Speaking up for the Freedom Riders

When James Bullington started the 1960-61 school year at Auburn University, he didn’t anticipate that it would be such a formative year in his life.

Bullington was part of the reporting team in November 1960 that first broke the story about an Auburn University public safety officer’s beating of a 67-year-old African American man. It was the first time the paper covered racial injustice since 1957 when Auburn University censored another student reporter for writing an editorial opposing segregation.

Bullington became the editor of The Plainsman in May 1961 and two weeks into Bullington’s term, Alabama state troopers watched as klansmen and white mobs attacked the 14 Black and white Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, with chains, bats and brass knuckles and bombed their bus, an event covered in front page headlines around the world.

Bullington was incensed and penned an editorial, “A Choice — Reality or Anarchy,” which ran on the front page of the May 24, 1961, edition of The Plainsman. In it, Bullington criticized the white supremacists who engaged in or stood by watching the violence against unarmed Freedom Riders.

After the editorial came out, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross at Bullington’s residence, students hurled racial epithets, and university officials reprimanded him.

Bullington held firm, continuing as the paper’s editor over the next academic year, ignoring censorship threats, and parlaying that experience to gain entrance into the U.S. Foreign Service after his graduation in 1962.

For the next nearly 30 years, Bullington led a successful career as a U.S. Foreign Service officer with stints as ambassador to Burundi, and diplomatic posts in Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Chad and Benin.

On the upcoming 65th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, Bullington has no regrets about his editorial. In fact, he believes it was a “life-changing” experience that set him on a course of serving all over the world as a U.S. diplomat.

Early Days

James Bullington was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and spent his early years there before his family moved to north Alabama near Huntsville.

In his memoir, Global Adventures on Less-Travelled Roads, he recalls his childhood in a working class family with limited opportunities.

From his first job at age 11 as a newspaper boy for the Chattanooga News-Free Press, Bullington always held a job. He was also a good student and a voracious reader.

No one in Bullington’s family had attended college and he knew he didn’t have funds to attend.

“We didn’t have any money,” Bullington said in an interview at his home in September 2025. “No way my parents could have sent me to school even though my grades were good.”

He applied anyway, figuring that it could work out financially for him by using a co-op program. That meant six months of school and six months of work in order to pay his way through school.

He looked at several schools with co-op programs and selected Auburn University as he really liked the atmosphere and the small college-town campus.

“I felt more at home at Auburn,” Bullington said. “I immediately chose it and that was one of the best decisions of my life.”

Bullington’s childhood illnesses — asthma and polio — limited his participation in athletic events. That’s what gave Bullington the impetus to become a reporter. He couldn’t play on the field yet he loved sports.

“If I can’t play it, maybe I’ll write about it,” Bullington said.

Studying chemical engineering and English, Bullington reported for the student newspaper starting as a sports writer.

Halfway through his college career, he ditched the co-op program and took a part-time job writing for the University News Bureau to pay tuition.

He found he loved writing and ran for the position of editor of the student newspaper, The Plainsman, for the 1961-1962 school year. The Plainsman’s office was located in the same building as the Lee County Bulletin, founded and directed by prominent journalist Neil O. Davis, who served as an unofficial mentor to Bullington and other student journalists.

“That’s where I spent most of my time,” Bullington said about the years he spent at Auburn.

When The Plainsman’s then editor Jim Phillips took leave from Auburn in May 1961 due to health issues, Bullington became editor months earlier than he’d planned.

Two weeks later, Ku Klux Klansmen and their sympathizers firebombed the Freedom Riders bus, nearly killing the 13 riders.

“I found them appalling,” Bullington wrote in his memoir about the mob attacks on the Freedom Riders.

The Freedom Rides and the Freedom Riders

The Freedom Rides were the dream of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, the name derived to signify that the organization would be at the “center of things, the heart of the action,” according to James Farmer, CORE’s director and one of the founders.

CORE organized the first ride, the Journey of Reconciliation, in 1947 in the Upper South.

Fourteen years later, CORE organized a second ride, using “Freedom” rather than “Reconciliation” to describe their actions because “such a name would be out of touch with the scrappy nonviolent movement that had emerged,” according to Farmer in his autobiography.

Impatient with the slow pace of the new Kennedy Administration’s actions, Congress’ inaction on civil rights legislation, and endless lawsuits over civil rights matters, CORE members believed in direct action and confrontation in a non-violent manner in the locations where the segregationists were most active. They purposely took actions to garner media coverage to demonstrate the illegitimacy of Jim Crow laws and segregation to the rest of the country.

CORE’s goal for the 1961 Freedom Rides was to challenge states that weren’t implementing the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on interstate travel and planned to start in early May and end two weeks later.

After the first 10 days driving south, the initial 13 Freedom Riders continued toward Alabama in two buses, ignoring warnings that they would never make it through Alabama.

On one bus, just before the first bus entered Alabama, roughly a half dozen white men got on the bus.

“You n—- will be taken care of when we get to Alabama,” one of the men said using a racial epithet to the half dozen Freedom Riders who were Black.

At one point, the bus driver stopped the bus and told the Black riders to get off the bus.

After the Black riders refused to de-board, the white men who’d boarded used chains, pistols, blackjacks and brass knuckles to beat the Black Freedom Riders and threw them into the back of the bus.

On the second bus that stopped in Anniston on Mother’s Day 1961, white mobs slashed the bus tires with knives. The bus left the station and when the tires blew out, mobs surrounded the bus, held the doors closed and threw a firebomb into the bus, setting it ablaze.

A reporter snapped a photo of the burning bus, one of the most iconic photos of the modern Civil Rights Movement, published on the front page of newspapers across the globe.

The Freedom Riders narrowly escaped with their lives, transported away from the danger by Birmingham’s civil rights leader, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and his followers.

Of the initial riders, some made it to New Orleans by plane the day before the Brown v. Board anniversary, and other riders arrived three days later.

Inspired by that first group, more than 400 Freedom Riders would ultimately participate, with fresh groups joining at various points, continuing the Freedom Rides until the end of 1961.

The editorial

Incensed by what he saw all over the news, Bullington decided to write an editorial in support of the Freedom Riders despite the fact that he knew there was no support for them at Auburn University.

Bullington was most upset by “seeing the Alabama State Troopers standing there and looking on… almost approvingly. They certainly didn’t do anything about it. They just stood there while all of that was going on.”

Bullington recalls reading Harper Lee’s recently published book, To Kill a Mockingbird, his “civil rights epiphany.” Lee’s book profiled a fictional case based on true-life events in her childhood about the wrongful prosecution of an African American man for the alleged rape of a white woman.

“I took a six-pack of Blue Ribbon to The Plainsman office,” Bullington wrote in his memoir about the night he penned the editorial on May 22, 1961.

In his editorial, “A Choice — Reality or Anarchy,” Bullington called out the ignorance and lawlessness of the people who attacked the Freedom Riders, as well as the people who silently stood by with an “ostrich-like attitude” or who were part of the culture of white supremacy that denigrated Black people.

Bullington wrote that “outside agitators” — a favorite phrase of white southerners — did not cause the violence and that the Freedom Riders themselves were not to blame, especially as they were unarmed and committed to non-violence.

“They do not strike back when attacked or return curse for curse and hate for hate,” Bullington wrote about the Freedom Riders.

Bullington was direct about who he believed was responsible for the violence and maintaining segregation.

“The blame must lie squarely on the shoulders of the white supremacist bigots of the state of Alabama and the people who actively or tacitly help them,” Bullington stated in his memoir.

As the newspaper’s editor, Bullington decided to place the editorial on the front page, above the fold. He sent the paper to print the afternoon of May 23, 1961, for publication on the next day.

However, copies of the paper leaked out. Bullington still doesn’t know exactly how. But he believes that some of the printing press staff provided copies to local members of the Ku Klux Klan after the paper was published after midnight.

Reaction

Bullington awoke early on May 24, 1961, to a 10-foot-high burning cross on the front lawn of the fraternity house where he resided. The dean of student affairs, police, neighbors and fraternity brothers came to see the burning cross, a hallmark of the Ku Klux Klan.

“It was a method of intimidation,” Bullington said. “You do this again and you will be on this cross.”

The cross burning “made for a very bright fire,” Bullington said and “dramatically increased the readership of the editorial because then everybody wanted to read it.”

University and state officials reacted immediately to the editorial.

Auburn University President Ralph Draughon hauled Bullington into his office and told him that he had “poor judgement” and was an “irresponsible radical.”

“He was giving me unshirted hell about it,” Bullington said.

“You really pissed off the governor,” Draughon told Bullington. Bullington never heard directly from Governor John Patterson, but he did read the governor’s statements of disapproval in the press.

“He did not make a secret of his attitude,” Bullington said about Patterson’s views on the editorial. Patterson even threatened to cut off Auburn’s state funding but ultimately did not.

An Alabama state legislative committee modeled after the U.S. House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee also condemned Bullington’s editorial.

Draughon threatened Bullington with expulsion.

However, when the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, sent a telegram to Draughon implying that the AAUP might need to “review Auburn’s accreditation if they did anything to that brave, young newspaper editor,” Bullington said, the university took no further action against him.

On campus, students yelled racial epithets at Bullington as he walked to classes that day.

“Everywhere I went I was cursed, confronted, and threatened with violence by angry students,” Bullington wrote in his memoir.

“One group of students had gathered a bunch of copies of the newspaper and made an effigy of me,” Bullington said. “They were burning the newspapers and me in effigy as I walked across the campus.”

“Initially, I think the editorial stunned everybody,” Jim Phillips, previous editor of The Plainsman, said. “Frontal attacks on segregation just didn’t happen at Auburn.”

Several weeks later, on June 5, 1960, Auburn University’s Board of Trustees issued a statement that all future editorials would have to be approved before publication by university officials.

The following week, the Associated Press published a story, “Auburn Paper Losing Freedom?” about the Bullington editorial and the fallout from it.

“That was the first time that a Deep South student newspaper had advocated for integration,” Bullington said.

In Chattanooga, the local paper ran the story. Bullington said that his parents started receiving “nasty phone calls” from people yelling racial epithets at them.

Aftermath

Bullington wrote in his memoir that he didn’t think about the possible consequences of writing the editorial. Nor did he expect the reaction that he got from other students. He wasn’t afraid either.

“I had not really thought about the consequences when I was writing the editorial,” Bullington said. “Besides at 20 you are invulnerable. You can’t be hurt. I wasn’t afraid. I should have been, damn well should have been. But I just didn’t feel that.”

Bullington couldn’t believe that the reaction was so negative, not anticipating the cross burning and the national headlines from the AP story.

Several student journalists at The Plainsman supported him and some faculty.

“It would have been in single digits,” Bullington said about the number of other students that supported him.

He recalls hearing from one of the local church ministers who called him to congratulate him on the editorial.

In fact, with such little support, Bullington dug in more to his stance against segregation, stating that, “before long, I came to relish my new-found notoriety.”

Eventually, Bullington felt he was on the right side of morality and history.

Bullington went home for the summer to work for The Chattanooga Times. A summer editor, Noel Leon, took over The Plainsman.

Bullington returned to Auburn in the fall and continued to serve as editor of The Plainsman and “continued to publish commentary supporting civil rights.”

“They thought I could be intimidated enough that I would comply with the censorship requirement,” Bullington said.

Ignoring the university trustees’ edict, Bullington said that he “never submitted anything for censorship.”

University officials ultimately did not push back on Bullington.

“They knew damn well he was fearless enough to go to the press if they persisted,” Phillips said.

The following December, Bullington drove to Montgomery to take the all-day Foreign Service Officer Test, offered only once a year. He had limited hopes of getting into the elite ranks of the foreign service, full of wealthy Ivy Leaguers.

Five months later, Bullington took his first airplane ride ever, from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. for a follow up in-person interview where his editorial featured prominently.

“This was the subject of a substantial part of the interview,” Bullington wrote. “I suspect this experience and my discussion of it were decisive in the panel’s deliberations.”

That same day, Foreign Service interviewers told Bullington he’d passed and would be invited to join the Foreign Service, the youngest member of his class and one of the very few selected who was not from an Ivy League university.

“I laid claim to being that year’s token redneck,” Bullington wrote in his memoir.

Initially Bullington’s career seemed stalled. Rather than a plum assignment in some other part of the world, the Foreign Service assigned Bullington to a desk at the State Department in Washington, D.C. for two years.

He felt disappointed, writing that “I didn’t join the Foreign Service to live in Washington.”

After the rest of his classmates went overseas for their assignments, he felt alone until two good friends from The Auburn Plainsman — Jim Phillips and Bobby Boettcher — joined him as roommates and at the 1963 March on Washington, holding “Alabamans for Jobs and Freedom” signs and garnering some “curious looks” from other marchers.

“Hearing King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech live,” Bullington said, was “one of my most memorable experiences even though at the time I didn’t fully recognize its historic significance.”

Finally, the U.S. State Department sent Bullington overseas to Vietnam in July 1965, where he eventually met and married Tuey-Cam. The newlyweds narrowly escaped Vietnam during the Battle of Hue in 1968.

For the next two and a half decades, Bullington served tours of duties in Thailand, Burma, Chad and Benin, and a stint as the ambassador to Burundi.

Reflections

Bullington has no regrets about writing the editorial about the Freedom Riders; It was “life-changing” for him.

Fellow classmate Jim Phillips admired Bullington for his actions in writing the editorial, stating that it took “utter fearlessness and extreme self-confidence in Jim’s ability to pull off an important act in the face of extreme danger.”

Nearly 20 years after that seminal year, Bullington had a chance encounter at the Army War College to greet former Governor Patterson.

“So you’re the son-of-a-bitch that wrote that editorial!” Patterson exclaimed, pointing a finger at Bullington after he introduced himself.

Retired from the foreign service, Bullington lives with his wife in a retirement community in Williamsburg, Virginia.

From a near expulsion by Auburn University’s president in 1961, more than 60 years later, Auburn’s alumni association awarded Bullington with its highest honor, Auburn’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award.