freedom rider
1
7.6
- noun
- /ˈfriːdəm ˈraɪdər/
- US
:
activista de los derechos civiles
- She was a freedom rider back when they had those, but then she was always weird.
Was given that that title of being a Freedom Rider.
- Was given that that title of being a Freedom Rider.
Examples
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He was the only black man he knew in Manchester, but he followed the news of lunchroom sit-ins and the freedom riders and joined the NAACP, although he was a lifelong Republican, like his father and his grandfather before him.
Fiction book (1999) -
I for for me, that was my first contact with a person who would actually been a freedom rider who had actually been in the South.
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I know your son is a Freedom Rider.
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Mr. Hill, you a Freedom Rider?
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So we start with Freedom Riders, the very beginning part of the film, the first clip.
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Well, you know, the Freedom Riders are coming into Monroe, and they're bringing this kind of Gandhian sense of, of nonviolence.
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Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the front lines of the civil rights movement. Ann Bausum. National Geographic Society. 978-0-7922-4173-7.
Academic text (2007) -
The hearings exposed Klan secrets, including a bitter rivalry between leaders, and evidence revealed a conspiracy in attacks on freedom riders in Montgomery, Anniston, and Birmingham, Ala.
Academic text (1994) -
In 1961, Johnson enjoined the Ku Klux Klan from further violence after a planned assault at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery bloodied "freedom riders" who had arrived from Northern states to bolster local civil rights demonstrations.
Academic text (1994) -
During the Civil Rights Movement, many young adults joined as freedom riders to fight against segregation.
Synonyms
12
3.5
A person who works to get equal rights for people in minority groups
4
4.1
A person who works to get equal rights and chances for minority groups
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound 'freedom' + 'rider' gives a general sense of a person associated with 'freedom' and who 'rides', so learners might infer a political or activist rider. However, the specific historical meaning — members of 1960s interracial bus protests challenging segregation — is cultural and cannot be fully derived from the constituents alone, so a B1 learner would likely miss the precise referent without prior exposure.
Etymology
Freedom rider The name freedom rider comes from people who fought for civil rights in the 1960s and who rode buses into the US South to protest laws that kept Black and white people separate. They were called freedom riders because they literally 'rode' buses for 'freedom', so today the term means someone who took that brave kind of protest.