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The whole point of the "Freedom Rides" was to provoke an angry reaction. The idea of wet eared College students, coming by bus into a community for the purpose of trying to change its social customs is inherently incendiary. The angry mobs, were the whole point of the exercise.

I recently wrote a response to an article previewing what you have apparently seen on PBS, which appeared a few months back in the student newspaper of my Alma Mater. I do not have the web address of the correspondence, handy.

Nothing about the "Civil Rights" Movement in the 1950s has been, or is likely to be, correctly represented on PBS. The objective was never improved relations between the races.

William Flax

Tactically the goal of the Southern wing of the Civil Rights campaign was to provoke violent actions to use the power of visual imagery relayed by television to undermine the GOP-Dixiecrat coalition in Congress. The tactic worked pretty well. Also those same images worked as a sort of psychological warfare with white Southerners., many if whom were rendered uneasy and ethically challenged by those images. I know this from my own family where my parents didn't like what they saw even if they didn't like MLK. They also were appalled at my attitude as a ‘yout’ which was ‘don't mob them shoot them and defy the Feds to do anything about it and fire on the Feds if they show up.’ I was convinced most Yankees support of ‘Negro rights’ was mostly feel good bs and that making it clear there would be a significant price in blood and treasure to achieve these ends would deflate most of the pressure from the Feds. Fortunately for all concerned my Southern fried Viet Cong strategy was never entertained by any of the Dixie leadership class. Soon after I went off to college in Michigan and within a few months became a standard liberal Although I later realized what I had become was a Neocon.

The objective was never improved relations between the races.

Exactly.

I remember an elderly black gentleman speaking of some people from Washington DC down in Southern Maryland trying to "...stir up trouble with our white folks". He said they'd sent them packing because "We ain't never had no trouble with our white folks."

That was in the early '60s, just a few years before Cambridge (MD) was burned in riots.