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Published on: 9/21/2007
Last Visited: 9/21/2007
Dennard to win award for lifetime civil rights deeds
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Herbert Dennard sits Thursday in the Georgia Informer office on Forsyth Street. Dennard began the paper 25 years ago.
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Herbert Dennard sits Thursday in the Georgia Informer office on Forsyth Street.Dennard began the paper 25 years ago.
IF YOU GO
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A rainstorm one February day in 1968 altered the course of Herbert Dennard's life.
Dennard and a military buddy were going toe-to-toe in a pickup basketball game when the drops began to fall.The weather was a tad inconvenient: After all, they'd been talking trash about each other's hoop skills for a while.No way the game could end without declaring a winner.
So they marched to Macon's YMCA, in search of an indoor court.Dennard, fresh from a four-year stint with the Marines and nearly a year in Vietnam, had membership cards from YMCA facilities he had used in New York and Hawaii.No reason he and his friend couldn't use the Macon gym, right?
But Dennard, 22 at the time, was shocked when he and his friend were turned away at the door.Thinking the Y might not be aware of his membership, he pulled out his card to prove his status.
"They said, 'We still can't let you in.This YMCA is for whites only,'," Dennard recalled Thursday while sitting in the offices of the Georgia Informer, the monthly newspaper he publishes.
In the weeks that followed the YMCA incident, Dennard and a group of about 10 other recent military veterans tried to decide how to respond.Things progressed slowly.Until then, Dennard, after witnessing the savagery of jungle warfare, had been content to return to his hometown and settle down with his wife and child.
But other events intervened.On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.The group decided then to again seek entry at the Y, Dennard said.Again they were denied.This time they were arrested.
"That was my first involvement in the civil rights movement," Dennard said."And it was by accident."
Saturday, the Macon branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will present to Dennard the Earl Shinhoster Freedom Award.The awards breakfast starts at 9 a.m. in the Round Building at Central City Park.
The lifetime achievement award, named in honor of an NAACP regional director who was killed in a car accident, has been handed out for the past three decades.That's not quite as long as Dennard has been advocating equal treatment for blacks.
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"People really don't know a lot about the civil rights part of Herbert Dennard."
He outlasted the YMCA, which he said was shuttered a few years after his arrest.Its funding had dried up, and the national organization disassociated itself from the Macon branch when local leaders refused to change the segregationist policies.
Dennard, meanwhile, pressed on.
Macon City Councilwoman Elaine Lucas first met Dennard at Macon State College, she said, where they helped start a black student organization that's still around.
Dennard's strength as an activist has come in organizing forums and meetings that bring focus and attention to the concerns of Macon's black residents, she said.But Dennard has also been there at the picket lines, Lucas pointed out, and has always preached the virtues of working to do something for yourself and not waiting for others to do it for you.
"He talks the talk, but he always walks the walk," she said."And I think that's why he's so well respected."
NAACP officials credit Dennard with helping plan marches and boycotts in Macon for economic equality - efforts that led companies that hadn't typically hired blacks to begin employing them.He helped form the first Macon chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and he also founded the Medgar Malcolm Martin Educational Center.
The center aimed to teach black youngsters academic and social skills and provide adults with test-taking and work skills.
Dillard recalled first learning of sickle-cell anemia and its particular dangers to blacks when Dennard started a foundation to educate people about the disease.
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The Informer, Dennard's newspaper, continues to play an important role in the community today, friends said.
Dennard founded the paper 25 years ago after an editor at the Macon Courier, another local newspaper, refused to run one of his columns.In the column, Dennard argued that blacks shouldn't shop at stores where they weren't allowed to work.The editor was afraid of offending advertisers, Dennard said.
"He said, 'If you don't like it, why don't you start your own newspaper,'," Dennard recalled."I said, 'I believe I will.',"
The Georgia Informer claims circulation in all of Georgia's 159 counties.It seeks to report information that might not make it into the mainstream media, Dennard said.This month's cover story features pastors from the largest black churches in Middle Georgia.
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Hudson, chairman of the Macon-Bibb Transit Authority and vice chairman of the Bibb County Board of Education, said the paper is just one example of how Dennard has stood against injustices ever since returning from Vietnam.
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