Bleeding, battered, many missing shoes or other articles of clothing, the girls, some as young as ten, none older than sixteen, were stolen away under the cover of nightfall, hauled out of town, and secretly transferred to a dilapidated stockade in a remote corner of the countryside. There they would be held, under lock and key and at gunpoint, for forty-five days without proper meals, water, sanitation, beds, or medical treatment. This is not the story of human-rights violations in an unstable, war-torn nation in some far off corner of the world. It is the story of a group of now grown women dubbed the Leesburg Stockade Girls, who, as adolescents in Americus, Georgia, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, were arrested during peaceful demonstrations and held, some for nearly two months, in deplorable, inhumane conditions despite their youth and vulnerability.