King documentary to air at Civil Rights Institute

ALBANY — Two screenings of a new documentary profiling a southwest Georgia town infamous for lynchings will help mark Black History Month at the Albany Civil Rights Institute.

The film entitled “Fair Game: Surviving A 1960 Georgia Lynching” profiles the tiny Blakely community, where 24 known black men were lynched, and where, in 1960, a black New Jersey Navy veteran risked becoming the 25th victim.

Written, directed and produced by Boston-based documentary filmmaker Clennon L. King of Albany, the 65-minute film will screen at the Albany Civil Rights Institute, located at 326 Whitney Ave., on Feb. 15 at 7 p.m. and Feb. 16 at 10 a.m. King will introduce his documentary before leading a post-screening discussion, followed by audience Q&A. The program is free and open to the public.

“I’m delighted (the Civil Rights Institute has committed) to share this work in my hometown about a county that was notorious for lynching deaths, second only to Atlanta,” King said in a news release. “With the opening of the national museum on lynching, the continued murders of blacks in police custody and our current over-incarceration, this film is both timely and relevant, and hopefully offers audiences a granular look at a problem still alive and well.”

King dedicated his film to the 24 black men who were lynched in Early County, and to his late father, civil rights attorney C.B. King of Albany, who along with the late Atlanta attorney Donald L. Hollowell represented a doomed Bayonne, N.J., man named James Fair Jr.

A week after winning Fair’s July 1962 release, King had his scalp split open by Dougherty County Sheriff D.C. “Cull” Campbell. Forty years later, King would become the namesake of the first federal courthouse in the former Jim Crow South to be named for a black person.

In May 1960, Fair joined a friend from nearby Newark on a road trip home to Blakely. Their arrival in Early County coincided with the alleged rape and murder of an 8-year-old black girl, prompting local authorities to finger Fair as the fall guy. Less than three days later, a local judge sentenced him to Georgia’s electric chair, prompting his mother, Alice Fair, to mount a 26-monthlong fight for his life.

The film features multiple Georgia luminaries, including the Atlanta native Vernon Jordan, who was a young law clerk on the case, and Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, founding dean of Morehouse School of Medicine and former Health and Human Services Secretary under President George H. W. Bush. Sullivan grew up in Blakely, where his father served as the community’s sole black undertaker.

Also featured is retired Chief Justice Herbert E. Phipps of the Georgia Court of Appeals, Dougherty County Associate Juvenile Court Judge Johnnie M. Graham, former Albany Municipal Court Judge Henry Williams and Albany attorney Chevene B. King Jr.

Former Blakely Police Chief Charles Middleton also offers an unvarnished and personal look at the role his own family played in the lynching that took place in Early County.

The film narrative pays particular attention to historic context, noting as Fair is fighting for his life, JFK is making a White House run, MLK is behind bars at Reidsville Prison, and Hollywood is shooting Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mocking Bird.”

“Fair Game” marks King’s second documentary. His first, “Passage at St. Augustine: The 1964 Black Lives Matter Movement That Transformed America,” which won the Henry Hampton Award of Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking at the 2015 Roxbury International Film Festival, screened in Albany in September 2017.

King was a staff reporter at the Albany Herald from 1995-1996.