GEORGE L. GREENE AND MATTIE BIVINS
October 29, 2018
Today we celebrate the lives of two former SNCC Field Secretaries who passed away this week: George L. Greene and Mattie Bivins
Dorie Ladner, SNCC veteran, shares her memories.
I am heartbroken over the recent passing of my friends Mattie and George. We knew when we joined the movement that life would not be a bed of roses and that death awaited us all. But maintaining this philosophy makes dealing with the pain of loss no less difficult. The following are but a few of the fond memories I have of Mattie and George.
Like so many movement people native to the state of Mississippi, Mattie and I were related. We were actually cousins and both our families hailed from Wayne County Mississippi, a particularly tough part of the state as far as race relations goes. So that basically meant you had to be tough to survive if you were a Black person. My mother was related to Mattie’s father through the now famous Woullard family. At least they’re famous in that part of Mississippi. During the movement, we talked all the time about being related and having come from a family as large as ours. During those days, I’d spend as much time with Mattie as I could. At the time she was married to Dave Dennis and we often found ourselves at their house because they always had room for movement people. Her connection to Dave reminds me of a great story. It goes something like this:
Mattie, Colia Liddell, and I were the first females working for SNCC to be exposed to Mississippi’s Sundown laws. It must have been some time in 1961 or '62 because we were leaving the founding meeting of COFO in Clarksdale. Apparently, it was against the law to be caught outside in certain towns after sundown. Having left Clarksdale, we were trying to get further south in the Delta to go to Amzie Moore’s house, where we hoped to spend the night. Well wouldn’t you know it. The police stopped us on the road and questioned us at length about who we were, where we were going, and who we worked for. They took Dave, who was driving, out of the car and put him in the police car. And I don’t know exactly how long it was, but it seemed like an hour. If you can imagine a very dark road, with no street lights, and a big scary looking white man with a gun in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, you’d probably think time stopped too. Well at some point, Dave came back to the car and told us they were asking him all kinds of questions and apparently he wasn’t giving them good enough answers because they were going to take him to jail, which they promptly did. But before they could whisk him away, Dave told us to follow them to jail.
Now you have to remember we’re teenagers, and even though we’re activists, we’re Black and it’s the middle of the Mississippi Delta, a place most of us had only heard about—whether it was from the newspapers or through stories people told. So, we have to figure out how to deal with this fear and at the same time, we need to come up with a plan to get Dave back because we were sure they were going to kill him if they got the chance. Well through lots of deliberation and eventually the process of elimination, me and Mattie came up with the idea that when we got to the jail, we were going to proudly walk in, present ourselves to the head deputy, and tell him that we were attorneys. And that’s what we proceeded to do.
We parked the car, gave them some time to get Dave inside, and eventually Mattie and I found the nerve to go inside the jail. We thought the fact that were well dressed from having attended the COFO founding meeting would show them that we were serious customers and would work in our favor. Well, we sauntered in, heads held high, and demanded to speak to the man in charge, who as luck would have it, turned out to be the man we were actually speaking to. We proceeded to tell him that we were attorneys and that we were David Dennis’s lawyer and that they needed to tell us why he was being charged or let him go immediately. I personally thought we’d done quite well. The man we were speaking to looked at us for what felt like a long time, then seemingly out of the blue, he yelled, “You better get the F@$*K out of here before you need both a lawyer and a coroner!” He said it with such meaning that we didn’t wait to see if there would be more. We high tailed it out of the jail, jumped in the car and left poor Dave to his own devices. Of course, we were quite sad about having to leave a fellow movement worker behind but we were also genuinely afraid and decided to obey nature’s first law of self-preservation.
Well the problem is that we had no idea where to run to. When we left the jail, it never occurred to us to see if they would allow us to ask Dave for the directions to Amzie Moore’s house, which was our destination. So, we decided to figure it out on our own. What that meant is that we spent the rest of the evening and all the wee hours of the morning aimlessly circumnavigating the Delta because we had no idea where we were or how to get to where we were going. We did get lucky around daybreak though. We saw a sign that said Ruleville, MS and we knew then we were close. We were also afraid because we’d heard that one of the men who killed Emmett till lived in Ruleville. We cautiously made our way around town and eventually asked some field hands who were on their way to work that morning if they knew Amzie Moore. Of course, they did and they directed us to his house.
You never saw a happier group of movement soldiers when we pulled into Amzie Moore’s driveway. When we got there, James Bevel and Diane Nash and their newborn baby were all there and of course we told them what had happened and Amzie immediately started making plans to get Dave out of jail, which he managed to do later that afternoon. But I never shall forget that long scary night I spent with my cousin and friend Mattie. Of course, what most people don’t know is that Dave had taken a liking to her, and her to him, and not long after that they got married. I can remember when they were blessed with their precious baby Erika. Mattie exhibited a happiness that I had never seen before. They truly loved their beautiful baby girl. That was a lot of years ago because today Erika is a wife and mother of two sons. There were great moments of laughter in Mattie’s Hattiesburg home. Through the years we did a lot of eating, talking, and reminiscing. I will always love and miss my Cousin Mattie.
GEORGE GREENE
My good friend George Greene is also someone I will never forget. He was just about one of the bravest people I knew. Of course, he came from a big family up in Greenwood where his father had been an activist. In fact, activists were always welcome in the Greene home. WE stayed there more than once but I particularly remember the time me, Stokely and H. Rap Brown stayed there. Mr. Greene was kind of an independent business man so he didn’t have to worry about being fired from his job. I think he painted houses and did other kinds of handy work. Both Black and White people liked and respected him. And they respected him because they knew he was not one of those kinds of Black people who was afraid to fight back. Well George was the same way.
I remember we were told explicitly and in no uncertain terms by members of the Justice Department that we were absolutely not to go into Natchez, Mississippi trying to organize a voter registration campaign. They thought it was just plain ole too dangerous. There had been people there doing work, attempting to organize, and in response the Klan let loose with a lot of bombings. Justice Department officials, who we thought supported our work, were under the impression that we would be killed if we went there and all but ordered us to stay out of Adams County. Well, of course we were SNCC workers, and there was work to be done so we couldn’t let something as simple as the threat of a theoretical death stop us from doing our work. So, me, Chuck McDew, and George decided it might be off limits to the feds, but it wasn’t off limits to us. Despite their pleading with us to find another town to organize in, it was especially George who was not deterred.
Just as in every instance when we went to new towns there was reconnaissance work to do. It was George who went into Natchez to open up the community for us. Not only was he brave, George was one of those people who made friends easily. He also happened to be an excellent organizer. He was the kind of person that would spend as much as time as it took to explain things to you. He was very patient. So, if he had to spend several hours getting his point across, he would do it. If it took him several weeks, he would do that too. He was just very patient and he loved people, so he was always very understanding of whatever shortcomings a person might have and he would answer any question you asked him about the movement or politics or organizing. In that way he got a lot of people to join us and help with the voter registration project. Doing this work of course put us on the Klan’s list of people to be eliminated. To this day, I believe George must have given somebody the impression that we were staying in the house next door to the one that we were actually living in because the Klan came and bombed that house. Well, they bombed the wrong house because we were actually next door. So that’s something I will always be thankful for. There’s nothing wrong with a little misdirection every now and then.
Like a lot of SNCC members, I’m familiar with the stories of George’s mind boggling driving skills. He made a habit out of leaving Mississippi cops and Klansman in the dust. There’s one story that stands out the most to me and that was the time in the Delta, I forget the year but it might have been 1964, when some sheriff’s deputies finally caught up with him and put him in a trap. Well they thought they trapped him, but George just threw the car in reverse and high tailed it out of there. From what I’m told, he drove 80 or 90 miles per hour in reverse until he could whip that car around and leave them for good. They never did catch him. Not that night or any other night. He has earned the crown of one of SNCC’s best drivers! I already miss my friend.
May 23, 2018
Historic Glen Echo civil rights recalled
BY HANNAH MONICKEN . The Washington Jewish Week
FROM LEFT, ROY WILKINS, PHILIP RANDOLPH, HYMAN BOOKBINDER, LAWRENCE HENRY AND GWENDOLYN GREEN HOLD PROTEST SIGNS OUTSIDE GLEN ECHO AMUSEMENT PARK IN 1960. (PHOTO COURTESY OF JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF GREATER WASHINGTON)
Before the Freedom Rides, before the March on Washington and “I Have a Dream,” before the Civil Rights Act, before any of that, there was Glen Echo Amusement Park.
In 1960, Glen Echo park was a popular summer destination in Montgomery County, known for its carousel. It was owned by the Jewish Baker brothers. It was also for whites only.
But that summer, students from Howard University, a historically black college, and residents of the nearby Bannockburn neighborhood in Bethesda — many of whom were Jewish — banded together to demonstrate for the integration of the park.
This early civil rights protest was recalled at the National Archives on May 17 at an event co-sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington.
“Washington, D.C., the capital of America, the country that stands for justice, equality and, here it is, right outside of this capital you’ve got this great hypocrisy,” said one of those demonstrators, Hank Thomas, in an unfinished documentary about the protests, “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round.”
Filmmaker Ilana Trachman, who showed a six-minute clip from her documentary — named for a line in a Langston Hughes poem — moderated a discussion with four members of the 1960 demonstrations. The four — there were more in the audience of about 200 — called their participation in the protest life-changing. One of them, Dion Diamond, came from segregated Fredericksburg to attend Howard University. He was an 18-year-old freshman when he joined the protests.
“I started school as a physics major,” he said. “But after Glen Echo and the Freedom Ride I wanted to find out why it took 100 years from the Emancipation Proclamation to these protests. I changed my major to history and sociology.”
The protest began on June 30, when 12 Howard students, calling themselves the Nonviolent Action Group, rode the carousel they were banned from using. Five, all black, were arrested.
Neighborhood resident Joanne Delaplaine was 7 when she joined her mother, Esther Delaplaine, on the picket line. It became a formative memory and inspired a life of activism.
“I like to say at age 7 I had my first taste of a political win,” Joanne Delaplaine told the National Archives audience. “And I wanted more.”
JOANNE DELAPLAINE, LEFT, WAS JUST 7 WHEN SHE JOINED HER MOTHER, ESTHER, ON THE PICKET LINE. THEY WERE PART OF THE CONTINGENT OF PROTESTORS FROM THE LARGELY-JEWISH BANNOCKBURN NEIGHBORHOOD. (PHOTOS BY HANNAH MONICKEN)
Esther Delaplaine, now 94, “was one of many Bannockburn mothers who brought children in strollers to stand in picket lines holding homemade signs in the air in the summer heat,” The Gazette wrote in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the protests. “She made sure the picket line was always staffed with picketers from 2 to 10 p.m. daily and opened her house to protesters for food and water breaks.”
Panelist Helene Berleant Ageloff, who is Jewish, was 25 during the Glen Echo protests. She said part of the reason she joined the picket line was the memory of the Holocaust and what some of her family members in Europe had gone through.
She also told a story about the time she was shopping in a store in Dupont Circle, and when she went to pay she walked to the end of the line, where several African Americans were standing. As she did, they moved out of the way to let her pay first.
That moment stuck with her.
“Why should I get to be at the front of the line ahead of all those people?” she said. “I always remembered it.”
After Glen Echo, she went on to join the Freedom Ride to New Orleans to protest segregation in public waiting areas and restaurants.
Tension between black and white protesters
Glen Echo was not only an early civil rights protest, it was one of the first that those on the panel could remember in which blacks and whites joined together, a fact they also credited with its success. Some of the residents of Bannockburn had tried unsuccessfully to integrate Glen Echo before 1960, Esther Delaplaine said, by petitioning the Montgomery County Council and boycotting the park. She credited the Howard students for taking the lead and tipping the scales.
Bannockburn was known at the time as a liberal Jewish neighborhood, in part because discriminatory housing covenants prohibited Jews from living in other areas.
Esther Delaplaine, who is Quaker, said her family moved to the neighborhood precisely because of its reputation as liberal and Jewish.
“We had been warned,” she said, referring to what was considered the undesirability of the Jewish residents. “Did we know the neighborhood was Jewish? Yes, we sure did.”
In Trachman’s film, Thomas said it was at the Glen Echo protests that he met Jews for the first time, and the same was true for many of the other black protestors. He said that everyone should remember that Jews were African Americans’ closest allies in the civil rights movement. And he exhorted the audience to oppose anti-Semitism whenever they see it.
There was tension, however, between the two groups, even as they fought for the same cause. The white residents had largely been organized by the labor unions, while the Howard students organized themselves.
Leaders of each contingent felt like the other was telling them what to do. According to Esther Delaplaine, a graduate student was appointed to act as intermediary.
The Nazis arrive
HELENE AGELOFF AND DION DIAMOND SAID THE GLEN ECHO PROTESTS INSPIRED EVEN MORE ACTIVISM IN THEM, INCLUDING JOINING THE FREEDOM RIDES.
Soon after the demonstrations began, George Lincoln Rockwell, an American Nazi Party leader, arrived with a group at Glen Echo. The Nazis heckled the desegregation protestors and attacked them with rocks.
The appearance of the Nazis both galvanized and terrified the local Jewish residents, the panelists said. The Delaplaines remembered several Jewish families, some of whom had survived the Holocaust, stayed at home.
John Kenyon, who grew up in Chevy Chase and attended the National Archives event, remembers the Nazis showing up.
“When the Nazis showed up at Glen Echo, it was just incomprehensible,” he said. “There was a lot of anger and just [being] dumbstruck.”
He and his friends, all around 15, joined the picket line, at first for the teenage thrill of making trouble. And all those Howard students “were just so cool,” he said.
The protests kindled his passion for activism.
After Glen Echo, Kenyon “could no longer sit back and go home and pretend that everything wasn’t screwed up,” he said.
Many times, speakers drew connections between the Glen Echo protests and more recent events that reflect America’s struggle with race.
One audience member asked why religion could lead some people to choose to do what he called “the right thing” while others chose to do “the wrong thing,” such as evangelical Christians voting for Trump. The panel took a pass on that question.
Ann Hoffman, who lives in Washington, said when Thomas spoke about Jews as allies in the civil rights movement, she thought of D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8), who is African American and used an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to explain a light snowfall.
“There’s no way to remember that if you never knew it,” she said, referring to alliances such as the one that formed at Glen Echo.
As the summer of 1960 ended, protesters vowed to return when the park opened the next spring. But the issue had already entered the political arena. In February 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, spurred by a Jewish administration official who lived in Bannockburn, threatened Glen Echo’s owners with revoking the lease to the trolley line that brought people to the park.
The next month, the owners announced that Glen Echo would desegregate.
Hoffman said she was happy to see the story getting a wider audience.
“I just think it’s such an important story,” she said.
hmonicken@midatlanticmedia.com
May 17, 2018
This issue of the Duke Magazine e-newsletter includes a link to an audio postcard from the SDG closing events—Chuck Neblett leading us in song. The direct link is https://soundcloud.com/user-290303657/sncc-digital-gateway. I enjoyed re-living the moment!
May 17, 2018
Drum And Spear: How A Local Bookstore Educated Washington About Black Power In The ’60s And ’70s
April 3, 2018
SNCC Digital Gateway is a valuable resource for young activists
Buy PhotosProject members from SNCC Legacy Project, Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke University Libraries. Standing, L-R: Jennifer Lawson, Geri Augusto, Courtland Cox, Charles Cobb, Molly Braff, Emilye Crosby, Naomi Nelson, Judy Richardson, William Chafe, Hassan Jeffries. Front Row: Will Sexton, John Gartrell, Wesley Hogen, Karlyn Foner. The project, which created an online archive and activism platform, is a product of a five-year partnership between SNCC, the documentary center and the libraries. Photo courtesy of Wesley Hogan.
As a young activist, Jennifer Lawson left Tuskegee University in the 1960s to work full time for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
As a field secretary in Lowndes County, Alabama, Lawson encouraged residents to register to vote and explained how the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the independent political party SNCC built with local residents, could help black people win political power.
When the LCFO chose the black panther as its symbol — a response to the white Democratic Party in the county that had chosen a white rooster as its symbol — Lawson was the one to paint it on billboards.
"The local people said they wanted a black cat to run that white rooster out of the county," Lawson said laughing.
Today, Lawson is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project and contributor to the SNCC Digital Gateway.
The project, which created an online archive and activism platform, is a product of a five-year partnership between SNCC, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and Duke University Libraries.
Two generations of activists came together for a two-day symposium at Duke University last weekend to reflect on and celebrate the completion of the SNCC Digital Gateway.
SNCC, an organization started by participants of the sit-in movement that began in Greensboro in February 1960, formed after a meeting held by activist Ella Baker at Shaw University the same year. SNCC gave young Black Americans a stronger voice in the civil rights movement.
"These are people who changed the world in a very short period of time if you think about the space of one college semester,” said Wesley Hogan, the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
The SNCC Legacy Project, formed in 2010 on SNCC’s 50th reunion, is an effort to preserve SNCC’s history with the greatest degree of accuracy possible, Lawson said. The organization creates oral histories and collected documentation of SNCC’s work throughout the movement. Five years ago, the Legacy Project caught Duke's attention.
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and Duke University libraries officially teamed up with the SNCC Legacy Project in 2013 to create the SNCC Digital Gateway, a free website geared toward telling the stories of SNCC members to future generations and making the history accessible for all people.
The website is both an archive of SNCC's history as well as a source of tools for activists today. It contains resources like an FAQ section where SNCC veterans answer common questions about organizing, an interactive map of SNCC’s reach across the South and a directory of SNCC veterans.
Wesley said the project offers a wealth of information for today’s activists.
"I think part of what young people face — regardless of whether they're active in 2018 or 20 years ago or 20 years from now — is they feel like they have to reinvent the wheel and learn all of this all over again,” she said. “We're trying to really make a space where they could not have to that, where they wouldn't be starting from scratch.”
Wesley said she hoped the website would be more interactive and inclusive than some traditional ways historians have tried to convey the history of the civil rights movement.
“Oftentimes academics can be pretty extractive in how they take oral histories out of communities and aren't reciprocal in giving back,” she said. “So we wanted to work in a different kind of way with activists as co-creators of the history, not just subjects of oral histories."
Lawson described the project as an unusual, successful collaboration.
“It's been a partnership of equals, where we have managed to get beyond the more conventional treatment of activists by university people and scholars, which is generally that the university knows best,” she said.
Lawson said most people who have been activists in their youth often continue it in some form, and it is inspiring and moving to them to mentor young people. She said they are learning from the students, who have new tools and technology to connect globally.
“It has been wonderful to see that what we did in the 1960s and 70s has a relevance to young activists today,” she said.
Why We Can Be Hopeful
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) veteran and chairperson of the SNCC Legacy Project Courtland Cox shared with Teaching for Change why we can be hopeful in these political times.
Cox said, “A divided America is a good thing.” Listen to this seven minute video clip to hear why.
https://youtu.be/UxaM1AbX3k0
Civil Rights Activist, Poet, Bookseller: An Interview with Charlie Cobb
From Black Perspectives By Joshua Clark Davis
Stokely Carmichael, Charlie Cobb, George Greene at protest in Atlanta, December 1963. Photo: SUNY Geneseo.
This is an edited excerpt of an interview I conducted with Charlie Cobb in October 2015. Perhaps best known as a key organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Cobb also co-founded the Drum and Spear Bookstore in Washington, D.C. in 1968. Since the 1970s, Cobb has enjoyed a lengthy career as a journalist and the author of several books, including This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.
Joshua Davis: I wanted to start by asking you about the poetry and writing you were already doing at the time you were involved in the SNCC.
Charlie Cobb: Yeah. Well, see, in SNCC, like almost all of us were field secretaries, firstly. We were all writing field reports every month. That’s Jim Forman’s influence. He was a trained historian, so he was always on us to write field reports. So, there was a whole body of written reports: mine, not just mine, but a number of people that were in SNCC and in the field in southwest Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. So, there’s that.
Then there’s a whole strain of poetry in SNCC: Jane Stembridge, Worth Long, myself, others. Now, my first poetry was published by Maria Varela and she was living in Tougaloo then. And she had first published a book by Jane Stembridge, I Play Flute, which gave the name Flute Publications. Then she asked if she could publish a collection of my poetry, which she published as Furrows. This is in 1966, ’65, something like that. The printer was Henry J. Kirksey, who would later become a state senator in Mississippi—maybe the first black state senator, I don’t remember now—but then he had a small print shop.
Davis: Did you have a key role in organizing or developing the Freedom Schools?
Cobb: Yeah, I proposed the idea and wrote the first proposal to the SNCC, which essentially said, “This is what we should do in the summer of 1964. This is why we should do it.” That proposal emerged because we were faced with the question, “Okay, if you’re going to have a thousand or so students, what are you going to do with them? Because they don’t have any experience organizing.” And the logical thing to do with them, it seemed to me, since they were coming off college campuses, was to use them to fill some of these huge gaps that existed in young people in Mississippi—both gaps in the sense of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and gaps of consciousness, because obviously Mississippi public schools were not giving a great deal of emphasis to black history or black struggle. So, as for the Freedom Schools—we had always been concerned about education. What the summer volunteers enabled us to do was actually approach, in a meaningful way, some of the education issues that we had long been aware of.
Davis: “Gaps of consciousness,” that’s a great phrase. So in 1967 you went on a trip to Paris and you visited the pan-Africanist journal and bookstore Présence Africaine?
Cobb: Yeah. I went, although the trip wasn’t to Paris. It was to Vietnam. Bertrand Russell financed that trip to bring us to the International War Crimes Tribunal he organized. He was a philosopher and he had a philosophical question: “What would people who were doing what we were doing in the deep South—organizing—find similar and what would they find dissimilar between themselves and a group like the Viet Cong?” The initial idea was to travel with the Viet Cong and see what they did. Julius Lester and I agreed to go on that trip, but the war kept us from going across the border from Cambodia into South Vietnam. So, the Viet Cong people said it was just too dangerous and they didn’t want to be responsible for anything happening.
At the end of that trip, which took all summer—we went to Guinea and, I forget, Ivory Coast, and Liberia, fourth class on a boat. When I came back to the States—and remember now the movement in the States in the wake of Black Power’s shout out by Stokely Carmichael was very much involved with issues of black consciousness, black thought, and I was no less affected than anybody else. In that framework, the Présence Africaine visit pushed to the forefront of my mind. I said, “Well, we could do something,” and that seemed doable.So, Plan B was to go to North Vietnam, and we spent maybe two or three weeks in North Vietnam. This was ’67. And then, coming back to the States, I went to Paris and I visited. I was aware of Présence Africaine, the magazine. My mother was chair of Romance Languages at Howard University. I was aware of Présence Africaine for both linguistic reasons and political reasons, since it was a Pan-African journal not only around art and literature but around technology, politics, and all of that. So, it was an obvious place to visit if you were young and black in 1967. Then Courtland Cox and I decided, because Courtland was the SNCC representative at Bertrand Russell’s war crimes tribunal in Stockholm, that before going to the States we would visit Africa. We wound up drifting down the whole west coast of Africa.
Doing something like the Présence Africaine, what I had seen in Paris, with artists coming in and out, political people coming in and out, and books to inform the struggle, seemed doable in a city like Washington, DC, my hometown.
So, that’s where the Drum & Spear idea begins to emerge as a body of work. I’m on the tail end of my involvement with the SNCC at this point, although I’m having this discussion with SNCC people. All the people I’m talking to about this—Judy Richardson, Courtland Cox, and others—have either been directly involved in the SNCC or represent kind of the second—generation is not the right word, but they’re engaged in student activism, like Tony Gittens, for instance. Tony represents a second generation of campus activists. There were a number of them that we were interacting with on other college campuses as well, like Howard Fuller (Owusu Sadaukai) down here in Durham, people up at Cornell, and others.
Davis: Had you ever been to a black-owned bookstore in the United States before?
Cobb: Oh, yeah!
Davis: Had you been to Michaux’s?
Cobb: Michaux’s, yeah, in New York.
Davis: Did you think about whether Drum & Spear would be like Michaux’s?
Cobb: Well, in the sense that it would be a crossroads for, if you will, a range of people engaged in black struggle to meet and that it would be a source of information, yeah, in that sense, it would be like Michaux’s. It would be very different in the sense that we weren’t as nationalistic as Michaux’s Bookstore. We weren’t similar in Washington, I believe, to the scene in, say, New York on 125th Street, with stepladder speakers at Michaux’s and the Nation of Islam. No, we didn’t have that sense.
But we did share with Michaux’s and others the sense that it was important to get information in various forms, in various written forms—pre-social media, pre-computers—out to bookstores. It was a natural and logical vehicle to do that.
We wanted a shop that warmly welcomed authors and we emphasized authors as distinct from, say, political figures. We wanted a shop that a range of authors could feel comfortable reading in, and we wanted a range of books. It was interesting because there were people who took exception to some of the books we carried. I remember there were some Black Panthers who felt we should have Mao’s “Little Red Book” in the front, but it was on the side. We said, “You know, it’s our bookstore. We’ll put the damn books wherever we want.” There were people who objected, for instance, to us carrying somebody like Iceberg Slim’s Pimp.
There were mixed feelings about Chester Himes and his Gravedigger Jones/Coffin Eddie books too. So, we felt we had everybody. What’s the point of having a black bookstore if you’re going to now start to decide who’s too black or not black enough to be in the shop? So, we had everybody, and it was supposed to be just that kind of place.
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Challenging Ourselves: Martin Luther King, the Movement, and Its Lessons for Today
This is a talk delivered by SNCC veteran Charles E. Cobb Jr. on Sunday, January 15, 2017 at the People’s Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. on the occassion of the Dr. Martin Luther King holiday.
By Charles E. Cobb
My thanks to Rev. Hopson, the congregation of Peoples church, and especially the church’s Board of Christian Social Action for inviting me here. I grew up in the Congregational church. My father Rev. Charles E. Cobb pastored St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield Massachusetts, and later co-founded the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice and became its first executive director. So I feel like I have come back home and welcome the opportunity to speak to you. Thank you.
Julian Bond in Mississippi, 1963. Photo by Harvey Richards.
My friend and former co-worker in the movement Julian Bond, who is greatly missed, used to say that the primary misconception in the public’s perception of the southern civil rights movement can be boiled down to three short sentences. “Rosa sat down. Martin stood up. And then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.”
In the minds of many, the movement is thought of as mass protest in public spaces led by charismatic leaders. That is only partly true, however. The organizing tradition—a very old tradition, with roots in slave rebellions—better describes the movement. And, I want to push this forward as what is most relevant for continuing struggle in the 21st century as well as properly understanding movement history. And that does not mean that mass protest—those of yesteryear and those now, contradicts this tradition.
My approach to discussing the movement this morning is from the bottom up, or put another way, from the inside out since I was very much involved with the movement as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. We were an organization of grassroots organizers.
First, as much as the movement challenged segregation, racial discrimination and white supremacy, fundamental to real understanding of the movement are the challenges black people made to one another within the black community. This underappreciated dimension of the movement is as important today as it was more than half a century ago. Maybe even more important now, given the kind of violence we are witnessing in Chicago and other cities.
Martin Luther King was born today in 1929; we are celebrating his work. So before going further, let me tell you a story about Reverend King that is relevant to the point I have just made.
Few people give enough thought to the fact that before he achieved national and international renown as a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King was a young local minister in Montgomery, Alabama. How he emerged is important to understanding the emergence of the bus boycott there, which was driven by local people at the grassroots.
After Rosa Parks’s arrest, black Montgomery organized a highly successful one-day bus boycott. I am tempted here to discuss Mrs. Parks at length. She was much more than a weary dressmaker seeking a place to sit on the bus. As she put it, her life was “a history of being rebellious.”
E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks in Montgomery on March 19, 1956. AP/Gene Herrick
At the end of the day, Montgomery’s black leadership—many of them ministers—met in Martin Luther King’s church to discuss continuing the boycott until the city committed to desegregation of bus seating. Most who spoke, expressed various degrees of reluctance and fear about doing this. Finally, the preeminent black leader of Montgomery—E.D. Nixon, one of A. Phillip Randolph’s union men and the former head of Alabama’s NAACP—rose and spoke. As the story came to me from Johnnie Carr, 95-years old when she was telling it, and part of a core group of women who had been working with Rosa Parks since the 1940s, Nixon basically accused the gathering of cowardice: “You preachers been eating these women’s fried chicken long enough without doing anything for them.” It was women, after all, riding buses across town into the white community to jobs as housekeepers and cooks and nursemaids who suffered regular humiliation traveling on public transportation. “Now,” Mr. Nixon continued, “it’s time to get up off your butts and do something for them!” It was then that a 26-year-old Martin Luther King stood up. Do we even think of Martin Luther King as a 26-year-old? “I am not a coward!” He said. The embarrassed gathering agreed to continue the boycott and Rev. King was elected head of the organization they formed at that meeting to continue the boycott—The Montgomery Improvement Association.
The way to understand this moment, I hope you see, is by understanding the kind of challenges black people were making to one another across the south. This is what drove struggle and change. Much of this still remains invisible. And broadening this with an almost equally invisible related point: The Movement thrust forward leaders, not the other way around.
However, as important as he was, I am not here this morning to discuss Martin Luther King. I intend to concentrate instead on Mississippi and its lessons, particularly as they apply to these times. That is the state where I worked as a SNCC field secretary from 1962 until 1967, and the state I know the best.
The vicious racial oppression that once so completely defined this state establishes a special kind of clarity for us this morning. To illustrate this, in a moment I will read to you a description of an encounter reported by another friend, and comrade, and hero from the days of Mississippi’s mid-20th century freedom struggle. Sam Block is his name. He, like almost everyone who formed the backbone of the southern Movement, is invisible and he died far too young from both the physical and psychological traumas of that struggle.
Rally for the Freedom Vote, Hinds County, 1963. Front row from left: NAACP leader Aaron Henry, SNCC organizers Sam Block and Willie Peacock, unidentified. Back row, Rev. Ed King with bandage on face. From crmvet.org
The words will come from a 1962 field report Sam wrote describing the early days of his efforts to organize around voter registration in the Mississippi Delta. Sam was the first of us—meaning the first of us who were young—18, 19, 20, 21 22 and 23-years-old—to organize for voting rights in the Mississippi Delta—cotton plantation country. The Delta was a vicious place where most black life had been reduced to plantation serfdom following the dismemberment of Reconstruction. The Delta was where the White Citizens Council was born. Sam began working in a town where the White Citizens Council was particularly powerful—Greenwood—county seat of Leflore County. Greenwood and the rest of the county, like most other Delta towns and counties, was two thirds black. When Sam arrived, there were more than 13,000 voting-age blacks in Leflore County, but only about 200 had succeeded in being registered. Listen to Sam’s report. The N-word, as we now say in polite company, is used in it; but it is necessary, I think. However, I apologize in advance for any discomfort its use causes. Here’s Sam:
We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, “Nigger where you from?” I told him, “Well I’m a native Mississippian.” He said, “Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? I don’t know where you from.” I said, “Well, around some counties.” He said, “Well I know that, I know you ain’t from here ‘cause I know every nigger and his mammy.” I said, “You know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?” He got angry. He spat in my face and he walked away. So he came back and turned around and told me, “I don’t want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do is pack your clothes and get out and don’t never come back no more.” I said, “Well, sheriff, if you don’t want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, ‘cause I’m here to stay; I came here to do a job and this is my intention. I’m going to do this job…”
Now I think this exchange, which took place on the steps of the Leflore County courthouse, explains everything you need to know about the movement. Sam’s words were a promise and a prediction. Along with Sam, those of us in SNCC and CORE especially, dug in and stayed to do the job; were committed to doing the job, and drawing from deep wells of strength in black communities, broke the back of apartheid in Mississippi. But the outcome did not just affect Mississippi; it changed America. The job we did resulted in changing forever the rules of the national Democratic Party and that is what laid the groundwork for the Obama presidency. This is not boast, but history. Basically: In fighting for the right to vote—and winning—the door was opened to the possibility of winning any elected office, even the highest in the land. As the black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass pointed out more than 150 years ago and it’s as relevant now as then, “If there is no struggle there is no progress.” I stand here in praise of our struggle, and to testify that the violence underlying the Greenwood Sherriff’s words reveal the blood-soaked ground in Mississippi and across the American south that has been the price of progress. I stand here to insist that this must never be forgotten, and that there is a debt, a duty—an obligation we have—all of us—to repay this history with continuing struggle.
Approaching this history, there are, of course, some legitimate questions you may want answered in trying to grasp why I think Sam’s courthouse encounter with the sheriff was so significant. Who was Sam Block? He was only 22 when this happened; that’s kind of young, isn’t it? How did he get to Greenwood? What made him stay in defiance of the sheriff’s threat? The larger question is: Is there something we can use here today?
So, let’s look more closely at Sam. Youth comes immediately to mind in this consideration. As I said, he was just 22-years-old at the time of his confrontation with the sheriff. Largely missing from the narrative about the civil rights movement is that in many instances it was led by young people like Sam. To quote Martin Luther King speaking in support of sit-ins at a February 16, 1960 civil rights rally in Durham, North Carolina: “What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.”
I was a 12th grade high school student when on February 1, 1960 the sit-in movement erupted in Greensboro, North Carolina. Black students there began refusing to leave whites only lunch counters and restaurants. Within two months such protests had spread to 80 southern cities. The student protests in Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, and other southern cities that year, reached us via television and newspapers—especially black newspapers. And for me and most of my friends, before seeing these sit-ins, civil rights had been something grown-ups did. Now, looking at young people like Diane Nash or John Lewis or Julian Bond—students, my generation—what was coming through to us was that civil rights struggle was something we could do.
We see something similar in the way that protests over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford Florida have led to an ever-expanding Movement for Black Lives that is led by young people. A whole new set of young leaders has begun to emerge and lay claim to the future they want to live in; launched a fight for their future. As a SNCC veteran, I see a lot of my younger self in this, and applaud it.
Amzie Moore, Mississippi, 1963. Photo by Harvey Richards.
Sam was also one of Amzie Moore’s people. That’s who sent him, via SNCC to Greenwood. SNCC, which grew out of the sit-in movement had by 1962 evolved into an organization of organizers, working closely and at the grassroots with older veterans of civil rights struggle—many of them local NAACP leaders like Amzie. You won’t know his name any more than you knew Sam’s, but you need to know some things about Amzie because understanding what he represents is another essential component of any real discussion about the movement.
Amzie Moore was the president of the Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP where Sam had been born and grew up, and had decided that he wanted to tap into and use the young energy he saw in the sit-in students. He admired what the students were doing, but was not interested in organizing sit-ins in his town; he wanted a voter registration campaign. He put that idea on our political plate, challenging our idea that “direct action” only meant sit-ins and picket lines of protest. Amize wanted to see the emergence of black power in the Delta. The black people were there; the registered black voters were not.
As we began working in the Delta, Amzie Moore’s home was our central headquarters. His house was an orientation center, a place for breakfast of scrambled eggs or for a spaghetti dinner; it provided telephone connections and was always full of conversation as well as Amzie’s sometimes grim, sometimes funny stories of Delta life and earlier civil rights struggle. Floodlights washed his backyard because he was certain that one night Ku Klux Klansmen, or white terrorists of some sort, would attack his home. Often Amzie, who had fought the Nazis overseas after all, sat in the bay window of his living room with rifles and pistols, waiting to repel an attack he was certain would come (which may be why it never came).
Our relationship with Amzie puts into perspective yet another important dimension of the movement: The convergence of young people—like Sam…or myself—with older people like Amzie—he was 49- years-old when we met him. I had just turned nineteen in 1962. They were willing to share their experiences and open up to us, networks that they had built over many years, even decades, of struggle.
Ella Baker (center) at the Highlander Center.
Ella Baker introduced us to Amzie. She was 59-years-old. You cannot talk of 20th century civil rights struggle without discussing this remarkable woman. And let me also say as an aside here, although it should really be central to any discussion, that you cannot talk about 20th century civil rights struggle without discussing the leadership of women. Ms. Baker was the NAACP’s Director of Southern Branches in the 1940s, was the person who organized Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) after the 1955-56 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. She immediately recognized the significance and potential of the emerging student sit-in movement in 1960 and negotiated 800 dollars from Rev. King to bring student protest leaders together at her alma mater, Shaw College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Out of this meeting came SNCC. As much as anyone, and more than most, her hands and her brains shaped the theory and methods of community organizing which defines the modern civil rights movement. Her main lesson: Organize from the bottom up. “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
Although a number of historical forces mark the era of modern civil rights struggle, in my opinion, the convergence of some very particular and very critical forces laid the foundation for the modern mid-20th century struggle from which there would be no turning back: the commitment to democracy and human rights embedded in the rhetoric of World War Two’s fight against fascism, the accelerating struggles for decolonization in Africa and Asia, post war economic and educational opportunity in the United States with so much of the world in rubble, and finally: the1954 supreme court decision in Brown v. Board of Education which began the process of dismantling the legal framework which underwrote U.S. apartheid. Importantly, that decision engendered hope, one of the indispensable ingredients for resistance.
Fannie Lou Hamer picketing on Freedom Day, 1964, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
What uniquely marks the era, though, is that in large numbers, people who were usually spoken for by others, began to speak for themselves, and not only that, spoke for themselves in such a way that they could not be ignored. This is very important so let me restate it in a slightly different way: Ordinary people who were usually spoken for by sympathetic advocates, or of, by hostile white supremacists, began speaking for themselves saying “this is what we demand; this is the kind of society in which we wish to live.” Montgomery, Alabama’s mid-1950s bus boycott and the now almost completely forgotten student struggle in 1951 Farmville, Virginia may be the post-World War II events that best represent this. I also think the person who probably best symbolizes this is Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi. She was a sharecropper and timekeeper on a Delta cotton plantation who became not only a leader of Mississippi’s 1960s movement, but a great national voice for civil rights. In any case, maids, sharecroppers, day workers, cooks, janitors, farmers, factory workers, beauticians and barbers, as I said, ordinary people who were usually spoken for or of—these voices began to be heard, or at least could no longer be ignored in the mid 20th century. And, through organization and direct action they changed a way of life.
It is worth noting as we seem to have entered an era where civil liberties are being eroded in the name of national security that the civil rights movement forced the issue of civil liberties. In 1963 Bernard Lafayette, one of the leaders of the Nashville Student Movement organized the first civil rights mass meeting in Selma, Alabama. When Sheriff Jim Clark burst in with his deputies and disrupted the meeting he was armed with a warrant from the circuit judge empowering him to prevent “insurrection.” And in the months leading up to the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project approached, the state legislature passed a “criminal syndicalism,” law. It empowered local authorities to redefine organized civil rights struggle (or labor union organizing) as “terrorism” with 10 years of imprisonment possible for any person who, “By word of mouth or written words or personal conduct advocates, instigates, suggests, teaches or aids and abets criminal syndicalism or the duty, necessity, propriety or expediency of committing crime, criminal syndicalism, sabotage, violence or any other unlawful method of terrorism as a means of accomplishing or effecting a change in agricultural or industrial ownership or control or effecting any political or social change….” Whew! After the first group of people tried to register to vote in Sunflower County, Mississippi, white nightriders shot up the black community. In Ruleville, a tiny Delta town, two girls were wounded. I was arrested for the shooting, by the mayor, who said I had done it to gain publicity for a failing movement. I was let go the next morning. If also charged and convicted as a criminal syndicalist I could have had 10 years in jail added to whatever sentence I was given for the shooting.
Looking across today’s political landscape I cannot say that such oppressive legislation is no longer possible. Fear often leads to tyranny.
In the United States today, with civil rights and civil liberties so vulnerable, the most important lesson of the civil rights movement is still relevant. You have to make a demand for the kind of society in which you want to live—especially if you want to live in a free society. As we used to say, “Freedom is not free.”
And this brings us to the Movement for Black Lives today. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter wrote a year or so ago, “When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgement [that] Black poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country–one half of all people in prisons or jails–is an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of state violence.” Ms. Garza’s framing mirrors the concerns with systemic oppression that we held while fighting for change in the South.
I, for one, think their protests have been powerful and effective. Now they face the question of organizing beyond protest, a question we had to face too. A question we also have to face is how to support this young movement. We might begin by talking to them seriously about their ideas. I believe the earlier movement history I have offered here can be of some use to the young people working to maintain our ongoing struggle today. Obviously, while not everything from our era will be useful for 21st century activists, there is a core reality that strong movements are built by developing inclusive relationships capable of knitting together strategies formed as a result of listening to ordinary people’s experiences and ideas for change. More than any single thing this is what the movement did in order to engage in effective struggle. I think doing this in the black urban communities that now form the heart of black America is much more difficult than what we were faced with in the rural south of the 1960s, but the basic principle of digging in and finding a language that works remains fundamental. This is a conversation we do not have time for this morning. But I do know that this discussion has begun among some of the groups that form the Movement for Black Lives. So, as the Mozambicans used to say in their struggle for independence from Portugal—a Luta Continua, the struggle continues.
Finally, I ask you to consider this which can serve as a theme for today’s struggle as much as it served as the founding principles of the United States in 1787:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
For all the contradictions found throughout U.S. history this is the core, though still unrealized, ideal of the country. But do we really want to do this? Government as we’ve known it since the country’s inception has always been ambivalent and at many times, hostile to this ideal. And this idea is really the heart of my message to you this morning; what we learn in the passage of time from Martin Luther King’s emergence to the now of Black Lives Matter. It’s the emergence of ordinary people as leaders and spokespeople who are the real force for change—people who keep their eyes on the prize, as the old song goes. And today, this need is more urgent than it has ever been. And perhaps, too, more possible. I am, in effect, challenging each one of you to be the change. A luta continua.
Charles Cobb and SNCC veteran Philippa Jackson, who introducted Cobb at the church service.
Thank you.
Charlie Cobb
Peoples Congregational Church
Washington, DC
January 15, 2017
Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a journalist, and the author of a number of books including This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014). Read more.
Related Materials
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This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
Book – Non-fiction. By Charles E. Cobb Jr. 2015. 328 pages.
Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s.
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Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project
Book – Non-fiction. By Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr. 2001. 256 pages.
Algebra Project founder on math literacy and civil rights.
Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand
Two black demonstrators killed in the Orangeburg Massacre lie on the ground at the edge of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, S.C., on Feb. 8, 1968. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Robert Lee Davis found himself lying in blood next to his teammate Sam Hammond. At least one bullet had struck Davis in the back. Another went in Hammond’s neck.
Davis recalled in an oral history that Hammond, a running back at South Carolina State, asked him, “Do you think I’m going to live?” Davis, a linebacker, said he answered, “Sam, you are going to be all right, buddy.”
Hammond was the first of three young black men to die that night 50 years ago in Orangeburg, S.C. Davis was one of several football players at historically black South Carolina State to survive a hail of police fire with injuries.
What brought them together that Feb. 8, 1968, evening was not a team meeting or the training table. Instead, it was a call to confront a wrong, an affront, an act of overt racial discrimination in Orangeburg at a bowling alley that refused would-be black bowlers just like the state was denying black citizens their human rights.
As a result, Davis and Hammond became athlete-activists long before we created the suddenly ubiquitous, if not trite, alliterative phrase these days to describe football and basketball players, almost all of color, who have, by comparison, merely sported sloganeering T-shirts, or employed histrionics, to demonstrate against racial injustice.
It is a noble and laudable effort, of course. But what we’ve come to champion of athletes today pales juxtaposed to what so many did in the cauldron of the late ’60s civil rights movement. Davis and Hammond, for example, dared to physically confront the very embodiment of the South’s recalcitrant racists — scores of carbine rifle-toting, all-white state troopers — for which Hammond forfeited not just his career but his life.
They were among at least 30 victims of what became known as the Orangeburg massacre.
I was reminded of it three years ago as a presenter at the annual Media and Civil Rights symposium at the University of South Carolina. It included a mesmerizing panel featuring a demonstrator that night, civil rights icon and scholar Cleveland Sellers, and a reporter who became legendary for his fearless coverage of the massacre and other civil rights movement era violence, Jack Bass. With Jack Nelson, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the civil rights movement, Bass authored “The Orangeburg Massacre” in 1970.
And I took note that the panelists, particularly Oliver Francis, a one-time baseball player at Voorhees, another historically black South Carolina college, pointed out that black male athletes in particular stepped to the fore in Orangeburg’s deadly confrontation with white supremacy, and in others. Francis wound up convicted and sentenced to prison for 18 to 24 months as an organizer in an armed black student takeover in 1969 of the Voorhees administration building.
It all reminded that black athletes played not just pivotal roles in the civil rights movement, like the muscle North Carolina A&T football players provided for their classmates engaged in sit-ins to desegregate the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth’s lunch counter. Or in Rock Hill, S.C., where 10 black Friendship College students were detained by police for trying to desegregate a town lunch counter in 1961 but became known as the Rock Hill Nine after one among them wasn’t booked so he could maintain his athletic scholarship. Chicago Bears running back Willie Galimore was the test black registrant at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla., that became a flash point for desegregation fights in 1964.
And as was evidenced in Orangeburg, black athletes sometimes were even in the vanguard of protests. Samuel Freedman underscored as much in recounting the Orangeburg massacre in his 2014 book, “Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”
Freedman wrote: “Shortly after the 1967 football season ended, many of the politically engaged members of the South Carolina State team joined in protests against a segregated bowling alley near the campus in Orangeburg.” On Feb. 6, 1968, Freedman reported, Davis and several of his teammates went on their own to the bowling alley and not only were denied admittance but were threatened with arrest by city police for disturbing the peace. Other students eventually joined the football players, objected to the police threats and wound up defending themselves from swinging billy clubs.
Two nights later, Freedman stated, “an all-white force of state troopers opened fire on the student demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight. Among the dead was one football player . . . Hammond. Several other players were injured by gunfire, one of them temporarily paralyzed.”
Davis was that temporarily paralyzed victim.
The student survivors of the massacre refused, however, to be deterred and allow the killings of Hammond, fellow student Henry Smith and high school football player Delano Middleton to be in vain. They organized a march from campus to the state capital 42 miles away to demand justice. Athletes decided to lead the march by running the distance.
“The four young men who approached me about the run were all track and field distance runners,” Willis Ham, a South Carolina State baseball player at the time, told the (Orangeburg, S.C.) Times and Democrat five years ago. “Three of the young men were not of American descent, and they simply wanted to express their disgust for the way Americans ‘treat their own,’ with the one tool that they had to their credit [the ability to run].
“We wanted our fellow students to know how deeply we felt about their determination to go to Columbia [S.C.], and express to state officials how they really felt about the lack of support in the days leading to the massacre.”
“It gave us a chance to say that our spirits and drive for freedom from depression would never be destroyed,” Ham explained.
The white troopers who fired on the students were exonerated in a trial a year later. The lone conviction from the incident was of Sellers for incitement. He spent seven months in prison. He was pardoned in 1993.
But what Hammond, the football player, first fell for is forever remembered on South Carolina State’s campus. Its basketball arena that opened that fateful day, Feb. 8, 1968, was renamed the Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Center.
Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Post.
SNCC Legacy Project 2017 Annual Report
The SNCC Legacy Project was very busy in 2017.
SNCC DIGITAL GATEWAY (SDG) Since the SNCC Digital Gateway’s debut in December 2016, the project has focused its efforts on assessment and revision of the website, promotion, and the continued development of content, especially creating new material in partnership with SNCC veterans and young(er) activists. Project staff conducted assessment activities throughout 2017 designed to gauge SDG's usability and overall design, as well as to assess the site's effectiveness in conveying a bottom-up, grassroots interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement and passing on the "informational wealth" of SNCC to the next generation. Based on feedback received, the Editorial Board decided to undertake a website redesign, which went live at the end of May 2017. The redesign incorporated a new "Today" section featuring contemporary activists discussing how SNCC's work is relevant to their organizing today in short, engaging videos; added theme buttons that let users navigate the site by important themes like voting rights, Black Power, and the organizing tradition; and made the homepage more active and informative. The project also brought four groups of movement veterans to campus in 2017 to record conversations about Southwest Georgia, Lowndes County, SNCC's internationalism, and song and the Movement. Portions of these conversations are featured in the "Our Voices" section of the website. As of December, the website featured 178 profile pages, 102 event pages, 42 inside SNCC pages, 8 Our Voices sections, and 19 today videos. Project staff and partners have been promoting the SNCC Digital Gateway through social media and mailers. The documenting of the Civil Rights Movement in Southwest Georgia for the SNCC Digital Gateway by residents and former civil rights workers.
2 SUMMER INSTITUTES FOR TEACHERS
SNCC Veterans and today's movement leaders meet at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. January 19, 2018
The meeting was organized by SLP and the young activists, and hosted by the Museum, to discuss the importance of documenting and archiving their documents and materials so that they can tell their stories from the inside out. The activists have formed a working group to follow up on the very successful meeting. The groups represented include Jobs with Justice, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Black Immigration Network, BYP100, UndocuBlack Network Howard University/ASCAC, and NAACP branches in DC, Brooklyn, NY, and UDC. The SLP, NMAAHC and hopefully CRMVets have committed to serve on an Advisory Board to help guide the process. SLP Board members Courtland Cox, Charles Cobb, and Sharlene Kranz attended.
SNCC Workshop for DCPS Teachers
On December 1, 2017, Teaching for Change and the SNCC Legacy Project offered a workshop for 11th grade language arts and social studies teachers on the central role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Civil Rights Movement. The workshop was hosted by the DCPS Division of Secondary Literacy in the Office of Teaching and Learning for teachers from across the city during a professional development day at Eastern Senior High School.
At the workshop, teachers participated in a new role play by Rethinking Schools editor Adam Sanchez, viewed the SNCC Digital Gateway website, and heard directly from the people who made the history. The special guest SNCC veterans were Courtland Cox, Tim Jenkins, and Frank Smith. Dr. Smith is the founding director of the African American Civil War Museum and Memorial. The museum’s education director Dawn Chitty and historic interpreter Marquette Milton (a 2010 Eastern SHS graduate) also attended the session and encouraged teachers to bring their students to the museum.
SNCC veterans Tim Jenkins, Courtland, Cox, and Frank Smith with Secondary Literacy director Raymond Cummings (second from left.)
The role play by Sanchez (to be published in the winter issue of Rethinking Schools magazine and eventually posted at the Zinn Education Project website) posits three questions faced by SNCC in the early 1960s, such as whether to engage in direct action or voter registration. In small groups, the teachers grappled with the questions in the role play. Then the veterans went to one group each to reveal what SNCC decided at the time and respond to additional questions. The room was buzzing with conversation. There was also time for a full group Q&A where teachers asked a variety of questions, including about links to contemporary movements and organizations such as the Movement for Black Lives and the NAACP.
The group also viewed the SNCC Digital Gateway website and several participants signed up for an upcoming Teaching for Change dialogue to share ideas for using the website in their classrooms.
Reflections
Here are selected reflections from the teachers:
The SNCC veterans shed light on their organization and discussed present and past conflicts. They offered wonderful insight into movement strategy and tension and successes.
The first hand accounts were very memorable of the inner-workings and debates within SNCC on some of the most pressing issues during Civil Rights Movement.
I gained more insight into the decision process and the efforts that went into the events we remember today.
I appreciated the ability to get first-hand accounts of SNCC members’ experiences.
The SNCC Digital Gateway would fit perfectly within the unit on Civil Rights by allowing students to take ownership over finding information.
I plan to use the SNCC role play when I introduce nonviolence as a tactic at the beginning of my Civil Rights Movement unit.
It was a great session.
More trainings like this are needed.
Thank you. It was an amazing experience.
Good news about Charles Sherrod!
Shirley Sherrod reports that her husband Charles Sherrod is cancer-free twelve months after surgery for lung cancer!We join in celebrating this great news!Charles has participated in RDLN Assemblies and CSW gatherings. A long-time Civil Rights leader, he was Field Secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Georgia, has been a local elected official, a prison chaplain, and non-profit leader with Shirley at New Communities and the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education (SWGA Project). RDLN participants in the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the RDLN Assembly in New Mexico in October have had the chance to see the video Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Beloved Community, a documentary about New Communities, the land-based community-development project led by the Sherrods that involved the first community land trust in the U.S. on the largest tract of black-owned land in the country, land gained in the sixties, lost in the eighties, and regained with the purchase of a former plantation through a settlement in the minority farmers law suit.In addition to following medical advice, which included no chemotherapy or radiation, Charles followed the guidance of Natural Solutions for Preventative Healthcare based in Sylvester, Georgia.Contact information for Charles Sherrod:c/o Southwest Georgia Project1216 Dawson Rd Ste 108Albany, GA 31707Starry KruegerRural Development Leadership NetworkP.O. Box 98 Prince St. StationNew York, NY 10012(212)777-9137/(212)477-0367 (Fax)
Civil rights veteran Dorie Ladner honored in documentaryDeborah Barfield Berry , Gannett Mississippi November 5, 2016
WASHINGTON — Civil rights veterans gathered Thursday night for the screening of a mini-documentary about Hattiesburg native Dorie Ladner and her work registering blacks to vote in Mississippi.
Ladner, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was among the “foot soldiers’’ of the civil rights movement challenging segregation in the Deep South during the turbulent 1960s.
“I wanted to confront the issue head on,” Ladner, 74, told the crowd after Thursday’s screening. “I just felt like I wanted to get out and do the work.”
Civil rights veterans from SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), packed an auditorium at the University of the District of Columbia for the screening of “Well-Behaved Women Don’t Make ‘Her-Story’: The Dorie Ladner Story.’’
It was the second showing of the film. The first was at Tougaloo College in Jackson earlier in the week. It will also be shown at the University of Southern Mississippi next February, organizers said.
The 23-minute film was the brainchild of Tougaloo students who met Ladner in 2014 at a conference hosted by the college to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Tougaloo College played a key role in the civil rights movement, hosting meetings and staging rallies. Many civil rights workers were Tougaloo students.
Yasmin Gabriel, the film’s executive producer, said students wanted to showcase the contribution of Ladner, who went to Tougaloo.
“It became a real intergenerational, symbiotic thing,” said Gabriel, also the special assistant to Tougaloo College President Beverly Hogan Wade. “Dorie Ladner is the kind of person who is selfless.”
LISTEN: Civil Rights Leader And Son Talk Activism Then And Now
Dr. Cleveland Sellers and Bakari Sellers
September 20, 2017
This project will examine how Civil Rights Movement leaders and workers used geospatial data and techniques to calculate, map, and analyze the spatial and social dimensions of segregation and discrimination in the US South during the 1960s freedom struggle. At the center of this geospatial labor was the Student-NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which generated a series of detailed reports and other products that informed civil rights projects but which have been largely neglected by social scientists. From their field-based operations in Deep Southern small towns and rural areas, SNCC workers strategically compiled, disseminated and interpreted spatial and social information for the purposes of documenting and challenging the normative power of white supremacy and racial inequality. Understanding how Civil Rights organizations engaged in this "Geospatial Intelligence" (GI) advances an understanding of the potential of geographical data collection, application, and analysis to be utilized for the purposes of non-elite activism and social change. This research project contributes to Geographic knowledge and has the potential to impact Geographic curriculum and public thought through its plan of publication and innovative outreach. Specifically, the investigators will distribute research findings to a broad collection of community actors, including through the Tennessee Geographic Alliance and its partners within the state alliance movement and the National Council for Social Studies. They will create education materials for both the broader public and to facilitate classroom teaching and learning about the role of space and place in challenging segregation and discrimination during the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, findings of the research will be disseminated via the University of Tennessee "Pipeline Program", which offers an opportunity to engage with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and to recruit minority students for further graduate education.
This research project relies on archival work at several Civil Rights related collections across the United States as well as a series of open-ended interviews with surviving members of SNCC familiar with the generation and implementation of geospatial data gathering and analysis techniques. Critical race theory and methodology and discourse analysis will be used to investigate the following questions: 1) How and in what ways and political contexts did civil rights workers employ mapping and geographical data collection and analysis strategies to identify patterns of racial inequality and targets for protest? 2) How did Civil Rights workers use or operationalize their Geospatial Intelligence methods and analytical products to plan and execute major civil rights projects and how do those products expand our definition and understanding of Black Geographies? 3) How do everyday forms of Geospatial Intelligence used by Civil Rights workers problematize and expand contemporary understandings of GI that strongly associate Geospatial Intelligence with defense and national security concerns? While the focal point of academic work for over a decade, GI-related research confines the craft to military-industrial applications. SNCC's use of geographical data and GI practice expands this definition and context as well as understanding of the inner workings of African American politics and the value of a Black Geographies perspective within a study of the Civil Rights Movement.
June 26, 2017
SLP Chair Courtland Cox appreciates the bench. 
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June 22, 2017
June 22, 2017
I'm pleased to announce the publication of my new book--Envisioning the African/Edenic Future: The Path to Our Self-Actualization in Freedom.Check it out at: www.createspace.com/7253067. Meanwhile, have a great day!(John Churchville is a SNCC veteran of Southwest Georgia and Mississippi).
June 18, 2017
May 7, 2017
April 24, 2017
“Come Let Us Build a New World Together”: The SNCC Digital Gateway
By Lauren Tilton
It can be challenging to teach about the civil rights movement. For many reasons, from time constraints to lack of access to archives, the liberation struggle is often framed through its most prominent leader, Martin Luther King Jr. Now, thanks to a partnership between Duke University and the SNCC Legacy Project, an organization comprised of SNCC participants, teachers have access to the SNCC Digital Gateway. The digital exhibition and archive uses essays, documentary sources, and visualizations to dive deep into the workings of the youth-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Throughout the 1960s and 70s, SNCC empowered black communities in the Deep South through grassroots organizing and planning actions such as freedom schools, sit-ins, and voting registration drives. The SNCC Digital Gateway offers students the opportunity to explore grassroots histories of the Civil Rights Movement while broadening their understanding of who accomplished social change and how.
The National Museum of American History in DC displays the counter segment where four African American college students staged a sit-in at a “whites only” counter at a store in Greensboro, NC in 1960. UserFan/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0
The site offers users seven gateways into SNCC’s activism: About, History, Timeline, People, Inside SNCC, Map, and Resources. Because of the depth of the content, I’d recommend providing students with some initial guidance on how to engage with the project. While it might be tempting to go straight to the History gateway, I tell students to start with About and read “The Story of SNCC,” which provides a brief overview of the organization and how it fits into a constellation of organizations fighting for freedom.
Next, I encourage them to read the History gateway which focuses on major SNCC events from 1943 to 1969, including the sit-in at Greensboro and the Freedom Rides. The timeline helps students keep events organized and see them in a broader civil rights context while noticing organizational changes within the SNCC. The design suggests a static timeline, but it is much richer than it appears. For example, students can click on “1965–1969 Black Power Takes Power: Political & Economic Organizing” and learn about how the SNCC organized around issues of economic justice and came to support the anti-Vietnam War movement.
From here, I recommend letting students explore on their own. For example, the Timeline links to pages including expository essays and documents. Clicking on “SNCC makes contact in Lowndes County” leads to a brief and well-researched essay about the efforts of Stokely Carmichael and fellow SNCC organizer Bob Mants in the infamous Georgia county that typified the violence of white supremacy. The right side of the page includes primary documents such as an article about SNCC’s organizing in The Movement and a 1988 audiovisual interview with Mants where he reflects back on the events that took place in 1965. The materials include links to the institutional and private archives that provided the materials. Along with introducing students to primary documents, the project thus encourages students to explore the archives. It also shows students the importance of giving credit through citations.
North Carolina Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members, who helped organize and inspire sit-ins across the South, meet at the Tottle House lunch counter in Atlanta in 1960. U.S. Embassy The Hague/Flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0
Other gateways include People, Inside SNCC, Perspectives, and Map. People brings attention to lesser-known activists and organizers like Martha Prescod (Norman). The page on Prescod, for example, helps illuminate the complexities of organizing through a short essay about her work as well as primary source materials including an oral and audiovisual interview. One possible assignment is to ask each student to select an interview of a woman and assess how race, gender, and sexuality constrained the revolutionary possibilities of SNCC.
Inside SNCC offers essays with documentary materials that address major themes such as governance, culture, political policy, and coalition building. This is particularly useful for helping students understand the organization’s structure as well as the central role of the arts through projects such as Freedom Singing and Freedom Southern Theatre. The Perspectives gateway has essays written by activists who reflect in the first person on their experiences. It also includes a rich collection of audio and video interviews with activists about Black Power. The latter in particular allows students to see activists reflecting back on SNCC, helping students see how historical actors framed their aims and accomplishments in the past and the present. The interviews can also help students learn how to assess oral histories. Teachers can ask students to compare how a person reflecting on their experience in 2016, like Jennifer Lawson, might frame their story and understanding of SNCC back in the 1960s. This might be of particular interest to those teaching about historical and cultural memory.
The Map section visualizes SNCC’s presence geographically. It allows students to immediately see a cluster of activities in Mississippi, where the organization concentrated its efforts. Clicking on a place brings the user to a page that lists the people and events in that location. Each name links to the People section, while an event brings users back to the Timeline. In fact, each of these gateways include in-text links that move the user across the site. The ability to click and move to another section of the site helps create a nonlinear narrative that encourages discovery and curiosity. A functionality ideal for teaching, students can move through the site creating connections across events, people, perspectives, and themes.
For instructors looking to link the 1960s to today, the Resources gateway is a great place to turn. Our recent presidential election has made clear that the road to ending racial inequality is anything but straight, and the struggle continues as exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement. I have found students eager to discuss the connections they are seeing between the past and today, yet I want them to do so in a way that isn’t reduced to narratives of progress or claims that nothing has changed. The interviews with SNCC activists reflecting on their work in the intervening 40 years show that organizing for change is a continual and uneven struggle. Because the interviews are long, I’d recommend selecting short clips of three to four minutes and assigning them. Students can then discuss how the SNCC informed their later activism and also its continuing impact.
Whether interested in understanding SNCC in its moment or its legacies, the gateways build on each other to explain the intricacies of the organization and its role in the broader freedom struggle. One could easily use the project to focus several weeks of a course on SNCC or simply mine it for additional materials for a lecture. The hours of audio and visual material woven throughout the site are prime materials for close readings. The SNCC Gateway is, thus, an incredible resource for teachers and students alike who are looking to immerse themselves in the world of SNCC while learning about the broader grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights Movement.
Lauren Tilton is assistant professor of digital humanities and research fellow at University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. She directs Photogrammar, a platform for visualizing photography, and is co-principal investigator of Participatory Media, a digital project exploring participatory community media from the 1960s. She is co-author of Humanities Data in R.
April 18, 2017
Organizing Lowndes County: Then & Now
March 2, 2017
Why we can be hopeful.
Former Ashfield Selectman to be honored for work with Freedom Singers
Bill Perlman of Ashfield. Recorder/Paul Franz
At 18, he was asked by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to become part of the group that lent their voices to the Civil Rights movement at rallies, in concerts and fundraisers throughout the South and beyond.
On Saturday, more than 50 years after the “Bloody Sunday” attack by armed police officers on demonstrators who tried to march on the Alabama state capital to win voting rights, Perlman will receive a Freedom Flame Award.
“A lot people have the view that the Civil Rights movement was in the 1960s, and that was it, that it solved all the problems and went away,” Perlman said in 2015, when he brought The Freedom Singers to Ashfield for a concert to mark the sesquicentennial of the Selma-to-Montgomery March.
“But the Civil Rights movement started in 1619,” he said, “when the first slaves came, and not only is it still going on, it’s also still needed.”
The 70-year-old retired electrical engineer, who was a longtime Franklin Regional Council of Governments Executive Committee member, was invited to take part in the 52nd annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee in Selma this weekend to receive the award in honor of his activism as part of the civil rights and voting rights movements. He is the youngest member of the otherwise all-black group that formed in 1962.
The celebration comes as voting rights are once again under attack. On Monday, President Donald Trump’s administration said the federal government no longer plans to challenge a strict voter ID law in Texas.
The Justice Department informed plaintiffs in the case that it will be filing documents to formally drop its opposition to the Texas law, in what the Associated Press called “a stark reversal under new Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Obama White House, which joined a lawsuit against Texas in 2013.”
A federal appeals court last year ruled that the Texas law discriminated against minorities and the poor, and it ordered changes ahead of the November election.
Faya Rose Toure, executive director of Selma Jubilee, wrote to Perlman, “People who come often say the Jubilee is a pilgrimage, as we host people from all over the country and the world to commemorate and celebrate these historical events, as well as to inspire and educate those who attend regarding the pressing issues of the present related to voting rights, civil rights, and human rights.”
Toure added, “Jubilee also serves as an opportunity for all those who value these rights to come together as a community of people for four days of communion and serious discussions, speakers and educational workshops, renewal of old friendships, recognition of those individuals who have made a difference, and to enjoy good food, music, art and entertainment.”
Previous Freedom Flame Award recipients include Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Andrew Young and many others.
When James Forman, executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, invited Perlman to be one of the Freedom Singers after hearing him as a last-minute substitute playing his Martin 00-21 guitar at a 1965 fundraising event, the teen had recently dropped out after a month of community college in Brooklyn.
Each member was paid a $10 weekly wage as SNCC staffers, and the group’s main role was to raise money for the organization, singing, “Which Side Are You On,” “We Shall Overcome” and other songs on Northern college campuses such as Yale, Brandeis and Mount Holyoke. The group also performed at house parties as well as in large concert halls in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere around the North, playing a 28-day tour of eastern Canada.
In rallies in Southern churches, the singers tried to boost morale and bring people together.
Unlike song leaders, who specifically led rallies and marches, Perlman recalled, “The Freedom Singers were performers — entertainers. We came up with interesting, complex harmonies. That was very different than getting hundreds of people singing.”
February 17, 2017
Interview with Bob Moses in the Southern Illinois University newspaper
February 7, 2017 The Chronicle at Duke University. Article by Bre Bradham.
SNCC legacy project brings together former members of the civil rights movement
In the early 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized youth across the South in the fight for desegregation. On Saturday night at North Carolina Central University, six veterans of the movement came together in Durham to recount how they became involved with the movement.
Although the five activists—Faith Holsaert, Shirley Sherrod, Larry Rubin, Annette White and Janie Rambeau—came from a variety of backgrounds, their stories intertwined through their involvement with SNCC and their experiences in Albany, Georgia, the site of one of the toughest civil rights battles.
“[Albany was] one of the most important of the southern movements of the 1960s, and arguably the most ignored,” said Charlie Cobb, the event's facilitator and a board member for the SNCC Legacy Project who worked with SNCC in the Mississippi Delta. “All the people seated at this table have been important to the movement that emerged in southwest Georgia.”
The panel’s discussion was organized through a partnership between the SNCC Legacy Project, Duke University Libraries and the Center for Documentary Studies. It is the first of four sessions planned for 2017. Each discussion will focus on a particular topic—from Saturday night’s panel on southwestern Georgia to a future talk on SNCC’s international connections.
Karlyn Forner, the SNCC digital gateway project manager for Duke Libraries, explained that the former SNCC members' discussions will be included on a website that aims to share the organization's history.
“It’s trying to tell the story of the movement from the inside-out. Part of the premise is that the movement’s history has been told by historians and scholars, but not necessarily the people themselves who created the history,” Forner said. “So it’s really about trying to tell the history of the movement that the participants recognize and know.”
The history of SNCC began not far from NCCU on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh. All of the veterans, however, had their own stories to share about how they became involved with the movement.
Janie Rambeau, a leader of the movement at Albany State College who was expelled because of her involvement in the movement, said that she cannot recall exactly when she became involved because she always considered herself part of it.
Rambeau grew up hearing her parents’ stories about discrimination and activism but began to see it more “outright” for herself when she was in high school—water fountains were segregated and labeled with signs, and the “colored” bathroom was dirtier. She was arrested while singing “We Shall Overcome” on a rainy December morning.
Annette White, who lost her title of Miss Albany State College due to protesting, similarly cited her early beginnings in the movement. She said that she was delivered by the only black, female doctor in Southwest Georgia in August 1939.
“That’s when it started,” she said. “I was in a totally segregated city on the south side of town, where black people lived. Everything that went on in that city affected me in some way. As I grew, my parents explained what being in a segregated city meant. My father wanted me to know what was out there so I could survive in that type of society.”
Faith Holsaert came to Albany from New York City where she first became involved in SNCC. When SNCC organizers approached her about going down South in the summer of 1962, she initially said no but then tragic events in Georgia changed her mind.
"At the end of that summer three churches were burned in southwest Georgia," she said. "For whatever reason, that really lit my fuse."
Larry Rubin, who is a Jewish veteran of the movement along with Holsaert, said that unlike other white northerners who ventured South, he was not shocked that people trying to register to vote were beaten up and fire-hosed.
“I know this is hard to believe,” he said with sarcasm, “but at that time this country was run by white, racist, white-supremacists. The reason it was is because a lot of their constituents were not able to exercise their right to vote.”
Rubin cited his Jewish heritage as one of the reasons that he felt he “had no choice” but to become part of the movement, leading him to move to southwest Georgia to join the efforts.
“I learned that part of my job was to be white in this movement,” he said. “To show people that blacks and whites can work together and that whites do not have to be in charge.”
Shirley Sherrod was born on a farm in “bad Baker County.” Her father died after being shot by a neighboring white farmer following a dispute over cows when she was 17. She said the night he died she made the decision to stay in the South and devote her life to making a difference. Sherrod joined SNCC a few years later.
Sheerod stressed that despite the passage of time, the need for activism has not ended.
“I’m still in that mode. I can’t separate the work after 52 years because it didn’t end,” she said. “The need for it is greater now, or almost as great now, as it was it back then. We need young people.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/unpublished-black-history-claude-sitton-civil-rights.html?emc=edit_rr_20170204&nl=race-related&nlid=14186377&te=1&_r=0
Dear friends. Fifty-seven years ago today, I was driving to Atlanta to start a new job as director of the NSA Southern Student Humans Relation Project. I had stopped in Greensboro, N.C. (my hometown) to pick up some things at my sister's house, was driving down West Market St. had the radio on and heard on the news--"Four students from A & T College have just been arrested at our downtown Woolworth's for sitting at the lunch counter and asking to be served......." "what is going on, I thought" but picked up my things and drove to Atlanta. I had been in Greensboro unintentionally at the same moments that began the student movement, that led to over 50,000 students in the south demonstrating at lunch counters, etc. by June of that year. Well, you know the rest of the story, including my meeting Ella Baker in Atlanta, then Julian Bond, Charles McDew and many others and becoming a member of the SNCC Committee--first white woman. The love and caring that we felt back in those early days lingers forever. Was just listening to the news and while lots of things are mentioned about Feb. lst meanings--nothing about us. Well, that is their problem. "We'll walk hand in hand. Black and White together. The truth shall make us free and o and on." Much love, Connie
Challenging Ourselves: Martin Luther King, the Movement, and Its Lessons for Today
This is a talk delivered by SNCC veteran Charles E. Cobb Jr. on Sunday, January 15, 2017 at the People’s Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. on the occassion of the Dr. Martin Luther King holiday.
By Charles E. Cobb
My thanks to Rev. Hopson, the congregation of Peoples church, and especially the church’s Board of Christian Social Action for inviting me here. I grew up in the Congregational church. My father Rev. Charles E. Cobb pastored St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield Massachusetts, and later co-founded the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice and became its first executive director. So I feel like I have come back home and welcome the opportunity to speak to you. Thank you.
Julian Bond in Mississippi, 1963. Photo by Harvey Richards.
My friend and former co-worker in the movement Julian Bond, who is greatly missed, used to say that the primary misconception in the public’s perception of the southern civil rights movement can be boiled down to three short sentences. “Rosa sat down. Martin stood up. And then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.”
In the minds of many, the movement is thought of as mass protest in public spaces led by charismatic leaders. That is only partly true, however. The organizing tradition—a very old tradition, with roots in slave rebellions—better describes the movement. And, I want to push this forward as what is most relevant for continuing struggle in the 21st century as well as properly understanding movement history. And that does not mean that mass protest—those of yesteryear and those now, contradicts this tradition.
My approach to discussing the movement this morning is from the bottom up, or put another way, from the inside out since I was very much involved with the movement as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. We were an organization of grassroots organizers.
First, as much as the movement challenged segregation, racial discrimination and white supremacy, fundamental to real understanding of the movement are the challenges black people made to one another within the black community. This underappreciated dimension of the movement is as important today as it was more than half a century ago. Maybe even more important now, given the kind of violence we are witnessing in Chicago and other cities.
Martin Luther King was born today in 1929; we are celebrating his work. So before going further, let me tell you a story about Reverend King that is relevant to the point I have just made.
Few people give enough thought to the fact that before he achieved national and international renown as a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King was a young local minister in Montgomery, Alabama. How he emerged is important to understanding the emergence of the bus boycott there, which was driven by local people at the grassroots.
After Rosa Parks’s arrest, black Montgomery organized a highly successful one-day bus boycott. I am tempted here to discuss Mrs. Parks at length. She was much more than a weary dressmaker seeking a place to sit on the bus. As she put it, her life was “a history of being rebellious.”
E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks in Montgomery on March 19, 1956. AP/Gene Herrick
At the end of the day, Montgomery’s black leadership—many of them ministers—met in Martin Luther King’s church to discuss continuing the boycott until the city committed to desegregation of bus seating. Most who spoke, expressed various degrees of reluctance and fear about doing this. Finally, the preeminent black leader of Montgomery—E.D. Nixon, one of A. Phillip Randolph’s union men and the former head of Alabama’s NAACP—rose and spoke. As the story came to me from Johnnie Carr, 95-years old when she was telling it, and part of a core group of women who had been working with Rosa Parks since the 1940s, Nixon basically accused the gathering of cowardice: “You preachers been eating these women’s fried chicken long enough without doing anything for them.” It was women, after all, riding buses across town into the white community to jobs as housekeepers and cooks and nursemaids who suffered regular humiliation traveling on public transportation. “Now,” Mr. Nixon continued, “it’s time to get up off your butts and do something for them!” It was then that a 26-year-old Martin Luther King stood up. Do we even think of Martin Luther King as a 26-year-old? “I am not a coward!” He said. The embarrassed gathering agreed to continue the boycott and Rev. King was elected head of the organization they formed at that meeting to continue the boycott—The Montgomery Improvement Association.
The way to understand this moment, I hope you see, is by understanding the kind of challenges black people were making to one another across the south. This is what drove struggle and change. Much of this still remains invisible. And broadening this with an almost equally invisible related point: The Movement thrust forward leaders, not the other way around.
However, as important as he was, I am not here this morning to discuss Martin Luther King. I intend to concentrate instead on Mississippi and its lessons, particularly as they apply to these times. That is the state where I worked as a SNCC field secretary from 1962 until 1967, and the state I know the best.
The vicious racial oppression that once so completely defined this state establishes a special kind of clarity for us this morning. To illustrate this, in a moment I will read to you a description of an encounter reported by another friend, and comrade, and hero from the days of Mississippi’s mid-20th century freedom struggle. Sam Block is his name. He, like almost everyone who formed the backbone of the southern Movement, is invisible and he died far too young from both the physical and psychological traumas of that struggle.
Rally for the Freedom Vote, Hinds County, 1963. Front row from left: NAACP leader Aaron Henry, SNCC organizers Sam Block and Willie Peacock, unidentified. Back row, Rev. Ed King with bandage on face. From crmvet.org
The words will come from a 1962 field report Sam wrote describing the early days of his efforts to organize around voter registration in the Mississippi Delta. Sam was the first of us—meaning the first of us who were young—18, 19, 20, 21 22 and 23-years-old—to organize for voting rights in the Mississippi Delta—cotton plantation country. The Delta was a vicious place where most black life had been reduced to plantation serfdom following the dismemberment of Reconstruction. The Delta was where the White Citizens Council was born. Sam began working in a town where the White Citizens Council was particularly powerful—Greenwood—county seat of Leflore County. Greenwood and the rest of the county, like most other Delta towns and counties, was two thirds black. When Sam arrived, there were more than 13,000 voting-age blacks in Leflore County, but only about 200 had succeeded in being registered. Listen to Sam’s report. The N-word, as we now say in polite company, is used in it; but it is necessary, I think. However, I apologize in advance for any discomfort its use causes. Here’s Sam:
We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, “Nigger where you from?” I told him, “Well I’m a native Mississippian.” He said, “Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? I don’t know where you from.” I said, “Well, around some counties.” He said, “Well I know that, I know you ain’t from here ‘cause I know every nigger and his mammy.” I said, “You know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?” He got angry. He spat in my face and he walked away. So he came back and turned around and told me, “I don’t want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do is pack your clothes and get out and don’t never come back no more.” I said, “Well, sheriff, if you don’t want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, ‘cause I’m here to stay; I came here to do a job and this is my intention. I’m going to do this job…”
Now I think this exchange, which took place on the steps of the Leflore County courthouse, explains everything you need to know about the movement. Sam’s words were a promise and a prediction. Along with Sam, those of us in SNCC and CORE especially, dug in and stayed to do the job; were committed to doing the job, and drawing from deep wells of strength in black communities, broke the back of apartheid in Mississippi. But the outcome did not just affect Mississippi; it changed America. The job we did resulted in changing forever the rules of the national Democratic Party and that is what laid the groundwork for the Obama presidency. This is not boast, but history. Basically: In fighting for the right to vote—and winning—the door was opened to the possibility of winning any elected office, even the highest in the land. As the black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass pointed out more than 150 years ago and it’s as relevant now as then, “If there is no struggle there is no progress.” I stand here in praise of our struggle, and to testify that the violence underlying the Greenwood Sherriff’s words reveal the blood-soaked ground in Mississippi and across the American south that has been the price of progress. I stand here to insist that this must never be forgotten, and that there is a debt, a duty—an obligation we have—all of us—to repay this history with continuing struggle.
Approaching this history, there are, of course, some legitimate questions you may want answered in trying to grasp why I think Sam’s courthouse encounter with the sheriff was so significant. Who was Sam Block? He was only 22 when this happened; that’s kind of young, isn’t it? How did he get to Greenwood? What made him stay in defiance of the sheriff’s threat? The larger question is: Is there something we can use here today?
So, let’s look more closely at Sam. Youth comes immediately to mind in this consideration. As I said, he was just 22-years-old at the time of his confrontation with the sheriff. Largely missing from the narrative about the civil rights movement is that in many instances it was led by young people like Sam. To quote Martin Luther King speaking in support of sit-ins at a February 16, 1960 civil rights rally in Durham, North Carolina: “What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.”
I was a 12th grade high school student when on February 1, 1960 the sit-in movement erupted in Greensboro, North Carolina. Black students there began refusing to leave whites only lunch counters and restaurants. Within two months such protests had spread to 80 southern cities. The student protests in Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, and other southern cities that year, reached us via television and newspapers—especially black newspapers. And for me and most of my friends, before seeing these sit-ins, civil rights had been something grown-ups did. Now, looking at young people like Diane Nash or John Lewis or Julian Bond—students, my generation—what was coming through to us was that civil rights struggle was something we could do.
We see something similar in the way that protests over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford Florida have led to an ever-expanding Movement for Black Lives that is led by young people. A whole new set of young leaders has begun to emerge and lay claim to the future they want to live in; launched a fight for their future. As a SNCC veteran, I see a lot of my younger self in this, and applaud it.
Amzie Moore, Mississippi, 1963. Photo by Harvey Richards.
Sam was also one of Amzie Moore’s people. That’s who sent him, via SNCC to Greenwood. SNCC, which grew out of the sit-in movement had by 1962 evolved into an organization of organizers, working closely and at the grassroots with older veterans of civil rights struggle—many of them local NAACP leaders like Amzie. You won’t know his name any more than you knew Sam’s, but you need to know some things about Amzie because understanding what he represents is another essential component of any real discussion about the movement.
Amzie Moore was the president of the Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP where Sam had been born and grew up, and had decided that he wanted to tap into and use the young energy he saw in the sit-in students. He admired what the students were doing, but was not interested in organizing sit-ins in his town; he wanted a voter registration campaign. He put that idea on our political plate, challenging our idea that “direct action” only meant sit-ins and picket lines of protest. Amize wanted to see the emergence of black power in the Delta. The black people were there; the registered black voters were not.
As we began working in the Delta, Amzie Moore’s home was our central headquarters. His house was an orientation center, a place for breakfast of scrambled eggs or for a spaghetti dinner; it provided telephone connections and was always full of conversation as well as Amzie’s sometimes grim, sometimes funny stories of Delta life and earlier civil rights struggle. Floodlights washed his backyard because he was certain that one night Ku Klux Klansmen, or white terrorists of some sort, would attack his home. Often Amzie, who had fought the Nazis overseas after all, sat in the bay window of his living room with rifles and pistols, waiting to repel an attack he was certain would come (which may be why it never came).
Our relationship with Amzie puts into perspective yet another important dimension of the movement: The convergence of young people—like Sam…or myself—with older people like Amzie—he was 49- years-old when we met him. I had just turned nineteen in 1962. They were willing to share their experiences and open up to us, networks that they had built over many years, even decades, of struggle.
Ella Baker (center) at the Highlander Center.
Ella Baker introduced us to Amzie. She was 59-years-old. You cannot talk of 20th century civil rights struggle without discussing this remarkable woman. And let me also say as an aside here, although it should really be central to any discussion, that you cannot talk about 20th century civil rights struggle without discussing the leadership of women. Ms. Baker was the NAACP’s Director of Southern Branches in the 1940s, was the person who organized Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) after the 1955-56 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. She immediately recognized the significance and potential of the emerging student sit-in movement in 1960 and negotiated 800 dollars from Rev. King to bring student protest leaders together at her alma mater, Shaw College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Out of this meeting came SNCC. As much as anyone, and more than most, her hands and her brains shaped the theory and methods of community organizing which defines the modern civil rights movement. Her main lesson: Organize from the bottom up. “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
Although a number of historical forces mark the era of modern civil rights struggle, in my opinion, the convergence of some very particular and very critical forces laid the foundation for the modern mid-20th century struggle from which there would be no turning back: the commitment to democracy and human rights embedded in the rhetoric of World War Two’s fight against fascism, the accelerating struggles for decolonization in Africa and Asia, post war economic and educational opportunity in the United States with so much of the world in rubble, and finally: the1954 supreme court decision in Brown v. Board of Education which began the process of dismantling the legal framework which underwrote U.S. apartheid. Importantly, that decision engendered hope, one of the indispensable ingredients for resistance.
Fannie Lou Hamer picketing on Freedom Day, 1964, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
What uniquely marks the era, though, is that in large numbers, people who were usually spoken for by others, began to speak for themselves, and not only that, spoke for themselves in such a way that they could not be ignored. This is very important so let me restate it in a slightly different way: Ordinary people who were usually spoken for by sympathetic advocates, or of, by hostile white supremacists, began speaking for themselves saying “this is what we demand; this is the kind of society in which we wish to live.” Montgomery, Alabama’s mid-1950s bus boycott and the now almost completely forgotten student struggle in 1951 Farmville, Virginia may be the post-World War II events that best represent this. I also think the person who probably best symbolizes this is Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi. She was a sharecropper and timekeeper on a Delta cotton plantation who became not only a leader of Mississippi’s 1960s movement, but a great national voice for civil rights. In any case, maids, sharecroppers, day workers, cooks, janitors, farmers, factory workers, beauticians and barbers, as I said, ordinary people who were usually spoken for or of—these voices began to be heard, or at least could no longer be ignored in the mid 20th century. And, through organization and direct action they changed a way of life.
It is worth noting as we seem to have entered an era where civil liberties are being eroded in the name of national security that the civil rights movement forced the issue of civil liberties. In 1963 Bernard Lafayette, one of the leaders of the Nashville Student Movement organized the first civil rights mass meeting in Selma, Alabama. When Sheriff Jim Clark burst in with his deputies and disrupted the meeting he was armed with a warrant from the circuit judge empowering him to prevent “insurrection.” And in the months leading up to the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project approached, the state legislature passed a “criminal syndicalism,” law. It empowered local authorities to redefine organized civil rights struggle (or labor union organizing) as “terrorism” with 10 years of imprisonment possible for any person who, “By word of mouth or written words or personal conduct advocates, instigates, suggests, teaches or aids and abets criminal syndicalism or the duty, necessity, propriety or expediency of committing crime, criminal syndicalism, sabotage, violence or any other unlawful method of terrorism as a means of accomplishing or effecting a change in agricultural or industrial ownership or control or effecting any political or social change….” Whew! After the first group of people tried to register to vote in Sunflower County, Mississippi, white nightriders shot up the black community. In Ruleville, a tiny Delta town, two girls were wounded. I was arrested for the shooting, by the mayor, who said I had done it to gain publicity for a failing movement. I was let go the next morning. If also charged and convicted as a criminal syndicalist I could have had 10 years in jail added to whatever sentence I was given for the shooting.
Looking across today’s political landscape I cannot say that such oppressive legislation is no longer possible. Fear often leads to tyranny.
In the United States today, with civil rights and civil liberties so vulnerable, the most important lesson of the civil rights movement is still relevant. You have to make a demand for the kind of society in which you want to live—especially if you want to live in a free society. As we used to say, “Freedom is not free.”
And this brings us to the Movement for Black Lives today. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter wrote a year or so ago, “When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgement [that] Black poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country–one half of all people in prisons or jails–is an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of state violence.” Ms. Garza’s framing mirrors the concerns with systemic oppression that we held while fighting for change in the South.
I, for one, think their protests have been powerful and effective. Now they face the question of organizing beyond protest, a question we had to face too. A question we also have to face is how to support this young movement. We might begin by talking to them seriously about their ideas. I believe the earlier movement history I have offered here can be of some use to the young people working to maintain our ongoing struggle today. Obviously, while not everything from our era will be useful for 21st century activists, there is a core reality that strong movements are built by developing inclusive relationships capable of knitting together strategies formed as a result of listening to ordinary people’s experiences and ideas for change. More than any single thing this is what the movement did in order to engage in effective struggle. I think doing this in the black urban communities that now form the heart of black America is much more difficult than what we were faced with in the rural south of the 1960s, but the basic principle of digging in and finding a language that works remains fundamental. This is a conversation we do not have time for this morning. But I do know that this discussion has begun among some of the groups that form the Movement for Black Lives. So, as the Mozambicans used to say in their struggle for independence from Portugal—a Luta Continua, the struggle continues.
Finally, I ask you to consider this which can serve as a theme for today’s struggle as much as it served as the founding principles of the United States in 1787:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
For all the contradictions found throughout U.S. history this is the core, though still unrealized, ideal of the country. But do we really want to do this? Government as we’ve known it since the country’s inception has always been ambivalent and at many times, hostile to this ideal. And this idea is really the heart of my message to you this morning; what we learn in the passage of time from Martin Luther King’s emergence to the now of Black Lives Matter. It’s the emergence of ordinary people as leaders and spokespeople who are the real force for change—people who keep their eyes on the prize, as the old song goes. And today, this need is more urgent than it has ever been. And perhaps, too, more possible. I am, in effect, challenging each one of you to be the change. A luta continua.
Charles Cobb and SNCC veteran Philippa Jackson, who introducted Cobb at the church service.
Thank you.
Charlie Cobb
Peoples Congregational Church
Washington, DC
January 15, 2017
Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a journalist, and the author of a number of books including This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014). Read more.
Related Materials
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This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
Book – Non-fiction. By Charles E. Cobb Jr. 2015. 328 pages.
Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s.
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Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project
Book – Non-fiction. By Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr. 2001. 256 pages.
Algebra Project founder on math literacy and civil rights.