Meaning of freedom ride | Babel Free

Definitions

1. In the United States in the 1960s (chiefly 1961), any one of a number of trips taken by bus or other forms of transport through parts of the southern U.S., made by groups of civil rights activists demonstrating their opposition to racial prejudice and segregation.
   US, historical
2. Alternative letter-case form of freedom ride.
   alt-of
3. A similar excursion undertaken by protesters in Australia in 1965 in opposition to unfair discrimination against Indigenous Australians.
   Australia, broadly, historical

Examples

“It is a slight miracle, I think, that in the almost two years since February of 1960 there has not been a fatality. But we have come amazingly close to it several times. Let me mention the case of William Barbee who was on the Freedom Ride when it arrived at Montgomery and met with mob violence.[…]”

“Segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us on the Freedom Ride will continue. No matter what happens we are dedicated to this. We will take the beatings. We are willing to accept death. We are going to keep coming until we can ride anywhere in the South.”

“A Negro leader said today the "freedom riders" whose arrival here touched off race riots last Saturday will continue their test of Southern bus station segregation barriers. [...] [T]he Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. [...] told a news conference the group met for four hours last night and decided that "the freedom ride must continue, we will not specify the exact time, but it will continue."”

“The Freedom Rides had reached their peak in June but were not over, and the ferment stirred up by them had by no means subsided. [...] It was the Nashville Student Movement that had continued the Freedom Rides when CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], the original sponsor, had declared them too dangerous and had withdrawn. These students had a right to feel proud and sure of themselves.”

“Challenging legal obstacles to equality, the civil rights movement inspired mass protests—sit-ins, freedom rides, marches to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma—that eliminated obvious forms of racial discrimination as it won support from sympathetic whites.”

“Abbie [Hoffman] took his freedom ride at the tail end of the freedom movement. He had missed the chance to be among the Freedom Riders of 1961 or the Freedom School teachers of 1964, and he was determined not to let the South slip through his fingers again. The summer of 1965 would be the last time that significant numbers of Northern whites would go to Mississippi for civil rights, and Abbie would be among them.”

“CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] organized some of the earliest sit-ins for civil rights in Chicago in 1943, and in 1947 sponsored the first interracial freedom ride, called the "Journey of Reconciliation."”

“The year of the first Aboriginal freedom ride is the year the principal of Fineflour Central boards up a group of kids in the toilet block roof.”

“Led by young activists, black and white, who were conducting ‘freedom rides’ modelled on those of the civil rights movement in the United States, a change in attitudes was in progress which would lead in 1967 to the removal, by a large majority in a referendum, of the provision in the Constitution that prevented the Parliament from making 'special laws' in the interests of Aboriginals.”

“Ann Curthoys is Professor of History at the Australian National University, Canberra. She has written widely on questions of gender, race and ethnicity in Australian history, and is currently working on a history of the Freedom Ride of 1965.”

“Then, in February 1965, Charles Perkins led the famous and extremely effective freedom rides that made him probably Australia's best known civil rights activist. [...] The freedom rides were an extremely dangerous and confronting form of public protest. At one stage the bus was run off the road in Walgett after being pursued by a truck and ten cars, and the bus driver later withdrew from the tour because of safety concerns.”

“It is a slight miracle, I think, that in the almost two years since February of 1960 there has not been a fatality. But we have come amazingly close to it several times. Let me mention the case of William Barbee who was on the Freedom Ride when it arrived at Montgomery and met with mob violence.[…]”

“Segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us on the Freedom Ride will continue. No matter what happens we are dedicated to this. We will take the beatings. We are willing to accept death. We are going to keep coming until we can ride anywhere in the South.”

“The Freedom Rides had reached their peak in June but were not over, and the ferment stirred up by them had by no means subsided. [...] It was the Nashville Student Movement that had continued the Freedom Rides when CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], the original sponsor, had declared them too dangerous and had withdrawn. These students had a right to feel proud and sure of themselves.”

“Ann Curthoys is Professor of History at the Australian National University, Canberra. She has written widely on questions of gender, race and ethnicity in Australian history, and is currently working on a history of the Freedom Ride of 1965.”

CEFR level