Freedom Riders Documentary

As I watched the Freedom Riders documentary the first thing that resonated with me was the fact that one woman said that segregation made her feel humiliated. When I think of segregation I typically think of how wrong it was, but I never thought about what it must have been like to feel as though you are not human enough to eat or travel with white people. I think this goes back to our talk about privilege because I’m not a person of color I don’t know what it’s like to feel that type of humiliation. Speaking to privilege there were many white people in the South at the time who did not recognize that they had a privilege. I thought it was interesting that one white man stated that he was raised right, but he still never thought twice about segregation. It was just the norm in the South, it was so ingrained in the culture that some people did not realize it was an issue. This is part of why I think that the Freedom Riders came about. They needed something to publicize why segregation was wrong, and they also tried to appeal to the Kennedy administration. At first, the Kennedy administration felt that the civil rights movement was a nuisance. It was not an issue that they were worried about, so the Freedom Riders needed to do something extreme to make them realize that civil rights and desegregation were important. The Freedom Riders movement was seen as very extreme for this time period. It was a risky form of protest, but it was felt that it was necessary to show why segregation was such an issue. The movement also was very controversial within many group, even the civil rights groups. While they didn’t promote using violence as a response, they did hope that they would be met with violence from the white resistors. I would like to discuss more about how violence played a role in the Freedom Riders movement even though it was a non-violent protest.

Nelson , Stanley. “Freedom Riders (2010).” YouTube, American Experience Films, 28 Aug. 2015, youtu.be/srIcN1Eo_y8.

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