Local & State Headlines

Shipp sails into civil rights museum

• A Sylvester activist and political force becomes a permanent part of the Albany Civil Rights Institute.

Susan McCord

ALBANY — From a 1982 run as Sylvester’s first black candidate for mayor to organizing a 2004 meeting of ranking Georgia Democrats, Mary Alice Shipp pushed the boundaries of Southwest Georgia civil rights history. But Albany’s Civil Rights Institute has room for it all.

“My mother always told me, let my work speak for itself,” said Paula Shipp Adams, Shipp’s daughter, at an impromptu ceremony Saturday honoring Shipp, 80, now a resident at Albany’s Evergreen Assisted Living.

The artifacts of Mary Shipp’s work and that of others who accomplished civil rights “firsts” in Worth County will become a part of the 12,000-square-foot expansion under construction at Albany’s civil rights museum, since Shipp decided to donate her large collection of photographs, newspaper clippings, plaques and awards to the museum.

“We shall ever be grateful, not only for what you gave in the struggle for equality, but for allowing us to share it with the rest of the world forever,” said C.W. Grant, Chairman of the Board of Albany Tomorrow Inc., the organization responsible for construction and development of the museum expansion.

The museum, which now occupies the sanctuary of Old Mount Zion Church where Martin Luther King Jr. rallied crowds in 1961 and 1962, seeks to tell the entire story of civil rights in Southwest Georgia, from its earliest origins in Albany, to the changes in rural counties that sometimes took longer to develop, said Brenda Hodges-Tiller, director of the museum expansion.

“When it comes to the movements in the various communities, we have not been able to secure the kind of artifacts that we’ve been looking for; pieces of communication (showing) that the activities actually took place,” Hodges-Tiller said. “Mrs. Shipp has been kind enough to share hers.”

A native of McRae, Shipp’s involvement in Worth County civil rights began when she returned to Sylvester in the 1960s after teaching at Worth’s segregated high school, Oak Hill, from 1952-1957.

The county was slow to desegregate, but a pioneer was Dorothy Young, who at 14 was jailed for three months at Albany Detention Center after her parents enrolled her and a younger sister at all-white Warwick Elementary School in 1968.

“There were many people who were in the struggle at that time,” Shipp said Friday. “But in all that struggle they didn’t get any ... people were afraid to register.”

Shipp’s collection of papers helps to document these events, though she and her husband, Sylvester native Curtis Shipp, didn’t get actively involved in the Worth County movement until the 1970s.

Her husband “was disturbed because we had no black elected officials,” said Shipp, who by 1978 was spokesperson for the Worth County branch of the NAACP, speaking out publicly after a black woman was shot in the back at a local furniture store by the store’s manager.

During that same summer, the NAACP registered about 1,500 black voters, on street corners and in rural areas because blacks were “afraid to go to the courthouse,” and in 1979 Curtis Shipp became the county’s first black elected official, Mary Shipp said.

He served on the Sylvester City Council only two years before resigning to head the city’s sanitation department, but by 1982 Mary Shipp was determined to enter politics and made her first run for mayor.

“I got so upset with the way they were doing,” she said. “I thought I needed to be on that council so we’d have a voice.”

During the early 1980s, the Worth NAACP would sue Sylvester over its at-large voting system, and a three-judge federal panel ruled the city had to adopt a ward system, she said.

Shipp also took on Worth County schools, where blacks did not serve on the Board of Education and were refused the opportunity to speak at board meetings.

“We had to go to Atlanta, and then they came down to do an investigation ... The board agreed to do some things,” she said.

It was also the beginning of new alliances for Shipp, who became “very good friends” with Worth’s white superintendent of schools, Alan Kimbro.

“Some of the people I had trouble with, they became my staunch supporters,” Shipp said.

Shipp won election to the Sylvester City Council in 1984, a position she held until 1992, when she resigned to run for mayor a third time.

That same year, Gov. Zell Miller appointed Shipp to the Georgia Board of Corrections, which oversees the state’s prison system. She held the post for six years.

In 2002, Sylvester named its new senior citizen center for Mary Alice Shipp.

Still a stronghold with the county NAACP during the 2000s, Shipp would increasingly disagree with local black officials, such as Sylvester councilman Bruce Washington, who spoke out against the 2004 death of Herman Jackson during his arrest by Assistant Police Chief Charles Thurmond.

“Dr. Washington and I were friends, but I was not the kind of person he wanted. He got more vocal and angry. I believed in attacking issues, not people,” she said.

Washington died in 2005.

The Worth NAACP had differed with state and regional branches and said Jackson’s death was an accident.

Camilla’s first black mayor, Mary Jo Haywood, and Sylvester councilman Larry Johnson said recently that Shipp had inspired them to seek elected office.

“It must be something in the name,” Haywood said.

“What an inspiration you’ve been to all of us,” Dougherty Commissioner Art Searles said. “By your contribution, we can show young people what courage can do.”

Even Worth’s longtime sheriff, Freddie Tompkins, paid his respects to Shipp at the ceremony, which was organized by Dougherty Commissioner Muarlean Edwards, who got to know Shipp well while employed with Worth County schools.

“Over the years that I’ve been sheriff, Mrs. Shipp has always helped me out,” Tompkins said. “She’d come by and see me or call me — I appreciate the advice she gave me.”

Shipp never hesitated to call — newspaper reporters or friends at the capitol — when she had a concern.

“She will call you,” Edwards said.

Edwards said she felt honored when Shipp asked her to organize the event last Saturday.

“I thought it was very important, because she’s accomplished so much, that those things need to be shared,” Edwards said. “Although it was done in a quick manner, I did not have any trouble getting a local, state and regional response.”

Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany, as well as the City of Dawson responded with letters of appreciation presented at the ceremony.

Museum officials hope Shipp’s contribution of memorabilia will inspire others to entrust their belongings with the museum, Hodges-Tiller said.

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