The Freedom Rides: Civil Disobedience at Its Finest

Civil disobedience is fighting for what one believes in while acting nonviolently and fairly. Whether they’re up against powerful people, like the government or a big corporation, or up against a more local power, like a school board or a small business, people protest things that go against their beliefs everyday. Civil disobedience is a way of fighting for justice without attacking those who are for things that one finds unfair. This can be found constantly in the Civil Right’s Movement. During the Civil Rights Movement, many people decided to hold nonviolent protests, sit-ins, and freedom rides to fight for equality among races. A man by the name of John Lewis was the first student to be assaulted during the Freedom Rides, a movement where people rode buses into the segregated parts of the South. The Freedom Rides were a nonviolent way to test the Supreme Court’s ruling on segregation. John Lewis and the other freedom riders showed civil disobedience when they refrained from fighting the people who attacked them during the Freedom Rides, and when they continued to ride to protest segregation in the South.
The Freedom Rides were organized by the CORE, or Congress of Racial Equality. The CORE was founded in 1942, and the congress based their protests on Gandhi’s principle of nonviolent protests. In the early 1960s, the CORE decided to start a new kind of protest, where thirteen determined people would ride through the South in an effort to test the Supreme Court’s ruling, called the Irene Morgan Decision, which declared the segregation of bus and rail stations unconstitutional. The riders had to endure harsh training to be sure they would refuse to fight back, if trainee began to fight back, he would not be allowed to r...

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...ts are civil disobedience in the use of intelligence to fight power, which resulted in the forced cracks in the walls of segregation. For the freedom riders, the rides were “[The] most important decision in [our lives], to decide to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that justice and freedom might come to the deep South.” (Lewis) And today, it is one of the most important decisions in history.

Works Cited

"The Freedom Rides" Congress of Racial Equality. The Congress of Racial Equality, Web. Feb.-Mar. 2014.
"Lewis, John (1940-)" Martin Luther King JR. And the Global Freedom Struggle. Stanford University, Web. Feb.-Mar. 2014.
Smith Holmes, Marian. "The Freedom Riders, Then and Now" Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Magazine, Feb. 2009. Web. Feb.-Mar. 2014.
"We'll Never Turn Back" Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. West Wind Writers, Web. 12 Mar. 2014.