?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
(CIVIL RIGHTS.) FREEDOM RIDERS. Collection of 65 press photographs of the 1961 Montgomery, Alabama "Freedom Riders." For the most part, 8 x 10 glossy photographs, with captions describing the scenes. should be seen Birmingham, Alabama, 1961
An exceptional visual record of the valiant "Freedom Riders" from their point of departure to their arrival in Birmingham, Alabama and the mobs that greeted them there. Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decisions Boynton v. Virginia (1960) and Morgan v. Virginia. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961. Boynton outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South. The Freedom Riders set out to challenge this status quo by riding various forms of public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American Civil Rights Movement and called national attention to the violent disregard for the law that was used to enforce segregation in the southern United States. Riders were arrested for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses.
