​​​​​​​Janie Forsyth, Anniston, Alabama. Photo courtesy PBS.

The Greyhound bus rolling toward Anniston carried five regular passengers, two of whom were undercover state patrol officers eavesdropping for the governor. Seven were Freedom Riders and two, journalists.

The year before, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled segregation on interstate transportation unconstitutional, but it was still the practice throughout much of the South. The Freedom Riders, mostly college students, challenged local law and custom by riding Greyhound and Trailways buses and trying to use “whites-only” restrooms and “whites-only” lunch counters in bus stations.

They met with hostility along the way, but it reached a new level at the Anniston bus station. A mob of about fifty white men, dressed in their Sunday best having just come from church, attacked the bus with pipes, chains, clubs or whatever was to hand. They smashed windows, dented sides of the bus and slashed tires.

When police belatedly arrived, they made a show of clearing the crowd and escorting the bus out of the city limits. The mob at the bus station followed in their own cars and trucks. Several miles west of Anniston, flat tires forced the bus to stop in front of the Forsyth and Son Grocery store.

Forsyth and Son Grocery. Photo courtesy PBS American Experience

Janie heard the noise and came out to see what was happening. The crowd of people following the bus had grown to roughly two hundred.

"Angry white men yelling racial epithets and armed with various bludgeoning implements milled around our front yard and the parking lot of our family’s grocery store next door. They surrounded the bus with obvious evil intent while their families — wives, children and babies in arms — quietly watched. 

Janie, a self-described, shy 7th grader, had already developed a conscience. She believed her favorite passages of scripture, "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do it to me." 

"I was already a civil rights activist, intent on doing the right thing. I was just closeted about it." ​​​​​ 

Then she saw a man break a window on the bus and throw something inside.

"A crowd stood around him, trying to hide his identity, but I could see he was white. The “something” turned out to be a firebomb, and the bus burst into flames. Acrid black smoke soon billowed out the back window."

Anniston, AL, May 14, 1961. Photo courtesy U.S. National Park Service

In a state of terror, passengers scrambled to flee the bus, some climbing out broken windows. The front door was held shut by Klansmen. People in the crowd shouted, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn n%#*&$s."

Somehow, the mob was forced back, possibly due to an exploding fuel tank or it could have been one of the law officers inside waving his gun. Riders managed to escape the bus, coughing and gagging in the tense smoke.

The first to emerge was Henry "Hank" Thomas. "Are you all OK?" a man shouted, but then before Hank could answer, the man hit him in the head with a baseball bat. Thomas dropped to the ground, nearly losing consciousness. 

Anniston, AL, May 14, 1961. Photo courtesy U.S. National Park Service.

"The growling, cursing white men began to beat them," Janie Forsyth McKinney recalled as an adult. "I could hear the passengers cry out, “Water, please give us water … we need water. They were so sick by then they were crawling and puking and rasping for water. They could hardly talk.”

Janie ran into her house for a bucket of water and as many glasses as she could carry. She returned to push through the swinging clubs and snarling bodies.

"I knew what I was doing was dangerous," she said, "and it could get me in real trouble.... It seemed to [the whites] that the blacks were penetrating some sort of barrier that they had no right to come through and sitting next to a person on the bus was the beginning of that barrier coming down and they couldn’t stand it.

"They weren’t ashamed of what they were doing, they thought it was a social service…This is how to be a man…I’m protecting my women and children. They were proud of it."
 

Janie hurried to help a woman who looked like the nanny who raised her. 

"I took her a glass of water. I washed her face. I held her. I gave her water to drink and as soon as I thought that she was going to be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else."

Anniston, AL, May 14, 1961. Photo courtesy PBS American Experience. 

Local authorities allowed the violence to continue for 15-20 minutes before firing shots in the air to disperse the crowd. They made to effort to provide medical aid to the injured.

Janie was told that Klan members considered charging her with a crime for getting in their business, but in the end decided was a mentally deficient child and let it go.

"For years, various local KKK members railed against me, sometimes getting right in my face. In the hallways of my high school, the offspring of Klansmen often confronted me. But no one laid a hand on me. After the initial furor passed, my family never talked about it again, as if I had done something shameful that would be best forgotten."

Janie's choice to step out of place in southern culture that day might have been lost to history, except for Hank Thomas. As the 20th anniversary of Freedom Summer approached, CBS news producers interviewed Hank about what happened that day in Anniston.

He said they couldn't “do that story justice” without finding the little white girl who had given the Freedom Riders water. Thomas continued to participate in the Freedom Rides and was later arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, where he believed he would not survive.

In Jackson, police routine arrested the civil rights activists as soon as they stepped off the bus, charging them with a breach of the peace. When local jails filled up, the young people were sent to the infamous state penitentiary, Parchman.

“Women are as capable … as men are in their chosen positions,” she told People magazine in 2022, when she received the Congressional Gold Medal. “So if you give them more chance — and Black women especially, because they haven’t had the same opportunity — give them a chance and see what they can do. Ask them.”

Thanks for your service, Romay. Rest in peace. 
 

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