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work on a voter registration project for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee in southwest Georgia. About
mid July, one of our weekly meetings at the Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Sasser,
was taken over by Sheriff Zeke T. Mathews and fifteen or twenty deputized white
citizens with nightsticks and five cell flashlights. They pretty much surrounded the little congregation of about thirty-five people who'd assembled in the church from the five county area SNCC was working in to swap stories of attempts to register to vote, sing freedom songs and pray. With
all those deputies around tapping those flashlights repeatedly into their
hands, we prayed a little harder than usual that night. |
Ralph Allen photographed by Danny Lyon in
Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
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Shortly after he and his men strolled into the church, Sheriff Mathews walked front and center of the church saying to Lucius Holloway, who was presiding, "Now look-a here, Lucius. What you-all want to vote for? You ain't never wanted to vote till these outside agitators come down here from New York and Massachusetts and put these dang fool ideas in your head."
About that point, he realized that there were three white men sitting in the front left of the church writing furiously in their notebooks. ""Hey there, boy, who are you?" he said to them.
"I'm Claud Sitton from the New York Times, and I'm a native Georgian just like yourself," drawled one, standing up and giving a little respectful bow. The others followed suit. The next said his name and added, "I"m from the Atlanta Constitution, and I was born and raised over in Moultry County." The third said he was from Newsweek Magazine and lived in New York City.
"Well, you just write this down just like I say it," said Sheriff Mathews. He proceeded to single people out of the congregation and interrogate them about why they were there and where they came from. Mr. Sitton wrote down everything that happened, and the story got printed on the front page of the Times the next day, and according to Taylor Branch in his book Parting the Waters about Dr. Martin Luther King, President Kennedy was so outraged by the story that he went storming into Attorney General Robert Kennedy's office and told him to find out what was going on down there in Georgia.
Clearly, Sheriff Mathews was made uncomfortable by the fallout from the incident because he, personally, became more cagey in dealing with voter registration workers. In late August, however, just as I was getting ready to go back to school, the Mt. Olive Baptist Church was firebombed and burned to the ground about four o'clock one Sunday morning. Rev. Charles Sherrod, who was my boss, called Dr. King in Atlanta shortly after he heard the news from Deacon Bruner, who lived next door to the church. Dr. King was scheduled to preach at his father’s church, Ebenezer Baptist, that morning. It's a big church, not an engagement he could drop easily, but he must have gotten on the road pretty quickly because by ten o'clock the next morning he and a retinue of reporters had driven the three or four hours from Atlanta to Terrell County to be with the people who'd lost their church.
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The reporters took pictures of what was left of the church, ashes and pipes and chimney, and Deacon Bruner told the story once again of how he'd woken up as the car sped off and seen the inside of the little country church ablaze beyond hope of saving. Then we all gathered round in the yard between Bruners' and the cotton field and Dr. King preached and said, "We will rebuild this church."
Nobody knew who the "we" was, but we prayed and sang a freedom song or two. At the end we all gathered in a circle and crossed our arms, each person holding hands with the person on either side and sang "We Shall Overcome."
In Southwest Georgia the way it ends is everybody hums the song and anybody who's moved to say or pray anything goes ahead and does it. Rev. Wells from Albany, who would later go to work for Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he prayed, and Sherrod prayed. |
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Ralph Allen pictured 4th from the right in this photo from Open Dem Cells
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My friend Chris Potter, who used to teach here describes good friends as those who "you can call late, and they'll come early." That's the kind of person Dr. King was. That's the point I want to make about him. In addition to being a visionary, a deeply inspiring writer and speaker, and a man of such courage he could walk daily joking with the shadow of death, he was a "call late and come early" friend to whole communities of people he didn't even know |
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For More Informtion About Dr. King:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University
The King Center
Additional Information About Ralph Allen's Experiences with SNCC:
Allen, Ralph
"Voter Registration As Direct Action"
A Circle of Trust
edited by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg
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Lyons, Danny
Memories of the Southern
Civil Rights Movement
Foreward by Julian Bond
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Jenkins, Mary Royal
Open Dem Cells:
A Pictoral History of the Albany Movement
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GA
> Faculty > Think About It! > Ralph Allen
Last updated 01/17/03 Andrea Owens
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