EDITORIAL: Women who were ‘Leesburg Stockade Girls’ deserve presidential recognition

An online petition supporting the awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a group of women who, as young teens, were imprisoned in 1963 for participating in a peaceful protest during the Civil Rights Movement has picked up quite a bit of support. This week, the petition eclipsed 25,000 signatures.

The recognition of the group known as the “1963 Leesburg Stockade Girls” is long overdue.

For decades, the story of the mistreatment these women endured more than a half-century ago was not widely known. No doubt, there are numerous brave and heroic acts from the period that many of us still are unaware of, stories that should be told.

Such was the case with the ordeal of these 15 girls who were ages 12-15 when they were locked up for two months, the same sweltering time of the year that we’re enduring now. From sometime in July until September, they were confined in a concrete stockade in Lee County, one with no working toilet and little ventilation. Food and water also were in short supply and the food often undercooked and even served raw. These children had no protection from brutal heat or against pests such as mosquitoes and cockroaches, much less a rattlesnake that got into the stockade one day. They had no bedding, no running water, no cleaning or hygiene products, no working shower.

The description of the deplorable conditions leads one to question how human beings could treat other human beings in such a harsh, callous way.

Their “crime”? They were in a group of 200 black Americans in Americus who marched peacefully from Friendship Baptist Church to the local movie theater to buy movie tickets at the theater’s entrance that was reserved for whites only.

For that, they were taken without their parents’ knowledge, denied basic American rights and locked away in squalid conditions. There is no excuse for the way every level of government failed them, nor for the actions of those who so grossly mistreated them, and the inactions of those who knew and didn’t intervene.

Earlier this year, two of the nine surviving members of that group, Carol Barner-Seay, who was 12 at the time of the lockup, and Shirley Green-Reese, who was 14 during the protest, decided to tell their story and urged others to as well.

“We want to let people know, after 53 years,” Barner-Seay said in an interview with The Albany Herald in February, because they wanted to make sure the “story doesn’t die again.”

She and Green-Reese, now an Americus City Council member and board president of the Americus-Sumter County Boys & Girls Clubs, said the conditions weren’t fit for animals, with Green-Reese recalling that the youngsters only had the clothes on their backs. Their families had no idea where they were for a week after they were taken away.

“It was,” Green-Reese said, “heartbreaking, emotional and unbelievable. It was not fit for anyone to live in.”

The inhumanity that they suffered can’t be undone, but these brave women can be recognized for overcoming the injustice they endured. Earlier this year, U.S. Reps. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany; John Lewis, D-Atlanta, and Hank Johnson, D-Atlanta, sent a letter to President Obama nominating them for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Last month, Brittany Dawson, CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs in Americus, set up the change.org petition urging the president to make the awards.

We join in asking the president to grant each of these brave women the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We cannot think of anyone — or any group — more deserving of this recognition and honor.