Accidental Activist

Accidental Activist: Changing the World One Small Step at a Time 

By Mary Allen Jolley 

Livingston Press, 2024 

Paperback: $19.95 

Genre: Memoir 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

The long and productive life of service of Mary Allen Jolley (1928-2023) is documented in her memoir Accidental Activist: Changing the World One Small Step at a Time. At a time when vicious and rampant partisan divides threaten our democracy, Jolley recalls a time of reaching “across the aisle” and making positive changes for the benefit of all Americans. She urges her readers to “know that you can be part of making the changes that … need to happen.” 

Accidental Activist includes Jolley’s “lessons I learned” as she recounts her life and exceptional career which serve as motivation – and inspiration – to be and do better.  She dedicated her life to working for the principles of fairness and equality which are the “American dream,” even though she admits they haven’t always been the “American way.” 

Mary Allen was born in rural Sumter County, Alabama, in a setting she calls “a child’s paradise.” She demonstrated a diligent call to service from an early age. When she was a senior in high school, and the school bus driver (her brother) went off to fight in World War II, she took the test and became the school bus driver. After a year at Livingston State Teachers College, she was hired as a teacher at Cold Springs School in rural Cullman County. After her father’s death, while teaching at another school and finishing her college degree, Mary had tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium. After a full recovery, she was hired back to teach at Cold Springs, but her fellow teachers, with the unfounded fear that they might contract tuberculosis, refused to live with her at the house where the school housed its teachers. The principal offered her a room with his family, but she decided not to return to teaching. 

That last statement is misleading, though; Mary Jolley taught in one way or another for the rest of her life. She became an advocate for citizen participation and civility throughout her life of service. After the decision not to return to classroom teaching, Jolley took a clerical job in Washington, D.C. In 1955, when she became a legislative assistant to Alabama Congressman Carl Elliott, her ambition and mission coalesced. Carl Elliott of Jasper, a progressive Alabama politician, had a strong commitment to education, the poor, and the working classes. Working with Elliott, Jolley learned lessons in advocacy, community outreach, and pragmatism.  

A highlight of Elliott’s years in Congress was the passage of the Hill-Elliott Bill of 1958 – the National Defense Education Act. Jolley details the logistics of that accomplishment as Alabama Senator Lister Hill and Congressman Elliott used the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite to enlist bipartisan support; the bill used national defense as an incentive for increased federal support for public education. As Elliott’s assistant and Clerk of the Subcommittee on Special Education, Jolley had a front-row seat and an integral part in the formation and passage of that enduring legislation. In the decade of the 1950s, Jolley describes a functioning Congress that is hard to imagine now. 

During her time with Carl Elliott, Jolley worked on grassroots campaigns and organized “Koffee for Kennedy” gatherings in Alabama in 1960. During the Kennedy administration, Jolley was hired as an assistant director in the U.S. Office of Education. By 1964, when George Wallace and his political machine firmly controlled Alabama politics, Jolley took leave from her Education position to help run Elliott’s reelection campaign. The Wallace forces did not support Elliott’s reelection bid, and he lost. 

Thus begins a period of Jolley’s profound disillusionment with Alabama politics. Her account provides a probing and personal view of the steep decline as “Alabama lost its collective progressive political voice during and since the Wallace years.” However, Carl Elliott hoped to revive and retrieve that progressive voice when he ran for governor in the 1966 Alabama election. Wallace was not allowed to run for a third consecutive turn and ran his wife, Lurleen, as his surrogate. Mrs. Wallace won that election, and a part of Jolley’s idealism was crushed. “I was convinced that there was no place for me in Alabama,” she writes, “and I wanted to be as far from the Wallace reign as I could be.” Elliott put it best in remarks he made at a dinner in honor of his friend and mentee before she left Alabama to return to Washington: “We fought to stop hate, and malice and ill-will that has enveloped our State. While we were not successful in these efforts the important thing is that Mary Allen did her part.” 

Carl Elliott of Alabama became the first recipient of the Kennedy family’s Profiles in Courage Award in 1990. Jolley and her colleague Julian Butler nominated him. 

After returning to Washington, Jolley became Associate Director of Government Affairs for the American Vocational Association and met and married Richard Jolley, a former Jesuit priest and President of Loyola University in New Orleans. Mary Allen Jolley moved on to establish the first Office of Public Affairs for the American Home Economics Association, continuing her focus on broadening career horizons for women. She and Richard left Washington to take positions in academia in Charleston, South Carolina. While serving as Vice President for Development at Trident Technical College, Jolley writes that “for the first time in my life I experienced gender discrimination that was real and unadorned.”  

Jolley returned to Alabama in 1985 and established the University of Alabama’s Center for Economic Development. She was instrumental in Alabama’s efforts to successfully attract the first Mercedes-Benz plant to be built outside Germany. At the Center for Economic Development, she began developing “the most creative venture in which I have been involved.” Her office developed a network of Family Resource Centers that currently provide services at no charge in forty-five Alabama counties. 

After retiring from the University of Alabama in 1994, Jolley did not stop working for the benefit of the public. Her advocacy and activism continued with the Family Resource Centers. In fact, all royalties from the sale of Accidental Activist will go to the Alabama Network of Family Resource Centers. Accidental Activist chronicles an amazing and unlikely life and is a primer for organizing and an urgent call to action. “God is in community,” she says, as she often refers to how her strong and evolving Christian faith sustained her.  Her straightforward and wise language entices us to keep reading, wanting to know more. Throughout it all, Mary Allen Jolley shows grace and humility for the exemplary life she lived and for those who helped her along the way. This frank and detailed memoir serves as inspiration for all readers to become “accidental activists.” 

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).