In the days following the incident, the riders met King and other civil rights leaders in Atlanta for dinner. The beating of Lewis and another rider, coupled with the arrest of one participant for using a whites-only restroom, attracted widespread media coverage. On, the freedom riders left Washington, D.C., in two buses and headed to New Orleans. Although they faced resistance and arrests in Virginia, it was not until the riders arrived in Rock Hill, South Carolina, that they encountered violence. Lafayette’s parents would not permit him to participate, but Lewis joined 12 other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride. After this first ride, they saw CORE’s announcement recruiting volunteers to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to test the enforcement of Boynton. Prior to the 1960 decision, two students, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, integrated their bus ride home from college in Nashville, Tennessee, by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. Virginia that segregation in the facilities provided for interstate travelers, such as bus terminals, restaurants, and restrooms, was also unconstitutional. Virginia (1946), that made segregation in interstate transportation illegal, in 1960 the U.S.
Fourteen years later, in a new national context of sit-ins, boycotts, and the emergence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Freedom Rides were able to harness enough national attention to force federal enforcement and policy changes.įollowing an earlier ruling, Morgan v. The lack of confrontation, however, resulted in little media attention and failed to realize CORE’s goals for the rides. Called the Journey of Reconciliation, the ride challenged bus segregation in the upper parts of the South, avoiding the more dangerous Deep South.
The Freedom Rides were fi rst conceived in 1947 when CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation organized an interracial bus ride across state lines to test a Supreme Court decision that declared segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional. Although the campaign succeeded in securing an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ban on segregation in all facilities under their jurisdiction, the Freedom Rides fueled existing tensions between student activists and Martin Luther King, Jr., who publicly supported the riders, but did not participate in the campaign. Traveling on buses from Washington, D.C., to Jackson, Mississippi, the riders met violent opposition in the Deep South, garnering extensive media attention and eventually forcing federal intervention from John F. The Department of Justice has identified seven motorcycle clubs that it believes are highly structured criminal enterprises, many of them allied in one form or another against the best-known gang, the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.Ī Justice Department report classifies such organizations as outlaw motorcycle gangs, and federal law enforcement authorities are focused on their alleged drug activity and possible connections to Mexican cartels.During the spring of 1961, student activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Freedom Rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals. “This is not a bunch of doctors and dentists and lawyers riding Harleys,” said Waco police Sgt. The Hells Angels are more likely to make news for suing the film “Wild Hogs” than the kind of drug-fueled bacchanalia for which they were once famous.īut Sunday's bloody confrontation in Waco, Texas, is a jolting reminder that some motorcycle gangs are still a violent force in some parts of the country. Since the 1966 epochal “Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” helped cement the image of motorcycle clubs as a drug-addled danger to postwar society, the biker gang image has been largely defanged.
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