powerpoint on the freedom riders, who the freedom riders are

1. Freedom Riders
By Stacey, Hannah, Emma and Hannah.

2. May 14th 1961
• On May 14, Mother's Day, in Anniston, a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen, some
still in church attire, attacked the first of the two buses (the Greyhound).
• The driver tried to leave the station, but was blocked until KKK members
slashed its tires. The mob forced the crippled bus to stop several miles
outside of town and then firebombed it.
• As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, intending to burn the
riders to death. Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank or an
undercover state investigator brandishing a revolver caused the mob to
retreat, and the riders escaped the bus.
• The mob beat the riders after they escaped the bus. Only warning shots
fired into the air by highway patrolmen prevented the riders from being
lynched.
• That night, the hospitalized Freedom Riders, most of whom had been
refused care, were removed from the hospital at 2 AM, because the staff
feared the mob outside the hospital. The local civil rights leader Rev. Fred
Shuttles worth organized several cars of blacks to rescue the injured
Freedom Riders in defiance of the mob.

3. At the bus station on South Court Street, a white
mob awaited. They beat the Freedom Riders
with baseball bats and iron pipes. The local
police allowed the beatings to go on
uninterrupted. Again, white Freedom Riders
were singled out for particularly brutal beatings.
Reporters and news photographers were
attacked first and their cameras destroyed, but
one reporter took a photo later of Jim Zwerg in
the hospital, showing how he was beaten and
bruised.
Seigenthaler, a Justice Department official, was
beaten and left unconscious lying in the street.
Ambulances refused to take the wounded to the
hospital. Local blacks rescued them, and a
number of the Freedom Riders were
hospitalized.

4. People showing honour to the freedom riders
• On Sunday, May 21,(the day after the attack at
Montgomery) more than 1500 people packed in a
Church to honour the Freedom Riders.
• One if the Speakers was Martin Luther King, Jr.,
who was newly based in Montgomery.
• But there was still hatred and hardy anybody for
protection;
• Outside, a mob of more than 3,000 whites
attacked blacks, with a handful of the United
States Marshals Service protecting the church
from assault and fire bombs.
• With city and state police making no effort to
restore order, the civil rights leaders appealed to
the president for protection.

5. Despite all the violence
• On may 22nd more freedom riders arrived in Montgomery
to continue the freedom ride, despite all the violence and
abuse these freedom riders have got already on their
journey.
• However when the bus arrived in Jackson without
incident, the riders were immediately arrested when they
tried to use the white-only facilities at the depot.

6. They were arrested !!!
In Jackson, where they were
arrested and jailed.
Once the Jackson and Hinds County
jails were filled to overflowing, the
state transferred the Freedom Riders
to the infamous Mississippi State
Penitentiary.
Abusive treatment there included
placement of Riders in the Maximum
Security Unit (Death Row), issuance
of only underwear, no exercise, and
no mail.
When the Freedom Riders refused to
stop singing freedom songs, prison
officials took away their mattresses,
sheets, and toothbrushes. More
Freedom Riders arrived from across
the country, and at one time, more
than 300 were held in the State
Penitentiary.

7. A little summary…
• Freedom Rides, in U.S. history, a series of political protests against
segregation by blacks and whites who rode buses together through the
American South in 1961.
• In 1946 the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus
travel. A year later the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the
Fellowship of Reconciliation tested the ruling by staging the Journey of
Reconciliation, on which an interracial group of activists rode together on
a bus through the upper South, though fearful of journeying to the Deep
South. Following this example and responding to the Supreme Court’s
Boynton v. Virginia decision of 1960, which extended the earlier ruling to
include bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with
interstate travel, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left
Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, on a Freedom Ride in two buses bound
for New Orleans. Convinced that segregationists in the South would
violently protest this exercise of their constitutional right, the Freedom
Riders hoped to provoke the federal government into enforcing the
Boynton decision. When they stopped along the way, white riders used
facilities designated for blacks and vice versa.