Local & State Headlines

Long, hard road

• Albany is still building on its place in history.

Susan McCord

ALBANY — Forty years today since his assassination at a Memphis motel, Albany continues to remember, and to build, in remembrance of the city’s most famous visitor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Some 300 people were already jailed for protesting when King arrived in Albany Dec. 15, 1961, to speak at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, said Charles Sherrod, who’d arrived that year with the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

“The whole idea was to stay there until they let us out for free,” Sherrod said. But the pressure was mounting from parents and older adults who feared for the safety of prisoners, many of whom Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett and others had sent to jails in Albany and the surrounding counties of Terrell, Lee, Baker, Worth, Mitchell and Sumter.

Expecting to give a speech and go home, King instead marched the next day with 264 others, and all were arrested.

Albany then, as it is now, was the retail hub of Southwest Georgia. Many came to the city to do business. But like the rest of the region, segregation was taken for granted.

“It was the mindset that made people allow other people to make them put on a stocking cap before they tried on a hat,” Sherrod said.

“The Albany Movement’s greatest accomplishment was the freeing of our minds. People who would bow down to a white woman now look them straight in the eye; they go to the front door.”

King visited Albany at least three times, staying for a period of days or weeks at the homes of friends, including Dr. William Anderson, who was named president of the Albany Movement when it was formed Nov. 17, 1961.

“What I remember most is the fact that I didn’t have to knock on doors to get anybody to come to a mass meeting when Doc was here,” Sherrod said.

“(He’d) speak and it would make your flesh crawl. He could speak and you’d be able to march out there in front of fire hoses, state troopers, cattle prods, beatings, the KKK or whatever you had to face that day, you’d go face it.”

Mary Royal Jenkins was a young teacher at segregated Carver Junior High who volunteered as a secretary at SNCC’s makeshift office in Anderson’s home.

“There were all kinds of retaliation against people who participated in the movement,” said Jenkins.

“Churches burned where pastors had opened their doors to mass meetings,” including three churches in Leesburg and a fourth in Sasser during 1962.

That year, however, Albany would have a series of never-before-seen firsts, including the first black candidate, Thomas Chatmon, for Albany City Commission, and the first black employee, Adella Cutts Russ, at all-white Albany Vocational-Technical School.

The next year, Slater King ran for mayor of Albany, and the first black students were admitted to Albany High School and Highland Elementary School.

Jenkins, an English teacher, also put together one of the few books that focuses on the Albany Movement, called “Open Dem Cells,” which includes numerous photographs taken by Benjamin Cochran, whose photo studio her husband, photographer A.E. Jenkins, acquired.

“When I would attend the mass meetings, I just knew that this was a moment in history and that I should be recording the things that people were saying and doing,” Mary Royal Jenkins said.

She was still teaching when King was killed, more than six years after his time in Albany.

“It was very sad. I knew that we had lost a great leader; that speech that he made the night before — he had been to the mountaintop — that was quite emotional,” Jenkins said.

“Always when you are in a movement of that type, you’re going to have the good and the bad. In this situation (Albany), a lot of people never knew about a lot of things that went on.”

Jenkins said that the persona of the “good police chief,” Chief Laurie Pritchett, is what was spread.

“You know when you think about people like Sherrod going out in those counties on those dirt roads,” to organize and register people to vote in rural counties surrounding Albany, “really they were near-death kind of situations,” she said.

“I’m sure among those who were taking those kinds of chances, I guess they were thinking in their hearts this was for freedom and for freedom I’ll die.

“What I get frustrated with today is there are so many people that don’t realize what the struggle was all about. They think that because they can walk in the front door of a McDonald’s or Burger King they could always do that.”

Sherrod was at a meeting in rural Clay County when he heard about King’s death.

“I immediately stopped the meeting, walked out of the house and walked down the road; the moon was high and full,” he recalls. “I just was to myself and talking to my God, walking down the road having lost a friend.”

King would be overjoyed to see the changes in American society since 1968, Sherrod said.

“I think he’d be happy to see where we’ve come from, where we were,” he said.

“I think he’d be happy to see the Obama phenomenon; that’s what we’ve prayed for, a history in which we see black hands and white hands feeling the same, not based on the color of his skin but on the content of his or her character.”

Albany has made substantial progress on the expansion of the Albany Civil Rights Museum at Mt. Zion Church, and the project is expected to open in October, museum administrator Irene Hall said.

“People are really interested in the Southwest Georgia experience,” Hall said.

Jenkins and others have been working steadily to compose the scripts that will become part of interactive exhibits inside the expansion, which also will include a city bus.

Students who staged a sit-in at Albany’s Trailways Bus Station to test the new federal law desegregating transportation facilities were the first to be arrested in Albany.

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