The young people were Mary Jane Pigee, aged eighteen, a college student at Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio, and a former local Youth Council president Adrian Beard, aged sixteen and a student at Immaculate Conception Catholic School and fourteen-year-old Wilma Jones, a student at Higgins High School. The agent refused them service and a bystander called the police and the local newspaper. They approached the ticket agent and asked for tickets for the next Memphis-bound train. For example, on August 23, a Wednesday afternoon after lunch, three black youths walked into the white waiting room of the Illinois Central Railroad Station in Clarksdale. The 1961 Freedom Riders did not pass through Clarksdale, yet the town’s civil rights activities in 1961 were strong, producing local drama and stories. The result of the Youth Council efforts produced one hundred new voters. They also announced the program in their churches and schools. For instance, in the spring of 1961 many young people went door-to-door in Clarksdale during the NAACP’s Crusade for Voters. The Youth Council undertook many activities that helped the adult officers and leaders of the local branch meet their goals. Pigee also served as Clarksdale/Coahoma NAACP branch secretary and as the state’s Youth Council advisor. She then worked principally with local black youth under the auspices of the NAACP Youth Council program. Vera Mae Pigee, who owned a beauty shop in the heart of the black neighborhood in downtown Clarksdale, had helped Henry organize the Clarksdale/Coahoma County NAACP chapter. In fact, the branch had such a large active membership that SNCC and CORE had little to do there and focused more on other towns and counties in the state. The group received its charter in 1953 and remained at the fore of civil rights activities in the Mississippi Delta for years. In 1951 a group of local black people, under the leadership of World War II veteran and pharmacist Aaron Henry, formed a Clarksdale/Coahoma County NAACP branch to harness the resources of the larger national organization. One of the most active NAACP branches was in Clarksdale, Mississippi, covering the whole of Coahoma County. Some Mississippi branches were more organized and viable than others, depending on the areas where active and strong all-white Citizens’ Councils or more violent vigilante groups had also organized. Moreover, in the early 1950s the national office in New York City sought to increase its membership and build on the momentum from its Supreme Court successes in dismantling Jim Crow, or the system of denying African Americans civil liberties and enforcing segregation. Most of the state’s NAACP branches were formed after World War II had ended in 1945. Clarksdale and the NAACPīefore the young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Congress of Racial Equality entered Mississippi on the Freedom Ride buses in 1961, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had branches throughout Mississippi. But their efforts did not kill the local civil rights movements. Board of Education decision that ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional. The whites in power who wanted to maintain and strengthen segregation had little tolerance for black resistance, and they worked hard to navigate ways out of implementing the 1954 U. Their activities were quietly organized, and struggles against discrimination were small and localized, because it was too dangerous to make large public statements and draw too much attention to the activists. Most of the local civil rights movements began in the 1950s, in churches, homes, and in the back rooms of small black-owned businesses across the state. Mississippi had pockets of strong local civil rights activity before the Freedom Riders entered the state, but their presence in 1961 propelled the local movement to new heights.
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