Home / Full timeline / Walter Bergman, an eighty-four-year-old former Freedom Rider who was beaten by Ku Klux Klansmen at an Alabama bus station in 1961, is awarded $50,000 by a U.S. District court judgement.
Walter Bergman, an eighty-four-year-old former Freedom Rider who was beaten by Ku Klux Klansmen at an Alabama bus station in 1961, is awarded $50,000 by a U.S. District court judgement.
1984 (Feb 7)
United States District Court Judge Richard Enslen in Kalamazoo, Michigan, awarded a judgement of $50,000 to Walter Bergman, an eighty-four-year-old former Freedom Rider who was beaten by Ku Klux Klansmen at an Alabama bus station in 1961. On May 31, 1983, Judge Enslen had decided that there was a “preponderance of evidence" to indicate that the FBI knew the Klan planned to attack Bergman and other Freedom Riders as they rode through Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, during the height of the civil rights movement. The Bureau, he added, "had specific information” that the Klan "would be given free reign” by police in the two cities "to attack the Freedom Riders." Thus, he ruled, it could be sued for damages. At the time of Judge Enslen's decision, Bergman, a former Wayne State University professor from Grand Rapids, was confined to a wheelchair from injuries suffered in the 1961 attack. He had asked for $2 million from the FBI for himself and the estate of his late wife, Frances.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.