Interview With Diane Nash, Coordinator of the Nashville Freedom Riders (2009)

And so, you know, what was it like traveling on the bus for Black people back then? Travel in the segregated South for Black people was -- inconvenient is not an adequate term. It was humiliating. It was difficult. Blacks had to ride at the rear of the bus. There were inferior waiting rooms at the rest stops. There were, of course, separate waiting rooms, and the side that Blacks went into was never as adequate as the one that whites could use. Very frequently, Blacks carried their own food with them to have to confront a minimum amount of adversity and insult.

One of the things that we don't understand and a lot of people who aren't around in that time don't understand, and that's almost 50 years ago now, is that it's kind of not knowing. Do you know what I mean? What you might encounter when you travel and when you're in those situations, just kind of that not knowing. Not knowing what to expect was certainly a part of traveling throughout the South. Black people just based on the color of our skin were hated and treated with contempt. The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to Black people and white people that Blacks were so subhuman and so inferior, that we could not even use public facilities that the general public used, and that was so demeaning and so humiliating.

Well, the Supreme Court, even at one point, said that there was no right that a Black person had that white people had to respect, and white people throughout the South acted like that. So you never knew quite what would have happened by the time you got where you were going. I wanted to talk -- get back to the Freedom Rides now. I wanted to talk about -- so when the Freedom Ride started, you know, they had kind