Laurie Pritchett

Laurie Pritchett (December 9, 1926 - November 13, 2000) is best known for his actions in 1961 and 1962 as the Chief of Police in Albany, Georgia in suppressing the city's civil rights demonstrations by the Albany Movement. He was notable for using non-brutal methods based on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s own tactics, which greatly differed from the way most police departments handled such demonstrations at the time.

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, voting, and employment. The movement faced a great deal of resistance initially from 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 take place. Consequently, tensions ran high in the community and the police department got involved to put an end to the marches, sit-ins, and other peaceful acts of defiance.

Previous movements in other cities had often relied on images of police brutality to be successful. Such images would be seen 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. He decided to use non-brutal methods of arresting protesters 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 the crime of disturbing the peace rather than violating the laws of segregation. Many community members praised Pritchett's ability to maintain order in Albany.

When studying Dr. King's methods of non-violent protest, Pritchett also learned about how his methods were similar to Mahatma Gandhi's. Specifically, 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, preventing local law enforcement from being able to make any more arrests. After learning about 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. Additionally, 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 managed to fill 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.

Among those jailed were Dr. King and Reverend Ralph Abernathy. They chose jail over paying a fine as an act of protest. Pritchett was hesitant to keep Dr. King because he knew that it would gain national media attention. He said, "I knew that if Dr. King stayed in jail, we'd continue to have problems, so I talked to some people." Pritchett arranged to have King's bond paid. He hoped that once King was out of jail he would leave Albany and the movement would die. Unfortunately for Pritchett, King decided to stay and continue his efforts. Once again, he was jailed and his fines were paid against his will. After this, the movement completely lost momentum.

Pritchett was impartial towards segregation and integration. His main objective was simply to enforce the laws that Albany put in place. He stated: "My responsibility was to enforce the ordinances and laws of that city and state. As I told Dr. King many times, I did not disagree with his motives or his objectives, it was his method. I believed in the courts, he believed in the streets. So I've never been classified as a segregationist, and not as an integrationist. I was administrator of the city of Albany's police department."

In an address on July 12, 1962, King said of Pritchett: "I sincerely believe that Chief Pritchett is a nice man, a basically decent man, but he’s so caught up in a system that he ends up saying one thing to us behind closed doors and then we open the newspaper and he’s said something else to the press."King left Albany in August 1962, having gained nothing - labelled by the press as "one of the most stunning defeats" in his career. King later expressed his indignation at Pritchett’s use of "the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral ends of racial injustice."

Pritchett left Albany and served as chief of police in High Point, North Carolina, until he retired in 1975. Pritchett later considered King a "close personal friend."

Laurie Pritchett and his actions were chronicled in the song "Oh Pritchett, Oh Kelly".