First 9 pictured below: Judith Frieze Wright, Margaret Leonard, Samuel Nash, Mimi Real, Henry Schwarzschild, Rev. Leon Smith, Jr., Theresa Walker, Wyatt, Tee Walker, and Melvin White.
My mother was scared for me. So when I was in the Hinds County jail in Jackson, she called them up a lot to see how I was doing. She...wanted them to know, "We're watching to see how you're treating her." - Margaret Leonard (Breach of Peace, Etheridge, 2018)
"There were about 14 of us packed in the cell — it could really only fit three or four people. We slept on the floor, which was filthy and damp. At night, the bugs would crawl all over me, and the big light stayed on all night; they never turned that light off.” -Theresa Walker (Richmond Magazine, 2019)
“I wish I could do something. I wish I could do something.”
That refrain played in Theresa Ann Walker’s head through her youth: as she saw school buses taking children to their all-white schools, as she walked past white churches she couldn’t enter. “I just knew it was wrong,” says Walker, now 93 and living in Chester. “And I wanted this country … to be the best it could be, for my children to grow up in.” She yearned, always, to do something. In June 1961, she did. - Theresa Walker (Chesterfield Observer, 2021)
Arrested and beaten during civil rights protests, she’s 93 and finally telling her story. - The Washington Post, 2021