New and unbelievably good documentary on the Freedom Riders' of 1961. If you think you know anything about what happened that year in Alabama and Mississippi you need to see this film, because you probably don't know it all. The 120 minute production has loads of video from the period and interviews with the (formerly-interviews are recent) brave young participants. It also notes this was one non-violent action that MLK was apparently either too chicken or too smart not to take part in because the black and white students, many from Fisk University in Tenn., were beaten, arrested, burned out of a bus, left on the road, and put out to labor like slaves as state prisoners in Mississippi fields..... the riders were largely ignored at first by JFK and RFK who wished they would go away, the scenes and events were touted by Moscow as counter-American propaganda, and JFK's federal representative was even knocked unconscious at one point in a riot of racist whites attacking the riders in Alabama while police did nothing.The only apparent violation of the freedom riders was leaving the buses to congregate in the 'all white' section of bus deports.

The DVD is well worth it to educate your kids or grandkids about racism and America. The south may have changed but how much?  It is noted that the southern racist politicians in the period news clips call the students 'agitators' and the baseball bat/crowbar wielding, incendiary throwing gangs of local white trash are not the 'agitators', but solid citizens, and I suppose by today's definition, Real Americans. They could just not resist congregating in mobs and beating up riders, who the white leaders said bore all the fault for the trouble for not going home, but were instead riding through Montgomery and Birmingham Alabama.