In early June of 1963, when I was 15 years old, a group of us including Fannie Lou Hamer and Annelle Ponder of SCLC went from Greenwood, Mississippi, to a voter education workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. On the way back we had to change buses at the Trailways station in Columbus, Mississippi. We had an hour or more layover there.
We had taken the notion that we were really serious about breaking the barriers of discrimination. We felt like the bus station was a good place to start, so we went in to eat at the "Whites Only" lunch counter. A couple of police officers came in and stared at us and made little remarks, but we did get served.
Then they called for all the people going to Winona, which was our next stop, so we got our baggage and stood in the front of the line to board the bus. The bus driver came and pulled a little white girl out of the line and pushed Mrs. Hamer and Annelle Ponder back and said blacks did not get on the bus before whites. So we began to raise questions and took the driver's name and badge number. That was one of the techniques we had learned at the workshop. Then we boarded the bus and sat down at the front.
On the way to Winona, we noticed that the driver would stop at every little town and use the telephone. All during the trip Mrs. Hamer was very outspoken and was telling the driver that he had violated our rights, that we had a right to be sitting at the front of the bus, and that he had abused us by putting whites in front of us. So when we got to Winona we felt like there was going to be trouble, especially since the driver had made those phone calls.
When we got to the Trailways station at Winona there were highway patrolmen and police officers all over the place. We went in and sat down at the lunch counter on the white side. A police officer came over to us and said that we had to leave. He said that niggers didn't get to eat on that side. But we refused to leave.
At that point several other officers surrounded us and began to poke us in the back and side with billy sticks. So we went outside and talked about the situation. We had to decide whether we were going to eat at the lunch counter or go on to Greenwood and forget about it.
While we were outside some of us went around to the back of a highway patrol car to take down the tag number. As we were doing that a highway patrolman came out and asked why we were tampering with state property. By this time Mrs. Hamer had gone back on the bus to sit down. She had a limp in her leg from polio, and she had gotten tired. But when the police officers surrounded us and put us under arrest she came off the bus and made a loud cry, "Do you all want me to go on or to stand by?" By the time we hollered out the window of the police car, "Go on to Greenwood," one of the police officers had grabbed Mrs. Hamer and arrested her too.
When we got to the police station the officers started asking us who we were and where we were from and why we had come to Winona. But we were very reluctant about giving out any information. They began poking and hitting two of us, and we began trying to defend ourselves by talking up. They said we were "smart niggers" because they weren't used to black folks really standing up and talking back to white folks. After a while we were sent off to cells.
I had started to go to a cell, but they stopped me and kept me out by myself. They began to interrogate me. They told me I had really made a bad mistake by messing with the highway patrol car. They said they wanted to teach me a lesson, that I would regret ever coming to Winona. Then one of them hit me in the face, and they all began to beat me.
The next thing I knew I was on the floor and they were all beating me with sticks and kicking me. One pulled me up and started tearing my clothes off and another came behind me and started choking me with a billy stick. By this time my eye was all messed up, and my head was knocked open, and I was just screaming and trying to protect myself some way.
After they quit beating me, they took me to a cell and then took Annelle Ponder out and beat her. When they brought her back they came and got Mrs. Hamer. We could hear her screaming as they were beating her. When they brought her back to the cell she fell right there in front of the cell door and told us what had happened.
She said what was so sad about the situation was that they had made two black inmates beat her. At first the two men refused, but they were threatened by the police and they knew they had to do it. The police made them take her legs and pull her dress up, then one of the inmates sat on her feet while the other just constantly beat her. After the beating she couldn't walk the whole time she was in the jailhouse.
So there we were beat up real bad with no medical attention, and for two days we didn't hear from anyone and couldn't make a phone call. We didn't know what the outcome was going to be. They got us up late one night and took us across town to an empty building, tried us and found us guilty. Another night they took us out of the jail and pulled guns on us to make us sign statements saying that they had not done anything to us, that we did it to ourselves. But we refused to sign the statements.
After a while people had heard about us being in jail, and the police started getting calls from the Justice Department and people began to come to the jail looking for us. Finally we got out on June 12, and the Justice Department came to escort us safely to Greenwood.
In late November we had to go to Oxford for a trial of the policemen in federal district court. This was just a year after James Meredith had tried to enroll in Ole Miss [University of Mississippi], and a lot of the racism and bad feelings were still there. They picked an all-white jury to try the policemen, and there were lots of white students from Ole Miss in the courtroom with Confederate flags. We wondered why we'd come; there was no justice.
When the verdict came in, John Rosenberg, a Justice Department attorney, came to my house and said the jury had found the policemen not guilty. We'd lost the case.
June Johnson lived in Greenwood, Mississippi, and worked in various campaigns for black political rights at the time this article appeared.
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