Bound for Glory

FREEDOM RIDERS

1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

By Raymond Arsenault.

Illustrated. 690 pp.

Oxford University Press. $32.50.

The recent death of Rosa Parks refocused national attention on one of the most beloved figures of the civil rights movement. But without the heroism of thousands of unsung grass-roots activists, the movement would never have accomplished what it did. In "Freedom Riders," Raymond Arsenault, a professor of history at the University of South Florida, rescues from obscurity the men and women who, at great personal risk, rode public buses into the South in order to challenge segregation in interstate travel. Drawing on personal papers, F.B.I. files and interviews with more than 200 participants in the rides, Arsenault brings vividly to life a defining moment in modern American history.

"Freedom Riders" begins not on May 4, 1961, when 13 black and white volunteers boarded two buses in Washington bound for New Orleans, but 17 years earlier, when Irene Morgan, in an act of defiance that anticipated Rosa Parks's, refused to give up her seat on a bus traveling from Virginia to Maryland. Convicted of violating local segregation laws, she appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1946 that segregated seating on interstate buses violated the Constitution.

In 1947, the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, an obscure civil rights group founded a few years earlier by Christian pacifists, organized the Journey of Reconciliation to test compliance. The trip through the upper South went off peacefully, but failed to dent the edifice of segregation. As Arsenault notes, there had been Reconstruction-era battles over integrating streetcars and railroad carriages, and late-19th-century lawsuits brought by black travelers demanding equal treatment. The Freedom Rides of 1961, also organized by CORE, represented the latest front in a battle that had begun decades before.

In most parts of the world, a bus journey would hardly have attracted attention. In the Jim Crow South of 1961, the Freedom Riders encountered shocking violence that deeply embarrassed the Kennedy administration. Outside Anniston, Ala., a mob set one of the buses on fire. The riders were lucky to escape with their lives. In Birmingham, police officers gave Klan members 15 minutes to assault the riders at the bus station before intervening. The result was what Arsenault calls "one of the bloodiest afternoons in Birmingham's history."

Further violence followed another group of riders in Montgomery, where John Seigenthaler, the president's personal representative, suffered a fractured skull and several broken ribs. It took a small army of policemen and National Guard troops to escort the bus from Montgomery to Jackson, Miss., where the Freedom Riders were promptly arrested for breach of the peace and attempting to incite a riot. Some spent time at the infamous Parchman Farm, a prison plantation the historian David Oshinsky called "synonymous . . . with brutality."

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.