/ Mugshots of a group of Freedom Riders who were arrested and jailed in Jackson, Miss. 1961.
Sixty years after the Freedom Riders began their journey into the South from the nation’s capital, Beverly Bassett belted out her favorite freedom song outside of the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery.
“Ain’t gonna let segregation turn me around,” she sang with a slight growl in her voice.
Now known as the
Freedom Rides Museum, the bus station was one of the many stops the interracial group of civil rights activists made as they departed in 1961 to test the enforcement of an earlier
In 1961, the story of the Freedom Riders captured the American imagination: young, mostly white Northern students teaming up with Southern, mostly black civil-rights activists to stage acts of civil disobedience by simply riding together on segregated buses.
Traveling through the South in Integrated groups, the activists faced violence and arrests, followed by weeks-long stays in prisons, often under abusive conditions. Those circumstances, and their courage in facing them, brought a powerful new wave of attention to racial injustice, and served as a catalyst for major new civil-rights initiatives.
Among the Freedom Riders imprisoned was Rabbi Philip Posner, then a seminary student in California.
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