Lipscomb sponsors ‘Freedom Riders’ at Nashville Film Festival

by | Apr 25, 2010 | News Slider

If any group of American children today was asked, “Can black and white people use the same bathrooms? Can they eat together at the same table in a restaurant?,” the answer would be a resounding, “of course.” Many children, teens, and young adults today will never be able to understand the hostile segregation that was prevalent in the South just 50 years ago. They owe this to the civil rights movement and to those who began to draw national attention to the movement in 1961: the Freedom Riders. The documentary Freedom Riders had its premiere Tennessee showing at Regal Cinema Green Hills as a part of the Nashville Film Festival on Wednesday, April 21. The film was followed by a question-and-answer session where actual Nashville Freedom Riders voiced their opinions about the movie and their experiences in the rides. The film was sponsored by Lipscomb’s School of Humanities, and was moderated by Norma Burgess, dean of the Lipscomb College of Arts and Sciences. Also in attendance were Ted Parks, associate Spanish teacher at Lipscomb, and Richard Goode, a professor of history at Lipscomb who teaches a class on the Civil Rights Movement. Freedom Riders takes an in-depth look at the journey of over 400 Americans who helped bring some of the first national attention to the physical abuses of protesters of segregation in the South. While teachers and history books give great detail in Dr. King’s involvement in the movement, the Freedom Riders get little attention. The concept of a Freedom Ride first arose from a group called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Washington, D.C. The group...