People were lynched, I was thirteen years old when I saw my first lynching.” If you tried to get away, them people would come and get you,” he said. They made my uncle dig his own grave and then they shot him. They were some people in Mississippi. They didn’t put on KKK hoods they would just come to the house and take you out and kill you. We never came out, at the end of the year they told us we didn’t make good. If they gave us five dollars, it could have taken five years to work it off.

I took a lot of garbage there all the time.  But that particular time I saw a hand, a boy’s hand,” Gaddy recalled.  “I asked, ‘What’s a hand doing in here?’  He said, I’ll tell you, don’t ever mention that to nobody because you can end up like that.’  So I didn’t mention it to nobody.  I was scared all the time.

Arthur G. Dozier Reform School for Boys

CBS Sunday Morning News with Pastor Johnny Lee Gaddy –https://cbsn.ws/2LmyZH4

Black News – Black Children Feed to Hogs – https://bit.ly/2XGUZDb

WUSF News – Bill Pass 1st Senate – https://bit.ly/2ScMUjG

Dallas Examiner – Black and White Men Seek Compensation – https://bit.ly/2XXRMP2

Black Business Review – Boys Used as Modern Day Slaves – https://bit.ly/30Ai9Ie

The Weekly Challenger – Murders And Forced Labor at Dozier School – https://bit.ly/2NRfxEu

MI Chronicle Online – Bodies to be Exhumed at Dozier – https://bit.ly/2JxeTrs

I went to Progress, Mississippi every summer to plant and pick cotton and other produce on the place with my grandfather.

Every year he was told that he didn’t make out. That was a sad day at the house for us. My grandfather was up in age where he couldn’t walk and he would be on his hands and knees crawling in the fields trying to work on the farm. He and my grandmother never made good on their crops. They always fell behind and they could leave the place.

As Mae Miller tells it, she spent her youth in Mississippi as a slave, “picking cotton, pulling corn, picking peas, picking butter beans, picking string beans, digging potatoes. Whatever it was, that’s what you did for no money at all.”

Vice – Modern Day Plantation Life in the 1960s –  https://bit.ly/2oLk64j

The Selma Times Journal – Mae Louise Wall Miller – https://bit.ly/30xWcty

People Magazine – Mae Louise Wall Miller – https://bit.ly/2NTIccb

The Root – The Arthur Wall Story – https://bit.ly/2JFk2g9

The Daily Press –  Woman  to Discuss Her Time Being Enslaved –https://bit.ly/2Shf5xP