Freedom Ride 69THE MAGNOLIA STATE’ and ‘PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.’ ‘Everyone on
the bus was prepared to die,’ a rider admitted. The riders took the precau-
tion of writing down the names and addresses of kinfolk who could claim
their bodies. To banish their fear, they sang one song with gusto:
I’m a-takin’ a ride Hallelujah, I’m a travelin’
On the Greyhound bus line. Hallelujah, ain’t it fine?
I’m a-ridin’ the front seat Hallelujah, I’m a travelin’
To Jackson, this time. Down freedom’s main line.As the Ride continued, Robert Kennedy decided that his brother’s polit-
ical fortunes mattered more than the constitutional rights of the students
to travel where they wanted. After a flurry of telephone calls, the attorney
general made a Faustian bargain with James Eastland, the rock-ribbed segre-
gationist who chaired the Senate Judiciary committee [Doc. 7, p. 144]. The
riders would be arrested in Jackson for their own safety, provided there
was no mob violence. Eastland kept his promise. When the riders entered
the bus station’s white cafeteria and restrooms, they were promptly pushed
in paddy wagons, charged with disorderly conduct, and fined $200 each.
State officials told klansmen that arrests were more effective in stopping
Freedom Rides than burning buses.
Farmer announced that the riders would not pay the fines, which meant
three weeks of jail time. The riders were crammed into small cells where they
were given urine-soaked blankets. To relieve overcrowding in the county jail,
the police moved the riders to the dungeon cells of Parchman penitentiary.
In ‘Little Alcatraz,’ the riders were subjected to a nearly unbearable routine.
They ate overly salted food covered with bugs and were denied books,
exercise, and cigarettes. The guards regularly abused them with electric
prods and wrist-breakers and subjected women to humiliating body searches.
Some riders were so stressed that they sang songs, began hunger strikes,
and punched each other. The songfest irritated the guards, who confiscated
the bedding and blasted the riders with pressurized water. Hank Thomas
hollered, ‘Takemy mattress! I’ll keep my soul!’ When the riders still refused
to cooperate, they ended up in sweatboxes or solitary confinement.
Farmer urged others to keep the pressure on apartheid by flouting Jim
Crow laws and going to jail. A thousand people, mostly young black men,
but also white clergy, Quakers, professors, communists, and union members,
crossed the color line in Dixie. The push to desegregate bus bathrooms
spread to other interstate facilities, including railroad depots and airport
terminals, and the jails filled to overflowing. Their sacrifice paid off. At the
attorney general’s behest, the ICC required interstate carriers and terminals
to display signs saying that seating was available ‘without regard to race,