Winona, June 1963: the arrest and beating in the jail

Where were they coming from?

The group was returning from a week of training at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference citizenship school in South Carolina, where they learned to teach adults to read the registration form and the state constitution. The citizenship schools grew out of work by Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins on the South Carolina Sea Islands, and SCLC ran training sessions for teachers from across the South. Annell Ponder, an SCLC citizenship teacher working in Greenwood, was one of the group's leaders.

They rode a commercial bus west through Alabama and into Mississippi. During the trip some of them sat near the front, and the driver argued with them. When the bus stopped in Winona, the county seat of Montgomery County, police were waiting. The SNCC Digital Gateway says the driver had called ahead.

What happened at the bus station?

June Johnson, Annell Ponder, Euvester Simpson, Rosemary Freeman and James West went into the white waiting room and lunch counter, and officers ordered them out and then arrested them. Hamer had stayed on the bus. When she saw her friends being put into a patrol car, she got off to ask whether the others should go on to Greenwood. An officer arrested her too.

What happened in the jail?

Over the next hours, officers beat the women in the jail, and a highway patrolman ordered two Black prisoners to beat Fannie Lou Hamer with a blackjack. June Johnson, who was fifteen, was struck with a leather strap studded with metal. Annell Ponder was beaten for refusing to call the officers "sir." Hamer was taken to a cell where the prisoners were told to beat her while she lay on a bunk. When the first man tired, the second continued. Euvester Simpson, who shared her cell, later helped care for her wounds.

Lawrence Guyot, a SNCC field secretary, drove to Winona to try to get them out and was arrested and beaten as well. Andrew Young and other SCLC staff arranged bail. The group was released on June 12, 1963, and learned that Medgar Evers, the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary, had been shot and killed outside his home in Jackson in the early hours of that day.

Was anyone held responsible?

The U.S. Justice Department prosecuted the Winona police chief, the Montgomery County sheriff and other officers in federal court in Oxford in December 1963, and an all-white jury acquitted them on every count. An FBI agent testified about bloodstains on the clothing of Hamer and Johnson. Hamer testified about what had been done to her. The verdict was typical of the period, when federal civil rights prosecutions in Mississippi rarely ended in convictions.

How did Winona shape her later work?

The beating left Hamer with lasting injuries, and her account of it became the center of her testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She told the story many times afterward, in speeches and interviews, and the details stayed the same. Our page on the 1964 testimony explains how the Winona account reached a national audience.

Can you visit the site in Winona?

Yes. Two Mississippi Freedom Trail markers stand in Winona: one at the site of the former jail, dedicated in 2022, and one at the site of Staley's Cafe at the old bus stop, dedicated on June 8, 2024. Winona is roughly an hour's drive east of Ruleville by way of Greenwood. WDAM reported that Vickie Roberts-Ratliff led the effort to place the two markers.