It didn’t get bad until the Trailways bus crossed the state line from Georgia into Alabama in May of 1961.
A gang of white men boarded the bus in Anniston and started beating the handful of young Black and white Freedom Riders who were aboard, forcing them into the back. The riders did not fight back, as they had been taught.
“Even when they were beating me, I didn’t yell out. I didn’t cry. I didn’t cover up,” Charles Person told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2021.
When the bus reached the terminal in Birmingham, Person recalled 40 years later, “the entire wall was lined with men … and they just came toward us, and they started beating us with pipes and sticks … and their fists.”
Far from stopping the Freedom Riders on their first trip to call attention to Jim Crow laws in the Deep South, the brutal racist reaction got nationwide media attention and convinced more than 400 people to join Charles Person, John Lewis and others in this crucial early chapter of the Civil Rights Movement.
“The courage Charles Person displayed when he boarded those buses as the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, knowing that he was potentially risking his life in the fight against segregation, should be an inspiration to every person — young or old — who believes in a more just and equitable future for all,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Charles confronted the ugliest elements of the South at that time and refused to let them shake his will.”
Among the first group of 13 Freedom Riders, carefully vetted and trained in nonviolence, Person was the youngest, at 18. A freshman at Morehouse College, he fibbed to his parents that he did not think the trip would be very dangerous, so they gave their permission for him to go.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“Charles had an inner spirit in him that just spoke joy, shouted joy, sang joy,” said Richard Rooker, co-author of Person’s 2021 autobiography “Buses are A Comin’: Memoir of a Freedom Rider.”
“He was a lifelong champion for justice and equality and dignity,” Rooker added. “He always believed that tomorrow will be better than today even when circumstances suggest otherwise.”
Charles Person died Jan. 8, 2025, of complications from leukemia at his home in Fayetteville. He was 82. Of the original 13 Freedom Riders, only one, Henry Thomas of Stone Mountain, remains alive.
Person was born Sept. 27, 1942, in Atlanta to Hugh and Ruby Person, a medical orderly and a domestic worker. He grew up with seven family members in two rooms with no electricity or indoor plumbing, in Buttermilk Bottom, an impoverished Black neighborhood that was demolished in the 1960s to build the Atlanta Civic Center.
Person recalled seeing his mother “have to eat out of a, quote, special dish, unquote, with the white family she worked for ‘cause she couldn’t eat out of their dishes,” said Rooker.
He graduated as salutatorian from David T. Howard High School in 1960.
As a freshman at Morehouse College in 1960, Person and fellow students staged sit-ins at segregated Atlanta lunch counters. He was arrested several times and spent 16 days in jail.
At the sit-ins, white people would throw ketchup and mustard and sometimes flick lit cigarettes on the protesters, Person recalled for a 2001 University of Mississippi oral history project on the Freedom Riders.
“You’ve got to realize that for a lot of these whites, this is the first time that Blacks had rebelled,” he said. “Normally you knew your place and knew what was expected of you, and everybody was happy. But we weren’t happy.”
After his freedom ride, Person joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served 20 years, including postings in Vietnam, Okinawa, Cuba and Hawaii. He mainly worked as an electrical technician. When he left the Marines, he continued that occupation, starting his own business and working for Atlanta Public Schools.
He was married to Carolyn Henderson, and they had three daughters: Cicely, Cammie and Carmelle. After they divorced, he married Joetta Mapp in 1986, and they had two children: Brandon and Keisha
Person toured regularly, giving speeches on his days in the movement along with other Freedom Riders, including Joan Browning.
“We really tried to communicate to young people that you don’t have to get on a bus and go to jail,” said Browning. “There’s all kinds of things you can do.
“The fact that he was a military veteran helped,” she added. “People think that nonviolent people are sissies. He was no sissy. He was a combat veteran. He would wear his combat medals. Here he was, a soldier telling people we can change the world through nonviolence. That’s his legacy, and he did it with humor and grace.”
Another part of Person’s legacy is the Freedom Riders Training Academy in Anniston, Alabama. “What they did was so profoundly important we didn’t want it just to be locked up in history,” said Pete Conroy, co-chairman (with Person) of the academy.
“The [Black Lives Matter] protests that followed George Floyd inspired him,” Conroy said. “He said, ‘We have to develop a program to teach people to protest properly.’”
The academy is scheduled to officially launch in the coming weeks, Conroy said. “He won’t be around to see it. But he knew it was coming.”
In 2021, Person was signing copies of his memoir in Anniston when a white woman reluctantly approached him with a copy of his book. She said her father had been one of the white men who beat Person back in 1961, and she wanted to apologize.
Person embraced her, and the two cried together. “I could see how happy he was,” his wife Joetta said.
Person is survived by his wife Joetta; siblings Joyce Clark, Susan Person and Michael (Judith) Person; children Cicely Person, Cammie Person, Carmelle (Romon Jr.) Searcy, Brandon (Robin Mills-Swain) Swain and Keisha Person; and grandchildren.
Services are scheduled for noon on Jan. 22, 2025, at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, 2407 Cascade Road, in Atlanta. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Freedom Riders Training Academy. https://cfnea.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create/fund?funit_id=1084
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