Annell Ponder

Annell Ponder was a SCLC Citizenship Education Program field secretary who trained voter-registration teachers across the Deep South alongside Septima Clark and Dorothy Cotton. Returning from a citizenship workshop in Charleston, South Carolina on June 9, 1963, she was arrested with Fannie Lou Hamer, June Johnson, Lawrence Guyot and others at the Winona, Mississippi Trailways bus station. In Montgomery County jail she was brutally beaten by Highway Patrol officers and prisoners; her face was so swollen she could barely speak. The beatings produced national outcry and a federal Justice Department prosecution of the officers — who were acquitted by an all-white jury. Ponder continued civil-rights organizing until her death.