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bigotry , and exploitation. He worked to bring white and black Americans together as one people, firmly believing that as long as the races remained divided, racism would continue to flourish and blacks would continue to suffer. In 1942, working with other committed men and women, Farmer founded the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization dedicated to ending discrimination against blacks. By 1961, CORE had attracted thousands of young people of all races, each of them committed to the fight against racism. Buttressing the discrimination and segregation of the Deep South was not only custombut law. Farmer and his colleagues in the growing civil rights movement knew that before they could hope for true social justice in America, they would have to conquer the South. Thus it was that Farmer, at the age of 41, had returned to the hostile land of his youth. With him in 1961was a small band of young people, all of them determined to break down the walls of prejudice between black andwhite Americans. Arriving in Mississippi in Greyhound buses on May 24, the Freedom Riders—as Farmer and his young allies were called—brought their campaign to the Jackson bus station. Farmer and the other blacks marched into the whites-only waiting room, drank from the whites-only water fountain, then entered the whites-only restaurant. Meanwhile, white Freedom Riders took their places on the benches reserved for “colored.” Both groups were deliberately violating the laws that prohibited the races to mingle in public places. Ordered by the Jackson police to leave the bus station, the demonstrators refused. After arresting them for “disturbing the peace, disobeying an officer, and inciting to riot,” the police herded the activists into patrol wagons and hauled them off to the Jackson City Jail. There, they refused orders to remain silent, roaring out hymns and freedom songs instead. Segregated even in prison, the Freedom Riders sang to each other through the echoing hallways. They were determined to fill the prisons of the South with their spirit as well as their bodies, overpowering the defenders of inequality with love and defiant nonviolence.

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C I V I L R I GH T S L E A D E R S : J AM E S FA RM E R