"They were black and white, young and old, men and women. Some were college students who had just left home. Others were dedicated veterans of the old left. Yet others were ministers and rabbis. They believed in the power of non-violent protest, of direct action in the face of injustice. In the spring and summer of 1961, all of them literally put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. They were the Freedom Riders, and their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement. Yet no full-length history of the Freedom Rides has been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of those months that jolted the consciousness of America." "The Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. Some barely escaped with their lives. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church, and a murderous riot was prevented only by the last-minute arrival of the National Guard." "Arsenault recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House - where, as he shows, the Freedom Rider crisis helped awaken the cautious Kennedy brothers to the moral power of the civil rights struggle - to the cells of Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison, where dozens of Riders tormented their jailers nightly with rousing choruses of freedom anthems. He offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth."--BOOK JACKET.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. A graduate of Princeton and Brandeis, he is the author of two prize-winning books and numerous articles on race, civil rights, and regional culture.