A Lasting Impression: Student Travel Study

Teaching Reflection by Colleen Bell and Susan Oppenheim

In 1963, the police arrested a group of African American girls aged 12 to 15 when they tried to purchase tickets at the front entrance of a segregated movie theater as part of a civil rights protest in Americus, Georgia. They were transported to and held in an abandoned Civil War-era prison in Leesburg, Georgia for 45 days. The “Stolen Girls” girls were never formally charged and their parents were not informed of their location by the police. This article documents what a group of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders and their teachers experienced when they traveled south to meet Carol Barner Seay and Sandra Mansfield, two of the Stolen Girls.

Arrested for demonstrating in Americus, teenage girls are kept in a Civil War-era stockade in Leesburg, Georgia. © Danny Lyon

Travel study — with learners of any age — requires planning and preparation. In this piece we demonstrate the impact on middle school students of studying history through the lives of young people and then traveling to meet some of those people, now elders, in communities where their courageous acts unfolded decades earlier. That impact is a powerful motivator for the preparation that makes it possible; we discuss the work of planning and preparing for travel at the end of the article.

This article draws on Susie Oppenheim’s teaching at Southside Family School (SFS) in Minneapolis and Colleen Bell’s observations and field notes from one of the school’s many Southern civil rights travel studies. Here we focus on one community of the many we have visited in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Traveling South

Before we travelled south, we studied Danny Lyon’s images of various local movements. The students found a handful of photos especially engaging: teenage girls in a Civil War-era stockade where they were locked up for weeks. In one, a dozen Black faces look back at the photographer from behind the bars, many with shy smiles. Most are in pedal-pushers and short-sleeved blouses; a few wear sleeveless dresses. Their hair is pulled into braids or wrapped in scarves or worn in short afros. All but one stand barefooted, their clothes wrinkled.

Children had read accounts of their capture and detention. Because the Stolen Girls and their story has not been well-documented in civil rights history, children read one student’s personal narrative about the experience (Lulu Westbrooks’) and an article about a reunion of the Stolen Girls (Essence magazine, 1996).

The girls in the photo were arrested during a protest march in Americus, Ga. It was the summer of 1963. Their cause: challenging Jim Crow brutality against Black people, especially the dehumanizing treatment of their parents, grandparents and community elders.

Now — 40-some years later — we’re on a bus, traveling down Highway 19 from Americus to the little town of Leesburg, where the stockade still stands. Two of the girls in that photo, now in their 60s, are riding in the bus with us. After decades of silence, Carol and Sandra have begun to share their stories publicly.

The woods press in toward the road. Carol holds the microphone close to her mouth and tells us they were arrested in the afternoon, held in Americus until sunset, and then transported out of town. She tells us,

“They carried us to Leesburg at ‘blackdark’ so no one would see us or know where we were. The trees around the stockade were so thick you couldn’t see it from the road. And most of us hadn’t been beyond the outskirts of Americus so we had no idea where they were taking us.”

The bus slows. Carol points to the right and our driver takes a tight turn onto a sandy yard with rain puddles here and there. A squat concrete building stands nearby. A sign over the door reads “Leesburg Public Works” but as we get closer, I see underneath it in stone, “Leesburg Stockade.” Two doors face the parking lot.

Sandra Mansfield with students outside the Leesburg stockade. Photo: Colleen Bell