Biography
Jesse Harris was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, on July 6, 1961, for participating in a sit-in against segregation at Livingston Park — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library, which establishes the arrest and the individual identification photograph. The arrest photograph is titled Jessie L. Harris while the CRDL authority form is Jesse Harris. He later trained Freedom Summer volunteers and organised in the McComb area and for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. A separately catalogued June 2, 1961 Freedom Ride arrest photograph under the name Jesse James Harris may or may not be the same man; the CRDL material does not settle it, so no second record has been created. The disposition, any transfer to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the time served and the release date are not established in the CRDL record and are left unresolved here rather than inferred.
Photo credit
Contemporary source and chronology limits
The July 14, 1962 Mississippi Free Press, page 4, explicitly names “Jesse Lee Harris, 20” and Luvaghn Brown, 17, both of Jackson, as released from the Hinds County prison farm on the evening of July 3. It reports their May 21 arrest for refusing to move from a bench reserved for white spectators during Diane Nash Bevel’s court proceedings, contempt sentences of thirty days at hard labor and $100 fines, and reported beatings in custody. The visible release numeral is 3; the embedded OCR misreads it as 8. The existing profile’s Jessie L. Harris alias and reported birth year make this an important identification lead, but this source note does not by itself assign a new custody case pending individual identity reconciliation. Jesse James Harris is not merged or given these dates, and the dates are not substituted for the separate 1961 sit-in arrest.
