Causes
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Freedom Riders were civil rights activist who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and following years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States supreme court decisions which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The riders were selected by members of the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE). CORE was a group started in 1942 by a group of Chicago students who wanted to practice non-violent protest for civil rights. The group trained the selected riders to learn how to protect themselves from attacks along the trip. Each rider understood the risk of being beaten, spit on, and attacked verbally. One of the most violent days of the trip happened when the first bus arrived in Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961. A mob of white people attacked the bus that carried the African-American riders. Attackers pelted the bus with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. When the second bus arrived in Anniston, KKK members boarded the bus and beat the black riders until they forced the riders to move to the back of the bus. The KKK members remained on the bus while it headed to Birmingham. When they arrived in Birmingham the Klan members beat the riders for 15 minutes while the police chief kept his officers away. As news of the non-violent protest spread, more and more people joined the effort and on September 22, 1961 the interstate Commerce Commission announced tougher regulations that eventually led to terminals being desegregated.
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The Freedom Rides inspired many African-Americans in the south to take immediate action for more civil rights. The impact is that this sparked an uproar for direct action on Civil Rights throughout the country. It showed the nation that the Southern state were ignoring the Federal Government which had ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. An example of how this can relate to current events is the "Hands up, don't shoot" protests originating from the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mississippi. Both events are protesting civil rights and racism in America.
Details
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- U.S. government officials sent more than 400 federal marshals to Montgomery to protect the Freedom Riders
- By the end of the 1961 summer, over 300 men and women were incarcerated in the Mississippi penitentiary alone
- When the Riders were injured, most local, southern Christian hospitals would not treat the wounded
- Unsure of what might happen to them, many of the Freedom Riders wrote out their wills or put notes in their clothing to help identify them if they were injured or killed.