Tag Archives: Gees Bend

First Weeks of April 1965 – Camden Demonstrations Continue

scope051_2April 2, 1965 – Camden

March is Blocked at Camden 2D Day: Mayor and Deputies Bar Walk to Courthouse

Students from Camden Academy, adults from Gees Bend and others continue to defy the mayor and city officials and demonstrate without a permit, every day for at least a week. They continue to be assaulted with either or both tear gas and smoke bombs but the students announce “We’ll be back!” Source: Chicago Defender

Author’s note: Adults who were then students who told me that demonstrators from Coy and other communities were involved as well and that there were weeks of weekday marches both from Antioch Baptist church and from Camden Academy for the rest of the school year into May.

April 4, 1968  Martin Luther King Jr Assassinated in Memphis, TN during his support for a sanitation workers strike. Union busting continues today in 2013 as living wages slip out of the reach of millions of willing workers.

 April 6, 1965 – Camden

 Use Smoke, Tear Gas on Ala Demonstrators

Eleven (11) arrested in a third march in the same week. Smoke bombs and tear gas both were used. Adults began at Antioch Baptist Church and students at the Camden Academy.

Source: Chicago Defender.

Author’s note:  Some former students I interviewed said that the police tried to confuse them by using both smoke and tear gas bombs shot from big barrel guns. The police then mocked the students if they panicked when it was smoke instead of tear gas. As time went on the student organizers gave the youth wet towels to cover their faces before leaving campus to march.

Camden demonstrators from out of town, dubbed “outside agitators” may have included Bruce Hartford, Charles “Chuck Bonner” Bonner, Amos Snell, Luke (Bob) Block, Strider “Arkansas” Benson and other civil rights workers. Bob/Luke Block was shocked with a cattle prod but stayed and worked in Wilcox with both SNCC and SCLC until August.

Return to Gees Bend

Nancy Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph, Maria Gitin, Annie Kennedy

In 1965 we were inspired when Dan Harrell told us about Reverend Lonnie Brown and farmer Monroe Pettway leading a handful of courageous residents from Gees Bend try to register to vote in Camden in 1963. They succeeded in filling out the registration forms but were denied on the basis of the Alabama requirement that new voters be vouched for by an already registered voter. Since no Blacks had been allowed to register and no whites registered in the county would sign the supporting witness form, their applications were denied. He said that their case on appeal and they were sure to win by next year. That’s why we had to educate and register voters now, to be ready for when the law would finally insure voting rights. And so walk and talk we did.

In 2008, when I returned to the small isolated community that I vividly recalled—the full immersion baptism in Foster Creek, the beautiful voices of the Pleasant View Church ladies—Gees Bend had become the most famous of all of Wilcox County’s tiny communities, primarily because of its quilters.
After art dealers discovered the quilts in the early 1970s, they became collectors’ items. Now the quilts are displayed in locked cases in museums instead of warming walls and covering beds in drafty shanties where we had seen them in 1965. Despite all the national attention, nearly 40% of the seven hundred souls in Gees Bend still live below the poverty line and the unemployment rate is the highest in the state.

Ms Allie Pettway signs a quilt sample in her Gees Bend Home

When Luke and I sat down in the Quilter’s Cooperative lunchroom with three quilters, they pointed out a photo of Mary McCarthy, the VISTA worker who they credited for founding their quilting cooperative even though most histories credit two men, a white minister and a white art dealer. Read Linda Hunt Beckman’s first-hand account of the change in the quilters fortunes after our work there and an alternative to the usual romanticized view of the community.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/456/456_quilt_story_beckman_guest_share.html.
from This Bright Light of Ours 1965. Watch this site for publication updates.

Return to Gees Bend

Nancy Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph, Maria Gitin, Annie Kennedy

In 1965 we were inspired when Dan Harrell told us about Reverend Lonnie Brown and farmer Monroe Pettway leading a handful of courageous residents from Gees Bend try to register to vote in Camden in 1963. They succeeded in filling out the registration forms but were denied on the basis of the Alabama requirement that new voters be vouched for by an already registered voter. Since no Blacks had been allowed to register and no whites registered in the county would sign the supporting witness form, their applications were denied. He said that their case on appeal and they were sure to win by next year. That’s why we had to educate and register voters now, to be ready for when the law would finally insure voting rights. And so walk and talk we did.

In 2008, when I returned to the small isolated community that I vividly recalled—the full immersion baptism in Foster Creek, the beautiful voices of the Pleasant View Church ladies—Gees Bend had become the most famous of all of Wilcox County’s tiny communities, primarily because of its quilters.
After art dealers discovered the quilts in the early 1970s, they became collectors’ items. Now the quilts are displayed in locked cases in museums instead of warming walls and covering beds in drafty shanties where we had seen them in 1965. Despite all the national attention, nearly 40% of the seven hundred souls in Gees Bend still live below the poverty line and the unemployment rate is the highest in the state.

Ms Allie Pettway signs a quilt sample in her Gees Bend Home

When Luke and I sat down in the Quilter’s Cooperative lunchroom with three quilters, they pointed out a photo of Mary McCarthy, the VISTA worker who they credited for founding their quilting cooperative even though most histories credit two men, a white minister and a white art dealer. Read Linda Hunt Beckman’s first-hand account of the change in the quilters fortunes after our work there and an alternative to the usual romanticized view of the community.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/456/456_quilt_story_beckman_guest_share.html.
from This Bright Light of Ours 1965. Watch this site for publication updates.