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Among several of the contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Rides proved to be one of the most significant. After the Freedom Rides and the Journey of Reconciliation adopted the Civil Rights Movement nationally, several different events occurred in various places such as the situation in Little Rock, the bus boycott in Montgomery, and other protests against executions. As such, the so-called Freedom Riders were able to advocate their cause in different places while also linking communities. This further fuelled the continuous crisis regarding civil rights. Furthermore, these issues shifted the attention of the nation to the bankruptcy claims of Southern politicians.

Chapter 3 moves from the student sit-in movement to the 1961 Freedom Ride campaign, which sought to desegregate bus terminal facilities. In doing so, it argues that the period from late 1960 through 1963 was the high-tide of the jail-no-bail protest philosophy. By exploring the treatment of imprisoned Freedom Riders, it highlights the diversity of the civil rights jail experience and how it was shaped by racial, class, and gender identities. It also continues to consider the often divisive nature of the debate over how to respond to the mass incarceration of civil rights activists.

The sit-in protests, launched in Greensboro, NC, in early 1960 and the Freedom Rides of the following year, presented Wilkins with a new paradigm in the fight for freedom as a wave of mass-action protests quickly spread across the South. The founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) joined Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and a revitalized Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as serious challengers to the NAACP’s previously dominant position. The Association found itself competing with these new organizations while at the same time providing financial and legal support as scores of protesters were jailed and fined. Although the protests quickly achieved what lengthy litigation had so far failed to do, the desegregation of some public facilities, for Wilkins the successes were still too piecemeal and dependent on city and state actors. These hard-won victories had to be secured in law to be truly sustainable and effective. There was little support from the Kennedy administration, however, until pictures of snarling dogs attacking young protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, outraged the nation. Kennedy finally acknowledged the need for action and called for Congress to enact civil rights legislation.

The second chapter follows seven students across Mississippi as they came of age and observed iterations of the national civil rights movement as they materialized in their hometowns. Students studied and discussed the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and other protests that occurred in their home communities while they were growing up, which constituted a form of education that served as an important precursor to the Freedom Schools.

Before the Freedom Ride began, a bus company and one of its drivers was fined a hundred dollars each by federal judge William A. Bottle for insisting that Marguerite L. Edwards—an interstate passenger—take a seat at the bus's rear as it traveled across Georgia. After this event, several bus lines in Memphis such as Continental and Greyhound announced that their racial segregation policies would be discontinued. Because these company practices accounted for only one layer of Jim Crow transportation, these announcements were not integrated nationwide. During that same week, a campaign was launched by the State Department to lessen the discrimination against Asian and African diplomats in the South and in other border states. While President Kennedy moved that Southern governors facilitated “friendly and dignified reception” towards foreign diplomatic representatives, CORE focused more on how the Freedom Rides heightened the organization's effectiveness, finances, visibility, and membership.

This chapter describes an ideological rupture at Correspondence. Debates about the course of the Cuban revolution lead to disagreements over the nature of the working class in America. James and Grace Lee Boggs leave the organization.

This chapter recalls Harry Golden’s larger involvement in the Civil Rights Movement during its height in the 1960s. It also describes Golden’s coverage of the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann for Life in 1960. As a Nazi war criminal, Eichmann was tried in Israel on charges of engineering the deaths of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Life chose Golden for the job, as he was the most popular mainstream Jewish writer, and the coverage gave him further international exposure. After the trial, Golden became involved with the Alabama Campaign of the Civil Rights Movement, supporting the Freedom Rides project by CORE in 1961. The projects aimed to stop segregation in Alabama, a state where the practice was still prevalent even though the Supreme Court had made it unconstitutional. The chapter also explores Golden’s relationship with Martin Luther King and Robert and John F. Kennedy—key people in the movement towards desegregation.

This chapter looks at Black struggles for equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s, first assessing the impact of the Vietnam War on Blacks, with Muhammad Ali drawing the link between the war and the denial of civil rights to Blacks. The chapter looks closely at the sit-in movement that started in the 1940s and spread across the country, followed by convoys of buses in Freedom Rides marked by White mob violence, beatings, and hundreds of arrests. Activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee launched a “Freedom Summer” campaign in 1964 to register Black voters in Deep South states; the fierce White resistance included the murders of more than twenty Black and White volunteers. The chapter then shifts focus to Detroit, as the city became progressively more Black with the flight of several hundred thousand Whites from city to suburbs. The racial segregation of Black children in Detroit schools, while the suburban schools were virtually all-White, led to an NAACP lawsuit that resulted in a judicial order for large-scale busing between Detroit and its suburbs. This case, Milliken v. Bradley, ended in 1974 with a 5–4 Supreme Court decision that banned busing across school district lines, with a passionate dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall; that year also saw violent White resistance to a busing order in Boston.

The verdict is mixed concerning the extent black broadcasters in the city provided interpretation of issues related to the modern Civil Rights Movement between 1954–1968. The black press, owned by African Americans and relatively independent, covered civil rights news locally and nationally. For example Louisiana Weekly in New Orleans provided quotes from speeches, such as those delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. The paper also published commentary concerning the movement. Nevertheless, broadcaster Larry McKinley produced programming targeting blacks. He was so moved by a King speech in 1957 that he attempted to join the rights group CORE, but could not "turn the other cheek." CORE representatives asked him to go on air and broadcast times and locations of rallies and other public meetings. McKinley also interview foots soldiers such as CORE member Jerome Smith who was terribly brutalized by white terrorists in Birmingham during the Freedom Rides in 1961.