Mount Olive Baptist Church was established in Sasser in 1896 by freedmen and their descendants. In 1962, as the Albany Movement spread beyond the borders of Dougherty County with the intention of registering voters and raising civil rights awareness, it played a central role in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Many Black churches were resistant to the movement due to the potential for retaliation by White employers and law enforcement and many of those fears were realized at Mt. Olive, with the unapologetic support of Terrell County sheriff Zachary Taylor “ZT” Mathews. Mathews was an avowed racist and particularly irredeemable character who had most notably led the coverup in the lynching of James C. Brazier.
Because of Mount Olive’s prominence in the community, it was the primary site for the mass meetings of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its allies, organized by Charles Sherrod. On 25 July 1962, Sherrod led a meeting at Mount Olive, with White activists Ralph Allen and Penny Patch also present. The SNCC activists were well aware of the attention they had attracted by local law enforcement but continued their work. As noted in the SNCC digital archives: Mass meetings at churches were under constant surveillance. Police sometimes stood outside the churches, taking the names of people as they entered. In Sasser, Georgia, a tiny town in Terrell County, Sheriff Zeke Matthews and a dozen deputies stormed into the Mount Olive church during a mass meeting and went from pew to pew rubbing their pistols; they then stood scowling in the back. Reporting on this for the New York Times, Claude Sitton quoted Matthews as telling him, “We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years.”
On 9 September 1962, Mount Olive fell victim to arson, with no immediate aid from firefighters or law enforcement, begging the question of their own involvement. Zeke Mathews’s responses to journalists covering the crime were predictably despicable, blaming the arson on outside agitators. He was quoted in the 10 September 1962 edition of the New York Times: “It’s unusual for white folks to go down there living with n___ – pretty unusual. The n____s are upset about it, too – the better n___.” And he told the Atlanta Constitution: “People here are disturbed because some of these white boys are living with Negroes. I think that has more to do with the fires than this voter registration business. People here know that the Negroes just don’t care anything about voting.”
While real justice in the case(s) was questionable, the congregation of Mount Olive persisted, and with the aid of funds raised by Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was rebuilt in 1963 during the pastorate of Rev. F. S. Swaggott. It remains active today.
