The Freedom Riders were sponsored by the Congress for Racial Equality, or CORE, a civil rights group that was founded in 1942 by interracial group of students in Chicago as an off shoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization seeking to change racist attitudes. CORE was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistence and applied it in sit-ins and picket lines to successfully integrate many northern public facilities in the 1940s. A percursor of the Freedom Rides of 1961 was the Journey of Reconciliation, a CORE activity where eight white and eight black men traveled together in the upper South to test a Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel unconstitutional. During the Journey of Reconciliation four of the riders were arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and three, including Bayard Rustin, an important Civil Rights leader, were forced to work on a chain gang. PBS did a documentary on the Journey of Reconciliation called You Don't Have To Ride Jim Crow by Robin Washington.

In 1961 CORE decided to test the Supreme Court case Boynton Versus Virginia which according to wikipedia held that racial segregation in public transportation was illegal because such segregation violated the Interstate Commerce Act, which broadly forbade discrimination in interstate passenger transportation. It moreover held that bus transportation was sufficiently related to interstate commerce to allow the United States Federal government to regulate it to forbid racial discrimination in the industry. CORE put James Farmer, a charismatic Ph.D. who had helped found CORE in the 1940s. Farmer wanted to get groups of blacks and whites to travel in Southern states to force the Kennedy administration to enforce the Supreme Court ruling and hopefully push Kennedy to take a stronger stance for Civil Rights. Kennedy was at the time lukewarm in his support of Civil Rights because of his hesitancy to offend Southern Democratic Congressional support that he needed for his economic policies. Kennedy was more focused on the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Diane McWhorter wrote in the forward of the book Breach of Peace:

"Farmer recognized what had essentially been true since the Civil War: The South would not voluntarily grant civil rights to its second-class, black citizens. Change had to be forced on the region by the United States government. The 1960 sit-ins, because the segregation laws they challenged were local ordinances, had provided no clear pretext for a federal response. But a Supreme Court ruling that same year gave Farmer an opening. Expanding upon the 1946 decision that inspired CORE's Journey of Reconciliation, the new one decreed that segregation was illegal not just on interstate buses and trains but in the stations that served them. Accordingly, Farmer's new Freedom Riders would travel on regular Greyhound and Trailway buses into Southern depots and integrate their restaurants, restrooms, and waiting rooms. In contrast to the student sit-ins, which were law-breaking acts of civil disobedience, what the Freedom Riders were doing was perfectly legal. Nonetheless, Farmers' avowed aim was to inflame 'the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law.' In other words, he was doing exactly what the white South always accused civil rights 'agitators' of: looking for trouble."

The Freedom Riders initially enountered only minor problems in the upper South, but when they reached Atlanta they encountered violence from local thugs and the police. A convoy of fifty cars overtook one bus and firebombed the bus. The second bus was ambushed Birmingham's Trailway station, as Klansmen beat on the Freedom Riders. Birmingham Commissioner Bull Connor had let most of his police officers off duty that day, because it was Mother's Day, leaving the Freedom Riders no protection from the mob.

The Freedom Rides were initially unpopular with the vast majority of Americans, who felt that they were going too far too fast in pushing for the rights of African Americans. Major newspapers also felt that the Freedom Riders were going too far, with the New York Times saying that the Freedom Riders were "overreaching". President Kennedy was against the Freedom Rides as well. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had just occurred just a month before the beginning of the Freedom Rides and Kennedy was preparing for a difficult summit in Vienna with Nikita Kruschev. Kennedy felt that the Freedom Rides were an embarassment to the country and had only one thing to say about the rides: "Tell them to call it off. Stop them."

The Freedom Riders would not call it off. After this initial round of violence, more Freedom Riders went to the South to force the government to act. John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led the next group of Freedom Riders, and as more Freedom Riders entered the state, they adopted the tactic of trying to fill the Jackson Mississippi jails. To avoid giving the movement a legal pretext to mount a Constitiutional challenge to segregation, the Riders were charged by the Mississippi police with a "breach of peace" charge when they were jailed. Eventually the Jackson city and county jails were so crowded that the Freedom Riders were pransfered to Parchman Penitentiary, the most notorious prison in the South. The riders were put in maximum security in Parchman, where they endured included placement in the Maximum Security Unit (Death Row), issuance of only underwear, no exercise, no mail, and, they took away mattresses, sheets, and toothbrushes and removed the screens from the windows so that mosquitos could fill their cell. In spite of this treatment, Freedom Riders would sing freedom songs to bolster their morale and drive their captors crazy.

In 2002 the Mississippi Department of Archives and History published the digital archives of newspaper articles and court records of the Freedom Riders and mug shots of the Freedom Riders intermixed with other historical photos of the Mississippi archives. You have to scroll down a bit until you see some young people to realize that these are the Freedom Riders. I think the first Freedom Rider is a young African American man marked "Police Dept. Jackson Miss. 20877 5-2461". When I look at the faces of these Freedom Riders, what amazes me is how young and how ordinary these people look. They seem like people I'd meet on the street. The book Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders gives a description of the make up of the Freedom Riders. It is estimated that almost 450 riders participated in one or more Freedom Rides. About 75% were male. Forty percent were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one; seventy- five percent were between eighteen and thirty. They came from thirty-nine states, with fifty-four coming from New York and seventy-eight coming from California. Clergymen, like Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin and 15 Episcopal priests from the The Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, participated in the Freedom Rides. Overall, half of the Riders were black, half white.

In reading Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, I most admire how many of the Freedom Riders maintained their social conscience during length of their lives and continue to contribute to their communities. I end this blog with some of the individual profiles of the Freedom Riders with links to their mug shots and descriptions of what they've done since the Freedom Rides. I highly recommend that you read both Etheridge's and Arsenault's book.

Frank Holloway was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was a student and member of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. He has continued to work for poverty and employment agencies, including Economic Opportunity Atlanta and the Fulton Atlanta Community Action Authority, which trains people and helps them find jobs.

Matthew Walker Jr. was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was a student at Fisk University and active in the Nashville Student Movement. In the 1960s, he continued organizing, helping on rent strikes in Harlem. He worked as an organizer for the Commission for Racial Justice, an organization supported by the Church of Christ. In the 1980s, he worked in Louisiana to organize workers for the AFL-CIO. He still is involved in local politics in Nashville on environmental and public school issues.

Jean Thompson was arrested as a Freedom Rider in June 6, 1961 and was an active member of CORE. She continued work for local CORE chapters, and eventually was involved in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist efforts in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was active in the Nonviolent Action Group protesting in Washington, northern Virginia, and maryland. Sine then, she moved to Arlington and worked for the Smithsonian, then for a federal program helping communities to resolve racial issues. From 1980 to her retirement in 2007, she was an assistant teacher in the Arlington public schools.

Marv Davidov was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was an activist, art dealer, and organizer in Minneapolis. He took part in a Canada to Cuba peace walk in 1964, and was active in antiwar and draft resistance movements in Berkeley and Los Angeles. He began the Honeywall Project in Minneapolis to stop Honeywell to stop making cluster bombs, land mines, and other weapons. He has organized for the American Indian Movement, farmers and hotel workers. He has taught a course on active nonviolence at the University of St. thomas in St. Paul, since 1992. Davidov started a local chapter of the War resisters League in 2006.

Charles Purnell was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was a student at Campbell Junior College at Jackson. Since then, he has been the pastor of the Bethel AME church in Savanah, Georgia since 1990.

Thomas Armstrong III was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was a student at Tougaloo college in Jackson. He was active with the NAACP in Jackson on voter registrationand Mississippi. He led in efforts to integrate white churches on Sundays, and tried to integreate Millsaps in 1964, a private Methodist college in Jackson. In the late 1960s he moved to Chicago and managed trucking services for the U.S. Postal Service. He is now retired and lived in Naperville, IL.

Helen O'Neal McCray was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was a student at Jackson State University. She went to Mississippi to work for SNCC, developing material to help illiterate adults learn to read. helping with voter registration, and teaching in a Freedom School in McComb. She eventually worked for the Law Students for Civil Rights, the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and the Southern Regional Council. She taught in public elementary public schools in Yellow Springs, Ohio for twenty-nine years and now teaches at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio.

Alexander Weiss was arrested as a Freedom Rider and was a student at San Francisco State. He was chairman for the San Francisco CORE chapter. In the mid 1960s he worked as a keepter at teh San Francisco Zoo, and became a state park ranger, where he became the chief ranger of the Candlestick Point State recreation Area. He initiated a successful campaign to save teh Angel Island Immigration Station from being torn down. He retired as a park ranger in 1987 and worked for a few years as a zoo keeper. Now living in Oakland, he works on an as-needed basis for Alameda County in helping run elections.