FBI Ordered to Pay Jim Peck $25,000 for Assault as Freedom Rider
Jim Peck, a long-time a pacifist and civil rights activist, was brutally beaten by racist attackers in the 1961 Freedom Rides (May 4, 1961) when the bus stopped in Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961. It was later revealed that the FBI knew in advance of the plan to attack the Freedom Riders but did nothing to prevent the attack.
Peck sued and, on this day, the FBI was ordered to pay him $25,000 in damages, for the assault, twenty-two years after the event.
Peck had been a conscientious objector during World War II and was sentenced to prison for refusing to cooperate with the draft. While in Danbury prison, he and other COs staged a hunger strike in protest of racial segregation in the prison (August 11, 1943; December 23, 1943). In 1947 he was a participant in the first freedom ride to desegregate bus transportation in the Deep South, the Journey of Reconciliation (April 9, 1947). He holds the distinction of being the only person to participate in both the 1947 and 1961 freedom rides.
Read Peck’s account of the Freedom Ride: James Peck, Freedom Ride (1962)
Watch an interview of the injured Jim Peck in 1961: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CuhV14w4pg
Read James Peck’s autobiography: James Peck, Underdogs and Upperdogs (1969)
Read about the Freedom Ride: Ray Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2006)
Learn more about race and the FBI: Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (1989)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here