The Freedom Riders and Lessons for Today

[Omaha Steve]

http://buildingbridgesradio.blogspot.com/2011/05/freedom-riders-and-lessons-for-today-28.html

written by building bridges radio at Monday, May 23, 2011

The Freedom Riders and Lessons for Today
With
The Rev. Dr. James Lawson , helped coordinate the Sitdown
strike in 1960, Freedom Rides in 1961, the Meredith March in
1966. While working as a pastor at the Centenary Methodist
Church in Memphis, he invited Dr. King to Memphis & played
a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. Dr. King
called Lawson "the leading theorist and strategist of
nonviolence in the world.”

and
Diane Nash, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) who participated in the sitdown strikes in
Nashville & rode the freedom buses into Alabama and Miss.
where she endured mob violence & imprisonment. Later, she
was hired by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) & was a major organizer for the 1963 Birmingham
campaign.

The movement by African-Americans, in the 60’s to desegregate interstate
travel facilities throughout the South was pivotal in challenging & ultimately eradicating the most onerous Jim Crow laws and breaking the back of whatwere the police states of the South. The Freedom Rides, along with efforts to integrate public accommodations, & educational institutions and the voter registration campaigns coalesced as a mass movement that triggered theconscience of a nation and spurred it to action. Risking life and limb toconfront white supremacy, the civil rights activists forced major changesin the power relationships of the nation.

Fifty years after the freedom rides, on this anniversary Building Bridgeslooks back at & learns anew how the freedom riders organized and mobilized to dramatically alter the very functioning of the state and what he can emulate today in the face of increasing repression, by undemocratic forces who seek to unravel fifty years of gains, ushered in by the freedom
riders.

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