Biography
Meryle Joy Reagon was a nineteen-year-old Tennessee State University student, the sister of SNCC field secretary Cordell Reagon and was arrested at the Jackson Trailways terminal on June 2, 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.
She later married fellow Freedom Rider Frederick Leonard, becoming Meryle Joy Leonard. Her birth year, about 1942, is derived from her reported age of nineteen at arrest.
