Parchman and the Freedom Riders' Summer
Near Jackson, Mississippi
They started arresting Freedom Riders in Jackson on May twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-one. The riders had come south on buses, Black and white together, testing the Supreme Court ruling that had ordered desegregation of interstate travel facilities. When they stepped off the buses at the Greyhound and Trailways terminals in Jackson, they were arrested before they reached the waiting room. Breach of the peace. Failure to obey an officer.
By the end of that summer, three hundred twenty-nine Freedom Riders had been arrested in Mississippi. The Jackson city jail could not hold them all. Authorities transferred the overflow to the Hinds County Prison Farm, and then to the maximum-security wing at Parchman Penitentiary, the Mississippi State Farm.
Parchman is ninety miles north of Jackson, in the Mississippi Delta. It had been established in nineteen oh one on land the state purchased in the Delta, and it was structured explicitly on the plantation model: armed guards on horseback, work gangs in the cotton fields, a hierarchical system of trustees and overseers, and labor extracted from prisoners from sunrise to sundown, sometimes fifteen hours a day in cotton fields in summer heat. Civil rights attorney Roy Haber, who visited a prisoner at Parchman in nineteen seventy-one, described what he found as the last legal vestiges of slavery in the United States.
The Freedom Riders were housed in the maximum-security wing, segregated from the general population. The conditions were harsh. The cells were small, the heat extreme, and when the riders sang freedom songs, as they did consistently, the guards confiscated their mattresses as punishment.
What the state of Mississippi did not understand was that Parchman, designed as a breaking place, did not break the movement. The Freedom Riders sang. They wrote letters. Some of them radicalized further in those cells. When James Farmer, who had organized the rides, was offered release, he refused it. They left only when their cases had worked through the courts, and what happened to them there became part of the public record.
