Sally Rowley

Rowley was born in Trenton, New Jersey,[2] the daughter of Emos Rowley and Sara Rowley. She graduated from Stephens College in Missouri. At Stephens, she learned to fly small planes and worked as a flight attendant for American Airlines after graduation.[1]

Rowley worked as a secretary in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1959, she was aboard a plane hijacked by Cuban gunmen.[3] She joined the Freedom Riders, who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States to challenge the non-enforcement of the Supreme Court's ruling that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.[4] She was arrested with other Freedom Riders by Jackson County police in July 1961.[5][6] After serving time in Mississippi State Penitentiary she returned to New York, but later lived in Mexico, Guatemala, Hawaii, California, and New Mexico, making and selling her jewelry.[1]

Rowley's partner was artist Felix Pasilis; they never formally married, but lived and worked together from the 1960s until his death in 2018. They had children, Sofie and Oliver, and raised his daughter, Beatrice.[1] She died in May 2020, aged 88 years, from coronavirus, after it swept through her Tucson, Arizona nursing home.[1] Her granddaughter, Anika Pasilis, wrote an op-ed essay about attending Rowley's deathbed through a window at the nursing home.[7][8]

• Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, mug shot photograph of Sally Rowley (1961), in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.