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.
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.”
John Patterson, Alabama's governor from 1958 to 1963, discusses his decision to refuse a phone call from President Kennedy when the Freedom Riders encountered mob violence in Birmingham.
In 1947, 16 men—eight black and eight white—boarded a bus to test compliance with a recent Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation on interstate bus travel.
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.
