Evelyn Toney

Evelyn Toney who was born in Albany, Georgia.  The struggle for Toney started at an early age because as a child she was taught to stand up for what was right. At age seven there was a racial incident that forever shaped how she felt about Jim Crow and segregation. So, when she graduated from high school and went on to Albany State College, Toney was ready for the Civil Rights Movement. Before the movement, she was vice president of the local NAACP Youth Council Chapter. In this group, students heard about the sit-ins and boycotts sweeping the nation. Finally, she and two other Youth Council members tested the ICC Ruling by sitting-in at the Trailways Bus Station.  Toney believed the horrible conditions of the segregated facilities at the bus station had to be changed. On November 22, 1961, they sat at the lunch counter on the "White" side.   Albany Police Chief Pritchett’s assistant approached them and asked them “what they were doing” and told them they had to come out back. Pritchett was waiting in back and told them if they went back into the bus station they would be arrested. They took the challenge, returned to the counter on the "White" side, and were taken to jail. A crowd of students had formed across the street that told Prichett “You Better Not Mess With Her.” Something Toney remembers when she got to the police station was that the jail was integrated. She was greeted in her cell by a White female about an hour before Mr. Thomas Chatmon, advisor for the youth council, and attorney C.B. King bailed them out. Proudly, today, Toney declares that their arrest was the beginning of the revolution that would become the Albany Civil Rights Movement. She says she is happy to have lived to see the fruits of their labor. Toney now challenges present day youth to pick up the torch of freedom so that generations that follow will see and know that there was a group of people in Albany, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, that “kept their backs straight.”

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