Peter de Lissovoy was a SNCC campaign worker in Albany, Georgia, in 1963, and a speechwriter and advance man for C. B. King's congressional campaign from southwest Georgia in 1964. Presently he is a writer, editor, and teacher, who lives in rural New Hampshire with his wife and two Newfoundlands.

December 11, 2002 | In recent years I have revisited Albany, Georgia, and coming up from Florida, each time I cross the state line and see those fields of white cotton and neat groves of pecan trees, the old chills remind me of when Georgia was a dangerous place to be, for those of us who had a vision of a normal expansion into social reality of the American ideals of equality of opportunity and freedom for everybody, and who were living out the vision, sometimes in the most easygoing sort of way. Black and white together was a crime back then actually and an affront to the crackers just in itself. Half the time we didn't even mean anything by it—we were just being that way. (Later we realized the crackers in New York were about the same.)

I go to visit my old pals Randy Battle, John Perdew, and others, who live in Albany. John Perdew was one of the Americus Four who were charged under the hoary sedition laws and sat in jail actually facing the death penalty for months. He is currently involved in helping black farmers in Southwest Georgia keep their land by digging ponds and converting to catfish and shrimp growing.

Randy Battle was right-hand man of Charles Sherrod, head of SNCC in Southwest Georgia, and of C. B. King, the one-man legal department of the Movement in Southwest Georgia (along with his most esteemed associate Dennis Roberts for a season), whose specialty was running verbal circles around the cracker prosecutors and cops and judges until they gasped and begged for a repeat and mercy. C. B. King ran for U.S. Congress from Southwest Georgia and also for Governor in the sixties; he was one of those who knowingly and calculatedly pioneered the way in politics for the present somewhat improved state of things. I have described one day in C. B. King's congressional campaign in "A Gambler's Choice," a piece I wrote for The Nation, collected in the Library of America's anthology Reporting Civil Rights.

Randy Battle did all the dangerous setup and advance work for C. B.'s tours through the small towns speaking at the little piney grove churches, and I traveled around with him. This job required equal parts attention to detail, ability to talk to the sometimes difficult backwoods preachers, willingness to confront white staffs at the newspapers, and plain raw courage going out to places like Dawson on behalf of the "nigger candidate." Randy had all these qualities in ample measure and more.

Last time I visited Albany in November 2002, Randy took me by to look at the new Federal Courthouse building named for C. B. King, which had just been dedicated. There it was in great letters at the top of the handsome new Federal building in downtown Albany: C. B. KING. Long ago, C. B. King was beaten on the head with a cane by the infamous Sheriff Cull Campbell on the courthouse steps for the simple reason that he was a "nigger on the courthouse steps" and bore the scar on his forehead. Now Campbell is deservedly forgotten along with various other vicious nobodies, and the Courthouse is named after C. B.

As we passed by the C. B. King Federal Courthouse, a white workman was readying the pavement for improvement with a jackhammer. High in the air on the topmost facade—C.B. KING! Randy or I observed slyly, however, that C. B. was about springing folks from jail back in the old days, and now the slammer doors would close on some poor souls under his name.

The event I mainly remember Randy Battle for is the Great Tift Park Pool Jump of 1963, as we dubbed it. With the Civil Rights legislation looming, the city sold its swimming pool to the late James Gray, publisher of the Albany Herald, so as to make it private and avoid integration. Everybody said we ought to just go on down and jump in and have a swim. This would first require scaling a steel fence. It was a hot summer. One morning about 75 kids took off from all directions bent on thus slipping through the alleys and byways and converging on Tift Park Pool. When we got there, though, only three had the nerve to hit that steel fence and go over—Randy Battle, Jake Wallace, and James Daniel. It truly appeared that when they hit the water, all the whites in the pool were sprung straight into the air onto the deck. They were so astounded and beside themselves with the impropriety that Randy, Jake, and James just walked out of the park and never got arrested. The last time I visited Albany I ran into Jake over by Randy's place, and he reminded me in his intense no-nonsense way that people got killed for doing things like that in those days. It was no joke; it was serious fun. Randy has often remarked to me that he fully expected to die in the Movement in the sixties. We all sort of did.

In my other piece in the anthology Reporting Civil Rights, originally published in The Nation, "This Little Light: Moments in a Southern Town," I chronicled events on the first night after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Law, when we fanned out across town and tried things out. We still couldn't have swum in Tift Park Pool, however, because of the subterfuge of selling it to James Gray. But we could swim in it now, because ultimately the pool was sold to the Boys' Club. All the kids swim in it today and it is a place of recreation for the community. So there is progress, and in the end Gray couldn't hold out. This seems very hopeful to me, and a sign that there is a healing law at work in America. President Johnson's law has had many happy effects.

Jumping in the pool that day was the first thing Randy did in the Movement. After that, when he returned to his job at a grocery, hearing the bossman curse that "nigger mess" of a Movement was no longer tolerable. Randy borrowed fifty dollars on his paycheck from the man and never returned. His life from then was the Movement, and he was a rare man in and contributor to the Movement in that he had an uncanny rapport with all elements, black and white, middle-class and poor, student and farmer. Everybody depended on him, not for anything in particular, just for being himself and being there. His conversation roamed far and wide. I think some of the white kids were astounded to suddenly find themselves in a philosophical discussion ranging in totally unexpected directions. Having had almost no school education whatsoever, he learned to read in the Movement and devoured all the books the volunteers brought with them. He bridged all the gaps, not least that between past-present and far future, in that he had an impeccable grasp of the nuts and bolts of the practical and peculiar southern realities while the most far-seeing ideals of the Movement were nothing new to him and he seemed even ahead of them. In those days in SNCC and in the Movement people of every sort lived in an everyday visionary mode that put them in a place that America as a society has in no wise approached yet. I never understand people who say the Movement didn't accomplish anything, especially when I go to places like Albany and see the public and social integration where in the old South recently people actually couldn't cross a line without some sort of an unwritten menial passport. As a white SNCC worker who became for a time a member of the community I imbibed this sense and would no more have thought of crossing Oglethorpe Avenue (the racial dividing line) than of going to Mars. Anyway Randy Battle blended all the contradictions and being both visionary and streetwise was indispensable to the leaders like C. B. King and Charles Sherrod.

I have written about the third in the trio James Daniel's story of the Jump in a fictional way in my novel Feelgood.

Seeing Randy and Jake and reminiscing about the Great Pool Jump of 1963 in Albany now suggests to me an observation about SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement that certainly was never made at the time, and perhaps has not been made in just the way I would like to make it. Such confrontations with the system as our marches, our by-night painting of little black coachmen with white spray paint, our picketing of various employers from the Albany Coca-Cola bottling plant to the corner grocery store, the Tift Park Pool Jump, and many others dear to our hearts now but beating in our hearts like crazy then—all seemed dangerous, outrageous, daring, and definitely were in that era when all the force and weight of the state and the law came down on the side of the segregationists. Now however we can't help but notice the prankish and funning side of it—such things would hardly be seen as courting death or dismemberment nowadays, but just as kind of happy pranks. Of course the whites then hardly took such a view.

Blending the past and the present view, it seems to me the good-hearted and good-natured atmosphere of the Movement in the face of jails and police dogs and by-night shootings and beatings of Civil Rights workers has rarely been observed. After centuries of vicious miserable slavery and anonymous inconceivable suffering and the unfathomable long-suffering when any amount of hatred and anger and poison would seem to have been in order and even unavoidable, the kids approached their historical task of confronting the racist system with such a good nature—such singing, laughter, hope, and yes, in fear with beating hearts—wild good-hearted pranks!

Each time I visit Southwest Georgia again we walk around and see some of the old places and milestones, what used to be and the new sights—this time the C. B. King Courthouse. We said we were going to go to Tift Park last time, but we still haven't. Perhaps we don't want to remember how bad things were—when a public park was a dangerous place to be. The young people of America nowadays probably have no idea. As a young white kid growing up in the Midwest in the fifties I certainly didn't. Anyway we don't have to revisit the scene of the crime to remember that the demon of racism still lurks in the land. It was by such countless often unheralded intrepid good-hearted acts as the Tift Park Pool Jump of 1963 that the Civil Rights Movement inched along to its provisional successes in and for America. On the willing shoulders of the kids like the three pool jumpers stood Dr. King and the other leaders.

The past two years I have visited the Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum at the Old Mt. Zion Church, where Martin Luther King and other preachers raised our spirits at the mass meetings in the sixties. The Museum provides an active link of consciousness and memory between the Movement days and the young people of today. A fine collage of photographs by Danny Lyon and other Civil Rights photographers is displayed in the entranceway of the Museum, and also many older photos depicting the history of the Albany Movement, going back decades long before SNCC and the sixties. Such are the strange ways of time and memory that a fond word for even Chief Laurie Pritchett, now gone, and no Bull Connor after all, escapes the lips of the viewer of the photograph of a confrontation. Pritchett had a truckful of watermelons brought up for the marchers in his jail one time, remarks Randy. In another photo Eddie Davis, gang leader, is hauled nobly away in the arms of the police. And in another, Randy sits silently beneath the eloquent Sherrod as the latter harangues a sharecropper couple about their right and duty to vote. Randy never would march with us, because if he was hit he would hit back, he knew; he wouldn't give up his knife. The Freedom Singers had their origin in Albany, especially among the famous Harris family members. The Freedom Singers perform regularly at the Museum, among them one of the originals, Rutha Harris.

It surely never occurred to us we would one day see our faces in a Museum, or our writings in a collection of reporting such as the anthology upon which this website is based. C. B. King's son recently said to me that in the old days I wore two hats, which was true, although I never thought about this at the time. It was equally natural for me to be there wholeheartedly and to write about it objectively (realizing every writer or journalist has his or her values no matter how well hidden). I marched, went to jail several times, encouraged people to vote, and also lived in the community for a couple of years—and wrote about it. The virtue of the first hat is easily seen in hindsight; with this new anthology from the Library of America that of the second comes into view. So after all it has been the journalists who have brought the flavor and texture of those days down to us, enriching memory.

I have and did meet people who questioned whether I could both be in the Movement and write what I wanted to about it. These people came from both the journalistic end of things and the Movement end of things. Sometimes it was implied to me I was politically incorrect—whatever the politics of the moment happened to be. I leave the whole debate to anyone who has thought more about it than I have. For myself this seems one of those artificial separating out of parts of life certain people are so keen to do. I believe with those who have held that life is richer for reflecting on it; but I also think reflection is not likely to be worth much without engagement of some type or another. I can't read two pages of one of the dry histories of the Movement, although I know they are valuable for those who want an idea of what simply happened. By the way, for a really terrific recent book, get a hold of Deep in Our Hearts, published by the University of Georgia, written by a bunch of white women about how they got involved in the Movement and what it was like—a super read by some superlative individuals.

About Peter de Lissovoy
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