Remembering Civil Rights icon and teen Mississippi “exile” Brenda Travis
- Charlie Braxton
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
By 16, the SNCC activist had sat at a segregated lunch counter, served time in jail and led a school walk-out of over 100 students
Former teen Civil Rights activist Brenda Travis died May 17th. She was 81 years old.
The tragic irony of Travis’ passing is that her death comes at a critical time in our history, when many of the rights and freedoms she selflessly dedicated her life to are being taken from us. But her exemplary life blazed a trail of activism for many young Black women to follow.
“The death [of Emmett Till] and the photo had the opposite effect on me. Perhaps Emmett’s mother knew that by showing her son’s desecrated body, some people would merely recoil in fear and horror, but for others it would have the opposite effect – outrage and anger. That was my reaction.”
Many of the legendary heroes of the Civil Rights Movement were women like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks. Then there are the names of other lesser-known women, such as Claudette Colvin, who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. This incident occurred March 2, 1955, a full nine months before Rosa Parks’ refusal to do the same launched the historic Montgomery bus boycott. While the world knows about Parks and her contributions to the Civil Rights struggle, few people know about Colvin’s contributions to the struggle.
Unfortunately, she isn’t the only female Civil Rights leader who contributed significantly to the movement, yet remains largely unknown. Despite her significant contributions, Travis passed away this year, still largely unknown.
Brenda Travis was born in 1945, the fourth of seven children, after her parents fled to McComb, Miss. Her father, L. S. Travis, didn’t let his pregnant wife, Icie, work in the fields where he was sharecropping, as demanded by the landowner. Enraged that a Black man had defied his orders, the landowner left to get a gun to kill him. Knowing the landowner had a brutal reputation for killing Black sharecroppers, L.S. rushed his pregnant wife to McComb, where Brenda was born soon after, and he fled the state, leaving them behind.
According to Travis, that incident was a defining moment in her life because it tied her from birth to resisting oppression and became a harbinger of things to come. She writes about this in her autobiography, Mississippi’s Exile Daughter: How My Civil Rights Baptism Under Fire Shaped My Life. “The theme of flight and exile haunted my father, and, like father, like daughter, the same theme of flight and exile was later to haunt me as I took a stand for my own rights and the rights of my people,” she writes. Throughout her life, Travis describes incidents designed to cow or frighten her that instead galvanized her.
In 1955, two other events significantly shaped her life forever. The first was the death of Emmett Till, who was brutally mutilated and murdered by a group of white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
“Many of my friends were traumatized by the photo of Emmett. Some parents even used the photo as a life-learning lesson for young Black boys or Black men, for that matter. Step out of line and you might be the next person whose death photo would appear in ‘Jet’,” writes Travis. While some parents used the hideous photo of Till’s badly disfigured body as a teachable moment, a tool to scare Black children into avoiding the eyes and ire of white people, the photo had the opposite effect on Travis. She writes: “The death and the photo had the opposite effect on me. Perhaps Emmett’s mother knew that by showing her son’s desecrated body, some people would merely recoil in fear and horror, but for others it would have the opposite effect – outrage and anger. That was my reaction.”
A few months later, the McComb police broke into her family home in the middle of the night, shoved her grandmother to the ground, grabbed her brother and whisked him away, reminiscent of Emmett Till’s fateful abduction. The traumatic event, needless to say, was devastating to the family. They thought that would be the last time they would see James Travis alive. Fortunately, James returned home a few hours later. According to his sister, James later told her the police spent hours trying to physically force a confession from him. But James, knowing he was innocent, refused to cop a plea to a crime he didn’t commit. After a while, the police got frustrated and let him go, without so much as a ride back home. That incident combined with Till’s murder, further stoked Travis’s anger and added fuel to her burning passion for justice. "I became enraged and knew that one day I had to take a stand." It would be a full six years later when Brenda would get her chance to make that stand.
In the summer of 1961, Travis joined the NAACP. She also met Bob Moses, who recruited her to help organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC's) first voter registration project. That summer, she joined SNCC’s training camp for nonviolent protests and became the youth president of the Pike County NAACP.
In August of 1961, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes were arrested for sitting in at a McComb Woolworth counter, requesting service. Their arrests galvanized the people of McComb. That night SNCC called a meeting that garnered more than 200 attendees and asked for volunteers for a second Woolworth’s sit-in. Travis, Robert Talbert and Ike Lewis agreed to continue Wakins and Hayes’ protest efforts.
On August 30, 1961, Travis, Talbert, and Lewis bought tickets to New Orleans at the segregated Greyhound bus station in McComb and sat at the lunch counter. For this courageous act of civil disobedience, they were immediately arrested, charged with trespassing and incarcerated at Pike County Jail for 28 days. Travis was just 16-years-old at the time of her arrest. The trio was released from jail on October 3, 1961.
While their time in county jail was meant to break the protester’s spirit and make them question whether they did the right thing, it only strengthened Travis’ resolve.
“It is interesting that some of the most important decisions that we make in life that impact your life forever, are made quickly and instinctively. I had no idea when I volunteered along with Ike and Bobby that the decision would set the course for my life,” writes Travis. “I knew that my decision was right, knew intellectually and emotionally that it was necessary for someone to step forward at great risk, and that someone was me, while I did not, could not fully appreciate the risk that I was taking as a 16-year-old gir. I knew that everything I had experienced in life up to this time was moving me in this direction. And I was comfortable in myself that what I was doing was not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do.”
After her release from jail, Travis learned Burglund High School expelled her for her activism. She tried to re-enroll but was denied on October 4, 1961. News of her expulsion quickly spread, and Travis, in an incredible show of solidarity, led more than 100 students in a walk out. Students marched to city hall, singing "We Shall Overcome." Police viciously beat and arrested many of the kids. Students protested and refused to return to school until Travis was re-enrolled. As a result, they were also expelled. Sixteen seniors who participated were unable to graduate.
Once again, Travis found herself arrested and detained without charges or a trial. She was sentenced to an indefinite term and subsequently taken to Oakley Training School, a juvenile detention center near Raymond, Miss. Neither her attorney nor her mother were informed of her location. According to Travis, that was the one time she didn’t care if she lived or died, because she thought she’d never see her parents again.
“ I felt like just breaking out of there and running. Shoot me; do whatever you have to do to me, because right now, you've stripped me of everything — when you took me away from my parents. I didn't have anything to live for. And then they allowed [my mother] to come to see me.”
After serving six and a half months at Oakley, a professor from Talladega College managed to speak with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and negotiated a deal for Travis’ freedom.
“It was the Saturday night before Easter of ’62. I was released into the custody of this individual. And he did take me to Jackson, and I had about three hours to visit with my mother before leaving the state of Mississippi. Governor Ross Barnett had stipulated that he would release me into his custody if and only if he got me out of Mississippi within 24 hours, because he could not ‘guarantee my life.’ So I don't know what anybody else called it, but I called it exiled from the State of Mississippi.”
Travis finished high school in Connecticut and later attend the Tony Taylor School of Business in California.
Decades later, in 2013, Travis returned to McComb and founded the Brenda Travis Historical Education Foundation, a non-profit organization designed to teach history and encourage both youth leadership and community development opportunities in McComb. She was honored by the City of McComb with a street named in her honor, and the McComb School District gave her and the other expelled seniors honorary diplomas. Tougaloo College gave her its Meritorious Leadership Award for her contributions to the advancement of Civil Rights. And her story is also featured in an exhibit at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
The history of the American Civil Rights Movement is replete with unsung heroes. Quiet foot soldiers of justice, like Travis, sacrificed their time, energy, and livelihoods, and, sadly, in some occasions, they gave their very lives so that we could live in a country that was a little freer than it was before they joined the struggle.
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