Civil disobedience means fighting for what you believe in by acting non-violently and fairly. Whether against powerful people, like the government or a large corporation, or against a more local power, like a school board or small business, people protest every day against what goes against their beliefs. Civil disobedience is a way of fighting for justice without attacking those who support things you believe are unjust. This can be found consistently in the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, many people decided to organize nonviolent protests, sit-ins, and freedom runs to fight for racial equality. A man named John Lewis was the first student to be attacked during the Freedom Rides, a movement in which people rode buses in segregated parts of the South. The Freedom Rides were a nonviolent way to test the Supreme Court's ruling on segregation. John Lewis and the other Freedom Riders showed civil disobedience when they refrained from fighting people who attacked them during the Freedom Rides and when they continued to ride to protest segregation in the South. The Freedom Rides were organized by CORE, or Congress of Racial Equality. CORE was founded in 1942 and the congress based its protests on Gandhi's principle of non-violent protest. In the early 1960s, CORE decided to initiate a new kind of protest, in which thirteen determined people would cross the South in an attempt to test the Supreme Court ruling, called the Irene Morgan Decision, declaring the segregation of bus and train stations. unconstitutional. The runners had to endure tough training to make sure they would refuse to fight back, if the trainee started to fight back, he would not be allowed to retreat... middle of paper... is civil disobedience in the use of intelligence to fight the power, which has caused forced cracks in the walls of segregation. For the Freedom Riders, the rides were “[The] most important decision in [our lives], deciding to give up everything, if necessary, for the Freedom Ride, so that justice and freedom could come to the Deep South.” (Lewis) And today is one of the most important decisions in history. Works Cited from Congress on Racial Equality "The Freedom Rides." The Racial Equality Congress, Web. February-March 2014."Lewis, John (1940-)" Martin Luther King JR. And the fight for global freedom. Stanford University, Web. February-March 2014.Smith Holmes, Marian. “The Freedom Riders, Then and Now” Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009. Web. February-March 2014."We'll Never Go Back" Veterans of the civil rights movement. West Wind Writers, Web. March 12. 2014.