SNCC's turn to voter registration in the Deep South was paid for in jail time. In McComb, Mississippi, in the fall of 1961, Bob Moses was beaten and jailed, farmer-organizer Herbert Lee was murdered by a state legislator, and over a hundred high-school marchers were arrested with their SNCC elders, several spending weeks in the Magnolia jail. In Albany, Georgia, the mass movement of 1961–62 produced over a thousand arrests, with SNCC organizers like Charles Sherrod cycling endlessly through Chief Pritchett's network of jails.
The pattern — organizers charged with vagrancy, breach of peace, or "insurrection" for registering voters — extended through Greenwood, Danville, and Americus, where in 1963 four SNCC workers were held months without bail under Georgia's capital insurrection statute, until a federal court struck the law down.