The Freedom Rides

The Freedom Rides. . The Rides began in May 1961 when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to test a 1960 U. S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation in depot restaurants and restrooms serving interstate passengers., Previously, CORE had organized a bus trip in 1947 called the "Journey of Reconciliation" to test a 1946 decision by the high court that ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional. During the 1947 trip, an interracial group of 16 men and women spent two weeks traveling by bus through four states in the Upper South. Jim Peck, a white participant, received the only beating of the trip but eight of the riders served jail time with several forced to work on a chain gang for breaking state segregation laws., No other tests followed until James Farmer, the CORE director and a participant in the 1947 ride, called for a test of Southern compliance with the 1960 ruling. "Our intention," Farmer said, "was to provoke the southern authorities into arresting us and thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the law of the land.", The new test became a "Freedom Ride" because in Farmer's estimation, it required a name that expressed the organization's determination to put "the movement on wheels … to cut across state lines and establish the position that we were entitled to act any place in the country, no matter where we hung our hat and called home, because it was our country.", In early April 1961, the planners developed the route and lined up sponsors in communities along the way. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were now included in order to test Deep South compliance.