>> 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.