Colored and would eat together at segregated lunch counters to defy local laws. (6) Initially, the Freedom Riders had encountered only minor clashes until a stop in South Carolina. In Rock Hill, an angry mob severely beat John Lewis, late Congressman from the 5th District of Georgia, when he entered the bus station. Henry Hank Thomas was jailed when he entered the bus station in Winnsboro. Authorities delivered him to a waiting mob long after the station had closed that evening. A local Black minister rescued Thomas, enabling him to rejoin the group in Columbia. However, Lewis was so badly beaten he could not continue the Freedom Rides. (7) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders met with the group in Atlanta to dissuade their continuance through the Deep South due to death threats. Despite these warnings, more Freedom Riders joined in Atlanta. Dedicated to their mission to end segregation in the South and trained in nonviolent movements, the Freedom Riders continued on their journey. (8) On Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961, the Freedom Riders were on two different buses. An angry mob in Anniston, Alabama, firebombed the first bus. When the Freedom Riders rushed out, still choking from the thick smoke of the burning bus, the waiting angry mob beat them with lead pipes and baseball bats as the bus exploded. Ambulances refused to transport the Black Freedom Riders to the hospital. The mob beat the Freedom Riders on the second bus and forced them to sit in the back. As they journeyed to Birmingham, another mob savagely beat the Freedom Riders. (9) The Nashville (TN) Student Group, a local group of students who had been successful in desegregating the lunch counters and movie theaters in Nashville (TN), vowed not to let these acts of violence curtail the goal of the Freedom Rides. They sent their members to continue the Freedom Rides and called out to other student groups to do the same. (10) As the violence grew, the Attorney General of the United States called in the National Guard and the U.S.