Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction by Greene Melissa Fay

Author:Greene, Melissa Fay [Greene, Melissa Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics
ISBN: 9780306824951
Amazon: 0306824957
Goodreads: 35033486
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1991-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

3

Sammie Pinkney was not the first person in McIntosh to call on the services of the legal aid lawyers. Sheriff Poppell was.

“I remember the first time I met Tom Poppell,” said Tom Affleck, “though I didn’t know at the time who he was. I was up in Hinesville, at the courthouse to do some divorces, and he came up to me: kind of a thin fellow wearing a polyester leisure suit. He didn’t look like an intimidating or a hard-nosed guy at all. He came up and said to me, ‘I understand you’re from Legal Aid, and we got some folks over here in McIntosh need some divorces. Would you mind helping us out?’ Very cordial and friendly.

“Then as we were up there more and more, we realized how powerful he was. We used to joke—and I don’t know if this is true or not—we used to say he was the only sheriff in America who owned four houses, one with an airfield, and all on twelve thousand dollars a year.”

As happened in most circuit-riding towns, a GLSP attorney—in this case, Marian Smith from Brunswick—borrowed the use of a cubicle at the welfare office in Darien and saw clients referred to her by welfare caseworkers. It was not the best method for getting at the true and large grievances in the poor community, but the twice-monthly appearances in town established a presence. Sammie Pinkney, well read and well traveled, probably the most well read and worldliest black man in McIntosh, assumed the Legal Aid lawyers would be capable of analyzing more complex cases than divorces and food stamps. But he was not one to sit on a folding chair in the steamy, crowded hallway of the welfare office among wet-bottomed babies and pregnant mothers and cane-wielding old ladies, waiting for a turn. In the middle of the summer of 1975, he phoned the GLSP office in Brunswick for an appointment with the managing attorney and invited Alston and Grovner—worn out and hoarse from the nightly church meetings—to take a ride with him down the coast.

“It had gotten so heated in Darien at that point, after Chatham Jones was let go,” said Sammie, “that white folks felt they had to call in the Ku Klux Klan. They marched more than once. The last time they came, we came so close to having bloodshed it was unbelievable. They marched in Darien, then Thurnell Alston was shot at, at the Omega Club, by a particular individual driving by in a truck—shot the door out as Thurnell was going in. Most of them came from elsewhere. I believe there were two local people who robed up. We saw them; we took pictures of them; we knew who they worked for. It was so heated then, we were having nightly meetings.

“When I came back from New York, I already had two years of law studies, and I was very familiar with a lot of things I knew we could do. I was involved with a

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