Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum
at Old Mt. Zion Church
P.O. Box 6036  Albany GA 31706
(912) 432-1698  432-2150 fax
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Moving forward by recalling the past...
a brief history of the Albany and Southwest Georgia Civil Rights Movements

Written by Lee W. Formwalt, former dean of the Graduate School and
professor of history at Albany State University.

The Southwest Georgia Civil Rights Movement had its origins in 1865 with the destruction of slavery at the end of the Civil War, but it was a hundred years later before Southwest Georgia experienced a real civil rights revolution. The Reconstruction Era of the late 1860s witnessed efforts by the newly freed African Americans to secure their livelihoods through new forms of labor and their freedom through political participation. This first effort at civil rights failed with the demise of Reconstruction and the restoration of the white power structure in the 1870’s. Nearly a century later, Southwest Georgia experienced its second Reconstruction. It was the 1960s. Charles Sherrod remarked, "Now I can’t help how Dr. King might have felt, or...any of the rest of them in SCLC, NAACP, CORE, any of the groups, but as far as we were concerned, things moved on. We didn’t skip one beat."
It is no coincidence that the revolution in race relations in the mid-twentieth century Southwest Georgia accompanied a contemporary agricultural revolution. As white planters and farmers mechanized agricultural production and African American tenants moved off the plantation and the farms to towns and cities, they moved from an environment of strict racial control to one with less white domination.

The civil rights movement began in the cities, and the first Southwest Georgia city to experience a severe challenge to the Jim Crow system was the biggest and most progressive trade center in the region, Albany. The movement in Southwest Georgia had its roots in both city and countryside. During the Second World War and immediately after, Southwest Georgia blacks launched a wave of NAACP organizing and chartered chapters in nine counties, including such dangerous places as Brooks, Early and Mitchell counties, which had some of the highest lynching rates in the region, if not the state.
African Americans in post World War II Southwest Georgia still lived behind the veil of strict segregation. In The Negro Revolt, Valdosta native Louis E. Lomax described how the southern racial caste system had isolated blacks from the American mainstream and contributed to the development of an African American culture complete with its own schools, churches, and fraternal organizations. The perennial desire to gain more control over their own lives led some middle-class blacks, like the Rev. E. James Grant in Albany, to organize voter registration drives in the 1940s and 1950s. Events in Albany helped to inspire grassroots movements in other Southwest Georgia communities:
Lee County, Terrell County, Americus, Baker County,  Moultrie, Cordele, Thomasville, Tifton
Others petitioned local governments to make improvements in the infrastructure of African American neighborhoods. Streets in the black sections of towns remained unpaved long after white neighborhood street had been resurfaced with asphalt. In 1961, Albany witnessed the intersection of some of those local efforts with those of three young civil rights workers who were members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Charles Sherrod, Cordell Reagon, and Charles Jones had originally come to Southwest Georgia to conduct a voter registration drive in Terrell County. But Terrell was too difficult to break into, so they went to nearby Albany to raise the consciousness of its black community.

The SNCC workers talked with students and others in Albany, encouraging them to challenge the establishment and its policies of segregation. From the start, the SNCC workers faced opposition from whites as well as from conservative African Americans. Divisions in the black community would continue to plague civil rights efforts throughout 1961 and 1962. Yet, at important moments Albany’s African Americans rose above the divisions. They did so in mid-November 1961 when the major black improvement organizations in town formed the Albany Movement and selected as their president Dr. William G. Anderson, a young black osteopath. Mass meetings were called, protesters marched, and by mid-December more than 500 demonstrators had been jailed. The decision was made to secure greater national publicity for the cause. King arrived in Albany expecting to give a speech and return to Atlanta. Instead he stayed and marched and was arrested and jailed.

Convinced that city officials had agreed to certain concessions, King accepted bail but discovered that the white leadership refused to consider any of the movement’s demands. King returned to Albany the following summer for sentencing on the convictions related to the December marches. He and Ralph Abernathy refused to pay their $178 fines and instead chose the alternative punishment of 45 days in jail. But before much of the sentence could be carried out, a representative of the white establishment anonymously paid their fines and the pair was released against their will.

KING DECIDED TO STAY AND CARRY ON HIS EFFORT to desegregate the city. He brought in his Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) staff to coordinate the campaign. But King had a formidable opponent in Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett ostensibly practiced the nonviolence that King preached, ordering his officers to avoid brutality and name calling. When Ku Klux Klan members from outlying countries came to Albany, the police chief persuaded them to disperse quietly. Prepared for the waves of marchers King encouraged to march downtown, Pritchett had them arrested and sent off to jails in the surrounding counties, including Baker, Mitchell, and Lee.

In the end, King ran out of willing marchers before Pritchett ran out of jail space. At one point in July 1962 violence flared in Albany as frustrated blacks threw rocks and bottles at the police. King was saddened as his nonviolent attempts turned violent. He was further frustrated as fewer volunteers showed up to march and get arrested after the violence. Once again, King got himself arrested and once again he was let go. By early August it was clear that King had proven himself ineffective in bringing about change in Albany. He had failed to desegregate the city. But he learned important lessons that he and the SCLC would carry to Birmingham.

From King’s perspective the Albany Movement was a failure and he admitted as much. But African Americans in Albany disagreed. Because King failed DID NOT MEAN THAT THE MOVEMENT FAILED. SNCC field secretary (and later Albany city commissioner) Charles Sherrod remarked, "Now I can’t help how Dr. King might have felt, or...any of the rest of them in SCLC, NAACP, CORE, any of the groups, but as far as we were concerned, things moved on. We didn’t skip one beat."  In fact, two months after King left Albany, the success of black voter registration efforts led to African American businessman Thomas Chatmon’s securing enough votes in his election for a city commission seat to force a run-off election. And the following spring, the city commission removed all the segregation statutes from its books.

The challenge to the white power structure in other parts of Southwest Georgia followed in the wake of the Albany Movement. The civil rights movement developed sooner in some counties than others and the form of the movement varied from county to county. Those counties with an established black middle class and larger numbers of African Americans experienced the movement sooner than those areas with fewer blacks or a weak or nonexistent black middle class.

In 1963, African Americans in Thomasville reorganized the dormant NAACP chapter and, after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, conducted sit-ins at public facilities to test the new law. Blacks also marched in Cairo and conducted sit-ins at Bainbridge restaurants. African American students in Moultrie began that city’s movement when they boycotted classes at the all-black William Bryant High School. The students demanded teaching supplies equal to those at the all-white Moultrie Senior High School. Before it was over, 389 students were arrested and jailed in town and in nearby counties. The boycott hastened desegregation in Colquitt County and led to a freedom of choice plan allowing black seniors to enroll as Moultrie High the following fall.

Berrien County, with one of the smallest percentage of African Americans in Southwest Georgia, experienced little, if any racial turmoil in the 1960s. The small numbers and the lack of a substantial black middle class may have contributed to the lack of activity.  Meanwhile at the opposite end of the region, predominantly black Clay County (more than 60 % black throughout this century) experienced a similar lack of civil rights activity. In this case, the numbers were there but there was no black educated class in the county to provide the necessary leadership.

The civil rights movement has gone through several stages in Southwest Georgia. Once the segregation laws were challenged and overturned, movement leaders turned next to school integration in the late 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, efforts shifted to politics and the attempt to end at-large voting in city and county elections; while in the 1990s, civil rights leaders have refocused on education and discrimination practices, such as tracking (grouping students by academic ability) which persist in the region.

School integration was one of the most divisive issues once the Jim Crow statutes and ordinances were wiped off the books. The first steps were taken in the late 1960s with freedom of choice plans that allowed students to attend whatever school they wished. In many communities most white and black students were too frightened to be among the first to integrate a school. Usually the first year of such programs saw a handful of blacks students attend the town’s or county’s formerly all-white school. In 1967, only two black families in Alapaha volunteered to send their children to the Alapaha elementary school. The same year two black students integrated Northside Elementary in Tifton. One of those two, Audrey Beard, went on to Tift County Junior High where, in 1970, she was the first black to be elected Shrine Bowl Queen. The victory was bittersweet, though, when none of her attendants, all of who were white, showed up at her coronation.

After the first blacks to integrate white schools made it through their first year or two in Southwest Georgia, court-ordered integration required many school boards to sit down and devise the busing necessary to achieve it. Suddenly, white parents in many Southwest Georgia counties became enthusiasts of private education and white academies were established. Some 30 years later a number of these schools still flourish in the region. At the same time, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia established a new junior college in Albany to meet the needs of its residents for higher education close to home. No one considered at the time the possibility of enhancing the campus of Albany State College, the city’s historically black senior college, as a way to meet the higher education needs of white Albany area residents.

The recent demographic history of Lee County dramatically illustrates some of the recent developments in Southwest Georgia race relations. In 1930, Lee County was the heart of the Southwest Georgia black belt. With African Americans comprising 77.9 percent of the county’s population, Lee had the highest black population percentage in the state. Sixty years later, blacks comprised a mere 19.3 percent of Lee’s population. The big turning point came in the 1960s. Between 1930 and 1960, Lee’s population declined, largely as a result of blacks leaving. In August 1962, at the time of the Albany Movement, the Shady Grove Baptist Church was firebombed four days after SNCC workers had conducted a voter registration meeting there. The Lee County sheriff investigated and concluded that lightning had caused the blaze.

Lee County blacks continued to leave in the 1960s, but now large numbers of whites, many from neighboring Dougherty County moved in. In the 1970s the black population declined by 10 percent, while the white population grew at the rate of 124 percent. Lee was becoming Dougherty’s bedroom community as whites abandoned the latter’s integrated schools where growing numbers of blacks attended. White flight continued to increase the percentage of whites in Lee County in the 1980s and 1990s. A Lee County Chamber of Commerce was established and began touting its superior (i.e., whiter) school system.

Meanwhile community leaders in Albany and several other larger Southwest Georgia cities began in the 1990s to address the issues of race that had been swept under the carpet. The Albany Area Chamber of Commerce helped establish and supports the Coalition for Diversity, which touts the advantages of a diverse and multicultural work force and community. BASE Network, a group of African American professionals, built a memorial in downtown Albany to celebrate the Albany Movement.

The citizens of Dougherty County voted in 1994 for a 1 percent sales tax, $750,000 of which was allocated for the renovation of the Old Mount Zion Church into a civil rights movement museum. Additional funds from the city of Albany, a number of industries and other companies, as well as from individuals made the completion of the Albany Civil Rights Museum possible in 1998. And supporting all of these efforts is The Albany Herald, which in the early 1960s campaigned vigorously against Martin Luther King, Jr., and black Southwest Georgians’ struggle to destroy segregation.

 The civil rights revolution has made significant changes in Southwest Georgia. Lynching and legal segregation are things of the past. Blacks and Whites work together and attend school together, but rarely do they pray or play together. The way we work and the way we educated our young may be easier to change than our attitudes. There is a lot more racial harmony today than 30 years ago, but division remains. Churches remain largely segregated with a few of them accepting token blacks.

When several middle class black families move into a formerly all-white neighborhood, the real estate agents begin their campaign to change it into a black neighborhood. Even local historical societies are not immune to racial division. Since 1983, historical societies in Lee, Calhoun, Baker, and Seminole Counties have published county histories that largely ignore the African American past; this is especially regrettable since three of the four counties were predominantly black for most of their history.
This article was first published in a supplement to the Albany Herald, November 15, 1998, on the eve of the Museum's opening.