Ellis County African American Hall of Fame Museum and Library

06/16/2026

05/20/2026

May 14, 1961: The Freedom Riders bus is fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama, and the civil rights protesters are beaten by an angry mob.
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.
The Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner, Bull Connor, together with Police Sergeant Tom Cook (an avid Ku Klux Klan supporter), organized violence against the Freedom Riders with local Ku Klux Klan chapters. The pair made plans to bring the Ride to an end in Alabama. They assured Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informer and member of Eastview Klavern #13 (the most violent Klan group in Alabama), that the mob would have fifteen minutes to attack the Freedom Riders without any arrests being made. The plan was to allow an initial assault in Anniston with a final assault taking place in Birmingham.
MOB VIOLENCE ON MOTHER'S DAY:
On May 14, 1961, Mother's Day, in Anniston, a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen, some still in church attire, attacked the first of the two buses (the Greyhound). The driver tried to leave the station, but was blocked until K*K members slashed its tires. The mob forced the crippled bus to stop several miles outside of town and then firebombed it. As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, intending to burn the riders to death. Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank or an undercover state investigator brandishing a revolver caused the mob to retreat, and the riders escaped the bus. The mob beat the riders after they escaped the bus. Only warning shots fired into the air by highway patrolmen prevented the riders from being lynched.
That night, the hospitalized Freedom Riders, most of whom had been refused care, were removed from the hospital at 2 AM, because the staff feared the mob outside the hospital. The local civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth organized several cars of blacks to rescue the injured Freedom Riders in defiance of the mob.
When the Trailways bus reached Anniston and pulled in at the terminal an hour after the Greyhound bus was burned, it was boarded by eight Klansmen. They beat the Freedom Riders and left them semi-conscious in the back of the bus.
When the bus arrived in Birmingham, it was attacked by a mob of K*K members aided and abetted by police under the orders of Commissioner Bull Connor. As the riders exited the bus, they were beaten by the mob with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains. Among the attacking Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant. White Freedom Riders were singled out for especially frenzied beatings; James Peck required more than 50 stitches to the wounds in his head. Peck was taken to Carraway Methodist Medical Center, which refused to treat him; he was later treated at Jefferson Hillman Hospital.
When reports of the bus burning and beatings reached US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he urged restraint on the part of Freedom Riders. He sent an assistant, John Seigenthaler, to Alabama to try to calm the situation.
Despite the violence suffered and the threat of more to come, the Freedom Riders wanted to continue their journey. Kennedy had arranged an es**rt for the Riders in order to get them to Montgomery, Alabama safely. However, radio reports told of the mob awaiting the riders at the bus terminal, as well as on the route to Montgomery. The Greyhound clerks told the Riders that their drivers were refusing to drive any Freedom Riders anywhere. Recognizing that their efforts had already called national attention to the civil rights cause and wanting to make the rally in New Orleans, the Riders decided to abandon the rest of the bus ride and fly directly to New Orleans from Birmingham. When they first boarded the plane, all passengers had to exit because of a bomb threat.
Diane Nash, a Nashville college student and SNCC leader, believed that if Southern violence were allowed to halt the Freedom Rides, the movement would be set back years. She pushed to find replacements to resume the rides. On May 17, a new set of riders, 10 students from Nashville, took a bus to Birmingham, where they were arrested by Bull Connor and jailed.These students kept their spirits up in jail by singing freedom songs. Out of frustration, Connor drove them back up to the Tennessee line and dropped them off, saying, "I just couldn't stand their singing." They immediately returned to Birmingham.

05/20/2026

On July 4, 1881, thirty Black students gathered in a broken shanty and watched education begin through the rain.
The rain should have stopped the lesson, but it did not.

Inside that leaning shanty beside Butler Chapel in Tuskegee, Alabama, a student opened an umbrella and held it over Booker T. Washington’s head so the books would not be ruined and the teaching could continue.

That image says more than any marble statue ever could.

A twenty-five-year-old Black teacher stood before thirty Black students on July 4, 1881, with no proper schoolhouse, no campus, no library, and no guarantee that the dream would survive the week.

The state of Alabama had given money for salaries, but not for the things a school needed to breathe.

There was no land, no desks worth trusting, no dependable roof, and no cushion against failure.

Still, Washington taught.

He had already learned that Black progress in America often began in conditions that looked impossible to everyone except the people who needed the progress most.

His own beginning had been inside a one-room cabin on the Burroughs farm in Franklin County, Virginia.

The cabin had a dirt floor, no glass windows, and a small opening near the door, while his mother Jane labored as the plantation cook.

That childhood did not hand him comfort.

It handed him scraps, cold, work, and a hunger for learning so deep that it followed him from slavery into freedom.

After emancipation, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where the boy who could not yet read was sent into salt furnaces and coal mines.

Every day, his body belonged to labor before it belonged to childhood.

But somewhere inside him, school became more than a wish.

It became a thirst, the kind our people have always known when the world tries to keep knowledge locked away and then acts surprised when we break toward it.

His mother found him a spelling book, though she could not read it herself.

That small act was a kind of Black inheritance, a mother placing a tool in her child’s hands even when the system had denied her the chance to use it.

Then, in the darkness of a coal mine, Washington heard men speaking about Hampton Institute in Virginia.

They said poor Black students could work their way through school, and from that moment, the distance stopped being an excuse.

He did not have money.

He did not have a clear map of the road ahead, but he had already decided that ignorance would not get the final word over his life.

At sixteen, he set out toward Hampton with a small bundle of clothes and almost nothing else.

He walked, caught rides where he could, slept outside when doors were closed to him, and reached Richmond with his money gone.

In Richmond, he slept under a wooden sidewalk, using his satchel as a pillow.

The next morning, he found work unloading pig iron so he could earn enough to keep moving toward the school that had already taken hold of his spirit.

When he finally reached Hampton, he had only fifty cents and the worn look of a boy who had traveled through hardship.

The head teacher, Mary F. Mackie, did not immediately admit him.

Instead, she gave him a broom.

She told him to sweep a room, and Washington cleaned it as if his entire future were hiding in the dust.

He swept, dusted, moved furniture, and worked until her inspection found nothing left to criticize.

That broom became his entrance exam.

The same discipline he had learned while working in the home of Viola Ruffner carried him through the doorway of Hampton.

He graduated, taught, and eventually became part of Hampton’s faculty.

Then Tuskegee called.

The school itself came from Black political will, especially the work of Lewis Adams, a formerly enslaved man in Alabama who understood that freedom without education could be trapped and narrowed.

A deal was made in Macon County politics, and out of that pressure came the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers.

When Washington arrived in June 1881, he did not find a proud building waiting for him.

He found a borrowed church space, a broken shanty, and a community that needed someone with enough faith to start before conditions were ready.

That is why the umbrella matters.

It was not just a student keeping rain off a teacher.

It was Black people protecting the fragile beginning of their own future.

Those students could have seen the leaking roof as proof that the world did not care about them.

Instead, one of them stood up and made himself part of the solution.

A year later, Washington borrowed money for a down payment on one hundred acres of former plantation land.

Think about that transformation carefully: land once tied to bo***ge would now be shaped into a place of Black learning.

The students did not simply attend Tuskegee.

They built it with their hands.

They dug clay from the earth, fired bricks, cleared fields, raised walls, and learned that education was not separate from labor, discipline, ownership, and institution building.

This was not glamorous work.

It was the slow, sweaty work of turning a neglected place into a Black center of possibility.

In time, Tuskegee developed a brickyard, a printing press, a sawmill, a dairy, and a growing campus.

Robert R. Taylor, the first Black graduate of MIT, became central to the architecture of Tuskegee, helping give physical shape to a dream that had begun in a leaking room.

Washington raised money from some of the wealthiest white donors in America.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Rosenwald, Huntington, and Olivia Sage all became part of Tuskegee’s financial story, but the soul of the school was still rooted in Black hunger for education.

Washington’s public life was complicated.

His 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech made him famous, but it also made him deeply controversial among Black thinkers and activists.

Some saw his message as a practical path through a violent South.

Others, including W. E. B. Du Bois, believed he conceded too much at a time when Black people needed direct demands for full citizenship.

Both truths belong in the story.

Washington was not a flat figure, and Black history becomes weaker when we turn our leaders into saints or villains instead of studying the hard choices they made under pressure.

What many did not see clearly at first was that Washington also supported legal challenges and civil rights efforts behind the scenes.

He quietly helped fund fights against disenfranchisement, peonage, and the systems that tried to keep Black Southerners trapped even after slavery’s legal end.

That hidden work matters.

It shows a man navigating a dangerous political world, speaking one language in public at times while moving money and influence in quieter channels.

By 1915, Washington was worn down.

His body had carried too many miles, too many speeches, too many negotiations, too many burdens for one lifetime.

When doctors in New York told him he had little time left, he wanted to return to Tuskegee.

He had been born in the South, labored in the South, built in the South, and wanted to die on the ground where his life’s work stood.

He reached Tuskegee just after midnight on November 14, 1915.

A few hours later, he died on the campus that had grown from that leaking shanty into a major Black institution.

At his death, Tuskegee had one hundred buildings, hundreds of acres, fifteen hundred students, two hundred faculty members, dozens of trades and professions, and an endowment that would have been unimaginable on that first rainy morning.

That is the distance between the umbrella and the institution.

Not magic, not luck, but vision carried through exhaustion by a people who understood that education could become a weapon, a shelter, a ladder, and a legacy.

Booker T. Washington’s story should not be taught as simple praise or simple criticism.

It should be taught as Black history really is: layered, difficult, brilliant, argued over, and still alive with lessons.

Our ancestors often had to build while being doubted.

They had to learn while being underfunded, organize while being watched, and dream while standing inside rooms that leaked on their books.

That first umbrella at Tuskegee still speaks.

It reminds us that sometimes Black history begins with one person teaching, one person holding the covering, and a whole people deciding that the storm will not have the last word.

We must keep teaching these stories, especially the parts too detailed and powerful to fit into schoolbook summaries.

Black history does not stop at the names we already know, because behind every name is a road, a sacrifice, a contradiction, and a lesson still waiting to be carried forward.
I invest a lot of time researching and sharing these important stories. If you’d like to support the work behind them, here’s the link:

https://ko-fi.com/trueblackhistory

Every coffee helps me keep creating.

05/20/2026

America feared Black literacy for generations because a child who could read could also remember, resist, and rise.

Before America pretended to care about equal classrooms, Black children were already sitting upright in rooms the country had underfunded and underestimated.

The walls might have been wood, the books might have been secondhand, and the heat might have come from one stove, but the purpose inside that room was larger than the building.

For generations, education had been treated as dangerous when Black people wanted it.

During slavery, many places restricted or punished Black literacy because reading and writing could help enslaved people communicate, understand politics, forge passes, organize escape, and imagine freedom beyond what white power allowed.

That is why a Black classroom was never just a classroom.

It was a direct answer to centuries of people who believed Black minds should be controlled, not cultivated.

After emancipation, Black families rushed toward schools with a hunger that outsiders often failed to understand.

Parents who had been denied letters wanted their children to read the Bible, sign their own names, understand contracts, count wages, write letters, and never again be trapped by somebody else’s words.

That hunger built schools before justice ever did.

The Smithsonian notes that after the Civil War, constitutional promises were followed by backlash as many states worked to rebuild white supremacy and strip African Americans of newly won rights.

So when Black children sat in segregated classrooms, they were sitting inside a struggle that did not end at the schoolhouse door.

Outside could be debt, low wages, racial violence, voter suppression, and signs telling them where they could not go.

Inside, a teacher could still place a reader in their hands and say, in effect, your mind belongs to you.

That teacher was doing more than teaching grammar.

She was guarding a future.

Many Black teachers worked with fewer supplies, lower pay, overcrowded rooms, and school boards that treated Black education as an afterthought.

Still, they created order, pride, discipline, and possibility in places where the system had planned only limitation.

That is why the faces in photographs like this feel so powerful.

The children are not asking to be pitied.

They look like they have been told to sit tall because learning was a responsibility, not a luxury.

They knew the books were often worn before they arrived.

They knew white schools usually received better buildings, better equipment, longer terms, and more public money.

But Black families kept sending children anyway, because the lesson was bigger than the lesson plan.

Education meant survival.

Education meant not being cheated.

Education meant being able to read a deed, write a letter, teach a younger sibling, pass a test, preach a sermon, build a business, or challenge a law.

In the rural South, Black communities often raised money, donated land, and supplied labor for schools that public systems should have funded fairly in the first place.

The Rosenwald school program, created through the collaboration of Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, helped build roughly 5,000 schools for African American children across the South in the early twentieth century.

But even those schools were not simply gifts from above.

Black communities sacrificed for them, and the National Trust notes that by 1928, one-third of the South’s rural Black schoolchildren and teachers were served by Rosenwald Schools.

That means whole communities were turning poverty into architecture.

They were taking coins from church collections, hours from field labor, boards from local hands, and hope from people who had every reason to be tired.

Some of those buildings became the first real schoolhouses a Black community had ever had.

The National Park Service describes Rosenwald Schools as often being the first schools in Black communities and helping improve education across the South.

But photographs of Black classrooms should never make us romanticize inequality.

There is beauty in the determination, but there was injustice in the need for that much determination just to receive what should have been ordinary.

Black children should not have needed heroic teachers just to get decent books.

Black parents should not have had to pay taxes into systems that neglected their children, then raise more money to build what those systems refused to provide.

Still, they built.

That is the part our children need to hear.

They need to know that their ancestors did not wait for perfect conditions before choosing excellence.

They learned under leaking roofs, beside wood stoves, in churches, in cabins, in one-room schools, in borrowed spaces, and in classrooms where one teacher might be responsible for several grades at once.

Some students walked miles before sunrise.

Some left school early to help family.

Some studied from books already marked by children from white schools.

And still, they became teachers, nurses, ministers, farmers who knew their accounts, soldiers who could write home, business owners who could keep records, parents who could read to their children, and organizers who could read the laws used against them.

That is why a simple classroom image can carry so much history.

It shows Black children being prepared for a world that did not plan to make room for them.

It shows Black teachers refusing to let scarcity define the size of a child’s future.

It shows a community saying that knowledge was not a favor from America, but an inheritance Black people had the right to claim.

The quiet rebellion was not only in the lesson.

It was in the posture.

It was in the clean clothes, the careful rows, the raised hands, the serious faces, and the belief that a child born into segregation could still become somebody the world would have to respect.

We honor those classrooms by refusing to let their struggle become a faded picture without a lesson.

We honor them by teaching that Black education was fought for long before court rulings, integration orders, and federal promises caught up with the courage already alive in our communities.

Black history does not stop with famous leaders or landmark cases.

It lives in chalk dust, wooden desks, hand-me-down books, lunch pails, school bells, church fundraisers, and teachers who stood in front of Black children and saw futures the country refused to imagine.

So when we look at classrooms like this, we should not only see what they lacked.

We should see what they carried.

They carried discipline.

They carried dignity.

They carried the unbroken belief that a Black child’s mind was worth protecting.

And if we keep teaching that truth, especially the overlooked parts, then those old classrooms are still doing what they were built to do.

They are still educating us.

I invest a lot of time researching and sharing these important stories. If you’d like to support the work behind them, here’s the link:

https://ko-fi.com/trueblackhistory

Every coffee helps me keep creating.

05/20/2026

“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” —Shirley Chisholm.