I Will Keep My Soul'

...One stanza rang out: "They say in Hinds County no neutrals have they met...

...In Jackson, Mississippi, forty-one Negro citizens of that community joined the Freedom Riders, ending up in their hometown jails...

...People are learning that in a nonviolent war like ours, as in any other war, there must be suffering...

...A Freedom Ride later that year, called the "Journey of Reconciliation," cosponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, demonstrated that segregated seating was still enforced on buses in the upper Southern states, and that anyone who challenged this segregation was subject to arrest and threatened violence...

...We sang new words to old labor songs, too...

...Others have lost their jobs or have been expelled from school because of their participation in the rides...

...He told me about his family, his wife, and four or five children—the good records they had made in schools, including Ole Miss...

...I do not think these jailers will ever be quite the same again after their experience...

...Who were the Freedom Riders...

...The Interstate Commerce Commission has now issued an historic ruling in behalf of interstate bus integration which may indeed mean that the suffering of the past six months has not been in vain...

...This is a basic motive behind the Freedom Rides, and nonviolence is the key to its realization...

...One evening at the county jail, after a rumor of our imminent transfer to the state penitentiary ha*d reached us, the jailer came quietly to our Freedom Riders cell block...

...But there is a new spirit among Negroes in Jackson...

...Jails are not a new experience for many of the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails...

...The Freedom Riders rejected this essentially states' right doctrine of race relations...

...Keep up the good work," one said...

...This was another purpose of the Rides themselves: to break down the voluntary submission of Negroes to racial injustice, a submission created by generations of suppression with the rope and with fire and with economic reprisal...

...It is not only that Southerners and other Americans have been shaken in their unjust racial practices, or out of their lethargy...

...And the Freedom Riders sang...

...The world and America saw also the Freedom Rider's challenge to the traditions and fears which have immobilized so many Negroes in Dixie...

...Yet, in the months that followed reports continued to pour into our office indicating that the South was defying the Supreme Court's edict, just as some of the Southern states have defied the Court's school desegregation rulings...

...Further, the states' rights doctrine is just as outmoded on the domestic scene as Nineteenth Century isolationism is on the international...

...In 1960 the Supreme Court issued a ruling, in the Boynton case, banning segregation in the terminal facilities used by interstate passengers...

...The guards threatened repeatedly, as a reprisal for our insistence upon dignity, to take away our mattresses...

...Upstairs...

...We sang old folk songs and gospel songs to which new words had been written, telling of the Freedom Ride and its purpose...

...He did most of the talking...

...This new spirit was expressed well by one Freedom Rider in the Mississippi state penitentiary at Parchman...

...In 1946 the Supreme Court ruled in the Irene Morgan decision that segregation of interstate passengers in seating on buses was an unconstitutional burden upon commerce...

...Now, as a result of the Freedom Rides, the world at large, and especially the developing nations of Africa and Asia, have been offered the opportunity of viewing a new, more constructive approach to America's racial dilemma...

...Come and get my mattress," he shouted...

...One of them lies in a Detroit hospital critically ill from a cerebral hemorrhage, a direct result of the beating he took...

...Has the whole thing been a stunt, a gimmick engineered by irresponsible publicity seekers...

...Many of the victims will carry permanent scars...

...The first twenty-seven Freedom Riders to arrive in Jackson saw the inside of two different jails and two different prisons— the Jackson City Jail, the Hinds County Jail, the Hinds County Prison Farm, and the State Penitentiary at Parchman...

...Sing your freedom song...

...I will keep my soul...

...Jobs will be lost, mortgages will be foreclosed, loans will be denied, persons will be hurt, and some may die...

...As I entered the white waiting room in one terminal in the South, a Negro woman passenger from the same bus caught my eye and anxiously beckoned me to follow her into the dingy but safe colored section...

...replied the voice...

...Has America's prestige been damaged in the eyes of the world by the events that grew out of the Freedom Rides...

...Through the years since that time reports have come into the office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) of continuing segregation in seating on buses, especially in the deep South...

...Why did we ride...

...He told me of his son's prowess in sports and of the children's marriages and his grandchildren...

...However, whenever the guards were not present, the Negro trustees went out of their way to show their sympathy by word and deed...

...One night at the county jail, a voice called up from the cell block beneath us, where other Negro prisoners were housed...

...The Freedom Riders' aim is not only to stop the practice of segregation, but somehow to reach the common humanity of our fellowmen and bring it to the surface where they can act on it themselves...

...the anonymous prisoner shouted...

...None of us, in the North or in the South, can afford the moral luxury of unconcern about injustice...

...Nor will the other prisoners, black and white, be the same again, after having seen in the flesh men and women who do not believe segregation to be in the very nature of things, and -who are willing to defy it...

...I wish I could do the same thing, but I have to do what these people tell me to do...

...The girl Freedom Riders, in another wing of the jail, joined in the Freedom Ride songs, and for the first time in history, the Hinds County jail rocked with singing of songs of freedom and brotherhood...

...If Africans witnessed our national shame in the necessity for the Freedom Rides, they saw our nation's hope and promise in the fact that there were so many Americans willing to risk their freedom and even their lives to erase that shame...

...What is the meaning of it all...

...They smuggled newspapers in to us, delivered notes and messages between our cell block and that of the girl Freedom Riders, and passed on rumors which they had heard in the jail or in the community...

...Upstairs...

...No American can afford to ignore the burning bus and the bloody heads of the mob's victims...

...Today, how can we think of outsiders keeping hands off injustice in Alabama, when outsiders all over the world can be threatened with destruction by events in a far away place like Laos...

...As Americans, from whatever state, all of us are Mississippians and Minnesotans, Carolinians and Californians, Alabamans and Arizonans...

...Then the downstairs prisoners, whom the jailers had said were our enemies, sang for us...

...Mississippians, born into segregation, are human too...

...I admire you guys and what you are doing," said another...

...Who can fail to be stirred by the new convicts for conscience, black and white, who walked with pride into Southern jails, especially in Mississippi, surrendering their own personal freedom in the struggle for a greater freedom for everyone...

...It was to close this gap between the interpretation and the implementation of the law that the Freedom Riders rode...

...Moments later, when she saw me served at the lunch counter in the white section, she joined me for a cup of coffee...

...This, I am sure, was his way of saying goodbye, and of telling us that he respects the Freedom Riders, and that whatever unpleasantness we might meet at the state penitentiary would be something of which he did not approve...

...Outsiders...

...Prison authorities frequently said, and really seemed to believe, that other Negro prisoners like things the way they are and have no sympathy with us, and that it was for our own protection that we were isolated from them...

...JAMES FARMER, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, has been one of the nation's pioneers in developing nonviolent, direct action methods to meet race relations problems...

...He called me, and we stood there with the bars between us, chatting...

...If the world looks now it will see that many dedicated and conscientious Americans of both races, rather than sweeping the dirt of discrimination under the rug,, are striving,' at any cost, to remove the dirt from their house...

...We replied, "Downstairs...

...Jail at best is neither a romantic nor a pleasant place, and Mississippi jails are no exception...

...How would the dead of Korea view Mississippi's claim that only Mississippians have a right to concern themselves with injustice in that state...

...These are questions frequently asked, and I think the answer should not be required to wait upon the verdict of history...

...Now, six months later, as all the world knows, the fire-gutted shell of one bus lies in an Alabama junk yard, and some of the people who almost died with it are still suffering prolonged illnesses...

...For the first time, penal authorities in the citadel of segregation had a glimpse of the new Negro and the emancipated white...

...By what right did we seek to "meddle in the South's business...

...He told me, too, of his dis^ like of violence, and of his children's upbringing in that regard...

...Riding in two regularly scheduled buses, one Greyhound, the other Trailways, traveling beneath overcast skies, our little band—the original Freedom Riders —was filled with expectations of storms almost certain to come before the journey was ended...

...Ever since the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the Presidency in 1876, and the bargain with the South which it entailed, the Southern states have maintained that what they do with the Negro is their own business, and "outsiders" have no right to interfere...

...So we came from all over the country, from both races and of all ages, to test compliance with the law, to exercise the right of all Americans to use all transportation facilities with the dignity of equality, to shake Americans out of their apathy on this issue and expose the real character of segregation to the pitiless scrutiny of a nation's conscience...

...In terminals in the South, and on the buses, many Negro passengers took the Freedom Riders' cue and dared to sit and ride "first class...

...A dozen Freedom Riders nearly gave up their lives under the fierce hammering of fists, clubs, and iron pipes in the hands of hysterical mobs...

...Now out on appeal bond, they report many threats of reprisals...

...The jailer stood there talking for more than hour, in the first conversation we had had with him...

...You're either for the Freedom Ride or you 'torn' for Ross Barnett...

...More than 350 men and woman have been jailed in a half dozen states for doing what the Supreme Court of the United States had already said they had a right to do...