From Pre-Civil War to Post-Civil Rights: The Political Lives of African-Americans from Slavery to the 21st Century in Perry County, Alabama by Valerie Pope Burnes A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December 8, 2012 Keywords: Voting Rights; Civil Rights; Perry County, Alabama; Race; African American Copyright 2012 by Valerie Pope Burnes Approved by David C. Carter, Chair, Associate Professor of History Reagan L. Grimsley, Assistant Professor of History Charles A. Israel, Associate Professor of History Abstract African Americans have played a major role in the history of Perry County almost since the first white settlers arrived in the area with their black enslaved laborers. In a county known for its pre-Civil War cotton wealth, enslaved blacks plowed the fields and built the houses that made all of that wealth possible. In 1865, they were freed when Union soldiers moved through the county on their way to the Confederate arsenal in Selma. The freed men and women worked to establish their identity in a white governing society that wanted interaction on their own terms. Through the establishment of their own churches, schools, and businesses, blacks maneuvered within a segregated society that allowed them to learn at the Lincoln School but offered them no employment opportunities to use their education other than menial labor. Exactly 100 years after gaining their freedom, the African-American community in Perry County, in conjunction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, marched on the county courthouse and lined up at the voter registration office to demand change. Through the work of the U.S. Department of Justice and the local black community, the Civil Rights Movement in Perry County helped define and pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This work documents the lives of African-Americans in Perry County from slavery through segregation and then discusses the Civil Rights Movement in the county and its impact on the lives of blacks and whites in the county into the twenty-first century. ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii List of Abbreviations ......................................................................................................... iv Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: “With Colored Servants for Each”: The Ante-Bellum History of African Americans in Perry County ............................................................................. 19 Chapter 2: “To Feel Within Their Hearts ‘A Possibility of Inexhaustible Happiness’”: Reconstruction and the Founding of Religious and Educational Institutions in Perry County ............................................................................................... 61 Chapter 3: The Rising Star: The Life of African Americans in Perry County in the First Half of the Twentieth Century ................................................................ 99 Chapter 4: “Perry County Negro Activities”: The Beginning of the Movement in Perry County ............................................................................................. 142 Chapter 5: “Troopers, Negroes Clash in Marion”: The Climax of the Voting Rights Struggle in Perry County ………………………………………………….. 205 Chapter 6: To “Demand Loyalty and Unity Throughout the Negro Electorate”: The Political Landscape of Perry County Since 1965 …………………………. 242 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 258 iii List of Abbreviations CORE Congress of Racial Equality PCCL Perry County Civic League SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference SNCC Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee MLKC Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violence, Atlanta, GA ADAH Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, AL iv Introduction It was the best of times. Marion, Alabama, in the mid-twentieth century, was a small, thriving rural Alabama town. As with most towns in the Black Belt region of west central Alabama, Marion survived the Civil War, and Wilson’s Raiders, and did what it could to pick up where it left off before the war began. White landowners who managed to keep their land, and those who had moved to the area right after the Civil War to take advantage of cheap land prices, continued to plant cotton and assert their influence in the Alabama state legislature. After the creation of several Alabama state constitutions during Reconstruction that were not favorable to white landowners, the planters were able to regain and eventually cement their control through district apportionment via the 1901 state constitution. The populations in their counties were small, and the black majority of the population was not allowed to vote, the Perry County representative in the Alabama state house represented 8,679 residents, while a representative from Mobile represented 104,767 residents.1 Both representatives cast votes that were weighted the same. But some things in Perry County had changed after, and because of, the Civil War. The descendants of African-born slaves brought to the United States prior to 1808 still worked the land, growing and harvesting cotton. But now, according to the 1 Brian K. Landsberg, Free At Last To Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Denton, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 112. 1 Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, they were free from slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, made them citizens and provided them due process under the law. As free citizens, they were entitled to a paid wage for their labor, though in the South after the War, actual specie was scarce. Education became an option for the newly freed men and women and they took advantage of the opportunity once the American Missionary Association established the Lincoln Normal School in Marion just a few years after the War ended.2 Most importantly for this discussion, the Fifteenth Amendment, which became the law of the land in 1870, granted all males, regardless of race and previous condition of servitude, the right to vote. It would be almost one hundred years before the Supreme Court would insist that states operate under the decrees set forth in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The increasingly perceptible struggle for political and economic power between the white and black citizens of Perry County began during the first Reconstruction, continued through the second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and continues in the twenty-first century. For African Americans, the somewhat imperceptible struggle prior to 1965 was a struggle for power over their own lives and households. They struggled to gain a quality education and equal access to jobs and the ballot box. And they struggled for recognition as human beings, to be recognized as “sir” and “ma’am,” just as their white counterparts were.3 For white landowners, the struggle 2 An extensive history of the Lincoln School can be found in Bertis Deon English, “Civil Wars and Civil Beings: Violence, Religion, Race, Politics, Education, Culture, and Agrarianism in Perry County, Alabama, 1860-1875” (PhD diss., Auburn University, 2006), http://etd.auburn.edu/etd/handle/10415/593. 3 For a contemporary picture of the racial etiquette of the early twentieth-century, see Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937). Doyle was a professor of Sociology at Fisk University, a traditionally black 2 was to retain a workforce to grow and harvest their crops for market in an increasingly industrialized economy that paid less and less for commodity crops. It was only with the wealth from their land that the white landowners could retain their power in Montgomery, the Alabama state capital. As long as these landowners controlled who could and could not vote, they controlled the money, and the power. Thus, it was the best of times in Marion and many of the small towns in the South, if you were white. According to the 1960 United States census, the population of Perry County was 17,358, down from 20,439 in 1950, a 15% decline. The white population of Perry County was 5,943. The black population was 11,415.4 The median income by 1959 in Perry County was $1,675. For blacks alone, however, it was $980.5 Judson College, a Baptist woman’s college founded in 1838, and Marion Military Institute, founded in 1841, experienced peak enrollments in the 1950s.6 The county’s population had risen steadily from the 1920s, through the Great Depression and WWII. university, at the time the book was published. For the white view of Southern blacks during the early twentieth century, see W.D. Weatherford, Negro Life in the South: Present Conditions and Needs (New York: Association Press, 1911), and William Hannibal Thomas, The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (New York: McMillan Company, 1901). 4 Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “The General Condition of the Alabama Negro,” 12. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Papers, Martin Luther King Center (MLKC), Atlanta, GA. Box 147, folder 11 – “Direct Action Files.” 5 1960 U.S. Census.