Albert Turner

Albert Turner (February 29, 1936 – April 13, 2000) was an American civil rights activist and an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. He was Alabama field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped lead the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery; and assisted others escape beating during the Bloody Sunday.

Early life Turner was born outside of Marion, Alabama, the son of a Perry County farmer; he was the fourth of 12 children. He graduated from Alabama A&M. That incident galvanized Turner to organize local voter registration efforts and educate prospective voters about the voter registration tests.

He served as State Director of the SCLC from 1965 to 1972. After the assassination of Dr. King, Turner led the mule train which bore his body to its final resting place. Turner attracted national attention in 1978 as the manager of the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association, when he and an ex-moonshine distiller teamed up to cheaply produce ethanol for gasohol from corn mash.

Voting rights activism in Alabama

Traditionally, white voters in the Black Belt region of Alabama had taken advantage of absentee ballots to retain control of elected offices; even with the increased registration of black voters, white absentee nonresident voters would vote in local elections at the behest of resident relatives and friends. Perry County and the other counties forming the Black Belt, initially named for its soil, The verdict was reached by an all-white jury, and the pair were sentenced to four (Bozeman) and five (Wilder) years imprisonment, believed to be the strongest sentences handed out to-date for voting fraud in Alabama. The initial conviction, though, depressed black voter participation in Pickens County. applying it in a selective manner against civil rights activists seeking to register black voters in the Black Belt. In the 1984 election, according to testimony from Jeff Sessions who was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1981 and testified about the election at a Congressional hearing in 1986 to decide whether to confirm him as a U.S. district judge, out of 4,000 ballots total in Perry County, 729 were absentee ballots, which seemed like a disproportionately high number since more absentee ballots were cast in Perry than in Jefferson County, which had more than 45 times the number of residents of Perry County. During the grand jury investigation in October 1984, more than two dozen subpoenaed witnesses, many of them black senior citizens familiar with segregation-era intimidation techniques, were bused more than to Mobile to be photographed, fingerprinted, provide handwriting samples, and testify before the federal grand jury. The federal jury deliberated for three hours Turner renewed his contention that the trial was instigated by freshman Senator Jeremiah Denton (R-AL), who, Turner said, had the most to gain by intimidating black voters.

Later life and legacy Turner died on April 13, 2000, while being prepared for an operation to stop abdominal bleeding. In January 2023, his son, Turner, Jr., was indicted for voter fraud charges.

A stretch of Perry County Road 45 south of Marion is named the Albert Turner Sr Memorial Highway. Perry County has also named an elementary school for Turner.