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

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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Arsenault met Lewis in 2000, as he was researching his 2006 book “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.”

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He impressed them with his sense of purpose and his courage, and he soon moved into leadership roles himself, first in lunch counter sit-ins and then, at barely 21, as one of the Freedom Riders who defied violent attacks to desegregate public transport in the Deep South in 1961.

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