Autobiography of a Freedom Rider : My Life As a Foot Soldier for Civil Rights (9780757391712) by Armstrong Thomas; Bell Natalie

Author:Armstrong, Thomas; Bell, Natalie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9780757391712
Publisher: Hci
Published: 2011-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

First Freedom Ride Arrives in Mississippi

The first group of Freedom Riders arrived at the bus station in Jackson on June 2, where they were met by a horde of policemen. There was no violence, though we at Tougaloo felt the Riders were not safe. In a ironic twist, two of the police dogs used by the Jackson Police Department, Happy and Rebel, were trained by Harry Nawroth of Springfield, Missouri, the former Nazi storm trooper who trained killer Dobermans to guard Adolph Hitler’s airports. As soon as the Riders stepped off the bus and walked into the bus station, crossing the color line in the waiting room, they were almost immediately arrested and carted off to local jails.

Students at Tougaloo were taking in all of these events as we continued our classes with crossed fingers and hopeful hearts. One of our prayers was “let the Riders survive their stay in jail.”

A small group of us, maybe ten or twelve, kept track of the number of Riders who had been injured and taken to hospitals along the way, and we checked regularly for details about their whereabouts. We knew that we were expecting twenty-seven Freedom Riders; therefore we wanted to make sure that twenty-seven arrived in Jackson. We were glued to radio and television for any type of information we could get on them. We were prepared to take action to help them.

Shortly after the Freedom Riders had been booked into jail in Jackson, they appeared in court. They were quickly found guilty of “breach of peace,” and sentenced to sixty days in the state’s maximum-security prison, known as Parchman Farm, Mississippi’s ultimate humiliation. The prison houses death row inmates and is located on a 21,000-acre farm.

CORE called for other civil rights organizations to support a “jail-no-bail” initiative, aimed to fill all of the jails in Mississippi. That’s when hundreds of people from around the country began to board buses bound for Jackson. After the first group of Riders were arrested and jailed in Mississippi, another group came in, then another, and another. By the end of November, as many as 406 Freedom Riders had come into the state,

Almost daily, the newspapers ran editorials and politicians made speeches claiming, “All the trouble in Mississippi is being caused by outside agitators.” They ignored the fact that there were Freedom Riders who were native-born Mississippians. The segregation fathers had overlooked the June 2, 1961 arrest of Leslie Word, a black male Freedom Rider from Corinth, Mississippi, because he came into Jackson on the freedom bus from Montgomery. The arrest on May 24, 1961 of James Bevel, a CORE activist born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, did not count. Bevel was considered an outsider, since he was a student attending American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville.

Those of us who had been engaging in acts of protest in Mississippi were eager to start a larger movement of our own. However, the reality was that we did not have a plan. Our NAACP base had limited legal

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