The Albany Movement begins in the middle of 1961.
The people of the city of Albany, like many Americans throughout the South,
have grown increasingly impatient with
segregation, increasingly impatient with the pace of change.
Particularly in Albany, the young people who are inspired by the changes that have been occurring
throughout the South. Specific examples of those changes would be the Nashville
Movement, where students desegregated lunchroom counters.
The fact that in other southern cities change was occurring galvanized and mobilized blacks
and whites in and around Albany, Georgia to do something about their city and
what made the Albany Movement so bold and so unique was that the activists in
Albany decided that they were not going to undertake to desegregate one
institution or one facility at a time. They were going to try to desegregate
everything at once.
Led by SNCC, they would have public marches to protest segregation. They knew
that those public marches would attract news reporters with cameras who would
film their actions as well as write about their actions. They invited Dr.
King to come down because of his national and really international
visibility. They understood that if Dr. King marched with them, if Dr. King went
to jail with them, then they would take the Albany Movement to an entirely
different level. They would engage a wider national and international audience.
So Dr. King did come, and he did participate in the Albany Movement.
Their long-term goal was obviously to desegregate everything. Their short-term
goal was during these protests, during these sit-ins, to have confrontations
with police officers. They wanted policemen to get a little violent with them.
They wanted to show the hostility, the aggression of the local police and of
segregationists, and they wanted to show how it was very powerful to return that
kind of violence with non-violence. What they didn't expect was a police force
that had studied their tactics, that had studied the writings of Dr. King, that
had studied the writings of Mohandas Gandhi. Led by police officer Laurie
Pritchett, the police tried to be very dignified and respectful to the
activists in front of the cameras, so that the confrontations that were filmed
and photographed lacked the drama of the confrontations that we see in places
like Birmingham and in places like Montgomery.
Dr. King came and went several times during the Albany Movement, which lasted
between 1961 and 1962. Ultimately much of Albany was desegregated.
Nevertheless, many insiders, as well as historians of the Civil Rights Movement, feel that the
Albany Movement was a failure because there was no dramatic moment when all of
the walls fell, so to speak, and all of the rules changed. The rules about Jim
Crow changed gradually and some of them well after Dr. King had moved on to Birmingham,
well after the years of 1961 to 62. But the conclusion one can draw
from the Albany Movement is that as far as the local citizens of Albany who are
involved in the movement action are concerned, that movement was a success.
A success because it gave individuals in Albany, many of whom had experienced in
their families generations of Jim Crow, the understanding that they could as
individuals change their communities. It gave the Albany Movement gave local
people a sense of voice and visibility that many of them had never had before.