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

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346 Freedom Riders

cooperation with the highway patrol and the White Citizens’ Councils, the

commission was empowered “to do and perform any and all acts and things

deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mis-

sissippi, and her sister states.” Like the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI)

and Florida’s Legislative Investigation Committee, also known as the Johns

Committee, the Sovereignty Commission patterned itself after the FBI, tar-

geting alleged subversives and troublemakers. Even before the first group of

Freedom Riders arrived in Mississippi, the commission was on the case, com-

piling information on CORE, SNCC, and movement leaders. Once the

rounds of arrests began, investigators monitored every aspect of the Free-

dom Rides, amassing files on each Rider and scrutinizing anyone who pub-

licly supported the Rides.

Although the stated rationale for this massive effort was the preservation

of civic order, the driving force behind the Sovereignty Commission’s inves-

tigative activities was the deeply held conviction that the civil rights move-

ment, including the Freedom Rides, was connected to an international

Communist conspiracy. The sense of panic that spread across much of the

Deep South in the summer of 1961 was, first and foremost, a reaction to

what appeared to be an impending loss of racial privilege and social control.

But the intensity of the resistance to the Freedom Riders had a lot to do with

the widespread perception that they were “outside agitators” in the truest

sense of the term, that they represented forces alien and hostile to American

values. The notion that the Freedom Rides were part of a Communist plot

first emerged in Alabama in mid-May when Bull Connor, Attorney General

MacDonald Gallion, and others played upon Cold War suspicions of a grand

conspiracy to subvert the Southern way of life. Later, after the focus of the

Rides moved to Jackson, the Communist linkage became the stock-in-trade

of Mississippi politicians and editors attempting to discredit the campaign.

On June 9, for example, the Jackson Daily News printed an exposé of

CORE and FOR under the headline “Record Reveals Close Ties of Leftwing

Organizations—‘Freedom-Riding’ CORE Linked with Conspiratorial Out-

fits.” Increasingly sensational exposés followed, and the Daily News and other

local papers printed scores of articles and letters to the editor reinforcing the

themes of conspiracy and subversion. One letter from a Camden, South Caro-

lina, man insisted that “the so-called ‘freedom riders’ were really backed by

the Communists and their dupes, the NAACP, CORE, and others,” adding:

“When you fight to stop these ‘Riders’ you are also fighting communism.”

Speaking in Memphis on June 20, Robert Welch, the head of the ultra-

conservative John Birch Society, claimed that Communists were “behind the

Freedom Rides,” and two days later Alabama congressman Michael Hud-

dleston asked the House Un-American Activities Committee to launch a full-

scale investigation of the Freedom Rides. Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland,

the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, had already

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 347

hinted that he was considering a similar investigation, and in late June the

momentum for a congressional probe continued to build.

Despite rising concerns, the political and editorial Red-baiting of the

Freedom Riders remained unfocused until June 29, when General T. B.

Birdsong, the head of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, revealed that his in-

vestigators had discovered that at least two white Freedom Riders had at-

tended a “Communist planning workshop” in Havana, Cuba, three months

before the start of the Rides. Under the sensational headlines “Soviets Planned

‘Freedom Rides’ ” and “No God, Non-Christian—FR’s Learn Trade in Red

School,” the Jackson Daily News and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that

Katherine Pleune, a twenty-one-year-old Chicago woman, and Jim

Wahlstrom, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the University of

Wisconsin, were among 202 American students who had traveled to Cuba to

meet with “nine officials of Soviet Russia.” According to Birdsong, the pur-

pose of the meeting was “to teach the students how to make sit-ins, walk-ins,

kneel-ins, and Freedom Rides.” Both Pleune and Wahlstrom freely admitted

that they had gone to Havana in February as part of a student “Fair Play for

Cuba” tour. But after Pleune refused to divulge whether she was a member

of the Communist Party, Birdsong concluded that she was an active con-

spirator, especially after she revealed that she was an atheist who “did not

receive a Christian upbringing” and that she had been arrested dozens of

times for picketing racially segregated facilities, including the CIA headquar-

ters in Washington.

Even more disturbing, according to Birdsong, was the mounting evi-

dence that Pleune’s unsavory background was typical of the Freedom Riders.

In addition to a record of convictions for auto theft, burglary, and grand

larceny, as well as “undesirable discharges from military service,” some Rid-

ers were clearly “Communist backed, pawns in the hands of Communist

powers that be.” Art Richardson, the highway patrol’s public relations chief,

issued an even bolder charge, announcing that the Freedom Rides had been

“planned and directed by the communists.” “We have known for some time

the communist party is behind the freedom rider movement,” Richardson

added. “Now we’re getting some proof.” This statement drew an angry de-

nial from Gordon Carey, who, after terming such accusations “so ridiculous

as to merit no reply,” replied anyway “because the reputation of scores of

imprisoned Freedom Riders is at stake.” “The Freedom Rides have no con-

nection whatsoever with the Communist party in this nation or any other,”

Carey declared.

Such denials carried little weight in a state where many prominent editors

and politicians regarded the connection between civil rights agitation and Com-

munist subversion as self-evident. For many white Mississippians, the most

trusted source of information on public affairs was the White Citizens’ Coun-

cils’ monthly newsletter, The Citizens’ Council, which made frequent reference

348 Freedom Riders

to the conspiratorial designs of “CORE and its Communist-tinged support-

ers” and which repeated even the most outlandish accusations against the

Freedom Riders and other movement activists. Quoting Senator Eastland,

the June 1961 issue of the Citizens’ Council reported that “CORE is known as

the war department of the U.S. integration movement. Since its inception,

its creed has been lawlessness and its tactics have followed the pattern set by

Communist agitators the world over.” Not to be outdone, Mississippi con-

gressman John Bell Williams, quoted in the same issue, stated flatly that the

Freedom Riders were “part of the Communist conspiracy to destroy America.”

Such rhetoric was also featured in a widely syndicated radio program, The

Citizens’ Council Forum. In mid-July, a Citizens Council spokesman boasted

that three special programs focusing on the subversive nature of the Free-

dom Rides had been distributed to more than four hundred stations in forty-

two states. On one program, Mississippi attorney general Joe Patterson assured

an interviewer that “there is not a bit of doubt in the world that Communist

influence is behind the freedom rides. The Communists have endorsed the

program, and it is in direct keeping with their plan of activity in the South, to

go in and create chaos, confusion, strife and discontent among the races.”

Though generally speculative, these assertions were sometimes grounded

in what appeared to be hard evidence, such as the supposed exposé of Pleune

and Wahlstrom or pro–Freedom Rider statements in the Soviet press. Equally

alarming were the periodic reports that Communist activists in Northern

cities were openly agitating on behalf of the Freedom Riders. Under the

headline “Communists Mount Soapboxes in NYC to Back Riders,” the Citi-

zens’ Council described the sinister activities of party leaders, including James

Jackson, the editor of the Daily Worker, and Benjamin Davis, the national

secretary of the CPUSA, both of whom were black. At a series of rallies in

midtown Manhattan, Jackson and others used sound trucks to incite the pub-

lic to exert pressure on behalf of the Freedom Riders in “the union, in your

shops, and in your neighborhoods.” Such activities, which undoubtedly raised

a few eyebrows even among politically jaded New Yorkers, communicated a

frightening message to white Mississippians—and perhaps to many other

Americans as well.

While the practice of tar-brushing the Freedom Riders with the Com-

munist label was most evident in the Deep South, it was not unknown in

other parts of the country. Northern conservatives such as the columnist

Walter Winchell also tried to discredit the Riders by linking them to Com-

munists and other political subversives. “The Communist Party, always anx-

ious to exploit our racial problems,” Winchell reported on July 4, “is busy

turning out stickers focusing attention on the Freedom Riders. Some of the

commy-written slogans are: ‘Action, Yes. Cool Off, No’ . . . ‘Ride the South

the Freedom Way,’ etc.” Winchell, like most cosmopolitan conservatives,

characterized the Freedom Riders as Communist dupes rather than as active

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 349

conspirators, but one suspects that this distinction did little to calm the fears

of Americans caught in the throes of Cold War hysteria. At the very least,

the Freedom Riders had powerful and brazen allies who were bent on the

destruction of the American way of life, and for many Americans this was

more than enough justification to withhold support from a movement that

they might otherwise endorse.

THE GROWING DIVERSITY of the Freedom Riders also affected the internal

dynamics of the movement. Any movement that involved multiple organiza-

tions, hundreds of participants, and thousands of active supporters was bound

to have a measure of inconsistency and internal conflict. This was especially

true in a protest movement that faced the emotional and physical challenges

of mass incarceration. Beginning in late May, prison life was the dominant

reality for most of the Freedom Riders, including many of the movement’s

leaders. The fact that Farmer, Lewis, Bevel, Walker, and hundreds of others

shared the Parchman experience provided a certain commonality, a bond of

sacrifice and struggle that fostered a sense of solidarity. Yet, at the same time,

the intensity and uncertain outcome of the experience sometimes reinforced

and even accentuated existing differences of perspective, political ideology,

and philosophical conviction. While Parchman often brought people together

in ways that they could not have imagined before entering the prison’s walls,

it sometimes had the opposite effect. Like most closed authoritarian institu-

tions, Parchman exerted a powerful influence over everyone in its grasp. But

for a group as diverse and determined as the Freedom Riders it was an im-

perfect and unpredictable crucible of personal survival, collective engage-

ment, and movement culture.

The depth and variety of the Freedom Riders’ prison experiences had a

lot do with the special conditions created for them at Parchman. For the

Riders, even more than for regular inmates, Parchman was a world unto it-

self. While beatings and acts of outright brutality were rare, the world of

isolation and deprivation mandated by Mississippi authorities tested the lim-

its of the Riders’ resilience. By order of Governor Barnett, the Freedom

Riders did no prison labor and were confined to their cells “throughout each

day, never going outside, even for exercise.” Spread out through the prison’s

large U-shaped maximum security wing, the Freedom Riders’ two-person

cells made group conversation and community life extremely difficult. In

early August, when the number of Freedom Riders in Parchman became too

large for the maximum security wing, many of the white male Riders were

transferred to the prison’s first offenders’ unit, where they lived barracks-

style in two large rooms filled with cots. During the first six weeks, though,

there was little or no opportunity for communal living, beloved or otherwise.

With a few exceptions, interaction beyond adjoining cells was limited to sing-

ing, which became a treasured lifeline for many of the Riders.

350 Freedom Riders

“The monotony was tremendous,” John Lewis recalled. “We had no

reading material other than the Bible, a palm-sized copy of the New Testa-

ment, which was given to each of us by the local Salvation Army. . . .We each

had our own metal-frame bed with a mattress made by the inmates. That, a

commode and a small washbowl completed the cell’s furnishings. There were

walls between the cells, so we could not see one another. Only when we were

taken out to shower, which was twice a week, did we see anyone but our

cellmate and the guards. Once a week we could write a letter.” The biweekly

shower, as Steve Green recalled many years later, “was easily the highlight of

each week” and a ritual that the Riders tried to make the most of:

We were instructed to strip the sheet off the beds and bring it with us. The

cell doors were opened one by one, and naked, two of us at a time could

proceed to the end of the hallway where we handed over our dirty sheet,

and were given a towel. In front of the guard door, we could shower and

shave with no mirror and, as the evening passed, an increasingly dull razor.

We then returned our towel, were issued a clean sheet, and told to return

to our cells. . . . It was the only time we could actually see each other, but

the trip down the hallway became an occasion for rude comments, heard

by all, and even a crude form of competitive theater. A bed sheet, we dis-

covered, could become a judge’s robe, or a hanging rope, or a cop’s club, or

a slave’s head dress and pants, or a pasha’s turban, or any number of cos-

tumes. The performances were more than entertainment—they also be-

came a form of “communication” with the guards who gathered around the

ward door at the end of the hallway, glaring at our depictions of the tradi-

tions of the South.

The shower ritual provided a brief respite from the loneliness and isola-

tion of cell life. But the dominant reality for Green, Lewis, and hundreds of

others was an involuntary personalization of time and space. Cut off from

family, friends, and worldly institutions, separated from the regular prison-

ers, constricted by the limits of cells and cellmates, and deprived of most of

life’s chosen pleasures, the Riders had no choice but to fall back upon them-

selves. Consigned to seemingly endless hours of reflection, introspection,

and contemplation, they lived primarily in interior worlds dominated by

matters of mind and spirit. Freedom songs, hunger strikes, and other provo-

cations provided a semblance of community life. For the most part, though,

the individual Freedom Riders were on their own.

It was in this context that Farmer, Lewis, and other leaders tried to main-

tain a modicum of unity and collective purpose. From the beginning of the

Freedom Rides, few had doubted the difficulty of building the beloved com-

munity. But doing so under these conditions was especially daunting, given

the wide differences of opinion among the Riders on matters of faith and

philosophy. Despite a common commitment to nonviolent direct action, the

philosophical distance between secular and religious activists involved per-

sistent and even fundamental disagreements. At one end of the spectrum, the

Nashville students led by Bevel, Lewis, and Lafayette pressed for a deep and

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 351

mystical commitment to a philosophy grounded in the principles of the Chris-

tian social gospel and Gandhianism. To them, nonviolent struggle was an

all-encompassing way of life and the challenges of Parchman were a wel-

come spur to greater sacrifice and commitment. By contrast, at the other end

of the spectrum avowedly secular and worldly activists such as the streetwise

New Yorker Stokely Carmichael saw the Freedom Riders’ predicament pri-

marily in terms of power and political realism. To them nonviolent direct

action was a tactical initiative that carried no meaning beyond its social and

political utility. Many others, of course, fell somewhere between these two

poles, and with so much time for thought and reflection nearly everyone was

engaged in some form of reformulation or reassessment. Consequently, there

was more dynamism than order, and for some, more confusion than clarity.

These swirling emotional and intellectual currents did not promote con-

sistent factionalism or submit to easy categorization, but there were discern-

ible patterns of thought and behavior that both divided and unified the jailed

Riders. According to Bill Mahoney, a Nonviolent Action Group activist from

Washington who spent forty days in cell 13, most of the Freedom Riders at

Parchman fell into three broad categories—“political, emotional, and moral.”

Drawing upon conversations with his cellmate and the Freedom Riders housed

in adjoining cells, Mahoney offered Marv Davidov, the radical Jewish art

dealer from Minnesota, as an example of the political group. To Davidov,

the Freedom Rides were essentially a “way of fighting a system which not

only hurts the Negro but is a threat to world peace and solidarity.” The men

who defend segregation, he told Mahoney, serve the same interests as those

who develop “war industries[,] . . . recklessly speculate in other countries,

and in general . . . meticulously exploit masses of people.” Representing the

second group was Mahoney’s cellmate, a young black musician from Nash-

ville who was relatively uninterested in politics but nonetheless passionately

committed to the Freedom Rides. A close friend of William Barbee’s, he had

decided to become a Freedom Rider after Barbee suffered serious injuries

during the Montgomery bus station riot. Living next door, in cell 12, was an

example of the third group—“the son of a well-to-do businessman who had

come because it was his moral duty.” Politically moderate, “he spoke proudly

of his father who had fought hard and ‘made it,’ and was constantly defend-

ing North America’s economic and political system from the attacks made

upon it by myself and the art dealer.”

In this particular microcosm of the Parchman experience, there was little

movement toward consensus, but in the broader population of jailed activ-

ists, Mahoney detected a powerful common denominator that provided a

basis for intellectual dialogue if not convergence. “The name of Gandhi was

constantly on the minds and lips of most of the imprisoned riders,” he re-

called in an article published a few months after his release. “Anything Gandhi

had said or done was interpreted and reinterpreted to be applied to the situ-

ation in Mississippi.” Despite considerable disagreement on the meaning and

352 Freedom Riders

implications of the Indian philosopher’s life and teachings, Gandhianism

served as a touchstone for deliberation and debate. Competing versions of

Gandhian orthodoxy justified a wide range of positions on everything from

hunger strikes to the choice of freedom songs. Even within the ranks of the

Nashville group—generally the most experienced Gandhian activists at

Parchman—there were doctrinal disagreements. On balance, however, the

desire to stay on the right side of the Mahatma was a unifying force among

the jailed Riders.

In effect, the Freedom Riders turned a prison into an unruly but ulti-

mately enlightening laboratory where competing theories of nonviolent

struggle could be discussed and tested. In the darkest corners of Parchman,

where prison authorities had hoped to break the Riders’ spirit, a remarkable

mix of personal and political education became the basis of individual and

collective survival. Even though fear and insecurity remained an integral part

of the Parchman experience throughout the summer, it did not take long for

the Riders to make the best of a bad situation. Once they realized that Mis-

sissippi authorities did not dare resort to Parchman’s traditional means of

intimidation and control—namely, brutal, life-threatening violence—the

Riders, despite numerous indignities and aggravations, had the upper hand.

If federal officials and the national press had not been hovering over the

situation in Mississippi, the guards might have been given the authority to

unleash the full force of Parchman’s infamous brutality, but political and

cultural realities left Barnett and his lieutenants with a limited range of op-

tions. They could make the jailed Riders miserable by withholding privi-

leges, restricting movement, or serving inedible food. And, as John Lewis

recalled, they could keep the lights on “around the clock, making it difficult

to sleep,” or keep the windows closed as the Riders “baked in the airless

heat.” Indeed, they could even spray the Riders with fire hoses, as they did

on one occasion, and then bring in giant fans to blow cold air over shivering

bodies. But none of this was enough to slow the momentum of a nonviolent

movement that embraced unmerited suffering. While a few individual Rid-

ers buckled under the strain and abandoned their “jail–no bail” pledges, the

vast majority came to view the Parchman experience as an eminently surviv-

able rite of passage. Unwittingly, Mississippi authorities had provided them

with a means of achieving a higher stage of Gandhian consciousness, and

most of the Riders took full advantage of this ironic situation.

On occasion prison authorities resorted to the extreme measure of plac-

ing an offending Freedom Rider inside a six-foot by six-foot metal box known

as “the hole.” This horrific creation, located in the basement of the maxi-

mum security wing, offered its unlucky inhabitants “no light, no food,” and

only “an open hole in the floor for defecation.” But even the hole did not

always have the intended effect on those subjected to its dungeon-like aura.

A case in point was the unforgettable “concert” sung by a black Freedom

Rider from California with operatic training. Described by Steve Green in

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 353

his Parchman memoir, the Californian’s response to being put in the hole

was to take advantage of the discovery “that the metal walls of his box made

a perfect reverberator.” “That evening,” Green recalled, “as we began our

usual sing-along of protest songs, there rose from the bowels of the Parchman

Prison maximum security unit the notes of a beautiful spiritual. The volume

was incredible—his deep baritone could be clearly heard in every room of

the building, by prisoners and guards alike. In silence, with tears of joy in

some eyes and rage in others, we listened to the most moving concert I have

ever heard, to this day.”

The Riders’ ability to turn almost any situation to their advantage also

became clear during the so-called mattress war that began on June 24. After

a week of exuberant singing and preaching, the Riders had pushed their jail-

ers to the limits of endurance, prompting Deputy Tyson, the head of the

maximum security unit, to threaten to remove all of the mattresses in the cell

block if the Riders didn’t quiet down. Though ultimately a subject of dark

humor, the idea of taking away the Riders’ mattresses and forcing them to

sleep either on a concrete floor or on the cold metal coils of a box spring was

hardly a trivial matter at the time. As Jim Farmer recalled: “The mattresses

were the only convenience we had in those little cells. They were our link to

civilization, so to speak. Everything else was cold and hard and the mattress

was no more than an inch and a half thick, and straw, but at least it was

something.” Already sleep-deprived, many of the Riders soon fell silent in an

effort to keep their mattresses. But others could not resist transforming the

threatened removal into a test of moral fortitude.

Speaking in his best preacher’s voice, Jim Bevel yelled out: “What they’re

trying to do is take your soul away. It’s not the mattress, it’s your soul. . . .

Satan put us in here for forty days and forty nights. To tempt us with the

flesh. He’s sayin’ to us, ‘If you’ll just stop your singin’ and bail outta there,

I’ll give you anything you want—soft, thick, cotton mattresses and down

pillows and everything. Be good boys and I’ll let you keep your mattresses.’ ”

This call to righteousness elicited a round of concurring amens, especially

among Bevel’s Nashville colleagues, but the first Rider to turn Bevel’s words

into action was, surprisingly, Hank Thomas, a predominantly secular activist

who loved to sing. After bellowing, “Come get my mattress, I’ll keep my

soul,” Thomas propped his mattress up against the cell bars and urged the

other Riders to follow suit. Soon all but two had done so.

The only holdouts were cellmates Fred Leonard and Stokely Carmichael,

but when the guards and trustees came to collect the mattresses a few min-

utes later no exceptions were allowed, and they too lost their bedding. This

apparent injustice left Leonard and Carmichael fuming, but the rest of the

Riders broke into song, intoning the choruses of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody

Turn Me ’Round” and placing special emphasis on the lines “Ain’t gonna let

no jail house, Lordy, turn me ’round, I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, Lord,

keep on a-talkin’, Lord, marching up to freedom land.” The forceful singing

354 Freedom Riders

continued for hours, as the Riders worked their way through a medley of

freedom songs before falling asleep on their mattress-less box springs. The

next day Deputy Tyson returned the mattresses but warned that he would

take them away permanently if the Riders didn’t tone down their incessant

singing. Accepting the challenge, Thomas and several other Riders were soon

singing louder than ever, and Tyson promptly ordered the trustees to re-

trieve the mattresses, this time for good. As the trustees went through the

cell block, there was little resistance—until they reached Leonard and

Carmichael’s cell. After a brief struggle Carmichael surrendered his mat-

tress, but Leonard fought on, defying both Deputy Tyson and his fellow

Riders, the majority of whom had decided that voluntarily relinquishing the

mattresses was the best way to demonstrate moral authority. Undaunted,

Leonard clung to his mattress with a determination that he later recalled

with pride:

They drug me out into the cellblock. I still had my mattress, I wouldn’t

turn it loose. They were using black inmates to come and get our mat-

tresses, and I mean inmates. And there was this guy, Peewee they called

him, short and muscular. They said, “Peewee get him.” Peewee came down

on my head. Whomp, whomp—he was crying. Peewee was crying. And I still

had my mattress. Do you remember when your parents used to whup you

and say, “It’s going to hurt me more than it hurts you”? It hurt Peewee

more than it hurt me. I still wouldn’t turn my mattress loose, and they had

these things they put on my wrists like handcuffs, and they started twisting

and tightening them up—my bones start cracking and going on and finally

I turned my mattress loose.

After vanquishing Leonard, Deputy Tyson returned to the cell block to

gloat and to see if the Riders were ready to acknowledge his authority. As he

strutted along the cell bars, he was sorely disappointed by what he heard.

Instead of bowing down, the Riders mocked him. “Since those mattresses are

so valuable,” Lafayette yelled out, “why don’t you auction them off and tell

people that the Freedom Riders slept there. In that way, you can get back

some of the money the Freedom Rides are costing you. And we’ll sing a little

song at your auction.” Unaccustomed to such insolence from black prison-

ers, Tyson shot back: “You shut yo’ mouth, boy.” Realizing that he had struck

a nerve, Lafayette couldn’t resist following up with a question about the

deputy’s use of the word “boy.” “Deputy Tyson,” Lafayette asked, straining

to keep a straight face, “do you mean anything derogatory when you call us

boy?” Caught off guard, Tyson lost whatever composure he had left. “I don’t

know nuthin’ ’bout no ’rogatory,” he insisted. “All I know is if you boys don’t

stop that singin’, y’all gon’ be singin’ in the rain.” What he meant by this was

unclear, but within minutes Hank Thomas was singing a new stanza of the

old labor song “Which Side Are You On?” that went: “Ole big man Deputy

Tyson said, I don’ wanna cause you pain, But if you don’t stop that singin’

now, You’ll be singin’ in the rain.”

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 355

Hearing this taunt, Tyson ordered his guards to spray the cell block with

a high-pressure fire hose. Later, as the drenched Riders sat in their cells

wondering what other indignities Tyson was planning, the cell block win-

dows were opened and exhaust fans were turned on to confirm the message

of intimidation. During the long, cold night that followed, there was more

shivering and sniffling than singing in the cell block. But once they dried out,

the Riders returned to their singing as if nothing had happened. Indeed,

though the mattresses were gone, the struggle had left many of the Riders

with a new sense of collective purpose and pride. For a growing number of

Riders, the mystique of sacrifice and unmerited suffering was evolving into

an article of faith and a powerful source of individual and common resolve.

In a few cases, this evolution led to a blanket rejection of worldly con-

cerns. At some level, though, most of the Riders continued to struggle with

the competing concerns of mind and body. Most obviously, the nagging is-

sues of dealing with prison food and a lack of exercise were serious problems

for almost everyone. In early July, several days after the removal of the mat-

tresses, Jim Farmer discussed both issues with prison superintendent Fred

Jones. Granted a brief appointment in Jones’s office, Farmer, barefoot and

dressed only in a flimsy T-shirt and a pair of shorts, found himself straining

to keep his composure, desperately trying, as he later recalled, “to salvage

what dignity I could.” Avoiding any discussion of the mattresses, he made

only one request: that the Freedom Riders “be allowed to go outside and

work, along with the other prisoners.” Before he could elaborate on why he

felt this was so important, Jones summarily dismissed the suggestion as too

dangerous. “You all wouldn’t last two minutes out there,” he declared with a

sly smile. “The other nigras’d kill you. If you want to get y’selves killed, it’s

all right with me. But y’ain’t goin’ to do it here.” Undeterred, Farmer replied

that he and the other Riders “would gladly take our chances with the other

prisoners.” But Jones, turning deadly serious, made it clear that he had no

intention of providing the Riders with exercise, fresh air, or any other form

of comfort. “We ain’t goin’ to let y’all go no place,” he bellowed. “We didn’t

tell you all t’ come down here, but y’ came anyhow. Now, we want y’ to stay

in there an’ rot! We’ve got to feed ya, but we can put so much salt in y’ food

that y’ won’t be able to eat it. And that may be just what we’re gonna do.”

Later, back in the cell block, a dejected Farmer reported that the meeting

had been a waste of time and that the barely edible food the Riders had been

forcing down might get even worse.

During the following week Jones made good on his threat, instructing

the prison kitchen staff to lace the Riders’ food with mounds of salt. But, like

the removal of the mattresses, the salt episode turned out to be a minor physical

irritant that, at least for some, could be added to the lore of sacrifice and

resistance. Dealing with prison slop was never easy, of course, and from their

first days at Parchman the Riders had squabbled among themselves over how

to respond to the food issue. While complaints about the quality of the food