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

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306 Freedom Riders

showed a wary Matthew Walker Jr. poking his head out of a bus window to

scan the scene as Alabama National Guardsmen protected the first freedom

bus to Mississippi. The last two pages were devoted to William Sloane Coffin

and his eloquent defense of Freedom Riding.

Later in the week, a number of other magazines—including Nation, U.S.

News and World Report, New Republic, and Newsweek—ran feature stories on

the Freedom Rides. Though generally sympathetic to the civil rights struggle,

some commentators, such as Gerald Johnson in the New Republic, were criti-

cal of the Freedom Riders’ provocative tactics. Nevertheless, among nation-

ally circulated magazines, only the ultra-conservative National Review offered

an outright defense of Southern segregationists, and even the National Re-

view based its argument on states’ rights, not racial bigotry. At the other end

of the spectrum, the June 5 issue of Newsweek presented three captioned pho-

tographs on its cover: one of Robert Kennedy accompanied by the quotation

“We stand for human liberty”; a second of Martin Luther King with the

caption “We must be prepared to suffer . . . even die”; and a third of John

Patterson, with the defiant quotation “The Federal government encourages

these agitators.” The five-page cover story focused on the journey from

Montgomery to Jackson but also included two long sidebars. The first, en-

titled “A New Breed—The Militant Negro in the South,” presented profiles

of SNCC, CORE, and the Nashville Movement, plus thumbnail sketches of

Lawson, Nash, Ed King, and Wyatt Tee Walker. “The white South has not

seen such Negroes before,” the sidebar proclaimed. “Impatient at the slow

course of racial integration, they are mostly young people who have emerged

from the Negro colleges and churches to take up battle with their own com-

plex mystique of religious fervor and Gandhi-like passive resistance—all of it

summed up in the word non-violence.”

The second sidebar, “How the World Press Viewed the Days of Ten-

sion,” offered a far-flung sample of international editorial opinion, including

comments from editors in Egypt, India, Kenya, France, and the Soviet Union.

“As if written on the wind,” Newsweek concluded, “the Freedom Rider story

swept around the globe last week.” Noting the Cold War implications of the

crisis, the sidebar cited no less an authority than Edward R. Murrow, the

distinguished journalist and newly appointed director of the U.S. Informa-

tion Agency (USIA), who declared: “There are no more domestic issues.” As

the reaction to the Freedom Rides had demonstrated, significant events in

the United States were inevitably “absorbed, debated, and pondered on all

shores of every ocean.” Fortunately, according to Newsweek, many “overseas

editors” had stressed not only the “racial bigotry” of Southern segregation-

ists but also “the complex issues involved and the Federal government’s ef-

forts to calm and correct the situation.” Predictably, the pro-administration

sidebar ended with a summary of Robert Kennedy’s May 26 Voice of America

broadcast, and at the close of the general article the editors allowed him to

have the last word. Re-creating the late-night scene at the Justice Depart-

Make Me a Captive, Lord 307

ment on May 24—the Freedom Riders’ first day in Jackson—the editors por-

trayed a weary but resolute attorney general pouring himself “a nightcap of

Old Grand-Dad over ice.” “Well, it’s still a step forward,” Kennedy mused.

“But these situations are something we’re going to have to live with. This is

going on and on.”

KENNEDY WAS RIGHT, of course. But for a brief period in early June some

observers wondered if the Rides would continue. During the weekend of

June 3–4, and on Monday the fifth, there were no new Rides in Mississippi or

anywhere else. With the attention of the nation and the world focused on the

summit in Vienna, it is unlikely that additional Riders would have drawn

much media coverage, but the three-day respite had little to do with the

public’s preoccupation with the Cold War parley between Kennedy and

Krushchev. In movement circles, the matter of greatest concern was Judge

Johnson’s restraining order. Until Johnson rendered a final injunctive deci-

sion on June 12, the FRCC had little choice but to bypass Alabama. Circum-

venting Johnson’s order required an unexpected and complicated rerouting

of several planned Freedom Rides, as well as a temporary relocation of FRCC

recruiting and training centers. For the time being, at least, Montgomery

could no longer serve as a major center of Freedom Rider activity. New Or-

leans, Nashville, and Atlanta would have to pick up the slack as new travel

patterns were developed. Jackson, FRCC leaders agreed, would remain the

primary target, but the Freedom Rides would now converge on the city from

the north and the south, not the east.

The situation also prompted a partial reorganization of the FRCC.

Working in close collaboration but with separate strengths, the four primary

participating organizations—CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the Nashville

Movement—divided up the movement’s responsibilities along geographical

lines. While CORE concentrated its energies in New Orleans and on vari-

ous recruiting and fund-raising efforts outside the South, SCLC and SNCC

volunteers jointly maintained a recruiting and communications command

center in Atlanta. At the same time, the Nashville student movement re-

mained the emotional nerve center of the struggle. Despite the persistence

of ideological disagreements—especially over the role of religion in the move-

ment— representatives of the four organizations held weekly meetings in an

effort to maintain their common commitment to nonviolent struggle. The

result was a loose but surprisingly effective coalition that sustained the Free-

dom Rider movement without stultifying the creativity of an eclectic band of

volunteers. Striking a balance between nonviolent discipline and individual

freedom was never easy, but as a general rule the Freedom Riders came closer

than most movement activists to achieving this ideal.

Even among the Freedom Riders, however, a unifying common cause

could only do so much. As a social movement with hundreds of participants,

the Freedom Rider campaign reflected the diverse experiences, as well as the

308 Freedom Riders

strengths and weaknesses, of individual personalities. Following the CORE

model, the FRCC relied on brief but intensive training and group leaders to

maintain adherence to nonviolent discipline. And as long as the Freedom

Riders were conducting tests in buses or trains, or in terminals, the system

worked well. In the jails of Mississippi, it was not always so effective. For the

most part, imprisoned Riders remained true to the principles of nonviolent

self-sacrifice, but there were enough exceptions to cause considerable con-

cern among movement leaders. Even with Farmer, Lewis, and Lawson on

the scene, there were troubling breaches of movement solidarity. CORE field

secretary Richard Haley was also in Jackson, but he had little access to the

jailed Riders and could do little to influence their behavior. Once the Riders

were behind bars and dispersed among various cell blocks, they were essen-

tially on their own. Under such conditions, individual proclivities and fac-

tional loyalties sometimes outweighed collective ties and responsibilities.

This became painfully evident during the first week of the Jackson jailings, as

personal grievances and disagreements over the etiquette of nonviolent struggle

became commonplace.

The split between devoutly religious and largely secular activists was the

most persistent source of conflict, but in early June the most publicized issue

dividing the Riders was the pressure to participate in hunger strikes. Some of

the Riders opposed the idea of a hunger strike from the beginning, and on

Saturday, June 3, thirty of the fifty jailed Riders decided to end a three-day

fast. Among the twenty who continued to fast, there were feelings of disap-

pointment and even betrayal, and some relationships never fully recovered

from the controversy. Earlier in the day Jim Lawson and Grady Donald,

after growing tired of the squabbling, had posted bond and returned to Nash-

ville, but Lewis and other valiant peacemakers remained on the scene.

On most issues the stresses and strains within the movement were kept

hidden from the outside world. On June 5, however, as FRCC leaders were

making final preparations for the resumption of the Rides, a jailed white

Freedom Rider from Chicago publicly broke ranks. After posting bond,

Richard Gleason, a twenty-four-year-old minister and social worker, held a

thirty-minute news conference during which he criticized the background

and behavior of several of his fellow Riders. Claiming that some of the jailed

Riders were not the “high caliber people” that he had expected to encounter

in a movement for racial justice, Gleason said he had become “alarmed when

I found out about the police records of others in my cell.” “I told them I

didn’t want to have anything to do with a questionable group,” he declared,

“and they thought I was a traitor.” After disclosing that his disillusionment

had crystallized after other Riders had criticized him for refusing to fast, and

that the guards had moved him to another cell for his own protection, Gleason

advised “anyone thinking of joining the rides to look them over carefully

before deciding.” Even more sensationally, he insisted that some of the Rid-

ers had expressed support for the Communist Party and were planning to

Make Me a Captive, Lord 309

disrupt their Monday afternoon trial. “There was all sorts of Yoga and other

exercises going on in the cells,” he reported, “and they were talking about

‘passive resistance’ moves where people fall in their places and refuse to move.”

After returning to Chicago, Gleason held a second news conference dur-

ing which he repudiated much of what he had said in Jackson, but the dam-

age had already been done. Fortunately, the Gleason incident taught

movement leaders an important lesson that would serve them well in the

weeks and months to come. Discovering that Gleason had joined a June 2

Ride at the last minute after impulsively flying to Atlanta, where a brief con-

versation with Ed King led to his recruitment, FRCC organizers decided to

pay closer attention to the process of selecting future Freedom Riders. With

a half-dozen Rides planned for the coming week, there was some nervous-

ness that another Gleason might have slipped through the cracks, but a quick

check of the roster of new Riders failed to uncover any obvious problems.

The next group scheduled to arrive in Jackson represented an eclectic

assortment of activists, ranging from Ernest Weber, a fifty-two-year-old white

photographer from Orange, New Jersey, to Shirley Thompson, an eighteen-

year-old student at New Orleans’s all-black George Washington Carver High

School. The other five Riders included two white college students from New

York, a white student from Madison, Wisconsin, a black student from

Chicago’s Marion College, and Terry John Sullivan, the editor of Awareness,

a monthly alternative newspaper published in Chicago. Despite her youth,

Shirley Thompson was a movement veteran, and all of the others arrived in

the city in time to undergo the rigorous nonviolent training offered by New

Orleans CORE. Shirley was also the sister of Jean Thompson, who was among

the first group of Riders to be arrested in Jackson. After being struck by

Mack Thomas at the Hinds County Penal Farm on May 31, Jean posted

bond and returned to New Orleans, where she filed a complaint against

Thomas with the FBI. When her younger sister boarded a bus for Jackson

almost a week later, the investigation of the incident—which Hinds County

Sheriff Gilfoy described as “funny”—was still in progress.

The arrests at the Jackson Trailways station on Tuesday afternoon, June

6, followed the same pattern as those of the previous week, with one excep-

tion. At a Monday afternoon trial, Judge Spencer had announced that future

Freedom Riders would face stiffer penalties than the sentences handed out

during the first week of arrests. The new policy, which mandated four-month

rather than two-month sentences, was prompted by the discovery that some

of the Freedom Riders had “served time in Federal prisons for refusing to

bear arms in defense of their country.” “Some have discharges other than

honorable conditions,” Spencer explained. “Some have atheistic beliefs, and

three . . . have beliefs, learnings and ideologies contrary to the principles

on which this country was founded.” While he didn’t elaborate on what

those principles were, his message to the press and the Freedom Riders was

clear: Mississippi was cracking down on outside agitators. In a brief trial held

310 Freedom Riders

minutes after their arrival, the seven new Riders received four-month jail

terms, two months of which were suspended, and two-hundred-dollar fines.

Unfazed, all seven declined to post bond and announced that they planned to

join the hunger strikes at the county and city jails.

The onslaught continued on Wednesday as two groups of Riders con-

verged on the city. At the Trailways terminal in the early afternoon, the

Jackson police arrested six Riders—three black students from Virginia Union,

two white Yale Divinity School students, and Carol Ruth Silver, a twenty-

two-year-old white secretary from New York City. Four hours later three

more Freedom Riders were apprehended at the city airport. To the dismay

of local officials, the second group—all black activists from St. Louis—had

staged the movement’s first “fly-in.” After trying to desegregate the airport’s

white restrooms, they were charged with breaching the peace. In a separate

incident, Michael Audain, a white Canadian student at the University of British

Columbia, was arrested at the Greyhound terminal after entering a black

restroom. Visiting the United States to conduct research on housing dis-

crimination in Memphis and New Orleans, Audain decided to conduct a one-

man protest during a rest stop in Jackson, an impulsive act that led to a

two-week stint in the notorious Parchman Prison Farm.

By Wednesday evening there was no doubt that the Freedom Rides were

once again in full swing and gaining momentum. Within the civil rights

movement, there were still those who had serious reservations about the use

of provocative direct action in the Deep South. Indeed, Roy Wilkins voiced

such reservations during a visit to Jackson that evening. Speaking to an over-

flow crowd of twelve hundred at the Lynch Street Masonic Hall, Wilkins

acknowledged that the NAACP believed that the best “way to make progress

. . . is to set up a test case, carry it through the courts and get a determination.

We do not believe you can test a law and get it thrown out by staying in jail.

After one spends 20 or 60 days in jail, the law is still on the books and still

constitutes a support for segregation.” Nevertheless, even Wilkins seemed

resigned to the reality that the Freedom Riders’ tactics had energized the

movement. The NAACP does “not sneer at those who choose to stay in jail,”

he told the crowd, adding that “even though methods may differ there is

basic agreement among Negro leaders and organizations in the overall goals

and objectives. All methods should be used.” Wilkins went on to pay what

the Jackson Daily News characterized as “a back-handed tribute” to Ross Barnett

for avoiding the violence that had erupted in Alabama. But the overall gist of

his remarks provided little comfort for Mississippi officials.

The next morning Wilkins made an unannounced visit to the county

jail. Two weeks earlier he had warned Farmer that Mississippi was a perilous

place for Freedom Riders, but now he came to comfort his old friend and

colleague. Bearing two books, including Harper Lee’s popular novel To Kill a

Mockingbird, as a peace token, he embraced a startled Farmer through the

bars, quipping: “You look all right, Jim, but you need a shave.” Both men

Make Me a Captive, Lord 311

smiled, and as Farmer’s cellmates came forward to shake the hand of a man

whom they had often criticized but whom they now welcomed as a comrade,

Wilkins graciously acknowledged the Freedom Riders’ achievements. “You’ve

really shaken them up, fellow,” declared the NAACP leader. “I’m watching

closely and if I can be of any help, if you need anything at all, just have Jack

Young give me call.” Moments later he was gone, off to catch a plane to the

North, but to Farmer and his cellmates even a brief visit signaled a new spirit

of cooperation within the movement.

As Farmer later recalled, Wilkins’s visit triggered “an explosion of song”

that reverberated through the cell block. “We sang and sang,” he remem-

bered, “and then we paused to catch our breath.” During the pause, a seem-

ingly remarkable thing happened: A voice from the floor above, where the

regular black prisoners were housed, cried out: “Freedom Riders, if you teach

us your songs, we’ll teach you ours.” To this point there had been no contact

between the Riders and the other prisoners, but with the ensuing exchange

of songs the worst fears of Mississippi officials were confirmed. The impu-

dent spirit of agitation, which most Mississippi whites regarded as a deadly

and alien virus, was beginning to spread. Soon after the first arrests, Farmer

had urged the guards to put the Freedom Riders in cells with the regular

prisoners, but, as one guard told him, such an arrangement was out of the

question. “No, we can’t do that,” the jailer explained. “Them other nigras

would kill y’all. They know their place and they hate y’all for coming down

here stirrin’ up trouble.” Farmer, of course, knew better. “The real fear,” as

he later put it, “was that we might contaminate the convicts, turning them

into Freedom Riders.” During an interview with Franklin Hunt, a Baltimore

Afro-American correspondent who spent two weeks in the Hinds County Jail

after being arrested as a Freedom Rider on May 28, Farmer put it even plainer.

“We are prisoners of war,” he told Hunt. “This is, in a very real sense, a

battle to the death . . . the death of segregation.”

The successful recruitment of local Freedom Riders would rattle the

nerves of Mississippi officials in the weeks to come, but in early June their

most pressing concern was the daily tide of Riders from other parts of the

nation. Virtually every day brought at least one new group of Riders to Jack-

son. On Thursday, June 8, the day Wilkins made his morning visit to the

county jail, two groups of Riders descended upon the city. The first—a two-

man delegation from New York—arrived on an early-morning plane from

Montgomery. Mark Lane, a white New York state assemblyman, and Percy

Sutton, a black attorney recently elected president of the Manhattan branch

of the NAACP, told reporters that they were “deeply concerned” about re-

cent arrests of New Yorkers visiting Mississippi. Their fact-finding mission

took on a new dimension when Sutton tried to use the airport’s white restroom.

Charged with breaching the peace, both men were behind bars by noon.

A few hours later, the police arrested nine Riders at the Illinois Central

railway station. Before boarding a train in New Orleans, the Riders had been

312 Freedom Riders

jostled and in several cases pummeled by white protesters who tried to block

their way. “They were shouting. Throwing cans and lit cigarettes at us. Spit-

ting on us,” Howard student Stokely Carmichael later recalled. “And swing-

ing, actually fighting each other to get in a good lick at us. . . . To this day I

don’t know how we got through and onto the train. Some of us were bleed-

ing, but we all got on, wiped off the spit and blood, and the train set out.”

Led by Carmichael’s NAG colleague Travis Britt, a twenty-seven-year-old

cafeteria worker and part-time student, the New Orleans group brought to-

gether a provocative combination of four black men, one black woman—

Howard student Gwendolyn Greene, Britt’s future wife and a future Maryland

state senator—and four young white women, including Joan Trumpauer, a

nineteen-year-old secretary who worked in the Washington office of Sena-

tor Clair Engle of California. Even so, there was no violence once they

arrived in Jackson, as Captain Ray and the police quickly ushered them to a

waiting paddy wagon. Unlike Lane and Sutton, who immediately posted bond

and returned to New York on Thursday afternoon, all nine refused bail. Two

weeks after the first Jackson arrests, the total number of jailed Riders had

risen to more than seventy; and there was no end in sight.

For the most part, Mississippi officials denied that the growing number

of jailed Riders was putting a strain on the state’s police and penal facilities.

But there were signs that at least some were beginning to worry about the

seemingly endless stream of outside agitators willing to go to jail. On Friday,

June 9, several speakers at the annual convention of the Mississippi Munici-

pal Association, meeting in Biloxi, warned that the Freedom Riders repre-

sented an unprecedented challenge to the Mississippi way of life. After

Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson told the gathering of municipal leaders

that “we in Mississippi and this nation of ours are facing some frightening

years,” Attorney General Joe Patterson acknowledged that “the very soul

and fiber of every city in Mississippi is being tested.” They had good reason

to worry. Earlier in the day, just before dawn, a new group of Freedom Rid-

ers had been arrested at the Illinois Central terminal. After undergoing non-

violence training in Nashville, five white college students—three from Ohio

and two from New York—had boarded a train for Jackson determined to

demonstrate their solidarity with earlier Riders.

Mississippi officials were also troubled by a sweeping desegregation pe-

tition filed with the federal district court in Jackson later in the morning.

Presented on behalf of three local blacks by NAACP attorneys R. Jess Brown,

Constance Baker Motley, and Derrick Bell, the petition initiated a class ac-

tion suit to enjoin the police from enforcing state and local transit segrega-

tion statutes. Although the petition did not mention the Freedom Riders by

name, the NAACP also sought an injunction against the breach-of-peace

ordinances used to “arrest, harass, and intimidate” travelers exercising “their

federally protected right to use interstate and intrastate facilities and services

without segregation or discrimination against them solely because of race or

Make Me a Captive, Lord 313

color.” Several weeks earlier the NAACP had asked the court to overturn the

convictions of several black students arrested for sitting in the front section

of a local bus, but the new petition represented a significant escalation of the

legal campaign to dismantle the state’s Jim Crow transit system.

On Saturday the district court forwarded the petition to Judge Elbert P.

Tuttle, the chief judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Empowered to convene a three-judge panel to rule on the petition, Tuttle

promised to begin hearings on the matter sometime in July. In the mean-

time, the Freedom Riders would continue to face arrest and imprisonment.

Six Riders arrived in Jackson on Saturday, followed by six more on Sunday.

Arrested at the Greyhound terminal, the Saturday group demonstrated the

growing diversity of the Freedom Rider movement. All six underwent three

days of nonviolent training in Nashville, but otherwise they represented a

wide variety of backgrounds. The two black Riders were Lowell Woods, a

thirty-four-year-old police reporter for the Chicago Crusader News, and Leon

Horne, a troubled twenty-four-year-old student and part-time waiter who

had drifted from his home in Madison County, Mississippi, to Florida before

settling briefly in Chicago. Down on his luck and homesick, Horne later

claimed that for him the Freedom Ride “was just a way to come home.” With

“no friends and no money” in Chicago, he pretended to be a Freedom Rider

and accepted CORE’s offer to buy him a ticket to Jackson. “I’d rather be in

jail here than free in Chicago,” he told reporters on Monday, adding that he

had found the Freedom Riders to be “demoralized characters” who associ-

ated with Communists and other radicals. “They say God is on their side,

but he’s not,” Horne insisted.

The rest of the group, though diverse, consisted of legitimate Freedom

Riders. The four white Riders included two young women from Chicago—

Katherine “Kit” Pleune, a twenty-one-year-old mimeograph operator, and

Leora Berman, an eighteen-year-old high school student—and two men:

Richard Griswold, a thirty-four-year-old social worker from Brooklyn, and

Steve Green, a twenty-one-year-old junior at Middlebury College in Ver-

mont. Though drawn together in a common quest for social justice, each

Rider brought a unique perspective to the Freedom Ride. Green, for ex-

ample, had grown up in a privileged family in Kentucky and had only re-

cently embraced the civil rights movement. In early May, while serving as

chairman of a campus lecture series committee, he took William Sloane Coffin

on a campus tour that prompted a stinging comment from the Yale chaplain.

“What a wonderful place to go to sleep for four years,” Coffin intoned. Two

weeks later, after brooding about Coffin’s remark and after reading the shock-

ing accounts of the Anniston and Birmingham riots, Green informed his father

that he had decided to become a Freedom Rider. Canceling a much-anticipated

summer trip to Norway, he soon left for Nashville and the movement that

would transform his life. When he returned to Middlebury in the fall, after

surviving several weeks at Parchman prison, he was, by his own estimation,

314 Freedom Riders

an entirely different person, saddened but energized by what he had seen.

Propelled toward a stint in the Peace Corps and ultimately a forty-year

career as a crusading journalist and international relief specialist, he, like so

many others, became in effect a Freedom Rider for life.

While not everyone followed such a dramatic path to the movement, the

Freedom Riders’ personal stories of awakening and commitment were as di-

verse and complex as the society they were trying to transform. Even when

they came from the same locale, as the six arrested on June 11 did, individual

decisions and experiences reflected a wide range of choice and contingency.

All six were white Minnesotans, and five were current or former students at

the University of Minnesota. Several were longtime friends who had been

part of a local bohemian subculture that existed on the fringes of Dinkytown,

the sprawling student ghetto in Minneapolis.

Marv Davidov, the oldest of the group at twenty-nine, was a transplanted

New York Jew who had become active in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests in

the mid-1950s. An art dealer, he was politically and culturally sophisticated

and the most radical member of the Minnesota group. To him, becoming a

Freedom Rider was a natural and connecting link in an activist career that led

to regional and even national notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s. A tireless pro-

ponent of nonviolent civil disobedience, he eventually helped to organize move-

ments against the draft, nuclear power plants, high-voltage power lines, and

the Honeywell Corporation’s production of military technology.

Zev Aelony, a native Californian who moved to Minnesota as a child in

the 1940s, was a political science major who had spent time on an Israeli

kibbutz and at Koinonia, an experimental biracial religious cooperative in

Americus, Georgia. Horrified by what he witnessed in Georgia, where there

was a concerted campaign to destroy the Koinonia farm, Aelony attended

the CORE direct action workshop in Miami in 1959. While in Miami, he

was arrested with Pat and Priscilla Stephens during a sit-in at a Royal Castle

hamburger restaurant, an experience that brought him in contact with Tobias

Simon, Florida’s most celebrated civil rights attorney and a distant relative of

Aelony’s mother. All of this reinforced his dual commitment to CORE and

racial justice, preparing him for the Freedom Rides and later civil rights

struggles in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In 1963 he would suffer a savage

beating after an arrest in Dunnellon, Florida, and later in the year he and

three SNCC voting rights workers arrested in Sumter County, Georgia, would

become the first such activists to be charged with a capital offense by local

officials intent on stifling voting rights agitation. Eventually acquitted, he

remained active in CORE until 1965.

The other four Minnesota activists had less experience with the move-

ment but were no less committed to the Freedom Rides. Bob Baum was a

nineteen-year-old college dropout whose attraction to existential philosophy

led him to a deep and abiding distrust of social and political complacency.

Quiet and introspective, and a self-described “mystic,” he viewed the Free-

dom Ride as an opportunity to test the applicability of ideas that challenged

Make Me a Captive, Lord 315

the conventional limits of the American mainstream. Gene Uphoff was a

nineteen-year-old premedical student and Quaker who also performed as a

folk and rock guitarist in several Minneapolis coffee houses. After the Free-

dom Rides, he attended the University of Colorado Medical School and later

opened a series of government-sponsored “storefront” clinics for the poor.

Dave Morton, a Unitarian and self-styled “mountain man” who spent part of

1961 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was, like Uphoff, a talented musician who

expressed his dissatisfaction with the American mainstream through folk bal-

lads and protest songs. An occasional sideman for a rising Minnesota folk

singer named Bob Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan), Morton added a lyrical and

quixotic touch to the growing community of Freedom Riders.

To some extent the same could be said of Claire O’Connor, a twenty-

two-year-old Boston-born Catholic who worked as a practical nurse at the

University of Minnesota Hospital. The daughter of a politically active mother

and a deceased father who had worked as a union organizer, O’Connor had

little experience with racial issues. As she explained years later, though, there

was something irresistible about the Freedom Rides, something that drew

her into a world that she could hardly imagine before leaving the safe and

secure atmosphere of Minneapolis. Later, after her experiences as a Freedom

Rider, she became active in anti-poverty work, wrote a master’s thesis on the

plight of battered women, and served as the executive director of a health

clinic for teenagers. But why this relatively naive young woman became in-

volved in the Freedom Rides in the first place when so many others like her

refused to put themselves at risk remains a mystery. In her words, she simply

accepted “a one-way ticket” to the movement and never looked back.

THE “MINNESOTA SIX,” as they came to be known, were part of a widening

circle of engagement that troubled Mississippi authorities and many other white

Southerners. Despite the obvious fact that the Freedom Rides were disrupting

civic order and providing Soviet publicists with propaganda material, the on-

going frontal assault on segregated transit had now achieved a measure of re-

spectability in certain quarters. During the same weekend that the Minnesota

Six arrived in Jackson, the noted Broadway theatrical team of Elaine May and

Mike Nichols hosted a benefit concert in New York to raise funds for Free-

dom Riders, and the general board of the National Council of Churches ap-

proved a resolution endorsing nonviolent direct action as a legitimate means of

attacking racial segregation. Even worse, from the perspective of conservative

white supremacists, on Monday, June 12, Judge Frank Johnson allowed the

temporary restraining order against the Freedom Riders to lapse. Ruling that

there was no justification for a permanent injunction, Johnson, in effect, re-

opened Alabama and Mississippi’s eastern flank to future Freedom Rides. Al-

most immediately, jubilant FRCC and CORE officials announced plans to

open an office in Montgomery where Tom Gaither and Ralph Abernathy would

recruit and train Mississippi-bound Freedom Riders.