2010 Sundance Film Festival

In 1961, a civil rights group known as CORE set out to unveil the inequalities that black individuals faced in the South despite the federal ban of racial discrimination and segregation in interstate travel. The plan was simple: spend two weeks using the Greyhound and Trailways bus systems to travel in integrated groups of blacks and whites from Washington, DC, to New Orleans, Louisiana. What CORE didn’t account for was the bigotry, racism, resistance to change and hate that inevitably waited for them in the Deep South. Luckily, when one group fell, another was quick to rise to the challenge. The two-week plan turned into a six-month struggle that continued its non-violent crusade for equality despite a bombed bus, mob beatings, arrest and intimidation. A combination of archival footage and chilling testimonies from the original freedom riders, government officials and witnesses to the violence, are used to tell the story of how a small group of determined people forced the federal government to defend their rights. Freedom Riders skillfully tells an important, yet overlooked, scrap of history from the Civil Rights Movement. –Jeanette D. Moses http://www.slugmag.com/festival-coverage/582/Freedom-Riders-Review.html