The Girls Of The Leesburg Stockade

An Almost, But Not Quite, Forgotten Piece of Civil Rights History

Workers reveal the long hidden inscription on the front of the Lee County Stockade on Leslie Highway in Leesburg, Ga,, right next to the public schools bus barn. The building jailed 15 pre-teen girls for 45 days in the 1960s. Grant Blankenship/Georgia Public Broadcasting.

by Bradley George and Grant Blankenship

Many of the struggles of the Civil Rights era are well known.

Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat, the March on Washington, Bloody Sunday in Selma, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Others remain hidden, or only known to a few. In 1963, more than a dozen African American girls, aged 13–15, were held in a stockade for two months. Their crime: demonstrating for integration in Americus, Georgia.

Clockwise from top left, Shirley Reese, Carol Barner-Seay, Diane Dorsey-Bowens and Emmarene Kaigler-Streeter were among the 15 girls who in 1963 were jailed, some as long as 45 days, in the one room Leesburg Stockade for their part in Civil Rights protests. Grant Blankenship/Georgia Public Broadcasting

In this short documentary from Georgia Public Broadcasting, meet some of the women who were jailed as children and learn how the work of the then young documentary photographer Danny Lyon led to their freedom.