Tracing the Movement's Path

In the familiar narrative of the civil rights movement, the Freedom Rides tend to be no more than a brief stopping point, sandwiched between the sit-ins of 1960 and the Albany campaign of 1961–62. The image of the burning Greyhound bus outside of Anniston, Alabama, (rightly and predictably on the dust jacket) is a movement icon, and the interviews for the 1986 documentary series Eyes on the Prize have made the beatings in Birmingham and Montgomery and the prison experiences in Parchman, Mississippi, vividly available for history and social studies classes. Yet in the public consciousness, the King/Alabama triptych of Montgomery (1955–56), Birmingham (1963), and Selma (1965) looms larger in the struggle for racial justice. Consequently, the inclusion of the Freedom Rides in a series entitled "Pivotal Moments in American History," especially one that already has a volume on the 1954 Brown decision as a pivotal moment in race relations, warrants comment. Surely this implies that one should see the Freedom Rides as changing the course of the history more significantly than either the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) or the sit-ins? One of Raymond Arsenault's many achievements in this volume is to make a case for such a judgment.

Before elaborating that argument, however, it is worth repeating the book's title. Arsenault's subject is the Freedom Riders not the Freedom Rides, and his pivotal moment is 1961, and certainly not just the initial Freedom Rides of May of that year. Most civil rights scholars, let alone non-specialists, will be unaware that there were 436 Freedom Riders and will know little about the Rides to other southern destinations such as Little Rock, Shreveport, or Houston, let alone the testing of facilities at railroad stations and airports. The principal terminal point for the Riders was, of course, Mississippi's state capital of Jackson, and Arsenault's account demonstrates compellingly how profoundly the Rides affected life behind the Magnolia Curtain in 1961, bringing the movement to life in a new way within what James Silver so aptly labeled the "Closed Society."

In this respect, one can begin to see why 1961 is arguably a better choice of pivotal moment than Montgomery or the sit-ins. The preeminence of the 1955–56 bus boycott rests almost entirely on its role in launching Martin Luther King's career, since that is what carries its significance forward. In other ways, it looked back. The Montgomery Improvement Association's (MIA's) initial request for a more polite form of segregation reflects the tactics of racial diplomacy that had won small gains in the 1940s urban South. And both the segregationists' conviction that the NAACP was the real mastermind behind the boycott and the sometimes overlooked fact that bus desegregation ultimately came through the Gayle v Browder decision confirm that Montgomery belongs to a phase of the movement when NAACP legalism rather than nonviolent direct action set the tone. Arsenault shows how the Riders' 1961 campaign links to subsequent clashes in McComb, Mississippi; Monroe, North Carolina; Albany, Georgia; and even Birmingham, Alabama, whereas most scholars accept that despite the merits of Montgomery, the subsequent early years of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) produced little. The bus boycott tactic did not transfer effectively to other cities, and King, like the rest of the MIA leadership, struggled to develop either a mobilizing strategy rooted in direct action or an organizing strategy focused on voter registration. By 1959, the civil rights movement looked less vibrant in key respects than its segregationist opponents.

The sit-in wave in the early spring of 1960 revitalized the movement, spreading rapidly from their North Carolinian starting point to college towns in other southern states (with the notable exception of Mississippi). This was a significant turning point since it brought students to the forefront of the movement and showed the coercive, disruptive power of nonviolent direct action. The bus boycotts' economic coercion...