ABSTRACT
The sit-ins forced the local white business community to address the question of whether segregation was worth the cost of racial unrest and the economic damage that it caused through loss of custom. Farmer, in the wake of the sit-in movement and of increased civil rights activity across the South, proposed to renew the Freedom Rides to test facilities at bus terminals throughout the region. A coalition of national civil rights organizations formed to orchestrate, coordinate and fund Freedom Rides over the summer of 1961. Martin Luther King involved with the sit-ins when he addressed a meeting of students in Durham, North Carolina. As in the Montgomery bus boycott, King stressed the need for student protests to take place in a spirit of non-violence and to seek reconciliation with whites. Robert Kennedy took up King's suggestion to petition the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), an independent body that had direct responsibility for interstate travel facilities, to issue regulations to ban segregation.
