FREEDOM DRIVER

“If they were going to die,
I was going to die with them”

JIMMY ALLEN RUTH, the Tennessee Trailways bus driver who, in 1961, braved the Ku Klux Klan and racist lawmen to carry civil rights movement “Freedom Riders” deep into the American south to challenge racial segregation, died on June 2 at the age of 83 in Bartlett, Tennessee.

Ruth, who was white, began commercial bus driving after graduating from Chester County High School in 1956.

Ruth considered his job driving Freedom Riders from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi his life’s greatest accomplishment.

Ruth, then 23, took the risk of driving the bus when no one else would, after racists in Alabama had attacked the first Freedom Riders bus, a Greyhound en route from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana.

After the Birmingham attack, no more bus drivers could be found.

After the vicious attacks in Alabama, to dare to drive an integrated bus through Mississippi—the deepest of the Deep South—took enormous courage. “[E]very Trailways driver turned down the job except Ruth,” a family obituary noted.

“He agreed to drive the students and never asked any questions although he was aware of the risks involved. Ruth was willing to aid in the cause for freedom and justice at all cost.”

The freedom riders bus, escorted by National Guard troops, arrived without incident.

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