Albert Turner (February 29, 1936 – April 13, 2000) was an American civil rights activist and an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. He was Alabama field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped lead the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery; he was beaten on Bloody Sunday. Early life Turner was born outside of Marion, Alabama, the son of a Perry County farmer; he was the fourth of 12 children. He graduated from Alabama A&M. Career 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. Turner was one of the marchers credited with leading the Selma to Montgomery procession in March 1965 while Dr. King attended a ceremony honoring his work in Cleveland. 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 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. Wilcox County Commissioner Bobby Joe Johnson joked, "Do you know why the roads to white folks' cemeteries are paved in the Black Belt? It's so people won't get their feet wet if it rains on election day." Despite complaints of fraud, election officials failed to obtain any indictments for absentee voter fraud. When Turner went to Washington D.C. to complain about fraud to lawyers at the Justice Department, he was told the government "[couldn't] do anything ... Y'all need to learn to use the absentee-ballot process yourselves." Perry County and the other counties forming the Black Belt, initially named for its soil, are some Alabama's poorest counties, and residents of the Black Belt typically travel out of their home counties for work, making it difficult to vote at local polls, which were only open in