Special: Oprah Honors American Heroes: The Freedom Riders Reunite 50 Years Later

The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Podcast

Oprah

Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From May 4, 2011: Oprah celebrates the 50-year anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Riders movement with 178 surviving Freedom Riders in the audience. The American heroes share their reasons for risking their lives to defy the segregation laws of the Deep South. Congressman John Lewis is reunited with Elwin Wilson, one of the men who beat him at a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They open up about the beating and Wilson’s subsequent apology in 2009. In 2013, Elwin Wilson died in a South Carolina hospital at the age of 76.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Through 25 seasons, 4,561 episodes.
0:05.0	I believe the Oprah Winfrey show
0:08.0	was one of the greatest classrooms in the world.
0:10.0	I really never thought of it that way.
0:12.0	The aha moments, the breakthroughs, the connections,
0:16.0	the occasional ugly cry.
0:18.0	I'm missing so terribly, I miss it every single minute.
0:21.6	The LOLs.
0:22.6	The moments that mattered.
0:24.6	The eye-opening life lessons.
0:27.6	Never allow them to take you somewhere else.
0:30.6	I'm bringing them back.
0:32.6	It's time to open the vault.
0:34.6	I've personally chosen these classic episodes to share with you again.
0:40.2	Every single person you ever will meet shares that common desire.
0:45.0	They want to know, do you see me?
0:47.9	Do you hear me?
0:48.7	Does what I say mean anything to you?
0:52.6	You are listening to the Oprah Winfrey Show, the podcast.
0:57.0	For many of you watching, I know that this may be the first time you're even hearing
1:04.0	about the Freedom Rides. But let me tell you, if it were not for these American heroes,
1:11.6	this country would be a very different place right now.
	...

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