230 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPSAs the map on page 198 shows, African Americans
hoping to travel through the South were wise to
plan with care. Segregation was enshrined in law,
and woven into daily life. But by the 1950s, far fewer
were willing to accept a system that excluded them
from schools, restaurants, theaters, restrooms,
and other public facilities. The 1954 Supreme Court
decision in Brown v. Board of Education heartened
many by ruling that such segregation—particularly
in education—violated the Fourteenth Amendment
of the Constitution. Separate facilities based on race
were inherently unequal.
The Brown decision was followed by others, but
the failure to enforce this ruling at the local level
drove civil rights activists to expose and overturn
segregation through direct action. In 1955 the black
community’s year-long Montgomery bus boycott
led to a Supreme Court decision against Alabama’s
segregated public transit system. In 1960 four
black students at the North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical College sat down to be served at
an all-white lunch counter, and drew violence
and humiliation but also national attention to the
absurdity and cruelty of segregation.
In 1961 the Congress on Racial Equality took
a similar approach of non-violent direct action to
test enforcement of the recent court ruling against
segregation in interstate travel. The idea was to have
whites and blacks sit together on interstate buses, in
restaurants, and in terminals. With this ordinary and
legal act they risked not just arrest but much worse,
for whites routinely responded to the prospect of
integration with violence.
On May 4, a century after the outbreak of the
Civil War, thirteen passengers—black and white,
male and female, Northern and Southern—boarded
a bus in Washington, D.C. They first traveled south
through Virginia and the Carolinas before turning
east through Georgia and Alabama. In Anniston,
Klansmen and segregationists attacked and set fire
to the bus while the riders were still inside. Days later,
another white mob brutally assaulted the Freedom
Riders in Birmingham, after which ambulances
initially refused to transport injured riders to the
hospital. The police occasionally even facilitated these
Klan attacks. The New York Times and the Washington
Post reported the Anniston attack on the front page,
while television news outlets shocked and shamed
viewers with indelible images of the burned bus and
its victimized passengers.
THE BATTLE AGAINST SEGREGATION
Associated Press, background map of
the Freedom Rides, 1962
A subsequent ride organized by Nashville students
encountered violence in Montgomery, prompting
Attorney General Robert Kennedy to send in federal
marshals. Alabama’s governor threatened to arrest
the marshals, underscoring the conflict between
federal and state law that endured throughout the
Civil Rights Movement. Upon arriving in Jackson,
Mississippi, over 300 student Freedom Riders were
arrested and jailed, an event which drew even more
intense national attention. By the end of the year, 400
individuals had participated in the Freedom Rides,
but the upshot was unclear.
President Kennedy had been in office only a few
months before the first of the Freedom Rides, and
initially distanced himself from the action as well
as the civil rights bills that had just arrived on his
desk. The president was loath to alienate Southern
Democrats, and spent most of his energy prosecuting
the Cold War. But ironically the nation’s moral
posture against communism also prodded Kennedy
to avoid embarrassing footage of bigoted Southern
whites attacking those who were exercising their
lawful right to travel.
On November 1, the Interstate Commerce
Commission ordered an end to segregation in bus
terminals, prompting a second set of rides to test
enforcement of the ruling. This map was designed
by reporter Sid Moody to accompany a newswire story
on the Freedom Rides as a whole, throughout 1961.
The diagram traces the routes of the individual
rides, and the attacks they met. But in its simplicity
it reveals two crucial dynamics of the Civil Rights
Movement. First, the map documents the will of
the activists themselves, who were prepared to risk
humiliation, injury, and death in order to train the
nation’s attention on these egregious practices. Only
by the sustained willingness to venture into these
remote and potentially dangerous regions did the
Freedom Riders expose the enduring resistance
to desegregation.
Second, the map points to the essential role of
the media, for the violence that greeted the Freedom
Riders was graphically reported across the country.
Asterisks on the map mark sites where the passengers
met with violence, while annotations list the spots
where they were arrested. It was in those spots—
where the peaceful riders met obstacles—that the
news media found a story to cover. Indeed, over the
course of the year civil rights activists began to worry
that the country had grown tired of such stories.
Yet it was this persistent activism on the ground
that forced a nationwide reckoning—however
limited—with segregation.