AND YOU CAN SEE IT IN THEIR EYES

AND YOU CAN SEE IT IN THEIR EYES

This post originally appeared in the ARTHAUS:Detroit subscriber newsletter of 13 August 2022

Residents look on and participate in verbal and physical abuse of black and white activists integrating the Woolworth lunch counter at a sit-in, in Jackson, Mississippi, May 28, 1963. Photo credit: Fred Blackwell.

Pauline K. Sims (pictured below) was born neither in the south nor the north. Coming into the world on June 20, 1939, she was born in Putney, England, making her a 22-year old expat at the time of her arrest. She was apprehended for integrating the Trailways bus terminal in Jackson Mississippi, on August 14, 1961. She knew this was everybody's fight.

Sims was one of the only two Freedom Riders participating in that encounter. It had been the only official freedom ride that month. And it would be the second-to-last for the whole interventive campaign.

Not much is available on Sims, which is self-kicking-sad as I’m sure there is much about her and her motivations that would do us good to know. What we think of as worth noting at the time...

But the other one, the other rider, there is considerable information on him.

Pictured above: George Raymond and Pauline K. Sims, Freedom Ride 48.

...virulent jeers, glass to the back of the head, violent kicks to the gut — a lunch counter sit-in was anything but appetizing

Perhaps you'll discover you know something about the other rider, George Raymond, even if indirectly. 

Only 18 at the time of the August 14 freedom ride encounter, a very determined George Raymond went to Jackson as a member of the New Orleans office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Driven by his sense of justice, he would later become a field director for CORE. 

Raymond eventually recruited students to come to Canton, Mississippi, to help him establish a CORE office there. This is where he functioned as field director. With CORE established in Canton, Raymond was instrumental in getting residents registered to vote.

However, it’s worth noting that so serious, so frightening, and so grave were the threats and scare tactics lobbied by white residents — including the police — against black residents of Canton, Mississippi, that only 121 of 10,000 potential black voters — 121 of 10.000...let that sink in before you move on — even registered that year.

Pictured immediately below is former police officer Benny Oliver kicking student activist Memphis Norman. Former police officers were not the only police officers participating in terrorizing activists and residents alike. Can you imagine how hard it was to enlist local help for the Canton, Mississippi field office?

The name George Raymond. Still not ringing any bells?

If you know about the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner, who were abducted in Mississippi in June of 1964, you incidentally know something about George Raymond, because they were abducted, and then murdered, while currying the car he was to have driven that night. This act of murder was reportedly meant to snare Raymond and put a stop to his work , voter drive activity, and him.

But if the missing persons poster above of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner is not familiar, perhaps the images below, and the photo at the very top, will be. Theywill connect us to Raymond.

Pictured above are famous photos of black and white civil rights activists enduring verbal and physical abuse at the Jackson, Mississippi Woolworth lunch counter sit-in of May 28, 1963. Seated in these two photos are (left to right): John Hunter Gray, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, and Anne Moody. Photo credit: Fred Blackwell.

May 28, 1963 was an inconsequential day for most of us reading this post. But it is the date of the lunch counter sit-in pictured above and not a day its participantswill likely forget. With virulent jeers, glass to the back of the head, violent kicks to the gut, a lunch counter sit-in was anything but appetizing, and everything other than lunch.

If you look toward the top at the very first photo I show, picturing the sit-in, you'll see Raymond in it. Pictured in that photo are activists Walter Williams, George Raymond (in what would become his iconic trademark overalls), Pearlena Lewis, and Lois Chaffee. Raymond was right in the thick of things. 

You can see it in his eyes. There was no way he was going to wait for someone else to make things happen. He knew he had to be the change. And that every willing body was necessary.