Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
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356 Freedom Riders
were frequent and undoubtedly justified, some of the Riders, especially those
from poor or working-class backgrounds, felt that such complaints smacked
of bourgeois privilege and were inappropriate in a movement of mass libera-
tion. On several occasions individuals or groups of Riders called for a general
hunger strike and total noncooperation with prison authorities “until the food
gets better,” but no such strike ever materialized, even during the salt epi-
sode. Interestingly enough, the hunger strikes that did occur had more to do
with individual conscience and Gandhian strategy than inedible food. And
even the philosophically based hunger strikes led to disagreements about the
etiquette and timing of prison-constricted protest. “Those who went on long
fasts,” Bill Mahoney recalled, “justified Gandhi’s remark that at times he had
to fast in spite of his followers’ refusal to join him; others, who would fast
only when there were numbers large enough to be politically effective, said
that they took this stand in accord with Gandhi’s practice of only making
meaningful sacrifices.”
Most of the hunger strikes at Parchman—unlike the earlier fasts at the
Jackson and Hinds County jails—were short-lived and unpublicized, but there
were a few exceptions. After Ken Shilman, an eighteen-year-old white Free-
dom Rider from Long Island, posted bond on June 20, he told the press that
three of his fellow inmates were conducting a prolonged hunger strike to
protest the inhumane conditions at Parchman. One of the hunger strikers,
Price Chatham, a twenty-nine-year-old white Rider from East Rockaway,
New York, had begun his fast in Jackson on June 2 and had not eaten for
nearly three weeks. According to Shilman, Chatham’s weight had dropped
from 150 to 120 pounds, endangering his health. Prison authorities disputed
Shilman’s claim, insisting that Chatham was actually sneaking food from other
prisoners and had lost only two and a half pounds during his so-called fast.
To prove their point, they placed Chatham in solitary confinement on June
23, a move that brought his fast to an end three days later. Whatever the
truth of Shilman’s claims on behalf of his friend, the episode demonstrated
the difficulty of using a hunger strike to send a message from Parchman to
the outside world.
16
Fortunately, there were other means of reaching beyond the prison’s
walls. While personal visitors were prohibited, carefully monitored contact
with visiting ministers, rabbis, and priests was allowed. And even though
letters to and from the Freedom Riders were routinely censored by prison
authorities, some Riders developed elaborate codes to foil the censors. Oth-
ers relied on the periodic release of individual Riders as a means of delivering
messages to friends and family members or of publicizing what was going on
at Parchman. Shilman’s description of the inhumane conditions in the maxi-
mum security wing was only the first of several exposés offered by recently
released Freedom Riders. After posting bond on June 29 and returning to his
home in Victoria, British Columbia, Michael Audain gave the press a de-
tailed briefing on the treatment being dispensed at Parchman, including the
Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 357
removal of the mattresses and the use of “wrist breakers,” viselike metal clamps
that administered excruciating pain when tightened. “I would not describe it
as torture,” Audain told reporters, with a touch of sarcasm, “because I do not
know the precise definition of that word, but I would at least say it was very
brutal treatment.”
After posting bond on July 3, Jim Farmer issued similar charges during
an emotional Independence Day press conference in Jackson. Joined by CORE
field secretary Jim McCain, Farmer held forth on the situation at Parchman
and on the movement’s plans for the future—and he did not hold back on
either front. After predicting that his experiences at Parchman would prove
valuable to CORE’s efforts “to orient new riders about what to expect there,”
he confessed that his time in prison had “tried my faith in human nature.”
Judging by what he had seen and experienced, “the policy of the prison is the
dehumanization of the riders, to make us as animals.” Prison authorities had
violated the Riders’ civil rights at every turn, Farmer insisted, and Superin-
tendent Fred Jones was well aware of what was going on. When asked to
respond to the charges by Farmer and others, Jones simply grinned and said
he had never intended “to turn the prison into a country club.” Referring to
the mattress episode, he declared that “a penitentiary must have some order
and discipline. . . . This is a bunch of trouble makers . . . who came here to
make trouble. They thought they could come down here and take over, but
they’re not going to take over as long as I’m here.”
17
Such explanations drew wry smiles from local reporters and other white
Mississippians, but they did not dispel the growing suspicion that the Free-
dom Riders were being systematically mistreated at Parchman. On the day of
Farmer’s release, Minnesota governor Elmer Andersen ordered the head of
the state Human Rights Commission, Wright Brooks, to conduct an investi-
gation of the conditions at Parchman. Two weeks earlier the families of the
six Minnesota Freedom Riders arrested and jailed in Mississippi had asked
Anderson to help them gain access to their children, but Anderson’s appeal
on their behalf had gotten nowhere. Frustrated by Ross Barnett’s seeming
indifference to the parents’ concerns, he eventually decided to send Brooks
and Assistant Attorney General John Casey Jr. to Mississippi for a “first-
hand look at the situation.”
When the two Minnesota officials arrived in Jackson on July 6, a defiant
Barnett placed severe restrictions on the investigation. While the Minneso-
tans “would be permitted to view jail facilities in Jackson, Hinds County and
at Parchman” and talk with the jailed Minnesota Riders for “about five min-
utes,” they would not be allowed to conduct an extended inspection of penal
conditions. Mississippi had nothing to hide, Barnett assured Brooks and Casey,
pointing out that earlier in the week a local judge had asked a Hinds County
grand jury to visit Parchman on a fact-finding mission. Indeed, Barnett even
arranged for the Minnesotans to take a tour of Jackson State College and
other “Negro facilities” to demonstrate how much racial progress had been
358 Freedom Riders
made in recent years. Nevertheless, when the two officials arrived at Parchman
they were given only a cursory look at the prison’s cell blocks and only a
brief, tightly monitored visit with their fellow Minnesotans. With most of
their scheduled time at Parchman taken up by a lavish dinner with Superin-
tendent Jones and his wife, they had little chance to gather the kind of de-
tailed information that they had been told to gather. Predictably, their
subsequent report was noticeably lacking in specifics and of little value to
Governor Anderson or the worried parents back in Minnesota. In fact, to the
dismay of movement leaders, the report all but absolved Mississippi prison
officials of any wrongdoing. Brooks told reporters upon her return to Min-
nesota: “A tour of the prison facilities has convinced me that there have been
no examples of mistreatment or abuse.” Other than a few complaints about
the food and requests for more exercise, there were allegedly no problems to
report. Claire O’Connor, who posted bond and returned to Minnesota just
prior to Brooks’s visit, presented a darker version of Parchman to anyone
who would listen. But her personal testimony had little impact on the official
response to the plight of the Minnesota Six.
18
BOTH THEN AND LATER SOME OBSERVERS suspected that the Brooks Report
was a whitewash. But others concluded that the report accurately reflected
the treatment accorded white Freedom Riders. The treatment of black Rid-
ers, it was commonly assumed, was far worse—not an unreasonable assump-
tion considering Parchman’s unrivaled reputation for racial oppression.
Notorious for breaking both the spirit and the flesh of black men, Parchman
epitomized a criminal justice system dedicated to the interests of racial con-
trol and exploitation. Forged in the image of Mississippi’s caste system, it
was a plantation masquerading as a prison, a place where the state’s least
fortunate black laborers went to suffer and die. Thus, even though whites
also suffered and sometimes died there, the mystique of Parchman was gen-
erally more intense for black prisoners. This is not to say that the white Free-
dom Riders who spent time at Parchman felt safe and secure. On the contrary,
in the aftermath of the assaults in Birmingham and Montgomery there was
no longer any doubt that under certain conditions white segregationist rage
could fixate just as easily on white transgression as on its black equivalent.
Indeed, the brutal beatings of Jim Peck, Jim Zwerg, and Walter Bergman indi-
cated that at least some segregationists were capable of a special rage when
confronted by white civil rights activists. Still, not even these harrowing events
could overturn the conventional wisdom that the institutional manifestations
of white supremacy were more dangerous for blacks than whites.
This was certainly true of the Freedom Riders themselves, many of whom
felt extremely uncomfortable about the imposed racial segregation in Missis-
sippi jails and prisons. At Parchman, all of the Freedom Riders, black and
white, lived in the same maximum security unit, but the unit’s individual
cells were rigidly segregated. While blacks and whites sometimes found them-
Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 359
selves in adjoining cells, they were not allowed to share the same living quar-
ters. In such a Jim Crow setting, differential treatment of some kind was
virtually inevitable, even though the basic physical conditions of food, cloth-
ing, and shelter seem to have been the same for both races. How meaningful
these differences were to those who suffered relative deprivation probably
varied from individual to individual, and from cell to cell, but the racialized
nature of the overall Parchman experience was, at the very least, an unfortu-
nate reality that interrupted the rising interracialism of the nonviolent move-
ment. Denied the opportunity to practice racial integration in prison, black
and white Riders were prevented from practicing what they preached.
19
The separation of male and female Freedom Riders was an additional
source of guilt and anxiety. Both in the Hinds County and Jackson jails and
at Parchman, the female Riders faced many of the same problems and condi-
tions as the men—racial segregation, bad food, monotony, and even the re-
moval of their mattresses—but they also had to deal with persistent fears
related to gender and sexual vulnerability. While several had been arrested
before, none had spent more than a few days behind bars. Nor did any of
them have any extended experience with an artificial environment detached
from the traditional world of men and women. Virtually all of the female
Riders, black or white, had been reared in families where some man or woman,
either a father or a mother, or perhaps an older brother or sister, assumed
the role of custodian; and most had an array of other protectors, friends both
male and female, who constituted an extended support system that could be
called upon in time of need. None of this was available to them in the jails of
Mississippi, where normal patterns of both “feminine” and dependent be-
havior lost meaning and relevance. At one time or another, insecurity and
anomic disorientation plagued almost all of the jailed Freedom Riders, male
or female. But, in the pre-sexual-revolution context of the early 1960s, prob-
lems related to privacy, hygiene, and personal security often held a special
significance for women.
Of course, what made them especially vulnerable was not so much gen-
der per se as it was the assumption that they had crossed the boundaries of
racial and sexual decency. In the Deep South, women often found them-
selves on a cultural pedestal of affection and sentimental deference, but there
was no room on this pedestal for women who abandoned the shibboleths of
regional orthodoxy. In the calculus of patriarchal traditionalists, white women
who collaborated with black men to attack the cultural mores of the South
did not deserve to be treated as women, much less ladies. Neither did black
women who violated Southern conventions from the opposite direction.
Female transgressions, even when they were essentially political, could sel-
dom be separated from the broader assault on white supremacy. To many
white segregationists, women riding on buses with men of another race was
a sexually provocative act that could not be ignored or forgiven. To them,
the very fabric of civilization was at stake, and the women involved deserved
360 Freedom Riders
punishment harsh enough to deter other women from straying from the fold.
Such attitudes seemed to be especially common among white Mississippians,
who could turn even the most casual conversation about the Freedom Rides
into a discourse on miscegenation. William Kunstler had been in the state
less than a week when he encountered this fixation during a visit to Governor
Barnett’s office. After learning that Kunstler was both an ardent integration-
ist and the father of two daughters, Barnett could not resist asking the ques-
tion: “Mr. Kunstler, what would you think if your daughter married a dirty,
kinky-headed, fieldhand nigger?” Stunned by Barnett’s language, Kunstler
shot back that his daughter, like all American women, had “the right to select
her own husband.” Unmoved, Barnett warned the New York lawyer that the
real goal of the civil rights movement was intermarriage. “That’s all the niggers
want,” the governor insisted.
From the moment they arrived in Mississippi, the female Riders had to
deal with variations of this theme, including the insinuation that they were
fallen women who had joined the movement as a sexual lark. Whatever their
actual behavior, they were treated as little more than civil rights whores.
While there is no evidence that any of the women were raped—a violation
that was probably precluded by the glare of publicity surrounding the Free-
dom Riders—other sexual indignities were common. For Carol Ruth Silver,
a white Freedom Rider from New York who kept a detailed diary during her
six weeks of incarceration in Mississippi, the undercurrent of sexual suspi-
cion became palpable when detectives interrogated her the day after her ar-
rest. With no apparent justification, she was bombarded with questions about
interracial sex. Had she ever dated “Negro boys”? Would she be willing to
marry a Negro? Over the next few weeks, such questions would become al-
most routine for Silver and the other female Riders.
Insulting and unwelcome questions represented only a small part of the
sexually related intimidation that the women were forced to endure. After
their arrival at Parchman, the female Riders had to deal with male guards
who could not resist watching them undress and shower and with a prison
doctor who conducted invasive and unnecessary vaginal examinations. The
strong suspicion that the doctor used the same cloth glove for all the women
he examined added to the feeling of victimization and served as a symbol of
the prison staff’s contempt for the female Riders. During most of their stay
at Parchman, the female Riders were placed under the collective supervision
of one male guard, one matron, and a staff of female trusties. In actuality,
though, they received little attention from prison authorities, other than the
delivery of daily rations. On several occasions the guards and trusties all but
ignored requests for medical attention, including one instance in which a
young California Freedom Rider, Janice Rogers, suffered a miscarriage.
This was Parchman at its worst. Fortunately, there was another side to
the women’s saga. As one of the first female Riders to be transferred to Parch-
man, Silver was able to experience—and to chronicle—not only the hard-
Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 361
ships and indignities of prison life but also the evolution of resistance and
community in the women’s section of the maximum security unit. Like the
male Freedom Riders who lived at the opposite end of the unit, the women
were racially segregated and housed in small six-foot by nine-foot cells. Un-
like the men, however, the women were crowded into a tight cluster of thir-
teen cells that provided opportunities for considerable interaction and
collaboration. Thus for them the Parchman experience took on a more col-
lective cast than the cell-by-cell pairings that dominated prison life among
the men. Perhaps for this reason, the women, even more than the men, were
able to turn Parchman into a makeshift school of political education and
cultural enrichment. In addition to endless rounds of freedom songs, female
Freedom Riders organized nonviolent workshops, political seminars, ballet
lessons, French classes, and even a series of lectures on Roman history and
Greek mythology. Not all of the women participated in these activities, and
prison life was never easy for the female Riders. But the stories of resilience
and ingenuity that appear in Silver’s diary and other sources stand as a testa-
ment to the female Riders’ determination to make the best of a difficult situ-
ation. While some of the women found Parchman unbearable and posted
bond as soon as bail money became available, many others stuck it out for a
month or more, creating a saga of survival that became a staple of movement
lore. Often condescended to as the “weaker sex,” they very nearly proved the
opposite during the first “freedom summer” at Parchman.
20
At the same time, women prisoners, like their male counterparts, discov-
ered the difficulty of reaching a consensus in a group that spanned a wide
range of cultural backgrounds and personal philosophies. Even before they
arrived at Parchman, the cancellation of a planned hunger strike caused hard
feelings among several of the female Riders. On June 14, after learning that
many of the male Riders were about to be transferred to Parchman, eleven of
the women at the Hinds County Jail agreed “to go on a hunger strike until
the boys come back or we are sent there.” Selecting Pauline Knight, a twenty-
year-old black student from Nashville, as their designated spokesperson, the
eleven women began a fast that within a day caused one of them, Winonah
Beamer—a nineteen-year-old white Rider from Ohio—to faint and others to
question how long they could hold out. Though several of the hunger strik-
ers were determined to make good on their pledge, the strike quickly col-
lapsed when attorney Jack Young persuaded Knight that fasting in a Mississippi
jail was a waste of time and energy. Before the end of the second day, Knight
had announced that as far as she was concerned the strike was over, a deci-
sion immediately seconded by Ruby Doris Smith and at least two other black
Riders. Among several of the white hunger strikers, however, Knight’s state-
ment engendered considerable resentment. As Silver chronicled in her diary:
“All eleven of us had considered very carefully the value, implications, etc.,
of this strike, its objectives and purpose and how it should be run. We felt a
great deal of resentment against Pauline for not having consulted with us in
362 Freedom Riders
the first place. . . . We had all felt very strongly that the spokesman for the
strike and the leadership of it should come from one of the Negro girls rather
than from one of us in this cell, but we also felt that as individuals equally
with them involved in a democratic movement, we had at least the right to be
treated equally.”
21
This was not the last time that hard feelings and misunderstandings would
disrupt the solidarity of the women Riders, and the necessity of compromise
and cultural negotiation became one of the prime lessons of the prison expe-
rience. But with the women, as with the men, the problem of bridging racial
and philosophical gaps never reached the level of a true crisis. While several
incidents foreshadowed the deep divisions that would plague the movement
later in the decade, the newness of the experience and the relative innocence
of the Riders, male and female, seemed to foster a spirit of cooperation that
eliminated the worst manifestations of suspicion and distrust. Though the
Riders were flesh-and-blood human beings and hardly infallible, the com-
mon ground of the emerging freedom struggle provided a foundation for
generosity and forgiveness that few movements, before or since, have been
able to match. On a number of occasions strong feelings and tactless state-
ments led to frayed nerves and even angry outbursts, but with few exceptions
the Riders seemed to be able to absorb whatever barbs came their way with a
measure of disarming grace or humor.
Even the acerbic Stokely Carmichael generally produced more comic
relief than meanness when he tangled with other Riders. Steve Green, for
one, discovered the comic side of Carmichael during his first week at
Parchman. After Green introduced himself as a student at Middlebury and
offered an “exuberant” prediction that “hundreds if not thousands of college
students . . . would head to Jackson when the school year ended,” Carmichael,
the son of struggling West Indian immigrants, yelled out: “Hey, guys, did
you hear that? We just need to hold on here until Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
let out, and then there’s going to be an invasion of the Deep South by rich
white kids.” Momentarily stung by Carmichael’s sarcasm, Green managed
only a perfunctory response that was drowned out by gales of laughter. But it
didn’t take him long to develop respect for Carmichael’s hard-earned cyni-
cism. “Stokely was a bit rough,” Green acknowledged in a candid memoir of
his Parchman experience, “but then, as later, he was mostly right.” In John
Lewis’s memory, Carmichael was the most argumentative of the Freedom
Riders in Parchman. With his strong views and sharp tongue, he could be an
unsettling influence, and his challenges to what he viewed as a misguided
faith in Gandhian sacrifice often irritated Lewis and others. Carmichael’s
dissent did not, however, lead to serious disruption or consistent factional-
ism. During the mid-1960s his fervent advocacy of “Black Power” would
have major consequences and effectively split the movement, but in 1961
there was no such cleavage.
Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 363
For Green, Lewis, and Carmichael, as for Silver and Knight, prison was
not so much a battleground as it was a testing ground where generalizations
and stereotypes related to race, class, region, and religion could be examined
and reconsidered. As Carmichael later recalled: “What with the range of
ideology, religious belief, political commitment and background, age, and
experience, something interesting was always going on. Because, no matter
our differences, this group had one thing in common, moral stubbornness.
Whatever we believed, we really believed and were not at all shy about
advancing. We were where we were only because of our willingness to af-
firm our beliefs even at the risk of physical injury. So it was never dull on
death row.” For many of the Riders, the time at Parchman represented their
first extended experience with exotic allies—movement activists who had
grown up in places that they had read about but never visited. Freedom
Riders of all descriptions—blacks and whites, Northerners and Southern-
ers, Christians and Jews, working-class laborers and relatively privileged
students—discovered firsthand that the freedom struggle was a movement of
multiple and shifting perspectives. In such a setting, they could not help but
learn from each other. Indeed, despite the artificial constraint of racially seg-
regated cells, they all shared enough of the dangers and challenges of mass
incarceration to develop a level of mutual respect that would have been im-
possible under less authoritarian circumstances.
This was not, of course, what Ross Barnett and his lieutenants had in-
tended. But, like the imposed institutionalization of Jim Crow in the early
twentieth-century South, the mass incarceration of Freedom Riders at
Parchman had unintended consequences for a movement that had long suf-
fered from organizational disunity and fragmentation. Not only did the un-
resolved crisis at Parchman provide a temporary focus for the movement at
large, but also the personal dynamics of the drama being played out in the cells
and corridors of the prison acted as a unifying force among the Freedom
Riders themselves. Organizationally, the Freedom Rider coalition remained
a fragile entity. Indeed, the cooperative spirit among the Riders at Parchman
suggested that a meaningful convergence of CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the
Nashville Movement was more likely to take place inside the walls of a prison
than outside. Why this was so is difficult to explain, but in a state renowned
for paradox and irony the prison-based maturation of a democratic social
movement somehow seems fitting.
22
WHATEVER THEIR ULTIMATE SIGNIFICANCE, the unexpected benefits derived
from the gathering at Parchman were not apparent enough at the time to
alter the movement’s strategy of challenging the constitutionality of the Free-
dom Riders’ arrests and imprisonment. Having already proven that they could
mobilize hundreds of activists willing to go jail for their beliefs, movement
leaders saw little advantage in prolonging the struggle. In addition to the
obvious injustice involved, Mississippi’s policy of fining Freedom Riders and
364 Freedom Riders
sentencing them to long jail terms placed a heavy legal and financial burden
on CORE, which continued to bear the primary responsibility for under-
writing and sustaining the Freedom Rider movement. In effect, Mississippi’s
decision to arrest the Freedom Riders had initiated a war of attrition, a con-
test between the state’s ability to accommodate wave after wave of Riders
and the movement’s capacity to sustain them, financially and otherwise. As
of early July the outcome of this struggle was still very much in doubt, and
Farmer and others worried that the movement’s greatest challenges lay ahead.
To this point much of the financial cost had been postponed by the Riders’
decision to forgo bail, but this favorable situation was about to end, thanks to
a provision of Mississippi’s disorderly conduct statute that required the jailed
Riders to post bond within forty days of conviction. Riders who missed this
deadline lost their right of appeal and any alternative to serving out their
entire sentence. In this context, posting bond on the thirty-ninth day became
an essential part of the Riders’ legal challenge to Mississippi’s Jim Crow sys-
tem. The day of reckoning varied depending on the date of conviction, but
for the first group of Riders—those convicted on May 26—the thirty-ninth
day was Tuesday, July 4. While more than a third of the first group had
already posted bond, fifteen remained in jail as the deadline approached.
The first mass bailout, which actually took place on July 7 due to proce-
dural delays, brought joy and liberation to the Freedom Riders involved. But
it also represented an ominous development for a movement perpetually short
of funds. For each Freedom Rider, bond was set at five hundred dollars, but
that was only the beginning of the financial burden imposed by litigation. In
addition to the bond payment, CORE had to come up with enough money
to provide each Freedom Rider with a defense attorney, transportation back
home, and, at some time later in the summer, transportation back to Missis-
sippi for an appellate trial. When combined with court costs, housing costs,
the purchase of bus and train tickets for the actual Freedom Rides, and other
miscellaneous outlays, the average cost per Freedom Rider was well over a
thousand dollars. CORE had raised a considerable amount of money since
late May, prompting Marvin Rich, the organization’s financial coordinator,
to exclaim in a letter to Farmer in early June: “More and more freedom rid-
ers should be moving toward Jackson in the next two weeks—and we have
the money to get them there!” But CORE leaders felt less flush by early July.
With more than a hundred Freedom Riders already in jail and the prospect
of hundreds more by the end of the summer, the projected budget required
to sustain the Freedom Rider movement had risen to more than a half mil-
lion dollars.
23
At his postrelease press conference in Jackson, Farmer was careful to
avoid any mention of CORE’s precarious financial situation. He was equally
discreet when he arrived at New York’s LaGuardia Airport the next day.
Greeted by his pregnant wife, Lula, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter,
Tami, and more than a hundred friends and colleagues sporting buttons pro-
Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 365
claiming “Freedom Now–CORE,” he was all smiles as he entered the termi-
nal. Standing in front of a large banner that read “Welcome Home, Big Jim,”
the crowd erupted into song as he rushed to embrace his family. “We Shall
Overcome,” they sang over and over again, giving reporters and other on-
lookers a glimpse of the movement’s soaring spirit. Later, after one of the
well-wishers in the crowd began singing a special version of the spiritual
“We Shall Not Be Moved,” the entire gathering joined in. “Farmer is our
leader, We shall not be moved,” they chanted. “Just like a tree that’s planted
by the waters, We shall not be moved.” Years later Farmer described the
scene as one of the high points of his life and a “dizzying” introduction to
national fame. As soon as he stepped off the plane, he felt as if he had been
thrust into an “Alice-in-Wonderland world.” “I was blinded by flashbulbs.”
he recalled. “Microphones were shoved into my face as newspersons jock-
eyed for position. Television cameras recorded my walk to the terminal as if
each step were a stride into history.” During his six weeks of isolation at
Parchman, he had developed some sense of the Freedom Rides’ widening
impact, but the realization that the project had already exceeded his wildest
expectations did not hit him with full force until he returned to New York.
As he told the reporters at LaGuardia, the Freedom Rides had unleashed a
transcendent feeling of hope and redemption that was stronger than any force
wielded by demagogic politicians or prison wardens. Despite the desperate
efforts of men like Ross Barnett and Fred Jones, the nonviolent movement
This picture was taken in July 1961 in Chicago, where these six Freedom Riders—
all Nashville Movement veterans—had gathered to raise funds for CORE. From
left to right: Bill Harbour, Lucretia Collins, Jim Zwerg, Catherine Burks, John
Lewis, and Paul Brooks. (Courtesy of Bill Harbour)