Spies of Mississippi by Rick Bowers Read Free Book Online Page B

won a major victory, although it would take more time to fully enforce the anti-segregation law.
    When it was all over, 328 riders had been arrested and jailed in Mississippi, their mug shots preserved in the files of the Commission. The mug shots of young faces—innocence mixed with fear mixed with defiance—seem frozen in time in testimony to a life-and-death struggle.
     
    After the riders returned to their colleges in the North, it was left to local civil rights activists to contest the bus and rail stations that remained segregated. With the glare of the media gone, the local activists faced harsh and often degrading opposition.
    Fannie Lou Hamer, Annelle Ponder, and June Johnson had been working on a voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, when they were recruited to take part in a workshop on freedom rider tactics in Charleston, South Carolina. On their way home from the workshop, their bus stopped at a Greyhound terminal café in Winona, Mississippi. The café had a “whites only” sign on its glass door. The newly trained African-American freedom riders walked through the door, sat at the counter, and ordered Cokes and bags of peanuts.
    The restaurant manager told them that Negroes could only be served through the rear window and asked them to leave. When they refused, he called the sheriff’s office. The three were promptly arrested and taken to the county jail, where they were denied lawyers and placed in separate cells. Then, a black female trustee—an inmate assigned to assist the prison staff—went to Hamer’s cell and escorted her to a booking room, where the jailer was waiting with a thick, three-inch-wide leather belt with a handle at one end. The jailer ordered Hamer to bend over a table and pull down her skirt. Then he handed the belt to the trustee. A beating ensued. In short order, Hamer and the other women were found guilty of breach of peace, fined $100, and released.
    The NAACP reported the beatings to the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. A week later, Justice Department civil rights attorney St. John Barrett interviewed the women and ordered the crime lab to photograph their still-visible wounds. Barrett also traveled to Mississippi with a tape recorder to interview the jail trustee who had administered the beating. In his personal memoir, Barrett recalls the interview:
    “What were you in jail for?”
    “Waiting trial on grand larceny.”
    “Were you a trustee?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “That means they trusted me. They would let me out of my cell to do the jobs around the jail, like mopping the floors, peeling potatoes, washing dishes, taking meals to the cells—stuff like that.”
    “Did the jailer have a strap?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Did you ever use the strap?”
    “Yes, sir. He had me use it on the prisoners who broke the rules. But I only used it when he ordered me to and only for the number of pops he ordered.”
    “When the two women were brought to the jail, were you in your cell?”
    “No, sir. I was mopping the floor.”
    “Tell me what happened.”
    “Well, the police and the jailer put the women in separate cells in the women’s section. They didn’t book or fingerprint them. The police talked for a while and then the jailer told me to get the heavier woman out of her cell and bring her to the booking room. When I brought her, he told her to take her skirt down and lay on a table on her stomach. She didn’t say anything and did like he said. The jailer handed me the strap and told me to give her a few good licks. I gave her a few and he told me to hit her harder and don’t stop until he told me to. I kept on going until I saw she was bleeding. I looked at the jailer and he said O.K.”

CHAPTER 11
THE BATTLE FOR OLE MISS
    Clyde Kennard had been denied a college education and railroaded into prison, but the dream of breaking the color barrier in higher education in Mississippi lived on. The next attempt came from