BOOK MARK : The Old Man Who Led a Georgia County Into the 20th Century

Thurnell Alston was an unlikely agent of change. But the elderly and disabled black man brought the civil-rights movement to McIntosh County, Ga. An adaptation.

Years after the movement for civil equality between the races began to transform the rest of the South, news of it barely had filtered into McIntosh, a small, isolated county on the flowery coast of Georgia. In 1971, McIntosh was a majority-black county, with virtually 100% black-voter registration. Yet the residents had never elected a black person to the mayor’s office, the county commission, the city council, or the school board; had never seen a black person appointed to any governing board or selected for grand-jury or trial-jury service; had not elected a black to state government since the end of Reconstruction, and had not seen any black person hired by any local employer above the level of unskilled laborer, maid or cook.

The whites in McIntosh, nearly half the county’s population, lived in the quiet town of Darien. By daylight, during work hours, black people traveled south on U.S. 17 into Darien. And at the end of the day, they drove or walked home to their distant wooded lots.

“You know there was fear,” said Sammie Pinkney, a local black man and friend of Thurnell Alston. “You can’t get a dog to go up against a tiger. 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, it was nothing for them to take a man out and beat him half to death. Or beat him to death. Or hang him. And nothing was ever said.”

To the black people of McIntosh in 1971, the epic of the civil-rights movement was still a fabulous tale about distant places. Martin Luther King Jr. might have delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech dressed in flowing white robes, so hallowed and remote did his life appear to McIntosh County. The people felt about Montgomery and Selma roughly the way they felt about Mt. Sinai and Gethsemane. The stories of heroes were stirring, but it seemed unlikely that such miracles would occur again, much less locally.

But a miracle of sorts did materialize in Alston, a disabled black boilermaker who became a kind of secular preacher to the town. He was a Christian like the rest of them, as well as a churchgoer and a choir singer, but when he spoke to crowds, it was his stammering call for American justice that stirred them up; and when he addressed white officials, the black people knew that Alston was not stammering in fear.

“There’s a lot of people have been intimidated in McIntosh, but there was no fear of things for me,” he said. “I would tell it the way I see it. Regardless of who they are, I mean they could kill me for it, because I’m going to say it anyway.”

Alston’s antagonist, Sheriff Thomas Poppell, ran McIntosh County with “an iron fist,” said Doug Moss. “He was a benevolent dictator, but he was a racist. He kept his eye on the black community. If a black person got out of control in McIntosh County, he simply disappeared. We used to say they took a swim across the river wearing too much chain.”

Alston began preaching against Poppell after Ed Finch, an unarmed local black man, was shot point-blank in the face by a police officer, jailed, denied medical attention, and then charged with aggravated assault--a felony--and drunk and disorderly conduct--a misdemeanor. He was also charged with having obstructed a law-enforcement officer in the lawful discharge of his duties.

Hadn’t offenses similar to the shooting of Finch occurred in the past? Of course they had. The blacks bore lifetimes of insults quietly like ancient scars, most of them insults casually, rather than willfully, inflicted, tossed at them by whites operating under the foolish assumptions of racism. Even to be talked to fondly, like a favorite hound, can leave a mark, and the black people bore up under this marking until they were psychologically a tattooed people.

Finch’s shooting in 1972, however, was seen as exceptional, something not to be tolerated. The cynical misuse of power expressed by the shooting, the conviction of Finch and the exoneration of the officer who had shot him exposed a rude and flippant freedom possessed by the whites that the blacks could only gape at. The whites then appeared utterly lawless to them, shamelessly flouting even the pretense of being law-abiding.

The blacks had lived for a long time with that pretense. It was as if previously they had seen themselves and the whites as harnessed to the same millstone, as two races treading the same circle of days on opposite sides of the wheel; they believed that the whites had no more asked to be born to their particular status than the blacks had to theirs, that all fulfilled the roles God gave them. Suddenly, with Finch’s shooting, it was as if the millstone were stopped and turned on end and the two races looked at each other over its pocked rim: What is going on over there? the black people had to ask.

“Finch never did end up joining our organization or doing nothing,” said Alston. “He was just a person that we saw some wrong had been done to him, and everybody in the county just jumped in and helped. That was a breaking point for me. I mean there is just no excuse for a white guy shooting a black guy in the mouth. If you’re that close to me with a .38, hit me in the head with it for God’s sake, you don’t have to shoot me.

“I’ll tell you what: I think that was the first time we really felt--in the Crescent district where I live--that we had more blacks than whites. The sheriff could do nothing with that district from that day until he died.”

1991 by Melissa Fay Green. Reprinted with permission from Addison Wesley.

BOOK REVIEW: “Praying for Sheetrock,” by Melissa Fay Greene, is reviewed on Page 1 of the Book Review section.