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Mug shots of the Freedom Riders arrested in Mississippi, including John Lewis, upper left, and Catherine Burks-Brooks, top row, third from left.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Upended car damaged and smoking after a riot protesting the Freedom Riders arrival in Montgomery, Alabama.
Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Norman Dean, Birmingham News.
Martin Luther King, Jr., with Freedom Riders as they prepare to leave Montgomery, Ala., for Jackson, Miss.
Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Norman Dean, Birmingham News.
In February 1946, Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play in major league baseball, and his wife, Rachel, boarded a plane in Los Angeles, bound for spring training in Daytona Beach, Fla. They had first-class tickets.
Freedom Riders: 5 things to know on 60th anniversary
Updated 7:02 AM;
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By Shelia Poole The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (TNS) and Tribune Media Services
May 4 marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Freedom Rides. Here are five things to know about the movement that helped change the course of the nation and the fight for equality.
What are the Freedom Rides?
In May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality launched the Freedom Rides as a way challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus facilities like waiting rooms and dining counters. Groups of Black and white activists, many college students, would board Greyhound or Trailways buses and travel across the segregated South to test the law. The Freedom Rides lasted for seven months.
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By Alabama NewsCenter Staff
March 9, 2021
The 2021 virtual Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage highlighted the Freedom Rides and Bloody Sunday while honoring the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis. (file and contributed)
On March 4, 1961, two buses left Washington headed south. A group of activists known as the Freedom Riders were on board, challenging Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in interstate travel.
The annual Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage that took place last Friday, 60 years after that act of nonviolent civil disobedience, commemorated the anniversary and paid tribute to the pilgrimage’s board chairman emeritus, the late Congressman John Lewis.
From May into September 1961, more than 60 Freedom Rides took place, during which more than 400 young Blacks and whites traveled shoulder to shoulder, challenging the Jim Crow transportation laws that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling had struck down but cities across the South were ignoring.
By Michael Sznadjerman
Alabama Newscenter
In her police mugshot taken almost 60 years ago in Jackson, Mississippi, Catherine Burks-Brooks looks straight into the camera, without fear or agitation. One might even interpret the curve of her mouth as a smirk.
What was Brooks – then a 21-year-old college student and Freedom Rider, already battle-hardened from several civil rights actions – really thinking about when the bulb flashed?
“When they took that picture, I knew I was going to jail,” said Brooks, who lives in Center Point, near Birmingham. “I was tired. I was hungry. And I was ready to get into bed. I was not afraid.”