DR.

CATHERINE BURKS-BROOKS
Nashville to Montgomery Freedom Ride, May 17-21
Nashville to Jackson Freedom Ride, May 28

Catherine Burks was born near Selma, AL on October 8, 1939, and spent her youth in
Birmingham. From a very young age, she developed a sharp tongue, a critical eye, and a strong
sense of justice. She used these tools to speak out against the injustices of racism and
segregation. Her first acts of protest occurred when she was only 11 years old, while walking
down the Birmingham sidewalks. When white pedestrians approached from the opposite
direction, Catherine always refused to step out into the street to allow them to pass, defying
both local customs and city laws.
Catherine’s activism continued throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. Frustrated
with segregation on the city bus that she rode to high school, Catherine and her friends
removed the sign marking the back of the bus as “colored” and threw it out the bus window.
While attending Tennessee A&I (later renamed Tennessee State University), in between taking
classes and modeling for Jet magazine, Catherine joined the Nashville Student Movement and
participated in more organized protests like sit-ins and picket lines. Here, she struggled with the
philosophy of non-violence. In her own words: “It was touchy to have someone maybe push
you and to not push back… I was kind of used to pushing back, used to not stepping to the
side.”
When she joined the Freedom Rides in 1961 with other members of the Nashville Student
Movement, Catherine had the opportunity to put her commitment to nonviolence to the test.
The group of student Riders arrived in Birmingham on May 17, just three days after the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) group of Freedom Riders had been brutally beaten there. In
Birmingham, she and her fellow student Freedom Riders found themselves face-to-face with
the man whose name had already become a byword for racial segregation and white
supremacy: Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor.
Connor wasted no time in arresting the Freedom Riders and hauling them to jail for a night in
the cells, before loading them into squad cars and personally driving them out of the city.
Catherine found herself in the lead car with Connor. Never one to give in to intimidation, she
spent the drive chatting with him and even invited him to join the Freedom Riders for a meal
once they were back in Nashville. Instead, Connor opted to leave Catherine and her fellow
Freedom Riders by the side of the road at the state line in the middle of the night. Before he
drove away, Catherine promised him that the Freedom Riders would be back in Birmingham by
“High Noon”.
After Bull Connor’s unsuccessful attempt to stop them, the Freedom Riders made their way
back to Birmingham and continued to their next stop: Montgomery. Though they had been
promised protection in Alabama’s capitol, the city police were nowhere to be found when a
violent mob of several hundred angry white supremacists descended on the student Freedom
Riders at Montgomery’s Greyhound Bus Station (now Freedom Rides Museum) on May 21,
1961. When Catherine and six other female Riders attempted to hail a taxi to escape the attack,
the driver refused to take all of them—He could not legally take more than four passengers,
and as a Black driver, it was not legal for him to take unaccompanied white women in his cab.
Unwilling to take no for an answer, Catherine ordered the driver, “Give me the keys! I’ll drive!”
Though she escaped the worst of the violence in Montgomery, Catherine still faced dire
consequences for taking a stand against injustice. Though a senior on the cusp of graduation,
she was expelled from Tennessee A&I for taking part in an act of protest. Charged with “breach
of peace,” she, along with hundreds of other activists who joined the Rides that summer, spent
several weeks imprisoned in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm prison.
After the Freedom Rides, Catherine married her boyfriend and fellow Freedom Rider, Paul
Brooks. They returned to Mississippi in 1962 to continue fighting for justice. They participated
in voter registration efforts, and together were the co-editors of the Mississippi Free Press until
1963. Though they later separated, their work together was critical in laying the groundwork for
the Freedom Summer project of 1964.
After leaving Mississippi, Catherine worked as a social worker and an entrepreneur before
moving to the Bahamas in the 1970s. In 1979, she returned to Birmingham, AL, where she
served for many years as a substitute teacher in Birmingham City Schools. In 2008, Tennessee
State University awarded her the other expelled Freedom Riders an honorary doctorate. She
continued to share her story with many from around the world at the Freedom Rides Museum
in Montgomery and in other venues especially during the major anniversary of the Freedom
Rides.
Links below provide more information online about Dr. Catherine Burks-Brooks:
https://alabamanewscenter.com/2021/02/25/alabama-freedom-rider-catherine-burks-brooks-
recalls-her-civil-rights-journey/
https://19thnews.org/2021/06/freedom-rides-catherine-burks-brooks-voting-rights/
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2017/03/02/civil-rights-advocate-catherine-burks-
brooks-would-not-moved/98601036/
https://samepassage.org/catherine-burks-brooks/

Related Videos

https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-4m9183506h
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wieBK6sOMJs
https://weta.org/watch/shows/american-experience/american-experience-film-freedom-riders-
catherine-burks-brooks
http://bcriohp.org/items/show/54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGqlL1AmftM

Suggested Reading:

B. J. Hollars, The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 2018).

Eric Etheridge, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2008).

Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006).

Derek Charles Catsam, Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom
Rides (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).