The original group of Freedom Riders were made of 13 people. They traveled through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The first display of resistance towards the Freedom Riders was in South Carolina. Three riders were violently attacked for entering a whites-only waiting area, one of them a white World War II veteran. The further south these riders went, the worse the violence they faced. In Anniston, Alabama, 200 white people surrounded the bus. The bus was forced to continue driving past the bus station, and were followed by cars until the tires blew out. Someone then threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus, but once they were out, they were beaten by the mob. The original 13 could no longer continue their journey.
CORE called the Freedom Ride off, but their efforts were continued by the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They too rode to Alabama, to again be faced with violence. The government sent in U.S marshals to protect the riders. When Martin Luther King Jr. led a service in Montgomery, Alabama the next night, a riot ensued outside the church that led Governor Patterson of Alabama to declare martial law on the city. They were able to continue to Mississippi, and were faced with even MORE violence. Even with all the resistance and violence, the brave activists pursued their protest. By the end of 1961, more than 400 Freedom Riders were arrested.
The outcome of the Freedom Riders was worldwide recognition and attention to America's civil rights problem and eventually, regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals.
Bibliography:
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-rides
http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_546.html
I loved this article Tanshi! You clarified the build up of resistance that the freedom riders faced as they moved further into the South. I found it interesting that CORE stopped organizing Freedom Rides, but the younger group (SNCC) continued them. Something I found interesting is that a group of 10 students (participating in a Freedom Ride) were driven out of Birmingham by "Bull" O'Connor, the same man who would later be dismissed from his public office after the Birmingham Campaign, less than three years later. Another interesting note is that CORE had actually ran a Freedom Ride in 1947 --an interracial bus ride across state lines to test the newly published Supreme Court decision-- but had never garnered public/media attention until SNCC took them up in the 60s and they were photographed and televised.
ReplyDeletehttp://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_freedom_rides/
https://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/rides.html
Tanshi, I found this article very interesting and was particularly curious about the international response so I decided to research that a bit more. I found that the violence and arrests that ocurred during the rids continued to gain national and international attention, and drew hundreds of new Freedom Riders, both white and black to the cause. The rides continued over the next several months, and in the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals. Really that pressure from the Kennedy administration came from international pressure however.
ReplyDeleteSource: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-rides