Freedom Riders

Threatened. Attacked. Jailed. Could you get on the bus?

—the movie's tagline

During 1961, more than 400 people from across the nation, black and white, women and men, old and young, challenged state-sanctioned segregation on buses and in bus terminals in the Deep South, segregation that continued after the Supreme Court had ruled the practice to be in violation of interstate commerce laws. Some 50 years later, Freedom Riders, a two-hour PBS American Experience documentary made by Stanley Nelson, charted their course in considerable depth as they faced savage retaliatory attacks and forced a reluctant federal government to back their cause.

The riveting story is told without narration using archival film and stills and, most engagingly, through testimonies of the Freedom Riders themselves, journalists who followed their trail, federal, state, and local officials, white southerners, and chroniclers of the movement including Raymond Arsenault, whose book inspired the documentary. The film takes viewers through many complex twists and turns of the journey with extraordinary clarity and emotional force. The courage and conviction of the Freedom Riders, ordinary Americans willing to risk bodily harm and death to combat injustice nonviolently, will inspire later generations who watch Nelson's eloquent film.

Freedom Riders was named to the National Film Registry in 2020, becoming the first film to be named to the Registry in its first year of eligibility.

Watch it at Public Broadcasting Service's website, here.

Tropes used in Freedom Riders include:

All There in the Manual: 46 full interviews conducted for the film are available at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting's website, here.