LEESBURG, Ga. (WALB) — On Aug. 14, 1962, Shady Grove Baptist Church in Lee County was burned by arsonists. Local officials attributed the fire to faulty electrical wiring, but the FBI disagreed, and charged two white males with the crime, but they were never indicted by a grand jury.

Shady Grove Baptist Church was one of four churches burned, along with Mount Mary, Mount Olive, and I Hope churches.

In a September 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference newsletter, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in part: “Tears welled up in my heart and my eyes not long ago as I surveyed the shambles of what had been the Shady Grove Baptist Church of Leesburg, Georgia.”

Following the burnings, Jackie Robinson, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, and several other prominent civil rights leaders visited Southwest Georgia.

Doretha Hamilton, who was a child at the time, said the visits made an impact on the community.

“Those were the ones that thought enough of Lee County, to come and observe our desperation of need,” she said. “They gave confidence, they gave strength, by just being present.”

Fundraising efforts by King and Robinson successfully rebuilt three of the four churches. The fourth, “I Hope” in Dawson, could not be rebuilt. The land was not owned by the congregation but by a white property owner.

Voter registration at the center of the movement

Pastor Calvin James said he believes voter registration is what helped African Americans in Lee County begin to have a voice.

“There’s a lot of people that at age are not registered to vote, and we still have to tell them that one vote does matter,” James said. “You have to be willing to stand for something.”

James said his father, Agnew James Sr., was the first African American registered voter in Lee County and chairman of the county’s voter registration movement. He said that put a target on his father’s back, resulting in his home and four other homes occupied by African Americans involved in the movement being struck by gunfire.

“They were trying to intimidate us, they were trying to put fear in us, and trying to stop us any way possible,” James said.

Hamilton reflected on what the attacks meant then and now.

“It’s an injustice, as I see it now as an adult, but I didn’t see that as a child,” she said. “For every action, there’s a reaction. The reaction was to get together and build us up and show the people that are doing this to us.”

James said the struggle has not ended.

“We’re still in the struggle. We’re still fighting now for the same purpose, that we were fighting then,” he said. “But as they didn’t stop us in 1962, they won’t stop us in 2026.”

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