Carolyn Quillion Coleman, Civil Rights leader, speaks about the strategies used by herself and other community organizers to ensure that Savannah residents maintained their successful 15 month boycott against racist businesses. The Sunday Mass Meetings were a key time for sharing key updates about the local Movement.
"NAACP Mass Meeting at Mt. Zion"
(From The Herald issue Saturday, Febrary 29, 1964)
The weekly Mass Meeting of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored
People will be held Sunday, March 1, 1964, at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Rev. John
Q. Adams, Pastor.
Many interesting developments of the week will be discussed. Rev. L. Scott Stell,
Jr., Pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and Chairman of the Education Committee
of the NAACP will report on a conference he and a
committee
composed of Rev. Alfred Polla, Miss Carolyn Quillion, President of the
Young Adult Council
of the NAACP, and Mr. W. W. Law, President of the NAACP, had with the Board of
Management of the Public Library. This committee appeared before the Board to
complain about the slow pace of further
integration
of the Library facilities,
staff, and services. The group charged that the Carnegie Branch Library is still
segregated from top to bottom and that the Main Library has only experienced
token integration.
The committee made the following three recommendations:
1. That the Savannah Library and the Carnegie Library System should be reorganized
into one system.
2. That the staff be completely integrated.
3. That the Bookmobile Service be extended to include Negro children fully.
Another interesting feature of the meeting will be a report to be given by Mrs.
Willie Belle Battie, Mrs. NAACP 1963-64, of a campaign which she is leading against
a neighborhood bakery.
Take a trip into archives of the Museum and read a newspaper article
from The Herald, a local Black-owned paper, written on February 29, 1964.
The article announces the events of a Mass Meeting at Mt. Zion Baptist Church.
Mass Meetings were community events organized by the local NAACP at churches
throughout the Black community. They were an important resource of news from
recent developments in the Civil Rights Movement.
The warm social atmosphere
of the events also helped to strengthen the resolve of community members
as they continued their struggle against the segregation of Jim Crow era
Savannah laws.