WASHINGTON, D.C. – Edith Bush, along with the Martin Luther King Coordinating Committee of West Palm Beach, organized a bus trip to take 44 people from Florida to Washington, D.C., to witness the second inauguration of President Barack Obama in January. They considered themselves the heirs of the Freedom Riders movement of the civil rights era. In 1961, the Freedom Riders began when a group of blacks and whites boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington and rode to the segregated South. Now, more than five decades later, the committee’s bus carries the mostly African-American group, with a handful of Latinos and whites, to see a president who looks like most of them. “Now we are going from West Palm Beach to Washington on an integrated bus,” said Bush. “So we are the Freedom Riders. We are free to ride everywhere on the bus.”
By Barbara Corbellini Duarte / South Florida News Service
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