Let Them Burn - May 14, 1961

On Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama while the FBI watched, and local police honored a deal they had struck with the Ku Klux Klan. The standard story tells us this was tragedy that galvanized a movement. The fuller story is more unsettling: CORE sent those riders south knowing violence was likely, because they needed the photographs. This episode explores the collision of courage, cold strategy, and political calculation that made the burning bus one of the most consequential images in American history.