For example, they published the names and “crimes” of the riders who had been arrested prior to the Jackson demonstrations. 6 The Clarion Ledger resorted to more pointed and damaging tactics in articles that fashioned the riders as outsiders at best, and un-American at worst.
5 On the sixteenth page of the same issue, amid Woolworth advertisements for muumuus and 4-H club announcements, the editors also included an image of three White men in the act of attacking a Black Freedom Rider (1961, AP Wirephoto).
In fact, not a single image of an identifiable rider was published in the paper until May 21, 1961, when the front page featured a closely cropped, highly publicized image of the White activist Jim Zwerg, who was severely beaten in Montgomery (1961, AP Wirephoto). While the newspaper devoted hundreds of words to the riders’ progress in the weeks leading up to their arrival in Jackson, the pictures to which the caption of the Ellis photograph refers were largely absent. For a newspaper that claimed its readership was in need of relief from the sensationalized photographs capturing the Freedom Riders’ progress, the Clarion Ledger had published remarkably few-and remarkably de-sensationalized-images of the Freedom Riders’ journey. After the first arrests in Jackson, the newspaper minimized the riders’ visual presence and lauded the Jackson Police Department efforts to maintain order. When the riders continued to Jackson, Mississippi, they would be arrested for “breach of the peace” upon exiting the bus, curtailing mob violence, and avoiding the media fallout that had thrown Alabama into the spotlight. The circulation of these violent images sparked public outcry, prompting the staunchly segregationist Mississippi governor, Ross Barnett, to make an agreement with United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy. 3 Photographs of the bombing and mob violence comprise some of the most well-known visual records of the 1961 Freedom Rides: White mobs attacking riders in the cramped hallway of a bus station, riders fleeing a burning Greyhound, the charred skeleton of the bus, empty and foreboding, on the side of the road, and riders sprawled out on the grass in a state of shock. This followed brutal attacks in Birmingham and Montgomery, all of which were overlooked, if not encouraged, by law enforcement. Outside of Anniston, Alabama, White mobs chased down and firebombed the Freedom Riders’ bus, barricading the doors in an attempt to trap them inside and severely injuring several demonstrators. Departing from Washington, DC, on May 4, the group encountered hostility as they traveled south. In 1961, CORE recruited interracial activists, clergymen, and college students to integrate bus and train stations throughout the South. Kennedy, who had made promises to protect every American’s constitutional rights. Virginia and the recently elected John F. A pendant to the headline “Racial Scene is Quiet Once More in Jackson,” the caption reads “Tired of ‘riders’ and their pictures? How’s this one for relief?” 1 The riders in question were participants in the 1961 Freedom Rides, a summer demonstration organized by CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, to test the Interstate Commerce Act the more recent 1960 Supreme Court decision, Boynton v. It is the kind of image that would elicit a noncommittal chuckle if, in fact, the caption was not a telling example of Mississippi’s long-standing resistance to integration and the casual ways in which this sentiment permeated visual culture.
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In the photograph, a White baby sports sunglasses and a white bonnet, propping up a book titled How to Retire Young between his chubby fingers (1961, AP Wirephoto). A small, unremarkable image appeared at the bottom right corner of the issue of the Jackson, Mississippi, daily newspaper, the Clarion Ledger.
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