Biography
Claude Albert Liggins was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 25, 1961, for participating in the Freedom Rides and challenging segregation in interstate transportation — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library. The catalog establishes the arrest, participation, and individually identified police photograph. In his May 26, 2011 oral history for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Claude Albert Liggins recalled initial city and county jail custody followed by imprisonment at Parchman. The exact physical release date remains unresolved.
Liggins recalled initial city and county jail custody followed by transfer to Parchman. His recollections do not establish an exact physical-release day.
Later Los Angeles jailings and vital-record source
In his May 26, 2011 first-person oral history, Liggins says that after the Freedom Ride he was active in Los Angeles and went to jail about three other times. He describes stays ranging from two weeks to one demonstration-related imprisonment in which he actually served six months, in the context of voting-rights, civil-rights and fair-housing campaigns. The six-month stay is distinct from the 1961 Mississippi imprisonment. The interview gives no individual action date, jail admission, discharge, statutory charge or case outcome for that later stay; six months is his recollection of service, not a back-calculated calendar interval. The other later jailings are not arbitrarily split into dated episodes.
His 1961 recollection places three or four days in city/county jail before Parchman and describes 43 days at Parchman, then later refers to release after 43 days. Those statements do not establish an exact overall total or physical-release day; existing Mississippi dates and unknown totals remain unchanged. His references to Henry (Hank) Thomas, Stokely Carmichael and Lawrence Twist concern fellow prisoners and a transfer within prison, not new independent arrest dates.
In an August 2, 2023 memorial, fellow Freedom Rider Carol Ruth Silver identifies him with the years 1940–2023 and states that he died on July 7, 2023 in Inglewood, California. Only the explicitly printed birth year is recorded; the birth month/day are unknown.
MDAH oral history, original PDF pages6–7 (printed4–5); Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, Claude Liggins memorial.
