What gnawed at [the prisoners] most was a cold suspicion that the movement itself did not care enough to contact or rescue them, and was letting them slide to oblivion because they were ordinary Mississippi Negroes who lacked the middle-class connections of Annell Ponder in Winona. The thought punctured memories of jail triumph and transforming brotherhood since Bob Moses had drawn them into the registration movement. For Hollis Watkins, somehow it was the heroic memory of catching the runaway yearling at the Dahmer farm that turned to dust; he beat back the thought by singing movement songs even when the punishment came to be hanging in handcuffs from a horizontal bar of his cell door. A guard informally sentenced Douglas MacArthur Cotton to stretch beneath the handcuffs for forty-eight hours but took pity on him after three. Willie Carnell hung sleepless for a full thirty hours. Watkins and others lost track of how long they hung, but all of them, still singing or not, eventually gave way to helplessness and let their wastes fall down their prison-issue trouser legs.

Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-64By Taylor BranchPage 117