Nov. 29, 1961
A white mob attacked CORE’s Freedom Riders when they attempted to integrate the “all-white” waiting room at the Greyhound bus station in McComb in southwest Mississippi, yelling, “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!”
The five riders — Doratha “Dodie” Smith-Simmons, Jerome Smith, Alice Thompson, George Raymond and Tom Valentine — were from New Orleans and had already been active in the civil rights movement.
When Raymond asked for a cup of coffee, a white man poured the hot liquid over his head and smashed him with the mug. “All hell broke loose,” Smith-Simmons recalled. “I thought we would all die that day, because they were trying to kill us.”
A white mob jumped on Smith, beating him with brass knuckles. Others grabbed Valentine and began to bash his body against the floor, one man yelling out, “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”
When Thompson and Smith-Simmons tried to flee, the mob turned on them, beating and kicking them. She somehow escaped.
“I just ran and ran until the truck overtook me, and I saw it was Jerome and the rest of the group and I just stood there ready to cry,” she told The Times-Picayune. “I don’t know how they all got together, but they did and went looking for me.”
They fled to safety to a Black-owned hotel. By the time night fell, it became obvious they had won. Local police, who had been conspicuously missing when the riders arrived, escorted the riders safely to the bus terminal while the FBI looked on. And the mayor and police chief told the press that segregation would no longer be enforced in the Greyhound waiting rooms.
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