The Freedom Riders

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.

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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.


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.


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.


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


• 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.


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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.


• 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.


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

- Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg

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The Freedom Riders

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