A History of the Civil Rights Movement

SIT-IN S AND FREEDOM RIDES

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ing and youth activism, Baker was reaching out to leaders of the sit-in protests. More than 200 black students participated in the conference. From that meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was created. This student-run organization would go on to play a major role in coordinating sit-ins and other civil rights actions, including Freedom Rides. Ella Josephine Baker was active in the civil rights movement for more than 50 years. As an NAACP activist, she worked with many important civil rights leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Diane Nash. Baker helped organize the SCLC in 1957 and the SNCC in 1960.

The Freedom Rides were meant to test laws in southern states that mandated segregation. Such laws were supposed to be illegal. In 1946 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that was unconstitutional to segregate bus and train passengers traveling between states. That decision had been affirmed in 1955 by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the federal agency that oversaw transportation between the states. But in the South, local authorities continued to ban white and blacks from sitting together when traveling in buses and trains. The waiting rooms and restrooms were still marked “White” and “Colored.”

In December 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court over turned a lower court’s conviction of an African American student for trespassing in a bus terminal restaurant labeled for whites only. In the case Boynton v. Virginia , the Supreme Court affirmed that because racial segregation in public transportation was illegal, African

John Lewis