Brenda

11/1/2016

“My oldest sister was a student at Lemoyne College and participated in the first sit-ins with the students who went to desegregate the public library. Her first arrest was in March, 1960. She was 'Miss LeMoyne', and an article came out in the paper the next day with the headline Queen Goes to Court. Other sit-ins took place after that, and of course they were arrested too. Then in June when school was out, my other sisters and I---there were 5 of us---got involved. We went to different stores that had lunch counters where you could sit and get coffee and a little snack. As black people, we couldn’t do that, of course, so we were arrested again and again. My mother would have to come and get us out of Juvenile; the NAACP attorneys got my older sisters out of jail. That continued until finally the judge at Juvenile, who was there for many years, tried to get my mama to promise we wouldn’t get involved and arrested anymore, but all she would say is, ‘I’ll talk to them.’ She wasn’t going to tell us not to because she knew this was something that had to be. They put our names and address in the paper, and people would call making death threats. Our parents were afraid for us, but they understood. They knew it was important and needed to take place. Our mother always quoted her father’s words to us: ‘Nobody is better than you, and you’re not better than anybody else. We’re all equal in God’s sight whether other people recognize that or not.’ We lived with that premise. We were fearful, but that didn’t stop us. There was a time when we sat in at the railroad station---we weren’t allowed in the waiting room there---and a man snatched up a chair and threatened to hit me over the head with it. I just sat there, not moving. Finally he threw the chair down and walked off. A few days later I saw him in the neighborhood and realized he lived just a few blocks up from us. Our house was kind of at a border of a street where the other side was whites only. He didn’t know us and we didn’t know him, but I recognized him. It was all a part of that time in history.

“We were featured in Jet magazine one year as the most arrested family in the United States for our participation in the Civil Rights movement. We were the Lee sisters. One sister, Joan Lee Nelson, just passed. Another sister, Elaine Lee Turner, founded Heritage Tours and operates Slave Haven.”

Brenda Lee Turner

Brenda

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