Mississippi Clarion Ledger
JACKSON, Miss. Fred Douglas Moore Clark Sr. remembers lying on the concrete floor of a Mississippi State Penitentiary cell in Parchman, sucking in fresh air from a crack below the cell door. It soothed his lungs, rattling with pneumonia.
No sheets. No blankets. No toilet. The cell bare but dense with Mississippi humidity.
He said his cellmate told him what people hadn’t dared say too loudly.
“We’re gonna die in here.”
The cellblock was full of Freedom Riders arrested May 24, 1961 at a Jackson bus station. It was a stop through the South on organized bus trips to show interstate transit terminals remained segregated after the United States Supreme Court ruled the segregation unconstitutional in Boynton v. Virginia the previous year.
From the Freedom Rides to BLM, generations talk decades of activism
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From the Freedom Rides to BLM, generations talk decades of activism
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