Beyond the Burning Bus: The Civil Rights Revolution in a Southern Town

Anniston, Alabama, is a small industrial city between Birmingham and Atlanta. In 1961, the city’s potential for race-related violence was graphically revealed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a Freedom Riders bus. In response to that incident, a few black and white leaders in Anniston took a progressive view that desegregation was inevitable and that it was better to unite the community than to divide it. To that end, the city created a biracial Human Relations Council which set about to quietly dismantle Jim Crow segregation laws and customs. This was such a novel notion in George Wallace’s Alabama that President Kennedy phoned with congratulations. The Council did not prevent all disorder in Anniston―there was one death and the usual threats, crossburnings, and a widely publicized beating of two black ministers―yet Anniston was spared much of the civil rights bitterness that raged in other places in the turbulent mid-sixties. Author Phil Noble’s account is carefully researched but told from a personal viewpoint. It shows once again that the civil rights movement was not monolithic either for those who were in it or those who were opposed to it.

REVEREND JAMES PHILLIPS NOBLE (1922-2022) grew up in Learned, Mississippi. After graduating from King College in Bristol, Tennessee and Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, he was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He completed graduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Cambridge University in England. From 1956-1971, Noble was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Anniston, Alabama, where the events described in this book took place. Over his career, he also served pastorates in Georgia and South Carolina, the last of which was Charleston’s historic First (Scots) Presbyterian Church. Noble was also Co-President of the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church, USA. He has traveled extensively on six continents. Noble was married to Betty Pope Scott. They had three children (Betty, Phil, Jr., and Scott) and two grandchildren. He was retired and living in Decatur, Georgia at the time of his death. He was also the author of Getting Beyond Tragedy (2006).