The Freedom Riders

Presentation by Robert L. MartinezPrimary Content Source: American Greats, edited by R. Wilson and S. Marcus.Images as cited.

The Freedom Riders challenged segregation in interstate bus terminals

across the South in the summer of 1961.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

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• Something was not right that morning of May 20, 1961. John Lewis sensed it the

moment he led the Freedom Riders into the Montgomery bus station.

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The terminal was deserted, save for a pack of reporters and a few figures loitering in

the shadows. There was no police presence at all.

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• Lewis’s intuition was accurate, just a little slow. He and his colleagues were

ambushed by a dozen white men armed with bats, bottles, and lengths of pipe.

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• Even the reporters were brutally beaten. John Seigenthaler, a Nashville newspaper editor working as a special observer for

Robert F. Kennedy and the Justice Department, was clubbed unconscious.

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John Lewis, a seminary student and future Georgia congressman, was knocked

unconscious.

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• Jim Zwerg, a white student from another country, was held down while his teeth were methodically knocked out with his

own suitcase.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

Six days earlier, outside Anniston, Alabama, a bus had been chased down by

fifty cars and firebombed and its passengers barley escaped with their lives.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

• Inside the city limits, white Anniston thugs swarmed aboard still another Freedom Rider bus, beating Riders mercilessly.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

• Nor did the terror end there. The demonstrators who escaped the buses were often arrested and imprisoned. Others were

denied first-aid at local hospitals.

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• On February 1, 1961, four students at all-black North Carolina A&T, in Greensboro, sat on stools at a Woolworth’s segregated

lunch counter.

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• In Nashville, a group of idealistic, religious, and determined individuals, led a months-long protest that brought down the city’s

public segregation laws.

http://www.life.com/Life/blackhistory/links.html

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• The protestors were the backbone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

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• They decided to make a living test in the Deep South, of whether the Supreme Court’s repeated decisions against

segregated federal facilities, were worth the paper they were written on.

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• Busloads of students put themselves on the line, enduring beatings, prison terms,

and humiliations, until the Kennedy administration, and finally much of the public, awakened and came to their aid.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

• Theirs was the first, mass, youth-led revolt of the 1960s. And though their movement would experience set-backs, the Freedom

Riders stayed in the saddle.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Society/freedom_rides/Freedom_Ride_DBF.htm

“We will continue our journey one way or another….We are prepared to die,”

- Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg

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