![]() ![]() ![]() The Freedom Rides brought national attention to the cause, led Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department to strengthen the laws outlawing segregation in interstate travel, and marked a crucial early turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. But at every step brave new determined volunteers traveled to meet them and take their places. By the time the Freedom Rides actually ended months later, many in the original group had been beaten, brutalized, or arrested, and buses they rode on had been firebombed and destroyed. on May 4 with plans to arrive in New Orleans on May 17 on the seventh anniversary of the Brown v. The original group, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), began with thirteen riders who left Washington, D.C. As a result, he was attacked by angry mobs for entering “Whites-only” waiting rooms, left unconscious on a bus station floor in Montgomery, Alabama after being hit in the head with a wooden Coca-Cola crate, arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for trespassing and disturbing the peace, and sentenced to time at Mississippi’s notorious Parchment State Prison Farm.Ĭongressman Lewis was one of the Freedom Riders-more than 400 Black and White volunteers, mostly young people, who risked their lives and freedom to face down segregation in the Deep South. But in May 1961 he was a twenty-one-year-old student leader from American Baptist College in Nashville who volunteered to join the interracial group traveling through the South by bus to test the recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate travel. ![]() Today, Congressman John Lewis is serving his twelfth term representing Georgia in the U.S. I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army. “Boarding that Greyhound bus to travel through the heart of the Deep South, I felt good. ![]()
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