Biography
Jesse Harris was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, on July 6, 1961, for participating in a sit-in against segregation at Livingston Park — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library, which establishes the arrest and the individual identification photograph. The arrest photograph is titled Jessie L. Harris while the CRDL authority form is Jesse Harris. He later trained Freedom Summer volunteers and organised in the McComb area and for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. A separately catalogued June 2, 1961 Freedom Ride arrest photograph under the name Jesse James Harris may or may not be the same man; the CRDL material does not settle it, so no second record has been created. The disposition, any transfer to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the time served and the release date are not established in the CRDL record and are left unresolved here rather than inferred.
