Honoring America's Riders for Justice

Check out our new website

Posted on | January 26, 2011 | Comments Off

We have launched a new website for the 50th anniversary event, Return of the Freedom Riders, May 22-26, 2011.

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See the Movie, Meet the Riders

Posted on | October 21, 2010 | Comments Off

On Thursday, November 11, Mississippi Freedom 50th will host a free screening of excerpts from Freedom Riders, Stanley Nelson’s new documentary, at the Alamo Theater. After the screening, a panel of Freedom Riders — including Hank Thomas, Catherine Burks-Brooks and Bill Harbour — will discuss the Rides and the movie.

The Alamo Theater is located 333 North Farish Street in Jackson.

The event starts at 7 PM, and is free. Nelson’s film will air on PBS on May 16, 2011.

The event is funded by MINACT, a leading provider of career training and support services to government agencies and businesses. MINACT: “Making the American Dream a Reality.”

Category: Events
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Journey Back to Parchman

Posted on | October 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

Hank Thomas in a cell in the maximum security unit, where the Freedom Riders were held in 1961.

Like most of the Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961, Hank Thomas did the bulk of his time behind bars in Parchman, the prison farm in the Delta. The Riders — males and females, blacks and whites — were housed in Unit 17, then the facility’s maximum security unit. Unit 17 was also the site of death row and the gas chamber. Today it sits empty of prisoners but is still used for executions, now performed by lethal injection.

Thomas recently visited Parchman and Unit 17 for the first time since 1961, part of trip sponsored by the Mississippi Center for Justice, a public-interest law firm “committed to advancing racial and economic justice.” Below is Thomas’ account of his trip back to Parchman. The photographs are all courtesy of Frances Trice at Parchman.

On Sunday, October 10, I took a bus trip to Parchman Prison in the Mississippi Delta. The Mississippi Center for Justice had arranged this trip and invited me to revisit the place I was locked up in the summer of 1961, charged with disturbing the peace of Mississippi. I was a Freedom Rider, you see.

My visit to Parchman was part of a larger two-day tour of the Delta, which included stops in Ruleville, the home of Fannie Lou Hamer, and Money, the place where in 1955 Emmett Till had his fateful encounter with a white woman, which led to his lynching.

Shortly after our tour began on Saturday, some folks on the bus asked me my feelings about going back to Parchman after 49 years. I had been expecting this. I could easily recall ealier times when I had been asked the same question.

In 1993 I was one of three GI’s going back to Vietnam to meet North Vietnamese veterans, a reconciliation meeting of former enemy combatants. As our plane descended toward the Hanoi airport, my wife asked me how I felt about coming face to face with comrades of the men who’d shot me.

In addition to Vietnam, I had also been back to Anniston, Alabama, a place where as a Freedom Rider I had come face to face with the second lynch mob I’d ever encountered.

So as far as I was concerned, I was used to “going back.” I had done it before. I thought I would be hard and emotionally detached.

I was wrong.

Thomas at the entrance to Unit 17, where the Freedom Rides were housed in 1961.

Once we got to Money, things started to happen within me. We’d stopped at the general store, now abandoned, where Till had whistled, or not, at a white woman. As our tour guide retold the now familiar story of the 14-year-old’s lynching, a childhood memory started to run through my mind. A few people noticed a visible change in me. When we re-boarded the bus, they asked me to talk about it.

I took the bus mike and began: “I am Emmett Till.”

“He and I were the same age. In 1955, I lived in rural Georgia and that could have been me. At the age of 8 I accidentally brushed up against a white woman in the narrow aisles of our local grocery. Regardless of age, you see, black boys were never to touch a white woman. When my mother learned what I had done, she immediately fell on her knees and began praying for me and asking forgiveness.”

About an hour later, as we neared Parchman, Money was still on my mind. I could sense that once again all eyes in the bus were on me, trying to detect some visceral sign of emotion.

When we arrived at the prison entrance, the superintendent, a white man who appeared to be in his late 40s, boarded the bus and said, “Welcome to Parchman.”

This greeting was very unlike my first visit, the words form which still vibrate against my skull: “Y’all think y’all important. We goin’ ta straight’n y’all out.”

Today the superintendent shook my hand and asked me if I’d consent to being photographed with him and autograph his copy of Eric Etheridge’s book Breach of Peace.

Parchman superintendent Emmitt Sparkman with Thomas.

We were shown the maximum-security building where I had served my sentence in 1961. Unit 17 also housed the gas chamber. As we walked the cellblock, I discovered that my cell was only 50 feet from the execution chamber.

I am writing this essay only 24 hours after my visit to Parchman. Seeing the proximity of my cell to the gas chamber has had more psychological effect on me than the 1966 ambush in Vietnam when I was shot. I had to step away from the group to collect myself.

At the end of our visit, the superintendent thanked me for coming and invited me to bring my family with me the next time I come back. My life has had a few ironies, but none more memorable than this. Being welcomed back to Parchman by the superintendent and treated as something of a celebrity was a surreal experience.

The mood was solemn as we left Parchman. I could imagine how Nelson Mandela felt going back to Robben Island or how a Jew felt returning to Germany in 2005.

Thomas at the entrance a solitary confiment cell in Unit 17. In 1961, when the Riders were put in solitary for singing, not saying "sir" to the guards, and other such infringements, the door had a small opening on it. Those doors have since been replaced.

As we drove away, I had lots of time for reflection. The Mississippi Delta is a flat, almost featureless landscape. My early childhood in rural Georgia was spent chopping and picking cotton. School for black children did not start until October — after the crops had been brought in. I remember the harshness of life in Jefferson County. I remember the daily humiliation black adults suffered. I remember the KKK.

I also thought about Rock Hill, South Carolina. There in 1961 I encountered my first lynch mob. My fellow Rider, now Congressman, John Lewis and I had been arrested as we tried to integrate the bus station there. Much later that night, two policemen took me from my cell and carried me back to the station, now closed, where a Klan mob was waiting. I narrowly escaped when a local minister, a very brave African-American World War II veteran, pulled up beside me in his car.

“Son, jump in and get down on the floor,” he shouted. “Do not raise your head.” I remained on the floorboard of his car all the way to Columbia.

The present day police chief in Rock Hill is John Gregory III, an African-American. I am looking forward to going back to Rock Hill next year.

These and many other thoughts flooded my mind as the flat lands of the Delta flashed by the bus window.

My wife and I have been successful. We’ve obtained that elusive American dream. We live a comfortable life. Looking back over all that I’ve endured and my people have endured, I am saddened and conflicted. Yes, I was arrested 22 times for demanding my human rights. I narrowly escaped two lynch mobs. I was beaten five times by the police for not addressing them as “sir.” I was drafted and shipped to Vietnam to fight for . . . rights that I did not enjoy in my own country. Is there any wonder that sometimes I just wanna holler?

And then I think about the gains from our struggle: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, laws mandating fair housing and equal employment. And President Barack Obama in the White House

I wouldn’t take nutin’ for the journey.

Hank Thomas, Freedom Rider

A banner drawn by an inmate to welcome Thomas back to Parchman.

Category: Riders on the Rides
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‘Courage and Convictions’:
David Myers and Winonah Beamer

Posted on | September 30, 2010 | Comments Off

Freedom Riders David Myers and Winonah Beamer, above, were profiled by Jeff Klinkenberg in the article “Courage and Convictions” in the St. Petersburg Times on March 4, 2006. Bob Croslin made the portait.

Myers was arrested on May 28, 1961, at the Trailways station in Jackson, Mississippi. Beamer was arrrested on June 9 at the train station there. Beamer was one of a handful of Riders who refused to bail out ever, serving her entire sentence. She was released on Christmas Day, 1961. Myers and Beamer were married in April 1962. Today they live in Ellenton, Florida.

(Hat tip to the Facebook page for the WGBH documentary Freedom Riders for the link).

ELLENTON — Winonah Myers, a gray-haired contrarian of 64, wakes long before dawn. Then she drives her yellow Ford pickup through Manatee County to the Sunshine Skyway and collects tolls. The best part of her job is watching the sun come up. The worst part is feeling perpetually sleepy and having to work in the cramped dimensions of a tollbooth.

She has bad memories of tight spaces. When she was 19, she spent much of a year in the most notorious lockup in the South, Mississippi State Prison, better known as Parchman Farm. The gas chamber was a few cells away from her death row cubicle. At night she whispered through the ventilation system to an inmate who later was executed. “I was a little baby when I was in prison,” she’ll tell you now. “I was scared to death.”

On June 9, 1961, Myers and four other young civil rights activists, some black and some white, walked into a train station in Jackson, ignored the “colored” waiting room and took their seats in the “white” waiting room. They were quickly arrested for breaching the peace.

Myers and her friends were known as Freedom Riders. A U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibited segregation at interstate public transportation facilities – at airports, train and bus stations – but the law was ignored in the Deep South. People of color were supposed to know their place, no matter what federal judges said.

Freedom Riders, including white people like Myers, challenged the tradition by drawing worldwide attention to the reality of Southern living. They got themselves arrested. Then they clogged the jails. Eventually the government was embarrassed into enforcing the law.

Before the year was out, nearly 400 Freedom Riders had been arrested. Many served brief jail sentences and happily got out. Not Myers, who stubbornly refused bail, refused even to file an appeal. Jailed on June 11, she stayed behind bars until Christmas Day.

Of all the Freedom Riders, white or black, she served the longest sentence.

Read the rest.

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MF50: May 22-26, 2011

Mississippi Freedom 50th is a week-long series of events in Jackson, MS, designed to honor and celebrate the 1961 Freedom Riders.

Letter from Hank Thomas

"It is my dream to see you all in Jackson, Mississippi, for the fiftieth anniversary celebration next year."

MF50 on Facebook

Mississippi Freedom 50th

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