Nothing like gettng to know your hometown by making it a character in your novel. Same is true of your childhood street. On both my recent research trips back to Albany I walked up and down the old Hazard Drive (now College Drive) mourning the houses and people that populated it in the 1960s. The… Continue reading More from Hazard Drive
Author: Anita Gail Jones
Oh ~ So this is what a first draft feels like!
I promised to keep y’all updated on the progress of Peach Seed Monkey so here I am (finally) with a real update. Thanksgiving is two days away so I’m also here to give thanks ~ first to you for visiting/reading/subscribing to the PSM blog. It’s been quiet the past couple of weeks for good reason… Continue reading Oh ~ So this is what a first draft feels like!
50 Years After the Albany Movement
Albany Civil Rights Institute, June 2011 (ACRI) Photo: A.G. Jones While in Albany researching the novel in June 2011, I snapped the picture above during the opening reception of the SNCC 50th Anniversary of the Albany Movement. The Movement was founded on November 17, 196, so ACRI has had many festivities throughout 2011… Continue reading 50 Years After the Albany Movement
Poor People’s Campaign ~ Lessons from the Streets of 1968
My family was living on Hazard Drive in Albany, Georgia when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968—my late mother’s 42nd birthday. I was two months shy of 14 and felt doubly sad—that King’s life had been snuffed out and my mother would cry for him on her birthday. Five weeks later, on… Continue reading Poor People’s Campaign ~ Lessons from the Streets of 1968
Powerful Reserve
Notch > November 1st On this day in 1961, SNCC workers Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon, along with nine members of the NAACP Youth Council—funded by local business man Tom Chatmon—test new Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) rules at Trailways bus station in Albany, Georgia. Meeting Rev. Charles Sherrod at the 50th Anniversary of the Albany… Continue reading Powerful Reserve
The First Bite
America has a multitude of best-kept secrets. The Albany Georgia Civil Rights Movement is one of them. It started in the fall of 1961. I was seven years old, and my late sister, Betty, was just shy of twelve.To my knowledge our late parents—like most of the more than 20,000 blacks in Albany at the… Continue reading The First Bite
Growing up on Hazard Drive
Our house was #325 Hazard Drive, one door down from Hazard Laboratory School in Albany, Georgia. During the late 50s and into the 60s when I was growing up there, Hazard Drive was a dichotomous slice of black life, one of the east side communities closest to the Flint River. On the north end of… Continue reading Growing up on Hazard Drive
About Anita
In the late 1980s, Anita migrated to San Francisco, escaping life as a New York City fashion model. In further efforts to avoid the 9-5, and figure out how to use a Fine Arts degree in Drawing & Painting, a random detour lead her to writing in earnest: children’s stories and adult fiction. Anita joined… Continue reading About Anita