[This transcript has been edited to delete extraneous material for improved flow. Speakers were allowed to edit and expand their comments for clarity and completeness. As indicated by [brackets] some clarifications and explanatory annotations have also been added.]
| Phyllis Cunningham |
| Fatima Cortez |
| Laura Foner |
| Karen Haberman (Trusty) |
| Peter Orris |
| John McAuliff |
[BEGIN SESSION #1]
Cortez:
I'm going based on who's on my screen, going from the upper left, around. So Laura, if you will introduce yourself and just say what organization, what years, where you were, and that's it, and then we'll go on.
Foner:
Okay. By organization, do you mean what we're active in now?
Cortez:
No, then.
Foner:
My name is Laura Foner and I was in Arkansas SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] from June of 1965 through June of 1966.
Cortez:
Thank you. Peter.
Orris:
I'm Peter Orris, I'm now in Chicago. It's a two hour time difference. And I was working with Friends of SNCC in Boston in '63, '64, and was in Mileston Mississippi with SNCC in '64 summer, and then traveled around the state putting in the citizens band radios.
Cortez:
Thank you. Karen.
Trusty:
I'm Karen Haberman Trusty and I started by being an exchange student to Spelman and got involved in the Atlanta Movement there. Got to know SNCC, worked in the office, came back for the [Freedom Summer] training session in Oxford (OH) in '64. Went back to Atlanta, was the student white girl who went into the Atlanta [KKK] rally at Stone Mountain and somehow escaped with my life and then was down in Mississippi on the WATS line on the midnight to 8:00 AM shift as staff in 1964.[WATS (Wide Area Telephone Service) was a precursor to the 800 numbers commonly used today. SNCC and CORE WATS lines were operated around the clock, day and night, mostly by women. Activists out in the field used the WATS line system to call in to headquarters in Atlanta, Jackson, or Greenwood without those calls being billed to the phones of empoverished or endangered local movement supporters. The WATS women received reports, fielded emergency calls from the field, and dispatched what aid as was available. When travelling from one town to another, field workers would call in to WATS when they left and again when they arrived. If they were ambushed or arrested on the road, when they didn't check-in on arrival the WATS operator would know they were in trouble and sound the alarm. WATS operators typed up daily — sometimes hourly — reports and summaries that were used for press releases and to mobilize support from Friends of SNCC chapters and other support groups.]
Cortez:
Thank you. Okay, thank you. Phyllis?
Cunningham:
My name is Phyllis Cunningham. I went South to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, was in Hattiesburg and Palmer's Crossing. Palmer's Crossing first for the summer, and then moved into Hattiesburg and worked in the Fifth Congressional District, as it was called at that time, which included Gulfport and Biloxi, that area down by the coast, but I really stayed in Hattiesburg.And then after the Selma to Montgomery March, Jim [Forman] asked me to come over to Alabama, and so I was in Alabama until late 19 — I think it was 1967. Until '67 and worked in — I lived in Selma and worked in all the counties — went to all the counties that SNCC went to in the Black Belt area west of Montgomery.
I also must say that at the end — In the fall of '64, probably around October/November, the [Medical Committee for Human Rights] had doctors coming down there, and they had decided at that time that they wanted to hire full-time nurses and I wasn't really — I didn't want to leave SNCC at all. So they said, "Well, You can. You're actually doing in SNCC what we would want you, the Medical Committee to be doing, so we'll give you a car and we'll give you — "I think it was about $100 a month. So I was with the Medical Committee and that money went to really enrich our projects and we had another car. So, that's where I was. Mississippi and Alabama.
Cortez:
Thank you. John.
McAuliff:
John McAuliff, I'm in Riverhead, New York, east of the city. I learned about SNCC hitchhiking around, learning about Civil Rights Movement in I think it was '61 when I was at Carleton [College]. Went back, finished, then the next two or three years at Carleton we did a lot of support work, hosted the [SNCC] Freedom Singers, various speakers, and then I organized for Carleton a very large group to be part of the [Mississippi Summer Project]. I was in Cleveland most of the summer of '64 and then went off to the Peace Corps, so that was my short history.
Cunningham:
Cleveland, Mississippi, you mean?
McAuliff:
Cleveland, Mississippi, yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. The [Mississippi] Delta. Cleveland, Mississippi.
Cortez:
Okay, I'm Fatima Cortez-Todd and I started, actually, in New York with Riverdale CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]. My mother was chairperson, and we went to the March on Washington [in 1963], and we were at a lot of organizing meetings that my mother took me to that I kept hearing stuff and getting more and more involved. And ultimately, I went to Louisiana in the summer for Freedom Summer '64, and then I stayed longer and came back at the end of '64 and then went back and came back in '65 to New York and worked for National CORE. So I'm the only non-SNCC person here. But we all share the same Freedom Summer time and then I had all other stuff after that.
Cortez:
Okay, we should go around now and talk about how and why we became involved, what did it mean for us, or how did it change us. We each have five minutes. Okay. Peter, now you're up in my upper left hand corner, so Peter would you start?
Orris:
Oh, just don't feel all alone [as a CORE person]. Some of us in high school put in our time picketing Woolworths in New York for CORE also, so you're not all by your lonesome.
Cortez:
I know. I know.
Orris:
It was quite natural for me to become involved. I was active in high school. I went to high school in New York. I was in high school and had been involved in the Ban the Bomb Movement, and then became involved with CORE and the activities with Walgreens. And participated in my senior year, with my mother, in a freedom ride as part of CORE's Route 40 Initiative in Maryland.[Referring to CORE's campaign to desegregate eating and lodging establishments on the main highways between New York and Washington DC. Because nonwhite diplomats and UN delegates travelling between the two cities had been denied service and abused, segregation on those routes had become an issue of international relations. CORE was able to garner publicity and embarass the U.S. State Department into applying federal pressure to force Maryland to end enforcement of local segregation ordinances against travelers with diplomatic immunity as required by international treaties. Black college students from Howard and other HBCU then donned African garb to demand service in Route 40 restaurants to expose the absurdity of the Jim Crow system.]So that was quite something for my fellow students in high school, but then they asked me who I went with, and I had to tell them, "With my mother."
It was natural for me, because my mother had been involved — In '45, I was born late in '45, my father was part of the US military and was a captain. As a physician, he could bring his family to Germany with him as part of the Army. And we went to Germany and my mother came back absolutely committed never to have to tell somebody she didn't know it was happening.
As a Jew in Germany, she never wanted to feel she was in that position, and when she came back to the US, the issue of racism and the civil rights movement was critically important to her. So, I was involved in the March on Washington and worked in their office in '63 and met with SNCC people. And then when I went to college, Dottie Zellner decided I was to go to Mississippi along with Foreman, so that's how I got into this situation.
Cortez:
Thank you. Karen.
Trusty:
Well, I was a freshman at Connecticut College for Women and I really hated it with a passion. They had an exchange program and I had read the book "Black Like Me," and I had a little bit of knowledge about racism and stuff, but not much. But, I mostly wanted to get away from Connecticut College, and so I filled out to go down to Spelman. So I went to Spelman and I left on my nineteenth birthday, the fall of '63. I arrived in Spelman, and I was not going to get involved in the movement. I had these resolutions, all of which I broke.And so, as I was there, I was one of the three white students on campus, and yet I felt more welcomed than I did in my high school or in the college that I was going to. Not everybody welcomed me, but the people who did — I had my first best friend there. It meant so much to me. I studied with Staughton Lynd. It was right after Howard Zinn had left, so there was a bit of turmoil.
[Historian Howard Zinn had been fired as Chair of the History Department because of his support for students active in the Freedom Movement in Atlanta.]Meanwhile, the Atlanta demonstrations started up again, and so I saw this little sign on a tree that said, "Do you have questions about the demonstrations? Come here." And it was a little basement room, and Jim Foreman was leading it and I was just there because I was curious.
And toward the end of the meeting, I raised what I call my lily-white hand to ask this question saying that I wanted to be a psychiatrist and I didn't want to get involved in the movement because it would change my career path. And he was so kind. He basically said, "It's a good thing that you want to help people, but you can't help people until racism has been changed." I had worked in a mental hospital and I saw a lot of racism there, and I immediately knew he that was right, and I was on the picket line the next day.
I got arrested twice, once with Judi Richardson, and I started hanging out at the SNCC office in their communications department. I'm the world's worst typist, but I still did that and it really meant a lot to me. I got arrested and then I went back to Connecticut College for — I think I had half a nervous breakdown there and came back into SNCC for the [Freedom Summer] training at Oxford, and I worked with Dottie mostly trying to keep track of everybody.
Then my father had said he'd have a nervous breakdown if I went into Mississippi, so I came back to Atlanta. And while I was there, I was hanging around with Chuck Neblett and Wilson Brown and Marshall Jones, the Freedom Singer people, and we ended up going to a, basically what turned out to be Klan rally at Stone Mountain in July 4th, 1964 — which I call my survival day. I still celebrate it.
There were 10,000 people, segregationists, in there when we walked in. I was the only white person [accompanying the Black SNCC members]. We walked in. I really didn't know, again, what I was doing and people stood up on their chairs and started yelling, "Kill the N's. Kill the N's."
[SNCC] People outside the stadium who were going to come in with us could hear it, and they didn't come in. People started hitting me with a chair — I'm not going to get into this too much, but anyway, I got out there alive because one white person in that stadium who didn't believe in violence, he believed in segregation, but not violence, from Columbus, Georgia. He put his arm around me and led me out of there and then went back in pulled people off Matthew Jones, who ended up with 16 stitches on his head who was a Freedom Singer. It was a very difficult, scary time.
Well, my father heard about it on the radio in New York, and the first thing he said is, "You can go into Mississippi now." So I went to Mississippi and I worked on the WATS line for the Freedom Summer, midnight to 8:00 and that's what I did. And so, I feel like everything that I did, I was unconscious about why I was doing it, and I've just finally come to the peace of I was supposed to be there because it totally changed my life and I'm so grateful for having that experience. I'd talk more about that, but I probably won't be able to do it without crying, so — And I'm so glad to be here, so thank you.
Cortez:
We're glad that you're here too. Thank you. Phyllis.
Cunningham:
Hi. Gosh, I don't know where to start. Well, I'll tell you. When I started was in college. I was doing my clinical experience for nursing at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. It's connected to Mayo Clinic and we hated — I mean, a group of us who belong to an organization — It was considered left-wing radical at that time and we were forbidden on a lot of campuses — called Young Christian Students.We were following the worker-priest movement in Paris. It was born out of the worker-priest movement in Paris. But anyway, to make a long story very short, we went every week. And we asked if we could have permission to bring the NAACP down from Minneapolis and St. Paul. Well, they came down and they opened our eyes to the racism and segregation, really, that was going on in Rochester, Minnesota.
Then I went to a conference, a Young Christian Student conference, in the Chicago area and a fellow from New Orleans had come up and told us all about what was going on there. And then, when I graduated, I went to Chicago and I worked full-time for the Young Christian Students and we were then demonstrating at Rainbow Beach because Blacks could not go to Rainbow Beach. They had a terrible, terrible segregated school system. We demonstrated against the Department of Education in Chicago. We did a lot of work in terms of housing to testing apartments and rentals that were segregated.
I also was on the fringes of Friends of SNCC, Chicago Friends of SNCC, and was involved in raising money for to get cars to go south.
But anyway, Maria Varela, worked with me and Young Christian Students. And then Tim Jenkins was going with Loretta Sochack(?) who was working with Young Christian Students and we were doing a lot on racism on college campuses. And Tim came up with Chuck McDew and I learned my world was even expanded more. And Maria went South and kept asking me to come down and it took me a year to finally make the decision to go, so I went down in '64 and I worked, basically, at the Community Center in Palmer's Crossing.
And people found out I was a nurse and it became very apparent to me that voter registration, racism — Everything's connected to racism and I did a lot of consultation and advice in terms of nursing and when I went back in to Hattiesburg and worked, I worked with organizations that were set up — Well, actually SNCC had some health, welfare groups and I worked with those groups in consultation and advisement, and it was very important.
We were trying to contact — To get to the — What do you call it? The Washington Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and they actually said they couldn't do anything about all this segregation in the south because they didn't have anybody to monitor the hospitals and the hospitals had been receiving Hill-Burton funds.
[The OEO was the main agency in charge of President Johnson's "War on Poverty" programs. Long before the War on Poverty, the Hill-Burton Act provided federal funds to states to build public hospitals and also prohibited racial discrimination by federally-funded hospitals. But in the 1960s, that anti-discrimination requirement was still widely ignored throughout the South.]So when Dr. Al Poussaint came and became head of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in the South, and what we did was we got a lot of information, people to write letters, and eventually it went to Washington, D.C. and Johnson, actually — It's a long story so I can't go into all of it right now, but anyway, to make a long story short, Medicare was passed because Johnson had said "I can't do anything unless you bring me the documentation" et cetera, and I think as a result of a lot of the work that the Medical Committee and SNCC did, together with the people in Washington, D.C. that were working on this, so we contributed to getting Medicare passed in 1965.
Also, I was on the — I was in Gulfport when the first Bloody Sunday happened.
[Referring to the March 7, 1967 assault against nonviolent protesters on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma Alabama.]SNCC called right away and said, "Get over to — " SNCC from Atlanta called and said, "Get over to Selma," so I went for the second [attempted march] and the third [march]. And together with the Medical Committee van and a Medical Committee nurse, we rode up and down the highway in this van. We called it the "green dragon" and picked up people who were — Couldn't make it, et cetera, and stayed in the tents overnight and bandaged feet and did a lot of healthcare.
And then I worked — I stayed — I went back to Alabama in late '65. No, it was — No. Yeah. '60 — No. Yeah, late '65. Or — Anyway, I get my dates mixed up. Anyway, I went back to Alabama and worked with the SNCC people. I worked with SNCC in Lowndes County and Wilcox County and a lot of the counties in the Black Belt.
And the tent cities was at least —
[Referring to the tent encampments set up in Lowndes County and many other areas in the Deep South to house sharecroppers who had been evicted from their homes because they dared to try to register to vote.]
Cortez:
Phyllis. Phyllis.
Cunningham:
Yeah? Okay. Too much.
Cortez:
More later.
Cunningham:
Okay. Yep, okay. Sorry.
Cortez:
No, no problem. John.You know what? If I put the hand up that means, you know — You have to slow down.
McAuliff:
Thanks, Fatima. Could you rephrase for a second the parameters of this presentation? Exactly what we should be saying.
Cortez:
We're supposedly, in this particular session it's, "How did our participation affect us?" That is, you can choose how and why you became involved, or what it meant for you or what changed.
McAuliff:
Okay, yeah. All right. I just —
Cunningham:
I was off. I'm sorry.
Cortez:
It's okay. We all get carried away.
McAuliff:
It's hard for any of us to put limits around what to say. And I did some of it in my intro. I had gone from high school in Indianapolis to Carleton, and Indianapolis is very conservative city and I was fairly on the libertarian scale of conservative. So I get to Carleton and though it's in Minnesota, it was a more national school. And I was reading the things that were in the press. A friend of mine from high school and I then spent two weeks hitchhiking around the South to try to figure out what was actually going on and what — How we should respond to it.In Atlanta, I met Stoughton Lynd and Howard Zinn and some SNCC people. And to this day, I don't know who the SNCC people were, but that was the first contact with them. And then we went on to Mississippi and met Medgar Evers and also met [Mississippi Governor] Ross Barnett. He was willing to see these college kids because nobody was prepared to talk to him from the North. We also, in Georgia, seen Lester Maddox. He was the guy who had the ax handles, and the chicken —
[Referring to Lester Maddox, owner of the Pickrick restaurant in Atlanta GA. He placed a barrel of ax-handles by the entrance for white patrons to club down any Black person who tried to enter in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Based on his violent defense of segregation, white voters elected him governor of Georgia in 1966.]Anyway, this was a what-is-really-going-on kind of trip, and of course, we saw what was really going on and were very affected by it, so I spend much of my other years at Carleton doing support work for SNCC. We did sacrifice meals. We had speakers. We had the Freedom Singers.
We actually got into a big fight in Northfield, Minnesota about handing out leaflets to voters saying that if they were in Mississippi and they were Black they couldn't have the same right to vote. So, there was a variety of projects and as I said before, then I pulled together 12, 15 people from Carleton to go to Mississippi [for Freedom Summer].
I was not able to go to Oxford because I had a previous commitment that week, so I went through Tennessee and was assigned to Vicksburg and had this intense conversation with Bob Moses because Vicksburg didn't meet my image of what I was going to Mississippi for. It seemed this very modern, very heterogeneous city. Of course, at the end of the summer there was a bomb that had exploded, but Bob heard me and sent me — I think it was to Shaw originally and then I was there just for a couple of weeks and they needed people more in Cleveland [MS], so that's where I was for most of the summer, doing door knocking and taking people in to register and going to a lot of church meetings.
Cortez:
Well, can I interrupt? With all of that in mind, meanings and so forth, we're looking for how you felt about what you were doing.
McAuliff:
Well, I think that how I felt — I was going to say that one of the other people who was in Cleveland at that point was Heather Booth, so that's — Our friendship goes back to those days, but I mean, I think that the whole process, the original hitchhiking around trip and then intensified by Mississippi was that it provided a insight into a reality that had not been part of my home, very non-political home, or my very —At that point, Carleton had, I think, three Black students, all of whom were Africans. There had been an African American, but she was no longer there, so it was very much giving a different sense of reality, and also a sense of community, organization and community struggle.
I mean, I very much saw our being in Mississippi as having a symbolic function and having the role of getting national media attention. It's the stuff that I knew and people who were intensely involved doing support work knew about it, but most people didn't know about it and I went to the conference at the end of the summer in the other half of the state. Remember the big conference that rounded up the — The summer where they brought together all the Freedom school people and the folks who had been voter registration.
And so I think it gave me both a sense of more complicated American reality, in terms of class and race, but also a sense of organizing. The idea of organizing is major focus of my life. I then was in Peace Corps and then I did anti-war work. And in a sense, I did Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, until that normalization happened. Now I do Cuba. And I would say all of those things are closely related to what I learned during that summer and during — I don't want to say just the summer, because I think — The SNCC people coming to the campus and trying to get other people to understand. Trying to get people to do a sacrifice meal was part of that process.
Cortez:
Thank you. Thank you. Laura. Excuse me, before you start, more of how you came to this and more of the feelings.
Foner:
Yeah, yes. Yes, yes. That's what I thought the question was. Thank you very much.Yeah, so I was born in 1944, and my parents came from immigrant Jewish families. They were radicalized during the Depression and both became communists. So, I grew up in a communist household. My father [Philip Foner] was fired from a teaching job at City College and was then blacklisted for many, many years.
So, I grew up in the '50s in a very left-wing household in a community that actually had a — There was a left-wing community there, but the community also had some very organized anti-communist right-wingers. And so I grew up in a period where, as we know, there was a whole myth about the American dream — America, "The land of the free, home of the brave," and all that and —
But I was — knew that the FBI was out to get us and I had friends whose parents were underground [meaning in hiding] or in jail, and then there was the Rosenberg execution, so that's all to say in context that I always felt like I didn't really belong, or I wasn't part of the American consensus. And the history I was learning at home about this country was very different from the history that I was being taught in school.
My father was working on, both the history of the labor movement and also a lot of — I didn't realize at the time, but he was working on a five volume Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass starting in 1944 when I was born, and the first volume was published in 1950. I just recently kind of discovered this. So he was the first person to collect the works of Frederick Douglas and understand — I mean, not that other historians didn't understand this, but really pull together the writings and to understand this major — The major contribution that he made.
So anyway, I grew up feeling very alienated in some ways from the US sort of consensus, but also longing to be a part of a movement for change. Which for me at that time did not represent the Communist Party because it seemed kind of old and stale and — whatever. My parents, by the way — Cuba, were totally rejuvenated by the Cuban Revolution and that's a whole other story.
So when I was in high school, I was really aware of some of the early Freedom Rides and sit-in moments. Friends of mine and I would picket Woolworths in a neighboring town. I was really inspired by what was going on and had some inkling that this represented a major shift in this country.
When I was in college, my sophomore year, Chuck McDew came. I was at Brandeis and he was there for a semester on some kind of special program, and he was telling people about SNCC. So that was my first real introduction to SNCC. I went to the March on Washington in '63, but I was in — In the summer of '64, Mississippi Freedom Summer, I was in Europe. But I knew people who had gone south, and so in my mind I thought, "This is what I need to do." So when I graduated college, I tried to figure out a way to be part of the Southern Freedom Movement. Although, I was also scared, but I was also very — I wanted to be there.
The Arkansas SNCC project decided that even though Mississippi — SNCC in Mississippi decided not to repeat the Summer Project for all kinds of reasons. The Arkansas people decided to have a smaller, more scaled-down summer program, but really try to make it smaller and also make sure that it was really balanced with half, at least half, Black people. So, that's what I did. So I went to Arkansas and I ended up —
I went to a couple of other places first, but I ended up living for the next year in the town of Gould, G-O-U-L-D, Arkansas, which is south of Pine Bluff, a town of about not that much over 1,000. 80% Black. Similar, I'm sure, to what other communities peopled lived in. Totally segregated. The highway, the railroad tracks — There was the Black side of town and the white side of town.
I was living on the Black side of town with — After the summer one other SNCC staff person who was a Black man from Mississippi, so it was quite a big — To be there — I mean, there had never been a white person living on the Black side of town, let alone a white woman living on the Black side of town. And mostly, I did a lot of different things. Mostly I, in the summer I set up a Freedom School with classes and we built a library and there was a lot of —
So, I'll say in terms of changing, the experience changed me in, I would say, really profound ways. I had never seen [rural] poverty, I'd never seen people living in shacks without running water and just — So, the way of life was very different for me.
I lived — There are so many things to say about this. The person I lived with, the woman whose home I lived in, was named Mrs. Carrie Dillworth, and she had been an organizer with the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. And there were a couple of other people in the community who were leaders in the local organization that we worked with, helped form, and then worked with, who had been organizers in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and were long time community leaders and fighters.
So, I would say in terms of some of what I learned and how I was changed — I had never — I mean, I was so moved and inspired by the courage of the people who I lived and worked with, and that has stayed with me my entire life. The whole — The SNCC strategy and understanding of, really working with developing the local leadership and taking guidance from the local leadership, learning from the people who are our elders and who had a history of struggle, and understanding that we were part of this —
We were just little flecks. We were part of this long stream of history that we were not going to see the end of and we're still not going to see the end of it. That to feel part of this national movement for change that was so profound and so inspiring on kind of a soul level. It was not anything I had ever experienced before. I've experienced it some other times since then, but it had a profound impact on me and still does.
Cortez:
Thank you. Thank you. I just want to say that I was also born at the end of 1945 in October. I went to the University of Connecticut. It wasn't a college for women, but the University of Connecticut. I was raised in New York and I come from a family that — My father was Puerto Rican, but he was in denial because it wasn't a good thing to be a Puerto Rican in New York at that time. And he could pass and he'd pass for a white Castilian Spaniard.I was raised rather privileged and very sheltered, but in the midst of all of that the people around me — I had an aunt who said, "Do not tell me any secrets on the phone." And she taught me how to have conversations of, "Oh, didn't you hear about — " "Oh, no, no. I didn't hear that." "But did you know that who — " "Nope. Don't know who." And it was conversation — Because she knew that she was being wire-tapped. I didn't know what that meant, but that's what it was.
I spent a lot of my teenage years on the Shinnecock Reservation, which is in the Hamptons in New York which was very different from the rest of the Hamptons. The reservation land was very different. And I knew that something was wrong, but I didn't know what. And I knew that people would say, "Oh, the Shinnecocks, they're just dirty." And my family was out of Arkansas Native American, so Pine Bluff and Cottonmouth mean a lot to me just in terms of towns. I had never been there. And so all of this stuff was going on around me and there were some very, very poor people in my family that I knew nothing about because we weren't allowed to have contact with them.
I was actually a New York debutante twice, at the same time my mother was going to court to get an apartment in Riverdale and she had been working with the New York Commission on Human Rights and I just knew that we had a new apartment and it was in — She had to go to court for it, and I didn't understand what that meant.
She also was involved in Women Strike for Peace and then CORE in Riverdale and she became a chairperson and I understood, "Oh, that's a group that's doing some very important stuff down in the South. Okay. And they're sending money. Okay." But it never clicked, and I went to a private school where 31 of us went in as Freshmen and 31 of us graduated as Seniors, so I was very sheltered.
But I was aware of some other things going on around me that I wasn't a part of. And then, all of a sudden, my mother said, "No. You're coming with me to these meetings." And then I started to feel and I started to find out that I had a responsibility to my community, to my People of Color that were catching shit all over the country, and I had a responsibility to stand up and do something. When the March on Washington came, I made the banners for the buses and I went and it was the best day of my 17 years at that point.
And when we came back, there were more meetings because they were talking about the week that was to be. There was a Sunday salon at Andrea Simon's house and all the information about what was going on and the different movements around the country and how the folks there could do stuff for it.
And then the information came about Freedom Summer, and I'm like, "I'm going." And my mother's like, "No, you're not." And I said, "Yes, I am," and I announced it to the group who rallied behind me to send me, and I actually went on a first class Delta flight [to New Orleans]. I mean, everything is an oxymoron for me.
And of course, in the first week that I'm in Louisiana, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner go missing and I had to call home. My mother says, "I knew it wasn't you." And I'm like, "Well, how'd you know?" She said, "Because you just wouldn't be out there on your own and put yourself in danger." "Oh. Okay. So you weren't worried?" "No, we weren't worried." And I'm like, "Okay."
So, that's how I got to be in the middle of the movement and what I came away from Freedom Summer is that I couldn't leave Louisiana. That I felt committed I needed to stay there. I needed to do more work and I needed to be a presence that — I mean, I would cook dinners for some of the people that I stayed with and they had never had lasagna and I said "Oh, you got to have this."
So, I learned so much from them and what I could give them back were different dishes and conversation and working on literacy and working on what it feels like to not be in prison. And that is what enriched me for the rest my life because I've never stopped being in one — Handling one issue after another because it's what you do when — I felt I was compelled to be an activist all of my life, and it changed with different evolving movements — Feminist Movement, the Women of Color Movement, the Anti-violence Movement — All of the stuff that was important like Vietnam War and it just made me — It fed my spirit is what it did.
Okay. I'm going to stop there. It's 11:11, my time, which we're supposed to have our — We have four minutes to our break and if everybody would like to have a break we can do that now just for 10 minutes and then come back at 11:20. Or do you want to just keep on going?
Foner:
I wouldn't mind a quick break, like five minutes or something.
Cortez:
We can take 10.
[Break Time Open Conversation]
Cunningham:
Well, there's a lot of music on the street and I have my window open. Can you hear it?
Foner:
No.
Cunningham:
Okay, fine.
Cortez:
That's so unfair, you get to hear music and we don't.
Cunningham:
24 hours. 24/7.
Foner:
Where are you physically?
Cunningham:
I'm in the Upper West Side of New York.
Foner:
Oh.
Cunningham:
Across from Central Park. So, there's a lot of people out on the benches.
Foner:
I know it's a gorgeous sunny, warm, day. I'm in Boston in Jamaica Plain.
Cunningham:
Oh, Jamaica Plain.
Foner:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's where I live.
Cunningham:
Okay.
Foner:
But I come from New York.
Cortez:
I went to high school near the Museum of Natural History
Cunningham:
I think I know your father.
Foner:
Uh-huh.
Cunningham:
Was it Moe?
Foner:
No, Moe is my uncle. My father's Phil.
Cunningham:
Oh, no, no. I've never — Yeah, I'm familiar with Moe.
Foner:
Moe. Yeah, Moe was my uncle. They're all gone.
Cunningham:
He went to Spain.
Foner:
What?
Cunningham:
He went to Spain for the War In Spain.
Foner:
No. Actually, none of them went to Spain.
Cunningham:
Okay, nevermind.
Foner:
None of them went to Spain, but my uncle Henry worked on the archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Cunningham:
That's okay. That's the Abe Lincoln Brigade
Is that Bread and Roses project still on at 1199? [Referring to the healthcare workers union now known as 1199: National Health Care Workers' Union.]
Foner:
As far as I know. Yes — I don't know, but I think so.
Cortez:
I was a member of 1199 when I worked at Lincoln Hospital's mental health services.
Foner:
Wow, when did you —
Cortez:
We were on strike to bring the union in.
Foner:
When were you there at Lincoln Hospital?
Cortez:
'66 to '69.
Foner:
Oh, wow.
Cortez:
Yeah, we did a lot of community mental health work there. I can't tell you — I followed whatever job was going to take me to the middle of the action.
Foner:
Because — Let's see, when was I, no '71 to '73 there were — I lived in Washington Heights '71 '73 and I lived with people who were doing their residencies at Lincoln Hospital and there was a big — The Young Lords — Do you remember there was a big Young Lords action?
Cortez:
Yeah.
Orris:
The Lincoln Collective was the — I forget who in the Lincoln Collective, but somebody told us back maybe early '70s, late '60s, that their aim was to build communism in the South Bronx and for sure if it was created in the South Bronx it would spread over the rest of New York.
Foner:
If not the world.
Cortez:
[[laughter and crosstalk ]] I don't think they succeeded.
[End Break]
Trusty:
[SNCC leader] Charlie Cobb challenged me to go work with white people and so I remember that meeting so well and I said to myself, well, by God I will, and I ended up going to Appalachia for the [inaudible 00:49:54] and —
Foner:
I'm sorry. I missed that — You went to Appalachia for what?
Trusty:
Well, Charlie Cobb challenged me to go work with white people.
Foner:
Right.
Trusty:
And so, after SNCC I went and worked in Appalachia for 10 years trying to do welfare-rights work and living with the people. It was very — The people were the people, but it was very difficult to talk about race because it was all white.And we did some good welfare-rights organizing and it was interesting to me to see the class situation there because they had a poor class of people. That's what they called them. And then the middle class, and the middle class people treated the poor class people like shit. I mean, it was just interesting. Going into a grocery store with somebody who had food stamps and watching how they were treated by the clerks and by the — It was not as bad as Mississippi because they didn't shoot them, but it was there.
Foner:
Yeah. Well, that's a whole — I mean, I was going to say something about acknowledging that this group, except for our facilitator, is all white people and just to acknowledge that in terms of the dynamics of this group.
McAuliff:
Was it sorted out that way deliberately?
Foner:
I think some people are missing.
Cortez:
Yeah, Doris Ladner is missing. She's the only one.
Cunningham:
It's her birthday I think. Or it was yesterday. Yesterday was her birthday, yeah.
Orris:
I know where her priorities are. [laughing]
Foner:
Well, in terms of the — I mean, I'm not in control of this at all, but I'm assuming that Bruce or whoever did the sorting was trying to mix it as much as possible in some way, but I don't know if more white veterans responded than people of color. I have no idea. But looking at who —
Cortez:
That's going to be something that needs to be explored because it's kind of out of balance and I don't remember there being an out of balance — I think there were more people of color in Louisiana. I can only speak for Louisiana. There was more —
Orris:
Not the '64 project, but from then on, I think. Yeah.
Cortez:
And I think that, Karen, you did exactly what folks started moving towards, working in — At the March on Washington, the 10 things that were pledged, one of which was to go to your homes, to your communities, wherever that was, and go to your families, whoever they were, and start talking about these issues.[Referring to the March on Washington's list of 10 Demands that A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin read alound after Dr. King spoke and then asked the crowed of 300,000 to pledge that they would continue to fight for those demands in their home communities.]So it became — People of Color going and facing their families. My grandfather, for the first time in his life, was in the same place that my mother and I were at the March on Washington because we had harassed him enough to get him to see that this was important and he was very moved and very changed.
Foner:
And where did he come from?
Cortez:
Mississippi.
Foner:
Really?
Cortez:
He was born in Mississippi. He lived in New York. He was a gangster in New York for a while, but he had a ladies and women's clothing store in Harlem. And he was very active in the church, which was down the street, but it was him, and Mr. Rosenberg who was Black, and Mr. Perkins who had the funeral parlor, they were kind of buddies in the church. But they were kind of gangster-ish in a numbers policy [referring to illegal lotteries common in poor urban communities].And it's just — We kept saying — I don't know. I went to a predominantly white high school, so I'm used to the majority of people around me being white, except when I'm in the South and then there was more Black people around. So I don't know the participation level of the veterans in SNCC or in CORE. I know we have a group that Bruce Hartford facilitates — They started in San Francisco Bay area and I became part of it back in February and there are only three non-white people in the group and I'm one of them and there are eight of us. There's an Asian woman, there's me, and there's this guy who's Black. Yeah. That's kind of it.
Cortez:
Okay, so now it's kind of open to how people want to talk about their experiences and what they came to and how their experiences of coming to the Movement. And the common thread I keep hearing is it fed your soul and that's it. And when it feeds your soul, how do you share what you get fed with the world around you?
McAuliff:
It gave a different sense of yourself and how you change the reality around you. As I said, I went into the Peace Corps and I was in Peru and working in a rural community development and that sort of carrying, trying to translate the Mississippi experience into that situation. I noticed a real distinction between me and a lot of the other volunteers. And it would come — They were obviously — most of them were liberals and they had come from similar undergraduate experiences, but there was just some different attitude that came from having been engaged and affected by the people that we were working with in Mississippi. It just changes your way of seeing reality is what it comes down to and so you interpret — That carries out throughout your life. I don't think that you ever lose that.
Trusty:
I got such a feeling of a whole different idea of what freedom was. I saw how people in Mississippi, just working with SNCC people, many of whom became my heroes and everything, that there was just — It was frightening to be in Mississippi, but we did it anyway. There was just a way in that gap of the fear and doing it anyway. That's a long gap. And yet everybody was doing it anyway, including myself. And it set a tone for my internal and external liberation. I feel like I got so much more by being involved with SNCC than I gave.I certainly did what I could, but I got this sense that it wasn't my dysfunctional parents who wanted me just to be on academic track and do all that. It was this freedom, internal freedom, to be who you wanted to be.
I went down an atheist. I now am a very spiritual person. I attribute that to the SNCC — Well, to the mass meetings. The mass meetings were enough to — They were the best things I had ever been to and ever since.
And it's just that I have spent this part of my life trying to tell people — When I first got back it was very difficult. I would try to talk to white people and they had not a clue what I was talking about. It was so — I didn't talk for 25 years. Part of it was the [Atlanta Klan] rally and part of it was I just didn't know how to voice it.
But then I was part of a race dialogue group and a white allies group and now I speak around town and I did a CD with a Black woman in town [Portland OR] telling the stories of the movement and then she would sing freedom songs. I've just done — Yeah. It's called the Spirit of Freedom. I'm not advertising, I'm just saying it was just —
Cortez:
No, advertise.
Trusty:
Okay. It's on Bandcamp.com under Spirit of Freedom and it's been my passion to talk about this stuff and let people know that they can step up and do this stuff and it's not just that they're risking things, but they're setting themselves free. And I've been in therapy further because I realize that I had parts inside of me that weren't free and I haven't gotten clear of all of them, but I've gained a few inches in there and that's meant the world to me.So, it changed my whole life. As I said before, I'm so grateful for the experience I had and it was — I kind of bumbled into it. And somebody said, "Well, you were just where you were supposed to be," and I guess that's true, so thanks for letting me talk.
Cortez:
You got it. We appreciate all that you've done. Now, one of the things I think is that it is hard to come home and have anyone to talk to because no one really understands what you saw, what you felt. And for my part, I felt like I was seeing the world for the first time because I had been so sheltered and so cloistered and so class-protected. And it takes you a long time. I became a therapist and I had to go to therapy to be a therapist, and one of the things I realized that we talk about people, "Oh, those poor people. Oh, those poor people. Isn't that such a shame?"And then I discovered that I was one of those poor people. I had all the same ailments that society had put on a whole other class of people. I really had them myself and I had to own them, so that's a real awakening thing and that happened some 20 years after I came back. No, 10 years after I came back from being down south. I don't want to monopolize the time, but it feels like there's a commonality of experience that you should feel comfortable sharing for the next half hour or so. A little more. Oh yeah.
Orris:
Before we go off to something else, for Phyllis, I'm sure you know about it, but there is this new movie by Barbara Birney and her colleagues on exactly the effort to desegregate the hospitals.
Cunningham:
I'm in it. Yeah.
Orris:
I wanted to mention that to everybody. It's really quite good.
Cortez:
What's the name of it?
Cunningham:
Power to Heal.
Orris:
And it's out on DVD and it's really nice. It's about a one hour kind of thing, but it really details how the movement pushed the Johnson administration and really got the documentation that Phyllis was talking about.
Cortez:
Lovely. Medicare and the Civil Rights Revolution.
Cunningham:
There's also a book written by a doctor named Power to Heal and Barbara Birney really worked with this doctor on this movie. But I must say, the book doesn't really give credit to SNCC and CORE because that would have never happened if SNCC and CORE hadn't been down there organizing and working and helping develop people in the community. And I think he refers to SNCC and CORE as the street fighters and it was only mentioned in passing and I really feel that SNCC and CORE and what SNCC did, in terms of — You think about childcare and — What's the name of the — SNCC was really very responsible for Head Start.[Referring to the Child Development Group of Mississippi.]
Cortez:
Because that discussion of what happened there seems to be more appropriate for this afternoon on the evolution of the Freedom Movement. This time is our time. Our feelings about what we did and where we were.
Foner:
So, I was struck by a lot of things that people said, but I was struck, Fatima, by what you said when you were talking about what we gave, when you were talking about making the lasagna, thinking about what was given to us and what we gave in terms of learning and what that meant which was something I've thought about a lot because — I thought a lot about what my role was when I was there and how to be the most helpful without trying to use the skills that I had that other people didn't have in a way that was dominating or taking over.And one of the things that really struck me was that I've been in touch with people who I knew when I worked in Gould, who were kids who went to the Freedom School. I've been in touch with them as adults and one of the things that they remembered was that I taught them French, which I didn't remember at all, but that was really one of the things that stayed with these — These elementary school girls told me that that was so important for them because — And they thought it was crazy. And I don't remember. As I said, I don't remember doing this, but that they said that at the time they said, "Why are you teaching us French? We'll never — "
I mean, it was the not the first thing from their thoughts that they would ever be in a situation where they'd be speaking French, and [[a young lady]] she remembers me saying, "Because you never know. You might go to Paris someday." That was the wildest furthest thing for this kid in the Arkansas Delta who didn't even think about going to college. The idea that they would go to Paris was totally outlandish. It was like going to the moon. However, she said it's — This one particular person said it had stayed in her head and became a goal and she actually did go to Paris. She did end up going to college and now she's actually teaching.
But that's one of the things that stayed with me and I think I feel the same way that Karen does, that what I learned and what I got was so much more than what I gave. But there was something about my presence there that represented a connection to a wider world, but also represented a connection to being part of a national movement that gave people courage. I mean, there was this national organization they were part of and was looking out for them and helping protect them, helped give them the courage to fight, to resist, to do things they had never — To act in ways they never had done. The vision that stays with me is watching people, particularly grown men, who had been used to walking with their eyes down and never looking a white person in the eye, like just straighten up and have a completely different — Obviously, within their own community they didn't do that, but they started behaving in ways that were different and that blew my mind.
Cortez:
I did a documentary called We'll Meet Again. It was on PBS. It was about finding somebody that I had not spoken to in 57 years, and one of the things that — When I finally hooked up with her, we met and I said — I just wanted to thank her because her family fed us from their farm, housed us. We had people that would drive by, shoot under the porch, and she said, "You made us feel important enough to come down here to help us." Then I was in Jonesboro (LA) when the Deacons for Defense finally stood across the road, all with guns laying across their arms, and turned the Klan around. They used to come and night ride every night.And what they also said about the workers that should've been there was that you taught us that we could fight our own battles." And it's like, "Yeah." That just feels — You feel really good about that. I didn't know shit about living and life and children and farming and anything, really. But I could make them feel important and they needed to be validated for being important to the world. How about somebody else? Peter, Phyllis, John, what are your thoughts about that?
Cunningham:
One of the things — I had seen poverty in my own community in Minnesota where I grew up and in Chicago and I knew something was wrong. I knew something was wrong. But when I went to Mississippi, I never knew in the Black community how people lived en masse in poverty. And working with a lot of the people in Hattiesburg and especially Mrs. Gray who was one of the delegates for the Freedom Democratic Party. And the Freedom Democratic Party — people in there were really very inspirational to me and that how hard they fought and how hard it was to organize people to go to Washington.But anyway, what helped me put things together was there was a fellow by the name of Jack [Minnis?] And he did a lot of research in terms of connecting the dots about why people were oppressed and about the corporations and the politicians and the way the world is organized and how — Yes. And how racism and classism —
Cortez:
Phyllis, you are a wealth of really important information. But, I want to know how you felt, how you felt about what you did, and what do you think you left and what do you think you got from the community that you worked in. You can talk about that other stuff later on.
Cunningham:
Well, personally, when I learned all of this it's really inspired me for the rest of my life. I'm fighting the oppressor, but basically it's racism. And every opportunity —
Foner:
You can't separate them.
Cunningham:
No, you can't separate it. Whether it's the [Anti] War Movement, whether it's jail and solitary confinement, no matter what it is, whether it's — Anyway, that's what really inspired me and I feel — And I'm just able to figure it out. When you talk about going back home and me talking to white and Black people and people of color who just say, "Well, you know, you're an idealist. By your age, you should be over it," this type of thing. But really, I just feel deep in my heart that the experience in the South was so enriching and so opening my world to what really is going on and it just sustains me forever and ever and ever and I'm still in touch with people that really were very important to me in the South, both the local people and people in SNCC.
Cortez:
Well, John has gone off somewhere because he's been eating and drinking and having a good time partying all there, so Peter why don't you tell us what do you think you left? What do you think you got?
McAuliff:
I'm hearing everything. I'm trying to eat at the same time.
Orris:
Bits and pieces of what everybody else said. I'm still interested in what high school you went to in New York, but that's —
Cortez:
Notre Dame.
Orris:
Ah, no then that's not what I would've thought. Interesting.Well, just to from something that Laura had said about feeling and growing up and feeling part of an occupied country or whatever we're being and a minority within the country that was really underground coming out of the left-wing communist Jewish New York City, much reviled by most of the rest of the country in rhetoric et cetera. But where it really sunk in — I was quite young. I suppose I was eight or nine, and my mother and I would go to the newsstand on the corner and we would get the big paper, New York Times, and we would get the two little papers, The National Guardian and The Daily Worker and the two little papers were taken out from underneath the counter —
Cunningham:
I know.
Orris:
It was, and we put it inside the big paper because you didn't want to be seen walking down the street with it.Well, that has a definitive effect on a kid of that age and only reflected by driving in Mississippi in '64 and hearing Ross Barnett on the radio where you got the same feeling of being the isolated minority. So, coming out of that experience, and then becoming involved in civil rights activities quite young I suppose, both for the CORE-Walgrens stuff, the civil rights, working in the national office for the March on Washington, et cetera and then going South in '63 to North Carolina and then we got burned out of there, but that's another question. But then in going to Mississippi in '64 it was all sort of an extension.
But I will tell you, besides the very important organizing lessons that I learned from SNCC besides idolizing — I was the kid, of course, and Laura turns out to be younger than I, so did you Fatima, but I've really felt like the kid in almost all of these things because I was a good — Other than Stu House I was the youngest one in that crowd.
So, idolizing the SNCC organizers in general, but really learning that what you've been talking about, any number of you, about how do you stimulate leadership in a group you're organizing? How do you participate with the group as an equal member and support the group and enlarge the group and find ways of elevating leadership that's more genuine, if you will, than you are within that. That was all very, very important. Coming out of New York City, a leftist background in high school, we were talking like this at other people in debates, et cetera, and all of a sudden in SNCC you were talking about how would you do this? How would you do that? Very classically different which had a major effect.
And the other thing was — And you've also talked about the liberating aspect, and for me, the liberation was very important through the '60s because it gave me a confidence that would not — It was not amenable for being shamed or guilt-ridden or guilt tripped and getting into any number of activities in the '60s. They were not organizing activities or activities to build mass movements, but rather were individual frustrated activities of middle class kids who've demanded something and the country didn't give it to them and they acted out on that. And what was that?
Well, when we got back to school, we started to have a demonstration and we were told by the dean's office, "You can't demonstrate there." "Why?" "Because we never allowed in 300 years demonstration there." "So, what are you going to do?" "Well, we're going to punish you." We'd already been in jail and people had already been shooting at us and beating on people and all of this sort of thing and so that was really a very hollow kind of threat and so we did it anyway. And every time we did something like that you empowered yourself.
Cortez:
Peter, I'd like you to go back a moment in all of this, and what do you think you gave to the people that you were working with in the South? You've gotten a lot of inspiration from the organization. You've gotten a lot of inspiration seeing them make changes, but what do you think they got from your presence there? What was your not-connected total contribution?
Orris:
I agree with the things that have been said about being part of this organization, this national movement, and how that empowers people in local areas that have been under the kind of oppression and, really, terror that that people were under and that connection. Not that it had been entirely burned out in the South because much of our activities were a continuation of left-wing underground anti-racist activities that we all know came from the '20s, '30s, '40s, et cetera, and the whole migration itself. Migration was a response to the terror.So, having said that and that was happening there, I think we did give support and we certainly turned the light of the country on these activities and we produced stuff. I would — Myself? I was a kid. I was a soldier in the army. I was part of the movement and the fact that there were many of us meant that the strategy and the thinking and the goals of this movement would be effective.
Besides that, when I was Bar Mitzvahed, at 13, I got $130 worth of gifts. I didn't do very well on the New York scale, but I was Bar Mitzvahed in a store-front synagogue that Mom went to, not in a fancy whatever, but I had $150 bucks and after putting it in my savings account, three years later I told my mother — And my father, but my mother was the organizer, and I said to her, "I'm buying these Citizen Band walkie talkies. This is going to be very important. It's the new stuff." And I bought two Citizen Band walkie talkies and it so happens nobody else in the movement was yet focused on that, so I got to be Bayard Rustin's radio man at the March on Washington and got to go out with him all day for that day and when we got back to Mississippi — Nobody has yet had that, so I got to go. I was part of the group from McComb going to Amite county. Why? Because I had these walkie talkies —
Foner:
Walkie talkies. That's a great story.
Orris:
I was also a male. Because there were 12 males, and the decision-making there was no women who were going to Southwest [Mississippi]. Well, we didn't get there anyway because of the killings and all, but having said that, I was the person who knew something about radios when these engineers from New York, when we started to get some money, and these engineers from New York brought us these Citizen Band radios to stick on top of the houses and stick — To make up for the — And put them in the cars to make up for the lack of the phones, and the cell phones and stuff.And I got to go to Atlantic City and was the radio man there, so when you see Victoria Gray standing up in the the sit-in there, there's a little antenna sticking up behind the two of them and that was me sticking down there. I got way more out of it then I gave, but that was my little piece. Anyway.
Cortez:
Okay. John.
McAuliff:
What we gave — What I gave was I said at the beginning, it was a certain symbolism, attention from the national media that, as somebody else said, gave people a feeling of empowerment themselves that somebody was caring and somebody was paying attention. And I suspect on a moment-to-moment basis, the presence of ourselves gave people a bit of protection from what they might have otherwise been hit by because an awareness in the white power structure and people outside just in the white community, that while they resented us, they also recognized that they were visible in a very different way, so I think that was a contribution.The other thing that hasn't been mentioned enough — It was mentioned a little bit on the religious side, but I think just the community meetings and the role of music in those meetings was something that got carried into the anti-war movement. There's a lot of history of people who were in Mississippi who then played very active roles in the anti-war movement of the late '60s and early '70s. And I think, again, as Peter was saying, just that sense that you could do something that affected all of us.
And he touched a little bit on Atlantic City and I think that also was very important and affecting us. I was told that they said some of us had to stay in Mississippi and others would go and I was a stay in Mississippi person during the convention.
But I think that whole drama of the convention and the refusal of even good people in the Democratic Party to decide the historical moment had come, that he needed to support the Freedom Democratic Party against the official Democratic Party. I mean, that educated all of us about how far you could count on friends and allies if you didn't have your own power in the situation, so as I said before, it affected just the way you approached the world. But as to what we contributed, we went — And I remember accompanying people as they went to register and go through that process and Cleveland wasn't the worst place in Mississippi, but there were very, very few people. Very few Black people who had been registered.
I think the other factor that hasn't been mentioned that was very important in people's history of people around us was the Second World War. That it was veterans, Black veterans, coming back and having, again, discovered even in the context of the military, a kind of citizenship or respect for themselves and their own capabilities and a sort of sense of what their rights were in the society. That contributed to that underground. It wasn't — Some of it was political and Communist Party related, but a lot of it was just veterans, the CORE organizers that I remember meetings were people who would come back from the Second World War and just worked together throughout the state, so.
Cortez:
This is a very, very special day for me, and I hope for all of who were able to share their stories and stuff, I would like to go back a little bit about the Medicare and Head Start programs. The Black Panther Party, which has been so vilified at the time, and later on, are the ones in the Bay area who created Head Start and breakfast, feeding the kids breakfast before they went to school, and the whole idea of daycare and medical care for seniors.[Referring to the Black Panther Party's free breakfast for children program so that poor kids didn't have to sit in class with hunger cramps. At that time, the federal government had no nation-wide program for feeding hungry children before school. The Panthers were a major factor in forcing the USDA to set up the national, federally-subsidized School Breakfast Program at schools and child-care facilities.]And nobody wants to give credit to the Black Panther Party because of who they were and how they saw themselves. But they were the protectors and the feeders and the educators in any community in which they were. And SNCC learned a lot from them to go on and move towards helping get that stuff enacted, but I don't want us to lose sight of the origins. And then the origins of that is back in 1941 with Peace and Reconciliation, the early Quakers, who had the first March on Washington in their minds and James Farmer was part of that and Bayard Rustin as well. And that our ancestors, our recent ancestors, guided us a lot.
And we have about 10 minutes before the lunch break, so go for it.
Trusty:
I just wanted to say that I had a lot of fun, too, in Mississippi, as scared as I was. I remember going to a juke joint with Jesse Morrison and we would buy [inaudible 01:32:18] and I felt safe and there was just — There was such a spirit there.It was with the kids in the Freedom schools, and even though I was on this weird shift so I didn't do — I was more on the national scene, writing up when somebody — A church got burned or something like that, but it was just a lot of spirit. I mean it was just like unbelievable spirit everywhere and — And fear, but I just remember, God, that was the best time going to that juke joint.
And I went back into Greenwood and I actually found somebody who worked in that juke joint that we used to go to, and the owner of it would always feed us free, and there was just this sense of community and comradery and we're pitching together. We're just going to fight this damn thing and it was just cool. I just — It was really — It meant so much to me. I'd never really — I was such a loner in high school. My parents were so fucked up and all this stuff and it just was just like, man, this is — People are living here. They're not just walking through the damn day until the next day. And that just meant the world to me, so.
Cortez:
Laura, you wanted to say something before.
Foner:
I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this. I was kind of — Karen, I was going to go back to kind of what Karen and — Is it Fatima or Fatima [re pronunciation]?
Cortez:
Fatima.
Foner:
Fatima had said about the trauma and some of the ways that we dealt with fear by — Out of necessity by sort of suppressing it, and I would just say that, since we're talking about the various ways that we've been impacted, I was going to say that at some point, I realized that I had been — From my upbringing, there was a way I was used to living with a certain level of terror that I just internalized and that it was familiar to me, and so being in it — So, putting myself in a situation where I lived with my life in danger on a daily basis, in some way, was familiar and allowed me not to really feel it.Although, not feeling it was probably a pretty effective strategy for me. I went to continue on, but it took awhile to recognize that and there's some experiences that I had — I was threatened a number of times, and I also had a very painful, ugly experience of sexual abuse from someone within the organization, someone I worked with, which I couldn't talk about at the time and really couldn't talk about until much, much later. So, I don't know exactly where we want to put this, but I think the issues around race and sex and gender —
Cortez:
Where we put it is in the conversation after the break because that's very important and I really want us to be able to address the "-isms." The race, the class, the gender, the who's got power, and how sexual abuse happens, occurs and the pressures — There were a lot of pressures on white women to sleep with Black men to prove that they were not bigoted. And nobody wanted to talk about it. But I want to go back to Karen. I want to end this —
Foner:
And I was actually warned about that before I went down, but anyway — Okay. I just thought since we're talking about sort of deep stuff, I wanted to raise some deep stuff.
Cortez:
We're going to give all that deep stuff room after the break. But I want to end on a note of Karen. When I went South, that was the first time I had been anywhere except summer camp and I became a wild child. And I went to the Dew Drop Inn, put my nickel in, and danced all the time, any opportunity I got. I didn't drink because I had learned from home that if I had drink I was not going to be able to function and I was going to be very sick. But I danced. I danced all over Plaquemines and I went to New Orleans one time and I danced all over New Orleans and I felt so safe and so embraced by the people that I was with, really good people that the experience just gave me a great joy. Okay, we got four minutes to the lunch break.We can take it now and then come back four minutes earlier or what do you want to do?
Foner:
Can I ask a quick question? Fatima, were you in the SNCC Project in Louisiana?
Cortez:
No. CORE was in Louisiana.
Foner:
That's what I thought. I was like — Yeah, okay. [laughter] Okay, that's what I thought so I just wanted to be clear.
Orris:
Just in the couple minutes before we quit, could I ask John what was applicable from Mississippi and from SNCC for the stuff you started to do with the Peace Corps and then with the organizing of the veterans in the Peace Corps
McAuliff:
Well, the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps, very specifically was I was, most of the time, up in Cusco [Peru] in an area that was traditional land owning, big owners with basically sharecroppers on the land. And one of the projects I did, which was probably inspired by Mississippi, was to help the people in that community take advantage of a theoretical Agrarian Reform Law that gave them rights to control — To effect, to have influence on land rent questions and other issues with the owner of the property. So, there was a very direct kind of organizational inspiration that came.And again, going back to the earlier thing, the sense that providing, helping a community to come together to understand and express its own interests influenced the way I approached that work. I'll leave the post-return questions to another moment.
But I think, also, what I was talking about before, was it's almost — I mean, I obviously was not the same as the Black people in Mississippi. I was not the same as the Quechua-speaking people in Peru, but I think something about the experience of knowing and being accepted — Fortunately not with all the complicated relationship questions that women had, but in terms of relating to that community also affected the way I related to the people in the Peruvian communities I was working. I don't know how to put it. My hand on that is not — It's not classic community organized. It's something else about the way you simply have a sense of commonality of community with people with even very different backgrounds, so.
Cortez:
But that is the key to community organizing, understanding where you have that commonality, and when you feel that commonality —
McAuliff:
It's feeling that commonality. It's not understanding it, it's feeling it.
Cortez:
Exactly.
Foner:
Also, the respect that — People can tell if you're genuine. I mean, people know if you're really interested in who they are. And if you're open — If you respect them.
McAuliff:
Yeah, I think most of the other volunteers had a distance. I mean we're Americans, we're coming to help you. That's what I wanted to avoid.
Cunningham:
The great white hope. And it's also what may have affirmed my thinking about listening, you listen and you listen and you listen. And it's equated with observing, observing, observing, and knowing what people are going through and when you can say something. Or when you don't say anything.
Foner:
But also, I want to go back to what you said about Jack Minnis. I think that's core, but there is something about the organization where we had a way of looking at the community and identifying the community leaders who were the people who were respected, learning what were the different organizations through the different churches, the different business, the people who owned the Black businesses or stores who were there to provide resources. There was also some strategy around understanding local power structures.
Trusty:
But it was also — The focus to me, what I learned so much, was that it was bottom-up organizing. It wasn't going to the leaders of the middle class or the churches. It was going — We were concerned about how the least in the community would be treated and improved their lives, improve — That was the focus and that is so different than other organizers.
Foner:
Right. But there were divisions within — Even the tiny town that I worked in. There was a very conservative church and then there was the AME church that was very supportive of the civil rights work. And there were people whose — Anyway.
Cortez:
All good stuff to carry over. No, really. All good stuff to carry over. So, we come back at 1:00 on the West coast and 4:00 on the East coast and both in the middle figure out what time that means.
Foner:
Okay.
Cortez:
All right. Thank you all. Thank you all [inaudible 01:44:29]. Good Morning.
Foner:
Thank you for your facilitation, Fatima.
Trusty:
Amen.
Cunningham:
I thank everyone for all you contributed.
Cortez:
I thank everybody for being willing to be vulnerable and to talk about your stuff. We will talk later.
[LUNCH BREAK — CASUAL CONVERSATION]
Cunningham:
John, I'm so glad to hear another person from Carleton. I didn't go to Carleton but my daughter did and it has just — Anyway, I'm so glad she went to Carleton.
McAuliff:
Yeah, I know. It's a very different school by the time your daughter got there. As I said, it was really strange, in retrospect, to recognize that there had been one Black American student who had graduated by the time I got there, but —
Cunningham:
Oh, my.
McAuliff:
And there were a few African students, one of whom had been my roommate for a year, but it's — And it's the fact that even while we're doing all of the civil rights stuff, we didn't ever quite come to terms with the nature of the institution and what had created it in that way, so —
Cunningham:
There were quite a few people in SNCC that went to Carleton, and I've been following them and I'm very impressed, so it must have been something happening.
McAuliff:
Yeah, I know. It was progressive. We had an immense fight with the administration three years before Berkeley [referring to the U.C. Berkeley Free Speech Movement]. We had major conflict over things like women's hours. At that point, the women had to be back in the dorms by 10:30. It was —
Cunningham:
Oh, my God. It sounds like a Catholic college. Yeah.
McAuliff:
So, when was she there?
Cunningham:
She graduated in '91, so it was in the '80s.
McAuliff:
Yeah, I graduated in '66 — Or '64. I graduated in '64. And what is she doing now?
Cunningham:
Oh, my. She went on and got her doctorate in education in multicultural and multidisciplinary education and she's been working on that. She's working now, thank God, in a community college, but about to go to work in adolescent department of a prison system. She had been working in prisons before, but she — More even important what she's doing for the town that she's in. She has started a local chapter of ROAR [Residents Organized Against Racism] and the public school system is just abominable in terms of discrimination against people of color and they have quite a few people Black, quite a few Indigenous people —
McAuliff:
So, she's in Minnesota still?
Cunningham:
Yeah, in Minnesota. Winona, which is right on the Mississippi and a lot of people from Chicago have migrated to Minnesota. Anyway, she's really — Her basic reason for living is doing anti-racist work, really.
McAuliff:
Uh-huh. Well, she probably knows it. I think he was after her time, but — And I'm not of course going to blank on his name, but I think one of the smartest people at MSNBC is —
Cunningham:
Oh, yeah. He was a year ahead of her. She knew him and she had — She graduated in economics from Carleton and she had three full courses with the Senator who was killed —
McAuliff:
Paul Wellstone, yeah.
Cunningham:
As far as I'm concerned, killed by the FBI.
McAuliff:
Yeah, he came in after my time, so that was — Well, yeah. No, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's — No, no, no. The MSNBC.
Cunningham:
I know, I'm blocking, too. I'm at that age.
McAuliff:
No, that's — If it wasn't for phones and computers, we could logically think out how to find people's names.
Cunningham:
They come to me probably as soon as I walk out.
McAuliff:
Well, that's the other thing, but it's figuring out through logic, where you can find somebody's name in your computer or your phone.
Cunningham:
Yeah, and you could do it that way, too.
McAuliff:
All right. Phyllis, nice to have this bye conversation with you.
Cunningham:
Yes, yes. I thought this whole session was very touching and very informative.
McAuliff:
Yeah, no. It's —
Cunningham:
It certainly touched me.
McAuliff:
No, well, we'll see when we get into the second half, the division —[Referring to SNCC's 1967 decision to ask its white members to leave SNCC and organize against racism in white communities.]By the time I got back from the Peace Corps the split had happened. So, people that I had known in SNCC in Mississippi were now had nothing to do with white organizing. There's some people that wasn't true, but it's — Whatever that meant in positive terms for the Black community. It was a negative, I think, for the development of any kind of broad American left.
Cunningham:
Well, you know there's a lot that's unknown and that bits and pieces are known by some people and other people, and why it happened and how it happened —
McAuliff:
Right. Exactly.
Cunningham:
I do believe that white people should be organizing in white communities.
McAuliff:
Well, that's true, but there's got to be a way — When Bob Moses died, I'd always had the feeling — I mean it's like Tom Hayden at least got into the state legislature, but he never made it nationally. Moses should have been a national leader.
Cunningham:
But he didn't want to be — People would just follow him, whatever, and he didn't want to be glorified or [inaudible 01:52:02].
McAuliff:
Well, I understand that. It's also knowing that society you've could have guaranteed that he would have been killed, so —
Cunningham:
Yeah.
McAuliff:
That's the other part of it, so anyway.
Cunningham:
Yeah, I mean, okay.
[END SESSION #1]
[BEGIN SESSION #2]
Foner:
I forgot. Someone's in Chicago. Someone's on the West Coast.
Cortez:
I'm on the West Coast.
Foner:
Where are you?
Cortez:
Los Angeles. I'm a native New Yorker. I love New York. I cannot handle the winters anymore. And really, people have told me I have just betrayed New York because I love LA. And I can't be guilted out, I love LA. I love —
Foner:
Good for you. New friends
Cortez:
I like the weather –
Cunningham:
You have to love where you live.
Cortez:
Okay, so this is now the time to really evaluate the Freedom Movement. And some of the things that you were talking about this morning that were not as personal, and this doesn't have to be as personal, but it's your observation and your analysis or whatever you want to call it. And I think it's probably like, "What did we achieve?" "What did we fail to achieve?" "What did it all mean?" And "What lessons did we learn?" So we should take five minutes each and then open it up.
Cunningham:
It's a tough one.
Cortez:
Okay. Phyllis, since you opened your mouth, you go first.
Cunningham:
Yeah. Well, it's really tough because I think, not just we, but we were part of an achievement that happened in the early '60s. It started 400 years ago and on and on and on.But I think we were part of an achievement, because it wasn't just — and there were things that did change in the South say — it did change. And there are a lot, if you look at the elected representatives [inaudible 00:02:33] open up the [inaudible 00:02:33]
Cortez:
Okay. Okay. The Zoom is freezing. Everybody's frozen. Yeah, we went away and came back. The internet and the Zoom in combination are a little flaky right now, but I didn't mean to interrupt you Phyllis
Cunningham:
That's okay. We need a better system if we're going to have meetings on the internet. I don't mean that SNCC is responsible,
Cortez:
It's the infrastructure.
Cunningham:
That's right, you got it. I mean when I'm in Minnesota, sometimes I can't even get on a computer.When I was in Alabama, I said "So and so has been elected as Sheriff. Oh it's going to be a different world, [with him] as Sheriff — but it wasn't. I thought "Well, what's the matter with me believing that all Black people were for the people." And they're not. And I knew that, of course, from living in Chicago and I knew that after I went to the South.
But I would say that wasn't really a failure. But it happened, and I felt like at that time it was a failure. But [now] I don't think it's a failure. I think a lot of it's like the oppressed-oppressor — what happened in South Africa. What happened, it's happening all over in the world, people, and we're reflective, very reflective of the system. And we can choose to do good, or we can do what we want to do to empower ourselves to have power over people. That's the way I feel.
Now, okay, I'm not saying that it was a complete failure, I think that they're just things and times when I felt personally that maybe we failed. But we really didn't. Getting a perspective, getting away from it — No. I get very thrilled about the things, how different Mississippi is now. And I can't help but think that the SNCC and CORE had a small piece to do with it. They had something to do with it. Now, what else were we supposed to talk about?
Foner:
Was that five minutes.
Cortez:
What did you learn?
Cunningham:
What did I learn? I learned a lot. I learned about how things operate. I learned about how organizations function, and that's what I really learned. That's what, I guess, I really learned. And I can apply what I learned in terms of the way things operate to what's going on in some of the communities and some of the organizations that I'm working with.And as, when people say, [that] we're talking to the choir, but a lot of times we aren't.
[Referring to a common problem of activists talking too much to each other and not enough to people in their communities. Traditionally summed up as "Preaching to the choir."]I'm working with people and I expect them to think the way I do, but they haven't had my experience. And I really see that, and I don't mean to put down people. But there's a long way to come within the [anti-] war movement, within the peace movement, there's a long way to come in several different organizations and certainly within the woman's movement.
I really, for a while I was meeting with [women's] consciousness-raising groups when I came out of the South. And found out that it was horrendous. I thought very, very racist. And yet people didn't think they were racist. And you can't say, "Oh, you're racist," that you bring out, "Well, what if? What if? What if?" And I ended up saying, and I still say that now, I have another friend who we're probably on the same level of our thinking, we just shake our heads and say, "They just don't get it."
And then somebody, and then my friend may say, "They'll never get it. If they haven't gotten it by now, they're not going to get it." The whole thing about race and racism. Did I?
But anyway, I learned that you just keep on, you just keep on. You just keep on, you listen to the people and you raise questions, and you don't put them down unless your anger can't be contained. Sometimes I just go blow off and somebody says, "You are mad." I said, "Yeah, you've never really seen me angry," but anyway, yes. Okay.
Cortez:
Okay.
Cunningham:
It's you have to keep on keeping on.
Cortez:
There you go. Who would like to go next rather than my calling any, who's ready?
Foner:
I'll go.
Cortez:
Okay.
Foner:
So, one answer to that question of what did we achieve? In 2010, the same year as the SNCC 50th, I went back to the South for the first time for a conference that we had in Little Rock. That was about the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas, which was so amazing. And it was a mind blowing experience to walk down the street with a group of Black and white people on the same streets, and we're thinking and sitting together and having a meal in a restaurant, and remembering that [an interracial group] couldn't drive in a car. Someone would be down on the floor hiding so that you would not be seen and not be shot at. So that experience was pretty mind blowing just on that level of segregation in the legal, formal sense, obviously. .And then in 2019, I went back to Gould, the town that I had lived in, for a visit that also totally blew my mind. Because, and I knew some of this, but to experience it, there was no Black and white side of the town anymore. But there were about five white families left in the town. Most of the white people had left. Most of the jobs had left. There were fewer stores. There was a Dollar Store and that was about it.
Black people had been elected mayor and members of the town council, but the schools had closed because there were not enough school age children. One of our big fights when I lived there was around improving the schools for all children and having a real desegregation plan. So there are no schools and few jobs. One of the only places to work is the nearby state penitentiary. So the Delta is in terrible shape economically. There is tremendous poverty and lack of resources.
And one of the things I learned about when I was in Little Rock is that ironically, Little Rock High School, so well known for the fight against segregation, now is segregated again. Most of the students on the top floors in the advanced classes are white and the bottom floors have students of color in the remedial classes.
So there have been obviously major advances in terms of legal segregation, in terms of Blacks having access to political power that we're obviously still really fighting around the vote and real empowerment. But real empowerment meaning economic power, et cetera. We're still in a big fight around that.
But an overall achievement, I think, was a huge, because of TV, because of the change, because of this, the Civil Rights Movement came into everybody's living room in a way that had never happened before. There was a big change in the way that people started to see the history of our country and how crucial racism was and what was happening that people didn't know about. So I think the examples of struggle and inspirational fighting and stuff, inspirational struggle was a huge example and the change in the consciousness, I think was big. I have more to say, but I think that's five minutes.
Cortez:
Very good. Okay. It's open. Who's going to jump in the water now? Okay. I'm going to call on you, Peter.
Orris:
So, to my mind, clearly major changes in the last 50 years, 60 years, changes both in consciousness and changes in some aspects of structural racism. But as we knew then, the structurally racist capitalist economy in the country was not touched. And we knew then just like you don't get 40 acres and a mule for Reconstruction. If you don't affect the underlying economics and control of the country. One, there will be slip backs, and two, you're not going to even have the opportunity of making some of the fundamental changes you want to make.The other thing we learned over 50 years is that, I think anyway, that what we thought were structural changes were really rather limited. Even in the socialist countries where theoretically there had been a revolution for control, those countries turned out not to be democratic in ways that were necessary to build forward. Or when we lost them, the global counter revolution was very impressive, very swift, but by and large implanted undemocratic governments and not majority governments. So perforce, many of them didn't last long because in fact, the philosophies, the approaches we have about democracy have in fact moved ahead and come true.
And that is, without majority support of the people, if you're ruling you live a very tentative period. So there have been real important advances moving ahead, major regressions over the period, and that's not just in this country, it's internationally. And now we're in more, we are both much further ahead than we ever were in terms of support amongst the people. We have a majority of us, majority in the country that one, and a lot of this was accelerated since that cop put his knee on George Floyd's neck who has a visceral understanding, especially of young people, about what structural racism is.
Is that a 100%? No, by no means. But it is a preoccupation of the country and a commitment of the vast majority to make changes in that, as well as the question of immigration and whether this country will remain a country of immigrants, et cetera. And I think we have more people and more supporters than ever before. We certainly are more than we had in the '50s. But that was a reaction to the coalition in the '40s of course.
Having said that, the dangers are even worse, because as we've seen the mobilization of the racist fascist element is more organized, better organized, destructive by its leadership. But leadership has always been, in those movements, destructive. If Trump was better, we'd all be in more trouble. But, this is a committed, organized movement to destroy the democracy, because we're moving away from the whites running the place, and the rich whites running the place. And they ain't going to give up without a fight.
And we're going to have to see what that means. Right now I think it means exerting the democratic power and seeing how far it's going to take us. I still firmly believe that the majority of the country is closer to where we're going than it has been, and is committed to the ideals that the country was put together on. But it ain't clear that the fascists aren't going to win, and they're not going to be able to impose what they're imposing in other countries.
How's that for, you asked for a nickel answer, and there was my quarter response.
Cortez:
So what you're saying is that you learned all of that from your time in the South?
Orris:
I'm saying it was the beginning — not the beginning, but it was a formative part of my education, proof that you could do something, proof that you could win. It proved if you mobilize the majority for, if you will, the greater good and in the people's interests, you made progress. Not that we did all those along the way, but you could make progress.
Cortez:
Okay. Who else? Who else want to jump? Okay, Karen, you raised your hand. Thank you so much. Unmute yourself.
Trusty:
Unmuting, okay. There we go. This is a hard question, because on the one hand, I too have visited Mississippi, and when I drove in the first time with an integrated car and I was the driver, I was pretty sure that I was going to die. And I drove up to this little burger joint and it was integrated in there. There were white, Black people behind the counter and in this place, and I was like, I thought I was about to be shot for just driving.And there's judges, and there's people, I think that mayor of Jackson has done an amazing job. There's these pockets of very continuation of SNCC and the revolution. On the other hand, there's, I just think that the Republicans and where they are now, they've been organizing ever since we were organizing. This is a backlash that has been developed for 60 years, that's what we're seeing now. And the white community, overall, nobody here, but it's retarded. I don't mean that, it is just so backwards and doesn't understand any of this that it's in their interest to join with Black people. You know.
White people are dying now [of the Covid pandemic]. Old white men are dying faster than they ever have. And the reason for that is that they're entrenched in this racist thought, and they don't want to be part of getting help, being part of anything.
Lately I've been studying the sort of the justifications of slavery and how that has carried on in the consciousness of white people in America, and doing some presentations on that. And so I think there were achievements, but did we produce the fall of capitalism? Are we not in this terrible situation right now where, God help us, that Trump doesn't come back and we are really —
We're so often that all the statistics show that Black people are still at the bottom of the caste. We have a caste system that is entrenched. And did we change that? No. We changed it for some people, and we gave some Black people a real hope, who have carried that forward. There's certainly a larger Black middle class and all of that stuff, but you also have the breakup for the Black community. So it's a way complicated question is what I'm trying to say.
And I'm very glad for the movement for one, for the last question, which I'm probably jumping ahead of passing on to the next chair, you can give the next generation some hope, how to organize and how to fight this stuff. But there were a lot of failures, but when I think of how it was in Mississippi and what we were under, we were under, we were in a terrorist state that was determined to do us in. And we not only survived, but we came out talking about it, and many of us tried to heal ourselves.
I would say that one thing we didn't do is we didn't pay attention to our own frailties and learn how to take care of ourselves. When I talk to young people that have gotten involved in this [anti-] racist stuff, I say, "For God's sake, take care of yourself. Do not burn yourself out in the first year." Because SNCC people, including myself, had a terrible time right after the movement. It was well good, and I think it was many people were burned out and traumatized, and we didn't have any way to deal with that. And I don't think that would happen again, but I think that was one failure in terms of setting a model of how a movement could be self-sustaining, and how it could go on without people falling by the wayside because it's too much and too —
So, what did we fail to achieve? A lot. What did we achieve? A lot. That's how I feel, is that, it's both. And I don't know how you could take a person like me or other people in the movement who were justly fighting for the right to vote, to give Black people some power in Mississippi, which we did, but how you could expect us also to undo all the economic stuff. It's like South Africa. South Africa has, it's a Black government but nobody's dealing with the economic stuff. We didn't deal very much with the economic stuff. And how we could have done that given what we were under? I don't know. We were all superman, some women, some of us were, but it was real. It's a lot to ask for a small group of people that still achieved so much change in this country. So I don't know if that's an answer, but it's the best I can give.
Cortez:
That's your answer. Your thoughts. They're valuable.
Trusty:
Yeah.
Cortez:
Okay, John?
McAuliff:
All right. Happily, I think the dogs have quieted down.Some echoes are similar. I took our older son when he was in high school — there was the church that was burned-out that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were on their way to visit. There were ceremonies there on an annual basis. I don't know if they're still doing them. But I took him there, and as we were, because of the flight, there wasn't time to go into Cleveland [MS], but we went on the Belt Road which didn't exist at that point, went into a McDonald's and it was not only integrated in terms of its clientele, but the manager was Black and had a Black and white staff under him. So that was when it struck me what had happened, [whatever] the extent that we contributed to it.
Also, I don't know how many went to Jackson for that 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer [2014]. But it was rather mind boggling to be treated as heroes and heroines and to be feted by the upper classes of current Jackson, the white upper class as well as the Black upper class. And there was a reception at a very nice museum, and it was almost embarrassing going around and talking to people. But it clearly, things changed.
I also note, though, that Mississippi's vaccination levels are very low and that's partially the attitude of the Black community and partially the power structure of Mississippi.
[Referring to the fierce and highly-partisan opposition by Republicans and anti-vaccination groups to government measures to stem the Covid pandemic by mandating vaccinations and mask-wearing. At the time of this discussion, conservatives and the far-right were mobilizing mass-resistance to public-health measures throughout the country — particularly in the South. Similar in some ways to the way that Dixiecrats in the 1950s mobilized massive resistance to school integration. Ostensibly based on an "individual-liberty" versus "government oppression" theme, their opposition was rooted in traditional Republican antagonism towards all government programs that provided benefits or services to individual, non-wealthy, Americans, or that imposed regulations or requirements on businesses and corporations.]I also think that we achieved some important personality breakthroughs. Andy Young being in Congress and then mayor [of Atlanta], and then John Lewis and Jim Clyburn still [in Congress], I [may] agree or disagree with all of their politics [but their] carrying on of life histories into the exercise of power, I think out of both the civil rights and the anti-war movement, there's much less of that than would have benefited the country.
Taking it to today, during the Black Lives Matter eruption two summers ago [2020], couple of things struck me. One thing, well, let me actually jump back a little bit earlier than that. When during Obama's term, especially connected to healthcare, there emerged in Eastern Long Island and all around the country, these incredibly harsh confrontations with Democratic Congress people.
[Referring to the anti-government, anti-healthcare bill, Tea-Party movement that erupted immediately after Obama's election. The Tea Party movement was organized and funded by wealthy conservatives to generate mass political opposition to the popular political agenda that Obama ran on.]And I went to some of them and I thought, "Oh, I know those people. They were the people that I knew in Mississippi that were threatening our lives." It's a culture that was continuous. And I think that that's reemerged now around Trump and around the stuff at the school boards —
[Referring to Tea Party-like gangs of angry (and sometimes violent) whites disrupting and threatening local school boards to force a halt to any teaching about racism and racial discrimination in American history and modern-day society.]
Foner:
Yes, the school boards
McAuliff:
Watch what's happening at the school boards, you know who those people are. It's like what Obama's election did, we talked about. We lifted up the rock and we discovered what was still under the rock and they flourished and are still flourishing and I think they confront us with a real threat to our kids and our grandkids and what they are going to face.I started saying about Black Lives Matter, it struck me that they were, we had done a first part of it, which was going after the most overt explicit racism of U.S. apartheid of overt system of racial discrimination. They were going after the impact of racism within institutions that was much, it so has become painfully visible now in the last, post-Trump, era, but they were dealing with —
I think "Defund the police" was a dumb slogan. And Lord knows who came up with that and for what reason. But it was very obvious that there was a sense that emerged, not just among directly affected Blacks but among white people of, that generation in their 20s, college and post-college, which did not exist in our era. We were the fringe, not the center. These people marching —
Are the center of their generation. At least, obviously not the whole generation, because there are younger people also in this crazy right-wing stuff. But I think the fact that the Black Lives Matter, and attention to the behavior of the police has gone to a much deeper level of race within the culture showing up now on the school board levels and the arguments about what's taught.
You know, I think we had a much easier job, I don't know if it was easier; [it] didn't feel like the easier job. We had the overt — the [segregated] water fountains & movie houses, the public places, and the voting, overt voting [denial of voting rights]. Now the voting stuff is still there, but it's a lot more hidden behind other layers. That's too much, but that's my sense of what we learned and accomplished, what we didn't and what a different generation is now dealing with.
Cortez:
From what you were talking about earlier, what you brought to the Peace Corps is clearly what you learned to take to that group and be able to enrich what was going on with your work there. Would you say that was correct?
McAuliff:
Oh yeah. Yeah, no question about it.
Cortez:
Okay.
McAuliff:
I came in [to the Peace Corps] with a very different biography.
Cortez:
Yeah. And that was valuable and important.
McAuliff:
Yeah.
Cortez:
Just listening to everybody, I'm thinking about when I was in Louisiana, I was caught by myself sitting on the steps of a grocery store that was closed, a little market. And it was this young white boy who was in, and this is the most vivid image that has never left my consciousness, he was in a lime green Ford F150 truck with a gun across in the rack in the back window that you could see. He came, he stopped in front of me, took the rifle and pointed it at my head. And he didn't know that I was in absolute shock that I was so still and all I could do was look him in the eye. So that's what I did. And he put his rifle back and then he drove off.Now, what I got from that was what I'm seeing now with a generation of young white kids who are on both sides of the battle, so to speak. You got the conservatives and you got the Black Lives Matters allies.
I think that we had some expectations of what we wanted coming into these communities. And at some point, we never asked the people what they wanted. It was our decision that they should register to vote. Well, they're worried about putting the food on the table, and going down to the clerk's office and stand there forever trying to register to vote for a candidate who may be Black, but has not got their interests at heart. So, Zelma Wyche is an example. I got run out of Tallulah, which is in Madison Parish, put back on the bus that I came on, sent back to Monroe by the two most powerful Black men — heck, they might as well have the white — Black men in that town who had been organizing voter registration stuff. And that's as far as they wanted to consider going.
I came in with other information about what other people in another parishes wanted in terms of having a union for domestic workers, having social security and having health insurance and all that — they weren't interested in that. They were Black property owners who were, for all intents and purposes, the most capitalistic, racist, Black people you ever want to come across.
And what became clear to me later on was that they were talking about power and who had power in that parish. And so it was very clear that going to the "so-called leaders of the Black community," for their assistance in doing improvement is not necessarily where you're going to get the improvement. So in some ways we did not achieve it. And he became High Sheriff a number of years later. So, again, there are people like that you look and you think you have a commonality with them and you realize that you don't, because they're thinking a whole other set of values.
And so what we did achieve on some levels were little things that were very big back then, but we did not put it in a context of what the community wanted. We did not put it in the context of our outside-agitator privilege and how that affected everybody in the community. So it was, what we achieved were things that we look at now and go, "Well, we could have done more. We should have done more. We should have listened more. We should have asked questions and taken a back seat as opposed to being the drivers in on the bus."
One of the things that I think that we really needed to do and need to do now with all of our movements is to really talk about racism, and classism, and sexism, and ageism, and heterosexism, all the "isms." And those are not even all the "isms," but all the "isms" are the things that represent power over somebody or another person. And until we are willing to share that power, I don't think we're going to have any long lasting success.
Now, the Republicans, whether they agree with each other or not, are at least united. The Democrats on the other hand, appear to be still hanging on to some Dixiecrat ideology and can't get anything done right now and have no allegiance. It's like we have to come together as whoever we are and say, "Well, I don't agree with that, but we're going to focus on this." And, "Oh, no, I don't like the way you cook, or I don't like the way you dress. Or I don't like this, or I don't like that. But we are going to go as a united front anyway, beyond our differences."
And I think that's the thing that I learned, is that you have to look past individual attitudes or behaviors and decide if you're committed to something that's bigger than both of you. And that I think has been a lesson. And being able to speak up, and at some point when I was in the feminist movement, I realized it was the white-women's movement.
And the one thing that we shared in terms of ideology was the fact that women were shit-over no matter where they came from or who they were. And I know that there are some tea toting, white glove wearing, Southern white women, or Northern white women, who are voting what their husbands say because the husband pays the bills or whatever. And they are as much victims and don't realize that they are victims.
It's a really outrageous thing, but until we can get to some of those women, or that white women had to get to those women to really turn them around, then women of color understood that there were some other issues that women of color had, but all of us needed to be at the Women's March on Washington. Whatever we thought, whatever differences we had, and until we identify those differences and say, "Regardless, this is what we're fighting for," then we're not going to have any change.
And I'm terrified about Trump and those blankety-blank — Oh, I need to be quiet right now because I'm emotional. I want to hit something.
Trusty:
That's okay.
Cortez:
I want to go out with a baseball bat. There's a line in the Dutchman, which was written by Amiri Baraka, which the Black male character says, "Bessie Smith, everybody loved Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith would have been totally justified getting up on any given morning and going out and killing the first five white people she saw." And that kinda shocked people, but it is also true. And if we don't want to be on the other end of the shot, we need to recognize that and do some changes about it within ourselves.And it's like you learn, well, I learned that I had to do some changes. I had to do some changes around class issues, around education issues, and you know you go stepping up in somebody's house as a little prima donna who went to college and they barely got out of eighth grade. And you assumed by your very behavior that you're better. And you don't eat, you're not even aware that that's what you're doing. And I had to learn over and over, to this very day, to make sure I don't let those things come in the way of doing whatever organizing that I'm part of.
So having said that and had my little tantrum, I throw it out to everybody, what did it all mean in terms of what is the legacy we want to leave the next group of organizers? What do we say to the people who are organizing today that we learned, that the mistakes that we learned and how can they make it better?
Because everybody has, you've said something that's really important, if you don't take care of the economic thing, then towns, little towns are dying. Anthony Bourdain went to a place in Mississippi which had incredible barbecue, and the town is all pretty-much boarded up, but they had great barbecue, and it's mostly Black folks left in the town. So, have at it.
Foner:
I want to add a couple of things about what I think we accomplished and have to pass on. It's just, we've all said, and it's true that it's all complicated. But in a way we weren't ever just fighting for the right to have the vote, the right to sit down in Woolworths. And that was, I think in some ways, always clear, even though the focus was on voter registration and sometimes on challenging segregation, there was a way that it was always about more than that.And I think Karen said, somebody said it was about "freedom." That when people said "freedom" or "I am a man" [the slogan of the Memphis garbage workers strike], now we'd say "I am a person." It really was about — There was a revolutionary spirit that challenged society as a whole.
And in SNCC, in particular, there were certain things that were always part of it, including internationalism. That SNCC was the civil rights organization that first came out against the Vietnam war. And that started actually in Mississippi and then became a national stand.
[Referring to the McComb chapter of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) who in July of 1965 issued the first declaration against the war by a civil rights group.]And [SNCC] looked to countries and the rest, looked to Africa and the liberation movements in other parts of the world. So, I just want to make sure that we don't — I don't think the focus was really that narrow when you think about it.
Cortez:
Well, Women's Strike for Peace, my mother was part of, in the early 60s, were condemning the Vietnam war all the way back then before SNCC was even born. And they were women and they were mothers. And somehow they got dismissed in a certain way because they were women and because they were mothers who were speaking to their sons sent to this awful war and not coming back.So, our international stuff — Okay, a couple of things. Anybody who is not of Native American heritage, indigenous heritage, in this country, is an immigrant. And whether or not that some people recognize that and celebrate it and some people recognize it and hide it, and until all immigrants can respect the country and the people of original origin, then the land is going to just be ravaged and our communities are going to be ravaged even more.
So there's got to be on a 10 million different levels and about five different personalities in each person, with one arm doing this and one arm doing that, and one finger doing this and finger doing that, but it's all coming on the same body. And it's a big job because we got to keep looking over our shoulders at everything that we do. I had a point, I'm just going to stop. Phyllis, you started to say something before I jumped in.
Cunningham:
I think I was responding to internationalism. But to me, internationalism links up with militarism. And in this country what we've done all over the world, it's against people of color, whether it's in this land or whether it's in Yemen supporting Saudi Arabia or Vietnam, wherever we are. It is the white power structure basically, or that it's militarism. And that's what I was responding to when somebody mentioned internationalism and how SNCC got involved in that against the war in Vietnam, yes, and against the internationalism and what was happening in the African countries, et cetera. But I just see militarism is the big, what should I say? It really is so basic to what we do to people of color worldwide and certainly in this country.
Cortez:
I think the word — I learned this concept of neocolonialism in the United States, and I learned it from Bernard Magubane [Professor at University of Connecticut], who was smuggled out of South Africa and brought here during those turbulent times. And it's what needs to be acknowledged, because communities of color are policed, educated, given healthcare and businesses that they don't control. It's white people coming in or the white power structure placing people there. And I think that our present day organizers need to really examine the neocolonialism aspect without worrying about white guilt. And that's what has to be owned and moved beyond.
Orris:
We just saw the newspapers a month ago where the Indian health service in this
country finally recognized Black slaves that were owned by Seminoles on their
reservation and were entitled to health care. And so I am not sure when
we're – we need to balance your view of history I am nervous
when we take all of the native people on the western hemisphere who had very
sophisticated cultures and civilizations and saw themselves as distinctly
different from other native people on the same hemisphere and warred against
each other and sometimes cooperated with each other
Cunningham:
Orris:
In Illinois, I don't know how to do it correctly, if you know what I mean,
because there were various different groups that occupied the same area at
different times. And certainly nomadic groups in Asia are also like that. So
I'm just a little nervous about exactly how we do that accurately and make the
point that we're trying to make. And that is, the European invasion was
genocidal and wiped out the people. And we have to fight that. But I'm a
little nervous when we homogenize people that saw themselves as very
different. So that's my two cents. That's my slightly different approach to
that question.
Cortez:
Foner:
Orris:
Cortez:
Orris:
Cortez:
McAuliff:
So, I think the question is, in the America we are facing right now is really,
as I said going back to our experience 60 years ago, an America in which a
resurgent racism I think is on the defensive. I think that this is a battle
we're going to win if for no other reason, for demographic reasons. But it
seems to me that we are right now refacing the most overt forms of racism that
exist that were sort of driven underground in the last 30 or 40 years.
Cortez:
And however we view the history of this country, and who came from when, and
when did they come, and what did they face, and all of those things, you just
tell the truth about the event that happened in this particular year and the
event that happened in this particular year, but we get past that and we start
rebuilding those coalitions. And that's what — Oh, the
Fellowship of Reconciliation, that's what James Farmer and Bayard Rustin were
part of. And they were absolute coalition builders. And that's what I think is
the legacy we want to leave for the young people under 50. It becomes a
perspective of who's young and who's whatever, really, really teaching
coalition rebuilding.
Orris:
Foner:
Cortez:
Orris:
McAuliff:
Foner:
Cortez:
Orris:
Cortez:
Orris:
Cortez:
Trusty:
And when I look at the world today and the Republicans, I think that, I keep
on going — the whole vaccination thing — I
keep going, "Where is your sense of the common good? How is this happening?"
And so, when I look at the question, what do we learn that we should like to
pass on to the next generation of activists? One thing is that you're thinking
of the common good — what is good for people? And you find
that out, as you said, by listening, by actually going in and listening, which
I do think SNCC did a lot of. They didn't do all of it, but they did a lot of.
At least that was my experience.
And the other thing is, is that in spite of how big these multinational
[corporations] are, and how everything's being consolidated, you can fight
them. You can fight them. And if you look at the country, it's like half the
country gets what I'm talking about and is somewhat behind it, and the other
half is fighting it to the finale.
And how do we help young people, activists? What can we tell them? I like the
question, "What can we tell them?" I always say, one person can start things
that will turn into maybe more than what you thought.
[Mississippi SNCC leader], Hollis Watkins always said, "If you don't like
something, you start talking about it. And then the first 10 people aren't
interested, but the 11th person will be interested. And then you have two
people talking about it."
And I use that example because most young people, a lot, and they feel very
disempowered, and I don't blame them. Look at the [2020] uprising that
happened around George Floyd and what it descended to. I'm in Portland [OR].
It's been a tough go. I'm not quite sure what happened, but it doesn't have
the same cachet that it did in the beginning. We had some beautiful
demonstrations with people, thousands of people lying on the bridge for eight
and a half minutes or whatever, and with a real sense of trying to imagine
what happened at George Floyd and what shouldn't have happened and fighting
for that. And yet it's descended into property damage and violence against the
city. And now the police are asking for twice as much police. I mean, Good
God!
But what do we, as activists in the '60s, say to people? And what I try to say
to them is that "It's worth being passionate about something, it's worth
talking to their people and working with them to get together to fight what's
ever happened." That's what I learned in SNCC. There were all the horrible
things, I agree. The sexism, the everything. And I don't think that would
necessarily happen today because it is a slightly different world. But anyway,
that's just what I want to say.
This question is a good question, because I do go into classrooms, and I'm
trying to talk to young people about what it is. They ask me questions, "How
did you keep any hope? How can you still be passionate about it now? You're
77, for Christ's sake." Stuff like that, that I would like to hear what people
have to say about what we should be telling the young people.
Cortez:
Trusty:
And so when the White Walls of Mom came, they were good for a while but then
they started to take over. And what ended up was, they were excommunicated,
and a Black Wall of Moms, a Black and White Wall of Moms came. And to me, one
of the things that is important is to be able to listen to Black leadership.
White people don't have that in their mind. Their racist consciousness is that
they know best. It's very difficult for them to believe that they don't know
best. And they don't know what's best, but it's dealing with that. Does that
make any sense?
Foner:
Trusty:
Cortez:
The term, "Black power," affected the country the same way the words, "Black
Lives Matter." On the one hand, it alienated some folks, but then other folks
went and said, "Oh, I can be an ally. I can support that." And that, here in
L.A. there are Latinx folks who say, "Yeah, as much shit as we get as a Latinx
community, I know that Black people have been getting it longer in this
country and harder," because a lot of Latinx folks can pass for with light
skin privilege, but supporting another group is, the coalition building is
what we need to enforce, support.
Trusty:
Cortez:
Trusty:
Foner:
We didn't know that there was going to be the massive eruption in the streets,
the massive demonstrations in the streets after George Floyd, it could have
happened after somebody else. But for some combination of reasons, there was
this explosion of amazing demonstrations all over the country. So you just,
and I'm not saying that that's, we haven't won everything we wanted to win for
sure, and there's been a big backlash, but you just don't know, so you keep
going. You keep fighting because it's better to live your life fighting to
make things better than not to.
Trusty:
Cunningham:
Trusty:
Cunningham:
Foner:
Cunningham:
Cortez:
Orris:
I get to talk mostly to medical students and residents who all look very, very
young to me, but clearly older than some, but I [sound recording freezes,
inaudible]
Cortez:
Orris:
— and how do we move ahead and what is accepted is the
culture, what they accept is a cultural change. It's like day and night. It's
like for us, World War II was really in our hindsight. And the Vietnam War was
way longer ago than that for them. And what they accept now as their culture
for the younger people, even the right-wing conservative young people, is
truly amazingly different. And the thirst among the young progressives, if you
will, for "How do you work with people and how do you build coalitions?"
Because there is such a feeling that all you have to do is get on YouTube and
say something, or get on Twitter or WhatsApp and say something, and thousands
of people are gonna come and listen to you.
Well, I come from a tradition where small left parties, communists amongst
others would talk about speaking to millions of Americans. Well, that wasn't
worth a hill of beans, if you didn't organize them. So I think the younger
people today, it's amazing what they, the change in the culture. And if this
is a democratic process, that's the key, because if the culture changes
enough, you can't stand against it that [Rep Elizabeth] Cheney [R-WY] has to
say, "Yeah, I've got a daughter who's gay," that sort of thing.
Foner:
Orris:
Cunningham:
Foner:
So I'm thinking about what you were saying, what you've been saying, Karen,
about talking to white people. And we've done a lot of canvassing and
listening to people and talking to people up there. And it's hard. It's really
hard because if what they're watching is Fox News and One American Network and
that shit, that's what's in their brain. And it fits into that dying empire
where they feel like their way of life is being challenged and they're losing
out. That's what they feel like. They're losing what they, anyway.
In the last conversation, I tried to have a conversation where I said, and I
think, and he was actually listening, "You don't have to think of it as giving
everything up. Try to think of it as life being more interesting, that you can
enlarge your — That it's complicated and you can actually
learn things about other people in other cultures. It doesn't mean giving up
everything that you feel proud of. It means making room, trying to expand your
way of — "
I didn't use exactly these words, "Your way of seeing the world so you're
letting in learning about new things. You're a curious person, you're
interested in learning about new things." That was the best I could do. But he
was kinda listening. This was about Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day.
Don't hit me over the head, don't take things away. Anyway, they are losing.
And demographically they're losing, but that is why it's so dangerous as they
feel like they're — That's why it's so dangerous.
Trusty:
Foner:
Cunningham:
Foner:
Cunningham:
Foner:
Orris:
Trusty:
Cortez:
Foner:
Cortez:
And I think that the thing about what people think that they are losing is
very short-sighted in their fear of how they have treated people in the world
and they expect to be treated in kind. And they don't want to have their
asses whipped. We ain't about whipping anybody and that's not how that's
gonna play out.
And what you're asking them to do is, you're giving up bad habits for your
best humanity, for you being a better human being who pays attention to the
ecology, who pays attention to where you shop and the money you spend in any
given day to those organizations or those businesses that oppress you and
everybody else. That you find your place in the oppression that's going on in
this country of class and money, and you'll find all kinds of reasons to join
with all the folks that you think are going to take over and kill you.
Trusty:
Cortez:
Trusty:
Orris:
Trusty:
Orris:
And maybe, so many Black organizers we know, not just Bob [Moses] and others,
have died, and there may be a differential death rates since we're all getting
older, it may be any number of other things in the consciousness. But it may
also be, and I'm a little worried that it's just because of lack of time or
whatever, who volunteered and who wanted to be part of the group? And we all
know that doesn't work if you want a balanced group. You got to make extra
efforts to make sure that the group is balanced one way or another. So I don't
want to make this an issue, but somebody should whisper {UNCLEAR}
Foner:
Orris:
Cortez:
And they need to step up to the plate by voting. The percentages of people who
vote is so pathetic with the people who complain the most. So it's like the
people who are complaining about this, about that, about that, about that, did
you vote? Did you volunteer to do anything?
I campaigned for [Rep.] Karen Bass [D-CA] when she first ran for state
representative. And now she's going to run for mayor, I don't know why she's
leaving Congress to come back here and be the mayor, but on some level she
might feel more of a commitment or ability to do something to her hometown.
And that might mean more to her than the stuff she's not able to do for the
country.
But I'm going to go to the kickoff campaign thing on Saturday because that's
what I do. And it nourishes me and it is more than — You can't
stop. You just cannot stop. To stop is to die as far as I'm concerned. You
have — I had a friend and I said had, because she admitted
when Obama was running that she wasn't voting for Obama, but not only that,
that she had never voted and was never ever going to vote because it didn't
matter. I said, "Thank you, goodbye." Because I tried to tell her, "I don't
understand how you can't participate in your government, in what's going on."
So, African American voting is abysmal. And thank you [Georgia voting-rights
activist and candidate] Stacy Abrams for inspiring more folks in general, but
that we've got to be working harder. And we can't let [Rep.] Ralph, Reverend
Warnock [D-GA] get ruled out [meaning defeated for re-election because of new
Republican voting rules that target voters of color].
And there's all these elections that we got to show up with our five dollars,
with our five minutes. I don't do telephones, but I will fold flyers, put them
in envelopes and send them out.
There is just, Peter, you're right, we got to talk to folks within our own
ranks and call ourselves on what kind of job we did. I didn't expect, I knew
that Dorie [Ladner] was a woman of color and she is not here and I'm not angry
with her that she's not here [maybe because its her birthday], but there was
no one else in the group, just all you white folks.
Orris:
Cortez:
Foner:
Orris:
Foner:
Cortez:
Foner:
Cortez:
Orris:
Cortez:
But for most protesters, the demand meant recognizing that decades of
conservative and neoliberal de-funding of social and mental-health services by
both Republicans and Democrats had so crippled the social-safety net that the
only agency available to deal with domestic disputes, homelessness, drug
addiction & alcoholism, mental-health crises, community friction, and so
forth, were the police who were neither trained nor equipped to handle those
problems and who therefore tended to use force and suppression as their first
and only response. Most "Defund the Police" supporters argued that a portion
of law-enforcement funding needed to be shifted to agencies better able to
handle social-problems so that police could focus their time, energy, and
resources on actual crimes and criminals.
Republicans and conservative Democrats seized on the dramatic and frightening
"eliminate" interpretation of "Defund the Police" to mobilize their political
bases. And the mass media reported only the "eliminate" interpretation because
it was the most dramatic attention-grabbing story. As a result, the electorate
was repelled by the slogan, and rejected anything that could be associated
with it.]
Trusty:
And there's all argument right now right in the city council to see if they're
going to expand the funding of it. It's an interesting dilemma, but at least
they've come up with a different kind of team that is more skilled to deal
with what you're finding on the streets.
Foner:
I know it's complicated, but I always feel like I have to remember that
that's — It's important to remember that nothing changes
unless there's a big push in that direction, then you end up with some
incremental stuff. But if you don't have that big push, then you don't end up
with incremental stuff.
Cortez:
Foner:
Cortez:
Orris:
Cortez:
Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers' sons,
That touches me most, is that I had a chance to work with people
Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on
me
Struggling for myself don't mean a whole lot, and I've come to realize
We who believe in freedom cannot rest.
Foner:
Cunningham:
Cortez:
Trusty:
Foner:
Orris:
Trusty:
Orris:
Foner:
Orris:
Cortez:
Webspinner:
webmaster@crmvet.orgEthnicities
Fatima, I want to disagree on a couple of points, or make a slightly
different view of a couple of things that you said, only because it is a
particular preoccupation of mine at the moment. Even those groups that we call
native [to] North America are immigrants. They just came earlier. And those
groups that are immigrants have some aspects of their culture that are very
important and have been lost and we need to support around their right to have
their culture, et cetera. But there are other aspects that were not so.
Yes.
I'm really nervous that we not pick out, for instance, because I hear this
now coming from a lot of European Australians, and I'm particularly
interested in the Aboriginal culture in Australia, but what makes me nervous
is, that we not pick out the Germans, if we were talking about Europe, we not
pick out the Germans to pay homage to the Germans in Paris, because they
occupied Paris for a brief period of time.
That's valid. That's totally valid.
Yeah. Well, I was going to say the other trap that you can fall into is
romanticizing different oppressed people. And the history is complicated and
all cultures are complicated and have different aspects to them. That's
certainly something that I know I have fallen into and other people have
fallen into, romanticizing and not seeing, romanticizing one group or another
group.
From my concerns, you can be fascinated with all of our human differences,
and honor those human differences, and respect those peoples that have those
differences without doing what you're talking about. I have the unusual
opportunity of organizing on environmental issues on almost every continent
in the world in the last 10 years. We've based community organizations and
advocacy groups, et cetera, against the multinationals in general. And it's
just fascinating how different and how the same we all are all over the
world. I just find it amazing and exciting.
I think when I talk about the indigenous people, I'm talking about prior to
1600, because there were no Europeans or anybody else that had landed here
prior to 1600. There may be some rowboat folks or whatever. But prior to 1600
before the mass invasion began, the indigenous people didn't have a sense of
property ownership. They may have been warring with each other, but that's
like having a family at war with each other and the cousins don't like those
cousins or whatever, but it was not somebody else coming in and saying, "All
you live on, all you have, now belongs to us."
I'm not so sure of that.
You don't have to be.
I think I'm not sure whether this is productive or the place or direction to
go. Peter, I actually what I think about is the fact that my ancestors came
here because they were essentially pushed out of Ireland by the Brits who
occupied their land and took over their property and they wound up coming
here and were as racist as any other group with a very nasty history in New
York with African-Americans. Well what started out as a very close history and
then got to be very nasty history. I just think that the complexity of ethnic
histories is, I agree with you the deeper you go the less perfect any
particular portion of it seems.
I remember those Sunday soirees that I was talking about, that the coalition
building at that time, there were Catholics and Jews and Baptists, just to
make a distinction between the religious thoughts and the mixture of
ethnicities, and including white people as an ethnic group of their own, and
yellow people, and brown/Black people, and red people, but there was a
coalition that somehow or other was allowed to be divided in the late 60s that
needs to be repaired. And we need to be working on coalition building.
Absolutely.
Well, the young people also have a sense of the importance of working around
the climate issues, which we did not have at the time, which we didn't
understand. And I would say also that we really did not have our strength,
that we didn't challenge sexism within our own movement and we didn't see it
as a priority in terms of our general outlook.
I remember teaching, doing a workshop on sexism, and the first thing people
went, "What?" And I said, "Yes, women are sexist to other women." "How dare
you? I'm not." "Yes, you are. When you do this, or you do that, da, da, da,
da." So we have to own those things. How much have we internalized the
oppression so that we become worse than folks that we're fighting against?
But that comes in wiping away those things and having a coalition where we
can look past all of it.
No, but it makes the underlying point about, that you're —
Excuse me, I just realized I need to leave to another Zoom, so my apologies.
But since I'm running the other one, I have to take this five o'clock finish.
See you again, I hope.
Goodbye. Nice to meet you.
OK, John.
Effects and Lessons
I was just, that gets back to the original question you asked, "What was the
lasting effect of the 60s?" And I think none of us would argue that each of
these movements, and increases in consciousness about these relationships and
the divisions in society, are built on the Civil Rights Movement. Sometimes
[they] acknowledge, sometimes recognize it, and other times don't, but I think
that's important, I'd say.
Oh, yeah. I don't think that there's any movement — now this
is my personal absolute arrogance — I don't think that there's
any movement after the '60s that did not look at the Civil Rights Movement and
say, "That's what we need to do that's, that's what we need to do, and that's
what we need to do"
And if we were to look at the '30s, we would have done better. And we made
those organizers sneak in and teach us, and we didn't realize they were doing
it.
Yes, Karen.
So I'm sitting here thinking around a couple things. One, that I feel like,
in spite of the failures of this, that overall SNCC represented fighting for
the common good. And particularly for the bottoms-up awareness that sometimes
people see common good only within their own strata, and that believe that
they fought for that.
Wall of Moms & Black Leadership
Was it in Portland where the mothers formed that line?
[Referring to lines of women
identifying themselves as "moms" who interposed themselves between nonviolent
protesters and heavily-armed federal law-enforcement formations to protect the
demonstrators from attack. Similar to "mothers" organizations in other nations
around the world who protest police violence and abuse.]
Yeah.
Trusty:
So let me tell you the backstory about that is that, it was a white
organization to begin with, and they started fundraising just for themselves.
That organization originally was organization, Don't Shoot Portland [a
police-accountability organization in Portland OR]. And it's organized by a
terrific organizer who I liken to SNCC a lot, Teressa Raiford.
Take over.
Cortez:
I think the Black and White Wall of Mothers is the goal. That's the goal.
Yes.
Because that makes — and I know there were some Latinas in
there, Latinx folks in there — and that's what we need to be
looking towards and hold that up.
What Do We Say to Young People Today?
Yeah. I'd like to hear what other people, if you are sometimes talking to
young people or you have that opportunity, what you would say? Because this
to me is, how do I talk to my grandchild? How do I talk to
these — I'm talking to 36 freshmen in a week, what should we
be saying? The world is so screwed up that many people don't even think the
Civil Rights Movement achieved anything, because it's so screwed up right now.
No, we didn't win the war, that's for sure, but we did do some stuff. So I'm
just curious.
And a lot of the things that we benefit from now like Title IX [of the
Civil Rights Act
of 1964 that pre-prempted segregationist state courts] and
federal0funding, no federal-funding to any organizations or institutions that
are segregated. [Representative] Adam Clayton Powell [D-NY] as much of a
rascal as he was, he put 63 pieces of legislation in front of Johnson's
fingers. And basically said, "Now you sign this." And the Hill-Burton Act
[prohibiting segregation in federally-funded hospitals], and Title IX, and
just a whole bunch of things that came from the Civil Rights Movement that
people don't even know they came from there.
Well, the fight in Atlantic City, one of the compromises was that the next
round they would start having Blacks and women come into be delegates. And
that was part of the compromise of the so-called compromise, the defeat, but
that was part of it. Ten years ago, they finally had equal number of white,
Black, and women. That's how long it took to get that there, but that's where
it started. I remember going, "Yes, SNCC," because they were the ones that
were pushing for equality in that realm. Now, it's still a mess,
but —
One of the things I always say to people is, you can point to some specific
gains, but what you were saying about the choice, how
fulfilling — The choice of how to live your life, and do you
want to live your life with hope that things can change and get better, or do
you want to live your life feeling like things are — you're
helpless and hopeless? And I know that's a very personal thing, but I actually
think it makes a difference, that I have chosen to remain an activist because
it's better that way. You never know, you don't know. Howard Zinn has this
wonderful thing, which I don't have the quote with me, but about, how you just
never know when things are going to change. [Against Discouragement, Howard Zinn.]
Yeah.
Yeah. And so, don't you feel that what else can you do? There's no question
about stopping and saying, "Goodbye." No stopping. I mean, once you've been
there, you have to keep going. And it's because you want to go. I know when I
do — I don't lecture — I participate in
discussion with college kids at Hunter every semester in a specific course.
And they said, "Well, what keeps you going?" "Well, what keeps me going is
there's no way that I can stop." And more or less what you said, the hope that
you always have that there's going to be a change.
I answered that question one time, and I said, this is when I was 75, I think
I said, well, "Well, I just got a girlfriend, and I'll tell you what, there
is sex after 75." And the whole class just totally cracked up. It made the
class, because you also do other things besides just fight for this. You try
to have a life that's full, that gives you some love and some hope. And we're
actually still together
And they still stay in tune, yeah.
Yeah, good for you.
We have to take care of ourselves.
I think Peter has been trying to say something, but he met the wall of women.
Oh, just becoming 76, I'm happy to hear it.
Peter, I don't know, can you hear?
[Sound resumes]
We have to hope that some things can't be put back in the bottle. We'll
see — I mean, abortion. We'll see.
I think it was somewhere, anyway.
Talking to the Other Side
And teaching. I think it, the right wing picked up "Critical Race Theory," [as
a scarecrow to mobilize their base] and it's not [what they claim] at all.
It's teaching what actually has happened and taken place in this country. But
then what do you do with the mothers and the parents that say, "I don't want
my children to feel bad. I don't know what to say to them when they come home
and they feel so bad because of how Black people have been treated."
You know what, I had actually had a conversation with somebody. I know this
is really hard stuff. But we have a house, we have a little house in Western
Maine, which is the 2nd Congressional District, very large Trump support. And
we have a neighbor who voted twice for Obama and twice for Trump.
That's why they're fighting so hard.
Right.
The whole reinforcement thing and the problem that people are going to have
voting, that's all strategies to keep hold of the power.
Right. And we have to —
And yet, so many people don't even think about how the corporate world is
controlling all this and Whole Foods and everything. And like you said, the
consolidation of all the businesses and so forth. Who owns all the newspapers
now? My God.
But they don't totally control what's going on on the right.
It's —
Oh, that's also the danger of course. That we {UNCLEAR} Germany.
Fatima, do you have something you wanted to say? I saw you don't come forward
a few times.
I'm more than willing to let you all talk and I'm listening. And I have my
thought that I can get in here somewhere.
Go ahead.
Well, when I was thinking about, going back to Phyllis saying, "I don't want
my children to come home and feel bad," and I'm thinking about how all of a
sudden, every child gets an award for just showing up to the game. And it's
like, you didn't earn that award. And maybe all the awards need to be
disbanded And you just gotta show up and play the game [crosstalk 01:23:09]
Yeah, you could just start talking about the pharmaceutical companies.
Oh, Jesus.
Because that's across the board. That is affecting Black, white, all of us.
Old people.
Yeah.
Composition of These Discussion Groups
Could I add? I don't know where this fits, and it's a little part of our
routine home parliamentarian over the years, but Fatima, and I don't know who
organized this, but I want to go back to Laura's thing just for a moment. And
that is, looking at those 45 or so, on the gallery [the people participating
in the small group discussions], we were awful white for this crowd.
But it is an issue. It is an issue.
Well, somebody should whisper to somebody how did it happen? Because I think
everybody over the 45 understand this routine. This is not something we just
would ask this question today. This is a question we've all been asking for
30 years. So I think we have to ask it of this situation too. Anyway, that's
all.
[Outreach for the small group
discussions was made to every Movement veteran who registered for the SNCC
60th conference and all those who were on the various SNCC, CRMA, and SLP
mailing lists. More whites than Blacks signed up to participate. As it
happened, a disproportionately large number of the African Americans who
signed up were unable to do so for various reasons (health, family-crisis,
internet-connectivity, and so on).]
I think people of color, especially Black people or African American people,
need to really step up to the plate.
At least the way the group looked, we've all learned how unscientific that
is, or at least how sociologic it is, if that's a name.
Yeah, I think it's an example of who ultimately does have that power because
who ultimately is the one that goes out there and does the work. And on some
level people of color have kinda given up and said, "I'm not going to be
involved because what's the point?"
Except that that's not true of the organizers, the organizing group.
So that's why we have to ask, it's just it brings that question.
And I think they're all very, those people are all very busy planning for the
next few days, so they are not part of, or some of them are, but a lot of
them aren't. Anyway, I don't know the answer.
But I think it, I don't know the answer either, I just know that
it's —
Disappointing.
It is disappointing and you wonder where people's priorities are. I think
there's an attitude about veterans of anything get overlooked and some of the
veterans don't even want to participate with other veterans because, "Oh,
that's just preaching to the choir. I don't want to hear a bunch of folks,
moan, groan and complain." Well no we're complaining and trying to come up
with some solutions to the problems we are complaining about.
And especially when there's plans to transcribe, there's plans to set in the
historic record some of this interchange that gives us an opportunity of
addressing that imbalance if we think about how to do that.
"Defund the Police"
Yeah. The whole idea of defunding the police was a bad statement, a bad
choice, and it should have just been "reforming" the police and "reallocating
funds" for certain things that support good police action. As opposed to
militarizing our local police that we need to have. Because most of the folks
on the street have mental health issues, and our veterans that have had mental
health issues and are homeless, and we don't need to police them, we need to
therapize them.
[Rising out of the 2020 George Floyd
protests was a controversial demand/slogan to "Defund the Police." For many
protesters that meant either eliminating police departments altogether or
paring them down to a small fraction of their current size.
They're now starting in Portland something called a Street Group or a Response
Team, which has a mental health advocate and two or three people that aren't
police that are — And they go out to the ones that are about
mental health and they're trying to take — so that police
don't go out and try to deal with things that they've never been trained to
deal with. That's not what they've been trained to deal with. So they're
actually trying to separate some of this stuff into that.
I agree with you, but in a way I have to keep remembering that if that more
radical demand had not been there, then none of the reform
stuff — I'm not saying it's gotten very far because it hasn't
and then there's been a big backlash — but it's always true
that when there's an extreme visionary statement, which is saying, "Police are
not doing what they're supposed to be. They don't keep our communities safe,
so we shouldn't be just automatically giving them more money," that's the way
I understood that.
Yeah, you're right about the pendulum swinging, so you want to swing it all
the way to the right — bad choice of
words — but all in one direction so that hopefully it will
come back and land in the middle somewhere.
I think there's more to be said about all that, but it's more complicated
than just saying, "Oh, that was a bad slogan." It was too easy for the right
to attack it.
Well, that's absolutely [crosstalk 01:35:19].
I think agitate, agitate, agitate, then promising [laughter].
Ella's Song & Ella Baker
I got the 10-minute notice [that session was about to end]. But I have a poem
that Bruce suggested all of us read at the end of our groups. So I'm going to
read it, and if you have any more comments before we get shut out, just say
them, it'll be a free for all. It's [Ella's Song by Bernice Johnson Reagon].
We who believe in freedom cannot rest.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers' sons.
passing on to others that which was passed on to me.
I need to be the one in the number as we stand against tyranny.
that teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle
survives.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
It's Ella's song. It's the freedom singers, the Sweet Honey in the Rock, sang
it.
Sweet Honey in the Rock and Ella Baker.
I got to meet her in New Orleans one time in the 80s. She was an incredible
woman, and very much overlooked for all of her accomplishments.
Very much
That is definitely changing.
Is that new movie about —
[inaudible 01:37:51]
But I'm thinking about Ella Baker's colleague, same age.
Septima Clark?
No. I'm sorry. I'm just blocking on her name. Don't get old ladies.
It's too late.
(Labor donated)