Today, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) is helping train the next generation of young leaders through our youth leadership development programs, including our Young Advocate Leadership Training (YALT®) Program. Those of us in my generation were blessed to be in the right places at the right times to experience and help bring transforming change to the South and to America, and we seized that opportunity and responsibility.
#Freedom riders registration#
One of the important lessons in this documentary is how integral students and young people were to the Freedom Rides, just as they were to the sit-ins, marches, voter registration drives, and every other piece of the Civil Rights Movement. The fiftieth anniversary this month of the start of the Freedom Rides is receiving widespread national attention, in part thanks to the powerful new documentary film “Freedom Riders” by award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson, which chronicles the entire bold and dangerous journey. The Freedom Rides brought national attention to the cause, led Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department to strengthen the laws outlawing segregation in interstate travel, and marked a crucial early turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
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But at every step brave new determined volunteers traveled to meet them and take their places. By the time the Freedom Rides actually ended months later, many in the original group had been beaten, brutalized, or arrested, and buses they rode on had been firebombed and destroyed. on May 4 with plans to arrive in New Orleans on May 17 on the seventh anniversary of the Brown v. The original group, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), began with thirteen riders who left Washington, D.C.
As a result, he was attacked by angry mobs for entering “Whites-only” waiting rooms, left unconscious on a bus station floor in Montgomery, Alabama after being hit in the head with a wooden Coca-Cola crate, arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for trespassing and disturbing the peace, and sentenced to time at Mississippi’s notorious Parchment State Prison Farm.Ĭongressman Lewis was one of the Freedom Riders-more than 400 Black and White volunteers, mostly young people, who risked their lives and freedom to face down segregation in the Deep South. But in May 1961 he was a twenty-one-year-old student leader from American Baptist College in Nashville who volunteered to join the interracial group traveling through the South by bus to test the recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate travel.
Today, Congressman John Lewis is serving his twelfth term representing Georgia in the U.S. I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army. “Boarding that Greyhound bus to travel through the heart of the Deep South, I felt good.
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