BLACK HISTORY

1961

FREEDOM RIDES BEGAN

Following the student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing “freedom rides” through the region.

Led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, CORE organized a dozen activists who were paired into two interracial sets of Freedom Riders who would travel on Greyhound and Trailways buses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana. The Freedom Riders left Washington on May 4, 1961, and traveled across Virginia and North Carolina.

The Freedom Rides lasted seven months before ending December 7, 1961. The Freedom Rides inspired rural southern blacks to embrace civil disobedience as a strategy for regaining their civil rights, inspiring campaigns such as Mississippi’s Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Movement in 1965 as well as in dozens of much less heralded efforts to register to vote or to integrate the region’s public schools.

1941

ASHFORD OF ASHFORD & SIMPSON BORN