H.R. 945: To award a Congressional Gold Medal to the Freedom Riders, collectively, in recognition of their unique contribution to Civil Rights, which inspired a revolutionary movement for equality in interstate travel.

H.R. 945 does one thing: it authorizes a Congressional Gold Medal for the Freedom Riders as a group. The Speaker and the Senate President pro tempore arrange the presentation, the Treasury Secretary designs and strikes the medal, and afterward it goes to the Smithsonian to be displayed and studied.

Almost the entire bill is history rather than mechanics. Congress writes thirteen findings into law, starting with the 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia that made segregated bus and rail stations unconstitutional — and with the fact that Southern stations kept their separate waiting rooms anyway.

The findings then name every one of the thirteen volunteers the Congress of Racial Equality trained and sent out on May 4, 1961: Genevieve Hughes Houghton, Charles Person, Hank Thomas, John Lewis, Edward Blankenheim, James Farmer, Walter Bergman, Frances Bergman, Joseph Perkins, Jimmy McDonald, Mae Francis Moultrie, Benjamin Elton Cox, and Albert Bigelow. Seven were Black, six were White, and they sat together on two buses bound for New Orleans.

Putting those thirteen names into the United States Code is the part of this bill that outlasts the metal. The findings go on to describe the beating of John Lewis in Rock Hill, Hank Thomas being handed to a waiting mob in Winnsboro, and the Mother's Day firebombing of a bus outside Anniston, Alabama, where the findings say ambulances refused to carry the Black riders to a hospital. They record that Mississippi jailed many of the riders at Parchman Prison, and that the riders refused bail.

Five months after the first bus left Washington, according to the findings, the Interstate Commerce Commission and Attorney General Robert Kennedy banned segregation at interstate public facilities, effective November 1, 1961.

The money side is small and self-contained. Production costs come out of the Mint's Public Enterprise Fund rather than a new appropriation, the Mint may sell bronze duplicates at a price that covers labor, materials, dies, machinery, and overhead, and those sales go back into the same fund.