person mostly kept quiet about his involvement in the Freedom Rides. After he returned to Atlanta, he took the advice of his mother, who “thought I’d be safer serving my country in the military than serving in the Movement,” he recalled in his 2021 book “Buses Are a Comin’: Memoir of a Freedom Rider.” He served in the Marine Corps for 20 years, including a stint in Vietnam, and came to specialize in electronics maintenance, running his own company and later working as a technician for Atlanta public schools.

Mr. Person’s second wife didn’t know he had been a Freedom Rider until about a decade after they were married, when he opened up during a visit to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, according to their daughter Keisha. He later began participating in commemorative events for the Freedom Riders, joining in bus rides that retraced their journey through the South.

His friend Pete Conroy recalled that when Mr. Person joined a 40th anniversary Freedom Rides tour, he was unable to get off the bus in Anniston because of the violence he had experienced there. For the 60th anniversary, Mr. Person not only got off the bus, he joked about buying real estate in the city, Conroy said.

Mr. Person helped lobby for the creation of the Freedom Riders National Monument, which President Barack Obama established in Anniston in 2017. Three years later, dismayed by violence and vandalism he saw while watching television coverage of protests over the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer, he partnered with Conroy to cofound what is now the Freedom Riders Training Academy, an initiative to “teach people how to protest legally, effectively, peacefully,” as Mr. Person put it.

A pilot program was recently used in Hoover, Alabama, where about 80 people who were arrested during racial justice protests had their sentences reduced — or their records expunged — after completing coursework developed through the initiative, according to Conroy. Mr. Person worked on the coursework while also giving frequent talks about activism and the Freedom Riders, meeting with high school and college students as well as Black Lives Matter organizers and other activists.

“Change always begins with the young,” he told The Washington Post in 2017. “As you get older you can rationalize things and can kind of live with them. But as a child or young person, you don’t have that rationalization, and you just want to see things change.”

One of seven children, Charles Anthony Person was born in Atlanta on Sept. 27, 1942. His father was an orderly at Emory University Hospital, and his mother was a domestic worker. He grew up in Buttermilk Bottom, a dusty neighborhood of unpaved streets and clapboard homes, and graduated from high school in 1960, second in his class.

Hoping to pursue a career in nuclear physics, he applied to the Georgia Institute of Technology. The school was segregated at the time and rejected his application, motivating him to get involved in the civil rights movement. “I could sit there and complain, or I could do something about it,” he told the Journal-Constitution.

After the Freedom Rides ended, Mr. Person dropped out of Morehouse, a historically Black college, and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1961. He retired from the military 20 years later and lived in Cuba, where he had been based at Guantánamo Bay, before returning to his hometown.

His first marriage, to Carolyn Henderson, ended in divorce. In 1986, he married JoEtta Mapp. In addition to his wife and their daughter, survivors include their son, Brandon Swain; three children from his earlier marriage, Cicely Person, Cammie Person and Carmelle Searcy; two sisters; a brother; and two grandchildren.

His death leaves Hank Thomas, 83, as the last of the original Freedom Riders.

In his lectures and conversations with students, Mr. Person emphasized education and reconciliation, saying he harbored no ill will toward his attackers. Two years ago, speaking to Alabama high school students over Zoom, he discussed the Freedom Rides and their legacy with Eve Cole, the daughter of Kenneth Adams, a local Klan leader in Anniston who was linked to the attacks on the riders.

“He fought hate with love,” said Theresa Shadrix, the teacher and former journalist who organized the talk. “Every single time.”