What is the significance of freedom rides

Those who could not refrain from striking back when pushed, hit, spit on or doused with liquids while racial epithets rang in their ears were rejected. As soon as he heard the call for riders, Robert Singleton remembers, he "was fired up and ready to go. Peter Ackerberg, a lawyer who now lives in Minneapolis, said that while he'd always talked a "big radical game," he had never acted on his convictions.

Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, "I was pretty scared," he told Etheridge. They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives. Vivian's] head and him shrieking; I don't think he ever said 'sir. John Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted.

While trying to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs. Less than two weeks later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some buses to prevent violence. When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used "colored" facilities.

Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Skip to content Skip to navigation. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Search form Search. Back to the King Encyclopedia. Freedom Rides. May 4, to December 16, Share this article on Facebook Share this article on Twitter. Footnotes Arsenault, Freedom Riders , Carson, In Struggle , Garrow, Bearing the Cross , Lewis, Walking with the Wind , Peck, Freedom Ride , Ross, Witnessing and Testifying , This entry is part of the following collection Civil Disobedience.

At the behest of the Kennedy Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued an order on November 1, banning segregation in all facilities under its jurisdiction. The following December, a group of freedom riders traveled by train from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia to test the ruling. The Rides also marked an unprecedented level of engagement with the federal government and the beginning of a personal rapport between Attorney General Robert F.

Kennedy and movement leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. The Rides were an escalation in a nonviolent war, and that escalation would only continue. Efforts such as the SCLC's successful Birmingham Campaign of , which curtailed segregation of public facilities in Bull Connor's Birmingham, AL and the SNCC and SCLC Selma to Montgomery Marches, calling for the passage of national voting rights legislation, used many of the same techniques as the Freedom Rides — pitting sympathetic activists including children, in the Birmingham campaign against violent segregationist foes while the world looked on.

But the greatest impact of the Rides may have been the people who came out of them.