The Battle of Ole Miss by Frank Lambert

Author:Frank Lambert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

NAACP lawyers: Constance Baker Motley and Jack Greenberg.

©Bettmann/Corbis

You don’t have to ride jim crow,

You don’t have to ride jim crow,

Get on the bus, sit any place,

Cause Irene Morgan won her case,

You don’t have to ride jim crow.10

CORE Director James Farmer explained the goal of the group dubbed the Freedom Riders in 1961: “We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law.” The riders expected violence and were prepared to endure it for the cause of equal opportunity. Their expectations were realized in a flurry of violence from whites who slashed the tires of the buses and police officers who severely beat riders who entered segregated areas. At Nashville, some wanted to turn back, but Nashville SNCC students reenergized the Freedom Rides and took them deeper into the South. In Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner Bull Connors refused to provide police protection to the riders who were then at the mercy of a mob that severely beat many of the protestors. Alabama Governor John Patterson, who was elected with the enthusiastic support of the KKK,11 voiced the prevailing sentiment of whites across the Deep South: “When you go somewhere looking for trouble, you usually find it. … You just can’t guarantee the safety of a fool and that’s what these folks are, just fools.” Though beaten and frightened, the riders elected to continue their journey into the soul of the segregated South—Mississippi, where their actions would intersect with that of James Meredith.

The Freedom Riders arrived at the Jackson bus station just a few months before Meredith began his quest for admission to Ole Miss. However, not only did Meredith not participate in the riders’ protest, he was critical of it. He thought that the riders were approaching the fight for civil rights in a piecemeal fashion by attempting to gain access to public facilities. He believed that blacks should demand full civil rights, which could be done only by dismantling the state’s power structure that propped up segregation. Nonetheless, the protests of the Freedom Riders in Jackson and their mass jailing brought national attention to the fight for civil rights in Mississippi, and that certainly dovetailed with his strategy of proceeding under the bright lights of publicity. Moreover, the Freedom Riders confronted the Kennedy Administration with a thorny civil rights problem much as Meredith had confronted the Barnett Administration with the pressing problem of school desegregation. While President Kennedy would like to have ignored the mounting civil rights struggle in the South, he was under increasing pressure to make his administration an active partner with those fighting for their constitutional rights. The presence of the Freedom Riders also fostered a siege mentality among white Mississippians, who became more determined than ever to defend the status quo. So as the Jackson police arrested scores of protestors and took them to crowded jails, both the nation and the state watched to see what the respective responses would be from federal and state officials.

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