When Kredelle and Alphonso Petway joined the civil rights movement of the 1960s, they were following in the footsteps of their father Rev. Matthew Petway, who had been an activist since the 1950s. The family was based in Pensacola, Fla., but spent time in Montgomery, Ala. Kredelle started out helping people get registered to vote, assisting them with the application process. She helped them understand poll taxes, literacy tests and other suppression tactics the government used to intimidate Black people attempting to cast their votes in the Jim Crow South.
“For me, even at the age of — I think I was 17 or 18 — when I started being a volunteer with the Montgomery Improvement Association, I was amazed at how our people had been so humiliated that they were actually afraid to register to vote,” said Petway.
Alphonso was a youth member of the NAACP in Pensacola. He was deeply disturbed by the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, and reading news articles and seeing the images of Till’s mutilated body ignited a flame of activism in Petway. It was a burning, Petway says, that could not be quenched…