Freedom Summer

Though the origins of the civil rights movement had been brewing for years before the 1950s, it exploded into the national spotlight in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education decision. As the 1950s continued, many direct action campaigns, including sit-ins, became popular forms of protest throughout the South.

At the beginning of the 1960s, another form of protest began: freedom rides. These included Northern activists who boarded segregated interstate buses and rode them into the South. The point of this protest was to contest the government’s non-enforcement of previous Supreme Court rulings that made segregated public buses unconstitutional.

The freedom riders were often met with violence from white people, including the Ku Klux Klan, once the buses reached Southern states. Often, this violence was coordinated or ignored by local police forces, which were made up entirely of white people at the time. “Freedom Summer” details one such instance of collusion and vigilante action between police and the Klan, this time involving volunteers from the Freedom Summer Project (an initiative that would take place three short years after the freedom rides).  

While the riders were heavily criticized by many in the public, including the press, their actions led to the enforcement of desegregation in the buses in 1961. Additionally, the courage shown by these activists inspired many people to join direct-action campaigns in the years that followed.

During this time, activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. engaged in other direct-action campaigns against segregation in the South. Demonstrations included boycotts, marches, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and other non-violent demonstrations across the country. The movement did not enjoy a lot of popularity with the majority-white population at this time, but it did garner significant public attention and resulted in many victories for civil rights, mainly in the realm of desegregation.