Charles Person, the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Ala., in 1961 in an effort to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South — and who were nearly beaten to death for doing so — died on Wednesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 82.
His daughter Keisha Person said the cause was leukemia.
Mr. Person was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, when he first became involved in the civil rights movement, joining the thousands of students across the South who were marching against Jim Crow laws and sitting in at segregated lunch counters.
His first arrest, during a sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant, was in February 1961. When he returned to campus, he saw an ad from the Congress of Racial Equality looking for volunteers for a trip by commercial bus from Washington to New Orleans. Along the way, the ad said, they would test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in bus terminals that served interstate travelers.
Because of his age, Mr. Person had to obtain his father’s permission to apply. (His mother flatly refused.) He was accepted, and after training in nonviolent techniques, he and the others — six other Black riders, including the future congressman John Lewis, and six white ones — left from Washington’s Greyhound station aboard two buses.
Mr. Person was paired with an older white rider, James Peck. Their job was to enter the terminals so Mr. Person could try to use the white restroom while Mr. Peck entered the Black restroom. Then they would order food at the designated white and Black lunch counters.
Their first test, in Fredericksburg, Va., was uneventful, save for a few ugly stares from white people in the depot. But in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Person was almost arrested when he tried to have his shoes shined in a white part of the terminal.
Things became tense in Atlanta, the last major stop before Alabama. Several white men boarded and sat among the Black riders, who, against custom in the Jim Crow South, were seated throughout the bus instead of in the back.
The next stop was Anniston, a small town in western Alabama. The station was closed, but the driver stopped anyway. Another bus had been firebombed outside town, he said. If they wanted to proceed, the Black riders would have to move to the back.
When they refused, he left the bus. The white men who had boarded in Atlanta, members of the Ku Klux Klan, then viciously attacked the riders; both Mr. Person and Mr. Peck were knocked unconscious before being dragged to the rear.
“They threw us to the back of the bus,” Mr. Person said in a 2021 interview on the podcast “Book Dreams.” “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes.”
With racial hierarchy restored, the bus proceeded to Birmingham. It was Sunday, May 14 — Mother’s Day. A crowd of white people, including scores of Klansmen, awaited the riders.
They left the bus and gathered their bags. Mr. Peck and Mr. Person were supposed to be the first to enter the terminal. Mr. Peck, looking at Mr. Person’s bloodied face and shirt, hesitated. But Mr. Person said, “Let’s go.”
At first, the crowd inside the station thought Mr. Person had assaulted Mr. Peck. When Mr. Peck said the two of them were friends, several men pulled him into a hallway and began beating him with a pipe. Someone grabbed Mr. Person, too, but after a few minutes he was able to break away.
By then the station was engulfed in violence, with Klansmen setting upon riders with abandon. Mr. Person managed to catch a city bus, then made his way to the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leading figure in the city’s civil rights community.
Over the next few hours, more Freedom Riders, including Mr. Peck, made it to Mr. Shuttlesworth’s home. Most doctors did not want to treat them for fear of retribution, but they eventually found medical care.
They struggled to find another bus willing to take them to New Orleans. They finally boarded a plane. After a few days of speeches and meetings, Mr. Person flew back to Atlanta.
The first Freedom Ride was over, but others had already begun — some 400 people joined the campaign in total, many of them facing beatings and prison along the way. But it worked: On May 29, President John F. Kennedy’s administration ordered the desegregation of all interstate bus terminals.
“It really was the template for citizen politics in the 1960s,” said Ray Arsenault, the author of “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice” (2006). “A lot of what came after — the antiwar protests, the women’s movement — all drew on these ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
Charles Anthony Person was born on Sept. 27, 1942, in Atlanta. His father, Hugh, was a hospital orderly, and his mother, Ruby (Booker) Person, was a domestic worker.
A gifted math and science student, Charles was accepted to M.I.T. but, without a scholarship, could not afford to attend. He also applied to Georgia Tech, a public university, but was rejected because of his race. He enrolled at Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, with plans to become a nuclear engineer.
When he returned from the Freedom Rides, he told his mother he wanted to continue being part of the civil rights movement. She urged him try a different form of service by enlisting in the Army, which was a safer option at the time.
He joined the Marines instead. He served two years in Vietnam but spent most of his career at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, as an electronics expert. He retired in 1981.
Mr. Person married Jo Etta Mapp in 1986. Along with their daughter Keisha, she survives him, as do their other children, Cicely Person, Cammie Person, Carmelle Searcy and Brandon Swain; his siblings, Joyce Clark, Susan Person and Michael Person; and two grandchildren.
After returning to Atlanta, Mr. Person started his own electronics business and later worked in technical support for the city’s public schools.
He also became locally involved in civil rights activism. In 2022, he wrote “Buses Are a Comin’: Memoirs of a Freedom Rider” with Richard Rooker.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, he and Pete Conroy, who helped create a national monument around the Freedom Rides, founded the Freedom Riders Training Academy, which draws on the 1961 campaign to teach nonviolent protest.
“My sense is that he had very little ego,” Mr. Arsenault said. “He didn’t want to get any credit. But he never changed his ideals.”
