Albert Turner attempted to register to vote in 1962, but despite his college education, could not pass the
literacy test given. That incident galvanized Turner to organize local voter registration efforts and educate prospective voters about the voter registration tests. He served as State Director of the SCLC from 1965 to 1972. After the assassination of Dr. King, Turner led the mule train which bore his body to its final resting place. Turner attracted national attention in 1978 as the manager of the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association, when he and an ex-
moonshine distiller teamed up to cheaply produce ethanol for
gasohol from corn mash.
Voting rights activism in Alabama {{external media Traditionally, white voters in the
Black Belt region of Alabama had taken advantage of absentee ballots to retain control of elected offices; even with the increased registration of black voters, white absentee nonresident voters would vote in local elections at the behest of resident relatives and friends.
Perry County and the other counties forming the Black Belt, initially named for its soil, The verdict was reached by an all-white jury, and the pair were sentenced to four (Bozeman) and five (Wilder) years imprisonment, believed to be the strongest sentences handed out to-date for voting fraud in Alabama. The initial conviction, though, depressed black voter participation in Pickens County. applying it in a selective manner against civil rights activists seeking to register black voters in the Black Belt. In the 1984 election, according to testimony from
Jeff Sessions who was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1981 and testified about the election at a Congressional hearing in 1986 to decide whether to confirm him as a U.S. district judge, out of 4,000 ballots total in Perry County, 729 were absentee ballots, which seemed like a disproportionately high number since more absentee ballots were cast in Perry than in Jefferson County, which had more than 45 times the number of residents of Perry County. During the grand jury investigation in October 1984, more than two dozen subpoenaed witnesses, many of them black senior citizens familiar with segregation-era intimidation techniques, were bused more than to
Mobile to be photographed, fingerprinted, provide handwriting samples, and testify before the federal grand jury. The federal jury deliberated for three hours Turner renewed his contention that the trial was instigated by freshman Senator
Jeremiah Denton (
R-
AL), who, Turner said, had the most to gain by intimidating black voters. ==Later life and legacy==