For eight months in 1961, 400 black and white men and women risked their lives when they flouted Jim Crow laws to sit side by side on interstate buses and trains traveling across the South. They called themselves the Freedom Riders, and, committed to non-violence, they sought to provoke the Kennedy administration into protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans. Their actions met with violent retribution, as enraged mobs threw firebombs at a Greyhound bus in one part of Alabama and beat freedom riders with baseball bats, iron pipes, and bicycle chains in another. In the end, they changed America forever, as their courageous example set the scene for the civil rights movement that followed. Combining harrowing archival footage with the vivid reminiscences of many participants on both sides of the battle as well as of reporters who covered it, filmmaker Stanley Nelson has documented an extraordinarily powerful moment in American history.  EM