Freedom Riders hit the road again, 50 years after US civil rights milestone

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It was just like the old days, when Mississippi was burning. Freedom Riders were back on Greyhound buses – and police cars with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring were waiting for them.

This time, 50 years on, there was nothing to be scared of. Mississippi was welcoming the civil rights activists, and the police were providing an honour guard to ease their way.

Luvaghn Brown, 66, from Mississippi but now living in New York, was acutely aware of the change. "It is a huge difference. When we were escorted by the police before it was only to take us from one prison to another."

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Most of the 427 riders were students in their teens or early 20s, arriving from across America on the trains and buses, black and white together going into segregated waiting rooms and cafeterias. They were attacked in Alabama and jailed in Mississippi, in Parchman, the most notorious prison in the south, William Faulkner's "Destination Doom".

They were allowed back inside Parchman this week, travelling deep into the delta in a convoy of six Greyhounds, to visit their old cells. There was a welcome placard outside the gates.

The Clarion-Ledger – which the day after Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech used the headline Washington is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed – led with Riders Return as Heroes.

Governor Haley Barbour even invited them to breakfast at his mansion. A potential candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential race, Barbour dropped out after a row over a comment sympathetic to the White Citizens Council, a civil rights era supremacist group. Some riders refused to return in protest. But Barbour surprised the 60 to 70 who did make the journey by issuing "an apology for your mistreatment in 1961" and adding: "We appreciate this chance for atonement and reconciliation."

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