“If you was living segregation, born in segregation, slept segregation, ate segregated, went to church segregated, freedom meant everything to you,” she said. Seay remembers him signaling to the girls with the peace sign and a single word: Freedom. Shirley Reese holds onto the bars of the stockade window in Leesburg, Georgia, in 1963. So, that’s why I wanted to make sure that he got me.” “I knew if he was there taking pictures and they were going to go somewhere. “I said, ‘Take my picture, right here!’” she recalled. “(Lyon) come around the building, I said, ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’” Reese recalled. Danny Lyon was a 21-year-old photographer with the SNCC. Reese and Seay remember the day, nearly a month into their imprisonment, that a White photographer showed up. And then we would pray individually, and cry individually. “We started praying together,” Reese said. We didn’t think we would ever get out, Reese said. I missed my siblings … my mother’s good food,” Seay said. They used the hamburger wrapping for toilet paper, she said. Reese said they were fed hamburgers that were delivered by a stranger daily. “Leesburg was known as Lynchburg … They lynched Black people on the trees,” she said.įor almost 60 days, the girls were unable to bathe, forced to remain in the clothes they were wearing when they were arrested. If the girls had been told their whereabouts, Seay said, it likely would have evoked even more fear. “We had no idea where we were,” she said. Seay said she was briefly moved to a jail in nearby Dawson, Georgia, before eventually being taken to the Leesburg Stockade. “Look at me … somebody owe me an explanation?! They going to give me an explanation?!” When asked if the officers ever explained why she was detained, Seay gestured to her brown skin as if that were reason enough to jail a child. She told CNN she remembers demanding an explanation from officers who led her away. A few days before Reese was taken into custody, Seay, then 13, was also arrested during a march in Americus. CNNīut things changed during the summer of 1963. Carol Barner Seay was arrested at 13 and held in the Leesburg stockade for nearly two months.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |