Bert Bivins To Receive NAACP AWARD

The Macon Branch of the NAACP will sponsor the Annual Earl Shinhoster Freedom Fund Awards BanquetSaturday, October 21, 2006 at 6:00 P.M. at the Macon City Auditorium, 415 First Street, Macon, Georgia.

This year, the NAACP will honor veteran civil rights leader Bert Bivins, III with the Earl Shinhoster Freedom Award. Bert Bivins, III was the first Black to integrate the Bibb County School System in 1963, and he was arrested for integrating the YMCA. He serves as a County Commissioner, retired teacher, and retired Warner Robins Air Force Base employee.

Just before finishing high school, Bert Bivins, III followed his mother, Hester Bivins, into the civil rights movement, taking part in protest demonstrations, marches and the bus boycott.
In the fall of 1961 Bert Bivins, III went back to Ballard-Hudson at night to study electronics. In the summer of 1962, he went to work at Robins air force Base as a janitor (a common entry point for minorities in those days).

While attending vocational school at Ballard-Hudson in 1962, he asked for a transfer to segregated Dudley Hughes Vocational School. Because Ballard-Hudson had one teacher teaching two classes. That “uppity” action got him suspended from school, and school officials said that they were going to “teach him a lesson.” His attitude was so “uppity”, he told them “when it was all over, we’ll see who learns the most.”
Not long after that, he earned the right to take part in an electronic training program at robins Air Force Base. Base Officials tried to discourage him from taking part in the program, because training was to be held at segregated Dudley Hughes Vocational School.

He not only insisted on taking the job, but told school and base official he intended to attend classes at Dudley Hughes with the white students, or he would not attend at all.
Base officials told him he would lose his job if he did not accept second class arrangements for certification of training. His reply was that f he lived in a country that would allow him to lose his job for refusing to be segregated, it was time for him to know it. He wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and soon had discussions with the justice department.

With talk that the school system could lose some federal funding, the Bibb county board of Education held a called meeting in June of 1963. The board voted to admit Bert Bivins, III to Dudley Hughes as an exception to the rules of segregation.

In June of 1964, he finished the training program with the highest average in the class, and was immediately drafted into the army. In 1968 (or 67) a group of young black men were denied admission to the Young Men’s Christian Association YMCA) to play basketball, in spite of the fact that one of them had a membership card (from New York).

He helped organize and participated in a demonstration at the YMCA, which landed him in jail. Rather than integrate the YMCA, the charter was given up, and the place once known as the YMCA is today commonly called the “City Club”.
Bert Bivins, III was involved in many other civil rights activities:

He was involved in the integration of Tatnall Square Park .
A member of the “White Hat Corp”, set up to prevent violence at a time when cities were being burned all over the country.
Took part in bi-racial group discussions
Was a panelist on a weekly television talk show (Community Forum)
Wrote for the Macon courier and The Telegraph
In 1970, he married Barbara Hones. They have two children – Belinda and Bert IV. He also has six siblings.

Bert retired from Robins Air Force Base in 1992 and returned to Fort Valley State College to become certified to teach. He graduated in the summer of 1994, with the highest GPA in his class, and taught in Twiggs and Bibb County School systems until 2004 when he retired from teaching.

In 1995, he ran for the un-expired term of his mentor, William P. Randall, on the Bibb County Board of commissioners, where he still serves.

He is a member of the Little Rock Baptist Church and honorary society organizations.