50 Years After Their Mug Shots, Portraits of Mississippi’s Freedom Riders
50 Years After Their Mug Shots, Portraits of Mississippi’s Freedom Riders
The journalist and photographer Eric Etheridge provides visual and oral histories of the courageous men and women known as the Freedom Riders in the 1960s.
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Gloria Bouknight, at 20 years old, and at 74 in 2015. While living in New York City, she discovered the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, on a visit to Harlem, and became an active member. Since then, she started a business representing European designers in the United States, and she now works as a wardrobe consultant for executive women.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Eric Etheridge
May 15, 2018
For seven months in 1961, hundreds of black and white volunteers descended on Southern bus and train stations. These Freedom Riders, as they were called, occupied segregated waiting areas, lunch counters, and restrooms in an attempt to compel the federal government to do what local authorities would not: enforce a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared discrimination in interstate public transportation illegal.
During their first incursion into the Deep South, as they rode buses through Alabama, the Freedom Riders were met by angry mobs of white people. Many were savagely beaten. Later that month, in Jackson, Miss., hundreds of protesters were arrested and hastily convicted of breach of peace. Most endured six weeks of imprisonment in sweltering, filthy and vermin infested cells.
Among the important artifacts of this historic campaign are more than 300 mug shots taken of the Freedom Riders in Jackson, now the subject of “Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders” (Vanderbilt University Press). In it, the journalist and photographer Eric Etheridge provides visual and oral histories of these courageous men and women, juxtaposing vintage mug shots with short biographies, interviews and contemporary portraits. Originally published in 2008, this expanded edition, with updated profiles and additional portraits, includes essays by the writer Diane McWhorter and Roger Wilkins, the journalist and official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who died last year.
Luvaghn Brown, from Jackson, Miss., at age 16.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Luvaghn Brown at age 68 in 2013. When he was arrested he had just graduated from Lanier High School at 16, having skipped two grades. In 1979, he was hired by the accounting firm Cooper and Lybrand as a software development manager, eventually becoming a managing director. He retired in 2009.CreditEric Etheridge
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Margaret Leonard from New Orleans, at age 19.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Margaret Leonard at age 65 in 2007. She had been a sophomore at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, where she participated in CORE demonstrations. She later became a newspaper reporter and editor, and is now retired.CreditEric Etheridge
Mr. Etheridge, who grew up in Mississippi, first saw the mug shots after the state’s Department of Archives and History published them online. “I was captivated by these images and wanted to bring them to a wider audience,” he recalled. “I wanted to find the Riders today, to look into their faces, to make new portraits to set against the earlier photographs.” Since he began working on the project in 2005, Mr. Etheridge has tracked down nearly a hundred Riders, visiting them in their homes, conducting interviews and making new portraits.
If these mug shots inadvertently captured the humanity and special qualities of their principled subjects, as Mr. Etheridge observed, their intention was nefarious: to publicly impugn and humiliate people whose only crime was to advocate equality through peaceful protest. No matter their purpose, mug shots inevitably imply aberrance or delinquency, whether or not the people they depict are eventually found to be guilty. With this in mind, the current mayor of Jackson, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, issued an executive order in February prohibiting their release in cases involving people killed by the police.
“Mug shots and sensationalized news narratives create lasting impressions that adversely impact communities and widen the historical divides between police and community,” stated Mr. Lumumba’s directive. “A mug shot is just one snapshot in time, and cannot be presumed to represent the sum total of any individual’s existence.”
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Helen O’Neal McCray, from Jackson, Miss., at age 20.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Helen O‘Neal McCray at age 65 in 2006. She had been a sophomore at Jackson State University, and had dropped out of summer school to join the newly formed Jackson Nonviolent Movement. She later worked with various civil rights groups and taught at schools, eventually joining the faculty at Wilberforce University, a historically black school. She died in 2010.CreditEric Etheridge
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Hank Thomas, from Washington, D.C., at age 19.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Hank Thomas at age 65 in 2007. He had been a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and one of the original 13 Freedom Riders on May 4. He later became a field secretary for CORE, and served as an Army medic in Vietnam. He moved to Atlanta after serving in the Army and went into the franchise business.CreditEric Etheridge
By pairing mug shots with contemporary portraits — and providing stories about individual Freedom Riders — Mr. Etheridge undoes some of the psychic and social damage perpetrated by these symbols of police malfeasance. “Breach of Peace” corrects the historical record, representing its subjects not as dehumanized icons of criminality but as exemplary citizens and complex human beings.
The Freedom Riders were a diverse group. Largely college students at the time, they came from 39 states, were of different races and economic classes, and went on to varied careers: Hank Thomas, then a sophomore at Howard University, now owns fast food and hotel franchises; Peter Stoner, who studied at the University of Chicago, earned a Ph.D. in chemistry and later worked as an auto mechanic; Margaret Leonard, who attended Newcomb College, became a journalist; Hezekiah Watkins, who was a ninth-grade student in Jackson, ran a small grocery store; and Helen O’Neal McCray, a sophomore at Jackson State University, taught elementary school and later writing and literature at Wilberforce University, a historically black institution in Ohio.
The diversity of the Freedom Riders affirms the importance of allies in the struggle for racial equality and justice, acknowledging that the support of some in the white majority was necessary to achieve legal and political rights. In the early 1960s, these demonstrators motivated and inspired Americans of all races. “The courage and tenacity of the Riders electrified large segments of the American public and drew them into the midcentury civil rights movement as no activity had done before,” Mr. Wilkins wrote. “People began asking themselves: ‘What can I do?’”
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Carol Silver, from New York, at age 22.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Carol Silver, at age 72 in 2011. At 22 she had been living in New York and working at the United Nations. She later worked with federal programs providing services to the poor, and practiced law in San Francisco. In 2014, she published “Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison,” about her experiences as a Rider.CreditEric Etheridge
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Hezekiah Watkins, from Jackson, Miss., at age 13.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Hezekiah Watkins, at age 59 in 2007. At the time of his arrest he was a a ninth-grade student in Rowan Junior High, in Jackson. He was later drafted into the Army and served two years in South Korea, before returning home to work for health and human resource agencies. He now works providing daily transportation to cancer patients who come to Jackson for treatments.CreditEric Etheridge
The solidarity of these activists stands in contrast to the complacency and social and cultural divisions that impede progress today. The period between the initial publication of “Breach of Peace” in 2008 and its reissue in 2018 attests to the volatile and continually shifting fortunes of the struggle for racial equality and justice. A decade ago, the nation made history as a coalition of voters of all colors elected the nation’s first black president. Today, an administration routinely exploits racial anxiety and resentment.
There is much to learn from the unity, courage and passion of the Freedom Riders, whose efforts resulted in federal regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals. During the 50th anniversary of their demonstrations, many came forward to tell their stories, work that continues to the present day.
“They did not waste their golden anniversary press,” Mr. Etheridge wrote. “The good news is that since 2011 the Riders have become much more frequent speakers in classrooms, libraries and auditoriums across the country. Once more they are putting their bodies on the road, this time to share their histories, to tell how they resisted, to spread the practice of ‘good trouble,’ as John Lewis calls it. … The good news is that the Freedom Riders are still overreaching.”
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Peter Stoner, from Chicago, at age 22.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Peter Stoner at age 68 in 2007. He had been a student at the University of Chicago, where he enrolled without having finished high school. He worked throughout Mississippi in the civil rights movement throughout the ’60s, later getting a master’s degree and Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Southern Mississippi.CreditEric Etheridge
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The Rev. LeRoy Glenn Wright from Nashville, at age 19.CreditCourtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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The Rev. LeRoy Glenn Wright at age 68 in 2010. He had been a student at Fisk University. He later served as pastor of Faith United Methodist Church in Syracuse for nine years, and worked in substance abuse and social services programs. For 20 years he also served as a minister to the inmates at the Onondaga County Justice Center and the Syracuse Public Safety Building.CreditEric Etheridge
crazy how this wasn't that long ago
To them 
It’s like night and day compared to the others.