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Julia Aaron and David Dennis, along with 25 other freedom riders and several members of the National Guard, travel from Montgomery, Ala., to Jackson, Miss.

Just shy of the Mississippi-Alabama border, members of the Alabama National Guard surround a bus carrying freedom riders.

A freedom rider and member of the National Guard on a bus in the Deep South

The view from a bus window on a freedom ride.

Freedom riders peer from bus windows during a stop.

A congregation in Alabama prays for the safety of freedom riders

Freedom riders sing at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., as a white mob gathers outside.

A weary Martin Luther King Jr. sits at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., as a white mob surrounds the building.

Freedom riders try to rest at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., as a white mob gathers outside.

After U.S. Atty General Robert Kennedy intervened, forcing AL Gov. John Patterson to declare martial law and send in the National Guard, the white mob outside First Baptist Church finally broke up.

montanabohemian:

UNDAUNTED: RARE AND CLASSIC PHOTOS OF MLK AND THE FREEDOM RIDERS, 1961

It’s mid-spring, 1961. In the kitchen of a safe house in Montgomery, Ala., Martin Luther King Jr. is tense. In the house with the 32-year-old civil rights leader are 17 students — fresh-faced college kids who, moved by King’s message of racial equality, are literally putting their lives at risk. These are the groundbreaking practitioners of nonviolent civil disobedience known as the Freedom Riders, and over the past two harrowing weeks, as they’ve traveled across the state on integrated buses, their numbers have diminished at every stop in the face of arrests, mob beatings — even fire-bombings.

Right there along with the riders, capturing the mood of the movement as it swung between exhilarated and exhausted, thrilled and terrified, was 26-year-old LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer, who covered the landmark Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom march and rally in Washington, D.C., four years earlier and witnessed firsthand the courage and determination Dr. King inspired in his followers. (Filed along with Schutzer’s Pilgrimage photos in LIFE’s archives are notes from the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Henry Suydam Jr., citing the energy and excitement swirling around King even then: “At the end of the ceremonies, a couple of hundred people pressed feverishly on Reverend King — seeking pictures, autographs, handshakes, or just a close look. The jam got so heavy that he had to be escorted to safety by police.”)

Here, five decades after the Freedom Riders put their lives on the line for dignity and equal rights, LIFE.com presents photos — most of which never ran in LIFE — made by Schutzer during that heady era in American history. Here are images charting a pivotal moment in the historic journey of Dr. King himself and in the nation-changing movement he led, from the monuments of Washington to the highways, rural roads, churches and bus depots of the Deep South.