Freedom's Main Line (eBook)

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other civil rights groups began organizing the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Riders were volunteers of different backgrounds who travelled on buses throughout the American South to help enforce the Supreme Court ruling that had declared racial segregation on public transportation illegal. In Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, Derek Catsam shows how the Freedom Rides were crucial in raising awareness among decision makers and in bringing the realities of racial segregation into American homes through national media coverage.

---

"e;A compelling, spellbinding examination of a pivotal event in civil rights history . . . a highly readable and dramatic account of a major turning point."e; -Journal of African-American HistoryBlack Americans in the Jim Crow South could not escape the grim reality of racial segregation, whether enforced by law or by custom. In Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, author Derek Charles Catsam shows that courtrooms, classrooms, and cemeteries were not the only front lines in African Americans' prolonged struggle for basic civil rights. Buses, trains, and other modes of public transportation provided the perfect means for civil rights activists to protest the second-class citizenship of African Americans, bringing the reality of the violence of segregation into the consciousness of America and the world. Freedom's Main Line argues that the Freedom Rides, a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, were a logical, natural evolution of such earlier efforts as the Journey of Reconciliation, relying on the principles of nonviolence so common in the larger movement. The impact of the Freedom Rides, however, was unprecedented, fixing the issue of civil rights in the national consciousness. Later activists were often dubbed Freedom Riders even if they never set foot on a bus. With challenges to segregated transportation as his point of departure, Catsam chronicles black Americans' long journey toward increased civil rights. Freedom's Main Line tells the story of bold incursions into the heart of institutional discrimination, journeys undertaken by heroic individuals who forced racial injustice into the national and international spotlight and helped pave the way for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.