>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C..
[ Silence ]
>> Guha Shankar: Hi.
Good afternoon.
Welcome to the Library of Congress.
I am Guha Shanker, and on
behalf of Betsy Peterson,
director of the American
Folklife Center, we're very glad
to welcome all of you
-- old, new faces --
to the center's Public Program
series, many paths to freedom,
looking back, looking ahead at
the long civil rights movement.
I am going to turn the podium
over in just a second to our guest
of honor here, Charlie Cobb.
But we need to do the necessary
paid party political announcements,
which I am going to do right now.
I wanted to acknowledge the
sponsorship and the partnership
that we had with the -- first,
the Smithsonian National Museum
of African-American History
and Culture represented here
by Rex Ellis, associate
director for curatorial affairs,
and Elaine Nichols, who
is somewhere out there.
I think she's buying one
of Charlie's books, so
that's a good thing.
Within the library
we have, of course,
been helped out throughout the
series with various partners
and divisions, including the Motion
Picture Broadcast Recorded Sound
Division, the Education
Outreach Program, the Prints
and Photographs Division,
the Manuscripts Division,
the Office of Strategic
Initiatives, who is responsible
for mounting our website on the
Civil Rights History Project,
which we launched yesterday
to all proper acclaim.
As you know, with the Civil Rights
History Project, we've been working
with the MMHC over the last
five years on the initiative.
It's been a pleasure to collaborate
with all of our colleagues
at the MMHC, and we have now posted
on line 55 interviews, and shortly,
we will be up to our magic
number of 108 total interviews
with over 130 participants who were
active in the freedom struggle.
So if you haven't already
done so, bookmark our website,
become a friend on Facebook,
subscribe to our RSS feeds,
and you'll get instance
notices about the CRHP updates
and other information about
programs in the series, and the AFC.
The library itself, just
stepping back a little bit,
has been attempting
to and commemorating
and marking various events
in the freedom struggle
in the civil rights movement.
We've been producing events, such
as a terrific exhibition on A Day
Like No Other, which marks the
50th anniversary of the 1973 march
on Washington for jobs and freedom.
In just a couple of months --
I am sorry, in just a month,
on June 19th, the interpretive
programs office
at the library will
launch a major exhibition
to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of the Civil Rights Act of --
passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
It will feature unique items from
divisions across the library,
along with materials from the AFC
collections, including the CRHP,
National Visionary Leadership
Project, and other collections.
Obviously, not every object, photo,
video, manuscript that is housed
under the various divisions
in the library will make it
out to public view, but
there will be a rotation
of the exhibition items in January.
So as Roberta Schaffer,
our associate librarian said
yesterday, come back twice.
That's a good way to do it.
But also make plans to talk
to your reference librarian
so they can get you
into the collections,
and get you to those treasures.
And then finally speaking
about external partners,
I also want to acknowledge the
assistance and insights of the folks
at the SNCC legacy project,
Cortland Cox, the president,
along with Charlene Crance,
have been instrumental
in helping us program the series,
not to mention that Charlie Cobb,
our guest, also sits on the board
of that particular organization.
So we have many folks to thank,
many people to acknowledge,
and hopefully this will just
give you a sample of those folks.
Okay, so I am going to turn
this directly over to our guest
of honor today, who is -- well,
if you only have to buy --
if you can only buy one book a
year, I suggest you get two copies
of this book -- read
one and give the other
out as a gift -- all right.
The library gets no proceeds
from the sales of the copies,
which are out there in the hall.
But it will eventually end up
here, being catalogs by one
of our catalogers and be
part of the national library.
Charlie Cobb Junior was born in
Washington, D.C., so he's one of us.
He was Mississippi field secretary
for the student non-violent
coordinating committee from 1962
to 1967, working primarily
in the Mississippi delta.
He was a founding member
of the national association
of black journalists, subsequently.
A foreign affairs reporter for
National Public Radio from 1985
to 1997, a member of
the editorial staff
of National Geographic
Magazine, and here it's good
to note he was the first
black writer to become one
of that magazine's staff writers.
In July of 2008, Charlie
Cobb was inducted
into the National Association of
Black Journalists Hall of Fame.
He's the author of previously
on the road to freedom,
a guided tour of the civil
rights, and this book,
"This Non-Violent Stuff
Will Get You Killed;
How Guns Made the Civil Right
Movement Possible," which --
that's a title to wrestle
with, and a set of issues
which I think are quite
provocatively
and brilliantly argued.
It is a topic of this
library presentation today.
So please welcome Charlie Cobb.
[ Applause ]
>> Charles Cobb: Thank you,
Guha, and thanks to all
of you all for coming out.
It's a pleasure for me to be here.
Now, I am going to do
a couple of things --
two or three things, in fact.
In the book-publishing
world, there's what's called,
with respect to a book,
the front matter.
That's everything that you see
before the book actually begins,
before chapter 1 begins.
So that would include the table of
contents, that would be the forward
or preface or an introduction of
some sort, dedications and the like.
So I want to first of
all, in an oral sense,
give you some of the
front matter of the book
which is not quite a forward
here, but sort of my reasoning
with respect to the
book and the process
that unfolded in doing the book.
I won't spend a long
time doing that.
Then I want to make some comments
about the actual content
of the book.
And -- and sort of outline
for you why I think guns made the
civil rights movement possible.
Then I am going to sit down with Rex
here and pursue that conversation
in conversation with him
and finally take questions
from you all in audience.
So that's a lot to
do in an hour or so.
The book marks in some
ways my determination to --
to address the question of how
the southern freedom movement
is portrayed.
I've long been dissatisfied with
what might be called the cannon
with regards to the
southern freedom movement.
The cannon -- I think
Julien Bond sort of --
in a conversation with me
when I began this book --
sort of neatly and with a great
deal of irony put the cannon
as the general person gets
it in perspective for me.
Julien said, "Well, it all boils
down to Rosa of sitting down,
Martin standing up, and then
the white folks seeing the light
and saving the day."
And that more or less
is my complaint
about much of the narrative.
There, in fact, is a newer
body of scholarship emerging
from younger historians, Emily
Crosby who was here yesterday,
Wesley Hogan, who was
here yesterday,
represent that newer approach
-- Hasan Kwame Jeffries,
Akinyele Umoja -- these are
all scholars, which I am not.
It's important for you to understand
I am a journalist, I am a reporter.
I am not a scholar, I lean heavily
on my experiences and I lean heavily
on the scholarship of scholars,
like these younger
scholars in particular.
And this was all pioneered
by Richard Cluger,
with his important work on the 1954
Supreme Court decision, Clay Carson
and his work on SNCC,
Charles Ditmar,
and Charles Payne's
works on Mississippi.
So there is, I would say,
roughly since the middle 1980s,
slowly emerging, a
better scholarship,
a more sensitive scholarship
to that.
But as part of this
decision of front matter,
what was really driving this
book was my dissatisfaction
with how the narrative of the is
civil rights movement is presented
in general.
And this is a little bit ironic,
because, you know, as a journalist,
as a working reporter, as I have
been ever since I left the south,
I have mainly been a
foreign affairs reporter.
I covered Africa, I covered wars,
I bounced all over the world,
partly with NPR and
then for twenty years
with National Geographic Magazine.
What was the tipping point for
me was almost a volunteer effort.
Bob Moses, who was here yesterday,
and a legendary figure
Mississippi's civil rights movement,
asked me to help him with a
book, which is available now
as Radically Equations,
"Civil Rights From Mississippi
to the Algebra Project."
And as Bob puts it, it's my
story and Charlie's book.
That means I did most
of the writing.
But after the book was
published, I brought the book to --
to school, middle school -- that
had given me considerable help.
The principal of the middle
school, middle school --
Brinkely Middle School, is
in Medgar Evers neighborhood
in Jackson, Mississippi.
And as it happens, the school
is directly across the street
from a public library,
and the library is the Fanny
Lou Hamer Public Library.
So I was getting ready to go up to
the Delta, and I was sort of sitting
on the steps of the school with
these kids, middle school kids.
And so I went into what I only
half jokingly call "old-guy mode,"
and decided to engage these kids in
a discussion about Fanny Lou Hamer.
So I asked them, sort of
broadly, does anybody know,
can anybody tell me
something about Mrs. Hamer,
who knows -- and not one of them.
I guess it was half a dozen kids,
and not a one of them knew
anything about Mrs. Hamer.
So my ride came and I got up
and I pointed at the library,
and I explained that Mrs.
Hamer was really important.
Not just to Mississippi's movement,
but to the southern freedom movement
and you needed to know
something about Mrs. Hamer,
that kind of old guy
lecture, you know?
And I was getting ready, and then
I sort of ended those remarks
by saying I knew Mrs. Hamer.
And I was getting ready to
tell them Fanny Lou Hamer story
that I was certain would engage
them so that they would all show
up when I got back to hear
more about Mrs. Hamer,
as I suggested that they do.
But when I said I knew Mrs.
Hamer, one of these kids --
he must have been about 13
years old -- leapt to his feet,
looked at me in total
amazement, and said, "Mr. Cobb,
you was alive back then?"
You know, I mean, he
got stuck on the idea
of me knowing somebody whose
name was chiselled, you know,
in the front of the library.
And I understood, and I bit my
tongue and didn't say something
like me and Freddy Douglas,
and Sojourner Truth,
and Harriet Tubman all used to
hang out and debate where to go
in the fight against slavery.
I didn't say anything like
that, I just laughed to myself.
But it occurred to me, here's
a 13-year-old, and the history,
which to me is recent
history, is so distant from him
that he couldn't imagine that he's
sitting on the steps of his school,
who was someone -- who knew
the actors in this history.
And -- and it occurred to me that
maybe I ought to turn my attention
as a writer to -- to addressing
some of this history in writing.
So I shifted gears and I
essentially have really, since then,
and that was in 2001, have really
not done foreign affairs writing
and reporting any more, you know,
I sometimes miss it,
but I don't do it.
I totally turned my attention to
writing about the southern movement.
So that one part of the problem,
one part of the front matter,
if you will, that's reflect
-- that I want to talk --
tell you that's reflected in this
book is the need to figure out how
to make the history itself real,
and make young people feel
connected to the history, I feel,
is through telling them stories.
So if you read the book you'll see
there's a lot of stories in here.
There's analysis, a lot
of analysis, but a book,
it's built around stories.
Most of the stories are about people
who are not famous,
who are not well-known.
Yes, I have a couple of Martin
Luther King stories in here,
and I have some Medgar
Evers stories in here.
But most are people like
Janie Brewer and why she wound
up making Molotov cocktails
in her kitchen sink
when the Klan was coming
to attack her farm.
And they were about people
like Hartman Turnbow,
a farmer in Holms County,
Mississippi, who --
when he drove the Night
Riders away with his rifle,
who were attacking his home,
because he was very active
with the freedom movement
in Mississippi,
when we came up the following
morning, the first thing
out of his mouth was, "I
wasn't being non-non-violent,
I was just protecting my family."
The point being, you know, you
could see that these farmers
and these people in the rural south
didn't see any contradiction saying
they're part of the
non-violent movement,
but also keeping their rifles and
pistols ready on the coffee table
or in the -- in the drawer.
So I am trying to tell this story in
a way that young people, especially,
can view it and understand
it, and also in a way
that grownups can get
something out of it.
And another important influence
in terms of telling these kinds
of stories or my commitment
to telling these stories
and a very important
part of the front matter
of this book is the
influence of a person
who should be much better
known, Ella Josephine Baker.
There would not have
been without Miss Baker.
She was "Miss Baker" to us
because she was 57 years old
when she pulled the young people
who would make SNCC together
at a conference in Shaw College,
in Raleigh, North Carolina.
And I want to read to you something
from Miss Baker on history,
and understanding history,
that I hope will help you
understand what I mean.
I could take et next hour and
elaborate on Miss Baker's life,
not just her importance to SNCC,
but her importance to the formation
of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference,
which is Martin Luther King's
organization, her importance
in organizing local branchs of the
NAACP in the south in the 1940s
when she was director of
branchs for the NAACP.
But that's another book that
I will do at some point.
But she did say this about
history, that's crucial
to understanding why
this book was written.
And she says, "in order for us
as poor and oppressed people
to become part of a
society that is meaningful,
the system under which we now
exist has to be radically changed.
That means we are going to have to
learn to think in radical terms.
I use the term 'radical' in its
original meaning, getting down to
and understanding the root cause.
It means facing a system that
does not lend itself to your needs
and devising the means by
which you change that system.
That easier said than done.
But one of the things that has to be
faced is in the process of wanting
to change the system --
how much have we got to do
to find out who we are,
where we have come from,
and where we are going?
I am saying to you as you must
say too, that in order to see
where we are going we not only
must remember where we have been,
but we must understand
where we have been."
This idea of Miss Baker, talking to
us, is at the core of the reasoning
for doing this book, is at the
core of why I turned my attention
from foreign affairs as a
working reporter to writing
about the Southern Freedom
Movement of the 1950s and '60s.
Now there's some other things,
given Miss Baker's words,
let me say by way of critiquing --
one of the problems I have with the
narrative of the Southern movement,
the way it's presented,
is what's left out.
One of the first things I
learned as a working reporter is
that news is shaped more
by what's left out than
by any bias that's put in.
We can recognize bias if we
see it in a newspaper account,
a magazine account, or in
a television news report.
If something has been left out
and we don't know it happened,
then we can't confront it, and
it often shapes our opinion.
One of my criticisms,
for instance --
right now we're right up
on the 50th anniversary
of the Mississippi
Freedom Summer of 1964.
And one of the things
I have noticed in --
and I noticed this last
year when the celebrations
around the 50th anniversary of
the march on Washington of 1963,
one of the things I have
noticed and criticized is
that these events are portrayed as
if they happened out of nowhere.
They're not connected to anything.
We don't know any of the
history that leads up to --
to why did this march on Washington
happen, what was the thinking
in people's heads about
this march on Washington.
And we see this continually absent.
One of the interesting things
I noticed, and I admire a lot
of the scholarship that
has been done on SNCC,
Leslie Hogan's work,
Clay Carson's work.
But what's interesting, as I
began to think about this book,
and one of the questions that
occurred to me, because remember,
I am thinking, this non-violent
stuff will get you killed --
well, the question that occurred to
me and should have been a question
to obviously ask by anybody
writing about the movement,
but it doesn't appear
in any of the books,
is how does SNCC get its
name in the first place?
Was there a naming committee?
Did somebody stand up in a
preliminary session and say,
I move that we be called the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee?
It doesn't exist in the literature.
And I found -- and so it was one
of the first questions I asked
of people like Chuck McDune and
Charlie Jones, people who were there
on the founding conference of SNCC.
It was interesting, because in
raising the question it opens
up a whole area of discussion,
the discussion about non-violence
that took place at the 1960 founding
conference, the thinking that was
in the minds of these
19, 20, and 21-year-olds
who are sitting in
at lunch counters.
And remember, they don't have
much grounding in non-violence,
only the Nashville students, really,
under the mentorship of Jim Lawson,
Reverend James Lawson, really had
any grounding in non-violence.
So how did all these other
students, then, make their way
to non-violence, and how
committed were they to -- ?
I discussed this at some
length in the book and built it
around the discussion about
coming up with a name, SNCC,
Student Non-violent Coordinating --
Well, if you didn't
have much commitment
to non-violence beyond
using it as a tactic,
why did you come up with that name?
Why not a name like the
Deacons For Defense and Justice,
as they came up with in Louisiana?
The thinking of movement people,
people in the freedom movement,
is the most noticeable
absence in the historiography.
We get the events, we know there
was a Montgomery Bus Boycott,
or we know there was a
Supreme Court decision,
or we know there were
sit-ins that erupted in 1960,
we know there were protests
in Birmingham, Alabama,
we know there was a 1964 Mississippi
Freedom Summer, et cetera,
et cetera, we know that
Stokely Carmichael shouted
out "Black power" in 1960.
But what is the thinking there?
And can you really
understand a movement
without understanding the thinking?
And to the extent that many
historians describe the thinking,
they describe what they
thought we were thinking.
Nobody ever asked us
what we were thinking.
They say "were you there
at such-and-such a place,"
and then when they write, they go
on to tell me what I was
thinking when I was there.
[laughter] This is a huge --
not only is it a huge
problem, it's an old problem.
I am going to read you a
section of the book that comes
from Frederick Douglas's
autobiography,
"My Bondage and My Freedom."
That's his 1955 auto
-- 1855 autobiography,
"My Bondage and My Freedom."
There in that autobiography,
Frederick Douglas complained
that William Lloyd Garrison
and other influential
white abolitionists thought
that his intellectual
growth weakened their cause.
They only wanted him to,
quote, "narrate wrongs,"
end quote, bemoaned Douglas.
Although after escaping from
slavery, quote, "I was now reading
and thinking," end quote.
However, if he did not have, quote,
"the plantation manner of speech,"
end quote, John A. Collins,
general agent of the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society once counselled
Douglas, quote, "people wouldn't
ever believe you was a slave.
It's not best that you
appear too learned," quote.
The abolitionist went on to tell
Douglas, with no small degree
of arrogance, quote,
"give us the facts,
we will take care of
the philosophy."
Now, this problem is still with
us when it comes to the history,
and that's a lot of also what --
I mean, I say in the introduction
that the thinking of freedom
movement people, from SNCC,
from Core, from SCLC, formed the
intellectual spine of this book.
I know the events, I don't have
to talk to people in Mississippi
about what happened during
the 1964 Freedom Summer.
What I want to know from Hollis
Watkins or [Inaudible] Henderson,
or any number of people,
Margaret Block or --
what I want to know is
what were you thinking?
Why were you thinking that?
You know, let's talk about that.
So it's important to understand,
again, in approaching this book,
that it's the intellectual spine --
the intellectual spine of this book
is the thinking of movement people,
which is what is really
most often left
out of the traditional
narrative of the movement.
Now, before sitting down with
Rex, a couple of other things.
This book went through
several incarnations
in my own thinking, in my own mind.
Originally, I was really going to --
this was going to be a book
about rural culture in the South.
And where guns fit
into rural culture.
Not quite an anthropological
work, but a book, essentially,
about rural culture,
and it's not that,
because I had neither the time
nor the money to dig into such --
to do such a project would have
taken twice as long as it took
to do this book, and
it took a little
over two years to do this book.
But it occurred to me along the
way as I am thinking about how
to approach this book that
an interesting story to tell,
and I am approaching my writing as
a story teller, is how activists
from non-violent organizations
with varying degrees of commitment
to non-violence confronted
the culture of guns
that you find in the rural south.
Because gun -- in the
south, guns are a part
of the culture, black or white.
people use guns to go hunting,
to put food on the table.
People are very poor in many places,
they use guns to keep varmints
out of the gardens
that they maintain.
And yes, they use guns
for self defense.
You know, and here you see
the severest discrepancy
in race, in terms of use.
Blacks almost always use guns for
self defense, to protect themselves
from Night Riders, the Ku Klux
Klan, or something like that.
Whites would also use guns
for aggressive actions
against black people who they felt
were challenging white supremacy,
so a radical difference in the
two approaches to the use of guns.
One of the stories I tell in
the book, though, to explain --
give people a sense of guns
in rural Southern culture,
the first place I ever worked in
Mississippi was in Sunflower County,
a little, bitty town called
Ruleville, Mississippi,
where Mrs. Hamer was from.
The town only had 1100 people.
And shortly after Mrs. Hamer and
others tried to register to vote,
Night Riders came through
shooting up the black community.
And the mayor of the
town, Charles Durrow,
had me arrested for
doing the shooting.
He said the voter registration
effort was failing
and I had tone this shooting
to generate publicity
for this failing voter registration.
And he handed me over -- the
town constable, by the way,
was the brother of the man
who murdered Emma Till.
And he hands me over to him,
who sits me next to a police dog
in the back of the car,
and I'm hauled off to jail.
Well, he let's me go
the next morning,
because this was an
attempt to intimidate.
But within the context
of having arrested me,
he had confiscated the shotgun
of the man I was staying with,
Joe McDonald, 76 years old.
And when I got back, Joe
McDonald is now worried
about not having his gun, because
he needed it for just what I said,
he was me, Charles
McLorn, and Randy McLear,
three of us staying
with him, and his wife.
And he would go out every
morning and shoot game to put food
on the table, without a shotgun
he didn't see a way to feed us.
So what was he going
to do without his gun?
Well, I told him he had a right
to his gun, and he asked me
if I was certain about that.
And I said yes, it's in the
United States Constitution.
And we had a history book, and I
went and got it, and came back,
and I read the second
amendment to him.
And then Charles McLorn, who was
with me said you see, Mr. Joe --
that's what we used to call him --
it's in the United
States Constitution.
That's what Charlie's reading to
you, because Mr. Joe could not read
or write, 76 years old and
couldn't read and write.
And Mr. Joe told me to fold
over the page of the book,
and then took the book from me, and
we more or less forget about it,
except an hour or so later
we notice he's not around.
So we ask his wife, Rebecca,
well, where's Mr. Joe?
And she says he went to get his gun.
You said it was all right.
Well, you know, now we're scared,
because our fear is, you know --
and this was a continuing
fear in the organizing work
that people would get hurt or killed
because they're doing something
that you asked them to do.
Voter registration or whatever.
And the worry was that he's going
to go down there and say Charlie
or Max said give me my gun
back, and wind up getting shot.
Because this mayor packed
a pistol, because he went
to the mayor's office, because he
already stopped us, this mayor,
in another account which
I describe in the book,
in one year he had already
stopped us at gunpoint
and tried to run us out of town.
So we're worried that Mr.
Joe is going to get killed,
and are about to run out after him.
But then we hear the rattle
of his old truck pulling up,
and there's Mr. Joe,
driving back from downtown.
And of course we rush out
and say what happened?
And he says, well,
I went down there,
and I told the Mayor,
I've come to get my gun.
And we said, but then what happened?
He said, the Mayor said I
didn't have a right to my gun.
And so what did you do?
And he said -- because he's sitting
in the truck as he's explaining this
to us -- and he said, I
brought the book, I held it up
and I told the Mayor,
"This book says I do."
[Laughter] And the mayor
gave him the gun back.
As he stepped out of the truck, and
the image is burned in my brain,
helping out of the truck,
holding this shotgun,
.22 shotgun up above his head
with this big smile on this face.
And it was as important a
demand, it seemed to me,
as going down to the courthouse
and trying to register to vote.
And also tells you something about
the relationship of organizers
to people who supported
them in these communities,
like Joe McDonald,
rural communities,
And it tells you something
about gun culture.
Because the Mayor really knew
that Joe McDonald was not going
to take his little .22 shotgun
and get into his raggity old truck
and drive around town shooting
into houses as a Night Rider.
He knew this 76-year-old man
was not going to do that.
As racist as this Mayor was, he
knew that was not going to happen.
But the culture -- I mean,
I think at the bottom,
the Mayor didn't have a problem
with Joe McDonald having a shotgun.
That's just part of the culture.
It's like going down to the hardware
store and getting some screws, or,
you know, going out to the
field and picking cotton.
The guns were just
part of the culture.
So the book does
try and show that, and what it
meant for people like myself
and SNCC organizers and CORE
organizers, and yes, even organizers
for Martin Luther King, SCLC, to
find themselves in this culture --
especially since we were almost
inevitably identified one
of two ways.
We were either identified
by the local communities
as "the non-violents," and
that's because of the sit-ins
and the Montgomery bus
boy kinds of things.
Or we were identified
as the "freedom riders,"
and people's heads, we were
the non-violent people.
They considered that a little
strange, but they liked the idea
that we were prepared to
fight and help them fight
against white supremacy,
which is why they could say
with their shotguns and with
their pistols, they were part
of the non-violent movement.
And Steptoe down in Emmet County,
A. W. Steptoe who kept
maybe half a dozen guns
in his house always saw himself as
part of the non-violent movement.
You know, Aimsly [Phonetic] Moore,
who sat up in the bay window
of his house with his
rifles saw himself as a part
of the non-violent movement.
So that's the other important point.
I will give you two
examples, and then sit down--
because they reflect different ways.
One is from Charles Sherrod,
who is philosophically
committed to non-violence.
He -- Sherrod was the guy who
opened up south west Georgia.
There are few people in SNCC
who believed more deeply
in non-violence than Sherrod.
He told me
two stories -- I will
tell you what he told me
about a woman named Mama
Dolly Raines [Phonetic]
and then tell you his response
to a question I asked
after he told me this.
He told me, "Mama Dolly
had this big shotgun.
I tried to talk her out of
guarding me, but she said, 'Baby,
I brought a lot of these white folks
into this world and I will take them
out of this world if I have to.'
Sometimes no matter what I said,
she would sit in my bedroom window,
leg propped up with
that big old gun.
She knew how to handle
it way better than I did.
In fact, I didn't know
nothing about no shotgun."
So I asked Sherrod after he told
me this story, I said "well,
did you ever question
your non-violence?"
I said, "you know, of
all the people at SNCC,
maybe you are -- "
and he said, "Yeah."
I -- he said, I am paraphrasing now
because I don't have the book
turned open to that page.
He said, "The only time I ever
questioned by non-violence was
when I got married and
when I had children."
So I said, "So what did you do?"
I asked him.
The obvious reporter's question.
He said, "What I did
was get four big dogs.
In fact, I kept a dog until
all of my children were grown."
And that's how he reconciled.
Now that's one way.
Now here's Hollis Watkins.
Now it's important to know
that Charles Sherrod grew
up in Petersburg, Virginia.
And he's a city guy.
Hollis Watkins grew up in maybe
the smallest place I can imagine
in Mississippi, a little
hamlet, not even as big
as Ruleville, called
Chisolm Mission.
It's named for an AME church.
And Hollis told me this, and I think
it's important, you see, in a sense,
the dilemma that organizers
have to confront
in rural communities around weapons.
What is -- it boils
down to one question.
What is your obligation to
people whose lives are endangered
because they're responding to you?
What is your obligation
to those people?
Hollis says this, "I was
living with Dave Howard,"
and this is Holmes
County, Mississippi.
"I was living with Dave
Howard and his wife.
They farmed.
I realized before a few days
that they had set up a shift
to protect me and the house.
His wife took a shift,
and he took a shift.
One shift was from
dark until midnight,
the other from midnight
to day break.
Now, here I was, living in
their house, eating their food,
and I'm sleeping all night, and
this man and this wife, farmers,
are up all night protecting me.
At day break, he's in the field all
day until it starts getting dark.
When I realized that, I told
him I would take a shift.
He asked me if I knew
how to use a gun.
I said, 'yes, sir.
I do. We don't use
them in the movement,
but I know how to -- I know how.'
'But will you use a gun, he asked?'
I said, 'if necessary,
I will use it.'
So, he says, 'take a look at these
and see which one you like best.'
I think he was testing me.
He shows me a shotgun, a 30 ought
6, and a 3030 Winchester rifle.
As I was checking them out,
he said I could have them all.
[laughter] Later I told Jim Foreman,
SNCC's executive director,
about this.
And he said, "You can't do that."
And I said, 'I am already doing
it.'" So that's another kind
of response to -- and you
find in the responses,
and this is what really
started to engage me, you know,
the story is really that
people really don't know,
is what are the SNCC people thinking
as they're finding themselves
in situations with guns, how
are the CORE people responding
to the founding of the Deacons
for Defense and Justice?
How is the SCLC chapter that was
protected by an unnamed group
in Tuscaloosa responding
to these guys with guns?
That seemed to me to
be a movement story
that needs not the whole story,
it's not even most of the story.
But how does Dorie Ladner,
who is sitting back there,
respond when Chuck MacDougal
[Phonetic] gives her a pistol.
[Laughter] You know, that seemed
to me to be an important piece
of the story that's, A, left
out of the history, and B,
needs to be explored if you want
to get a deeper understanding
of the movement.
And as I said from the beginning,
what I am about in my writing
is doing the best I can
to providing a deeper
understanding of the movement.
I think I will stop there.
I went on longer than I should have.
I get carried away with
some of these stories.
And Rex and I can talk.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
[ Background sounds ]
>> Rex Ellis: I think the
first question I want to ask is
where did you come up with
this name, where were you,
how did you come up with it,
and how did you settle on it?
>> Charles Cobb: The name
is actually a -- is it on?
>> Rex Ellis: Yeah.
>> Charles Cobb: The name is
actually a contracted version
of a longer sentence made by Hartman
Turnbow, a Mississippi farmer
who is very active
with us in Mississippi.
The full quote is this, and this --
Hartman Turnbow met
Martin Luther King in 1964
at the Atlantic City
democratic party convention.
Hartman Turnbow was one
of the Mississippi freedom
democratic party delegates.
When he met -- after he was
introduced to Reverend king,
the first thing Mr. Turnbow
said to Dr. King was, quote,
"this non-violent stuff ain't
no good, it'll get you killed."
That's the full quote.
And it was just too
long for a book title.
So I just contracted it to
"This Non-violent Stuff'll
Get You Killed."
But the attribution properly
belongs to Hartman Turnbow,
one of the great figures
in Mississippi's movement.
>> Rex Ellis: You talked about Mr.
Joe and him getting his gun back.
I think that probably says a lot
about community organization,
because you mentioned that as well.
And you mention the
proportion of trust
in building community
organizations, and you also talked
about the fact that, you know,
one of the names they gave
you all was outside agitators.
So could you say something
about trust, outside agitators,
and community organization?
>> Charles Cobb: Okay.
I will combine trust and
community organizing,
and then one brief comment
about outside agitators.
What I think you had to do
as an organizer entering
into these communities was
earn the right to organize.
You know, you -- by going to these
communities, whether like me,
you were coming from Washington,
D.C., or like Hollis Watkins,
you're coming from Chisolm
Mission, Mississippi.
When you come into these communities
you're bringing danger with you.
You know, danger is already a
part -- regular part of life,
and people know in these communities
know way better than you how
to manage danger, life-threatening
danger.
For centuries black people
have figured out doing this,
from the days of slavery
through reconstruction,
through what Rayford Logan called
"the nadir," after the collapse
of reconstruction, on the way into
the 1960s, when we were working
in the south, black
people know about danger.
But you are bringing in a
different new danger into --
when you -- just by entering town.
When we came to Ruleville,
we weren't there two days before
the mayor who also engaged
in police patrol stopped us and
said, jumped out of his car --
we were walking down
a dirt road in town,
Mayor Durrell [phonetic]
stops, jumps out of his car,
and points a pistol at us and says
"I know you all ain't from here,
and you're here to cause trouble.
I'm here to tell you
to get out of town."
And then he orders us into
his police car, and McLaurin,
Charles McLaurin says, "Well, why do
we have to get into the police car?"
And the mayor waves the
pistol at us , and says,
"Because this pistol says so."
Well, we got in the car.
[laughs] You know, so you're known
and you're bringing
this danger with you.
And it's not just danger.
One of the big differences between
sit-ins and community organizing
in places like Ruleville-
In a sit-in,
the danger is all directed at you.
You can say, "I will sit
at this lunch counter,
and if these white people beat me
up I am not going to fight back."
That's your decision.
Or you can say, "I am
not going to do that."
In the rural communities,
it's collective punishment.
You know, it's not just you when
you're in there being targeted.
It's everybody in the community.
So they're putting a bomb underneath
a church or they're driving
through town shooting into homes.
It's a collective danger.
So the dynamic of how you're going
to respond to it is different
than if you were just
sitting in or picketing
or engaged in a protest march.
You're doing any of that,
you've already accepted the fact
that you're going to get --
So, for instance, in Ruleville,
when the Night Rider shot
up the black community,
two girls were wounded,
but they had nothing
to do with what we were doing.
They were college students
that had stopped
to visit their grandparents before
going on to Jackson State College.
And they just happened to
be in front of the window
when the Night Riders shot in.
So that's a different kind
of danger than you're faced
when you're sitting in
and you know, and you say,
"Yeah, I'll let them do that."
But -- and that's important
to understand.
So you have to earn the
right to organize, I think.
And how do you do that?
You do that by talking to people.
You know, you're sitting
on the front porches,
you're going to church with them,
you're at the juke joint drinking
beer with them, playing basketball
with people, you're playing
baseball with people,
you're doing a whole
range of things,
and you're answering questions,
because people want
to know who you are.
When I call in southern culture,
I call it the "who are
your people questions."
You know, they're trying to hook you
up with something that's
familiar to them.
So it's important, for instance,
for me, in the Mississippi delta,
to be able to say my grandmother
came from Greenville, Mississippi,
up in the delta, and my
grandfather came from outside
of Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Those are important things, because
people are trying to, you know,
and it takes a little
while, you know,
what is it Paul Lawrence
Dunbar, I guess, wrote the poem,
"We wear the mask that grins and
lies," and so on and so forth.
And that's how people live.
And they don't take off those masks
and begin to reveal their real face
until they really are
comfortable with you.
You've been fishing with them,
you know, probably helped me a lot
in Ruleville, unlike McLaurin
and McClear [phonetic],
two Mississippians I was with,
I had never even seen
a cotton field before.
So I decided one day that I
would go out into the field
and try and pick some cotton.
[Laughter] That did not work.
But everybody got a
big laugh out of that.
I am sure I was the subject of
several nights of conversation
about going out there with
this long sack behind me
and lasting about half an hour.
It was August, after all.
So I mean, little things like
that, you slowly build --
people teaching you
something about their lives,
you're explaining things about
your life, they had never been
to Washington, D.C., or they
had never been to New York,
or maybe even never been
to Jackson, Mississippi.
So that's how you earn
that right to organize.
And you pick up when people --
and slowly people become, A,
comfortable with your
presence, and B,
decide maybe it's even worth
trusting this guy enough to try
and do what he wants us to do,
like try and register to vote.
And sometimes it does.
And one of our big --
Charles McLaurin and I
laugh about this sometimes.
There was a lady named
Mrs. Anderson,
she had what today would be
called a convenience store,
but in fact was a lot smaller
than a convenience store,
at the end of the dirt
road we were living on.
And every time we walked up the road
past our store, she would yell out,
"It's kind of hot in
here, why don't" --
"out here, why don't you
boys take a seat right here?"
She had a bench right
underneath a pecan tree.
And let me go inside and get
something cold for you to drink.
Well, it took us a while,
but I realize she never
let us in the store.
It occurred to us, she
was afraid if we were
in the store the white people
might think we were up to something
in the store, and burn
up or blow up the store.
And this went on for
weeks and weeks and weeks.
And she was a gossip.
She knew everything.
I don't know how she
knew this stuff,
but she knew what the white
citizen's council was up to,
what the Ku Klux Klan was up to,
and she would give us warnings:
"They talked about you last night."
You know, so I don't know how her
network worked, but she seemed
to know everything that
was going on in this town.
And our big break through,
Mac and I laugh sometimes,
is one day we were coming up the
road and she said her usual thing,
"It's kind of hot out here" --
but instead of saying
"Why don't you boys sit
down here while I go get you
something to drink," she said,
"Why don't one of you go inside
and get something to drink?"
I had no idea whether Mrs. Anderson
ever tried to register to vote,
but in my mind, in some
respects, that's was one
of our more significant
breakthroughs
in Ruleville, Mississippi.
>> Rex Ellis: Interesting.
You also talk about -- you call
them in your book "crazy Negroes."
You mention C. O. Chin, from
Madison county, you remember --
you talk about T. R. M. Howard --
T. R. M. Howard, Theodore
Roosevelt Mason Howard,
and you mention the Regional
Council of Negro Leadership.
These folk that you called crazy,
you put in quotes, because I think
that you thought of them as
something other than crazy,
but I wanted you to
sort of say a little bit
and help us understand the
sort of mentality of C. O. Chin
and Mr. Howard and the
significance of them all.
>> Charles Cobb: Well,
I put it in quotes
because that's what
white people called them,
"crazy niggers" is
what they called them.
"Crazy Negroes," the more
polite planter-types might say.
And these were people -- Medgar
Evers's father was one of them,
"Crazy Jim," they called
him, up in Decatur.
They say he wouldn't step aside
when the white people
came down the sidewalk.
And you know, and the
story Charles Evers tells
about Medgar you know,
is really dramatic.
Decatur, Mississippi,
is a saw mill town.
And James Evers was going
to the saw mill commissary
with the then-very
young Medgar Evans
and the very young Charles
Evers to pay a bill.
Now, again, James Evers
could barely read or write,
but he could do numbers in his head.
so when he got the bill --
he saw the bill wasn't right,
and told the clerk, it's not right.
And the clerk said "you
calling me a liar, nigger?"
They're standing in
front of the counter,
and he starts to move back
behind the counter where --
where everybody knew he kept
a gun beneath the counter.
Well, James Evers is standing
next to a crate of coke bottles.
He yanks one out and smashes
it against the counter,
shoves it at the clerk, and tells
him, "you make another move" --
you know -- "and I'll do you in,"
something I won't go
into the exact language.
In any case, he orders
Charles and Medgar
to back out and leave the store.
And Charles -- according to Charles,
he tells them, he says, "Now,
don't run," because there's
some other white people there.
He says, "Don't run, these people
ain't nothing but cowards."
And the boys leave, and then he
backs out holding the coke bottle.
And he goes home.
Now, he stays up all night
guarding the house with his rifle.
I says, Charles, "Well, why -- why
didn't the white people attack you?"
Charles -- "Well, white people
do a lot of dumb things,
but they don't mess
with crazy Negroes."
[laughter]
And Charles Evers wrote
in his autobiography,
and I think the point is valid
because it matches to my experience.
Whites are not prepared to
die for white supremacy.
It boils down to that.
And if you show you're
not scared of them,
then they will almost always --
and every instance of self
defensive violence that I know
of in the south, whether it's
Robert Williams in North Carolina,
whether it's the deacon's defense
of Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana,
or Bogalusa, Louisiana, whether it's
the group in Tuscaloosa, Alabama,
all places where there was
actual gunfire between white mobs
or Night Riders and black
people, white people run.
When the Night Riders in
Monroe, North Carolina,
decided to attack Dr. Albert Perry
who they decided was the real
man behind the resistance
to white supremacy in Monroe, North
Carolina, because he was wealthy --
relatively wealthy, he was a
doctor, and he was a Catholic --
and he was from Austin, Texas.
And when they attacked --
when they came to attack
after a Klan rally, the
word had gotten out.
So Robert Williams and a whole
bunch of the people in the --
officially, I guess, it was
the Monroe NAACP, but actually,
Robert Williams also
organized a rifle club,
affiliated with the National
Rifle Association, which was known
as the Black Guards, and these guys
were there, and they had on helmets,
and when the Klan came, they
opened fire on the Klan.
But they fired high,
and they fired low.
And they clearly, although
they could have,
were not trying to kill them.
They could have killed them.
These are trained World War
II and Korean War veterans.
They could have killed these guys,
because these guys weren't looking
for self defense from black
people in the first place.
And -- but they didn't.
They consciously chose to
fire above their heads or low.
And you see that repeated
in Louisiana with the Deacons
for defense and Justice,
you see that repeated
in Tuscaloosa, Alabama,
and you see it repeated
by individuals.
C. O. Chin, in Mississippi,
is a legend.
There's nobody in Mississippi
that was like Mr. Chin.
He was a small farmer, he ran a
big-time rhythm and blues nightclub,
he was a bootlegger,
he was a lot of stuff.
He's the first black man I
ever saw wearing a pistol
in a holster tied down on his hip.
And he provided -- and
this was a CORE project --
he provided armed protection
for the CORE workers
in Madison County, Mississippi.
Dave Dennis told me this
story about C. O. Chin,
because Dave was the project
director over there, and Dave said,
and I tell it in the book, Dave
says he had gone to court one day
because one of the workers was
being brought before the judge
for some kind of traffic violation.
So Dave was there.
He says, while he was there --
while this was going on,
C. O. Chin walked in.
And he had his pistol on.
And the judge looks over at C. O.
Chin and says something like, now,
C. O., you know you can't
come in here with that pistol.
But the Sheriff is also
there, Billy Noble,
and everybody knew
there was bad blood
between Sheriff Billy
Noble and C. O. Chin.
So C. O. Chin looks over at Billy
Noble and says, "As long as that SOB
over there got his pistol,
I am going to keep mine."
This is a courtroom.
Dave says, "I'm thinking
we're all dead in here."
[Laughter] Looking for a shoot out.
But the judge intervenes
and says, "Now, boys,
boys, let's be good boys.
Why don't you put your pistols
on the table over here?"
And so both men do, they ease out
their pistols, kind of looking
at each other, and
walk over to the table
and put the pistols on the table.
That's Dave Dennis's
story about C. O. Chin.
And everybody who worked in that
county has a C. O. Chin story,
Mateo Suarez, Dave
Flukey, Dave Dennis,
George Raymond, if he was alive.
They've all got C. O. -- I never
worked that county or that region
of Mississippi, but when the
Night Riders shot up his house,
shot at his house, I am told -- C.
O. Chin didn't just fire back --
then he got in history car and
chased them to the gas station,
the Ku Klux Klan at the gas station.
He served three years
in prison for it.
But he's that kind of man, nobody,
black or white, messed
with C. O. Chin.
Arguably, the most legendary of
all the men and women with guns,
willing to use them in Mississippi,
he probably is the
most legendary figure.
Although there are guys
in Mississippi, and women,
Mrs. Hamer said -- Fanny Lou
Hamer said once, I keep a shotgun
in every corner of my bedroom.
And the first cracker tries
to throw some dynamite
on my porch won't write
his mama again.
So there are men and women
in this gun tradition,
but C. O. Chin stands head and
shoulders above them, I think.
>> Rex Ellis: Why do you mention
C. O. Chin and Fanny Lou Hamer
and the -- what's the -- what's
the point you'd like us to leave
with about this -- this balance
and this dichotomy between violence
and non-violence, guns and
no guns, and how it sort
of made the movement -- it was
so essential to the movement?
>> Charles Cobb: One, I think
the dichotomy between violence
and non-violence is a false one.
I think the violence -- the
dichotomy made between violence
and non-violence is a false one.
The average person doesn't
call himself, even if he
or she uses a gun -- doesn't
see himself as a violent person,
nor does the average person,
even if they're involved
in the non-violent movement, see
themselves as a non-violent person.
There are a handful of people
who would describe themselves
as philosophically committed to
non-violence as a way of life.
And that's an important part
of how they define themselves.
That's very, very few people.
People just see themselves as
people, it's Hartman Turnbull,
"I'm out here protecting my family."
You know, he told Howell Range --
Howell Range's anthology of
interviews with movement people
that came out some years ago,
he tells Howell Range, he says,
"I had a wife, and I had a
daughter, and I loved my wife just
like the white man loves his one,
and just like the white man will die
for his one, I will protect
-- I will die for mine."
That's Hartman Turnbow.
That's how people see --
so the important thing to take
away is these are human beings,
and their responses
are human responses.
Simple to understand why
people would use guns
to protect their houses,
their families,
because they're human beings,
and that's what human beings do,
they try and protect
their loved ones,
they try to protect
it as best they can.
People make very hard-headed
choices about when to use a weapon
and when not to use a weapon.
We're not talking here about the
organization of guerrilla armies,
we're not talking here
about the organization
of even retaliatory violence.
We're talking about the
responses to terrorism.
Night Riders come through,
shoot at your house.
You know, as one farmer said,
"You've got to be a very little
man not to do something."
You know, and that's a
human response, you know?
It's just that the experience I
am talking about is our experience
in Mississippi, which is the
experience of black people.
And you can go into
many parts of the world
and encounter the same kind of
responses to violence and terr --
I think that's extremely important,
because one of my criticisms
of the history is, like, black
people are doing something unique.
Well, no. If you're a slave, then
I don't care where you come from,
Africa, Asia, Serbia, if you
-- if you're a slave, yeah.
You'd be inclined to
revolt against your slavery.
The best way to understand that is
at a human response to oppression.
People resist it as best they can.
Sometimes it's harder, sometimes,
to resist oppression than it is
at other times to resist oppression.
But of the human desire
is to resist oppression.
And the other thing I
want to say very quickly,
although it's almost another
book, although I devote part
of the first chapter
to it, is you also have
to understand this
as an American story.
You know, why is there racism
and white supremacy
in 1960s Mississippi?
Because that's the way America
was built at its very founding,
when Thomas Jefferson wrote the
Declaration of Independence,
when he wrote, we told these
truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal,
and are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights.
He did not mean black people.
He had 200 African slaves.
You know, the country -- and
here, the country in both,
in a de jure sense, thelaw was
founded around white supremecy --
read the whole Dred Scott
Decision, and it's an argument --
it's a present by Chief
Justice Brook
as to why black people
couldn't be citizens.
They would endanger the
security of the state, he said.
And furthermore, they would
have political voice, he says.
This is in 1857, the Dred Scott
Decision-- read the whole decision,
because most people usually
make out -- just make the --
use the quote, you know,
"the black man has no rights
that a white man need respect."
The whole decision is
even much more interesting
than that one single quote.
So the country was founded both
in a a de jure sense, which --
finally gets eliminated
by 200 years after --
the country is founded in 1960,
but the culture is still there.
What you get when you
establish a slave society,
you have to rationalize
why you're doing it.
You rationalize it by saying,
"well, these people need slavery.
They're inferior."
You know, they're helped
by their enslavement.
Much -- we heard something
like that in 1960 Mississippi.
And that burrows into the culture,
as it's much more difficult
to remove than the law.
You know, you can get rid of
laws prescribing segregation,
you can get rid of laws,
you can make laws guaranteeing
the right to vote.
It's a lot harder, though,
and we see that with a lot
of the reaction to Barack Obama.
It's a lot harder to
get rid of the notion
that these people are inferior,
that these people need to be kept
in their place, that these people,
you know, are ignorant, et cetera,
et cetera, or savages, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That's a problem that's
still with us today.
But I am trying to present -- and
I spent some time in the front part
of the book discussing
the founding of America,
what I call of the founding
contradictions, you know?
And you -- if you want to
understand in the 1960s movement,
it seems to me you
have to understand 17th
and 18th century America.
And Virginia in particular.
[Laughter]
>> Rex Ellis: My last question
for you: Yesterday when we were
at the Madison Center
and opening the website
and there was a panel discussion
there, you were there along
with Bob Moses, and Mrs.
Joyce Ladner was there
as well as her sister, Dori.
But at one point, Bob began to talk
about the deaths he had to face
and how that effected him.
You could just see it in
the way that he talked
about it, and just got quiet.
And then Mrs. Ladner talked about
two people who were very special
to her and how they had
died, and how she had
to sort of deal with that.
If you were to just make a short
statement about how this --
you mention in your book a woman
by the name of Brenda Travers,
and you mention also
Bernice Johnson Reagan.
And you talk about
what the movement meant
to them and how it changed them.
How would you answer that question
about what it did for Charlie Cobb
and how it changed Charlie Cobb?
>> Charles Cobb: Well, that's
a complicated question, too.
Well, the simplest way to put
that, one, it certainly opened
up a new world and
new ways of thinking.
Both about myself and
the world around me.
Just opened me up to that.
I mean, to be in Mississippi in
early 1960, '61, '62, is to see --
especially for me, growing up
in Springfield, Massachusetts,
and Washington, D.C., it
confronts you with a world --
not just that you didn't know about,
but you didn't even conceive of.
New ways of thinking.
Recognizing that there's no
real link between intelligence
and education, for instance.
You know, recognizing
that courage can emerge
from the most unexpected places.
Joe McDonald going down, you
know, to get his shotgun back,
as I talked to you about.
Mrs. Hamer, you know, going back
to the plantation after she tried
to register to vote, being
confronted by the plantation owner
who tells her she has
to remove her --
withdraw her application to register
to vote, and Mrs. Hamer looking
at the plantation owner and saying,
"I didn't go down to register
for you, I went down there
to register for myself."
So this courage that's
coming from just totally un--
especially with respect
to Mississippi, for me.
I mean, you know, for my generation,
Mississippi was wholly defined
by the murder of Emett Till.
Wholly defined by that murder.
I mean, there was -- as far as we
were concerned, there was no place
on Earth, indeed, the
entire universe,
that could possibly be worse for
a black person than Mississippi.
And I got off that bus passing
through Mississippi in 1962,
as I said yesterday, precisely
because students in Mississippi,
like Dori Ladner, were sitting in.
And I couldn't imagine -- that's
one thing for me to be sitting in,
in Maryland, or on
the eastern shore.
To my way of thinking, it's a
radically different proposition
to be a student in
Mississippi sitting in.
And I wanted to see
who these people were.
And if I hadn't done that,
they wouldn't have hijacked me
and kept me here in Mississippi
for the next four years.
You know? So that was a
radical shift in my life.
Then as a practical -- finally, as
a practical and professional matter,
I've been a working reporter all of
my life, since leaving Mississippi.
And one of the things you
had to do in the south
and in Mississippi was learn how
to listen to people and learn how
to speak to people in places where
you didn't know very much about
or didn't know anything about.
And those, of course,
are invaluable skills,
if you are a reporter,
as I have been.
>> Rex Ellis: Let me -- let
me turn on the audience now.
We've got time for at least
a couple of questions.
And we have two mics.
So wait for the microphone.
>> Female speaker:
I'd like to -- sorry.
[Laughter]
>> Female speaker:
I'd like to hear more
about Josephine Baker
and the role she played.
>> Charles Cobb; I am sorry?
>> Female speaker:Josephine Baker
and the role she played
in the civil rights --
>> Rex Ellis: Ella Baker.
>> Female Speaker: Ella Baker.
>> Charles Cobb: Josephine had
a role, but before our time.
[laugher] SNCC and CORE people know.
>> Female speaker: That's right.
>> Charles Cobb: Ms.
Baker -- when the --
Ms. Baker, and I will skip
just for reasons of time,
her very long history in the
1940s, her work in New York
and the co-op movement and the like.
Suffice to say in the -- in what
might be called the modern era
of the civil rights movement,
first, it was Ms. Baker
who organized Martin Luther
King's Southern Christian
Leadership Conference.
And she became the
executive director --
actually, she was hired as the
temporary executive director,
because these preachers
had a lot of trouble
with a woman being
executive director.
So she was the temporary executive
director until they finally hired,
I think, Wyatt Walker
out of Virginia.
So she helped found the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.
Then when the sit-ins erupted
in 1960, February 1, 1960,
Ms. Baker was one of
the first adults
to recognize the significance
of those sit ins.
And there's a whole exchange she
had, I won't go into, between her,
Doug Moore, who then was a young
minister in Durham, North Carolina,
who attempted sit-ins in 1957, and
James Lawson, who was in the process
of training a group of
students sitting in --
to sit in, in Nashville, Tennessee.
To make a long story short,
Ms. Baker managed to get $800
from Martin Luther King to
bring sit-in students together
at her alma mater, which was Shaw
College, then, now Shaw University,
in Raleigh, North Carolina.
And they had a conference of
maybe a couple hundred students,
I think that's -- the numbers vary,
anywhere from 120 to 200, or 300.
I don't know.
But a conference, and out of that --
and what Martin Luther King
wanted was a student arm
to his organization, because
SCLC was sort of mired in place
at that particular time, uncertain
about where it's going to go.
But that's another book.
[Laughter] But what he wanted was
a student arm to his organization.
He actually had meetings to
talk about the ministers.
I wasn't at the meetings,
so I can't speak --
I cannot speak to this
from first hand experience.
This -- so I am telling
you what I've been told,
and the stories vary.
One variation, they
were all meeting,
and these ministers were talking
about which students they could
convince to become part of SCLC,
and Ms. Baker stormed into
the meeting and gave a
"how dare you" kind of speech, and
broke it up, or something like that.
Chuck McDew told me, and
I do use this in the book,
Chuck being the second chairman of
SNCC, that Martin Luther King asked
to speak to the conference
a second time.
And at that second speech,
he asked the students
to become the student arm of SCLC,
buffet went on to tell the students
that in order to become part of
SCLC, they would have to commit
to non-violence as a way of life,
and Chuck says the students
weren't prepared to do that.
They were willing to use
non-violence as a tactic,
and in fact were using it, which
is why they had gathered together.
But when it came to
committing to non-violence
as a way of life, they weren't.
And Chuck says if it wasn't for
that, they would have become --
agreed to become a
student arm of SCLC.
Although Loni King, who was
one of the leaders of --
of the Atlanta student
movement differs a little bit,
because he says, "I would have
been suspicious of being a part
of any adult organization."
[Laughter] So you know,
this is memory,
we're talking 1960, after all.
And I am asking these
questions in 2011 and 2012.
I am sorry, 2012 and 2013.
So I -- there's a lot of
latitude, you know, for the passage
of time here, and people's memories.
Nobody quite remembers,
for instance,
how the name "SNCC"
actually came about.
There are various theories.
>> Rex Ellis: We'll go
to this gentleman --
And then we have a
gentleman in the front row.
And then one here.
And that will -- oh, and then here.
And then that will be it.
>> Male speaker: My question is--
Chuck knows I came out of Bogalusa,
Louisiana, where my father was
one of the first chapter --
>> Charles Cobb: His father, I
should say, interrupting you,
I am sorry, is a legendary
figure in Bogalusa.
Not just one of the founder --
his father is a legendary
figure in Bogalusa Louisiana.
Go ahead.
>> Male speaker: In
your observation,
do you find that there became
a subculture of defense groups?
For an example, we had
-- there was the Deacons,
and it was an organized structure.
But then what we began
to realize is people sort
of created their own structure
to guard their neighborhoods
or their streets or their things,
who were not members of the Deacons.
>> Charles Cobb: Yeah, two things --
>> Male speaker: And --
>> Charles Cobb: Go ahead.
I am sorry.
>> Male speaker: My second
question is did you see a difference
between an organization like the
Deacons overpowering the impact
of the civil rights group?
For an example, when people say
Bogalusa, they think the Deacons,
and they did all of this.
What people made things happen
was the Bogalusa Voter's League.
But it's that image of what these
people did, like the Panther Party.
People think of them not in
terms of where they were at,
but this image that
people got of them.
Can you in your research,
did you see any of that?
Or can you comment about that?
>> Charles Cobb: Okay.
Let me do the -- the
first question first
and then the -- the second question.
Yes, there were more local or
neighborhood self-defense structures
than there were a group
like the Deacons.
If you really look at the
southern tradition of self-defense,
you really see it rooted
in neighborhoods
or communities aimed -- around --
built around protecting communities.
Even Robert Williams's group
in Monroe, North Carolina,
really took shape around
protecting the black community
of Monroe and Union County.
McComb, Mississippi had
a self-defense group,
a number of communities
had self- defense groups,
and they weren't like the Deacons.
I mean, the Deacons
were highly structured,
and the Deacons were,
in fact, incorporated.
And you know, the Jonesboro Deacons
which was the first up at the top
of the boot, up in
northern Louisiana,
were the first Deacons group.
And they grew up partly to -- as I
say, self defense for the community
and then around the very,
very specific purpose,
and this really distinguishes
it from Mississippi
and southwest Georgia, around
the very specific purpose
of protecting CORE workers that were
working in Jonesboro, Louisiana.
Meanwhile, the Voters League
in Bogalusa was catching hell,
because Bogalusa, I mean,
Howell Range said it,
had no redeeming value.
Bogalusa was a Ku Klux Klan town.
I think the Ku Klux Klan's office
was across from the Mayor's office.
It was a Ku Klux Klan town, and
CORE really slowly comes in,
into Bogalusa, but
it's really your --
well, you remember the CORE
workers came to your house and --
and the sheriff showed up and
told them to get rid of them,
and your sister, Barbara,
called the neighbors,
and they came over with the guns.
Meanwhile, the sheriff had left,
and that begins the discussion
in Bogalusa about arms self-defense
they invite the Jonesboro Deacons
to come down to Bogalusa and
talk to them about self- defense,
and they eventually
-- you know, they --
they eventually form
the Bogalusa Chap --
which may be in the final
analysis the most prominent,
because not just your dad,
but Charles Sims, you know,
had achieved -- by this
time, the press is picking
up on the existence -- the New York
Times did a whole series of stories
on the Deacons -- this armed
group emerging in Louisiana.
And it kind of focused on
Bogalusa and what's his name,
Jim Brown becomes interested,
I think it's because he
helps get guns into Bogalusa.
And so there's a range of -- there's
interest in the Bogalusa group.
That is somewhat unique,
that is somewhat unique.
The Tuscaloosa, group, for instance,
A, restricted itself to 50 members.
B, they couldn't drink,
they had to be church-going,
they had to be military veterans
of either World War
II or the Korean war.
It was a very disciplined
-- And they never --
they didn't want a name,
because it just made --
they didn't want any exposure.
They were created for
the express purpose
of protecting the SCLC
chapter in Tuscaloosa, Alabama,
which was as bad a Klan
town as Bogalusa, Louisiana.
And you don't have anything
like that in Mississippi.
And you don't have anything
like that in Alabama.
Although people in Birmingham
protected Martin Luther King
with pistols all the time.
But you don't have anything like
what you had in Bogalusa, Jonesboro,
Tuscaloosa, in Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia,
although you have communities
arming themselves --
I mean, relatives in Lowndes
County, Alabama -- Alabama --
people from Lowndes County,
Alabama, who formed the diasporal,
the Lowndes County
diasporal in Detroit
and Georgia were bringing
in, particularly ammunition,
to people in Lowndes
County, Alabama,
because the gun stores
stop selling ammunition
to black people in Lawrence County.
I have a picture in the book of
this old lady with this shotgun,
about as tall as she is
sitting in a rocking chair
in Lowndes County, Alabama.
So the story varies.
And also with the Deacons,
sort of like what happened
with the Black Panther
party later on.
You also begin to get
local groups springing
up calling themselves Deacons,
but actually had no affiliation
with the Deacons, just picked
up on the name Deacons.
And you certainly had that in
Mississippi, I think, in Natchez
and Belzoni and a few other places,
these groups calling
themselves Deacons.
And they were armed, but
they really weren't chapters
of the Deacons For
Defense and Justice.
Although Charles Sims did claim --
Charles said there were 50 chapters
of the Deacons across the south.
I don't know about
those numbers, but --
>> Rex Ellis: Yes, sir?
>> Male speaker: Congratulations,
Charlie,
for a very enlightening
discussion and for the book.
I like very much your
definition of radical.
>> Charles Cob: Ella
Baker's definition.
I should --
>> Male speaker: Well, Of --
actually addressing the
root causes of the issues.
And I suppose all of us here are
tempted to revisit the word radical,
because it has a bad name in
this town, generally speaking.
So thanks for that.
I think you are well-positioned
with your reporter experience,
international experience,
and with the --
with this fantastic work on the
south and the SNCC and so on,
to sort of perhaps bridge the
gap and go from the micro,
the American Civil Rights Movement,
you know, US-centric approach,
to perhaps-- Because in the
'60s there was a global movement
of revolt for dignity, which is the
independence movement in the whole
of Africa and also
in the Third World.
Which is very interesting, because
it raises the issue of the fact
that we actually -- as human
beings, we come from the same root.
You know, from an Abrahamic
perspective, we come from Adam
and Eve, so we are one family.
So the issue here is the question
of Cain and Abel, and the question
of analyzing the different
cultures we spoke about culture,
very important, critically.
Revisiting our cultures, and seeing,
you know, the Cain side of humanity
and the Abel side of humanity.
And here I would like just to -- you
to address the issue of non-violence
as an intrinsic part of a spiritual
mindset in certain cultures
that actually make people from
a divine perspective peaceful
and consider that as a
high degree of being human.
Thank you.
>> Charles Cobb: Well, I am -- you
know, we need another hour or two
to really probe such a question.
You know, and I am going to resist.
[inaudible response
from audience] Yeah.
And I am actually thinking about as
a -- as a follow up book to this,
to approach the question
of non-violence, perhaps --
you know, -- both the practicalities
an the philosophy of it.
It just seems unnatural
out growth of this book.
In fact, in this book you will see
that I explore on a regular basis,
in every chapter, the
tension between non-violence
and self-defense, because
there's a tension in --
the tension in the choices
that people have to make.
I also say, and really in an
epilogue, in after afterword,
that I actually think that
the movement legacy most worth
considering today, given the
growing coarseness of the society,
given the violence that exists
not only internally in terms
of the United States, but
world-wide, might be non-violence.
I express -- I must admit --
some skepticism in the sense that
the ideal is noble, but the reporter
in me then kicks in and
doesn't quite see how it works.
And then I sort of issue a
challenge obliquely, in the book,
in the afterword, to
the proponents of --
of non-violence as a way of life to
dig into communities and explore how
that might work in
a city like Chicago,
where we see these awful
statistics of violence
within the black community
of Chicago.
Or if you go to state prisons as --
in federal prisons you see
a disproportionate number
of black minority jailed
for outrageous drug laws.
But when you go to state
prisons you see a high degree
of prisoners reflected people of
color killing other people of color
or trying to kill people of color.
And that seems to be an arena, I
say, in the book, that seems to me
to be an arena in which people
committed to non-violence as a way
of life need to be
thinking about working in.
I mean, if you want to bring up
the issue and work around the issue
of non-violence in a city, like, say
Chicago, now how would you do that?
Ivanhoe Donaldson told me in
a conversation on this book
when I was working on the book, he
said -- he found it interesting,
you know, he said really, you
know, there's never been --
there's been a movement around
issues, voter registration,
non-violent movements around
issues, independence, voting rights,
labor rights, a range of issues.
But there's never been a movement
around non-violence itself.
Just for non-violence.
A movement to make non-violence
part of the political conversation,
a movement that attempts to -- to
instill in communities the idea
of non-violence as a way of life.
And that seems to me to be a
work people who are committed
to non-violence as a way
of life should find
worthwhile, attempting to do.
That seems to me that's -- part --
as far as I can go in
response to your comment.
[inaudible response from audience]
>> Rex Ellis: Thanks.
We have -- we have
one final question.
One final question from a civil
rights worker in her own right.
Charles, would you
like to say something
about this young lady before
she asks her question?
>> Joan Mulholland: Tell the truth.
>> Charles Cobb: Yeah.
I will. I will.
I like to do -- I like to
do these kinds of things.
>> Joan Mulholland: Don't
tell too much truth.
>> Charles Cobb: Joan Trumpauer as
I sometimes slip into calling her,
as opposed to her old
married name, Mulhand --
Mulholland was a student at
Tougaloo College in 1960,
and she participated in the sit-ins
in Jackson, Mississippi in --
so you have to imagine a little
blond girl from Virginia being
at a historically black college,
not only attending a
historically black college,
but engaging in sit-ins
with students
from that college in
Mississippi, in 1960.
And that's enough of -- of --
>> Joan Mulholland: That
sit-in was actually '63,
and the point of my question.
It wasn't an organized
group, it was, I think,
Baker's next door neighbor, Wells.
But after he dropped off folks
for the sit-in, he went and got --
parked his car, got his buddies,
and they were in Woolworths, armed,
for our protection, in case of need.
We weren't aware of it at the time.
But in your research or knowledge
with the student sit-ins,
not the community organized stuff.
Was there much of this going on?
>> Charles Cobb: I don't know.
Loni King was the only one sit-in
student who told me a story
about being defended from
-- he says that he was --
Loni was the chair of the
Atlanta student movement,
the committee on appeal
for human rights.
And obviously, you have a -- he
was a Moorehouse student as well.
And obviously, as a chair of a
group like CORE the Atlanta group,
you get a certain amount
of visibility,
Loni said they publish not just
their names in the newspaper,
but their names and
addresses in the newspaper.
And he says -- actually, Loni says
the story came to him second-hand
because he was out of town.
He says one night some
white guys came by and sat
out in front of his apartment.
And nobody knew why they were there.
And his immediate neighbor
spotted them.
So four of them came down.
They were all Korean war
veterans, and they came down,
they came down to the
parking lot where the car was,
with their shotguns
and approached the car
from four different directions, and
Loni says he clicked the shotgun
and put it into the
window which was open,
and asked the driver what he was
doing, what they were doing there,
and the driver said they
were waiting for a friend.
And Loni said, he told them, well,
maybe you better wait
somewhere else.
And Loni says they "jetted
out of there," to quote Loni.
And that was the only instance
that I heard a story, you know,
about self defense related
directly to sit-in protest.
Although probably such stories
exist in Cambridge, Maryland,
around Gloria Richardson
and the people
out there on the eastern shore.
>> Rex Ellis: The book is called,
"This Non-Violence Stuff
Will Get You Killed."
They're outside.
The author is Charlie Cobb, Junior.
Let's give him a hand,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
[ Applause ]
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