Businessmen's Reform
It was Mother's Day, May 14, 1961. A white mob milled about the Birmingham Trailways station awaiting the arrival of integrationists from the Congress of Racial Equality. After the white man, James Peck, and his black associate, Charles Person, got off the bus and approached the segregated lunch counter, several Ku Klux Klansmen intervened, six of them grabbing Peck and another five hustling Person out a side door and into an alleyway beyond the view of the public. With iron bars, lead pipes, and chains, they brutally assaulted the civil rights activists. For fifteen minutes, the vigilantes kicked and clubbed everyone suspect, leaving blood- splattered and crumpled bodies scattered about the station. Innocent black bystanders who had come to greet friends also were attacked. One witness watched the white men beat a Freedom Rider until "his face was a bloody, red pulp." Birmingham Post-Herald reporter Tom Langston photographed the attack on Peck. The next day's editions of the Post-Herald and Birmingham News printed the picture of the mob scene. Carried by the Associated Press across the world, the snapshot of the brutal treatment of the Freedom Riders confirmed Birmingham's national reputation as a racially intolerant
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