Still a shadow of legally enforced segregation that existed in the south.  Most of the Freedom Riders grew up in the north, and were told to expect the kind of treatment that they have heard of, but never experienced personally, because they grew up in a northern state.  There is a huge difference between some racist who refuses to ride on the same bus with you, and the racist with a badge who releases the trained attack dog on you for your belief that you get to ride on the bus regardless of someone else's opinion.  Check your history books, black men in the south risked getting beaten or killed for looking a white woman in the eyes.  For that matter, they risked getting killed for sport in some areas for the act of being black.  That's real racism, and it was often condoned, if not outright committed by, the elected and appointed representatives of law and order.  If I was so inclined, I could find dozens of such cases in the old south prior to 1960 that went unpunished.  I can probably find a dozen such cases in the north also, but the perpetrators were normally prosecuted.  No one just stopped being racist because of the law being changed, or the Civil Rights Act being passed.  It took a generation of education, at least, to alter the culture; but only the hard racists in the deep south were forced into it, the Civil Rights Act made little difference to the culture of the northern states and western states, which is one reason that it passed so easily.