In 1961 Dodie Smith-Simmons wanted to be a Freedom Rider. A native of New Orleans, she had joined the local youth chapter of the NAACP at age 15. Now she was 18, a member of CORE and a veteran of marches and sit-in. But instead of going to Jackson and getting arrested, she worked behind the lines. New Orleans was an important staging city for the campaign, a way-point for Riders coming from the west coast and elsewhere. Smith-Simmons and her CORE colleagues housed and fed the Riders on their arrival, trained them in nonviolence, then put them on trains and buses into Jackson.

When the federal government announced on September 22 that it would finally enforce the law, abolishing segregation in southern bus and train stations, it appeared that Smith-Simmons had lost her chance. But Mississippi provided nothing if not opportunities for Civil Rights activists. Many cities continued to segregate their stations, so New Orleans CORE began sending Riders back into Mississippi.

On November 29, 1961, Smith-Simmons and four others road a Greyhound bus to from New Orleans to McComb, Mississippi. On arrival they were denied entrance to the station’s waiting room due to a supposed gas leak. They returned a bit later and successfully integrated it, at which point they were attacked by a gang of whites and driven from the station. Claude Sitton, the New York Times reporter who had covered the Rides all summer, described the scene as a repeat “on a smaller scale [of] the riots that greeted Freedom Riders last May in Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala.”

The Riders managed to escape without any help from the McComb police, who were nowhere to be found, or the FBI observers on hand, as always, to observe and nothing more. But if they were paying attention that day, they did get to see Dodie Smith-Simmons become a Freedom Rider.

Above, Dodie Smith-Simmons photographed outside the old bus station in McComb on April 16, 2012.

If Virginia does mandate vaginal ultrasounds be performed on women who want abortions, it will join the ranks of seven other states that currently impose the procedure. Surprise, surprise, five of them are southern — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Texas — and the other two are southern wannabes — Arizona and Kansas.

But then of course the South does have a history of gouging the vaginas of women who break the rules. Freedom Rider Joan Mullholland (above) remembers her arrival at Parchman prison in the Mississippi delta one evening in the summer of 1961:

It was night, I think, when we got to Parchman — getting processed and a change of clothes and vaginal searches. The matrons would dip their  — as I recollect, it was gloved hands, but somebody else may remember it differently — they would dip ‘em into these buckets of whatever between gouging us up. It smelled like Lysol or Pine-Sol, one of those highly disinfectant things. It was all frightening. I think it was meant to impress the seriousness of our isolation and that they could do anything they wanted to.

Below is a scan and the transcript of the entry for June 10, 1961. Mulholland had been arrested two days before.

Washed my hair. Dinner spaghetti with two little chunks of hot dogs & cornbread. Ugh! Ruth can’t take it and has been trying to call the lawyer. Lovely little article in yesterday’s paper about me. Wrote Paul but got it back. He’s bailed out and so has Frank.

This evening we sang a lot. Most girls did folk dancing, but since I’d just washed I didn’t want to get all sweaty. After dinner most of us changed to shorties. I think all the girls in here are gems but I feel more in common with the Negro girls & wish I was locked in with them instead of these atheist Yankees.

The jailer brought by two girls to look at us, including one he brought by last night. The boys have devotions twice a day. Sigh! When I grease up Emmy comes over to have some on her lips. Got paper tonight. Wrote Cecil – smuggled.

Almost as soon as the lights went out the singing started. The boys would sing some, and we’d sing some. A man named Charles (non-rider) has a beautiful voice and sang several solos. Someone further away sang “How Great Thou Art” for Betty. Some white guy kept cursing us out. One guy answered back a little and everyone sang louder. We quit around 11. It was one of the most uplifting experiences I’ve ever had.

At least three of the Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961 had managed to survive or escape the Holocaust as children.

Alex Weiss (above) was born in Vienna, Austria, in May 1936, and emigrated with parents and sister in 1940.

In May 1940 they arrested my father. There was one line that said, “You’re going to the camps.” Another line, if you signed over your house, your possessions, your business, they would give you an exit visa. My father signed everything over, and the next day, he gathered me and my sister and my mother together but left his sisters and my grandmother there, because we only had exit visas for the immediate family. We got on a train to go to Trieste and had made arrangements to be on the Saturnia. I don’t know the exact details, but my aunts and my Grandma all stayed, and they all went to the camps and died. Well, there were two aunts that got out, but he had six sisters, and four of them didn’t make it.

The other thing that’s really traumatic that I remember is that after we got to Trieste, we were supposed to wait there for two weeks to get on the Saturnia, a passenger ship, to go to New York.

We were in a hotel room for those two weeks, and I remember we weren’t allowed to go out, because Trieste was full of Black Shirts and Gestapo and what have you. We only spoke German, but my father, who had traveled widely in Italy as a wine-press salesman, spoke fluent Italian and could pass as Italian. So he would go out. I remember I was climbing the walls, and my sister as well, she was only 2.

Finally my father said, “Okay, I’ll take you out and buy you an ice cream or whatever, but you cannot open your mouth and speak, because if you speak German, there might be somebody who notices that and figures we’re refugees and might send us back.”

I said, “I promise I won’t way a word.”

I remember going to this big piazza. My father bought me a whirligig, and he talked Italian to the guy. There was hundreds and hundreds of pigeons in this plaza, and all of the sudden they all flew up at the same time, and I shouted to my father in German, “Look, Papa, the pigeons!” and he looked at me and slapped me.

I cried, of course, but I was more scared seeing the look on my father’s face. My father was frightened, and that’s the first time I felt that, “My God, you know, I’m on my own. Even my father is even scared.” I felt guilty that, now they’re gonna take us back. Well, they didn’t but – I remember that very distinctly.

Weiss and his family made it out of Trieste to New York, and then on to San Francisco, where they resettle.

I grew up in the Fillmore District, which was like the Harlem of San Francisco, but at the time it was fairly mixed. It was primarily black, but with lots of refugees. There was a little Jewish section with Jewish delis and Jewish poultry areas and so on, and I went to school with, you know, black buddies.  After high school, I joined the Navy, two years active duty, from ‘55 to ‘57, and I had a lot of black shipmates who were friends.

When the Freedom Riders were attacked in Alabama, I was outraged. I just couldn’t believe it. And one of my motivations for joining CORE [the Congress of Racial Equality] and volunteering to go on the Freedom Rides was that I did not want to be one of those good Germans who just looked the other way.

I remember reading in the papers about the Anniston bus burning and that CORE was looking for Freedom Riders. So one day I went down to the CORE office in San Francisco and said, “I’d like to join,” and volunteered to go on the Rides.

I told my father. He was totally against it: “You’re gonna get killed. It’s not us this time. It’s the schvartzes.”

I said, “Hey, you know, this is what happened to you. I’m not gonna stand by.”

That whole idea — if you see evil and do nothing about it you are a participant in it — I really believed that.

Alex Weiss photographed in 2007.

If you’re a bit hazy on the details, here’s an EZ-FAQ to help you sound like you know what you’re talking about when all the hubub kicks into high gear.

Wow, Oprah?
Damn straight.

Wait, the Freedom Rides were . . .
In 1961, 400+ people were arrested for integrating bus and train stations and airports in the South.

I remember Freedom Summer, is that . . .
Freedom Summer came three years later, in 1964, when hundreds of college students went to Mississippi to work with local organizers on voter registration.

Is that when . . .
Yes, Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodmen were murdered outside Philadelphia, on June 21, 1964.

Were any Riders . . .
No Riders were killed.

Is there a cheap, easy irony here?
Yes, while the Rides were still going on, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with several leaders of the Rides and the Movement and offered support of various kinds if they would focus on voter registration instead of nonviolent direction action. The administration considered voter registration a safer alternative.

But weren’t the Riders attacked . . .
Yes, Klan mobs came very close to killing Riders in three vicious attacks in Alabama. In Anniston, they firebombed a bus, but the Riders managed to escape. At the stations In Birmingham and Montgomery, the police made themselves scarce and let the mobs attack the Riders on their arrival. Several Riders were severely wounded.

Were there any famous people on the Rides?
James Farmer, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Bernard LaFayette, James Lawson, Percy Sutton, Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, Rev. C. T. Vivian . . .

Uh, were there any famous . . .
Time magazine cub reporter Calvin Trillin rode on the first bus of Riders into Jackson.

Who started the Rides?
James Farmer and his colleagues at the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) created the Rides.

What was CORE’s elevator pitch?
A demonstration bus ride through the Deep South — Washington, DC, to New Orleans — integrating stations along the way in an attempt to draw some attention to the fact these stations were segregating in defiance of federal law.

Law? What law?
In December 1960, the Supreme Court had ruled that stations serving cross-country buses (more formally, interstate transportation) could not segregate.

How did it get started?
On May 4, 13 riders — blacks and whites, men and women — left Washington. They made it mostly OK until they got to Alabama. Reinforcements from the Nashville Student Movement arrived to keep the Rides going into Montgomery on May 20 and then into Jackson, Mississippi, on May 24. Where for the first time they were all arrested.

This is getting too detailed, can you just bottom-line it for me?
Wait, this part is important: Once arrested in Jackson, the Riders deftly abandoned their goal of New Orleans and opted to employ “jail — no bail.” They refused to bail out and instead invited new Riders to join them and fill Jackson’s jails to overflowing. Across the country, people responded and within three weeks Jackson’s jails were full.

Cool.
Mississippi then found room for the Riders in the state prison, Parchman. The Riders were locked up pretty much 24/7 in Unit 17, the maximum-security building that also housed death row and the gas chamber.

And then?
The Freedom Riders won. In September 1961 the Interstate Commerce Commission mandated an end to segregation in all bus and train stations and airports.

Can I sound clever by saying the Rides basically break down into three phases?

Yes, you can. Phase one: May 4 – May 14: The original Riders from Washington, DC, to Birmingham.

Phase two: May 14 – May 24: After the attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, the Nashville Student Movement sends reinforcements to keep the Rides going, on into Montgomery, on May 20, and then into Jackson, Mississippi on May 24, where they are all arrested.

Phase three: May 24 – September 13: Jackson takes center stage, as Riders fill the jails to overflowing.

What’s my response if someone says that before I can?

A three-stage view overlooks two other very important stages. First, Rides elsewhere around the south — in Albany, Georgia; Houston, Texas; and St. Augustine, Florida, among other places. Second, Rides in Jackson and McComb late in the year, to test the state’s compliance with the new ICC regulations.

Anything else I can say to try to sound clever?

The Rides showed the movement that nonviolent direct action offered a way forward, and provide a vital template for future campaigns.

That it?
For much of the summer of 1961, Parchman became Movement University. New recruits were locked up with movement leaders. Pretty much all they could do was talk. Many of the future leaders of the Mississippi movement were schooled here.

Weren’t the Freedom Riders mostly . . .

Overall, half of all the Riders in 1961 were black, half white. The same is true of the 330 Mississippi Riders as well. Also: Three-quarters of the Mississippi Riders were men, a quarter women. Three-quarters were between the ages of 18 and 30.

And weren’t they mostly from . . .
The Mississippi Riders came from all over: 39 states and 10 other countries. Roughly a third came from the Deep South, a third from the Northeast and Midwest, and a third from the West Coast.

Hey, this is all great but I want to know more . . .

1. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_riders

2. Read Ray Arsenault’s excellent narrative history: Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Pivotal Moments in American History)

3. Read my book Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders

4. Look inside my book

5. Watch Stanley Nelson’s Freedom Riders, airing nationally on PBS on May 16

6. Read around this blog blog

7. Read John Lewis’s autobiography: Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

8. Read James Farmer’s autobiography: Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement

9. Read Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography: Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

Freedom Rider Mimi Real was arrested at the Trailways Station in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 21, 1961. At the time she was a sophomore at Swarthmore College. Today she lives in the Bay Area and works as an administrator in a private school.

We all gathered at the Montgomery [Alabama] bus station [on June 21]. There was some more excitement at the station because, of course, everybody knew who we were, and there was much scurrying around of law enforcement people. The first thing we learned was that there had been a bomb scare on the bus that we were supposed to get on. So the police had to come in and search the bus. And, of course, there wasn’t anything on the bus.

Then the other thing that happened – I can’t remember what order these things happened – is the bus driver, whose shift that was, showed up, realized what he was gonna be doing, and promptly turned around and went home. So there was additional delay, while they rounded up another driver.

Then we all got on the bus. The bus driver kept insisting that the whites all sit in the front and the blacks sit in the back. We refused and all sat in the back. This was a milk-run — the bus stopped at every little cow town in Alabama and Mississippi. The poor bus driver, I guess he figured he was stuck with us, but he sure wasn’t gonna get in any trouble. So he made it quite clear that we were not allowed to get off the bus.

We couldn’t go to the restroom. We couldn’t buy anything to eat. But we were fine with that. But then, in one of the many stops in the middle of nowhere, a lovely black man, probably in his 20s or early 30s, got on, and he had this huge picnic basket of food.

His mother or whoever he had just been visiting had packed it for him, knowing that he probably wasn’t gonna be able to go into any of these little bus stops along the way, and had packed him enough food to feed an army. And he got to chatting with us, and when he learned that we hadn’t anything to eat, he insisted on giving us his entire picnic basket.

So we feasted on fried chicken and all kinds of stuff. And included in this feast was a chocolate layer cake in this big cake box. We ate everything else, but we decided to save the cake. And I was somehow given the responsibility of holding onto the cake. Other than that, the bus ride was totally uneventful.

There was no crowd at all when we arrived at the Trailways station [in Jackson]. The police were there and it was almost perfunctory. As we drove past the front of the bus station, we saw that there was a paddy wagon, a Black Maria, sitting in front. The bus driver insisted that everybody get off the bus first before we got off. Then we got off, and we all filed into the white-only waiting room. The police were waiting for us. The whole thing was very engineered. There weren’t supposed to be any surprises.

We went through this little song-and-dance routine. They asked us to move on. We didn’t. And they said that two or three times, and said they’d have to arrest us if we didn’t move, and we didn’t move. So they put us all under arrest. We had come in the back door of the waiting room, and then we just walked out the front door right into the paddy wagon, me still clutching the cake. I still had that cake with me when I got to the Hinds County Jail, where we ate it.

In 1962 Real returned to the South to work as a CORE volunteer for more than a year on voter registration projects in southern Louisiana. In 1966, about a year after the Voting Rights Act had been signed into law, she returned to the parish where she had worked to see the changes the new law had brought about.

I was totally totally blown away. By this time virtually everybody who could register was registered and there were elections in progress and blacks were running for office. The one scene that crystallized the change for me was a mass meeting in a Masonic Hall somewhere in the boonies in West Feliciana Parish. There was a mass meeting and it was candidates night. The place was packed, standing room only, and who was there to speak but the sheriff, who was running for re-election.

Now this was the same guy who had arrested a lot of them and who had harassed them and under whose watch all manner of things had gone on. There had been all kinds of harassment at that very same Masonic Hall there when we’d had our voting clinic meetings there years before. He gets up in front of this group to plead for their vote. That scene was the fairy tale ending. It’s not that everybody lived happily ever after, but that scene to me vindicated everything we had done.

The poor guy. I can vividly feel what I felt then, almost being embarrassed for him. It was the most painful thing he’d ever had to do in his life. Get up in front of a room of whatever he thought this was a room full of and be at the begging end.

Everybody knew exactly who he was but nobody was rude, nobody heckled him. They gave him polite applause afterwards; of course everybody kind of cluck clucked to each other. Everybody thought it was very funny. He obviously couldn’t say very much—“I did a fine job of beating you over the head”—so he just said he’d appreciate their votes and he’d be sure that the law was enforced fairly.

By this time the black power movement was in full swing in most of the rest of the country. Not that they were black power people in West Feliciana, but they all had televisions and they all saw Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael and all these people speak. They were all charged up. My feeling then was, okay they’ve arrived in the 20th century, I can leave now. There was a bittersweet element, in the sense that the fight to get registered and vote was so morally clear-cut. It was so clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. That battle had been won, and they were now joining the messy world of politics in a democratic republic, where it’s no longer good versus evil or black versus white, but it’s lots of shades of gray.

Mimi Real photographed in 2007.

The soundtrack, “Buses Are A-Coming,” is a Freedom Song created like so many others: composed in the heat of moment — in this instance in a Jackson, Mississippi, jail cell.

Freedom Rider Bernard LaFayette Jr., who rode on the first bus into Jackson, describes its genesis in Stanley Nelson’s forthcoming PBS documentary on the Rides:

We made up a song saying that buses are a-coming. And we sang it to the jailers to tell them, and warn them, to get ready, to be prepared, that we were not the only ones coming. So we started singing, [singing] “Buses are a-comin’, oh, yes, buses are a–comin’, oh, yes, buses are a-comin’, buses are a-comin’, buses are a-comin’, oh, yes.”

And we say to the jailers, [singing] “Better get you ready, oh, yes.” The jailers say, “Alright, shut up on the singing and hollering in here! This is not no playhouse. This is a jailhouse.” So we said to ourselves, “What are you going to do? Put us in jail?”

This particular recording of “Buses” features the renowned singer Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, in concert with the Flint Community Schools Title One Choir and Verse Chorus.

In 1961, the year of the Rides, Dr. Reagon, then a college student in Albany, Georgia, joined the movement and witnessed firsthand what she calls “the power of song.”

As a singer and activist in the Albany Movement, I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective. It was the first time that I knew the power of song to be an instrument for the articulation of our community concerns.

Ever since, Dr. Reagon has been exploring and exploiting the power of song.

Read more about Dr. Reagon, the video and Mississippi Freedom 50th.

Stokely Carmichael’s cry for Black Power in ‘66 was a cry of frustration. It did not have planning behind it, and in some ways I feel Stokely — whom I loved, whom I liked a good bit personally in 1960 when I first met him — betrayed the movement.

That’s Rev. James Lawson on the moment in June 1966 when Stokely Carmichael (above) unveiled his idea of Black Power.

Five years earlier, during the Freedom Rides, things had been different. Nonviolence was then the dominant model, in large part thanks to Lawson himself. His Nashville workshop had created the strongest student movement in the south. It was the Nashville Movement, notably Diane Nash along with Lawson and many others, who saved the Rides after the horrific attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, AL.

Stokely Carmichael was a student at Howard University in 1961, and as a Freedom Rider, any reservations he had then about nonviolence were publicly put aside, though they were certainly expressed behind bars in Parchman Prison, where he and the other Riders were locked up for several weeks.

By June 1966 Carmichael had been organizing in Lowndes County, AL, for over a year, and had helped force John Lewis out as the head of SNCC so that he could replace him. Lawson had moved from Nashville to Memphis, and was now the pastor of Centenary Methodist Church.

After James Meredith was shot on the second day of his solo March Against Fear (from Memphis to Jackson, MS), on June 6, 1966, Lawson along with other leaders rushed in to to fill the void, reconstituting the march with Meredith’s permission. Carmichael was part of that group, and ten days later, as the march passed through Greenwood, MS, he issued his first public call for Black Power.

(Read more details on that moment in The First Black Power Flyer?)

I interviewed Rev. Lawson in Nashville in the summer of 2007 as part of the research for my book. He visibly bristled when I used the word “radical” to describe certain events in the mid- to late ’60s.

The fact that Stokely’s cry was picked up by various revolutionary elements in the country as being radical and militant, that to me is a kind of white romanticism that is not connected to the effort to create a new nation. I don’t think anything was more radical than the Montgomery bus boycott or the sit-in campaign or the Albany movement or the Birmingham campaign.

Here are his comments on Carmichael and Black Power in their entirety:

Stokely Carmichael’s cry for Black Power in ‘66 was a cry of frustration. It did not have planning behind it, and in some ways I feel Stokely — whom I loved, whom I liked a good bit personally in 1960 when I first met him — betrayed the movement.

Stokely betrayed us in two ways: first, he became chair of SNCC after John Lewis had already been elected and had to leave, so that’s an old, tyrannical tactic that did not become Stokely or the movement. Second, because he wanted to plant this notion of black power into the Mississippi March Against Fear, in ‘66. He should have been talking to Martin as early as 1965. Stokely was getting frustrated in Lowndes County by that time. So he should have been talking to King and to others of us about all of this early on. We were his friends. We had spent time in jail together. So he should have been exploring that discussion early on, as soon as he was developing it instead of deliberately — as he admitted — injecting it into the ‘66 Meredith march.

On the day that [James] Meredith was shot, he didn’t have the courtesy to call me in Memphis and say, “I’m going to be on a plane Monday — the next morning, whenever this was — will you pick me up?” I picked him up, but that’s because I was picking up King.

King and I had talked about continuing the march, and I picked up Martin and a couple of other people at the airport. Lo and behold, Stokely’s there with a small entourage. So I picked him up too, because I had a nine-passenger station wagon. I brought him to the house, and he didn’t say any of this in the process of that day together. The first day when we started down the highway from Hernando [in north Mississippi], where Meredith had been shot, I don’t remember Stokely raising any of this about black power. There was no media there that day. There was no media there; we hadn’t announced that we were going do it, we were doing it quietly with Meredith’s consent.

I visited with Meredith the day he was shot, and he agreed that the march should not be stopped by his being shot and that some of us should do it. So we had not broken faith with Meredith over the issue. I mean, King and I saw to that. And so James received me that afternoon at the hospital, and we talked these things out; and he agreed, let’s go forward.

I don’t remember Stokely ever raising it that particular day. But he claims later on that he decided there, with King, when the media came, that he was going to put this out into the world. Well, that was a fairly unfaithful way of doing it. With folk who loved him and knew him.

The fact that Stokely’s cry was picked up by various revolutionary elements in the country as being radical and militant, that to me is a kind of white romanticism that is not connected to the effort to create a new nation. I don’t think anything was more radical than the Montgomery bus boycott or the sit-in campaign or the Albany movement or the Birmingham campaign.

The urban explosions that began in ‘64 in Rochester, NY, as I remember, that was only Americana coming to the surface. Urban explosions and riots against black people had had a long history in the United States. So to see those as a part of the movement, I do not. An urban explosion is an urban explosion.

Did the movement have an effect on them? Only in this sense: That we started the awakening of black people, and black people were saying enough is enough is enough. So that took place in ‘64 the first time. I don’t consider that part of the civil rights movement but part of America.

What I call the civil rights movement was the various efforts out of the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congress Of Radial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other such groups to deliberately plan resistance, deliberately call for the awakening of people, the reaffirmation of equality, freedom, justice, and the dismantling the segregation system. That’s the movement, and it happened in a great variety of ways.

Two weeks ago, I posted her scan of what is perhaps the first Black Power flyer, which she had picked up on the last day of the Meredith March (aka, the March Against Fear) in June 1966 in Mississippi.

What occasioned both that flyer and this new one — “Black Out Downtown Canton” — was a brutal tear-gas-and-baton police attack on the Meredith marchers during an evening rally on the grounds of a black public school in Canton, MS, where the marchers also intended to camp for the night.

In the earlier flyer, the Madison County Movement calls for a “Black Out for Black Power,” employing the phrase that Stokely Carmichael had unleashed a few days earlier in a Greenwood, MS, speech. It exhorts people to quit shopping in downtown Canton and to stage a one-day strike “if you work for the White Man.”

The aim of the document below is more to provide background details on local organizers’ preparations for the march’s passage through Canton, especially of their efforts to secure proper permission for use of the school grounds.

We feel that many of you do not know of and understand the terrible incidents of brutality of the Madison County Law Force and the Mississippi Highway Patrol. You have a right to know the true facts. The leaders of the movement have spent several weeks . . . discussing and planning for the march which was to come through our town.

Like the earlier flyer, this one is a mix of hand-written and typewritten elements (the green type is in the original).