Feb 2, 2010 · Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus...

Police arrested riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly, violating state and local Jim Crow laws, and other alleged offenses, but often they first let white mobs of counter-protestors attack the riders without intervention.

Led by Ku Klux Klan leader William Chapel, a mob of 50 men armed with pipes, chains, and bats smashed windows, slashed tires, and dented the sides of the Riders' bus. Though warned hours earlier that a mob had gathered at the station, local police did …

On May 20, 1961, Freedom Riders traveling by bus through the South to challenge segregation laws were brutally attacked by a white mob at the Greyhound Station in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. Several days before, on May 16, the Riders faced mob violence in Birmingham so serious that it threatened to prematurely end their campaign.

May 20, 2024 · A white mob of more than 300, including Klansmen, attacked Freedom Riders at the Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery, Alabama. Future Congressman John Lewis was among them. “An angry mob came out of nowhere, hundreds of people, with bricks and balls, chains,” Lewis recalled.

May 14, 2021 · Freedom Rider James Peck, of New York, under attack at the bus station in Birmingham, Ala., 60 years ago today. In the spring of 1961, a group of Black and white civil rights activists set off...

Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later? Get our newsletter! After a mob attacked a bus with protesters in...

May 31, 2018 · During the spring of 1961, student activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Freedom Rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals.

Apr 13, 2024 · Traveling on buses from Washington, D.C. to Jackson, MS, the Freedom Riders met VIOLENT racial opposition from white mobs in Alabama and Mississippi. The brutality against the Freedom Riders gathered national attention, eventually forcing the …

On Wednesday, May 24, the Freedom Rides resumed, heading for Jackson, Mississippi. Federal and state officials in Alabama and Mississippi had agreed the Riders would be arrested but protected from mob violence. As the first bus left Montgomery, reports came of more Freedom Riders on the way.