Eric Etheridge recently sent over a copy of his book Breach of Peace, and it has literally taken my breath away. An exhaustive photographic and archival survey of the lives of the Mississippi Freedom Riders through their original mug shots, it seems an incredibly important and poignant reminder of what can be achieved by ordinary people.

Here's a description and synopsis from the very helpful Breach of Peace blog:

Breach of Peace is a book about the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, a photo-history told in images old and new. The book features new portraits of 80 Riders and the mug shots of all 328 Riders arrested in Jackson that year, along with excerpts of interviews with the featured Riders.

In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans -- blacks and whites, men and women -- entered Southern bus and train stations to challenge the segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters and bathrooms. The Supreme Court had ruled that such segregation was illegal, and the Riders were trying to force the federal government to enforce that decision.

Though there were Freedom Rides across the South, Jackson soon became the campaign's primary focus. More than 300 Riders were arrested there and quickly convicted of breach of peace--a law many Southern states and cities had put on the books for just such an occasion. The Riders then compounded their protest by refusing bail. "Flll the jails!" was their cry, and they soon did. Mississippi responded by transferring them to Parchman, the state's infamous Delta prison farm, for the remainder of their time behind bars, usually about six weeks.

A few days after the last group of Riders were arrested in Jackson, on September 13, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new regulations, mandating an end to segregation in all bus and train stations.


Here's more info on the project.

Below are tidbits I've cobbled together from conversations with Eric, research on the blog, and text from the book.


How do these records exist?!



Eric Etheridge:

In 1956, Mississippi established the State Sovereignty Commission and empowered it "to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from the encroachment thereon by the Federal Government."

As it turned out, "any and all things" included hiring a former FBI agent who had once worked for J. Edgar Hoover and establishing a network of informants throughout the state to report on on the doings of anyone who showed the slightest inclination to thing or act differently on matters of race.

The commission's investigators kept close track of the Riders as they came to Jackson, gathering their names, addresses, birth dates and mug shots from the police and filing that information away. They thus preserved not only the mug shots but the name of every Freedom Rider and other information that would prove very useful in finding them some forty years later. In my research I found no evidence that the commission ever used this this information again, even though several of the Riders continued working for the movement in the state. Perhaps the investigators were were just fulfilling a bureaucratic imperative. For whatever reason, the investigators proved also to be excellent, if inadvertent, archivists.

I started contacting Riders and making portraits in 2005. I usually met them in their homes. Our sessions lasted on average three hours, the first of which was spent conducting an interview. Then we made a picture.

Though it was defunct by 1973, the commission was not finally abolished until 1977. At that point, the Mississippi ACLU and other plaintiffs sued the state to force it to open the agency's files. Twenty-one years and much legal wrangling later, they won, and the files were turned over to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and opened to the pubic. Four years later, in 2002, MDAH archivists published every page of the files online, which is where I came across them, two years later.