Throughout the long struggle for civil and political rights, African Americans utilized a number of protest methods. One of the most favored of these were the "Freedom Rides" that captured the country's attention and imagination in the early 1960s, and successfully influenced the cultural consciousness of the nation with regard to matters of racial prejudice. The goal of the freedom rides was simply to end segregation in interstate travel. Although the United States ruled the segregation of interstate facilities unconstitutional, the edict went largely ignored in the Jim Crow South.

In 1949 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) launched a freedom ride throughout the upper South to highlight the discrimination African Americans faced when traveling below the Mason-Dixon Line. However, the efforts of these interracial, nonviolent, and pacifist organizations were unsuccessful, largely because they were unable to attract press attention. Nonetheless...