Biography
Lewell A. Cecil was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in the Freedom Ride sequence of June 10, 1961 — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library. The catalog establishes the arrest, the participation, and the individually identified police photograph, but not the court disposition, any transfer to Parchman, or the physical release date; those fields are unresolved pending county-jail, court, or penitentiary records.
WHETHER THIS IS A SECOND MAN IS NOT SETTLED. The archive also holds Lewell A. Woods Jr., arrested in the same June 10 group. Lewell A. is not a name two men in one arrest group are likely to share, and the two forms come from separate passes over the catalog rather than from one list naming both. What tips this record into existence is that the Cecil form has a catalog item of its own — a single identified photograph, verified at the item level — while the Woods form was recorded from a collection listing whose item record and full title were never recovered. That is evidence enough to publish the arrest and not enough to merge or discard either record. The same note appears on the other one.
