My role in the movement was pretty much focussed on publicizing what we were up to since I had vast skills as a photographer and half-vast skills as a writer. That started in Wisconsin when I was a student and, about 1959, we started picket lines, visitations, fund raising and such to support the kids in the south who were sitting in at lunch counters. Our student NAACP got blacklisted by the Madison and national NAACP because we associated with leftists, but the student government types joined in and pretty soon were doing most of the work and leadership, so I headed to where the real action was.
Day after my last class, I headed to New York City with wife and baby and soon hooked up briefly with a friendly NAACP chapter (Welfare Dept.) and more importantly, with Brooklyn CORE. There I started a monthly newsletter for members and the community, and barraged local media about actions and neighborhood needs involving services, schools, housing.... We also helped to launch the political career of Major Owens with Brooklyn Freedom Democrats, but he survived it and is still in Congress from Brooklyn.
After I bit the poisonous apple of the middleclass, I started to spend significant time earning a living. I often mixed that with the movement when I discovered that editors would pay me to write about and photograph some of the same stuff I had been doing for free to publicize the movement. I traveled a lot through the hotspots in the south, especially MS where I eventually became good friends with Fannie Lou Hamer and always stayed in Ruleville with her brother. (I've been in Israel during the Intifada and felt perfectly comfortable there, but I don't recall ever feeling comfortable in MS.)
The other spot that is still etched into my psyche is Bogalusa, LA. I worked like hell to get Look magazine to run a piece on the Deacons for Defense and Justice (who carried guns to protect the nonviolent protesters against the violent classes), but never found the right stuff so that information with photos ran in a lot of smaller places like Newsday, Sepia, Ave Maria.... In the 1980s I visited Royan Burris in Bogalusa, and his new house had bars on all windows and loaded guns leaning against all 4 corners of the house!
I'm back in Wisconsin now, turned 65 a year ago (and still haven't mumbled that dreaded "r" word), but you know what? The instincts that got me (and probably all of us) neck deep in the movement don't retire either.
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