With the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday upon us, there is no better time to set the record straight about the civil rights leader’s first major campaign after Montgomery.
Though the Albany Movement has long been called a defeat for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., nothing could be further from the truth.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The fact is that the campaign was no more a failure than Pearl Harbor was for Navy sailors, Auschwitz and Dachau was for Jews or 9/11 for New Yorkers and the Pentagon.
Movement veterans were the victims, not the perpetrators. The good guys, not the bad guys. The ones who assumed the moral high ground, not the low ground, successfully wiping segregation laws off Albany’s books even before Birmingham.
Indeed, the campaign was a calculated hit executed by two ambitious white men in pursuit of wealth, power and the White House.
Traces of those two men’s relationship first surfaced publicly in early 1957.
That’s when wealthy New England businessman James H. Gray, who settled in Albany in the 1940s and made himself into a leading segregationist voice, arranged for a rising political star, Sen. John F. Kennedy, to visit the city.
How well they knew each other remains unclear. But Gray and Kennedy had a lot in common. A year apart in age, both hailed from Massachusetts, graduated from Ivy League schools and served in World War II. Both were also state Democratic Party chairs.
Unlike Kennedy, Gray married into money. He invested his wife’s wealth to build a nascent communications empire. He acquired a daily newspaper, penned a column that unapologetically took a hard line on segregation and launched the second TV station in the state. He also owned a radio station and a controlling interest in a general aviation airport.
From that airfield on Thursday, Feb. 7, 1957, Gray dispatched a pilot and plane bound for Washington, D.C., to pick up Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, for an event. That evening, the politician who had made a national splash the year before at the Democratic National Convention served as keynote speaker at Albany’s annual Chamber of Commerce dinner, which Gray televised live. The couple overnighted at Gray’s Radium Springs home, where Kennedy reportedly slept on the floor because of his bad back. Then, Gray delivered them the next morning to the airport, where they flew on to Florida for a family vacation.
Kennedy’s trip makes clear that he and Gray shared something more valuable than money: a relationship and, apparently, an understanding: If one needed help, the other had his back, whether it be support for a White House run or help containing Black Americans who had forgotten their place.
In advance of the Albany Movement, Kennedy’s stance on race was a mixed bag. On Sept. 9, 1957, in the name of not alienating Southern Democrats and jeopardizing his political future, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, aimed at protecting Black voting rights. Three years later, on the eve of his election, he secured the Oct. 27, 1960, release of MLK from jail at Reidsville, winning overwhelming Black support, which helped him land the White House.
Coming off that win, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Charles Sherrod rolled into Albany in November 1961, organizing Black voter registration and kick-starting the Albany Movement.
Gray and the powers-that-be pushed back hard, partnering with surrounding counties and placing hundreds behind bars, including King.
Movement leaders telegrammed the Oval Office, naively expecting Kennedy to reciprocate their support shown at the polls the year before.
They were dumbfounded as they watched the administration stand on the sidelines, giving Gray and other segregationists full sway to do as they pleased.
By July 1962, thousands had been arrested, King had been run out of town, a civil rights lawyer had been beaten by the sheriff and a pregnant mother had been assaulted by police, killing the unborn child. Kennedy refused to intervene.
The Kennedy administration didn’t even react when Gray pulled arguably the most flagrantly racist stunt of the campaign. After a lawsuit forced the all-white city commission to remove segregation laws from its books, the body circumvented the victory by selling its once-segregated public pool to Gray, who reopened it as a private whites-only establishment.
Through it all, Kennedy remained loyal to his friend and ally. On, Feb. 7, 1963, six months after the height of the Albany Movement, Gray was photographed at a White House luncheon with the president sitting six chairs away. Six months after that, at an Aug. 9, 1963, news conference, the president’s brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, personally announced the indictments of nine leaders of the Albany Movement, who were prosecuted and convicted, effectively shutting down the campaign.
The Albany Movement was not a failure. It was a targeted hit by a president protecting the vested interests of a rabid racist and his own shot at a second term.
Clennon L. King is an Albany, Georgia-based historian and award-winning documentary filmmaker, who has published extensively on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His father was the legendary civil rights lawyer C.B. King, who represented Martin Luther King Jr. during the Albany Movement.
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