Biography
Annell Ponder was a SCLC Citizenship Education Program field secretary who trained voter-registration teachers across the Deep South alongside Septima Clark and Dorothy Cotton. Returning from a citizenship workshop in Charleston, South Carolina on June 9, 1963, she was arrested with Fannie Lou Hamer, June Johnson, Lawrence Guyot and others at the Winona, Mississippi Trailways bus station. In Montgomery County jail she was brutally beaten by Highway Patrol officers and prisoners; her face was so swollen she could barely speak. The beatings produced national outcry and a federal Justice Department prosecution of the officers — who were acquitted by an all-white jury. Ponder continued civil-rights organizing until her death.
Contemporary signed voter-registration report
Annell Ponder authored this issue’s report on the August 6, 1963 primary-election-day voting protests across the Mississippi Delta, particularly Jackson, Greenwood and Clarksdale. She described organizing by Delta residents and SCLC, NAACP, CORE and SNCC through the Council of Federated Organizations, and reported thirty-six SCLC citizenship schools operating since the beginning of the year. Her byline and this continuing educational work supplement the biography; the article does not date her own Winona jail admission or release and is not used to replace those separately sourced endpoints.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter, volume 1 no.11, August 1963, original pages 3.
