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A recent story about a group of girls fighting for civil rights in Georgia in the 1960s serves as a vital reminder that racial injustice is deeply rooted in the history of our juvenile justice system — and shows us how Black girls’ voices, resistance, and leadership can help us pave the way for something better.
In the summer of 1963, a group of girls in Americus, Georgia, refused to accept the blatant discrimination around them. “We all wanted change,” Lulu Westbrook Griffin, who was just 12 at the time, told students last year during a presentation in Rochester City, New York. The girls wanted to fight against the discrimination they saw represented in the signs posted all over their town: “Whites only drinking fountain.” “Coloreds use the back door.” “No Negroes allowed.” They also fought more broadly for equity. “We wanted better schools. We wanted better jobs. We all wanted to be treated equally,” she explained in an interview for Heather E. Schwartz’s 2017 book Locked Up for Freedom: Civil Rights Protesters at the Leesburg Stockade. “It was a matter of standing up for what you knew was right.”
The girls began to organize. “My teachers and my parents, hand in hand, were teaching us that there’s a better life beyond these signs that you see,” Westbrook Griffin said to the students in Rochester City. “They told me, ‘You have greatness in you. You can change things. Your voice has to be heard.’” The girls were fighting for themselves, she said, but also for the next generation.
In July 1963, more than a dozen of the girls, all between the ages of 12 and 15, marched together toward the local movie theater, singing songs and carrying signs. They tried to buy movie tickets. “We were very peaceful,” Westbrook Griffin said in Locked Up For Freedom. “We were trained. We had to take an oath of nonviolence. The cops were the ones who had sticks and dogs and billy clubs.” When she saw the state troopers, she told the students in Rochester City, “I was afraid. But I knew I could not change my mind.”
Police arrested the girls and locked them in what they described as a small, hot, dilapidated stockade building. They had limited food, and water only from a dripping showerhead. One of the girls, Carol Barner-Seay, recounted her experiences for StoryCorps earlier this year and said, “The place was worse than filthy. People wouldn’t put their pets in such condition. It was hot…. [There were] all kinds of insects…. We slept on the hard concrete floor. Our parents didn’t even know where we were.” Shirley Green-Reese told StoryCorps, "I gave up hope many days."
The girls were terrified, but also showed incredible strength. Westbrook Griffin said that the years of staying strong in the face of segregation had prepared her for this moment. She thought to herself, They can put me in the stockade, but they’re not going to break my spirit, as she recalled for the students in Rochester City. “We would pray. We would sing our freedom songs. We would look to one another for strength.”
The families eventually learned where the girls were, but they couldn’t afford bail. Eventually, after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee learned of the girls’ situation and sent a photographer to document their conditions, they were released. Most had been held at the stockade for 45 days. The girls were never formally charged with a crime. But, according to a 2016 NPR article on the Leesburg Stockade, their parents were billed to cover the expenses for the girls’ time in the stockade.
The stockade was an egregious example of mistreatment of Black children by the justice system, though hundreds of Black children were arrested for fighting for civil rights during that era. Yet all around the country today, Black girls are still punished for speaking out. They are also too frequently taken from their homes, processed through the juvenile justice system, and placed in juvenile facilities that do more harm than good. A 2016 report by the Sentencing Project found that Black youth face harsher consequences in the justice system than white youth who engage in the same behavior. And many parents still receive the bills.
In 2015, high school student Niya Kenny spoke out when, according to the ACLU, police picked up another girl, flipped her desk, and threw her across the classroom for failing to put her cell phone away. Niya urged her classmates to record the incident on their cell phones, and then stood up and said, “Isn’t anyone going to help her? Y’all cannot do this!” Niya was arrested, taken to jail, and charged with “disturbing a school.”
Another Black girl, Niya’s classmate, was also arrested for videotaping the abuse. Charges against both girls were eventually dropped, but these examples aren’t outliers. In a study entitled “Against Captivity: Black Girls in School Discipline Policies in the Afterlife of Slavery”, published in 2015 in the journal Education Policy, education researcher Connie Wun described how school policies position Black girls as “captive objects” who repeatedly meet with discipline when they resist harmful or oppressive structures.
The overt silencing of Black girls’ voices arises in the broader context of over-policing and police abuse. Even a science experiment by a Black high school student led to arrest and felony charges when a mixture of chemicals caused a small explosion, popping the top off of her water bottle. (The charges were later dismissed.)
Black girls make up just 16% of the female student population in the country, but account for more than one-third of all school-based arrests. A 2007 report in the journal Youth and Society found that Black girls were penalized for deviating from social norms of female behavior, and in particular for being “loud, defiant, and precocious.” Research from Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality has also found that, compared to white girls of the same age, Black girls are perceived as more adult and less in need of nurturing, protection, support, and comfort.
Once young people are pushed into the justice system, they — like the girls in the stockade — face harmful and traumatic conditions. Juvenile incarceration can inflict harm on young people and may lead to worse health outcomes in adulthood. It separates children from their families and communities. It exposes them to violence, strip searches, and solitary confinement. Research has found it can interfere with educational success. And all too often, young people still face dirty cells, insects, overheating, and other poor conditions.
It adds insult to injury that parents still get slapped with the bill. Despite recent reforms in a few jurisdictions, such bills are still common across the country. These policies exacerbate racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, heighten the economic burden on families of color, and leave families struggling economically when they want to be supporting their children.
This disparate treatment must be understood in the context of our history of slavery and the evolution of the criminal and juvenile legal systems. Immediately after emancipation from slavery, laws were passed to criminalize Black citizens for a wide array of highly subjective behaviors, such as being “vagrant” or “idle” or “disturbing the peace.” In addition to violence, the penalty was often high fines — and for those who couldn’t pay, forced labor. From its inception, the juvenile legal system built on these disparities offered white youth more supportive and rehabilitative treatment than it did Black, Indigenous, or Latinx youth.
When we penalize girls for being “loud, defiant, and precocious,” we further expand on this problematic history, and we silence and punish important voices for justice. As Monique Morris explained in Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools: "Born into a cultural legacy of slavery, Black American women have interpreted defiance as something that is not inherently bad. Harriet Tubman was defiant. So too was Sojourner Truth and countless other enslaved women who dared to reject oppression…. For Black girls, to be ‘ghetto’ represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be ‘loud’ is a demand to be heard. To have an ‘attitude’ is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and mistreatment."
The girls of the Leesburg Stockade rose up against explicit discrimination evident in the Jim Crow laws of the 1960s. But the struggle of girls today is no less important. From expressing individual perspectives to advocating for systemic reform, Black girls continue to resist. Talking to the group of students in Rochester City, Lulu Westbrook Griffin echoed the message of her childhood — “There is greatness inside of all of you.” It’s time for us to stop silencing Black girls and charging their families for a racially unjust system. We must instead make room for their voices, their insights, and their leadership.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Youth Incarceration in the United States, Explained
