Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration. Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
Civil Rights Activism
Albert Dunn was a Texan who had been arrested in the Freedom Rides of 1961 and was arrested again that year when, as a student, he joined a group of ministers seeking breakfast at the Atlanta Terminal Station restaurant. Among those agitating to integrate the Pickrick, Dunn was among the most passionate.
Confrontation with Segregationists
Ignored Martin Luther King Jr.’s father’s urging not to confront Lester Maddox, pressing ahead only to be escorted off Maddox’s property at gunpoint. At the ITC, Dunn kept his own copy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Legacy and Ministry
Graduated from the Interdenominational Theological Center in 1966, died in 2005 at age seventy in Texas. Before his death, he was a minister in Clarkston, Georgia, and for years was the dean of chapel at Paul Quinn College, a private historically Black institution in Dallas affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Quotations
Summer of 1964
“He didn’t want to give Lester the publicity,” Dunn would recall years later, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the three-decade anniversary of the civil rights law’s passage. “But we thought Daddy King was just being an Uncle Tom. We were young and unafraid, and we wanted to take on that beast.”Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (pp. 52). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (pp. 52). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
August 11
Why did the ministers keep turning out when they knew the odds of crossing past the restaurant’s front door were slim to nonexistent? Dunn said they kept returning not to put the spotlight on themselves—he said he never watched the television reports on the confrontations—but for a simpler reason. “I could never as a human being accept the fact that anyone could deny me entrance in public places,” he later said. Their visit, unsuccessful on its face, became fuel for government lawyers arguing that Maddox was a habitual scofflaw to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (p. 119). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
Maddox as Georgia Governor
One of his classmates, Albert Dunn, took a more pointed view. Years later, recalling their repeated attempts to crash through Maddox’s segregationist doors, Dunn would think back to the wisdom Martin Luther King’s father, himself a celebrated Baptist minister and civil rights activist, had shared. If you confront the Maddox horde, it will only boost his popularity. “Daddy King was right,” Dunn said in 1994, eleven years before his passing, in an interview with the Atlanta newspaper. “We helped make Lester governor.”
Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (p. 176). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
