In Cambridge (Maryland) I worked primarily on voter registration and school desegregation, trying to enroll Black students in the newly integrated school system, although I also took part in a well-covered sit-in at a restaurant that ended badly. I was there from July through September of 1963, and again from May 1964 through January of 1965, when I got my 1-A draft notice and had to return to school.
In Durham and Chapel Hill I was active in picketing and the mass demonstrations in Durham in the Spring of 1963, led by students from North Carolina College (now NCCU); and in Chapel Hill in the Winter of 1963-64. I was arrested six times and spent about two weeks total in jail. In Durham I was also involved in testing supposedly integrated restaurants in late 1963, before the civil rights bill was passed.
Since then, about the only two periods worth noting were my 15 months as I.F. Stone's editorial assistant for his well known I.F. Stone's Weekly, and then the 23 years I was the owner of the Georgetown Book Shop in Washington and Bethesda, dealing in better books and ephemera, of which African American history and literature played a prominent part. That history has been a lifelong interest that predated my involvement in the civil rights movement.
I wish I could say that my brief years of civil rights activity were of any great significance in the overall picture, but I was but a tiny cog in a much larger army. OTOH what I got out of it personally is almost impossible to put into words. Maybe I should just say that I entered the movement with only the vaguest idea of reality, but by the time I left it, my entire worldview had been changed beyond recognition. I suspect I'm not the only person who would say this.
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