No detail was considered insignificant-he spoke with anyone alive who had ridden. No one had tackled the whole story of the Freedom Riders before Arsenault, and he did so with a vengeance. Supreme Court in 1946, to the Southern segregationists who dug in and upheld local customs over the laws of the federal government. In exacting detail, it gives a day-by-day account-sometimes hour-by-hour-of the events and people along the way, from the original unintentional Freedom Rider, Irene Morgan, whose case went all the way to the U.S. The rest of the book painstakingly records details great and mundane of all the events concerned with the Freedom Rides, when between May and December 1961 a group of people-students, clergy, and others of all colors, most under thirty years old-descended by bus and train into the Deep South to confront segregation in interstate travel.Īrsenault’s book is a dense read. An appendix running fifty-four pages at the back of his nearly 700-page 2006 book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice provides a biographical dictionary of every Freedom Rider he could find, documenting each rider on each ride, giving their age, gender, hometown, profession or college where they studied, and what became of them. He later worked at a hospice in Tucson, and still lives in Tucson, where he has retired.Īrsenault collected 436 such stories. He became a minister in the United Church of Christ, and then switched career tracks in 1975 to become a personnel manager for IBM. Zwerg was hospitalized after a mob beat him with bats and pipes in Montgomery, Alabama. And there was Jim Zwerg, who was a Wisconsin student on exchange at Fisk University when he became a Freedom Rider.
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