![]() So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank- The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata's Diary- A Child's Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust-only to be met by uncomprehending looks. As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER & NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Straight from the front line of urban America, the inspiring story of one fiercely determined teacher and her remarkable students. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. In the course of six months, some four hundred and fifty Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage in the years to come for the 1963Birmingham demonstrations, Freedom Summer and the Selma-to-Montgomery March. Their courage, their fears, and the agonizing choices made by all these individuals run through the story like an electric current.The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. Arsenault brings the key actors in this historical drama vividly to life, with colorful portraits ofthe Kennedys, Jim Farmer, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Martin Luther King, Jr. ![]() The mayhem in Montgomery wascaptured by news photographers, shocking the nation, and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which after some hesitation and much public outcry, came to the aid of the Freedom Riders. In Birmingham and Montgomery, mobs of white supremacists swarmed the bus stations and battered the riders with fists and clubs while local police refused to intervene. ![]() One bus was disabled by Ku Klux Klansmen, then firebombed. The book paints a harrowing account of the outpouring of hatred and violence that greeted theFreedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi. Arsenault recounts how in 1961, emboldened by federal rulings that declared segregated transit unconstitutional, a group ofvolunteers-blacks and whites-traveled together from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals, putting their bodies and their lives on the line for racial justice. ![]() Here is the definitive account of a dramatic and indeed pivotal moment in American history, a critical episode that transformed the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.Raymond Arsenault offers a meticulously researched and grippingly written account of the Freedom Rides, one of the most compelling chapters in the history of civil rights. ![]()
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