![]() The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300 arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist riders. During a visit with his parents in Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to open its archives. I had heard horror stories of people going missing."Įric Etheridge, from Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, Atlas & Co.Ī few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to engage his budding photographic skills. Alphonso Petway, of Mobile, Alabama, who was 16 when arrested at a "white" cafeteria: "That was a frightening moment. ![]() "I was by myself in the paddy wagon for a while," recalls the Rev. "Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.'" ![]() But he well remembers using one entrance to his doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony. He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval taking place around him. The book, a collection of Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.Įtheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.Īfter news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.Ī few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. The ACMC is a select group of Elite established Clubs and Organizations who have banded together in a fight for freedom and to stand in defense of people’s rights, MC Clubs and all Motorcyclists as well.On Sunday, May 14, 1961-Mother's Day-scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The ACMC does not approve organizations or in our language, “sanction” Clubs. It will accomplish these goals by any lawful means necessary. ![]() It’s goals are to promote and protect motorcyclist’s rights. It serves to educate both riders and the non-riding public of all of the positive aspects of motorcycling and to warn against and oppose any intrusion(s) upon their rights to live and ride free. The ACMC is made up of Arizona Motorcycle Clubs and Organizations which have come together in unity to facilitate and broaden communication among it’s Clubs and with the motorcycling community and general public. ![]()
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