Biography
Mae Mallory was a Harlem activist and one of the 'Harlem Nine' mothers whose 1958 lawsuit against New York City's segregated schools produced In re Skipwith, a precedent against de facto segregation. Visiting Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina during the August 27, 1961 Freedom Rider violence, she was indicted alongside Williams on kidnapping charges arising from a white couple they had sheltered from a mob. While Williams fled the country, Mallory was arrested in Cleveland, fought extradition to North Carolina for two years, and ultimately served time. Convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to 16-20 years in 1964, her conviction was reversed in 1965 on the grounds that Black citizens had been excluded from the grand and petit juries. She was released and the charges were eventually dismissed.
Photo credit
First-person account of interrupted Cleveland and Monroe custody
Mae Mallory's Memo from a Monroe Jail, Freedomways, Second Quarter 1964, printed pages 210–211 (PDF pages 8–9), explicitly dates her renewed jailing without bail to March 1, 1962. She describes about a year jailed, followed by release on $15,000 bond, then extradition from Cleveland to Monroe on January 10, 1964. The memoir gives no exact day for that intervening bail release and does not establish continuous custody from the original arrest. Its earlier arrest passage prints Thursday, October 11, 1961, conflicting with the currently recorded October 12; that discrepancy is not silently resolved. Printed page 214 reports her 16–20-year sentence and says she, Harold Reape and Richard Crowder remained in Union County Jail when she wrote, while John Lowry alone was then out. The introductory editorial note says this was written before bond was raised to free her. Neither statement supplies an exact physical-discharge day. Existing dates and counters are unchanged.
Mae Mallory’s first-person account in Freedomways, Second Quarter 1964, individually identifies Judge Walter Brock as the judge who imposed the sentences in the joint Monroe trial. The imposed term is not a served-duration total.
The November 1969 appeal lists Mallory as assistant chairman of the July 23rd Defense Committee, which organized support for the Glenville defendants.
