We in the nonviolent movement have been talking about jail without bail for two years or more. The time has come for us to mean what we say and stop posting bond. . . . This will be a Black baby born in Mississippi and thus, wherever he is born, he will be born in prison. I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free—not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives.
—DIANE NASH, public statement on her refusal to cooperate with the court system (1961)
It was unlike any testimony the committee had heard before. Then again, there was little typical about the August 1964 Democratic National Convention. Gathered in Atlantic City, the Democratic Party was experiencing the most profound political challenge imaginable as a group of black Mississippians, most of them tenant farmers, worked to unseat the openly white supremacist delegation of that state. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party formed officially on April 24 of that year, emerging from years of tireless work by civil rights activists in the Sunflower State. Four months after it began, the Freedom Democrats shook the national Democratic Party to its core. They gathered in front of the 110-person credentials committee to argue that they, not the all-white delegation of Mississippi Democrats that had also made the trek to New Jersey, should be seated as the state’s voting members of the convention. The Freedom Democrats submitted to the committee between four and five thousand briefs in support of their position; for their part, the regular Democrats filed only sixty briefs and denied all claims of black disenfranchisement.
It was not the briefs that captured the nation’s attention. Rather, it was the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, a forty-seven-year-old sharecropper. In just eight minutes, Hamer offered a vivid portrait of life in the apartheid South. She described a life of confinement and brutality. Hamer told the committee and the assembled media of the vicious violence she had encountered a year earlier in the Montgomery County Jail in Winona, Mississippi. Hamer and four others had attempted to desegregate the bathroom and café at the bus station on June 9, 1963. Police arrested them for their efforts. Police had kicked and cursed at Hamer as they arrested her and had subsequently beaten young activists June Johnson and Annell Ponder. James West and Hamer had received beatings from other prisoners, acting on orders from the police. Two black male prisoners had beaten Hamer all over her body with blackjacks, in the process attempting to remove her clothes so that their blows would land directly on her skin and so that the abuse would be amplified by the specter of sexual assault. After the beating, Hamer’s skin was like “raw cowhide.”1
Hamer testified that the five activists had survived the assaults through their faith and determination and by singing freedom songs. She concluded her short speech with a pointed indictment: “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”2
The violence that Mississippi jailers inflicted on Hamer and her fellow activists was nothing new to the southern prison system. The county jail where the civil rights activists were beaten sits seventy miles from Parchman prison farm, which had for nearly a century been notorious for its brutality. Parchman rivaled Louisiana’s Angola Prison, which sits on the grounds of a former plantation, as the harshest prison in a land of harsh prisons. Since the end of Reconstruction, southern prisons had earned a reputation as sites of extreme racial violence. The fall of abolition democracy by 1877 ushered in an era of racial retrenchment that saw increasing authority vested in institutions of policing and punishment. The criminal justice system became a vital implement through which whites tried to discipline black workers. These developments were constitutive, not coincidental. Embedded in the southern Democrats’ dismantling of Reconstruction was the criminalization of black civic and political life.3
Beginning in the late nineteenth century and backed by the investment of northern capital, southern businesses (especially industrial but also agrarian) used black “criminals” the way they once had used black slaves. Black men and women continued to serve as a reservoir of cheap labor. Arguably even less concerned for the health of their captive workers now than under slavery, southern elites enforced a brutal regime of forced labor that violently punished even the slightest transgressions with imprisonment. Black prisoners resisted as they could, often through individual acts of sabotage or self-mutilation. The convict leasing system—dubbed by one recent chronicler the “re-enslavement of black Americans”—continued until World War II. Convict leasing was the premier element that made the southern legal apparatus—from the police to the courthouse and the prison—a formidable foundation of the Jim Crow South. Even after the practice of convict leasing subsided, the southern criminal justice system remained a bastion of white supremacy.4
Until the civil rights movement challenged the foundations of the Jim Crow order, the criminal justice system openly coerced black labor and enforced white supremacy. As journalist Douglas Blackmon reports, “More than 12,500 people were arrested in Alabama in 1928 for possessing or selling alcohol; 2,735 were charged with vagrancy; 2,014 with gaming; 458 for leaving the farm of an employer without permission; 154 with the age-old vehicle for stopping intimate relations between blacks and whites: adultery.”5 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whites freely terrorized blacks through the law—with economic reprisals, with political disenfranchisement—and then used the law to evade punishment. White extralegal violence against blacks, especially brutal throughout the southern Delta, was so pervasive as to be functionally and sometimes even technically legal. At the same time, whites could challenge any act of black civic life, no matter how constitutionally protected, without fear. The level of violence, both legal and extralegal, against black southerners was so immense that it took a great degree of support from northern black communities, whose members had fled the region during the Great Migration, for the civil rights movement to achieve success in the South.6
Criminalization and incarceration provided the ideological basis for white supremacy from the end of slavery forward, not just in the South but nationally. Across the country, white elites held that “segregation maintains law and order, while integration breeds crime.” Indeed, as political scientist Naomi Murakawa puts it, “The U.S. did not confront a crime problem that was then racialized; it confronted a race problem that was then criminalized.”7 The management of race increasingly transpired through the language and policy of crime. The specter of interracial marriage had long been white supremacists’ rationale for using carceral as well as extralegal force to maintain their way of life.8 Yet as black activists became more emboldened in pursuit of their freedom dreams, their violations of segregationist laws “only further reinforced the idea that black civil rights activists were disrespectful agitators and deliberate lawbreakers.”9 Law and order, the rallying cry of segregation, would become the language of American politics writ large.
As the South modernized white supremacy, it made increasing use of incarceration. From Virginia and Georgia to Florida and Texas, southern states used their jail cells to aggregate racial injustice. The most spectacular abuses, however, occurred in Mississippi and neighboring Alabama—two states that would become central battlegrounds in the fight over civil rights in the mid-twentieth century. In a region becoming known globally for its gruesome spectacles of white supremacy, Alabama and Mississippi stood out with regard to the horrific histories of convict leasing and mob violence. Across the twentieth century, deep, abiding connections persisted between the police and the extrajudicial infrastructure of white supremacist violence in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, both the police and the Klan constituted elements of the “police power,” the broadly conceived capacity of state agents to punish in the name of enforcing public order.10
The police power entails policing, laws, and the institutions that regulate social norms. It is a question of governance in the service of state power. While this capacious notion of the police power has preoccupied a range of legal thinkers since the eighteenth century, its importance in the United States increased in the aftermath of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery “except as punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This wording wrote slavery into law in the form of penal punishment, thereby providing the framework for replacing the era of Radical Reconstruction with the era of Jim Crow racial subjugation.11
The prison and the larger carceral system of which it was a part proved a central component of black life in the twentieth century. And between 1955 and 1965, the combination of black civil disobedience and white civil disorder continually converged around the jail cell.
Both black liberationists and white segregationists saw the prison as holding the key to a larger social order, though they differed about whether that order should be rooted in universal human equality or governed by white supremacy. Segregationists relied on imprisonment as a crucial element of the police power, using the law to do in practice what Cold War anticommunism did as ideology: punish, stigmatize, and divide.12 Black activists, meanwhile, boldly endeavored to remake the prison into a site of liberation. The movement interrupted the most haunting power of imprisonment, the stigma of criminality, and instead made it synonymous with moral authority. These efforts to amplify and to interrupt the police power echoed in the years to come: as white elites experimented with mass incarceration, black activists learned the potency of dramatic action against confinement. The battles in southern cities and jail cells established some of the parameters that would later come to define the struggle in prisons around the country.
Consequently, the best place to know freedom was where it was most elusive. For the civil rights movement, jail served many purposes: it was a rite of passage, a form of community, and a tool for political mobilization. Imprisonment was so common to the civil rights movement that historians often take it for granted. Movement partisans breathed an air thick with the threat of incarceration, earning their stripes by surviving a night or more in jail.13
This intimacy with incarceration was part of a larger battle over the meaning of freedom in postwar America. White power brokers and black activists—North and South, pacifist and otherwise—took up the issue of legality and criminality to battle over morality. This shared investment in the legal system as a site of contestation ultimately yielded the prison movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. For the prison to emerge as a site of political struggle, the wider criminal justice system of which it was a part needed to be problematized. And the civil rights movement did just that. The emergence of revolutionary prisoners such as George Jackson and Assata Shakur owes as much to civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer as it does to stalwart nationalists such as Malcolm X and Audley “Queen Mother” Moore.
For all its talk of integration, the southern civil rights movement broadcast the seeds of nationalism, or at least a certain protonationalism that can be seen in its direct-action approach to prison. In their effort to fill the jails, activists put forth a face of unshakable black (and multiracial) unity in the face of white authority. King’s consistent plea for unity among the civil rights organizations, including a willingness to downplay certain strategic differences, demonstrated a nationalistic willingness to sublimate difference for the sake of political and racial unity. Civil rights organizations positioned this unity as a necessary antidote to the captivities of the state. As a result, direct action united the civil rights movement with the burgeoning Black Power movement. Both shared a black nationalist notion of racial oppression and racial solidarity in the face of overwhelming state repression. For all their philosophical and political differences, then, both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Nation of Islam (NOI), among others, defined blackness in this era as a condition of captivity.
Speaking on the first night of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956—and in his first mass movement speech—King claimed to speak for all black people “tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”14 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Diane Nash echoed this theme of black captivity five years later. Facing jail, the pregnant Nash said that all black children are “born in prison.” Echoing the fill-the-jails ethos of the moment, Nash proclaimed that her willingness to “go to jail now . . . may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free.”15 Nash refused the judge’s patriarchal benevolence, saying she would rather serve two years in prison than pay a fine or appeal her sentence. Not wanting to contravene the bizarre algorithm of the South’s gendered racism, the judge “simply declined to impose the two-year sentence. Nash ended up serving only ten days in jail for refusing to move to the side of the courtroom reserved for blacks.”16
This notion of blackness as uninterrupted confinement is typically associated with a later phase of northern Black Power that developed a theory of “internal colonialism” that characterized black people as a nation captive within a nation, defined either as a “white nation” or simply the American nation. The NOI, the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, and similar groups deserve credit for popularizing a notion of racial confinement. Yet southern civil rights activists also engaged this line of reasoning; SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael recalled that “‘nationalism’ was no exotic import from Northern ghettoes, but indigenous to the southern communities out of which [SNCC activists] came.”17 Their entanglements with the most dreaded southern institution facilitated their ideas that race and freedom were grounded in a carceral experience.
The fact that women civil rights activists could be attacked with the same vitriol and incarcerated at the same rate as their male counterparts lent credence to civil rights activists’ nationalistic claims: all black people, and certainly those who challenged white supremacy, were being incarcerated. And in the South more than the North, this short-term mass incarceration meant that black women who fulfilled certain standards of respectability could emerge as symbols of black radicalism. This gendered politics of respectability was bound up with the South’s sexual citizenship, where black women experienced racism in the form of sexual violence at the hands of white men. By refusing to be bullied in the streets by police or vigilantes, by exiting the domestic sphere and embracing potential assault through incarceration, black women activists such as Rosa Parks and Diane Nash demonstrated a subversive respectability. Their organizing allowed for the creation of mid-1970s defense campaigns focusing on black women who challenged sexual violence, such as Joan Little and Dessie Woods. These subsequent campaigns thrived without attempting to appeal to middle-class notions of respectability.18
This enthusiasm for direct action became a bedrock principle of activism for years to come. In writings from and about jail, civil rights groups contributed to an American theory of antiracist revolution that sought to polarize racial injustice. That polarization, toward which Black Power theorists of armed struggle also worked, proved central in other political struggles against white supremacy. The civil rights movement, therefore, initiated a broader spectacular politics that the Black Power movement would later take up and take in new directions. Southern pacifists and other civil rights workers, not Black Power militants, first selected bombast and spectacle as an orientation for promoting black radicalism.
Rather than seeing patient organizing as the opposite of dramatic spectacle, the civil rights movement demonstrates their coexistence. Tensions certainly existed between media-made actions and the door-knocking campaigns of traditional community organizing; the two strategies coexisted but did so unevenly, and these tensions grew as the media took greater interest in certain individuals and tactics. Yet these tensions should not distract us from the shared emphasis on direct action that united the Congress of Racial Equality, the SCLC, and SNCC along with the local people who comprised the backbone of the movement as a whole. All of them relied at some level on turning incarceration into a spectacle of freedom. Mass arrests and an attempt to repurpose the jail cell required mass attention from black and white neighbors as well as among the national media. Further, these different strands were united by circumstances beyond their control: those who cautioned against media-driven actions nonetheless worked under the constant threat of arrest as they sought to organize black communities to claim their freedom. When arrested, more patient organizers relied on the same tactics of publicity as those who voluntarily sought out incarceration through dramatic acts of conscience.19
Paradoxically, the ubiquity of imprisonment removes the focus from any one particular location—even a location as seemingly fixed as a prison. Because so many activists were jailed, telling the story of the jail’s role within the civil rights movement transcends any specific locale but instead pushes us to see the prison as a “regime”—a form of power dispersed across multiple sites.20 City jails, county jails, and state prisons existed as part of a singular, if dispersed, system of incarceration. The differences in management between one prison and another, between a jail and a prison, mattered far less than the fact that these repressive institutions enforced the same set of power relations throughout the region—and, indeed, throughout the country. For the civil rights movement, “jail” and “prison” were largely interchangeable words to describe both the idea and the fact of incarceration. There are, of course, significant differences between the jail and the prison: the former is used for short-term or pretrial detention, whereas the latter holds people who have been convicted. This distinction mattered in terms of the length of confinement and to some extent the treatment, with the prison usually harsher (although Hamer’s experience demonstrates how dangerous jails could be). But civil rights activists approached the jail and the prison with the same alchemy, turning the horror of imprisonment into the potency of camaraderie.
Hamer’s intervention at the 1964 Democratic National Convention joined her experience in jail with a demand for what historian Hasan Jeffries calls “freedom rights”—that is, the bevy of “civil and human rights that slaveholders denied” black people, a list that includes the constitutionally guaranteed rights of speech, religion, assembly, due process, and suffrage as well as the human rights to live, love, work, move, and study without restriction.21 The pursuit of freedom rights had engaged the southern criminal justice system a generation prior to the modern civil rights movement. Earlier generations of civil rights activists, especially those associated with the Communist Party, had challenged the southern judicial system as nothing more than an extension of the lynch mob. Several World War II–era cases catalyzed national and even international attention on the peculiarities of the thing called southern justice. Once again, this dynamic played out with special intensity in Alabama and Mississippi.
A string of dramatic frame-ups involving black men and white women focused greater attention on the Jim Crow South for a two-decade period beginning with the conviction of nine young men in Scottsboro, Alabama, in March 1931 and continuing at least until the execution of Mississippi truck driver Willie McGee in May 1951. The charges in each case synthesized the race/gender nexus at the heart of Jim Crow: in each instance, black men were imprisoned on false charges of raping white women. The Scottsboro and McGee cases were atypical only in the attention they drew, the mass outcry they provoked. A vibrant Communist Left rallied around the Scottsboro Boys, as they were called, providing attorneys, protests, and publications on their behalf. The Scottsboro campaign renewed a phase of leftist organizing against political repression. These defense campaigns enlisted the support of leftists and civil libertarians around the world to challenge the wholesale persecution of black people of all political persuasions and radicals of all colors. While the defendants were typically men, the organizers were disproportionately women. Progressive and leftist women spoke, wrote, petitioned, lobbied, strategized, and organized a social movement to save persecuted men (and some women) from the killing state.22
These cases often came to depressing endings: the Scottsboro Boys served years in prison, and Mississippi executed McGee, while scores of other fraudulent arrests took place and several executions occurred against the continuing backdrop of the lynch mob.23
More than any given legal outcome, these cases laid the groundwork for the next generation of activists to challenge the southern racial order. Both the NAACP and the Communist Party provided sophisticated critiques of southern legal practice, including the use of all-white juries to produce all-but-guaranteed convictions of black defendants. Both groups also provided resources for defending several targets of southern legal violence. The NAACP in particular refined an apparatus for using the legal system to challenge the racial injustice that often expressed itself through precisely that system. The organization’s resources and savvy were often little match for white supremacy’s powerful grip, and the group lost many court cases, but it nevertheless provided a spirited opposition to southern mores. Further, the NAACP identified the arena of criminal justice as a vital battleground for pursuing black freedom demands.24
With their bold direct action campaigns of the mid-1950s and 1960s, the new civil rights activists took this history of black anticarceral activism in a new direction. For them, the jail cell was a metaphor for the extent of racist depravity—especially in the South—as well as a sign of rising militancy. Both symbolically and in fact, the jail represented the harsh realities of southern life. Yet as activists repurposed the prison into an extension of the mass meeting, it took on another, more surprising meaning: it came to be a place of freedom. If jail could not break the movement, partisans reasoned, nothing could.
By the time of Hamer’s stirring testimony, the black freedom struggle had nearly a decade of experience in using the jail cell as a strategic point of departure for gaining public attention to the fight against Jim Crow. The jails of Birmingham and Selma, Greenwood and Winona, and countless other places served as key battlegrounds in a two and a half decade national struggle during which black activists used the criminal justice system as a counterintuitive site in which to spark national action at the intersection of race and freedom. Literary scholar Houston Baker argues that civil rights activists turned “the entire apparatus of white policing and surveillance . . . into a vocational site for liberation. The white-controlled space of criminality and incarceration was transformed into a public arena for black justice and freedom.” Baker dubs this the creation of a “black public sphere of incarceration” that has characterized the United States, in different ways, ever since.25
Beginning in the mid-1950s, then, white supremacy and black resistance met at the jailhouse door with special fervor. Southern segregationists hoped that arrest and imprisonment would enforce docility, whereas civil rights activists saw the criminal justice system as the best symbolic staging ground on which to challenge white supremacy. The population of southern jails and prisons was disproportionately black, as it had been since the dismantling of Reconstruction. But this campaign was not, as it would soon become, aimed at transforming or dismantling the criminal justice system. Rather, both sides sought to use that system to advance their solutions to the crisis of a segregated South. Incarceration was literally central to the movement. It occupied a structuring place in movement tactics and was a midpoint through which activists necessarily passed on the journey from emerging consciousness to committed political activism. The jail thus served as a critical tool in movement narratives at the time, just as it remains a distinctive feature of subsequent memoirs and biographies. Incarceration was a fundamental component of black life and activism.26
The jail was a consequence of challenging segregation but also an ongoing front in that struggle as activists brought the public consciousness into the prison, if briefly. In doing so, they carried on a tradition initiated through black vernacular, folklore, and popular culture—especially music—that sought to make freedom out of incarceration.27 The terms could not have been more starkly put: as the movement struggled for “Freedom Now,” it passed through the jail cell, while the condition of unfreedom that it opposed extended well beyond prison walls to encompass the totality of Jim Crow America. The movement demanded, even if it did not quite define, freedom. Freedom was the destination as well as the journey, something found in fellowship, direct action, and community organizing.
Freedom was the antithesis and the antidote to law and order: they were equally capacious, equally open-ended articulations of oppositional world orders. Freedom lay at the heart of the movement’s culture: its songs and pictures and naked idealism. Movement songs, sung to annoy jailers as much as uplift activists’ spirits, resounded throughout and beyond the prison. The songs constituted the leading thrust of the opposition to the police power, exposing the inability of even the harshest institutions to dampen spirits. This stubborn insistence on freedom conjured and simultaneously undermined its opposite, for why would someone need to demand freedom unless it had been denied? The repetition of the freedom demand challenged the typical American notion of where freedom could and could not be located. Civil rights activists turned the institution most associated with freedom lost—the prison—into a gateway to freedom found. Imprisoned together, movement activists claimed to be freer than they were in their daily lives of apartheid America. As they did so, they challenged the prison as a private institution removed from public life, sight, or access. Their position was clear: the jail could not imprison civil rights activists, for white supremacy already did.
In retrospect, this ubiquity of imprisonment can be seen as a dispiriting prophecy of the hypercriminalization that would mark the late twentieth century and beyond, where black youth every day faced arrest for petty infractions. Indeed, the threat of jail constantly hung over the movement. Imprisonment was the possible outcome of such otherwise banal activities as trying to vote or register to vote, ride a bus, order a hamburger, or go to the bathroom. But the story has another, equally interesting element: the ways in which civil rights activists embraced the jail and sought to repurpose it show a tactical continuity, too often overlooked, between Fannie Lou Hamer and Angela Davis, between Martin Luther King Jr. and George Jackson, notwithstanding their differing commitments to nonviolence and American ideals. The civil rights movement showed that the prison could be made public and turned into a source of power where prisoners could trump their literal and figurative jailers.
The direct action campaigns that illuminated the southern wing of the freedom struggle reveal a fascinating similarity between South and North, civil rights and Black Power. This similarity is born of a shared entanglement with the carceral state. Seen from the perspective of imprisonment, the southern civil rights movement shares much with the Black Power militants who were its contemporaries as well as its successors. Both movements exhibited a nationalistic commitment to racial unity as the precondition of interracial harmony and took for granted the women’s labor needed for success. Both shared a strategic orientation premised on soliciting public support or sympathy through spectacular direct actions that appealed to the media. And both subscribed to a politics of respectability that sought to demonstrate the dignity of black life amid the dehumanization of white supremacy that extended from the city bus to the city jail, from the ghetto to the prison.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus in December 1955, she did more than rest her tired body and continue her tireless activism. Parks, a veteran organizer and champion of black women’s dignity and integrity, inaugurated an era of black activism that used the prison system as its staging ground. Parks had a long organizing history with the NAACP, fighting sexual violence and other forms of black disenfranchisement. Yet she did not plan to launch a yearlong boycott of the city’s public transportation system at the moment she challenged segregation on that Alabama bus. The recalcitrance of Alabama officials helped stiffen the movement’s resolve. The nascent Montgomery Improvement Association, formed around the boycott but with deep roots in the Women’s Political Council and the local NAACP, initially offered compromise solutions that would lessen the extent but maintain the structure of segregated transit. Indeed, the association’s plan called for adopting the segregation practice used on the buses of Mobile, in the southern part of the state. There, black people sat from back to front and whites from front to back, but no one using that system was denied a seat.28
Yet Montgomery city officials refused to compromise and instead doubled down. They pressed charges against Parks, refused all of the movement’s demands, and in February 1956 indicted eighty-nine black activists. The city leaders, fresh from a pro-segregation rally, described the indictments as part of a get-tough strategy. In fact, the move was an early skirmish in a law-and-order counterrevolution. The indictments held that the activists violated a 1921 statute prohibiting boycotts “without just cause or legal excuse.”29 It was the biggest indictment in Alabama history.30
The Montgomery activists—respectable women and men who had rarely run afoul of even the Jim Crow legal system—seized the moment and elected to go to jail. They surprised the city’s elites by voluntarily turning themselves in while dressed in their Sunday best. They laughed with each other, sitting up straight and defiant for their mug shots. They expressed no fear of jail. The photos became and remain artifacts of black courage, proof that the movement sought to remake every aspect of the prison experience, from surveillance and isolation to fear and shame.31
From indictments came icons. The activists’ dignity and comportment, starting with Mrs. Parks’s initial arrest, nurtured a collective identification with the jailed and emboldened black activists. “Overnight these leaders had become symbols of courage,” legendary organizer Bayard Rustin wrote of the scene at the first mass meeting after the group was released. “Women held their babies to touch them. The people stood in ovation.”32 The dignity of the indicted protesters impressed a wide audience. Following the arrests, the boycott organizers stiffened their Gandhian resolve and found support pouring in from around the country as a result of their commitment to bear witness against injustice. Just as important, the black residents of Montgomery began to shed their fear of the state’s formidable criminal justice system, regardless of their views on Gandhian nonviolence. They became determined to conquer the prison.
The indictments had another unexpected outcome: they turned King, a young preacher, into a national symbol of the burgeoning civil rights movement. King’s first arrest had come just a month before his inclusion in the sweeping Montgomery indictment. The Montgomery Improvement Association had recently launched a carpool system so that people could get to and from work without use of the city buses, and on January 26, 1956, King picked up a couple of people at one of the carpool’s designated locations. Police arrested King on a spurious traffic violation and hauled him to jail. As on many previous occasions, a crowd gathered outside the jail demanding that the captive be released into the hands of the mob. But this crowd was different. It was not a lynch mob. Rather, it saw the prisoner as its hero, not its enemy. Much as abolitionists and antilynching activists had done decades earlier, the crowd demanded the prisoner as a symbol of its desire for freedom rather than a symbol of its desire for racial hierarchy. Fearful at the response, the jailers released King on his own recognizance. Here was the antilynch mob in full force, coming out to rescue a man they had only begun to know.33
This unexpected response was the first psychic break for black activists in weakening the stigma of the jail. It turned a historically taboo location into a place of pride and principle. It also brought added international attention to the boycott, which until that moment had been largely a local affair. And it forced the realization that southern power brokers cared nothing for moderation, pushing the movement to adopt more radical demands that challenged the system at its core.34 Global attention, a collective refusal of the stigma of incarceration, and a stiff resolve against the dampening effect of moderation—these would be crucial resources in repurposing the criminal justice system throughout the civil rights era.
Montgomery was luck; the dramatic display of dignity and widespread support for the protesters caught many people across the nation by surprise. Subsequently, however, the civil rights movement sought out situations where injustice could be exposed. And the willingness to go to jail was a crucial weapon in the developing arsenal of this new wave of the black freedom struggle. As King ultimately laid out the logic, the plan was to orchestrate confrontations that would yield “the surfacing of tensions already present.”35 One’s commitment to risking incarceration was crucial to this process of exposing the latent but structuring political tensions of American life.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott ushered in an era of nonviolent direct action in which activists demonstrated dedication in part through a willingness to go to jail. The boycott brought with it certain class- and gender-laden notions of which prisoners deserved support. Ideas of innocence continued to reign, even when embracing the guilty. For example, Parks’s color and class status made her—rather than the younger, poorer, and darker-skinned women (Mary Louise Smith, Aurelia Browder, Susan McDonald, and Claudette Colvin) who had been arrested earlier in 1955 for refusing to give up their seats—the icon around whom the Montgomery Bus Boycott was built. The boycott’s organizers came from middle-class backgrounds, which for black southerners in the 1950s meant steady employment, moderate comportment, and aspirations of upward mobility. Such incarcerations were more distinctive than those of the black poor, for whom the jail cell was a more familiar—and less voluntary—site.
Middle-class activists encountered the carceral state in more limited ways, largely in pretrial detention in jails or short-term lockup in state prisons for conscious political acts. Intimidating and rife with abuse as the jail experience almost always was, the activists were not serving lengthy prison sentences. Many of them differentiated themselves from other prisoners, describing part of the injustice of their incarceration as stemming from their treatment “like a criminal.”36 This position may have prevented deeper cohesion from emerging, but many imprisoned activists expressed their solidarity with the women and men they met inside.
The boycott inaugurated a new spirit of resistance. The next wave of this kind of direct action and widespread political incarceration did not crest until the spontaneous emergence of the 1960 sit-ins and the following year’s Freedom Rides. In the interim, jail remained a looming presence in the lives of civil rights activists and southern black communities more generally. Imprisonment remained the potential price of registering to vote or infringing on Jim Crow’s other written and unwritten rules. The southern criminal justice system was one of several expressions of white supremacist violence. Many civil rights activists during the late 1950s focused on developing adequate responses to racist terror, and the responses ran the gamut from increased training in Gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance to the institutionalization of armed self-defense units such as the Deacons for Defense and the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, headed by military veteran and militant activist Robert Williams. These semiclandestine formations existed alongside a wider belief in self-defense among many in the rural towns where the civil rights movement set up shop.37
Such self-defense efforts not only attempted to maintain the physical safety of activists and community members but also signaled a growing fighting spirit. And even many activists who were attracted to Gandhi were more taken with his bold leadership and creative direct actions than with his philosophy of nonviolence.38 Their tactical differences notwithstanding, committed pacifists, pragmatic nonviolent activists, and practitioners of armed self-defense displayed similar commitments to hastening the fall of Jim Crow throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.
The sudden growth of the sit-in movement, which began with the efforts of four Greensboro, North Carolina, college students on February 1, 1960, offered a new vision of ways to protest Jim Crow with a mixture of creativity and democratic simplicity. The men attempted to order food at a Woolworth’s and stayed seated after waiters refused them service. Nothing happened to them that day, so they returned the following day with more people. Local media covered the calm uprising, and the sit-in tactic spread. By the end of the week, sit-ins had occurred in eight North Carolina cities. By the end of the month, writes historian Clayborne Carson, “Nashville, Chattanooga, Richmond, Baltimore, Montgomery, and Lexington were among over thirty communities in seven states to experience sit-ins. The protests reached the remaining southern states by mid-April. By that time, according to one study, the movement had attracted about fifty thousand participants.”39
Although the initial Greensboro sit-in did not attract the police, subsequent sit-ins elicited both white violence and mass arrests of black activists. The sit-ins inaugurated a wave of spectacular protests in the first half of the 1960s, with activists using creative and often courageous confrontations to dramatize Jim Crow barbarism. Such protests transpired alongside and in conjunction with the patient work of grassroots community organizing that enabled such spectacles to generate long-term mobilization.
The palpable enthusiasm for direct action nurtured throughout the 1950s exploded in the early 1960s. With direct action becoming the calling card of civil rights, activists increasingly questioned the state’s ability to act as an arbiter of justice. How could the state that protected segregation sit in judgment of its critics? Activists began to view their court-imposed punishments as extensions of the segregated lunch counters and bus terminals. This growing radicalization yielded two new movement strategies, summarized in the slogans “Fill the Jails” and “Jail, No Bail.” The former signaled the movement’s decreasing fear of incarceration and embrace of spectacular confrontations, whereas the latter emphasized a rejection of state authority. Many activists felt that paying bail or a fine stemming from an arrest for movement activity would only legitimate the segregationist system. Choosing prison over payment, supporters of civil rights struck a blow against the “plantation mentality” by seeking to repurpose the institution that had replaced the plantation in the structure of southern life.40
In choosing prison, activists attempted to signal that they would no longer submit to Jim Crow. The “Jail, No Bail” strategy was controversial, and it never sustained the support of every activist who was arrested. Strategic or medical reasons at times prompted certain individuals to post bail, and political differences arose because that strategy was costly and required substantial human sacrifice. Nonetheless, the call to spend time in jail rather than post bail or pay fines fueled the movement. Across the South, a critical mass of activists began to fill the jails—first through an explicit attack on segregationist niceties, second by refusing to legitimize the system through pecuniary reprisals. This one-two nonviolent punch spread rapidly. Freedom Rides brought groups of people dedicated to this strategy to twelve southern states, while SNCC and the SCLC staged confrontations in particular cities and towns. News of these dramatic confrontations circulated widely, kicking off similar eruptions elsewhere.
As the sit-in insurgency spread across the South and calls to “fill the jails” grew louder, incarceration became not just a rite of passage but a precondition for leadership. The prison experience did not just embolden activists in their opposition to segregation but also constituted a possible point of division. At SNCC’s April 1960 founding conference, one participant suggested that decision-making authority be vested only in those who had been arrested: “Everybody has the right to speak, but in this organization if you haven’t been to jail you can’t vote.”41 That position, an ironic twist on the risk of arrest that accompanied black attempts to vote in the South, did not win out but nevertheless reflected the prized position of the jail experience in the activist imagination. A few months later, King found himself challenged when he initially balked at the invitation to join student activists in an action in downtown Atlanta. “I indicated to him that he was going to have to go to jail if he intended to maintain his position as one of the leaders in the civil rights struggle,” said activist Lonnie King, who convinced the reverend that he would need to participate in such actions if he hoped to retain his esteemed status in the burgeoning movement.42
These struggles over who would go to jail continued to follow the older, more established, more famous, and more moderate of the civil rights figures—including Martin Luther King Jr., though he largely came to agree with his critics in this regard, as well as others from SCLC and such top NAACP brass as Roy Wilkins. The message was clear: civil rights activists needed to go to jail to be taken seriously.
From their experience in southern jails and prisons, along with what they knew or learned of the long history of convict leasing, civil rights activists grew sensitized to the prison experience. The conditions inside were shocking enough to ultimately capture the attention of even the most moderate civil rights organizations, as witnessed by a variety of documents, including a 1968 report by the Southern Regional Council on the endurance of convict leasing in southern prisons.43 But neither the heroic greetings from other black prisoners nor the brutal conditions inside—including savage beatings for refusing to address the warden as “Sir”—transformed the civil rights movement as such into a prisoners’ rights movement. Rather, it strengthened activists’ resolve to take down the broader “prison” of white supremacy while empowering other prisoners to launch their own efforts to improve their conditions.44
Through these direct actions, the jail experience became an extension of the mass meeting. Overflowing jails joined overflowing church pews to sustain the movement’s energy. Reverend King praised the movement’s success at having “transformed jails and prisons from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and justice.” Assuming the presidency of the Mississippi NAACP chapter, Aaron Henry pledged to turn the state’s jails into “Temples of Freedom.”45 Other activists expressed similar sentiments. Jail offered a chance to recruit, to demonstrate one’s spiritual and political resolve, a place to debate tactics and strategy. In dark cells and dilapidated cafeterias, activists strengthened their relationships and commitments to one another and to the movement that brought them to prison.46
When they were not placed in isolation, these short-term political prisoners, especially the black ones, often tried to forge common cause with the other men and women they met while incarcerated. While all civil rights activists faced violence from prison guards and staff, white activists often suffered jeers or assaults from the prisoners with whom they were segregated, whereas black activists frequently established a camaraderie with the other prisoners they met inside. Whether hostile or hospitable, though, these relationships were almost always short-term. The jail remained primarily a symbol for the broader problem of racial oppression.
The time in jails and prisons also gave rise to a black literary culture that proved especially catalytic for the Black Power movement. Prior to the 1960s, black prisoners had produced a rich and largely musical folk culture that described the racial ordeal of confinement. Black activists in the civil rights era added a literary element, and prison narratives began to blossom in the mid- to late 1960s. These narratives are understandably associated with figures such as Malcolm X and George Jackson, but the southern civil rights movement also produced its own literature of confinement. The signal text in this regard was King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Today, King’s letter is remembered as a stirring indictment of passivity as itself a form of injustice; the document stands as an artifact of the civil rights movement’s higher moral purpose, a defense of its urgency against the false promise of liberal moderation. It also helped to instantiate a genre of American prison writing that takes the prison as the staging ground for antiracist critique.47
Over the next decade, millions of people discovered the prison through the written words of dissident prisoners—both those incarcerated for their activism, such as King, and those whose activism arose from their incarceration. As confinement limited physical access, it privileged the written word. This emphasis on the written—and more to the point, published—record highlighted the knowledge and eloquence of the author. At the same time, it obscured the various labors that had gone into getting the letter, essay, or book from a prisoner’s cell to the public eye. King’s letter was part of an emerging literary field that utilized a gendered division of labor, whereby a select few male prisoners became well-known dissident authors, while the women who transcribed, published, or distributed these writings—as well as other equally articulate political prisoners who were less inclined to write—often labored in anonymity.48
King wrote his open letter on scraps of paper smuggled out of jail while he was serving time for violating a city injunction against protest marches. King addressed the letter to eight white Alabama clergymen who had publicly chastised the movement for going too far, too fast. King’s response, written as the confrontational campaign reached its apex, outlined the inner workings of a nonviolent campaign and offered a passionate explanation of the movement’s demands. King could have easily addressed the letter to any of the more overtly hostile forces allayed against the movement. His choice of the white moderate as his intended audience highlighted the movement’s urgency and anticipated the ways black revolutionaries would, within a few years, use the occasion of their imprisonment to launch their own critiques of liberalism. From prison, King (as with later prison authors such as George Jackson) challenged the cowardice of moderation. His writing anticipated the Black Power critique, leveraged by Jackson, among many others, that liberal pleas for calm and respect for established channels perpetuated injustice.
Undergoing the indignities of confinement, then, afforded a certain moral authority to demand immediate freedom. Noting that “tension” could be productive, King also sought to locate the source of conflict as the system of white supremacy. “We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” King wrote. “We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”49 Imprisonment in pursuit of such exposure, he argued, was obedience to a higher law.
Initially obscure, King’s “Letter” achieved growing popularity as an urtext of the southern civil rights movement. It was gathered in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait, along with other writings about the Birmingham campaign, which was pivotal for the southern phase of the civil rights movement. In Birmingham, the Manichaean struggle orchestrated by the movement played out with the most dramatic and violent force. Not surprisingly, then, imprisonment remains a persistent trope throughout King’s book, a metaphor for the black condition as well as an all-too-common reality. In “The Sword That Heals,” King noted how the new mood of black activism had reconfigured the meaning of the southern jail cell. Whereas imprisonment once meant physical violence and economic insecurity for southern blacks, the movement now offered a different meaning. Because the movement had offered jail as a way to expose the cruelties of Jim Crow, King argued that “to the Negro, going to jail was no longer a disgrace but a badge of honor. The Revolution of the Negro not only attacked the external cause of his misery, but revealed him to himself. He was somebody. He had a sense of somebodiness. He was impatient to be free.”50
Imprisonment was a point of pride, a crucial site in the development of black politics; Jim Crow was so barbaric a system that going to jail now revealed a deep humanity that everyday life in the South sought to deny. King praised the tactic of filling the jails, arguing that about 5 percent of the black population in Albany, Georgia, went to jail as part of the protests there in 1961. “If a people can produce from its ranks 5 per cent who will go voluntarily to jail for a just cause, surely nothing can thwart its ultimate triumph,” King predicted.51
In addition and quite unexpectedly, jail produced a certain joy. Going to jail was not just duty or sacrifice; it produced a counterintuitive sense of pleasure at refusing the shame of being arrested, the stigma or sheer terror of being incarcerated. (It helped, of course, that most activists were incarcerated for short periods in jails rather than long periods in state or federal prisons.) Movement activists delighted in getting arrested for their beliefs, in being able to fill the jails beyond capacity, and hoped that their dedication would tumble Jim Crow. “I felt no shame or disgrace,” John Lewis recounted of his first arrest, for a 1960 sit-in as part of the militant Nashville student movement. “I didn’t feel fear either. As we were led out of the store single file, singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I felt exhilarated. As we passed through a cheering crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside, I felt high, almost giddy with joy. As we approached the open rear doors of a paddy wagon, I felt elated.”52
Such sentiment, while dulled by the boredom and violence of confinement, nevertheless continued for many activists inside the jail cell. In 1963, the movement brought the city of Birmingham to a standstill and rejoiced at the success. So many people were imprisoned there—more than twenty-five hundred—that the city could not arrest anyone else. With so many adults in jail, movement leaders decided to accept the support of the city’s children, declaring that anyone old enough to go to church was old enough to get arrested. The police agreed. During one march on the “Children’s Crusade,” people were arrested “at the rate of ten per minute for nearly two hours.”53 The movement’s pledge to fill the jails had become a boast that there were more activists in the movement than there were jail cells to hold them. In the Birmingham campaign and elsewhere throughout southern civil rights campaigns, jail was not just a moral act of witnessing but an exhilarating harbinger of freedom. As they had done in church pews and meeting halls, civil rights activists in jail cells sang freedom songs and sung the praises of the courage to commit oneself to the jailer. In songs laden with religious imagery, the activists sung of captivity and liberation, of suffering and redemption, of hope and perseverance.54 Civil rights organizer Bernice Johnson Reagon, who later founded the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, said freedom songs served as a “medium of unity and communication” within the cross-class group of incarcerated black women and men.55
Throughout the South, black organizers emboldened by their dramatic confrontations with southern authorities viewed the prison as another bastion to conquer. Impatient to be free, they entered jail with a spirit of determined resistance. Imprisonment was an intellectual as well as a spiritual enterprise: activists formed study groups and debated political ideas with passion and urgency, bringing some of their organizational apparatus and movement culture into the prison. They sought first to endure imprisonment and second to enjoy it, a combination that would undermine incarceration’s intended purpose. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, black organizers maintained that the prison could not hold them.
In a Georgia prison after a raucous antiwar demonstration in 1966, SNCC organizer Michael Simmons, who had refused induction into the military, brought a healthy spirit of irreverence with him. When a guard told the ten imprisoned SNCC militants to stop chanting “Black Power” while they conducted menial labor, Simmons told him off. The guard then pulled out his gun. “You motherfucker,” Simmons responded. “What you going to do, shoot us?” Simmons walked toward the armed guard, holding the pick with which he had been splitting rocks. “You got six bullets,” he told the guard. “There are ten of us. Four of us are going to kill you.” Simmons told him to put the gun away. “And I just kept walking towards him. Man, he put it away.” Simmons acknowledges that his action was pure bluster, high on the collective spirit of black radicalism. “All he had to do was to shoot one shot in the air and say, ‘Well goddamnit . . . it won’t be your ass killing me,’ and I would’ve shit all over myself,” Simmons concedes. But the guard balked at this unexpected display of strength.56
To a large extent, activists’ claims that they enjoyed or did not fear imprisonment were undoubtedly bravado. To confront a terrifyingly violent order, movement activists needed to convince themselves of their own power. They needed to make themselves feel invincible. They needed to turn the prison from a dreaded end into a tolerable point on a longer journey. They needed, in short, to strip the repressive regime of one of its most potent weapons: the fear it generated among its captives. And what better way to do that than to willfully undermine that most formidable of southern institutions?
Many activists found no joy in jail, and even those who found some modicum of it—typically the most stalwart of movement activists—at times feared for their safety. Life inside certainly bored everyone. This joy did not exist separate from the other feelings elicited by forced confinement: the terror and tedium of jail, the monotony and resentment. The difficulty of staying clean, eating healthy foods, and being treated with respect were a constant source of anger and frustration in jails and prisons. To them, life in lockup was a more concentrated form of the abuse they experienced throughout society. But activists took delight in the freedom songs they sang, the discussion groups they held, and the expressions of solidarity from other prisoners and from outside supporters that enabled them to, at times, talk back to the guards, protest the racial epithets and denigration, or launch work strikes with a stunning collective unity.
These emotions coexisted in the temporary communities forged through unfreedom. Indeed, as incarceration became an ever more prevalent feature of black social life and especially black political life, civil rights activists took their growing militancy into prison. The movement had at least temporarily accomplished a major feat: the jail was no longer an abstract bogeyman. If, as the reigning penal ideology at the time put it, jail was supposed to be the punishment rather than the place where punishment was meted out, a certain feeling of invincibility circulated within the civil rights movement. Activists believed that the guards could not carry out most of the threats they wielded against other prisoners because the jails could not hold all of the movement’s supporters, especially as their cause garnered increasing public attention.
Ruby Doris Smith was one of four SNCC activists who traveled to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to fill the jails in protest after nine men were arrested during a sit-in there. The publicity their protests generated made Smith’s brief prison stint even lighter. “We receive letters from all over the country congratulating us for our courageous action,” she wrote to a Spelman student in the Fulton County jail after another sit-in. “I feel so guilty and unworthy because we are really enjoying ourselves.” She concluded, “This isn’t prison, it’s paradise.” Fellow SNCC organizer Charles Sherrod, sentenced to thirty days hard labor in Rock Hill, agreed. “You get ideas in jail. You talk with other young people you’ve never seen. . . . We’re up all night, sharing creativity, planning action. You learn the truth in prison, you learn wholeness. You find out the difference between being dead and alive.”57
This counterfactual embrace of the jail was premised in part on the leniency, at least in terms of sentencing guidelines, for multiple misdemeanor arrests at the time. While the treatment people received inside of jail cells was often quite brutal, as the testimony of Hamer and others so powerfully illustrated, people arrested multiple times in cases of civil disobedience faced relatively light penalties, especially with so many lawyers offering their services to the movement. Further, the middle-class aspirations of many of those who filled the fearsome jails of the South also promoted this surprising repurposing of carceral space. Precisely because college students, who might escape the fate of black agricultural serfdom, as well as the ministers and church leaders who functioned as power brokers within the community eagerly sought out imprisonment, such willful, temporary mass incarceration threatened the prison’s taboo symbolism.
Not just class but Christianity shaped this paradoxical embrace of the prison. Activists’ willingness to sacrifice their freedom, risk violent assault, and suffer for a higher moral power was in keeping with the Gandhian-inspired Christian ethic that dominated the early years of the most visible elements of the southern civil rights movement. Both the tactical decisions and the spiritual ethos of these partisans fit well within the longer history of nonviolent direct action among Catholics, Quakers, and other faith-based communities during World War II.58 These earlier activists, including those who participated in the first Freedom Ride by the pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1947, bequeathed a legacy of submitting to incarceration to protest war and injustice. Even the many people who did not possess a moralistic or philosophical commitment to nonviolence shared what Carmichael later called a “moral stubbornness” that allowed them to use Gandhian methods.59 As a result, abuse by jailers generally failed to quell the movement because its participants saw suffering and sacrifice as either rites of passage or helpful tools in movement building, sources of individual and collective strength. Whatever their beliefs regarding the methods and goals of the black freedom struggle, activists shared a willingness to put their bodies on the line—through risky direct action, through the ordeal of imprisonment, and in several cases through engaging in hunger strikes while incarcerated. These actions combined to strip Jim Crow of its power by denying its impact down to the level of the individual body.
Imprisonment featured monotony and isolation punctuated by the constant threat and frequent experience of violence. Yet the prison also served as a polarizing institution, a perpetual reminder of who and what the real enemy was. Even where people disagreed about specific tactics, they joined forces for the sake of upholding unity against the prison and the society it represented. Difficulties and differences arose in a context that clarified the underlying stakes of opposition. Denied its power of secrecy, the prison proved a unifying force within the southern civil rights movement.
People’s experiences in southern jails and prisons were not easy or uniform. People were often afraid, and some had more serious mental breakdowns.60 The prison routinely exacerbated political or strategic differences. It is no surprise that the high-pressure environment of incarceration would result in bickering or divisions among those committed to moral witnessing and those invested in political struggle. This difference often manifested in debates over escalating tactics. Carmichael, for example, recounted a jailhouse debate over whether to go on hunger strike, with the committed Gandhians viewing the strike as the logical way to protest while incarcerated and strike opponents (including Carmichael) arguing that refusing to eat was dangerous and ineffectual. Stubborn and upset at having to spend his twentieth birthday in prison—the first of several birthdays he spent incarcerated as a result of his political activities—Carmichael joined the strike and was the last one to come off of it precisely so that he could tell his comrades never again to pursue that tactic. “I’m a very young man but I intend to be fighting the rest of my life so I’ll probably be in jail again,” Carmichael yelled to his fellow prisoners in neighboring cells after the strike ended. “So probably will some of you. So this may not be the last time we are together in prison. That’s why I want you to remember my name. Because if we are ever in jail again and any of you even mention the words hunger and strike, I’m gonna denounce you properly.”61
Both the joy and the misery of jail were structured by the gender of southern racism. Historian Zoe Colley writes that because black men were arrested more often, white men and black women in the civil rights movement had the worst experiences in prison: they were more often isolated from their comrades by the prison’s segregation by both race and sex.62 The relatively few white men who risked arrest for civil rights work could be set up for attack by racist white prisoners. Further, as seen in the brutality Hamer and scores of other black women experienced, black women were at particular risk for sexual assault by guards or prisoners acting on the guards’ behalf. And the always latent, sometimes actualized threat of sexual violence was indeed a potent weapon used against some black women in prison or in police custody. Recognizing this vulnerability, some civil rights organizers launched the Youth Emergency Fund to “assure the personal privacy and protection of girls and women in southern jails.” They pledged to visit women incarcerated for their organizing and to help them with any urgent needs. This short-lived development fit within black women’s organizations’ larger opposition to Jim Crow’s sexual violence.63
All encounters with the criminal justice system were fraught with danger, both because of what would happen in prison and because of the prison’s place within a larger geography of white violence. During Freedom Summer, the auspicious 1964 effort to organize Mississippi black communities and focus national attention on the apartheid South, more than one thousand people were arrested. In one of the most notorious murders of the era, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested on specious charges in Neshoba County. The sheriff released them to the Ku Klux Klan, which lynched the three men. Their mutilated bodies were not found for forty-four days.64
Though movement activists praised Christ and Gandhi, Bayard Rustin, Miles Horton, James Lawson, and A. J. Muste provided the protesters with mentorship in direct action. The anticolonial theorists who would so inspire the Black Panther Party and its generation of black revolutionaries—Fanon and Mao and Cabral and Guevara—had not yet put pen to paper or had not yet had their works translated and widely circulated in English. Yet the movement’s emphasis on dramatic “acts of conscience” to polarize public sympathies and press for change shared much with the theory of armed struggle emerging from the world’s national liberation struggles.
Indeed, the call from participants in sit-ins and Freedom Riders to “fill the jails” can be seen as an American foco.65 Most often associated with Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, the foco theory held that a small, disciplined, and ideologically committed group could inspire the masses to action through exemplary actions. In Cuba and among U.S. insurrectionists in the early 1970s, such exemplary actions included violent assaults on government or corporate property or on police officers. Yet the southern phase of the civil rights movement utilized a similar logic: small groups of ideologically committed activists used dramatic actions as catalysts for mass uprisings. The four students who sat in at the Greensboro lunch counter launched a massive wave of sit-ins across the South, while four hundred Freedom Riders traveling in smaller groups elevated civil rights to a regular news item for six months in 1961. Both actions motivated others to pick up the cause when death, injury, or arrest prevented the original participants from continuing. For example, when white supremacists beat Congress of Racial Equality Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, and burned the bus on which they were traveling, activists from Nashville quickly stepped in to fill the void. The dedication of this “nonviolent army” yielded much in the way of financial and moral support from around the country.
The bus fire in Anniston and the urgent embrace of the legal system to quell black insurgency reveal a deeper tension in the civil rights movement. The nonviolent army, with its protonationalism, coexisted with another form of nationalism that had its own army and far more institutional power. The white nationalism of the apartheid South pulled out all the stops to maintain the region’s way of life. Historians have recently offered portraits of the white South as a more nuanced, internally divided region than it seemed at the time.66 The white South was not a monolithic entity—differences existed in politics as well as strategy throughout the region; white moderates grew tired of the excesses of vigilante violence; and even committed white supremacists differed over whether to defend their order through the law or outside of it. Yet many officeholders and everyday citizens nonetheless organized on behalf of more police and harsher sanctions against those who violated an ever-expanding litany of laws. As civil rights activists broke the law in pursuit of grand goals, southern segregationists used the law to maintain their power. Demonstrators received lengthy sentences on spurious charges. The state’s carceral capacity was strengthened by mass arrests and a wide range of collective punishment, including economic reprisals.
Mass arrests of political activists provided a dry run for mass incarceration, especially when joined with the economic transformations wrought by mechanization and migration. The civil rights movement gave states an early taste of what it would mean to arrest, prosecute, and imprison large groups of people (and to do so as pure punishment rather than coerced labor). Facing sharp challenges to their order and a diminishing need for black labor, southern states turned instead to the criminal justice system. Recognizing the ways in which the movement was making the most of incarceration, Mississippi authorities during the Freedom Rides altered the state’s disorderly conduct provisions so that people who failed to pay bond within forty days lost their right to appeal and had to serve their entire sentence. Jackson officials used civil rights activity to justify the purchase of new weapons—including a tank—for the city police force. Other police departments followed suit, further militarizing American police departments. In 1963, Alabama officials tried to raise the bail amount required in misdemeanors from three hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars. Though the effort failed, it was one of many ways in which governments responded to the movement by attempting to amplify the police power.67
Local and state governments across the South enacted punitive ordinances to at least delay if not outright ban civil rights agitation. While these changes were in some sense precipitated by the direct actions of the civil rights movement, they sought a broader political realignment whose center of gravity came to be called “law and order.” That the battle against segregation would take the form of a struggle over law and order is not surprising. After all, the law was precisely what was in question. Activists willfully violated and attempted to abrogate the laws of segregation, while southern white power brokers took refuge in the law to maintain their power. The racial disparity of incarceration had already been institutionalized, and whites who physically attacked movement activists were rarely arrested and even less frequently prosecuted for their assaults; in contrast, black activists filled the jails.
At the height of the movement’s march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Lowndes County officials moved the voting registrar’s office from the courthouse to the jailhouse. According to historian Hasan Jeffries, “The old brick jail, with its blood-stained cells, was the one place in Lowndes County that evoked more fear in African Americans than the courthouse.”68 The move also reduced the transport time should officials want to incarcerate any would-be voters. And where the stick failed, officials occasionally tried the carrot. As the movement succeeded in using imprisonment as a base for organizing, some southern sheriffs wanted to keep certain activists away. Montgomery police commissioner Clyde Sellers, an open member of the White Citizens’ Council, paid Martin Luther King Jr.’s fine to keep him out of jail in 1958. The incident, repeated in Albany in 1962, was slightly embarrassing for King, who had vowed to stay in jail rather than pay a fine and thus legitimate the arrest for violating Jim Crow. White officials hoped that keeping King out of jail would weaken public sympathy for the movement, since they realized that imprisonment gave King power. Other high-profile figures also had difficulty staying in jail as southern elites noticed the movement’s ability to translate imprisonment into public sympathy.69
Some notable movement leaders enjoyed an occasional buffer of protection from the white elites they opposed, though rank-and-file activists never had that insulation. Mayors, police chiefs, judges, and governors throughout the South used mass arrests to intimidate and thus quell the movement or at least temporarily quiet it. As white southerners responded to the civil rights movement with a combination of legal restrictions and mob violence, the jail became a way for elites to have both order and segregation, two things they prized highly. White mob violence aroused the nation’s conscience and spurred a reluctant federal government to act. But in the context of larger economic shifts, the use of the criminal justice system arguably left a larger legacy. State police and officials tried to criminalize civil rights activists through arrests, injunctions, and bans while rattling the saber of law and order to prevent greater organizing.70
The white South responded to the civil rights movement by expanding and modernizing its carceral capacity. Southern states relied more heavily on the jail cell than the lynch mob, embracing the lawful state as a more reliable and less controversial enforcer of political order than the lawless crowd. In the coming years, local, state, and federal authorities launched an unprecedented campaign of prison construction and expanded police powers, and this carceral power proved itself far more enduring than a civil rights movement whose object was freedom. The popularity of the civil rights movement, which saw even young children willing to submit to arrest, left in its wake a strategy of policing that was increasingly comfortable with the incarceration of youth. In the decades that followed, the United States came to rely less on extrajudicial and vigilante violence and more on modern, technology-based forms of policing and incarceration. Police in Albany, Georgia, and Jackson, Mississippi, deflated the movement’s attempts to stage dramatic confrontations in those cities in 1961 through a quick burst of mass arrests. Policing and imprisonment did what white riots did not: stunted the civil rights movement’s ability to reach a national audience, earn public sympathy, and press for policy changes. In Albany, police arrested more than four hundred people in less than a week; police and white bystanders were not permitted to attack the demonstrators.71
Police officials succeeded because of their slick carceral management, arresting people quickly and quietly carting them off to jail. The use of widespread arrests was no coincidence; after studying Gandhi and the civil rights movement’s “Jail, No Bail” policy, Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett determined that he needed to use swift, mass arrests. Pritchett instructed his deputies to follow a four-point plan calculated to both silence and criminalize black activists. First, police violence would not occur in front of the media. Second, arrests would be made on color-blind pretenses, such as trespassing, rather than for violating Jim Crow laws. Third, “Incarcerate, incarcerate, incarcerate.” Finally, no negotiations with the movement would take place.72
The civil rights movement often benefited from confrontations where the carceral regimen was much more openly brutal and visible and where the movement could elicit public support by filling the jails. As a result, the state adopted a domestic counterinsurgency. It set out to weaken the movement through a combination of expanded arrests and limited public exposure. The savvy opposition refused not only to negotiate but also to give black organizers any venue, such as the media, that would enable them to reach a wider public. For the rest of the century and into the next, the United States would not lack for carceral capacity.
As the movement shifted its strategies to prioritize political struggle over public sympathy, civil rights activists ultimately tired of the jail cell as a step on the way to a grander freedom. The beatings, deprivation, and collective and arbitrary punishments inflicted in prison had long defined black working-class life across the country and became an increasingly common feature of the black condition in the decades to come. But the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement came to see the jail as an obstacle to rather than a vehicle for liberation. This shift became evident in a speech by Carmichael on June 17, 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi. Local police had arrested the SNCC chair during a massive march in the wake of the shooting of civil rights activist James Meredith. Released from custody, Carmichael was furious about the arrest and the larger violence it represented. “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down to get rid of the dirt,” he told those assembled. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whupping us is to take over. We have been saying ‘Freedom Now’ for six years and we ain’t got nothin.” With the help of fellow SNCC organizer Willie Ricks, Carmichael exhorted the crowd with a new demand: “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.”73
Carmichael’s speech attracted a great deal of press attention and consternation at the time for allegedly shattering the civil rights coalition. In reality, he was naming a parallel and long-standing political tendency. The phrase “Black Power” had already become part of the black radical lexicon. Where civil rights activists had for years celebrated their march to the jails, Carmichael’s demand for Black Power was a demand that advocating civil rights no longer be considered a crime for which jail was an appropriate punishment. Calls for Black Power came from multiple sources: from Harlem street speakers and Detroit mosques, from a growing number of books and plays, from prisoner organizing, and from within the civil rights movement. As more and more organizations dedicated to Black Power began to sprout up, many observers contrasted them with traditional civil rights groups. Of central concern were tactical and philosophical matters—most notably, whether groups were committed to nonviolence. Arguably more crucial were the demographic differences. The civil rights demonstrators tended to be drawn from the black middle class, with many preachers and students participating and with women serving as prominent and unifying figures.
Black Power, especially in its embrace of the prison, was a more masculine-centered project that appealed specifically to “brothers on the block”—both the street block and the cell block. This shift in class and gender demographics accompanied the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s, which were launched largely by under- and unemployed young black men. But as much as anything else, Black Power’s success resulted from the bold direct action and strategic insights of civil rights workers. Women served as key strategists and insurgents, generals and foot soldiers in the wave of civil disobedience actions across the South that sought to repurpose the prison as a site of liberation. Women’s work enabled the rise of a national movement among prisoners, even if public attention and mass militancy were more concentrated among male prisoners.
The civil rights embrace of nonviolent fellowship and the Black Power elevation of revolutionary armed struggle are not as far apart as they often have been described. Both shared an emphasis on media-generated spectacle. Both counterintuitively used the prison as a place of regeneration. And both told a story of collective racial confinement. This narrative centered the prison as a site of both repression and redemption. When it came to imprisonment, southern civil rights activists articulated a racial nationalism rivaling that of any Harlem street corner or Oakland college campus. They spoke of a whole people imprisoned at birth by virtue of their race and without regard to class or gender. And they showed the prison to be a jumping-off point for a broader struggle for freedom. Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, and countless others marched into southern jails and prisons in hopes of making America mean democracy for African Americans. Many Black Power activists reared in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities had been to prison for reasons other than civil disobedience, and they took a different lesson from those experiences. To them, as Malcolm X put it and the Black Panther Party later dramatized it, “America means prison.”