Share
Digg
StumbleUpon
RedditPhoto Gallery
|
The Freedom Riders, Then and NowExplore more photos from the story |
Video Gallery
Riding to Freedom
In the spring of 1961, black and white civil rights activists rode buses to protest the segregationist policies of the Deep South.
On Sunday, May 14, 1961—Mother's Day—scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive," somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.
A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.
The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.
After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.
Etheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961. He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval taking place around him. But he well remembers using one entrance to his doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony.
"Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.' "
A few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to engage his budding photographic skills. During a visit with his parents in Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300 arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist riders.
Nearly 75 percent of them were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were black; a quarter, women. Their mug-shot expressions hint at their resolve, defiance, pride, vulnerability and fear. "I was captivated by these images and wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the Internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked riders down, then called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even think that it still existed."
Comments
I enjoyed looking over this. However, I enjoy reading the actual magazine more because I am the type of reader who enjoys holding what he or she is reading and sitting in a comfortable chair reading it! I look forward to continuing to read my actual magazine when it comes in the monthly mail. Thanks, and have a great week! Best wishes, Lee.
Posted by Dr. Lee Prosser on January 24,2009 | 01:03PM
I read that some of the freedom riders were as young as 16, I was 15 in 1961, and living in NorthEastern Ohio. There was only one black family in the small town of Ashtabula, but on the lake front was an old mansion called the Hubbard House. This was atop a hill above Lake Erie, cna had a tunnel to the beach in which runaway slaves were taken down to waiting ships in the dark of night. Thank You for this article which touches on the brave men and women of both races who had the courage to participate in this daring adventure.
Posted by Steven Cox on January 25,2009 | 06:25PM
It was so long ago. I was a high school teacher at Kirkland, Washington when The American Federation of Teachers sent me to Mississippi to set up a freedom school. I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi in a Greyhound Bus. At Jackson I marched with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee regional director Stokely Carmichael and was incarcerated at Mississippi State Fair Ground's main provillion for ten days and harshly beaten.
I then went to Amite County, a KKK stronghold, and set up a freedom school and assisted with the registration of 35 blacks, the first black residents ever registered in that county.
I wrote a lengthy article about my experience focusing on Herbert Lee and Bob Moses.
I would like to get a copy of my mug shot by the Jackson, Mississippi police.
Sheridan Peterson
eagleeye@sonic.net
Posted by Sheridan Peterson on February 1,2009 | 07:59PM
WAS 1961 LIGHT YEARS AGO. I WAS BORN AND GREW UP IN BIRMINGHAM BUT BY 1961 WAS LONG GONE FROM THE "PITTSBURG" OF THE SOUTH TO A RURAL TOWN IN NORTH ALABAMA. I WELL RECALL THE SCREEMING HEAD LINES ABOUT THE "FREEDOM RIDER" AND HOW THEY WERE INTRUDING INTO OUR LIFE STYLE, AT THAT TIME I THOUGH THAT ANY AMERICAN SHOULD BE ABLE TO TRAVEL ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND OUR GOVERMENT PORTECT THEM. I WAS COMPLETELY BENT OUT OF SHAPE WITH BULL CONNOR AND HIS WATER SQUIDS. AT THAT TIME I WAS BADLY OUT OF STEP WITH REST OF SOCIETY. NOW I AM CROWED BY POLITICIANS WHO SAY THEY WERE WRONG AND THAT "ANY AMERICAN SCHOULD BE ABLE TO TRAVE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND BE PROTECTED BY THEIR GOVERNMENT" WHEN I MOVED TO THIS SMALL TOWN,FROM THAT FAR AWAY FOREIGN CITY OF CHATANOOGA TENNESSEE, THE BOARD OF REGISTRATION ALMOST DID NOT ALLOW ME TO REGISTER TO VOTE. THEY THOUGH I MIGHT BE BRINGING IN FOREIGN IDEAS. THE FACT THAT MY WIFES MOTHER WAS BORN AN RAISED HERE, AND BOTH OF US WERE GRADUATES OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY HAD NO BEARING ON THE LADY WHO HEADED THE BOARD. WAS ALL OF THIS LIGH YEAR AWAY, OR WHAT?
Posted by walter vice on February 7,2009 | 10:12AM
I subscribe to your magazine and thoroughly enjoy it.And yes, I did read this article. An eye opener for sure.Thank you. EllenPS. Would it be possible to obtain one of the World Maps that you give to new subscribers. I have been a reader for a number of years and give gifts of the magazine too.Thanks Ellen
Posted by Ellen Harrington on February 7,2009 | 07:00PM
Couple things. First, One of my professors in college was a Freedom Rider. But he never told me about his time in the Birmingham jail; I discovered that on his web site thirty years later. He was a good man. Two, I would suggest that "massive and instant privilege" (on a World scale at least) could be applied to almost anyone in the United States (although certainly not all; Black people and Appalachian whites included), even then. But this was not South Africa; even for African Americans. Think about if your name was "Kennedy" or "Bush;" It's mostly a class issue in the end. Three, that life for Black people was no worse in the South than the North irrespective of press emphasis. The press made much of the Southern problem but I grew up in Cincinnati, and I saw first hand as much there as here in Memphis where I have lived for almost 30 years and northeastern cities such as Boston were even worse. It has been said that the difference in the Southern and Northern racial view was this: that the South viewed Blacks as simply inferior; the Northern view on the other hand was vile hatred. One may eventually prove oneself, but hatred is a completely different matter. I will never return to Cincinnati.
Posted by Alan Wells on February 8,2009 | 10:46AM
Cities were a lot safer then. Look at Detroit and how badly deteriorated it is compared to 50 years ago.
Posted by Bill Elliott on February 12,2009 | 08:28PM
There were the Jews, there were the "blacks", there are now the "gays"... who's next? WHEN will America be what our fore-fathers set out to make it? God Bless them all. God help those, who hate...
Posted by Diane Lacey on February 13,2009 | 09:35PM
I take offense to the term "paddy wagon". The correct term is "Police Van". Paddy Wagon is a slur against Irish people. I am not offended by Eric Ethridge personaly because I'm sure he does not know any better. The term "Paddy Wagon" came about when the police would send a van in to the town to arrest groups of drunken citizens, man of which were Irish.
Posted by Joseph Hastings on February 14,2009 | 05:08AM
I feel guilty that in the 60's I was in a word, private Catholic schools, secondary and post secondary, where the Beatles were more popular than Rev. Martin Luther King jr, who led many freedom marches through the South. I was about his age. I began to educate myself after his assasination. Since that date I have read so much about Civil Rights and how we came to be feared by whites since slavery. I am happy that our history is so open compared to the few paragraphs I learned in American history from school text books in the 60's. I read this article and I am awed of our black history. Thank you for putting it out there.
Posted by Joy R. Rees on February 15,2009 | 02:32PM