“I ran away from the cotton fields and I started hanging out at Jeff’s Pool Room on Hamilton Avenue. All the civil rights work was based on Hamilton Avenue. I was 14. They was doing street protesting for different things, trying to get equal rights in restaurants, theaters, all over Georgia and Alabama. … I wasn’t a big part. I was just making up the numbers, just being part of the body…Among the protests he participated in was one in Americus, Georgia, in the mid 1960s against blacks receiving much harsher sentences than whites for similar crimes. “It was a kind of big demonstration, bigger than usual. They had the fire department deputized and they had citizens deputized. And things got out of hand. White people started shooting. And we started running and everything. So I ran down this alley trying to get away and these two white men were running behind me. There was this car sitting there and I took that car and got away.” Within hours, police caught him: “They just pulled up behind me. And they put me in jail in Cuthbert.”
Rembert managed to overpower a deputy and escape. Then things got worse.
“I went to some people’s house who I thought I could get some help from. But they went in the next room and called the police. They threw me in the car. First, they put me in the back seat and escorted me to the jail. Then two, three hours later, they threw me in the trunk [of a police car] and drove me out to an isolated place where they had these noose hanging from a tree. Then they took me out and hanged me upside-down. Then the same guy that I locked in the jail, in the cell, he tried to castrate me. Until another man, a white man, came up and stopped him and saved me from being castrated. Then they cut me down and took me back to the jail bleeding like a pig…There was no new trial. One day they took me to a kangaroo court. They had a judge, but there was no plea, guilty plea, and all that kind of stuff. They just gave me some time. Judge gave me five years for escape, two years for pointing a pistol, and he gave me 20 for robbery. And I asked him, ‘Who did I rob?’ He says, ‘You robbed a man of his pistol.’ I said, ‘Well, he was pulling the pistol to shoot me.’ He says, ‘Well, you should have let him shot you.
Rembert went to prison, got out and moved to New Haven, where he has worked at his leather crafts ever since. But Randolph County, where he nearly was murdered in custody, is back in the news again, with history echoing loudly through the years back to the time when Winfred Rembert grew up there. From The New York Times:
The Randolph County elections board is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss a proposal that would eliminate seven of nine polling locations in the county, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. Included in the proposed closures is Cuthbert Middle School where nearly 97 percent of voters are black. “There is strong evidence that this was done with intent to make it harder for African Americans,” ACLU of Georgia attorney Sean Young said. The ACLU has sent a letter to the elections board demanding that the polling places remain open and has filed open records requests for information about the proposal to close the polling places.