'The Movement,' for me, lives. It's the central event, the central process, the central continuity of my life, as I approach sixty. People who I met, the Rev. Jim Lawson, Bob Moses, Ed Hamlett, Stokeley Carmichael, Gene Guerrero, Nan Grogan Orrock, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Ed King of Mississippi, Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Pete and Mike Seeger, people who went on Anne Romaine's & Bernice Reagan's Southern Folk Festival tours, Julian Bond, who I wrote about in Chicago, and who helped Sue Thrasher, John Lewis, Robert Sherrill, Marcus Raskin, and others, found the Institute for Southern Studies, the year after SNCC and SSOC died in peculiar, self-inflicted wound ways, Connie Currie, who worked here in Atlanta with small groups of students before SNCC was born, with AFSC afterward, and the city of Atlanta after Maynard Jackson's election, and who continues to pour out a torrent of invaluble recollections, collections, and introspections, as well as people I've never met, like Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, whose part in the movement I know through their stories and poems, and Julius Lester, the most Jewish of my acquaintances, who was also the first true black 'hippie' I ever met, living in New York City, writing for the Evergreen Review and the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, back when African-Americans led the RESISTANCE TO AMERICAN FASCISM, headed by Richard Nixon and his illegit crew...and 'after losing every battle we finally won the war' said my friend Bob, who, if you ask me, is all tangled up in the movement too; at least he was last month here in Atlanta when he sang, 'hiway 61 revisited, ... remember..a world war can be easily done, we'll just have it all on hi-way 61,' which runs from the Mississippi Delta just near his home town in Minnesota...hell, it seems like the 'movement' is everywhere...and it's just picking up steam..
have y'all read 'Radical Equations' who ever woulda thought we'd get Algebra into it...except for that old craggy n.african, Euclid...he wasn't writting those lines for nothing..best to all ...howard romaine
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