Word: mardon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Civil rights have come so far in Atlanta that no one bats an eye any more when Negroes are served side by side with whites at Krystal restaurants, a chain that sells 100 hamburgers all over town. Yet only 17 months ago, Connecticut College Coed Mardon Walker, 18, was considered such a menace when she joined a sit-in at a Krystal counter that she was arrested for trespass and hauled before Fulton County's terrible-tempered Judge Durward...
...Mardon, the white daughter of a U.S. Navy captain, Pye meted out the absolute maximum sentence-a $1,000 fine, six months in jail and twelve months' hard labor in a county work camp. Pye set Mardon's appeal bond at a whopping $15,000, to be secured by unencumbered property only. She appealed to Georgia's highest court-and lost...
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Mardon's conviction with a brief order explaining that all such sit-in cases have been rendered moot by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "We are glad Miss Walker's long ordeal is over," rejoiced the Atlanta Constitution in an editorial slap at Segregationist Judge Pye. "We only wish she had not had to go to Washington to get justice...
...does not automatically end local prosecution of sit-in cases; civil rights lawyers may have to seek dismissal in specific cases. Yet it does mean that a great variety of civil rights advocates-ranging from Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, 73-year-old mother of Massachusetts' lame-duck Governor, to Mardon Walker, a 19-year-old daughter of a white Navy captain, no longer need fear confinement. Said a relieved Miss Walker in New London, Conn., where she is a student at Connecticut College: "I somehow felt that I would never have to serve 18 months in jail for trying...
...released on bonds of $300 or $500, he upped the ante to $3,000 or more, explaining that he "acted on my own motion." Then he began meting out ferocious sentences. His most famed was six months in jail and a year at hard labor for Connecticut College Student Mardon Walker, an 18-year-old white girl who had taken part last winter in a nonviolent sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant. Even the Atlanta Constitution, which opposed the demonstrations, snapped that the punishment was "disturbingly disproportionate...