At seven-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, May 24, with National Guardsmen lining both sides of the street near the bus terminal, twelve Freedom Riders (eleven Negro, one white), accompanied by six Guardsmen and sixteen newspapermen, left Montgomery for Jackson. Before leaving, they tasted victory by eating in the “white” cafeteria at the Trailways terminal. On the road, a convoy of three airplanes, two helicopters, and seven patrol cars accompanied the bus while, inside, James Lawson held a workshop on nonviolence. On arrival in Jackson, escorted into the city by National Guardsmen, the group was arrested trying to use white rest rooms and waiting rooms. The charges were the customary ones for civil rights demonstrators: breach of peace, refusal to obey an officer.
Several hours after the arrest of the first contingent of Riders in the Jackson terminal, the rest of the group, including James Farmer, arrived from Montgomery, also with National Guard escort, and entered the Jackson bus terminal. Frank Holloway wrote later in New South about this experience:
Behind all these escorts, I felt like the President of the United States touring Russia or something. … At the door of the waiting room a policeman stood there like the doorman of the Waldorf Astoria and opened the door for us. … I guess the crooks in the city had a field day because all the Jackson police were at the bus station… opening doors for us….
Standing in line at the terminal cafeteria, the Riders in this second group were arrested too, and joined their friends in the city jail. All twenty-seven were found guilty, given two-month suspended sentences, and fined $200. They decided to go to prison rather than pay, and were taken to the Hinds County jail across the street. “When we went in,” Holloway recalls, we were met by some of the meanest looking, tobacco-chewing lawmen I have ever seen. They ordered us around like a bunch of dogs and I really began to feel like I was in a Mississippi jail.” Then they were transferred to the penal farm out in the country:
When we got there we met several men in ten-gallon hats, looking like something out of an old Western, with rifles in their hands, staring at us.… Soon they took us out to a room, boys on one side and girls on the other. One by one they took us into another room for questioning.… There were about eight guards with sticks in their hands in the second room, and the Freedom Rider being questioned was surrounded by these men. Outside we could hear the questions, and the thumps and whacks, and sometimes a quick groan or a cry.… They beat several Riders who didn’t say “Yes, sir….” Rev. C. T. Vivian of Chattanooga was beaten pretty bad. When he came out he had blood streaming from his head…. We could hear somebody slap a girl Freedom Rider, and her quick little scream. … She was about five feet tall and wore glasses….
In the meantime, the newspapers were full of excited talk about the Freedom Rides. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, while seeking an injunction in federal court to prohibit Bull Connor and other policemen from interfering with interstate travel, issued a call for a “cooling-off period.” The reaction of moderate opinion in the country (for instance, the New York Times and the Charlotte Observer) was to support this. On the other hand, the very next day saw the arrival in Montgomery of Negro and white ministers headed by William Coffin, Yale University chaplain, all of whom were arrested trying to use the facilities of the bus terminal. Wyatt Walker of SCLC, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy from Montgomery, and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth from Birmingham—were all arrested that day in Montgomery.
Charges flew back and forth. Governor Patterson of Alabama denounced the Riders and the Federal Government. Twenty-six white students from Auburn University, a state-supported college in Alabama, wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser: “Governor Patterson referred to the freedom riders as rabble rousers.’ He is entitled to his opinion, but is Alabama to glory in the fact that it furnishes sufficient rabble to be roused?”
In the Atlanta Constitution, editor Eugene Patterson, although criticizing the “theatrical approach” of the Freedom Riders, said:
But that is not the point of what happened in Alabama. Any man in this free country has the right to demonstrate and assemble and make a fool of himself if he pleases without getting hurt. If the police, representing the people, refuse to intervene when a man—any man—is being beaten to the pavement of an American city, then this is not a noble land at all. It is a jungle. But this is a noble land. And it is time for the decent people in it to muzzle the jackals.
Meeting in Atlanta, the executive committee of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference turned down the Attorney General’s plea for a “cooling-off period,” but said there would be a “temporary lull” in the Freedom Rides. It was very temporary, because students kept arriving in Jackson, by train and by bus. Through June, July, and August, the pilgrimage continued, with students, ministers, and many others, white and Negro, coming into Jackson, where police, with monotonous regularity, arrested all comers as they tried to desegregate the terminal facilities. Forty-one Negroes from Jackson joined the Riders. By the end of the summer, the number of arrested persons reached over three hundred.
In early June, Ruby Doris Smith started her two-month sentence in Hinds County jail, sharing a four-bunk cell first with thirteen others, then with seventeen others, then with twenty-three others. She told me later, smiling, speaking softly as she always does:
It was a nice set-up. When the windows were open we could talk to the fellows. We sang. We wrote Freedom Songs. A Negro minister from Chicago sang: “Woke Up In The Mornin’ With My Mind Set On Freedom” so everyone began singing it. It started there…. Other songs were composed—“I Know We’ll Meet Again” was written by a fellow I knew from Nashville and Rock Hill. We would do ballet lessons in the morning to keep ourselves fit. There were different people from different areas. Somebody was giving Spanish lessons. But then, after about two weeks, we were awakened at 4:00 A.M. to find out that we were all going to Parchman State Penitentiary. … It was a long ride in the night. We sang Freedom Songs.…
Parchman was tougher. The prisoners had all their belongings taken from them; they were stripped down and searched, not left with a comb or cigarettes. Even their shoes were taken from them. The women were issued skirts with stripes, then put in the maximum security unit of the penitentiary, reserved for the most dangerous criminals, with whites and Negroes in alternate cells. Each was given a towel, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, sheets, and pillow cases. The cells, Ruby Doris says, were filthy, full of bugs.
The prisoners were only allowed to speak softly, and when they began to sing the guards threatened to take their mattresses away. Elizabeth Wyckoff, a white woman from the North, was quietly telling some of the Greek myths, and a guard said she was disturbing people and began to take their mattresses away. They started to sing The Star-Spangled Banner, and then their sheets were taken away. They kept singing, and their towels and toothbrushes were confiscated. The singing kept getting louder all the time. They slept on steel for three nights, without coverings, with cold air deliberately blown into their cells all night long.
One time, Ruby Doris recalls, she and nine other Negro girls were taken to live in the prison infirmary, where conditions were better. Through their windows they could see the men prisoners going out to work in the fields every morning. “There were fifty, sixty Negro men in striped uniforms, guarded by a white man on a white horse. It reminded you of slavery.”
In jail with Ruby Doris, on the men’s side, were Stokely Carmichael and Bill Mahoney of Howard University. Bill Mahoney had been one of the driving forces behind the decision of students at Howard to continue the Freedom Ride after the CORE group flew to New Orleans. “By that time,” Stokely recalls, “Bill Mahoney decided we should all go South. Bevel said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘Let’s go on through.’ Here we were, discussing what we were going through and then the call came in that they had sent the first bus off.…”
Stokely Carmichael was brought up in New York, where his parents had moved from the West Indies.
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