Laurie Pritchett

Laurie Pritchett (December 9, 1926 – November 13, 2000) was city Chief of Police in Albany, Georgia, best known for his actions in 1961 and 1962 suppressing the city's civil rights demonstrations by the Albany Movement.

Pritchett was born in Griffin, Georgia in 1926.

He attended Auburn University and South Georgia College.

He was an Army veteran and graduated from the National Academy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Southern Police Institute at the University of Louisville.

Pritchett worked in his hometown as a police officer for 12 years before he arrived in Albany as Chief of Police.

The Albany Movement began in 1961 and was designed to eliminate segregation in the city of Albany by the use of non-violent protest.

It started when three young members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—Charles Sherrod, Cordell Reagon, and Charles Jones—came to Albany for a voter-registration drive.

They began encouraging the local people to challenge the city's policies of segregation on public transit, in public facilities such as libraries and hospitals, in voting, and in employment.

The movement faced a great deal of resistance from both white and conservative black citizens.

The major civil rights organizations came together to form one cohesive group, called the Albany Movement.

After this group formed, several demonstrations took place.

Consequently, tensions ran high in the community and the police department got involved to suppress the marches, sit-ins, and other peaceful acts of defiance.

Previous movements in other cities had often relied on images of police brutality, broadcast nationwide, showing violent actions being taken towards peaceful demonstrators.

However, in Albany, the city's chief of police Laurie Pritchett had studied Martin Luther King Jr. and his non-violent strategies.

Pritchett decided to use non-brutal methods of suppressing protest to avoid negative attention.

Pritchett knew that if his police responded with violence, they would be criticized, only further fueling the movement.

He also charged demonstrators with disturbing the peace rather than violating the laws of segregation.

Many community members praised Pritchett's ability to maintain order in Albany.

After learning Dr. King's intentions, Pritchett began teaching the Albany police department how to effectively deal with the non-violent protesters.

He insisted that they not use violence or force.

His intentions were to "out-nonviolent" them.

Pritchett went on to further explain that "the men were instructed that if they were spit on, cussed, abused in any way of that nature, that they were to not take their billyclubs outs."

When preparing his police officers to use less violent ways of dealing with the protests, Pritchett was surprised by how his department reacted.

In an interview he stated, "You know, it was strange that the, the men, I did not expect the police department personnel to, to readily accept this position."

During this same time, Pritchett realized that Dr. King's appearance would bring in many members of the news media, which could either hurt the police department or help them.

The media played a big role during the civil rights movement, and with the nation watching, Pritchett was concerned with how people would view the city police tactics.

He stated, "We knew that if [Dr. King] came in we were going to have mass media as I instructed and, and lectured to the men that the news media could either be our ally or our enemy and we wanted them as an ally.".

Pritchett observed that the methods of non-violent protest that the SNCC was employing were similar to Mahatma Gandhi's. Civil rights activists would allow themselves to be jailed and serve their sentences in order to fill the jails.

The jails would be filled to capacity, obstructing local law enforcement from being able to make further arrests.

Therefore, Pritchett contacted all jails within a seventy-mile radius to ensure that they had enough room to accommodate individuals held in the mass arrests that took place.

Pritchett filled neighboring jails with arrested activists before putting a single person in the Albany city jail.

Dr. King and the local organizations ran out of willing protesters before Pritchett ran out of space in the jails.

Of the many young people involved, more than one thousand were arrested and jailed in other cities.

The arrests were so plentiful that adults, who were reluctant at first, began to join the movement.

What had started as an effort to desegregate the bus terminals became a larger attempt to desegregate the entire city.

Other than the arrests and relocation of arrestees to neighboring jails, the Albany police refrained from other violent action against the African American activists.

Laurie Pritchett emphasized how his control was only in the city of Albany and his duties didn't include supervising other towns' jails.

He talked about one incident that had occurred in the city of Camilla.

In Pritchett's own words, he mentioned, "Slater King’s wife went down and while she was outside the fence, she was pregnant at the time, one of the deputy sheriffs of that county did kick her. It was an unfortunate thing that happened."

By December 1961, more than five hundred protesters had been jailed.