After deciding to participate in the Freedom Rides in May 1961, Jim Zwerg called his parents for support only to be told that he was “killing his father.”
Former civil rights activists raised in the South recount how their commitment to nonviolence was sorely tested by the extreme hostility and mob violence they encountered.
The state of Mississippi's plan to bankrupt CORE backfired when, on August 14, 1961, all but nine of the Freedom Riders returned to Jackson for their arraignment.
The story behind a courageous band of civil rights activists called the Freedom Riders who in 1961 creatively challenged a segregated interstate travel system in the American South.
The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South.
During the early 20th century, the NAACP and other organizations employed a variety of courtroom strategies to chip away at Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation.
In 1960, due to racially discriminatory voter registration practices, the overwhelming majority of voters in the South was white; the "Solid South," was key to the Democratic Party’s fortunes.
