Civil Rights Events

Freedom Rides

Jackson, Mississippi, Parchman State Prison

 

Robert Kennedy was a close friend of Governor John Patterson of Alabama.   I had this long relationship with John Patterson …. He was our great pal in the South.  So he was doubly exercised at me – who was his friend and pal – to have involved him with suddenly surrounding this church with marshals and having marshals descend with no authority, he felt, on his cities… He couldn’t understand why the Kennedys were doing this to him.” (Simkin 7).

 

Recognizing that previous and new Freedom Riders were adamant about traveling by bus to Jackson, Mississippi, the next city along the original route that ended at New Orleans, Kennedy, talking over the telephone “seven or eight or twelve times each day” (Simkin 8), with Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, reached a deal.  Kennedy would use no federal forces if Eastland would ensure that the Riders would not suffer mob violence. 

 

Interviewed in 1998, James Farmer, director of CORE, said this about the Kennedys.

 

The Kennedys meant well, but they did not feel it. They didn't know any blacks growing up - there were no blacks in their communities or going to their schools. But their inclinations were good. I had the impression in those years that Bobby was doing what had to be done for political reasons. He was very conscious of the fact that they had won a narrow election and he was afraid that if they antagonized the South, the Dixiecrats would cost them the next election. And he was found to be very, very cautious and very careful not to do that. But we changed the equation down there, so it became dangerous for him not to do anything (Simkin 9).

 

Two buses, a Greyhound and a Trailways, departed Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi, May 24.  Rider William Mahoney, a nineteen-year-old black student at Howard University, observed:

 

Once across the (Mississippi) state line we passed a couple of police cars, which began to follow us. At our first stop the station was cordoned off a block in every direction. A police officer jumped on the bus and forbade anyone to move. One woman, who was a regular passenger, frantically tried to convince the police that she was not involved with us. After checking her ticket the police let her get off.

 

As we rolled toward Jackson, every blocked-off street, every back road taken, every change in speed caused our hearts to leap. Our arrival and speedy arrest in the white bus station in Jackson, when we refused to obey a policeman's order to move on, was a relief (Simkin 10).

 

They were given good protection as they entered the state, and no mob greeted them at the Jackson bus terminal. "As we walked through, the police just said, `Keep moving' and let us go through the white side," recalled Frederick Leonard. "We never got stopped. They just said `Keep moving,' and they passed us right on through the white terminal into the paddy wagon and into jail" (Cozzens 12).

 

Peter Ackerberg, white, 22, Antioch College student, interviewed years later, recalled his motivation and experience.

 

While he’d always talked a “big radical game,” he had never acted on his convictions. “What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?” he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, “I was pretty scared … The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives.” Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying “sir” to a jail official who was “pounding a blackjack.” Soon after, “I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian’s] head and him shrieking; I don’t think he ever said ‘sir.’”

 

When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used “colored” facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called “jail, no bail”—a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities

 

The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there,” said Hank Thomas, [black, 19] a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I’ll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point.” (Holmes 2-4).

 

The May 24 Freedom Riders were at the mercy of the local courts. On May 25, they were tried. As their attorney defended them, the judge turned his back. Once the attorney finished, he turned around and sentenced them to 60 days in the state penitentiary.

 

Using buses, planes, and trains, more Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson to continue the Freedom Ride, and they were arrested to, not under local or state segregation laws, but on charges of incitement to riot, breach of peace and failure to obey a police officer.  Freedom Riders continued to arrive in the South, and by the end of the summer, more than 300 had been arrested (Cozzens 13).

 

Convicted of violating the law, each Rider was fined $200.  Refusal to pay the fine brought each individual a sentence of 90 days in jail.

 

In an effort to intimidate the marchers, Mississippi officials transferred the now nearly one hundred men and women freedom riders to the state penitentiary at Parchman where they were subject to beatings and inedible food and repeatedly strip searched.  Prison officials confiscated the blankets and mattresses of all of the activists. When other demonstrators arrived in Jackson they were also arrested and sent to Parchman where they faced similar conditions  (Mack 3).

 

Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him “sir.” An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that “no one was beaten …. “That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening.” When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. “We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK,” [said] rider Carol Silver …. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs (Holmes 5).

 

The reputation of Parchman is that it’s a place that a lot of people get sent...and don’t come back,” former Freedom Rider Carol Ruth [later] told (Oprah] Winfrey.   … The struggles of the Freedom Riders garnered nationwide publicity. Rather than intimidate other activists, however, the brutality the riders encountered inspired others to take up the cause. Before long, dozens of Americans were volunteering to travel on Freedom Rides. In the end, an estimated 436 people took such rides (Nittle 2).

 

One such individual was Pauline Knight.  Part of the May 28 wave of Freedom Riders from the Nashville Student Movement, Pauline … escaped the violence of the earlier rides. Pauline Knight was a 20-year-old Tennessee State student when she was arrested in Jackson, MS. After being transferred to Hinds County Jail, she led a brief hunger strike among the female Riders.

 

 "I got up one morning in May and I said to my folks at home, ‘I won't be back today because I am a Freedom Rider.  … It was like a wave or a wind, and you didn't know where it was coming from but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me, nobody told me."

 

Another individual was Joan Trumpauer Mulholland.  A 19-year-old white Duke University student and part-time secretary in the Washington office of Senator Clair Engle of California, Joan Trumpauer arrived in Jackson, MS by train from New Orleans, LA as part of the June 4, 1961 Mississippi Freedom Ride.

 

 The group was promptly ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all nine Riders refused bail. Trumpauer was transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm.

 

 In her interview for Freedom Riders, she recalls the harrowing conditions at Parchman, which included forced vaginal examinations used as a tactic to humiliate and terrorize female prisoners (Meet 6-7).

 

Out of her experience as a Freedom Rider, it is the memory of the rabbi who faithfully visited the jail that still moves her today. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland of Arlington, Va., joined the rides just in time for the fill-the-jails strategy in Mississippi. Volunteers from across the country began arriving in the South in waves and getting arrested, thus burdening the criminal justice system and bringing more focus to their cause. More than 300 riders were jailed that summer. Mulholland spent three months in jail, much of it at Mississippi’s Parchman Prison.

 

“We were down, we calculated, to less than three square feet of floor space for the prisoners in the white women’s cells,” she said. “That’s pretty crowded; that means you have to sleep underneath the bunks and things.”

 

Perry Nussbaum, a rabbi in the Jackson area, drove in weekly, like clockwork, to visit the riders, said Mulholland. This was no small gesture during that time and place, she says, pointing out that his routine made him an easy target for the Ku Klux Klan members who probably were watching.

 

Nussbaum would ask riders to call out their jail cell numbers if they wanted him to pray with them, and Mulholland always took him up on the offer. “He would start praying in Hebrew and get a nice cadence going, and sort of lull the guards, and then he would slip in little tidbits of news, like what was happening in the world, and baseball scores and stuff. And then he’d slip back to Hebrew,” she said. He would also write to their parents letting them know how the riders were faring.

 

She also recalls an underground network of church women in Jackson who secretly collected money to help the imprisoned riders purchase necessities such as shower shoes and toiletries.

 

A few years later, there was the moment of kindness from a hairdresser in Jackson who walked Mulholland and other women over to her salon to give them a shampoo after patrons had covered the demonstrators with condiments and spray paint during a Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in 1963.

 

“There were always people who were supporting you,” she said, “people to drive you down to the demonstrations and take you back . . . as crucial as those out there demonstrating, and usually more numerous.”

 

A retired teaching assistant for Arlington Public Schools, Mulholland hopes the new monument will remind Americans of the power in organizing for change (Colvin 11-15).

 

Notable riders who did time at Parchman included James Farmer, John Lewis, Catherine Burks, Bernard Lafayette Jr., Frederick Leonard, Henry “Hank” Thomas, James Bevel, David Dennis, David Paul, James Lawson, Doris Jean Castle, and John Moody.   

 

Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation persisted; still, the “white” and “colored” signs in bus stations across the South began to come down. The New York Times, which had earlier criticized the Freedom Riders’ “incitement and provocation,” acknowledged that they “started the chain of events which resulted in the new I.C.C. order” (Holmes 6).

 

The Freedom Rides illuminated the courage of black and white youth and highlighted the leadership of Diane Nash.  The Freedom Rides also inspired rural southern blacks to embrace civil disobedience as a strategy for regaining their civil rights.  That inspiration would be seen in subsequent campaigns such as Mississippi’s Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Movement in 1965 as well as in dozens of much less heralded efforts to register to vote or to integrate the region’s public schools (Mack 4).

 

Segregation was unfair. It was wrong, morally, religiously. As a Southerner – a

white Southerner – I felt that we should do what we could to make the South

better and to rid ourselves of this evil” (Freedom 2).

~ Joan Mulholland, Activist

  

 

Works cited:

 

Colvin, Rhonda.  “As Trump attacks John Lewis, here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.”  The Washington Post.  January 15, 2017.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/we-were-soldiers-the-flesh-and-blood-behind-the-new-civil-rights-monument/2017/01/15/4d1c9edc-42dc-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html?utm_term=.3a43ab1ea4f6

 

Cozzens, Lisa.   “Freedom Rides.”  Watson.org. Web.   http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/freeride.html

 

“Freedom Rides Quotes.”  Uen.org. Web.  https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/downloads/Freedom_Rides_Quotes.pdf

 

Holmes, Marian Smith.  “The Freedom Riders, Then and Now.”  Smithsonian Magazine.  February 2009.  Web.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-freedom-riders-then-and-now-45351758/

 

Mack, Dwayne.  “Freedom Rides (1961).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rides-1961

 

“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.”  American Experience.  Web.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/meet-players-freedom-riders/

 

Nittle, Nadra Kareem.  “How the Freedom Riders Movement Began.”  ThoughtCo.  March 18, 2017.  Web.  https://www.thoughtco.com/the-freedom-riders-movement-2834894

 

Simkin, John.  “Freedom Riders.”  Spartacus Educational.  August 2014.  Web.  https://spartacus-educational.com/USAfreedomR.htm