Arizona Sun

75 Ministers Jailed In Albany, Georgia

ALBANY, Ga. (UPI)—A racially mixed group of 71 Northern ministers was arrested yesterday for staging a prayer protest demonstration against segregation in front of city hall and 500 cheering whites stood by and applauded the police action.

Chief Laurie Pritchett warned the clergymen four times before ordering his men to step in and make the arrests.

"Go back to your own cities and cleanse the sins of segregation in your own back yards," the chief urged.

But the ministers, who had traveled here from the East and Midwest, did not budge and a rabbi stepped from the group and read from the Book of Psalms. When he finished, a Negro minister led the group in prayer.

Police said the group arrested included 50 white men, 19 Negro men, four white women and two Negro women. Twenty of the white men and 19 Negro men were taken to a stockade in adjoining Lee County. All the women were lodged in Albany city jail and 30 white men were confined at Dougherty county jail in Albany.

The group had formed at a local Negro church and marched double file to the city hall. Police, tipped in advance of their march, walked at both ends of the line of ministers.

Pritchett, who had his entire 67 man force standing by in front of city hall, pleaded with the preachers at length.

"I have no desire to put you in jail. Go about your normal way of life," he said. "Go in the name of decency. You have had your prayer, go now."

Negro leader Dr. Martin Luther King, who has been jailed here three times since demonstrations began in December, was not among those arrested yesterday.

"This brings a new dimension to the problem in that religious leaders are willing to express this type of creative moral witness and make the principles of our Judeo Christian heritage relevant in the crisis that we are facing in racial issues," King said.