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, cross burnings, 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.
"Phil Noble, Presbyterian minister extraordinaire, belongs to that odd company of folk-all the way back to Moses -- who found their life taken up in a struggle for the things of God. Like Moses and his ilk, Noble was going about his business (in his case ministry) when his immediate context, infused with God's purpose, put him front and center in the struggle for racial justice, a struggle he purs
Columbia Theological Seminary
"A compelling read."
National Federation of Priests' Councils Newsletter
"Beyond the Burning Bus is a welcome addition to American History with a focus on the civil rights era, and highly recommended."
The Midwest Book Review
"The story Rev. Phil Noble tells in Beyond the Burning Bus is engaging, in part because he was in the middle of the struggle. But he is also a truth-teller. In a time now of continued unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere over matters of racial justice and social systems that keep people down, Noble's book is a good reminder that although the U.S. has made progress since the 1950s and '60s, there is still much to do."
Bill Tammeus,
"In the early 60s, when black and white ministers reached out to each other, their voyage was anxiety-ridden-as if they had been astronauts. But they did, and Phil Noble was one of them. He tells a story of violent clashes between good and evil in 'the town that burned the bus.' His book is a page-turning rarity among civil rights histories - a success story."
