“Buses Are a Comin’. Oh Yeah!”: Stanley Nelson on Freedom Riders

This conversation with the prominent filmmaker Stanley Nelson engages with Freedom Riders, his most recent feature-length documentary, which aired on the American Experience (PBS) during the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides—a nonviolent protest movement that in 1961 challenged Jim Crow laws and practice in the Deep South. In it, Nelson elaborates on the Freedom Riders’ tribulations and triumph, the leadership role and contributions of women who participated in the rides, and the contradictory stance and ambivalence of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. during this tumultuous moment and rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. Nelson also discusses the practice of and obstacles to making the documentary.