Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

Author:Taylor Branch [Branch, Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History: American, USA, Military History, United States - History - 1953-1961, African American Studies, Afro-Americans, United States - 20th Century, American history: from c 1900 -, Social Science, Political Freedom & Security, Second World War, Civil rights movements, САЩ, Cultural Heritage, American history, 60s, Civil Rights, Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General, United States - Race relations - History - 20th century, United States, Biography & Autobiography, POLITICAL SCIENCE, Civil rights movements - United States - History - 20th century, c 1960 to c 1970, African Americans - Civil rights, History, History of the Americas, African Americans, 20th century, Афроамериканци, General, King; Martin Luther, c 1945 to c 1960, History - U.S., Граждански права, Ethnic Studies, World history, Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - Histor, Black studies, 50s
ISBN: 9780671687427
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1989-11-15T07:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

ALMOST CHRISTMAS IN ALBANY

Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon made a special bus trip to attend the Moses trial in McComb. They watched their friends being led off to jail, then they returned to their new outpost in Albany, Georgia. Since criminal charges arising from their own McComb arrests had been dropped in mid-October, they had been working to re-create the Mississippi registration project in the cotton, pecan, and peanut region of southwest Georgia around Albany. They had arrived there full of zeal and empty of nearly everything else, sleeping at times in parked cars or on porches. Having spent the summer in Mississippi, they thought of Albany as a slightly larger version of McComb, and of Terrell County as a forsaken plantation of violence, like Amite County.

From the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Sherrod had obtained the name of C. W. King, a prosperous Albany Negro who was a supporter of liberal causes. Patriarch of a remarkable family, C. W. King had seven sons, all highly educated, many of whom had studied abroad. The eldest, Clennon, was the professor who had been declared insane in 1958 because he was crazy enough to apply for admission to the University of Mississippi. The youngest, Preston, was an expatriate professor of philosophy at the University of South Wales, in Australia. Of the five middle brothers, two remained in Albany as pillars of the young Negro establishment. Slater King was a builder and real estate broker, like his father. C. B. King was one of only three Negro lawyers in all of Georgia outside Atlanta. (He had secured his brother Clennon’s release from Whitfield Asylum in Mississippi.) He wore a neatly trimmed beard and tailored suits, and he discussed all subjects in a melodious, polysyllabic stream. Yet with all his affectations, C. B. King remained in Albany to press the legal claims of maids, mechanics, and drunkards. Local white lawyers did not quite know what to make of him.

The eccentric senior King allowed Sherrod and Reagon to occupy an empty room in one of his buildings. The two young SNCC workers seemed a scruffy and unlikely pair of political leaders. Reagon was only eighteen. As a high school student in Nashville, he had so resented James Lawson’s rule barring him from the nonviolence workshops as too young that he had crashed some of the Nashville demonstrations. By his own account the seriousness of the movement had not sunk in until he arrived at Parchman Penitentiary in a truck with the first Freedom Riders and saw the guards there beat, shock, and strip the two prostrate Chicago pacifists. Reagon was fearless, but most of his SNCC elders regarded him as a kid who was a little too eager to keep up.

Sherrod was the only SNCC veteran who tolerated his company, and to the Albany Kings, Sherrod himself was a young man of mixed qualities. There had always been something about him that was dangerous as well as innocent. When as a teenager he had announced

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