“When the roots are deep, there is no need to fear the wind.” African Proverb
.webp)
“In Spight of all Endeavours to disguise this Point, it is clear as Light itself that Negroes are as essentially necessary to the Cultivation of Georgia as Axes, Hoes, or any other utensil of agriculture.” --W. B. Stevens - The History of Georgia, 1847
I was overwhelmed by the Foreword from Michael's book and asked him if I could share it here in its entirety... For me it certainly set the stage for reading the following history of Macon, Georgia...
Foreword
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hen
Georgia was organized as a colony in 1732 in honor of the British Monarch, King
George; enslavement did not exist in the new colony. The founding Board of Trustees
believed that a prohibition on slavery would encourage the settlement of
Georgia by Englishmen and Christians and not, God forbid, the Spaniards,
Catholics, or Irish.
Soon,
Africans were brought in from the Carolinas and “hired for life,” according to
W. B. Stevens, so much for the niceties of the rule outlawing enslavement in
the Georgia colony. The authorities looked the other way, and by 1749, the
slave trade was wide open in Georgia, albeit with restrictions that historians
agree, like the rule prohibiting enslaving other human beings, were not
strictly enforced.
Like all land in this country, the site
of Macon, Georgia, was originally land owned by natives who were indigenous to
the region—by 1823, Andrew Jackson had successfully weakened the native
community with superior weaponry, causing natives in Middle Georgia to
negotiate the sale of their homeland at bargain rates.
On
December 8, 1823, the Georgia legislature issued a charter for Macon, Georgia. Eleven
months later, merchants moved to establish Macon as a solid mercantile center.
An announcement for an Administrator’s Sale in the Georgia Journal and Messenger,
Bibb County’s first legal organ, on November 17, 1824, by Charles
Bullock, Administrator, and Martha B. Dawson, Administratrix, pitched the
William W. Dawson estate “…a few miles below the Reserve, on the Ocmulgee
River,” as a place “… persons wishing to establish a permanent interest
in the town of Macon, would do well to attend the sale.”
In
that same edition of the Georgia Journal and Messenger, William Bivins
caused to be published a notice that he had taken over the Mansion House, “that
new and commodious building, in Macon belonging to Capt. Charles Bullock,
fronting the public square where he will entertain travelers and others with
everything that can be offered in the line of his business.”
By
the end of 1824, Macon had a population of three thousand, primarily northern
transplants who migrated from New York, New England, and the northeast region.
They brought with them their Yankee “stiff upper lip” and penchant for
business.
Only
White men ran the government, and no White women or Negroes of any sex were allowed
in governance. As Stevens pointed out
in his history of the state, Blacks were essential as a farm instrument,
nothing more, nothing less.
On
September 19, 1826, L. Thompson, D. S., advertised the following in the Georgia
Journal and Messenger:
“Will
be sold on the first Tuesday in October next, at the courthouse in the town of
Macon, Bibb County, the following property. One Negro man named Sam levied on
as the property of William Robinson to satisfy a fi fa. In favor of Wm.
Bressie.”
Ten
years after Macon received its charter from the State of Georgia, Great Britain
outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire with the passage of the Slavery
Abolition Act of 1833. The Slavery Abolition Act took effect in England on August
1, 1834. Meanwhile, the United States of America, teetering on the brink of a
grave civil war, continued to import human cargo for sell on auction blocks
throughout the agricultural south. In many communities throughout the southern
states, Macon, Georgia included, the number of enslaved people was more
significant than the planter community that kept them in bondage. The fact that
the enslaved outnumbered the enslavers would become a sore spot for Southerners
when troops representing the United States of American moved south to enforce
President Abraham Lincoln’s Executive Order freeing men and women held in
bondage within the several states.
According to census data, in 1860, Macon had three thousand people. Another 15,952 people lived in Bibb County. Real estate holdings were valued at $4,777,551, and personal property, most of which was enslaved labor, was valued at $10,279,574.00.*
Despite
this enormous valuation in enslaved labor, the
value of Black lives had not improved much within the next 40 years,
according to this advertisement for Life Insurance by Aetna Insurance Company,
Hartford, Connecticut, in the Georgia Journal and Messenger on July 27,
1863:
“The
undersigned, Agent, will receive applications for Insurance on lives of White
persons. Also, risks on Negroes are taken on two-thirds of their cash
valuation.”*
Against this backdrop, Black Maconites
saw a brief period where they exercised political power on the state and
federal levels but none in the local governmental entities. Beginning on April
1, 1867, Georgia began registering voters for the new state government emerging
from the ashes of the Civil War. In Bibb County, “over 2500 Blacks took the Loyalty
Oath* and registered to vote, while about 2,000 Whites agreed with the Loyalty
Oath (Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, p. 186).
The
first vote Blacks took in Bibb County after the Civil War was to determine whether
to hold a state Constitutional Convention. Voting began on October 29, 1867,
and ran through November 2, 1867. Over 100,000 people voted statewide on this
measure. In Bibb County, Blacks cast 1,845 votes in favor of the State Constitutional
Convention.
Eight
White Bibb County residents voted in this first election. The percentage of eligible
White men was deficient in 1867, as few were ready to swear allegiance again to
the United States of America. These Georgia rebels were undoubtedly waiting for
the South to rise again quickly following General Robert E. Lee’s surrender.
Georgians, led by a strong contingent of
Blacks formerly held in bondage, overwhelmingly approved holding a Constitutional
Convention, which was the State’s pathway back into the United States of
America. From the start of efforts to reconstitute the country after the Civil
War, former enslaved Black men were ready to govern.
Based
on reporting by The Macon Telegraph, the five-day period to vote on the Constitutional
Convention saw Black leadership casting the majority of the votes passed
without any peace disturbance (Macon Telegraph, November 8, 1867).
According
to the Black Scholar, W. E. B. DuBois in his research, Black Reconstruction
in America, An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in
the Attempt to Reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880, Atheneum,
Kingsport, Tennessee, Kingsport Press, Inc., p. 498), the Constitutional
Convention originally scheduled for Milledgeville, Georgia had to be moved to
Atlanta because of “White hostility.”
Rev.
Henry McNeal Turner, a Black man born of free parentage near Newberry
Courthouse, South Carolina, represented Bibb County at the Constitutional
Convention. Turner is recognized as the most prominent and influential Black person
in Georgia during the early days of Reconstruction. Ordained by the Methodist
Episcopal Church South, Turner came to Macon around 1858 to preach in the
city’s African Methodist Episcopal Church.
According
to Mungo M. Ponton in his book, The Life and Times of Henry M. Turner (Atlanta,
A. D. Cardwell Publishing Co., 1917, p. 4), “Turner’s eloquence has moved many
Whites to attend his sermons.”*
During
the Civil War, Turner received a commission as a Chaplain by President Abraham
Lincoln, and at the end of the war, Turner was sent to Macon to work with the Freedmen’s
Bureau. Soon after that, Turner left his work at the Freedman’s Bureau and
dedicated his days to organizing the African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Georgia and to organizing political power for the Black community.
As
a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention during Reconstruction, Turner
introduced and passed two resolutions to preserve former enslavers’ economic
interests in their real property. Turner’s resolution to allow White planters
to keep their real property was a benevolent act and an olive branch to Whites
who had just felt the sting of a humiliating defeat on the battlefield.
White
Georgians were not as benevolent when the delegates considered a resolution
establishing one citizenship classification for all Georgians the right to vote
for all males over twenty-one who had lived in the State for six months, and
the right of all voters to hold public office. The majority White delegation
struck the last provision granting Blacks the right to hold public office. While
this version presented to the Georgia Constitutional Convention granted the
vote to Black men, it denied them the right to hold elective office.
In
the latter proviso, a Black male registered voter could vote for any candidate
of his choice as long as that candidate did not have one drop of Black blood
flowing through his veins. Codifying this provision would have made it against
state law to deny a Black male the right to serve in an elective office. Whites
fought against this amendment, and the amendment failed.
Within
four years, prohibition against holding public office gave White state
legislators the basis to remove Turner and 38 other Blacks from the Georgia
House of Representatives and three Blacks from the State Senate.*
Turner
responded by convening a Colored State Convention in Macon, Georgia, on October
6-8, 1868. Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 82 sent delegates. Enslaved Black men had
been holding Colored Conventions throughout the United States since September
20, 1830, when Bishop Richard Allen, Senior Bishop of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church, convened a Colored Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
at the Mother Bethel A. M. E. Church, following the “Cincinnati Race Riot” of
1829.
Nine
states sent 40 free Black men to the first “Colored State Convention” to discuss issues facing free Black Americans
in the antebellum north. Eighteen delegates registered from Pennsylvania, six
from Maryland, four from New York, three from Delaware, two from Rhode Island,
two from New Jersey, and one from Ohio and Connecticut.
The
local law in Cincinnati cut with a double-edge sword. While the law outlawed
enslavement, it also made Black citizenship illegal.*
Turner,
trained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church tradition, was keenly aware
of Allen’s “Colored State Convention” and utilized this concept when it seemed
that the interest of newly freed enslaved people in Georgia was about to be
overrun by the defeated traitors who wanted back into the United States under
terms favorable to their sense of racial superiority.
In
fact, as Bishop, Turner returned to Georgia in 1893 and organized one of the
last Colored State Conventions. He gave the keynote address at the Colored
State Convention, arguing for mass emigration to Canada.
The
1868 Colored State Convention elected Turner as President. The Colored
Convention convened in Macon City Hall to the chagrin of Whites, who were
offended by the strong mistrust of Whites expressed by Turner and other
delegates.* The editors of The Telegraph urged White leaders to stop the Blacks
from using city hall* for what The Telegraph described as the Blacks slandering
the name of “…the good White people of Macon…” (The Macon Telegraph, October 16,
1868).
During
the Congressional Reconstruction from 1867-1876. Henry McNeal Turner, a cleric
in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Connection, ran and won a seat in the
Georgia State Legislature from Macon and Bibb County. Turner ran for
re-election and won and served until he and other Black State Representatives left
the state legislature at the point of guns drawn by white legislators who
disliked free Black men debating the issues of the day.*
On
the federal level, Jefferson Franklin Long won a seat in the United States
Congress from Bibb County by 900 votes over Democrat W. J. Lawton. He served in
the House for three months, From December 1870 until March 1871, and spoke in
the well of the House against allowing members of the Confederacy to serve in
the United States Congress.
“On
election day in 1872, he [Jefferson Long] rallied Black voters and marched with
them to the polls in Macon, where they were met by a group of armed Whites. In
the ensuing riot, at least three people were killed, and most Black voters fled
before casting a ballot”* (Hardwick, Grace,
Jefferson Franklin Long, New Georgia Encyclopedia).
Thus,
violence at the ballot box was the state of affairs for the next 152 years,
filled with unfulfilled dreams of participating in the democratic process.*
Henry
McNeal Turner was the most consequential Black leader in Macon’s first
forty-nine years. After numerous battles with White leaders, Turner spoke
during an Emancipation Day service on January 1, 1872. He urged Congress to
pass a Civil Rights Bill, and then Turner left Macon, leaving a void in Black
political leadership.
This
void remained until the mid-1940s when Austin Walden returned home from
military duty, which included service in France during World War I, and set up
the first Black law practice in Macon, Georgia. In 1946, Walden left Macon for
Atlanta, where he helped establish the Gate City Bar Association, Georgia’s
oldest Black Bar Association.
Not until December 9,
1975, did a Black man, a Black woman, or a White woman take the oath of office
to serve on the Macon City Council.* This book is about the fantasy coming true
for four Black men and one Black woman with their 1975 election to the Macon,
Georgia City Council.
A fantasy for most Black
people living in Macon, Georgia, before 1975 was imagining that a Black person
won an elective office. Post Reconstruction, the earliest account of a Black
person running for public office was Andrew Fields, who ran for Coroner of Bibb
County around 1964.
Fields had a degree in
mortuary science, contracted himself out as an embalmer for local funeral
homes, and worked as a teacher in the public school system. Next up was an
unsuccessful 1968 run for State Representative in the old House District 94 by
Macon’s second Black Attorney, Tom Jackson.
Winning an elective city office
was a pleasant thing to think about, but it was not likely to happen. Reality
is what dreams are, nothing more and nothing less. Black people in Macon,
Georgia, continued to fantasize about holding political power within the limits
of the city government until one November day in 1975, they were standing smack
in the middle of an improbable dream.
During the summer of 1975,
this writer worked as the pollster for the Committee to Elect Reverend Julius
Caesar Hope, Mayor of Macon. Hope was the first Black person to seek the office
of mayor. The Hope campaign events often overlapped with the campaigns of the
Blacks seeking to become the first Black members of the Macon City Council.
Practically every night,
a couple of churches in the city would host a candidate forum. I attended these
events with Rev. Hope and had the opportunity to watch the Black candidates’ historic
run for city council while simultaneously charting the landmark course for the
first Black candidate for mayor of Macon. Hope stepped into the void left in
1872 by the departure of Henry McNeal Turner. Like Turner, Hope was a Southerner.
He was born in Mobile, Alabama. He attended Alabama State College (University)
and lettered in baseball.
After college, Hope
joined the United States Air Force, where he developed into a champion boxer. Hope
became an ordained Baptist preacher, and in the 1960s, he was called to pastor
the Zion Baptist Church of Brunswick, Georgia.
In 1965, Hope became the
first Black person to run for mayor of Brunswick, Georgia.
“I was in fifth grade
when Hope ran for mayor of Brunswick,” Cornell Harvey (no known relation) said.
“I went to bed that night thinking Hope had won, only to wake up the next
morning and the news said there would have to be a run-off. I didn’t understand
what happened. Everybody was disappointed. In the run-off, Hope didn’t have a
chance. People came out of the woodwork to vote for the White candidate,”* Harvey said one night as he followed in Hope’s
footsteps in 2014, campaigning for the Brunswick Mayor’s office. He won the
race, becoming that coastal city’s first Black mayor forty-nine years after
Hope gave it the good old college try.
Ten years after Hope’s
maiden run for mayor of Brunswick, Georgia, he qualified to seek the mayor’s
office in Macon, Georgia. By this time, Hope was the President of the Georgia
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP).
Like Turner, Hope was
conservative in his political views. As with Turner, the White leadership, led
by The Macon Telegraph, feared Hope and painted him as a Black radical
primarily because Hope’s political style* did not align with that of Bill
Randall, a Black leader who “carried the White man’s water” in times of Black
political activism. Through our polling, we identified where Hope, a relative
newcomer to the city, was weak among Black voters. Gauging Hope’s relative
strength in the Black community was a critical assessment because, in a field
of five candidates, three were White men
with strong ties to the Black community. These three White mayoral candidates held
expectations of getting their share of Black votes.
The Black electorate was
accustomed to voting for White candidates because there had not been many Black
candidates on the ballot to vote for, and the conventional wisdom, according to
Christopher Bonner, Political Writer for The Macon Telegraph, “…the
other [White] candidates in the race were expected to take their share of Black
votes,” (The Macon Telegraph, Thursday, September 1975).
Of those candidates two were
Attorney James I. Wood, who served as Sheriff of Bibb County in the 1950s and
got to know the Black community well. Also in the race was City Councilman
Major David Carter, who had served as Senior Army Instructor at the Junior Reserve
Officers Training Corp (ROTC) program at Lanier Senior High School. By 1975,
Carter had over a decade of getting to know Black young men in his ROTC program
and their parents. Lanier alums widely respected him.
However, the other reason
Bonner and other White political pundits believed that Hope would not fare well
among Black voters was that, as Bonner put it, “Hope was considered no
better than a fourth-place finisher in the primary election because one-time
Black Macon kingpin William P. Randall was backing [Buckner] Melton.” Ibid.
Bonner wrote, “Many
observers expected Hope to receive a few thousand Black votes and a handful of
votes from White liberals” Ibid. In the end, Hope polled 6,321 votes and
finished second in the race, setting up a run-off race with Attorney Buckner
Melton, who received 9,043 votes, most of them from White voters. Hope brought
me aboard in April 1975 after he addressed a small gathering at Unionville
Baptist Church at 1660 Pio Nono Avenue. We met the following day for breakfast
at the famed H & H Restaurant on Forsyth Street. We would meet every
morning at 7:00 am at H & H throughout the campaign to plan our day and
plot strategy to address the different groups on Hope’s schedule.
Hope showed me a napkin he
had received from Dr. Neil Cullinan, a history professor at Fort Valley State
College (University), which laid out the number of votes it would take to win
the election. Then, he tasked me with materializing those numbers in the ballot
box. Professor Cullinan later endorsed Hope as mayor.
I suggested we hit Bonner’s
Black kingpin, Bill Randall, square between the eyes. While I was away in
college in the early 1970s, Hope and Randall clashed over leadership in the
Black community, so my idea went over well with Hope. Randall’s message to the
Black community was that the time was not suitable for a Black person to be
Mayor of Macon and that Hope’s candidacy would hurt race relations and cause a
backlash against Blacks running for the first time for seats on the city
council.
I witnessed Randall take
the same approach to civil rights issues for fifteen years. He urged bus
boycotters in 1960 to go slow. If the Ministerial Alliance, led by Rev. James
Lorenza Key, had not called for mass meetings and encouraged the public to
boycott the city bus line, those cream and green buses would still divide the
races today. We painted Randall as an “Uncle Tom” whose leadership was no
longer relevant to the Black community. We wanted to give Black voters a reason
to break with Randall’s leadership when they entered the ballot box. We wanted
to create enough discussion on Cotton Avenue and at the Beer House on Pio Nono Avenue
that would provoke the question:
Why not vote for a Black
man?*
Hope came out swinging,
without mentioning Randall by name; Hope blasted the notion that the time was
not suitable for a Black person to participate in government and politics.
Randall hit Hope under
the belt by leaking a letter to the media that he wrote to Hope dated June 4,
1975. In the letter, Randall accused Hope of jeopardizing the chances of Blacks
running for seats on the city council and declaring Hope would run so poorly
that he would not force a run-off in the race.
We decided to respond to
Randall’s letter, but not directly to Randall. We prepared a media advisory for
Hope. In it, Hope blistered Randall, stating that he would not be forced out of
the campaign because he did not have Randall’s support. “A majority of the
people are with me,” Hope wrote (The Macon Telegraph, Wednesday, June 11,
1975).
While Hope’s campaign
promoted funding that supported the least of Macon’s citizens, he purposely did
not bill his candidacy as a Black mayor for Macon. His pecan tan skin tone made
that case loud and clear. His campaign theme was “Elect Julius C. Hope – Macon’s
Only Hope.” His was a true statement. A look in the Macon telephone directory
for 1975 and Rev. Hope is the only Hope listed.
Hope retorted, “Only
one reference has been made racially in this campaign, and Mr. Randall has made
it. The campaign will not be decided on racial issues, to the dismay of many,
including Mr. Randall.” Ibid.*
By Independence Day 1975,
tensions mounted between the Randall faction and the Hope team. Herbert Dennard,
community activist and President of The Concerned Citizens League’s Political
Action Committee, scheduled a mass meeting at Allen Chapel African Methodist
Episcopal Church on Pursley Street in the Pleasant Hill community where Bill
Randall had his home.
Sherry Howard, a Macon
Telegraph Staff Writer, summarized the meeting as “…an effort to achieve
unity in the Black community, and not to influence persons in one direction or
another. She quoted Dennard as saying, “There are many brewing rumors
and controversies. Ours is an attempt to seek ways to prevent the pot from
boiling over and burning us all” (The Macon Telegraph, Saturday,
July 12, 1975).
Also, to counter Randall’s
slow walk on Black empowerment, we brought Congressman Andrew Young to speak to
a banquet of about 200 people at the Macon Hilton the week before the election.
Young addressed the timeliness of Black participation in governance. He told
Bonner, “I don’t know whether that’s the question. The time is right to do
right. I hope the majority (of voters) have moved beyond simple racism” (The
Macon Telegraph, Saturday, September 6, 1975). Later, Young added, “When
you have been down as long as we’ve been down, there is only one way to go,”*
Ibid.
Despite Bill Randall’s prediction,
we had engineered our way into a run-off
with Randall’s candidate, Attorney Buckner Melton, when the dust had cleared.
As I had predicted, the dark horse in the race was James Wood. He ran a solid
third, and with our substantial numbers, Melton did not reach fifty percent
plus one to win outright.
The beauty of that September
night in 1975 is that the Black community had stood together on the precipice
of history, one step away from the mayor’s office. Five Blacks won the Macon
City Council election, swallowing up one hundred and fifty-two years of history.
When we drove Rev. Hope
home that night, Willie C. Hill and his brother-in-law Bill Barnes met us in
the driveway. Hill was one of four out of five Black candidates who were
assured of a seat on the next Macon City Council because he had no opposition
in the General Election. Hill and Barnes were strangers to the Hope Campaign
during the heat of battle.
They concentrated their
efforts on getting Hill elected to the council. Hill’s and Barnes’ late-night Nicodemus-like
visit caused Hope to shake his head and muse out loud, “Where have they been
all summer.” The four other Black candidates for city council posts won their Democratic
Primary, but Delores Ann Brooks faced opposition in the General Election. The
results of the Democratic Primary that night proved the lie to Bill Randall’s forecast.
Not only did Rev. Hope win the Black vote, but he also forced the well-financed
Melton Campaign into the run-off Randall said would never happen. Neither did Hope’s
improbable fantasy harm the Black candidates for city council. Every Black
candidate who ran against a White candidate won over the White opposition.
The night before the
run-off, Hope brought James Brown to town. Brown did not sing any of his patented
songs.* He spoke for several hours at First Baptist Church on New Street. Brown
preached that Black folk only wanted the system to open the door to opportunity.
Before Brown had finished speaking, we began to receive threats that a group of
disgruntled White men planned to harm Rev. Hope.
Robert Brown, Director of
the American Friends Service Committee in Macon, volunteered to post security
outside the church edifice. No bombs turned up, and without notifying the
public, Hope motioned for James Brown to wrap up his remarks, and we got
everybody out of the building and home to their families without a panic. True
to Hope’s promise, he did not run a race-based campaign. His message was to
represent every section of Macon fairly.
Afterward, no one could
say that Hope caused a division between the races. However, in the mayoral
run-off, the Hope Campaign did galvanize White voters who feared a Black person
as mayor. There is no doubt that Hope, a Black man, disturbed the sensitivities
of certain folk in Macon, but it is equally valid that Hope ran a non-offensive
campaign, a campaign every member of the Black community could be proud to know
that Hope gave his best.
A Black mayor was inconceivable
in 1823 when the founding fathers organized Macon. Macon’s White voters, in
1975, like their counterparts in Brunswick a decade earlier, came out in droves
to support Melton and maintain the 1823 status quo bolstered by the 1868 Georgia
Constitutional Convention stipulation prohibiting Black public office holders.
Nearly a year after the
election of the “Macon Black Five,” I was a journalist working for The Macon
Courier. I sat down with each Black City Council member to gauge their
pulse and determine their standing on issues confronting the Black community.
My reporting ran in a copyrighted story in the December 1, 1976 edition of The
Macon Courier under the headline, Black Impact Upon Local
Government.
As a twenty-five-year-old
African living in Macon, Georgia, I believed that the readership of the Black
newspaper should review how the first year of governance went for the Black
city council members. Now, nearly fifty years later, as a seventy-three-year-old
journalist still working in the writer’s trade, I believe it is appropriate to
honor the memory of the “Black Macon Five.”
Before beginning this
book, I discussed my idea with my former publisher at The Macon Courier. I
was aghast when he asked who the first Black city council members were. A
lot has transpired in the last fifty years. You can forget history, but the “Macon
Black Five” memory should live as long as the city-county government lives.
Understandably, one may
take for granted the pioneers when Black people in Macon went from having no
representation in city government to consistently seeing Blacks in leadership
positions in government and business.
Should we ever forget
Christopher Attucks, Jackie Robinson, or Barack Obama?
I dutifully rattled off
their names: Willie C. Hill, Vernon Colbert, Julius Vinson, Rev. Eddie D.
Smith, and Delores Ann Brooks, who not only was one of the first Blacks on the
city council but one of two women elected that year. The other woman, Dr. Mary
Wilder, was the first White woman elected to the city council.
Society tends not to give
Whites credit for their accomplishments, as Whites, it presumes, have always
been achievers. White women in 1732 were about as valuable as “axes, hoes, and any
other utensils of agriculture,” like Negroes.*
My former publisher left
me disheartened. How could a leading person in business in the Middle Georgia
area have forgotten these local history-makers?
If a leading businessman
who interacted with the original “Five” a great deal fifty years ago does not
have their names on the top of his mind, one shudders to think whether the members
of Macon Black Five have crossed the minds of any other citizen, for God only
knows how many years.
It crossed my mind to
abandon this project and chalk it up to a bad idea with no public interest,
another book filled with information that few would bother to read. According
to Dr. Duval, it is an unnecessary project upon which to devote time and energy.
No one seems to care about the past. After all, the past is yesterday’s happenings.
But Dr. W. E. B. DuBois told us, “The past is the present, that without what
was, nothing is, that, but for the infinite dead, the living are but
unimportant bits.”
What has the past to do
with the present?
Who cares about the past?
Those courageous first Black
members of the Macon City Council are all but forgotten in the annals of Macon
history. There is a city building named for Delores Brooks but no markers for
Hill, Colbert, Vinson, or Smith; except for Smith, the history-making council
members transitioned long ago. I began attempts to interview Rev. Smith for
this book in 2019 but did not receive a reply to any of a half dozen inquiries
over the last five years.
Nevertheless, we should
tell this story. Those, like this writer who remember and are still in charge
of their faculties must share this history with new generations of students,
scholars, and community leaders. The current generation should not repeat
mistakes made by previous generations, errors which should never happen in the
future. Lessons learned must be passed on and utilized by the current historical
Age.*
I will depend, with a few
poetic license exceptions for grammar and clarity, on several pieces I wrote in
The Macon Courier and my recollection of history during the summer of
1975 when a pipe dream fantasy manifested into a physical reality for Five of
Macon’s most improbable Black citizens. It was unlikely because, from the city’s
incorporation, it denied public service to Black people within the city limits.
Beginning on December 9,
1975, people with no experience in public governance because they had never
been allowed to participate in the political process volunteered to make
decisions for the fifth largest city in the state. The “Fantasy Five” cut their
teeth singing “We Shall Overcome” in civil disobedience marches. They came into
their new leadership role as the order of the day turned to chants of “Black
Power,” the fear of every White Maconite who had never contemplated Black men
and women making laws that regulated their daily affairs.
In my 1976 copyrighted
story in The Macon Courier, I recapped the previous year as follows:
“9 December 1976
is recorded in Central Georgia history as the day Jim Crowism died in city
government. The election of five Blacks to the city council brought the death
blow to an archaic era in Central Georgia politics. This feat occurred due to
the election of current Black State Representatives David E. Lucas and William
C. Randall. Their election, incidentally, was a first for Bibb County since
Reconstruction.
Immediately upon
their election, the two began working on a bill to create ward lines for city
council members. They researched, introduced, fought, compromised, and passed a
ward-by-district plan.
By not forgetting
their reason for being in the General Assembly, Lucas and Randall paved the way
for council persons Willie C. Hill, Delores Brooks, Vernon Colbert, Julius
Vinson, and Eddie Smith.
Hill, Brooks,
Colbert, Vinson, and Smith campaigned through some of this writer’s hottest-known
dog days. They walked streets, knocked on doors, shook hands, made promises,
and appeared before public forums to answer tough questions about their
background, wealth - and commitment to Black uplift and progress.
This group, a
teacher, a librarian, a retired postmaster, an insurance agent, and a preacher
prevailed against the opposition.
Willie C. Hill,
the teacher, had the ideal race. Pitted against two White opponents who fought
over the White votes in the District, Hill won by a comfortable margin. Delores
Brooks had the toughest test of all; not only is she a beautiful woman, but she
is also Black. A double negative in heretofore Macon politics, by a slim margin,
she won. Vernon Colbert, the former postal worker, pitted against A. C.
Postell, a Black intellectual, won by a nose. Julius Vinson, the insurance
agent with a spellbinding baritone singing voice disavowing any connection with
the machine and Eddie Smith, won amidst cries about Church and politics and in
open opposition to the machine.
With Judge J.
Taylor Phillips presiding, they took the oath of office. History, unfathomable
history, made!
But all this was
nearly a year ago. What impact have Black council members had on city
government?
This is
undoubtedly a good question that demands our careful attention. For the answer,
we turn to the council members to see how they feel about their role and what
the future scope of the council might become as a result of Black people
actively participating in the day-to-day affairs of city government” (The Macon
Courier Wednesday, December 1, 1975).
What follows within the
pages of this essay is how the City of Macon, Georgia, went from an all-White
male-ruled government from 8 December 1823 to 9 December 1975.
Once answered
satisfactorily, this postulation begs the lingering and persistent question: What
has been the Black impact upon local government from 1975 to 2025?*
Has the White fear of
Black rule been justified, or has it been alleviated by the passage of time and
the quality of Black leaders sent to the council by the Black community?
I leave this critical
assessment to another generation, to other researchers, to other writers with inquiring
minds. My task is to document for prosperity the improbable historical journey
of chattel property, viewed as less than human, who persisted for over a
century and rose to take an oath to protect and serve the city government for
the benefit of all Maconites.
This essay is not without
controversy and criticism of the first five Black members of the Macon, Georgia
City Council. Back in the 1970s, it was blasphemous to utter a public
disagreement with the leadership of the Black community, especially when Blacks
were talking to members of the media, who in that day were practically
all-White, except for the staff employed by Alex C. Habersham to bring the news
to the Black community.
Habersham was so
successful each week in bringing positive news of the Black experience in Macon
to the Black community through the pages of The Macon Courier that it
caused Billy Watson, the editor of the daily White paper (The Macon
Telegraph), to accuse Habersham of trying to create a market for a Black
paper. Watson attempted to disassociate the current Macon Telegraph
from the hostile light in which the paper had painted members of the Black
community. This essay includes some of the raw views the White papers in Macon
expressed from the city's inception in 1823.
In a special heritage
section of The Macon Telegraph published in the Sunday edition of the newspaper
on February 17, 1979, Watson stated, “Alex Habersham is trying hard to create a
market for an all-black newspaper.”
In the early 1970s, when Habersham established
The Macon Courier, he stated that he had done so to fill a void in
presenting news of interest to Blacks in Macon. Habersham took offense to
Watson’s comment and fired a retort in the Wednesday, February 21, 1979 edition
of The Macon Courier. “Alex Habersham is not trying to create a market for
an all-Black newspaper; I am serving one and will continue to do so as long as
the people whom I am serving continue to support The Macon Courier and all for
which it stands,” Habersham editorialized.
Also, this tome will
delve into the public fight between William P. “Bill” Randall and Rev. Julius
C. Hope. Randall came to Macon, Georgia, in the early 1950s. He established a
profitable construction company on his way to becoming recognized as a Black
leader and kingpin in politics related to the Black community.
Rev. Hope, younger and
with a glib tongue, came to Macon twenty years later with a different approach
to addressing the problems of the Black community. He quickly rallied the “young
Turks” to his cause—people like Herbert Dennard, Robert Brown, Henry C. Flickin,
and Elaine Huckabee Lucas.
However, the passage of
time has given us a unique perspective on the times fifty years in our review
mirror. In keeping with the adage that if subsequent generations do not learn
from history, they are bound to repeat it, this essay will address as
delicately as possible some of the mistakes and faulty thinking of the first
class of Black City Council members in the history of Macon, Bibb County, Georgia, segregated by
race ab initio.
“Not everything
that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin once wrote, “but nothing can be
changed until it is faced.”
History, that sweet truth-teller,
will be my judge.
Harold Michael Harvey
Unionville -Macon, Georgia
July 3, 2024
*As I read this Foreword again, and highlighted all of the issues that came to mind that I wanted to talk about further, I realized that I would need to start a new article... Look for it next...
God Bless
Gabby
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