Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of articles commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Riders.

Sixty years ago, in the middle of the night, a limousine arrived at the Alabama-Tennessee state line. Inside were several students who had attempted to ride a bus from Nashville to New Orleans.

They’d made it from Nashville and through Limestone County without incident — the Alabama Courier even published a front-page story about how quiet and hardly noticeable they were during a rest stop in Athens — but when they got to Birmingham, they were arrested. Police said it was “for their own protection.”

That night, the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, visited them at the Birmingham City Jail. According to one of the students, Catherine Burks-Brooks, Connor said he would take them back to Nashville.

They chatted on the way back. She invited him to breakfast when they got there; he accepted. He asked what she thought of the limousine; she tried not to let it show that it was her first time ever being in one. They talked about Dixiecrats, a group of Southern conservatives who supported racial separation and had formed their own political party.

“Bull and I had a conversation off and on for the whole trip,” Burks-Brooks said.

She said it was like a conversation between an uncle and niece or father and daughter. There were two reporters from the Birmingham News in the limousine, and their description of the ride was included in an Associated Press article that ran in the May 19, 1961, edition of the Decatur Daily.

“There were no incidents during the trip,” the article reads. “The students quoted Biblical verse, sang hymns, and slept while en route to the North Alabama border town.”

But, Burks-Brooks said, they didn’t know they were stopping there. And when they did, Connor said they were being dropped off at a train station.

“He was playing us all along,” she said. “… That was no train station. It was a warehouse.”

They were seven Black college students, part of a group of 10 that had tried to ride the bus and prove public transportation wasn’t being integrated the way federal courts had said it should be, members of an even larger group known as the Congress of Racial Equality and the “Freedom Riders.”

Two other groups of Riders had been attacked earlier that week. Racist mobs had firebombed a bus in Anniston and beaten Riders in Birmingham, the latter on a promise from Connor that the racists would get 15–20 minutes to attack Riders without police intervention.

Now her group was alone in Ardmore.

Finding shelter

“When we got up there and realized it was not a train station and no one was in that building, … we had a meeting,” Burks-Brooks said, adding the students had lots of meetings as part of their training to make group decisions.

They decided they would search for a Black family or neighborhood. A few of the guys in the group tried to find one but couldn’t.

“We walked down the tracks then,” Burks-Brooks said. “I remembered what my momma had said: When you see some homes on the railroad tracks, the Blacks usually live on one side and the whites were on the other side, and the Black homes were usually worse than the whites’.”

The group found just that. Houses along the railroad tracks, with homes on one side appearing considerably worse than the other.

“The first one we knocked on was a Black family,” she said, but the man of the house would not let them in, fearing what would happen if he was caught helping Freedom Riders.

That’s when Burks-Brooks’ mother was proven right a second time. Burks-Brooks recalled her mother advising her to “always talk to the lady of the house.”

“I said softly to the others, ‘Let’s talk loud and wake up his wife,'” she said. It worked. “I can almost hear her saying to this day, ‘Let them children in this house.'”

Inside, Burks-Brooks went to a bedroom and called Diane Nash, chairperson of the student movement. She said she told Nash about the night’s events and that they wanted a car to get back to Birmingham.

“(Bull) thought we were on our way back to Nashville,” Burks-Brooks said. “He had called (U.S. Attorney General) Robert Kennedy and told him that we were on the way back to Nashville. And we were on our way back to Birmingham.”

Leaving Ardmore

One can only imagine what would have happened to the group had the family, whose identity remains largely unknown, not opened their doors that night.

Next to the AP article, the Decatur Daily ran a brief noting the mayors of Ardmore, Alabama, and Ardmore, Tennessee, had no idea the group was brought to the town. Ira “Rooster” Smith, who served as the policeman for both sides of Ardmore, told the newspaper he also had no idea they were there.

At the bus station, manager Tinnie Ledsoe said a driver told her he had been notified the Freedom Riders were “out somewhere on the highway with expectations of getting on another bus” and he “had been warned not to pick them up because of the previous trouble.”

That bus stopped in Athens about an hour after Ardmore, and the Decatur Daily reported there were no Freedom Riders on the bus at either location.

Instead, Burks-Brooks and her fellow Riders had successfully obtained a car. One of the guys was from the area, so he knew which back roads to take to get back to Birmingham, and she knew which streets would get them back to the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s house.

They weren’t sure if authorities were looking for them, but Shuttlesworth knew they were on the way, and the Freedom Riders intended to complete their journey.