Today is Sunday, May 24th, 2020.

On this day in 1961, a group of civil rights activists rode a bus into Jackson, Mississippi.

Despite federal protections, all riders were jailed, labeled criminals for entering a bus stop.

Welcome to today in True Crime, a parcast original.

Today we're covering the historic arrest of the freedom riders who crusaded for racial

equality throughout the American South.

Their May 24th arrests marked a pivotal moment in ending segregation.

Let's turn back time some six decades

to the morning of May 24th, 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi.

It was a hot day in Mississippi when a bus carrying 13 freedom riders entered the town of Jackson,

but the heat was nothing compared to their fears.

The Freedom Riders mission was to enter bus stations and attempt to use the white-only restaurants and bathrooms. When asked to leave, they would stand their

ground. If attacked, they would not fight back with physical force. These

tactics centered around Gandhian principles of nonviolence.

Now what they were doing was technically legal, but as it happened,

many folks in the South were not ready to accept the equality of all, and they would stop

at nothing to protect their discriminating ideologies.

In the weeks that preceded the May 24th journey, there had already been several outbreaks of severe violence from white supremacists.

At one rest stop, an angry mob roared in protest of the freedom riders. But when they tried to move along,

someone in the crowd threw a bomb at their bus.

When the riders escaped, they were brutally beaten with baseball bats and steel rods.

The extreme display of discrimination only confirmed their fears.

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