Freedom Riders

In 1960, the Supreme Court decided that people did not need to observe local segregation laws at bus stations when they were traveling from state to state. In 1961, an intrepid group of men and women, white and black, set out from Washington D.C. to test the Jim Crow laws in states throughout the South by traveling and eating together. This protest against racism provoked vicious attacks by angry mobs and arrests by racist police. Despite the violence—and pressure from the Kennedy Administration and even Martin Luther King, Jr.—the Freedom Riders stuck to their Gandhi-inspired principles of nonviolence and changed the world.
—DH