A groundbreaking ceremony will be held next week in Alabama to commemorate the location where an iconic Freedom Riders bus was burned more than 50 years ago.

On May 14, 1961, on a trip designed to test a Supreme Court decision banning interstate bus segregation, seven members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) departed from Atlanta on a Greyhound bus. An angry white mob met the bus at a station in Anniston, Ala., where its tires were slashed and windows were shattered. The bus driver later stopped to change a tire and the bus was set on fire as passengers were attacked as they fled. Related attacks in Birmingham drew national and international headlines, leading to a crush of new Freedom Riders, many of whom were jailed.