Freedom Rides Museum - The Station of 1961

Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on Montgomery: Legacy and Civil Rights Road, a free self-guided tour.

This low Streamline Moderne building opened as Montgomery's Greyhound station in 1951. Ten years later it became a turning point. In 1961, Black and white Freedom Riders boarded interstate buses together to test a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation in terminals serving interstate travel. When violence in Alabama halted the first ride, students from Nashville, among them 21-year-old John Lewis, insisted on carrying it forward.

When their bus pulled in here on May 20, 1961, a mob was waiting and the police were nowhere to be seen. Floyd Mann, the state's public safety director, stepped in to restore order. The attack shocked the nation and pushed the Kennedy administration to side with the riders, and that fall the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered segregation signs taken down in bus terminals.

Panels along the front tell the story day by day, and since 2011 the Alabama Historical Commission has run a museum inside. Check its website for current hours.

Getting here: Walk back down Dexter Avenue to Court Square and continue south on South Court Street two blocks to number 210, about 10 minutes.

Did you know?: The building served as a working bus station until 1995, and the story panels went up on its front in 2008, three years before the museum inside opened.

Photo op: From across South Court Street, frame the long, low facade with the story panels lined up along the front.

More on Wikipedia: Freedom Rides Museum · Freedom Riders · John Lewis · Floyd Mann

Freedom Rides Museum - The Station of 1961

Stops on this tour