Triumph

Triumph. . But the Ride didn't end. The national newspaper and television coverage of what had happened galvanized the Nashville Student Movement, which already had experience successfully challenging segregationist practices through lunch counter sit-ins, stand-ins, and other acts of nonviolent resistance., Eight black and two white college students, none over 23, volunteered to continue the Ride immediately on May 17. Their actions and the brutal response they endured ultimately inspired other Americans – 436 in all – to become Freedom Riders throughout the summer of 1961. They were college and high school students, ministers, rabbis, professors, artists, secretaries, nurses, longshoremen, and day laborers – black and white, male and female, young and old. While subsequent Riders experienced more violence and 300 were jailed in the notorious Parchman Prison in Mississippi, the Rides succeeded in ways, both practical and inspirational, that no one could have predicted., Historian Ray Arsenault writes: “Within six months of the first Ride, travelers of all races were sitting side by side on buses and trains all across the nation without fear of arrest, the WHITE and COLORED signs that had blighted the walls of Southern bus and train stations for decades were gone … The most important and lasting consequence - the one that confirmed the Rides' status as a pivotal moment in American history – was a revolutionary change in the character of citizen politics … they, more than any other activists of their day, foreshadowed the grassroots ‘rights revolution’ that would transform American citizenship over the next four decades.”,

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead, author and anthropologist

, Following a mistrial, five of the six men indicted for the bus burning pled guilty and were sentenced to one-year probation terms by Federal District Court Judge Hobart Grooms. He allowed a sixth to serve time concurrent with a sentence for burglary.