As told to Elspeth Leacock - Lynda Blackmon Lowery's “In the Sweatbox (Chapter 4)” lyrics

For weeks we marched and we went to jail, over and over again. Then the police shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in a nearby town. I didn't know Jimmie Lee, but when I heard the news, I was scared for him and for us all. Jimmie Lee had been peacefully marching in Marion, thirty miles away. The marchers were singing freedom songs when the state troopers and police attacked them. As Jimmie Lee tried to protect his mother, a state trooper shot him in the stomach. Marion was a real small town, so Jimmie Lee Jackson was brought to Selma. When we heard this, a lot of us headed for the Good Samaritan Hospital. (That was the hospital for black people then.) We all prayed Jimmie Lee Jackson would live. • • • While Jimmie Lee Jackson was in the hospital, it just seemed that everything got more dangerous. Even jail got more dangerous. One day when a whole bunch of us went to jail, Pat Green got sick. We kept calling the jailers and asking for help, but all they did was bring us two brooms and tell us to clean up the place, saying it was filthy. There were twenty-three girls stuffed into this one cell. Pat was moaning and groaning by this time, so I decided to try and get her some help. From the windows high up in the cell, you could look down and see people on Franklin Street. I used one of the brooms to break the window. We shouted down that we had a sick girl who needed some help. That was all we were saying. We needed help for her. Pretty soon the jailer and two deputies came in. “Okay,” the jailer said, “who broke that window? You are in big trouble.” (He actually called us by a bad name. White people called us that name a lot, to try and hurt us. But I don't say that word.) Then he said we were all going to the sweatbox. None of us knew what he was talking about, but it didn't sound like a good place. He cursed and said, “I'm gonna ask you one more time, who broke that window.” So I answered, “I did.” “What's your name?” I said “Lynda Blackmon.” Somebody behind me said, “My name's Lynda Blackmon.” Somebody on the side said, “My name's Lynda Blackmon.” Pretty soon there were about five Lynda Blackmons. “All right, you all are trying to be smart— get up and move,” he ordered. He let Pat and one other girl stay in the cell. The rest of us were marched down a little hallway to the sweatbox. The sweatbox didn't have any windows. It was an iron room with a big iron door. They pushed us right in, closed the door, and locked it. I don't know how long we stayed in there. It could have been five minutes; it could have been five hours. All I know is every one of us pa**ed out from the heat. There was no air. There was no bed. There was no toilet. There was no sink. There was nothing but heat in an iron box. It was dark too— there weren't any lights. We couldn't see anything. We didn't know anything. When we came to, some other prisoners were carrying us out of the sweatbox into a courtroom. There was a judge there, and he said, “Y'all smell. Just write your name on a piece of paper and get out of here. If I see anyone of you up here again, I'm gonna send you to juvenile detention.” So I wrote a name from TV, like Howdy Doody. Others wrote names like Minnie Mouse, the Lone Ranger, or Tonto. I doubt if anybody wrote her real name. All the judge wanted was to get us out of his courtroom. By the time I got out of jail that day, Jimmie Lee Jackson had died. I went straight to the funeral with my daddy. There were so many people there, we had to stand outside in the drizzling rain. It was hard to hear and I was too tired to listen. It was a long, sad, miserable day. I learned that people were calling for a great march. They wanted adults to march along with us kids in protest of Jackson's murder. It would be a whole new kind of march. A big march with everybody—adults along with us kids—on Sunday, March 7.