There are more ways than ever to listen to history daily ad-free.

Listen with Wondry Plus in the Wondari app,

or you can get all of history daily plus other fantastic history podcasts at intohistory.com.

It's around 4.15 pm on May 14, 1961 in Birmingham, Alabama.

A bus pulls into a depot and slowly comes to a halt.

Among the passengers on board are members of an organization called the Congress of Racial Equality

or Core. Five years ago, the Supreme Court declared segregation in interstate buses and

public spaces along bus routes to be unconstitutional, but much of the American South ignores this

room. To protest, members of Core have boarded buses bound for southern states and refused to

comply with any segregationist measures they encounter along the way. Their journeys are known

as freedom rides. And among Birmingham seven newly arrived freedom riders, the youngest is Charles

Persson, an 18-year-old black student from Atlanta. As he steps down from the dusty bus,

Charles dabs his brow with a hankerchief, stinging pain spreads across his forehead.

He winces as he looks down at the red spots of blood that stain the cloth.

Earlier in their journey from Atlanta, the activists were assaulted by members of the prominent

white supremacist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Charles was seriously wounded,

but his injuries were not enough to deter him from continuing the journey to Alabama.

Even battered and bruised, he's happy to be in Birmingham, and eager to continue protesting

segregation. But as Charles follows a fellow core volunteer toward the bus station's

whites-only waiting room, he glances wearily at the group of angry-looking white men standing

on the platform. The volunteer ahead of him, James Pack, is a white man, too, and it shouldn't

raise any concern if he walks into the waiting room alone. But Charles's presence as a black man catches

...