The Film Archives: Mississippi Freedom Riders- Civil Rights Movement

Source: The Film Archives- Freedom Fighters in the 1960s American South.

Source:The Daily View

"Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States, in 1961 and subsequent years, in order to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.

Boynton outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines.[7][page needed] Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955) that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel. The ICC failed to enforce its ruling, and Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South.

The Freedom Riders challenged this status quo by riding interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation in seating. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American Civil Rights Movement. They called national attention to the disregard for the federal law and the local violence used to enforce segregation in the southern United States. Police arrested riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses, but they often first let white mobs attack them without intervention.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored most of the subsequent Freedom Rides, but some were also organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The Freedom Rides followed dramatic sit-ins against segregated lunch counters, conducted by students and youth throughout the South, and boycotts of retail establishments that maintained segregated facilities, beginning in 1960.

The Supreme Court's decision in Boynton supported the right of interstate travelers to disregard local segregation ordinances. Southern local and state police considered the actions of the Freedom Riders to be criminal and arrested them in some locations. In some localities, such as Birmingham, Alabama, the police cooperated with Ku Klux Klan chapters and other white people opposing the actions and allowed mobs to attack the riders."

From The Film Archives

The Mississippi Freedom Riders, were young adults and civil rights activists and even volunteers, who had the gaul to march and ride for freedom and equal rights for African-Americans in 1961 and then several times after that in the 1960s. To challenge non-enforcement of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions Morgan v Virginia and Boynton V. Virginia. Which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. States like Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and others in the South, were not enforcing these Supreme Court decisions. Even though under law they were supposed to.

Keep in mind, Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, was already up and running by 1961, but it didn’t have the backing of the media and especially not Congress, or the Eisenhower Administration, or even the Kennedy Administration, by 1961, at least not officially. They were working what’s called backchannels and staying in touch with each other and the U.S. Administration working with Dr. King and his organization behind the scenes.

But even if President Kennedy was privately in favor of civil and equal rights for all Americans in 1961, he certainly wasn’t making that position public yet. It’s not until 1963 after big bombing in Alabama where President John Kennedy comes out strongly in favor of civil rights laws in a prime time speech that the networks broadcast.

The civil rights marchers and even the Freedom Riders, were considered radical especially in the early 1960s especially pre-civil rights laws of the mid 1960s. Imagine that, radicals because they not only believed in individual freedom, but then would march for that, but take that even a step forward and march for civil rights and equal rights for all Americans.

But that what life was like in the early 1960s which didn’t look much different culturally and politically as 1955. Where racial and ethnic minorities in America, were seen as second-class citizens. Even though under the U.S. Constitution they were entitled to the same rights, freedom, and responsibility as European-Americans and even European-American men and even Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxon men.