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Permalink 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 igno ....
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.” ....