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.