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The Freedom Riders: A nonviolent approach to a slow victory

The Freedom Riders: A nonviolent approach to a slow victory. By: Ashton Fontenot. Who are the freedom riders.

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The Freedom Riders: A nonviolent approach to a slow victory

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  1. The Freedom Riders:A nonviolent approach to a slow victory By: Ashton Fontenot

  2. Who are the freedom riders • Two people willing to sit side by side of opposite race and travel through the South, going through difficult and unfair physical assaults as they drove through the South pushing for the end of segregation.

  3. Setting • When: During the Civil Rights Movement mainly between 1955-1968 • What: Long bus rides starting at the nation’s capitol in D.C. and going through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi attempting to end in New Orleans, Louisiana. Journeys included rides that had whites going into black-only rest stops and blacks going into white-only rest stops. • People were bombed, shot at, beaten, arrested, and even killed with no law determining actions behind the violence.

  4. What the freedom riders were all about • The entire Civil Rights Movement consisted of Black Americans that would make only nonviolent attempts to push for the end of segregation. • Examples of these attempts would be public protests and occupied sit-ins. • “We shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system.” - Martin Luther King

  5. Research/thesis • In what ways did the nonviolent attempts of colored people pushing for the end of segregation cause more problems between them and the violent attacks that they encountered? • People that were pushing for segregation did not want African Americans to ever get the same opportunities in life that they did, possibly because they were scared to see what African Americans would do with that opportunity, and because slavery had just come to an end. Colored people at this time were still fighting for their rights, and the idea of them being inferior to whites was still a very common misconception.

  6. Unfair and brutal violence May 14th, 1961, marked the beginning of violent assault that wouldn’t end until Black Americans pushing for the end of segregation and the Freedom Riders gave in and quit standing up for their rights. The Freedom Riders split into two different groups. First group met by 200 pro-segregation citizens in Anniston, Alabama where their tires were slashed and stones were thrown at the bus. 6 miles outside of the town the bus was firebombed. The other group ran into a mob in Birmingham, Alabama, and were brutally beaten and pulled one by one out of the bus. No police or any public safety was in site at the time of the mob.

  7. Pictures

  8. Students as Freedom Riders • Young college students from Nashville, Tennessee, joined as Freedom Riders getting on a bus and traveling to Birmingham with protective security flying over them. Once arriving to Birmingham, they were arrested, put into protective custody, and then safely brought back to Tennessee where they were dropped off at the state line. They went directly back on a bus to Birmingham after getting but this time the results were not the same. • Once they reached Birmingham, the first man to step off the front of the bus was a man named Jim Zwerg, and he was beaten until unconscious and left in the street with no one to help. This caused so much commotion throughout the nation that Martin Luther King came down and held a mass meeting in support of the Freedom Riders.

  9. Reasons for topic selectionandLearning outcome

  10. bibliography • Cozzens, Lisa. Watson.org: Freedom Riders. August 18, 1999. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/freeride.html (accessed April 12, 2011). • Fankhauser, David B. Freedom Rides. February 7, 2002. http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/society/freedom_rides/freedom_ride_dbf.htm (accessed April 11, 2011). • Gross, Terry. NPR.org: Get on the Bus "The Freedom Riders of 1961". January 12, 2006. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5149667 (accessed April 11, 2011). • Unknown. Oracle Think Quest: Freedom Rides. August 25, 2010. http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112391/freedom_rides.htm (accessed April 10, 2011).

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