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.
My father really worked hard, day and night. There were times when I didn’t see him for a week. He’d get up in the morning and leave for his regular job—he was a carpenter—then he’d have an odd job on the side, so he’d probably eat at my aunt’s house downtown and go to his odd job, and after that he’d drive a taxi, and then he’d come back and go to sleep. By that time, I’d be in bed…. He died in early 1962. He was a man in his late forties. It was a heart attack. We think he died of hard work….
A very bright student, Stokely was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, which was reserved for the top students in New York. “I was an avid reader, but had no discipline. All the other kids I went to school with, their fathers were professors, doctors, they were the smartest kids in the world. Their fathers had libraries.… We had Huckleberry Finn. That was our highest book.” In his later high school years, Stokely read Marx; pondered and debated radical ideas.
He was a senior in high school when the Greensboro sit-ins occurred. Soon after, he joined some of his classmates who went to Washington, D.C., to picket the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I was shocked to see Negroes at a H.U.A.C. demonstration. It turned out they had been involved in the sit-in demonstrations I was reading about in Virginia. I was very happy and decided, well, I can try it.”
At Howard University in Washington, Stokely joined an affiliate of the newly-formed SNCC. It was called NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group, and in it were Bill Mahoney (to whom the others looked for leadership), Courtland Cox (tall, handsome, bearded, dark), Joan Trumpauer (tiny, blonde, and soon a Freedom Rider), and Dion Diamond (who later, as a SNCC field secretary, would be locked up for a long time in a Baton Rouge jail). The NAG conducted sit-ins and demonstrations to desegregate public places all around the Washington area. Then came the Freedom Rides.
Bill Mahoney, writing later in Liberation, described their arrival at Parchman penitentiary in mid-June, shortly after Ruby Doris had gotten there. As they got off the trucks, they were surrounded by men who brandished guns and spat at them and cursed. Two white men, Terry Sullivan and Felix Singer, refusing to cooperate, kept going limp as guards tried to move them along. They were thrown from the truck onto the wet sand-and-gravel drive, dragged through wet grass and mud puddles across a rough cement walk, into a building. Then a guard in a Stetson hat approached them carrying a long black rubber-handled tube. It was a cow-prodder, battery operated, which sears the flesh with an electric charge. When the two men refused to undress, the prodder was applied to their bodies. They squirmed in pain but would not give in. Their clothes were ripped from them and they were thrown into a cell.
Stokely talks of their time in Parchman:
I’ll never forget this Sheriff Tyson—he used to wear those big boots. He’d say, “You goddam smart nigger, why you always trying to be so uppity for? I’m going to see to it that you don’t ever get out of this place.” They decided to take our mattresses because we were singing…. So they dragged Hank Thomas out and he hung on to his mattress and they took him and it and dropped him with a loud klunk on his back…. And then they put the wristbreakers on Freddy Leonard, which makes you twist around and around in a snake-like motion, and Tyson said, “Oh you want to hit me, don’t you,” and Freddy just looked up at him meekly and said, “No, I just want you to break my arm.” And Sheriff Tyson was shaken visibly, and he told the trusty, “Put him back.” I hung on to the mattress and said, “I think we have a right to them and I think you’re unjust,” and he said, “I don’t want to hear all that shit nigger,” and started to put on the wristbreakers. I wouldn’t move and I started to sing “I’m Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me,” and everybody
