Freedom rides

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Freedom Rider is also a song by Traffic

The Freedom Rides were a series of student political protests performed in 1961 as part of the US civil rights movement. Student volunteers, African-American and white, called Freedom Riders rode in interstate buses into the pro-segregationist U.S. South to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 that outlawed racial segregation in interstate public facilities, including bus stations. The rides were organized by activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as well as the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They followed on the heels of dramatic SIT-INS against segregation held by students and youth throughout the U.S. South the previous year.

The freedom rides began May 4, 1961, and were a protest set up by CORE as a comeback for one of the original protest groups. It was due to take a group of mixed black and white protesters from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans using public bus services. This route was to go through the Deep South and the worst areas of segregation and racism in America.

The names of the riders included James L. Farmer, William Mahoney, John Lewis, James Zwerg, James Peck, Frederick Leonard, Diane Nash, and William Sloan Coffin, among others totalling over 400. Three-fourths of the riders were under 30, mostly male and evenly divided between black and white.

Technically, the Riders were not engaging in civil disobedience since they had the clear legal right to disregard any segregation rules in the states they visited concerning interstate public facilities. However, the volunteers still had to use their doctrine of non-violent resistance in facing both mob violence and mass arrest by authorities who were determined to stop this protest. The Freedom riders faced much resistance to their cause but had support from leading figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr. during their protest in Alabama, and many other people.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government was criticized for not making a concerted effort to protect the riders. However, in Montgomery, Ralph Abernathy's church held a supporting rally for the freedom riders, and the only thing that prevented disaster when the building was mobbed was the intervention of the Federal Marshalls. Eventually, the publicity resulting from the rides and the violent reaction to them led to a stricter enforcement of the earlier Supreme Court decision.

The worst violence that occurred during the Freedom Rides was when the busses approached Birmingham, Alabama. At the time the Police chief, Eugene "Bull" Connor was allowing the continuance of racist attitudes to go unchecked. No protection was given to the protesters and one of the two busses was fire-bombed before reaching the city. When the other bus reached Birmingham City, the violence that it was greeted with left one of the protesters, Jim Zwerg, severly injured and temporarily disfigured. The rest of the Protesters were left feeling defeated and almost gave up until the intervention of the protest group SNCC (student non-violent coordinating committee), this student based group took over the organising and peopling of the protest and saw it through until it reached its final destination, New Orleans.

The activists in the campaign gained credibility among blacks in rural communities of the South, who were impressed by the riders' determination and heroism in the face of great danger. This credibility helped many of the subsequent Civil Rights campaigns, including campaigns for voter registration, freedom schools, and electoral campaigns.

There was one Freedom Ride prior to the famous ones; in 1947, Bayard Rustin and George Houser of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a Freedom Ride through the South following a Supreme Court ruling desegregating the buses themselves (though not the bus terminals) in interstate travel. One rider, James Peck, would also participate in the 1961 ride.

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