“You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow”: the Freedom Riders of 1961 and the Dilemma of Mobility Barbara Lüthi 1 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract This article offers an exploration of what it meant to move under “cramped conditions” for African Americans and their compatriots during an era of often violent racial discrimination and segregation in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA. As the example of the Freedom Rides shows, these conditions included both moments of closure and entrapment determined by the rule of law as well as acts of resistance resulting from a century-long legacy of resistances. Particularly, I try to understand the complex “constellations of mobility” as a fragile entanglement of the politics of movement, representations of movement, and the embodied practices of movement. This paper proposes an approach to mobility that takes both historical forms of mobilities and immobilities seriously. On the one hand, my analysis relates to regulatory power and technologies used by state and non-state actors in order to retain white privilege over issues of mobility during the period preceding and accompanying the Freedom Rides. On the other hand, I argue along the lines of “mobility as resistance” by showing the strategies used to transgress written and unwritten laws and normative standards of the Jim Crow era. Keywords Freedom Rides . Transport segregation . Race . Regulatory power and technologies . Politics . Representations and practices of mobility “[The students] set up a new way of acting, the beginnings of a new ritual: one of human acceptance, of—not freedom (that word is too big)—but free movement in the public places of the earth.” (James Peck 1962, p. 10) For a long time, segregated transportation was one of the most detested forms of discrim- ination for Southern blacks (Barnes 1983, p. IX). Starting out from the seats at the back of a Int J Polit Cult Soc DOI 10.1007/s10767-016-9238-2 * Barbara Lüthi bluethi@uni-koeln.de 1 Anglo-American Department of the School of History, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany