More than six decades after courageous young activists boarded buses in Washington, D.C., to challenge segregation in the South, a new generation of Freedom Riders is taking off on a journey of their own to remind Americans that the struggle for equality, justice and democracy is far from over.
The Ride — a national bus tour turned feature documentary — is a 12-day, eight-state journey that broadly retraces the 1961 Freedom Ride route through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi to New Orleans — where the original riders, stopped on the road by mob violence in Alabama, ultimately had to arrive by plane.