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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

326 Freedom Riders

remained in the back of one of the trucks and then gone limp in defiance of

the guards, were being dragged toward the processing center by their feet.

“We refuse to cooperate, because we’ve been unjustly imprisoned,” Sullivan

cried out. The guards were unimpressed. “What you actin’ like that for?”

one guard asked. “Ain’t no newspaper men out here.”

Taken to the basement of the concrete-block processing center, the Riders

soon found themselves under the control of a man who introduced himself as

Deputy Tyson. Later described by Stokely Carmichael as “a massive, red-

faced, cigar-smoking cracker in cowboy boots,” Tyson would become an all

too familiar figure to the Riders during their stay at Parchman. Without any

explanation other than a smirk, he ordered them to remove all of their clothes.

When Sullivan and Singer refused, a guard shocked them with an electric

cattle prod. But even this did not bring compliance, forcing the frustrated

guards to rip off the resisters’ clothes before throwing them into a holding

cell. The rest of the Riders remained in the room for more than two hours as

a crowd of curious white guards gawked at them through barred basement

windows. The whole scene was both frightening and demeaning, and the

Riders did not know what to expect next. “We were consumed by embarrass-

ment,” Farmer recalled. “We stood for ages—uncomfortable, dehumanized.

Our audience cackled with laughter and obscene comments. They had a fixa-

tion about genitals, a preoccupation with size.” Finally, they were led, two by

two, down a long corridor to a shower room, where they were ordered to

shave off all facial hair. To John Lewis, the shower room evoked images of

Nazi Germany and concentration camps. “This was 1961 in America,” he

later reflected, “yet here we were, treated like animals.” From the shower

room, they marched to their cells in Parchman’s maximum security wing,

where, still naked, they waited for the distribution of prison clothes. The

clothes, when they finally arrived, were meager—a T-shirt and boxer shorts,

but no shoes or socks. Understandably some complained, but Bevel, for

one, responded philosophically. “What’s this hang-up about clothes?” he bel-

lowed, “Gandhi wrapped a rag around his balls and brought the whole Brit-

ish Empire to its knees!”

A few hours later, on Thursday evening, Governor Ross Barnett and

Colonel T. B. Birdsong, the head of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, paid a

visit to Parchman to see how the prisoners were doing. In a meeting with the

prison staff, Barnett warned that “it will be hard for you men to take what

they may say to you,” and Birdsong predicted that the Freedom Riders would

be “different than any other prisoners you have handled before.” Accord-

ingly, Barnett announced, the Freedom Riders would not be put to work in

the fields with the other prisoners, at least for the time being. “If they re-

fused to work, what could we do?” he explained. “It would upset the whole

prison routine.” By keeping the Freedom Riders locked up and isolated, the

dual threat of a sit-down strike and unsettling contact between outside agita-

tors and regular inmates could be avoided. As he told reporters before re-

Make Me a Captive, Lord 327

turning to Jackson, everything was under control, and the Freedom Riders

whom he had visited had assured him that they had been “well treated.” In-

deed, they were “resigned to serving their sentences.”

The prospect of scores, and eventually hundreds, of Freedom Riders

spending the rest of June and July at Parchman was appealing to Barnett and

many other white Mississippians. But this scenario held no such charm for

federal officials in Washington. A world unto itself, Parchman was almost

impossible to monitor; and, while the terrors of the South’s most infamous

prison might deter some prospective Freedom Riders from actually coming

to Mississippi, others almost certainly would be drawn by the lure of real

danger and meaningful sacrifice. On Friday, June 16, President Kennedy

returned to Washington after ten days in Palm Beach, Florida, where he was

vacationing and receiving treatment for a painful back condition. Like his

personal ailments, the ongoing Freedom Rider crisis presented him with a

seemingly inexhaustible set of irritations. In addition to the Parchman trans-

fers and the arrests in Tallahassee and Ocala, a new set of five Freedom

Riders was arrested in Jackson on Friday afternoon. Four of the five were

college students, and one, Elizabeth Hirschfeld, was a laboratory techni-

cian who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in Ithaca, New York,

adding a new wrinkle to the argument that the Freedom Riders represented

a security risk.

One of the four students, Bob Filner, was an eighteen-year-old engineer-

ing student at Cornell and the son of Joseph Filner, a left-wing labor orga-

nizer who had been active in civil rights fund-raising circles since the early 1950s.

A founding member of the Cornell Liberal Union, Filner later taught at the

Tuskegee Institute, participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March,

and beginning in 1992 served seven terms as a liberal Democratic congress-

man representing a predominantly Hispanic district in San Diego, Califor-

nia. “The Freedom Ride changed my whole life, personally and politically,”

he insisted forty years after his arrest. A political ally of Senator Ted Kennedy

in the 1990s, Filner as a teenager was emblematic of the idealistic college

students who pushed the senator’s older brother to accelerate the pace of

social change.

As President Kennedy was well aware, such acceleration posed political

and physical risks. Indeed, while Filner was en route to Jackson, two Free-

dom Rider–related bombings rocked the city of Washington during the night

of June 15–16. At 11:00

P.M. on Thursday evening, a homemade bomb ex-

ploded in front of the Veterans Administration building, and nine hours later

a second bomb exploded in a Massachusetts Avenue phone booth. No one

was injured by either blast, but later in the day an anonymous caller informed

the FBI that he had planted six bombs in the capital city as a protest against

the Freedom Rides and racial integration. Although there were no additional

explosions, and a police search of downtown Washington failed to locate the

other four bombs, local citizens and federal officials were on edge for days.

328 Freedom Riders

In the midst of this turmoil, Robert Kennedy presided over a memo-

rable meeting at the Justice Department. A week earlier Burke Marshall had

met with a small group of civil rights activists during a conference held at a

York River plantation house near Capahosic, Virginia. For several weeks Jus-

tice Department officials had been looking for a chance to nudge student

activists toward a greater emphasis on voting rights agitation, and the

Capahosic conference represented the first opportunity for Marshall to make

his pitch. A voter registration campaign, Marshall argued, had distinct ad-

vantages over confrontational direct action campaigns such as sit-ins and

Freedom Rides, not the least of which was the administration’s willingness

to fund the former but not the latter. Among those at the Capahosic confer-

ence were several black student leaders favorably disposed to the idea, in-

cluding the incoming SNCC chairman, Chuck McDew, Charles Jones of

Johnson C. Smith (and the recent Freedom Ride led by William Sloane

Coffin), Charles Sherrod of Virginia Union, and Tim Jenkins, a recent

Howard graduate who served as vice president of the National Student Asso-

ciation. Encouraged by their receptiveness, Marshall invited them, along with

several FRCC leaders, to a June 16 meeting at the Justice Department.

Student leaders and Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee representatives at the

Justice Department prior to their meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy,

June 16, 1961. From left to right: Chuck McDew, Wyatt Tee Walker, Diane Nash,

New Orleans attorney Lolis Elie, Jim Lawson, Gordon Carey, and Charles Sherrod.

The partially obscured figure cannot be identified. (Getty Photos)

Make Me a Captive, Lord 329

To Nash, Lawson, Walker, and the other FRCC representatives present,

the primary purpose of the meeting was to urge the federal government to

intervene on behalf of the Freedom Riders unjustly arrested in Mississippi.

But, from the outset, Marshall and Kennedy tried to steer the conversation

toward a discussion of voting rights. After making the administration’s pref-

erences clear, Kennedy all but promised to provide movement leaders with

tax exemptions, foundation grants, and legal and physical protection if they

agreed to shift their attention to voting issues. To several of the students,

including the voting rights enthusiast Sherrod, Kennedy’s offer sounded too

much like a bribe, and the meeting nearly broke up when Sherrod jumped to

his feet to scold the attorney general. “You are a public official, sir,” Sherrod

reminded Kennedy. ‘It’s not your responsibility before God or under the law

to tell us how to honor our constitutional rights. It’s your job to protect us

when we do.” At this point Walker and others interceded to calm Sherrod

down, and Kennedy, after a brief pause, continued to press the argument for

a voting rights campaign. Ignoring the gathering’s emotional ties to direct

action, he outlined an ambitious region-wide voter education project similar

to one proposed earlier in the year by Stephen Currier of the Taconic Foun-

dation and Harold Fleming, the founder of the Potomac Institute and the

former director of the Southern Regional Council. All of this was food for

thought, and by the time the meeting adjourned even the most skeptical of

the young leaders had a heightened sense of the attorney general’s interest in

civil rights. For better or for worse, the Freedom Rides had certainly gotten

his attention.

Kennedy left the June 16 meeting with the distinct impression that he

had witnessed the beginnings of a move toward voting rights and away from

direct action. Even though he realized that the Freedom Rider crisis was far

from over, the long-term prospects for a less confrontational approach to

civil rights activism seemed to be improving. His faith in such a reorientation

rested on a rather simplistic dichotomy of orderly voting rights campaigns

versus provocative direct action struggles that would lead inexorably to dis-

order and violence in the streets. But on June 17, less than twenty-four hours

after the meeting with the student leaders, the validity of this dichotomous

conception was challenged by Martin Luther King. During a Saturday after-

noon press conference at the Los Angeles airport, King predicted that the

Freedom Rides would be followed by an all-out nonviolent campaign for

black voting rights. “We are going to win the transportation fight through

passive resistance,” he told reporters. “Then we will tackle the problem of

Negro voting in Dixie. We will make a nonviolent assault on all phases of all

segregation. But our big move will be to intensify voter registrations through

stand-ins at places of registration and polling, and anything else we can do to

emphasize the degree to which the negro is denied his right of franchise.”

Such an open-ended, multifaceted approach to voting rights activism

was not, of course, what Kennedy or the Taconic Foundation had in mind.

330 Freedom Riders

The gap between the movement’s view of things and Kennedy’s became even

more apparent on Sunday when King—followed by Sammy Davis Jr., Mahalia

Jackson, Dick Gregory, and a string of other celebrities—reiterated his com-

mitment to direct action during a mass rally at the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

The rally, which drew a crowd of nearly twenty thousand and raised a sub-

stantial amount of money for Freedom Rides and other civil rights causes,

signaled that the restless spirit of grassroots insurgency was still rising.

Whether the target was disfranchisement or segregated bus terminals, get-

ting the struggle out of the streets was not going to be easy.

Even so, voting rights remained the strategy of choice at the Justice

Department, in most intellectual circles, and for many movement activists.

For Robert Kennedy, in particular, the effort to accelerate the transition from

protest to politics was a high priority throughout the summer of 1961. On

Saturday, June 17, while King was raising funds in Los Angeles, Kennedy

interrupted a dinner party to lobby Harry Belafonte on the matter. Even

though it was his tenth wedding anniversary, Kennedy found time to urge

the singer-activist to use his influence on behalf of political action. Ten days

later Belafonte, who was in Washington for a series of concerts, met with a

select group of SNCC leaders in an effort to convince them to form a politi-

cal action vanguard within the Freedom Rider movement. At the close of the

meeting, the students agreed to do so, and a grateful Belafonte promised to

give them ten thousand dollars to initiate the project. Led by Tim Jenkins

and Charles Jones, the Harry Belafonte Committee, as the group came to be

known, would play a pivotal role in SNCC’s turn toward political action later

in the summer.

IN THE MEANTIME, however, the direct action tactics of the FRCC continued

to draw new recruits into the movement. During the week following the

Sunday rally in Los Angeles, four groups of Freedom Riders arrived in Jack-

son. On Monday, June 20, nine more jailed Freedom Riders were transferred

from Jackson to Parchman, but later in the day their former cells were filled

by fifteen new Riders. One of those arrested was Eugene Levine, a thirty-

four-year-old English instructor at Oklahoma State University, who, after

traveling to Jackson by car, conducted a “lone wolf” desegregation test at the

Greyhound terminal. The other fourteen were northern Californians who

attempted to desegregate the Illinois Central railroad depot after arriving on

a train from New Orleans. Eleven of the fourteen were white, and eleven

were college students, six at the University of California, Berkeley. Accord-

ing to one disapproving reporter, following their long trip from the West

Coast “most of the group wore wrinkled clothes and the men needed hair-

cuts.” Described as “amateurish,” they “didn’t even know the tune to the

‘Freedom Song’ ” that earlier Freedom Riders had sung on their way to jail.

Only one of the Riders, Paul McConnell, a Pennsylvania native who had

attended both the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama in

Make Me a Captive, Lord 331

the mid-1950s, had spent any time in the Deep South, and he reportedly had

been dismissed from both universities because of poor grades.

The nine Riders who arrived from Montgomery on Tuesday provoked

less scorn from the Mississippi press but ended up in the same courtroom

facing the same unsympathetic judge. The Tuesday group included Wyatt

Tee Walker and his wife, Theresa; two Northern white college students,

Judith Frieze of Smith and Miriam Feingold of Swarthmore; Henry

Schwarzchild, a German-born Jewish official from Chicago; and Margaret

Burr Leonard, a nineteen-year-old student at Sophie Newcomb College in

New Orleans. Blonde, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, Leonard presented

Mississippi officials with a disturbing development in the evolution of the

Freedom Rides. The daughter of Margaret Long “Maggie” Leonard, a liberal-

minded columnist for the Atlanta Journal, she was the first unmistakably

Southern white student to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Rides. Fear-

ful that other white Southern dissidents would follow her lead, white Missis-

sippians would have been even more anxious if they had known that a second

Southern white girl had tried to join the June 21 Freedom Ride.

Mary Little, Margaret Leonard’s best friend and the daughter of the

noted Atlanta columnist and writer Celestine Sibley, traveled alone to Mont-

gomery a day early in an effort to accompany Margaret and the other Riders

to Mississippi. While Sibley privately supported nonviolent direct action,

she thought that her precocious seventeen-year-old daughter was too young

to become a Freedom Rider, especially considering the situation that the

Walker group was likely to encounter in Montgomery. When the group ar-

rived in Montgomery on Tuesday afternoon, it became clear that Sibley’s

fears were justified. Minutes before the group’s arrival, the police stationed

at the terminal received two bomb threats, and despite heavy rain a “sullen

crowd” of five hundred whites was on hand to protest against the first batch

of Freedom Riders to visit Alabama since the issuance of Judge Johnson’s

June 2 restraining order. Protected by sixty heavily armed police officers,

the Riders avoided contact with the protesters and eventually made their

way to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where a BBC film crew was

waiting to record the group’s final preparations for the next day’s journey

to Mississippi.

That night, amidst the whir of BBC cameras, Little, along with Leonard

and the other Riders, participated in a socio-drama performed in the church

basement. However, on Wednesday morning, just as the Riders were pre-

paring to leave for the terminal, Walker told Little that Martin Luther King

wanted to speak with her. Prompted by a call from an overwrought Sibley,

King informed the wide-eyed high school student that she needed parental

permission to go on the Ride. Crestfallen, she reluctantly returned to At-

lanta, where she defiantly lived with the Leonards for several weeks before

making up with her “hypocritical” mother. Later in the summer, when she

picked up Leonard at the airport following Leonard’s release from Parchman,

332 Freedom Riders

Little finally achieved her goal of being arrested—albeit for driving without

a license. But the sting of not becoming a full-fledged Freedom Rider both-

ered her for years, fueling the compensating passion that drove her later

activities as a SNCC, CORE, and SCLC volunteer.

June 21, the day the Freedom Rides resumed along the Montgomery-

to-Jackson stretch of Highway 80, was the summer solstice, the official di-

viding line between spring and summer. Coincidentally, it was also a day of

deep contextual change for the Freedom Rider movement. While the Walker

group was on the way to Jackson, U.S. District Judge Sidney Mize was pre-

siding over a hearing that would determine the legality of the Freedom Rider

arrests by Mississippi authorities. The plaintiff was Elizabeth Wyckoff, a forty-

five-year-old freelance writer—and former professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr,

Vassar, Wells, and Mount Holyoke Colleges—from Greenwich Village. The

first white woman to participate in a Mississippi Freedom Ride, she had been

arrested for breaching the peace on June 2. Declaring that the arrest was

unconstitutional and a “disgrace in the eyes of the rest of the world,” her

attorney William Kunstler, a feisty New York civil liberties lawyer, made a

plea for a writ of habeas corpus, which if granted would free not only Wyckoff

but all of the other jailed Freedom Riders. Opposing the writ was Hinds

County prosecutor Jack Travis, who maintained that the arrests had rescued

the state from an outbreak of interracial violence. After listening to two hours

of testimony, Judge Mize took the matter under advisement and promised to

render a decision before the end of the month.

On the same day, there were two other potentially important legal de-

velopments. In New Orleans, Judge Elbert Tuttle, the chief judge of the

U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered a three-judge panel to convene

in Jackson on July 10 to consider an NAACP motion challenging transit

segregation in Mississippi. Meanwhile, in Nashville, Burke Marshall clari-

fied the federal government’s position on the Mississippi arrests in a speech

at the annual Fisk University Race Relations Institute. Speaking to more

than a hundred race relations specialists from around the nation, Marshall

confessed that the Justice Department was “powerless” to prevent the arrest

of Freedom Riders by local or state authorities. Describing the government’s

unfortunate position as “one of the frustrations” of federalism, he nonethe-

less predicted that segregated transit would soon be a thing of the past. Not-

ing the hearing held in Biloxi earlier in the day, he endorsed Kunstler’s habeas

corpus motion and expressed hope that Judge Mize would invalidate the Free-

dom Riders’ arrests.

The legal maneuvering in Biloxi, New Orleans, and Nashville was sig-

nificant and newsworthy, but the day’s most important development related

to the Freedom Rides did not take place in a courtroom or any other public

arena. In a run-down dormitory at Jackson’s Tougaloo College, hidden from

the gaze of judges and reporters, four black students were plotting a minor

revolution. To this point all of the Freedom Riders arrested in Mississippi

Make Me a Captive, Lord 333

had come from somewhere else, and many editors and politicians from around

the state had boasted that black and white Mississippians shared a common

disregard for disruptive outside agitators. Hardly a day passed without an

editorial or speech reminding the public that the Freedom Riders were all

outsiders, and even the Jackson Advocate, the state’s most widely read black

newspaper, lent its editorial voice to the anti–Freedom Rider campaign. Ac-

cording to Advocate columnist Percy Greene, “a vast majority of the rank and

file of Jackson Negroes view the Freedom Riders as doing more harm than

good in visiting the city. . . . Most point to a sharp change in the attitude of

their employers, and most noticeable change in the attitude of the white

employees with whom and by whose direction they perform the duties of

their daily work. A large number of those among the unemployed have been

heard to blame the Freedom Riders for their continued unemployment and

their failure to find a new job. Many have been heard to express the opinion

that Negroes of the city would be better off if the Freedom Riders had never

come to Jackson.”

Whatever truth there was in Greene’s assessment, it did not apply to

many of the city’s students, including four Tougaloo students who set out to

dispel the image of local black complacency. One of the four, Mary Harrison,

was a twenty-one-year-old Asian-American from San Antonio, Texas, and

another, Joe Ross, was a visiting student from Tennessee State who had helped

recruit and train Freedom Riders in Nashville. Along with Elnora Price, a

twenty-five-year-old from nearby Raymond, Mississippi, and Tom Armstrong,

a nineteen-year-old sophomore from the Delta town of Silver City, Harrison

and Ross decided that it was time to organize a home-grown Freedom Ride.

Accordingly, on Friday afternoon, June 23, they entered the Jackson Trailways

station, bought tickets to New Orleans, and sat down in the white waiting

room. Disregarding a police order to leave, they were arrested and carted off

to jail, making them the first Freedom Riders to be apprehended while try-

ing to leave Mississippi.

The full implications of the first local Freedom Ride would not become

apparent until early July, when scores of black Mississippians followed the

lead of the “Tougaloo Four.” But the episode raised deep concerns among

local and state authorities. Publicly they dismissed the Tougaloo Four as

little more than misguided pranksters, but privately they began to brace them-

selves for what they feared was an inevitable coupling of local and national

movements.

To many white Mississippians, the public fiction of local black compla-

cency was still an article of faith. But, for at least a decade and perhaps longer,

that faith had coexisted with the reality of an emerging indigenous freedom

struggle. Despite the persistence of white supremacist violence and intimi-

dation, local civil rights initiatives and organized resistance to the status quo

had become a fact of life in Mississippi. Although SNCC and CORE were

new to the state, the NAACP had maintained a strong presence in Jackson

334 Freedom Riders

and several other communities since the 1940s. With the rise of the White

Citizens’ Councils and the reemergence of the Klan in the mid-1950s, some

black Mississippians retreated into heightened accommodationism and po-

litical and social conservatism. But others became increasingly assertive and

even militant, especially after the brutal lynching of Mack Charles Parker in

Poplarville in April 1959.

As in other areas of the South, this new spirit was most evident among

high school and college students, who exhibited both the impatience of youth

and the bravado of those who were relatively invulnerable to the economic

intimidation tactics employed by the White Citizens’ Councils. In the spring

of 1960, for example, more than two hundred Jackson college students dis-

tributed leaflets announcing an “Easter boycott” of downtown stores that

had discriminated against or failed to hire black citizens. Organized by

NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, the boycott met with limited suc-

cess, but it helped to set the stage for other protests, including the April

1960 Biloxi “wade-ins.” The attempt to desegregate Mississippi’s Gulf Coast

beaches provoked a determined response from the police and led to a

shootout that injured eight blacks and two white vigilantes. Indirectly, it

also prompted a change of leadership in the state NAACP. In September,

Aaron Henry, a militant activist from Clarksdale, replaced Charles Darden,

a conservative critic of direct action, as state president. “Our actions will

probably result in many of us being guests of the jails of the state,” Henry

predicted in his inaugural speech as president. “We will make these jails

Temples of Freedom.”

True to his word, in collaboration with Evers and a somewhat reluctant

Roy Wilkins, Henry launched “Operation Mississippi” in early April 1961, a

direct action desegregation initiative designed to enlist black students. Ten

days earlier a sit-in by nine Tougaloo students at the main branch of the

Jackson Public Library had led to a mass meeting at Tougaloo, a student

boycott at Jackson State College, and a march on the city jail where the

“Tougaloo Nine” were incarcerated. Using tear gas and nightsticks, the

police intercepted the march before it reached the jail, which was probably

fortunate since the streets in the area of the jail were filled with white Missis-

sippians—including three thousand Confederate reenactors—celebrating the

centennial of the state’s secession from the Union. This near miss scared

even Henry, but it did not stop him from pushing for Operation Mississippi

or from organizing a Freedom Rider support committee in May that evolved

into the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)—a movement “um-

brella” group that later coordinated the freedom struggle in Mississippi.

To the dismay of white officials, interaction between the Freedom Rid-

ers and local activists began as soon as the first group of Riders arrived in

Mississippi. When the first group was brought into Judge Spencer’s court-

room, several local civil rights leaders were on hand to lend support, includ-

ing Claire Collins Harvey. The owner of a Jackson funeral home and the

Make Me a Captive, Lord 335

daughter of one of the founding members of the local NAACP, Harvey did

not hesitate to identify with the Freedom Riders. Noticing that several of the

female defendants were shivering inside the courtroom, she rushed over to

inquire “if they needed sweaters or something.” That evening she and Aurelia

Young, the wife of attorney Jack Young, delivered an assortment of warm

clothing to the city jail, and several days later she canvassed three local churches

to plead for support for the Freedom Riders. Over the next few weeks her

personal campaign evolved into Womanpower Unlimited (WU), a broad

network of more than three hundred volunteers who donated and collected

“food, sheets, clothes, magazines, and books, blankets and everything to help

minister to the needs of the Freedom Riders.” Whatever the Freedom Rid-

ers asked for, from something as simple as a toothbrush to the often compli-

cated task of relaying messages to outside contacts, Harvey and the women

of WU did their best to provide it. And they did so without the support of

the majority of the city’s black leaders, many of whom considered close iden-

tification with the Freedom Riders to be foolhardy and even dangerous. In

the face of both criticism and apathy, they carried on and later in the summer

even expanded their activities to include voter registration, economic boy-

cotts, and the sponsorship of pro–Freedom Rider rallies.

THE LOCAL SUPPORT SYSTEM created by activists such as Henry, Evers, and

Harvey was part of a growing national network that boosted the Freedom

Rider movement during the critical days of late June and early July. In addi-

tion to the substantial financial contributions solicited by CORE, SCLC,

and the NAACP, there were numerous expressions of support from a wide

range of groups and influential individuals. On June 17, for example, the Epis-

copal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity announced that it would sponsor a

“Prayer Pilgrimage” from New Orleans to Detroit, where the Episcopal

Church was scheduled to convene its triennial convention on September 17.

In a show of solidarity with the Freedom Riders, a busload of thirty-seven

clergymen would conduct desegregation tests along the route while “peni-

tently admitting our own involvement in the sinful system of separation and

segregation at so many levels.” On June 20 Rabbi Bernard Bamberger, the

president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, endorsed “the great

ethical principle” of the Freedom Rides by contrasting it with the morally

bankrupt pageantry of the Civil War Centennial. “The war was in vain, the

celebration is a blasphemy and a disgrace,” Bamberger insisted, “if a century

later the Negro’s right to full equality may still be limited by prejudice enacted

into law or perpetuated by custom.” In Mississippi and most other areas of the

South, rabbis and other Jewish leaders were either too conservative or too

fearful to speak out in favor of the Freedom Rides. But in the North, many

Jewish leaders and congregations were active and vocal supporters of the in-

carcerated Riders, a growing number of whom were Jewish.