Essay: Albany Civil Rights Movement

The short term cause of the Birmingham campaign was the Albany Civil Rights Movement in 1961. This campaign was on organised November 17, 1961, in Albany, Georgia. The Albany Movement challenged all forms of racial segregation and discrimination in the city. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the movement in December 1961. The people of Albany had become impatient with the ways of segregation and increasingly impatient with the pace of change. They would have public peaceful marches and sit ins to protest segregation. By having their protests public they hoped the reporters would film them spreading the word by the media, drawing attention to their efforts of integration. They invited Martin Luther King because of his international status and visibility in the public. If King marched with them and went to prison it would headline on the news taking the Albany Movement to an entirely different level.
The difference of their movement compared to others such as the Nashville Movement was that they wanted to desegregate everything at the same time. It would be a huge step for African American rights and freedom in society. One strategy was during these protests they wanted police officers to get a little rough and violent with them. To highlight to the media, how they are treated and why it’s wrong. But the lead police officer Laurie Pritchett studied their tactics and the books of Dr. Kings and the writings of Gandhi. That fighting with aggression did not work. The police tried to be very dignified and respectful to the activists in front of the cameras. This worked, and the confrontations that were filmed and published lacked the drama and caught less viewers eyes. The nation’s media was less likely to be attracted to what was going on. Pritchett was a very intelligent and sharp in his actions. After studying the writings of famous peaceful protesters like Gandhi he went to surrounding counties and got permission to use their prisons incase of an overflow. So when the jails got full, he would just transfer the prisoners to other jails.
Every tactic or advancement King would make Pritchett would counter it. Such as when King went to jail and was determined to stay there, Pritchett got worried that this would be a rallying point if he had to keep Martin Luther King in jail and for weeks. So Pritchett paid his bail and held a press conference blaming an ‘unidentified black man” for paying his bail. This caused a lot of controversy over who this ‘unidentified Black man’ was, until it was later released that Pritchett did it. Dr. King came and went several times during the Albany Movement between 1961-1962, until he moved onto Birmingham. The rules of Jim Crow gradually changed over a couple years – well after King left. In a sense the Albany Movement was a failure because it didn’t specifically meet their goal of ending all of segregation in one. But it did however give the understanding to individuals who had experienced many generations of Jim Crow that they had the ability to change their communities.