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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.