Bruce Hartford interviewed by Rev. Harry Williams with questions about the 1960s Civil Rights Movement for a book he is writing.
Contents:
Rev. Harry Williams:
Okay. Well, sir, I want to just start right in if it's okay. I've got a list of questions I want to ask you. I won't keep you too long though.
Bruce Hartford:
Okay. Well, I see you're recording and that's fine. But please send me a copy of the recording for my records.
Williams:
Okay. Well, the first question I wanted to ask you would be about some of your firsthand recollections. Please tell me about the first time that you saw Stokely Carmichael or actually came into contact with him face-to-face.
Hartford:
Well, first of all, Stokely Carmichael was SNCC, and I was SCLC. And if I make reference to the Sharks and the Jets, do you grasp that?[Referring to two rival youth gangs in Westside Story.]
Williams:
I exactly know what you mean from my study of history, yes. I completely understand that. Yes.
Hartford:
So both SCLC and SNCC had the same goals, the same stance on segregation, voting rights and so forth, but different strategies. And we were all young and young [people] adhered to their gang [or group].
Williams:
Yes.
Hartford:
So there was a certain amount of rivalry and tension between SNCC and SCLC. Sometimes we would say "Snick" and "Slick." So the first time I saw Stokely, or the first time I met Stokely was in Selma [in 1965].
Williams:
Yes.
Hartford:
I met him, I encountered him two or three times at meetings and so forth. And then I later encountered him once or twice on the Meredith March [1966]. And I always kind of liked him. I mean, he was charismatic, but he was also charming. He had strong politics, but he was not mean about it, so I kind of liked [and admired] him. But other than that, I never really — We exchanged a few words here and then, but we had no real interaction.
Williams:
Okay. Now, since we're talking about SCLC, would you tell me about Dr. King? There's the public persona, but as you've met with him and you've been in meetings with him, what type of person was Dr. King?
Hartford:
Okay. So first of all, you started this call by saying you won't take too much of my time, which I appreciate, but I'm a talker. so I don't give short answers [laughing].
Williams:
Go right ahead. No problem at all. No problem at all.
Hartford:
So we used to joke that we were part of Dr. King's Freedom Army. Now, when I say 'we,' I'm talking about people who were on the field staff of SCLC, and of course he was the head of SCLC. So in that metaphor of the Freedom Army, he was the general, and I was a corporal. Maybe towards the end, I might've made sergeant. Now, if you know anything about the military, generals and sergeants or corporals don't really socialize a lot.So I was in many meetings, big level meetings, with 20 or 30 or 50 or so staff. And he was at the head and I was at the back. And I attended a number of mass meetings where he spoke in the church. And if he saw me on the streets of Selma or Grenada [MS], he would remember, I think, that I worked for him and he might send me on an errand or something. And once I drove him when Brownlee was in jail, Brownlee was his regular driver, but I don't think he ever really knew my name. Or if he did, he forgot it.
So my feeling about Dr. King, well, first of all, I absolutely loved, admired, and adored him, and I still do. And one of the things — it didn't strike me then, but in years thereafter, it struck me — that I've met a number of famous people in my dissolute and disreputable life. And Dr. King was unique in the sense that his private persona when you met him or encountered him was entirely the same as his public persona. The same brilliance, the same compassion, the same humility, the same concern for the individual. What you saw on the stage at the March on Washington was what you got in the back room of Belle Flower Baptist Church in Grenada, Mississippi, which was our office for SCLC.
Williams:
Yes.
Hartford:
One of the things that I really appreciated about Dr. King in comparison with some other big Civil Rights, anti-war, and other political leaders is that he would send us out to do dangerous things, but he did not do so casually. And we knew that if we were injured, he bled, if you understand what I'm saying.
Williams: Yes.
Hartford:
And that was not true for many of the others. I won't mention any names. So I still tremendously admire Dr. King. And one of the things I have posted [on our website] is a memory of Dr. King, on the anniversary of his birth.
Williams:
Okay. He said that he would send you to do dangerous things. What kind of things would that might be?
Hartford:
March over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, march here, march there, go out in the rural and register voters. It was dangerous work.
Williams:
So I know that you were at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, were you at the first march or at the —
Hartford:
No, I was not there at that time, but I was there at the second march and then the third march. The first march was the famous Bloody Sunday, which fortunately I missed, but there were a lot of other marches, and dangers, and being teargassed, and attacked by possemen on, horses and having the Klan try to kill you. And I mean, it's all in my book. You know that.
Williams:
If you could go back in 1967, back in the 60s, tell me about a mass march. Not mass march, but one of the mass meetings. Could you tell me about the energy that would've been in the room? Who might have started a meeting? And what would a mass meeting have been like?
Hartford:
Well, the mass meetings were really inspiring and amazing. It's interesting — and this is going to be somewhat divergent to your question — but it's something —Prior to working for Dr. King in the South, I had spent two years working for the Congress of Racial Equality CORE in Southern California. And that being a northern — in our lexicon, anything that wasn't in the South was the North — and the northern movement, the people who organized it, their political experience had primarily been in the labor movement of the 40s and the 50s. So a CORE meeting, a Los Angeles CORE meeting, was shaped and modeled after a good union meeting. So start with the Pledge of Allegiance, you have people in the audience, you have the officers on the stage sitting at a table, there's a president's report, a treasurer's report, committee reports, and there may be some singing and so forth. And I came from a labor family, so I was really familiar with union meetings. And it was old home week. I know this. I can do this falling off a log.
So when I came south, the mass meetings, since there had not been any union movement in the south, were based on church services, and they were held in churches. Except in Louisiana, where actually the Civil Rights Movement was based in the union halls rather than the churches in many locations such as Bogalusa or Jonesboro, and even to an extent in NOLA.
[But most of the southern mass meetings [were church based.]. And this wasn't a kind of uptight white Christian saditty, what can I say? Bourgeois middle class church service. These were down home, rock and roll. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
Williams:
Oh, I'm a preacher. Yeah, I'm a preacher, so I got you, yes.
Hartford:
And so there would be this marvelous singing, and then the preacher, the leaders would give a sermon and they weren't limited to five minutes. They spoke, they testified, and then people would get up in the audience and testify. And all through it, there was singing, and it was emotionally just so powerful.My first experience of this was the first mass meeting I attended at Brown Chapel in Selma. The first night — Well, I arrived at midnight and slept on the pews there, but then the next night was the mass meeting. And I was so moved that when the donation bucket came around, I put in a $20 traveler's check [equal to about $200 in 2025). And I am well known as a tightwad. I'm free and generous with my time, and I'll go to jail and I'll take risks. But I didn't come from a middle-class background. We were hardscrabble working class, and I did not give away my money easily. So yeah, I was tremendously impressed with the mass meetings.
Williams:
Do you remember, the buy-in that Dr. King got, when he would address the meeting finally, what might happen?
Hartford:
Well, in the Black community of the South — Well, first of all, let me caveat this. I was a white Civil Rights worker. And the Black homes to which I was invited, and in some cases lived in, were of movement supporters. Nobody talks about this now, but there was a segment of the Black community that did not support the Civil Rights Movement and would not dare to have me in their home. Now, the majority of those who did not support the Civil Rights Movement did so out of fear and intimidation. It was just too dangerous for them. But some did so out of religious objection, that would be the 'sanctified,' which was a small component.
So the reason I predicated my answer with that is I was going to say, and I'm still going to say, that when I would go into a Black home, there would always be either two or three pictures on the wall. One would be John F. Kennedy, who I did not consider a great supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, but who the media portrayed that way. The second would be Dr. King. And if the house was Catholic, there would be a picture of Jesus. So when Dr. King came to a community, a Black community, or spoke in a Black church, he would receive this adulation as a religious prophet, as a [holy] figure. And the SNCC workers were really jealous of that, and they kind of sardonically referred to him as 'De Lawd,' L-A-W-D, De Lawd.
Williams:
Yes, yes.
Hartford:
And that was out of jealousy, I think. And that kind of annoyed some of the Black SCLC workers. It didn't bother me one way or another.But [the adulation] embarrassed Dr. King. You could see that he felt uncomfortable with it. But he was an [organizer], and he used that. So he shaped it towards the movement. I mean, one of the things that almost nobody knows about Dr. King is that unlike some other leaders, again no names will be mentioned, he never profited from the movement to the degree that when he received the Nobel Prize, which is a big cash prize, I forget what it was in money, but it was a lot of money back then, he donated all of the money to the movement. And not just to SCLC, but to SNCC and CORE and other groups. And Coretta King, Mrs. King was off about that because she had four kids that she had to put through college, and they weren't making a lot of money on his job as assistant pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church. So there was some tension there. Anyway, how did I get off on that? Anyway, he was uncomfortable with the adulation.
But it was really, I mean, people would reach out to touch him. They were just ecstatic. It was like a ecstatic religious experience. In some instances, after people got used to him in places where he was a lot like Selma or Birmingham, some of that died down a bit.
Hartford:
As you know, Dr. King was strong in his beliefs, but he was not sectarian about it. He and Stokely got along famously. He and Stokely really liked each other, and they used to joke and tease each other. One time they were at a meeting — I wasn't present, but I heard about this later — they were at a meeting at doctor — the dentist at Selma where Dr. King stayed [Dr. Jackson?]. I think that's where they were. Anyway, Stokely was telling a story about how he had come into Lowndes County [Alabama]. Do I need to explain what Lowndes County is?
Williams:
Bloody Lowndes.
Hartford:
Bloody Lowndes, okay. So he had come in and he was telling this story, how people would come up to him and say to him, "Are you one of Dr. King's men?" And he said, "Yes, ma'am, I am." And Dr. King just laughed. Now, some of the other SCLC people got a little bristly, but Dr. King thought that was wonderful.
Hartford
And [Dr. King] was, as you know, philosophically nonviolent. [Yet,] most of the great majority of people in the Freedom War Movement were tactically nonviolent, but he was philosophically nonviolent. [Yet] he did not insist on that for other people.I remember a meeting in Grenada [Mississippi] where he was talking. A guy got up and he said, "Dr. King, I love you and I admire you, but if the Klan rides through Grenada again like they did last night, and if they start shooting, I am going to shoot back." And Dr. King did not chastise that man. Dr. King said, "I do not believe personally in violence of any sort, but you are an American citizen. You have the right to defend yourself and to defend your community. And so if you have to defend yourself, that is your choice. However, if you come on one of our demonstrations, you have to commit to being nonviolent. And if you cannot do that, please support the movement in other ways." And that man sat down completely and utterly satisfied.
Williams:
Wow.
Hartford:
So one of the tensions of Dr. King encountered was that he would go from town to town to speak, and that was very dangerous. One of the things, if you look at our website and we have leaflets from Selma and places, I don't think you will see a single one that says, "Dr. King will speak tonight." Because when he was going to speak, it was always mentioned word of mouth at the last minute to limit the amount of time the Klan had to mobilize an assassination team.So when he would come to a community to speak, very often they would organize armed guards to guard the house wherever he was sleeping. Usually, I mean, Selma and a couple places had hotels, Black hotels, but most of the time he would sleep at somebody's house and they would put armed guards around and that made him very uncomfortable. And he said this, "I'm uncomfortable." But he never said, "If you do it, I won't come." He could have said that, but he never did, not out of cowardice, but out of respect for the community.
Williams:
Wow. I want to get back to the Sharks and the Jets. What I've heard about SNCC is that SNCC had a on-the-ground movement that would build local leadership and it was intense and it was built for the long run. And their criticism of SCLC was that SCLC would come in, have the big events and leave. What do you think of that?
Hartford:
[That's] a deep question. In my experience, I've been now a political activist for 60 years, more than 60 years. And in my experience, when dedicated, committed, sincere political activists have fundamental strategic disagreements, in most cases, both are right.SNCC in 1961 had a big — almost broken apart — a big split between those who wanted to keep doing nonviolent protests against segregation and those who wanted to do community organizing around voter registration. It was a big fight. And Ella Baker cut through it by saying, "Do both."
And it turned out that in Mississippi and Alabama and the rest of the deep South, voter registration was direct action and that the two were complimentary. That the direct action of the high school students and the college students gave courage to the adults to register to vote. And the political power of the adults gave cover to the students.
Now, I didn't understand this at the time. So in the split that you described about King and SCLC and SNCC, I leaned towards the SCLC side. We will never get political power through votes until the whole segregation, Jim Crow literacy test system was overridden at the national level. But I saw also, I accepted the grassroots strategy of SNCC.
They were complimentary. And yes, SNCC's criticism of big events, SCLC comes in, big events, leaves emptiness in its place, is a valid description. And it applied to Selma, and it applied to Albany and [to a lesser degree] to Birmingham. But Birmingham and St. Augustine gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — without which there would still be "White Only" signs in restaurant windows. Selma gave us the Voting Rights Act of 1965, without which there would've been no electoral Black Power.
And here's another thing that SNCC did not — Well, they would acknowledge it if I pointed it out to them. SNCC was SNCC throughout. It changed enormously. SNCC was like a meteor across the sky. The SNCC of '60, '61 was totally different than the SNCC of '63 and '64. And the SNCC of '63, '64 was totally different than the SNCC of '66, '67. But whatever they were, they were always SNCC.
[But] SCLC was an amalgamation of really different organizations. You had Dr. King as an individual. You had the Executive Staff of Abernathy, Young, Bevel, Vivian, Shuttlesworth, Williams, [and later Cotton], [who] were a power center unto themselves. You [also] had the SCLC of the affiliated churches and local organizations who were relatively conservative, and you had the SCLC field staff.
And you [also] had the Citizenship Schools program. Are you familiar with the citizenship schools?
Williams:
No, I am not. No, I'm not. Was the Highland School one of those citizen schools?
Hartford:
No, the Highland Schools started the citizenship schools. But when [Highlander] was driven underground by the state [of Tennessee], they handed it off to SCLC. And Septima Clark and Dorothy Cotton and Mrs. Robinson and Annell Ponder came over to SCLC.The citizenship schools were like the underground resistance against the Nazis in France. [They were] revolutionary cells, disguised as literacy teaching. And you really should read what we have on the website about that because they were — I say they were an underground revolutionary cells because they were creating a social revolution [at the grassroots level] beneath the notice of the white power structure by teaching sharecroppers how to read, by teaching sharecroppers basic arithmetic so that when the master said, "I'm sorry, Joe, the amount you took from the company store over the year is greater than the amount of cotton you produced, so you owe me" they could actually add up the figures for themselves. It taught them how to write out a check so they could actually go to a bank and have a bank account instead of relying on the prices at the company store.
And when SNCC went into a community, very often the local leaders they found there who became the local leaders in their communities were the citizenship school teachers who had been trained by SCLC at Frogmore Academy in South Carolina to teach the literacy [classes]. Fannie Lou Hamer was a citizenship school teacher. So was Mrs. Divine [in Canton] and Victoria Gray in Hattiesburg. So were some of the local leaders in Selma.
So whenever I heard SNCC say, "Oh, SCLC doesn't do any grassroots organizing," I would ask, "Do you count an Annell Ponder and Septima Clark and the citizenship school teachers?" And they'd have to say, "Well, yeah, of course we don't count that. Of course, we know about that."
The SCLC leadership had a response to the, 'you don't do community organizing complaint of SNCC,' and it was a valid response. And [yet] by the way, I still support SNCC's position to a large degree. I'm not condemning SNCC.
But SCLC's response was, "The Black community is already organized around the Black church, and we are mobilizing those Black churches to fight for freedom." And they had a point [too]. And they said, "We're not going to go into the Black community and organize them as a rival to the church," which SNCC to some degree did.
On the other hand, SNCC had a valid reason for doing that because in most Black communities, there would be one or two or at most three Black churches that would support the movement, and the rest didn't. So in Selma, one of the reasons Selma had such a strong movement was that there were three churches that supported it out of the 50 that were in Selma. Now, that 50 includes 30 that had congregations of 10 or 20. You know what I mean.
Williams:
Absolutely.
Hartford:
So the real criticism that I would accept, or that I agreed with, or made with SNCC, is that the problem with SCLC was it was dominated by middle-class values. The middle-class values and interests of the preacher, small business, small landowner class of the Black community, and that's where [SCLC's] mentality was.But not King. King was unique in that he always identified with the poor, but most of the others — strike that. Some of the others on the Executive Staff identified with the Black middle-class, and the affiliates who elected the SCLC board members almost universally were identified with the Black middle-class.
Whereas SNCC identified with the sharecroppers, the maids, the day laborers, the Black working class, and that was reflected in some of their politics and in a whole lot of stuff. King had to drag SCLC kicking screaming reluctantly into the Poor People's Campaign, into the Chicago War Against Slum. They didn't feel comfortable with those economic issues because it challenged the Black middle-class.
Williams:
How did it challenge the Black middle-class? When you're talking about going to Chicago and when you start talking about [King's later] speeches about economic equality and the guaranteed income —
Hartford:
Well, some of those slumlords were Black. The Black ministers had a middle-class, well, in Black terms, a middle-class lifestyle on the nickels and dimes from the working class parishioners. They had business-ties — both North and South — with the white community.So when you start talking about sharecropper unions, and co-ops, [you] began to upset some of these economic ties. Well, a lot of the ministers had business relations with white businessmen (not white business women there weren't any of those). Black ministers would also run a store, and that store had to be supplied by white wholesalers. They would need permits from the white city council, whatever. [Or] they would be selling insurance.
Or they would be elected to their position in the church. As you know, some of the Black churches call their minister by vote. Well, who controls that process? The sharecroppers and maids in the congregation? Or the insurance agents, storekeepers, small landowners in the congregation?
Williams:
Right. I see it today. Yes.
Hartford:
All right, here's an example. So in Grenada, in the latter half of the movement, we were trying to figure out, what should we do next? And the Black middle-class with the support of Hosea Williams [of SCLC and I think Andy Young and the others] came up with, "Well, let's build a Black supermarket and we'll sell shares and we will employ Black people."And by 'supermarket,' they [did not mean] what we would call a supermarket out here, but [rather] a store that was much larger than the average 500 square foot Black grocery store [but not the thousands of square feet of a modern supermarket]. And so they were selling shares and so forth and so on.
I said, "Let's organize a welfare rights union to have people support those going in to [the welfare office] to make sure that they were treated fairly and that the law was obeyed." And I was the only one on the staff who thought that was a good idea.
And I went out and I did it and it was actually fairly successful. And I always wondered why [I was allowed to do so] because they looked at me like, "What is this guy?" It was just not in their world view to organize welfare recipients.
I think the reason they didn't [try to stop me] was because they knew if Dr. King had heard about it, he would've said, "No, don't you dare." That's what the Poor People's Campaign was about. That's what Chicago was about, was the welfare recipients. As it turned out, after I left, that welfare rights group continued for a year or 18 months, whereas the supermarket never got past the foundations. It never got off the ground.
And by the way, going back to our earlier discussion about SCLC leaving the community with nothing left, that was also true for SNCC, because SNCC would come in and after [their full time staff] would leave, things would [eventually] fall apart because you really needed dedicated activists to keep a movement going. So a lot of the communities that SNCC had where they did their community organizing, when the SNCC worker left, it died down. And that was just inherent in the nature of up-from-below politics, you need people who are organizers. And when SNCC lost its money they couldn't have organizers, so those movements also went into quiescence.
Now, in both cases, both with the protests and with the community organizing, they had made amazing and fundamental revolutionary changes in the society.
[For example,] in Lowndes County where they formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which became [known as] the "Black Panther Party" [in 1966]. They created their own party instead of running in the [Democratic Party] primaries, whereas SCLC's strategy was [to run Black candidates in] the primaries. [But all of them lost]. SNCC founded a party and they ran in the '66 elections and the election was rigged and they lost [too]. [By late] '66, SNCC no longer had money to fund organizers there.
By '68, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization had become part of the Democratic Party. This is the only way they could win. So the guy who eventually [became] sheriff in '68 [did so] as a Democrat. So the criticism of being left flat was valid, but it also applied to SNCC and CORE.
Williams:
Wow. Well, those are such powerful answers. The core of my book lands in Greenwood, Mississippi. And it lands the night that Stokely Carmichael got out of prison, got out of jail, and he goes to that park, and I sent you a picture of myself in that park, and there's the rally [where] he says, "Black Power." You talk about that in your book, but were you actually there that night?
Hartford:
No. No, I wasn't there.
Williams:
Okay. How do you think that changed history? And did that lead to the end of the Civil Rights Movement?
Hartford:
I think the cry for Black Power had a very strong effect on history, on the Black community, on politics in general. It's a very complex effect. I would not say it led to the end of the Civil Rights Movement because I think it was an outgrowth of the decline of the Civil Rights Movement or the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement from a mass protest to a building of community power.But it was enormously complex. First of all, it's very difficult to talk about Black Power because it didn't exist as a program. It was a slogan and it was an emotionally powerful slogan, but there was no stated program behind it so everyone could interpret it however they wanted, which meant that every Black person was enthusiastic about it because everybody had [their own] meaning of it [that they liked]. But they were different [meanings].
Now, some of the people, Stokely, I believe, Floyd McKissick for sure, of course, SCLC people, Dr. King himself, I think, interpreted the cry of Black Power for a fair and equal share of political and economic power — which is what the Freedom Movement had been about since 1860. And that's what the Montgomery Bus Boycott was about. [Black Power] was simply a continuation of that. But under a slogan that was very controversial, and Dr. King did say he thought the slogan was unfortunate, but he never criticized the concept.
So I supported that [definition of] Black Power, but there were other people who saw Black Power as Black nationalism And as rejecting any cooperation with whites, as the rejection of nonviolence in favor of revolutionary violence. I did not support that interpretation of Black Power, and I thought it was strategic suicide.
And then there were people who interpreted Black Power as, they will use the Black Power slogans as a vehicle for their achieving personal political power through the election system that we [then had] because of the Voting Rights Act. I was not enthusiastic about that interpretation either. Mrs. Hamer never won significant electoral [office]. I think she was eventually elected to some small commission or something. The Blacks in Sunflower County who achieved electoral office had not been the Blacks who had supported the movement when it was dangerous to do so — or most of them had not. What's his name? Benny Thomas, I would say, would be an exception to that.
[Recording interrupted by outside noise]
Hartford:
The cry for Black Power occurred in the context of a major shift in the stance of the National Democratic Party and the national mass media, a major shift in their attitude towards the Civil Rights movement.Initially in the early years, bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, era, the mass media and the National Democratic Party were very suspicious and not particularly supportive of the freedom movement, and particularly the Kennedys because they were afraid it was 'communist dominated.' [That] it was a red plot, and that was the Kennedy's line. [Yet] Kennedy had been elected because he called Mrs. King when Dr. King was jailed in Georgia, and that swung the election for him in Illinois, because it was the Black vote that put him over the top in Illinois. [Which sealed JFK's victory in the Electoral College.]
Williams:
Wow.
Hartford:
Anyway, [Kennedy] was very unhappy with the Civil Rights Movement because he was trying to be the leader of the 'Free world' globally and in the United Nations. And all of these Freedom Rides, burning buses, and people being assassinated and arrested looked very bad on the national stage. Made him look like a fucking idiot when he said, "America is the standard-bearer of freedom," and made it very hard for him to win the support of the Third World countries in Africa and Asia that were struggling against colonialism.So he was very unhappy with the Civil Rights Movement. That's a whole long story. The National Democratic Party and the national media were sort of in sync with that. Then after Birmingham, there was a shift and the National Democratic Party and the national media became more supportive of the movement and the stories would become more supportive and sympathetic and critical of the Southern sheriff stereotype.
So that [supportive] period lasted basically from the spring of '63 through the spring of '65 after Selma and the March to Montgomery and the passage of the Voting Rights Bill. [During that supportive period] at the Democratic Convention in 1964 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party demanded that they be seated as delegates from Mississippi [either instead of or alongside the white-only 'regular' Mississippi delegates]. President Johnson was afraid of losing the Southern vote — the white Southern vote [before the Voting Rights Act the Black southern vote was minimal]. So he was adamant against allowing any members of the Black-led MFDP to take seats that would've been held by the white Mississippi delegates — all of whom who were opposed to him politically, and all of whom ended up voting for Goldwater anyway. So he was furious that the MFDP,
He offered a bullshit, so called compromise which was basically a sham, that he would appoint just two MFDP delegates, one white, one Black, to be observers, not voting delegates. And the MFDP quite righteously said, 'Fuck you.' Well, they didn't say it in that way. They said, "No, we didn't come here for no two seats." The controversy embarrassed Johnson because it was forcing him to take sides against the Dixiecrats. You know who I mean by the Dixiecrats, right?
Williams:
Right. The Southern Democrats who were [white segregationists].
Hartford:
The pro-segregation white Southern Democrats who controlled a good hunk of the party. So from that point forward, the National Democratic Party was pulling away, was angry at the Civil Rights Movement, and a lot of funders who had been funding the movement, but who were aligned with the party, stopped funding SCLC and SNCC and CORE.
Williams:
Wow.
Hartford:
And then after the voting rights [bill], the movement increasingly began to address economic issues and northern issues.[The two fundamental issues addressed by the Civil Rights Movement up until 1965 were the Jim Crow segregation system and denial of voting rights on the basis of race. Passage of the two civil rights bills in 1964 nd 1965 meant that the Freedom Movement could turn its attention to addressing issues of poverty and economic justice.]So a lot of the northern liberals who had stuck with the movement when it was talking about Southern segregation suddenly said, "Hey, wait, wait a minute. You're talking about housing desegregation in my neighborhood. You're talking about desegregating the schools my kid goes to. You're talking about strikes at the businesses that I own shares in." Suddenly their support for the Civil Rights Movement fell away.
And there was this very important incident in a place called Watts, Watts, California, followed by an urban uprising of Black violence. And then following Watts, which was '65, in '66, you had urban uprisings in Detroit, Newark, etc. And suddenly there were urban uprisings, violent urban uprisings in northern cities where northern liberals lived. Now, these uprisings didn't do any harm [to the liberals] physically. It was the police against the cops. The buildings that were burned — Well, some of them were owned by — Yeah, some of them were owned by whites, but no white people were attacked. Yet it spread fear.
And I mean, there was [was all this media hysteria about] 'Black militants.' And the media decided, okay, the real story now that sells newspapers and delivers eyeballs to advertisers on CBS is Black militants, Black Muslims, 'kill honkies' and so on. So the media swung that direction. And it's in that context that the cry for Black Power emerged in Greenwood in June of 1966. And so the media — well, of course the white media in the South, had been horrified by the movement from day one, and Black Power certainly didn't change that — but the Northern media seized on Black Power as an expression of what they feared from the urban uprisings.
So the arc from Atlantic City in '64 through the urban economic issues, through the urban uprisings to Black Power caused an enormous falling away of financial support for SNCC and CORE, and to a [lesser] degree SCLC. Dr. King's personal fundraising still kept SCLC alive financially, although it meant more and more of his time had to be addressing large audiences and doing personal fundraising.
But for SNCC and CORE, it meant that their field staff was decimated. Well, I don't know the numbers, but 80 to 90% of their field organizers had to be laid off by '66. Which meant that their program could no longer be actual grassroots organizing, but more media manipulation by spokespeople first like Stokely and then later like H. Rap Brown and others. And Black Power was all mixed in on that.
So in one way, Black Power was manifested in positive ways. Black businesses, Black co-ops, Blacks running for office or forming political organizations. All of that was positive. But [some] of it was militant rhetoric that was just rhetoric, and that wasn't so positive. And posturing.
Hartford
And also some of [the Black Power rhetoric] was very nationalistic — anti-white. I was a white Civil Rights worker, so obviously I didn't resonate well with that. I'm Jewish. And Jews have had 2,000 years experience living in communities where they were reviled, hated, and persecuted. And part of that genetically inherited experience is you got to find some allies in that Polish community, that Russian shtetl, or you're going to get killed. And so the whole anti-white, 'we don't want no white allies' approach seemed like a suicide plan to me. So anyway, I don't know if that answered your questions on Black Power.
Williams:
You changed the whole book. Oh my goodness. That is amazing. Oh, you don't realize how much this has blessed me so much. My goodness.
Hartford:
All right. Well, let me tell you something else that I should have said. A lot of the issue in SNCC and CORE was resentment of Black activists against white activists, because we were all mixed in together. And some of that was quite legitimate. Some white activists were sincere and noble, but they came from middle class, upper class, arrogant backgrounds where it was just assumed that they would be the leader. I mean, they went to fucking Stanford or Harvard or Yale. I mean, of course, it's without even thinking that they should tell you what to do. And the Black activists legitimately and justifiably resented that.And then there was the whole sexual tension. And I don't know, are you familiar with Dr. Poussaint's writings? Stresses on the White Female Worker in the CRM? Well, that was also a huge tension. So there was all of that. So there was a lot of racial tension between Blacks and whites in SNCC and CORE. And to a certain extent in SCLC, though the leadership in SCLC really did not — really squelched that and said, 'Oh no, don't you do that shit." Whereas the leadership in SNCC and CORE somewhat played into it.
But here's the interesting thing. One of the arguments of the SNCC and CORE people about white activists is that they suppressed leadership in the Black community. And to a certain extent that was true, but also to a certain extent, that was also true for Black college students who could do things that Black sharecroppers couldn't — like type or speak at a meeting or write a press release or come up with a strategy. But the interesting thing is that the Black local leadership in the Black communities did not share the jealousy or antagonism of Black activists against white activists because they knew that white activists were never, ever going to challenge them for leadership in the Black community.
Whereas a Black Civil Rights worker might decide to run against them in a future election or become a community leader that threatened the power of a Black minister or became this, that, or the other thing. They might embed themselves in that Black community and the existing Black leadership, they would be a rival. So the local Black leaders were usually very supportive of having white activists. If for no other reason, then if they had someone in jail, we could ask our family to send $50 to get that person out. Or if they needed a typewriter, we could call up our old teacher and say, 'You know that old typewriter you don't use? Send it here.' So this whole thing about the tension of white and Blacks is very complex and it's not simple black and white [so to speak].
Williams:
No, it's got class threads in it. Can you tell me, so some of the Black people that you would've met in the South, you would've probably been the first white person that they ever talked to as an equal. Can you tell me what was that like?
Hartford:
That was amazing. That was mind-blowing for both of us, for all of us. I mean, when I initially came to Selma, I stayed with the famous West family in the [Carver housing] projects and they put up a lot of [activists both Black and white]. [James and Diane] Bevel lived there. I mean, this was an experience. We white Civil Rights workers were the first whites they had ever had a social conversation with on the basis of at least some equality.And that was just mind-blowing on both sides. In fact, I wasn't the first white that they had stayed with them. So by the time I got there, they knew some of the drill. Their [apartment] was a big unit with several bedrooms because they had a huge family. They had 12 children. And they had a little alcove that had a side-by-side washer-dryer. And I was allowed to put my sleeping bag on top of the washer-dryer, and that's where I slept.
Because other people had already staked out floor space in the living room, and Jonathan Daniels was in the bedroom. Anyway, so the first night I was there, we got to know each other, and there was a certain feeling-out [of each other]. After that, they said, 'Look, here are the streets it's safe to go to on the daytime. Here are the streets it's safe to walk on the daytime, but not at nighttime. And here are somebody you can trust. Here are the people. They're snitches. Don't talk to them.' And they scoped it all out for me.
Now, this becomes significant because one of the things they told me is — God, I'm spacing on the name of the street [Franklin St.]. Selma was large enough that it had a sort of a Black business, a Black district in the commercial area. But it was not entirely Black. And there was a saloon that was a white-only saloon called the Silver Moon, and that was a Klan hangout. Now if you walk directly from one of the main black hamburger joints [Walkers Cafe] where a lot of Civil Rights people ate, the direct route from there to the SNCC and SCLC offices passed right by the Silver Moon. And they told me, "Do not ever walk past the silver moon after dark."
Now, some days later, after the big crowd of people had come from the North, including me, three white ministers had not been given that briefing because they had been staying at the seminary. There was a Catholic order of monks and nuns that were supporting the movement. They were staying there, so no one told them. They walked past the Silver Moon after dark, were attacked by Klansmen. One of them, Reverend Reeb, was brutally beaten and later died.
Williams:
James Reeb.
Hartford:
James Reeb, yes. I did not ever do that because Alice West told me not to do that.Now, I may not have been the very first white person they had sitting in their kitchen, but I think I was the first Jew. And they said, "You're a Jew. You don't believe in Jesus? What?" [Like it amazed them.]
[One day [I was having dinner in a Black home in rural Crenshaw County] and one of the younger children [starts] patting me on the head. And this five or six, year old kid starts patting me on my head. I didn't mind, but I asked, "Why are you doing that?" He said, "I wanted to feel your horns." Because he knew I was a Jew. Because the backwards preacher they went to [preached that], Jews were devils and had horns.
Williams:
Wow. Oh, my goodness.
Hartford:
But the main thing was we could have a conversation without an assumption of master-servant.
Williams:
Wow. So powerful. So can you tell me about voting? When you're going through a rural area, do they give you a stack of voting registration forms? How do you approach somebody? What's the process for them actually being — Do you give them a form? Do you tell them to go to City Hall? How does that all work?I want to ask about the voting process. If you are in a rural area and you're working for SCLC and you go up to a shotgun house and there's somebody there, how do you approach them about voting? Do you have a voter registration form? Do you tell them —
[The weathered wood, tin-roof, sharecropper shacks were sometimes referred to as "shotgun shacks" because they were just two or three rooms with connecting doors, no hallways, and if you shot a gun thorough the front door, the bullet would fly through all the rooms and out the backdoor.]
Hartford:
Well, that really varied. There is on our website, if you go to the... There's a pull down menu called Movement, and there's a [page describing voter registration in Alabama before the Voting Rights Act.] So I'm not going to regurgitate that because you can read it. It describes the literacy test and so forth and so on. I'll just talk about how we did it, what we did.And that would vary depending on where we were and what was going on. So in Mississippi, prior to my getting there, [the movement] had a dual system where they would try and get people to register to vote officially, and then a second system where they would ask people to sign up to be part of the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party], which Blacks could easily do if they weren't scared to do it — though most were.
[So] we would be walking these rural roads, and it was very, very dangerous to approach a house of a white person. For some of the houses, it was easy [to identify]. If it was a good-looking, solid brick house, nicely done and so forth, okay, white house, just walk quickly past it. But the poor whites lived in shacks that were indistinguishable from the shacks of the poor Blacks. And so that got a little riskier.
So as we approached [a shack], we would check to see, what color were the children playing in the yard? And if they were Black, okay, that seems pretty safe. Except that sometimes there would be a white child playing in the yard, yet the Black — We always tried pair ourself with a local Black person, usually a high school or a college student, — and [he or she] would say, "Oh, that's okay. That's a Black family." Because that white [looking] child was the product of 'midnight integration' where the mother either had voluntary or involuntary sexual relationship with some white man. And there was a lot more of that than you might suspect. So if it was a Black house, we'd go up and we'd knock.
If they peeked from the curtains and didn't answer the door, we knew [they were terrified of being seen talking to us] so we weren't going to get anywhere with that. And there were a lot of that because remember, there were snitches everywhere. And we were followed [by the cops]. Every motion we did was known and snitched on. So a lot of people were afraid to even talk to us. Some people came to the door and sometimes [in my case] they were afraid to not come to the door because [I was] white and [they] didn't want to offend these strange white people, even though I was with a Black person.
[If someone would talk to us] basically would say two things. We would invite them to come to the mass meeting, whichever the next mass meeting was. And we would say, [tell them about] the next voter registration day [and urge them to try to register] [In the rural counties registration days] only occurred twice a month. The voter registration office would only be open during working hours one or two days a month.
So we would say, come on down. If you need a ride, we will bring you down there to try and register to vote. If you need training on how to pass the literacy test, we would give you that training or whatever. And [sometimes] people would say, "Yes, yes, I would do that." And you knew they were just agreeing with you because you were white. And we didn't press that because they had very justifiable reasons for being afraid. And so we offered, but we did not pressure.
And sometimes somebody would say, "Oh, thank God you've come. I've been waiting for you all my life." And they would come to the meeting and they would come down and try and register. So it was a very mixed bag. It was exhausting, but that was what we did. I don't know what more to say about that.
[In the South before the Voting Rights Act, it took enormous courage for a Black citizen to dare attempt to register to vote. And most who did dare to defy Jim Crow were denied and blocked. So only a brave few were willing to risk life, limb, job, and home, by going to the courthouse on registration day — and then be denied. In Selma Alabama, according to the records, probably around 10% of the Black population attempted to register when it was hard and dangerous to do so. And all but a handful of them were turned away. Once the Voting Rights Act became law, however, that changed.]
Williams:
So do you remember when Johnson gave the speech where he says, "It is not only Negroes, but we shall..." And he used the term, "We shall overcome," were you watching TV when that happened?
Hartford:
Oh yeah, absofuckinglutely. I remember it to this day. I was in the West's living room and it was crowded and Bevel was sitting on the stairs and Diane was there and several others and the children were laying on the floor with their chin in their hands, staring at [the TV], and people cried.Now, a lot of SNCC people were very angry about it because they were really angry at Johnson. And [James] Foreman said that his use of that it was ruined for him, the song, "We Shall Overcome." I thought that was an overreaction.
We took [Johnson's words] to mean that in a fundamental way, we had won on voting rights, and that proved out to be correct. At the time that he made that speech, and Foreman said what he said, in exculpation [I should mention that the SNCC folk] were outside [in the cold], surrounded by police [in Montgomery], menaced by police, listening on a little transistor radio because they were about to be arrested or attacked. And in that context, [LBJ's speech] may not have meant as much to him as it did to those of us watching in the West family [living room]. You know, an interesting thing later, Rachel West, eight years old, told me later, or it was in her book or something, that when [the next day] she went to her [friend], Sheyanne Webb next door and were talking about it, Sheyanne's comment was, "Yes, he said that, but he's up there in Washington DC. We're down here in Selma, Alabama." Or something to that effect. I don't remember the exact words. But yes, it was a profoundly moving event.
Williams:
Wow. Wow. So let me ask you just two more questions here. One of them is, let's see, what is the one thing, if you could think of one thing that people just have wrong, you've watched a lot of TV specials and you've seen a lot of people speak about the Civil Rights Movement. What is the greatest mistake people make when we're calling the Civil Rights Movement?
Hartford:
Well, I think the greatest mistake in the way [the movement is] presented in media and television — with only a very few exceptions — is that it's presented as a top down movement rather than a bottom up movement. The Civil Rights Acts were not bestowed upon us by a gracious president and a [benevolent] Congress. They were forced through passage by the power of the people rising up from the below.Dr. King did not make the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement made Dr. King — and he said that. He acknowledged that.
The Civil Rights Movement occurred in every community in every state of the nation. The Civil Rights Movement was a people's movement up from below. 90% of all the Civil Rights protests never got a word of press coverage or a single inch in the paper. But those protests changed those local communities.
Julian Bond [of SNCC] referred to the way the Civil Rights Movement is portrayed as the 'Master Narrative,' top down, gracious leaders recognizing a problem and solving it. Whereas it was actually an up from below movement that forced social change.
Hartford:
The other thing that they get wrong — and I will just allude to that because I've written about it on the website — is that they portray nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement as only philosophical nonviolence. [Nonviolence] as a philosophy and a way of life. But overwhelmingly, those of us in the movement practiced tactical nonviolence where we used it as a tactic to build a political movement for social change, to force social change.We were not trying to win over the hearts of white segregationists. Occasionally that happened and we welcomed it, but we weren't trying to win over the hearts of Jim Clark or Bull Connor. We were trying to build a political movement to force change — but that's not the way it's taught. And that has consequences that for the movement today who think nonviolence was about love and winning over their hearts. It wasn't. It was about forcing change politically.
Williams:
Wow. So here's my last question. I want to ask you about the courage of the people who risked everything to gain Civil Rights or to make sure others got it. That's the one thread that I've never been able to completely uncover. What would make somebody risk having their house pulled apart, or you walking up to the wrong house in Mississippi, or just being in the wrong place and somebody's throwing a bomb at you? What would make you or anybody else, what would give you the push to do all of that or anybody?
Hartford:
Anger, rage, frustration, fed up-ness. As Mrs. Hamer said, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Courage was the absolute foundation on which the Civil Rights movement was built, and it was a courage of the people who had just had enough.Courage — and hope — were the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. The defeat of fascism in World War II, the GIs coming back with having seen the world, the beginning Civil Rights Movement activities of the '50s that ended segregation in the armed forces, that began to talk about school integration, began to stir hope in Black communities. And that the political repercussions growing out of a war to defend democracy against fascism created a hope in suppressed communities. So that hope combined with just simply not willing to put up with it anymore is what was the foundation on which the Civil Rights Movement was built.
And let's be very, very clear here. I did not do a fucking thing to organize any Black community. Most Civil Rights workers, Black, white, Latino, Asian, whatever, the most important thing we did was to exist and survive and show people that it could be done.
And [also] to provide a link from an isolated Black community — where whatever happened in that community would stay in that community and nobody would ever hear about it — a link to the outer world that gave them hope that if they did stand up, somebody else would hear about it and that they would get some support. The most important thing we did was that example and that link. And the actual organizing and setting up of committees. That was great. That was good. But I didn't do any of that until I organized that welfare group. The last six months I was active out of the two years in the South.
Oh, and here's another thing, and this is specific to white Civil Rights workers. Strategically, the strategy of the Dixiecrats and the segregationists and the conservatives and the right-wingers was to frame the issue as white versus Black, because whites outnumbered Black in America ten to one. And if you include Latinos and other non-whites, seven to two or something like that, whatever. So if the issue was white versus non-white, they could count on the support of whites and [they] would win.
The presence of white activists created a dynamic where the issue was framed as right versus wrong. Well, it didn't create [that dynamic], but it made it more difficult for [white supremacists] to frame it as white versus Black, and easier for movement leaders to frame it as right versus wrong. And that's how we gained white support in the north.
And that's why when those who opposed Black Power [tried] to frame it as Black versus white, [because] that eroded white support. And that's why Dr. King said he regretted the slogan, though not the concept. He didn't frame it quite that way, but that's what he meant, that framing allowed our enemies to frame [the issue] as Black versus white rather than right versus wrong. So he often talked about Green Power. He used that phrase, meaning that Blacks should have economic power.
[Green Power] didn't have that emotional resonance [but it] didn't allow our enemies to [claim the movement was about] "Kill honkies." What was [that] book title —
Williams:
There was a guy named Julius Lester had a book called, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!.
Hartford:
Yeah, I mean, he was satirizing what they were trying to do, what our opponents were trying to do. So anyway, I don't know if that answered your question.
Williams:
Oh, right. Sir, do you live here in the Bay Area?
Hartford:
Yeah, I live here in 'Frisco. I'm in the Mission [District].
Williams:
So for years, I worked in the San Francisco at Glide Memorial Church.
Hartford:
Oh, sure. I know Glide.
Williams:
In the Tenderloin, I was a case manager there. Then I became a minister before I left there.
Hartford:
Oh, where are you a minister now?
Williams:
Well, I'm a community minister now. So I don't have a set church, but I do community work out in East Oakland where I live. And so yeah, I help people who are unhoused, people trying to get out of bad situations.
Hartford:
That's great. I lived in Oakland for a while. I lived in one of those old apartments up behind the Grand Lake Theater up on the hill.
Williams:
Oh, that's a great area. I like that area. Well, the reason I asked you is that I'm going to have a program for King Day and then I have it every year at this church in Oakland and I'm going to send you an invitation. And then in February for Black History Month, I would love for you to come speak. You'd be the sole speaker at this event and we'd sell your book. Would you be interested in that?
Hartford:
Yeah. I'm not doing [much] traveling, but I can get over to Oakland. And I might be [able to] King Day, I'm very active in politics with Indivisible, but I would certainly be interested in speaking at an event.
Williams:
Okay. Well, I will keep in touch with you. And I'm going to send you this recording. I want to thank you so, so, so much. You have added so much insight and clarity to this work. I'm so appreciative.
Hartford:
Oh, well, thank you for saying that. Well, it's been great talking to you because I did most of the talking and I like to talk [laughs].
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