The Freedom Rides were a grass-roots revolution, a physical and psychological journey during 1961 into the heart of a southern racial darkness; their fundamental sociocultural effect was a lesson in the human condition and the nature of historical agency. Raymond Arsenault deftly illustrates the complex history of segregation and discrimination, and, most importantly, successfully relates the often very personal and exceedingly distressing moments in the lives of individual Riders, as many of the photographs attest.

Arsenault begins in the 1940s, with the Journey of Reconciliation, thus introducing the principle concept of nonviolent activism, or Gandhianism. The Irene Morgan case (1944) similarly locates the reader amid the legal and political issues of segregated transport in the South. From this, diverse groups form a rather fragmented mid-century movement that involves Jim Farmer's CORE, Martin Luther King's SCLC and the NAACP. Arsenault makes their various importance and impact comprehensible to readers hitherto unversed in black civil rights.

We textually and emotionally traverse time with Freedom Riders, we witness the lack of political and federal intervention, Arsenault moving confidently and chronologically, as bombings and beatings prevail in Alabama; the Riders' necessary flight emphasizing the brutality faced by both black and white activists. Externally, the movement struggles to remain intact amid a political atmosphere of Cold War culture, Kennedy focussing more intently outside America rather than concentrating on the conflict within.

With CORE in disarray and constitutional rights ignored, amid mass demonstrations, arrests and government attempts to halt student activists, the Riders surge into the South. Again, the savagery is deplorable as belated federal intervention allows stubborn state control to reign supreme. However, from this seemingly insurmountable situation, the movement unifies with a mass meeting involving such leaders as Abernathy, Shuttlesworth and King. Arsenault details the unremitting rides, juxtaposing them against the polarization of southern extremists, and portrays the continual hope of a civil rights movement in all its diversity – its political, social and religious equality that sometimes affected internal dynamics. The movement becomes one of shifting perspectives, one that allows mutual respect between individuals who would not have otherwise united.

This exceptionally well-documented and annotated book ends as it began, with Irene Morgan, leading the reader to feel they have taken a personal journey through the legends and exploits of the Freedom Riders. Through them Arsenault candidly details a mid-century expansion of the realm of the possible in American political and social insurgency, the Freedom Riders redefining the limits of dissent, of escalating demands and rising expectations in the 1960s and beyond.