Freedom Rides

The Freedom Rides were a series of political protests against segregation during the American civil rights movement. Carried out by Black and white Americans who rode buses together through the Deep South in 1961, the rides exemplified civil rights organizations’ use of nonviolent, racially inclusive direct action to advance social change and racial equality. Organizers recognized that deliberate, peaceful violation of Jim Crow laws would provoke violent reactions from white Southerners, thereby attracting national media attention. The federal government would then be pressured into enforcing federal law and Supreme Court rulings—most notably, the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, which banned racial segregation in public transportation. More than 400 Freedom Riders participated in the rides between May and December 1961, and their actions led to one of the first examples of mass civil rights protest directly affecting federal policy.

U.S. Supreme Court rulings and origins of the Freedom Rides

In 1946 the NAACP won a 7–1 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Morgan v. Virginia, which found that segregation in interstate bus travel was unconstitutional under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. A year later the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), led by organization cofounder Bayard Rustin, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist human rights group, tested the ruling with the Journey of Reconciliation. The two organizations brought together an interracial group of 16 activists who traveled by bus through the Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky) but stopped short of the Deep South for fear of violence. The trip, which began on April 9, 1947, lasted two weeks and included 26 tests of segregated seating, resulting in multiple arrests and confrontations with white segregationists.

Although the Journey of Reconciliation did not result in any substantial changes in interstate travel, it did demonstrate the effectiveness of nonviolent action, laying the foundation for other coordinated, multiracial, nonviolent protests in the decades to follow, such as the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955 and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins in 1960. Building on these examples and responding to the Supreme Court’s 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, which extended the 1946 ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel, CORE again organized a group of riders to test the law. This time 13 riders—8 Black and 5 white Americans (including 21-year-old John Lewis)—left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, on a Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. (The plan was to arrive on May 17—the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the anti-segregation ruling that underpinned all subsequent legal decisions on integration.) At stops along the way, white riders used facilities designated for Black riders and vice versa. Convinced that segregationists in the South would violently protest this exercise of their constitutional right, the Freedom Riders hoped to force the federal government to enforce the Boynton decision.

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American civil rights movement Events

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Brown v. Board of Education

May 17, 1954

Montgomery bus boycott

December 5, 1955 - December 20, 1956

sit-in movement

1960 - 1961

Greensboro sit-in

February 1, 1960 - July 1960

Freedom Rides

May 4, 1961 - September 1961

March on Washington

August 28, 1963

Civil Rights Act

1964

Selma March

March 21, 1965 - March 25, 1965

Watts Riots of 1965

August 11, 1965 - August 16, 1965

Loving v. Virginia

June 12, 1967

Poor People’s Campaign

June 19, 1968

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Testing federal resolve and encountering violent resistance

As they had anticipated, the Freedom Riders encountered violence, first in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Lewis and others were attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and then, more severely, in Alabama. On Mother’s Day, May 14, when one bus stopped outside Anniston to change a slashed tire, it was firebombed and the Freedom Riders were beaten by a mob of over 100 people as they fled the burning bus.

Arriving in Birmingham, Alabama, the second bus was similarly attacked and the passengers beaten. In both cases law enforcement was conspicuously late in responding, and there were suspicions of collusion between Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene (“Bull”) Connor and the Klan in that late response. Members of Birmingham’s civil rights establishment, led by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) cofounder Fred Shuttlesworth, were on hand to assist the riders, pulling them from the bus and also attracting the wrath and attacks of the mob. The violence was so intense that CORE leader James Farmer called for an end to the rides, and the riders, unable to find a bus line to carry them farther, flew the rest of the way to New Orleans.

After the defeat of the first group of riders, a second group of 10, led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) cofounder and Nashville Student Movement organizer Diane Nash, renewed the effort. Nash, only 23 years old but already a movement veteran and a staunch believer in nonviolent resistance, was undeterred by the threat of violence, saying to Farmer, “We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.”

This second wave of riders took off from Nashville on May 17, destined for Jackson, Mississippi. They were arrested en route in Birmingham for violating segregation laws. Shuttlesworth was arrested on charges of conspiracy and disturbing the peace. Unbowed, he declared that more riders were prepared to come to Alabama “wave after wave, if necessary,” to force the integration of bus facilities. Another group of riders departed on May 20 and, at the behest of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, secured a bus and protection from the State Highway Patrol while traveling to Montgomery, Alabama. When they arrived in Montgomery, local police failed to protect them, and the riders were again beaten, along with reporters, photographers, and bystanders, including a Justice Department aide to Kennedy. Television cameras captured the violence and broadcast it nationwide.

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On May 21 the riders and more than 1,000 supporters gathered at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery to hear civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. (who, to the chagrin of many organizers, did not directly participate in the rides), speak in support of the actions of the riders. As a mob of thousands congregated outside, King asked those gathered inside to have faith in the role of government to enforce racial equality:

The law may not be able to make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me. The fact is that habits, if not the hearts, of men have been and are being changed every day by federal action.

The mob outside the church attacked with impunity those who tried to leave. Firebombs were thrown at the church. The violence led Kennedy, who had already sent federal marshals to provide protection for the Freedom Riders, to press Alabama Gov. John Patterson to employ the Alabama National Guard to maintain the peace. Patterson, who had resisted federal intervention in Alabama, relented late that evening, calling out the National Guard and declaring martial law in Montgomery.

Federal intervention

Thereafter National Guard support was provided for the rides, and violence was managed. Twenty-seven Freedom Riders continued on to Mississippi, only to be arrested and jailed, resulting in a new strategy: Fill the jails. Riders streamed into Jackson, were charged with breach of the peace, and were sent to the local jail. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett said, “We don’t want to break their bones. We only want to break their spirits.” Farmer would later report that 325 Freedom Riders went to jail in Mississippi.

And yet, in the county jails and in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison, organizing and training continued, strengthening and building the movement; James Lawson, the civil rights movement’s foremost teacher of nonviolent direct action, called the jail cells “universities of nonviolence.” This training and community-building prepared the young civil rights activists for the mass protests and organizing events—including the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, the Selma March, and the activities of the 1964 Freedom Summer—that would test their commitment to nonviolent direct action throughout the 1960s.

On May 29 Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to enforce its guidelines banning segregation in interstate travel; these were first issued in November 1955 following a challenge that relied on the decision in Brown. He asserted, “The time has come for this commission to declare unequivocally by regulation that a Negro passenger is free to travel the length and breadth of this country in the same manner as any other passenger.” In September the ICC extended its rules to cover terminal facilities in addition to buses and ordered that, beginning on November 1, 1961, interstate carriers must remove all segregated facilities and post signs affirming that “seating aboard this vehicle is without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin, by order of the Interstate Commerce Commission.”

Multiracial groups of Freedom Riders continued to travel in the South even after the dictate took effect. The Freedom Ride campaign ended in December 1961.

Following the path of the Freedom Rides: Map and timeline