"Revolution in Georgia" radio show hosted by Larry Rubin, part 2

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	Freedom Singers: Woke up this morning/ With my mind stayed on Freedom/ I woke up this	0:00
	morning/ with my mind, Lord, stayed on freedom/ I woke up this morning/ with my mind stayed
	on freedom/ I pray, I pray, I pray, Hallelujah
	Radio host: [singing continues in background] Revolution in Georgia: The Negro	0:34
	Struggle for Franchise. Produce for radio by Larry Rubin, a white Antioch student, who worked
	for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Southwest Georgia voter registration
	movement.
	Freedom Singers: Stayed on freedom/ I woke up this morning/ with my mind, Lord, stayed on
	freedom/I woke up this morning with my mind/ stayed on freedom/ I pray, I pray, I pray,
	Hallelujah
	Larry Rubin: Tonight, I would like to describe the Negro community in which I worked. I’ll attempt to
	analyze it a bit in order to try to explain why the civil rights movement exists in the first place.
	First of all, the southern system is called segregation, but this is a euphemism. The real system is
	one of exploitation and exclusion. This is summed up as a story that an elderly woman told me.
	She said that when she was a little girl, the white people that live next to her would come to her
	mother and asked her mother if she could come out and play with their children, and she went
	out and played, and the way they played was this: the white children would be under the water
	pump. The Negro little girl would have to pump the water for them, and was not allowed under
	the water pump, and the woman said it was hot out and she wanted to get under the water, but
	she wasn’t allowed. She had to serve the white children. It’s a system of exploitation.
	Sharecroppers and day laborers earn maybe $15 a week picking cotton, peanuts. There are no	2:41
	unions, and most of the land is owned by huge plantation owners. The people that live on these
	plantations are totally isolated from the rest of society, and meanwhile the people who own the
	plantations are making quite a bit of money. It’s a system of exploitation, sexually. It’s common
	knowledge, and it was proven in the Kinsey Report, that most white men in the South – I think it
	was 90% – have their first sexual relations with Negro women, and yet the white Southerner
	claims is that the reason he’s against integration is that it brings on miscegenation. I feel that the
	reason he’s against integration is that it might bring on intermarriage, which is not sexual
	exploitation but sexual relations on equal basis. All their lives the Negroes that I work with are
	called boy. One elderly man expressed it this way, he said until he was 60 he was called boy, and
	now he’s called uncle. He said that when he was a child he went in with—to a store with his
	father, and the storekeeper called his father boy. This leaves scars. As an example, here’s Charles
	Wingfield, who describes what happened when he went to try to register to vote.
	Charles Wingfield: Its always dangerous when a Negro come down to register because [unsure: (0:04:38-
	0:04:44)]. Something was making him very uncomfortable, just the idea of him coming down
	there, you know?
	Larry Rubin: [unsure]	4:52
	Charles Wingfield: Yeah, and they look at you like you are guilty or dirty, or just wondering, you know
	what, what, what are you doing in here, and when you tell him you come to register, most the
	time he’ll actually try it. He’ll say, what you say? What you, what you want, boy? You say, I
	came down to register. You came down to what? Just the way he talk, you know? He, he act like
	shocked when you, when you tell him you came down to register, and he’ll say for what? I looked
	down, and he say, what you want boy? I said, I came down to register. He said what, for the
	Army. You know, is the first thing he said, the Army. And I said no, I registered for the Army
	already. I came down to register to vote today.
	Larry Rubin: the Negroes in the community in which I worked constantly expressed to me of the
	seemingly arbitrary power of life and death held by the white man. Here, Dr. Anderson, who is
	the head of the Albany movement, describes incidents that have created this fear.
	Dr. W.G. Anderson: I can yet remember so vividly, and it hasn’t been too long ago the Negro was shot
	down on the courthouse steps in Baker County, and who is tied to the back of an automobile and
	dragged around. I can remember very vividly, as early as last year, a Negro who was in jail in
	Bainbridge, Georgia because he said he would vote against Marvin Griffin if he was out of jail
	and could vote, was beaten and died.
	[unsure] commit such dastardly crimes, and be	6:30
	given a license to do it, [unsure: (0:06:38)] down in Baker County, to lynch Negro and be
	elected to office the next year. Zeke Matthews can walk into a church where a voter registration
	meeting is going on and disrupt the service, create chaos and confusion, and the license to carry
	that pistol and still be the sheriff in the same county.
	Larry Rubin: however, if the southern way of life does not provide fair wages for the Negro, it does
	provide a custom by which the white people for whom he works will give him their old clothes
	and small loans when needed. This is a system that I would call paternalism. Many white people
	whom I spoke to justified the southern system by saying they take care of their Negroes. But I
	observed, the Negroes who got the castaway clothes were in fact the white people’s Negroes.
	They had to grin and scratch and say “Yassa Boss” in just the right way, and they could take part
	of any civil rights or human rights activities. The system of paternalism is a great enemy of the
	movement because people are afraid to give up getting these cats we close in order to gain
	something that is not immediate like the right to vote. This is my paternalism also can be very
	vicious. A good example of this occurred after church was burned down near Terrell—in Terrell
	County, near Dawson. The white community of Dawson decided they would rebuild the Negro
	church. They got a lot of publicity about it nationwide, praising them for this act. But this was
	just the old system working again because, in order for the whites to rebuild the church, the
	Negroes had to give up their deed to it, and they had to give up all right to use the church as they
	please. They cannot hold any voter registration meetings there from now on. Here Jack
	Chatfield, a SNCC worker, talks about this. He’s explaining the situation to the people in Terrell
	County, who are meeting in a tent which is on the site where another church used to stand. It too
	was burned down.
	Jack Chatfield: And, course you, you why, I think you know, probably heard a story about I Hope, we may
	have mentioned I Hope last week, didn’t we? That, the white man with using the insurance
	money, and all of, all, all, all of the building funds. There are all kinds of rules, things like
	[unsure].
	He refused to allow us the church at all and, see, coupled, refusing to do	9:51
	anything to enlarge the church [unsure: (0:10:01)] more money, unless I help. There is going to
	be donated labor, which means of course, the boss man will say, I donated my boys for Saturday.
	Means they’re going to work on Saturday to rebuild the church. This is, this is a, this is almost as
	worse: what is going on now is just about as worse is burning down a church. It’s really just, it’s
	a—it’s the type crime that’s been committed down here for centuries.
	Larry Rubin: And the crime that has been committed for centuries is essentially this: a whole people
	have been robbed of their right to determine their own lives. A young Negro man growing up in
	the South is faced with a situation where he soon learns that he is very little control over own his
	actions or his own destiny. He learns that all power is in the hands of the white man. He learns
	that there’s very little he can do, no matter how smart he is. No matter how motivated he is, there
	is very little he can do to advance himself. Any people overcome the system individually in the
	traditional way: in bars. The Negro family in the South is largely maternalistic. Is the woman
	who is the stable part of the family. She’s the one that takes care of the kids. Also she’s the one
	who mostly has steady employment. It’s a lot easier for a Negro woman to get a job as a maid
	and has steady work than for a Negro man to get work, let’s say in the fields. In order for
	Negroes to get the benefits from what I have previously called paternalism, they not only have to
	give up their claims to human dignity, they have to work with the whites against other Negroes
	getting human dignity. For example, twice in the South I was arrested on the complaints of
	Negroes. Once—this is a typical example in both cases—three of us were canvassing in
	Bronwood, Georgia and we went into a store that was managed by a Negro. As we were in the
	store the deputy sheriff came and he, he gruffly asked the store owner if we are bothering him,
	and he asked him, didn’t he want to press charges against us for trespassing.
	The Negro replied in the way he’s been taught to reply to the things white people say, Yassa boss. And all of	12:41
	this happens in a society which teaches that anyone can make it, which teaches the Great
	American dream of rugged individualism and of individual achievement. The closest
	resemblance that I could find the southern way of life as it applies to Negroes is a passage from a
	book called Survival in Auschwitz, which is written by a, a man who was an inmate in the
	Auschwitz concentration camp and who survived. He said that the Jews there didn’t hate the
	Nazis. They didn’t, they didn’t hate their situation. They simply accepted it because they knew
	that there was no hope. They, they felt they were being punished, they felt that they are being
	assigned a way of life, and once you give up all hope you simply adjust the best way you can to
	the situation. You try to live in any way possible. Negroes adjust by saying, Yassa boss. By
	arresting civil rights workers. In this context, going down to the courthouse and registering to
	vote takes on tremendous significance because it’s not only Negroes demanding their rights to
	citizens—and the rights of citizenship, but it is, it is Negroes claiming that they are humans. It is
	Negroes going to the courthouse and facing this white man, but most of the people that I met feel
	resentment, and understand that they are in fact not inferior. Charles Wingfield, the Negro high
	school student to whom I referred previously, visited New York and wrote a letter back to Lee
	County, which was read at one of our mass meetings.
	Unidentified man reading letter: dear Lee Countians…
	[end of audio]

Item Info

Title:

"Revolution in Georgia" radio show hosted by Larry Rubin, part 2

Date:

1962

Creator:

Rubin, Larry, 1942-

Description:

The audio in this recording has been digitally processed to reduce noise and enhance clarity. The unprocessed preservation file can be requested by contacting the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/franklin.

Subject:

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