The Prince Hall Masons were first organized in Columbus as the Bradwell Lodge No. 4, in 1871. Bradwell later became Lewis Hayden Lodge No. 6, which still meets today. Since 1871, seven lodges have been established in Columbus, and some, including Mt. Pisgah Lodge No. 53, as well as several Eastern Star chapters, meet in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple, which was built in 1953, and is a center of Black civic and social life in Columbus.
Of historical importance, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to a gathering of over 1000 people here on 1 July 1958, imploring the audience to meet “physical force with soul force“, in response to increasing racial violence. He was in Columbus following the murder by white store owner Luico Flowers of Dr. Thomas Brewer (1894-1956). Dr. Flowers, a local physician and Civil Rights leader, was an advocate of King v. Chapman, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the white primary system in Georgia. This decision led to heightened KKK activity in the area, including a threat to bomb the Prince Hall Masonic Temple during Dr. King’s visit. Armed Prince Hall Masons kept vigil on the roof. Unable to harm Dr. King, the KKK bombed the home of Essie Mae Ellison, who had recently moved into a white neighborhood.
“He is never far from any of us”. One of at least ten “story windows” installed at Mount Mary in 1963.
Mount Mary Baptist Church in Chickasawhatchee, a forgotten settlement near Sasser, shares a similar history with other Black churches in the area. It was an active congregation founded by freedmen and their descendants in the late 19th century. [I’m still confirming details about the history of the church and will update when I learn more].
In 1962 Mount Mary was used for voter registration meetings by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and like Shady Grove in Leesburg and Mount Olive in Sasser, it was burned to the ground in retaliation. In fact, it was destroyed on the same day as Mount Olive, 9 September 1962. It was rebuilt in 1963. The stained glass windows are the most notable feature of the church, which was designed by Atlanta architect Joe Amisano. Trappist monks of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers are credited with the windows. I’m not sure if the other churches feature the “story windows”, with verses and illustrations. I am trying to learn more about them.
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.
Shady Grove Baptist Church was established in the late 1870s by freedmen families, and in 1880 members James Harris, Paul Tracy, Billy Pope, and Boss Scrutchins purchased the land on which the congregation still worships today. Rev. Samuel Lamar was the first pastor.
On 14 August 1962, Shady Grove was the first of four Black churches (including Mt. Mary, Mt. Olive, and I Hope) to be burned by arsonists in Lee and Terrell Counties. Unsurprisingly, local officials who inspected the Shady Grove site dismissed arson as a cause, blaming it instead on “faulty electrical wiring.” The FBI disagreed and in October charged domestic terrorists Jack Smith and Douglas Parker with the crime.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who visited the ruins of the church, wrote (in part) in the September 1962 issued of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Newsletter, in an essay entitled “The Terrible Cost of the Ballot”: “Tears welled up in my heart and my eyes not long ago as I surveyed the shambles of what had been the Shady Grove Baptist Church of Leesburg, Georgia. I had been awakened shortly after daybreak by my executive assistant, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who informed me that a SNCC (Student Non violent Coordinating Committee) staffer had just called and reported that the church ·where their organization had been holding voting clinics and registration classes had been destroyed by fire and/or dynamite.
Lee Count y is one of the three southwest Georgia counties where for years an attempt to register to vote has been tantamount to inviting death...
The naked truth is that whether the object of the Negro community’s efforts are directed at lunch counters or interstate busses, First Amendment privileges or pilgrimages of prayer, school desegregation, or the right to vote, he meets an implacable foe in the southern white racist. No matter what it is we seek, if it has to do with full citizenship, self-respect, human dignity, and borders on changing the “southern way of life ,” the Negro stands little chance if any, of securing the approval, consent or tolerance of the segregationist white South.
Exhibit “A”: The charred remains of the Shady Grove Baptist ·Church, Lee County, Georgia. This is the terrible cost of the ballot in the Deep South.”
Shady Grove was one of the three burnt churches to be rebuilt in 1963, with Dr. King present at the groundbreaking ceremony. Fundraising efforts successfully netted $70,000 (over $700k in 2024 dollars) and were led by baseball star Jackie Robinson, who along with Dr. King helped bring attention to the problem. Joe Amisano, representing the Georgia branch of the American Institute of Architects, designed the new church, as well as those at Mt. Mary and Mt. Olive.
The Georgia State Prison at Reidsville was open from 1937 until 2022. The main building, seen above, was the work of the Atlanta architectural firm of Tucker & Howell in the Stripped Classical style and was completed in late 1936 but not occupied until 1937. It cost $1.5 million and was funded by the Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency. One wall of the structure features an idealistic frieze with sculptures of various men at work by famed sculptor Julian Harris entitled “Rehabilitation”. The prison was built at a time when Southern prisons and chain gangs were coming under serious criticism in the national press and by Congress for their poor conditions. Robert Elliott Burns’s bestselling book I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, published in 1932, put a particularly unwelcome focus on Georgia. The reforms that followed were an ongoing process, and were fully embraced by Governor Ellis Arnall in 1942. As the state’s crime rate grew rapidly along with the population, more structures were added. The Rogers State Prison is located near the closed Georgia State Prison, as is the prison cemetery.
According to Tattnall County: “The Georgia General Assembly passed a law on August 16, 1924 that abolished hanging for all capital crimes. From that point forward, instead of being hanged by the sheriff of the county or judicial circuit where their crimes had occurred, the condemned were to be electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison at Milledgeville. During that year an electric chair was installed in the prison, and the first execution in that method occurred on September 13, 1924.“
“On January 1, 1938 the execution chamber was relocated to the new Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. In the 1940s and 1950s, volunteers were offered $25 to flip the switches which would start the flow of electricity and eventually lead to the death of the prisoner. Executions were moved to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison near Jackson, in Butts County, in June 1980. The state’s old electric chair can still be found in the museum on the upper floors of the main building, as well as prison documents containing names, authorizations and last statements of the prisoners.“
“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was transferred from the DeKalb County Jail in Decatur, Georgia, to Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia. He was released on October 27, 1960 on a $2,000 bond [after intervention by John F. Kennedy]. GSP also housed radical activist H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Al-Amin. Al-Amin was the chairman of SNCC in the late 1960s. In 2007, he was transferred to a federal facility where he now resides. The facility also housed notorious Atlanta killer Wayne Williams.”
Georgia State Prison was also the site of the execution of Lena Barker, the only woman to face the death penalty in the state in the modern era. Baker was later exonerated.
The Longest Yard, a popular movie starring Burt Reynolds and Eddie Albert, was filmed at the prison.
With a history dating back to 1867, on this site, First African Baptist is the oldest Black congregation in Dublin. It is a well-loved community landmark but has a special place in the history of the struggle for Civil Rights, as the first place Martin Luther King, Jr., ever made a public political speech.
His essay, “The Negro and the Constitution” won first place in a contest sponsored by the Colored Elks Clubs of Georgia. At their state convention in Dublin, on 17 April 1944, King read it before the Elks in the sanctuary of this historic church. He affirmed this fact in his autobiography. [The text of the speech follows].
THE NEGRO AND THE CONSTITUTION By Martin L. King, Jr.
Negroes were first brought to America in 1620 when England legalized slavery both in England and the colonies and America; the institution grew and thrived for about 150 years upon the backs of these black men. The empire of King Cotton was built and the southland maintained a status of life and hospitality distinctly its own and not anywhere else.
On January 1, 1863 the proclamation emancipating the slaves which had been decreed by President Lincoln in September took effect, millions of Negroes faced a rising sun of a new day begun. Did they have habits of thrift or principles of honesty and integrity? Only a few! For their teachings and duties had been but two activities, love of Master, right or wrong, good or bad, and loyalty to work. What was to be the place for such men in the reconstruction of the south?
America gave its full pledge of freedom seventy-five years ago. Slavery has been a strange paradox in a nation founded on the principles that all men are created free and equal. Finally after tumult and war, the nation in 1865 took a new stand, freedom for all people. The new order was backed by amendments to the national constitution making it the fundamental law that thenceforth there should be no discrimination anywhere in the “land of the free” on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
Black America still wears chains. The finest Negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man. Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar. Look at a few of the paradoxes that mark daily life in America. Marian Anderson was barred from singing in the Constitution Hall, ironically enough, by the professional daughters of the very men who founded this nation for liberty and equality. But this tale had a different ending. The nation rose in protest, and gave a stunning rebuke to the Daughters of the American Revolution and a tremendous ovation to the artist, Marian Anderson, who sang in Washington on Easter Sunday and fittingly, before the Lincoln Memorial. Ranking cabinet members and a justice of the supreme court were seated about her. Seventy-five thousand people stood patiently for hours to hear a great artist at a historic moment. She sang as never before with tears in her eyes. When the words of “America” and “Nobody Knows De Trouble I Seen” rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on thee sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity.
That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America. Recently she was again signally honored by being given the Bok reward as the most distinguished resident of Philadelphia. Yet she cannot be served in many of the public restaurants of her home city, even after it has declared her to be its best citizen. So, with their right hand they raise to high places the great who have dark skins, and with their left, they slap us down to keep us in “our places.” “Yes, America you have stripped me of my garments, you have robbed me of my precious endowment.”
We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance. We cannot have a healthy nation with one tenth of the people ill-nourished, sick, harboring germs of disease which recognize no color lines, obey no Jim Crow laws. We cannot have a nation orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitudes and crime. We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule. We cannot come to full prosperity with one great group so ill-delayed that it cannot buy goods. So as we gird ourselves to defend democracy from foreign attack, let us see to it that increasingly at home we give fair play and free opportunity for all people
Today thirteen million black sons and daughters of our forefathers continue the fight for the translation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments from writing on the printed page to an actuality. We believe with them that “if freedom is good for any it is good for all,” that we may conquer southern armies by the sword, but it is another thing to conquer southern hate, that if the franchise is given to Negroes, they will be vigilant and defend even with their arms, the ark of federal liberty from treason and destruction by her enemies.
The spirit of Lincoln still lives; that spirit born of the teachings of the Nazarene, who promised mercy to the merciful, who lifted the lowly, strengthened the weak, ate with publicans, and made the captives free. In the light of this divine example, the doctrines of demagogues shiver in their chaff. Already closer understanding links Saxon and Freedman in mutual sympathy.
America experiences a new birth of freedom in her sons and daughters; she incarnates the spirit of her martyred chief. Their loyalty is repledged; their devotion renewed to the work He left unfinished. My heart throbs anew in the hope that inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom. And I with my brother of blackest hue possessing at last my rightful heritage and holding my head erect, may stand beside the Saxon, a Negro, and yet a man!
An historic marker placed in 2008 summarizes: On April 17, 1944, in the 1st A. B. Church of Dublin, Georgia, fourteen year old Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his first public speech, “The Negro and the Constitution.” At this site a seed was planted in his heart that would grow into his life’s work. His journey to the mountain top began here.
Like its neighbor across the street (Old Mount Zion), Shiloh Baptist is one of the Mother Churches of the Albany Movement. The congregation was organized in 1888. The present structure was built by contractor A. S. Cobb in 1953, during the pastorate of W. H. Calhoun. Jim Bishop notes in his 1971 book, The Days of Martin Luther King, Jr., that one of his most famous phrases was first delivered in a sermon here: “We shall overcome. Don’t stop now. Keep moving. Don’t get weary children. We will wear them down by our capacity to suffer.”
A 2014 historical marker notes: The Albany Movement began here, at Shiloh Baptist Church, in November 1961. A coalition of black improvement associations and student activists from SNCC and Albany State College, the protest group set an unprecedented goal: the desegregation of an entire community, from bus stations to lunch counters. Demonstrations over two years resulted in the detention of 1,500 protesters. The participation and repeated arrests of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought national attention to the Albany Movement. Music sustained the campaign in Southwest Georgia and gave birth to the SNCC Freedom Singers. Legal action and the increase in black voter registration led to school desegregation, the end of public employee discrimination, and the election of black political officials in the region. Lessons learned in Albany influenced events in Birmingham in 1963.
Mount Zion is one of the largest congregations in Albany today. Their old home, now a part of the Albany Civil Rights Museum, was built in 1906. But the history goes back to just after the Civil War. According to their website: The Mount Zion Baptist Church of Albany, GA was organized December 8, 1865 by the late Rev. R. R. Watson. The church’s original location was in a building then known as the Jerry Walter’s Blacksmith Shop, which was located on the corner of State Street (now Highland Avenue) and Jackson Street. A successful financial drive made it possible to purchase land for the church at Washington Street and Highland Avenue. Twenty-six hundred dollars was raised for this purpose. However, before the structure was completed, it was destroyed by a storm. Nevertheless, the site at South Street (now Whitney Avenue) and Jefferson Street was purchased. An old house brought from Leesburg, Georgia was donated to the congregation by a Yankee Colonel named Howard. This became the first church structure at that location. Northern teachers taught school in that building until a schoolhouse was later erected.
Old Mount Zion hosted some of the earliest meetings of the Albany Movement of the Civil Rights Movement and hosted important figures including Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Ralph David Abernathy. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singers, who participated in the March on Washington, gave their first performance here.
This church served the congregation until 1972, when they relocated to a larger facility.
Dorchester Academy was founded as a primary school for African-American children by the American Missionary Association after the Civil War. The dormitory, designed by Norwegian-born architect George Awsumb in 1934 to replace an 1890s structure lost to fire in 1932, is all that remains of a once-larger campus. After the school closed in 1940, demolition of the campus took place. The boys’ dormitory became the community center and still serves that purpose.
During the Civil Rights Movement it was the primary site of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) (1961-70), an important initiative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This was seen as the basis for the highly successful Voter Education Project (VEP). One of the prime boosters of the CEP was Septima Poinsette Clark, a Charleston school teacher referred to as the “Queen Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”. The work of this and other so-called “citizenship schools” trained over 700 teachers and registered 50,000 voters by 1963.
Workshops were often held at the site with numerous civil rights icons in attendance, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, Wyatt Walker, and Dorothy Cotton.
National Historic Landmark + National Register of Historic Places
