History of the Baptists in Perry County

In the 1880s the Alabama Baptist State Convention Executive Secretary offices located near Judson College in Marion. Across town at Howard College, fighting broke out between Howard boys and Lincoln boys. The Lincoln School now looked more like a college campus than a day school, and Lincoln Normal University for teachers had been added. As tension escalated between the two student bodies, black and white men in the town armed themselves. A few days later the Normal University "mysteriously" burned to the ground. The perpetrators were never brought to justice. The next year, 1887, Howard College located to Birmingham, where it eventually became Samford University. Lincoln Normal University relocated to Montgomery and became Alabama State (its alma mater praises the blue skies of Marion).

With the departure of Howard, local residents purchased the campus at auction and deeded the property to the city of Marion with the stipulation that Siloam Baptist Church membership always be represented on the board of trustees of the new educational institution (the school later amended the charter). Marion Military Institute was established with the mythology of a "noble Lost Cause" that white Southerners invented to try to justify their secession and defeat. The Lost Cause ideology permeated white culture of Perry County for generations.

In the twentieth century, the Great Depression affected Perry County as it affected most rural areas across the country. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers subsisted on whatever food they could grow for themselves. Although the crisis democratized poverty in some ways, Roosevelt's New Deal generally assisted property-owners in the area. In such bleak time, black and white churches provided as much relief and diversion as possible for members and non-members.

At the end of World War II, tired of their service being ignored while white veterans enjoyed social status and benefits, black veterans marched silently in cadence, escorted by the white sheriff, from Lincoln School to the Perry County courthouse. The march was the beginning of a new civil rights movement in Perry County.

For generations Perry Countians had known where blacks were welcome or unwelcome. Some white businesspeople in Marion made no distinctions among customers, while others refused to accommodate black patrons. During the war, the state of Alabama had, against the wishes of students and teachers, expelled white teachers and administrators from the Lincoln School, making it a completely segregated black school. White students at the time attended Perry County High School, located at the former Female Seminary.

One of the graduates of Lincoln School, Coretta Scott, married Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. and introduced her new husband to her classmate Jean Childs, who married Marion's new congregational pastor, Andrew Young. The Scott homeplace in Perry County has been designated a national historic site.

Inspired by the success of the Kings and other black Baptists with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington, many Perry County African-Americans organized grass-roots boycotts of Marion establishments and institutions that served "whites only." In 1965 an ill-fated "night march" from a mass meeting at Zion AME Church to sing outside the Perry County Jail, where numerous demonstrators were being detained, resulted in a bloody confrontation with white state troopers and thugs from neighboring counties. The fatal wounding of Lincoln graduate and U.S. sailor Jimmy Lee Jackson led to plans for a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. The intervention and leadership of Andrew Young in Marion and Selma prevented armed retaliation by blacks and further bloodshed.

The series of events surrounding "Bloody Sunday" at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and the final march to the statehouse in Montgomery, the "cradle of the confederacy," begian in Marion and had significatn repercussions on the future of Perry County. Judson's all-white female student body, confined to campus while demonstrations occurred only blocks away, remained largely oblivious to the civil rights movement at their doorstep. The college's administration, however, removed the "whites only" ban in compliance with federal law.