Ralph Waldo Allen grew up at this house at 204 East Foster Street, and it was his legal residence during the summers of 1962 and 1963, which he spent working as a volunteer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, registering Black people to vote in Terrell County, Georgia. For his efforts, he would be shot at, beaten up, and thrown in prison repeatedly.
In August of 1963, Allen was arrested on charges of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer. He was sent to prison, and his bail was set at $40,000. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was urged to intervene, and he arranged for Allen’s defense to be taken up by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights. In December, he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. In July of 1964, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Allen’s rights had been violated because he had been tried by an all-white jury. He walked free, and the ruling in his case led to the desegregating of juries in Georgia.
Ralph Allen spent most of his later life working as an English teacher at a high school in Pennsylvania. He died in 2005. His older sister, Dixie Clark, was a lifelong Melrosian, very active in the community, and passed away in 2018.
In a 1962 editorial, the Boston Traveler noted that in Georgia “such disparate figures as the Rev. Martin Luther King and a white Melrose, Mass. youth, Ralph Waldo Allen, have been jailed for their efforts to help Negroes.” Since Dr. King’s murder, he has become something of a national saint; but in the last opinion poll conducted before he died, only about one-third of American white people said they approved of him. Most white people were not standing with Dr. King while he lived. Ralph Waldo Allen did, and is the only Melrosian of his era who put his life on the line to do so.
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