-: Thank you.
When I first met Charlie
Sherrod and Lonnie and Tim,
who would come.
The crowd was in Europe I think that was.
I had never been out of Ohio.
I mean my only place I'd ever been from Ohio,
outside of Ohio was Orangeburg, South Carolina,
and I came here as a freshman.
By the time I had gone home for Christmas,
I had been arrested like five times.
My jaw had been broken and my arm had been busted
because it was the first time in this new world
of South Carolina having come from Madison, Ohio.
It was a strange world
and so when I went to Sumter for Christmas,
for, I'm sorry, for Thanksgiving,
and the only reason I went to Sumter is because
they closed the campus down
and you had to go somewhere.
You gotta get up outta here sort of thing.
So I'd went to Sumter and it was the first time I'd been
off campus since I'd been placed in South Carolina State
and we went to a party
and my friends drank
and this time I didn't so I was the designated driver
after going to this party.
As we were driving home the police stopped me.
I'd never been confronted by a police officer in my life
at that time, 16 years old, Sumter, South Carolina,
and we started talking and the officer said,
finally said where you from boy?
I said Ohio, why?
He said they didn't teach you how,
(laughing) not only did I say why,
I said I'm form Ohio.
You got the license.
Can't you read?
(audience laughs)
It was the beginning.
(audience laughs)
That's when he said what?
They didn't even teach you how to say yes sir
and no sir to white men up there?
I said you gotta be jiving.
(audience laughs)
It was an auspicious meeting.
That man hit me so hard,
but in from the still mills in Ohio
I had a few tricks of my own.
I was hitting and kicking as I went down
and before his fist slapped my face,
I had struck him back,
and his partner grabbed me
and we just got it on
down there on the side of the road
in Sumter, South Carolina.
They got the better of it.
Broke my jaw, busted my arm and as they were beating me,
I was saying to the guys in the car, I'm gonna get you,
(audience laughs) because where I came from
you didn't let your partners be whipped
and not help.
That of course was long before I'd ever heard
of nonviolence and I only knew of direct action.
(audience laughs)
So by, you know I got my jaw busted, went to jail
and when I got out of jail and went to get on
the train coming from Sumter back to Orangeburg,
the conductor say all right get on back to the baggage car.
I said I what?
Not for $7.82 do I ride with a bunch
of old cheap suitcases and mangy dogs.
There are seats here I'm sitting in them.
I look back now at times on say was I naive
or just a fool and I think it was a combination.
It was a combination but out of that combination of things
I had that reputation of that nigger is crazy
and so most of the students sort of passed me by,
in Orangeburg, say hello
and make wide circles around me.
(audience laughs)
So I finally got home and my father decided this little
venture of meeting your brothers and sisters in the
confines of a black college just wasn't going to be for you.
I can't afford to have you there the way you put it
and besides you going to be killed.
So my year of penance was to end early with
the understanding I'm taking you back to that campus
you stay here there until I get there and come back
and pick you up.
I said fine.
Well on February 1st 1960,
there were sit-ins in Greensboro.
Greensboro, Orangeburg is 80 miles from here
and a group of students came to me
and we're talking about did you hear
what they did up in Greensboro.
I say yes of course I did.
They said what we want to do that here.
I said go ahead and do it.
(audience laughs)
What's that got to do with me?
They said we want you to be the spokesperson.
I said y'all crazy.
You all are out of your mind if you're going
to put up with what those crackers
going to do to you, you do that.
It's not my place to interfere.
I've got 24 days in this place and I'm gone
and I will never see anything south of Cincinnati,
(audience laughs) again in life.
Well I was reading the Talmud
and you all know all about that part of my life.
There's a section of the Talmud that
says if I'm not for myself who will be for me.
If I'm for myself only what am I?
If not now when?
And I thought about that
and I spent the night thinking about it,
the night thinking about my life.
I was born the night Joe Louis knocked
out Max Schmeling where in
Madison, Ohio there was jubilation.
I used to thank my father when he got older
for several things, not naming me Joe Louis.
(audience laughs)
And for every one of my birthdays they
tried out this old 8mm film of the fight.
Within one minute and 28 seconds of the first
round Joe Louis the Brown Bomber knocked out
Max Schmeling the Great White Hope of the western world
and what my father was say is look at the crowd,
look at the crowd and it was full of men with Swastikas on.
He said these are people you're gonna have to deal with.
He used to call him pecker woods all the time.
He said these pecker woods are going to make
your life hell and I think and I'm four years old.
(audience laughs)
When we going to cut the cake?
When we going to get the Kool-Aid?
(audience laughs)
And he's talking about you have to
do something for the race.
You are a race baby and that's the first time
I've ever heard anything,
a boy or girl,
this man talking about you a race baby
and I'm talking about when we going to get the Kool-Aid.
(audience laughs)
But that started very early for me which
taught me something later with my own child
of those early lessons come back and guide you.
That night when I was thinking about these students
from Claflin for most of them college who'd
asked me to leave them,
be the spokesman in these sit-ins,
all of those things came back.
The pictures of the fight,
Yankee Stadium Field with Nazis screaming,
discussions of my father about
you know they killed three black people
killed in Detroit after that fight.
Four black people were killed in Cincinnati after that fight
and Lord knows how many they killed down site South
after that fight and don't you ever forget it.
So that night after I thought about where I had
come from and what I was supposed to do,
I knew the next morning that I was supposed
to be involved in this movement.
So I went back to these people and apologized
for my being flippant and said I will do
whatever I can to help
and joined the Orangeburg Movement
for Civic Improvement and was chairman of the Orangeburg
Movement for Civic Improvement
and we would sit in by the 6th of February.
The first one started on the 1st and on the 6th
and I was leading demonstrations not knowing a thing
about what was happening except they said if these
white folks at you don't hit him back.
Well that makes sense to me because the last time I--
(audience laughs)
We'll do that until we figure out
something else, at least until I get enough
of y'all to join me.
(audience laughs)
And we were having sit-ins
and that first sit-in was on March 6th.
I went to jail.
That next week I was in jail
and by March 12th lead a demonstration of 1500
students in Orangeburg which
1200 of them us went to jail.
We were put into an outside enclosure
and attacked with water hoses
and then we got the call
and as I think I mentioned this morning.
The only thing I knew about Dr. King
was what I read in newspapers and magazines
but when they mentioned Miss Baker,
when I mentioned to our advisors in Orangeburg
that Miss Baker, a letter came asking us
this meeting Miss Baker sent the letter
and I remember Reverend Cullum telling me that
Miss Ella Baker said that she wants you to do something.
You can put your life in her hands
and we talk on the phone after that
and we were sort of ready and when I came here
there was already a sense that we were like Charlie said,
I know the names I knew the Charles Sherrod's,
I knew the Diane Nash I knew the Lonnie Kings,
I know that Charlie Joneses and what we had
shared was I remember and we talked about them.
The first thing is what do you remember about it
and we talked about the Brown decision
and just about everybody had a copy of the Jet
with the picture of Emmett Till in it.
We had a common sense of remembering what
was happening to our people but that thing on it
that picture which I have today
of Emmett Till lying in his coffin.
So we all started at a, sort of ground when we got here.
I thought that compared with people like Charlie
who it been a world traveler and Lonnie from Atlanta.
I'd never been to Atlanta and these people from Nashville.
I said great God of Zion I'm up here
with all these hot city people,
hot shots and the thing, the statement was Jim Lawson
because Jim is from my hometown and I knew growing up that
he had been in prison and he had
been in prison as a pacifist.
I knew what a pacifist was and I knew there been hours
of discussion about going to jail for ideas,
for beliefs because we had an example from
our small little colored community of Madison, Ohio
of someone who had a scholarship, courage, compassion
and commitment and it was Jim
who were going to school with my aunts and stuff
and so the idea of going to jail
for an idea was already acceptable to me
and so when we came up here
there were people who argued
and discussed the whole nonviolent philosophy.
Most of these people were from Nashville.
Diane and Bernard and Bevel
and the whole concept of discussion
and a discussion of a beloved community was discussed
and I felt that we were already in it because these people
I saw already as kindred spirits
and brothers as a sort of in a common sort of
and sisters in a common sort of struggle.
So we cleaved very quickly.
We all came together very, very quickly and we talked.
I met Tim and there was a feeling
that we came from the same backgrounds
wherever we came from for the most part.
We were the sons and daughters of working
class people, working people.
I remember and if you had any sense of shame
from where you came I remember when Tim claimed
told me he was raised in his first crib
was the bottom drawer of the bureau
in his parents' bedroom and then said
and I moved up to the third drawer.
I said well, (audience laughs)
now if that isn't upward mobility.
(audience laughs)
And we all had an appreciation,
a thirst for knowledge and a commitment to doing
something as Sherrod mentioned earlier we didn't know
what it was going to be but we knew it was going to be
something and you came to trust in each other by spending
time talking together, learning together, planning together.
I remember with pride when Jim got kicked out of Vanderbilt.
He was in graduate school.
The School of Theology there,
and you know my thing was you see
in the Christian School of Theology
they done kicked him out.
They're not serious about nothing them Christians.
And you know I was continuing with my other rebellion.
(laughing)
But that was, I hadn't seen him since
I was a kid but I had this feeling that
we were kindred souls and then there were all these
others and we started in the early discussions
when we talked about the Student Coordinating Committee,
the Coordinating Committee, non-violence was kept out of it
and it was then in a concession where Lonnie talked about
those purists, the nonviolent purists that kept us together,
kept us on the road and so it became a thing
that after a mantra that we must have this
in the spirit of non-violence and love.
I never told a man that I loved him in my life.
Wasn't too many girls I said more than I liked you.
(audience laughs)
And here we were talking about love, a word
and a concept I use all the time now because
it was through the movement that I came to understand
the deeper meanings of agape and loving my fellow man,
my brothers and my sisters and there came a time
that I understood how you can love somebody
and an idea so much that you would die for it
and that became the case with all of you all.
I remember when we first went me, Tim Jenkins,
Josh Rod, Charlie Jones, when we decided that we were
going to drop out of school and spend full time helping
to build the movement at whatever cost that was going to
take and we found out about that cause very quickly when
Charlie Jones hit a little back dog owned
by big white lady driving through Alabama.
It became the first ideologicals with the ministerial
students Jones and Sherrod was saying,
the lady came, the mean white lady came out and said
oh my God my baby is gone and he got polio
and if y'all could just give me a few dollars
to make him happy so I can buy a new dog.
Jenkins, dog ran in the street.
(audience laughs)
We don't have extra money to pay for this woman's dog.
Let's get out of here.
We're standing out there debating and in the spirit
of non-violence we should pay for this dog.
Should have had a dog on a leash.
(audience laughs)
The big white lady got tired of our discussion.
(audience laughs)
And told us if you don't pay for this dog you
will never make it out of Alabama alive.
(audience laughs)
White folks have a way
(audience laughs)
of defining issues.
So we moved to a different level.
It became no longer matter of compassion.
It became Sherrod, no let's go we ain't going dog.
Let's go.
Like how dare she threaten us.
The Christian brothers had stopped talking about
paying for the woman's dog which
Nathan and I said all along we shouldn't do and we prepared,
but we wouldn't have left there alive.
The woman was right.
There was a white man,
a man who looked like an old Colonel Sanders.
He had a white linen suit.
I remember that.
Had a white linen suit on and he came out as this crowd
was gathering around us in Pell City, Alabama
and he told us, he was sort of like
the local head white man in town.
(audience laughs)
And he told these boys didn't do nothing wrong.
I saw the whole thing.
The dog ran out now in the street
and they couldn't help hit him.
So y'all just let him alone and told us y'all
better get out of town quick and I remember
we started driving towards, turned to the highway
driving towards Mississippi outrunning
because people were getting the cars coming behind us.
I never forget this but when we got to Mississippi
the border of Mississippi we stopped,
scared, running from a mob from Alabama
but still scared go to go into Mississippi.
(audience laughs)
I swear.
I know each one of us was in that car remember
that day because Sherrod too was trying
to use the bathroom along the way.
Man said one drop, blow your brains out.
It was a terrible time.
Speaking of time.
(audience laughs)
Thank you Martha.
They'll be time to continue this later.
We're trying to keep a rather close schedule
and so and I realize that I had drifted off
of it but it was here 40 years ago that
I learned the deeper meanings of comradeship and love
and trust and a willingness to do anything to help bring
about a change and I knew at different points
along this journey that we wouldn't all get there together.
So I'm happy proud to be able to celebrate with you
and those of us who made it on thus far, thanks.
(applause)
-: I really want to apologize for the time.
I just want to make sure that we all get
some lunch a little bit later.
I think they were hearing in these talks a different
sense than the traditional of what leadership can be of
something that can be created by people
themselves when they decide to act
or they can be quiet unassuming kind of thing
that really makes pivotal and important decisions
that can change the course of history
and right now we'll hear from Joyce Ladner.
I'll say this when we're doing the program as
you know we're doing all of this last minute and everything.
So we were trying to put in people before their
SNCC accomplishments and their present-day accomplishments
and one of the reasons that we just totally gave
up on the whole project.
We just say we're going to put people's names
in is that when we came to Joyce's name there
were so many accomplishments on both sides we said
it'll take up half a page.
So I won't say anything else and let her to come
and talk to you about the spirit of Miss Baker
and organizing in Mississippi.
(applause)
-: I was about to say good morning but it's good afternoon.
The war stories remind me, that I've heard from the three
previous speakers, reminds me of a time back in the sixties
when we used to hear people who came out in the 30s
movement and we used to say God I'm so sick
of the thirties and I could imagine that some of you may
well feel like my son and my niece.
My sister Dories daughter, when we
tell them watch this program.
Recently I told my son watch freedom songs.
It's coming on (mumbling).
He said what is it about, SNCC?
(laughing)
I say yes.
He said I already know all about SNCC.
Mom you taught,
I said you don't, you got to see the real SNCC.
He said well what is this you been
telling me all my life then?
That wasn't a real SNCC?
But I think that first I want to thank the organizers
for bringing us together so that we can tell
the war stories because they're deeper meanings hidden
within all of them and the second is that
in remembering Miss Baker I think she would want us
to remember the legacy of doing
because she was indeed a doer.
She was quite an elegant speaker but you can probably
count the number of times that she was the keynote speaker
on or she tended to one to shy away from that role.
I'm going to make two points one is that to describe
what Mississippi was like when Miss Baker's philosophy
began to resonate in the state
and why did it resonate
and then to say a few things about
the lessons she taught us.
All of us necessarily have to be autobiographical
in making our comments and so I was was a high school
senior at 16 years old in 1961 on Easter weekend
when SNCC was founded.
Probably don't remember having read about it
in the Hattiesburg Mississippi American Newspaper
because it censored everything.
I do remember it did carry some information
about the sit-ins that were occurring.
Nevertheless we were, all of us,
not all of us but I was particularly blessed
because have a sister Dorie who was coming later today
who was only 15 months older than I and I could not
remember a time in our lives when race was not the
central most important thing that we focused on.
I have always been and I've always carried both of burden
and the blessing of the strong racial consciousness
and perhaps it came from my mother who taught us that
you look white people dead in the eye and don't blink.
I remember when Dorie and all the salesman
and the insurance collector came around our house deferred
to her and she always calls it a certain way you carry
yourself in order to keep your dignity so
that white people don't walk over you.
So when Dorie and I were at the grocery store,
Hudson's grocery a block from our house
and we're looking at magazines,
the magazine rack and Dorie had bought some donuts
and she, I remember clearly because she probably
just gotten her first bra but we were entering puberty
and I was the younger and certainly
had not yet but mine 28 AAA bra.
(audience laughs)
That was the size I remember clearly the first one.
There's this man.
A cashier, white cashier in the store
who all four of his fingers on the right
hand haven't cut off for some reason
and he walked up behind her and try to touch bra
and she turned and took the bag of donuts
and began beating him on the head
and we ran all the way home and we can told Mother.
Mother guess what happened?
And we told her and she said you should have killed them.
(audience laughs)
So that we were taught to stand up
for our beliefs and another thing she taught us
she becomes the plural because we learned
this within this all black community called
Palmers Crossing outside, 4 miles from Downtown Hattiesburg.
We were taught to stand up for my beliefs
and if you couldn't stand up for them
that Mother used to say that they're not worth very much
if you can't stand up for what you believe in.
Beliefs can't be worth much to start with
but they taught us how to survive with dignity
and I was walking a tightrope.
They told us that we could indeed stand tall
and have the courage of these convictions
and carry ourselves in such a way that if a white
man makes a pass at you and they did
and they were quite plentiful,
you stand proudly and don't even respond
and just walk away like a lady and it worked.
We knew we couldn't turn around and beat too
many people over the head with donuts for fear
that we could have been killed but we,
I remember some things that had an impact on
us that became threads throughout the larger,
that were threads throughout the larger society
but they followed us as well from the time of childhood.
The Brown decision I remember very very clear clearly
and how the local newspaper covered it.
I read the newspaper from the time I was very little.
I used to spend a dime a day to buy this paper
and know that it was referred to the day the decision
was handed down what's was referred to as Black Monday
but we didn't get, there was no rush integrate,
no attempt at all to desegregate that Hattiesburg schools
or the schools anywhere Mississippi.
What we got were new public schools.
They built the county built us a new school
that we had always needed and that was their
way of staving off any attempts to say that
we were unequal or that we have unequal facilities.
We lived in a very, very closed society
but it was possible to get in certain information.
I don't even remember maybe I heard national news
on the radio but we got a new television,
we got a televisions station WDAM in Hattiesburg
in about 19, it was about was the late fifties
and they were very, very racist but I do remember seeing,
oh wait it was an NBC affiliate so David Brinkley,
(mumbles) and David Brinkley.
That was the one window of national news
that we saw but was most important was that we had this
friend an older man who came by our house all the time.
We called him Cuz for cousin.
He really wasn't our cousin but others referred
to him as Dr. McLeod and he was a race man.
He sold herbal medicine.
Today he'd be in vogue.
Back then my mother said I wouldn't take anything
that Cuz gave you, it might poison you.
(audience laughs)
She said that those roots that he's boiling
I don't know what's in them, but Cuz was a race man.
He was a member of the local NAACP.
I was 10, 11, 12 maybe a little older.
But probably not 10 but 11, 12, 13
and he brought us weekly the Chicago Defender,
the Pittsburgh Courier and we got
the monthly Ebony and the Jet.
It was funny I think Charles referred to it as the Jet.
Black people in the south always called Jet magazine
the Jet and that is where we got information.
He also brought books.
I read the first biographies about black people
because I don't know where he got the books
from but I guess he ordered them but he brought them,
he introduced us to literature on black people
and he used to tell us you girls are
going to have to change things.
It'll be your generation that's going
to change things when you get older.
We, several references were made to the veterans
of World War II and I would add World War I.
My Uncle Archie went to France
and the French asked him if you would pull down his pants
according to him and show them his tail
because they had been told that
black people were kin to monkeys and had tails.
He told us this and I remember this as a little girl
sitting on his back porch when he talked about
how disappointing it was to come back home
and see how terrible conditions were but he going to France
had given him a perspective that was very different.
The veterans of World War II especially were very,
very important because they were sent abroad to fight
for freedom with the expectation that they
were also going to reap some benefits.
They came home and saw the white soldiers reaping
the benefits but they did not and many of these
people were the founders of the then underground
NAACP in Mississippi, throughout the state.
I cannot emphasize enough how important
the role of these men were.
They were the ones who, I always felt that my generation
was the one that they felt would be,
ours was a generation that would change things
that the environment was pregnant with possibilities
of all kinds of change but it was almost as if
they were on the precipice of it but knew it was to come.
I refer to ours as the Emmett Till generation
because I cannot think of a single thing that
had a more profound impact on some of the people
who came into SNCC who had seen the cover
of the Jet Magazine cover of Emmett Till's
body where he,
they didn't do any cosmetic
surgery or whatever to the face of him
and in the 1980s I asked Mrs. Mobley, his mother
why did you have him buried open casket without them,
they pulled him out the river so he was
not, he didn't look like her, anyone's son.
It was just an awful picture.
And she said I wanted the world to see what
they did to my baby and we were his age.
We were in terms of psychosocial theory
or whatever we identified with him.
I felt personally if they killed a 14 year old
they could also kill me, they could come my brothers.
We knew that men were lynched but we'd never
known a child being lynched before and I believe that
on a deeply profoundly personal level
that had a strong galvanizing effect on all of us.
That image is with me still.
It became etched in our consciousness.
We were also very, very fortunate to have mentors.
Eileen Beard a woman was a member of our church.
Eileen Beard was the sister of Vernon Dahmer.
Mr. Dahmer and Clyde Kennard,
who lived in that same community
and Medgar Evers were the three
mentors that I had who were killed
and I thought about this recently.
That is so ironic that these three men who
had such a profound influence on my life we're all,
died for their beliefs.
Mr. Dahmer and Mrs. Dahmer,
Brother Beard and Sister Beard as we called them
in our church and Clyde Kennard used
to take Dorie and me with them to Jackson to the state
NAACP meetings in the 50s when we were in high school.
I don't know mentors, I think mentors,
you seek mentors out as much as they,
and this is a message I like to give to the young people
here today that is not just a matter of older
people saying we want to mentor young people
but young people also have to seek out the older people.
It's possible that the reason that they took us
likely is because they knew we had this interest and race.
We talked about it you know and it was then that we saw
people like Ruby Hurley who was the first black woman
lawyer I ever saw and probably didn't know one existed.
She was the southeastern regional director Of the NAACP.
So she would come and speak.
Then Gloucester Current director of branches spoke.
So we saw these outside people coming in to this late
and all the meetings we held at the Masonic Temple
up the street from Jackson State College.
We also organized, the same mentors especially
Clyde Kennard and Mr. Dahmer helped us to organize and NAACP
youth chapter in the very late 50s and Clyde
was a very, how many of you know,
have heard of Clyde Kennard?
All older people but the younger people don't know him.
He came back home after having been in the military,
having been a student at the University of Chicago,
his father died, came back to Hattiesburg
to help his mom run the farm.
Wanted to finish, go back to college so he applied
to Mississippi Southern College now the University
of Southern Mississippi twice,
I believe it was two times maybe three.
But any at any rate it was in the late 50s
and they planted some, they arrested him for having $3.50
worth of stolen chicken feed in his car.
Sent him to the Forrest County Jail.
Then sent him to Parchman State Penitentiary.
He got cancer and was literally dying
by the time Governor Ross Barnett gave him
a pardon for something he never, I mean it was awful.
I have never cried yet I still feel the tears
that one day will come over how terrible they
treated him but he got out after the pardon,
went to the University of Chicago.
It was Billings Hospital and died within I believe
it was a month or 6 weeks from cancer.
He was a very quiet person who moved easily
without you're noticing his presence except
there was a profundity to the,
I must confess also that I had
a crush on him for some reason
even though he was an older man.
He was early 30s I don't know.
But he was an older man.
I was maybe 14, 15 and up to 16 but
there was also a network of students
in the high schools around.
I knew Leslie Mclemore who stood up
to criticize us, the organizing of this conference
from high school because he lived in northern Mississippi
and I lived in Southern Mississippi but what
facilitated a lot of the people was joining
the younger people my age joining the movement
or getting active in the movement was that
we were also active in certain high school organizations.
Like I believe you were state president
when I was state president.
Tri HAWA, you were state president of HAWA.
So we traveled around.
A lot of us, I have been out of Mississippi
once maybe twice to go up to New Orleans
but most of us travel within that close circle.
I often wonder how did I high school teachers
and especially music teachers teach.
Where do they learn opera when they taught Dorie
who had a great voice, taught her how to sing opera
or where did they get their books from
because our librarian had $150 a year
to replenish the, to buy books
and we got the hand me down,
used textbooks from the white schools
after they use them 5 years, we got them
and I bristle even today when I walk past
the public library that was for a whites-only
because as a child I wanted more books to read than
there were available and they didn't give them to us.
Anyway we went to college to Jackson State
in the fall Of 61, the following 60 and
this again I began to see some of those same freshman
in my class as some older upperclassmen
that I've seen it the Masonic Temple at the state wide
NAACP meeting.
One of the students an older student was James Meredith.
We used to sit before he well he's very strange now
but back then he was very,
very strange. (audience laughs)
And because this is all on tape
I won't say how strange he is.
(audience laughs)
But he wasn't strange then
and we knew absolutely nothing about the fact
that he applied to go to Ole Miss, nothing
and I was as close to him as the
other small group around him.
He was an upperclassman, been in the military,
was married and but we could recognize
who each other was in a way.
I don't know if I'm getting through to you.
As a freshman every Wednesday afternoon was free time.
So you could sign up always to go downtown
and that meant to shopping.
Dorie are we go up to see Medgar whose
office was on the second floor of the Masonic Temple
and I remember because of that said we have met him
and when we were in high school and one time we went
to talk to him and he would always tell us what
was going on and the NAACP chapters around the state
and one time he told us that there was going
to be a sit-in and we said really can we join?
We didn't know what they were going to sit in what
or where or what and he said
well yeah you can.
And we said all that's great.
Tell us when.
And he said I'll let you know letter
and each time we went by his office he would say something.
It was vague and you do not to ask too many questions
because having information could be dangerous to you
if you were ever pressured enough to give it up
so finally he told us you really can't,
he said I would never be able to explain
to your parents why you were arrested.
That would be important to me because one time
he has seen my mother in a grocery store
in Palmers Crossing and she'd given him some money
and said will you give them give this to Joyce.
He just ran into her accidentally.
He came on campus and found me
and gave me this money Mother sent me but finally
he told us that the sit-in was going to be on such a date
and it was within a short period of time.
My memory is not very good but maybe a week or two
or so and he said what you can do is try to organize
the students on Jackson State's campus
and that was a, talk about being ingenious.
So we began to do things like
Dorie was present dorm counselor
so we had a meeting one night and the dormitory,
regularly scheduled meeting.
She (mumbling).
Everything in Mississippi at the
time was opened with a prayer.
So I to give, she said you give the prayer
and I'm talking about oh dear Lord there are
perilous times ahead.
Please protect us as we go into this danger and so on.
The next morning we were called before the dean of students,
Dean Rogers.
He asked what did I mean about the prayer and perilous times
and Dorie, most of you know Dorie,
she's, well she's a hell raiser and the guys in SNCC were
scared of her and that's why I say the thesis
about men dominating women in SNCC,
well they never dominated Dorie.
She dominated them if anything (laughs),
but anyway that's an aside,
but we, I said what do you mean asking me about
what I said to my god.
You have no right to question me about my relationship
with Jesus and Dorie jumped in and said
as a man of the cloth how could you
because he was also an ordained minister.
So we went off on him and walked out of there
and he said well you're right, you're right
and we walked out of there laughing you know.
(audience laughs)
but what we began to talk about the,
well what we actually did was told,
you spread rumors so they could never get back to you
but something is gonna happen and we gotta be ready
as students to support it when it goes down.
At Tougaloo what happened was 8 Tougaloo students
or 9 Tougaloo students sat in at the public library,
the Jackson Public Library sponsored by the NAACP chapter
on the campus and supported by Medgar and he organized it
actually and what happened was that because they didn't go
to Woolworth's or the Crest store because they wanted
to attack a facility that was taxpayers,
black people pay taxes too.
Tax supported by blacks.
What we did was a number of us at that point got together
and said start spreading the rumor again that couldn't be
traced back to the one person that there was going to be a
prayer-meeting in front of the library at 7 that night.
So what happened is that the guys got
it first because they had free range.
They didn't have curfews like girls and so on.
So we are the women decided to go to the library so by the
time we got out there it was seven o'clock.
Here's Emmett Burns who was also a minister
and a student was in the middle
of his prayer, when out of the blue, we heard this noise.
Stop it, stop it, shut up and everybody was looking.
Where is this coming from
and it was Jacob Reddicks the president of the college.
He ran through.
He was absolutely out of control.
He was in a frenzy and like what is this?
What's going on?
Stop it and his arms was flailing
and one of my two roommates, Margaret and Eunice,
he took Eunice by the shoulder and pushed her
like that on the ground and then we turned on him
and the rest, they brought a lot of police on the campus
that night and the next day we tried to march down
to the courthouse when the Tougaloo students were
being arraigned and they shot, all I remember
is saying oh lord they're killing us.
It was tear gas canisters being shot
and it sounded like guns and I hid
and we ran into different people's homes.
I never forget there was this older black lady
and we were just knocking on her front door.
I heard the radio I reached I had through the the hole
in the screen and unlatched and ran in the house
and told her what happened.
And she said come on and nobody's coming to my house.
At the funeral home some of the kids were
hidden in the embalming room.
It was bedlam but I never forget this lady kept ironing
and it was on the radio and she kept
saying it's a low down dirty shame.
These white folks are treating these children like dogs
and she, I mean she was quiet and soft-spoken.
And she was talking to herself you know.
Eventually they got back to campus.
They closed school early the next day.
Sent us home for spring break and when we came back
it was quieted down.
They expelled the president of student government.
Now we kept going to Medgar's office.
One day he said I want your girls to meet Tom Gaither.
Tom has come to help us get our freedom
and we said oh that's good, how are you?
You didn't ask any question questions.
I didn't ask him what is it going to do.
He was core organizer who was had come to organize
Mississippi to get ready for the freedom rides.
That's what Mississippi was like before
Miss Baker's philosophy entered.
There were a lot of people who carried
on that work underground less than be killed
and many were killed even without it.
Miss Baker came into a state that was no longer totally
closed but a wedge had been put in and it was being pried
open because they're were the Vernon Dahmers, Amzie Moores,
Sister Steptoe, Clyde Kennard, I could go on and on of the
local men and women
Miss Haymer, my dear cousin Victoria Gray.
These are people who have taken the stands.
So by the time the SNCC people came in, direct action
couldn't be carried out in Mississippi but we also matured
to a point but we realized that eating in lunch counters,
eating at a lunch center was not as important as having the
right to vote and we thought naively
that if you get some political power,
then you can change things.
We hadn't really progressed yet to the point
where we understood that economic power was
very, very important.
Miss Baker taught of several things.
First of all I saw her as a kind of mother figure.
She reminded me quite frankly of my momma.
I never ever thought of calling her Ella.
Even today if she was still alive I mean
she would be Miss Baker.
Miss Baker was kind of secretive.
No one has said that but I remember asking her
over and over and when I lived
in New York and the 70's when I used to
go over and visit her,
Miss Baker tell me about your husband.
(mumbling)
(audience laughs)
It was not until I read Joanne's book that I
got to know who Miss Baker's husband was and she
didn't really talk very much about herself or was she
believed personally and it would have been hard,
she wasn't a talker about the philosophy
of things to me as much as she was a doer.
I understand who she was from her actions.
I think she felt that we should it was important for all of
us to have a very, to be firmly grounded, have a strong
sense of identity because it was a source of our strength
knowing who we, I think she believed
that we needed to know we were
because we were going to some turbulent times and whatever
strength to you could derive from your roots
and that's why I believe in part the kind of circle
and embracing of each other in SNCC as brothers and sisters
came out of that.
She believed family and a democratic ethos.
The concept we saw always say that the people decide
was very very much Ella Baker.
She also was anti-hierarchical
and don't get her talking about black baptist preachers.
Now that's one that you would go off on.
She also taught me that courage was,
and my mother taught the same thing is that
courage is not the answer to fear.
It is not the absence of fear,
but the you keep on even in the face of understanding,
recognizing and accept that fear is a natural reaction to
dangerous situations but despite it
and it goes back again to the strength of your beliefs
have to be such that you risk something.
A lot of us probably didn't think that we and I
heard this more from SNCC guys then from women, that we live
to see 30 years old or I didn't even think about the next
month not to consider a long term life span.
She taught me that she did the others of us that
we had to work with what we had,
that we had to be resourceful,
that whatever was available in the environment you used as
prudently as possible and that you don't stop your work
because you don't have a lot.
I mean the $10 a week check this SNCC sent out
was actually $9.54 after taxes.
People like Sam Block slept for the first
several weeks in his car in Greenwood
before he found someone who would take him in
but that was what was meant by being resourceful.
She very, very much taught us that we had to start
with where the people are.
That you don't go in and tell people
that you're to do this your to do that
but to get a sense of the lay of the land where the people
are and then try to begin to build, help to work with
them to build the consensus and she felt that leadership
emerged out of the local people, that they already had it
there but you had to be able as facilitators to
help to bring it about.
She also told us that we had to be resilient
and I learned this at the feet of my parents
that just because you fall down doesn't mean
that you don't keep getting up so I think that one of the
reasons that the nonviolent philosophy was able to prevail
for as long as it did was because we were taught to be tough
and to understand that times will get rough, that you'd get
beaten up, I was never beaten common ever in the situation
but I spent spent a week in jail and it wasn't easy but we
also knew that this was just
part of what being involved in this
kind of very dangerous social change work meant.
She told us we have to think on her own.
I can't think of anything more important than her
empowering us to be free thinkers and to be critical
thinkers and that's why I some of those,
you remember that SNCC meeting
I believe in the spring of 63 or 64--