In this case, it was walking and violating the laws of Montgomery in terms of bus segregation and involved the willingness to go to jail of putting your life on the line.

It added.

I think a crucial dimension to the game of politics, that if you if you don't have that direct action option, you can't do it all the time.

12 ounces of civil disobedience might kill one ounce can cure.

But we needed that outs or two or three ounces of civil disobedience to be added to the struggle.

We needed that that that that tool, that new weapon and King showed how to wheel that weapon.

It was a weapon that required an art art of persuasion.

I think that the art of nonviolent direct action to persuade and bring about change was used better by King and the civil rights movement.

Then it was moved by the anti used by the anti war movement in the late sixties.

If you if you don't practice the art well, you don't persuade you produce counter reaction.

I don't mean that was always done well by King or the civil rights movement, but it was an extraordinary, um, achievement.

The other thing that, as you look back and look at our problems today has to be noted is that the goals of that civil rights movement of the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit in students and the Freedom Riders were achieved.

The problems we have now are enormous, and we're not doing so well by them in terms of race and poverty.

But the ending of public segregation, the ending of the denial of the right to vote, the of achieving of that revolution was was was successful.

It happened within a year of the Freedom Riders writing.

All segregation and interstate transportation was ended because the the public power of the presidency and later the Congress responded the right to vote by the end of the decade was achieved.

There's no going back on either of those two achievements, and I think it's very important that democracy have successes.

So that part part of the, um, the need for our respecting the history of that aspect of the sixties is that there were great successes that we need to note because we need to achieve some success is our own.

We're not doing so well.

But they did.

How did Kennedy respond his response to that?

Who he waas?

Well, Kennedy, the president, and Robert Kennedy, attorney general, both as men of action and preferred to control the agenda or to think that they could control the agenda.

So when the Freedom Riders rode and Kennedy's agenda was to go to the first meeting with Cruz job and to deal with the Berlin Wall or whatever the crisis was in foreign affairs, Hey was very irritated.

It was embarrassing the country as he was first going forth to Vienna and and he got on the phone at me and he said, Get your friends off those buses.

You know, they're embarrassing my trip abroad.

This isn't the time.

Get your friends off those buses, I said.

Well, first place they wouldn't get off if I tried and secondly, wouldn't be my friends if I tried and he hung up on me.

And very soon thereafter, he was calling me in to say, Now, what more should I say to go beyond just asking for law and order?

But to show that the Freedom Riders were actually writing for a purpose he believed in?

And he within a few days of that angry response, he was figuring out how to say something that would move the country toward achieving that desegregation.

And rapidly, he ordered the Justice Department to seek an Interstate Commerce Commission order that would end segregation in in bus stations and bus transportation.

And within one year it was ended.

Now the Freedom Riders ride would have been a historic thing, even if nothing had happened.

But it would have been a historic failure if nothing had happened.

It took the response of Kennedy after his first irritation.