In the summer of 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began organizing in McComb after local NAACP leader C.C. Bryant invited Bob Moses to town, and workshops on nonviolent protest drew local high school students into a growing movement. On August 30, 1961, Burglund High School students Brenda Travis, Robert Talbert, and Ike Lewis held a sit-in at McComb's segregated Greyhound bus station and were arrested, with Travis and Lewis later expelled from school. During their incarceration, local Black civil rights activist Herbert Lee was shot dead by legislator E.H. Hurst in nearby Liberty. In response to Lee's murder and their classmates' expulsions, 115 Burglund students walked out on October 4, marched to McComb's city hall, prayed on its steps, refused police orders to leave, and were arrested on charges of disturbing the peace. Those over eighteen, including SNCC organizers Bob Moses and Chuck McDew, were charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors, and a White mob brutally beat SNCC field secretary Bob Zellner while police watched. Brenda Travis was sent to the Oakley juvenile detention facility with an indefinite release date and remained there until May 1962, when she was released on condition that she leave the state. Afterward, students refused to return to school unless Travis was reinstated, rejected an offer to be readmitted if they disengaged from the movement, and on October 16 more than one hundred turned in their books and withdrew. SNCC then established Nonviolent High for the expelled students, though it lasted only briefly after instructors were convicted and jailed, and many students later enrolled in Campbell Junior College in Jackson. Community reaction was divided, with some parents joining the freedom movement, others disciplining their children out of fear, and many local NAACP members objecting that SNCC had exposed young people to violence and arrest. In October 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the walkout, the McComb school district awarded honorary diplomas to Travis and other students suspended because of the protests.
