Biography
Jesse James Harris was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 2, 1961, for participating in the Freedom Rides and challenging segregation in interstate transportation — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library. The catalog establishes the arrest, the participation, and the individually identified police photograph, but not the court disposition, any transfer to Parchman, or the physical release date; those fields are unresolved pending county-jail, court, or penitentiary records.
WHETHER THIS IS A SECOND MAN IS NOT SETTLED. The archive also holds Jessie L. Harris, arrested at the Livingston Park sit-in on July 6, 1961. The catalog files the two arrests under different names and states in more than one place that they are different people. But one pass over the same catalog rated that only moderate and flagged a possible identity overlap needing biographical comparison, and no such comparison has been made. If they are one man, these are two of his arrests and the records should be merged. The doubt is recorded here rather than resolved by guessing, and the same note appears on the other record.
