[This transcript has been edited to delete extraneous material for improved flow. Speakers were allowed to edit and expand their comments for clarity and completeness. As indicated by [brackets] some clarifications and explanatory annotations have also been added.]
Miriam Cohen Glickman Faith Holsaert Timothy Jenkins Lauretta Jenkins Carol Rogoff Hallstrom
[Start Session #1]
Miriam:
I'm Miriam Cohen Glickman, and I worked in Albany, Georgia in the summer of '63. And then, in Mississippi in the fall of '63, for the Freedom Mock Vote. I worked in the SNCC office in DC in the spring of '64, and in Indianola, Mississippi in the Delta for the Freedom Summer and then I finished in Columbus, Mississippi until February of '65.Okay. Tim, your turn.
Timothy:
Well, it's hard for me to confine find what I have to say to just a few episodes of my experience in the movement, because it went on for a period of years. I was in the early days of SNCC's decision to go to Mississippi. I was one of the people who recruited people as well as did fundraising to get that whole effort started.I was in that smaller subset of the SNCC founders who was interested in the politics of the movement, rather than the direct action style of things. We had quite a schism between our ranks that was healed ultimately by Ella Baker who gave us to understand that there are more than one keys to the kingdom. We had to use those different keys in order to open a multiple-faceted block.
I think one of the things that I got —
Miriam:
Tim, I'm going to stop you. I don't know about the other people in the group, but I am well aware that you have no way to say this in less than a minute. What we'd like to do is wait and enter that, what you want to say now is appropriate in the discussion part. How about you do this. You've introduced yourself. How about the first year and the last year that you were involved. Save the good things you're telling us for just in a little bit. Fair?
Timothy:
It's spread over many years, and it's hard for me to know what was the first year and the last year. What I just described was my overall view. And I have many different episodes that make up that.
Miriam:
Okay, thank you. Okay, Faith.
Faith:
Hello. I'm Faith Holsaert. I worked in the field in Southwest Georgia the year of 1962 to 1963 and then returned to college in New York as I had promised my mother I would. I was 19 when I went south. I also had hepatitis when I came home — long story but connected with jail. The summers of '64 and '65, I worked full-time in the New York office, some of that with Carol [Rogoff], who's here. All of those academic years, I was also in and out of the New York office.
Miriam:
Interesting to hear more about that. Okay. Is Carol there?
Carol:
I began in '62 on the Eastern Shore [of Maryland]. '62, '63 where I started working with Reggie [Robinson] and some of the folks from Howard [University] and lived for a while at Gloria Richardson's house [in Cambridge MD]. Went in '63-'64 to the New York office as Faith suggested, starting, gosh, with [Jim] Monsonis when we were a one room office in the old ACLU offices and then with Julie Prettyman, with Elizabeth Betita [Martinez] and Marion Barry, who'd come up to New York office. I then went down to Southwest Mississippi. I lived at [E.W] Steptoe's. Worked in Amite County until I left the beginning of '66.
Miriam:
Thank you. Okay, so we lost Tim for a minute. The first part, we're supposed to limit this to five minutes — but we can go over a little bit because we're a small group, we have extra time. But I'm going to say the first session is "How did our participation affect us? How and why did we become involved? What did it mean for us? How did it change us?"Who wants to start with that? Let me repeat for Tim. Tim, we're going to each have five minutes, but we can run over a little because we're a smaller group. This session, that first five minutes is how did our participation affect us? How and why did we become involved? What did it mean for us and how did it change us. Who wants to start with that? Or if not, if there are no hands up, I'll call somebody.
Faith? I want to hear about the illness you got in jail.
Faith:
Well, it wasn't in jail, but we were in jail, Penney [Patch] and Joni Rabinowitz were the two other white women, [Jack] Chatfield was the white man and then there was just an open area that was the Black people associated with SNCC and the movement. But a lot of us were in jail. I don't know why but [project director Charles Sherrod] had us tested for VD when we came out of jail —
Miriam:
For what?
Faith:
Venereal disease. Syphilis.
Miriam:
Oh, yeah. Like we really could have —
Faith:
Yeah, I don't know. But I don't need to spend all my time on that. But he took us to a sleazy white doctor in Little Harlem [neighborhood] in Albany. And Martha Prescod Norman Noonan's husband is a public health doctor and he and I think that what probably happened is that that doctor used a dirty needle when he did my test. Because I certainly had no exchange of bodily fluids, etc, etc. I was very sick for a while.
Miriam:
Sorry. I was in jail with you. That was in June of '63?
Faith:
No, this was before you all arrived till.
Miriam:
Okay. All right.
Faith:
So I don't even know which of these to focus on. Obviously, it affected me profoundly. Let me back up and say, several of you know that I worked on Hands on the Freedom Plow, which is a book told in their own voices by women who were associated with SNCC. At one point, in the editorial process, one of us, Martha, went and looked at all of the manuscripts and just discovered or revealed that I forget, maybe two thirds of us had had some kind of activism in our background. It might have been just church related. It might have been being part of an NAACP youth group.In my case, I grew up in a totally silenced family of two mothers, one of them was African American. One of them was my Jewish birth mother. I believe they were in a relationship, but my sister said "No," so who knows? So just walking out into the street from the time I was five was a political act even though we grew up in Greenwich Village [neighborhood of New York City].
I think I was fortunate to go to a so-called "progressive" elementary school, where many of the students were children of Communists in the village. That school was very child-centered. And I guess what I've come away with from that which led to my involvement was, first of all, I had an experience — I also lived in Haiti with these two mothers for a year in '50-'51. So I was six and seven, I think.
So first of all, I think my — I had an experience very different from many white children in the sense that I became aware of what other people's races were and the implications of almost any situation I stepped into from a young age.
Second of all, I was in this very nurturing situation where children were trusted and I think that that's — I didn't check my time, so cut me off if I'm running over. What I think this contributed to directly in my SNCC and later political organizing experience — because SNCC was not the end [political experience] — was a sense that you listen to people as I had been listened to as a young child and you respect their experiences. Everybody has their own wisdom.
Especially since I was in the grassroots side, if there was a spectrum, I leaned more towards grassroots work. I think this trust in the people was a really important part of the person I became as an organizer.
Now, obviously. I can answer all the other questions and I'm working on a memoir, which is over 300 pages but I'm going to stop there.
Miriam:
Thank you. Okay. Carol.
Carol:
Yeah. I will meander a bit on the very personal aspects of affect. Like many of my colleagues, many of you, the course that I set in my social and political and professional life was set by [those] years [in the Movement], the work that I've done as an attorney all these years. But what I profoundly have had to recognize — and I appreciate that some of you have done a far better job than I have in reconciling the array and depth of appreciation for what we did.But also for the painful side. In my life, I never replicated — though we had all of the tensions of being young people attempting to create something in a world that wasn't welcoming of what it was we were creating. That still the connections were something that I've never replicated again in my life. That's been a source of both appreciation for the work and the community and also the source of real struggle for me.
I have never been able to get rid of the guilt that I have felt. I don't know if any of you — Faith, maybe you remember Barbara Jones. Barbara and I had worked closely together when we were recruiting for the [Freedom Summer] project. Our many assignments was going out to Queens College and we recruited Andy [Goodman].
[Referring to Andrew Goodman who, along with James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, were murdered by KKK and cops in Neshoba County Mississippi the first week of the Summer Project.]Though Andy's mom long ago — I found a letter from Carolyn Goodman not too long ago going through boxes of stuff. I just always carry that, and we, each, I'm sure from our experiences in the different places where we've worked, had to struggle. I certainly have had to struggle with the feelings of responsibility and guilt even though rationally, intellectually, I know that's not accurate.
I have come to understand over time the "whys" of my connections of the choices that I made to become part of this effort. But I'm not sure I've ever understood how it was as a young person, not out of a political family, how I made the choice to go off knowing no one other than being moved by my own belief in the importance of what young people have started and I became a participant in.
I'm sure that sounds all scattered. Tim, I see you. All I think of is [Gil Huelle 00:16:23], who sadly, is gone. And I know that's often another direction but that's also washing over me right now just looking at you and thinking of Tom. So thank you all.
Miriam:
Thank you, Carol. Tim, it's your floor. They said originally five minutes, but we can go longer because we're a small group.
Timothy:
Well, my involvement to it comes from having been a participant in various activities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.I went to undergraduate school at Howard University [in Washington DC]. Howard University had a number of people who were active in politics and civil rights from their earliest days. I became part of that nucleus that wanted to create a permanent organization that would carry on our political interest. That was the founding of SNCC.
There were, as I used to, say, the three Charles: Charles McDew, Charles Sherrod and Charlie Jones. I became not a Charlie, but a member of that core group. In the course of it, I began to pull upon the experience that I've had in Philadelphia in my father's barber shop, where I had had the opportunity to hear, people who are activists, who were literary figures, people who were concerned with community development and issues of race. It was a natural thing for me when I also had been involved in the youth programs of the NAACP and youth chapter in Philadelphia. My association grew in other directions as well.
I also became active in student government and Howard, and ultimately, was elected a national officer in the National Student Association [NSA]. In that position, I was exposed to broader context for student activity, not only in the United States, but around the world, to ISIRS the International Student International Relations Seminar. We had an opportunity to hear what students were doing all over the world in changing their governments and changing their policies and in changing the ways in which they live. I saw that the relevance of that international experience in the context of the United States. When I met the three Charleses, I also had a chance to see the application of what we had experienced in our local situations on a national and international front.
That became the nucleus of creating SNCC. SNCC was a group of youngsters, who of course, came together by happenstance. And thought at a given point, it was important to organize into some more structured way and that was the founding of SNCC.
Miriam:
What effect did it have on your life thereafter?
Timothy:
The question is what effect did that have on my life? Well, of course, the most important thing was that this was the experience that I think is the founding of my whole perception of politics. But in a peculiar way, because I never had dealt with people who were so idealistic in their orientation and who were not committed to doing something for some ulterior motive. It was a wonderful experience for me to see people at the most naive level, be concerned about the welfare of others over and above their welfare for themselves.Of course, that was the guiding light of what SNCC was all about. It of course, became one of the things that I used as a pillar in both my academic world and also in my professional world, as a lawyer and in my political world as a organizer in trying to mobilize people on the right to vote is the primary motive for changing society. I think this is all tied into that early indoctrination of having been exposed to the people of the beloved community who are the core foundation of SNCC.
Miriam:
Okay. I'm going to be brief on mine because we did this in person in the San Francisco area in 2014. I've already said a lot about the effect being in SNCC had on the rest of my life. I'm going to add the things I didn't add them. One of the things that I learned from being in SNCC was not to trust what the government said.Now, that sounds a little — Of course, now. But at that time [in the early 1960s], people did trust what the government said. What Kennedy was saying. When the civil rights stuff was maybe causing him to squirm a little bit, he'd say, "We're watching the situation very closely." That's exactly what they were doing. They were watching. They were not helping us. I took with that kind of skepticism about what people in the government said.
One of the other things is the courage that I saw displayed in SNCC. Made a pretty big impression on me. People knowing that they were going to get — Have repercussions. The family I stayed with in Columbus, Mississippi, in the fall of '64 and early '65, the woman — It was a man, woman and their five kids. The man and the woman had not finished sixth grade, but both could read. The woman went to register to vote in Mississippi. Of course, they published her name in the paper for two weeks and she got fired. She had been taking care of a [white] child and a family for years.
But just the raw courage to make that step. Something that I picked up as — Because I was in SNCC, I'm in the Civil Rights Vets group which is a support group for people who worked in the South, that's active in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because of that, I learned how to be a facilitator. There's probably no other way I would have had the experience to try that, learn that.
Here's another one I didn't mention in 2014. At the 30th [SNCC] reunion. I overheard Dorie Ladner say that she still could not bring herself to be silhouetted in a window at night [because of the danger of KKK snipers]. I thought to myself, I can't do that either, 30 years later. I just decided, that was ridiculous. I had to get over that already ready. 30 years was too long. I lived in a suburb that backed up to an open area, a park and there was no way someone was going to shoot into my house in Lafayette, California. I did it by the way they teach you. Like okay, two seconds. All right, tomorrow. 10 seconds, until I got over it. It does come back to me. Now, it's 58 years. But it does come back to me sometimes — but mostly not. The other thing I took away was a fairly good sense of how Congress worked because I was involved with lobbying for the Civil Rights Act.
I worked with the guidance of Bill Hicks, who was a Mississippi lawyer working on that. It would be so clear how to do law that solved the problem. It was clear cut, but they never do that. It's a little bit like you don't want to know a lot how sausage is made. Just, I understand more than most of my friends who didn't have this experience, what goes into how they end up with a bill. That's only a few of the things that changed my life from being in SNCC because as I mentioned, I already said many of the other ones.
We've done this, each having our five minutes or so. Now, it's open discussion. Now Tim, is a perfect time for you to continue from what you wanted to say in the beginning. We're still sort of on the topic of those — How did our participation affect us? How and why did we become involved? What did it mean for us? How did it change us?
Timothy:
Well, I think it's safe to say that the whole experience is seminal to the rest of my career. Because it is the point at which I emerged from high school and into college, at that point that civil rights was becoming a national and a local issue. We were all called upon to individually get involved in one way or another.As I mentioned, that while I was in undergraduate school at Howard, I got in the student government and student government allowed me to go to different conferences and one of the conferences that I went to was that organized by the National Student Association. It was in that context, that I got to know a lot of the southern students who were also involved in local activities.
When we left the NSA, we went into other specific areas of activity. Some was on the issue of war resistance, some was on poverty issues, some was on civil rights and law and police brutality. That became a kind of a melting pot of many different ideas for me and I pursued that in many different ways in the afterlife of professional and in business.
Miriam:
Anyone want to continue on — Well, then let me —
Faith:
I will.
Miriam:
Okay. Thank you, Faith.
Faith:
Like, Tim, and it was what he said that made me think of this, I became involved in a group or an organization that then opened doors and windows for me that eventually led to my meeting SNCC people, including Tim, which was the National Conference of Christians and Jews [NCCJ] which was is a very 1950s kind of organization. That [thought] if we could just get young Jewish people and young Christian people, like that was the whole world for Christians and Jews. If we could just get them to sit down and talk to one another and go to Brotherhood Camp together, everything would be good.
Faith:
That's where I met Ivanhoe Donaldson. That's where I met Peggy and Hank Dammond. I don't know that I met her there, but Doris Derby also had connections to NCCJ. Perhaps more importantly, Tim might be the only one who knows this name, Dr. Robert Johnson, whom we call Dr. Bob was a sociologist and the son of Charles Johnson, who I believe was president of, help me, Fisk [University in Nashville TN] maybe?
Timothy:
Yes.
Faith:
I lived in the village and Dr. Bob also lived in the village and it was in his apartment, I think, that I probably met Tim and Charles Jones and [Charles] McDew and Diane Nash and others probably.In retrospect, I think it's really important to have these conduits like NSA, which may not be perfect politically. But I was exposed to all kinds of young people on fire just like me. We were escaping, kind of the McCarthy fear, etc.
[Referring to the notorious 1950s-era racist, red-baiting, demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy [R-WI]. In this context, his name is being used as a shorthand label for the post-WWII, "Red Scare" era of American politics during which Republican and Diexiecrat politicians incited fear and hatred of anyone who questioned or dissented from conservative orthodoxy. Civil rights advocates, labor union activists, New Deal supporters, free thinkers, liberals, and progressives of all kinds were demonized and smeared as "commies," "pinkos," and "subversives." They were persecuted politically, fired from their jobs, investigated by the FBI, and subjected to violence by right-wing vigilantes.]I actually ended up studying sociology in college because that was the only discipline I could find that would allow me to talk and think about power and the effect of power on race in the United States and justice in the United States, because people were still kind of very afraid professors, etc.
But I think — And Amina Rachman, who some people might know the name Sharon Jackson, she worked with SNCC in Chicago for a while. Amina was a 13 or 14-year-old when I met her through NCCJ. Thanks Tim for allowing me to think a little bit about those. I think of them as kind of conduits or gathering places where I met similar young people but they were also elders who knew things I didn't know and some of them knew what I needed to know, kind of thing. Thanks Tim.
Carol:
Listening to you makes me think about, and I haven't in so long, and Tim with the Philadelphia connection, Fellowship House, Marjorie Penney.[The Fellowship House of Philadelphia PA was originally founded in 1931 as the Young People's Interracial Fellowship to bring Christians of different denominations together for worship and fellowship. It had two pastors, one Black and one white, and an interracial choir. In 1941 it became Fellowship House as a "laboratory in racial and religious understanding," adding Jewish participants and a Rabbi. It also advocated for an anti-lynching law and around other social issues such as ending racially segregated housing in the Philadelphia area.]That was an early connecting point for me through Miss Penney, as we always called her. It was a similar kind of — If we embrace, I always think of apple butter when I think of Marjorie Penney because Fellowship House had a farm someplace and there were apple trees and we were always making apple butter.
That was going to be the glue of connecting those of us who were trying to take some initial steps toward the kinds of connections which led them to a relationship with — you remember Augie Meyers at Morgan State. And we began to do — When I started on the Eastern Shore on Route 40 in '62, it was joining up with students from Morgan State [College in Baltimore], when we would participate, again, in direct action at that point, students' freedom rides. But I hadn't really thought about the circle. It was also the connection for me then with the Northern Student Movement, with Peter Countryman.
Yeah, the connecting points each time that created more and more concentric circles coming into contact with learning from people who otherwise would not have been part of my political growth and my ability then to take the steps in a full-time way into the movement and with SNCC in particular. Thank you again.
Those helped me think of some of those early connections that had such profound influences. Someday, going to jail with Miss Penney, now that was an experience because Miss Penney was going to take that apple butter mindset to those jailers, she was a better person than I was or will be.
Faith:
Since you mentioned Fellowship House, that is how one of the ways that Prathia [Hall] came into the movements.
Carol:
That's right. That's right.
Faith:
Actually Miss Penney and another person connected with Fellowship House came down with Prathia and Joyce Barrett to Southwest Georgia.
Carol:
That's also where the Gray family — I was very close friends with Marian Gray, and then her brother, we always called Herbert. But it was Reverend Grays — He was a junior, who went on to lead, I think it was UNCF [United Negro College Fund], wasn't it? Went on to Congress. But yeah, all those, there were a lot of Philadelphia connections. I'd forgotten Joyce Barrett's name. Thank you for that.
Timothy:
The mention of Fellowship House touches many different chords. I was active in Fellowship House as well and it was in my neighborhood that the Fellowship House had it's headquarters on Brown Street and on Girard Avenue. It was, I later learned, at Fellowship House that Martin Luther King first heard of the whole question of nonviolence. He was a student at Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania which is just outside of Philadelphia.He used to go in on weekends to hear discussions of different subject matters that this Quaker institution had. And of course, nonviolence was always a part of their mission to spread the whole ethic of the Friends Movement. And he was at one of those sessions as a student at Crozier Theological Seminary when he heard Mordecai Johnson, who was president of Howard University, speak on the question of Gandhi, nonviolence and the need for social change through other than the physical and military means.
He was so inspired by what Mordecai Johnson said that he went back to Theological Seminary at Crozier and locked himself in his room and got all the books he could find on the question on nonviolence and stayed there for a whole week with barely eating anything to read those books. Many people have said that Dr. King came to nonviolence to a number of European sociologists and theoreticians. But the fact of the matter is, Dr. King acknowledges that it was Mordecai Johnson who exposed him to the question of international nonviolence. And it was Mordecai Johnson who he first was introduced to at Fellowship House in Philadelphia when he was a student at Crozier. My connection on that is really important, because I think it opens up a broader understanding of where some of this later activity came from.
Miriam:
Tim, when would that have been?
Timothy:
That was the '50s. It was the '50s when I was in high school. I went to Howard in 1956. I was in high school four years before that at Central High. Central High was, again, a building block in my own mind because it was a peculiar school in that it really emphasized academics or athletics and other kind of extraneous activity.It was a network of people that I gained to know at Central High that led me to later go to college because a recruiter from Howard came to Central High — because it was the leading academic high school in Philadelphia — to recruit people to go to Howard and they offered me a four year scholarship. And that led me to go to Howard and that led me to the seminal group of SNCC people who were at Howard. From Stokely Carmichael on, I who led me to the part of a political life that was really inspired by that early beginning.
It really goes to show how little things as seeds, grow into trees.
Miriam:
My introduction to all of this was I went to an out-of-district high school. I didn't go to the local one I could have walked to in Indianapolis, Indiana. And then the out-of-district one, which I went to because that's where most of the Jewish kids went, was a big inner city high school that was integrated. That's where I saw a lot of prejudice against the Black students there by the teachers and the social groupings. Like for the cheerleaders, it was always the wealthy white girls. For the basketball team, the coach would not play five African American players. It was the four best plus one white guy. The white guy was always a junior prom king or the senior prom king.With one exception, there were no Jewish girls ever put up to be junior prom queens or stuff like that. It was always the wealthy white stuff. Anyway, opened my eyes and I became friends with across many different groups there. The Black kids that I knew were very unhappy because there was an amusement park called Riverside. It was segregated always. No Black kids ever got to go there. It kind of made me aware in a way — I probably wouldn't have become aware if I had gone to the all white high school in my neighborhood.
And then I went to Brandeis for college. A shockingly liberal [school] for a nice Midwestern girl like me. It took me a while to adjust. [At] the very end when I was a senior, this was after I had tried for a couple years to get into SNCC, Chuck McDew came there for a semester. His job apparently, which I didn't know, was to see who he could recruit to come down South.
Carol:
What did you mean that you had tried to get into SNCC for a couple of years? I don't understand what that reference is.
Miriam:
My sophomore summer, I traveled by myself around the South to civil rights places. A place in Virginia where they'd close in schools rather than integrate them [Prince Edward County].I went to Atlanta, I met Julian Bond and other people there. Went to New Orleans, went to Jackson. Luckily, when I arrived in Jackson, I had the good sense, when I was asked if I was a Freedom Rider, I just say "No," because I had no support. No one would have known I was coming. Anyway, and I applied to SNCC and never heard back.
So that's what I mean. I was interested early on and they wouldn't take me. I was told I had Chuck's okay, and that's why they finally took me. Where Faith and I worked in Albany, Sherrod had decided to try an integrator project. Fifty years later, I heard him say why. He said that he had felt like they were doing everything they could in Albany and nothing had changed. By everything, he really meant everything. Martin Luther King had come down, they'd had over 700 and some people arrested and gotten all kinds of promises and nothing had changed.
So he decided to think outside the box and decided to try bringing down white kids. He explained 50 years later why he did it, that he knew no black families where the uncle or the grandfather had a trust fund, but he knew there were white families that had money. He knew of no Black local families where if they got beaten or killed, where it would make the national press but he knew that would be true if it happened with a white person. He knew no black families that could get on the phone and call their congressperson and have a little chat. But he knew that was true for white families. That's why he decided to try it, and that's why I was able to become a SNCC worker. Does that answer that?
Carol:
Sort of. But that may just be me. I'm paralling it, which may not be appropriate with my own experience, this notion of — What period was that again, Miriam, when you're saying this was occurring —
Miriam:
I went [to the South] in '61 and I got accepted [by SNCC] and started in '63. Now, there was work that we could do before in the spring of '60 when the kids were sitting in the South. At Brandeis, we were picketing the national chains that were integrated in Boston but segregated in the South, like Woolworths.
Carol:
When I think of SNCC then and just based on my experience, again, it was — I'm staring off looking at this old photograph that some guy from Life [magazine] took that I've kept up here and it's dated '62 on the back. It's me standing up in a bus. We're off on — It's one of the Route 40 things, but this notion of there being a more formal gateway is what I think I'm trying to sort out.
Miriam:
Well, let me help you. The psychiatrist, [Dr.] Alvin Poussaint, has written about this. There was quite a bit of concern by the Black women, that white women coming down would get the attention of the Black guys and they didn't want unfair competition. I'm going to not name the one person I know who eprobably vetoed my application, probably threw it away. But she was very, very hostile even after I got in. She was in the Atlanta office, and she would send my checks — and you know we were paid subsistence — she would send my checks to a project I wasn't on. So I got maybe a half of my checks. I was in SNCC living on a real poverty level. But that wasn't a real issue. Does that make sense?
Carol:
That makes sense. Certainly, that was underlying and explicit, at various times, and in my own head, I go very much to Waveland.[Referring to a major, multi-day conference/retreat of SNCC activists held after Freedom Summer at a Black-owned resort in the small community of Waveland MS. (At that time, only the Waveland beach was open to Blacks, all other Mississippi beaches were segregated white-only.)One of many issues raised at the Waveland conference were debates over race and racial roles within SNCC, sparked in part by the recent influx of white activists who had stayed on in Mississippi after the summer. Prior to Freedom Summer, SNCC had been an almost all-Black organization with a handful of whites. After Freedom Summer, it was still majority-Black but with an increased minority of whites. Another critical issue first raised publicly at the Waveland conference was that of gender-equality and gender-roles.]
But as an entry point, that's just so not my experience at all, not denying the legitimate, understandable, never to have been resolved tensions. My own experience of becoming part of the organization was showing up and doing the work and a formal relationship developing with the famous $9 a week checks in the South. Cigarette money in those days.
But I did not have the experience of the access issues as you're describing them. At various points in time, certainly I've had conversations with male and female colleagues, Black and white, about the tensions, the gender tensions, the racial tensions, the overlapping of the two. It just evolved and merged at a different point, I think in my experience, Miriam.
Miriam:
Interesting to talk about this. Thank you.
Carol:
And Julie [Prettyman?], I worked so closely with Julie, Alvin's sister. It was always part of our discussions as well when Julie came in and ran the New York office, I think, after Jim when I was then back from the Route 40 stuff in New York. The conversation occurred, at least in my experience, in a lot of different geographic locations with different constellations of folks. But not as a barrier to actually becoming part of the organization. Faith, did you have any experience similar or different than what Miriam and I are talking about?
Faith:
It's complicated because I think it's easy for me to say, "Well, I didn't have that problem." And then appear to be saying, either Miriam didn't have it either or Miriam was an exceptional case and I don't want to say either of those things. My experience was that — almost like what Tim said before about organizations through which we flowed into SNCC, sort of. But there was, speaking geographically, kind of this area, open area — or like waiting to be led into the conversation room on Zoom — there's this vestibule where you might be working in the Chicago office or the New York office or whatever. Then you might — If you were northerner and white like myself, you might go South. I know that Sherrod okayed my coming and Miriam, I think it was Miriam's described a little bit some of his reasoning.What it feels like we're skirting around are some of the issues raised by people who at the end of their SNCC experience felt ejected or rejected or expelled — white people. Some of whom never got over it. Some of whom said, "Well, actually, class was more important than race." And they were just going in a different direction.
My feeling about SNCC at that time — which is a much later time than Miriam is talking about — is that we were an organization that was under the gun. I feel like one of the most, well, a neglected piece of movement history is how the movement in Albany, Georgia and many other movement sites were persecuted and prosecuted and hounded [by both] the press and the US government. Bobby Kennedy, for instance from DC, announced the prosecution of the Albany 9 in the spring of '63. Not only that, he went and the government went to kind of made an extreme effort to highlight the perhaps Joni Rabinowitz, daughter of the cousnel to Cuba was involved. She was there but that's a whole other story.
[Referring to the federal "jury tampering" frameup and trial in Albany GA.]My feeling about that time when many people felt expelled or mistreated or misunderstood — and I understand how deep those feelings were and how life defining their work for some people — was that SNCC, SNCC was fighting for its life. When [South African singer & anti-apartheid activist] Miriam Makeba announced this kind of, maybe trivial but not, when she announced [that] she'd married Stokely Carmichael [of SNCC in 1968], all of her [concert] engagements across the United States were canceled within I think days.
I'm not proposing anything final. I think that life was very difficult. I think we were — We were fucking young. I was 19 when I went South. Sometimes we, including myself, exercised poor judgment. Some of us were kind of sharp tongued. Some of us were maybe even a little devious, because there were a lot of us and — But some of those people who were difficult also were very courageous. I think this is the fact that I'm in my late '70s that I'm kind of like, "Well, yeah. So and so was harsh. Everybody knew so and so was harsh. But so and so also was on the chain gang at Rock Hill," for instance. Both things are true. I think that's where sociology helped me was to say, "We just — I don't know. We have to look at everything in terms of its framework and where it fits."
But it's also really hard because we were all pieces of the puzzle, whoever we were. Miriam, I hope that this hasn't been felt like an attack, because that's not what I'm feeling. I'm feeling compassion.
Miriam:
No, it's interesting. You remember about the chain gang at Rock Hill? I do.[Referring to freedom fighters sentenced to serve 30 days on a chain gang for sitting-in at a segregated diner in Rock Hill SC.]Tim, I'd like to hear from you. I cut you off at the very beginning. You were saying some interesting stuff. Now is your chance.
Timothy:
Well, one of the things that — it hadn't occurred to me until I do it retrospectively — was one of the reasons I had difficulty with the exclusion of whites from SNCC was that my whole orientation in political activity had been an integrated setting. I was active in, as I mentioned, the business of the NAACP, but also the young student movements that we were involved in high school were always highly integrated and reflected no difference — [that] least we were able to observe at the time — on the basis of race.It was an interesting opportunity for me to see that the students who came from the South who had never interfaced with whites, except in a hostile way, that they didn't understand that we felt the complete acceptance without any kind of racial difference. When I mentioned I went to high school in Philadelphia, I should also mention that this high school that I went to, Central High, was primarily a Jewish institution. We celebrated the Jewish holidays more than we did the Christian holidays.
I learned to sing all the songs of Yeshiva and what have you. I learned all the stories of who can retell the things that befell us, who can tell them in every night and through our lives. All those are Jewish expressions. It wasn't until later when I was at an event when I was riding in a car with someone and that subject came up and I started reciting to him all of the Yiddish words that I had learned in high school. I realized that really that was an opening to me to a different culture than I was experiencing in my neighborhood.
My parents were, I guess, activists in a quiet way. I was in North Philadelphia. If I had gone the route of my brothers and sisters, I would have gone to a neighborhood school. My mother was an advocate for me not going to the neighborhood school because they were segregated economically, racially, and geographically. She said, in order for me to be prepared, I had to have a broader exposure. She insisted that I not go to the neighborhood school, but I go to the predominant training school for teachers. That was a school called Thaddeus Stevens School of Demonstration.
It was outside my neighborhood and I had to "bus" long before busing was popular in order to go to elementary school.
[Referring to intense controversies in northern cities over court-ordered de-segregation plans that required white and nonwhite students to ride busses to schools outside of their neighborhood district in order to achive racial balances. Many white parents furiously opposed "bussing" — in some instances to the point of violence. To many observers, white anger over "bussing," and their insistence on preserving the sanctity of "neighborhood schools" were smokescreens disguising their rage against school-integration itself. White parents did not want their children, particularly their daughters, socializing with any significant number of nonwhite, particularly Black, students.For many civil rights activists, the "bussing" issue was a diversion. Their goal was quality schools and a quality education for nonwhite students. Integration was seen as a necessary stepping-stone towards that because white-controlled school boards — and white taxpayers — consistently refused to adequately fund or resource schools that were predominantly nonwhite. To this day, the systematic inequality and underfunding of nonwhite-majority schools remains a national disgrace.]
But that also led me to junior high, that was not in my neighborhood, Jay Cook Junior High School, which again, was predominantly a Jewish institution. And then when I went to high school, I was really inundated with exposure outside of my cultural and neighborhood background. It became to me as a surprise that the student movement took the Black Power orientation, especially since many of the people who I had known at Howard had been part of the National Student Association and participated in integrated settings in a open away.
All of a sudden, this notion of race being the defining line of who was with and who was against us came as a surprise to me. It has continued to be a surprise.
Timothy:
Now that went to the point when things were getting ridiculous, politically. I was recruited to be a staff member for the first commission for employment discrimination. Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I was with one of the commissioners who started the EEOC. That was a white commissioner and he happened to be a Republican. That led me another direction of surprise. I found that there were many Republicans who were more advanced on the questions of race than there were Democrats. That led me to getting the Republican Party and I participated and created a thing called the National Conference — The Council of Black Republican Leadership, that allowed me to participate in creating the movement to get Blacks appointed to the federal court.Little was known of the fact that the Civil Rights Act would not have been passed in the 1960s but for the participation of the Republicans. And the Republicans would not have been mobilized if it wasn't for the blacks who were in the Republican Party. That is all lost. There's no history footprints of that whole experience. It's one of the things that I would hope that somebody who wanted to be engaged scholarsip of a deeper sort would look into and see that this maverick development of republicanism is not something that started back then, but it's something of a recent vintage [referring to adoption of racist-demagoguery by some Republican politicians in the 21st Century].
Miriam:
There's a new book out called Crisis and Compromise. It's by a guy who worked with John Lindsay, a Republican. This was John Lindsay, who was later mayor of New York. He was on Lindsey staff and he helped negotiate with the Republicans on passing the Civil Rights Act. So it's crisis and compromise. But what I think is that the Republicans had nothing to lose by getting [the Civil Rights Act] passed, whereas the Democrats were worried they'd lose the South, which they did from passing that. It was Republicans in Congress that made it happen as you said.
Timothy:
It was interesting. In my work with the Republican side of politics, I worked with the Judiciary Committee. It was clear that we were not going to get a civil rights bill out of the Judiciary Committee with the Democratic vote in the committee. I was assigned the responsibility of trying to get Republican supporters.[Ever since the New Deal era, the Democratic Party had been politically split into two wings. The Northern Wing was mostly urban, white, Black, and Jewish. It was more or less liberal, pro-New Deal, and to a degree it favored civil rights for Blacks and other nonwhites. The smaller Southern Wing, known as "Dixiecrats," were mostly white, rural & small-town, primarily but not entirely in the South. They were staunchly segregationist and extremely conservative. Together, the two wings controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. But because the Dixiecrats opposed anything that might weaken Jim Crow segregation or increase civil rights, some Republican support was required to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act out of the Judiciary Committees and eventually passed in each chamber.]I went down the list of — Emanuel Celler [D-NY] was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House. He was very open minded in the way he wanted to approach these things. He would allow us as staff people to participate in the discussions of the commissioners.
It was at my surprise, that the people who are more concerned about integration were the Republicans as opposed to the Democrats. The people who [were] concerned about women's rights were the Republicans, not the Democrats. I've been surprised by this latest phenomenon where Republicans have taken this extreme view on both women's rights and Black rights because in my background, it was just the opposite.
Miriam:
Let me just ask people, would we like to have a get up and stretch break for five minutes maybe or do you want to keep going?
Carol:
I'm happy to do either one. I would like to just put it on the table for now — or five minutes from now — that shift from an integrationist Tim as you describe, to more of the experience of the organization of SNCC, choosing to go a direction that directed some of us to work in the white community, I will raise my hand there. And an assessment of the role of the events in Atlantic City. It does seem to me that the bruising experience in Atlantic City had over the months subsequent to it, a great deal of influence on the shifting direction within SNCC about role of whites.
[Some participants take a brief break]
Carol:
So Ms. Faith, look at you. What a treat!
Faith:
Yeah. I really need to say to you that I have actually taken the correspondence that you sent me through Cole.
Carol:
Oh, yes.
Faith:
And it's part of the memoir now and it actually ends a whole long discussion of, in effect, some of these tensions and what was going on in SNCC. I felt like — I don't know whether it was being a white child in Haiti or living with Charity Bailey or what, but I'd always been aware of tensions — not constant, not devastating. I think also, having been aware of those tensions, it wasn't as devastating or it wasn't as much of a personal upfront.But Sherrod talked about white people all the time. What he said was true, mostly.
Carol:
I had forgotten that I had gotten that letter to you. I tried to find it myself. It was a rather lengthy —
Faith:
It was maybe three letters even. And it would have been that spring of '65 when SNCC really was desperate and under attack. I actually heard Willie Ricks use the call "Black Power" in Albany Georgia in '62. At the time, I just found it exhilarating. Unlike Bob and Dottie Zellner who actually went to SNCC and asked to not leave, I didn't do that. I removed myself from the theater in '66, basically because I moved to New Mexico with my former husband. Was that cowardice? Maybe.Did you know Sharon Jackson?
Carol:
I don't think I did, Faith.
Faith:
Okay. Well, long before I left New York, she joined the [Nation of Islam] mosque in Harlem and was at a very young age an important figure in Minister Malcolm's world. I had lived with that. I had lived with the fact that one of my very close friends was talking about Republic of New Africa and moving to Alabama and never seeing white people again. I don't know. I could live with it. That's not to say it wasn't painful. I understood absolutely that that's where I would have been if I weren't white. I think some white people did not feel that.
[Full discussion resumes]
Carol:
When I went off, actually back to Philadelphia, Philadelphia is playing a strangely critical role here. I had gotten married, reconnected with Peter Countrymen and we started — Do you remember Reverend Gracie, David Gracie or Paul Washington? Two Episcopal, Black and white Episcopal priests? We had started a white group, People for Human Rights to work parallel with some of the emerging Black organizations, the young people in Philadelphia. This would have been 1966, 1967. It felt like a natural evolution of work to be done. I don't remember — Did you know Joan [Canaday?], Tim?
Timothy:
Oh, yes. I did.
Carol:
Joan and Peter were still in Philadelphia. That was really grounding work for me as a stepping out of SNCC. I had great battles with Jack Newfield, who — Jack who passed away years and years ago, but it was around this very issue.In my going off to do the work that I did with Peter, with what the Northern Student Movement had evolved into, and Jack was one of those people who is very much, Faith, as you describe, from his distant perspective of just not being able to understand or accept the shift. The tension in those discussions, I guess, I'm reflecting back, were just really quite surprising to me and maybe it shouldn't have been. I think it affected very much then what he portrayed and how we portrayed SNCC in particular in some of his later writings.
Faith:
I think one of the differences in my experience, which doesn't mean it's not a judgment between two different ways is that I didn't exactly see it as a shift. I always saw myself as a respected, valued member of SNCC staff. But I also understood I was a guest. Always.
Carol:
I don't think these two things are inconsistent.
Faith:
Right. Right. But if someone's a guest, then you can ask them to leave. Or you can say, "Well, I'm going to bed. See yourself out, I guess." It's just so clearly to me, a product of what was happening in the racist context. That's one of the things I loved about sociology. It taught me the word context. It wasn't pleasant. I don't think it was pleasant for anybody.
Timothy:
Lest we forget, that during those days of SNCC's development, there was a lady called Connie Curry. Connie Curry was a Southern white lady who had gon to [Sarah Lawrence?]. One of the prestige white girls schools. She became one of the staff members of the United States National Student Association. She became also one of the pillars of the creation of SNCC. Constance Curry, Connie Curry, was one of the people who made the bridge between whites and Blacks in SNCC.It was difficult for anybody to take issue with the perspective that Connie brought to the movement on a racial basis, because she was one of the people who was most outspoken, most militant and most defiant of authority and much more stronger terms than many of the Blacks were. That too is part of the heritage of SNCC that sometimes gets lost in the history.
Miriam:
I'll talk just for a minute about my personal experience with the white-Black thing in SNCC. When I worked in Southwest Georgia, I became friends with [some of] the other [Black] staff there, including Jean Wheeler Smith and Martha Prescod Noonan. We stayed friends when we ran into each other in Mississippi projects or meetings, but I never made another Black-woman friend in SNCC. It was like in a pledge class, we were all brand new. In the pledge class, we were able to link up together. But then when I moved on to Mississippi, I was seen more as competition rather than a colleague. I thought that was kind of interesting. The sociology of that interested me.
Lauretta Jenkins:
Timothy, I wonder if I could speak up?
Timothy:
Yeah. Sure. My wife, Lauretta, wants to say a word about her experience in that whole period.
Miriam:
Lauretta, welcome. Hi Lauretta. Introduce yourself just a little bit. Take a minute to say what years or where you worked.
Lauretta:
Timothy, I was thoroughly rejected by Charles McDew and others who —
Miriam:
Wait, wait. Lauretta, hold it. Hold it. I'm thinking of the person who transcribes this. They're going to want to know your full name and record your voice.
Lauretta:
All right. This is Lauretta Jenkins and I have been married to Timothy Jenkins since 1963. I met him through the National Student Association. Both of our schools had sent us to NSA conferences and I met him at one of those conferences. I got involved in bringing the civil rights questions to my campus and to civil rights and support for African students in New York City and the early development of the Peace Corps. I was bringing speakers to the campus. Charlene Hunter Gault was one of the people I brought, along with Timothy Jenkins.
Miriam:
What campus? What college?
Lauretta:
The College of New Rochelle. Of course, I joined the staff of the Young Christian students in Chicago when I graduated in '61. We stayed active, that organization stayed active. In fact, Mary Varela came out of that organization, Kate Trainer came out of that organization.
Miriam:
I interrupted you. You were going to say... But thank you for that introduction. You were going to talk about your experience in [inaudible 01:22:22].
Lauretta:
I would have gone South and was told that they did not want me to come. That they would prefer that I stayed and was supportive of SNCC from the North, which I did. And did fundraising and stayed active. And then Timothy and I were falling in love, that's what we were doing. Timothy didn't know whether to marry me or not. It was the two Charles, Charles Sherrod and Charles McDew who encouraged him, that if he loved me that he should go ahead and marry me.I moved back to New York and had a job in New York City and then he came back from some trip down South, before his senior year. Well, no. It was two years before, in '63. We were married in '63 by William Sloane Coffin who was the chaplain at Yale and he knew Timothy through his activities, but he did not know me. He spent the whole day with me interviewing me to make sure I was marrying him for the right reasons.
Now, the memories of being rejected by the Black Power wing of SNCC go back to the '68 riots in DC. After Martin [Luther King] was killed and Marion Barry wouldn't let me into a meeting because they didn't want any white people involved in that.
I've been an activist on the outskirts for my entire life. I let Timothy go forward. I let him. He went forward with what he was doing actively and I went forward with what I was doing. It was not disruptive to either of us, but I do have feelings about some things and also, strong friendships with Sherrod and McDew and Joyce Ladner, the Ladner girls. A lot of long time friendships that are — I came out of a background that was a very unusual because my father was military and at two months old, I was taken off to China as a two month old and spent my early years in China, that was 1939.
I don't know how the US government let the family of a Navy man go to China. I expect it's because he was intelligence, naval intelligence at the time, and they were happy to have the family there but we were evacuated from China. I came back to this country, as a Chinese friend of mine said, "You came back culturally Chinese." Because my mother was not kind of a mother who took care of a child. She left me with a Chinese amah. My orientation was very different when I came back to this country. I thought Americans were barbarians.
Miriam:
Well, thank you for coming on and sharing this. We appreciate it.
Lauretta:
That's my orientation. I'll stay to the side and let you go on but I was a part of it in a very deep way. All right.
Miriam:
Thank you. Timothy, that was nice. Thank you. Where are we guys? Let me rephrase the topic and see if we're close, okay? How did our participation affect us? We talked actually a lot about how and why we became involved. I think that part was well covered. What did it mean for us and how did it change us?
Carol:
May I just put back on the table if anybody's interested and if not, that's fine. But I had raised just before our short break, this question of the impact, the legacy of the whole experience leading up to the '64 convention, what occurred at the convention, what various folks took away from that experience, in the context of this discussion, about the role of race and how we did or did not deal with it among ourselves in SNCC as that evolved.[The 1964 MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City NJ, profoundly affected Freedom Movement activists. For years, the white liberal establishment and leaders of the Northern Wing of the Democratic Party had assured Civil Rights leaders that they stood on the side of racial justice in opposition to the segregationist Dixiecrats. They said they supported voting rights for nonwhites and were ready to open up the party to full political participation reglardless of race. After years of organizing at the grassroots level, enduring economic retaliation, violence and murder, and diligently following the official party rules, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) believed that their integrated MFDP delegation would be accepted by the party convention. Either in place of the "regular" delegation who had barred Blacks from participation in party affairs, or at least alongside them.But rather than risk losing support from white voters in the South, Johnson, Humphrey, Mondale, and other national party leaders betrayed the MFDP. Siding with the Dixiecrats, they refused to recognize the MFDP as in any way representing Democratic voters in Mississippi. Instead they seated the all-white "regulars" even though those regulars were openly supporting the Republican presidential candidate Goldwater rather then LBJ the Democratic incumbent. Johnson and Humphrey characterized their unilateral action as a "compromise" because they graciously permitted two MFDP delegates (chosen by them) to attend the convention as non-voting "guests," and they promised that in four years, at the 1968 convention, all-white delegations would no longer be allowed.
By refusing to honor the promises they had made to the MFDP, the party leadership deeply alienated many civil rights activists, convincing some of them that white-liberals would always sacrifice the interests of Blacks and other nonwhites for their own personal gain — and that therefore no whites at all could ever be trusted, even those who had stood steadfast with the MFDP.]
Miriam:
Go for it Carol.
Carol:
I have no magic answers. I have thoughts and feelings. I think probably over the last weeks, thinking about our time together, have I've thought a lot about being on the ground in Atlantic City and feeling that was a pretty bruising experience for lots of us who were part of, certainly the Mississippi movement.Folks in the delegation, folks like myself who were on staff and support people, I just remember a lot of it being really, really so harsh and ugly. The outcome, I think, has created its own challenging legacy. Not a bad legacy, but a challenging legacy. I've never unraveled all of that for myself which is why I raised it in the context of some of what each of you has shared today. Sorry about that. Your own pieces into trying to reconcile or at least acknowledge some of the tensions and some of the questions about our own community creation and some of the struggles around that. If that's only me, that's fine and you all have some other direction you'd like to take. But that is one of the things in my head that I would find of interest.
Faith:
Carol, can you talk a little bit about the specifics of Atlantic City in 1964?
Carol:
Each of you there, were you in it? I'm sorry.
Faith:
I was in Atlantic City briefly. I actually came down with the [Orrises?] for a day. I was in New York, office.
Miriam:
I was not there. I stayed in Mississippi and I've regretted that for many years. Tim, were you there in Atlantic City?
Timothy:
I didn't participate in Atlantic City because we were having our first child and we were not able to do any kind of travel, but I focused on it from a distance. Of course, I was interested in the way in which the press was covering the whole issue. I was back in Philadelphia, but my focus was to try and create a way in which we can understand the expressions in the press is covered by race.One of the things that we were successful in doing was that by virtue of the our disclosure of the way in which the southern press was distorting the issues, we were able to flip the ownership of the public broadcasting station in Jackson, Mississippi, from white to Black ownership because they lost their franchise to have a broadcasting station. That was in the era when they had the doctrine of fairness, or the Fairness Doctrine was required that the broadcasting stations had to give equal time to different sides of an argument.
Now, of course, the Fairness Doctrine is gone and we only have one side at a time and this side is predominant at a given period and that's part of the legacy of our [current?] regime of violence in White House.
Miriam:
Congratulations on having that baby. Carol, now that you know our involvement in it, go ahead with what you wanted to say.
Carol:
My memories are fuzzy, being in meeting rooms, not having a role other than a support person, listening — I particularly have this image in my head of Joe Rauh trying to sell the compromise.[Referring to Joseph Rauh who was an official of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) and a key player in Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) which was the main organization of the Democratic Party's northern-liberal faction. The UAW had provided crucial financial and political support to the Freedom Movement, and as a member of the Credentials Committee Rauh had presented the case for seating the MFDP. But after Johnson made Humphrey's nomination for Vice-President conditional on the liberals agreeing not to support seating the MFDP Rauh urged the MFDP to accept the so-called "compromise."]I have vivid images. We were assigned different delegations to go out and to try to advocate for our position of the MFDP. I don't remember who I was paired with. I don't even remember which delegation. I remember we were wearing — Somebody had made up large buttons that said, "Free M-I-S-S." And then it may have had "Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party" around [the perimeter]. I just remember it was big buttons. And going — It was my first exposure to anything like a convention like that, of a lot frankly, of drunken old white people. The disrespect with which we — As Faith keeps emphasizing, we were very young.
Watching Bob [Moses], listening to Bob, the clarity with which he presented himself always, but certainly in this situation, being clear about where the decision was to be made [meaning that accepting or rejecting the "compromise" was up to the elected MFDP delegates].
But that Joseph Rauh piece representing folks who I guess I grew up with believing [in] — and maybe this is why this remains so bruising. Some of you came from political backgrounds, I did not. The images of the Democrat Party, where they were supposed to be. And the experience in Atlantic City, demonstrating pretty conclusively that, yeah, that's where they were supposed to be, they were doing what they were set up to do and I didn't understand that.
Coming with a feeling that if we only did more and better, that we would transform, we would create a mindset that would allow a power sharing. That clearly was not in the interest of the Hubert Humphreys of the world and understanding for the first time — Tim, you were far advanced from where I was in my political understanding that this had really nothing to do with morality or ethics. This was a sheer exercise in the maintenance of power among folks who were not inclined to have any interest in sharing that [power] no matter what their history suggested to somebody like me coming out of a non-political, middle class background.
As I experienced it and then through the folks — Steptoe of course, was a member of the delegation — I couldn't have been more confused about what was happening or more proud of the decisions that the delegates had made [to reject the "compromise" as a betrayal and insult].
But I do think that bad experience, my little piece of it watching, the clarity [that] Hubert Humphrey was going to get to be nominated if he [refused to support] what we were doing. It was very painful and important lesson that just guided a lot of my political work ever since.
[Humphrey was the preeminant leader of the ADA and the party's northern liberal faction. Johnson had made it clear that if Humphrey and the liberals he led backed the MFDP Humphrey would not be nominated for Vice-President.]Again, the array of emotions attached enormous pride in what was done and great shame about how the country responded to the folks who were behind and part of the emergence of MFDP and what it demonstrated as it had been intended to do.
Miriam:
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that.Tim, when you were introducing yourself, you were talking about the three Charles and yourself. I'd be interested in hearing that, what that meant. My understanding is the three of you decided to drop out of school and be full-time Civil Rights workers. I'd love to hear you elaborate on that part.
Timothy:
Would you state that again? I'm not clear.
Miriam:
Okay. At the very beginning, you were starting to talk about how you and Chuck and Sherrod and Charles Jones — my understanding is you realized that there needed to be full-time civil rights staff, not students who are doing it part-time. You guys did something different. You dropped out of school.
Timothy:
Well, I think [I] need to clarify. My references to the three Charleses was tied to my effort to bring to Northern College campuses more than just the names of people and just their political stories and have them understand the lifeblood of who the people were who made up the student movement. I chose the three Charleses because they represented vastly different personalities, who had coalesced to create this thing called SNCC.And that Charles McDew was a jock. He was a person who was concerned about games and sports and athletics and all of that sort of thing. Charlie Jones was a person who was much more interested in questions of showmanship and he was a fine dresser and he was concerned with social activity and all that kind of thing. Charles Sherrod was an [UNCLEAR 01:42:44]. He was a seminary student and he was more interested in the religious and theological aspects of the movement.
When I talked about the three Charleses, I was trying to present the fact that McDew, Sherrod and Jones represented three distinct personality types who were very different in other parts of the world. They didn't have much in common in the social sense or in their backgrounds and biographical history. But when they came to the movement, they dropped all of those external things and became one in a coalesced movement for change.
What I was trying to say when I went to these northern campuses, was that they need to go beyond the names of the people, to understand the personalities of the people and understand that the purposes that brought us together were not just political. They were also personal, and we came with very different perspectives. And therefore, it's not to be surprised or wondered at that we disagreed on many different issues because we were very different people. We were not of one mode.
One of the things that I think that we were able to do was to make sure people understood that in spite of our differences, we had a commonality of approach and purpose that made us one. That I think, became part of the mantra of what SNCC was. It was more than just a collection of individuals. It was an amalgamation of people into something that was greater as a whole than it was in all of its different parts.
Miriam:
Thank you. Anyone have something to add on this topic? How it affected us? What we took away?I'll land something. When I left SNCC and I was dating, I refused to date guys that were in business. They had to be doing something that helped the world. It could be a teacher, could be a doctor, could be somebody in social security, a lawyer — but business, I wouldn't go out with them. Which in my old age, I think was a little harsh. But that was one of the effects of SNCC on me. Anyone have anything else to add about lifelong effects of having done this in our youth?
Carol:
Let me just, if I may. When I think about the connections I have now, they're very intentionally with young people locally. I find that the orientation skills and even — can one be cynically idealistic? I think that's what I am. I'm cynically idealistic because I must have enough hope that some change is still possible to still be engaged in some aspect of this work and for me, that's meant working with 20 and 30-year-olds now who are grappling with shaping a role as they enter some aspects of this worth of work that they deem to be important now.The belief in the power of young people, I think, is one of the things — with all the disappointments that have been part of the legacy for me — that fuels my desire and helps me maintain some level of energy for connecting with young people now who are trying to find their way and just encouraging them. Encouraging them to not listen to me, I guess, is an odd way of saying it, but to support and acknowledge the evolution of their own experiences and truly, a very conscious continuing passing of leadership and role. That feels like a healthy and positive thing to be able to do at this point of my life. (silence)
[End Session #1]
[Break]
[Begin Session #2]
Miriam:
Hi, Carol.
Carol:
Hi there. I did not know you at all.
Miriam:
It's true.
Carol:
And when I saw — I didn't even recognize your name so I apologize. It reminds me that we were very decentralized and so folks we tended to get to know were those in the same project or certainly from my time in New York, all the folks who would come through the office from the South so I got to know a lot of the guys in particular from the various projects. But I'm interested to learn about you and a little bit about your perspective, it's been interesting to me and I appreciate that.
Miriam:
You know, I'll tell you about the one time I was in the New York SNCC office. It was 25 stories up, it was the first blackout and we had to walk down 25 stories in the dark.
Carol:
I have just found, and you inspired me there, Miss Faith, here you go, the "Dear Rogoff" letter. And August 18th, 1965, and I had not read this since I had come across it and, through Cole [Bridgeforth], gotten these couple of letters to you and as I just read this, I don't know what you might recall about what it was you were feeling then.
Miriam:
Wait, wait, I'm not sure, what are you-
Carol:
I'm sorry, I apologize. I had uncovered some while ago some letters that Faith had written to me in Mississippi when she was still in the New York office. And through a mutual acquaintance, had gotten these old letters to Faith and because she earlier referenced one of the letters, I was just rummaging through the endless stack of papers and found these letters that Faith had sent to me.And in light of this conversation, or aspects of it, I was just really curious about part of what sounded like a real — Well, you talk about the fatigue with the political aspect and you're interest in kind of backing away. You accused me of foulling, propositioning you, to work in the New York office, a phrase that is very Faith like. And so, I'm just curious and thinking about, again, the takeaways, then many take-aways that each of us have in trying to kind of understand where we were, who we were, the work that we did and the legacy of that for each of us, what that reference is about in that letter and what path you think that —
Faith:
Which reference now?
Carol:
Well, may I read a little piece of it?
Faith:
Sure. I do think it's a very interesting picture of where my mind and heart were at the moment.
Carol:
Yeah. [Reading:]"What I was doing before I started working with SNCC, many, many sad years ago, is to work on the small scale local level. As important as I see political wheeling and dealing, as much as it interests me from a distance, what I personally want is to do work on the idea of building community in a city-setting and it's about time I get back to that. I was halfway half-ass going to do that this summer and then I — "My favorite part:
"Then I unknowingly and innocently and without intent, walked into your office in which location I was foully propositioned by you."Okay. That was definitely a joke, I'm mean the foully proposition.
Carol:
Oh, I know.
Faith:
And I am going to put — I think there were actually two letters, at least excerpts from them at the end of — In this book, there's a section on my activism, which I see as a piece that began before SNCC and certainly into Mexico and Detroit and West Virginia continued well after.The way I read that letter was that I think I was expressing the kinds of emotions that, for you, came at the end of Atlantic City. Of just SNCC was not a sad experience, but I was just overwhelmed with the difficulty and the societal determination that we not succeed. And you're mentioning Hubert Humphrey just makes something awful come up in my throat, in that era anyway.
What I think is a little bit interesting, especially in light of what we were talking about before, is that nowhere in that letter do I say, "I'm really upset that my Black brothers and sisters are pushing people out." That wasn't where my center of concern was.
I also think it's interesting that I had an illegal abortion in New York that spring, which, again, we were really young, I almost died. I didn't tell very many people. So on top of everything else, we were human beings trying to figure shit out and I'm very grateful that you sent those — I think they were two letters through Cole and I'm not sure, I will send you those passages or even that SNCC section.
Well, SNCC really came into my life when I was active in Harlem and I went and was arrested, which I didn't mention before, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in Crisfield at Christmas 1962.
Chris — SNCC was in my high school and first year of college, Harlem organizing present, that's when I was meeting Charlie Jones and McDew and Tim, etc, and it really continued after I left New York. But those letters really, to me, personified some of the wariness and probably angst, the word more was "angst," which I might never had heard at that point, than sadness. Thank you for sending those.
Carol:
They clearly meant a great deal that I managed to have them, to find them. Your letters, and I have a whole bunch of letters from Charlie Cobb, '63, '64, that I'm grateful when we are able, as you are so beautifully, to move beyond the recitation of the facts and to dig into and to express some of the very emotional challenges of these highs and lows that were part of what we experienced and the reflections about the experience so thank you, Faith.
Miriam:
Carol, I want to share some information. The civil rights movement is a big deal on college campuses and they are paying for original stuff, not Xeroxed stuff. They're paying good money and if you get in touch with Bruce Hartford, you have Charlie Cobb's letters, you may want the Xeroxed and keep the Xeroxed but sell the originals.
Carol:
You know, I'm having a reaction to that a little bit like my reaction to finding the merchandise section on the website for this event. It's so counter to how I think of me and how I think of SNCC so I hear that but I'm not sure that's a direction that I can pursue.
Miriam:
Okay.Let me give us our topics for now. If we screw up the topic, so be it.
Carol:
Faith was just going to say something, will it be okay —
Miriam:
Go ahead, Faith, and then I'll read our topics.
Faith:
[Sally Bingham Center for Women's Culture and History at Duke University] would be happy, not for money, and although she's the daughter of the Louisville newspaper that just treated Anne and Carl Braden so badly but they're considered liberals, it would be a good place to be.
Carol:
I appreciate that, thanks.
Miriam:
Okay. This is our second session and it's an evaluation of the Freedom Movement, what did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve? What did it all mean? And what lessons did we learn? Any aspect of our evaluation in the Freedom Movement and like we did at the beginning of the first section, the instructions are we each get to talk five minutes about that and then it's open discussion.
Faith:
Could you repeat the questions?
Miriam:
Sure. Of course, as often as you want. Evaluation of the Freedom Movement, what did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve? What did it all mean? And what lessons did we learn?I'll start this one. When I left Mississippi in February of '65, I truly in my heart thought that the segregations were going to wait us out. That maybe they had to wait a year or two years and then once we had left, they were going to go right back to what they'd always done. And I was not hearing otherwise from a number of years afterwards until I heard that getting the vote actually did help. And that, as we had hoped, when the African American community could vote brutal sheriffs out of office, that things would get better, or run for office themselves. But when I left, I did not see a ray of hope. That was my immediate reaction to it all and that's after I worked hard and we worked hard.
Anyway, who would like to go next? I'll call someone if no one volunteers.
Miriam:
Tim, how about you? Evaluation of the Freedom Movement, that's pretty broad. Now, I wonder if Tim is muted, if he can hear us. Tim, can you hear us?
Timothy:
Okay, I think I can hear you now. I think I got most of it, what did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve and what lessons did we learn? What else was there?
Miriam:
What did it all mean? Five minutes and then after we each get the five minutes, then we'll open it up, we have the whole rest of the session.
Timothy:
We can all be grateful to have known each other in a struggle worthy of our lives, no matter where we can from or to whence we have gone since. The SNCC experience was the crowning time of our development as caring human beings.What we did achieve can be measured in many different ways. In an external world, we achieved a change of politics the Black Belt [referring to the Black majority regions of the Deep South]. Given that we now have a [Black] Congress persons from Mississippi, we have people who are in elected positions and law enforcement, police chiefs, in Mississippi who are black.
That clearly is something that we've achieved but we have also to appreciate that the other side has achieved something too. They achieved the cleavage between the white community and its politics, such that they now can talk about a party that is a white party, on a national level, not just on a regional level and that is something that it seems to me we need to consider as one of the failures of what we've done.
[Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, the southern-Democrats ("Dixiecrats") were mainly a regional white-only faction. In the 1970's, after Blacks won civil and voting rights, the Republican Party adopted a "southern strategy" (their term) of courting white Dixiecrat voters in the South and white-majority rural areas nationally. By the 21st Century, it had evolved into a party committed to upholding the ideology and interests of white-supremacy on a national level. A process greatly acceleratied and institutionalized by Trump's campaign and presidency.]And I think it was partly brought about by virtue of the schism that we allowed between Blacks and whites in the movement. The northern student movement was not intended to be a standalone, it was to be met with a corollary southern student movement among white students. That never happened. And the fact of the matter is that if it had happened, we would have now the semblance of some biracial politics in the South. We do not have biracial politics in the South today and I think that's part of our problem because of the way we allowed a schism in our own ranks. And I think that's something that we have yet to overcome.
I also think that one of the things that we accomplished doesn't get a lot of attention. And that is we transcended political questions to deal with personal questions and emotional and value questions. It is significant that the [southern student civil rights movement] was aligned with the religious movement in many places and the students themselves were mostly religiously motivated. John Lewis didn't just come out of the political world. He came out of a church environment.
The songs that we sang were not songs that we selected from the publisher's printing house, they were songs that came from the church. The institution of the church and the notion of soul-force as part of what our movement was about, in my view, is a revolutionary dimension of politics and it is something that I really worry about when I get invited to talk to the students of the day — the Black Lives Matter people and the What's Up people and all of those people who are now the spokesperson for what is called radical black politics.
And I raise the question, what is your values system? What is your connection to each other on a personal level? Do you know each other personally? Do you spend time beyond the business of dealing with your political questions together because you welcome one another as allies and friends and people and not just as figures of convenience and political participation.
It seems to me, one of the things that we're missing in today's movement is a lack of music. Music was an important part of what bound us together and when I talk to the students and they listen to their discussion, they don't have any musical or lyrical expression of what their attitudes are and I think that's a great loss because I think what they have forfeit is a recognition that there is a continuum between politics and spiritual values and that has been lost because now it's all politics.
I haven't heard any of the Black Lives Matter people make one spiritual ethical expression other than the political question of race and that, to me, is a shortcoming that has resulted from the bridge, or the breach of the bridge, between the old movement and the new movement.
I wonder too whether the question of gender participation hadn't gotten blurred so that people really recognized that it's more than just gender, it's also a commitment to make change for women and make change for girls and make change for in careers and make change for horizons. These are dimensions that are not stated as part of the current movement and it seems to me a great deal had been lost from the old movement to the new movement that needs to be recaptured. We need to have a deeper personal emotional dimension that now is no longer existent.
Miriam:
Thank you.
Carol:
I have wondered, I'm fascinated at your identification, Tim, of the absence of music. It's something that I find I talk a lot with young people about and have invited some of the young people I work with still to come over here on Friday evening to be with me and me with them for the musical part of our weekend gathering.I don't think there's been exposure. I'm wondering where we didn't do our part in bringing some of what you're talking about to the young people for them to more actively consider incorporating some of those ties. I see it as more of our failing than of the failing of the young folks and I'm not sure what it was that we might have done differently in an active way in that bridge with the generation of activists emerging now.
They still — I'm truly blessed with the young people who are working to understand what, for them, are some of the lessons and teachings that they feel they want to incorporate but, systemically, I'm not sure that we have done our part and I don't even know for certain what I think that would look like in helping creating that more nurturing place that goes beyond, as you said, the political alone.
Timothy:
And then coupled with that is also the matter of personal involvement with one another, really being interested in one another as human beings. It's not just a political ally that you're talking to, it's somebody whose life is important to you and your committed to expanding and enlarging. You want to know, not only who they are, but who their children are and what their future is as well as their past and that is a broadening of perspective so that a movement is not a single track, it's a multiple track, it's a universe of impressions. And I think that [has been] allowed to narrow and become focused on economic-political questions to the exclusion of the psychological, personal, and value questions and religion is a part of that enlargement.
Miriam:
Okay, I'm going to interrupt because we want Faith to have her five minutes before we get into the general discussion. Faith, it's your turn. You have the topic, right?
Faith:
I don't even know what to say. I'm sitting here thinking about what Tim's saying and how different it is from my experience and I'm wondering a little bit if it's because I live in the South now, and lived in West Virginia for most of my adult life. But in terms of the meaning, of SNCC, people I know who are in the movement now, talk about walking in their ancestors' footsteps and carrying a legacy and I think SNCC is part of what those people see as a legacy and some of them are impatient with what they see as SNCC's limitations.And I have to interject that, right now, I'm reading a wonderful book that came out the same year as Hands on the Freedom Plow, called At the Dark End of the Street. I don't know if any or all of you have read it but it's the story of basically how the fight to protect Black women against rape and pillage was a defining aspect of the Civil Rights Movement, but she also talks about the fact that Rosa Parks had been working on these issues for decades before she sat down on the bus. The book is rooted in the idea, or grows out of the idea, that all movements are rooted and also connected to the future and I feel like that's true.
I don't know where the differences come from, but one of the people who lives in Durham [NC] right now is named Adrienne Marie Brown, who's one Black female anarchist activist. And she coined a phrase that I just love, which is that "You can only move and organize at the speed of trust," which, to me, goes back to what Tim said of organizing among other things as relational and I think Durham is a bubble, but I think I'm lucky that I landed in a community, both here and in West Virginia, where those deep ties to one another's grandma's and children, etc, that we know a lot about them because [inaudible 00:29:19] and do other things together.
[In this context, "bubble" denotes a city or community with values and politics sharply different from those that dominate the surrounding region.]For me, the meaning of the SNCC experience was that we were part of this bridge that's across generations. I wish we had done more training young people while we were in SNCC. We had a cohort of wild and wonderful high schoolers in the New York SNCC office and there were wonderful teenagers everywhere, and little ones on the Eastern Shore of Maryland organized by elementary school kids, organized their own protests at swimming pools. But I wish we had done more Black Panther kind of thing of a curriculum and nurturing and mentoring that was structured.
[Referring to the breakfasts-for-children and other children-oriented programs organized in the North by the Black Panther Party.]That's a little wandering, sorry. These questions were hard for me, especially in the context of, "Oh, hello, I haven't seen you for 30 years and now I have to say something definitive."
Miriam:
I feel that too, Faith. I would like to catch up on how you are, what's going on, but I'm sticking to my script here.
Miriam:
Okay, we are now open for discussion on there so whoever wants to talk more about —[Pause]
Well, it seems obvious to me that the movements that happened afterwards respond. For example, Mario Savio was in Mississippi for the summer of '64 and came back and was part of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and then Chude Pam Allen was in Freedom Summer and was part of the early women's lib movement. I think we get to take credit for what followed after we were there.
Timothy:
As much as we don't like to focus on the question of violence as a positive, we do have to recognize that the presence of that violence and the threat of violence was part of our material of solidarity. We knew that when we took certain actions, we were putting our lives on the line. When we heard a call for help from one of our members who had been arrested or been detained or who was lost, we didn't have to question whether or not we had an obligation to do something about it because doing something about it was part of the fiber of who we were and that was moving beyond a paper commitment to a intestinal commitment.And what I don't see in the current students that I have listened to is the intestinal part of their commitment, the part of it that doesn't relate to the facts and figures, that doesn't relate to particular events. But who have a life story that they're weaving to accomplish a change of society itself, not a particular person being elected to office but a change to the way in which the whole concept of office is defined in terms of human need.
Carol:
Did the role, and I think what I'm hearing Tim, at least in part — and that I've grappled with — is whether the endless and persistent threats of violence for the people who had the courage to take us in, for ourselves, was in large measure what allowed us to transcend some of the tensions that we were talking about earlier. Some of the tensions within SNCC, around race and around gender but the certainly that others in our SNCC community would be present for us, that the folks who were used to defending their homes and families and who extended to us that same willingness to protect us. And that all those questions around violence and nonviolence, that that was part of what allowed us to have the solidarity that we did. Is the absence of that sustained level of violence a factor that makes it more difficult for folks, young folks today, to behave in the ways that you're talking about and recalling, Tim?
Timothy:
It's a part of the difference between our time and those time, these times and those times, and the question is do we give up or do we find another way to recreate the whole sense of community around which our efforts were built?
Miriam:
Let me throw out this one, what do you think the best legacy of SNCC was?
Timothy:
I don't understand that.
Miriam:
We did what we did. How did that help the people that came after in their organizing? What did we do right, in other words, that spawned the movements that followed us?
Timothy:
Well, one of the things we did right was we developed a community among ourselves. We had an ability to be committed to one another so that we were not abstract political operatives, we were bound together in a sense of identity and common purpose. What I don't see is that kind of binding in common purpose running through the current youth political activist. They're discreetly interested in this, that, and the other question — but I don't see them being committed to one another and have a commitment to a change of society itself that they are part of. And that is, what seems to me, we need to find vehicles to try and recreate.Our enemies did us a great service when they threatened our lives because when they threatened our lives, they broke us out of our nonchalance and they helped us understand that there was a deeper meaning to what we were doing than just the day-to-day activities that we're engaged in and it allowed us to see the history that goes back generations so that people who were forbearers could speak to us during out time about what they learned and what they need to teach us.
Miriam:
Thank you.
Carol:
I think what we learned from — again, the folks in the communities where we worked and from one another — was the depth of what organizing meant. And I see very little of that now. I see a lot of people, and talk to a lot of people, who call themselves organizers. It seems to be very chic but the drudge work or organizing, the long- haul work, I don't see a lot of it. And it may be in part, Faith, what you said, that we could've done a great deal more and a more focused and disciplined kind of training that would have allowed for the deeper connections with folks in communities and for the young folks among each other. And I think I agree, it goes more to those relationship questions.I think of a woman who lived down the road from Steptoe, who was part of the community around Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church, a little church on Steptoe's land. Miss Reece had a quilting rack that was on a pulley system and during the day, that quilting rack was up the ceiling of her little one room house and in the evening, some of the ladies from Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church would go over to Miss Reece's house and I would go over to Miss Reece's house and the quilt frame would be lowered, we'd be sitting around on tree stumps that were kind of the chairs in the little house and the quilt would rest on our legs.
I was not much on my sewing skills, but that was one of the vehicles, that's where the conversations occurred, that's where a lot of the planning occurred, that's where a lot of the connectivity would take place in the way that I hear Tim talking about. So you knew about family, you knew about what mattered, not in the theoretical abstract but because you were part of a community of people who, incredibly, invited you in and the strength that that gave to the organizing work couldn't be duplicated by the in and out kind of stuff, by the political calculus alone.
The richness of that. I know the richness that I was able to take away from that wasn't the main purpose, but that was the reality. I just don't see and feel, and it may be in Durham, Faith, that you see much more of that happening and feel it with the same depth and intensity among the young folks here who are very engaged, very active, but it's more in the transactional way that Tim talks about than the transformational way that I think was part of the work as I experienced it with SNCC in the South.
[Discussion of what we were proud of moved to later in transcript.]
Faith:
I think that Carol and Tim are describing what is true mostly in this country in terms of transactional work. But I just want to put out there that not only can things be different, but they are sometimes so. On the other side of my computer, on my desk are a bunch of — And I'm not big into crystals and sage and stuff but crystals and water from the ocean and some other things that I have received as an elder in this community because there's a group called Spirit House, which is Black women who are cultural organizers and they do this for a number of elders. I still kind of giggle [when] I think of myself as an elder, except when I try to get out of bed in the morning.And I have held peoples babies and I think I've been blessed. I think I'm very lucky and I think Durham is a bubble because the other thing to mention was the whole question of women and women's activism and I think SNCC was pretty extraordinary for its time, considering all of us grew up in the '50s, which were pretty sexist.
In terms of transactional politics, I am in awe of [Georgia Black political activist] Stacey Abrams but I also, here in this community, have received leadership from women, that's pretty amazing. And this is also a community like Atlanta, it's very queer friendly. So that's nice for me because most of the places I've been have not been. I'm sorry, that was kind of rambling. That's a good question, Miriam.
Faith:
Well, I'm interested in what kind of work — I mean, Carol has alluded now to these groups of young people, I don't know if they're students, I don't know if they're temple youth, I don't know who they are, but what kind of things we have done since, let's say, 1965-66 and, in a way, that is also an evaluation of SNCC. We're only three people so SNCC's [inaudible 00:48:21].
Miriam:
Well, my marching orders are if we talk about that, we have to relate it back to SNCC, okay? Fair? If you talk about what you've done since, find a way to relate it back to SNCC.
Carol:
I think it's really interesting, given where we come from, that now being rule bound becomes important. Follow the script, I'm sorry, but it just seems a little incongruous that, for me, part of what I'm proud of is not following a script through most of my life, including certainly becoming engaged with SNCC so I'm just having this little bit of how do I follow the rules now, Miriam, when my life has been not so good at following rules?
Faith:
Well, I would say that all of my activism relates to SNCC in the sense that it grew out of that experience as well as my childhood and my experience in Harlem before SNCC. And I think in terms of what was the meaning of SNCC, the fact that I spent time actually in New Mexico with Betita [Martinez] and others doing some work around La Raza and then went to Detroit and really had more experience of working class labor specifically, interracial labor politics, and then West Virginia, just a whole other thing. That, to me, broadens the definition of who SNCC was and who we were.And I have to be honest, I don't entirely identify with this, to me, very slick few days that have been planned for us [referring to the SNCC 60th Conference] because I didn't experience SNCC as slick. Slick was SCLC, at least in Southwest Georgia.
To the extent that we became active in teacher's unions or whatever, abortion rights, were on boards of women's health committees. I don't know, you can fill in the blanks, but that, to me, is also part of SNCC and I feel like a little bit, there's a SNCC [inaudible 00:51:23] — Martha [Presdoc Noonan] shared with me years ago, the phrase, the "Enterprising of SNCC," and maybe that's a little bit of my discomfort too. On the other hand, I don't want to shoot the messenger, in other words, Miriam.
Miriam:
Thank you, always a good plan not to do that. Well, I'll come into this thing we're doing now [this type of discussion]. It's something that the group that I'm in here — I'm in a support group here — seriously believes in, whereas panel discussions, we seriously don't. And that doesn't mean I won't listen to some, but this is the heart of what we want to do. And, of course, when it goes up on the website, then students all over the world can hear what people who actually were there have to say about it 50-60 years later.
[Portion moved from earliet in discussion to here.]
Miriam:
I'd like to change the subject just a little bit and throw out something new. I'm going to share something I was proud of when I was in the South and challenge you guys to come up with something you were proud of.I was proud of, I got a Mississippi driver's license and in order to do that, as a civil rights worker, they gave you Form-E as the test you had to pass, it was a written test, and it had questions like this, "Name the 18 cities that have a radio capability for the police. Name the 25 cities that have ..." In other words, Form-E was meant for civil rights workers or other "undesirables." I took it, I failed it, of course, but I remembered the questions, went back and memorized them and went back and passed the test. I got a Mississippi driver's license, I'm very proud of that still. If you'd like to share one, or maybe more than one, thing that you're proud about from your civil rights work.
Tim, can I call on you?
Timothy:
One of the things that I think we can be proud of is something that didn't happen and that is that in the history and analysis of SNCC, I can find no instance when a SNCC person has betrayed another SNCC person or betrayed the whole principles that SNCC stood for.There's no occasion when somebody turned coat and joined the other side, gave access to the enemy of our secrets that told things that were inappropriate to be shared outside of our circle. And all the different movements I've been involved in, labor, law, education, business, I can find no comparable instance that is without some aspect of betrayal in their [inaudible 00:54:00]. But I can say with SNCC, there's no occasion when we were sold out, no occasion where somebody accepted a bribe to do something adverse to our interests, no occasion when somebody ostensibly turned their back on us in order to get some advantage for themselves.
I can't say that's the same in other areas of my exposure, whether it's labor movements, whether it's professional life, whether's it higher education or where there's civic activity or communal or even social groups and that, I think, is an achievement that we can be proud of.
Carol:
I had a little struggle when I was living out at Steptoe's. Steptoe would not let me go out on my own except armed. I have never said this publicly before so allow me. We referenced earlier how the experience of being taken in, becoming part of families, and protection being extended to us. Certainly, my experience, but beyond that, Steptoe used to take me out into a field with a .45 [pistol]. Now, I grew up as a little Jewish girl in Brooklyn and didn't have a whole lot of exposure to guns, and that big old heavy thing and he'd have me shoot. And when I would go out in that blue pickup truck to canvas, that gun was like magnetized to the bottom of the dashboard.Now, I was always really conflicted about that. The one time where being run off the road, I was driving the car of the woman at that time, Juanita Griffin was one of the stalwarts in Amite County. And when that driver of that pickup got out with his long gun to my head, there was no way I was about to pull a gun out. I would be dead if I'd tried to do that. But that gun was there and, for me, trying to reconcile — that that was what was being demanded of me by one of the most courageous, one of the most cantankerous but one of the most courageous people I've ever met [referring to E.W. Steptoe].
But there was no way, practically or philosophically, that I was ever going to use that gun. But I've never quite resolved for myself whether there was something different that I should've done. Whether by practicing shooting, having that gun with me. I feel the tension to this day. And it's in no way questioning Steptoe. But it is questioning myself. Was there a different or more appropriate response or was that simply the right thing to do? Or were there a lot of right things and that was the right thing that I chose? But I struggle with that, I still struggle with that. In part because it does bring back that long gun to my temple and reliving all of the challenges that any of us who experience that kind of violence went through.
Timothy:
One of the things that distinguished to me from a lot of my colleagues in SNCC was that I never professed — and I think in this respect, Chuck McDew shared that with me — I never did espouse the question of nonviolence. For me, that was a "No-no." I grew up in a society where violence in self defense was always considered legitimate, if not obligatory. And I have this notion intention when I was to participate and hear the SNCC people talk about nonviolence in the beloved community when, in my heart of hearts, I did not believe that all of the community was beloved or worthy of love.My views were shaped as a child when I observed in my neighborhood of North Philadelphia, the way in which violence worked. The meek suffered, the strong survived and I was left with the impression, both by my parents and my community, that I had an obligation to be self defensive and that it was morally incorrect to be submissive to the force of another when the other was doing something that was evil, and especially if they were doing it at my expense. In that respect, I always was in a kind of a mild tension with much of what SNCC stood for in theoretical terms. And I always understood that there were limits to my ability to really buy into the SNCC code as a way of life.
Mine was that nonviolence was a tactic that given that you had inferior force, inferior self defense and inferior access to the origins of state to use as resources, that you were self reliant and therefore obliged to really on yourself in the ultimate extreme.
I must say that McDew and several others agreed with me although none of them would go public in their statements. My feeling has been that there is a point at which morality becomes immorality when it becomes timidity and I refuse to be timid in the face of oppressive alternative force. I wanted to say that because I think that many people feel that when you say you're part of a nonviolent movement, that you have to be intestinally nonviolent and I wanted to clear that you could be part of a nonviolent movement, behave nonviolently, but it doesn't mean you have to be intestinally so.
Miriam:
I remember talking a lot about nonviolence and the whole concept when I was in SNCC. And I have learned since about some number of people who were armed in SNCC, which I was totally unaware of when I was down there.
Carol, would you please tell us what happened after this — you're sitting there with a gun at your head? You're still here [meaning you're still alive].
Carol:
Your question earlier about a positive and the first thing that occurred to me was, "Well, I survived."We did a lot of work in Mississippi around the agricultural boards. The boards there were elected in local communities, that made the determination about crop allotments, which translated into dollars, we were working to get black folks to be willing to run and to be elected to those agricultural boards.
[Referring to campaigns aimed at electing Blacks to county-level Agriculture Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) boards. Known colloquially as "cotton boards," these all-white five-member bodies determined which farmers in each county received federal crop-support subsidies — and how much.]On this particular occasion, [we were] working in a part of the county where we had not done a lot of canvasing. We were just beginning to build connections. And those red clay roads were not really designed for two cars and they had deep ruts on the sides of the roads and it was like a car-and-a- half width.
[Referring to drainage ditches on either side of rural dirt lanes. If a car's wheels went off the road into the ditch, it might be stuck and require a tow truck to extract it. Meanwhile, the people in the car would be alone, stranded, and possibly injured.]We had a number of families we were going to visit to talk to. I was driving and a pickup truck was coming in the opposite direction and we maneuvered and the truck passed us, went behind us, driven by, a young white guy. Turned around, came up behind us. Passed us again, did this several times. Each time, I'm inching closer to that rut on the side of the road. The last time that the truck came up, the guy — all the trucks had gun racks — he'd taken the [rifle] off of the gun rack, came over to the window, and asked whether we looking for "Martin Luther Coon" and, to me, with the gun on my head, said, "Nigger lover, you will never get out of Mississippi alive." [He] got back in the truck. Back and forth.
I eventually, as the truck came back in one of these passes, pulled the car off and we went into one of those ruts on the road. With Miss Griffin trying to figure out exactly where we were, how do we get to a [paved] road? We knew we needed to get — There was one black family in the county, the Simmons family, that had a phone. And I'm sure you all recall, we had a set of protocols of contacts, what we were going to do when there were any issues, troubles, beyond the two ways radios that Morty Shift, if you remember Morty, Faith, helped set up. We knew we had to get to the Simmons house, which meant we had to get to the black-top road [on foot], which we estimated was half a mile, three quarters of a mile away.
We got out of the car and gathered up — because I had lists of names of families — and gathered up all this material, this information that we wouldn't leave for this guy [to seize and provide to the Ku Klux Klan]. We started to walk on that red clay road toward the black top. And the guy, the truck followed us, the guy in the truck, continuing to just shout a lot of threatening things. People came out of houses as we walked and [we] just stayed on the side of the road as we walked kind of this gauntlet. We got up to the black-top road and we eventually flagged down a logging truck. A lot of [Black] folks in Southwestern Mississippi went across to Louisiana and logging was the work that they did.
And that logging truck took us to the Simmons house where we began to make the calls and [to] follow all the protocols before I got back to Steptoe's, which also then involved — Oh, geez, I'd forgotten this. Part of what we did was because the FBI always asked, "Did you call your local sheriff?" As absurd as that sounds. Reaching out in Amite County, it was Sheriff Jones, who was widely believed to have been involved in the killing of Louis Allan [in 1964]. If you remember, Louis Allen had been a witness to the killing of Herbert Lee [by a white member of the state legislature].
And eventually there was all the FBI involvement and of course nothing was ever done, nothing was ever found. But that is a sense memory as well as a thought memory, for me, and I clearly had never done a great job of working totally through it so it lives at a cellular level.
And I recognize it's one small story of a lot of really important stories and I'm not sure that I, I'm not sure that we — I'll stay with I — have ever thoroughly been able — in all the speaking and all the work and all the communicating — to thoroughly — Even with young folks with whom I'm in contact today, to really convey what the horror was for Mississippi-folks [who tried] to do the most elemental things.
And my story was sometimes a window to trying to get that conversation, to get the depth of what it was that people were willing to risk. And if you're serious about organizing and social change, grasping this on some level. But I don't know. I don't know that I've ever successfully been able to do that in a way that has enabled others to, not just think about, but [to] feel about what it is to make a commitment to life changing events. I'm sorry to blubber a little bit here but it remains very challenging.
Miriam:
Carol, thank you for sharing that. I'll share with you that in looking at what was going on, when you messed with the cotton boards or the other things that hit the white farmers right in their pocketbooks, they weren't having that. So they reacted more strongly to that and that's what I think you got caught in the middle of. Not fun.
Carol:
Southwest Mississippi remained a very violent place. Remember, again, [the murders of] Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, they were still very recent when — And I talked with Bob [Moses] about this when Bob went into Amite in '61. The fact that those killings were still happening.Remember, we didn't even send anybody [there] in '64 [Freedom Summer]. Folks went into Pike County and McComb and Marshall and some others made some connections about in and around Liberty, the [Amite] county seat. But it remained such a violent place and, as Faith said, we were very young. We knew what we were doing in a way, and maybe we didn't in some other ways, but I think I certainly understood — I think I understood, I shouldn't say "certainly." Miss Griffin certainly understood, E.W. Steptoe certainly understood, the Wethersby's, the Simmons, they all understood. If they understood and took the risk, wasn't that, in large measure, what we were willing to demonstrate by the way we worked?
Miriam:
Thank you again for sharing that. There's a book on our website by Don Jelinek, who was in our support group, called White Lawyer, Black Power and he talks about the cotton wars and how touching on that was so dangerous. Yeah.I never got into that kind of situation and I was at the age of total denial, "I'm invincible," that kind of young-person age. And I think I was protected by being a white woman, that I never felt in that kind of personal danger whereas most of the white guys I know got beaten up, the majority of the white guys that were down there that I kept in touch with. Yeah.
Carol:
I think white women presented a particular dilemma for the white [segregationists] in the south. Jailed experiences in Mississippi and Jackson — there was the whole operative "race traitor" thing going on. But also the elevation of "white womanhood" and I sometimes felt both of these forces on the part of white [racists] and sometimes it was the race-traitor" piece that would win out and the attacks would — and sometimes it was the sanctity of white womanhood, even though you're a "race traitor."I think it was often very, very confusing to white [southerners], to white men, and I think sometimes being very aware of how that could provide for both danger for people we worked with and how to try to be very cautious, adhere very carefully. Again, for me, it was the wisdom of E.W. Steptoe about how to be present and how not to be present for the safety of a larger community.
Miriam:
Faith or Tim, any thoughts?All right. It's time to get up and stretch. We're supposed to have had a five minute break but we have less than a half hour left but how about a couple minutes of just relaxing, stretching, and then we'll come back?
[Break]
[Side conversation between Carol & Faith during break]
Carol:
Faith, seeing you makes me think I'd like to figure out a way to connect up some time. This is certainly stirring all kinds of thoughts and feelings again. And as somebody with whom I go back a few years, that might —
Faith:
Well, I saw you maybe twice in Ashville [NC] and, at that time, you were very involved in the twins from —
Carol:
Oh, my gosh, yes.
Faith:
— the [inaudible 01:20:11] children and there were lots of health problems, it was pretty intense. And, of course, now I'm still pretty cautious in terms of the [Covid Delta varient] surge.
Carol:
Understood.
Faith:
We did go to California to see my two grown children but it was at that moment of optimism in July and August, when maybe [the Covid pandemic was] getting better , but I think we should figure out, for the moment, an area in between Ashville and Durham where we can eat outside or whatever. You'd be welcome to come here if you're comfortable doing that, we've both been vaccinated, blah, blah, blah.
Carol:
Well, perhaps, as we get through these next few days, however we respectfully choose to navigate that, we might connect up and explore what might be possible. I, too, am cautious. Have now, at this ripe old age, a number of more substantial health challenges and need to be realistic, as I'm sure you do, about that but at least perhaps we could talk about a way of —
Faith:
I mean, we could Zoom, if you have a — I'm not crazy about Zooming but it works.
Carol:
As long as you don't ask me to do anything that requires some technical acumen.
Faith:
Yeah, and I don't have access to an account so looks like that's probably out.
Carol:
Well, we'll follow up and sort something out.
Faith:
Okay.
Carol:
I would hope that would be possible but we will explore that beyond this call.
Faith:
Okay. Do you know anything about Sandy Leigh [Sanford Leigh] and his death and beatings and —
Carol:
Well, you know, I've only read stuff recently about that and what sounds incredibly tragic.
Faith:
I think it was a gay-bashing but I can't substantiate that.
Carol:
But that's my — That's been my own inclination but I've been very cautious about that because I'm not aware of Sandy's ever publicly coming out.
Faith:
Oh, I think he was very out. I don't know.
Miriam:
Let me find out, are we talking about — Is this someone who was in SNCC, that you guys know from SNCC?
Faith:
He was a project director in Mississippi.
Carol:
In Hattiesburg, wasn't it?
Faith:
Right. Right.
Miriam:
And this is something recent or something that happened during the civil rights time?Faith:
Since civil rights [era], but not that recent. I only know because this queer Black man who's studying the movement interviewed me, specifically about queer experience. Although I was aware of who I was at the time, and I mentioned Sandy. I just kind of vaguely knew about him [back then]. But then I looked him up on Wikipedia and stuff and it sounds to me — He was seriously injured to the point where he couldn't speak, maybe couldn't see or hear, and then he was beaten again and he died.
Carol:
And didn't know who he was, had taken on a different identity, I think, between the two beatings. It's just a horrible, horrible, horrible series of events.
Miriam:
Okay. We're in our final 20 minutes. What have each of you not shared that might be helpful for somebody studying the movement 10 years out or 20 years out? Something that you want them to understand about what it meant for you or meant for the rest of your life after the movement.
Faith:
Well, I don't know about what something meant for my life but I've been doing some writing and, Amina, who I've mentioned a couple of times, who did work with SNCC. For years, I've — Amina has passed but, for years, I've just said kind of casually, "Yes, and Amina was the first student at Music and Art High School in New York City to have an afro [hair style]." Which was always interesting to me, but when I was writing about it recently, I thought, "What a world when nobody had afro's."Some people did but things have changed. They haven't all changed and they haven't all changed for the better. But just little things like that are different. And also what courage it took on her part, at 14, to do that.
Miriam:
Tim, can I call on you?
Timothy:
Ella Baker was not a person who was particularly known for her religiosity. In fact, it was because of her exposure to ministers through so much for her professional life that she chose to turn her back on the church. And she was one of those people who made clear that she was not exactly agnostic but she wasn't philosophically religious either.Ella and I were at the Highlander Folk School for one of our organizing and training sessions when it was decided that we would go to the airport in Chattanooga and go to our various places after the session was over. Well, as it happened, Ella and I were in this [inaudible 01:28:00] mini bus, which had the open skylight so that you could see from the roof. And this 16-wheeler [white] truck driver came along and saw that we were an interracial group of people and we were in there, singing, having a great time. He decided that he would move us off the road. He pushed us to the point of losing any contact with the asphalt and we were tumbling down the side of the Chattanooga mountains when a tree stump stopped us from rolling to the bottom, but we were in a precarious situation.
There was something like six of us in this minibus and it was so precarious that we had to coordinate our breathing so that we didn't lose balance on that tree stump. And we were sitting there for an indeterminate amount of time, looking for some form of rescue and, finally, we coordinated our breath sufficiently so that we didn't tumble the next 100 feet or so that would've cost us all our lives.
When we go out, the grappling hook that caught us and pulled us back up onto the road, left us there by the side of the road for the ambulance to come. The ambulance did finally come, and there was Ella, bleeding profusely from forehead, and there I was, bleeding from the side of my face from the ear, from my eye to my lip, with no bandages or anything else. They pulled us back up onto the road just in time before the ground gave way under the minivan that we were riding in. When we got back up on the surface of the road, the ambulance came and they addressed Ella's injuries and mine.
Ella motioned to me before the ambulance took her to the hospital to come nearer because she had something to tell me. All her life, she had been a pretty outspoken, if not agnostic, certainly a non-theological oriented person, and she asked me to lean down and I could barely hear her speak but she said, "Timothy, thank God for Jesus."
That's the only time I ever heard Ella say anything that was religious and it was in that context that I recognized that religion may be under the surface even when we cover it over with all sorts of political statements and agnostic statements and antithetical statements and atheistic statements. Ella told me that in the time of a pinch, we all become theologs. "Thank God for Jesus," and that was Ella's parting words to me.
Miriam:
Thank you for sharing that. What state was that in? That was Tennessee?
Timothy:
Yeah, Tennessee, we were on our way to Chattanooga and we were in Highlander and we were moving to the Chattanooga airport when we got pushed off the road.
Miriam:
We have 15 minutes left before we join the big group and I'm, by decree, going to say I would like to hear about your families.Faith mentioned coming out to the San Francisco area to see her kids. I actually am in a Philadelphia suburb right now because my son's family is in Bryn Mawr so I have two grown sons and one is out in the Bay area near me and it's quite interesting being in a new place. I've been away for two months already and I'm going to stay away one more month. The wildfire smoke in California was so awful last year that I decided I wouldn't stay during the height of wildfire season.
But that's where I am and I knew Faith from Southwest Georgia and, Tim, I've seen you speak at SNCC reunions. We didn't get — By the way, the white folks didn't get invited back to SNCC reunions until the 30th, 30 years later. They thought it was all right for us to come.
Faith, you want to talk a little bit about you've got two kids in [inaudible 01:34:10] area.
Faith:
Sure. Vicky and I have four kids between the two of us and 11 grandchildren. I'm not going to tell you about each and every charming, smart, one of them but the two children I gave birth to, Jonah is in his mid 50's and lives in Berkeley and is a tech person. My daughter, Camilla, has a serious mental illness. She probably has schizophrenia but she doesn't believe she does so jury's out. She lived in the Mission [neighborhood of San Francisco] for a very long time and she lives in Ukiah [CA] now. She has two teenage children who live with their father. That's a lot of mental energy goes into worrying about her, caring, etc.
Miriam:
Of course.
Faith:
Vicky and I have a really good life here in Durham, as I've been saying. She's involved in disability rights and one of her daughters has finally moved within 20-30 miles of us, so we are, for the first time, having a local grandma kind of experience so that's very nice.Lots of community friends, etc, and actually I'm still friends with people I met when I was four, at elementary school. And my sister — Carol may have known my sister, Shai died in April of 2020, not of COVID.
Miriam:
Carol, you going to say anything?
Carol:
Your mention of Shai, Faith, in this letter, your letter from 1965, you mention that — In fact, almost your closing line is, "Shai is in Canada with the Kismet cast."
Faith:
She was. Performing arts grad.
Carol:
I'm divorced, I have one son, who also in his 50's, married. He's a little flaky, in a charming way but a little flaky, married to a terrific young lady. They have twins, Faith eluded to them earlier. The twins are now 11, twin boys, and they live close by, although I must say, with COVID and with some of my health stuff, we're all super, super cautious.It's fun having the kids around, the idea of being a grandmother is one, it's something that my grandmother was, so I'm not sure that I'm a grandmother are one of the many sort of challenges as we think about who we are at any given point. I have lived all over the country after Mississippi. I was up in Boston when I went to law school, and we were then out in California, my husband was the dean of a law school out in San Diego. We are just all over the place, doing different work.
I did a lot of work on immigration, a lot of work along the southern border, working with immigration coalitions and connections, the creation, as I guess we all have in some ways of creating families and I've certainly done that. And so, my dearest friends are up in Boston and friends from California and I miss having as close a group of people where I am now, I'm in Ashville, North Carolina.
And it's been a good place and it's part because my kids, my grandkids, are here but I have, as I'm sure all of you just given the lives we've led, people scattered in different places so I engage in a total fantasy that before I pass from this earth, we will have a giant gathering, some place like Des Moines [IA] or something, Dubuque [IA], I don't know, some middle place. And I really know that's never going to happen, but I still hold onto the story that I make up that all these people who have been so important in my life, blood and otherwise, will have one more giant gathering. You're all invited, how's that?
Miriam:
Lovely.
Carol:
Thank you.
Miriam:
Tim, I know you had a child in 1964.
Timothy:
Yay, we did and we had one grandchild one month ago. One of the things that I think is important to appreciate is that we continue to live in the past as well as in the future and one of the things that I think what this gathering allows us to do is to really do both and it is remarkable to me to recognize that of all of our experiences, we have a common bond in the way in which we have approached life and it has been shaped by our association, one with another, in a way that I think is unique among associations and political units of the country. And especially of the next generation where they do not seem to blend well, the personal with the public.I won't worry you with the details of my life, you've met my wife, Lauretta, you can get the other details on Wikipedia and Google and what have you, just make sure you put the middle initial "L" after Timothy and before Jenkins otherwise you get a lot of imposters.
One of the things that I'm satisfied of is that we've had a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to people who are unique and their uniqueness comes out in even a simple simulcast like this. We are a special people and we must let the world know our meaning.
Miriam:
Okay. Some housekeeping stuff, thank you guys for all the wonderful stories and the sharing. Bruce will get this recording, Bruce is the webmaster for crmvet.org and he will get it transcribed and post it and you can go back and add, delete, correct anything you want with no time limit for what Bruce puts up. Then the video, we won't be able to go back and change because it's recording and that may end up at Duke Library or some other place and if we want to listen to it, I guess we can.It's been a most interesting eye opening, for me, time and, just to share, I intend to tune into the concert. I think there's two coming up as part of this SNCC thing and apparently the panels, you can watch when they're on but it sounds like they're going to stay on YouTube or something so you can watch them in the next month or so. That was my understanding.
Anyway, I'm really, really sorry we didn't have this at the Shoreham Hotel but some things can't be changed. In a couple minutes, they're going to tell us that we go back to the main meeting for some announcements of some information and then it should be over at 6:00.
How many people have twins in their offspring, either children or grandkids? I do and Carol does.
Timothy:
In our idle time, I'll tell you that I have two sons and one is a musician, a violinist with the Grand Rapids [MI} Symphony and he has been able to do some of his concertizing and include in his works some of the music of the movement and we did a joined appearance at the Rankin Chapel in Howard University, which has become one of the highlights of my life experience.Also, my younger son is an architect and he's been dealing with buildings from housing for the poor in New York City and it's been a challenging thing for trying to find new architectural techniques when dealing with low cost housing as opposed to high rise luxury kind of stuff. And I think it's a part of our legacy in our community, transmit what we have done in our lives but transmit it to our children as well so that they can carry on in their own individual way. Neither of my sons is a lawyer, a politician, a public figure or any of that sort of stuff but they've been doing their part of the crusade in their own unique way and I'm proud of that.
Miriam:
Okay. Now, let's see, leave breakout room is on my screen. They're asking us to come back to the main room. Everybody, you guys, take care. It's been just wonderful.
Carol:
Thank you, Miriam. Thank you all.
Miriam:
You're welcome. Okay, I'm clicking on leave.
[End Session #2]
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