Stolen Girls of the Lee County Stockade- 1963 in Georgia. I learned about this just this morning

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Sources: Georgia Historical Society; Smithsonian NMAAHC; BlackPast.org

the summer of 1963, a group of Black girls in Georgia vanished — some as young as twelve — and their own parents had no idea where they had been taken. Their “crime”? Trying to buy movie tickets at the whites-only entrance of a theater in Americus. ✊🏾

After their arrest, police drove the girls more than twenty miles away to an old Civil War-era stockade in Leesburg and held them for weeks with no charges, no trial, and no word to their families. They survived in a single filthy cell with a broken toilet, almost no food, and guards who once threw a snake into the room. Because their loved ones had no clue where they were, history remembers them as the Stolen Girls. It was only when SNCC photographer Danny Lyon found them and published photos through the barred window — pictures that ran in Jet and Black newspapers nationwide — that the country saw the truth and the girls were finally freed. 🙏🏾

Had you ever heard of the Stolen Girls before today? Drop a comment and say their name — and follow the page so we can keep uncovering the hidden Black history living in all 159 of Georgia’s counties.


Wiki page-https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Girls_of_the_Lee_County_Stockade

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/hidden-herstory-leesburg-stockade-girls

Hidden Herstory: The Leesburg Stockade Girls

snip-"I never fully realized the monumental role that massive numbers of children played in civil rights protests. Law enforcement arrested and jailed children by the thousands for days, and sometimes months, and their involvement helped to enable one of the greatest legal and social assaults on racism in the 20th century—the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Leesburg Stockade Girls are an incredible example of these courageous, young freedom fighters. "snip-"On August 28, 1963, as Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC, these children sat in their cell bolstering their courage with freedom songs in solidarity with the thousands of marchers listening to Dr. King’s indelible speech on the National Mall. Soon after the March on Washington, during the same week of the bombing of the five little girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, law enforcement released the Leesburg Stockade Girls and returned them to their families.

Their story was part of the broader Civil Rights effort that engaged children in a variety of nonviolent, direct actions. In Alabama, for example, thousands of youth participated in the 1963 Children’s Crusade, a controversial liberation tactic initiated by James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After careful deliberation about the merit of involving children in street protests and allowing them to be jailed, Dr. King decided that their participation would revive the waning desegregation campaign and would appeal to the moral conscience of the nation."


Much more there



You may ask, “Who were the Leesburg Stockade Girls?” In July of 1963 in Americus, Georgia, fifteen girls were jailed for challenging segregation laws. Ages 12 to 15, these girls had marched from Friendship Baptist Church to the Martin Theater on Forsyth Street. Instead of forming a line to enter from the back alley as was customary, the marchers attempted to purchase tickets at the front entrance. Law enforcement soon arrived and viciously attacked and arrested the girls. Never formally charged, they were jailed in squalid conditions for forty-five days in the Leesburg Stockade, a Civil War era structure situated in the back woods of Leesburg, Georgia. Only twenty miles away, parents had no knowledge of where authorities were holding their children. Nor were parents aware of their inhumane treatment.