Beyond the Burning Bus

Anniston, Alabama, is a small industrial city between Birmingham and Atlanta. In 1961, the city's potential for race-related violence was graphically revealed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a Freedom Riders bus. In response to that incident a few black and white leaders in Anniston took a progressive view that desegregation was inevitable and that it was better to unite the community than to divide it, and created a biracial Human Relations Council which set about to quietly dismantle Jim Crow segregation laws and customs. The Council did not prevent all disorder in Anniston, yet Anniston was spared much of the civil rights bitterness that raged in other places in the turbulent mid-sixties. Phil Noble, a Presbyterian Minister in Anniston and participant in the Council, offers his account of the events, carefully researched but told from a personal viewpoint. It shows once again that the civil rights movement was not monolithic either for those who were in it or those who were opposed to it.