Biography
Bernard Scott Lee was a student civil-rights activist, Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizer and close associate of Martin Luther King Jr. Montgomery police arrested him on May 25, 1961 during the Freedom Ride crisis; he was fined $100 and sentenced to ten days in the county jail. Police arrested Lee again with an interracial group of Freedom Riders at the Albany, Georgia train station on December 10, 1961. The riders spent the night in jail before release on bail, but Lee’s later total custody and the final Albany disposition have not been located.
Zinn’s contemporary account individually places this activist in the December 1961 Albany custody proceedings. He distinguishes the initial railway-terminal arrests, county-court proceedings and later group releases. Because the release accounts do not resolve every person’s exact custody trajectory, no exact individual discharge date or calculated total is inferred. Howard Zinn, Albany, Southern Regional Council SRC22, January 8, 1962, original PDF page 17. Source: https://www.crmvet.org/info/6201_zinn_albany.pdf#page=17
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Gadsden field organizing distinguished from unnamed mass arrests
The August 1963 affiliates report names Bernard Lee as SCLC field secretary helping lead the Gadsden desegregation campaign and reporting that city buses had been desegregated since mid-July. It separately reports more than six hundred unnamed demonstrators arrested August 3. The article does not individually identify Lee as one of those arrestees or state his own custody interval; August 3 is not copied into a new case for him.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter, volume 1 no.11, August 1963, original pages 8.
