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ILLINOIS CENTRAL TRAIN STATION, June 25, 1961, New Orleans, LA, to Jackson, MS - RIDE 25

Updated: Jun 21, 2022

George Blevins, Gloria Bouknight, Arthur Brooks, Jr., John Dolan, Mary Hamilton, Gordon Harris, Louise Inghram, Frank Johnson, Marian Kendall, Claude Liggins, Chela Lightchild, Norma Libson, Eddora Manning, Robert Mason, Frank Nelson, Janis Rogers, John Rogers, Wayne Taylor, Richard Thorne, and Claire Toombs.



'One of the guards at the county jail kept coming up to our cell...I can remember the phrase, "You don't understand us. We don't hate our niggers." - Gordon Harris (Breach of Peace, Etheridge, 2018)


I remember I was in high school when I first read about the Boston Tea Party, and I used to imagine myself being intuit kind of thing, wanting to know how it felt to be part of some historical thing. Now I can say I have been a part of something historical. It's a good feeling, because there are a lot of people who have done a lot of things, got rich, got poor, but whatever they have accomplished, they can't touch what I did. Not even Oprah can do that, and she got a lot of money. - Claude Liggins (Breach of Peach, Etheridge, 2018)


Capt. Ray called out our names and put us under arrest. When he called Mary Jamilton's name and she stepped forward, they said, "No, you're white. You can't be Mary Hamilton."


They pulled me out and said, "You're Mary Hamilton." Because I was tan, dark -- I spent a lot of time a the beach -- and Mary Hamilton was very light colored.


So they put me in the car with the black people and took me to the jail and sat me in with the blacks and Try with the whites and then later when the fingerprints came back they found out they had made a mistake. They didn't like that. So I got a little roughed up and I guess Mary got a little roughed up, because we'd integrated the cells.- Chela Lightchild (Breach of Peace, Etheridge, 2018)



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