Separate facilities for whites and blacks were the norm in the South, like at this Durham, North Carolina, bus station in Hundreds of mug shots, side by side, row by row, fill a movie screen over and over again; young faces, some still in high school, beaten and arrested because they dared to ride a bus or step into a terminal.
There was Joan Trumpauer, a nineteen-year-old secretary in Washington, D. After she became a Freedom Rider, she spent months in Parchman State Penitentiary, the harshest prison in Mississippi. Upon her release she went back to college and then in worked as an organizer of the Freedom Summer.
Historian Raymond Arsenault collected all the vital stats on Trumpauer: She later worked for the Smithsonian and elsewhere in the federal government. Today, her married name is Mulholland, and she teaches English as a second language at an elementary school in Arlington, Virginia.
The Nashville Freedom Riders were led by students C. Vivian left and Diane Nash, center, who had organized other successful nonviolent protests in Tennessee. Arsenault has his story too. Zwerg was hospitalized after a mob beat him with bats and pipes in Montgomery, Alabama.
He became a minister in the United Church of Christ, and then switched career tracks in to become a personnel manager for IBM. He later worked at a hospice in Tucson, and still lives in Tucson, where he has retired. Arsenault collected such stories. An appendix running fifty-four pages at the back of his nearly page book Freedom Riders: 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.
