ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1961, just four months after John F.Kennedy’s inauguration, an interracial group of thirteen men and women left Washington, D.C. on two buses headed to the Deep South. Firebombs and white mobs greeted the Freedom Riders when they arrived in Alabama, accelerating the spiral of protests and violence that finally commanded the nation’s attention. From the assault on Freedom Riders in 1961 through the mass march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Alabama remained a major battleground. There, the growing militancy of Southern blacks and the tentative engagement of the federal government competed with white defiance on the treacherous road to the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.
