I just now discovered this site because the Google search engine alerted me to the picture of me on your "Volunteers" page (sixth from bottom). I am stunned, overwhelmed — I hadn't seen photos of fellow c.r. workers for 40 years. God bless you for creating this site.
I had just turned 18 when I joined the Holly Springs, MS SNCC/COFO staff — graduated from segregated S.H. Rider High School (Wichita Falls, TX) less than a year earlier, some students routinely drew Confederate flags on blackboards there, most thought "the Negros are not ready" — dropped out of U. of Illinois to go to Mississippi because I couldn't stand being in school while so much ugliness reigned in our land — and I was definitely as determined / angry / confused as I look in that picture. Had to laugh, seeing the typewriter — I've been writing in movement & nonprofit offices ever since. The people I met & experiences I had in MS helped make me that way.
I have never completely abandoned the person you see in that photograph. In the late 1960s I helped create the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme & wrote an "underground bestseller," Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. Later came New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (Dell, 1979) and a national political organization based on those ideas. Then helped start the U.S. Green party and helped write its founding document, "Ten Key Values." Now am the proud editor of the on-line "Radical Middle Newsletter" and author of Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now (Westview, 2004), which won "Outstanding Book Award 2004" from the Section on Ecological & Transformational Politics of the American Political Science Association. The first paragraph on p. 91 is about an embarrassing (for me) incident at the Holly Springs SNCC/COFO office.
So the last 40 years has been an enormous journey. But sometimes I close my eyes and feel I'm still typing up people's letters to "the Authorities" or registering voters or setting up a library & teaching the occasional English or History class in Holly Springs. Strange; haunting; deep.
UPDATE: Ten years have now passed since I created this page in 2005, and much has changed. I have moved from Washington DC to Oakland CA, initially to reconcile with my 86-year-old father, who had all but disowned me after I went to Mississippi. I am in love! I am rapidly losing my eyesight to diabetic retinopathy — a result, my doctor suspects, of my dreadful "activist's diet" from ages 18-36 (young activists, please take note). Did I mention that I am in love? Most pertinent to this website, I have just completed a short story about my experiences in Mississippi, and have posted it online as my contribution to the deep truth-telling that needs to take place now, by people of all races, if this nation is ever to become healthy and whole.
UPDATE #2: It's the tail end of 2023. I walk around Oakland with dark glasses and a tall white cane now. Nevertheless, Sandra and I are still happily together — 15 years and counting! And I was finally able to write my Mississippi SNCC experiences up without using any fictional contraptions. Go to my just-published book, Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster) and see Chapter One, "Joining the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi." Its honesty may shock you, but it will definitely make you think. A lot of angry and complex feelings, mine and others', are explored there. I do not remember my time in MS with unalloyed pleasure.
But I'm glad I went. Besides being of some small use to the people of Holly Springs, my experiences there eventually helped me come up with a better version of radicalism, which I explore in my book. For me, radical politics no longer means taking an extreme side of an issue and acting as if you're right and everyone else is wrong (or, especially today, "evil"). Rather, it means listening empathically to the fears, needs, wants, and wisdom of people on all sides of an issue, and then working with all sides to develop genuine (not mushy-middle) solutions that address everyone's core interests. That is the kind of movement we need today, not a revival of the movements of the Sixties.
Copyright ©
Webspinner:
webspinner@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)