@article{813178,
      recid = {813178},
      title = {"We were prepared for the possibility of death" : Freedom  Riders in the South, 1961.},
      publisher = {Gale, a part of Cengage Learning,},
      address = {Farmington Hills, Mich. :},
      pages = {1 online resource (4,285 images).},
      year = {2010},
      note = {Date range of documents: 1961.},
      abstract = {Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode  interstate buses into the segregated South to test the  United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v.  Virginia. Boynton had 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 had issued a  ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had  explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of  separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC  had failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow  travel laws remained in force throughout the South. The  Freedom Riders set out to challenge this status quo by  riding various forms of public transportation in the South  to challenge local laws or customs that enforced  segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions  they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the Civil  Rights Movement and called national attention to the  violent disregard for the law that was used to enforce  segregation in the southern United States. Riders were  arrested for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating  state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged  offenses.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/813178},
}