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Author describes how the violence against the civil rights movement's Freedom Riders impacted the international image of the U.S. (:51)
 

Full Interview (13:51)
 

Tavis: Eric Etheridge is a journalist and photographer who previously served as an editor at "Rolling Stone" magazine. He's also an author whose latest book is a unique project about the Mississippi Freedom Riders of the early sixties, called "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Freedom Riders." Eric, nice to have you on the program.

Eric Etheridge: Thank you, great to be here.

Tavis: Let me start with two basic questions, for those who might not be up on their history with regard to what the Freedom Rides and Freedom Riders were, number one. Then I want to talk about how the book, how the text came to be.

Etheridge: Sure. Well, in 1960, the Supreme Court ruled that bus stations and train stations could no longer segregate. In the South, of course, they had separate waiting rooms, separate lunch counters, separate bathrooms, separate entrances, separate ticket counters. But the Supreme Court said in 1960, no. But the federal government was not enforcing that at all in the South, so they continued to segregate.

The Freedom Rides were originally conceived as a two-week bus trip from Washington to New Orleans to try to highlight the fact that the law was still being broken in the South, and it turned into a different event with the violence in Alabama and then being arrested in Jackson. But they were successful, and at the end of the summer the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations demanding compliance with the new law.

Tavis: The idea for the Freedom Rides came from?

Etheridge: CORE. James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality. They were looking for some event to follow, some new campaign to follow the very successful sit-ins of 1960, and they knew that in 1947 CORE had done a similar ride called A Journey of Reconciliation, mostly in the upper South, but again to highlight the lack of compliance in transportation.

Tavis: Help me - you've started to do this, now let me ask you to drill down a little bit more. Situate for me the timing and the importance of these Freedom Rides in the context of the civil rights movement. You think of the - for those who are watching, we think of "I Have a Dream," Dr. King. That's 1963. So let's back up two years to '61; situate this for me.

Etheridge: Well, sort of the modern civil rights movement, I guess you could sort of say, when does it start? People probably have different ideas.

Tavis: Emmett Till, Rosa Parks.

Etheridge: Right. Well, '55, '56 is Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Then there's really not much until 1960, when the sit-in movement breaks out in Greensboro, North Carolina. Then Nashville, then Atlanta, then all over the South except, interestingly enough, in Jackson. No sit-in in Jackson until the spring of '61, just before the Freedom Riders got there.

So the Freedom Riders are really the first big national campaign of the modern civil rights movement, and they really put the sort of Gandhian idea of jail, no bail, using the system against itself to make inroads into ending segregation.

Tavis: Because we think of Dr. King, as I mentioned earlier, when we think of the civil rights movement, King's juxtaposition to this Freedom Ride demonstration was?

Etheridge: Well, he was involved. Once they got to Alabama, the original Freedom Riders, they were met with horrific violence in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery. And at that point, the whole movement got involved, so you had the kids coming out of Nashville who would later be the core of SNCC, you had the SCLC with King, and you had CORE still involved, so really, the whole movement got involved to sort of shepherd the rides through their completion once all the violence happened in Alabama.

Tavis: We have some sense, of course, historically, how the country viewed the bombing of Birmingham, of 16 Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the four little girls who were killed. We have some sense, of course, how the country viewed around what was happening in Birmingham - the dogs and the water hoses. How did the country view the violence around these Freedom Rides?

Etheridge: Well, it was a very similar thing. It was worldwide attention brought on the U.S. and the South when there was the bomb - a bus leaving Anniston was chased down by the mob, tires slashed, forced off the road, and then a firebomb thrown inside the bus. And for a few minutes, the Riders were prevented from leaving the bus.

And they eventually got off, where they then were attacked by the mob. But the bus burned, and there are very many famous photographs of that, and this is at a time when Kennedy was trying to do international diplomacy, a lot of stuff with the Russians. And it was considered, you know, giving the U.S. a bad name, so to speak. The Riders should stop.

Tavis: The Kennedy you're referring to in that sentence was John F. Kennedy, who at the time was the president.

Etheridge: Right.

Tavis: His brother, Robert Kennedy, was the attorney general. Bobby Kennedy had to get involved in this, although reluctantly. Tell me the Bobby Kennedy connection.

Etheridge: Well, he got involved once the violence broke out in Alabama, and pertinently to the Mississippi piece, he cut a deal with senators and leaders in Mississippi to say, like, okay, the Riders are coming on to Jackson from Alabama. You can't let them be beaten again. And Mississippi said, "Well, we will not let them be beaten, but we're going to arrest them," which has never been done on the Rides before - the Riders had never been arrested en masse.

So Kennedy said, "Okay," and I think everybody at that point thought they'd kind of solved the problem of the Rides. So the first 27 Riders arrived in Jackson on May 24th, 1961. They were all arrested. And when they got thrown in jail, they said, "Ah hah, we know this. We're not leaving. This is our chance to do jail, no bail. We're going to fill up the jails of Jackson, Mississippi."

And at that point, they put out the call all over the country - come to Jackson. And over the next few weeks - within three weeks, enough people had come that they'd filled up the jails in Jackson. The Hinds County jail and the Jackson City jail, and Mississippi started shipping them off to Parchman, which is the state prison up in the Delta.

So the Rides were very successful in the sense of getting these people to come to Mississippi and get arrested and get thrown in jail.

Tavis: And the impact of filling up the jails, going to jail, was what?

Etheridge: It was just to overflow the system, just to kind of make the system work against itself. And so Mississippi didn't quite know what to do until they said, "Well, we've got a 40,000 acre farm up in the Delta we'll send you to."

Tavis: It occurs to me that I should ask, Eric, for some young student who might be watching who heard you say earlier and we let you slide right past it that the law was one thing - the Supreme Court says one thing, the federal government doing something different. Supreme Court says one thing, the federal government not enforcing it. How does that happen?

Etheridge: Well, I think that was a very common occurrence in the early sixties, and obviously before that, that there were laws on the books, there's the Constitution, of course, as well as rulings by the Supreme Court. I don't think the federal government knew how to project its power into states at that period. They didn't know how to do it.

And the states were very determined to preserve their sovereignty, and that's what the name of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission - those are the folks that we have to thank today for the mug shots. But their whole charge as a state agency was to preserve segregation and stop the federal government from doing anything.

Tavis: It's that notion of all deliberate speed, which meant don't do much of nothing, exactly.

Etheridge: Zero speed. (Laughter)

Tavis: To the text, before I jump into - there are three specific stories I think I might have time to get into with regard to these photos. Before I jump to the story specifically, tell me now how the book came to be.

Etheridge: Well, I was looking - I'm from Mississippi. I grew up in a little town called Carthage. I was four in 1961, so I didn't know anything about the Freedom Rides when they were happening. And as I grew up and I got older, I knew about race - obviously, I lived in a small, very segregated town. And as I got older in New York I started looking for a historical project to do, working with historical images.

And I knew the Sovereignty Commission files had been released to the public as the result of a lawsuit, and that happened in 1998. And in 2004, I went looking - I said, "Are there any pictures in the files that I can do something with?" And lo and behold, the mug shot of every Freedom Rider arrested in Jackson in 1961. So a complete set of 328 people, Black and White, men and women, sometimes boys and girls, from all over the country who had come to Jackson to put their bodies on the line.

Tavis: So the book is laid out in a very interesting and cool sort of way; I'll let you explain. People are seeing photos as we talk right now. But the way it's laid out is?

Etheridge: Well, so once I saw the mug shots, I thought they were an amazing addition to the sort of history of the civil rights movement, and I wanted to bring the mug shots to a wider audience, and I wanted to go see the Riders today and make a new picture of them to go with the old picture. And so I went around the country over about three or four years.

I photographed over 100 Riders, 80 of which are in the book, and all the mug shots are in the book. And it's laid out chronologically by the groups of people that came to Jackson.

Tavis: Anybody tell you no, they didn't want to be photographed in modern day?

Etheridge: About half a dozen folks said no. I've turned one or two of them around, I'm still working on the rest. (Laughter)

Tavis: All right, let me ask you about three stories. The first story - no particular order - Hezekiah Watkins. Tell me the story of Mr. Watkins.

Etheridge: Hezekiah Watkins was in the ninth grade in Jackson, Mississippi when he became a Freedom Rider, and he went on to work in the movement throughout his high school years and was arrested over 100 times. But he was 13 when he went up to buy a ticket at the White ticket window at the Greyhound station, and that became - that involved him in the movement.

His mother was a cook. She worked downtown at a big restaurant, and like a lot of the local Mississippians who got involved, the pressure came not necessarily on Hezekiah, although he was beaten several times during his career as a civil rights worker, but his mother was eventually told if your son doesn't stop what he's doing, you're going to be fired.

And she had long since blessed his civil rights work, so she wasn't going to change his mind, and wasn't going to ask him to do it. So he kept on, and she was fired. So that's what you saw, a lot of that economic recrimination in the South, as well as the outright violence.

Tavis: Winona Beamer and David Myers.

Etheridge: Winona Beamer and David Myers were sweethearts at Central State in Wilberforce, Ohio, and he went down pretty early on as a Freedom Rider. Winona said she wanted to go, too, and he said, "No, I know what can happen in Mississippi, and I don't want you to go down there." He was in jail in Jackson and about 10 days after he got there a new Freedom Rider, a man, walked into his cell and said, "I have a note for you." And he opened it up and it says, "Hi, Dave, this is Winona. I'm in the jail across the street."

And he told me he said, "I never told her since then what she could or couldn't do." (Laughter) But now she's kind of a special story herself, because she was determined - most of the Riders bailed out. They did about six weeks in jail, but they bailed out to preserve their appellate rights. But Winona was kind of hard-headed and kind of just incensed that somebody - that she had to go to jail for sitting next to her friend, Pat Bryant, a Black woman from Ohio, in a station in Jackson.

It just didn't - it was absurd to her. So she stayed her entire sentence, and she was arrested in June and she was released on Christmas Day, 1961.

Tavis: That's a long term.

Etheridge: And for most of it, she was by herself in Parchman, by herself on the cell block, the only one in her cell, the only one on her block. She would get out once or twice a week to take a shower, and she told me that when she would get out she would run the entire length of the cell block - that was her exercise.

Tavis: Tell me quickly about Stephen Green.

Etheridge: Stephen Green was typical - about half the Freedom Riders were White, half were Black. A lot of them were not really political before this moment, and Stephen Green was a student at Middlebury College. He'd just given a tour that spring to William Sloane Coffin from Yale University Divinity School, and at the end of the tour, Coffin said, "This is a great place to go to sleep for four years."

And Stephen was, like, sort of verbally slapped in the face, and the next thing you know he's on the bus going to Jackson, getting involved, and that totally changed his life. He ended up being a - he said, "I came out of Parchman I wanted to consume the world." He had this whole new vision of the world as a much bigger place than he knew before.

And he ended up being a worker for - in, like, Darfur and hot spots all across the world for the U.N.

Tavis: Finally - my time is running here - what do you make of the fact that you are a White guy who grew up in Mississippi; to your point now, half the Freedom Riders were, in fact, White. For those who don't know the real story of the movement, it couldn't have happened without a lot of good White people who were doing the right things.

Etheridge: Well, that's true, but there were also - there were about 100 people from the South who participated - two were White, three were White, that I know of in the Freedom Rides. So it's also the great story of the Blacks from Mississippi, from Alabama, from Louisiana who participated and then didn't leave. They had to stay there and continue working in the movement.

For me, the project was a great editorial idea. The images are - the mug shots are spectacular images, and I really wanted to - it was a great photographic project, but it really became, over time, a way for me to reconnect with my own history that I didn't know, because I was either too young or just wasn't paying attention.

Tavis: Well, thanks to you now there's a book that we can all be empowered by. The book is called "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Freedom Riders" by Eric Etheridge. Eric, thanks for your work.

Etheridge: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you on.