June 2, 1962 - A 17-year-old Negro girl who spent more than a month in a Mississippi jail and nearly seven months in a reform school for taking part in civil rights demonstrations will receive a $500 award in New York tonight. She is Brenda Lavern Travis (right) of McComb, Miss. At a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, she will get the first Louis M. Weintraub Award, which is to be presented annually to a person under the age of 25 “for outstanding personal courage in the cause of human rights or civil liberties.” Interviewed today, Miss Travis said that her jail experience had not frightened her. “You don’t give up fighting because you’re punished,” she said. A spokesman for the award committee said that efforts were being made to find a home and a school for Miss Travis, whose mother, a domestic, has been unable to find work in McComb since her daughter’s arrest.
