Worked with some Mississippi '64 veterans Nan Grogan and Bill Mony. We had a Freedom house in Kenbridge, Lunenburg County.
Only a handful of blacks were registered; if they tried, the registrar would stare them down by saying the should pay the few dollars they owed in back property taxes before paying the $5 poll tax. They had nearly nothing. When the Voting Rights Act was signed, poll taxes were abolished, we registered 500 folks that very day.
I would speak at the black church services and revival meetings, and the preacher would have already brought the house down with a sermon that started slow and would work up to a roaring back and forth with the congregation — "Tell the story!" Then, I would follow with my story of the Coming of the Freedom.
I had to be so dramatic that the style I developed damn near ruined me as a trial lawyer 10 years later. Took me 17 years to win a case worth telling my parents about. Since then, the passion and intensity of the experience and the sense of drama that it engendered have been of inestimable value to me in my life as a political activist and courtroom lawyer.
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