Customer Reviews

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders

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Breach of Peace is a great book for several reasons. It is beautifully designed and printed, with very high-quality reproductions of Etheridge's exceptional contemporary portraits of 1961's freedom riders and of their mug shots, recovered from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which had been formed in 1956 to protect the state from Federal encroachments like the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The featured freedom riders' pages display their portraits and mug shots, their stories then and now, and a quote from the interviews which Etheridge conducted as he traveled through the United States to meet them. Each story is moving but the accumulated effect of reading all of the stories is almost breathtaking. Courageous in their youth, these exemplary Americans have gone in many directions but all seem to have dedicated their lives to freedom, education, and equality.

You see in the mug shots dozens of youthful citizens who proudly traveled to Mississippi, knowing they would be arrested and imprisoned, staring with heads held high at the police cameras. There was no shame and little apparent fear, just a confidence that they were engaged in a mighty cause. Of course none of them could have imagined that these mug shots would have been preserved and found more than forty years later.

The juxtaposition of the mug shots with Etheridge's modern portraits is fascinating. I might find interesting any collection of portraits of people matched with their younger selves. But Etheridge's multitonal black and white pictures are particularly beautiful, and they work incredibly well next to the stark black and white mug shots of 1961.

Breach of Peace is organized chronologically, so that you see how various groups of freedom riders arrived, week after week, in Mississippi, and how the youth movement, first mostly black, led to the later participation of more young whites and then older, already-engaged progressives. At the end of the book, there are a number of extended interviews.

I think this book would be a cherished gift for many people, including teenagers and college students who may be questioning their innate idealism in the presence of what might appear to them to be a cynical and dystopian culture. There have been few books which so successfully allow us to observe dozens of people, initially attracted to participate in a seemingly impossibly challenging confrontation with racism, who have committed their lives to improving our society.

My review is not in anyway impartial or detached. Forty seven years ago tomorrow (June 2) myself and five fellow Riders were arrested in Jackson. Three members of our group are no longer with us today, with this disclosure in mind I will now review "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders" by Eric Etheridge.
The book is beautifully printed and the portraits are of outstanding quality. The text is, of course, minimal but to me at least, provacative in the extreme. The interviews Mr. Etheridge was able to conduct and include were the flesh on the bones. Incidently, I spoke with Mr. Ehteridge and was advised that the interviewing connected with his project is continuing and they will eventually show up on the internet.
This book is a perfect complement to Raymond Arsenault's "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice"(see my review). For primary history enthusiasts, I cannot strongly enough recommend: Mississippi Department Archives and History (MDAH Digital Collection). To get a feel for the real situation in Mississippi of what segregation meant in that state.
Perusing the portraits was like a portal back into time. Bittersweet memories of accomplishment and failure. Yes, we accomplished the immediate objective of integrating interstate travel and in the ensuing years(at the cost of a lot of blood) removed most overt forms of discrimination. But, sadly if one takes the time and energy to peer into her or his surroundings(locally and globally) the idealism of that time is rarely observed.
WE SHALL OVERCOME?

Captures the youthful optimisim of peole who knew they were doing the right thing and were willing to spend time in jail for their belief in the equality of human beings. The police mug shots, although very impersonal, convey the moral presence of these young people. The contemporary interviews and photos give the reader a glimpse of another era. You can also look at this book as an art book......the black and white photos really draw you into the written text. I think this makes a wonderful coffee table book meant to stimulate conversation and would be a great gift for a graduating student during these times when again it seems like our country has lost it's moral compass.

Putting the faces on those brave men and women....40 years later......it would be like talking to william lloyd garrison, frederick douglass, and wendell phillips in 1920. god bless the brave....buy the book and see there faces!

The Freedom Rider mug shots were collected by Mississippi's State Sovereignty Commission, which was established to protect segregation in perpetuity. The aim was probably to assure that if the Riders returned to the state, they could be run out on a rail, or perhaps blackmailed if they were later ashamed of their youth.
Who knows why the police photos went into the archives? Mississippi Sovereignty Commission employees were notoriously drunken incompetents (see numerous scholarly articles to that effect) and they needed to collect every shred of evidence of having shown up for work.
When the Sovereignty Commission's files were finally open to the public thanks to years of work by the ACLU, the evidence of their intimidation & spying & incompetence was astonishing.
And yet, even in the mug shots, the strength of character & idealism of the Riders showed through. Photographer Eric Etheridge made it his mission to track down those of the 500 Riders who were still alive, and persuaded many to allow him to do new, artistic, penetrating "mug shots" for posterity.
My regret is that the interviews which went with the portraits were so curtailed by the art book format. I also feel that the intensity of his approach made many people look more forbidding than they are in a more natural setting.
This is a valuable, powerful & revealing book, which presents to the public some of the people who have not been celebrated but who made the history while others got the kudos.

I recently purchased this, having read a review in either the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. It provides background information regarding the Freedom Riders within the civil rights movement and then offers photos of the individuals arrested and profiles of many of them: what they were doing then, why they joined the effort and what they've done since and are doing now.

The book provides a human face to a movement -- something that is very effective here given that the participants spanned various parts of the country, different socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.

The only issue I had with it, which is minor, is that the project is ongoing, which makes the book seem incomplete. That doesn't make me regret the purchase, however. Well worth the money and time.

"Here is a picture of the emergent civil rights movement plunging forward, adeptly taking its strategy of nonviolent direct action to the national stage" writes Eric Etheridge in the introduction to this wonderful book.

Etheridge found approximately 320 mug shots of Freedom Riders who had been arrested in Mississippi in 1961. Ironically, the mug shots were warehoused by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a Mississippi agency formed in 1956 "to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi...from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government." The Commission got the mug shots and arrest records from Jackson and Mississippi State police. (The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States' Rightsis an excellent history of the Commission.)

Etheridge has worked as a magazine story editor and on various Web-related projects. He was able to track down and photograph and interview more than 100 Freedom Riders. Many of the modern photos appear next to the original mug shot, as well as the all of mug shots of every Freedom Rider arrested in 1961 in Jackson.

A sample entry (for Larry Bell) consists of the two photos and the following text:

"Born: March 5, 1942, in Monroe, GA. Grew up there and in Los Angeles, where his family moved in 1950.

"Then: Freshman, Los Angeles City College.

"Since then: Returned to Los Angeles, working as a janitor during the day and attending City College at night. In 1966 was one of the first blacks to go to work for United Airlines in California. When he retired in 2000, he was a flight-attendant supervisor and also trained newly hired flight attendants. Still lives in Los Angeles.

"Quote: The clothing that they gave us in Parchman was a t-shirt that was military green and some green boxer shorts. No shoes, no. And as we began to protest, they took them from us and left us with nothing. Then they took the mattress, so now we had to lie on a metal slab with them little round holes--and boy, you talk about some hard sleeping at night? When you're sleeping on the thing, there's that indentation where your skin goes through that little round hole, and there you are, half of you is like being suffocated and the other half is being cut out, you couldn't sleep any way you tried. So we sat up and we debated all night, and we got more boisterous in our songs."

As Etheridge notes: "The irony here is that the Sovereignty Commission documented the success of the Civil Rights movement instead of defeating it, and left behind a great visual record and the names of everybody involved."

There are two excellent histories of the Freedom Riders:Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the Front Lines of the Civil Rights Movement by Ann Bausum and Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Pivotal Moments in American History) by by Raymond Arsenault.

Etheridge's excellent book adds a human element of great power to the story.

***

Reviewer's Disclosure: I worked on various Civil Rights matters in Mississippi between 1961 and 1970 as a law student and later as young lawyer.


Robert C. Ross 2008

If you want to know more about these courageous and selfless men and women, black and white, who risked their lives for Justice, this is a wonderful source, informative and inspiring.

Thank you, Amazon!

This is the history of our country. Of my friends and later family members. Sometimes it seems as if it is a long ago matter, however, we must at all times remember that history may repeat..We must moniter, at all times, those things that may take our liberty and rights away, These people were the Heros of our generation. The book is wonderful for the content and the photos.

The subject of an engaging exhibition and lavishly appended new book, Eric Etheridge's contemporary photographic portraits of this group of American heroes and heroines of many races and cultural backgrounds not only celebrates their world-changing courage, but traces their subsequent histories. Among the very many who remained active in political and social justice causes are included some famous civil servants like US Congressman Charlie Rangel (D, NY) to teachers, artists, lawyers, and at least one couple who fell in love during their Freedom Ride. - Shana Nys Dambrot on Flavorpill LA

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