Charlotte Mecklenburg Library

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Turbulent Times 1960-1979

1973 - Long Ride Home

Many Charlotte-Mecklenburg students must endure long bus rides to faraway schools. Even people who support busing to achieve integration are frustrated. Slowly, blacks and whites begin to talk to each other constructively and ask questions. What does or doesn't work? What are our similarities? What can we change? What is fair?

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1961 - Struggle for Equality

May 8, 1961 - The Freedom Riders are a group of civil rights workers traveling the South to challenge the system that separate people according to race, called segregation. In Charlotte, a black Freedom Rider named Joe Perkins tries to get for a shoe-shine from the bus station's white only barber shop. Perkins is jailed! This is only the first of numerous arrests the Freedom Riders will endure in their quest

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