LEE COUNTY, Ga. (WALB) — One of the surviving Leesburg Stockade Girls returned to the site where she was jailed as a teenager, saying the story still has not received the recognition it deserves.

Dr. Shirley Reese returned to the site where she and 13 other girls were held for nearly two months after challenging segregation in Americus. Reese said too many people know the landmark moments of the Civil Rights Movement but not the story of the Leesburg Stockade Girls.

“I guess it’s making me sick now, being here and looking at it,” Reese said. “I mean, every time I talk about this, I rehash it all over again.”

Conditions inside the stockade

Reese described the living conditions as squalid. The girls were served only four hamburgers or egg sandwiches a day with no drinkable water.

“The paper that was wrapped around the hamburgers, that’s what we use—that’s toilet paper,” Reese said. “In addition to tearing pieces of our clothing, but we washed it out under the dripping water and reused those clothing.”

Story overshadowed by larger Civil Rights events

The girls’ story briefly gained national attention after photographer Danny Lyon secretly photographed them through the windows. Their imprisonment occurred at the same time as the March on Washington.

“The March on Washington took place while they were locked up here,” said Donald Cole, a pastor and storyteller who is co-authoring a book with Reese. “So if you look at from a mere news standpoint, what’s the most important story? A million people in Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King or a dozen teenage girls in Lee County that nobody really knows about, that nobody really heard about”

Book aims to tell the full story

After she and the other girls were freed, Reese said she did not know how to talk about the situation for a long time. Now she says what happened to them needs worldwide attention.

“It started bothering me that nobody was talking about it,” Reese said. “Nobody seemed like they cared about it. And we were only children... Everybody should have been concerned about it during that time, but a lot of people in Americus had no idea that this thing was going on about us.”

Reese said a marker outside the stockade does not tell the full story, which is why she asked Cole to co-author the book. Although the building has been preserved, Reese said it is not enough—noting that it was not adult activists who spent days inside, but adolescents who fought to survive.

Reese said people can look out for the book telling the whole story soon.

>> READ MORE: Black Voices in South Georgia <<

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