Freedom Riders (2010)

Directed by

Stanley Nelson Jr.

Genre

documentary film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 57m

Rating

7.5 of 10 from 11 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary covers the 1961 Freedom Rides when interracial groups of activists rode buses through the segregated South to challenge racial injustice. It shows the dangers they faced and the impact their actions had on the civil rights movement.

historicaleducationalsoberinginformativeinspiringfactualserious

What happens

Freedom Riders is a 2010 American historical documentary film, produced by Firelight Media for the twenty-third season of American Experience on PBS. The film is based in part on the book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by historian Raymond Arsenault. Directed by Stanley Nelson, it marked the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride in May 1961 and first aired on May 16, 2011. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film was also featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show program titled, Freedom Riders: 50th Anniversary. Nelson was helped in the making of the documentary by Arsenault and Derek Catsam, an associate professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", making it the seventh film designated in its first year of eligibility, the first in the 2010s, and the most recently released film to be selected until 2011's Pariah was inducted in 2022. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970)
• Freedom Summer (2014)
• A Time for Justice (1994)
• The Bus (1965)
• Boycott (2001)
• Soundtrack for a Revolution (2009)
• Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks (2002)
• Freedom on My Mind (1994)