The youngest of the Freedom Riders, Charles Person, has died at 82. Person was one of 13 original Freedom Riders who risked their lives, frequently coming under violent attack, as they traveled across the South at the height of the civil rights era to fight against segregated interstate bus services.

Charles Person was just 18, a freshman at Morehouse College, when he joined the Freedom Riders movement, boarding a New Orleans-bound Trailways bus in Washington on May 4, 1961. Though the original journey was cut short after the Freedom Riders were repeatedly brutalized, including by Klansman, it inspired hundreds of others to join the bus desegregation movement, ramping up political pressure on the Kennedy administration. Interstate buses and terminals were desegregated later that year in November.