Freedom Riders By Sullivan Persuasive Speech

Intro #1

Imagine a man, going to bed after working hard for civil rights and his religion. He goes to sleep and in the night, the police sneak in and place bombs in his windowsill. The night is quiet and peaceful, serene, when an explosion occurs in the nearby church. People rush outside, hostile and armed, worried about their religious and civil rights leader. Then, he rises out of the rubble, unscathed, almost as though he was protected with holy intervention. As he rises, he points to a member of the crowd, holding a sawed-off shotgun, and tells him to go home, that there was no place there for those who wish harm on another. Then, with his church no more than a pile of blazing rubble, with electrical wires sparking everywhere, he begins to give a sermon.

In fact, when the freedom riders (African Americans who decided not to leave a bus traveling across the country) were under attack from angry mobs, he sent in 15 convoys to save them, with him in one. It is unknown whether he was completely successful. However, it is known that in one part of it, one man was alone facing an angry mob of approximately 1000 people. Yet, to his rescue, came Mr. Shuttlesworth, who escorted the man through the crowd which the man described as being “intimidated by him”. But it wasn’t just the Freedom Riders Shuttlesworth helped. Fred Shuttlesworth also had founded the SCLC[Southern Christian Leadership Conference] with the men Ralph D. Abernathy and more famously, Martin Luther King Jr. The man had even put his family at risk for civil rights by having his three children integrate into a previously all-white school. The main thing about this was the fact that his children were alone, they had no other colored people in their school except for each other. But the actions taken against him were more drastic than his