Annie B. Giles

By John Davis
Montgomery Advertiser

Annie B. Giles watched as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for no apparent reason. (Karen S. Doerr, Montgomery Advertiser)

Not everything changes.

About two years ago, Montgomery resident Annie B. Giles, 85, had a run-in with "a big, old, fat white man" at the farmers market on Madison Avenue. She picked up a large sweet potato and prepared to hit him with it.

She wasn't afraid, she said. She'd seen conflict before, the kind that couldn't be fought with a sweet potato.

"I was living on Frank Street at the time," she said, when she got word of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She was working two domestic jobs, one in the home of a family at Maxwell Air Force Base and a second at a house on Roslyn Drive.

At the beginning of the boycott, Giles rode with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and watched as he was arrested for no apparent reason.

"From then on I walked from Frank Street ... in the rain and sleet," she said. "They would pass by, spit on us."

Giles saw firehoses turned on her fellow protesters. She saw German shepherds let loose on her friends.

"I was lucky in it. I never did get beat up," she said. But she did risk losing her job. The Roslyn Drive woman Giles worked for threatened to fire her if Giles took part in the boycott.

Giles told the woman she wasn't part of the boycott and then went home to cook meals for people on the march from Selma to Montgomery and to give room and board to college students who came to Montgomery to support the movement.

Through it all, Giles said she was never scared.

"I'm more scared now then I was then," she said, sitting in the living room of her West Hannon Street home next to a tapestry of King.

Two years ago, at the farmers market, Giles picked up the sweet potato to defend herself from a man she said told her, "Don't be brushing up against me. I'll slap your brains out."

The farmers market was crowded. But the farmer behind the produce stand saw what was happening and told the man to leave.

"I did my part when I was walking," Giles said of her actions of 50 years ago. "A lot of changes have been made."