Freedom Riders

1. A group of northern idealists active in the civil rights movement. The Freedom Riders, who included both blacks and whites, rode buses into the South in the early 1960s in order to challenge racial segregation. Freedom Riders were regularly attacked by mobs of angry whites and received often belated protection from federal officers.

Example Sentences

During this same era, civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders had begun challenging the laws of segregation by riding buses through Southern states, passing through towns such as Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, where one group of riders was assaulted and their bus burned by mobs of angry Whites.

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One of the Freedom Riders, John Lewis, of Georgia, would eventually become a renowned congressman.

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Let’s take an example of a park like Freedom Riders.

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When I despair, I think of Ukrainian fighters down in the trenches, American soldiers mowed down on the beaches of Normandy, and Freedom Riders risking it all on back roads across the South — all fighting for freedom under conditions far more dire than what we face today.

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When the first Freedom Ride was derailed by mob violence, a small group of Nashville students trained by Lawson completed the dangerous bus trip from Montgomery, Ala., to Jackson, Miss. Lawson accompanied them and was arrested along with other Freedom Riders in Mississippi after some of the protesters entered the whites-only restrooms at the Jackson terminal.

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