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When Was Martin Luther King Born?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

Along with his older sister Christine and younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city's Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African Americans in the country.

Did you know? The final section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent and iconic "I Have a Dream" speech is believed to have been largely improvised.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College, the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

Although he had not intended to follow in his father's footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse's president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest's leader and official spokesman.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King-heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin -had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.

King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.

On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, "Are you Martin Luther King?" When he replied "yes," she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassination only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: "The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place."

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists-most of them fellow ministers-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.

The SCLC motto was "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed." King would remain at the helm of this influential organization until his death.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as "the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change." King also authored several books and articles during this time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America's most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the " Letter from Birmingham Jail," an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

March on Washington

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"I Have a Dream" Speech

The March on Washington culminated in King's most famous address, known as the "I Have a Dream" speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States-he shared his vision of a future in which "this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

The speech and march cemented King's reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named "Man of the Year" by TIME magazine and in 1964 became, at the time, the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the spring of 1965, King's elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had organized a voter registration campaign.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to vote-first awarded by the 15th Amendment-to all African Americans.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People's Campaign, which was to include a massive march on the capital.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. He was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers' strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

MLK Day

After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King.

Observed on the third Monday of January, Martin Luther King Day was first celebrated in 1986.

Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

While his "I Have a Dream" speech is the most well-known piece of his writing, Martin Luther King Jr. was the author of multiple books, include "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story," "Why We Can't Wait," "Strength to Love," "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" and the posthumously published "Trumpet of Conscience" with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. Here are some of the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quotes:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

"The time is always right to do what is right."

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

"Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last."

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

"Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are."

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'"

HISTORY Vault: Voices of Civil Rights

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Martin Luther King Jr: Day, Death, Quotes | HISTORY

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Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American Civil Rights Movement until his assassination in 1968.

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What Were Jim Crow Laws | Facts for Kids

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954) | Separate Is NOT Equal

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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Brown v. Board of Education | Case, 1954, Definition, Decision, Facts, & Impact

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Brown v. Board of Education, case in which, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. It was one of the most important cases in the Court’s history, and it helped inspire the American civil rights movement of the late 1950s and ’60s.

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Russell Lee/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (image no. LC-DIG-fsa-8a26761)

Plessy v. Ferguson was an important U.S. Supreme Court case concerning whether racial segregation laws were constitutional. These laws required African Americans and whites to use different public facilities ( see Jim Crow law). For example, there were separate schools, parks, water fountains, and bathrooms for African Americans and for whites, as well as separate sections of buses and theaters. Plessy v. Ferguson was decided on May 18, 1896. The court's decision in the case established the controversial doctrine of "separate but equal." According to this doctrine, laws that required African Americans and whites to use separate public facilities were constitutional as long as the facilities were reasonably equal. (In fact, public facilities for African Americans were inferior to those intended for whites.) The Plessy v. Ferguson decision served as a controlling judicial precedent for more than 50 years. The Supreme Court overturned the decision in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Plessy v. Ferguson originated in 1892 as a challenge to Louisiana's Separate Car Act. This law required that all railroads operating in the state provide "equal but separate accommodations" for white and African American passengers. Passengers were only allowed in the rail cars assigned to their race. To challenge the constitutionality of the law, a group of citizens in New Orleans formed a committee to generate a test case. They had Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth African American, purchase a rail ticket and sit in a rail car reserved for white passengers. After Plessy refused to move to a car for African Americans, he was arrested. He was tried and found guilty in U.S. District Court, and a state supreme court upheld the verdict. The case was then taken to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Plessy argued that the Separate Car Act was unconstitutional. He contended that it violated both the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full and equal rights of citizenship to African Americans.

Rejecting these arguments, the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 against Plessy. Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion-which did not actually contain the phrase "separate but equal." He held that the Separate Car Act did not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment because it did not reestablish slavery or constitute a "badge" of slavery or servitude. Brown further concluded that the act did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment, he argued, was intended to secure only the legal equality of African Americans and whites, not their social equality. Brown concluded that the racial segregation of rail passengers did not by itself imply the legal inferiority of either race. "If one race be inferior to the other socially," he wrote, "the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane."

The lone judge who ruled for Plessy was Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan. In his dissenting opinion, he argued that the Separate Car Act was universally understood to assume the inferiority of African Americans. As such, it imposed a badge of servitude upon them in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. The effect of the act, he argued, was to interfere with the personal liberty and freedom of movement of both African Americans and whites. It thus conflicted with the principle of legal equality in the Fourteenth Amendment. Harlan wrote:

Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Harlan concluded that the Plessy v. Ferguson judgment would in time "prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case." That case had declared in 1857 that African Americans were not entitled to the rights of U.S. citizenship. Click here to read excerpts from the opinions of Justices Brown and Harlan.

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Plessy v. Ferguson was an important U.S. Supreme Court case concerning whether racial segregation laws were constitutional. These laws required African Americans and whites to use different public facilities ( see Jim Crow law). For example, there were separate schools, parks, water fountains, and bathrooms for African Americans and for whites, as well as separate sections of buses and theaters.

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A mere thirty-five years after slavery ended, a sophisticated and strategic group of African Americans challenged the Jim Crow Separate Car Act in the state of Louisiana by placing a fair-skinned Creole black man named Homer Plessy on the "whites only" railcar. This video presents how the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v.

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Plessy v. Ferguson | Separate but Equal OK'd by High Court!

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Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation: Crash Course Black American History #21

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Rosa Parks stood up for African Americans-by sitting down.

Although Abraham Lincoln 's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation granted slaves their freedom, for many years Black people were discriminated against in much of the United States. In southern states, for instance, most Black children were forced to attend separate schools from white kids in classrooms that were often rundown, with outdated books. African Americans also couldn't eat at the same restaurants as white people and had to sit in the back seats of public buses. Segregation-the separation of races-was enforced by local laws.

Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913. On December 1, 1955, she boarded a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama and sat in the middle, where Black passengers in that city were allowed to sit unless a white person wanted the seat. As the bus filled with new riders, the driver told Parks to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused. The driver called police, and Parks was arrested.

Her arrest sparked a major protest. For more than a year, most Black people in Montgomery stood together and refused to take city buses. (One of the leaders of the boycott was a young local pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr.) Public vehicles stood idle, and the city lost money. Still, the Montgomery Bus Boycott didn't end until a 1956 Supreme Court decision ended racial segregation on public transportation throughout the United States.

Parks died on October 24, 2005. But throughout her life, her refusal to give up her seat inspired many others to fight for African-American rights and helped advance the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

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Rosa Parks stood up for African Americans-by sitting down.

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Rosa Parks | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Selected items from the Rosa Parks collection, documenting the life, work, and legacy of civil rights legend Rosa Parks.

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Desegregation of Schools

In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America's public schools was unconstitutional.

Until the court's decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, or Jim Crow laws, requiring African American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate "with all deliberate speed."

Little Rock Central High School

In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.

The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.

Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: The Capital Citizens Council and the Mother's League of Central High School.

Who Were the Little Rock Nine?

Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African American newspaper.

Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations.

The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.

Orval Faubus

On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African American students' entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students' own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if Black students were allowed to enter the school.

The Mother's League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Ronald Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.

Elizabeth Eckford

The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.

Elizabeth Eckford's family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone.

The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.

Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely in the United States and abroad, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention.

Ronald Davies

In the following weeks, federal judge Ronald Davies began legal proceedings against Governor Faubus, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to persuade Faubus to remove the National Guard and let the Little Rock Nine enter the school.

Judge Davies ordered the Guard removed on September 20, and the Little Rock Police Department took over to maintain order. The police escorted the nine African American students into the school on September 23, through an angry mob of some 1,000 white protesters gathered outside. Amidst ensuing rioting, the police removed the nine students.

The following day, President Eisenhower sent in 1,200 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and placed them in charge of the 10,000 National Guardsmen on duty. Escorted by the troops, the Little Rock Nine attended their first full day of classes on September 25.

Numerous legal challenges to integration continued throughout the year, and Faubus repeatedly expressed his wish that the Little Rock Nine be removed from Central High.

Although several of the Black students had positive experiences on their first day of school, according to a September 25, 1957, report in The New York Times, they experienced routine harassment and even violence throughout the rest of the year.

Melba Patillo, for instance, was kicked, beaten and had acid thrown in her face. At one point, white students burned an African American effigy in a vacant lot across from the school. Gloria Ray was pushed down a flight of stairs, and the Little Rock Nine were barred from participating in extracurricular activities.

Minnijean Brown was expelled from Central High School in February 1958 for retaliating against the attacks. Harassment went beyond the students: Gloria Ray's mother was fired from her job with the State of Arkansas when she refused to remove her daughter from the school. The 101st Airborne and the National Guard remained at Central High School for the duration of the year.

Ernest Green

On May 25, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, became the first African American graduate of Central High.

In September 1958, one year after Central High was integrated, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools for the entire year, pending a public vote, to prevent African American attendance. Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration and the schools remained closed.

Other than Green, the rest of the Little Rock Nine completed their high school careers via correspondence or at other high schools across the country. Eckford joined the Army and later earned her General Education Equivalency diploma. Little Rock's high schools reopened in August 1959.

Did you know? Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. attended graduation ceremonies at Central High School in May 1958 to see Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, receive his diploma.

Little Rock Nine Aftermath

Several of the Little Rock Nine went on to distinguished careers.

Green served as assistant secretary of the federal Department of Labor under President Jimmy Carter. Brown worked as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity in the Department of the Interior under President Bill Clinton. Patillo worked as a reporter for NBC.

The group has been widely recognized for their significant role in the civil rights movement. In 1999, President Clinton awarded each member of the group the Congressional Gold Medal. The nine also all received personal invitations to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009.

Jefferson Thomas became the first of the Little Rock Nine to die when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 67 on September 5, 2010. After graduating from Central High, Thomas served in the Army in Vietnam, earned a business degree and worked as an accountant for private companies and the Pentagon.

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Little Rock Nine - Definition, Names & Facts | HISTORY

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The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine Black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

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September 4, 1957, was supposed to be the first day of school for 14-year-old Carlotta Walls. But as she and eight other black teenagers approached Little Rock Central High School, in Arkansas, they were met by angry . Members of the Arkansas National Guard blocked the teens from entering the building.

Three weeks later, the students finally walked through the school's front doors. This time, they were protected by U.S. Army soldiers.

Carlotta and her classmates weren't just going to school. They were making history. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that in public schools was illegal. The teens were among the first black students in the country to attend an all-white school. They became known as the Little Rock Nine.

"[It is important] for people today to understand why kids are sitting in classrooms with those who don't look like them," Carlotta Walls LaNier, now 75, told TFK. "It was due to our success at Central [more than] 60 years ago."

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES

The Fight for Rights

The Little Rock Nine were assigned military for the school year. But the troops were not allowed to enter classrooms, bathrooms, or locker rooms. So Carlotta, like the other eight black teens, dealt with and violence daily. Students spat on her. They pushed her down the stairs. They knocked books out of her hands. Then they kicked her when she picked them up.

But Carlotta stayed strong. "I considered my to be ignorant people," she says.

Upsetting photos of the Little Rock Nine appeared in newspapers and on televisions across the country. The images increased public support for desegregation. "When people saw what was going on, they were genuinely horrified," Michael Brenes told TFK. He is a historian at Yale University. Brenes says the crisis at Central High School sparked school desegregation nationwide.

Today, Carlotta Walls LaNier still works to promote equality. She hopes young people will continue to stand up for justice. "We still have work to do," she says. "We have to make sure the progress we've made is not reversed."

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September 4, 1957, was supposed to be the first day of school for 14-year-old Carlotta Walls. But as she and eight other black teenagers approached Little Rock Central High School, in Arkansas, they were met by angry protesters. Members of...

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The Little Rock Nine: Facts & History - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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The Little Rock Nine were the first group of black students to be integrated into formerly white-only public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas....

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On February 1, 1960, four college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, stunned the world by a simple act. Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond sat down at a "whites only" lunch counter at the local Woolworth's. The young black men politely asked for coffee. When told that they would not be served, the friends sat peacefully until the store closed.

This quiet act of rebellion sparked a series of sit-ins across the South to end racial segregation. "It became what we call a 'spark' that was created here, and it spread like wildfire across North Carolina," says Cassandra Williams, a guide at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which is in the same building that once housed the Woolworth's.

From February 1 until July 25, 1960, the "Greensboro Four," as they became known, staged a series of sit-ins. They were joined by tens of thousands of students, both black and white. Even people in the North, where Woolworth's lunch counters were not segregated, wanted to support the movement.

"People boycotted the stores in the North," Williams says, "telling others not to eat there."
LIVING HISTORY
On July 25, 1960, the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro was finally integrated. People of all races could sit together to eat. But it would take a few more years for every business in Greensboro to take down the "whites only" signs for good.

Today, the old Woolworth's lunch counter serves as a museum where people can learn about civil rights history. Visitors can see where McCain, McNeil, Blair, and Richmond actually sat down in 1960. "I love meeting all the new people," says museum guide La'Tonya Wiley. "I like being able to give them information to add to their knowledge."

The Greensboro Four sat down not just for themselves. They wanted to create a better world for everyone. Such acts of courage still inspire us today.

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On February 1, 1960, four college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, stunned the world by a simple act. Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond sat down at a "whites only" lunch counter at the local Woolworth's. The young black men politely asked for coffee.

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The Greensboro Sit-in for kids | Black History

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The Greensboro sit-in was an act of nonviolent protest against a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four African American men sat at the counter, which was designated as "whites only." When the staff refused to serve them, the men remained seated to peacefully protest racial segregation. The success of that sit-in led to a wider movement that spread throughout the South.

Ezell Blair, Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond organized the sit-in. They were all students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. The students came to be called the Greensboro Four. They were influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques of Mahatma Gandhi. They also used the Journey of Reconciliation ( see Freedom Rides) of 1947 as a guide. During the Journey of Reconciliation, Black and white people rode buses together through the South. They were protesting ongoing segregation in interstate bus travel, which the U.S. Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional.

On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four entered a Woolworth's general store that had a dining area. The men bought small items at the store before sitting down at the store's lunch counter. Although Black people could enter the dining area, they had to use a standing snack bar because the lunch counter was designated for "whites only." The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated when the staff refused to take their orders. The lunch counter manager contacted the police. The police arrived, but they did nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store. Meanwhile, the Greensboro Four had prearranged for Ralph Johns, a local white businessman who was sympathetic to their cause, to alert the local media. A photo of the Greensboro Four soon appeared in local newspapers.

The following day the Greensboro Four returned to the Woolworth's lunch counter. They had some 20 other Black university students with them. The staff again refused to serve them. By February 4 some 100 protesters filled the store and lunch counter. Media coverage expanded, spreading the story throughout the United States. Within weeks, protesters were holding sit-ins in cities across the country. Soon many owners were integrating dining facilities across the South. The Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro opened to Black patrons in July 1960. The Greensboro sit-in marked an early success for the civil rights movement.

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The Greensboro sit-in was an act of nonviolent protest against a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four African American men sat at...

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On Feb. 1, 1960, four African-American North Carolina A&T University students, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, began a sit-in protest at a Woolworth's whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they had been refused service.

Their protest, while not the first sit-in of the modern Civil Rights Movement, triggered a wave of direct action through sit-ins across the United States. Earlier sit-ins include:

Little Palace Cafeteria in 1943 with Pauli Murray and other Howard University students in Washington, D.C.

Katz Drug Store Sit-in in 1958 with high school teacher Clara Luper and the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma.

Dockum Drug Store Sit-In in 1958 with students Ron Walters and members of the NAACP Youth Council in Wichita, Kansas.

Students from Bennett College also played a major role in planning and sustaining the Feb. 1, 1960 sit-in. Dr. Sharrelle Barber explains in Facing South,

The Bennett Belles were at the forefront. A lot of folks talk about the 1960 Woolworth sit-in, but many don't realize that that was actually planned on Bennett's campus. Bennett women were in leadership roles in terms of planning that movement. The four men sat down on Feb. 1, 1960, but Bennett women had planned to be part of it as well. And so they were very instrumental in doing that initial work and also continuing that work. Read in full.

Learn more from the C-Span Book TV interview with Linda Beatrice Brown about her book, Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement, about the February 1960 sit-in.

The SNCC Digital Gateway provides a student-friendly description of the Greensboro sit-in with primary documents and interviews. In concludes:

The Greensboro sit-ins inspired a mass movement across the South. By April 1960, 70 southern cities had sit-ins of their own. Direct-action sit-ins made public what Jim Crow wanted to hide-Black resistance to segregation. By directly challenging segregation in highly visible places, activists grabbed the attention of the media. . . The sit-ins told Black youth that they had power to capture national attention. "Before seeing these sit-ins," SNCC's Charlie Cobb said, "Civil Rights had been something grown-ups did." Continue reading at the SNCC Digital Gateway.

Find resources below to teach about the sit-in movement.

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Feb. 1, 1960: The Greensboro Sit-in Begins - Zinn Education Project

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Four African-American North Carolina A&T University students began a sit-in protest at a Woolworth's whites-only lunch counter.

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Who Were the Freedom Riders? | The Civil Rights Movement

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On Sunday, May 14, 1961-Mother's Day-scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive," somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.

Etheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961. He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval taking place around him. But he well remembers using one entrance to his doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony.

"Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.'"

A few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to engage his budding photographic skills. During a visit with his parents in Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300 arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist riders.

Nearly 75 percent of them were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were black; a quarter, women. Their mug-shot expressions hint at their resolve, defiance, pride, vulnerability and fear. "I was captivated by these images and wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the Internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked riders down, then called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even think that it still existed."

Most of the riders were college students; many, such as the Episcopal clergymen and contingents of Yale divinity students, had religious affiliations. Some were active in civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which initiated the Freedom Rides and was founded in 1942 on Mahatma Gandhi's principle of nonviolent protest. The goal of the rides, CORE director James Farmer said as he launched the campaign, was "to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law."

The volunteers, from 40 states, received training in nonviolence tactics. Those who could not refrain from striking back when pushed, hit, spit on or doused with liquids while racial epithets rang in their ears were rejected.

As soon as he heard the call for riders, Robert Singleton remembers, he "was fired up and ready to go." He and his wife, Helen, had both been active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and they took 12 volunteers with them from California. "The spirit that permeated the air at that time was not unlike the feeling Barack Obama has rekindled among the youth of today," says Singleton, now 73 and an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Peter Ackerberg, a lawyer who now lives in Minneapolis, said that while he'd always talked a "big radical game," he had never acted on his convictions. "What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?" he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, "I was pretty scared," he told Etheridge. "The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives." Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying "sir" to a jail official who was "pounding a blackjack." Soon after, "I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian's] head and him shrieking; I don't think he ever said 'sir.'"

John Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted. While trying to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs. Less than two weeks later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal," Lewis, a Georgia congressman since 1987 and a celebrated civil rights figure, said recently. "We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back."

As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some buses to prevent violence. When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used "colored" facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called "jail, no bail"-a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities. Most of the 300 riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets.

"The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there," said Hank Thomas, a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. "We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I'll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point."

Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him "sir." An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that "no one was beaten," she told Etheridge. "That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening." When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. "We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK," rider Carol Silver told Etheridge. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs.

None of the riders Etheridge spoke with expressed regrets, even though some would be entangled for years in legal appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court (which issued a ruling in 1965 that led to a reversal of the breach of peace convictions). "It's the right thing to do, to oppose an oppressive state where wrongs are being done to people," said William Leons, a University of Toledo professor of anthropology whose father had been killed in an Austrian concentration camp and whose mother hid refugees during World War II. "I was aware very much of my parents' involvement in the Nazi resistance," he said of his 39-day incarceration as a rider. "[I was] doing what they would have done."

More than two dozen of the riders Etheridge interviewed went on to become teachers or professors, and there are eight ministers as well as lawyers, Peace Corps workers, journalists and politicians. Like Lewis, Bob Filner, of California, is a congressman. And few former Freedom Riders still practice civil disobedience. Joan Pleune, 70, of New York City, is a member of the Granny Peace Brigade; she was arrested two years ago at an anti-Iraq War protest in Washington, D.C. while "reading the names of the war dead," she says. Theresa Walker, 80, was arrested in New York City in 2000 during a protest over the police killing there the year before of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea.

Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation persisted; still, the "white" and "colored" signs in bus stations across the South be- gan to come down. The New York Times, which had earlier criticized the Freedom Riders' "incitement and provocation," acknowledged that they "started the chain of events which resulted in the new I.C.C. order."

The legacy of the rides "could not have been more poetic," says Robert Singleton, who connects those events to the election of Barack Obama as president. Obama was born in August 1961, Singleton notes, just when the riders were languishing in Mississippi jails and prisons, trying to "break the back of segregation for all people, but especially for the children. We put ourselves in harm's way for a child, at the very time he came into this world, who would become our first black president."

Marian Smith Holmes is an associate editor.
Photographer Eric Etheridge maintains a Web site, breachofpeace.com, that publishes information about the Freedom Riders.

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Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later?

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John Lewis, Freedom Rider [reading]: "I wish to apply for acceptance as a participant in CORE's Freedom Ride, 1961."

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider [reading]: "...to travel via bus from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana, and to test and challenge segregated..."

Mae F. Moultrie Howard, Freedom Rider [reading]: "facilities en route. I understand that I shall be participating in a non-violent protest..."

Jerry Ivor Moore, Freedom Rider [reading]: "...against racial discrimination. That arrests or personal injury to me might result..."

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The Freedom Rides of 1961 were the simple but daring plan: The Congress of Racial Equality came up with the idea to put blacks and whites in small groups on commercial buses, and they would deliberately violate the segregation laws of the deep South.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: We were to go through various parts of the South, gradually going deeper and deeper, six of us on a Trailways bus and six of us on the Greyhound bus, and see whether places were segregated, whether people were being served when they went to get something to eat, or buy a ticket, or use the restrooms.

Gordon Carey, CORE Staff: One of the major thrusts of the Freedom Rides was to get the Movement into the Deep South. Most of the action up till this time had been in the upper South or in the North. And one of the ideas here was to go into the deepest South. We were hoping that this would start a national movement.

Derek Catsam, Historian: CORE had this set itinerary. They anticipated that this would be a two-week trip; that it would culminate down in New Orleans with a real celebration on the anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. And there's almost an element of naiveté attached to it, how easily they thought it would go.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: "I'm a senior at American Baptist Theological Seminary, and hope to graduate in June. I know that an education is important, and I hope to get one. But at this time, human dignity is the most important thing in my life. That justice and freedom might come to the Deep South."

Man (archival): I have no doubt that the negro basically knows that the best friend he's ever had in the world is the Southern white man.

Man (archival): We talk about it here as separation of the races. Customs and traditions that have been built up over the last hundred years that have proved for the best interest of both the colored and the white people. There's not been one single change.

Man (archival): The colored man knows where he stands. The white man knows where he stands. We have signs saying colored and white. The colored man knows that he is not to enter there.

Woman (archival): Well the nigger's all right in his place. But they've always been behind us and just tell you the truth, I want them always to stay behind me, 'cause I never have loved a nigger, mister.

Woman (archival): You cannot change a way of life overnight. The more they try to force us into doing something, then the worse the reaction will be.

Man (archival): Our colored people will do exactly as they have done. Our white people will do exactly as they have done. Why? Because it's worked out best.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: It was all-encompassing; this so-called Southern way of life would and not allow for any breaks. It was a system that was only as strong, the white Southerners thought, as its weakest link. So you couldn't allow people even to sit together on the front of a bus, something that really shouldn't have threatened anyone. But it did. It threatened their sense of the wholeness, the sanctity of what they saw as an age-old tradition.

Diane Nash, Student, Fisk University: Traveling the segregated South, for black people, was humiliating. The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks were so subhuman and so inferior that we could not even use public facilities that white people used. The Supreme Court even said that there was no right that a black person had that white people had to respect.

Charles Person, Freedom Rider: You didn't know what you were going to encounter. You had night riders. You had hoodlums. You could be antagonized at any point in your journey. So most of the time it was very, very difficult to plan a trip, and, you know, you always had someone to meet you there, because you didn't know what to expect.

Bus Driver singing (archival): We're rolling along the highway....

Sangernetta Gilbert Bush, Montgomery Resident: My father traveled quite a bit. And he just wanted a cup of coffee to make it to Montgomery. And he had to go around the back of the café to get a cup of coffee and then they told him--

Woman (archival): I'm sorry, our management does not allow us to serve Niggers in here.

Sangernetta Gilbert Bush, Montgomery Resident: Pushed 'em all out the door.

Bus Driver singing (archival): It's a wonderful happy feeling, going along the broad highway....

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: I grew up in the South, a child of good and decent parents. We had women who worked in our household, sometimes surrogate mothers. They were invisible women to me. I can't believe I couldn't see them. I don't know where my head or heart was, I don't know where my parents' heads and hearts were, or my teachers; I never heard it once from the pulpit. We were blind to the reality of racism, and afraid, I guess, of change.

Bus Driver singing (archival): We're rolling along, America.

Slate: 1961

John F. Kennedy (Archival): Let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: When John Kennedy was elected in November 1960, there was great hope and expectation that things would be better on matters of civil rights, that was a contrast between him and Dwight Eisenhower. He was young and had ideas and talked about the New Frontier. But when he gave his inaugural address in January of 1961, he talked about spreading freedom all over the world -- to China, to Latin America, to Africa -- to everywhere but Alabama, and Mississippi, and Georgia.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: The base of the Democratic Party was the essentially white voting South. The Kennedys had to be careful about antagonizing Southern governors and the whole Southern establishment which was segregationist.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: I was the first governor in the South that publicly endorsed him for president.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963 (Archival): I think he's a person who's sympathetic to the problems and conditions in the South. I think he's a man who will work with us down here.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: I knew that you couldn't run for president on a segregation ticket, you know I knew that. But I felt like, that if we ever got in a situation where we needed some understanding and some help from the federal government in regard to our problems down here, that I'd get a good-- I'd get an audience.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963 (Archival): The entire nation will be looking at us on election day and will judge the way we feel about the segregation question by the size of the Democratic vote on November the 4th. Let's turn out the largest Democratic vote in the history of the state and show the people of this nation that we're not going to tolerate integration of the races one minute.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: The Kennedys, when they came into office, were not worried about civil rights. They were worried about the Soviet Union. They were worried about the Cold War. They were worried about the nuclear threat. When civil rights did pop up, they regarded it as a bit of a nuisance, as something that was getting in the way of their agenda.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: It became clear that the civil rights leaders had to do something desperate, something dramatic to get the Kennedys' attention. That was the idea behind the Freedom Rides -- to dare, essentially dare the federal government to do what it was supposed to do, and see if their constitutional rights would be protected by the Kennedy administration.

James Farmer (Archival): I'm James Farmer, National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality, more often known as CORE.

Clayborne Carson, Historian: CORE needed to do something to demonstrate that it really deserved to be mentioned in the same sentence with the NAACP or SCLC or Martin Luther King. For James Farmer this was a way of saying, 'I need to be brought into the discussions at the national level about how the civil rights campaign was going to be conducted.'

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Farmer thought among the other benefits of the freedom rides would be added elevation for CORE. Because elevation for these groups mean everything; it means money, it means support, you get prestige, all that comes with publicity. And I'm sure Farmer was hoping for some publicity.

James Farmer (Archival): I do not think we can lose. We cannot lose unless we allow ourselves to be so divided that we lose a sense of direction and common purpose.

Derek Catsam, Historian: The idea of the Freedom Rides is a really radical idea. The idea of going into Mississippi and going into Alabama and challenging segregation so frontally and so aggressively in many ways is something that alarmed not only those who opposed civil rights but those within the civil rights community.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: They thought it was too confrontational, that it was going to backfire, it was going to set the movement back. It was too risky. CORE just didn't have the resources or the skill or really the know-how about the inner workings of Jim Crow and racism and how to fight it in the Deep South. And it was very likely that they would get arrested, they might get beaten up, they might even get killed.

Man (archival, training video): May I have a cup of coffee please?

Woman (archival, training video): Now look, I don't want any niggers in here, I don't...

Man (archival, training video): Nigger, what are you doing in here? Don't you know you don't belong here?

Gordon Carey, CORE Staff: The training that we did in Washington, D.C. prior to the time the Riders got on the buses was largely devoted to trying to see how the person is gonna react.

Man (archival, training video): Are you with this fella?

Man (archival, training video): Why yes, we're both interstate bus passengers.

Man (archival, training video): Where you from?

Man (archival, training video): I'm from the United States.

Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., Freedom Rider: By using nonviolence, people see the contrast between your dignified, disciplined confrontation of the wrong, and then the reaction of violence. No way of confusing that confrontation.

Man (archival, training video): You move!

Man (archival, training video): No, I don't move when I'm in the right.

Man (archival, training video): Well then, we'll....

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The Freedom Rides, I think, typified one of the standard contradictions within the Civil Rights Movement. On the one hand, it's nonviolent, doesn't hit back when hit. On the other hand, they're really courting violence in order to attract publicity that will ford the cause. And so you have these mixed motives: Let's hope nothing happens, nobody's hurt. On the other hand, suppose something does happen. Wouldn't that, in an ironic way, be good for us?

Man (archival): Get out! Move out! Move out!

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: People at CORE thought, "Maybe some bad things will happen," but I don't think they imagined anywhere near the kind of level of violence that they'd meet in Anniston and Birmingham and in Montgomery.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: It was make believe and it did not scare me perhaps because it was make believe and I wasn't sure I'd really have to use all these techniques. With our nonviolent behavior and our good will I thought we could do anything.

Reporter (Archival): Do you expect any trouble?

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider (Archival): There is a possibility that we will not be served at some stops. There is a possibility that we might be arrested. This is the only trouble that I anticipate.

Singing:: I'm taking a trip on the Greyhound bus line. I'm riding the front seat to New Orleans this time. Hallelujah, I'm a-traveling. Hallelujah, ain't it fine? Hallelujah, I'm a-traveling down freedom's main line.

Slate: May 4, 1961, Washington, D.C., Day 1

Jerry Ivor Moore, Freedom Rider: The first day getting on the bus, it was a good feeling. It was a good feeling. We were together, it was comradeship, it was a good cause, and we were going for the movement, you know, and we were going for the people.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: Boarding that Greyhound bus to travel through the heart of the Deep South, I felt good. I felt happy. I felt liberated. I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army. I was ready.

Singing:: Hallelujah I'm a-traveling, hallelujah ain't it fine? Hallelujah, I'm a traveling down freedom's main line.

Derek Catsam, Historian: When the Freedom Riders board those buses in Washington D.C. those are regularly scheduled buses. They're not chartered, they're not special buses. They have a couple of representatives from the black press but no national media following them and they certainly don't have any protection, whether from the police or from the military or anything, I mean, they are going down on their own, on regular buses and are going to see what happens to them.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: I thought white folks were gonna pull a fast one on us, they were gonna integrate the facilities during the time that we were there, and as soon as we left, they're gonna go back to doing business as usual. And in a few cities, that did happen.

Charles Person, Freedom Rider: The first few days of the ride was uneventful. And it basically was a piece of cake. James Peck and I, we realized, that, you know, this is not going to be as bad we thought. If we could do this all the way through, then we will have achieved what we had set out to do.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Almost certainly there wouldn't have been Freedom Rides without Irene Morgan. She refused to give up her seat on a bus in Gloucester County, Virginia, in July of 1944. She took her case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in Morgan vs. Virginia, in June of 1946, on paper at least the Supreme Court struck down segregation in interstate travel on buses.

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: But no state in the South obeyed these decisions, so it was as if they'd never happened. The Greyhound Bus Company, the Trailways Bus Company were able to hide behind the refusal of State law to accommodate to Federal law. So despite the fact that you'd had these national rulings, which should have been law everyplace in the country, they weren't in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, across the South -- business as usual.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: When we got to Atlanta, there was a little reception for us, headed by the Reverend Martin Luther King, and of course it was a great privilege for all of us to meet him. He was an icon of the Movement.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: They had hopes not only to meet Dr. King, but maybe he would be come a Freedom Rider, that he'd get on those buses with them. But he pulled some of the leaders of the Freedom Ride aside and said, 'Look, I hear some pretty disturbing things from my sources in Alabama. The Alabama Klan is preparing quite a welcome. And furthermore, many people in the Movement think what you're doing may do more harm than good.'

King said, 'I'm not going to get on the buses with you, and if I were you, I probably wouldn't go into Alabama.'

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: Later that night, Jim Farmer's wife called from Washington to tell him that his father had died, which meant that he was gonna have to leave for a few days and leave other people in charge. He was the main man, and losing him was quite a sobering thing.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: Jim Peck kind of took over, but the leader was not there to lead and we would have to lead ourselves, and we were getting into the most dangerous part of the trip.

Slate: May 14, 1961, Atlanta, GA, Day 11

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: There were two buses leaving Atlanta for Birmingham that Mother's Day morning -- one Greyhound, one Trailways. Two groups of Freedom Riders. They left an hour apart. Only one made it all the way to Birmingham.

Mae F. Moultrie Howard, Freedom Rider: It was such a beautiful day, it was such a quiet feeling that day at the-- it was bright and sunny. The sky was blue. And it was just a beautiful scenery. We didn't have a sense of fear.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963 (Archival): These people are going from town to town and getting off the bus and seeking, through mixed groups -- negro men and white women -- to force themselves into situations which tend to inflame the local people in such a manner as to incense them and enrage them and to provoke them into acts of violence. That's what they're doing.

Brandt Ayers, Journalist: It was a very disconcerting period. It was as if one civilization was just coming unhinged and was free-floating and taking on water. That was that feeling. People in the South felt, 'I'm being asked to live in a different way, I'm asked to have different attitudes, I'm asked to behave differently. And as I'm being made to do all of these things, there are people who come on the TV in my own living room and tell me that I'm a redneck, and I'm a racist, and I'm all of these things -- and by God, I'd like to, I'd just like to punch some of those- them damn agitators right in the face! I gotta hate somebody. I got to hate somebody.'

Janie Forsyth McKinney, Anniston Resident: I lived with my family five miles out of Anniston on the Birmingham highway. I was 12 years old at the time. My dad had a grocery store beside the house and the name of it was Forsyth and Son Grocery. One day he said there were some black agitators, nigger agitators, coming down from the North. He said, he and some of his friends had a little surprise party planned for 'em, and he kind of laughed.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: As we entered the city limits of Anniston, we could see the bus station. Looked like at least 200 people were around the bus station. All men.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: They were calling us all kind of names: 'nigger, nigger-lovers, communists, come on out and integrate Alabama, we dare you to do this, we dare you to do that.'

Mae F. Moultrie Howard, Freedom Rider: The men began to come closer and surround the bus completely and they were saying lets kill these niggers on this bus and these nigger lovers.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The Anniston Klan had it all worked out. They had one of their members lie down in front of the bus. They were puncturing tires. They were breaking windows. They wanted to make sure that bus couldn't leave before they could surround it and do whatever they wanted to do.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: The bus may have been there for 10 or 15 minutes; to us it seemed like an hour. Another bus driver was able to ease the bus through the crowd.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: At first there was a feeling of relief because we were getting away there, we thought. But this car that was in front of us kept dodging from side to side to keep the bus from getting by.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: I spoke to a innocent passenger who was sitting there and said, 'I'm sorry I got you into this.' And he said, 'So am I.'

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: Eventually we heard that sickening sound of tires going flat.

Janie Forsyth McKinney, Anniston Resident: There was a commotion outside so I walked to the front of the store to see if I could tell what going on. The bus driver came out and he went out to look at the tires and when he realized how flat and hopeless they were he just walked away from the bus and just left all the passengers to fend for themselves. He just walked away.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: We were now in the hands of this mob. It didn't look good for us.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: I'm, like everyone else on the bus, I'm pretty afraid. Okay. That's putting it mildly.

Janie Forsyth McKinney, Anniston Resident: I watched as a man raised his arm above the crowd with a crowbar and he broke out one of the back windows of the bus.

Mae F. Moultrie Howard, Freedom Rider: You could hear him say, 'Throw it in! Throw it in.' And asking, 'Where is the gas? Where is the gas?'

Janie Forsyth McKinney, Anniston Resident: The hand went down, and when it came back up it had some object in it that he threw into that hole.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: And there was immediate flash fire on the bus.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: Pretty soon the whole back of the bus was black. You couldn't even see in front of your face.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: So I ran up to the front of the bus. And I tried to open the door. The only thing I could hear is, 'Let's burn them niggers, let's burn them niggers alive.'

At that moment, the fuel tank exploded. I heard somebody say, 'It's going to go! It's going to go!' And they ran and that was the only way we could get that door open.

Janie Forsyth McKinney, Anniston Resident: The door burst open and people just spilled out into the yard. They were practically tripping over each other because they were so sick and needed to get some air.

Mae F. Moultrie Howard, Freedom Rider: I can't tell you if I walked off the bus or if I crawled off or if someone pulled me off.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: When I got off the bus, a man came up to me and I'm coughing and strangling and he said, 'Boy, you alright?' And I nodded my head, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. He had hit me with a part of a baseball bat.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: People were gagging and they were crawling around on the ground, they were trying to get the smoke out of their chests. It was just an awful, awful, awful, awful scene.

Janie Forsyth McKinney, Anniston Resident: It was horrible, it was like a scene from hell. It was - it was the worst suffering I'd ever heard. Yeah, I heard, 'Water, please get me water, oh God, I need water.'

I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her. I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be ok I got up and picked out somebody else.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: As I'm getting up off the ground, four or five guys coming at me again. And this is when I see the highway patrol man. He pulls his gun and he fired in the air. He says, 'Okay you've had your fun, lets move back.' And that's what stopped it.

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The people on the Trailways bus going into Birmingham don't know that the Greyhound bus has been burned in Anniston, outside Anniston, and the Riders are sitting on the side of the road, you know, covered in blood. Now, they're going into a city which is the worst city for race in the whole United States. It literally is a police state ruled by one of the worst figures in American history, Bull Connor, who must've been some kind of psychopath, just rabid on the issue of race.

Bull Connor (Archival): You can never whip these birds if you don't keep you and them separate. I found that out in Birmingham. You've got to keep the whites and the blacks separate.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Bull Connor was a real bigot. And he was willing and able to do anything, really, to make sure that the Southern way of life -- of segregation and Jim Crow -- remained intact. He thought that the whole social order, that civilization depended on it.

Howard K. Smith, CBS Evening News (Archival): Last night a man phoned me, said he was close to the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, he said he wanted to give me a tip. 'Be sure to be at the bus terminal on Sunday,' he said, 'because you're going to see action.'

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: Unbeknownst to any of us, the Birmingham Police Department, headed up by Bull Connor, had made an agreement with the head of the Klan to give them time to beat up the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station.

Gary Thomas Rowe, FBI Informant (Archival): My instructions were from the Birmingham Police Department that the Klan organization had 15 minutes, quote 'to burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don't give a goddamn.' He said, 'I will guarantee your people that not one soul will ever be arrested in that 15 minutes.'

Diane McWhorter, Writer: The FBI, even though they knew that there was gonna be violence and there was gonna be no police protection, they did nothing to protect the Riders.

Gary Thomas Rowe, FBI Informant (Archival): The Klan put out a fiery cross summonses which means people from all over the different states were to come. Not hundred, thousands of people would be down there in order to wait on them buses and beat and probably kill those people.

Diane McWhorter, Writer: What ended up being worse was that their very own informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, was at the center of the violence.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: In theory, the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, reports to the Attorney General. But in fact, Hoover was more powerful than any Attorney General. Hoover made no effort to stop the mob, and he never told Kennedy about it. He never told his boss, the Attorney General, that he was watching the mob be formed and that the FBI was gonna do nothing to stop it.

Ted Gaffney, Photographer, Jet Magazine: When the bus pulled up, there was a mob. Looked like a thousand people. They had these iron pipes.

Charles Person, Freedom Rider: James Peck and I, we were scheduled to test the facilities. So he looked at me, and I looked at him and we proceeded to go into the terminal.

Jerry Ivor Moore, Freedom Rider: I looked at the reporter. When our eyes met and he looked away... it just... oh my guts... my very guts shook. He must have thought we were doomed.

Charles Person, Freedom Rider (Archival): As we entered, we were met by hoodlums who were standing around the walls.

Gary Thomas Rowe, FBI Informant (Archival): The very first thing that I saw was a white man and he was hollering, 'No people don't do it! They are my brothers they're your brothers, before I let you kill them you'll have to kill me first.' The Klansmen made a statement, 'well, fink it, that ain't no problem.'

At that time all hell broke loose.

Charles Person, Freedom Rider (Archival): I was thrown forward. I was hit on the back of the head with something.

Gary Thomas Rowe, FBI Informant (Archival): It was a mass brawl. Sticks, bats, clubs, guns just swinging away, just swinging away.

Charles Person, Freedom Rider: James went down almost immediately. The blood started running.

Gary Thomas Rowe, FBI Informant (Archival): A black woman run up to a city detective and hollered, 'they are killing my husband, for God's sakes help me!' He slapped her down and knocked the hell out of her.

Jerry Ivor Moore, Freedom Rider: Then this flashbulb went off, and I believe that flashbulb had saved my life, cause they turned on the reporter.

Howard K. Smith, CBS Evening News (Archival): They knocked one man, a white man, down at my feet and they beat him and kicked him until his face was a bloody red pulp. The police did not arrive at this scene until 10 minutes late when these men had, as if on signal, dispersed and had gone further down the street, where I saw some of them discussing their achievement of the day right under the windows of the Police Commissioner's office.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Those pictures were about as dramatic as anything I think anyone had ever seen coming out of the civil rights struggle. The notion that just for the attempt to sit on the front of a bus, that you could risk your life, that people could try to burn you to death was incredible.

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: For the Kennedy brothers, domestic affairs were an afterthought for them and the Civil Rights Movement was an afterthought beyond an afterthought. Now all of a sudden, chaos is broken loose. Attention is riveted. People are talking about this. The whole world is watching.

Reporter, Radio Havana, Cuba (Archival): The recent incidents in Alabama speak eloquently of the problems that the devout and pious Mr. Kennedy has to resolve in his own country, before engaging his country in adventures against peoples where there is no problem of racial segregation.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: Both RFK and JFK wanted it just to go away. JFK was vocal about it. 'Get 'em off those buses! Stop it!' Cause he was getting ready for his summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, and he just didn't want the distraction.

Harris Wofford, Assistant to President Kennedy: To have the leading story about the United States be the kind of violence that took place against the Freedom Riders was a matter of embarrassment anywhere. And he was going to Europe. Our friends and allies were appalled that this was going on in the United States of America.

Rev. Benjamin Cox, Freedom Rider (Archival): If men like Governor Patterson and Governor Burnett of Mississippi and also Governor Davis of Louisiana would carry out the good oath of their office then a citizen would be able to travel in this country. And people in Tel Aviv and Moscow and London would not pick up their newspapers for breakfast and realize that America is not living up to the dream of liberty and justice for all.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963 (Archival): We can't act as nursemaids to agitators. I think when they learn that when they go somewhere to create a riot, that there's not gonna be somebody there to stand between them and the other crowd, they'll stay home. And you just can't guarantee the safety of a fool, and that's what these folks are. Just fools.

Slate: May 15th, Birmingham, Alabama, Day 12

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: After we got out of the hospital we met the next day. I saw Jim Peck for the first time. I felt like crying, but didn't. And he proposed that we should continue with our Freedom Ride. After that, there was no longer any debate; if he could be beaten as he was and still say we should go on, we certainly felt we could go on.

Reporter (Archival): Why are you planning to keep up this ride?

James Peck (Archival): We're planning to keep it up because we feel that we must not surrender to violence.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: We gathered at the bus station there in Birmingham. There were mob people around there too. We had to make our way through them to get into the bus station.

Jerry Ivor Moore, Freedom Rider: The police are there because a crowd is starting to gather. It was getting tense. It was getting tense. I mean anything was possible right then, right there, anything was possible.

Ted Gaffney, Photographer, Jet Magazine: The bus driver said, "There're a thousand waiting on you outside of town. You all are Freedom Riders. I am not. I have a family. So, I'm not driving this bus."

Charles Person, Freedom Rider: We were close to getting to Mississippi and for the rally in New Orleans. And as beaten, as weary as we were, we wanted to continue. But I think we were pretty much traumatized.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: I had very mixed feelings. I'd learned to be afraid overnight. I was no longer this fearless rider. I was no longer so interested in dying for the cause. I appreciated being alive.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: They had a vote. They were discussing things. Some wanted to continue. The problem was, they couldn't continue on the buses because we didn't have any drivers. They finally made the decision that they had come to -- that they had gone about as far as they could. It was over.

We got out to the airport. You wouldn't believe it, but those mob people were still there.

Genevieve Houghton, Freedom Rider: There was basically the same crowd we had seen the day before. And when it reached a critical point, we were gonna get beaten to smithereens.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American: Along the edges of the building that we had to walk past to try to get to the plane, they were still out there and they were still fired up and they were still trying to whack us and they were still calling us names. Eventually we got to the plane and settled in and everybody got a little relaxed. Then we get this call saying there was a bomb scare. We had to walk back through these people again. You had this nightmarish feeling that they would never go away.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: The Attorney General and the President talked together and I talked then with them. And our strategy was simply: go to Alabama, go to Birmingham, get those Freedom Riders to New Orleans. It's a long flight, but by the time I get there, they're still trapped in that airport. They were in limbo. They were in a frightened state of limbo.

I think the people who were not glad to see somebody from the Federal government were the airlines. I got with the manager and they got on the telephone, and if you represent the President of the United States and you're talking to the officials of a regulated airline, we were outta there on the first flight.

Ted Gaffney, Photographer, Jet Magazine: I'd never flown before, but it felt good when that plane got off that runway. I'd rather take a chance on getting killed in a plane crash than to get beat to death by hoodlums with iron pipes.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: When we arrived in New Orleans, the State Police formed a corridor from the steps of the bottom of the plane to the terminal, and I will say, they were cursed and condemned with racial slurs from the bottom of that ladder 'til we walked into that terminal. You wouldn't believe it from state police officers, just spewing filth and venom and hatred.

Moses Newson, Journalist, Afro-American (reading): "The courageous Freedom Riders won't ever be the same. They left Washington, D.C. in good spirits with high hopes in their country and fellow men. But the beatings, the tensions, the shocks, the depth of the hating, the open lawlessness took its toll. It will be a miracle if all their physical and psychological wounds ever heal. The Deep South was that tough."

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: I went to a motel to spend the night. And you know, I thought, 'What a great hero I am, you know? How easy this was, you know? I just took care of everything the President and the Attorney General wanted done. Mission Accomplished.'

My phone in the hotel room rings and it's the Attorney General. He has received word from the FBI in Nashville that another wave of Freedom Riders is coming down to Birmingham from Nashville to continue the Freedom Rides. And he opened the conversation, 'Who the hell is Diane Nash?'

Slate: May 16th, Nashville, Tennessee, Day 13

Diane Nash, Student, Fisk University: It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence. It was critical that the Freedom Ride not stop, and that it be continued immediately.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: Students from the Movement in Nashville had been through violence. We had been arrested, we'd all had our lives threatened. We were ones that had not broken. And we were the logical ones to continue the ride.

Diane Nash, Student, Fisk University: We had had a successful movement the year before, and had desegregated lunch counters. We had been watching the progress of the Freedom Ride. We were fresh troops.

Frederick Leonard, Student, Tennessee State University: CORE, I think, they didn't understand. We dealt with violence every day in the South. They didn't treat us like we were human, they treated us like vicious animals, like they were always on guard, thinking we were gonna do something to them, while they were doing it to us. And CORE, I think, they felt, 'We'll go down there, and you know, they'll let us ride the front of the bus and go into the white station, the white waiting room, and everything will be all right. And we'll just all the way to New Orleans doing this and then come back to New York and-- see we did it!' It wasn't like that.

You're saying that you're gonna start a movement, you're gonna do something to change this, and then you quit. Your parents tell you, 'Don't start something that you can't finish. Finish it.'

Diane Nash, Student, Fisk University (Archival): The groups will be dispatched...

Rev. C.T. Vivian, Freedom Rider: The meeting was called and Diane led it. And I remember Diane saying something was very important. She took a break and said, 'Go out and let's think about it for about 10 minutes and come back, and we'll make the decision.'

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: It was not an easy decision because what it meant was dropping out of school in the midst of our final exams. And for some of us, we were the first generation to go to college. Our parents had really made sacrifices. And we were making a decision to drop out.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, Freedom Rider: Time was up, everybody came back in. The decision was made to leave that night.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: My parents had provided me a wonderful childhood and a tremendous amount of love and support in everything that I had done. But as a white person, I was the primary focus of most of the violence that took place, because I was a disgrace to the white race. I was the traitor. So I knew, if anybody was probably going to get pretty well beaten or killed, it would be me. And I wanted to tell my folks how much I loved them and how much I appreciated what they'd done.

Singing: Oh freedom....

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University (reading): Tuesday, May 16, 1961. We held two meetings today. The first was at six this morning. The second from seven to one tonight. After much discussion, we decided to continue the Freedom Ride. Of the 18 who volunteered, 10 were chosen. Three females and seven males. We will leave on the Greyhound bus tomorrow morning at either 5:15 or 6:45. We were all again made aware of what we can expect to face: jail, extreme violence, or death.

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: We thought we would divide the group in half. If that group had been arrested, beaten, unable to continue, or even killed, we had a second group that was ready to go. And they knew that no matter what happened -- okay -- I would bring a second group.

Diane Nash, Student, Fisk University: The people who were going on the Freedom Ride from Nashville elected me to be the coordinator. That was a really heavy responsibility because the lives and safety of people whom I loved and cared about deeply, and who were some of my closest friends, depended on my doing a good job at that.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: My phone in the hotel room rings and it's the Attorney General. And he opens the conversation, 'Who the hell is Diane Nash? Call her and let her know what is waiting for the Freedom Riders.'

So I called her. I said, 'I understand that there are more Freedom Riders coming down from Nashville. You must stop them if you can.' Her response was, 'They're not gonna turn back. They're on their way to Birmingham and they'll be there, shortly.'

You know that spiritual -- 'Like a tree standing by the water, I will not be moved'? She would not be moved. And, and I felt my voice go up another decibel and another and soon I was shouting, 'Young woman, do you understand what you're doing? You're gonna get somebody... Do you understand you're gonna get somebody killed?'

And, there's a pause, and she said, 'Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night before they left. We know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome non-violence.'

That's virtually a direct quote of the words that came out of that child's mouth. Here I am, an official of the United States government, representing the President and the Attorney General, talking to a student at Fisk University. And she in a very quiet but strong way gave me a lecture.

Singing: We shall not be moved....

Slate: Title: May 17th, Birmingham, AL, Day 14

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: One young man -- white fella -- sitting kind of over there, leaned over and said, 'Where are you guys going?' And I said, 'To New Orleans.' And he kinda had a smirk on his face and said, 'You'll never make it.'

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: When we arrived at the city limit of Birmingham, Bull Connor let the regular passenger get off the bus. He kept us on the bus. Then he ordered the local police officials to place newspaper, cardboards, to cover all of the windows. They wanted to make it difficult for the media to get word out.

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: We sat on that bus for two hours or more. It was getting hot. There was no air condition, in the summertime. When they let us out, we immediately went in the white only side of the bus station. Bull Connor came in and arrested us, and put us in jail, he said, for our own protection.

Radio News Report (Archival): Birmingham's Police Chief has taken a group of negroes into custody. Thus ended a potentially explosive situation, which had been growing increasingly more tense since about noon today. The college students came down from Nashville with the avowed purposed of testing Birmingham's segregation laws. They wanted to continue the Freedom Ride aborted by a group of CORE members here after mob violence earlier this week.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: The Attorney General says, 'You better get up there as quickly as you can.' And of course by the time I get there, they're all incarcerated. Now the Attorney General is trying to reach the governor, I'm trying to reach the governor.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: The governor has nothing to do with the daily operations of the police department of the city of Birmingham. Bull Connor never supported me for governor. I never liked the man. In fact, I was a little bit afraid of him. He was so unpredictable.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The situation is really dangerous. Bobby Kennedy convinces his brother that maybe you need to talk to Patterson yourself. Maybe we have to assert Presidential authority.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: I had figured that I might get that call from the President. I told the operator to tell the President that I was not there. And they pressed, from the White House Office, and they said, 'Well, he can't be reached.' They said, 'Well where is he? Get him on the phone.' 'He can't be reached; he's out in the Gulf fishing.' I lied. I just lied.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: I think the Kennedy brothers were shocked that despite the assertion of Presidential authority, that their former political ally wouldn't even talk to them on the phone. I think that really gave them a sense of how dangerous things were in Birmingham; that anything could happen in Bull Connor's city when the governor won't even talk to the President of the United States.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: I guess maybe around 10:00 one of the guards came in and told us to get our clothes on, that we were leaving. We walked out of the cell. Saw Bull Connor.

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: We got on the outside, they had two police cruisers and a limousine, loaded us up, and start driving, 1:00 in the morning.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: The FBI called me at the motel and woke me up and said, 'The Freedom Riders have all been taken out of jail.' I said, 'Kidnapped?' And I thought, 'My God, they're gonna kill 'em.' I didn't think Bull Connor was above that.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: We got to the state line -- the Tennessee -- the state line of Alabama. He said, 'I'm letting you off here.' We didn't know what was gonna happen.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: They throw the luggage out and he says that, 'You all can go over there, there's a train station, and get a train back to Nashville.'

Of course, I couldn't let Bull have the last word. During that time we watched a lot of cowboy movies. So I told him we would see him back in Birmingham by high noon.

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: We didn't know if the Ku Klux Klan was following us. We didn't know where we was located. We saw no telephone to make any calls. We had to find a place to hide.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: We came upon a old house that was fallen, knocked on the door, said, 'We are the Freedom Riders. Please let us in.'

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: Older gentlemen came to the door. He said, 'Mm-nh, mm-nh, ya'll can't come in here.'

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: My mother had always told me that you need some help, then you try to talk to the lady of the house. And I said, 'Let's talk loud and wake up his wife.'

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: Few minutes later, we knocked on the door again, and his wife came to the door with him. And she-- we told her we were the Freedom Riders, she said, 'Ya'll chil'en, come on in.'

Singing: I'm on my way and I won't turn back....

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: We didn't get back by high noon, but we made our way back.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The first group of Nashville riders make it back to Birmingham from the Tennessee border. There's a second wave of riders from Nashville already there. They've got a terrible problem.

Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the Teamsters Union, says, 'None of my drivers are going to get on any of those buses.' Greyhound Corporation can't find any drivers willing to get on the bus. So the riders are stuck there, and it's not clear how they're ever going to get out of Birmingham.

News Radio Reporter (Archiva): A menacingly quiet mob grew into the several hundreds outside the terminal. Dozens of police patrolled the area and police dogs helped keep the streets clear and the mob back from the terminal. The Negroes went to board the bus finally and the driver stomped off saying he would not make the trip.

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: We were sitting in the white designated waiting room. This was my first encounter, face to face, with the Ku Klux Klan. They had on white sheets and their hoods were thrown back. And they walked around in the bus station while we were there, and they stepped on our feet. They threw cold water on our faces.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Bobby Kennedy was getting frustrated. He gets word to John Patterson that if the state of Alabama won't protect the Freedom Riders, won't end this crisis, then the Federal government would have to do it. They'd have to step in in some way.

Patterson realizes that he's gotta do something. He says, 'Can't you send somebody down to Montgomery to talk to my staff to figure this out?' And that opens the way for John Seigenthaler going down to Montgomery to talk with John Patterson.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: I said, 'Look Governor, it's just this simple: if you can't provide them protection and you say you can't, you don't leave us any option. We'll have to provide protection for them. And it will have to be the U.S. Marshals or troops.'

He turned immediately to a man seated across the table and said, 'That's Floyd Mann, my Commissioner of Safety. Floyd, tell this man these rabble rousers are asking for trouble and we can't protect them.'

He said, 'Governor, I've been in law enforcement all my life. If you tell me to protect them, I'll protect them.' It sucked the air out of the room.

Derek Catsam, Historian: Patterson's hands are tied. Because his chief law enforcement official has essentially said, 'I can protect the Freedom Riders' in front of the Kennedy administration's representative. And so Paterson's in a position where he has to act.

Robert F. Kennedy (Archival): Around 11:00, I talked to Mr. Seigenthaler, and the Governor at that time assured Mr. Seigenthaler that we have the means, the ability, and the will to protect these people. We'll make sure that people traveling in interstate commerce and traveling across our highways are not molested. And traveling through our cities are not harmed. That's all I asked for. He said that that's -- he gave us his flat word and assurance that that would happen.

Singing: Hallelujah I'm a traveling....

Slate: May 20, 1961, Montgomery, Alabama, Day 17

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: When we saw all the protection that we had, you know, we got relaxed then. We sang a few freedom songs and as a matter of fact, I dozed off. That's right. Felt safe.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: Floyd Mann had state troopers leading them and following them. And we had a state trooper helicopter overhead, protecting them from overhead, and escorted them to the city limits of Montgomery, where we turned them over to the city authorities of Montgomery, who guaranteed to us that they would protect them and maintain order themselves at the bus station.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: I was looking out the window. And I could see the policemens taking off in different direction. And so would the helicopter. And we were thinking that some Montgomery policemans was going to come in then. But then we didn't see anyone.

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: We pulled into the bus station, there was a eerie feeling; we didn't see anybody. We saw a couple taxicabs.

Herb Kaplow, NBC News (Archival): Cameraman Maurice Levy, soundman Wee Risser and I jumped out of our car to photograph the debarking from the bus itself. There was no large crowd around. I asked some of the Riders what they intended to do. They said they did not yet know. Then a heavyset man asked me whether I was one of the group, I said I was not. I noticed then that he was holding in his right hand an open penknife.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: John was getting ready to go to the microphone and just as he was about to do this, this fella went at one of the fellas that was holding one of the parabolic mics. And he grabbed it out his hands and he threw it to the ground, stomped on it, and turned and approached one of the photographers and grabbed his camera, and yanked on it and in doing so, the cameraman fell to the ground, he started kicking and beating him. And that seemed to be the cue.

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: The mob came out and went straight to the reporters, and started beating them and kicking them and throwing their cameras down, smashing them on the ground.

Reporter (Archival): After we were forced away, that's when the attack on the Riders themselves started.

Frederick Leonard, Student, Tennessee State University: It just seemed like, just suddenly they were -- we were like, the bus was like surrounded.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: You could see baseball bats and pieces of pipe and hammers and chains. And one fella had a pitchfork.

Frederick Leonard, Tennessee State University: They were like on a feeding frenzy. Like, you know how like sharks are just-- they were just crazy.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: And what really sticks with me were the women. They were screaming, 'Kill them niggers!' And they had babies in their arms.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: You could see baggage being thrown into the air, you could hear screams. My heart was in my throat. I knew suddenly -- betrayal, disaster. I hope not death.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: Bobby is getting this in real time, as it's happening, from his own lieutenants. Saying something to the effect, "It's terrible. It's terrible." He's watching it happen. "There are no police. They're just beating them."

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: This was war. On the Greyhound Bus terminal parking lot. This was absolute war.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: I asked God to be with me, to give me the strength I would need to remain nonviolent, and to forgive them.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: The last thing I recall standing with Jim Zwerg. I was hit in the head with a wooden crate.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University: I heard a crack and fell forward. Rolled over on my back, and a foot came down on my face, and that was it. I was out.

Frederick Leonard, Tennessee State University: William Barbee was knocked down. A big, 250-pound white guy had his foot on his neck while another one was trying to drive a steel rod through his ear.

Sangernetta Gilbert Bush, Montgomery Resident: The police were standing there, in their uniforms, just looking. They provided no protection for those students.

John Seigenthaler, Assistant to RFK: There was a skinny, young kid and he was sort of dancing in front of this young woman, punching her, and I could see, as she turned her head, blood from the nose and mouth. I grabbed her by the wrist over the hood of the car, had her right at the door and she put her hands up on the doorjamb and said, 'Mister, I don't want you to get hurt. I'm non-violent, I'm trained to take this. Please, don't get hurt. We'll be fine.'

And I said, 'Get your ass in the car, sister.' And at that moment, they wheeled me around and they hit me with a pipe. They kicked me under the car and left me there.

Radio News Reporter (Archival): There were some 300 to a thousand whites in the area of the bus depot before police finally broke up the crowd with tear gas. They beat and injured at least 20 persons of both races and both sexes.

Derek Catsam, Historian: After the Montgomery riots the Kennedys are feeling betrayed. There's John Seigenthaler lying in a pool of his own blood. They realized that they can't work with Patterson, and they're gonna to have to bring in Federal Marshals.

Radio News Reporter (Archival): The Justice Department says 400 United States Marshals will be in Montgomery tomorrow. They're being assembled from other southern states now and court orders are being prepared to enable them to keep armed order if necessary.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963 (Archival): We don't need the Federal Marshals here in this city. The situation here is well in hand and if the outside agitators who came here and deliberately stirred up this controversy would go home and the Marshals go home, it will be best for everybody and the situation would return to normal very quickly.

Jim Zwerg, Exchange Student, Fisk University (Archival): We're dedicated to this. We'll take hitting, we'll take beating. We're willing to accept death. But we're going to keep coming until we can ride from anywhere in the South to anyplace else in the South.

Singing: Don't you think its about time Lord that we all be free....

Slate: May 21, 1961, Montgomery, Alabama, Day 18

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The next day after the Montgomery riot, it was clear that the riot required a response from the Movement. That the Movement couldn't let this pass. So they called a mass meeting -- support for the Freedom Riders at the First Baptist Church, Ralph Abernathy's church. Jim Farmer flew in. Revered Fred Shuttlesworth came down from Birmingham. Dr. King flew in.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963 (Archival): He is the worst of all the agitators in this country. Now the best thing for King and all of the so-called Freedom Riders is to return to their homes go back to their books and mind their own business.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: Well, I wasn't happy when I found out he was coming to town. He was a spellbinder in those days and he could get a crowd riled up quick. This would exacerbate the overall problem of the interest in the thing, and it would draw more attention to it, and it would bring out more of the crazies.

Singing: Don't you think its about time Lord that we all be free....

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: They filled that church -- 1,500 people. And they were making a statement that the movement was behind the Freedom Rides. There had been disagreements before -- many people thought it had been a mistake, that they were squandering the resources of the movement, that they were gonna get themselves killed -- but now they had to close ranks. They had to say that we're in this together, that the Freedom Rides are here to stay, that we're not gonna get pushed out of Alabama by violence.

Delores Boyd, Montgomery Resident: In 1961 I was 11 years old. It was important that I go that night. The busload of Freedom Riders had been attacked, had been beaten. Many of them were still hospitalized at St. Jude. We were told that those who were able would actually be there. I'd heard Dr. King before, I'd heard Reverend Abernathy, so the excitement wasn't just seeing the leaders. We were all wanting to see who are these courageous Freedom Riders.

And probably we'd been there at least an hour, hour and a half, when we realized that this would be different.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: When I first realized that something was happening -- I think when I heard a rock hit the window. And then some of us went to look out the window, and then got some more rocks. And so then that's when, you know, a little fear came and we didn't know what was about to go down.

Diane McWhorter, Writer: There's a crowd of white people outside that just keeps growing and growing as the evening progresses. And finally, there's a full-scale mob.

Delores Boyd, Montgomery Resident: We could hear outside, noise. We could hear the jeering, the taunting. And they were all throwing things at the church.

William Harbour, Freedom Rider: You could see the flare up of fire on the outside. And you could hear the hollering from the groups on the outside. We just knew that the church gonna be set on fire and we couldn't get out.

Tommy Giles, Aide to Governor Patterson: They sent the Marshals to the church to protect the Freedom Riders. They showed up down there in a bunch of mail trucks. U.S. mail vehicles carried them down there.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: In fact, it was a motley crew, a kind of a posse rounded up of the last second, of Federal workers. Postal workers. Some customs officials. Maybe some border guards. And a lot of these guys were rednecks -- I mean, the joking up in Washington, I think one of the Kennedy's aides said, 'I'm not too sure which side they're gonna be on.'

Tommy Giles, Aide to Governor Patterson: The crowd started moving towards the church and the Marshals decided, 'We're gonna put out tear gas.' Throwing the tear gas, not realizing the wind was blowing back on the Marshals. And they got disbanded, and they went in all kinds of directions.

Martin Luther King (Archival): The first thing that we must do here tonight is decide that we're gonna be calm, and that we are going to continue to stand up for what we know is right.

Catherine Burks-Brooks, Freedom Rider: We were told that we couldn't leave the church, and to stay on the inside. The singing had kind of stopped, and we were tired at that time. We were about fit to leave the church.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: Well, here you have this church that's got 1,500 black folks in it, and they're surrounded by a screaming, raving mob of 3,000 whites who want to burn 'em, who want to kill 'em. And Martin Luther King is in there and he's scared, and he should be scared. And he's on the phone with the Attorney General and he's asking for federal help.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Dr. King was saying, 'The situation here is desperate, you have got to do something. You've gotta figure out some way to uphold the rule of law.'

Martin Luther King (Archival): We are not giving in for what we are standing for. And maybe it takes something like this for the Federal government to see that Alabama is not going to place any limit upon itself; it must be imposed from without.

Derek Catsam, Historian: At the same time as the Kennedys are communicating with the folks in the church, they are talking to Patterson saying, 'You need to do something. You need to act and you need to act now!' What they really want to see happen ultimately is a peaceful solution in which Patterson is the one who protects the Riders, Patterson is the one who takes the responsibility. They don't want to appear to be imposing the will of the federal government.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (Archival): It's a sin and shame before God on a day like this, that these people who govern us would let things come to such a sad estate. But God is not dead. The most guilty man in this State tonight is Governor John Patterson.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: I had my window up, and I could hear the din going on down there. I had a Colonel there from the National Guard assigned to me as a liaison officer, just in case I had to declare Martial Law.

Tommy Giles, Aide to Governor Patterson: I was driving back and forth and I was keeping Governor Patterson abreast of what was happening at the church. I told him, I said, 'Governor things have gotten real outta hand down there and we gone need to do a lot more with the situation.'

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: He said, 'Governor, you better call them out, you better call them out, this thing is gonna get out of hand.' And I signed the proclamation and I handed it to Colonel Shepherd and I said, 'Here, call 'em out.'

Martin Luther King (Archival): I want to make this announcement that the City is now under Marshal Law and troops are on the way into Montgomery.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: People rejoice. People express a sense of relief and happiness because they knew that the federal government has spoken from Washington. They knew that for the first time, the Kennedy administration, President Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, had identified with their side, at the side of Civil Rights.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The back and forth between King and Bobby Kennedy was one of the remarkable dramas of the Civil Rights Movement. It gave Dr. King a stature that Civil Rights leaders had not had before. It was a kind of personal contact that becomes one of the hallmarks of the Movement later, but in 1961 it was a real affirmation of the Movement's power.

Radio News Reporter (Archival): The capital city of Alabama remains under Martial Law in the wake of racial strife. Eight hundred National Guardsmen and 700 U.S. Marshals aided by state and local police are keeping the watch here to prevent a reoccurrence of the interracial violence which has swept the city over the weekend. Montgomery now hopes for the best but braces for the racial worst.

Radio News Reporter (Archival): This was as good a time than any to point out to the rest of the world that we are not barbaric. The man who did the pointing for the United States today was Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who, using the microphones of Voice of America, told the people of more than 60 countries, 'That the Montgomery mob did not represent the people of the South, it actually represented only a small minority of Americans.'

Robert F. Kennedy (Archival): In many areas of the United States, where there's no prejudice whatsoever, Negroes are continuously making progress here in this country. The progress in many areas is not as fast as it should be, but they are making progress and we will continue to make progress. There is prejudice now, there's no reason that in the near, in the foreseeable future that a Negro could also be President of the United States.

Slate: May 23, 1961, Montgomery, Alabama, Day 20

Radio News Reporter (Archival): The 17 freedom riders who were at last night's church service have disappeared within the city of Montgomery or in the surrounding countryside. There is no sign of them, no one who will admit that he has any knowledge of their whereabouts. They were expected to surrender to local authorities today to face charges of having violated an injunction against integrating buses operating on Alabama highways. They have not surrendered.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: After the siege, the Freedom Riders gathered at Dr. Harris' house. This was one of the largest houses in the black community in Montgomery, and it's an amazing scene. Nothing like it had ever quite happened in the history of the Movement before, where you have young and old leaders, sort of sequestered in this house, talking about the philosophy of the Movement, the strategy, what to do next. And part of this involves the relationship between the Riders, between the Freedom Rides and Dr. King.

Martin Luther King (Archival): We met with the students, some four hours last evening, and discussed many matters concerning the whole Freedom Ride and the goals ahead, and it was a unanimous feeling of all of the students present that the Freedom Rides should and must continue.

Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., Freedom Rider: There were a number of students and Riders who wanted Martin King to go on the ride with them. So there were major discussions and a lot of heat, I think, even anger at Dr. Harris' house during the night and the next day. The folk who were pushing him to go were wanting to use him because he was the spokesperson and symbol of the struggle and they wanted that to give them some kind of media edge.

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: He refuses, and he claims that he can't go because he's on probation and many of these young people are on probation three or four times over, you know, they've been arrested many more times than he has and they can't understand this reluctance.

Diane McWhorter, Writer: The SNCC kids fully expected that King was gonna be on the bus with them to Jackson, Mississippi, and were really crestfallen that he wouldn't and that's when they started calling him, mockingly, 'De Lawd.'

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: To refer to Dr. King, as some people did, 'The Lord' was being facetious, sarcastic, that he was bigger than any of us.

Clayborne Carson, Historian: When he was explaining why he wouldn't go on the Freedom Rides, he kind of compared himself to Jesus in the sense of seeing himself as a person facing crucifixion. I think he lost a certain amount of stature among some of the students. I think it fed into some of the splits that would come.

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: That didn't mean that they turned their backs on him by any means; he's still a revered and beloved figure, but he was revealed to have feet, well maybe of clay.

Slate: May 24, 1961, Jackson, Mississippi, Day 21

Clayborne Carson, Historian: At a certain point the Kennedy administration and the state officials in Alabama make a decision that this is a crisis that has to end and that they need to diffuse it. They decide to do what they could have done in the first place and that is to provide the protection necessary to make sure that the Freedom Riders get from Montgomery to the border of Alabama and Mississippi safely.

Tommy Giles, Aide to Governor Patterson: We had over 120 people to guard the Freedom Riders as they left Montgomery cause we gone be assured that there wouldn't be any problems. And the guardsmen had their rifles with fixed bayonets. Everybody was well prepared to get the Freedom Riders on out of Alabama and onto Mississippi.

Radio News Reporter (Archival): The scheduled departure: seven this morning. National Guardsmen and Highway Patrolmen dominated the scene. A half-dozen guardsmen boarded the bus, then the 12 Freedom Riders -- nine Negro men, one white man, two Negro women. At 11 minutes after seven, the convoy started to move. The bus was preceded by a half-dozen highway patrol cars.

Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., Freedom Rider: We did not ask for all of the state police and the helicopters overhead. It was shameful that we could not travel peacefully without that apparatus of protection.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, Freedom Rider: We take off across country. We can see people on porches and black people on their porches -- when we're going through the black part of a town -- they're just waving, you know, and we're waving back. It was really tremendous, and old folks sitting out on the porch like they normally do; and it was really a wonderful thing. Their hopes were on us, you know, and we were supposed to in fact do what we're doing, and to make it so that one day their children wouldn't have to put up with what they put up with.

John Patterson, Governor of Alabama, 1959-1963: We escorted them all the way with State Troopers and National Guardsmen, all the way to the Mississippi line. Then the thing was over. And then we began to lick our wounds.

Radio News Reporter (Archival): At 11:50 am, Central Standard Time, the bus hit the Mississippi line, the Alabama authorities pulling back.

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: We felt a very strange feeling when the changing of the guard at the Alabama-Mississippi state line; it was very eerie. In spite of all the Alabama had done, the fear of Mississippi in the minds of many people was far greater. There was a huge billboard and that billboard said, 'Welcome to Mississippi. The Magnolia State.' And when we continued to ride on, the next large sign we saw said, 'Prepare to meet thy God.'

Ross Barnett, Governor of Mississippi, 1960-1964 (Archival): There are seven or eight of these what they call Freedom Riders on the way from Montgomery, Alabama, coming into the state of Mississippi, and I believe you asked me if we'd made any preparation for them, is that right? (background: 'Yes') Well, we expect them to obey the laws of Mississippi just as you or any other citizen we would expect to do.

Frederick Leonard, Student, Tennessee State University: What we didn't know at the time was that Ross Barnett, the Governor of Mississippi, had told all the white people in Mississippi, 'stay home.' He said there would be no violence in Mississippi and there was no violence in Mississippi, even though that was the state most known for hanging, you know. That was the most violent state, but Ross Barnett said, 'Let us handle this.' And that's what they did.

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: We walked into the white waiting room and there was this police Captain, we learned his name was Captain Ray and he said, 'Move on. Move on. Move on.'

Police Officer (Archival): You are under arrest for refusing to obey my orders.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, Freedom Rider: By the time I came out of the bus station, everybody was in the paddy wagon, and he was telling his men to close the door. So I sorta tapped him on the shoulder and I said, 'I'm with them.' He looks and then he turns his face around because he's smiling. First time he have anybody tell him to open the paddy wagon so they could go to jail. And then when he got his face together, he turned back around and he said, 'Get in there!'

Frederick Leonard, Student, Tennessee State University: They took us right to the paddy wagon, to the jail, to court, and to the state penitentiary.

Julian Bond, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The arrangement is made between the Federal Government, Robert Kennedy, and the most powerful man in Mississippi, James O. Eastland, the Senator. In exchange for providing safety for the Freedom Riders, their civil rights can be violated and they can be arrested in Jackson, peacefully and calmly, under laws which have twice been invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: The authorities in Mississippi arrest them for breach of peace. This was the implicit deal worked out. I think the Kennedy administration was not totally averse to this. I think they thought that the Freedom Riders would learn a lesson, and that this would quiet down the whole movement.

Ross Barnett, Governor of Mississippi, 1960-1964 (Archival): In the face of an attempt to violate the laws of Mississippi by agitators, our law enforcement officers did in fact enforce these laws as they have always enforced them. And they will continue, Ladies and Gentlemen, to enforce all of the laws of the State of Mississippi when efforts are made by anyone or any group of people to violate those laws.

Derek Catsam, Historian: This is a major national story. It's drawing headline coverage in newspapers. It's on the nightly news every single night, and it is also drawing international coverage.

Czech Reporter (Archival, Subtitled): In the land of Ernest Hemingway, some people still fight for basic human rights. The police have the authority to preventing black citizens from entering areas of the bus stop reserved for whites.

Derek Catsam, Historian: It's a story that really resonates with people who are seeing on the one hand the American ideals that they know about, and on the other hand the way the Freedom Rides and the response to them confronts their image of American ideals.

Czech Reporter (Archival, Subtitled): For those who refuse to submit to unjust racial laws in this "paradise of freedom," prison awaits.

Singing: Let you free....

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: After the arrests in Jackson, Ross Barnett decided to send them to Parchman Prison. Parchman was the most dreaded prison in the South. William Faulkner, in one of his novels, called it "destination doom."

Clayborne Carson, Historian: Ross Barnett wants to teach them a lesson, and the lesson is, 'I'm going to send you to a real prison, to Parchman Penitentiary. So you're gonna do hard time in Mississippi. You're not -- this is not gonna be a city jail. This is going to be like the reputation of the old South where people did work gangs.'

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Ross Barnett thought that he could intimidate them; that just the thought of Parchman would scare people to death, and that this would break the back of the Freedom Rider movement.

Joan Mulholland, Freedom Rider: We were taken into this dark building. We had striped and get examined, a vaginal exam had-- matrons had on rubber gloves and would dip them into what smelled sort of like Lysol or some concoction like that, and then they'd gouge up us and back into the Lysol, or whatever it was, and on to the next one. And that was really intimidating. Showed they could do anything they wanted to us, and probably would.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, Freedom Rider: Suddenly he asked me, 'Do you have syphilis?' I said no and kind of laughed, quite like I'm doing now. Boy, that was the key. They jumped on me. But as they attacked blood spouted. And when the blood spouted, they all jumped back, because they weren't supposed to do that. The idea was to bruise, not to bleed.

Derek Catsam, Historian: Ross Barnett thinks that he has the ultimate move on the chessboard by sending them to Parchman farm. The Freedom Riders take the pretty brave stand of saying, 'Fine, we'll go to Parchman, and we'll fill Parchman up, and we'll make Parchman the next site of the Civil Rights Movement.'

Freedom Rider (Archival): We must now fill the jail and be willing to remain for at least a minimum of 60 days or more.

Derek Catsam, Historian: It became a continuation of the Freedom Ride, Parchman becomes every much the location in the Freedom rides as the bus depots themselves.

Man (archival): I would like to see the show of hands of those you who will be willing to continue the Freedom Ride in the near future. Put 'em up high please.

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: We made up a song sayin' that buses are coming. And we sang it to the jailers to tell them, and warn them to get ready, to be prepared that we were not the only ones coming.

So we started singing: 'Buses are a-comin', oh yes. Buses are a-comin', oh yes. Buses are a-comin', buses are a-comin', buses are a-comin', oh yes.' We say to the jailers, 'better get you ready, oh yes.' The jailers say, 'All right, shut up all that singing and hollering in here. This is not no playhouse, this is the jailhouse.'

So, we said to ourselves, 'What are you gonna do? Put us in jail.' (Singing) 'Better get you ready, oh yes. Better get you ready, oh yes.' And they said, 'Wait a minute, hold it. If we hear one more peek outta you guys, we gonna take your mattress.'

Ernest "Rip" Patton, Jr., Freedom Rider (singing): 'You can take our mattress, oh yes. You can take our mattress, oh yes. You can take our mattress, you can take our mattress, you can take our mattress, oh yes.'

Bernard Lafayette, Jr., Freedom Rider: And then, they said that they were going to take our toothbrushes. And someone struck out, (singing) 'You can take our tooth...' and we said, 'wait a minute, hold up. This is time for Quaker consensus. We all got to agree on this together.' Cause here we were, eight of us in a cell built for two and that means you had-- we're close quarters. And so we learned to sing with our mouths closed so we wouldn't breathe on each other, and we sang, (singing) 'You can take our toothbrush, oh yes. You can take our toothbrush, oh yes. You can take our toothbrush, you can take our toothbrush, you can take our toothbrush, oh yes.'

Singing: Buses are a comin', oh yes....

Pauline Knight-Ofoso, Freedom Rider: I got up one morning in May, and I said to my folks at home, 'I won't be back today because I'm a Freedom Rider.'

It was like a wave or a wind that you didn't know where it was coming from or where it was going, but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me. Nobody told me. It was like putting yeast in bread; it was a leavening effect.

Joan Mulholland, Freedom Rider: What are you gonna do this summer? Well, you can go do some, you know, menial, low-paying job, or you can go on the Freedom Rides. I think a lot of us, we were past fear. We can't stop. If one person falls, others take their place.

Rabbi Israel Dresner, Freedom Rider: They wanted to have people of different religions. We started out with 14 Protestant ministers -- eight white and six black -- and four Reform rabbis, and we wound up with 10 of us getting arrested.

Priest, Freedom Rider (Archival): We cannot submit to immoral laws which demand that we separate racially. Nor can we conscientiously avoid entirely the situation of which these segregationist laws operate contrary to the laws of the land.

Singing: Rolling into Jackson, oh yes....

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: As the Freedom Rider leaders called for more Freedom Rides going into Mississippi, Bobby Kennedy decided to go formally to the Interstate Commerce Commission -- the ICC -- and to ask them for a sweeping desegregation order. As Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy did not have the power to take down the Jim Crow signs, only the ICC did.

Robert F. Kennedy (Archival): Now the matter is before the ICC. We have taken action in the government to try to end segregation in all of these facilities. It seems to me that that's the proper place for it to be. I don't see that the Freedom Riders now, who are so-called Freedom Riders, who are making these trips, accomplish a great deal. I question their wisdom, I don't question their legal right to travel, but I question their wisdom. I think that some people can get hurt, innocent people that don't have anything to do with this.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Bobby Kennedy hoped that he could go to the Freedom Rider leaders and say, 'Look, I've made this move. Those signs are going to come down eventually. Why don't you call off the Freedom Rides?'

Derek Catsam, Historian: Robert Kennedy calls for this cooling off process and the Freedom Riders say 'no,' and in fact, they pick up the Freedom Rides. They intensify the whole project and they have people coming in from all across the country to participate. And they are coming in by plane, and they are coming in by bus, and they are coming in by train.

Reporter (Archival): Well as this train rolls on toward Jackson, Mississippi, do you have any second thoughts with regard to this effort you're taking?

Glenda Gaither Davis, Freedom Rider (Archival): No. Not at all.

Glenda Gaither Davis, Freedom Rider: Even though we came from many different places and we had many different cultures and many different home environments, in some ways we were very much unified because we had a common cause and we were all moving in that direction. And we did believe in what we were doing. We knew that we had taken a stand and that it was going to be better. There was something better out there for us.

Reporter (Archival): What made you want to take part in this?

Glenda Gaither Davis, Freedom Rider (Archival): I want to break, help break down these barriers of segregation.

Reporter (Archival): How about you? Can you give me any of your feelings on why you want to take part in this?

Male Freedom Rider (Archival): Well, I want to help establish the right of all Americans to eat together, and to travel together.

Reporter (Archival): Why do you think it's your responsibility?

Male Freedom Rider (Archival): I think it's every American's responsibility, and I only think that some are more conscious of their responsibilities than others.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Eventually there were over 430 Freedom Riders, 300 of whom ended up in Parchman. At Parchman they began to see the movement in a new way. It became almost a University of non-violence. They became not just an individual groups of Freedom Riders, but they had a shared experience. And they were from different parts of the country, they were different races, different religions, in some cases different political philosophies, and it all got blended together. They became tougher. They became even more committed. They became the shock troops of the movement.

John Lewis, Freedom Rider: The people that took a seat on these buses, that went to jail in Jackson, that went to Parchman, they were never the same. We had moments there to learn, to teach each other the way of nonviolence, the way of love, the way of peace. The Freedom Ride created an unbelievable sense: Yes, we will make it. Yes, we will survive. And that nothing, but nothing, was going to stop this movement.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: Finally, on September 22nd after hundreds of arrests, the ICC issued its order. It gave the Freedom Riders what they'd been asking for. The "colored only," the "whites only" signs that had been in the bus and rail stations for generations, they finally came down. This was the first unambiguous victory in the long history of the civil rights movement. It finally said that, you know, "We can do this." And it raised expectations across the board for greater victories in the future.

Singing: I'm taking a trip on the Greyhound Bus line. I'm riding the front seat to New Orleans this time. Hallelujah, I'm a-traveling....

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider: Black folks always lived in fear of white folks. And now they are seeing the young people, defying white people. And so we helped to get rid of that myth of impotence.

Singing: I walked in Montgomery, I sat in Tennessee. Now I'm riding for equality. Hallelujah I'm a-traveling. Hallelujah ain't it fine. Hallelujah, I'm a-traveling down freedom's main line.

Rabbi Israel Dresner, Freedom Rider: They understood that the only way it could be done in America is through peaceful methods. And the Freedom Rides illustrated that. The people who got beaten did not strike back. The people who got beaten did not have weapons with them. It was just a stroke of genius.

Delores Boyd, Montgomery Resident: The Freedom Riders introduced the notion that there were fair-minded white persons who were willing to sacrifice themselves, their bodies and their lives, because they too believed that the country had an obligation to uphold its constitutional mandate of liberty and justice for all. And I think it opened our eyes so that we didn't paint all white people with the same broad brush.

Robert F. Kennedy (Archival): A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

Evan Thomas, RFK Biographer: There's no question that Kennedy was changed by the Freedom Riders. There's a direct line from the Freedom Riders to the speech that President Kennedy gave in June of 1963, calling on Congress to pass legislation to get rid of Jim Crow and to give civil rights protection to all citizens.

Raymond Arsenault, Historian: It was America. It was interracial. It was inter-regional. It was secular and religious. It brought together people of different political philosophies. There was a sense of unity and purpose that I'm not sure that the movement ever had before. It was a shining moment.

Singing: Hallelujah, I'm a-traveling. Hallelujah, ain't it fine. Hallelujah, I'm a-traveling down freedom's main line.

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Freedom Riders | American Experience | PBS

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The powerful, harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever.

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Freedom Riders National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)

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In 1961, a small interracial band of "Freedom Riders" challenged discriminatory laws requiring separation of the races in interstate travel. They were attacked by white segregationists, who firebombed the bus. Images of the attack appeared in hundreds of newspapers, shocking the American public and spurring the Federal Government to issue regulations banning segregation in interstate travel.

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Courtesy Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing "freedom rides" through the region. They used as their model CORE's 1946 "Journey of Reconciliation" where an interracial group rode interstate buses to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court's decision in Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia which outlawed segregation in interstate travel. White southern segregationists resisted CORE's efforts. When most of the demonstrators were arrested in North Carolina, the police effectively aborted the Journey of Reconciliation.

Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation.

This time CORE organized a dozen activists who were paired into two interracial sets of Freedom Riders who would travel on Greyhound and Trailways buses, respectively, from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana. The Freedom Riders left Washington on May 4, 1961 and traveled without incident across Virginia and North Carolina. They encountered violence for the first time at the bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina when several young white males beat black riders who attempted to use a "whites only" restroom.

The Freedom Riders continued, however, and crossed Georgia without incident. When the activists reached Alabama on May 14 the attacks intensified. The Greyhound riders were met in Anniston by a mob whose members threw rocks and slashed the bus's tires. The driver managed to drive the bus a few miles out of town. When he stopped to repair the tires, white supremacists firebombed the vehicle. For that group the Freedom Ride had ended.

The riders in the Trailways bus were also assaulted by Anniston whites. They managed to get to Birmingham where they encountered a larger mob who beat them with baseball bats, lead pipes and bicycle chains.

Infuriated by the news of the vicious assaults, Diane Nash, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organized a new contingent of Freedom Riders in Nashville. The second group departed from Nashville on May 14 to reinforce the beleaguered CORE Riders in Alabama.

Upon their arrival in Birmingham on May 17, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Conner ordered his police officers to place the activists in protective custody. The following morning law officials transported the riders back to the Tennessee state line, leaving them on the side of the highway. Instead of abandoning the campaign, Nash led the resilient activists 100 miles back to Nashville to regroup.

On May 20, the Nashville riders were back in Birmingham where there were no incidents. Then all of the Freedom Riders traveled on to Montgomery where a mob of men, women and children carrying baseball bats, tire irons and bricks met them at the terminal. As the riders departed from the bus, the angry gang swarmed, beating the passengers. They attacked SNCC activists John Lewis and Jim Zwerg, who both sustained severe injuries. When White House observer John Seigenthaler attempted to protect two of the Freedom Riders, Susan Wilbur and Susan Hermann, an attacker knocked him unconscious.

The nationally televised attack strengthened the resolve of the Freedom Riders. James Farmer arrived to personally lead the rest of the group to Jackson, Mississippi. Law enforcement officials protected them as they traveled across the state. Once in the bus terminal in the Mississippi capital, Jackson city police arrested all of the demonstrators for violating a recently passed breach of the peace statute. They were convicted and fined $200 each. When the riders refused to pay, the judge sentenced them to 90 days in jail.

In an effort to intimidate the marchers, Mississippi officials transferred the now nearly one hundred men and women freedom riders to the state penitentiary at Parchman where they were subject to beatings and inedible food and repeatedly strip searched. Prison officials confiscated the blankets and mattresses of all of the activists. When other demonstrators arrived in Jackson they were also arrested and sent to Parchman where they faced similar conditions. By the end of the summer over 300 women and men were incarcerated there.

The Freedom Riders failed to reach New Orleans, Louisiana. However the international attention their efforts received forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to petition the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to outlaw segregation in interstate travel. Unlike the earlier Supreme Court rulings which segregationists largely ignored, the ICC immediately imposed sanctions and penalties for the violation of its order. On November 1, 1961, the new order went into effect across the nation.

The Freedom Rides illuminated the courage of black and white youth and highlighted the leadership of Diane Nash. The Freedom Rides also inspired rural southern blacks to embrace civil disobedience as a strategy for regaining their civil rights. That inspiration would be seen in subsequent campaigns such as Mississippi's Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Movement in 1965 as well as in dozens of much less heralded efforts to register to vote or to integrate the region's public schools.

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Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing ... Read MoreFreedom Rides (1961)

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The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | BrainPOP

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A hero is born

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. At the time in that part of the country, segregation-or the separation of races in places like schools, buses, and restaurants-was the law. He experienced racial predjudice from the time he was very young, which inspired him to dedicate his life to achieving equality and justice for Americans of all colors. King believed that peaceful refusal to obey unjust law was the best way to bring about social change.

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Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., never backed down in his stand against racism. Learn more about the life of this courageous hero who inspired millions of people to right a historical wrong.

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Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) is considered one of history's greatest speakers and social activists. His leadership in peaceful protests helped end segregation during the American civil rights movement.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was born, his parents, Michael and Alberta, gave him a different name from the one we know today. They called him Michael. But Michael Sr. later changed his name and his son's to Martin Luther, after the famous religious leader. The middle-class family was very religious. Both Martin's father and grandfather were pastors in Atlanta, Georgia. The King children grew up in a loving home but experienced racism from an early age.

Separate Is Never Equal

King attended segregated public schools in Georgia. He skipped the ninth and eleventh grades and graduated from high school at 15. It was around that time that he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization. King's father led the NAACP's Atlanta chapter.

In 1948, King graduated from Morehouse College, in Atlanta. He went on to study religion at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania. In 1951, he graduated with honors and was class valedictorian. Soon after, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Boston University (B.U.), in Massachusetts. He met music student Coretta Scott in Boston. The couple married in 1953 and later had two sons and two daughters.

In 1954, while completing his degree, King moved to Montgomery, Alabama. He became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Soon after, on December 1, 1955, a woman named Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give her seat to white passengers on a Montgomery city bus. In response, the NAACP chose King to lead a citywide bus boycott. For 381 days, members of the black community walked or carpooled to work. Many of them were attacked.

The NAACP filed a lawsuit against the city of Montgomery. They argued that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such segregation was indeed illegal. The court based its decision, in part, on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In that case, the court concluded that "separate is never equal."

One year later, King, along with 60 ministers and activists, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

"I Have a Dream"

In the spring of 1963, King organized a protest in Birmingham, Alabama. The event drew nationwide attention. That's because city police officers blasted participants with fire hoses and let attack dogs loose. King and others were jailed.

After their release, King and other civil rights leaders laid plans for a demonstration in the nation's capital. The March on Washington attracted more than 200,000 people. On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. He spoke of a day when all men would be treated equally. King went on to win the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. He was 35 years old and the youngest person to have received the honor.

Reaching the Promised Land

The fight for equal rights, however, was far from over. On March 7, 1965, demonstrators set off on a 54-mile march, organized by King, from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The event became violent when police met marchers with nightsticks and tear gas on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. Seventeen people ended up in the hospital. King was not present, but he watched the scene unfold on TV. Soon after, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law stated that all citizens had a right to vote, no matter the color of their skin.

On April 3, 1968, King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers. In a speech there, he said, "I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land." The next day, he was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where he was staying. The assassination ended King's life. He was 39 years old. It sparked riots in more than 100 cities. The accused shooter, James Earl Ray, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

"I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the United States, King's birthday is observed as a national holiday on the third Monday in January. On that day, many Americans volunteer at shelters, schools, hospitals, and other community organizations to honor the civil rights leader's legacy of service and commitment.

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Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) is considered one of history's greatest speakers and social activists. His leadership in peaceful protests helped end segregation during the American civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King Jr. was born,...

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Monday marks Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Below is a transcript of his celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. NPR's Talk of the Nation aired the speech in 2010 - listen to that broadcast at the audio link above.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, Black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.

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Read Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech in its entirety

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Americans across the U.S. are celebrating King's legacy this weekend. One way to reflect on his life and message is by revisiting his celebrated 1963 speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial.

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Martin Luther King - I Have A Dream Speech - August 28, 1963

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Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

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Malcolm X Biography: Black History Month (Educational Videos for Students)

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Malcolm X for Kids | History for Kids | Seed of Melanin Kids!

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Introduction
(1925-65). A Black militant, Malcolm X championed the rights of African Americans and urged them to develop racial unity. He was known for his association first with the Nation of Islam, sometimes known as the Black Muslims, and later with the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which he founded after breaking with the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, the 7th of 11 children. The family soon moved to Lansing, Michigan. There they were harassed by whites who resented the Black nationalist views of the father, Earl Little, an organizer for Marcus Garvey 's "back-to-Africa" movement.

When Malcolm was six years old his father was murdered. His mother later suffered from mental health issues and was sent to an institution. The family was separated by welfare agencies. Later in his life Malcolm came to believe that white people had destroyed his family.

Placed in a series of schools and boardinghouses, Malcolm became a fine student and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. A teacher, however, told him that because he was Black he should learn carpentry instead. Discouraged, he left school after the eighth grade to live with a relative in Boston, Massachusetts.

Malcolm shined shoes and worked at a soda fountain, in a restaurant, and on a railroad kitchen crew. In 1942 he moved to the Black Harlem section of New York City. He lived as a hustler, cheating to make money. He was wary of the police. A pusher, he sold drugs and became an addict himself. Pursued by a rival hustler, he went back to Boston, where he organized a burglary ring. In 1946 he was sent to prison for burglary.

Nation of Islam
While serving in prison Malcolm sought to educate himself. He spent long hours reading books in the prison library, even memorizing a dictionary. During this time he adopted the form of Islam practiced by an African American group that later became known as the Nation of Islam. It combined some elements of Islam with a movement to empower Black people. It taught that Black people were superior to whites and that whites were evil by nature.

Released from prison in 1952, Malcolm joined his younger brother in Detroit, Michigan. Malcolm replaced his last name with an X to symbolize his lost "true African family name." This was a custom among Nation of Islam followers who considered their family names to have originated with white slaveholders.

Malcolm X soon became an active participant in the Nation of Islam. He assisted the national leader, Elijah Muhammad, by starting many new Nation of Islam groups throughout the United States. Malcolm X's success as a recruiter was a result of his skill as a speaker, as he worked to instill racial pride in his Black listeners and recounted the sufferings of Blacks under white domination. In 1954 he returned to New York to become minister of the important Harlem temple. In 1957 he founded the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks.

Malcolm X preached on the streets of Harlem and spoke at major universities, such as Harvard University and the University of Oxford. During the main phase of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965, he expressed the pent-up anger, frustration, and bitterness of many African Americans. He also criticized the mainstream civil rights movement. Malcolm argued that more was at stake than the right to sit in a restaurant or even to vote. He thought the most important issues were Black identity, integrity, and independence. While civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., called for nonviolence, Malcolm X urged his followers to defend themselves "by any means necessary."

By the early 1960s the Nation of Islam had become nationally known. Malcolm X was its most effective national minister and its most recognized spokesperson. He was increasingly ignored, however, by Nation of Islam followers who accused him of seeking personal glory. In 1963 Malcolm X brought bad publicity to the movement for a remark he made about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Malcolm said it was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost," meaning that he thought the murder represented a violent society suffering the consequences of violence. In response to the remark, Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm to observe a 90-day period of silence.

Final Years
In 1964 Malcolm X broke completely with the Nation of Islam and began building his own Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He made the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to learn more about Islam. Impressed by the fellowship he observed among pilgrims of all colors, Malcolm X came to believe that whites, like Blacks, were victims of a racist society. He thought that Islam could someday unite people of all races. After the hajj he adopted the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

During later trips to African countries, where he was honored by their statesmen, Malcolm X began to advocate Pan-Africanism. He believed that Blacks all over the world should join to combat racism.

During the winter of 1964-65 Malcolm X received several death threats, and his home was bombed. On February 21, 1965, while speaking at an OAAU rally in Harlem, he was shot and killed. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the murder, though many people doubted the guilt of two of them. In 2021, after they had been in prison for many years, those two were cleared of the charges.

The death of Malcolm X saddened white and Black people alike who admired his tireless striving to build Black pride and who shared his hopes that all races might someday be joined in fellowship. Malcolm X was survived by his wife, Betty Shabazz, whom he had married in 1958. They had six daughters.

Malcolm X's autobiography, published after his death in 1965, was written with Alex Haley, author of Roots. The book was based on many interviews that Haley had conducted with Malcolm X shortly before his assassination. In 1992 director Spike Lee released the movie Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington in the title role. The popular yet controversial film revived interest in the slain leader, especially among young African Americans.

Click here to read portions of a speech that Malcolm X gave in 1964 to a group of teenagers from Mississippi.

Additional Reading
Burlingame, Jeff. Malcolm X: Fighting for Human Rights (Enslow, 2018). Doeden, Matt. A Marked Man: The Assassination of Malcolm X (Twenty-First Century Books, 2013). Gormley, Beatrice. Malcolm X: A Revolutionary Voice (Sterling, 2008). Gunderson, Jessica, and Hayden, Seitu. X: A Biography of Malcolm X (Capstone Press, 2011). Myers, Walter Dean. Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (Scholastic Focus, 2020). Pinkney, Andrea Davis, and Pinkney, Brian. Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America (Jump at the Sun Books, 2013).

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(1925-65). A Black militant, Malcolm X championed the rights of African Americans and urged them to develop racial unity. He was known for his association first with the...

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View of crowds on the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, August 28, 1963
Photo by Warren K. Leffler, LOC, LC-U9- 10360-5

A Powerful, Peaceful Protest

With that many people converging on the city, there were concerns about violence. The Washington, D.C. police force mobilized 5,900 officers for the march and the government mustered 6,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen as additional protection. President Kennedy thought that if there were any problems, the negative perceptions could undo the civil rights bill making its way through Congress. In the end, the crowds were calm and there were no incidents reported by police.

While the March was a peaceful occasion, the words spoken that day at the Lincoln Memorial were not just uplifting and inspirational such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream"speech, they were also penetrating and pointed. There was a list of "Ten Demands" from the sponsors, insisting on a fair living wage, fair employment policies, and desegregation of school districts. John Lewis in his speech said that "we do not want our freedom gradually but we want to be free now" and that Congress needed to pass "meaningful legislation" or people would march through the South. Although the SNCC chairman had toned down his remarks at the request of white liberals and moderate black allies, he still managed to criticize both political parties for moving too slowly on civil rights. Others such as Whitney Young and Joachim Prinz spoke of the need for justice, for equal opportunity, for full access to the American Dream promised with the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. They spoke of jobs, and of a life free from the indifference of lawmakers to people's plights.

In the end, after all of the musical performances, speeches, and politics, it was the people that truly made the March on Washington a success. They brought box lunches, having spent all they could spare to get to Washington; some dressed as if attending a church service while others wore overalls and boots; veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and individuals new to the issues locked arms, clapped and sang and walked. Many began without their leaders, who were making their way to them from meetings on Capitol Hill. They could no longer be patient and they could no longer be held back, and so they started to march - Black, White, Latino, American Indian, Jewish, Christian, men, women, famous, anonymous, but ultimately all Americans, all marching for their civil rights.

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (U.S. National Park Service)

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t was the largest gathering for civil rights of its time. An estimated 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, arriving in Washington, D.C. by planes, trains, cars, and buses from all over the country.

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Official Program for the March on Washington

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Official Program for the March on Washington

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This program listed the events scheduled at the Lincoln Memorial during the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The highlight of the march, which attracted 250,000 people, was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

The civil rights movement in the United States during the late 1950s and 1960s was the political, legal, and social struggle to gain full citizenship rights for Black Americans and to achieve racial equality. Individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and discrimination using a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws.

On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 demonstrators descended upon the nation's capital to participate in the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." Not only was it the largest demonstration for human rights in United States history, but it also occasioned a rare display of unity among the various civil rights organizations. The event began with a rally at the Washington Monument featuring several celebrities and musicians. Participants then marched the mile-long National Mall to the Memorial. The three-hour long program at the Lincoln Memorial included speeches from prominent civil rights and religious leaders. The day ended with a meeting between the march leaders and President John F. Kennedy at the White House.

The idea for the 1963 March on Washington was envisioned by A. Philip Randolph, a long-time civil rights activist dedicated to improving the economic condition of Black Americans. When Randolph first proposed the march in late 1962, he received little response from other civil rights leaders. He knew that cooperation would be difficult because each had his own agenda for the civil rights movement, and the leaders competed for funding and press coverage. Success of the March on Washington would depend on the involvement of the so-called "Big Six"-Randolph and the heads of the five major civil rights organizations: Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

The details and organization of the march were handled by Bayard Rustin, Randolph's trusted associate. Rustin was a veteran activist with extensive experience in putting together mass protest. With only two months to plan, Rustin established his headquarters in Harlem, NY, with a smaller office in Washington. He and his core staff of 200 volunteers quickly put together the largest peaceful demonstration in U.S. history.

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Official Program for the March on Washington (1963)

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: March on Washington (Program), 08/28/1963; Bayard Rustin Papers; John F. Kennedy Library; National Archives and Records Administration. View All Pages in the National Archives Catalog View Transcript This program listed the events scheduled at the Lincoln Memorial during the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

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The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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On August 28 1963, a quarter of a million people rallied for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to demand an end to segregation, fair wages and economic justice, voting rights, equal education, and civil rights protections.

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The crater and other damage caused by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four African-American girls. AP Photo.

It was a quiet Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama-around 10:24 on September 15, 1963-when a dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

The violent blast ripped through the wall, killing four African-American girls on the other side and injuring more than 20 inside the church.

It was a clear act of racial hatred: the church was a key civil rights meeting place and had been a frequent target of bomb threats.

Our Birmingham office launched an immediate investigation and wired the FBI Director about the crime. FBI bomb experts raced to the scene-via military jet-and an additional dozen personnel from other offices were sent to assist Birmingham.

At 10:00 p.m. that night, Assistant Director Al Rosen assured Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach that "the Bureau considered this a most heinous offense...[and]...we had entered the investigation with no holds barred."

And we backed that promise up. Dozens of FBI agents worked the case throughout September and October and into the new year-as many as 36 at one point. One internal memo noted that:

"...we have practically torn Birmingham apart and have interviewed thousands of persons. We have seriously disrupted Klan activities by our pressure and interviews so that these organizations have lost members and support. ...We have made extensive use of the polygraph, surveillances, microphone surveillances and technical surveillances..."

By 1965, we had serious suspects-namely, Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., all KKK members-but witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. Also, at that time, information from our surveillances was not admissible in court. As a result, no federal charges were filed in the '60s.

It has been claimed that Director Hoover held back evidence from prosecutors in the '60s or even tried to block prosecution. But it's simply not true. His concern was to prevent leaks, not to stifle justice. In one memo concerning a Justice Department prosecutor seeking information, he wrote, "Haven't these reports already been furnished to the Dept.?" In 1966, Hoover overruled his staff and made transcripts of wiretaps available to Justice. And he couldn't have blocked the prosecution and didn't-he simply didn't think the evidence was there to convict.

In the end, justice was served.

Chambliss received life in prison in 1977 following a case led by Alabama Attorney General Robert Baxley. And eventually the fear, prejudice, and reticence that kept witnesses from coming forward began to subside. We re-opened our case in the mid-1990s, and Blanton and Cherry were indicted in May 2000. Both were convicted at trial and sentenced to life in prison. The fourth man, Herman Frank Cash, had died in 1994.

If you are interested in learning more, please read our 3,400 pages on this case-what was called the "BAPBOMB" investigation- posted online. Also see more pictures on our Multimedia website.

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Baptist Street Church Bombing | Federal Bureau of Investigation

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The crater and other damage caused by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four African-American girls. AP Photo. It was a quiet Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama-around 10:24 on September 15, 1963-when a dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

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The Aftermath

Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands." The brutal attack and the deaths of the four little girls shocked the nation and drew international attention to the violent struggle for civil rights in Birmingham. Many whites were as outraged by the incident as blacks and offered services and condolences to the families. Over, 8,000 people attended the girls' funeral service at Reverend John Porter's Sixth Avenue Baptist Church.

The deaths of the four girls was followed two months later by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, causing an outpouring of national grief, galvanizing the civil rights movement and ensuring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Why This Church?

16th Street Baptist was a large and prominent church located downtown, just blocks from Birmingham's commercial district and City Hall. Since its construction in 1911, the church had served as the centerpiece of the city's African American community, functioning as a meeting place, social center, and lecture hall. Because of its size, location, and importance to the community, the church served as headquarters for civil rights mass meetings and rallies in the early 1960s.

Birmingham was the most segregated city in the United States and in April 1963, after an invitation by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth to come help desegregate Birmingham, the city became the focus of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The desegregation campaign conceived by Shuttleworth was known as "Project C" and was to be a series of nonviolent protests and boycotts.

Despite resistance from some of the church's leadership and members of the congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church joined the SCLC in their campaign. The church became the departure point for many of the demonstrations that took place in the city. On May 2, 1963, students ranging in age from eight to eighteen gathered at the church to march downtown and talk to the new mayor about segregation. After leaving the church they were met by police and many were jailed. By the time the "Children's Crusade" and the ensuing demonstrations ended on May 10th, thousands of children and adults had been injured by fire hoses and attack dogs and incarcerated by order of"Bull" Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety.

The church came to be viewed by many as a symbol and a rallying place for civil rights activists; and it became the focal point for racial tensions and white hostility towards the civil rights movement in Birmingham.

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16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963) (U.S. National Park Service)

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16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963)

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Video: "Remembering the Birmingham Church Bombing"

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Video: "Remembering the Birmingham Church Bombing"

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Remembering the Birmingham Church Bombing

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A former Freedom Rider describes what it was like walking among the rubble of the 16th Avenue Baptist Church

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On September 15, 1963, a bomb explodes during Sunday morning services in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls: Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Carol Denise McNair (11).

With its large African American congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who once called Birmingham a "symbol of hardcore resistance to integration." Alabama's governor, George Wallace, made preserving racial segregation one of the central goals of his administration, and Birmingham had one of the most violent and lawless chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

The church bombing was the third in Birmingham in 11 days after a federal order came down to integrate Alabama's school system. Fifteen sticks of dynamite were planted in the church basement, underneath what turned out to be the girls' restroom. The bomb detonated at 10:19 a.m., killing Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins-all 14 years old-and 11-year-old Denise McNair. Immediately after the blast, church members wandered dazed and bloodied, covered with white powder and broken stained glass, before starting to dig in the rubble to search for survivors. More than 20 other members of the congregation were injured in the blast.

When thousands of Black protesters assembled at the crime scene, Wallace sent hundreds of police and state troopers to the area to break up the crowd. Two young Black men were killed that night, one by police and another by racist thugs. Meanwhile, public outrage over the bombing continued to grow, drawing international attention to Birmingham. At a funeral for three of the girls (one's family preferred a separate, private service), King addressed more than 8,000 mourners.

A well-known Klan member, Robert Chambliss, was charged with murder and with buying 122 sticks of dynamite. In October 1963, Chambliss was cleared of the murder charge and received a six-month jail sentence and a $100 fine for the dynamite. Although a subsequent FBI investigation identified three other men-Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Cash and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr.-as having helped Chambliss commit the crime, it was later revealed that FBI chairman J. Edgar Hoover blocked their prosecution and shut down the investigation without filing charges in 1968. After Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison.

Efforts to prosecute the other three men believed responsible for the bombing continued for decades. Though Cash died in 1994, Cherry and Blanton were arrested and charged with four counts of murder in 2000. Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Cherry's trial was delayed after judges ruled he was mentally incompetent to stand trial. This decision was later reversed. On May 22, 2002, Cherry was convicted and sentenced to life, bringing some long-awaited justice to the friends and families of the four young victims.

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Four Black schoolgirls killed in Birmingham church bombing | September 15, 1963 | HISTORY

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On September 15, 1963, a bomb explodes during Sunday morning services in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls: Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Carol Denise McNair (11). With its large African American congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church served as a meeting place [...]

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Civil Rights Act of 1964

The years leading up to the 1960's were filled with unrest, violence and unhappiness as the Black Americans faces continual discrimination in almost all aspects of their lives.

The Civil Rights Movement brought attention to their situation and in all parts of the country, people began to realize the unfairness that existed in the treatment of Black Americans. The March on Washington was a peaceful demonstration that finalized the meaning of freedom and opportunity. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed to try to end segregation for the Black American.

Up until 1964, a variety of places in the country, mostly in the southern states had complete segregation between black and white citizens. This extended to bathrooms, restaurants, public transportation, hotels and even to the point of people working together.

Local laws called "Jim Crow Laws" in the south took things even further, allowing the direct attack and killing of Black Americans without due process of law as well as local rules that kept Black Americans from being able to vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination of employment based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It also banned discrimination involving any public place.

This act was originally proposed by President John F. Kennedy and, at the time of the first discussion, was completely opposed by those that lived in the Southern United States, and therefore it was opposed by their representatives in Congress.

After the assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson continued to move the act forward, even though there were many that were against it. There was a great amount of arguing in Congress as members of the Southern states repeatedly tried to keep the act from being approved.

The passing of the act created the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission that would oversee that the laws were upheld in employment and hiring. It became against the law to allow any Federal money to be used if there were situations of discrimination.

This opened the door to allow schools, who received Federal funding, to have segregated classrooms. This was of great importance in the south, where many of the 'Black Only' schools were poorly supported. It removed the "Jim Crow Laws" that kept Black Americans away from the voting polls and was hailed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr as a 'second emancipation'.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the beginning of the final expansion of freedoms for many people. In the years to follow, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, which removed any of the previous requirements set in place by local governments requiring literacy tests to be passed before being allowed to vote.

Additional laws that were passed, thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included The Fair Housing Act of 1968 which stated that discrimination of any kind in the purchase or renting of a home or any living area was against the law.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became the turning point in American history for Black Americans but also led to the fair treatment of other minorities and women. It removed Federal dollars from any organization or company that promoted discrimination and that led to changes that are felt to this day.

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Civil Rights Act of 1964 - History for kids

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The years leading up to the 1960's were filled with unrest, violence and unhappiness as the Black Americans faces continual discrimination in almost all aspects of their lives. The Civil Rights Movement brought attention to their situation and in all parts of the country, people began to realize the unfairness that existed in the treatment ...

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In 1964, the United States passed a law to end segregation in public places and not let employers discriminate against someone because of their race or color.

This law went by the name of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

President John F. Kennedy proposed it, but it became law thanks to Lyndon B. Johnson, who became President after Kennedy died.

Congress has passed other laws that are related to this one since then too, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Causes

After the Civil War, three new amendments were put in place.

One made slaves free (the 13th Amendment).

One let them become citizens (14th Amendment).

One let all men have the right to vote no matter their race or color.

But many states, especially in the South, used a poll tax and a literacy test to keep African American people from voting. They also enforced laws that separated people by white and black.

For a while after the Civil War, there were not any new civil rights laws. Finally, in 1957 Congress passed a law about civil rights. This law had two parts:

One part was the Justice Department's Civil Rights section

One part was the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate discriminatory conditions.

In 1890, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which gave judges the ability to assist black people in voting without being harassed. To go through Congress, it was diluted with southern opposition.

The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments made it illegal for slavery. They also said that people are treated fairly under the law. The Supreme Court found it acceptable to have separate facilities if they were equal. This helped discrimination stay legal way into the 20th century.

The Jim Crow Laws

The Jim Crow laws were a set of state and local rules that legalized segregation. The laws were around for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968.

These laws stopped African Americans from voting, getting jobs, going to school, etc. Anyone who did not follow the Jim Crow laws often faced jail time or violence.

Jim Crow laws began in 1865. Black Codes were strict laws that told freed slaves when and where they could work and for how much money. The black codes appeared throughout the south to take voting rights away and control where freed slaves lived. If they had children, their children would be taken from them to work for white people.

The legal system was not fair for black people because white people who were Confederate soldiers worked as police and judges. This meant that African Americans struggled to win court cases and were subject to Black Codes.

These codes went with the labor camps where prisoners were treated like they were slaves. Because of the hard work, most blacks did not live until their entire sentence was over.

The Reconstruction era was a hard time for Black Americans. The violence was getting worse, and they were attacked, tortured, and lynched by white people who wanted them to stop living in the South.

Some terrible laws prevented them from moving on with their lives. One law said that black schools were not as good as white schools, and another said that black people could not live on land owned by whites.

The Ku Klux Klan was a group that was dangerous during the Jim Crow era. It started when Confederate veterans met in Pulaski, Tennessee.

They were a club for veterans. A secret society that terrorized black communities and spread through white Southern culture. Members of the group come from all levels in government and crime.

The Sixties

In the 1960s, people who knew about "equal protection of the laws" thought that the government should protect all Americans. They wanted equal protection for everyone. To create social justice and benefits, they did not want to use racial or gender criteria.

But after some time, we saw that many different areas of life included these types of questions.

When John F. Kennedy started in the White House, he did not support new anti-discrimination measures. But with protests springing up throughout the South (including one in Birmingham), he decided to act.

President John F. Kennedy asked African American leaders to use caution in these demonstrations because new violence might scare away potential supporters. The President also submitted a bill to Congress about civil rights (H.R. 7152).

In June, he proposed a significant civil rights legislation, which has been the best till today. He said that the United States would not be entirely free until all of its citizens were free.

Then, President Kennedy was killed. This happened in November in Dallas. The new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, took up the cause right away.

Signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964

In his first State of the Union address, President Johnson said, "let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined." During debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, southerners argued about other things, too, like that this bill was unconstitutional because it would take away some liberties and states' rights.

Some people in Virginia wanted to stop the bill, so they made a change that would make it illegal for companies not to hire women. That amendment passed, and the other one did not. The House approved the bill by voting 290-130.

The bill then moved to the U.S. Senate, where Southern and Border State Democrats spoke a lot for a long time. Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia spoke for 14 hours.

Some people helped supporters of the bill. They got enough votes to end the debate. One of those supporters was a senator from California, but he was too sick to speak. He said "aye" by pointing to his eye.

The Senate voted 73-27 to let the bill pass. Johnson told his aide, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."

President Johnson signed this civil rights act with about 75 pens. He gave these to people who helped him or were important, like Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen. And he also gave them to some civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins.

What Is the Civil Rights Act?

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation was not allowed at all places of public accommodation. This includes courthouses, parks, restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, and hotels. You couldn't be denied service based on your skin color anymore because this law wouldn't allow it.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act stands for "equal employment opportunity." This law prevents discrimination against people because of their religion, race, gender, and country. One crucial part of this law is that it created an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). This commission can file lawsuits on behalf of workers who are discriminated against.

The Act said that the government could not use federal funds for any unfair program. It also gave more power to the Office of Education (now called the Department of Education). The Act also said that people should not be treated differently when it comes to voting requirements.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes eleven different sections. Some are about discrimination in public places (Title II), money for schools, colleges, hospitals, and other organizations (Title VI), or jobs at companies (Title VII). These sections have been used in the courts many times.

Importance of the Civil Rights Act

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was like another emancipation for African Americans. The Act has expanded to include disabled people, the elderly, and women in college athletics.

The Act didn't end discrimination, but it opened the door for more progress to come in the future. This law helped stop racist voting practices, like literacy tests. It also stopped discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of a property. People would now be able to vote because they were not discriminated against. But there was still more work to do.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 expanded rights to voting and housing. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and President Johnson's War on Poverty attacked economic inequalities that had been with racial discrimination. People who fought for the 1964 act were successful in the end. They wanted to make sure that other groups, like older people, people with disabilities, and pregnant women, could also do things like go to school or work.

Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has helped, there is still a struggle for equality. The Act helped stop discrimination. Some people want to end it, but it is difficult because it has been around for a while. People will continue to fight about what equality means and how to achieve it. They will do this by lobbying, protesting, and through the courts.
Read more about the Voting Rights Act of 1965
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Civil Rights Act of 1964 Causes, Impact, History for Kids

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In 1964, the United States passed a law to end segregation in public places and not let employers discriminate against someone because of their race or color. This law went by the name of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President John F. Kennedy proposed it, but it became law thanks to Lyndon B.

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The Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

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March from Selma to Montgomery | American Freedom Stories | Biography | History

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Bloody Sunday: A flashback of the landmark Selma to Montgomery marches

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On March 7, 1965, civil rights activists organized a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama to press for voter registration rights for African Americans in the south. However, they were violently confronted by local authorities along the way.

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The Story of a Child Who Marched With MLK at Selma Is Coming to the Stage

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Watch the exclusive interview only on NY1.

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The Selma March was a civil rights demonstration that took place in Alabama in March 1965. Demonstrators were stopped twice, once with violence, before they were allowed to...

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In 1965 the United States enacted the Voting Rights Act. It aimed to stop state and local governments from passing laws that kept African Americans from voting. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to the U.S. Constitution granted African American men the right to vote. ( Women of all races were barred from voting in national elections until 1920.) However, some states in the South enacted measures such as literacy tests to discriminate against African Americans. The Voting Rights Act halted the states from taking these actions. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law on August 6, 1965. It is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

Shortly following the American Civil War (1861-65), the U.S. Congress ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. It guaranteed that the right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Soon afterward, Congress enacted legislation that made it a federal crime to interfere with an individual's right to vote. In some states of the former Confederacy, African Americans made up a large portion of the voters. They also ran for and were elected to office at all levels of government.

Many white people were opposed to African Americans voting. Some white leaders used intimidation and fraud to keep African Americans from registering to vote and from voting. Anti-Black groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used terror and violence. As whites regained power in state legislatures, they enacted legislation to disqualify African Americans from voting. These laws included poll taxes (requiring people to pay a tax in order to vote), literacy tests, and whites-only primaries. As a result, by the early 20th century, nearly all African Americans were deprived of their right to vote.

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that several of the state laws regarding voting were unconstitutional. In 1944, for example, the court struck down whites-only primaries. Still, by the early 1960s, voter registration rates among African Americans were much lower than among whites. This was especially evident in much of the Deep South.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-ds-05267)

During the civil rights movement, African American activists worked to secure equal-rights legislation. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Congress enacted laws to protect the voting rights of African Americans. However, the legislation was only partially successful. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed. It was intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. That same year the Twenty-fourth Amendment was also ratified. It abolished poll taxes for voting for federal offices.

In 1965 President Johnson called for comprehensive federal legislation to protect voting rights. The result was the Voting Rights Act. It suspended literacy tests. It also required some jurisdictions to get federal approval for any changes made to their voting laws or procedures. In addition, the act allowed the federal government to challenge the use of poll taxes. In the 1970s Congress expanded the law to protect the voting rights of U.S. citizens who do not speak English.

The Voting Rights Act dramatically increased the number of African American voters. In turn, the number of African American elected officials also rose. In 2013, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down the section of the act determining which jurisdictions needed approval to make any voting changes. The court declared that part to be unjustified in modern times.

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In 1965 the United States enacted the Voting Rights Act. It aimed to stop state and local governments from passing laws that kept African Americans from voting. The Fifteenth...

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Animals Arts and Literature Earth and Geography History Life Processes Living Things (Other) Philosophy and Religion Plants Science and Mathematics Society Sports and Recreation Technology

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The Fair Housing Act became a law on April 11, 1968. Also called Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, it protects people when renting or buying a home. The law makes...

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11th April 1968: The Fair Housing Act of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 signed by President Johnson

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Racial discrimination may have been most well-known as a southern state situation, but in reality it occurred in all of the states. The oppression included state approved discrimination as well as violence. Many of the 'Jim Crow Laws' were set in place after the Civil War and during the reconstruction of the southern states and were allowed on both the state and local levels. Those Black Americans that had been former slaves, but were now considered free, had limited rights under the Jim Crow Laws.

This means that if a local area passed a law that was based on discrimination, it was allowed. The Jim Crow Laws basically offered African Americans a 'separate by equal' status. They had equality, only as far as the local or state laws permitted. The reason these laws were passed is due to the fact that the white governing communities thought that Black Americans were inferior to them.

Some of the Jim Crow Laws that were passed were heavily based on segregation. This is the separation of Black Americans from the white population in many of the daily activities and lifestyle actions. This included: separate schools, drinking fountains, bathrooms, hotels, public libraries, restaurants and public transportation. The United States military was also segregated, allowing Black American soldiers to serve in 'Black Only' infantry. There were also Jim Crow laws forbidding Black Americans to participate in or attend sporting events. Even Black and White Americans working together in the same office was considered against the law in some areas.

President Woodrow Wilson was a southerner and during his presidency, supported the Jim Crow Laws of any state or area. The government turned away at every complaint or protest, even when the Jim Crow Laws allowed murder without the benefit of a fair trial. Wilson appointed southern representatives to his cabinet and they made sure that laws were not passed to allow any additional freedoms to the Black Americans.

Some of the most important Jim Crow Laws had to do with voting rights. Many of the southern states passed laws requiring a voter to be able to pass a literacy test before they were given the approval to vote. Since many of the Black Americans still lived in the south and most were not literate due to previous laws against educating slaves, a majority of the Black Americans could not vote. Additional Jim Crow laws on voting added a 'polling tax' which was a payment that allowed you to vote at the voting polls. The lower income Black Americans could not pay the 'polling tax' and this reduced their voting abilities.

I wasn't until 1953, when attorney Thurgood Marshall, brought a legal case to court known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) had their day in trial. The court case that Marshall won over ruled all laws, local or state, that would be considered "Jim Crow Laws" and listed them as unconstitutional.

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"Jump Jim Crow" was the name of a 19th century song that created a stereotype about African Americans. It became the term that was used for the type of laws that allowed oppression and racial discrimination that was common in the United States. Racial discrimination may have been most well-known as a southern state situation, ...

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What Are Jim Crow Laws?

Imagine what it was like to be a Southern slave living during the Civil War Era. Your hopes were aroused with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Even so, because you lived in the Confederate States of America, your master could care less about Lincoln's executive order. But at last, after two more long years, you experienced elation as the South surrendered to Union forces. At long last, you were free!

Yet. . . as you made your way in this strange new world, everywhere you encountered local laws intended to prevent you from succeeding in life. These laws restricted the freedom you thought you had attained. True, you were no longer a slave, but under some of these laws you weren't free either.

These laws were called Jim Crow laws. Okay, but who was Jim Crow? Even before the Civil War took place, the term Jim Crow was derogatory slang for 'negro.' It is believed that the origin of the term dates back to the 1820s or so when a white comedian wrote a song and dance called 'Jump Jim Crow' about a disabled slave. Soon the term caught on and, by the outbreak of the Civil War, was a common nickname for black slaves and free African-Americans.

Jim Crow laws existed primarily between the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s. They took many forms and varied considerably by locale, but segregation and discrimination were common themes. Let's learn more about Jim Crow laws.

After the Civil War

The immediate aftermath of the Civil War is called Reconstruction, or the Reconstruction Era, which took place between 1865 and 1877. Southern Democrats were particularly active in passing Jim Crow laws in the aftermath of the Civil War. There was widespread resentment because the North had won the war and slaves were now free.

To maintain white dominance and keep free blacks from gaining affluence, they legislated varieties of Jim Crow laws. Many Jim Crow laws had to do with voting. For example, the ability to read was often held as voting requirement, and it was previously forbidden for slaves to read. Land ownership was also a requirement in certain areas. These requirements were intended to prevent black Americans from voting and thus gaining political power. By the turn of the century, arbitrary requirements effectively barred black males from voting.

Segregation was another key component of Jim Crow laws. Segregation refers to the policy of keeping black and white Americans separate from one another. For example, this would involve separate drinking foundations for blacks and whites, separate bathrooms, schools, libraries, etc. Typically, the black facility was inferior due to a lack of funding and a lack of interest by the mainstream white community. In parts of Texas, for example, zoning ordinances kept black and white residents from living in the same area.

In 1875, the Enforcement Act, or the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was passed by 'Radical Republicans' in an effort to end Jim Crow laws. Unfortunately, the act was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883.

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facts & timeline - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Jim Crow Laws: Significance, Facts & Timeline - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Imagine what it was like to be a Southern slave living during the Civil War Era. Your hopes were aroused with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Even so, because you lived in the Confederate States of America, your master could care less about Lincoln's executive order.

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

For more than a century after the Civil War, a system of laws and practices denied full freedom and citizenship to African Americans, segregating nearly all aspects of public life.

Historical Background

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation symbolically established a national intent to eradicate slavery in the United States. Decades of state and federal legislation around civil rights followed. In January of 1865, the 13th amendment to the Constitution officially abolished slavery in this country, while the 14th amendment, passed in 1866, set forth three principles:

All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. were citizens for the nation and no state could make or enforce any law that would abridge their rights of citizenship.

No state could deny any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

No state could deny any person equal protection of the laws.

Finally, the 15th amendment, passed in 1869, outlawed the denial of voting rights due to race, color, or past servitude.

However, immediately after the Civil War ended, some states began imposing restrictions on the daily lives of African Americans, whether they were survivors of slavery or had always been free. By the end of the 19th century, laws or informal practices that required that African Americans be segregated from whites were often called Jim Crow practices, believed to be a reference to a minstrel-show song, "Jump Jim Crow."

With the Compromise of 1877, political power was returned to Southern whites in nearly every state of the former Confederacy. The federal government abandoned attempts to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments in many parts of the country. By 1890, when Mississippi added a disfranchisement provision to its state constitution, the legalization of Jim Crow had begun.

Jim Crow was not enacted as a universal, written law of the land. Instead, a patchwork of state and local laws, codes, and agreements enforced segregation to different degrees and in different ways across the nation. In many towns and cities, ordinances designated white and black neighborhoods, while in others covenants and unwritten agreements among real estate interests maintained residential segregation. African Americans were denied the right to vote by onerous poll taxes, unfairly applied tests, and other unjust barriers. The signs we associate today with Jim Crow - "Whites Only," "Colored"- appeared at bus stations, water fountains and rest rooms, as well as at the entrances and exits to public buildings. Hotels, movie theaters, arenas, night clubs, restaurants, churches, hospitals, and schools were segregated, and interracial marriages outlawed. Segregation was not limited to African Americans, but often applied to other non-white Americans.

Segregation was often maintained by uniformed law enforcement. In other instances, it was enforced by armed white mobs and violent attacks by anonymous vigilantes. African Americans resisted these pervasive restrictions using many different strategies, from public advocacy and political activism to individual self-defense and attempts to escape to a better life. In the century following the end of Reconstruction, millions of African Americans moved away from the South in what became known as the Great Migration, only to discover that they faced discrimination in the northern states.

In the middle of the twentieth century, generations of resistance to segregation culminated in the Civil Rights movement, in which African Americans launched widespread demonstrations and other public protests to demand the rights and protections provided by the Constitution. As a result, a series of landmark court cases and new legislation in the 1950s and 60s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, relegated many of the Jim Crow laws and practices of the previous century to the dustbin of history. The impact of a century of segregation can still be felt today, and, although the specific segregation policies of the 19th and 20th centuries have been discredited, voices calling for equal rights for all can still be heard today.

Suggestions for Teachers

Select one primary source that reflects racial segregation and ask your students to consider segregation from multiple perspectives. How would they react if they were excluded? How would they feel if they were not excluded? What would they do if they were asked to enforce the rule or law?

Ask students to analyze several primary sources that express or illustrate views in favor of Jim Crow segregation. What are some of the ways that proponents of segregation make it sound like a benefit -- either to whites, to African Americans, or to both? Invite them to explore what is meant by the term "separate but equal." and how is this concept related to the arguments?

Ask students to compare and contrast several primary sources that express or illustrate opposition to Jim Crow segregation. What were some of the different justifications given for abolishing Jim Crow? What different methods - or approaches - of opposition can you identify? Brainstorm other forms of protest not shown in the primary sources and look for examples in either historical collections or the media of today.

Additional Resources

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Jim Crow and Segregation | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Jump to: Historical background Suggestions for Teachers Additional resources For more than a century after the Civil War, a system of laws and practices denied full freedom and citizenship to African Americans, segregating nearly all aspects of public life.

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Eyes on the Prize | Article

Ralph Abernathy (1926-1990)
The 29-year-old minister of Montgomery, Alabama's First Baptist Church, Ralph Abernathy took a leading role in the 1955-56 bus boycott in that city, and had his home and church bombed as a result. Called "the best friend that I have in the world" by fellow minister and activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Abernathy traveled with King as a representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was jailed 19 times between 1961 and 1965. After King's 1968 assassination, Abernathy led the Poor People's Campaign and ran the SCLC until 1977.

Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) (1942-)
The only three-time heavyweight champion of the world, Cassius Clay grew up in segregated Louisville and was deeply affected by the murder of Emmett Till. Clay became a boxer and suffered the indignation of winning an Olympic gold medal for the United States in 1960 and being refused restaurant service upon his return home. After defeating Sonny Liston in 1964, Clay announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam and was renamed Muhammad Ali by Elijah Muhammad. Ali famously declared "I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong" and refused induction into the Army in 1967, for which he received a five-year prison sentence, but the Supreme Court later overturned the conviction. Ali retired from boxing in 1981 and lit the Olympic flame at Atlanta's 1996 Olympics.

Ella Baker (1903-1986)
After the first student sit-ins in February 1960, a former Harlem organizer turned Southern Christian Leadership Conferenceexecutive director, Ella Baker, worked to develop the isolated incident into a broader series of protests. Unlike some of her colleagues, Baker was enthusiastic about the growing student movement and leaders like John Lewis and Diane Nash. She organized the April 1960 conference that led to the formation of theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and continued to serve as an advisor to that group.

Amiri Baraka (Everett Leroy Jones) (1934-)
Born Everett Leroy Jones during the Great Depression in Newark, New Jersey, Jones changed his name a few times. In college he changed the spelling of his middle name to mirror the French word for king, "LeRoi." Later, to symbolize his political and spiritual transformations, an Islamic minister renamed LeRoi Jones "Ameer Barakat," meaning "Blessed Prince" in Arabic. Subsequently, Maulana Karenga, founder of the Kwanzaa holiday, renamed him Amiri Baraka.

One of the African American writers who galvanized a second black Renaissance - the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s - the prolific Baraka produced poems, plays, essays, fiction and music criticism. His writings reflected a quest for identity and individuality that resonated with a generation of African Americans. In the Black Power era, he was seen as a rebel artist, the "Malcolm X of literature." Baraka declared "It's Nation Time" in his poetry and helped organize the National Black Political Convention in 1972.

Selected as New Jersey's poet laureate in 2002, Baraka was criticized for a poem about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center entitled "Somebody Blew Up America."

Julian Bond (1940-)
Julian Bond's mother was a professional librarian, and his father was the first black president of Lincoln University before becoming the dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University. Bond was attending Atlanta's Morehouse College when the student sit-inmovement began in February 1960. He and a group of friends formed the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights and held their first sit-in a month later. Bond later became SNCC's communications director, and a voter registration organizer.

Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, but that body voted not to seat him because of his activism against the war in Vietnam. Bond would be reelected twice more before the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia violated his rights in denying him the seat.

In 1971 Bond became the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 1974 he won a seat in the Georgia Senate. He lost the 1986 Democratic primary for a Georgia Congressional seat to fellow civil rights activist John Lewis. In 1998 Bond was elected chair of the NAACP.

Elaine Brown (1943-)
The first woman to run what had been a male-dominated Black Panther Party, Elaine Brown moved to Los Angeles from her native Philadelphia in 1965 and became involved with radical politics, joining the Black Panthers in 1967 and becoming Deputy Minister of Information in the Los Angeles branch. Brown was impressed by the Panthers' presentation of powerful, responsible black men, and she also welcomed the opportunity to be a soldier in an army of "socialist revolution." In 1974 she took over the reins of the organization from Bobby Seale; Brown left the United States three years later and lived in France for 20 years, eventually returning to America in 1996.

Roy Bryant (1931-1994) and J. W. Milam (1919-1981)
In the fall of 1955, half-brothers Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were put on trial for the murder of a black fourteen-year-old named Emmett Till who had allegedly flirted with Bryant's wife. The jury acquitted the two white men on the grounds that Till's mutilated body could not be positively identified. In a later, paid interview with Look Magazine, the two Mississippians admitted to the murder, claiming that they had only intended to scare the boy but because the stuttering teenager would not repent, they had to kill him. "Well, what else could we do?" Milam told his interviewer. A boycott of their stores by the black community eventually drove Bryant and Milam out of business.

Angela Davis (1944-)
Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and educated in New York, Boston, Paris and Frankfurt. When she was hired by the UCLA philosophy department, the university's Board of Regents, including Governor Ronald Reagan, had her fired for membership in the Communist Party. Although she eventually got her job back, the publicity brought her to the attention of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners accused of murdering a white guard at California's Soledad Prison. Davis was working on the Soledad Brothers case on August 7, 1970 when a brother of one of the prisoners assaulted a courthouse; four men died in a shootout. Davis became a fugitive, sought for supplying weapons for the courthouse attack. In the meantime, George Jackson, one of the Soledad Brothers, was shot and killed in prison. His death became one of the events that precipitated the riots at Attica.

Davis was eventually tried and acquitted. She continues to teach, speak publicly, and work on prison reform.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Former general Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 and held office during the years when the civil rights movement achieved its first milestones. When President Eisenhower first heard the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, he worried that school integration would lead to social disintegration. However, Eisenhower was keenly aware of the importance of the race question for the international image of America in the midst of a Cold Waragainst Soviet Communism. Highly publicized lynchings and the murder of Emmett Till were internationally embarrassing, as was the Little Rock crisis.

Despite his reservations about the Warren Court's decision in Brown, when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied federal court orders and summoned the National Guard to prevent the black students dubbed the "Little Rock Nine" from integrating the city's Central High School, Eisenhower ordered federal paratroopers in to safeguard the students. "Mob rule," he said in a televised address, "cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts."

Medgar (1925-1963) and Myrlie (1933-) Evers
The NAACP's Mississippi field representative Medgar Evers led the search for black witnesses to testify in the Emmett Till murder trial. He later assisted James Meredith's efforts to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962. On June 12, 1963, shortly after President John Kennedy had delivered his first speech on civil rights, Evers was gunned down outside his home by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith. Evers' widow Myrlie, who had served as his secretary, went on to become the first woman chair of the NAACP. She also urged Mississippi authorities to retry Beckwith, whose first two trials had ended in hung juries. Beckwith was finally convicted of murder in 1994 and died in prison.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
Fannie Lou Hamer was the youngest of 20 children, who became sharecroppers like their parents. Her grandparents had been slaves. Hamer's mother fashioned a black doll for her when she was young, so that she would develop self-confidence and pride despite her poor surroundings. Her mother also taught her spiritual strength, including the power of song.

In 1961 she was sterilized without her knowledge, as part of Mississippi's systematic effort to reduce the poor black population. Soon after, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee visited Hamer's church; she was a 44-year-old Delta field hand who had become a plantation time-keeper. In 1962, Hamer was arrested when she tried to register to vote. According to her biographer, the costs of Hamer's initial activism were severe. She was evicted, jailed, and beaten, suffering kidney damage and partial blindness.

As SNCC's Mississippi field secretary, she became vice chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and received national attention during its attempt to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Although the party's efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, Hamer riveted television audiences with her testimony. "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now," she said, "I question America." Fannie Lou Hamer would continue to fight racism and poverty for the rest of her life.

Jesse Jackson (1941-)
The great-grandson of slaves, South Carolina native Jesse Jackson became involved in sit-ins while in college and joined the SCLC in 1965. In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. took the civil rights movement north with a campaign dubbed the Chicago Freedom Movement. It aimed to raise awareness of northern ghettos and end housing discrimination. Jackson led activists in Chicago, heading Operation Breadbasket, which organized boycotts of businesses that discriminated against African Americans. Jackson was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968, and he left the SCLC and formed his own economic justice organization, Operation PUSH, in 1971. He helped register voters during the campaign that saw Harold Washington elected Chicago's first African American mayor in 1983. Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988 as head of the Rainbow Coalition, receiving millions of votes in the Democratic primaries.

Maynard Jackson (1938-2003)
The son of a prominent Atlanta pastor, Maynard Jackson became the city's vice mayor in 1969 and won the top position four years later when he was just 35 years old. The first African American mayor of a major Southern city, Jackson promised to create a "people's administration" and increase economic opportunity for all. To that end he instituted affirmative action programs that upped the number of black municipal employees and the percentage of city contracts that went to black-owned businesses. Jackson faced resistance from the white business community but the city saw unprecedented economic and civic growth during his tenure. He was twice re-elected and helped bring the Olympics to Atlanta in 1996.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973)
Lyndon Johnson was a white Southerner who took up the civil rights cause shortly after being elevated to president when his predecessor was shot. Five days after John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, Johnson urged passage of Kennedy's civil rights bill, and it became law on July 2, 1964. Content to wait before introducing more such legislation, Johnson was prompted to action by further civil rights demonstrations, particularly the televised "Bloody Sunday" incident in Selma, Alabama. Quoting the anthem of the movement, "We Shall Overcome", in a March 1965 televised address to Congress, Johnson presented a Voting Rights Act that would become law that August. But the Vietnam war eroded Johnson's support, and he decided not to seek reelection in 1968. Above all, President Johnson clearly understood there would be a political backlash to his civil rights initiatives, but he also backed civil rights and the domestic Great Society programs which form a major part of his legacy.

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy called Coretta Scott King after learning of her husband Martin's imprisonment for leading a nonviolent civil rights protest. Many black voters, who had voted Republican for almost a century, since Reconstructiondays, subsequently shifted their support to Kennedy, a Democrat, helping make him the 35th president.

In contrast to the Eisenhower years, blacks increasingly looked to the White House for leadership from the Kennedy administration. However, once in office, Kennedy was slow to support the civil rights movement. It would take the dramatic and televised violence against the Freedom Riders in 1961 and attempts to prevent James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi to spur federal intervention. In June 1963, Kennedy delivered a televised address on civil rights and subsequently introduced the first sweeping legislation on the subject since Reconstruction. He was assassinated that November, but his successor Lyndon Johnson saw the bill through to passage.

Robert Kennedy (1925-1968)
President John F. Kennedy's younger brother, who served as his attorney general, shared the chief executive's hesitation to act in the civil rights arena. But savage violence against the Freedom Riders began to change Robert Kennedy's mind. Kennedy ordered federal marshals to intervene during James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and the attorney general also urged the president to submit a forceful federal civil rights bill in 1963. After his brother's death, Robert Kennedy became a senator from New York and anti-poverty advocate. A presidential candidate in 1968, he broke the news of Martin Luther King's assassination to the crowd at an Indianapolis campaign event and was himself gunned down just two months later.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
The son of an Atlanta preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to national attention when, as a 26-year-old minister just starting out in Montgomery, Alabama, he helped lead the bus boycottthat initiated the modern civil rights movement. In 1957 King and some associates formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and despite numerous arrests and threats, he remained committed to nonviolent protest as the means of effecting social change. King helped the United States re-envision itself as an interracial democracy when he delivered the famous "I Have a Dream" speech at 1963's March on Washington. Later that decade he broadened his focus to include economic justice, Northern ghettos, and opposition to the Vietnam war. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee, during the tumultuous year of 1968. In 1986 his birthday became a national holiday, making him the first non-president to be so honored.

John Lewis (1940-)
As a young seminarian in Nashville, John Lewis attended a workshop on nonviolence and soon joined other students in conducting sit-ins. One of the original Freedom Riders in 1961, he helped create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and spoke as its representative at the March on Washington. Lewis also was a key organizer of 1964's Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Lewis was beaten by police during the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma. He left SNCC the following year because of what he saw as its increasing militancy. He was elected to Congress in 1986, defeating fellow activist Julian Bond in the Democratic primary, and continues to serve as a representative from Georgia.

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People Of The Civil Rights Movement: Part 1 | American Experience | PBS

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Learn about key figures during the civil rights movement.

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The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

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At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King's assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. During King's funeral a tape recording was played in which King spoke of how he wanted to be remembered after his death: "I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others " (King, " Drum Major Instinct, " 85).

King had arrived in Tennessee on Wednesday, 3 April, to prepare for a march the following Monday on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. As he prepared to leave the Lorraine Motel for a dinner at the home of Memphis minister Samuel "Billy" Kyles, King stepped out onto the balcony of room 306 to speak with Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) colleagues standing in the parking area below. An assassin fired a single shot that caused severe wounds to the lower right side of his face. SCLC aides rushed to him, and Ralph Abernathy cradled King's head. Others on the balcony pointed across the street toward the rear of a boarding house on South Main Street where the shot seemed to have originated. An ambulance rushed King to St. Joseph's Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead at 7:05 P.M.

President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a national day of mourning to be observed on 7 April. In the following days, public libraries, museums, schools, and businesses were closed, and the Academy Awards ceremony and numerous sporting events were postponed. On 8 April King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and other family members joined thousands of participants in a march in Memphis honoring King and supporting the sanitation workers. King's funeral service was held the following day in Atlanta at Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was attended by many of the nation's political and civil rights leaders, including Jacqueline Kennedy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Ralph Bunche. Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays delivered the eulogy, predicting that King " would probably say that, if death had to come, I am sure there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors " (Mays, 9 April 1968). Over 100,000 mourners followed two mules pulling King's coffin through the streets of Atlanta. After another ceremony on the Morehouse campus, King's body was initially interred at South-View Cemetery. Eventually, it was moved to a crypt next to the Ebenezer Church at the King Center, an institution founded by King's widow.

Shortly after the assassination, a policeman discovered a bundle containing a 30.06 Remington rifle next door to the boarding house. The largest investigation in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) history led its agents to an apartment in Atlanta. Fingerprints uncovered in the apartment matched those of James Earl Ray, a fugitive who had escaped from a Missouri prison in April 1967. FBI agents and police in Memphis produced further evidence that Ray had registered on 4 April at the South Main Street roominghouse and that he had taken a second-floor room near a common bathroom with a view of the Lorraine Motel.

The identification of Ray as a suspect led to an international manhunt. On 19 July 1968 Ray was extradited to the United States from Britain to stand trial. In a plea bargain, Tennessee prosecutors agreed in March 1969 to forgo seeking the death penalty when Ray pled guilty to murder charges. The circumstances leading to the plea later became a source of controversy, when Ray recanted his confession soon after being sentenced to a 99-year term in prison.

During the years following King's assassination, doubts about the adequacy of the case against Ray were fueled by revelations of the extensive surveillance of King by the FBI and other government agencies. Beginning in 1976 the House Select Committee on Assassinations, chaired by Representative Louis Stokes, re-examined the evidence concerning King's assassination, as well as that of President John F. Kennedy. The committee's final report suggested that Ray may have had co-conspirators. The report nonetheless concluded that there was no convincing evidence of government complicity in King's assassination.

After recanting his guilty plea, Ray continued to maintain his innocence, claiming to have been framed by a gun-smuggler he knew as " Raoul. " In 1993 Ray's lawyer, William F. Pepper, sought to build popular support to reopen Ray's case by staging a televised mock trial of Ray in which the " jury " found him not guilty. In 1997 members of King's family publicly supported Ray's appeal for a new trial, and King's son Dexter Scott King supported Ray's claims of innocence during a televised prison encounter. Despite this support Tennessee authorities refused to reopen the case, and Ray died in prison on 23 April 1998.

Even after Ray's death, conspiracy allegations continued to surface. In 1999, on behalf of King's widow and children, Pepper won a token civil verdict of wrongful death against Lloyd Jowers, owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Although the trial produced considerable testimony that contradicted the original case against Ray, the Justice Department announced in 2000 that its own internal investigation, launched in 1998 at the King family's request, had failed to find sufficient evidence to warrant a further investigation.

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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At 6:05 p.m. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King's assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities.

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Emmett Till is murdered | August 28, 1955 | HISTORY

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Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.

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A new limited series premiering on ABC takes a look back at the brutal kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till back in 1955.

The focus of "Women of the Movement" is on his mother, the late Mamie Till-Mobley, and how she made her only son's death a turning point in the fight for civil rights.

The six-hour presentation shows how one woman's determination to seek justice had a profound effect on U.S. history.

This brave mother, played by Adrienne Warren, mobilizes folks following her son's murder.

"The death of my son has shown me that whatever happens to any of us had better be the business of all of us," she says in the show.
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Till has been called "the Trayvon Martin of the 50s," a reference to another Black teen killed in 2012.

Till was just 14 years old and living in Chicago when he went to visit relative in Mississippi. He was accused of flirting with or whistling at a white woman, and an angry group went to the home where he was staying determine to do him harm.

His cousin, the Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., was 16 at the time and survived to bear witness to what happened.

"I was shaking like a leaf," he said at a recent screening of the TV show. "I heard the men talking outside at 2:30 in the morning. I said 'God, we're getting ready to die'...It was dark, darker then 1,000 midnights. I couldn't see my hand before my eyes, but when they stepped in with the flashlight and the pistol, I close my eyes to be shot. They didn't shoot me. They walked past me, went to the third room. They found Emmett, and that's the last time we saw him alive."

Rev. Parker was among a group of Till relatives who came to the screening to show their support for "Women of The Movement."
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"It's very powerful," Till's cousin, Ollie Gordon, said. "I think it brings accuracy and validity to the story, and that's very important to my family."

Her late aunt was Mamie Till-Mobley.

"We are so honored to have them part of the process with us," Warren said.

The person guiding the entire process was the creator of the show, Executive Producer Marissa Jo Cerar, who said that hearing the praise from family members is "all she ever wanted" after filming was over.

Cerar hopes viewers will take home a larger message.

"Just a regular person, a regular mother, a woman just like them can change the world by using their voice, by speaking the truth, by fighting back when people tell them to sit down and remain silent," she said.

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'Women of the Movement' looks back at kidnapping, murder of Emmett Till

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A new limited series premiering on ABC takes a look back at the brutal kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till back in 1955. The focus of "Women of the Movement" is on his mother, the late Mamie Till-Mobley, and how she made her only son's death a turning point in the fight for civil rights.