03/27/2026
Bull Connor dumped Catherine Burks-Brooks on a dark Alabama road at 4 in the morning and told her to find her way back to Nashville.She yelled after his car: "I'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon."
She was back before three o'clock.
Catherine Burks-Brooks' mother used to tell people the same thing whenever they asked whether she had tried to stop her daughter from riding those buses into Alabama in 1961. Her answer was always the same.
"It wouldn't do any good," her mother said. "She came feet first."
Those words were not a complaint. They were a portrait of a woman who entered the world already moving in the direction she chose, and who never once changed course.
She was born on October 8, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in a city that spent decades trying to teach Black children to stay small. Birmingham had Bull Connor, church bombings, and the kind of structural violence that made itself invisible through repetition until it just felt like weather.
Catherine did not accept any of it as weather. By the time she enrolled at Tennessee A&I State University in Nashville, she had already been arrested multiple times for sit-ins in Birmingham and Nashville both.
She was twenty-one years old and battle-hardened, already clear about who she was and what she was willing to do. She had integrated lunch counters and bus stations, and had been organized through the Nashville Christian Movement under the influence of James Lawson, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and John Lewis.
In the spring of 1961, she was a senior at Tennessee A&I, nine days from graduation. She was sitting at a picnic with fellow student activists when word came through that the Congress of Racial Equality had suspended the Freedom Rides.
A mob had firebombed a bus outside Anniston, Alabama on May 14, trapping passengers inside while the doors were barricaded from outside. CORE could not find bus drivers willing to continue, and the original thirteen riders had flown to New Orleans.
The Nashville students did not need long to decide. The Freedom Rides had to continue, because if they collapsed under mob violence, the message to the South would be that violence worked.
The Supreme Court had ruled twice, in 1946 and again in its 1960 Boynton decision, that segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional. The South had simply refused to comply, and someone had to make that refusal costly.
Catherine's group organized quickly through the Central Committee, with Diane Nash as chairwoman that season. Their Nashville office stayed open twenty-four hours a day throughout the rides.
The group left Nashville by bus on the morning of May 17, 1961. Seated near the front, side by side, were Catherine's fellow student Paul Brooks, who was Black, and Jim Zwerg, who was white.
Bull Connor himself boarded the bus at the Birmingham city limits and ordered Brooks and Zwerg to separate, citing Alabama's segregation laws. They refused, and Connor arrested them both, then arrested everyone else on the bus as well.
That night, Connor loaded some of the students into three long black limousines and told them he was driving them back to Nashville. Catherine ended up in the center front seat of the lead car, with Bull Connor at the window beside her, and John Lewis, Lucretia Collins, and a reporter from the Birmingham News riding in the back.
For hours, through the Alabama night, Catherine talked to Connor, the way she talked to everyone, direct and entirely unimpressed. Connor spoke about the old South and brought up the 1948 Democratic convention, where Strom Thurmond had led the walkout to form the segregationist States Rights Party, and Catherine debated him.
She even invited Connor to breakfast when they got to Nashville, and he accepted, not meaning a word of it. She told him, "You know y'all were wrong."
At three or four in the morning, Connor stopped the cars in Ardmore, a tiny town at the Alabama-Tennessee state line. Police threw the students' luggage onto the road, and Connor pointed to a distant building and told them there was a train station where they could get back to Nashville.
As the limousines turned around, Catherine could not let it end on his terms. She shouted after him, drawing on the Western cowboy movies she loved, "I'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon, Bull."
The students walked toward the building Connor had pointed to and found a dark warehouse. There was no train station, almost no Black families in that town, and it was four in the morning on a rural Alabama road.
The fear was real, and Catherine said so honestly in later interviews. But fear had never once been the same thing as paralysis for her.
A Black family living nearby opened their door and took the students in. They called the Nashville office and Diane Nash answered.
A car was dispatched, and Catherine and Bill Harbour, both raised in Birmingham, navigated the back roads to avoid the main highway on the way back into the city. They rode low, not all sitting up at the same time, because they had heard on the radio that Connor was claiming they were on their way to Nashville, and they did not know who else might be watching the roads.
She was back in Birmingham before three o'clock that afternoon. Not by high noon, as she had promised, but close.
From Birmingham, the rides moved south to Montgomery, where a white mob attacked the riders at the bus station with clubs and fists and no police intervention. Catherine was there and described later what she saw, including women in the crowd, some with babies in their arms, screaming for the riders to be killed.
The Nash office had sent a driver ahead to have cabs waiting, and the men insisted the women board first. Catherine got out of Montgomery.
The rides then moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and Catherine was on that bus too. The Jackson riders were arrested en masse, charged with breach of peace, and sentenced to Parchman State Penitentiary, the most notorious prison farm in Mississippi, used deliberately to break civil rights workers through brutality and exhaustion.
When the Jackson police took Catherine's mug shot in 1961, they photographed a young woman looking directly into the camera. Her mouth was curved at the corner, not quite a smile, something closer to a smirk.
She was twenty-one years old, she was heading to Parchman, and she looked entirely unbothered by anyone's opinion about any of it. That photograph has traveled for more than sixty years and it still looks exactly the same way.
For participating in the Freedom Rides, Tennessee A&I expelled Catherine along with twelve other students. She had been nine days from graduation.
She fought the expulsion in court and won reinstatement. She completed her degree, and in 2008, Tennessee State University awarded her and the other expelled riders honorary doctorates.
She married Paul Brooks in August 1961, the man who had refused to separate from Jim Zwerg at the front of that Birmingham bus. They moved to Mississippi and registered voters together, co-editing the Mississippi Free Press from 1962 to 1963.
She taught elementary school in 1964 and worked as a social worker in Detroit in 1965 and 1966. She then lived in the Bahamas for nearly a decade, running a jewelry boutique specializing in African jewelry and clothing, before returning to Birmingham to keep teaching.
She told younger people what she had done and what they could do. "Whatever you see that needs to be fixed," she said, "then that's what you start concentrating on and find others who feel the same way."
That fall of 1961, under sustained pressure from the Freedom Rides and the international embarrassment they caused, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new rules mandating real desegregation in interstate bus terminals. The enforcement that the law had required for fifteen years finally existed.
Catherine Burks-Brooks died on July 3, 2023, at her home in Birmingham. She was eighty-three years old, and she died in the city that had tried its hardest to make her invisible.
There is a photograph taken at the Birmingham Greyhound station on May 17, 1961, before the limousines and Ardmore and the shouted promise at the state line. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth stands to the left, and seated on a bench are Charles Butler, Catherine Burks-Brooks, Lucretia Collins, and Salynn McCollum.
They are sitting in the white waiting room. They are sitting there because that is where the law said they had the right to sit, and they had decided to believe the law meant what it said.
She came into the world feet first, already in motion, already pointed toward what needed changing. The world, however slowly and violently and bitterly, was moved.
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