Civil Rights Movement Unit:
The Freedom Rides
Today's e-mail from U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation:
50 years ago, on May 4, 1961, the first bus of the Freedom Rides left Washington, DC, headed to New Orleans, with people committed to challenging segregation. The Freedom Rides were one of the sparks that contributed to a movement to dismantle a degrading system that violated human rights.
In an interview with organizers from The U.S. Boat to Gaza, Alice Walker, one of our nation's foremost contemporary writers and the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize, likened the planned Gaza "Freedom Flotilla II" to the Freedom Rides. In the U.S. the racist system of segregation was challenged; in South Africa the racist system of apartheid was challenged; in Palestine the racist system of occupation and apartheid, enforced by the Israeli government and supported by the U.S government, is being challenged and will come to an end.
