"Revolution in Georgia" radio show hosted by Larry Rubin, parts 1 and 2

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	Freedom Singers: “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed on Freedom)” (0:00:02)	0:00
	Woke up this morning/ With my mind 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 prayed, I Prayed, I Prayed, Hallelujah	0:02
	Radio host: [singing continues in background] Revolution in Georgia: The Negro Struggle for Franchise. This is the first in a series of four programs produced for radio by Larry Rubin, a white Antioch student who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Southwest Georgia’s voter registration movement. Tonight, Rubin discusses the organization and function of the movement. Parts of this program you are about to hear were recorded in the field.	0:34
	Unidentified woman 1: My mother, my grandmother, and they all of them died in slaves. Now I’m fighting for my rights. Give me my rights, please.
	Larry Rubin: Southwest Georgia is peanuts, pecans, and cotton country. It’s in the blackbelt—so called either because the majority of people are Negro or because of the black earth. I’ve heard both reasons and both are true. Negroes outnumber whites more than two-to-one in Lee, Terrell, and Sumpter counties. All political and economic power is firmly controlled by whites. Before the Civil War, this was slave plantation country. Today, a lot of the land is still owned by the grandchildren of slave ow—holders, and worked by the grandchildren of the slaves.
	The special report published by the United States Civil Rights Commission in 1961 and entitled Voting deals at length with Lee County.
	The average Negro in Lee county has gone to school only 3.2 years; the average White, almost 10 years. The average White person earns 1,571 dollars annually; the average Negro, only 478 dollars a year. When I worked in Lee, I found out for a fact that a Negro field hand in Lee is often paid only fifteen dollars a week during the crop picking season, and as automatic pickers are replacing human labor, jobs are becoming even scarcer. The Commission’s Report says that out of close to the 4,000 Negroes living in Lee County, less than 29 were registered to vote in 1960, although most of the 2,000 whites were registered. Reverend Charles Sherrod, the head of the Southwest Georgia registration project, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told me that there were only two kinds of classes in Southwest Georgia: the owners, and the sharecroppers and day laborers. In other words, wealthy Whites and poor Negroes. There used to be some poor Whites, but most of them migrated to the factories. The first day I came to Southwest Georgia to work with the S.N.C.C. [says each letter] or SNCC [pronounces “Snick”], Reverend Sherrod drove me though Lee County and Terrell County. He showed me piles of rubble that had once been churches. They had been burned down by irate Whites because Negroes were using them for voter registration meetings. He showed me a field where a Negro body had turned up last summer riddled with bullets and castrated. In Lee Country, Sherrod showed me the tree where several Negroes had been lynched by a White mob. That tree stands as a reminder to Negroes of the White man’s power.	2:05
	Sherrod introduced me to the leaders of the local voter registration movement. They showed us the bullet holes in their walls. White night riders had shot into their houses. I was overwhelmed and frightened. I asked one of them if the police had caught the people who shot into the house. He laughed. He had contacted the sheriff the first time, but all the sheriff did was accuse him of shooting into his own house. The shooting involved the intimidation of people trying to register to vote. Justice Department officials and FBI agents investigated, but it seems that the only person they questioned were the homeowner himself, and as yet they have brought in so suspects.	4:09
	Still in Lee County, Sherrod turned the car off the black top road. Most of what passes for roads in Lee are just ruts cut between the pecan and cotton fields. Sherrod explained that most of the poor people lived back here in the fields. This is where SNCC begins its real work. We were visiting Mrs. Annie Raines, one of the first people in Lee County to organize her friends to register. Mrs. Raines is a good example of how the Negro people in the South are changing. She had been a nurse and a midwife, and everybody calls her “Mama Dolly.” She has helped most of the White women in the county give births. She was a “good nigger.” She had gained love of the Whites: they would give her their old clothes, and give her small loans, and sell her goods on credit; but as soon as she started to register, and began encouraging others to do likewise, she lost the Whites’ paternalistic affection. She lost all her nursing jobs and her credit. She became ostracized by a large part of the Negro community as well, because they had been warned by their White bosses to stay away from her. Her home was attacked by night riders.
	A former mayor of Dawson, in Terrell County has said: this is a feudalistic system, but I don’t know how, or if, it will be changed. And at first it might appear that it would be impossible to start any kind of movement at all in Lee County. It’s a large county in area, but its people are live widely scattered. There are no urban centers. During slavery days, there had been sporadic rebellions, and there had been many individuals from time to time who have challenged the segregation system. For instance, James Mayes, a Negro farmer, said that his fathers and brothers had tried to vote several years ago. They couldn’t because they were threatened with guns, but it wasn’t it until the summer of 1962 that a coordinated mass movement began. The Negroes of Lee and Terrell County were inspired by the mass anti-segregation demonstrations in the nearby city of Albany. They adopted methods used in the city to their own needs, and began a movement to improve the conditions of the schools and to register to vote. Here’s Dr. W.G. Anderson, a physician and past head of the Albany movement, exemplifying the explosion of Negro feeling:	6:19
	Unidentified Man 1: What happened to the Negroes down there in Southwest Georgia?	7:43
	Dr. W.G. Anderson: We just decided that we wasn’t going to take it anymore. We just decided that we going to stop going to the back door [soft chorus of agreement in background]. We going to stop bowing and scraping and a scratching where we don’t itch and grinning we [unsure: 0:07:59]. [soft chorus of “here, here” in the background]. This is a Negro who is not afraid any longer, as we say in that song, “we are not afraid,” we sing it from the bottom of our hearts because we really mean it. It a Negro who walks and holds his head up high, and as long as he holds his head up high he cannot be enslaved, because you have to bend down and bow down to become a slave. The [unsure: (0:08:22)] Negro have a dream. It’s a dream of being a first-class citizen, and his dream has been filled with nightmares from many years past. Many of us can remember [unsure: (0:08:35)] infliction of bodily harm and pain that has come to Negroes down through the generations. I can yet remember so vividly and it hasn’t been too long ago, the Negro who was shot down on the courthouse steps in Baker County, and was tied to the back of an automobile and dragged around. In this day and generation, I can remember there vividly, as any as last year, a Negro who was in jail in Bainbridge, Georgia because he said he said he would vote against Marvin Griffin if he was out of jail and could vote, was beaten and died. Last year’s nightmares are in our dreams, but we have, at the end of the dream, a shining light that says on it freedom, and we know that that road to freedom is a long and narrow road. We know that one side that there’s briars and bramble bushes and we know on the other side there are cottonmouth moccasins and diamondback rattle snakes. We know that segregation and discrimination will be over our heads every inch of the way, but we keep our eyes set on that little light at the end of the road that shines for freedom. This is the dream of the American Negro. We here in Terrell County—and the Negroes over in Dougherty County, and the Negroes in Lee County, and the Negroes in Baker County—have decided that aren’t going to take it any longer. They decided that they will not have their backs bent and [unsure: (0:10: 04)] anymore. They are determined to be free and nothing can turn them around, because the change has come from within, and once the change has started from within there is no turning back. The martyr has already mounted the cross. He has felt the pierce of spear in his side. He cannot come down off the cross. He will stay there. He will suffer, bleed, and die until he is free. I look forward to the day when I can exert myself as a man downtown and demand what is rightfully mine and get it without fear of any retaliation, without fear of my life being lost and my body being harmed. I look forward to the day when I don’t have to go around to the back door anymore. I will not have to be subjected to the humiliations and embarrassments of being called a boy, or why I can’t go into the zoo because my face is black. They can kick us out, but they can’t kick us down. They can burn the [unsure: (0:11:12)] down but where this one stood and greater [unsure: (0:11:14)] will stand. Because our cause is a righteous cause, and you can slow it down, but you can’t stop it. You can cause it to take a more devious route, and get off that straight path, but you can’t stop it. It’s going. Because the Negroes have a dream. A dream of being an American citizen.
	Larry Rubin: Our main job was to go from shack to shack and talk to people. We would talk about the importance of registering to vote. With the vote, Negroes for the first time since reconstruction could have a voice in how their government was run. We talked about their rights under federal law, about the fact that people both white and Negro all over the country were supporting them. We invited them to the weekly mass meetings. We explained to them how Negroes were getting together in nearby Albany, and how conditions were getting better there. Every Sunday, all SNCC workers would go to the various churches in the counties. We worshiped, we met knew people, and if the minister was friendly and invited us to talk, we spoke about a New South and about voter registration. Also, in the past, reports about police brutality, lynchings, and discrimination were suppressed by local authorities, but now, whenever incidents occurred, we got the story to the national press. We contacted the Justice department and the FBI also. We also started literacy classes. But as a white, my main job was to somehow work to break communication barriers that existed between Whites and Negroes for hundreds of years in the South. Most Negroes reacted to me as they had been taught to react to all white men—with a subservient “Yassa, boss.” I would talk to them about anything: about the weather, crops, local gossip, religion—anything to gain confidence. Sometimes we had a little transistor tape recorder with us. Some of the children we talked to got a kick out of it.	11:36
	While we were talking to some kids on a farm near Bronwood, Georgia, and making the next tape, the local deputy sheriff was parked outside the house. He arrested us later in the day.	13:36
	Unidentified man 2: What’s—What’s your name?
	[Landon]: Landon. I’ve got a sister.
	Unidentified man 2: You got a sister?
	Unidentified man 3: You’ve got a sister?
	Larry: You do?
	[Landon]: Yeah.
	Unidentified man 3: How about that?
	Unidentified man 2: Bigger than you are smaller than you?
	[Landon]: Small.
	Unidentified man 3: She’s nice?
	[Landon]: Yeah.
	Unidentified man 4: She is nice.
	Unidentified man 2: Alright.
	Unidentified man 4: Don’t you [unsure: (0:14:03)]
	[Landon]: Uh huh.
	Unidentified man 4: That’s good. That’s my boy. Alright.
	Unidentified man 2: Can I get [unsure: (0:14:08)]?
	[Landon]: Yeah.
	[general laughter]
	Unidentified man 2: Oh, Oh, Uh Oh! We’re getting somewhere, huh?
	[Landon]: Yeah.
	Unidentified woman 2: Say that’s her name, [unsure: (0:14:17)]
	[Landon]: That’s her name is [unsure: (0:14:19)]
	Unidentified woman 2: [inaudible]…has a little girl named Dara [?].
	[Landon]: And a little girl named [Dara].
	Unidentified man 2: [Dara]?
	[Landon]: Yeah.
	Unidentified woman 2: And his dad’s name is Jesse P…[?]
	[Landon]: And my dad’s name is Jesse P…[?]
	Unidentified woman 2: And your mother’s name.
	[Landon: [Theresa]?
	Larry Rubin: It was hard for me to overcome those characteristics in myself that caused these stereotype reactions in others. I discovered that I had many traits that were particularly white. And I had to had to have a full understanding of these before I could be affective. Traits such as paternalism, or over-reacting and trying to prove that I wasn’t like other white men. I had to overcome self-consciousness. I had to develop those traits that were basically human and universal, and give up many traits that I considered part of my individuality, but which only served to alienate myself from the people with whom I worked. All SNCC workers in Southwest Georgia live in homes of local residents.
	We had very little means of support outside of the food and shelter people gave us. Sometimes we receive small amounts from the main office of SNCC in Atlanta, but houses in the rural areas are so separated from each other, and automobiles are so necessary to our work, that many times we decided between food for ourselves or gasoline. And gas always came first. Sherrod assign John O’Neil, a graduate of Southern Illinois University and myself to work in Lee County. We lived with Mama Dolly, and many times we had to help her pick crops and do the farm work in order to get food for ourselves and help—ends meet. Very close feelings often develop between SNCC workers and those who take them in. Prathia Hall, a field secretary in Terrell County, who had gone home to Philadelphia for several months and was returning, tells her feelings.	15:28
	Prathia Hall: Today I was able to spend some time in Terrell County, and it was really like a real homecoming. And it’s the most wonderful thing that has happened to me two months because you are really my family, and—and this is our struggle together. And so, to know that you are well and that your spirit is high, and—aand that even though your, your bodies may be tired, your spirits aren’t—it means an awful lot.
	Larry Rubin: Of course, anybody who houses SNCC workers has to live in constant danger. All the houses that have taken SNCC workers in have been shot at. And there was a shotgun in every room at Mama Dolly’s, just in case. One of the most active men in Sumter County was Trim Porter, a day laborer and a deacon at a Sumter County church. He convinced his congregation to open a church for voter registration meetings. One day he came home from fishing and found that his house had burned to the ground. His two little girls had told him that a white man had come and done it. He and the girls were questioned by the local sheriff and by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and by the FBI. These agents said that the two girls had done it.
	Unidentified man 5: What’s Trim told him?
	Unidentified man 6: After he had gone to the store at about a quarter to eleven, upon coming back—he was driving his truck—and another man stopped him, and told his house was on fire. So he sped toward his house and found that the fire had been started, that the house was running, falling down to pieces. And he also found his kids in the ditch. They were scared, they were cold, so he couldn’t get anything out of them then. Took them to our friend’s home. Well after they had thawed out—you know, got them warm and everything—he, he questioned them. They said that a white man came to the house and told them to go down to the road, and they went down to the road. So this white man came in a blue car. The kids were questioned and everything, by both the GBI and FBI, and the GBI’s story is the kids did it. This man—the same man, Mr. Porter, was all spied upon a couple weeks ago, and, as he was driving along the road one day, had two white men in the car drive up—you know, drive beside him, and point that gun from their car to his. You see all this happened before [unsure: (0:19:44)], so, I mean you can put one and one together.
	Larry Rubin: Shortly after this happened, and Mr. Porter was staying with a friend, he called us and asked to talk to us. The sheriff had told him that he and Reverend Sherrod would get arrested if they went to another meeting in Sumter. Mr. Porter just wanted us to know he was planning to come to the meeting and hear Sherrod.
	Friend of Mr. Porter: Well there’s a rumor out that tomorrow night at the meeting in Sumter County that a Mr. Trim Porter, who’s a d—eldest deacon at that Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, is to be arrested if he comes to our meeting—Along with me. I received a letter—a telephone call from my mother say that my grandmother is ill. I would have gone Tuesday. My grandmother is near death. Well, if they just hadn’t gotten out that rumor, that if I didn’t—that if I came to that church then I’d be arrested, I would have gone Tuesday. But since they said that, I’ll be prepared to go.
	Larry Rubin: When we started work in Lee and Sumter Counties, we received threatening phone calls, our car was followed everywhere we went—sometimes it was with teenage kids and sometimes it was by the Sheriff, and sometime by elderly men with guns.

	00:21:15.000 --> 00:24:39.000
	The first thing we did when we moved into a new small town, was just to walk down the main street together, to try to show people that we were operating strictly in the open and not as a secret group like all newspapers had said. The first town that I worked in was Bronwood. It had only one main street. It looked like one of those towns you see in a cowboy movie, with high wooden sidewalks with an awning that stretched from one end of the street to the other. We walked down the street and decided to get a coke from a gas station on the other side. There were three of us. As we walked across the street, a group of men from the gas station were coming towards us. They’re the men who are found in every southern gas station: they seem to spend half their lives there. One man tried to shove us to try to provoke a fight. It’s later turned out that he was a mayor of the town, and several days later he issued a warrant for our arrest claiming that we trespassed on a corner of the field he owned. He owned most of the fields in the town. He came towards us and told us not to come a station. We politely turned around to go back across the street where another two men stood glaring at us with, with a hatred that I, I’ve never seen before. We walked toward them not looking at them because we didn’t want to start a fight. We simply walked from the from which we had came. They shouted after us, yelling curses like, “you red S.O.B.s.” I—I can’t explain what fear is like except it’s a hard, tight feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it became a part of life. Wherever we went, we were constantly harassed by the police. In Albany I was picked up twice on suspicion of stealing the car I was driving. It takes several hours for the police to prove for their own satisfaction that the car had not been stolen, but in the meantime, they let you sweat it out, and ask you questions about the next move the voter registration movement will take. In Dawson, in Terrell County, there’s a corner where a new stop sign had been put up by the city, but they obviously forgot to take the old one down, so there are two stop signs, one about five feet from the other. If a person working for the movement doesn’t stop twice he’s likely to be slapped in jail with a fine. One night, the home of Caroline Daniels, a Negro in Dawson, was shot into by whites. Everybody in Dawson knew that she was housing white SNCC workers. Jack Chatfield was standing in the living room and got shot in the arm. He showed me the shirt that he was wearing. The holes were just a fraction of an inch from his chest. Jack had just come to Terrell. In fact, it—this was the first time that he’d ever been in the South, and he had been in Dawson only forty-five minutes when it happened. The police were called to help, but listen to Jack describe their attitude when they drove him and another SNCC worker to the police station for questioning.

	00:24:39.000 --> 00:27:06.000
	He also said that the doctor, who, who had been called in to treat them, threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave Terrell.
	Jack Chatfield: [unsure: (0:24:48)] on the night, the night of the shooting, they thought it was my fault. [unsure: (0:24:55)] They stuck Ralph in the prison there. The funny thing was, you know, when, when they stopped us they frisked us for weapons. They didn’t care that I’d been shot.
	Larry Rubin: Our project is the only one in the Deep South that uses whites. For part of the six months that I worked there, I was the on—White working in the rural counties. This is a very big experiment. Throughout the South, Negroes engaged in the Civil Rights Movement are chastised as communists, but in Southwest Georgia this, this is necessary. All the press does is to indicate that Whites and Negroes are living together. To the Whites with whom I came into contact, this meant something lewd, dirty, and filthy. A good example is something a gas station attendant once told me when I told him I was working with the voter registration movement. He, he—his face turned read and he, he glared at me, “ah you’re the one that’s a—sleeping with the n-niggers.” When the movement first moved into Terrell, all the local has to do was to public a—publish a picture of a Negro worker standing beside a White female worker. The next day several churches were bombed. When Reverend Sherrod and two other SNCC workers first came to Southwest Georgia, they intended to begin the voter registration movement in Terrell. It’s called “Turbo Terrell” by local residents, and its police authorities had the reputation of being one of the most oppressive; however, Terrell Country Negro leaders are very cold to the movement. Most of the Negro ministers would not let SNCC use their churches to hold voter registration meetings. Other leader spread rumors about SNCC workers. Sherrod came to the conclusion that the Negro community of Terrell was not yet ready to be a pilot voter registration project. They had to see successes elsewhere first.
	So SNCC moved from rural Terrell County to the nearby, relatively larger city of Albany. As a result of anti-segregation demonstrations organized and carried out by the Negro use of Albany, working with SNCC workers, the adult community was moved, and organized the Albany movement, headed by W.G. Anderson, a physician. The movement spread back to the rural areas, and residents organized their own movements in Terrell and Lee Counties. In Lee, a high school student, Charles Wingfield had been expelled for presenting to school officials several demands for improvements in the schools, and for encouraging people to register. Lee County Negroes organized a boycott of the schools, keeping your children home and demanding that [Wingfield?] be reinstated and his demands be met. In the midst of this boycott, several residents invited SNCC workers to Lee County.	27:06
	Unidentified Woman 3: Who’s worried about the SNCC workers?
	Unidentified Woman: I don’t think I have met a more dedicated group since I’ve been here these thirty years. First thing when they came into Albany and since my husband and I went to the first of several meetings, and I knew then that I was going to fix this thing. I haven’t regretted it. (0:28:31)
	Larry Rubin: A group of Lee County teenagers formed a committee and when after school to ask people to register. We helped them with training sessions. Mama Dolly and other elderly women formed their own groups. Canvassing is hard, frustrating work. Many people are simply afraid to let you in. They won’t listen. Their boss may have warned them not to. The would close the door in our faces and hope that ‘Mr. Charley’—a name for any boss—wouldn’t find out that we came. But many would stare out of the cracks between the boards in their walls until we were gone. Once the voter registration movement gained strength in Lee and Terrell, county officials closed the registration offices all but one day each week, and they were open only during hours that most people worked. A lady from Terrell tells what it’s like to canvass. She insists that she’s not a freedom rider, an outsider—she lives in Terrell.	28:31
	Woman from Terrell: I’ve been in here, Terrell. I’ve been here [unsure: (0:29:4)]. And I’ve been asking people about freedom. Everybody in Terrell County’s afraid to talk about freedom. [unsure: (0:29:51-54)]. I went up to peoples’ houses and asked them, you know. They said, you one of them freedom riders. They said, you come here from [unsure: (30:00)]. I said, no. I said I’m not a freedom rider. I said I’m in here trying to do the word of God, trying to work for the Lord. I’m not a free—I, I’m trying to hold up and get freedom for myself. The people in Terrell County need to wake up.
	Larry Rubin: Reverend Wells is a minister of several country churches. He preaches voter registration from the pulpit.
	Reverend Wells: Something keeps telling me that I won’t let go of. It’s to get these people down to the polls one-by-one or two-by-two. I will hope the rest is [audio static and voice fades: (0:30:43)] getting these people down today…I know that you can say it’s hard, almost impossible, but in the face of [unsure: (0:30:59)] it must be done.
	Larry Rubin: But despite violence, and despite isolation from their friends, the people of the Lee County movement have registered many voters. And registering isn’t simple: it means facing that white registrar; it means going up to the court house; it means daring to say that it is valid for you to be concerned about your government and how it should be run. It is a first step toward regaining dignity and manhood. The movement in Southwest Georgia is also running Negro candidates for office for the first time since Reconstruction. It has started literacy classes and is beginning to work on a plan whereby county Negroes can pool their meager financial resources. Mass meetings are held in each county each week. Here the people of the counties get together, sing, and share their fears and victories, and learn about registering to vote.
	Singing at Mass Meeting: Going to let my freedom in/ let my freedom in, one of these days/ we’re going to eat at the freedom table/ oh, we’re going to eat at the freedom table, one of these days/ hallelujah/ we’re going to eat at the freedom table/ eat at the freedom table one of these days/ hallelujah	32:06
	[audio clip change]
	Singing at Mass Meeting: ...guide my feet, while I run this race/ oh, I don’t want to run this race in vain.
	Larry Rubin: [singing fades to background] This is a mass meeting in Terrell County. It is in a tent on the same site where a church once stood. The church was burned down last summer. The people of the county are huddled around a small Carson stove. They look nervously at the tent opening every time there is a noise outside. Twice the county sheriff has broken up the meeting, but they have faith that they shall overcome. [singing resumes in volume]
	Freedom Singers: …run this race in vain/ guide my heart while I run this race/ guide my heart while I run this race/ oh, guide my heart while I run this race/ oh I don’t want to run this race in vain.
	Reverend Wells: Let us bow our heads and start a prayer. O gracious King as they come together, we pray that Thou will bless our coming together. Bless this people, pray to give us strength, give us courage to carry on, to fight on and on until the victory is won. This we ask in the name of our Son Christ Jesus. Amen. At this time, I would like to say, welcome everybody to the home of the brave. I think I used that name to call what we people in Terrell County went through in order get the few people we have got registered to vote. [shout of Amen! In the background] Because that’s our primary objective, it’s very hard. (0:34:59) Although it shouldn’t be, but it’s very hard.
	[cut to different clip]
	Unidentified man 7: Well this was an outgrowth of the Albany movement, but meeting was fired after that because the child was one of the children who attempted to integrate the white high school in Albany. All of them walked out. It was just wonderful to see that sort of spirit on that sort of unanimity, and it seems to me, when you really want something you believe in it you’ll get up everything to try and get it. So I hope that will fight with that kind spirit.
	[cut to different clip]
	Unidentified Woman 4: I’ll tell you what we need to do. We need to go on over here to Dawson and fall out on our knees and ask God to have mercy like he did in Albany. That same God in Albany is over here now.
	[cut to different clip]	35:31
	Unidentified woman 5: You are may remember that we were all for the exercise a while back when seven people who had been picketing very peacefully in the middle of Albany in connection with asking people not to buy downtown or Midtown, because business, were arrested and thrown in jail. After they are bonded out, they went to Washington and picketed the Department of Justice with signs that read, among other things, “we can pick it here, why not in Albany, Georgia?” Which was a very good question.
	[cut to different clip]
	Unidentified woman 6: We shall overcome. We shall overcome some day, deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome, someday. Would you stand joined hands right over left and sing with us, “We Shall Over Come.”
	Freedom Singers: We shall overcome/ Oh, Lord we shall overcome/ My Lord, we shall overcome/ Someday/ Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe/ We shall overcome, someday/ We are not afraid/ We are not afraid/ My Lord, [singing fades out] (0:37:36)
	Radio Host: Revolution in Georgia: The Negro Struggle for Franchise. This has been the first in a series of four programs producer radio by Larry Rubin, a white Antioch student, who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Southwest Georgia’s voter registration movement. Tonight, Rubin discussed the organization and function of the movement. Next week at this time the series continues with the second program entitled “Roots of Discontent,” in which Rubin traces the origins of the conflict. The songs “Woke Up this Morning” and “We Shall Overcome” were sung by the freedom singers.
	[singing resumes from background]
	Freedom Singers: The truth will make us free/ My Lord, the truth will make us free/ My Lord, the truth will make us free, Some Day/ Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe/ We shall overcome.

	Freedom Singers: Woke up this morning/ With my mind 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	0:00
	Radio host: [singing continues in background] Revolution in Georgia: The Negro 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.
	But 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 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.	2:09
	Charles Wingfield: Its always dangerous when a Negro come down to register because he has a habit of saying wait towards me. You know when, a time that I went down, he seemed that something was making him very uncomfortable, just the idea of him coming down there, you know?
	Larry Rubin: That’s the way, that’s the way it seemed today?
	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.	4:48
	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. That he can commit such dastardly crimes, and be given a license to do it, the Sheriff, like Johnson 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	7:36
	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 he refused to give them a tile floor. He refused to allow us the church at all and, see, coupled, refusing to do anything to enlarge the church is the fact that they won’t take any more money, outside 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 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.	10:16
	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 as 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.	13:48
	Unidentified man reading letter: Dear Lee Countians, you are living in a society where the color from man’s skin controls his activities. It limits his friends and confines him to a particular area in which he is to live, and in most cases, he is isolated in the worst living area. It forbids him to go to the part in places in the city or town in which he lives. It keeps one from getting some of the better jobs in matter how great his abilities are to do the job. And as a result of this it robs us of all our constitutional rights. I went to New York a few days ago [unsure: (15:18)] New York is wonderful but somehow the city didn’t mean much to me, and yet I spent almost all the time I was there walking around the streets, watching the people and wondering about them. To me they did not seem terribly offended, millions of people riding around the same buses and subways without thinking about who they were sitting next to. People walking the streets, bumping into each other. I got sheer pleasure going into coffee shops, lunch counters seeing all kinds and shapes of people, meeting and talking. We were sitting there side-by-side perfectly calm. There is no fuss or disturbance. I think of you all the time and miss you, miss all of you terribly. There is no place like home. Yours in the struggle, Charlie.
	Larry Rubin: when I describe my experiences too many people in the North, especially well-meaning white people, ofttimes there’s a great deal of, almost anger, at the fact that I use terms ‘white man’ and ‘Negro’ so much, but the point I’m trying to get across is that people in the South think in terms of the black race and the white race.
	The Negroes express all their frustrations at having no jobs, and having poor living conditions in terms of their resentment towards white people. James Baldwin tells audiences this, this joke about, about how Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by Indians and the Lone Ranger asked Tonto, what should we do? And Tonto turns to him and says, what do you mean we, white man? Baldwin is, is trying to get across that, that white liberals shouldn’t assume that the Negro is with him. I think the Negro’s attitude towards the white, and especially how he feels the white feels towards Negroes, I think this is best expressed in a story that Dr. Anderson told.	16:43
	Dr. W.G. Anderson: to my colored friends had to you honorary-colored folks, a story that was told to me by a little colored boy who decided that he wanted to see what it would be like to be white for just a little while, and so he went home one evening and got down in the basement got into his daddy’s Lyme and he powdered himself all over and he ran upstairs, and he said, mommy, mommy look at me I’m a white boy! And she took him down and tanned his hide good, and when his daddy came home, mommy told daddy, and daddy took him into the basement and tanned his hide good again! He went upstairs in his mama asked him, will how was it to be white? He said, while I see what it’s all about: I was white for 15 minutes and I hate to Negroes already. [laughter]
	Larry Rubin: when I first arrived, I tried to talk to many rural Negroes about registering to vote, but they just responded to me the way experience had taught them to respond to all white men, with a subservient, Yassa boss. I didn’t understand at that time. I became very angry and irritated and frustrated, but then I was forced to reevaluate myself.
	It, it’s very hard to explain, but I was acting like a white man: I was stiffly self-conscious and seem to have the attitude that I had come from above to bring freedom. This is much more subtle than a feeling of racial supremacy, but is the result of 300 years of cultural barriers. Breaking down these barriers is a part of the movement also. I had to cease being white and start being human. After a while begin to understand my role. First of all, it was to be the Negroes white men. As an example, at many mass meetings the Rev. Charles Sherrod, who was the head of the project, would bring me up to the front of the church and shake my hand, and he would tell the people, look, here’s a white person who is shaking the hand of a Negro. I have to, I had to be the brunt of frustrations and anger, which were directed at all white people. In a way this was very dehumanizing because this role did not recognize my own individuality. I was simply a white skin to a large extent. I had to find fulfillment in other than in activity that would tend to build my ego. I like to spend the last part of this, of this evening discussing very briefly of the divisions that exists within the Negro community in which I worked. Essentially there are two divisions: the middle-class professionals, who are just teachers a few ordained ministers and very few principals, and one or two white, uh—one or two businessman, and most people who are rural county farmers.	19:26
	In the past, these rural people look to the professionals in the principals to be there leaders. But when the movement has come, it has shown great division between the two groups. The erstwhile leaders to a large extent don’t support the movement. A good example of this, our Negro public school principals who work for white boards of directors – white boards of supervisors. John O’Neill tells what happens when he tried to go to high school to talk to some of the students by registering to vote.	21:56
	John O’Neal: we went over to see the principal of Lee County training school to ask him if we could, you know, if he had a list of the names of the kids in Lee County schools who are old enough to vote, and I—if we could walk around and talk to some of the kids that are in school, and try to get them to go down and register. I said, this is the place that most of them come together, you know and, we didn’t expect to get a good answer from him, a positive answer but we thought we go and see anyway, and it took about 20 minutes to say no. And he said it in about five or 10 different ways, and he stopped every time someone’s footsteps were heard in the hall, you know, he’d stop and people around the corner, and say what, wait a minute I want to see if that’s Mr. Charlie. Never can tell when he’s going to come through here.
	Larry Rubin: the same principal that John spoke about outlaw the school’s PTA when the parents began discussing voter registration in PTA meetings.
	But the situation is changing greatly. I was at church service once when this principal came to talk. He, he spoke about various school activities and invited the parents to come even though there was no PTA. Well one of the parents and the service got up and roundly criticized the principal for outlawing the PTA and for outlawing voter registration activities. He got a routing applause from everyone in the audience, and the principle sort of snuck out the back door before the service was over in order to avoid speaking to the parents. The ministers are beginning to take a leading role in the movement also. For years ministers have been teaching Negroes are not supposed to drink, and supposed to be respectful of white people, and they’re supposed to work hard, and they’re supposed to stay away from trouble, and that if they’re good here on earth that though get the rewards after they die. Now many people are criticizing the same ministers for preaching up high in the sky type philosophy. In fact, the whole area of religion is central to the movement, and many ministers are playing leading parts. This area is so important that next week I will devote my whole evening’s discussion to this question of the religious revolution.	23:44
	Radio host: Revolution in Georgia: The Negro Struggle for Franchise was produced for radio by Larry Rubin, a white Antioch student who work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Southwest George’s voter registration movement. Parts of this program that you are about to hear were recorded in the field.
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