“It Was Like I Was in a New World”: Black Women, Freedom Rides, and the Price of Incarceration at Parchman Penitentiary during 1961

The paper considers the history and the lived experiences of women who participated in the Freedom Rides during the summer of 1961 and who were incarcerated in Mississippi's notorious Parchman Penitentiary. The paper argues that young Black women, determined to use different forms of activism as a means to uncover and denounce a system of racism across the South, encountered a southern justice system determined to criminalize their very being. Thus, once the Freedom Riders arrived in Mississippi, young Black girls and women found themselves at the mercy of the state's penal system, a harsh institution that punished them to illustrate just how far the state would go to protect its white majority. Lastly, the paper will explore the gendered shared experiences of both white and Black Freedom Riders who were incarcerated at Parchman to illustrate that Mississippi was hesitant to punish white women to the extent that they punished Black girls and women.