We Changed the World by Harding Vincent;Lewis Earl;Kelley Robin D. G.;

Author:Harding, Vincent;Lewis, Earl;Kelley, Robin D. G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

After black teenagers had gathered at the Albany public library to sing and pray as part of a protest, white police officers quickly moved in and arrested them.

Nevertheless, King, Abernathy, and some of their SCLC staff arrived in Albany for a December 16 mass meeting that they understood to be a one-night inspirational event. But at the meeting Anderson publicly maneuvered King into leading a march the next day. As a result, King and his organization became enmeshed in a very difficult situation.

Increasingly, Albany attracted black and white allies from across the nation. Religious communities were especially attracted to the strong church component of the movement’s mass meetings, marches, and mass jailing. But Albany’s black leaders, now joined by King and the SCLC, were working for something that had never been attempted in the South before. They had moved beyond the immediate confrontational settings of the bus and train terminals and were pressing for the desegregation of the entire city, beginning with its municipally owned public accommodations and its local bus lines. Such a development was a necessary and inevitable step in the burgeoning Southern struggle, but no one knew how to organize for it or to develop a citywide strategy. Much later, Charles Sherrod admitted, “We didn’t know what we were doing. We’d never done it before.”

The movement’s task was complicated by the fact that Laurie Pritchett, the chief of police, was not a volatile loose cannon like some of his counterparts in other Southern communities. Instead, Pritchett was very concerned about public relations and insisted that his officers rein in their tendencies toward violent treatment of the black community, especially when they were under the scrutiny of the mass media. This strategy was meant to deprive the movement of emotional rallying points and to deprive an already recalcitrant federal government of any reasons for entering the Albany situation. Partly because of Pritchett’s strategy, partly because of divisions within the Albany Movement, partly because of the unprecedented demands that they were pressing on the segregated city, and partly because of their own inexperience with such a setting, King, SNCC, and the Albany Movement leaders were unable to reach their immediate goals of achieving the desegregation of public facilities, such as libraries, swimming pools, and courthouses. They could not get the city fathers to expose the racist violence that had kept the black community down for so long. Pritchett undermined the very basis of nonviolent passive resistance by refusing to respond with violence. There were no dramatic images of activists being attacked or beaten by mobs. Instead, they were peacefully arrested for breaking the law.

Pritchett’s strategy of limiting publicity was best illustrated by his response to one of three Albany jailings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his fellow SCLC leader, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. After each arrest for their role in the Albany demonstrations, they chose to remain in jail in order to make a point of their sacrifice and to heighten national outrage over the situation in Albany. After the first arrest, they were released on bail after negotiations with city officials.

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