Albany, Georgia: The Movement That Taught the Movement How to Lose

Albany sits on the Flint River in southwest Georgia, a city of about sixty thousand people in a county where Black residents made up more than a third of the population but, in nineteen sixty-one, had almost no political power at all. That fall, two young SNCC organizers named Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon arrived on a bus to start something.

Within weeks they had built a coalition that no one had managed in Georgia before: SNCC, the NAACP, the local ministerial alliance, the Negro Voters League, and the Federation of Women's Clubs all joined under one umbrella and called it the Albany Movement. They began sitting in at the bus terminal, marching on City Hall, filling the jails. By December, five hundred people had been arrested. Then six hundred. The jails of southwest Georgia ran out of room.

Martin Luther King arrived that December, was swept up in a mass arrest, and declared the Albany Movement a model for the South. Then the city outsmarted him. Police Chief Laurie Pritchett had done something almost no Southern law enforcement officer had done: he had read King's books. He trained his officers to arrest protesters calmly and without visible violence, to commit no act that would photograph badly. He arranged with surrounding counties to take overflow prisoners so the jails would never fill completely. The movement's strategy of filling the jails and provoking the confrontation that would force federal action simply did not work when the confrontation was invisible.

King left Albany in August nineteen sixty-two without a single concrete desegregation victory. He later called it his biggest defeat. But what the movement learned in Albany shaped everything that came after. In Birmingham in nineteen sixty-three, organizers chose Bull Connor specifically because he was the opposite of Pritchett , a man who would swing the club in front of the cameras.

Albany lost the battle and helped win the war. The lessons of this city's resistance, and its failure, are written into the strategy of every successful civil rights campaign that followed.