A civil rights march is “useless,” said Kay Smith. “It’s for nothing but publicity.”
Smith made the comment in 1962 as an 18-year-old white resident of Albany, Ga. She was sitting in a segregated restaurant talking to an Associated Press reporter. Her comments appeared on the front page of The Macon News, her photo side by side with that of Gloria Ward, a 16-year-old African-American girl who had been jailed four times for participating in protest marches in Albany.
“I’m willing to go again,” Ward told the AP reporter. “I will give up my life for my freedom.”
Eleven hundred civil rights demonstrators had been arrested in Albany over a 10-month period and President John F. Kennedy was considering federal intervention. Smith and Ward were featured in an article on the opposing views of two Albany teenagers. They never met and never even saw each other until March 1997, and yet they had never forgotten each other either.
Kay Smith, now Kay Pedrotti, grew up in a world of unquestioned segregation. She remembers being disciplined as a young child for addressing local African-Americans as “Mrs.” or “sir,” but she also remembers “that it didn’t make any sense to me. There again was that double standard. Be polite to older people and use respect and use `yes sir’ and `no ma’am,’ but not if they’re black. Then you get to be a teenager and peer pressure takes over and you go along with the crowd. Yeah, they’re marching for nothing. It’s all a publicity stunt.”
She agreed to the Associated Press interview when her father, a local newspaperman, suggested it.
“I got lots of hate mail from all over the country. I didn’t feel good about it at the time.”
Her father told her: “Those Yankees don’t know anything. Don’t pay any attention to that.”
She graduated the year before Albany schools were integrated, not knowing a single black person in the town.
In 1963, a church bombing in Birmingham killed four black girls.
“That was the first time it dawned on me that there were children involved in this,” Pedrotti said. “Vicky (her little sister) was 14 that year. That came home to me — three of those girls that were dead were the same age as my little sister. It was the beginning of the conversion experience or whatever it was, but it wasn’t instant. It wasn’t overnight. It took a long time.”
A close friend who did not share Pedrotti’s segregationist views “wanted to help educate me and took me to the black section of Albany. I’d never been there before. I didn’t realize they didn’t have running water in their homes . . . that one faucet served the whole block, one outside spigot.”
Pedrotti worked for the Albany Herald with her father for a while, but by the summer of 1964 she was ready to branch out. When she was hired by the Savannah Morning News, it finished the transformation of her views.
“I’m just sitting in my apartment thinking about the whole thing and the process I was going through and I thought to myself that if I was a black girl and I had two years of college and I went to night school and two years’ experience on a daily newspaper, I still wouldn’t get that job in Savannah. But I have this job in Savannah. This isn’t right. So by the time I got to Savannah, the process was pretty well complete.”
In fact, in Savannah, Pedrotti was largely responsible for getting the first photograph of a black person on the local page.
“It was kind of a conspiracy between me and the photographer, who was also a liberal-type person. They wanted a photograph of some of the newer health services at Memorial Medical Center and one of them was walk-in screening. So (the photographer) and I got a picture of a black guy getting his blood pressure checked.”
Pedrotti became very active in her church. She is on a multicultural committee for the Lutheran synod and has been trained as a member of an anti-racism team.
“We are set up to help churches and church leadership understand how systemic racism works and to understand that because you are white, you enjoy a certain amount of power or privilege whether you want it or not. It just happens. And to be able to turn it around and see from the other perspective.”
Through the years and through her transformation, Pedrotti remembered the article from the Macon News and wanted to meet Gloria Ward. Why did that seem so important after 35 years?
“Because she was the one person I could identify that I had hurt personally, and I didn’t want to die without asking the woman’s forgiveness, and then when I met her, I didn’t have to.”
The opportunity came when Pedrotti began writing for the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1996, where she met Alton Moultrie, a black state official who frequently attended the meetings Pedrotti covered.
“The one reason I believe it took me 35 years to find this woman is because I didn’t know any black people in Albany when I was growing up,” Pedrotti said. “I just didn’t know them. When I met Alton Moultrie on my job and found out he was from Albany, that was practically the first thing I said to him. We’d only seen each other two or three times and I said, `Alton, you have to help me find somebody,’ and I started setting up the story of the article. He told me later on he knew exactly what I was talking about because he remembered the story. And he said, `Well, who is this woman?’ He was playing with me now. I said, `Her name was Gloria Ward.’ He said, `I know exactly where she is. We used to date, we’ve been friends for years.’ “
Kay Smith Pedrotti and Gloria Ward Wright met over lunch in March 1997, 35 years after the article appeared in Macon.
“Gloria was so open and so friendly, and I was really blown away. I expected at least an element of distrust. This has been going on for 35 years and how would she have any way of knowing I was for real?”
Wright, a minister in Atlanta, admitted she “debated in my mind for a fleeting moment.” And yet, said Wright, the meeting “was like we had known each other all the time . . . like meeting a long lost sister.”
Wright said she had always felt sorry for Pedrotti, but never angry or bitter. Only two weeks before their meeting, Wright said, she spoke to her son’s middle-school class about the civil rights movement, discussing the original article and mentioning that she wanted to meet Pedrotti some day.
It was as if Pedrotti, Moultrie and Wright were actors in a preordained script. Pedrotti and Wright are convinced there was indeed divine inspiration involved.
The luncheon had some comic relief, Pedrotti said. “Our server was a little girl named Beth, and we were looking at the article and we told her the story and she thought it was wonderful and awesome and she told everyone in the restaurant. Gloria and I discovered we were devoted to fried chicken, and we like the breast pieces and the drumsticks. So that’s what we ordered, and Beth comes back and she is red as a beet. `You won’t believe what they told me in the kitchen. They told me you can’t mix white and dark. And I told ’em, “You don’t understand. I can’t go back and tell those two women you can’t mix white and dark.” ‘ And I thought, Yes, you can, if you’re not chicken. So I’m not chicken anymore.”
Pedrotti wrote a column about the experience in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in April. “Public confession of sin is difficult,” she acknowledged in print, but at least this time there was no hate mail.
Wright was impressed that Pedrotti could talk openly about the turning point in her attitudes on racism and segregation.
“Kay asked, `Do you forgive me?’ I kept on talking and then realized she was waiting for my answer. I had been praying for her all these years . . . hoping she didn’t grow up with those ideas.”
