According to local history, this structure was built as the Lee County Public Works Building, likely in the 1930s or 1940s, and is variously known as the Leesburg Stockade and the Lee County Stockade.The word stockade usually evokes romanticized notions of Western cattle drives. In the Jim Crow South, a stockade was more likely to be a stark place used for the warehousing of Black prisoners, a reminder that the racial order would be maintained. It was an element of an inherently racist ideal driven by White Supremacy and White Christian Nationalists with the approval and participation of most, if not all, of the county’s elected officials.
In July 1963, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a protest in Americus, marching from Friendship Baptist Church to the segregated Martin Theatre. According to a story on Georgia Public Radio, a group of Black girls joined the line to purchase tickets and were arrested on site. They ranged in age from 12-15. After being briefly held in Dawson, they were transferred to the Leesburg Stockade. Their parents knew nothing of their whereabouts until a janitor got word to them of their incarceration. They came to be known as the Stolen Girls.
Conditions in the stockade were horrible. The girls slept on concrete floors with barely-running water and a non-functioning toilet. Food was brought to them but was often under-cooked or substandard. It’s hard to imagine a society that thought it was acceptable for this to happen to anyone, let alone children. But so it was.
The story of the Leesburg Stolen Girls was widely publicized by SNCC. When photographer Danny Lyon’s images were published in Jet magazine it brought an unwelcome national focus on Lee County and the girls were released in September 1963. They were not charged with any crimes but were billed for their stay in the facility. Dr. Shirley Green-Reese, one of the Stolen Girls, helped lead the initiative to have a Georgia historical marker placed at the site in 2019.
