Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern 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 did 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.
Mugshots of Freedom Riders, as displayed at the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia
The Greyhound bus attack site (center) is south of Anniston on Old Birmingham Highway (right). See Freedom Riders National Monument (2017 photo)
Violence at the Anniston Trailways Terminal, at 901 Noble St., is commemorated with a mural (2012 photo)
A mob of white people beat Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama. This picture was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed.
Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court. The case overturned a judgment convicting an African American law student for trespassing by being in a restaurant in a bus terminal which was "whites only". It held that racial segregation in public transportation was illegal because such segregation violated the Interstate Commerce Act, which broadly forbade discrimination in interstate passenger transportation. It moreover held that bus transportation was sufficiently related to interstate commerce to allow the United States federal government to regulate it to forbid racial discrimination in the industry.
Future justice Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Boynton in front of the U.S. Supreme Court (1957 photo)
