...Christina Glenn Sociology 10:15 Mary Hewitt Extra Credit Freedom Riders Extra Credit On May 4, 1961 a group of seven blacks, and six whites from the group C.O.R.E. (Congress of Racial Equality) boarded two buses in Washington DC. They planned to travel to New Orleans, Louisiana with the intentions of testing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Boynton v. Virginia which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. The riders were a peaceful, loving group of people wanting to bring justice and freedom to the South. Initially, the riders encountered minor hostility. However, the deeper south they travelled, they were met with hostility. The police chief of Birmingham, Bull Connor saw the Freedom Ride as a challenge to his authority in the city. He ordered his officers to look the other way, while one bus of riders was severely beaten and the other bus was burned after being attacked by several dozen whites. Eventually, with the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department, most of CORE's Freedom Riders were evacuated from Birmingham, Alabama to New Orleans. The freedom riders played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. While Rosa Parks may have initiated equal rights back in 1955, the freedom riders took it to the next level. They brought racism in the United States to the attention of the entire world. When news of The Freedom Riders stories hit the newspapers, and airway, it showed other countries the injustices that were put on African-American...
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...A Freedom Rider De’Shunda L. Davis-Brown HIS/145 The American Experience Since 1945 December 15, 2014 Instructor: James Green Looking back to 1960 and 1961, I am reminded of a time of fear, despair, inequality as well as accomplishment. Being an African American was hard during those times, but, as an activist and active part of the change seen today in 2014, I am proud to say I was a tremendous part of the Civil Rights Movement. Patterned after a 1947 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) project known as the Journey of Reconciliation, the Freedom Rides began in early May with a single group of thirteen Riders recruited and trained by CORE’s national staff. We were a diverse group of volunteers, black and white, young and old, male and female, secular and religious, Northerners and Southerners (Arsenault, 2006). In 1960, the US Supreme Court expanded upon previous rulings and declared segregation in bus terminals, waiting rooms, restaurants, restrooms, and other interstate travel facilities unconstitutional. A year later, SNCC joined forces with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in an effort to test the will of local and federal officials to enforce the new legal decisions. Black and white “Freedom Riders” (as we called ourselves) traveled together on bus rides into the Deep South. During these rides, we challenged the government to protect participants from mobs of Klansmen (members of the Ku Klux Klan) and violent segregationists. In 1961 CORE undertook a new...
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...BBB Period N 18 March 2013 Freedom Riders Backlash The Freedom Riders strive through a journey of hardships to have their point accepted by others, which was bus desegregation. Through the journey the Freedom Rides took some obstacles that affected them physically and mentally. They fought threw times like the downfalls that their movement brought and the mobs that greeted them in every state. The mobs were verbally and physically violent towards the Freedom Riders more than a few times while their movement went on. The Freedom Riders went through a devastating downfall through their movement. In May of 1961, the Greyhound carried the Freedom Riders into South Carolina where, like Carson’s article “SNCC” describes, “…John Lewis was the first to be hit as he approached the white waiting room” (SNCC 1). This was a downfall because they were trapped and injured, not being able to move on in their movement. The “MLKJ Research and Education Institute” stated that, “[…] from the attack of Lewis and another rider, the arrest of one participant attracted media coverage.” (MLKJ 1). Their arrival in South Carolina brought an impact on their movement; it began to be shown from each state. As the Freedom Riders rode into Alabama, a furious mob crowded the Greyhound bus and sent it into flames without care for the people inside. The mob surrounded the bus and locked them inside. In Carmichael Stokleys “Freedom Riders”, she states that the Freedom Riders continued to fight for their...
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...Those of us who've been invited to participate in the first reunion on the fortieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides have been asked to write down our memories of the summer of 1961, as one part of an oral history project. Mine won't be typical, but that's alright. None of them will be, for we were a remarkably diverse group, the 300 or so of us who were arrested in Jackson in May-June of that year, convicted of "disturbing the peace", detained at the Hinds County Jail, and transported upstate to the maximum security facility at Parchman State Penitentiary to serve our six month sentences. South Carolina My road to Jackson probably began in December, 1960. Benjy Rosen, my roommate at Middlebury College in Vermont, had agreed to join me on a non-stop run to Florida for the first week of Christmas break. With the savings from a job on an oil rig the previous summer and a great deal of help from my Dad, who was a corporate executive in New York, I'd bought a new Morgan+4, a British racing car. We thought it'd be cool to use it as an airplane - straight to Florida from Vermont in 30 hours, a week in the sun, and back home to New York for Christmas. We got lost, of course, and found ourselves at a small filling station, surrounded by fields, on a back road in South Carolina. It was a two person operation - an older white man in overalls was the owner and watched us from the doorway of the station, and a young black man almost our age pumped the gas. Groggy from the overnight...
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...Diary of a Freedom Rider Headed to New Orleans In 1960 Diary of a Freedom Rider leaving Washington headed to New Orleans and what they had to endure during this very difficult and violent time, even though a law had been passed prohibiting segregation. In the spring of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored “freedom rides.” Groups of black and white travelers rode through the South deliberately entering segregated bus terminals and restaurants. Local mobs often attacked the “freedom riders. (Moss & Thomas, 2013) The CORE organized a dozen activists who were paired into two interracial sets of Freedom Riders which traveled by Greyhound and Trailways buses traveling from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana. The Freedom Riders left Washington on May 4, 1961 and traveled without any problems across Virginia and North Carolina. They began encountering violence for the first time at a bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, several white males beat black riders whom attempted to use a “whites only” restroom. The Freedom Riders continued their travels and crossed into Georgia without incident. The activists reached Alabama on May 14th and the attacks worsen, a mob met the Greyhound riders in Anniston, rocks were thrown and bus tires were slashed. The bus driver managed to drive the bus a few miles out of town. While the bus was stopped for repair of the tires, white supremacists firebombed the bus which ended that groups Freedom Ride. Freedom...
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...Freedom Riders John Smith HIS/145 September 17, 2014 Freedom Riders Journal entry December 12th 1961: It has been difficult living in the era that we do. Being an African American in Alabama is not the life I had envisioned for myself. The benefit of going to college, which is handed to white people, is often unobtainable for the black person. I have always known I was destined to do something more with my life. The Jim Crowe laws constantly remind me that I am not an equal to those around me. Last year 1960, the Supreme Court ruled that those very laws are illegal. Shortly after those rulings my sister took part in a sit-in at a drug store, which led to that store changing its policy. Later she met Ella Baker an SCLC activist and was invited to a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh in April 1960. That conference led to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That committee took nonviolent actions ever more forward by organizing freedom rides. This was a direct challenge of segregation on interstate busses as the Constitution protected interstate commerce. Inspired by my sister’s actions I have made up my mind to join those people. To stand up and stand out in order to see that discrimination comes to an end. There are some 400 freedom riders putting the Supreme Court ruling to the test. We often go in inter-racial teams from somewhere North in to the Segregated South. Essentially backed by Boynton v. Virginia, (1960) ruling that segregation...
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...On February 7, 1967 my journey started on the freedom ride. The events which took place in the past week were the worst experiences of my life. Until now I have not realized how unworthy my existence is to this world. I actually feel like I am nothing, I feel like a nobody I feel so worthless, actually who am I? I just sitting here right now and thinking to myself what has this country changed to. I am basically being treated in the non-human category. I have been discriminated against, been hurt physically, mentally and emotionally for being in my own country and practising my own religion, traditions and beliefs. On the first day on the freedom ride we headed off to Moree, In Moree we decided to address the segregation of the local swimming pool. Firstly we protested out the front of the council chambers. We then to took the Aboriginal children to the pool. The white people were angry and furious they had thought that we would bring diseases and infections by swimming in the same pool as them, but we insisted and we didn’t leave until we fulfilled our satisfactions. But obviously we didn’t enjoy the stay at the pools the white people were calling out offensive names to us and throwing pebbles at us and swearing at us but we had no choice. From my own memory I can just recall the white Australians saying “we don’t want these scary looking animal like creatures around us” I wanted to cry but I had to man up. Such humans like us aboriginals are being compared to animals. This...
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...The Freedom Rides in the U.S were one of the many events that further inspired Indigenous Australian activists and protesters to replicate events of their fellow activists in the U.S in Australia to bring equality to Indigenous Australian. . A major example of this are the Freedom Rides that took place in the segregated Southern States of the U.S that later took place in the rural state of NSW led by Charles Perkin and fellow student Jim Spiglem. He had led many peaceful protests around Australia for a push for recognition and equality for Indigenous Australians. Role of the media was a major one throughout the push for indigenous equality as well as for African Americans especially as the media gave large exposure of the injustices against the African-Americans and the Aborigines. This brought a big opportunity for the Indigenous Australians to surge in their cause for land rights and recognition of their ownership of the land. The freedom rides of the U.S were a enormous factor in bringing a push for activism, equality, recognition and peaceful protest for Indigenous Australians. This thesis will be further backed through the body paragraphs about the 1961 US Freedom Rides, the influence on Australian freedom rides and other peaceful protests and the influence on Aboriginal activism and Recognition. On May 4, 1961, a group of 13 African-American and white civil rights activists launched the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation...
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...railways was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court”) (Freedom Riders http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfreedomR.htm). In 1954 there was a similar judgment with inter-state buses. The Deep South kept their segregation policies involving whites sitting in the front of the bus, and blacks sitting closest to the front having to give up their seats to whites. African Americans were punished if they did not abide by the transport segregation policies. They were fined and arrested. Martin Luther King JR helped organize a protest against bus segregation after Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for not giving up her seat to a white man. This protest involved a bus boycott which involved African Americans not ride any bus unless it was integrated Martin Luther King JRs house was fire bombed he was arrested due to this protest and boycott. Anyone that was involved in this boycott was intimidated and harassed, but none of this stopped the boycott. The Montgomery bus company was forced by the Supreme Court to accept integration on their busses after the 13 month boycott. In 1961 The Congress of Racial Equality formed the Free Rides. The Freedom Riders which consist of black and white volunteers began their journey through the Deep South on May 4th, 1961 stopping at “white” only restaurants. On May 14th one of their buses was fired-bombed and the Freedom Riders were attacked by an angry mob. During the Freedom Riders travel through the South Attorney General Robert Kennedy and...
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...The members were influenced by Gandhian principles of nonviolence. The members used sit-ins as a form of protest against segregation. Sit-ins consisted of activist going to white-only spaces and refusing to leave. CORE organized many protest, but one of the most important was the freedom rides. There were thirteen...
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...Page 1- The Freedom Riders were a group of 7 African American people and 6 whites that protested against racial segregation. Most of the riders were college students and members of the CORE which stands for Congress of racial Equality. The CORE was founded in the early 1960s which focused on political idea of black national and separatism. Another great organization is the SNCC which stands for Student of Nonviolence Coordinating Committee. The SNCC was founded in April 1960 by young kids that were involved in the sit-ins that were beaten. Page-2 On May 4 1961 the freedom rides started in Washington DC and they also went through Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, New Orleans and Louisiana and through time they improved their numbers by having...
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...One of the many ways that we have freedom now is because of Martin Luther King Jr. African American. One of the ways african americans communities fought legal segregation was through direct action protest, such as boycotts sitting, and mass civil disobedience. The tactic of nonviolence civil disobedience in the civil right movement was deeply influenced by the model of Mohandas Gandhi, an indian lawyer who became a spiritual leader and lead a successful nonviolent resistance movement against the british colonial power in India. Gandha approached of nonviolent civil disobedience involved provoking authorities by bring it to an end. For its followers, this strategy involves a willingness to suffer and sacrifice oneself. In 1960, black college...
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...The freedom rides were started by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1961. The freedom rides were a major thrust to get movement of civil rights into the deep south. As stated by Derek Catsam in the video, “The idea of the freedom rides is a really radical idea, the idea of going into Mississippi and going into Alabama and channeling segregation so frontally and so aggressively in may ways is something that alarmed not those who apposed civil right but those within the civil rights community”. People in the deep south spoke with such hatred and belief that this way of life was not wrong. While watching the video I was so disgusted and I would cringe whenever the “N” word was said. Growing up in school we never heard of the actual lengths...
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...rights movement. We still remember them in many different ways such as a memorial or a holiday or even just in some articles, they still are just as important as one and another. Rosa Parks One very important leader is Rosa Parks. She was important in many different ways. One of the ways that is most memorable is when she sat in a bus and a white person wanted to sit there and she didn’t give it up when that was the law so she got a $10 fine. According to the the website, in2013dollars.com , “$10 in 1955 is $92.04 now.” By not giving up her seat she sparked in idea for people to boycott buses. The incident happened on December 1 and people started boycotting on December 5. The boycotts lasted for 381 days. 90% of African Americans did not ride the...
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...Charles Perkins was a very effective leader as he solved problems he identified. Effectiveness can be defined as the degree to which objectives are achieved and the extent to which targeted problems are solved. As Charles Perkins grew up he suffered racial discrimination and was generally treated as a second-class citizen to his peers. Due to this he collected a group of students and traveled around rural New South Wales to raise public awareness of the discrimination that Aboriginals faced, and to expose the discrepancies in living, education, health conditions and standards among the Aboriginal population. The Freedom Rides were conducted to bring attention to the racial discrimination that was rife in rural communities. Whilst on the ride...
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