An Effort to Define Self Through Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement
I was a summer volunteer in SNCC. I arrived in Atlanta the summer after my freshman year at Earlham College in Indiana.
I was involved in recruiting Albany youth to attend mass meetings and participate in marches and demonstrations involving desegregation of public acomodations. Arrested and spent a week in the Albany jail sharing a cell with Ralph Allen and Bob Cover. We were on a hunger strike for a week.
Other wonderful people I got to briefly know included Charles Sherrod, Joni Rabinowitz, Vera Giddens, Jean Wheeler, Martha Prescod, Dennis Roberts, C.B. King, Willie Ricks, Penny Patch, John Perdew among others.
In the second half of the summer I did volunteer work in the NY SNCC office. At that time Stokely Carmichael, Michael Thelwel, Ivanhoe Donaldson, and Barbara Jones were in and out of the office. Collecting books and other need materials and sending them South were part of the activities.
In the summer of 1965 I worked for the The Child Development Group of Mississippi in the town of Rolling fork. I was was in charge of a reading-readiness program in the daytime and those of us who lived in the rented building that functioned as a summer school guarded it by night with a shotgun as we were constantly under threat from local whites.
Copyright ©
Webspinner:
webspinner@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)