Avery, Anne Pearl, 1943-

Annie Pearl Avery
1943 –
Raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Annie Pearl Avery–whose civil rights work spanned decades–did not come off a college campus. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she was sent to live with relatives in Pittsburgh when she was 9 or 10 years old. She returned to Birmingham when she was 14, no longer used to segregation. Continuous violence seemed to surround her life. Before she started high school, police barged into her home looking for her brother. When Freedom Riders were mobbed in Birmingham in May 1961, she went to the bus station to see what was happening and perhaps help or at least meet the riders. She could not get through police barricades, but she met SNCC organizer Wilson Brown who invited her to attend a SNCC conference in Georgia. After the conference, Brown, Avery, and a young white woman got lost while driving back to Alabama and stopped at a bus station in Marietta, Georgia seeking directions. Immediately, the police were notified that a mixed race group was in town. It didn’t take long for the police to arrest Wilson Brown and impounded his car. Eventually she became SNCC’s project director for the voter registration effort in Hale County, Alabama. After working with SNCC, Avery never abandoned her commitment to civil rights struggle. In October 2014, she was arrested at the Alabama State Capitol for protesting the state legislature’s refusal to expand Medicaid. She made a statement after her arrest and said, “When you stand up for right, right will prevail. I was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during Bloody Sunday in 1965, and I am still standing up for right today.” And although she often feared for life working in some of the most dangerous places in the South, her response continued to carry relevance: “You get motivated to do something, and that fear thing is overcome.”