Customer Reviews

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Pivotal Moments in American History)

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As a participant,I can vouch for all material that related to my experiences as a Freedom Rider in the book.The writing accurately descibes the atmosphere and conditions of my experiences in Jackson City Jail and Parchman Prison Farm's maximum security unit.I was amazed by the fidelity of the narrative,it was like being transfered back in time!The short but excellent telling of the Monroe Freedom Rider Project with Robert Williams in North Carolina was enlightning for me as a participant because of the dramatic events of that disastorous Sunday.I was one of five riders not on the picket line and never heard of the experiences of those arrested downtown.I cannot recommend this book more highly for anyone interested in the civil rights movement. It should be read by anyone who is politically active in order to understand the complexity of social movements and the responsibilty of the participant to their cause and the people they are attempting to help.
We shall overcome!

In 1961 there were dozens of Freedom Rides by hundreds of riders. Ray Arsenault set out to interview as many of them as he could find, and he spent eight years tracking them down in order to write this comprehensive, highly readable and fascinating book. Before the first rides, he gives the reader a complete history of the civil rights movement, so that when the riders get on buses and head south, you understand fully how radical and dangerous it was. When a bus is burned, you're as horrified as when it happened. By the end of the book, the reader has experienced a lot of sturn and angst. Some questioned whether the rides really accomplished anything, but the author makes it clear just how important the Freedom Rides were to the civil rights movement. All without much help from the Kennedy brothers, who feared a southern backlash in the mid-term elections in 1962. A lot has changed in the last 45 years. This great book documents why.

This is an unqualified masterpiece treatment of an epic civil rights story. Fascinating characters, superb storytelling and a brilliant historian's perspective create a book that will amaze and move you. I read the whole thing in a mountain cabin on a vacation in New Zealand, and have rarely felt so proud to be an American. It is a story of pure guts and glory. Prepare yourself to be absouletly blown away.

The subject of the Freedom Riders came up during a dinner conversation with my 38 year old son. I could not answer some of his questions which led me to this book. Raymond Arsenault starts exactly at the right place with Irene Morgan in 1944 to begin his narrative. He writes with a style that enables the reader to absorb the wealth of information on every page with ease. I highly recommend the book and it should be required reading for any serious student of the Civil Rights Movement post World War II.

An excellent narrative history of the Freedom Bus rides of 1961. This is "on the ground" history with details of the bus rides and the horrendous events surrounding them - the Anniston bus burnings, the racist beatings in Birmingham and Montgomery. Mr. Arsenault tells the story as history in the making - at the time in question the bus riders did not have the advantage of forty-five year hind-sight.

The author portrays well the myriad characters who organized these rides as well as their Southern antagonists. It still remains incomprehensible the level of hatred, racism, and intolerance that white southerners manifested to their fellow human beings. One must remember that these beatings by mobs were orchestrated by the White Southern power structure. The state and municipal (as well as the F.B.I.) gave whole-hearted backing to the Ku Klux Klan to pursue and assault the Freedom Riders. Raymond Arsenault depicts the ambivalence of the Kennedy administration wavering between the Southern state governments (to whom they owed their election victory) and the moral imperative of civil rights. Their reaction, as Arsenault suggests, was more political than moral.

Robert Kennedy was very reluctant to even send a few hundred federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders who were besieged in a church by a mob tossing Molotov cocktails.

There are various heroes and groups portrayed - from Irene Morgan in 1944 who refused to leave the "white section" of a bus to Diane Nash who continued the Freedom Rides after their initial "failure" in Anniston and Birmingham.

It would seem that when the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) passed a law prohibiting discrimination on buses and their affiliated distributors (like restaurants, waiting rooms...) that most southern governments grudgingly started the process of de-segregation.

There is a touching passage in the epilogue where Freedom Rider Walter Bergman successfully sued the F.B.I. in 1982-83 for negligence in its failure to protect U.S. citizens. Walter Bergman suffered permanent injuries from the beating of the mob in Birmingham. The F.B.I. knew well (from its informants) that the Ku Klux Klan was gathering to meet the Freedom Riders.

This book is another great addition to the Pivotal moments in American history series. This series seeks to assess the events that led to a major paradigm shift in American history changing the country in some way. The argument here is that the Freedom Rides established a basis for social justice that had not been achieved previously. With this topic the author does an excellent job of putting a human face on the struggle the riders went through and you can feel the palpable hatred that the riders experienced and the racism is simply nauseating. It is unbelievable how clear the author captures it and not only for the hate towards the riders but the strict values that held this racism in place. What many people saw as right was the destruction of the freedom riders. The author does an excellent job at explaining the dichotomy in the country and showing how the Freedom Rides changed the perception of everyone towards social justice issues. For the first time white and black worked together not always seamlessly but with greater fervor than ever before. The direct action campaigns shifted focuses on what was happening the country creating new challenges. The book is extensively researched and relies not only on newspapers but countless interviews and the author should be commended for the work he put in. An excellent book to read and highly recommended.

I heard Mr. Arsenault speak recently and his love of this subject came through. I highly recommend this book.

The perfect follow up to "America in the King Years," (by
Taylor Branch) Arsenault focuses in on the single most important, ground breaking, and personally dangerous aspect of the civil rights movement.

This is a gripping story, and reads like a thriller. Truly, this is contemporary history that you can't put down.

I was 14 in 1961 and on a bus to vising my grandmother in Texas, my nieve yankee self stepped off a bus at a bus stop and walked into the colored waiting room and lunch counter. The reaction was powerful on all sides, the blacks looked anxious, the whites looked angry, and I had no idea what was going on. It was so powerful a personal, shocking introduction to segration. The courage of the freedom riders that same summer meant that noone would ever again encounter that terrible experience, now matter who they were.

This book gave me a thorough and complete picture of what was going on that summer, and especially gave me an undying gratitude for Diane Nash and the impact her unbending backbone had in pusing back the doubters and cowards that would have steped away from the danger and commitment.

Thank you for writing such a comprehensive book on this subject. Also, your prose was easy to read and not too dry as I have found other non-fiction books on the era.