According to traditional accounts the Albany Movement began in fall 1961 and ended in summer 1962. It was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era to have as its goal the desegregation of an entire community, and it resulted in the jailing of more than 1,000 African Americans in Albany and surrounding rural counties. Martin Luther King Jr. was drawn into the movement in December 1961 when hundreds of black protesters, including himself, were arrested in one week, but eight months later King left Albany admitting that he had failed to accomplish the movement's goals. When told as a chapter in the history of the national civil rights movement, Albany was important because of King's involvement and because of the lessons he learned that he would soon apply in Birmingham, Alabama. Out of Albany's failure, then, came Birmingham's success.
Recent historians, however, have suggested that extending the narrative of the Albany Movement chronologically and geographically and treating the movement on its own terms—as a local movement with deep roots—rather than viewing it as one brief failure in the long saga of the national civil rights movement, creates a very different picture of the freedom struggle in the southwest corner of the state.
Although the struggle for civil rights in Albany can be said to have started during Reconstruction, when thousands of politically active black men elected fellow African Americans to local and state offices, the roots of the modern movement can be traced to the early-twentieth-century Jim Crow era, when fewer than thirty African Americans were registered to vote in Albany. In the immediate wake of World War I (1917-18), returning black veteran C. W. King founded a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Albany. Although dormant within years, it was revitalized in the 1940s. The perennial desire to gain more control over their own lives led some middle-class blacks to organize voter registration drives in the 1940s and 1950s. Others petitioned local governments to make improvements in the infrastructure of African American neighborhoods. C. W. King's son, C. B. King, went to law school and used his talents on behalf of African Americans in the segregated courtrooms of southwest Georgia.
In 1961 Albany witnessed the intersection of some of these local efforts with those of three young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers—Charles Sherrod, Cordell Reagon, and Charles Jones—who had come to the Albany area to conduct a voter registration drive.
William G. Anderson, a young black osteopath. Mass meetings were called, protestors marched, and by mid-December more than 500 demonstrators had been jailed. The leaders decided to call in Martin Luther King Jr. to keep the momentum going and to secure greater national publicity for the cause. In December King spoke at a mass meeting, marched the next day, and was arrested and jailed.
In Albany King witnessed the power of song to inspire and empower the crowds attending the mass meetings. Out of Albany emerged the SNCC Freedom Singers, including Albany native Bernice Johnson Reagon, who brought this rich musical tradition, borrowed from the rural Baptist churches, to other communities around the nation.
Convinced that city officials had agreed to certain concessions, King accepted bail only to discover that the white leadership refused to consider any of the movement's demands. King returned to Albany the following summer for sentencing on the convictions relating to the December marches. Although he and fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy chose jail over paying a fine, a white attorney anonymously paid their fines, and they were released against their will.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staff to coordinate the campaign. He had a formidable opponent in Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett ostensibly practiced the nonviolence that King preached, ordering his officers to avoid brutality, at least when the TV cameras and news reporters were present. Prepared for the waves of marchers King encouraged, Pritchett had them arrested and sent off to jails in the surrounding counties, including Baker, Mitchell, and Lee.
In the end King ran out of willing marchers before Pritchett ran out of jail space. Once again King got himself arrested, and once again he was let go. By early August it was clear that King had proved ineffective in bringing about change in Albany, but he had learned the important lessons that he and the SCLC would carry to Birmingham.
From King's perspective the Albany Movement was a failure, but African Americans in Albany disagreed.
Americus and Moultrie, and African Americans in other southwest Georgia towns and counties were inspired to challenge their local white power structures. The civil rights movement went through several stages in the Albany area. Once the segregation laws were challenged and overturned, movement leaders turned to school integration in the late 1960s and 1970s. When court-ordered integration required many school boards in and around Albany to bus students, white parents established private academies, many of which still flourish in the region.
In the 1980s civil rights efforts shifted to politics and the attempt to end at-large voting in city and county elections. By the Albany Civil Rights Institute, which opened in 1998. And supporting all of these efforts was the Albany Herald, which in the early 1960s campaigned vigorously against King and the black struggle to destroy segregation.
Media Gallery: Albany Movement