Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

296 Freedom Riders

in our cell had to lie down somewhere.” Later, after Holloway and others

disobeyed an order to stop singing freedom songs, several Riders were put in

a sweat box; and when even that didn’t stop the singing, at least one jailer

warned them that he “could get rid of a nigger in Mississippi, and nobody

could do anything about it.”

The wretched conditions at the Hinds County Jail should have been

enough to force at least some of the Freedom Riders to reconsider their

commitment to the “jail–no bail” policy. Most observers, including govern-

ment officials at all levels, certainly expected the policy to unravel as the

Freedom Riders began to realize what it was actually like to spend hard time

in a Mississippi jail. Even among movement supporters, there was a common

expectation that sooner or later most of the Riders would agree to be re-

leased on bond. Only among the Freedom Riders themselves, it seems, was

there a full appreciation of the strange but powerful seductiveness of mean-

ingful sacrifice and unmerited suffering. The greater the hardship, the more

committed they seemed to be, a dynamic that could not be explained away as

a mere manifestation of peer pressure or youthful illusions of invulnerability.

Something deeper was at work, something that remained hidden from all but

the most perceptive observers. As Farmer recalled, reflecting on the Riders’

response to their unexpected return to the county jail: “A half-dozen new

occupants were there, having arrived during our absence. They had been

informed of our transfer to the county farm by the trusties and the upstairs

prisoners—those non–Freedom Riders who now sang Freedom Rider songs.

The homecoming was celebrated with more singing, joined by the other

three Rider groups and, occasionally, by the upstairs inmates. Some in our

group swaggered triumphantly, like conquering heroes. We had met the en-

emies at the dreaded county farm, and they were ours. We had survived it

with a minimum of brutalization. We had forced them to retreat. Our tor-

mentors were tormented. We had twisted the tail of the lion and lived to tell

the story. Even the upstairs fellows were impressed.”

One of the first to detect the special character of the Freedom Rider

experience was the veteran journalist Walter Lippman. “It would be vain for

anyone to expect that there can be a quick and easy end to the kind of cour-

age and determination which has been shown in the bus rides and in the

lunch-counter sit-ins,” he wrote on May 25. “No one should expect this kind

of thing to disappear.” A second observer who shared Lippman’s viewpoint

was Leslie Dunbar, the executive director of the Southern Regional Council

and the author of a special Freedom Ride report authorized by the council

and released on Tuesday, May 30. “The Freedom Ride will continue,” Dunbar

predicted. “If not in its present form, in some other similar style, and soon.

There is in it momentum too great to be held back. The South and the na-

tion are now critically dependent on the quality of Negro leadership, and its

ability to direct that momentum and not be overrun by it.” Nevertheless, in

keeping with the traditions of white Southern liberalism, Dunbar went on to

Freedom’s Coming and It Won’t Be Long 297

insist that “the big problems . . . can be tackled only by the South itself: by

white Southerners coming to deserve the trust of Negro Southerners.” “There

would be no Freedom Ride,” the Southern Regional Council report declared,

“if there were compliance with law and decency in the South.”

The overlapping issues of legal compliance and public decency were also

the focus of attention in Montgomery on Tuesday morning. In one court-

room, the Alabama Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of twelve Bir-

mingham blacks arrested during a series of sit-ins in March 1960. Ten of

those arrested were students, and two, including Fred Shuttlesworth, were

leaders charged with inciting the sit-ins. Just down the street, in a second

courtroom, Judge Johnson was presiding over the second day of the injunc-

tion hearing. Throughout the day Doar grilled a series of witnesses, includ-

ing Imperial Wizard Shelton and Cecil “Goober” Lewallyn, the Klansman

suspected of tossing the firebomb into the Trailways bus outside of Anniston.

Lewallyn, along with two other Klan suspects, avoided giving detailed testi-

mony by pleading the Fifth Amendment, and Shelton’s testimony came only

after Johnson threatened him with a contempt of court citation. Other wit-

nesses offered scattered evidence of Klan involvement and police inaction in

Anniston and Birmingham, but by the end of the day there was no clear

picture of the perpetrators of the May 14 attacks. For a frustrated Doar, the

only real highlight of the day occurred during a brief recess when Calvin

Whitesell, the attorney representing Montgomery police officials, informed

him that he planned to call Robert Kennedy to the witness stand. Implying

that the attorney general was a suspected co-conspirator, Whitesell wanted

to know “what, if anything, he [Kennedy] had to do with the segregation-

challenging ‘freedom riders.’ ” Incredulous, Doar informed the earnest but

naive Alabama attorney that he was fairly certain that the attorney general

would respectfully decline to testify.

Whitesell’s request provided a moment of comic relief, but Doar was

not amused when the subject of Kennedy’s collusion with the Freedom Rid-

ers came up again on Wednesday afternoon. Earlier in the day, after Doar

had rested his case, Judge Johnson had rejected the federal government’s

motion to include the Birmingham police in the injunction and, even more

surprising, had lifted a temporary restraining order against a Montgomery-

based Klan group, the Federated Ku Klux Klan, Inc. From then on, as de-

fense attorneys for the Montgomery police and two Klan groups still subject

to injunctive restrictions sensed an opening, the proceedings turned into a

counter-attack against meddling Justice Department officials. The star wit-

ness for the defense of Alabama’s sovereignty was George Cruit, the Bir-

mingham Greyhound superintendent who had haggled with the attorney

general by phone on May 15 and again on May 20. Reading from a transcript

of the first conversation, Cruit quoted Kennedy’s declaration that the “Gov-

ernment is going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue

their trip.” To Cruit, to most of the white Southerners in the courtroom, and

298 Freedom Riders

to thousands of others who read the attorney general’s words in news ac-

counts, this declaration was proof that the federal government had conspired

with the Freedom Riders to attack the Southern way of life. Even more damn-

ing for some was Kennedy’s insistence that Cruit recruit a black driver after

white bus drivers refused to drive to Montgomery. By the end of the after-

noon, this and other alleged violations of racial etiquette had put Doar and

the Justice Department on the defensive, so much so that a beaming Whitesell

filed a counter-motion seeking a temporary restraining order against CORE,

SCLC, SNCC, and Abernathy’s newly organized Montgomery County Jail

Council. Somewhat taken aback, Johnson took the counter-motion under

advisement, promising a ruling by the end of the week.

On Thursday, June 1, the fourth and final day of the hearing, Commis-

sioner Sullivan offered a predictable and anticlimactic litany of excuses for the

Montgomery police department’s failure to protect the Freedom Riders, pro-

ducing yawns from reporters and other spectators. Elsewhere, however, there

were new wrinkles in the Freedom Rider story. In Birmingham, Circuit Judge

Francis Thompson ruled that Fred Shuttlesworth was guilty on two counts of

inciting a breach of peace, at the Trailways station on May 14 and at the Grey-

hound station three days later. Fined a total of a thousand dollars and sen-

tenced to six months in jail, Shuttlesworth immediately posted bond and

appealed the conviction. The next morning, the minister announced that he

would be leaving Alabama in August for a pastorate at the Revelation Baptist

Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. The move to a larger congregation, he explained,

would make it easier to support his family. Though sad to leave Bethel Baptist,

he promised to make frequent visits to Birmingham and remain active in the

local civil rights struggle that he had fostered for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, in Jackson, the seven white Freedom Riders (the eighth white

Rider, Peter Sterling, a Cornell student scheduled to be married on June 27,

paid his fine and left for home on Thursday morning) at the city jail initiated

a hunger strike that soon spread to the black Riders incarcerated in the county

jail across the street. And in Chicago, seven former Freedom Riders—Walter

and Frances Bergman, Ike Reynolds, Jerome Smith, Dave Dennis, Doris

Castle, and Julia Aaron—announced a drive to recruit “hundreds or thou-

sands” of new Riders. Dismissing the call for a cooling-off period, Bergman

urged his fellow activists to strike “while the iron is hot.” “American students

are going to strike, strike, strike and ride, ride, ride,” he predicted, “until we

achieve our goal of an open country.” In Ithaca, New York, a group of Cornell

students promised to reinforce the student Riders already arrested in Missis-

sippi; in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard students formed an Emergency

Public Integration Committee (EPIC) that sponsored end-of-the-semester

“freedom parties” as a means of raising funds for CORE; and in New Haven,

Connecticut, a petition of support for the Freedom Riders signed by 307

members of the Yale faculty and administration, including Yale Law School

dean Eugene Rostow, was on its way to the White House. Farther afield, in

Freedom’s Coming and It Won’t Be Long 299

San Francisco, a group of clergymen announced the founding of “Freedom

Writers,” an organization pledged to gather funds and a million signatures in

support of the Freedom Rides. To the dismay of those who had hoped for an

early resolution of the crisis, the Freedom Rider movement was becoming

national in scope.

Nevertheless, on Friday morning the focus of attention returned to

Montgomery, where Judge Johnson issued an unexpectedly sweeping set of

injunctive rulings. As expected, Johnson formally enjoined Alabama Klansmen

from interfering with interstate travel and ordered the Montgomery police

to protect all interstate travelers regardless of race. Citing Klan-inspired vio-

lence and the “willful and deliberate failure” of Montgomery police officials

to do their duty, he issued a preliminary injunction against Robert Shelton’s

Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Alvin Horn’s Talladega-based U.S.

Klans, Montgomery Klansmen Claude Henley and Thurman Ouzts, Com-

missioner Sullivan, Police Chief Ruppenthal, and “their officers, agents,

employees, members, and all persons acting in concert with them.” But he

did not stop there. To the surprise of almost everyone in the courtroom, he

also granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting CORE, SNCC, SCLC,

and the Montgomery City Jail Council from “sponsoring, financing, assist-

ing or encouraging any individual or group of individuals in traveling in in-

terstate commerce through or in Alabama for the purpose of testing the state

or local laws as those laws relate to racial segregation.” The order also spe-

cifically restrained the activities of several movement leaders, including King,

Abernathy, Walker, and Shuttlesworth. In effect, he had placed at least a

temporary ban on future Freedom Rides in the state of Alabama. On June 12

he would convene a hearing to determine whether the order should be va-

cated or turned into a full-fledged injunction. Until then, he warned, the

anti–Freedom Ride ruling, like the injunction against the Klan and the Mont-

gomery police, would be rigidly enforced. “If there are any such incidents as

this again,” he declared, “I am going to put some Klansmen, some city offi-

cials and some Negro preachers in the Federal penitentiary.”

In a lengthy, fifteen-page preamble and in a stern-voiced statement from

the bench, Johnson surveyed the evidence of incitement and dereliction of

duty and explained the logic of his double-edged ruling. “Those who spon-

sor, finance, and encourage groups to come into this area, with the knowl-

edge that such trips will foment violence,” he argued, “are just as effective in

causing an obstruction to interstate travel as mobs themselves.” Even though

he conceded that the sponsoring organizations and individuals had engaged

“in agitation within the law of the United States,” he maintained that such

agitation constituted “an undue burden upon the free flow of interstate com-

merce at this particular time and under the circumstances that exist.” While

acknowledging that organizing bands of Freedom Riders “may be a legal

right,” he insisted that “the right of the public to be protected from the evils

of their conduct is a greater and more important right.” Anticipating legal

300 Freedom Riders

and constitutional objections, he reminded potential critics that “the right of

the public to be protected from evils of conduct, even though the constitu-

tional rights of certain persons or groups are thereby in some manner in-

fringed, has received frequent and consistent recognition from the courts of

the United States.” Individuals traveling through Alabama “on bona-fide trips”

deserved full constitutional protection, but civil rights activists, at least in the

short run, would have to sacrifice some of their freedom for the greater good.

Predictably, Johnson’s bold ruling elicited a wide range of reactions. In

Alabama, the mainstream white press hailed the paired injunctions as an even-

handed rebuke to violent Klan-led extremists and provocative outside agita-

tors. Earlier in the morning, two Alabama legislators, one in the senate and

one in the house, had introduced anti–Freedom Rider bills that imposed three-

hundred-dollar fines and sixty-day jail terms on anyone who willfully vio-

lated the state’s “social customs.” Now, in the wake of Johnson’s ruling, some

observers were no longer sure that the emergency legislation was necessary.

“With one stroke of the pen,” one Montgomery editor wrote, the “upstart

Republican” judge from Winston County “ceased to be the villain and be-

came the hero of the hour.” James Free, a columnist with the Birmingham

News, agreed, pointing out that Johnson was “the first federal official of real

stature and influence to crack down on both sides of the freedom rider hulla-

baloo.” According to Free, Johnson was on “the way to becoming a national

hero and there are backstage predictions that he may wind up on the Su-

preme Court, Republican appointee though he be.” Other local and regional

commentators were less effusive, but virtually all of the white Southerners

who commented publicly on the ruling were supportive. “Judge Johnson,”

the editor of the Huntsville Times exclaimed, “deserves the thanks of the South

and the nation.”

Most civil rights activists, of course, felt otherwise. From the perspective

of those who saw the Freedom Rides as a necessary step down the road to

desegregation, Johnson’s ruling was an unexpected slap in the face. Within

minutes of Johnson’s injunctive decree, Marvin Rich announced that CORE

had asked Montgomery attorney Solomon Seay Jr., the son of one of the

leaders named in the restraining order, to seek a stay in federal court. “Every

person has the right to travel on the public highways with dignity,” Rich

insisted, “and this is what we in CORE have been trying to do. There is no

justification for this temporary injunction.” In Atlanta, Martin Luther King

initially refused to comment on Johnson’s decision to include the names of

specific civil rights leaders in the order, but he expressed serious doubt that

the ruling would halt the Freedom Rides. “I think we have revealed through

many experiences,” King reminded Johnson and the nation, “that we have

no fear of going to jail and staying to serve time when necessary. We have

transformed jails and prisons from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom

and justice.” Others voiced their objections more bluntly, and some even put

their words into action.

Freedom’s Coming and It Won’t Be Long 301

At 11:30

A.M., a little over an hour after Johnson issued his injunction,

eight Freedom Riders left the Montgomery Trailways terminal on a bus bound

for Jackson. An eclectic assortment of activists, the group included three young

white men from Chicago, a forty-five-year-old white woman from New York

City, a twenty-eight-year-old black male laborer from Corinth, Mississippi,

a female nurse from Nashville’s Meharry Medical School, a male Howard

student representing the Nonviolent Action Group, and Cordell Reagon, a

Tennessee State freshman who would soon gain fame as a leader of the Al-

bany Movement in southwestern Georgia. Before leaving, the eight “post-

injunction” Riders tested the station’s restrooms and waiting rooms. Even

after a bomb threat delayed their departure, local authorities did not attempt

to stop them from boarding the bus (as a federal district court spokesman

later explained, the injunction did not apply to anyone who did not have

prior knowledge of it). When the bus stopped near Selma, Sheriff Jim Clark,

who would achieve national notoriety in 1965 for his persecution of civil

rights demonstrators, arrested one of the white Riders, Ralph Fertig of Chi-

cago, for allegedly bothering a white female passenger. But the other seven

Riders made it safely to Jackson, where they were promptly arrested for try-

ing to desegregate the Trailways terminal.

The first Freedom Riders to leave Montgomery after the injunction,

they were actually the second group to be arrested in Jackson on June 2. At

7:30

A.M., two and a half hours before Johnson’s ruling, another group of

Mississippi-bound Freedom Riders had departed from the Montgomery

Trailways terminal. Led by SNCC veteran and Montgomery-riot survivor

Ruby Doris Smith, the group of six Riders included three white male volun-

teers from Long Island and two black students from Nashville, Charles But-

ler and Joy Reagon. On Friday afternoon, when a frightened but defiant

Reagon was arrested in Jackson along with Smith and the others, she was taken

to the Hinds County Jail. Four hours later her younger brother Cordell joined

her there, the sixty-fifth Freedom Rider to enter the strange world of Missis-

sippi justice. With the exception of C. T. Vivian, Hank Thomas, and Jean

Thompson—all of whom were struck in the face by penal farm superinten-

dent Max Thomas for failing to address him as “sir”—none of the jailed Rid-

ers had yet seen the violent side of that world. But no one could be sure how

long the show of restraint would last. Earlier in the day, following a perfunc-

tory investigation, Mississippi authorities had exonerated Max Thomas, rul-

ing that Vivian’s injuries had occurred during an assault on the superintendent

and not, as Vivian claimed, during a beating. Even more ominously, there

were signs that the hunger strikes and freedom songs were beginning to wear

on the nerves of the guards, particularly at the overcrowded county jail where

the black Riders were imprisoned.

For Justice Department officials in Washington, the increasingly unstable

situation in Mississippi was a matter of great concern, but on Friday afternoon

and on through the weekend their most pressing problem was formulating a

302 Freedom Riders

response to Judge Johnson’s temporary restraining order. From the outset

Marshall, Doar, and others expressed grave doubts about the constitutional-

ity of the order. Earlier in the week, after Whitesell had requested the order,

Doar had presented Johnson with a memorandum explaining why the Justice

Department opposed such an extreme measure. In the wake of the Friday

morning ruling, department officials publicly reiterated their objections,

pointing out that the Supreme Court had already closed the option of restor-

ing civil order through constitutionally questionable judicial orders. In the

1958 Little Rock case, the Court had ruled that no such shortcuts would be

allowed, and the department had no interest in reopening the question three

years later. Privately, however, many department officials welcomed the or-

der as a judicial substitute for the voluntary cooling-off period requested by

the attorney general. While they felt compelled to challenge the order in

court, they were pleased that the ban on Alabama Freedom Rides would be

in effect for at least two weeks, and perhaps even longer if the Fifth Circuit

Court of Appeals took its time to rule on a motion to vacate the order.

Of course, no one in the Justice Department could be sure how the FRCC

would react to Johnson’s high-handed judicial intervention. As an act of faith,

the department went ahead with its withdrawal of the marshals at Maxwell

Field, announcing on Friday that the remaining fifty marshals had received

demobilization orders. Even so, the likelihood of additional Freedom Rides

was a continuing concern. On Saturday King announced that the FRCC

planned to sidestep Judge Johnson’s improper ruling by sending Freedom

Riders into Mississippi through states other than Alabama, and he even hinted

that the present plan to comply with the order might change in the future.

“There are legal remedies to the order,” he declared, “and we intend to ex-

haust them all.” But he also warned that the option of civil disobedience was

still open. “If a law is unjust,” he told reporters, “we have a moral responsi-

bility to disobey the unjust law.”

This kind of talk made Justice Department officials, and many other

observers, very nervous. While editorial and public opinion outside of the

South was sharply divided on the question of the restraining order’s legality,

there was widespread agreement that mass disorder offered no solution to

the problem of racial discrimination. On Friday, during a visit to New York

City, former president Harry Truman took time out from his morning walk

to excoriate “meddlesome intruders” from the North. “They stir up trouble,”

he declared. “. . . They ought to stay here and attend to their own business.”

Likening the Freedom Riders to William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher

Stowe, and other abolitionists who provoked a bloody civil war, Truman

argued that the nation should let the South solve its own problems. “Good-

will and common sense,” not agitation or civil disobedience, he insisted, rep-

resented the best approach to social change. In upbraiding the Freedom

Riders, Truman undoubtedly spoke for many, if not most, white Americans.

But there were some, perhaps even a growing number, who were willing to

Freedom’s Coming and It Won’t Be Long 303

speak out for a broader vision of participatory democracy. One such voice

was that of Rabbi David Seligson, whose Saturday sermon on June 3 ap-

plauded the Freedom Riders’ commitment to nonviolent direct action. “The

Gandhian spirit is written all over them . . . ,” he told his midtown Manhat-

tan congregation. “While the faces of the whites are distorted with hatred

and rage, the Negroes radiate a kind of spiritual dignity and inner peace, a

quality of the soul that is slowly and surely teaching Americans a moral

lesson. . . . The world of Gandhi and that of the segregated South may be

worlds apart. But the confrontation between physical force and the power of

the spirit, between evil and good, is essentially the same.”

Although Rabbi Seligson did not mention him by name, the example set

by William Barbee in a Montgomery courtroom on Friday morning testified

to the integrity and raw moral courage described in the sermon. Brought

back to Montgomery to sign a warrant against Thurman Ouzts, one of the

Klansmen who had nearly beaten him to death on May 20, Barbee decided

that signing the warrant violated “the principles of nonviolence.” “I feel that

the violence perpetrated against me was prompted by the general evil of seg-

regation to our society,” he later explained. “Therefore, no one person should

be punished.” One month after the original CORE Freedom Riders boarded

a bus to destiny, the message of hope and redemption was still alive.

304 Freedom Riders

Make Me a Captive, Lord

Make me a captive, Lord, And then I shall be free;

Force me to render up my sword, And I shall conqueror be.

—from the hymn “Make Me a Captive, Lord”

DELIVERING THE MESSAGE OF HOPE AND REDEMPTION required a sustained cam-

paign of personal commitment and nonviolent fortitude. In and of them-

selves, however, the actions and experiences of the Freedom Riders could

not topple or even seriously challenge the Jim Crow regime. To be an effec-

tive agent of historical change, the moral drama of the Freedom Rides needed

a broad and attentive audience—an audience that could only be reached

through the mass media. Without widespread press coverage, the 1961 Free-

dom Rides would have suffered the same obscure fate as the 1947 Journey of

Reconciliation. In the early going, as we have seen, the 1961 CORE Ride

garnered few headlines. But that situation changed dramatically in the wake

of the May 14 riots in Anniston and Birmingham. During the second half of

May, the Freedom Rider crisis was front-page news in newspapers across the

nation and throughout much of the world, and a source of riveting images

for local and network television reporters. Indeed, following the formation

of the FRCC on May 26, nourishing and sustaining press interest in the

Freedom Rides was a key element of movement strategy.

In early June, maintaining the Freedom Rides’ status as a media event

became more challenging as President Kennedy’s visit to Paris and Vienna

overshadowed all other news stories. But FRCC leaders did their best to keep

the movement in the public eye, resorting to press conferences, television and

radio interviews, and even staged publicity stunts. On June 5, for example,

Jim Peck interrupted Harry Truman’s Monday morning walk in an effort to

obtain a retraction of Friday’s anti–Freedom Rider remarks. Although Truman

Make Me a Captive, Lord 305

refused to oblige, the confrontation between the former president and the

injured Freedom Rider became a national news story. Later in the day Mar-

tin Luther King, who was also in New York, held a press conference during

which he called for “a second Emancipation Proclamation.” “The time has

now come,” King declared, “for the President of the United States to issue a

firm Executive Order declaring all forms of racial segregation illegal. . . .

There is a mighty stirring in this land. The sit-ins at lunch counters and

Freedom Riders on buses are making it palpably clear that segregation must

end and that it must end soon.”

King and other FRCC leaders feared that some headline-hunting jour-

nalists would lose interest in the Rides as the threat of violence subsided and

the daily arrests in Jackson became routine; and the daily coverage of the

movement did indeed drop off in early June. Nevertheless, the developing

story in the Deep South continued to attract considerable media attention,

especially among magazine editors. As the Freedom Rider saga entered its

second month, several major magazines ran cover stories or lengthy features

on the Rides. Displaying a cover picture of John Patterson standing in front

of a Confederate monument, the June 2 issue of Time featured a five-page

article on “The South and the Freedom Riders.” While most of the article

focused on recent events in Montgomery and Jackson, it also included a legal

primer on the statutory confrontation between federal and state officials, as

well as profiles of four Freedom Riders: Diane Nash, Jim Lawson, Jim Farmer,

and William Sloane Coffin. Openly sympathetic to the Freedom Riders’ cause,

the article, after reporting that “the boldness and bravery of the Freedom

Riders” had “won over most of the old-line, conservative leaders,” concluded

with a quotation from Howard University president James Nabrit’s recent

commencement address at Benedict College, a black institution in Colum-

bia, South Carolina. “Swifter than you can imagine,” Nabrit predicted, “you

will have all the rights and privileges of every other citizen in the U.S.”

“That time,” the Time reporter interjected, “cannot come too swiftly for

young Negroes of 1961—and the John Pattersons of the South can do little

to stop them.”

Taking an equally sympathetic stance, the editors of Life chose the Free-

dom Rides as the “Story of the Week” in the June 2 issue. Under the title

“Asking for Trouble—and Getting It: The Ride for Rights,” the editors ran

ten pages of photographs framed by straightforward captions and intermit-

tent commentary. Several of the most captivating pictures showed the Free-

dom Riders during the May 21 siege at First Baptist, which Life characterized

as a near tragedy that “might have been the most shocking racial attack in

U.S. history—a riot within the holy precincts of a church.” The photo essay

included snapshots of Robert Kennedy and John Patterson and of bayonet-

wielding National Guardsmen, but the primary focus was the Freedom Rid-

ers themselves. One photograph captured several fresh-faced students raising

their hands during a discussion session at Dr. Harris’s house, and another