jan 1, 1961 - Freedom Rides

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A series of multiracial sit-ins conducted on interstate bus lines throughout the South by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1961. An early and important civil rights protest.



Emboldened by SNCC’s sit-in tactics, in 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a kind of mobile sit-in on interstate bus lines throughout the South. These so-called Freedom Rides aimed to call attention to ongoing segregation in interstate commerce, which had recently been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The activists who signed on — mostly young, both black and white — knew that they were taking their lives in their hands. They found courage in song, belting out lyrics such as “I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line…. Hallelujah, I’m traveling down freedom’s main line!”

Courage was a necessity. Club-wielding Klansmen attacked the buses when they stopped in small towns. On May 14, 1961, outside Anniston, Alabama, a bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed, and fleeing passengers were brutally beaten. Freedom Riders and accompanying journalists encountered vicious attacks by Klansmen in Birmingham and Montgomery. Despite the violence, state authorities refused to intervene. “I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble rousers,” declared Governor John Patterson of Alabama.

As in Little Rock and other civil rights battlegrounds, the refusal of local officials to enforce laws left matters in the hands of the federal government. The new president, John F. Kennedy, had discouraged the Freedom Riders. Elected by a thin margin, Kennedy believed that he could not afford to lose the support of powerful southern senators and had failed to deliver on his campaign promise of a civil rights bill. But footage of savage beatings, broadcast on nightly television news, proved the tactical power of nonviolent protest. The nation and the wider world became witnesses, and public pressure goaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy, with his brother’s White House approval, to dispatch federal marshals to protect the riders.

From Central High School to the sit-ins to the Freedom Rides, activists had learned the tactical value of nonviolent protest that provoked violent white resistance: if white lawbreaking and violence did not prod local officials to act, federal officials could be forced to intervene, putting the national government on the side of black protesters. These victories were modest, but the groundwork had been laid for a civil rights offensive that would transform the nation. The NAACP’s legal strategy had undermined the legal edifice of segregation, and the emergence of a major protest movement shook it. Now civil rights leaders focused their attention on Congress.

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