A Journalist of Heart, Mind and Courage

Andrew McDowd "Mac" Secrest
September 15, 1923 - April 27, 2010
An Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

By Tom Scheft

As the “voice” of his newspaper, as the conscience of his community, his state, his country, and even the world, as a federal mediator for civil rights, Mac Secrest chose roles that—literally and figuratively—set him apart. 

Part I

When you meet someone initially and know little about him or her, you can’t possibly speculate on how important this person may be to you, how much of an influence he or she may have on you. So it was with Mac Secrest for me. It was 1977. All I knew was that he had joined the English faculty at North Carolina Central University. He had been the editor and owner of a small weekly newspaper in South Carolina, and he was heading up the new Media-Journalism Program. He was going to train volunteer faculty to be journalism teachers, whether they had any newspaper experience or not. I was one of the volunteers.

           

When he entered the room to address his faculty recruits, he sported an engaging smile. He was tall and trim, was dressed in blazer and tie, and sported a well-groomed head of sandy-colored, gracefully graying hair. I said, “Hi, Dr. Secrest,” and he immediately replied, “It’s Mac. Call me Mac.” Clearly, in those brief seconds I experienced a positive feeling about the man—a genuineness that would be confirmed again and again and again throughout our years of work and friendship.

           

As he talked to us about his plans for the program, I felt at ease. I am, at heart, what I call a “healthy skeptic,” but in a matter of minutes I watched him begin to win the trust of his colleagues. He was, first and foremost, an astonishing conversationalist—juxtaposing seriousness and insightful examples with witticisms, erudite quotations (sometimes rendered in French), and even contemporary slang. His conversational panache was impressive.     

           

I remained amazed by—but cautious of—his cheerful openness and intellect. I was guarded, because here was my new “boss.” Like many people, I had learned that no matter how nice bosses may be in the beginning, eventually many feel the need to “show you who’s boss.” Inevitably, underlings need to be put in their place. With Mac, that day never came.

           

While he was the director of the program, Mac made it clear that we were colleagues, and he valued our expertise. He explained he had sold his newspaper because he wanted no part in journalism’s move to computerization, and he promptly put Tom Evans and me in charge of developing the new electronic newsroom that was to be the hands-on, production part of the program. Evans and I relished that immediate trust and responsibility.

           

Evans was certainly deserving of trust. He was a seasoned English teacher equipped with full professorial beard and a quick, bright mind. But me? I cast a different impression—a short, stocky sort with wild, longish hair. I looked like a product of the ’60s, which I was. This “look” was (and continues to be) off-putting for many folks. However, Mac gave off no initial sense of reservation. Nor did he ever.

           

This acceptance was no accident. I would come to learn that he was—indeed—a man who gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, preferring to judge people, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. advised, based on the content of their character. Years later in 2004, when reading Mac’s autobiography, I would be reminded—again and again—that Mac was someone who believed in people and did not impulsively judge books by their covers.

           

One example of this is Jim Crawford, who worked for Mac at his newspaper, The Cheraw Chronicle. In the 1950s, Crawford, a Black man and a linotype operator, had come down with tuberculosis and undergone medical treatment before moving to Cheraw and attempting to find a job. In his book Mac says matter-of-factly that he was “in great need” of a linotype operator, but that simple statement is followed by a quote from one of Crawford’s friends:

Crawford had to face a double stigma in the workplace. He ease a recovered tubercular patient, which scared a lot of people, and he was a black man. In the 1950s newspapers publishers in South Carolina didn’t hire black linotype operators. But Secrest didn’t pay any attention to stigmas. Jim had a health certificate. He was proficient in his trade. Race didn’t matter. He hired Jim, paid him the prevailing wage, and just saved his life.

I don’t remember when I first learned that Mac had been a significant person in the America’s battle for civil rights. I had no idea he had been a crusading journalist—a successful one, whose editorials were reprinted in newspapers across the nation, including The Washington Post and The New York Times; no idea he’d taken on the Ku Klux Klan; no idea he had written award-winning editorials—such as the 1958 Sidney Hillman Award for best editorial on civil rights and racial issues and his 1967 denouncing of Sen. Strom Thurmond, “A Profile in Extremism”; no idea he had strategized with Andrew Young and Dr. King; and no idea he’d been a racial mediator for the government’s Community Relations Service, which included his being stationed in Selma, Alabama in 1965 in the midst of its historic turmoil, and also serving from 1964-1966 in Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

           

Mac never initiated talk about his work with the Civil Rights Movement, but things would pop up. The first time I remember that occurring was when a group of faculty was sitting around and someone mentioned comedian/activist Dick Gregory. I noted that his autobiography had a huge impact on me when I was 13 years old. Mac followed with: “I helped integrate a Holiday Inn with him one night during the ’60s.” He said it as though he were announcing the time of day.

           

I sat up straight and exclaimed: “You know Dick Gregory? You did what with him?”

           

Mac nodded. “We helped integrate the first Holiday Inn in Alabama. Interesting man. That was quite a while ago.”

           

On another occasion a group of faculty and students had informally gathered in the English Department newsroom. The conversation turned to the Ku Klux Klan, since we were preparing to bring the director of Klanwatch, a program sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to speak at NCCU. The discussion focused on the ruthlessness and intimidating practices of the Klan. One of my students, an older woman, had lived in a town with a significant Klan presence, and she talked about her childhood and having to routinely hide under her bed on the weekends when drunken Klansmen would ride into the Black section of town and fire bullets into homes.

           

Mac spoke up: “As an editor, I had to deal with the Klan a number of times.”

           

The room got very quiet.

           

I remember stammering, “You took on the Klan?”

           

“Yes. Quite a bit.”

           

“What did you do?” I asked.

           

“Well, I wrote editorials against their ideas and the things they did.” He paused briefly. “One time I actually covered one of their meetings.” He explained that he had “self-invited” himself to cover a Klan function—just walked up on the platform “in a barren, wind-swept cotton field one winter night two miles across the Pee Dee River into Marlboro County.” He “recorded the proceedings,” which included a “harangue of me, The Chronicle, and ‘wishy-washy’ local civic leaders.”

           

We sat there spellbound. Then he smiled. “One time … I stacked wood for a bonfire in front of my house. I stood beside it holding an unlit match. We took a picture and ran it on the front page of The Chronicle. Underneath the picture I ran a caption that told the Klan I’d already assembled the bonfire. I’d already done their work for them. I even had a match for them. I offered them an open invitation. All they needed to do was light the bonfire during the day in their robes but without their hoods on.”

           

He paused and I stammered again, “What happened?”

           

“Nothing … I knew they wouldn’t do it. I was just calling their bluff.”

           

“Weren’t you scared?” I was frightened just thinking about it.

           

Mac thought for a moment. “No,” he said, slowly shaking his head. Then he grinned. “I guess I was just young enough and dumb enough not to be scared.”

           

Many years later I would ask Mac’s wife, Ann, about the bonfire story. “Weren’t you scared?” I said. Ann stood there, her mouth in Mona-Lisa-mode. She shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t respond.

           

Little by little I would pull out bits and pieces from Mac’s history as an activist. He would render things calmly without much elaboration, and I would relentlessly prod him: “Then what happened?” … “How did you feel?” … “Were you scared?”

           

Here’s my point: It’s one thing to “do the right thing” in a difficult situation. It’s quite another to do it when your life may be at stake.

Mac Secrest could have easily made his contribution safely. Born into a life of privilege, Mac could have restricted his focus to that of his family and friends. Why risk one’s life? And yet, he chose a community and took on a role at a time and place in which many of his “critics” had no reservation in taking the law into their own hands:

As the crisis deepened through the years 1956-1964, I occasionally received unsigned hate mail and anonymous telephone calls. Signs reading “For Sale” and “Moving Out” appeared in the front yard. Occasionally pellets peppered our living room picture window. The threats, plus ample evidence of violence against people and property elsewhere, prompted me to take certain precautions. I’d place a penny on the window of my car or tie a thread from hood to bumper. If the penny had dropped or the thread was broken, I’d check to make sure I hadn’t been booby-trapped.

            

For those unaware of the tumultuous zeitgeist of Southern racial politics during that period, Mac notes that many of his enemies had very different methods of redress for people, like him, who used the pen rather than the sword. In 1957, he was one of the writers who contributed to a book of essays, South Carolinians Speak: A Moderate Approach to Race Relations. In discussing that book in his memoir, Mac’s tone appears sobering and haunting:

Public reaction [to the book] was mixed. One contributor’s house was fire-bombed. Another was intimidated into recantation. Some withdrew into silence. Others, including me, just hung in there. So my concern about car bombs and booby traps was not entirely misplaced.

           

           

Imagine what it must be like to live with the daily possibility that you or your family could face death. Why not simply avoid that by moving … anywhere out of the line of fire, away from the threat? How do you not do that?

Next Issue: In Part Two, Mac’s children, David and Molly, talk about growing up in Cheraw, S.C., and discuss being members of a family set apart. The character and personality of Mac Secrest is further explored.

Reference

           

Secrest, Andrew McDowd. (2004). Curses and Blessings: Life and Evolution in the 20th Century South. Bloomington, Indiana: Author House.

Lee Formwalt Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2015

As Lee Formwalt explains to us in Looking Back, Moving Forward, the Civil Rights Movement in Southwest Georgia was not limited to the more well-known events that occurred there in the 1960s. It is rather a movement that began with the arrival of enslaved people in the early 19^th Century, and it is a history that he brings right up to the present day. In bestowing this award, the Lillian Smith Book Awards Jury commends Professor Formwalt for doing justice to this long history of struggle through a narrative that is compelling, that is instructive, and that is often heartbreaking; For sharing with us this intensely local history with national significance.  It was Albany’s Citywide Campaign in 1961 and 1962 when events came to a head in Southwest Georgia . and when the region received widespread attention.

 

Professor Formwalt is particularly effective in conveying a sense of this period: The mass meetings at Mt. Zion and Shiloh churches, the convictions of local leaders, the marches, the boycotts, the Freedom Rides, the young women locked in the Leesburg Stockade, and the brutal attack on the pregnant Marian King. He writes of the music of the movement that brought unity and courage in the face of great adversity.

And who better to relate these events and many others than the former Director of the Albany Civil Rights Institute and long-time Professor of History at Albany State University, Lee Formwalt? All the better that the proceeds from the sale of Looking Back, Moving Forward will go to the Albany Civil Rights Institute to help support that institution in its effort to educate this and future generations on the civil rights struggle in Southwest Georgia.

In accepting a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2015, Dr. Formwalt observed as follows:

I am truly honored and humbled to receive this award today.  When I look at the competition this year and at the previous winners, I am in awe that my work on the history of that dark southwest corner of Georgia is recognized and graced with this prize named after the courageous woman whose writing and work challenged segregation in the Jim Crow South.

Looking Back, Moving Forward tells the story of the Albany and Southwest Georgia Movement. For some people that means the years 1961-1962 when Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Albany and participated in the movement. With his involvement, the Albany Movement came to be part of the larger national civil rights movement which many people consider to have begun either in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring public school segregation unconstitutional, or in 1955 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott when the young minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a civil rights leader of national renown. The movement is often considered to have concluded either in 1964-1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, or in 1968 with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.

Many historians are rethinking the chronological boundaries of the movement which make it a 1950s and 1960s phenomenon. Instead, they propose what they call the Long Civil Rights Movement which began before 1954 and did not end in 1968, but continues right up to the present. In the Long Civil Rights Movement we look to those earlier and later attempts by African Americans and others to assert their human and civil rights.

Some would argue that the civil rights movement began in the 1930s; others go back to the beginning of the 20th century when the NAACP was founded. Still others go back to emancipation and Reconstruction in the 19th century. Others argue that the movement began with slavery and those enslaved persons who resisted their bondage. In other words, most historians agree that the freedom struggle for civil rights was not limited to two decades in the middle 20th century, but has a long history that goes back to before our nation’s founding and continues right up through today.

This book tells the story of the Long Southwest Georgia Movement, going all the way back to the earliest white and African American settlers in southwest Georgia. Greed and white privilege on the one hand, and resistance and a yearning for freedom and equality on the other have been continual themes in southwest Georgia history in the last two centuries. Quickly summarized, the story of its early years consists of the white man defeating the red man in the Creek War, 1813-1814, and taking his land to grow the white gold of that day—cotton. To clear the land, and to plant and cultivate the crop, he brought in the enslaved black man, and laid in southwest Georgia what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom.” That kingdom, built on African American slavery, came crashing down with emancipation at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. There followed in the brief hopeful years of Reconstruction in southwest Georgia (1865-1871) a struggle to make African American freedom real. With the spotty protection of the federal government, black men by the hundreds elected African American men to represent them in the state legislature. They built their own churches, schools, and social institutions.

Federal support of the experiment in African American freedom did not last long. The bonds of race were strong; white northerners and southerners reconciled as the 19th century ended, ushering in the long dark years of Jim Crow, and segregation became the law of the land south of the Mason Dixon line. White supremacy was reinforced by law and by extralegal violence, the worst of which was lynching. As during slavery and Reconstruction, African Americans resisted the system of oppression. Some left southwest Georgia; others organized and laid the groundwork for the Albany civil rights movement which burst on the national scene in late 1961. The eyes of the nation and the world were on southwest Georgia and witnessed the largest direct action community protest at that time in American history.

Key players in igniting the Albany Movement were Charles Sherrod, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and high school and Albany State College students. Martin Luther King, Jr. came in 1961 and left in 1962, but Sherrod and SNCC stayed. Their stories flesh out the narrative of the southwest Georgia movement in the 1960s. Once again the federal government allied itself with the African American liberation cause, but it was local people of color who went to court and, in county after county in the region, brought the white power structure kicking and screaming into the modern world of equal rights and diversity. The struggle for freedom and equality continues in the 21st century as whites continue to avoid true public school integration and wield economic power in their own interest. One thing that continues to inspire contemporary freedom fighters is the story of how their predecessors challenged oppression.

This book had its origins in the 1980s and 1990s when I was teaching at Albany State and researching and writing about 19th-century Dougherty County. In the 1990s I got involved in the effort to turn the old and no longer used Mt. Zion Baptist Church into a civil rights museum.  We restored the front half of the church to the way it was in 1961-1962 during the heyday of the Albany Movement.  In the back half of the church were the museum exhibits.  The $1.2 million renovation was completed in 1998 and the museum opened on the 37th anniversary of the founding of the Albany Movement in November 1961. Our dream for a new building with separate exhibit space next to the church was realized in October 2008, when the $4 million  facility was dedicated as the new Albany Civil Rights Institute or ACRI.

In the meantime, I had left Albany in 1999 to become executive director of the Organization of American Historians in Bloomington, IN.  When I retired in 2009, I got a phone call from ACRI and before I knew it I was back in Albany running our beloved new civil rights institute.

I wasn’t there long when the editor of a slick glossy photo-rich community magazine proposed that we put together a souvenir book that ACRI visitors could buy which would tell the story of the Albany Movement. We raised $25,000 to cover the costs of making the book so that all the sales proceeds would benefit ACRI.  We had difficulty finding a writer and the project remained unfinished when I retired and returned to Indiana at the end of 2011.

The following summer I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and I decided that while I was still able I would visit those places I had always wanted to see: Italy, Greece, Machu Picchu, and the Galapagos Islands. I went to Italy in May 2013, and while I was in Greece four months later I got an email from ACRI director Frank Wilson asking me about the souvenir book project.  When I got home, I explained that he needed to find a writer for the book.  Within ten days, I was signing a contract to write the book over the next four months before I headed down to Machu Picchu. Having researched and written so much on 19th-century southwest Georgia history and having written the ACRI docents’ presentation on the movement, I was able to crank out a chapter every week to nine days.  For their feedback, I sent drafts out to former SNCC workers Penny Patch, Peter de Lissovoy, and Jack Chatfield, to former Albany Movement president Dr. William Anderson, to Julian Bond, and to historians Susan O’Donovan, Emilye Crosby, Hasan Jeffries, and Jamil Zainaldin.  Sadly, we lost Jack and Julian this past year, but both lived long enough to see the book before they passed. Jamil recognized the publication as more than a souvenir book and offered the help of the Georgia Humanities Council in promoting it to a wider audience.  Cathy Cowdrey did a superb job in designing and laying out the book. Rich Weichert read every word of every draft and provided support day in and day out.  Also with us today are others who supported me over the years—my mom who has been there for me for the last 65 years; my sisters Debbie McFerran and Kim Mistovich and their husbands; and colleagues Susan McGrath and Frank Wilson, who made this project finally happen. To all of you—Thanks!

Georgia Court of Appeals Choices are a Wake-Up Call.

November 3, 2015

To the Editors:

Despite protestations by many in the leadership of our State, including those who sit on the Judicial Nominating Commission, that the lack of diverse gubernatorial appointments is only a function of “lack of qualified nominees,” Governor Nathan Deal’s recent appointments to the three (3) newly created Court of Appeals seats confirms that “lack of qualified nominees” is not a reason for the lack of diverse appointments.

The list of nominees for the Court of Appeals included several highly qualified diverse candidates who have practiced law and administered justice in a variety of jurisdictions across the State. The final list of nominees that was sent to the Governor included three (3) distinguished African American sitting judges. Yet not one of them was selected for any of the three vacancies. Instead, the Governor, as has been the tradition, selected a white female and two white males to fill these important seats. Only one of the three (3) was a sitting judge. While there was geographic and gender diversity in his selection, the Governor appears to have completely ignored the importance racial diversity as part of his selection process.

In a state where 30.5% of the population is African American, the Court of Appeals, which hears cases from all across the state, is now 13% African American – far from representative of the state population. There are two (2) African American appellate judges, and one is near retirement age.

But, judging by recent actions, representation apparently does not matter to Governor Deal. He apparently believes that the diverse perspectives of people who don’t look like him are unimportant and need not be reflected on the bench above a token level. Evidently, the Governor does not believe any of the myriad of studies which have established that diversity enhances the quality of judicial decision-making and promotes greater confidence in our system of justice.

As a former judge, the Governor has personal experience of the homogenous composition of Georgia’s courts, and it is especially disappointing that someone with this experience displays an apparent lack of sensitivity to the urgent need for a representative judiciary in our highly diverse State. It is also disappointing that the Governor apparently did not believe that diversity and accountability are important on one of our State’s highest tribunals.

We did not want to believe those who suggested that that the Governor of our great State believes that he only represents “some “of the people – those who voted for him - and not “all” of the people. We did not want to believe that a Governor who inherits the legacy left by Governor Zell Miller and Governor Roy Barnes – a legacy of racially diverse judicial appointments - would turn his back on this legacy and seek to undo it. How can the Governor not be aware of and hear the growing unrest amongst lawyers and the general population that the current judiciary looks less like our state now and more like the all-white judiciary of the 1950’s?

Despite our trepidations, we still had a glimmer of hope that this Governor would “do the right thing” by all of the people of this State whose cases ultimately end up in the Court of Appeals and turn the tide toward inclusivity. It was this hope that led us to encourage a group of highly talented lawyers and judges to allow themselves to be considered for the recent Court of Appeals vacancies.

Apparently, our hopes were misplaced.

Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore (Retired)

Former Judge Bettianne Hart

Charles S. Johnson III

Suzanne Ockleberry

Wayne Kendall

Advocacy For Action, Inc.