DVD Movie Review of “Freedom Riders”

As I sat and watched Stanley Nelson’s documentary Freedom Riders (now in Redbox) I felt a plethora of mixed emotions: disgust, shame, pride, and courage. The 2010 PBS produced special chronicles the 1961 “freedom ride” of two buses which left Atlanta on Mother’s Day headed to Birmingham, Alabama with the goal of experiencing first hand the Jim Crow segregation laws of the South.

Members of The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which were made up of students, civil rights leaders, and other activist (mainly from the north), took it upon themselves to actually challenge the segregation being practiced in the Deep South. They would do this by stopping at diners, bus and train terminals, and anywhere else they thought they could challenge Jim Crow customs. The naïveté of the young integrated group was almost as astonishing as what was about to transpire.

The first bus was confronted by a violent mob in Anniston, Alabama, where the thugs surrounded the transport and then threw a Molotov cocktail inside, forcing the occupants out. When the “Riders” fled the bus, they where beaten with clubs, pipes, bats, and rocks. (The footage of the debacle is horrifying.) The second bus, unaware of what had happened continued on to Birmingham where they attempted to enter the segregated terminal and where they were verbally and physically assaulted by an angry mob and the police, with the consent of Governor John Patterson and the knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover.

The documentary is narrated by the actual riders themselves who are now civil rights leaders, historians, and religious leaders, without all the “glory hallelujah” nonsense.

I was born in 1955; lived in the north, and studied history and political science in college. I knew about the civil rights movement and the Reverend Martin Luther King. But I was highly unprepared for what I saw on this documentary. The viciousness of the mobs was only matched by the courageousness of the “Riders.” This is a must see.

(Note: I would strongly recommend watching this with your children).

My Rating: 5 of 5 Freedom Riders.


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