By Carol Ruth Silver, from a July 3, 1961, entry in a secret journal of her experiences at the maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary, in Parchman. One month earlier, the twenty-two-year-old Silver had joined a civil rights demonstration organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), riding a bus to the state to protest segregation in the South. She was arrested in Jackson and held at Parchman for three weeks. Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison was published last month by the University Press of Mississippi.

About an hour after dark, the cell block was relatively quiet. We decided…