At the time the Open Theater Movement had success in Nashville, this was the only city in the country where activists had organized such an action. In this same period, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the 1961 Freedom Rides through the Deep South to challenge southern state laws and practices that segregated interstate buses and their facilities despite federal laws for equal treatment. After buses and riders were severely attacked, including a firebombing of a bus and beatings with police complicity in Birmingham, Alabama, CORE suspended the rides. Diane Nash, the Nashville Student Movement's chairman, urged the group to continue the Freedom Rides, and called for college volunteers from Fisk and other universities across the South. Bevel selected the student teams for the buses. He and the others were arrested after they arrived in Jackson, Mississippi and tried to desegregate the waiting-rooms in the bus terminal. Eventually the Freedom Riders reached their goal of New Orleans, Louisiana, generating nationwide coverage of the violence to maintain Jim Crow and white supremacy in the South.