Biography
Evelyn Pierce was one of the students arrested in the March 1961 Jackson library sit-in and was arrested on March 27, 1961 for participating in a sit-in at a segregated library in Jackson — the read-in by Tougaloo students that became known as the Tougaloo Nine action; the catalog does not identify the precise library — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library. The catalog establishes the arrest, the participation, and the individually identified police photograph, but not the court disposition, any transfer to Parchman, or the physical release date; those fields are unresolved pending county-jail, court, or penitentiary records.
The library sit-in cost each of the nine about thirty-two hours in municipal custody. They were released on March 28, 1961 for court, convicted of disturbing the peace, fined $100 each and given thirty-day suspended sentences.
Custody record
Participant accounts place the Tougaloo Nine’s March 1961 detention at more than thirty hours, with estimates varying around thirty to thirty-six hours. The thirty-day sentences were suspended, not thirty days actually served; an exact common hourly duration has not been imposed on all nine.
