In 1961, a courageous band of some 400 civil rights activists—black and white, young and old, male and female, Northern and Southern—risked their lives by deliberately violating Jim Crow laws and traveling together on buses as they journeyed through the Deep South. Greeted by mob violence and bitter racism along the way, many endured savage beatings and even imprisonment. They called themselves the Freedom Riders, and they managed to bring the president and the entire American public face to face with the challenge of correcting civil rights inequities that plagued the nation.

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