[Transcript edited to delete extraneous material in order to improve flow. Speakers were allowed to edit and expand their comments for clarity and completeness.]
Cole Bridgeforth Theresa El-Amin Martha Livingston Penny Patch Dorothy Zellner
Cole:
Great. I think we probably should get started or Bruce will yell at us because you started the recording. So, my name is Ron Bridgeforth. I prefer to be called Cole as you'll see on my name plate. So, the topic for this discussion is how our movement participation affected us. Are there any questions about that?
Dorothy:
Why don't you go ahead Cole and start out.
Cole:
Thank you. What did they want me to tell you? I worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). I actually founded the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office in Starkville, Mississippi in June of 1964. And I was in Mississippi until February of 1965. I think that's it.And so why don't we start out with Martha?
Martha:
I thought you were going to say some more, maybe what you had done.
Cole:
That's [my] short intro. The next one after everybody [makes their introduction] is a five minute [description]. Thank Bruce.
Martha:
Martha Livingston. Most people from SNCC don't know me because I worked with the Summer Community Organization Political Education Project (SCOPE) project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). So, I was in Atlanta for a couple of months in 1965.And the thing I'm most proud of from that work was canvasing for Julian [Bond] for the first time that he ran, and poll watching for him, in his first election [for Georgia state assembly].
But I hung out with a lot of SNCCers' at that time. So that's why I know anybody in this room.
Cole:
So, Martha, could you clarify what year that was?
Martha:
Sorry, 1965. So, it was from April till July or so of 1965. So, I can say I was there for a hot minute.
Cole:
Okay. And I'm going to call on Dorothy.
Dorothy:
Everybody's I think everybody will know me as "Dotty," I think. I go by Dorothy now, when I grew up. So, I was in SNCC and did various things there. And just what I want to add is that I am one of the six editors of Hands on the Freedom Plow. So basically, I don't really want to say anything more than now, but I was in SNCC for five years.
Cole:
When did you start?
Dorothy:
I started in June 1962 and I ended in May 1967.
Cole:
Thank you, Theresa.
Theresa:
Thank you. My name is Theresa El-Amin. Back in the movement days, I was known as Terry Shaw.And when I went to college my first year at Tuskegee [University] on a nice little scholarship it was 1965. And so, that was the year that Sammy Younge was killed. So when I hit the campus, it was on fire. All we would seem to be doing was going to meetings. And Jean Wiley was my communications one-on-one instructor, and she invited Stokely Carmichael to class. And he said, "I'm for Black Power. Will you join me?" And we all raised our hands.
And so, I quituated and started going back and forth with CJ [Charles Jones?] and going to the freedom house there in Tuskegee. And Jennifer Lawson, I can still see her with her little jeans and her little camera. And so, I went back to Atlanta after somebody called the FBI on Mukasa, Willie Ricks, 'cause he was our campus organizer.
And so, I got back to Atlanta and my mother was so mad at me. She said, "You screaming 'Black Power,' you get a job." So I got a job at the phone company, joined the union and became a union organizer. And so, I guess we'll talk more about that stuff later, but it was the thing that changed my life. That moment in that classroom in Jean Wiley's classroom with Stokely Carmichael. So, it was like 'A-Ha' that's who I am. Just 17 years old when I hit it.
And it was so funny coming back into Atlanta, and Atlanta was such a mess and Stokely and John Lewis arguing and all of that. And I was a volunteer at the [SNCC] office because John Lewis set me up as a volunteer at the office. And that's where I met Faye Bellamy. And so, I remember everything and it was just the best time of my life because it made me who I am today. Sorry to be talking so much. Thanks.
Cole:
Thank you. You'll have a chance to talk more. Penny Patch, break, take us home.
Penny:
Thank you. I worked for SNCC in Southwest Georgia and Mississippi for three years from 1962 to 1965. And Theresa, I was 18 when I left college and joined SNCC. So, I was pretty young too and I guess I'll tell you more of my story in our five minutes. Is that what you want me to do Cole?
Cole:
Perfect. Any questions before we move to the next phase? And in this phase, I'm going to go last, but each of us has roughly five minutes, probably could go over six and I'll probably say please.And remember that after we do this five minute piece, each of us, we then come back for a general conversation. That's a conversation. And as long as people are respectful of other people's time and need to communicate, it should go pretty free flowing. And you won't hear much from me other than my thoughts.
So, who would like to start with their five minute discussion of how your participation in the movement affected you. See, the way Bruce writes this is 'how our movement participation affected us.' And I don't think that's the question. The question is 'how it affected you.' That makes sense? Who'd like to start ?
Theresa:
Felt like I was saying it all in my little supposed to be short introduction. But I can't just begin to say how important the experience was to be there with Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. When we came in Atlanta and we were throwing rocks at the police in my neighborhood of Dixie Hills, in Atlanta, and to be so close to so many people who knew so much.I was just 17, I'll never forget. I was dating Stokely Carmichael's friend, Joel Smith, in Atlanta. And we were in a restaurant, Pasco Brothers restaurant, on what was then Hunter Street, which became Martin Luther king Jr. drive. And Stokely said to me, "How old are you?" And I said, "I'm going to be 18 on June 27." And then Stokely looked at me and he looked at Joel and he said to Joel, "Joel, isn't your birthday June 28th?" Joel said, "Yes." And Stokely's birthday was June 26.
And then Stokely said, "26,27,28, what does this mean?" And I always saw him as a kind of spiritual visionary. And he thought that it was significant that we were there together at that moment. And our birthdays were 26, 27 and 28. Remembering all of that now is so important to me because I'm a brain aneurysm survivor. In 1994, they were pronouncing me dead in a Boston hospital.
But when my mother said get a job, I got a job at the phone company and joined the union. So, I was Communication Workers of America (CWA) and I was CWA for 20 years.
And then I joined 9to5 with Karen Nusbaum. And she recruited me to be an organizer in the new union district 9to5. So I'm a 9to5'er too.
[Founded in 1973, 9to5 is a multi-state organization of working women fighting for econmic justice, equal pay, and equal rights for women.]And so I moved to Cleveland, Ohio and I organized the Cleveland public library at the university of Cincinnati. So, it made me an organizer, which I still am to this very day. I started the Southern Anti-Racism Network (SARN) in 1998.
[SARN is a network of activists who cross the lines of race, gender, class, age, and immigration status to build community relationships in the South and develop campaigns and projects in to end racial disparities in criminal justice, economic opportunities, education, environmental justice and health care.]So, I'm the founder and I do community organizing. I started out in Durham, North Carolina, and then we expanded into several states. So, I moved here to Columbus, Georgia, and I'm still very much out there organizing. Now I have serious arthritic issues and I walk with a cane sometimes, but I'm still out there with the young people.
And I'm working with so many young people in their twenties and their thirties and they call me "Mama T." So, I just love my life because I'm Mama T now. And so, I'm working my way out so that in 2025, when I turn 77, I'm hanging it up. I'm 73 now. So that's my plan. Because I think I met enough folks that I could say, I love being mama T, let me sit on the porch, wave as as you go marching back. So, it's been a great run for me and I'm still enjoying it right now, but I think it's time for me to let the folks that I'm working with who are more than capable, just take it over. Because I want to rest a little bit. I really do. Thank you.
Cole:
Thank you. Beautiful. You're a hero, Who'd like to go next?
Dorothy:
I'll go next.Basically to say, SNCC was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. And I have to tell you, I get very weepy now, so just ignore me. I'll just have tissues and everything.
I have a sort of unusual background in the sense that I'm what they call a "red diaper" baby. I'm a child of the Left. So, I didn't have some of the difficulties that other people had in going South. I was living in New York. Everybody said, go, go, go. My mother was terrified, but my father was very thrilled that I was doing things that he couldn't do. And basically, what I've said ever since is that SNCC was the greatest collection of people that I ever saw. I'm sure you all agree with me? The smartest, the bravest, the funniest people, people don't know about the humor.
And I remember so many meetings where people were so funny that we were literally falling on the floor laughing. And so, I consider myself unbelievably lucky that I was able to be in SNCC.
And Theresa, I don't know you, but I've heard about you for years. I mean, years and years, it's got to be 20 years that I've heard about you. And Martha, I just met actually about two weeks ago in the flesh, but I've seen her name all over the place on the SNCC ListServe. And Penny, we worked together for years, 15 years on this book. And Cole, I do know your name, your name 'Ron' is familiar to me. And that must be from the summer of '64 because we were in Greenwood. And where did you say, in Starkville ?
Cole:
Starkville, which is in Mississippi.
Dorothy:
I knew your name. So, politically speaking, SNCC had a tremendous role to play. I think the historians haven't even started to even examine SNCC, although — and usually we get completely slighted. If you read the New York Times, you wouldn't even think that SNCC even existed, but someday the historians will deal with us.Because first of all, what we did was we got rid of most of the terror in the south. I guess I'm talking about the second thing instead of the first thing. Sorry about that. But looking at SNCC, we had the beginnings of the women's movement, the beginnings of Black Power, the beginnings almost of everything.
So basically, I ran the Boston office of SNCC. I also worked in Mississippi in the summer of '64. I also went to Danville, VA. Wrote a pamphlet about Danville. Worked in Atlanta, worked with Jim Forman. Forman, I think is one of the completely unsung geniuses. And I hope in the next 10 years, people will come around to writing books about him. And I could sit here and talk to you for 10 hours about Forman.
So if the question is, how were we affected? I'm sitting here as a lucky person. That's how I was affected. Luck happened to be in the right place at the right time, at the right age. And I'm older than some of you. I'm 83 and a half, but still going to strong. And when we get to part two [of this discussion], I'll say, "What's SNCC."
Well, I guess I can say this, as white people, SNCC challenged us. How are we going to live in this society as white people? How are we going to join with the Black community in moving this country forward? To me, the country is in terrible condition, probably worse than it's been for years. I see all these fascists knocking at the gate and those of us who are white have to encourage other white people. We have to get out in the community. We haven't done it yet. Anyway, that's a whole other story. But anyway, that's basically what I want to say.
Cole:
I do have a question. How did your participation in SNCC movement affect the decisions that you made throughout your life?
Dorothy:
SNCC has been central to my entire life. There's no question about it. I was going to say that SNCC said to us, especially to the white people, "Where are you going to work? How are you to work in your community?" And from 2002, I have been working as a Jewish person in the Jewish community to advocate solidarity with Palestinians. So that came directly from SNCC. And SNCC said, "This is what you need to do," and that's what I've tried to do.
Cole:
Thank you. It's either Martha or Penny.
Penny:
The years since SNCC totally transformed my life, they moved me out of whatever mainstream white life I might have led into a completely different reality. As I said, I came into SNCC as an 18 year old, just having finished my freshman year at Swarthmore college in Pennsylvania. Dorothy has her weird background. My background is also weird in that I grew up in China, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, in the aftermath of world war II. My father was in the U.S. foreign service, which will tell you something about the class I started off in.I knew a lot about war and the Holocaust and genocide and less about Black history and American racism. And yet, out of a determination to not be a bystander, when students from Black HBCUs were recruiting white students from white colleges in the area to come and join the sit-ins on the Eastern shore of Maryland, that they were running. I went and that involved going and getting arrested on the weekends and then coming back and trying to go to school.
And there I also met SNCC folks — who were up recruiting. They weren't looking for white girls, they were recruiting Black students. But what happened is I got a phone call that may of 1962 [1963?]. Charles Sherrod, who was the SNCC project director in Southwest Georgia had decided to try to have an integrated on-the-ground field project. SNCC people thought he was crazy, but as things went in those days, if you wanted to do it, okay.
So that summer, a group of us young people from the North, I think four or five Black women and men, several white guys, and me came south to Southwest Georgia. And I was the only white woman. I had a huge amount to learn and I was an experiment. And I will say that the experiment contained its successes and its failures. In the year and a half I was in Georgia, I worked in the office. I learned to type, I worked in rural counties and in Albany canvassing on the ground, which was like, it created danger for the community that I was in. And yet it also was navigated. And I did it. Sherrod had me doing it.
[Referring to the danger of racist violence on the part of white segregationists who were enraged at the sight of a white woman working with Blacks on a basis of social equality. As part of the southern way of life that southern whites so cherished, Black men and women could — and frequently were — brutally lynched for even the slightest implication of defying the racial hierarchy or asserting any sense of equality.]And I learned about keeping going through fear and exhaustion, which has helped me throughout the rest of my life. And then in January of 1964, I went to Jackson to work on the applications for the Mississippi Summer Project [Freedom Summer]. And then after two months in Greenwood I ended up in Panola County [MS]. And Cole, I think it was in that year, I don't know if we met, but I certainly heard of Ron Bridgeforth.
So, my biggest most transformative lessons that have embedded with me for the rest of my life is everything that I learned from living in Black communities. I learned about bottom-up organizing. I learned about taking guidance from the people you were organizing. I learned working across race and class. I learned about the power of community, the power of song. All of which lives in me and that I have shared. I live in the largely white state of Vermont, not completely white, but that's what I do, is work in the white community of Vermont.
In the end, I left SNCC in the South as the process of moving white people out of the organization, what's happening, there was no vote or anything for at least another year, but the handwriting was on the wall. And we were being told our job was to work in the white community. And I will be honest and say that in the aftermath, the years in the aftermath, I was a mess. I was lost. I was completely alienated from white people and the white world. And I think as many of us can attest, probably I also had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which was not defined at that time.
And yet in time I recovered and I found a path into feminism and women's reproductive health. And I became a nurse midwife. Also in the 1980s, and I tell you, it took me 15 plus years, I found my way back into anti-racism work and found it in the white community. And it's taken various forms.
I've taught for years about racism and criminal justice to largely white working class students in our local college. I work now with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), which again is an organization with hopefully accountability to Black led and Black organizations, but we're white folks working in the white community. And I also found my way back to some of my SNCC comrades, including Dorothy Zellner.
Martha:
Wow. I guess that leaves me.
Penny:
And Cole after you.
Martha:
No. I understood that, but I know that Cole said you wanted to go last, am I correct?
Cole:
That's what Bruce told me.
Martha:
So this has actually been wonderful, but also very helpful in me thinking about how to frame in five minutes or less my entire life, because there're some pieces that I picked up from each of you. So Theresa, I actually spent time in Tuskegee and I met Sammy Younge Jr. There was a SNCC conference, a student conference that took place there.After I left SCOPE, I spent some time with Worth Long and we traveled around Alabama a bit and then went to Highlander [Folk School, today Highlander Research & Education Center in TN] where there was a movement poetry workshop for a week. That was really a remarkable transformative experience. And speaking of PTSD, Penny, it was people who were bruised and it was a great time for people to come together and really just enjoy and write poetry together. It was an amazing experience.
I was also a "red diaper" baby. It's a disgusting expression for somebody who was born on the Left. It would've been hard for me to be anything other than a Left person in my life. My parents literally met on a picket line. So, I'm union in my DNA. I'm a public health professor and I am the campus president of my union.
So, my roles are split 50-50. I started out in civil rights when I was like 11, because that's the kind of family I had. And the other piece that's real important I think to understand about me is that I grew up in a low income housing project. So, I didn't grow up in a white world. I grew up in a very multi complexioned universe. So my life experience was very different, I think, from a lot of other folk who came into the movement. I started organizing around civil rights stuff, literally when I was like 12 years old in junior high.
And I worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in New York City. I just went to their office after school and stuffed envelopes and stuff. And my parents moved to Queens out of the housing project that I grew up in downtown Brooklyn. And at that moment, CORE said, "We are starting a Queens chapter of CORE. We wonder if we could use your house?" And given my family, they said "yeah, bring it." And so that's how that chapter was formed or where that chapter was formed.
And from there, I started college when I was 16. The movement was happening and I love that term you used Theresa, "I quituated," I never heard that before. It's brilliant. And that was me. And so I found the SCOPE project.
I was going to work, I don't know if people, this was just completely random. Did anybody here know Bennié Luchion? So Bennié was an SCLC organizer originally from New Orleans. And he worked in Gadsden AL and he had a freedom house in Gadsden and I was going to go work at his freedom house. I met him randomly on a bus because some of us from Queens College went down and did a student exchange at Talladega College AL for a week. And then coming back on the bus there he was, and he sat next, whatever. Anyway and I was going to go do that.
And then Selma happened and he deemed it too dangerous for me as a white woman to go be in his freedom house at that moment. So at that point, he linked me up with the SCOPE project. It was not a happy marriage. Hosea Williams was the head of the SCOPE project and not the greatest boss and pretty abusive. And so, I didn't stick around for the whole summer. While I was there, I was the typist for the group, apart from the SCLC paid staff — whatever. Met a lot of wonderful people, then went off with Worth and traveled around for a while. And that's where I got to meet Sammy Young Jr.
And oh yeah, I wanted to tell you guys one other story. And that is that when I was working with CORE, and the stuff was going on in Maryland and the Freedom Rides were, all that stuff was happening, and I was 15 and I was gung-ho.
[From May through September of 1961, CORE and SNCC were recruiting students for Freedom Rides across the South from Maryland to Texas, many of them encountering and enduring violence, arrest, and prison.]And my parents were lefties and they're like, We do not want our child on that bus [due to the danger]. Now, how are we going to figure out a way to tell her she can't be on that bus, but we can't talk to her like that because that's not who we are. And we know she'll say, The hell with you I'm going on the bus. So my dad, genius that he was, he said, I talked to [my] and he's got a summer job for you, but you have to start on Monday. So that meant I couldn't go on the bus. Slick, very smart. That was really smart.
I guess we all had some PTSD. I remained friendly with people I remained friendly with for a long time. I last saw Worth in Atlanta where he lives in I want to say 2017. I was there for a conference. Theresa I just want to — and I'll shut up in one more minute Cole — And that is to say union, and working class organizing, and 'we are the 99%' that's in my blood. It's in my DNA. It's what I've spent my life doing.
And you see the sign behind me, 'UNION.' I put that up actually today because I was having a meeting with my boss on Zoom — as the campus union president, I want to make sure that that was in his face. So that's me. That's in my DNA. That's till I die.
[Later email clarification by Martha:
At the time of the SNCC reunion I was chair of the Public Health department at State University of New York (SUNY) Old Westbury campus on Long Island. [Though] I no longer hold that position, until 6/23 I remain president, of the Old Westbury chapter of United University Professions (UUP), AFT Local 2190, representing professors and professional staff at the SUNY colleges.]And one other comment, Theresa, funny about you saying that you're going to sit on your porch. I was honored to meet Bill Bailey, who was a left wing working class organizer for his whole life. We became friends for the last 10 years or so of his life. He lived in San Francisco and I went to visit him once in the 1980s. And I said, 'How do you keep on doing it?' He was like that's the stupidest question in the world. How do I keep on doing that? The world is still a mess. You have to, you don't have a choice. You have to keep on doing it. So Theresa, I wanted say good luck sitting on that porch because I think we're going to see you marching past your porch for the foreseeable future. Okay. I'll stop there. Thank you.
Cole:
So before I start, let me take care of one housekeeping piece, when I finish, we're going to take a 10 minute break and you don't [turn] off anything. Oh Lord, it's technology something. And I'll remind you again. You don't want to cut off anything. You may want to mute your computer. You can stop the video, but don't leave. All right.So, okay. Who am I? Wow. All right. Oh, how did SNCC affect me? I was 19 when — I don't know if anybody knows Ike Coleman. He and I were at Knoxville College, it's Presbyterian college of about 800 students in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was about, had about 10 white students, exchange students. Other than that, it was a Black college. Marion Barry was a grad student at [Fisk College] in Tennessee. I think it was in chemistry or something. I, yeah, I never thought about the irony of that.
[Marion Barry was a founding member and the first Chairman of SNCC. He later went on to become mayor of Washington DC.]But he recruited folks to come from Knoxville to go into Summer Project and only two of us volunteered to go. The administration told us if we left and went south, we weren't going to be welcome back — because they didn't have to say — because we're going to be messing with their funding base [from white donors]. If they got seen as a hotbed of civil rights. So we weren't doing much in school anyway. So we went.
So ten of us were taken to Columbus, Mississippi after a week of orientation in Ohio, the same weekend or right after Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney disappeared.
Starkville is about 50 miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi [where the three were lynched], but it's a very different town because it had Mississippi State University there. Of course we couldn't go on the campus [because at that time it was segregated white-only], but it did set a certain tone about what they wanted in that community. And they didn't want any dead civil rights workers. So that was the deal.
A young man by the name of Steven Frazier, he and I were dropped off every morning in Starkville. After about 10 days, they started dropping us off in local communities. He was a young Jewish kid from New York city. He was 18. And so we're supposed to set up a project office and do all of that stuff. And it's just totally unreasonable — looking back as an adult. But so we went through people what go through, we did get an office established, we ran a project.
How did it affect me? Changed the course of my life because as a young Black man in this country, I was like, okay, where do I fit? I know what I'm reading in the history books and I'm very good at that, but there's something fundamentally wrong. We've known that all the way from living in Compton [CA] in high school, but I didn't know what the mechanism was.
And what I saw in Mississippi was the mechanism. Now I grew up — because I spent my first seven years in semirural Arkansas. When I got to Compton, I had this little funny accent, wore glasses and I was smart mouth. So I learned to fight, and I learned about bullies. So when I got to Mississippi and I met the sheriff and particularly the chief of police, I recognized them. And so ultimately, I didn't know this until, oh, in the last five, ten years, I've started to talk about that experience in Mississippi, to everything from third graders to graduate students.
I didn't really realize until this period that what I was there to do was to survive, to break the hold of white supremacy on the minds of folks in that community because everybody's watching on this one. They're like — middle school and elementary kids would just follow us around. And the chief of police would get his bullhorn out and harangue us about how we were "agitators" and all of that. But adult Black people said, "They're going to get themselves killed and I'm not going to risk my life and my whatever I've accumulated on that."
White folks were like, hmmmm, they're going to let those — yeah — get away with that? Because if they do, something fundamentally has changed. They weren't that logical, but that was the reality. So my job was to stay alive and prove that you could walk the streets that was of a small town in Mississippi and speak your mind and go to jail and come back and all of that stuff. And it was the coming back that was important I think. They expected that jail would break us, but that's not what happened.
I was in Atlantic City in August of '64.
[Referring to the national convention of the Democratic Party in Atlantic City, NJ, where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenged the national Democratic Party leadership to seat an integrated delegation from Mississippi that had been democratically elected rather than the all-white "regular" delegation that had been selected by the traditional "good 'ole boy" crony system in violation of party rules. Rather than risk alienating white voters in the South, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and other leaders of the party's northern liberal wing betrayed the promises they had made to Black and liberal voters by siding with the segregationists and preventing the MFDP delegates from being seated.]But when I left Mississippi in 65, I was pretty disillusioned. [I mean] Atlantic City had that effect because we really were true believers in the American dream, at least I was. And so when I saw that [thrown] back in our faces like it means nothing — what are we supposed to do now? There's this wonderful book out by, okay, I don't want to digress. Stay with it. So I left Mississippi. I was young. I was a cowboy, give me a car, I'll take you wherever you want to go. [So when] some people [would] say we've heard of you, well I don't know if it was good [or not] because we were pretty crazy.
So came back to the West Coast, moved to San Francisco, worked with Mike Miller as an educator and fundraiser in the Friends of SNCC office in San Francisco. Drifted into the [Black] Panther underground essentially. We were organizing young Black men for self defense. I never was nonviolent. I just, you have to pick your places. And as you know, if you're out there in a country road, you better fight or run. If you can't run, you better fight. If you're in a demonstration, yeah, you're nonviolent. I was never in a demonstration. I don't know why that was, right time, right place.
Many of you might know Bill Light, Ron Carver. They came through [the Starkville] project and started building. In fact Bill Light took it over after I left, but they had that interesting phone exchange the night that Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner disappeared because I think Ron was at Atlanta on the line and Bill was in Jackson and they were trying to get somebody to go look after him.
So when I left Mississippi disillusioned and radicalized and living in the Bay Area, yeah, I wound up part of that. And then in about 1968, November, I caught a case. It was exchange of gunfire with three policemen down in a place called South San Francisco. But the lawyers that we had, it was three of us, the lawyers that we had said if I went to jail, I wasn't coming out because they had — the judge didn't get to tell you how long you're going to serve, the parole board did. And that was that way in California till about 1970, '71. So I chose not to go to jail. I chose not to surrender.
[I] moved to Africa. Lived there two and a half years, came back. Things were worse than when I left. Got married, had two sons or she had two sons, I supported. And because this is before the time of computers, simply reinvented who I was. Everything from name to whatever. Went to college because I never had a real reason to go to college before, it wasn't hard, it just, when you have two kids and your best skill set is your back, college becomes more attractive.
So I went to college, became an educator, college counselor, 20 years as an administrator and ultimately a union leader. I joined the National Education Association because that was what the faculty was part of at that college. And when they promoted me to faculty, I was like, okay, I'm home. The nuts and bolts of unions and contracts, you need lawyers. So my job was to get lawyers. So I think that's, oh, just to finish that cycle. How did [I] get out of that? In 2011 my wife and I after being married over 50 years and she grew up in San Francisco, we decided to return to California and we did.
So I wound up going to court and the judge didn't see any good reason to have me serve out that sentence, which would've been the same sentence. I wasn't going to get out until somebody decided that they couldn't see any light in my eyes. And the lawyers were right. They told me you may not want to do this because I had the emotional intelligence of a gnat [at] the age of twenty, from my early twenties. I got shot that night. They put me in a hospital, the next morning I get on the floor and I start doing pushups on one foot and two hands. They said, put him back in a cell. I mean I just, yeah.
So I'm all about the ancestors and I don't have much other explanation why I get to sit here now because I made every foolish choice I think I — I didn't learn to run when it was time to run though.
Okay. So that's how it affected me. Even in my administration as 20 years as administrator, I'm using organizing techniques with staff of 30, that came out of my experience in the South. You recognize what do people want? Will they get a little money. They got contract, what they really want is respect. So then we start organizing student groups and did all kinds of educational stuff. It's been a really nice ride. It's all about the values that I learned in the South.
And one last thing I'll say is that as a young Black man in 1964, self-esteem was not easy to come by. But when I got to Mississippi, I saw in the eyes of local people, as we call them, a reflection of myself and what I could be and should be, that was validating. And that's always given me strength.
All right, this is harder than we think. Huh? Okay. Let's take a 10 minute break and we come back. We're just going to open it up for conversation.
[Break]
Cole:
So what's the big question [Evaluating the Freedom Movement]. How the heck do we get here?Yes, Dorothy.
Dorothy:
Well, I wanted to start out because I've thought a lot about this. I've given talks for 35 years probably to student groups and other people. And like I said, SNCC was unbelievable and fabulous, but I do have an honest evaluation of our work and the success is what's tremendous. If you read history, which I'm doing now in my dotage, reading about Reconstruction and John Brown and everything else, we did this colossal work in five years of doing what had not been able to be done the previous 80 years. And we really broke the back of segregation. And we also diminished, I won't say eliminated, but diminished the terror on the ground in Mississippi. This was colossal.We weren't prepared for Atlantic City. And Ron, I really appreciate what you said. I've been saying this for years that I think we actually thought we were going to win in Atlantic City and we were not prepared when we lost. And we were not prepared for the stab in the back from the white liberals that we thought were our friends. And I think after that, that we were [in] a sort of depression — a group depression and an individual depression, because I hear what Penny was saying also sort of took over. And that was a big error. And I remember at the time talking with Forman about that and we really should have been ready. Especially those of us who had done any kind of studying, I'm talking about Black people and white people.
And I think the second problem that we, the second evaluation is that while we did these tremendous things, we did not alter basically the economic relationships at all. And I don't think that we really had an economic outlook and that is what is going to kill us in the end, is that we don't really — I'm saying "now," the movement such as it is — we don't have a coherent way of moving forward so that we understand that race and class are twins and you can't do one without the other, that's sort of shorthand.
The other thing is the way, I don't want to dwell on this, but this has often been an issue when — especially when I've been talking — it's about white people leaving SNCC. And I remember at the time being totally, totally distraught, and [I] was distraught for a long time.
So looking back, I think there — This is all hindsight that the way it was done and what our thoughts were at the time was a mistake. And I think we might have been able to figure out that some white people could actually go into the white community, which is what Bob and I were prepared to do. But then how are we going to function in SNCC? If it was going to be an all Black organization, it was going to be really hard. And at the time I said, and I believe to this day that it's very hard to, almost impossible to organize white people in a vacuum because then you have, it's very easy for them to be fascists, become fascists.
And that's why SURJ has learned that lesson. And they really work closely with Black organizations to avoid that. So is my time up? I'm not looking at my watch watch. So I think we have plenty of lessons. Those are all lessons that we have to learn it seems to me and pass on to the young people.
And just to say, Theresa, I don't know if you're back, if you're there or not. Are you there? I can't tell. I don't think she's there. Anyway, I want to just mention that in my long career, I had also organized a union. I just wanted her to know that, that I organized a union when I was briefly a practical nurse in Louisiana. I just wanted you to know that since we all seem to be touching on labor stuff.
So I think we have some big lessons to learn. I hope that this conference is going to communicate some of those lessons, I don't know. I spoke to Cortland Cox today and he said so far, the registration is upwards of 850 people. So it's going to be unbelievable, but I don't know. Anyway, those are the lessons that I look back on that I've talked a lot about. I've talked about this publicly on the radio, on television, everything, it's nothing new, but those are the lessons that I would take the end.
Theresa:
Well, Dorothy, I am really struck by what you've said because the centrality of the South in all of this is what is so significant. And to have not learned that lesson is just really getting to me, Dorothy, because when I entered SNCC in '65 in Tuskegee, I was fully aware that SNCC was founded in 1960 at Shaw University, after all of those sit-ins that went on. And we were on fire as students and how massive a Black student movement it was. It was a massive Black student movement in the South. There is no way to deny that. And I am just so disappointed when I think back to the SNCC 50th anniversary [Conference] and all of the little whispering that was going on among the white comrades about that hurt that you felt from back then. It was really abominable, abominable.And I think that if we really tell the truth about what happened and the whole call for white people to do what they were called to do back then is the same call that we make today. Because the white people who are in those trailer parks, who won't live in public housing because it's overwhelmingly Black and they would rather live among themselves in abject poverty, in a trailer park than to be among us. And what I have said to people in recent years, white people who are like, "Oh no, it is too hard. It's just too hard to go over there, talking to those other white people. We're not like them." Well, the fact that they are like they are, and I can't go there means that you have to go there. And so the spirit of John Brown has not existed. It's just not existed. And that is fundamentally the problem. And what I take from this.
So in 2007, when Highlander celebrated its 75th anniversary, and many of us were there, oh I'll never forget seeing Fay Bellamy and her hair was so gray. And I was just crying because I still remembered everybody as they were. And to see everybody so old, it was like, it's devastating to me.
And I started the Ella Baker Tour. So I started working with students at East Tennessee State [University]. And it's so funny because Ash-Lee [Woodard Henderson], who was the first person who said, "I'll be a part of it," and now she's a Co-Director at Highlander. That's how my life has been shaped by connecting because I was just nobody. I was just a little volunteer. And for me to pull together the Ella Baker Tour and to bring Bob Zellner together, bring Gwen Patton together, bring [Althea Gaza?] together, to bring all these people together.
And I set up these things with the students and we went to the campuses and that's how I met Isaac Coleman. Isaac Coleman and our Ira Grupper were on the stage with me and Athea and some other folks and we were telling our stories at the Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina. And when Isaac started telling about when he was in jail and what they had eaten and everything, and Ira was like, "I was in the same jail." And they figured out that they were in the same jail together at the same time. So this is how massive the movement was.
I go to conferences and I'm speaking about my SNCC experience. And Linda Burnham says, "I was in SNCC" and I'm like, where were you? And she says, Greenwood, Mississippi. Where were you in? I say, Lowndes County and that's how massive the movement was.
We were so many until this very day, I still meet people and I find out you were in SNCC too. So it is just so important, Dorothy, that we understand that it was a mass movement, not really an organization. It was a mass movement. We were so spread out. We were so spread out when Mukasa Willie Ricks came and got us from the campuses, he married one of the students that he had recruited from a campus. And we were all there.
And my instructor at Tuskegee, who was a Zionist from Israel, who tried to get me to go back to Israel and be his concubine and I was like, "No, no, no white man. No, no, no." He called my mother and told my mother that the SNCC Negroes had kidnapped me. And that was why I hadn't come home and she needed to call the FBI. I found out many years later that my mother had called the FBI.
Mukasa Willie Ricks knew the story and when I saw him one time, he was like, "Yeah, I'm the one who stole you from your mama." And that's when he told me that story about the FBI. And I went to my mother and I was like, "Mama, did you do that?" She said, "Yeah, your teacher called me from Tuskegee. And he told me that I needed to call the FBI because they had kidnapped you. You hadn't called, you hadn't come home, school was out. And I didn't know what to do." That is how the movement was so powerful. We had our enemies and we had our friends and we had just the movement.
And when I worked at the SNCC office, people would come banging on the door and my job was to go to the door and say, who is it? And then I'd shout back upstairs to Stokely and say who it is. And Stokely would say, "Don't open that door. He's an agent." I said, "But Stokely it's Jimmy from Tuskegee." He said, "I told you, don't open that door. He's an agent." And I just came back upstairs and left Jimmy out there. There were so many agents among us. And it seems like some of the leaders knew who they were. But the agents, some of them I think were into trying to work or whatever. They may have been reporting back. But that's how powerful the movement was, Dorothy, but it was based on the southern freedom movement of struggle. When we got the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 that's when I entered. So I'm just sorry that you talking about Atlantic City, Dorothy, I'm really baffled by that, sorry.
Cole:
Have any of you all been able to do this before, make these kinds of recordings?
Dorothy:
I've been on many of them and they've been recorded.
Cole:
Who'd like to go next? And there's no need to follow anybody else's strand.
Theresa:
I'm sorry. I turned off my camera, because I'm eating. I'm listening, so please speak. I know I kind of lit up a little fire here, but speak. I'd love to hear what you have to say based on what I said, if you have anything. Thank you.
Cole:
Which way would you like to take the conversation? Penny, Martha, or I guess me?
Penny:
I — Oh, God. It's so confusing. But it was indeed a mass movement of Black students and then of Black communities in the South, and I think to get really personal about it, it took me — I mean, I got absorbed into SNCC really early and although — Theresa, I don't know if this is answering you. I'm not sure where this is going, right? But, so I got absorbed into SNCC in some of the pretty early years, and there were sort of these two things happening. One is, I was welcomed and taken in, and on the other hand, I was — You know, as far as Black SNCC people were concerned, I was always white.There was a period when I have to admit, I kind of thought I was Black and it took years in the aftermath for me to get pleased enough with who I was in order to then take action again. So I don't know how this speaks to anything. I agree with you completely Theresa and I also, you know — I don't, I can't remember one SNCC conference from the next, but I guess you really heard white people talking about their pain. I don't remember that myself, but yeah, white people had pain and Black people had a different kind of pain, and here we are, you know?
Cole:
I'd like to jump in a little bit. You know, I was not a southern, I was not from the South. I was from California. So that made me kind of an oddity. The numbers I've heard were about 950 student [volunteers] came south in the Summer of '64. Only about 50 of us were Black.I think, you know, Bob Moses and the other folks who made the decision to bring in white kids in the summer of '64, made a very calculated political decision. You know, on one hand, it did undermine the agency of local folks, but on the other hand, they were going to keep putting us in rivers until something else happened.
You know, Mike Miller was one of my mentors and still remains a friend over in San Francisco. He talks about, I think it was Peg Leg Bates, maybe.
[Referring to the SNCC meeting held at the Peg Leg Bates blues-themed resort in the Catskill Mountains of NY.]That conference, and the level of pain that comes out of him when he talks about that experience. You know, it's like being thrown out of your house. You've risk everything, and now you're being told — But I almost feel like the disillusionment and pain we went through as an organization, after Atlantic City, caused us to eat our own. You know, we turned on each other. It wasn't white volunteers fault that America was America, and we could not have accomplished as much as we did, in the South, without the support of white students. I mean, it's just, that's the reality.
Dorothy:
Could I just add something, Ron? Oh, I'm calling you Ron. Sorry.
Cole:
As long as it's mealtime, you can call me whatever you want to call me.
Dorothy:
Okay. I really didn't want to go down this route, you know about, "Oh, the poor white people." I was really adding that on a list, to be honest. If we're going to be honest about the things that we could have done better, that was one of them. I totally, it took me years, but I understand it. I understand it, and I have to say that if I had been Black, sitting there, after everything, after what everybody had gone through, was I going to feel comfortable having a bunch of white people make a decision that was going to affect me? So I understand it.I don't even want to... So I'm sorry that I even raised it because I hope it won't monopolize our discussion about this, but I do feel that Atlantic City was a big, big factor. I still, I don't think we're over that yet, and I certainly don't think the movement as a whole, the way it is now, has successfully embraced what I said before, which is race and class. But I don't want to talk about the poor white people, you know?
Theresa:
Dorothy, Dorothy, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "Atlantic City."
Dorothy:
I know.
Theresa:
So can somebody please explain to me what happened in Atlantic City? I was deep in the South for the short time I was there.
Dorothy:
What happened — Yes. Sorry. Very sorry that I did shorthand. I'll be very brief. In Atlantic City, the Freedom Democratic Party challenged the Mississippi delegation. Had they succeeded, and if you watch the movie Freedom on My Mind, you will see that Bob Moses and a lot of other people thought that we were going to succeed, and Mrs. Hamer made her famous speech there, and the reason that we failed was that the white-liberals that people had counted on stabbed us in the back.
Theresa:
Well, I know exactly what... If you had said the Democratic Party convention in 1964, I would have understood, definitely, because Fannie Lou Hamer said, "I won't take no two seats".
Dorothy:
That's right. That's right. So —
Theresa:
I remember that clearly, but I had no idea what you were talking about.
Dorothy:
Oh, very sorry.
Theresa:
Because you never mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer's name and you never mentioned the Democratic Party convention. That's why I didn't know what you were talking about.
Dorothy:
Okay. So that's what I'm saying. I'm sorry that I wasn't clear enough. Okay, that's all I wanted to say, Cole.
Martha:
Can you remind me what my assignment is for this, this portion?
Cole:
Well, just continuing to explore how this experience has changed your life, and how this experience — You've seen how it affects people around you, your family, even.
Martha:
Yeah. I can't help thinking about this through the lens of BLM and what's happened to us in the last year and a half.[Referring to the Black Lives Matter organizing and protesting that began in 2013 around the issue of racially-motivated police killings and abuse and other forms of racism. In May and June of 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, millions of Americans of all races came together around the slogan "Black lives matter" and participated in a mass upsurge of anti-racism protests across the country.]It's been — You know, we were in the middle of the pandemic shutdown. I did not join one single Black Lives Matter rally because I wasn't joining anything, because I wasn't buying my own groceries. I was privileged to be able to sit at home and have working class people who made a lot less money than me — not that I'm wealthy — bring food to my home for a year. So I was taking this stuff seriously. I was not out in the streets. It hurt my heart not to be out in the streets, but there was no way, in the middle of that pandemic.
A lot of stuff went down on my campus, around anti-racism. A lot of younger faculty, all of a sudden discovered that they were white and all of a sudden discovered that there was racism in the world, and I salute them for that discovery and for wanting to explore the issues, but they could not have been — There's some people that were really, really horrible to me personally.
Not that I was really engaging so much — I mean, so for example, Cole, take a look at — You see your hand? Your reaction hand, your Zoom reaction hand [the "hand-raised icon]. You see the color of that hand? You went into the system and you altered the complexion of that hand in order to have that be a black hand. I know that because the default setting for [someone's] hand is that sort of weird yellowy thing. In the midst of all this stuff that was going on, in the midst of us moving our classes and all our meetings to Zoom, in a gesture of solidarity, I went in and changed my hand to brown, and I got some serious shit for it.
I got told by people who are younger than my child, how wrong it was and how offensive it was for me to do that, and they did not understand, Theresa, the concept of solidarity. I said, we're in the middle of this struggle and I did that as a gesture of solidarity. They couldn't hear it. They wouldn't hear it. People wanted me to go read that book called White Fragility. I've been teaching anti-racism since when these kids were in pre-K, right?
I mean, I started using White Privilege, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh, when she wrote it in 1994. But I do it always, speaking now directly to Dorothy and to Theresa, in the context of uniting class and racism, in an understanding of what makes us sick or healthy, because I teach public health. So to have people tell me that that gesture of solidarity was actually insulting to them. Just, it just blew my brains out and it re-stimulated the same stuff that a number of us, and I also don't want to go through the "poor white people" thing, but we heard a lot of that stuff in the day. I remember making —
Dorothy:
Martha. Martha, could you explain? I don't understand who objected to your changing the hand color, and why?
Martha:
On my campus, younger faculty complained about it. Actually, a couple of them, no joke, went to the dean. You got to understand something also, Theresa, right? I'm their god damn union president, and you're going to go rat me out to the dean because you don't like the color of the hand [icon] that I'm raising?
Dorothy:
These were white people objecting?
Martha:
No, no. Various complexions of people, who would not engage with me, would not have the conversation with me, but felt a need to rat me out to the dean. I'm sorry I'm taking this somewhere else, but Cole, it's because it really reanimated —
Cole:
Re-traumatized?
Martha:
Some old stuff. Re-trauma. Thank you. Some old stuff. I remember — Okay, I'm just going to put this out here please. Oh, oops. It's going to be recorded. Cordell Reagon —
Theresa:
— so important. It's so important, Martha, that it is recorded. So call on me next, Cole. After Martha finishes.
Martha:
Let me, let me just say — I'm just going to say this one thing and I'm a regret saying it, but I remember when I'm like 18 and —
Cole:
Hold up, hold up. Hold up, hold up, hold up. Say what?
Martha:
So here I am 50 years later taking similar shit from people who weren't born when Cordell [crosstalk]. It's still painful to me because I don't know what to do with it.
Theresa:
Oh Martha, just stop. Just stop, because... No, no, no.
Cole:
Before you go, Theresa.
Theresa:
Yeah. Yeah, you're calling on me.
Cole:
Before you go. Hold up. So these are the people who are standing on your shoulders? Okay. Just wanted to be clear. Theresa, go for it.
Theresa:
Okay. Let me tell you what this Black radical feminist thinks about the bullshit that you just told. And I do want this to be recorded, because you're holding up a hand that's not your hand. That's like you were appropriating Black culture, and that has been a discussion that goes back at least 20 years. I'm sorry, you did not get it, but that's why people went wild on you because that's called appropriating. You know, white people appropriating.See, I was at a meeting with a woman who married someone from Guatemala. She was white, and we were all asked — This is The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, people know about that. Ron Chisholm, in New Orleans, where they teach anti-racism training all over the country. Ron just recently retired on the 40th anniversary of the organization a couple of years ago.
Well we were at a meeting where they were doing their thing with this workshop and a woman who was one of the founding members of the Southern Anti-Racism Network, Helen, out of Birmingham, and we were all asked to bring something to the session that reflected our culture. Because she had been married to a Guatemalan, and she had children who definitely identified as children of color, in Guatemala, she brought Guatemalan stuff to the meeting, and what happened to you about the hand was nothing compared to what happened to Helen. I felt so bad for her. Those Black people in that meeting ripped her apart. This is not your culture. What are you? You from Scandinavia, you from whatever, and so why didn't you bring stuff from your own culture?
And that is what I find, that among the white SNCC comrades, when I watched many of you at the 50th anniversary at Raleigh and how people were so upset about what happened back then, and you know — I've had so many arguments with Bob Zellner about this because you can't appropriate, and you just can't be thinking that you are just white and it's just great, and all the great things you've done. It was a Black movement. It was a movement to end white-supremacy against Black people, and Dinky Romilly understands that. So when I met Dinky — I didn't meet Dinky until like, in the eighties, in Atlanta. I went to a meeting at her house 'cause she was all about the Communist Party, and so her mother and all of that.
So all this red diaper baby stuff? There's plenty of it, but I've been in socialist organizations and I've never seen so much white-supremacy among white socialists in my life. They are not ready to integrate and bring Black people into your all-white organization, but the expectation has been, historically, that Black people should always embrace and welcome white people into our organization. When Stokely and Mukasa said "Black Power", that was like the end.
It was the beginning of the end because all the money dried up, everything went downhill from there, and so it wasn't long. So when I sit around with Gwen Patton, rest her soul... 'Cause I didn't meet her until 1988, but the analysis that Gwen Patton and others of us in the South have, about what happened, is different from how you remember it, and race is still central to how we engage.
And Cole, I'm really disappointed with you, and I'm going to let people know. For you to cut the recording off while Martha was saying, you know, while Martha was talking, I really object to that because this is about authenticity and it is about transparency. So the recording should stay on the whole time because that's how we're really going to learn what happened then and what we think about it now. You can't censor this and I'm really disappointed at you, Cole, for doing that. I just want you to know that.
Cole:
Well, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I will stop the recording at appropriate moments. That's part of my role. If you go back and look at what Bruce wrote, that's part of my role. Now, having said that.
Theresa:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I love Bruce, but are we going take direction from Bruce?
Cole:
Yeah, I am.
Theresa:
About the Black movement? For our liberation, Black man?
Cole:
Listen.
Theresa:
Black man?
Cole:
Don't. Don't do that.
Theresa:
Oh yeah. I am going do that, because —
Cole:
Don't do that.
Theresa:
— at this time, when everybody has said Black Lives Matter —
Cole:
Because you really don't know. You don't know anything about me. Just like I know very little about you.
Theresa:
I know what you're doing now. I know what you're doing, now.
Cole:
I respect your opinion, but I also respect my responsibility. So I'm sorry that you're feeling this way, but I'm going to move this conversation if I can. Can I do that?
Theresa:
I'm not going to stop you. You're in control, Cole. You in control.
Cole:
There's an interesting thing I'd like to talk about.
Theresa:
You're in control. Go right ahead.
Cole:
I was gone, say 40 years. So when I came back to the Bay [Area], there were people who worked in the SNCC office who are still here. Eugene Turitz being one of them. They asked me to join the local vets group, and of course I just didn't. So, Miriam Glickman went to my wife and asked her to help get that done.So eventually I joined the local group, obviously, and what I find interesting is that, it was like I never left [SNCC]. Even with people I didn't know before, like Marion Kwan. Yet, when we got in that room, we're all sharing the same set of values, and belief systems and —
Cole:
Yeah, race in America is race in America, but we're still human. So, I'd like to talk a little bit about that experience, about how this has connected us over time, and jobs, and families. Anyone want to share any thoughts about that?No? Okay. e
Dorothy:
You're talking about connecting us, as SNCC people?
Cole:
Yes. Movement people really.
Theresa:
I thought you were talking, Cole. I thought Cole was talking. Are you just facilitating? Are you going to put some skin in the game?
Cole:
Thank you, Theresa. Go right ahead, Dorothy.
Dorothy:
Well, if you would like to say something, Cole, that would be great.
Cole:
I thought I did. I thought I did.
Dorothy:
Well, in my experience about getting us together, we went for a period of, I would say about 15 years when we were not together, and then in 1988 — Actually it was Ms. Baker's funeral. That's when people came back together again, and at the funeral, which I think was in 1987, Bob Moses stood up and he asked all of Ella's children to come up to the front.
Cole:
Wow.
Dorothy:
And everybody got up, and after that there was the first SNCC conference, which was at Trinity [College], in 1988 [see A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (Editor)].And since 1988 — So what is that? 35 years? I'm too old to subtract. In my experience, the wounds healed. And if you put any SNCC people together in a room, it's like — It's like we never left each other. So just on an emotional level, there was a bad break and then a healing.
Now, in our own SNCC community, I think we have our own differences too. I mean, political differences. Some people are more on the left. Some people want to work more in the system. You know, some people concentrate on electoral politics, other people are out on the street, you know, that kind of thing. I mean, we mirror everybody's views, but my own experience has been that people came back together.
Theresa:
Well, Dorothy. It's a conversation. It's valid conversation.
Cole:
Theresa, take a breath.
Theresa:
[Well you] keep interrupting people.
Cole:
Take a breath long enough to let other people jump in, please.
Theresa:
Well, they're muted, and I'm not. You finished talking, and so I started talking. Does Penny want to say something, now?
Cole:
All you have to do is wait, just wait.
Theresa:
Well, I'm not waiting in the conversation. It's a conversation.
Cole:
But you do understand that one person does not get to dominate everything.
Theresa:
I got a problem with patriarchy. Let me just tell you, so [crosstalk 01:29:35]. Yeah, really. Really.
Cole:
It's {UNCLEAR} Black patriarchy. Don't worry about it.
Theresa:
Yeah. Yeah. Black patriarchy. Yeah. It's patriarchy, whatever it is. So look, if you're —
Cole:
Theresa. Theresa. Theresa.
Theresa:
No, no, no. I'm just having a problem with you, Cole. I'm just having a problem with you.
Cole:
I need you to stop.
Theresa:
Stop what?
Cole:
Talking. For a minute. Just a minute.
Theresa:
Okay.
Cole:
Thank you.
Dorothy:
Penny has her hand up, Cole.
Cole:
Go right ahead, Penny. We appreciate it.
Penny:
You know, Theresa, and Martha, and Dorothy, and Cole. It's kind of, I don't know. I didn't expect the conversation to be like this, but the topic of the conversation is a critical topic. And I, who tend to be able to talk a lot about this, I kind of don't know what I can say that would be helpful to us all in these circumstances. So what I can say about myself is I would agree with Dorothy that since 1987, '88, I have found my way back to white SNCC people, Black SNCC people, and then some are dying, which hurts my heart greatly, and the fact that we aren't together at this point hurts my heart.On the other hand, I also recognize what Theresa is expressing, and that lives also. That lives in the fact that we are Americans, Black Americans and white Americans, and Black people in the world, and white people in the world, and this is the conversation. Somehow we have to work together and we have, and I think we can, and I think to a degree, there are younger generations doing it now, having similar conflicts and issues, but we have to do this together. Somehow or other, even though it remains really difficult.
In the deepest part of my heart, I hold my relationships with certain SNCC people who I actually believed trusted me, then didn't, then did, and so that's how it is.
Anyway Theresa, Dorothy, Martha, Cole, I'm here with every one of you and we need each other, no matter what because this country is in a freaking mess, it was in a freaking mess 60 years ago. And I would also just say one more thing, which is that I am somewhat hopeful because I spend time with — It's more young white people working in this, Showing Up for Racial Justice organization but they're very aware of class, they're very aware of all the intersections that are happening. And equally the young Black and brown and indigenous and people who I also know from doing this work whom we consult and ask, they also are — I'm not feeling hopeless about the future generations, that's for sure but I do think we are stuck with each other. We're for better and for worse forever and thank heavens for that.
Theresa:
Penny, let me just say this, Penny. I know of you when I got in this room with you and Dorothy Zellner and Martha Livingston, I was like, "I'm in the room with the famous people." because I was a person who was just a organizer all my life. I never knew, never met you before. I heard about Dorothy Zellner and after I met Bob's Zellner I said, "Ooh, I got to meet Dorothy."That's why I remember people saying, "Dorothy Zellner" and every time I was in New York and I stayed at Dinky [Romilly]'s home in the East Village, I would always wonder, 'Will I ever meet that woman Dorothy Zellner?' So you are like icon to me and to be in this conversation with you and to be able to speak frankly, because the one thing I've learned as a Black radical feminist, the politics that I arrived at are because when the SNCC 50th anniversary happened in 2010, it was like every year there was some kind of anniversary. So I went back to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer thing [reunion in 2014?] and I saw Gwen [now Zoharah Simmons?].
And it was the last time I saw Julian and I was fussing at Julian so bad. I felt so bad about it because Julian was like, "It was so nostalgic." And I said to Julian, "Don't you remember what Harry Belafonte said to us in 2010 at Shaw, he was so disgusted with us for all this nostalgia." And he was like, "What are you doing now?" That was what Harry Belafonte said to us in 2010, when we were at Shaw for the 15th. And I had no idea that Julian wasn't well, I knew that he looked pretty frail and Heather Booth looked like she could kill me. She looked like she could kill me for talking [about] that. So I'm glad to know that she's in these conversations in some other group, because for me, I never stopped.
And part of my commitment is to be consistent, to be authentic, to be accountable, to be transparent. So what you hear from me is what a lot of what I hear from young people who say, "Oh, you old folks, you didn't do anything back then and look at the mess you made now." That's what the young people are saying. They say, "Well, what did you really accomplish?" And I asked myself that question, when I listened to white people from the Movement who don't realize that white supremacy is more consolidated now than it was 50 years ago, we have fascism staring us in the face now.
So what have we accomplished? That is a question that is being put to me on a regular basis because the young people are feeling the pain and the heat of white nationalism all over the place. We are in danger and that is what's going on now. And that's what you are hearing from me, a recognition of the moment we find ourselves in, after all of these years that we've been working over 50 years, we've been out here and look at where we are now. That's what you're hearing from me. Thank you.
Cole:
All right, Martha.
Martha:
Yeah, thanks. I would really like to speak to that. And Theresa, I get exactly where you're coming from. There was national demonstration — what two Saturdays ago? — around abortion rights. And goddamnit it, I was on that picket line 50 years ago and here we are still fighting that fight and about to get as close to losing that right that we won 50 years ago as we could possibly be.But what did we accomplish? Just earlier I said how I was the typist at SCOPE. Okay. There was a women's movement in between then and now and we have assumed positions of authority that — Now it's true there was Ms. Baker and it's true that there is Ms. Hamer. We know there's always been powerful women leaders in the world, but, but, but we are in a different place now.
Now I'm not going to say anything about — I do want to say one thing about racism besides the fact that it sucks and it still here and it's still in our face every minute. But it ain't what it was before SNCC existed. There has been some transformation. There has been progress, but we know how progress works, without struggle there is no progress. We get that. We know that it's not linear. We know that we take two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes one step forward, two steps back, but things are not where they were back in the day.
It hurts my heart when young people say, "What did you all do?" Whatever, because as we've been fighting our hearts out for our whole lives, and there's not a young person in this small group and we've been doing this work and we continue to do it. I don't have a front porch Theresa but I would love to join you on yours and watch the march go by. I live in an apartment, can't do that as easily but I don't think I'm going to be in a wheelchair. I'm going to be however, still having to be in the march.
My point was it ain't 1960 anymore and we do mean something. And the work that everybody here did means a lot. I remember just one little cynical note. I don't know people remember this, like around '66, I want to say '67 when all of a sudden, every business in New York city that had a glass window in their business had a Black person sitting in that window. And we used to make fun of it, because it was hilarious. It was like tokenism writ large, right? But it was a sign that progress was being made that we had made a dent that we were making a difference. I don't mean to be Pollyanna at all but I'm just pointing to dramatic changes that we've been involved with.
Dorothy:
Now don't be shy Cole, because if any time you want to talk just jump right in and jump in.Well, just a few things. When I'm talking, I'm telling people that if they need an example of courage and whatever it takes to keep on going, they don't have to look far, they just look at the Black community.
I got involved in an actual typing experience. The University of Delaware was typing up the minutes of the colored conventions that took place in 19th century. Actually there were minutes. These were conventions of mostly freed people and some escaped enslaved people and a few white abolitionists. And when they tried to digitize these conversations, the software wouldn't take it because of the typeface, the font, the 19th century font. So they asked typists all over the country. There were about 200 people worked on this to retype some of these sections so that they could be digitized.
So I'm sitting there and I'm typing up a speech in 1830 from a Black man at one of these conferences. And he is talking about, "Well, what we need to do now and how we can help our four million brothers and sisters who are enslaved..." And I'm thinking to myself, 'He doesn't know that the Civil War is coming. He has no idea that's 30 years away. How did he keep going? How did they keep going?' So that was an unbelievable lesson to me.
And that's what we're really talking about now. I mean, we have a 60 year view back, and we see a lot of the same problems. I totally agree with what Theresa's saying about the fascists, at the gate. Our only choice, and this was even for John Brown and for Du Bois, the only choice we have is to keep going.
I asked a friend of mine who came from the South. I said, "What did you say to each other? In 1950, there was no way of knowing anything would change. And they just said, "Keep moving, keep going, keep moving." That's what we have ahead of us and we've come through some rough times. I'm hoping that the young people can learn some of the lessons that we think have been created and worked, or from some of our experiences. I don't know if this meeting is going to do that, I have no idea.
But as for us, I mean I'm closer to death than most of you. I'm going to keep on going, believe me, to the last minute unless one of you accidentally falls over. And we have lost, oh, we've lost so many people, talking about my heart hurting. I mean when we lost Betty last year, Betty Garman Robinson, that was that practically did me in Penny. Really.
Penny:
I know.
Dorothy:
Like I'm thinking about her all the time. And Bob Moses was a different thing, there was something kind about him because he was sick. And everybody around him knew that he was going to die. And it was a kindness to us, it wasn't a shock but when those of us leave us and they're not sick, something happens to them. It's really hard to bear. So I don't think there's a better group of people I'd rather be in the room with, to keep on going. And if you think —
Dorothy:
I'll tell you one final story, because you know, I could go on also for years. I knew a woman who was 85 in a wheelchair from polio and she went on those demonstrations they had years ago when Amadou Diallo was killed [by New York City police] with the 44 bullets, you remember that? And she was down there. I have this thing on tape. She was in a wheelchairnow — now I would start cursing, but I don't know all of you well enough to do that — they came and they arrested her. They put her hands behind her back with that plastic thing in her wheelchair and the television is rolling.And I know this woman, I knew her and she had a very heavy New York accent and she was screaming, "I'm 85! I'm 85!" and they took her away but you know what? She was 85 and she was still doing it. And they took a paralyzed person away who was 85 years old in a wheelchair in those demonstrations. Now, if you're going to go out, that's the way to go out.
Theresa:
Well, and Dorothy just recently the police drug a Black man paraplegic out of his car.
Dorothy:
Oh, yes I read about that. Yes.
Theresa:
The police are a real problem for us and we haven't really risen to the occasion on that either. That's the main part of the fascist kind of movement. It's the people that we trust with guns to so-call, 'protect us' they are the fascists who are doing the most damage against us and we have got to start speaking with strong voices about what's wrong.The young people will give us no respect because they're doing it. They're doing it, and in this conference, if they get to speak out and if they're as frank as they are with me, we will hear that from them. We will hear that from them. [crosstalk 01:49:28] out : pasture. I'm not out to pasture yet.
Cole:
There are two things. One is that after I finish, we're going to take a 45 minute break. So four, o'clock your time, One o'clock my time. Yeah?This going into schools and organizations and talking about this journey has been a real gift, for me anyway.
[Referring to the CRMA Freedom Movement Speakers program for schools, churches, organizations and civic groups.]And I always remember this young lady — eighth grader — gym full of eighth graders at a charter school over in Alameda [CA]. Young woman stood up and she asked a simple question, a young Black girl, "Is it better?" And after all of this stuff that — It was me and Marion Kwan who was talking actually that day and she wanted to know if it was better.
And I told them a story about my grandfather snatching me off the sidewalk down in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, back in the fifties. And you know how a kid knows, but they don't know what they know. It was only later that I processed that we were being approached by two white men who wanted the whole sidewalk. And my grandfather just wanted to get home that night.
[Under Jim Crow segregation, Blacks who failed to defer to whites in any way risked being violently attacked or arrested or both. So Black pedestrians often had to step off the sidewalk into the gutter to allow whites to pass by.]So my answer to her was I'm not dragging my kids into the gutter. We see all this murder by policemen, of course this has always been going on. We just didn't have cameras or social media. So it is traumatizing for our kids to see this sort of the fact that we're being hunted, but they need to know it.
And they need to know that they can do something about it. When I watched those demonstrations [in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic], you know, I'm not going out there. But my mouth is open. Those are mostly white kids, led by Black people. Isn't that what we fought for? And so the journey for me has been worth it.
And sometimes I look at young people who say, "Obama didn't do anything." Okay. So where are you going for your vacation? Or which island are you going to? And what kind of job do you have and what schools are you in? I even look at a Black policeman and say, "When I was a kid, you couldn't exist. Not in Los Angeles, not in Oakland, not in Compton."
So yeah, it's our job to teach about history and about how it matters and how that little girl in Minnesota with her cellphone camera at the age of 17 changed the world.
[Referring to the cellphone video of the brutal Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 that sparked the national wave of "Black Lives Matter" protests.]
Martha:
That's right.
Cole:
We have power, we need to be about using. So I don't want to preach about that, but yeah, I'm very heartened by what I see. And I'm in an organization that's multi generational, we're all Black men. The Brotherhood of Elder's Network. It's founded in Oakland. We're about to make our —So I try to listen to young people. I'm supposed to have lunch with one, breakfast, Thursday, tomorrow with a young man. He's about 20 years old and he says, "Thank you, for having breakfast." And I said, "I should be thanking you." Because the truth is in my mind that without him, this journey would not have been worth it. Yeah. Like y'all the end is coming, but God I've been blessed and it's really a pleasure to meet y'all because I have heard your names by the way. I mean, Gene and Gail Brown and all those folks. Yeah, they talk about y'all that's what being gone for 40 years does, you kind of lose track of things, but thank you.
Is there anything you want to say before we stop for this session? [The session following the break is] Evaluation of the freedom movement. What did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve? What did it all mean? What lessons did we learn? Those are kind of guiding questions.
Theresa I'm glad to see you back. We're going to reconvene four o'clock.
Theresa:
Cole, I was trying to see if I could move to another room, but I think y'all have heard enough from me. I probably not be returning at four.
Dorothy:
Well, please try.
Cole:
Yeah.
Theresa:
Well, I'll leave everything on but I just think enough has been said. And I know how I'm feeling about how the world is today. My papers are at Duke university. So if you Google, 'Theresa El-Amin papers.' When I put my papers there they started talking to the SNCC legacy project who put their papers there, because John Franklin's papers are there. I'm just an organizer. When they ask me for my papers, I was like, what do you want with my papers? I'm just an organizer and then they start naming the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And Penny, I do want to talk to you about that. Do you know my friend, Robin Lloyd in Burlington, Vermont? Because that is part of my main work now [inaudible 01:57:21].
Penny:
Well, we've met. Yes, yes. Yes.
Theresa:
I just have a hard time in this kind of nostalgia bubble because I know I'm deep in the work right now. And I just feel like, because I am I shouldn't be making y'all feel bad and I just don't want to make you feel bad because I'm not feeling all this happy talk that y'all have going on about because I didn't know you back then.I knew Mukasa, Willie Ricks, and he's a Black African revolutionary and we stay close with each other cause he's in Atlanta and I'm a hundred miles south of that. So these are the people I talked to, I talk to [inaudible 01:58:07] Bailey. I talk to [inaudible 01:58:12]. These are the Black SNCC people I talk to. So I'm not a part of your group. I'm just not — I'm with a different section of SNCC. So it makes no sense —
Cole:
When we come back for the second portion, we're going to talk about the evaluation of the freedom movement, what it achieved, what did it fail to achieve? What did it all mean? What lessons did we learn? That's the tone of the conversation and come back now. We're supposed to come back at four. So we're not going to get 45 minutes, but I hope that's all right.
Theresa:
Hello, Cole and everyone. I'm really not into this nostalgia fest. So I will listen in, but I'm not going to engage. I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of the conference, but I feel like Harry Belafonte felt in 2010, everybody's into their nostalgia and I'm still on the ground working. So this just ain't me.Like I said, the SNCC people I talk to who are still alive, are in a different place from where Martha and Dorothy and you and Penny are. And so I'm just not one of you. I'm not one of you, but I'll listen in to see what you have to say about what you thought you did. But I don't think I'm appreciating in the way that I think of myself and based on what I'm doing on the ground. So I got lots of stuff that I'm doing on the ground that makes me feel good.
And being in this conversation makes me feel bad. And so I'll listen to what you have to say, but I don't want to make other people bad and I don't want to feel bad myself. And I do want that in the recording because I want people to understand that there was so many different sections of SNCC. And I was not in the section with white people. I came through the Black Power section. So it was very few white people that I worked with was close to very few. So this doesn't fit. It just doesn't fit.
[Break]
Cole:
Okay. So the topics we're talking about is evaluation of the freedom movement. What did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve? What does it all mean? Whatever that means. That's we learned so any in all of that.
Dorothy:
So I think we talked a lot about that subject already. So I want to, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I want you to tell, to talk about your feelings of optimism because I'm optimistic at times. But I also think whether it's negative or positive, I don't have any choice. I just have to keep going and doing what I'm doing because I believe in it, but things, I, I think things seem to be so dire now.I mean, there are literally millions of people who are getting organized. They don't know how to organize a, an organization. Thank God because otherwise we would be in worse trouble. And I don't know if we're ready to deal with this. You know, my fantasy always was that take the top 50 organizations in the country and have a representative from each one and then lock them up in a hotel room over the weekend and have them come out with a united front, you know, some sort of general policies that they would all stick to. And you know, it's a, it's, it's an unbelievable fantasy when I mention it to people, they say, "Oh my God, and how could we?" But, I don't know whether we're ready to take these people on. So that's what I'm asking you, Ron, what you think about that? Since you seem to be optimistic.
Cole:
I don't know that we have a choice and it always makes it easy do it for me. When I look at the young people around us, and it's not just Black or white, we got a lot of Asian folks out here, Hispanic folks. When I look at the young people, I have hope, because they're smarter than I was.Sister Wilkerson has put out this book called Caste [Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson]. And when I read it, I said like, "Oh crap" When I was 18, 19, 20, 21, I believed that, if you carried yourself in a certain way and you got your education, led a clean life, you're a good Christian, whatever you want to call it, this country would accept you and support you. And I wondered after I read that book, if I had understood then that, that stuff doesn't really work. How would that have changed my response changed my life? But it did. It was here and now. If you haven't read that book, you should really read it.
Racism and classism is just very deep. But on the other hand, I also remember my grandparents, my great-grandparents, who were born in a place called Oakland, Mississippi. They were enslaved people and they made their journey after the Civil War. They had to hide out in a box car just to escape the [Mississippi] Delta, because [white plantation owners] still wanted people to pick that cotton.
And homestead some land in a portion of Southeast Arkansas. They didn't read and write. Yet, they raised, I don't know how many kids off that scrubland. If they could hope, and I can hope, I have so much more. They couldn't even dream of the life that I've lived. Just like, I tell young people, "Hey, I'm not trying to tell you what you need to do with your lives, I can only tell you what I did with mine and the difference that it made for me and hopefully for you, but you're going to live in a time that I can't even envision its moving very fast."
So, we've survived so much — even white folks in the movement who are still at it — survived a lot. So I didn't even know about red diaper babies until I got out here in 2011. My lawyer, Paul Harris is a red diaper baby. And all these stories about the FBI stopping him, because they were hunting his uncle. Gene Turitz, the another red biaper baby. It's just I'm like, "Wow"
But when I went to [the Freedom Summer training session in] Ohio in '64, I asked the question like, "Who are these people with this curly hair?" And somebody said they were Jewish. I said, "What's that?" I mean, I didn't know anything. They didn't have that in South L.A, at least not living next door to you.
So, there is just so much in the world that — Maybe somebody's written about it, but why the affinity of the red diaper babies to the movement. It's a whole other thing, right?
What is important to understand, I would not have survived in Mississippi. Had it not been for those kids. They would've put me in a river.
Dorothy:
Those kids. You mean the children that you were working with?
Cole:
No the white kids who came down [for Freedom Summer]. No, I wasn't going to survive in Mississippi. That's why Bob [Moses] brought them.
Penny:
Yeah.
Cole:
They put their bodies between me and their parents and their brothers and sisters. So to deny that reality, to think that we could have done this without help. I mean, the Abolitionist Movement, right? Underground railroads, all of that stuff. It was a multiracial struggle. If you're bringing the American Indian, native Americans or indigenous folks, we're also connected with them — sometimes not always positive — but it's true we were connected.
Dorothy:
Well, what's your feeling about the current situation as we call it? How long do you think those people are...
Cole:
Democrats, liberals, whatever. We're nice people. We do not fight as ruthlessly as somewhat more conservative folks. Somehow, we think truth will set us free, maybe it will. In term of "fascism," it's been there. Now this guy might have activated, but 55 million people voted for this knucklehead [referring to Trump].
Dorothy:
Yeah.
Cole:
And he was terrible as a president.
Dorothy:
Yeah, terrible.
Cole:
But he represented what they really valued. I used to arrogantly think that, white folks are voting against their own self-interest. Because they were voting down economic policies [that would have benefitted them], and this and that. And I had to conclude now that they were voting their interests. Their interests just would not lay in the place that I was thinking. It wasn't about the money and the healthcare and all of that. It was about, they get to be on top.
Dorothy:
Yeah. Status. It was status.
Cole:
But they don't have any.
Martha:
Now I want to go back to Dylan's song, Only A Pawn In Their Game. Because, that's what you're talking about. And, no, it isn't in poor white people's interest to be racist and unite with white billionaires. It's exactly opposed to their interests. And until we figure out, how to breakthrough racism and really unite, the best slogan, I think of the last bunch of years is, "We are the 99%." Because that says, get rid of the petty differences that we have. Not so petty, all of them, I understand that. But if we could come together and kick the butts of the bazillioners, we'd really have something. And the only way that they really keep us apart is with that bullshit you're talking about.
Cole:
How do we convey that? How do we convey what we have learned to the next generation, in a way that they can hear? Because, I'm not about telling them how they live their movement. No more than I would've listened to, unfortunately, to my parents, but we have something to —
Martha:
We listened to some elders. We did learn from some elders.
Cole:
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer.
Martha:
For example.
Cole:
Now I was thinking more of my mother.
Martha:
Different story.
Dorothy:
Yeah. Tell us more about — Did you know your great grandparents?
Cole:
No. I lived with my grandparents for about seven years.
Dorothy:
And your great grandparents were enslaved people.
Cole:
Yeah.
Dorothy:
Do you know where they were enslaved?
Cole:
Oakland, Mississippi. [crosstalk 02:12:50].
Dorothy:
Do you know the exact geographical spot? I mean of where the plantation was. By the way, current historians are starting to call plantations "slave labor camps."
Cole:
Yeah. I haven't put any time into researching more closely. They homesteaded 160 acres [in Arkansas]. Our family still owns 10 of those acres
Dorothy:
And, Oakland is near where? Where's the —
Cole:
No, this is not in Oakland. This is in Arkansas. Oakland, Mississippi's in the Delta.[Oakland MS is halfway between Batesville and Grenada MS on Highway 51. It was a stop on the Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear in June of 1966.]
Dorothy:
Okay. Because I don't remember that name either.
Cole:
I didn't know either.
Dorothy:
It must be a small place. A small —
Cole:
It is. I'm able to find it on the map, but it's a small place.
Dorothy:
And, they own 10 acres still of that land?
Cole:
[No.] In Arkansas. The land in Arkansas is hill country a lot of pine and not for cash crops, but you can feed a family.
Dorothy:
And they held onto it. This is amazing.
Cole:
Well, the family made a commitment to do that.
Dorothy:
Yeah. Because after reconstruction, all of that land was stolen. I mean, a lot of land was stolen.
Cole:
I don't think anybody wanted it, now they do.
Dorothy:
Yeah.
Cole:
So anything else I can share?
Dorothy:
Well, I'd like to ask Martha and Penny and you, to talk about your interactions with young people. I have to say, I don't have that many interactions. The [kind of] political work that I'm doing, there are young people around, but I don't know them as young people, if you know what I mean. I don't know any people in organizations of young people. So, I would be interested if you, three of you, talk about what some of these kids are thinking about. When they look at this country, what do they see? What do they want to see?
Martha:
So I'll start, because I hang out with young people all the time at my job, because I'm a professor. And I want to say that I'm really blessed, because I always make this joke — I walk into a room, I run my mouth, people write down what I say, and they pay me to do this. Is there a more blessed line of work than that?But the real blessing comes in the interactions with young people. Not all my students are young. A lot of them are middle aged. There are a lot of working class students. We are a very diverse campus. There are those who call us — and I don't think it's appropriate — but I understand where they're coming from. They call us the — because I'm in the State University of New York system, they call my campus — "SUNY's HBCU." Which is wrong. But we do have 40 to 50% students of African descent and a big chunk of Latinx students as well and Asian, south Asian and so forth.
[Later email clarification by Martha:
It would probably be good to contextualize the HBCU remark. The short version is that we are the most diverse (read: minority-serving) campus in the SUNY system, and in the past have been referred to by some in SUNY and elsewhere as "the Black college," an inaccurate assessment. Overall, our Black student population is in the 40% range, though we are majority-minority serving, but with a hefty ~40% representation of caucasian students. We serve a working- and middle-class population primarily from NYC and Long Island.Over the last 30+ years, our campus presidents have been African-American for all but one year. Most recently, Calvin O. Butts III of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church was our president, a handsome parting gift for his having endorsed Republican George Pataki in Pataki's successful bid for a third term as NY governor, in 1999. As of early 2021, we have another president, Dr. Timothy Sams, whose career has been largely HBCU-based (he was last at Prairie View), and who seems to want to incorporate aspects of the HBCU model.]
What the piece I really wanted to address is, I'm not sure I understand the world that those young people live in. But what I know about them is they're not that different from us. They're young, they're clueless. They don't know a lot of history because they haven't been taught a lot of history and they're not sure what they want to do with their lives. Except two things, make a difference and make money.
And so, I have one little thing that I do one on one with students is, you'll come into my office and I'll say, "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?" Which everybody thinks is cute, right? But might be point is I want to help guide you in the direction you think you want to go. And they talk about wanting to make money. And they also talk about wanting to make a difference.
So I say, close your eyes and imagine the alarm is going off and you're getting up in the morning and you have to go to work. Are you waking up and saying, "Oh, damn. I have to get up and go to work again." Or are you waking up and saying, "Hey, I get to go to work today." And choose the job that makes you feel that second way and worry a little less about the money.
It's easy for me to say "worry less about the money," because people want money. They want security. I get it. But I have flipped some students out of business into, for example, education. Because, that was really where their heart was. And it's a gift to be able to do that in somebody's life. I mean, that's fantastic. My colleagues, I'm less sanguine about. I think, they think they know a lot more than they know.
And I think, that there's a lot of ageism going on. They think that they just discovered racism last week, for example. And how could any of us in our generation possibly know anything about that? And that just hurts my heart. And you can't get up and say, "But, but, but listen to what I did well before you were born." Nobody wants to hear that. Nobody can hear that. I don't even want to say it. So, how do we do what we always talk about that we do carry it on? How do we do that?
Cole:
You wrote a book [Hands on the Freedom Plow].
Dorothy:
Well, we did a book and it's still — We published the book 11 years ago and people are still buying it. So that means something. Whether it's being read in the numbers that it should be read. I doubt it. Maybe some professors are saying that they have to read as course selection. That's the main way I know, because I really am pretty much cut off from young people, is to write it down and hope that they read it, to hope somebody reads it.But I'm a dinosaur when it comes to social media, that's what I'm really interested in. Do they feel that they have more of a grip on making changes, because they have this fantastic technology that we didn't have? I'm just curious, the three of you, especially, Cole talks to young people all the time, but Penny —
Cole:
I think Martha said they don't know much about history. And, I think that's really relevant. They really can't conceive of a world that's not the one they're in.
Dorothy:
Right.
Cole:
Some people listen, some people don't. But the thing that I think is most important is, and I'm sure Martha's doing this, and the rest of you, is letting them know how much we value them, how much we respect them and how much we support them. We're not going to agree with everything they do or don't do, but they want to be respected. They want to be valued and they may not be getting that from their family, frankly.
Dorothy:
Penny, I think you had your hand up when I was talking.
Penny:
When I think about young people, there's three different — Well, maybe four different groups. There are —I'll go back to the years that I taught at Springfield college, but this is in St. Johnsbury Vermont. It's a satellite of the Massachusetts, Springfield college. And I taught two courses. One was called Race in the Criminal Justice System. And the other one was called Education, Oppression and Resistance. And I loved that course because I got to do anything I wanted, basically. And this was a college, there were certainly a lot of people younger than me, but there were certainly adult students also. People in their twenties, thirties, forties. Most of them white, but not all of them. And, I just brought all sorts of history into them. I think one of the — And they were starting by and large from nothing except when I had Black students and Latinx students in the class or Asian students for that matter.
And one of the skills I really had to work on, as this white teacher of this topic, is to find out how to support my Black students and brown students and also support the white students. And it's a real dance. And for them, it was just like — They were not activists, necessarily. But they got intrigued by the history. And then when I would spend one session telling them my own personal story, then that drew them in, which is the value, I think of our personal stories.
Then there's this group of SURJ young people, again, they're white, but we do have association with young people of color, who are the ones who are organizing the demonstrations at the state house around racial justice issues, policing issues, education issues. Well, they don't know a lot of history, the white ones in SURJ where I'm the elder, they actually ask me about history and they want to know history and the more they hear, the more they take it in. But these are all — All of these young people are, they're moving very fast. I can hardly keep up. They all have taken on race, but they also take on class, gender, the entire range of intersectional issues that are out there now.
Martha:
Should we take a break?
[Break]
[Recording begins with discussion already in progress]
— that quote from Margaret Mead in the chat that you had mentioned.[Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead, 1978.]
Cole:
Yeah. I talk about her. I always talk about that quote. Because, I just believe it.
Martha:
Beautiful. Yeah. It's exactly right.
Cole:
And, interesting thing about this book list is, the first book on the list has always been the first book on the list and the list has changed a lot over time. But reading, Man's Search For Meaning, really affected the course of my life. so I've always encouraged students to. It's not a hard read, just read the first half, then read the second half.But when I was working in Michigan — I'm in Oakland now. When I was counseling, we had student clubs, African American Humanities club, African American Men Success, stuff like that. But we would take these group of about 55 kids. That's what go on the bus. It was subsidized by [the] Student Activities [fund] and we'd take them to the museum in Detroit, the Museum of African American History. And then we take [them] down to Cincinnati, to the Underground Railroad Freedom Center, about four hours away and do videos and stuff on the bus.
But our last set of trips were a combination. We'd go in the morning to the Detroit museum. We'd have box of lunch on the bus. In the afternoon, we'd go to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills. And then, we'd have dinner in African American restaurant afterwards. We would go on Fridays. And on Fridays there were speakers at the Holocaust Memorial center. There were [Holocaust] survivors or "hidden children" — lots of tears to go around.
But I thought it was in part important for our students of all colors to know that we weren't the only ones who were persecuted. Because, when you're abused, you can take that on ourself. "Must be something wrong with me." I was a counselor, wanted to guard against that. But the bonding that took place between some of these survivors and our students was amazing. So I considered that set of learning beyond the campus, beyond the classroom, I considered that some of our best work.
Dorothy:
That's a nice story. By the way, I just sent an email to Courtland [Cox] and Judy [Richardson] saying that, you would be a moderator for tomorrow. And I sent them so they can add you to the list.
Cole:
Okay. Good, I guess. All right.
Dorothy:
I said, it's easy.
Martha:
That's what they all say.
Dorothy:
I told Courtland he owes me a drink.
Cole:
What lessons did we learn from the movement? First of all, Margaret Mead's quote.
Dorothy:
Well, I'll tell you one of the things when I give talks to young people is to say, "If you want an interesting life, it won't be a well paid life, but if you want an interesting life look for the movements." I mean, myself, I consider myself so fortunate, so fortunate.
Cole:
You know, I used to caution students about being seduced out of school, just like I was. You're running projects, you're doing all of this and nobody's going to pay you for that. My advice was find a job that you would do for free, if you could afford to, and then find a way to get paid exceptionally well. Poverty is not a good look in America.
Dorothy:
No.
Martha:
No.
Cole:
You know, you need to be able to take care of yourself and the people that you love.
Dorothy:
Right. Yeah. But you know, a lot of people think now you need $200,000 to do that.
Cole:
Depends on where you live. You live in Michigan, nah, not so much. About half that.
Penny:
Yeah. About half.
Cole:
There's still just, this class thing is just —
Dorothy:
Well, I think I pretty much said what I had to say about our successes and our failures. I think speaking of the movement, generally, not just of SNCC, there's some lessons that we haven't learned yet. We truly did. I think Penny touched on that before and I guess Martha did too. We don't really yet know how to build. First of all, we need another party. We need a party, a Labor Party, let's say. I mean, that's an idea, but we need many more organizations to work with each other really. [crosstalk 02:37:33] And we have a tremendous amount of strength, if we do that. I mean, huge amount of strength. And then we can not only hold off these fascists, we can actually make real changes that will benefit people.I think I'm waiting for the leadership. I'm not seeing a lot of leadership on that issue. People seem to want to build their own little tent. They're doing their own little fundraising, their own little demonstration here and there. That's why Black Lives Matter, that's why it took us all, that we were all so thrilled. Because it was totally amazing. It was amazing. I think somebody told me that they estimate 25 million people were out on the street at various times [in the summer of 2020]. We've never had anything like that. That is unheard of, unprecedented in the United States. [crosstalk 02:38:31]
Cole:
In the pandemic.
Dorothy:
Even in the pandemic that's —
Cole:
Well, you needed one in order to have people with free time.
Dorothy:
Yes. But a lot of people were afraid to leave their house. So they were not out there.
Cole:
I wasn't.
Dorothy:
But whatever it was, it was George Floyd.
Cole:
Yeah.
Dorothy:
I mean it was something and that's the other thing. Someday, maybe people will figure out what are these little sparks. There's a spark that sets things on fire. So we know now, now we know what our strength is. We have a tremendous amount of strength now, but do we have the strength to go from the street to the courthouse or the street to wherever else we need to go?
Cole:
And so what's our strength?
Dorothy:
To do it together. Well, we have the numerical strength. We have 25 million people, at least, who were prepared to go out on the street on a question of racial justice.
Martha:
Yeah. But Dorothy, the difference is between mobilization and organization.
Dorothy:
Yes. I agree.
Martha:
I think that BLM was fantastic. I also think Occupy was fantastic for its little while of existence.["Refering to the Occupy Wall Street movement that swept across the America in the Fall of 2011, raising issues of income-inequality and political domination by the very wealthy. Occupy brought back into political discourse, and to an extent re-legitimized, class-conflict concepts that had been taboo subjects ever since the McCarthy-era. It popularized the idea that wealth has become concentrated in the top 1% of the population and the remaining 99% of the population are economically falling behind. The Occupy Movement experimented with "leaderless" structure and decision-making by consensus. Occupy in the United States was preceded by, and paralleled by, similar movements at the same time in a number of other countries.]The people do come out, but absent leadership and organization, stuff does not sustain itself. That's really the difference that we're talking about.
The other issue that I think you touched on is the issue of "silos." So when I've got my teaching gig, teaching public health, I'm an all purpose radical, right? I'm a "Commie left wing." I'm for fighting every injustice there is, all of the issues. They're all dear to me, but I can't do everything.
When I got my job, I said, and it was right at the time that there was that first talk about national healthcare. Not the first ever, but the first in a while. And I said, that's it. That's going to be my focus because I can be Dr. Livingston who teaches public health, getting up at a mic and saying, "Health policy. Here's what we need, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
And that's where I've devoted the lion's share of my movement energy for the last 30 years. I'm pissed off we don't have it yet. I'm pissed off that the ACA [Affordable Care Act or "Obammacare"] could have been so much more, but let's not go there. My point is, a lot of us are [working] in little silos. And what I see in this movement for national healthcare is a very white movement, and it shouldn't be because who's getting screwed by our healthcare system even more than white people is Americans of color. I mean, duh! We know this, and yet the movement has not — not saying there are no people of color in the movement, because there are plenty, but we have not figured out how to take that particular piece of the revolution to that part of our population. How do we do that? Hair was being torn out last year on that subject. It has been torn out over the years I've been in this movement on that subject.
So I'm working on healthcare. Dorothy is working on Palestine, right? You know, we say what? Same struggle, different fight, whatever. It's all part of the picture, but how do we get all of those different silos in action together? That's a rare moment. BLM was in part that moment, but some of us elders were not there because we weren't going out in the street [due to health concerns]. Anyway, I'll shut up.
How do we take mobilization and move it into organization? How do we take silos and get together? Big questions, not such good answers.
Dorothy:
Yep. I agree with that. I agree.
Penny:
And not to put it on them, but it's the question for the young people. How are they going to do that? I don't want to just be following along behind, but when there was this mass movement in the South led by young people, at least initially — well, not always completely. There had been elders there for a long time. I don't know. Dorothy, I like your idea of not a super fancy hotel, but a relatively comfortable hotel somewhere and you just lock everybody in there and they have to... [crosstalk 02:44:07]
Dorothy:
Well, you know, what Penny brought up earlier about, about the united front in Germany and what happened if you don't mind another historical thing. Of course, the Social Democrats and the Communists couldn't get along for reasons that dated back 15 years earlier, and that's a horrible story where the Social Democrats were absolutely horrible, but oddly enough, the Communist Party, even staring Hitler in the eyes, completely mistook their [own] strength.
Penny:
That's the right idea.
Dorothy:
And they thought they had all kinds of people in the factories so that they could do a general strike. The trouble was they didn't have the membership they thought in the factories because of the Depression, because people had been laid off. I mean, it was a stupid mistake. They actually had membership lists that were not current, that were not real. So the two things together doomed [them] and [in] the last election, I've forgotten some of the figures, but the Communist Party alone tallied 5 million votes and eight months later [after Hitler took power], there was no union movement. There was no free press.There was no Communist Party. There was nothing, and what happened to those 5 million people? There were 10 million people who voted for Social Democrat. [Which meant that] there were 15 million people [forced] into fascism who were opposed to fascism and they collapsed. This is very scary. I think this is probably why I dwell on this because I'm sort of not only a red diaper baby, I'm a World War II baby, you know? Those are really grim.
And that's why I say that — Cole says, you keep on doing what you can do. I totally agree with that. But I sort of sit there and I think, "Oh my God, what are we not doing? What could possibly happen?" And I'm worried about it. I'm worried. Not everybody who is a vaccine denier is also a fascist and a Trump person. That's definitely not. But that was the kernel of how this started, of how that started. So anyway, that's why I'm very keen on this and Martha's absolutely, you're all right.
I mean, people are in their own silos. Just one final thing, I mean, somebody said to me, which, and I've been brooding about it, actually a young person. He said he couldn't understand why everybody didn't just drop everything, whatever silo they were in, whatever they were doing, drop everything and just only do climate because if we only have 10 years left where we can actually breathe normally, what will the other things mean in the end? We can stand on our heads and talk about racial justice and everything else. If we're dying, what good is it going to be? And I was very hard pressed to answer that.
And some people say, "Well, no, you have to still be in the struggle for voting rights because it's the people who you elect who will make the climate change." Well, I don't know, that was one answer I got, but it does give you pause. I mean, if little Greta Thunberg is right, we only have 10 years. I won't be here. Well, I might be here, who knows, but it's not me who's going to have the trouble. So I feel this urgency. I would like to feel the way Cole does, but I sort of feel this urgency.
Martha:
I Want to just touch on something that, thinking about what you're saying, Dorothy. When Trump was elected and we all went to that gigantic demo all over the country, the Women's March, the day after inauguration day. And then we went home and then all the shit started hitting the fan. I mean, serious shit. The Muslim ban and all that and there was a lot of great stuff went on, but I was still doing my job. Why was I doing my job? Because I have bills to pay and I don't want to live out on the street.I felt for the first time, I said, "Now I know how it must have felt to be an ordinary German person in like 1934." It's like, holy shit. We have to take down this Nazi menace, but I have to go to work and I have to fix my kid a sandwich." It's just that I had never in my life felt that contradiction before, like me doing my daily life was in contradiction with stopping the world from falling apart, stopping fascism from rolling over the United States.
Dorothy:
Yep. Good point.
Penny:
That's a really good point.
Cole:
I just think that what I encourage people to do is, everybody can't be a doctor. Everybody's not going to be a lawyer. Some of us going to be janitors, which I have been. We all have something to give, where we stand. I just have that faith that if everyone does the very best they can to steer this country in the right direction, whether that's in healthcare, which I'm all about that these days, Lord. Not have Healthcare in America, you will die. Union organizing, daycare, kindergarten. Important place. I mean, really.I'm not going to go do climate. I will do what I can. My wife does more and she really does recycle well. But I'm going to do what I can do and what I'm called to do and then leave some of this to — I tell my kids, ancestors don't make mistakes, I'm not here by an accident. I had an aunt who died at 101 in 2013. She was a city council person in Oakland, in Berkeley for 20 years. She ran for her first seat at the age of 70, she served to the age of 90. But she used to say that the old folks used to tell me, you got this Arkansas drawl that you are not going to always be able to do what you can do now. So I believe that you have to do you what you can while you can. And that has become my motto.
Y'all are living. We are living books. We carry a body of knowledge. It's almost like an ark sometimes. You know, just find ways of sharing it because our kids need it actually. Sometimes history maybe it needs to come across social media. One of the things I did for organizations, I hired a 20 year old to handle Instagram and Facebook and all that stuff because I had no clue. Scares me, but I know that's what they're looking at. I'm not going to get younger. My time, I'm happy to wake up with this thing working really well every day and the more I do it, better it seems it works.
But sometimes in conversations, I think, eh, you can hear somebody and they're starting to.... Memory's hard. Watching my [adult] son go through when he was in ICU [Intensive Care Unit], they would ask him his name, his birthdate and all of that. He couldn't tell them. I was like, huh, geez David dude. But [crosstalk 02:53:14]
Dorothy:
It was a brain aneurysm?
Cole:
Yeah. There was a vessel, I don't know it was the artery or a vein broken his head. Hole under the skull, filled with blood. And they put a hole in top of his head, and a tube right into it. For about three weeks, he had a breathing tube. They were feeding him through something that went down his nose and giving him his medicine. If you look at pictures of that ICU room, it is just — Now they said the machines weren't keeping him alive. It was just helping him. But he went through pneumonia, he went through intestinal stuff. So he doesn't remember. All he knows is that he stopped breathing at his girlfriend's house. And she tried to revive him and the ambulance got there and they were able to revive him.
Martha:
When was this Cole?
Cole:
July 30th.
Martha:
Oh, wow. Like right now. [crosstalk 02:54:24]
Dorothy:
Right in the middle of the pandemic. He was in the ICU?
Cole:
Yeah. Actually last year at that hospital, they would not have let his family come in at all.
Penny:
What was my question? Were you able to be in with him?
Cole:
They were very good to us.
Penny:
Good.
Cole:
They allowed us to have as many as three people a day in that hospital, which is breaking their rules. But it was clear that he needed his family. Three of those weeks, we just sat there. My wife, his mother, on one side of the bed and I'm on the other, we're just holding his hand and he's holding our hand. He's not responding to the doctors. And so they went back in twice more and did more surgery because he had continued to have some [crosstalk 02:55:17]
Martha:
And how is he doing now?
Cole:
He's been up three, almost four weeks and he's going through physical therapy and occupational therapy and speech therapy and trying to get his cognitive thing back. But the bleed bled into his eyes and he can't see. They hoped that it would resolve itself, but it hasn't. So he's got eye surgery lined up for his right eye, I think next week, as long as the neurologists say it's okay, they've been very conservative with it. And we appreciate that but —
Martha:
I didn't know you before today, but I want to send out all the love and support that I possibly can. I wish I could hold your hand across country. Amazing. The fact you are here doing this today, considering the circumstance, is remarkable.
Dorothy:
Yes. I want to definitely second that, because this has really been a gift. I mean, I've met Martha once and we are on track to meet each other in person here, and Penny I've known forever. And Theresa's not on, so it is been a gift meeting you. You're really exceptional. I have to say.
Cole:
So where are you located?
Dorothy:
I'm in NYC Manhattan, Upper West Side.
Cole:
I'd love to be there. Okay. I love New York.
Martha:
I'm in New York as well. If you ever come East, let us know.
Dorothy:
Yes.
Cole:
Are you in New York city?
Martha:
I am in Queens, New York.
Cole:
Queens, Yeah, that's cool. I will certainly take you up on that.
Martha:
And may I point out and I make this offer not lightly at all, but I have a guest room.
Cole:
My gosh, life gets better.
Penny:
And I'm up in Vermont.
Martha:
Where, Penny?
Penny:
My daughter, in the northeast corner of Vermont. The most, the poorest, the poorest part of the state —
Martha:
The Northeast Kingdom.[Known as the "Northeast Kingdom" because of its great natural beauty.]
Penny:
Yes. The Northeast Kingdom.
Martha:
I've been to Bread and Puppet [theater in that area].
Penny:
Oh God.
Martha:
What's the name of that greenhouse that's right up there? That fantastic nursery. I can't remember now. It's about 10 miles. What town are you?
Penny:
Lyndonville. North of St. Johnsbury.
Martha:
Wow.
Penny:
Bread and Puppet Theater is like 20 minutes away. Yes. We've been part of that operation for a long, long time.
Martha:
You're essentially in Canada.
Penny:
Pretty close.
Cole:
Okay.
Penny:
Right, right. There was a time in the 1970s — No, whenever it was, early 1970s, when there were people that I was associated with who were taking people across the borders.
Martha:
Yes indeed. I lived in Canada in the mid-seventies for a while. So I'm aware of that movement.
Penny:
Yes. Okay. There we go. But my daughter and her family are in New York city, so —
Martha:
Okay.
Penny:
We, I come to New York City as well as they come here.
Martha:
Well, we have to do some hanging out.
Dorothy:
I'm still eating outdoors. In fact, my kids, I went through the winter. You haven't lived until you've eaten outdoors in 28 degrees.
Martha:
Yeah I have.I want to make one quick final point. Because we're talking about how to pass it on and all that stuff. And that was that we have to disabuse — especially young people — of cynicism and explain to them that cynicism is really the master's tool against us ever doing anything and making any change. Because it's so facile, I can be cynical, you know. But it is, it's really the tool of the oppressor — Why bother? Why bother? You can't make a difference anyway. That's yourself killing yourself.
Dorothy:
Right. And before we get shut off, because I think there was a notice up here that we have a few more minutes.
Martha:
They're going to shut us off in a minute.
Dorothy:
Cole, I want to steal something from you, and I love this phrase that you said, we are "living books." So I am hereby stealing it from you. And the second thing is, what is your full name now? So you were Ron Bridgeforth, What are you now? Cole?
Cole:
My legal name was Ronald Bridgeforth.
Dorothy:
Right? You [now] go by...?
Cole:
See, I was Cole for 40 years. And then in deference to my mom, who passed in 2017, I never really liked Ronald, whatever. So in the last six, seven years, I've started to go back and use Cole.
Dorothy:
You're Cole. That's your name?
Cole:
Yeah, R. Cole.
Dorothy:
R. Cole. That sounds Wall Street.
Cole:
It's really a confusing life that I've lead. I go back to Michigan. I have to listen for what are people calling me? Oh, Mr. Jordan. Yeah. Well, they grew up knowing Mr. Jordan.
Dorothy:
Cole Jordan.
Cole:
Where you get that name. I don't know, I made it up, I think. More computers. The first thing I went to the social security and put in my papers, this young lady comes out and she's probably about 35. She says, "How did you do this?" I said it was before computers. It's good to be able to laugh about it.
Dorothy:
Well, it was really great being with all of you. I don't know if we're supposed to get off now or what is happening.
Cole:
We're going to go back automatically. They're going to [crosstalk 03:02:08]
Dorothy:
They're going to do it to us. Oh, we're going to go back into the big group?
Cole:
I may not be with you because I may be messing with trying to save this recording, but it shouldn't take long.
Penny:
Oh. But I think they're going to ask you Cole to make a comment about this. Maybe not. I don't know.
Cole:
What's there to comment?
Penny:
I don't know. It was a really interesting [crosstalk 03:02:26]
Cole:
Oh, y'all almost loved me. Almost.
Dorothy:
How many? I have two kids. Penny, you have two.
Penny:
Two.
Dorothy:
Martha?
Penny:
[I have four] grandchildren. [crosstalk 03:02:47]
Dorothy:
And no grandchildren. Martha, you have one kid.
Martha:
One child.
Dorothy:
Okay. And Cole?
Cole:
Two, but no grandkids. It's the bane of my life. I want grandkids.
Martha:
And no grands for me, but I have grandniece and nephew. They're a piece of my heart too.
Penny:
Yeah.
Cole:
Such a beautiful thing. Listen, I really appreciate having the opportunity.
Dorothy:
Definitely.
Cole:
Like I said, I mean, Penny, you must be a friend of Gene's?
Penny:
Of who's?
Cole:
Gene [Turitz].
Penny:
Gene. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes we are.
Cole:
Yeah. He's been dope to me a lot.
Penny:
When they go off to Wellfleet, Cape Cod in the summers, we have this appointment, my husband and I and another red, he's a socialist, Jewish family. I'm the outlier in this group. And then we have another red diaper baby, she's in one group here. She was a Freedom Rider and also worked in Pinola County [MS]. Claire O'Connor is an Irish red diaper baby. And Betty was also. Betty Robinson was part of this group and we meet, well every summer, but now without Betty.
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