Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 9781604731071, 9781617030505, 9781604737608

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Recovering Women’s Voices from the Civil Rights Movement
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE
SARAH PATTON BOYLE
MAMIE TILL BRADLEY
DAISY S. LAMPKIN
ROSA PARKS
AGNES E. MEYER
KATHARINE DU PRE LUMPKIN
FRANCES H. WILLIAMS
EDITH S. SAMPSON
JOHNNIE CARR
LORRAINE HANSBERRY
DOROTHY TILLY
DELLA D. SULLINS
BARBARA POSEY
PRISCILLA STEPHENS
CASEY HAYDEN
MODJESKA M. SIMKINS
CHARLOTTA BASS
DIANE NASH
LILLIAN SMITH
KATIE LOUCHHEIM
ANNE BRADEN
MARION KING
MARGARET C. MCCULLOCH
JANE SCHUTT
DOROTHY HEIGHT
MARIE FOSTER
PAULI MURRAY
MYRLIE EVERS
ELLA BAKER
VICTORIA GRAY
ELIZABETH ALLEN
RITA L. SCHWERNER
RUTH STEINER
FANNIE LOU HAMER
ANNIE DEVINE
DOROTHY COTTON
MARTHA RAGLAND
CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY
Acknowledgments
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965

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Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965 Edited by Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon

University Press of Mississippi Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2009 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2009 b

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women and the civil rights movement, 1954–1965 / edited by Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60473-107-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century—Sources. 2. Women civil rights workers—United States—History—20th century—Sources. 3. African Americans—Civil rights— History—20th century—Sources. 4. African American women civil rights workers—History—20th century—Sources. 5. Women civil rights workers—United States—Biography. 6. African American women civil rights workers—Biography. 7. Women—United States—History—20th century—Sources. 8. United States—Race relations—Sources. I. Houck, Davis W. II. Dixon, David E. E185.61.W828 2009 323.092—dc22 2008030388

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Dr. Yvonne Williams, who taught a very naїve freshman at the College of Wooster about race in America in the fall of 1985; and To Mrs. Georgeanne Brink, the terrific second grade teacher and neighbor who brought several arm-loads of political biographies for me to read when I was bedridden with chicken pox in the spring of 1971.

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Contents Introduction Recovering Women’s Voices from the Civil Rights Movement ix Mary McLeod Bethune 3 Sarah Patton Boyle 10 Mamie Till Bradley 17 Daisy S. Lampkin 33 Rosa Parks 37 Agnes E. Meyer 41 Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin 50 Frances H. Williams 61 Edith S. Sampson 72 Johnnie Carr 81 Lorraine Hansberry 88 Dorothy Tilly 98 Della D. Sullins 112 Barbara Posey 118 Priscilla Stephens 123 Casey Hayden 135 Modjeska M. Simkins 139 Charlotta Bass 148 Diane Nash 154 Lillian Smith 169 Katie Louchheim 179 Anne Braden 186 Marion King 199

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Margaret C. McCulloch 202 Jane Schutt 213 Dorothy Height 220 Marie Foster 224 Pauli Murray 228 Myrlie Evers 241 Ella Baker 245 Victoria Gray 251 Elizabeth Allen 257 Rita L. Schwerner 263 Ruth Steiner 270 Fannie Lou Hamer 280 Annie Devine 288 Dorothy Cotton 292 Martha Ragland 296 Constance Baker Motley 307 Acknowledgments 315 Index 317

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Introduction Recovering Women’s Voices from the Civil Rights Movement

E

ight years to the day of Emmett Till’s murder, civil rights leaders, supporters, and the idle curious descended on the Mall in Washington, D.C. They began gathering on Wednesday morning, August 28, 1963, at the bended knee of Lincoln, a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, to march “for jobs and freedom.” They also assembled to register support for the Kennedy administration’s pending civil rights bill— progressive action foisted on the administration by the triumphs of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. Organized by Bayard Rustin, crowds quickly swelled to more than a quarter-million. That afternoon the nation listened as its leading moral prophet spoke in rhythmical and memorable cadences about his Dream. By evening, and as carefully planned, the massive and predominantly black crowd had evacuated the nation’s capital. It was an altogether remarkable event—in planning, in scope, in execution, and of course in its soaring eloquence. But in the march’s immediate aftermath several women were still fuming— including the usually demure Rosa Parks. As recounted by Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the women of the civil rights movement had been thoroughly rebuffed in seeking at least one speaking opportunity for the women; such sex-specific glory-seeking, they were repeatedly told, was anathema to the movement and the many women involved in its several organizations.1 At a late hour, and after much cajoling, organizers finally agreed to make a “Tribute to Women.” After being refused the honor of marching with male movement leaders in a triumphal procession, several women took their assigned places near the podium. Based on an archival recording of the event, here is the “Tribute”: IX

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A. Philip Randolph: Our fellow Americans, in great tribute to the role the negro woman has played in the cause of freedom, equality, and human dignity, I now call on Miss Daisy Bates [sic], that great champion of negro rights and freedom, to give awards [sic] to Diane Nash Bevel, Miss Herbert Lee [sic], Miss Rosa Parks [sic], and Miss Gloria Richardson [sic]. Miss Daisy Bates [sic]. Daisy Bates: Mr. Randolph, friends, the women of this country, Mr. Randolph, pledge to you, to Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and all of you fighting for civil liberties, that we will join hands with you as women of this country. Rosa Gregg, vice president, Dorothy Height, the National Council of Negro Women, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the Methodist Church Women, all the women, pledge that we will join hands with you. We will kneel-in, we will sit-in until we can eat in any corner of the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-in, and we will kneel-in, and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge to the women of America. A. Philip Randolph: May I request the women whom we are honoring to stand: Mrs. Diane Nash Bevel of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Miss Herbert Lee [sic], the wife whose husband was killed in Mississippi two years ago because he tried to register and vote, Mrs. Medgar Evers, would all the NAACP. . . . I’m sorry to report to you that sister Evers could not attend our demonstration because of uh, unusual circumstances. Uh, who else? Will the . . . [voice: Rosa Parks] Miss Rosa Parks [sic] . . . will they all stand. And Miss, uh, [voice: Gloria Richardson] Gloria Richardson.2 In an otherwise magnificently staged event, the “Tribute to Women” was dreadful. It is even worse on tape. Randolph’s halting delivery, combined with a complete unawareness as to why the women were even assembled—Daisy Bates was not presenting “awards” to the women—turned what should have been a token gesture of solidarity into a spontaneous display of sexism. Said Height afterward, “I’ve never seen a more immovable force. We could not get women’s participation taken seriously.” As for Daisy Bates’s 142-word “speech”—Anne Arnold Hedgeman and Height had initially lobbied for Diane Nash Bevel to deliver a speech—a brief “pledge” to the men of the movement underscores the extent to which women’s voices on a national stage were effectively muzzled. Being loyal soldiers, Height, Lee, Nash, Parks, Bates, and Richardson did not allow their anger to diminish the luster of the event. X

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As a final slight, no woman was invited to meet and consult with the president immediately after the event. Today, our collective memory of the March on Washington has been telescoped into a brief twelve minutes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inspired eloquence. Little do we know of the opening prayer delivered by Father Patrick O’Boyle, or the fact that he alone almost blocked the participation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) John Lewis. Nor yet do we know of the moving addresses by Rabbi Joachim Prinz or Reverend Eugene Carson Blake. But perhaps the most egregious crime of American public memory has been committed against the women: their voice and their struggle to have a voice that memorable afternoon have been all but effaced. Over the past twenty years, scholars have persuasively demonstrated that women did more than dutifully follow orders from the men; in fact, they often led movements in their own communities, regions, and across the nation. In addition to scholarly assurance, we also knew from our own experiences that women, contra the March on Washington, were in fact granted an important place at the speaking dais. In the summer of 2004, on a research trip to the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., we listened to a most compelling audio archive.3 In 1963 and 1964, Alan Ribback, later to be known as Moses Moon, carried his rather cumbersome recording equipment South from Chicago, to such places as Selma, Alabama; Danville, Virginia; Jackson, Greenwood, Hattiesburg, and Indianola, Mississippi; and Washington, D.C. In more than seventy hours of audiotape, Ribback captured the fascinating and moving rhetorical drama taking place across the nation. Speeches, songs, prayers—it is all there to experience. We heard a young “Bobby” Dylan, introduced by James Forman, play his new song, “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a field in Greenwood; we listened to Fannie Lou Hamer create a joyful rapture as she sang “This Little Light of Mine” in the nation’s capital; we laughed out loud as we listened to comedian Dick Gregory humiliate a not-very-undercover white man at a Selma civil rights meeting; and we experienced a Reverend Redd deliver a memorable prayer chant. We also heard speeches, several of which were delivered by women. And they were eloquent speeches filled with a pathos and a passion that we had simply never before experienced. In sum, extant scholarship combined with our own archival experiences revealed that women were not marginal figures when it came to participation and leadership in the civil rights movement. To date, though, the words that inspired a nation remain elusive. But where to locate that revelation? Other than the Moon archive, just where are the material traces of that profound influence? XI

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As it turns out, they are in many places—more than we thought. They are as far West as the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Oregon Historical Society, and the Denver Public Library; they are as far North as the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Michigan; as far East as Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, New York University, the Bethune Council House, and Smith College; and as far South as the University of Southern Mississippi and the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans. We also discovered speeches at many places in between—from community college libraries to national museums, and even a few private residences. In compiling the thirty-nine speeches that we feature here, we also realize that many addresses remain to be discovered. Our hope is that this volume will be a spur to their discovery, dissemination, and critical evaluation. We are surprised that this anthology of speeches is something of a first. With the massive literature on the civil rights movement, combined with the active and ongoing scholarship examining its female participants, we initially expected to find a bevy of books and articles that both feature and critically analyze women’s rhetoric, even if they examined only a small handful of “great” texts. Equal parts shocking and sad, we have found little scholarship for the period 1954–1965 that would suggest a significant rhetorical contribution on the part of women.4 Since the 1990 publication of Crawford, Rouse, and Woods’s Women in the Civil Rights Movement, historians have begun exploring women’s involvement—made difficult in part because much of the primary source material does not survive and because many women have passed away without leaving a careful record of their activities.5 Even so, we now have book-length biographies on such movement stalwarts as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Lillian Smith, and Anne Braden.6 Scholarly monographs and articles have focused on such key players as Dorothy Tilly, Charlotta Bass, Gloria Richardson, Pauli Murray, Dorothy Williams, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Septima Clark, to mention only the most prominent.7 Such projects have been facilitated by autobiographical discourses, from oral histories to articles and books.8 One of the fairly recent results of such numerous and discrete projects is a first synthetic treatment of women in the movement, Lynne Olson’s ambitious and exemplary book, Freedom’s Daughters. In it, she reveals the intricate and intimate network that many activist women developed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eschewing the “great woman” view of history, Olson repeatedly demonstrates just how reliant white and black women were on each other, XII

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their families, and the pioneering women who helped pave their way. Civil rights historians like to point out that without Rosa Parks, there is very likely no Martin Luther King, Jr. Olson genders and extends the logic: without Septima Clark and Virginia Durr, there is likely no Rosa Parks. Indeed, freedom’s daughters. Mothers, too. Historians of American public address have also taken note of the contribution of women to the American civil rights movement, but that recovery project has proceeded rather slowly. Anthologies of women speakers, for example, are largely mute when it comes to the civil rights movement. Kennedy and O’Shields’ We Shall Be Heard bypasses the movement altogether.9 Similarly, of the sixty-seven texts included in Ritchie and Ronald’s fine book, Available Means, none feature the movement years.10 Additionally, collections that highlight women’s roles in the history of rhetoric are also surprisingly silent.11 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s anthology, Women Public Speakers in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, 1925–1993, fares somewhat better as it features three important movement activists (Pauli Murray, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker).12 Collections of speeches that feature black rhetors have made progress. Early treatments such as Smith and Robb’s The Voice of Black Rhetoric do not include a single female voice. Three decades later, Foner and Branham’s expansive collection, Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 features 151 primary texts, thirty-five of which are authored by women.13 Walker’s anthology, The Rhetoric of Struggle: Public Address by African American Women includes thirty-six addresses by black women.14 Moreover, in 1996, the communication field published its first book of essays on African American orators.15 Leeman’s bio-critical sourcebook includes forty-three chapters, fifteen of which feature the rhetorical activities of women. In sum, we’re beginning to hear from the many women who helped lead the civil rights movement. That said, we agree with Barnett, who notes that “the names and roles of most contemporary Black [and white] women who initiated, organized, and sustained the modern civil rights movement in the South during the 1950s and 1960s are not” known.16 In surveying the increasingly large and sophisticated scholarship on the women of the civil rights movement, we’ve been struck by one very interesting conclusion reached by many authors and activists: women’s active participation in the movement outnumbered the men. In our early archival work, especially in the papers of SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), we noted somewhat anecdotally that local women often dominated the long handwritten lists of would-be activists compiled by field workers. XIII

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Marable Manning in his introduction to The Autobiography of Medgar Evers, claims that “women were the foundation of the movement’s success.” That foundation, he argues, was (and is) quantitative: “women are far more likely than males to emerge as the critical leaders in most working-class and poor neighborhoods. Women activists are far more prevalent than males in the building of civic capacity.”17 In his award-winning study of movement organizing in Greenwood, Mississippi, Charles M. Payne states emphatically, “We know beyond dispute that women were frequently the dominant force in the movement.”18 Based on his fieldwork in and around the Mississippi Delta, Payne argues further that in the thirty-to-fifty-year-old age range, women were typically three or four times as likely to be involved.19 Farther east, in Montgomery, Alabama, Bernice McNair Barnett demonstrates that women initiated and helped sustain the year-long bus boycott. Historians tend to forget that following Rosa Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955, it was Jo Ann Robinson of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) who mimeographed 35,000 leaflets calling for a one-day bus boycott on December 5.20 More compelling is the testimony of movement participants themselves. It should be emphasized, though, that many of the activists spoke candidly about gender relations in the movement only after the second wave of American feminism had radically altered the discursive terrain—and reconfigured personal and public memory. In other words, movement activists typically did not publicly critique or comment on gender relations during the movement years; that critique awaited the full flowering of a gendered consciousness years in the making. But even if gender relations were on the minds of some activists, the rhetorical focus of the movement almost always kept race relations as its singular theme. Stokely Carmichael, no stranger to gender controversy in the movement, stated, “the ones who came out first for the movement were the women. If you follow the mass meetings, not the stuff on TV, you’d find women out there giving all the direction. As a matter of fact, we used to say, ‘Once you’ve got the women, the men got to come.”21 Ella Baker, perhaps the national organizer most attuned to the movement’s often demeaning treatment of women, noted, “the movement of the fifties and sixties was carried largely by women. . . . it’s true that the number of women who carried the movement is much larger than that of men.”22 In an oral history conducted in 1974 as part of the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South project, South Carolina activist Modjeska Monteith Simkins was queried whether “the women were stronger than the men?” “I think that’s true,” she responded. “And I think that it’s true even among the blacks today.”23 XIV

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Before we address the obvious incongruity invoked by the number of women involved and their degree of commitment, and yet their lack of rhetorical visibility, the all-important question of why arises: just why did more white and black women get involved in the movement than white and black men? The answers are primarily two, and both tell us some fascinating sociohistoric details about the South. Several prominent female activists are quite emphatic about the answer: the specter of physical violence. In an oral history conducted by Stanford University undergraduates in the summer of 1965, Fannie Lou Hamer instructed, Well, you would understand it if you had lived in Mississippi as a Negro. You would understand why [women participated more actively and publicly]. As much as Negro womens are precious, men could be in much more danger. If my husband had gone through or attempted 1⁄3 of what I’ve gone through he would have already been dead. So we understand why it’s more women involved. And until it’s where that mens can actually speak out, there will be more women until they can speak out, but it’s so dangerous . . . if they beat me almost to death in jail, what do you think would happen to my husband? You have to live in Mississippi as a Negro to understand why it’s not more men involved than there is.”24 In her inimitable and profound manner, Ruleville, Mississippi’s First Lady makes explicit the linkages among civil rights work, gender, and violence. While Hamer and several other women had indeed been brutally beaten on June 9, 1963, in a Winona, Mississippi, jail, being a woman enabled rather than constrained her activism. Thus was white racial violence leavened—to what degree?—by a misanthropic chivalry. Importantly, Fannie Lou Hamer limits her generalization to Mississippi, and that generalization is attested to by other women activists working in the state. Annie Devine of Canton, with Hamer, an active leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) observed, “The Negro woman does not in many cases have to go through all the things that men go through. That’s not true in every case, but it is true in some.”25 Victoria Gray Jackson from the Palmer’s Crossing community of Hattiesburg, who along with Hamer and Devine, ran for Congress in 1964, reflected on their unlikely journey together: “We come from three totally different places; three totally different environments; never had heard of each other before the movement, and somehow, as we journeyed, our paths came together and remained so, throughout and continues. And the black woman was the only one who could do it and live.”26 And although she worked and traveled in very different circles, NAACP lawyer and XV

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later Federal judge Constance Baker Motley claimed that Thurgood Marshall assigned her to the James Meredith case because he believed “the only people who are safe in the South are the women—white and Negro.”27 Marshall’s comments, as remembered by Motley, are apt; it was not just Mississippi where women could “get away with” civil rights work that men could not. Simkins’s answer to the “why” question is much more geographically and psychologically expansive. when it comes to black women, you know, it has always been said in the South that the only two classes of people free in the South are white men and black women. I know that you have heard that statement. And the mother instinct is one thing. You know, a cat or a bird or anything like that will fight for its children and the other is that ordinarily, in very few instances have Negro women been lynched. They lynched black men. And so, very often, the woman got away with the things that a man wouldn’t have gotten away with saying or doing. . . . I had a man tell me one day that one of the biggest fights he was ever in was because one day one of the boys told him that he had wet nursed at a black woman. . . . So, many times there was that carry over that they maybe didn’t realize. I’m talking about where they had trusted and beloved black servants, you see? . . . But you take the case of Rosa Parks. If that had been a Negro man, they would have thrown him out on his can. Don’t you know they would have? Out of that bus. And they put her in jail, but they certainly didn’t abuse her. . . . If they were whipped a thousand times, I should have been in South Carolina.28 Simkins’s candid remarks contextualize white-on-black violence as being shot through with race and sex—but also with class; families wealthy enough to have had a black domestic might be inclined to see black women with a benevolent, if paternalistic, nostalgia. Simkins’s reading of Rosa Parks’s arrest is also instructive: perhaps James Blake, the infamous bus driver, or arresting officers Fletcher B. Day and Dempsey W. Mixon might have roughed up a black Ross Parks. The comments by Hamer, Devine, Gray, Motley, and Simkins seem to address the complex relations governing interaction among black men and women and white men. What about white women? Were they more inclined to civil rights work than white men? Tellingly, when SNCC’s Bob Moses solicited Allard Lowenstein’s help for what would become the 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote, Lowenstein sent only white men from Yale and Stanford (several of whom were beaten, arrested, or both).29 No doubt the specter of young white women working closely with black men in Mississippi would

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have likely triggered a wave of violence and intimidation. The consequences of such interracial cooperation, of course, would have clearly imperiled black men. Simkins takes it as a given that white women were more involved and outspoken than white men. That activism, located historically in such national organizations as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), Church Women United (CWU), and the Fellowship of the Concerned (FOC) had a particular appeal for educated, progressive, typically middle-class, and religiously affiliated white southern women. Lynching in particular and criminal justice in general were racial issues around which such groups could organize.30 At least one scholar, though, is suspicious of what he calls the “differentialreprisal interpretation.” Based largely on his fieldwork in Mississippi, Payne claims that while the explanation of less violence was directed at women “has a certain plausibility,” “no women to whom I spoke ever suggested, even indirectly, that her own involvement could be explained in such terms.” Furthermore, he argues that women were in fact the targets of often violent reprisals and they also opened their families to physical threats and intimidation as well. His explanation for the “overparticipation of women” lies in “either religious belief or preexisting social networks of kinship and friendship.”31 Whatever the motivation, women’s involvement in the civil rights movement was sustained, public, and open. Why, then, their relative “invisibility” when it comes to rhetorical leadership?32 Is it simply the case that, as Payne contends, the men led and the women organized, that women didn’t speak because their roles were circumscribed by a rigid, sexist hierarchy? Perhaps Payne is correct. This would account for their relative lack of rhetorical leadership. The March on Washington speaks rather pointedly to Payne’s claim, but our archival research, and the research of several others, indicates that it needs amending. As Belinda McNair Robnett argues, Payne’s terminology is misleading: surely organizing work is an important form of leadership as well.33 Similarly, Belinda Robnett proposes the role of “bridge leaders,” particularly for black southern women prominent in their local communities.34 Such women would often connect the movement with community members likely to be sympathetic to its message. But in addition to serving as bridges, women would also be asked, in turn, to serve as local leaders who could recruit, raise money, and mobilize protest activities. These activities, of course, need rhetorical leadership—public and persuasive messages strategically calibrated to movement aims. Hamer, XVII

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Devine, and Gray immediately come to mind as bridge leaders who helped lead movements in their communities. We would emphasize, though, that such leadership was largely local, confined to relatively small meetings and small communities; moreover, the media was not likely to be present. Contrary to much popular public memory, the movement was not a series of great speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., interspersed with images from Montgomery, Little Rock, lunch counters, Ole Miss, Birmingham, the March, Freedom Summer, and Selma. As we know from the work of John Dittmer, and the oral histories of many activists, movement work was daily, it was relatively invisible, it did not follow an ordered sequence of progress, most wanted no part of it, it was locally fractious and dangerous, it was often initiated and sustained by women—and it was certainly not glamorous.35 That said, “the tendency in the popular imagination and in much scholarship has been to reduce the movement to stirring speeches—given by men—and dramatic demonstrations—led by men. The everyday maintenance of the movement, women’s work, overwhelmingly, is effectively devalued, sinking beneath the level of our sight.”36 Women’s rhetorical leadership at the national level was radically circumscribed by a sexist society; it was also severely delimited, as several scholars note, by the sexism of the black church.37 And yet we also know that women were very active and visible in local communities, so the question remains: what happened to their speeches? Sadly, the great majority vanished upon utterance; all too many moments of transformative eloquence are simply “irretrievable.”38 In almost all instances, movement meetings were not recorded; perhaps more importantly, most speakers spoke without notes or with a minimal outline. In her excellent biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Kay Mills reveals that her powerful oratory was almost never scripted—not even her famous remarks before the Credential Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.39 As was likely the case with many movement participants with very poor, if any, formal schooling, speechmaking was a largely impromptu activity; it was part of a long oral tradition that was a reaction, in part, to the forced illiteracy of slavery.40 The many hours of the Moses Moon audio archive clearly demonstrate that movement meetings were not well scripted nor were speakers usually working with prepared texts. We would do well to remember that even the speech voted overwhelmingly the “best” of the twentieth century was, to some degree, an impromptu creation.41 So while we agree with Campbell, Beasley, Nero, and Wu that class bias pertaining to the preservation and archiving of women’s voices badly skews the historical XVIII

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“record,” we also just do not have, as yet, many written texts to archive or preserve in the first place.42 Perhaps this will change. We know, for instance, that the Highlander Folk School Audiotape Collection, housed at both the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Tennessee State Library and Archives and inventoried online, features many speeches by white and black female activists. Unfortunately, as we recently discovered, they are essentially inaudible because of age and decomposition. The Guy and Candy Carawan tapes in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina also hold promise. The husband and wife folksinging duo recorded hundreds of hours of civil rights meetings. Presently, though, the collection remains unindexed. We also know from several conversations that movement leader James Lawson has an extensive collection of speeches—all of which he’s pledged to donate to Vanderbilt University. Other speeches are likely archived in unexpected places, the source of “opposition research,” for example, among the papers of arch segregationists scattered across the South. We suspect, too, that the recently opened and massive James O. Eastland collection at Ole Miss contains many “subversive” texts. And surely some of the black-owned and operated newspapers around the country published the texts of important movement speeches. In brief, we are very confident that the rhetorical record will indeed fill out. But what does that record look like to date? After four years’ worth of fairly intensive searching, here’s the sobering scorecard: Ruby Hurley, Southeast regional secretary of the NAACP—no speeches; Septima Clark, Director of the SCLC’s Citizenship Education Project, and for many, the “mother” of the civil rights movement—no speeches; Prathia Hall, SNCC fieldworker-turnedminister who Martin Luther King, Jr., feared following at the dais—no speeches; Amelia Boynton, long-time organizer and voter registration leader in Selma— no speeches; Jo Ann Robinson, WPC leader and organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—no speeches; Gloria Richardson, leader of the movement in Cambridge, Maryland—no speeches; Endesha Ida Mae Holland, SNCC fieldworker from Greenwood—no speeches; Anne Moody, CORE fieldworker in Mississippi—no speeches; Unita Blackwell—SNCC fieldworker and Mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi—no speeches; Autherine Lucy, black student who integrated, very briefly, the University of Alabama in 1956—no speeches; Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, SNCC fieldworker and later Executive Secretary—no speeches; Annelle Ponder, SCLC organizer—no speeches; Virginia Durr— Montgomery activist and mentor to Rosa Parks—no speeches; Mary Hamilton, CORE organizer and first female Southern Regional Director—no speeches; Lucille Black—NAACP organizer—no speeches; Dorothy Williams, Pittsburgh XIX

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NAACP leader—no speeches; Lillian Jackson, NAACP leader in Baltimore— no speeches; Coretta Scott King, SCLC activist and wife of Martin Luther King, Jr.—no speeches; Polly Cowan, NCNW member and co-creator of the “Wednesdays in Mississippi” project—no speeches; Bernice Robinson, citizenship education leader from John’s Island, South Carolina—no speeches; Patricia Stephens Due, CORE organizer and student leader at Florida A&M University—no speeches; Alice Spearman, executive director of the South Carolina Council on Human Relations—no speeches; Frances Pauley, executive director of the Georgia Council on Human Relations—no speeches.43 We could go on. Much longer. The point is that some of the most prominent women in the movement are not represented here. We remain hopeful that our work will act as a spur to others who want to hear from these—and so many other—women. What follows, then, is a collection of thirty-nine full-text speeches, organized chronologically, delivered by the prominent and the obscure, addressed to civil rights issues local and global, and delivered to audiences across the country. Beyond the accident of sex, though, what has guided our selections? First, we wanted to hear from women whose importance to the movement is well known—women such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Dorothy Height. But we also wanted to balance the well known with the more obscure—women such as Barbara Posey, Jane Schutt, Frances Williams, Marion King, Priscilla Stephens, Johnnie Carr, and Marie Foster. Second, we have selected those texts that we think make important thematic points about the civil rights movement—whether it is a critique of movement sexism, a narrative of personal involvement, or the challenges of local white and black intransigence. Perhaps more than anything else, many speeches highlight the profound personal sacrifices each woman made in taking a public stand for civil rights—whether it was the murder of a son, the execution of a husband, or a life lived on the margins of “respectable” society. Third, we have included only those speeches for which we have a full or nearly full transcript. We did not want to reduce a complex rhetorical act to a series of catchy soundbites, nor truncate a story to heighten a dramatic effect. Finally, we have decided not to feature more than one speech by any given speaker. As much as we may have initially wanted to feature additional speeches by Fannie Lou Hamer, Frances Williams, and Lillian Smith, scarcity does not permit such rhetorical luxuries. We introduce each speech with a bio-critical headnote that details the speaker and the speaking situation and provides a brief overview of the speech. We hope our readers derive as much pleasure from these treasures as we have. As a mosaic they tell a most remarkable story. It is a uniquely American XX

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story. And it is a story whose many authors we are just now beginning to acknowledge and appreciate. DWH DED

Notes 1. Her account of the March and the events leading up to it appear in Dorothy I. Height, “ ‘We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to be Heard’: Black Women and the 1963 March on Washington,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, eds., Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press), 83–91. 2. Our transcription comes from an audiotape of the event in the Moses Moon Audio Archive, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. In her otherwise exemplary book, Lynne Olson wrongly claims that “Daisy Bates, too, would make no speech”; see Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001), 13. 3. We are indebted to Janice D. Hamlet for finding this archive and letting others know of its whereabouts and contents; see her essay, “Fannie Lou Hamer: The Unquenchable Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 26 (1996): 560–76. 4. In adopting the twelve-year period between 1954 and 1965, we are not unaware of the historiographical consequences of our decision. Of course we realize that a great deal of important civil rights activity happened well before and well after these dates. By periodizing the movement, we are of course invoking the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 and passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. 5. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990). 6. See, for example, Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Plume, 1993); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: Wiley, 1998); Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000); Anne C. Loveland, Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Catherine Fosl, XXI

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Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 7. Edith Holbrook Riehm, “Dorothy Tilly and the Fellowship of the Concerned,” in Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era, ed., Gail S. Murray (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), 23–48; Rodger Streitmatter, “Charlotta A. Bass: Radical Precursor of the Black Power Movement,” in Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists Who Changed History (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 95–106; Anita K. Foeman, “Gloria Richardson: Breaking the Mold,” Journal of Black Studies 26 (1996): 604–15; Peter B. Levy, “Gloria Richardson and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, eds., Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 191–225; Paul L. Edenfield, “American Heartbreak: The Life of Pauli Murray,” Legal Studies Forum 27 (2003): 733–78; James Collins, “Taking the Lead: Dorothy Williams, NAACP Youth Councils, and Civil Rights Protests in Pittsburgh, 1961–1964,” Journal of African American History 88 (2003): 126–37; Darlene O’Dell, Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Steven R. Carter, “Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry’s Life in Action,” MELUS 7 (1980): 39–53; LaVerne Gyant and Deborah F. Atwater, “Septima Clark’s Rhetorical and Ethnic Legacy: Her Message of Citizenship in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 26 (1996): 577–92. 8. A partial listing of autobiographies includes Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Laurel, 1968); Pauli Murray, Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Constance Baker Motley, Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998); Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 1987); Patricia Stephens Due and Tananarive Due, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (New York: One World, 2003); Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949); Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2005); Mamie Till-Mobley with Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (New York: One World, 2003); Amelia Boynton Robinson, Bridge Across Jordan (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991); Myrlie Evers-Williams, Watch Me Fly (Boston: Little Brown, 1999); Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York: Knopf, 1947); Johnnie Rebecca Carr with Randall Williams, Johnnie: The Life of Johnny Rebecca XXII

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Carr (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1996); and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 9. Patricia Scileppi Kennedy and Gloria Hartmann O’Shields, eds., We Shall Be Heard: Women Speakers in America (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1983). 10. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, eds., Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s) (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). 11. See, for example, Andrea L. Lunsford, ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, eds., Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997); and, Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997). 12. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed., Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1925–1993: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994). Campbell does include essays on several women active in civil rights, but whose work occurs before or after the movement years. 13. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998). 14. Robbie Jean Walker, The Rhetoric of Struggle: Public Address by African American Women (Brooklyn, NY: Garland, 1992). Only six of the featured speeches were delivered between 1954 and 1965. 15. Richard W. Leeman, ed., African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996). One of the field’s first single-authored texts on black rhetoric is Arthur L. Smith’s The Rhetoric of Black Revolution (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1969). That same year Robert L. Scott and Wayne Brockriede published The Rhetoric of Black Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). We would also note W. Stuart Towns’s fine anthology, “We Want Our Freedom”: Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), which features several speeches by women, including Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Daisy Bates. 16. Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” Gender & Society 7 (1993): 178. 17. Manning Marable, “Introduction: A Servant-Leader of the People: Medgar Wiley Evers (1925–1963),” in The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches, eds., Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable (New York: Basic, 2005), xviii. XXIII

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18. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 276. 19. Charles Payne, “Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, 2. 20. Barnett, “Invisible Southern Women Black Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement,” 162–82. 21. Cited in Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 15. Carmichael had a reputation among activists for being something of a lothario, but his statements at a SNCC retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, put him in the gender cross-hairs for decades. Asked to comment on the “position” of women in the organization, Carmichael announced, “the proper position of women in the movement is prone.” In his posthumously published memoirs, though, Carmichael claimed that the quip was meant to be funny, made to a group of SNCC friends relaxing on a pier after a long day of rancorous debate. “Casey” Hayden (Sandra Cason), who was there on the pier in Waveland that night, confirms that in fact Carmichael was just joking. Further, while she admits that “Stokely sounds like a sexist, pure and simple,” he was “quite the opposite.” See Casey Hayden, “Fields of Blue,” in Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press), 366. For Carmichael’s account see, Stokely Carmichael and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003). 22. Quoted in Vicki Crawford, “Beyond the Human Self: Grassroots Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, 25. 23. Interview with Modjeska Simkins, November 15, 1974, Documenting the American South, #4007, interview G-0056-1, p. 13. The transcript is available online at http:// docsouth.unc.edu/ 24. Fannie Lou Hamer oral history, Stanford University Project South Oral History, sponsored by radio station KZSU, Summer 1965, 0491, 1–18. The complete transcripts of this ambitious and very under-utilized project are available through the Microfilming Corporation of America, Glenrock, New Jersey. 25. Quoted in Crawford, “Beyond the Human Self,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 20. 26. Quoted in Vicki Crawford, “African American Women in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” in Sisters in the Struggle, 130. 27. Quoted in Douglas Martin, “Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights Trailblazer, Dies at 84,” New York Times, September 29, 2005, n.p. 28. Interview with Modjeska Simkins, Documenting the American South, 13–14. XXIV

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29. Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 293. For an extended history of the Freedom Vote, see Joseph A. Sinsheimer, “The Freedom Vote of 1963: New Strategies of Racial Protest in Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History 55 (1989): 217–44. 30. See, for example, Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Edith Holbrook Riehm, “Dorothy Tilly and the Fellowship of the Concerned,” in Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege, 23–48; Cherisse R. Jones, “ ‘How Shall I Sing the Lord’s Song?’: United Church Women Confront Racial Issues in South Carolina, 1940s–1960s,” in Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege, 131–52; Constance Curry et al., eds., Deep in Our Hearts, and Andrew M. Manis, “ ‘City Mothers’: Dorothy Tilly, Georgia Methodist Women, and Black Civil Rights,” in Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South, ed., Glenn Feldman (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 116–43. In her essay comparing white and black women’s participation in Mississippi, Irons notes that many white women were recruited from religious networks on college campuses; see Jenny Irons, “The Shaping of Activist Recruitment and Participation: A Study of Women in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement,” Gender & Society 12 (1998): 692–709. 31. Payne argues this case both in his book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 267–71 and his essay, “Men Led, But Women Organized,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, 1–11. 32. Lee Sartain asserts that women were rendered largely “invisible” because of a host of facts; see, Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 1–11. 33. Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” 176. 34. Belinda Robnett, “African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954– 1965: Gender, Leadership, and Micromobilization,” American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996): 1661–93. 35. Dittmer’s emphasis on the local has engendered a large and growing literature on the civil rights movement; see his award-winning Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 36. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 276. 37. See, for example, Anne Standley, “The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, 183–202; Barnett, “Invisible Southern Women Black Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement,” 162–82; Robnett, “African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965,” 1661–93; Height, “ ‘We Wanted the Voice of a Woman XXV

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to be Heard,’ ” in Sisters in the Struggle, 83–91; and Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 378–81. One of the most outspoken women on the issue of movement sexism was Septima Clark, who was a member of the SCLC’s executive board. In an oral history she recalls, “I can remember Reverend Abernathy asking many times, why was Septima Clark on the Executive Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? And Dr. King would always say, ‘She was the one who proposed this citizenship education which is bringing to us not only money but a lot of people who will register and vote.’ And he asked that many times. It was hard for him to see a woman on that executive body”; see Interview with Septima Poinsette Clark, July 30, 1976, Documenting the American South, p. 11. But even Dr. King didn’t escape her public criticism: “I think that there is something among the Kings that makes them feel that they are kings, and so you don’t have a right to speak. You can work behind the scenes all you want. That’s all right. But you don’t come forth and try to lead. That’s not the kind of thing they want.” Quoted in LaVerne Gyant and Deborah F. Atwater, “Septima Clark’s Rhetorical and Ethnic Legacy: Her Message of Citizenship in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 26 (1996): 588. The original quote appears in Septima Poinsette Clark, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, ed., Cynthia Stokes Brown (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees, 1986), 77, 78. 38. Carol Mattingly, “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 100. While Mattingly mourns the loss of nineteenthand early twentieth-century speech texts authored by women, her remarks are lamentably germane to the women of the civil rights movement. 39. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 44. 40. For an elaboration of this theme, see Arthur L. Smith, “Socio-Historical Perspectives of Black Oratory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 264–69. 41. The “I Have a Dream” sequence of King’s March on Washington speech was improvised; see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 882. Septima Clark notes that most men on John’s Island had become “adept at memorizing” in order to compensate for their illiteracy; see Septima Poinsette Clark with LeGette Blythe, Echo in My Soul (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 51. 42. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 46; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “Gender and Public Address,” in The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication, eds., Bonnie J. Dow and Julia T. Wood (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 188; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (2005): 17, see endnote 28; Vanessa B. Beasley, “Gender in Political Communication Research,” in The SAGE Handbook of Gender and XXVI

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Communication, 210; Nero, “ ‘Oh, What I Think I Must Tell This World!’ ”: Oratory and Public Address of African American Women,” in Black Women in America, ed., Kim Marie Vaz (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995), 261–75; Hui Wu, “Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 91. 43. Our record of futility is limited to the years, 1954–1965.

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Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965

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Mary McLeod Bethune June 11, 1954, Detroit, Michigan

Mary McLeod Bethune, one of the most important educators and political leaders of her time, was born during Reconstruction on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina; she was the fifteenth of seventeen children, born of two former slaves, Samuel and Patsy McIntosh McLeod. Bethune’s childhood consisted of schooling and working in her family’s cotton fields. Her mother instilled early in her daughter’s life a belief that God did not discriminate based on color. She attended Mayesville Presbyterian Mission School, the town’s one-room schoolhouse, and later attended Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. Bethune graduated in 1894 and received a scholarship to Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (later Moody Bible Institute) in Chicago. In 1898 she married Albertus Bethune; they had one child, Albert McLeod Bethune, born the following year. Bethune’s education career began in 1896 at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. Later she taught at schools in Sumter, South Carolina, and Palatka, Florida. In 1904, Bethune founded a school in Daytona, Florida, for African American girls; she and her students baked pies to gain the financial resources for the school, which was called Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. She also solicited money for the school by having her students sing Negro spirituals to white, northern tourists in their hotels. The school thrived and eventually combined with another nearby school to form Bethune-Cookman College (now University). Bethune served as president until 1942. While education was her lifelong vocation, Bethune was also very active politically. She was president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women and vice president of the NAACP, and worked with the Association of American Colleges, the National Urban League, and the League of Women. Bethune was appointed to the planning committee under the National Youth Association and was a nationally renowned consultant. She was director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration (1936–44), the national commander of the Women’s Army for National Defense, and she was a consultant to the U.S. secretary of war to help select the first female officer candidates. She was an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt on child welfare, education, and home ownership, and because of her 3

Mary McLeod Bethune

strides in equality, she was claimed as a member of Roosevelt’s “black cabinet.” Bethune also founded in 1935 the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), a group designed to unite disparate black women’s groups from around the nation. To this day, the NCNW remains a powerful nonprofit organization with a vast outreach. Internationally she consulted on interracial affairs, served at a charter conference of the United Nations, and was awarded the Haitian Medal of Honor and Merit (the country’s highest honor) and the Liberian Commander of the Order of the Star of Africa. Ironically, her original intent was to become an African missionary. A stalwart on nearly every “influential black American” list, Mary McLeod Bethune died on May 18, 1955, from a heart attack at her home in Daytona Beach. She is survived by five grandchildren, seventeen great-grandchildren, and eight great-great grandchildren (her only child, Albert, died in 1989 at the age of ninety). Her papers are housed at Bethune-Cookman University and the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historical Site in Washington, D.C. In this address less than one month after the historic Brown decision, Bethune claims that America has discovered a new freedom with the Supreme Court decision; it’s a freedom that she has been cultivating for fifty years. But with this new freedom and blessing from God come great responsibilities and even greater opportunities. She reminds her listeners that the point of the Brown decision is not merely to go to school with white children; rather it represents “the chance to realize our fullest and best selves in the richest and most inspiring environments under the best guidance that can be made available.” The challenge just now was leadership: who had the courage, the understanding, and the faith to harvest the fruit in a post-Brown world? Bethune closes her speech with a story about an early twentieth-century land dispute between Chileans and Argentinians. Once settled, the countries dedicated a statue of Jesus Christ and placed it on one of the disputed boundary lines to serve as a constant reminder of their mutual peace. Bethune also urges her listeners to “erect Jesus Christ and His great principles of living so that all of the people of our land may see the values of creating the abundant life.”

Full Integration—America’s Newest Challenge

W

hen first I heard of the Supreme Court Decision, I lifted my voice to utter the first inspiration of my heart—and I said,

“Let the people praise Thee, O God! Let ALL the people praise thee.”

4

Mary McLeod Bethune

That pronouncement should have been met with praises to God, not only from those who enjoyed the new freedom but from all of America. For America that moment, under God had a new birth of freedom and our government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. The immortal Lincoln was a prophet whose words have re-echoed down through the years since that memorable occasion of the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. But I do not come to you to dedicate a cemetery. I do not come to keep a rendezvous with death. I come to you so that we together may keep a rendezvous with life. And to say to you that this opportunity to enjoy the rich ripe fruits of democracy is a challenge to all of us. We now have, as Mrs. Roosevelt said to a group of young graduates this year, an opportunity—a responsibility— yes, even a privilege—to make our freedom real. It is significant to me that exactly fifty years after I started my venture in this field of education that this marvelous new door has opened. For fifty years we have been harrowing the soil, cultivating the land, planting the seeds of service and learning. Should be we startled at the fruit we have reaped? Even those of us who have toiled to bring this seed to flower are awe-stricken with the sense of its reality. I want to congratulate you who have set aside a special occasion to think upon this responsibility that you must assume as you stand upon the threshold of your larger future. Now is the acceptable time for us to confirm our common faith in the already existing enterprises for full integration and to use every possible resource in forging ahead to fulfill every immediate opportunity for making it work. We are not here to dream to drift We have hard work to do and loads to lift Shun not the struggle, face it! Tis God’s Gift. Oh, my stalwart Americans—let us be strong in this undertaking remembering always that you are giving not only America a new birth of freedom—but you are giving our world a chance to believe in the brotherhood of man and the possibility that men of varying creeds and nationalities may share this life together in peace and goodwill.

5

Mary McLeod Bethune

During this last year of my life, I have had many relationships that are international and far reaching. In every instance I have thought of the people as interesting, beautiful, charming, wonderful. It has never occurred to me that they were strikingly different from myself. I have always found them sharing common experiences which have made our meeting fruitful and memorable. On the local and national scenes this same fact is true. God has enriched me with the power to enjoy people, without labeling them for their color or their national backgrounds. I love people. Inherent in the fundamental principles which were established by our forefathers before they put into words the constitution, there was the essence of democratic living which gave to each man the worthiness of his person and the dignity of his personality. One of the challenges of our new task is that every one may enjoy self-realization. We belittle our opportunity when we say, “Now is our chance to go to school with white people.” That is not the point at all. We want the chance to realize our fullest and best selves in the richest and most inspiring environments under the best guidance that can be made available. Such goodness is not available to all the people when the funds available for such abundance must be allotted for the same thing in fractional proportions. All of our people are free or none are free. In his last address, which he did not live to speak, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote words which were his political testament. He said: We are faced with the pre-eminent fact that if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationship—the ability of people of all kinds to live together and work together in the same world, at peace. The World has looked to America for the leadership in that issue of peace through better human relations. The door to the fulfillment of Roosevelt’s utterance has just been opened. The challenge is that we must work zealously to discover the ways to put to work our knowledge of the science of human relationships. We know the facts. Now we must practice what we know or we are doomed as a civilization. The fact that our leaders were able to make this pronouncement portrays our readiness to act upon it. The fruit is ripe to harvest. I pray you then, friends, who among you is prepared to lead up in the harvesting. The challenge of the hour is leadership. Let us discover those who have the abilities and the skills; whose hearts are filled with the understanding and the faith; whose courage is unswerving; whose service motives are worthy of emulation. Let us discover them, I say, and put all that we have in confidence and cooperation and goodwill behind them so that they may be able to lead us 6

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to the fullest realization of our goals. All of the challenges to full integration depend upon the kind of education and ground work we do from this point on. We are often reminded by leaders outside the field of education, that the educative process is slow. H. G. Wells warned our world that if our processes of training did not change, our civilization was already doomed. The works of science and technology have far surpassed our understanding. Human beings change slowly. Some of us still recite the age-old adage: Be not the first by whom the new is tried Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. But in the words of a newer philosophy, Time makes ancient good uncouth. We must be upward and doing if we would keep abreast with truth. So it is today my earnest plea that we work cooperatively and with great precision toward the dissemination of the truths that will undergird the realization of a full integration. What are the facts? Who can best give them to the people? When and where are the best places? What organized groups already have the platforms and the facilities that we need? It all means that we lay aside our own bigotries and littleness and with an open mind prepare the people to accept the new responsibilities. Let us pray for the illumination of our minds and our hearts and then let us set to work with a master will to achieve. The tools are in our hands. All the people love art, literature, music, for in them is full release and harmony. They are the therapies for wounded minds and broken spirits. The world is hungry for the love which can be brought to the people through the avenues of life. They turn away anger, subside fears, and kill evils. You must work too to discover the common needs which may become the common tasks of many people. You know what they are, but you have not taken time to put the variety of peoples at work together upon them. These now are your responsibilities. More than ever now we need to know what the gifts and powers of the people are so that we may use them for the common good. May I close with that thrilling story of the Christ of the Andes: Far, far away to the south of our United States, on the other side of the equator at the farthest end of South America, are the countries of Chile and Argentina. While we are picking roses and shooting firecrackers on the Fourth of July, they are shivering in winter; and they have their roses and warm weather at Christmas. Now the Argentine Republic is on the Atlantic Ocean side of 7

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South America and Chile on the Pacific side and the Andes mountains rise between them. They are very, very high mountains—so high that the snow never melts on their tops, but stays there both summer and winter—as on our Rocky Mountains in the United States. Really they are the southern end of our Rocky Mountains. Since the mountains are so high, so snowy and rocky and very steep, you can see how hard it would be for a surveyor to scramble up on top and that is how it happened that no one could really discover where the boundary line between the two countries really ought to be. So they just took it for granted. So it happened that the rulers of the two countries at one time began to squabble about how much belonged to one or the other. Each one went to work building big warships and lots of guns and fortresses and gathering together armies of soldiers; and the poor people of the land who did not care at all about where the boundary was had to pay for it all and see their families suffer and fight and die. Finally when things were at their worst, the women and the clergymen of the country made up their minds to try to put a stop to it. The good Bishop of Argentina went around and pleaded for peace and tried to show the people the foolishness of war. He told them that even after the fighting would be over, they would not then know to whom the land and the waterways belonged. He pleaded with the people to accept Christ and peace. Bishop Jara of Chile did the same thing among his people. Finally they agreed to let the King of England be their judge. Finally they agreed and made treaties of peace. When the question arose as to what they should do with their forts, warships, guns, and other implements of war, they began to realize what a waste had been allowed because of their ignorance. In the meantime, a beautiful statue of Christ had been made by a young sculptor of Argentina from bronze cannons which had been taken at the time Argentina was fighting against Spain for her independence. The cannon was melted into a great figure of Christ more than twenty-five feet high with one hand stretched out to bless the two peaceful countries and the other holding a cross. One hundred thousand dollars were raised, mostly by the women of both countries to pay for this wonderful statue. On the 25th day of May in 1903, the day the treaty of peace was signed, the Presidents of Chile and Argentina were called to see this great statue. One of the brave women asked that this statue be placed on the highest accessible pinnacle of the Andes on one of the disputed boundary lines. This was granted and with great effort the huge statue was carried to this special place and erected. There was great joy among the people. Hundreds toiled up the steep road the night before the great unveiling and prayed their prayers and sung their hymns of thanksgiving. Chileans and Argentineans met and watched in breathless silence as the 8

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cover was taken off and the lovely face of Christ looked upon them—and He seemed to speak to them . . . “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God . . .” In their hearts hundreds of them exclaimed: “Peace! Good will to men.” The statue still stands there and on the granite at the base are these words: “Sooner shall these mountains crumble to dust than Argentines and Chileans break the peace which at the feet of Christ the Redeemer they have sworn to maintain.” My friends, let us erect Jesus Christ and His great principles of living so that all of the people of our land may see the values of creating the abundant life—not just for themselves, but for others.

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Sarah Patton Boyle November 7, 1954, NAACP, Gainesville, Virginia

Sarah Patton “Pattie” Boyle was an outspoken advocate for desegregation in her native South. Born on May 9, 1906, on a plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia, Boyle was the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman who directed the American Church Institute of the Protestant Episcopal Church and the granddaughter of Confederate veterans who served alongside famous historical figures such as Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and J. E. B. Stuart. Boyle was educated at home during her youth; later, during her teen years, she matriculated at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. She married a drama professor from the University of Virginia, E. Roger Boyle, in 1932, and the couple had two sons, Roger and Patton. Her career included writing for magazines, community organizing, and being a faculty wife. Growing up under what Boyle calls the “Southern Code,” she experienced extreme dissonance by the mandate placed on her to have only formal relations with blacks. Though she was able to interact with blacks on an informal basis before her twelfth birthday, this “adult” mandate ignited a spark that would move her towards fighting fervently for the equal rights of all citizens regardless of race. Boyle recounts several incidents in her autobiography wherein she learned to be condescending to blacks simply by observing others. She felt varying levels of pride and shame while she was praised by her parents for taking her designated place in society, yet she knew that these actions contradicted her personal morals, values, and beliefs. Though Boyle was a product of her segregated environment for nearly twenty years, she began to question her prejudices after her father delivered a speech at Howard University and she realized that she had befriended a black woman who could pass as white. This moment prompted Boyle to stand against the prejudices she had so insidiously inherited—and later enforced. She was also moved to act based on the then controversial admission of black lawyer Gregory Swanson to the University of Virginia law school in 1950. As a result of her involvement with Swanson, Boyle befriended T. J. Sellers, who edited Charlottesville’s black newspaper, The Tribune. Perhaps more than anyone else, Sellers educated her on black history and culture in the South. Boyle also learned from other civil rights advocates 10

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such as Dorothy Tilly, Lillian Smith, and Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin. While her civil rights activism often took the form of articles and speeches, she was arrested in June 1964 for protesting against segregation in St. Augustine, Florida. In addition to her widely circulated autobiography, The Desegregated Heart, which was published in 1962, she authored several more books before her death in 1994 due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Her papers are housed at the University of Virginia. Boyle’s address to an NAACP gathering in Virginia, just five months after the Brown decision, is notable for the optimism of its two broad claims: opposition to integration in the South is less than it seems; and prejudiced southerners can be changed. The former claim is argued largely from within the University of Virginia community; Gregory Swanson had been admitted to the university’s law school without any untoward “incidents.” The assumptions implicit in Boyle’s case study are quite revealing. First, many faculty no doubt did not hail from the South. Second, Boyle does not make the case for school integration in a post-Brown world at the level of primary and secondary schools. In fact, the NAACP’s larger legal strategy in desegregating schools began at the graduate school level for important reasons: there were no “black” graduate schools in most states (thus making moot the argument of “separate but equal”); and, older, often married, black students posed less of a “threat” to the white South’s miscegenation fears. While Boyle avoids such legal strategy, she is conspicuously silent on the question of school integration at the lower levels—and in the Deep South. As for changing prejudiced hearts and minds, Boyle’s optimism is again tempered by a very biased sample: among educated white elites, interaction with blacks might certainly change minds. Unfortunately, as the country would soon experience, Boyle’s ideal audience of “normally flexible persons” did not include many Congressmen, journalists, clergy, police, business leaders, and educators. She closes by encouraging her predominantly black audience to be “goodwill ambassadors” of their race; embodied proximity between black and white community activists would go a long way in mitigating the increasingly rancorous desegregation debate.

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here’re two points which I wish to make today. I doubt if many of you will concede either now. I hope you’ll be more inclined to when I’m through. The first is that opposition to integration is far less than it seems. And the second is that most prejudiced southerners can be changed. I’m a faculty wife at the University of Virginia and, I think, a pretty typical southerner. I was there when Gregory Swanson, our first colored student, was admitted by order of the Supreme Court, and I think that what I discovered 11

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about my own attitudes and those of other members of my community may help you to understand our present integration problem. When news of Mr. Swanson’s suit hit the headlines, I felt a curious mixture of joy and fear. It seemed right that he should come there—a rightness long overdue. But I was afraid others would not receive him well. “There’s going to be a lot of trouble!” I thought. Later I learned that my reactions were characteristically southern. The South-wide conviction that everybody else is prejudiced is like a sodden blanket over each individual’s impulses toward democracy. Certainly no reassurance came from the southern press, just as none comes now. Newspaper comment on the “impending situation at the University,” as they called it, gave no hint that any except colored Virginians might rejoice in the justice of it if Swanson won. Unchallenged by public statement, written or spoken, there rose before the mind’s eye a picture of a lone American citizen struggling for inalienable rights against unanimous opposition from the institution which Thomas Jefferson founded. I felt a twisting pain and a rising pressure to do something about it. But what? There seemed nothing I could do. “How do you feel about having a Negro here?” I inquired privately of a series of friends. The answers ran like this: “I think it’s about time at Mr. Jefferson’s University!” “I hope he wins, but I reckon most of us will feel pretty bad.” “Well, personally, I think that segregated education is a handicap to both races, but I’d probably be run out of town if I went around saying that.” Astonished and intrigued, I began to canvas for private opinions in real earnest. My findings? That roughly 90 percent of the women in the University community favored the admission of Negroes to our graduate schools, but each believed herself to be a lonely democratic star in a black void of prejudice. I now applied for enlightenment of our sociology department. I learned that in 1948, a poll of faculties of all the southern state universities had been made. It inquired whether the professors favored integration in southern graduate schools. Sixty-nine percent of the returned ballots, even including those from Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, declared themselves in favor of it. The University of Virginia faculty and voted 79 percent in favor of integration. I was also informed that only a few weeks before Swanson opened suit, C. Lee Parker, a sociology student, had polled the University’s graduate schools, asking students if they would object to Negroes in their classes. Less than 5 percent objected strongly. Seventy-three percent checked “No objection.” 12

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Yet in the fight for Swanson’s admission not one voice implied that he might be welcome. Why? Apparently because we southerners believe that any defense of integration will only “stir up trouble.” It is an almost universal southern practice to speak loud and fast if you favor segregation, but to keep as silent as an orchid if you favor integration. This of course is because the prejudiced imagine that they are in the huge majority, while the good-willed imagine that they are in the helplessly tiny minority. Actually, in many communities the percentages run the opposite way. Mr. Swanson won his case, becoming the first Negro to enroll in the University since its founding 125 years before. In the next few weeks the good-willed majority, which included most of the University’s professors and administrators, sweated out the suspense. I sweated right along with them. Even though I knew that the majority of students and professors were pleased to have Swanson, I couldn’t escape my old indoctrinated fear that “trouble” would inevitable result from integration. Would Swanson invite incidents by attempting to eat with the other students at the Commons, the University community wondered. Would he try to sit in the student section at the first football game? (But surely he’d have sense enough not to do that!) If he did, someone would be certain to start “trouble”! Would he be foolish enough to do this, that, and the other thing? Mr. Swanson did everything which we hoped he wouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt—and he suffered during his entire stay no unpleasantness related to his race. In addition to the conviction that “everybody else is prejudiced” and its accompanying fears, there’s something else which contributes to feelings of defeatism concerning early integration in the South. This is the conviction that prejudiced southerners can’t be changed and that we must wait for the old guard to die off. The facts do not support this theory. According to it the 21 percent of our faculty which opposed integrated graduate schools in 1948 would still be opposing them. Yet four years later when it was polled only  percent now objected. A local physician, himself a southerner “converted,” is fond of recounting the dramatic about-face of one of his elderly patients. She was ill and in need of a public health nurse. “I can get you a corking good one,” he told her, “but she’s colored and I won’t send her to you unless you agree to address her as ‘Mrs.’ She’s a cultured lady and I’ll not have her insulted.” 13

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“I’d rather die,” his patient said. Two days later she phoned: “I’ll call that Negro ‘Mrs.’ if you’ll send her.” Her voice was weak. He complied and upon his next visit asked: “How did you like your nurse?” “You mean Mrs. Bunn?” his patient asked brightly. “Why she’s one of the loveliest people I’ve ever known. I’d like to have her for a friend.” Before my position on the integration front become known, an acquaintance, also elderly, approached me with a haggard face. “I’ve just heard something horrible,” she confined. “Our minister said that soon we’ll probably have Negroes in our own church!” Her pain was so genuine that I refrained from pointing out that a church is a good place to practice Christianity. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you fear,” I said reassuringly. “Modern Negroes don’t fit our old fashioned ideas of them.” A few months later she approached me at a tea. “I’ve been meaning to phone you that you are so right about the Negroes. I worked between two young colored women at the Red Cross last month, and I want to tell you that they were two cultivated women! I wouldn’t mind meeting Negroes like that anywhere.” Incredible as it may seem, it often takes no more than a well chosen statement of fact to start a southerner thinking along the right lines. Only a few weeks ago an anonymous woman phoned me to upbraid me for attending NAACP meetings. “It’s a disgrace to the University,” she informed me. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, “but you see I believe the NAACP is right.” “Why?” she demanded. “Partly because in the South any white man, no matter how worthless, dirty, shiftless, and criminally inclined he may be, has privileges and opportunities which no Negro can have, regardless of how fine his mind, character, and conduct are. I don’t think that’s fair, do you?” There was a long pause, then the reply: “No, I don’t. I’m going to think about that. Goodbye—and thank you.” I can’t very well speak of individual about-facing without the blushing confession that Gregory Swanson was the very first Negro whom I had ever addressed as “Mr.” Not only individuals but also large groups of southerners often do a dramatic switch. My favorite example occurred in Tennessee when the Board 14

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of the University of the South considered admitting colored theological students. This is a private school, not subject to federal rulings, and so the matter was entirely in the hands of the board. Meeting June 1952, they voted, after a heated debate, forty-five to twelve against integration. They agreed, however, to spend the coming year studying the pros and cons and to introduce the issue again the following summer. What “pros” they unearthed is a matter of conjecture, but it’s a matter of history that they met as agreed June 1953 and voted seventy-eight to six in favor of integration. Actually, our common sense should tell us that the attitude of normal southerners toward Negroes must be easy to change, for their prejudice has its roots simply in an implanted “idea.” They have nothing against our minority, having never suffered any ill at its hands. Their prejudice is based simply on their false idea that colored citizens are backward and uncultivated, many years of segregation having prevented them from revising their opinions. Obviously then, among normally flexible persons, a few object lessons will inevitably result in the changing of that idea. It’s the duty of citizens of our minority to grasp every opportunity to meet and talk with members of our majority, so that these object lessons may abound. Regard yourselves as good will ambassadors to the majority group. Never let slip a chance to participate in public service activities, such as the Red Cross and the Community Chest. Let yourselves be seen at political rallies and at all civic and religious gatherings where the public is invited. Shared activities which permit fellowship on the basis of mutual interest are, I think, the answer to our integration problems. Yes, I know it takes courage to go where you think you may not be welcome. But since when were NAACP members wanting in courage? And the simple truth is that you’ll be far more welcome than you think, for prejudiced persons are fewer than they seem, and many who are prejudiced now easily can be changed. O Lord, Make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith O Divine Master,

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Grant that not so much seek to be consoled As to console; To be understood As to understand; To be loved As to love. Amen.

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Mamie Till Bradley October 29, 1955, Bethel AME Church, Baltimore, Maryland

Mamie Elizabeth Carthan was born near Webb, Mississippi, in Tallahatchie County on November 23, 1921. At two, her family moved to Argo, a small town just outside of Chicago. At the age of thirty-three, she would return to Tallahatchie County for the trial of the men who murdered her only child. Carthan married Louis Till on October 14, 1940. On July 25, 1941, she gave birth to a son, Emmett Louis Till. Her husband died during World War II, but not from war wounds. He was executed on July 2, 1945, upon conviction of raping two Italian women and murdering another. She married “Pink” Bradley in 1951; the two were later divorced. In 1957, she married for a third and final time, to Gene Mobley, who died in 2000. Mamie Till became a heroine of the civil rights movement for her brave and bold actions in the summer and fall of 1955. Following the brutal slaying of her child, she not only had his body shipped back to Chicago, but she opened the casket, allowing any and all to see what “Mississippi has done to my son.” Photographs of the hideously deformed corpse were soon published in such prominent magazines and newspapers as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, Jet Magazine, and the NAACP’s Crisis. No mainstream white newspaper or magazine published the gruesome photographs. Mamie Till also traveled to Sumner, Mississippi, site of the trial, to testify on her son’s behalf. Immediately after the trial, and in cooperation with the NAACP, she spoke to packed venues across the country about her child’s kidnap and murder. In November 1955, she split with the NAACP over misunderstandings regarding compensation for a scheduled west coast speaking tour. Her uncle Mose Wright went in her place. In 1956, Mamie Till entered Chicago Teacher’s College, graduating cum laude in 1960. Until her retirement in 1983, she taught in the Chicago public school system. She also founded the Emmett Till Players, a traveling group of young students who would recite from memory Dr. King’s rhetorical masterpieces. She completed her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, with Christopher Benson before her death on January 6, 2003. She was eighty-one. She also cooperated with documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp in his award-winning 17

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The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till—a project that helped convince the U.S. Justice Department to reopen the case in 2004. Most recently, a grand jury, convened in Mississippi, issued no new indictments for Till’s kidnap and murder. On October 29, 1955, less than five weeks after the murder trial ended in a not guilty verdict for J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, Mamie Till addressed a standingroom-only crowd at a Baltimore NAACP rally held at Bethel AME Church. The climax of the address occurs as she graphically recounts identifying her son’s body in a Chicago morgue. Further details of the gruesome identification appear in her memoir. Mamie Till also mentions Willie Reed’s dramatic eyewitness testimony— only to emphasize Reed’s ineffectual presence in court caused by Mississippi’s system of educational apartheid. Reed’s testimony, largely discounted at the time, has been recently confirmed after extensive investigation by the FBI. Throughout the address, the presence of God is invoked to provide a guiding telos to the murder and trial; that is, she understands her burden as a gift from God to aid in the cause of civil rights. Mamie Till often “thanked God that He felt that I was worthy to have a son that was worthy to die for such a worthy cause.” And, more secularly, “I have invested a son in freedom and I’m determined that his death isn’t in vain.” At the close of her address, Till calls on her listeners to make a sacrifice—of automobiles and fine clothes—for the NAACP and its mission. With such a sacrifice, “we can make this world one we’ll be proud of.”

I Want You to Know What They Did to My Boy

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uring the last two months, I have found it very necessary to talk to God quite a few times. When I first found out that Emmett was kidnapped, I was just so upset and so shocked I didn’t know what to do. So, having been dependent on my mother most of my life, the first thing that I did was to call her. I thought that when I got to mother’s house, she could take care of everything. She could handle it. This would be another burden that I could dump on her. When I got to mother’s house, she had started making numerous telephone calls and she had found out nothing. We stood there. We sat there. We waited for two or three days trying to find out what had happened to Emmett. During these two or three days, I looked at my mother and saw that she was failing. I was sitting at the telephone one night. I saw her walk through the dining room toward the front room. She weakened as she got there, and fell to the floor. I noticed as she passed me, I was getting stronger as she was getting weaker. It kind of startled me. 18

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When she fell, I jumped up to run in there and put my hand on her and all of a sudden it seemed that something told me that if you touch her, you’ll take her strength so fast, it’ll kill her. So I stood there. I asked the others to let her alone. She’ll be all right, I said and turned around and took my seat at the telephone. I had been answering the phone night and day, taking messages and trying to send messages. And that’s when I realized, for the first time in my life, I was going to have to stand up on my feet and be a woman. A real one. And I started praying to God to give me strength. Because I just thought that I could never have anything that mama couldn’t handle or daddy couldn’t take care of. As long as I had them, there was no point to exert myself too much. But with mother there and with father there, there was still something that I had to do that nobody else could do. I sat at the phone. I sent the messages out. I tried to get through to Mississippi. Ladies and gentlemen, the hardest thing in the world that I have ever tried to do is get a call into Mississippi and get information out. We remark about the Iron Curtain in Russia, but there’s a cotton curtain in Mississippi that must have a steel lining. When you make a telephone call, I don’t know who signals whom, but the person that you want to talk to doesn’t want to talk if the call is coming from Chicago. The people that you always knew as being great, wonderful leaders, suddenly had nothing whatsoever to say. We called the home of the man on whose plantation my uncle has worked for forty years. The man said he was too old to hear. He didn’t have a pencil. He didn’t know where the paper was. He was just in a helpless condition. He couldn’t even call anybody to the phone who could take the message. In fact there was nobody there. I thought what a shame for all of those people to go out and leave that helpless old man at that telephone. But just about the time that the crops were gathered in and they start weighing up to find what they are going to pay their sharecroppers, this old man gets very active. He loses all that helplessness. He’s able to answer telephones. He’s able to make calls. He’s able to go over and tell a poor sharecropper that he only cleared ten dollars this year, that his bills ran rather high. There is no accounting system down around these farms. They just have to take what the white man says. Now before I get too far, I want to stop and point out and to make clear that our job here tonight is not to stir up a whole lot of racism. We’re not trying to start a race riot. Instead we’re only trying to pinpoint and to focus on the conditions that are existing in this country, the conditions that make this no true democracy. Standing up here tonight and talking to you white people and to you colored people, I want to say we’re not trying to start trouble, we’re 19

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trying to end trouble. The trouble is down there where a man can’t look at a man and judge him for himself but must judge him by his color. Many of us have been in homes where the mother and the father battle each other constantly. A neighbor doesn’t have to walk in there and break up that home, it breaks up itself. Well, that’s just what’s going to happen here in these United States if the white man and the black man fight one another day in and day out. Foreign powers won’t have to come over here to destroy us. We’ll just stand here and disintegrate. I’m kind of proud of being a part of a great nation. I wouldn’t want to think that my nation was getting behind. Sure we have progressed so far in the past. I think we can do better now because we have more to work with. The average person now is intelligent. We get a chance to go to school to learn how to love our neighbors and love one another, to respect a man for what he is worth and represents. Why should we just let a few states upset all of that? Why should we let them put us back in the dark ages? I don’t want to go back there. I received letters from some well-wishers. They weren’t intentional well-wishers, however: they were hate letters. They were letters telling me that you’ve had a show already, why don’t you sign off. They wrote me: I’m glad that it was your n—— boy that was killed; that’ll show some more smart kids in Chicago that they can’t come down in Mississippi and get away with what they get away with in Chicago. I would like to tell those people tonight, that if it hadn’t been for those letters, I probably wouldn’t be standing here. I want them to know that every one of those letters gave me a new determination to stand up and fight that much harder. I do realize that those people are going to have to be taught. As long as they exist, and as long as their minds stay dirty, we’re going to have a little harder time progressing and advancing. I also know that if I’m upsetting just one of them, then I feel that I’m doing a pretty good job. We sat at our telephone trying to get through to Mississippi and get these different messages in and out. Finally we had to resort to telegrams. I wired my uncle some money and told him to do the best he could. I would wait for a reply, but the answer that I asked for never did come back and we went through hours and hours and hours of such torture. And finally on Wednesday, with the presses working and everybody working, the news finally came through. Emmett Till’s body had been found in Mississippi. The news came through a girl friend of mine. She knew that she should have called earlier, but just didn’t feel that she should break the news. So when she called she was reluctant to talk. She didn’t want to talk to me at all. But I insisted that she give me the message. Whatever it was, I could 20

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take it. She did, and I wrote down what she told me. As I sat there, I suddenly divided into two different people. One was handling the telephone. The other was standing off telling the others what to do, or helping me to keep myself under control. And this second person told me you don’t have time to cry now—you might not have time to cry tomorrow. You can’t cry at anytime. Don’t worry about that because there’s something you’ve got to do. There are a whole lot of people out there that are going to do the crying for you. If I should even cry the rest of my life there wouldn’t be enough tears for Emmett Till. For Emmett Till was just an ordinary boy like your ordinary boys and girls you have here. He had made his mark in a way because his heart was generous and the people in the neighborhood liked him. He was a well-mannered child. He wasn’t on a higher level than anybody else. He was just Mr. John Doe. Emmett Louis Till, an American. He didn’t realize that because he was colored, he was at a disadvantage. He had been taught that you are what you are taught to be and what you make yourself because that’s the way I had trained him. He never guessed that a “yes” or a “no” answer would cost him his life. When I found out that Emmett had been discovered, we got ourselves together, held ourselves in check a little while, and started making these other calls back to Mississippi. To our surprise, we found that it wasn’t going to be an easy job to get his body shipped back here. The sheriff at Money had ordered my uncle Mose to immediately bury that body. He had also called a colored undertaker who rushed to the scene with a box, a box covered with some gray flannel material. They picked up that body from the river bank and threw it in that box. They herded it away to the cemetery. He started making telephone calls down to Money. They had promised that they would let my uncle know if they happened to find Bo, or if any word came through about him. But somehow they forgot to do that. He had the presence of mind to get a sheriff and go down there. By the time he got there, the funeral had been preached and two men were digging a grave to bury my son’s body. He told them they would have to stop. “I have to take that body up north.” The sheriff was rather surprised or maybe he wasn’t. I don’t know what the situation was at that time. But my uncle had the presence of mind to call a white undertaker and ask him if he would handle that body, embalm it, and fix it for shipment. The colored undertaker told my uncle, “I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t dare let that body stay in my establishment over night.” He said if he did, “I wouldn’t have any place in the morning and perhaps I wouldn’t be alive by morning.” This colored man took the body to the white undertaker. The white 21

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undertaker looked at him and shook his head and said, “I’ll do the best I can with one provision. I’ll handle this body and prepare it for shipment provided you promise me that this seal will never be broken and that nobody will ever review that body.” My uncle didn’t have time to stand up there and argue with anybody about anything. He agreed. And he had every intention of carrying out that promise. When I met that body at the station that fatal Friday morning, I was overcome with grief. To think that I had sent a fine fourteen-year-old boy to Money, Mississippi, to spend an innocent two weeks vacation and at the end of seven days, he came back to me in a pine box. That was enough to make anybody cry. Well, we went on to the undertaker’s parlor. Mr. Rainer picked up the body and escorted us to his establishment. We waited while he opened the casket. He came to me and said, “Now, Mrs. Bradley, I want to talk to you. As a friend of the family, I would advise you not to open that box.” I said, “Mr. Rainer, I’m sorry, that’s all that I will ever be able to do for Bo now is to look at him and pay my last respects.” I said if I die, it doesn’t make any difference. I don’t have too much to live for anyway. So Mr. Rainer looked at me and he shook his head and said, “Well, if that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it’ll have to be.” So with my father on one side, and my friend on the other we made a few steps to that casket. The first thing that greeted us when we walked into the parlor was a terrible odor. I think I’ll carry that odor with me to my grave. But out of the newspaper accounts and all the other stories I had heard I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. When I got up to that casket and looked over in there, something happened to me that is akin to getting religion. I have seen people shout. I have seen them jerk. I have seen them lose control of themselves and be very happy. And then again I’ve seen them very sad. But it hit me from the head and the feet at the same time. And it met in the middle and straightened me up. I looked at my arms because it felt that every bone had turned to steel. I wanted to know was the change physical, was it noticeable. Then after examining myself, I looked in the casket again, and I said, “Oh my God!” What I saw looked like it came from outer space. It didn’t look like anything that we could dream, imagine in a funny book or any place else. It just didn’t look like it was for real. And I had to stand up there and find my boy. I couldn’t find him in five minutes, because that was not the Emmett that I had sent to Mississippi. The first thing that struck my attention was a big gash in

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his forehead. It was big enough for me to stick my hands through. I said they must have done this with an ax. I saw something that I imagine was his brains down there. Then I looked over here and I saw a gash that was so large you could look right through and tell that every tooth in the back had been knocked out. And Emmett left home with a beautiful set of teeth. One of the most beautiful sets that I have ever seen. I had worried with those teeth and bothered him about them. I would have known his teeth anywhere. But Emmett didn’t have any back teeth at all, he just had about 6 perhaps, right across the front. I could tell because his mouth had been choked open. His tongue was out. His lips were twisted and his teeth were bared just like a snarling dog’s. And I said, “Oh my God!” I had to keep calling on Him in order to stand there. And then I looked at his nose. There was another hole. I noticed that somebody even had the nerve to put a bullet in his brain. I wondered why they wasted a bullet because surely it wasn’t necessary. I stopped then, and put all of these pieces together, and it wasn’t exactly an easy job. But after I took them one by one, I said that’s Emmett’s nose, the bottom part here, you couldn’t mistake that. And I said, that’s his forehead, because it was very prominent. And I looked at his one eye over here, that was bulging out. His eyes were very light in color, and I said that certainly is his eye. And then I looked over here where it seemed that the right eye had been picked out with a nut picker, so I couldn’t really go by that. I decided to examine his ears because he had very large ears, larger than an ordinary person. That’s when I found out that part of the ear was gone, and the entire back of the head had been knocked out. I said, “Mr. Rainer, I can’t see very well.” I said, “Will you take this body out of this box and let me look at the left-hand side, because it’s not too much to go by on the right-hand side?” And the man really looked at me like I was crazy. He just shook his head and said you sit down and I’ll do it, but I’d rather for you to go home and come back.” I said, “All right. I’ll do that. I’ll bring you some clothes to put on Bo” because they didn’t dress him. He was covered in white powder when he got here, because nobody was to see him anyway. I sent the clothes to the parlor and went back a little while later. Mr. Rainer had laid the body out on a slab. That’s when I walked around to the left-hand side of him and looked. It looked as if somebody had taken a criss-cross knife and gone insane on the left side of his face. It was beat into a pulp. I told Mr. Rainer, if you will have the wake here, I said I would like for as many people to walk in here and see this thing as want to come. As long

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as we cover these things up, they’re going to keep on happening. I said, I’m pulling the lid off of this one. Nothing else worse than this could ever happen to me—my personal feelings don’t matter, it’s those other boys and girls out there that we’re going to have to look out for. And the more people that walk by Emmett and look at what happened to this fourteen-year-old boy, the more people will be interested in what happens to their children. Now, maybe, I didn’t say those exact words. I doubt if I did. But I do know that I wanted the world to see what had happened to my boy. We went on home and we had our funeral Saturday as we had planned. While that body was at the funeral parlor, they tell me that fifty thousand people walked by that night. They had to close the parlor up at 1:30 a.m. because windows were being broken and the place was just in a shambles. You couldn’t move traffic for blocks around. I asked Reverend Roberts if he would be good enough to let me move the body to his church and have the funeral there. Reverend Roberts said yes. Not only that, he said, “I will open the doors so that the people can continue the wake until the time of the funeral.” We went in there Saturday and had our funeral and there were so many people locked outside of that church. I guess they must have stood for eight blocks or more. I told Reverend Roberts the funeral isn’t over until the remains have been viewed. If you will let us have our funeral and go home, you tell those people out there they won’t be turned away, they can see, too. Reverend Roberts was very cooperative. He said, “Yes, Mrs. Bradley. I’ll throw these doors open twenty-four hours a day.” I said if we don’t bury him today, which was Saturday, we can’t bury Sunday or Monday, because it’s a holiday. I figured on Tuesday we would proceed to the cemetery. Those people walked twenty-four hours a day. They walked for blocks. They were six abreast and I’m told that the traffic was tied up from Saturday afternoon until Tuesday at the close of the funeral. People were interested. They wanted to know what was happening. One would go out and tell another and more than 600,000 people looked at Emmett Louis (Bobo) Till. When they walked in that church, they had one feeling. But when they looked down in that casket, they got another. Men fainted and women fainted. I’m told that one out of every ten went to their knees and had to be carried out. Those 600,000 people were stirred up so much until the newspapers in Chicago got stirred too. And other people became stirred. And that’s why you’re out here tonight, because they reached you. We went back to the church on Tuesday and took Emmett to the cemetery.

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We have a little town near Chicago, called Argo, and that’s where Emmett was practically born and raised. The people out there, the school system and everything, is mostly white. You might find five or six colored children in a class of 130 pupils in high school. You might find eight or nine children in a class of forty in the grade school. The children out there don’t realize that I’m black and you’re white. That’s where I was educated incidentally. I never discovered I was colored until I was a pretty big girl. I just didn’t know. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was darker than some of the other people that were in the class. I was graded strictly according to my ability to perform and I was never looked down on. For that reason I cherish my white friends and my colored friends, because I have no reason to be standoffish or to feel inferior to any of them. They treated me the way I treated them. These schools in Argo, Illinois, turned out en masse. Every school, public and Catholic, in Argo, Summit, and Bedford Park turned out to pay tribute to Emmett Louis Till. Most of the people didn’t know Emmett. Just a few of them did. Not only that, but the police and everybody cooperated to the fullest extent. We had a one-hundred-police escort to the cemetery. They stopped traffic. They stopped transportation. They stopped everything to let Emmett Till’s body be moved. When we got to the cemetery, there were approximately fifty or more cars waiting. I’m sure that there were two hundred in the procession that left Chicago. Not only did they take us there on an uninterrupted journey, but they brought us back to my door the same way. I had the privilege of hearing Adam Clayton Powell speak several nights ago, and I listened to him tell about the situation existing over in Africa and other places. He said those people have decided they’re going to have freedom regardless of the amount of blood they have to spill. You can’t scare a man whose life expectancy is only twenty-eight years. In some countries that’s as long as they expect to live. They’re starved to death, they’re hungry and everything else. How can you scare them with an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb? There comes a time when you get beyond fear—fear doesn’t mean anything. You’re going to die one way or the other so you might as well die fighting. So, those poor ignorant people over there have stood up and asserted themselves. They have said that we are going to die trying to do better. We’re not going to just sit here and waste away or idle away and let somebody kick us around till we die. And they have gotten very good results. If those ignorant unlearned people can stand up and take a stand, how can we who have been exposed to education, exposed to all of the good things, sit

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down and let somebody just walk up and say I’m not going to give it to you and you’re not going to have it. We can’t sit here and wait for somebody to come and hand it to us on a silver platter. That’s not going to happen. I don’t think there are very many people who have ever had somebody walk up and say here’s a Cadillac. I think you deserve it, you’ve waited patiently for it. When you wanted it, you went out and worked pretty hard. I think my freedom is worth more to me than a Cadillac, because if I have the Cadillac and can’t drive it, I don’t need it anyway. I have invested a son in freedom and I’m determined that his death isn’t in vain. When I was talking to God and pleading with Him and asking why did You let it be my boy, it was as if He spoke to me and said: “Without the shedding of innocent blood, no cause is won.” And I turned around then and thanked God that He felt that I was worthy to have a son that was worthy to die for such a worthy cause. I don’t say that I’m not regretting it. I don’t say that I’m accepting it gleefully or happily. It’s a terrible thing to have to accept, but still I’m glad that He made me able to accept it. And also I have stopped, I wondered, and even asked myself how am I making it; how am I doing the things that I am doing, why is it that I’m still in my right mind? The answer always comes back to me that there is a God up there. He’s looking down here. My constant prayer through this ordeal hasn’t been so much for myself. I haven’t prayed too much for Mamie, because I think God’s looking out after me. But I have prayed to Him rather to keep me aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it. Don’t let me get my feet off the ground, my head way up in the air and just start thinking that I am great because there are no great people really. We are only as great as the least one can become. We’re going to have to stop worrying about am I too good to associate with you, or this and that and the other. Instead we are all going to have to realize that we are all very, very small. We are very tiny as individuals. But together we can’t be beat. If we stand up and unite ourselves together for a common cause, there is nothing that can stand before us—not just colored people but white people altogether. The colored people can’t do it by themselves and the white can’t do it by themselves. As long as we are awakening, I don’t think we’re going to stand to be held back. I don’t believe that the average good, white person wants us to be held back. We can read where our race has contributed innumerable things to the progress of America. Without that rich resource to be tapped and things that we are able to contribute, America herself would not be as great as she is. So I want to stand up now and I want you to stand up, too, and demand our place. Then after we get it, walk in it and respect it. We’ll have to be very dignified. 26

Mamie Till Bradley

The day is gone that we’re nobodies; we are all somebodies, and together, I can’t tell you how great we are as somebodies. I would like to touch briefly on the trial in Mississippi. The Mississippi trial was really an ordeal. When I started down there, I’m not going to tell anybody I was brave and raring to go. If there had been any other way, I don’t think I would have gone. And without the people and the press standing behind me, I still probably would not have made it. My father came from Detroit, my mother was in Chicago already. She was telling me, she said, if you go it will be over my dead body. Other relatives and friends were calling up and saying please don’t go. I really didn’t want to go. I was convinced that I shouldn’t go, but then I had a dream, and it seemed like to me my place was in Mississippi, that I had more business in Mississippi than anybody down there. I called my father in Detroit the day before I was getting ready to leave, and I said Dad, we’re going to Mississippi. He said, “what?” I said, yes, we’re going tomorrow, so get here as quickly as you can, and if you’re here by a certain time, we’ll leave together, if not, I’ll have to go without you. I don’t think I would have left though until he got there. When we first mentioned going to Mississippi, we got so much response until I knew we would just have to hire an Illinois Central train to take all the people to Mississippi. But about three hours before plane time, we started making calls to check on the people who wanted to go. Suddenly so many ailments cropped up. There were ingrown toenails and migraine headaches. The Chicago police department said it had no jurisdiction. They couldn’t send anybody. Detective agencies with big strong detectives weren’t authorized to go to Mississippi. So I looked around. I said, well, it’s just me and my dad and Mr. Mooty. I said we’ll take God and that will be enough. So that’s the way we flew to Memphis, Tennessee. And He was there, because we could feel Him in the plane. He was there. We got there. We went on down to Mississippi. It was the second day of the trial and it was just about ten o’clock in the morning, when we go to the courtroom. I was surprised to see the number of colored people milling around there. I had thought maybe their bosses would have told them that they better not go to the trial. But they were there. When we got out of the car, I noticed that there were several television outfits there. There were the newsmen and they were looking for us, and they were right there on guard to see to it, to watch us with the eyes of the camera, to see to it that nothing happened. When we walked in the courtroom, the judge had made the announcement that if anybody took any pictures, they would be thrown out. But when we 27

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walked in there, those white reporters, and those colored reporters, evidently forgot what the judge had said, because they stood on chairs, they stood on tables, they stood on railings, even on one another, and took pictures. So the trial had to be recessed. We can have another recess down in Mississippi, if we let them know that they are not going to lynch people, they are not going to make slaves of our men and women down there. We can have another recess, and it can be just as effective as the one when I walked in the courtroom. They settled down and they had what they called the trial. Little vendors were going around selling cases of pop. Mr. Milam and Mr. Bryant went to the washroom unescorted without handcuffs. They had their children on their laps and they spanked them playfully. They hugged their wives and kissed their mothers. They were just privileged characters. Then we had this jury that looked like, well I just can’t really tell you what they looked like. But the way that they looked at us, you’d have thought we came from outer space. The big question in their mind was, what business did we have down there. It was Mississippi’s problem and Mississippi was going to handle it. But without the newspapers and the press news agencies, there never would have been a trial in Mississippi. That was forced on them. It was bitter gall in their mouths. They even released an article to the citizens around there. I won’t try to quote it. In substance it meant that we know that you’re being tried. We know that this is getting under your skin, but for God’s sake try to take it. You have a right to get up and blow somebody’s head off if you want to because they are certainly down here disrupting your life. But just wait two days: we’ll have this over, and you can just go right on back to lynching and doing whatever you want to do. That was just the feeling of the whole town. We knew that they were only holding off, because they didn’t dare latch on. After the summaries were made, it wasn’t hard to tell within a few days which way the trial was going. In fact when we got there, the prosecutor told me Tuesday that we should have it over with by Wednesday afternoon. What they hadn’t figured on was that Dr. T. R. M. Howard, the NAACP, and the colored press were going to get together and dig up some more witnesses. They hadn’t figured on that at all. But those people went around down there and got this information. On Tuesday evening, they told the District Attorney that they had eye witnesses to this murder and they would like to have the court recess until they could produce them. Thursday and Friday they went on the stand. Little Willie Reed stood up there and told how he saw Emmett Till in the back of a truck that Mr. Milam

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Mamie Till Bradley

was in. He describes how there were four white men in the cab and four colored men in the back. One of these four colored people, he said, was my boy. He was sitting on the floor of the truck. He recognized him from a picture that he saw in the newspaper. He said that he saw this truck because he had gotten up early that Sunday morning to go and get himself some cigarettes. Well I don’t think God necessarily teaches us to smoke. I think it might have been God’s will that Willie Reed ran out of cigarettes and just happened to want to get up at six o’clock Sunday morning and go to the store. Willie Reed saw Mr. Bryant when he got out of the truck and go in the same store, come out, get in the truck, and drive away. It just happened that Willie Reed lived on the farm of Mr. Milam’s brother. So he went on back to his house and when he got to the house, he saw the truck was there. And he also heard a lot of noise out of the barn. He heard a voice screaming. He heard a boy crying for his life, calling for his mother and calling on God. He heard him begging for mercy and he heard the blows that were being struck on the body. Willie Reed asked a friend, “who is that they’re beating up over there,” but he didn’t know. So Willie came back to a pump, which was approximately four hundred feet from where the beating was going on. He also saw Mr. Milam walk up to the pump with a gun still around his waist. It was the same gun he had had when he went to my uncle’s house and took the boy out of bed. He saw that man and recognized him. He even spoke to him. Mr. Milam went back to the barn. They tell me that this confusion must have lasted about an hour or better. Pretty soon there was no more noise. They pulled this tractor out of this barn and backed the truck into the barn. When the truck came out, there were only four white men in the cab. There were no colored people to be seen. I know what happened to one of those colored people. There was a tarpaulin over the back of the truck. We don’t know how long they were in there. Maybe it was one, maybe it was two hours, maybe it was more. But for the life of me I don’t see how Emmett Till could have screamed that long because any one of those blows on his head would have surely killed him. But then I imagine the body can take a lot of punishment. And his body was badly beaten, and because the skin even popped and rolled off, the second skin was all that was left on Emmett’s body. After little Willie Reed got up on that stand, he was questioned by the prosecuting attorney. It was then the need for desegregation really stood forth. Willie Reed had a story, but he couldn’t tell it. It was locked inside of him. It would have taken education to put the key in the lock and turn it loose. Every word that was gotten from Willie had to be pulled out word by

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word. That’s because Willie is eighteen years old and has probably been to school only three years. What he learned in school was not enough really to have gone to the trouble to go there every day. That’s why you are going to have to integrate those schools and make it possible for those children to talk and know what they see and be able to tell it. When the defense got up and questioned Willie, they tore his story all apart. He didn’t even know how far he was from the barn. They said, well, would you say you were five thousand feet? Little Willie would say “yes, I guess so,” but he didn’t know how far five thousand feet were. We all know that you can’t see anything from that distance. But they didn’t ask him five hundred feet, five feet, or yards. No, they put it at the impossible distance, because they knew that Little Willie wouldn’t be able to defend himself. They threw that testimony out. Little Willie Reed was not a good witness. He was standing too far away. Moses Wright said that the men walked in his house, took the boy out of the bed. The defense got up, they said that anybody could have walked in Moses Wright’s house and said Mr. Preacher, let me in, this is Mr. Bryant. Perhaps Mr. Bryant had an enemy who was playing a joke on him. And so far as Mr. Milam is concerned, there are a lot of tall, fat, baldheaded men in Mississippi, and it didn’t necessarily have to be him. In other words they were saying that Mose Wright was too big a fool to know who he saw come in his house. So that tore that testimony down. When I got up on the stand, they realized immediately that I wasn’t exactly a fool. Then they turned around and made a very bad person out of me. They questioned me as to the insurance I had, and then they proved to the satisfaction of that jury, that I sent Bobo down there and had Uncle Mose get him killed, so I could collect the insurance. And the jury was satisfied. That explanation pleased them very much. Well I had a ten-cent policy and a fifteen-cent policy and I don’t think that’s enough for me to get my son killed, because it wasn’t enough to bury him. Well, the trial proceeded. The men said they took Emmett and that they questioned Emmett. He wasn’t the right boy, so they turned him loose. Yet and still Emmett Till has never turned up at home. I had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that that was my son. The ring that he had on his finger was the one that the Army sent me with his father’s personal effects. The ring was made in Casablanca and there was only one of that kind because it was a handmade ring. They did give Moses Wright credit for being smart after all. They said that Mose, being a preacher recognized the possibility of starting something when Emmett was taken from his house. But knowing that Emmett was going to be 30

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turned loose up the road a piece, he rushed out to meet him. That perhaps he knocked him in the head, threw him in the bushes or buried him or maybe, he put him on the train and sent him home. Then he took this ring off Bo’s finger and contacted the NAACP down there. They got together and went out in the Tallahatchie River and got them a body, put this ring on the finger, put this gin mill fan around the neck and dropped it over there very conveniently so that they could find it a few days later. And you’d be surprised how the jury fell for that story. It was just a plot to disgrace Mississippi. But they didn’t try to explain whose body it was. It seems that bodies are pretty plentiful down there. And the only point that they were trying to prove is that the body that I had did not belong to me. The county doctor took the stand. He said that when he went down to the river bank and examined the body, he couldn’t tell if it was a colored or white man. Then the sheriff stood up on the stand. He too couldn’t tell if it was a colored or white man. Yet and still he called a colored undertaker. The man was black enough for nobody to wonder if he was white or black. You might not know it, but down in Mississippi you don’t call a colored undertaker to handle a white body. If there is any doubt in your mind whatsoever, you call a white undertaker because a white man or a black man can get his brains blown out if he makes the mistake of giving a white corpse to a colored undertaker. That you just don’t do. Well, another mistake that Mississippi made. They held the inquest. They sent me three death certificates signed by the same doctor that couldn’t tell whether the body was that of a colored or white man. He testified that Emmett Louis Till had died on such and such a date, “colored,” age fourteen, born the 25th of July, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois. There was the paper in black and white that this was my body. They sent me the death certificate. The insurance policy paid off on the basis of those death certificates. Yet and still when we got down to the Mississippi trial, it couldn’t possibly be my boy. I think they should be a little more careful before they start signing these death certificates. But I knew because I stood up there and looked. I found what I was looking for. Somebody has to sacrifice for a cause. With the sacrifice of a few of our automobiles and some of our fine clothes, we can make this world one that we’ll be proud of. I don’t think that freedom is so far away that we are not going to enjoy it. I think that pretty soon this thing is going to be over. In fact, it’s over now, we just haven’t realized it. The tooth has been pulled out, but the jaw is still swollen. 31

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It’s just a matter of time before it’s going to go down. If we all get together and support the NAACP, that has fought so hard to make things come to where they are now, then I do believe that we are right over the hill to victory. Pray for me, pray for your organization and above all, don’t forget the NAACP. Thank you.

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Daisy S. Lampkin November 9, 1955, National Council of Negro Women, Washington, D.C.

Known as “Mrs. NAACP” by many, Daisy Adams Lampkin was born on August 9, 1883, in Washington, D.C. She came of age in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Rosa and George Adams. After moving to Pittsburgh in 1909, the same year that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, she married William Lampkin in 1912 and helped him with a restaurant business. A lifelong activist, organizer, and fundraiser, Lampkin began her career in social justice as a suffragist, joining the Negro Women’s Equal Franchise Federation, later renamed the Lucy Stone League. From 1915 to 1955, Lampkin presided over the League. Lampkin was also a charter member of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune, and a board member of the National Association of Colored Women. That same year, Lampkin was made a national field secretary with the NAACP, a position which she held until 1947, at which point she was named to the Board of Directors. She earned her national field secretary position based on her tireless regional efforts between 1930 and 1935, including bringing the national convention to Pittsburgh in 1931. Lampkin’s fundraising and organizing on behalf of the NAACP were legion, but she also didn’t shy from national political issues; in 1937, for example, Lampkin took the lead in the NAACP’s drive to get a federal anti-lynching bill passed. In 1963, Lampkin directed the NCNW’s Educational Foundation, a program that provided college scholarship monies to student activists who had interrupted their higher education for the cause of racial equality. Her successful organizing philosophy was rooted in the local. “Anytime you organize, get grassroots people,” Lampkin implored. “They’ll help you. But big shots do not help anybody. They want you to help them.” In addition to her tireless work on behalf of the NAACP, Lampkin was a vicepresident of the Pittsburgh Courier; in her positions as writer, editor, and executive, she helped make the paper the top circulating black newspaper in the world by the 1950s.

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Daisy S. Lampkin

The recipient of many honors and awards, Daisy Lampkin died on March 10, 1965, just three days after civil rights marchers were brutally beaten in Selma, Alabama. Her husband and an adopted daughter, Romaine Childs, survived her. In this speech delivered at the annual convention of the National Council of Negro Women, Lampkin eulogizes Mary McLeod Bethune, the woman who had founded the NCNW twenty years prior. In addition to including the standard epideictic topoi of praise and achievement, Lampkin includes a personal story that illustrates the savvy fundraising skills of both women. Diligently documenting which northerners had visited Bethune’s school in Daytona Beach, Lampkin and Bethune were careful to follow up with wet feet—in other words, such luxuries as personal automobiles or taxis were not employed in person-to-person fundraising. Such practiced austerity was not so much disingenuous as it was necessary as a survival strategy in the competition for scarce funds for interracial philanthropy. A skilled and very practiced orator, Lampkin uses the eulogy as a celebration of black womanhood and achievement; in so doing, she also celebrates her own career as a black woman of extraordinary achievement.

B

orn: Mayesville, South CarolinA—July 10, 1875 Died: Daytona Beach, Florida—May 18, 1955 Age: Seventy-nine Years, Ten Months, Eight Days

This is what may appear on the tombstone of America’s beloved Mary McLeod Bethune—but the story of the life of this great American will be on the hearts and in the memories of countless millions. She came, she saw, she dedicated, she served. She selected to dedicate her early life to the children in the turpentine sections of Florida. How often have we listened to her tell the story of the beginning of the little school with one dollar and a half—and faith: the little school, which today stands as a million-dollar monument to her dream, her faith, her sacrifice, her devotion, her untiring effort. Most of us, her close friends, had personal contact with her during the early years, as she depended to a great degree on the help which friends so willingly gave. This brings to my memory one of the times that she spent some days with me in my little home in Pittsburgh. She needed money for the school. Always the school, never anything else in those early days. We phoned a few friends who had visited the school while vacationing in Florida—who had spent a Sunday afternoon at the school vespers and had heard the students sing. One such friend was Mrs. Ralph Harbison, aged and wealthy. We were invited to lunch, which consisted of a small piece of cold meat, a half pear, bread and 34

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butter and hot tea. After eating this meager lunch, during which time Mrs. Bethune told of the needs of the school, Mrs. Harbison excused herself, went upstairs, assisted by her secretary. In a few minutes, the secretary returned with a check for thousand dollars. This we were able to repeat in several homes and at one church. We had wet feet, because it was a rainy week, and we did not dare arrive at the homes in a car or a taxi. Little personal incidents like these are precious to each and every one of us who touched the intimate life of this great woman. All over the nation women and men who are now secure in good jobs, point to the help given them by Mary McLeod Bethune during the lean years when she was Director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration, 1935 to 1943. En route to Oakland, California, when she was president of the National Association of Colored Women, at which time I served as chairman of transportation to carry eighteen solid Pullman cars of women to the coast, we were scheduled to hear the noon concert at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Our train was late, but when the Greyhound buses met us, we were told that the organist at the Tabernacle had agreed to give a special concert on our arrival. As we sat next to each other, Mary clasped my hand with a strong grip as the organ pealed forth the strains of “Swanee River.” We did not talk . . . we could not talk, but the hand clasp said to me, “It is a long way over which we Negro women have come, and it does not yet appear what we shall be.” The spiritual depth of this great woman was ever uppermost. It was following this meeting that she said to a group of us: “we need an organization that will be an overall organization—that will include the Federation, the sororities, church women, the Elks, the Eastern Star, the Courts of Calanthe—all women. This will not be in competition to anything we have now, but will be all inclusive, for all women.” Again and again, she said this to me, to countless others. All of us did not visualize her dream, but she saw it, believed in it, and then one day, twenty years ago, a few of us met at the YWCA in New York City and then and there was given birth to this great organization which meets here today. Its history, its value, its influence, its breadth are well known to you. We are living it today—nationally and internationally. Mary McLeod Bethune walked in high places, hand in hand with the great in her own land and in other lands. She was a proud woman, with no apology for the color of her skin, nor the poverty of her childhood. She lived with lifted head, squared shoulders—as she looked at the world in passing. She served as the president of the National Association of Colored Women, president of the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, Director 35

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of Negro Affairs, NYA, vice president of the NAACP, vice president of the National Urban League, member of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation, vice president of the National Council of Women of the United States, chairman of the Headquarters Board of the National Association of Colored Women, president of the National Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, member of the Elks, Eastern Star, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and Iota Phi Lambda Sorority. She was appointed special assistant to the Secretary of War for the selection of candidates for the WAC, 1943; official observer for the Department of State to the Founding Conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, 1945. She was the recipient of many honors for long years of service to her people and to her nation, by founding and directing the destinies of a college, by contributions to many significant causes, and by meriting the confidence of many leaders in the public and governmental life of her country, including President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among her many distinctions were nine honorary degrees—AM, South Carolina State College, 1910; AM, Wilberforce University, 1915; LL.D, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, 1935; LH.D, Bennett College, 1936; M.Sc., Tuskegee Institute, 1938; LL.D., Howard University, 1942; LL.D, Wiley College, Marshall, Texas, 1943; LL.D, Atlanta University, 1943; and Doctor of Human Relations, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, 1949. Among other awards are 21st Spingarn Medal, Frances Drexel Award for distinguished service, Thomas Jefferson Award for outstanding leadership, South Carolina State Award for the most distinguished native of the state, First Hill City Youth Award for distinguished service among youth, and the Haitian Medal of Honor. Who among us can equal this? One thing is sure: we can aspire and strive to follow in her footsteps. She left us a rich heritage—one to which we can point with pride. Today, if she were here, she would stand where I am standing, would say: “My women, carry on with the strength that God has given you . . . with the wisdom with which He has endowed you. Carry the torch, and hand it on, lighted and clean, to those who follow after.”

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Rosa Parks August 21, 1956, Public School Integration Workshop, Monteagle, Tennessee

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, one of the iconic figures of the civil rights movement, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, the oldest child of Leona and James McCauley. Upon her parents’ separation when she was two, Parks moved to her maternal grandparents’ farm in Pine Level, forty miles south of Montgomery. With aspirations to be a teacher, Parks later entered Alice L. White’s Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a school modeled on Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of vocational education, because school for children of color ended at the sixth grade in Pine Level. As a fifth grader, Parks befriended Johnnie Mae Carr (then known by the name Rebecca Daniels), and the two would become lifelong friends and civil rights stalwarts. Parks also became an active member of Montgomery’s St. Paul AME church when she was a teenager. Parks did not graduate high school until she was twenty as she dropped out after completing the eleventh grade to tend to her sick grandmother in Pine Level. She married Raymond Parks, a barber and NAACP activist ten years her senior, in December 1932. A charter member of Montgomery’s NAACP chapter, Raymond Parks also served on the National Committee to Defend the Scottsboro Boys. While her husband encouraged her activism, Parks did not join the NAACP until 1943. That same year she was publicly humiliated on a Montgomery city bus driven by James P. Blake; she vowed never to ride his bus again. In her role as secretary for the local NAACP chapter, Parks worked closely with its president E. D. Nixon, who later served the organization as state president. A Pullman porter with extensive civil rights contacts, Nixon would prove pivotal in Parks’s future. Parks also befriended Ella Baker, whom she met at an NAACP event in 1946. An instrumental leader and organizer at the national level, Baker would serve as a mentor and role-model to the seemingly demur seamstress. Like Baker, Parks believed that real civil rights progress could and would be achieved by young people; as such, she began advising Montgomery’s NAACP Youth Council in 1949. Parks wasn’t the only Montgomery woman taking an active role in civil rights. In 1946, black women organized the Women’s Political Council (WPC) in response 37

Rosa Parks

to the unwillingness of the local League of Women Voters to integrate. It was the WPC, in fact, that first warned local white leaders in 1954 of an impending bus boycott if conditions didn’t change. Importantly, those conditions did not involve integrating the buses, but in better treatment for black passengers and for seating white passengers front-to-back, and black passengers back-to-front, on a firstcome, first-served basis. In the fall of 1954, E. D. Nixon introduced Rosa Parks to the Durrs, Clifford and Virginia, prominent white liberals who had recently relocated to the city after spending considerable time in Washington, D.C. Clifford, a lawyer, worked in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations while Virginia was very active in civil rights circles, befriending Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt, among others. In addition to doing alteration work for the Durrs, Parks quickly became close friends with the outspoken progressives. In the summer of 1955, Virginia Durr had an offer for her civil rights–minded seamstress: a two-week scholarship to attend the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a school famous for educating labor and civil rights activists on the finer points of community organizing and leadership. Parks accepted the scholarship. By all accounts she returned to Montgomery a changed person. Eager to move on the bus issue, Nixon and the WPC experienced two false starts. Teenagers Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were each arrested on Montgomery buses for refusing to give up their seats, Colvin in March 1955 and Smith in October 1955. Colvin and Smith were both parties to the Supreme Court case (Browder v. Gayle) that ended the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On Thursday evening, December 1, 1955, Parks boarded Montgomery city bus number 2857 and took a seat in the middle rows. At the next stop she was momentarily stunned to see that James F. Blake was driving the bus—and he wanted her seat for the recently boarded white passengers. By refusing to move, Parks set into motion a remarkable chain of events that would forever alter America’s race relations: a 381-day citywide bus boycott; the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association; the leadership of that organization by a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr.; the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957; and most importantly, a newfound racial consciousness that far transcended the city limits of Montgomery. If civic sainthood beckoned, Rosa Parks wanted no part of it. She and her husband moved from Montgomery in 1957 to her brother Sylvester’s adopted hometown of Detroit. There Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when she became a receptionist for Representative John Conyers. She retired from his office in 1988 at the age of seventy-five, far more famous and in-demand than her employer. The winner of nearly every major civilian honor and award, Parks died in Detroit 38

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on October 24, 2005 at the age of ninety-two. Parks was eulogized nationally and internationally, and her body lay in state in the Capital Rotunda, only the second African American to be mourned in such a manner. A museum and library honors her memory at Troy University–Montgomery, and her papers are housed at Wayne State University. Surviving full-text speeches delivered by Rosa Parks are extremely rare—so rare that this is the only one of which we are aware; it survives in the Highlander Folk School Audio Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. Delivered to a small group at Highlander during a retreat commemorating the workshop she attended just one year prior, Parks drove to Monteagle with white Montgomery minister Robert Graetz and his family. Just days following this speech, the Graetz residence was dynamited for his outspoken and public involvement with the ongoing bus boycott. This brief address attempts to contextualize Parks’s act of defiance as one bound up with Montgomery’s history, the history of segregation, the JudeoChristian tradition, and the bullying she had endured—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

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r. Pierce, Mrs. Clark, and ladies and gentlemen, the whole cause of our trouble in Montgomery, as anywhere else, is segregation which is the evil that exists, the artificial legal segregation, and the transportation is very painful, very humiliating, and the drivers made very good use of it. Our city ordinance, of course, says that a driver has police powers in which he can enforce segregation by moving his passengers. If he desires a person to move from one seat, there should be another for this person to take it. If a colored person is sitting too near the front or somewhere near, the white person should take it; this person if ordered from a seat should have another one available. In my own case this was not true and as well as in others where arrests had taken place. In Montgomery, long before our protest began, on some occasions, I had been on committees to appear before the city officials and bus company officials with requests that they improve our conditions that existed that were so humiliating and degrading to our spirit, as well as sometimes physical discomfort in riding the bus. We would have some vague promises and be given the runaround and nothing was ever done about it. And they continued to grow worse instead of better; it showed no improvement whatever. As late as March 1955, when this fifteen-year-old girl in Montgomery, a high school girl was arrested for not giving up a seat, even much further to the rear of the bus than I was; she was handcuffed and taken to jail and of 39

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course tried and found guilty on at least three counts and put on probation. And there was another arrest in the fall, about October, of a teenage girl who refused to give up a seat, I’m sure to stand, and she paid her fine. And when my arrest occurred, of course, that is when the protests actually began in Montgomery, and I want to say here that it was not at all planned on my part, because I, at that time, was only interested in getting home from work and trying to rest and be prepared to work the next day. While I have always been against segregation because of its placing persons in inferior positions because of something that they have no control of—the color of their skin—it is also bad if not worse for the person imposing the segregation. I’m sure people who enforce such inhuman laws cannot in all fairness to themselves feel that they are doing the right thing if they look at the issue from a Christian and human standpoint. So it is my opinion, it has always been, and I’m sure it always will be, that we must abolish such evil practices where they are legal, especially, and every person should be given their right to live and treat others as they would like to be treated. And it was with this thought, when the officer placed me under arrest, said that he didn’t know why the laws were pushing us around, I felt that some of us should find out in some way. I had no idea that it would cause the interest and excitement that it did, or cause the movement that took place. But I felt that at some time and once and for all, after this question had never been answered, that it should be known: why we do things and why we have to obey such unfair laws; it is unfair, unjust, and unchristian. And as long as we continue to be pushed around, we were getting treated much worse, and there had to be a stopping point, so this seemed to have been a place for me to stop being pushed around and find out what human rights that we had, if any.

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Agnes E. Meyer November 17, 1956, National Council of Negro Women, Washington, D.C.

The roles of journalist, philanthropist, activist, wife, and mother define Agnes Elizabeth Ernst Meyer’s extraordinary life. She was born in 1887 in New York City to a notable lineage of German Lutheran clergy who provided her with a rich European legacy. Though she forged strong bonds with her parents during her youth in Pelham, New York, they quickly deteriorated as she moved into her adolescent years. In spite of the strained atmosphere looming at home and her lawyer father’s many objections to her ambitions, Meyer pursued her education at Barnard College on a scholarship in 1903. Her rebellion from her father and her quest for independence “became an almost neurotic obsession, rebellion an almost ineradicable habit.” This struggle for her own identity and career came, for a time, absorbed her: “I was so imbued with my own importance that the gradual turning of my eyes away from self and out upon the world was an agonizing ordeal.” She originally entered Barnard with the intent of pursuing mathematics; however, she quickly grew complacent with its content and instead cultivated a new interest in philosophy and literature. Through this interest she met John Dewey, who helped “turn her eyes” outward “upon the world”; Meyer would become involved in many causes ranging from education reform and integration to ending racial discrimination in employment. Not only did she lobby fervently for these causes, but she also achieved several milestones, such as becoming the first female reporter for the New York Sun newspaper after graduating Barnard. Following a year of studying history and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, she returned home to marry successful banker and future Federal Reserve Board Governor Eugene Meyer, eleven years her senior, in February 1910; the couple eventually raised five children. One of the many successes she experienced with her husband was their purchase of the Washington Post in 1933; their daughter Katharine Meyer Graham would later become the Post’s president and publisher. With a circulation of 50,000 and a physical plant in ruin, the Meyers eventually turned the newspaper into a thriving and profitable enterprise. During World War II, Agnes Meyer traveled around the country filing stories for the paper—often as many as three per week. In 41

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1944 the Meyers established the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation to provide funding for the improvement of education and various civic activities. After the war, Meyer penned her autobiography, Out of These Roots, which was received with broad acclaim when it was published in 1953. In 1958 the Meyers established the Agnes and Eugene Meyer Fund to support Barnard College professors. Following the death of her husband in July 1959, Agnes founded the Urban Service Corps in Washington, D.C., a volunteer mentoring program designed to assist the District’s school children. The following year she created the National Committee for the Support of the Public Schools, for which she served as chair until her death. She died on September 2, 1970, survived by four children, several grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. In this address given to the National Council of Negro Women on November 17, 1956, Meyer makes an impassioned plea to the women in attendance to take a more rational approach in overcoming the racial obstacles confronting the nation. Standing the conventional gender wisdom on its head, Meyer argues that “most of the men” have been sidetracked by a tribalism, steeped in myth and history, anathema to American ideals and contrary to reason. And unless the nation makes good on its ideals, communism will be a player in the revolutions then sweeping Africa and the Far East. Unstinting scientific analysis leavened with humanitarianism is Meyer’s remedy to the racism propagated by unthinking tribalism. But Meyer is realist enough to know that such enlightened methods won’t redeem many—“especially the older ones.” Finally, given the enormity of the problem and the intransigence witnessed following the Brown decision, Meyer calls on the Eisenhower administration to begin the hard work of organization and research demanded by the racial situation. While several months away, much of Meyer’s call for action would be addressed with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, one of the provisions of which established the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

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y friends, the theme of this convention is, “Women working together can surmount barriers to civil and human rights.” I agree. For women share so many profound interests, especially the well-being of the family, that they can do much to soften the tensions that now surround the problem of racial equality. But we shall not be effective in emphasizing the need for peaceful cooperation, unless we make an effort to be far less emotional and far more rational than most of the men. Now, to be rational means that we use observation, experiment, and the test of experiment by its results—in short, clear thinking rather than appeal

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to passion and prejudice. It is the method of science, which considers the argument rather than the person arguing and is therefore our only hope of establishing what may be described as the rational unity of mankind. Alas, it was never more difficult to defend reason as the prime source of morality and social progress than it is today. For our people have succumbed to the wave of anti-intellectualism now sweeping the Western World, to an extent we older folks who grew up in an era of sanity never thought possible. Let us not be tempted to think that this wave of emotionalism and its expression in the rise of powerful reactionary forces has subsided because the worst of our senatorial demagogues have been discredited. These evil men could never have gained the power they did, if our people had not been receptive to their hysterical antics. This anti-intellectualism, this unwillingness even to listen to factual argument, this flight from reason, is the most dangerous disease of our time. It is dangerous because it is extremely infectious and because of its influence on our political and social thought. It is sad but true that in our country today we have emotional rather than social communities. That is why problems far more trivial than this major one of equal rights for the Negro arouse hostility and prejudice rather than a spirit of reason, impartiality, and compromise. Do not be discouraged, therefore, because the Supreme Court decision on the desegregation of our public schools has touched off another civil war in our country—a cold war, to be sure, but one that will inevitably breed violence unless an appeal to reason is eventually successful. Given the atmosphere of intolerance that has long existed in our country, the struggle over desegregation of our schools was bound to increase, at least temporarily, the deep anxieties which haunt the American people. But, aside from the difficulties created by the emotional climate of our country, we must consider the long historical background of race relations in order to see the problem realistically. Its roots lie deeply buried in the psyche of both races. The Western, white, Christian world has spent a millennium creating a myth which still haunts it today; and myths are hard to combat because they become embedded in our subconscious. They are difficult even to define. Expressed in the poetical terms suitable to myth, the white man thinks of himself as representing the light of day, and the Negro as the embodiment of the darkness of night. The white man fears the Negro because he projects on him all the dark urges which he has not conquered in his own nature—the powerful but deeply buried instincts which he tries so hard to control in his supposedly enlightened self. The Negro, on the other hand, is handicapped by the cultural 43

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advantages which historical developments have given the white man and either resents him fiercely or meets with subservience—real or feigned. Because of the mutual dependence of the two races—each projects upon the other his own weaknesses, each is swayed unconsciously by his resulting inferiority complex, producing an elaborate tangle of emotions, which neither race is willing to take into account and to face. As a result, honest communication between the two races is almost nonexistent. Each responds to the other either with aggression or subservience. The white man accuses the Negro of arrogance or subterfuge without realizing that he, himself, is guilty of the same irrational behavior. We all know the white man who is determined to keep the Negro “in his place.” His counterpart is the white professional friend of the Negro, who curries favor with him by overemphasizing the injustices he endures. The Negro responds by hating the first and despising the second, but he cannot clear the atmosphere because he falls into the same pattern of challenge or evasion. That is why, in the past, race relations committees have been a farce. It surprises me that nobody has ever thought of putting a typical race relations meeting on the stage. For sheer absurdity these biracial encounters afford any comedian a wonderful opportunity. And they will continue to be both comical and tragic until both the Negro and the white man learn to tell each other the truth. How, then, can we begin to unravel the emotional entanglements of the two races which now act as a barrier to progress in race relations? It can be done only if both sides will use reason and scientific analysis to bring to the surface the underlying reasons for their intuitive fear of each other. And since the whites are the dominant race, it behooves them to lead the way toward honest self-analysis. We Americans must also realize that we have no time to lose in solving the race relations problem here at home. For the West is now contending with two major revolutions. The power of the communist revolution is actually on the wane. This is demonstrated by the uprisings in the satellite countries and the rapid disintegration of the communist parties in Western Europe. But the worldwide revolt of the colored races is acquiring more momentum every day. If communism recovers its powerful impetus, it will be accomplished by placing itself at the head of the revolt of the colored races and by encouraging their determination to put an end to white supremacy. Colonel Nasser played this communist game when he shouted to the Egyptian mobs that the British-French-Israeli attack on the Suez Canal was an attempt to oppress the colored races. He failed to mention the brutal oppression of whites by other whites in Hungary. But we dare not ignore the fact that anti-Western feeling is growing as a result of such communist pro44

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paganda. Unless the American people become aware of this and the bearing it should have on their attitude toward their Negro fellow citizens, we shall continue to play into the hands of the communists. Unless our reactionary elements are rapidly awakened to the urgency of the situation, the white man’s position in Africa and the East will become untenable, and the hope for a free cooperative world civilization—the kind of world order democracy has set as its goal—will be crushed by a fusing of communist ideology with the aspirations of the colored races to reenter history as a positive force. How, then, convince the die-hard reactionaries amongst us that they are imperiling the future of all mankind? Some of those with whom I have argued the problem—especially the older ones—gave me the feeling that they are beyond redemption. But we can prevent their influence from spreading by the use of reason—by explaining why they behave as they do, and why the younger generation should not be influenced by their compulsive behavior. If we look back upon the history of Western civilization, we find two major trends which have always competed with each other for men’s minds. The one trend is that of tribalism, the most primitive form of human association which goes back to prehistoric days. The other trend which I will call humanitarianism—the urge toward freedom, justice, and the rule of law—made its first appearance with the rise of Greek civilization. The tribal instinct is deeply imbedded in all of us. Its roots go back millions of years before Greek civilization began. It tempts all of us to love only our own kind, the familiar and the near, together with the feeling of security these emotions gave primitive man and still give us today. It also arouses fear of the remote and hatred of the stranger who was an actual threat to security in primitive days—fears so deeply ingrained that most people are still affected by them. Tribalism has been the source of fine emotions such as mutual loyalty. But in times of stress, its bestial origins come to the surface. In modern times it was responsible for the witches’ brew of racialism concocted by the Nazis, who used the Jew as the stranger who must be destroyed. A byproduct of the racialism preached by Hitler is that the Blood, the People, and the Race must be kept pure at any price, that not the spirit but the Blood of a nation determine its destiny. In our own country the Ku Klux Klan is, of course, the perfect example of this primitive bestiality. It is against these ancient instinctive forces, that civilization has always had to struggle for survival. Even in Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, the democratic ideals of Democritus and Pericles yielded to tyranny—always a byproduct of tribalism. The very concept of equalitarianism was set forth in Pericles’ famous funeral oration: “Our laws” he said, “afford equal justice to 45

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all.” “Our administration favors the many instead of the few: this is why we are called a democracy.” Yet only fifty years later when Greece was involved in the Peloponnesian War, Plato summarizes his betrayal of equalitarianism with the formula “Equal treatment of unequals must beget inequity.” If even a great genius like Plato succumbed to tribalism under the stress of war, it becomes clear how deeply imbedded it is in even the greatest of men. Seen in its profoundest aspect the world revolution that now swirls around us, is a struggle to preserve humanitarian concepts against the resurgence of primitive tribalism. We are faced by one of two possibilities, whether to succumb under stress to tribalism or to go bravely forward to establish the fundamental concept of a free democratic civilization—the acceptance of every individual as having unique qualities and therefore of being an end in himself. Are we going to go the way of Greece and surrender our faith in equalitarianism? Are we going to go the way of Nazi Germany, begin shouting about the purity of our blood, and looking about for a victim to sacrifice to this barbaric concept? If not, we must realize that to go forward means that the burden of our democratic civilization with its demand for personal responsibility will become heavier than ever before. It is a burden created by the endeavor to be truly civilized—to be rational rather than emotional and to accept equality not in a few but in all of our human relationships. It implies a willingness to make over all of our institutions—not merely our schools—that now prevent equality of opportunity. It implies faith in freedom, in human nature, and in man’s capacity for self-development. It is a faith for which Socrates died— faith that received its first political formulation by our Founding Fathers, a faith for which we, too, if necessary must be willing to die. The American people must now realize that they stand at a parting of the ways and that the Supreme Court ruling on the desegregation of our schools is a watershed. It dramatizes the fact that we Americans have been torn between our ideals and our failure to implement them without resolving this conflict. Our democracy has a bad conscience because we preached equality and never practiced it. Nor has the Negro been the only victim of this hypocrisy. The Supreme Court decision highlights the struggle in our civilization to become truly humane. It confronts us with the necessity to conquer the split in human nature between its primitive tribal origins, which encourages purely instinctive behavior, and a truly rational attitude toward life, which sets free the critical powers of man. As Karl R. Popper points out in his study of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” the abandonment of the rationalist attitude, of the respect for reason and argument, the stress upon the so-called deeper layers of human nature, 46

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all this must lead to the view that thought is merely a somewhat superficial manifestation of what lies within these irrational depths. It must produce the Nazi belief that we think not with our brains but with our blood. By thus abandoning reason, we split mankind into friends and foes; into the few who stand near and the many who stand far; into those who speak the untranslatable language of our own passions and those whose tongue is not our tongue. Once we have done this, political and racial equalitarianism becomes practically impossible. Tribe is set against tribe and nation against nation. Yet we live in a world today which calls for the use of reason by all men everywhere to transcend their primitive tendencies toward tribalism, if the world is not to perish in a holocaust of atomic warfare. What, then, must we do to bring the power of reason to bear on a question so fraught with possibilities for infinite evil and infinite good? Preaching that we must all love each other has been of little avail. Love in the abstract has no meaning. We can love only the people we know. And the gap between our Negro and white population has been so wide that they have had but little opportunity to communicate with each other freely and frankly. It has been my personal experience that many white men who have told me how well they know the Negro are actually more ignorant of his real state of mind than others who make no such pretensions. Now is the moment to analyze carefully and factually the historical and the immediate barriers to mutual understanding, if a new and brighter chapter on race relations is to be written into the annals of our country. It is a practical task of scientific research. It is bound to be time consuming. But the mere fact that an honest approach to the problem is being undertaken will in itself have a psychological effect of far reaching value. The good news which the many successful experiments in desegregation could document would encourage the many people of good will who are working toward intergroup relations in their local communities and counteract the distortion of the fact now promulgated by those who are opposing progress in race relations. The Congressional hearings on desegregation of the schools here in Washington are a good example of these deliberate attempts to misrepresent what is actually happening. But we need to know the facts not only on the desegregation of our educational institutions. A thorough job of research must include the problem of civil rights for the Negro, of housing requirements, employment opportunities, recreation facilities, and the complex underlying economic factors involved. The mass migration of the Negro to our cities is a vast subject in itself. Much data already exists in all these areas. But it needs to be collated, and summarized in simple language that everyone can understand. Moreover, a nationwide approach to the social 47

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problems of the Negro would inevitably reveal the serious weaknesses of our whole social structure, which affect the lives of the entire population. Many are the individuals who have warned the nation that the disintegration of family life, the mental cases that fill more than half of our hospital beds, the increase in juvenile delinquency and crime are due to the social chaos created by the industrial revolution and two world wars. Such profound nationwide problems cannot be solved by local or state leadership nor by individual research. It calls for federal leadership if the efforts of the local communities are to be effective. Such federal leadership must come from the president. President Eisenhower said during the campaign that the desegregation of our schools is a problem for the states and the localities. This is a half-truth. Certainly the problem has local aspects which each locality must solve in its own way. But once the Supreme Court made its decision on desegregation, it became the law of the land and therefore a federal responsibility as well. The mere fact that disrespect for law is growing in our country as a result of the Supreme Court decision should be a concern of the president. No less dangerous are the violent attacks on the Supreme Court which this decision set in motion. One hundred leaders of the American bar have declared: “These attacks have been so reckless in their abuse, so heedless of the value of judicial review, and so dangerous in fomenting disrespect for our highest law that they deserve to be repudiated by the legal profession and by every thoughtful citizen. To accuse the court of usurping authority when it reviews legislative acts or of exercising ‘naked power’ is to jeopardize the very institution of judicial review.” Those are statements which needed to be made but which would have been even more effective had they come from the president. But surely he should be interested in implementing means by which a renewed respect for law can come into being. This could be done if the president would appoint a federal commission to investigate the social causes underlying not only the problem of desegregation but the general tension, unrest, and intolerance that endanger our national stability. Such a commission should consist of national leaders of both races and be staffed by experts in the social and natural sciences. It should be supplemented by regional commissions who command the confidence of their fellow citizens. The District of Columbia is entitled to its own commission since President Eisenhower declared that the nation’s capital must set an example in living up to our democratic ideals to the rest of the nation and to the world. These local or regional commissions, like the federal commission, must be staffed by men and women with experience in social research. 48

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Let me emphasize that this essential task of social research must not be allowed to arrest the rapid progress now being made to desegregate our educational system. We must not let the enemies of desegregation use a nationwide analysis of the causes of racial tension as an excuse to wait, look, and listen. I have some friends, whose opinion I respect, who fear that any such profound but lengthy approach to the problem of race relations might do just that. Personally I think that the effect would be just the opposite. If the local leaders who are now doing their best to implement the Supreme Court decision realize that the federal government is supporting their endeavors with a long-range conciliatory program, they would be encouraged to go ahead with far greater assurance of success in their immediate endeavors. Now let’s face a major hurdle. Given the fact that we have a federal administration which cuts down even our military defenses in order to balance the budget, we must recognize that social progress on a nationwide scale is costly. President Eisenhower is always preaching the importance of a sound dollar. We should ask him, “What good is a sound dollar unless we have sound citizens?” My friends, we can’t desegregate schools that we haven’t got. We cannot give the individual attention the Negro child must have in his new school environment unless we have more classrooms and more teachers. That means federal aid to education. Therefore Congressman Powell’s bill which killed the federal aid bills in the last Congress is a tragic disservice to his race. I think it is high time you made this clear to him. To be sure the research program I have suggested and adequate federal aid to our public school system will be costly. But if we spend billions on armaments, surely it makes sense to spend a few millions in fortifying our home front. The most powerful secret weapon of democracy is the moral force of a free people—the only weapon the communists cannot duplicate. They have already lost their influence in Europe because of their brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising. They will lose their hold on the Near East, on Asia, and on Africa, if we now use reason and intelligence to recapture the moral leadership, not only of the colored races but of the whole wide world by proving that democracy means what it says when it boasts of equal opportunity for all. We have it in our hands, my friends, if we now bring to bear our immense resources of knowledge, technology, and scientific progress upon the social problems of the day to create the finest civilization the world has ever seen—a civilization that will be global in scope. I am convinced we can achieve this radiant goal if we now conquer our tribal instincts and approach this world crisis with the same courage, self-confidence, and determination with which we have met every threat to our beloved nation in the past. 49

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin March 1957, Mills College, Oakland, California

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was born into a prominent planter family on December 22, 1896, in Macon, Georgia. She was the twelfth child of William and Annette Lumpkin. By 1899 the family had left Georgia for Columbia, South Carolina, where William had taken a job working on the railroad; he also continued to run a large farm operation. The racial climate was such that Katharine and her playmates were feted by their parents when they formed a local children’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. She remembers, “It was natural to do it, offspring of our warm Southern patriotism. We were happy in it for the aid and blessing it won from our adults.” Even though considered “outsiders,” the Lumpkins quickly established their southern bona fides, especially given William’s heroic service at fifteen years of age in the Lost Cause. So esteemed was her father that he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1908. Upon his passing in 1910 and Katharine’s enrollment two years later at Brenau College, an all-women’s school in Gainesville, Georgia, her fealty to the Confederate cause and its strict racial mores underwent profound changes. But Lumpkin’s first conscious memory of race and her privileged status as a white woman occurred in adolescence. Upon hearing loud blows punctuated by screams for help, the young woman ran to her family’s kitchen in time to see her father brutally beating their petite black cook. Young Katharine was incredulous as to what offense could have triggered such violence; she was later told it had been caused by the cook’s “impudence” toward Katharine’s mother. At Brenau, Lumpkin, who inherited from her mother a “lively intellectual interest,” came under the spell of an unnamed male instructor who taught a host of courses in the social sciences and humanities. The professor encouraged his young charges not only to seek out the most reliable sources and to cultivate their curiosity, but to use the tools of sociology, political science, and economics to answer topical questions. No doubt such rigor and method clashed sharply with Lumpkin’s inherited sentimental nostalgia for the Confederacy and its unchallenged white supremacy. Perhaps the most profound moment in Lumpkin’s evolving racial consciousness occurred at a Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) meeting held in 50

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Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1915. She and a cohort of undergraduate women were addressed by “Miss” Jane Arthur, a progressive local black leader. Lumpkin was aghast that a black woman would be addressed with a courtesy designation: “The only time we had ever said ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Mr.’ was in telling a ‘darkey joke,’ or in black-faced minstrels.” But even more telling was the intelligence and rhetorical abilities of the speaker. “If I should close my eyes,” Lumpkin wondered, “would I know whether she was white or Negro?” Following her graduation from Brenau, Lumpkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Columbia and the University of Wisconsin. Between her graduate education, Lumpkin worked as the YWCA national student secretary for the southern region. From 1932 to 1939, Lumpkin was the director of research for the Council of Industrial Studies at Smith College; during the relatively short span of seven years, Lumpkin published four books in applied sociology. She is perhaps best known, though, for her autobiography, The Making of a Southerner, which was published to wide acclaim and review in 1947. After appointments at the Institute of Labor Studies, Mills College, and Wells College, Lumpkin retired to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1967, where she was actively involved in university and community affairs until she moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1979. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin died on May 5, 1988, in Chapel Hill. While she never married, she bequeathed much of her estate to the children of her partner, Dorothy W. Douglas, who had passed away in 1968. Her papers are housed at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In this wide-ranging lecture delivered at Mills College in Oakland, California, Lumpkin offers her optimistic view of what she terms, borrowing from W. J. Cash, the Southern mind. That optimism is premised on an inconsistency between racial prejudice and the region/nation’s “values and ideals.” Honestly confronted, the latter should and would convince Southerners that legal and illegal means of discrimination must end. In making her case, Lumpkin draws on the life of Charleston’s Angelina Grimké, who though born into privilege and an inheritance of slavery, eventually became a public and vocal abolitionist. Many of the particulars about Grimké that Lumpkin develops are strikingly autobiographical; in fact, it was her own religious conversion of sorts—a religion that southerners had hypocritically rigged to supremacist ends—that opened Lumpkin’s eyes to the triumph of the country’s high-minded religious and civic values and ideals.

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have chosen the subject “Social Change and the Southern Mind,” for obvious reasons. Today the Southern states are experiencing social change in a marked degree in one important area of their life. The 51

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long-established institution of racial segregation in this biracial section is undergoing an apparently rapid transformation. Under this pattern of segregation, the Negro and white populations, by law and by what has seemed to be immutable custom, have been living their lives separated and set apart in numerous and significant ways. True, the changes that are coming to a climactic point today have been under way for a long time; often they have been a scarcely perceptible process. Yet there can be no doubt, I think, that the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, calling for an end of segregation in the nation’s public schools, is the most striking and far-reaching in this gradual process of change. In effect, this decision abrogates certain laws and customs touching racial segregation, calling for eventual desegregation of all the schools of the nation, and a gradual integration, regardless of race. While the Court’s decision affects the entire nation—North, Middle States, West, as well as South—wherever segregated schools are found, I shall speak only of the Southern states, the section I know best, the one where racial segregation is—or has been—firmly established as a way of life. The South has seen a good many social changes within the span of a hundred years, some of them striking changes. These have come about much as change always comes, sometimes slowly and almost smoothly, sometimes swiftly, in a few short years. Some Southern transformations have on the whole been welcomed, or at least accepted and adapted to. This was true of much that happened in the late nineteenth century, when a so-called “New South” rose on the old foundations. But some transformations—you know this well from history—have been strongly resisted, and by influential Southerners. The prime example of the latter, I hardly need say, was the uprooting of slavery. These changes, great and small, have been advanced in every instance by a complex of factors. Even take the change, so familiar to us now, which the phrase “industrialization of the South” represents—the vast change from a predominantly agrarian economy to one that has been industrialized. The face of the whole South was altered thereby: the old plantation system receded in importance, the section tended away from single crop farming; the movement from farms to urban centers was accelerated; industrial plants grew in number and variety, and the proportion of the laboring force employed in industry increased with each decade. Compulsory public school education became general—and there was more tax money now in state and county coffers—education even for the minority group; standards of living rose to some extent, labor organization became more acceptable, protective legislation was placed on the statute books. As we trace this process in its beginnings, and follow its involved and fascinating history, we can identify fairly clearly the several influences: the 52

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strong personalities that pushed the process forward; the play of politics that both aided and retarded; the operation of large impersonal forces, as factories spread and mines were opened, and railroads were built, and competition arose between New England and Southern mills; and the pull exercised by the cheaper labor force, with its lower living standards, its unorganized condition; and the curious influence of the presence of the Negro who was thought of by some of the earlier industrialists as a labor reserve, not used, but always there. Until once the process of [industrialization] was set in motion in the decades after the 1860s, it seemed almost to move in and of itself. At best the “Southern mind” is but one among various factors that influence social change. I realize that the term “Southern mind” can be questioned. I am well aware of the pitfalls of its use. There is no such thing as some mystical “mind” of a whole people or section or nation. In the case of the South, there is not even as much common outlook as is sometimes supposed. You have heard the oftused and misused phrase “solid South.” But I would especially remind you of our biracial makeup. The two races could hardly think as one, divided as we are, and living out our lives on the two sides of the segregation wall. Even in the white population alone, there have been many divisions over the years: sectional divisions within the different states, upcountry, lowcountry, rural, urban, socioeconomic differences. Even politically, the South has not been one, not before the Civil War, nor since, not even in recent elections. I am quite sure there is no truly “solid” South, even taking the white population alone; I very much doubt if there ever has been, although I grant that the section at times has acted and does act as though from a unified solidified opinion—thereby hangs a different tale. Granting all this, it can still be said, I think, that large numbers of white Southerners have a common mind on certain crucial matters. W. J. Cash, in a book appearing some fifteen years ago, called The Mind of the South, expresses in some measure what I mean by “Southern mind.” Cash’s book I consider a brilliant analysis, perceptive, illuminating, a book I would recommend probably first on my list to anyone wishing to comprehend better the complex circumstances in history and social setting, but especially in attitudes, that have gone into the making of white Southerners. Cash puts the matter this way: “It is easy to trace throughout the region . . . a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern—a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and associations of ideas, which, if it is not common strictly to every group of white people in the South, is still common . . . to all but relatively negligible ones.” 53

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When you think of the white Southern “mental pattern,” no doubt the term “prejudice” comes first to your minds. I know all too well, know it in my own history, and the long years I spent “changing” my mental patterns, that prejudice and fears are integral to this pattern, that they play a large part in holding back change. Yet it is not so much with “prejudice” and “fears” that I am dealing now. Oddly, perhaps, I wish to stress ideals and values, as these play a part in social change. I believe I can state with a good deal of assurance that ideals and high values have been prominent in the Southern outlook and that the conceptions that white Southerners have of what is good and desirable in personal values and aspirations are not in essentials different from the ideals and values that have been held throughout the nation. Does it seem incongruous to you that human beings can at one and the same time espouse high ideals and try to live by them, while they uphold and defend institutions such as slavery was before 1865, and such as segregation has been throughout the past decades, institutions that can scarcely be termed consistent with certain of these values? It is incongruous, and here indeed is the point, that insofar as “mental patterns” can influence Southern change, this striking incongruity may be a dynamic force. Let me try to illustrate what I mean, do so in terms of real persons. Biography, as it happens, is a major interest with me, and I am often confronted with this problem in a biography I am writing. I am writing of a woman named Angelina Grimké, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1805, whose career spanned three quarters of the nineteenth century. Angelina was the fourteenth and youngest child of a well-known Charleston family, people of large means, owners of many slaves. While still a young woman in her twenties, Angelina left her home, went North to live, and there, in the 1830s became an abolitionist. She was a very brilliant woman, possessed of great gifts; while far from perfect, she was a person of character, dignity, and reserve. This daughter of the South became a public speaker in the anti-slavery movement at a time when a woman’s “place” was decidedly in the home; she traveled up and down New England and New York, speaking to audiences which sometime numbered several thousand. She became a writer of anti-slavery tracts and a pioneer woman leader in the woman’s rights movement. Human liberty regardless of race or sex, human equality as a God-given right for all, freedom of the mind to uphold one’s convictions, these became the basic tenets of her life. Had she always held these principles? By no means—not in the sweeping sense she came to uphold them. She had accepted slavery until a few years before and had accepted without question the position allotted women. Her “mental pattern” was much like that of other members of her family and church and social circle. She had 54

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shared the “mind” of the dominant white South in those years of the early nineteenth century. Then how could it be that this young woman changed? As I well know, the answer is not simple. I have read thousands of pages of diaries and letters and printed works from the pen of this woman and from that of her sister, of her husband, who was himself a prominent abolitionist; also from members of her family. I have studied the events of her day, both of North and South, and tried to understand the features of her Southern social setting. It is true I have a theory, and shall try to convey it in the biography. Angelina herself was unable to explain it. “Why,” she once wrote, “I did not become totally hardened under the daily operation of this system of slavery, God only knows; in deep solemnity and gratitude, I say, it is the Lord’s doing, and marvelous in my eyes.” All I can do here is mention a very few of Angelina’s experiences and personal characteristics, which, taken together, may have helped to change her when opportunity came. In childhood, and until young womanhood, Angelina assumed that the Negro was inferior, and that given his inferiority, slavery was his portion. Hers was a home of luxury and culture; she was waited on by slaves hand and foot. While city-bred, her family’s main wealth rested on a slave plantation in the Carolina upcountry. To her the slave system was natural and right. Even so, from childhood she was sensitive to slavery’s abuses. She was “prejudiced” to be sure, yet moved when she saw with her own eyes a slave’s deprivations: wife and husband torn apart; a child taken from its mother to be trained far away as a field-hand; the punishment of slaves by the white master. Once she wished to teach some household slaves to read; she found this was forbidden by law and custom; she devised a Sunday school class and taught the Bible—a compromise that seemed to be permitted. As a child she had certain clearly traumatic experiences, when witnessing ill treatment of a certain slave she knew. Certainly thousands of other children of slave owners had similar experiences, children who never changed. At the same time that Angelina was growing up under slavery, she was being reared to believe in certain values. She was sensitive to people, possessed perceptive powers, and as she grew older her ideals meant much to her. She was taught to love liberty, and loyalty, and courage; to be trustworthy and of good reputation, faithful to truth, striving after integrity; to believe in justice, protection of the weak, the sacredness of duty honorably fulfilled; to recognize her obligation for the talents she possessed and the duty she owed God to live according to his will. These values and ideals became as much a part of her outlook as were her prejudices and fears. 55

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When some twenty years old, Angelina experienced a religious conversion. She left her family church, St. Phillips Episcopal (thus begun her nonconformist career) and joined a zealous Presbyterian Church of Charleston. She dropped her social life, felt a sense of high mission—her diaries are filled with her ardor and joy. Meanwhile, her sister Sarah, who lived in Philadelphia, had become a member of the Society of Friends. Angelina visited Sarah in 1828. Quakers on principle were opposed to human slavery. For the first time, Angelina heard slavery debated: She was stirred, she was shaken, at last she was convinced—indeed far beyond the Quaker position. When she returned to Charleston, she felt slavery was a sin. From that time forth Angelina opposed slavery. Thenceforth, what was the burden of her thought? The terrible “inconsistency”—she used the term—of the “professing” Christian. How could a Christian, she repeated it continually, her letters are full of it, and the pages of her diaries—how could a true Christian hold human beings in bondage?—How could the members of her Church fellowship—the Presbyterian Church she loved so much—why did not her minister, who had meant so much to her, fail to speak out from the pulpit against slavery? How could her mother, so devout in Church work, so outspoken a believer in the Christian faith—how could her mother be so “inconsistent” as not then and there to free her slaves? And how could she, Angelina Grimké, who had come to see that slavery was a sin, continue to condone it by her example? Angelina, I’m afraid, became rather difficult, oftentimes forgetful of her own recent “inconsistencies,” to say the least inconsiderate of family and friends. Perhaps it’s that way with the new young convert, especially one whose change had been so great. It was hard for her too, we can’t forget that. She suffered “mental conflict” again (this was her term). She was miserable at home, yet of course felt its pull, for after all she loved her people and they loved her. But she had come to feel that human slavery was a sin. Which way could she turn and feel at home with herself ? Many a time, in that year of 1829, the year she left Charleston for good, her diary shows her misery: “When shall I be released from this land of slavery?” Angelina Grimké had uncommon gifts, unusual powers of leadership, as her career proved. Yet the way she came to change, I think, was not uncommon. Perhaps not many in Angelina’s day turned against slavery, though we have learned the number was far larger than we had once dreamed. We know of wills that masters made setting their slaves free, and of masters who let slaves buy themselves. We know of slave owners, James Birney of Kentucky was an outstanding example, who set their slaves free and became abolition56

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ists. Research students have unearthed numerous examples indicative of the fact that Southerners did change. And I suspect many of them would have had experiences very similar to Angelina’s. We must not lose perspective. Slaveowners, by and large, upheld the institution until 1865 brought human slavery to its end. Angelina’s mother illustrates this mental pattern. Understand, I like and admire Mrs. Grimké. She was a lady of spirit, she spoke her mind, she insisted on her right to be herself, she possessed convictions and maintained them staunchly, she would not be coerced, she was a person of character. And she had high values, let us remember that. Angelina, after all, learned her values from her people, even those that seemed so incongruous with slavery: justice, human liberty, freedom of the mind. Mrs. Grimké believed in these ideals also. True, she thought Angelina had applied them rather oddly, in the assertion that human liberty was a right belonging to the African. Mrs. Grimké could see no connection here. Slaves to her were a different order of being; they were her inferiors; different canons of human rights applied to them. But I would have you sense the subtleties of this problem. The case is complicated by human frailties. Over the years after Angelina left her home, after she had become a public figure in the anti-slavery movement, she wrote home constantly trying to convert her mother. They were both religious, both believed that to sin against God’s law meant dire consequences to the unregenerate soul. Angelina was disturbed on her mother’s account. As we will see, Mrs. Grimké was disturbed by Angelina. As you can guess, Angelina became a trial to her mother. Mrs. Grimké grew weary of the notoriety of her daughter, her “alien” daughter, as she often called her. Sometimes this notoriety struck close to home, such as on the occasion when one of Angelina’s tracts, called “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” (appealing to them to turn against slavery), found its way in a good many copies to the post office of Charleston—this in 1836. And a crowd of Charleston citizens raided the post office, took out the pamphlets, and made a bonfire of them. A lawless act—and a very unpleasant experience for the many Grimkés living in Charleston, we must grant that. No, Mrs. Grimké’s life was not made easy by her daughter—I suppose could not be. Certainly, she wearied of her letters urging that she free her slaves. Mrs. Grimké became impatient and extremely defensive. She began to point out wherein her daughter was at fault. “I have more charity than you have,” she once wrote, “I believe there are many Christians among the abolitionists, I have no doubt there are many of God’s precious Children of the opposite party”—at this point, however, her “charity” broken down, as she 57

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added sharply—“that engine that Satan is using to destroy the good understanding between North and South.” Perhaps Mrs. Grimké felt a “sense of guilt.” (Some regard this as a trait of the white Southerner’s mental pattern.) If she did, it was not in her conscious mind. She reminded her daughter that tolerance was a virtue. “Far be it from me to be so arbitrary in judgment as to condemn everyone, who cannot think with me. . . . Now I must beg you to consider that I have as much right to maintain my opinion as you have, and as much proof that I am acting from principle as you have: one would suppose you have never been mistaken. . . . Since neither of us is infallible, my Prayer to God is, if you are right, to prosper your undertakings, and to open my eyes, if wrong, that I may see my error, for I have not shut my heart against conviction. . . .” But was it true that Mrs. Grimké had not shut her heart? She herself gives the answer a few lines down, “I should not keep my slaves in Bondage one moment were I convinced I was [a] sinner against God whom I love above all. But I am not convinced of this . . . for,” said Mrs. Grimké , “I expect to die a Slave holder, and at present feel no compunction of conscious on that account.” It could be a temptation to draw parallels, to say, here in its essence are today’s attitudes among those white Southerners impervious to change. But this would be doing violence to the facts. There may well be those who say, “I expect to die—Segregationist.” It still is not the same. Back of them lies more than a century of historic changes that have altered mental patterns, even of those that seem so reminiscent of the past than of that bygone day. [break in manuscript] . . . doctrine was set forth, a doctrine that said so long as facilities for the two races were allegedly “equal,” separation did not contravene the law—this was its essence. This doctrine became the main bulwark of this entire segregation institution. In 1954, the Supreme Court rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine. This decision is momentous, a worthy addition to our conception of human rights. Said the court, “We come to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.” The court says further (I am quoting scattered sentences), “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” “We 58

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conclude,” says the Court, “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It is not for me to speculate about the course of change, but there are a few facts and factors that I find throw light for me. There is a little book by a distinguished Southern historian, Professor C. Van Woodward of Johns Hopkins University, its title The Strange Career of Jim Crow: A Brief Account of Segregation. It is made up of lectures Professor Woodward gave in 1954 at the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s university. Among other things it shows that legalized segregation in the Southern states, touching schools, transportation, housing, occupations, and the numerous laws disenfranchising the Negro citizen—that this entire network that constitutes the pattern of segregation was built up gradually in the late nineteenth century, that it arose against a good deal of Southern opposition, and that it did not reach completion until fairly recent times, perhaps after the turn of the twentieth century. In some sense, therefore, it is not so deeply rooted; it can almost be said to have come within my lifetime; hence its eradication may not be so vast a problem. In any event, it is good to have perspective on this point. Industrialization, I suspect, plays its part in mental patterns. Segregation does not work well in mines and mills, wage structures are difficult to apply in such conditions, efficiency is impeded where there are racial tensions, occupational distinctions according to race are a heavy burden on any industry. The trend in industry is away from discrimination. Much progress has been made in this regard. Desegregation has begun in various areas of the South. For instance, there are the military installations. Not only has segregation ended in the armed forces, but the schools in these locations, as I understand it, have also been desegregated. There are numbers of such places throughout the Southern states. Moreover, in some sense the South as we have known it has dwindled in size. The border states are departing from the old patterns of segregation. In some, the institution is melting away. If you could see a spot map of Kentucky, for instance, it might surprise you to see in how many counties desegregation of schools is already underway. States we once thought of as largely Southern have moved in this matter, are beginning to comply: Maryland, West Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, I believe also parts of Texas and Arkansas. There are isolated instances in a few other states. This leaves chiefly the so-called Deep South states. Well, that does reduce the size of the problem. 59

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I have said nothing today of the Negro’s role and contribution. That has not been my subject. I could say a great deal about the dignity, and self-restraint, and devotion, and belief in our nation’s principles, with which the Negro has pressed his case against segregation. And I do not doubt that in the long run, this role of the Negro will be a constructive factor in bringing many changes in white Southern mental patterns. Mental patterns of many white Southerners have changed. In saying this, I do not feel blandly optimistic—far from it. I know of the violence in the South, I know of the resistance, I know of the measures some state legislatures have passed. It still remains that some Southern minds have changed, and many more are changing under the new situation. You hear all too little about this fact. Such people are going about their daily lives, mindful of their values, and trying to apply them. Many men and women in the churches, in YWCAs and YMCAs, in League of Women Voters, in some parent-teacher groups, many men and women of the teaching profession, many young people in colleges and universities, many in the trade unions. I wish you could know more about these Southern people. How many are changing, I cannot guess. At most, I can say this, that if the recent decisions of the Supreme Court could be accepted as the law of the land in most Southern minds, and if segregation then began to melt away, I am sure the mental patterns would soon see much change, for it would be seen how groundless are the old fears we have harbored, and how reliable as guide posts are our values and ideals.

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Frances H. Williams March 3, 1957, North Carolina State Conference, National Student YWCA

Francis Harriet Williams was born in Kentucky to a well-educated family in 1898 and raised in St. Louis. Her father was the principal at Charles Sumner High School, a black public school in St. Louis, while her mother, Fannie, served on the first Council on Colored Work. Francis was valedictorian of her high school class and enrolled at the University of Cincinnati for one year. After deciding the university was too large, she applied to Mt. Holyoke, which accepted her. When her mother later informed Mt. Holyoke officials that her daughter was black, they informed her she would not be happy at Mt. Holyoke. Fannie Williams replied that she was not sending her daughter to find happiness but to pursue an education. Francis double majored in economics and chemistry, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1919. She later received a master’s degree in political science at the University of Chicago in 1931. She divided her career among race relations work with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the labor division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and governmental work, first as a race relations advisor with the Office of Price Administration during the New Deal and later in the office of Herbert Lehman, governor and senator of New York. Her work with the YWCA allowed her to co-organize (with Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin) the first interracial meetings of its groups in the 1920s. Williams also served on the staff of President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. A lifelong activist for racial justice, Williams passed away in 1992. In this address of March 3, 1957, to the North Carolina State Conference of the National Student YWCA, Williams reveals an arsenal of analytical skills, including ethnography, self-reflection, and literary criticism. She begins by warning students that no one wins a battle over segregation, because we must embrace those we consider the losers as part of our community. Before addressing segregation, she focuses on lynching. To understand fully how that historical process evolved, we must regard the perpetrators, the victims, the fear, and the hatred (of others and self) and place ourselves in the mob. Could we have hated this way? Williams then turns to the issue of segregation using a barrage of anecdotes intended to help us 61

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understand that celebration of freedom is a fleeting need which will soon give way to pragmatic mutual accommodation. Finally she immerses students in the wisdom of Tolstoy, William James, and Emerson to prepare her audience for the future by knowing what they want and where their happiness lies.

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n this third and last conversation together, we must decide what a responsible individual, living in our South, can and must do for his own salvation and for the salvation of the land we love. First and foremost, I think we must understand what—if anything—we are about to lose with the inevitable removal of legal segregation. We must come to understand, whether we are Northern or Southern, whether we are black or white. Now, at first glance, you may say to yourself I have nothing to lose, only all to gain. But that is not so. For no man is an island unto himself so do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. If any man is to lose, then all are to lose. Now it may be that we are losing something we do not want but it is a loss just the same. And it is this loss which we must first come to understand. To suggest something of the nature of this search, may I illustrate from the same field but another day in history. Once we in the South thought of lynching as a sad but inevitable necessity. Dreadful things happened, something had to be done, and that something was lynching. I grew up in a South that felt this way. As a child in Kentucky, I either heard, or thought I heard, through the streets the hoofs of the Night Riders—Kentucky’s form of the Klan—riding forth to preserve something that our system of justice seemed unable to preserve. I was terrified on these nights and the terror has never completely left me. I could not even read about lynchings. But one day I said to myself, well, there are lynchings—and if you are to be of any use as a responsible citizen of the South, this, too, you must come to understand. There is no way to hide from the facts of life—except in fantasy. As an adult you must choose therefore whether to look at the facts or stay in a self-woven cocoon all your life. So I decided to look. When I started to look at lynchings, I know only one thing, namely, that I believe strongly in the American system of justice. I believed that the police force could find and stop wrong doers. I believe that the courts would give every man his day in court and that those who could not function in a constructive manner within our society could find a simpler environment within our walls of confinement where they would do neither

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themselves or others any harm. So I started the search believing that lynchings were unnecessary, mankind had devised a better way. But I also knew that this was not all there was to the problem. The Night Riders did not trust our police or our courts. They trusted their whips and guns. Luckily for me, at this moment of history I had as my close friends “the powers that be” in the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People. I know that their files contained the most authentic records in the country. So I asked to read the records—the raw data. This reading was not easy. But I read. I had to take rest periods in between, but I read page after page until, in my mind’s eye, I began to see it all. The events prior to the lynching, the lynching itself, and the aftermath. And through it all I saw a terrible fear—in fact there was little else but fear. The victim was afraid, those who did the lynching were afraid, the part of the white community that would have no part in the deed itself was afraid, and the Negro community that stood in silence by was also afraid. As I read on, I saw there was something else—hate—hate of white people for Negroes and hatred of Negroes for white people. And then, finally, a long time after I had stopped reading and was just thinking I came to see that there was hatred of white men for themselves and hatred of Negroes for themselves. I began then to see that this self-hate perhaps was the most difficult problem of all. I began to understand that when men and women hate themselves they cannot extend to anyone else the leeway—the time space—in which our system of justice might work. They had to take the matter in their own hands and to relieve themselves of their own hate. They had to be brutal to someone else and, having been brutal for a moment, they then felt safe. The truth of this I found in the records—a town that experienced a lynching for a time was a safe town. Wrong doing of all sorts continued to take place in that town, but no one had to take the law in his own hands. Having read and thought a lot, I began to be less frightened. I began to put myself in the place of the victim of a lynch mob. I saw that, though it would be painful, for the victim this was just one more event. A terrible accident could be equally painful. I even thought of men condemned to die in prison. What was this like? Through my imagination I marched myself to the gas chamber, the scaffold. I saw to be killed was not so bad. It did not last too long. And, by and by, I saw that to be the victim was something one could take. Then I thought about the lynchers. What was the experience for them? Had I myself ever lynched anyone? Had I ever felt that I had to inflict pain? 63

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Here the most difficult part was holding myself to the situation as selected. Then it occurred to me that I, who had never had a gun in my hand, could shoot a mad dog if he were about to attack a child or another person. From this the transfer was easy. I could also shoot into a mob that was heading for the Negro community—my community—to shoot and burn at will. But still I was not at the end of the trail. Could I shoot down the innocent? Had I ever poured forth hate on the innocent? Then I thought of the times I had been angry and poured forth hate in words. That was when light began to dawn. I asked myself, was it worth it? And though it is hard to face that which is evil within you, I looked—maybe not too long—but long enough to know that those who participated in a lynch mob and I were more alike than unlike. They had grown up accustomed to physical violence. I knew only the violence of words, looks, emotional isolation. And having accepted them all—good and bad alike—as my brothers, I was now ready to talk. For two years I talked with people about their experience with the phenomenon of lynching. Once I talked with a young man who rode a whole night in a car with a group of men and a rope. It was to be his last ride. I asked this young man, “How did you feel?” “Well,” he said, “really okay. I had had a good life and this seemed to be the end. The end comes to everyone. What I thought most about was the men who had me physically in their possession. They were such sad men. There was no joy in them.” Another time I talked with a member of a mob. He did no violence himself, but he did go along. On his return home he was sick—physically sick—he could hold nothing on his stomach. Again, I talked with a girl who had ridden past a jail one night and saw the lynch mob standing there. She said, “Frances, it was the stillness that got me. They were deathly still.” Again a young white girl told me of a night when she and her sister had just returned from dates and were sitting on the front porch. The village banker came by. He stopped to chat and they asked what the news was. He said, casually, “Tomorrow at three, there is to be a lynching.” My friend told me that when he said these words, she could not speak. “Up to that moment,” she said, “I thought lynchings were just things that happened and no one could stop them and here was my mother’s friend calmly announcing even the hour a lynching was to be and it was still a night and a half a day away. Yet, our friend, the banker, planned to do nothing.” But this journey that I took in an effort to understand for myself the phenomenon of lynching, many men and women, Northerners, Southerners, whites and blacks have taken. And that which we all found, we did not like. 64

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So, collectively, we decided to give up lynching and we have. We are all proud that we have done so. For the problems of hate and fear in this instance, we have found a better answer. And so it is with segregation. We must first come to understand what this phenomenon is, then see if we like it, and finally ask ourselves if we lose it, will we be proud? I think we will. I think we will find—and the we here is all of us, white and black, Northern and Southern—we will find a simple fact, namely, that we do not like segregation and that there is a better answer to the fears that trouble men. But the search to understand will not be easy. It will be time-consuming but not nearly as time-consuming as the perpetuation of segregation. Have you ever thought how much time and energy goes into this business of preserving white supremacy? Have you ever thought how costly it is not only in dollars and cents, but in happiness? If you decide to take up this search, do not try to cover the whole field at one leap. Select one segment: Segregation in schools—or segregation on buses. Or take a field where there is no legal segregation, but segregation by custom, like the unwillingness to call adult Negro women Mrs. or Miss. And try to find all the facts of this field of activity and the meaning of the facts of those who participate. Be sure to take an area where you yourself have some firsthand data. And remember, don’t let yourself off easy. At the same time, do not berate yourself. Here is a little guide post: You seldom arrive at any truth without finding a few jokes along the way. If you never really see how funny you yourself were and are in the midst of all you are studying, then you probably haven’t struck rock bottom yet. So just go on, and on, and on. There are some books that will help. But in reading, remember that no one book can tell the complete story. I think of Cash’s Mind of the South; Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream; Walter White’s Rope and Fagot; Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom; Richard Wright’s Black Boy; Du Bois’s Litany of Atlanta; Katherine Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner, and many others. I want to repeat that the need to understand is present in all of us. Perhaps we will never finish our study. At times, insight will come at unexpected places. I remember one lovely, sunny morning I was riding down from Harlem to midtown Manhattan, when I experienced a great enlightenment. I was on the Lexington Avenue bus. At that time the bus stopped to load and unload passengers at every other street, the even-number streets. One 65

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large colored lady decided to get off at 91st Street; not 92nd or 90th, but 91st Street. So she pulled the bell and did not let go. Now the bus driver had been told by his company to get along with Negroes—no matter what, just to get along. So he stopped the bus at 91st Street. Then the lady descended to the step which automatically held the door open—and thus made it impossible for the bus driver to close the door and proceed on his journey. Standing there, she turned to him and proceeded to deliver a sermon. Everyone on the bus was speechless as they listened to this good lady deliver herself of her complete thoughts on the white race. They were not pretty thoughts, neither were her words qualified or even printable. I am sure she didn’t plan this sermon, it just welled up in her and she delivered it—regardless of the inappropriateness of the time and place. It was authentic, but I think, objectively speaking, one could call it nothing but a tirade of hate. The driver said nothing. No one in the bus moved or spoke. All just listened. When she had finished, she descended to the street and went on about her business without even a backward glance. The bus moved on. Next to me was seated a young Negro lad of about sixteen. He looked puzzled and ashamed. So I thought I must speak. He must understand. So I said, “Son, our people are wonderful. Now take that lady, she is really celebrating her freedom.” He waited a moment, then he smiled. I continued: “You see, she has been pushed around all her life—and now she is where she knows no one is going to push her around simply because she is a Negro. So she decided to get it all off her chest and she did just that. I suspect she feels fine now and will have a good day.” Then I added, “You see, this is part of the price of segregation. This is part of the price that all of us must pay because we have not been smart enough to do away with this evil in our midst. This good lady, struggling to possess her own self-respect, knows no other way. We, and the society we allow to exist, have provided her with no better teaching. So we must not be ashamed of her. We must love her and the driver also. Because, whether he understood or not, he did not strike back. Not one ugly word did he utter. He merely took it.” Now this is what parents do all the time with little children’s pent up frustrations. They simply take the punishment their offspring dish out to them, knowing that they must help the child find a better way. And no better way can be found if the parent is angry. It is only in and through love—hard, realistic, yet tender love—that a better way can be found. But my lady on the Lexington Avenue bus was not unique. 66

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All over the country our fellow citizens have been paying this kind of price. If I had time, I would indicate that this price is not just for our sins of commission or omission, but also for their own. But now I want to tell you another story that indicates that my lady on the bus is not unique. A business man, whom I came to know at OPA [Office of Price Administration], said to me one day: “When you come to California, I want you to meet the chief of police of Los Angeles. He is a wonderful man. You know, when Negroes first came to our city, they didn’t seem to care for our custom of boarding the bus from the rear. They preferred to get on at the front door. Now this upset the bus company no end. The company had provided that people would pay their fare but they would not get on at the right place. Well, the drivers would stop and call the police. There would be a great waste of time. The public was inconvenienced. The police couldn’t see how the bus company was injured too much since the people were not really trying to gyp them out of their money. It was all very confusing. Finally the chief of police got in on the problem. “Now the chief was accustomed to looking at human behavior and saying to himself ‘just what am I looking at?’ And being very wise, he understood. The Negroes were just celebrating their freedom. So he said to the bus people, ‘Why not let them celebrate. You will lose a few dimes, but you are losing by having your buses stop and miss all that time. Why don’t you just let the Negroes do as they please? It will not last very long. Celebrations never do. By and by they will join the family, and then they will want to do things like the rest of us. Then they will get on from the rear end and pay their dimes and everything will be okay. But if you keep on stopping your buses, you will continue to lose money. Furthermore, you are wasting my men’s time—sending for them to arrest people over a dime.’ “So the bus company reluctantly, but still with a shrewd eye as to the profit and loss column, agreed. And, by and by, everybody was getting on the rear of the buses and what was once a problem vanished into thin air.” You see, what I am really suggesting is that, if you do your research properly, in the end you will be like the chief of police. You will understand everybody’s point of view and you will be able to suggest what we are really dealing with and so modify people’s conduct that things will work out to everyone’s satisfaction. I am also suggesting that this is a process which will give you great inner satisfaction and a lot of fun. You set the stage and then the good, the bad, the indifferent all behave in a manner which leaves them all more pleased with themselves. Where there was a cold and barren land, you will make once more a friendly country. 67

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And setting the stage is frequently so simple, once you understand just what it is you are dealing with. May I illustrate once more: When I worked for the Office of Price Administration as the Race Relations Advisor, Mr. Chester Bowles was the administrator. The day came when he was going to visit our southern regional office which was located in Atlanta. Now Mr. Bowles had an assistant in charge of all regional offices who was a very nice gentleman from South Carolina. Naturally, therefore, he got all worked up over this visit and came to see me. He asked what would we do about this and that, all situations involving racial factors. I listened politely and saw that the poor man was suffering. He, of course, had stated that he had no personal prejudice against the Negroes. He just wanted everything to go right. But I saw that he just did not know what he was dealing with. So, after hearing him out, I asked him what did he usually do when Mr. Bowles made a visit to a regional office. He said, “Well, I just wire and say he is coming.” I then said, “Why not do that this time. Why prejudge the people in the regional office?” Then to comfort him, I said: “I think everything will come out alright.” But he was doubtful—he was worried about the agency-wide meeting. We had Negroes on the regional staff and there had never been a meeting where they were included. So he prolonged the conversation but then—and here is where “know how” comes in—I gave him no further help, I just listened. So finally he got tired of his own words and said, “Well, I guess I will just wire them.” I said, “That will be fine.” Now you see the thing I understood that the assistant in charge of regional offices did not recognize was that the men in charge of the Atlanta office supported the Southern way of life, but they were also interested in their own jobs and that they would not find too much pain in setting aside their prejudices to please the administrator, who after all could continue or withdraw their paychecks. I knew that there would be no segregation at that meeting, that all employees would be invited, and everyone would feel the better for having been there, including the administrator. So I just set the stage and let things evolve as they might. It turned out to be a fine visit. Everyone had a nice time. And, as for me, I chuckled over it all then and I still chuckle. You see, men like to be their best selves—all you need to do is help them a little every now and then. Sometimes I think there resides in the Supreme Court this kind of thinking. They just set the stage for us, and they know haltingly, eagerly, and even sometimes reluctantly, most of us will come along, and in the end we will like 68

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being our best selves. They are just helping us by assuring us that we really are fairminded people. We really do love justice. We really do not want to hurt anyone. So they believe not so much in what we are, but in that which we can become—granted they have given us a little shove. But the action part, just like coming into an understanding, is not all easy or pleasant. Neither do I think action has to wait for complete understanding. For one way of learning is to act. Now it is my belief that no one should act against the segregation pattern of the South except under two conditions—one, when the law requires it and, two, when you desire to do so. In either case the action will bring you a new experience and sometimes the experiences which follow may fill you with strange and poignant emotions. These will have to be digested and incorporated into your total framework. Let me suggest something of what some of these feelings may be. A good friend of mine who was born and brought up in the South said to me one day, “You know, if you are white it is not so hard, once you make up your mind, to act against the Southern code. But the act itself leaves you feeling exposed, like you just dropped your petty in the middle of the street.” As I listened, I remembered that at times I too felt exposed, as on that day when I waited on the railroad platform in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was waiting for a young white student who was to chair one of the three first interracial conferences we ever had in the South, where there was no segregation. I was the YW regional secretary in charge and I had to go over the conference plans with this young man before proceeding on to Chattanooga to make arrangements for a place to house the conference. I knew no place in Knoxville where the two of us could meet and talk, since he was a white student and I was a Negro secretary. I finally decided on the platform of the railroad station, one of those as yet unassigned places. He arrived, we talked, my train came. He picked up my bags. But I said, “Never mind—you go on, I will attend to them.” I walked down the platform. It was night. I saw the Pullman conductor. I asked if I could have a berth. Hearing in my voice my own recognition of his right to refuse me, he said, “Get on ahead.” I did. I entered the Jimmie and sank down. A few minutes later, there came the clanking of chains. A large man carrying a shotgun arrived and ordered all passengers to sit on one side. Then came the chain gang. But even here the Southern way of life was not ignored. The white prisoners were chained in front and the Negro prisoners in the rear, but a single chain held them all. I had seen prisoners chained together before, but I had never been so close to them for such a long period 69

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of time. They were quiet enough people that night, except for one white lad notably disturbed. For myself, I was not only longing for a bed and clean sheets, but I was hungry. A waiter from the dining car came through. I asked if he could get me something to eat. He said the dining car was closed. I said, “Well, bring me a sandwich.” He seemed indifferent. He was indifferent. So I sat throughout the night with one hundred dollars cash in my pocketbook. But I was unable to buy food or a proper resting place. But this is not all that happened that night. At four in the morning, after a long taxi ride, I awoke a Negro family who had never seen me. They asked who I was. They took me in on faith and shared what they had with me. The next day I secured a church for the conference and that night found me again in the Jim Crow waiting room, waiting for a train. The waiter who had come into the “Jimmie” the night before passed by. He stopped, looked at me, then he said, “You are the lady who wanted something to eat last night.” I said, “Yes”—and that was that. However, in the years that have passed since that Chattanooga conference, I have had student after student who was there say to me, “Of course, you know him, Frances. He hit the saw-dust trail to Chattanooga.” So I knew then and I know now that in that conversation at the railroad station and all that followed I helped build the kind of world I believe in, I want, and I love. I think now as I retell this story that my life has been right in spite of the hardships. I have had opportunities to create that which is good. I have worked for things that count and, having done so, I know that I shall always do so. There is but one requirement and that is to rise and greet the day. The work is always there. My young friends, in this last story I have suggested the final thing I wish to say to you, namely, something about the nature of the rewards that come to those who venture to build creatively against the hard, rigid, and destructive lines of segregation in the South. Some of these rewards are suggested by Tolstoy in his War and Peace. I quote from two sections: The first is when a prisoner is standing a captive before one of Napoleon’s generals. Tolstoy writes: At the first glance, when (the general) had only raised his head from the papers where human affairs and lives were indicated by numbers, (the prisoner) was merely a circumstance, and (the general) could have shot him without burdening his conscience with a evil deed, but now he saw in him a human being. 70

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The second quote concerns itself with the hero of this great novel, Peter, who is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian Empire. During the French invasion Peter is taken prisoner and dragged through much of the retreat. Tolstoy writes: here only, and for the first time (Peter) appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words. . . . Later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful . . . sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch. . . . He learned that man is meant for happiness and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance. . . . When calm reigned in the camp . . . The woods and the field roundabout lay clearly visible. . . . Then Peter cast his eyes on the firmament, filled at that hour with myriad of stars. “All that is mine,” he thought. “All that is in me, is me. And that is what they think they have taken prisoner. That is what they have shut up in a cabin.” So he smiled and turned in to sleep among his comrades. William James in commenting upon this passage wrote: “The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given.” Emerson also speaks about this kind of excitement in life when he said: “Crossing a bare common in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.” So the real decision as to what you as an individual shall do—granted you are a Southerner and live in the South—lies in the answer to another question: What do you want from life? The ease and comfort of a silken cocoon woven out of the tears and heartbreaks of others—or the inner calm of knowing that the stars are yours because you paid the price to claim them for your own. Of this no prison, no torture, can deprive you. What you really want, you get. Make no mistake about this. Life will not deny you your own purchase in its market place. The choice is unlimited. Just be sure you know what you want and where your happiness lies.

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Edith S. Sampson April 12, 1957, Regional Conference of the Links, Kansas City, Missouri

Edith Spurlock Sampson was born on October 13, 1901, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Louis and Elizabeth Spurlock. She graduated from Peabody High School before moving to New York City. In New York, she worked for Associated Charities while studying at the New York School of Social Work. She married Rufus Sampson in the early 1920s. In 1922, she moved to Chicago, working as a social worker while taking night courses at John Marshall Law School where she graduated first in her class in 1925. In 1927, she became the first woman to obtain a Master of Laws Degree from Loyola University. Later that same year she passed the bar exam. In 1934 she was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Not long thereafter, Sampson divorced her first husband and married Joseph Clayton, keeping the name Sampson because people already knew her by that name professionally. In 1947, she became assistant state’s attorney for Cook County. Two years later, she participated in a round-the-world town meeting, a tour of twenty-six prominent Americans to engage people from all over the world. When questioned in India about the condition of African Americans, she pointedly replied, “I would rather be a Negro in America than a citizen in any other land.” In 1950, President Truman appointed her alternate U.S. delegate to the United Nations; she was the first African American woman to serve in this capacity. President Eisenhower appointed her to the U.S. commission for UNESCO. In 1961 she became the first African American U.S. representative to NATO, and during the following year she became the first African American woman to serve as judge of the municipal court of Chicago. From 1966 to 1978 she served as associate judge for the circuit court of Cook County. Edith Sampson died on October 8, 1979, in Chicago. Her papers are housed at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. In this speech of April 12, 1957, before an African American social service organization in Kansas City, Missouri, she asserts that she does not want pity from her audience for having been vilified by famous segregationists; in fact, such vilification functions rhetorically to instantiate her racial bona fides. She encourages her audience to look at the new era as a new set of responsibilities, not just opportuni72

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ties, and to realize that segregation had certain advantages that are falling away as protective environments like churches, historically black colleges, and middle class business districts give way to the competitive environment of an integrated and interdependent society. She urges the audience to remember, as bitter opponents continue their quest for segregation, the world is watching the U.S. experience as other nations decide on strategies for dealing with their differences. She ends her speech encouraging tolerance and patience.

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latforms,” said Clarence Darrow, the famed attorney for the defense, “are not the proper forums for spreading doubts, the miscellaneous audience wants to listen to a man”—and, I suppose, also to a woman—“who knows. How he knows is of no concern to them. Such an audience wishes to be told, and especially wants to be told what it already believes.” Most people know Clarence Darrow because of his brilliant defense in the Leopold trial. He was a smart man, Clarence Darrow, great enough, wise enough that the Adult Education Council in Chicago is now preparing to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his birth. He was also, as it happens, one of the nation’s greatest public speakers. Undoubtedly, then, he knew what he was talking about when he made this observation about what it is the audience wants. Yet, I am going to disregard his counsel. I’m going to risk saying some things that many of you may very well not believe at all. I’m going to take the risk because I think these things are tremendously important, and because I believe them with a passionate sincerity. It would be easy to use the privilege granted me tonight of being the first speaker at this regional meeting to deliver a stock speech of self-pity. I could picture the past and the present of our grave oppression. I could deliver tirades against those who have mocked and scorned us, those who have beaten and burned in the blind fight to deny us our heritage of liberty. I could blast the Eastlands and the Byrnes and all the bigoted others who would put us in shackles again, repealing the Proclamation of Our Emancipation. And then I could, in a ringing concluding paragraph, warn all our enemies that the truth of our freedom is indeed marching on and will not be denied. This, I say, I could do easily. For I know all of the usual phrases, and I know the realities of which they are born. Remember, I too am one of the despised. 73

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Through circumstances I did not control and for which I cannot take credit, I have twice been privileged to serve with the United States Delegation to the United Nations. I have also known what it means to have a white sneer and refuse to shake my hand and to be denied membership in a bar association. I have been privileged to travel much of the world and to meet many people of high rank. I have also known what it means to be refused in my own country a seat on the first floor of a theater. I have been called “Madame” respectfully in Iran and India, and I have also been called unspeakable names in scores of cities in my native land. So, if I do not now dwell upon the many injustices done to us, it’s not for any want of knowing them. Rather, it’s that I’m afraid that we, like so many other minorities, are in danger from ourselves. Ourselves, not those around us. We’re in danger of defensively huddling close together, commiserating with each other, assuring each other that we’re badly abused. We’re in even greater danger of forgetting that the goals for which we’ve been striving can be attained only at a price. A stiff price. We have for many years now been carrying into battle a banner, that shouted one stirring phrase—“Equal Opportunity.” It’s a good rallying cry, and God knows it’s a necessary one. But, it’s time, and past time, that we began to realize that that’s only one half the story. The other half is in another phrase, equally stirring but even more challenging—“Equal Responsibility.” These are the two sides of the same single coin. They have to go together. We don’t deserve equal opportunity, unless we’re willing to pay the price of equal responsibility to get it. That’s why I’m convinced we—you and I—have to begin asking ourselves the really hard question: What am I doing, me personally, to earn the recognition of the human dignity to which I’ve so long laid claim. You know that over the years the authors of a thousand books or more and ten thousand stories in magazines have written to fabricate a stereotype of us. In their writings we’re the Uncle Toms, the Handkerchief Heads, only a single step removed from the slave shanties of a romantic South that never was. There are some, it’s true, who’ve libeled us as vicious criminals, immoral, unprincipled. But there are more who have libeled us as a carefree lot, natural comedians, childishly simple. And always in those distortions, there is one characteristic we are supposed to have in abundance: We are, these authors say, irresponsible. Irresponsible. 74

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I know of only one way, really, to nail the vicious lie, which is all the more vicious for pretending to be kindly. That’s to prove by our actions that we are capable of responsibility, high responsibility. I know that I don’t always do it. I’m afraid there is none of us who does it as well and as consistently as we should. But I’m everlastingly sure that we ought to try. We came to the top of a high peak in this nation on May 17, 1954. We had mounted a smaller one before, when the Supreme Court had said that the judicial arm of the states could no longer be used to enforce racial covenants. But we were at a much loftier height than that in 1954 when the Supreme Court read the death sentence on segregation in the schools. Here at last was the end to legal protection for the grim inequalities in educational opportunity. Here was an end to the tragic farce of the self-contradicting “separate but equal” doctrine. Now finally, we told ourselves, our children would be given a fair chance to get the education they must have, if ever they’re to develop their full potential. Now the doors, so long locked in our faces, would be opened at least to the generations to come after us. We told ourselves more: we told ourselves the fall of segregation in the schools foreshadowed a cracking of the old barrier everywhere. And we were right. There are still segregated golf courses in southern parks, but they no longer have the sanction of law upon them. There are still segregated buses moving over the streets of southern towns, but they’ve lost all their claim to legality. Once these things had happened, though, some among us went one step further in the messages of congratulations we were exchanging. Now that the court has spoken, not just once, but several times, they said, it’s all up to the white man. It’s all up to the white man now. I don’t believe it. I think we are in the gravest peril of our lives if we act on it. It’s obvious that much of the job must be done by the whites, just as it’s obvious some are Hell bent on not doing it. It’s for them to open the universities to the Autherine Lucys and to give them protection. It’s for the white men, because they dominate school boards everywhere, to move with deliberate speed to close out segregation in the high schools and the grade schools. It’s for the white men, because they control the city councils everywhere, to rewrite the shameful, outmoded laws of the color line. 75

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It’s for the white men, because they dominate the legislatures, state and federal, to outlaw discrimination in hiring and to make civil rights something more than a mockery. But, dare we say that it’s all up to them? Dare we sit back, arms folded, and say that our job is over with, completed? We risk catastrophe if we do it. Let’s here among ourselves be honest enough to admit that some of us have profited by segregation. We’ve been confined and limited by the walls of the ghettoes built around us. But we’ve also been defended by them. Among our own, at least, we’ve gained at times by being shielded from competition with whites. Sometimes we could explain away our failures by rationalizing that it was only our color that was against us. Sometimes we gained certain successes strictly because there is naturally a spirit of cohesion within a besieged camp, and we were under siege. But the siege is lifted, at least in part. Now we must begin to cross-examine ourselves. The questions are many, and some of them are terribly uncomfortable. Are we trying ourselves to walk outside the now-broken walls of the segregated community? Are we willing to accept personal losses by giving up the cozy protection that segregation automatically conferred on us? Are we, who once railed against the whites for their bigotry, now refusing on our own to extend the hand of friendship even to whites who would be friendly? What are we doing in our communities for the newcomers? Are we rejecting them as ignorant, or are we accepting them as simply unfortunate in not having had our opportunities? To how many of them have we extended a welcome and an offer of help in the difficult job of adjustment? Having cracked one line that prejudiced hatred drew, are we now drawing our own lines of selfish discrimination among ourselves? What are we doing to insure a better education for Americans in general and for Negroes in particular? Are we working so the people as people, regardless of color or creed or nationality, can develop their talents and skills to the fullest? Are we giving only lip service to such magnificent efforts as the Montgomery Improvement Association? Or are we giving of our time or our money to help support this world-recognized spontaneous revolt of passive resistance to inequality? Are we stirring within our own circles new animosities, new hatreds, that will flame in new violence? Or are we working for the patient tolerance and the encompassing understanding and the sensitive compassion that we wept for when it was denied to us? 76

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I cannot pretend to answer any of the questions for you. Only you can do that, even as I must answer them for myself and must myself face up to my own shortcomings. But I can tell you this: upon your answers—your own individual answers— and upon mine may ride the fate of our entire world. I know—that’s the kind of sweeping generalization you come to expect from the platform and to discount even as you hear it. “The fate of our entire world may ride upon our answers.” But I am not exaggerating in this instance, not by half. We are witnesses today to one of the great revolutions of all history, a revolution of the colored peoples of the world. It has long been in the making, but most of the leaders of the West, smug in their stupidity, have refused to see it. With a show of reluctance that deceived no one, they insisted on shouldering “the white man’s burden.” Translated, that phrase proved to mean only the ruthless imposition of colonial exploitation on what were patronizingly called The Backward Peoples. Those leaders might have staved off disaster if ever they had been willing to share their power with those they ruled. But they would not. Their only thought was exerting power over them. Now, in our times, the pressures so long kept under a heavy lid have exploded. We have seen new, independent nations come to birth—India, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, a new Egypt, on down to the youngest, Ghana. We have seen Algiers, Morocco, and Tunis writhe in a long-delayed revolt, and the whole eastern sky has been aflame with the fires of rebellion. What has happened is that people who long considered themselves an oppressed minority awoke to the fact that they were really a majority. Twothirds of this world’s population is what the Caucasians call colored—yellow, brown, black, red, what have you. And so in a world movement of which our own surge toward self-assertion is an important part, the colored people have smashed the old chains. Tragically, though, many of the newborn nations have found that only the breaking isn’t enough to give them what they most desperately want. They wanted liberty, yes—but a liberty to progress, to attain a security for themselves and a new wealth of opportunity for their children, and this, they have discovered, is not easily come by. Because they were so long kept under the heel, they’ve had no chance to develop any of the techniques of true stability. So they look now for a model on which to pattern themselves and a friend who can give them constructive aid. 77

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Where will they find that model and that friend? What course will they choose? On their answers to those questions the whole shape of our own future depends. For it must be obvious that as the world is now put together their choice must lie between the Communism of the East on the one hand and the Democracy of the West on the other. And who stands to speak for the West? Not Britain surely. The colonialism that was so firmly entrenched a policy of the United Kingdom must forever stand as a reproach to the colonial people but recently freed. Not France surely. The French fight, even now, to maintain their policies of exploitation in a world where there’s no longer room for them. There is in truth only the one last, great hope of the world—the United States. Our United States—and let’s never forget that it’s ours. It’s ours by virtue of blood—the blood of our birth and the blood our people spilled on a hundred battlefields to defend it. It’s ours by virtue of our own aspirations. We cannot leave it to the whites alone to carry the case of our United States, which is the case for true liberty, to the peoples abroad. They can’t do it, as a matter of fact. There are too many places on this globe today where a white skin is a badge of infamy. The dispossessed, now come into their own, shy from the man of pale skin as if he were leprous. They will trust only their own—people like you and me. And so it is that we must talk to them. I don’t mean that we must, all of us, catch the next plane or the next ship and roam the foreign nations, evangelizing. There’s need for that, great need, but it’s an avenue necessarily open to few. But we can in our daily living talk to those on the other side of the world. They watch us. You’d be amazed how closely they watch us. I wish often that our white friends would recognize that. I wish that they would realize that if a young girl is turned away from a southern university today because of her color, the news of it is known in Indonesia tomorrow. If a council in Montgomery bars interracial domino-playing today—and it has done just that—resentment against it flares in Pakistan tomorrow. If a blameless young Negro is struck down on the streets of Chicago today, a darkskinned radio commentator will be flaying the western democracies with that fact in Egypt tomorrow. But it will not be enough if only the whites come to this realization. We must come to it, too, you and I. We must come to see that we live, like it or not, in a goldfish bowl, and all that we do is on display to the world. 78

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We have our complaints against the continuing abuse of our people here in this nation, of course. We have a long way to go down a hard road before we attain the goals—the legitimate goals—we have set for ourselves. But let’s soberly remember this even as we continue to fight the good fight: in no other nation, in no other time has a people managed to make the strides that we who are Negroes have been able to make here. And we have been able to make them because, however imperfectly, the dream of a democratic freedom has been kept alive in this nation. Men may deny it in practice at times, but the words of the Declaration of Independence affirming that all men—all—men—are created equal remain a perpetual challenge, a perpetual taunt to hardened consciences. And the world does move. It does move. It will continue to move if we can keep the beacon of our own performance here alight by taking on ourselves the responsibility that goes with opportunity. I began with a passing quotation from Clarence Darrow. Let me close with another that is appropriate for its own pertinence as well as for the fact that Thursday marks the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Clarence Darrow was making his summary in the second of the famous Sweet trials in Detroit. This was in the 1926 case when Darrow successfully fought for the principle that a man’s home is his castle even if the man be black. And as he closed, he said this: I do not believe in the law of hate. I may not be true to my ideals always, but I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred. I would like to see a time when a man loves his fellow man and forgets his color or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes. I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The law had made him equal, but man has not. And, after all, the last analysis is, what has man done? And not what has the law done? I know there is a long road ahead of him before he can take the place which I believe he should take. I know that before him there is suffering, sorrow, tribulation and death among the blacks and perhaps the whites. I am sorry. I would do what I could to avert it. I would advise patience: I would advise tolerance: I would advise understanding: I would advise all of those things which are necessary for men who live together. 79

Edith S. Sampson

Yes, patience, tolerance, understanding, all of those things which are necessary for men who live together. I cannot help feeling that Darrow was talking to us as well as to that allwhite jury in Detroit.

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Johnnie Carr June 1957, Women’s Auxiliary Baptist State Convention of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois

Johnnie Rebecca Daniels Carr was born on January 26, 1911, the youngest of six children of John and Annie Richmond Daniels. Her father died when she was nine, and her mother raised her alone from that time onward. They moved to Montgomery to find schools that provided more education than was possible in their rural home which had schools that met only six months per year. In Montgomery, Johnnie attended the Bredding School and Alice L. White’s Industrial School for Girls, both private. At Mrs. White’s school, Johnnie met Rosa Parks, who would become her lifelong friend. After a brief marriage to Jack Jordan when she was sixteen, Carr eventually graduated from high school and practiced nursing; later she became a successful insurance agent. She joined the NAACP in the late 1930s following an event at Hall Street Baptist Church. She also became an active volunteer in the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). She remarried in 1944, to Arlam Carr, a union which would last for more than sixty years. In 1955, when her friend Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat on a segregated city bus, Johnnie joined her and others in organizing the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). During the 381-day bus boycott, Carr served as secretary of transportation. She later served briefly as vice president of the MIA until she began her forty-year role as president of the association in 1967. In 1964, her son, Arlam Carr Jr., was the litigant whose case prompted the courts to integrate the Montgomery school district. Going strong well into her nineties, Johnnie Carr served Montgomery’s African American community in countless capacities since the civil rights era and was the recipient of three honorary doctoral degrees. In 1998 the Johnnie Carr Center opened in Montgomery to provide adult day health services, and in 2004 the Southern Poverty Law Center feted Carr with its Woman of Courage award. Carr died on February 22, 2008, at the age of ninety-seven. Her papers are housed at the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. In this June 1957 speech, Johnnie Carr addresses the Women’s Auxiliary Baptist State Convention in Illinois, one of three out-of-state speeches she gave after the conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott organized to protest the arrest of Rosa 81

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Parks. Here Carr gives an eyewitness account of the events leading up to the boycott. She begins with what she describes as an uneasy, superficial peace wherein African Americans were often humiliated and resentful. She then recounts cases where two teenage girls and one war veteran received fines. After narrating these events she turns to an account of Rosa Parks’s refusal to relinquish her seat, having decided with Thurgood Marshall that gradualism had lasted long enough. Carr compares her close friend’s behavior to the Biblical Esther, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Nannie H. Burroughs (president of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention), thus placing her rhetorically in the lineage of some of the world’s most revered women activists. Our transcription of Carr’s address is from a handwritten original housed at the King Center.

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his story has been told many times by many people in many places. It seems to hold something that no other story told of a people struggling for Freedom and Human Dignity has. Its beginning is very strange. Its place is even more startling for it would seem that a story such as this one would have had its beginning in some place where people were already fairly free, and its beginning, it seems, should have had prepared plans for such a tremendous program. The place was Montgomery Alabama, the capital of Alabama, known to many as the Cradle of the Confederacy and the Heart of Dixie. A place where Negroes seemed very polite to the other group. Always giving up their rights for peace. But this kind of peace was only on the surface; way deep down inside they were sick at heart of the many humiliating experiences which led to deep resentment. Public transportation provided by the city was one place where constantly the Negro was humiliated. They were constantly embarrassed by having to stand over empty seats, having to pay their fares at the front door and go to the back to board the bus. Sometimes they were left standing if they could not push [. . .] Many times drivers passed passengers without stopping if the rear was filled and they didn’t want them standing near the front where empty seats were being reserved for white people who might get on later. The drivers were often discourteous and rude in speaking to Negro passengers. The segregation law then existing and rigidly enforced was that no white and colored passengers could occupy the same seat or sit across the aisle from each other. Then there was another very humiliating experience of being ar-

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rested for refusing to get up and give a seat to a white person. But drivers often forced Negro passengers (usually women) to stand up for white passengers (usually men) to sit. On March 2, 1955, a fifteen-year-old high school girl, Miss Claudette Colvin, was arrested, handcuffed, and jailed for refusing to give up a seat almost to the rear of the bus. She was found guilty of disorderly conduct and assault and battery. It required three officers to arrest and take her from the bus. Later in March 1955 a veteran of World War II and a recent patient of the Veterans Hospital [. . .] The young man was not riding the bus only standing in the street. From this the driver was only fined twenty-five dollars. He continued to drive the bus on the same route. In October 1955 Miss Mary Smith age eighteen was arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus. She paid the fine charged. Following these incidents and general practices so humiliating to us, committees of citizens representing organizations and individuals called on the city commissioner and bus company officials with petitions that action be taken to relieve this very unpleasant situation. They were always politely brushed off. No action was ever taken to remedy these existing evils. The Negro was growing more and more tired of such abuse and accepting these conditions meted out by the other group, which to them were their Southern way of life and their traditions. Through the years the white man had used this southern tradition to perpetuate the myth of White Supremacy and to instill in the Negro an inferiority complex. They pretend to believe and want us to believe that [. . .] They also want us to believe that we are happier as an inferior race with an inferior social, economic, and political position. That it is best for us to stay in our circumscribed place as they see fit to push us around. Many Negroes lost faith in themselves and came to believe that they were something less than men. With the Negroes’ acceptance of this role a sort of racial peace could be maintained. It was an uneasy peace in which the Negro was found to accept patiently injustice, insult, injury, and exploitation. In the ninety-four years since chattel slavery was abolished the white man has done as excellent job of brainwashing the Negro. He lost faith in himself as a man. But somehow we learned that our self-respect had not been entirely smothered, and we just could not go on living with ourselves without asserting it. The good race relations in the South was placed in jeopardy as the masses of Negroes began to reevaluate themselves. A new Negro came into being determined to fight and struggle for justice and human dignity. The stage was well set for the spontaneous action of Montgomery Negroes to not ride the buses. 83

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The action of one woman, one determined woman, not to give up her seat for anyone else sparked the movement. It was the determination of Mrs. Rosa Parks not to be pushed around anymore. She made up her mind as she sat on that bus that before she’d continue to be a slave she’d rather be buried in her grave than go home to her God and be saved. In every generation there is a person for the job. Bible history gives us such great persons as Esther, who saved her people from being destroyed because she was fearless. These are women who prayed for God’s minister when they were put in jail. Our history gives us great women who had a burning desire for freedom and did something about it. The great Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth who worked and fought during the dark days of slavery. It is said that on one occasion a white man stormed up to Sojourner Truth and said, “Old woman do you think your talk about slavery does any good? Why I don’t care any more for your talk than I do about a flea bite.” “Perhaps not,” responded Sojourner Truth, “but the Lord willing I’ll keep you scratching.” The Lord was willing and she did many wonderful things in helping to liberate the slaves. Harriet Tubman was called Moses by her people. She delivered hundreds out of Egypt into the promised land. John Brown called her General Tubman. “There are two things I have a right to,” she said, “they are death or liberty. One or the other I mean to have.” She won liberty. In our day we can recall Mary McLeod Bethune. What great work she did to bring freedom to her people. She worked against many odds. She stands in our memory as a great woman. We have many very fine and brave women today who are giving their all for the cause of freedom and the Christian movement. Our national president Miss Nannie H. Burroughs, your great women here of the State of Illinois and all over the world. We cannot all be great stars, but we can be a star wherever we are. In Montgomery, Alabama, the great Cradle of the Confederacy, the Heart of Dixie we have Mrs. Rosa Parks. The woman who on December 1, 1955, struck the match that has lighted the torch for freedom all over the world. The Negro is no longer satisfied with second-class citizenship, but is willing to fight and work for his freedom. Mrs. Parks had worked very hard that day in a local department store as a seamstress. She was tired and when she got on the bus was happy to be able to get a seat. It was early evening. She sat where Negroes normally sit. After about the third stop from where she got on, the driver demanded her seat and the seat of two other Negroes. They got up but she refused. The policemen were called who arrested her, took her to jail, locked her up, where she was charged with violating the segregating laws of the State of Alabama in public 84

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transportation. She was not permitted to call her family until the usual prison processing was completed, fingerprinting and photographing. Meanwhile Mr. E. D. Nixon had been told of her arrest. He came to the jail, signed the bond of a hundred dollars, and she was released until the trial in recorder’s court, set for Monday, December 5, 1955. Mrs. Parks is a very sweet, kind, and unassuming woman, very civic minded having worked extensively with all of our civic movements. To the minds of the average person they would never have thought of her as the one to rock the Cradle of the Confederacy and plunge the knife of the desire for freedom in the Heart of Dixie, although her early training was from white instructors who gave us the assurance that we were as good as any one. It mattered not the color of the skin or the texture of hair; you are as good as anyone, if your heart is clean. I feel that her training along with her everyday thinking helped her to feel as she did. Love all men, hate none, and know that you are as good as any one. So after many years of trying to live, waiting for gradualism to take effect and as our own leading legal attorney Thurgood Marshall said how long is gradualism after ninety-four years, it is still supposed to be gradual. I feel that on December 1, 1955, Mrs. Parks decided that this is the end to gradual for her. One thing I am sure of it was not premeditated. No one planned for her to even ride a bus nor not to move when asked. The Negro community was so moved that a meeting was called, and it was then decided that on Monday, December 5, the day of Mrs. Parks trial, that no Negro would ride the bus in protest of Mrs. Parks’s arrest. We were getting the word around the best we could, and one of our people who received the message decided to take it to her mistress who in turn notified the bus company and the mayor. They notified the press. Thus we got free publicity we could never have paid for. Some of the events and dates: December 1—Mrs. Parks arrested. December 3—Newspaper publicity about the proposed boycott of buses by certain Negroes. Thirty thousand readers informed. December 5—Mrs. Parks’s trial; fined fourteen dollars; the number joining the protest increased. December 5—A college student was arrested who was helping a lady across the street. He was accused of forcing her to stay off the buses when she was not even intending to ride it. That evening TV news helped to bring out five thousand persons to the first mass meeting. 85

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There are many other meetings of city officials and our leaders and more and more joining the movement. It is hard to explain how one felt; there were many expressions from the general public. The arrest of Reverend King. His home bombed. The near bombing of Mr. E. D. Nixon’s home. The mass arrests with twenty-four ministers included. All of this only cemented the Negroes together. I hope when history is written Mrs. Parks along with many other great women will be remembered. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed and the Reverend M. L. King Jr. was selected to lead the organization. Reverend King is young, well prepared, and fearless. It is he with God who has guided our protest on. There have been many trying, critical situations, during the protest. The transportation system was very good. Many have suffered reprisals, some of which no one will ever know, but as far as possible the MIA has given aid to them. There is a great movement on now to get registered voters. The ballot is very much needed if we are to be free in the South and elsewhere. Our president Reverend King is very dear to those who are seeking firstclass citizenship. He is called the Alabama Moses, called to lead his people out of the valley of Jim Crow to full freedom. He is very handsome and well poised, eloquent though calm, scholarly but down to earth. A native of Georgia he is the son and grandson of distinguished ministers. He is the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church just one short block from the Alabama State Capitol. Reverend King has inspired his followers. They have lost their girl and boy feeling and now feel really grown up, to manhood and womanhood. Our church leadership throughout the city has taken its rightful place in the community, the stream of everyday life in this protest. The mass prayer meetings which are going on every Monday night, the militant stand of the ministers, many of whom were indicted for their part in the protest. We have had many bombings and many other incidents. The Citizen Council and KKK are waving red banners before their people, but we are waving love, nonviolence, prayer, and determination for freedom before our people, and I am sure that with the leadership we have and with God’s guidance we will be completely free someday. For we in Montgomery surprised the world and ourselves with the success of our protest. From the beginning we have insisted on nonviolence. This is a nonviolent protest against injustice. We face our struggle with Christian love but also with a determination not to weaken our efforts to carry on to a victorious end. This we know to be true. We can stick together. We do not fear 86

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threats of intimidation and violence. We have faith in ourselves. Faith in our leadership and faith in our God. May we say with the poet: Beams of Heaven as I go Through this Wilderness below, Guide my feet in peaceful ways. Turn my midnights into days. When in the darkness I would grope, Faith always sees a star of Hope. And soon from all life’s grief and danger I shall be free someday. The power of God is so strong and the determination of our people so strong. There is no man power able to stop it, it may be weeks, months, and even years. We shall be free some day. Burdens now may crush us down, Disappointments all around. Troubles speak in mournful sigh. Sorrow through a tear stained eye. There is a world where pleasure reigns. No mourning soul shall roam its plains And to that land of peace and glory I want to go someday. We may be burdened by the local state courts trying to do all their power to get around the Supreme Court rulings. There may be trouble all around. We may be disappointed because the president does not speak out against violence being done in the Southland. There may be much more shedding of tears, but our God is not asleep, and I believe that we are going to have peace and glory right here. “We do not know how long ’twill be nor what the future holds for us but this we know: if Jesus leads us we shall be free someday.” The author was writing about heaven. I have faith in God and want to go to heaven. I also believe if we keep praying, trusting God, and fighting with love in our hearts, nonviolence in our minds, God is going to let us enjoy some heaven right here. For all of this is His. He said that “the cattle upon a thousand hills are mine,” and I know that I am His also and if I trust Him, He will give me some blessings here and receive me unto Himself when this life is over. Continue to pray for us and do all you can in your own communities to make God real in your life. 87

Lorraine Hansberry May 12, 1959, Women’s Scholarship Association Luncheon Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 19, 1930. Her father, Carl, was a litigious real estate owner and banker, and her mother was a former teacher. They were a well-to-do family and often invited prominent guests such as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Jesse Owens, and Walter White to their home. In 1938 Carl bought a house on the south side of Chicago with the explicit intention of challenging the restrictive covenant clauses used to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods. He won the landmark Supreme Court case (Hansberry v. Lee, 1940), a harbinger of the eventual demise of racially motivated restrictive covenants. This victory was fleeting, as the Hansberrys earned the distinction of living surrounded by hostile neighbors. So hostile was the environment that Carl’s next move was to Mexico, where he hoped to relocate his family just before his death in 1946. Lorraine displayed the Hansberry intelligence very early. In addition to her mother’s teaching background, her grandfather Elden was a history professor at Alcorn College (today Alcorn State University), and her uncle William Leo was a history professor at Howard University. In 1947 Lorraine was elected president of the high school debate team at Englewood High School. She studied from 1948 to 1950 at the University of Wisconsin, where she concentrated on art, literature, and drama. In 1950 she returned to Chicago to study art at Roosevelt University before moving to Harlem to write for Paul Robeson’s monthly magazine Freedom. By 1952 she was promoted to associate editor, the same year she married New York University–trained writer Robert Nemiroff. Perhaps influenced by her historian uncle, she also attended W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminar on African history and culture at the Jefferson School of Social Science, an adult education institute founded by leftist faculty dismissed from City University of New York. In 1953, Lorraine resigned from Freedom to devote her time to more serious writing. She and Nemiroff separated by 1960. Various sources disagree as to whether Hansberry publicly auto-identified as lesbian by the late 1950s, but she did join the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian rights organization. By 1957, a precocious twenty-seven-year-old Lorraine completed Raisin in the Sun; it played in New 88

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Haven and Philadelphia before making it to Broadway in 1959. In addition to being the first Broadway production written by an African American woman and directed by an African American, Raisin in the Sun was a critical smash, winning the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play of the Year in 1959. A less controversial film version won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Screenplay in 1961. In 1962 Hansberry began using her fame to gather resources for the burgeoning civil rights movement. As she became more active, she also began facing the challenge of pancreatic cancer in 1963. She held a fundraiser in her home to provide the automobile which transported Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney to their fate in Mississippi the following summer. She also joined a group of prominent African Americans to vent their private dissatisfaction with the pace of the civil rights movement to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Lorraine Hansberry died on January 12, 1965, at the age of thirty-four. This speech of May 12, 1959, delivered just weeks after the lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Poplarville, Mississippi, is a return to her alma mater, Roosevelt University. She begins her deft theatrical criticism by introducing her audience to a provocative assumption: our drama reflects important realities of our civilizations. To understand Periclean Athens, for example, we must examine the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides. Shakespeare likewise informs us of the conditions of Renaissance Europe, as Chekhov helps us understand Czarist Russia. For postwar U.S. citizens to look in the mirror critically, we thus turn to dramatists such as Archibald McLeish, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lorraine Hansberry. While all are important literary figures, we should also note that all were fairly revolutionary people if not outright expatriates. After establishing the ways drama reflects civilization, Hansberry contrasts her protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, to the angst-ridden characters created by McLeish, Williams, and Miller. While Younger is dissatisfied and perhaps unhappy, he is not a failure. He does not blind himself in helpless rage as Oedipus did. Rather, Younger attacks the oracle, symbolizing American possibility rather than impotence. Likewise, Hansberry (and her audience) must follow her character’s lead. She is restless about having to admit while traveling abroad that she is not a free citizen, that she does not have equal opportunity, and that her countrymen still engage in lynching. Yet her critical admissions allow for, and encourage, meaningful action—especially fleeting in her brief, precocious life.

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am going to speak to you about contemporary American drama. Or, at least, I am going to use contemporary American drama as a point of departure to discuss what I believe are some of the most significant ideas and 89

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attitudes at large in our present day culture. I do not believe that this is a narrow frame of reference but a quite inclusive one, because surely the theatre is and always has been an excellent source of analysis and even assessment of, at least, Western civilizations. That is, if one would know something of the social agonies which beset the Greeks, then one does well to study Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides. Or if one would be aware of the pulse of the Renaissance, then one loses nothing by an awareness of the plays of Shakespeare. And if we would truly understand the stagnation and deathly decadence of Czarist Russia, Chekhov can be enormously pertinent. And so on. What then is a representative picture in American drama as of this moment? I have just left New York City where among the musicals and light comedies, three major plays are enjoying successful runs on the Broadway stage. They are the Pulitzer Prize play, J.B. by Archibald McLeish, the distinguished American poet; Sweet Bird of Youth by the famous American playwright Tennessee Williams, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in past years. And A Raisin in the Sun—by an obscure author who is distinguished in such company, by having won no Pulitzer Prize at all—ever. There is also a fourth play, the principle character of which I plan to mention from time to time. It is not a current play in the sense that it is running on Broadway now; it first appeared ten years ago, but because of the depth of its commentary it is relevant. It is Arthur Miller’s extraordinary play, Death of a Salesman. These are, in my opinion, for the most part, good plays, serious plays, and, I think, in the case of Death of a Salesman—a great play. They are plays which have been written by writers who are deeply concerned with the human experience. And I should explain that I certainly do not intend to pose the craft of one writer against another, but, rather, I hope to discuss the ideas of these plays, and more actively, the areas of life from which I think they are drawn. In this, I do claim the right to be partisan like, I should hope, all of you. For unless I am very far afield in my judgment, I truly believe these four plays very much reflect the mood and temper of our times and nation, and, more precisely, certain acute features of current American intellectual life. It seems to me, for instance, that great numbers of our people are possessed by emotional fatigue, political disenchantment, and intellectual cynicism. With regard to politics in particular, American letters seem much affected by a generation which apparently came to maturity in the 1930s, and which was much affected by the intense social awareness and activity of that period, but who now only seem to wish to disparage it, ridicule it, or forget about it. 90

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One has the feeling that the enormity of the present day crisis has seeped into the very marrow of some sections of our people and imprisoned them with philosophies of indifference and/or neo and quite real despair. Philosophies which are particularly bound up with the ever recurrent idea that fate exists as a force, that it is innately destructive and, moreover, indestructible. Or, in street-corner idiom, refurbished declarations to the effect that, “You can’t fight city hall, nohow.” Thus, Mr. McLeish has written a thesis which argues that man is impotent in the face of the catastrophes which nature ceaselessly imposes upon us; and that, furthermore, these catastrophes are indifferent to man’s sense of justice and injustice. It suggests, to my mind at least, something of the existentialist view of life as an absurdity, but excludes the strong existentialist notion of choice of action within the absurdity. It is interesting that some have found in this, a ring of noble and profound statement and a sound of anguished wisdom. Mr. Tennessee Williams has written another thesis which, draped in poetry of exquisite despair, offers a message which is not, in essence, profoundly different. Corruption and ambition, it seems to the poet, are kinsmen. And, in his view, the only human creatures who long for the sweet and the beautiful are the young who are themselves inevitably affected by corruption, since it is the nature of youth to be ambitious. Thus, he suggests, all beauty wafts away out of life, like the sweet bird of youth itself. These are, in 1959, the morals of the stories of JB and Chance Wayne, the hero of Sweet Bird. If you will forget for the moment that some people will tell you that according to these remarks that I simply did not understand either play, I will ask you to note the line of descent which has begun from the legacy that Willy Loman, the hero of Death of a Salesman left us ten years ago. It is true that Willy Loman was more recognizable than the ultra symbolic JB or the highly romantic Chance Wayne; and it is not really important which was written first. What is important is that the descent began with the Salesman. For Willy Loman represents a curious paradox in what an English character in an English play by an English author labels dismally, “the American Age.” Willy Loman, the Salesman, is a product of a nation of great military strength, indescribable material wealth, incredible mastery of the physical realms, which, on the other hand, is unable to take hold of a view of life which permits in 1948 of an affirmative hero. Willy Loman cannot reconcile the illusions of his life with the struggles of its reality. Death becomes his salvation; the source of the only true reward for the particular life that he has lived. It is true that he acknowledges 91

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choice and will at the end but he chooses death. That is why it is important to compare him with his new character named Walter Lee Younger who has appeared in American drama in 1959. Both come out of America, today, both choose—one for death and one for life. Surely there is some hint in this of a new American mood. But before I speak specifically of Walter Lee Younger, the pivotal character of A Raisin in the Sun, let us say this, that neither Williams nor Miller misstates the case. Something is glaringly wrong “in this Denmark” at the moment, and I believe that these particular representative heroes must be overwhelmed on the stage, as they are, in fact, in life, without or with the consciousness of their fictional prototypes. For it is clear that something has gone wrong with at least part of the American dream. Our great sprawling middle class is possessed with a national restlessness and preoccupation with trivia which can only be a reflection of a more deep-seated dissatisfaction of some of the goals it once thought it wanted. Our automobiles, as often noted, have virtually ceased being instruments of transportation and have become far more important articles of display of images of real affluency. The same holds true for the nature of our houses, the choice of the communities we wish to live in; the school, the friends, the pastimes we select—and certainly our earning power itself. This particular section of the middle class, Willy Loman’s middle class, seems trapped. There aren’t anymore forests to clear or virgin railroads to lay—or native American empires to first steal and build— and Willy and his milieu will never quite make it up to the higher quarters where the bigger and better stealing is now going on—overseas. No, Willy Loman is trapped in a dream that has no top on it because it never really had a base under it. I suppose that real tragedy rather than pathos would finally emerge if Willy himself ever saw that is wasn’t much of a dream anyhow. . . . No—it wasn’t much of a dream, that of mere acquisition. Willy and his prototypes don’t encourage their sons to be engineers because the world needs bridges and airplanes and atomic powered heating plants. They can only advise them to “make something big” out of themselves. That’s why there is no base under his dream. The useful, the essential, the necessary, the creative, and in many ways, the beautiful, got side-tracked in Willy Loman’s view of paradise. That’s why there wasn’t much base under his dream. And even if he should direct his boys to become doctors, it won’t really be to fight the good fight against misery, but because, “Some doctors, boy, say they make out all right for themselves—” I am perfectly aware that this is not a popular view of what is wrong with part of the American dream and I must say it would be a pointless attack 92

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indeed, save for one thing: the fact that Willy Loman just wasn’t and isn’t a happy man, and worst of all, he thought and thinks of himself as a failure. When men end their lives that way, in or out of fiction, suicide or not, it is time to take into account all that produced them. I cannot promise you that Walter Lee Younger is a happy man at the end of Act III, but I do know that he knows that he is not a failure. And what of the world which surrounds Chance Wayne—the contemporary South? Has Tennessee Williams distorted and abused, as many say, the reality of the South? I don’t think so. Not if we look at not only the literature but the statistics of the worst fed, the worst housed, most poorly serviced region of the nation in terms of education, hospitals, public services, and above all, guaranteed human rights and privileges. Not if we consider some of its purely illegal representatives sitting in our national houses of congress, infecting our foreign and domestic policies alike with their medieval concepts of class and race. I say class because too often we forget that the race hating maniacs of the South, who boast to the world how they despise Negroes, are far quieter about the fact that they have never given a hang-nail for the poor white of the South either. In fact when you start talking about closing down the public schools of the South and making them “private”—in order to keep them just as segregated and primitive as they already are, then you are talking about halting even the piecemeal education of an awful lot of poor white children, as well as black, who are dependent on the free school system for their constitutionally promised education. This does not seem to disturb these gentlemen who I am sure do not propose to tax themselves to support that kind of white supremacy. Such is the character of the life which surrounds our Chance Wayne. A way of life saturated with a malignancy of race hatred which I am sure more than any other single factor is the true root of the incredible backwardness of the Southland. People begin to speak now, and in one way I do not deny that it is a sign of health, of their weariness with Tennessee Williams’s preoccupation with what they call “aberrations” and “abnormalities.” What they are usually referring to is his treatment of personal deviations of one kind or another in some of his characters. Well, I do not consider that a valid criticism of art, insofar as all human problems, I should imagine, deserve exploration in art and society alike. What we don’t know can hurt us like everything. But, more important, I think they miss the true significance of his work. For seen as a study of what is—it is enormously valid and necessary and important to show the sickness under what so much of our popular, desperately pro-Bourbon, slave-loving literature (Gone With the Windism) has painted as quaint and 93

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charming (and as per Senator James O. Eastland’s and James Byrnes’s visions of themselves). If we would speak of abnormalities, of the ill, of the maladjusted, of the sick—then let us get to the heart of the matter and see the thing as it is, thinking these days as we must, of not only a fictional Southerner named Chance Wayne but another Southern young man named Mack Parker, and truly say the thing as it is—that the South today, in a civilized world, is an aberration. Tennessee Williams is right to the extent that he sees a symptomatic madness in a total culture that excuses, apologizes for, appeases, justifies, and agrees with a way of life such as produced the murderers of Mrs. Parker’s son and the fictional mutilators of an innocent if corrupted white youth. At this point I must tell you before I make some final summary remarks about why I think the hero of A Raisin in the Sun begins to carry us in another direction—and provide for your understanding that what I am paying tribute to here is not by any stretch of the imagination my skills or hopeful gifts as a dramatist, but precisely as with Willy Loman and Chance Wayne—I want to indicate the source of his emergence as a character of affirmation, which is, in my opinion, his direct relationship to the tumultuous and inspiring effort of twenty million people in this country to gain utter and absolute equality in the fraternity of men. But first I should like to say that I had the opportunity to meet with and address a congress of Negro writers in New York City some months ago, and, for those of you who are familiar with the expression of angry young men, as applied to English writers, you can no doubt appreciate it if I tell you that the present mood of Negro writers right here in the United States approaches what can best be described as—crimson fury. We are in a mood, for instance, to write the truth about our people. Our objective is art, not distortion, and this in itself is a reflection of maturation of any artist. Moreover, we know that a presentation of the full-scale nature of all the complexities and confusions and backwardness of our people will, in the end, only heighten and make more real the inescapable image of their greatness and courageousness. However, we see no reason to stop there. The truth demands its own equals—therefore let an American that respects its name and aspirations in the world now anticipate the writings of Negro writers whose novels and plays and poetry must go out to an eager world. For we are going to tell the truth from all its sides, including what is the still bitter epic of the black man in this most hostile nation. As it is, so shall it be recorded in fiction and essay and drama. And when the questions are asked in Bombay and Peking and Budapest and Lagos and Cairo and Jakarta, because as it is—so I will tell it; 94

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and as of today if I am asked abroad if I am a free citizen in the United States of America, I must say only what is true—no. If I am asked if my people enjoy equal opportunity in the most basic aspects of American life—housing, employment, franchise—I must and will say no. And shame of shames, under a government that wept for Hungary and sent troops to Korea, when I am asked if that most primitive, savage, and intolerable custom of all, lynching, still persists in the United States of America, I must and will tell the truth—yes. This brings me then, at last, to our final character—the hero of my play A Raisin in the Sun, Mr. Walter Lee Younger of Chicago, Southside. In my view, Walter Lee Younger is an American more than he is anything else. His ordeal, give or take his personal expressions of it, are not extraordinary, but intensely familiar. He has virtually no values which have not come out of his culture. Moreover, he has no view of the possible solutions to his problems which do not come out of that self same culture. Like the other characters we here discussed, everything about him is in a state of agitation and turbulence; everything about him has a quality of restlessness. He has no peace with that part of society which seems to permit him and no rapport with that which has excluded him. Therefore he must be at war; there must be some place to go, some thing or things to do; and because all men are born with a vision of the awful ultimate, time comes to bear. He must do it quickly; there is desperation because the years close in. Someplace, somehow the possibility of it all being out of his hands has escaped him, as indeed, it did Willy Loman. But, significantly, not as it did Chance Wayne and JB. He and Willy share a feeling, the idea that something is obstructing their progress, that something is in the way of their ascendancy. In some other culture, in some other part of the world or perhaps in some other time as this one, other courses would appear before Walter. Perhaps in Asia or Africa or Europe he might be invited to squat by the curb day after day and contemplate the divine justice of his misery, and would take to wearing the saffron robes of acceptance and shave his head or don a beret; or perhaps he would accept the invitation of a friend or poster to wander down to his first Communist Party meeting. One thing is certain, and this is the heart of my quarrel with the ideas of Williams and McLeish, the conditions of men everywhere dictate their actions; even when that action leads to mass action for reform or revolution or toward inaction, toward escapism. But there are many pulses in Walter Lee’s culture and some, and this is important, which embrace him with more immediacy than other members of 95

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his society. His People have had somewhere they are trying to get for so long that other confusions do not bind them. His specifically Negro culture is as complex and deliberate as the dominant one which surrounds it and, at the moment at least, far more rigidly and gloriously affirmative. The ostrich has never been favored with tribute in Negro folk statements. We still sing for instance: “Went to the rock to hide my face, the rock cried out, no hidin’ place down here—” Paradoxically still, the two paramount demands of manhood in his society oblige him to look upon himself as the source of the only rewards he will ever know in his life; as well as the source of his own defeat if he fails. No analyst will tell this to Walter Lee Younger, living on the Southside of Chicago and knowing about analysts only from movies and television comics. But his teachers probably did; his minister probably does; and his employer most certainly will. There is paradox in it because half of the message is true. Without the exertion of his will, Walter Lee Younger will never change anything. Thus his frustration is his culture’s frustration; the problem lies in the direction in which his mentors and his associates and all the agencies of society will tell him to exert himself. All of them will take the view that the institutions which frustrate him are somehow impeccable or, at best, unfortunate, but “things being as they are—” he must better himself and not cry about the state of things. Aside from the legitimate agitation of his existence Walter Lee must carry an additional burden, that of reconciling the surrounding myths with the reality around him. So there is a choice for Walter, a choice diminished once again by circumstances, but a choice which is at the same time made enormous by them. In other words, the symbolism of moving into the new house is precisely as small as it seems and quite as significant. The fact of clean walls and roachless crevices and a patch of dirt where Mama can get to “grow a few flowers” is not only the homely achievement of simple folk standing up against adversity for a paltry bit of comfort (which is far from insured considering the precarious nature of their lives in the new neighborhood), but it is also the point of departure where Walter Lee leaves Willy Loman. By the nature of his immediate history, Walter does not feel the futility of life so keenly to believe that death returns the only reward; there is someplace to go. Thus his will is brought to bear towards life; he is angry with it and confused by it but he is still adequately involved with it and master of it to do battle. If there are no marching songs and waving flags at the barricades as he marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. 96

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On the contrary, he has picked up in his way what Arthur Miller once called “the golden thread”; he becomes, in spite of the view of those who cannot see it even, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes—but attacking the oracle instead. Such is his majesty; such is his completion for the moment; such is his reflection of what is, and not for Negroes alone, absolutely an American possibility.

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Dorothy Tilly May 22, 1959, Congressional Subcommittee, Civil Rights Hearing, Washington, D.C.

One of the most influential women in the South, Dorothy Rogers Tilly was born on June 30, 1883, in Hampton, Georgia. The daughter of a Methodist minister, her religion would become the foundation of Tilly’s civil rights fervor. Tilly attended Reinhardt College and Wesleyan College (Macon, Georgia) and graduated in 1901. Two years later she married Milton Eben Tilly, who would become a successful businessman in Atlanta, where the couple resided. At her husband’s suggestion, she channeled her missionary zeal into the Women’s Missionary Society (WMS) of the Methodist church. For thirteen years she was in charge of the WMS Children’s Work for North Georgia. Her involvement with the WMS allowed for exposure to other organizations, such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) of which she became a member in 1930, and also the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). As an anti-lynching activist, Tilly once stared down a Mississippi mob, and she actively organized against the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and South Carolina. In addition, Tilly was a field worker for the Southern Regional Council (SRC) headquartered in Atlanta. When lobbying work brought her to Washington, D.C., in 1934, Tilly met Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom she would share an extended and warm friendship. Whether it was the First Lady’s influence or someone else’s, Tilly’s stature as a civil rights leader blossomed in 1946 with her appointment to Harry Truman’s President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). The only white woman on the committee, and one of only two southerners, Tilly aided the committee in understanding the South, its history, and its racial customs. The PCCR’s official report, To Secure These Rights, published in 1947, presaged much of the coming civil rights revolution—legally and culturally; it also made Dorothy Tilly something of a regional celebrity. During the summer of 1949, Tilly attended the trial of thirty-one whites in Greenville, South Carolina, for the lynching of Willie Earle. Not unlike scenes in many southern courtrooms, the trial was a farce of interracial justice, and Tilly vowed to do something about it. Out of her experience came the organization with 98

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whom she was most often identified: the Fellowship of the Concerned (FOC). Tilly recruited thousands of southern women (the majority of whom were Methodists) to the cause of racial justice through the auspices of the FOC, which reported to the SRC. Members were asked to play a visible and active part in their communities by attending trials, seeking out local elites and public opinion leaders, and making it known that racial injustices would neither be tolerated nor unreported. Whether the fight was waged over public housing, the courts, newspaper reporting, voting, education, or employment, the FOC was actively involved in the battle for racial justice. Tilly also encouraged FOC members to teach their children and their husbands that racial equality and desegregation were ideals that began with the family. Her work on behalf of the FOC was such that Tilly received a personal invitation in 1963 from President John F. Kennedy to join the National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights. In addition to her work with the FOC, Tilly was also actively involved with the U.S. Community Service Commission, the Farmer’s Union, the Catholic Rural Life Conference, the Federal Council of Churches, and the Farm Security Administration. The winner of many regional and national awards, Dorothy Tilly passed away on March 16, 1970, survived by her only child, Eben Fletcher Tilly. Her papers are housed at Emory University. Before a Senate subcommittee holding public hearings on civil rights, Tilly carefully documents the state of Georgia’s attempts to privatize its public schools. With a keen eye on Little Rock, Arkansas, which had seen Central High School close for the 1958–59 school year, Tilly makes the case against many of the state’s leading segregationists. Racial redemption in Georgia, though, is possible given the progressive leadership in Atlanta—she singles out Mayor Hartsfield as well as the black clergy—and the emphasis on interracial dialogue. Tilly closes her speech by detailing the harassment endured by members of the FOC and their families following a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama. In a move that was long a staple of the Citizens Councils, a local newspaper published the names of women meeting under the auspices of FOR—not for any particular news value, but to enable locals to harass, threaten, and even boycott such “racial radicals” and “Communists.”

I

am Dorothy Rogers Tilly. I like to go, though, under the title given to me when I was married, Mrs. Milton Eben Tilly. It has been quite an honor to be the wife of my husband. I am of the South, born and bred in the South, and have held offices in the Methodist Church, statewide and southwide, and these offices have been in the field of human rights. 99

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I have kept my fingers on the pulse of the South, and I know its heartbeats and its heartthrobs, and they are my heartbeats and my heartthrobs. For almost a hundred years we have been suffering from that which was bequeathed us by slavery. I want to bring this thought in—not as an excuse for what is happening, Mr. Chairman, in my section of the state, but because there is a general suffering of our nation. I want to change the trend of today’s session. I could sit here and give you stories, as you have heard just now, which I have heard all day, the stories of infringement on the civil rights of people. But what I want to talk to you about is the climate of my own state in regard to the school integration decision. I want to talk about that mostly, because I think it has something to do with what will happen in all of the South. And I wanted to tell you, too, of the various decisions, how they are helping us along to a more democratic way of life, which we will reach fully some day. The business editor of the Atlanta Constitution says, “Perhaps the most certain thing that can be said at this time about the future of Georgia’s public school system is that it is very uncertain.” The climate of my state in reference to the integration of schools, as I said, is what I want to talk about. Social changes come slowly, always, and perhaps a little more slowly with us in the five southern states than anywhere else in our nation. But we will finally get there sometime—because we are in the Bible Belt, and I believe some day we will reach the place where we will translate what we read in the Holy Writ into action. We talk a lot about our way of life. And I think when that time comes when we can translate that which we read into daily action, as we will find the way of life is the way of the Master [. . .] The legislature of 1953, anticipating the school decision of the Supreme Court, ordered a referendum on a constitutional amendment to end the public school system and substitute private schools to keep segregation in effect in Georgia. That was some months before Governor Talmadge went out of office. In spite of the fact of the money spent by the state propagandizing the necessity they felt this amendment to be, and in spite of the fact that all the time on the radio and the television the evening before the election was tied up, so that we had no voice except voices of the people of Georgia pleading for the passing of the amendment, when the votes were counted—there was something about 391,340 votes—the amendment won by a margin of 29,340 votes. And every county in the 159 had some votes against the amendment. Thirty counties had a majority against it, and some of them were little rural counties. 100

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So you see, then, we do feel that it is not all good and it is not all bad. We do realize there is more bad than good, but we are very grateful for the good. In the 1956 session, however, a package of bills called the private school plan was introduced. Five of the six bills were passed. In a way, it sounds ridiculous, but it does give you a picture. The first required the closing of the public schools in the event of a federal decree ordering integration, and provides for grants to individual children in amounts to be determined by the governor himself. It directs that state and local taxes should be collected to finance it. Section 3 of this act made it a misdemeanor for any parent to use that money in a sectarian school. Since Georgia has few private schools except sectarian schools, this would deprive a great many parents of the use of the money that might be granted to the children for education, in case of the closing of our schools. Senate bill 2 declared it to be a misdemeanor for anyone to even enter the property of a closed school except for its care, custody, maintenance, or inspection. Senate bill 3 authorized the leasing of public schools for private educational purposes without even any bids and for periods up to five years. The next one authorized the state school building authority to lease the school buildings. The next one amended the state teachers retirement system by providing for the admission of teachers in privately operated nonsectarian schools. Legislature after legislature has piled up a multitude of bills. And one by one most of these bills have been declared unconstitutional in one state after another, until we see our Georgia bills knocked down, almost as if knocked down by tenpins. Three successive governors have solemnly promised that Georgia would have no mixed schools during their term of office. First, we had Governor Talmadge for one year, and then Governor Griffin, and now our new governor, Mr. Vandiver—and they declared that as long as they were governor there would be no mixing of the races in our schools. Governor Vandiver devoted one-third of his inaugural address to the question of segregation. And he said this: “My first words to you are that your executive has no intention of turning Georgia schools and colleges over to the federal government for any purpose, anywhere, at any time during the next four years.” Then, he brought with him six bills. Part of it was a concession. 101

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The first one was “School closing,” and it was to implement the power of the governor as conservator of peace, to define the powers with respect to operation of schools and to provide for closing of a single school within a district without the necessity of closing all schools therein. Then the second one, “University closing,” was to implement the power of the governor as conservator of peace with respect to units of the university system, and to provide for the closing of only the one in which integration had been ordered. That is quite a change from the 1956 bills. The 1956 bills provided that if one unit of a system, or one unit of a public school system, was ordered to be integrated, all of the units of the university system were closed, all of the units of the schools were closed. And then he added another. This one he frankly stated was to be a bar to prevent Negroes from entering the university system. The entrance requirement as to age was to be twenty-one years or younger, and the entrance to graduate levels was to be limited to those twenty-five or under. That has brought a great deal of controversy in the state, and a great many people pled with the governor not to sign that bill, but he finally did. It has brought about a great deal of trouble to the university branches. It would not affect the university proper, but the branches of the university are suffering already the loss of enrollment. Some of them have even predicted in four years they would have to go out of business, unless this was changed. And then you have to remember there were some exceptions to it, for teachers and certain veterans. But in the state of Georgia we have Fort Benning, we have Fort Stewart, we have the Savannah Air Force Base and Parris Island, S.C., which is near Savannah. And there is no provision for these servicemen. Most of them are under twenty-one years of age. Another was to provide for the employment of counsel in certain legal action, specifically litigation of a public school admission. And then he provided for the levying of taxes for segregated schools and to forbid taxing for the support of integrated schools. But there is a ray of hope on the horizon now. We have a new voice—you might say an old new voice. For a few days ago, ex-Governor Ellis Arnall appeared on television and reminded the people of Georgia that he was elected governor in another school crisis. We had a ban of schoolbooks, and we had the firing of certain teachers, and our university lost accreditation. And on that basis, Mr. Arnall was elected governor. He stated he was going to announce for governor in case the schools were closed; that he believed in public education; that he had three children, and they were all in the public schools, and he wanted his son to graduate from the University of Georgia. 102

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And then he added something that was very interesting to me. He said: “Most of the shouting and ranting about closing schools to avoid integration is coming from those who have no children of school age, are rich enough to send their children to private schools, or else do not want their children educated.” Mr. SLAYMAN. This was former Governor Ellis Arnall? Mrs. TILLY. Yes. Mr. SLAYMAN. Is he practicing law? Mrs. TILLY. Yes; and a very successful lawyer, too. Mr. SLAYMAN. He said this just the other day? Mrs. TILLY. Yes. I can quote a letter from him, that he wrote to the newspapers. He said: “I have read with interest the splendid editorial in the Atlanta Constitution, April 10, 1959, which poses the question, ‘Will the State hear more from ex-Governor Arnall?’ The answer is ‘Emphatically yes.’ My election as governor was due solely to the fervent desire of the people of Georgia to save their public schools and the university system of Georgia from destruction at the hands of the politicians. I am ready and willing to fight for the preservation of Georgia’s public school system whatever the cost may be. Our children must be provided the right to an education. This is the platform: (1) for public schools; (2) against the unfair county unit system; (3) against stealing the taxpayers’ money.” It has been predicted that the schools will be closed—and we are waiting anxiously for the decision on a school case that has been brought against the public school system of Atlanta, and some predict our schools will close this September, and some in 1960 or 1961. We have a member, the strongest member, I suppose, of our States Rights Council, which is the same as the Citizens Councils of other states, Mr. Charles J. Bloch, an attorney from Macon, Georgia. He says: “We do not need to integrate to have education. Georgians would vote to close every school and keep them closed before it would accept any integration.” Mr. SLAYMAN. Does Mr. Bloch have any children of school age? Mrs. TILLY. I cannot answer that. But this is what he says. He proposes the organization of a statewide private school foundation, with private school corporations in each county. He says: “The state can provide the funds that are necessary.” But now, as to the private school situation. There are three private schools which have already received their charters. Two of them are in the city of Atlanta and one in Cobb County, which is the adjoining county. Those schools could not nearly take care of the many 103

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thousands of schoolchildren in the Atlanta public schools alone. And of course there is no provision in them for the Negro child, and the Negro pupils would be about one-third of the hundred thousand pupils of the Atlanta public schools. Mr. SLAYMAN. Under that proposed private school plan, what would happen to Negro children? Mrs. TILLY. They have no plans for the Negro children. What Mr. Bloch is providing for is a county corporation, and then the Negro child would be taken care of. Then another bill we have had provides that funds would be allocated to the children, you see, by the government, and they could spend it where they pleased, provided they did not spend it in a sectarian school. Those are the bills that we have. The cost of the private schools has been estimated from $250 to $450 per pupil. Of course, that would exclude most of the children of Georgia. One very interesting thing I picked up the other day was a financial report of the board of trustees of Little Rock’s new Baptist High School. It is costing the Baptists $8,500 a month to provide an offering of 25½ units of a stateaccredited program to 370 students. Monthly tuition fees of $20 a month and donations are bringing in only $6,500 a month. That makes a deficit each month of $2,000. And on top of that, they still owe for all the equipment they had to buy to furnish the school. This is the financial record of an institution which came into being with no original investment in buildings and grounds. They could ask for higher tuition, higher than the $20 a month they have now, but the Baptist Church and the Baptist school has said many of those children that they have are not paying that $20. Now, can we, as a practical matter, educate the children of Georgia in private schools that cannot be financed? That is a hard question we have to face. Now there is another part of this picture, the picture of Atlanta. The picture of Atlanta is quite different from the rest of the state. However, there are some fairly good spots, our cities of Macon, Augusta, Savannah, and Rome, a few of those, that are really taking seriously this question of the closed schools. Someone has said that Atlanta is different, and it really is. In some parts of the state, the word “integration” is never mentioned. If it is, it is mentioned in a whisper; it is taboo. But in Atlanta the integration of schools is discussed freely on the streets and in public meetings. In Atlanta, we have the Christian Council that is interracial. The United Church Women are interracial. We have a Council on Human Relations. 104

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We have our dinners together; we have our luncheons together. Most of the topics now, of course, are discussions of our public schools. And to save our schools, our groups are gaining strength and working without any intimidation whatever. The high school pupils have big signs on their cars, “SOS” for “Save Our Schools.” There are others that say, “Keep Our Schools Open.” You find them all over the city. But you also find a few tags for segregated schools. This is due to many things in the city. One thing is the good city government we have. First of all, it is Mayor William Hartsfield’s forthrightness in his efforts in behalf of the public schools. He has made an appeal for local option. This is his appeal: “Let the state give us exactly what they are asking the federal government to do for Georgia. Let the people of Atlanta be the jury to decide the fate of their own schools.” And from the growing sentiment in Atlanta, it is the consensus of opinion that if Atlanta can take care of its own school system, we would not have very much trouble. You know, we had our bus integration with only one slight incident. That was between a teenage Negro girl and a teenage white boy. They were taken down to the police court and they were told we were not going to have anything like that, and that if they ever did it again, they would have to suffer serious consequences. And then another thing that happened about that is the Negro ministers preparing their people for it. That integration of the buses is a most interesting story. We had various meetings in which the president of the Atlanta Transit Company was there with us, the leading Negro figures of the town, the leading white figures of the town. We all sat there together and talked. The Negroes had the utmost confidence in the president of the Atlanta Transit Company and utter confidence in our mayor. And the mayor and the president of the Atlanta Transit Company had utter confidence in the ministers and the Negro leaders there with us. If you remember the story, some Negro ministers were arrested for riding on the front seats of a bus. But this was planned. They know they had to have a case in court. When they were arrested, they were all in church together. There came an integrated police team to arrest them and carry them down to the police court. The case kept being postponed, and finally when it did come on the court calendar the judge said: “I don’t see any use in trying this, bringing it any 105

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further. The city of Atlanta has not pushed it at all. The Atlanta Transit Company has not pushed it. The ministers who have been arrested have not pushed it. And the Supreme Court has already spoken. We will just let it be. We will have integrated buses.” And that was the end of the story. And then the integration of the golf courses was most interesting. But first I would like to say this: One of the reasons Atlanta is so far along in human relations is the Negro leadership [. . .] There is complete communication between the leaders of both races in Atlanta and confidence in each other. The Negroes have absolute access, on the same basis as whites, to the chief of police anytime that they need to call him or go and have a conference with him. That is the situation in Atlanta. And a great deal of it is due to the fine leadership that the Negro ministers have given to the community. They prepared them for the bus integration. They themselves told their congregations that they must do nothing, that they, the ministers themselves, would take the initiative when they felt they were spiritually strong enough to do so, and that no one must come to the police station. And after integration came, the Sunday afterward, every Negro minister in Atlanta talked to his congregation of how much depended on their own behavior on the buses. Unfortunately, maybe the white ministers did not do the same thing. But at any rate, we have not had any trouble. Mr. SLAYMAN. You say you have not had any problems? Mrs. TILLY. No, sir. I told you just that one instance. Now about the golf course; that, too, was interesting. That case was filed by a Negro doctor and his son. The day that it was announced they were to play on the golf course—of course, it was national news. Newspaper reporters were there from different parts of the nation. Television was set up for it. The Negro doctor found out about this and went to the mayor, went to Mr. Ralph McGill, and said, “We are not seeking publicity. What we really want is an opportunity to play golf.” And very quietly they moved to another golf course. So we had integration of the golf courses, too. Now, Mayor Hartsfield said this: “We have fought every integration suit brought against us to the limit of the law, and our policy beyond that has been one of decency and fairness to all people. The greatest loss of the Civil War in Atlanta”—he said—“was not the burning of the city, the loss of the cotton economy, the end of slavery. It was the loss of a whole generation of educated people. Yet we have men who are willing to do it all over again. If we can introduce some sanity in our state, we are going great places in the future. We have got everything here it takes—land, water, forests, the means 106

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of sustaining ourselves. What we need most in the troubled days ahead are men who will quit hating. We need a little of our own state motto—wisdom, justice, and moderation.” Now, another thing has happened. The manifestoes of leading groups have spoken well. Three hundred and twelve white clergymen representing the Jewish religion and sixteen Protestant denominations called for the appointment of an interracial commission to help maintain harmony and good will. They recommended the preservation of public schools. Two hundred and fifty faculty members of Emory University opposed the closing of the schools which, if prolonged, could result in the loss of an entire generation of specialists. Ninety-seven percent of the faculty of Agnes Scott agreed with Emory teachers that closing schools would “spread illiteracy and speed migration from the South.” The Atlanta chapter of the Scientific Research Society says: “We cannot afford to lose a single year of schooling. The nation’s survival depends on continuous training of scientists.” Four hundred physicians said interruptions of public education—“would materially interfere with the supply of essential scientific personnel and would ultimately damage the health services of this region.” Fourteen parent-teachers’ associations took action—the PTA council never did decide that they all should—but fourteen did, anyway; out of the fourteen, 3,471 voted for open schools and 816 for closed schools. This does not mean by any means all of them were really favoring integration. But they were willing to keep our schools at any cost. The United Church Women of Georgia and the United Church Women of Atlanta are both very strong forces in the State. The United Church Women of Atlanta, at their meeting in October, agreed to stand back of the Supreme Court decision, really putting a stamp of approval on it. Then they expressed their concern about the defiance of law by higher authorities, the effect it would have on those who would like to defy the law. On the other hand, a day or two ago fifty-three ministers in Atlanta from a newly organized Evangelical Christian Council issued a manifesto strongly favoring segregated schools. They believe racial integration to be “satanic, unconstitutional, and the main objective of the Communist Party.” Now, the Communist Party must be mighty powerful, because everything we do not like we say comes from the Communist Party. We have a new organization, Help Our Public Education, which is becoming a strong and vital factor. It is now reaching out into the state to organize 107

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groups like it. It held its first rally in the Tower Theater with 1,700 people present. That was about a month ago. On that program were the mayor, the retired superintendent of public schools of Atlanta, an editor from Gainesville, and a young boy from the high school. All of them made strong speeches. We had someone from Arkansas, too, to tell us about their situation there. She explained to us what had happened with the loss of industry and business. But this young boy was so concerned, and he was so poised. I think he made the strongest appeal to keep our schools open. Now, that is the picture of Atlanta. But, you know, we in Atlanta are voiceless people. The little county of Echols, with 1,100 people in it— Mr. SLAYMAN. Would you take a moment to describe briefly how the county unit system works? Mrs. TILLY. Well, the county unit system is that device to make the rural vote much stronger than the city vote. We vote by land, land area, rather than by population. And now with the trend of people moving into the city, the city population is increasing all the time. Fulton County, which has the largest population, has six unit votes. Then there are some counties that have four, some two. Eight counties have six unit votes each, 30 have four unit votes, and 121 have two unit votes. But this little county of Echols has 1,100 people living in it, and that 1,100 votes equals 93,000-plus of those of us living in Fulton County. There are two or three strange things about it. Moreland Avenue in Atlanta divides DeKalb from Fulton County. And if you live on the Fulton side, your vote counts for less than your neighbor’s directly across the street, who lives in DeKalb. Now, on the other side we touch Clayton County, and Clayton County is one of those two county units. Their votes, on the different sides of the street, are worth much more than the person who lives on the DeKalb side of Moreland, and much more than the person that would live on the Fulton County side. No candidate for office in the state need ever bother to come to Atlanta and make a speech. It is not necessary. He plays up to the little counties. It is somewhat of the same fight that New York has now, where New York City claims it ought to secede from the state and set up its own government. In fact, somebody in the legislature this year brought in a bill to make Atlanta a county in itself. That is the situation we are in. No matter how strong we get in Atlanta on integrated schools or anything else, we are almost a voiceless people, because of the county unit system. 108

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One of our candidates for governor won the popular vote by an immense majority some years ago, but he did not win the county unit votes, so he lost. That is the situation we are in, in the city of Atlanta. We have tried two to three times to get to the Supreme Court. But now we have a little more hope. Even Mr. Talmadge, who has been an advocate of the county unit system, begins to see the handwriting on the wall, and he is proposing that the legislature make some redistribution of the voting power of the counties, possibly giving the larger counties more votes. But the mayor of Atlanta is still fighting for it to go through the Supreme Court, because he believes we ought to get rid of the system entirely, rather than just give in a little. Now, in light of what was said today. I would like to add just a little story about what we go through—not in Atlanta, however. There is no intimidation whatever in Atlanta from anybody. When we had some of our first meetings, we did have a little heckling, and that heckling was always led, or has been led, by one of those who had been indicted for the dynamiting of the Jewish temple. But we have not had any more of it since. But in light of what was said today, I want to tell you one story. I could have had stories to match nearly every story we have heard here today. The organization of the churchwomen of the South is called the Fellowship of the Concerned. It is something that has been under my direction for a great many years. The denominations select who should come from the thirteen southern states to the meeting we have in the fall, and then we follow it by state meetings. We have done marvelous things. When we were studying the courts, we brought out a program of the women just sitting in the courts, and it changed the climate of the courts in the South by their presence. The women of the South helped get the Hill-Burton bill through for rural hospitals. But in the last few years, of course, we have been working entirely in the field of human relations. In September of last year, the Fellowship of Alabama met at the St. Jude Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama. Everybody is delegated by their denomination—Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, and members of both races. We were meeting that day in the lovely room provided by the St. Jude Hospital. Well, that day I went on out to the hospital, and as I came in, one of the women said, “There is a woman here who cannot give an explanation why she is here. What should we do about it?” I said, “We have nothing to hide. Let her come in and she can sit with me.” 109

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When I looked at the program, I wondered what they were going to do. They had first of all the women of the Old Testament and then the women of the New Testament. Of course, we always build everything we do on a firm religious foundation, because this is a religious and moral question, really. Well, the Jewish women presented the women of the Old Testament. When they came to Esther, we were told how Esther risked her life for her convictions. Then I saw what they were trying to do. They were showing that we are not pioneers, that we are just in a line of splendor that started way back in the Old Testament. The little woman sitting next to me had a pencil and notebook, but she never took notes—except when one woman was speaking of the women of the New Testament, she happened to mention Gandhi, and the girl wrote that down. In the afternoon, when we came out, there were two cars of men there, taking down the automobile tag numbers. Mr. SLAYMAN. Where was that meeting? Mrs. TILLY. Montgomery, Alabama; but, as I say, that did not bother me very much. But in October the Montgomery Home News, which is a little neighborhood paper, printed in big headlines “Negro and White Women Meet at Seat of Confederacy,” and then said something about us worshiping Gandhi. And then I knew where the report had come from. And they printed the name of every woman, the automobile tags, and the owners. And then the trouble began. Their telephones would ring at all hours. People had to take their phones off the hook. Ugly letters began to pour in, threats of various kinds. There was some loss of business. I wrote to the paper and reminded the editor what he had done to infringe on the basic rights of those women. First of all, there was their right to worship, their right of assembly, freedom of speech, and so forth. Incidentally, the Citizens Council gave the editor of that paper a medal for writing the story of the fellowship. Now, I have an article here in my hands, and this is by the Citizens Council of Montgomery. And I would like to read just two excerpts from this. First, let me say this. Those women are holding steady. Now, in Birmingham, the laymen of the two Methodist conferences met and drew up what they were going to do to prevent the integration of the central jurisdiction, that is a Negro jurisdiction, into the full church. One of the women we have in Montgomery made a study of it, and she wrote a leaflet, showing how little it would affect Alabama if they had integration, because 110

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there are so few Methodist Negroes. And she stood at the door and gave it to everybody that came in. The hope of the South is in the women. They have to be the interpreters and the shock absorbers of the social change. Now, I will just read this. Mr. SLAYMAN. You can put the whole statement in the record, if you want to. Mrs. TILLY. This is from the Montgomery Citizens Council: As citizens, we feel that in a time of crisis like this, we have the right to expect and we do expect the complete cooperation of members of the legal profession in making their services available on such a panel, and also we have the right to expect and we do expect similar cooperation from other leaders in the community life in making their time and services available to serve on other nonlegal council committees and bodies. We request that the council officials inform the public of any who refuse to render such cooperation. Then one other thing: We are of the firm conviction that public opinion of the people of Montgomery, city and county, will insist that all readers and all people cooperate in our fight if they want to be considered worthy of our confidence, support, and association. We believe that any person who speaks, writes, or in any way advocates or works for anything short of total and complete segregation will be ostracized and will earn and will receive the condemnation of the public. We recognize the power of aroused public opinion, and we believe that in this community it will not be indifferent to those who to any extent give support to persons, groups, or proposals which would destroy our public schools by integrating them, or that otherwise ask us to accept or consider anything short of total segregation as we now have. These are some of the things, some of the pictures of the South today. This is not the picture in Atlanta, for which I am grateful. Thank you so much. I am sorry you had to stay so late.

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Della D. Sullins October 6, 1959, Tuskegee Civic Association, Tuskegee, Alabama

Della Davison Sullins was born on October 13, 1917, just six days after Fannie Lou Hamer and two weeks before the birth of Marie Foster. She graduated from Second Ward High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. She also graduated from Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing in Durham, North Carolina, with a diploma in nursing. She received a B.S. in nursing from Tuskegee Institute and later a M.S. in psychiatric and mental health nursing from Indiana University at Bloomington. She married Palmer Sullins, Sr., and raised three children: Palmer Jr., Alan D., and Marsha Marie. While raising her family, Della served for thirty-three years at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuskegee as a staff nurse, supervisor, night assistant chief, instructor, and clinical specialist. She also served as director of practical nursing at Southern Vocational College. In 1972, she became the first African American member of the faculty at Troy State University. She later became the first African American R.N. to be elected president of the Alabama District 5 Nurse’s Association. In 1976, Governor George Wallace appointed her to serve on the Alabama Board of Nursing. She has won awards too numerous to detail, while breathing life into the African American community. She fought the Tuskegee school district’s attempts to modify the original 1954 Brown verdict to integrate with litigation as recently as 1999. In October 2007, she celebrated her ninetieth birthday. The Tuskegee Civic Association (TCA), before whom Sullins speaks, remains an active and vital organization. Founded in 1941 and led for many years by Tuskegee Institute professor Charles Gomillion, the TCA has a proud history of racial protest and reform. Its members led local movements to desegregate Macon County schools, to register black voters, and to rebuff a gerrymandering attempt, an action that led to the Supreme Court’s Gomillion v. Lightfoot verdict. In this October 6, 1959, speech to the TCA, Della Sullins introduces a cornucopia of imagery, sprinkling her address with such metaphors as verandas rotting, the South awakening past midnight, the julep wilting, the bark growing fainter, and the turned soil taking on life. Within these metaphors she builds a systematic argument: Brown v. Board of Education was not the start of the South’s trouble; rather, the overreaction of vigilantes and dishonest politicians threw the South into its present turmoil. Perhaps resistance to 112

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change is a natural response, but if we take an honest personal inventory, she argues, the changes coming to the South are an awakening at dawn, not a bleak nightmare.

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hen change is in evidence, it is logical to assume that there has been an awakening. Change, as we speak of it at this time, means “the passing from one condition to another.” With change must come an awakening, a realization, and a reaction. One should not become too upset by resistance to change. Primarily, this is a natural reaction. It is not with the fact that there has been massive resistance to change in the South that we are concerned, nearly so much as with the effect which it has produced and is producing. Peacefully the South has slept, satisfied with its “way of life,” but suddenly it awakes at midnight, a frightened, confused, upset South which has suddenly discovered that the veranda on which the veranda-sitters once sat is rotted and the mint from which the julep was once sipped has wilted. The realization is that there can no longer be a “Southern way of life”; there must and will be an American way of life. Contrary to the belief of many, the awakening did not begin with the Supreme Court decision of 1954, but the frightening boom of its impact had its greatest influence on the South. In the middle of the night, as a frightened and confused people awake, we found men like Alabama’s Jack Owens, who threatened to deputize every white man in Alabama to save segregation, if he were elected to the public office which he sought; men like Judge George C. Wallace who ordered the sheriff in his district to lock up any FBI investigator who showed up to find civil rights violations; men like the Montgomery Southern Baptist minister, who openly expressed his inability to see the brotherhood of man extended to his darker brother; men like John Crommelin, who calls integration a “satanic plot”; men whom you and I elected to represent us resorting to manifestoes; men like our own ex-senator Sam Englehardt who would dare to destroy his own county and reduce its seat to a mere village; we see honorable servants of the people who would stoop to resign rather than register citizens of their own community, whose only desire is to be part of what could be a growing South and a democratic nation. P. D. East of the Petal Paper of Mississippi says, “I’ve been trying to decide which is costing all America the most, the monetary or the psychological loss, as a result of discrimination.” Mr. East recognizes, however, that psychological loss cannot be measured. 113

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In the frightening moments of the South’s awakening, southern legislatures have spent and are spending more of my money and your money planning to legislate their states further out of the Union than for any other one single cause. The South is painfully aware of what should happen and what actually is happening. There is a strong gap between the conception of right and wrong. It is hard to conceive that any group can believe it is right to deny its fellowcitizens the right to participate in the affairs of a community which they have helped to build. It is even harder to understand the attitudes of those states, such as Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and our own Alabama, when they threaten to close the doors of public, tax-supported schools rather than to provide equal opportunity for all their people. Needless to say, separate but equal is not the answer. The South, like all other America, is far too poor for that. “Separate but equal” has had its day. And what has it netted us? Nothing more than a two-standard existence. This I need not describe, because you like I have lived in the South and have seen this system in operation. I cannot help but agree with those who have said that it is far better for a thoughtless mob to bomb one school building than for a group of paid politicians to destroy an entire school system. There are those who claim that the southern white man should be given time to learn to tolerate the minority group, but far too much time has been spent already. Only where there is equal opportunity for a minority group may a society begin to achieve a toleration for it. Minority may not refer to just numbers. It can refer to a group whose members have a minority share in the affairs of the community, such as exists in our own community, the group which receives the short end of the stick. The South no longer has an opportunity to make up her mind to become a part of the Union; she has been caught within a situation. She must act. Yet, there are those who stumble along with no guide other than the cruel presumption that their advantages must mean the disabling of others, and their power only exists through the disqualifications of others. This is a sad state when one finds himself believing this. Pity does not help this kind of individual. Experience can prove of great value in educating him. Harold White, a North Carolina minister, once said that “the loud bark of southern politicians merely seeks to hide the toothless feeling resulting from the extraction of the teeth in the segregation laws.” 114

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These futile efforts of which I speak are last resorts to hang on to a dream. Fortunately, dreams do not really exist after an awakening. They can only be held as sacred memories of the past. Little by little, we are hearing the bark of southern politicians grow fainter, as parks begin to open, signs begin to disappear in public transportation, school doors begin to open to people of all races, and some of the good people begin to speak and act. It was Burke who said that “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The South has not been and is not void of its liberal whites no more than has it been void of its complacent Negro. When I think of the liberals of the South, I am reminded of the Reverend Robert Graetz, formerly of Montgomery, who says of the liberal white, “They cannot maintain both their principles and their silence forever. Some of them may and are losing their jobs (in this awakening), but that is cheap enough a price to pay for an unshackled conscience.” The awakening of which I speak has not been an awakening of the “white South.” It has been an awakening of the people. The Negro of the South has been awakened too. It is impossible for a people of any group to sleep with the rustling of unrest sounding about him. We are where we are because some few people have been farsighted enough and alert to protect our heritage and struggle for improvement. Forty-five thousand people walking the streets of Montgomery; the Daisy Bateses of Arkansas; the Autherine Lucys of Alabama; the parents of Clinton, Tennessee; the voting clinics springing up in the South; the messages to nationally elected officials by citizens of this and other communities; the ministers of Atlanta, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida; the Shuttlesworths of Birmingham; the nonviolence love attitude of the Martin Luther King followers, and the Crusade for Citizenship in our community under the able leadership of our own C. G. Gomillion, cannot be overlooked in this awakening. The democracy which we hold dear is not something that can be carefully developed by a few well-meaning persons, then packaged and delivered intact to the masses. Democracy is fragile and delicate. It has its defects as well as its good points, but the defects of democracy in the South are the defects of its people. As the people of the South improve, so will that type of government which recognizes and defends the dignity of every citizen. Now that the South is no longer sleeping, my greatest concern is for my people, the Negroes of the South. We have a responsibility, a responsibility which each of us must assume. 115

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Regardless of whether we like it or not; regardless of whether or not we enjoy the fact that we are living in one of the “die-hard” states of the South, which has not seen fit to join the Union, the fact remains that the South is our home. A few days ago, Dr. Martin Luther King reportedly made the statement to those gathered for the fall session of the Southern Christian Ministers’ Conference that “massive resistance to integration will be broken down in five to ten years and that legal barriers to integration will be broken down in urban areas in ten to fifteen.” I, too, feel optimistic about this. But it will be through the Negro vote that we may hope to break down these or any other barriers. A voteless people is a voiceless people. We as a group of people must first take inventory of ourselves. We must answer for ourselves the question of “where do I fit in the setting—who am I?” Am I one who is frightened by the change, one who has been indoctrinated with the so-called “southern way of life?” The way of life, as many southern whites see it, is not given to the white man alone. There are those among us, my people, who, too, believe that there is such a thing. They have given little or no consideration to the American way of life, as it should exist under the provisions of the Constitution of this great country of ours. Do I say to one group that I want my due rights and privileges and at the same time say to another group, I’m satisfied with the crumbs that I get? Am I complacent? Do I show lack of interest in the vote; do I say that my vote counts just one, and what good is one vote? Each of us is a fundamental part of our community, state, and country. And each contribution, although seemingly small, is nevertheless important. The let-the-other-fellow-do-it attitude can easily ruin all of the things that most of us think are important. Am I contented? Hill once said that “Nothing is more certain than that improvement in human affairs is wholly the work of the uncontented characters.” Or, do I say and believe that now is the time? Do I say that I want what is rightfully mine and it is my responsibility to seek the right to have it? Our country has but one Constitution; we have but one flag; we make but one pledge. Can the South truthfully say, “We the people of the United States of America”? Or must the South distinguish itself and say, “We the people of the South”? Those of us who gather periodically for meetings such as this realize what is means to be an “American” and not a “southerner,” but unless we are able to help others to understand, our own knowledge is of very little value. Our lives will be quickened into fruitful living in proportion as we learn to put value into our responsibility as a part of a transient setting. 116

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Meaning must reside in the things for which we strive. The goal must be faced realistically. An adult may seek to shirk his responsibility and wish that he were the child he once was, but that can never be, regardless of how hard he may try. He has been marked by years behind him. When the soil of the earth is plowed and turned, it takes on new life. Man is industrious; man is courageous; man is adventurous. We may even say that he is smart. He has performed miracles. He has even reached out into the realms of heaven and touched the hem of the moon. Even though there are those of the South who would have it so, man cannot turn back the hands of time. It is past midnight for the South. She has awakened and cannot return to her peaceful sleep because the rustling continues to grow louder and louder, and the world is carefully watching the path of the storm. I am reminded of the words of Sait, who says, “No human institution can stand still; the process of transformation goes forward.” The character of democracy will vary with the intellectual approach and the degree of participation by its citizens. Whether democracy stays on its sensitive perch or whether the perch becomes desensitized will be determined by you and me. The dawn is sure to come to the South; then we shall see daylight. It will come at a rate comparable to the interest of the Negro in his own salvation. Your power and my power, as an influence on the awakened South, lies in the degree of participation and the power of the vote.

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Barbara Posey June 24, 1960, 51st Annual NAACP Convention, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Barbara Posey was born on June 23, 1943, in Oklahoma. As a fifteen-year-old Douglass High School student, and encouraged by a local high school history teacher, Clara Luper, Barbara helped organize a sit-in in her capacity as president of the local NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City. Despite the common assumption that the sit-in movement began later in Greensboro, North Carolina, this appears to have been the earliest student-led sit-in documented to date. Posey married Mack Henry Jones on April 1, 1964. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois and retired as a political scientist from Clark University of Atlanta. Barbara also embarked on an academic career, receiving a bachelor’s degree in government, economics, and mathematics from the University of Oklahoma in 1963, a master’s in economics from the University of Illinois in 1966, and a Ph.D. in economics from Georgia State University in 1973. She has held numerous academic posts including a lectureship in Zaria, Nigeria, but has spent the better part of her career on the faculty at Clark University. She is currently the dean in the school of business at Alabama A&M University. In addition to these professional achievements, Barbara and Mack raised three accomplished children: Patrice Lumumba Jones, a marketing executive for Prentice Hall; Tayari Acio Jones, an author and member of the full-time faculty at Rutgers University-Newark; and Bomani Babatunde Jones, a freelance writer and adjunct faculty member at Duke University. In this speech delivered before the NAACP’s national convention on the day after she turned seventeen, Barbara Posey introduces us to her country, a nation of people from many different creeds, ethnicities, and ways of life who share a rhetorical history including the Gettysburg Address and a famous folk song. She also introduces us to twin cancers which threaten her nation: segregation and discrimination. The prescription? Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Charles Darden (a Meridian, Mississippi NAACP field officer), Walter White (former executive secretary of the NAACP), and Roscoe Dunjee (publisher of the Black Dispatch) agree that Jim Crow must die immediately. In a provocative twist, she contrasts President 118

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Eisenhower’s perceived gradualism with the views of the NAACP stalwarts mentioned above. Eisenhower was fond of golf, and his day book indicates that during this speech he was finishing up day four of a five-day golf outing at Kaneohe Marine Golf Club in Hawaii. Posey opposes the image of a golf club–wielding, aging war hero cum lame-duck second-term president with the sarcastic bantering of eleven-year-old boys over the reasons for Eisenhower’s love of golf balls. She then canonizes Crispus Attucks and Kivie Kaplan (the president of the NAACP) by including them in the ranks of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Washington. She concludes her brief speech by gloating briefly about Oklahoma Governor J. Howard Edmonson’s ten-thousand-dollar commitment to a cause empowered by student sit-ins and with a challenge to nativists who tell her to return to Africa.

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onight, I would like for you to take an imaginary trip across the beautiful country that we call America. I want you to see the skyscrapers of New York, the wheat fields of Kansas, the cotton fields of Texas, and the swamps of Florida. I want you to see men of different religions, economic, political, social, and racial backgrounds. I want you to see America, my America. You are familiar with the scenery, the history, the customs, the traditions, and the glory of this country. You, as I, love our country and its ideals. As you travel in America you notice a cancer, a very old cancer, the cancer of segregation and discrimination as it works to destroy the things that we love best. The cancer is working against every religious and democratic principal that we have been taught and that we cherish. Many of you were taught either in the segregated schools of the South or in integrated schools elsewhere that “America was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We have been taught either on the laps of our parents or in the little white church of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. These ideas have been embodied in the greatest document ever written, the Constitution of the United States, which is the law of the land. Because of these ideals, the ideals of democracy, Americans, black and white, have fought and died on the battlefields of the world to make America a safe place for democracy. Because of this ideal, this dream, of an America where all men can enjoy the fruits of democracy, the NAACP was organized and has fought for over fifty years to preserve these ideals by destroying that cancer of segregation and discrimination. 119

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In spite of all that the NAACP, Urban League, the churches, and other organizations have done, the cancer of segregation and discrimination still eats boldly and openly at the very heart of America. Mr. Thurgood Marshall, the greatest constitutional lawyer of all times, has prescribed a treatment for this cancer—immediate death. Roy Wilkins has exposed the case and has told everyone, even the people in Texas, that segregation must die. Mr. Wilkins was not playing. The people in St. Paul will tell you that Mr. Wilkins is a very serious and dedicated man. Way down in Mississippi we can hear the voice of Charles Darden crying segregation must go. Also, we can hear the voices of the Laurel, Mississippi, NAACP youth choir singing segregation must go. If you will listen closely you will hear younger voices mingled with the still voice of Walter White and the aged and now broken voice of Roscoe Dunjee, now in a rest home, crying segregation must die. The youth of America are not playing. We are young enough to have wisdom. With this wisdom, this courage, this knowledge, this faith in God, and all the dedicated NAACP leaders behind us, the youth are now ready to announce “our plans for a democratic America.” Our first plan is to kill and bury the cancer of discrimination and segregation in order to make democracy work here in America. Now this will keep a lot of embarrassment from our country, because no longer will our chief executive, at taxpayers’ expense, have to travel all over the world nervously telling others about our democracy. He will no longer have to look into the eyes of colored people of the world trying to explain segregation and discrimination here in America. If our plan is accepted, we will be able to sell our product, “true democracy.” Even though I am no advertising agent, it is only plain horse sense that in order to sell our product we will have to demonstrate it. True democracy will have to be demonstrated in Little Rock, Greensboro, Orangeburg, and even in Jackson, Mississippi. That is our best selling point and I think that even Mr. Dwight D. Eisenhower ought to see that. I have often wondered how he can play golf in the South when the very Constitution that he has sworn before Almighty God and the people of America to uphold is being kicked around. Maybe Henry Rolfe Jr., one of the eleven-year-old Freedom Fighters from Oklahoma City, was right when he said, “Mr. Eisenhower cares more about his golf balls than he does the Negro youth of America.” A quick answer then came from another youth member, “Don’t forget Henry, those golf balls are white.” 120

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If it will help to kill segregation and discrimination here in America, maybe Mr. Eisenhower should integrate his golf balls. Our second plan is to keep the torch of liberty burning. Thomas Jefferson kept the spark alive with his pen, Patrick Henry with his voice, Crispus Attucks with his life, George Washington with his sword, and Kivie Kaplan with his life memberships. Now the youth of America plan to keep that torch of liberty burning regardless of the price they will have to pay. In keeping that torch burning, we plan to make it crystal clear that we want to be free. We don’t want pity, we want freedom. We don’t want promises—we want to eat, and we want that ballot. We want it now, and we plan to get both the ballot and a Coke. We plan to attend that school and to buy that house in any neighborhood that we like. Now to our white brothers who don’t want to have these things, I have a little message for you: You may go and dig up your outmoded laws, your Ku Klux Klan, your customs, traditions, your White Citizens Councils, your water hoses, tear gas, police department, state guards—all of no use, because this is the space age and segregation and discrimination must die. We are going to launch a step-up plan that might be called practical citizenship. It is real simple, our playhouses will be turned into voting booths and we will take our dolls to the polls. We will invite other kids over to tea and plan our dinners in the largest and most beautiful cafeterias in town. We will pick up our newspapers and select a movie that we want to see at random. We plan to teach our dolls how to go into public places and sit down and eat. We will teach our dolls high moral and educational standards and will enroll them in the best schools in the nation. We plan to open new fields of employment for them. These dolls represent the Negro youth of America. The youth plan to give swimming parties all along the beaches of the Atlantic Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. To carry out our plans, we will secure help from federal, state, and local officials. With the proper use of the ballot, this will not be a problem. Speaking of state officials, today I called my governor, the honorable J. Howard Edmondson, and we had quite a friendly talk. You see Governor Edmonson asked the student leader to call off a mass demonstration that was set for the John A. Brown’s store last March in order not to embarrass the state and to give him a chance to see what he could do. We had conducted a sit-in, a stand-in, and a walk-in since August 19, 1958. Trusting our governor we carried out his request and this evening he reassured me that he was doing everything that he could. He has given $10,000 to carry out the work of 121

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the committee and has hired an executive secretary. His committee has gone into the area of employment and in a month you will hear some good news from Oklahoma. In order to get our freedom, we plan to spend our money wisely. We don’t plan to buy where we can’t eat and if the business men in the community won’t help us, then we won’t buy. We do not plan to finance our own embarrassment. We plan to put our money in the Fighting Fund for Freedom; that means instead of buying cokes and chewing gum, we are going to turn our money into freedom by putting it into the NAACP, the organization that has won our victories for us. These are our plans, and if it takes sit-ins, negotiations, boycotts, and any other techniques, we are going to carry out our plans. We have got to save America. Let the mob cry: “Go back to Africa.” Then listen to the thousands of Negroes from the North, South, East, and West in the words that were quoted by Brown, we will go back to Africa when the English go back to England, the Irish back to Ireland, the French back to France, and when the white man gives America back to the Indians and goes home. Until then, we, the youth of America will carry out our plans for a democratic America.

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Priscilla Stephens July 1, 1960, KPFA broadcast, Berkeley, California

Priscilla Stephens was born August 1938 in Quincy, Florida, a small agricultural community twenty miles west of Tallahassee. She and her fellow activist sister, Patricia, grew up in Belle Glade, part of Palm Beach County. Their stepfather was a high school civics teacher, and their mother, Lottie Hamilton, encouraged them to work constantly for community improvement in the form of voter registration drives and other civic projects. Both sisters wanted to attend a well-funded white public school in Palm Beach County, but local schools were not yet in compliance with the court orders to integrate. The Stephens sisters attended Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University (FAMU) in the mid to late 1950s. After an initial bus boycott in 1956, civil rights mobilization on university campuses came to a standstill during the “Johns Committee,” years, a witch hunt for communists, gays, and civil rights activists resulting in a purge of about a hundred professors and deans in the Florida state university system. The Stephens sisters’ activism dates to a Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) event in Miami during the summer of 1959. In addition to the inspiring speakers, they were also influenced by the gang rape of their fellow student Betty Jean Owens by four white men. Priscilla and Patricia recruited heavily for CORE at Florida State University and FAMU, and between September and November 1959, the sisters amassed considerable experience with nonviolent tactics and demonstrations. Many accounts describe the sit-in movement as a set of events which begin only in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, but the Stephenses’ experience predates these more famous events by several months. Between 1960 and 1964, Priscilla (with her parents’ blessing provided she found a chaperone) served jail time, organized numerous nonviolent protests, and was kicked in the stomach while briefly integrating a public pool. In 1966 Priscilla Stephens fled to Ghana to raise her family in a more peaceful setting. She has not slowed down in civic activities. From 1989 to 2000 she taught at Gulfstream elementary school. She also founded the Black Heritage Museum in Miami and is a generous philanthropist. This speech of July 1, 1960, broadcast over KPFA, reads much like a creation myth—a systematic account of the origins of a social movement as a response to a 123

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barrage of questions from an inquisitive child. In this case the questions are: What is nonviolence? Why did you decide to organize a nonviolent civil rights organization? What were your first activities? How did you take on bigger projects? Are your events more effective when people of all races work together? Which citizens pose the biggest problems when staging an event? Do you practice the event before carrying it out? How do you keep so many people from regressing into anarchy? Were local attorneys available to represent you? Did the university and student population support you? Should we opt for jail time or pay fines? How do we get the word out to other people? The context of this speech is the conclusion to the final question. The Stephenses were invited by CORE to share their experiences to audiences from New York to the West coast, where the following speech took place.

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certainly wish I had all of you with me in Tallahassee; you seem all to be very interested in this movement somewhat, and we can certainly use you in the South. I wish I was up here planning a demonstration, a sit-in demonstration, rather than just telling you about what we’ve done so far. Last summer, my sister and I when were on our vacation in Miami, were invited to a CORE meeting, and CORE stands for the Congress of Racial Equality. We were invited to attend this meeting, and we did. We were so impressed by what CORE was doing that we decided to attend more meetings. So on our return to school in September, my sister and I decided to organize a CORE chapter in Tallahassee. So we were successful in doing this in the latter part of October and the first of November. Our first projects were testing the local buses in Tallahassee. In 1956 we had a bus boycott, and as a result of this bus boycott, the buses were supposed to have been integrated. We had heard that they were not. So we decided to find out why these buses were not integrated, although they were supposed to be. Some CORE members, including myself, decided to test the buses, and when we organized a CORE chapter in Tallahassee we were integrated. We had three white members, an instructor from the white university in Tallahassee, which is Florida State University, a woman who works in the government in Tallahassee, the capital, and the instructor’s wife. And along with some twenty Florida A&M University students and instructors. We got the white observers to ride the buses, to get on the buses first, at the same point where we were getting on the buses. They were to sit down, and in the cases where we were using females, we used a female white observer, we’ve learned that it’s best to have a white female and a Negro to work together in testing these

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local projects. On this particular test, we had a white woman and two Negro women. We purchased a ticket on the bus and we sat down the first seat and the second seat there. So the bus driver said very softly, but hard, “move to the back.” Of course we ignored him. We knew he was talking to us, but we just ignored him. So he then said, “move to the back,” getting slightly louder. So we still ignored him. Then he cursed and didn’t say anything else. Before we finished our ride, a Negro woman came up to us and said, “Don’t you know you can’t sit up here.” So then we knew what our problems were: first was the bluffing of the bus drivers, and secondly, educating the Negroes. We learned that Negroes had a tendency to sit to the back of the bus because of habit or fear or both. Then we decided to send leaflets out to all the churches in Tallahassee telling Negroes that we were going to change our society from a rear-view society to a front-view society. The CORE members decided to ride the buses once a week to find out whether the Negroes were going along with this new society. We discovered that the people that we were talking to were people that did not ride the buses; they were people who had cars and so forth. We discovered that people who ride the buses didn’t go to churches. Then we had another problem, which meant that we would have to get on the streets and varying other places where these type of people were, and tell them to change the society from a rear-view society to a front-view society. We accomplished something in that some of the Negroes, after seeing us ride in the front of the buses for maybe a month and a half, decided that they would change over, that this was not something so horrible after all, wasn’t so frightening after all. Our next project was testing the bus stations in Tallahassee—Greyhound and Trailways. There’s a law in Tallahassee saying that you should be able to purchase an interstate ticket on either side. We decided to see whether or not we could purchase an interstate ticket on the white side. Greyhound is on one corner and Trailways on the other corner on the same street, so we decided to test both of these stations on one night. Sometimes the persons who are participating have a tendency to go on these projects without any money; they always think that they are not going to be served. So we thought it would be a good idea to carry money along. Also, if they would sell us a ticket, we would buy the ticket to Thomasville, Georgia, which is only twenty-one miles from Tallahassee. Because really no one wanted to leave the state and since Thomasville is right across the line, we would get this ticket. We went on several projects protesting the bus stations and of course we were all refused. In one particular instance we had a man there from New York 125

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and he was on his way to Atlanta, Georgia, so he gave me twenty dollars to get his ticket for him. This was a white man. He went to the station first, to be an observer, to get the afterthoughts, and to be a witness if we needed one later on in court. He was in there just looking around, you know white people can do this in the south; they don’t really have to go once they purchase a ticket. He was there sitting about two minutes before we got there, so we arrived and walked over to the ticket booth and of course we noticed that this woman was ignoring us. Then we finally got her attention and told her that we wanted to purchase an interstate ticket to Atlanta, Georgia. Gergia, they say down home. She said, “I’m sorry, we just don’t serve colored here; go on the other side.” We said, “Why, we just want to purchase an interstate ticket to Atlanta, Georgia.” We emphasized it. She said, “I don’t care what kind of ticket you want to get, you go on the other side.” We decided to leave and go up to Trailways. And the Trailways station in Tallahassee is known for having a lot of rough characters around. So we were afraid that Greyhound would probably call Trailways and tell them we were coming in, that they were somewhat familiar with some of us testing. We went to Trailways and didn’t find too many rough looking characters; a policeman was standing over in the corner there and so we thought maybe we’d get a little protection. In Tallahassee, policemen do not protect Negroes as such. We followed the same procedures except the ticket agent was a man this time. We asked to purchase an interstate ticket to Atlanta, Georgia. He said, “I’m sorry, go right through that door and I’ll sell you a ticket.” I had not seen a door until he pointed, and there was this little door on the side that you go through but it was closed. We reemphasized that we wanted to purchase an interstate ticket to Atlanta, Georgia. He started getting as if he was about to get violent, and he was only bluffing. After I was convinced he was not going to sell us a ticket, I walked over to the counter and just stood there about five minutes, and he was just burning up. He wanted me to run out of there as if I was scared to death and I just wouldn’t. I was scared, but I wouldn’t run. I stood there for five minutes. This policeman was over there in corner not saying a thing but looking, just looking. The second time we tested the station, made a test, we really didn’t want to purchase a ticket. No one was going anywhere. We were just going to test again, make another test. You know when you ask for something and you’re surprised sometimes things come out the way you don’t really mean. So instead of saying Thomasville, Georgia, on this particular time we said Atlanta, Georgia, which is 369 miles away. Thomasville was only twenty-one miles away. He sold us a ticket; I don’t know why. So she still has this ticket; she’s trying to get rid of it. 126

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With that we decided that we would write the bus station about Greyhound because we were unable to purchase a ticket from the Greyhound station but we were at the Trailways station. We went back several more times to make sure they would do this again. They did, but we would go only when we really wanted to go and we were going short distances if we were not. Along with this we were testing the lunch counters in Tallahassee. We were doing this all along. It may be one group of CORE members that would go to the bus stations and one group of CORE members would go to the lunch counters. Prior to the mass demonstrations of sit-ins, we were testing in Tallahassee in that we would go to these lunch counters—we have four in Tallahassee—we would go to these lunch counters and sit down and we would ask for service and we were politely refused. Then we would ask why. And then they would say something like “It’s a policy of the store.” And then we would ask for the manager’s name. After getting this information, we would then get up and leave; we would not sit for any long length of time. However, we were planning a sit-in in Tallahassee before the sit-ins started in Greensboro, North Carolina. So since they did start before we got to them we decided to sympathize with a group on a particular date and then too we had the same problem in Tallahassee, as they have in North Carolina and other southern states. On February 13th, we decided to have a sit-in demonstration. But before February 13th, on the 12th, which was a Friday, the 11th and 12th we had social dramas. Maybe some of you have seen the social dramas on television that they made in the South. The social dramas are when students will sit down, pretending that they are at a lunch counter and other students will kick them, slap them, blow in their faces, pull their hair, and so forth. We do all of this to find out whether or not the students are capable of participating in that we stress nonviolence, and also to get them prepared as to what might happen on these demonstrations. So after two days of having social dramas, we decided that we were somewhat ready for the demonstration. Our procedures were, the first demonstration, we did not have white observers; this is quite unusual. We decided first to shop around first in the Woolworth’s; this is a particular store that we had our sit-in first. The students would go in, shop around; they would not go in all together. There were nine students involved in the first sit-in, and all nine students were not rushing to the store, going to the store at one time; they were going in pairs, right behind one another, maybe seconds apart. And then they would shop around, purchase some small articles and then they would move quietly to the lunch counter and sit down. Then they would try and place their orders if possible, and then if they were asked to leave 127

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they would say, “We’ll just wait.” And before each demonstration, we select a spokesman for the group in case some people want to argue or anything like that, we just have one person they can go to for information and what have you. On the first demonstration my sister was chosen as the spokesman of the group. They went into Woolworth’s at eleven o’clock on Saturday, February 13th. They were seated. After they were refused, they decided to read and just talk among themselves, never talking to anyone else, unless the spokesman decided that this was the right thing to do. And only he or she would do so. They sat for two hours and the only trouble they had on the first demonstration was that some white men, in most cases in the South it’s always the men and not the women—on both sides, it’s the men doing something wrong or not doing something; it’s one of those cases. And we were never the ones to give violence to the opposite side; women are just good on both races, I have found; it’s always the men. So of course some white men came into the store; and these men picked the youngest and the smallest person sitting at the lunch counter, a fifteen-year-old high school student. These big old guys walked over to him and asked him questions: “Can you read, boy,” they said. So he said, “Direct all of your questions to the spokesman.” So these men looked at him and said, “I said, can you read, boy?” And the man asked him, “How should they know if you can read, you should know.” He kept saying, “Direct all of your questions to the spokesman.” So then the white man decided he wanted to get violent and decided to blow smoke in this little fellow’s face. I don’t know why he didn’t pick on the other fellows; there were some big ones sitting down, too. They picked this little boy and aggravated him. There were a lot of reporters there and they were asking my sister a lot of questions and she was the only person who was supposed to talk. So they left at two o’clock and they had no more trouble. Now on the second demonstration we decided to plan it somewhat different in that we decided to use white observers on this particular demonstration. The white CORE members in Tallahassee decided to participate in that they were to go into Woolworth’s first looking around to find what kind of people were in the store, if there were any kind of unusual looking characters there. And they were to inform us what they found in there. So of course they did this and then they were to go back to the store and order a big breakfast or lunch or what have you, enough to last maybe an hour and a half, enough to eat on for an hour and a half. See, we do this in case we need witnesses in court or something; we can have these people there. So you’re not letting the other people, the public, know that they are with us. 128

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They did this and the procedures were different on the second demonstration in that my sister made a mistake. On the first demonstration she wore this loud orange coat, and on the second demonstration she wore it again. So, unfortunately, a waitress who was there on the first demonstration was there on the second and she saw Patricia entering the store with this orange coat on. And she threw up her hands and said, “Oh my God, here they come again,” so we didn’t have a chance to shop around. We had to rush quietly to the lunch counter and sit down. So then we all tried to place our orders and we were refused. We all said we would wait. And the other difference was, we only sat for an hour and a half, we were reading, we weren’t really reading, we were trying to read, and we were talking among ourselves. And no unusual crowd gathered as a result of our being there. And I might add, no white person got up to leave because we sat down; in fact, especially on the first demonstration, over a hundred persons were turned down after we were seated there. And on the second demonstration, plenty of people were turned down, after we were seated, and no one got up to leave. We were sitting there and after an hour and a half had passed, this gentleman, well-dressed gentleman, walked into the store. You know how you’re impressed by how some people look, they’re so well dressed and polished and so forth. So I saw this man come in the door, there was a mirror right in front of us and you can see everything going on in the back. This is very good you know, too. You can see anybody trying to sneak up on you in case you want to duck. You can’t fight back, but you can duck. So we saw this welldressed gentleman, we were all impressed with how well-dressed he was, we knew that there was something striking about this man. We saw these fifteen policemen behind him. We knew there was something. We all looked around to see what was going on; we thought maybe something had happened and we had not heard or seen it. So we looked around trying to see what had happened while the policemen were rushing into the store. So then we came to the conclusion that they were coming for us. So we all looked—well, I can’t tell you exactly how we looked—but this gentleman walked over to my sister and asked her if she can read. I don’t know why they always pick this question to ask us in that we have books; it should be obvious that we can do something, you know. We have these books, although we are not reading most of the time, and he asked her if she knew the counter was closed. So she told him to direct all of his questions to the spokesman, and he looked at her very mean, as if “What do you mean, telling me what to do?” you know, one of those sort of expressions. So she pointed me out to him. So he then came over to me asking the same identical questions, only adding, “as the mayor 129

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of Tallahassee”—and this is when I realized that it was a possibility that he was the mayor of Tallahassee, I never met the mayor of Tallahassee, there was nothing written on him or something like that saying he was mayor, but anyway, he said “as the mayor of Tallahassee I’m asking you to leave.” So I asked the gentleman if any of us did not leave, would we be committing a crime? He didn’t even bother to answer that question. He merely repeated the statement he had made previously. Then I thought it was only right for me to get up and relate to the other students what he had said to me in that all of them could not hear what he was saying. There were eleven of us involved, too, by the way in this demonstration. So I got up to tell the other students what he had said, and I also said if we didn’t leave we’d probably be arrested. We had talked of being arrested, but no one had really decided to be arrested. So then and only then, all eleven persons, including myself, decided to stay knowing that we would be arrested. The other students were already seated but before I could return to my seat the mayor told the chief of police to place all of us under arrest. Then the chief of police did something like this [gestures] and ten more policemen walked into the store. I don’t know why they need all those policemen for a peaceful body of students, but anyway, two policemen stood behind each one of us, some of them grabbing the fellows by the seat of their pants and searching them right there. We had nothing but books with us, but I don’t know why they searched us, the fellows anyway. And there were too many of us to travel by car, in that the Tallahassee police department, they don’t have that many cars in Tallahassee, so we had to walk to the police station, which was last year, the bank in Tallahassee. And the bank is now the police station. And the vault is the cell for prisoners. When the building was built, the vault was built for money and things of value, not human beings—not saying we’re not of any value, but it wasn’t built for us. So they put all eleven of us in there. So for two hours we were in that vault, no air whatsoever, you can imagine money doesn’t need air, so they had us in there. And for two hours we were in there before we knew what we were charged with, or before any of us were allowed to use the telephone. We were continuously asking what we were charged with and if one of us could use the telephone. This was all denied to us for two hours, although a policemen kept coming back saying the charges are this long and, “I’ll tell you in a minute.” This minute lasted for two hours. Finally, after two hours and a half had passed, this policeman came back and said, with this long piece of paper, folded, indicating the charges were all the way down, he read off three charges, and he blundered through those three. So of course they were disturbing the peace, inciting to riot, and dis130

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rupting the peaceful tranquility of the community. This was just sitting down now, quiet just talking among ourselves, very sorrowfully. So then he said, “Come in, girl, you can come out and use the telephone” (I can’t get rid of my southern accent for nothing in the world). He pointed to my sister so then she went out to use the telephone, she’s hurrying, dialing the telephone number very fast, telling someone where we were and to come get us out. So before she could get that last number dialed, the policeman told us, “Yes, while you’re dialing tell who you’re calling to bring $500 to get each one of you out.” Now this is just for sitting down at a lunch counter, quietly. So of course she immediately dropped the phone, almost on the floor. She had no idea who to call to come and get us out for $500. I’m telling you there wasn’t $5,500 in Tallahassee anywhere, we thought. She came back into the vault very sadly and related to us what he had said. I might add, that while we were in this vault, we were continuously singing and praying between times of asking what we were charged with. And meanwhile, it took so long for them to tell us what we were charged with because it took them two hours for them to think of something to charge us with. And it took about seven people to think up the charges; most of them were not even there. The chief of police came and said to us that a minister was sending a professional bondsman down to get us all out. So then we were released an hour later. Our preliminary hearing was the following Monday, February 22. And we had the demonstration on Saturday. After we were released from jail, the remainder of the Saturday and Sunday, we were trying to get lawyers to represent us in court for Monday, the preliminary hearing. And we were unable to get lawyers in Tallahassee—this is the capital of Florida, too, by the way, to represent us. We had to go five hundred miles away to get lawyers to represent us. And our lawyers got to Tallahassee one hour before court, one hour. So you can image how things were over that weekend after we were arrested. We all pleaded not guilty to the charges, and then our trial was set for March 3. Eight days before our trial, the entire student body at Florida A&M University—this is a Negro university in Tallahassee—decided to meet in our auditorium to discuss this problem and tell us ways they could support us, give us moral support. So the president of the student body at Florida A&M University, spread leaflets out on our campus saying that there would be a meeting at six o’clock. So at five o’clock the president of our university told the president of our student body that we could not have this meeting at six o’clock. The president of the student body had no idea how he could inform three thousand students by six o’clock—he was only informed at five o’clock 131

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that he could not have it—there was no way in the world for him to inform three thousand students by six o’clock that we could not have this meeting. On this particular day it was raining extremely hard, too. So, what we decided to do was just let the students gather in the auditorium and then we would tell them what we wanted them to come for before we had heard about this—that we could not have a meeting—and then tell them we couldn’t have it. The auditorium was packed—we have an extremely large auditorium—and it seemed to me that although it was raining very hard, all the students were there; they had to stand up, there was not enough seating room for all of them. The students who were involved decided to sit in the audience rather than sit on the stage, because if we would have been on stage it would have meant we were going to have the meeting anyway and we didn’t want to do this without their permission. The president of the student body got up and said, “I’m very sorry but we cannot have this meeting concerning the rest of our eight students today because the president said we could not,” something like this—all in one sentence he was trying to say it. One of the students got up and said, “Why can’t we have this meeting?” He told him the president said we couldn’t have it. Then he said, “Well, why?” “I don’t know, the president said we can’t have the meeting.” Then someone said, “We’ll have it anyway, we’ll go outside,” and then it seemed to be raining harder as he said this. I said, “Oh my gosh we’re going outside and have it.” Then someone said, “Why shouldn’t we have it right here; it’s raining outside, let’s have it here.” Then the entire student body voted to have it there. Then—of course they voted to have it in there. The student body decided that they would give us moral support as well as financial support on the day of our trial, and before our trial, too. Then they decided to go down to the courthouse and give us support. The courthouse only seats 260 people, and you can imagine, I don’t know where in the world those three thousand students thought they were going to sit, but anyway they were going down. This meant there would have been a big demonstration downtown. But what we did not know, before we had the meeting, we had called the press in Tallahassee and we asked them to cover this meeting. But evidently we had called the wrong person. And he didn’t show up, he only planted a tape-recorder in the auditorium. So the city officials downtown knew of our plans and so they decided to reschedule our trial, cancel our trial indefinitely. We heard this over the radio the next morning. So then we were invited to New York, we leaders of the sit-in movement in Tallahassee were invited to New York for a press conference and to tell of our experiences. Then when we were in New York at the time when they had a snow storm, and we were so impressed with the students as well as the 132

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older people picketing Woolworth’s in all of that snow. And you know how people from Florida are, we just aren’t used to seeing all of that snow, and all of those people out picketing—we were really impressed. Now we thought, if these people can picket in all of that snow at the worst time, the worst time they’ve ever had, the least thing we could do is go to jail. Of course we told them this. So on our return to Tallahassee, we decided to have a mass demonstration. As a result of the mass demonstration forty-six students were arrested. Then the city officials decided to get rid of all the leaders in Tallahassee. They decided to reschedule our trial (it’s a shame I can’t tell you about that mass demonstration). We were tried and convicted. We were sentenced to sixty days in jail and a $300 fine. And we were given until the next day at eleven o’clock to come in with our $300 or we would all go to jail. What the judge didn’t know is that we were not going to pay our fine, but we were going to jail. But our lawyers advised three persons to stay out. Our lawyers thought that three persons out of the eleven should stay out. If all the leaders went to jail, things would probably die down in Tallahassee. So we spent four or five hours before we were supposed to go to jail voting people out, everybody wanting to go to jail. You see all of us, all of us, do not believe in paying for segregation. No one involved, and no one that I know of, believes in segregation. So after five hours had passed and we got these three people out the other eight persons went to jail, and three weeks after we went to jail, three other persons were taken out on an appeal, which is still pending. The other five of us remained in jail for forty-nine days. Now we were given sixty days, and we wanted to serve sixty days, but they decided to do us a favor. They gave us ten days for good behavior and one day to avoid publicity. I’d like to say that I’m sure that all of us will probably be going back to jail again. Jail is not a very pleasant experience, and then it is a pleasant experience in that when you believe in something strongly enough, you don’t consider jail as something horrible or anything like that, because this summer I’m sure that my sister and I and the other persons who were involved in the sit-in demonstrations will be going back to jail. Some of you think that the sit-ins and the other demonstrations have quieted down a bit, but you just keep your eyes open. You might not hear the word sit-in but you’ll hear something else, with another “in” in it. And you’ll probably hear of students being arrested. And let me add this to my conclusion. I hope each one of you will give all the support, as much support as possible, to push this thing, because this is a fight that concerns all of us, not just the Negroes. This is a fight that should 133

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concern all Americans—I shouldn’t even segregate it to Americans—all individuals who believe in democracy, who believe in equality. Do everything possible: picket, boycott, just do everything to help us as much as possible, write letters to people, send money if you have any—I know most of you are students and have very little money—but your physical support can be most important, especially here. Don’t think that because you are in the West and not in the South that this does not concern you, because it does. As long as we are not free, you are not free. Thank you very much.

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Casey Hayden August 1960, National Student Association Convention, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Sandra Cason “Casey” Hayden was born on October 31, 1937, in Victoria, Texas (she maintains her birth name Sandra Cason). Raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents, her affinity for those on the margins came personally, as her mother was the “only divorced woman in town,” the young Hayden “identif[ied] with outsiders.” Upon entering the University of Texas as a junior in 1957, Hayden moved quickly into student racial politics—first with regional and national positions with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and later with the United States National Student Association (NSA). As the student sit-in movement exploded during the spring of 1960, and as campuses across the country were quickly mobilized for action, Hayden was recruited by the NSA’s Constance Curry to participate in a six-week Southern Student Human Relations Seminar. At this seminar, held on the campus of the University of Minnesota, Hayden met student activists from across the country, including several who were working for the fledgling Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Later, at an Atlanta conference of SNCC held in October 1960, Hayden was transfixed by the idea of the Beloved Community as espoused by Nashville leader James Lawson and student activist Diane Nash. Hayden married the charismatic student leader Tom Hayden in the fall of 1961 and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked professionally southwide on race relations for the YWCA and helped organize what would become the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as SNCC, whose first Mississippi project had gotten underway that summer in the virulently racist city of McComb. Hayden traveled extensively in the South, moving from SNCC headquarters in Atlanta to hot spots such as Albany, Georgia, where her attempts to integrate a courtroom got her arrested. As her marriage to Tom Hayden (then in Ann Arbor, Michigan) fell apart in the fall of 1962, she worked as a Northern Coordinator for the Friends of SNCC. Ostensibly a fundraiser, Hayden worked feverishly in the cramped Atlanta offices 135

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trying to keep SNCC afloat. But she also wanted part of the organizing action in the field; as such, she headed to Mississippi in the fall of 1963 to work with Bob Moses. Stationed in Tougaloo, Mississippi, Hayden worked both on a literacy initiative and for the Council of Federal Organization’s (COFO) voter registration projects. During Freedom Summer, Hayden served as a program coordinator for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and later traveled to Atlantic City to participate in the party’s historic challenge. Hayden’s fame outside of the movement dates to an important SNCC conference held in Waveland, Mississippi, in November 1964. As the organization began fraying from within, riven, ironically, by race, Hayden and several other women drafted an anonymous paper, which “seemed [like] an aside.” Titled “The Position of Women in the Movement,” the brief paper noted that “the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority. Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.” A year later, along with fellow SNCC worker Mary King, Hayden drafted a more formal paper titled, “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo.” In it they argued that women also needed to organize, to tell their stories of oppression, exclusion, and condescension, and to transform the personal into the political. That document would prove to be a founding document, especially among white, second-wave feminists. The text was received coolly by black women. After breaking with SNCC in 1965, Hayden continued her activism in New York, Vermont, San Francisco, and Colorado. She returned to Atlanta in 1981 to work for the Southern Regional Council. Later, she worked in Andrew Young’s mayoral administration as an administrative aide in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs. In 1989, Hayden followed her southwestern roots to Arizona, where she presently resides in Tucson with her husband, Paul Buckwalter, and near her two children Don and Rosemary Boyce. Her lyrical account of her activism is recorded in the anthology, Deep in Our Hearts. This brief speech, delivered before nearly five hundred delegates of the NSA, came at a pivotal moment in that organization’s history. With delegates lined up against using the resources of the NSA to publicize and raise money for the southern student movement, Constance Curry needed a major rhetorical favor—and this she got with Hayden’s speech. Hayden recalls that her address was received with a standing ovation; more importantly, it helped carry the vote in favor of NSA support for the budding movement. Employing a refutative design and raising key questions, Hayden skillfully makes the case for supporting the student sit-in movement. With an assumed agreement on ends (the right to protest), Hayden engages the consequences of the means (sitting-in). The sit-ins are important not just in a 136

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moral sense, but that morality is fully realized in the moment of action; in other words, sitting-in is the performance of an ideal. That performance is both means and end, noble idea actualized in human embodiment.

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understand we on this panel are to represent different shades of opinion on the sit-ins. While I may fall within a certain shade of opinion, I speak neither for the sit-inners nor the Southern white, but only for myself. I find the sit-in question to be essentially an ethical question, not a question of expediency or emotion. I do not mean this to be abstract, for an ethical question means a personal decision. None of you can make this decision for me, nor would I attempt to make it for any of you. Now an ethical question is both utterly simple and confusingly complex. On this particular question, I only hope we do not lose its essential simplicity in the complexity. I would touch on the first point first—its simplicity. When an individual human being is not allowed by the legal system and the social mores of his community to be a human being, does he have the right to peaceably protest? Yes. No “buts,” just “Yes.” Perhaps in this situation protest is the only way to maintain his humanity. I feel sure that everyone concurs with the statement I have just made. However, we may say this and add “but” and the complexities arise. First, the fear of violence. I can understand this. We certainly feared violence in Austin after hearing of Marshall. But should a person who does not strike back be blamed because he is struck? I simply fail to understand why, if the presence of Negro students sitting quietly or white and Negro students sitting together is so infuriating to a mob that they resort to violence, the students should be blamed for the sickness of the mob. Another complexity may be that you agree with this, but simply do not think the sit-ins are wise. Well, wise in terms of what? The amount of discomfort caused? I do not choose to live my life in terms of comfort. Or perhaps unwise because it will cause the segregationists to harden in their attitudes? Here I can only say that I do feel some pity for the segregationists and realize it will be difficult to accept the changes that must come. But I am not free as long as he keeps me from going where I please with whom I please, and I do not think that fear of him should keep me and others from trying to right the wrong for which he stands. Still further, we may raise the question of the relation of protest and the law. In the first place, most of the laws applied are old laws obviously revived to enforce the segregationist mores of a community. Secondly, I believe the 137

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patently discriminatory laws are illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment. However, students are breaking state laws. As I see it, a person suffering under an unjust law has several choices. He can do nothing. We have never advocated this in a democracy. He can use legal means. This has been done and will be done. However, if he sees the slowness of the legal means and realizes he is a human being now and the law is unjust now, he has other choices. He can revolt. I think we should all be proud and glad that this has not been the course of the Southern Negro. Or he can protest actively, as Southern students have chosen to do, and he must take the consequences. I do not see the law as immutable, but rather as an agreed-upon pattern for relations between people. If the pattern is unjust or a person doesn’t agree with the relations, a person must at times choose to do the right rather than the legal. I do not consider this anarchy, but responsibility. But the things I have been discussing I discuss only in order to converse with the other panelists. It seems to me now that these questions disturbed me because I’m so used to giving lip service to an ideal. We would all quote the slogan that segregation is wrong, but we would condemn the method used to bring people’s attention to its wrongness. An ideal can be transmuted into action . . . a just decision can become a reality in students walking and sitting and acting together. I cannot say to a person who suffers injustice, “Wait.” Perhaps you can, I can’t. And having decided that I cannot urge caution I must stand with him. If I had known that not a single lunch counter would open as a result of my action, I could not have done differently than I did. I am thankful for the sitins if for no other reason than that they provided me with an opportunity for making a slogan into a reality by making a decision an action. It seems to me that this is what life is all about. While I would hope that the NSA Congress will pass a strong sit-in resolution, I am more concerned that all of us, Negro and white, realize the possibility of becoming less inhuman humans through commitment and action with all their frightening complexities. When Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to a government which supported slavery, Emerson went to visit him. “Henry David,” said Emerson, “what are you doing in there?” Thoreau looked at him and replied, “Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?” What are you doing out there?

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Modjeska M. Simkins December 15, 1960, Bill of Rights Dinner, Washington, D.C.

Mary Modjeska Monteith Simkins was born on December 5, 1899, in Columbia, South Carolina. Her father, Henry Clarence Monteith was the mixed race son of a wealthy attorney, Walter Monteith, and his domestic servant, Mary Dobbins. The Henry Clarence Monteiths were a progressive Baptist family who participated in the Niagara movement, a precursor to the NAACP. They lived on a farm outside of Columbia, South Carolina, so that Mary Modjeska and her mother would not have to work for white people or be subjected to sexual servitude as Henry’s mother had experienced. In elementary school, Modjeska dropped her first name. She attended Benedict College in Columbia, graduating with a B.A. in 1922. From 1921 to 1929 she taught math at Booker T. Washington School. Her administrators asked her to leave the faculty in 1929 when she married Andrew Whitfield Simkins, a prosperous businessman twice widowed trying to raise five children. From 1931 to 1941, she directed the Negro Program for the South Carolina Tuberculosis association while engaged in graduate training at the University of Michigan and Columbia University. From 1941 to 1957 Modjeska Simkins served as the South Carolina state secretary for the NAACP, whose conference she cofounded. She ran for local and state offices unsuccessfully and was also active in too many associations to detail here, but three highlights deserve our attention. First, she was one of the organizers to work on the Clarendon County component of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Second, she founded the Victory Savings Bank, using interest of a black-owned enterprise to fund organizers’ attempts to integrate public schools. Third, she was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and removed from her position with the NAACP for her supposed communist party links. Modjeska Monteith Simkins died April 5, 1992. The Modjeska Monteith Simkins papers are held by the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Simkins’s speech of December 15, 1960, at a gathering in honor of the Bill of Rights in the nation’s capital, begins with an epigraph from Carl Sandburg, a prominent Abraham Lincoln biographer who valued intellectual autonomy. From there, Simkins casts her nets widely, quoting next from Sir William Blackstone, 139

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an English jurist who published an important commentary on the common law. She then turns to a brief description of the importance and content of the Bill of Rights. Even at the time these amendments became law, there were dissenters, she reminds us. Indeed, the Bill of Rights was too controversial to pass in 1787. The colonies could only risk such a potentially divisive issue after Spain and Great Britain could be theoretically pacified by treaty after France lay paralyzed with civil war. Despite the long tradition of Bill of Rights critics, some forty Americans have now taken their rights seriously while facing the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Four of these, Simkins explains, now languish in jail (Carl Braden, Edward T. Graham, Rev. Theodore R. Gibson, and Dr. Willard Uphaus). She understands that the HUAC is singing its swan song, as the San Francisco riots in May of 1960 had turned the vast majority of Americans against the committee after watching the public bullying of students. Simkins’s speech, beyond giving us a glimpse at the HUAC’s role in undermining the Bill of Rights, also gives her a stump from which to regale her opponents’ excesses: why should the NAACP and others spend millions of dollars in an effort to secure the rights which already belong to us? Why, in a post-McCarthy world must we face “the dogma and slimy claptrap of McCarthyism that is masticated and regurgitated by the big and little loyalty boards and investigating committees?” “I stand in this whirlpool as NOBODY’s yes-man . . . and when it happens that I no longer own the priceless piece of territory under my hat . . . then I will know that I am one of the moving, walking, stalking, and unburied DEAD.” —Carl Sandburg

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ivil liberty has been defined as the liberty of freedom of an individual to conduct his own affairs as he pleases, with only so much legal restraint as the public good may require. Blackstone said that “Political or civil liberty is no other than national liberty so far restrained as is expedient for the general advantage of the common good.” In addition, individual liberty is honestly recognized as freedom from restraint in the performance of rights outside of government control, such as the freedom of opinion and of conscience. The Bill of Rights, which we recognize in profound observance here tonight, compromises the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution as adopted by the First Congress on March 4, 1789. Following ratification by the various states and made a part of the Constitution on December 15, 1791,

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the Bill of Rights became the bedrock upon which the prestige and protection of civil liberties are based in the thinking of all honest and honorable men. Our forefathers, recognizing fully the prime necessity to guard jealously the elemental rights of even the least among men, and knowing only too well that tyrants of greater or lesser breed had trampled upon these liberties through countless generations, clearly stipulated certain definite fundamentals in the Bill of Rights. As to persons accused, for instance, they declared: They shall be confronted by witnesses against themselves; They shall be informed of the nature and cause of charges against them; They shall not be compelled to witness against themselves; They shall have the right to speedy and public trial by an impartial jury; They shall not suffer unreasonable search and seizure; They shall have the aid of defensive counsel; They shall not be deprived of life and liberty without due process of law—all geared when properly employed to fully protect the accused. In addition, in Article I, there are the guarantees of free speech and of the press, the right peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Significantly, many men of that day were not of kindred mind with the writers of the Bill of Rights. Less than a century later, we find in Smith’s John Bright (1881), “I trust the time is not far distant when the consciences of men will be no longer shackled by the restrictions of civil power.” Approximately forty Americans now well known for doing so have made the fatal error of believing that the First Amendment means everything expressed in it. Four of these have languished in jail. Tonight, one hundred sixty-nine years after Congress adopted the Bill of Rights, the constitutional liberties embodied in them are being trespassed upon with contemptuous disregard, even by agents and agencies of the very government which itself guaranteed these liberties. Various loyalty boards along with the most dastardly culprit, the Un-American Activities Committee, have hounded to social annihilation, physical suffering, emotional instability, death, and even at times worse than death, hundreds of honorable citizens. Add to these hundreds of thousands who have trembled in stark terror of character assassination, guilt by association, social ostracism, loss of work— which was the only source of basic marginal necessities of life for many, with the blackest terror being the refusal of the guarantee to be confronted with accusers. 141

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How much respect and regard can be extended a man or a nation that makes a contract—a guarantee—and then either breaks that contract or allows others to violate the provisions of the guarantee? This question is being pondered by other nations, especially the newly born, who cannot equate our professions of democracy with our practicing of it. As true Americans, you and I, even at the risk of being greatly misunderstood, must strive to see that democracy becomes an actuality in wider and wider areas. Because the contracts guaranteeing our fundamental liberties have been so persistently disregarded in various areas of our nation and in the several more significant areas of our liberties, we come tonight to rededicate ourselves to the task of seeing that these guarantees shall be met, and that those who are violating them are flushed out into the open and utterly discredited. No more urgent task faces us at this moment. One hundred sixty-nine years of indecision, the expenditure of hundreds of million of dollars in litigation to secure what is already guaranteed to us, and countless hours of anguish have brought us only a short distance along the way. We must remember constantly that as long as one man’s liberties are restricted, all men’s liberties are imperiled. In this hour of rededication, we pray, “Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression; and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of Justice among men and Nations” (Book of Common Prayer). The term “Civil Rights” is more often heard and discussed than that of “Civil Liberties.” “Civil Rights” usually is used to mean the right to equality—equal protection, equal justice, equal treatment, while “Civil Liberties” ordinarily is interpreted to mean freedom from unwarranted governmental interference, as in the case of freedom of speech, movement, assembly, etc. Witnessing the struggle in the Southland, the civil liberties of those seeking civil rights are under attack. The curbed ability to speak freely, move about, assemble, organize, and protest without government interference (including state and local governments) as witnessed particularly in the current sit-in demonstrations, endangers the enjoyment of civil rights through the implementation of civil liberties. Where formerly we were prone to think of progressives and so-called radicals as being forced to struggle for civil liberties for themselves while Negroes fought for equal rights, now that the struggle in the South has become a mass action program with hundreds of arrests, the civil liberties facet of the situation stands out prominently.

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Modjeska M. Simkins

Those who have eyes to see now observe that the Dixiecrat element realizes that the most effective way to deny civil rights from spreading in Dixie is to deny the enjoyment of civil liberties. A common example is the curbing of the liberty of assembly by denying the use of certain publicly owned meeting places such as public schools and municipal auditoriums to Negroes, as exemplified by the NAACP, when they are readily opened to whites, including White Citizens Councils. Recently the Columbia Township Auditorium was denied for use by the NAACP for a meeting to be addressed by Roy Wilkins, its national executive director. Less than two weeks later, the Martin Luther King interview program was snatched from local broadcast in Columbia, TV authorities stating that it was felt that they were acting “for the public good.” It is no accident that on several occasions Dixiecrats have made extreme attack upon the civil liberties of such Southerners as Carl Braden and Langston Goldfinch to intimidate those fighting for civil rights. The time has come long since when those in the South, fighting for civil rights, as well as those fighting in the North for civil liberties, should realize that the civil rights fight and the civil liberties struggle are one and the same. Negro leaders should broaden their perspectives so as to be concerned just as much about the freedom of Willard Uphaus as those seeking freedom for Uphaus are concerned about justice for Daisy Bates. As intimated above, the implementation of civil rights through the exercise of civil liberties is expensive and long drawn out. The opposing forces, particularly on the segregation front, are quick to see that the stifling of civil liberties will hinder the oncoming of civil rights. Hence the rash of antiNegro legislation in the unreconstructed Deep South, aimed to exhaust all private funds in the fight for civil rights, while the rapists of our civil liberties dissipate the general public funds unflinchingly. It is high time that injunctive proceedings should be instituted wherever possible to stall the use of general tax funds just to save “our way of life down here in the South,” and “Save Americans from destruction by subversives elsewhere.” The Dixiecrats are solidified in their determination to exert road-blocking interference against civil rights advances. Just as determined are similar forces elsewhere in the nation, who aspire daily to nullify all efforts on the part of liberals or progressives to enjoy the already guaranteed civil liberties. In moving our phalanxes back to the bedrock of our liberties, we must understand clearly and demand the enjoyment of every jot and tittle of our civil liberties.

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As said above, the blackest trespass in the last two decades has been that of not allowing those under attack to confront their accusers. I need not give you a history of the Un-American Committee or a biography of its patron saint, Joseph McCarthy, who being dead, yet speaketh. It is unnecessary to elaborate on the dogma and slimy claptrap of McCarthyism that is masticated and regurgitated by the big and little loyalty boards and investigating committees, for there are those here who know far better than I how to do any of these. They and those dear to them have suffered the rigors and wounds of the more devastating years of the McCarthy era. There are those here who withstood vicious attack from all sides until McCarthy was utterly discredited, and the change came. All of us often must wonder what would have been the fate of America today if those had not dared to hold the line at all cost. We mourn the passing of others whose names are well known and revered for their combat as they fell mortal victims to the viciousness of McCarthy and this progeny. We must remain ever alert to the danger of not being allowed to confront our accusers. We have the paid and lousy opportunist accusers and witnesses on the run. We must keep them running. The sneaking characters who would help build dossiers of flimsy fabrication which aid in character assassination and guilt by association must be stood up to and utterly routed. We have now bred stalwarts like Carl Braden who told the Un-American Committee, “My beliefs and my associations are none of the business of this committee.” Also Edward T. Graham, who defied a state legislative committee and was sentenced to six months in jail and a fine of $1,200, along with Reverend Theodore R. Gibson said, “We are hoping that we can reestablish once and for all that rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights still prevail. The State has not convinced me that its right is more compelling than the rights given me as an individual in the Bill of Rights under the U.S. Constitution.” To these must be added Dr. Willard Uphaus, who served the major portion of a one-year sentence in the Merrimac County (New Hampshire) jail. Of him, Mr. Justice Black said he is “another of that ever-lengthening line of cases where people have been sent to prison and kept there for long periods of their lives because their beliefs were inconsistent with the prevailing views of the moment.” America’s slumbering millions, as much brainwashed and hoodwinked on the matter of the violation of their liberties as any people, must be awakened to the onslaught on the bedrock of their liberties. 144

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Which brings us finally to the milk in the coconut. No matter how one looks at it, the American people must be made to realize clearly that their fundamental liberties will be dangerously threatened and viciously attacked as long as the Un-American Committee is allowed to draw the breath of life. With the same finality with which Christ said, This one thing thou lackest, we must hold that we cannot survive free men unless this cancer is cauterized from our society. This one thing we must do! Whatever progress has been made over several generations in implementing our liberties has been almost totally erased by the onslaughts of this committee. Its members, its protégés, and fellow travelers are the major saboteurs of our liberties and the pure concept of democracy. Their poisonous fangs are sunk deep into the vitals of this nation, so that the small-fry investigating committees have been set up in various states, one being in South Carolina and having the power to throw anyone they deem in contempt “in the common jail of any county and held there until he complies with such order.” That order is a pure demand to incriminate oneself. When all other efforts to gain their ends fail, the oppositions shrieks, “Communist.” One can assert without fear of significant contradiction that the last home of McCarthyism will be in the breasts of Dixiecrats and their like, for they see the potency of McCarthy tactics in attaining their ends in the integration struggle, which they are doing their best to label communistic. In the McCarthy era, the idea was sown that one way to spot a Communist was to notice his belief in and action for racial equality, so they eagerly use the “logic” and say one for racial equality in the South is a Red. This routs and makes slaves of weak souls who would think and do righteously. It will be remembered that Professor Walter Gelhorn in Security, Loyalty, and Science quotes the chairman of a government loyalty board as saying, “Of course the fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn’t prove he’s a Communist, but it certainly makes you look twice doesn’t it? You can’t get away from the fact that racial equality is a part of the Communist line.” However we illuminate or expostulate, we must come back to the pivotal point. We must eradicate any agency or group that would neutralize the potency of our civil liberties. Once that is done, the roust-about, unnecessary snooping done by the Un-American Committee and its little brat committees in the various states will be replaced by the legal and more dignified services of agencies qualified and paid to do police work. The courts, organized to try and judge, will have that portion of their rightful power returned to them. 145

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The espionage agencies, capable of doing a good job of protecting our land, can get these busy-bodies from under foot as they properly guard us. It is just as unreasonable to be burdened with double expenditure for repetition of services as it is unjust to suffer double jeopardy. Make no mistake. The pendulum has swung. The Un-American Committee has fouled its own nest. Individuals, groups, and organizations who think like ourselves are daring to speak out now. So are press and government officials. Representative James Roosevelt (D-California), said of this committee: We come to what I think is the most serious criticism of the committee—the fact that it has become an agency for the destruction of human dignity and constitutional rights. On this subject volumes have been written, especially concerning the committee’s contempt for the legal rights of its victims. We have become accustomed to think of those whom it subpoenas or labels as victims rather than witnesses. Endlessly they are dragooned before the committee and accused. Secret sources, arrogance, rudeness, defamation, and the threat of prosecution either for perjury or contempt if they do not seek the refuge of silence are the constant ingredients of this degrading spectacle. Beyond this the committee is sanctimoniously cruel. Those who would answer the charges against themselves are forced to accuse others and become agents of further havoc. It is, I think, a monstrous thing that we have created such an institution and lent it our powers and prestige. But we can also end this terrible agency and take back our powers. . . . We have no mandate to abuse the rights and feelings of our citizens, nor are we obligated to profane ourselves in the eyes of the rest of the world. The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee has made a magnificent fight under great odds against the Un-American Committee. Equally as strategic an attack is being made in the South by the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Other groups in many parts of the nation are taking hold. “Say not the struggle naught availeth.” It is our duty, somehow, to see that the littlest man lowest down in this nation eventually shall know what his guarantees of liberty are, and how important it is for him to demand them for his fellowmen as well as for himself. He must realize that the man who differs even drastically with him must have the right to tell what he thinks or believes to all who will hear. That is

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his free speech privilege. He must know the right and power of protest; the justice of fair trials before impartial juries; and he himself respect and demand that others respect a man’s home as his castle. Former Governor James Folsom of Alabama once said, “A man’s home is his castle; the way he protects it is a matter of his own choosing.” The masses are ready to move. We who know that we are right and that we are on the right track must make a telling struggle for the minds of men as we reestablish our liberties in our daily lives. We must start almost at the bottom again. The road back will not be easy. But the accomplishment will be most rewarding for we will be working in coordination with the Master of all Men who came that all men might have the more abundant life and that they might be free indeed.

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Charlotta Bass February 12, 1961, First Unitarian Church, Los Angeles, California

Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass was born on February 14, 1874, in Sumter, South Carolina, the sixth of eleven children. After attending Penbroke College for one semester, Bass moved to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1900, where she lived with a brother and worked as an “office girl” for the Providence Watchman. Ten years later, and because of health concerns, Bass moved to Los Angeles, California, where she quickly got a job selling newspaper subscriptions for the California Owl, one of the oldest black-owned and operated newspapers in the western United States. Per founding editor John J. Neimore’s deathbed wish, Charlotta assumed editorial and publishing duties in March 1912. Captain G. W. Hawkins, a secondhand store owner, put up the capital to purchase the Owl, then turned the paper over to Bass. The new owner took correspondence courses in journalism from UCLA and Columbia, and she quickly changed the paper’s name to the California Eagle and hired Joseph Blackburn Bass to edit the paper in 1914; he would serve in that capacity for twenty years. The two later married and together they produced one of the most influential voices for racial equality on the West Coast. Charlotta served as managing editor of the Eagle from 1914 to 1951; she also published a weekly column, “On the Sidewalk.” The event that regionally galvanized Bass’s racial credentials was her court challenge of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Though Griffith won the suit and was thus able to continue production, Bass parlayed her challenge into speaking engagements around the country; as a result, subscriptions for the Eagle spiked, rising to 60,000 by 1925. Because of her very public and outspoken stance on such matters as school desegregation, restrictive housing covenants, Klan vigilantism, and unfair hiring practices, she received numerous threats on her life and livelihood. The FBI constantly monitored her activism, and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s interest in her resulted in flagging sales, prompting her to sell the paper in 1951. The next year she ran for vice president on the Progressive Party ticket, becoming the first black woman to do so. She also ran for Los Angeles City Council and the U.S. House of Representatives. She later founded the California Independent Progressive Party and was a close friend to Paul Robeson and 148

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W. E. B. Du Bois, among other luminaries. In 1960 she retired to Lake Elsinore, where she remained politically active, opening a reading room and voter registration office in her garage. She also published an autobiography, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper. She passed away on April 12, 1969, from complications related to a stroke. Her papers are housed at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. In this speech of February 12, 1961, just two days before her eighty-seventh birthday, Bass opens with a litany of African American contributors to U.S. history. But she also wishes for her audience to focus on the basic problem besetting black Americans: getting beyond second-class citizenship. Her history of black Americans launches an account of notable gains, from Crispus Attucks on through the twentieth century. She then links domestic racism and anti-labor and anti-free speech legislation to international Cold War attitudes meant to poison American minds toward their fellow human beings in China, the Soviet Union, Africa, and the world.

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f I attempted to tell a brief history of the advent of the White Man on the American scene, I would take it from the pen of a White Man, who would find no language strong enough to paint that history. This morning, however, the First Unitarian Church and its eminent pastor, the Reverend Stephen H. Fritchman, have granted me the privilege of fifteen minutes to tell you the story of the advent of the Negro in our country, America. Just how I am going to crowd what is in my mind on this subject in the time allotted, I do not know. In bygone years, I would have begun with the achievements of such historic characters as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, and many others of their particular era. But my thinking has long since drifted from this trend. So briefly, in order to relate the advancement made by Negroes in the United States during a long period of cruel oppression, it is significant that we look backward for a few moments. During the early history of this nation, slavery became the chief issue. Those who believed in slavery fought to preserve it, while those who sensed the injustice and futility of a system that gave some human beings the right to hold others in bondage for the purpose of exploitation and profit fought against it. What was true of that early period in a sense is true today. About the time when the question, as to the right or wrong attitude towards slavery, became such a burning issue that it threatened destruction of 149

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the new country, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the presidency. In his acceptance speech, Lincoln said, on the question of slavery: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” “I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free.” I ask you, my brothers and sisters, is ours a united nation? Are all Americans free and equal? The line between freedom and slavery truly is not as sharply drawn now as it was when Lincoln and Roosevelt made those pronouncements that a nation cannot endure half free and half slave. But we do know that there are twenty million second-class American citizens. There are those among us, no doubt some here this morning, who answer this challenge with: But look at the progress you have made and are still making. Let us take a retrospective look at the past. In the colonial period a Negro, Crispus Attucks, struck the first blow for American freedom against British tyranny. Peter Salem was the hero at the battle of Bunker Hill. Five thousand Negro soldiers served in the American Revolution. During the Civil War 178,975 Negroes were enrolled in the Union Army. A total of 36,847 Negro soldiers lost their lives in this struggle to preserve the Union of the States. 404,348 Negroes served in the U.S. Army in World War I. In World War II, there were 920,000. A Negro served as governor in Louisiana in 1876. In that same year, there were fourteen Negroes in the U.S. House of Representatives. Since that time eighty Negroes have served in the House of Representatives; thirty as members of legislatures, some twelve judges, four of whom are presently serving in California. To name a few of these statesmen there are Adam Clayton Powell, William Dawson, Charles P. Diggs, Earl B. Dickerson, Francis E. Rivers, Arthur W. Mitchell, Julian Rainey, and our own Augustus Hawkins, who represents the 62nd Assembly District of Los Angeles in our state capitol in Sacramento. In the federal government there are Judge William Hastie and Walter Gordon, the present governor of the Virgin Islands. Representing the U.S. in the United Nations is Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, and in our new administration, against bitter opposition, our president appointed Robert C. Weaver as administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. It is said that this is the highest position a Negro has ever held in the United States government. In literature, in music, on the stage and screen, the Negro artist forged ahead through all opposition and difficulties and has taken his place among 150

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the highest of whatever race or color. To mention a few in that struggle there are Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Nat King Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Josephine Baker, and many, many others. True, the race has been hard and long. It is still not won completely. In every field there is opposition. There is especially a tough battle in the political field, in the endeavor to secure our much heralded civil rights. Beyond a hope for something definite during the Eisenhower administration, nothing has happened that would secure these civil rights to the Negro people since the beginning and end of the Reconstruction period. We have heard the voices of many of our leaders, chosen not by us, but by the forces that enslave us and keep us poor and submissive. It seems to me that, as we review some of the past events in history, we should realize that the Martin Luther Kings, the student sit-ins, the Negro children who are not afraid to face segregationist mobs in their determination to get an education will lead us toward rather than away from the KansasNebraska Act. For what we need today is not a Taft-Hartley Act to destroy the masses of labor; not a Smith Act to kill freedom of speech; not a McCarran Law. No, not a Loyalty Oath to ostracize some of our greatest scientists, or to drive out of the educational system teachers of liberal thinking, willing to teach the facts of life. We need faith, and peace, and trust in government that protects our rights and the rights of all people without regard to race, color, or religion. Looking backward to 1776, at a time of awful trial and tribulation for the people of America, a man called Tom Paine addressed himself to his fellow countrymen. He wrote a proclamation called “The Crisis,” a message for those who loved freedom and thought independence a cause worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. At this very moment, we, the American people, are part of a new world crisis. We are challenged by Russia, China, and Africa to stop talking about our free country and act for peace. Since we, the Negro people of the United States, are members of that great family of dark peoples of the world numbering into millions in India, China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaya, Africa, and other parts of the world, we naturally are concerned with the future destiny of our nation and these other nations, and our place in this atomic age. We have felt and are still feeling the pangs of hate and oppressions. On every hand we hear it said that ours is a free country, the only one left in the family of nations. 151

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As a part of this free world and a member of the American Family, we, the twenty million American Negroes, claim a share in the democracy we helped to win in all the wars. We also answered the call at home and abroad, and we do not want to again sacrifice our youth in a third world war. Today, the Negro is a part of the UN forces in Africa, Laos, and in all parts of the world fighting, we say, to subdue Communism and demonstrate that colonialism is still in the saddle cracking the whip. The same forces that keep us in chains now tell us to fight again, to shackle the Chinese who liberated their people by their own might and determination to be free. They tell us that the Chinese people are “red”; they are “communists,” and we run and bury our heads in the sand because we are afraid—we don’t know why. We never stop to think that we are persecuted because we are black. They manufacture lies about our greatest and most unselfish and most prominent leaders, such as Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, by calling him a foreign agent. No victory is ever won through fear. Frederick Douglass defied fear when he unleashed his own shackles and made a break for freedom and the eventual freedom of his people and fellow prisoners in chains. Harriet Tubman with only a record of education in the debasing school of slavery knew that the desire of her heart was freedom for herself and her people. Are we, the Negroes of this age and period, enjoying the full freedom that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman fought for? Are we less courageous than they were? These are the challenges we face and must answer real soon. We must not lay down our arms before victory is won. Today we stand on the brink of a new world and watch a world drama rush through the daily headlines of the metropolitan press with increasing anxiety. We have seen slavery abolished. We have seen fascism sprout, blossom, and bloom in Europe. We witnessed its conquest supposedly in Europe, at the close of World War II. We believed that it had been destroyed everywhere. But today, we have a different story to tell you—today we see our government, the United States of America, appropriating billions upon billions of dollars to breathe new life in those decadent nations which lent their support to our enemies in World War II, and to fight, we say, aggression in Russia. Our allies in World War II have become our enemies, and our enemies our allies as we set the stage for World War III, which we hope will never come to pass. World Wars I and II picked from our population the flower of our youth and sent them to all corners of the earth, but our government has consistently refused to appropriate a dollar to outlaw racial segregation in education, local 152

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transportation, and to provide for our defense against Ku Klux tyranny here in the United States. If we must fight again, let it be to batter down the walls of racial prejudice, national hatreds, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, and the lynch mob. Intolerance has grown and flourished in our nation to the extent that it has penetrated to all corners of the world wherever the American flag is flown, even to the so-called dark continent of Africa where a few days ago one of the most hideous crimes was committed—the assassination of Premier Patrice Lumumba. It is our fervent prayer that these bulwarks of misunderstanding and hatreds in our own nation and the other nations of the world—Russia, the People’s Republic of China, Africa—will crumble and fall like the walls of Jericho in that other period of unrest in the world’s history. But it is also wise to say, “Beware, ye Nations of the World!” The people are speaking out louder and more coherently than ever before in their demand for peace and their share of the fruits of their labor. And in the language of Andrew Jackson, “By the Eternal” they are going to have them!

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Diane Nash August 1961, National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, Detroit, Michigan

Diane Nash was born on May 15, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois. She attended public and Catholic schools on the Southside, where she also won several beauty pageants. She began her collegiate studies at Howard University but transferred to Fisk University in 1959. Her move from a northern world, where an African American could compete successfully with white women in beauty pageants, to the humiliating world of segregated Tennessee state fairs was abrupt, prompting her involvement in the civil rights movement. In 1960 Nash began attending the Reverend James Lawson’s nonviolent civil disobedience workshops in Nashville, and later she began organizing sit-ins. Initially Nash was skeptical of the nonviolent approach and also fearful of jail, but her workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, her friendship with Septima Clark, and her activist experiences convinced her of the method’s efficacy. In April of 1960 she helped co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In August 1961 she and James Bevel, also a civil rights activist, shocked their co-workers by marrying. Bevel was a notorious womanizer, and Diane was a Catholic who had once considered taking a vocation in a convent. That same year, Diane Nash took over coordinating responsibilities for the freedom riders. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) originally organized the rides, but abandoned them in the face of heavy violence, including bombings and mob riots. Nash and her fellow Nashville activists made sure that the rioters did not win. In 1962 Nash served part of a two-year sentence for her activism even though she was four months pregnant. Most remember Nash for her ability to build bridges among ego-involved men in SNCC, SCLC, and the NAACP. The March on Washington may have been a harbinger for change in activist trajectory, but in spite of her poise and eloquence, Nash was not invited to speak. She continued her work for SCLC until 1965, then parted ways as the Black Power movement took over SNCC and male clergy continued their hegemony over SCLC and other movements. She and James Bevel soon separated. While raising her two children, she remained an activist, joining antiwar, feminist, and fair housing movements while working as a real estate agent. 154

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She has received numerous awards including the Rosa Parks Award (1965), the John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation Award (2003), and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Award (2004). While no central archive houses Nash’s papers, many oral histories and other important artifacts on her life are found at the Washington University Film and Media Archive (St. Louis), the Beck Center at Emory University, and archive collections at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, University of North Carolina, Middle Tennessee State University as well as the University of Southern Mississippi. Diane Nash begins her August 1961 address to the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice by reminding her audience that her remarks are a personal interpretation—not an authoritative voice of the movement, the SCLC, or SNCC. The motives of the broader movement, she says, are love, service to God and Mankind, and the beloved community. This last concept comes from idealist Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916), who influenced W. E. B. Du Bois as a student in Cambridge. As popularized by Martin Luther King Jr., this idealism was pragmatic—tolerance and dignity were feasible goals, but no one expected lions and lambs to transform their inner natures. After a brief comparative reference to individual places across the world, Nash argues that global problems have the same root: a paucity of respect for human dignity. To illustrate her perceptions she utilizes anecdotal evidence of her experiences in the South upon first attending school there in 1959. She adds to this evidence a careful analysis of racist fallout and follows with a justification of her methods of change: boycott and freedom rides. The boycotts increased awareness to business owners who misunderstood their broader customer base. Freedom rides were not attempts at troublemaking, but a celebration of the rights of citizenship under the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Nash ends her message with a question: what can we do? Her answers are practical and varied. We can encourage federal decisiveness. We need to increase awareness to ordinary people. As Catholics (her target audience), we need to use existing groups to emphasize racial justice and deal with it directly, by way of three methods: participation, observation, and active resistance.

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see no alternative but that this text must be a personal interpretation of my own experience within the region known as “Dixie.” My participation in the movement began in February 1960, with the lunch counter “sit-ins.” I was then a student at Fisk University, but several months ago I interrupted my schoolwork for a year in order to work full time with the movement. My occupation at present is coordinating secretary for the Nashville Nonviolent Movement. 155

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I should not wish to infer that I speak for the southern movement, for I think that there is no single person who can do that. Although many of the following statements can be generalized for the entire movement in the South, I shall refer largely to Nashville, Tennessee, for that is where I have worked. I submit, then, that the nonviolent movement in that city: 1. is based upon and motivated by love; 2. attempts to serve God and mankind; 3. strives toward what we call the beloved community. This is religion. This is applied religion. I think it has worked for me and I think it has worked for you and I think it is the work of our Church. One fact occurs to me. This is that the problems of the world lie within men and women; yes, within you, me, and the people with whom we come in contact daily. Further, the problems lie not so much in our action as in our inaction. We have upon ourselves as individuals in a democracy the political, economic, sociological, and spiritual responsibilities of our country. I’m wondering now if we in the United States are really remembering that this must be a government “of the people” and “by the people” as well as “for the people.” Are we really appreciating the fact that if you and I do not meet these responsibilities then our government cannot survive as a democracy? The problems in Berlin, Cuba, or South Africa are, I think, identical with the problem in Jackson, Mississippi, or Nashville, Tennessee. I believe that when men come to believe in their own dignity and in the worth of their own freedom, and when they can acknowledge the God and the dignity that is within every man, then Berlin and Jackson will not be problems. After I had been arrested from a picket line about three weeks ago, I jotted down the following note, with this meeting in mind: If the policeman had acknowledged the God within each of the students with whom I was arrested last night, would he have put us in jail? Or would he have gone into the store we were picketing and tried to persuade the manager to hire Negroes and to treat all people fairly? If one acknowledges the God within men, would anyone ask for a “cooling off period,” or plead for gradualism, or would they realize that white and Negro Americans are committing sin every day that they hate each other and every day that they allow an evil system to exist without doing all they can to rectify it as soon as they can? Segregation reaches into every aspect of life to oppress the Negro and to rob him of his dignity in the South. The very fact that he is forced to be 156

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separated obviously implies his inferiority. Therefore the phrase “separate but equal” denies itself. The things non-black Americans take for granted, such as a movie and dinner date for college students, or a coffee-break downtown, are usually denied the black American in the South. Sometimes he may obtain these services if he wishes to compromise his dignity. He might, for example, attend a downtown movie if he would enter through the alley entrance and climb to the balcony to be seated. But these are not the most important things. The purpose of the movement and of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides and any other such actions, as I see it, is to bring about a climate in which all men are respected as men, in which there is appreciation of the dignity of man and in which each individual is free to grow and produce to his fullest capacity. We of the movement often refer to this goal as the concept of the redeemed or the “beloved” community. In September 1959, I came to Nashville as a student at Fisk University. This was the first time that I had been as far south as Tennessee; therefore, it was the first time that I had encountered the blatant segregation that exists in the South. I came then to see the community in sin. Seeing signs designating “white” or “colored,” being told, “We don’t serve niggers in here,” and, as happened in one restaurant, being looked in the eye and told, “Go around to the back door where you belong,” had a tremendous psychological impact on me. To begin with, I didn’t agree with the premise that I was inferior, and I had a difficult time complying with it. Also, I felt stifled and boxed in since so many areas of living were restricted. The Negro in the South is told constantly, “You can’t sit here.” “You can’t work there.” “You can’t live here, or send your children to school there.” “You can’t use this park, or that swimming pool,” and on and on and on. Restrictions extend into housing, schools, jobs (Negroes, who provide a built-in lower economic class, are employed in the most menial capacities and are paid the lowest wages). Segregation encompasses city parks, swimming pools, and recreational facilities, lunch counters, restaurants, movies, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, restrooms, water fountains, bus terminals, train stations, hotels, motels, auditoriums (Negro college students usually attend the most important formal dances of the year in the school gymnasium), amusement parks, legitimate theaters, bowling alleys, skating rinks—all of these areas are segregated. Oppression extends to every area of life. In the deeper South, Negroes are denied use of public libraries, they are denied entrance even to certain department stores, are discriminated against on city buses, in taxicabs, and in voting. Failure to comply with these oppressions results in beatings, in house burnings and bombings, and economic 157

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reprisals, as we saw in Fayette County, Tennessee, and in Montgomery in the case of the Freedom Riders. Significant, however, are the many countless incidents that the public never even hears about. As can easily be imagined, all this has a real effect upon the Negro. I won’t attempt to analyze here the effect of the system upon the Negro, but I should like to make a few observations. An organism must make some type of adjustment to its environment. The Negro, however, continues to deny consciously to himself, and to his children, that he is inferior. Yet each time he uses a “colored” facility, he testifies to his own inferiority. Many of the values that result from this dual self-concept are amazing to note. Let me relate to you one very interesting incident. I spent thirty days in the jail in Rock Hill, South Carolina. For the first few days the heat was intense in the cell. Breathing was difficult. Everyone was perspiring profusely. We couldn’t understand why the women in the cell hesitated to ask that a window be opened or the heat be turned down. It turned out that it was because they were so often cold in their homes, and had come to value heat so highly, that they were willing to suffer from it if they could just have it. A further example of these curious values is given by the Negro who has received several college degrees or who has a profession and who can consider himself a successful and important man, but who, at the same time, will still attest to his own inferiority by cooperating with segregation. What value, or lack of it, accounts for the fact that so many faculty members at Negro colleges have not disassociated themselves from universities which have expelled student demonstrators? Why are the faculty members and administrators of southern Negro colleges not on the picket lines and sitting at the lunch counters? I think the answer lies within the answer of what Jim Crow does to the Negro. For one thing, it stymies his ability to be free by placing emphasis on the less important things, but on things, nevertheless, which Negroes have been denied. Segregation has its destructive effect upon the segregator also. The most outstanding of these effects perhaps is fear. I can’t forget how openly this fear was displayed in Nashville on the very first day that students there sat-in. Here were Negro students, quiet, in good discipline, who were consciously attempting to show no ill will, even to the point of making sure that they had pleasant and calm facial expressions. The demonstrators did nothing more than sit on the stools at the lunch counter. Yet, from the reaction of the white employees of the variety stores and from the onlookers, some dreadful monster might just as well have been about to devour them all. Waitresses dropped 158

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things. Store managers and personnel perspired. Several cashiers were led off in tears. One of the best remembered incidents of that day took place in a ladies restroom of a department store. Two Negro students, who had sat-in at the lunch counter, went into the ladies restroom which was marked “white” and were there as a heavy-set, older white lady, who might have been seeking refuge from the scene taking place at the lunch counter, entered. Upon opening the door and finding the two Negro girls inside, the woman threw up her hands and, nearly in tears, exclaimed, “Oh! Nigras everywhere!” So segregation engenders fear in the segregator, especially needless fear of what will happen if integration comes; in short, fear of the unknown. Then Jim Crow fosters ignorance. The white person is denied the educational opportunities of exchange with people of a race other than his own. Bias makes for the hatred which we’ve all seen stamped upon the faces of whites in newspaper pictures of the mob. The white hoodlum element is often provoked and egged on by the management or by onlookers; this is a type of degradation into which the segregator unfortunately slips. Police departments can also sink to a sorry state. Bias lets the police turn their heads and not see the attacks made against demonstrators. In Nashville, police permissiveness has served to make the hoodlum element more and more bold, with incidents of real seriousness resulting, even a real tragedy, as was the case in the bombing of a Negro attorney’s home last year during the sit-ins. An unhappy result of segregation is that communications between the races become so limited as to be virtually nonexistent. The “good race relations” to which segregators in the South often refer is nothing more than a complete breakdown in communication so that one race is not aware of any of the other race’s objections or of interracial problems. This has been clearly exemplified in cities where race relations have been called “good” and where the masses of Negroes have rallied behind students in boycotts of downtown areas that have been, reportedly, up to 98 percent effective among the Negro population. By not allowing all its citizens to produce and contribute to the limit of their capacities, the entire city, or region, or country, will suffer, as can be seen in the South’s slow progress in industrial, political, and other areas today and in the weakening of American influence abroad as a result of race hatred. Segregation, moreover, fosters dishonesty between the races. It makes people lie to each other. It allows white merchants to accept the customers’ money, but to give them unequal service, as at the Greyhound and Trailways Bus Lines, where all customers pay the same fares but some are not free to use 159

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all the facilities in the terminals and at restaurants where rest stops are made. Fares are equal, but service is not. The system forces the Negro maid to tell her employer that everything is all right and that she’s satisfied, but when she is among her friends she talks about the injustice of the system. Worst of all, however, is the stagnancy of thought and character—of both whites and Negroes—which is the result of the rationalization that is necessary in order that the oppressed and oppressor may live with a system of slavery and human abasement. I can remember Nashville in this stage of sin when I first came there in September 1959, a few months before the sit-in movement was to begin. As a new student at Fisk University that September, I was completely unaware that over the next few months I would really experience segregation; that I would see raw hatred; that I would see my friends beaten; that I would be a convict several times; and, as is the case at the moment, that there would be a warrant out for my arrest in Jackson, Mississippi. Expecting my life to pursue a rather quiet course, I was also unaware that I would begin to feel part of a group of people suddenly proud to be called “black.” To be called “Negro” had once been thought of as derogatory and had been softened by polite company to “colored person.” At one time, to have been called “nigger” was a gross insult and hurt keenly. Within the movement, however, we came to a realization of our own worth. We began to see our role and our responsibility to our country and to our fellow men, so that to be called “nigger” on the picket line, or anywhere, as now an unimportant thing that no longer produced in us that flinch. As to the typical white southerner who compromises with “nigra” we only secretly wish for a moment when we could gracefully help him with his phonetics, explaining that it’s “knee-grow.” The revolution in the Negro student’s concept of the name of his own race is really important only as it is indicative of change in the Negro’s concept of himself and of his race. Through the unity and purposefulness of the experience of the Nashville Negro, there was born a new awareness of himself as an individual. There was also born, on the part of whites, a new understanding and awareness of the Negro as a person to be considered and respected. I think an outstanding example of this latter change was revealed by the negotiations which took place between Negro students and leaders and the white merchants who were the managers of downtown lunch counters. It became apparent to me during the negotiations that the white southerner was not in the habit of taking the Negro seriously. During the initial stages, the attitude of the merchants was one of sort of patting us on the head and saying, 160

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“Yes, we’ve listened to your story and maybe segregation is bad, but you can’t have integration now, because it’ll ruin our business.” And they closed the matter there. However, after the sit-ins continued and after the moral weight of the community was felt, through our 98 percent effective boycott; after a number of talks in which the merchants got to know us as people and saw our problem (and we saw theirs), there was indeed a beautiful type of awareness born, to the extent that one of the merchants, who incidentally was a white southerner, made what I think was a real concession: “Well, it was simply that we didn’t see they were right and we were wrong.” I think we can also see this awareness of Negro and white for each other as individuals, in the attitudes of the crowds who watched the demonstrations. In the beginning, as I mentioned, there was mostly fear. However, after the violence was allowed to go on and after the police protection broke down and officers insisted on looking the other way while people were beaten, not infrequently there was a white person in the crowd who would see someone about to tear up one of the picket signs or about to hit someone, and would go up and stop this person and say, “No, no! You can’t do that.” And often they would get into a discussion which sometimes looked constructive. I hope it was. There also has been a real change in the temper of the crowd, a change from fear to, I think, just curiosity and watching because something is going on. There is not the hatred and the serious fear and emotional tension that there once was. In Nashville, since the integration of the lunch counters and dining rooms and department stores, we’ve been fortunate enough to have movies also integrated. As I mentioned earlier, in the downtown area Negroes could not attend movies unless they entered through an alley entrance and sat in the balcony. However, after several weeks of standing-in, they are now allowed to use the theaters’ facilities on a fully integrated basis. Swimming pools in Nashville have been closed this summer under very strange circumstances. It seems that on one particular day a group of Negroes attempted to integrate the city’s swimming pools, which incidentally, of course, are tax-supported. On the next day, the park commissioners closed all the swimming pools in the city, for financial reasons. Now it seems that the mayor did not know anything about the park commission being in serious financial difficulty, nor did any of the other city officials, and strangely enough the park commissioners could not be reached for comment. But I’m afraid our swimming pools are closed for financial reasons. The H. G. Hill food stores are currently being picketed. This is our local project for the moment. This company hires Negroes only for warehouse 161

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work and as truck drivers and, of course, pays them below union standards. Many stores are in completely Negro neighborhoods and even in these stores we cannot have Negro cashiers or personnel. I am eager to talk with you about the Freedom Rides because I think that they denote a new and important level of effort. And I feel that more such projects will be necessary for the ultimate success of the southern movement, especially in states of the deep South, such as Alabama and Mississippi. As you know, the idea of a Freedom Ride was conceived and the project was begun by the Congress of Racial Equality. The first trip originated in Washington, D.C., in May of this year. From Washington, the group traveled through most of the southern states and was repeatedly beaten and jailed as the bus made its way across Dixie. As you remember, at Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, the bus met with mob violence; the CORE members were beaten and the bus was burned. Most of the riders were hospitalized for a short time. Mr. James Peck, who was one of the whites along with the group, had fifty stitches taken in his head as a result of the repeated beatings that he had to take. Attempting to get a bus to their destination, which was Montgomery, the riders were told that no driver would take them further. In a state of exhaustion then, after traveling hundreds of miles under tremendous tension, repeated jailings, and beatings, they took a plane to New Orleans, which was the last stop of the planned itinerary. In Nashville, the students had been closely following the Freedom Bus as it moved from town to town, for the people on the bus somehow were ourselves. Their dream of freedom in travel was our dream also. Their aspirations were our own aspirations. There is a tremendous bond between people who really stand up or ride for what they feel is just and right. You see, the CORE members were riding and being beaten for our freedom, too. Therefore, it was quite simple. Mob violence must not stop men’s striving toward right. Freedom Rides and other such actions must not be stopped until our nation is really free. In Nashville then, we were faced with a grave situation. We called a meeting of the students and adults within the movement. Talking by phone with persons who had been at the scene of the tragedies in Birmingham and Anniston, we were told, “Don’t come. It’s a bloodbath. Be assured, someone will be killed if you do come.” Upon hearing this, the Nashville group set about preparing themselves for the fact that someone of them would be killed when they took the trip. You see, these people faced the probability of their own deaths before they ever left Nashville. Several made out wills. A few more gave me sealed letters to be mailed if they were killed. Some told me frankly that they were afraid, 162

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but they knew that this was something that they must do because freedom was worth it. I, incidentally, feel very blessed and very grateful for knowing such people and for being able to call most of them my friends. The purpose of any nonviolent demonstration is to focus the attention of people on how evil segregation really is and then to change their hearts. Some people have been confused about the objectives of the Freedom Rides, and I’ve heard it said that “the point has been made,” so there is no use in going on. The objective of the Freedom Ride from Birmingham was not just to point out that people cannot ride freely but to make it possible for all persons to ride and use terminal facilities without being discriminated against. Until that objective has been attained there is reason for going on. So the drama continued. The bus left Nashville about 6:00 a.m. en route to Birmingham, Alabama. My own role was to stay at the telephone, to keep contact with Birmingham, to hear from the riders as often as they could call, to make arrangements ahead in Montgomery, to keep the Justice Department advised—in short, to coordinate. The students were held on the bus for some time when they reached Birmingham and subsequently were taken into “protective custody.” The next morning at 4:25, I received a call from them. They said that they’d been driven by the police to the Alabama-Tennessee border and had been put out of the car there on the highway and told to cross the border. At the moment they were on the open highway and felt unsafe. They did not know where shelter was, but would call again as soon as possible. They had been fasting since they had been in the jail the day before. We immediately sent an automobile to get them, and the next time we heard from them, they advised us that they were returning to Birmingham and were determined to board a bus for Montgomery. The police chief wasn’t going to get off that easily. The next night was an all-night vigil for them at the bus station. They were told, again, that no driver would drive the bus. Finally, next morning they were able to get a driver and the bus moved on to Montgomery, Alabama. We all read about that morning, I think, in Montgomery, Alabama. I wish I could have shared with you the moments in our office when that violence was taking place. It seemed that when the bus arrived and the mob attacked the students, they were immediately dispersed. People put a few of them in their cars and took them home. Within a very short time the group was scattered throughout the city. We listed all the names of the persons who had left Nashville and began trying to account for them. We would ask the students as they called in, 163

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“When did you last see ______?” The reports we got that morning were: John Lewis was bleeding profusely from the head; another student seemed unconscious; Jim Zwerg had been cornered by about sixteen or seventeen men and was being beaten. They had lead pipes, knives, and guns. In a relatively short time, however, we were able to account for all of the students. Miraculously, no one was dead. Shortly afterwards, in the job of coordinator, I went down to Montgomery to help with the work there. I think you probably read about the meeting which took place in the church in Montgomery that night, at which Martin Luther King, the Freedom Riders, and a number of other people were present. When the police would not afford the church protection, a car was burned. There were incidents of violence and a mob of thousands, I understand, gathered outside. People in the church that night didn’t know how close they were to real tragedy. This was the night martial law was declared in Montgomery. That night everyone remained in the church throughout the night. Now something very interesting took place in the church that night. I think it can almost be a generalization that the Negroes in Alabama and Mississippi and elsewhere in the deep South are terribly afraid until they get into the movement. In the dire danger in which we were that night, no one expressed anything except concern for freedom and the thought that someday we’ll be free. We stayed there until dawn and everyone was naturally tired, but no one said so. There were about three thousand people there that night, representing all walks of life, from young children to the elder people in the community. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of people band together as the crowd in the church did that night. Finally at dawn, we were escorted home by the troops. The students boarded the bus for Jackson, along with a second bus that had come from Nashville carrying five ministers. The buses left for Jackson, Mississippi, and I think we pretty well know the story from there on. Immediately upon arrival, the people were jailed. Since then there have been roughly three hundred people jailed for doing nothing more than riding a bus. It interests me that the Freedom Riders have been called “troublemakers,” “seekers of violence,” and “seekers of publicity.” Few people have seen the point: here are people acting within their constitutional and moral rights; they have done nothing more than ride a bus or use a facility that anyone else would normally expect to use any day of the year, but they have been confined and imprisoned for it. And somehow the attorney general and the president of the United States and the Justice Department of the United States can do nothing about such a gross injustice. As far as being seekers of violence 164

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and publicity, the students have, at all times, remained nonviolent. Are not the committers of violence responsible for their own actions? To date, as I’ve said, there have been approximately three hundred people jailed as Freedom Riders. All were returned within the last two weeks for arraignment. There stood to be lost five hundred dollars for each person who did not return to Jackson. And out of 189 who were on bond, all except nine were returned. The riders had been convicted in the city court and are currently appealing on the county court level. Their appeal trials have been set at the rate of two per day between now and January. The first trial took place yesterday. The result of that trial is that Mr. Henry Thomas was convicted of breach of peace, sentenced to four months imprisonment, and his bond was set at two thousand dollars. Now I think that this is a serious question for the American public to consider. Is this really the country in which we live? This is a serious moment, I think, for those who take democracy and freedom seriously. Remember now that these Freedom Riders are citizens of the United States who can be called on to go to war and who are receiving treatment of this type. If so harsh a treatment is involved for an action as right as riding a bus, perhaps one as unimportant as riding a bus, can we not draw from that an inference of what life in the South for the Negro must really be like? I think that it is most essential that the government move at a rate of progress adequate to meet the needs of the governed. Not being able to do so has resulted in the tragedies of Little Rock, New Orleans, and Montgomery. It might be interesting to note that we have not had incidents such as New Orleans and Montgomery where there has been adequate government. There always needs to be a Faubus or a Patterson. The Negro must be represented by those who govern. Without this representation, there is moral slavery, if not physical. No person or country can have a clear conscience and a noble mien with such a sin on its conscience. I’m interested now in the people who call for gradualism. The answer, it seems to me, is to stop sinning and stop now! How long must we wait? It’s been a century. How gradual can you get? Montgomery has shown how far it has advanced on its own; we’ve seen this from the mob to the governor. As for the legal position about the right to serve whom one pleases, I would say that this position does not alter the fact that segregation is wrong. Segregation on the bus lines, trains, and planes is wrong intrastate as well as interstate. The press has made much of the interstate passage. However, the Freedom Riders are just as concerned with intrastate travel, because we’re concerned with the injustice of segregation. 165

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The Negro is seeking to take advantage of the opportunities that society offers; the same opportunities that others take for granted, such as a cup of coffee at Woolworth’s, a good job, an evening at the movies, and dignity. Persons favoring segregation often refer to the rights of man, but they never mention the rights of Negro men. I would like to say also that the students and the adults who have taken part in this movement and who are doing so now are dead serious. We’re ready to give our lives. It is a slight miracle, I think, that in the almost two years since February of 1960 there has not been a fatality. But we have come amazingly close to it several times. Let me mention the case of William Barbee who was on the Freedom Ride when it arrived at Montgomery and met with mob violence. Barbee had gone on a few hours ahead to arrange for cars and other necessities before the riders arrived. When they did get there and were attacked, he was busy trying to get them into taxi cabs or ambulances and take them where they could receive medical attention. Just as about all of them had gotten into cabs, the mob attacked him. At that moment a Negro man was passing by. He was on his way to pay a bill. It was just a regular day in his life until he saw one of the mobsters with his foot upon William Barbee’s neck. Mr. Nichols, who had lived in the South all his life, said that he started to go ahead about his business. But, he said, he knew that he would never be able to live with his conscience again if that man killed Barbee. So he turned around and pulled the man off. Well, Mr. Nichols landed in the hospital next to Barbee. But even after he had pulled the man off, the crowd went back to William Barbee, and he was again in danger of death when the head of the highway patrol came along and was able to get the mob off with a gun. This student, William Barbee, is back in the movement, has been beaten up on a picket line, and jailed again. I think that his is indicative of some of the determination and the seriousness with which we take the cause. I think that quite often today you can hear the strains of a very old spiritual that’s sung quite seriously. Some of the words are: “Before I be a slave I would be buried in my grave and go home to My Lord and be free.” From those who say they approve the ends, not the means, I would be interested in suggestions for a means which would yield freedom without delay. Let us look at the means. The students have chosen nonviolence as a technique; there is no reason why they couldn’t have taken up guns. It was a responsible choice, I think. We have decided that if there is to be suffering in this revolution (which is really what the movement is—a revolution), we will take the suffering upon ourselves and never inflict it upon our fellow man, because we respect him and recognize the God within him. 166

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Let us see now what the movement needs. The movement is very much in need of a major federal decision that will result in enforcement of the Constitution and federal law. (You might be interested to know that during the Freedom Rides Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi informed me of two very interesting things by telephone: He said [1] that he did not feel that Supreme Court decisions applied to his state, and [2] that he intended to enforce Mississippi law over and above any federal law that conflicted with it.) Along with a major federal decision to follow through on civil rights, there is needed a major decision on the part of the people. There is needed a realization that the problem lies as much in Jackson or Nashville as it does in Berlin or anywhere in the world. The problem, I think, centers around the questions of truth, honesty, justice, and democracy. What is needed is concern for human rights—not just white human rights. Until such time as this realization comes, Freedom Rides and similar such southwide projects are necessary. Count on more of them. As far as the Catholic student and the Catholic Church are concerned, from our pulpits we need directness and we need emphasis. If this is not an area in which the Church must work, what is? It seems that our role must necessarily be leadership. And anything but outspoken and direct leadership in this movement is immoral. Newman Clubs and campus organizations in the South can certainly revitalize themselves by contacting local movements or starting one, pledging their support and participation. And the same is true for the problems which exist in the North. There are roles for all of us to play. First, of course, is the role of the participant, who really pickets or sits in. Then there is the role of the observer. I don’t know if you have heard, but a number of whites are being utilized effectively as observers. In the integration of lunch counters and movie theaters, many of the older church women who have been sympathetic with the cause for a long time, but who haven’t had an opportunity to speak out, have helped by doing such things as sitting next to Negroes at the lunch counters or at movies and thus creating an appearance of normalcy. These people have become quite enthusiastic about their new role. There have been several cases of—well, real “bigness.” One lady is known to have drunk countless cups of coffee and gained ten pounds in sitting at lunch counters all day for several days in a row and looking normal. Several have been known to see the same picture over and over again. Also looking normal. For those in the North, as I mentioned, there are local problems, and we also need groups that we can call upon to support the southern movement.

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Finally, this movement has been called one of passive resistance. But it is not that at all. Rather it might be called one of active insistence. In regard to our own roles and the role of our Church, I think we need to understand that this is a question of real love of man and love of God. Is there such a thing as moderate love of God or moderate disdain for sin? I think we need radical good to combat radical evil. Consider the South. It can be the answer for the free world; it can be the pivot. The problem there is a vital challenge for truth; for respect for man. In a word, it is a question of dignity.

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Lillian Smith September 2, 1961, All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C.

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born on December 12, 1897, in Jasper, Florida. She was the eighth of ten children born to the family of a prominent business and civic leader. As a young girl she had her first confusing and emotionally devastating confrontation with race. Her parents had agreed to adopt a young white girl who had been discovered living with local blacks in “Colored Town.” The young Lillian immediately took to her new best friend, Janie. But three weeks later it was discovered that Janie was in fact black and would have to go back to “Colored Town.” Despite Lillian’s vehement protestations and unanswered questions, Janie was quickly returned to the “shack” on the other side of town. In 1915, when her father lost his turpentine mills, the Smiths repaired to their summer home in Clayton, Georgia. Lillian attended Piedmont College and studied her first love, music, at the Peabody Conservatory. Between 1922 and 1925 she taught, under Methodist auspices, at a school for girls in Huzhou, China. In 1925, as her father’s health was failing, she ran Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, a cloistered and progressive haven where girls could learn poetry, dance, and drama and discuss taboo subjects such as race, gender relations, segregation, and sex. Upon her father’s death in 1930, she continued to run the camp while also caring for her ailing mother. She and a camp counselor, Paula Snelling, began publishing a literary quarterly titled Pseudopodia in 1936. The liberal forum became the North Georgia Review (1937) and later the South Today (1942). Lillian ended the quarterly in 1945 to concentrate on her own writing. Her best-selling novel Strange Fruit was published in 1944 after rejection by seven different publishers; it would sell more than three million copies and be translated into fifteen languages. Her autobiographical Killers of the Dream (1949) was simply ignored until people could better understand it in the 1960s. By 1953, Smith was already well along in her battle with cancer which would take her on September 28, 1966, shortly after voicing her discontent with the civil rights movement’s takeover by people who had abandoned nonviolence. She is buried adjacent to a chimney from the gymnasium at Laurel Falls. Her papers are housed in special collections at the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, and Armstrong Atlanta State University. 169

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However, many of her private papers related to her long relationship with Paula Snelling have been destroyed to protect their privacy. This September 2, 1961, address at All Soul’s Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., is a rare instance of Lillian Smith’s public addresses, which were usually in smaller gatherings among friends. Her controversial writings and her havened life at Laurel Falls cast a familiar, intimate ambience to her spoken engagements. At All Soul’s church, she truly was among family in a progressive community sculpted by Rev. Duncan Howlett and his soon to be martyred protégé, Rev. James Reeb. Interspersed with an occasional excursus on gratitude for All Soul’s participation in the Freedom Ride movement several months earlier, this speech explains how mobs form. Her analysis is reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s epigraph pilfered from T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion: “I tell you, it is not me you . . . / Incriminate, but that other person, if person, / You thought I was: let your necrophily / Feed upon that carcass.” Mobs only incidentally attack people, Smith argues. They really mean to attack ghosts they mistakenly perceive inhabiting real people’s bodies.

The Mob and the Ghost

Y

ou may think it strange that I have chosen to talk to you about mobs when you have recently been in the thick of them, and ghosts, when you have just returned from Mississippi—which is the swampiest ghost country I know. But I would like to, for there are things you Freedom Riders may have missed while you were down there. Usually, when you are dodging rocks thrown by a mob or climbing out of a burning bus set on fire by a mob, you don’t have much time to get acquainted with either mob or ghost. It is a pity. For they are fascinating. Especially the ghosts. And too, you need for your own sake, as well as for that of your country, to know more about the care and feeding of ghosts, what their little secret habits are, and how and why they and mobs coexist so amicably. I wish I could give you this briefing. At least, I would like to try. But it cannot be done, tonight. Let me suggest only this: that you make a serious effort to understand ghosts. To understand them, of course you must believe in them. I realize this isn’t easy for people to do if they are the kind who must prove everything before they believe it. But you should try, for without an understanding of ghosts I do not think you will ever understand mobs, and while U.S. Marshals will protect you from mobs, if they are around, U.S. Marshals are not always around.

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A mob, as some of you surely realize after your recent experiences, never goes after a man: always, it is chasing a ghost. It is true, the mob may settle for a man, but only because the members of the mob think he is harboring the ghost they are after. Some of the uncanny experiences you had in Mississippi were undoubtedly experiences with ghosts whom the Mississippians thought had crawled into you: you got hurt because you got in the way. It is likely to happen anywhere: The young Negro freshman who entered the University of Georgia last January had a most interesting encounter with the mob and the ghost. You remember, she was there in a dormitory (one of the first two Negroes accepted at the university), probably studying hard that night, when two thousand students suddenly formed a mob, went to her dorm, and began stoning her—or at least stoning the windows behind which she sat studying. The next day, the whole world asked why it took two thousand young men to stone one girl? Why didn’t one husky do it? But you see, that is the wrong question: those two thousand students were not stoning a girl, they were stoning memories, ghosts, dreads, fears, names and places they had half forgotten. To them, Charlayne Hunter was not a person: she was a ghost; a composite ghost, for all their ghosts had suddenly hidden in her. Why? Because Charlayne Hunter had become the Unknown, she had become a symbol of a future they feared, she had become Something Else. Not one of these students knew the real Charlayne Hunter; they would not have recognized her had they passed her on the street in Atlanta or New York; they had never met her or spoken to her, they knew nothing about her personality, her interests, her skills or talents. The mob was not really after Charlayne. They were trying to kill a ghost. But when they can’t kill the ghost (and they never do), they may settle for flesh and blood, but it isn’t really what they are after. But let’s leave our ghosts and mobs for a few minutes, while I tell you, first, how deeply moved millions of Americans have been by the courage and persistence, the patience and compassion you Freedom Riders have shown. There have, of course, been some Americans who did not understand: a few who tried to see the first bus ride as a Machiavellian piece of cleverness, who refused to let the symbolism penetrate their minds. That first bus ride was poetry whose meaning eluded them, whose metaphors slid out of their reach. And it has angered these people that they could not grasp its deeper implications. They saw you as troublemakers, not as symbolists. They could not see that you were acting out symbolically a future that must be, a relationship with one’s world that must come to pass. No. They, in the way of humans, squeezed your action small enough to fit their own 171

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fears—and hearts and minds. They made that bus ride into a ride to stir up trouble; they used all the words at their command to twist courage into cowardice, compassion into hate, the bold imaginative act into a cunning trick. In a sense, their foolish trying was a compliment to the Freedom Riders. For those who felt compelled to lie to keep from seeing courage and compassion did see it, of course; and even now, the memory of it is working deep within them—changing them against their will. Your courage touched their spirit, although they did not want to be touched; your quiet humor and dogged persistence in the face of danger enraged them because they felt, “These Riders dare to do what I would never dare. They dare because they care for something larger than themselves; they have looked the future in the face.” And thinking this, these people suddenly began to fear you: the primitive in them came to the surface, you were taboo, and they turned away and tried not to see. And yet, they did see. Remember this. And it is changing them even now although they may think they escaped the experience. But others were aware of the poetry of those events: they recognized the fact that something new was happening; and they were glad that you would fight for freedom at home. Fight? Yes, you fought; nonviolently, but it was struggle: hard, spiritual struggle. It is not easy to pit your spirit against guns and sticks and tear-gas bombs. You were not quite sure you had that kind of spirit—were you? You knew it was a moral test for you as well as for the South and the American people. But though it was hard for you, I think it was harder for the men with the sticks and guns who fought you. For they must have felt they were fighting a spirit bigger than any men. They must have felt they were fighting the future. And they must have felt that you were using human technics, the technics of talk, of conciliation, of concern while they were using the subhuman technics of violence. And they must have felt, dimly, that the force of sticks could never win in a struggle with the force of the human spirit. But what moved the American people most of all—so much, that some are now trying to forget it—was your willingness to go to jail for other men’s right to be and become, for their need to relate themselves to all aspects of the human experience. Not only your willingness to go to jail—but the fact that you did go to jail in Mississippi and stayed there, many of you, for weeks, in Parchman, in bare cells with no conveniences. You did this for the rest of us—and can you not see how hard it is for us to accept it? Of course, it is hard: only our humility makes it possible to accept so much from you. For what have we done, the rest of us, to deserve it? 172

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You went to jail for men’s right and need to relate. That is not an easy idea for a world to understand when it is drifting toward not only political totalitarianism but all forms of totalitarianism. The South has, for a century, been melting things and fusing them into lumps. But this same kind of melting and merging has taken place in all totalitarian regions and countries; indeed, the trend toward fusion and merging has invaded all levels of our life, today. We tend to melt and merge; we do not tend to relate. For one relates only what remains separate, what maintains its own integrity and individuality, what is a little different. It is ironic, isn’t it that in the name of “segregation” so much merging has taken place. The segregationists have tried to rid us of our real differences in order to preserve our false differences. But solidity, or lumping, is contrary to human nature. Man is not a solid animal. No. He is broken and fragmented, torn and separated, even from himself. This is his nature. This is the human condition that cannot be changed. But man can build his bridges (a skill that is also human) from man to man, from idea to idea, from past to future, from old to new. He can relate himself to himself and to all he is separated from. Separations, when real, are good—painful, yes, but good. For only by being separated, by being split off, only by being fragmented did man leave the animal world and become man. We know this but it is well, now and then, to say it again. We need to remember Eden: to remember that Primal Moment when man was torn in two and left with his broken self—and awareness. That day, that moment, he began to turn into a human being. That day, he learned to look at himself and ask, What does it all mean? What is it all about? That day, he began his neverending search for mirrors. That day, he began to talk and to symbolize. Then, why should we fear separations? Or even loneliness, when we know that out of the milk of loneliness has come all that has sweetened human existence. Of course, it isn’t easy to milk one’s loneliness and get even a teacup of milk. Poets can? Yes, but how many of us are poets! Hard though they be, we should fear the separations, the splits, only when they are spurious—as is the idea of color—deliberately concocted in order to shut other men from their human inheritance and away from each other. What we are fighting for, it seems to me, is the freedom to build bridges. Isn’t this it? Not just freedom; this is too large a word. We are fighting for the freedom to relate to each other as human beings, and to the human experience, the freedom to bridge the chasms, and where they cannot be bridged, the freedom to transcend them. And when we use the word integrate we are not talking about melting everything into a sameness or merging everything into a lump or mass; we are talking about relating one individual to another, 173

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we are talking about bridges and relationships. What we are against is segregationists burning our bridges, dynamiting our relationships to each other and our world. We are also fighting for the freedom to move into a future where men can grow in human stature, where they can realize their human potentialities. You Freedom Riders rode a wayward bus down in Alabama and Mississippi and it made a few unannounced stops and detours. But your destination was not any Southern city you can name: it was the future, wasn’t it? And no one, not even the Jackson police, or the governor can keep you from that destination. The future is closer to all of us than it was the day you set out on that bus. Nothing has been wasted: your long aching days and nights in jail, the money spent on bonds, your bruises and cracked skulls. And it will not be wasted unless we, outside the jails, forget the poetry of your sufferings and hopes. People grow blind and deaf, and memories shorten. But it is the role of a few of us, at least, to see to it that the world does not forget you. You have done your work, we must do ours. Now—let’s go back to Jackson, Mississippi. Swampy country, isn’t it? As swampy as is our own mythic minds and those of Jackson’s people. In Jackson, the mythic mind seems to dominate and reason hides and does its work furtively. It is not a ghost town, no; but it is a living town full of ghosts for it is trying to cut itself off from the future. A town of symbols where everything seems always to be turning into Something Else. A town of symbolic acting where acts hold a secret meaning for the actors. Mississippians have a prodigious talent for symbol and metaphor. This could mean that Jackson is a city of poets and artists. But no. I’m afraid not. For the people who use the symbols do not use them to create something new: they use them thinking they are talking factually and acting sensibly. And as you well know, there is nothing more dangerous than to use a symbol when you think you are using a fact. But this is what Mississippians tend to do: they keep confusing facts with symbols and symbols with facts. Have you ever seen a small child who for weeks, perhaps, or even months, persists in clinging to a little dirty rag? Playing with it, going to sleep with it? Did you mistake it for just a rag? It may have seemed so from your viewpoint. But from the child’s viewpoint, that rag may be his lost mother, or a playmate he never had, or love itself, or hate; or it may stand for the child’s future or past. How desperately the state of Mississippi, and its people, cling to their little dirty rag which they call “segregation.” It means so much to them on symbolic levels; it means life itself to some of them. Pitiful? Yes. But remember, that dirty little rag is cherished. Men, being human, care as much for their 174

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symbols as do lonely children. Out of this esteem of symbols come beautiful things, oftentimes; and out of it, also, come obscenities and brutalities and destruction. Great poetry, yes; and paintings, and books; but also Hitler’s concentration camps came out of this need to symbolize. What was Hitler trying to do? To kill his ghosts. But ghosts are hard to kill—so he settled instead for six million Jews. Now, they are gone, and with them, their beautiful skills and brilliant minds and good hearts. And where are Hitler’s ghosts? Roaming the whole earth, even now. And many of them have somehow got into the South—which had plenty of its own ghosts to handle. The Alabamians and Mississippians who tried to block your journey met you in mobs. They know ghosts are hard to catch, and since, to them, you were ghosts traveling a ghost bus, they naturally met you in mobs. They felt they had to, to catch their ghost. Whose ghost? Their own. Their embodied dreads and guilts, and memories, and perhaps their embodied emptiness. Hollow men are good places for ghosts to hide. But, not only white supremacists have their symbols, you do—and I do. To you, that ride through the South was symbolic, also; for it had special meaning for you. It was Something Else than an ordinary bus ride—just as it was Something Else to the white supremacists. A different Something Else. That is why the white supremacists came after you with sticks and guns. You had dared give a different meaning to that bus ride than the meaning they had given it. Nothing can anger a man, or group of men, more. To you, that bus ride symbolized the good future; to you, it symbolized good relations between men; to you, it symbolized a new way of life. And when some of us heard you had gone to jail, we felt you had done it for us and for everybody on earth. You became to us symbols of a new courage, a new willingness to suffer for what is right; you became for us creators of the future. But to the Mississippians who were holding tight to their symbols, you and your ride were symbols of the destroyers of a past they cherished; you were jailbirds, rascals, criminals who had come down to tear their little dirty rag to pieces. And, therefore, you were the ghosts that had to be caught. Now, of course ghosts can’t be killed. Even a big mob can’t kill one. For although the members of that mob may kill the man they think that ghost has slipped into, even as they hold the bleeding flesh in their hands, the ghost floats away. Jackson’s leaders preferred to let demagogues and the ghosts handle their affairs when the crisis came; they preferred to let the mythic mind take over the job the reason should have handled. 175

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And what did Atlanta do when its crisis arrived? Atlantans have spent plenty of time in the past, in the mucky swamp of the mythic mind. They, too, in the past, have often set their ghosts free to roam the land. And that past is not distant. But Atlanta has a new idea now. Led by a few thousand courageous and wise and concerned men and women they are leaving the swamps of the mythic mind and climbing up on the solid rock of reason. They have decided that reason is a pretty good place to be when a crisis hits you. But in order to do this difficult thing, in order to keep their city functioning on the rational level of human affairs, they had to see to a number of things: They had to see to it that facts were carefully segregated from fantasies and the future from What Used To Be. They had to be sure they were keeping coincidence strictly separated from cause and effect. They had to watch categories and take care not to stuff the categories with the wrong items. In other words, they decided to function rationally instead of mythically. Now, let’s keep one thing straight: Atlantans did not decide not to be emotional; they deliberately were emotional, but they chose their good emotions rather than their bad ones. They realized that without emotions, they couldn’t move one way or the other. To keep the bad emotions under control, they decided to segregate the ghosts and leave the people free to function on the level of the reason. This was a revolutionary decision but they made it. They also decided to keep facts where facts belong and not let them mix and mingle with fears. And they decided that, above all else, they must not get confused about Big and Little. Now that is not so easy: at least when it is one’s own town, one’s own life that is involved. Of course, we always understand what is big or little in the other man’s life, or the other city’s situation. The magnificent job Atlanta did in desegregating its schools without violence was small, I think, compared to what it has begun to do for all its citizens. To persuade a big city of a million people to distinguish a fact from a fear or a fantasy and to hold tight to Big and not confuse it with Little is a stupendous achievement. The civic project of pulling Atlanta out of the past and bringing it to the Edge of the Future was done by numbers of people; Mayor Hartsfield, Chief of Police Jenkins, Superintendent Letson, both newspapers, all TV stations, many radio stations, some writers, about 850 clergymen, many thousands of women who worked day and night with their neighborhood coffee gatherings in homes, their persistent whispering to important men that this must be done and that, their imaginative solutions to insoluble problems. There was also the organization HOPE which had worked hard for three years selling the city 176

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on the idea of keeping schools open. There was OASIS—a loose federation of about sixty civic organizations. And the young people of both races who worked hard all summer to get acquainted with each other, hoping to find ways of conciliation by the simple means of knowing each other as persons. And did the older Negroes help? Of course. Without their cooperation much of this could not have happened. In their churches, in consultation with white groups, in the briefing and training given the young Negro students entering the four high schools, they contributed much. And the sit-in students by their previous demonstrations of nonviolent action prepared the people for citywide nonviolence. They had demonstrated before the eyes of Atlanta the fact that there are things, like human dignity, worth working hard for, worth suffering and going to jail for. This stirred the hearts and imaginations of Atlantans. And prominent citizens who feared the students at the time of their sit-ins have been gently nudged forward by them. What happened in Atlanta is closely related to the lonely, heroic, often misunderstood acts of the group of nonviolent students. Now, let us compare Atlanta with Jackson. In its crisis, Atlanta segregated its ghosts and freed its people; while Jackson, in its crisis, freed its ghosts and kept its people segregated. Atlanta segregated its symbols from its facts, while Jackson mixed and mingled them in mad confusion. Atlanta jailed its troublemakers while Jackson jailed its future makers; Atlanta protected those thoughtful citizens who were trying to meet the ordeal creatively while Jackson made life insecure and miserable for them. Atlanta has shined up the word democracy, while Jackson has dirtied it by equating it with communism. Atlanta is stressing the economic facts of its city’s existence, it is planning for its people’s growth and development and its children’s schooling, while Jackson clings to the old corpse of a dead economic system and the dead customs that stick to the system, embalming and re-embalming the corpse each time election comes around. But more than all else, it seems to me, is the fact that Atlanta is beginning to find ways to encourage its good people to speak out, to seek new ideas, new feelings, new ways of working together. A man or a city is never the same after facing ordeal. Overnight, Little Rock became a symbol of the rotted mistakes of its demagogues. Jackson, overnight, became a symbol of ghost hunts and ghost jailings. And now, Atlanta is becoming a symbol of a city that knows the future has to be created, that it is never a gift; that freedom to relate one’s self to the future, is something one works for every day of one’s life. And it is achieving an excellence 177

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which comes to cities and people when ordeals are met by men and not left to mobs and ghosts. As a Georgian, I pay my tribute to Atlanta. As a person, I pay my tribute to you Freedom Riders; I know what your sacrifice, your suffering has done for the human spirit. You are making this age a better place for the human race to live in and you are doing it by giving form to new symbols of the new realities—realities we know we must create for ourselves.

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Katie Louchheim November 17, 1961, National Council of Negro Women, Washington, D.C.

Kathleen “Katie” Scofield Louchheim, talented poet and Democratic activist, was born in New York City in 1903. Raised in a privileged family, her stockbroker father, Leonard, had earlier changed the family name from Shoenfeld because he “despised being Jewish.” As an adolescent, Katie attended the prestigious all-girls school, Rosemary Hall. A precocious student, she also excelled on the athletic fields as she captained the women’s ice hockey team and “innovated” by taking on a nearby boys’ team from Greenwich, Connecticut. She graduated in 1920 only to learn that she would be unable to attend Smith College as her family’s finances began to unravel. She spent considerable time in Germany in order to maximize the family’s increasingly strained resources. On a trip to Hamburg in 1926 she married Walter Louchheim, a partner in her father’s successful Manhattan brokerage house. The newlyweds settled in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, and had two daughters, Judy and Mary. In 1934 the family moved to Washington, D.C., as Walter began work under Joseph Kennedy in the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Katie quickly became involved in the Democratic National Committee and the National League of Women Voters. Her first major political appointment occurred in 1942 when she joined the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations (OFFRO) as a public affairs officer. She held the same position with the United Nations’ counterpart to the OFFRO, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), where she traveled to Germany after World War II to arrange press releases for displaced persons. After resigning in March 1946, Louchheim began cultivating her recently discovered affinity for poetry; it was a talent she would use for personal catharsis for the remainder of her life. Louchheim’s sabbatical from politics was short-lived: in 1948 she became a delegate from Washington, D.C., to the Democratic National Convention; later, in 1952, she would serve as an alternate member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Perhaps her biggest break came in 1953 when she accepted an appointment 179

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as Director of Women’s Activities for the DNC. In this position, Louchheim traveled extensively and made important local and regional contacts as she encouraged women to get involved at all levels of politics. She was also an outspoken advocate for holding integrated meetings in the South; in fact, with her help, the Women’s National Democratic Club changed its bylaws and began admitting black members in 1956. With Democrats back in power following the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, Louchheim signed on with the new administration as a special assistant to Undersecretary Chester Bowles—a job she loathed given Bowles’s mercurial habits. In January 1962 Kennedy tapped Louchheim to be deputy assistant secretary for public affairs—the highest position ever held by a woman in the State Department. In the Johnson Administration, she served as United Nations Ambassador to the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization until 1969. The following year her autobiography, By the Political Sea, was published. After the death of her husband Walter in 1973, she married Donald S. Klopfer in 1981. Following an extended illness, Katie Louchheim died from pneumonia on February 11, 1991, survived by her two daughters, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Even though a longtime partisan for Adlai Stevenson, Louchheim had no trouble going to work for President Kennedy. The heady days of a New Frontier beckoned, and she eagerly embraced her new position and its many rhetorical opportunities. In her speech of November 17, before the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Louchheim speaks in eloquent, though general, terms about the interracial work that awaits American women; it is work that will be watched on a world stage with enormous consequences. With revolution afoot abroad, played out in the volatile climate of the Cold War, the “weapons” with which American women needed to fight involved fidelity: only if America lived up to its founding promises would world peace reign. Before an older, more conservative group of black women, Louchheim could perhaps get away with a tradition that feted politically powerful men; women, “mercifully” didn’t need to get involved in the “awesome decisions” of foreign policy. Even so, many in her audience might have been rightfully suspicious of Louchheim’s praise for Bobby Kennedy’s handling of civil rights; for as she addressed the NCNW in the State Department auditorium, Bob Moses and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers languished in a McComb, Mississippi, jail—despite their pleas to the Kennedy Justice Department.

I

am delighted to be here this evening with the members of the National Council of Negro Women. For me this is a very special occasion.

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Those of us who work to expand the role of women, to improve their status and enlarge their opportunities for participation in the affairs of our great country, are always glad to talk with an audience dedicated to these same principles and purposes. Your president, Dorothy Height, richly deserves the honor you have bestowed upon her in selecting her as your leader. She has long been successful at finding new ways in which you of the Council can respond to the challenges of a free society, a society which today must continually prove itself sufficiently dynamic and progressive to meet the demands world leadership places upon it. Commenting recently on the qualities women possess, I mentioned patience, persistence, and those imaginative, creative instincts with which they manage to surmount seemingly insuperable problems. Dorothy Height is well endowed with all these qualities and those of us who have worked with her know well with what industry, zeal, and success she has applied them. Tonight you honor the memory of a very great woman. It was my privilege to know Mary McLeod Bethune. I was present on the occasion here in Washington when the world’s great leaders, including her good friend Eleanor Roosevelt, paid her tribute. Mrs. Bethune was a person of great heart. Her presence, her sage counsel, and her marvelously rich voice inspired and enlightened many generations of women. She never tired, she never faltered. She seemed possessed of limitless inner strength. It was this quality, this spiritual fortitude that communicated itself to all those who came within her orbit. I know of no one who stood her ground as she did. We can be grateful for her example. We can do more. We can do our best, as you are doing, to follow it. There are many ways in which we can move forward together. The frontiers of democracy, as intended by our founding fathers, are limitless. The democratic dream, the noblest dream ever dreamed by man, the dream of a free society, free to go forward, to progress and improve and forge together the future in which the greatest good for all may be achieved, belongs to all of us. But together this dream through no fault of ours, has new frontiers, dangerous frontiers. For as President Kennedy said so eloquently in his address to the United Nations, sometime in the next ten months we must make decisions which will determine whether we all perish in a fiery holocaust or hopefully survive to progress in freedom and dignity. These are awesome decisions. These decisions—on Berlin, on disarmament, on nuclear weapons tests—mercifully are not our responsibility. We are living in a desperately complicated world, and the best we can do is to know 181

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that the courageous, forthright, and farsighted men making these decisions deserve our sympathetic trust and our prayers. But what we can do, as citizens and as women, is to help extend the frontiers of this democracy with which we are blessed. For what we do here in the United States, how we live, work, compete, how we relate to one another is no longer just our concern. What we do is everyone’s concern. How we live and relate, whatever and wherever it may be, is known everywhere. Democracy is on trial, and therefore we are on trial. All over the world there are eyes and ears, listening, watching, observing, evaluating, making judgments. I have recently traveled half way around the world. During the course of my travels, I learned many valuable lessons. The most important of these can be simply stated: we are judged by our deeds, by whether we act according to the principles of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, the intentions of our Founding Fathers. The spirit of democracy in the eyes of the uncommitted nations is only as true as it is viable. We Americans are the children of revolution, the heirs of freedom. And yet, unless this spirit is made manifest here and now, in our everyday life, it is but a promise given and not kept. When we preach of liberty and freedom for all, we must not only mean it but live accordingly. Do you know what the most striking evidence has been as far as the havenot nations, the watching nations, are concerned? I will tell you. For them the spirit of revolution, the spirit of freedom, has been reborn and reenacted in the sit-ins, in the peaceful demonstrations at lunch counters, in the Freedom riders, the news that white and black together have carried the torch of liberty high. The quiet courage with which our Attorney General Robert Kennedy has ordered an end to segregation in interstate carriers is cheered in a thousand hamlets and market places. The peaceful means by which the Department of Justice has insisted on safeguarding the voting rights of all our people has been applauded in every country where the right to self-government has been recently achieved. These are the shots that are heard around the world. If we are to win this long drawn out cold war, if we are to extend the frontiers of world peace, if we are to prove to all those who watch and wait for us to lead that democracy and not totalitarianism is the answer, these are the weapons we must use. These matters are our concern, as citizens and as women. They lie directly within our province. In our enlarging role as women with many skills and talents, we can lead and make the force of our opinion felt. As an individual and as a woman, I am dedicated to the proposition that we are not only capable of interpreting this democratic ideal we would like to 182

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see survive and flourish, but that we are specially qualified to keep it alive and on fire in what are at best perilous times. I believe that our potential—your potential—has never been realized. I believe we can do more, as women, to make practical and real the individual good will and mutual understanding we all believe in, than we have ever dreamed of attempting. In creating the post which I now hold, President Kennedy gave us a unique opportunity. He was in effect paying tribute to all women and to women’s importance in this exploding and often unpredictable society in which we live. What I have been trying to do, both with women’s groups in this country and with our visitors from overseas, is to dramatize the respect this country has for the importance of women and the contribution we can make. All over the world, even in countries where they have been traditionally subservient, women are gradually emerging and making their influence felt. They are demanding education and status. They are beginning to organize, in order to improve their lives and the lives of their children. For the word has got about that women (men too, of course) can achieve through organization what they cannot achieve alone. In a southeast Asian country such as Vietnam, the major women’s organization is already a definite political force, capable of deciding a national election. This emergence, this organizing of women, is characteristic especially of the nations—forty-two of them in all—which have won their independence since World War II. In many of the twenty-three nations of Africa, women’s organizations have sprung up simultaneously with independence or have even preceded it. Women are essential to social progress. Perhaps because they are mothers, women seem to realize more quickly than men the need for a clean water supply, for better shelter, better health and nutrition, more modern methods of baby care, above all, education. A famous African educator once said that “if you train a man you educate an individual, but if you teach a woman you educate a nation.” To press for progress at all levels of society, and to teach the elements of progress, the countries of the world need large numbers of trained women. A woman from Colombia said to me recently: “We need trained women in Latin America to teach children and adults how to use spoons, how to sleep on beds, how to wear shoes and boil water.” They need trained women in Latin America, and in Asia and Africa, to stimulate people to want to do these things. The less developed nations desperately need teachers, social workers, nurses, home economists. In many of these countries there are already a few pioneering professional women. In Afghanistan, where only two years ago women appeared in public with veiled faces if they appeared at all, one woman physician is now 183

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practicing and fifty girls are studying medicine. In Indonesia a distinguished woman pediatrician, Dr. Subandrio—who visited the United States just recently—is acting minister of public health. In tiny El Salvador, there is a small but growing middle group of women teachers, social workers, nurses, chemists; even a few women agricultural extension experts. Early this year regional seminars in Nigeria and Kenya, sponsored by our AID program, brought together forty or more able African women educators from eight countries south of the Sahara—the nucleus of a teaching corps. To help associate the progress which such women lead, the State Department wants to encourage larger numbers of them to visit the United States, whether on government or private grants. We are making a special effort to bring here women who are working in the basic fields of health, literacy, and community development. For example, last spring my office sponsored a study tour of the United States by twelve Latin American women from twelve different countries. They spent two months here on State Department leader grants. The group included trained social workers, rural school teachers, and heads of voluntary welfare organizations in small towns. They were women whose work is fundamental to the success of the Alliance for Progress. From Colombia there came the chief of the Bogota Social Service Section of the National Housing Institute, from Paraguay a community organizer in the slums of Asuncion. From Brazil there was the president of a society for leprosy prevention and assistance to lepers. The Panamanian representative, a remarkable young wife and mother, was head of the housewives’ committee and the leader of self-help efforts in a struggling village of wooden shacks. Her village has so little cash income that she could not afford clothes for the trip. The women in our embassy in Panama collected a wardrobe so that she could come, and we felt that she both gained and gave more than anyone in the group. Our Latin American visitors traveled from Washington to San Francisco and back to New York. They visited schools, vocational centers, and housing projects. They saw handcraft instruction and the work of home demonstration agencies. They observed juvenile court judges and parole officers at work. They studied the organization of public and private welfare agencies and the training of hospital volunteers. They were entertained in homes in big cities and small towns. They stayed overnight in farmhouses and went to a Fourth of July picnic. Finally, they spent a week in Puerto Rico, where they could see many of the same general types of institutions operating in a Hispanic setting to solve problems very like their own at home. We are making a special effort to invite here leaders of those new but potentially very important women’s movements of Asia, Latin America, and 184

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Africa. In the past fortnight I have had the privilege of meeting Madam Marie Gueye of Dakar, Senegal, who is not only the wife of an associate justice of the Senegalese Supreme Court, but in her own right a teacher, the director of women’s affairs in the Ministry of Development and Planning, and a chief organizer of the Senegalese women’s organization which is now being formed. Another recent visitor has been Mrs. Lasmidjah Hardi, a director of the Indonesian Union of Women’s Cooperatives. Last week Mrs. Tonimowo Ogunlesi of Nigeria, who was recently elected president of the West African Federation of Women, arrived in Washington. These distinguished women have been particularly interested in seeing our women’s organizations in action. And not only these women leaders, whose special interest it is, but all our foreign visitors put at the top of their list of questions: “Can we see your organizations? Can we get to know their officers? Can we go to a meeting?” The fact that this activity is voluntary makes a deep impression. The American woman volunteer is a unique and wonderful institution. Her ideal of service to her community is one of our best items for export. This sense of service, of concern and responsibility for others, has been implicit in our way of life from the earliest days of our country. But since that early time our horizons have widened a thousandfold. We have always acknowledged that we are our brother’s and our sister’s keeper. Today our sister is not only the neighbor in our home community; she is now the student in Liberia; the rural school teacher in Bolivia; the farmer’s wife in India. The entire world has become our concern and our responsibility. Through our sense of responsibility for our own communities we have been steadily extending the frontiers of democracy at home, though we know that we still have much to do. Through our concern for the people of other countries, who are working to achieve economic and social progress and permanent independence, we can help to extend the frontiers of world peace.

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Anne Braden September 27, 1962, Annual Convention of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Birmingham, Alabama

Anne Gambrell McCarty Braden was born on July 28, 1924, in Louisville, Kentucky. The daughter of genteel middle-class segregationists, Braden came of age in Anniston, Alabama, where she was exposed to the stifling constraints of race, class, and gender. Inspired by her Episcopal minister to lead a “selfless life,” Anne developed a seriousness as a teenager that occasionally worried her mother. Her budding racial and gender consciousness matured as she matriculated at Stratford and Randolph-Macon College, then two women’s colleges in Virginia. Graduating in 1945 and determined to make a name in journalism, Braden worked first for the Anniston Star and then the Birmingham News. In covering the courthouse beat of the “Magic City,” Braden became acutely aware of the judicial system’s unfair treatment of blacks. In fact, Braden fled the city for the more progressive Louisville after a white deputy sheriff proudly showed her the skull of a black man who had been killed by a white man—a killing that would remain “unsolved,” boasted the deputy. While working for the Louisville Times, she met fellow journalist and workingclass trade unionist, Carl Braden, ten years her senior. Married in 1948, the two quickly made a formidable rhetorical team. Working as journalists in the labor movement, the Bradens formed allegiances with leftists of all stripes, including Communists. By 1950 the Bradens’ work shifted to integration as they helped create the “Interracial Hospital Movement” in Louisville. A year later, Anne traveled to Mississippi under the auspices of the Civil Rights Congress to protest the execution of Willie McGee for the alleged rape of a white woman. Such associations, though, left the Bradens vulnerable to the nation’s increasingly hysterical anti-communism fervor. Perhaps the defining moment of their lives took place in May of 1954. Acting as fronts for a black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, the Bradens purchased and then sold a home to the Wades in the segregated Louisville suburb of Shively. News of the new neighbors was met with rocks, burning crosses, and later dynamite. Instead of investigating such violence, a grand jury indicted the Bradens and 186

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four other whites on sedition charges for their alleged Communist Party affiliations. Carl would be convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in jail—a sentence later overturned, but for which he spent eight months in jail. Carl would also serve ten months in jail several years later for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about his political beliefs and associations before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The Bradens came to national civil rights prominence and influence in 1957 as they were hired as regional field organizers for the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), a group whose sole mission was the elimination of segregation. The Bradens quickly turned the Fund’s newspaper, the Southern Patriot, into an estimable and important voice for the freedom movement. Anne Braden clearly made an impression on movement leaders: Martin Luther King Jr. praised her in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and Fred Shuttlesworth claimed that without her work, he “would have been dead.” She was also a close friend to Ella Baker and the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with whom she shared the philosophy of decentralized leadership and grassroots involvement. And like Baker, her racial consciousness was always informed by an equally unrelenting gender consciousness. Writing to a friend about sexism in the freedom movement, Braden said, “I think a lot of our problems would be solved if we could just get rid of the men and leave this matter to the young people and the women.” After her husband’s unexpected death from a heart attack in 1975, she continued her activism in Louisville; even after turning eighty she was tirelessly dedicated to the cause of social justice. Anne Braden passed away at the age of eighty-one on March 6, 2006. She is survived by two children, James, an attorney, and Elizabeth, a teacher. Her 1958 memoir, The Wall Between, a National Book Award finalist, remains in print. The Bradens’ papers are housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Tennessee. In her address to the Annual Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Anne Braden offers a profoundly prophetic and personal message before her Birmingham interlocutors. Just six months away from perhaps the most important civil rights demonstrations in American history, Braden attempts to describe how the civil rights revolution functions rhetorically to create change. In her understanding, the movement is forcing the white southerner to “turn himself inside out”—a process she underwent in the 1940s—by confronting the evil that is segregation. Once this truth is recognized as the truth, inner turmoil will lead inexorably to national rebirth and ultimately reconciliation. As such, the suasory power of the civil rights revolution is both profoundly social and profoundly personal; Braden’s own life is a testament to this dialectic. Borrowing from Modjeska 187

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Simkins, also a SCEF member, and intimately familiar with the domestic fears associated with international Communism, Braden closes her address by emphasizing the need for the movement to maintain its radicalism and its emphasis on civil liberties.

I

am happy to be here today and to be a part of this meeting. I am happy because when I come to Alabama, it is coming home. I used to work in Birmingham, just after I finished school some sixteen yeas ago, and I grew up just sixty miles from here in the town that has recently become infamous, Anniston. Coming back to my home state and my home town is not always a happy experience—I rarely have occasion to be proud of them and what they are doing, and it would be the understatement of the year to say that among certain elements of the population I am welcomed back with something less than open arms. But when I come home to attend a meeting of this kind, I am both proud and happy because I believe that it is the people attending this meeting and organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which is sponsoring it that offer an almost miraculous hope that someday—and that not too far off—Alabama is going to be a decent state to live in. In fact, I would go even further and say what to some might seem an extreme statement: I believe it is entirely possible that because of the work of groups like this one, Alabama and other Deep South states, so benighted now, may someday become a force for good that will influence the whole course of man’s history by showing to the world a new kind of relationship among men. I think the possibility of this development is greatest here precisely because, paradoxically, it seems the most remote here. I will come back to this idea in a few moments and try to explain more exactly what I mean. First, however, before I get to the main topic of my remarks, I would like your indulgence for one more personal comment. I don’t know whether this meeting here today will be covered by the Birmingham newspapers or not. If it is, I’m sure they will have some very uncomplimentary things to say about me. That does not bother me too much, because I am quite accustomed to having uncomplimentary things said about me. Trouble is they never give you a chance to answer such things in print— so any answer that I want to make, I’d best make right now. I mention this because the last time I made a public speech in Alabama was a couple of years ago at a meeting of the Tuskegee Civic Association. On that occasion, the Birmingham News was so upset about my being in the state that they wrote an editorial about it. I don’t know where the Birmingham News

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presumes to get the right to advise Negroes in Alabama as to what they should do, but that’s what they attempted to do in this editorial. The head on it was “Tuskegee Group Makes a Mistake,” and the editorial, complete with a picture of myself and my husband, went on to say that the Negroes of Tuskegee would be well advised not to invite people like me to visit them. They said I was a quite dangerous character and had been accused of being a communist. Well, this sort of thing doesn’t bother me very much; it’s been said so often and I get used to it and I consider the source which is the committee of Senator James Eastland of your neighboring state of Mississippi. But one thing in that editorial really hurt me: They not only called me a communist which is a tired old charge I’m used to; they described me as an outside “agitator.” I don’t usually bother to answer such attacks. But this time I did. I sat down and wrote the Birmingham News a letter and asked them to publish it. I asked them why they had neglected to mention in the editorial that I used to be a reporter for their newspaper and that I lived in Alabama all my life until I was twenty-four years old, and had never lived outside the South yet. I said to them—I believe this was the wording, I am quoting from memory: “All I know about the evils of segregation I learned in Alabama, a great deal of it, I might add, while working as a reporter for your paper. In fact, if there was any one thing that more than anything else made an integrationist out of me, it was the stark injustice and inhumanity that I saw while covering the Birmingham courthouse for the Birmingham News. I saw that this was the final horrible fruits of segregation, that it was destroying the souls of white Alabamians as it was destroying the bodies of Negroes—and I had to do something about it.” As you might imagine, the Birmingham News did not print this letter. I don’t guess they’d print it now if I wrote it again. So I’m saying it here. I guess this somewhat constitutes my credentials to speak to you: When I talk about segregation in Alabama and the Deep South, I know whereof I speak. Nobody can tell me I don’t know, because I grew up with it. As a white person, I may never be able to completely understand what segregation does to the Negro, but I know what it does to white people: it destroys them utterly and completely. I have gone into this incident with the Birmingham News for two reasons: First, of course, just to set the record straight in case they call me an outside agitator again, but also because I think all this ties in with the topic I am to discuss this afternoon. I have been asked to speak on the “The Deeper Meaning of Nonviolent Direct Action.” To go back just a minute, I have sometimes wondered why the segregationists—and their newspapers—become so frenzied in attacking 189

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people like me. Why can’t they just express their differences with us in reasonable, rational terms? Why do they have to try to explain us away—as communists, as outside agitators, as the devil incarnate? I’ve been watching these people operate now—from my present vantage point within the integration movement—for more than fifteen years. I used to wonder, but I don’t anymore. I think I understand. These people simply can’t admit that people like us—and we are becoming more numerous all the time, white Southerners who have decided unequivocally that the fight for integration is our fight—they just can’t admit that we exist. Because once they admit that, they’ve got to examine their whole world; the same world that produced us produced them; the same evil that we escaped from imprisons them. If they look at us honestly, they’ve got to look at themselves and their world honestly—and once they do that, they’ve got to admit to themselves that their whole world is wrong and evil and corrupt. That’s not an easy thing to do. The human organism builds up every kind of defense it can to avoid a showdown of this kind, to avoid a face-to-face confrontation with stark ugly truth. No one likes to admit that his whole world and the people he loves are evil; when he has to face this, it tears his insides out—until he can once get over that hump of facing it and then he is free. But he’ll postpone the moment of truth as long as he can by every device of selfdeception. And that is what has been going on in communities all over the South in recent years. But some of the truest words ever spoken are those that tell us it is the truth that will make us free—the truth no matter how painful, no matter how ugly. I think it is herein that lies one of the most significant aspects of the nonviolent direct action movement in the South today. It is this movement that is presenting to the white population, in mass—and in a way that could never have occurred without the direct action movement—the necessity, the burden if people want to see it that way but I would rather call it opportunity, to face the truth about themselves and their society. When I was growing up, only a relative few of us ever came to that point of necessity to face the truth; we were the lucky ones. The necessity came to me, I think, by chance—the details are not pertinent to this discussion, but I could so easily have missed the opportunity and gone in a different direction. Others also found their way by chance—more perhaps than are generally realized. But no longer today is it a matter of chance. There is not a white person in the South today who does not have the opportunity to find the truth and be set free. And this situation exists because the nonviolent direct action movement has carried this issue into the glaring light of the public marketplace—and into the secret recesses 190

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where each man lives with his own conscience; into the schools, the churches, the public park; into the streets with picket lines and marches and into jails; into the front pages of every newspaper (which when I worked on the Birmingham ones were ignoring the issue in every way they could), and to the doorstep of every white Southerner. And the frenzied attacks—the ones that I feel, the ones that every person in the nonviolent movement has felt in some form or another—all come from the same source: They are the defense mechanisms of those who are fighting off the pain and liberation that comes with facing truth. There are two aspects of the deeper meaning of nonviolent direction that I want to discuss specifically. One is related to what it seems to me direct action means to the people who participate in it, and the other to what it means to those who see themselves at this moment as its opponents. First, to define some terms as I am using them. I should make it clear that I do not see direct action as the only form of nonviolent action or the only channel for nonviolent revolution. I realize we could get into some fine-point discussion on this, but other means of social action can if they are carried out in certain ways come within my definition of nonviolence. I have a friend who says her favorite form of nonviolence is political action—and certainly it is theoretically possible to have a nonviolent revolution at the ballot box. Court action is also a nonviolent way of attacking social evil. But while both of these methods are nonviolent and could be revolutionary, they have in life very rarely been revolutionary—and the reason they have not is that traditionally too few people have participated in them. When you file a lawsuit and do nothing else, a lawyer does it and the rest of the people who are interested can go home and forget it—or just hope it comes out right. Everybody can theoretically go to the polls, but even in the areas of our country where there are no limitations on the ballot by terror and other devices, how many, Negro or white, do? Relatively few. This is all related to what it seems to me is one of the real tragedies of our modern age. So many people feel—often unconsciously—that there is really nothing significant that they personally can do about the society and the world in which they live. The problems look too big, too complex—the evil too monstrous, big impersonal things like bombs that can kill the whole human race with one blow, complex problems that supposedly only “experts” can understand. What, many have been led to ask, can the individual conscience of one man or woman mean in this vast impersonal fabric of human affairs? And so we have the sense of futility that grips so much of mankind—with each individual withdrawing into his own life, into his own 191

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backyard, into a position of moral neutrality, into ultimate alienation from his fellowman. The use of nonviolent direct action as a mass social weapon was introduced into the Western World by the integration movement in the South. In this, I believe history will record that this movement made a contribution to our times and our society that actually transcends the issue of segregation. For nonviolent direct action cuts through this shield of moral neutrality and this sense of futility that grips modern man. Nonviolent direct action says the individual conscience does matter, it says the individual can do something about his fate and the future of his society. If a mass movement exists you can go faster, but no man moved by conscience need wait for a mass movement. One individual, acting, may move mountains. One small woman, Mrs. Rosa Parks, refused to move back on a bus, and a whole movement resulted. Four lone students sat down at a lunch counter in North Carolina, and the South has never been the same since. One could go on and on with the examples. And when a mass movement develops, such as we’ve seen in Albany and elsewhere, every person who cares has a part to play; no one need sit back and think the problems must be solved by experts. Once people have come together and become involved in their society through direct action, they are changed people. I am not speaking here just of what it gives the Negro in terms of a new sense of dignity and strength—as important as that is—but what I’m talking about happens to all participants in direct action, Negroes and the white people who identify with the cause. They realize that they are not just helpless pawns in the hands of fate or forces too complex for them; they realize they are making themselves felt. They become active participating members of the human race, not passive neutralists. After this sort of awakening has occurred, then if you go into court action and political action, these weapons for social change also take on a new character. It is in this context that they also become a part of a nonviolent revolutionary struggle—because they involve the participation and allegiance of individuals who felt futile before. The whole matter involves the difference between paternalism and democracy—the difference between people having something done for them and doing it themselves. The only changes that really go deep are the ones people bring about themselves. Democracy means doing it yourself. Democracy has been at a low ebb throughout America in recent years, precisely because too many people have lost faith that they can do anything for themselves. The nonviolent direct action movement may be seen in history to have revitalized democracy in the Western World by giving people faith again that they can organize and change things for themselves. 192

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But this important new situation that comes with a wide feeling of participation could also come in a violent revolution; for violent revolution too requires that many individuals participate in shaping their fate and the world they will live in. And so we should look at another deeper aspect of what the current direct action movement means in the South: What is this nonviolence and what does it mean. To me, the most important thing about the nonviolent philosophy is not just its refusal to use physical violence. That’s essential to it, of course. But the aspect of nonviolence which provides the real hope in human affairs is the implicit faith of the one who practices nonviolent protest that there can and will be an ultimate reconciliation with people who are now the opponents, or the enemy. I’ll tell you what nonviolence means to me. It is something I heard Fred Shuttlesworth say a few years ago. Someone in a workshop asked him what he was working for in Birmingham; he thought a minute and said: “The day when I can sit down and talk as a friend with the man who attacked me and my family with chains at Phillips High School.” Fred Shuttlesworth—this man who has suffered from the action of white men as much as anybody I know—and this is what he said. I believe he meant it. I don’t think he literally believes the day will come when he and that particular man will sit down as friends—maybe he does, maybe I’m the one who does not have enough faith, I don’t know—but what I’m sure he believes is that the day will come when Negroes will be able to sit down as friends with the children of that man or people like him. Now I am fully aware that not everyone in the nonviolent movement has this perspective, or this hope or this faith. But I know that some do, and to me this is simply a miracle, and I use the word advisedly. I think that statement of Fred’s which I just quoted—and I’ve quoted it all over America—is a miracle of the human spirit, pure and simple. As a white person, I’m not sure I understand how any Negro could ever want to reach a reconciliation with white people. But for some reason it has been given to us in the Southern United States that in this year of 1962 this is so. Because of this, we on this little spot on the map may have the opportunity that exists in few places in the world—to prove that people of different colors can live together on this planet in peace and brotherhood. The very survival of our planet may depend on this—and so we here in this small corner of it may have been born to the age and the location which can decide the future of humanity. But let us think for just a moment about what is involved when we speak of reconciliation between Negro and white Southerners. Reconciliation, as 193

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I understand it, does not mean compromise—or just peaceful coexistence. Reconciliation means an entirely new relationship. And to reach new relationships you have to have new people, profoundly changed people. When Fred Shuttlesworth said he was working for the day when he could sit down as friends with the man who beat him—or someone like that—he didn’t mean he wanted to sit down with that man as he is now, or even that man slightly “moderated.” You can’t talk about integration with the white South as it has been. These people—all of us, and I include myself in this— have got to become new people. This is why the movement we are engaged in is in a very literal sense a revolution. We are working for a complete and radical change in the structure of our society and in its people. This is both an outer revolution and an inner revolution—and they are both going on simultaneously. Now, I think it is axiomatic that revolutions don’t come easy. Not if we are talking about real change. Sometimes, when there are direct action protests and a whole white community doesn’t have a change of heart overnight, you hear people say that the nonviolent faith is a futile dream, that it doesn’t work. Or you hear them say that things are worse than they’ve been before, that new hatreds have been generated in a place, for example, like Albany, Georgia. I think people who say these things simply don’t understand the true revolutionary nature of this movement and its goals. If we are truly working for new relationships among men, the changes can’t come painlessly to the white South. If it were just surface changes we wanted, it might be easy. You can get a few court decisions, you can get a few bad laws off the books, you can get a little token desegregation, you can force a system of law and order and restrain the really crude forms of discrimination—you can do all that, and we should do it—and you can do it without too much turmoil if you ease the pain of the segregationists by tacitly assuring them things aren’t really going to change much. But if that’s all we are going to do, we are going to end up with more sophisticated forms of discrimination and a society not too different from what the world has had for a long time and which has not brought us to a stage where the human race may well destroy itself. I think of a discussion I had a year or so ago with a group of white ministers in a border city. All of them were from northern cities except one, and he was from Birmingham. He was the one-man minority in the room, because he was the only one of them who did not classify himself as an integrationist. He was really suffering. He was not defending segregation, but he was saying: “I know it’s wrong, but I don’t know what to do—if I go to Birmingham and say these things, I know what will happen. There will be turmoil. I don’t 194

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know what to do.” He wasn’t on the right side from our point of view—but he was suffering, he was probing, into himself and his society. The others in the room weren’t suffering at all; they had all the answers, it seemed. It all began to seem a little too glib to me, and finally I realized why when one of the other ministers said to the man from Birmingham: “Look here, I don’t see why this has you so upset. You are making a mountain out of a molehill. You could get rid of all those silly segregation laws you have in Birmingham, and it’s really not going to hurt anybody because things wouldn’t change too much. It wouldn’t be very different from the town I come from.” And I interrupted to say to the man who was speaking: “That is just the point—this man doesn’t want things to go unchanged in Birmingham, he knows in his heart that to have a town like yours as you describe it is not the answer to the evil that has corrupted Birmingham. He is afraid of the future, but he is realizing he can’t live with the past. He’s looking for something new.” I told the Birmingham man later that for all his hesitation at this moment I’d put my money on him ahead of that other minister who had not yet even recognized the evil we are fighting. This man—and people like him all over the South—have got to go through this inner turmoil—and society has got to go through an outer turmoil if there is to be any real change. They have got to recognize the evil in themselves and their society for what it is. To go back to the point I was making in the beginning this afternoon, it seems to me that it is the nonviolent direct action movement that is providing them with the necessity to face it. If a mass conversion does not come to a white community in a sudden flash of light, this does not mean we are failing. It simply means that people do not face truth within themselves and become reborn without turmoil. First all their defense mechanisms go up, all the hatred and hostility that has been latent before boils to the surface. When things seem to get worse instead of better, I think we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new set of relationships among men. Recently I talked with some old friends of mine in Anniston, a couple I grew up with. They are now parents of young children. These people consider themselves somewhat “moderate” and civilized. They’ve learned how to pronounce the word “Negro” fairly well, which their parents didn’t know when we were all growing up, so they feel they are a part of the “New South.” And this young father said to me: “I’m worried about what is happening. I know segregation is wrong—but all this agitation for integration, it’s creating hatred, hatred you and I never knew when we were children. Take our children, for example, we’ve tried to rear them without prejudice (as if this were possible in a segregated society), and the other day our nine-year-old son 195

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came in using the old ugly word for Negro and saying he’d never go to school with them. He hasn’t heard that at home—but he’s getting it because of all the turmoil.” This father was sincerely concerned. I said to him: “I don’t think you need to worry about your son; you can talk this thing out with him. He’s got a better chance than you or I had at that age—because there was no opportunity for talk to reach us. We didn’t hear this kind of open hatred to be sure. But we grew up in a world which simply took for granted the assumption that some people should be separated from others. This was hatred in the worst form, we accepted it, we lived with it, and it corrupted us—until long afterward, when we were grown, we had to dig it out, piece by piece. With your son, with the people who are hearing these things now, it’s on a conscious level—and there it can be cured, and so much more easily.” I’m not sure this father understood then—or now. He is one of those who has not yet faced the truth. Often we divide white Southerners into neat categories—we talk about segregationists, moderates, liberals, integrationists, etc. For the purpose of this discussion, let me suggest different categories. Let’s classify people on where they stand in this thing I’ve been talking about, this basic encounter with truth, recognition of the fact that their society is evil and the evil is within them. Some of us who have faced the truth, rejected all of the values of our old world, and identified our lives with the movement for change are the most fortunate white Southerners today. We are free; we have escaped from the prison segregation places around the soul of the white man. We have our difficulties, but they all come from the outside, not from within. Then there are great numbers who have honestly faced the truth but for various reasons have not yet come to the point of identifying openly and completely with the movement for change. They are more numerous than is sometimes realized, and of all the people in the South today they are the most miserable, I think. Many white ministers, I believe, fall into this category. When the prison to which they still consign themselves becomes unbearable, more and more of them will break loose. But then there is the great third category: of people who have simply not yet faced the truth. Obviously segregationists are in this category. But what is not so obvious is that many quote “moderate” unquote people are also in this third category: People who say sure segregation is wrong, but wait a minute now, don’t go so fast, you are going to stir up too much turmoil, there’s an easy way to work this out—all this. These people too are evading the truth and finding defense mechanisms. Because if they had really faced the truth of the evil of segregation and what it does to all of us, they would not suggest to anyone, white or Negro, that he 196

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live with it another day. Nor would they suggest, if they had faced the truth of how deep the evil goes, that a real change can come without pain and turmoil, both outer and inner. I don’t think there’s really any question as to whether the nonviolent direct action movement in the South is succeeding or not. Direct action, along with other nonviolent techniques that have been fired with new meaning because of mass involvement in direct action, has already made many surface changes that some thought were impossible a few years ago. It has also already effected an inner revolution in more white people than is sometimes realized—the inner changes that can make possible the real substantive changes outside. If it has not yet changed enough people in this fundamental way, the present tumult is a sure sign that it has cracked through the hard shell of complacency and made a beginning. And I think we can soon see a quickening of the tempo of real conversion. I think this will occur, given certain important conditions within the nonviolent movement itself. Number one, I think the nonviolent movement must continue to be radical. I don’t think it can succeed if it begins to listen to those who say go slow, or those who say we must try to ease the pain of change for the white South. The nonviolent direct action movement has got to recognize, as it has in the past, that it would not be doing any white person a favor to try to make things easy for him or to compromise on the old terms. The real favor that can be done the white Southerner is to present him the challenge so sharply that he can’t avoid meeting it, to present him with the opportunity to turn himself inside out. And number two, I think the nonviolent movement has got to continue to work for civil liberties as well as civil rights. If nonviolence depends on reaching the opponent with what we have to say, we’ve got to have the right to say it. We’ve got to have the right to speak, to picket, and to protest—these are all civil liberties, and as we all know they don’t exist in many parts of the South. Nonviolence as a weapon of social change depends on a civil libertarian atmosphere. Civil liberties have been at a low ebb in recent years not only in the South but all over America, and the national civil liberties crisis results from the after-effects of McCarthyism and the hysteria over “communism.” This has had a profound effect in the South because it has provided the white Southerner with one of the best defense mechanisms against truth—he can tell himself and the world that there is no real problem, it’s just all the communists trying to stir up trouble. He couldn’t use that defense mechanism so effectively if the rest of the nation weren’t using it too, every time they want to avoid a real problem our world faces. I see no real fundamental solution to 197

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this in the South unless the whole nation can establish a civil libertarian atmosphere where the scare word “communist” cannot be used so effectively. If we in the nonviolent movement can do these things—if we can maintain our radicalism without compromise and if we can help establish a civil libertarian atmosphere in the nation—I believe we are going to accomplish a real nonviolent revolution in the South. The tumult we are witnessing now is not because things are worse but because a new society is struggling to be born. It is not coming easily, because we are asking of the future a society which is different from any ever established among men before. We want more than surface changes. Racial segregation is just one aspect of the separation of man from man that has plagued humanity everywhere—but it is the aspect of it that is on our doorstep. If we can solve it in a fundamental way, creating new relationships among men, we will be setting an example the whole world can look to. And we may be able to do it here, where it looks the most hopeless, precisely because man’s alienation from his fellowman here is so deep that it can’t be alleviated by any short-cut measures, by anything but the most fundamental revolution of a man’s inner being and his outer institutions. That, I think, is the opportunity that history has given us, and the direct action movement gives to each of us a way to have a part in the seizing of this opportunity.

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Marion King November 1962, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Meeting, Nashville, Tennessee

Marion King was born on September 12, 1932, in Valdosta, Georgia. She graduated from Spelman College and Mercer University Law School. In the 1950s she moved to Albany, Georgia, and married Slater King, Sr., who would later become one of the pivotal leaders in the Albany freedom movement. On Monday, July 23, 1962, Marion King, along with her two children, drove south from Albany to the Mitchell County Jail in Camilla. Her maid’s daughter was jailed there following mass arrests during a protest march two days earlier. She had brought food for the daughter and fellow incarcerated protestors. While singing freedom songs near a chainlink fence outside of the jail, King did not move back fast enough for the sheriff and his deputy. The sheriff slapped her hard across the face, sending her three-year old-daughter Abena flying to the pavement; his deputy then kicked her in the shins, knocking her to the ground, whereupon he kicked her several more times as she lay on the ground. Marion King was six months pregnant at the time of the assault and later miscarried the child. Charges were never pressed. She later moved to Atlanta and worked as an assistant city attorney in Maynard Jackson’s and Andrew Young’s mayoral administrations. She died while in heart surgery on May 24, 2007. Typically it was Marion King’s husband, Slater, who delivered the speeches. But during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) invited Mrs. King to speak, recounting the Albany protests as well as the death of her unborn child. While praising SNCC for starting what would become the Albany movement, particularly Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagan, King briefly contextualizes the loss of her child. While not privy to any “divine revelation,” she nonetheless reveals a growing spiritual strength. And while she saw “pure, unadulterated hatred of the two persons who attacked me,” she also sees God at work among some white southerners.

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M

y husband has said that he cannot always buy nonviolence and that had he been present when the incident occurred at Camilla, he would have had to die trying to protect me. But let me say that we have both learned many lessons in nonviolence during the past year, and we are still learning. As I stand here now and look into your faces I feel that we are attending a homecoming, for I see so many people whom we have had the pleasure of having in our home at some time or other during the last critical year in Albany. And I know the names of others of you who have visited in our home, although we didn’t know you were there at the time, because we were in jail and you were out, and later you were in and we were out, and we didn’t have the chance to meet! I would like to take this opportunity to thank you of the Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for what your coming to Albany has meant to us, and for what it will mean to the world. You may feel discouraged because things are not happening as fast as you thought they would, because you think you don’t see any change in a place where they are still excluding Negroes from the dignity, opportunity, and liberties of life in Albany, and where Negro citizens are still put in jail for peacefully petitioning for redress of our grievances, for asking for a share in our government and public places, and for walking in orderly nonviolent demonstration on our wide streets. But I would thank you young people of SNCC for starting something that will not die and that cannot be stopped. You have given my children something that cannot be taken away from them. Even my little three-year-old knows many of the Freedom songs we have sung in Albany and that you have sung here tonight—word for word. Many, many other children have seen the struggle for freedom in the marches on the streets of Albany. Thousands of children have seen pictures of it on television and have heard about it on the radio. And they will not forget. This vision cannot be taken from them, and I know that the fight you have started will go on and on. There has been more publicity for the Peace Corps, but let me reemphasize a statement of Bill Weatherby, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian: you are the real Peace Corps, the unsung heroes who will be the salvation of America. So, may I say that I am happy that Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon of SNCC saw fit to come down to the “bushes” of Albany, 170 miles southwest of Atlanta, to help us start this movement, this struggle, this vision, and this faith in freedom that will not die and cannot be stopped.

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As to the loss in our family, I cannot say that I have received any “divine revelation” out of the whole ordeal. There are a few things, though, that stand out in my mind and feelings. First, I cannot forget the pure, unadulterated hatred of the two persons who attacked me and my children. I say they attacked my children because I was holding one child in my arms and had the others right there with me. I really feel that in the eyes of those policemen we were much lower than human beings, not to mention fellow men. I have asked myself and my God “why” a few thousand times. It would be easy to give a ready-made answer, such as that they are products of an evil system which has brutalized them, and that we must forgive them and get rid of the system. But I cannot be completely satisfied with this, and I wonder again and again what is the matter with the white people of Albany. Second, I have been amazed at the strength that has come pouring into me from some source outside myself. Despite the many days and the sleepless nights of labor, even when I knew for sure that the baby would not make it, I felt literally physically strong. I could hoe a few rows in my yard in the bright autumn sunshine and I gradually grew spiritually stronger, too. Third, the love which we now share with our little children seems newer and stronger than ever and compensates more than enough for any loss that we might have sustained. It is probably natural that we should be more dear to each other. So, even though we don’t understand why the incident happened or all of its implications, and even though I have had some moments of real despair, I do feel that there is some master plan, some purpose for it all. I have had more moments of real hope than of despair. I see in some white Southerners of just and generous spirit “Signs of the coming of the Lord,” and I know that “His truth is marching on.”

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Margaret C. McCulloch November 1962, South Carolina Council on Human Relations

Teacher, philanthropist, and social worker Margaret Callender McCulloch was born on January 16, 1901, in Orange, New Jersey. Raised by her parents in the Episcopal Church, McCulloch’s childhood was plagued by severe rheumatoid arthritis, which often kept her out of school. A very bright student, she graduated from Miss Beard’s School in Orange and then headed north to study at Wellesley where she completed her bachelor’s degree in 1923. She began her teaching career that same year, heading back to Miss Beard’s School; two years later she moved to Frogmore, South Carolina, where she taught at Penn School, which was run by Quakers. After receiving her master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina in 1934, McCulloch took a position teaching history at LeMoyne College (today LeMoyneOwen), a historically black college in Memphis, Tennessee. Following a move to Nashville in 1941, McCulloch immersed herself personally and professionally in race relations, first at the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, and later at the American Missionary Association (AMA) at Fisk University. At Fisk, she helped in the publication of an important study led by the renowned sociologist Charles S. Johnson, Into the Main Stream. She also published several pamphlets under the auspices of the AMA addressed to the South’s racial problems. Upon moving back to Memphis in 1948, McCulloch became very involved in attempting to improve life for its black citizens by participating in such organizations as the Community Council of the Memphis Welfare Federation and the Memphis League of Women Voters. The latter organization also set up the first black chapter in the South. Always generous with her money, McCulloch established the Opportunity Foundation in 1962 by endowing it with nearly $150,000. The Foundation provided scholarships to needy students and offered assistance to families in financial crisis; it was also one of the first private foundations in Memphis to have an interracial board of directors. Even though plagued most of her life by arthritis, McCulloch lived to the age of ninety-five, passing away in Memphis on March 7, 1996. Her papers are housed at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. 202

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In this oratorical bouillabaisse delivered to the South Carolina Council on Human Relations (the state organization of the national Southern Regional Council), McCulloch draws on her extensive knowledge of sociology, economics, community organizing, and theology to offer causes and solutions to the South’s ongoing racial problems. She toggles between large structural forces such as automation and individual acts of goodness that can transcend oppressive, impersonal forces. There is no small historical irony in McCulloch’s qualified praise of Memphians and the city’s budding interracial solidarity: within six years, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be gunned down at the Lorraine Motel near downtown Memphis. She closes her speech by imploring her listeners to understand the complexities that race relations entail: “simple goodness is not enough. We need informed, enlightened, complex goodness. We need to study and think.” Such a view, of course, privileges a top-down, reflexive, and well-educated sensibility—precisely the organizational ethos adopted by many civil rights organizations, and spurned by a few. In her laundry list of civil rights groups flocking to help in Haywood and Fayette counties, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is conspicuously missing. Such an omission would surely have pleased the organization known for its cultivation of local leaders solving their local problems.

Part I—The Candle of the Lord

“T

he Spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” This is our faith, that every man has in him some spark of God’s own nature. We seek to foster, not quench, that spark in every human being. Interracial hostilities, injustices, rejections of each other contradict this view and aim. Hence, we view as sins white supremacy and also hatred of whites by Negroes. But if these are spiritual matters why do we find this particular sin apparently distributed on a geographical basis, at least as far as concerns resistance to desegregation? Because we are embodied spirits. We tend to take for granted and defend as right the ways of the people among whom we live. So we are more prone to one sin in certain circumstances than in other circumstances. Thus we find resistance to desegregation least in the non-South; next in the upper South, which has state policies of compliance; greater in the midSouth where we find policies of delay, evasion, and mere token compliance; greatest in the Deep South where we find massive resistance. Why? The key is to be found in a set of factors which I call “The Deep South Complex” of resistance to desegregation. There are fifteen of these factors. 203

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They are least present in the non-South; we find them more and more as we move towards the Gulf of Mexico, so greatest in the Deep South. This is because the Gulf itself with its warm, moist climate, year-round farming season, and the rich, flat alluvial soils around it lent themselves long ago to the big plantation and the system of mass cheap labor which was the basis of Negro slavery and from which the other factors have flowed. These fifteen factors are: 1. Agriculture the basic economy 2. High percent of population rural 3. High birth rate 4. Low income rate 5. Low schooling levels 6. High percent Negro 7. History of slavery to 1865 8. History of Confederacy 9. White supremacy patterns since 1865 10. Regional and state loyalties above national 11. Wide racial differentials in schooling 12. Laws sustaining white supremacy 13. Organizations to maintain white supremacy 14. Weakness or absence of contrary organizations 15. Distance from desegregating or unsegregated areas Try this hypothesis: Wherever these factors are found in a high degree, desegregation will meet with maximal resistance. Conversely, where they are weak or lacking, it will be comparatively easy. This understanding can help us in four practical ways. (1) It can save us from being too self-righteous and condemning unduly those who oppose us. (2) It gives us a framework for studying our own states and communities within them and deciding where the areas of least resistance are. We can choose these places for launching our new practices. (3) It suggests how we can release some of the forces that counteract and undo this resistance: moral and spiritual forces, yes, but also organizations, industrialization, better schooling, and others that will occur to you as you study the list and apply it to your locality. (4) It helps us understand how mass migrations of Negroes and economic changes are easing race relations in the South and increasing race tensions in the North, and why we must be concerned not only with desegregation in the Deep South but with such problems as family disorganization, illiteracy, automation of agriculture and now of industry, opening 204

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new employment opportunities, and meeting the new employment demands for much better educated workers. It helps us understand how these changes that have redistributed Negroes from being a rural Southern, farm folk to being a nationwide, urban, big-city proletariat; have also altered the nature of our race relations problems and created new problems calling for new approaches. These things I shall try to illustrate from my home city of Memphis, Tennessee, and leave to you to apply them to your state and communities. Memphis, as you know, is in the extreme Southwest corner of Tennessee, right on the Mississippi River and right at the state line of the state of Mississippi. It is surrounded by big plantation areas of West Tennessee, Northern Mississippi, Eastern Arkansas, and the “Boot Heel” of Missouri. It is 37 percent Negro. It was occupied by “Northern” (Union) troops during the Civil War. In all these ways it is Deep South. So it was seven years after the first U.S. Supreme Court decision on school desegregation in 1954, and then only under pressure of lawsuit, that Memphis took its first step in school desegregation. But note something else. Memphis is a big city of over half a million people. This knocks out all five of the first enumerated factors of the Deep South complex of resistance. It is industrial, commercial, and financial, not agricultural. It is urban, not rural. For the Mid-South its income level and schooling levels are high. And what do you think is its ambition as declared by our current president of the Chamber of Commerce? To become “The Chicago of the South.” I shudder but pass on. Now any city that wishes to become the Chicago of the South will do whatever will bring business and money. And Memphis has long been shrewd enough not to hold down one third, the Negro third, of its population too low for this. Memphis Negroes have voted for half a century or more. They range in wealth from dire poverty to riches, in housing from slums to mansions, with everything in between. There has also long been quiet, small-scale interracial cooperation for the improvement of race relations on a voluntary basis in particular phases—such as health or child care for instance. Now all of these factors were at work paving the way for eventual desegregation. But what finally tipped the scales in favor of citywide desegregation more than any one other thing was the victory of U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, a moderate on race who triumphed locally as well as statewide over his opponent, “Tip” Taylor, an arch segregationist. It was a complete upset of all predictions for the Memphis-Shelby County vote, and it was brought about by a coalition of the votes of women, liberals, Negroes, labor, and students under astute leadership. When this occurred, it dawned upon the business 205

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men of Memphis that their bread was buttered on the underside: And, in its rather fascinating characteristic way, Memphis flopped it over. When we do change, we change in a big way. In the last few years, we have desegregated peaceably and without furor the following: Memphis State University (about one hundred Negroes attending), University of Tennessee medical and related units located at Memphis, our library system, the zoo, the marina, art museum, art academy, three golf courses, several parks and several playgrounds, the municipal auditorium, and the fairgrounds (including the amusement park and the annual midSouth Fair), also our local bus system. These are tax-supported. In addition, non tax-supported, we have desegregated the railroad, bus, and plane terminals and their restaurants and airport limousine; and about twenty-six restaurants and lunch counters in the department and variety stores. We also have Negroes now in appointed posts in the County Tax Assessor’s office, as deputy sheriffs, as assistant public defender, on County Board of Education, on City Traffic Advisory Commission; on City of Memphis Hospitals Board. In volunteer posts of prominence, we have long had Negroes on the Board of Health and Welfare Planning Council and some social agencies, and have recently elected one to the board of directors of our community chest called SUN (Shelby United Neighbors). Last year the Memphis Round Table of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, previously all white, elected a well-integrated board of directors. But we are doing more than that; we are trying to cope with the impact of automation. All of us are aware, I trust, that this century (the years since 1900) has seen a revolution in agriculture brought about by automation. We have tractors for mules, weed poisons spread by crop-dusting helicopters for the hand-hoe and the man, and many other changes. The proportion of our American population needed on the farm has shrunk from one-half to onetenth and is still shrinking. We realize, I am sure, that Negroes have been even more sweepingly affected than whites and have moved by hundreds of thousands from farms to cities and from South to North and West. They are today even more urban than whites are, in that they have migrated to the big-city centers and massed there. In 1900 they were 90 percent Southern; in 1930, 78 percent; in 1960, 52 percent. The Negro, a Southern rural farm folk, has been transformed to a national urban proletariat. Now Memphis experiences this in both immigration from the rural areas around us and out migration to the North and West-coast cities. They come streaming in, poor, illiterate, unskilled, unused to city life. They fall victims to every city racket and lure. Their family life disintegrates. They revel briefly 206

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in “buying” every luxury at the modern rate of nothing down and something weekly the rest of your life. Soon they are hopelessly in debt. They swell the ranks of mounting delinquency and crime, the relief rolls, and the rolls of divorce, desertion, non-support, and illegitimacy. A recent report gave the current illegitimacy rate for Memphis Negro children as one in three. The move to the city is not all a blessing. So we, in Memphis, experience something of the anguish that is filling the great “black ghettoes,” of the North, something of the rising tensions, and hostilities and frustrations. As fast, too, as we desegregate facilities whites flee further away to the fringes of the city and rural Negroes pack the inner city. So the gap we have been clearing widens again. We experience also out-migration. This migration tends to skim off the cream of the Negro crop; it takes our educated young Negroes, especially men from eighteen to thirty-five, who go elsewhere because the better jobs in Memphis are closed to them. And now we are just beginning to feel the frightening front edge of a vast new problem, the trickle back resulting from the new automation, automation invading industry. Hitherto our expanding industrial economy in the U.S.A. has been able to absorb the mass of city-ward rural migrants into the ranks of unskilled industrial labor in our big Northern and Western cities. Now no more. Not merely can they absorb no increase of such laborers; they have begun reducing their numbers by hundreds weekly as machines replace the brawny arms and legs and backs of men. For the adult with less than a sixth-grade education who gets laid off, there is now no place to go. Slowly they are beginning to trickle back. On my block, once white, now Negro, one man is back from New Jersey, one from Chicago, one from Detroit. So it goes. This poses for us from end to end of the South a new and vast challenge. We must find ways to do three things and do them fast. We must manage to absorb our own unskilled men at home, for they have now no place to go. We must wipe out illiteracy and functional illiteracy in a crash mass program. We must make race relations decent enough and progressive enough for us all to live together in mutual respect and good will right here. Now these problems affect us all. But what specifically is Memphis doing about them? So far, it has been able to absorb in employment both the rural immigrants and the few trickle backs. Its Negro population, like its white, has kept growing, not shrinking, and employment levels have been maintained by new and expanding industries. Memphis also engages in vigorous promotion of 207

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small-scale industrial development in the small towns of the surrounding mid-South area. It sponsors essay contests, competitions, prizes, and the like in promoting this—and it is effective. On the score of wiping out illiteracy we have made a beginning. We have a World Literacy Foundation based in Memphis and as a local demonstration we have television literacy lessons set up at listening centers with work boards, volunteer teachers trained by the foundation, and hundreds of students. Probably our most unique gesture took place this last year when topdeck young white business men in the Junior Chamber of Commerce gave their time and talents in cooperation with the foundation and the City Commission and taught three hundred Negro men, garbage collectors, to read, write, and cipher. We have also a recent night elementary school for adults. It feeds into the night high school which we have had for many years. But, and we must face it, the problem of racial discrimination in employment grows worse, not better, in Memphis as across the nation. Negroes in Memphis, as elsewhere, have been virtually squeezed out of the building trades; automation of industry is closing out the unskilled industrial jobs; labor unions, once the Negroes’ allies, are now in many cases their most implacable opponents; yet Negroes have no choice but join these unions which are open to be employed at all. Higher level jobs are gradually closed against Negroes; and when they are not, or if with difficulty a few are pried open, Negroes are generally so poorly schooled that they can rarely qualify. And every year the space age demands higher education of us all. Many national trends felt in Memphis also have been highly favorable to Negroes. But while we have been busy about civil rights and public privileges such as use of theatres and restaurants, this major adverse economic trend has been slipping up on us, rolling in unrecognized. Somehow we must find a way to cope with it. Frankly, I do not know what that can be, nor do I know anyone who does; but some alleviative steps at least we can take. We have in Memphis four organizations aware of this problem and at work on it. These are the Urban League, the NAACP, the Memphis Chapter of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, and the Memphis Committee on Community Relations, a very influential body with membership of both races. Just before I left Memphis to come here, the four men who are leading the organized efforts of their four groups were planning to meet together and confer on how best to coordinate their efforts. It would be presumptuous to suppose that we shall turn the national tide or solve this vast problem alone, but it would be cowardly to assume we can do nothing and to quit before we begin. 208

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The way ahead in employment may for the moment loom darkly as it does in the tragic spectacle of Negro family disintegration, but the Candle of the Lord within us sheds enough light for us at least to venture forward in faith. In all of this, I have tried to show, by way of the city I do know, some of the great trends and forces and problems and efforts at solution that affects us all. But we must never overlook the individual. The greatest advances made in Negro hospital and medical opportunities in Memphis were launched chiefly by one devoted and able Negro physician. The World Literacy Foundation was the brain child of one woman, inspired by Frank Laubach and backed by a few friends. Memphis State University was opened by eight brave young Negroes who faced every kind of rebuff and rejection, vilification and threat for two years unflinchingly, not from the university, I am happy to say, but from extremists in the city. A white attorney called into being what is now the influential interracial body called the Memphis Committee on Community Relations. At the first year’s end he laughingly displayed to us a file about four inches thick of the anonymous letters of vituperation and threats which he had received. Today, this is a highly respected organization. Time alone cuts short this list of individuals. “The Spirit of Man is the Candle of the Lord.”

Part II—Going Where? In Part I we assumed that all of us working on race relations share the faith expressed in man as “The Candle of the Lord,” and therefore are all working towards a common goal, and that we will work towards that goal by methods consistent with our faith. Actually the facts are much more complex than this. Many thousands of people are working in the field of “race relations” today and they have very varying faiths and goals and methods. Perhaps we ourselves are not as clear as we might be on our own. Just as in Part I we saw how geographic, economic, historical, and social factors affect people’s views and actions about white supremacy and segregation, so now we must realize that all of us grow up this same way; we are all affected by the views and actions that surround us. Often we ourselves hold different and even contradictory sets of values and beliefs without realizing it. When we see this in others, we call it “hypocrisy”; when someone points it out to us in ourselves we try to defend ourselves and make up “good reasons” for it. This sort of confusion is dangerous in leading social movements. If we are not to be blind leaders of the blind, we need to devote 209

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study to the questions: Just what am I seeking to accomplish? What sort of society? And what methods fit my aims and faith and what do not? We need to ask the same questions about the South Carolina Council on Human Relations and its parent body, the Southern Regional Council. If we do not, we and those we lead are likely to suffer bad consequences. Concentrating on civil rights and desegregation of such semi-public places as theatres and lunch counters, we are likely to overlook automation and all the related problems of employment and education for it in the space age. Concentrating on as much school integration as fast as possible, we may bring on a mass exodus of white people from the area and have “resegregation.” That is, the school will become again all-Negro and now the basis will be firm because all the residential area has become all-Negro. Now over against a vague confusion of values and goals and methods there are systems offered us for organizing these more consistently under some overall view. Probably the five that are most widespread and influential in race relations today are these: 1. Racialism (both white and black); 2. Communism. 3. Americanism (This is of two types, integrationist or assimilationist is one; cultural pluralist the other); 4. so-called “Nonviolent direct action”; and 5. Christianity. For myself, as far as in me lies I am a Christian, and judge the other four value systems in terms of Christian faith. Doing so, I find I must reject both Racialism and Communism because of some basic conflicts with my faith. I find Americanism of both types inadequate and Gandhianism, or “Nonviolent direct action,” inadequate. But that does not help you. Not what I understand and believe, but what you do is important to you. Perhaps these things seem theoretical and remote to you. But they are not. Let me illustrate from my area. Memphis is in Shelby County. Two of the counties bordering Shelby are Fayette and Haywood. Most of you have heard of these. They were the last two counties in Tennessee where Negroes were not free to register and vote. And note our Deep South complex; they had all the factors. When Negroes tried to register and vote a few years ago, whites began a fierce persecution. Help was then rushed in from all over the nation. Along with clothing, food, tents, and money came people representing all sorts of organizations of all the five systems I have mentioned. Let me just give you a list from memory—I shall doubtless leave off some. There were of course the local Negro organizations: the Civic and Welfare League of Haywood County, and two rival civic and welfare leagues in Fayette County fighting each other; and against them the local white Citizens Councils. In moved the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the NAACP, CORE, 210

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the National Sharecroppers Union, young men distributing Communist literature, the Peacemakers, the Black Muslims, the C.I.O., the National (Negro) Baptist Convention with a “Freedom Farm,” the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, several farm unions, the National Council of Churches Race Relations Department, the Church of the Brethren with work campers, the American Friends Services Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the Southern Conference Education Fund, and representatives of all sorts of “emergency aid” committees from New York and California and others too many to mention. And each one urged its ideas and plans and methods on the local Negro farmers whose median schooling level in one county was about grade 6 and in the other about grade 5. To try to bring some order out of this chaos there was a “Coordinating Committee on Aid to Fayette and Haywood Counties.” Of course it could not meet there, so it met in Memphis. There were representatives of all three civic leagues and of many of the national organizations I have listed. It was in this committee that these strange conflicts and the struggle of “outside” groups to capture the local situation and bend it to their ends come to light. Now, in so brief a talk, and briefer paper, it would be impossible to discuss even one of the five major systems named, let alone all five; and it would be totally impossible to discuss all of these organizations and how they were related to the five major views, the things they advised doing and not doing, and the ways they conflicted. The point of bringing it all up is just this: We had to deal with these conflicts of organizations, viewpoints, aims, and methods in the Fayette and Haywood County struggle. They are all ready to move in on any crisis situation anywhere, South Carolina included. How ready and able are you as leaders in race relations to help guide the people at the grass roots through such chaos? Can you help them understand what the case is for white supremacy, for black nationalism, and why you reject both? Can you help them to see what lines of actions spring from each view and will strengthen it? Do you know enough about Communism not to be hysterical about it and suspect anybody who seems queer or out of order but also enough to recognize Communist tactics when pro-Communists move in on you and to block them? Do you understand the difference between maximum integration as a goal and cultural pluralism and what difference this view makes to action? If you accept, as most of us here probably do, Christianity as your basic faith, are you clear on what it calls for in terms of goals and methods and what it will call on you to reject in both goals and methods? And can you make this clear to others? 211

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These are theoretical questions but they are also very practical questions. If we just blunder blindly along from day to day making decisions and taking actions that happen to occur to us as being favorable to “the Negro” as to integration or some other end, but not understanding where we are trying to go or why or how, we are likely to add to the confusion and frustration rather than resolve it. Simple goodness is good in simple people who are in simple situations; but we are complex persons seeking to lead in highly complex social situations and for this simple goodness is not enough. We need informed, enlightened, complex goodness. We need to study and think. Our problems are difficult but with God’s help not insoluble. Coming together we not only warm each other’s spirits and thereby cause the candle of the Lord in each to burn more vigorously; but the combined light of our many candles can illuminate a larger area more clearly. “It is better to light a candle than to curse the dark.” And for all its limitations, “The Spirit of Man is the Candle of the Lord.”

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Jane Schutt May 22, 1963, Congressional Subcommittee, Washington, D.C.

Jane Menefee Schutt was born on January 2, 1913, in Washington, D.C. Educated in the public schools and in the Episcopal Church, Schutt (pronounced Skutt) attended George Washington University from 1929 to 1932, where she met her husband, Wallis I. Schutt, an engineer. Between 1934 and 1942, the two traveled across the United States with Wallis working on several major engineering projects. The couple and their five children eventually settled in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1942. Wallis worked for the M. T. Reed Construction Company and Jane raised their children and was active in the local branch of Church Women United (CWU), a national organization that brought together Protestant women for the purpose of progressive social action. The family also became active members of St. Columb’s Episcopal Church in west Jackson. Schutt’s work with CWU eventually garnered the attention of staff members of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), who were then looking to create a Mississippi Advisory Committee to the federal commission, which was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Despite threats and intimidation from the local and national Citizens Councils—council leader William J. Simmons deemed any potential member a “scalawag” and a traitor to the state—Schutt accepted one of six positions on the Mississippi State Advisory Committee (MSAC) in late December 1959. State and local opposition to the committee was so fierce and widespread that public hearings could only be held in federal buildings, churches, or private homes. Less than four months after joining the MSAC, in April 1960, the covert and statefinanced Sovereignty Commission was already working behind the scenes to coerce Schutt’s resignation. According to its chief of detectives, “Mrs. Schutt is the real source of trouble on the committee. . . . someone of influence should contact Mr. Reed and have the necessary influence exerted whereby Mrs. Schutt would resign from the advisory committee.” Typical of racial intimidation throughout the South, key operatives attempted to force Schutt’s (and her husband’s) hand through economic coercion. The threats, though, even ran to her fellow Episcopalians. A Sovereignty Commission document reveals that “The Terrible 73,” also known as the “Conservative Underground at St. Columb’s,” was working to thwart Schutt’s activism. 213

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With the death of MSAC Chair Murray Cox in 1962, Schutt assumed leadership of the commission; with the appointment the level of late-night phone calls and daily intimidation only increased. Schutt was not deterred; in fact, she joined the executive committee of the revived Mississippi Council on Human Relations in 1962. Schutt took solace in her family and her faith. Two prayers in particular sustained her: “Almighty God, who has made of one blood, all nations to dwell upon the face of the earth,” and “Make no peace with oppression.” Not even the Klan could intimidate her: in response to a cross burning in front of her house, she decorated the charred remains with Christmas lights. A lifelong activist, Schutt would later become involved with Head Start and the Mississippi Association for Retarded Children. She died in Clinton, Mississippi, on July 23, 2006, survived by her five children. Her papers are housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Schutt’s appearance before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in May 1963 was not without controversy. As chair of the Mississippi State Advisory Committee, she had received considerable press for the board’s controversial suggestion to the national Civil Rights Commission to withhold federal money if Mississippi’s elected and appointed officials continued to flout federal civil rights laws. The commission had, in turn, passed along the suggestion to President John F. Kennedy to use as a retaliatory measure if the intransigence didn’t abate. Following her prepared remarks, segregationist North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin sharply interrogated Schutt for the board’s draconian and punitive measure. But before that interrogation, Schutt argues forcefully for Senate Bill 1117, which would continue the work of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and its affiliated state organizations. Her argument rests on the assumption of ignorance: that is, without an outlet for blacks and whites to tell their stories, ignorance would continue to prevail in Mississippi. Moreover, the MSAC was just beginning to gain the trust of Mississippians who, for so long, did not have a public body to hear their grievances. Those grievances surprised the committee, who questioned “the representative and democratic nature of the system of state government in Mississippi.” Schutt concludes that this “other voice of Mississippi must be heard” if American ideals are to triumph. Sadly, Schutt was effectively forced to resign her position with the commission just months after she delivered this bold testimony. It would take federal officials nearly twenty more months before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights finally held hearings in Mississippi.

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rs. Schutt. My name is Mrs. Wallis Schutt. I live in Jackson, Mississippi.

Jane Schutt

I am presently serving as chairman of the Mississippi Advisory Committee. Having been an active working member of this committee since its formation in December of 1959, I hold strong and deep convictions concerning the absolute and vital necessity for the extension of the life of the commission for the next four years. To question the need for or the value of legislation to this effect seems to me to be not only unwise, but also most unrealistic. There are many things that could be said in support of Senate Bill 1117 and many aspects of the legislative process of which I have only limited knowledge. However, I can tell you of the value of the Commission of Civil Rights as we in Mississippi see it. First and foremost, the value of the services rendered by the commission to the Congress itself and to the chief executive. What other provision do we have whereby a group of responsible and representative citizens may work together to determine objectively what the true facts are in regard to denial of civil rights based on color, race, or creed and having so determined to advise and recommend not what is expedient, but what is right? We are most fortunate that the commission is composed of a group of such eminent men. We of the Mississippi State Advisory Committee would also hope that our work would be considered of value to you gentlemen of the Senate. Our committee meets nearly every month to gather factual information about the treatment of our Negro citizens under the law as it is applied in Mississippi. We earnestly strive to hear all sides of the question. We invite any official who is likely to be criticized to attend our meetings and give us his view of the matter. We try to meet in as many parts of the state as is possible in order to get a truly representative picture. The press is invited to our meetings, and we report on our findings and recommendations to the Commission on Civil Rights. Our last report was published by the commission in January of 1963. We used only information that had been presented to our committee in sworn affidavit or was otherwise known to be reliable. We did not use some of the more startling and really frightening accounts which were told to the committee during our meetings, but for which we felt sufficient substantiating evidence was lacking. Our report contained enough information I believe to bring into question the representative and democratic nature of the system of state government in Mississippi. We talked to many people who had been mistreated by the police, but felt they had no one to turn to until our committee made its appearance. 215

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We have tried to remind our state government of its obligation to all and not to just the white citizens of our state. Unfortunately, I cannot say that we have noticed any great improvement in the attitude of our state leaders on this subject since the publication of our report. But I can say with certainty that the report has been widely noticed by others in and outside the state. The entire advisory committee has been grateful for the notice given the report by Senator Javits and Congressman Diggs by inserting it in its entirety into the Congressional Record. We earnestly hope that our work has been of some value to you gentlemen in your most important task of passing the laws under which we all live. Coming from Mississippi as I do, it is well nigh impossible to find words strong enough to convey accurately the importance to the Negroes of having one place where they can speak their minds and tell of their troubles. The existence within the state of an organization dedicated to the equal rights under law of all citizens is immensely important to a people who are not receiving the benefits of those rights just now, but know there is hope so long as the nation is aware of their plight. Equally important, the advisory committee provides one of the first opportunities for Negro and white citizens of good will to discuss the common problems of our people and our state in this time of transition, bringing these problems into the open for objective discussion by a biracial group which is a step forward in Mississippi. Perhaps the best way to convey to you the sentiment of the Negro population is to read to you a statement given to me yesterday morning by the Negro Ministerial Alliance of Jackson. I can testify that this is a statement representative of the thinking of at least 95 percent of our Negro population. It is dated Jackson, Mississippi, May 1, 1963, and reads: We, the members of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance wish the continuance of the Civil Rights Commission for the following reasons: 1. This is the only way that the Negro can express grievances and expose the injustices that he is experiencing. 2. This is the only way the white and Negro can communicate together and discuss their problems. 3. We feel unless the commission is continued, the Negro will have no one or source in which we can appeal and will be compelled to resort to violence or become more radical. 4. We are praying that the commission will continue because of a recent statement made by Mayor Allen Thompson, of Jackson, Mississippi, saying 216

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that he will never permit Negro and white to meet together as a biracial committee. That is signed by T. B. Brown, president, and G. R. Haughton, secretary. For many thousands of our citizens to let the commission expire at this moment in time would be, in their opinion, utterly disastrous. Another point I would like to make concerns the value of the work of the commission and the work of the advisory committee to the white citizens of my state. I have always felt that one of the most important services of the commission and the advisory committee is education. In my own case, I have been concerned with the rights of our Negro citizens for many years, well before the commission came into existence. But only since beginning to work with the advisory committee have I learned the true state of affairs regarding the everyday trials that Negroes of my state must endure. It has been shocking to every member of our committee. In our report of January 1963 we tried to convey a sense of urgency to our fellow citizens, and I must say that the response has been gratifying. Friends and neighbors in Jackson and other parts of the state, ministers from various parts of the state, and educators from many places have phoned or written to me and other members to discuss the report and to express their astonishment and dismay. Gentlemen, as far as my state is concerned, we have only scratched the surface. It is only recently in spite of all that opposing forces could put in our way, only recently have we been able to so establish our committee in the eyes of the citizenry at large that they are beginning to seek us out and hear what we have learned. How else and in what other way can we begin to dispel the abysmal ignorance of the great majority of our responsible white citizens as regards what the Negro citizen lives through daily and really wants, expects, and is determined to gain for himself ? And until this ignorance is dispelled, how, under the shining sun are we to avoid these tragic and heartbreaking disturbances that continue to plague us or even having experienced them, how are we to learn from them and move forward together unless we have somebody set up to render the assistance and give the answers to the many questions that must be asked before the truly constructive steps that issue out of understanding can be made to rectify the situation. It would have been most valuable, of course, to have had the commission itself hold a hearing in Mississippi.

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In 1961 and again in our 1963 report, our advisory committee recommended that a hearing be held in Jackson. We fully understand the overriding reasons that made it impossible for the commission to meet in our state this year. We urge you to prolong the life of the commission so that it can perform this valuable service to the citizens of Mississippi. Recommendation Number 2 of our 1963 report stated as follows: That the Commission on Civil Rights hold formal public hearings in Mississippi on charges of denial of equal protection of the law on account of race and that these hearings be held periodically so long as the present situation exists and the commission remains in force. No one can gainsay the value of the wealth of information which is at the fingertips of the commission; information that has been gathered painfully and slowly by many earnest citizens as they listened patiently in face-toface confrontations with many other citizens as they pour out at length their real or imaginary grievances. In all kindness and all sympathy these persons listened and then patiently advising, counseling the witnesses as best they may, giving them what support and encouragement they can, knowing all the while how slow will be the processes that will eventually rectify these great and terrible wrongs, wishing it were otherwise, but recognizing that this is the democratic procedure and counseling those who appear to be patient, then turning around to the controlling forces who have exploited the situation, and facing them with the inescapable truth of their failure to assure to all citizens equal opportunity and basic human rights. Further, turning to the white citizenry at large, giving them at one and the same time enlightenment as to the true state of affairs and a not-too-gentle prod to bestir themselves to do something about coming to a realization of their responsibility in this whole problem. In my humble opinion, such procedure is truly democracy in action. This is the day-to-day practical application of the great ideals to which we are all dedicated. Finally, I should like to mention the importance of the work of the commission and the Mississippi State Advisory Committee as it affects the state’s image. For those Mississippians, and there are many, who do not support the tenets of the white Citizens Councils, this has been the only public expression on any but the most limited scale of what they think and feel to be true. We do not enjoy being thought of as being loyal to a program or laws which we consider wrong and abusive. 218

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Yet, we are all loyal to Mississippi. We are loyal to Mississippi and also loyal Americans loving and upholding and fighting for the ideals on which America was founded and we want the world to know that there are Mississippians like that. We recognize and appreciate the achievements and the great services rendered by our own representatives here in Congress. We are loyal to them, even though we must disagree with them on some points. This other voice of Mississippi must be heard. In the immediate and foreseeable future, I believe this role can best be played by our advisory committee. I would add one final word. I cannot count the great number of Mississippians from all walks of life who are in agreement as to the need for the existence of the commission and its related state committees. From bishops to domestic servants I have engaged in dialogue with hundreds of citizens. Educators, clergymen, businessmen, professional men and women, laborers, housewives, and students, all these have expressed directly to me their appreciation for the work being done and their belief in the necessity for the continuance of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This is not in my written statement, but I would like to express my deep appreciation for this opportunity to come and make this statement to this committee.

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Dorothy Height October 5, 1963, First Baptist Church, Selma, Alabama

Dorothy Irene Height was born on March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Virginia. At four, her family moved to Rankin, Pennsylvania, where she attended public schools and gained early recognition for her oratorical skills. In 1929, her rhetorical skills earned her an Elks scholarship for $1,000. Initially she planned to enter Barnard College, but was turned away because of the college’s quota system of accepting only the first two of the three African American women they initially accepted. Height instead enrolled across town at New York University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in educational psychology in four productive years. Upon graduation in 1933, she led the United Christian Youth Movement, which actively opposed the practice of lynching, segregated armed forces, excesses in the criminal justice system, and unfair distribution of public accommodations. President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her to the committee to address the fallout of the Harlem riots of 1935. Nineteen thirty-seven was Height’s pivotal year: while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) meeting, Height met Mary McLeod Bethune, who would shape Height’s career trajectory in the coming years. In 1938 Eleanor Roosevelt invited Height to her Hyde Park, New York, home to plan the World Youth Conference at Vassar College. From about this time onward, Height was active in the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the NCNW. From 1944 to 1977, she was a member of the national staff of the YWCA. She took a visiting professorship in the school of social work at the University of Delhi (India) during 1952, and conducted a study of training practices in Liberia, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. She served as president of Delta Sigma Theta from 1947 to 1956. In 1957 she assumed the presidency of the NCNW and served in that capacity until 1997; the following year she became chair and president emerita of the organization. Dorothy Height has won more awards than are possible to detail here, but we must mention a few: the Presidential Medal of Freedom (from the FDR administration), the Spingarn Medal (NAACP), the 1989 Citizen’s Medal (Reagan administration), and the 2004 Congressional Gold Medal. Perhaps the honor which most reflects her generous character is her acceptance of 220

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the 1980 Barnard College Medal of Distinction. Still active and visible well into her nineties, Height published her memoir, Open Wide the Freedom Gates in 2005. Height delivered this speech of October 5, 1963, to a local audience of black Selmans just five weeks after the March on Washington and twenty days after the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church not far away in Birmingham. It was recorded by Alan Ribback/Moses Moon. As detailed in her autobiography, Height had received a rather urgent invitation to speak in Alabama by SNCC’s Jim Forman and fieldworker Prathia Hall. Both had emphasized the brutal prison conditions then being endured by upwards of three hundred protesting youth, including threats of sexual assault. Their incarceration and corresponding publicity was quickly leveraged by SNCC into a Freedom Day, which was scheduled for Monday, October 7. Forman was not shy about bringing in movement stalwarts and celebrities: in addition to Height, he called on comedian Dick Gregory and his wife, SNCC chairman John Lewis, and author James Baldwin and his brother David. Historian Howard Zinn was also on hand to record the voter registration effort. On the evening she spoke, Height described the area around the church as “an armed camp.” Height begins her brief talk by reminding the audience that she is unable to speak for the millions of women united across twenty-five organizations by the National Council of Negro Women which Mary McLeod Bethune had consolidated twenty-seven years earlier. The argumentative focus of her address is a parallel between the events in Selma and the recent events in Washington, D.C. Just as blacks gathered peacefully and on the side of right, so too did black Selmans; furthermore, Height suggests that the national media might also focus on Selma and the indignities being heaped on its black residents. That focus would occur—but it would take fifteen more months before the spotlight would reveal to the world the racist ways of its sheriff, Jim Clark, and the state’s governor, George C. Wallace. Height concludes by concisely achieving what she said was not possible in the beginning of her speech: “there is one thing in which we are all united: we want our freedom and we want it everywhere in our country, now.”

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ear [Jim] Forman and friends, I think anyone who has the opportunity to be here tonight can only be uplifted by your spirit and your courage. In fact, it makes me proud to be an American and to be an American Negro, to be in this room tonight. Because many of us across this country long to see the day when the kinds of things that we’re working for will no longer be necessary because it will just be taken for granted that to be a citizen is to be a citizen and the rights for one will be the rights for all. But that day will only come because we not only pray for it, but that we work for it. 221

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I want you to know that I wish that I had the words to speak for some million women who are within the twenty-five national organizations in the National Council of Negro Women. Mary McLeod Bethune brought us together twenty-seven years ago because, she said, “what we really needed was to learn how to work together and to stand together.” And I think that a woman who was born of slave parents dreamed of something which today is more important than ever before. And I want to let you know that there are millions across this country who have their eyes on you. But more than that, they have their hearts and their prayers with you. Because we know that only as we are together can we achieve the things that are the best traditions for which our country stands. I couldn’t help but think as I looked out here and listened as we sang “This Little Light of Mine,” how many fears there were across this country when people talked about a march to Washington. There were stories of what was going to happen. The stories were many. I think the chief of police in Washington, D.C., did a very clever thing when he met the whole group of people who were asking him questions because they went prepared to have him tell them what to do in case of rioting and in case of all kinds of things happening. And he looked them all in the eye and he said, “Well, the first thing to do, tell everybody to come to Washington with no mayonnaise on their sandwiches.” And I think that the United States of America had an object lesson in the March on Washington [August 28, 1963, protest on Washington, D.C., with 250,000 participants] because it saw there the way at which people who stand for something can stand together. And especially when the thing they stand for is on the side of right and justice. And I hope that this little light of mine can somehow shine wherever I go and carry back to every corner of this country something of the spirit which I’ve sensed in the young people and the older people here in this community. I want you to know, too, that October 7 will be a day of importance all around this world and I am sure that just as someone from our United States Information Agency was able to say that there was a real lesson when the pictures that grew out of the March on Washington could be shared with seventy-eight countries of the world, and the people of the world could see that in a democratic country, the freedom to express oneself was assured in the nation’s capitol to people throughout this land and that this was a moment that made him proud that he could show this. I hope that October 7 will be another demonstration of a day when all people, everywhere, can be proud because every light of freedom that burns in every heart will somehow find 222

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its way to take hold of that great American right, the right to register and the right to vote. God bless all of you and may I say again on behalf of the National Council of Negro Women that there is very little that any of us can bring to you. We can only take from you the sense of dedication to the whole cause of freedom and assure you that your sisters and brothers across this land are with you. Many people talk about the way we are divided. Many people act as though Negroes were something perfect, that we were better than human, that there would never be any difference among us. But whatever our differences, I am renewed in my feeling tonight that there is one thing in which we are all united: we want our freedom and we want it everywhere in our country, now. Thank you.

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Marie Foster October 5, 1963, First Baptist Church, Selma, Alabama

Marie Jackson Foster was born October 24, 1917, in Wilcox County, Alabama, a few days after fellow voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s birth. While Marie’s father preferred life in a rural setting, her mother moved the family to Selma to avail her children of better schooling. Marie dropped out of high school, married, and raised three children on her own when her husband died. She worked many years while rearing her family and eventually returned to finish high school and earn a college degree at a local junior college. With her education complete, she worked as a hygienist in her brother’s (Dr. Sullivan Jackson) practice. Inspired by the civil rights movement—she had been in the third row of marchers violently turned back at the Edmund Pettus bridge—Foster soon began distributing voting registration leaflets and offering citizenship classes in her home. Her first class had one seventy-year-old student. Public and private associations made numerous attempts to shut down Foster’s home school. In 1964 Dallas County Circuit Court Judge James Hare issued an order prohibiting groups of three or greater from discussing civil rights. Many considered this order a bill of attainder directed specifically at Marie Foster. Klansmen directed their attention to her more frequently than the judges, showering her with a barrage of threats. She persisted, registering to vote herself after eight attempts and offering classes for others to learn to do the same in the privacy of her home. She did not stop offering her classes until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rendered her classes obsolete. Within six weeks of the act’s passage, some 10,000 citizens registered to vote in Dallas County. She continued her activism throughout her eighty-five years, devoting her time to housing for the poor and removal of a statue in a public park rendering the likeness of a Klan founder. She passed away on September 6, 2003, survived by two of her children. Foster’s October 5, 1963, speech is both deliberately provocative and sociologically profound. Tensions in the state had escalated since the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing which took the lives of four black girls on September 15. Student protests, sit-ins, and other events in Selma ensued immediately. Jails were filled beyond architectural, bureaucratic, and septic capacity. Sheriff Jim Clark’s infamous temper had an especially short fuse. Long registration lines of irritable would-be 224

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registrants languished day in and day out well in advance of October 7, Freedom Day. Marie Foster begins her speech by reminding the crowd that they have assembled for their sixteenth mass meeting; such a reminder functions simultaneously as an announcement and an affirmation that they are breaking Judge Hare’s order habitually; it also records her steadfast devotion to the black freedom movement in Selma. From there she gives a brief account of all the places in the world which discriminate against blacks, from Canada to Bulgaria. But for this local woman who would spend nearly her entire life in Selma, what mattered far more than what took place across the world was the simple disturbing fact that little white children in Selma could call her “nigger” with impunity—and without malice. So, too, black men were called boys, and black women could never attain to “Mrs.” She then closes with a simultaneous look backward and forward into history, giving the full names of many of the so-called “savages” who had taken office during the Radical Reconstruction era. The gleefully accurate account, down to middle names and precise titles, is Foster’s prescient celebration of the imminent death of Jim Crow.

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aster of ceremonies, platform guests, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, I’m happy to see all of you tonight. We welcome you back to our sixteenth mass meeting. We welcome you to our first-class citizenship council. Our continuation of theme, tonight, is time: time to accept and time to refuse. What is it time for the Negro to accept and refuse? It is time for the Negro to accept the fact that discrimination is worldwide, and other countries express horror at the United States’ handling of the racial problem. And it is time to refuse to compromise and cooperate with race discrimination. Racial segregation in Britain has caused Parliament to end free entry from other countries. Negroes had been coming in from the Caribbean at the rate of six thousand a month; now fewer than seven hundred and fifty a month may enter. In Britain, we are discriminated against in housing, jobs, and sometimes restaurants. When Negroes make hotel reservations, they often find no rooms available when they appear. The thirty-two thousand Negroes in Canada often encounter discrimination in seeking jobs or housing accommodations. Negro tourists from the United States are sometimes turned away from resorts despite advanced reservations and deposits. In Bulgaria, authorities banned the African Student Union because Bulgarian students refused to sit by African students. Are we pushing too hard for our rightful place in God’s world and this supposed to be land of freedom? No. Because we refuse to believe what a Mrs. Bernard Gaillot of New Orleans said. She says she doesn’t have to wonder 225

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what God thinks about race. She knows God is a segregationist. That is sad, sad, sad. That anyone would be so mislead, so ignorant, so filled with prejudice, and have so much prejudice, hatred, and wrong information instilled into their hearts and minds that they would use God to cover up their prejudice. Then it is time for the Negro to awaken and realize what is going on. It is time that other races besides the Negro race awaken to realization. And realize that if they live, eat, and sleep in church, their efforts would be just what one of the greatest leaders in our history, Frederick Douglass said. “Just a sham, their boast of liberty for the Negro. If they boast of liberty for the Negro, it’s an unholy license. Their denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impotence, their shouts of liberty and equality is hollow mockery. Their prayers, hymns, sermons, thanksgivings, and religious parades are to God fraud, deception, hypocrisy, and a veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages if they don’t believe that the God they serve loves every man regardless of the color of his skin.” And speaking of the word “savages,” some time ago it was leaflets put out and strung up and down the highways of Alabama. And on these leaflets it was something like this written, “Do you want your children to go to school with Negroes? Do you want your children to go to school with savages?” It is in a late issue in one of our magazines where a survey and interview were made. It was made of the north, east, and west. And what these men wanted to know was what white people thought about integration and equal rights for Negroes. They said they received some “yes” and some “no’s”, and they think a greater percentage of “yes,” but with a lot of “but’s.” It was a lot of “but’s” that went along with the answers “yes.” And it was something like this: “Yes, I think they should have equal rights, but I wouldn’t like to live next door to a Negro. They put their garbage on the lawn.” Others would say, “Yes, I think they should have their equal rights, but they should work their way up.” Some would say they thought we should have our equal rights, but we are pushing too hard. The housing subject was the most touchy subject. It was said by one man that he wouldn’t like for a Negro to live next door to him because he thought Negroes were like savages. These people think that we are like savages because they know nothing about us. Nothing, absolutely nothing. And why they don’t know anything about us? Because they don’t communicate with us. And why they don’t communicate with us? Because as little children they have been told that Negroes are niggers. And niggers are dirty, shiftless, lazy, and just plain inferior. I have been walking down the street and little white children, small things, just little tender things, and they would point their finger at me and say, “Nigger, nig226

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ger, nigger, you an old, old nigger.” And I would say to the child, “Honey, who told you that?” And she would say, “My momma.” It’s really pathetic ’cause I have actually held conversations with them. And they are just as innocent and sweet, and you talk with them, and they are friendly with you, but they have been told these things. And it grows up in ’em, and so when they become men and women, then they look down on us. And they actually think that all of us are inferior, dirty, shiftless, and lazy. And they also think that we never get grown, especially the men; they are always boys. And women, if we marry ten times, we’re still just called by our first names. We can’t be given the title “Mrs.”; we can’t be given that distinction. But there are places in Alabama that have awakened. They realize the value of the black dollar. So some of them are giving married Negro women their title as “Mrs.” So we are just letting Selma sleep. Here is proof of what training and the ballot can do for savages. In 1875 a Negro by the name of Pinckney Benton Steward Pinchback was sitting in the governor’s mansion in Louisiana. Blanche Kelso Bruce, a Negro, attended Oberlin College, moved to Mississippi, and in 1869 became county sheriff of Mississippi. And in 1875 he was sitting in Jefferson Davis’s old seat in the United States Senate. A Negro was secretary of state in Florida. James Pike, a Negro, was in the House of Representatives in South Carolina. It was the first western assembly of its kind, and Pike reported, “The speaker is black, the clerk is black, the door keepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of Ways and Means Committee is black, and the chaplain is coal black.” Now we see, the ballot has no color line and is colorblind.

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Pauli Murray November 14, 1963, National Council of Negro Women, Leadership Conference, Washington, D.C.

Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray’s Odyssean journey began on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Agnes, was a nurse, and her father was a Howard University educated high school teacher and principal. In 1914 Pauli’s mother died and because of her father’s encephalitis, Pauli’s aunt and namesake (Pauline Dame) adopted and raised her in Durham, North Carolina. In 1923 Pauli’s father was murdered by an asylum intern. Pauli earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in 1933, where she was one of four African American women to graduate in a class of 247. Upon graduation she worked for the Works Progress Administration, but quickly turned her sights to graduate school. The University of North Carolina refused her admission, and the NAACP would not take up her case. Under the inspiration of rejection she penned the words, “You sit on the same seat with your Negro nurse as a child, you come to her to pour out all your childish woes, you depend upon her for sympathy and advice when you are in trouble, you eat the food she prepares with her own hands, and yet if that same Negro nurse decides that she too is a human being and desires to study with the same group of professors and with the same equipment as you, you go into tantrums, organize ‘lynching parties’ and raise the old cry of Ku Klux Klan.” In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Murray sought psychiatric treatment for gender identity confusion. Yet this issue did not slow her down professionally. In 1939 she joined the Workers Defense League. Her most famous project was her attempt to save Odell Waller, a black sharecropper who killed his white landlord in self-defense. Despite her nationwide lectures, Waller was executed two days shy of Independence Day in 1942. Murray entered Howard Law School in 1941, where she volunteered for the NAACP and participated in lunch counter sit-ins. She attempted to enroll in Harvard’s master of laws program, but despite Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lobbying, Harvard would not accept her because she was a woman. While at Howard, Murray formulated the strategy that Thurgood Marshall would later follow: aggressive assault on the Plessy decision rather than ad hoc reforms within the narrow confines of stare decisis. She graduated first 228

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in her class at Howard and enrolled in the master of laws program at University of California Berkeley. After a stint as deputy attorney general in California, she returned to New York to care for her aunt. Initially she waited tables, worked for the American Jewish Congress, and clerked at a small law firm. She also ran for New York City council as a Liberal Party candidate in 1948. A year later, she began writing her influential treatise titled States’ Laws on Race and Color, which helped shape many of Thurgood Marshall’s strategies as lead counsel for the NAACP. In 1956 she joined a prestigious New York law firm as the only female attorney. In 1960 Murray took a position in Ghana where she hoped to stay permanently, but her constitutional views conflicted with President Kwame Nkrumah. In 1962 she took a position on the faculty of Yale University’s law school, where she earned a J.D.S. in 1965. Later, she served on the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and in 1966 she became a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW). After a stint as vice president and political science professor at Benedict College, she joined the faculty at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1973. After the death of her partner, Renee Barlow, she left Brandeis to join the Episcopal priesthood, receiving her M.Div. from General Theological Seminary in 1976. She was the first ordained black female Episcopal priest, receiving her ordination at Washington Cathedral in 1977. Pauli Murray died following a battle with cancer July 1, 1985, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A prolific writer, Murray penned three autobiographical accounts of her life, Proud Shoes, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, and Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. Her papers are housed at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this speech of November 14, 1963, Murray addresses the National Council of Negro Women’s leadership conference in Washington, D.C. She begins with a lesson in sociology: African American women carry a dual burden as part of an ethnic minority combined with a gender-based mandate to reproduce culture, economies, and political structures which require super-exploitation. She offers a familiar litany of role models including Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Autherine Lucy, Daisy Bates, Diane Nash Bevel, Constance Baker Motley, and Myrlie Evers. Yet she also canonizes a few less familiar names—Ida B. Wells (an anti-lynching activist), Mary Church Terrell (a women’s rights and civil rights activist), and Gloria Richardson (leader of the Cambridge, Maryland, movement). Murray continues in sociological mode, citing Gunnar Myrdal’s account of the myth of female contentment with disenfranchisement. She then contrasts pioneers like William Lloyd Garrison, who pointed out female disenfranchisement, with contemporaries like A. Philip Randolph, who keep women from power while blaming their own factions for their powerlessness. She adds James Meredith to her critique, 229

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arguing that Meredith could only have accomplished his goals because of the protective association of Constance Baker Motley, who accompanied him to Oxford as he matriculated at Ole Miss. She reminds the cultural heirs to Rosie the Riveter that there are no civilians in an era of total warfare. Her speech concludes with a sobering analysis of how race, gender, and educational distributions mutually reinforce the plight of the African American and American families.

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egro women, historically, have carried the dual burden of Jim Crow and Jane Crow. They have not always carried it graciously but they have carried it effectively. They have shared with their men a partnership in a pioneer life on spiritual and psychological frontiers not inhabited by any other group in the United States. For Negroes have had to hack their way through the wilderness of racism produced by the accumulated growth of nearly four centuries of a barbarous international slave trade, two centuries of chattel slavery and a century of illusive citizenship in a desperate effort to make a place of dignity for themselves and their children. In this bitter struggle into which has been poured most of the resources and much of the genius of successive generations of American Negroes, these women have often carried disproportionate burdens in the Negro family as they strove to keep its integrity intact against the constant onslaught of indignities to which it was subjected. Not only have they stood shoulder to shoulder with Negro men in every phase of the battle, but they have also continued to stand when their men were destroyed by it. Who among us is not familiar with that heroic, if formidable figure exhorting her children to overcome every disappointment, humiliation, and obstacle. This woman’s lullaby was very often “Be something!” “Be somebody!” My friend and colleague, Mrs. Dovey J. Roundtree, who tells this story of her own grandmother, was never quite sure in childhood what it was she was supposed to be, but there was never any escape from the mandate. Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son” has great meaning for a generation which still recalls the washtub and the steaming wood stove as the source of hard-earned dollars which sent it to school. It reveals the great gift of the Negro woman for mothering, consoling, encouraging: Well son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

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It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor— Bare. But all the time I’s been a-climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light, Go boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps ’Cause you finds it kinder hard. Don’t you fall now— For I’se still goin’, honey, I’s still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. In the course of their climb, Negro women have had to fight against the stereotypes of “female dominance” on the one hand and loose morals on the other hand, both growing out of the roles forced upon them during the slavery experience and its aftermath. But out of their struggle for human dignity, they also developed a tradition of independence and self-reliance. This characteristic, said the late Dr. E. Franklin Frazier, sociologist, “has provided generally a pattern of equalitarian relationship between men and women in America.” Like the western pioneer settlements, the embattled Negro society needed the strength of all of its members in order to survive. The economic necessity for the Negro woman to earn a living to help support her family—if indeed she was not the sole support—fostered her independence and equalitarian position. In the human rights battle, America has seen the image of the Negro evolving through many women: Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth a century ago; Ida B. Wells in the latter part of the nineteenth century; Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune in an earlier generation; Mrs. Rosa Parks, Autherine Lucy, Mrs. Gloria Richardson, Mrs. Daisy Bates, Mrs. Diane Nash Bevel, Mrs. Constance Baker Motley, Mrs. Medgar Evers, and many others in the contemporary struggle. Not only have women whose names are well known given this great human effort its peculiar vitality but women in many communities whose names will never be known have revealed the courage 231

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and strength of the Negro woman. These are the mothers who have stood in school yards with their children, many times alone. These are the images which have touched America’s heart. Painful as these experiences have been, one cannot help asking: would the Negro struggle have come this far without the indomitable determination of its woman? In the larger society, Negro and white women share a common burden because of traditional discriminations based upon sex. Dr. Gunnar Myrdal pointed out the similarities between the Negro problem and the women’s problem in An American Dilemma. What he saw is common knowledge among Negro women, but it is interesting to see the United States through the eyes of a foreign observer. He said: As in the Negro problem, most men have accepted as self-evident, until recently, the doctrine that women had inferior endowments in most of those respects which carry prestige, power and advantages in society. . . . The arguments, when arguments were used, have been about the same: smaller brains, scarcity of geniuses and so on. . . . As in the case of the Negro, women themselves have often been brought to believe in their inferiority of endowment. As the Negro was awarded his “place” in society, so there was a “woman’s place.” . . . The myth of the “contented women,” who did not want to have suffrage or other civil rights and equal opportunities, had the same social function as the myth of the “contented Negro.” Despite the common interests of Negro and white women, however, the dichotomy of the segregated society has prevented them from cementing a natural alliance. Communication and cooperation between them have been hesitant, limited, and formal. Negro women have tended to identify all discrimination against them as racial in origin and to accord high priority to the civil rights struggle. They have had little time or energy for consideration of women’s rights. But as the civil rights struggle gathers momentum, they begin to recognize the similarities between paternalism and racial arrogance. They also begin to sense that the struggle into which they have poured their energies may not afford them the rights they have assumed would be theirs when the civil rights cause has triumphed.

The Dilemma Recent disquieting events have made imperative an assessment of the role of the Negro woman in the quest for equality. The civil rights revolt, like 232

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many social upheavals, has released powerful pent-up emotions, cross currents, rivalries and hostilities. In emerging from an essentially middle class movement and taking on a mass character, it has become a vehicle to power and prestige and contains many of the elements of in-fighting that have characterized labor’s emergence or the pre-independence African societies. There is much jockeying for position as ambitious men push and elbow their way to leadership roles. Part of this upsurge reflects the Negro male’s normal desire to achieve a sense of personal worth and recognition of his manhood by a society which has so long denied it. One aspect is the wresting of the initiative of the civil rights movement from white liberals. Another is the backlash of a new male aggressiveness against Negro women. What emerges most clearly from events of the past several months is the tendency to assign women to a secondary, ornamental or “honoree” role instead of the partnership role in the civil rights movement which they have earned by their courage, intelligence, and dedication. It was bitterly humiliating for Negro women on August 28 to see themselves accorded little more than token recognition in the historic March on Washington. Not a single woman was invited to make one of the major speeches or to be part of the delegation of leaders who went to the White House. This omission was deliberate. Representations for recognition of women were made to the policymaking body sufficiently in advance of the August 28 arrangements to have permitted the necessary adjustment of the program. What the Negro women leaders were told is revealing: that no representation was given to them because they would not be able to agree on who their delegate would be. How familiar was this excuse! It is a typical response from an entrenched power group. Significantly, two days before the March, A. Philip Randolph, leader of the March, accepted an invitation to be guest speaker at a luncheon given by the National Press Club in Washington in the face of strong protest by organized newspaper women that the National Press Club excludes qualified newspaper women from membership and sends women reporters who cover its luncheons to the balcony. Mr. Randolph apparently saw no relationship between being sent to the balcony and being sent to the back of the bus. Perhaps if he had been able to understand what an affront it is to one’s personal dignity to be sent to the balcony at a meeting concerned primarily with the issue of human dignity, he would have set as a condition for his appearance a nonsegregated gathering. He failed to see that he was supporting the violation of the very principle for which he was fighting: that human rights are indivisible. In 1840, a somewhat similar issue arose in the anti-slavery movement. William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Redmond, the latter a Negro, refused to 233

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be seated as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London when they learned that the women members of the American delegation would be excluded and could sit only in the balcony. Mr. Garrison dramatized his protest by joining the women in the balcony. The seed of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which marks the formal beginning of the woman’s rights movement in the United States, was planted at that London convention. One wonders what similar decisions were made by the spiritual successors to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth on August 28. This was not an isolated incident. Women who have been active in local branches of the NAACP have observed the efforts of men to push them out of positions of leadership. And from Atlanta came the recent announcement of Mrs. Ruby Hurley, veteran NAACP fieldworker, that she was organizing women’s auxiliaries for the NAACP because “Negro women and white women, too, have a responsibility to carry a greater share in the civil rights protest than they do.” A woman’s auxiliary implies an adjunct to a male organization. Can it be that the movement which Mary White Ovington, a woman, helped to organize has become so male-dominated that women no longer feel like first-class members and can be roused to action only through an auxiliary organization in which they are at least treated as equals? More recently, Mr. James Meredith, hero of the University of Mississippi crisis, reportedly told the Washington Post: “My makeup won’t allow me to go along with using women and children in certain exposed roles in our fight. I love them too much. I think it is the man’s role to face danger and protect his women and children.” Two comments are relevant here. All Negroes are born involved in the civil rights fight and exposed to its dangers. Ironically enough, the very presence of women and children in the demonstrations has doubtless minimized the violence and aroused the sympathies of the American public. The grudging respect of some local police for an aroused public opinion has been a key factor throughout the mass demonstrations. No more dramatic illustration of the many roles which women have played in this struggle can be found than the news photos of Mr. Meredith himself in many tense situations with his legal counsel, Mrs. Constance Motley, at his side. The plain fact is that in today’s wars and social revolution there are no civilians. The tragic deaths of six children in Birmingham on September 15 made that painfully clear. The second and more important fact is that in the civil rights revolution, it has been the individual commitment of men, women, and children to the struggle for liberty and without regard to age or sex which has made the movement so spectacular and won the respect of the American people. It cannot be too strongly emphasized here that part of what has set the American Negro off 234

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from other Americans is their commonly held view that Negroes are not part of the significant American traditions and movements. It is pointed out that Negroes are the one group whose immigration to the New World was not voluntary. Negroes were not intended to be included in the Declaration of Independence, we are told. Although, 200,000 Negroes fought in the Civil War and their emancipation was a result of the war, it was not their war it is said. All too often, upon reading American history one is left with the impression that Negroes are a group about which history has been made but who themselves have not taken the initiative in making significant history. Few people bother to read the historical materials which refute these general impressions. But the whole world knows today that the American Negro is making history on the front pages of every newspaper and that he is keeping alive the tradition of liberty upon which the United States was founded. The civil rights revolution has been called the Second American Revolution. Let us not forget that this began as a revolution for school children in the 1950s when they won worldwide acclaim for their courage in desegregating the schools. A Negro child can have no finer heritage to sustain him and give him a feeling of “somebodiness” than the knowledge that he himself or she herself has been physically a part of the great sweep of history. What we are learning in this struggle is that self-respect must be earned. No one can win it for anyone else. It is an individual matter. Hence, while Mr. Meredith is well intentioned, his view will not win the civil rights fight. To return to our central theme, it is also pointedly significant that in the great mass of magazine and newsprint expended upon the civil rights crisis, national editors have selected Negro men almost exclusively to articulate the aspirations of the Negro community. There has been little or no public discussion of the problems, aspirations, and role of Negro women. Moreover, the undertone of news stories of recent efforts to create career opportunities for Negroes in government and industry seems to be that what is being talked about is jobs for Negro men only. The fact that Negro women might be available and, as we shall see, are qualified and in need of employment, is ignored. While this is in keeping with the general tenor of a male-dominated society, it has grave consequences for Negro women. If what has been described represents trends instead of mere coincidences, then Negro women need to face some hard questions. Are they losing or gaining ground in the transition from a segregated to an integrated society? At the very moment in history when there is an international movement to raise the status of women and a recognition that women generally are underemployed, are Negro women to be passed over in the social arrangements 235

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which are to create new job opportunities for Negroes? Moreover, when American women are seeking partnership in our society, are Negro women to take a backward step and sacrifice their equalitarian tradition? Negro women have tremendous power. How shall they use their power? How can they help Negro men and themselves to achieve mature relationships in the wider community without impairing this tradition? Or is it inherent in the struggle that Negro men can achieve maturity only at the price of destroying in Negro women the very characteristics which are stressed as part of American tradition and which have been indispensable to the Negro’s steep climb out of slavery? And if these qualities are suppressed in the women, what will be the effect upon the personalities of future generations of Negro children? What are the alternatives to matriarchal dominance on the one hand and male supremacy on the other hand?

Matriarchal or Mateless? Much has been written about the matriarchal nature of Negro family life intensified because of the inability of Negro males to find adequate employment and fulfill their family responsibilities, thus thrusting upon the Negro woman additional economic and social burdens. The difficulties and tensions growing out of the fact that Negro women are generally better educated than Negro men and often are compelled to marry beneath their educational level have been discussed in Dr. Jeanne L. Noble’s study of Negro college women published in 1956. It should not be overlooked that this is not a problem unique to the Negro community. Within the white population as well, a larger percentage of women than men have completed high school and at least three years of college. The 1960 census showed that 134,000 nonwhite women had completed four or more years of college—21,000 more than male college graduates in the nonwhite group. The interesting fact here is that the percentage of both sexes who have completed college is roughly the same. There were more Negro women college graduates because there were more Negro women in the population. A fact of enormous importance to the whole discussion of Negro family life and one which has received little analysis up to now is the startling 1960 census figure showing an excess of 645,000 Negro females over Negro males. More than half million of these were fourteen years and over. In the past century, the ratio of Negro males to females has decreased steadily. In 1960 there were only 93.3 Negro males to every 100 females. 236

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The statistical profile of a Negro woman which emerges from the latest census reports is that she has a harder time finding a mate, remains single more often, bears more children, is in the labor market longer, has less education, earns less, is widowed earlier, and carries a heavier economic burden as a family head than her white sister. Moreover, while it is now generally known that women are constitutionally stronger than men, that male babies are more fragile than female babies, that boys are harder to rear than girls, that the male death rate is slightly higher and life expectancy for males is lower than that of females, the numerical imbalance between the sexes in the Negro group is more dramatic than in any other group in the United States. Within the white population the excess of women shows up in the middle and later years. In the Negro population, the excess is present in every age group over fourteen and is greatest in the fifteen to forty-four group which covers the college years and the age when most marriages occur. Consider, for example, the fact that in the fifteen to twentyfour age group, there are only 96.7 nonwhite males for every 100 females. This ratio drops to 88.4 in the twenty-five to forty-four age group. Compare this with the white population in which the ratios for these two age groups are 102.2 and 98.1 respectively. The explosive social implications of an excess of more than half a million Negro girls and women over fourteen years of age are obvious in a society in which mass media intensify notions of glamour and expectations of romantic love and marriage, while at the same time barriers are erected against interracial marriages. The problem of an excess female population is a familiar one in European countries which have experienced heavy male casualties during wars, but an excess female ethnic minority as an enclave within a larger population raises important social issues. What is there in the American environment which is hostile to both the birth and survival of Negro males? How much of the tensions and conflicts traditionally associated with the matriarchal framework of Negro society are in reality due to this imbalance and the pressures it generates? Does this excess explain the active competition between Negro professional men and women seeking employment in markets which have limited or excluded Negroes? And does this competition intensify the stereotype of the matriarchal society and female dominance? We have seen from Dr. Noble’s study that the higher educational rank and earning power than that of their husbands has created feelings of guilt in some Negro women and that some even failed to go on to higher degrees in order to preserve the marital relationship from the destructive effects of envy and jealousy on the part of their husbands. It is nothing less than tragic that a 237

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ceiling should be set upon education for Negro women at a time when more education for all is being stressed in the wider society. This condition, however, affects less than 4 percent of all nonwhite women. Let us look at this problem from another angle. What relationship is there between the high rate of illegitimacy among Negro women and the population figures we have described? It is said that there is a strong mothering and serving tradition among Negro women. Social workers have found that often Negro mothers have children by a series of fathers but refuse to get married. It appears from some of these situations that the woman prefers her independence to marriage with a male who is irresponsible. It also appears that the woman is seeking some indication of personal worth and the feeling that she is important to someone. She tries to find this through temporary arrangements which often result in children. Whatever are the reasons, the sobering fact is that in 1961, of the 240,200 illegitimate live births recorded in the United States, 149,100 were born to nonwhite women. (Negroes constitute 92 percent of the nonwhite population.) I have stressed these figures because it seems to me that the Negro woman’s fate in the United States, while inextricably bound up with that of the Negro male in one sense, transcends that issue. Equality for the Negro woman must mean equal opportunity to compete for jobs and for a mate in the total society. For as long as she is confined to an area in which she must compete fiercely for a mate, she remains the object of sexual exploitation and the victim of all of the social evils which such exploitation involves. In short, many of the 645,000 excess Negro women will never marry at all unless they marry outside of the Negro community. And many others will marry men whose educational and cultural standards may not be the same as their own. Add to the large reservoir of unmarried nonwhite women (22.3 percent), a higher proportion of widowed, separated, and divorced nonwhite women than of white women, and you have factors which have combined to make the Negro woman the responsible family head in more than one fifth of all nonwhite families. The point I am trying to make here is that the Negro woman cannot assume with any degree of confidence that she will be able to look to marriage for either economic or emotional support. She must prepare to be selfsupporting and to support others, perhaps, for a considerable period or for life. In these circumstances, while efforts to raise educational and employment levels for Negro men will certainly ease some of the economic and social burdens now carried by many Negro women today, these burdens will not be eased for a large and growing minority. These burdens will continue and 238

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may even be aggravated if there continues to be a large numerical imbalance between the sexes. Bearing in mind that everything possible must be done to encourage Negro males to develop their highest educational potential and to accept their family responsibilities and feel secure in their marital relationships, Negro women have no alternative but to insist upon equal opportunities without regard to sex in training, education, and employment at every level. This may be a matter of sheer survival. And these special needs must be articulated by the civil rights movement so that they are not overlooked.

Education and Employment One out of every eight women workers is nonwhite. Of the 3,000,000 nonwhite women in the labor force in 1962, however, three-fifths were in household employment or other service jobs as compared to the national average of 25 percent of all women in these jobs. Conversely, over half of all women employed (56 percent) were in professional, clerical, managerial, and sales positions. Only one-fifth of nonwhite women were employed in these jobs. While 44 percent of all nonwhite women were working outside of the home in 1962 as compared to 35 percent of white women, the median wage for nonwhite women who were employed in all year round full time jobs was only $2,325 as compared with $3,430 for white women. The median wage of families with a female head in 1961 was $3,006 as compared with $5,630 for families in which the husband was present and household head. Families in the nonwhite group with a female head would earn less accordingly. The Negro woman worker is triply handicapped. She is largely concentrated in nonunion employment and thus has few of the benefits to be derived from labor organization or social legislation. She is handicapped because of her race and sex. On the whole she is further handicapped because of inadequate education and training. Thus, in 1960 a little over half of all nonwhite women had completed eight grades of elementary school (56.7 percent) as compared to more than four out of five white women (82.1 percent). More significantly, less than a fourth of nonwhite women had completed high school (23.2 percent) as compared to nearly half of all white women (44.7 percent). Twice as many white women, proportionally, have completed college (6 percent) as nonwhite women (3.6 percent). When we consider that presently the bulk of Negro women are non-skilled or semi-skilled, that there is a steady pool of 3.4 million unemployed in the United States, and that automation 239

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continues to eliminate jobs in the semi-skilled categories, the present outlook for the Negro woman is dark indeed unless she is encouraged to increase her educational level and to develop wider skills.

Implications for Leadership I have touched only briefly upon some of the important issues and problem areas which Negro women need to examine in their quest for equality. If they are not to be left behind in the major effort which is involved in the transition to an integrated society, they need to define their goals, to have a more exact knowledge of their peculiar problems through an intensive self-audit and to develop the machinery through which to advance their objectives. How these issues are resolved may very well determine the outcome of the integration effort. One thing is crystal clear. The Negro woman can no longer postpone or subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights struggle but must carry on both fights simultaneously. She must insist upon a partnership role in the integration movement. For, as Mr. Justice William O. Douglas, speaking for the United States Supreme Court, has declared, “The two sexes are not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one is different from a community composed of both; the subtle interplay of influence of one on the other is among the imponderables.” Clearly, therefore, the full participation and leadership of Negro women is necessary to the success of the civil rights revolution. Moreover, Negro women should seek to communicate and cooperate with white women wherever possible. Their common problems and interests as women provide a bridge to span initial self-consciousness. Many white women today are earnestly seeking to make common cause with Negro women and are holding out their hands. All too often they find themselves rebuffed. Integration, however, is a two-way effort and Negro women must be courageous enough to grasp the hand whenever it is held out. The path ahead will not be easy; the challenges to meet new standards of achievement in the search for equality will be many and bewildering. For a time, even, the casualties of integration may be great. But as Negro women in the United States enter their second century of emancipation from chattel slavery, let them be proud of their heritage and resolute in their determination to pass the best of it along to their children. As Lorraine Hansberry, the gifted playwright, has said, “For above all, in behalf of an ailing world which sorely needs our defiance, may we, as Negroes or women, never accept the notion of ‘our place.’ ” 240

Myrlie Evers November 26, 1963, Freedom House Award Ceremony, New York, New York

Myrlie Beasley Evers was born on March 17, 1933, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she was raised by her paternal grandmother and an aunt after her parents divorced. Both guardians were school teachers. A gifted student, she graduated from Bowman High School as salutatorian in 1950. That same year she attended Alcorn A&M College (today Alcorn State University), where she met Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran nearly eight years her senior. The two married on Christmas Eve 1951 and later moved to the all-black community of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where Medgar worked for Dr. T. R. M. Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Medgar would periodically drive his young wife, a selfdescribed “child bride,” from the Delta all the way back to her home in Vicksburg. “Here’s your child. I can’t do anything with her,” he would say in frustration. Through his travels as an insurance agent, Evers got an advanced education in Mississippi’s apartheid system. He quickly began using his job as cover for political recruitment for Howard’s Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL). With Howard’s influence and blessing, the couple moved to the state capital of Jackson in 1954 where Medgar became the first state field secretary for the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A maturing and steely Myrlie Evers was his secretary. For the next nine years, wherever there was a racial conflagration in the state, Evers was usually there investigating. In 1962 retaliatory violence escalated in Jackson, Mississippi. Segregationists were angry about two issues: first, Evers was the organizer of a successful boycott of segregated stores in downtown Jackson; second, after being turned down by the University of Mississippi law school in 1954, Evers had, through skillful advisement, successfully placed James Meredith in the undergraduate program there. On June 12, 1963, just hours after President Kennedy’s nationally televised plea for racial harmony and understanding, Greenwood native and fertilizer salesman Byron de la Beckwith assassinated Medgar Evers, shooting him in the back as he walked from his car to his front door. The 30.06 rifle lay a short distance from the

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house in a honeysuckle hedge with de la Beckwith’s fingerprints on it, but two allwhite hung juries failed to convict de la Beckwith. Not long after her husband’s murder, Myrlie Evers and her three young children moved to Claremont, California; she enrolled in Pomona College’s sociology program, where she graduated in 1968, a year after co-authoring her late husband’s biography, For Us, The Living. In 1975 she married Walter Williams. After working for several years in the corporate sector, in 1988 she served as commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works at the request of Mayor Tom Bradley. But she never left the cause of justice for her first husband’s murder, and in the 1990s she convinced Mississippi officials to reopen the case against de la Beckwith, armed with the trial transcript she had perspicaciously ordered in the 1960s. Other transcripts had mysteriously disappeared, likely at the insistence of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a publicly financed anti-civil rights organization. In a third trial in 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was found guilty of Medgar Evers’s murder. The events surrounding that trial are dramatized in the film, Ghosts of Mississippi. De la Beckwith died in prison in 2001, two years after Myrlie Evers published her memoir and three years after she concluded her tenure as chair of the NAACP. Myrlie and Medgar Evers’s papers are housed at the Department of Archives and History in Jackson. She makes her home in Bend, Oregon. Myrlie Evers’s acceptance speech of November 26, 1963, comes five months after her husband’s assassination, and just four days after President John F. Kennedy’s murder. She accepts the Freedom House Award on behalf of her late husband, and she recounts his final moments within the context of his self-understanding as a soldier in war. She uses this extended metaphor in solidarity with U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam, a solidarity that would soon dissolve for most civil rights activists as Lyndon Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in a second Asian land war. Her speech is not just encomium for her late husband, though, as she fingers the nameless masses who are guilty for the murders of the president and her late husband. As Mamie Till had faced her son’s murderers and the nation without blinking in 1955, so too did Myrlie Evers stare down her husband’s spilled blood. She prays that his blood will run deep into the soil to nourish the trees and branches of freedom, creating a canopy of justice and equality to shelter all humankind.

M

r. Chairman, Board Members of Freedom House, Dr. Gideonse, dais guests, ladies, and gentlemen, I am filled with humility and gratitude as I accept this bronze memorial plaque presented to me in honor of my late husband, Medgar Wiley Evers.

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More than five months ago, a soldier was found dying on a southern battlefield. The location of this particular battlefield was Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.A. As he departed from his car a single shot was fired from a high-powered rifle with telescopic lens. He fell mortally wounded. This soldier wore no uniform, but he often said that he was fighting just as hard for his country on the southern battlefield as the soldiers in Vietnam. His only weapon was his love for his country, love for his fellowman, and a strong determination to do all he could to help make America a true democracy in every sense of the word. But he knew that danger followed him like his shadow, that he was never safe for a minute. For there were always threats, vile and vicious, to constantly remind him that death was close by. But this soldier was one who believed in doing his duty, regardless of any sacrifice. He also said many times that if giving his life would help, in some small way, he would give it gladly. This man, this soldier, made the supreme sacrifice. A casualty of hate, his work is done. We are living in troubled times. America is facing a crisis which is deeper than she has ever faced before. We are still shocked and grieved over the assassination of our beloved president, John F. Kennedy. He, too, was a man totally dedicated to world peace. I know only too well what Mrs. Kennedy has had to go through and what faces her in days to come. When my husband was shot down, I, too, held his head in my arms. I know well her feelings when told he was dead. I know what she had to endure when she informed her children that their father would not be back. I had to do the same thing. I had to comfort them even more because they saw their father as he fell. And yes, I, too, witnessed my husband’s burial in Arlington Cemetery. There are many similarities in both of these murders. The men who pulled these triggers seemed to forget that you can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea. You cannot kill the good that these noble men stood for. We might ask ourselves exactly who is responsible for their murders. It might be wise if we searched our own souls to find if we are not responsible in some way. For everyone who is complacent is guilty. Everyone who is indifferent to the cry and search for world peace and freedom is guilty. Everyone who would prefer to be a spectator rather than a participant is guilty. And people who go over this country and preach hate and prejudice are guilty. And, perhaps, the practice of nursing bigots in high places as though they were premature infants is a part of our guilt. 243

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Now is the time for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom for all. If such acts of violence can be perpetrated in Mississippi and Texas, even against the person of the president of the United States, then we must realize that none of us is entirely safe from these extremists. We in America should learn from the tragedies of the past few months and days the need for understanding, unity, and love of one’s fellowmen. For only a united country can stand and endure. May the death of these men and others unite us in a common effort to see that our future generations will not be as devoid of sympathy and understanding as we ourselves today seem to be. I pray that their blood may flow deep into the soil of America and nourish the tree of Freedom so that its branches of justice and equality may shelter all mankind. These men leave behind a great heritage to their children and to their nation. May we work even the harder to make this the land of the free, the home of the brave. Again, my thanks for this tribute to the memory of my late husband, Medgar Wiley Evers.

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Ella Baker December 1963, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Conference, Washington, D.C.

Described as “the greatest organizer the civil rights movement ever knew,” Ella Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. Raised in Littleton, North Carolina, on land her grandparents had worked as slaves, Baker came of age under the careful guidance of her activist and deeply religious mother, Anna. Upon graduating as valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1927, Baker headed north to Harlem where she cut her organizing teeth in the city, working for the Young Negroes Cooperative League, the Works Progress Administration, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and other progressive and relief organizations. She also worked in editorial positions for the American West Indian News and the Negro National News. Baker began working for the NAACP in 1941 as a field secretary and quickly earned a reputation as an exceptional organizer of black youth. From 1943 to 1946 Baker worked as national director of NAACP branches, which made her the highest ranking woman in the organization; later she served as president of the New York City branch and led the fight to desegregate the city’s schools. During World War II she helped advise the Office of Price Administration on price controls and war rationing. Not content to do strictly organizational work, Baker ran (unsuccessfully) in 1953 for the New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket. In 1956 Baker, along with two of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest confidantes, Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin, formed In Friendship, a fundraising organization designed to aid victims of discrimination in the South. After the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was organized in February 1957, Baker was co-organizer of the Prayer Pilgrimage, which brought thousands of youth to the nation’s capital to commemorate the Brown decision and to lobby for federal civil rights legislation. Such was her organizing acumen, that Levison and Rustin persuaded King to bring Baker to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. She would serve as executive director of the organization for a year and later for two and a half years as interim director.

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During her stint at SCLC as well as during her earlier work in the NAACP, Baker grew suspicious of leader-centered approaches to civil rights, especially among glory-seeking black preachers; instead, she favored a grassroots model of vigorous and active local participation. Such an ethos was at the very heart of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group she helped found. “Strong people,” she said, “don’t need strong leaders.” In April 1960, with the student sit-in movement in full ferment, Baker called a conference of youth leaders at Shaw University. Sponsored by the SCLC, Baker steered the students away from formally aligning themselves with the black clergy-dominated group. For many in SNCC, Baker quickly became the very soul of the organization—serving as mentor, mother, and always active organizer. “Miss Baker,” as she was known among SNCC workers, was a civil rights free agent throughout the 1960s, working seemingly wherever organizing work needed to be done. Baker is also credited with helping to create and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), leading its Washington, D.C., office. Between 1962 and 1967, Baker was a staff member of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), where she worked with her close friends, Carl and Anne Braden. Throughout the 1970s, she was active in many causes for social justice, including the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. An activist to the last, Ella Baker died on her birthday in 1986, survived by a niece, Jacqueline Baker Brockington. Her papers are housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Schomberg Center at the New York Public Library in New York City, and the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. In her speech before a gathering of SNCC staff and workers, Baker returns to her central theme: we must cultivate leadership, not leaders. Her reasoning carries the weight of a too-recent presidential assassination: leadership allows organizations to move forward after individual leaders are no longer with us. She then turns to a theme that would haunt SNCC in 1966 and beyond: we must focus less on race and more on universal human dignity. We must understand, for example, the people who mistreated Brenda Travis, a fifteen-year-old girl expelled from public school for sitting in the “whites only” section of the Greyhound bus terminal in her hometown of McComb, Mississippi. We must understand the men who followed Bruce Payne from Natchez to Port Gibson and assaulted him. Those people have been taken in by a lie we can unmask—if we value their humanity.

I

suppose it must be an indication of my growing old, I actually get affected by such applause. I almost lose my sense of balance and want to sort of act like a female and cry. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad for me.

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I had not anticipated having anything to say, and I think it’s very gracious of Jim [Forman] to not only call on me, but to indicate that what SNCC is, is the result of what the people are who are in SNCC. And SNCC if it is anything different from any of the rest of the groups that have come on the scene, I hope is different in two respects in particular: one is, it is concerned with not the development of a leader, but the development of leadership. And there’s a lot of difference between the development of single individuals as leaders and the development of leadership, with leadership concepts, leadership goals, leadership methods that people can follow after we have moved on, and we must all move on from one point to the other. I think it’s different in that respect; it’s also different in the respect that it goes into the hardcore areas and identifies very closely with people. It works with people. It lives with people. And it has had to do this especially in the areas where it worked, because there they found—and we all know this, if we hadn’t known it, we should know it—that in order to get people in deep areas of the South to move, to even act in their own behalf, they have to first be given a feeling of confidence in you, and then this gives them the feeling of confidence so that they can break through the years of fear and suppression that they have experienced. And this I think SNCC has done a good pioneering job in, setting the pace for others to follow. I think if we are to move forward, as we can move forward, we have to also combine that other thing that I hope will become very unique with us and which was conceived in the beginning, namely that we bring to bear on the problems of race, the problems of human suffering, not only our own emotional righteous indignation with the situation, but we use the full capacities of our thinking and our minds and others’ minds to actually think through and to chart programs that people can respond to and programs that have basic effect on changing the system so people can live instead of just exist. I wish that we had time tonight, not tonight, but certainly during the conference to analyze further that which Bob Moses set before us this morning. And if we don’t do it now, we’ve got to do it as a staff, because we have reached the point that the old line methods of just getting out in a demonstration just for the sake of demonstrating is far from being enough. And we’ve got to find ways in which to involve people at many different levels. And we’ve got to find ways in which to evaluate our own selves in respect to the movement. Frequently we don’t find time to look at ourselves. And this is one of the reasons why, today, when Mr. [James] Baldwin made the statement to the effect that the white man, in order to find his role in the movement, he would have to forget that he’s white. I think we also have to forget that we are 247

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Negroes as such. But we forget that only in terms of not trying to feel that the white fellow who comes into our movement has to come by us. Now I can understand, as we grow in our own strength and as we flex our muscles of leadership, and flex our muscles that have come from seeing how effective we are, we can begin to feel that the other fellow should come through us. But this is not the way to create a new world. We can only create a new world out of a commonness of purpose and a decent respect for all the people who are helping to contribute to it. I don’t think we need to be afraid. Certainly we don’t need to be afraid of being taken over, if we know where we’re going, know why we are going there, and then know how we’re going to get there. I suppose if I’d wanted to speak, I could have been shorter. But since I didn’t want to speak—no, I don’t think I should, Jim, no, I got some other things we can talk about later—but maybe before the conference is over we can have an opportunity to talk some. But certainly we ought to begin to think very seriously about the directions in which we are going and assume the responsibility that has been laid on our shoulders as a result of the fact that, whether we like it or not, we have been able to pioneer in a direction that had not been pioneered before. When you talked about a movement on Mississippi, you called it MOM. I remember those days. And I remember the fact that we didn’t move on Mississippi when we thought we were going to move on Mississippi. But I also remember that you didn’t forget to dream, that you didn’t forget it, and that when Bob Moses went down into McComb, Mississippi, and inspired such people as Brenda Travis, who is here somewhere—I don’t know whether she is here or not in the audience—but inspired the high school students of McComb, Mississippi. And when out of this came some other people, and when you began to come to the conferences, and no longer were there ten or twelve people who were on the staff, but there were twenty, and there were thirty, and then there’s now over a hundred people, people who come to the staff because they feel it offers some opportunity to find some greater meaning in life, and an opportunity to help provide . . . [break in tape] He said, “I been wondering what keeps you going?” And afterwards I thought about it myself. What is it that keeps people who have been going as long as I have trying to keep going? I think one of the things that keeps one going is a faith in human beings. Basically I believe human beings want to live in a decent world. Basically I believe that the young people of today really are out to create that kind of world. And if I didn’t believe that there would 248

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be no virtue in my living, because I cannot see any virtue even in using one’s creative instinct, one’s creative capacities, if we cannot create a world in which people can live, then we haven’t done anything. When I was much younger, I used to make speeches that were much better rounded, and one of them had to do with this subject: that to penetrate the mystery of life and to perfect the mastery of life were the twin goals of great living. At that time, and I suppose I can still say now, we have done much in the direction of penetrating the mystery of life. With all this equipment we have around us, it is part of the penetration of the mystery of life. And when we hear about the Telstar and all of the marvelous things of science—the computer machines and all of these things—this is part of the penetration of the mystery of life. But where we have failed, and failed so woefully, is the perfection of the mastery of life. And there can be no perfection of the mastery of life until we have learned that human beings are human beings worthy of the dignity and respect wherever they are, irrespective of who they are. And as Jim Forman pointed out today, what we think of others, we can so easily become. And this is a danger for us. When we look at these irrational people, and we know they’re irrational, when we see as I happened to have seen, about the 31st of October, four young white men who trailed us from Natchez, Mississippi, to Port Gibson, and then jumped out of their car and vented their spleen on Bruce Payne, a young graduate student at Yale University. Why did they find it necessary to do this? Why do they find it necessary to take out their venom on somebody else? Because somewhere, somehow, they have been fooled. And you and I know a great deal of why they have been fooled. And they have been fooled and made to feel that they had something of value in being white. And then deep down inside of them they knew this was not true, that they knew that just being white was not enough, and so they are confused and they don’t know where to turn. And so when we gaze upon these people, we gaze upon them not with a sense of despising them, or even rejecting them, or being overcritical of them, but being understanding of what has made them into what they are. And part of our task, as I see it, is to help them to see that they can be something other than that, and I don’t know whether it comes through nonviolence or not, but it certainly comes through an understanding of your own value, so that you do not feel it necessary to lord it over somebody else just because you have the opportunity to do so. These things may be very elementary, but I think they are basic to what we become and how well we carry the torch that has been handed to us. 249

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I am glad to see so many people in SNCC that I don’t know them. But I do hope, that whoever we are, and wherever we are, that we will continue to think in terms of the fact that what we do in SNCC is not for the development of SNCC as a big, powerful organization, nor for getting headlines. But we do this because we believe that it is necessary to change the political and social system of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and yes to change the political and social system in respect to the entire country. So that when we say we have a democratic country and when we claim that we’re a nation for the people and by the people, it will truly be a people’s nation and a people’s government. And this can only be if the people themselves understand how valuable they are, and understand what it takes to become a nation of the people, for the people, and by the people. And we have the opportunity to help the people understand this, and understand it in a way and in a depth that we perhaps haven’t even begun to find the final depth for. But I think this is an opportunity and I’m glad that I’m here tonight. The three years from ’60 to ’63, out of my fifty-odd years, seems to me to be the best years of my life. I hope I have three more to be with you.

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Victoria Gray May 1964, Wisconsin

Victoria Jackson Gray Adams was born on November 5, 1926, in the all-black community of Palmer’s Crossing, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Raised by her paternal grandparents after her mother’s death when she was three, she later graduated from Depriest Consolidated School in Palmer’s Crossing and then attended Wilberforce University in Ohio. She returned from Wilberforce to marry Tony West Gray, and the couple had three children: Georgie, Tony Jr., and Cecil. The family moved to Germany in the early 1950s as Tony served in the United States Army, and they eventually returned to Palmer’s Crossing in 1955, whereupon Victoria opened a successful cosmetics business. Like many activists before her, Gray Adams’s entry into civil rights was somewhat accidental. In looking for a place to hold movement meetings in Hattiesburg in the spring of 1962, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field workers Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins were encouraged to contact Victoria Gray, who was highly respected by her minister (Reverend L. P. Ponder) at St. John’s Methodist Church. One parishioner later stated, “That’s really where the Hattiesburg movement started.” Gray Adams was one of the first volunteers to try and register to vote—a task made even more daunting by the intractable registrar Theron Lynd. Later that same summer, she became involved in the Forrest County Voters League, and when Hayes and Watkins left for the Delta, Gray Adams took over the project for SNCC in September 1962—precisely the local, indigenous leadership model favored by the organization. Gray Adams was also involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) citizenship education classes led by the legendary Septima Clark in Dorchester, Georgia. She was one of the few women to serve on the national board of the SCLC while Dr. King was president. She later observed that literacy projects provided her with an excellent forum for educating local blacks about civil rights. As the freedom movement gathered momentum in 1964, Gray Adams became one of the founding members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a fledgling political party comprised of mostly black Mississippians

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formed to protest the exclusionary and racist practices of the state’s Democratic party. As a delegate to the national convention held in August 1964 in Atlantic City, Gray Adams was instrumental in articulating the MFDP’s political mission; she was also resolute in not compromising with party regulars. Later, along with Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine, and with the backing of the MFDP, Gray Adams ran for Congress in 1964, a race that would play out prominently on the House floor in January and September 1965. After divorcing in 1964, Victoria Gray married Reuben Earnest Adams Jr. in February 1966, and their union produced one child, Reuben Earnest Adams III. After traveling abroad and living for a time in Thailand, the Adams settled in Petersburg, Virginia, where Victoria served as a realtor; a campaign manager for a number of political candidates who sought and won local office; a member of the State Fire Board under three governors (during her tenure she designed training and policies that resulted in people of color and women being hired and retained at the highest levels of fire departments in Virginia and throughout the country); and interim campus minister at Virginia State University. Always a spiritual warrior for the cause of civil rights, in August 2005 Gray Adams (with Freedom Movement veterans Dr. Vincent Harding and Professor Sonia Sanchez) helped her son Cecil launch the first of many Freedom and Democracy Public Charter Schools, where students receive a traditional education along with instruction about the Freedom Movement. She passed away on August 12, 2006, survived by her husband, two sons, a daughter, and eight grandchildren. Many of her papers are housed at the University of Southern Mississippi. In her brief address before a northern audience, not long after the formation of the MFDP, Gray Adams attempts to educate her listeners on both the specifics of voting legislation embodied in the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the realities and repercussions of voter registration for blacks in Mississippi. While she presciently details the “emasculation” of voting rights, thus creating the legislative context for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Gray Adams also reveals the economic coercion at the heart of White Citizen Council retaliation aimed at would-be black voters. From publicity in local newspapers to revised property tax assessments, the “reign of terror” in Mississippi extended far beyond the physical intimidation and violence so pervasive in the post-Reconstruction Deep South. Under the guise of local legal customs, empowered whites could in fact terrorize and intimidate through other means. Such tactics quickly rendered moot the early distinction SNCC had made between direct action campaigns and voter registration work. As field workers quickly learned, voter registration work in Mississippi was dangerous and direct action.

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’d like to speak, tonight, about something of grave national importance. That something, as you may be aware, is the Civil Rights Bill— vague as it is—and the chance it stands of being passed in its present form; or the chance that it will be emasculated or completely scuttled. When we are speaking of legislatures and the procedures by which they operate, in reality, we are speaking of men, principles, and motivations. We must first consider what Senator Clark of Pennsylvania meant last year when he referred to the “Senate Establishment,” and the vital role it plays in the discharge of national responsibility. By the term “Senate Establishment,” it appears to me, Senator Clark meant the control of the Senate by those persons in the minority, in powerful positions—and by virtue of a conservative coalition of Republicans and diehard segregationist southern Democratic senators: both of whom desire, for varying reasons, the embarrassment of the Democratic administration. My opponent, Senator Stennis, needless to say, is a member of this very politic coalition. Stennis will continue to be active and powerful unless the political climate in Mississippi is changed. And unless some of the proposals advanced by Senators Clark and Proxmire are implemented. But I’d rather not go into that because both Senators Clark and Proxmire, as well as other senators supporting their views, have just about exhausted the subject. I’d like to talk about the Civil Rights Bill, and the importance, the overwhelming importance of the bill being passed in its present form. You may have gathered from my earlier remarks that I am not altogether enthusiastic about the bill in its present form, and that is true. Neither am I overly optimistic that the bill will be passed. In fact, I must assert that I cannot believe, in all sincerity, that the Civil Rights Bill will be passed in its present form. In view of my present candidacy in the Mississippi State Democratic Party, I’d like to talk about one aspect of the bill that affects some 475,000 Negroes in Mississippi who are of voting age. Of this number, there are less than 20,000 Negroes who are registered to vote. So, the section of the Civil Rights Bill I am interested in seeing passed—just as is—is the First Section, Title I. This title prohibits (1) the application of different tests, standards, and so forth, to white and black voter applicants, and (2) the denial of registration for immaterial errors in applications. These prohibitions were designed to give some measure of protection to voting rights in federal elections. Under this title, there is a requirement for all literacy tests to be given in writing, or that these literacy tests be transcribed. To expedite the handling of cases against registrars who are said to have violated this statute, and filed under the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, it would authorize the attorney general

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or a defendant to ask for trial by a three-judge court, with direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In any such proceeding it establishes a presumption of literacy for those who have completed the sixth grade. Now of course, all of this has no bearing on the procedures of voter registration in Wisconsin, because here it can be assumed that voter registration activities are carried out in a civilized and honest manner. Where Title I has its most pertinence would be in certain areas of the South, notably Mississippi. For example, in the county where I reside, up to and including January 1964, there were only 55 Negroes registered to vote. This is in an area where there are more than 7,400 Negroes of voting age. Since August 1961, a voting suit, initiated by the Justice Department against our county clerk, has been and still is in litigation. That nothing significant has been done through the courts—with the possible exception of an injunction against the county clerk, which by and large he has chosen to ignore—is the fact that there are at this point less than 200 Negro registered voters in Forrest County. Add to this the fact that well over 850 Negroes have sought to register since the intensified voter registration drive began in Hattiesburg on January 22 of this year. And I might add that this figure of less than 200 includes the 55 who were already on the books on January 22. Forty-three of these 55 registered voters were ordered registered by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. These facts and figures speak nothing of the intimidation to which a Negro is subjected when he attempts to exercise his constitutional right to participate in government as a first-class citizen. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the Justice Department, the FBI, and other branches of government are well aware of the forms and methods of intimidation experienced by Negroes who put their lives on the line when they go down to a courthouse for the purpose of registering to vote. An incredibly courageous man, Professor James W. Silver, in his now historically famous “Closed Society” speech about Mississippi, noted that “On March 31, 1963, the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council released a chronological list of sixty-four acts of violence and intimidation against Negroes since January 1961. The thirty-page indictment of man’s inhumanity to man, with its accusations of whippings, shootings, murder, and outrageous debasement of the courts, admittedly comes from a interested party, but it is characterized by understatement.” In my own work as a Citizenship Education supervisor, I can testify to many such incidents of harassments and intimidations. I do not mean to convey the impression that these incidents are all of a particularly brutal charac254

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ter. Rather, I would like to point out that these incidents are now taking color of more subtle hue. One no longer gets shot down on the courthouse steps in broad daylight—as in the case of a Negro minister in Belzoni, Mississippi, who was warned against continuing his voter registration activities. You are warned, in a roundabout way, that you’ll lose your job if your name appears in the newspaper as a voter applicant. There is a requirement recently written into law that an individual who has applied for registration must have his name published in the local newspaper for two consecutive weeks. This serves several purposes. Suppose, for example, you have a bill at a local furniture store and the owner is one who keeps an eye peeled for “uppity niggers” who attempt to register to vote. Your bill, regardless to the terms, suddenly becomes due. You, of course, cannot pay. The court orders recovery of said furniture. Or suppose you do not own your own home and you are renting. Your landlord is another who keeps tabs on his tenants. Your name appears in the newspapers. Now you find yourself faced with one or more of several types of reprisals. Your rents goes up. Or you are asked to move, usually immediately. Or you are required to pay for some nonexistent repairs made on the property you rented. Or it is discovered that you have damaged the property and this needs immediate payment. You are a homeowner. Your property has been valued for taxation at $1,000, a fraction of its market value. Your property is reassessed and now you have valuable property. Your taxes go up. You are a restaurant owner. You have attempted to register to vote and your name appears in the newspaper. It’s time for the Board of Health to come around to make an “inspection.” You now have numerous violations of the Health Code. You are either fined, or, in some extreme cases, your place of business has been condemned. There is no end to the types of reprisals—economic or physical—that must be faced by those in the Negro community who have attempted to register to vote. And so the quiet but fierce, determined battle for citizenship—waged by Negroes against the white power structure of Mississippi—goes on: unheralded, largely unknown outside of the Negro community. These conditions are denied by our so-called representatives in Washington. They delight in stating that Negroes are “satisfied” with the status quo. They pontificate that Negroes are politically apathetic, and that there is no need for legislation in this area. On the other hand, in a very recent report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, they report that “after five years of federal litigation, the conclusion is inevitable that present legal remedies for voter discrimination are inadequate.” 255

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There is a constitutional basis for the voting provision under Title I of the Civil Rights Bill Section 1 of the 15th Amendment says that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section 2 clearly states, “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” And finally, Section 4 of Article One gives Congress the power to make or to alter regulations prescribed by the state for the election of senators and representatives. Now, these constitutional bases for this legislation defeat any allegation that Title I is an invasion of states’ rights, about which so often we hear the bleating of our congressional opponents in the South. I stated earlier this evening that I had little reason to believe that the Civil Rights Bill would be passed in its present form. I also stated that as a whole the bill is unsatisfactory and extremely vague. A lot of honest, hard work on the part of our Senate is necessary in order to obtain a meaningful bill that is enforceable. The urgency of serious, clear cut legislation cannot be overstressed. I should like to close these remarks by stating what probably you have heard on numerous occasions. Yet for all of its repetition, it cannot be said too often. Freedom in America depends on the individual. As long as one individual is not free, as long as the rights of one group—minority or majority—have been abridged or denied, then democracy in America for the individual, or for the greater majority of the people, is endangered. America prides herself on being the citadel of democracy. Let us all strive to make this true. I thank you.

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Elizabeth Allen June 16, 1964, Congressional House Subcommittee, Washington, D.C.

Elizabeth Taplin Allen was born on October 8, 1922, to Jim and Etta Taplin in Amite County, Mississippi. The Taplins owned farmland and were very well respected in their community. On March 8, 1941, Elizabeth married Louis Allen, who had also come of age in Amite County. In January 1943, Louis mustered out with the Army, serving in the Pacific theatre during World War II. Upon returning from the war, the veteran worked as an independent logger, while his wife tended to the family’s ten-acre farm and to their children. The couple had four children: Tommie Louis, Henry Crawford, and Mary Elizabeth; a daughter, Doris Etta, died in 1957. In the summer of 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Robert Moses began a voter registration project in the virulently racist town of McComb, Mississippi, in Pike County. A local farmer and founding member of the Amite County NAACP, Herbert Lee, agreed to serve as Moses’ driver and to help recruit voting volunteers. At a cotton gin in Liberty on September 25, 1961, Lee was shot and killed by E. H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi state legislature, and his lifelong neighbor. Hurst would later claim self-defense; he testified under oath that Lee had in fact brandished a tire iron and that Hurst’s gun had accidentally discharged in a skirmish between the two. Witnessing the event was Louis Allen, who happened to be walking past the cotton gin that same morning. Harassed by the sheriff, deputy sheriff, and the other white “leaders” of Liberty, Allen was coerced into lying about what he had seen, thus initially providing corroboration to Hurst’s testimony. Allen later recanted his coerced testimony to the FBI and claimed that Hurst had in fact murdered Lee without provocation. The FBI, tragically as it turns out, later informed the sheriff and deputy sheriff that Allen had changed his account, thus contradicting the lawmen. Allen’s truth-telling led to his own murder on January 31, 1964, as three shotgun blasts to the body and head killed him. His widow listened to the gunfire from their living room. The very next day, Allen was scheduled to head north to Milwaukee to flee the danger and physical intimidation that had accompanied him since his FBI statement. On the very day of the funeral, the Allen family fled Amite County and the life they had known. Elizabeth Allen settled in Baton 257

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Rouge, Louisiana, where she raised her children and several grandchildren. She died in February 1991 and is buried next to her husband at Star Hill Methodist Church near Liberty. Following in her husband’s truth-telling footsteps, Mrs. Allen testified before a House subcommittee less than six months after his brutal murder. While she begins haltingly, after a few prompts her testimony moves with a vernacular eloquence that underscores the terror Mississippi blacks face when confronting white intimidation and lawlessness. Out of a reflexivity leavened by fear, she is always careful to use the courtesy title of “Mr.”—even for the white police officers who had assaulted, and perhaps murdered, her husband.

M

y name is Elizabeth Allen from Liberty, Mississippi. My husband was Louis Allen, and he was killed the 31st day of January by shots. He had applied to get a job. He was leaving for Milwaukee on the a.m. train, the 9 o’clock train, the next morning, and he got out on the gap that leads to his home and he was shot down with buckshot. No one was in the home but Mrs. Elizabeth Allen and little Mary Allen, three years old, the mother and the daughter, when the shots were fired. He wasn’t a man that stays out late at night. So after he didn’t come in and I looked at the time, I wondered what was wrong. My baby son was eighteen years old. He was out with his girlfriend. When he came in some hours later, he came in saying, had his daddy come in? He found his daddy’s body at the gap, shot down, which he had been dead ever since 8:30. The reason I know it was 8:30, there is a special program that I watch on a Friday night, and I was watching this program, and when the shot was fired, I switched the TV off and listened. Then I heard another shot and I heard another shot. Then I saw the truck lights at the gap, but I still didn’t know that it was my husband, and I didn’t know that it was the truck. I didn’t know what was going on until about 1:30 or 2 o’clock, my baby son came in. I asked him, I said, “Son, where is your father?” I said, “He don’t stay out late at night.” I have heart trouble and a bad stomach, and he said, “Sit down, let me tell you something now.” I sat down, and he said, “Daddy is dead.” The minute he said it I said, “Well, I heard the shots.” I said, “He has been killed ever since 8:30.”

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He said, “Well, he has been killed awhile.” Then he went and got his oldest brother which is married and staying about two and a half miles out of town with his mother-in-law. He stays with me, but that night he was visiting his mother-in-law. Then they moved his body. So the undertaker came in and said, “Mrs. Allen, you have to bury your husband tomorrow, because we can’t hold him out until Sunday.” I wanted to save his body until Sunday. They had the inquest and the undertaker fixed up his body and came up to the funeral home. Then the high sheriff, which is Mr. Daniel Jones of Liberty, Mississippi, came in and questioned me and asked me did I hear anything at the road. I said, “Sure, I heard three shots, but I didn’t know it was someone killing Louis Allen, Mr. Louis Allen,” my husband. He said, “What time were they fired?” I said, “At 8:30.” I said, “I was watching my TV program when the shots were fired.” Then, during that time that I said I had heard them shoot, he asked me did I know it was my husband. I told him, no, I didn’t know it was my husband until my baby son came in and told me that my husband was dead. But I knew my husband wasn’t a man to stay out at night. So I was worried, I was wondering what had happened, but I didn’t know that he was down at the road, dead. . . . I wouldn’t really know why he was killed, but they had been picking at him before they killed him. On the Herbert Lee case, as far as I know. It was a man that was killed at the gin, named Herbert Lee. When he [Louis Allen] testified that Herbert Lee did have an iron—they wanted him to testify that Mr. Herbert Lee had a piece of iron, which he said he was ready to kill him [E. H. Hurst], he said Mr. Herbert Lee didn’t have a piece of iron. He [Louis Allen] said Mr. Herbert Lee didn’t have anything. He said he didn’t want to tell them a story on his color they picked at him, and they continued to pick at him until they destroyed him. . . . mr. freedman. You say they were picking at him before they killed him. Who was picking at him and in what way? Well, Mr. Daniel Jones and different other white people. In 1962, Mr. Daniel Jones came out there and told him that he was under arrest, at 10 o’clock on Saturday night—about 10:30 on Saturday night. He went out to see what he was arresting him about. So he told him that he was under arrest. He said he didn’t know anything, and he said, “Can I go my bond?”

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He said, “No, not niggers, you can’t go your bond.” So right there, watching TV, he was bound. Then he asked, “Can I get my hat?” He said, “No, not you, nigger, you can’t get your hat.” So his baby son, which is this child, was standing in the door. He looked around and said, “Well, let my baby son bring my hat.” He struck him with the flashlight and broke his jawbone and then carried him on and put him in jail. I don’t know whether they was carrying him off to finish him off or what, and I told my baby son, “Let’s get in the car and see what they’re going to do with my husband and your father.” We got in the car and tried to follow him, but there was no way on earth to follow him, because they were driving too fast. When I got to town, Mr. Daniel Jones was coming from the courthouse. I asked him, “What did you do with my husband?” He said, “I put him in jail and that is where the hell he’s staying.” He cursed me and told me if I didn’t get the so and so back across the river and mighty quick, I would be in jail, too. Then he said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going down to my son’s mother-in-law’s to pick up my son and tell him that his father has been brutally arrested.” He said, “You go down there and get your son and get the hell back across the river.” So I went down there, picked up my son, and done just as he said and went back home, all three of us. So the next morning, my son went up and asked his daddy, “What do they have you for?” He said he really didn’t know at the time. Then he said, “I’ll tell you they hit me last night, and they broke my jawbone.” He said, “Go out to the high sheriff,” which was Mr. Caston; Mr. Daniel Jones wasn’t sheriff at that time, “and ask him would he get a doctor for me?” He run the children away and he wouldn’t get a doctor for him. So he stayed in jail until Monday or Tuesday—I disremember what day, but it was the first of the week he got out. He still hadn’t had a doctor, and he couldn’t eat anything, because what they would carry to him, he couldn’t eat because his jawbone was broken. When they let him out of jail they charged him $17.50, I think it was. Then he came, later on, home. Then he went to Somerville, Mississippi, to the doctor, next day, and from there to Jackson, Mississippi, to the doctor, 260

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because he is a veteran, to the veterans’ hospital and took treatment there. They told him that for him to stay there and they would treat him, he would have to stay a certain amount of days. Well, he has a family, so he couldn’t stay as many days as they wanted him to stay, so he came on back home the next day or two and there he stayed until the jaw got the least bit better, and then he went back to work. . . . I really don’t know whether they have arrested Mr. Hurst [accused of the murder of Herbert Lee] or not, because they don’t arrest white people in Mississippi. They arrest Negroes, but they don’t do anything to white people. Mr. Day. Did your husband ever have to go to court to testify? That’s right. I left that out. I also went. I went to court in Jackson. It was my husband and my baby son and his nephew and my nephew and my daughter, which is his daughter, my stepdaughter. He told them in Jackson about Mr. Daniel Jones breaking his jawbone, and we went to Jackson on that account. Mr. Day. But did your husband ever have to go to court and say, “I saw Herbert Lee get killed?” Sure; he went to court twice on Mr. Herbert Lee’s death. Mr. Day. Did anything happen? They called him and told him, the leaders, they call themselves the leaders in Liberty, Mississippi, which is Mr. Daniel Jones and the high sheriff, which was Mr. Caston at the time, they told him he would have to testify that Mr. Herbert Lee had a piece of iron if he expected to live in Liberty, Mississippi. They all knew he didn’t have a piece. . . . He said he tried to live because he had a family to live for, but he told the court Mr. Herbert [Lee] had a piece of iron and told the FBI different, that Mr. Herbert Lee didn’t have a piece of iron. Somehow or other, it got back to Mr. Jones. He said everything that you tell the FBI has to go back to him. He said Louis wouldn’t be laying dead on the ground if he hadn’t told the FBI that Mr. Herbert Lee didn’t have a piece of iron, which he didn’t have a piece. Mr. Day. Could I just check this over again? They told your husband to lie in court? That’s right. They told him to lie, and he did lie, because he wanted to live. Mr. Day. But he told the FBI the truth? But he told the FBI the truth, but he was living there where he knew they would take his life in a minute if he told them; he told the FBI the truth. . . . That’s why he went to Jackson when the police broke his jawbone. He asked the FBI for protection and they tell him different ones would help him, 261

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because he has a fear in himself. They took his credit from him. He had stood good in Mississippi. But after he tried to raise himself and he a man that wasn’t just anything, they took his credit from him and which he got killed the 31st of January, but he was going to leave. . . . He was killed from the Herbert Lee case, I believe, as sure as I know.

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Rita L. Schwerner July 29, 1964, Deposition, Hinds County, Mississippi

Rita Levant was born in March 1943 in Mt. Vernon, New York. She began her college education at the University of Michigan and transferred to Queens College, where she graduated in January 1964. She and Michael Schwerner married in June 1962. The activist couple began their work together in New York, receiving brief sentences for picketing a Manhattan building which allowed no blacks. While New York offered many outlets for young idealists, the death of four girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing focused the Schwerners’ resolve to fight injustice in its most pervasive milieu: Mississippi. The Magnolia state had been the second to secede from the Union and the only state to supply the confederacy with a president. During the civil war Mississippians along major waterways quickly adapted to life in caves while their homes, businesses, and churches were shelled by Union forces. Even the citizens in larger towns like Vicksburg and Jackson expressed disappointment at their leaders for surrendering. Eastward backwater denizens likely had not changed their lifestyles much even during the radical Republican Reconstruction era. Conflict began after Brown v. Board of Education signaled the death of Jim Crow throughout the South (and North—Topeka was the test case). Segregationists, faced with federal troops and young idealists, fought back by organizing White Citizens Councils; the Ku Klux Klan, too, received an infusion of new members following the tectonic shift of Brown. Michael and Rita Schwerner were the advance guard of a formidable organizational machine engineered to escalate and dramatize change in Mississippi. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) served as an umbrella organization to unite many civil rights groups then working in Mississippi, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and to raise nationwide consciousness of the foot dragging ways of the Deep South. The Schwerners began working for CORE as Mississippi field officers in January 1964, for a salary of $9.80 apiece per week. COFO’s primary program that year was Freedom Summer, a voter registration and education project whose ambitions and embittered opponents were unprecedented in our nation’s history. The Schwerners were so successful in their organizing and fundraising that by May, Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Mississippi 263

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Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bowers, put out an “elimination” order for the man they derisively called “Goatee.” On June 21, just hours after returning from a week-long training program at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, Michael Schwerner, twentyfour, accompanied by two CORE volunteers, Andrew Goodman, a twenty-yearold Queens College student, and James E. Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old native Mississippian, drove to the Longdale community in Neshoba County to contact friends at Mt. Zion Methodist whose church had just been firebombed into ashes by the local Klan—the same church that had agreed to host a freedom school. Later that afternoon, deputy sheriff Cecil Price arrested the three young men for a traffic violation; he released them at 10:30 that evening. Klansmen, in a carefully organized cabal with the Neshoba County Sheriff ’s Department, laid in wait and quickly executed the three civil rights workers and hid their bodies in a nearby earthen dam. The FBI, acting on a tip, found their decomposed bodies on August 4, 1964—nearly a month and a half after their disappearance. During these weeks, Rita Schwerner confronted numerous officials including the sheriff, governor, and federal authorities in a search for answers. Governor Paul Johnson slammed his door in her face. The trial for the murders dragged on through 1967 and resulted in the temporary incarceration of seven men for conspiracy. Edgar Ray Killen was finally convicted for manslaughter in June 2005, forty-one years to the day that the three men had been executed. These dramatic events have been memorialized by Hollywood in the movie Mississippi Burning. Part of Mississippi Highway 19 near Philadelphia was renamed the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Memorial Highway by an act of the Mississippi Legislature in 2005. While past injustices remained a part of Rita Schwerner’s life, she pressed forward. She remarried in 1967 and received her J.D. in 1968. She has since served as a public defender in Seattle, Washington, and Newark, New Jersey. She was the Seattle Regional Director of the Legal Services Corporation from 1977 to 1982. She has held academic appointments at Rutgers University and the University of Washington and has served on the Practice of Law Board in the state of Washington and is a principal partner in her law firm. She also raised two children. Rita Schwerner’s deposition of July 29, 1964, may appear at first glance to be a clairvoyant eulogy, describing the events leading up to her husband’s disappearance with two co-workers on June 21, 1964. She accurately portrays the systematic psychological torture and social ostracism civil rights workers experienced that year. Her detailed account is a harbinger of a gifted attorney in training. This is one of our earliest glimpses of the clear-minded professional who would testify against one of her husband’s murderers, “Preacher” Killen, on June 16, 2005. 264

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I

am twenty-two years old and the wife of Michael H. Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers who have been missing in or near Philadelphia, Mississippi, since June 21, 1964. Michael and I came to Mississippi on about January 16 of this year as field staff workers for the Congress of Racial Equality, assigned to the Council of Federated Organizations. On about January 21 we went to Meridian, Mississippi, with the purpose of establishing a community center in that city which would provide such services which the state and local authorities would not provide for Negro citizens. From that time until June 21, 1964, we worked continually in and around the area of Meridian, and other counties in the eastern half of the Fourth Congressional District. To my knowledge, the only times that Michael left the store in those six and a half months were for a four-day conference in New Orleans in February, a one-day trip the two of us took to New York in March, and the Oxford orientation session in Oxford, Ohio, immediately prior to his disappearance. The only additional time that I was out of the state was for a ten-day visit to New York City from May 24 to June 2. Shortly after we arrived in Meridian in January, we met Mr. James E. Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old Negro man who worked with us and eventually became part of the Congress of Racial Equality staff. From about the middle of February to the end of March, James was out of Meridian, working first in Canton and then, for a short time, in Greenwood. At the end of March, he returned to Meridian to work with us. In the first few weeks that Michael and I were in Meridian, we had to change our place of residence some three or four times, because the Negro families who took us in received intimidating phone calls and became afraid to house us. In February we were able to rent a house from a Negro, Mr. Albert Jones, which he rented from a white woman, Mrs. Roy Cunningham. We lived in that house until the beginning of June when Mrs. Cunningham insisted that we leave. Prior to our eviction we had had our rent raised by her. In the first few weeks that we were in Meridian, we received no threats nor did we suffer harassment at the hands of the local authorities. However, as people came to know us better, to recognize us, and to know what we were attempting to do, the tension increased. On several occasions my husband was picked up by the local police and taken to the police station, where he was questioned as to our activities, asked to show proof of ownership of our car, etc. They never did pick me up for questioning. As we achieved some success in establishing the community center, the threats and intimidation began to increase. By May we received so many phone calls at late hours of the night that in order to get some sleep we were 265

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forced to remove our telephone receiver before going to bed. We finally resolved this problem by obtaining an unpublished telephone number when we moved to our new apartment after being evicted. The phone calls at the office during the day and evenings continued. They were of several forms. Some were extremely unpleasant in that when I picked up the phone the party at the other end of the line would use extremely offensive language towards me. Other calls we received were threats of violence, such as someone calling and telling me that he was planning to kill my husband, or that my husband was already dead. Michael received anonymous calls telling him that they intended to kill me or that I was already dead. A man by the name of Mr. Oliver, who runs an electrical shop a few doors down the block from our office, used abusive language directed towards me and my husband continually. He constantly referred to my husband as “jewboy” and “nigger-lover.” I have been told by workers in Meridian that on at least one occasion in the last month, several of them were threatened by Mr. Oliver with an axe handle. At the end of April, my husband was arrested on two counts of blocking a crosswalk. He was held in the Meridian City Jail from Monday until after his trial on Wednesday. When he was released, he told me that he had narrowly escaped a beating. The police officer who took him to his cell on Monday afternoon called one of the other prisoners out of the cell. My husband could not hear what the police officer said to the other prisoner, but when that man returned to the cell he took Michael aside and told him that he didn’t know who he, my husband, was, or what he did, but that he better keep quiet about it while in the jail, because the police officer had said that if this prisoner got the others to beat Michael, no action would be taken by the police. On Friday, April 18, my husband and I were visiting Reverend R. S. Porter, when he received word that a cross was burning in front of his church. We arrived at the First Union Baptist Church as the fire department was extinguishing the flames, but the cross was still smoldering. In the beginning of June, a large group of people were arrested in Meridian when they attempted to form a picket line in front of three of the five-andten-cent stores. They were charged with obstructing traffic. My husband went down to the police station to find out the charges on the arrested persons. Officer Kirkland, whom I believe was the desk sergeant that day, threatened my husband. From what Michael told me, his words were something like this, “If you get anymore of these damn kids arrested, Schwerner, I’m going to get you, and that’s a promise.” 266

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Working so closely with my husband and James Chaney, I was able, over the course of months, to observe their habits and attitudes as workers. I have had the opportunity to observe other civil rights workers at their job, but I do not believe there are any other workers in the state any more cautious or meticulous in their work than were Michael and James. Michael’s concern about the danger to other people and the importance of minimizing it came from his experience as a rights worker, and his feeling of responsibility as the project director. James undoubtedly derived much of his feeling of caution from the experiences he underwent in the twenty-one years of his life as a Mississippi Negro, subject to all the whims and capricious acts of the white citizens of this state. Michael started making trips into Neshoba County in February and, in all, made about thirty such expeditions. Every time he went into that county to work, I remained in the office in Meridian to receive his phone calls when he checked in, or in the event that anything went wrong and he needed to contact someone. The only times that I did not serve in that capacity were the few trips he made into Neshoba County when I was out of the state. Because the county was known to be so dangerous, I insisted on assuming that job myself, out of obvious concern for my husband’s safety. When James Chaney returned to Meridian at the end of March, the two of them usually traveled to Neshoba together, although there were one or two occasions when one of them went alone or with another person. Neshoba County has had a reputation for being so volatile that it has been nicknamed, “Bloody Neshoba,” and many experienced civil rights workers, for very good reason, declined to work in that territory. My husband believed very strongly in security precautions, such as phoning in one’s whereabouts, and on several occasions I heard him reprimand others who did not call in to the office when they were supposed to. I remember only one incident prior to his disappearance when Michael was two hours late returning from Neshoba County and did not call to tell me why. I was frantic and at the point of calling the jails, but refrained because I knew that if he had not been picked up this would inform the authorities of his whereabouts and make the situation graver. When he and James returned that particular evening, they said they had been detained in talking with a contact, who had no telephone, and that they were fearful of stopping on the road to call in and advise me of their delay. On one occasion, I believe at the beginning of May, the two men, James and Michael, were planning to drive to Philadelphia during the day to see some people. As I had met several of the Neshoba County contacts in Meridian, 267

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and I had information to relate to them about community center programs which I believe would benefit them, I requested permission of the two men to accompany them. At first they both refused, but when I persisted, Michael finally agreed because he felt he may have been over-protective of me as his wife. James, however, did not have any of these personal involvements so that he was able to rationally say that if I went and if he were seen in Neshoba County with a white woman, we would all be killed. His sound advice was heeded and I did not enter Neshoba County on that day, or at any other time until after the disappearance of my husband, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. On one or more occasions, James told me that the car had been followed in Neshoba County by white persons in cars with the license plates either covered or removed. On one occasion he said he had been followed by an official car, either that of police or sheriff ’s department, but I don’t know which. On June 21, 1964, Michael and James made another trip to Philadelphia, this time accompanied by Andrew Goodman, one of the volunteer COFO summer workers. I was in Oxford, Ohio, at the time, but before my husband left Oxford at 3 a.m. Saturday, June 20, he told me of his intention to go on Sunday to Philadelphia to investigate the burning of the Mt. Zion Church in the Longdale Community. The three men never returned to Meridian, nor did they call in their whereabouts. All knowledge I have of my husband’s habits and training indicates that, given the opportunity, he certainly would have called in. It is foolish to assert that he would have turned down the opportunity to do so. The information from officials is vague and contradictory, and all knowledge of the situation in Neshoba County would lead me to believe that the three men have been murdered. On June 25, at about 3 p.m., I went to the State Capitol Building in Jackson with John Robert Zellner, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, and Reverend Edwin King, the Tougaloo College chaplain. I attempted to see Governor Johnson to ask for his promise of help in search for the three men. We were told by Senator Barbour that the governor was out for the afternoon and could not be contacted. He was extremely rude in his treatment of me. We then walked over to the Governor’s Mansion, arriving just as Governor Johnson walked up the steps with Governor Wallace of Alabama. We followed them up the steps and Mr. Zellner introduced himself by name to Governor Johnson and they shook hands. Mr. Zellner then turned towards me and introduced me as the wife of Michael Schwerner, one of the three missing men. He said that I would like to speak for a moment with the Mississippi governor. The moment Johnson heard who I was he turned and 268

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bolted for the door of the mansion. The door was locked behind him and a group of Mississippi Highway Patrolmen surrounded the three of us. An officer with the name plate “Harper” refused to allow us to request an appointment with the governor. Harper said that he would not convey our request to Johnson. On June 26, 1964, when I went to Neshoba County to speak with Sheriff Rainey, the car which I was in was followed by a blue, late model pick-up truck without license plates. There were two white men in the truck. At one point the truck blocked us off in front and a white, late model car blocked us from behind. We turned our automobile around and were able to get by the white car; the pick-up truck followed us a while farther. We reported this to the FBI agents who were working in Philadelphia on the investigation. After I spoke with Sheriff Rainey, who denied any knowledge of the circumstances of the disappearance of the three men, we obtained permission from Rainey and the FBI to follow the sheriff ’s car to the garage where the station wagon (which the men were driving on June 21) was being kept, in order that I could see it. Several young white men, whom I believe were workers at the garage, laughed and made screams which are usually referred to as rebel yells when they realized who I was. When we left the garage, the sheriff ’s car was close behind ours, and the blue pick-up truck once more followed after us to the outskirts of town, with the sheriff making no attempt to stop it or question the occupants about the lack of license plates. Signed: Rita L. Schwerner Sworn to and signed before me this 29 day of July 1964 Signed Margarit A. Lewis Notary Public

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Ruth Steiner December 13, 1964, First Unitarian Society of Denver, Colorado

Experiencing the civil rights movement firsthand helped such activists as Ruth Steiner not only to advance the movement, but also to obtain something quite personal from it. Born in Holtville, California, Steiner grew up watching her father fight fervently against the racial discrimination imposed on Mexican immigrants in Southern California. It was this experience, along with her active involvement as a member of the Unitarian Church of Denver, her experiences in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the influence of the first Denver chairman of CORE, Jim Reynolds, which ignited her passion to make a difference. Steiner earned her bachelor of science degree in public health and nursing from the University of California, Berkeley. Not only was she a founding member of the Denver chapter of CORE, but the lifelong activist remains a proud cardcarrying member of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the National Organization of Women (NOW). At the time of her active involvement and participation in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Steiner recounts the impression the movement made on her, especially experiencing the turmoil between the young white college students who wanted to get things done immediately and blacks who wanted others to be sensitive to their struggle and their leadership. While the college students brought with them the national media and thus the national attention needed to make political advancements, many blacks resisted these students who they felt were being insensitive, a resistance that eventually led to the dissolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the rise of Black Power. The long-term progression of the civil rights movement remains a concern for Steiner; in fact she maintains that society is again facing some of the very issues that started the movement. Due to the lack of an active watchdog organization and the lack of organized protests, Steiner maintains that we are back to dealing with segregated schools and housing with a distinct black/white divide, especially in the city of Denver. She is currently working on a project titled Rebels Remembered, which documents the history of this powerful movement in Denver and the relations 270

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between the police and the community. Ruth Steiner remains an active community leader, committed to ensuring that every human being, regardless of skin color, enjoys the privileges of racial equality. Her papers are housed at the Denver Public Library. In her speech given on December 13, 1964, to the First Unitarian Society of Denver, Steiner offers a detailed account of her recent experiences in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to help with the Freedom Vote. That trip involved canvassing Mississippi blacks and encouraging them to vote in a “mock” election with candidates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); a large turnout would help counter the long-held beliefs that blacks in Mississippi were content without the franchise. Hattiesburg had become an organizing priority for SNCC and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) with the vital leadership of Lawrence Guyot and locals like Victoria Gray Adams—to say nothing of the resistance offered by white supremacists such as Forrest County Circuit Clerk, Theron Lynd, who actively resisted the federal government’s efforts to get blacks registered in the county. Such was Lynd’s intransigence that not even a single black person attempted to register between 1959 and 1961. Steiner’s experiences in Hattiesburg are a personal revelation for her: the battle is not only a struggle between black and white, but also a turbulent and very personal fight between right and wrong. Steiner offers her listeners a behind-thescenes look at her three weeks in the “monster” that is Mississippi. From the lack of food, running water, and adequate toilet facilities to the varied and clashing personalities of Joe, Cornelia, Everett, and Doug, she documents how the movement has taken such a devastating toll on its “warriors” on the front lines. In shifting the attention away from high-profile marches, picket lines, celebrated personalities, and the triumphalism of many civil rights narratives, Steiner offers an intimately honest sketch of movement life among the movement’s actors. The “big enemy of segregation,” she quickly learns, is multilayered and existentially devastating; her three weeks feel like three years and her ability even to relate to other whites on quotidian matters has frayed to the point of hostility. Against this rather bleak backdrop, Steiner challenges her audience “to start building a world deserving” of the heroic black Mississippians who have endured such devastating deprivation their entire lives.

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e had 12 registered Negro voters in Hattiesburg this time last year. Today we have over 300! This number must continue to grow until every adult Negro citizen in Mississippi is a registered voter. To help our Voter Registration Drive there will be a mass meeting at 271

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St. Paul’s Methodist Church, Wednesday evening at 8 o’clock.” These words were a part of a leaflet passed out in the Negro community a week after the election on November 3. Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the county seat of Forrest County, lies halfway between Jackson and the gulf cities of Southeastern Mississippi. Forrest County has a population of some 52,000—some 34,000 in Hattiesburg. A little less than half are Negroes. About 8,000 are of voting age. According to the U.S. Constitution, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on the account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude . . .” A sign in the Forrest County Courthouse reads as follows: “Applications for Registration must be completely filled out without any assistance or memorandum. After 10 days applicant’s names and addresses are published for two consecutive weeks in the newspaper. They cannot be ruled on until 14 days after the second publication. Therefore it can take a long as 33 days before we can give an answer as to your application being accepted or rejected. Your indulgence is appreciated. . . . The Registrar.” Theron C. Lynd is the Forrest County registrar. Efforts by the federal government to force him to register qualified Negroes as voters began in 1960. It was shown by the government that Lynd had never registered a Negro, that prior to January 1961 no Negro was permitted to apply and after July 1961, obviously qualified Negroes were rejected. The government obtained an injunction against such discrimination. Mr. Lynd’s attorneys, of course, are employed by the State of Mississippi. Up till the end of 1963, Mr. Lynd had not complied with the injunction nor purged himself of the contempt. Well, now, isn’t this a situation! A mass invasion of the state is the only thing left to do. Okay, I’ve got three weeks’ time—why should I go to Mississippi and get involved in that mess? For just such a short time, I’d really be more of a hindrance than any kind of help. And that’s what isn’t needed down there—some naïve white person stumbling around getting in everybody’s way. And like the people there sure don’t need anyone standing around with only good will oozing from every pore giving the appearance of some curiosity seeker. I’ve never even been South—maybe I just want to gain some notoriety—like the first kid on the block to take a trip to the city zoo so he can come back and tell the rest of the kids about all the bizarre creatures he saw. And, of course, I really expect too much. Alright, so I get involved in some demonstration—get beaten, put in jail—and the thought of that frankly did frighten me a bit—so what? Demonstrations are common occurrences, getting put in jail is a way of life in the movement—and 272

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now what if in those three weeks nothing happens to me?—like I mean, I don’t come back with bruises or tales of being spit at or yelled at—what am I going to say about my trip? In the end, I guess my decision to go was not based on the reason why I should go, but just simply because I could not imagine my not going, and that was that. So it might end up that the whole experience would benefit my own enlightenment more than anything else, but possibly there would be some small bit of something that I could contribute. I arrived in Hattiesburg just in time to help with the Freedom Vote. This vote had been organized by the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi to be held four days prior to the regular election on November 3, to give any resident of Mississippi who is over twenty-one and who has lived in the state for two years the opportunity to vote. So-called “legal” registration was not necessary. Voters could choose from Freedom Democratic Party candidates, regular Democratic Party candidates, and Republican Party candidates. This was the only opportunity to vote for any of the Freedom Democratic Party candidates since they were not allowed to appear on the regular ballot on November 3. In the final count, President Johnson had received over 65,000 votes. On November 3, he received only some 52,000 votes in the State of Mississippi. Certainly the Freedom Vote was a mock election, but it is not to be made a mockery of. One seventy-four-year-old man who could hardly walk came down to a little corner grocery store which was listed as one of the polling places in Hattiesburg. He had to come twice because the ballot box was not set up the first time. He told me, “I’ve waited all my life for this chance to vote—Oh, yes, I’ve been down to the courthouse several times, but somehow they just wouldn’t accept me.” Many people were fearful to participate in the vote. Some record had to be kept of the voters, so it was asked that people sign their names in polling books which were kept at each polling place. Teachers, particularly, were afraid of their jobs if they should put their names in the book. Most finally would put an “x” down and then vote. As I listened to President Johnson the night before election telling all citizens to exercise their right and responsibility by going to the polls the next day and casting their ballot for the candidates of their choice, I wondered from what country he was speaking and to the citizens of what country was he speaking. The large sign which was placed high over the U.N. Square here in downtown Denver before the election with the words, “In some places, they can’t vote,” instead of showing the hammer and sickle, might better have displayed the flag of the foreign State of Mississippi. 273

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There is a war taking place in his foreign state. It is not really a battle between the black and white, but more between right and wrong. But who says what is right and wrong? We get back to Mr. Lincoln’s parable about the use of liberty and tyranny: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence, we behold the process by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.” The rule, “If you’re white, you’re right, if you’re black, stay back,” still strongly prevails in varying degrees in both the North and South. Negroes have for hundreds of years been beaten, tortured, shot, and lynched, but no such national indignation and demand for justice was expressed until three civil rights workers were missing in Mississippi the beginning of last summer. Two were white. There is an ever-increasing number of young warriors who are trying to answer the question, “Which side are you on, Brother?” and joining the united front attack organization of COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, becoming involved in the economic, social, educational, political life of the Negro in Mississippi. The motives, backgrounds, and interests of this young army are as varied as the hundreds of individuals the movement has attracted from all parts of the country. Most of the Northern students coming down to the South are white and of middle-class orientation, and they do outnumber the Negroes in some of the COFO projects. This, of course, in itself creates problems. Let me tell you a little about the crew in Hattiesburg, and hopefully, I’m honest enough that I don’t give a distorted picture at their expense. There is Joe—a twenty-seven-year-old Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Berkeley, California—a very quiet, sensitive young man. He is very mindful of the fact that such a high-powered degree is more of a hindrance in most cases than it is of any help. He remains flexible and his sense of understanding places him head and shoulders over many of his colleagues in his ability to communicate his attitudes and ideas. Cornelia is taking time out from her schooling at the University of Wisconsin where she is working on her master’s degree in genetics. A brilliant young woman—somewhat drab in appearance. The work she is doing in the 274

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literacy classes she conducts and the organization of the Freedom Library is always placed above any expressed emotion on her part of any of her inward feelings—sort of the Florence Nightingale type—“My work, my work, I must get back to my work.” Then there’s Johnnie—looking like she stepped out of an Eastern finishing school. There’s a phrase for her that they give white females who are the bossy, pushy variety—she’s a P.W.B. I’m afraid the direct translation of this might not be proper to utter in these hallowed halls. Johnnie gives out orders like a five-star general. She’s always immaculately groomed. Never catch her with a hair out of place. Barbara, who’s about twenty-one or twenty-two from New York City, is the long-suffering Madonna variety. No one does more than she and anything short of being beaten in broad daylight on the front steps of the county courthouse is relatively insignificant. Wendy is a new arrival from Washington state. Her genuine enthusiasm and sincerity about life is far-reaching and magnetic. Everett is eighteen, a Negro born and raised in Hattiesburg. Any white person is his enemy. If you survive his test, he declares you a Negro and one to be trusted. Heading up this crew is Doug Smith. He is also eighteen and born and raised in Hattiesburg. He has never finished high school—he was suspended in his junior year when he organized the Mississippi Student Union. This is an organization of high school students who participate in various civil rights activities, such as voter registration, and testing of lunch counters and libraries after the Civil Rights Bill was passed. Anyway, the local high school authorities decided Doug was too much of a disturbance and his influence on other students was diverting their attention from their studies. Doug says this of himself, “I’m a born agitator—nothing ever happens until you agitate somebody.” Doug’s understanding and organization are fantastic. To deal only with the staff ’s interpersonal problems—the Everett-Johnnie feuds—Barbara’s maternalism that nobody can think for himself—would be more than a supposedly expertly trained leadership and counseling person could handle. But Doug is overseer of all the activities going on in the community—the Freedom classes, the two community centers, the voter education, and registration. People in the community come to him for advice and Doug knows who to see when there’s a problem. Doug also has an ulcer. The war we’re talking about is not always fought with guns, hoses, cattleprods, ropes, bombs, or jailings, although there are plenty of those. The day to day aggravation of abject poverty is much more effective—the dust, the 275

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roaches, the rats, the malnutrition, the poor education—all this is part of the enemy which slowly and steadily eats on the very soul and spirit of the people. When I decided to go to Mississippi, several people asked me why—I answered jestingly—“to find a magnolia blossom.” A friend of mine even gave me a bottle of white magnolia cologne so that at least I would recognize the scent. Well, I never found the blossom. There is a distinct odor, however, which does pervade the community of Hattiesburg—the part of town where most of the Negroes live. The Hercules Gun Powder factory pours its refuse into open ditches which wend around in front of wooden shacks and by dusty roads. The stench from the fumes is somewhere between rotten eggs and limburger cheese. They tell me that Governor Paul Johnson’s mansion is surrounded by magnolia trees. I stayed out in the country, about five miles from the center of town, several nights with Mrs. Robinson who is seventy-seven years old. She lives by herself with her dog, Ponto, who looks like she also is seventy-seven years old. Mrs. Robinson’s home is located at the corner of two dusty narrow roads— that’s another thing—Hattiesburg does have some paved streets, but they abruptly end where the Negro community starts. Anyway, Mrs. Robinson’s house has no plumbing facilities—the closest running water is from a pipe coming out of the ground located about the distance of a couple city blocks down the road. There is no outhouse. The slop buckets used are dumped out the back door. I got some Purex and thought that at least the stuff will be disinfected. But of course a bottle of Purex costs sixty-seven cents. I wondered one morning as I was scouring out the slop bucket, why in heaven’s name President Johnson sends the Peace Corps all the way to Peru or wherever to build outhouses. I met a rat—or several of them—they do travel in packs—and I mean a rat-rat—for the first time in my life at Mrs. Robinson’s. And you know, they sing to each other at night. I kept comforting myself with the thought that rats don’t eat humans unless they’re hungry, and I know there was flour and corn meal in the kitchen and they seemed to still be gnawing quite voraciously on the walls of the house. After my first night at Mrs. Robinson’s I made a comment to one of the other workers that the rats had been quite lively and woke me up several times during the night and therefore I was quite tired. He said, “Oh, it’s just you and your middle-class values—Cornelia Meyer never complained about the rats.” Cornelia had been staying with Mrs. Robinson since the beginning of summer. No, I’m sure Cornelia didn’t ever say anything and I’m sure none 276

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of the other workers, who were staying in homes that at least had running water, gave much consideration to the fact that Cornelia had to start her day a couple of hours before the rest of them. It’s amazing how long it takes to do something when there’s no running water. I hope I long remember this experience. I now bless the running water, and when it’s hot I bless it ten times over. Of course it’s one thing to remember something and it’s quite another to put up with it day in and day out. Mrs. Robinson’s circumstances are not unusual. At least she had electricity and gas heat. I went to see Mr. Wilson several times; he was sick and needed surgery—had needed it for about three years now. Anyway, his old wooden frame house in town had running water, but his only source of heat and light was from an open fireplace in his bedroom. Most families have little gardens in their backyards where they grow collards, turnips, carrots, and the like. This would be great, but for some reason these vegetables are cooked to death and are also cooked in grease. Any vitamin is quite thoroughly killed. Chicken is the main source of protein but this is not part of the diet every day. Many homes do not have refrigerators. The day I left Mississippi—and this was the middle of November—it was a muggy 85 degrees. The flies and bacteria have a field day in this kind of environment. I spent some time in the two community centers where during the course of a day’s activities children from ages three through seventeen would come. Many of them had some kind of infected sore somewhere on their body—whether it was from some kind of insect bite or a bruise which remained unhealed, open and weeping. Most of the kids had huge, ugly scars, the remnant of these sores after they finally healed. Many of the older kids would come to the Freedom Library after school asking for a textbook of one kind or another because there weren’t enough at school to give one to each student in the class. Many requested reference books—dictionaries or encyclopedias—since there were only one or two at school and there certainly weren’t any available at their homes. The average day a COFO worker puts in never really starts at any specific hour and never ends. After three weeks, I began to wonder if I hadn’t been there for more like three years. Each day was forty hours long. The workers many times don’t take time out to eat—or rather many times they don’t have the money to buy food, or more probably they don’t really see the importance of maintaining their own physical health and well-being. In Hattiesburg, unlike many of the other COFO projects located throughout the state, at least one complete meal is provided by someone in the Negro community each day, but this is usually all they get. 277

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This physical fatigue and lack of adequate nutrition is aggravated by yet another aspect which the enemy provides—the constant tension and fear of when and where another full-scale attack will take place—whose home will be bombed? Or who will run into difficulty when they go down and try to register to vote, or is that policeman standing on the corner watching me, waiting to take me in for some trumped up charge? These workers learn to live with their battle fatigue and tensions, but in the process most of them learn also not to depend on anyone or anything. There is an intenseness of purpose against the enemy, but largely no personal consideration among the warriors themselves for each other. If Joe is sick this morning, it’s only because he didn’t want to help with voter registration. Cornelia doesn’t complain about the lack of running water. The big enemy of segregation, then, has many faces, many moods, many attitudes, and not all of these are recognized by the young warriors who focus their attack on the heart and core of the monster. Rather unwittingly they become victims of and contribute to the many faces, the moods, the attitudes, and thereby weaken parts of themselves in the process. However, through all of this, it is heartening to realize that a significant part of our American youth are not all what someone called young materialists, but rather are actively involved in a situation which they see as unjust and are willing to pay a personal sacrifice in order to do something about it. My three weeks ended and I left Hattiesburg with an awesome burden of guilt and frustration. My first expression of these feelings was anger. The man behind the counter at the airport couldn’t be more accommodating— “The plane will be fifteen minutes late, make yourself comfortable. . . .” I kept thinking—“Don’t give me all this jazz—just give me my ticket—would you go through all this fal-de-rol if I were black?” The saleslady at the New Orleans airport chatted about the weather and where I was going and on and on—“Shut up—I’m sick and tired of words, words.” I took a bus downtown and walked down Canal Street—there was a bench, one side labeled “colored,” and the other “white”. . . the same stupid bench. “I can’t stand it—I must escape.” So I secluded myself for two days. . . . “Which side are you on, Brother? Which side are you on?” . . . My dilemma seemed to be expressed in a little poem I ran across the other day, part of it reads: To be civil and right Is all that a man Can expect from the law’s Neglected plight.

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To be civil and right Is time’s unassailable law. Maturing is both an art and a part Of all unknown of the human heart In my solitude I thought I could put all my thoughts, feelings in some kind of capsule. Obviously, this didn’t work. I am part and parcel of this monster in society. “No man is an island entire of itself . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” So I came back to Denver, but still became angry at questions, the questions, “Tell me all about Mississippi?”— “Well, like I wasn’t taking a cruise to the Caribbean Islands”—“How did you like Mississippi?”—“Man, what do you mean, like it—blow it up, sink it, push it into the ocean, that’s how I like it.” It’s so easy to wallow in this luxury of sheer frustration, desperation, and hopelessness. Doug Smith had learned long ago not to do this. Let me read you part of a letter he wrote me recently, “How is Colorado with you? Mississippi is hell with me. . . . Know[ing] that you left the state not planning to return, I got all kinds of good and bad things going through my mind about you. I don’t mean that you was a good girl or bad girl, but when a person comes into the state and leaves, I think that a person is not satisfied with the work that is being done by COFO. If this is one of the things that makes you not satisfied with Mississippi, will you share your feeling with me. If you will share your feeling with me, it will help me and I can help others improve the work in the State of Mississippi.” Mrs. Robinson learned long ago that if the status quo remains, not only she, but all of us are losers. “I’ve got just as much right to walk God’s green earth as anyone.” When they let her out of jail, she said, “Keep the door open, I’m coming right back.” She said she laughed at the deputy’s dumbfounded expression. So there they are—the Doug Smiths, the Mrs. Robinsons, and the Joes, the Cornelias, for they too are learning their involvement, their loss if things don’t change. It is time, high time, high past the time, to start building a world deserving of them.

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Fannie Lou Hamer December 20, 1964, Williams Institutional CME Church, Harlem, New York

Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the youngest of twenty children born to sharecroppers Lou Ella and Jim Townsend. In 1919 her family moved west to the Delta where they worked on the E. W. Brandon plantation. Fannie Lou was forced to quit school after the sixth grade in order to earn money for her family. Baptized in the Quiver River, she was a devout Baptist all of her adult life. In 1944 Fannie Lou married Perry “Pap” Hamer, and the two settled on the W. D. Marlow plantation just outside of Ruleville, Mississippi, in Sunflower County; she picked cotton and was a timekeeper for most of her eighteen years on the plantation. Hamer did not become a civil rights activist until she was forty-four years old. At the invitation of her friend Mary Tucker, she attended a mass meeting at the Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville on August 27, 1962; it was the only church in Ruleville willing to host the meeting. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in concert with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had sent Charles McLaurin into the area to canvass for its voter registration program. By late August, McLaurin had convinced only three locals to attempt to register to vote. At the August 27 meeting, Hamer listened to Bob Moses, Jim Forman, and Reginald Robinson. But perhaps she was most inspired by James Bevel’s sermon entitled “Discerning the Signs of Time”; Hamer would later make use of this sermon in her own speechmaking. Fannie Lou Hamer became a convert to the cause on August 27 as she volunteered, along with seventeen others, to attempt to register at the county seat of Indianola that Friday. The events that transpired on August 31 would appear frequently when Hamer told her story to audiences all over the country. Hamer represented the embodiment of SNCC’s civil rights philosophy: instead of a top-down, hierarchical model, the organization favored grassroots leadership, where local leaders sustained the movement long after civil rights organizations had left the area. Bob Moses recruited Hamer to become a field secretary with SNCC, and she obliged in November 1962. From then on, her life as an activist 280

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was cemented. She was a frequent speaker and singer at SNCC conferences and local meetings, and almost always Hamer would tell her voter registration story of August 31, 1962, and the Winona jail story of June 9, 1963. The latter story is a brutal account of torture endured by Hamer and other activists arrested and jailed on their way back from a workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. The beating, a mainstay in her rhetorical repertoire, stayed with her the rest of her life as her vision was affected and a limp from polio exacerbated. Despite overwhelming physical evidence and voluminous testimony, the men who beat Hamer and the others were acquitted in federal court by an all-white jury in December 1963. Hamer’s fame inside and outside of the movement grew exponentially in August 1964. As part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation that traveled to the Democratic National Committee meeting in Atlantic City, Hamer was selected to testify on live television before the Credentials Committee. In that brief speech, Hamer’s rhetorical powers so captivated the country that president Lyndon Johnson called an impromptu press conference to preempt the rest of her address. At the convention she famously declared that the MFDP had not come all this way “for no two seats.” With the radicalization of SNCC and its turn toward Black Power in the late 1960s, Hamer dropped out of the organization and helped run Freedom Farm, a Delta food cooperative as well as a small garment factory. As the 1970s began, Hamer remained active in Mississippi politics, the burgeoning feminist movement, and of course day-to-day life in Ruleville. But her fame never translated into material wealth; in fact, not long before her death, she and her husband owed a collection agency more than $2,200. Plagued by poor health for much of her life, diabetes, heart disease, and later cancer slowed Hamer’s frenetic activism. Fannie Lou Hamer died in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on March 14, 1977. She was eulogized by Andrew Young, and posthumous fame has only grown. Perhaps no other movement activist experienced both the crippling reality of racism and the promises of grassroots democracy to a greater degree than Fannie Lou Hamer. Her famous epitaph, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” is written on her gravestone in Ruleville. But the world she labored so mightily for was eloquently revealed in a recently discovered letter to Rose Fishman, a white supporter who lived near Boston: “Rose I wonder when will people love each other as human being[s], and stop killing, hanging, hating, and fighting? I hope one day we can truly say, peace on earth Good will toward all men. Until then my mission is to keep telling the world it’s wrong to hate any body.” Hamer’s papers are housed at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. Several of her speeches recorded in 1963 and 1964 are available at the Moses Moon Audio Archive at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. 281

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In a curious coincidence, several SNCC activists bumped into Malcolm X in Africa in the fall of 1964. As a result of their chance encounter, each side realized they were working toward similar ends—and the means were not that far apart either. Each pledged cooperation with the other. Malcolm X was true to his word: in late December, just two months before he was murdered, he invited Fannie Lou Hamer and SNCC’s Freedom Singers to come to Harlem to address his organization. By this time, Hamer had carefully calibrated her rhetorical appeals before northern and southern audiences. To this Harlem audience, Hamer downplays religion and the vernacular of the Judeo-Christian tradition in favor of the more secular tradition of America’s civic promises—promises it had hypocritically reneged on. Hamer also features two of her staples: her first attempt at registering to vote and the fallout it caused, and the brutal beating inflicted upon her and several civil rights workers in Winona, Mississippi. In telling both stories, she underscores the economic and physical coercion at the core of Mississippi’s reaction to the black freedom movement.

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y name is Fannie Lou Hamer and I exist at 626 East Lafayette Street in Ruleville, Mississippi. The reason I say exist is because we’re excluded from everything in Mississippi but the tombs and the graves. That’s why instead of the land of the free and the home of the brave, it’s called in Mississippi the land of the free and the home of the grave. It was the 31st of August of 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, to try to register to become first-class citizens. It was the 31st of August in 1962 that I was fired for trying to become a first-class citizen. When we got to Indianola on the 31st of August in 1962, we was met there by the state highway patrolmen, the city policemen, and anybody, as some of you know that have worked in Mississippi, any white man that is able to wear a khaki pair of pants without them falling off him and holding two guns can make a good law officer. So we was met by them there. After taking this literacy test, some of you have seen it, we have twenty-one questions and some is not questions. It begins with, “write the date of this application. What is your full name? By whom are you employed so we can be fired by the time we get back home? Are you a citizen of the United States and an inhabitant of Mississippi? Have you ever been convicted of any of the following crimes?” When the people would be convicted of any of the following crimes, the registrar wouldn’t be there. But after we go through this process of pulling out this literacy form, we are asked to copy a section of the constitution of Mississippi, and after we’ve copied this

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section of the constitution of Mississippi, we are asked to give a reasonable interpretation to tell what it meant, what we just copied that we just seen for the first time. After finishing this form we started on this trip back to Ruleville, Mississippi, and we were stopped by the same city policeman that I had seen in Indianola and a state highway patrolman. We was ordered to get off the bus. After we got off the bus, we was ordered to get back on the bus and told to go back to Indianola. When we got back to Indianola, the bus driver was charged with driving a bus the wrong color. That’s very true. This same bus had been used year after year to haul people to the cotton fields to pick cotton and to chop cotton. But, this day, for the first time that this bus had been used for voter registration it had the wrong color. They first charged this man a hundred dollars. And from a hundred dollars they cut down to fifty. And from fifty to thirty, and after they got down to thirty dollars the eighteen of us had enough among ourselves to pay his fine. Then we continued this journey back to Ruleville. When we got to Ruleville, Reverend Jeff Sunny drove me out to this rural area where I had been existing for the past eighteen years as a timekeeper and a sharecropper. I was met there by my daughter and my husband’s cousin that told me this man was raising a lot of Cain because I had left for Indianola. My oldest girl said that she believed I would have to leave there. Then my husband came, and during the time he was talking this white man walked up and asked him had I made it back. And he told him I had. And he said, “Well did you tell her what I said?” My husband told him he did, and I walked out. He said, “Fannie Lou, did Pap tell you what I said?” And I told him he did. He said, “I mean that. You will have to go down and withdraw or you will have to leave.” I said, “Mr. Marlow,” I said, “I wasn’t trying to register for you today. I was trying to register for myself.” And this was it. I had to leave that same night. On the 10th of September in 1962, sixteen bullets were fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker where I’d been living after I was fired from this plantation. That same night, two girls were shot in Ruleville. They also shot in Mr. Joe McDonald’s home that same night. And until this day the place was swamped with FBI, until this day; it’s a very small town where everybody knows everybody. It hadn’t been one arrest made. That’s why about four months ago when the FBI came to talk to me about my life being threatened—they wanted to know what could I tell them about it—I told them until they straightened out some of the things that had done happened, don’t come asking about the things that just happened. Do something about the problems that we’d already had. And I made it plain. I said, “If there is a God and 283

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a heaven,” I said, “if I was going to see you two up there, I would tell them to send me back to Mississippi because I know He wouldn’t be just to let you up there.” This probably don’t sound too good to everybody, but if I can’t tell the truth, just tell me to sit down, because I have to tell it like it is. The 3rd day of June, we went to a voter educational workshop and was returning back to Mississippi. We arrived in Winona, Mississippi, between 10:30 and 11 o’clock on the 9th of June. Some of the people got off the bus to go in the restaurant, and two of the people got off the bus to use the washroom. I was still on the Continental Trailways bus and looking through the window. I saw the people rush out of the restaurant and then the two people rush out who had got off to use the washroom. One of the people that had got off to use the washroom got on the bus, and I got off the bus. I went straight to Miss Ponder, it was five of them had got off the bus, six in all but one had got back on the bus, so that was five. I went to talk to Miss Ponder to ask of her what had happened. And she said that it was state highway patrolmen and a city chief of police had tapped them all on the shoulder with billy clubs and ordered them out. And I said, “Well, this is Mississippi.” I went back and got on the bus. When I looked back through the window they was putting those people in the patrolmen’s car. I got off of the bus, holding the eyes of Miss Ponder, and she screamed to tell me to get back on the bus when somebody screamed from her car and said, “Get that one, too.” And a man jumped out of his car and said, “You are under arrest.” As he went to open the door, he opened the door and told me to get in. And as I started to get in, he kicked me and I was carried to the county jailhouse by this county deputy and a plainclothes man. They would call me all kinds of names. They would ask me questions and when I would attempt to answer the questions, they would curse and tell me to hush. I was carried to the county jail, and when I got inside of the jail, they had the other five already in the booking room. When I walked in the booking room, one of the city policemen just walked over, a very tall man, walked over and jumped on one of the young men’s feet, James West from Itta Bena, Mississippi. Then they began to place us in cells. They left some of the people out of the cell, and I was placed in a cell with Ms. Euvester Simpson from Itta Bena. After they left the people in the booking room, I began to hear the sounds of licks and I began to hear screams. I couldn’t see the people, but I could hear them. And I would hear somebody when they would say, “Can’t you say yes sir, Nigger? Can’t you say yes sir?” And they would call Annelle 284

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Ponder awful names. And she would say, “Yes, I can say yes sir.” And they would tell her, “Well say it.” She said, “I don’t know you well enough.” And I would hear when she would hit the floor again. I don’t know how long this happened until after awhile I saw Miss Ponder pass my cell. And her clothes had been ripped off from the shoulder down to the waist. Her hair was standing up on her head. Her mouth was swollen and bleeding. And one of her eyes looked like blood. And they put her in a cell where I couldn’t see her. And then three men came to my cell. The state highway patrolmen asked me where I was from. And I told him I was from Ruleville. He said, “We’re going to check that.” And they left the cell and after awhile they came back. And he told me said, “You were right,” said, “You’s from Ruleville all right, and we gonna make you wish you was dead.” I was led out of that cell and into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The state highway patrolman gave the first Negro prisoner a blackjack which was a long, heavy, leather something made with something you could hold it, and it was loaded with either rocks or something metal. And they ordered me to lie down on the bed on my face. And I was beat by that first Negro until he was exhausted. I was beat until he was ordered by the state highway patrolman to stop. After he told the first Negro to stop, he gave the blackjack to the second Negro. When the second Negro began to beat, it seemed like it was more than I could bear. I began to work my feet, and the state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro that had beat me to sit on my feet where I was kicking them. My dress was up real high and I smoothed my clothes down. And one of the city policemen walked over and pulled my dress as high as he could. I was trying to shield as many licks from my left side as I could because I had polio when I was six or eight years old. But when they had finished beating me, they were, while they was beating, I was screaming. One of the white men got up and began to beat me in my head. A couple of Saturdays ago, I went to a doctor in Washington, D.C., a specialist, and he said one of the arteries behind this left eye had a blood clot. After this happened in jail, we was in jail from Monday until Wednesday without seeing a doctor. They had our trial on Tuesday and we were charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. I was in jail when Medgar Evers was killed. What I’m trying to point out now is when you take a very close look at this American society, it’s time to question these things. We have made an appeal for the president of the United States and the attorney general to please 285

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protect us in Mississippi. And I can’t understand how it’s out of their power to protect people in Mississippi. They can’t do that, but when a white man is killed in the Congo, they send people there. And you can always hear this long, sad story; you know it takes time. For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change. We want a change in this society in America because, you see, we can no longer ignore the facts and get our children to sing “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed.” What do we have to hail here? The truth is the only thing gonna free us. And you know this whole society is sick. And to prove just how sick it was when we was in Atlantic City challenging the National Convention, when I was testifying before the Credentials Committee, I was cut off because they hate to see what they been knowing all the time and that’s the truth. Yes, a lot of people will roll their eyes at me today but I’m gonna tell you just like it is, you see it’s time. You see, this is what got all this like this. There’s so much hypocrisy in this society, and if we want America to be a free society we have to stop telling lies, that’s all. ’Cause we’re not free and you know we’re not free. You’re not free here in Harlem. I’ve gone to a lot of big cities and I’ve got my first city to go to where this man wasn’t standing with his feet on this black man’s neck. And it’s time for you to wake up because, you see, a lot of people say, “Oh, they’s afraid of integration.” But the white man is not afraid of integration, not with his kids. He’s afraid of his wife’s kids because he’s got them all over the place. ’Cause some of his kids just might be my second cousin. And the reason we’re here today, we’re asking for support if this Constitution is really gonna be of any help in this American society, the 1st day of January is when we’ll find it out. This challenge that we’re challenging the five representatives from Mississippi. Now how can a man be in Washington, elected by the people, when 95 percent of the people cannot vote in Mississippi? Just taking a chance on trying to register to vote, you can be fired. Not only fired, you can be killed. You know it’s true because you know what happened to Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. And any person that’s working down there to change the system can be counted just as another nigger. But some of the things I’ve got to say today may be a little sickening. People have said year after year, “Those people in Mississippi can’t think.” But after we would work ten and eleven hours a day for three lousy dollars and couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t do anything else but think. And we have been thinking a long time. And we are tired of what’s going on. And we want to 286

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see now, what this here will turn out for the 1st of January. We want to see is democracy real? We want to see this because the challenge is based upon the violation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution which hadn’t done anything for us yet. And the U.S. Courts tied it to Section 201 and 226. Those people were illegally elected, and they have been there, the man that I challenged, Jamie L. Whitten, has been in Washington thirteen years, and he is not representing the people of Mississippi because not only do they discriminate against the colored Negro, they discriminated up until the 3rd of November against the pro-white, but they let them vote them because they wanted votes. But it will run until the 1st of July and we need your support—morally, politically, and financially, too. We need your help. And, people, you don’t know in Harlem the power that you got. But you just don’t try to use it. People never would have thought, the folks they said was just ignorant, common people out of Mississippi would have tried to challenge these representatives from Mississippi. But you see the point is: we have been dying in Mississippi year after year for nothing. And I don’t know. I may be bumped off as soon as I go back to Mississippi, but what we should realize, people have been bumped off for nothing. It is my goal for the cause of giving those Negro children a decent education in the state of Mississippi and giving them something that they have never had. Then I know my life won’t be in vain. Because, not only do we need a change in the state of Mississippi, but we need a change here in Harlem. And it’s time for every American citizen to wake up because now the whole world is looking at this American society. I remember, during the time I was in West Africa, some of you may be here today ’cause I don’t know what it’s all about, but I know I can tell you the truth, too. It was a lot of people there that was called the PIAA. “What are you doing over here? Who are you trying to please?” I said, “All you criticizers when you at home and you’re worried to death when we try to find out about our own people.” I said, “If we had been treated as human beings in America, you wouldn’t be trailing us now to find out what we’s trying to do over here.” But this is something we gonna have to learn to do and quit saying that we are free in America when I know we are not free. You are not free in Harlem. The people are not free in Chicago ’cause I’ve been there, too. They are not free in Philadelphia ’cause I’ve been there, too. And when you get it over with all the way around, some of the places is a Mississippi in disguise. And we want a change. And we hope you support us in this challenge that we’ll begin on the 4th of January. And give us what support that you can. Thank you very much. 287

Annie Devine June 1965, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Meeting, Jackson, Mississippi

Annie Devine was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1912 and raised in Canton, Mississippi, by her mother’s sister. She graduated from Tougaloo Southern Christian College (now Tougaloo College) and taught elementary school in the early 1950s in Flora, Mississippi. Married for ten years to Andrew Devine and mother to four children, she also worked for the black-owned Security Life Insurance Company before beginning an active and public career in the civil rights movement. In fact, her work as an insurance agent put Devine in contact with many Madison County blacks, with whom she would later organize in Canton. Devine’s claim to fame in the movement occurred in 1964 and 1965 with the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an insurgent group of primarily black Mississippians who challenged the Democratic party’s racist and exclusionary electoral practices in the state. Created officially in 1964 by the Conference of Federated Organizations (COFO), the short-term aims of the fledgling political party involved increasing black voter registration and an official challenge to the seating of the regular party at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. At that convention, Devine testified to a group of black Democrats that “We have been treated like beasts in Mississippi. They shot us down like animals. We risk our lives coming up here. . . . Politics must be corrupt if it don’t care none about people down there.” Due in part to Devine’s influence, MFDP delegates later rejected the party’s compromise of granting two at-large seats to the MFDP. Just months later, Devine joined friends and fellow activists Victoria Gray and Fannie Lou Hamer in challenging the seating of five white recently elected Mississippi congressmen. That attempt, known as the Mississippi Challenge, catalyzed support across the nation even as it was eventually defeated in September 1965 by a House vote of 228 to 143. But before her fame on a national stage, Annie Devine was instrumental in helping to organize Madison County and her hometown of Canton. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) opened its first Mississippi project headed by George Raymond in Canton in June 1963. After much promise, the project faltered by fall, 288

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only to be resuscitated by the efforts of Devine. She got involved thanks to the persistence of Anne Moody, a Tougaloo student whose memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, would later be a movement classic. After reluctantly attending a meeting at the Pleasant Green Holiness Church, Devine was threatened with eviction from her home the very next day. “I think I made a decision right there. If I was going to be harassed, be made to move just because I went to a meeting, then I was already in the movement.” Described by one CORE worker as a “country diplomat,” Devine helped unify disparate points of view among Madison County blacks. Another CORE worker later claimed that without Devine’s diplomacy, there would have been no movement in Canton. Devine remained active in local Mississippi politics and social justice projects well into her eighties. She died on August 22, 2000, survived by two daughters, one son, eight grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. She makes a posthumous appearance in the acclaimed documentary Standing on My Sister’s Shoulders. In this short but interesting impromptu address before a Jackson audience of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Devine covers a variety of topics. First, she pointedly calls out Jackson’s civil rights community for the seeming lack of interest in hundreds of youth jailed for protesting the allegedly illegally constituted Mississippi legislature, then meeting in special session. Second, Devine attacks the reason behind the special session, specifically its attempts to circumvent some of the provisions in the soon-to-be enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965. Such attempts, as well as the illegal nature by which the legislature had been elected, serve to underscore the importance of the Mississippi Challenge, which would get a national hearing in less than three months. Finally, Devine forcefully closes her brief remarks by insisting that the movement will in fact move not only in Jackson, but across the entire state.

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ell, I was feeling alright sitting out in the audience and listening to all the things that have been said tonight. I think it is good for us to see a real, live Negro representative, congressman. Some kids came by the FDP office today to tell Mrs. Sanders that they had been down on Capitol Street to apply for jobs in some of the stores down there. The kids were very articulate, very intelligent kids, and one said, “Well, my husband has an account at this one store, and I don’t see why I can’t get a job there.” And then I thought about Jackson. I thought about the state of Mississippi. And I thought about my hometown where I live and I walk in the stores beginning June and I see all of those white kids, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old standing behind the counter to serve me when I went in and 289

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I saw all the Negro kids walking around with nothing to do and wishing they had something to do, just roving the streets. And I say that’s wrong. And I visited a meeting here in Jackson last week, and I heard one of the biggest businessmen in this city say that Negroes could get jobs if they would only go down to these places and apply for them. And I thought again and said, “Well, here we have the same thing. Negroes can’t go down to the registrar’s office and get registered to vote because they’re not qualified to pass that test. And here Negroes at this late date in Jackson go down to apply for jobs and can’t qualify because they can’t pass the test.” And I want to know where Jackson is tonight. And if you’re so sophisticated and so well-prepared, where are you tonight and why don’t you have these jobs? And what’s keeping you from getting them? And more than that, if you care about your children and the future and what it holds for them, where are you? And what are you doing about it? The big city and state of Mississippi: I’m a little disturbed because there are five hundred people down there in jail fighting your battles. They’re fighting their battles, too. But they’re here in the capitol city and they’re being ignored. And I don’t know how you feel. Maybe you’re not the people who need to hear. Maybe the people who need to be stirred up and touched are at home tonight or are at some kind of business meeting planning up ways to get more money out of people who can’t get jobs to spend the money that these people want to make. It was not the plan of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to come to Jackson to get put in jail. It was our plan to come and protest the calling of this legislature because we knew what they were trying to do and that is to try and pass some kind of law to get around the federal registrars from coming into the state that Negroes might get registered. We knew that their laws that they’re going to try and pass in this legislature has to do with trying to maintain the status quo along with trying to fool everybody with the big lie that Mississippi’s image is changing. But the fact is that they couldn’t prove it. The fact is that the people that have been in power for a hundred years are still in power. And those are the racists, and those are the people who hate, and those are the people who are not going to let Negroes enjoy first-class citizenship. And they stand out: the governor. And nobody else can ever tell them what to do. If Paul Johnson had issued an executive order that was really meant to bring peace and quiet and calm in this city, he could have said that people who protest and demonstrate have a right to do this. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United State gives them that right. But I say that he 290

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was taking orders from the Council and the Klan, and he couldn’t afford to do that. The people of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party are determined now more than ever because we have proved that Mississippi’s image has not changed one bit. It has not changed. There is no plan to change. But there is always a get-together to try and find new plans and ways to break the law of the land and to keep Negroes down and subject them to new brutality and intimidation and all this inhuman treatment that we have seen this week and last week and is just a repeat of what has been going on in the last hundred years. The only difference here is that people came in numbers, but I can’t help thinking of that family down in Hancock County that disappeared on March 10 and hasn’t been found yet—a man, wife, and six children. I can’t help thinking that people here in Jackson have killed people. And if it isn’t true, people are saying it. That they have gotten all these poor . . . it wasn’t no demonstrations that brought it about. We didn’t come to Jackson to talk about electing policemen. No, we didn’t come to Jackson with a list of things we wanted Jackson to get. But we came to Jackson saying to this whole country, trying to bring new attention around to this illegally constituted system in the state of Mississippi. We come to Jackson to remind you that the congressional challenge is going on and that we intend to unseat these congressmen in Washington and to have free and open elections in this state this year. Because every person who has been elected to a public office in the state of Mississippi in this year was elected illegally. And we’re going to move shortly to have this election declared void. And we don’t know how many people there are in Jackson, but we do stand here and testify that 500 people who are in jail and more than that—860 people who have been arrested since last Monday—have laid their all on the altar. And whether you move or not, people all over this state are going to keep moving. And we want Jackson to understand that. We want to tell it on the mountain and tell it everywhere you go that this thirst and this desire for freedom is in the hearts and minds of the people of Mississippi from the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf Coast, from Meridian to Vicksburg, and we will not stop until we have really gained what we have started out to get.

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Dorothy Cotton June 18, 1965, SCOPE orientation session, Alabama

Dorothy Lee Foreman Cotton was born during the Great Depression in Goldsboro, North Carolina. When Dorothy was three years old, her mother passed away and thus her father, Claude Daniel Foreman, raised four daughters while continuing his job as a tobacco factory worker. Dorothy put herself through school at Shaw University by working as a housekeeper for university president William Russell (W. R). Strassner. She transferred to Virginia State when Strassner took the presidency there. At Virginia State, Foreman earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Library Science. During this period she met George Cotton, whom she later married. Dorothy Cotton then earned her master’s degree in speech therapy in 1960 at Boston University. From 1960 until Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in 1968, Cotton worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, directing its Citizen Education Program. From 1968 to 1978, she served as vice president for field operations for the Martin Luther King Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia. She joined the Carter administration as the southeast regional director of ACTION, a federal agency for volunteer programs, serving from 1978 to 1981. She then served as director of student activities at Cornell University from 1982 to 1991. Since 1991 she has been active as a motivational speaker and trainer. In the post-1982 period, she has received several honorary doctorates for her accomplishments in the civil rights movement. This June 18, 1965, speech, caught on tape by a Stanford University undergraduate, is part of an orientation program for Summer Community Organization and Political Education Program (SCOPE), a voter registration program bringing predominantly white volunteers to engage in expanding Alabama suffrage to African Americans. Cotton prepares volunteers for numerous interracial encounters where people unaccustomed to each other may be uncomfortable or perhaps even unintentionally insult one another. She urges volunteers to be sensitive without being patronizing.

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guess that I only have two things to say. Perhaps, it’s only one, I don’t know. But, I’m thinking that once you decide how you yourselves feel about this subject, it might be good—you might want to

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understand that it’s good to be sensitive to the feelings of Negroes in the communities where you’ll be working. Really sensitive to what they feel— sensitive without being maudlin. For example, it might be good for you to know that thousands and thousands of Negroes in the South have never been around white people before, except in a servant-master kind of relationship. As Dr. Morsell was saying, well, there’s this kind of stereotype that Negroes laugh a lot and perhaps that’s the truth in this. But, when he said it I was thinking about all the different kinds of laughter and all of the reasons there might be laughter. I’m not saying, really, that there is or is not, but it challenges my thinking. You’ll find—and, again, I’m thinking in terms of being sensitive to what Negroes feel in the communities where you will be working—if you, for example, walk up to some family and the mother answers the door, she just might giggle. I’ve seen it happen. She’s giggling, she’s laughing because she’s so uncomfortable because here a white person is talking to her in a kind sort of way, a very pleasant sort of way, and she’s just not used to this. She doesn’t get the feeling that you want to dominate her, but that you might want just to be her friend, for example. And this might make her a little bit uncomfortable and she just might laugh, you know. Sometimes, perhaps, there is laughter because maybe we wanted to hit you and maybe were afraid to fight, perhaps, and so you couldn’t fight, you couldn’t express your hostility, and so you laugh, you know, you giggle. But, you’re really giggling or laughing and gritting your teeth at the same time. Perhaps, this might be true. It might be good to be sensitive to these various kinds of feelings. Reverend Wells is smiling back there. Have you known this to be true? And sensitive to the feeling of just general discomfort. You know, many Negroes kind of get butterflies in their stomach when they are around white people. They’re uncomfortable because they have, we have accepted the fact for too long—the statement, the whole history of what’s been impinged upon us—that we are not quite as good as other people and so, we are uncomfortable. We had accepted this. And I think you might want to be sensitive to some of these feelings. And if you do, if you want to be more understanding to some of these reactions to you, you might find your work going a little bit more smoothly in these Negro communities. On the other hand, you might find in a more sophisticated situation a person who would respond as Mrs. Sarah Patton Boyle experienced once when, at some school, Negroes and whites were in some school program together and when a Negro girl was through dancing she ran off the stage into the dressing room and a white girl standing there said, “My goodness, you can dance.” And the Negro girl became really insulted and angry with the white 293

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girl that she had said that she was a great dancer. Well, the white girl didn’t understand this and she was puzzled, the white girl was puzzled, and she didn’t understand why the Negro girl would respond this way in anger at a compliment. Now, you may or may not understand why she responded that way. But she was thinking, “Gee, now this white girl thinks that all Negroes can dance.” And she rejected the stereotype and so she didn’t see this as a compliment. But the white girl, at some point coming to understand some of this, didn’t feel quite so badly and perhaps helped the Negro girl to overcome the feeling that she had to this. Incidentally, this little book in which Mrs. Boyle relates this is called For Human Beings Only and some of you may be interested in reading this. We have a few copies in the office. In the first section she calls for whites only and in the second section for Negroes only and she just related little things like this. For example, Negroes being invited home for dinner by a white college classmate. The Negro students got there and found them serving the dinner in the living room on trays, what do you call them, TV trays, and the Negro students were a little bit insulted. They were sitting there thinking—and the white family was puzzled that their friends, these Negro students are friends of the children in my family—the white family—but they couldn’t understand (the white family) the reaction, the silence, the coldness in the Negro students there. And the Negro students were sitting there thinking that they didn’t want to sit at the same table with us so they’re serving dinner on little TV trays in the living room. It may be laughable, but I hope you can maybe understand why they might have had these feelings. This is not to understand it to excuse it necessarily, but I’m glad that Mrs. Boyle has a little section for Negroes only because there are more little things for them . . . there are things that we all could understand. Well, be sensitive to their discomfort that Negroes feel because the whole history of the relationship of the country is important. Sensitive without being maudlin. And be sensitive not only to the fear and the discomfort, but to the point of understanding hostility, also, that you may have felt already somewhere. And certainly, if you have not felt it already, in some communities, with some of the people with whom you will be working, you will be feeling a great deal of hostility. And to understand this hostility—it will make your work a little easier. Not that you have to let people kick you around, but you may run into some Negroes who feel, “Gee, they’ve mistreated me all these years, and I don’t like white folk. They’ve been so bad. They’ve been so mean. I saw my father get lynched, you know, by some white people and so I hate all white people.” And so, you know, there is some of the feeling, so being 294

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aware of the possibility of some of this hostility toward all people might help you work—help things go a little more smoothly. I think I could summarize with a few remarks that I have time to make; what I want to say is just with a few words: be sensitive to the whole history and what it has done to the minds and to the personalities of Negroes in the South.

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Martha Ragland June 29, 1965, Tuskegee Civic Association, Tuskegee, Alabama

Called Tennessee’s “first modern-day feminist,” Martha Ragsdale Ragland was born in Paducah, Kentucky, on May 14, 1906. After earning two degrees in economics from Vanderbilt University in the late 1920s, Ragland moved to Washington, D.C., in 1929 and worked as a researcher for Ellsworth Huntington until 1933. The product of their labors was a book on eugenics, published in 1935, After Three Centuries: A Typical New England Family. For the future outspoken civil rights and women’s rights advocate, it was a most inauspicious start. Ragland moved back to Tennessee in the early 1930s and married Thomas Ragland; their union produced two children, a son Thomas Jr., and a daughter, Sandra. She refused, though, to wear a wedding ring, claiming it represented a “symbol of bondage, or slavery.” Ragland’s early activism involved working with Planned Parenthood and the Birth Control League in Knoxville. In 1938, Ragland persuaded Margaret Sanger to accompany her on a speaking tour of the state in an effort to convince public health officials to offer birth control education in Tennessee’s public clinics. Later, Ragland was very active in the state’s League of Women Voters, becoming president in 1945. In this position she pushed successfully for a reform of the state’s constitution. Ragland resigned her position with the league in 1948 to serve as chair of Estes Kefauver’s senate campaign as well as heading the women’s division of the Democratic party during the general election. In 1952, based on her earlier successes, Ragland was appointed chair of Albert Gore’s senate campaign, and she also served as a delegate and platform committee member at the Democratic National Convention. But it was in the role of president of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations that Ragland’s involvement with the civil rights movement became more pronounced. She also served as chair of the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1963–1969) and as a board member of the Southern Regional Council. Still socially and politically active well into her eighties, Martha Ragland died on January 18, 1996, in Nashville at the age of eighty-nine, survived by her daughter

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and her husband of more than sixty years. Her papers are housed at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. In this speech before the Tuskegee Civic Association, just weeks before passage of the Voting Rights Act, which would mark the apotheosis of the civil rights movement, Ragland argues that the “unfinished business of democracy” remains. That business had moved beyond desegregation to include a host of thorny problems—most notably those typified by Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Given her academic training as an economist, Ragland sees perspicaciously that the future of civil rights is bound up with poverty, unemployment, job training, tax policy, and geography. Furthermore, she targets the “Far Right” for its complicity in denigrating the “national character” as well as its insidious attempts to consign women to an exclusively private sphere. But even more damning is the Far Right’s attempt to discredit the federal government, equating any collective action at the national level with “Communism.” Indeed, the specter of McCarthyism was migrating from the isolated “subversive” to the more insidious collectives, whose policy of federal incrementalism was a sign of the larger conspiracy.

I

was delighted to receive the invitation to come to Tuskegee. For many years I was a frequent visitor in Alabama. My father was dean of Athens College and my mother taught history there. Through them and through my visits to Alabama I kept in more than normal touch with Alabama affairs. I was interested in Tuskegee Institute and its long and distinguished history long before that interest was heightened by the role of Tuskegee Institute professors in the fight for full democratic participation by all citizens of Macon County. Gomillion vs. Lightfoot will, of course, always stand as one of the milestones along the road to democracy. And the inclusion of federal registration in the voting rights bill now before Congress surely owes much to the creative activity here. There are many other examples—and I think you have only begun. What has already been done here enshrines Tuskegee, Tuskegee Institute, the Tuskegee Civic Association and its distinguished president, Dr. Charles Gomillion, and many more of your citizens in the national honor roll of distinguished service. For that reason, alone, I would have been interested in coming here. But perhaps my chief interest concerns the future not the past. I have some ideas about where we stand in our society and about what we may be able to do. I particularly welcome the opportunity of presenting these ideas to you for your consideration. In a unique way Tuskegee embodies both

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the problems and the promise in our situation. Nowhere else in the United States could I find an audience that combines, to so high a degree, distinguished academic training and practical political experience, both focused so directly and involved so constructively in the central issue of our times. And while there may not be in my audience tonight local citizens whose minds and hearts and souls have been completely enmeshed in traditional white Alabama thinking (the kind which Governor Wallace typifies)—while there may not be any of these people in this immediate audience, I know that they are completely involved in what I will call the Tuskegee Experiment. That is the experiment of having all citizens share in running the government, and all share in the benefits. (This, of course, is nothing more than what our constitution calls for, and what our Fourth of July orators brag about. But so far as I know this is the only place where it is really being tried.) The fact that the local white citizens who have long run the town are now cooperating (however reluctantly) with those who were formerly excluded makes what you are doing here far more important than it would be otherwise. I want to say a little more about these white resisters. I have understanding and compassion for them. They are caught in the stresses and strains of a worldwide revolution that they don’t understand—and no one has tried to help them understand, not their schools, not their ministers, not their political leaders. The remarkable thing, really, is not that there have been so many stubborn, angry, men—the remarkable thing is, that with such a minimum of leadership from our great institutions that we count on to guide us—the remarkable thing is that it hasn’t been worse. For of course we are living in a revolutionary age. Not one but several revolutions are sweeping the earth—the colonial revolution, the revolution of race, and the revolution of rising expectations. All over the world men have decided to move into the twentieth century. They are demanding a place in society that grants dignity and opportunity commensurate with the promise that scientific, technical, political, and moral standards now make possible. We started this revolutionary era with our own American Revolution. It was not just a revolt against England; it was a revolt against the whole idea of an elite who would run things by and for themselves. It is a dark irony that now we so often seem to be cowering in fear before the forces to which we gave original impetus. Indeed, the fact that we did this, consciously and deliberately, and spelled it out for all the world is what made our country different—what made us a world force from the beginning. The words of Jefferson have sparked nearly two hundred years of revolutionary momentum. But as always, a time of great change is also a difficult and dangerous time. And our revolutionary age is 298

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made much more difficult and dangerous because of the worldwide population explosion and because of the nuclear bomb. I often think that there isn’t a chance that we can survive it. I often think that world tensions are so great, and getting greater, and at the same time our powers of destruction are so overwhelming, that mankind simply does not have the intelligence, the know-how, and the will to cope with it. I often think that we will end in a smoking radioactive planet with no life on it. Those are my blue days. I also realize that the revolutions sweeping the world carry with them the seeds of great promise and great hope. And for the first time in all history poverty can be eliminated. If we can survive the stresses and strains, and develop the skill to channel these revolutionary drives into orderly institutions that will carry forward their aim, this could usher in a period of undreamed of peace, prosperity, and well-being. I am talking about the whole world. For of course the stresses and strains that Alabama and Tennessee are suffering are part of the stresses and strains that are shaking the planet. We have to worry about the whole world if we are to survive. Our country needs to take a constructive part in helping the disadvantaged people of the world come into the promise of the twentieth century. We need to take a leading role in bringing political freedom, education, and economic opportunity to the disadvantaged people of the world—for that sums up the aim of all the revolutionary forces. We need to do this because of our wealth, because of our technical and scientific know-how, and because anything else would be a betrayal of our history and our most cherished traditions. For this concern for all mankind lies deep in our national character. It began with our founding. And while it often seems forgotten, it has been reasserted from time to time, and often enough, that it must be accepted as part of us. This concern was asserted forceful, if belatedly, in the Civil War. And again in the first World War when our rallying cry was that we were going make the world safe for democracy. In the second World War President Roosevelt proclaimed the Four Freedoms that we wanted for all the world, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. This seemed right to most Americans. We thought, “Yes, that is what we stand for.” After the war the Marshall Plan to help Europe and foreign aid to other countries of the world seemed in line with our history, our traditions, and our better self. Yet somewhere, imperceptibly, our role has changed. It’s like that test that involves a series of pictures that begin a cat and end a dog. It reveals something or other about you by the point at which you notice that what was a cat is now a dog. 299

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But I am less interested in how we got off the track than I am in getting back on it. Because I believe that it is absolutely essential for this country to come to terms with its destiny, and now. And I think we can only do it if our own house is in order. We need quickly and massively to attend to the unfinished business of our democracy. We need to work toward bringing everyone into the political process—so that everyone will have his rightful say in running the country. We need to work toward bringing everyone into our economic system, so that all will share in its bounty, and so that all will contribute to its operation and growth. There are encouraging developments all around toward an expanding democracy. Tuskegee has played an important role in this, one that is always cited in any national discussion. The Supreme Court decision on reapportionment of state legislature (if it is not invalidated) can be tremendously important in strengthening the democratic process. (We started that one in Tennessee.) The voting rights bill now before Congress, if it ever emerges, and is still intact, will be another important gain. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its total impact will help to bring into the mainstream of American society many formerly alien from it. Perhaps the most exciting development right now is the many summer projects which altogether are involving thousands of concerned and dedicated young people, mostly students. This summer they seem to be zeroing in primarily on political education. They are working to teach people who were totally outside the political process how to become a part of it, but they are also doing much more. They are brushed with the same idealism that has lighted up the Peace Corps. And nothing on the American scene today has so warmed my heart. In parenthesis here I want to say a little more about the contributions of students in recent years. Without in the least underestimating the years of solid work by organizations and individuals, it was the students with their dramatic innovation of sit-ins and demonstrations that sped up the whole process of attaining civil rights. I welcome their turn toward political education, but I disagree with the tendency in some quarters to deplore their previous and spectacularly successful tactics. I suspect that sometimes this attitude is prompted by a fear that these tactics may be used to redress other grievances. Until the students reintroduced them, these tactics had been forgotten but actually they are as old as government by free men. I was reminded of this recently when I read about England’s celebration of the signing of the Magna Carta. 300

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Seven hundred and fifty years ago this June, after great pressure from his barons which can only be described as “demonstrations” and “sit-ins,” King John of England signed the Magna Carta, the first milestone in constitutional government. Before that all power rested with the king. After having been a little roughly pushed into it by his barons, he said, in the grand tradition which our ruling establishment still honors, that he was doing this “by divine impulse, and for the salvation of our souls. . . . And the exaltation of the Holy Church.” That is written in the Magna Carta. And while the barons probably grumbled a little there on the meadow of Runnymede, I imagine they also said, “We don’t really care who gets the credit. If it makes King John feel any better let him say he is doing this by divine guidance.” I was reminded of some of our brave leaders in the last few years who have said they were doing something because it was “right.” But like King John at Runnymede, it took a little nudging for them to see the “right”! Another interesting and hopeful development is this concept of involving the poor in efforts to alleviate their condition, a concept written into several of the anti-poverty measures. It is also written into the urban renewal law—that those who will be affected must be involved in the planning. This is a totally new idea on the American scene, so far as I know except in TVA, which from the beginning worked this way. Involvement of the poor—and of those concerned—is being stoutly resisted all over. And I don’t know of any place where it is truly implemented. Still it is important to have it written in the laws. And I count on Saul Alinsky, the Tuskegee Civic Association and SCOPE and SNCC to show us how to implement it. These are all developments of consequence and hope and there are many more. On the economic front the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with its equal employment title and the Appalachia Act (though a pale shadow of what is should be) are at least moves in the right direction. The whole anti-poverty program recognizes the need to move in the direction of economic democracy. But so far I think the best part about the Poverty Program is that it has called attention to poverty, its extent, its social and economic cost, its moral digression from the American Creed. The disturbing thing about the program is that none of the measures so far undertaken, even if they were in full and effective operation (which they are not), are anywhere near equal to the need. This could lead to new frustrations. At least we have not yet committed our ground troops or sent in the Marines. Its biggest fault is that it puts too much emphasis on the individual and concentrates on training and retraining programs. It seems to be based on the assumption that unemployment and underemployment are due primarily to 301

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personal inadequacies—lack of skills, lack of education. I am very much in favor of training and retraining programs and think they should be expanded. We are late starting them compared with other industrial countries and at best have made only a timid beginning. But as long as we have large, chronic unemployment, training and retraining programs can have only marginal significance. We need to be looking at the big problem of unemployment and doing something about it. In 1946 Congress passed the Full Employment Act which made it national policy to utilize the resources of this country to maintain full employment. But it is being pretty generally ignored. What we have done is to concentrate on tax reductions. We did this in 1962, 1964, and again this month. No doubt some part of these tax reductions have stimulated the economy, but it is obvious that the chief beneficiary is the well-to-do. It seems to me that a better way to stimulate the economy and create jobs would be to use that money for some of our great public needs: more schools, more housing, resource development, health care, hospitals, transportation, and recreation. This would create jobs, stimulate the economy, and at the same time would help to meet the needs and raise the standard of living of millions now living in poverty and deprivation. As a nation we will simply have to face up to the problem of gross and sustained unemployment and do the necessary planning and employ the necessary moves to reduce it. It can be done if we only have the determination to do it. But who is pushing on this? Not the AFL-CIO. Not the economists—at least not many of them. My hope is that the new national concern with poverty will prompt some of our new action groups to tackle this fundamental problem. There is another aspect of poverty that needs attention. Many people who live in poverty are employed and always have been, but they are paid substandard wages. There are millions in this category. They, in effect, are subsidizing more affluent segments of our society. It also disturbs me that while we are initiating new and creative programs to rescue individuals from poverty—programs such as Head Start, the Job Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the many retraining programs under Manpower Development, that very little is being done about those areas where the federal and state government are guaranteeing poverty. For example our stingy welfare programs that enforce and perpetuate poverty. In so wealthy a country they are a national disgrace. And in addition they are an economic drag by practically guaranteeing that their recipients will never graduate into the normal productive stream of our society. 302

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While the Job Corps and the Neighborhood Youth Corps reach some out of work, out of school youth, thousands more are in families that are recipients of stingy, inadequate welfare on a scale foreordained to turn out dropouts, the unemployed, and the unemployable. If welfare grants were adequate for decent lives of dignity and promise, we wouldn’t need many of these other programs. Or perhaps I should say we would at least have a chance to catch up and wouldn’t be manufacturing new dropouts, illiterates, and unskilled faster than our new programs are able to rescue them. Of course it isn’t just increased grants we need in welfare. We need more trained social workers with smaller case loads, so they can give guidance and counseling, and utilize the total resources of the community to return welfare recipients and their children to the mainstream of our society. So far as I know the War on Poverty has not leveled any guns on this problem of subsidized poverty, known otherwise as public welfare. Social workers, who know the problem best, have been conspicuously silent on it. I hope that after this summer the SCOPE and other summer project graduates will begin to look at the institutions that bear on the problems with which they are so gloriously concerned and so personally involved. That would seem to me to be the logical next step. Another intuition heavily responsible for our democratic inadequacies is our public school system. It has been allowed to fall in disgraceful disrepair. We need public schools that will really prepare our young people to participate creatively in our democratic society and have a productive role in our highly complex economy. The public schools are simply not doing this now. When too many of our young people drop out of school saying, “I don’t see any point in going to school. I’m not learning anything”—very often they are stating a simple truth. We talk too much about getting the children back in school or keeping them in school—and not enough about making the schools so good they will create their own holding power. The real dropout has been the public school system. Of course, here in the South, maintaining two systems has been an economic as well as moral drag. I hope the momentum that has been built up to get one system can be maintained long enough to make that system one that truly meets the needs of our complex society and our sophisticated technology. An integrated school system is only the bare beginning. I predict that the resistance to adequately improving public schools will be equal to the resistance to integrating them. It may be even greater. There is so much to be done to square our country with its history and its promise. If by some miracle, we suddenly developed a national determination 303

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to use our resources and our know-how to bring all our citizens into full participation and full sharing, it would be a gigantic task, though surely a zestful one. But we don’t have such a miracle. We have, in fact, strong, wellorganized, and well-financed forces in our society that are working night and day against everything I have been talking about. And in addition they systematically set out to discredit and harass any organization, institution, or individual that works to bring all segments of our people into full participation in our society—to help in running it and to share in its benefits. There is no need to identify these forces to you. They are generally spoken of these days as the Far Right. There are thousands of organizations in this category. Some are more active in one area and some in another. But no geographical area and no group working for a more dynamic and inclusive democracy escapes their attention. Whatever reason they give for their existence, their impact is to stop progress—economic, social, and political. They discredit individuals and organizations who are genuinely trying to cope with the monumental problems of this age. They discredit them and impair their usefulness. Their tools range from physical harassment through brutality to murder. And from individual harassment of the nuisance variety to organized campaigns to discredit institutions and organizations and destroy reputations. For twenty years their most successful tool has been to label “communistic” any person, organization, or institution working for progressive measures. The long and ugly campaign to discredit and destroy Chief Justice Earl Warren is a well-known example of these tactics. It has its counterpart in many individual cases across the land. The Tennessee Valley Authority has been the steady recipient of this treatment. The TVA has been a tremendous success in harnessing the resources of the Tennessee Valley for the benefit of all the people. And not just the people in its area. It is a great national asset. In addition it is the most creative concept in democratic government in a century. It is so recognized around the world. When delegations visit us from other countries, most of them want to see the TVA. It has a tremendous appeal to underdeveloped countries. And when they develop their rivers they call it their TVA. Yet the TVA idea of unified resource development for the benefit of all people has not been repeated in this country. Not on any river and not in Appalachia. When the Appalachia bill was before Congress, pains were taken to explain that “this is not another TVA”—and the Appalachia Act, for all its big promise, is in the main an expensive road-building program, and a weak approach to the total problems of Appalachia. It is indeed not 304

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remotely comparable to TVA, and the results will predictably be less impressive. The point I am making is that the reason we have not taken TVA as a pilot project (as President Roosevelt intended it should be) and repeated its success by harnessing our resources across the country for the benefit of all the people, in a series of TVA’s—the reason we have not done this, is because of the steady barrage of propaganda to discredit TVA, to smear it as communism or socialism. And too few were saying that it is really dynamic democracy at its best. I will move to another example of how the Far Right operates to stop progress and discredit those who seek answers to today’s problems. This example is the National Council of Churches. This is an organization made up of thirty-one Protestant denominations. It is concerned with the world we live in, and it attempts to translate the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God into a living reality. As a predictable result it has been maligned and discredited and called “Communistic.” Its effectiveness as a Christian force seeking Christian solutions has been greatly impaired and in some places completely destroyed, which of course was the intent of the discreditors. Labor unions, back in the days when they were militant, used to be a focus for discrediting attacks. And I suppose they are yet in some areas. Maybe here, but for the most part labor unions have settled into the economic status quo. They turn up on the right side of most issues, but they are no longer innovators. I honestly don’t know whether it is fair to blame the Far Right for the general retirement of women from good causes. But I am inclined to think that the general fog of fear and conformity have had much to do with the widespread absence of women from the front lines. Where are the women? We are faced with problems that you would think would touch the heart of millions of women and move them to concerted action—in the area of civil rights, in the area of poverty, in the area of war and peace in a nuclear age. Where are the women? The feminine mystique that has smothered the influence of women in the past fifty years is completely alien to the American tradition. It has more in common with the Machus of China who bound their women’s feet as a symbol and a determinant of their uselessness. We have only bound our women’s minds. I don’t know the answer on that one. I throw it in because it is of much interest to me and because I believe it belongs here in this context. Probably the most pervasive and the most damaging campaign of the Far Right has been its steady campaign to undermine confidence in our government, 305

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and particularly in the federal government. Sometimes they seem almost to have succeeded in equating federal action of any kind with “communism.” And of course the effect of this is to greatly handicap the government in its efforts to meet the legitimate needs of the people, often needs that cannot be met in any other way. The net effect is to stagnate progress and strangle the democratic process. We need to reassert the fact that the government is our government, constituted to promote the general welfare. We need to dispel this idea that government is “bad,” for as long as that idea is so widely held, a dynamic government is impossible. What I am pleading for throughout this entire talk is a continuation of the present civil rights momentum and its expansion to include the full range of our needs: good schools and good housing for all, full employment with adequate pay for all who can work, adequate support for those who cannot work (for children, for the old and the sick and the disabled). And all this in the context of a broadening participation of all the people in the political and economic process. And there I think of Tuskegee as a pilot project. If we can move along this route—if we can hold off the dark, negative forces that abound in our society and that will use their great resources of skill and wealth to stop this whole process, if they can—if we can hold them off and keep moving, we will grow and prosper. We will fulfill the early promise of this Republic and be a force for peace and prosperity in the world. Think what it could mean if our great national wealth of resources, scientific knowledge, and technical skill could be combined with a new upswelling of concern for the common man and a real national dedication to utilize the knowledge of the Twentieth century to improve the lot of all mankind. It could be a great adventure and our finest hour. Thank you.

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Constance Baker Motley August 9, 1965, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Birmingham, Alabama

Constance Baker Motley was born on September 14, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut, the ninth of twelve children, to a Caribbean immigrant couple from Nevis. Her father was a chef for many local organizations including Skull and Bones. She attended primarily white public schools and was raised in the Episcopal tradition. At age fifteen she experienced the humiliation of being turned away from a public beach for her dark skin. At that moment she knew she wanted to be an attorney, despite her family’s lack of resources and support. Her mother had hoped she would become a hairdresser. As a young woman she became president of the local NAACP youth council. Because she had no money initially to pursue higher education, she took a job as a domestic worker. At a youth civil league function, her rhetorical skills so impressed Clarence W. Blakelee (a local philanthropist) that she soon had the means to attend college. She started at Fisk University, but was put off by her perception that her classmates were content to excel within a Jim Crow framework. She transferred to New York University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1943. In 1946 she received her J.D. from Columbia University, where she volunteered for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. That same year she married Wilson Motley Jr., a real estate broker. She began full-time work for the NAACP, clerking for Thurgood Marshall and focusing much of her early energy on restrictive covenant litigation. In 1954 she drafted the complaint in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1961 Marshall sent her to serve as lead counsel in the James Meredith case to integrate Ole Miss on the assumption that her gender would help her evade violence in the Deep South. When Marshall left the legal defense fund for a career on the federal bench, she expressed disappointment that she would not be his replacement despite her excellent record of winning nine of ten cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1964 Motley became the first African American woman to serve in the New York State Senate. Later that year, the Manhattan City Council unanimously appointed her to fill the vacant borough’s presidency. She was the first woman 307

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to serve in that capacity. In 1966 she accomplished yet another first for African American women by serving as a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. This honor came at the recommendation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jacob Javits, and Lyndon Baines Johnson—and despite Mississippi Senator James Eastland’s seven-month attempt to block the appointment based on Motley’s supposed communist associations. Motley served as a federal judge for the remainder of her life. She published her autobiography Equal Justice Under Law in 1998. She referred to Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court as the “most cynical move made in the area of race relations since Plessy.” Constance Baker Motley died on September 28, 2005. Her papers are housed at Smith College. In this speech of August 9, 1965, Motley addresses a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) audience in Birmingham, Alabama. She begins her address by acknowledging Rosa Parks’s role in serving as the inspiration for the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955, as well the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr., whose leadership was the sine qua non to prompting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the latter of which President Johnson had signed the Friday prior to this gathering). Motley then reminds her audience that the future is not yet secure in an era with Mississippi poll taxes, Dirksen Amendments, and Georgia’s county unit–based primaries. She reminds her audience of the importance of maintaining the “Grand Alliance,” of labor, intellectuals, religious liberals, and civil rights advocates scarcely a year before Stokely Carmichael would drive a wedge between many allies who disagreed on methods of achieving power. She closes her address by urging members of the alliance to continue to strive for educational integration.

F

irst, I want to say how pleased I am to have this opportunity to address the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on its return to desegregated Birmingham. Your coveted invitation to be the guest speaker at this opening night banquet is, indeed, a high compliment. No city in America owes more to the SCLC than Birmingham. Your crusade for freedom put Birmingham on the civil rights map and has assured it a place in the history of our fight for freedom. I am especially proud to be here to honor the movement’s most celebrated daughter, Rosa Parks. We do honor tonight Mrs. Parks, the freedom fighter whose proud refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, ten years ago was an act of courage comparable in importance to that of the Yankee Militiaman 308

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at Concord, who “fired the shot heard ’round the world.” No Emerson has yet given Mrs. Parks’s historic act the poetic commemoration which it deserves, but when the history of the second half of the twentieth century is written there is no doubt in my mind that Montgomery, 1955, will rank with Fort Sumter, 1861, and Concord, Massachusetts, 1775, as a turning point in our nation’s history. It is, of course, always a great pleasure to see Martin King, but especially on a memorable occasion such as this. The record Dr. King has compiled in the last ten years has established him not only as America’s most widely acclaimed freedom fighter but as spokesman for the entire country. He is an American hero of authentic distinction who has achieved an unprecedented position of respect and prestige throughout the world. His inspiring oratory, his doctrine of aggressive restraint, his sweeping influence for good over the entire American scene, have made him a leader of unique importance—every great cause requires great leadership. We are fortunate indeed that, at this time in history, Dr. King came to us to serve and to lead. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, that historic declaration of human equality, would have been thought impossible ten years ago at the time Mrs. Parks refused to obey the order to move to the back of the bus. Yet, today, we find that momentous act significantly strengthened and implemented by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act will rewrite the history of the southern United States in the next few decades. Nevertheless, its passage through congress was relatively tranquil. It is a measure of the strength of the civil rights forces that such a significant legislation—this pioneer involvement by the federal government in an area previously left to state misrule—was passed with such near unanimity. Notably, most of the opposition to the new voting rights act came from states where people are denied the right to vote. That opposition, we hope, has been now put down for all time by the passage of this new act. Consequently, we can all well understand the new-found fear and trembling on the part of the Jim Crow governors and legislators as they contemplate the future expansion of their constituencies. Let the new voters of the 1960s remember at the polls officials whose racist appeals kept them in political bondage. But let them never forget those civil rights martyrs who laid down their lives for this new day. The importance of the Voting Rights Act was illustrated by the historic manner in which it was signed last Friday by President Johnson. The president and the entire cabinet assembled and went to the rotunda of the Capitol. There the president spoke on this second great landmark in civil rights 309

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legislation passed during the Johnson administration. With unprecedented speed, the Justice Department has moved toward implementation of the Voting Rights Bill by the filing of a suit in Mississippi to bar enforcement of that state’s poll tax law. I believe that wise exercise of the right to vote is now the keystone to actual equality, legal equality having been won. It is through the ballot that the great social changes which transformed America in the past have been authorized. The voting strength of Negroes does not mean only civil rights legislation and the complete destruction of state-supported segregation and discrimination. It means an equal share in the state’s revenues for all communities and individuals, regardless of race. It means paved streets in the Negro community as well as in the white community. And it means the harnessing of the power and resources of the state to provide the economic changes required for the elimination of poverty and illiteracy. The gains achieved in the civil rights area thus provide hope for gains in other areas. All this will be part of the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another important gain which has been won in recent years is the ruling of the United States Supreme Court in support of that honored but often ignored principle known as “one man, one vote.” The elimination of malapportionment and rural domination of state legislatures has enfranchised city voters and brought legislators closer to the realities of the twentieth century. In this connection we should be thankful for the recent defeat in the United States Senate of the Dirksen Amendment which would have overruled the Supreme Court’s “one man, one vote” decision. Yet, we must remember that this amendment, which would have allowed for the reapportionment of one house of the state legislature, on a basis other than population, actually received a majority of votes in the Senate. It received fifty-seven votes while only thirty-nine were cast against it. Needless to say, every senator from the states where Negroes are denied the right to vote supported this amendment. It was only defeated because a two-thirds vote is required for a constitutional amendment. We cannot be secure when, in the most heavily democratic and liberal senate of this century, such a proposal could come within seven voters of adoption. Another result of the “one man, one vote” decision has been the end of the state of Georgia’s county unit system, under which a candidate who received a majority of votes could actually be defeated by overweighted rural ballots in a statewide primary. As if it were not bad enough that Negroes were not allowed to vote in Georgia, when they did vote, their votes were not counted equally. But the fact that such an utter perversion of majority rule could have 310

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persisted for so long, and the fact that it took federal intervention to destroy it, shows how fragile our liberties are. Today, 1965, ten Negroes sit in the Georgia Legislature, two senators and eight representatives. Some day the legislatures of all southern states will contain Negroes in substantial numbers. That day cannot come too soon. I should say at this time that as many of you know I hold the office of president of the Borough of Manhattan. In this an elective office I represent 1,700,000 residents in the heart of New York City. My jurisdiction includes Black Harlem and Park Avenue, Wall Street, and Chinatown. Manhattan’s newly created Puerto Rican ghettoes and the famous Lower East Side. I am the twentieth person to hold the office of borough president since the position was established with the consolidation of five boroughs (counties) into New York City on January 1, 1898. In the beginning, most of the borough presidents were Irish-Americans. In the 1930s and ’40s there was a string of Jewish borough presidents. In November 1953, a Negro was elected to hold this position for the first time. When the borough presidency was held by a member of a white minority group, one did not hear racist charges or complaints. Historically in New York as in many areas candidates had been nominated for office for many different reasons one of which is their ethnic appeal. The tradition of the balanced ticket in a melting pot society is an old custom that has been adhered to by reformers and traditionalists alike. Yet, when this rotation of office brings a succession of Negroes into a high position there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. The quality of the candidate is ignored and the feeling is piously expressed that race should not be a factor in the selection of candidates. Where were all these critics when Negroes were excluded from candidacy or public office because of their race? I believe that full equality demands treatment of the Negro community the same way that our society treats its other communities and that includes the political recognition of the Negro. I believe in electing people without regard to their race, and I am aware that those who cry “race”—on both sides—are often those who have no more worthy arguments to present. But I do not believe that all the merit and all the fitness to govern can be found in people of one color. I look forward to the day when race will be relegated to obscurity as a criterion in the selection of candidates for high office. But until that happy day we must all remain aware of our longstanding struggle to prevent discrimination and to gain first-class citizenship for the Negro. And I know as you know that first-class citizenship means not only the right to vote but the right to run for office and the right to hold public office. In order to do this, it will be necessary for Negroes by 311

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the hundreds of thousands to take advantage of the new federal laws and to register and vote. A Negro who does not vote is just plain ungrateful to those who already have died in the fight for freedom. A Negro who does not vote is not helping to make a better world for his or her children. A Negro who does not vote is lending aid and support to the racists who argue that Negroes will not assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Any person who does not vote is failing to serve the cause of freedom, his own freedom, his people’s freedom, and his country’s freedom. The theme of this convention is the “Grand Alliance.” This term is used to denote the alliance of organized labor, the church liberals, and intellectuals along with the civil rights movement. This is the confederation which has provided the momentum for much of America’s social progress. The Grand Alliance is the backbone of the fight for freedom. The partners of the alliance believe in human rights not merely in the exaltation of property rights and state’s rights. Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King the alliance has strengthened and taken shape. Now, more than ever, all its components are becoming involved in the full struggle for equality. That means not only political and social equality, but economic equality which makes possible the full enjoyment of legal equality. The alliance currently exists in a relatively informal sense depending on relations between individuals. It is underfinanced and overextended. Although noble in purpose, it is a fledgling in operation. It is in need of substantial assistance from all the allies if it is to take its rightful place as the people’s lobby. The alliance should support the reformation of American society in a great many areas. It should seek massive federal assistance for employment and training of the unemployed adult male population especially among Negroes. It must seek such assistance to teach children to read, to integrate our schools, to build decent homes, and to provide adequate health care for all Americans. In its struggle for the achievement of these social goals the alliance should use all the time-honored methods which Americans have used to seek freedom. I am reminded of a statement made just six days ago by President Johnson, at the White House. The president said: “So free speech, free press, free religion, the right of assembly, yes, the right of petition, the right to buy ads, and to have teach-ins and sit ins, and parade and march and demonstrate, well they are all still radical ideas, and so are secret ballots and so is the principle of 312

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equal dignity and so is the principle of equal rights for all the sons and daughters of man. But all of these things are what America stands for and all of these things are what you and all other Americans need to stand up for today.” President Johnson thus encouraged the fullest range of expression for Americans anxious to improve social conditions and to implement court decisions already won. I think we should consider his remarks carefully and be guided by his words. We should not be weary. We must move toward full equality for our children’s sake. Let’s not forget them. In pursuit of this goal, now is the time to finish the task of integrating our schools. In this struggle we have a strong new ally in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which now has the responsibility for withholding federal funds from school districts which refuse to desegregate. Tonight we are dining in a white hotel in Birmingham, several hundred of us. But how many Negroes will go to school with whites in Birmingham come September 1965? How many Negro teachers will teach white children who are now teaching Negro children? The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has its responsibility but we also have ours. Our responsibility is to secure for our children all of the rights for which the civil rights revolution of the last decade was fought. There are today no more Jim Crow buses—there are only Negroes who are afraid to ride up front. There are no more segregated public recreational facilities—only Negroes who are afraid to take advantage of their rights. There are no more legally segregated schools—only Negro parents en masse to take their children by the hand to a white school in September 1965. I predict that such a demonstration by Negro parents coupled with the new federal determination to require compliance with the school desegregation decision as a condition of federal financial assistance will bring a swift end to segregated school systems in the south. Just as Rosa Parks’s courageous refusal to be segregated brought about the end of Jim Crow travel in this nation so every Negro mother has it within her power to end school segregation. Rosa Parks we honor you tonight because yours is the kind of courage and determination and nonviolent spirit we all need for the future. Your name will be remembered as long as freedom is abroad in this land. My prayer in Birmingham tonight is that Negro women everywhere will follow your example and hasten the day when all of our hard won legal rights are secure in practice here and throughout the land.

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Acknowledgments

W

e have been blessed by many people in completing this project. Without the aid of generous archivists around the country, we simply could not have found the eloquent texts that comprise this book. We thank Sandra Polizos of the Alabama Public Broadcasting System; Cathy Cade, Mary E. King, Heather Booth, and Sally Jacobs of the Wisconsin Historical Society; Joellen El Bashir of the Moorland-Spingarn Special Collections at Howard University; Plater Robinson of Tulane University; Jeff Chandler of the Bethune Council House; Anne Prichard of the University of Arkansas; Dorothy Hazelrigg of the University of South Carolina; Shawna Gandy of the Oregon Historical Society; Brian DeShazor of the Pacifica Radio Archives; Yvonne Arnold of the University of Southern Mississippi; Peter Filardo of New York University; Wendy Shay of the Smithsonian Museum of American History; Rukshana Singh of the Southern California Library for Social Science and Research; Kathy Shoemaker of Emory University; and Judy Brown of the Denver Public Library. Archives at the University of North Carolina, the University of Tennessee, the University of Alabama, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Duke University, the University of Virginia, Stanford University, the University of Georgia, and the King Center were also invaluable to the completion of this project. We would also like to thank Barbara Posey Jones, Rita Schwerner Bender, Ruth Steiner, Nancy Fichter Smith, Reverend Edwin King, and Tayari Jones for their help, feedback, and excellent counsel. To our family, friends, and students, Ingrid Houck, Debra Dixon, Patrick Burton, Fabeanne’ Collins, Matt Hittel, Krystin Olinski, Shari Smith, Justin Maynard, Lucy Morton-Hicks, Lindsay Opsahl, Allison Shuffield, Derik Mosrie, Megan Oliver, and James Lawrence, a special thank you for taking this project personally—and therefore making it better. Our friends at the University Press of Mississippi, particularly its nonpareil editors Seetha Srinivasan and Walter Biggins, have encouraged this project at every step. They have also improved it with their careful feedback and expeditious handling. We will miss you with your pending retirement, Seetha, even as we are aware that Walter has some estimable pumps to fill. 315

Acknowledgments

Finally, we dedicate this book to two of our special teachers, Dr. Yvonne Williams and Mrs. Georgeanne Brink, both of whom have made, and continue to make, a profound impact on how we see the world and its diverse inhabitants. Copyright and Credits Mary McLeod Bethune, courtesy of Margaret Symonette. Sarah Patton Boyle, courtesy of Roger Boyle and Patton Boyle. Mamie Till Bradley, courtesy of the Afro-American Newspapers. Daisy S. Lampkin, courtesy of Dr. Earl Douglas Childs, DMD. Rosa Parks, TM 2008 The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for SelfDevelopment, by CMG Worldwide, Inc. / www.RosaParks.org. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, from the Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin Papers #4171, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reprinted courtesy of Kay Kent and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Johnnie Carr, courtesy of Arlam Carr. Della D. Sullins, courtesy of Della D. Sullins. Barbara Posey, courtesy of Barbara A. P. Jones. Priscilla Stephens, courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives. Casey Hayden, courtesy of Casey Hayden. Modjeska M. Simkins, courtesy of Modjeska Simkins Collection, South Carolina Political Collections, The University of South Carolina. Charlotta Bass, document courtesy of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. Diane Nash, courtesy of Diane Nash. Lillian Smith, courtesy of Nancy Smith Fichter. Anne Braden, courtesy of the Estate of Anne Braden. Pauli Murray, courtesy of the Estate of Pauli Murray, c/o Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Victoria Gray, courtesy of Cecil Conteen Gray, Ph.D. Ruth Steiner, courtesy of Ruth Steiner. Fannie Lou Hamer, courtesy of Charles McLaurin. Annie Devine, courtesy of Barbara Devine Russell. Dorothy Cotton, courtesy of Dorothy Cotton. Martha Ragland, courtesy of Sandra Demson. Constance Baker Motley, courtesy of Joel Motley.

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Index Abernathy, Ralph D., xxiv Absalom, Absalom!, 65 AFL-CIO, 302 Alinsky, Saul, 301 Allen, Elizabeth, 257–58 Allen, Louis, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262 American Dilemma, An, 232 American Friends Services Committee, 211 American Revolution, 150, 298 Anderson, Marian, 151 Appalachia Act, 304 “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, An,” 57 Aristophanes, 90 Arnall, Ellis, 102, 103 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), xv Atlanta Constitution, 100, 102 Atlanta Transit Company, 105, 106 Attucks, Crispus, 121, 150 Autobiography of Medgar Evers, The, xii Available Means, xi

Birney, James, 56 Black, Hugo, 144 Black, Lucille, xvii Blackwell, Unita, xvii Blake, Eugene Carson, ix Blake, James, xiv Bloch, Charles J., 103, 104 Book of Common Prayer, 142 Bowles, Chester, 68 Boyle, Sarah Patton, 10–11, 293, 294 Boynton, Amelia, xvii Braden, Anne, x, 186–88 Braden, Carl, 143, 144 Brown, John, 84 Brown, T. B., 217 Brown vs. Board of Education, xix, 4, 43, 46, 48, 49, 52, 58–59, 75, 100, 107, 113 Bruce, Blanche Kelso, 227 Bryant, Roy, 28, 29, 30 Bunche, Ralph J., 150 Burke, Edmund, 115 Burroughs, Nannie H., 84 Byrnes, James, 73, 94

Bailey, Pearl, 151 Baker, Ella, x, xi, xii, xviii, 245–46 Baker, Josephine, 151 Baldwin, James, 247 Barbee, William, 166 Barnett, Ross, 167 Bass, Charlotta, x, 148–49 Bates, Daisy, viii, xix, 115, 143, 231 Battle of Bunker Hill, 150 Belafonte, Harry, 151 Bethune, Mary McLeod, xviii, 3–4, 34, 35, 36, 84, 181, 222, 231 Bill of Rights, 140, 141, 182 Birmingham News, 188, 189

Carawan, Candy, xvii Carawan, Guy, xvii Carmichael, Stokely, xii, xxii Carr, Johnnie, xviii, 81–82 Cash, W. J., 53, 65 Chaney, James E., 265, 267, 268, 286 Chekhov, Anton, 90 Church Women United (CWU), xv Civil Rights Act of 1957, 253 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 253 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 300, 301, 309 Civil Rights Act of 1965, 309, 310 Civil War, 53, 106, 150, 205, 235, 299 Clark, Septima, x, xi, xvii, xxiv 317

index

Cold War, 182 Cole, Nat King, 151 colonialism, 78 Colvin, Claudette, 83 Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), xiv Communism, 44, 45, 78, 107, 145, 152, 189, 197, 198, 210, 211, 305, 306 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), xi, xvii, xviii, 124, 125, 127, 128, 162, 210, 265 Cotton, Dorothy, 292 Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), 265, 268, 274, 277 Cowan, Polly, xviii Crommelin, John, 113 Crow, Jane, 230 Crow, Jim, 70, 86, 158, 159, 230, 309, 313 Cunningham, Mrs. Roy, 265 Darden, Charles, 120 Darrow, Clarence, 73, 79, 80 Davis, Jefferson, 227 Dawson, William, 150 Day, Fletcher, xiv Death of a Salesman, 90, 91 Declaration of Independence, 79, 235 Delta Sigma Theta, viii Democratic National Convention (1964), xvi, 286 Democritus, 45 Devine, Annie, xiii, xiv, xvi, 288–89 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 86 Dickerson, Earl B., 150 Diggs, Charles, 150, 216 Dirksen, Everett, 310 Dixiecrats, 143 Douglas, William O., 240 Douglass, Frederick, 149, 152, 226 Du Pre Lumpkin, Katharine, x, 50–51, 65 DuBois, W. E. B., 65, 152 Dunjee, Roscoe, 120 Durr, Virginia, xi, xvii Dylan, Bob, ix East, P. D. (Percy Dale), 113 Eastland, James, xvii, 73, 94, 189

318

Edmondson, J. Howard, 121 Eisenhower, Dwight, 48, 49, 120, 121, 151 Emancipation Proclamation, 73 Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, 146 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 138, 309 Englehardt, Sam, 113 Esther, 84, 110 Euripides, 90 Evangelical Christian Council, 107 Evers, Medgar, 242, 243, 244, 285 Evers, Myrlie, viii, 231, 241–42 Faulkner, William, 65 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 113, 210, 254, 261, 269, 283 Fellowship of the Concerned (FOC), xv Fifteenth Amendment, 256, 287 First Amendment, 290 Folsom, James, 147 For Human Beings Only, 294 Forman, James, ix, 221, 247, 249 Foster, Marie, xviii, 224–25 Fourteenth Amendment, 138, 287 Frazier, E. Franklin, 231 Freedom Rides/Riders, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 172, 174, 178 Freedom Vote, xiv Freedom’s Daughters, x Fritchman, Stephen H., 149 Full Employment Act of 1946, 302 Gailot, Mrs. Bernard, 225 Gandhi, Mahatma, 110 Garden of Eden, 173 Garrison, William Lloyd, 233, 234 Gelhorn, Walter, 145 Georgia Council on Human Relations, xviii Gettysburg (Pa.), 5 Gibson, Theodore R., 144 Goldfinch, Langston, 143 Gomillion, Charles G., 115, 297 Gomillion vs. Lightfoot, 297 Goodman, Andrew, 268, 286 Gordon, Walter, 150 Graetz, Reverend Robert, 115

index

Graham, Edward T., 144 Gray, Victoria (Jackson), xiii, xiv, xvi, 251–52 Gregg, Rosa, viii Gregory, Dick, ix Greyhound Bus Company, 125, 127, 159 Griffin, Marvin, 101 Grimke, Angelina, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 Grimke, Sarah, 56 Gueye, Madam Marie, 185

Javits, Jacob, 216 J.B., 90 Jefferson, Thomas, 12, 121 Jesus Christ, 4, 8, 9, 145 Job Corps, 302, 303 John Bright, 141 Johnson, Lyndon, 273, 276, 309, 312, 313 Johnson, Paul, 268, 276, 290 Jones, Albert, 265 Jones, Daniel, 259, 260, 261

Hall, Prathia, xvii Hamer, Fannie Lou, ix, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 280–82 Hamilton, Mary, xvii Hansberry, Lorraine, x, 88–89 Harbison, Mrs. Ralph, 34, 35 Hardi, Lasmidjah, 185 Hartsfield, William, 105, 106, 176 Hastie, William, 150 Haughton, G. R., 217 Hawkins, Augustus, 150 Haydon, Casey, xxii, 135–37 Head Start, 302 Hedgeman, Anne Arnold, viii Height, Dorothy, vii, viii, xviii, 181, 220–21 Help Our Public Education, 107 Henry, Patrick, 121 Hill, H. G., 161 Hitler, Adolf, 45, 175 Holland, Endesha Ida Mae, xvii House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 141, 144, 145, 146 Howard, Dr. T. R. M., 28 Hughes, Langston, 230 Hunter, Charlayne, 171 Hurley, Ruby, xvii, 234 Hurst, E. H., 259, 261

Kansas-Nebraska Act, 151 Kaplan, Kivie, 121 Kefauver, Estes, 205 Kennedy, John F., vii, 181, 183, 243 Kennedy, Robert, 182 Killers of the Dream, 65 King, Coretta Scott, xviii King, Edwin, 268 King, Marion, xviii, 199 King, Martin Luther, Jr., viii, ix, xi, xvi, xvii, xxiv, 86, 115, 116, 143, 151, 164, 309, 312 King John of England, 301 Ku Klux Klan, 45, 62, 86, 121, 153, 291

“I Have a Dream,” xxiv Jackson, Andrew, 153 Jackson, Lillian, xviii Jackson, Mahalia, 151 James, William, 71 Jara, Bishop, 8

Lampkin, Daisy S., 33–34 Laubach, Frank, 209 Lawson, James, xvii League of Women Voters, 60 Lee, Herbert, 259, 261, 262 Lee, Mrs. Herbert, viii Lewis, John, ix, 164 Lift Every Voice, xi Lincoln, Abraham, 5, 150, 274 Litany of Atlanta, 65 Loman, Willy, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96 Louchheim, Katie, 179–80 Lowenstein, Allard, xiv Lucy, Autherine, xvii, 75, 115, 231 Lumumba, Patrice, 153 lynching, xiv, xv, 28, 62, 63, 64, 65, 95 Lynd, Theron C., 272 Magna Carta, 300, 301 Making of a Southerner, The, 65 Manchester Guardian, 200

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Manpower Development, 302 March on Washington, vii, ix, xv, 222, 233 Marshall, Thurgood, xiv, 85, 120 Marshall Plan, 299 McCarron Act, 151 McCarthy, Joseph, 144, 145, 197 McCulloch, Margaret C., 202–3 McDonald, Joe, 283 McLeish, Archibald, 90, 91, 95 Memphis Committee on Community Relations, 208, 209 Meredith, James, xiv, 234, 235 Methodist Church Women, viii Meyer, Agnes E., 41–42 Meyer, Cornelia, 276, 279 Milam, J. W., 28, 29, 30 Miller, Arthur, 90, 92, 97 Mind of the South, The, 53, 65 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), xiii, 273, 289, 290, 291 Mississippi State Advisory Committee, 215, 218 Mississippi Student Union, 275 Mitchell, Arthur W., 150 Mixon, Dempsey W., xiv Montgomery Bus Boycott, xvii Montgomery Home News, 110 Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), 76, 86 Moody, Anne, xvii Moon, Moses, ix, xvi Moses, 86 Moses, Robert, xiv, 247, 248 Motley, Constance Baker, xiv, 231, 234, 307–8 Murray, Pauli, x, xi, 228–30 Myrdal, Gunnar, 232 Nash, Diane, viii, 154–55, 231 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), viii, xiii, xvii, xviii, 14, 15, 28, 31, 32, 63, 119, 120, 122, 143, 208, 210, 234 National Baptist Convention, 211 National Conference of Christians and Jews, 206 National Council of Churches, 211, 305

320

National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), vii, viii, xviii, 4, 180, 222, 223 National Press Club, 233 National Sharecroppers Union, 211 National Student Association (NSA), 138 National Youth Administration, 35 Negro Ministerial Alliance (Jackson, Miss.), 216 Neighborhood Youth Corps, 302, 303 Nixon, E. D., 85, 86 Noble, Jeanne L., 236, 237 O’Boyle, Father Patrick, ix Oedipus, 97 Office of Price Administration (OPA), 67, 68 Ogunlesi, Tonimowo, 185 Ovington, Mary White, 234 Owens, Jack, 113 Paine, Thomas, 151 Parchman Farms Prison, 172 Parker, C. Lee, 12 Parker, Mack, 94 Parks, Rosa, vii, viii, x, xi, xii, xiv, xviii, 37–39, 84, 85, 86, 192, 231, 308, 309, 313 Pauley, Frances, xviii Payne, Bruce, 249 Peace Corps, 200, 276, 300 Peacemakers, 211 Peck, James, 162 Peloponnesian War, 46 Pericles, 45 Petal Paper, 113 Pike, James, 227 Pinchback, Pinckney Benton Steward, 227 Plato, 46 Ponder, Annelle, xvii, 284, 285 Popper, Karl, 46 Porter, R. S., 266 Posey, Barbara (Jones), xviii, 118–19 Powell, Adam Clayton, 25, 49, 150 Prinz, Rabbi Joachim Proxmire, William, 253 Quakers, 56

index

Ragland, Martha, 296–97 Rainer, 22, 23 Rainey, Julian, 150 Rainey, Lawrence, 269 Raisin in the Sun, A, 90, 92, 94, 95 Randolph, A. Philip, viii, 233 Reagon, Cordell, 200 Reconstruction, 151 Redmond, Charles, 233 Reed, Willie, 28, 29, 30 Rhetoric of Struggle, The, xi Ribback, Alan, ix Richardson, Gloria, viii, x, xvii, 231 Rivers, Francis E., 150 Robinson, Bernice, xviii Robinson, Jo Ann, xii, xvii Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith, xvii Rolfe, Henry, Jr., 120 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 5, 36, 181 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 6, 36, 299, 305 Roosevelt, James, 146 Rope and Fagot, 65 Roundtree, Mrs. Dovey J., 230 Rustin, Bayard, vii Salem, Peter, 150 Sampson, Edith S., 72–73 Sandburg, Carl, 140 Schutt, Jane, xviii, 213–14 Schwerner, Michael, 265, 266, 267, 268, 286 Schwerner, Rita (Bender), 263–64 Security, Loyalty, and Science, 145 Seneca Falls Convention, 234 sexism: in black church, xvi; in civil rights movement, viii, xv, xviii, xxiv Shakespeare, William, 90 Sherrod, Charles, 200 Shuttlesworth, Reverend Fred, 115, 193, 194 Silver, James, 254 Simkins, Modjeska Monteith, xii, xiv, xv, 139–40 Sit-ins, 127, 132, 137, 138, 151, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 182 slavery, 54, 57, 58, 84, 149, 150, 204, 236, 240

Smith, Doug, 275, 279 Smith, Lillian, x, xviii, 65, 169–70 Smith, Mary, 83 Smith Act, 151 Socrates, 46 Sophocles, 90 South Carolina Council on Human Relations, xviii, 210 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), xvii, xviii, 116, 188, 211, 308 Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), 146, 211 Southern Regional Council, 210, 254 Spearman, Alice, xviii Steiner, Ruth, 270–71 Stennis, John, 253 Stephens, Patricia (Due), xviii, 129 Stephens, Priscilla, xviii, 123–24 Strange Career of Jim Crow, The, 59 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), viii, ix, xi, xiv, xvii, xxii, 200, 247, 250, 301 Sullins, Della D., 112–13 Sunny, Jeff, 283 Swanson, Gregory, 11, 12, 13, 14 Sweet Bird of Youth, 90, 91 Taft-Hartley Act, 151 Tallahassee Bus Boycott (1956), 124 Tallahatchie River, 31 Talmadge, Herman, 100, 101, 109 Tennessee Council on Human Relations, 208, 211 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 301, 304, 305 Terrell, Mary Church, 231 Thirteenth Amendment, 287 Thomas, Henry, 165 Thompson, Allen, 216 Thoreau, Henry David, 138 Till, Emmett, vii, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31 Till, Mamie (Bradley), 17–18 Tilly, Dorothy, x, 98–99 Tolstoy, Leo, 70 Trailways Bus Company, 125, 126, 159

321

index

Truth, Sojourner, 84, 149, 231, 234 Tubman, Harriet, 84, 149, 152, 231, 234 Tucker, Robert, 283 Tuskegee Civic Association, 188, 297, 301 United Church Women, 104, 106 United Nations, 74 Uphaus, Dr. Willard, 143, 144 Urban League, 120, 208 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 215, 216, 218, 254, 255 U.S. Constitution, 116, 119, 120, 140, 167, 182, 272 U.S. Information Agency, 222 Vandiver, Ernest, 101 Voice of Black America, The, xi Voter Education Project, 254 Wallace, George C., 113, 268, 298 War and Peace, 70–71 Warren, Earl, 304 Washington, Booker T., 149 Washington, George, 121 Waveland Conference, xxii Wayne, Chance, 91, 93, 94, 95 We Shall Be Heard, xi Weatherby, Bill, 200 Weaver, Robert C., 150 Wells, H. G., 7

322

Wells, Ida B., 231 West, James, 284 White, Harold, 114 White, Walter, 65 White Citizens Councils, 86, 103, 110, 111, 121, 143, 153, 291 Whitten, Jamie L., 287 Wilkins, Roy, viii, 120, 143 Williams, Dorothy, x, xvii Williams, Frances H., xviii, 61–62 Williams, Tennessee, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 Women in the Civil Rights Movement, x Women Public Speakers in the United States, xi Women’s Political Council, xii, xvii Woodward, C. Vann, 59 Woolworth’s, 127, 128, 133, 166 World Anti-Slavery Convention, 234 World Literacy Foundation, 208, 209 World War I, 150, 152, 299 World War II, 150, 152, 183, 299 Wright, Moses, 21, 30 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 60 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), xv, 35, 60, 69 Younger, Walter Lee, 92, 93, 95, 96 Zellner, John, 268 Zwerg, Jim, 164