Director: Stanley Nelson
Run Time: 120 min.
Call Number: E185.61 .F74 2011
"The filmmaker Stanley Nelson has a stunning accomplishment in 'Freedom Riders,'
a documentary that chronicles a crucial, devastating episode of the
civil rights movement, an episode whose gruesome visuals impinged on the
perception of American liberty around the world. Commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the freedom rides, the film . . . is a story of ennobled youth and noxious hatred, of decided courage and
inexplicable brutality. In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality
sought to challenge the segregation of interstate travel on public
transport and sent forth activists, both black and white, and many of
them students, on a bus journey through the South, where they were
received with violence that law enforcers refused to tame. . . . It is hard to imagine a feature film conveying the events with a more vivid sense of drama or suspense."
—Ginia Bellafante, New York Times