The Freedom Rides and Alabama: A Guide to Key Events and Places, Context, and Impact

This concise guidebook gives a brief overview of the 1961 Freedom Rides, a crucial moment in American history in which an interracial group traveled across the South to protest segregated transportation. The Freedom Rides and Alabama focuses on the Freedom Riders’ experiences in Alabama, from the firebombing of their bus in Anniston to surviving beatings in Birmingham. A large portion of this book describes the riders’ arrival in Montgomery, including the violent white mob that greeted them and the ensuing mass meeting at First Baptist Church, where leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth spoke. This volume puts the Freedom Rides in historical context and is published in conjunction with the Alabama Historical Commission to celebrate the opening of a Montgomery museum at the site of the Greyhound station where the Freedom Riders arrived on their journey south, dedicated to the history of the Freedom Rides on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary.

NOELLE MATTESON is a graduate of Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. She became interested in Southern culture after volunteering in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.