effort by working for the government on the home front. After a year at the labor camp he left, on 1 July 1943, along with five other dissenters. He went to Detroit, Michigan, and worked on anti-discrimination campaigns with the Congress of Racial Equality. Soon after his arrival there, he and his companions were arrested for having left Civilian Public Service. A hostile judge handed down maximum sentences: five years imprisonment. He served seventeen months in county jail before being transferred to federal prison. It was during this time that he met his future wife, Juanita Morrow. She came to Cuyahoga County Jail as a reporter, working on a story on jail conditions. He and his cell mate asked to meet her and after that they kept in touch through the mail. During his imprisonment, he went on a hunger strike after federal prison authorities insisted that he eat at a Jim Crow table in the prison. He again launched a hunger strike when he was transferred to Danbury federal prison, for more comprehensive reasons of opposition to the prison system. He said, "You've got me in jail; you're responsible for this, and I'm not going to eat until I am on the other side of these walls." During this hunger strike he went for eighteen days without eating anything at all. After this, they started to force feed him. The first time that the guards force fed him, they purposefully made the tubes too large, making this process torturous for Nelson. The tubes went through his nose and directly into his stomach. After this event, Nelson had to be hospitalized for his injuries. It had made him very sick, and he lost a lot of weight. The force feedings went on for 89 days, until Nelson was finally released from prison. Freedom Ride Nelson Participated in the first Freedom Ride (then referred to as the Journey of Reconciliation) in which people purposefully rode in the "wrong" seats (blacks in the front, whites in the back) in 1947 to test a new Supreme Court ruling banning the enforcement of segregation on interstate public transportation (several arrests and even convictions of riders proved that the ruling was not being obeyed). He rode with a number of notable Freedom Riders such including Bayard Rustin, Conrad Lynn, James Peck, Igal Roodenko, Homer Jack, and George Houser. All of the participants were men; they