"I'm takin' a trip on the Greyhound bus line. I'm ridin' the front seat to New Orleans this time. Hallelujah I'm a-travelin'. Hallelujah, ain't it fine. Hallelujah, I'm a-travelin' down freedom's main line."

These words come from one of the many songs that brought inspiration to those on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of 1961, about 450 activists of different races conducted Freedom Rides— trips on interstate buses into the deep South to desegregate public spaces and challenge the Jim Crow laws.

Last Monday, the organizer of the Freedom Rides, Diane Nash; two freedom riders, Paul Breins and Ellen Ziskind; and historian Ray Arsenault MA '74, Ph.D. '81 spoke at the University to discuss the admirable rides and to show a documentary on the subject, The Freedom Riders.

The event, sponsored by the Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice, took place in the Levin Ballroom and started with a 30-minute scene from the Emmy Award-winning documentary that came out this year. The film was inspired by Arsenault's 2006 book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

Both the book and documentary tell a poignant history of an essential chapter of the Civil Rights Movement that is seldom discussed.

"When I did the book on the Freedom Rides, it was the first book [on the subject], which is incredible," Arsenault said in an interview with the Justice.

"A lot of what we've tried to do in the last few years is point out that the devil is in the details. If this story hadn't happened, the timing of the movement would've been very different," he continued.

The Freedom Rides began in May 1961 with a group of men and women from the Congress of Racial Equality. There were 13 riders who planned on sitting in interracial pairs on the bus and stopping at segregated interstate bus stop facilities.

However, the CORE riders were met with extreme violence in Birmingham and Anniston, Ala., and decided to end the Freedom Rides and return to the North. A bomb was thrown at the bus, and the bus went up in flames. The Riders were also brutally beaten as racist segregationists spewed hatred at them.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the leading national organizations of the Civil Rights Movement represented by Diane Nash, a student at Fisk University at the time, decided that the rides needed to continue.

"When those buses were burned, it was clear that if the rides stopped, then the opposition would have thought anytime we start a movement about anything, … all you had to do to stop the campaign was to inflict massive violence. We couldn't do that or the whole movement would've stopped right then," Nash said in an interview with the Justice.

Nash, originally from Chicago, witnessed the cruelty of Southern segregation when she moved to Nashville, Tenn. to study at Fisk.

"I got outraged when I saw ‘Whites only' signs. There were places I couldn't go. I couldn't treat myself to a cheap lunch at Woolworth with a girlfriend. … You could get food on a carryout basis, but you couldn't eat it there. … Sitting along the curb in the alley is humiliating," she said.

Nash and other members of SNCC decided that every time a bus was stopped on its journey to Mississippi, a new bus would be ready to head south. If the Riders were arrested and put in jail, new riders would still continue. Nash became a leader in organizing the Freedom Rides, she says, because of how well-organized she was.

"I was afraid not to be efficient because somebody could have gotten hurt or killed if we were not efficient and staying ahead of things. So, after those of us who worked in the Nashville movement worked together for a little while, people saw that I worked efficiently," she said.

"[Nash] didn't know, no one knew what was going to happen, but she intuited that this risk had to be taken to make anything happen. It was kind of a clarity of intuition, and it was done on the basis of a kind of faith, not knowledge of what might happen," Paul Breines, one of the visiting Freedom Riders, said in an interview with the Justice.

Breines was a student at the University of Wisconsin when he decided to "get on the bus." As a white man, he did not feel the dehumanization that Nash felt by segregation, but he had firsthand experience seeing racist malice in his freshman year at Wisconsin. Breines was inspired by the Woolworth counter sit-ins and wanted to become involved in the movement.

"I was a pledge in a fraternity, and I took a little baseball cap that I had, and I went to a pledge dinner and passed a hat around to raise money to send down to these students. … My pledge father knocked the hat out of my hand and redefined me for myself by calling me a n— lover and saying, ‘We're not gonna have that s— here,'" he said.

That negative inspiration sent Breines to a fundraiser in New York for the Freedom Rides, where Breines met Jim Zwerg, a white Freedom Rider who had been injured by Southern segregationists. Zwerg called for more "white folks" to become involved. Breines didn't think twice about the decision. He said he believed that he had to be on the bus.

"For me to be who I am, this is what I have to be doing," Breines said he thought at the time.

Ellen Ziskind experienced a similar calling to the movement. Ziskind, from Lowell, Mass., had been working at CORE and had the chance to meet four or five men that had come from the South.

"They'd been Freedom Riders, and we were doing a telethon to raise money for the Freedom Rides, and I was talking to these guys, and I get chills. I had never met anyone like them. They were like from another world, which of course they were," said Ziskind about her first encounter with the Freedom Riders.

"I was very devoted and committed to the cause and working for it, but there's something about meeting people that live in that land. It becomes non-academic and not a [distant] story anymore," she continued.

Ziskind traveled from Nashville to Jackson, Miss. Along the way, like many other Freedom Riders, she met violence and hatred.

"It was pretty scary, although I can't remember being scared because there is some part of you that takes over, and [that's] just keeping you going," said Ziskind.

On Sept. 22, 1961, after nearly five months of Freedom Rides, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued an order to take down all the Jim Crow signs from all of the interstate bus and train stations in the South.

"In the '60s, we were using nonviolence and challenging segregation. We didn't know it was going to be successful," explained Nash. "We had changed ourselves from people who could be segregated into people that could be no longer segregated."

The Freedom Rides story can be seen in the documentary The Freedom Riders, which was distributed on DVD at the event and can also be read about in Arsenault's book.

"The film all of this, … it's an extension of the Freedom Rides. It's like it's been reborn. … If you think about Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, people are actually using non-violence again after ignoring it for years," Arsenault said on the film's relevance.

Nash and the Freedom Riders would like their story to show Americans that there must be more done to achieve social change than to simply rely on elected officials.

"Can you imagine if we waited for elected officials to desegregate? We would probably still be waiting," said Nash.