01/13/2023
This is the mugshot of Ga***rd Brewster Noyce (Miami University 1945) who was arrested and jailed in Montgomery, Alabama on May 25, 1961 for protesting racial segregation. He was one of a group of Freedom Riders who had ridden a bus from Atlanta to Montgomery the day before and was attempting, along with legendary civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth to integrate the “whites-only” lunch counter at the Montgomery bus depot before taking the bus on to Jackson, Mississippi.
Brother Noyce was the son and grandson of Congregational ministers and had served in the US Navy after graduating as valedictorian of his high school class in Grinnell, Iowa. At Miami University, he was an outstanding student leader who was a member of Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa. He went from Miami to the Yale Divinity School (YDS) where he graduated in 1952 and began his career as a local pastor and by 1960 joined the YDS faculty where he would teach for 34 years, serving for a time as its dean of students.
Noyce was recruited by Yale chaplain and friend of Martin Luther King, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. to join an African American Yale Law student and two theology students from North Carolina to participate in the Freedom Ride from Atlanta to Jackson. Other faculty members were reluctant to go, perhaps fearing for their safety after Freedom Riders a week before had been brutally beaten. But Noyce, who was married with three young children volunteered, along with faculty members from Wesleyan University. Coffin’s intention was that they would be the first northern whites with “respectable” credentials to participate in the Freedom Rides. Noyce and Coffin’s fellow Yale faculty members raised $1000 in bail money for the group after they were arrested. Noyce later marched with Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington.
Rev. Noyce had a long and distinguished career at YDS, training future generations of pastors and writing eleven books. He died in 2009 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
