Freedom Rides

American civil rights activists of the 1960sLead figuresCORE membersJames FarmerGordon CareySNCC and Nashville Student Movement membersDiane NashJohn LewisJames LawsonBernard LafayetteJames BevelGovernorsRoss BarnettJohn M. PattersonCity of BirminghamEugene "Bull" ConnorTom CookFreedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregatedSouthern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government had done nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17. Boynton outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955) that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) doctrine of separate but e