6 CIVIL RIGHTS STORYTELLERS...SCROLL DOWN

Here's 2 of our 5 businesses!

  I am part of the Dudley family that has been here in Dublin since the 1800s. And a lot of their businesses started because there was a service need in the African-American community.

There were groups of businesses that supported only white people. One of the first businesses that the Dudley’s had was a general or dry goods store in Dublin, that was located on the east side, near the river. And from that, other businesses started.
 

FUNERALS

The Dudley’s funeral home was started in 1922 because there was only one other competitor in town, and they didn’t accommodate different income levels in the city.

Everybody couldn't afford a funeral. So the Dudley Funeral Home was started by Clayton Dudley and his son, Herbert Dudley. They offered caskets made here in town that were affordable. A new cemetery replaced the Cross Creek Cemetery, often inaccessible in inclement weather.
 

SERVING AFRICAN-AMERICAN MILITARY

One of the things that came out of that entrepreneurial spirit was the “accommodations” business. When WWII started, a Naval hospital was built in Dublin. Today it is the Veterans Administration Center. A number of people came to town to be treated at the Naval hospital. However, the black folks who came did not have places to socialize, like many of the white people who could visit the local establishments--the restaurants, bars, whatever. 

So, the Dudley family opened a USO, an officer's club, for the black folks that came to town. 

Next story: THE FUNKY CHICKEN

First, Read about the COUSINS

Several years ago, I was invited by a friend to the Buckeye Baptist Church to the descendants of Alphonse Wright. When I was invited to that reunion, I called my sister to go with me. We went. I didn't know what to expect, but because of who invited me, I felt like I should go. 

So, I walk in into the Life Center at Buckeye Baptist. Three hundred people are there and I’m the only White person there. And people come over to hug me, people that I've known all my life. Sharman Mae, who I graduated with and later worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitutioncame up to me there and said, “My grandmother told me we were cousins. I didn't know how to tell you.”

Alphonse was the child of my great great-grandfather John Wright – who had a farm up in northern Laurens County. He had relations with one the slave girls on the farm. Unusual to the time, he recognized Alphonse, named him in his will and left him some property. 

The descendants of Alphonse would gather but because of how the world was being so racially divided here, I never knew about it. I didn’t know I had so many cousins in the County!

It's been really wonderful to know about your extended family. I'll be in Home Depot and somebody yell, ‘Hey, cuz!”. 

I was at Keisha Lance Bottoms’ election night party in Atlanta. Some people would come up and say, “I remember see you at Buckeye Baptist. We're cousins!” I wish we'd known that earlier.

When Stacy Abrams was campaigning down here, several of my African-American cousins said, “Come on, DuBose, let's get a family picture with the next governor!” Stacey looked at me funny. I said, “Oh, yes, Stacy, they really are my cousins!” She smiled and said, “I'm from Mississippi. I understand”. 

Let’s don’t deny it. Let's talk, let’s celebrate it. I’ve become a lot closer to many just knowing that. But I did not know that growing up. I'm sure my grandmother probably knew. 

But you know, let's celebrate who we are and the history. It's been kind of fun knowing that --embracing a lot of good friends that I now know we share blood kinship.

THE FUNKY CHICKEN 

Gayle Wells, now Gayle Wilson, was one of the first African American students who attended Dublin High School. 

Prior to the merger, the two schools were separate. We were in band and drama club together. 

Well, they started playing music at a pep rally and Gayle said to me, “Let's do the Funky Chicken!” And we got up in front of everybody on stage and did the funky chicken.

All the students stood up and started doing it too. The teachers were shocked. They didn't know how to react this first time that you had White and Black students get up in public and dance with each other.

It was fun and innocent to us, but it caused a pretty big ripple. I mean, they still talk about we were the first interracial couple to dance in public, in Dublin, doing the funky chicken at that 1969 pep rally.  

But, you know, young people don't know the difference in race. It's learned. And there's still that undercurrent. That's what we've got to overcome. I'm thinking it's going to be through our young people, that next generation that gives you that hope, that helps make that happen.

  My parents moved to St. Augustine, Florida, in 1950,\par not by choice, but because we had to move to St. Augustine. My father was a very, very professional man--he did\par not play. He wanted to be his own boss. He didn't\par want folks telling him what he could or could not do,\par you know, and stuff like that. So when we moved to\par St. Augustine, it was because my father had gotten\par into trouble with a white man.\par My father had purchased the vehicle from this man,\par and he was paying him on a weekly basis. And my\par mother was keeping up with it every time the\par payment was made so they would know when the\par car was paid off. My father did not miss one\par payment for that vehicle.\par So when my father went to pay his last payment, he\par says, }{\i\f1\fs22 \u8220 \'D2Thank you so very much for everything. This is\par my last payment.\u8221 \'D3\par }{\i\fs22 But then the man is going to show out with him and\par the man said, \u8220 \'D2This is not your last payment. You\par don't make your last payment until I tell you that\par your last payment.\u8221 \'D3 So my father said, }{\i\f1\fs22 \u8220 \'D2No, my wife\par has been keeping up with the paperwork.\u8221 \'D3 }{\i\fs22 He got\par the paperwork and showed it to him and showed\par him how he was paying him and how much the\par balance was and everything.\par And the man got kinda ugly with him. Well, you\par don't get ugly with my father, you know. My father\par was an honest man, very honest, man. So they got\par into a little ruckus, and my father punched him. And\par then he got in the car and drove away and went back\par to the house.\par Well, people talk, you understand. And I had a very\par large family at that time. And everybody knew\par everybody. In the black community, everybody kept\par in touch with everybody, so you know what's going\par on and you could protect each other. They learned\par that these gentlemen were coming for my father.\par That night, they were getting ready to go to bed and\par my father's uncles came over and they said, }{\i\f1\fs22 \u8220 \'D2Jim,\par you gotta get up and get outta here \u8216 \'D4cause they\u8217 \'D5re\par come in for you.}{\i\fs22 \u8221 \'D3 There was not a police report. I\par think it was more of the man being embarrassed in\par front of his friends when he was confronted by my\par father. It was more of a spontaneous act, \u8216 \'D4Let's go\par get him\u8217 \'D5--that kind of thing. Just to show him who's\par still boss, 

You can't do this to me. I'm a White man.  You, a black man, don't tell  me what to do. I tell you\par what to do. 

It might've been that the guy who sold them the car didn't want to lose face. I would put it that way. 

This was 12 o'clock at night. When we left, we had to\par leave everything behind because we couldn't take\par any furniture or anything. The only thing that we\par could take was the clothes that could be gotten\par together as quickly as possible and could be put in\par the car.\par It was 1950. I was 8 years old and already asleep. I\par don\u8217 \'D5t remember being scared or anything.\par We headed to St. Augustine, Florida. My grandmother's brothers were there. He had a huge family. My grandmother was a Eubanks and my father had seven or more uncles. When my parents got to St. Augustine, they had to start all over again. My mother had an associate degree and she was teaching school in Barnwell. Well when we moved to St. Augustine, she didn't get a job as a teacher. She started working for Florida\par Normal and Industrial Memorial College, an historically Black college, as a dormitory counselor. 

In all the years, since that time, as long as my father was living, we could never go back to Barnwell in the day. My mother's mother still lived in Barnwell, and he would take us back during the summer months to her, but he would do it at night. 

He would always have to carry us back to see our family at night and then drive all the way back to St. Augustine that same night.

  GROWING UP IN THE COUNTRY

When I was coming along, my, mom, my dad would buy flour. It would come in bags and sacks, and they would be pretty sacks. I mean, with flowers on them. And she finished using the flour, she would wash them and get them ready for sewing. And she would make me clothes out of them -- when you were real young. And you would look so pretty! Sometimes they would buy clothes. Usually September and October, they would have ginned cotton. They would take us to town, to buy us clothes and shoes and things like that.

PLAYMATES

When I was real young I lived down the road from a white family. There was a little girl. We played together all the time. I remember that she had a swing outside. Her dad had made it, a tree swing – there was two out there. We would be out there a lot. We played hopscotch sometime too.

One day her mom and dad left us up at the girl’s house. Ann, that was her name. We when we got tired of playing and we walked on down to my house, but before we got there, this man was working in the field and he stopped us and he said, “Hey, Baby Ann, where you going? And she said, “I'm going down here with this little ‘n word’.”

I slapped her! He had turned around to go back to work and I slapped just as hard as I could, and I said, 

“Don't ever call me that again!” And she pretended to cry.

I said, “And now you stop crying before you get when parents are. I don't ever want to here you call me that again.” She said, “I won't.” So she sat down and she stopped crying. 

When she got down where they were, “Ann why is your face so red, what happened?” 

She said, “I fell.” 

I thought she was going to tell them what I'd done. I was going to tell them why, but she never did. 

And do you know, we were still best friends after we grew up. She moved away. She lived in Warner Robbins. But she would always call me. Ann Brown was her name. She died about two-three years ago. 

Who Knew that wearing

flour could be so cute

The sacks would have

actual flowers on them

From big to little

From black to white

Even though it was cute

it’s not like I wore

sacks my whole life

During the chilly months

we had ginned cotton

We would go down to 

town

and buy clothes

not the ones made from

flour sacks.

-- Miyona Wells

Dublin High School

Friends

With my friend Ann Brown. 

We are skipping

Down the sidewalk

This unusual man

asked Ann, 

Where are you going?

I suddenly stopped

Because Ann had

Got very disrespectful

I got on to her

And slapped Ann

Because I don’t play that way

When it was time to tell

She fell

--Da’Jana Shivers

Dublin High School

Photographed by Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Albany, Georgia, 2013

I’m 84-years old, but I still remember the days when SNCC first came to Terrell County. 

SNCC- Students for Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – came to Terrell County in June, 1962.  They began organizing the community to stand up to the injustice we were living with every day. I was the secretary for the Terrell County movement when we were having the meetings at the Mount Olive Baptist Church. I was in my twenties. 

I attended the first meeting SNCC arranged in Terrell County. Charles Sherrod came here from Albany. Our mission was to free our Black people from, well, I would say ‘slavery’ because at some point we were still kind of in slavery.  We worked in the cotton fields. Some people worked at White folks' houses. They worked for almost nothing. And to me those were slave wages. $2 a day when you went to the cotton field or whatever kind of work you were doing. So to me, it was kind of a state of slavery.

We started our meetings. We talked about things that were happening in our lives from day to day.  We had people coming down to help us. We was going door to door, talking to people, trying to get them interested in the movement. And people started coming to the church, to the meetings. 

We started talking about people getting people registered to vote. The was before the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Wages was the basic thing we talked about. Then the other problems-the separate bathrooms.  If you went to a restaurant for food, you had to get it from a little cutout in the side of the restaurant. and you had to go there and stand and wait for your food. You couldn't go inside to get your food. You had to pick it up. They handed it to you through the window.

The doctor's offices were separate. I never had any problems getting medical care. But back then, the doctors made house calls. So if you could get to a phone and call the doctor and the doctor would come out to see. We had one Black doctor, but he died when I was a child. It was probably in the 1940s 

We started talking to people about voting. Some people had never already heard of voting because they had never had an opportunity to participate in any such thing. They didn't tell us that that was their God given right to be able to vote. People didn't know. I don’t remember any Black folk in Terrell County who had register to vote in the early 1960s. 

We would walk to the school. After school, I would talk to get high school students and we would walk the streets of Dawson and talk to people. Those that would talk to us, we would tell 'em they needed to become registered voters. But they were afraid. 

And I can understand that that was something new for them. Most of 'em were living in homes that were rented homes, and they were afraid that if they if they tried to vote or even registered to vote, that they would get put out of their homes. They had no place to go. Anybody that owned a home, they was gonna burn it down. 

That’s what happened to Carolyn Daniels - she spoke up. They burned her home. 

NAACP President Murdered!

I was first vice president of the local branch of the NAACP in 1994 when Mr. James Barnes served as president. Mr. Barnes was a dedicated civil rights leader. Secondly is that he, like most NAACP leaders in Terrell County, was somewhat self-sufficient. They wasn't begging for bread. Mr. Barnes challenged the court system. Mr. Barnes stopped the banks from foreclosing on low-income people's homes. He got a lot of people out of jail when they couldn't find no one to bond 'em out. Sometimes I could post a bond up to a $100,000 because I got enough property to get a property bond. But Mr. Barnes could go much higher because he owned a large farm.

Mr. Barnes was scheduled to meet with the FBI on Monday, November 3, 1994, to discuss some complaints that the City Manager was sexually abusing some women who were doing community service. Three days before the meeting, on Halloween night, Barnes was killed. 

Both the GBI and FBI investigated because there was a lot of questions coming from the national NAACP. They had their people on the ground here at that time. It looked like they wanted to really get to the bottom of what happened.   

I was interviewed by the FBI. This is the story we heard. 

Willie Goodson, a Black man from Randolph County, was an addicted drug user out on parole. He was working for the sheriff, running a motor repair shop for him. And for some reason he was in Terrell County, in Dawson, to pick up some parts on Friday night, Halloween night. 

Think about it—he was a parolee who worked for the sheriff’s car business, and he was sent over to this county to get parts. At night. That all sounds a little strange.

Now Mr. Barnes was involved in selling some raffle tickets for an NAACP fundraiser that Friday evening. On Saturday morning, they found Barnes dead in the NAACP office there on 227 South Main Street. He had been robbed. Willie Goodson was arrested in Terrell County on Saturday morning. It was alleged that he stole money from Barnes to buy dope. The crime was considered a botched robbery.

The Chief of Police moved the forensic evidence to Columbus. That was suspicious because he wasn’t in charge of the investigation. The defense attorney said there was no evidence linking Goodson to the murder. Goodson’s shoes had only 1 drop of blood on them, but the NAACP office had blood scattered all over.  

Goodson was convicted and got sentenced to life without parole. The grief brought upon the community and the Barnes family was horrific at the time. 

I don't think the community ever come to grips with the motive that was given by the GBI--get cash to buy drugs. The national NAACP office wanted to get to the bottom of it, expecting the FBI to get involved. They just relied on the GBI investigation. There was no direct evidence and GBI did not pursue another suspect. It was known at the time that Dr. King said that the FBI was sympathetic to the ‘southern’ way of life. They were NOT going to help us find the truth.

I was elected local NAACP president that November.  

About 20 years later, the same City Manager was accused of offering $6000 to kill the Mayor of Dawson. The Mayor, Chris Wright, was shot 6 times, but didn’t die. The word was the manager only paid $1000 for the botched murder. 

At his trial, I was able to give the Court the complaints that the women had filed years before for sexual harassment. 

Thanks to my persistence, the City Manager was convicted of sexual harassment and molestation and fired.

Willie Goodson is still serving out his time in prison for the murder of Mr. Barnes.