They did so in mid-November 1961, when the major Black improvement organizations in town formed the Albany Movement and selected as their president William G. Yet at important moments, Albany’s African Americans rose above the divisions. Divisions in the Black community would continue to plague civil rights efforts throughout 19. From the start they faced opposition from whites as well as conservative African Americans. The SNCC workers encouraged students and others in Albany to challenge the establishment and its segregation policies.
#Aim definition civil rights registration#
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. King, went to law school and used his talents on behalf of African Americans in the segregated courtrooms of southwest Georgia. Others petitioned local governments to make improvements in the infrastructure of Black neighborhoods. The perennial desire to gain more control over their own lives led some middle-class African Americans to organize voter registration drives in the 1940s and 1950s. Although dormant within years, it was revitalized in the 1940s. King founded a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Albany. In the immediate wake of World War I (1917-18), returning Black veteran C. BackgroundĪlthough 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. 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-creates a very different picture of the freedom struggle in the southwest corner of the state. Out of Albany’s failure, then, came Birmingham’s success. 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.
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. 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.
The Albany Movement began in fall 1961 and ended in summer 1962.
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