Freedom Rides
Freedom Rides were a series of civil rights protests that began on May 4, 1961, organized primarily by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The initiative aimed to challenge segregation in interstate transportation following the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, which prohibited such practices. A diverse group of activists, both black and white, traveled by bus from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to expose the ongoing segregation that persisted in southern states. The journey faced violent resistance, particularly in Alabama, where riders were attacked and their buses firebombed.
Despite the violence and arrests, the Freedom Rides galvanized further participation in the civil rights movement, prompting many to join the cause and face similar hardships. The federal response, influenced by the public outcry and media coverage of the violence, ultimately led to the Interstate Commerce Commission issuing rules to outlaw segregation in interstate travel facilities by September 1961. The Freedom Rides highlighted the complexities of the struggle for civil rights, illustrating both the reliance on federal intervention and the determination of activists to fight against systemic racism.
Freedom Rides
Date: May 4-August, 1961
One of the most significant protests of the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Rides, which highlighted the continued segregation of interstate bus terminals throughout the South, were met with violence that caused much of the nation to support the riders’ cause.
Origins and History
James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial, northern-based civil rights group, conceived the idea for the Freedom Rides. Modeled on the Journey for Reconciliation, the 1947 project sponsored by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, Farmer’s plan called for an integrated group of civil rights activists to travel by bus from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana, as a means of testing southern compliance with Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Supreme Court’s ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation facilities. Farmer believed that by demonstrating that bus terminal waiting rooms, bathrooms, and restaurants remained segregated throughout the South, the rides would highlight southern defiance of federal law and prompt federal authorities to remedy the situation.
The Rides
On May 4, 1961, seven blacks and six whites divided into two interracial groups and boarded a Greyhound and a Trailways bus in Washington to begin their southern journey. The trip through Virginia and North Carolina was uneventful, but in South Carolina, white toughs attacked the riders in Rock Hill, and police arrested two of them in Winnsboro. Though they made it safely to Atlanta, Georgia, the situation worsened dramatically when they entered Alabama. Near Anniston, angry whites firebombed the Greyhound bus and beat the riders as they escaped from the burning vehicle. In Birmingham, a mob attacked those on the Trailways bus when it arrived at the terminal. Several riders were seriously injured, so CORE called off the rest of the journey.
Other civil rights activists, however, rushed to resume the rides, lest segregationists think that violence could derail the movement. Led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leading student civil rights organization, an integrated group of student activists converged on Birmingham. From Birmingham, the new riders traveled to Montgomery, where they were brutally assaulted by a mob awaiting them at the bus station. In the ensuing melee, John Lewis of SNCC suffered a concussion, James Zwerg, a white student from the University of Wisconsin, sustained spinal cord injuries, and John Seigenthaler, the administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was attacked as he tried to protect several riders.
The violence in Montgomery forced the John F. Kennedy administration to act. As the riders prepared to travel into Mississippi on May 24, the administration arranged for National Guardsmen to ensure their safe passage into the state. Determined to prevent another violent disturbance, Robert Kennedy consented to the riders’ arrest for violating segregationist ordinances in Jackson in exchange for assurances that state and local authorities would stop a white mob from forming at the terminal. As a result, the only white people on hand when the bus pulled into the station were National Guardsmen, state troopers, and city police officers. Local officials promptly arrested the twenty-seven Freedom Riders as they entered the whites-only areas of the terminal. Rather than paying fines, the activists chose to stay in jail to dramatize their opposition to segregationist laws. Subsequently, Farmer called for others to travel to Jackson to be arrested for trying to exercise their constitutional rights, and by the end of the summer of 1961, more than three hundred people, most of them African American southern students, had heeded his call and had spent time in Mississippi’s jails and prisons.
Impact
The threat of renewed violence and continued arrests in Jackson inspired the Kennedy administration to pressure the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue explicit rules outlawing segregation in interstate travel facilities, a step the commission took in September, 1961. For civil rights activists, the Freedom Rides revealed that the federal government was an unreliable partner in the struggle for African American equality. Although the rides made it clear that violent confrontations and national media attention would impel the federal government to act, they also showed that in the absence of such conditions, federal authorities would permit others to trample on African American rights. The Freedom Rides helped deepen the participants’ commitment to the Civil Rights movement and to each other. Beatings, arrests, and jailings strengthened the bonds between the activists and encouraged them to see themselves as the vanguard of the militant, direct-action wing of the movement.
Additional Information
Original CORE Freedom Rider James Peck published an account of his experience in Freedom Ride (1962), and Taylor Branch offered a lengthy discussion of the Freedom Rides in his magisterial Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988).