Exploration 7: Amanda Chirico

This video was very captivating and moving. It taught me considerably; throughout school they teach the big picture, the influential people and the basics of civil rights. This movie is so much more then that. It takes you though the young African Americans thoughts and doings. How the students formed the SNCC, which was based on a new optimism, a feeling that youth could be a real force for change in the 1960s. It started with the sit-ins, then the boycotts, to marching, and finally the freedom riders, the student’s weren’t giving up they really did think they would be the change. The movie said that within two months, the sit-ins had spread to 69 cities, from Greensboro to San Antonio, and 2,000 people had been arrested. Finlay after all the violence and boycotts in Nashville, Tennessee Diane Nash asked the mayor, "First of all, Mayor West, do you feel that it's wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of his race or color"(Nash)?  Major West responded, “and I tried as best I could to answer it frankly and honestly, that I could not agree that it was morally right for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service. And I had to answer it just exactly that way”(West). Diane Nash said, “I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said that he felt like it was wrong for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counter solely on the basis of the color of their skin. And I think that was the turning point”(Nash).  Tennessee might have done something but for the other southern states it was a different story like Alabama and Mississippi. The freedom rides played a huge importance in the civil rights movement in the south. The Freedom Riders would board two buses in Washington, DC, on May 4th. Their journey would take them through the Deep South and on to New Orleans by May 17th. This was a group of 13 Freedom Riders, seven white and six black where the whites would sit in the back of the bus as the blacks would sit in the front. As they made it down to the deep south things started getting way out of hand, huge groups of violent people were attacking the busses to a point the bus company stopped driving them in fear for there busses and there drivers. These rides got the attention of the president and the attorney general Bobby Kennedy.  When Patterson Alabama’s major refused to talk further, Kennedy sent Special Assistant John Seigenthaler to Alabama. Seigenthaler’s duty as a federal officer was to inform him that if the state could not protect citizens of the United States, either in the cities or on the highways, that it was a federal responsibility and we were prepared to assert it. During this time Marten Luther king Jr. gave a speech inside an Alabama church saying this to the people; “That we're going to be calm, and that we are going to continue to stand up for what we know is right. And that Alabama will have to face the fact that we are determined to be free. The main thing I want to say to you is fear not, we've gone too far to turn back. Let us be calm, we are together, we are not afraid, and we shall overcome”(King). That quote was very powerful to the people. The rides had continued becoming more and more peaceful finally making it to Jackson, Mississippi where they got off the bus and were peacefully arrested for 60 days in a maximum-security prison. Later on more and more freedom riders would go to Jackson and get arrested finally during that same summer, Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue regulations banning segregation in interstate travel. In late September, the commission complied. The students had won their victory, and they had become a major force in America's civil rights movement. Today because of these peoples actions people of any race can travel state to state and not get arrested.