Tornado fallout gives ‘living legend’ Annie Pearl Avery a reason to fight to rebuild

When the Jan. 12 tornado destroyed Annie Pearl Avery’s Selma house, she did what you expect a world-renowned civil rights legend to do. She mobilized the neighborhood to get help together.

Her house was unlivable after EF2 tornado ripped through Selma, so she heard about a group called Samaritan’s Purse and called them to come to her neighborhood and put tarps on all their roofs.

“That’s the civil rights in me … everything there is affected everybody,” Avery told the Selma Sun during an interview at the annual Foot Soldiers Breakfast at Selma High School on Saturday morning.

Now she’s asking for donations of roof shingles and plywood to help cover the cost for them to rebuild. She’s worried FEMA won’t cover the costs needed to make repairs.

“My blood pressure been up since been dealing with this,” said the 79-year-old who is well known for her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.

The first three days after the storm, she lived in her white pickup truck and ate canned Vienna sausages and crackers she had stored in a plastic bin and shared with her neighbors.

Without cell service, she eventually tried dialing 911 for help and got through to a dispatcher who got her name and said she has a man who has been calling looking for her. It was Avery’s son in Birmingham checking to make sure she was OK.

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“The lady told me this man has been calling four or five times a day demanding to talk to his mama, so they transferred me to another line so I could talk to him,” she said. “I told him, ‘I’m not hurt. I’m not sick. The house is damaged, but everything is OK.’”

When asked where she is staying now, almost two months after the storm, she just said “here and there” and that she has a goal to clear out the glass from her bedroom so she can sleep there again. She’s now getting estimates from builders to see what she can afford to repair.

Avery has received many awards for her civil rights efforts and there are many archived recounts she’s given with stories of joining SNCC after the Freedom Riders were attacked, even though she wasn’t a student. She says she can’t count how many times she was arrested for protesting in at least seven Southern states. It’s what earned her the title “Living Legend.”

“My legend is so big I don’t remember all the stuff,” she told the Selma Sun while resting on the seat of her walker outside Selma High’s cafeteria where the Foot Soldiers Breakfast was underway.

It all comes down to purpose, she said. “Everybody has a purpose. Everything has a purpose. Animals, insects – they all have purpose. Each individual has a purpose. Part of what I’m doing is my purpose.”

Even though she wasn’t a student, she says being active in SNCC was how “I felt like I could contribute, and my purpose was to participate in demonstrations and go to jail.” Then she chuckled like a school girl.