On May 14, 1961 the Freedom Ride came to Anniston, Alabama and the bus bringing the Riders was attacked by an angry mob and firebombed. As a blaze began to consume the bus and smoke rose into the sky, the Freedom Riders, who barely escaped being burned alive inside, were beaten and battered by the mob. The violence of that day was not an isolated incident—Riders continued to face angry mobs in Birmingham and Montgomery. Riders who reached Jackson, Mississippi faced the physical and emotional brutality of imprisonment in the notorious “Parchman Farm” state penitentiary. In the study of turbulent times and events like these, it is easy to look back and lionize the few leaders of a movement, making their actions seem to be an inevitable consequence of extraordinary character, ability, or force of will, and to attribute the great gains which came forth to these few special people. But many of the young men and women who got aboard the buses of the Freedom Rides and risked their safety to finally end the segregation of interstate transportation were ordinary, “little people,” as NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers once called them. One of the great mysteries of human experience lies in asking what it is that takes ordinary men and women and gives them the courage to perform extraordinary actions that they previously would have never imagined. What makes a young teenager, with his whole life ahead of him, willing to risk unjust arrest? What enables someone to endure the traumatic experience of confronting extreme hatred and violence? What drives people to hazard both life and limb for a cause?
Thomas Armstrong is a sixty-six year old contract specialist for the United States Postal Service and leads a quiet life in Chicago much like any other citizen. But as a young man in 1961, Armstrong was one of the youths who risked violence and arrest to join the Freedom Riders in their efforts towards desegregation. This paper explores what made Armstrong risk his safety to make history and become a part of the civil rights movement through participation in voter registration drives, picketing, and the Freedom Rides. I begin by examining the effects of his childhood in Mississippi amidst the rampant racial injustice of what V.O. Scott labeled “the last vestige of a dead and despairing civilization,” still clinging to ironclad adherence to Jim Crow and white supremacy. I then examine Armstrong’s participation in the civil rights movement, the effect his participation had upon his life, and finally in what ways his experiences as an individual activist shed light on the larger civil rights movement. Ultimately the story of this one nineteen year old man illustrates the fascinating process by which injustice and the need for civil rights action in Mississippi brought forth in Armstrong—and other youths—the extraordinary courage that helped to turn an ordinary black teenager into a crusader who helped to change a society.
Segregation as Normalcy: The Childhood of Thomas Armstrong
Although Armstrong did not become involved directly in the civil rights movement until his arrival at Tougaloo College in the fall of 1959, his childhood certainly helped plant a seed of awareness in him of the rampant injustice in Mississippi and the need for civil rights action. Armstrong was born in Jefferson Davis County, approximately sixty miles due south of Jackson, on August 17, 1961. Growing up between the towns of Silver Creek and Prentiss, Mississippi, he was raised in circumstances that were at once similar to and different from those of blacks in other parts of Mississippi. In Jefferson Davis County, many blacks had a measure of occupational freedom, in that most owned their own land and were therefore unburdened by the restrictions of a life of sharecropping. Among these individuals was Armstrong’s father, Enoch Barnes, who worked as a logger and shared a timber business with his brothers. Together they owned several trucks and would buy timber (and sometimes land) and sell it on the market. He was also a part-time farmer, though according to Armstrong this was a secondary occupation which he engaged in mainly to give his family “something to do.” Armstrong himself rarely picked cotton and was able to complete a high school education at the Prentiss Normal and Industrial Institute, a church-run school for black children. Armstrong’s father would frequently hire the neediest black workers, sometimes even managing to pay them thirty dollars a day, high wages for that era.
Because of his family’s relatively comfortable condition, Armstrong enjoyed a fairly peaceful childhood. Yet the entrenched reality of segregation always lurked in the background, ready to intrude upon the quiet routine of daily life. Armstrong and his family lived in an almost exclusively black area which had its own business center, the Lucas community, as well as its own shops, depot, and school, thus allowing local blacks to survive without much interaction with whites. Yet try as they might, local blacks still could not escape the reality of white oppression. Armstrong still remembers segregation’s impact on his family:
My parents and uncles were great role players. They knew that it was easier to let White folk think that they were satisfied with conditions as they were. They knew that if they rejected those conditions... they would no longer be able to get the loans for new trucks “next year”, or the best prices at the sawmill for the logs and pulp wood, or transport that next load of logs without getting a traffic ticket. They knew that they still had to feed their families.
Yet though seemingly acquiescing to the “normalcy” of segregation in 1940s and 50s Mississippi, Armstrong’s family covertly worked to undermine that very system, a fact unknown to Armstrong until many years later. After playing the role of cooperative black loggers, Armstrong’s father and uncles would return home to attend community meetings in Prentiss and Silver Creek and “lend their support to the causes of the ‘learned Black folks.’” Years later, when the adult Armstrong was perusing the minutes of old NAACP meetings, to his surprise he discovered that among the names of local Mississippi members were those of his father Enoch and his uncle Clark Barnes.
There was a clearly drawn line, however, between this quiet activism and family life. His parents and uncles never preached the evils of segregation or encouraged Armstrong to champion the cause of black equality. Yet Armstrong himself could not avoid segregation’s bitter consequences, though perhaps they came upon him later than was usual for black children living in worse economic conditions or more overtly oppressive regions such as the Delta. He first came face-to-face with Jim Crow oppression when he was thirteen years old. On a hot summer day in Prentiss, he decided to stop by a local Dairy King to buy an ice cream cone. When he went to the front window, he was told he had to go around to the west side of the building to buy a cone. As he backed up to go to the side window, a large “Whites Only” sign suddenly caught his eye. Going around to the side window, he saw the “Colored” sign—but even more pronounced was the large metal trash can sitting right next to the window. It was uncovered. A swarm of flies hovered overhead, right next to the window counter. His appetite for ice cream gone, he turned and left the store, leaving his order unfilled.
He talked with some of his friends about the situation, but no one was interested. “They knew it was there,” he says, “but there was no activist attitude at all.” After the experience at the ice cream store, Armstrong started observing his environment with a more critical eye: he saw the plight of the sharecroppers and domestics while internalizing the reality that he wasn’t able to receive the same treatment from businesses that whites enjoyed. Yet in the county in which he lived, he was able to maintain a relatively normal life given the relatively self-sustaining nature of the black community and the strictly-enforced segregation that kept children from coming into more frequent contact with overt discrimination.
Tougaloo Transformation: Sowing the Seeds of Activism
When assessing the role of childhood experiences in motivating individuals to champion civil rights, it is often difficult to find a direct causal chain of events. Yet it is clear that growing up, Armstrong lived in a complicated world: on one hand, he was sheltered from Jim Crow, but on the other hand, he could not escape its existence, either materially or psychologically. But the question remains: what led him from a childhood of contradictions to his decision to participate in the voter registration drives and become a Freedom Rider? It must be asked what is needed to make someone undertake such dangerous actions as picketing outside a Jackson department store, entering a courthouse in South Mississippi, or sitting in a white waiting room in Jackson with one’s ears perked at all times, ready for a sudden encounter with the end of a nightstick or the butt of a revolver. Armstrong himself attributes his motivation to several factors, the first of which was his decision to attend Tougaloo College. At Tougaloo, a private institution which Armstrong refers to as an “oasis in a sea of hatred,” students and faculty faced less fear of state reprisal than their counterparts at the other local black university, Jackson State University. Armstrong was initially drawn to Tougaloo because of its strong reputation in the region and because his sister had attended. Yet even before his arrival there was nascent civil rights activity on campus. Voter registration meetings involving Tougaloo students and students from the white private college, Millsaps, occurred as early as the late 1950s.
A second factor involved in his decision to participate was the inspiration of two figures in the Mississippi civil rights campaign: the esteemed Medgar Evers and the lesser known Reverend H.D. Darby of Prentiss, Mississippi. In spring 1960, Armstrong happened to visit a mass meeting at which he heard Evers stress the need for Tougaloo students to become involved in voter registration drives. He listened to Evers provide concrete evidence of the conscious efforts of city clerks across the state to strike eligible black voters from the rolls. He learned that in his native soil of Jefferson Davis County, the city clerk had struck 1,000 otherwise eligible black voters from the rolls in 1956. He was also inspired by the efforts of Reverend Darby, who lived just five miles from Armstrong’s residence near Silver Creek. Darby earned respect from the fledging activist for filing the first lawsuit in Federal District Court that attempted to have Mississippi voter registration laws declared unconstitutional. Though filed in his native county while Armstrong was still in high school, the 1958 lawsuit, Darby v. Daniel, , remained unknown to Armstrong until that mass meeting at Tougaloo. Just as years later he was startled to see family members listed on NAACP records, Armstrong was quite surprised in 1960 to learn that this subversive activity had been occurring right in his hometown during the previous decade, in a county which he had always assumed to be passive regarding civil rights. After the mass meeting, where he heard Evers speak and learned of the efforts of Darby, Armstrong was inspired to become involved in these mock voter registration drives.
Voting Rights and CORE: The Beginning
His most memorable experience with the voter registration campaign was also his first, in the Pascagoula area. It was not memorable because it was different from the other drives in which he would participate, but because this first act of participation in the movement provided him with a tremendous sense of satisfaction that he was actually taking concrete action to “do something.” The NAACP instituted a special training session, and he was dispatched to Southeast Mississippi to establish voter registration classes for local blacks. The first thing he and the other participants would do was to contact local ministers. After church on Sunday, Armstrong would introduce local congregations to the voter registration process by explaining the requisite forms and teaching them the state Constitution. It was critical to teach blacks how to understand the Constitution, for the last two questions on the registration form would force them to read and interpret selected excepts. Blacks, no matter whether college-educated or illiterate, invariably failed. During his initial drives, he frequently encountered fear among potential participants: “No one wanted to be the first one to go up the courthouse steps.” With this natural fear, the campaigners knew that the first group had to be a very select one; therefore, Armstrong reports, they strategically chose people who “had less to lose”—mostly women who would be less likely to be victims of violence.
When asked why he would continue to proceed with the voter campaigns even with an assured chance of failure, Armstrong stresses the perception among those early participants that their actions were leading to an overall increase in education among Mississippi blacks. Even while knowing that the campaigns themselves were likely to have little impact on the actual ability to vote, Armstrong was heartened by what he saw as an increase in knowledge about the importance of voting:
Fear was prevalent...But as time went on, the attitudes changed rapidly. Initially, there was no trust [from the local blacks]… but as we started giving them examples of how life could be changed simply by voting, [we] could see a great concern, great interest in voting... as a way to obtain social programs, health, education and food programs which were denied to blacks in Mississippi at that time.
In addition to the emphasis on educating blacks, Armstrong was also inspired by the potential of direct local action to alter the perceptions of whites, both on a state and national level. He vividly remembers seeing a televised speech by Governor Barnett in the summer of 1961, in which Barnett proclaimed that blacks in Mississippi were content with their circumstances and that outside agitators were the ones stirring up trouble. A fury rose up within Armstrong and he desperately wanted to demonstrate the sheer wrongness of Barnett’s statement. This was a pivotal factor in influencing Armstrong to become a Freedom Rider and thus to make history as one of the first three Mississippians to be arrested for participation in the Rides. Again the act of participation itself had immense value for it was a way of disproving the convictions of Barnett and along with him, a sizable proportion of white Mississippi:
I had to let the world know that most citizens of Mississippi were tired of being at the bottom of the economic and educational ladders. Black citizens were tired of inferior schools and housing conditions. We were tired of not being able to make enough money to feed our children. Governor Ross Barnett, you are wrong in your assessment of the feelings of Black citizens of Mississippi.
Angry at the attitudes of people such as Governor Barnett, students like Armstrong were beginning to “do something,” even if the impact of their actions was yet to be fully felt.
The Next Step: June 23, 1961
Even though Armstrong was dedicated to educating blacks, building local leaders, and proving the white leadership wrong, why did he take that extra step and put himself even more directly in the line of fire as a Freedom Rider? Again, several factors were at work in transforming Armstrong’s noble intentions into a trip to the white waiting room at the Trailways Bus Terminal in Jackson. The first crucial motivation was the example set by the first several waves of Freedom Rides, which initially started in Washington D.C. in May 1961. Each night after class, Armstrong and fellow students would rush home to watch television coverage of the Rides. They saw the bus firebombing in Anniston, Alabama and feared for the riders’ safety as they rode into Jackson. After some of the arrested Riders’ release from jail, Armstrong met them when they came to Tougaloo. He approached James Bevel outside on the campus lawn in June, told him of his anger concerning Governor Barnett’s speech and asked for suggestions for getting involved. Bevel told him that the best thing he could do was to become a Freedom Rider. He and his friend Mary Harrison, also a student at Tougaloo, decided to continue the Freedom Ride from Jackson to New Orleans, and they were accompanied by two other students, Elnora Price and Joseph Ross.
It was when they entered the white waiting room at the Trailways terminal that they made history. Interestingly enough, when one considers that they were later charged with disturbing the peace, Armstrong recalls that as they entered the bus terminal, “All the people there began smiling. The police were the only ones not smiling. I suppose that the people were smiling because they knew that we were about to be arrested.” The police captain James Ray, already present at the scene, approached them right away, asking them to leave. After they refused several times, Ray arrested them, making Armstrong one of the first three Freedom Riders originally from the state of Mississippi, and one of the first three individuals arrested for trying to leave Mississippi. He spent three days in Hinds County Jail charged with breaching the peace before being bailed out by the President of Tougaloo College, A.D. Beittel.
When asked if his decision to take a stand amidst potential violence was a simple one, Armstrong says that it was simultaneously very simple and very complicated. It was simple, he says, in that he felt like he had to do it—there were too many people who had already risked their lives—outsiders from the North even—who had been beaten and jailed. Mississippi blacks, Armstrong included, continually had to watch as their voter registration forms were torn up time and time again. He said that something had to be done to improve Mississippi by ending segregation. Yet it was difficult in that he and the other participators knew that the risk of injury was omnipresent. He had known this grim fact while standing in picket lines and when registering locals to vote. And he grappled with this risk when deciding to become a Freedom Rider:
Because we believed in what we were doing, no threat or harm could stop us. By the same token, I had to ask myself a couple of questions. Was I ready to accept the harassment? Was I ready to accept the beatings? Most of all, was I ready to accept death for my belief? I knew that I had already answered those questions in the affirmative. I knew that segregation was wrong and had to be stopped. I knew that I had to do all I could do in order to stop it.
That it is hard for many students today in the United States to understand a willingness to die for a cause is some indication of how high passions were running. Forty-six years have passed since Armstrong’s decision, but his idealistic remembrance of his participation offers a fascinating glimpse into how an energetic college student can, in the span of a few days, make an extraordinary decision to risk his own life and limb for a larger cause.
His participation in voter campaigns and pickets of Jackson-area department stores and churches indicated his status as a committed civil rights activist, yet it is his action on June 23, 1961 that marks his legacy. After a trial lasting for two hours at most, and filled with testimony of an array of policemen complaining of the Riders’ “attempts to incite violence,” Armstrong was sentenced to a two hundred dollar fine and four months in jail, and his case was initially appealed to the Hinds County Court. Armstrong ended up avoiding prison time, however, when his case took on greater significance when merged with a larger federal class action lawsuit filed by NAACP lawyers in the summer of 1961. The suit accused Mississippi of failing to uphold desegregation laws as dictated by the Interstate Commerce Commission and was initially filed on behalf of Joseph Broadwater, Burnett L. Jacobs and Samuel Bailey. One of the NAACP attorneys, Constance Baker Motley, who had worked on the earlier Darby v. Daniel case, took over as the attorney for Armstrong’s case. The court ruled against the constitutionality of the segregation laws, highlighting the failure of Mississippi in the early 1960s to yield to federal civil rights law which was increasingly being enforced.
Throughout the remainder of 1961, Armstrong continued to work as a field worker for SNCC and CORE. In these capacities Armstrong had two main duties: first, to help organize and carry out the voting registration drives mentioned above and second, to obtain police protection for Freedom Riders who were heading to Mississippi. Each time, he failed to secure cooperation from the local police chiefs. He was then left with the task of finding a safe haven for the Freedom Riders once they arrived. He has a few stories to tell that would chill any person concerned for his or her safety. At the request of CORE Field Secretary Thomas Gaither, Armstrong and a fellow CORE worker MacArthur Cotton, of Kosciusko, traveled to McComb Mississippi on McComb, Mississippi on December 1, 1961 to pick up Freedom Riders arriving from Baton Rouge. They waited in eerie silence on an empty street in front of a bus station, expecting the busload of Riders to arrive at around 1:30 PM. The silence seemed deadly—something was clearly amiss. Their suspicions were soon fulfilled. When the bus appeared at 1:40, the police chief George Guy, who had been standing near Cotton and Armstrong, disappeared into the Ballard billiards parlor across the street and a mob of approximately 400 angry whites suddenly began to pour out of local businesses carrying sticks and paper bags containing hard objects. FBI agents in suits stood by writing in their notebooks and doing nothing to prevent the potential mob violence. In memoirs written the day of the event, Armstrong writes that he and Cotton were forced to drag Freedom Riders inside the car as the crowd rushed towards them. Luckily Armstrong escaped unharmed as he made a quick dash for the car, though he says that Cotton suffered a minor knee injury at the hands of an elderly white man. Armstrong stayed the night at a house in McComb and the next night returned to the terminal to a waiting bus which would take some of the workers back to Jackson. Though Cotton reported to Armstrong of having seen some newsmen being assaulted to the west of the two CORE cars, Armstrong did not himself witness the violence which would receive coverage in the Jackson papers that same afternoon as their escape from the mob. After the activists departed, three newsmen from Time and Life magazines were not so lucky, as several members of the mob turned their anger onto them. One Life photographer Don Uhrbrock—who had already been beaten during the Montgomery Freedom Ride riots on May 30— was “struck four or five times in the face and was shoved through a plate class window.”
An End to the Activism: Spies, Threats, and Emotional Fatigue
After the Freedom Ride, Armstrong continued for a short while to participate in the civil rights movement. Later in that same year of 1961, urged on personally by Medgar Evers, Armstrong took a stand against university segregation by attempting to enroll in a night extension course at Millsaps College along with ten other black students. According to Carol Horowitz, a white Millsaps student at the time who has kept in touch with Armstrong, a group of Millsaps students picketed the university administration in an attempt to convince them to register the students. Despite having this student support and a sufficient number of students required to open the class, Millsaps chose to cancel it instead of being forced to admit black students. Armstrong remarks that, “Had I not already been enrolled in college I would have tried to attend Millsaps College full time.”
Yet Armstrong’s idealistic participation had already begun to have an effect upon his life, and this story is not one of continued progress and hope. After his testimonies in the various court cases, Armstrong dropped out of the civil rights movement. In explaining this time period of his life, he talks of a “disconnect” with the movement that stemmed from the immense physical and mental demands placed upon workers. Most discouraging to Armstrong was the harassment he suffered at the hands of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the state-sponsored intelligence organization established to spy on civil rights activists. According to Armstrong’s research, his attempt to enroll at Millsaps was probably the factor that sparked the Sovereignty Commission’s decision to open a file on him. After he and his family in Silver Creek received direct threats from the Klan, his father advised him to leave Mississippi for good. He moved to Kansas City in 1962 and joined the local NAACP chapter. Finding it inactive, he moved back to Mississippi after several months. Waiting for him at the train station near his home were local policeman, most likely tipped off by the Sovereignty Commission. Learning that his name was on a list “to be eliminated” compelled Armstrong to leave Mississippi for good in 1963. State investigators arrived in Silver Creek in February 1964 to dig up damaging information about him, “afraid that once again [Armstrong] might try and enroll at Millsap [sic] College.” In addition to speaking with his neighbors, relatives and associates, the investigators visited his high school, the Jefferson Davis sheriff’s office and the county registrar’s office. After speaking with citizens of the county about Armstrong, the investigators would invariably demand that they “keep quiet” about the encounter.
In addition to the physical danger that resulted from his civil rights actions, Armstrong also faced an emotional struggle that made it difficult for him to continue with his activism. His comments on these difficulties shed light on some of the larger implications for young workers suddenly thrust into a world of constant danger and life-and-death responsibilities. Armstrong’s own feelings illuminate the intricacies and consequences of the decisions of one man, a native Mississippian, a college student, and an idealist of the early 1960s era of civil rights: Sometimes the task of getting the Freedom Riders out of town safely took its toll on many of us. If the Freedom Riders and even the Media were beaten, it appeared subconsciously that maybe we were at fault. We had failed to perform our duty successfully. This was Post Traumatic Syndrome at its best. I hope that we will, in time, recover from that.
Acknowledging that there was considerable variation among the physical and emotional consequences faced by the activists, Armstrong’s story still sheds light upon the unique challenges faced by a civil rights activist from Mississippi. Threats towards outside activists were frightening enough, but local workers bore the burden of having nowhere to escape back to, as well as their responsibility for the safety of their families.
Reflecting on the Experience: The Lessons of a Freedom Rider
This story of one man’s activism illustrates the larger civil rights struggle in several important ways. First, it highlights some of the divisions found in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s—the division between leaders and the workers in the field, native Mississippians and outsiders, and civil rights activists and nonparticipants. As a “field soldier” of the local movement in the early 1960s, Armstrong worked with students from Yale and Bryn Mawr universities as early as 1961 and his attitude towards the arrival of Northern whites revealed no discontent: as Armstrong says of the attitudes of most of the early Tougaloo activists who worked in voter registration, “We were happy to have [the Northern students] there. We needed all the help we could get.” In fact, he greatly enjoyed having the northern students—who sometimes comprised a majority of the workers at any given registration drive—initiate the meeting. Yet at the same time, Armstrong did notice the visible differences in expectations and strategies of the northern workers versus the local student activists. The northern students, for example, often had difficulty understanding why local blacks were initially so hesitant to join the voter registration drives, or why local black activists would sometimes be cautious. He says of the northern students: “They had no fear, they didn’t know the situation that they were in,” which often led initially to disappointments stemming from high expectations. Later these divisions would rock the Mississippi CORE membership during the Freedom Summer as Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer faced difficulty in trying to break down fellow CORE members’ opposition to allowing white students to take on leadership roles within the 1964 voting project.
Armstrong’s experience also illuminates the role that white extremism played in increasing determination in the local black community to pursue civil rights activism. Scholars such as Dittmer have discussed how hardliner whites often caused national sympathies to align with the civil rights movement, yet it is clear that this happened on a local level in Mississippi as well. Barnett’s speech hailing the “satisfaction” of Mississippi blacks, policemen with sticks beating down innocent teenagers, white pastors telling picketers that they were not allowed in a house of God—all these incidents served to increase the incentive of Armstrong and others to risk their lives to protect Freedom Riders, to register blacks to vote, and in the case of Armstrong, to become a Freedom Rider himself.
Perhaps most importantly, Armstrong’s story illustrates the critical role that dense, interconnected networks of local people played in the Mississippi movement. The daily decisions of ordinary people provided the fuel enabled the movement to continue, from voting registrations to Freedom Rides. For example, the actions of the Tougaloo Four would have never been possible were it not for the support they received from a local woman, Mrs. A.M.E. Logan, who made it her duty to provide transportation for civil rights workers. On June 23, 1961, she drove Armstrong, Harrison, Ross, and Price to the bus station and calmed their fears with words of support. Armstrong writes of her, “For her role in the civil rights movement, she received harassment and threats. I will always remember her, and her courage.” Just as Armstrong was inspired by the example of a local woman, so too were many other civil rights activists inspired by lesser known local figures who played a role in their lives. Many young Tougaloo activists, such as Anne Moody, credit their involvement to brave teachers in the 1950s who defied social pressure and spoke openly to their students about the need for integration. As Dittmer says, “These teachers risked their jobs to raise the consciousness of the state’s black youth.” Moody carried that consciousness with her to Tougaloo where she was a student alongside Armstrong and contributed to building networks of students who participated in sit-ins and other forms of protest.
Yet neither the local schoolteachers, nor those who provided assistance like Mrs. Logan, nor even activists like Harrison, Ross, Price, or Armstrong ever occupied a position in the upper ranks of the leadership in any formal or informal organization. But their combined actions sustained and amplified the cumulative effect of the wave of explosive victories in the early 1960s. The McComb Freedom Rides, in which Armstrong played a small part, clearly showed what Raymond Arsenault labeled “the common determination of movement activists and white supremacists to force a showdown [that] tested the resolve of federal authorities and helped to dispel any lingering doubts about the wisdom of timely intervention.” The prospect of a McComb showdown and the violence which might follow spurred Robert Kennedy and others to take action on behalf of desegregation.
As Armstrong put it, When I speak of the Little People, as Medgar Evers sometimes called us, I’m speaking of the Civil Rights participants of 1959 through 1963, before Freedom Summer 1964. When you tried to give credit to Medgar for something, he often would tell you: It wasn’t me, it was the ‘Little People’ against the system.
These so-called ‘little people’ formed the backbone of a movement that changed American society. Thomas Armstrong’s history serves as an example that injustice can inspire ordinary people to take action even in the face of extraordinary risk to “do something.” Though they were “branching out into a sea of hatred and hostility” and all risked, and some suffered, harm, the Freedom Riders still alive today can take solace in the knowledge that their struggle largely achieved its aims, and that ordinary citizens with quiet lives can and did rise up and make a difference.
References
Books
Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Oxford University Press, New York. 2006.
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 1994.
Unpublished Memoirs
Armstrong, Thomas. “Thomas Madison Armstrong’s Life in the Movement.” Draft, May 18, 2007.
————, Memoirs on Millsaps College. Draft, May 18, 2007.
————, Memoirs on the McComb Freedom Rides. Draft, May 18, 2007.
Interviews
Armstrong, Thomas, interview by the author, University of Chicago, May 18, 2007.
Armstrong, Thomas, interview by the author, May 27, 2007.
Newspaper Articles
Shoemaker, W.C., “Station Integrated, Reporters Attacked: Six Negroes Enter McComb Terminal,” Jackson Daily News, Jackson, Mississippi, December 1, 1961. MSC file SCR ID # 10-67-0-47-1-1-1. Available online at MDAH Sovereignty Commission Online website, http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd09/069013.png&otherstuff=10|67|0|47|1|1|1|68120|. Accessed May 22, 2007.
————, “Whites Manhandle 3 Time-Life Reporters: Negroes ‘Integrate’ Bus Waiting Room’,” Jackson Daily News, Jackson, Mississippi, Friday, December 1, 1961. Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC) file SCR ID # 10-67-0-59-1-1-1. Available online at MDAH Sovereignty Commission Online website, http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd09/069080.png&otherstuff=10|67|0|59|1|1|1|68187|. Accessed May 22, 2007.
Court Cases
Samuel BAILEY, Joseph Broadwater and Burnett L. Jacob, Plaintiffs, v. Joe T. PATTERSON, Attorney General of the State of Mississippi, The City of Jackson, Mississippi, Allen C. Thompson, Mayor, Douglas L. Luckey, Commissioner, Thomas B. Marshall, Commissioner, W.D. Rayfield, Chief of Police of the City of Jackson, Mississippi, Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, Continental Southern Lines, Inc., Southern Greyhound Lines, Illinois Central Railroad, Inc., Jackson City Lines, Inc., and Cicero Carr, Defendants. Civ. A. No. 3133, United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, Jackson Division. April 7, 1962.
H. D. DARBY, on behalf of himself and others similarly situated, Plaintiffs, v. James DANIEL, Circuit Clerk of Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi, and Joe T. Patterson, Attorney General of the State of Mississippi, Defendants. Civil Action No. 2748 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, Jackson Division. November 6, 1958.
Government Documents
Johnston, Eric Jr. “Memorandum from the Director, Sovereignty Commission.” Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC) file SCR ID # 99-36-0-86-1-1-1. Available online at http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd10/076465.png&otherstuff=99|36|0|86|1|1|1|75491|. Accessed May 22, 2007.