[Jimmy Rogers was a Tuskegee student activist and SNCC organizer
in Alabama from 1961-1967. Linda Dehnad worked with Friends of SNCC in
New York. Linda passed away in June of 2006. See
Linda Remembered]
Hartford:
How and why did you become active in the Civil Rights movement?
Rogers:
During 1959 after coming out the service, I went to work for the New
York State Commission Against Discrimination, which was located at 270
Broadway in Manhattan, New York, New York. The chairman, Allan McCarter,
who is located in New York, in Manhattan that is. We also had regional
offices in Syracuse, Albany, Buffalo and they already had commissioners
too. There were about five commissioners. Three of them were in the
city. What the New York State Commission Against Discrimination did was
they investigated complaints of discrimination in housing, employment,
public accommodations. That was the year I had gotten out of the
service, out of the military, and I went to work for them.
For example, in area of public accommodations, there were people that would be discriminated against in bars, at bowling alleys, at barber shops.
I can remember once an incident where I was assigned to assist the New York State commission against Discrimination because they suspected this one barber shop of discriminating against people. They sent me down to go into this Italian barber — and I believe, though I don't have any proof, that it was a Mafia barber shop. When I walked in the door, the guy looked at me and he said, "Yeah, what do you want?" I said I wanted a haircut. He said, "I don't know how to cut your hair." Well, I was very happy to hear that, because I could run back to the office and tell them, you know, that he said that he didn't know how to cut my hair.
The commission officials replied that the barber didn't say that he would not cut my hair, so I had to return to this Mafia barber shop to either get a hair cut or to get them to say they were not going to cut my hair. So I went back and I told him I wanted a haircut. So he figured that there was something up. They finally cut my hair rather than my throat and gave me a pretty descent hair cut. What I didn't realize, in New York by law, barbers in New York are required to be able to cut everyone's hair. Another barber story, After completing my basic training I stopped by the Waldorf Astoria in my Air Force uniform to get a hair cut and the barber was very nasty because he didn't want to cut my hair, because of racial discrimination but he did, and gave me a terrible hair cut.
Hartford:
So how did you go from there to the Southern freedom movement?
Rogers:
Well, during the time that I worked at the New York State Commission
Against Discrimination, this woman got a scholarship for me for the
summer to Syracuse University through the National Conference of
Christians and Jews (NCCJ). That really gave me motivation to go back to
school. I noticed that there were a lot of things going on in the South
that were sort of an extension of what I was doing at the New York State
Commission Against Discrimination. So I decided that I would apply to
Howard, that I would apply to Tuskegee, and Fisk, and Morehouse and all
of them places that I'd heard about. Tuskegee was the first to call. So
right away, I filled out an application and decided that I would go to
Tuskegee.
I wasn't there a month before I met some people and we decided that we were gonna go to a football game in Montgomery. Being from New York, New York is dressed. They dress, right? So I had a closet full of clothes. Had about 10 suits, trench coat, hats, all that sort of stuff. So we went to Montgomery and I had on a brand new suit with a trench coat and hat going on top of my head and had to get the shoes and all that sort of stuff. We went to this football game. I had a pocketful of money.
After the game, we decided that we wanted to get something to eat. We went to the Greyhound bus station. At that time, 1961, the bus station, Greyhound, had two sides. They had a Black side and a white side. Well, usually when I went to the Greyhound bus station I go on the white side first, just to see what would happen. But this night, I decided that I didn't want any problems, so I go into the Black side. So as I'm walking up to the door, there's two cops standing outside. They looked me up and down, nice shiny shoes and this, that, and the other thing. So they look at each other. I said, uh oh, here it comes. I just knew it, too. So I walk into the Black side of the Greyhound bus station with my two friends and no sooner than we get in there, here they come. They're standing up by the door, in the mirror in front of me, where you can see what's going on behind you, every time I looked up, they'd be staring right at me.
One of the guys that I was with later became my roommate, John Stevens, who ended up going on to Vanderbilt to get a Ph.D. in physical chemistry after graduating from Tuskegee. He was really brilliant. Anyway, we had our food and then I told them, "I think you guys better leave. I have a feeling I'm gonna have a little problem when we leave out of here." So they said, "Oh, man, they ain't thinking about you." I said, "Yes, they are." I said, "You just watch and see." So they got up and left and I waited until they got outside, because if anything did happen to me, I would want somebody that could say exactly what had happened. So I got up and I walked out. No sooner than I got through the door, here they come. So I walked there and I heard somebody say, "Hey, boy." I looked around, I didn't see nobody else. I kept on walking. Then I thought about it and I said, maybe if I do that, they might shoot me in the back, talking about how I was resisting arrest or something. I didn't see anybody else out there, so I asked them, who were they talking to, and they said, "you."
So they walked up to me and one of them had this little baton. They had two batons, one big and one little. He comes up and he sticks it on top of my hat. He said, "Nigger," he says, "Where are you from?" I wanted to say Tuskegee, but I was so nervous, I said, "New York." Why did I say that for? "New York, what the hell are you doing down here?" I said, "I go to school here." "Don't they have any schools up there in New York?" I said, yeah. "Well, why did you have to come down here?" I said, "Well, I like these better." They said, "Oh, well, these schools down here, they are a little better than they are in New York."
About this time, a local guy comes out of the bus station, while they're hassling me, Black guy. He comes down to the restaurant and they, "Hey, nigger." He looked at them. They said, "Let me see your teeth." He said, "I don't have any, motherfu — ." [Laughter]
He walked on about his business, that's what he did. That's what he said, too. So they looked at me and they said, "Hey, that nigger don't have any teeth." I figured that he could get away with that and not get knocked upside the head, you know, they ain't gonna. So I felt a little better about that. So then they asked me, "What does your mother do?" I told them. "Down here?" I said, "No, up there, in New York." "What does your father do?" I said, "He's up there, too, in New York." "What are you studying at that there school?" I said, "Well, I'm majoring in English and history." "Well, what do you intend to do after you graduate?" I said, "I intend to go to law school." "Law school? To handle them God damn civil rights cases?" I said, "No. All I want to do was to be able to make a living." "Well, we can understand that." It went on and on and on and on. God, I don't even remember all they said.
Hartford:
Was this incident before or after the first Freedom Ride into Montgomery
with John Lewis and Diane Nash? Remember, that came through Birmingham
and then Montgomery and they had that riot? It was in May. It was on
Mother's Day.
Rogers:
It must have been after. The reason why I say that is because I
didn't go South until June of '61.
Hartford:
So they had already gone through — they already had the
Freedom Rides come through Montgomery, so they see you going in, they're
already primed.
Hartford:
So how did you go from there to getting active in SNCC?
Rogers:
We had a group on campus called the Tuskegee Institute Advancement
League. That was one of the — Jennifer Lawson was also
very actively involved in Tuskegee Institute Advancement League. We were
not only interested in civil rights, but we were interested in academic
freedom and that sort of thing. We had a similar thing going on, as
Berkeley did in 1964, with the Free Speech Movement. Our group was TIAL
and we did voter registration work and we took people in Macon County,
that's where Tuskegee is, down to see the registrar's. We went out into
the community and talked to people.
Rogers:
From TIAL, Bill Hall was coming onto campus. That's around the time that
I met [Wazir] Peacock. Stokely [Carmichael] and Courtland [Cox] and a
lot of SNCC people used to come. [James] Foreman.
Oh, and then even before that, I was involved with the campus YMCA, we had a race relations group where we used to meet with students from Auburn University. This was about 1962 or '63. We used to alternate meeting sites. One time the meeting would be at Tuskegee and the next time it would be at Auburn. One of the things that really struck me, when we had the meetings at Tuskegee, we would have them on the campus, but when we had them at Auburn, we weren't allowed on the campus. We had to go to a local church and have the meeting. There was one local church that would let us have the meeting there. As I said on our website, as a member of the YMCA race relations group, I attended a regional conference in Gatlinberg, Tennessee, where there were students from all over the South. We would have both Black and white. We all stayed at the same hotel and things were fine until somebody suggested that, "We don't have to eat this hotel food all the time. Let's go down to the restaurant down here." You know, one of the local restaurants. We walked in and the man looked up and saw all these Black and white people coming in there, and he reached down and grabbed a shotgun and he said, "Ain't no niggers coming in here. The only way they coming here will be over my dead body." I didn't want a hamburger or anything else that bad. [Laughter]
Hartford:
Obviously, movement work was dangerous, so why'd you do it? Why
did you get involved?
Rogers:
Because I felt that it was something that really needed to be
done. In saying that, I still don't feel that the movement is
over. I think that the resistance to inequality based on race has
just changed. In other words, with all of the profiling movements
that have been going on in terms of the police. I mean, there's
just so many discriminatory type things that are still happening
that I feel that I could live probably another 10 lifetimes and I
don't think that all of it will be resolved.
Hartford:
Linda, how and why did you get involved in the movement?
Dehnad:
Jimmy was saying something that made me think
that — I thought, what was the first time that I
felt that urge. I must have been in elementary school and some
friend of my parents, Black guy, came up to my house and was
standing on the front porch, rang the bell, and I looked outside and I
said, "Oh my God, a Black person coming to visit us in this
neighborhood. This is amazing."
Rogers:
Which neighborhood was that?
Dehnad:
It was a white neighborhood in New Rochelle, New York.
Hartford:
How old were you?
Dehnad:
I must have been in fifth grade, 10? That was 1947.
Dehnad:
So I thought back on it. The feeling that I had then
was — the situation is so horrible that for this person to
be coming to our house was a righteous act. It was a resistance. It was
done in such a casual way. I remember going to the door and opening the
door and feeling so proud to be involved in this. It just struck me
as — this is right. This needs to happen. I'd do other
things. My mother used to give me envelopes to address for the
Scottsboro Boys.
Hartford:
So you came from a leftie family? As we used to say, a "red diaper
baby?"
Dehnad:
Yeah. I guess you could call it that.
Rogers:
Scottsboro? I thought that was in the 30's.
Dehnad:
Yes, but there was still stuff being done later.
Rogers:
Oh, probably the defense. It happened in the 30's, but they were
probably still in jail.
Dehnad:
I don't remember what year that was. I mean, I could write. I
could address an envelope. I remember thinking, I hope they don't
mind my handwriting. So, I remember thinking that those things. I
just felt honored to be asked to do something like that. Came all the
way to 1963, my son was two years old. My husband said, "I'm going to
the March on Washington. You stay home with the baby." I said, "Oh,
okay." We watched, my son and I, watched the March on Washington on T.V.
When A. Philip Randolph said to everybody in the crowd, "I'm asking you
to make a commitment to be part of this movement, and in order to make
this commitment you need to stand up." I was sitting in my living room
and I got out of my chair. I stood up and I took whatever oath it was
that he gave us. I thought, that must have been the moment when I was
committed to the movement that started at that time.
Then, maybe it was a year later? I was reading, I think it must have "The Nation" or "The New Republic" had articles about people getting beat up in the South and bloody. My first reaction was, they need help. I wish I was a nurse. Well, I'm not a nurse, let's think about this. Must be something I can do. So I called the New York SNCC office. I said, "What do you need?" They said, "We need places for people to stay when they're in New York and we need money." So I started the Riverside Friends of SNCC and I got all my neighbors involved in it, saying, "Well, we can have somebody stay at our house." Which didn't work out too well. My house remained as the place. They couldn't handle most of the neighbors. But we did raise money. We had fundraising parties and Mrs. [Fannie Lou] Hamer would come. Then I guess [Jim] Foreman or somebody asked me to come and work in the New York office. I was on the [Friends of SNCC] steering committee in New York I worked with students.
Hartford:
So you did not go on Freedom Summer or work in the South?
Dehnad:
No. I was in the New York office. Emery Harris came to my house and he
could see that I was a nervous person. I was saying, "Jeez, you know,
maybe I should go South." Emery Harris said, "No, Linda, you should not
go South." [Laughter]
He was just a baby at that time. I mean, he was so young. But I believed him, he was so smart. He was brilliant. So I though, okay, I would stay. Because I was working. I was happy working in the New York office. I thought, somebody wants me to do this work. If they want me to do this and they don't want me to do that, I'll do this. So I kept doing that until they closed the New York SNCC office, I guess. So my house always had SNCC people in it.
That was in New York City. On Riverside Drive. 90th Street. On Bloody Sunday, my dining room was filled with people. We were watching T.V. We just turned on the news. So we're watching the news and there, and somebody said, "Oh my God. That's John."
Rogers:
John Lewis.
Dehnad:
Within 10 minutes, my house was empty. They grabbed their stuff and they
went.
Hartford:
There'd been this big controversy. SNCC said he shouldn't go on that
march. He said he had to go as an individual. SNCC said, we're not going
to participate.
Dehnad:
Yeah, well they all went. When they saw what happened to him.
Rogers:
Bob Mantz was there.
Hartford:
Bob Mantz was the only other one. Bob said he didn't want to go, but
that he wouldn't let John go alone without at least one other SNCC
person to back him up.
Dehnad:
Yeah, I remember that now.
Rogers:
Yeah, I was in Selma that day.
Dehnad:
Betty [Fikes?] knew there was going to be a mess. She went back to the
church.
Hartford:
I think everybody knew. I mean, everyone knew there was going to be a
mess.
Hartford:
Let's move on — Do you think the Civil Rights movement
changed race relations in the United States? Do you feel that progress
has been made?
Rogers:
Oh, I feel that the Civil Rights movement has definitely changed
race relations in the United States. Because I feel that Black
people, for the most part, have become more assertive in terms of
demanding their rights. As far as improvements, some people have
definitely benefited from that time. People are able to obtain
employment that they hadn't been able to obtain before. People
have been able to go to schools that they weren't able to go to
before the Sixties. There's just been a lot of things.
People were unable to register to vote. The movement gave them an opportunity to do that. Not only to register to vote, but to run for public office.
Hartford:
Let me ask you this. It seems to me, that one of the things that the
Civil Rights movement did, and I'm curious to know what you think of
this, is that before the Civil Rights movement, overt-explicit racism
was socially acceptable. A politician could get up and make a racist
speech, could publicly say that white Europeans were superior
genetically, and that people of color were inferior. That was
acceptable. At the dinner table in the middle-class homes it was
perfectly okay to make darkie jokes or kike jokes or polack jokes. You
could have companies who would use racist images or logos like Sambo's
or Aunt Jemima. In other words, overtly racist culture was was an
accepted part of American life. But the Civil Rights movement drove that
kind of racism underground. It's not that there is no longer racism, but
they can't be as explicit about it. It's now hidden. Do you think that's
true?
Rogers:
Yes. I think that a lot of discrimination today is really subtle.
It's not as flagrant as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties
and Forties, and whatnot. I think that the Civil Rights movement
not only helped Black people and minorities, it helped a lot of
other groups. Like I think the Civil Rights movement helped
women, because that brought about the women's movement, too. I
think that the Civil Rights movement helped the gay community,
because that brought about a movement around that. There's just
been a lot of different things that have happened since the
Sixties and the Civil Rights movement, what I attribute to the
Civil Rights movement. A lot of things have come after.
Dehnad:
What I was thinking was that I think it helped a lot of people who
weren't in any groups, really, because before it, I was just very
discouraged by America and feared racism and injustice. The only time I
don't feel that way is if I'm fighting it. So it was an opportunity to
fight it. I was filled with hope. I felt very positive. The other thing
that I would find in answer to that is, that the worst thing about
racism is that people die from it and are still dying in great numbers.
People being shot, people in Cincinnati [2001] and people all over the
country, being shot by police for, you know, looking for their wallet,
it seems to me that in probably in as great number as they had
lynchings.
Rogers:
Probably more.
Dehnad:
Probably more, that's what I was thinking. The number of people
in prisons is huge now. It just seems to me like it's really
dangerous to be Black again. Or still. If you're poor.
Rogers:
See, one thing that I noticed about the violence that you are talking
about, and what you're saying is very interesting because most of the
violence is targeted against just Blacks and other minorities, because
I've known several instances where they were Hispanics that were also.
But back in the Sixties, not only Black people were getting killed for
challenging the system, you've had a number of white people that were
also killed for challenging the system. Like you had [James] Goodman and
[Mickey] Schwerner [in Mississippi]. You had Viola Liuzzo [in Alabama].
You had Reverend [James] Reeb [in Alabama], and you had a number of
other white people that were killed.
Dehnad:
The thing is that these people getting killed now are not challenging
the system. They're just living, and they're getting killed.
Hartford:
But I think that was happening, too, back then.
Dehnad:
Yeah, that was happening.
Hartford:
Society just didn't see it as important back then. The fact that it is
even reported now is because of the Movement.
Dehnad:
It wasn't seen as important. I remember when Goodman, Schwerner
and Chaney were missing, when somebody called me from the Atlanta
office and was crying on the phone and said, "They just keep
finding bodies in the river."
Rogers:
Did you know George Green?
Dehnad:
Yeah. I didn't know him very well. I remember him, though.
Rogers:
He was from Greenwood, I think. He had a sister, Freddie Green? Did you
know her? Anyway, George was telling me that one time he was with the
FBI and they went around and talked to some sheriffs down there in
Neshoba County. They found this guy, pulled a guy out of the water. He
had been shot 69 times in the back. The FBI asked the sheriff, what did
he think happened. The sheriff shook his head and said, "This is the
damnedest case of suicide I ever saw in my life."
Hartford:
I think probably, racial murders were probably more prevalent back then
than they are now.
Dehnad:
Was that happening in the North, too? That people were getting killed?
Rogers:
Oh, yeah.
Dehnad:
As much as now?
Rogers:
We've always had police corruption and brutality and whatnot. There were
just as many Blacks getting killed. The only thing is, when I was
younger, like before 1950's and before it was very rare that you had a
police shooting.
Dehnad:
That's what I'm saying.
Rogers:
I grew up in probably one of the roughest neighborhoods in New York,
Bed-Stuy, right? The police, they'd knock you upside the head, you know,
but they didn't shoot you.
Hartford:
That was not true in Los Angeles. In L.A, they shot you and didn't
bother asking any questions later. The Chief of Police at that time,
Parker, basically saw the Black and Latino communities as enemies to be
suppressed.
Rogers:
But see, I talked to people here that felt that back in the Forties and
Fifties, Los Angeles was just as racist as the South.
Hartford:
They got that right.
Rogers:
Do you know that back in the Forties, that if you were of different
races, it was illegal for you to marry. It was on the books.
Dehnad:
That's right. That's absolutely right.
Rogers:
See, you didn't have anything like that in New York.
Hartford:
Yeah, you in some states were thrown in jail for the crime of marriage.
Dehnad:
And got killed for that.
Rogers:
See, you didn't have that in New York. It's a whole different thing.
Hartford:
Well, we all know how vastly liberal New York was. [Laughter]
Rogers:
Well, New York wasn't that liberal because they still had their
problems. Especially when Linda talks about how this guy came to her
house and she was so shocked. And it didn't have to be New Rochelle.
There were places in the city where the same thing could have happened.
Dehnad:
Lots of places, absolutely.
Hartford:
Okay, next question. Do you believe that the promise of equality has
been fulfilled in 2001?
Rogers:
No.
Hartford:
Do you believe that there's still racism in the United States?
Rogers:
Yes. I do. One of the things that tells me that is the inordinate number
of police shootings of Black men. The other thing that tells me that is
the inordinate number of Black men in prison.
Dehnad:
Exactly.
Rogers:
Hispanic men in prison. The largest inmate population in the state is
not Black, it's Hispanic, with Blacks becoming a close second.
Dehnad:
And the proliferation of prisons. So many more prison.
Rogers:
Well, the more prisons you have, the more prisons you need.
Hartford:
Well, if you have a business, you have to have customers.
Dehnad:
Yes, and it's a business. It's an industry.
Rogers:
They call the prison industrial complex.
Dehnad:
That's right.
Hartford:
What other ways do you see that racism still exists or the promise of
equality has not been fulfilled, other than police shootings?
Rogers:
Well, I feel that there's still discrimination in employment. I think
that there's still problems with the schools.
Dehnad:
Big time.
Rogers:
Big time.
Hartford:
What would those problems be?
Rogers:
I think I'm going to defer to Linda here.
Dehnad:
Well, but you know perfectly well the same thing. You're in the schools.
We have Black schools and we have white schools and they are totally
different. It's like Bob Moses says, sharecropper education. Educating
Black people to not be part of the economic system.
Rogers:
Okay. One thing that I notice is that there seems to be more resources
available for white schools than Black schools. This isn't anything new.
This is something that's gone on forever. There's more resources
allocated to white, middle-class schools.
Dehnad:
And tracking. Different curricula for different groups of people. On the
assumption that Black people will be tracked out of algebra. Not
expecting ever to do well in math.
Rogers:
Or science.
Dehnad:
Or science. Just sets them up for economic failure completely.
Hartford:
Do you think that the Civil Rights movement had an impact on the whole
United States population or just on African-Americans?
Rogers:
I think the Civil Rights movement had an impact on the whole United
States population. I feel that the Civil Rights movement not only
benefited Black people and other minorities, but it also benefited white
people. I think it gave a lot of white people a chance to really open up
their eyes and see what was going on with the different levels
of — I can remember back in the Fifties and Sixties and
whatnot when people became aware of — if you went to
certain places, there were two water fountains, one Black and one white.
Two bathrooms, one Black and one white. Movie theaters. There were
certain places where if you were of a certain group, you weren't allowed
in at all. I think all of these things came to the full and that I've
always believed that there was some right-thinking white people that
felt the same way about all these things that were going on as I do. So
I think it's opened a lot of white people's minds. By that, I feel they
benefited from that.
Hartford:
What about you, Linda?
Dehnad:
Well, I think that the closer you come to equality, the more you benefit
everybody, because racism is a stain on the country. It's a poison in
the country. The problem with the color line is a problem with the 20th
century, it doesn't just speak about a problem for Black people, it
speaks about a problem with the country. So if you do anything to
improve it, it benefits everyone.
Rogers:
The other thing is to, I think people that run this country are
concerned about their image internationally, right? When Malcolm X
started going around to all these African countries talking about human
rights here, I feel that that made a lot of people very nervous.
Dehnad:
Oh, it did indeed.
Hartford:
That's why he was killed?
Rogers:
I think that was probably the reason. I'm one of those who think that
that might have been probably the reason.
Hartford:
I think in addition, it affected the whole population in some other
ways. One, obviously, the Civil Rights movement sparked a number of
other movements. Women's movement, environmental movement, student and
free speech movement. That had an affect on people.
I think another big way in which it had an affect on everybody is that prior to the Movement we had been taught, we had been brought up, in an environment in which if you want something changed, you either begged your politician to pass a law or you went to court with a lawsuit. But change wasn't anything that you could do or influence yourself. I think the Civil Rights movement taught a whole generation that you can go out and take charge of your own history. I think that since the 60s people have done that in an enormous variety of ways. People of our generation went out and did everything from getting stop signs put in on their corner to starting whole social movements. It certainly reinvigorated the labor movement. I think that Cesar Chavez and that whole movement directly flew out of the Civil Rights movement. Seeing what could be done.
Hartford:
What do you see as the failures of the Civil Rights movement?
Rogers:
There were some, I'd have to think about it.
Dehnad:
What does that mean, failures?
Hartford:
What did we wanted to do and didn't, or were unable to do?
Rogers:
I think one of the things, one of the places where we failed is that we
weren't developing any kind of mechanism for the movement to sort of
perpetuate itself.
Dehnad:
That's true. I don't think we could have done it, though.
Rogers:
I think there were things that could have been done.
Hartford:
Do you think there's still a women's movement?
Dehnad:
I have no idea.
Hartford:
An environmental movement?
Dehnad:
I think there is.
Hartford:
The environmental movement is probably now 20 or 30 years old and it's
still a movement. So clearly they found a way.
Dehnad:
But Bob Moses said that the main thrust of the Civil Rights movement was
to get a Voting Rights Act, right? And they got it, and that was pretty
much the end of it. There needed to be another reason. Everybody, what
Bob said was, everyone had to agree on something that they had to have
and everybody had to agree on it and wanting political access was it.
Rogers:
I don't think that.
Dehnad:
It made sense when I heard him say that.
Hartford:
I would say that it — from the point of view of
doing the voter registration work in Mississippi and Alabama,
that was the goal, but the Civil Rights movement included the Freedom
Rides, the sit-ins, Birmingham, St. Augustine, Grenada, school
desegregation. All of these things that, what I call the Civil Rights
movement, was much bigger than just voter registration.
Rogers:
Much bigger, yeah.
Dehnad:
Yes, but in terms of organization, how organized were all those
different things? In terms of each other.
Hartford:
Pretty organized. As organized as the voter registration. Well, of
course it's fair that, you know, one could say we were never very well
organized. [Laughter]
Dehnad:
I mean, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was a major, big
organization, state-wide organization and involved a lot of people,
right? 55,000 votes. I think that's the right number. Probably not.
Those other things, the Freedom Riders did that and different groups did
different things, but it didn't hold together because it seems to me
that historically it wasn't the time for it to go past that point. It
seems like it was done. It had grown as far as the people who were
involved with it were ready at that point to grow. That's what I think.
Hartford:
Jimmy? What do you think?
Rogers:
Well, I think that one of the reasons that it made it difficult for the
movement to continue in its present form was that there were various
conflicts within the group. I think one of them was — and
I'm not going to say whether this was a good or bad
thing — was the rise in Black nationalism.
Dehnad:
Absolutely right.
Rogers:
Back, I'd say around 1966, '67, I was listening to a lot of Black people
stating, we have to take back our movement and, you know, just take
control. Then from there, there were a lot of white people who left or
were forced out.
Dehnad:
Right. Well, there wasn't a job to do.
Hartford:
You put that in the context of — ?
Rogers:
I put that in the context of one of the reasons for failure.
Hartford:
I think that in some ways there were two movements. There was the
movement of the activists, people like us, and there was the movement of
the people who lived in the community for whom being in the movement was
not the be-all and end-all of their lives. The movement was there in
their town. Albany, Birmingham, Greenwood, Selma, Grenada, wherever, and
they participated in it. They were the soul of it, in a sense. It was a
major event in their lives, but it was not their lives the way it became
our life. After the movement in their town settled down, they returned
to their lives.
I remember talking to people in Selma, particularly young people, and we're singing, "Want our freedom now. We're gonna get our freedom." Well, what does that mean? As I recall, what that meant to them was not something specific like a Voting Rights Act, but something more general like a better life. I think where we were not able to provide that, and where I think we disappointed people, was in the economic area. That we did not, we were not able to really deal with economic based injustice, the economic side of racism. The job discrimination. The fact that non- white owned business had no access to capital or to markets or to financing. That there was no career. That Black-owned farms got no agricultural subsidies.
Rogers:
I agree with you, there, but then it seems to me just by what you just
said, that there's ample evidence that racism and discrimination still
exist. Something could be developed to challenge it. While you were
talking, the one thing that struck my mind was a personal experience
that I had when I went to a bank to get a loan. The same bank that lent
me money to buy my house, the same bank that lent me money any number of
times, that I never had any problems with, and I go into the bank on
another occasion and deal with this new guy because I wanted to get an
equity loan. All of a sudden, I started having all kinds of problems and
I've never, I've always paid off my loans, never late, I have A-1
credit. I noticed I started having all kinds of difficulty.
Dehnad:
When was that?
Rogers:
This is back in the Eighties.
Dehnad:
In the middle of the Eighties?
Rogers:
More towards the end of the Eighties.
Dehnad:
Because I think banks started changing at that time.
Rogers:
But they didn't change that much. I remember becoming very angry. The
guy decided that he was going to let me have the loan and he was talking
to somebody on the phone and I could hear him say, "I don't think I'd
better mess with this guy." I didn't have any more trouble here.
Dehnad:
I was going to add something else. I think that the wall that we came up
against and couldn't get over, what stopped us, was the big cities. It
was a rural movement. It worked really well in rural areas. Every time
we tried to move into a big city, we couldn't do it.
Rogers:
There are issues right now that, and there were issues then, that could
have been worked on even in cities. I feel very strongly that we could
have been effective.
Dehnad:
Like what?
Rogers:
Like banks redlining people. Around the economic thing, that's what. I
agree with Bruce that economics plays a central role, and that's just
why the United States is as racist as it is. I believe that if it wasn't
for the economic situation, racism in this country would be much less.
Dehnad:
That's when it started, right? Didn't it start after the Civil War to
keep the Blacks and the whites separated so that there wouldn't a united
labor force?
Hartford:
Well, I don't think you can say racism started then.
Dehnad:
But it was pushed.
Rogers:
Racism started here even before the slaves got here, between the whites
and Indians.
Hartford:
Do you make any distinction between racism, tribalism and nationalism?
Dehnad:
What's tribalism?
Hartford:
Tribalism is a tribal society where members of our tribe are "human
beings" and everyone else is not.
Dehnad:
I'd have to think that, that's a long time.
Hartford:
It seems to me that racism, tribalism, nationalism is very deeply rooted
in human history going way back — the ancient Greeks
considered they themselves superior human beings. Everyone else, the
"barbarians," were not really human to them. The Cheyenne, their name
for themselves — which is not "Cheyenne" in their
language, that's someone else's name for them — means
"human being." Implying that everyone who's not a Cheyenne is not a full
human being. That's pretty widespread in most tribal societies, and once
tribes form nations, it's in nationalism. So what I'm saying is that you
can't say that racism started in the United States.
Dehnad:
No. But I remember hearing that the people you hate the most are the
people you've hurt. Considering what we did to slaves, we had to hate
them.
Hartford:
Yes. Yet there was a whole different kind of slavery in history which
was not race based.
Dehnad:
I'm talking about in America. So I think America racism is different
from all that.
Rogers:
You have to understand that Blacks were not the only slaves in the
United States.
Dehnad:
Who else were slaves?
Rogers:
They tried to enslave the Indians. They had a very difficult time with
that. Then you had white indentured servants who were sent here.
Dehnad:
That was a little different, though.
Rogers:
It was a little different in that they were able after a certain number
of years —
Dehnad:
For seven years.
Hartford:
Chinese in America were very similar to slaves. They were brought over
to work on the railroad. They were shipped over in horrendous ships.
They had no legal rights. They could be, and were, lynched and killed
without recourse. It was illegal for Chinese women to enter the country
because they did not want the Chinese laborers to marry and have
children who would become American citizens.
Dehnad:
That was true on the plantations in Hawaii, too.
Hartford:
Exactly. Let's go back to the things said about the cities. When you say
the cities, you mean cities bigger than say Atlanta or Birmingham or
Selma?
Dehnad:
As I recall, but I don't think I ever knew really a lot about it, there
was an attempt to — you must probably know about
this — was there an attempt to organize in Birmingham that
failed?
Rogers:
Organize what in Birmingham?
Dehnad:
I don't know. I remember people talking about it when I was in New York.
Rogers:
I'll tell you where there was a situation that failed. That was because
the guy who led the opposition was very shrewd. That was in Georgia,
southwest Georgia.
Hartford:
Albany.
Rogers:
Yeah, Albany.
Dehnad:
But that's not a city.
Hartford:
That's not a big city in the way she's saying.
Rogers:
Then what city are you talking about?
Dehnad:
A big urban area.
Rogers:
Which one?
Hartford:
New York, Chicago.
Dehnad:
I just have a recollection of discussions in New York, in the New York
office, talking about this topic. I remember people talking about trying
to do some kind of organizing in Birmingham that was different from the
kind of organizing that you would do in a rural Mississippi county, and
that for some reason, for a lot of reasons, they couldn't do it. If my
memory is right, it's a little vague, there was an attempt in Chicago.
Hartford:
Yes. There was a big attempt in Chicago. The SCLC, Dr. King, after
Selma, went to do —
Rogers:
When he did the march in Cicero?
Hartford:
Right, but that was sort of a sign of the failure, in my opinion, in
that originally they said, let us see if we can bring the tactics and
strategies and concepts of the Southern Civil Rights movement to a city.
Not Birmingham or even Atlanta, but a big, northern city. They went to
Chicago and they asked, "What is the issue that is most on people's mind
and that is most clear?" And it was housing. It was the movement for
open housing. A big part of it was forming tenant unions to clean up the
tenements. The two main parts were to break down segregation in housing,
which was what the marches were about, and the other part was to combat
slumlords of the housing where people already were, and both pretty much
failed.
Dehnad:
I remember a feeling, in the New York office anyway, of well, if we
can't function in the cities, how are we ever going to make any
difference in America?
Hartford:
I would say that this is the place where we failed because the urban
issues were essentially economic issues.
Rogers:
That's what I was about to say because I don't think that you could
solve the city problems by going in and dealing with the housing
situation as the main issue. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been an
issue, but I think economic equality should have come first and then the
housing thing would have more or less taken care of itself.
Hartford:
I'm not sure I agree with the last part. I think the most effective
thing I've seen about ghetto housing is not the campaigns to organize
tenants' unions or fight slumlords, although that's not bad, but what's
been most effective was those outfits that have gone around and found
ways to give low-cost loans so that people could buy their own home.
That's what's doing more to change neighborhoods, I think, than
anything.
Dehnad:
I thought part of the problem was that communication in the city is so
different from the communication in rural areas. In the rural area, you
have a community. People are, in a sense, already organized in a
community so that it's not so hard to turn that into — to
use that organization for some other purpose.
Rogers:
In some communities within cities, you have a very high degree of
organization. Like in New York, like in Chicago. Italian neighborhoods
are very highly organized. The Asian neighborhoods —
Dehnad:
All the way through the neighborhood?
Rogers:
All the way through the neighborhood, yeah.
Dehnad:
So all the little pieces of it?
Rogers:
All the little pieces of it. You go to Benson area in south Berkeley.
You go to Cicero and places like that where you have a lot of people
that don't even speak English, but they don't have to because there's a
significant number of people in the community that speak their language.
Dehnad:
It sounds like a rural area in the city.
Hartford:
There was a time when the Jewish community in the Lower East side [of
New York] was organized that way.
Dehnad:
That's right.
Hartford:
There are Black communities in the city —
Rogers:
That are well organized.
Hartford:
— that overlay through the church structure, so that
there could be several communities in one physical locale. That was the
Alinsky approach to organizing, that people were already organized into
church groups, social groups, gangs, clubs, unions, PTA, and so forth
and that what the organizer needed to do was to help bring all those
existing groups into coalitions that could address common problems.
Dehnad:
Whatever it was, I don't think we understood it at that time.
Rogers:
Do you know that Harlem, in New York, is probably is as organized as any
community in this country, in terms of big cities.
Dehnad:
Do you think maybe we were intimidated by Harlem?
Rogers:
What do you mean?
Dehnad:
There's such a difference between Nashoba County and Harlem in terms of
magnitude. I just want to say one other thing about failure. That is
when I was reading the history of Cuban revolutions when Castro came to
power, there were six or seven revolutions in Cuba in the hundred years
that preceded Castro. Nobody ever thought that each one was a failure,
it was a gradual process over one hundred years that changed Cuba. Each
revolution built on the one before. So, I think that we came to a
certain point in that movement. It's not the last movement. Those of us
who were involved in that will be involved in other movements, too. Is
it over for you? It's not over for me.
Rogers:
Oh, yeah. Because like I said, there were some thing that we did discuss
that I felt were failures. One of them was that we didn't try to work
towards setting up some kind of system where we could sort of perpetuate
ourselves.
Hartford:
Yeah. That' actually right.
Hartford:
Let's get back to the question you raised about Black Power, Black
nationalism. What were your thoughts on that?
Rogers:
Black Power and Black nationalism have existed in this country ever
since I can remember and probably a long time before I was born with
Marcus Garvey and other groups. They'll probably still be here after I'm
dead and buried or whatever. I think it has some good points and it has
some bad points. This is my own personal perspective. I think one of the
good points is that it more or less motivate Black people to rely on
themselves, but I don't think this should be carried to the extent that
you waste a lot of energy, which people get so involved in their
Blackness or whiteness or Asian-ness. I see the same thing happening
with other groups.
Dehnad:
Do you think maybe there's a reason why it's necessary to a certain
point?
Rogers:
Yeah, I just said that I thought it was necessary in terms of groups of
people coming by, with same ethnic groups —
Dehnad:
Becoming strong in themselves.
Rogers:
As Black people, as Black people, the one thing that we don't have that
most other groups have is that they have a culture that they brought
with them, that's been able to thrive, I feel, through the centuries.
People started coming to the United States. Do you understand what I'm
trying to say?
Dehnad:
I see it in a very narrow view, like in the New York SNCC office, where
there were people who were very taken with Malcolm and were very
interested in becoming Muslims and were taking religious instruction and
would go into one room to talk and be alone together. And it was
uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable in the New York SNCC office.
Hartford:
To you as a white person?
Dehnad:
To everybody who was white in the office. It was clumsy.
Rogers:
When you talk about those people that wanted to be Muslims or whoever,
all of those people that profess to be Muslims, weren't necessarily
connected to —
Dehnad:
Oh, to Malcolm, right.
Rogers:
Malcolm and to Elijha Mohammed, and they weren't necessarily racists.
Dehnad:
I understand that, too.
Rogers:
Because the one thing that was really funny, Temple #7 in New York,
which was a Black Muslim temple in New York, there was some Muslims from
the Middle East who went there one day. They wouldn't let them in. They
were too white. There was a big brouhaha. They would go, just to see
what went on there. I've heard of other people say that they were there,
they'd been there and that really isn't Islam, either. There's a big
difference. Talking about that Islam is a racist religion.
Dehnad:
I know that. It's very different Islam from the Islam that I knew in the
Middle East.
Hartford:
What do you think was the effect of the Black Power movement and Black
nationalism on the Civil Rights movement, what we call the Civil Rights
movement? What was the effect? How did it influence it?
Rogers:
I don't think that there really was any kind of influence on it, but
I'll tell you what. When Dr. King got killed and when Malcolm got
killed, I think the Black nationalist movement grew. I feel that was one
of the reasons why the movement did grow was because the death of King
and Malcolm. A lot of people had given up.
Dehnad:
Exactly. That was it. There were all those people who defected, right?
Because of the position on Israel. And there were so many Jewish
people —
Rogers:
People that defected? What do you mean?
Dehnad:
Well, I mean there were a lot of Jewish people who were fundraising who
said, "We believe that this position on Israel is anti-Semitic. That's
it's not just anti-Zionist." They couldn't see the difference between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
Hartford:
That was only in SNCC.
Dehnad:
Right.
Hartford:
Because in SCLC, that was not an issue.
Dehnad:
It wasn't?
Hartford:
No. And as a Jew who saw the SNCC material that the Jews in SNCC were
angry about, I agreed with them. I though that it was anti-Semitic too.
Hartford:
Let's go to another frequently asked question. What are your thoughts on
non-violence?
Rogers:
I like non-violence as a tactic at a demonstration, but I don't consider
myself to be non-violent. If in a situation where I was by myself, I
would try to defend myself with every ounce of whatever it is that I
have.
Hartford:
The movement in its demonstrations was staunchly non-violent. Do you
think that was the right tactic?
Rogers:
Well, I think so.
Hartford:
Why?
Rogers:
Because I felt that if you tried to oppose it with violence, you didn't
have the resources available to deal with it on that level.
Hartford:
Certainly, though, in your organizing in the South and in the North,
when you were talking to people, you would try to recruit them to
demonstrations, didn't you ever run into people who said, "Oh, I ain't
gonna be non-violent."
Rogers:
All the time.
Hartford:
What did you say?
Rogers:
Well, let me give you the perfect example of what you're talking about.
This was the week before [Father John] Daniels got killed in 1965. We
were down in Fort Deposit, Alabama. getting ready to demonstrate at a
restaurant that wouldn't allow Black people in and they had to go to the
back window in order to be served. The FBI tried to talk us out of the
demonstration, and to be perfectly honest with you, I would have been
more than happy not to. [Laughter]
But there were some young people there that weren't gonna back down, and I wasn't gonna let them go down alone. So I went. But before, there were some people that said, "Well, we're not gonna go down there and get assaulted and not react." And we said that we would appreciate it that if you felt that way, that you not come. Because if you decide to respond in kind, that's an individual thing, and what we wanted was a group response. The group, the overwhelming majority of the people there, said that they wanted to keep it non-violent. That's what we did. But when we got downtown, we found white people there with shotguns, pistols, ax handles, pick handles, and all kinds of other things, anything they could get their hands on. I can remember standing in front of this line and the guy stuck a shotgun in my face. It was the longest shotgun I've ever saw in my life. They hauled us off to jail in a garbage truck.
Another time, Chris Wiley and Stokely Carmichael were participating in a demonstration. They got arrested for reckless driving. The police tried to get them, and Chris Wiley, instead of letting Stokely Carmichael drive, decided he wanted to drive and you talk about nervous? Chris Wiley is about ten times more nervous than you are. He didn't have any business driving that car instead of letting Carmichael. He crashed the car and they got arrested. They ended up going to jail and it was really funny. I kept asking the guys who arrested us, what are we being arrested for? Because, see, the project was the area where I worked in Lowndes County, and it was probably the most racist area in Lowndes County and it had the largest number of white people.
Hartford:
I know it well. We used to drive through it. I was working in Crenshaw
County, south of Montgomery. We had to go through Lowndes to get to
Selma. I know that every time, as soon as we crossed over the border
into Lowndes County, we started singing as loud as we could and we kept
singing until we crossed over into Dallas County. We were so scared.
Dehnad:
I just don't know the answer to that. I mean, all the time that I was in
SNCC, I fervently believed that I was non-violent, that I thought it was
both a good strategy and I thought I believed it in philosophically.
Rogers:
Well, did you consider yourself to be a pacifist?
Dehnad:
No.
Rogers:
That's all I was saying.
Dehnad:
So there was some area in the back of my mind that held the doubt, but
it didn't interfere with what I was doing. As the years go by, I say, I
still feel the same way, but I reserve the right to use a gun if I
decide that I need to. I mean, I think that you don't make a decision
like that through eternity.
Hartford:
I'm sure Jimmy and SNCC had long discussions between those who were
philosophically non-violent and those who were tactically non-violent
because I know we had them it in SCLC. Did you have those?
Rogers:
Oh, definitely. Definitely, and I tell you what. As long as I worked in
Lowndes County, I don't recall anybody that was philosophically non-
violent. I can't think of anybody came through there.
Hartford:
Even in SCLC, which I think had a higher proportion of philosophically
non-violent people than did SNCC, it was never more than a fifth.
Probably less than that.
Rogers:
In fact, the only person that I sort of feel is, that I knew in SNCC
that was philosophically non-violent, there'd probably be others, but
the only one that come to mind is John Lewis.
Hartford:
What about Bob Moses? Wasn't Bob Moses philosophically non-violent?
Dehnad:
Probably.
Hartford:
At least in the early years.
Rogers:
I would think that, yeah. Bob and John would be in the ones.
Foreman, I wouldn't consider him.
Dehnad:
No. Not for a minute, right?
Hartford:
But you notice, it's interesting, when we think about who was
philosophically non-violent and who wasn't, it's almost always an issue
and question about the men. That for the women, I bet you there's an
assumption that mostly they would be non-violent.
Dehnad:
Well, see, I was afraid of guns. I think it was a very convenient
philosophy to have because I didn't have to deal with guns. I didn't
want to think about using a gun. I didn't want to use a gun. I just
don't like guns. Scare me to death. I have shot rifles at camp, and I
wasn't good.
Hartford:
I'm just remembering, at least in SCLC, the discussions, the very
intense discussions between philosophical non-violence and tactical non-
violence were always among the men.
Dehnad:
I'm trying to think about women.
Hartford:
I never recall any of the women being even interested in the discussion.
Rogers:
There were some women. Within SNCC, that were even more violent than
some of the men.
Dehnad:
That's right, huh.
Hartford:
Okay, there were a few. But I don't think there were in SCLC.
Rogers:
No, they were in SNCC, though. I think about Annie Pearl Avery.
Dehnad:
Really, Annie Pearl. I loved her.
Rogers:
Did you know her? Annie Pearl?
Dehnad:
I would love to see her now.
Rogers:
There were a bunch of them.
Hartford:
Moving on to another question, do you think that you made a difference?
Dehnad:
Yeah, we made a difference.
Rogers:
I don't want to put it on me, see.
Dehnad:
We all —
Rogers:
See, you said "we."
Dehnad:
You think SNCC, you didn't make a difference?
Rogers:
No, you said "we." But he said, do "you" feel. Not me as an individual.
I think I was part of a situation that made a difference. I don't really
feel that I did that much on my own.
Dehnad:
But recently I've come to find out that a lot of people did something. I
always thought that I wasn't doing hardly anything at all, and I've come
to realize that it wasn't — it was a lot less dramatic. I
was a lot less courageous than most everybody else, but I worked hard. I
really felt honored again for the opportunity to do it.
Rogers:
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. I really deeply appreciate the work the
people in the offices did, especially in Atlanta and New York and
Chicago. Because Chicago had a strong presence in terms of a SNCC office
for a while.
Dehnad:
We were really lucky. I got to work every day with Ella Baker. A lot of
the time, I got to spend a lot of time with Fannie Lou Hamer.
Rogers:
She spent a lot of time in New York.
Dehnad:
Yes, which she hated.
Rogers:
She hated New York?
Dehnad:
Oh my God. She used to sit — she stayed at somebody named
Lenore's house on 90th Street. I think Lenore is related to Ella, maybe.
I didn't know Lenore. I might have met her once, but she stayed, and I
used to sometimes take her home from the New York SNCC office because I
lived at 90th Street and Riverside Drive, not too far away. I'd go over
there to visit her sometimes because she had to sit there all day long
with her hair in curlers. For the party that night. She was lonely
sitting there and bored. She wasn't really happy to be sitting there
with her hair in curlers so much. But it was a great opportunity for me
to have a chance to talk to her.
Hartford:
So what kind of difference did you, meaning you all, make?
Rogers:
Well, I think that one of things that we did, we managed to get the
Voting Rights Act, get it passed. I think we had a tremendous influence
on that. I think that we motivated a lot of the local people in Lowndes
County to believe that the situation could change somewhat, and it did.
Since I left the South, I've been back to Lowndes County two or three
times, and I'd have an opportunity to talk to people and when they
recall the old days, you know, they talk a lot about SNCC and how they
feel that SNCC impacted their lives and just about all of it was very
positive.
Hartford:
In what way?
Rogers:
I think that it gave them motivation to stand up to oppression.
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