Originally published by the Civil Rights History Project
Interview completed by the Southern Oral History Program Under contract to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress
Interview Participants:
C.T. Vivian, interviewee
Taylor Branch, interviewer
March 29, 2011, Atlanta GA
Nashville as Center of Religion
Branch:
{UNCLEAR} ... They're in Nashville?
Vivian:
Mm-hmm.
Branch:
No. Why?
Vivian:
And there's about 15 of them — there used to be about 15 of them, 12 to 15.
Branch:
Uh-huh.
Vivian:
Is because they were looking for the center of population in the United States.
Branch:
Uh-huh.
Vivian:
Right, and it was a part of the great Sunday school movement in the country, right?
Branch:
Uh-huh.
Vivian:
And that was the closest one where they could get real railroad and get the materials out to every place in the country.
Branch:
Uh-huh.
Vivian:
And so as a result of that, that's why the publishing houses were in Nashville.
Branch:
Yeah, oh.
Vivian:
I thought you would like that kind of story.
Branch:
So can you hear okay? Are we ready to start?
Male 1: Sounds great. Yeah, we are ready. We are rolling.
Branch:
All right, are we going now?
Male 1: Yeah.
Introduction
Branch:
My name is Taylor Branch. Today is Tuesday, March 29th, 2011. We're here in the home of Reverend C.T. Vivian in Atlanta recording an oral history for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Welcome, Dr. Vivian. Please introduce yourself and we'll get started telling stories about your career in the civil rights movement.
Vivian:
It's good to see you, Brother Branch, and I'm so glad that you're in our house and I remember the last time you were here, and so it's very good to have you and everyone who is with you. And it's so good to know that this is going into the African American Museum of Negro History. Is that right?
Branch:
That's where it will be, on the mall in Washington.
Vivian:
That's exactly right.
Beginnings
Branch:
So let's start at the beginning, just a little bit of background. You were born in Missouri, so you have a heartland background — this is not all in the south, and moved to Illinois early.
Vivian:
That's exactly right. In fact, we moved to Illinois so I could go to school in a non-segregated school.
Branch:
And this is the influence of your mother and grandmother, if I'm not —
Vivian:
My mother and grandmother. Ultimately, though, it was pushed by the Depression. The Depression, we lost everything we had, three farms and all that sort of thing. This is why you see Howard County, Missouri on where I was born, right?
Branch:
Mm-hmm.
Vivian:
But then everything was lost and as a result of the Depression, and then we moved into the house in town which was in Boonville, and that's why you get that, right?
Branch:
Yes.
Vivian:
Then somebody burned, a fellow burned because of the religion of my grandmother, burned the house in Boonville.
Branch:
What was the religion of your grandmother?
Vivian:
See, I knew that would work. See, here's the thing is my grandmother was a very religious person and Church of God In Christ, right? And she refused to let a man down the street in a common-law marriage put this very nice woman out into the streets. And it was kind of a snowy day at that, right? And she was coming up the street and when my grandmother found out she told her to come on into the house, right? And so she was making certain that she would be all right.Her common-law husband was angered by it all, and came in the middle of like, 3 o'clock in the morning and put — went in the basement or in the lower level it really was, because that's where you kept the coal in those days and you kept the wood and really fine wood that you could start fires with. He started a fire under the house and it happened to be under my bedroom and my grandmother was out screaming my name in the middle of that morning because of the fire. I awakened, ran to the door of my bedroom or of the bedroom, looked out and looked straight through that house, through the front door was open and I ran back and jumped in bed, just kind of in a happy mood, right? Kind of something was all right about it, but it was strange, it was different, and I liked the idea.
Then there was some sound in her voice that was panicky, and I jumped out of bed and phew, shot right through the house. They say that about 20 minutes after that, my room fell into the fire below, saving me, right? Well, after that, the family decided that they had nothing left, plus the fact —
It's strange what happens. Depressions create more divorces than you could think. Men could not stand what happened to them, everything taken away, everything they'd worked for for their lives. They would wake in the morning and they had nothing. They didn't know what to do, right? And it created crises all over — that whole period is filled with divorces, and both my mother and grandmother ended in divorce. Well, the women said that this was the time to move out of a segregated society and they moved into Macomb, Illinois, but they moved there because there's a university there, and they knew that no matter what happened I could go through college and that was a dream, particularly of my grandmother.
But the family, her brother had gotten to go to college at Lincoln University in Missouri. She had not, and she was really fulfilling her desire through me by making certain that if we moved to a college town, that could happen, all right, and so those two women made certain of it. That move they made was I was just entering the first grade — I was 6 years old.
Branch:
So that's in 1930.
Vivian:
1930, right, and that made the difference in the rest of my life. If they had not decided to do that and do it, I don't know really what would have happened to me.
Branch:
So your childhood is marked by conflict not only of racism to move, but conflict with the Depression and influence by strong women.
Vivian:
That's exactly right.
Branch:
Who wanted to move you into college —
Vivian:
That's it.
Branch:
A college town in Illinois.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's it.
1946 Peoria Sit-In
Branch:
Now, the next moment I would like to jump to is that it seems that you were a pioneer in the sense that in a way you tried to, you tried out the civil rights techniques early to see how they would play in Peoria —
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
As the phrase goes. You had a sit-in in Peoria, Illinois in 1947 when you were a very young man, long before, 13 years before the Greensboro sit-ins.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
How did that come about?
Vivian:
Yeah, well, see, here's what happened is that I was — we had — well, let me tell you the whole story. I had gone back to Peoria or to Peoria, actually, in order to work, in order to go back to school, to go back to Western. I had dropped out, went to work and then was in Peoria. Well, Ben Alexander who was a chemist there, he and I became friends so I was living at a huge house he had and there were three of us there, a medical doctor, and myself and Ben, right? And Ben was involved with a church group that was basically a white church — you'd still say that whether it was north at that time or not, right? And he wanted me to join him in direct action with — out of CORE, as that —
Branch:
The Congress of Racial Equality —
Vivian:
Equality, see —
Branch:
— Which had started in World War II, in '41 —
Vivian:
Yeah, in '41 and this is important because it was really the commission, on, I think, at first, as a part of the church. Then Jim Farmer started there, and in Chicago. Well, we began to get material from him a couple of years later, right, and the techniques that had been formed by CORE is what we used to open up the restaurants and lunch counters in Peoria, Illinois after that. In fact, Jim and I were in jail together in Jackson, Mississippi and we talked about that same thing.
Branch:
Oh, well, we'll have to get to that.
Vivian:
Yeah, okay.
Branch:
So after this early experience in Peoria, it's not too many years later than that in 1954 or thereabouts that you met and married your wife, Octavia. Can you tell the story of how that came about?
Vivian:
Oh, yes, in fact, I love to tell this story. In fact, there were very few black professionals in that period, right?
Branch:
Yes.
Vivian:
And so whenever one would come to town, we would — others would have a party for that person, right? And my wife came to Peoria to be a women's director and girl's director at Carver Community Center. Carver Community Center was the largest community center for African Americans between Chicago and St. Louis, and she came to be in charge there. We had a party for her and I met her at that party and found out that within a couple of weeks she was going to have a birthday, so I called her after the party, the next couple of days and let her know that we were too nice of people to allow someone new to sit around in their room and that I would love to take her out so that she could enjoy herself on her birthday. Well, and she finally agreed, and so we did, and from that time on, if you saw one, you'd see the other. So one year from that day, we were married, so that day — and I know better not to give it — February the 22nd became for us her birthday, anniversary of our first date and our wedding anniversary all in one day.
Branch:
On George Washington's birthday, too.
Vivian:
Yes, exactly right. It's so terribly important.
Branch:
Just jumping ahead a little bit, because your wife, Octavia later became the biographer of Coretta Scott King and friend of hers in the movement —
Vivian:
That's true.
Branch:
Could you tell us just a little bit about her background as you learned it after you met her?
Vivian:
In fact, that is one of the good things. The reason that she had a chance to come to try out for the job was because the person that came to head the center, his name was Harper, had been the director of her community center during the summers when he was a student at one of the Michigan universities. She was from Pontiac, Michigan, and a group of wonderful young people gathered around during that period there in Pontiac, and they had their own newspaper. They knocked on doors, the local African American doctor led them and they registered people to vote, they got people out to vote, they were involved in all kinds of activities in the community or anything that came up that the doctor was concerned about, they were all involved in it, right? And that group of young people continued as part of the city. In fact, my wife said one day she was going to go back and become mayor. Well, one of her group did become mayor of Pontiac — it was that kind of group, and the intensity of it was very important.Her father's minister was a Morehouse man. And so that history follows us, but she was then part of — Lunch Counter in Peoria, Illinois — her pastor had them to go out to Ted's Trailer and got them in the car, took them out to Ted's Trailer [phonetic] which was a drive-in. They were used to going to Ted's Trailer, but never inside, right? So they didn't know it was segregated, and they would serve you in the car but they wouldn't serve you in the place. Well, when he took these young people out, a group of them, the idea was to make certain they ate inside. They tried to hand them a bag with their stuff in it. He went back to one of the tables, they gathered around and they split open the bag and sat there and ate like human beings should have the opportunity to do.
The word got out — of course, he put it out as pastor of the town, right, and it already worked, so people began to come and park their cars and go in and eat. That opened that up entirely, but so she had been a part of these kinds of activities before and they were just perfect for me. I was trying to start a newspaper there because journalism was my minor. I had just found that they didn't teach me enough about advertising, so I didn't last long. Journalism demands much if not more advertising and knowledge of than writing itself, being an English major I thought all you had to do was write. I came to find out it was a bit larger than that, especially if you own the newspaper, so I didn't own it long.
Branch:
Well, before we jump to the south in your career, I'd like to ask you one question —
Vivian:
Sure.
Going Back to the South
Branch:
Because a lot of people today, all these years later, young people tend to think that all the African Americans involved in the civil rights movement grew up like Dr. King in the south.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
But here, both you and your wife, one from Missouri and Illinois, the other from Michigan —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
— are people in the north, so I'd like to ask you two questions: Did you have people from the south in both of your families, in other words where did they come from?
Vivian:
Oh, I see.
Branch:
And then what drove you back down to the south, to Nashville?
Vivian:
Yeah, that becomes an important question that we who were young did not come to until much later, but my wife's folks were really from Arkansas. They had come north to work. Her father had, right? And it was a large family and a couple of the others of them also came. He was the older son, and they came so it ended up, there were three or four of them in Michigan, most of them in Detroit, the father went to Pontiac, and that's where my wife was born as a result.But the history of that is interesting, because where they were in Arkansas was rice country, and my wife as a result happens to know and is part of the tracing that rice was a science that was unknown or was not well-known here in the United States. So when they told — her great great great grandfather was a person who knew rice culture. He was told that if he would — he could come to the United States and that they would take care of him and his family. No sooner they got on board ship, they made them slaves. So then when things were much better, they made that move on up north. That's how her family got there.
My family got there as I was telling you earlier, right? Because they had lived in Missouri and grew — the whole family, three generations, both my father and my mother, my grandfather was a teacher, right? He became a principal of schools. He got fired, though, because he was teaching black kids algebra and the white school board didn't know algebra. So they fired him for teaching black kids algebra, but that's how we really came involved, first to the country and then to the north from the south.
But to further the meaning of your question is that everybody north thought they were better than those who were still south, right? And thought that things were so much better off north than south, right? Which gave the beginning of an expression we used — "up south" because even then, as I was coming through school, that was an understanding. At first, we didn't want to admit that things were that bad where we were, but later on had to face the fact that it was bad enough to be no more than "up south."
For instance, why we opened the lunch counters in Peoria, Illinois was around the understanding that we could go into a restaurant, one restaurant in downtown — it's the only one we could go in and sit and eat — that didn't have a sign that said that you had to eat in a particular place, but we all knew that if we went any other but that part of the restaurant, we would be asked to move, so we naturally went there. But always, there was that thing — you want to change that dislike for it, and so when this opportunity came that Jim Farmer had produced in Chicago, then we did the same thing. But there were those years which you mentioned between us and coming south, coming back south, but had we who came south not helped start a great movement, there probably never would be the population moves that happened.
Family Names & History
Branch:
I'd like to jump back just one more little question, because on your wife's side you went all the way back into slavery with the rice grower.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Does your family go back before Missouri? Do you know anything before that?
Vivian:
No, in fact, I think we were there for two or three generations. In fact, I have paintings and photographs of three generations of my family — well, four generations of them really, but my great great grandfather was in slavery, right? And he left slavery to join the northern armies, and when he came back after winning it, they came — he came back to Boonville, Missouri, and when he came back to Boonville, he refused to take the name of his former — I hate the word "owner." I must admit in the middle of the civil rights movement I began to call them "murderers," not "masters." And as a result of that, I began to think a whole different way. But I can trace four generations back to slavery in Missouri.
Branch:
You've said that he refused to take his name —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
What name did he take? What name was he and what name did he take?
Vivian:
He took his wife's name, which I like, too, because that showed that we had no prejudice either way, right?
Branch:
So what were those names?
Vivian:
Tyndall [phonetic] was my mother's name, and I'll show you the whole thing, you can take pictures later, but that was my mother's name is that her name was Woods, and so that was the family name on the other side — Tyndall on one side, Woods on the other.
Branch:
And what was the name he refused to take, do you know?
Vivian:
Oh, I didn't know that. I've never found that out.
Branch:
And where did "Vivian" come from?
Vivian:
Vivian came as my father's name, you see, was Vivian, right — as the family moved through its generations and so there was the Tyndalls, the Vivians and the Woods. In fact, the most interesting thing, I've looked all over the country for Vivians and it wasn't until about four years ago — I've even gone to Vivian, Louisiana, right? Found that there had been a great number of Vivians there in Monroe, Louisiana, and that we lost everything we had there because of the Louisiana Purchase. As soon as the United States took over the Louisiana Purchase, they took the land and so forth.[Under French and Spanish rule, race relations in Louisiana were governed by the Code Noir and Codigo Negro which were quite different from American laws. Under the Code Noir, for example, children born of white fathers and slave mothers were automatically free while under American law it was the opposite, the children of male masters and the slave women they owned were slaves. In Louisiana under the Code Noir and Codigo Negro, children who were born free and slaves who were granted their freedom were classified as "Free People of Color." While those codes placed some restrictions on the lives and rights of Free People of Color, they were allowed to own land and businesses. After the U.S. purchased Louisiana from the French in 1803 it came under American rule and law. The rights of free Blacks were abolished or ignored, their lands and businesses were stripped away, and some were forced back into slavery.][I] went to graveyards — went to a graveyard in Vivian, Louisiana where the family tombstones. I couldn't find Vivians. I've went all over the United States looking for Vivians that connected. In Iowa, near the Missouri border, I found a Vivian family, but we couldn't make any identity in terms of the move. Then a man about four years ago called me and said I've been wanting to do this and I'm traveling through and I'd like to meet you, and so we got together and he had two of his daughters with him and we all got together and just sat around and talked. Well, he shows up every now and then. He's a minister, by the way, but he's done about four things — he's also a minister, and he comes every now and then. He was here about a month ago, but it's the only Vivian that I had met then so I went to a funeral that he was telling me about, and I met several other people who were related to Vivians.
Branch:
So you are carrying the legacy to some degree in your own family of the famous statement that after slavery it is by choosing a name that we first placed ourselves into the world —
Vivian:
Yes.
Branch:
Because your names in the family are to some degree choice and in some way it makes it harder to trace but more interesting to trace.
Vivian:
Yeah, precisely right. This is one reason my great great grandfather I really appreciate because he refused to take a slave name. Now, my grandfather — my great grandfather Woods, he might as well be a Woods, right? In fact, although it's the family name, one of the sons is really his father — you can tell when you look at the pictures how different in color everyone really is.
Called to the Ministry Branch:
Let's shift to your move to Nashville in the 1950s. How did that come about from Illinois to move with Octavia, I presume —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
— to Nashville?
Vivian:
Yeah, because now there's a long story and a short story to this, but the thing is —
Branch:
I want the good story. [laughter]
Vivian:
Is that we got married there, right, in Peoria, Illinois, and I was working for Helen Gallagher Foster, a mail order company, when I got my call to ministry.[Referring to the Foster & Gallagher mail order company of Peoria IL, which at that time was largely employee-owned.]I thought I'd go to Colgate Rochester. And my final year of college, Western, is I had been picked to go to Colgate Rochester. They picked what they call the hot 100 every year, you know, across the country they pick them and invited you in and paid all the bills and asked you to come and they set up a two-day thing hoping then that you would come back, right?And I had made my choice to go to Colgate Rochester but when I got the call to the ministry I found out that my pastor had already been saving money for me to go, but to go to a school he was on the board of which was in Nashville. And as a result, that's where I ended — in Nashville. And I often think that had I made up my mind I was going to Colgate Rochester in spite of — see, I was going to wait until I got the call to ministry. People had always told me in my hometown I was going to be a minister. I'd even tried to bring the three black churches in my town together to create one good solid church, right? And so they always knew me as that kind of person but then I wouldn't go because I had not been called to ministry.
The calling came in Peoria at Helen Gallagher's place, and then when that call came — and that's the story that my wife was involved in a way that you should hear, because a good deal of all the movement was deeply religious and that's not a CORE idea that has been carried through and should be. When I got the call to ministry, as I said, I wanted to go to Colgate Rochester but I was on my way to American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville because of how everything happened. So I go there and I've often thought if I had gone to Colgate Rochester, I would have missed my life because the connections and the attitudes and the actions of going to American Baptist made it possible for me to be involved in the movement.
And if you notice that I ended with Martin King, but that even before that, in Nashville, Kelly Miller Smith was the pastor of First Baptist Church and the natural leader of the movement, right — was a minister, right? When you look at the people, Bernard Lafayette and Jim Bevel and any number of others of us, John Lewis, we were all at the seminary. And when we came out to struggle for freedom there, the leadership was from religious side of life. In fact, basically all over the country that was true because you see, Martin had called ministers together to form SCLC, of which Kelly Miller Smith was one of those that was called to that meeting.
When I first came to Nashville, he had me to preach for him, and that was First Baptist and that was the intellectual church of the community, and so he and I were very good friends so when he came back, he called a group of ministers together. They started only with three of us that really heeded the call to form SCLC in Nashville and it grew to six. But half of those were not pastors in the town, half of those were in one of the other publishing houses in the town, all right. But then once they saw what the movement was all about, once the movement really got under way, boy, all the ministers joined us.
Branch:
Let me ask you one more question about this calling.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
You've mentioned it several times.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
A lot of people in modern life may think that a call to the ministry is on the phone, somebody tells you that you're going to be a minister. [laughter]
Branch:
Explain to the world in posterity how a call came to you in Illinois.
Vivian:
Yeah, it's very important. And especially because I was one of the persons that didn't really totally believe in a call, yet I said I was going to wait until I got one. It seemed a little backward in one sense to me, right? But it happened. I was walking across the floor at Helen Gallagher and it's where everything was being packaged. It was a mail order company and I was walking across the floor going towards the front. At the time when it seemed like that the roof opened, right, and I heard, "I want to work for you eight or ten hours a day," but it was a booming voice that came, right? And all of it, I don't totally understand yet because how could those be the words, right? But they were.Then things just disappeared, but it seemed like it came right through the ceiling, right through the roof really of that part of the building and I turned around me because I wondered how everybody else was taking this because it was a booming sound. There was no way you could not hear it as far as I was concerned. It filled me, right? And I turned around and everyone was just about their regular business. I can see a woman now that I don't remember her name by any means, but I can see a woman now — she was just packaging. She was one of the regular people. They had about 50 or 60 people that did nothing but package all the time, and she was one of them that was always in my memory, and I turned and she was just about packaging things. Whatever the gift was, right, she was packaging it. And then I walked on up to the front.
Well, now, as I said, my minister had money for me — he had come to the place and Helen Gallagher had given him a gift for me to go to college. Now, an interesting thing, though, is I got a letter last year, right? I got a letter last year signed by Helen Gallagher Foster but the letter was sent to me by a woman who was her neighbor, and she told me in the letter that she had gone over to Helen's house and found that she had had a stroke and died there in her kitchen. But she had written me this letter and she had told the woman about me so she knew who I was, right, and so she found out where I was and sent me the letter. One of the last things she did, and we had not talked to each other in all of those years.
Branch:
What did the letter say?
Vivian:
Well, the letter was so thankful that I had done well and all of that sort of thing and that she'd kept up with me throughout the years and every time I came to Peoria and all that sort of thing, right, but I hadn't even gone back to the place, even the few trips I made back to Peoria I had not. And it was one of those kind of mysterious kinds of things, you know? Here a person dies the same morning she's writing me a letter, and it would have been the only letter that she would have written during all those years and would have been the only time we would have communicated but we both remembered each other quite well. In fact, I've still got a piece from Helen Gallagher Foster's shop — it was really Helen Gallagher and Foster is a young man that came on much later, and I have it right there on a stand as you come in the front door, not because of Helen but it was a gift that I still had from there.
Branch:
Helen Gallagher's mail order company in Peoria, Illinois —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
— mail ordered what kind of products, remind me — our museum is collecting artifacts from places like this and I'm just curious a little bit about what it involves —
Vivian:
Okay, one of her very important sales was of things with roosters with them, all right? Glassware, all kinds of things to put flowers in, things for the kitchen, all kinds of things, right, would have that sign on it. Helen Gallagher Foster advertised through all of the home and garden and House Beautiful and all of the great magazines, house magazines of that period, both lower ordinary and the high class and you could tell a great difference, all right, between House Beautiful and some of the others, right? But that's how she advertised.
Branch:
So was she selling to an integrated white market and black market?
Vivian:
No, I'm glad you said that, because that's why I was there. What I wanted to do was to start an African American mail order house — well, under her — she had about three different companies through the advertising but they were all out of the same place and they were all under her, right? And she had a great business mind and her husband wasn't bad at all either, right? He was good at the backroom. She did the stuff out front, and picked items and etcetera.Now, so that she, when things happened, what I wanted to do was to start a mail order house because we had just come out of the war. African Americans had more money than they had ever had before, right? You don't send letters and advertising to people who don't have money, right? We had come to a point which I thought that we could stand and develop an African American mail order house, right? If you would have followed Johnson Publications, one of the only ones they didn't duplicate was House Beautiful, because we were just coming to the point. I wanted to get in on that market before Johnson did, right?
And then right at that time, I got the call to the ministry so I dropped all of that, but the main story that I think that you need to know about the call to the ministry is that a couple, two or three days afterwards, I knew I had to tell my wife because I knew I was going to go a seminary somewhere, right? As I said, I had Colgate Rochester in my mind so I decided to tell her. I came home from work and I said to her, I said, "Baby, I've got something I want to tell you," and she said, "I got something to tell you, too." So we always waited until we got in bed and we'd share with each other, right? And so after we had eaten and one thing and the other, we'd go up to bed and we're lying there and she says, you tell me your story — I said I was going — you tell me your story first. And I said, "No, baby, you tell me," because I knew she was just bursting to get it out. Well, we were having our first child, that's what she wanted to tell me, right? So after we celebrated that fact, she said, well, now, tell me your story. And I said, no, I'm not going to tell you right now. And so she finally coaxed it out of me, right, and so... [background noise]
Vivian:
Shall I get it? [background noise] So I know it's not going to work.
Male 1: That was a great story, by the way.
Vivian:
Well, we haven't finished the good part.
Branch:
So wait just a minute.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
So tell us when we're going again.
Male 1: Good.
Branch:
Okay. Picking back up, you're in bed and you've got — your wife has given you her news but you haven't given her yours.
Vivian:
That's exactly right and so I refused to tell that and she coaxed it out of me. So I told her that I had my call to the ministry but that I wasn't going because I would have to leave her in Peoria — there would only be one job, that would be her job, and she was having a baby as well. I was going to stay there through that, and so I was going to let it go at that, and we laid there in the darkness and suddenly she says, "Whose faith is in question now?" I'm the faith boy, right? I do everything on faith. Well, how do you answer? Particularly your wife, right? When they say — fine, you go to the seminary because God will make it all right. And I had to go, because you know, her reply was too much for me, so I went to seminary.
Branch:
And she stayed in Peoria?
Vivian:
And she stayed in Peoria, and so one day at the seminary I get a call, all right, and I get the call and we were — I mean, we didn't have a phone in every room as most seminaries do now, right, because they're graduate schools and they just have one and so on, but there was one phone on each floor. Somebody called down to the end of the hall where I was and said, "Vivian, you've got a call" so I go down and it's my wife, right, and I'm standing there looking at the window and it's just so wonderful to think she's coming and she says I'm coming, so I said, well, how long are you going to stay? And she said, oh, I'm coming to stay.Well, I was suddenly silenced. I looked out the window, and I couldn't believe it. I said, how was this going to happen? Here I was in one dorm room, right, and didn't have a job, and didn't have any way to get an apartment. I'll tell you what happened is that before she got there, the publishing house had called me and I was using the job would have had me use everything that I had ever done before, the various tasks that I had done before I was going to do. I had been in boys work with the YMCA — this job was around boys' work. I had been an editor of this newspaper I tried to put together, right? I was going to do that. I had been a speaker all my life. I was going to be able to do that all over the country, so that this job would take in each and every important thing I had done in my life, and it was so perfect for me, right? But most important for that moment was that there was only one student dorm open at the end of the school year, and I got it, and so by the time the wife got there, everything was ready. Everything was ready.
Branch:
Did she come with the baby born or before the baby —
Vivian:
No, the baby hadn't been born yet. The baby was born —
Branch:
In Nashville?
Vivian:
— Mm-hmm, in Nashville, but he had cerebral palsy — he just died last year. He was, very seldom were people born with cerebral palsy — they usually die between 30 and 35. He lived to be 45, and so he just died last year, but all of that is to anchor me in Peoria — I mean, in Nashville.It should have been — the movement starts, I meet Martin King there in the first place doing an article. The wife and I were going to produce a 24-page piece on Martin. Well, that's how it ended — we ended up doing it. I was trying to do it for the publishing house. The publishing house actually was really afraid to publish anything on Martin. This is important to be said because then it makes you realize the climate, because they were afraid that the publishing house would be blown up. I led — I and Diane Nash led a movement, an action in Nashville, 4000 — the paper said 2000 people.
Branch:
You're jumping ahead to —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
To April 1960.
Vivian:
There we go.
Branch:
Let's back up just a little bit.
Vivian:
You amaze me, how you have the dates.
Branch:
I want to know first —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Lawson & Others
Branch:
— how you met Jim Lawson in those workshops that were going there —
Vivian:
Good.
Branch:
And we'll come back to Dr. King.
Vivian:
Oh, that's good. Yeah.
Branch:
Because so much of the national movement was incubated in a way in that Nashville nonviolent workshop there.
Vivian:
It really was.
Branch:
I'd like to know — and you were a critical part of it, how you met Lawson and —
Vivian:
Yeah, well, that's very important. We had started the action as I said — Kelly Miller Smith had put things together with a few ministers, right? It was beginning to build but not really heavily.[The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), an affiliate of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed in 1958. In 1959 it began holding workshops on nonviolent resistance to segregation led by Lawson and Vivian. That evolved into the Nashville Student Movement in 1960.]We were having workshops and so forth but for ministers in the city — not many came, all right? They did not quite understand nonviolence whatsoever, right? They did not see how it was going to work so that they sort of pulled away, except for a half a dozen, and I was one of those, but as I said, Kelly Miller Smith was the leader.
Well, Jim Lawson comes to town to go to Vanderbilt, but he's also working for Fellowship of Reconciliation. He's coming in to do training across that region of the south, and he's going to be anchored at Vanderbilt in Nashville, so as he comes, he comes to train, and training is what no one had done for the movement at that time. Martin had just gotten started good. The 24-page piece the wife and I did was because he had come to Fisk to get — at the time, he'd come to Fisk to get an honorary doctorate and part of that was for people also in town to hear him and understand what had happened.
In fact, nothing really happened in the 11 months that that went on, right? Nothing really happened anywhere in the country until they won it.
Branch:
You mean the bus boycott?
Vivian:
The bus boycott, yeah.
Branch:
You're talking about it, you came there — ?
Vivian:
Yeah, and then the bus boycott. Well, they won it. Jim Lawson is in Nashville and begins to train ministers, begins to train students, and that training of students went on for several months. It was through that that I met Jim, because I had already been in movement in Peoria, so I knew Jim and then it ended up that Jim got an apartment right across the street from our apartment, and his wife was working at one of the colleges near where my son was going to school, to a special school across the street from the Vanderbilt campus. And so she would take him to school.Well, we met each other through that means and really — but I had done it [nonviolent sit-in] nine, ten years before, but Jim really knew far more about nonviolence than I did, and so I welcomed him because this was what we needed, as much knowledge as we could get of the method. I had done it, but he had the background to be able to teach it in quite a different way. I had gotten techniques and so forth and it was naturally for me a natural way of life, right? But that's what fit the ministry. But then to teach the students and so they can get it is another thing. Jim was excellent at it.
Branch:
Of course, he had just come back from India.
Vivian:
That's what I was going to say, and that kind of coming back from India just was the kind of thing that the kids were, you know, bug-eyed about, and they really listened, they really learned because Jim was a good teacher, still is.
Branch:
Now, those workshops with the students, of course, were very influential.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
They were quite dramatic. I've talked to many of the students who were in them. Many of them didn't know how nonviolence was going to work either and were quite skeptical —
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
I never will forget Diane Nash saying that she was a very, very good student and she said that her government professors defined government and politics as a monopoly of violence so how can nonviolence work? And they were doing all these experiments and slapping each other around and everything — she was horrified by it. Did you actually participate in any of those and watch that or having already done it, did you not need to — ?[Referring to the physical aspects of nonviolent training where trainees practiced holding to nonviolent discipline while being insulted, hit, assaulted, dragged, arrested, and so on.]
Vivian:
Yeah, I watched some of it and participated in some of it. I never will forget one of the ministers there, they burned — put out a cigarette on him and it burned a hole, some of the fire fell and burned a hole in his trousers, and he made it very clear that we were going to buy him a new suit. [laughter]
Vivian:
Quite a guy — he went to Morehouse, too, by the way, and was a Methodist, and his church was near Fisk campus which we used to meet in all the time.
Branch:
Now, these workshops are going on before the sit-ins, after the bus boycott but before the sit-ins, that period of kind of percolation in the late '50s —
Vivian:
Yes.
Branch:
With you starting a family and working a job and going to seminary, and meeting Dr. King and all of those things. Talk a little bit about your relationship with Lawson in the early days. He always used to tell me that it was somewhat difficult because the people around Dr. King were all Baptists and he was a Methodist, and that Dr. King would always tease him about getting his bishop to tell him what to do and that sort of thing. In fact, Dr. King had helped recruit him to come south —
Vivian:
Yeah, so that's what it seems as though.
Branch:
How did the two of you get along together?
Vivian:
Oh, wonderful, wonderfully — those kinds of things were jokes.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
They had nothing to do with real life. In fact, actually, though, the president of the board of SCLC at that time was a Methodist, Joe Lowry. Everybody else was in fact Baptist and they had known each other in Alabama, all of them, Joe as well as the rest. In fact, most of the guys, even the pastor from Tallahassee had gone to school in Montgomery, so many of them, Fred Shuttlesworth, the great guys came out of Alabama.And Martin, in fact, we often — well, didn't joke, it's just a fact of life — Martin came from Atlanta but he had to come to Alabama to become famous and he had to come to Alabama to find a wife, right? Coretta was from Alabama. Abernathy, who was his sidekick — Alabama. And his wife, right? And Andy's wife was from the same area of Alabama, about a 75 mile radius, and you had them all, which is the most interesting kind of thing. All of them were talented people — in fact, one of the stories I like best that Abernathy could have been the president of SCLC had he wanted to be, right? He was the most important single minister in Montgomery. He was the one that had the largest church. He was the one that had gone to the university which is the part of Montgomery —
Branch:
Alabama State.
Vivian:
Alabama State. He was the one whose parents had been in Alabama for at least two or three generations, right? And so he had everything going for him, but when he met Martin and saw what Martin had, he became the sort of John the Baptist to Martin's Jesus, you see, because he did not care to be the leader with a man like Martin. They had become friends in the time and he understood Martin and loved his background and his ability and wanted to go to Colgate Rochester and in fact, he had on his mind after he met Martin to go to Colgate Rochester but then things really happened before then and that never happened.
Branch:
Well, I think we should take a break before we start the sit-ins —
Vivian:
Yeah.
The Nashville Student Leaders, 1959
Branch:
But what I'd like to do just before that is that because these workshops that you're involved in with Jim Lawson in Nashville, you don't know that the movement is about to take off — you're doing these workshops in nonviolence. You met in these workshops a number of people who later become consequential and some who didn't, but can you share your memories of meeting the people in those workshops — the students?
Vivian:
Yeah, the students — well, basically —
Branch:
[James] Bevel, [Bernard] Lafayette, [Diane] Nash.
Vivian:
Yeah, this is what I'm remembering, and most of them that you will know except for Diane and there was another young woman with Diane. I can't think of her name but she was also from Chicago, and by the way, Diane was Catholic —
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And the only Catholic one in the group. We have funny stories about that, but I talked about John Lewis, talked about Jim Bevel, talked about Bernard Lafayette, we mentioned — there are two other fellows I'd like to think about but can't come up with. There were three or four from the seminary but they were not fully engaged. They would come to actions but they were not fully engaged.
Branch:
And there were some white kids in those groups, too.
Vivian:
In fact, there was one in particular that stood out, and the guys — he was Southern Baptist and the only guy from the Southern Baptists that was involved in anything, anything positive with the movement. But I can't think of his name, but he was —
Branch:
Was it Paul Laprad?
Vivian:
Oh, Paul Laprad came and became —
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
The one I was thinking about went to school —
Branch:
All right, not Jim Zwerg?
Vivian:
No, Zwerg wasn't really from Nashville.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
No, this fellow was from Vandy, and there's a great story there in terms of the president.
Branch:
Maybe we'll come up with his name. What about Salynn McCollum?
Vivian:
That's a name — I don't remember that as a name.
Branch:
All right. I guess we'll take a break here.
Vivian:
Okay, good, and then but we'll continue this, though, while he's dealing with the camera.
Branch:
Because there were a lot of — when we get to the Freedom Rides, these were all characters and if you have stories about them, how they got in, because most of them came in through the workshop, right?
Vivian:
Yeah, see, that's the point — I remember very few white guys and gals in the movement, right?
Branch:
Mm-hmm.
Vivian:
Until after that time —
[audio ends abruptly]
[START NEW TAPE)
Vivian:
— See, for instance, Martin King without doubt was a minister but it was surprising to me how many people didn't know he was. He was Dr. King.
Female 1: Do you need water or anything?
Vivian:
No, I think I'm all right.
Female 1: Okay.
Vivian:
For some reason my throat isn't been as clear as usual, but —
Branch:
You know, I'm sorry; I should have brought my book or something because I have a lot of the names of those people in —
[break in audio]
Female 1: — Part?
Branch:
Yeah, part —
[break in audio]
Nonviolence in American Context
Branch:
— That I know of, to Gandhi and nonviolence because you had different conditions here.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
You weren't 95% of the people —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
And various other things and so they —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Anyway, we don't need to go back to that.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
We can pick up where we were planning to.
Vivian:
But you know, when you look at Martin's quotes later on, he talks about a real difference based upon the Christianity involved, right? Now, there's one other — the thing I've heard, I want you just for this to — so you can deal with it for the rest of the time, because I never liked to talk about it, because I don't know enough.But the idea that there were Indians as late as the world conference we had in South Africa that were talking about Gandhi's not really liking the untouchables. These were the untouchables, talking, right? They got a new name now, right? [Dalit] But they gave themselves a name instead of someone else giving them a name, right? But they were all there — I mean, a gang of them were there at the conference and they were very active about it, but the way they were talking about it gave a different picture of Gandhi's attitude toward the untouchables than our attitude toward the untouchables. So it's just something to, you know, keep in mind —
Branch:
Right, and of course Dr. King and Coretta had just come back from India. They had their visit over there —
Vivian:
That's exactly right. That's right.
Vanderbilt President
Branch:
When we had Richard Gray [phonetic] there, but anyway, jumping back to Nashville and picking up where we were talking before —
Vivian:
Sure.
Branch:
You said that you had a story about the president of Vanderbilt.
Vivian:
Yeah, you see, it was interesting that remember, Jim Lawson was kicked out of Vanderbilt but he was kicked out by a president that had written the book that we used on the life of Jesus, that we used in seminary on the life of Jesus. Here is the president of the seminary, had been, and became president of Vanderbilt, and he was kicking Jim out of school and they ended up putting him in prison and his book on Jesus was refuting what he was doing in fact, all right? And that was our text. I'm trying to think of his name, but that was our text and we couldn't see how he could have written that book and be anything because at the time we used it. We saw it as refuting the south without his saying it directly.
Branch:
I'm sorry, I can't remember his name myself, but you weren't taking his class — he was not teaching that?
Vivian:
No, it was his book was being taught at American Baptist Theological Seminary on the life of Jesus, and here he was kicking a man out who was talking for Jesus as we saw him, and yet he was talking from Jesus so the south could accept it, right? Because that's really what had happened in his mind, but that was always interesting to me. See, there are so many religious stories like that that it makes it difficult to see how the south could have gone on thinking as though they can be Christians and racists at the same time.
Branch:
Well, we should continue to pick up the religious themes as we go forward here.
Vivian:
Okay.
Nashville on the Eve, 1960
Branch:
We're starting at the beginning of the sit-in movement. The timing for me was always very striking, that the Greensboro sit-ins started on February 1st because January 31st, just the night before was Dr. King's farewell from Dexter moving to Atlanta.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
So he was literally finishing his ministry and the bus boycott in Alabama, moved to Atlanta and said farewell the night before and as he's driving to take up his new residence in Atlanta, these sit-ins break out in Greensboro and looking at it from another angle, you people in Nashville had been preparing to do things like this —
Vivian:
For a year.
Branch:
But hadn't quite got going so that a lot of the students told me that the students in Greensboro stole the march on them because you were preparing —
Vivian:
And they did. In fact, I'm glad you said that about the day before, right? I really didn't put that together. I'd never thought of that. It's good. I mean, I never will forget it, though, but you see, we had been preparing. They moved without preparing, right? They just went and sat down, but see, we knew — that had they done that, especially in Greensboro, anything could have happened. Remember later it was in Greensboro in broad open daylight they killed what they called communists, remember? And I remember being there the day afterwards and so and talking with the police chief, and he did not mind the killing at all. He let us know that he'd been killing communists during the war and so —
Branch:
Now, this is a story from the 1970s, jumping way forward.
Vivian:
That's right, pardon me.
Branch:
That's all right.
Vivian:
We've got to get back to the story because we're —
Branch:
No, that's all right. It's pertinent. I just wanted people to know that it was from a different time.
Nonviolence & the Movement
Vivian:
Oh, I see what you mean. But did not mind killing at all — well, see, that same attitude was an attitude toward us as far as I was concerned, that any uppity nigger, right, was asking to be killed. In fact, truthfully I don't see why more of us were not killed, not less. In fact, what we found was that less people got killed, less black people got killed during the heat of the civil rights movement than did before. The Klan didn't seem to kill nearly as many of us —
Branch:
Don't you think that some of that is the religious training and the nonviolent training that made it harder?
Vivian:
Yeah, in fact, let's look at this — you see, once it's brought out in the open, this is the Bible Belt, right? Once you bring out in the open and you make it a religious confrontation, that changes everything to me. When we begin to ask questions, which I did in workshops later on — can you be a Christian and a racist at the same time? 90% of everybody in the workshop was always white because that's the way I wanted it, that was who I was trying to get to, but I had to have blacks in the workshop or what I would hear was, well, you said that but our black people don't think that way, so I just turned and asked black people and said, am I right or am I wrong? You get my point? Tell him. And they would, right? And it was always a surprise to these white folks — I work with him. He didn't think that way.And that would always make everybody black in the room kind of look down and smile. They would not act like they were laughing at him, right — because they did not quite understand who we were, what we were, what we thought and what we did, right? Now, that's why I think had we faced them boldly every day after day with their Christian message — not the Old Testament message, the Christian message, am I right? That would have changed things a lot sooner, a lot sooner. I believe so, right?
Now, my wife used to say, the other thing that we used to do, we should have done, was carry the flag — in other words, it was our flag we were defending. Their flag was the confederate flag, right? So to speak — I mean, it wouldn't be stated but that's what we would be saying, is that this flag, you don't really represent a racist. You don't represent the American flag. But we'd always fought it on those grounds and it didn't get anywhere, but if you're in the deep south, the one thing that's believed in is the Bible.
Theologians don't get nearly as far as Bible school people in the south because Bible school people can quote texts. Theologians don't quote texts. They quote a series of ideas, right? And so the Bible people in the south say, well, that's what you think, but that's not what my pastor said. Well, but they never questioned their pastor because they didn't know how in the first place, right?
But all you had to do was state scripture and they'd go look it up. That's what I found in my workshops — I'd state scripture and people would come back the next day when I was doing reconciliation and say, well, we looked it up last night. My husband and I looked that up, and we found out that you're right, that it's right there and it's clear — because I don't want to quote some stuff that there was no way of getting around, love your brother as yourself, you know, your fellow man as yourself but things like that, right?
I think we could have won if we'd really kept talking nothing but, but most of the civil rights movement was based on getting new law. Totally different, but Martin was leading a movement that was a moral and spiritual movement. See, there were two movements going on all the time within the one — there were two going on. One of them was by-any-means-necessary, and the other one was nonviolent-direct-action. And with a biblical base — difference, that's a real difference between nonviolence as we had known it in India, and what we knew here, we did it with a biblical base, based upon Jesus. But there were great deep religious undergirding for nonviolence in India as far as that's concerned, but the one thing about this American culture is the matter of the Bible as being the final authority on everything.
Branch:
Well, of course the movement, it's interesting to hear you say that because there were a lot of people in the movement who thought it was too religious. You're saying it wasn't religious enough and that's the decision.
Vivian:
That's right. That's a good point.
Branch:
And the same thing on the patriotism — there were occasional marches where people did carry the American flag —
Vivian:
That's true.
Branch:
Famously at Medgar Evers' funeral, they were carrying American flags because he was a veteran —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
And he had been assassinated, and the police in Jackson, Mississippi waded in and took the flags away because they were upset with them, so —
Vivian:
That's the point.
Branch:
It was both patriotic and spiritual, grounded in nonviolence, and one other thing I'd like to ask about —
Vivian:
Keep going.
Branch:
Before getting into the sit-ins — a number of the people that I've talked to who were in Lawson's workshops said that there were psychological aspects to it as well, besides the religious, the patriotic, that what you were doing was that they'd come into the workshops thinking that nonviolence meant a kind of curling into the fetal position and that sort of thing to protect yourself and Lawson would tell them "No," you need to make eye contact and keep eye contact with people. They have a harder time being violent with you when you're looking at them and making human contact with them, which is kind of related to a religious thing because you're saying we're fellow creatures and everything.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
But there was a lot of training about how that would work.
Vivian:
Well, see, the thing, there was a lot of conversation about it. It was easy to understand it, but you see here again are these various parts of the movement, you see what I mean? SNCC was the one that wanted to curl up and get beaten and put over your head and all that sort of thing, you get my point? That was not true with SCLC at any point. I never remember that true from beginning to end, and the very picture of Martin King is a man standing looking at you and giving his opinion, or stating the truth, you know how it is — giving our opinion to the public, right?But it seemed as though that if you didn't have a moral and spiritual understanding of what you were doing, there was the willingness to duck the deal, be willing to get beat, but only as a way of saying you're nonviolent. But you see, I don't use nonviolent by itself anymore. It has to be nonviolent direct action to me, right? You have to be acting nonviolently against the negative forces, and that you didn't try to get away from being beaten or get away from being hit by a car.
Fred Shuttlesworth tells about Martin walking across the street and a car, he and Martin, and a car was sort of bearing down on them. The guy wasn't slowing up, he was picking up speed, right? And Martin just kept going at his regular pace, and Fred tried to get him to move forward, or said to him, you know, out the corner of his mouth — that's the way we talk to each other when we're in situations like that — Martin, this guy is going to run over us, right? And Martin said well, you've got to die when your time comes and just kept going like he was going. Now, I don't believe that's exactly what Martin said because the way Fred said it, you know? But that was the idea and the guy did stop, right? He built up speed but he refused to hit them, too. That's what I found — when you look people in the eye — I'll tell you my story, looking people in the eye.
Branch:
Certainly the culminating one when you looked Jim Clark in the eye in 1965, that's where we're headed.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
And you spoke directly to him and you maintained eye contact and you talked nonviolent direct action. That's where we're going, but let's start at the sit-in, you are in Nashville —
Vivian:
I was going beyond that to Jackson, Mississippi.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
But we will add both of them later.
Branch:
Okay.
Vivian:
Okay.
Nashville Sit-Ins, 1960
Branch:
But you are in Nashville in the workshops and you get word that the sit-ins have occurred in Greensboro. That's on February 1st and it's April 19th is your big march with the mayor, so you've got basically two and a half months there of moving into action as the sit-ins are sweeping the south. What's your memory about how that occurred there within this Nashville movement?
Vivian:
Yeah, see, the thing I remembered but it turned — I thought I remembered, right? And that's very important — what you think you remembered and what actually occurred, but I know what I remembered but I think I had in the wrong timing. Jim called — Jim and I were in one of the school buildings, and Jim stopped to make a call to the guy who led the group in Greensboro. Now, when he did that, he was talking to this fellow and I was listening, and I wasn't clear on who the guy was, I just knew he was one of the real leaders of it, right? And Jim was talking as though there should have been some waiting and joining forces on that, because Jim had been training for such a long length of time.But you see, the action in Greensboro, should have is quite different — the action in Greensboro, what these three guys, four guys — four it was, wasn't it? They just sat down. They hadn't talked to nobody, seemingly, right? They decided just to go sit down. Now, I think what Jim was thinking about and where we came from out of that whole thing was the understanding that you can get people destroyed that way, that if you just go sit down, you can get killed and get a number of other people destroyed, whereas if you prepare your people, they don't fight back in a way that you can be taken over and fight back.
This is why we could take guys off of the street with knives and all that, but we never put them near the front and we always had people walking alongside that were trained, because we understood that without training, people will lose it. I like to think this another way, too, by the way, and I say I like to think of it — this is not something that everybody was saying or that I would go hollering up and down the street either, right?
SCLC & SNCC
But see, I really think that when we picked places — for instance, we picked Alabama, and the three biggest most important events of the whole movement happened in Alabama. We got the method in Montgomery, we got the civil rights bill in Birmingham and we got the voting rights bill in Selma, right? When you look at those three, there's nothing that comes close to them, right?Now, that was SCLC. When you look at SNCC, they went into Mississippi. The youngest least experienced going into the most difficult place. We basically saw Alabama and then if necessary, go to Mississippi. Now, let me say what I mean by "if necessary." See, the thing is that when we saw Alabama, that's where we started. We wanted to clean it up, but we saw it not as the way SNCC did. SNCC saw it as going into a place and putting people in various places until they changed, until they helped the people of that town change, you see?
We didn't. We saw it as changing, changing Washington, changing the national laws, not just having — not just doing legal [legislative] stuff, right? But making for certain that we change the laws which we did, you see what I mean? This is why we got the voting rights bill. This is why we got the civil rights bill, because we created what was necessary to do it and stayed with it. St. Augustine was a part of finishing up Montgomery; you see, the March on Washington was a part of finishing off Birmingham.
Branch:
Let me jump in here briefly just to make sure people understand that when you speak of SNCC, you're speaking of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which is an allied group but with slightly different tactics, the younger folks —
Vivian:
Yeah, and basically all students.
Branch:
And some of them were out of your Nashville movement.
Vivian:
And not only Nashville. Once the meeting at Raleigh, at Shaw, once the Shaw meeting, students all went there. Very few stayed anywhere else, right? But a number of the leadership came back to SCLC, right? John Lewis, because — and check this, because you're the kind of person that really checks good stuff. Here's it, is that when we look at John Lewis coming, being at Bloody Sunday, John Lewis at Bloody Sunday was coming away from SNCC, right? Remember, there was no other staff member with Hosea from SCLC and there was no other SNCC person with John.
Branch:
John.
Vivian:
Now, because John was leaving SNCC, because guys like — the more violent and violent in fact side of SNCC was taking over, right?
Branch:
All right, that's several years down the road.
Vivian:
Okay, okay, okay.
Branch:
But you're right, that's in 1965.
Vivian:
Okay.
Branch:
But in the 1960 period, just to set back you in your progression —
Vivian:
I have to do this right.
Looby Bombing & March to City Hall, 1960
Branch:
The [Greensboro] sit-ins start in February, on February 1st. The time that you're talking about, when SNCC was formed, when the students got together, only because the sit-ins spread so rapidly that Dr. King enabled them to come together and talk about coordinating. They wanted to coordinate their sit-ins. They had spread like lightning — I call it the quickening, all across there including in Nashville, that's on April 15th that they get together —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
— and form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ten weeks after the sit-ins start and it's that very next week in April 19th that you lead the march — now, you had been having sit-ins in Nashville as part of all of this.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
But it culminated just a week, the very time that SNCC was formed, people come back to Nashville and you have the big march through Nashville of the 4000 people and the confrontation. Tell that story, attorney Looby's bombing and...
Vivian:
Okay. See, it's that — I was telling you about the minister who had, his suit was burned. He was the pastor of a Methodist church and a strong follower, person, leader within the African American community in Nashville with Kelly Miller Smith and around the idea of nonviolence. Well, we were meeting at his church —
Branch:
Do you remember his name?
Vivian:
No, that's why I kept talking. I was trying to think of it. I can't think of his name, but it will come up. No, we'll have to look it up because I don't think I'll think of it, right?
Branch:
All right.
Vivian:
But we were at his church early one morning because that's what we had our leadership meetings for the movement — it was early in the morning. We'd be at one of the churches or the other and his was an ideal church to be at because it's about two blocks or so from the college, Fisk, and then about six blocks or so away from Tennessee A&I, right, all on the same street which made that easy for meetings because the rest of us were ministers and so forth, and we could take one car. We could drive across town to the seminary, right? And we were older anyway.Now, we were having the meeting when we heard a bombing sound but we didn't pay much attention to it. It didn't seem like it was close. The next person coming in told us that they had heard what seemed like a bomb and they thought it was coming from over to Meharry Medical which wasn't too far away from where we were. Well, we immediately — because we were planning action anyway — immediately came to what we would do, right? If it was a bombing over there, what we would have to do, so we figured out before we left the room how we were going to organize community to make certain that they dealt with that fact. And then we broke out of there. Bernard Lafayette tells it the best way because Bernard, when he broke out of that meeting, went to Tennessee A&I and started organizing. A couple of other people went to Fisk and started to organize.
Branch:
Even before they knew what had happened?
Vivian:
Yeah, well —
Branch:
When did you find out?
Vivian:
Well, they found out right afterwards. We didn't get outside long before people knew that the house had been bombed but what they first thought it was Meharry, because it knocked out — somebody had counted the windows, 140-some windows were knocked out, right? And that's the big building, so you could tell that from some distance, whereas Looby's home was a small house on the furthest corner across the street from Meharry.So they immediately finding out that Looby's house had been bombed just kept going onto A&I to get the word out, right? And in order to get the word out, what they did was to go into where the announcements were made for the whole school and started announcing then, and they broke for lunch at 11 o'clock and part of 12 o'clock, and so right after — 11 or 11:30 — right after lunch is when we would start the march, and started it from Tennessee A&I. By the time that we got to Fisk, Fisk was letting out. We met them — instead of 17th, on 16th, the other end of the campus, off of Jefferson Street. And then — no, met them on 17th and the students from Pearl High School cut through and met us on 16th Street. That's what it was, right?
And we kept walking and then the people began to join us as we walked, people would come off their porches and join in, and keep going — cars would begin to drive slowly alongside of us as we walked down the way, right? As we were singing a part of the time and then when we got close to town, we stopped singing and it was a silent march where you could hear nothing but feet move. New York had pioneered that back in the 1920s, and we were really doing the same thing, so that you couldn't hear anything but the feet fall.
I remember when we turned to go right down into the heart of town, some fellows at one of the little factories there were playing ball at their noon hour, by the time we got there it was their noon hour and they were playing ball as they ate lunch. Throwing the ball back and forth, I mean, playing pitch and catch, and they saw us coming and they began to — you could see them and then they began to back up against the buildings, and as we passed, it was very clear that we were not to be played with, there was nothing — and they were just so, they thought it was quite different, right? They didn't know what to do or what to think. They had never seen this many black people before in any mood but just, you know, walking down the street, but this was quite different and they reacted to it quite differently but they didn't attempt anything to stop it or to speak back to it or to holler or anything, right? They were dead silent, backed up against the building and we passed on by.
As we came closer to downtown, we cut across and went over one block over to City Hall. When we got to City Hall, I made a speech to the mayor and we had to wait for them. They hadn't come down yet, and made a speech to the mayor and then Diane made the speech with the line that really caught the attention, right, when she asked him point blank about his manhood, and what would he do and so forth, and it really caught him and he had to answer, and that was the goodie. But we had planned it so that the final question would be asked, but when she asked it he really wasn't ready for it and the place was surrounded, all that side of City Hall was surrounded with students, and I remember seeing students that had come from Meharry, but they had not walked down with us because they couldn't afford to walk out of school, right? But by the time we got down there, there were a number of them down there, right?
Note — the newspapers said the next morning there were 2000 of us. There were 4000 of us, and the thing that surprised me is that there were still — when we had finished there were still students and people coming up the staircase still coming into the meeting, coming up to the stair steps, and coming to the meeting. In fact, we had had the meeting and it was over before some people actually got there. That's still baffling to me and I don't talk about it very often because I can't explain it too easily, all right, but people were coming and coming and coming to be a part of that and to make clear where they were, what they thought and what it was all about. Now, when we did this, right, he said he was, that —
Branch:
He — Mayor West? Mayor Ben West?
Vivian:
Yeah, Mayor Ben West — that's what I should say — responded, right, to us and said something to the effect that he was going to examine the matter, right? But what he really did, one week from that day, everything in Nashville was open. Everything in Nashville was open. It was a great victory for us — that had not been done anywhere in the south. You'd had an action in Greensboro but they were nothing like ours, right?
Branch:
All right, let's back — because you have just described one of the seminal marches in the early movement.
Vivian:
Right.
Branch:
This is April 19th, 1960, just a few weeks after the sit-ins started. Your confrontation with the mayor of Nashville at the end of this march — you describe very well how something is both spontaneous and planned, because people went out to mobilize, made announcements on the phone and everything.
Vivian:
Sure.
Branch:
And instantly created a march but it wouldn't have happened without those people kind of seeding the clouds like Bernard Lafayette.
Vivian:
That's it.
Branch:
So it was spontaneous and planned —
Vivian:
Yeah, and he was in the meetings that we had. He was in the planning meetings. He was part of that.
Branch:
The dialogue between the mayor and Diane — of course, this is all preserved on television and they made a film of it.
Vivian:
Yeah, I got a record in there, by the way.
Branch:
Yeah.
Vivian:
I pulled it out so you could see it.
Branch:
So this is a remarkable event, this became one of the recruiting things that people would use saying if students want to do something they can have a march like this in Nashville. This, we had 4000 people who confronted the mayor and Diane said to the mayor, "Do you recommend that these segregation laws be changed?" And he kept dodging saying "Well, I don't have anything to do with the laws, that's up to the merchants" — but she kept pushing, well, what would you do? And confronting him and finally he said, well, yes, I guess I would recommend — I can't justify it and so that became quite famous.
Vivian:
Oh, it did.
Branch:
Tell us a little bit about who attorney Looby was, because it all started with the bombing of his house and we haven't really explained to people who he was and his relationship to your movement.
Vivian:
Yeah. Attorney Looby was the lead lawyer among African American lawyers and therefore the movement in Nashville. He had a doctorate in law, in fact, which most people don't even take the time to get, but he really had it. He was from the islands, spoke with a slight break in it, he'd been there for years, been in Nashville for years. Looby was the natural leader of all the lawyers, right? And a spokesman on many occasions but there were other lawyers that were spokesmen, but Looby was the person looked up to.
Branch:
And when his home was bombed — and of course we just a little bit more background — his home was bombed probably because in-between the beginning of the Greensboro sit-ins on February 1st and this march on April 19th, there had been sit-ins in Nashville with arrests and he was defending your sit-in people who got arrested at lunch counters.
Vivian:
Yeah, and that's true, and he was, and —
Branch:
And that's what upset the white folks, that this was the guy who was in the newspapers defending them.
Vivian:
Yeah, in fact, he had been defending us from the very beginning of the action. I mean, when students came down from Minnesota and Wisconsin in particular that I remember, as they went to jail, he and all the other black lawyers met there and worked on their behalf as well. In other words, every time anything happened where we had to face the law, white law or the courts or so forth, all these lawyers came forth, but Looby was their natural leader and best strategist.
Branch:
So that's why people would react when his home was bombed —
Vivian:
Precisely.
Branch:
— Because he had been the defender of the movement.
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
Now, when you said that the mayor opened everything up, these were lunch counter demonstrations.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
He didn't open up all of Nashville. He didn't open up the library and the theaters — go ahead.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's it, but most of the stuff he opened. He didn't open the theaters, though —
Branch:
Because you had a big campaign on the theaters —
Vivian:
That's exactly right.
Branch:
Coming up, between then and the Freedom Rides. Actually, it's a wonderful transition to the Freedom Rides a year later.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Because I think John Lewis's phrase was that once we won this victory through the mayor and got a lot of things opened up, we were going to march through the yellow pages and get other things opened up.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
The library and —
Vivian:
That was the statement but it didn't happen that way.
Nashville Theater Campaign, 1960
Branch:
Right. But you had a long campaign about the movie theaters —
Vivian:
Yeah, but that theater was a long campaign and it was really different — now, I left about that time. I was not there at that particular time.
Branch:
You mean for the theater campaign?
Vivian:
For the theaters. Actually, I was trying to think of the fellow's name — I was in Denver. I had just gone to Denver to make a speech or something, I was coming back from there. But that night on TV, I saw this tall fellow I'm thinking about — can you think of his name? He was the vice president of the adult group. You remember that's about the time we had this kind of halfway split, and he was hit in the head with a stone and you saw the blood run. I got up the next morning extremely early and took the quickest thing out of town [Denver]. It happened to be a train, and I got to Kansas City, I got off the train, I took a cab across town and flew into Nashville so I could be there in time for the action because there was a march afterwards, right, that day coming out of — and they were starting at Kelly's church. I remember it better for that than for anything else because when he was hit in the head, that electrified all of us, when he started bleeding and I was in Denver and I was electrified by it and had to come to join it, right? And we started marches the next day — also started some arrests, though, as well.
Branch:
We have to remember that one of the things that made the theater campaign different is theaters aren't open in the daytime so these are night marches so it gives the Klan and the people attacking the cover of darkness, so it required an extra level of commitment to march at night.
Vivian:
Yeah, it was at late evening or night, and the reason I say that is because Hosea [Williams of SCLC] started real night meetings, midnight meetings in Savannah, I remember.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And I was wondering if we had already — were we doing late night or were we doing evenings?
Branch:
I think you were doing — trying to get as much daylight as possible when people were trying to get in the theaters.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Branch:
You have to wait until the theaters open.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's why I brought that up because I saw them as that evening matter, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
Once everybody got in, then we didn't wait for them to come out to keep going, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
But in Savannah, we started at 11 and 12 o'clock at night.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
That bell would ring, right — pardon me, we're —
Freedom Rides, 1961
Branch:
That's two years later. But the sit-in movement has taken over the whole country in 1960, Nashville keeps marching. The theater campaign was at the end of 1960, about the time President Kennedy was elected and went into 1961, and the reason we know that is because this is the transition to the Freedom Rides —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Because Nashville was having a picnic to celebrate the end of the theater campaign to desegregate it a year into the sit-in movements when the Freedom Riders were ambushed in Birmingham on Mother's Day, 1961.
Vivian:
That's true. Mother's Day, yeah.
Branch:
And we know that because one of the seminal moments in Nashville is you're having a picnic to celebrate this, a lot of shell-shocked people who have been doing marches and going to jail for a year and you get word about the terrible thing, the bus burned in Anniston, the Greyhound and the Trailways bus went into Birmingham and people were beat up. And the question is, what if anything we're going to do about it? And some people at the picnic said, let's worry about that tomorrow. We deserve this picnic, and other people said let's not have the picnic because this is a crisis.
Vivian:
You know, I don't even remember anybody saying "No." But that meeting that evening was something else. And these are the agreements and disagreements here again — you know, who saw, felt and thought what, right? I remember we took a break, but we took the break in the meeting. When we agreed we were really going to Jackson, Mississippi.[Meaning they were going to continue the Freedom Ride from Birmingham to Montgomery and from there to Jackson.]There were some people that broke down and cried. Diane was in charge of the meeting, and she asked for a break. I remember we talked outside and were looking around, just taking a break, right? I remember looking at the sky that night and I remembered that we were going to leave here and go to Jackson, and by the time we got all back together there were 10 students, 10 or 12, but I think it was 10 students that were ready to go, all right? The adults that were part of the group had to go home to talk to their families because we had children and had wives and so forth, and so we had to go home, but the students started to Montgomery —
Branch:
To Birmingham.
Vivian:
Yeah, to Birmingham that night. Now, by the time I get there it's Montgomery.[Timeline of Freedom Ride events referred to in this interview by Vivian & Branch:
May 15 (Mother's Day) Bus burned, riders attacked by mob in Birmingham
Nashville students decide to carry the rides forward
May 16 Nashville students mobilize to continue the rides
May 17 Nashville riders arrested in Birmingham and deported to TN
May 18 Nashville riders return to Birmingham bus depot to continue ride
May 19 Riders endure threats at bus depot
May 20 Riders reach Montgomery and are attacked by mob
May 20 Riders hide out in Abernathy's church from cops trying to arrest them
May 21-22 Riders & Montgomery Blacks besieged by mob in Abernathy's church
May 22-23 Additional riders arrive in Montgomery, decision made to carry on
May 24 Rides continue from Montgomery, all arrested in Jackson MS.]
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
You see what I mean? They had that meeting. There's a great picture that was in ife — a great picture of everybody that was at that meeting at the dentist's home.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And the next morning, we were at the bus station. That's when I joined them. I'd been there that night and then got up and joined them the next morning. We were at the bus station and there were a number of folks there at the bus station to start. Now, I can give you a story from there.
Branch:
Let me give a little context and then pick up your story, because this is a great moment in history. This is when really — the kids in Nashville and your group in Nashville refused to let the Freedom Rides die because everybody was beaten up — they went home.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's true. Keep going because I want to see what you're saying —
Branch:
So you decided in these meetings in Nashville —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
We cannot let violence stop the movement.
Vivian:
Defeat nonviolence, that's the way we said it.
Branch:
No, you cannot let violence — the violence against the movement stop it.
Vivian:
Stop nonviolence.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
But we really — that's the way it was really stated in the meeting. We had come to that conclusion a long time before though, right?
Branch:
Mm-hmm.
Vivian:
So we restated that as basic. That was right before we took the break.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
You see what I mean? We stated that, but that was very, very important because it became the real statement of not only that movement but it became the statement for the rest of our history, when in no way would we allow nonviolence to be destroyed by violence, or violence to destroy nonviolence, right?
Branch:
Exactly, so these kids —
Vivian:
But there's one other piece to that you want to add.
Branch:
All right.
Vivian:
See, because this is where there's a mix-up, and if you can find some way to deal with it I'd like it. See, Jim Farmer — I heard Jim on the radio saying that he'd already proven the point that an African American could not go from one end of the country to the other on public transportation without —
Branch:
Submitting to segregation.
Vivian:
— and in fact the way you said it was what he was really saying, submitting to segregation. The point is afterwards we were thinking of it in terms of even you couldn't go from one end to the other without being possibly killed, you get my point? But I think the way he was really saying it was more like you said it, right? Now, both of those things became very, very important for us. I remember a story before that, though, that you might like to know about. I was coming through Birmingham from somewhere and I went into the white room — I remember there were two expressions that were used because they were trying to get around it, and one of them — what were the two terms?
Branch:
Interstate and intrastate?
Vivian:
And interstate, intrastate, remember?[In the Deep South, racial segregation was required by local law. But under court rulings and federal regulations, racial segregation on busses traveling between states (interstate) was illegal, as was segregation in facilities that served interstate travelers. Therefore, the Freedom Riders bought tickets for travel across state lines — Birmingham to Jackson, for example — so that they would be under the jurisdiction of the federal rules. Moreover, after the Brown decision, southern prosecutors tried to avoid arresting people for violating local segregation ordinances because they feared that the Supreme Courth would overturn them. So protesters arrested by local cops for deying segregation were usually charged with offenses such as "failure to obey an officer," "disorderly conduct," or "disturbing the peace."]So I went in and I sat in the white section. This huge policeman came over and he was "wa wa wa wa wa," right? And so I went over to the telephone booth to call Fred Shuttlesworth because I was in Birmingham now, right, and I was calling Fred. I called Fred and his house had been bombed so he could not answer, right? I went — this guy looked like he could have played on the Chicago Bears, great big guy — I've met two or three of those in Alabama.
But I went over back and sat down and he wanted to get me out of there but he didn't call the police, which was interesting to me. He didn't call the police. They didn't physically move me, which they normally would, especially after he had made all this — you know, by coming over and leaning over the telephone booth and all of that. I thought that he was really going to go out of his way to have me moved. It wasn't an "us," it was me — have me moved — but he didn't. I just waited for my transportation and got on and came on back to Nashville, I think, right — but all of these kinds of actions were used because that interstate is very, very important for where we were going.
For instance, when we — and I mention that because as we were getting ready to leave Montgomery to go to Jackson, that was the next morning — everybody was ready to go, right? And people had come in. Some of them were from the meeting the night before, some of them were coming from wherever they were in town.
[When Vivian refers to the "Meeting the night before" he is proably referring either to the mob siege of Abernathy's church on May 21-22 or the leadership meeting where it was decided to carry the ride forward despite the mob attack in Montgomery on May 20.]Most of the people that were coming in [to Montgomery] from out of town were adults who had had to talk with their families before they left. When we were there, then when we had tickets, but they were going to — the idea was to deal with those tickets the way that Alabama was doing it, intrastate, right, give you a ticket that you could only use in-state, but it was seemingly more of a guise than a fact, because they never tried to take our tickets away from us.
When we got onto the bus, there were already white people on the front of the bus, right? And we had to go to the back of the bus because there was no other space. They'd put the white people on first, put them right up front and the rest of us had to go to the back behind them, really. But that took most of all to the very back of the bus, right? Then when we got on, then the state troopers came and got the white passengers off the bus, and then filled that first with the Alabama militia, those first three or four rows, and we started for —
[In this context "militia" refers to state troopers.]
Branch:
Jackson.
Vivian:
— Jackson, but when we were in Alabama, there was kind of a sensible driving and so forth. When we got to the state line, the bus stopped, and the Alabama militia got off, but before I say that — as we were going to the state line, there was a long trail of cars behind us, a huge trail of cars. Most of them turned out to be news people, right? We get there, we stop, but we stopped to change so that Mississippi militia could take the place of Alabama militia.But that stopped is what they needed to come up along, the news people needed to come up beside and ask questions, right? Well, we'd made up our minds that we were not going to everybody talking, and we chose Jim Lawson to explain nonviolence to them because that's what we wanted them to know and we had learned that what you do, no matter what they want, you tell them what you want and they have nothing to use but what you said, so you would get your story out, regardless of what was asked.
So then it was handled that way, but I remember the Life magazine reading on the front cover, I'm pretty certain it was the front cover or it was the statement over the article — "Asking for trouble and getting it." They didn't understand nonviolence and nothing Jim said or anybody else said — and there wasn't anything in the article that said that they understood nonviolence and yet that's what we were using. That's why they had the movement in the first place. That's what it was all about, because we couldn't have moved the nation without the understanding of nonviolent direct action. But the news people did not get it.
So we moved but when we moved out from there, there was a colonel from Mississippi that got on and he unfastened the speedometer, undid the speedometer and told the driver to go into Jackson, and boy, they just barreled into Jackson, I mean, barreled into Jackson.
[At this time, US-80 between Montgomery and Jackson was not a limited-access highway. It was just an ordinary two-lane rural road and the main street of every town along the way.]All along the way, people were on — every little town we'd come to and all that, people were out on their porches, which is a Mississippi thing anyway, right? And if you had a house like that you'd want to be out in the open too, right? And they were out there and they'd be waving at us and so forth and they knew we were coming. They weren't saying nothing, they weren't hollering nothing, but they were all waving, you know? And then later on as we came closer and closer, and I don't think it was just the closeness — I think some of the towns are larger than others and in the places that were larger, people came right out to the edge of the road and waved and so forth. In the smaller towns, they stayed on their porches and waved.
We came on in to Jackson, and when we got to Jackson, it started off the bus — well, everybody had had to go to the bathroom and he wouldn't stop for us, right? So everybody was anxious to get off and get into the bathroom, but we were anxious to get into the white section that the orders were clear, right? But as I started off, I was on the first row — in fact, the colonel and I had an encounter about that because I was trying to get him to stop for all of the — so that everybody could get off and go to a bathroom and so forth, right? It had been a long time, but he wouldn't do it and so we had a real — Ebony played that up rather big. I don't remember if any other places did or not, but the idea was that when he changed that thermometer —
Branch:
Speedometer.
Vivian:
— speedometer, I knew from that time on that we were going to have real problems, you know what I mean? And we sped on in and I wanted to get off the bus but I heard a voice from up front telling me "Stay on the back; we need experience on the end," right? So I was the last one off the bus. I get in there and I'm in there quite a while, right, and —
[background noise]
[audio ends abruptly]
Branch:
Because we were in the middle of a very historical significant point here in the Freedom Rides.
Vivian:
Okay. Yeah.
[break in audio]
Branch:
— Where it left off, in Birmingham.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Freedom Riders in Birmingham, 1961
Branch:
They were stalled there — it took, by this time, everybody's scared. There's national press, national attention: Can this bus go forward? These kids want to take up where the adults left off —[Referring back to the situation in Birmingham after the May 15 mob attacks on the initial two groups of Freedom Riders. Most of the CORE members who had been on those buses flew out of Birmingham that night to attend previously scheduled events in New Orleans. On May 17, the Nashville students arrived in Birmingham by bus to continue the ride on to Montgomery and Jackson. They were arrested and deported across the border into rural Tennessee but they managed to make their way back to Birmingham the next day. The bus drivers, however, refused to take them on to Montgomery out of fear of another mob attack. The Nashville students and additional riders coming in from elsewhere had to wait around the clock in the bus depot while under threat from angry whites being incited by KKK Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton.Eventually, under pressure from Washington, a bus driver was obtained on May 20 to carry the new group of freedom riders forward to Montgomery. There the police stood aside to allow a huge mob of angry whites to savagely beat and brutalize them. The next evening, Sunday May 21st, an even larger white mob surrounded and besieged Rev. Abernathy's church, which was filled to capacity by an Afro-American mass meeting in honor of the riders. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was forced to order a handful of U.S. Marshals to protect them. Martial law was declared, and the Alabama National Guard mobilized. On the morning of May 22, the Black men, women, and children who had been blockaded all night in First Baptist Church were finally able to leave.]
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
It took a long time. President — {UNCLEAR} The state patrol — {UNCLEAR} — got beaten right there in — {UNCLEAR} — having been beaten in this spectacular thing in Abernathy's church that night.[Referring to events in Montgomery May 20-21, 1963.]
Vivian:
Yeah. Now, but — {UNCLEAR}
Branch:
No, John had been beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina on the adult — John is the only one who was on both ends of the Freedom Rides.
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
He was coming down from Washington —
Vivian:
In fact, he gave us the message that that caused us to get involved.[Referring to the May 15 call to Nashville after the mob attacks in Anniston and Birmingham. Which led to discussions about continuing the ride at the picnic celebrating the Nashville theater victory.]
Branch:
Right. He came down from Washington with the Jim Farmer group, was beaten in Rock Hill, and then he — {UNCLEAR} — For a fellowship in India —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
So he wasn't there when it went into [Anniston] and got burned in — {UNCLEAR} — Is that in the week between the Mother's Day picnic when you guys decide that — {UNCLEAR} — [Attorney] General gets involved, they get beaten in Montgomery. Then they're holed up in Abernathy's church because Alabama's trying to arrest them, arrest the people that caused the Freedom Rides —[Referring to events in Montgomery May 20-22.]
Vivian:
Yeah, Martin was there.
Branch:
That's when Dr. King was there —
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
And mobs of 3000 people are outside the church and they threw rocks through the windows and Bobby Kennedy finally had to send in marshals and all that sort of thing. Then the question — they survive that, and then the question is, is the Freedom Ride going to stop in Montgomery because it was beaten yet again, and that's when you arrived and had the meeting at Robert Harris, the pharmacist's home.
Vivian:
That's his name.
Branch:
And argued, are we going to go forward or not? And famously, in some of those — at that meeting, Diane asked Dr. King to go and there was an argument about whether he was going to get on the bus.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
But you and Jim Lawson did to continue.
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
So you continued the Freedom Ride, and by that time it is a national and even international phenomenon that this integrated bus has been burned once in Anniston, and a new group came, got beaten up in Montgomery and they're still going.
Vivian:
Yeah, because —
Jackson MS, 1961
Branch:
And you went on into Jackson —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Not knowing what was going to happen there, and tell us what happened in Jackson.
Vivian:
Yeah. So you still got — is that —
Branch:
We'll have —
Vivian:
But we'll get that later right? All right, now — good. So we get there and as I said, I was the last to get off the bus, but as they were getting off the bus, the lieutenant, was he? Or captain — captain —
Branch:
Are you talking about the Mississippi highway patrol, the one riding with you?
Vivian:
No, no.
Branch:
The one riding with you was Colonel Birdsong —
Vivian:
That was the colonel — yeah, Birdsong.
Branch:
He was on the bus.
Vivian:
But I'm talking about when we get off the bus —
Branch:
Oh, the captain of police, yeah.
Vivian:
Yeah, the captain of police, remember?
Branch:
His name's in my book but I can't remember it. [Captain Ray.]
Vivian:
Yeah, because we all knew it — we'd call his name all the time. We were in jail, right? But he was putting people in as fast as they came out from going to the bathroom, he was putting them into a wagon to go downtown, right? Well, being the last one out, I came across and they were getting ready to close the doors, so I patted him on the back and I said — he turned around and I said, "I'm with them."And he couldn't help but smile — I think that's the first time anybody ever asked him to go to jail, right? So he turned around the other way so I couldn't see his face but he turned so far, I could look around and see — the side of his face, he was smiling. Then he straightened it up and then he turned back around and he said, "Get in there." So we got in, and we got in, and went to the city jail. This is where some stuff can easily get mixed up, right? The difference between the city jail and the county —
Branch:
The Hinds County Jail.
Vivian:
The Hinds county Jail, but we went to the city jail, all right? I've got my certificate from there, hanging on the wall in there, right? Now, I wasn't for certain because Jim Farmer comes a day or two later, but the way Jim writes it is as though he was right there coming off that first bus. But he was not coming off that first bus, right? But the way it sounds — but Jim came off a bus with Clarinda [phonetic] something, right? She was of Nashville, but she had come lately if she was on the bus with Jim, and it's something I've never got figured out straight in my mind because reading to them in the beginning — it's only later I was trying to get that figured out, right? And so we went to jail and later Jim joined us. Now, I bring later Jim joined us up because that kind of funny thing there is when did Jim come, and —
Branch:
Jim was on the second bus.
Vivian:
That's what I thought.
Branch:
You were on the first bus, you and Jim Lawson —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
And a number of them — he was on the second bus.
Vivian:
The second bus.
Branch:
It wasn't days later.[Vivian was on the Trailways bus that departed Montgomery for Jackson on May 24. Later that day a Greyhound bus went from Montgomery to Jackson and that was the bus that Farmer was on.]
Vivian:
It was the second day.
Branch:
It may have been days later when you wound up in the same jail — but it was eight hours later or something like that.
Vivian:
Okay, that's what I'm getting at is — did that second bus unload to go to the county jail, all right, or —
Branch:
It may have, and then you got — because you may have filled up that jail or something or they just wanted to use another one.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
But he came on — now, remember this is an interesting connection because this is the James Farmer who, as the director of CORE —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
— Started the original, the adult Freedom Ride, and then he rejoins after the kids have taken it up.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
So he comes back and in fact tells the story on himself that he wasn't planning to get on the bus. He was there to see them off [from Montgomery].
Vivian:
That's it.
Branch:
And had a fit saying I cannot justify this, and he yelled at somebody, put my luggage on, I'm going on the bus — he was kind of mad. I've got to go, but he came in alter and this of course is the person from whom you had done your demonstrations all the way back in Illinois.
Vivian:
In Peoria, yeah.
[break in audio]
Vivian:
— When we'd eat, how we were served, when we'd take our breaks, when we would have our meditation periods, when we would discuss strategy, right? We'd set up our whole thing in jail. Now, I was trying to get when Jim came because I have a hard time — I know Jim wasn't there in the beginning. But I have a hard time after that remembering when he was no longer there.
Branch:
Yeah, I don't know when they put people together and I do have the date that they transferred everybody to Parchman. That's different, but —
Vivian:
They woke us very early that morning —
Branch:
The two jails, different jails there in Jackson [city and county] I don't really know, but I do know he was on the second bus. I do know that from the standpoint of the white people, that is the attorney general, the federal government and the state government, that the second bus was a terrible surprise to them because they had worked out this whole thing of rushing the first bus through Alabama and Mississippi, getting it in and allowing you to be arrested even though that was against federal law. Attorney General Kennedy said arrest them as long as you're not going to do any violence and the whole thing will be over, and the governor of Mississippi —
Vivian:
He did, huh?
Branch:
— Yeah. The governor of Mississippi was profoundly upset when the second bus came and called up and said, "You promised me only one bus." And Bobby Kennedy's saying well, it's as big a surprise to me as to anybody 50 else — I didn't know there were going to be anymore, and then all of the sudden the Freedom Rides became a phenomenon —
Vivian:
They kept coming.
Branch:
They kept coming all summer.
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
So they felt betrayed that they were trying — and it goes back to this thing you were talking about earlier which a lot of people may not understand if we don't explain it, about the difference between interstate and intrastate.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Intrastate means within the state. The function for segregation is wholly a state matter —
Vivian:
That's exactly, a state matter —
Branch:
Interstate gets the federal government involved.
Vivian:
Essentially right.
Branch:
So the movement wanted it to be interstate so that the federal government would be responsible for enforcing citizens' rights to ride an integrated bus —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
And the segregationists all wanted it to be intrastate —
Vivian:
Intrastate.
Branch:
And say it's a matter of —
Vivian:
The states' rights.
Branch:
— The sovereign laws of Alabama, and that's segregation and there's nothing you can do about it.
Vivian:
Precisely right, and this is why I was so surprised when the policeman didn't arrest me.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
You see what I mean? Because I was going interstate regardless of what he wanted, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
Because I really didn't want to bow to states' rights. I just didn't want to bow to states' rights.
Branch:
Right.
Jackson Jail, 1961
Vivian:
Now, we're there. We go to the place, they write us up as we're going in, right? We go on in. We are there for several days. In fact, it seemed like we were there about a week because we had a Sunday service inside, and we had the service by writing up who was to do what and passed it through the bars to each other, and then who was opening, who was singing, who was doing everything, right? And we had this special service and that's why I knew that the weekend had to have passed, and I could see us there for totally then, because we didn't leave the next day, right? So we must have stayed there a week and a half, at least. Do you remember what days we entered Jackson and what days we left going out to the Parchman Farm?
Branch:
I don't remember it right now, but it was about 10 days you were in Jackson —
Vivian:
That's what I thought, good, about a week and a half.
Branch:
Other Freedom Riders were coming in and they moved you to Parchman because you filled up both jails —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
But that was the next big thing —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
You're there with Freedom Riders.
Vivian:
That's it, and we go to — we're there. We set up a whole routine. I think that's very important to know, because it showed how to do nonviolent direct action. Jim had talked about it in India, right? They had a time to meditate and a time to — well, he talked about time to meditate, what I really remember, but I know he must have talked about more than that.But the thing that surprised them in the jail is that they'd always slipped food through the place where they're supposed to slip it through, but then people are fighting for it, fighting for their meal. Well, we all went and sat down in our chairs around the tables that we had, and we'd have two people delivering the food to us, two of our people delivering food to us. And that just stunned them — they just didn't ever understand that, that we were having order and it put us in charge in a way that they didn't like the idea because they were so used to people just wanting the food and fighting with each other over it that they couldn't understand that they had to understand the difference between us and what they normally dealt with.
Now, this deeply impressed the black guards, right? They really weren't guards. They were prisoners that were —
Branch:
Trustees.
Vivian:
— trustees, right, and the trustees began from that moment on as I remember it. Maybe it was before, but some people remember it — as I remember it, from that moment on, we could trust trustees. They would do things for us. They'd let you know in meaningful ways that they were on our side, and that whatever they did they had to do, any negative thing, that they had to do it because of the white guards.And that was very important to us because they saw that sense of dignity, liked it and they understood what effect it had on the white people running the jails. Now, let's look at that again, because that was the kind of thing that was making the difference for us when we did the church service. I remember the next morning, the morning before we went, it must have been two, three days later, because the day before we went out to Parchman, this tall — it was a lieutenant type, right? He had a certain — he had something in for me, right? And I was trying to get where he was coming from.
I just couldn't understand where he was coming from, so Jim Bevel was from Mississippi, right? So I said to Jim, I said, what is wrong with this guy? And Jim laughed and he says, you're a man. And I said, what the heck are you talking about? And he said he's not used to anybody black looking him in the eye, and to look him in the eye to him was almost an insult and you never turned away and you talked to him straight. And I wasn't being unusual, I was just talking to him, you know, just like you'd talk to somebody, right?
And it seemed like the more we talked, the madder this guy got, and yet there was nothing in the conversation to me that would create anger under any circumstances, right? And Jim laughed because he was the only one that — we northerners didn't understand this white-black relationship. Jim Bevel understood it totally and he understood what was moving this guy.
Parchman Prison Farm, 1961
Vivian:
Well, we wake up the next morning — they wake us up the next morning very early and take us out to Parchman, right? So we're out to Parchman —
Branch:
We should stop and tell them what Parchman is.
Vivian:
Oh, Parchman Prison — famous prison. Parchman Prison is one of the most vicious prisons ever. I have an entire book on Parchman that was written years ago, right? They had two burial grounds there, right?
Branch:
It was modeled on a plantation. It is a farm. It's a farm-prison.
Vivian:
That's it — it's a farm-prison. And the best way to say that — and I like that it was modeled on a [slave] plantation. I had never heard it that way, but it was. I mean, the whole thing was in fact — it was probably a plantation at one time before it was the farm that they used. And they don't know how many people were killed in that thing, right? Because there wasn't any real formal cemetery arrangements, as much as people were just buried on top of each other as they died and as things went on.So we get to Parchman and so they start to find out about us. The next day they start questioning us really — the regular arrangements, and so they start questioning us and there's a girl that was in there right before me, was first, and ends up in tears, right — I could hear it through the walls. And we were upset about it, but nothing to do about it. In fact, we weren't even where you could see in. We were hearing through the walls. And I was next.
Well, this guy that didn't like the fact that I was looking, just looking at him and talking, right? He was there. He didn't go back to Jackson. He stayed there for all the questioning, right? When we started to question, they asked me a question and I said yes and no. And then they said, "say sir," so fine, you know, I wasn't there to be making an argument for anything, and so I said "sir." So they ask a couple of other questions, and then I answered them "yes, sir," and "no, sir" and they were simple questions.
And then they asked me right quick, the guy that was asking questions, turned right quick — and that was the warden of the place, and he said, "Do you have syphilis?" And I said no. And they jumped on me, right? We were sitting close to each other, and they jumped on me — there were about five or four, I think, four or five of them, and they jumped on me. Well, it was obvious, this is what the guys from downtown had been waiting for, right?
And he out comes with this flapjack [blackjack] and he's right down on top of me, right? And I was just warding off blows, right? But that caused his hand to turn, and his hand to turn, it was no longer a flapjack, it was the edges of this — it was a pretty ... See, some of them are just black leather around a piece of lead, right? This one was pretty embellished with figures and so forth. But it was so pretty, it was thick tan leather so that steel was inside, but it was thick and it had sharp edges, and when his hand turned, it was no longer hitting you like a flapjack would, right? It turned and it cut me right down the side, there.
As soon as the blood spurted out, they jumped back. I mean, they jumped back and they looked at each other. I wondered what really happened, because I didn't understand until later and I was looking at them as if to say, "What is this all about?" No more beating, no more questioning — they had a guy to take me back to the cells because we were out in front — back to the cells, so he's taking me back to the cells and we make a turn and go down, you make a turn and go straight on in to the first part of the cells and then there was a turn there, right? Where a great big steel gate was, so the guy unlocks the gate and tells me to go on in.
So I start in and I'm going into the jail and suddenly I feel something. Now, the guy's really a long ways from me — he's about 10 foot from me, right? He's at the end of that cell, right — at least I thought he was, but I know he was in where this — if the door had been closed, he would have had to have moved, right? And I'm walking in, and I feel something right down the back of my neck, and it's just like that, just like it's — looked like a half question mark in my mind, and I saw it as red, and only occasionally do I ever dream in color, much less — and I wasn't dreaming, and I was standing up walking and I could feel this thing, and so I stopped and I look around at him, because any time anything that you've never felt before and never had any knowledge or thought of happens to you, what you do is to turn to any human, another human being, you know, anybody that's there.
So I turned around to look at him and so much as if to say, did you feel that? When I realized I was looking in a 45, or a 38, either one — I think it was a 38, actually. I was looking into the barrel of this 38 because I was looking in his eyes, because you look to see him, you know, to ask him the question without announcing it, you know, what did you feel? You're feeling at the same time you're asking, and then I realized he had a gun on me and I was looking down the barrel of it so I just kind of slumped and looked at him as if to say, "What kind of human being are you," you know what I mean? I just couldn't take it in, that somebody was standing there with a gun.
You're just, you're going to take two more steps and you're totally inside with all the other guys, right? Because you have to make little quick turns there. And so I look at him and he's got this 38 on me, and I just look at him and I look him straight in the eye, looking at him as if to say "What is wrong with you?" You know, and he's trying to make up his mind whether he's going to shoot me or not. That's obvious and I just keep looking at him and he decides he's not going to shoot me, so he just pulls down his gun and throws it in his holster, slams this big steel door and those big jail doors, you know, you don't forget the sound them, right? You can't repeat it but you don't forget the sound of it, right? And then he turned around and walked straight down that long hallway, and I just kept looking until we came to that first turn going back.
Branch:
But all this time you're bleeding, right?
Vivian:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But they — I don't know how that — I guess we just stopped it somehow, right? I don't remember. I remember being beat like that in another place, but in that place they had doctors come, right? But this one, I don't remember a doctor coming at all. But they prepared — they began to prepare — well, let's get the rest of the story. That's very important.So I go on in and the guys wonder what's happening and we talk, you know, but then they let a guy out because by that time there were people all over the jail. Remember, bus after bus kept coming — it wasn't just one bus or two buses, right? Buses kept coming, kept coming, kept coming, right — and so this one white fellow that was with us for some reason was let out and I've read why he was let out but I don't remember why it is now. He was let out and there was press that he talked to and Washington began to call, and then I began to understand — I mean, afterwards I understood, what really happened is they were not supposed to beat anybody. And they bled me — they beat me until I bled, right? Well, that's what they were upset about — not the beating but the fact that I bled.
This guy said that I'd been beaten. It was — Kennedy got it within a couple hours, and it was back on the warden, right? The warden was very, very fearful that he was going to be removed. We found that out later — I didn't know that, but we found that out later. Then about that time, Kelly Miller called, right, and a woman from my church had called earlier than that, and they weren't going to let her talk but she demanded to talk, right? So I knew what the kind of stuff was like and that was the day or two before, right — that my member called. But then Kelly called and within hours Kelly showed up, right? Remember all this started early in the morning, and Kelly showed up and took me back to Nashville.
Branch:
He shows up at Parchman?
Vivian:
Yeah. He came in to get me, and then we drive back. I know we drive back into Jackson. I think we took a plane into Nashville, though.
Branch:
That was a very nervy thing for him to do, to come into Parchman.
Vivian:
Oh, yeah, that's exactly right. See, but he's got the word now from Kennedy, you see what I mean? The difference — that same fear was in them. See, as soon as the FBI has showed up and/or official Washington showed up, because most of those guys in the FBI were from the region that they were sent back to, right? So I didn't see that as a big thing but I found out that when they do come, generally because Washington's given them the word, they act as though — they started becoming creepy, right? They start worrying because they don't know what's going to happen. No longer are they in charge — they know they're not in charge and they don't know what's going to happen to them, especially when they have done something to someone and Washington cares about it, right?For instance, there were a number of people that were let in the jails that a marshal was in one of the jails. I didn't see him because I was a short length of time, but Marshall was in one of the jails. The NAACP was in one of the jails. Our top man in Mississippi got to come in and visit early, when we were in the downtown jail. A woman, I can't think of her name but she was a powerful Methodist woman could come on into the jail when we were in Jackson —
Branch:
To visit?
Vivian:
Yeah, uh-huh, and to bring stuff and —
Branch:
So this is, the Freedom Rides, you have described your direct participation in an event that really transformed the whole movement from May through the summer of 1961, because by the end there were 600 Freedom Riders —
Vivian:
Yeah, that's it.
Branch:
— staying in Parchman for the summer. And it became quite a phenomenon — can you tell me, when you came out of prison, what was it like to come out of Parchman as a Freedom Rider? Could you tell the world had changed?
Vivian:
No. See, this is one reason I wished I had been there all summer. See, I wasn't there but a week and a half, two weeks — that's a good point. The blood came out, right? I was saved by the blood.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
So by the way, I used that — when we got back to Nashville, when Kelly brought us back to Nashville we went to a mass meeting and that's what I used as text, right?
Branch:
Saved by the blood.
Vivian:
That's right — I used the other one — no, I used another one, that there is no redemption — without the shedding of blood, there's no redemption of sin, and that's what I used for that evening because every time, it got to be a habit that I had to talk for each mass meeting.
Branch:
Well, nevertheless, you didn't stay for the whole term in Parchman.[Under federal law, the Freedom Riders defiance of segregation was entirely legal because they were interstate travelers. Mississippi arrested and convicted them for "breach of the peace" rather than violating a segregation ordinance. Movement lawyers appealed those arrests and convictions. The riders could have been bailed out of jail pending appeal, but most chose not to do so. Instead they adopted a modified "jail-no-bail" position as a protest against the injustice of their arrest and prosecution. However, under Mississippi's bizarre laws, if they remained in jail for 40 or more days without posting an appeal bond they lost their right to appeal to a higher court. Which meant they would have had to serve their entire 120-day sentences and pay $200 fines (equal to $1700 in 2019). So those who had chosen jail-no-bail remained incarcerated for 39 days and were then bailed out. In 1965, after four years of legal struggle, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned their convictions.]
Vivian:
No.
Branch:
But you were a Freedom Rider, you were on the first bus [into Jackson] as a Freedom Rider —Vivian:
Yeah, first bus, that's right.
Branch:
And how has that marked your life? Are there many people that are aware — given all the other things you've done, is the fact that you're a Freedom Rider — has it been a large or small part of your identity?
Vivian:
Oh, no, it's been a large part of my understanding of my identity, right? But the major one for me is that — internally is the one where I got feel that down the back of my head, right, and that this guy wanted to shoot me and didn't, all right?Now, that to me is the deepest piece. It was as though I was warned — I'm walking away from the guy. Parchman is a place where they kill anybody black any time they want to, right? We were the only two there because whatever the prisoners said wouldn't have made a difference, but we couldn't even see them. It was as though this — I've often wanted to go through and walk through all of this again, but it's as though they made this place in the jail as though most of the jail, the open area where people came to is back here — then there was a crook, well, you've got to do it this way. A kind of crook there, so that only one person could get through here, you see what I mean?
Branch:
Yeah.
Vivian:
And then you went back to where the bars were, right? And you know, the big gate, and only one guy could get — well, two or three guys could get through the gate but they would be jamming up trying to get any further, but I think it was really to keep guys from coming out of the cell in case anything happened, right? Jammed them up there at the gate. The guys, the policemen would be standing down at the end of the hall and they would never get out of the hall. See, that's really what was happening. But see, it's the mystery of that — I feel something that causes me to turn around and the guy's got the gun on my head.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And when he invited me in it was almost like — it was like he was doing wonderful, doing me a favor, right? And then suddenly when I feel this red, I can see red, right? Down the back of my head, and I turn around and there's that gun. To me that's one of the most — I've only had a couple what I call truly religious experiences like that in my life. I had another one in a jail in Alabama where I just put my fingers behind my head just in time — if I had had more time, my fingers would have been like that and when that billy club hit me, it would have broken my —
Branch:
Knuckles.
Vivian:
— knuckles, and probably would forever be — knuckles, that's kind of a funny thing. You break them and they crack and you feel it the rest of your life, right? Had I not got to this position, right, he could have really — the blow could have really hurt me deeply, you know? But it hit me right, just as my fingers came together, so it padded the blow, but the ends of my fingers I couldn't feel for three days. It took three days for the pain to stop in my hand.
Selma Jail, 1965
Branch:
Do you remember which jail this was or when?
Vivian:
No, I can see the jail, I can see the jailer, and I can see the warden of the jail because the whole thing was — for instance, they bring me in, I think it was right after this thing with Sheriff Clark.
Branch:
Oh.
Vivian:
See, they put me in jail there.
Branch:
So this is in Selma?
Vivian:
Yeah, this is in Selma, and they take me over to the jail, and this is another one of those great big guys. Remember I said a while ago, every now and then there was some one of these policemen that looked like he should have been on the — playing halfback for the Bears or something, right? Huge guy.I kind of knew what was happening when we got onto the elevator — it's one of those little dinky elevator types from that period, you know, we're talking about 50, 60 years ago, right? And it worked by hand, you know, they used to all work by hand like department stores and they had pretty girls there doing it, all that kind of stuff, right? But this guy was the head of the jail, and he started to take us up, and we were crowded on this, because the other guy's so big, and the guy was in charge of the jail and I'm about the same size, but all three of us together filled that little —
Branch:
Elevator.
Vivian:
— elevator, but what bothered me about it was I knew when I stepped on it what was happening. I just knew that this guy was going to try to hit me, but I could feel it but I didn't really know it until he said to the jailer, he said to him, "Let me hit him."And it felt as though he would be able to be okay with the jailer, right? And he said let me hit him, and this great big guy, and he was behind me, right? He couldn't swing too well — it was kind of tight in there, but he was behind me, and then he asked him, let me hit — and the jailer looked at him as if to say, you are sick, you know what I mean? But he couldn't say nothing.
See, one of the things you learn, and you don't have to be in the Deep South, and you don't have to be in jail and you don't have to be between policemen — is that the hardest thing for a white man to do is to tell another white man he's a racist. And I don't care where you are, and I can give it to — 25, 30 years ago. I could give it to you North as well as South, but particularly in the South. So I knew what was going to happen, and the jailer turned his head. When the jailer turned his head, I knew it was coming, boy, and I just went up like that, and I was trying to get my fingers together and just as they came together the blow came down, right, and that gave me a cushion, and that cushion made all the difference in the world, because when they hit you with a club — and he was a big man, boy, and —
Branch:
Do you think this was the same day as your confrontation with Sheriff Clarke?
Vivian:
I think so, that's the only time —
Branch:
Because I know the record was that you went into Good Samaritan Hospital. Dr. King tried to visit you, but by the time he got there, you were already back in the jail.
Vivian:
Yeah. See — but this wouldn't have — no, because let me tell you, no, it couldn't have been then. Let me tell you what happened. When they took me upstairs — you know, that's why we were in the elevator. We went up to where the cells were, right? Because that's different than the other place we were talking about — we were talking about Parchman, right —[Vivian's story about being hit in the elevator may have occurred after his arrest in Selma for violating Judge Hare's injunction on February 5th, 1965.]
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
They were all on that same floor, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
Because they're out on the farm, they've got plenty of room. So we go and the guy, the warden opens the cell and this other guy just shoves me in, right? And the beds are made to the wall. I mean, they're made to the wall. And so man, when I got in there, I jumped with joy, right? Well, now, it sounds like I jumped with joy because they didn't shoot me or something, right? No, I jumped with joy — I said, and I got down on my knees, I mean, very quickly I was praying — thank you father, because I did what I was supposed to do. Do you understand the point? And this is why I know I'd had an encounter with someone and this is why I was thinking about, it was Selma, because I felt that way after the encounter in Selma, that I had said all the right things, I had done all the right things. That Selma thing sounds like it's almost written, right?
Branch:
Oh, all the dialogue.
Vivian:
The dialogue, right.
Branch:
We have the names of your badges, we know what you've done —
Vivian:
That's right, it sounds like a dialogue, but I had no idea what I was going to say as I was walking to it.
Branch:
Yeah.
Vivian:
I hadn't even thought up anything. In fact, I had no idea what was going to happen when I got there. I thought they would let us in and we would have some sort of encounter or conversation or whatever with whoever was in charge of the voting.[Vivian is referring to his confrontation with Sheriff Clark on the steps of the Dallas County Courthouse in mid-February 1965.]
Branch:
The courthouse?
Vivian:
Yeah, see what I mean? But he comes out of the courthouse — right, he comes out of the courthouse and closes the door behind him. The door's closed, but I mean, he let the door close behind him but he had all his guys out up on the top step, so when we get there on the bottom step they're on the top step, right? And we march up to him, okay? About 40 people.
Branch:
This is February 15th, 1965. We're jumping ahead. We'll stop, but it's in the middle of Selma.
Vivian:
I don't know what date anything happens. I always come to my wife about dates.
Branch:
That's all right. But this is —
Vivian:
It's marvelous to hear you sit there and lay it out.
Branch:
This is three weeks before Bloody Sunday in Selma.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Just to finish this off.
Vivian:
Yeah, just to get this out, right?
Branch:
Uh-huh.
Vivian:
Because I was talking about the various times that have been a real mystery for me, you see what I mean? And this was one of them, right? The other one was the one, though, just to keep us line, now, right — the one where we're in line with where you're going, right, is when the guy that took me back to the cell had pulled a gun on me.
Branch:
Right, in Parchman.
Vivian:
I had no idea — right, in Parchman.
Branch:
Well, that finishes off — the Parchman story, your part in one of the great seminal transformations of the civil rights movement, which is the Freedom Rides.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Branch:
Which became a phenomenon, kind of internationalized the movement.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
We probably need to take a break and figure out our strategy —
Vivian:
Yeah, because you've got another hour or two as far as I'm concerned.
Chattanooga, 1962?
Branch:
I'd like to ask you one last question — how did you become director of affiliates at SCLC? Because that will set us — and then we can stop. Just — this is just a job.
Vivian:
I'll do it very quickly. I was a leader — I had left Nashville to go to Chattanooga and I was pastoring in Chattanooga. I'd built a church in Nashville — when I went to Chattanooga, I wanted to build a church as well, because the church we had — nice, but it wasn't what I wanted.But there was a fellow there that was the pastor of the church a block away, who was — he loved journalism as I did, right? We had met one time before because we were trying to put our two newspapers together to save money and all that sort of thing and just change names and use both his information and my information to make it more of a newspaper. And also, Jesse Hill here in Atlanta, we were trying to all three get together and after all, Jesse had money and we didn't, right?
But so I had met this fellow from Chattanooga before, and he was a bright guy and it was just nice to be with the group, but he had the stats on voting in Chattanooga. That's what I needed in order for us to plan strategy. When I saw what the stats were, I thought, well, what are we standing still for? And I'm used to the action — I'd just left where we'd just opened up Nashville, right? And I begin to organize it and he had all the stats we needed and had some contacts, but he wasn't light and that was what was slowing him down. I happened to be light, so coming in from a victory like that and everybody thankful in Chattanooga, get my point, that anything had happened.
So we got together and then we began to plan the real action for it. We created — we ended up before it was over electing three-fifths of city hall, and on one of the rainiest election days that anybody would want to see — that usually slows us down tremendously, slows everybody down, but if you're not used to voting it slows you down more than that. We went and got people out of beds and so forth, right? The rain slacked off by the end of the day and we were getting people out and into vote. We took three-fifths of the city council. We didn't get the mayor.
Now, this is what I forgot to tell you about, an important part of the strategy was this — we found out that 20% of the vote in Chattanooga was paid for. They paid black people to vote, but we saw that 20% as totally different so my basic speech was — or end to the basic speech as I was going over the city, getting people out the vote was that they have been making a fool out of you by buying you, as though you were slaves. Let's make a fool out of them, right? And take their money, keep it. They can't pay you what they owe you, but vote like you want to.
In fact, I was right down the street behind a car during the voting on another day, not on the rainy day but on another day, because we had to take — we took three straight elections. This guy had his straw hat on and waiting for people who wanted to go vote to get in the car and the woman was dressed all nicely and with a ribbon across her, all that, vote for whatever this guy's name was, and I really saw a guy get into the car to go vote, and the next thing I saw him getting out. I mean, within minutes, so when he left, I walked up to them and I said, "What happened?" And he says he wanted to vote for, I think the guy's name was Brown, and he wanted to vote for Brown and I said well, yeah, but that's who you're supposed to be taking. He said I know it. The point is, he was keeping the money but he wasn't going to take anybody who wanted to vote for the guy that was buying him — it was that kind of thing that helped us win in Chattanooga. So —
SCLC, 1963
Branch:
How is that connected to?
Vivian:
Well, that's my point — that's how Martin knew how effective I could be, and Nashville, next thing was Chattanooga, and we won that. In fact, we even created a statewide voters organization. So Martin asked me to come and Dorothy Cotton had heard me give a speech somewhere and Dorothy Cotton had been telling him about me, right, so he wanted to —
Branch:
Dorothy's on Dr. King's staff.
Vivian:
Right, that's right, Dorothy Cotton, right. And so he wanted to see me and the next thing I know, Wyatt Tee Walker is asking me to come to Atlanta about it, right? About being this new post they had, national director of affiliates. If you were in the NAACP, you would have called it branches, you see? We had affiliates just so we could have a name for all the things, so if it had Martin's name on it or if it was SCLC-affiliated, I was over that and having to take care of it and deal with it and etcetera.And the way we were structured, the money didn't come from the ground up. The money came from the national office down, you see what I mean? Every local tried to get as much of their own funding as they could, but for serious projects we got it from the office so they called me to come in. I was also a troubleshooter in that sense, so I traveled everywhere.
Branch:
So for the rest of the career that we'll talk about later —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Your movement affiliation is with the SCLC as director of affiliates.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
You've still got your church.
Vivian:
No, I gave it up.
Branch:
You gave it up when?
Vivian:
Yeah, I gave it up as I left to take SCLC's job.
Branch:
So that became a full-time job — I think you went in 1962, which is before Birmingham.
Birmingham, 1963
Vivian:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, in fact that is exactly at Birmingham. See, that was my first assignment out of the [SCLC] national office. That was my assignment out of the national office. Wyatt Tee Walker and I began Birmingham.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
See, Fred Shuttlesworth really had begun Birmingham a long time ago, get my point? But our participation in it was at that exact point.
Branch:
Mm-hmm.
Vivian:
I joined Wyatt Tee and we go into Nashville to open it up.
Branch:
Right. You mean into Birmingham?
Vivian:
Into Birmingham.
Branch:
Yeah, that was Dr. King's big gamble, to go into Birmingham.
Vivian:
It was, but I was there giving a speech last week, two weeks ago, something like that in the last couple of weeks, and something really became very clear as I was going to the speech — that had we lost Birmingham, there wouldn't have been a voting rights bill. If we'd lost Birmingham we couldn't have made Selma. Birmingham was the necessary thing, but we see — you see, we could not lose — I know I'm not on your track right now.
Branch:
No, you're on the track —
Vivian:
Okay, good.
Branch:
Because your first assignment as director of affiliates —
Vivian:
Okay, good.
Branch:
— Is Birmingham, and Birmingham is Dr. King's big go-for-broke, because what he said was — at his convention in Birmingham in '62 at the end, he said in the eight years since the Brown decision we've been working hard in the movement but the opposition has organized as powerfully as we have, and right here during his convention he said it took 23,000 soldiers to get James Meredith, one black student in Ole Miss, we've got to take a big break or we're going to lose our window in history, so he said we can go in and try to do Birmingham, so that's your first assignment, and Wyatt Walker presented his plan for it called "Project C" for "Confrontation" —
Vivian:
Yeah, that's it. And this is why he goes in, right?
Branch:
Wyatt Walker was Dr. King's chief of staff.
Vivian:
Chief of staff at the time, and the thing is that we go in to open it up. But what I was — well, I've said what —
Branch:
Just do a little bit of the beginning of Birmingham, what you remember about that, where we can end.
Vivian:
That's what I want to do right now. In fact, when we began Birmingham, when we began Birmingham, SCLC began Birmingham, because Fred was so important — I just never like to act as though it started with us. It started with Fred, right?But when we first moved in, this story tells you exactly what was going on. We were trying to set up this little office, right, that we had — Wyatt and I, right? And so looking out a window and you saw the telephone company building — you could see the whole side of it, right? And it had balconies all the way up on each floor, and there were two guys out there smoking cigarettes, so I think it was Wyatt — I don't think it was me, I think it was Wyatt that made a telephone call. And I saw those guys sort of hurry in as he was making the call, all right?
So when Wyatt gets off the phone I said Wyatt, I think I know that those guys over there on that balcony are government guys, right? And so let's have some fun. So we started making telephone calls and they would run in, and then we'd hang up the phone and they'd appear again. So we did it about four or five times and so we knew what was really happening and it was always funny to me to think about, it's bad enough that you're in Birmingham, right, but the feds on top of that increased it, but you were very clear where you were, what was going on, who you were going to have to deal with — it all became very clear when you picked up that phone, and you knew that the regular stuff — well, remember, the regular stuff is where we always knew that we were being bugged, right?
And as we rented this little space, the first thing we did was to begin to look for bugs, because if we could stop it, fine, you know? If we couldn't, fine, but we knew that we had problems that we weren't expecting in terms of cutting off the whole telephone call. It's one thing to be bugged in your room. It's another one that every telephone call that comes in and out of your place is also going to be covered, you know what I mean? But it gave us something to go with. Now, let's look at another because you're looking more for high points — let's look another at Birmingham, because everybody knows when the hoses were turned on, right?
[Referring to the use of firehoses to knock down nonviolent protesters.]
Branch:
Right. May 3rd.
Vivian:
I love it — May the 3rd.
Branch:
1963.
Vivian:
I want this tape because I want to know all these dates, right? But May the 3rd, you say it was?
Branch:
Mm-hmm.
Vivian:
Okay, good, all right. So we were sending students downtown —[Referring to students nonviolently marching into the downtown shopping district to protest segregation and to support the ongoing boycott of white merchants who operated on a segregated basis. On May 2nd, almost 1000 students were arrested. With the jails and courts filled to overflowing, on May 3rd "Bull" Connor ordered the police to suppress the marchers with firehoses, police dogs, and billy-club violence rather than arresting them.]
Branch:
Young kids.
Vivian:
That's right. They were turning the hoses on them. We were sending guys out — Wyatt and I were inside the church, right? Wyatt and I were inside the church so that we were sending folk out the front door towards [Kelly Ingra] park, and while the firemen and so forth were all involved in that, we were sending others out the back door right down the street, get a bus, and we're going right downtown. Finally, the sheriff who is head of the —
Branch:
Bull Connor.
Vivian:
Bull Connor, head of police department and the fire. He was head of everything at the time.
Branch:
Head of police — right. Public safety commissioner, they called him.
Vivian:
That's right, and remember, in this same time he ran for mayor. He was trying to take it all, right? And he thought this was the time to do it. Remember, we stopped then and went to Washington. So he must have gotten a call that said they're downtown, because all of the sudden the hoses stopped, because there wasn't any sense to keep turning the hoses on us. We were already downtown. They expected us all to come out the front door. We had them going out the back door, taking buses downtown, and changed the tenor of it all, right?
Branch:
Absolutely. That was the — of course, there had been all these demonstrations in Birmingham and I want to talk after a break about the decision to use young people because I know that was crucial. What you just described was when finally after the big breakthrough that melted people's hearts in a way, you occupied downtown so much that the city powers wanted to make a deal so that was really the beginning of the deal.
Vivian:
That's exactly right; that was the beginning of the deal.
Branch:
The great climax of Birmingham.
Vivian:
That's the only thing — one other piece with that, it was the dogs.
Branch:
The dogs, right.
Vivian:
You see what I mean? That dog thing backfired on them.
Branch:
Oh, absolutely, and the hoses too. The dogs and the hoses.
Vivian:
Yeah, it's that combination. It was that combination — it said how really brutal they were without our saying it, and the whole world knew that that kind of brutality couldn't — made us honest. I mean, they knew that we were saying everything that we were saying was right.
Branch:
Absolutely.
Vivian:
And I'll tell you what, when the dogs showed up, when they turned those dogs on us and the hoses, the next day, you see the one where the guy's trousers are ripped down there with the dog —
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
The next day is that ministers were coming in from all over the country.
Branch:
Absolutely.
Vivian:
And it changed the very tenor of everything.
Branch:
One of the great breakthroughs. Well, we need to come back to Birmingham but we should —
[END of tape. Audio ends abruptly]
[START new tape]
Silent March, 1960
Branch:
Back for one thing that you mentioned —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
That Elaine has asked about, which is that you said that when you did the march in Nashville, the Looby march in April of 1960, that you sang for a while and then switched to a silent march going into downtown after a technique that had been developed in New York in the 1920s. Can you just tell us briefly about that, in New York in the 1920s, if you know, because we hadn't heard about that.
Vivian:
Yeah, I don't know much about it.
Branch:
Uh-huh.
Vivian:
Except that it was called the silent march, all right, and it was designed by W.E.B. Du Bois. But all the great ones of that period were involved in it, right? And they had — according to what I remember in pictures I saw, they'd put up banners and so forth. It was around lynching, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
To the end of lynching, and this was this silent march —
Branch:
Silent marches against lynching in New York.
Vivian:
That's it.
Branch:
Organized by the NAACP if it was Dr. Du Bois.
Vivian:
That's exactly right, and that was W.E.B. Du Bois. Now, you see, they didn't stomp or anything but you couldn't hear nothing but their feet.
Branch:
I see.
Vivian:
You couldn't hear nothing but their feet.
Branch:
And you people knew about it in Nashville.
Vivian:
That's right, and this is what we — so as we were going, we didn't do it until we were going into downtown, as we turned — see, you come down, you turn and you go in towards City Hall, and you cut across the street. You would come to the publishing house and go one block over, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And down in that, as you turn toward town, there's a lot of small factory-like buildings, right? Now, some of them are still there. I don't know whether that's still there or not. Some of them they moved and some of them are still there, and that's when these guys backed up against the wall.
Branch:
Right. Yeah, you've said that.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Tell me this — if you have a reaction, I'm going to try to jump around a little bit.
Vivian:
That's all right. Oh, please, please, please, yeah.
Branch:
If it triggers a story, tell the story; if not, just tell me and I'll move on.
Vivian:
Okay, good.
Birmingham Jail, 1963
Branch:
The moment when Dr. King in the Gaston Motel had to decide whether or not to go to jail when he went into the Birmingham jail —
Vivian:
Oh, that's great.
Branch:
The famous story about Dr. King and everything —
Vivian:
I'm not the one to tell you that. I wasn't there.
Branch:
You weren't there, okay.
Vivian:
But the person who tells it so well is Dorothy Cotton.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
She tells it so well.
Branch:
Dorothy Cotton was on Dr. King's staff, actually came down from Petersburg with Wyatt Walker.
Vivian:
That's right, with Wyatt Tee.
Branch:
Yeah, I know her very well.
Vivian:
And there was another guy with them — Wyatt Tee brought two people, one of them was Dorothy and another one was another person that never gets brought up. He turned to radio here in town very early after coming.
Birmingham Childrens Crusade, 1963
Branch:
All right. The decision — because even after Dr. King came out of jail in Birmingham, before those big dogs-and-hoses marches, the Birmingham movement was almost on life support. And Bevel and Dorothy Cotton and the people running those youth workshops said we're not out of volunteers yet, we've got these young people. And lots of people have talked about debates within the movement over whether to use young people and how young to use them. Does that trigger anything?
Vivian:
Oh, yeah, definitely. That was a real argument — what should happen. Bevel was the one that really said young people should go, right? That you're never too young to fight for your freedom became the thing for all of us, but I mean it was Bevel who brought it up and really fought for it, and Diane of course, they were married at the time.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
But that changed things. In fact, I have a list of six things I want to give to the museum in Birmingham. I mean, ideas, right? And that's one of them, that they're not highlighting that enough. It's the only place — I want to say in the western world, but it's the only place in nonviolent work I know in the west where there was a children's movement. Now, but do you know the other part of it where they get out to the jail, because when the people that Sunday, when people come out and go out to the jail to sing to their kids and the firemen refused to turn the hoses on them? Okay, I just wanted to be certain that that's —[Local law required retail stores to close on Sunday, the Christian sabbath. So for the movement, Sunday, May 5th was to be a day of prayer and nonviolent training. On that day, supporters from out of town arrived in Birmingham to join the struggle. When folk-singers Joan Baez, and the Carawans, Guy and Candie, were arrested for some reason on the steps of New Pilgrim church, SCLC leader James Bevel called on the congregation — mostly adults in their Sunday best — to march on the jail and sing their support for the jailed children.The spontaneous march caught Police Chief "Bull" Connor by surprise. Close to 2,000 protesters made it five blocks through the Black community before the cops and firemen managed to block them just short of the jail. Led by Rev. Charles Billups, the marchers knelt two-by-two in prayer on the sidewalk while Billups preached a freedom sermon. Connor ordered the firemen to turn their hoses on the kneeling marchers — but they hesitated. They were unwilling to turn high-pressure hoses against adults peacefully kneeling in prayer. SCLC leader Wyatt Walker seized the moment and was able to negotiate an agreement allowing the marchers to continue their prayer in a nearby park which for the Black community was an important victory.]
Branch:
That's a great story.
Vivian:
Oh, that's a great story.
Branch:
But the decision to use children — and you're absolutely right. I wrote in one of my prefaces that the only parallel that I know of is the Passover story, where the children in Egypt had —
Vivian:
Talk about going back.
Branch:
But I mean, where people that young have that kind of historical impact.
Vivian:
That's a good story. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It just didn't happen. In fact, this is why there was an argument against using them, because it was thought — everybody thought, oh, "You shouldn't use children." Why not, right? But I think one of the reasons is because most adults weren't ready to do it, period, right. Much less have children do it.Listen, I remember doing that thing, having kids out of one of the high schools — high schools are like small colleges, right? And they were coming out of windows, coming down, and you reminded me when you said that one of my arguments I was making to the kids is that it had been raining one morning when I went over there and the stream was coming through the schoolyard and I told them, cross over Jordan, baby, let's go. Let's go do it, right? And we did, and we did, and they were right with it.
Listen, they so badly wanted to come out, the principal had to so badly keep them in, they locked the doors and so the kids were crawling out of windows and jumping down from that second floor because the first floor's always a little higher. They were coming down and hanging down and falling and jumping out of windows so that they could go on out and do it. There was no doubt in the kids' minds, none at all —
Branch:
No, but plenty in the adults' minds.
Vivian:
That's exactly right, but not in the kids' minds and I think part of it, I think that the adults were afraid they may be blamed for something, you see what I mean? Rather than — because all of us in Birmingham knew, everybody in Birmingham was part of the movement.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
But then like so many things, you never knew what the police were going to do to them.
Branch:
So that's a good comment about the fatefulness of the children in Birmingham.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
So jumping from there, what about the March on Washington? Any memories or stories about the march on Washington?
Vivian:
Oh, stories or memories — no, I have a picture where they cut my head off. Who was the great writer of that time?
Branch:
[James] Baldwin?
Vivian:
Baldwin. Baldwin's being there was the most interesting thing for me that I consider a story, but it's just that he was there and we were involved in the back and we were talking and so forth — and not just he and I, I mean, you know, a whole gang of us, about 15, 20 of us.
Branch:
Back to Birmingham, just briefly, for all the argument and the resistance of the parents in Birmingham, there were arguments in practically every black home in Birmingham about what to do with this, should we let our children do it, should we keep them from doing it. It's also true, though, that a lot of the parents who didn't want their children involved in, practically none did, were converted by their children when they actually did it. There's this famous story of the woman walking along the line, all upset that she sees her 8-year-old marching and then she says sing, children, sing, because...
Vivian:
She changed her mind.
Branch:
She just kind of gave into it, so that happened.
Vivian:
Sing, children, sing — I guess, I never heard that one but I love it, because whether it's true or not it gets the whole feeling of everything that happened, the stuff that happened. But I was very clear that everybody wanted it to happen. Now, not that — when I say everybody, it's over 200. There was a lot of argument but I don't think it was nearly as intense as it seems, because — and when the children went to jail, that did change everything. There was no longer anything but I think it was no longer because they knew they wouldn't be hurt, right?
Branch:
Mm-hmm.
Vivian:
But the story to me is more so than the kids going is their parents coming out.
Birmingham Church Bombing, 1963
Branch:
The Birmingham church bombing, where were you on that Sunday in September? [September 15, 1963.]
Vivian:
The church bombing — oh, I don't know.
Branch:
You don't know? Did you go in for the funeral or any of the things right afterwards?
Vivian:
No, I wasn't into that funeral, no. Jimmie Lee Jackson [in 1965], I was.
Branch:
Well, okay.
Vivian:
That comes later.
Branch:
Later in '63 [referring to the church bombing], right before the Kennedy assassination, just very briefly if you had any memory, because this has been a big year and breakthrough for nonviolence and everything and your SCLC convention was in Richmond, and you had a nonviolent workshop there that I know you were on called the Power of Nonviolence with you, Bayard Rustin, Jim Lawson and James Bevel talk about the power of nonviolence in the year 1963. It was in a hotel in Richmond. Is that in the blur?
Vivian:
To me it's just another one of those speeches.
Branch:
All right.
Vivian:
What I mean is you did so much of them at that time, you know, it didn't stand out.
St. Augustine & Civil Rights Act, 1964 Branch:
Yeah. The next year, 1964, is the year of the filibuster, the passage of the civil rights bill and for Dr. King it's widely overlooked and not very much known because what dominated the news was Mississippi summer where the students and SNCC were in freedom summer that year —
Vivian:
Yeah, we all went down for that.
Branch:
But Dr. King was more in St. Augustine and you were a leader of that group. Some people told me that Dr. King actually didn't really want to go — in fact, I think Andy [Young] told me that Dr. King didn't want to get engaged in a major movement there with the filibuster going on, but it just kind of happened. Does that seem true?
Vivian:
Yeah, there was more to it than that because I went down. There was an argument over should we, but the real argument was — but what we need to do is to keep the legislation moving in Washington.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
See what I mean? The real reason for St. Augustine was not St. Augustine, right? It was keeping the legislation going, coming out of Birmingham. It's because we had to get Johnson to really come through with that stuff, right? We had heard it, and then Johnson came through with it which is why we got to march, had to wait until the second, third time, right? Because Johnson hadn't signed off on the stuff we wanted to. You knew that of course, right? But then the next step was that once it got to congress, could we get it through congress?St. Augustine's real purpose was to get it through congress. Well, you can tell that story better than I can probably, but the point is that I wanted to go. Bevel didn't want to go, you notice Bevel wasn't there because part of the argument was that "it's not necessary," "it's unimportant," you know, it's small stuff. But usually I didn't get in the arguments and the only reason was because once the decision was going to be made, it's going to be made, right? And we were going with it.
Now, if I didn't care, I didn't argue. If I cared, I only then argued. I mean, if I really cared and I saw my side was losing, that's when I jumped in the argument, right? And this is when I had to jump in the argument with those who said it's unimportant, and no, it's not unimportant. Action isn't finished until it's finished, right?
Branch:
So tell us about St. Augustine itself. Why St. Augustine? It's the oldest city in North America.[St. Augustine is the oldest North American city founded by Europeans. A number of Native American towns and pueblos are much older.]
Vivian:
And it was their 100th anniversary or 200th or whatever it was —
Branch:
Their 400th.
Vivian:
400th, that was it — it was their 400th anniversary. Well, with the 400th anniversary and the tourists coming through there and all of the meaning of that, this was the time to be there. And we couldn't swim on the beach, right? Here are 1600 feet of beach and you couldn't swim on it.
Branch:
We should stop there. People don't know what you're saying.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
It was a segregated beach — black people were not allowed to go on the public beach into the ocean.
Vivian:
Precisely right.
Branch:
And if they did, what would happen?
Vivian:
Now, the 1600 — okay, let me answer your question, because I said 1600 feet. That was a black-only —
Branch:
A black-only, right.
Vivian:
That's right. Now, because if you went in they would drown you to give you an idea of what I'm talking about — they would create, all the guys because they were always on the beach, the white guys because they were always on the beach, all the white guys were on the beach and they swam all the time, right? It was just natural. They almost swam like fish — they're used to it. Most black people don't swim at all, much less swam in the ocean, so what they would do is to create like a net, like a human net, and then as you walked forward they would go deeper, walk forward into it, they'd go deeper, right? Walk forward in, they'd go deeper.Now, we would have really been in trouble on the big one. I was leading it, Fred Shuttlesworth came out from nowhere and joined me and Fred said "Can you swim?" out the side of his mouth. He said "Can you swim?" I said, "Yeah, but not in an ocean," the idea being, these guys are going to take you out in the ocean, right? So Fred couldn't swim, right? But he wanted — he said, well, let's go in at an angle. I said "Fred, this is the ocean — go in at an angle." And these guys know what I was saying, right — all they'd do is move over a step. You're talking about going in at an angle. But he came on and we got out to about here, and one of their guys jumped too soon, because they were going to take us out to our neck, which you can do in St. Augustine — you can walk straight out up to your neck in St. Augustine.
That's why I love the beach out there. But a guy moved and he moved too soon and then all of them, they disconnected their hands and they jumped, and that really saved us, actually. A guy jumped on top of me, however, and wow, took me right to the bottom, and he's on top of me. Well, as I said, I can't swim in an ocean, right? I used to teach at the YMCA in a pool, but I didn't do it in the ocean, and my face was in the sand and I said — and I laughed to myself. I said, "This is it," and I figured this was it, this was over, I knew I wasn't going to get out from underneath this guy, right, and my face was already in the sand so what, right?
And right after that there was a jerk, a phew — I shot straight to the top. A policeman had come over and jerked this guy off of me. I didn't see any police and there was a picture that shows a policeman but that's an after shot, because there weren't any policemen when we started in, and there were two guys way over to the side and I know they couldn't have gotten there, two policemen way over on the side, and almost — it was yards and yards, like 100 yards away from us, and that's about right, about 100 yards away, and I knew they couldn't have gotten there that quickly.
But the guy who was a policeman, he pulled the guy off of me, I shot to the surface and then he started to arrest me. And I said, "You don't arrest me." I said, "He's the guy that jumped on me. I got a right to be on this ocean." And he looked back and forth and this guy ran because he knew I was right. This guy ran and the policeman was caught between and he was afraid to go get him because he was still thinking about what I said, and then he decided that I was right, so he was very nice from that time on. He took me out to the beach and got me towels and everything. He was very nice then. And that's another thing I found, that the jail was horrible — in fact, when I looked —
Branch:
The jail in St. Augustine?
Vivian:
Yeah, the jail in St. Augustine, right.
Branch:
Dr. King said that was one of the most violent places he was down there and it was not the Klan because it was mostly Catholic. That's where Hoss Manucy had like these posses of —
Vivian:
Yeah, in fact, that was their Klan, you know what I mean? Hoss Manucy was the guy. And he had this whole — Hoss Manucy and his what? They had a term for it — his followers, right. And they were the Klan. But a couple of things —
Branch:
About St. Augustine?
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
They had the old slave market downtown which was a tourist attraction.
Vivian:
That's right, and that's what I turned into. This is before Andy and them really came, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
That's what I turned into a teaching center. I would walk a group down there at noon and then I would be teaching them but I was really teaching all these people that came to eat because people would come to eat and have sandwiches and so forth and they'd want to know what was happening, so then you could see them just leaning towards it because they wanted to hear so it was our way of getting a message through to them about why we were there, what we were doing, what we were about. So it worked in our favor. Now, but Dorothy [Cotton] — by the way, Hosea created the midnight march.
Branch:
Hosea Williams?
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
Hosea created the midnight march but we went down on a midnight march one night, right, and Dorothy Cotton and I were leading the group, and we were coming in not right there in the front. It was around the side somehow, and the policeman would not let us in.
Branch:
Into the slave market area?
Vivian:
Into the slave market area — they cut us off and wouldn't let us into it, right? Well, they knew something we did not know — the Klan or Manucy's guys, right, were there waiting for us, and they had chains and steel bars and all kinds of stuff. So we stopped there and prayed, but we couldn't move on and so that was the night that Dorothy talks about when we were praying and she said something and this guy says — or somebody prayed to God and says, "Niggers ain't got no god," remember, as almost say it like Dorothy said it, because that stuck out in her mind.But we were leading the march down there for one of those midnight march nights. I was leading another midnight march one night when about 40 of us were sent to the hospital. You have that old Mexican kind of wall around things, and they would throw stuff over the walls onto us as we marched down the sidewalk, and we'd have to move over to the middle of the street, and those walls are so beautiful in the daytime, but at night they were dangerous, man. They were dangerous and they would climb up on the walls and throw stuff down on us, right? And we'd have to go out in the street because we'd be walking in the sidewalks.
I remember that night was when we went back to a church to recoup but I knew I couldn't let them — couldn't stop it because here again, we won't let violence stop nonviolence. And so once it gave people time to get themselves together, and I gave another speech and there was another guy with me from the movement, and I gave him a speech and said whether anybody goes or not, I'm going, and I stepped off this little platform and started down the aisle and I didn't know whether they were coming or not. It's one of those nights you don't really know, but you know the only way you're going to find out is you've got to go, and so I started walking down the aisle, I got about halfway there and I saw them look behind me and they were coming out the aisles and joining in to walk on out. And I remember a woman sort of getting up, unclear whether she really wanted to go but she had made up her mind she was going, and she walked to the center aisle and came on out, too, and down the street we went.
Branch:
This is St. Augustine — it's a movement that not even a lot of people even know about because it was overshadowed by national events —
Vivian:
Precisely.
Branch:
But it was to keep the issue of racial discrimination and violence alive in the country because even at that point there were some people saying we don't really need the civil rights bill because that's a thing of the past.
Vivian:
That's it. Precisely, and we were saying that all of those are southern excuses not to pass the bill, and we have to show that the south is wherever you go like this, like it was in Birmingham, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And so when they could see it, we would march at midnight with the bell — we'd march about 15 minutes until midnight, 20 minutes from midnight and then the bell, the midnight bell would go on the church tower, and —
Branch:
Yeah, the Episcopal church was right there next to the slave auction.
Vivian:
That's it — boom, boom, right, as it would go off, and we would march through it and there could be all these guys waiting to do you in because they were trying to stop you from marching.
Branch:
And Dr. King went to jail in St. Augustine, too.
Vivian:
That's exactly —
Branch:
So did Fred Shuttlesworth and you, and —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
And 19 rabbis came down and went to jail, so this —
Vivian:
Precisely, and they put them all in one cell.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
I think it was one cell. I know they put 13 of them in one cell.
Branch:
Yeah, it's a remarkable time. After St. Augustine, the great landmark passage of the civil rights bill which not only desegregates the south but it also provides for equal employment, not just for black and white but also for women —
Vivian:
That's exactly right.
Branch:
Freedom's benefits spread.
Vivian:
That's it.
Selma Voting Rights Campaign, 1965
Branch:
But anyway, after that summer, that great landmark, Dr. King wins the Nobel Prize and says he's going to Selma. As I understand it in the records, you were one of the ones that went to scout —
Vivian:
Yeah, see, I have to. See, that was as national affiliates director —
Branch:
Right. You were scouting for a place to have a voting rights movement in Alabama.
Vivian:
Precisely. Well, Martin had pretty much made up his mind already, but I was doing that because it was necessary, you see what I mean? But what I really went in there for is to see how well they were prepared for it and to get an invitation from them. See, remember SNCC was just leaving, you get my point? SNCC had not pulled it, but I think it was a difference in strategies. See, SNCC was not trying for a bill. What the student nonviolent coordinating committee was, you come to a town and you set up and you prepare those people and keep them struggling and keep them fighting until their town was cleaned up.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
Now, truthfully, when you're dealing with Selma, you're not just dealing with the town. You're dealing with all those surrounding counties, you see what I mean? And black people were coming in from those counties into Selma. Now, for the action — now, there's a woman that's written a book about that. Her name is — it starts with an F. She teaches black studies at the University of Tennessee — Flemings is her name, right? She's supposed to be doing a book on me — she's been doing it for two years. But the point is — well I mean, she's had real reasons for not finishing it, because there wasn't that much — she writes small books but they're very good books. And this last book she's written is Selma and the surrounding counties.
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
She's got another name. Now, I keep thinking about — oh, there are a couple things you should know in St. Augustine. I don't know whether you know or not, but they're very important — we were going to have a meeting with a state congressperson who ran a real estate office downtown. Martin had said that we should all be talking to each other. It was a part of trying to create some real relationships. This guy said — and everybody was saying "No," and the white people, "We didn't want to talk to them," but this guy did and he said so in the paper and that we would have a meeting at 2 o'clock at his office or 3 o'clock at his office or whatever it was. And when we got there, his windows were knocked out, and we went in and you could tell the guy had been crying. They had gotten there early, and intimidated him out of his mind. He was afraid of everything. I've always wanted to know — never have followed up, but I always wanted to know if he got reelected, you know what I mean? It would have been interesting —
Branch:
Just for dialogue.
Vivian:
Yeah, that's right, that would be a thing to know.
After Selma, 1965-66
Branch:
So we don't have much time left. We're going to have to skip for a couple of things. I wanted to ask you about two things — the decision to go north, to have a Chicago movement was very controversial within SCLC.
Vivian:
Oh, that's it — within the whole organization.
Branch:
And how did you feel about it within the whole movement?
Vivian:
That was one of those things that it was so controversial — I didn't care. I was going either way. But I was on the edge of leaving —
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
So when we really — and this is one of the reasons I wasn't arguing it, you get my point? Because I had create upward bound, right?
Branch:
Right.
Vivian:
And now I got a call for Jim Morton, New York, and it was starting the urban training center in Chicago and they wanted me on staff. Well, I had come to the conclusion that when we won Selma, and we'd won it at that time, right, that that was it. I woke up one morning saying to myself, this is the end of the line. What we have to do is to train the guys in the locals — in other words, we've got the big picture nationally. Now what we have to do is to go into the locals and make certain that this is pinned down, right?Then I was walking around for a day or so and thinking about it, and I had to go make some speeches across in Indiana, across the Midwest but mainly Indiana, and Jim Morton had called me right before I left. I guess all this was happening about a week because I know that I had woken up thinking about it, but I was wondering how I was going to get it done. In other words, how are we going to make all these little towns — well, all these cities, really. There were no little towns we were in, and so I got this call from a guy named Jim Morton, right?
Well, I didn't know Jim at the time. He would later become dean — Mr. Jim Morton later became dean of Saint John the Divine in New York, and stayed there for about 25, 30 years. Now has another kind of thing going in New York. So he said, Vivian, we're starting an urban training center. Well, I knew what the urban training center was, I knew why it existed, right? He said we want you to come and take the Ford Fellowship program and you can bring who you want for urban training. I just had to, you know — the dream, I woke up thinking about it, I wasn't dreaming it. I woke up saying it to myself, right?
But I was trying to decide, how are you going to get that done, right? I'm facing something like that now, I've got an educational program I'm working on, and so Jim called, an urban training center he was telling me about, and I was driving across Indiana I made my mind — hey, what are you waiting for, Vivian? That's the answer to your question. So I had a guy stop — a guy was driving me and had him just stop on the corner where there was a filling station and a telephone. Remember, they used to all be out there — we hardly have any telephones around anymore. And so, I called Jim and Jim — I told him yeah, I'm coming, and Jim said, "wow."
Branch:
So you started a new career —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Training in the north?
Vivian:
I think if somebody can let them in so we can keep going, right? Just — I don't think it's the front door. Yeah, it's that other door. No, straight down the aisle and to your right, and do you know how to let up the door?
[background noise]
Vivian:
I hope so.
Branch:
They'll figure it out.
Vivian:
But yeah, they got the door. Right. And that's when I started the urban training center. Well, what we're saying is — but that was right before he was coming to Chicago. I was there before he was, right?
Branch:
That's good.
Vivian:
And —
Branch:
So we're going to have to jump to a couple of things here at the end because we've only got a few minutes.
Vivian:
Right; that's right.
Branch:
Did you have anything to do with the Meredith March?
Vivian:
No, none at all. I was — all I can say is that I was there in Birmingham with — who was the woman that was a great lawyer for NAACP, a woman and she became mayor of Manhattan later on? [Constance Baker Motley]. Anyway, she's quite a — and I was there when the news came. We were eating breakfast at what's it called, the motel in Birmingham —
Branch:
Gaston?
Vivian:
Gaston, at the Gaston Motel.
Branch:
— When the news came that Meredith had been shot?
Vivian:
That's right, and here's the story for you. You know what she said? No, that he had — that he was coming, coming through — see, because it started in Tennessee.
Branch:
It started in Memphis.
Vivian:
Memphis, right, coming through Birmingham, because I know only because we were at that motel, and I got the message and she said — but will he live until nightfall? Now, that was not for Meredith — that was for the guy that —
Branch:
William Moore.
Vivian:
Yeah, William Moore.
Branch:
William Moore — that was in 1963.
Vivian:
So he was dead and then he takes it up, right?
Branch:
No, that's all right, because that was in '63, the final comments.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
Because SNCC was always divided to some degree between — as you put it, the by any means necessary, and there was a religious element within SNCC, too. Diane was part of it.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
John Lewis stayed part of it until they threw him out.
Vivian:
That's right.
Nonviolence & Violence
Branch:
But then Black Power comes about in the summer of '66 by people who have been nonviolent for many years. Some of them just got tired of it, some of them never believed in it, certainly religiously and everything. How do you see it in retrospect, the split between the people who stayed with nonviolence and the people who abandoned nonviolence?
Vivian:
Well, I think it became very clear that the people who stayed with nonviolence won. Just that simple. The people — when you ask, my way of asking is, who did what? Finally, in the final analysis — not who did what in that moment. Who made what happen? What did they do?Like anybody says to me, Malcolm or Martin? And I did that one thing in a conference, right? Tell me, what did Malcolm do? And they all backed off, right? The same thing here — the "by any means necessary" folk, in other words, what did they do? What did they get accomplished?
In fact, SNCC ended up without having students. They were not nonviolent, and they were no longer a committee. But largely because they didn't have a base, you see what I mean? SCLC only remains now because it had the church as a base. It had a base that was important, right? In fact, there's no reason for SCLC to still be alive, truthfully, but because of the church they stayed alive in language and etcetera, right?
Now, so that when you had guys like [SNCC leader James] Forman talking about "We'll kick the legs out from under you," they wanted him to try it. They just wanted an excuse to kill him. That was always the truth with everything, right? But they didn't even think he was important enough to kill. You see, the real question when people say — are you worthy to be killed? I mean, people don't want to kill everybody. They don't want to kill certain people. They only kill the ones that will make the difference, right? The rest of them are just something to play with, and that's the way I see most such movements.
Martin Luther King
Branch:
Let's close just our last few minutes a little bit on your relationship with Dr. King. What stands out about your — I mean, he's going through a lot. He's always expecting to be killed. Did you have any personal moments with him, or what sticks out in your memory about the course of life or a reflective — I know you talked once about, you gave him the news that Vernon Johns had died, that at one point he told you that you didn't — he asked you, did you think he knew what he was talking about when he was talking about the Vietnam War. So you had some personal conversations — what sticks out in your mind there?
Vivian:
The first one was when I did a 24-page piece on him very early in the movement, right after he won in Selma, in —
Branch:
Montgomery.
Vivian:
In Montgomery, when he won in Montgomery, right — he was getting an honorary doctorate from Fisk and I went out to cover him because I was an editor of the Sun school publishing part, right? And I did a 24-page piece on him of which that was one of the pieces, and the rest of it was various articles that he had done and copy under pictures about Montgomery. That was the first one that we talked things out right there following on Fisk campus, following the Fisk thing. He and I met on the Fisk campus and had a conversation.That's when I knew that he was the man he should be. That's when I knew, because I'd already been in nonviolent direct action, get my point? And to me, I was finding out whether he can go weather the storm beyond Montgomery and I came to the conclusion that he not only could but he was the ideal person for us, just like Obama suddenly becomes a genius and steps out from nowhere, right, and becomes president. Martin was the first of these and I call him the prophet of our age — line after line talking and reading, Martin stands out. Martin said violence creates more problems than it solves, right? That was in that first speech and I thought this man is, you know, guided, right?
And I was beating out against a background of nine years before, nine and ten years before, because there were those years when he was doing movement in the north, right? This is the spiritual insight, the religious insight. This is the knowledge that was going to make the difference, and when Martin — when I understood from Martin the kind of stuff, the line when he was saying that the change that must happen was not legal. The change that must happen was moral and spiritual, right, and that the basis upon which we would move was that.
Branch:
A couple of last things — do you remember your last conversation with him?
Vivian:
Oh, no.
Branch:
You don't?
Vivian:
No.
Branch:
Do you remember a joke he told?
Vivian:
Yeah, I do remember one.
Branch:
That can be told in an oral history.
Vivian:
Yeah, yeah, that's right. No, it's a very simple one and it always makes a point. He was making a point. The guy went to buy a race horse, right? Do you know this one? He says do you know this one?A guy went to buy a race horse and so the fellow was showing him the race horse and he said, now, let me show you this horse. He says boy, this horse is quite a horse. He says he used to this and he used to that, right, so Martin — or the guy in Martin's story says, well, show me another one. And he says, well, here is a horse — look at him, see how sleek he is, he's going to be a great horse. And Martin said I don't want to see a has-been or a will-be; I want to see a must-is, or a now-is.
See, that's the kind of joke stuff out of Martin that I always appreciated. I don't care nothing about what you were going to do, what you thought you were about, I mean, what are you doing right now? And it's that minute thing in terms of the scriptures, right? It's in the now that life is lived.
Branch:
So anything else about him with the various people around him, are there any outstanding memories of his relations with people that you would like to leave, because we've only got a minute or two.
Vivian:
Yeah, Ab — and I'll say the quick form because I don't think you've heard it in any other form.
Branch:
"Ab" meaning Abernathy.
Vivian:
Abernathy, yeah.
Branch:
You all called him "Ab."
Vivian:
Yeah, that's right — Ab could have been the leader. I don't know whether I mentioned that today or not. Ab could have been the leader, and in a time when black people — as we used to say, the only board you could serve on if you were black was the deacon board. Here was the biggest thing in the nation, Ab could have been it because he had all the connections but he refused to do it and gave it to Martin.The other thing that stands out like that was that everybody — I mean, most of the people that surrounded [King] were older than he. But it didn't get in their way because they knew how bright he was, and his leadership abilities were far beyond anybody else in the group, and if you notice, when Martin left, it was all over, because he was the only one that could hold everybody together.
Branch:
He had all those big egos and personalities and it didn't bother him.
Vivian:
It didn't bother him a bit. And it wasn't because they didn't have any place else to go — they didn't, but that was not Martin's reason. Martin knew their talents, saw them and understood, with these we can move, and made it happen anyway. Ab also, when we're speaking of people surrounding him, Ab was also his — here's where we get to some of those words that we don't mention in public, but he was a guy that used to be a very popular word, but he was Ab settled everything that Martin, so Martin wouldn't have to settle anything that he didn't want and they didn't see that Martin should settle, they settled.And it's those — a memory of Martin that is always with me when I think like this is that we would have a party out to his house occasionally and we'd always end it with singing and I can see Martin now sort of rocking back and forth on his heels singing "There Is a Balm in Gilead." And I can see him now. I mean, it was just a wonderful kind of thing, the depth of this guy, something that should be known. He started a philosophical organization when he was a senior — I think it was when he was a junior at Boston U. He was always there thinking. When you saw Martin, you always know he's thinking.
The thing that stood out for me with Martin always is that Martin understood timing. That's a thing that stood out for me with Martin. He understood timing. He was never pushed into anything. He never had to back up on anything. He always understood timing, when to move, when not to move, right? When to say things and when to later say them. And that's basic to his leadership. I was trying to think of some other kinds of things that would come right quick, right?
Looking Back
Branch:
That's good. Last thing, just on you personally, looking back on all of this career —
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
— That you've had, with Dr. King in the movement and since the movement, you've been involved in a lot of things.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Branch:
What do you think of most about your legacy?
Vivian:
That's one of your questions —
Branch:
That you don't want to get.
Vivian:
When you rise to greatness — no, I don't see it — only one thing sticks out for me, that I want to keep on fighting this struggle until I am no longer here. The idea is, and I'm sort of using this, is that a great movement, a great people's movement, it's necessary to have it followed with the multiplicity of minor but important issues, okay? So the movement goes on, and you're moving but on a multiplicity of fronts, now, not on one big front, and I think people's movements make that necessary, that all of that is necessary. You've got to put it together.I'm trying to put together an organization right now and I'll give you an idea of why I'm doing it and I'll say it right quick, right? I want to see that we create up to a million black people a year that pass the ACT test at a high level. We've got a method to do it right now, doing it all right, just sent a girl to Princeton that is — you can only get a 36; she's got a 32. She's at Harvard level. The point is, it's because given the global world in which we live, what we have known as good is not good enough. And I think that we will be right back as janitors of the world if we do not solve this problem. I think it's the saving problem. I've come to the conclusion that following freedom always, it has to have education. Education must always follow freedom. Whatever degree of which you gain freedom, it has to be followed with a greater degree of education.
Branch:
I think that's a great place to leave it.
Vivian:
Yeah, okay.
March to the Jail (Continued)
Female 1:
It is, except I want to go back to the story that you didn't tell, you were talking about the Sunday morning when the parents came to sing to the children in the jail.
Vivian:
Yeah.
Female 1:
Can you tell that story?
Vivian:
Oh, yeah, I know. He knows it, but let's just tell it so that you've got it on tape. The ministers had already decided that they were going to let out church at a certain time and that all the church members were going to march over to the jail, right? When they got there, and they did it with all their — to sing to their children, right? And when they got there, and they didn't undress or redress or anything — just right coming out of church, and when they got there, there was a line of hoses, firemen with hoses there, and what's his name, the sheriff —
Branch:
Bull Connor.
Vivian:
Bull Connor was there, and when the people came up, he said "Turn on the hoses, turn on the hoses." And they looked at him, and his people looked at him — they were down on his knees with the hoses, but they looked at him as though, what are you talking about? The people prayed and when they got up is when he said turn on the hoses, and people of god were there. The hoses didn't turn on. The firemen got up and walked away and the people of god walked forward and they sang the songs of Zion to their children in the jail.
Branch:
That was called the Red Sea March because it parted —
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
Reverend Billups, I think.
Vivian:
That's what I was going to say is that Billups was the leader, all right? Billups was the one that got down and started the prayers. Billups was a friend of mine before the movement. A very few people —
Branch:
Not many people know him. Could you just mention a word about Billups and we'll stop?
Vivian:
That's right.
Branch:
Charles Billups was his name.
Vivian:
That's exactly right. Let me give you Billups — Billups was a perfectly dressed guy all the time, very thin kind of guy, and he was always immaculate, right? Billups could sell anything, and Billups loved the movement. He'd been waiting for something like this. He'd been in the army. He knew about explosives and all that sort of thing, but he was really taken in by nonviolence and understanding it and moving with it. He saw it as the answer.Billups was so good that he would spend all his time in the movement until the last couple weeks when he had to turn in all of his sales and stuff — we worked for two weeks and had more to turn in than the other guys working for six to eight weeks. He was that kind of person. Billups was beaten — one of these little filling stations, there were always Klans around them because they were all part of the same stuff, and they followed Billups one night as he was going home out a road. And they cut him off, they tied him to a tree and beat him until he just fell, right?
But in the process, after he laid there for about a half hour or so, he thought — right, that's the way he tells it, and Jim Lawson has written this story up for one of the magazines, by the way, some time ago. And Billups lay there and he came to the conclusion, he said, because we talked about it — he said he came to the conclusion that — it was right off the highway or a road, a two lane road, and he decided that if he could get to the road, maybe a car would take him to the hospital, and he crawled out of there until he got over to the road, saw a car coming, and he tried to wave it down and it didn't stop, and the next one he went right out on — he crawled right out on the road. He said I'm going to die anyway. Maybe it will stop them and maybe they'll take me to the hospital and he's on a road that didn't necessary have all that kindness in it for anybody black, but he did and the people put him in the car and took him to the hospital and saved his life.
Billups was that kind of person. Billups followed the movement to Chicago, and he worked for one of the stores for a while. They gave him a five-year pin and he hadn't been there but a year.
Branch:
He's a character. That's great.
Vivian:
He really was great —
Branch:
That march was May 5th or 6th, 6th or 7th, 1963. Let's stop there.
Vivian:
Yeah, just one more line on this — when Martin was shot, I heard it on the way home on the way to my house coming from downtown outer drive in Chicago, and so as I entered the house, the wife said "Are you going?" Split level going up to the side, and she was over there and while I was packing Billups comes over and Billups says, "Are you going?" and I nodded my head, and he said "Wait for me."Now, the rest of the Billups part of this story, we get out to airport and the plane is coming in with the band, with the bed basket band, and so we stand there and talk until we have to go to the plane, right, and when we get to the motel we go out and pick out the casket, really. Guys — they weren't waiting for us, they just, we happened to — we were trying to get to the motel. The guys were leaving and we jumped in the car with him and we were sitting all up on each other's laps and stuff because the car was packed, but when Billups got back to the hotel and opened his suitcase, there wasn't anything in it but ties.
Branch:
He took the wrong suitcase?
Vivian:
No, he just, he was so frustrated with them, he just threw stuff in, but he didn't throw anything in but ties.
[laughter]
Female 1:
That's a great story.
Branch:
Yeah —
[END of tape. Audio ends abruptly]
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