>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Guha Shankar: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm not Betsy Peterson, Director of the American Folklife Center Library, but I'm here to convey her greetings, pass along her apologies to you and our guests for her unavoidable absence, competing meetings, and welcome old faces and new friends to the Center's public program series Many Paths to Freedom: Looking Back, Looking Ahead at the Long Civil Rights Movement. My name is Guha Shankar. I'm a Folklife Specialist here at the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, and Project Director on the Library's side for the joint Library of Congress/Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultures Civil Rights History Project. More about that in a second. Before I introduce our special guests for the day I want to acknowledge and give all thanks to our college and other library divisions who helped pull this program together by providing collections materials, notably the Prints and Photographs Division and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library [NAVCC], Motion Picture, Broadcast, Recorded Sound represented by our colleague Alan Gevinson here. The NAVCC is also one of the cosponsors of the program for today along with the Library's chapters of -- Chapter of Blacks in Government. We also have a couple of external organizations who are working with us to program this series, and I'd like to call attention to them and thank them for their help. One of those organizations is the SNCC Legacy Project, Courtland Cox, Sharlene Kranz head the SNCC Legacy Project endeavor. They've been very helpful and amazingly at providing -- provided amazing insights in helping program this series. And as for the other institution, we at the Library want to thank our major partners the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture with whom we have been working over the last five years on the congressionally-mandated collecting initiative, the Civil Rights History Project. The Project is a joint effort between the National Museum and the National Library to record the memories of the experiences of men and women who engaged in the struggle for African-American freedom, otherwise known more broadly as the Civil Rights Movement. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Lonnie Bunch and the NMAAHC staff including Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Rex Ellis, Elaine Nichols, Carlos Bustamante, Dorey Butter, Deirdre Cross, Esther Washington, and others. Dozens of videos -- video recordings of interviews of Movement veterans are already available for streaming, accessed by worldwide audiences through the online portal for the Project. We had sort of a soft launch, so it's a little under wraps at the moment. If you haven't already done so bookmark our Website, become a friend on Facebook, subscribe to our RSS feeds, Twitter, whatever you do with social media, and you'll be informed of the hard launch which will take place in May and will also commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964. That's a very special program we have here in May, and you should keep an eye out for it. There are other such events in the works along the -- across the length and breadth of the Library. In just a couple months on June 19th our colleagues in the Interpretive Programs Office -- and I see Kim Curry, Betsy Miller here, right -- will launch a major exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which will resonate with the -- some of the materials which will be presented here today. The exhibit is called The Long Road to Freedom and will feature unique items from divisions across the Library along with materials from several AFC collections. Obviously not every object, photo, video, manuscript that is housed at the Library will make it out into public view either at the exhibition or online, so please contact the divisions that I have mentioned here today and those you will see during the exhibition. Make appointments to visit our reading rooms, and curator reference staff will guide you to a wealth of historical and cultural information about the freedom struggle. Okay, enough of the paid party political announcement. Present business, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our two guest scholars for the day, Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Thomas Jackson. Hasan Kwame Jeffries is Associate Professor in the History Department at Ohio State University. He specializes in 20th Century African-American History and has expertise in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. His 2010 book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt won the 2010 Clinton Jackson Coley Award for the best book on local history from the Alabama Historical Association. And if you look right behind you -- everybody look right behind you -- there's a book stand set up conveniently with his book. Right, so that's -- I'm shilling for Hasan because he's going to bring me a cup of coffee later on. And he is one of the research scholars and interviewers also, we're proud to say, for the Civil Rights History Project sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture. It gives me great pleasure to welcome our first speaker who is Thomas F. Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UNC Greensboro and a 2013 to 2014 Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville, Virginia. His forthcoming book investigates the revolution of 1963, detailing the local struggles for rights and justice in communities across the south in that critical period for black freedom struggle. His previous publications include From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice . You've already turned around, so you know where to locate the book -- locate the stand, but again, his book is back there as well. If you have to buy one go ahead and buy two. It'll be a Christmas present for somebody. And the book, by the way, won the 2007 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award of the Organization of American Historians. I'll be back up here at the termination of their talk to engage in a small cross-conversation with them. And in the meantime please enjoy and welcome Thomas F. Jackson. [ Applause ] >> Thomas Jackson: Thank you so much for coming. Heartfelt thanks to Guha Shankar, and Alan Gevinson, and everybody here at the Library for inviting, and supporting us, and providing with such wonderful material from the Library's rich holdings. And thanks also to Hasan for -- for joining in this. I want to begin with then-SNCC Chairman, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, now Congressman John Lewis as he spoke to the March on Washington in August 1963. More important than how much he was forced to tone this down I think is how Lewis connected the national and the local as did no other speech that day. He spoke for poor and working-class people whose needs for economic security and civil liberties protections were not being met. They might have been better met under existing law, but he argued they were not well addressed by John Kennedy's recently introduced Civil Rights Bill. A bit of context: rights workers in the poor black majority counties of the Deep South faced a dual challenge, really. How do you persuade local people to overcome fear, go down to the courthouse, apply for the privilege of registering to vote? Few of them could immediately succeed, many knew they would not pass the literacy test. More and more in the revolution of '63 they went anyway, where there might be photographs, their names published in the newspaper. They risked being cut off from county-administered federal food assistance. They risked being fired, evicted, jailed, beaten, or killed. And all of this happened. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, only the most famous perhaps, here pictured at Hattiesburg Freedom Day the next year was fired, evicted, shot at in her first place of refuge, and later beaten in a Winona prison cell. Repression, intimidation, violence could suppress people, but at a certain point it could also galvanize them. So SNCC faced a related national challenge, how do you make less famous people working in more remote places visible in a way Martin Luther King and the citizenry of Birmingham had done back in May when news of Bull Connor's savagery was broadcast around the world and President Kennedy sent in federal troops? They tried everything. They invited clergy, celebrities, northern white students, and especially reporters and photographers because all these people might restrain local police and vigilantes and might open up a space for citizenship. They also used every means to speak truth to power in a language that might be heard, hence John Lewis' speech to the March on Washington. In a militant language some labeled extremist at the time. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, an organizer of the March, called it the one speech of true significance that day. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> [video] John Lewis: We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, for they're receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in their fields working for less than $3 a day, 12 hours a day. While we stand here there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. Our brother James Farmer along with many others is also in jail. We come here today with a great sense of misgiving. It is true that we support the administration's Civil Rights Bill. We support it with great reservation, however. Unless -- unless Title III is put in this bill, there's nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstration. [ Applause ] In its present form this bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear of a police state. It will not protect the hundreds and thousands of people that have been arrested upon trumped charges. What about the three young men, SNCC field secretaries in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest? As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of people who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama, and Georgia who are qualified to vote, but lack of sixth-grade education. One man, one vote is the African cry. It is ours too. It must be ours. [ Applause ] >> We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecropper who was put off of his farm because he dared to register to vote. We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year. We must have a good FEPC bill. [ Applause ] >> My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. [end video] >> Thomas Jackson: All right, low wages or no wages at all. The equality of a maid. One man one vote is the African cry; it is ours, too. It must be ours. Where is the federal protection, Title III, for citizens exercising their rights? I've read quite a bit and talked to people, field reports, publicity, recordings from this period, and three themes emerge from these discussions powerfully. Poverty and unequal incomes impose cruel limits on citizenship. Voting rights might and should be a ticket to freedom, power, and opportunity. The Department of Justice already has and should have clearer authority to restrain, enjoin, and prosecute officials and vigilantes violating civil rights. Without Title III protection, as Hasan will discuss, they were increasingly prepared to protect themselves. So what was wrong about the most sweeping piece of civil rights legislation in the century? One man, one vote, Title One eliminated or outlawed discrimination in the application of literacy tests, uniform procedures without respect to race. No trivial disqualifications for somebody who misspelled something or mispronounced something. And finally here the presumption that somebody with a sixth-grade education in public or private school has sufficient literacy and intelligence to vote, at least in federal elections. Now SNCC Executive Director James Foreman spoke powerfully and made an answer very clear as the National Education Television Broadcast for Freedom Now, which I'll show you makes clear. It's a discussion. This is actually part of a wonderful project, a collaboration between the Library of Congress, WGBH, WNET, Indiana University to catalog and make available dozens, maybe hundreds, of National Education Television programs from local stations across the country, many of them probed racial issues in ways the newspapers and the networks simply did not. So this is a recently digitized, and I'm very grateful to be able to see this. The moderator is Kenneth B. Clark. And you'll see James Foreman, Martin Luther King, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. And that link didn't work. And that one didn't, either. No problem. >> There we go. Foreman is asked -- answering the question why he is coming to the March on Washington, and part is to support Title II of the legislation which makes illegal discrimination in places of public accommodation, the lunch counters, theaters, restaurants. And that's how he's starting off, that's an important part. But he said that's -- that's really not enough. >> [video] Kenneth B. Clark: The men who have come here today to sit down and talk with us are the members of the Negro community who have assumed the risk of transforming the American ideal into reality. These men, sometimes labeled the Big Five, are the captains of five of the most vigorous organizations, different in their history, their methods, and their means, but united in their purpose. They lead the battle for freedom now. James Foreman, does this hold for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, too? >> James Foreman: Well, yes. We'll be there. I think it's important that the March go off because there is legislation which many people have gone to jail for the substance, that is the lunch counter demonstrations throughout the South, have to be sort of brought to some climax, and it could be done in this public accommodations bill which is before the Congress. I, of course, just left the Delta and a lot of poor people of there. People who make $2 and a quarter a day for 12 hours of work. And so some legislation has to come out of the Congress of the United States to deal with these problems. >> Kenneth B. Clark: Gentlemen -- >> James Foreman: But I think that there are two areas that should be covered you know and that's to question the voting bill. I don't see why we can't have universal suffrage for all Negros. I mean, I really don't see why it has to be just a sixth-grade education level because that's a device. And I think we were talking beforehand about how many people would be covered -- >> Kenneth B. Clark: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is putting a great deal of its effort on voting, isn't it? >> James Foreman: Yeah, well, we just -- yeah. We have a great program now, and I think in the Delta of Mississippi, but Roy might want to amplify on just how many people would be covered by a sixth-grade education. >> Roy Wilkins: Well, the literacy test bill -- >> James Foreman: Yes. >> Roy Wilkins: -- you know we agreed -- well, we estimated. We couldn't -- that not more than 100,000 Negros would be added to the rolls under the literacy test. This is -- Martin you remarked on the number of people -- >> Martin Luther King: Yes. >> Roy Wilkins: -- who didn't have a sixth-grade education in one -- >> Martin Luther King: That's right. >> Roy Wilkins: -- state for -- >> Martin Luther King: Yeah. >> Roy Wilkins: -- 58% I think it was in Louisiana? >> Martin Luther King: In Louisiana. That's right. >> Kenneth B. Clark: May I get one thing clear? Are you saying that the President's Civil Rights package does have a limitation on sixth-grade -- >> James Foreman: Yeah, that's right >> Martin Luther King: Yeah. >> James Foreman: And let me tell you -- we testified before the House and -- and suggested universal suffrage. I mean, there's just no reason why a person is not 21, and he can't vote. He can go into the Army whether he can read or write. >> Martin Luther King: Yeah, that's right. >> James Foreman: So why shouldn't he be able to vote? >> Martin Luther King: And this is no sign that the person isn't intelligent, that the person doesn't have some basic intelligence. But because of discrimination and other conditions many of these people haven't had an opportunity to get an education, and I think they should have the right to vote. And this is very basic. >> James Foreman: The distance from which we have to come is so great. I mean you know if you talk about a sixth-grade education is the government going to see that in Mississippi the families get more than $2 and a quarter a day so that the child will not have to come out of school to help raise money to feed the other children? >> Martin Luther King: That's right. >> James Foreman: See, this is a problem. So I think you ought to begin with just universal suffrage. [end video] >> Thomas Jackson: This is not a new argument by the way. If you study reconstruction a century -- century earlier indeed you can't deny somebody a sixth-grade education and then deny her the right to vote on the basis of the first denial. We made that case for 100 years plus. Discrimination in the registration office, poverty, vulnerability to economic reprisal, they're all powerful obstacles, and so is violence. And SNCC knew the media was obsessed with violence. And they had plenty of that to report as the next slides demonstrate. They had to dig their own channels of communication, however, because Martin Luther King and Birmingham kind of defined at this point what protest was and meant. Not entirely; you'll see. But through pamphlets, Jack Minnis, "A Chronology of Violence and Intimidation in Mississippi since 1963," was something they put together in Atlanta, and it details the shooting of Jimmy Travis who collapsed in Bob Moses' lap when Bob Moses slammed on the brakes on February 28th, shooting him in the neck. The other one is Oscar Chase on Hattiesburg Freedom Day later. >> Fire bombing in the Greenwood Office March 24th, 1963. Arrest of SNCC leadership and organizers March 27th. The list goes on and on. Incidentally, they did not arrest comedian Dick Gregory, knowing that would make too much publicity, even though he was taunting the cops with his inimicable humor. Greenwood briefly gets front-page coverage in the -- in the nation's newspaper when police dogs start biting marchers on March 28th. That same days Senator Jacob Javits of New York introduced a civil rights bill with a strong Title III, giving the Attorney General authority to intervene on his own initiative to protect rights violation, any civil rights violation. Greenwood stayed newsworthy, but Birmingham increasingly stole the headlines and became, indeed, global news. The Birmingham demonstrations and the wave of about three -- 503 protests that crested in May and June convinced the administration that it was time to submit legislation, that no longer could the courts or executive action take care of the problem and keep Negros off the streets. And their focus, the strongest part, was Title II, on public accommodations because Burke Marshall had been involved in the Birmingham negotiations. He was Civil Rights Division Head, and in an Oval Office meeting that is recorded and available for download from the Miller Center up at University of Virginia, Presidential Recordings Project, Burke Marshall explains on May 20th to Bobby and Jack Kennedy just why Title II ought to be the centerpiece, because this business of going in and -- and eating at a lunch counter is the one thing that makes all Negros, regardless of age, maddest. I've got a little montage -- audio montage from those tapes that I'll play for you. Begins with Bobby Kennedy saying, "Yeah, Title II is the centerpiece. And I'm not sure about Senator Javits' Title III, authority for the Attorney General to prosecute anybody." >> [audio] Robert Kennedy Now what would be helpful -- if we get that voting bill by it would be helpful to get the public accommodations bill by. And it would be helpful if we get the school bill by. And it would be very unhelpful if we get >> section -- Title III by because if we think we have trouble now, if we >> get Title III by, well, we just -- >> Burke Marshall: Among other things, that -- that involves the right to demonstrate. >> President Kennedy: Title III is the right of the Justice Department to initiate protection for all rights -- all constitutional rights. >> Burke Marshall: You see, that includes right to demonstrate. It includes the right to go to the swimming pool. It includes Rockwell's right to demonstrate as well as Martin Luther King's. >> President Kennedy: You mean, every school district in the country you would have to initiate a suit..? >> Robert Kennedy: and every swimming pool. >> [Inaudible] maybe in the Burke Marshall: Schools in the north as well as the south. >> President Kennedy: I don't care so much about Title III. I don't know. Title III -- >> Burke Marshall: Title III's significance is more to us than -- >> President Kennedy: I agree. Accommodations thing would be big -- could be a big story. Now what are we going to do about education? [end audio clip] >> Thomas Jackson: What are we going to do about education? That's the flavor of the conversation. They do not want that authority. It's reintroduced in Senate subcommittee -- or House subcommittee, Judiciary Subcommittee Number Five after the Birmingham church bombing, early October, giving the Attorney General injunctive power to bring temporary injunctions against and restraining orders against local police. Robert Kennedy appears before the full committee opposing it successfully saying it would create a national police force. It's too much power. That's a kind of a slippery slope argument that many segregationists were actually making at the time. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is livid that this thing was in the subcommittee bill and is no longer in the House bill, and too late inaugurates Roy Wilkins, a national campaign to educate people to the need for it. This is from the manuscript division of the Library of Congress' NAACP collections. There are several like this, but I chose this one because it's especially vivid about the -- the brutality that is happening across the country against many people, but especially Negro women and children, victims of outrageous police action. So SNCC relentlessly tries to get Justice Department protection under existing law, whites trash their office on August 29. And a technique they had learned to do was that you know violence or jailing didn't necessarily make news, but if you sent a telegram to Washington that would be newsworthy. That's something Julian Bond recently explained to me. And Chuck McDew sends a telegram demanding federal marshals at that point. They had to get very creative. They cut a record with the help of Guy Carawan, two years later selling it through Folkways, a recording of the Greenwood movement in March and April. Little background, in 1962 the county cut off commodity food aid as a scatter-shot reprisal against the voter registration drive. SNCC and its northern allies organized a massive food drive to keep these people from starving. Now we've seen some of the rash of shootings and attacks on the voter registration office and the organizers. That galvanized SNCC and the local people to focus all-out on Greenwood and build from there. We haven't yet heard, though, from the organizers and the local people who challenged the system. All -- all the themes of my talk come together in this one recording. You'll begin hearing Bob Moses, SNC project director for Mississippi, several citizens including Fannie Lou Hamer and end up with comedian Dick Gregory questioning why Kennedy could project American power into West Berlin and Vietnam but not in Mississippi. >> [audio] Bob Moses: The coming of the new year brought a coming of a new plateau in the voter registration project in Greenwood. The food and clothing drive was organized around the country, and shipped into Greenwood. And thousands of people turned out from the plantations and in town to stand in line, to wait in the cold to get a box of food to take it home to a family of eight, 10 children who were literally starving. >> Unidentified female: We don't have enough money to buy clothes or food for our children to go to school or to take care of school expenses for them. We don't get enough out of our jobs to cover our expenses at home. And some of us just only makes $2 and a half a day. And our husbands, they doesn't have jobs. >> Unidenitfied male: It was in this situation you had a chance to tell thousands of people first that they were poor, second why they were poor, and third what were some of the things that they had to do you know to alleviate their poverty. This meant we had a chance to tell thousands of people that they needed to walk down to the courthouse to register and vote. >> Unidentified speaker: We know that all persons born and naturalized in the state of Mississippi are citizens. And we don't have our right of citizenship. We never have had it. >> We are underprivileged, and we are denied our civil rights. And that's what we want. We want freedom of speech. We want freedom of press. We want everything that the white man has. We're entitled to it because we are full-fledged citizens just like they are, and we're willing to die for it. We're willing to die that our children and our children's children may live. Fanny Lou Hamer: We've just got to stand up as Negros now for ourselves and for our freedom. And if it don't do me any good I do know the young people it will do good, and it is a help to our nation because we need peace. And there's no other way that we can have it and trying to live together. And we've been apart, but something got to bring peace to this earth. >> Unidenified male: I never thought that Greenwood people would treat Negros that live around here, that nursed they children, cooked for them, and farmed as this land, that they would have those type of a police that would put dogs on women. >> Dick Gregory: I can't tell you how heartbroken I was last week as I sit in New York City and read the reports that was coming out of Greenwood, reports that you would expect to come out of South Africa, reports that you would expect to come out of Russia, South Vietnam. If Russia aggravated West Berlin half as much as you was aggravated last week we would be there. And I can't help but wonder why someone can't come down here. Whether they want to admit it or not Mississippi is America. [end audio clip] >> Thomas Jackson: Thanks to Audacity, the free download program that allows you to edit fair use recordings from libraries. They build momentum. They build a statewide organization by the fall. They put up for governor, even though they can't vote in the white election, their own separate so-called mock election, Ed King for Lieutenant Governor, on the right, Aaron Henry whose house had been bombed earlier for Governor. Mainstream news coverage focuses on the white Governor's race. It mentions the freedom vote, but it focuses to a great degree on the violence directed against Yale and Stanford students who had gone down and volunteered. A little bit on the platform, but really even in the African-American press there's very little on what they were actually running on on the platform. And it had to do with unfair economic system, archaic, and this dictatorial political and law enforcement system. So first they've got a voting plank that really says a large proportion of Mississippi is denied. And we got a tyrannical government. So they want restoration of the right to vote so they can have a two-party system and some choices. One man, one vote they say. But in economics I wanted to highlight just a couple things. No one can be truly free unless relieved from the burden of economic security. Federal programs have not helped poor sharecroppers. To grant economic freedom to Mississippi it is proposed a farm loan program, a progressive land tax, cooperatives in farming, a public works program that would bring new jobs and provide sewages and water for black communities that did not have it -- hughe problem. A minimum wage of $1.25 an hour, a fair employment law, and collective bargaining protections for unionization of workers. That's their platform. It gets very little coverage, and I wanted to share that with you because they have an analysis, and they have a program as well. It's actually over 80,000 who cast trade-in ballots, but The Student Voice , the SNCC newspaper, tries to get out the -- the word, and you know it does rather well. I'm going to hand this over to Hasan with a segue way into Alabama, however, and talk just for a second about the Selma Freedom Day of October 7, just a month before the Freedom Vote in Mississippi, a full year and a half before Chairman Lewis got his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in that same town. Bernard Lafayette and Amelia Boynton had gotten a voter registration drive going over the summer, lots of momentum, arrests, repression, marches, confrontations. On October 5th the Pittsburgh Courier reports that 300 are arrested by local, and state police, and Sheriff Jim Clark's private posse with sawed-off shotguns and cattle prods. The Washington Post two days later reports on some of Freedom Day. 300 in jail; 300 more are lined up at the courthouse. They're hemmed in by Sheriff Clark and his forces. Few pictures emerge from this. Why? They beat up the photographers, and that's largely what The Washington Post reports on, the attack on the photographers. There are some pictures, however, that make it into The Student Voice , and this is the arrest on the steps of the federal building with FBI and Justice Department officials watching, the arrest of two SNCC volunteers holding signs supporting the people across the street. So they got a little bit of word out about that. Howard Zinn later that month, an advisor and historian tries to tell the story, tries to get the story out about how people who sought to bring them sandwiches -- they couldn't leave their line for anything -- got beaten up and throw in -- in the police cars. Mary King furiously types on the phone with a Watts line, Jim Foreman in Selma sent a telegram, "Why can't the Justice Department take steps to save Sheriff -- to have Sheriff James Clark of Dallas County, Alabama placed under an immediate temporary restraining order, etcetera, etcetera? His -- his deputies are consistently arresting and intimidating people." By then Foreman later wrote, "For me personally the brutality of the blue-shirted Alabama police and the club-swinging posses of Big Valley Jim Clark that day were putting the finishing touches on my experiment with nonviolence." Hasan? [ Applause ] >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, thank you so much, and good afternoon. >> Audience: Good afternoon. >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It is a great pleasure to be here with you today, to be amongst friends old and new. There are a couple people here who I would just like to recognize. One group in particular, my friends from the Exhibit Design Team of Howard and Revis who just completed a masterful work down at the National Civil Rights Museum, the Lorraine Motel which just reopened after a $28 million renovation, fantastic. I had the pleasure and privilege of working with them for the last five years as one of the historical consultants, and they did fantastic work. I looked over my shoulder at some of the images that Tom was showing, and I could see them nodding, like, "Oh, yes, we used that. We know that one!" So that's always good. And of course one of the great, again, pleasures and privileges of doing this kind of work is that the folk who really did the work, the folk who were on the ground, often show up to make sure that not only we share the history but that we get it right when we share it. So Ms. Mulholland, the Freedom rider is here. [ Applause ] >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And then I -- and then I also saw, I believe, Brother Ivanhoe Donaldson slip in in the corner over there. So we need to acknowledge [applause] Brother Donaldson as well. And of course all those who I have not -- whose names I have not called who are here and there -- who are here and not here, I very much thank you as well. Today I want to talk about how I framed my comments, titled my comments "The Ballot and the Bullet: Grassroots Organizing in Lowndes County, Alabama 1965 to 1966." I want to just pick up briefly from where Tom left off in Alabama -- in Selma Alabama. In the heart of the Black Belt Selma, Alabama was considered the capital -- the financial capital of the Black Belt, and this being the economic center of Alabama where old cotton money was, the heart of slavery in Alabama. Well, after the Freedom Day we fast forward to 1964, and then of course to the beginning of 1965. Many of us are very much familiar with the Selma voting rights campaign. And of course SNCC laid the groundwork along with local people like Amelia Boynton for voting rights organizing in Selma, Alabama for several years. Well, in the beginning of 1965 SCLC and SNCC partner with the Dallas County -- Dallas County Voters' League down in Selma, Alabama and lead this voting rights charge. The Civil Rights Act of '64 had been passed, was on the books, people still trying to give it meaning. But the critical voting rights protections are missing from it, and so you have this organizing push for voting rights down in Selma. Well, SNCC and SCLC organizers of course are -- are working together. And then you know they have had a philosophical conflict that has been well documented, discussedover the years. SNCC was very much about empowering local folk to make the decisions that affect their own lives. SCLC -- I'm speaking in general terms -- was more about, so let's mobilize the troops; let's kind of fall in line and move forward for often a broader sort of national agenda. Well, we then have -- Jimmy Lee Jackson is killed, and -- and then there's this call to march from Selma to the state capital. This leads to the Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. Interestingly, SNCC was not very much -- those on the ground working in Alabama weren't enthused, to say the least, about this march. They said, "We've had enough marching. It's often too dangerous, certainly in a place like Alabama." And that's borne out by Bloody Sunday. And then afterward when the decision is made that we can't let violence stoop any kind of protest or movement the march does proceed. SNCC organizers join the march, but what they do in this 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery -- what they do is they organize in its wake. >> So this 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, March of 1965, some 45 -- 40 plus miles of that march go through a small rural county, Lowndes County, Alabama. And at the start of 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama this county that was 80% African-American, there were 5,122 African-Americans of voter registration age, and not a single one was registered to vote. In other words, political exclusion in Lowndes County, Alabama and in so many other places in Alabama and throughout the Black Belt in the American South political exclusion was absolute. And this exclusion was maintained through terror. The nickname for Lowndes County, Alabama was "Bloody Lowndes" because of this long history of racial violence and racial terror to maintain white supremacy that wasn't just a 1960s creation, that dated back as far as the turn of the century, and even before then into slavery. And so this march, this great march from Selma to Montgomery passes through Lowndes County, Alabama, and SNCC organizers begin to organize in the wake of the march. Stokely Carmichael and -- and others who had been organizing, veterans of organizing in Mississippi who had been in Selma, Alabama decide that if we're going to -- if we're not going to continue to work in Selma let's move into a place where others are afraid to go. In other words, SCLC had no interest really in organizing in a place like Lowndes County, Alabama because they knew it was too violent. But those places that seemed to be most challenging were those places that SNCC organizers tended to go. And so as the march proceeds three days, three nights or so through Lowndes County, Alabama SNCC organizers, young folk, begin to collect names, begin to contact people who are in the county. And then after this march is over, five days or so after this march is over they return to Lowndes County, Alabama. Five SNCC organizers, Stokely Carmichael among them, with the names that they had gathered, and they begin to talk to people. Well, one of the things that historians have done -- we do some good things, but sometimes we do a whole lot of bad things. One of the things that historians have done -- and this is really a reflection in part of what the media had done in terms of their general coverage of the movement during the high point of the struggle, the African-American Freedom Struggle, 1960s, is that they tended to focus on large-scale mobilizing events. So certainly the march on -- certainly the march from Selma to Montgomery received tremendous media coverage, much as Bloody Sunday did in its aftermath. The March on Washington received tremendous media coverage. Federal legislation and the debates behind it often would receive tremendous media coverage, as we saw from some of the press coverage. But that's only part of the story. Equally important is what the media rarely covered and -- and historians for the most part, but of course have increasingly gotten better with this over the generations, focusing not so much on mobilizing events, large scale demonstrations and marches, but on organizing -- grassroots organizing, the -- the slow, hard work of talking to everyday, ordinary people. People in Mississippi, people in Alabama, people in rural counties like Lowndes County, talking to them about the problems that they're facing and coming up with creative solutions to address these issues. And so in the wake of this Selma to Montgomery march, this mass mobilizing event, SNCC organizers say, "Let's turn this into an organizing opportunity, collect some names, collect some contact information, and then go back into Bloody Lowndes and see if we can't start a organizing project there." Well, in March -- end of March 1965 local folk had already started to move, and -- and March, April, May, June, first couple of months of that year they formed the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights and begin a voter registration campaign, voter registration drive. Look magazine, which I don't know if there's even an equivalent of that today in this sort of media age. Look magazine sent a team, a reporter and a photographer down to Lowndes County, Alabama in June of 1965. And Look magazine has given those images, those contact sheets to the Library of Congress. These are really a rare and wonderful glimpse of what is so hard to capture. And that is that hard work, that daily grind, that unglamorous, difficult work of organizing. And what does it look like? Here's a -- and -- and it's some 100 plus pages of contact sheets that tell in remarkable and vivid detail this story of organizing -- this is one sheet, and if you can -- I know it's a little bit hard to see, but if you start from the bottom left corner and work your way up to the top moving from left to right what you actually see is Stokely Carmichael walking to -- knocking on the door of a local woman's home, talking to her children presumably on the front porch in the bottom right-hand corner. Then convincing them to go get their mama to come on out, and to talk to her. And then you can see there -- again, ain't no march going on. This is organizing. This is building relationships. This is talking to people. This is building trust. This is what the media didn't cover. Often we hear about Stokely Carmichael, and he's sort of defamed as this sort of "prophet of rage." This is what he and so many others in SNCC were -- were doing on the ground. This is that slow, hard work of organizing, and talking to folk, and living on -- living amongst the folk, living amongst the people. We see this image -- this series continues here where he had done this little back-and-forth talking to this young woman, presumably of course about what the -- what the project and the local folk in Lowndes County were doing. And then the next sort of set is him talking to folk who [inaudible] brought him to. And I wanted to include this here because you will notice that he's talking to young people, two images here, and then the very top. Talking to young people, and a whole lot of young women. And of course those two groups become key in organizing. One of the things that happens when you just focus on mobilizing is that we tend to focus on the folk who are behind the microphone, and they tended to be men, of course, tended to be preachers, and not necessarily young folk. And so here we see Carmichael trying to draft into the movement, if you will, get involved, young folk on the ground, women -- and they would prove critical because young people would often take the message home. And when you couldn't get the parents to -- to get involved you could often get the children. And the children would put pressure on the parents simply through their own involvement. And then that's part of the way that communities would be mobilized. This next series of contact sheets is equally interesting and fascinating because we often don't talk about the rural component of the civil rights struggle in the South. We tend in Alabama, for example, to talk about Birmingham, and Selma, and Montgomery, and not talk about places like Lowndes County, Alabama where organizing was different. You don't have large-scale churches. And -- and so you have to go out into the field. You don't necessarily -- you're not knocking on neighborhood doors. You're going out into the fields. And so what did that mean literally on a day-to-day basis? That meant talking to sharecroppers and tenant farmers, sneaking onto plantations. And here you can see Stokely Carmichael literally behind the plow. And you can only imagine that conversation where you're saying, literally, I'm willing to get my hands dirty with you to talk to you about what we are doing as an organization, to talk about just as the organization of SNCC, but then also what local folk are doing. And so it wasn't just about movement messiahs come in, and individuals with this grand vision of democratic organizing, but serving in a partnership relationship with local people on the ground, folk like John Hewlett and others who I'll talk about later. But again, just think about that contrast of Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture, as this prophet of rage. You see him behind a microphone with dark glasses and a dashiki, a certain element, a certain part of his organizing life. But we never see him necessarily behind a mule with overalls on. And this is as much a part of his legacy and the legacy of grassroots organizers of the civil rights movement as anything else. Of course it was not just young people, not just individuals, but movement families. And here in this series of -- on this contact sheet you see Carmichael working his way inside the house. And again, there's nothing special about -- per se, I put that in quotes, about what Carmichael's doing. He's the one being followed by the Look photographer, but these conversations, these experiences -- experiences are happening day after day over, and over, and over again, talking to children and the family on the front steps, bottom left-hand corner, and then working your way inside. These aren't rich folk. These aren't middle-class folk. These are rural working folk who are living as close as you can get to poverty. And on both sides of straddling that poverty line. If we had a chance to sort of zoom in -- if you ever get a chance to look at some of these images it's very telling, the background. So it's not just the faces. It's where those faces are. The places where they're living and residing tell you about one, the difficulties that people were facing and organizers were facing, but the issues that people were interested in. And so certainly federal legislation has meaning, but these folk are also interested, as Tom had pointed out, in getting water, piped water and not necessarily dealing with wells. Sanitation, and sewage, and paved roads. And -- and so these were the issues that folk were talking about as they were doing their grassroots organizing. And this last image, set of contact sheets, it's a little bit difficult to see. And you -- contact sheets and sort of -- I'm of that generation transitioning into digital images, and you just zoom in on something; right? But when you have photographers would know that you need that magnifying glass, and you would go over and see what's what, and what did you actually capture? And if you look at that middle row what you've actually captured here is Stokely Carmichael out beside -- behind the Freedom House. The Freedom House was given to SNCC organizers in Lowndes County by the Jackson family. A Movement family said, "If you're going to help us then you need to stay. It's too dangerous to go back and forth to Selma and Montgomery." And it's a simple picture that doesn't make the headlines of any newspaper. A simple series, it's actually Stokely Carmichael with his shirt off, good-looking brother. And -- at a well washing up in the morning. At a well washing up in the morning. No showers, no -- no running water in the Freedom House. And -- and this is -- this is what folk were doing. So this is what you see before you get to the -- the major marches and demonstrations. This is the slow, hard work of organizing, of talking to folk. And then the sacrifices that people made who were willing to go down into places like Lowndes County, Alabama and spend not just a day or two, or a week or two, or even just a month or two, but over a year helping people to organize. And one of the -- one of the aspects of the Movement that is often overlooked -- this certainly is one -- is that folk were doing this in the face of white violence and white resistance. Far too often when we think about the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle that African-Americans were engaged in we don't think about it; we don't talk about the kind of resistance that they faced, as though they raised the call or raised America's attention to the problems that African-Americans were facing and then white Southerners just sort of had this moment of realization and said, "Oh, that's terribly unfortunate. Our bad. We'll go ahead and -- and change things." That's not the way it worked. They certainly resisted, and they -- they resisted in a way that they were used to. In other words the -- the default mechanism, if you will, for resisting the challenge to white supremacy for whites in the -- across the South, and certainly in places like Lowndes -- Lowndes County, Alabama, was violence. And so when African-Americans began to organize in Lowndes County, Alabama, challenging publicly white supremacy, organizing to improve the quality of black schools, organizing to register African-Americans, whites resort to violence. In this -- in -- in -- shortly after the Voting Rights Act is passed there's a demonstration that takes place, one of the only demonstrations that happens in Lowndes County, Alabama. Young people wanted to get involved, too young to vote, and so they -- they vote amongst themselves to -- to have this picket line and -- in Fort Deposit, a stronghold of -- of white folk in Lowndes County, Alabama. And they are immediately arrested. Ruby Sales, I'm going to turn it over to her here. Ruby Sales was one of the student volunteers down from Tuskegee who was helping. And she picks up this story of what happens in the wake of this demonstration. And this is from the Civil Rights History Project, and this is an oral interview with her. Now Tom, I'm going to click on this, but this is your computer. And so if it doesn't work I'm going to call you up here to help me out. There we go. >> [video] Ruby Sales: So having made that decision we all participated in the demonstration which took place on Saturday morning. And when we got there it was one of the most frightening scenes I've ever seen. It was a mob of -- there was a mob of white men there. And I guess being a mob you're undisciplined. And they had every conceivable weapon, baseball bats, garbage pails, anything it seems that they could lay their hands on they had. And they were threatening to beat us up, kill us. And -- and as the day -- as the time wore on they were getting louder and less willing to hold back the violence that they threatened to unleash. And I think -- I'm not sure -- that we were probably arrested not only because they did not approve of what we were doing, but also somewhere I think that they realized that if they didn't get us out of there we were going to get killed. So we -- by "they" I mean the white officials. We were put on a garbage can. >> Joe Mosnier: Truck? >> Ruby Sales: Truck, right. Put on a garbage truck, and we were taken to the jail in Hayneville, men on one floor and women on the other floor. And hell -- and the most barbaric conditions that you could imagine, with the threats -- the women being threatened, especially women with big mouths who wouldn't shut up singing, of being raped by the trustees and by the Sheriff threatening to -- to have the black men, trustees, rape us in the same way that they had beat Fannie Lou Hamer when she was in jail. Not raped her, but beat her. >> When we were finally let out the -- the jailer just came one day and said, "Get out of here. You're free." >> Joe Mosnier: It's a week later. >> Ruby Sales: Yes. >> Joe Mosnier: Seven days. >> Ruby Sales: It scared me to death. Now all of this is instinct. I knew that when people let you out of jail like that that they've got something planned, because that's what had happened to Goodman Schwerner. And so I knew instinctively, but I couldn't document it, that something was up. And -- but we went, nonetheless, with great protest because they said that if we didn't get out of jail, one again they started threatening us. And I said, this is really a change, people threatening if you don't get out jail. Anyway, so we went to the corner store, and I've been wrestling with this, and I've never said this before. I've been wrestling with what happened, and one of the things, somebody in that group suggested that Jon, Father Morrisroe, Joyce, and myself go and get sodas. And we got to the store, and Tom Coleman was standing in the door, and he had a gun. And it's one of these moments where you're there, but you're not there. You're sort of stopped in your footsteps, but you're trying to figure out how to move. And he said, "Bitch," because I'm -- I was in the front. He said, "Bitch, I'll blow your brains out." And the next thing I knew I was pulled backward, and I fell -- literally fell. And Jonathan -- I heard a shot, and it was Jonathan. He shot Jonathan. Jonathan never made a sound. I think he was dead instantly or in a coma instantly. Father Morrisroe who was with us, the Catholic priest who had literally just come to South when Martin Luther King issued the call, held onto Joyce Bailey's hands, a local young girl at 17 years old, who was -- who had been in jail. And they were running together. And the next thing I knew there was another shot. And unlike Jonathan, Father Morrisroe began to emit moans and begging for water. And Joyce Bailey with some level of consciousness still working headed that way and went around the -- in the South we always have these cars on the -- went around to those empty cars and called my name. And it was when I could hear her that I realized that I wasn't dead. Prior to that I thought I was dead. I had no sense that Jonathan was dead and that -- but I got up on my knees. I -- not got up. I got on my knees and crawled over to Joyce, and we ran over to the area where the civil rights workers -- where the Southern Freedom workers still remained. And Jimmy Rogers, Gloria Lowry, Ruby Sales, and Joyce Bailey went back over to try to give Father Morrisroe water. And Tom Coleman like a wild man was flinging his gun and saying he'd blow our brains out if we tried to give -- if we didn't leave. He let that man lay down there in the hot August sun, shot, begging for water, and threatened to kill anybody who helped him. We dispersed and ran in different directions. >> Of course Jonathan Daniels dies. Father Richard Morrisroe survives. Tom Coleman, lifelong resident of Lowndes County, Alabama is arrested, goes on trial at the county courthouse, and is not convicted, set free by a jury of his peers -- all white, all male jury -- and lives out the rest of his days in Lowndes County, Alabama. As a result, sort of the aftermath of this it was, as many people would say -- many people said at the time open season on Negros. But that certainly wasn't anything new. A wave of evictions will follow. SNCC organizers, in order to keep the folk who were being evicted for participating in the Movement there, some of the most committed people in the community, helped organize this tent city. But African-Americans in places like Lowndes County, Alabama certainly weren't merely victims of violence. Because we often focus on nonviolent demonstrations we often overlook this history of armed self-defense. When we tend to think about -- images are very powerful. When we tend to think about armed self-defense we think about organizations like the Black Panthers, for example, young brothers and sisters, afros and dashikis, looking good in my opinion, but with -- with guns and -- guns ablaze. But the history of armed self-defense in the African-American community is deep. These were rural communities especially. It wasn't outside organizers bringing guns to folk. It was local folk who had guns by their beds and behind their doors. The real image, if you will, of armed self-defense in the African-American community is the image of this elderly woman, a grandmother, with -- who had her own shotgun, her own rifle, and was willing to use it to defend themselves. This will play out. Just a couple more slides. Our time is short. This will play out in the next year. One of the things that happens in -- in Lowndes County is that after the Voting Rights Act is passed organizers -- SNCC organizers help local people form their own independent political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. And their focus and emphasis isn't just voter registration or mobilization, getting people out to the ballot box, but it's political education. And because the average education in a place like Lowndes County was the fifth grade they developed these cartoon storybooks, Freedom Primers, in which they talk about the duties of elected officials. This is a sheet about the duty of the County Sheriff saying that if you want justice then you need to elect an African-American to the County Sheriff. If you want the -- your taxes to be equitably distributed then you need to elect an African-American to the Tax Assessor's office. And an African-American woman by the name of Alice Moore will run on a platform of tax the rich to feed the poor. Can you imagine somebody saying that today? Tax the rich to feed the poor. One man, one vote, this was the ballot, the nomination convention ballot of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the original Black Panther Party, that was their ballot symbol in the corner. And this one last story, and then I'll -- and then I'll wrap up. In order to -- for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, these local folk that SNCC organizers had helped organize into this independent political party, in order to get their seven local candidates on the ballot to run to take over the county courthouse, to run for local office in November, they had to hold a nomination convention. And they had to have this nomination convention on the same day as the Democratic Primary, May 3rd, 1966. And they had to have it at a official polling place. Well, all the polling places -- remember, black folk hadn't voted in an election almost since the turn of the century. Every polling place in Lowndes County, Alabama, as in most places, tended to be in private residences or private -- or businesses owned by whites. The only public polling place in Lowndes County, Alabama was the county courthouse. The county courthouse wasn't a place that like we go to courthouses today to pay your bills. You just walk in; you walk out. You may cuss under your breath, but you're not feeling threatened. 1966 you know these county courthouses were sites of lynchings, so there was this long history of sort of terror, and there were certainly still segregated Jim Crow courthouses at the time. And so these organizers from the Lowndes County Christian Movement and Lowndes -- the LCFO, they understood that the only place -- viable place where they could hold this nomination convention and be within the law, and have it recognized, and not dismissed was to hold it at the county courthouse. And so they petitioned the Sheriff -- - Sheriff Frank Rouse to hold their nomination convention at county courthouse, and -- and the Sheriff -- although there had been Klan rallies on these courthouse steps before -- the Sheriff says -- denies them permission. Gives the false excuse that, "Well, I can't protect you. And -- and white folk would be upset." And certainly everybody knew that the Sheriff could do what he wanted to in that county. And so rather than give up black folk in Lowndes County said, "Well, that's fine. We're going to protect ourselves. We're going to have it here whether you like it or not. And if blood has to run in the streets then blood will run in the streets." Stokely Carmichael writes a letter saying as much to the attorney -- to the Justice Department. Justice Department sends a representative down. And -- and they question the -- the Chairman of Lowndes County Freedom Organization, John Hewlett. Says, "Well, what" -- he says, "What will happen if you show up on the county courthouse?" He said, "Well, people are going to die. And we're not afraid to die." Well, this gets the Justice Department into action, and they appeal to the Attorney General, State of Alabama and say, "Look, we need to avoid a race war. We need to avoid a bloodbath right here." All this is because black folks said, "We're going to come. We're going to come armed." Everybody knew they were armed. Everybody knew they were serious. The State Attorney Richmond Flowers says that if they hold it in the black church, First Baptist Church, down the road, that it would be officially recognized, officially and they can get their -- their candidates on the ballot. Again, it was nonviolence backed up by armed self-defense that gets the Justice Department to come in and do what it should have done all along. And on May 3rd African-Americans hold their nomination convention, cast their ballots for the Black Panther, and elect seven candidates to run against Democrats. This was a day of celebration. This is my favorite image -- it's one of the images in -- in the book -- of Stokely Carmichael holding -- or hugging a child on that Election Day. This only makes sense if you think about those Look images, those contact sheets, because he had been there for over a year. And SNCC organizers had been there for over a year working with people, sacrificing with people, living with people, knocking on doors. And so this isn't a show up on Election Day and hug some kid -- kiss a baby for a -- for a photo op. All right, this has real meaning. This was the truth. This is what it meant to be webbed into a community. This is what the relationships that SNCC organizers had built over the years captured in this image. Then of course this last image, vote November 8th. Pull the lever for the Black Panther, and then go on home. The ballot and the bullet. Don't stick around. Pull that lever and -- and go on home. And so I'm going to end right there just this -- this last point. None of the Black Panther candidates are elected that day. Every one -- every single one loses partly because of ballot fraud and -- and the like. But the victory, as John Hewlett said and Stokely Carmichael echoed, was just getting that Panther on the ballot, getting to the polls that day to vote for their own independent candidates. And the fruit of that work came to bear -- the fruit was bore even in 1970 when African-Americans elect the first black Sheriff. And then by 1980 are able to take over the county courthouse. So the story is not just mobilizing; it's organizing. And it's not just nonviolence; it's self-defense. It's the ballot and the bullet. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Thank you. We have some questions. We've got time for questions. And let me get up here. Thank you both, Hasan and Tom for that. Please raise your hands because we're trying to make sure that this gets taped and that our lovely assistant Jonathan Gold will enable you to ask questions. Any -- who's got the first one? In particular? Well, oh, me -- let me ask the first question, then. I was curious to know that if you as two historians, because we're here among friends and colleagues, what is it about the other's work generally, but more specifically the presentation, that resonates with what you have been trying to say? And I'll start maybe and get you to comment on what you saw on Tom's presentation? >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, certainly it's -- it's this -- the relationship between the local and the national. I think Tom does a wonderful job in this presentation, you can see in his work as a whole, saying the story isn't just about federal legislation and what's happening in the halls of power, but those only -- the results, major federal legislation, only happens as a result of the work that people are doing on the ground in places like Greenwood, Mississippi. The pressure that organizers are able to bring to bear on the federal government. Of course Tom's work isn't limited to the newest project, but this wonderful biography. If you -- political biography, if I -- if I might say, on Martin Luther King that says his work, in order to understand King, it's not just about what we see, or what we like to think about King, or freeze him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 dreaming about sort of a colorblind society. But it was about economic justice, and it was about human rights, and so he captured that wonderfully in -- in his work. >> Guha Shankar: Tom, do you want to say something? >> Thomas Jackson: I've been assigning -- is this on? >> Guha Shankar: It's on; it's on. >> Thomas Jackson: Yeah, I've been assigning Hasan's article, and groundwork, and now book for several years, and my grad students love it, and I love it. I don't think there's a local history that captures the texture of building relationships, of sustaining a movement culture through political education on a day-to-day basis. So you make that [inaudible] point about the organizing tradition beautifully, but you also show how this movement can be sustained, and has to be sustained by a -- a parallel movement of education, and culture, and expanding consciousness. And so it really helps appreciate that this revolution was a bottom-up revolution that was in interaction with a policy revolution happening in all three branches of government and also deeply at the local level in ways that we don't quite appreciate because we haven't looked. You know it's amazing what you don't find where you don't look. Local power, and that's where the rubber hits the road so that a Civil Rights Act made a huge difference in the places of public accommodation in the South. The fact that the federal government could deny federal funds to many of these school districts made a huge difference, but people putting pressure, and actually getting people who can represent them elected, and holding -- you know and people that -- even if it's not black, if it's a white representative now they are accountable. And there were studies that show that in cities across the South whites got sewers around the time of the Progressive Era in 1914. Black communities got sewers in the late '60s, early '70s. >> Female audience member: Unfortunately the work is not done. And where do you see the greatest opportunities for people to make a difference today? >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As -- as -- so just in terms of everyday people? Or as -- well, certainly you know you pick an area and there is a need. I mean, whether it's in education, whether it's in dealing with or creating sort of equal access to education, quality education. Healthcare, certainly that's on the minds of many people today. Economics, you know one thing that we don't talk about enough, the question of poverty, and lingering poverty, and how to deal with that. And so economic justice. You know jobs, certainly talking about 1963 you know we think about the legacy of the March on Washington, and as we celebrated it most recently though people often talked about the March on Washington, they didn't even call it by its full -- full name. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And so, I mean, jobs is certainly an area that -- that we need continued focus today. I mean, we haven't reached that sort of point in almost any of these areas where we can sit back and say you know sort of, "Job well done." Certainly progress has been made, advances have been made, but there's still a long, long way to go in almost every single one of these areas. >> Thomas Jackson: Yeah, I know a lot of public institutions were desegregated. The official terrorism was ended. But new forms of Jim Crow and inequality arose in their place. And so the efforts today might be in different areas. I see Freedom Riders in North Carolina where I'm from. And so come to North Carolina, be part of the Moral Monday Movement. And it's a -- it's a different set of issues. They are retrenching. They are freezing my fiancee's salary as a public school teacher. And they are imposing new voter requirements that are onerous for ordinary people to meet. And so voter registration is a crucial issue. That's what John Lewis stressed last summer, above all else. What he also -- and others -- stressed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case is this crisis of incarceration that is on a scale that was not even dreamed of in the '60s. And in part a response to the mobilization -- young people's mobilization. And certainly you can go down the line, but it's now a multi-racial struggle. In North Carolina we have hundreds of thousands of new Americans who have their own issues with intigration, and you know legalization, and -- and work. And wages have consistently been part of the struggle, but perhaps the least covered in the newspapers. We have business sections but not labor sections of newspapers. So there -- you know there are movements, movement cultures going on. And I'm to some degree encouraged. And I think Hasan's work really points out that you can have a movement without marches. And a lot of -- a lot of us need to pay attention to the nitty-gritty local election, yeah, results. >> Guha Shankar: Great, thank you. That's another question back there? >> Anne Jimmerson: Hi, I'm Anne Jimmerson. I'm a child of the Movement. Our dad was a civil rights worker in Birmingham. And last year I started a Website to begin collecting stories from people like me who were witnesses and there. One of my big goals is to make sure that these materials, these historical materials can be used to encourage young people to join this movement. So I'm really glad you asked that question. What have you, both of you, found at universities? What is it about your work that -- how can you use that to inspire young people to continue the struggle? >> Thomas Jackson: Okay, my first and foremost job as a 20th Century U.S. Historian is to train people how to think, how to read, how to discuss you know in a critical yet civilized and respectful manner whatever issue they encounter. So there's a whole range of things, and I think training young minds -- this is what Ella Baker said to a number of the people involved in the Black Power Movement, "You guys aren't reading enough." And I think that's -- that's one point. But issues that resonate with today are not hard to find. And I think you know the deeper a sense you have of the complexity of history and how really history will teach you, too, there are novel issues for which nobody has paved a path. And global warming is something that the next generation has to invent a solution. So to understand the creativity, and the inventiveness, and the trial-and-error nature of these movements is something that itself -- wow. People formed new identities, they -- new skills, new capacities. The Story of Fannie Lou Hamer is incredibly inspiring to students. That's all. >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I want to say the way that, one, the students that -- and I'm sure Tom would agree -- the students that we -- that we encounter, having come through America's educational system actually know very little about the African-American Freedom Struggle, very little about the Civil Rights Movement. Southern Poverty Law Center just did a study on the state of civil rights education, and it ain't good. In other words, before I can even -- I want to talk to students about Ella Baker's organizing philosophy in a participatory democracy, and I first have to stop and say, "Okay, I need to tell them who Ella Baker was," because they've never heard of her. Right, I mean, it's sort of this watered-down version of -- not even watered-down. It's this version of history, Martin Luther King you know sort of stands up; Rosa Parks sits down; and then America changed somehow. That version is, in my opinion, useless history, and I'm uninterested in useless history. I'm interested in useful history. All right, how the SNCC organizers organized. What were the obstacles that people were facing? Because in that lessons can be learned and applied to the critical issues that people are facing and young people are facing today in the 21st century. And so one, I think we have to get beyond this point of actually saying, "Let's educate," all right, and make sure our students understand and know this history, and then focus on those things that are most applicable to the circumstances and conditions that they face today. >> Male audience member: Why -- why is one person, one vote still an issue in 2014? If the federal government can give you a social security card number at birth why isn't that good enough to just -- from that point you can always vote local, federal, state? Why -- why is that still not done -- >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, I -- >> Male audience member: -- as far as the federal government pushing that through? >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, I mean, I think a couple things that we have to -- that it's important that we focus on. One, I think it's critical that we understand that the history of voting in America is really one of -- is more one of exclusion that inclusion. I mean, we like to think about America as being sort of this -- this democracy with a long history of the vote and -- and political inclusion around the vote, but the reality is American history is much more about political exclusion from the very beginning, from the Constitution, formation of the Constitution on down. And so the history of actual inclusion is very short in American history. And when we look about -- when we think about -- you know when we sort of reframe the -- the history of the ballot and the franchise in that sense then what we see today in terms of the resistance to really opening up and expanding the franchise, making it easier rather than more difficult for people to register, then it begins to actually make a little bit more sense. I mean, there's no reason why, just as you mentioned -- I mean, we -- just as the solution -- suggestion that you mentioned, why you can't have voter -- same-day voter registration and same-day voting? I mean, these are simple solutions that would really expand the electorate if we were really interested in doing that as a nation. But history says that we're not really that interested. We're interested in limiting and controlling the electorate. And the big -- you know today with Ohio and North Carolina the big problem isn't -- and we're beyond this -- this is progress in America. We're no longer excluding entire racial groups, right, entire classifications of folk within limits. Certainly there are some -- you know among citizens, if you will. But you no longer need to do that. You no longer need to disenfranchise African-Americans in the South as a whole to win an election. Right, Florida, the state of Florida, the Presidency in 2000 is won by essentially 500 votes. You don't need to exclude everybody. You just need to make it more difficult for a handful, and then you can turn a state. You can turn an entire federal election. All right, and so you know why do we continue to -- to support legislation mainly at the state level that limits the franchise? Well, because there are people that don't want to see an expanded electorate. And it has real political value in this day and age to make it more difficult for 10,000, or 20,000, or 30,000 people in a federal election or a state election simply to cast a ballot. >> Thomas Jackson: Yeah, I don't really have much -- that is a superb analysis. The localism and the degree to which local and state governments determines the rules is -- is huge in this country. In Australia you pay a tax penalty if you don't vote, and that's a federal action. So the structure of American federalism plays into this as well. It's a lot easier to vote in California, guess why, than North Carolina now. And it's these vested interests, just as back at the turn of the 20th century, vested interests in both parties determine the -- oh, the wrong kind of people are voting. Let's get some residency requirements, or some pauper exclusions, or some communist -- you know and it's -- it just sort of -- it's a constant struggle to -- because vested interests in political elites do not want to see widespread political mobilizing. It's potentially disruptive, and they don't have a job. >> Guha Shankkar: Jonathan, the gentleman [inaudible]. >> Joan Mulholland: Hi, Joan Mulholland from Arlington, Virginia. I just have a point of information question having to do with the Civil Rights Act of '64. Knowing that it was -- Medgar Evers was killed the night that Kennedy proposed it. It was sent to Congress the day he was buried in Arlington. And signed on the -- what would have been his birthday. Is it coincidence that it was signed on what would have been his birthday? Or do -- just -- how did that happen? >> Thomas Jackson: Medgar Evers' birthday? >> Joan Mulholland: Yeah. >> Thomas Jackson: I don't think anybody -- I haven't seen any documentation that it was planned that way. Though in the spirit of your question -- you were there -- that event galvanized this movement as much as Birmingham. You know often in the history books you read that Birmingham triggered 1000 brush fires. But the murder of Medgar Evers certainly galvanized in -- in a way that was profound. And his funeral and the concurrent demonstrations around the country really kicked this thing into high gear. And just to riff on my -- on my point, though, the kind of legal and extralegal violence that might have been prevented had there been more cooperation between local police and federal authorities that might have prevented that killing was not taken care of by the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. And really you don't get that kind of prosecutorial authority until 1968. >> Guha Shankar: Got a question right there? >> Female audience member: Dr. Jeffries, you discussed how the movement in Lowndes County was a nonviolent movement backed up with self-defense. And can you touch on the parallels of -- of that -- that idea with them choosing the Black Panther as their symbol? And then where exactly it transferred into being a violent -- or perceived as a violent movement once you get into like the Oakland Black Panthers. And it -- the -- the media went away from the community work and organizing they were doing at that point in time? >> Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That's a great question. Well, a couple things I think it's important that we -- that we recognize first. And one is the sources of racial terrorism in -- in the African-American community. So one of the things that we will talk about and we're comfortable talking about today sort of as a nation -- and -- and even then is racial terrorism from organized terror groups. And so the Klan, for example. But you're sort of looking back at where racial terrorism stemmed from, the Klan wants to get blamed for everything. And the reality is in places like Lowndes County and so many other counties the Klan wasn't the source of racial terror. Nobody was riding around with hoods and horses because they didn't need to. It was white neighbors. It was landowners. It wasn't the police. It wasn't the county sheriff, per se. Because they didn't have that sort of enforcement ability because of their size. It was ordinary white folk who were the sources of racial terror. Now that's critical because once you leave these sort of rural settings and you move to urban spaces, to Oakland, and New York, and Philadelphia, and the like, it's no longer on a daily basis, the kind of -- the source of white violence is no longer on a -- on a -- daily sources of white violence are no longer necessarily white neighbors or landowners because you don't have white neighbors and landowners anymore in that sense. The source of white violence and racial terror are police forces, and they become very much sort of these occupying armies. By comparison you can look at, for example, the number of African-Americans who were murdered, killed, by the police in any major metropolitan era -- area throughout the 1960s, any year, was more than the Klan in the entire South that entire year. Now think about that. Oakland, more African-Americans are dying in the Bay Area than are killed by the Klan during the same time. More are dying in New York City. More are dying in Cleveland. So source of racial terror is different, and because of that when movement organizing is -- is -- or becomes sort of the focus of African-American organizing outside of the South in places like Oakland it's not surprising that when they organize for defense they're not defending against the Klan; the Klan isn't the problem. Defending against the police. Six or so African-Americans are killed in just the months leading up to the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. They understood where the source of racial terror -- the racial terror was. There's still more to that, but in -- in interest of time I think I'll -- I'll leave with that point. >> Thomas Jackson: >> Thomas Jackson: Yeah, I might add that in the -- you know the sort of four or five summers of wide scale uprisings where about two or 300 people actually died, overwhelmingly shot by official forces of law and order, that -- that you know it's a long -- it's a deadly dialectic going back decades between white police forces and -- and black communities. And they were each in reasonable and -- and deep fear of each other. Yeah, so. >> Guha Shankar: All right, thank you so much. That concludes our session. See you here next month for the Freedom Summer Program, May 19th. Keep an eye out on our Website, and by all means let's please give our guests a big round of applause. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.