This is an accepted version of this page CORE members SNCC and Nashville Student Movement members Governors City of Birmingham Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.

In some localities, such as Birmingham, Alabama, the police cooperated with Ku Klux Klan chapters and other white people opposing the actions, and allowed mobs to attack the riders.

Like the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Journey of Reconciliation was intended to test an earlier Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel.

Rustin, Igal Roodenko, Joe Felmet and Andrew Johnnson, were arrested and sentenced to serve on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating local Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation.

Led by CORE Director James Farmer, 13 young riders (seven black, six white, including but not limited to John Lewis (21), Genevieve Hughes (28), Mae Frances Moultrie, Joseph Perkins, Charles Person (18), Ivor Moore,[8] William E. Harbour (19), Joan Trumpauer Mullholland (19), and Ed Blankenheim),[9] left Washington, DC, on Greyhound (from the Greyhound Terminal) and Trailways buses.

Bayard Rustin and George Houser, who were part of a civil rights organization called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), came up with a plan to test whether southern long-distance buses were following a 1946 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited segregation on interstate travel.

The Alabama attacks, coupled with the Mississippi arrests, inspired multiple small bands of civil rights supporters from all over the continental United States to head southward too," explains Arsenault.

They assured Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informer[14] and member of Eastview Klavern #13 (the most violent Klan group in Alabama), that the mob would have fifteen minutes to attack the Freedom Riders without any arrests being made.

Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank[16] or an undercover state investigator who was brandishing a revolver caused the mob to retreat, and the riders escaped the bus.

However, fourteen years later, he faced a hostile group of white men in sports shirts, who carried lead pipes hidden in paper bags.

[21] When reports of the bus burning and beatings reached the U.S. Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, he urged restraint on the part of Freedom Riders and sent an assistant, John Seigenthaler, to Alabama to try to calm the situation.

[15] Upon arriving in New Orleans, local tensions prevented normal accommodations—after which Norman C. Francis, president of Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA), decided to house them on campus in secret at St Michael's Hall, a dormitory.

After direct intervention by Byron White of the Attorney General's office, Alabama Governor John Patterson reluctantly promised to protect the bus from KKK mobs and snipers on the road between Birmingham and Montgomery.

[29] On the morning of May 20, the Freedom Ride resumed, with the bus carrying the riders traveling toward Montgomery at 90 miles an hour, protected by a contingent of the Alabama State Highway Patrol.

Outside, a mob of more than 3,000 white people attacked the black attendees, with a handful of the United States Marshals Service protecting the church from assault and fire bombs.

[22] In a commemorative Op-Ed piece in 2011, Bernard Lafayette remembered the mob breaking windows of the church with rocks and setting off tear gas canisters.

In return, the federal government would not intervene to stop local police from arresting Freedom Riders for violating segregation ordinances when the buses arrived at the depots.

[34] Surrounded by Highway Patrol and the National Guard, the buses arrived in Jackson without incident, but the riders were immediately arrested when they tried to use the white-only facilities at the Tri-State Trailways depot.

[36][37] In Montgomery, the next round of Freedom Riders, including the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Gaylord Brewster Noyce,[38] and southern ministers Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, Wyatt Tee Walker, and others were similarly arrested for violating local segregation ordinances.

Abusive treatment there included placement of Riders in the Maximum Security Unit (Death Row), issuance of only underwear, no exercise, and no mail privileges.

[39] Riders arrested in Jackson included Stokeley Carmichael (19), Catherine Burks (21),[8] Gloria Bouknight (20), Luvahgn Brown (16), Margaret Leonard (19), Helen O'Neal (20), Hank Thomas (20), Carol Silver (22), Hezekiah Watkins (13), Peter Stoner (22), Byron Baer (31), and LeRoy Glenn Wright (19) in addition to many more [10][40] Nashville Student Movement leader James Lawson, who played a prominent role in coordinating the Freedom Rides, was among the first to be arrested in Jackson.

[41] While in Jackson, Freedom Riders received support from local grassroots civil rights organization Womanpower Unlimited, which raised money and collected toiletries, soap, candy and magazines for the imprisoned protesters.

On May 29, 1961, Attorney General Kennedy sent a petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) asking it to comply with the bus-desegregation ruling it had issued in November 1955, in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company.

[47] In early August, SNCC staff members James Forman and Paul Brooks, with the support of Ella Baker, began planning a Freedom Ride in solidarity with Robert F. Williams.

Some SNCC staff members sympathized with the idea of armed self-defense, although many on the ride to Monroe saw this as an opportunity to prove the superiority of Gandhian nonviolence over the use of force.

Movement lawyers, eager to disengage from the situation, successfully urged the Freedom Riders not to practice the normal "jail-no bail" strategy in Monroe.

Their claims were ultimately rejected in the United States Supreme Court case Pierson v. Ray (1967), which held that the police were protected by a new court-created legal doctrine, qualified immunity.

At the same time, the Freedom Rides established great credibility with black and white people throughout the United States and inspired many to engage in direct action for civil rights.

At the time, most black Southerners had been unable to register to vote, due to state constitutions, laws and practices that had effectively disfranchised them since the turn of the 20th century.

This event brought attention to the significant social and legal discrimination against Aboriginal Australians in regional, rural and remote areas of New South Wales, including segregation from public facilities and private businesses.