[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.]
Josh Gould Janet Heinritz-Canterbury Ed Nakawatase Frances O'Brien (Fran) Muriel Tillinghast
Janet:
Well, let's go ahead and get started. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So my name is Janet Heinritz-Canterbury. I am the facilitator for today. Which doesn't mean a lot other than just moving the discussion, which I don't think will need a lot of movement.First of all, I would like each of us just to identify ourselves just with a whatever, like a one sentence [like] "I'm Janet Heinritz-Canterbury. I worked with SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] in late '65 and then '66 in Alabama."
Fran:
I'm Fran O'Brien. I am in California. And I worked in summers of '64 and '65 with COFO in Mississippi.
Janet:
Thank you. Ed.
Ed:
Hi. I worked at SNCC from the autumn of 1963 till the end of 1964 in the Atlanta office. And I have probably the ethnic distinction of being the only Japanese American in the office. There was also a Japanese Canadian, named Tamio Wakayama. And I became good friends. But —
Janet:
And Josh.
Josh:
Hi. I am Josh Gould. I worked with SNCC both in Los Angeles and in Alabama. Worked in Wilcox County and Sumpter. And when I was in Wilcox, I worked in Gee's Bend with Janet, for a brief period of time. And, frankly, all too brief, but that's a whole 'nother story. And that's me.
Janet:
Thank you. So Muriel is actually [still] trying to get on. So I wanted to just give us each a chance to talk a little bit about whatever we want to talk about in terms of this first issue that we're dealing with this morning. And that Bruce is basically [asking] how our movement participation affected us. So each of us should take about five minutes to say whatever we want to say about that.
Janet:
And Fran, you're next to me on the screen, so I'm going to ask you to go first.
Fran:
Okay. Well, what comes to mind first is how much history I learned that I had not learned in school. I thought I had been a very good history student. I always had straight As, but I got to Mississippi and I learned about all of these abolitionists and Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, people I'd never heard of.And I was fortunate to have a very good hostess [referring to the local women with whom she lived in the Black community], who was a retired teacher. She taught me a lot. And one time one of my students in the freedom school was reciting the Gettysburg Address. And I asked her, "Well, do you know what that was all about?" She said, "Yes." This was a 13 year old, she said, "It means that all the slaves are free. And it was signed July 4th, 1776." I tried to untangle that. I mentioned that incident to Mrs. [Garrett?], my hostess, and she said, "Oh, that is so common."
I said, "It is?" She said, "Well, yes." And she explained to me very patiently that July 4th, the Declaration of Independence did not mean a great deal to people who were already enslaved. And maybe the master called himself English, maybe he called himself American. They didn't really care.
The Emancipation Proclamation, of course, was much more important. And I said, "Well, yes, but the Emancipation Proclamation, only freed people who lived in the state of rebellion. It doesn't have a lot of effect." And she said, "Well, Fran, do you think George the Third recognized the Declaration of Independence?" Well, of course, I hadn't ever thought of it that way before. And the whole summer was like that. She was a great teacher to me. And helped me to be a better teacher when I went back and taught children with special needs in Bakersfield [CA].
Janet:
Thanks, Fran. Ed.
Ed:
Well, I think the experience in SNCC changed my life completely, really. I mean, and I suspect there are a lot of others that would say the same thing. I mean, I was totally engrossed, obsessed, I guess may be the right word by the movement.And so I just went on a limb. I mean, it's a crazy story. But I hopped a bus from South Jersey, and went to the SNCC office, essentially. And was basically on the staff in about a month.
And I think, in terms of how it changed, how I saw things, I mean, it totally altered my notion, somewhat similar to Fran's of what one reality and truth was. I think I came with a perception that a lot of people have, that "racial discrimination," as we termed it, was essentially a regional thing. And it seemed to be the particular possession of southern whites. And I think I learned in SNCC among many other things, that the problem was much deeper, more profound than that and more widespread, obviously.
I think it also put me in direct contact, both verbally and personally, with some of the bravest people I've ever known, and people who risked their lives, in effect. I used to take in reports from the field at the SNCC office. So there were all these stories of harassment and violence. And that was very much always on a factor.
And people persisted, which I think was another thing that affected my thinking about social change. About how it wasn't something that you just dallied around with for a little while and then left. It was something you worked on, and no matter what the odds looked, and the odds were often not good. But that it was profoundly important to do that. I think, in subsequent years, I've been accused of being hopelessly optimistic. And I plead guilty here.
But I think there's a reason for, in the sense that the SNCC experience was one in which, however, long the odds were, the movement prevailed on that sense. During the time that I came down south, and by the time, at the end of '64, I mean, essentially, Jim Crow was gone, legally speaking. I mean, it took a little while [before] we get also the voting rights as a legal issue. I'm not saying that there haven't been profound challenges and steps back, but [the] point is a number of us saw when we, it was a reality. And we saw how that happened.
And the poorest and most abused and oppressed people in the country made it happen. They organized and they changed the nation. And they provided a good example of how it might be able to be done. And I think that's always affected me since. Other words, optimism is you can divide the world one way I suppose, but there is also sometimes an objective reality to have to [inaudible 00:10:59], that if you've seen it happen, as a number of us did, as I've interpreted it, things do change. People do have an impact, organizing matters. And I think that that's something I've carried with me ever since.
Janet:
Thank you, Ed. Josh. So Josh, it's all yours.
Josh:
Well, I wouldn't be the person I am, I wouldn't have had any of the experiences I have had, if it hadn't been for the Southern Freedom Movement and particularly SNCC.I came to, I did not participate in the summer of '64, but I had already changed my life in Los Angeles. One of those people who when challenged by the historical events that were happening, I was in a junior college. And I organized the first chapter of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] that ever existed on a California junior college campus. In fact political organizations were banned on junior college campuses. And we got that changed.
And then I became involved with CORE. And I left school, worked with the people at UCLA CORE and with N-VAC [Non-Violent Action Committee], which is where Bruce Hartford worked, and he and I became good friends. And he had a big influence on my development. And after participating in demonstrations and getting arrested in L.A. [Los Angeles], and particularly because when SNCC announced that they were attempting to form independent political parties in Alabama, that really attracted me.
And so at the end of '65, the beginning of '66, Alabama, I'm sure Janet remembers, you were able to form political parties in a particular county. That's where the Lowndes County Freedom Organization [LCFO] was able to be developed as the "Black Panther Party," the first Black Panther Party in the country.
[Alabama election laws required every politial party to have a ballot symbol alongside the party name so that illiterate whites would know who to vote for (Blacks, of course, were prevented from voting by the so-called 'literacy test.' The symbol of the all-white Alabama Democratic Party was a rooster with a banner reading "White Supremacy For the Right." After the LCFO chose a blank panther for their symbol, people began calling it the "Black Panther Party."]In SNCC, obviously, people remember at the end, in May of '66, the thrust of SNCC, the growth of black nationalism and more revolutionary an outlook challenged whites to leave SNCC and do work in their own, in white communities in particular. I went back to L.A. I hooked up with another SNCC veteran, tried to do that. But the anti-war movement was challenging us.
The thing about SNCC was that, for a lot of us, what was the perception we had of ourselves? For me, it was like I was an organizer. That's what I wanted to do with my life. And I wanted to figure out what kind of organizational structures could be built that would bring people into the movement and help them participate in it.
And in '67, there was a big demonstration in Los Angeles that was viciously attacked by the police. And they had no monitoring system. So I have been involved in nonviolent training sessions that Bruce actually participated in teaching. And we established a monitors training school. And it just became part of the movement and part of the developing anti-war movement in L.A. And then it just became, every time I'd go out it would be like one arrest after another. So I figured it was time for me to go.
Anyway, long story short on that is that I ended up in Texas, by way of Louisiana, and was a participant in developing the anti-war movement amongst active duty GIs. I worked at a GI coffee house called the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas for two and a half years. There's a great documentary about the GI movement called "Sir! No Sir!" put up by David Zeiger, who also worked at the Strut.
And the thing about it is that, I just think about the people. I mean, for Ed, I'm sure he probably remembers Ron Carver, and Jack Minnis —
Ed:
Yes.
Josh:
And then came here to Atlanta. And I tried to and I do my best to participate in the Black Lives Matter.[Referring to a broad protest and political action movement that began in 2012 against racial injustice, particularly police murders, brutality, and abuse inflicted on Black and other nonwhite Americans. It's possible that the social-media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter which evolved into a generic label for what became a years-long, multi-issue, multi-tactic movement was inspired by Ella's Song written and sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock to honor NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC activist/leader Ella Baker. ]There was a documentary I helped work on where I got Bruce and another friend of mine, Clay Carson, professor at Stanford, to participate and give interviews.
But there's a lot of things about how people — I'll give you one example. In 1972, Hosea Williams was trying to organize against discrimination in employment at Bridge's department store. He was never able to get more than 1,500 people really to — and you know the amount of organizing that went in to build it.
[Hosea Williams was a charismatic leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).]Here around Black Lives Matter, somehow, someway, 6,000 people turnout for some of these, and I don't know how it happens. But that's the new reality for me.
Janet:
Yeah.
Janet:
Thank you, [Josh]. Thank you. That was wonderful. All of you, wonderful, wonderful stories. Muriel was with us there for a second and now we've lost her again. So I'm not exactly sure what happened. I guess I can text [Zoom hostess] Joy again. So let me do my little five minutes spiel here.Like Ed, I got on a bus from Appleton Wisconsin just literally went and asked the people I babysat for for money to get a bus ticket. And I actually had met some people, who were building a, putting together a library for Black people to use in Selma. So they were collecting books. And so I said, "Okay, well, I want to go back with you."
And I was just this good, quote, unquote, "Catholic girl." Third of 18 children, in my family. Not a very happy kid. I was in extension college at the University of Wisconsin, I was not liking it.
And so I got my $25 or some ridiculously cheap amount of money to get on a bus to Selma. Got off the bus and my life has never, never been the same. I was stunned to say the least by the — I actually had never seen anything like it. The streets [in the Black community] weren't paved, there were no streetlights, the houses were dilapidated. I thought I grew up poor because I'm one of 18 kids, we never had any money. And man, when I got off the bus, I realized that my family had everything compared to the neighborhood, where these Black people were living in Selma.
So from Selma, I was recruited by SNCC to work in Wilcox County [AL], same thing, Josh worked on the independent political party there. Our mascot was, I think, a white sheep or a lamb. That was the conversation that we had at a mass meeting one night. And I think we tried to talk people into making it a Black Panther, but they came up with a —
I lived in the Gee's Bend [communuty], and that was an incredible experience, for a lot of reasons. One was the people were so amazingly empowered, especially compared to other parts of the county and other folks that I'd met in the south, other Black people that I've met in the south, because there were no white people in Gee's Bend. It was at the end of a road, the dead end at the end of a road, and really nobody came down there except the [Coca Cola] truck to deliver Coke to Roman Pettway's store once a month or something like that.
[To officials and map-makers, Gee's Bend is known as "Boykin." But to local Blacks and Freedom Movement activists it was "Gee's Bend," an all-Black community located within a large loop of the Alabama River. No bridges spanned the river, and only a single, narrow, road led in and out. Surrounded on three sides by the river, it formed a self-sufficient Black-owned enclave in the heart of Wilcox County Alabama. In the 1960s, the Bend became a center of Freedom Movement activity and a safe haven for civil rights activists because the single road could be (and was) defended against KKK terrorists, and as land-owners they were safe from eviction.Originally, it had been a large cotton plantation owned by the Gee family (hence the name). It then passed to the Pettway family, and then to others. Prior to the Civil War, it was worked by slave labor and afterwards by Black sharecroppers mired in extreme and utter poverty. In the 1930s, the land was sold to the federal Farm Security Administration which set up Gee's Bend Farms Inc — a Black-run experimental cooperative that was furiously opposed by Alabama's white power-structure. First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt took a personal interest in the project as did other notables such as Dorothea Lange. The FSA built "Roosevelt" homes, and eventually sold land to the residents, creating a rare Black-owned region.
In the late 1960s, the "Freedom Quilting Bee," an outgrowth of the Movement, begun as a way to bring a trickle of outside dollars into the community.
]It was powerful in terms of what it did to me. I don't think I've ever been the same person that I was when I got on that bus in Appleton. And my whole life has been transformed by that experience. I've never stopped organizing, in whatever fashion. Certainly making more than $10 a week or a month or whatever we made for SNCC — which rarely got paid, I think — but, I've actually made a life with those values.
It's interesting, because my kids see me as naive. I'm not sure they would call me an "optimist" Ed, but they see me as a little bit naive, because they're all much more cynical and much more radical than I am.
But it's interesting, I ended up marrying my husband, Tom, who was also in SNCC. He and I worked and went to Tennessee and worked on the white organizing project, after white folks were asked to leave the Black community.Tom died a couple years ago, but he and I benefited from [SNCC research director] Jack Minnis' training. He came to Tennessee, and we got personal instruction from him on how to do the power structure research in Sevier County, Tennessee, which again, is a phenomenal concept. And actually I've used it for years and years and years in different settings. So anyway, I'll stop at that.
So actually at this point, I would love to just open up the conversation for questions or comments on each other's experiences and other ideas and questions that people have or discussion, whatever, not questions.
Anybody want to go?
Josh:
After people left SNCC, what kind of organizing and/or political work did they end up doing?
Ed:
The summer after leaving SNCC, this is 1965, I was hired as a community organizer in southern New Jersey, where I grew up. And this was when the poverty program was just getting started. So the tasks that we had, it was a contract with the state of New Jersey Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to do organizing at the local level.The task was to establish ultimately, community action goals in rural Jersey. And so I was traipsing around, essentially. And maybe that's the right word here. But I do remember feeling and thinking about a model that had become transcendent in SNCC and that was by Bob Moses and the approach to people in the local community that you didn't — The point was to ask questions to get some sense of where people were coming from, what they needed, and very much be in the background, so that people wouldn't be intimidated by credentials or race or whatever. In my case, there were certainly no credentials to be intimidated by, so it was easy. And ultimately, I mean, we did start that process. But even in post-SNCC it was very important to see that as a means of going forward.
And from that I established or had a connection with the American Friends Service Committee, which I did other programs. I ultimately wound up being the national representative for Native American service for the organization for about 31 years, till I retired. But that's another story-
Janet:
Right. Thank you, Ed. It looks like we've got Muriel. Yay.Can you just introduce yourself, tell us what years you were in the civil rights movement and where you were, and who you worked with?
Muriel:
Well, I worked in — Let's see. Early on, I worked on Route 40, I worked out of the Nonviolent Action Group, I went to Mississippi, I worked in Greenville and areas around the Delta, then I went up to Holly Springs, and I went to Atlanta. I've worked in Alabama a little bit. And that's pretty much it in a nutshell.["Route 40" refers to CORE's campaign to desegregate eating and lodging establishments on the main highways between New York and Washington DC. In addition to CORE, the SNCC-affiliated Nonviolent Action Group [NAG] at Howard University in Washington and the Civic Interest Group (CIG) in Baltimore played key roles in the campaign.]
Janet:
So Muriel, we each took about five minutes to talk a little bit about whatever we wanted to talk about. For this first session [the topic] is, How did the movement affect us? So any part of that you'd like to share with us would be wonderful.
Muriel:
I think the movement had a profound effect upon us. But I was involved in the movement before SNCC. So SNCC was just simply a continuation of work that I had been doing earlier on. Gave me, I guess, the affirmation to make that part of my life. And that's what I've tried to do.I guess, as I came into New York, I left Washington DC for a variety of reasons. I was surprised [at] how few people actually knew anything about the movement. And then the other part was how few people respected the movement. And that respect has grown over the years. But nonetheless, in the period of time, we were, I was a pariah. But that didn't bother me. I came to New York, worked in the SNCC office, and was a part of some of what went down there. And I've just moved on from job to job, but never really, quote, "had a career." I just had a job.
And now I'm basically working with the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, which is a group that I can tolerate, and they can tolerate me. And working on various issues, trying to bring some information to people who are at least willing to listen to new information or different information. And so that's it.
Janet:
So we've been sharing other questions and comments with each other. Josh was just asking about, what people did when they left the movement, or left SNCC organizing. And it sounds like your whole life pre- and post- Civil Rights Movement has been about civil rights.
Muriel:
Well, it's been about trying to get to the truth of stuff. I mean, we live in such a morass of mythology and lies. It's hard on the psyche. It's trying to get to some level or, "Can we have a truth about anything?" And so I've been working on that. So I've taught. I have done some rescue work. I have done a lot of advocacy work. And I'm back to now in some aspect of teaching with a little community group.
Janet:
That's great. So one thing that after — So, Tom [Canterbury] and I actually left the white organizing project in Tennessee together. By that time, we had become a couple. I met him there, but we connected later. So then we set up this white organizing project in Tennessee after the white folks were asked to leave the Black community in April or March of, I think it was April, of '66.Stokely [Carmichael] and Carl Braden [of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF] got together to organize or to set up the project, the white organizing project in eastern Tennessee. Ed Hamlett and SSOC [Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC] were still in Kentucky or Nashville or wherever they were, I forget where they were. But I think Stokely got some money from Carl. And he needed money. And then Carl had a house or something in eastern Tennessee. So they put a bunch of organizers there, including Tom and me and a bunch of other white folks. And then, like I said before, Jack Minnis came up and spent a week with us, which was absolutely wonderful.
But when the local newspaper covered — because we were seen as "outside agitators." Carl — it was a terrible project in so many ways — the strategy was just not developed at all. Carl came down and got arrested and it was the front page of the local newspaper, "Outside agitators are here."
Muriel:
What's the town?
Janet:
It was Sevierville [Southeast of Knoxville].
Muriel:
That sounds severe. [Laughter]
Janet:
Yeah. So it was actually the gateway to the Smoky Mountains. People did not want to talk to us. I mean, it was poor whites, everybody in the community was poor white, and we were white, but we were obviously outside agitators.So anyway. I went up to Gatlinburg and got a job in a restaurant. And when Jack [Minnis] came and talked to us, he basically said, "You're not ready to organize, you're ready to do some research. And this is what you need to figure out. This is the gateway to the Smoky Mountains. This is a gigantic amount of wealth and power in this little tiny county in Tennessee."
We definitely worked. We loved it. I mean, it was an incredible experience. But when the newspaper covered that incident with Jack being there, they referred to him as, "There was this white man who was old enough to have a real job." I swear we all thought that was the best. Because he was older than 30. And at that point anybody older than 30 was not legitimate. But Jack was older 30.
Anyway — So many wonderful stories, but more to Josh's point. So we did some anti-war organizing — After Tennessee, we went to West Virginia because Tom was from West Virginia. We did a lot of organizing against the war. We did organizing against strip-mining for a long time.
And then eventually, Ed, I too went to work for OEO and did a state contract with North Carolina and West Virginia to train — they had a notion that they would have community people sit on these boards, right?
And then from that, I started doing senior organizing in DC. And eventually moved to California, where I've been doing senior organizing and home and community based services organizing. I'm now retired and I'm not, although I'm still working on in home supportive services, which is a in home care program for people on Medicare for seniors and people with disabilities.
Ed:
I have a couple of Jack Minnis stories. For the last few months of the time I was at SNCC, I worked in the research department. And one of the things that I did, that a bunch of us did, was that we clipped various southern papers on — I mean, the focus was on the links between the business, class, and social power in the communities, and economic power and political power, in other words. So we wound up clipping various items from the Memphis Commercial Appeal the New Orleans Times Picayune, the Jackson papers.I felt at the time, and still do, these had to be some of the worst newspapers in the English speaking world. I mean, just in terms of their pure racism, but also obviously, they had to be pretty obtuse not to talk about the story that was right in front of them that was ongoing. I can still remember a piece from the Greenwood ommonwealth in which Fannie Lou Hamer had been arrested for a protest, I think that was. And the paper was so racist, so obviously so, that they couldn't refer to her or didn't refer to her as, I mean obviously not "Mrs. Hamer" or "Fannie Lou Hamer" or even "Hamer." They referred to her as "that Hamer woman," in the story. I just thought, "Wow, this is deep."
But Jack was a pioneer. I mean, I thought later on, that maybe he was a little too much of an economic determinist. I mean, it was, we just beginning to use some analytical tools about what made up the ruling class of these communities. So sometimes I used to think of him as the red [unclear]. But only in a comical sense. I mean, because he was onto something. I think he was a very important figure in the movement. He was also about the heaviest smoker I think I've ever met in my life. He's one of those guys that used to, once he'd start puffing on one, he'd light up another one.
The last time I had any contact with him was just around the time of Hurricane Katrina, and he was living in New Orleans. And I think he died somewhere in that period, summer or fall of 2005. But he was an important figure.
Janet:
Yeah. One thing that happened to me in that little bit of time that I was in the South, was that I really did develop a whole additional level of seeing things or something in my head.I mean, I grew up in a very conservative family. And I was raised Catholic. And I know, I understood contradictions, because I always, excuse me, as the third oldest of 18 children, I was pretty aware of conflict and contradictions, a lot. Older kids had to do certain things and the younger kids never had to do anything. Girls had to do all this stuff. And boys never had to do anything. I did all the cooking, and the boys went to sports, practiced football and basketball, and they would get home and they would sit down and eat the food that I'd cooked.
My sister, who was the oldest one in the family, she left in 8th grade to be a nun. So I was pretty much the oldest girl, most of my life in my family. So I saw a lot of contradictions. And so I wasn't a particularly happy camper, as I mentioned before, but when I got to the South, I developed the reality that it's not all about me. It's not all about what somebody else has and I don't have. I really did...
It was developing like a whole new a bit of compassion or something. I don't know that I had any compassion before. I mean, maybe I did, but I wouldn't call it compassion. It was more like just the reality or competitiveness or just trying to get through situations where — When I got to Selma, and saw how people lived, it really did do something to my inside value system or something, my awareness of people in the world.
And I'm curious about other people's experience with that. I mean, I don't know if I'm being clear on what I'm trying to describe. But I'd like to hear if that makes any sense to others.
Fran:
It does to me. I would have one question. Were you aware that you had changed or did that awareness come later?
Janet:
Oh, that's a really good question. Honestly, I don't think so, Fran. I think I was terrified most of the time I was in the South. I mean, truly, I think I was, just had a — I mean, particularly in Wilcox County, it was scary. It was terrifying, when I wasn't in Gee's Bend, especially if anywhere else in the county, it was terrifying. So I lived with that fear.But once, yeah, when I had some distance, I think I began to realize that. And particularly in doing training for these community action agencies in North Carolina and West Virginia, I had to articulate things that I'd never articulated before that I'd never actually consciously said before. And I think that's when I started hearing myself and feeling that more real, more whatever, visually or something in myself, more palatably in myself.
Fran:
The reason I asked is because I had a similar experience living in Vicksburg [MS], and just, I suppose in [an ironic] way the white supremacists there could claim they were the first ones to observe the civil rights law because they treated us exactly like everybody else — as if we were Black.But when I returned to college, I thought everybody else had changed. I wondered, "When had these people become such bigots? They weren't that way before." And it took a while for me to realize that they had not changed, I had.
Janet:
Right. Wow. Yeah.
Josh:
I think it was one of the things that happened to — I think everybody in one extent or another — is that we were challenged to immerse ourselves in other people's lives, not to be focused solely on ourselves as an individual separate from everybody. Not only in terms of a community, but actually in the real lives of other people who in a lot of cases were different than us. And it was a challenge to be able to move in that direction.
[Question on Black Power moved to below.]
Muriel:
Well, let me just answer the question before that question. I have had a couple of experiences abroad before I went South. So I had seen poverty. I saw poverty in South America. I saw poverty in Asia. I saw the kind of poverty that would make you stop in the middle of the street and just wonder how anybody could survive that.One of the things about the American poverty situation is that, if in many cases, is an imposed situation. Obviously, poverty in other areas would be imposed by other systems, like the colonial system, which was an extracting system.
But it made me really want to understand about this economic process that people felt was so important. You couldn't even say the word "capitalism" because people would look at you as if to say, "Well, that's just the way it is." And it turned out that no, that's not the way it is, but what is this? And what are the pieces to it, et cetera.
One of the things that I, of course, the South changed me in many ways, because I recognize the institutionalization aspect of all of this. It wasn't an individual necessarily making an individual mistake. It was almost a predestined relationship with many, many people that they were never going to get out of this, what can I say? This, particularly —
All right, I'll just use simple words. They were not going to be able to leave this horror, until they actually physically moved out of it. And that was going to be in itself a real test, both in terms of their physical ability to survive it, their economic ability to survive it. And also, what was the vision?
Because a lot of Black people came north, that the expectation that their lives were going to be different in the North than it was in the South. And that it wasn't. So that's my answer there.
I saw my first starving baby, when I was 17, and the nurse said that this child would be dead in a week. I had those kinds of exposures. So that's that situation.
I've heard of people who had very serious issues. And including one of the things that we're looking at now in my little group is looking at the situation among poor whites, because that almost never gets talked about. The assumption is that all white people are middle class. And that is not the case. Not at all.
Muriel: There are very serious social problems and economic problems that affect people who are considered "white" in this society, that [are] really quite common for Black people. And I don't know when we're going to ever grow up and actually figure out that the racial divide is the least of all of our issues, and that we have some other issues to look at, and maybe we can find some commonality.
Janet:
What are you thinking of Muriel, when you say other issues?
Muriel:
Well, I'm thinking that we have social issues, we have children that we're trying to bring up. I'm seeing when people say, "Well, we have a terrible drug problem." Well, Black community has had this terrible drug problem. I mean, we have been through that. We've had the [Vietnam] war that pulled so many of our young, bright men and got them killed. We have the drug problem that took many of the rest. We have a parents who are in any case, inept in raising their children.And even though ours may be more subject to review, I happen to know that those people who are taking drugs, whether they're black or white, are coming from a long stem of inadequacies and deficiencies in their social structure. And it really almost doesn't matter what their economic level is, because you've got many wealthy kids who are on drugs, just like you get poor kids on drugs. And that's just one situation that I'm pointing to.
We've got an education system that doesn't have any vision. The vision is to get a job. Well, that may be one of the aspects of the education system, but it ought to be about developing good citizens, for the next generation. A better government.
We seem to be going in the opposite direction, when 70 million people could say that Donald Trump is the answer, whatever answer they're looking for, I don't understand it. Because even as a good example of a bad person, he's not a good example of that either. So I'm just trying to understand where we're going and how we're getting there. And are we spinning at the bottom of the teacup here as a society?
I think SNCC people had leadership skills, leadership capability, if they could ferret out a vision. I think they're needed more now than probably ever before, actually. Because I think the country is at a loss. Or many people in the country are at a loss. I don't want to go on, because I'm not supposed to monopolize so I'm going to be quiet.
Janet:
I am curious, Muriel, because really, so when you said you were involved a long time before the southern civil rights movement was taking place, and you've been involved for your whole life. So in some ways, you were already involved in and it didn't change you —
Muriel:
Right.
Janet:
— a lot. Yeah. Got that. Back to Josh's question —
[Black Power question inserted here.]
Josh:
I was curious about whether, in a different question, how the transition when SNCC raised the slogan — when Willie Ricks who's now, his name is Mukasa lives here in Atlanta — raised Black Power as an alternative to, and as a divergence from, civil right" [and] maybe the Black Liberation. How did that affect people's lives?
Janet:
It's a curious question about "Black Power," about the slogan, what that slogan meant in [crosstalk 00:52:43] —
Muriel:
Right. I had gone [from SNCC] by the time that that had come about. I was particularly upset about it, because I felt like, well, I didn't know him, but I knew people like Zellner and Minnis [referring to two white SNCC members].And I didn't like some of what I understood to be the fallout for the racial affirmation of Black people, to the separation of us working with our white brothers and sisters. I had a real problem with that. And I continue to have a problem with that moving forward. But I was not in the organization [at that time]. I was trying to go back to graduate school, which was a waste in many ways, but maybe not the world's biggest waste. And then I went on to New York. And that's that that story.
Janet:
Thank you.
Ed:
I have a take on it that's a little different in terms of responding to Josh's question. I think it could be said, for me that I actually became an "Asian American," in the political sense, in SNCC. In the time that I was in SNCC, I mean, essentially, I was just another person who was Japanese American, and worked for SNCC. By the end of the decade, there was an actual Asian American movement, there was this consciousness that developed. I think, for many people in the Asian American movement, SNCC was one of the, I think, structures or institutions, it was the movement itself —
Janet:
Right.
Ed:
— because it raised the whole point about race, racism and how it was structured in a way to oppress people. That resonated with a number of Asian American activists. I mean, the very top Asian Americans that cam up in the late '60s as a political formation. It was a way of describing, politicized Asians, and those were Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos. I mean, that became a identity. So, yeah, I thought about it and a lot since. And that it's the black struggle made me an Asian American and that somewhat, very clear political sense. And it's in a way in terms of the means through which we organize and came to consciousness.
Janet:
That's fascinating.
Josh:
Did you have any connection to I Wor Kuen? It was an Asia —
Ed:
Only, that I knew a little bit about them. I mean, yeah, there were a number of these formations in the '70s, particularly. Marxist-Leninist groups. Yeah. I knew people in them and I was fairly, but I was not one of them.
Josh:
Ed, did you work with Ron Carver?
Fran:
No, I didn't. I was in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Ed:
I did. I worked Ron —
Josh:
Yeah. He got involved in the GI movement.
Ed:
Yeah. I've stayed in touch with him for all these years. I was at one of the events related to the GI movements. I mean, the book and the interviews.
Muriel:
When you say GI movement, are you talk about the anti-war movement? What —
Ed:
Yeah.
Muriel:
Okay, right.
Josh:
Yeah, there was anti-war movement amongst active duty GIs —
Muriel:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Ed:
Ron [Carver] and I were in the SNCC office in Atlanta when the announcement came, the word came that the three workers we're missing is Mississippi. So everybody — all the other staff — had gone to Ohio, where the [Freedom Summer] training was going on. We stayed up all night in that period. So yeah, I go back a ways with Ron.
Josh:
Right.
Muriel:
Mississippi was its own brand of horror. You know? When I went back, I don't know whether it was the 40th or somebody had something down there. When I went down there and people were trying to act like, "Oh, well, it's always been like this. We've always been so lovey dovey to each other."I said to myself, "Now you know, I'm neither drunk nor high, I don't know what kind of foolishness you're pulling, but I know this state." I never got a chance to go back up in the Delta, I wanted to know, if people in the Delta were faring better.
Mississippi is quite an old nut to break. And I don't really know what the real story is. Being in Jackson, it's a misnomer. You don't know about what's going on in other places in the state.
Josh:
Yeah, the same thing with me in Atlanta, for Georgia.
Muriel:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
[Go a few] minutes outside of Atlanta, and then you're back in the —
Muriel:
You step back in time. And I remember one time I was on empty with my car with my two little girls and I was just driving around. I thought I saw a gas station. I went to the gas station, the man refused to sell me gas. I said, "God, I'm going to need all the help I can to get back to Atlanta," because I was on fumes. You hear me? And this man was not going to sell me gas. Can you believe that? I said, "Oh my goodness."
Ed:
I believe it.
Muriel:
Okay.
Ed:
That would be about right.
[Short Break]
Janet:
So we can get started again, everybody is back on. So other comments and observations about our own — just the subject for this morning is, are the effects that the movement experience had on us? How did it affect our lives?
Josh:
Let me tell one story. A transition, it didn't happen in the South. It happened in L.A, but it happened right after the Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were found. I was in a car with a guy named John Tavasti, who was a ex-Marine and good guy with CORE. And I said, "Oh, God, we got to get the cops to get and find out who killed these guys." And he said, "You idiot, it was the cops that killed them."And I thought of, and that had, in other words, that was like this transition from liberal middle-class guy into something else. And when I realized that there was a power-structure, and that this was something that was systematic, and it wasn't an aberration. It was part of a transformation that I has conditioned my whole life.
Janet:
I totally connect with that completely. I didn't see the connections until something would just hit me in the face like that. I'm like, "Oh, wow." But you're right. It affected every aspect of my life from then on.
Fran:
It didn't actually change the direction of my life, because I had already planned since a teenager to teach children with special needs. But it certainly did affect the way I taught about it.And I owe a lot of that to my hostess, Mrs. Garrett. We had one history book that was donated to the library that was written for elementary school children. And it was extremely racist. Like it started out, "If you're an American, your ancestors came from England." Yeah, all right? That leaves out a few people.
I was saying, complaining to Mrs. Garrett, the teacher, "I can't teach this book. It's terrible." And they didn't have any materials for elementary school kids because Black history was geared to high school and adults. She said, "Well, maybe your kids can't read the high school materials, but I hope you can." And she said that having a poor book was no excuse for poor teaching.
And that really affected me. Sometimes I would be unhappy with the materials I was given in regular teaching, but somehow I was able to make the best of whatever teaching materials I had. Following Mrs. Garret's advice, I used the good and corrected the bad.
Janet:
I mean, as a white person growing up and I mean, there's so much of that stuff I didn't see. I mean, so much. I didn't realize anything before I hit Selma, other than what I was saying before my own personal, "Oh, poor me," stuff. But I know when I did see when — I mean what prompted me to going, leaving Appleton, Wisconsin.I saw things on the news, I saw that Bull Connor's dogs, I saw the fire hoses and stuff like that [referring to the Birmingham protests of 1963]. And I saw just a lack of interest on the part of people in Appleton about that — including my family. I didn't see [in them] the horror that I felt in my gut.
So when these people came to my college and said they were collecting books for Selma Free Library — because Black people weren't allowed to use the public library, I said, "Oh, my goodness, that's ridiculous." But then I also said, "I want to go with you." Because that seemed like something I could do. And so that's basically what got me on that bus to get out of Appleton.
The other day I was doing an interview with my eight year old granddaughter. And she asked me why I worked and went South. And I said, "Well, these people came and they talked to me in college, and they said that they were setting up a library for Black people because they weren't allowed to use the public library." And Geli said, "What? They couldn't use the library? I couldn't live without the library." And I said, "Well, that was my reaction." That's why I did that.
But when I watched her have that really just gut level reaction, "What?" It's just such a basic thing, for me, a white person who I never thought of myself as privileged, but Jesus Lord, I'm a privileged white person. And that my reaction was, "Jeez, a library that's such a basic thing." And to watch Angelica have that exact response, it touched my heart to say the least. It was wonderful.
Fran:
I can relate to that. Some of the books we had were very good, but with children, and not just the children but adults and teenager kids too who would come to our library in Vicksburg would be just so thrilled that they had their own library, where they could check out a book and read. In fact it was several of the kids who brought there history book and said, "Well, we've got a book. Teach US history so we can learn history like the big kids do."And that was when I learned that a bad book was no excuse for bad teaching. And they were so interested. I shared a lot of Mrs. Garrett's stories with them and they were just dumbfounded and it really is something when kids come to you and say, "Well, teach us," it doesn't always happen.
Janet:
There's still so much that I realized. Like my son wrote an article about the way — This is digressing, but just in California, the Mexicans are perceived as murderers and bandits and horse killers and whatnot in so much. There's so many stories, Black Bart kind of story and whatnot. And they're all upside down history, which is what we've all been fed. And I think, again, if I hadn't gone to Selma, I don't know that I would ever have figured this, come to this person that I am now. I really don't know that I ever would have because so much of that life is structured around lies and around things that —
Muriel:
Are completely untrue.
Janet:
— are completely untrue. Exactly.
Muriel:
Yeah, it's called drinking the Kool-Aid. As long as you drink the Kool-Aid, there's no reason for you to think that there's another drink to have. But when you put the Kool-Aid down for whatever the reasons are, and you realize, "Oh, wait a minute. And that's Kool-Aid. And what about what these other people over here are drinking," or something of that like.[Kool-Aid is a popular fruit-flavored powder that's mixed with water and sugar to make a non-alchoholic beverage loved by children. "Drink the Kool-Aid" as a meme for someone who has been manipulated or swayed to believe in a wrong or dangerous idea, or dedicated to some repugnant cause to the point of death, originated with the 1978 mass-suicide in Jonestown Guyana where charismatic cult leader Jim Jones convinced more than 900 of his followers to commit suicide with him — and force others to do so — by drinking Kool-Aid that they had poisoned with cyanide.]I mean the analogy gets thin, but the point of the matter is, when you have something that jars you awake, you realize, "Mhmm." And then you keep shaking it, and you find out that it's more that to jar you away coin that you never really get to the bottom of it. This is an old, old big tree that doesn't give up its pieces very easily. And you have to push, you have to investigate, you have to probe. Sometimes you have to walk away so much. All of that.
Ed:
You know, Janet, I often collect little factoids, and one of them is Joe McCarthy's from Appleton, Wisconsin, right?[Referring to the notorious 1950s-era racist, red-baiting, demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy.]
Janet:
Oh, duh, absolutely. I came home from school one day, and mom was standing at the kitchen stove and she was crying. And then I said, "What's wrong?" And she said, "Joe McCarthy died."
Muriel:
And you tried not to do the happy dance. Right?
Janet:
I was probably 10 years old, right? It was 1950s, well, he died —
Ed:
'57, I think.
Janet:
— I'm not sure. But I wasn't very old. I was not old enough to know who he was.
Josh:
I remember you telling me that too, that you and he were from that town.
Muriel:
You know that when you are talking about being insulated, essentially, and I was talking about drinking the Kool-Aid. That's part of the general miseducation in the educational system. Because it's actually in many ways, a training and not an education.The issue of being, what's the word? A critical thinker, to raise alternative questions, et cetera. And then you come in out of the Catholic Church, let me not go into that. I got put out of instruction one time when a man says, I kept asking questions, he said, "I've given you the answer." I said, "Okay. All righty, I guess I won't be a Catholic."
But the point of the matter is that when you stand outside and look, you'll see how many people are either voluntarily fed or force-fed a whole series of things that actually don't make a whole lot of sense, frankly. But that's the story.
And then some people will say to you, "Well, why are you disturbing that? Why are you bothering that?" Well, because if I move this, then maybe something else will move. That's why I'm moving this, but they consider you problematic or they consider you and you are the issue, not the issue that you're trying to unearth and expose.
That I think it's interesting this expression about being "woke," that people are beginning to use being woke up because it suggests that people have been asleep, which is true. It's quite true.
[Referring to the label "woke" which was much in the news at the time of this disccusion. Those opposed to racism and willing to take a stand against it, such as people involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, described themselves and urged others to become "woke" to the realities of racial injustice in America. Conservatives and Republican politicians then began using "woke" as a sneeing pejorative to discredit progressives and Democratic candidates.]
Fran:
Has anybody read the Leonard Pitts column?
Janet:
The what?
Fran:
Leonard Pitts. He is a columnist. You don't know. But anyway, he did a facetious column about the education people who were against "woke" would have, that everything [in America] was fine. [That] they realized slavery was wrong, so George Washington abolished it or something like that. And like I say, it was facetious, but it was not terribly different from what I was taught in elementary school.
Muriel:
I'd like to go back to Jack Minnis, if you don't mind. I really loved Jack. I mean, I thought he was an extraordinary person. He had had about four lifetimes before he came to SNCC. And he was just so unbelievably smart. And it could have been that he wasn't as smart as I thought he was, I was just so much younger than he. But nonetheless, I was impressed with his brain.But Jack opened up a whole world of inquiry for me, because Jack was the guy who, when you came up with a probe, he said, "Get the answer." When you get that answer, then the next question is, "Why is that an answer?" And then you just kept going until you actually get to the point, where there was no more information to unearth.
I am so surprised of how many people do such poor research these days. I'm almost appalled, actually, when I hear people talking. Not that I think I'm the world's greatest researcher, but under a Minnis' tutelage, I did learn how to probe. And I just would like to encourage, not just young people, but people who consider themselves part of the progress of the human race, to not go for the short answers and not go for the easy answers. Go for the information that gives you some resonance, that gives you some verification, that this is in fact, factual.
When I think of 70 million people in this country [who] will not comply with several very small requirements of the CDC [Center for Disease Control & Prevention] to put this pandemic under control, I just shake my head. I'm trying to figure out how did we get to 70 million people who don't have good sense, because this is not good. And even if you don't like something, nobody's taking anything away from you, we're trying to keep you from killing people, inadvertently, accidentally. And also trying to save your silly life so what's the problem?
[At the time of this discussion, a significant segment of the population refused to be vaccinated against the Covid pandemic and resisted wearing anti-contagion masks in public spaces. They claimed that being required to wear a mask or get a vaccination was a violation of their "personal liberty." For partisan purposes, many Republican politicians aligned themselves with "anti-vax" "anti-mask" sentiments, that they reinforced, promulgated, and glorified. Some Republican-controlled states passed laws forbidding school systems and private employers or businesses from requiring that employees and customers be masked and vaccinated.]Have we raised a nation of just completely selfish people who are unable to think beyond their individual noses? And I think that answer is resoundingly, yes. And we can't do that for another set of generations because the earth needs us. The water supply is polluted, the air is going. The school is not doing the teaching, and I don't want to, it's not doomsday, of course not. There will always be some form of human life here, but the question is what's the quality of the human life? We're supposed to be making progress, not retrogression.
Janet:
Yeah, Muriel, you answered one of the questions I wanted to ask you, [which] was what changed for you in the Civil Rights Movement? Even though you were involved before and your trajectory is a little different than the others of us. But how did it change you? Is what I'm — I mean, saying what you said about Jack, I get. That's a a major effect, or whatever you want to call it, that it had on your way of thinking. But I'm curious, if you had other thoughts about how it changed you?
Muriel:
I'll just say this. When I came to SNCC, I learned a couple of things. One of them is to listen. And to listen hard. And not to discount what somebody was saying because they broke their verbs or their subjective verbs did not, what's the word? They didn't match or didn't support each other. Listen past all that.I learned also respect people. I've even tried to treat the people who are disrespectful to me in a respectful way, in the hope that somewhere along the line, they catch the idea that we don't all have to be here in a love relationship, but we need to be here in a civil one.
And I think those are two things that — And then to keep on asking my "Whys." I've been asking "why" since I was a kid, and I'm still asking my whys.
One of the things I like about the Brooklyn Society where I'm working, is because they let me just go right ahead and do whatever research and bring it up and expose it. We have a meeting every Friday, for the first three Fridays of the month, and people can bring forth whatever they want. And I bring forth my research, and I'm enjoying it. I'm getting a kick out of it. So that's it in a nutshell.
Ed:
I wanted to respond to one of Muriel's points and make another one. Your point about listening is well taken. And I can tell you from experience, that it resulted in some of the longest staff meetings I've ever been in.
Ed:
I wanted to just bring up another dimension on SNCC's importance. I think that one of the things that SNCC did do, and this is clear in retrospect, that it was when it was happening, was that I think for a lot of us, it broke the hold of that the Cold War had on us in terms of —
Muriel:
That's true.
Ed:
And SNCC's criteria, I mean, they ran into a lot of problems, apparently, because they wouldn't automatically ban people who had a [leftist] past and [who had] been involved in the [Communist] Party in the '30s and '40s. And were the following day, [the question was] will this person do the work, do the job? And I think that was very much the case.I think that taught us [inaudible 01:24:35] because I think there had been this continuity between the experience of the American left in the '30s and '40s and the progressive movement. And I think that we didn't know that much about the [inaudible 01:24:54] civil rights movement, Paul Robeson and the struggles, of the Scottsboro boys, and the anti lynching struggles.
And we were a part of it, but there was, because of the fact that the left was a significant player in those other struggles, I think the general Cold War consensus cut that off. And I think what SNCC did was it played a major role in breaking that ice. And so there's a much fuller, and I'd say, a more accurate sense of our movement, where it comes from, and what are the connecting layers. And I think that's been important, because I think the absence of continuity was a real problem. I mean, in retrospect. I mean, there were things that we could have done or learned from, that we didn't know about and there are some wheels, we didn't have to invent, I think, in the '60s.
And so I think we've learned from that, in terms of our connection to a broader social movement for change. And that was important.
Janet:
When did that realization or whatever you want to call that, Ed, come to you? Did you think —
Ed:
Well, I just, it came over time. I mean, I was an anti-communist, in the early '60s, most of us probably were, unless you came out of a left wing family. You getting to know some communists or some old communists. And then, in the days of the New Left, you go to these conferences, and people will talk a little bit about some of the organizing work done by the party. And these youth meetings, youth organizations. And the struggle was obviously about labor laws, which the Communist Party was very crucial too, the Labor Movement in the '30s was important and the party was important to that.And the early struggles around civil rights, and the very idea of having an interracial movement against racism. I mean, you can you plumb through the history of the American abolitionist movement, and it's only until the '30s and '40s, that there was even the notion that you could have interracial organizations working against racism.
Janet:
Right.
Ed:
That was a kind of, I think that that was information was blocked off us. I mean, and as I was saying, I think SNCC broke, yes, or helped break this in that period in the '60s. Basically, by saying, "We don't give a damn if the guy if the guy was a party member in 1950 [crosstalk 01:28:29]," that sort of thing. People who had been involved in the left. I think of a Jack O'Dell, of course, and people who are not party members, but were crucial to the development of the civil rights movement. W.E.B. Du Bois or Paul Robeson.These were all people with close ties with the American, and they were pariahs when —
Janet:
Yeah. For me, I'm sure I'd never heard of Frantz Fanon, but I think everybody was reading him —[Frantz Fanon was an influential, and controversial, Black revolutionary intellectual from French Martinique who called for anti-colonial revolutions from a Marxist perspective. During the 1960s, his books on race, class, colonialism, psychological-oppression, and revolution — particularly Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and Wretched of the Earth — were widely read and fiercely debated by political activists around the world.]
Josh:
I mean, what happened with me, it seems to me that one of the things that happened especially after from '66 on, was that there was a transition from people viewing themselves as either activist or even organizers into being more revolutionary minded. And that's what Fanon was imparting to people. And that's what, even people like Che [Guevara] and even Mao [Tse Tung] and other people brought into the discussion was a question of, "Is it going to be a reform or a revolution that transformed America?"And I think a lot of people who came out of SNCC and who stayed with it, I mean, dealt with that question in a lot of different ways. You know. You're talking about the influence of the old C.P. And I think one, I mean, in Los Angeles, there were some people who had been in the party since the '30s and to the '60s. And these weren't people who had gone on to affluent lives, these were people who worked in Imperial Valley and worked amongst farm workers in the '30s and '40s. And the one thing they talked about was that one thing that the McCarthy period did was break the link between the '30s and the present [meaning the '60s].
And I'm not exactly sure how well we've done that job of connecting people to what happened during that upsurge. I mean, I'll never forget, I was in downtown Atlanta. And it was a demonstration going on. And this young woman walked past me with a T-shirt that had the famous picture of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, outside the Oakland Panther office. And I said, "That's a great T-shirt." And she didn't know who they were.
Janet:
Oh. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
It was a little bit of a lesson in terms of we have work to do.
Janet:
Yes.
Fran:
Yes.
Janet:
So I received a notice, by the way, we are just a few minutes short of our break for lunch. So I'm supposed to ask if anybody has any closing comments on this particular session, which is the way the movement affected us personally, how it affected our lives?
Muriel:
Well, I want to add just a note and that is when we were talking about the left et cetera. I think one of the things that my experience with the anti-colonialism, which I witnessed directly in Guyana when I was 17. And my first visit to a whorehouse when I was 17, just to have that experience. I was with a religious group. So it was all intact, but the point of the matter, that even knowing that a whorehouse existed, and that girls my age were, in fact, drawn into that by unseen hands with unseen other kinds of things.I came to college with one eye really open to really — I wasn't going to take, I wasn't going to drink the Kool-Aid. And I had a lot of problems at Howard. Because when the Kool-Aid was getting passed out, I was like pouring it on the ground. And so that made me a love interest of many of my professors. But I'll leave it at that.
Let me just also say that I learned, when I saw what the British press was doing to Cheddi Jagan and his wife, Janet, who were both Chicago people. Cheddi was actually a local Guyanese, but nonetheless, they wanted to take over the reins of power after the British colonials left, and I saw the rag sheets in Guyana, talking about how horrible these people were and how bad communism was.
[Cheddi Jagan was an effective and progressive anti-colonial and political leader in Guyana (formerly British Guiana) who had studied and lived for eight years in America. Winston Churchill and the British establishment press painted him as a "Communist" and "Maxist-Leninist" because of his anti-colonial stance and efforts to limit the power and exploitation of foreign corporations in Guyana.]And these people had not had a day, not a day in session, not a day, in any level of responsibility. I began to understand this pile-on that happens, this mindset that gets primed so you anticipate the worst out of people as opposed to the best.
When we [in SNCC] were in that, we were so few and the area was so, well between standing off and being hostile, you can take your choice. Anybody who wanted to work with us, I was open to. So we had the crazies, yes, we had a few. We had some people from YPSL that was the Young Socialist League or something like that. We had people from Catholic workers, we had a couple of monks running around, who were giving us on the QT various kinds of support. They were just a whole polygon of different kinds of people. They didn't fit any particular mold.
So I look for the good. I mean, I do. I look for the good in all of them. Because I realized that nobody has a monopoly on good. And I would like to say that nobody has a monopoly on bad, I'm still working on that premise. So I just wanted to throw that out.
I also used to hang out in secondhand bookstore. Secondhand bookstores, were a great way to get books cheaply. And you know who else was in the secondhand bookstore? A lot of socialists, a lot of communists. There were a lot of discussions on the benches in the back. You could take a book, and just sit there, and you would hear a whole world of conversation that you could never have at a university and you certainly never weren't going to have it in the streets. That was so educational.
Yes. Oh, my goodness. And to tell you the truth, I saw some things and heard some things [about what was occuring in the U.S. and the world that] I just could not believe — that this could not be the American government. And actually, yes, it was the American government. It's as simple as that.
So I think that you know when I say to people, "Go see for yourself. Don't always take somebody else's word for things. Go see for yourself, draw your own conclusions." And you will find out that some of the stuff they're telling you, yes, makes some sense. But you will also find out that a lot of the stuff that they're telling you, pardon my hand, makes no sense. And that's called nonsense.
And so therefore you have to put together your own analysis and don't be afraid to do it. And there are going to be pieces that you can't put together, that's okay. You'll be working on it for a lifetime.
[End Session #1]
[Start Session #2]
[Casual conversation while waiting for the group to reassemble.]
Ed:
Atlanta was an oasis in the '60s.
Janet:
I think we had to go to Atlanta for a training session or something, so it would have been — I don't know, it would have been October or September of '65. Anyway, I think Julian Bond, was he running or had he been kicked off, kicked out of office?[Referring to Julian Bond's campaign for a seat in the Georgia State Assembly. The seat was one of several that had been created by a series of Supreme Court "One Man One Vote" decisions.]
Janet:
Yeah, so we delivered blankets to people in the neighborhoods.
Josh:
Was that Fourth Ward, do you remember? Where Dr. King's home — where he lived as a child or was born, I think?
Janet:
I don't know Atlanta at all, Josh, so I don't really know. I think we probably just got in somebody's car and took blankets out. It must have been an election in November, right? Or it was an election, it was before he got [blocked from taking the seat he had won] —
Josh:
Did you work with Stu House?
Janet:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Stu was involved in Lowndes [County Alabama]. Stokely recruited us at the Chicken Shack one night, and three days later we were on our way to Atlanta for a training session, and then once we got back from Atlanta, then I guess I learned I was in Lowndes, I mean Wilcox, excuse me.
[Was that where Maria Gitin who wrote This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Fight — ]
Janet:
That book says she — Yeah, she's up in the Bay Area somewhere. Yeah, I read the book, and I got — Oh my God, the pit in my gut came right back, the same pit I had in my gut the whole time I was in Wilcox County. It was terrifying. Her book is very descriptive.
Josh:
What was the name of that Reverend and his wife in Camden?
Janet:
Yeah, he worked for SCLC. He fed us, he gave us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They kept us alive.
Janet:
[Harrell] Reverend Harrell. Did you know a guy named Danny Mack?
Josh:
Who was — That name's not familiar.
Janet:
I should send you the email, he wrote me this email, a couple different emails. He had more details on Camden and Reverend Harrell, and he knew what his wife wore to dinner, and what she fixed for dinner. I mean it was unbelievable amounts of detail in his memory. I was so shocked.
Josh:
The other guy in Gee's Bend with us was Hamilton, is that name right?
Janet:
Julius or Junus.
Josh:
Yeah, Julius.
Janet:
Hamilton.
Josh:
Is that right?
Janet:
Yeah, I think so, and I don't think I've ever seen his name on any listings or anything.
Janet:
This afternoon we're actually doing the evaluation of the Freedom Movement, and so this morning we were talking more personally, but this afternoon is more longer vision. What did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve? What did it all mean? What lessons did we learn? If we want to take the five minute thing like we did this morning, just each of us talk a little bit about that for a few minutes, and then we'll open it up for general discussion after each of us takes a little stab at the five minutes.
Josh:
Well, I can pose a question, because it's actually the discussion that Bruce and I had — When was it? It was in Atlanta. It was a SNCC meeting of sorts, of some sort. I'm trying to remember, maybe it was —Anyway, he and I had an argument about whether or not in a certain sense things are worse now than they were in the mid-'60s, in terms of the country as a whole. One thing I mentioned to him, and he was talking about the Black Belt South, and for the 50th anniversary [of Freedom Summer], I drove to Jackson. I think that was where, I'm pretty sure it was the 50th. On my way, I went by Sumpter County [Alabama] and I went through York, where I worked for a while. It was like a ghost town. This was the county seat for a southern [county] in 1966. It had activity [then], and now it was almost empty.
It strikes me that there were things that worked, that were so much bigger. Yes, there is a Black mayor in Birmingham. Yes, there is a Black mayor in Mobile. There are local communities — The terror of the Klan is less now than it was then. The terror of the police, although it exists, as well as you can see about Black Lives Matter Movement in Atlanta, it happens in Atlanta. I mean back in the day there was a phrase we used to use about what's going to solve the problem is maybe not black faces in high places. We're faced with the reality that, that is not necessarily — That was not the answer for liberation. That's my two cents.
Let me just say one more thing. My sister, 10 years younger than me, never had any political involvement. Two and three years ago I said, "Is this the America you ever thought would exist under Trump and what have you?" Which I think is a form of American fascism. She said, "Absolutely not." I think that's fairly widespread.
Ed:
I would take the position that I think things are better, but like I said in a materialistic, dialectical sense. I mean Jim Crow's gone. That was one of the central premises for which I think many of us, probably most of us, were involved in the struggle. Within an incredibly short period of time, given the historical record, by 1965/'66, it was gone as a legal force.
Josh:
That's true.
Ed:
I mean it certainly existed in other ways.
Janet:
Right.
Ed:
But it was over. I mean that exposed certain other things, I mean we deal with more clearly, more aggressive. But I think that we can't ignore that reality, because I think from that point, lots of other things happened. The notion of poor people organizing, the poorest and most despised even organizing and changing things, I mean that was an important point, it still is.I mean it seems to me that out of some clarity, inadequacies were exposed. I mean we don't — I think the point was being made even at the time, that you can integrate these diners, but who's got the money to buy the hamburgers? That point still remains, hamburgers are more expensive too, right?
I take a measured point of — Not opposition, but I'll just say the glass to me has water in it. I mean it may not even be half full, and it may be polluted, but the point is 60 years ago it was all poisonous.
Janet:
That's a good point, yeah.
Ed:
I think what's happened to a lot of us is we've seen what's possible. It may not be enough, it's clearly not enough, but if I may quote the point made by Martin Luther King, I mean "We've seen the promised land," for a brief fleeting moment, but it's there. I think the fact that we're here, the fact that we're talking about what happened to us, I think that, that's a reflection also of the positive nature of — I mean we're not quitting, we're not giving up, you know? I think that — Anyway, that's my point.
Josh:
I have a lot of agreement with what Ed said about the destruction of the label Jim Crow. More of the issue that I was talking about is still the overall situation. I mentioned going through York, Alabama, 10 years ago I guess it was, and it was the county seat of Sumpter, and it was a ghost town. The conditions in the rural South are, I would contend, even worse now than they were in the mid-'60s. What you don't have is you don't have the legalized terror of the Klan and the police in the same way.But if you look at this country as a whole and what's happened here in the last four years, and in fact the resurgence of a form of American fascism, represented by the Klan, the depth of white supremacy I think is actually deeper now than it was, even though the elimination of Jim Crow has happened. But we could even say maybe we underestimated how pervasive that ideology is. I don't know. That's kind of what I think I said.
Janet:
You know, for me, the whole notion of intersectionality that's come to the fore in the last couple of years, probably since — I don't know, just in the last couple of years, under Black Lives Matter, the "intersectionality" concept, which I never knew that.["Intersectionality" is a concept first articulated in print by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in a 1989 paper arguing that all oppression is linked. As defined by the Oxford Dictionary intersectionality is the understanding of, "The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage." Intersectionality is an acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression. Intersectionality is one component of the intellectual framework known as Critical Race Theory.To one degree or another, most social-justice activists, including those of the Freedom Movement, have always had an inherent sense of the inter-connectedness of oppression, exploitation, cruelty, and abuse, but did not have a terminology or framework for understanding or discussing it.]
I didn't know that for years. I just thought I saw everything kind of piecemeal. I think I'm kind of surprised that I didn't get that through the movement. It seems like — I don't know, it just seems like we hit a lot of different things. We hit housing, and health, and education. We hit all these different areas, but we didn't actually connect the dots to create the horror of it, the America that it created. If I would short change the movement on something, that's probably the one thing I would say, that I wish that concept had come through in our work.
Muriel:
Can I just jump in here? I think there are a myriad of things that we didn't do. That's because there were a myriad of things that we didn't intend to do. Most of us were working on voter registration, or in some cases public accommodations, and trying to stay alive. That was a 24 hour, seven day a week job.But what I was waiting for was a group of people, don't ask me where they were going to come from, who were going to come behind us, who were going to pick up the gauntlet and move on. Except that second group of people never showed up, and nor did the third, and so everybody looked to us to be the be all, end all. That's kind of ridiculous. We paid a very big price.
When you look at how small we were, in terms of numbers, and how big the issues were, we were doing voter registration, and we stumbled in on agricultural [allotments], the issue of farmers being paid to plant nothing, and those who planted to get nothing, especially if they were Black. We ran into land ownership, and one thing just moved into another. It got beyond us, you know? We were making a cake, but it was a feast that we were going to have to deal with. I think that's one of the reasons why some of us have continued. The question is not what did we not do, but what did they, the rest of the country, not do. They were waiting for us to be magicians.
We were just basically kids who had some notion from the civics class that America was supposed to be a better place, and we went out to try to make it a better place. They tried to make us a whole lot of things, we were "Communists," and "homosexuals," and "deviants," and child this. I mean they just came up with all kinds of crazy stuff, and you know you see the same stuff said over and over again all the time, and that is to — What's the word? Not only unnerve you, but to discredit you, because people in this country are more interested in how you look than what you have to say. We've been trained to do that, that's part of what I'm talking about, education versus training.
I would rephrase the question, and I would say what did the country fail to move on after we opened the door for change? That's how I would phrase the question. I have no guilt whatsoever about anything that we did or did not do, period, the end. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nor does my cat.
Ed:
I would make another point, which I don't think it's the fault of SNCC or the Civil Rights Movement, but one thing that I think in retrospect, and it certainly seems clear now, that needs to be challenged more directly is the economic system.I think there were certainly people in the movement that were moving in that direction, or had already moved in that direction, though it wasn't a consensus. I think that over the years many of us have felt clearer that capitalism is a road to disaster, and we're on it, and things like the revelations about climate change I mean only make the point more strongly. I think I could have wished that the movement to challenge the economic system had been stronger earlier.
Now, the other point to make obviously is there are lots of people in institutions that were pushing in the opposite direction. You don't get a Ronald Reagan for President if the ideas of economic justice are [inaudible 00:23:57] with the country. I think we're still recovering from that, but there are signs. I think the term "socialism" is now used in public places, even among some respectable people, you know, like us [laughter].
The likely mayor of Buffalo is an open socialist. I was reading your 10% of the City Council of Chicago, and on we go. Our one big difference maker over the last three or four years on the left has been Bernie Sanders, who is an open socialist.
We're still talking about concepts and notions of broad social change, but I think at least we're not afraid of using the word, or set of words. Some people might want to use some other words, but I think it's out in the open. It's not subterranean like it was 50 years ago. It's not a term that had to be banished from the vocabulary. 50 years ago even "liberalism" was kind of a term that you sort of whispered in the night.
I think that's changing, that has changed. More has to change, but I think that was a shortcoming, but I don't think that was the fault of SNCC or other movements, but I think the movement put us to the place where we know that we have to go farther.
Janet:
Opening up that space you think happened in part because of the '60s?
Ed:
Yeah, absolutely. We weren't [crippled] like the CP, so we could still — not exactly frolic, but at least operate in the public space.
Muriel:
I think along with that, the notion of fearfulness, at least among a segment of people was reduced. I think you're absolutely right, in terms of [a willingness to look] at "isms." Looking at socialism, communism, and everything in between. I think the issue of [Cuban leader Fidel] Castro, and the Bay of Pigs, and the various assassinations that occurred really sort of smacked us, at least a segment of the population, to what I would call "woke," that something was really amiss here, and we need to have further examination.In the universities, there were some professors who begun to dig deeper, thank goodness. We put I think a level of integrity on being something other than "American." You can be a Black American. Some people prefer to be an African-American. Some people European-American. We started hyphenating our self-image about who we were, and stopped eradicating what was our native homeland cultural experience.
I remember people who were from other countries used to squash speaking their own tongue in their own house, because that wasn't American. Now we have a revitalization of many, many languages, some of which are lost unfortunately forever. I live in New York, we have over 160 different languages in this town, and we just try to get three of them straight, the English, the Spanish, and I don't know, maybe some Arabic languages. But we've got all these different people here, and you know you have to talk to people. I mean that's the first level of communication.
Are we still on this question of what did we leave behind, what did we fail to accomplish?
Janet:
Yeah. I mean the question is how did the [Civil Rights] Movement help make that happen, what you're describing? Or did the Movement? I don't know about "how," but did the Movement — In what ways did the Movement make that happen? I don't know. I mean I'm curious in what ways did the Movement lead to the Black Lives Matter? Is there a tangible connection?
Muriel:
Well, some of these relationships are amoebic. They're not direct relationships, but they are rippling effects. Just like Carter G. Woodson in the '20s, how did he make stick in the '60s? I mean it's not ... In some cases I guess you could say it's a quantum leap, but it's not a direct link. You have to look at what has happened before, to decide what you need to have happen now, at least that's how I think it goes. Those are my comments.[Referring to the former slave, NAACP leader, Harvard PhD, and Howard University professor who was a leader in establishing the study of Black history and sociology as recognized areas of academic study. In the 1920s he began "Negro History Week" which evolved into Black History Month.]
Josh:
I don't know how many people here participated in any of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations [of 2020], but the ones here in Atlanta, for the time that they existed, were incredible, both in their size, in their militancy, and in their diversity. It was astonishing. Like I said, in our time, a demonstration that even approached that would take weeks, months of organizing. I don't know whether somebody just puts out the word on a cellphone and everybody shows up or how it happens, but there's an understanding that power is in the streets, that came out of our movement.
Muriel:
That's true. That's true.
Josh:
I think that a lot of it didn't get diverted into, whether it's electoral politics or whatever, but that our strength lay in our numbers in the streets.I've got to tell you, [in the 1960s] there was sometimes a rift between political people and cultural people. And let's say for a lot of the young white youth that would come out [back then], there would be kind of a "peace and love" attitude towards things. The [2020] demonstrations I was at in Atlanta was not that. These young white women especially were very defiant. It was a joy to see.
But then you don't know where it went after that. The question was posed, "Is this a movement or a moment?" I'm not sure that question's been answered.
Muriel:
I don't think it's been answered, that's a good question.I have to tell you, I was coming home one day a couple of months ago, and I was fussing because I couldn't get across a major street, and so I put my car on the side and got out and looked. I will tell you, I was absolutely thrilled for at least a good 10 miles, for as far as the eye could see to the East and as far as the eye could see to the West, and about 20 across, and all deep were thousands and thousands of people coming, and it was all a really good — I had never seen anything like that before in my life. It was for our cause.
Our demonstrations, we were lucky if we got 15 people and didn't get spit on and didn't get the signs knocked across your head. Here these people were defiant, they were strong, they were — It was invigorating. It was just invigorating to see it. I must have looked at 20,000, 25,000 people, I must have. Of course, the newspapers, as usual, always play it down. You're lucky if they even say there were five people who showed up, but I saw this for myself. I'm here to tell you that you're right on target. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
One other thing, there's a town about 25 miles outside of Atlanta, or a county, Forsyth County. In 1979, I think it was, or maybe even later, it may have been '89. It had to have been later. Again Hosea [Williams], because it was an all white county and this was in the '80s. When he went out to march there, he was met by a fairly large Klan group that threw rocks at them and assaulted them.When the Black Lives Matter demonstrations broke out here around George Floyd, there were demonstrations at the county seat of Forsyth County, of 100 to 120 people, that was majority white, and majority from that county. There was something very different going on.
[Referring to the brutal 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis MN cop. Videos of the killing exploded across social media and was the immediate, proximate cause for a nationwide wave of large-scale protests against police brutality and abuse.]
Ed:
One little anecdote, last year during that period when the demonstrations were happening, my family was up in the Northeast kingdom of Vermont, which arguably might be the whitest part of the United States. I think I was the darkest person up there at that point. There were signs for Black Lives Matter. I mean there wasn't a demonstration, but there was obviously some consciousness that was present. It is a phenomenon that I think we can build on.
Janet:
Yeah, I liked Josh's "power is in the streets" notion. There's a lot going on in L.A. here on a bunch of different issues. One of my daughter's friends knows what SNCC was, she knows what SNCC is. When Carol and my daughter told her, "My mom was in SNCC," Cindy, who's a Latina, and she went to L.A. schools, she has no reason to know what SNCC is, but she's just so enamored of SNCC, and the meaning and, "How cool it is that your mom was in SNCC." She's just an activist on hunger issues in L.A.I'm like, "How did she — " Whatever SNCC is, in her mind I think it's the power in the streets. I'm not sure. I should actually ask her, have a conversation with her at some point about how that notion of SNCC came into her life, because she's kind of a very, just a typical activist right now on a bunch of different issues.
Ed:
I think you're right. It seems to have permeated another generation. I'm not opposed to being a revered figure, but I do think that — I mean maybe there should be some — In some gatherings in subsequent years, it seems as if a little bit too much deference is perhaps made to SNCC. I mean the point of SNCC was the organization reflected some opposition, some criticism of the movement as it was, some impatience. I kind of think that wouldn't be an unhealthy attitude right now to push and to have.Anyway, I think overall it's a healthy thing that one, people know, and two, that they shouldn't receive our experience simply as the — That it comes from Mt. Sinai or Olympus, or wherever, and I think I would agree with Muriel that it's an ongoing process, and we're part of it, but we're not the only ones. We have stuff both to learn and to teach.
Muriel:
That's right.
Janet:
You know when Tom and I, we actually came to California after we left Tennessee, we drove out here, and we had an invitation, I have no idea why, from Stanley Scheinbaum, who ran a thing called The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, or something like that, up on a mountaintop in Santa Barbara. We drove our old clunker up there, and he had a whole table full of I guess intellectuals.As I recall, they were all white and they were all men, but anyway so they asked us a lot of questions, and the main interest was the independent political party [referring to the LCFO]. Which to me is a really bright spot of the Alabama SNCC. I just thought it was a brilliant strategy, and they did it in Lowndes County, and we tried to do it in Wilcox and a number of other counties, but the questions were primarily around that. We spent a couple hours there and drove away, and we went to San Francisco, or went to Stanford, Tom had been a student at Stanford, so we went there.
Then we went to Ramparts [magazine]. It had just opened an office in San Francisco. I think it had just started. This guy named Eldridge Cleaver [Black Panther leader] had just gotten out of prison, and he wanted to interview us, and so they set up an interview with us and him. All he wanted to talk about was Black Power. I'm not sure we ever got into any kind of independent political party discussion with him, but it was really "How did that come about and what did that look like?" Of course, we got into the discussion of SNCC asking white folks to leave the Black community.
But it was interesting to see how these two groups — Scheinbaum's group was — I don't even think they mentioned Black Power. I mean probably the Black Panther, because that was the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and then you had this Eldridge Cleaver's take on it was, "What is this Black Power all about? How did you see it?" It's just an interesting way of looking back on that period.
Josh:
You know the people at the Center, it was Harvey Wheeler, Ping Ferry, and Scheinbaum were also pretty instrumental in the formation and the development of the Peace and Freedom Party, which existed for a couple of years in California, and ran some candidates. I think one of the people was the writer from Ramparts, Bob Scheer.
Janet:
Oh, right. Yeah. It's a pretty interesting magazine.
Josh:
Yeah, interesting times.
Fran:
I had a pretty interesting experience. My niece and her school asked me to speak to her class. She had just had them read [the novel] Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which is set in Mississippi in the mid-'30s. She was wondering if my experience was different in the '60s. I had read Roll of Thunder, and it was maybe a little different, but not much. But what came up from the discussion was that I had been back to Mississippi in 1994, [for the 30th anniversary of Freedom Summer], and the same period of time, period of years, but the first thing we noticed was a big banner at the airport, "Welcome to Mississippi, Summer Volunteers."
Janet:
Wow.
Fran:
And the Holiday Inn motel, we were there, and Black, white, brown. We were in a mixed racial group, we could go into any restaurant we wanted. We could get on a bus and sit anyplace we wanted, where there was an empty seat. It seemed like everything had changed. Of course, there's a lot that still needs to change, but I felt it striking that between 1934 and 1964, there was practically nothing, and in the next 30 years, very dramatic.Another thing I've noticed is that I've talked with people who lived in Mississippi during that time, and I have not met anyone who could tell me exactly when the Jim Crow signs came down. Some people said, "It came right after Freedom Summer." Well, no it didn't, because I was back there in 1965, and they were still very much in evidence. But nobody seems to be able to pinpoint a particular time, "One day we saw the signs, white and colored, and then the next day they weren't there." I suppose it happened gradually, but it's interesting.
Janet:
Yeah, I mean they have those big museums now.[Referring to the increasing number of state and federal Civil Rights Movement museums, centers, and memorials. And by implication to promotion of civil rights tourism by some southern states.]I haven't gone, I do want to do that tour, but they actually have a tour. I was fascinated, Josh, to see that there's a tour for the [Gees Bend] ferry, so you can take the ferry now across the river to Camden, and when you book — I mean I don't even know where you stay, because Gee's Bend, although Gee's Bend might be gentrified by now, who knows? But when you book your housing in Camden or wherever, you can get a — A screen comes up on your computer telling you to buy a ticket for the ferry tour over to Gee's Bend.
The quilting took place at the quilting place up the road, but then it also took place in people's homes, right? I don't know what else is on that tour, but I mean it's all different. It's like everybody says, "Everything is different," and yet look at their congressional delegations, and look at their COVID regulations, and whatnot, and there's no connection to this other reality.
Ed:
I'm going to have to take my leave. This has been great. The next thing I'm going to won't be as interesting as this one. But thank you very much.
Josh:
You know Janet, they actually at the main museum here in Atlanta, just a couple of years ago, they brought the Gee's Bend Quilting Bee exhibit here, and it was the prominently displayed — It was amazing.
Janet:
Yeah. Yeah, no, to me that whole thing just blew me away. I think I went to the exhibit at the Whitney, where the women sang. I mean they did the whole thing. Then I went to the U.S. Post Office when I was in D.C, because I happened to be there the day that they released the Gee's Bend stamps, and I bought the first stamps. It was insane. Anyway, yeah, I mean — There's so many huge obvious changes, and then connecting that to what we did is I think the most fascinating thing for me to think about, like what little pieces of the puzzle did we put in place by doing whatever we did?
Janet:
I mean for me I think what it means is that — I actually see it in my grandkids, almost more than any other — Particularly now with COVID, since I don't go out anywhere, and I didn't do any of the demonstrations. I was too scared of COVID. My oldest grandchild, she's eight, so it's not like an intellectual conversation, but she really does — She sees things, and part of it is because of me. Part of it is because we talk about stuff like that, but part of it is because somehow she gets it in her school, although she goes to a West L.A. — Well, not anymore, she was in a West L.A. — It's a public school. They sent a letter to the president saying they should move on the silver dollar for — I think it was Harriet Tubman's silver dollar campaign, or something like that. I don't know what it was, I don't know. She's interested in things, and she has a sensitivity that I never ever, ever had in any way, shape, or form growing up.Yeah, society's different, but also my ability to communicate with her, and for her to know that I did that stuff or that I participated in those things has a huge effect on her. She appreciates that connection that I had. If you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she says she's going to go save women around the world, or some weird innocuous thing like that. She has a sense of action. She's not action in the streets yet, and she's only eight years old, so that's pretty cool. That's pretty darn cool. Anybody want to speak to lessons we learned?
Muriel:
Yeah, you're going to need more hammer to move the mountain, that's what I learned. You can't just go with half a step, and that there are people who won't help you move the mountain for a variety of reasons, one of which is this is the mountain they know versus the mountain that they think you're getting ready to bring about. They would rather be with the one that's familiar than to deal with what you're suggesting, which is an unfamiliar future, or what they think will be an unfamiliar future.That I have learned, but I've also learned to trust my instincts, and I have also learned that knowledge suits you well. You never know when it's going to come about, that's why I keep reading, and reading abundantly, because the lack of knowledge is what makes you fearful, or tends to make you more fearful than not. Those are my two cents, that's my two cents.
[And] yeah, we'll need more hammer to move the mountain, because we didn't come with all of it. We tried to deal with Martin [Luther King], that was a whole situation. Actually to the point where we could have actually coalesced with Martin, he was killed, so that took care of that. There was nobody to stand in that kind of, I'm going to use the word eminence, that kind of public draw, and also we were fatigued.
I don't know about you, but I was tired. When I left SNCC, I was exhausted. I had worked all these 17, 18 hour days for about two, two and a half years. I was done. I needed to rest. Like I said, I was always looking for somebody else to kind of show up. I had big expectations of my fellow Washingtonians, but they fell short.
Bottom line on all of that is you do what you can in your time. You do the best you can.
Josh:
Were you in D.C. when the Drum and Spear Bookstore was going?[Referring to a Black history & culture bookstore founded in Washington by SNCC veterans.]
Muriel:
No, I was in New York, but I know about the Drum and Spear a little bit. Judy Richardson and Charlie Cobb, and that crew know more about it than I do.
Josh:
Janet, were you ever around the Institute For Policy Studies?
Janet:
Oh, sure. Yeah, because I was involved with labor and liberal kind of stuff in D.C. at that time, yeah. Yeah, I had a good friend that worked for IPS. Pardon me?
Josh:
Did you ever work with Ron Carver there, who worked at the SNCC office in Alabama?
Janet:
No, I didn't. I wish I had known. D.C. was hard for me. Actually, I was born in D.C. also Muriel, interestingly enough, then we moved back to Appleton. But yeah, no, D.C. was hard. I worked a lot, and had my kids. I knew the folks at IPS and the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, all those efforts were sort of in their birthing years. I think there were probably SNCC people or Civil Rights people involved in a lot of them, like Carver. I did not know that he was at IPS, that's interesting.I mean individually, I think the movement had — It fed a lot of intellectual thinking, and I don't know about academics and stuff, but there were respected thinkers from the Civil Rights Movement. I do think this conversation is — It's a good conversation to have.
Janet:
Any thoughts on what we failed to achieve? I think Muriel said it well a while ago. She said what were we supposed to achieve, or I forget how you said it, Muriel, but it was — You have a lot of punchy phrases that immediately go out of my head, but when you say them, they're really good. But it was something like what did we achieve and what we didn't achieve, but what were we supposed to — I don't know, it was something like what were we supposed to achieve, I don't know. Anyway, it was a good thought.
Fran:
It seems like some people's thinking changed, but not everyone's. I'm not sure why that was. I think that a lot of people's thinking changed after the Civil Rights Movement, but there were many other people, as we can see now, whose thinking did not. I'm not really sure why, why it's very different.
Muriel:
People come into the movement for a lot of reasons, and they leave for a lot of reasons. Some people come in for —I put it this way, some people come in for a photo op, come for an hour. Some people come for part of a day. Some people even come for a whole day. Some people for a week, a year, and then some people will come forever. They're all different ranges of people, all different levels of commitment, all different interests. What concerns me about people, especially those who come in and out, is whether or not they have become adversaries, as opposed to supporters of the movement.
Because we need a fifth column too, we need people who are standing by and cheering us on, who may not be in the fray, but who see what our efforts are trying to achieve. I don't know about those people, I don't know too many people who have turned against the movement, but I'm sure that exists, because statistically it exists, you know?
Fran:
I wasn't really talking about people in the movement, I was talking about the others who were not in the movement. A neighbor of ours was very much opposed to the Freedom Movement, and she told my parents they were crazy to let me go, and my mother said, "Well, she's 21." But when I came back, and afterwards, after I'd made some presentations, she's like, "Well, that stuff, that was a good thing." That was one person, and then some people went right on saying it was a terrible thing. That's just one example.
Janet:
Well, you know my family — I was persona non grata to say the least when I left my family to go to Selma, "Never come back. Don't call us if you get in trouble." In some ways I knew I couldn't go back. That was what they said to me.Over the years, I've obviously reconnected with my family, with my parents, and with my siblings, but since I have so many siblings, 17 siblings, I can look at them, and piecing them up a little bit, because some people did know what I was doing. Some of my siblings know what I did in the South, and they were supportive. Other siblings, I'm not sure they knew what I did or cared what I did, they just thought, "Oh well, there goes Janet on one of her weird binges." Or not, I don't know that they were necessarily negative, but there was no consciousness to it.
Josh:
It's interesting to me, you know it's funny, we lived through the '60s, and the '60s have become a phrase. It's not just a 10 year period —
Muriel:
Yes.
Josh:
— or a 12 year period. It's a way you describe the historical period.Certainly at the time I don't think we realized how rare that period of time was, and how difficult it is to continue the type of struggle that existed then. But one thing I think we've done is we changed the culture a lot. We changed the terms of the debate that exists in society. I think [the changes we made are now] under attack, but they haven't gone away. There are still people who in many ways, in different ways, they kind of hold up the freedom banner, and that means something in their lives. That wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the '60s, and the Southern Freedom Movement, and the social movements that came after it.
Muriel:
That's true.
Josh:
I mean one thing is that the Anti-War Movement, I don't think the Women's Movement, I don't think the Gay Movement, none of those, I think, would exist in the way they did, if it hadn't been for both the Civil Rights Movement generally, and the Southern Freedom Movement. It changed the debate about the notion of humanity. That's a tremendous contribution.
Janet:
Say more about that, Josh.
Josh:
I don't know. The challenge to authority, the challenge to the very nature of authority was both diminished and people were — In other words, if people could stand up to the brutality that existed in the South, and teenagers, and young girls, and older people could march into those streets and take on the viciousness that existed, and the acceptance of viciousness that existed, and the complicity, and in the face of all that say, "You're not going to turn me around," that infused other sections of society who had been either disenfranchised, or diminished, or ridiculed, or rebuked and scorned, to go on and to challenge those things.In all areas, in the area of culture, I mean the contribution to the social movements in the realm of culture, whether it was literature, or music, or art, I mean not just the Southern Free — wasn't it Bob Moses's brother who was in the Free Southern Theater? Am I wrong about that? I'm trying to remember my history.
Muriel:
Oh no, you're thinking about Gil Moses [not related to Bob Moses].
Josh:
Okay, but I remember it was Gil — Actually, I was in a car traveling from Atlanta to Selma with him and some other, and we actually stopped in Lowndes County, and that was my first night in the South. I mean that's the touchstone for so many people, a lot of us who lived through it.Even today, the terms of the debate are what happened in the '60s, are so conditioned by what happened in the '60s, I think.
Janet:
That's pretty powerful, yeah.
Josh:
Polarization, I mean things were polarized in the '60s, but we were on the offense.
Muriel:
When I was at Howard, I had an opportunity in my sophomore year or junior year, one of those years, to go to Southeast Asia on a trip that I found out later was a CIA funded trip. If you remember, the National Students Association, and NSA was in fact — I didn't know, and they should have given me more money, because you know, they always put the students on the low end of the totem pole.But anyway, to make a long story short, so the trip was supposed to be very simply students meeting students. We went all, well not all over Southeast Asia, but we went to about six countries. I will tell you everybody knew about SNCC.
Janet:
Really?
Muriel:
Everybody, from Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, I mean I can't — Thailand. People said to me, "We are watching you and we are proud of you." I said, "Well, all right now, you're proud of us more than the locals." Because the locals [meaning whites in America] were definitely not proud.
Janet:
Not proud. Oh my God [agreeing].
Muriel:
Yeah, so I want you to know, from my direct experience, this is primary research here, that we influenced well beyond our borders. One of the reasons why the CIA and the FBI, yes fellas I'm going to raise that again, made some decisions about how they were going to put COINTELPRO on SNCC, was because they saw it as too powerful.[Refering to the FBI's infamous COunter INTELigence PROgram (COINTELPRO) that was designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of organizations and individuals that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered to be "subversive." For him, that included anyone and everyone who supported voting rights for nonwhites, an end to Jim Crow segregation, an end to racially-motivated police brutality, or an end to the system and culture of white-supremacy.See FBI's COINTELPRO Targets the Movement for more information.In 1975, the "Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities" (known colloquially as the "Church Committee") issued a report on COINTELPRO concluding that:
"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, ... Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views ... Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed — including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths."]
What is too powerful? A group of people came together and asking some essential questions? Particularly Constitutional questions. At the time and under the circumstances, yes, that was too powerful.
We had all kinds of informants. We had all kinds of — We can't talk about all the confluent factors that impacted us, but given what we had and given what we did, I think we did a superb job.
Josh:
During the Vietnam War, there were groups of anti-war activists who went to Vietnam to bring — The North Vietnamese government would release prisoners of war, and it would be the anti-war movement who would bring them back. There were some people who were good people, and they were militant, and they were revolutionary, and they would have these discussions with the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese would say, "We've heard these songs from the Civil Rights Movement."One of the participants got a little over enthusiastic and said, "Well, it's time we stop singing and start swinging." Here's this woman from Vietnam who has been in the trenches to fight for her liberation, and she says, "Really? Well, we find it quite inspiring to hear the music while we are in struggle." The music of the Civil Rights Movement was definitely international.
Janet:
Wow, that's amazing. Why do you think — That's amazing. I mean is it this power in the streets? Is there a concept that they grabbed from SNCC? What's the —
Muriel:
When I was in school and I decided I wanted to study history, I wanted to study why the Russians changed their government. I did the same thing with the Chinese, why did they want to change their government? It wasn't that I was enamored with Communism. I just wanted to know what were the circumstances that were going to make people rise up, face tremendous odds, and decide they had had enough. That better that this be the end of their lives today than to live another day under the same set of circumstances.There's something called the — I'm going to give it a phrasing, but the transmission of powerful ideas. They go over water, they go over land, they transcend time, which is one of the reasons people have worked so hard to make sure you only read certain kinds of material and see certain kinds of things. Because you will pick up the nuances, and you will pick up the nuances of courage, bravery, vision. You may even pick up strategic ideas, okay? You will think, "I don't have to just take this stuff. I can do something about it."
Now what that something is that you can do about it is a range of things. It can be from what you decide to do for yourself, to what you decided to do on behalf of other people, and maybe for the larger group, the larger society. But the point of the matter is that it helps you come to a catharsis. You have been wondering what to do about a set of things that have been worrying you in your subconscious, sometimes in your consciousness. Now here's some examples of some people who did something about it, so what are you going to do? That's what I think.
Josh:
Right. Yeah.
Muriel:
I mean I get inspired by the Opium Wars, okay? You know what I mean? I mean you get inspired by people who decided they're just not going to take it anymore. Who was more inspiring than the efforts in Cuba, or the efforts in Angola, or the efforts in Mozambique, the efforts in South Africa, and Algeria, don't forget Algeria. Frantz Fanon comes to us out of the Algerian experience, okay?Now that is not to say that everything that they did is going to give you a perfect thing on the other side, because governments are very imperfect things. There's a whole other conversation you can have about governments, and state formations, and all the things that they abuse in order to stay in power.
But for the moment and for the day, you give people some relief. You give them the idea that you can struggle together. I mean that's what we talked about in Mississippi. I mean you're talking to a sharecropper who has nothing — nothing, and not even a roof over his or her head, and you're saying, "If you go vote, maybe you can change your circumstances."
Now this is all wishful, you know? Because the vote is only a small step to making the change, but we convince people because somewhere in their minds it occurred to them there must be another way to live. Whether they articulate it or not, whether they came out of the Catholic Church, or the synagogue, or the mosque, or what have you. When people are disturbed enough in their psyche and are not controlled, or moving out of the controls of the institution, you can either go one way, you can go crazy, mad, insane, all of that, or you can look for other people who share some of these values. You can find them in church.
I mean look, we've had people who have struggled all through time on every continent in every generation. We haven't gotten very far, but nonetheless, we keep struggling. We're going to have to keep on struggling, because that's the nature of man. That's the ballgame.
Janet:
That's a powerful thought.
Muriel:
Where are we now?Janet:
I think I'm just cogitating over what you just said in my own mind. I'm not sure where Josh and Fran are. You put some heavy duty things out there, Muriel. I'll look forward to reading the recording or the transcription of our discussion, because you do put some — We all do, we're all putting stuff out there that's wonderful to think about. I love the transmission of powerful ideas.There are images, even the music, the SNCC's, the freedom singers and whatnot, just all of those things come together theoretically, right? To put together this transmission of the powerful idea of what SNCC was, so that when you go to some country in Southeast Asia, somebody knows what SNCC is. I mean I find that shocking. I mean I'm surprised when my daughter's friend comes in and says, "Wow, your mom was in SNCC?" I thought that was amazing, but what you just said was just kind of — That's my daughter's friend on steroids.
Muriel:
You know, we used to have a friendly press. We were a curiosity. We got a lot of press people wanting to know who were we and what we were about. Now of course you couldn't tell the press people from the CIA people or the FBI people, but nonetheless moving right along here. Because we didn't have any secrets. What did we have that was a secret, frankly? Okay, so the point of the matter is we had various people who at various times decided they wanted to know more, and they wrote. I remember, I can't think of his first name, but his last, Pin something. [Robert Penn Warren] was a very famous writer.He came down and he wanted to know, and there were other people who came through. I mean that's how a lot of people they came through, but they certainly came through the Atlanta office. I don't know about field staff, but they wanted to know, "Who are you people, and what are you about?" Some people left, some people stayed, and some people carried on in other areas of their lives, very similar kinds of things. They weren't going to do demonstrations or voter registration But you have the guy, I can't think of his name, went off and did a whole bunch of history stuff. I can't think of his name. But he used to come by the office, he was working at Spellman for a couple of years. The guy who wrote Eyewitness To History, and things like that.
[Possibly referring to Howard Zinn who later wrote A People's History of the United States.]The influence factor cannot be discounted. The influence factor is the rippling effect. Yeah, you know, that's kind of it. People have to raise their children to feel that there is a struggle which their parents were a part of, and they will continue. Now we have a lot of children who's decided that they want to go off and get a Cadillac, and a whole lot of other stuff, and they're all material minded, because, "The hell with the movement. It's too sacrificial. I'm not going to do that." So if that's where your movement is, that's where your movement is. It's in the latest car, it's in the latest pair of shoes. That's what they consider the movement.
It's made up of people, you know? People either come forward and stand firm, or it dies for a while. It'll never die completely, but it will die for a while, and then it will resurrect itself again when somebody else got the light, and they decided they were going to shine the light in somebody else's eyes, and then two people will have the light. Then you move on from there. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Janet:
You were mentioning the friendly press, I mean I'm not sure — The major press organs were not necessarily who we're talking about, but even —
Muriel:
Well, yes and no, because let's see now. You're going to ask me some names, and my head is going to show my age. But The New York Times, after it finished opinion, sent some people down. They sent some black folks down, who were writers. They came down to find out who we were and what we were about. At least one of them never left, and he married one of the women in SNCC. What can I say?There were artists who came through and said they were going to stay with their art, but can they do some artwork for you, or can they donate some art? I mean people, it was like a smorgasbord. Everybody wasn't going to join SNCC, but they were going to be supportive. I deal now with a young man, well he's my age, so I guess you wouldn't call him a young man, who is now working in epidemiology. There are other people that they weren't necessarily going to get off of their trajectory, but they heard you, and they're going to carry this message with them wherever they were going to go. You know? Sometimes that's as good as it gets.
Janet:
Yeah, so those things, all of those different pieces of different segments of our world that are attracted to SNCC, so what's the kernel of attraction? I guess it's different for whether it's artistic, or academia, or whatever. I suppose it's a different magnet that draws them to the concept of SNCC, but there's a — That's a powerful thing, I suppose, whatever that attraction is. That is a powerful thing that the movement did or created. As we said an hour ago, we didn't do everything, but we didn't do nothing either, so there's very much of a cultural shift. I think Josh was the one that used that term a little while ago. I mean that's amazing.
Fran:
I was contacted several years ago in 2014 by one of the former Freedom School students in Vicksburg. He's a minister in Memphis now. He said that it was his experience that summer that made him want to finish high school and go to college. He was living with his grandparents at the time, and his grandfather hadn't finished eighth grade, or I guess the fifth grade, and his grandmother had just finished third grade. They were wanting him to go on, but he was a typical teenager, "You didn't, why should I?"But he said that talking with those of us that were taking on the Freedom School, made him want to go to college. I suppose he was 14 years old, so naturally what a bunch of outsiders said was much more important than what his own grandparents were saying. But he felt that this had, had a great impact on his life. Besides his Doctorate of Divinity, he has two Master's Degrees. He's doing pretty well. We still correspond by email.
May I ask whether Tom Canterbury survives to this day?
Janet:
Tom Canterbury died two years ago.
Muriel:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), he passed, okay.
Janet:
He had a stroke, yeah, he had a stroke and died quite suddenly.
Muriel:
We've had a lot of deaths. We have a very, very long list of deaths. That's one of the things that's so — What's the word? I don't want to use the word amazing, because that's a very overused word. But it certainly is something that some of us have survived to this day, given how many people have not made it actually, for one reason or another, you know? I'm sorry to hear about it, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Janet:
The thing that's striking to me about some of these deaths is I oftentimes get an email from, I guess from Bruce, that they're looking for donations for people to get care or whatever. I feel like there's a lot of people who never made it out of the movement, so to speak, to get a job and a retirement benefit, and so on. I don't know that — I don't know. It's like my husband never really — He became a home care worker.
He was brilliant, he was so many things, but he could never reattach to society in any really meaningful way, I guess in a career way. I shouldn't say meaningful, because obviously he was — But he definitely never connected with the big, big, big world. I did, I worked and supported the family for all these years, but I was able to do that, he wasn't. I think that's not uncommon. I don't think —
Muriel:
I don't think so either, mm-hmm (negative).
Janet:
I don't know what that's about. I don't know if that's a failure of the movement, or just a failure of — Or the intensity of the movement.
Fran:
Well, my niece and my husband worked in China for 20 years, and they had a lot of support, and before they came back to the United States, they had a gathering where everybody could talk about — Like we're talking now, and they still have that support group. Any time it's difficult for them to readjust, they can call somebody else who was in China. I don't think we had that very much, it would have been nice.
Janet:
Thank you for asking about Tom, Muriel.
Muriel:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Thank you for telling me. Does anybody, by the way, remember the artist — Oh boy, what is his name? It just disappeared. He was from California, which is a big state, I understand that. He worked out of Holly Springs. Does that strike anybody's bell? Mm-hmm (negative). I'm not doing very well with this. Forget the question, I'll try to come up with a better way of asking it.[Possibly referring to Frank Cieciorka.]
Josh:
Was he a musician?
Muriel:
No, he was an illustrator, that kind of artist.
Fran:
Holly Springs.
Josh:
Do you remember Cliff Vaughs?
Muriel:
Oh yeah, how could you forget Cliff Vaughs? Once you met him, you met him for life. Yeah.
Josh:
I lived in Venice, California when he was there.
Muriel:
Did you know Cliff well? Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Fairly well, yeah. I knew his ex-wife for a long time. I forget her name now though. Yeah.
Janet:
Who was he? I didn't know him.
Josh:
He was a photographer, right? Well, he was — I mean he was complicated.
Muriel:
Yes, he was.
Josh:
But I remember him — I think the two photographers that I remember with SNCC were him and Doug Harris.
Muriel:
Yeah.
Janet:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Josh:
I met Doug Harris in the Atlanta office. We had an interesting discussion. But Cliff went into the movie business at a certain time, and if you remember the movie, Easy Rider, he helped design — This is bizarre, he helped design the motorcycle that Peter Fonda rode on — But yeah, he was kind of an artistic guy, who lived in Venice, California, which was kind of an artist community at that point. Yeah.
Janet:
You said he [Cliff Vaughs?] was complicated, so I'm actually thinking about that statement. I mean granted everybody in the world is complicated, I'm not going there. Were people in the movement more —
Josh:
He didn't have the best attitude towards women.
Janet:
Oh, towards women, okay. Okay. Well, yeah, a lot of people didn't have a good attitude towards women in SNCC either.
Muriel:
Well, you know, please don't quote Carmichael with that foolishness, because he was entirely capable of being silly, and some of his statements I just put to him trying to be with the boys, but he would never ever come back and say some of that stuff to Ruby Doris [Robinson], or to me, or to Sheslonia Johnson [SNCC finance officer]. All that's just crap.[Possibly referring to misquotes and allegations in some articles and books.]When you ask about people being complicated, movement people were complex, but some people were more complex than others. We were talking about Cliff, and Cliff was a person that I found unapproachable, and I disliked him on his own. There were other people who were unapproachable for a different set of reasons, I mean he wasn't the only one. But did I find that widespread? No, I did not. Because in the movement, in field work, you depend on each other. You can't afford to have these kind of way out attitudes that isolate you, etc. You may be out there in the middle of the night by yourself, I bet you would be looking for a friend then. A lot of these things were circumstantial. Okay, that's what I want to say.
They were opportunistic, that in other words if one had an opportunity to be highly individualistic and took advantage of it, then that was the situation. It's as simple as that. Frank [Cieciorka] is the name of the artist that I'm trying to think of. Did anybody know Frank?
Muriel:
He was not Black, but he was a wonderful, wonderful artist, and he died early. He died decades ago, I was just wondering if anybody knew him.He was friendly with a girl that I knew, who has gone, and her name was Cynthia Washington Hughes, and he turned Cynthia Washington onto two books that I've been trying to get people to read, because it talks about poor whites, and poor whites almost never get any exposure in our media driven culture, because they're considered an anomaly, but most people don't have money in this culture. Why are we hiding that?
But we talk about poor Blacks all the time, and one of the books that he wrote was called Deer Hunting With Jesus. He's a fellow from Appalachia, born and raised, and he talks about Appalachia, as only somebody who was poor and white could actually speak on it. He did another one called something Pie. We have to give exposure to various other levels in our society.
When Casey Hayden and some other people took a boat and went up the bayou in Louisiana and ran into the Cajun people, and not the ones who are for the tourists, I'm talking about the Cajun people who live, oh, I don't know, I would certainly suggest that they live very poorly, under the best of circumstances. They're trappers and hunters, and they came back with some tales that I never got all of the tales, I just got pieces of the tales. But a whole way of life that is quite different, and quite remote, and quite isolated, and reflecting of their circumstances.
Now how did these people get here? These were the people who were driven out of Canada in the 19th century, and had to do the walk.
[French colonists in Canada who refused to accept British rule after England won control from France during the colonial wars of the early 1800s.]They walked from Canada to Louisiana. That's a hell of a walk, okay? Who settled in the bayou, so they could be left — Basically, I think, to be left alone. Because most people who have a contained sense of culture wish to be contained and left alone, if they can be. They're not really interested in amalgamating with other people who are quite different.
There are pockets of people that we need to look at, and talk about, and get some sense of exposure to, and as a part of American society. American society is really not a middle class society. It aspires to be a middle class society.
I don't know. If we had an education system — I'm going to leave the world with this one. In the educational system one of the main ingredients that's not at the table is the children. How do I say that? The main ingredient that's not at the table for discussion would be the children, their views, their interests, their hopes, their visions. They are talked about, manipulated, all of that, but if a child knows at the beginning of the aspirational journey, "This is what it's going to take in order for me to be a pilot. This is what it's going to take for me to be an engineer." All the different kinds of things exposed to the different occupations that exist, and I'm not talking revolution, I'm just talking about being employable. Then the child has some grounding, in terms of understanding the journey.
Now the only thing the education system needs to do is prepare the child for the journey. It's as simple as that. Now if a child does not have a vision of self, then that's a whole other proposition, but I would venture to say that most children have a desire and an exposure of where they would like to be as young adults. What they don't have is the support to get there. They don't have it from the parents. They don't have it from the school. So forth and so on. It would be great if we decided to change that paradigm.
Janet:
You know you mentioned Appalachia, Tom was a hillbilly, Muriel. Tom was a hillbilly, he was from Wayne, West Virginia. That simple life, he wasn't a hunter, but he spent his childhood climbing trees, and building log cabins, and whatever, trapping animals, and releasing them with his brother, and that kind of thing. I think this happened to other people. When he hit Stanford, he was confronted — His valedictorian address from high school, he mentions Barry Goldwater, because at that point he was enamored of Goldwater's thinking. He goes to Stanford, and he's confronted by the anti-war reality, and he internalized that.
Muriel:
Right.
Janet:
Then decided to go to Atlanta and work in whatever it was, Peace, whatever, Southern Coordinating —
Muriel:
The Peace and Freedom Movement?
Janet:
I think it was called the Southern Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam. A name that just rolls off your tongue. From there, Stokely recruited him for SNCC, for Selma.
Muriel:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).
Janet:
But just the layers of that life, it all makes sense that he could never connect all the pieces back. I do think that — I don't know if we could have done more, if the movement could have done more to somehow support that. I guess that's a question. I mean I don't know, I keep wondering about stuff with Tom.
Muriel:
Do you consider him a wounded warrior?
Janet:
Yes.
Muriel:
Okay. We've never taken care of our own.
Janet:
I mean he was angry. I mean he was an angry, angry person. He was an angry person. That's why I think he died, because he had a stroke because he was angry. I think there were a lot of people like that. I don't know that Tom was unique in any way. I mean he was unique in a lot of ways, but not in that way maybe.
Muriel:
We've never taken care of our own. We didn't take care of our office. Let's not go on that one. It's a whole story, you know? It's what happens when you're young, you think tomorrow is promised, you don't realize that tomorrow is not promised. All these things you learn as you mature. We were maturing. I mean in many ways we were children. We were just coming out of our adolescent period.
Janet:
Yeah, totally, totally.
Muriel:
We were trying to learn, be grown, fight the man, register people. I mean we had a whole lot of things on our agenda. Like I said for people who say, "Well, you didn't do this and you didn't do that." I want to know, "Well, what were you doing? Can you just explain to me what were you doing? Because I was working very hard, okay? Then I got tired."I have a friend who tells me, when we talk about the movement, she was not in it, "I couldn't have done that. I would have done so and so, and so and so." I just looked at her because I know she has not taken that one good step in the direction of doing anything on behalf of anybody who is not her. I understand that, and I don't let those kind of people trip me up, because they're always deflecting from themselves onto you. Well, you know, not today.
Josh:
Let me just say this, one of things — In 1966, when SNCC challenged whites to go work amongst — You know, white working class people, it took two years to figure out exactly how that was going to happen for me. That turned out to be the GI movement. There were so many things that were similar to my SNCC experience. One is that if you were going to do work amongst GIs, you're going to be in the South, because that's where the bases were built.
Muriel:
That's right.
Josh:
I spent six weeks in a little town called Leesville, Louisiana, and got arrested for vagrancy, and I had an apartment, a car, and $400 in the bank, but that was Leesville, Louisiana.
Muriel:
That's right.
Josh:
But when I went to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, where guys from all over the country mostly were Vietnam returnees, overwhelmingly these guys had come back and they had about six months left on their tour, and as soon as they came back from Vietnam, they were put into riot-control training. This was 1968, and they were trying to train them for the Democratic Convention in Chicago.When it came up to that, there was a meeting of 200, mainly Black GIs, who basically had a meeting on base, and at a certain point, 43, they're known as the Fort Hood 43, refused to go to Chicago.
But there was also a substantial number of white soldiers that we worked with, that had stickers [anti-war stickers?], that if they were going to go on, they would put them on their helmets. I mean the experience we had in Killeen working amongst white working class guys who were back from Vietnam, was the second most powerful experience I had, in terms of the movement. And connecting to SNCC, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I wouldn't have been able to leave Los Angeles. I wouldn't have been able to go into a small town where I didn't know anybody and begin to do political work of this kind, if it hadn't been for SNCC. I think there were a lot of people who were affected like that.
Janet:
Wow, that's powerful, Josh. Yeah.
Josh:
Go see a documentary [about the GI anti-war movement] called Sir, No, Sir, it's on YouTube [for a fee].[It's also available on DVD and possibly some streaming services.]
Janet:
This has been a fabulous conversation, you guys. I really appreciate all of your comments and input.
Muriel:
I've enjoyed it myself. Thank you.
Fran:
So have I.
Janet:
I don't have a lot of people to talk to about this, because when Tom died, you know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Muriel:
Yeah, I know.Josh:
You were mentioning before about losing people, about people passing on. I got the notice about [the death of] Betty Garman.
Muriel:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
That broke my heart.
Muriel:
Betty, then we had Gloria [Richardson], then we had Bob [Moses]. It was like bang, bang, bang. But Betty's was really out of the blue. No lead up to it at all.
Josh:
Muriel, did you say you worked at the Atlanta office?
Muriel:
Oh yeah. I worked in Mississippi, and then I came to the Atlanta office. At the Atlanta office, I worked with Ruby [Doris Robinson], and Cleve [Sellers], and Shesty [Sheslonia Johnson].
Josh:
Were you anywhere near West Point, Mississippi?
Muriel:
No, I was in Greenville, Black Dog. Where else was I? Hollendale. Oh boy, I can't think of the name of the town, but it was in Issaquena County. There was Rolling Fork over in Sharkey County, and I can't think of the name of — I don't know how I forgot the name of the headquarters in Issaquena County. How'd I do that? Well, it's gone.Then I went to Jackson office, and headed state operations for a while, and then I went up to Holly Springs, and then Cleve came and got me and said he thought I had done enough, and it was time to go, so he hauled me in the car, and we went on to the Atlanta office. That's how I got to Atlanta. I'm like a mule, I'll just sit there and keep on, and keep on, and keep on, until somebody says, "Okay, that's enough of that."
You know, I was trying to keep the Mississippi thing going, keeping it with some kind of generalized contact, outside of the movement areas themselves. The small organizational areas themselves, because you know Mississippi, what was it? 98% rural? Even their towns were rural.
Janet:
What about Junius Hamilton? You know, he and I were in the car one time, and he had on a bandana on his head because for obvious reasons, he was Black and I was white. We were on our way to Selma from, we might have been coming from Camden, and the police stopped us. I think we called Selma, we called the WATS line or whatever, the WATS line, before we left Camden.[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 via 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.]I think Doug Harris, or Tina, maybe it was Tina answered, and I unfortunately was on the other end of the phone, and she hung up on me, I think because I was white. I'm not sure. That was right before the national staff meeting, when they wanted white people to leave the Black community, but anyway they hung up. She hung up, so without getting our message.The cops stopped us, and they roughed up Junius, and basically verbally assaulted me for a while, and then we got back in the car and drove on. To this day, I don't know why they didn't kill us. I mean there was nothing stopping them, we were in the middle of nowhere, and nobody knew we were coming. Anyway, it's just —
Muriel:
Well, I have to tell you about my cop experience. I was learning how to drive a stick shift, and I grabbed this —
Janet:
Oh no.
Muriel:
Well yeah, and a stick shift — Mississippi is not the place to learn how to drive a stick shift. So there I was, and I was on a hill, it was in some godforsaken part of Mississippi, this was not a part of Mississippi that I knew anything about, not that, that would have helped me. I had this poor little white boy volunteer with me. He was a nice guy, a really nice guy. Real thin, and real scared, okay? And the gears slipped, and I backed right into the cop car behind me, and bashed in the front of the cop car.Well, I could have gotten a drama award that day, as I climbed out of the car, and explained, and the guy finally, in the final analysis, they just said, "Get back in the car, lady, and just go on about your business." But the car, quite literally the car was quite damaged.
[End Session #2]
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