Biography
Curtis Hayes is individually documented in Charles Payne’s history of civil-rights-related custody in Mississippi.
Payne identifies Hayes and Hollis Watkins as the two young men who refused to leave the McComb Woolworth lunch counter. They were jailed after their August 1961 sit-in and actually spent thirty-four days in jail. The book’s August 29 chronology conflicts with the stronger August 26 date retained on Watkins’s existing record, so only the month is recorded here. Moses’s late-1961 Magnolia jail letter separately names Hayes in actual confinement; no admission date or thirty-nine-day group duration is assigned to him. The book also names Hayes in the March 1963 Greenwood protest-arrest group. The thirty-four days are a known subtotal for the first episode, not a complete lifetime total.
Sources: Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 92; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 93; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 94; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 98; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 124.
