Heading south on 'Freedom Riders'

THE SHOW "Freedom Riders," WNET/13, Monday night at 9

REASON TO WATCH Remarkable chapter in the civil rights movement

WHAT IT'S ABOUT On May 4, 1961, two busloads of people set out to challenge Jim Crow laws at bus stations in the Deep South, and hoped to end up -- in one piece -- in New Orleans a couple of weeks later. They expected publicity, maybe a little bit of trouble, but got unimagined quantities of both. This 2009 film by Stanley Nelson ("The Murder of Emmitt Till") has interviews with principals like Diane Nash, who led a second group of Freedom Riders; John Seigenthaler, assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; and former Alabama Gov. John Patterson.

MY SAY Watching "Freedom Riders" can occasion the unexpected out-of-body experience where you start to wonder if what you are seeing in fact is what happened in this country, or in recent history. The mob did what? The governor said that? The Kennedys did nothing because why? It's commonplace to the point of cliche to say that much has changed over the past half century, but "Freedom Riders" makes the sobering point that it took a small group of people to force such monumental change. Would (for example) nothing have happened if they hadn't taken that fateful ride on the Greyhound bus? Nelson's film doesn't play the what-if game but instead captures those four or five weeks in 1961 as deftly as a child captures a lightning bug in a bottle. You can step back and clinically absorb the enormity of the story -- until you realize that this really did happen, that there's a bug in that bottle blinking furiously away.

BOTTOM LINE "American Experience" -- which aired the classic civil rights doc, "Eyes on the Prize," in April -- has another gift Monday night.

GRADE A