In February 1961, nine students in Rock Hill, South Carolina refused to pay fines for a lunch-counter sit-in and served thirty days of hard labor instead — the "jail, no bail" tactic that transformed arrest from a deterrent into a weapon. Filling the jails shifted the financial burden of segregation onto the jailers and dramatized the moral stakes; SNCC adopted the tactic movement-wide, and it defined the mass campaigns that followed.
In Albany, Georgia (1961–62), more than a thousand demonstrators were jailed, dispersed by Sheriff Laurie Pritchett across surrounding county jails to blunt the tactic's force. In Selma, Alabama, the 1963–65 voting-rights campaign produced thousands more arrests — including hundreds of schoolteachers and children marched to holding camps — before the violence of Bloody Sunday forced the Voting Rights Act through Congress. The movement's ledger from these campaigns runs to tens of thousands of political arrests, most of them never individually recorded.