You’ve probably never heard of Bruce Boynton. It’s arguable that Boynton was more important than Rosa Parks in ending segregation, but his relative obscurity underlies the fact that there were thousands of brave Americans at that time willing to go against the hive mentality of their day. They were scared, isolated, often shunned by peers and family, but they felt fighting for justice was worth the risk of jail.
Most of them remain anonymous because history is often about big pictures, not individual acts of bravery.
Some of these individuals were beaten or threatened into silence, others were killed before they could get going. But it’s the myriad small acts that force the most important issues, and if you feel like you’ve been swimming against a stream for a few years, know that you’re playing a part in a great movement of history, even if future textbooks fail to record it.
Right now there are many Bruce Boyntons and Rosa Parkses contemplating their options, trying to decide if opposing their hive is a hill worth dying on. Or if not death, is it worth scorn, ostracism, or financial loss?
Maybe you’re there, and if so, it behooves you to learn about those who’ve been there, done that, and lived to tell the tales.
Boynton v. Virginia(1961)
As a young law student in 1960, Bruce Boynton boarded a bus in Washington D.C. bound for Montgomery, Alabama. While the bus was stopped in Richmond, Virginia, Boynton sat in the “white” section of the Trailways Bus Terminal restaurant and ordered a sandwich and a cup of tea.
When he refused the manager’s direction to move to the “colored” section, he was arrested. In that moment, Bruce Boynton played a small part in a sequence of events that would eventually end Jim Crow laws as they pertained to interstate travel. The eventual result of Bruce Boynton’s arrest was a trip to the Supreme Court. The issue at hand was this: Does the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 guarantee a right of non-discrimination against interstate travelers?
The law as written indicated it does:
“It shall be unlawful for any common carrier by motor vehicle engaged in interstate or foreign commerce to make, give, or cause any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person . . . in any respect whatsoever; or to subject any particular person . . . to any unjust discrimination or any unjust or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage in any respect whatsoever. . .“
Section 216(d) of Part II of the Interstate Commerce Act, 49 U.S.C. § 316(d)
Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (an NAACP lawyer at the time) argued on behalf of Boynton that it did. In what became one of those lesser-known landmark rulings, Boyntonv. Virginia (1960), the Supreme Court agreed.
Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority:
“And so here, without regard to contracts, if the bus carrier has volunteered to make terminal and restaurant facilities and services available to its interstate passengers as a regular part of their transportation, and the terminal and restaurant have acquiesced and cooperated in this undertaking, the terminal and restaurant must perform these services without discriminations prohibited by the Act.” Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)
The ruling provided hope that the U.S. government was finally going to enforce federal restrictions on segregation in the South. Previous rulings and challenges to Jim Crow laws were largely ineffective, but in 1961, dozens of courageous men and women signed up to test the federal government’s willingness to defend the liberty that the Supreme Court said still existed.
The Hive Mentality
We often suppress our God-given capacity to think, apply logic, and act in ways that better our lives and — like animals — follow a “hive mentality,” going along with the crowd and scorning those who refuse to comply.
You may be aware of the classic experiments on conformity and group-think. Ask a person simple questions about right and wrong and they’ll often give logical, reasonable answers. But put five people in a room with the questioner, and those answers won’t flow so quickly. The fear of non-conformity influences the responses. It takes courage to go against the hive, because the hive will often exact a price for doing so.
The hive crafts rules to govern itself, and sometimes those rules (policies, regulations, laws) are simply wrong. Sometimes they’re downright evil.
Who decided you can’t sell or purchase raw milk? What hubris leads a person to decree we can’t collect the rain falling from the sky, or pull our children out of public school systems? Why can’t I find an incandescent lightbulb anywhere in town? And why exactly do we accept the banning of Christianity in the public square?
These are just some of the things we need to begin challenging if we’re going to survive as a free nation. When the hive mentality agrees that a simple right is a crime, someone needs to confront it. Over the course of our nation’s history, many have. Those who came before us (like Bruce Boynton) were willing to confront the hornet’s nests of their day by merely ordering a sandwich. Others suffered much more.
Freedom Riders
In 1961, highly organized and media-savvy student protesters associated with Chicago’s CORE movement were busy challenging the status quo of segregation in the Southern states. Their efforts — white and black students trying to see a movie together, for instance — often resulted in misdemeanor arrests, with the goal of challenging unjust laws through appeals and federal lawsuits. [Note: Some modern conservatives argue that this pot-stirring was all a communist plot to sow discord in America. I disagree.]
After the Boynton ruling, in the aftermath of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, these students decided to up the ante by literally driving non-violent protesters straight into the heart of one of segregation’s strongholds: Alabama.
An interracial group of thirteen students boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington D.C with the intention of arriving in New Orleans. They split up in Atlanta, with some staying on the Greyhound and others taking a Trailways bus. The Greyhound stopped in Anniston, Alabama to a mob of enraged citizens. The driver, fearing the crowd, carried on down the highway, and was pursued by the mob in vehicles. Tires slashed during the brief stop gave way and the mob overtook the disabled bus. Undercover Federal agents barred the door from the inside, so a Molotov cocktail was tossed into a window, which forced the passengers into the arms of the mob where they were all (Fed agents included) severely beaten until Alabama State Troopers arrived.
Meanwhile, the Trailways bus arrived in Birmingham where another mob assaulted the passengers. Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the police to stand down and let the mob have a free hand. Among the attackers was FBI Klu Klux Klan informant Gary Thomas Rowe, who informed his FBI handlers that the Birmingham police had agreed to allow the Klan fifteen undisturbed minutes with the Freedom Riders. Rowe (a notorious agent provocateur) contributed many blows, as witness Howard K. Smith later reported.
The media broadcast these parallel images of rampage and attempted murder for all the world to see. As the Freedom Riders sought shelter in Alabama safe houses, Federal authorities, state officials, protest organizations, and local ministers worked the phones, trying to figure out what to do.
…
Something critical happened at this point. And I want to briefly pause the narrative because it echoes the predicament many of us feel today regarding the battles we’re fighting — whistleblowing, election investigations, property confiscation, censorship, slander, school indoctrination — and our willingness to soldier on.
Every stand for liberty is opposed by someone who wants to crush it. The hive can’t abide nonconformity. The hives take many forms, with racism and religious strife (or the faux appearance of such) popular and effective ones.
As I write this, the rah rah for Palestine and the rah rah for Israel hives are battling it out across the country. Both are populated by people with little knowledge of history and incensed to rage, seeking foolish solutions: more vitrol, less discussion, and ultimately more death. Satan smiles at all of it. It’s his arena, his game, and the hives follow his rules.
The enemy wants us to succumb to the pressure and give up on God’s plan, to say “screw it,” take our ball and go home. It’s so much easier to retreat than it is to stay and fight for God’s priorities in God’s manner. How can we love our neighbors when they tear down and burn an American flag? How can we forgive our brothers when they beat us with bricks for sitting in the wrong bus seat?
In those critical moments, Jesus’ teachings have a way of being drowned out as the hive mind speaks louder than the gentle Spirit of truth. Click on social media or check out cable news. It’s happening as we speak. And it was no different back then, when the hive firebombed a couple dozen people for peacefully sitting on a bus.
…
That hive mentality sparked an inner struggle within the hearts of the Freedom Riders as they waited, sequestered in safe houses or bus terminals wondering what lay ahead. Pressure to quit squeezed from all sides, from bat-wielding ruffians to President Kennedy himself; everyone wanted the Freedom Riders to just go away. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. was wavering on the Freedom Riders’ effectiveness, and SCLC leader Fred Shuttlesworth openly encouraged a tactical retreat.
“Young, lady,” Shuttlesworth lectured organizer Diane Nash over the phone, “you do realize the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?”
“Yes,” she replied, “that’s exactly why the ride must not be stopped.”
…
This is where many today are currently lingering. Countless Americans are sitting at kitchen tables wondering if the leviathan they’ll need to confront in defense of freedom is worth it. Whistleblowers in all levels of government (FBI, Secret Service, sheriff’s departments) and within private corporations (Boeing, Pfizer, Google) know that going against the hive will cost them dearly. Better to play it safe, go along with the charade and not jeopardize the pension that’s just a few years away.
Small farmers are facing off with the FDA instructing them to inject or cull their flocks. Car manufacturers are being forced to include remote access in new vehicles. You and I are being censored online and in person. HR managers are being instructed to illegally block qualified candidates in favor of maladroit DEI hires.
Is fighting any of it worth the hassle? Is any of it worth getting fired over? Arrested over? Are any of these fights worth dying for?
Instead of getting on that bus, many are content to hope things will get better when so-and-so gets back in office. Such sentiments were common in the Boomers’ era, until assassins’ bullets silenced many of those hope-filled voices.
…
But in Birmingham in May of 1961, the young men and women in the direct line of fire, the ones who endured the fists and pipes to the head, the ones who’d had men stomp on their chests, chose to continue.
They were prepared to die in order to peacefully challenge derelict authorities and unjust law. Even when their own leaders wanted to cut their losses, they chose to go on.
Not only that, others signed up to join them.
“It begins with one guy. He sees his buddies dying and running away. He wants to run too. And everything in him says he should run. But he doesn’t, he stays, and other people see him staying and they come back and stay with him. And that’s how wars are won.”
– Stephen Ambrose
Returning To The Fight
Undeterred and reinforced with additional Freedom Riders (many were too injured to continue), the students vowed to press on. Protecting the Trailways bus on its continuing journey therefore became a top priority for President John F. Kennedy, who implored his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to deescalate the situation. Over several days of frustrating phone calls with both sides, Robert Kennedy was able to coordinate a massive police escort with promises of protection from a very obstinate Alabama Governor, John Malcolm Patterson.
The Freedom Ride resumed on May 20th, flanked by a convoy of vehicles carrying state police, federal agents, and a swarm of media. Helicopters and planes circled overhead, and for the first time in days, the Riders could rest…for about two hours.
“We sort of believed that we were going to be fine,” Susan Wilbur thought as she lay in her seat, exhausted from days of physical and emotional trauma. “Then, of course, the helicopter disappeared, as did the police. By the time we got to the bus station there was no one in sight except bad people.”
From his seat, John Lewis watched the police escort drive out of sight.
“That’s not good,” he said to Jim Zwerg, who sat beside him.
The bus arrived to an eerily empty terminal, where a press conference podium awaited them. John Lewis began to make a statement for the media when the enraged mob descended on the Freedom Riders like a hive of angry hornets emerging from the shadows. First attacked was Moe Levy of NBC News. Film was ripped from photographers’ cameras as the hive swarmed anyone who didn’t belong, race disregarded. Justice Department attorney John Dore, personal liaison to President Kennedy, watched in horror. From a Federal building above the terminal, he gave play-by-play to Washington on the phone.
“It’s terrible. It’s terrible. There’s not a cop in sight. A bunch of men led by a guy with a bleeding face are beating them.”
The hive was incensed. Riders scattered across the city into safe houses. Many found their way into the basement of Fred Abernathy’s Brick-a-Day church. Martin Luther King flew in the next day and his presence only further encouraged the mob as they refocused their fury.
Hours passed as fires raged, rocks flew, and a standoff ensued between the hive and Federal Marshals guarding the entrances to the church. King worked the phones, calling Robert Kennedy from the basement. A massacre was narrowly averted only after President Kennedy reluctantly threatened to send in the U.S. Army, something Governor Patterson would not stand for. Patterson instead had the Alabama National Guard enforce a stand-down, allowing the churchgoers (and Freedom Riders) to return to their homes.
The Forgotten Battles
This was a turbulent period of American history, where atrocities seemed to flow freely and the perpetrators were insulated from justice, a period where those empowered to safeguard freedom (judges, sheriffs, governors) led the hive’s most grotesque assaults against it.
Lost in the headlines are the simple acts of hive defiance that best displayed the American spirit, courageous acts by those who followed Jesus’ command to love thy neighbor inherently, because someone had to.
I began this article by discussing the little-known historical figure, Bruce Boynton. But Boynton v. Virginia wasn’t the first landmark Supreme Court ruling to ban segregation over interstate travel. Fourteen years earlier, Irene Morgan won the same battle in the Supreme Court (Morgan v. Virginia, 1941), and for eight years, black and white men and women who tested the ruling were quietly arrested and tossed onto chain gangs.
The names of those who stood in the gap are largely lost to history.
When white Freedom Riders Susan Wilbur and Sue Harmann were fleeing for their lives, store owner after store owner callously refused to offer them safety from the mob, until one finally did, allowing them to secretly use the phone and arrange an escape from the city.
In Montgomery, an anonymous black couple sheltered two additional white Freedom Riders, Mimi Feingold and Judy Frieze, overnight at great personal danger to themselves.
And at Parchman prison farm, where many Freedom Riders were abused in the aftermath, Bernard LaFayette Jr. formed a friendship with one of the night wardens who appreciated the Riders’ nightly music so much that he sneaked them ice cream. In appreciation, the Freedom Riders gave enthusiastic college admissions advice to the warden, whose daughter hoped to be the first in his family to go to college.
Take people out of the hive, and they soon discover Jesus’ teachings are all that matter.
There are too many everyday heroes to recount, and we’ll never know most of their names. But we can celebrate some, like Special Assistant to Attorney General Kennedy John Seigenthaler, who, after witnessing the mob’s bloodlust, thrust himself into the melee to rescue Freedom Riders and ended up unconscious, beaten with a lead pipe to the head.
And then there was 12-year-old Janie Forsyth.
When the first Freedom Rider’s bus was on the way to her hometown of Anniston, Janie recalled her father had railed over the morning paper that “the KKK had some kind of ‘surprise party’ in store for them.” A few days later the disabled bus came to a stop in front of Forsyth home, giving her a front window seat to the horror that followed.
As bleeding and desperate Freedom Riders fled the smoke, flames, and blows of the hive that had tried to burn them alive, they cried out for water. Janie Forsyth filled a jug and took as many glasses as she could carry to both black and white riders. Miraculously, the mob somehow allowed her to make trip after desperate trip refilling their cups, while white adults — perhaps either out of shock at her audacity, or shame of their own inaction — looked on in silence.
“For years, various local KKK members railed against me, sometimes getting right in my face. In the hallways of my high school, the offspring of Klansmen often confronted me. But no one laid a hand on me. After the initial furor passed, my family never talked about it again, as if I had done something shameful that would be best forgotten. It wounded me for decades.” — Janie Forsyth McKinney
We may have never have heard of Janie Forsyth, were it not for Freedom Rider Hank Thomas mentioning the “little girl” to CBS journalist Ed Rabel in 1981. She didn’t do it for notoriety or to prove a point. She did it because it’s what God’s people are called to do, even if the eyes of the hive beat down on us, and even if that hive consists of our own family members.
It’s hard to know what acts history will remember, which courageous stands will make the difference, or even make the news. Many modern whistleblowers end up losing everything, wondering why they bothered.
They bothered because it matters, even if nobody else seems to notice.
In 1984, Janie Forsyth visited the deathbed of Pearl, a black woman who had done the lion’s share of raising her. Janie relates their final encounter in a 2021 Op-ed she wrote:
“I told her I thought my father, Richard Forsyth, had never forgiven me for helping the Freedom Riders. Pearl’s response was as magnificent and healing as it was unexpected.”
“No, that’s not right,” Pearl corrected her. “Mr. Richard told me he had never been prouder of you than he was that day.”
You never know how your courage today will affect the hearts of others — even the ones you never fathomed could be changed.
You can follow me on Telegram, Substack, Truth Social, GETTR, Gab, and X.
This is part VII of an ongoing series titled, The Bad Guys. Previous articles:
The Bad Guys: Part I, History.
The Bad Guys: Part II, Abortion…and Cobra Kai.
The Bad Guys: Part III, The Feds
The Bad Guys: Part IV, The GOP
The Bad Guys: Part V, Intelligence Agencies
The Bad Guys: Part VI, The Courts
If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting us with a paid subscription in the amount of your choice.
Or if you’d like to make a one time donation feel free to Buy Me A Coffee.
You can subscribe to receive new posts to your inbox for free, as well as get information on my upcoming books and projects.
Keep fighting.
If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy these as well: