Poem Analysis: The Freedom Riders

American Experience
Freedom Rider

“Hallelujah I'm a traveling”

This line out of a song sang by travelers indicates how much joy traveling is, how much joy a ride through the country side, from one place to another, can be it gives the people freedom, to go places, to experience new things and not be bound to just one place anymore. It should have been an equally enjoyable experience to everybody, but when traveling with public transportation first became popular, it did not live up to those expectations. Not at all.

The group that started the Freedom Rides in May of 1961 were “The Freedom Riders” and they protested against the racial segregation and discrimination of the black African Americans or as they are called in the movie,
There were two busses leaving Atlanta in the morning, one Greyhoud and one Trailways to make their way to Birmingham, AL. They left an hour apart to make sure that one of them was going to reach the city. As the Greyhound bus was on the way to Birmingham, the locals in Anniston, a city right on the highway, prepared themselves to greet them with a surprise. The bus arrived in Anniston and the locals were harrassing and threatening the Freedom Riders, destroying bus windows and waiting for the people on the bus to get off. Somehow a bus driver managed to leave the bus stop and continued the route on the highway. About five miles outside of Anniston the bus had a flat tire, right where another mob awaited the Freedom Riders. They harassed them, threatened them and threw a fire bomb into the bus. Just as the buses' gas tank was about to explode the mob retreated, giving the Freedom Riders and the other passengers on the bus the chance to get off it. Just as they got off the mob started attacking them, beating them tremendously. They got beaten up until a police officer fired his gun in the air and stopped the
The did not do anything to prevent any of the happenings and they did not stop it either. The Kennedy Administration also did not want any distraction from their negotiations with the Sovjet Union and the Cold War. In addition to that they did not want to loose the support of the Southern states who helped them take over the government. The most important factor, however, was that J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, did not tell the president about the happenings in the South. He did not inform him about the violence that was going on and Kennedy was therefore not familiar with the situation. When he heard about it being spread all over the US through news and even the international press, he ordered the Freedom Riders to be protected, to fly them to New Orleans,