Left, Bentonia, Mississipi, high school senior Miller G. Green, 1961 Right, Chicago businessman and civic leader Miller G. Green, 2006 February is Black History Month, but no calendrical coincidence is needed to justify calling your attention to an extraordinary large-format book, “Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.” “Breach of Peace” was conceived, photographed, assembled, edited, and in large part written by Eric Etheridge, who has now brought the skills honed as a journeyman editor at non-trivial publications—including The Nation, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Seven Days, George, and, currently, the Times—to bear on his own creation. In 1998, the Mississippi chapter of the ACLU succeeded in prying open the records of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the secret police agency which, with Stasi-like zeal, spied on “race agitators” and other political undesirables between 1956 and 1973. The files, which went online in 2002, contained a complete set of the police mug shots taken of the “so-called Freedom Riders,” as the Sovereignty Commission referred to the three hundred and ten mostly young blacks and whites who risked (and often found) officially tolerated mob violence by riding Greyhound and Trailways buses into Mississippi between May 24 and September 13, 1961. What Etheridge has done is to track down about a hundred of the surviving Freedom Riders, photograph them as they are today, interview them, and assemble the results into 240 riveting, large-format pages. The mug shots turn out to be a remarkable exercise in folk portraiture. Seeing them side by side with Etheridge’s terrific portraits of the same men and women forty-five or more years later exerts a fascination reminiscent of Michael Apted’s “Seven Up” film series. The interview excerpts bring to life the experience these people shared—not just the rides, the arrests, and the beatings but also, in many cases, the weeks or months they spent in jail afterwards, often in the fearful confines of the infamous Parchman prison farm. We learn what they were doing before the rides and what they have done since. Part of the genius of the Freedom Rides was that the segregation the riders were protesting was already illegal. As early (or as late!) as 1946, the Supreme Court had outlawed segregated seating aboard interstate buses and trains, but the bus stations and terminals remained as they were. I remember that in 1959, when I was fifteen, I took a bus from New York to Charleston, West Virginia, to visit a prep-school friend. On a rest stop at the Lynchburg, Virginia, Greyhound station, I was shocked, ashamed, and a little frightened to find, off to the side of the main waiting room, a smaller, windowless waiting room labeled “Colored”—ashamed because of my complicity in using the (unlabeled) white waiting room, frightened because I suddenly felt myself a silent stranger in my own country. A year later, in 1960, another court decision extended the desegregation rule to the bus stations and terminals. I don’t know whether or not Lynchburg complied, but in deep-south states like Alabama and Mississippi nothing changed. Nevertheless, it was the Freedom Riders who were obeying the law, while the bus station managers and local cops were defying it and the federal authorities were failing to enforce it. The Freedom Rides were such a perfect example of Gandhian nonviolent action that, strictly speaking, they weren’t even civil disobedience—they were civil obedience. And they were effective. In Washington, a new President was in the White House, preparing to go to Vienna for a summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. John F. Kennedy found it awkward, in his capacity as leader of the Free World, to leave behind a country in which peaceful, law-abiding bus passengers were clubbed and jailed for no reason other than someone else’s delusions of racial supremacy. Finally, the President and his brother, the Attorney General, ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to put its foot down, and segregation in at least one public accommodation—the bus and train stations—was ended. Three years later came the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Most of the Freedom Riders were students. They weren’t all “outside agitators”—a surprising number were African-Americans from Mississippi. More than a few were clergymen or future clergymen, and many more were motivated by Christian faith—a useful reminder that Christian belief, including evangelical Christian belief, has historically encompassed a social vision far more capacious than the punitive regulation of people’s sex lives. A few Freedom Riders, including John Lewis, would later achieve a degree of fame. Most ended up living more or less ordinary bourgeois or working-class lives, but in almost every case with an element of service. “Breach of Peace,” published by Atlas & Co., has a preface by Roger Wilkins, the lawyer-historian and civil-rights sage, and a foreword by Diane McWhorter, author of “Carry Me Home,” the classic history of the civil rights struggle in her native Birmingham, Alabama. Eric Etheridge himself was only four when the Freedom Riders rode, but he grew up in a little town not far from Jackson, Mississippi, and his solid feel for his subject is evident throughout this marvelous, moving book. Here’s a a good glimpse of it.
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