Video: 'The Heinous 1961 KKK Attack on the Freedom Riders'

(Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 14, 1961, shortly after 1:00 p.m. CDT;  part of the Civil Rights Movement) — A group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders, traveling by Greyhound bus from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, were met by a white mob today in Anniston, Alabama.

The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. “Burn them alive,” somebody cried out.

An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.

Video: 'AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: Freedom Riders: The Young Witness'

Thirteen passengers were taken to the hospital in Anniston where several were treated for smoke inhalation before hospital employees, fearful of a threatening mob that had gathered outside, ordered the riders to leave the hospital as soon as possible.

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Alabama led a caravan of African-Americans who rescued the riders and took them to Birmingham.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The Freedom Riders bus passengers assaulted that day were among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.