When the original CORE Freedom Ride was firebombed in Alabama in May 1961, SNCC students from Nashville insisted the ride continue — through the mob at Montgomery and on to Jackson, Mississippi, where riders were arrested at the terminal as fast as they arrived. More than 300 Freedom Riders were convicted of breach of peace that summer and shipped to the state penitentiary at Parchman, where they were held on death row, stripped of mattresses for singing freedom songs, and subjected to wrist-breakers and cattle prods.
The riders' refusal to bail out — serving 39 days to preserve appeal rights while keeping the cells full — made Parchman the movement's university; a generation of SNCC's leadership, from Stokely Carmichael to John Lewis, passed through it.