9781422277775

C H A P T E R 1 PRISONEROF CONSCIENCE T he Hinds County Jail in Jackson, Mississippi, might very well have been the last place on earth a black man would look for liberty in 1961. Here in the heartland of Dixie, Confederate flags still aroused the passions of most of the white population, which continued to mourn the South’s defeat in the Civil War—and the end of slavery—a century earlier. When Governor Ross Barnett shouted, “I love Mississippi!” at a 1961 football game, thousands of white fans knew he meant more than the indigenous mockingbirds and flowering magnolia trees—and they roared their approval for the traditions of white supremacy . Nevertheless, James Farmer, locked inacell in theHindsCounty Jail, far fromhome andwork on aMonday afternoon in June 1961, felt closer to freedom than ever before. To escape the stifling constraints of a townwhere blacks were treated as second-class citizens, he had left the Deep South of his childhood 2 decades earlier, at the age of 21. Farmer had headed north, intending to fight for the principles he believed in. First in Chicago, then in New York City, he became a union organizer and civil rights activist, dedicating himself to the struggle against racial hate, injustice,

CH A P T E R 1 : P R I S ON E R O F CON S C I E NC E

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