ARP: Three Children of Americus

ARP: Three Children of Americus: Foot Soldiers In Southwest Georgia's March to Freedom
By: Donna Winchester
Fall2009
Three Children ofAmericus:
Foot Soldiers in Southwest Georgia's March to Freedom
By Donna Winchester
An applied research project submitted in partialfulfillment of the requirements
for the Master ofArts degree in Journalism
from the Department ofJournalism and Media Studies
University ofSouth Florida St. Petersburg
November 20, 2009
Project adviser: Robert Dardenne, Ph.D.
Project committee members: Raymond Arsenault, Ph.D, and Jon Wilson
Dedication
This project is dedicated to the memory ofZev Aelony,
Freedom Rider and civil rights champion
1938-2009
nTh at summer was stolen from us."
- Emmarene Kaigler Streeter, 60
Emmarene Kaigler had barely learned to read when she first noticed the signs
posted over the water fountains at the five-and-dime in downtown Americus.
The sign above the tall, gleaming water fountain said "White."
The sign above the short, rusty fountain, the one people had to crouch down to
drink from, said "Colored."
The child puzzled over what the difference could be. Did the water that arced out
of the "White" fountain taste different from the water that stalled and sputtered from the
"Colored" fountain?
Emmarene knew she was supposed to drink from the smaller fountain. But every
time her mother took her to S.H. Kress for hair ribbons or penny candy, her eyes strayed
to the big fountain. She would leave the store thinking: One of these days, I'm going to
drink out of that one.
And then one afternoon, when the white man behind the counter had his back
turned, she did. Detecting no difference whatsoever, she decided to drink from the
forbidden fountain every chance she got.
That small seed of rebellion, planted when Emmarene was 7, took root and grew.
At 10, she began accompanying her grandmother to mass meetings presided over by
black preachers with voices steeped in fire and brimstone. Night after night, she listened
as they urged the city's black citizens to rise up and demand the same rights white
citizens enjoyed. By the time she was 13, she was ready to take her place on the front
lines of the Americus civil rights movement, participating in sit-ins, protests and
marches.
The fact that so many young people were willing to do so distinguished the
Americus movement from others in the Deep South. Encouraged by college students sent
from the Atlanta office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youth of
Americus passionately embraced the push for racial equality. Children as young as 10
stood in for parents who feared they would lose their jobs if they got involved
themselves.
While the majority of Americus' 13,000 inhabitants were black, racial brutality
and white supremacy had reigned in the area for decades. In 1942, members ofthe Ku
Klux Klan instituted a campaign of terror against Koinonia, a Christian interracial
farming community 8 miles east of the city. A dynamite attack destroyed Koinonia's
roadside market, vandals chopped down more than 300 fruit trees, and Americus' white
business owners closed down Koinonia's credit.
Over the years, black citizens routinely were denied service in white-owned
businesses. They were forced to use rear entrances and shoved aside when white patrons
entered. When they pressed the Chamber of Commerce for the formation of a biracial
committee, the president's response was, "What the hell for?''
Emmarene was too young to grasp the big picture, but she knew what it felt like
to be prohibited from drinking at the same water fountain as a white child. And she was
old enough to draw strength from the freedom songs she heard at the mass meetings,
which erupted frequently, spontaneously, and without accompaniment. She recognized
their melodies from the hymns she heard at church and quickly learned the words the
song leader called out at the start of each stanza.
Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'roun, turn me 'roun, turn me 'roun
Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'roun
I'm gonna keep on walkin, ' keep on talkin, ' marchin ' up to freedom land
Fifty years later, Emmarene Kaigler Streeter remembers the mass meetings as a
joyous opportunity to socialize with her friends.
"It was like we were going there to try to out-sing each other," says Streeter, 60.
"It became a game for us."
But even then, she knew the gatherings had a higher purpose.
"When I started to listen to what was going on, I said, 'Oh gosh, this is about
trying to get us some rights,' "Streeter recalls. "It just hit me that I needed to try to do
something."
She started going door to door with the young SNCC field workers when they
arrived in Americus in February 1963. In her child's voice, she begged black citizens
living in tin-roof shanties and cramped shotgun houses to get involved in the civil rights
movement. If they didn't stand up for themselves, she warned, things would never
change.
As soon as school let out for the summer, she became a regular at Allen Chapel,
the stepping-off place for activists who marched up N Lee Street protesting the
segregation ofthe Martin Theater.
"It just became a way of life for us," she remembers.
One hot Saturday in July, Emmarene' s friend Pearl Brown came to her house and
said, "Emmarene, we're going to jail today." As committed as she was to the movement,
Emmarene wasn't sure she wanted to go to jail. But she went to her mother and said,
"Mama, we're going to jail today."
"Make sure that's what you want to do," Mary Lois Kaigler told her.
"Yes, ma'am," Emmarene said.
"Make sure that's what you want to do," her mother repeated.
"Okay," Emmarene said, waiting.
Mary Lois sighed. "If that's what you really want to do," she said, "that's what
you do."
Emmarene ran to join her friends at the chapel. Old and young, black and white,
they swarmed up N Lee just after noon, singing:
Ain't gonna let no policeman turn me 'roun, turn me 'roun, turn me 'roun
Ain't gonna let no policeman turn me 'roun
I'm gonna keep on walkin, ' keep on talking, ' marchin' up to freedom land.
As the protest grew larger and louder, police officers wearing helmets with face
protectors arrived carrying billy clubs and electric cattle prods. Rather than issuing an
order to disperse, as they had done at the scene of other protests, the officers began
pulling people out of the line and loading them into police wagons.
The marchers knelt in the street to pray, as they had been instructed to do by the
SNCC field workers. Many were beaten or shocked with the cattle prods.
Ernmarene was pulled from her knees and loaded into a wagon along with a dozen
other boys and girls. They were taken to a two-story building adjacent to the police
station and marched upstairs.
"They didn't write down who we were," Streeter said. "They just said, 'Ya'll
come in.'"
Within hours, the building was overflowing with youngsters who had been
arrested at various points along N Lee Street. To make room for the protesters who were
still arriving, officers loaded the youngsters back into the wagons and drove them 27
miles southwest to the city jail in Dawson.
When they got there, the boys were locked in one cell and the girls were locked in
another. They sang freedom songs at the top of their lungs to keep their spirits up.
Ain't gonna let no jailhouse turn me 'roun, turn me 'roun, turn me 'roun
Ain't gonna let no jailhouse turn me 'roun
I'm gonna keep on walkin, ' keep on talking, ' march in' up to freedom land
The guards punished them by putting them in a sweatbox - a concrete room
roughly 5 feet by 8 feet with no windows and no ventilation also known as "the hole."
The boys went in first, and then the girls.
"We were just packed up on each other trying to get some air," said Streeter, who
still wakes up at night gasping for breath. "The walls were dripping water. By the time
we got up the next morning, there was a puddle on the floor."
Looking back, she wonders how they survived.
"I know the good Lord kept us," she said.
The children began singing again as soon as they were returned to their cells.
Infuriated, Americus Police ChiefRoss Chambliss called Sumter County SheriffFred
Chappell and told him he'd have to "come and get his niggers." Emmarene and the others
rejoiced, thinking they were going home. But instead of traveling north to Americus, the
police wagon headed east to Leesburg with 33 girl prisoners.
Unlike the others, Emmarene was familiar with the area. The insurance company
her mother worked for was based in Albany, 38 miles from Americus. Emmarene
frequently rode there with her, passing through the rural town of Leesburg on the way. As
far as Emmarene was concerned, there was nothing worth stopping for in Leesburg.
When the truck stopped alongside a dreary one-story cinderblock building, she
and the other girls noticed the bars over the windows. They refused to get out.
"We started saying, 'We're not going in, we're not going in,' "Streeter said.
"But where were we going to go? It was safer for us to go in than to run up and down the
highway."
She worried from the first night about "snakes and stuff' crawling in through the
windows, several of which were broken. She slept poorly when she slept at all. Because it
was summer, the air was thick with mosquitoes. Ticks and roaches roamed the walls. The
heat was unbearable.
To pass the time, Emmarene and the girls played cards. They gossiped. They sang
freedom songs, even when the guard ordered them to be quiet. When they'd run through
all the songs they knew, they made some up.
"All day long we sat on the hard floor," Streeter said. "Every once in a while, a
girl would get up to look out the window. But I wasn't tall enough. All I could do was
look out through the bars on the cell door."
After the girls had been locked up for several days, their jailer, a man named Mr.
Countryman whom the girls had started calling "Pops," struck up a conversation with
Emmarene.
"He asked me, 'Who are your people?' When I told him who my granddaddy was,
he said, 'I know Homer, he used to work on my house.' "
Streeter never found out why Mr. Countryman, a gray-haired, heavyset white man
who wore overalls and carried a shotgun, had been chosen to guard them. Nor did she
find out why the local dogcatcher, a man she knew only as Mr. Story, was selected as a
messenger to bring details of their whereabouts back to their parents. But that was what
Mr. Story did: He told the parents that they could meet him at midnight on the Dawson
Road with any supplies they wanted their children to receive and he would make the
deliveries.
Emmarene's mother and grandfather made plans to meet Mr. Story that night.
"My granddaddy got down in the back of the car with a shotgun," Streeter said.
"He didn't know what they were getting into."
The next day, Mr. Story delivered "two big old bags of groceries" to Emmarene.
"My mama knew that ifl was away from home, I'd be missing my junk food,''
Streeter said.
But the other girls were missing their junk food, too. They'd been choking down
undercooked hamburgers brought in each day by Mr. Story since their arrival. Before
long, they were greedily eyeing Emmarene's goodies- a couple of jars of Planters
peanuts, a few cans of Vienna sausages, and several candy bars. Fearing the girls would
steal from her, Emmarene kept everything in the brown paper bag, folded it over, and
slept with it under her head.
She decided after a few nights that it would be easier to share, "so everyone could
get a little taste."
Meanwhile, families that had the money to do so were paying to get their
daughters out of the stockade. Mabel Barnum, a leader in the Americus movement who
owned the local funeral home, came to get her granddaughter Lorena. Another movement
leader, the Rev. R.L. Freeman, came for his daughter Robertina. Lorena and Robertina
both had been chosen earlier that year by movement officials to integrate Americus High,
and with the school year about to start, they were needed back home.
Movement leaders had selected Emmarene as well. Her mother could have
afforded to pay the $2 a day Americus city officials were demanding for "keeping" the
girls, but she chose to stay.
"I just thought it was the right thing to do, to stay with everybody else," Streeter
said.
But she had underestimated the length of her confinement.
"I really thought we'd be there three or four days," Streeter said. "That's what
they'd been doing, locking people up for three or four days and then they'd let them go."
But as the weeks went by, she began to think: They're not going to let us go
home.
And then she got sick. Her skin felt like it was burning up, and she had a terrific
ache in her jaw. Mr. Countryman called for a doctor, who suspected Emmarene's wisdom
teeth were impacted. Her temperature was so high that the doctor told the police chief
she'd have to be released immediately. Arrangements were made to transport her back to
the police station in Americus, where a dentist would come to work on her.
But Emmarene was afraid.
"When (the police chief) came to get me I said, 'I'm not going back with you by
myself.' " Streeter said. "He said, 'Well, I' 11 bring one of the other girls and then bring
her back.' I said, ' That won't work. She'd be injust as muchjeopardy as I would be.'"
She was in too much pain to argue for long. Not entirely convinced she would be
safe, she got into the police car with the chief and his deputy.
"That deputy flew back to Americus," Streeter said. "He came straight up Lee
Street from Leesburg to the police station. I guess he didn't want me to be afraid. But can
you imagine? Here I am, at that age with two white men, and both of them have guns."
The dentist was waiting when they arrived at the station. He treated Emmarene as
best he could under the circumstances, administering medication throughout the night to
ease her pain. She expected to be sent back to the stockade the next morning. Instead, she
was taken to the courthouse and brought before a judge.
"He told me that if I got in any more demonstrations, he would send me to
juvenile court," Streeter said. "But I was like, 'Why should I stop now? I've done it. I've
been there. Juvenile court can't be worse than what I've been through.' "
The judge sent her home.
Mary Lois Kaigler, who had been frantic the entire six weeks her daughter had
been gone, questioned her endlessly: What had she been given to eat? How much
exercise had she gotten? Had any of the girls she's shared the cramped space with been
ill?
Fearing Emmarene may have been molested, she also wanted to know: Had
anyone touched her?
Emmarene did her best to assure her that no one had. She went back to school the
next day, two weeks behind her classmates. When she saw girls she'd been with in the
stockade in the hallways or around town, she wondered how they'd gotten out. No one
said much, and she didn't ask.
She began attending mass meetings again, but with three SNCC field workers and
a member of the Congress ofRacial Equality in jail, the Americus movement had lost
much of its momentwn.
Emmarene graduated from Americus High in 1967 after four brutal years at the
hands of white classmates who bucked school integration at every turn. Alternately
taunting her and shunning her, the students seemed to resent the fact that she consistently
scored at the top of the class. She couldn't wait to leave town for Fort Valley State
University, a historically black university about 45 miles north.
She earned a degree in elementary education and moved to Erie, Pa., in 1971 to
begin a teaching career. She came back to Americus and married John Streeter in 1975.
The couple had two children, LaKeeta and Raymond.
In retrospect, Streeter says, what most disturbs her about her ordeal in the summer
of 1963 was that it went unchallenged and was immediately dismissed.
"Nobody thought enough to say to us, 'Do you all need some counseling?'"
Streeter is now a counselor herself. She works at Crossroads Academy, a school
for middle and high school students with behavior and attendance problems. It concerns
her that the young people she works with have "no concept" of what the children of her
generation endured.
"I'd like them to know there was a struggle and that somebody had to do
something," Streeter said. "They need to realize someone had to struggle to give them
these rights."
She tries to share the story of the civil rights movement with them. But even now,
she keeps her own story mostly to herself. She's been to Leesburg but has always steered
clear ofthe stockade, which still stands.
The tears she wouldn't let herself shed for years come easily now.
"That summer was stolen from us," she says. "I think what happened is we grew
up. We just grew up and we didn't realize how we had grown up.
"After that summer, I never went back to doing stuff like playing with paper dolls.
I never went back to it."
"' * "'
A black man is severely beaten in, his front yard by police, hauled senseless into
court, and dies from a crushed skull five days later.
A black woman is locked up in jail when she goes to visit her son there.
Two-dozen blacks, many of them teachers, attempt to register to vote; all ''fail" a
literacy test and are turned away.
The Washington Post described the situation in Southwest Georgia in the summer
of 1958 as "an atmosphere offtar ... an atmosphere ofindignation ... an atmosphere of
despair." Terrell County Sherif!Zeke Matthews acknowledged there was unrest among
Negroes, but claimed the beatings and deaths were a consequence of resisting arrest.
The unrest was a direct result, Matthews said, oftelevision news broadcasts
originating "up North" that got citizens all riled up about integration and civil rights.
It was that, and "communists. "
"You know, Cap 'n, " Matthews told reporters, "there 's nothing like fear to keep
niggers in line. I'm talking about 'outlaw' niggers. We always tell them there are four
roads leading out ofDawson in all directions, and they are free to go any time they don 't
like it here. ''
Four years later, Matthews glared disapprovingly at 38 Negroes and two whites
gathered for a voter registration rally at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Sasser.
"We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred
years, "Matthews told reporters from the New York Times. "/tell you, we're a little fed
up with this (voter) registration business."
He and his deputies took turns harassing the meeting participants. He warned
them of the things "disturbed white citizens" might do if the meetings continued.
Meanwhile, two workers from the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee opened the meeting with a hymn, "Pass Me Not, Oh Gentle Savior. "
Charles Sherrod, a SNCC field secretary who had taken part in sit-in
demonstrations in 1960 against lunch-counter segregation in his native Petersburg, Va.,
offered a prayer.
"Oh, Lord God, we 've been abused so long; we've been down so long; oh, Lord,
all we want is for our white brothers to understand that in Thy sight we are all equal.
We 're praying for the courage to withstand the brutality ofour brethren. "
The sheriffbroke in, informing the group that it would not be "to your interest" to
continue the meeting. He then declared a five-month prohibition on voter registration.
Turning to reporters, he said: "Some ofthese niggers down here would just as soon vote
for Castro and Khrushchev. "
As the participants filed out ofthe church, a deputy was overheard telling one of
them, "We're going to get some ofyou." A month later, Mount Olive and two other
churches that hosted movement meetings were burned to the ground.
Such was the climate when Sherrod arrived in Southwest Georgia, intent on
transforming the region through community organizing. While his focus was voter
registration, he knew from the start that his ultimate goal would be to wage and win "a
psychological battle for the minds of the enslaved."
By 1965, SNCC would have staff workers stationed in the 23 counties
surrounding the cities ofAmericus and Albany, which formed the second and third
congressional districts. SNCC volunteer John Perdew, a white National Merit Scholar
who had left Harvard University to come to Georgia, had been one ofthefirst. After
spending two years there- during which time he· and three other young civil rights
workers were arrested and charged with attempt to incite insurrection, a crime
punishable by the death penalty- he would describe southwest Georgia as a "tragic
area, the stepchild ofthe New South. "
"I thought they were going to kill us. "
- Sandra Russell Mansfield, 58
Sandra Russell's heart beat to the rhythm of the civil rights movement long before
the day she saw two young men, one white and one black, trudging up the dusty red-dirt
road toward the house she shared with her mother and grandmother in Americus, Ga.
Every night for months, she'd been sitting in front of the family's black-and-white
television set watching scenes of violence play out on the 6 o'clock news. She'd seen
young people beaten and dragged by police officers, chased by police attack dogs, and
knocked off their feet by high-pressure water jets from fire hoses- simply for believing
that black people should have the same rights as white people.
Horrified, she wondered what she could do to help.
And so she listened politely to wliat the two men from Atlanta had to say on that
bright spring afternoon in 1963. Then she went in the house and asked her mother if she
could accompany them as they went up and down N Jackson Street proclaiming that all
Americans had rights, regardless of their skin color.
Catherine Russell warned her daughter that the men might not want an 11-yearold girl tagging after them. But Sandra was a strong-willed child. After offering her
assistance, she got the men to convince her mother that it would be a good idea for her to
get involved.
She immediately immersed herself in the campaign led by field workers from the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to increase black voter registration. She
picketed the white-owned stores in downtown Americus that refused to serve her and her
family because they were black. And she attended mass meetings, where she learned how
to peacefully resist arrest and other movement strategies.
The field workers took Sandra under their wing, treating her as they would a little
sister- even though none of them was much older than she. Bob Mants, who at 16 had
become the youngest member of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights for the
Atlanta student movement, warned her to lay low when arrests were likely. Sam Mahone,
who had started running voter registration drives when he was a junior at Americus High,
told her to stay home when he sensed the possibility of police confrontation.
As she moved into their circle, she lost some childhood friends. Many black
adults in Americus who worked for white business owners knew they could lose their
jobs if word got back to their employers that either they or their children were involved in
the protests. Quite a few parents forbade their children from playing with Sandra because
they feared she would recruit them as foot soldiers for the movement.
Sandra, now Sandra Russell Mansfield, considered it a small price to pay.
"Being involved with the civil rights movement was just a tugging on my heart,"
recalls Mansfield, 58. "It was my mission. It was the most important thing."
She still got up every morning and went to Staley Middle School, where she was a
fifth grader. But in the afternoons, she ran home in anticipation of the 6 o'clock news.
She tracked Martin Luther King Jr.'s activities in the Americus Times-Recorder and
adopted him as her hero.
"When I heard Dr. King's voice," Mansfield said,. "it was just like the Lord
speaking to me."
On a hot Saturday morning in July, Sandra arrived at Friendship Baptist Church
prepared to march up N Lee Street to protest the segregation of the Martin Theater.
Similar marches had been going on for months, gathering momentum after school let out
as hundreds of teens and preteens joined in. On this particular day, movement leaders
expected as many as 1,000 participants.
Word of the protest had reached Americus Police Chief Ross Chambliss.
Determined to crush the uprising, his "blue angels" were waiting for the marchers as they
crested the hill ofN Lee, armed with billy clubs and electric cattle prods.
Sandra was near the front of the protest line with dozens of other children. When
the officers surrounded them, she knelt in the street and bowed her head in prayer, as the
SNCC field workers had instructed. She prepared to be bludgeoned.
The expected blow didn't come. Instead, an officer grabbed her arm and plucked
her from the line. She let her body go limp, the way she'd seen the prot~sters do on TV.
The officer scooped her up and loaded her into a police wagon.
Just before the door slammed shut, she looked around. People were screaming.
'
They were running and falling on the ground. Some were bleeding. She started to panic,
realizing there was no one to help her.
The protesters, most of them children, were taken to an office building in
downtown Americus that had been set up to handle the overflow from the jail. Boys were
separated from girls and locked in different rooms. No one told them how long they
would be there. No one asked their names.
Prisoners continued to arrive all afternoon and into the evening until they couldn't
move without bumping into each other. Their excited chatter, along with police orders for
silence, made sleep impossible. Before morning, the younger boys and girls, including
Sandra, were loaded back into the police wagons.
This time, the trucks headed south to "Terrible" Terrell County, which had
attracted national attention for racial violence. The children were unloaded outside the
county jail and marched inside.
"When we got to Dawson, they put us four or five girls in one cell," Mansfield
recalls. "Some of us had to sleep with our backs against the concrete wall. I was one of
the ones who had to sleep that way."
The guards once again had separated the boys from the girls, locking them into
cells at different ends of the building. Using the traditional call-and-response pattern
they'd learned in the mass meetings, they began singing freedom songs back and forth to
each other. They got so loud that the guards threatened to put them in "the hole."
They only sang louder, until the guards came for them and forced them into a
small room with a steel door, also known as a sweatbox. Their body heat raised the
temperature by at least 10 degrees.
"We had to get down on the floor in order to breathe," Mansfield said.
She's uncertain how long the group was held in the Dawson jail; it could have
been weeks or days. What she remembers is how much she missed the warmth and
comfort of her bed, how much she craved the presence of her mother and grandmother.
She knew her family would be worried about her. She knew they would think she had
been killed.
Police officers eventually came "in the black dark" for about 30 girls. None was
older than 16. Sandra was the youngest.
"We had to march downstairs and get into a van with no windows, just the doors
on the back," Mansfield said. "You couldn't see anything, but you could tell when you
were riding over railroad tracks."
That was how she and the others knew they weren't going home; there were no
railroad tracks between Dawson and Americus.
When the doors opened, Sandra realized she was in a clearing in the woods. A
gray~haired
white man with a shotgun ordered them into a cinderblock building with bars
on the windows. A bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling shone down on a filthy toilet
and a dripping shower. A pile of mildewed mattresses and a few old Army blankets were
heaped in a corner.
The girls were hungry in the morning but no one offered them food. To slake their
thirst, they took turns standing under the dripping shower, cupping their hands to capture
mouthfuls of warm water. A man Sandra recognized as Mr. Story, the dogcatcher from
Americus, eventually arrived with several cardboard boxes of hamburgers. Each girl
received four.
"They were brown on the outside but more than rare on the inside," Mansfield
said. "I remember getting those hamburgers early each morning and they had to last us all
day. I remember when we didn't have those, we got two egg salad sandwiches (that were)
runny and caked with mayo."
The undercooked meat and the rancid mayonnaise made many of the girls sick.
They began throwing up. They suffered from diarrhea. Soon, the toilet was overflowing,
and the their guard, Mr. Countryman, made no attempt to fix it. The girls had no choice
but to squat over the shower drain to relieve themselves. They tore pieces off the
cardboard containers the hamburgers came in to wipe themselves.
There was no place for them to bathe.
"I missed my mama and my grandmother," Mansfield said. "I missed hornecooked meals and I missed going to church. But then we still had church in a way; we did
a lot of praying."
They also sang, alternating freedom songs with top 40 hits. They put on little
skits, just to distract themselves from their harsh surroundings. But Sandra couldn't help
coming back to one thought.
"It was as if they took us out there to get rid of us," Mansfield said. "I thought
they were going to kill us."
At night, as she lay sleepless in the dark on a filthy mattress, Sandra would
visualize being at home. She would think of what she would be doing if she were in her
front yard at that moment. Or, she would imagine what it would be like the day after her
release - what she would do, how it would feel to have her mother and grandmother hold
her.
For some reason, perhaps because she was the youngest girl, Mr. Countryman
paid special attention to Sandra.
"I remember him taking me out of the cell," Mansfield said. "He would fix me a
banana sandwich. When I got back in (the cell), the girls would ask me if he'd tampered
with me. He didn' t try anything like that. He was only asking me about different people's
parents."
Not long after Mr. Countryman questioned Sandra for the first time, boxes of food
and clothing began arriving at the stockade. The girls learned that Mr. Countryman had
passed the information Sandra gave him about the families on to the dogcatcher, who had
gone back to Americus to alert the girls' parents of their whereabouts. Some parents had
met Mr. Story on the road to Leesburg to drop off supplies for their children.
Included in the care packages were sanitary napkins for the girls who had begun
having their menstrual cycles. Up until then, the girls had been using strips of material
tom from their clothes.
Two terrifying events occurred during the weeks the girls were in the stockade.
One day, a man sent to guard the girls tossed a rattlesnake through one of the
windows. The girls screamed. Mr. Countryman came to investigate but didn't believe
them when they said there was a snake in the cell. When he realized they were telling the
truth, he opened the door and they ran hollering into the woods.
For one brief moment, they thought they could keep running. Two warning blasts
from Mr. Countryman's shotgun stopped them in their tracks. They returned to the
stockade to see the guard carrying the snake outside on his shoulder.
"I remember Mr. Countryman counting the rattles on his tail," Mansfield said.
And then one night, a truckload of teenage boys roared up to the stockade. Sandra
heard them call out to Mr. Countryman that they wanted to be let inside "to have some
fun with the girls." She saw beer bottles in their hands.
Mr. Countryman got his gun and told them to leave.
When the girls had been in the stockade more than a month, they heard another
car pull up outside. Sandra thought it was the boys trying once again to get in. But when
she looked outside, she saw a black man she recognized from the mass meetings getting
out of the driver's seat. A young white man she'd never seen before got out of the boot of
the car carrying a camera.
"The white man was making peace signs through the window," Mansfield said.
"We asked him if he was with the civil rights movement and he said yes, he was. He said
he wanted to take our picture, but some of us would have to distract the guard."
While a couple of the girls went to one end ofthe cell and called for Mr.
Countryman, the rest posed for the young man as he snapped photos from outside the
window. Two of the girls got down on the floor to show him how they slept; one flashed
a smile from behind the cell bars.
When he asked the girls to line up for a group shot, Sandra pushed to the front of
the line. Correctly anticipating that the pictures would be released to the newspapers, she
wanted her mother and grandmother to know she was all right.
The photographer told the girls they were beautiful, and then he was gone.
Mansfield learned later that movement leaders had dispatched Danny Lyon, a 21year-old photographer and civil rights activist, after they heard the girls were being held
in the stockade. The details of what happened next are still unclear to her; all she knows
is that a day or two after Lyon appeared, they were headed home.
Back at the courthouse in Americus, Sandra flew into her mother's arms. She said
nothing when the judge forbade her to resume marching and picketing. She had every
intention of getting back to the protests.
She returned to Staley Middle School, a sixth-grader that year. Her classmates
knew she'd been in "some mess," but no one questioned her about it. Instead, they turned
to each other whenever she was in hearing range and asked:
"What kind of bird don't fly?"
"A jail bird!" they'd screech at each other, laughing.
She tried to fit in but found it very difficult.
"I wanted to be at school," Mansfield said. "But after I was released from jail, it
was like I had outgrown the children I grew up with."
Despite her desire to rejoin the movement, much of the momentum was gone by
the fall of 1963. The field workers who had befriended Sandra had been arrested. They
would remain injail until November, charged with attempting to incite insurrection.
When Sandra ran into the girls with whom she'd been imprisoned, they never
talked about the stockade.
"We knew we had a bond," Mansfield said, "but we never discussed it. It just
never came up."
Several years later, movement leaders asked her to aid in the integration of
Americus High School. She tried to do as she was asked, but the verbal and physical
abuse from white students was too much to bear and she dropped out.
She gave birth to a daughter when she was 17, lived in Atlanta for six years, and
came back to Americus. She married and had two more daughters and a son. Her son died
in 1985 at age 12 because he wasn't able to get a liver transplant.
She never lost her desire to help others, and for years worked with the
handicapped. She had a job in an alcohol abuse treatment center until 2003, but lost it
because her boss said she wasn't working quickly enough.
She now works nights cleaning a Laundromat and lives by herself in a mobile
home on the outskirts of town. She drives up N Lee Street nearly everyday. Occasionally,
she drives out to Leesburg to visit the stockade. She's healed to the point where she no
longer cries when she drives through the gates.
She stays in touch with movement veterans. She appears with them on the
anniversaries of key moments in the civil rights era. When someone asks, she shares her
story. But her words are tentative, and at times, only whispered.
That's because until recently, she'd only told the story to her husband and her
children. People want to know about Martin Luther King Jr. and other luminaries of the
civil rights movement, Mansfield says, but no one seems interested in what happened to a
group of young girls in rural Southwest Georgia nearly 50 years ago.
Still, she 's never regretted her decision to follow the two young SNCC workers
down the dusty red-dirt road.
" When something like that comes into your life, it's a calling," Mansfield said.
"It's something God wants you to do. It was something I had to do."
ill
**
Historians differ on whether civil rights workers accomplished their goal of
winning "a psychological battle for the minds ofthe enslaved" in Lee and Terrell
counties. Most agree, however, that SNCC field workers achieved major breakthroughs
in Sumter County, which had not been an initial target area.
A large reason for SNCC 's success there can be attributed to the vibrant
community of local activists already at work in Americus when field workers arrived in
1962. The Rev. R.L. Freeman and the Rev. J.R. Campbell ignited passion in the hearts of
their black congregants. John and Mabel "Mom" Barnum opened their home - and the
basement of their funeral parlor - to SNCC workers when they needed a place to live or
to host meetings. Koinonia Farm, already steeped in the traditions ofnonviolence and
social justice, provided a training center for movement volunteers.
But it was the fervor of teens and preteens that elevated the movement to a higher
level. Americus High School students Sam Mahone and Collins Maghee started a
monthly newsletter, the Voice of Americus, which brought news ofthe national civil
rights movement to local youth. Young people eagerly accompanied staffworkers on
voter registration drives, serving as their guides and calling cards. They also provided
much of the manpower needed to fuel marches and boycotts.
Their dedication only escalated the pace ofracial brutality, which was perhaps as
fierce in Americus as in any town surrounding it. In the summer of1963, James Williams,
a 28-year-old black man, suffered a broken leg and a head bashing at the hands ofwhite
police officers. Mayor T. Griffen Walker claimed that Williams was drunk. "We don't
know if he broke his own leg or not, " Walker told a Chicago Defender reporter.
The "Americus Four " - Donald Harris, 24, ofNew York; John Perdew, 21, of
Denver; Ralph Allen, 22, ofMelrose, Mass.; and Zev Aeloney, 25, ofMinneapolis, Minn.,
remained in jail in Americus for "attempting to incite insurrection. " They were denied
bail because their alleged crime - trying to start a revolt against the government- was
an offense punishable by death. And as a new school year began in September, more than
30 young girls, none older than 16, remained imprisoned in the Leesburg stockade 26
miles south oftown.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, a Federal Bureau ofInvestigation inquiry
concluded that there was no police brutality in Americus. SNCC chairman John Lewis,
who had challenged segregation at interstate bus terminals as a Freedom Rider, blasted
the administration.
"They don 't want anything to come out ofAmericus, " Lewis said "Although
people are being beaten and arrested, President Kennedy wants to say, 'We're neutral.
Look, we are for white people, too. ' They're trying to hold the state ofGeorgia for the
next election. "
Convinced he had taken the steam out ofthe Americus movement, Sumter County
Sheriff Fred B. Chappell- whom Martin Luther King Jr. had called "the meanest man in
the world" after a visit to Americus in 1961 - proclaimed in the fall of 1963 that there
would be no more trouble.
"I don't think Americus is going to take any integration, " Chappell said.
John Barnum, the funeral director, countered: "We aren't going to quit. "
"It was almost like you were in a war zone. "
- Carol Barner Seay, 59
Even as a child, Carol Barner knew the rules.
Never look a white man or woman in the eye. Address white children, even those
the same age as you, as "Sir" or "Miss." If a white person enters a store while you're
being waited on, step aside.
Her mother had told her what could happen to Negroes who broke the rules in
Americus, Ga., in the early 1960s. Their homes could be burned down. They could be
beaten. They could even be hung from a tree and left to rot in the hot Georgia sun.
Carol did as she was told because she was a good girl. But the rules didn't make
sense to her. If all people were God's children, as the preacher at Big Bethel Baptist
Church told the congregation on Sunday mornings, why was it okay for white people to
treat black people so badly?
She was 12 years old in February 1963 when the young civil rights workers who
had been challenging white supremacy in Albany, Ga., about 40 miles south, turned their
attention to Americus. They first appeared at local churches and befriended high school
students at Weston's Soda Shop. Before long, they were going door to door in the town's
black neighborhoods, talking about racial oppression.
The Barners, like everyone on Winn Street, lived in a shotgun house - a narrow,
one-story structure in which all the rooms were laid out one behind the other,
perpendicular to the street. An overhanging roof along the front created a porch where
families congregated in the evenings.
Carol was on her porch one evening when the first wave of volunteers carne
through. She listened to what they had to say, something about how black people weren't
being treated like human beings; how they were treated worse than dogs. The volunteers
invited her to come to a mass meeting the next night at Allen Chapel, where they
promised to tell her what she could do to start getting her rights.
She liked what she heard, but she was suspicious. For one thing, these men and
women were white. For another, they were young. On top of that, they had northern
accents.
She followed them to the next house to make sure they weren't telling her
neighbors something different. Hearing the same message, she realized that this group of
young people who had only just arrived in town seemed to understand exactly what black
people in Americus were going through. She decided they might have something to teach
her.
Four decades later, Carol Barner Seay, 59, remembers what she heard at her first
mass meeting.
"We were told you could be spit on, you could be hit, you could be kicked," Seay
said. "The water hose could take the skin off of you. You could go to jail, you could be
killed."
As much as she wanted to work for change, she didn't want any of those things to
happen to her. She was relieved when the field workers said anyone who felt uneasy
could leave the protest line at any time, and that no one who did would be considered a
coward.
Carol stepped out of the line several times in the beginning. When she saw police
officers approaching, she would say to herself, "Not today, I'm not going to get locked
up," and she would go home. But one afternoon, she knelt in the street as the officers
closed in, peacefully resisting arrest as the field workers had instructed. When she was
ordered into a police wagon, she refused to go. Along with the other protesters, she
walked a half-mile to the jail and entered voluntarily.
Dozens of other teens and preteens were locked up with her, and rather than
feeling afraid, she felt exhilarated. Her mother was allowed to bring her food and orange
Kool-Aid in a Mason jar. Within hours, she was released.
"I wasn't mistreated," Seay said. "I was having fun."
Her second arrest would be different.
One Saturday morning in July, shortly after her 13th birthday, she set out for Allen
Chapel. The plan that day was for the marchers to move down N Lee Street toward the
Sumter County courthouse, where they would protest the segregation of the Martin
Theater. The protest had a special appeal for Carol; she rebelled every time she was
forced to use the theater's rear entrance and trudge up to the balcony because she had
paid just as much as a white child to see the movie.
More than 300 activists had shown up for this march. In the mix were local
movement leaders and many children who were standing in for parents who couldn't get
involved in the protest for fear of losing their jobs. Hundreds of spectators lined both
sides of the street to cheer the marchers on. Carol's younger brother Dexter waved to her
from the sidelines.
Movement leaders had expected an orderly protest that would wrap up before
dark. But waiting for the marchers at the crest of the hill in the Wheatley Plaza parking
lot was what Seay remembers as "a welcoming committee."
"They had helmet hats on their heads and billy clubs in their hands," she said. "It
was almost like you were in a war zone."
Americus Police Chief Ross Chambliss and his officers closed in on the protesters
and started grabbing them, forcing them into police wagons that had been waiting with
their engines revving.
"Usually when you were in a march, you were given a chance to disperse, to go
your own way," Seay said. "We never were told that. They never said 'Disperse.' "
She remembers being pulled up onto a police wagon and hearing a scream as the
person behind her was shocked with an electric cattle prod. The door slammed shut and
the protesters were taken downtown to the police station.
She recalls being imprisoned for several days. Other protesters were brought in
and thrown into cells, "packed like sardines in a can." They were never officially
charged, but they were fed and allowed to take showers.
Loaded once again into police wagons, Seay and the others were transported to
Dawson, 27 miles southwest of Americus. She'd heard about Dawson, in "terrible"
Terrell County. Ralph Allen, one of the young black civil rights workers from the North,
had been knocked down by a white man, beaten, and threatened with death in Dawson
the previous year. Another volunteer, Carolyn Daniels, had reported that her home had
been shot into one night with what appeared to be a machine gun.
Now, Carol was afraid.
The young prisoners had been separated from the older protesters. She shared her
cell with a dozen girls about her age, some younger. She thought of her mother and
wondered if she knew where she was.
To keep track ofthe days, the girls marked X's on the wall. That's how Seay
knows they were there nearly three weeks.
"We sang and we prayed; we prayed and we sang," Seay recalls. "We were told to
be quiet. They said, 'Shut up, niggers, be quiet!' The more they told us that, the louder
we got."
When the guards came that evening to put them in the sweatbox, a cramped room
with a heavy steel door and no windows, the girls kicked and scratched.
"We thought we could hold on to each girl as they tried to take her," Seay said.
"But how much fight is in young girls?"
The next night was even more terrifying. The guards came for about 30 of the
girls, including Carol, and forced them into a police wagon. The guards refused to tell
them where they were going. Silently, Carol prayed to be returned to Americus.
Instead of traveling north, the truck headed east to Leesburg, to an old stockade
that had been abandoned for years. The driver pushed the girls out into a clearing in the
woods and ordered them inside the ugly, one-story cinderblock building.
The first thing Carol noticed was the smell: mildew mixed with urine.
She looked around the room, which was about the size of her classroom back at
A.S. Staley Junior High School, and saw there was no place to sit or to lie down. She
noticed a stopped-up toilet in one comer and a showerhead mounted in the ceiling. Water
dripped into a drain in the concrete floor. There were bars on the windows.
Again, she thought of her mother. Helen Barner had been concerned when Carol
was arrested the first time. She had tried to discourage her from further involvement in
the protests, but Carol had refused to listen. Now, Carol wondered if she would ever see
her mother again.
She had no time to feel sorry for herself. As one of the older girls, at least by a
year or two, it became her responsibility to comfort the others. Throughout that long first
night, she allowed the girls who were more terrified than she was to rest their heads on
her shoulder. She held them when they cried. She encouraged them to try to get some
sleep, as difficult as that was on a hard floor with only a stained Army blanket for cover.
In the morning, the heat was stifling. The mosquitoes were unrelenting. The girls
were hungry and thirsty, but no one brought them food or water. They took turns standing
under the dripping showerhead, cupping their hands to catch mouthfuls of warm water.
It was clear that they would be unable to bathe or to brush their teeth.
Their guard, who introduced himself as Mr. Countryman, had stationed himself in
a small office in the front of the building. Gray-haired and heavyset, he spoke kindly to
the girls but kept a shotgun by his side. He eventually brought them food: undercooked
hamburgers that had been delivered by a man Carol recognized as Mr. Story, the local
dogcatcher. They also were given three tin cups of water to share among themselves.
A few days into their captivity, Carol began to worry about the youngest girl,
Sandra. Mr. Countryman had begun taking her into his office and closing the door. The
girls, including Carol, questioned Sandra closely, but all she would say was that he had
asked questions about their families - their mothers' and fathers' names and which streets
they lived on.
Several days later, Carol found out why he had asked. Using Mr. Story as a
messenger, Mr. Countryman had leaked word of the girls' whereabouts back to their
parents. Bags of groceries and clothes began arriving at the stockade. And then one
morning, Carol looked out the window to see her mother standing in the clearing with
several other parents.
Helen Barner was crying. She told Carol she was trying to put the money together
to get her out of the stockade.
"I didn't pay to get in here," Carol told her. "Why would you pay to get me out?"
Even at 13, she understood that her mother would have to borrow the money from
her employer, who owned a finance company. She knew it would take a long time for her
mother to pay the money back - along with the interest she would be charged - from the
small paycheck she earned as a maid. Carol also knew that many of the girls' parents
didn't have the means to get their children out. As much as she wanted to go home, she
didn't think it was right for her to leave until all the girls could be freed.
But many of the girls did get out. Three weeks after they arrived at the stockade,
only 15 remained. Most of the ones who were left had become ill from eating the
undercooked hamburgers, which were raw in the middle and burned around the edges.
They got diarrhea. Because the toilet was broken, they were forced to defecate on
a pile of mildewed mattresses that had been stashed in a comer of the cell. They tried to
breathe through their mouths to avoid the smell.
To amuse themselves, they had begun plotting escapes. They dreamed for hours
of sneaking up behind Mr. Countryman and stealing his keys, or of knocking him over
the head and possibly killing him. But even if they could manage to slip out of the cell, in
which direction would they go? They had no idea where they were.
"We knew that if we ran, we might have been shot and killed," Seay said. "We
may have been molested, or maybe wild animals would have gotten us.'.'
Still, one afternoon when a truckload of young white boys pulled up to the
stockade demanding to be let in, the girls wondered if it might not have been better to risk
those dangers.
"They were wearing straw hats and they had beer bottles in their hands, so we
knew they had been drinking," Seay said. "They told Mr. Countryman, ' We just want to
have a little fun. Let us in there to have some fun with those girls.' "
Mr. Countryman turned them away, a decision Seay attributes to the grace of
God.
"Had Mr. Countryman allowed them to come in, and had we lived, we wouldn't
have been any good, because to have·fun with a 'nigger girl' means to have sex," Seay
said. "Not consensual sex, but rape."
After so much drama, the girls' release was almost anticlimactic.
"Nobody came and said they were letting us out," Seay said. "It just happened.
One day a guy came and took some pictures. Next thing I knew, the paddy wagon was
coming to pick us up and we were told we were going back to Americus."
The photographer was Danny Lyon, a 21-year-old civil rights worker sent from
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after word reached the Atlanta
headquarters that some young girls from Americus were in trouble. A young black
movement volunteer from Americus drove Lyon's Volkswagen onto the stockade