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http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/154/6595/loc_jonh_000552_000575R.pdf
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Dallas County
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Dallas County
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loc_jonh_000552_000575
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Architecture notebook 4: Everdale House, near Selma, Ala.
Creator
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Jones, Harvie P.
Description
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Everdale House, built 1829. Late Federal and Greek Revival style. Slave quarters, built c. 1850s. Located near Selma, Alabama in Dallas County.
Addresses and locations of the structures pictured may no longer be accurate, as street names and house numbers change over time. The addresses given reflect the information provided by Harvie Jones at the time he documented these structures.
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1980-1989
1990-1999
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Architecture, Domestic
Architecture--United States
Slave quarters
Selma (Ala.)
Dallas County (Ala.)
Dwellings
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Photograph albums
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Text
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Harvie P. Jones Collection
Series 4, Box 1, Notebook 4
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama
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en
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loc_jonh_2021_01C
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http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/109/7571/r01c01-03.pdf
0de99d896cd728141b513de5e51dadb9
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Series 01, Subseries C: Cabaniss Personal Correspondence
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Series 01, Subseries C: Cabaniss Personal Correspondence
Description
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Subseries C, Cabaniss Personal Correspondence (CPC), consists of correspondence from letters from friends, relatives, and their children. Most of the family correspondence involves these children and families of S. D. Cabaniss, and his brothers and sisters who appeared to have been enormous burdens in these difficult years. These papers are sorted "to whom," "from whom," and then chronologically.
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r01c01-03
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Series 1, Subseries C, Box 1, Folder 3
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B____, C. B. (from Selma, Alabama) to Cabaniss, Charles Eugene, 1864
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r01c-210910
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Cabaniss, Charles E.
CBB
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1860-1869
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Selma (Ala.)
Hood, John Bell
Quinine
Jaundice
Illness
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Correspondence
Language
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en
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This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.
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http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/32/11350/Chesnut.jpg
064562da8dd8772f22b6378268109ae2
http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/32/11350/uah_civr_000004_Box_2_Tape_3.mp4
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/resources/21" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">View the Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965 finding aid in ArchivesSpace</a>
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
Oral History
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Early Years of the Movement (Part II) Speaker: J.L. Chestnut, Jr.
On behalf of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on behalf of President
Frank Franz, I am very pleased to welcome all of you to this lecture series
focusing on the history and impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. This
historic initiative brings to Huntsville, distinguished speakers who will
reflect on events of the past and who will share with us their hopes for the
future. I must once again commend the faculty from the University of Alabama in
Huntsville and from Alabama
A&M University, who worked over a period of more than two years to make this
possible. The faculty includes, but are not limited to, John Dimmock, Lee
Williams, Jack Ellis, Mitch Berbrier from UAH, and James Johnson and Carolyn
Parker from Alabama A&M. I am very pleased that you could be with us.
Good evening. It is my pleasure to take a couple of moments to acknowledge our
sponsors. These are the people who have made it possible for us to do all these
kinds of things.They have given us funds and all kinds of support.They are: The
Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the
Humanities; Senator Frank Sanders;The Huntsville Times; DESE Research Inc.;Mevatec
Corporation; and Alabama Representative, Laura Hall. At Alabama A&M, we have the
Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the State Black Archives
Research Center and Museum, Title III Telecommunications and Distance Learning
Center, Office of Student Development, the Honor Center, Sociology Social Work
Programs and the History Political Science Programs. At the University of
Alabama in Huntsville, we have
the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The History Forum Banking
Foundation, Sociology, Social Issues Symposium, The Humanities Center, The
Division of Continuing Education, the Honors Program and the Office of
Multi-Cultural Affairs, Office of Student Affairs and the UAH Copy Center. Let
us give these people a show of appreciation.
Introduction: The thing that has always fascinated me about the civil rights
career of J.L. Chestnut Jr., is the extent of which it is rooted in ordinary
light and then the experiences of
ordinary people struggling against poverty and injustice. Mr.Chestnut's
autobiography, Black in Selma, published in 1990 with Historian Julia Cast, is a
reminder of how history really operates. Here, one is far removed from the
well-ordered narratives of human freedom favored by Hollywood authors and writers
of fiction or those who devise stories where battles are fought and won, where
dramatic conflicts are resolved easily and quickly in time and space. Instead,
Mr. Chestnut introduces us to a far more complicated vision. One marked by the
passions of political combat in a small southern town and by the endless quest
for dignity among those that he calls "The little and forgotten people of this
world." His life shows that the struggle did not begin with the Civil Rights
Movement and it is not over today. Born in Selma, Mr. Chestnut's early
curiosity and his remarkable powers of observation and memory as a child,
particularly of people and events within the black communities and its relation
with the white power structure and with the police, is owed much to the example
of his own parents. He had a hard working and resilient father and an educated,
fiercely independent mother.She spent forty years teaching school and was never
hesitant about speaking her mind.
Mr. Chestnut told me this afternoon that his mother, now age ninety, is still
very quick to speak her mind about affairs of the world.After graduating from
Knox Academy, Selma's black high school, Mr. Chestnut went on to Dillard
University in New Orleans and from there to Howard University in Washington, DC
where he earned a degree in law. In 1959, he came home to open an office as
Selma's first black attorney. Though eventually merging as one of the
South's leading civil rights lawyer, his early years of practice often
encountered the same barriers that confronted Alabama's other black
lawyers. I think at that time there were only nine in all. He had to overcome
the racism of white judges.He struggled to maintain the semblance of a
professional life, even having to fight for the right to be able to sit within
the railing of the courtroom alongside the black sharecroppers and laborers, who
made up the bulk of his clients, are just a few examples. Nevertheless, Mr.
Chestnut's courage and legal skills and his long fight for the right of
Dallas County's black residents earned him the respect of poor blacks and
poor whites alike. Soon, he had become a leader of the black community and its
dealings with the power structure from the sheriff to the mayor, the courthouse
of bureaucracy and eventually to George Wallace himself. Mr. Chestnut headed the
NAACP legal team that oversaw Alabama's reluctant implementation of the
Supreme Court's decision back in 1954, which ordered the desegregation of
schools. In 1963, he helped the young freedom writer, Bernard Lafayette, the
first civil rights worker to come to Selma, persuade his fellow Selmians to
overcome their fears in order for them to attend mass meetings aimed at voter
registration. The importance of this was reflected in the fact that at that
time, out of one hundred and fifty counties, only fifteen thousand black
residents were registered to
vote. That was the start of the Selma movement. The subsequent emergence of
Selma as a symbol for the national black voting rights campaign during the
1960's is owed much to the health and advice that Mr. Chestnut was able to
provide the civil rights organizers. He represented many of them locally,
including Martin Luther King Jr., James Foreman, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy and
Joseph Lowery. After the event of Bloody Sunday, on March 7, 1965 and long after
the reporters and network television camera's coverage of the violence on
the Edmund Pettus Bridge disappeared, Mr. Chestnut continued to fight in
combating local job discrimination and winning the rights of blacks to sit on
Dallas County juries. Following the Selma to Montgomery March, in passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, Mr. Chestnut emerged in the words of Julia Cast as "a
leader in the long march. The process of turning the possibilities opened up in
1965 into a real grass roots change long after the national spot light and
national civil rights leaders had gone elsewhere."Eventually, Mr. Chestnut would
try more capital cases than any other attorney in Alabama and the firm he was
head of would become the largest black firm in the state.His list of cases
defending the political and economics rights of African Americans, Hispanics,
native Americans, and women continues to grow. Mr. Chestnut has been active in
speaking out in countless public forums across the nation, from ABC's Good
Morning America, BET's Lead Story to CBS Nightline, to name just a few. The
subtitle of Mr. Chestnut's autobiography, The Uncommon Life of.IL. Chestnut
Jr., is amply named, I think. I believe it will provide an endearing testimony
to what he has achieved. That achievement in the words of the San Francisco
Chronicle, has been to give "a vividly human face to the men and women of Selma,
who struggles, hopes,
contradictions, optimism, cynicism and general thrashing about helped shape
today's south." This symposium on the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama is
honored to have as our guest tonight, J.L. Chestnut Jr. Join me in extending a
warm welcome.
J.L. Chestnut, Jr.: Good evening to you. I want you to know that I cannot hardly
wait to get back home and let my dear wife know that I have been hobnobbing with
the president, the Provos and the president of UA in Huntsville as well as two
or three Ph.D's. My wife is always saying I am nobody, but she does not
know a single college president.You just wait until I get back there. My dear
friend, the president of this college who comes from my neck of the woods, is a
fine, fine man. This institution has really grown since the last time I was here
last. It is a great honor for me to be at this historic institution. I was
overwhelmed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and how it has grown to
seven thousand students, I think. It is a great testimony to the people of this
area and I am honored to be among you. I want you to know that I sit on the
trustee board of the University of South Alabama, USA.Last year, I spoke at the
University of Alabama Law School in Tuskaloosa. Fifty years ago, when I went off
to law school, I could not even get into the University of Alabama University
Law School except as a janitor. What has occurred since that has brought us to
where we are here is part of what I am going to talk about. What was the "there"
and what is the "here"? will try to shed some light on those questions.
First, I would like to take a moment or so to read the opening paragraph from a
deliberately, provocative and controversial weekly newspaper column I write,
which. Kay Turner is well aware of this. The paragraph, I think, says a lot
about the current
mindset of most of the people my age, that struggled in the front ranks of the
movement during the dangerous sixties. Three months before the unspeakable
bloody tragic murder of thousand of innocent souls in New York and Washington, I
wrote and published the following paragraph in several newspapers. It begins by
stating, "In significant ways, the United States of America is a great force for
good and progress in this really chaotic world. I am convinced that no other
country would have created a marshal plan or spent billions of dollars to
economically resurrect or vanquish folk, after a five-year bloody world war.
What nation other than this one would have fought and awful Civil War of the
emancipation of slaves of color. I dare say not one. America is in a class by
itself." I wrote those words because they are true.
I am the great grandson of slaves, but my lawyer states that this nation equals
any America. I was a soldier during the Korean War and I was prepared to die if
necessary, in defense of a democracy that denied me. Moreover, I did not accept
the city rationale in Washington for the war. How does one stop the spread of an
idea of communism with an army?Indeed, the Koreans had every right to be
communist if that is what they wanted to be in their own land. Yet, if my
country went to Korea to fight, I would fight for my country. Less than ten
years later, my country went to Vietnam and made the same mistake. We reaped
devastating results. However, if one listens to George W. Bush, one might think
that only good comes out of America and that all of the evil in the world is
elsewhere.The president described the tragic New York and Washington outrageous,
as unprovoked acts of war and as a war between good and evil. We all can easily
see the unmitigated evil of the terrorists but the young president overstates our
good. I understand his role to try and unify the nation but unity, like peace,
must in the end rest on truth. A false foundation will not support either in the
long run." That is pretty much where my mind is after all of these years of the
struggles in Selma and elsewhere.
Let me leave where I am now and let me take you back to 1958, Selma, when I was
foolish enough to come back and establish a law office. It was the first time a
black was crazy enough to do that in Selma. As you heard a moment ago, only one
hundred and fifty-eight blacks, out of twenty thousand, were registered to vote.
Each one of those people had to be vouched for by a white person. If a white
person did not feel that old Ned was all right, then old Ned did not get to
register. There were black and white water fountains, rest rooms, churches, and
schools.My mother, my wife, and other black women could not try on a pair of
shoes right a hat in some cheap department stores downtown. Not one black person
anywhere in the State of Alabama had ever served on a jury, not one. The police
were a law unto themselves in the black community. When they came to knock on
your door, if they bothered to knock at all, you would say, "Who is it?"They
would respond, "The Law", and they meant it.They did whatever to whomever
whenever. If you asked any questions, they would find you floating in the
Alabama River. This was just a few years ago in 1958. I saw black men literally
lynched for not saying sir or ma'am to a white person or yielding the
sidewalk. The only jobs blacks had in downtown Huntsville, Selma, Birmingham and
Mobile were as janitors, messengers and delivery people. There was a blanket of
fear over this state so thick that you could almost cut it with a knife. Black
folks had to be careful about what they said to
each other. You never knew what someone would go downtown and claim you said.
You could loose a hell of a lot more than a job. As a lady said to me at Harvard
University, "If it was that bad Mr. Chestnut, why did you go back?" I said,
"Hell, that's why I went back". I had no idea that a Civil Rights Movement
would explode in the streets of Selma. I just hoped that we could make some
modest achievement. I hoped that we could pull our resources as black folks and
set up a few credit unions, maybe open up some grocery stores and other types of
businesses. If we were lucky, I thought we might be able to get the white police
out of black Selma. That is about as far as I thought we could go. I was born
and raised in Selma. I had not seen anything that would suggest the Montgomery
Boycott or anything else such as a massive Civil Rights Movement in the streets
of Selma or in Birmingham for that matter. I though when the white man said it
was over, hell, it was over.
The Civil Rights Movements exploded in the city of Selma. I will never forget
March 71\ even if I live to be three hundred years old. I had never seen anything
like that in the army. I went across the bridge early on what we called Bloody
Sunday, to tie up the one telephone that we did have over there. The reason I
had to tie up the telephone is because I represented the NAACP legal defense and
education fund. Even though Martin King and Reverend Abernathy were putting all
of these folks in jail they were not paying for it; my bosses were paying for
it. I had to explain to them what was going on. In fact, we did not even believe
in all of this marching. We said that we should find two or three obviously
qualified black folks, send them down to register and when they turn them down,
you have a perfect test case; go to court. Martin repudiated all of that by sending
five hundred people out. I went across that bridge early just in case. We did
not even know there would be a march. What spurred it all off, Jimmy Lee
Jackson, a young fellow, had been shot dead by the state troopers in a
demonstration in Marion about thirty miles from Selma. All the boy was doing was
trying to protect his mother. People were so upset, they fiercely said, "We
should take his un-embalmed body and march all the way to Montgomery and put it
on George Wallace's desk. Obviously, we could not do that. It evolved from
that into the march to Montgomery. George Wallace said there would be no more
marches and that he was up to here in marches. We said we did not care if he was
up to there, we are going to march. We had this conflict. The question
was rather or not there would be a march said, "If Martin King is in the march, we
are not going to be in it. We have been in Selma for two years getting our ass
whipped, going to jail, bleeding and getting no credit for it, but Martin comes
in, makes one speech, goes out to Los Angeles, and raises ten thousand dollars.
The hell with it! We are not going to march." I went over there just in case. I
was over there looking at the carnival at the other side. On the other side,
there were four hundred state troopers decked out in riot gear. They had billy
clubs the size of baseball bats and tear gas. They were backed up by another one
hundred deputy sheriffs and posse men on horses. They were decked out in tear
gas mask also.I said to myself,"Who the hell are you all expecting ... the
Russian army or something?" They were over there as usual, arguing with each
other about who was in charge. The truth of the matter was none of them were in
charge. I looked back and there was John Lewis, who is now a congressman from
Atlanta, leading a little group of people. Martin Luther King was not in that
march. He
was in Atlanta, preaching in his church.You have seen that clip a many of times
on television of John Lewis and his group coming face to face with all of this,
all might of the state of Alabama, stretched out across that highway at the foot
of that bridge on the Montgomery side. I heard a white boy say, "Tum around. Go
back to your church. This is as far as you will be permitted to go." John
kneeled and begin to pray and the others behind him did likewise. Then,
something went off like a tear gas canister; I do not know what it was.Then,
there was absolute deadlock; tear-gas everywhere.People were screaming and
hollering.You could here ribs cracking as horses rode across folk's breast.
I saw grown men with these baseball bats coming down on the heads of women and
children, splitting them like watermelons. I had dropped the telephone because I
was trying to pull some of these people out of the highway. I could hear New
York saying, "What's happening... What's happening?" It was a horrible
day. Blood was everywhere. I remember walking back across that bridge, literally
crying.What is this all about? Martin keeps talking about the power of the
public opinion. What public opinion? They were beating my folks to death in the
middle of a public highway, at high noon and no one cared because they were
black. What public opinion was this? At that moment, I did not think that
America could be saved. I did not think that white people were worth saving. The
thing I did not know was that people all around the United States, black, white,
brown and red people had watched that ugly bloody scene and they did not like
what they had seen.The President of the United States had watched it spell
bound. Three weeks earlier, he had met with some of us in the White House. We
asked him to present to the congress a voting right bill. He said, "I can't
do that boy. I just got you a
was in Atlanta, preaching in his church. You have seen that clip a many of times
on television of John Lewis and his group coming face to face with all of this,
all might of the state of Alabama, stretched out across that highway at the foot
of that bridge on the Montgomery side. I heard a white boy say, "Turn around. Go
back to your church. This is as far as you will be permitted to go." John
kneeled and begin to pray and the others behind him did likewise. Then,
something went off like a tear gas canister; I do not know what it was. Then,
there was absolute deadlock; tear-gas everywhere. People were screaming and
hollering. You could here ribs cracking as horses rode across folk's
breast. I saw grown men with these baseball bats coming down on the heads of
women and children, splitting them like watermelons. I had dropped the telephone
because I was trying to pull some of these people out of the highway. I could
hear New York saying, "What's happening... What's happening?" It was a
horrible day. Blood was everywhere. I remember walking back across that bridge,
literally crying. What is this all about? Martin keeps talking about the power
of the public opinion. What public opinion? They were beating my folks to death
in the middle of a public highway, at high noon and no one cared because they
were black. What public opinion was this? At that moment, I did not think that
America could be saved. I did not think that white people were worth saving. The
thing I did not know was that people all around the United States, black, white,
brown and red people had watched that ugly bloody scene and they did not like
what they had seen. The President of the United States had watched it spell
bound. Three weeks earlier, he had met with some ofus in the White House. We
asked him to present to the congress a voting right bill. He said, "I can't
do that boy. I just got you a
public accommodation law wherein you can buy a hamburger wherever I can buy one.
You can stay in the Holiday Inn. Go home. Be quiet. Be grateful. Be thankful."
We went home and turned Selma inside out and upside down and the result of it
was at the bottom of that bridge. There he was, the President of the United
States, looking and he did not like what he saw. The next thing he was doing was
standing before the congress of the United States with the bill in his hand,
insisting that the congress pass the bill and pass it now. He ended that refrain
with, "We shall overcome!" Later on, Martin King told me that he was watching it
with his wife Coretta. He said that when the President of the United States
said, "We shall overcome," he said a tear trickled down his cheek. I said,
"Martin, my friend, no tear trickled down my cheek". He said, "Why?" I said, "Do
you not understand? You are no longer the number one Civil Rights leader in
America, hell, Lyndon Johnson is." This is the man who said three weeks ago that
the country would not stand for two civil rights bills. We were in deep, deep trouble.
From that moment on, every time the president of the United States could, he
wanted to preempt out our movement. He was never able to do it. As I was telling
some of the professors today, if it had not been for Lyndon Johnson, I would not
be here today; I would have been six feet under. Lyndon Johnson was able to get
his bill through. Then they took postmen and other federal workers and sent them
to Dallas County, Alabama to Terry County, Alabama and to Wilcox County, Alabama
and said, "Register those folks." In six weeks, we went from one hundred and
fifty registered voters to ten thousand. That has not happened anywhere in the
history of the human race. The struggle was hardly over. The struggle is not
over in the year 2001. It is not over as I
stand here speaking to you. Well, why not? For a whole lot of reasons. First, as
much a hundred years earlier, poor, uneducated slaves were set free to compete
or parish. They had no money. They had nothing.
First of all, in 1966, we had ten thousand new black voters who knew next to
nothing about politics or voting. We were opposed by people with centuries of
experience in politics, government, and voting. Second, we had no control
whatsoever, over the economy. Their political adversaries employed most of the
ten thousand new voters. Even worse, they had been brainwashed for centuries by
being told that voting and politics were white folks business. If you want to
stay out of trouble, stay away from voting and politics. Alabama was a one-party
state, the Democratic Party. It continued to back every incumbent who was white.
The best we could do every now and then was get together and elect what we call
the lesser of two white evils. That took place for the next ten years.
We went to see Jimmy Carter after he was elected. We said to Mr. Carter, "We
went to the poles, but every time they count the absentee ballot box, we lose."
Mr. Carter said, "Well, that is a state problem. We will not deal with that our
first term. We will deal with that our second term." As you know, he did not get
a second term. In 1980, Mr. Reagan came to town, not only were we not getting
any help but also Mr. Reagan prosecuted us. Mr. Reagan's justice department
under Mr. Edwin Meese brought at least a hundred and fifty indictments against
carefully selected black leaders and charged them with something called boast
fraud, something that Mr. Reagan did not know what it meant and hell, I did not
either. We went up to see Mr. Meese and said, "Why are you
doing this to us? Everything we know about the absentee ballot box, we learned
it from whites. We are doing just what they are doing. You have not indicted a
single white person. Here is the evidence." We showed to him how whites were
doing the same thing. Mr. Meese was writing furiously stating, "We are going to
look into that." I never heard another word from Mr. Meese. Finally, we circled
in the court and defeated every one of these indictments, except for about two
and those two were thrown out on appeal. We begin to elect black folks to office
and that was not the end of the battle. The battle was not over. The battle is
not over yet. The battle will not be over in my lifetime or yours.
I filed a lawsuit and charged systematic exclusion of black folks from the jury
box and won. We had blacks come into the jury box. Some of these counties are
seventy and eighty percent black. We came up with a jury with eleven blacks and
one white. The white, every time would be selected foreperson. Because of three
hundred and fifty years of slavery and another one hundred years of near
slavery, the mere fact that I won a lawsuit and was able to put them in the jury
box could not erase four hundred and fifty years of discrimination. It is a slow
process. That is why it is not over. We put an all black jury in the box. There
was a white lady, whose leg was broken in a car accident. She received two
thousand dollars. A black woman in an identical situation would receive two
hundred dollars from an all black jury. After three hundred years of slavery and
one hundred years of near slavery, we have these fools on television talking
about it is over. We are about a third of the way, at best. Do not you fool
yourself. As I say to you, after almost forty years since the bridge, black
folks now take in and spend close to
nine hundred billion dollars every year and we do not spend it with each other
because we have been taught to not do that since the first slave ship stopped
here. That is one of the reasons why people with nine hundred billion dollars
have so many folks on food stamps and living in public housing. Everyday, we
spend at least a million dollars in supermarkets. We do not own one single
supermarket. The NAACP and my so, so, so fraternity and my wife's so, so
sorority spends tons of money in white hotels arguing about poverty and racism.
We do not own a single one of those hotels. If we bought one of those hotels,
that would do far more than addressing poverty and racism than these so called
symposiums that we have on the subject.
We have come a long, long way against insurmountable odds. It is a miracle that
we have even survived. I argue all the time all around the country with all
kinds of folks. The argument is rather or not if the glass is half full or half
empty. If you are white, you are more likely to argue that it is half full. If
you know me or ever heard of me, you would argue that it is half-empty. We all
have to agree that there is some water in the glass. It is wrong to argue that
over the last forty years, we have not made meaningful progress. It is just as
wrong to argue that that progress equals victory. We have to be realistic about
the whole situation. I was arguing with a fellow. You have probably seen him on
television. His last name is Armstrong. I forgot what his name. He called me a
liberal. He was bragging about how conservative he was. I said, "Boy let me tell
you something, I don't care nothing about black liberals or conservatives.
A black conservative to me is someone carrying water on a political reservation
run by George Bush and two or three other powerful Republicans. A black liberal
is someone carrying
water on a political reservation ran by Bill Clinton. The hell with both
reservations!" I am a black man trying to deal with truth.
People like me made people like Armstrong possible. If we knew that would be
.There must be accountability in the black community. We are the only people you
can say anything about, do anything to and there are not any consequences
whatsoever. The reason that we attack and undermine each other is because there
is no penalty to pay. That has to change. Sooner or later, we are going to have
to deal with the Armstrongs whether they all want to do it or not. We are going
to have to do that. We cannot fight on the serious front and have all of these
little yard dogs laughing and yapping at our heel. We have to be loose so we can
concentrate on the real struggle. I will say this. I am going to be frank with
you. I would not have said this if we did not have all of these white folks
here. I am just telling you all the truth. I learned in the Civil Rights
Movement that black folks are just 10 to 12 percent of the national population.
We will never get it done by ourselves. Nothing really happened in Selma until
white people of goodwill came. They came not just from the North, but other
parts of the South and locked arms with us in the streets of Selma and said, "I
am ready to march, go to jail, die or do whatever is necessary that rights will
prevail." White folks died in Selma. White folks died in Mississippi, Georgia
and other places finding that this country could be free. So, I do not want and
I do not agree with these separatist ideas. I think it is not only
self-defeating but foolish to say, "We don't want no white folks in this
and we are going to do it ourselves." You sure will do it yourself. We need all
of the help that we can get. Last, I would like to say to white folks that we
freed more of you all in 1967
than we freed people that look like me. I had white people come up to me and
whisper in my ear in Selma and they would say, "Keep up the fight J.L." They are
still walking by fear.
Do you know what it is in the year 2001 for someone to call you a nigger lover?
You might as well pack up and leave. This is everybody's struggle. We have
come a long way and we have overcome many obstacles. We have a long way to go,
but we are on our way. Nothing can stop us. I know from experience. I have been
to the well many, many times and I know that when good people lookup, rise up
and decide to stand up, we can make mountains move and trees tremble but we have
to do it together.
Closing: Attorney Chestnut will entertain your questions. Before we do that, let
me remind you that the yellow sheets that you have, please fill those out. Those
are our evaluation forms. Some of our grants or rather some of the folks need
that. Please fill them out and give it to some of the young people that are in
the back. Attorney Chestnut will now entertain your questions
Q: (inaudible)
A: You were around in the sixties, I know? Then you know that even then they
were only relatively a few of them. Young folks, my children's generation
and my grandchildren have the impression that 85 percent of black America was on
the march in the 1960's. There were a minuscule number of us on the march. I
think we can increase our numbers, but it will always be small. That does not
matter. Jesus Christ only had twelve, only one of them was a trader. If you are
prepared to be free or die, I do not need an army. I just need a few of those
type people and you can change the world. We want
to give everybody the chance. Do not be disheartened when you look back and see
that there are not many behind you.
My wife and I were born in Selma. We were sick of that little place. We both sat
down and talked about it. We both concluded that in six months to a year, we
would either pack up and leave or we would be dead. We had to consider that, to
not consider that, for us, that would have been crazy. I do not know of anyone
in the Civil Rights Movement back in the sixties who came in because they wanted
to commit suicide. 1 also did not know anyone in that movement who was not
prepared to die, if necessary; what is now going on is a lack of dedication.
Let me tell you about my son who is a lawyer. I raised him in my house. All he
thinks about is the house on the hill and the BMW. There is something human
about that. There are only going to be relatively few people who are going to
rise above that and see a greater truth and a greater need and be prepared to
die for it. I was telling some professors today. Martin Luther King my fly, my
friend and more of my leaders than he ever saw was the most morbid man I ever
met in my life. You could not talk to him three minutes before he brought up
death, his death, and everyone else's. Every since the Montgomery Boycott,
death had stalked him. It stalked him all the way to that balcony in Memphis. If
he said it to me once, he said it one hundred times, "They are going to keep
coming back for us until there is not one of us left." The only reason that did
not turn out to be true was because of Lyndon Johnson. He put so much pressure
on John Edgar Hoover, that every time the Klu Klux Klan met, two thirds of the
meeting were either FBI informants or under cover people... had that not been
the case, every one of us would
have been dead. Lyndon Johnson saved our lives. Even though he used to call us
niggers, but he saved our lives.
Q: There are many people here who are facing tremendous violence. Let me give
reference to the Muslims. Muslims are like the rest of the people who want to be
free, live their own lives and not be murdered or challenged about the way they
live their lives. I hope all people who are suffering for this reason will join
together and try to make this country the kind of country it ought to be. It is
really bad that we do not realize that there is a better way. We could be
benevolent instead of a tyrant around the world. I hope that everybody around
the world will try. I certainly want to work on this because I have been aware
of this for a very long time.
A: The truth is that there are powerful forces in this country who do not want
this to happen, the very thing you suggest. They have been fighting for years to
keep that from happening. It has always amused me that poor white Southerners
went off in the Civil War, fighting to preserve slavery and they were damn near
slaves themselves. It has always puzzled me that in Alabama some of the poorest
folk I know are against labor unions and wants to exalt so-called write-the-work
laws. This is the result of what I call mainstream brainwashing and it is out
there. People like you and lots of people who want to see a better world, there
are powerful forces who only want to see a better world on certain terms. They
are prepared, if necessary, to destroy America, to keep it from happening. It is
a sad commentary on our time, but it is the truth. I was also telling the
professors this afternoon that my ninety-year-old mother and I was sitting in
her house the other night watching television; nobody but us. This is a woman
that I love with all of
my heart. She had cultivated powerful white people all of her life. knows her.
She said black folks cannot do anything for her because they are in the same
boat. She does not even like white people who are not powerful. She does not
have time for you all. We were sitting in her room and President Bush was on the
television. The president said, 'This is a terrible tragedy. Thousands of
innocent people have been slaughtered. It is unprecedented. It never happened in
evil." My mother looked around to make sure there was nobody in there. She knows
there was no one else there but us, but this is the way she has been living with
white folks. She looked around to make sure no one was there and then she looked
at me and said, "ls he too young to remember Hiroshima Nagasaki? Does he
remember the atomic bomb?" I said, "Yes, he remembers. That is not a truth he
wants to deal with." She started to say something else to me and she changed her
mind and did not say it. The thing that I was looking at there, as I was talking
to these professors, that goes beyond the I 960's. That goes all the way
back to slavery. Do you understand it? That is what that is all about. Who would
corrupt the mind of people for centuries except they have diabolical design.
These are the folk who prevent the kind of world that you and I want from happening.
Q: First of all, thank you very much for making myself as well as the multitude
of other people here aware who are our age because so often we do not actually
see what you guys went through back in 1958, even though it is still currently
going on. My question, however, is where do we go from here? As a person in my
generation, what steps do we take to further the goal of equality and freedom?
A: I think that we have to give as much attention to the economics of freedom as
we have given to the politics of freedom. The economics of freedom are far more
difficult to achieve than the politics of freedom. We have to learn how to pull
our resources. We have to learn how to reward our friends with our money and
punish our enemy. We should not be putting money in the First National Bank if
we cannot make loans at the First National Bank. We should not be putting money
in the People's Bank if no one down there looks like us. I think we have to
strike on the economic front and we have to hit as hard as we did on the
political front. America is the citadel of capitalism and spending every dime we
get is a recipe for bankruptcy in the citadel of capitalism. I do not like to
deal with our dirty linen in front of white folks, but I am going to go ahead
and do this. There are some things in the black community that we really need to
clean up and only we can clean them up. I am sick and tired of some of these
black preachers, in an automobile long as from here to there, two telephones,
wearing a $1500.00 suit, riding pass us and will not speak and raising all of
that off people on food stamps; that is wrong. We cannot free a people tied to
that. It is everywhere in a black community. We need to take a look at these so
called black radio stations, so called. We do not usually own them. We just get
on them and act a fool. My partners and I just bought two radio stations in
Selma because there ought to be some other voice to the Selma Times-Journal. If
you listen to some of these so-called black radio stations, what you here will
make a grown man blush. All day long they are preaching to our children that SEX
spells love and it does not. It spells more poverty, more disease, more
everything that is wrong. I am going to stop there because the whites folks are
sure enough getting interested.
Q: I am a public school educator in the city of Huntsville and I work in middle
school. It just breaks my heart. I grew up in Birmingham in****. It is just
devastating because we are not educating blacks nor whites to the truth. I want
to know where do you think education fits in at that level because that is the
future. My day is over with. It is that generation that will have carry us as
America to where we want to be.
A: I agree with you. We are still teaching children that Columbus discovered
America, though the Indians was on the beach waiting for him. In America, the
truth can get you killed. Let me give you all some truths that will shock some
of you. Do you know who trained and equipped some of Osama Bin Laden? He was our
close friend as long as he was killing Russians. Do you understand that these
misguided misfits who took these planes into those buildings, in their own minds
were retaliating against this country for wrongs they felt had been done to
them. Do you realize the truth will get you killed? So, how do you teach it? Do
you realize that beginning in 1980, for eight years, Ronald Reagan prosecuted
underclass, illegal wars on virtually every little country in Central and South
America. He destroyed villages, destroyed families, killing children and women.
Do you know that it is beyond rational dispute that all of the North help
finance those wars with drug money. We do not come with clean hands. That is why
the truth is so dangerous. If you start speaking or telling the truth, get ready
to suffer; it is coming. I have spent a lifetime suffering because I believe in
people and I love people. When I look in the mirror and shave every morning, I
want to see somebody I halfway like. I do not want to be ashamed of me. I have
seen some awful things in my time, things that would make you cry. The innocent
suffers, truth be damned. I am going to say this and then I
am going to hush. While President Bush and clergy from all denominations, black,
white, red and everybody were appropriately gathered in the National Cathedral
to show national tolerance, unity, prayer and hope, two of president Bush's
strongest supporters wrote Reverend Jerry Falwell and Reverend Pat Robertson was
on national television saying that the trade center and the pentagon because of
homosexuals, homosexuality and abortionists. Now, how crazy can you be? That is
loose in this land and it has been loose in this land for a long, long time.
These people have power. They have the airwaves. They have television sounds and
all that. They feed that to a misguided public all of the time. I hear stuff
from intelligent, educated people and I say to myself, "Did I hear that right?"
Q: I must first start off by saying that I have immensely enjoyed everything
that you have told us tonight. It encourages me as a college student to go forth
and do well. The question that I want to ask you is despite all that you have
experienced, what has reaffirmed your faith in America in all that you have done
and what has kept you going through all of these years?
A: As I mentioned earlier, my dear mother and my late father actually loved
people. They transferred that to me and to my younger sister. I cannot put up
with suffering. I do not like to see anybody mistreated. When you have a sense
of people, you want to try to help improve the human condition. I learned a long
time ago in Sunday school that I cannot love the Lord until I first learn how to
love you. I also learned that no matter what someone else does to me, I cannot
afford to let that person make me hate them. I read where Booker T. Washington
said, "The only way you can keep a man down a ditch is
you have to get down there with him." Throughout my life, there has always
seemed to be somebody there who cared and said, "Look here boy, you don't
want to go that way; go this way." There were a lot of people who did not care.
There was always one or two who cared. I went to these segregated public schools
in Selma, Alabama. The building 1 went to school in had been condemned twenty
years earlier when my mother was a student there. The ceiling would fall down
while we were in class. The whites had a brand new school on the main street in
Selma. The superintendent would come every year to explain to us why there was
no money for a new school. I wanted to do him some harm. I talked to my father
about that. My father talked to me about not getting down in the ditch with the
superintendent. I will say this. Nobody believes more in prayer than I do. I
pray everyday. I am not ashamed of that. I pray at night. I pray driving along
the street. When I get through praying, I get up off my knees; I am ready for
battle. I guess. I am having the time of my life.
Q: (inaudible)
A: I will relay your message verbatim.
Can I take two minutes and say something about fees that I think that you ought
to hear? Three years ago, three of us brought a law suit in Washington, DC on
behalf on twenty thousand black farmers from Maine to Florida and from New
York to California. We charged that the United States Department of Agriculture
had discriminated against black farmers by one, not giving them the loans that
were entitled to and two, if they got the longs, it was too little too late. It
forced farmers out of business. Fifteen years ago, there were thirty-six
thousand small black farmers in this country. There are about eight left
now. The judge said to me, "Mr. Chestnut, how much money are you talking about?
Are you talking about 20,000 farmers all over the country?" I said, "Yes your
honor." He said, "Well how much money are you talking about. I said about 2.5
billion dollars." The government laughed. The reason they laughed is because
black folk had never gotten any real money from the federal government. You get
social security and small business loans, but you do not get any real money from
the government. There was no precedent for that. As I talk to you now, the
government has paid fifty thousand dollars to about nine thousand black farmers
who had no records whatsoever. Once they paid them the fifty thousand dollars
because it was income, the government wrote a second check for 12,500 dollars
for taxes and paid that to the IRS. In addition to that, if the government had
some land that it had foreclosed on a black farmer, they had to give it back.
They are in the process of doing that right now. Do you know how much black
lawyers charged the black farmers? Zero. It cost my law firm 1.5 million dollars
to process the case. We said at the end of the case, we will come back to the
court. If we win, the court can order the government to pay us. We don't
want little farmers paying us. They didn't create this mess. The government
did. Now, the government is now paying us. Now, we are arguing with each other.
Q: First of all, I would like to extend my sincere appreciation for you sharing
that delightful and wonderful lecture that you shared with us. I also wanted to
comment on how one, the truth is not out there often and it is not often set out
as eloquently as you put it. First of all, you do not have to search for the
truth. There are books and research and a lot of that is for us today. If you do
teach us from our elders, we will receive that
information and we will take it and run with it. I do not want you to feel as if
the cause is gone; the cause is lost because there are still people out there
that feel that it is not over. We hear you when you call upon us to step up to
the plate. I know soon that you will have to sit down but just know that our
generation is not all lost. We are out there. We are waiting for you and that is
all we need to see a little direction and we are in it. Along the path, we as
children, we learn from our elders. In someway and somehow, it was mistranslated
that after the Civil Rights Movements and after desegregation, everything was
okay. Now, today our generation is driving around in luxurious cars paid by our
student loans and things like that. I just want to know how do you feel about
our generation kind of dropping the ball as far as the revolution is concerned
and as far as things of that nature of the Civil Rights Movement is not over. We
still have things to fight for. Like you said, it is only one-third of the way
to its final destination and I do not
see it in **. Where do you think we dropped the ball? So, thank you, thank you
for coming to our campus.
A: I am going to answer that quickly and then I am going to let you all go. We
all have to work together, as I have mentioned and went into that, and try to
bring those along who will not come. Some will not come regardless, but you will
get some of them. In 1964, every major black Civil Rights leader in the country
was in jail in little Selma, every one of them and the movement was dying
because there was no one to lead it. We had been trying for two weeks, habeas
corpus and everything trying to get them out. One judge told me, "No way. We
have the head of the snake. All we have to do is hold it long enough and the
tail will die. Then, Malcolm X showed up in Selma in front of my
office before he went on down to the Brown Chappuis Church. I was glad when he
went on down to the Brown Chappuis Church. He stood up in front of my office and
he said that he had come to Selma to take over the movement and that from now on
it would be going in a different direction. The only reason they were going to
turn the cheek to see which way the rascal went. I looked up and there was
Martin and Ralph walking down the street. The white folks put them out the jail.
That is a true story. Malcolm X could not have organized a march in Selma if he
life depended on it. He did not speak the language or walk the walk. He was from
Harlem and he knew that, but he also knew that the white folks did not know
that. If they knew it, they were too scared to take a chance. It takes all
kinds. Everybody brings something to the struggle.
Speaker: You have been trying to ask a question for a long time.
Q: (inaudible)
A: Let me go at it this way. Sometimes, we do not see what we think we see.
Sometimes, it is not so much the mentality as it may be other things. Let me
give you an example. In the same black farmer suit, there were serious problems.
The statue of limitations had run. The statue of limitations said that if you
have a lawsuit for discrimination against the government you had to bring it
within two years. These farmers had not brought in any lawsuits within two
years. The justice department told the president, "They are over with .Do not
worry about it. We will file a motion to dismiss on the basis of the statue of
limitations. The justice department thought that the President of the United
States had the same mentality that they did because they were all in the
government. The president did not want it to go away. He said, "Well, I do not know.
Let me think about it." While he was thinking about it, we went around and
brought black farmers. We back to the l 960's. We brought black farmers
from all over the United States to Washington. They came in fifteen-year-old
pick up trucks. They had little brown bags of cold chicken. That is all that
they could afford. They slept five and six in a hotel room. We were up and down
Pennsylvania Avenue. One fellow brought his mule. The biggest and the ugliest
mule I ever seen in my life. The mule's name was Trouble. We were up and
down Pennsylvania Avenue threatening to shut the government down. The President
of the United States was in the White House looking out smiling and Al Gore was
close to having a miscarriage. He was trying to run for president and that was
part of his political base out in the streets marching, so the president had the
pressure that he wanted. So, he called of all people, Newton Gingrich. That is
what I am saying. Everything that everything that looks a certain way is not. He
called Newton Gingrich and said, "I need you to help me." Then he told us, I
want you all to go up tomorrow to the speaker's office and talk with him.
We are going to see what we can do about this Statue of Limitations". I said,
"Oh Lord, who in the world want to be bothered with Newton Gingrich?" We went up
there. He said, "Come in. Come in. Then he said, "Look, we saved the Japanese.
We did you all wrong. Stop believing that." Newton Gingrich drafted it alone. He
had his committee to do it. He went down on the floor of the house himself and
insisted that amendment, about 3 paragraphs, be added to that federal budget and
it passed. For the first time in the history of the country, the government
waived the law and said it did not apply to these minority farmers. What am I
saying? I am saying that everything is not as it appears. There are people out
there with
a mindset that you cannot read. There are a whole lot of people we may think got
that mindset; they do not have it. We just have to reach them and talk to them.
We cannot give up. We have to keep pushing up.
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Digitized VHS tape of "Early Years of the Movement" (Part II).
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J.L. Chestnut, Jr. is the speaker in this lecture given at Alabama A&M.
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2001-09-20
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1:38:28
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en
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University of Alabama in Huntsville
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2000-2009
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Chestnut, J. L., 1930-2008
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Selma (Ala.)
Macon County (Ala.)
African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.
Voter registration
Segregation
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/384">Early Years of the Movement (Part II) - Speaker: J.L. Chestnut, Jr. - Transcription of Tape 3, 2003</a>
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/397">VHS tape of "Early Years of the Movement" (Part II). Box 2, Tape 3</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
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Selma to Montgomery, 1965 Speakers: John Lewis, Mary Stanton
Okay. I think we will be getting started if you want to make your way to your seats. Good evening. I am Douglas Turner, a professor of Political Science here at Alabama A&M
University. I'd like to welcome you to what has been a unique, informative,
and often moving series of lectures and panel discussions. This series, the
Civil Rights Movement in Alabama 1954 through 1965 is a joint endeavor between
Alabama A&M University and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In my
opinion, this series has been highly successful and is a testament to what can
be accomplished when people of good will come together and earnestly attempt to
build bridges that bring together communities that often view each other with
ambivalence, to say the least.
Of course tonight's program, Selma to Montgomery 1965, looks at the events
surrounding the confrontation that has come to be known as "Bloody Sunday," in
which hundreds of non-violent protesters led by of course John Lewis among
others and Hosea Williams, who attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in
Selma, Alabama and were met by Alabama state troopers who kicked and clubbed
marchers, severely injuring many. Congressman Lewis, himself, was struck in the
head and knocked unconscious in that particular incident. The event was captured
on film and of course garnered a great deal of publicity for the movement. This
publicity as a subsequent march between Selma and Montgomery would prompt
President Lyndon Johnson to push for the Voting Rights Act which congress passed
on August 6, 1965. Also, let me mention that next week's program, "Turmoil
in Tuskegee" will take place at Roberts Recital Hall on the campus of
UAH at 7 pm. The featured lecturer will be Frank Toland of the Department of
History of Tuskegee University. Let me also mention tonight, that the last two
lectures November 29th and December 4th will both be held here on the campus of
Alabama A&M University.We will be moving back to the multi-purpose room in the
new School of Business for those last two lectures; of course, they do began at
7 pm.
Now, of course the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama lecture series has been a
success in part due to the efforts of those committee members who initiated and
formulated the series and the many sponsors who have contributed financially to
make this ground breaking series a reality. Members of the Civil Rights Movement
in Alabama planning committee include members both from the University of
Alabama in Huntsville and Alabama A&M University which include Dr. Mitch
Berbrier of UAH, Dr. John Dimmock of UAH, Dr. Jack Ellis of UAH, Dr. James
Johnson of AAMU, Professor Carolyn Parker of AAMU and Dr. Lee Williams of UAH.
Funding for the series has been provided by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, a
state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Also, Senator Hank
Sanders, the Huntsville Times, DESE Research, Incorporated, Alabama
Representative Laura Hall. Also, the Alabama A&M University sponsorship has come
from the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the State Black
Archives Research Center and Museum, Title III Telecommunications and Distance
Learning Center, the Office of Student Development, the Honor Center of
Sociology and Social Work, History and Political Science.
From the University of Alabama in Huntsville, support has been forthcoming from
the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the History Forum, the
Bankhead Foundation, Sociology and Social Issues Symposium, the Humanities
Center, the Division of Continuing Education, the Honors Program, the Office of
Multi-cultural Affairs and the Office of Student Affairs, and also the UAH Copy
Center.We also, would like to recognize other distinguished guests and visitors
in the audience tonight, we acknowledge you.
The introduction of tonight's speaker, Mrs. Mary Stanton, who is a free
lance writer and director of Human Resources for Riverside Church in New York
City and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, Representative from the 5th district in
Georgia. The introduction of tonight's speaker will be provided by Alabama
State representative Laura Hall of Huntsville, Alabama. Do the Honors.
Introduction: Thank you, good evening. I want to say a special thank you to the
members of the committee for Alabama A&M and the University of Alabama in
Huntsville for providing this opportunity for us to reflect and for giving those
of us who did not have an opportunity to live during this time an opportunity to
hear about the experiences of the Civil Rights Movement. I will provide for you
the introduction for Mrs. Mary Stanton. I don't believe we give enough
credit to writers. We take it for granted that the printed word appears on pages
for our consumption and hardly appreciate the hours of research and talent
involved in writing. Mrs. Mary Stanton our speaker, is a writer to whom we owe
special honor. She practiced her profession from a foundation of education.
Holding a MA degree in English literature qualifies here to teach English at
the University of Idaho at Moscow, the College of St. Elizabeth in Morristown,
New Jersey, and the writing program at Rutgers University, and this is only her
secondary career. She has the most productive career in human resources. Her
experiences in human resources surely give her the special insight into her
writing career. I want you to know that Ms. Mary Stanton is the author of, From
Selma to Sorrow: the Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. Published in 1998, her
depiction of how this Detroit housewife came to be murdered during the 1965
Voting Rights March is essential to our understanding of the sacrifices made by
people who care. This book was nominated for the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize. It has been optioned by the Columbia Tri-Star pictures, and we
should see this new movie soon. A documentary film about the Life of Viola
Liuzzo is about to be completed. We will watch also for Mrs. Stanton's new
book, "Mississippi or Bus," the 1963 freedom walk that tells the story of five
interracial attempts to deliver a message of tolerance to Mississippi Governor
Ross Barnett. One man was murdered on this march. More than one hundred were
jailed and ten spent a month on death row at Kilby State Prison. Ms. Mary
Stanton, thank you for your dedication to writing. We are truly honored and we
benefit from the toils and your talents that you will share also with us today.
Ladies and Gentleman, let us welcome Ms. Mary Stanton with a warm round of applause.
Mary Stanton: Thank you very much. Good evening everybody. I want to thank you.
I want to especially thank Dr. Williams and Dr. Dimmock for your kind invitation
to Huntsville, my first trip to Huntsville, Alabama. I feel very privileged to be apart
of this forum tonight to share some insight about the Alabama of some forty
years ago. When I asked
Dr. Williams what he'd like me to talk about, he suggested that I tackle,
and I'm gonna quote right now, "the interconnections of law enforcement
officials with the intra and interstate police officers, the Klan and the FBI to
subvert the movement in Alabama.
That's a mouth full isn't it? At first, I looked at that and I said,
"well that's a pretty thankless task," but it really is a very important
part of what happened here forty years ago, and it certainly is a important part
of Viola Liuzzo's story. What we know is that the Alabama Civil
Right's Movement was all about power. Power. Who had it? Who intended to
keep it? Who wasn't going to get any? Yes, it was also about injustice and
segregation and economics, but day to day it was really about maintaining the
status quo, and that depended on maintaining segregation through intimidation,
because there were many more powerless black people than more powerful white
ones. Now, two very effective ways of sustaining segregation were number one, to
keep the electorate white, so that the segregationists couldn't get voted
out of office. And number two, to keep the jurists white, so those violent
racists wouldn't get convicted of their crimes against blacks and against
race mixture. Now, in order to maintain this southern way of life, people were
forced to operate outside the law. Remember, there were less than two thousand
Klansmen in the whole state, which is less than one percent of the whole
population. Now, the Klan was successful because they were federal, state and
local law enforcement officers who were members and supporters. The very people
responsible for enforcing the law were undermining it, and permitting the Klan
to operate really like a terrorist shadow government. Case in point Governor
George Wallace refused to intervene. Ace Carter, who was his special assistant,
was an outspoken white supremacist. He
headed an organization called the Official Klu Klux Klan of the Confederacy. And
then there were the sheriffs, Bull Connor and Jim Clark, who all actually
encouraged to defy the law.
So, what does all of this have to do with Viola Liuzzo? I'd like to tell
you about that. In the time that we have together tonight I'd like to talk
about three things. Number one, who Viola Liuzzo was. Number two, why she was
murdered, and finally, what does her experience tell us about the breakdown of
the rule of law, not only in Alabama but through a network of defiance that
stretched from Selma, up to Detroit and across to Washington, D.C. back in 1965.
Now, if Viola Liuzzo was here tonight among us, and we were to ask, "Who are
you?" She might say, 'Tm Penny, Tony, Tommy and Sally's mother." Or,
she might say, 'Tm Jim Liuzzo's wife." After she took a breath she
might add, 'Tm also a medical technologist, I'm a part-time college
student, I belong to the PTA, the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish and I
volunteer for the March of Dimes." Listening to Viola describe her life,
you'd be hard pressed to figure how she ever became the most controversial
of the American civil rights martyrs, and the only white woman who is honored at
the National Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.
So, how did it happen? The story very briefly is this. On March 25, 1965, Viola
and a young black man, whose name was Leroy Moton, drove from Selma to
Montgomery that night the voting march ended. They were picking up some marchers
who needed a ride. The march had drawn twenty five thousand people to
Alabama's capital city. Four Klansmen followed Viola and Moton on Highway
80 for twenty miles, and then they pulled up along side her car and fired out
the side window. Viola was
killed instantly, and Moton who was covered with her blood escaped by pretending
to be dead when the Klansmen came back to check their work. The
thirty-nine-year-old Detroit housewife and nineteen-year-old Selma short order
cook had been deliberately chosen by the Klansmen because they represented every
thing that the segregationists most hated and feared, a white female, outside
agitator driving after dark with a local black activist sitting in the front
seat of her car. Because one of the Klansmen was a paid FBI informant, Viola
lost her life in more ways than one. In order to deflect attention from the
FBI's carelessness in permitting a violent racist to work undercover the
night of that march, J. Edgar Hoover personally crafted a malicious public relations
campaign portraying Viola as an unstable woman who had abandoned her family to
stir up trouble in the south. The implication was that she got exactly what she
deserved. Years of unrelenting accusations and outright lies nearly destroyed
her husband and her five children. Until the family got her files through the
Freedom of Information Act, nearly fifteen years after their mother's
murder, they didn't know that the ugly slander about her had originated in
the offices of our own justice department.
Well, this is a very sad story you might say, and yes it's tragic, and yes
J. Edgar Hoover was a monster, but if this was a random slaying or even if it
was a symbolic killing, what is it that we can learn from it? Well, it's
this. J. Edgar Hoover may have molded a very sinister image of Viola Liuzzo, but
in 1965 a majority of white Americans believed it. Why? Well, nice middle aged,
working class white American women didn't go to college. They didn't
champion civil rights or travel by themselves. Those things wouldn't
enhance a white woman's reputation on a good day, but even a reputation
tongued by the FBI couldn't alter the fact that Viola was useless as a
symbol of the Civil Rights Movement. Her age, her gender, her background, her
class, her education, they were all wrong. Yet, ironically the Klansmen chose
her as a target precisely because her death would send a message, send a very
clear message that northern whites and southern blacks could understand. Come
south and get involved with the Freedom Movement at your own risk.
Like the international terrorists that we face today, the Klansmen knew how to
manipulate symbolism. Bin Laden chose the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
not because they are the tallest or the most beautiful buildings in America, but
because they represent something very fundamental about our society. Symbolism
stirs our deepest consciousness, and it has the power to terrify as well as to
inspire. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, the three young men
murdered during the Freedom Summer of 1964, also became symbols. To white
liberals, they were appropriate civil rights leaders. They were young. One was a
white activist, college student and another one was a selfless, white social
worker. The other was a black community worker fighting for the freedom of his
people. These were very positive symbols. Viola was too old, too pushy, too
independent, and she trampled on too many social norms. In 1965, Viola had
volunteered to advance the social movement that the majority of white Americans
felt was already moving too fast. Her activism couldn't be ascribed to
youthful idealism. It threatened the family and most importantly, the protective
status of women. White American women couldn't afford to make Viola a hero.
To do that would be to invite disturbing questions about their own lives. The
Goodman, Schwerner
and Chaney families worked hard to insure that their sons would be
remembered. All these families had supported their civil rights activism, while
violist husband Jim, had been very ambivalent about his wife's
participation. After Viola's murder, Jim found himself continually
defending her reputation, refuting these vicious rumors that were swirling
around her, and trying to protect their children. Two days after her funeral, a
cross was burned on his lawn in Detroit.Jim had little time or energy or even
opportunity to worry about his wife's immortality. Viola's children
were taunted by their classmates, shunned by their neighbors and shamed by the
cloud of suspicion that hung over their mother's activism. America fussed
about her and budged about her for a few days and then promptly forgot all about
her. The consensus was there was something just not right about this woman.
Okay, so now that we know who she was, and why she was murdered, let's look
to that last question. What does her experience tell us about the break down of
the rule of law, not only in Alabama, but also through a network of defiance
that stretched from Selma, to Detroit, to Washington? The answers are contained
in something called the Lane report. When I discovered this report in the course
of my research, the nicest thing I can say about it is that it absolutely
chilled me to the bone. I want to share some of that with you. On May 11,1965,
Walter Rugaber, a Detroit free-press reporter, called Jim Liuzzo to alert him
that a confidential report about his wife written by Marvin G. Lane, police
commissioner of Warren, Michigan and former chief of detectives of the Detroit
Police Department had been sent to Selma Sheriff Jim Clark, in April. Early in
May, Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton was seen passing copies of this report to newsmen
covering the Wilkins trial. Wilkins was one of the murderers of Liuzzo. Rugaber
told Jim Liuzzo that the free press would be breaking the story on May 12. Jim
was livid. He wanted to know why Commissioner Lane was investigating his
murdered wife. Jim was so upset that he called the Detroit FBI office.
Lane's jurisdiction was listed in suburban Warren, Jim told the agent.
Liuzzo's never lived in Warren. They had never received so much as a
parking ticket in Warren. And no one from the Warren Police Department had ever
questioned Jim about his personal affairs. Who authorized the Lane report?
Police commissioner Ray Girardin vehemently denied that his department's
criminal intelligence bureau had any part in compiling it. Commissioner Lane
refused to name the sources, insisting that confidential reports were routine.
Lane said he often supplied other police departments' confidential reports
and he received them in return. This was, despite the fact that it was highly
irregular to prepare a detailed personal history on a murder victim, after the
suspects have been apprehended. Commissioner Lane's note to Sheriff Clark
was written on City of Warren Police stationery. He clearly stated that on March
26, one day after the murder, the criminal intelligence bureau began an
investigation on the background of Viola Liuzzo. Lane went on to request Sheriff
Clark's assistance. We would like Wayne Rhode, if it is at all possible to
deterniine the method of transportation of Selma by Mrs. Liuzzo, and who may
have accompanied her. The Detroit Free Press posts three critical questions;
What business of Lane's was it to compile a report on Mrs. Liuzzo since
she was not a Warren resident? By what distorted judgment did Lane decide such a
report was any business of Sheriff Clark's
since the murder did not take place in Dallas County but in Lowden. What
authority did Lane ask Sheriff Clark to determine the method of transportation
she took, and who went with her? On May 14, Walter Rugaber reported that
virtually every detail of Lane's confidential report was smuggled out of
the file of the Detroit Police Department. Rugaber even identified the file as
number 1782, which contained material gathered both by the Detroit police and by
the FBI. Chief of Detectives, Vincent Persanti admitted it was an obvious
conclusion that Lane's information had come from the Detroit Criminal
Intelligence Bureau.On May 17, inspector Earl Miller, Director of the Criminal
Intelligence Bureau admitted to finding his ex-boss Marvin Lane with the file.
Former Sinclair county Sheriff Ferris Lucas, who was serving as Executive
Director of the National Sheriffs Association in Washington, admitted that he
had encouraged Sheriff Jim Clark to ask Lane for the information. Commissioner
Girardin relieved the inspector of his duties saying, "his motives were right,
his judgment perhaps wasn't." Chief Persanti explained the Liuzzo funeral
was going to be here in Detroit, and we wanted to know what sorts of security
arrangements were anticipated? Demonstrations and counter demonstrations were
anticipated and we were just trying to prepare ourselves. Commissioner Girardin
was then called before the City Council to explain why inspector Miller would
assume that Lane, who no longer worked for the police had a right to look at
confidential information.You must remember, that Lane is a retired chief of
detectives, he says, "If he asks to check a record, he would get
cooperation." Girardin assured that council that he would meet personally with
Jim Liuzzo.He said, "He wanted to spare the Liuzzo children from embarrassment."
That quotation was picked up
by the Detroit Free Press and subsequently hit the wire services. Jim went wild.
When he couldn't reach Girardin by phone, he dashed off a telegram
demanding to know what the commissioner meant by such a statement. Distortions,
half-truths, and outright lies were being circulated about his wife. Aspersions
were being cast on her sanity, her morality, and her sense of responsibility in
going to Selma.Girardin's statements said that aura of mystery surrounding
the Lane report, his posture with the council only encouraged further
conjecture. Bits and pieces of Viola Liuzzo's history were being taken out
of context, and distorted beyond recognition. The Jackson Mississippi daily news
was reporting that Mrs. Liuzzo had a police file four pages long. Now, I think
we've come to the crux of what Dr. Williams was talking about and what was
really going on here.The FBI's need to defame Viola in order to cover its
own tracks is understandable, if not a forgivable motive, as is the precious
desire for a good story. The connection between the Selma police, the Detroit
police and the Klan is however, much more ominous. Detroit was one of
America's most racially troubled cities in 1965. Relations between the
white police department and the black community were as angry and violent as any
in Blackbelt, Alabama. In 1925, the Detroit police department had recruited
officers from the Deep South and many of them, their sons, their nephews, their
brothers and their cousins remained on the force forty years later. Members of
the Detroit and Selma police forces reach down empathically to one another. Many
on both sides believed that a white woman who would leave her family to go off
on a freedom march, and live with blacks, ride in cars with black men, and advocate
for their rights was, if not crazy, at least a trader to her race and therefore
very likely immoral. Now, the Lane
report ultimately achieved it's purpose, public sympathy was withdrawn from
the Liuzzo family almost immediately, her murderers were set free, and her image
as a spoiled neurotic housewife abandoning her family to run off on a freedom
march began to stick. I could tell you that it made other northern white middle
age white women think about taking a stand on civil rights.It frightened them
off, just as Viola's murderers had intended to frighten off activists who
were considering coming south to work for the movement. An editorial in the
Detroit Free Press on May 13th tried to set the record straight. The Lane report
is inaccurate, the editor wrote, "It is derogatory, and totally uncalled for."
It makes insinuations, which are not supported by the facts, and dwells on
irrelevant and unfavorable minutia, not only about Liuzzo but also about her
whole family. What Lane ignored was that Mrs. Liuzzo was not accused of any
crime. Her murder was not the result of any provocation on her part. She was
involved in no ballroom brawl, and she had broken no law. Viola Liuzzo's
story, like so many other stories of the 1960's, causes us and cautions us
to be careful and to stay alert.The American electorates are no longer all
white.Juries are no longer all white, but intimidation and manipulation
continue. Spin and character assassination continues. The power of symbolism to
help and to hurt is as strong today as it ever was. Viola Liuzzo's reminds
us that the fight for justice is everybody's business, and no one, no
private citizen, no law enforcement official ought to be permitted to shame or
to terrify anyone into backing away from a lawful position of conscience. I
remember when I was a little girl growing up in Queens, New York and I got into
to squabbles with some of the neighborhood kids, and the kids would often say to
each other, "Don't you tell me to shut
up, this is a free country!" That's the message. The philosopher Plato
probably said it best when he observed at 400 B.C. that, "The punishment which
the wise suffer will refuse to take part in government, is to live under the
government of worse men." Let us remember that.It was something the Alabama
Civil Rights activists believed was important enough to risk their lives for.
Thank You.
Introduction: On February 21, 1940 in Troy, Alabama a little baby boy was born.
With nine siblings, he worked on his family's farm picking cotton,
gathering peanuts and pulling corn. Many times they had to work on the farms
rather than attend their local segregated schools in Pike County, Alabama. Who
would have seen a U.S. Congressman in that little boy by the name of John
Lewis? Who would have guessed that this little boy would devote his life to the
beloved community? Who would have known this little boy would play his role in
history? Who would have guessed this little boy who devoted his life to the
beloved community where all people of all races, religion and ethnicity, would
share basic human rights? Who could have foreseen his fellow congressman asking
him to tell them what is was like to have been in the action of the Civil Rights Movement?
As a young student at Fisk University, John Lewis organized sit in's and
non violent process. In 1961, he was one of the first freedom riders on the
Greyhound buses in Washington D.C., then down through Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and his native, Alabama. It was
1963; John Lewis was only twenty-three-years-old and a chairman of the student
non-violent coordinating
committee, which placed him in the national spotlight with the "Big Six": Martin
Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Whitney Young, James Farmer, and Roy
Wilkins. They met with John F. Kennedy to plan the upcoming march on
Washington. John's controversial speech at the National Mall placed him into
the forefront and into the national spotlight. Gaining national attention by
showing political power in numbers was a successful goal that summer of1964.
John Lewis was there to help organize voters registration drives and community
action programs for the Mississippi freedom summer. Challenging
Mississippi's long standing Democratic Party of segregationists while
democrats fought for seats at the upcoming national convention was a radical
step. John Lewis was there. It was back home in Alabama for John Lewis on March
7, 1965. Arm and arm with the non-violence intended, they marched six hundred
strong across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Suddenly, the clubs and the
kicks of Alabama State Troopers turned their peaceful march into "Bloody
Sunday." A violent blow struck John on the head, knocking him unconscious.This
incident propelled President Lyndon Johnson to work harder for the Voting Rights
Act which congress passed on August 6, 1965. Well, a knock on the head
didn't stop John Lewis. He became Director of the Voter Education Project,
which would add four million minorities to the voter role. In I 977, President
Jimmy Carter named him the Directorship of Action with more than two hundred
fifty thousand volunteers. In 1980, he became Community Affairs Director of the
National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta. After serving on the City Council John
Lewis was elected to represent Georgia's 5th Congressional District in
November of
1986. He is currently serving his 8th congressional term, and guess what ladies
and gentleman; he runs unopposed. In the 107th Congress, John is a committee
member of the Ways and Means where he serves on the sub-committee on health and
oversight. He is a Chief Deputy Democratic Whip sense 1991. He served on the
Democratic Steering Committee as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and
a congressional committee to support writers and journalists. He is also the
Co-chair of the Faith and Politics Institute.
Now I ask you, what crystal ball could have forecast that we here today would be
eagerly waiting to hear this hard working, farmer's son, this courageous
student, this national leader, this trench worker for voter registration, this
Edmund Pettus Bridge peaceful warrior, and this distinguished Congressman John
Lewis? Congressman Lewis.
John Lewis: Thank you very much, Representative Hall, for
those kind words of introduction. Let me just say to members of the planning
committee, to each and every one of you participating in this event, for
inviting me to be here, the representatives of University of Alabama in
Huntsville, and Alabama A&M University, I'm delighted and very pleased to
be here. It is good to be here with Mary Stanton telling the history of Viola
Liuzzo. Thank you, Mary. Thank You. You heard in the introduction, and I want to
be brief. I didn't grow up in a big city like Decatur. I didn't grow
up in a big city like Troy, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Bradford, Atmore, or
Florence. I grew up fifty miles from Montgomery, in this little town called
Troy. My father, as Representative Hall told you was a sharecropper, a tenant
farmer. Back in 1944, when I was four years old, and I do remember when I was
four, My father had saved three hundred dollars and with the three
hundred dollars he bought one hundred ten acres of land. That's a lot of
land for three hundred dollars. As a matter of fact, my eighty-seven- year old
mother is still living on this farm that my father bought in 1944 for three
hundred dollars. On this farm, there was a lot of cotton, corn, peanuts, hogs,
cows, and chickens. Now, Mary has heard me tell this story and Don Calloway, who
is the Executive President of the student body here at A&M with a intern in my
office this pass summer, he heard it probably more than you care to hear. Right
Don? But, I tell this story just to put it into the proper perspective about the
Civil Rights Movement in Alabama and our journey from Selma to Montgomery in
1965. Assuming you come to Washington and visit my office, the first thing the
staff will offer you will be a Coca-Cola, because Atlanta happens to be the home
of the Coca-Cola bottling company. And Coca-Cola provides all members of the
Georgia Congressional Delegation with an adequate supply of Coca-Cola products
to be made available to our visitors.The next thing the staff will offer you,
will be some peanuts. I ate so many peanuts when I was growing up outside of
Troy, that I don't want to see anymore peanuts. Sometimes when I would get
on the flight to fly from Atlanta to Washington or from Washington back to
Atlanta, the flight attendant would try to push some peanuts on me and I would
just say, "No, no peanuts!" The Georgia peanut people provide us with peanuts
and I don't want any of you to come to Georgia and say that John Lewis was
talking about the peanuts okay? Don't say anything, but if you are from
there we will offer you some peanuts. Also, on this farm, we raised a lot of
chickens and as young black boy growing up on this farm it was my responsibility
to care for the chickens. I fell in love with raising chickens like no one else
could raise chickens. It was
my calling; it was my mission; it was my sense of obligation and responsibility
to care for those chickens. Now, I know that at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville and Alabama A&M, you are very smart.They have wonderful professors,
wonderful administrators and smart students, but you don't know anything
about raising chickens. I know you don't. Let me tell you what I had to as
young black boy growing up in rural Pike County, Alabama in the 1940's and 1950's. You take a fresh egg, mark them with a pencil, place them under
the sitting hen and wait for three long weeks for the little chicks to
hatch. Now, some of you are smart in computer science and math, history and
literature, but you don't know anything about raising chickens.I know you
are very smart being here in this community of science and technologies, but you
don't know anything about raising chickens, but you' re saying why do
you mark those fresh eggs with a pencil before you place them under the sitting
hen? Well, from time to time another hen will get on the same nest, and there
would be some more eggs. You have to be able to tell the first eggs from the
eggs that we already under the sitting hen. Do you follow me? You don't
follow me. When these little chicks would hatch, I would fool these sitting
hens; I would cheat on these sitting hens. I would take these little chicks and
give them to another hen. I'd put them in a box with a lantern, and raise
them on their own. I'd get some more fresh eggs and mark them with a
pencil, place them under the sitting hen, encourage the sitting hen to sit in
the nest for another three weeks. I kept on cheating on these sitting hens in
order to get some more little chicks. When I looked back on it was not the right
thing to do. It was not the moral thing to do. It was not the most loving thing
to do. It was not the most non-violent thing to do, but I kept on
cheating on these sitting hens and fooling these sitting hens. I was never quite
able to save $18.98 to order the most inexpensive hatcher incubator from the
Sears & Roebuck store in Atlanta. We use to get the Sears & Roebuck catalog.
Some of you may be old enough to remember that big book, thick catalog, we
called it the wish book. I wish I had this, I wish I had that. So, I just kept
on cheating on the sitting hens. As a young boy, I wanted to be a minister. So,
when I was about 7-½ or 8 years old, one of my uncles had Santa Clause bring me
a Bible. I learned to read the bible, then I started preaching and teaching;
from time to time, we would church. With the help of my sisters, brothers and
first cousins, we would gather all of our chickens together, like you are
gathered here in this hall tonight. The chickens along with my sisters, brothers
and my first cousins would make up the congregation. I would start speaking, a
preacher, and as I started the chickens would become very quiet. As a matter of
fact some of these chickens would bow their head. Some of them would shake their
head. But when I look back on it, they never quite said Amen. I am convinced
that the regular majority of these chickens that I preached to in the
1940s and in the 1950s tended to listen to me better than some of
my colleagues listen to me today in the Congress and some of these chickens were
a little more productive.At least, they produced eggs.But growing up there in
rural Pike County, outside of Troy... When we would visit the little town of
Troy, or visit Montgomery, or visit Tuskegee, or visit Union Springs, I saw
those signs that said, "White men, colored men, white women, colored waiting." I
saw signs that said white waiting, colored waiting. As a young child, I tasted
the bitter fruits of racism and segregation and racial discrimination.
In 1955, at the age of fifteen in the tenth grade, I heard of Rosa Parks; I
heard of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1956, at the age of sixteen, a group of us
went down to the Pike County Public Library in downtown Troy, trying to check
some books out, trying to get a library card. We were told by the librarian that
the library was for whites only, and not for coloreds. I went back to the Pike
County Public Library on July 5, 1998 for a book signing and hundreds of
white and black citizens came out. As a matter of fact they gave me a library
card, so it says something about the distance that we've come and the
progress that was made in laying down the burden of race. I don't want to
digress too much, but I was telling Jim and his wife that when we were driving
in from the airport that when I finished high school in May of 1957, I wanted to
study at Troy State College. I sent my High school transcript, filed my
application, and I never heard a word from the college, only ten miles from my
home. I wrote a letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I didn't tell my
mother, didn't tell my father or any of my sisters and brothers that I had
sent a letter to Dr. King telling him about my desire to attend Troy State
College, better known now as Troy State University.In the meantime, my mother
was working at a baptist orphan home, white, Alabama southern baptist orphan
home, in addition to her work on the farm. She came across a little paper about
a black school, supported by the southern baptist white and nation baptist black
in Nashville for black students, students who studied and worked their way
through school. I applied to go there. I was accepted.
An uncle of mine gave me a hundred-dollar bill, more money than I had ever had. He
gave me a footlocker, one of these upright trunks, footlockers with the drawers,
the curtains, drapers you call it I guess. I put everything that I owned in that
footlocker, my
books, clothing, everything except those chickens and I went off to school in
Nashville. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. heard that I was in Nashville and got back
in touch with me.
He sent me a round trip Greyhound bus ticket and told me the next time I was in
Troy for spring break to come to see him. It was in March of 1958, by this time
I was eighteen years old, on a Saturday morning, my father drove me to the
Greyhound bus station. I boarded the bus, and traveled the fifty miles to
Montgomery. A young lawyer, I'd never seen a lawyer before, black or white
by the name of Fred Grey met me at the Greyhound bus station. Fred Grey for many
years was a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association for Dr. King and
Rosa Parks, for those of us on the Selma March and the Freedom Ride. He met me
and drove me to First Baptist Church in downtown Montgomery on Ripley Street
pastored by Reverend Abernathy. Arriving at the steps of the church, I was so
scared and so nervous. I didn't know what I was going to say to Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.He ushered me into the pastor's study and I saw Reverend
Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. standing behind a desk. Dr. King said,
"Are you John Lewis? Are you the boy from Troy?" and I spoke up and said, " Dr.
King, I am John Robert Lewis." I gave my whole name. I didn't want there to
be any mistake that I was the right person. That was the beginning of my
relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. I continued to study in Nashville.
While studying there I met individuals like Jim Lawson, one of the leading
thinkers and philosopher on the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence,
students like Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette and many other young
people. We start studying the philosophy and the discipline for non violence,
every Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at a Methodist church near Fisk University
campus. In then we got involved in the sit-ins and the freedom ride. Two years
later, I became the head of the student non-violent coordinating committee in
June 1963 as Representative Hall said at the age of twenty-three. On the freedom
ride through Alabama, we were arrested and jailed in Birmingham. Later, Bull
Conner picked us up, took us out of jail and dropped us off at the
Alabama/Tennessee state line, and left us. A car from Nashville came back in May
of 1961, picked us up and took us back to Birmingham where we were met by the
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and other students. We continued from Birmingham to
Montgomery, where we were beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery by
an angry mob. We continued to Mississippi, but we were arrested and jailed, a
few of us was in the city jail in Jackson, the county jail in Jackson and many of
us went to the state penitentiary in Parchment during the summer of 1961. All
across the south, not just in Mississippi, not just in Georgia, not just in North Carolina or South
Carolina, but in the eleven states of the whole confederacy, from Virginia to
Texas, it was almost impossible for people of color to become participants in
the democratic process to register to vote. When I was working on my March on
Washington speech for August 28, 1963, I was reading a copy of the New York
Times and I saw a group of women in Africa, black women, carrying signs saying,
"One man, one vote." So in my March on Washington speech I said something like,
"One man, one vote is the African pride. It is ours too, it must be ours," and
that became the rallying cry. That became the slogan for the student non-violent
coordinating committee.
A young man by the name of Bernard Lafayette who was a student in Nashville, had
gone into Selma, Alabama in the fall of 1962. He was working with Mrs. Boynton of the immediate Boynton in the Dallas County Voters League, working with
several ministers and others, trying to create a grassroots movement in Selma, around the
right to vote. In Selma in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 only 2-4 percent of blacks
of voting age were registered to vote. At the same time, we were organizing an
effort in Mississippi. There had been sit-ins in Selma. People had gone to jail,
got arrested at lunch counters and drugstores. There had been a movement there,
and we went there to help. A great deal of our time was left in a place in
Mississippi. Before we could launch the campaign in Selma or in Mississippi,
there was a terrible bombing at the sixteenth street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, where four little girls were
killed. We intensified our effort in Selma, but also in Mississippi. We recruited
more than a thousand students. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, priests, ministers,
rabbis, nuns and others to come to Mississippi and work in the Freedom School.
As Mary Stanton told you, the summer night of June 21, 1964 three young men that
I knew: Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner, white from New York and James Chaney,
black from Mississippi, went out to investigate the burning of black church. Their car was
stopped by the sheriff. They were arrested and taken to jail. Later that same
Sunday night of June 21, 1964 the sheriff and his deputies took these three
young men from their jail cells and turned them over to the Klan, where they were
beaten, shot and killed. These three young men didn't die in Vietnam. They
didn't die in the Middle East. They didn't die in Africa or in Eastern
Europe. They didn't die in Central South America. They died right here in
our own country, for the right of all of our citizens to become participants in
the democratic process. So, when people said what they said about the election
last year, and
what happened in Florida and other places, and they tell us to get over it, we
say, "We cannot get over it." It's very hard to get over it. It's
difficult for me to know that some of our friends, some of our colleagues died
for the precious rights for all of our citizens to participate in the democratic process.
That was a serious blow to the movement, but we didn't give up. President
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. He won a landslide election
in November of 1964. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received a Nobel Peace Prize in
December 1964. He came back to America, met by a group of us in New York, and
later went down to Washington to the White House to have a meeting with
President Johnson and he said, "Mr. President, we need a strong voting rights
act." And President Johnson told Dr. King in so many words, "We don't have
the votes in the congress to get a voting rights act passed." A judge signed the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King Jr. had come back to Atlanta to
meet with people in SCLC, his own organization. We were those involved in the
student non-violent coordinating committee. Then, he got an invitation from the
Dallas County Voters League in Selma, Alabama from Mrs. Boynton and the good
people in Selma, to come there and be the Emancipation Proclamation speaker in
January of 1965. Dr. King said," We will write that act, we will write it some
place." In Selma, Alabama we had a Sheriff, as the Mayor mentioned earlier by
the name of Jim Clark. Sheriff Clark was a very big man, who wore a gun on one
side and a nightstick on the other side. He carried an electric cow prodder in
his hand, and he didn't use it on cows. He wore a button on his left lapel,
and that button said, "Never, never to voter registration." Now all of you here
must keep in mind that in Selma, if you go there
now, the courthouse looks the same way it did thirty six years ago. The steps
and the rails are the same.You could only attempt to register to vote on the
first and third Monday of each month. The courthouse was the only place. And
sometimes when they knew that we were organizing the voter's registration
campaign they would just close the doors, just lock it up for the day or for the
week. I will never forget when it was my day, January 18, 1965, to lead a group
of elderly black men and women to the courthouse just to get inside the door, up
the steps, get an application form and try to pass the test. You must keep in
mind, and I know that there are some historians here and professors of political
science, but it was very difficult, almost impossible for people to pass the
poll literacy test. They were asked things like; How many bubbles are in bar
of soap? That was not on the test. There were black teachers, black lawyers and
black doctors told that they could not read or write well enough, and they
fought the so-called literacy test. On January 18th when it was my day to
lead a group of people up the steps, Sheriff Clark met me at the top of the
steps and he said, "John Lewis, you're an outside agitator. You are the
lowest form of humanity." At that time, I had all of my hair and I was a few
pounds lighter. I looked Sheriff Clark straight in the eye and I said, "Sheriff,
I may be a agitator, but I'm not an outsider. I grew up only about ninety
miles from here and we're going to stay here until these people are allowed
to register to vote," and he said, "You're under arrest." He arrested me
along with a few other people. We went to jail. A few days later Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., Reverend Abernathy and others came to Selma. In less than one
week, we filled the jails of Selma, every jail, the city jail and the county
jail. They took us out on some penal farm where it looked like a place where
they kept
chickens. They put us all in there and we slept on wooden floors. Then, about
three weeks later, I believe it was the night of February 17th or the 19th in
Marion, Alabama, in Perry County, in the heart of the Blackbelt. Perry County is
the home county of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, the home
county of Mrs. Ralph Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy, and the late Mrs. Andrew
Young, Jane Young; all from this county in Alabama. There was a demonstration, a
protest, for the right to vote. That night a confrontation occurred. A young man
by the name of Jimmy Lee Jackson tried to protect his elderly grandparents and
was shot in the stomach by a state trooper and a few days later, he died at the
Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. Because of what happened to him, we made a
decision (the movement did) that we would march from Selma to Montgomery. It was
the idea of James Bevel that had been involved in the Nashville incident and the
Freedom Ride. A whole new staff of Dr. King suggested at one point that maybe we
should take the body of Jimmy Lee Jackson to the state capital in Alabama and
present the body to Governor Wallace. We decided that we would have an orderly
peaceful nonviolent war from Selma to Montgomery to dramatize the fight, to help educate and synthesize
all of the citizens of Alabama but as a nation around the right to vote. We
announced that the march would occur on Sunday, March 7th. On Saturday, March
6th, Governor Wallace made a statement that the march would not be allowed. On
Saturday, the Governor, rather than the sheriff from Dallas County, Sheriff
Clark, requested that all white men over the age of 21 come down to the Dallas
County Court House to be deputized to become part of the process to stop the march.
There was a real debate within my organization, the student non-violent
coordinating committee. There were people saying that we should not march;
it is too dangerous; people would get hurt. So, we went back to Atlanta, had a
meeting there in the basement of a little restaurant. We met almost all night
debating whether we should march or not. I took the position as the chair of the
student non-violent coordinating committee and said that we should march and the
local people wanted to march. The SCLC people wanted to march. I felt that I had
an obligation to walk with the people from Selma. I have been there; I got
arrested with them. I felt that I should be there. So, the SNCC executive
committee voted that early that Sunday morning, about three or four o'
clock in the morning, that if I wanted to march I would march as an individual
but not as chair of the student nonviolent coordinating committee. Three of us
jumped in an old car and drove from Atlanta to Selma. We got our sleeping bags
and slept in the SNCC Freedom House on the floor until later that morning. We
got up and got dressed. We went to the Brown Chapel AME Church for the morning
services. After the services, more than six hundred of us, mostly elderly black
men and women and a few young people came out of the church near a housing
project (playground area) where we conducted a non-violent workshop, telling
people to be orderly, to be quiet and to walk in twos. We had a prayer. We lined
up in twos. I was walking beside Hosea Williams from Dr. King's
organization. At that time, I was wearing a backpack. I had a light trench coat
on and I was wearing a backpack before they became fashionable to wear
backpacks. In this backpack, I had two books, an apple, an orange, toothbrush
and toothpaste. I thought that we were going to be arrested and that we were
going to jail. So, I wanted to have something to read, something to eat and
since I was going to be in close quarters with my friends, colleagues and
neighbors, I wanted to be able to brush my teeth.
We started walking through the streets of Selma. No one was saying a word, so
orderly, so peaceful and so quiet on a Sunday afternoon. We got to the edge of
the Edmund Pettus Bridge, crossing the Alabama River, and Hosea Williams looked
down below and he saw this water. He said, "John, can you swim." I said, "No,
Hosea. Can you swim?" He said, "No. Well, there is too much water down there." I
said, "We are not going to jump. We are not going back. We are going forward."
We continued to walk. We came to the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and down
below we saw a sea of blue, Alabama state troopers, and behind the state
troopers, you saw Sheriff Clark's deputies; you saw men on horseback and we
walked. We came within hearing distance of the state troopers and a man
identified himself and said, "I am Major John Cloud of the Alabama State
troopers. This is an unlawful march. You will not be allowed to continue. I will
give you three minutes to disperse and return to your church." Less than a
minute-and-a-half, Major Cloud said, "Troopers advance," and Hosea said to me,
"John, they are going to gas us." We saw these men putting on their gas masks
and they came towards us beating us with nightsticks, tramping us with horses
and releasing the tear gas. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a
nightstick. I thought that I was going to die. I thought I saw death. Until this
day, I do not know how I made it back across that bridge, through the streets of
Selma and back to the Brown Chapel AME Church, but I do recall being back at the
church that Sunday afternoon. By this time, the church was full to capacity.
More than two thousand citizens of Selma and surrounding communities from
outside were trying to get in to protest what had happened. Someone in the
media said, "John, you should say something to the audience." I stood up and
said," I do not understand it, how President
Johnson can send troops to Vietnam but cannot send troops to Selma to protect
people who only desire is to register to vote." The next thing I know is that I
had been admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma with a fractured
skull. The next morning, early that Monday (it would be March 8th) Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Reverend Abernathy came in from Atlanta. They came by to see me.
Dr. King said, "Do not worry. We will make it from Selma to Montgomery. The
Voting Rights Act will be passed." He was right. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
issued an appeal for religious leaders to come to Selma
that following Tuesday, March 9th. And more than a thousand white and black religious
leaders, ministers, priests, rabbis, nuns and others came to Selma and marched
to the same spot where we had been beaten two days earlier, prayed and turned
back. Some of the people in SNCC that had opposed march came and they did not
like the idea that Dr. King turned back. They went to Montgomery and started
another effort organizing the students at Alabama State and Tuskegee; a
confrontation occurred there. We went into federal court and got an injunction
against Governor Wallace, Sheriff Clark and others for interfering with the
march. President Lyndon Johnson called Governor Wallace to Washington and tried
to get an assurance from him that he could protect us, as we got a court ruling
from federal district judge Frank Johnson. I do not know what the state of
Alabama would be like. I do not know what it would be like if it was not for a
man like Frank M. Johnson. I remember us going into court. The Department of
Justice subpoenaed the CBS film from that day of "Bloody Sunday." They showed it. Judge Johnson
viewed it. He stood up, shook his robe, recessed the court, came back and
granted us everything that we wanted and allowed us to march in an orderly
fashion all the way from Selma to
Montgomery. Three hundred of us walked all the way. On the night of March 15,
1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of the congress and made
one of the most meaningful speeches any American president had made in modern
time and the whole question of voting rights/civil rights. He condemned the
violence in Selma. He started that speech off that night by saying, "I speak
tonight for the dignity of man and for the destiny of democracy." President
Johnson went on to say, "At times, history and fate meet in a single place in
man's on end in search for freedom." It was more than a century ago at
Lexington and at Concorde. So, it was at Appomattox. So, it was last week in Selma,
Alabama. In his speech he said, "And we shall overcome," over and over again. He
said it with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the home of a local dentist. As we
watched and listened to Lyndon Johnson, tears came down Dr. King's face; he
cried. We all cried. He said again, "We'll make it from Selma to
Montgomery," and the Voting Rights Act was passed. We walked all the way, five
days. More then twenty-five thousand people gathered there on that day. As Mary
said again, Ms. Viola Liuzzo was killed on that
night traveling between Selma and Montgomery, and Reverend James Reed was beaten almost to death on the night of March 11th after crossed that bridge and later
died at the local hospital in Birmingham. The congress passed the Voting Rights
Act, signed it into law, and I said it might be because of what happened in Selma.
Because of what happened on the bridge, we had witnessed what I like to call a
nonviolent revolution in this region. We live in a different country. We lived
in a better country and we are a better people. Sometimes, I hear young people
saying nothing has changed and I feel like saying, "Come and walk in my shoes.
Come and walk across that bridge. Come and sit-in
in Nashville. Come and go on the Freedom Ride Bus. Come and be dropped off on
the Tennessee/Alabama state line by Bull Conner at four o'clock in the
morning leaving you to be ambushed." Things have changed. Today, there are
hundreds and thousands of black-elected officials like Representative Hall and
others because of what happened in Selma. So, tonight as we think and ponder
Selma to Montgomery in 1965, we must not give up. We must not give in. We must
not give out. We must not get lost in a sea of despair. We must keep the faith
and keep our eyes on the prize. I was just thinking a few days ago, since
September 11th, and I said it a few days after September 11th, that people may
bomb our buildings, kill some of our fellow citizens, but they will never ever
kill our love for freedom, our love for democratic ideas, our love for the good
society and to the open society. Many of us in the 1960's would be walking
across that bridge, through the sit-ins and when we went on the Freedom Ride,
accepting nonviolence not as a simple average technique or as a tactic but as a
way of life and as a way of living. Selma was not a struggle against a people;
it was against custom and tradition, a system we wanted to build and not tear
down. We wanted to reconcile and not separate. We wanted to create the beloved
community, the good society. I will tell this story and I will be finished. I
tell this story in my book, Walking with the Wind. It's a true story. When
I was growing up outside of Troy, Alabama, I had an aunt by the name of Seneva
and my aunt Seneva lived in what we called a shotgun house. She didn't have
a green, manicured lawn. She had a simple, plain dirt yard and sometime at
night, you could look up through the ceiling, through the holes in the tin roof
and count the stars. When it would rain, she would get a pail of what we called
a bucket and catch the rainwater. She lived in a shotgun house.
From time to time, she would go out into the woods and get branches from a
dogwood tree and she would make a broom. She called that broom the branch broom
and she would sweep the dirt yard clean, sometimes two and three times a week.
For those who are so young, who might not know what a shotgun house is and never
seen one, was not born in one and never lived in one, (in a nonviolent sense) a
shotgun house is a old house with a tin roof where you can bounce a ball through
the front door and the ball would go straight out the back door. In the military
sense, a shotgun house would be an old house with a tin roof where you can fire
a gun through the front door and the bullet would go straight out the back door.
My aunt Seneva lived in a shotgun house. One Sunday afternoon, a group of my
sisters, brothers and a few if my first cousins, about twelve of us young
children while playing my aunt Seneva' s dirt yard, an unbelievable storm
came up. The wind started blowing. The thunder started rolling. The lightning
started flashing and the rain started beating on the tin roof of this old
shotgun house. My aunt became terrified. She thought this old house was going to
blow away. She started crying. She got us all in the inside and told us to hold
hands. As little children, we did as we were told, but we all started crying.
The wind continued to blow. The thunder continued to roll. The lightning
continued to flash. In one comer of the house, it appeared to be lifting from
its foundation and my aunt had us walk to that side to try and hold the house
down with our little bodies. When the other comer appeared to be lifting, she
had us walk to that corner to try and hold down this house with our little
bodies. We were little children walking with the wind, but we never left the
house. As citizens of Alabama, as citizens of the world, as students and young
people and as faculty members, the wind may blow; the
thunder may roll; the lightning may flash and the rain might beat on our old
house. Call it the house of Huntsville. Call it the house of Alabama. Call it
the house of America. Call it the world house. We must never ever leave the
house. We must become one house, one family and one people. Just maybe, our
foremothers and our forefathers all came to this great land in different ships.
We're all in the same boat now. It doesn't matter whether we are black
or white, Asian, American, Hispanic or Native American; we are one people. As we
think about Selma to Montgomery, let us continue to walk with the wind and let
the spirit of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 be our guide. Thank you very much.
Douglas Turner: Alright, one again, how about another round of applause for Ms.
Mary Stanton as well. We want to take a short period here for answer and
questions. I want to mention that any of you who might have any commendations or
other certificates of recognition that you would like to present to the
congressman that you can do that after the symposium is over. We do want to open
the program now for questions for either Ms. Stanton or Congressman Lewis.
Q: The question and comment for both Congressman Lewis and Ms. Stanton ...
Congressman Lewis, you've spoke about the struggles that you had in the
march from Selma to Montgomery, the pain that you and others suffered. Ms.
Stanton you talked about Plato's reflection on government and
participation. The suffering that has occurred so that people, all people, have
the right to participate in this democracy, yet today eighty percent of young
people and more than fifty percent of all adults, do not bother to vote. We have
moved a great deal forward, but if we do not exercise, all of us,
the right to vote and if we do not take part in our responsibilities to
participate in this democracy, we are going to move backward. How do we get pass
this? How do we reverse this at present? How do we tell people, you have to
participate if you want to keep moving forward? I sincerely believe that. I
guess the question is two parts. Do you agree with that and if so, how do we win
that battle?
A: That's a good response. Mary, would you like?
A: I would prefer you.
A: I agree with you, sir. I think the greatest threat to our democratic way of
life and the greatest threat to our democracy and to whatever you want to call
it is the lack of participation and the lack of involvement. I think the day
will soon come in America, if we are not mindful, that we will no longer count
the people that are voting, we will count those who did not vote. I think it is
a very dangerous trend. First of all, I think we have to do something called
campaign finance reform. We have to get...In the congress, there is a group of
us on both sides, both Democrats and Republicans, and the Independents that we
have among us in the house, trying to get campaign finance reform. There is too
much money. I have been in congress for my fifteenth year, serving my eighth
tenth, but I have young colleagues that come and they spend all of their time
dialing for dollars. That's not the way. When you have some one in New York
spending fifty or sixty million (I don't know how much money was spent all
together) ... but to get elected. We have people running for congress and we
have someone running for mayor for Atlanta. We have to make the airways free. It
cost too much to be on television. The people have the right to know. We have to
take money out of it. It is too much money in American politics.
Whether someone is a millionaire or whether someone is a dogcatcher, they have
only one vote. We have to change it. It is not the way to go. We have to say to
our young people and those of us not so young, if you do not vote, you really do
not count. You have to participate. We have to encourage more people to run,
more women, more young people, more minorities. Get out there and run.
Don't leave it up to people. Everybody has something to offer. Run for
school board. Run for city council. Run for mayor. Run for congress. Get out
there. The more people we have participating, the better our democracy is. It
helps strengthen our democracy. We have a young lady who was just elected mayor
of the city of Atlanta. She came out of nowhere almost. She raised a lot or
money also, but she came out of nowhere.
Douglas Turner: Let me also mention that both Ms. Stanton and Congressman Lewis
have books for sale back here in the back. They will be available to sign if you
have already purchased one and you want them to sign it or if you will be
purchasing one. Next question, I saw your hand back there.
Q: Congressman Lewis and Ms. Stanton, I am trying to find the difference really
between the nonviolent revolution that you were talking about because I have
looked at most of the countries who practice nonviolent revolution and they do
not seem to be making any progress. They are stagnated like we are, but
Americans came with a more traditional
type of revolution and now we are the number one power in the world. It seems we
all will be ambulating to number one•or something in that area.
Douglas Turner: So, is your question or statement is that there is a need for
violence or some kind of revolution.
Q: Mary, you want to deal with that?
A: I'm not sure that I understand the question. Are you asking the value of
a nonviolent revolution?
A: Yes.
A: Well, I happen to believe in the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence
and I happen to believe also that in the long run, violence tends to create more
problems than it solves. As Americans, we've said, well Americans proceed
in violence when we talk about the American Revolution. A few days ago, I was in
(inaudible) and visited those historic places. I think humankind must evolve to
a much higher level, not just Americans but people all over this planet and all
over this world. We lay down the tools and the instruments of violence and some
people would say and maybe you would say that is too idealistic. As Dr. King
would say, it is nonviolent and nonexistent. No one in the long run wins in a
war. A war is messy. It is bloody. It kills; it harms; it divides and it
destroys. We have to find a way to say no more war.
Q: Do you know who killed Dr. King? (inaudible)
A: I don't know who killed Dr. King. A colleague of mine from one of our
southern states came to me on the floor just yesterday and wanted me to meet
with him and come and visit a family who says they had some information about
someone who participated in the assassination or knew something about the
assassination of Dr. King. He doesn't know if this is legitimate or whether
this is valid. I don't know. I believe until the day that I die that it was
a conspiracy to remove Dr. King from America. I do not think that any one person
acted alone. Some of the things that happened during the 1960's and what
Mary said about the FBI, it is unbelievable. It is to think the unthinkable. We
had this whole thing going on in America during the Cold War that there was _
members coming inside and we were under the Dukes of Marksville. If you saw a
sign saying white waiting and colored waiting, you did not need anyone from
Marksville, New York, Philadelphia or Washington to tell you that sign had to
go. So, somehow and some way, this mentality is creeping back into this segment
of America. There has been an attempt on the part of some of us to remove Mr.
Hoover's name and have another respected American's name put on there.
Q: Brother Lewis, it is so good to see you again. My name is James Steele. I
remember the situation quite well. I was a young student here at the college
when you were beaten on the Selma Bridge; 1954 just would not make it to Selma.
Right down the street, a young man was pastoring a church by the name of
Reverend Ezekiel Bell in the l 960's. I was with the first steering
committee that launched the movement here in Huntsville. Some of the student
nonviolent coordinating persons and the Congress of Racial Equality along with a
young lawyer here at Alabama A&M by the name of Randolph Blackwell that some of
you may know of. There had not been much talk about Reverend Bell and Blackwell,
but they were spark plugs in the movement here. I started with the movement
about 1954. I don't want to tell how old, I mean how young I am Dr. Lewis,
but what has concerned me is that was a great movement. People were together. I
must admit that we had a number of people shucking and jiving in the movement
back then. My question is about 1980. What I believe is going to go down in
history is the saddest part of our history, one who kept his eye on the Civil
Rights Movement and the Human Rights
Movement in Huntsville, Alabama. I believe that I have seen more shucking and
jiving starting in the l 980's to the present time. My question is from
your vanish point, do you see that and what we may do to overcome this go with
the flow, flip-flopping type leadership that we see now across the nation.
Somebody ought to stand up and tell the truth where it relates to real freedom,
justice and equality. I won't share that scripture with you now, but it is
in Isaiah 56:10.
Douglas Turner: What is the question?
A: I am getting to that. Go ahead and answer my question. They called time on me.
A: Only thing I would say my friend is that during the days of the height of the
movement, it was my philosophy not to engage in name calling, not to put anyone
down because it was keeping with the philosophy and the discipline of
nonviolence. There are roles for people to play. Everybody can go in a sit-in.
Everybody can go on the Freedom Ride. When I was a student in Nashville, there
were guys who played football and they said, "Oh, John. I can't go. If I go
down, I may fight and I can do something else. Maybe, they just did not have the
courage to sit-in unless someone put a lighted cigarette out in their hair or
down their back. So, I just do not think it is in keeping with the philosophy of
nonviolence to sit in judgment on the role and the function of anyone. So, I
don't want to call anyone shucking and jiving or put someone down because
they may be marching to a different beat.
Q: I would like to know was it pure luck that Ramsey Clark with feds monitored
the Selma to Montgomery march or was that a request.
A: Was it pure luck that Ramsey Clark?
A: Monitored the Selma to Montgomery march.
A: I do not know. I really do not. It could have been his role and maybe there
was something that he wanted to do. I have said in the past that there are such
individuals in the Kennedy/Johnson administration. There was a young man by the
name of John Door who was a Republican. He was held over from either house
administration. He was a tall, lanky guy from the Midwest. He played a major,
major role and I consider some of these individuals as sympathetic referees in
the struggle for civil rights. I think you had in the department of justice that
said Edgar Hoover was this and that. There were certain individuals. It did not
matter what time of night or what time of morning. You could pick up the
telephone and call them at home instead of Ramsey, Burke or Marshall or whoever
saying this is our problem; there is a problem in Alabama or there is a problem
in Mississippi. Some of these guys would say today. Some of you may not know
this. On the Freedom Ride, there was this brave, courageous man representative
by the name of Floyd Mann, who was the public safety director for the state of
Alabama during the freedom ride. When we were being beaten by this angry mob in
Montgomery, it was Floyd Mann. This white gentleman, native of this state and
from this part of Alabama, had to leave. I think he took a job as a security
person maybe for the Goodyear plant. He stood up with a gun and he said, "There
would be no killing here today. There would be no killing here today." It was
Saturday morning, May 20, I 961, at the greyhound bus station in Montgomery and
the mob dispersed. If it had not been for this man, I probably would not be here
today and others probably would not be here. I saw him for the first
time later, in all these years, at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial m
Montgomery. He came up to me and I think by this time I was on the city council
or maybe in congress and he said, "John Lewis, do you remember me?" I said, "Mr.
Mann, I do remember you. Thank you for saving my life." We both started to cry.
So, you had people there.
Q: Congressman Lewis, you mentioned about the woman in Atlanta who came out of
nowhere and won governor.
A: The mayor's office.
Q: Okay, the mayor's office. Don't you think it is about time for a
dark horse to come out and run for president? When are you going to run for president?
A: Who me? No, I'm happy being the congressperson from Atlanta, Georgia.
Q: It was a pleasure hearing you speak and I had the pleasure of being in Selma
at the last election for the run off and some of the same things are going on as
far as getting people the patient register to vote. My question is this. With
the incident that took place down at Auburn University, do you think that is an
isolated incident? Or is there something that should be addressed to the
governor, to the people of Alabama and to the nation as to that incident? The
other thing is that there are young people that need to take up the struggle. Do
you think that it would be befitting? In the state of Alabama and in the United
States of America, they teach history. They teach so-called American history. Do
you think they should teach civil rights and the Civil Rights Movement in the
state of Alabama and all the other states so that they will know the history of
this movement because this movement is what gave life to the whole constitution?
A: Well, I think it is important that we tell the story. To me, I am so
gratified and so pleased to see what these two institutions are doing. I wish
other institutions, not just in Alabama, all across the south and all across the
nation, would do this. It is to help educate, to synthesize all of our people
about the contribution that people made and the changes that have occurred. I
think it is a must. I think we need to be teaching the philosophy and the
discipline of nonviolence, not just when people get to college, but we need to
start teaching it in daycare, in Head Start and in first grade. We need to teach
people the way of love and it may sound strange for a politician or for people
to talk about love. We need to teach that the way of love and the way of peace
is a much better way and much more excellent way. Maybe, we would not have some
of the problems that we have. Maybe at Auburn, a group of students could start
conducting nonviolent workshops saying we just don't do this; we live in a
different time; we live in a different period. We respect diversity. We respect
people. We respect the worth and dignity of every human being. I think too many
young people in our society today are growing up, and too many of us, because of
something that is happening that we have this almost disdain for just common
decency and respecting the worth of a fellow human being. People bump into you
and do not even want to say excuse me; I'm sorry. So, to be nonviolent is
not not hitting some, but it is also attitude. Words can be very violent. Words
can be very destructive. So, it is a way of love and the way of nonviolence that
we have to get over to our people. Maybe, during this time of sort of national
healing, we can sort of tum towards each other as a national community and talk
about love and nonviolence and peace in the sense of community and in the sense
family. Don't be afraid
to say it to somebody. It's nothing weak about saying to somebody,
"I'm sorry I said that. I'm sorry I did that." A lot of times, I call
my colleagues and they say, "Hello, brother.
How are you?" It's not just a black brother; it's the white brother
and the brown brother who happen to be Hispanic or an Asian American brother or
sister. In the congress, you see us on the floor. We argue like cats and dogs,
but I bet you one thing, when something happens to us, we are there for each
other. We are family. The same people that get up and arguing on C-span or
arguing on the floor, the next moment they are working out together in the gym
or having a meal together in the member's dining room. I wish sometimes
that the larger community could see the sense of family that we try to exercise
even in Washington even among politicians. Can I go for one other moment? We
have a group in Washington, and I am the co-chair, called Faith and Politics. I
am the Democrat co-chair. There is a young man by the name of Amo Houghton who
is the Republican co chair. I am one of the poorest members of congress. This
guy is one of the richest members of congress. He is very, very... You know
Steuben Glass, CorningWare. That's the family in upstate New York. We get
together, members from Alabama, white members from Alabama, white members from
Mississippi, black members from Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia, Hispanic
members from Texas, California or Florida or Asian American members from
California. We get together in our offices, in our little
hideaways and in our homes and we have what we call a ---
on race and we talk
about it. We debate it. During the past four years, we have been taking (some of
you probably read about it) we have been taking groups of members from
Washington, starting in Birmingham to Montgomery and to Selma, over a weekend
during the
anniversary of the march across the bridge. It has been unbelievable. Some of the
members walked through Sixteenth Street Baptist Church or went to the site where
Rosa Parks was arrested or might go to the museum there or go to Birmingham and
walk through the park. They would walk across the bridge and breakdown and cry.
It helps to educate and helps to synthesize. It is making us better. We always
need to reach out to each other.
Q: Good evening, Ms. Stanton and Mr. Lewis. I would just like to thank you all
on behalf
of the student body for making your appearance and sharing with us your
experiences this evening. Mr. Lewis, I would just like you to, if you could for
just a moment, speak about your current struggles with historic preservation in
the African-American museums, which we did a lot of work on this past summer.
Ms. Stanton, my question was there is no doubt to anybody in here that Viola
Liuzzo was a remarkable woman and a remarkable individual and what happened to
her was disgusting and reprehensible to say the least, but we hear about a
movie, books and all these types of things. I have seen documentaries on her and
her existence. Do you believe that if Viola Liuzzo was an African-American woman
that she would be remembered today?
A: That's a good question. It's a hard one to answer because in many
ways Viola Liuzzo was not remembered. If she was an African-American woman, the
obvious answer is probably no.
A: In Washington, for the past twelve or thirteen years, I've been leading
in an effort to create a national African-American museum on the mall. As a
matter of fact, I had a meeting today with J.C. Watts, my Republican colleague
from Oklahoma, who is the
chair of the Republican conference. We had more than one hundred and thirty-five
members, cosponsors, Republicans and Democrats in the house, and thirty-two
members of the senate of cosponsor. All of the leadership on the house side and
the senate side are cosponsoring this legislation and I think one day, we will
have in Washington a national African-American museum that tells the whole story
of the struggle of African Americans from the days of slavery to the present.
It will happen.
Douglas Turner: I have been instructed to allow a few more questions, although
time is running out and I know our guests would like to, you know, get away and
rest tonight. Two more questions. Go ahead.
Q: (Inaudible)
Q: I am the president of 2000 Freedom Fighters out of Decatur and my question is
that we have had a hard time getting the ministers involved. I know way back
when the church was the foundation and the ministers was the backbone. So, what
would you have to say today that would encourage the ministers and the churches
to get involved with the civil rights because certainly there are so many
injustices in the state of Alabama and all over the country?
A: Well, it is a very interesting question. I do not know about how strong the
African- American churches are in the African-American community, but there was
no institution that ran parallel in the poor white communities when people were
trying to organize. I think that strength moved the movement, the incredible
thrust and the power that the church has, not only through faith but also
through organizing skills training people and
bringing people together. Maybe, you can speak to that Congressman Lewis. Is it
as strong as it was or are we losing ground?
A: I would like to think that the church in the African-American community is
still strong. From what we gather, more people in both the African-American
community and the white community are going to church. You must keep in mind
that during the 1960's and during the height of the movement, all of the
ministers were not involved. All of the churches were not involved. There were
certain churches even in the city like Atlanta did not even want Dr. King, when
he left Montgomery, to come back to Atlanta. There were churches in other parts
of the south. There were certain places where the ministers were afraid to speak
out or speak up. So, you do not give up because some group is saying, well, I
cannot do this. You just keep going, four year and five there, ten there, fifty
here and one hundred there, but you be consistent, be persistent and just hang
in there and do what you can do. You are never going to have everybody. During
the original Freedom Ride, the original Freedom Ride group that left Washington,
DC, on May 4, 1961, it was only thirteen of us, seven white and six blacks that
left Washington, DC, on May 4, 1961. Later, three hundred people got arrested
and went to jail over the summer of 1961. So, you do not have to have the whole
nation or the entire community. Sometimes, there are only a few that come
together in one accord committed, dedicated, believing in an idea and they
change things. So, do not be discouraged.
Q: (inaudible)
A: Well, I would encourage people, especially young people. There is a young man
who is a history teacher out in the bay area of California and he (inaudible).
He was able to get
the state legislature of California and others to get the necessary money, but
he started off just having a fundraiser, bringing one hundred students to
Washington. They go to the Lincoln Memorial. They listen to Dr. King's
speech on an old boombox, "I have a Dream." Then, they fly to Atlanta. Then,
they travel by bus to Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, Little Rock and to Memphis.
They go to Central High and they meet with some of the former students of
Central High. During the past four or five years, he has brought over eleven
hundred students. In some cases, there were superintendents, parents and members
of the board of education, but a whole generation of high school students. They
are black; they are white. They are Asian American. They are Hispanic and Native
American. In this state, there is so much history; it is unbelievable. I say to
the young people in Atlanta, to the students there sometimes, go and visit the
King Center. Go and visit Dr. King's grave. Go and visit Ebenezer Church.
There are kids growing up in Atlanta that have never been in the home of where
Dr. King was born. So, we encourage young people and people not so young to take
advantage of this history here. There is a lot of rich history here in this
state dealing with the whole question of race and civil rights.
Closing: We have gone over our usual time, but I think that most of you would
agree that it has been a productive and memorable evening. Once again, how about
a round of applause for Ms. Mary Stanton and Congressman Lewis. Do not forget
too that next week, the lecture series continues at UAH in Roberts Recital Hall
at 7 p.m. The topic will be "Turmoil in Tuskegee." The lecturer will be Frank
Toland of the History Department at Tuskegee University. Thanks for coming out
and see you next week.
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Digitized VHS tape of "Selma to Montgomery, 1965".
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U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Mary Stanton are the speakers in this lecture given at Alabama A&M University.
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2001-11-08
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1:56:01
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en
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University of Alabama in Huntsville
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Lewis, John, 1940-2020
Stanton, Mary, 1946-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Selma (Ala.)
Dallas County (Ala.)
Freedom Rides, 1961
African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.
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Lectures
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/391">Selma to Montgomery, 1965 - Speakers: John Lewis and Mary Stanton - Transcription of Tape 9, 2003</a>
Source
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/403"> VHS Tape of: Selma to Montgomery, 1965 - Speakers: John Lewis and Mary Stanton, 2001-11-08. Box 2, Tape 9</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama
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http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/32/13345/EarlyYearsoftheMovement_Tape3_File4.pdf
56fedaee613df78a371297db75354a33
PDF Text
Text
The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
Alabama A&M University
Early Years of the Movement (Part II)
Speaker: J.L. Chestnut, Jr.
On behalf of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on behalf of President Frank
Franz, I am very pleased to welcome all of you to this lecture series focusing on the
history and impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. This historic initiative
brings to Huntsville, distinguished speakers who will reflect on events of the past and
who will share with us their hopes for the future. I must once again commend the faculty
from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and from Alabama
A&M University, who worked over a period of more than two years to make this
possible. The faculty includes, but are not limited to, John Dimmock, Lee Williams, Jack
Ellis, Mitch Berbrier from UAH, and James Johnson and Carolyn Parker from Alabama
A&M. I am very pleased that you could be with us.
Good evening. It is my pleasure to take a couple of moments to acknowledge our
sponsors. These are the people who have made it possible for us to do all these kinds of
things. They have given us funds and all kinds of support. They are: The Alabama
Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities;
Senator Frank Sanders; The Huntsville Times; DESE Research Inc.; Mevatec
Corporation; and Alabama Representative, Laura Hall. At Alabama A&M, we have the
Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the State Black Archives Research Center
and Museum, Title III Telecommunications and Distance Learning Center, Office of
Student Development, the Honor Center, Sociology Social Work Programs and the
History Political Science Programs. At the University of Alabama in Huntsville, we have
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the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The History Forum Banking
Foundation, Sociology, Social Issues Symposium, The Humanities Center, The Division
of Continuing Education, the Honors Program and the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs,
Office of Student Affairs and the UAH Copy Center. Let us give these people a show of
appreciation.
Introduction: The thing that has always fascinated me about the civil rights career of J.L.
Chestnut Jr., is the extent of which it is rooted in ordinary light and then the experiences
of ordinary people struggling against poverty and injustice.
Mr. Chestnut's
autobiography, Black in Selma, published in 1990 with Historian Julia Cast, is a reminder
of how history really operates. Here, one is far removed from the well-ordered narrities
of human freedom favored by Hollywood authors and writers of fiction or those who
devise stories where battles are fought and won, where dramatic conflicts are resolved
easily and quickly in time and space. Instead, Mr. Chestnut introduces us to a far more
complicated vision. One marked by the passions of political combat in a small southern
town and by the endless quest for dignity among those that he calls "The little and
forgotten people of this world." His life shows that the struggle did not begin with the
Civil Rights Movement and it is not over today. Born in Selma, Mr. Chestnut's early
curiosity and his remarkable powers of observation and memory as a child, particularly of
people and events within the black communities and its relation with the white power
structure and with the police, is owed much to the example of his own parents. He had a
hard working and resilient father and an educated, fiercely independent mother.
spent forty years teaching school and was never hesitant about speaking her mind.
2
She
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Mr. Chestnut told me this afternoon that his mother, now age ninety, is still very quick to
speak her mind about affairs of the world.
After graduating from Knox Academy,
Selma's black high school, Mr. Chestnut went on to Dillard University in New Orleans
and from there to Howard University in Washington, DC where he earned a degree in
law. In 1959, he came home to open an office as Selma's first black attorney. Though
eventually merging as one of the South's leading civil rights lawyer, his early years of
practice often encountered the same barriers that confronted Alabama's other black
lawyers. I think at that time there were only nine in all. He had to overcome the racism
of white judges.
He struggled to maintain the semblance of a professional life, even
having to fight for the right to be able to sit within the railing of the courtroom alongside
the black sharecroppers and laborers, who made up the bulk of his clients, are just a few
examples. Nevertheless, Mr. Chestnut's courage and legal skills and his long fight for
the right of Dallas County's black residents earned him the respect of poor blacks and
poor whites alike. Soon, he had become a leader of the black community and its dealings
with the power structure from the sheriff to the mayor, the courthouse of bureaucracy and
eventually to George Wallace himself. Mr. Chestnut headed the NAACP legal team that
oversaw Alabama's reluctant implementation of the Supreme Court's decision back in
1954, which ordered the desegregation of schools. In 1963, he helped the young freedom
writer, Bernard Lafayette, the first civil rights worker to come to Selma, persuade his
fellow Selmians to overcome their fears in order for them to attend mass meetings aimed
at voter registration. The importance of this was reflected in the fact that at that time, out
of one hundred and fifty counties, only fifteen thousand black residents were registered to
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vote. That was the start of the Selma movement. The subsequent emergence of Selma as
a symbol for the national black voting rights campaign during the 1960's is owed much
to the health and advice that Mr. Chestnut was able to provide the civil rights organizers.
He represented many of them locally, including Martin Luther King Jr., James Foreman,
John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy and Joseph Lowery. After the event of Bloody Sunday, on
March 7, 1965 and long after the reporters and network television camera's coverage of
the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge disappeared, Mr. Chestnut continued to fight
in combating local job discrimination and winning the rights of blacks to sit on Dallas
County juries. Following the Selma to Montgomery March, in passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, Mr. Chestnut emerged in the words of Julia Cast as "a leader in the
long march. The process of turning the possibilities opened up in 1965 into a real grass
roots change long after the national spot light and national civil rights leaders had gone
elsewhere."
Eventually, Mr. Chestnut would try more capital cases than any other
attorney in Alabama and the firm he was head of would become the largest black firm in
the state.
His list of cases defending the political and economics rights of African-
Americans, Hispanics, native Americans, and women continues to grow. Mr. Chestnut
has been active in speaking out in countless public forums across the nation, from ABC's
Good Morning America, BET's Lead Story to CBS Nightline, to name just a few. The
subtitle of Mr. Chestnut's autobiography, The Uncommon Life of.IL. Chestnut Jr., is
amply named, I think. I believe it will provide an endearing testimony to what he has
achieved. That achievement in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, has been to
give "a vividly human face to the men and women of Selma, who struggles, hopes,
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contradictions, optimism, cynicism and general thrashing about helped shape today's
south." This symposium on the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama is honored to have as
our guest tonight, J.L. Chestnut Jr. Join me in extending a warm welcome.
J.L. Chestnut, Jr.: Good evening to you. I want you to know that I cannot hardly wait
to get back home and let my dear wife know that I have been hobnobbing with the
president, the Provos and the president of UA in Huntsville as well as two or three
Ph.D's. My wife is always saying I am nobody, but she does not know a single college
president. You just wait until I get back there. My dear friend, the president of this
college who comes from my neck of the woods, is a fine, fine man. This institution has
really grown since the last time I was here last. It is a great honor for me to be at this
historic institution. I was overwhelmed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and
how it has grown to seven thousand students, I think. It is a great testimony to the people
of this area and I am honored to be among you. I want you to know that I sit on the
trustee board of the University of South Alabama, USA.
Last year, I spoke at the
University of Alabama Law School in Tuskaloosa. Fifty years ago, when I went off to
law school, I could not even get into the University of Alabama University Law School
except as a janitor. What has occurred since that has brought us to where we are here is
part of what I am going to talk about. What was the "there" and what is the "here"?
will try to shed some light on those questions.
First, I would like to take a moment or so to read the opening paragraph from a
deliberately, provocative and controversial weekly newspaper column I write, which.
Kay Turner is well aware of this. The paragraph, I think, says a lot about the current
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mindset of most of the people my age, that struggled in the front ranks of the movement
during the dangerous sixties. Three months before the unspeakable bloody tragic murder
of thousand of innocent souls in New York and Washington, I wrote and published the
following paragraph in several newspapers. It begins by stating, "In significant ways, the
United States of America is a great force for good and progress in this really chaotic
world. I am convinced that no other country would have created a marshal plan or spent
billions of dollars to economically resurrect or vanquish folk, after a five-year bloody
world war. What nation other than this one would have fought and awful Civil War of
the emancipation of slaves of color. I dare say not one. America is in a class by itself." I
wrote those words because they are true.
I am the great grandson of slaves, but my lawyer states that this nation equals any
America. I was a soldier during the Korean War and I was prepared to die if necessary,
in defense of a democracy that denied me. Moreover, I did not accept the city rationale
in Washington for the war. How does one stop the spread of an idea of communism with
an army? Indeed, the Koreans had every right to be communist if that is what they
wanted to be in their own land. Yet, if my country went to Korea to fight, I would fight
for my country. Less than ten years later, my country went to Vietnam and made the
same mistake. We reaped devastating results. However, if one listens to George W.
Bush, one might think that only good comes out of America and that all of the evil in the
world is elsewhere.
The president described the tragic New York and Washington
outrageous, as unprovoked acts of war and as a war between good and evil. We all can
easily see the unmitigated evil of the terrorists but the young president overstates our
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good. I understand his role to try and unify the nation but unity, like peace, must in the
end rest on truth. A false foundation will not support either in the long run." That is
pretty much where my mind is after all of these years of the struggles in Selma and
elsewhere.
Let me leave where I am now and let me take you back to 1958, Selma, when I
was foolish enough to come back and establish a law office. It was the first time a black
was crazy enough to do that in Selma. As you heard a moment ago, only one hundred
and fifty-eight blacks, out of twenty thousand, were registered to vote. Each one of those
people had to be vouched for by a white person. If a white person did not feel that old
Ned was all right, then old Ned did not get to register. There were black and white water
fountains, rest rooms, churches, and schools. My mother, my wife, and other black
women could not try on a pair of shoes right a hat in some cheap department stores
downtown. Not one black person anywhere in the State of Alabama had ever served on a
jury, not one. The police were a law unto themselves in the black community. When
they came to knock on your door, if they bothered to knock at all, you would say, "Who
is it?" They would respond, "The Law", and they meant it. They did whatever to
whomever whenever. If you asked any questions, they would find you floating in the
Alabama River. This was just a few years ago in 1958. I saw black men literally lynched
for not saying sir or ma'am to a white person or yielding the sidewalk. The only jobs
blacks had in downtown Huntsville, Selma, Birmingham and Mobile were as janitors,
messengers and delivery people. There was a blanket of fear over this state so thick that
you could almost cut it with a knife. Black folks had to be careful about what they said to
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each other. You never knew what someone would go downtown and claim you said.
You could loose a hell of a lot more than a job.
As a lady said to me at Harvard
University, "If it was that bad Mr. Chestnut, why did you go back?" I said, "Hell, that's
why I went back". I had no idea that a Civil Rights Movement would explode in the
streets of Selma. I just hoped that we could make some modest achievement.
I hoped
that we could pull our resources as black folks and set up a few credit unions, maybe
open up some grocery stores and other types of businesses. If we were lucky, I thought
we might be able to get the white police out of black Selma. That is about as far as I
thought we could go. I was born and raised in Selma. I had not seen anything that would
suggest the Montgomery Boycott or anything else such as a massive Civil Rights
Movement in the streets of Selma or in Birmingham for that matter. I though when the
white man said it was over, hell, it was over.
The Civil Rights Movements exploded in the city of Selma. I will never forget
1
March 7 \ even if! live to be three hundred years old. I had never seen anything like that
in the army. I went across the bridge early on what we called Bloody Sunday, to tie up
the one telephone that we did have over there. The reason I had to tie up the telephone is
because I represented the NAACP legal defense and education fund. Even though Martin
King and Reverend Abernathy were putting all of these folks in jail they were not paying
for it; my bosses were paying for it. I had to explain to them what was going on. In fact,
we did not even believe in all of this marching. We said that we should find two or three
obviously qualified black folks, send them down to register and when they turn them
down, you have a perfect test case; go to court. Martin repudiated all of that by sending
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five hundred people out. I went across that bridge early just in case. We did not even
know there would be a march. What spurred it all off, Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young
fellow, had been shot dead by the state troopers in a demonstration in Marion about thirty
miles from Selma. All the boy was doing was trying to protect his mother. People were
so upset, they fiercely said, "We should take his un-embalmed body and march all the
way to Montgomery and put it on George Wallace's desk. Obviously, we could not do
that. It evolved from that into the march to Montgomery. George Wallace said there
would be no more marches and that he was up to here in marches. We said we did not
care if he was up to there, we are going to march. We had this conflict. The question
was rather or not there would be a march __
said, "If Martin King is in the march, we
are not going to be in it. We have been in Selma for two years getting our ass whipped,
going to jail, bleeding and getting no credit for it, but Martin comes in, makes one
speech, goes out to Los Angeles, and raises ten thousand dollars. The hell with it! We
are not going to march." I went over there just in case. I was over there looking at the
carnival at the other side. On the other side, there were four hundred state troopers
decked out in riot gear. They had billy clubs the size of baseball bats and tear gas. They
were backed up by another one hundred deputy sheriffs and posse men on horses. They
were decked out in tear gas mask also. I said to myself, "Who the hell are you all
expecting ... the Russian army or something?" They were over there as usual, arguing
with each other about who was in charge. The truth of the matter was none of them were
in charge. I looked back and there was John Lewis, who is now a congressman from
Atlanta, leading a little group of people. Martin Luther King was not in that march. He
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was in Atlanta, preaching in his church. You have seen that clip a many of times on
television of John Lewis and his group coming face to face with all of this, all might of
the state of Alabama, stretched out across that highway at the foot of that bridge on the
Montgomery side. I heard a white boy say, "Tum around. Go back to your church. This
is as far as you will be permitted to go." John kneeled and begin to pray and the others
behind him did likewise. Then, something went off like a tear gas canister; I do not know
what it was. Then, there was absolute deadlock; tear-gas everywhere.
screaming and hollering.
People were
You could here ribs cracking as horses rode across folk's
breast. I saw grown men with these baseball bats coming down on the heads of women
and children, splitting them like watermelons. I had dropped the telephone because I was
trying to pull some of these people out of the highway. I could hear New York saying,
"What's happening ... What's happening?" It was a horrible day. Blood was everywhere.
I remember walking back across that bridge, literally crying. What is this all about?
Martin keeps talking about the power of the public opinion. What public opinion? They
were beating my folks to death in the middle of a public highway, at high noon and no
one cared because they were black. What public opinion was this? At that moment, I did
not think that America could be saved. I did not think that white people were worth
saving. The thing I did not know was that people all around the United States, black,
white, brown and red people had watched that ugly bloody scene and they did not like
what they had seen. The President of the United States had watched it spell bound.
Three weeks earlier, he had met with some of us in the White House. We asked him to
present to the congress a voting right bill. He said, "I can't do that boy. I just got you a
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was in Atlanta, preaching in his church. You have seen that clip a many of times on
television of John Lewis and his group coming face to face with all of this, all might of
the state of Alabama, stretched out across that highway at the foot of that bridge on the
Montgomery side. I heard a white boy say, "Turn around. Go back to your church. This
is as far as you will be permitted to go." John kneeled and begin to pray and the others
behind him did likewise. Then, something went off like a tear gas canister; I do not know
what it was. Then, there was absolute deadlock; tear-gas everywhere.
screaming and hollering.
People were
You could here ribs cracking as horses rode across folk's
breast. I saw grown men with these baseball bats coming down on the heads of women
and children, splitting them like watermelons. I had dropped the telephone because I was
trying to pull some of these people out of the highway. I could hear New York saying,
"What's happening ... What's happening?" It was a horrible day. Blood was everywhere.
I remember walking back across that bridge, literally crying. What is this all about?
Martin keeps talking about the power of the public opinion. What public opinion? They
were beating my folks to death in the middle of a public highway, at high noon and no
one cared because they were black. What public opinion was this? At that moment, I did
not think that America could be saved. I did not think that white people were worth
saving. The thing I did not know was that people all around the United States, black,
white, brown and red people had watched that ugly bloody scene and they did not like
what they had seen. The President of the United States had watched it spell bound.
Three weeks earlier, he had met with some ofus in the White House. We asked him to
present to the congress a voting right bill. He said, "I can't do that boy. I just got you a
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public accommodation law wherein you can buy a hamburger wherever I can buy one.
You can stay in the Holiday Inn. Go home. Be quiet. Be grateful. Be thankful." We
went home and turned Selma inside out and upside down and the result of it was at the
bottom of that bridge. There he was, the President of the United States, looking and he
did not like what he saw. The next thing he was doing was standing before the congress
of the United States with the bill in his hand, insisting that the congress pass the bill and
pass it now. He ended that refrain with, "We shall overcome!" Later on, Martin King
told me that he was watching it with his wife Coretta. He said that when the President of
the United States said, "We shall overcome," he said a tear trickled down his cheek. I
said, "Martin, my friend, no tear trickled down my cheek". He said, "Why?" I said, "Do
you not understand? You are no longer the number one Civil Rights leader in America,
hell, Lyndon Johnson is." This is the man who said three weeks ago that the country
would not stand for two civil rights bills. We were in deep, deep trouble.
From that moment on, every time the president of the United States could, he
wanted to preempt out our movement. He was never able to do it. As I was telling some
of the professors today, ifit had not been for Lyndon Johnson, I would not be here today;
I would have been six feet under. Lyndon Johnson was able to get his bill through. Then
they took postmen and other federal workers and sent them to Dallas County, Alabama
to Terry County, Alabama and to Wilcox County, Alabama and said, "Register those
folks."
thousand.
In six weeks, we went from one hundred and fifty registered voters to ten
That has not happened anywhere in the history of the human race.
struggle was hardly over. The struggle is not over in the year 200 I. It is not over as I
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stand here speaking to you. Well, why not? For a whole lot of reasons. First, as much a
hundred years earlier, poor, uneducated slaves were set free to compete or parish. They
had no money. They had nothing.
First of all, in 1966, we had ten thousand new black voters who knew next to
nothing about politics or voting.
We were opposed by people with centuries of
experience in politics, government, and voting. Second, we had no control whatsoever,
over the economy. Their political adversaries employed most of the ten thousand new
voters. Even worse, they had been brainwashed for centuries by being told that voting
and politics were white folks business. If you want to stay out of trouble, stay away from
voting and politics. Alabama was a one-party state, the Democratic Party. It continued
to back every incumbent who was white. The best we could do every now and then was
get together and elect what we call the lesser of two white evils. That took place for the
next ten years.
We went to see Jimmy Carter after he was elected. We said to Mr. Carter, "We
went to the poles, but every time they count the absentee ballot box, we lose." Mr. Carter
said, "Well, that is a state problem. We will not deal with that our first term. We will
deal with that our second term." As you know, he did not get a second term. In 1980,
Mr. Reagan came to town, not only were we not getting any help but also Mr. Reagan
prosecuted us. Mr. Reagan's justice department under Mr. Edwin Meese brought at least
a hundred and fifty indictments against carefully selected black leaders and charged them
with something called boast fraud, something that Mr. Reagan did not know what it
meant and hell, I did not either. We went up to see Mr. Meese and said, "Why are you
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doing this to us? Everything we know about the absentee ballot box, we learned it from
whites. We are doing just what they are doing. You have not indicted a single white
person. Here is the evidence." We showed to him how whites were doing the same
thing. Mr. Meese was writing furiously stating, "We are going to look into that." I never
heard another word from Mr. Meese. Finally, we circled in the court and defeated every
one of these indictments, except for about two and those two were thrown out on appeal.
We begin to elect black folks to office and that was not the end of the battle. The battle
was not over. The battle is not over yet. The battle will not be over in my lifetime or
yours.
I filed a lawsuit and charged systematic exclusion of black folks from the jury
box and won. We had blacks come into the jury box. Some of these counties are seventy
and eighty percent black. We came up with a jury with eleven blacks and one white. The
white, every time would be selected foreperson. Because of three hundred and fifty years
of slavery and another one hundred years of near slavery, the mere fact that I won a
lawsuit and was able to put them in the jury box could not erase four hundred and fifty
years of discrimination. It is a slow process. That is why it is not over. We put an all
black jury in the box. There was a white lady, whose leg was broken in a car accident.
She received two thousand dollars. A black woman in an identical situation would
receive two hundred dollars from an all black jury. After three hundred years of slavery
and one hundred years of near slavery, we have these fools on television talking about it
is over. We are about a third of the way, at best. Do not you fool yourself. As I say to
you, after almost forty years since the bridge, black folks now take in and spend close to
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nine hundred billion dollars every year and we do not spend it with each other because
we have been taught to not do that since the first slave ship stopped here. That is one of
the reasons why people with nine hundred billion dollars have so many folks on food
stamps and living in public housing. Everyday, we spend at least a million dollars in
supermarkets. We do not own one single supermarket. The NAACP and my so, so, so
fraternity and my wife's so, so sorority spends tons of money in white hotels arguing
about poverty and racism. We do not own a single one of those hotels. Ifwe bought one
of those hotels, that would do far more than addressing poverty and racism than these so
called symposiums that we have on the subject.
We have come a long, long way against insurmountable odds. It is a miracle that
we have even survived. I argue all the time all around the country with all kinds of folks.
The argument is rather or not if the glass is half full or half empty. If you are white, you
are more likely to argue that it is half full. If you know me or ever heard of me, you
would argue that it is half-empty. We all have to agree that there is some water in the
glass. It is wrong to argue that over the last forty years, we have not made meaningful
progress. It is just as wrong to argue that that progress equals victory. We have to be
realistic about the whole situation. I was arguing with a fellow. You have probably seen
him on television. His last name is Armstrong. I forgot what his name. He called me a
liberal. He was bragging about how conservative he was. I said, "Boy let me tell you
something, I don't care nothing about black liberals or conservatives.
A black
conservative to me is someone carrying water on a political reservation run by George
Bush and two or three other powerful Republicans. A black liberal is someone carrying
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water on a political reservation ran by Bill Clinton. The hell with both reservations!" I
am a black man trying to deal with truth.
People like me made people like Armstrong possible. If we knew that would be
_____
. There must be accountability in the black community. We are the only
people you can say anything about, do anything to and there are not any consequences
whatsoever. The reason that we attack and undermine each other is because there is no
penalty to pay. That has to change. Sooner or later, we are going to have to deal with the
Armstrongs whether they all want to do it or not. We are going to have to do that. We
cannot fight on the serious front and have all of these little yard dogs laughing and
yapping at our heel. We have to be loose so we can concentrate on the real struggle. I
will say this. I am going to be frank with you. I would not have said this if we did not
have all of these white folks here. I am just telling you all the truth. I learned in the Civil
Rights Movement that black folks are just IO to I 2 percent of the national population.
We will never get it done by ourselves. Nothing really happened in Selma until white
people of goodwill came. They came not just from the North, but other parts of the South
and locked arms with us in the streets of Selma and said, "I am ready to march, go to jail,
die or do whatever is necessary that rights will prevail." White folks died in Selma.
White folks died in Mississippi, Georgia and other places finding that this country could
be free. So, I do not want and I do not agree with these separatist ideas. I think it is not
only self-defeating but foolish to say, "We don't want no white folks in this and we are
going to do it ourselves." You sure will do it yourself. We need all of the help that we
can get. Last, I would like to say to white folks that we freed more of you all in 1967
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than we freed people that look like me. I had white people come up to me and whisper in
my ear in Selma and they would say, "Keep up the fight J.L." They are still walking by
fear.
Do you know what it is in the year 2001 for someone to call you a nigger lover?
You might as well pack up and leave. This is everybody's struggle. We have come a
long way and we have overcome many obstacles. We have a long way to go, but we are
on our way. Nothing can stop us. I know from experience. I have been to the well
many, many times and I know that when good people lookup, rise up and decide to stand
up, we can make mountains move and trees tremble but we have to do it together.
Closing: Attorney Chestnut will entertain your questions. Before we do that, let me
remind you that the yellow sheets that you have, please fill those out. Those are our
evaluation forms. Some of our grants or rather some of the folks need that. Please fill
them out and give it to some of the young people that are in the back. Attorney Chestnut
will now entertain your questions
Q: (inaudible)
A: You were around in the sixties, I know? Then you know that even then they were
only relatively a few of them.
Young folks, my children's generation and my
grandchildren have the impression that 85 percent of black America was on the march in
the 1960's. There were a miniscule number ofus on the march. I think we can increase
our numbers, but it will always be small. That does not matter. Jesus Christ only had
twelve, only one of them was a trader. If you are prepared to be free or die, I do not need
an army. I just need a few of those type people and you can change the world. We want
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to give everybody the chance. Do not be disheartened when you look back and see that
there are not many behind you.
My wife and I were born in Selma. We were sick of that little place. We both sat
down and talked about it. We both concluded that in six months to a year, we would
either pack up and leave or we would be dead. We had to consider that, to not consider
that, for us, that would have been crazy. I do not know of anyone in the Civil Rights
Movement back in the sixties who came in because they wanted to commit suicide. 1
also did not know anyone in that movement who was not prepared to die, if necessary;
what is now going on is a lack of dedication.
Let me tell you about my son who is a lawyer. I raised him in my house. All he
thinks about is the house on the hill and the BMW. There is something human about that.
There are only going to be relatively few people who are going to rise above that and see
a greater truth and a greater need and be prepared to die for it. I was telling some
professors today. Martin Luther King my fly, my friend and more of my leaders than he
ever saw was the most morbid man I ever met in my life. You could not talk to him three
minutes before he brought up death, his death, and everyone else's.
Every since the
Montgomery Boycott, death had stalked him. It stalked him all the way to that balcony in
Memphis. If he said it to me once, he said it one hundred times, "They are going to keep
coming back for us until there is not one ofus left." The only reason that did not turn out
to be true was because of Lyndon Johnson. He put so much pressure on John Edgar
Hoover, that every time the Klu Klux Klan met, two thirds of the meeting were either FBI
informants or under cover people ... had that not been the case, every one ofus would
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have been dead.
Lyndon Johnson saved our lives. Even though he used to call us
niggers, but he saved our lives.
Q: There are many people here who are facing tremendous violence.
Let me give
reference to the Muslims. Muslims are like the rest of the people who want to be free,
live their own lives and not be murdered or challenged about the way they live their lives.
I hope all people who are suffering for this reason will join together and try to make this
country the kind of country it ought to be. It is really bad that we do not realize that there
is a better way. We could be benevolent instead of a tyrant around the world. I hope that
everybody around the world will try. I certainly want to work on this because I have
been aware of this for a very long time.
A: The truth is that there are powerful forces in this country who do not want this to
happen, the very thing you suggest. They have been fighting for years to keep that from
happening. It has always amused me that poor white Southerners went off in the Civil
War, fighting to preserve slavery and they were damn near slaves themselves.
It has
always puzzled me that in Alabama some of the poorest folk I know are against labor
unions and wants to exalt so-called write-the-work laws. This is the result of what I call
mainstream brainwashing and it is out there. People like you and lots of people who
want to see a better world, there are powerful forces who only want to see a better world
on certain terms. They are prepared, if necessary, to destroy America, to keep it from
happening. It is a sad commentary on our time, but it is the truth. I was also telling the
professors this afternoon that my ninety-year-old mother and I was sitting in her house
the other night watching television; nobody but us. This is a woman that I love with all of
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my heart. She had cultivated powerful white people all of her life. ____
knows her.
She said black folks cannot do anything for her because they are in the same boat. She
does not even like white people who are not powerful. She does not have time for you
all. We were sitting in her room and President Bush was on the television. The president
said, 'This is a terrible tragedy. Thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered. It
is unprecedented. It never happened in evil." My mother looked around to make sure
there was nobody in there. She knows there was no one else there but us, but this is the
way she has been living with white folks. She looked around to make sure no one was
there and then she looked at me and said, "ls he too young to remember Hiroshima
Nagasaki? Does he remember the atomic bomb?" I said, "Yes, he remembers. That is
not a truth he wants to deal with." She started to say something else to me and she
changed her mind and did not say it. The thing that I was looking at there, as I was
talking to these professors, that goes beyond the I 960's. That goes all the way back to
slavery. Do you understand it? That is what that is all about. Who would corrupt the
mind of people for centuries except they have diabolical design. These are the folk who
prevent the kind of world that you and I want from happening.
Q: First of all, thank you very much for making myself as well as the multitude of other
people here aware who are our age because so often we do not actually see what you
guys went through back in 1958, even though it is still currently going on. My question,
however, is where do we go from here? As a person in my generation, what steps do we
take to further the goal of equality and freedom?
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A: I think that we have to give as much attention to the economics of freedom as we
have given to the politics of freedom. The economics of freedom are far more difficult to
achieve than the politics of freedom. We have to learn how to pull our resources. We
have to learn how to reward our friends with our money and punish our enemy. We
should not be putting money in the First National Bank if we cannot make loans at the
First National Bank. We should not be putting money in the People's Bank if no one
down there looks like us. I think we have to strike on the economic front and we have to
hit as hard as we did on the political front. America is the citadel of capitalism and
spending every dime we get is a recipe for bankruptcy in the citadel of capitalism. I do
not like to deal with our dirty linen in front of white folks, but I am going to go ahead and
do this. There are some things in the black community that we really need to clean up
and only we can clean them up. I am sick and tired of some of these black preachers, in
an automobile long as from here to there, two telephones, wearing a $1500.00 suit, riding
pass us and will not speak and raising all of that off people on food stamps; that is wrong.
We cannot free a people tied to that. It is everywhere in a black community. We need to
take a look at these so called black radio stations, so called. We do not usually own
them. We just get on them and act a fool. My partners and I just bought two radio
stations in Selma because there ought to be some other voice to the Selma Times-Journal.
If you listen to some of these so-called black radio stations, what you here will make a
grown man blush. All day long they are preaching to our children that SEX spells love
and it does not. It spells more poverty, more disease, more everything that is wrong. I
am going to stop there because the whites folks are sure enough getting interested.
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Q: I am a public school educator in the city of Huntsville and I work in middle school.
It just breaks my heart. I grew up in Birmingham in****. It is just devastating because
we are not educating blacks nor whites to the truth. I want to know where do you think
education fits in at that level because that is the future. My day is over with. It is that
generation that will have carry us as America to where we want to be.
A: I agree with you. We are still teaching children that Columbus discovered America,
though the Indians was on the beach waiting for him. In America, the truth can get you
killed. Let me give you all some truths that will shock some of you. Do you know who
trained and equipped some of Usama Bin Laden? He was our close friend as long as he
was killing Russians. Do you understand that these misguided misfits who took these
planes into those buildings, in their own minds were retaliating against this country for
wrongs they felt had been done to them. Do you realize the truth will get you killed? So,
how do you teach it? Do you realize that beginning in 1980, for eight years, Ronald
Reagan prosecuted underclass, illegal wars on virtually every little country in Central and
South America. He destroyed villages, destroyed families, killing children and women.
Do you know that it is beyond rational dispute that all of the North help finance those
wars with drug money. We do not come with clean hands. That is why the truth is so
dangerous. If you start speaking or telling the truth, get ready to suffer; it is coming. I
have spent a lifetime suffering because I believe in people and I love people. When I look
in the mirror and shave every morning, I want to see somebody I halfway like. I do not
want to be ashamed of me. I have seen some awful things in my time, things that would
make you cry. The innocent suffers, truth be damned. I am going to say this and then I
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am going to hush.
While President Bush and clergy from all denominations, black,
white, red and everybody were appropriately gathered in the National Cathedral to show
national tolerance, unity, prayer and hope, two of president Bush's strongest supporters
wrote Reverend Jerry Falwell and Reverend Pat Robertson was on national television
saying that the trade center and the pentagon because of homosexuals, homosexuality and
abortionists. Now, how crazy can you be? That is loose in this land and it has been loose
in this land for a long, long time. These people have power. They have the airwaves.
They have television sounds and all that. They feed that to a misguided public all of the
time. I hear stuff from intelligent, educated people and I say to myself, "Did I hear that
right?"
Q: I must first start off by saying that I have immensely enjoyed everything that you
have told us tonight. It encourages me as a college student to go forth and do well. The
question that I want to ask you is despite all that you have experienced, what has
reaffirmed your faith in America in all that you have done and what has kept you going
through all of these years?
A: As I mentioned earlier, my dear mother and my late father actually loved people.
They transferred that to me and to my younger sister. I cannot put up with suffering. I
do not like to see anybody mistreated. When you have a sense of people, you want to try
to help improve the human condition. I learned a long time ago in Sunday school that I
cannot love the Lord until I first learn how to love you. I also learned that no matter what
someone else does to me, I cannot afford to let that person make me hate them. I read
where Booker T. Washington said, "The only way you can keep a man down a ditch is
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you have to get down there with him." Throughout my life, there has always seemed to
be somebody there who cared and said, "Look here boy, you don't want to go that way;
go this way." There were a lot of people who did not care. There was always one or two
who cared. I went to these segregated public schools in Selma, Alabama. The building 1
went to school in had been condemned twenty years earlier when my mother was a
student there. The ceiling would fall down while we were in class. The whites had a
brand new school on the main street in Selma. The superintendent would come every
year to explain to us why there was no money for a new school. I wanted to do him some
harm. I talked to my father about that. My father talked to me about not getting down in
the ditch with the superintendent. I will say this. Nobody believes more in prayer than I
do. I pray everyday. I am not ashamed of that. I pray at night. I pray driving along the
street. When I get through praying, I get up off my knees; I am ready for battle. I guess.
I am having the time of my life.
Q: (inaudible)
A: I will relay your message verbatim.
Can I take two minutes and say something about fees that I think that you ought to hear?
Three years ago, three of us brought a law suit in Washington, DC on behalf on twentythousand black farmers from Maine to Florida and from New York to California. We
charged that the United States Department of Agriculture had discriminated against black
farmers by one, not giving them the loans that were entitled to and two, if they got the
longs, it was too little too late. It forced farmers out of business. Fifteen years ago, there
were thirty-six thousand small black farmers in this country. There are about eight left
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now. The judge said to me, "Mr. Chestnut, how much money are you talking about? Are
you talking about 20,000 farmers all over the country?" I said, "Yes your honor." He
said, "Well how much money are you talking about. I said about 2.5 billion dollars."
The government laughed.
The reason they laughed is because black folk had never
gotten any real money from the federal government. You get social security and small
business loans, but you do not get any real money from the government. There was no
precedent for that. As I talk to you now, the government has paid fifty thousand dollars
to about nine thousand black farmers who had no records whatsoever. Once they paid
them the fifty thousand dollars because it was income, the government wrote a second
check for 12,500 dollars for taxes and paid that to the IRS. In addition to that, if the
government had some land that it had foreclosed on a black farmer, they had to give it
back. They are in the process of doing that right now. Do you know how much black
lawyers charged the black farmers? Zero. It cost my law firm 1.5 million dollars to
process the case. We said at the end of the case, we will come back to the court. If we
win, the court can order the government to pay us. We don't want little farmers paying
us. They didn't create this mess. The government did. Now, the government is now
paying us. Now, we are arguing with each other.
Q: First of all, I would like to extend my sincere appreciation for you sharing that
delightful and wonderful lecture that you shared with us. I also wanted to comment on
how one, the truth is not out there often and it is not often set out as eloquently as you put
it. First of all, you do not have to search for the truth. There are books and research and
a lot of that is for us today. If you do teach us from our elders, we will receive that
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University
information and we will take it and run with it. I do not want you to feel as if the cause
is gone; the cause is lost because there are still people out there that feel that it is not
over. We hear you when you call upon us to step up to the plate. I know soon that you
will have to sit down but just know that our generation is not all lost. We are out there.
We are waiting for you and that is all we need to see a little direction and we are in it.
Along the path, we as children, we learn from our elders. In someway and somehow, it
was mistranslated that after the Civil Rights Movements and after desegregation,
everything was okay. Now, today our generation is driving around in luxurious cars paid
by our student loans and things like that. I just want to know how do you feel about our
generation kind of dropping the ball as far as the revolution is concerned and as far as
things of that nature of the Civil Rights Movement is not over. We still have things to
fight for. Like you said, it is only one-third of the way to its final destination and I do not
see it in **. Where do you think we dropped the ball? So, thank you, thank you for
coming to our campus.
A: I am going to answer that quickly and then I am going to let you all go. We all have
to work together, as I have mentioned and went into that, and try to bring those along
who will not come. Some will not come regardless, but you will get some of them. In
1964, every major black Civil Rights leader in the country was in jail in little Selma,
every one of them and the movement was dying because there was no one to lead it. We
had been trying for two weeks, habeas corpus and everything trying to get them out. One
judge told me, "No way. We have the head of the snake. All we have to do is hold it
long enough and the tail will die. Then, Malcom X showed up in Selma in front of my
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office before he went on down to the Brown Chappuis Church. I was glad when he went
on down to the Brown Chappuis Church. He stood up in front of my office and he said
that he had come to Selma to take over the movement and that from now on it would be
going in a different direction. The only reason they were going to turn the cheek to see
which way the rascal went. I looked up and there was Martin and Ralph walking down
the street. The white folks put them out the jail. That is a true story. Malcom X could
not have organized a march in Selma if he life depended on it. He did not speak the
language or walk the walk. He was from Harlem and he knew that, but he also knew that
the white folks did not know that. If they knew it, they were too scared to take a chance.
It takes all kinds. Everybody brings something to the struggle.
Speaker: You have been trying to ask a question for a long time.
Q: (inaudible)
A: Let me go at it this way.
Sometimes, we do not see what we think we see.
Sometimes, it is not so much the mentality as it may be other things. Let me give you an
example.
In the same black farmer suit, there were serious problems. The statue of
limitations had run.
The statue of limitations said that if you have a lawsuit for
discrimination against the government you had to bring it within two years.
These
farmers had not brought in any lawsuits within two years. The justice department told the
president, "They are over with .Do not worry about it. We will file a motion to dismiss on
the basis of the statue of limitations. The justice department thought that the President of
the United States had the same mentality that they did because they were all in the
government. The president did not want it to go away. He said, "Well, I do not know.
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Let me think about it." While he was thinking about it, we went around and brought
black farmers. We back to the l 960's. We brought black farmers from all over the United
States to Washington. They came in fifteen-year-old pick up trucks. They had little
brown bags of cold chicken. That is all that they could afford. They slept five and six in
a hotel room. We were up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. One fellow brought his
mule. The biggest and the ugliest mule I ever seen in my life. The mule's name was
Trouble.
We were up and down Pennsylvania Avenue threatening to shut the
government down. The President of the United States was in the White House looking
out smiling and Al Gore was close to having a miscarriage. He was trying to run for
president and that was part of his political base out in the streets marching, so the
president had the pressure that he wanted. So, he called of all people, Newton Gingrich.
That is what I am saying. Everything that everything that looks a certain way is not. He
called Newton Gingrich and said, "I need you to help me." Then he told us, I want you all
to go up tomorrow to the speaker's office and talk with him. We are going to see what
we can do about this Statue of Limitations". I said, "Oh Lord, who in the world want to
be bothered with Newton Gingrich?" We went up there. He said, "Come in. Come in.
Then he said, "Look, we saved the Japanese. We did you all wrong. Stop believing that."
Newton Gingrich drafted it alone. He had his committee to do it. He went down on the
floor of the house himself and insisted that amendment, about 3 paragraphs, be added to
that federal budget and it passed. For the first time in the history of the country, the
government waived the law and said it did not apply to these minority farmers. What am
I saying? I am saying that everything is not as it appears. There are people out there with
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a mindset that you cannot read. There are a whole lot of people we may think got that
mindset; they do not have it. We just have to reach them and talk to them. We cannot
give up. We have to keep pushing up.
28
�
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Chestnut, J. L., 1930-2008
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Selma (Ala.)
Macon County (Ala.)
African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.
Voter registration
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/384">Early Years of the Movement (Part II) - Speaker: J.L. Chestnut, Jr. - Transcription of Tape 3, 2003</a>
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Text
The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
Alabama A&M University
Selma to Montgomery, 1965
Speakers: John Lewis, Mary Stanton
I am Douglas Turner, a professor of Political Science here at Alabama A&M
University. I'd like to welcome you to what has been a unique, informative, and often
moving series of lectures and panel discussions. This series, the Civil Rights Movement
in Alabama 1954 through 1965 is a joint endeavor between Alabama A&M University
and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In my opinion, this series has been highly
successful and is a testament to what can be accomplished when people of good will
come together and earnestly attempt to build bridges that bring together communities that
often view each other with ambivalence, to say the least.
Of course tonight's program, Selma to Montgomery 1965, looks at the events
surrounding the confrontation that has come to be known as "Bloody Sunday," in which
hundreds of non-violent protesters led by of course John Lewis among others and Jose
Williams, who attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and were
met by Alabama state troopers who kicked and clubbed marchers, severely injuring
many. Congressman Lewis, himself, was struck in the head and knocked unconscious in
that particular incident. The event was captured on film and of course garnered a great
deal of publicity for the movement. This publicity as a subsequent march between Selma
and Montgomery would prompt President Lyndon Johnson to push for the Voting Rights
Act which congress passed on August 6, 1965. Also, let me mention that next week's
program, "Turmoil in Tuskegee" will take place at Roberts Recital Hall on the campus of
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
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UAH at 7 pm. The featured lecturer will be Frank Toland of the Department of History
ofTuskeegee University. Let me also mention tonight, that the last two lectures
November 29 and December 4th will both be held here on the campus of Alabama A&M
University. We will be moving back to the multi-purpose room in the new School of
Business for those last two lectures; of course, they do began at 7 pm.
Now, of course the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama lecture series has been a
success in part due to the efforts of those committee members who initiated and
formulated the series and the many sponsors who have contributed financially to make
this ground breaking series a reality. Members of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
planning committee include members both from the University of Alabama in Huntsville
and Alabama A&M University which include Dr. Mitch Berbrier of UAH, Dr. John
Dimmock of UAH, Dr. Jack Ellis of UAH, Dr. James Johnson of AAMU, Professor
Carolyn Parker of AAMU and Dr. Lee Williams of UAH. Funding for the series has
been provided by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National
Endowment for the Humanities; Also, Senator Hank Sanders, the Huntsville Times,
DESE Research, Incorporated, Alabama Representative Laura Hall. Also, the Alabama
A&M University sponsorship has come from the Office of the President, the Office of the
Provost,
the
State Black Archives Research
Center and Museum,
Title III
Telecommunications and Distance Learning Center, the Office of Student Development,
the Honor Center of Sociology and Social Work, History and Political Science.
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From the University of Alabama in Huntsville, support has been forthcoming
from the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the History Forum, the
Bankhead Foundation, Sociology and Social Issues Symposium, the Humanities Center,
the Division of Continuing Education, the Honors Program, the Office of Multi-cultural
Affairs and the Office of Student Affairs, and also the UAH Copy Center. We also,
would like to recognize other distinguished guests and visitors in the audience tonight, we
acknowledge you.
The introduction of tonight's speaker, Mrs. Mary Stanton, who is a free lance
writer and director of Human Resources for Riverside Church in New York City and U.S.
Congressman John Lewis, Representative from the 5th district in Georgia.
The
introduction of tonight's speaker will be provided by Alabama State representative Laura
Hall of Huntsville, Alabama. Do your Honors.
Introduction: Thank you, good evening. I want to say a special thank you to the
members of the committee for Alabama A&M and the University of Alabama in
Huntsville for providing this opportunity for us to reflect and for giving those of us who
did not have an opportunity to live during this time an opportunity to hear about the
experiences of the Civil Rights Movement. I will provide for you the introduction for
Mrs. Mary Stanton. I don't believe we give enough credit to writers. We take it for
granted that the printed word appears on pages for our consumption and hardly appreciate
the hours of research and talent involved in writing. Mrs. Mary Stanton our speaker, is a
writer to whom we owe special honor. She practiced her profession from a foundation of
education. Holding a MA degree in English literature qualifies here to teach English at
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the University of Idaho at Moscow, the College of St. Elizabeth in Morristown, New
Jersey, and the writing program at Rutgers University, and this is only her secondary
career. She has the most productive career in human resources. Her experiences in
human resources surely give her the special insight into her writing career. I want you to
know that Ms. Mary Stanton is the author of, From Selma to Sorrow: the Life and Death
of Viola Liuzza. Published in 1998, her depiction of how this Detroit housewife came to
be murdered during the 1965 Voting Rights March is essential to our understanding of
the sacrifices made by people who care. This book was nominated for the National Book
Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It has been ____
optioned by the Columbia Tri-Star
pictures, and we should see this new movie soon. A documentary film about the Life of
Viola Liuzzo is about to be completed. We will watch also for Mrs. Stanton's new book,
"Mississippi or Bus," the 1963 freedom walk that tells the story of five interracial
attempts to deliver a message of tolerance to Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. One
man was murdered on this march. More than one hundred were jailed and ten spent a
month on death row at Kilby State Prison.
dedication to writing.
Ms. Mary Stanton, thank you for your
We are truly honored and we benefit from the toils and your
talents that you will share also with us today. Ladies and Gentleman, let us welcome Ms.
Mary Stanton with a warm round of applause.
Mary Stanton: Thank you very much. Good evening everybody. I want to thank you. I
want to especially thank Dr. Williams and Dr. Dimmock for your kind invitation to
Huntsville, my first trip down to Alabama. I feel very privileged to be apart of this forum
tonight to share some insight about the Alabama of some forty years ago. When I asked
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Dr. Williams what he'd like me to talk about, he suggested that I tackle, and I'm gonna
quote right now, "the interconnections of law enforcement officials with the intra and
interstate police officers, the Klan and the FBI to subvert the movement in Alabama.
That's a mouth full isn't it? At first, I looked at that and I said, "well that's a pretty
thankless task", but it really is a very important part of what happened here forty years
ago, and it certainly is a important part of Viola Liuzzo's story. What we know is that the
Alabama Civil Right's Movement was all about power.
Power.
Who had it? Who
intended to keep it? Who wasn't going to get any? Yes, it was also about injustice and
segregation and economics, but day to day it was really about maintaining the status quo,
and that depended on maintaining segregation through intimidation, because there were
many more powerless black people than more powerful white ones. Now, two very
effective ways of sustaining segregation were number one, to keep the electives white, so
that the segregationists couldn't get voted out of office. And number two, to keep the
juries white, so those violent racists wouldn't get convicted of their crimes against blacks
and against race mixture. Now, in order to maintain this southern way of life, people
were forced to operate outside the law. Remember, there were less than two thousand
Klansmen in the whole state, which is less than one percent of the whole population.
Now, the Klan was successful because they were federal, state and local law enforcement
officers who were members and supporters. The very people responsible for enforcing
the law were undermining it, and permitting the Klan to operate really like a terrorist
shadow government. Case and point Governor George Wallace refused to intervene.
Ace Carter, who was his special assistant, was an outspoken white supremacist. He
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headed an organization called the Official Klu Klux Klan of the Confederacy. And then
there were the sheriffs O'Connor and Jim Clark who all actually encouraged to defy the
law.
So, what does all of this have to do with Viola Liuzzo? I'd like to tell you about
that. In the time that we have together tonight I'd like to talk about three things. Number
one, who Viola Liuzzo was. Number two, why she was murdered, and finally, what does
her experience tell us about the breakdown of the rule of law, not only in Alabama but
through a network of defiance that stretched from Selma, up to Detroit and across to
Washington, D.C. back in 1965. Now, if Viola Liuzzo was here tonight among us, and
we were to ask, "Who are you?" She might say, 'Tm Penny, Tony, Tommy and Sally's
mother." Or, she might say, 'Tm Jim Liuzzo's wife." After she took a breath she might
add, 'Tm also a medical technologist, I'm a part-time college student, I belong to the
PTA, the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish and I volunteer for the March of Dimes."
Listening to Viola describe her life, you'd be hard pressed to figure how she ever became
the most controversial of the American civil rights martyrs, and the only white woman
who is honored at the National Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.
So, how did it happen? The story very briefly is this. On March 25, 1965, Viola
and a young black man, whose name was Leroy Moton, drove from Selma to
Montgomery that night the voting march ended. They were picking up some marchers
who needed a ride. The march had drawn twenty five thousand people to Alabama's
capital city. Four Klansmen followed Viola and Moton on Highway 80 for twenty miles,
and then they pulled up along side her car and fired out the side window. Viola was
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killed instantly, and Moton who was covered with her blood escaped by pretending to be
dead when the Klansmen came back to check their work.
The thirty-nine-year-old
Detroit housewife and nineteen-year-old Selma short order cook had been deliberately
chosen by the Klansmen because they represented every thing that the segregationists
most hated and feared, a white female, outside agitator driving after dark with a local
black activist sitting in the front seat of her car. Because one of the Klansmen was a paid
FBI informant, Viola lost her life in more ways than one. In order to deflect attention
from the FBI' s carelessness in permitting a violent racist to work undercover the night of
that march, J. Edgar Hoover personally crafted a malicious public campaign portraying
Viola as an unstable woman who had abandoned her family to stir up trouble in the south.
The implication was that she got exactly what she deserved.
Years of unrelenting
accusations and outright lies nearly destroyed her husband and her five children. Until
the family got her files through the Freedom of Information Act, nearly fifteen years atier
their mother's murder, they didn't know that the ugly slander about her had originated in
the offices of our own justice department.
Well, this is a very sad story you might say, and yes it's tragic, and yes J. Edgar
Hoover was a monster, but if this was a random slaying or even if it was a symbolic
killing, what is it that we can learn from it? Well, it's this. J. Edgar Hoover may have
molded a very sinister image of Viola Liuzzo, but in 1965 a majority of white Americans
believed it. Why? Well, nice middle aged, working class white American women didn't
go to college. They didn't champion civil rights or travel by themselves. Those things
wouldn't enhance a white woman's reputation on a good day, but even a reputation
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tongued by the FBI couldn't alter the fact that Viola was useless as a symbol of the Civil
Rights Movement. Her age, her gender, her background, her class, her education, they
were all wrong. Yet, ironically the Klansmen chose her as a target precisely because her
death would send a message, send a very clear message that northern whites and southern
blacks could understand. Come south and get involved with the Freedom Movement at
your own risk.
Like the international terrorists that we face today, the Klansmen knew how to
manipulate symbolism. Bin Laden chose the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, not
because they are the tallest or the most beautiful buildings in America, but because they
represent something very fundamental about our society. Symbolism stirs our deepest
consciousness, and it has the power to terrify as well as to inspire. Andrew Goodman,
Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, the three young men murdered during the Freedom
Summer of 1964, also became symbols. To white liberals, they were appropriate civil
rights leaders. They were young. One was a white activist, college student and another
one was a selfless, white social worker.
The other was a black community worker
fighting for the freedom of his people. These were very positive symbols. Viola was too
old, too pushy, too independent, and she trampled on too many social norms. In 1965,
Viola had volunteered to advance the social movement that the majority of white
Americans felt was already moving too fast.
Her activism couldn't be ascribed to
youthful idealism. It threatened the family and most importantly, the protective status of
women. White American women couldn't afford to make Viola a hero. To do that
would be to invite disturbing questions about their own lives. The Goodman, Schwerner
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and Chaney families worked hard to insure that their sons would be remembered. All
these families had supported their civil rights activism, while violist husband Jim, had
been very ambivalent about his wife's participation. After Viola's murder, Jim found
himself continually defending her reputation, refuting these vicious rumors that were
swirling around her, and trying to protect their children. Two days after her funeral, a
cross was burned on his lawn in Detroit.
Jim had little time or energy or even
opportunity to worry about his wife's immortality. Viola's children were taunted by their
classmates, shunned by their neighbors and shamed by the cloud of suspicion that hung
over their mother's activism. America fussed about her and budged about her for a few
days and then promptly forgot all about her. The consensus was there was something just
not right about this woman.
Okay, so now that we know who she was, and why she was murdered, let's look
to that last question. What does her experience tell us about the break down of the rule of
law, not only in Alabama, but also through a network of defiance that stretched from
Selma, to Detroit, to Washington? The answers are contained in something called the
Lane report. When I discovered this report in the course of my research, the nicest thing
I can say about it is that it absolutely chilled me to the bone. I want to share some of that
with you. On May 11,1965, Walter Rugaber, a Detroit free-press reporter, called Jim
Liuzzo to alert him that a confidential report about his wife written by Marvin G. Lane,
police commissioner of Warren, Michigan and former chief of detectives of the Detroit
Police Department had been sent to Selma Sheriff Jim Clark, in April. Early in May,
Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton was seen passing copies of this report to newsmen
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covering the Wilkins trial. Wilkins was one of the murderers of Liuzzo. Rugaber told
Jim Liuzzo that the free press would be breaking the story on May 12. Jim was livid. He
wanted to know why Commissioner Lane was investigating his murdered wife. Jim was
so upset that he called the Detroit FBI office. Lane's jurisdiction was listed in suburban
Warren, Jim told the agent. Liuzzo's never lived in Warren. They had never received so
much as a parking ticket in Warren. And no one from the Warren Police Department had
ever questioned Jim about his personal affairs. Who authorized the Lane report? Police
commissioner
Ray Girardin vehemently denied that his department's
criminal
intelligence bureau had any part in compiling it. Commissioner Lane refused to name the
sources, insisting that confidential reports were routine. Lane said he often supplied
other police departments' confidential reports and he received them in return. This was,
despite the fact that it was highly irregular to prepare a detailed personal history on a
murder victim, after the suspects have been apprehended. Commissioner Lane's note to
Sheriff Clark was written on City of Warren Police stationery. He clearly stated that on
March 26, one day after the murder, the criminal intelligence bureau began an
investigation on the background of Viola Liuzzo.
Lane went on to request Sheriff
Clark's assistance. We would like Wayne Rhode, if it is at all possible to detern1ine the
method of transportation of Selma by Mrs. Liuzzo, and who may have accompanied her.
The Detroit Free Press posts three critical questions; What business of Lane's was it to
compile a report from Mrs. Liuzzo since she was not a Warren resident?
By what
distorted judgment did Lane decide such a report was any business of Sheriff Clark's
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since the murder did not take place in Dallas County but in Lowden. What authority did
Lane ask Sheriff Clark to determine the method of transportation she took, and who went
with her? On May 14, Walter Rugaber reported that virtually every detail of Lane's
confidential report was smuggled out of the file of the Detroit Police Department.
Rugaber even identified the file as number 1782, which contained material gathered both
by the Detroit police and by the FBI. Chief of Detectives, Vincent Persanti admitted it
was an obvious conclusion that Lane's information had come from the Detroit Criminal
Intelligence Bureau.
On May 17, inspector Earl Miller, Director of the Criminal
Intelligence Bureau admitted to finding his ex-boss Marvin Lane with the file. Former
Sinclair county Sheriff Ferris Lucas, who was serving as Executive Director of the
National Sheriffs Association in Washington, admitted that he had encouraged Sheriff
Jim Clark to ask Lane for the information. Commissioner Girardin relieved the inspector
of his duties saying, "his motives were right, his judgment perhaps wasn't."
Chief
Persanti explained the Liuzza funeral was going to be here in Detroit, and we wanted to
know what sorts of security arrangements were anticipated? Demonstrations and counter
demonstrations were anticipated and we were just trying to prepare ourselves.
Commissioner Girardin was then called before the City Council to explain why inspector
Miller would assume that Lane, who no longer worked for the police had a right to look
at confidential information.
You must remember, that Lane is a retired chief of
detectives, he says, "If he asks to check a record, he would get cooperation."
assured that council that he would meet personally with Jim Liuzzo.
Girardin
He said, "He
wanted to spare the Liuzza children from embarrassment." That quotation was picked up
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by the Detroit Free Press and subsequently hit the wire services. Jim went wild. When
he couldn't reach Girardin by phone, he dashed off a telegram demanding to know what
the commissioner meant by such a statement. Distortions, half-truths, and outright lies
were being circulated about his wife. Aspirations were being cast on her sanity, her
morality, and her sense of responsibility in going to Selma.
Girardin's statements said
that ora of mystery surrounding the Lane report, his posture with the council only
encouraged further conjecture. Bits and pieces of Viola Liuzzo's history were being
taken out of context, and distorted beyond recognition. The Jackson Mississippi daily
news was reporting that Mrs. Liuzzo had a police file four pages long. Now, I think
we've come to the crux of what Dr. Williams was talking about and what was really
going on here. The FBI' s need to defame Viola in order to cover its own tracks is
understandable, if not a forgivable motive, as is the precious desire for a good story. The
connection between the Selma police, the Detroit police and the Klan is however, much
more ominous.
Detroit was one of America's most racially troubled cities in 1965.
Relations between the white police department and the black community were as angry
and violent as any in Blackbelt, Alabama. In 1925, the Detroit police department had
recruited officers from the Deep South and many of them, their sons, their nephews, their
brothers and their cousins remained on the force forty years later.
Members of the
Detroit and Selma police forces reach down empathically to one another. Many on both
sides believed that a white woman who would leave her family to go off on a freedom
march, live with blacks, ride in cars with black men, and advocate for their rights was, if
not crazy, at least a trader to her race and therefore very likely immoral. Now, the Lane
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report ultimately achieved it's purpose, public sympathy was withdrawn from the Liuzzo
family almost immediately, her murderers were set free, and her image as a spoiled
neurotic housewife abandoning her family to run off on a freedom march began to stick.
I could tell you that it made other northern white middle age white women think about
taking a stand on civil rights. It frightened them off, just as Viola's murderers had
intended to frighten off activists who were considering coming south to work for the
movement. An editorial in the Detroit Free Press on May 13th tried to set the record
straight. The Lane report is inaccurate, the editor wrote, "It is derogatory, and totally
uncalled for." It makes insinuations, which are not supported by the facts, and dwells on
irrelevant and unfavorable minutia, not only about Liuzzo but also about her whole
family. What Lane ignored was that Mrs. Liuzzo was not accused of any crime. Her
murder was not the result of any provocation on her part.
She was involved in no
ballroom brawl, and she had broken no law. Viola Liuzzo's story, like so many other
stories of the !960's, causes us and cautions us to be careful and to stay alert. The
American electorates are no longer all white.
Juries are no longer all white, but
intimidation and manipulation continue. Spend and character assassination continues.
The power of symbolism to help and to hurt is as strong today as it ever was. Viola
Liuzzo's reminds us that the fight for justice is everybody's business, and no one, no
private citizen, no law enforcement official ought to be permitted to shame or to terrify
anyone into backing away from a lawful position of conscience. I remember when I was
a little girl growing up in Queens, New York and I got into to squabbles with some of the
neighborhood kids, and the kids would often say to each other, "Don't you tell me to shut
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up, this is a free country!" That's the message. The philosopher Plato probably said it
best when he observed at 400 B.C. that, "The punishment which the wise suffer will
refuse to take part in government, is to live under the government of worse men." Let us
remember that.
It was something the Alabama Civil Rights activists believed was
important enough to risk their lives for. Thank You.
Introduction: On February 21, 1940 in Troy, Alabama a little baby boy was born. With
nine siblings, he worked on his family's farm picking cotton, gathering peanuts and
pulling corn. Many times they had to work on the farms rather than attend their local
segregated schools in Pike County, Alabama.
Who would have seen an U.S.
Congressman in that little boy by the name of John Lewis? Who would have guessed
that this little boy would devote his life to the beloved community? Who would have
known this little boy would play his role in history? Who would have guessed this little
boy who devoted his life to the beloved community where all people of all races, religion
and ethnicity, would share basic human rights? Who could have foreseen his fellow
congressman asking him to tell them what is was like to have been in the action of the
Civil Rights Movement?
As a young student at Fisk University, John Lewis organized sit in's and nonviolent process. In 1961, he was one of the first freedom riders on the Greyhound buses
in Washington D.C., then down through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and his native, Alabama. It was 1963; John Lewis was
only twenty-three-years-old and a chairman of the student non-violent coordinating
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committee, which placed him in the national spotlight with the "Big Six": Martin Luther
King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Whitney Young, James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins. They
met with John F. Kennedy to plan the upcoming march on Washington.
John's
controversial speech at the National Mall placed him into the forefront and into the
national spotlight. Gaining national attention by showing political power in numbers was
a successful goal that summer in 1964. John Lewis was there to help organize voters
registration drives and community action programs for the Mississippi freedom summer.
Challenging Mississippi's long standing Democratic Party of segregationists while
democrats fought for seats at the upcoming national convention was a radical step. John
Lewis was there. It was back home in Alabama for John Lewis on March 7, 1965. Arm
and arm with the non-violence intended, they marched six hundred strong across the
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Suddenly, the clubs and the kicks of Alabama State
Troopers turned their peaceful march into "Bloody Sunday." A violent blow struck John
on the head, knocking him unconscious.
This incident propelled President Lyndon
Johnson to work harder for the Voting Rights Act which congress passed on August 6,
1965. Well, a knock on the head didn't stop John Lewis. He became Director of the
Voter Education Project, which would add four million minorities to the voter role. In
I 977, President Jimmy Carter named him the Directorship of Action with more than two
hundred fifty thousand volunteers. In 1980, he became Community Affairs Director of
the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta. After serving on the City Council John
Lewis was elected to represent Georgia's 5th Congressional District in November of
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1986. He is currently serving his 8th congressional term, and guess what ladies and
gentleman; he runs unopposed. In the 107th Congress, John is a committee member of
the Ways and Means where he serves on the sub-committee on health and oversight. He
is a Chief Deputy Democratic Whip sense 1991. He served on the Democratic Steering
Committee as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and a congressional
committee to support writers and journalists. He is also the Co-chair of the Faith and
Politics Institute.
Now I ask you, what crystal ball could have forecast that we here today would be
eagerly waiting to hear this hard working, farmer's son, this courageous student, this
national leader, this trench worker for voter registration, this Edmund Pettus Bridge
peaceful warrior, and this distinguished Congressman John Lewis? Congressman Lewis.
John Lewis: Thank you very much, Representative, for those kind words of introduction.
Let me just say to members of the planning committee, to each and every one of you
participating in this event, for inviting me to be here, the representatives of University of
Alabama in Huntsville, and Alabama A&M University, I'm delighted and very pleased to
be here. It is good to be here with Mary Stanton telling the history of Viola Liuzzo.
Thank you, Mary. Thank You. You heard in the introduction, and I want to be brief. 1
didn't grow up in a big city like Decatur. I didn't grow up in a big city like Troy, Selma,
Montgomery, Birmingham, Bradford, Atmore, or Florence. I grew up fifty miles from
Montgomery, in this little town called Troy. My father, as Representative Hall told you
was a sharecropper, a tenant farmer. Back in 1944, when I was four years old, and I do
remember when I was four, My father had saved three hundred dollars and with the three
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hundred dollars he bought one hundred ten acres of land. That's a lot of land for three
hundred dollars. As a matter of fact, my eighty-seven- year old mother is still living on
this farm that my father bought in 1944 for three hundred dollars. On this farm, there
was a lot of cotton, corn, peanuts, hogs, cows, and chickens. Now, Mary has heard me
tell this story and Don Calloway, who is the Executive President of the student body here
at A&M with a intern in my office this pass summer, he heard it probably more than you
care to hear. Right Don? But, I tell this story just to put it into the proper perspective
about the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama and our journey from Selma to
Montgomery in 1965. Assuming you come to Washington and visit my office, the first
thing the staff will offer you will be a Coca-Cola, because Atlanta happens to be the
home of the Coca-Cola bottling company. And Coca-Cola provides all members of the
Georgia Congressional Delegation with an adequate supply of Coca-Cola products to be
made available to our visitors. The next thing the staff will offer you, will be some
peanuts. I ate so many peanuts when I was growing up outside of Troy, that I don't want
to see anymore peanuts. Sometimes when I would get on the flight to fly from Atlanta to
Washington or from Washington back to Atlanta, the flight attendant would try to push
some peanuts on me and I would just say, "No, no peanuts!" The Georgia peanut people
provide us with peanuts and I don't want any of you to come to Georgia and say that John
Lewis was talking about the peanuts okay? Don't say anything, but if you are from there
we will offer you some peanuts. Also, on this farm, we raised a lot of chickens and as
young black boy growing up on this farm it was my responsibility to care for the
chickens. I fell in love with raising chickens like no one else could raise chickens. It was
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my calling; it was my mission; it was my sense of obligation and responsibility to care for
those chickens. Now, I know that at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and
Alabama A&M, you are very smart.
They have wonderful professors, wonderful
administrators and smart students, but you don't know anything about raising chickens. I
know you don't. Let me tell you what I had to as young black boy growing up in rural
Pike County, Alabama in the l 940's and l 950's. You take a fresh egg, mark them with a
pencil, place them under the sitting hen and wait for three long weeks for the little chicks
to hatch.
Now, some of you are smart in computer science and math, history and
literature, but you don't know anything about raising chickens. I know you are very
smart being here in this community with tons of technologies, but you don't know
anything about raising chickens, but you' re saying why do you mark those fresh eggs
with a pencil before you place them under the sitting hen? Well, from time to time
another hen will get on the same nest, and there would be some more eggs. You have to
be able to tell the first eggs from the eggs that we already under the sitting hen. Do you
follow me? You don't follow me. When these little chicks would hatch, I would fool
these sitting hens; I would cheat on these sitting hens. I would take these little chicks and
give them to another hen. I'd put them in a box with a lantern, and raise them on their
own. I'd get some more fresh eggs and mark them with a pencil, place them under the
sitting hen, encourage the sitting hen to sit in the nest for another three weeks. I kept on
cheating on these sitting hens in order to get some more little chicks. When I looked
back on it was not the right thing to do. It was not the moral thing to do. It was not the
most loving thing to do. It was not the most non-violent thing to do, but I kept on
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cheating on these sitting hens and fooling these sitting hens. I was never quite able to
save $18.98 to order the most inexpensive hatcher incubator from the Sears & Roebuck
store in Atlanta. We use to get the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Some of you may be old
enough to remember that big book, thick catalog, we called it the wish book. I wish I had
this, I wish I had that. So, I just kept on cheating on the sitting hens. As a young boy, I
wanted to be a minister. So, when I was about 7-½ or 8 years old, one of my uncles had
Santa Clause bring me a Bible. I learned to read the bible, then I started preaching and
teaching; from time to time, we would church. With the help of my sisters, brothers and
first cousins, we would gather all of our chickens together, like you are gathered here in
this hall tonight. The chickens along with my sisters, brothers and my first cousins would
make up the congregation.
I would start speaking, a preacher, and as I started the
chickens would become very quiet. As a matter of fact some of these chickens would
bow their head. Some of them would shake their head. But when I look back on it, they
never quite said Amen. I am convinced that the regular majority of these chickens that I
preached to in the 1940's and in the l 950's tended to listen to me better than some of my
colleagues listen to me today in the Congress and some of these chickens were a little
more productive.
At least, they produced eggs. But growing up there in rural Pike
County, outside of Troy ... When we would visit the little town of Troy, or visit
Montgomery, or visit Tuskegee, or visit Union Springs, I saw those signs that said,
"White men, colored men, white women, colored waiting." I saw signs that said white
waiting, colored waiting. As a young child, I tasted the bitter fruits of racism and
segregation and racial discrimination.
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In 1955, at the age of fifteen in the tenth grade, I heard of Rosa Parks; I heard of
Martin Luther King Jr. In 1956, at the age of sixteen, a group of us went down to the
Pike County Public Library in downtown Troy, trying to check some books out, trying to
get a library card. We were told by the librarian that the library was for white only, and
not for colored. I went back to the Pike County Public Library on July 5' 1998 for a book
signing and hundreds of white and black citizens came out. As a matter of fact they gave
me a library card, so it says something about the distance that we've come and the
progress that was made in laying down the burden of race. I don't want to digress too
much, but I was telling Jim and his wife that when we were driving in from the airport
that when I finished high school in May of 1957, I wanted to study at Troy State College.
I sent my High school transcript, filed my application, and I never heard a word from the
college, only ten miles from my home. I wrote a letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I
didn't tell my mother, didn't tell my father or any of my sisters and brothers that I had
sent a letter to Dr. King telling him about my desire to attend Troy State College, better
known now as Troy State University. In the meantime, my mother was working at a
baptist orphan home, white, Alabama southern baptist orphan home, in addition to her
work on the farm. She came across a little paper about a black school, supported by the
southern baptist white and nation baptist black in Nashville for black students, students
who studied and worked their way through school. I applied to go there. I was accepted.
An uncle of mine gave me a hundred-dollar bill, more money than I had ever had. He
gave me a footlocker, one of these upright trunks, footlockers with the drawers, the
curtains, drapers you call it I guess. I put everything that I owned in that footlocker, my
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books, clothing, everything except those chickens and I went off to school in Nashville.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. heard that I was in Nashville and got back in touch with me.
He sent me a round trip Greyhound bus ticket and told me the next time I was in Troy for
spring break to come to see him. It was in March of 1958, by this time I was eighteen
years old, on a Saturday morning, my father drove me to the Greyhound bus station. I
boarded the bus, and traveled the fifty miles to Montgomery. A young lawyer, I'd never
seen a lawyer before, black or white by the name of Fred Grey met me at the Greyhound
bus station. Fred Grey for many years was a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement
Association for Dr. King and Rosa Parks, for those of us on the Selma March and the
Freedom Ride.
He met me and drove me to First Baptist Church in downtown
Montgomery on Ripley Street passerby Reverend Abernathy. Arriving at the steps of the
church, I was so scared and so nervous. I didn't know what I was going to say to Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. He ushered me into the pastor's study and I saw Reverend
Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. standing behind a desk. Dr. King said, "Are
you John Lewis? Are you the boy from Troy?" and I spoke up and said, " Dr. King, I am
John Robert Lewis." I gave my whole name. I didn't want there to be any mistake that I
was the right person. That was the beginning of my relationship with Martin Luther King
Jr. I continued to study in Nashville. While studying there I met individuals like Jim
Lawson, one of the leading thinkers and philosopher on the philosophy and the discipline
of non-violence, students like Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette and many
other young people.
We start studying the philosophy and the discipline for non-
violence, every Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at a Methodist church near Fisk University
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campus. In then we got involved in the sit-ins and the freedom ride. Two years later, I
became the head of the student non-violent coordinating committee in June 1963 as
Representative Hall said at the age of twenty-three.
On the freedom ride through
Alabama, we were arrested and jailed in Birmingham. Later, Bull Conner picked us up,
took us out of jail and dropped us off at the Alabama/Tennessee state line, and left us. A
car from Nashville came back in May of 1961, picked us up and took us back to
Birmingham where we were met by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and other students.
We continued from Birmingham to Montgomery, where we were beaten at the
Greyhound bus station in Montgomery by an angry mob. We continued to Mississippi,
but we were arrested and jailed, a few ofus was in the city jail in Jackson, the county jail
in Jackson and many of us went to the state penitentiary in Parchment during the summer
of 1961. All across the south, not just in Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina or South
Carolina, but in the eleven states of the whole confederacy, from Virginia to Texas, it was
almost impossible for people of color to become participants in the democratic process to
register to vote. When I was working on my March on Washington speech for August
28, 1963, I was reading a copy of the New York Times and I saw a group of women in
Africa, black women, carrying signs saying, "One man, one vote." So in my March on
Washington speech I said something like, "One man, one vote is the African pride. It is
ours too, it must be ours," and that became the rallying cry. That became the slogan for
the student non-violent coordinating committee.
A young man by the name of Bernard Lafayette who was a student in Nashville,
had gone into Selma, Alabama in the fall of 1962. He was working with Mrs. Boynton
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. of the immediate Boynton in the Dallas County Voters League, working with several
ministers and others, trying to create a movement in Selma, around the right to vote. In
Selma in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 only 2-4 percent of blacks of voting age were
registered to vote. At the same time, we were organizing an effort in Mississippi. There
had been sit-ins in Selma. People had gone to jail, got arrested at lunch counters and
drugstores. There had been a movement there, and we went there to help. A great deal
of our time was left in a place in Mississippi. Before we could launch the campaign in
Selma or in Mississippi, there was a terrible bombing at the sixteenth street Baptist
Church in Birmingham, Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, where four little girls
were killed. We intensified our effort in Selma, but also in Mississippi. We recruited
more than a thousand students. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, priests, ministers, rabbis, nuns
and others to come to Mississippi and work in the Freedom School. As Mary Stanton
told you, the summer night of June 21, 1964 three young men that I knew: Andy
Goodman, Michael Schwerner, white from New York and James Chaney, black from
Mississippi, went out to investigate the burning of black chnrch that stopped by the
sheriff. They were arrested and taken to jail. Later that same Sunday night of June 21,
1964 the sheriff and his deputies took these three young men from their jail cell and
turned them over to the Klan, where they were beaten, shot and killed. These three
young men didn't die in Vietnam. They didn't die in the Middle East. They didn't die in
Africa or in Eastern Europe. They didn't die in Central South America. They died right
here in our own country, for the right of all of our citizens to become participants in the
democratic process. So, when people said what they said about the election last year, and
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what happened in Florida and other places, and they tell us to get over it, we say, "We
cannot get over it." It's very hard to get over it. It's difficult for me to know that some
of our friends, some of our colleagues died for the precious rights for all of our citizens to
participate in the democratic process.
That was a serious blow to the movement, but we didn't give up. President
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. He won a landslide election in
November of 1964.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received a Nobel Peace Prize in
December 1964. He came back to America, met by a group of us in New York, and later
went down to Washington to the White House to have a meeting with President Johnson
and he said, "Mr. President, we need a strong voting rights act." And President Johnson
told Dr. King in so many words, "We don't have the votes in the congress to get a voting
rights act passed." A judge signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King Jr.
had come back to Atlanta to meet with people in FDLC, his own organization. We were
those involved in the student non-violent coordinating committee.
Then, he got an
invitation from the Dallas County Voters League in Selma, Alabama from Mrs. Boynton
and the good people in Selma, to come there and be the Emancipation Proclamation
speaker in January of 1965. Dr. King said," We will write that act, we will write it some
place." In Selma, Alabama we had a Sheriff, as the Mayor mentioned earlier by the name
of Jim Clark. Sheriff Clark was a very big man, who wore a gun on one side and a
nightstick on the other side. He carried an electric cow prodder in his hand, and he didn't
use it on cows. He wore a button on his left lapel, and that button said, "Never, never to
voter registration." Now all of you here must keep in mind that in Selma, if you go there
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now, the courthouse looks the same way it did thirty six years ago. The steps and the
rails are the same. You could only attempt to register to vote on the first and third
Monday of each month. The courthouse was the only place. And sometimes when they
knew that we were organizing the voter's registration campaign they would just close the
doors, just lock it up for the day or for the week. I will never forget when it was my day,
January 18, 1965, to lead a group of elderly black men and women to the courthouse just
to get inside the door, up the steps, get an application form and try to pass the test. You
must keep in mind, and I know that there are some historians here and professors of
political science, but it was very difficult, almost impossible for people to pass the pollliteracy test. They were asked things like; How many bubbles are in bar of soap? That
was not on the test. There were black teachers, black lawyers and black doctors told that
they could not read or write well enough, and they fought the so-called literacy test. On
January I&'\ when it was my day to lead a group of people up the steps, Sheriff Clark
met me at the top of the steps and he said, "John Lewis, you're an outside agitator. You
are the lowest form of humanity." At that time, I had all of my hair and I was a few
pounds lighter. I looked Sheriff Clark straight in the eye and I said, "Sheriff, I may be a
agitator, but I'm not an outsider. I grew up only about ninety miles from here and we're
going to stay here until these people are allowed to register to vote," and he said, "You're
under arrest." He arrested me along with a few other people. We went to jail. A few
days later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend Abernathy and others came to Selma. In
less than one week, we filled the jails of Selma, every jail, the city jail and the county jail.
They took us out on some penal farm where it looked like a place where they kept
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chickens. They put us all in there and we slept on wooden floors. Then, about three
weeks later, I believe it was the night of February 17 or the 19th in Marion, Alabama, in
Perry County, in the heart of the Blackbelt. Perry County is the home county of Mrs.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, the home county of Mrs. Ralph Abernathy,
Juanita Abernathy, and the late Mrs. Andrew Young, Jane Young; all from this county in
Alabama. There was a demonstration, a protest, for the right to vote. That night a
confrontation occurred. A young man by the name of Jimmy Lee Jackson tried to protect
his elderly grandparents and was shot in the stomach by a state trooper and a few days
later, he died at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. Because of what happened to
him, we made a decision (the movement did) that we would march from Selma to
Montgomery. It was the idea of James Bevel that had been involved in the Nashville
incident and the Freedom Ride. A whole new staff of Dr. King suggested at one point that
maybe we should take the body of Jimmy Lee Jackson to the state capital in Alabama and
present the body to Governor Wallace. We decided that we would have an orderly
peaceful nonviolent war from Selma to Montgomery to help educate and synthesize all of
the citizens of Alabama but as a nation around the right to vote. We announced that the
march would occur on Sunday, March 7th . On Saturday, March 6th , Governor Wallace
made a statement that the march would not be allowed. On Saturday, the Governor, rather
than the sheriff from Dallas County, Sheriff Clark, requested that all white men over the
age of 21 come down to the Dallas County Court House to be deputized to become part
of the part to stop the march. There was a real debate within my organization, the student
non-violent coordinating committee. There were people saying that we should not march;
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it is too dangerous; people would get hurt. So, we went back to Atlanta, had a meeting
there in the basement of a little restaurant. We met almost all night debating whether we
should march or not. I took the position as the chair of the student non-violent
coordinating committee and said that we should march and the local people wanted to
march. The FDLC people wanted to march. I felt that I had an obligation to walk with the
people from Selma. I have been there; I got arrested with them. I felt that I should be
there. So, the SNCC executive committee voted that early that Sunday morning, about
three or four o' clock in the morning, that if I wanted to march I would march as an
individual but not as chair of the student nonviolent coordinating committee. Three of us
jumped in an old car and drove from Atlanta to Selma. We got our sleeping bags and
slept in the SNCC Freedom House on the floor until later that morning. We got up and
got dressed. We went to the Brown Chapel AME Church for the morning services. After
the services, more than six hundred of us, mostly elderly black men and women and a
few young people came out of the church near a housing project (playground area) where
we conducted a non-violent workshop, telling people to be orderly, to be quiet and to
walk in twos. We had a prayer. We lined up in twos. I was walking beside Jose Williams
from Dr. King's organization. At that time, I was wearing a backpack. I had a light trench
coat on and I was wearing a backpack before they became fashionable to wear
backpacks. In this backpack, I had two books, an apple, an orange, toothbrush and
toothpaste. I thought that we were going to be arrested and that we were going to jail. So,
I wanted to have something to read, something to eat and since I was going to be in close
quarters with my friends, colleagues and neighbors, I wanted to be able to brush my teeth.
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We started walking through the streets of Selma. No one was saying a word, so orderly,
so peaceful and so quiet on a Sunday afternoon. We got to the edge of the Edmund Pettus
Bridge, crossing the Alabama River, and Jose Williams looked down below and he saw
this water. He said, "John, can you swim." I said, "No, Jose. Can you swim?" He said,
"No. Well, there is too much water down there." I said, "We are not going to jump. We
are not going back. We are going forward." We continued to walk. We came to the apex
of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and down below we saw a sea of blue, Alabama state
troopers, and behind the state troopers, you saw Sheriff Clark's deputies; you saw men on
horseback and we walked. We came within hearing distance of the state troopers and a
man identified himself and said, "I am Major John Cloud of the Alabama State troopers.
This is an unlawful march. You will not be allowed to continue. I will give you three
minutes to disperse and return to your church." Less than a minute-and-a-half, Major
Cloud said, "Move up that van," and Jose said to me, "John, they are going to gas us."
We saw these men putting on their gas masks and they came towards us beating us with
nightsticks, tramping us with horses and releasing the tear gas. I was hit in the head by a
state trooper with a nightstick. I thought that I was going to die. I thought I saw death.
Until this day, I do not know how I made it back across that bridge, through the streets of
Selma and back to the Brown Chapel AME Church, but I do recall being back at the
church that Sunday afternoon. By this time, the church was full to capacity. More than
two thousand citizens of Selma and surrounding communities from outside were trying to
get in to protest what had happened. Someone in the median said, "John, you should say
something to the audience." I stood up and said," I do not understand it, how President
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Johnson can send troops to Vietnam but cannot send troops to Selma to protect people
who only desire is to register to vote." The next thing I know is that I had been admitted
to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma with a fractured skull. The next morning, early
that Monday (it would be March 8th) Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reverend Abernathy
came in from Atlanta. They came by to see me. Dr. King said, "Do not worry. We will
make it from Selma to Montgomery. The Voting Rights Act will be passed." He was
right. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., issued an appeal for religious leaders to come to Selma
that following Tuesday, March 9th More than a thousand white and black religious
leaders, ministers, priests, rabbis, nuns and others came to Selma and marched to the
same spot where we had been beaten two days earlier, prayed and turned back. Some of
the people in SNCC that had a poster march came and they did not like the idea that Dr.
King turned back. They went to Montgomery and started another effort organizing the
students at Alabama State and Tuskegee; a confrontation occurred there. We went into
federal court and got an injunction against Governor Wallace, Sheriff Clark and others
for interfering with the march. President Lyndon Johnson called Governor Wallace to
Washington and tried to get an assurance from him that he could protect us, as we got a
court ruling from federal district judge Frank Johnson. I do not know what the state of
Alabama would be like. I do not know what it would be like if it was not for a man like
Frank M. Johnson. I remember us going into court. The Department of Justice
subpoenaed the CBS film from that day of "Bloody Sunday." Judge Johnson viewed it.
He stood up, shook his robe, recessed the court, came back and granted us everything that
we wanted and allowed us to march in an orderly fashion all the way from Selma to
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Montgomery. Three hundred of us walked all the way. On the night of March 15, 1965,
President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of the congress and made one of the
most meaningful speeches any American president had made in modern time and the
whole question of voting rights/civil rights. He condemned the violence in Selma. He
started that speech off that night by saying, "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and for
the destiny of democracy." President Johnson went on to say, "At times, history and fate
meet in a single place in man's on end in search for freedom." It was more than a century
ago at Lexington and at Concorde. So, it was at ____
. So, it was last week in
Selma, Alabama. In his speech he said, "And we shall overcome," over and over again.
He said it with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the home of a local dentist. As we watched
and listened to Lyndon Johnson, tears came down Dr. King's face; he cried. We all cried.
He said again, "We'll make it from Selma to Montgomery," and the Voting Rights Act
was passed. We walked all the way, five days. More then twenty-five thousand people
gathered there on that day. As Mary said again, Ms. Viola Liuzzo was killed on that that
night traveling between Selma and Montgomery, and Reverend James Reed was beaten
almost to death on the night of March 91\ after ____
crossed that bridge and later
died at the local hospital in Birmingham. The congress passed the Voting Rights Act,
finally to law, and I said it might be because of what happened in Selma. Because of what
happened on the bridge, we had witnessed what I like to call a nonviolent revolution in
this region. We live in a different country. We lived in a better country and we are a
.
better people. Sometimes, I hear young people saying nothing has changed and I feel like
saying, "Come and walk in my shoes. Come and walk across that bridge. Come and sit-in
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in Nashville. Come and go on the Freedom Ride Bus. Come and be dropped off on the
Tennessee/Alabama state line by Bull Conner at four o'clock in the morning leaving you
to be ambushed." Things have changed. Today, there are hundreds and thousands of
black-elected officials like Representative Hall and others because of what happened in
Selma. So, tonight as we think and ponder Selma to Montgomery in 1965, we must not
give up. We must not give in. We must not give out. We must not get lost in a sea of
despair. We must keep the faith and keep our eyes on the prize. I was just thinking a few
days ago, since September ll
th
,
and I said it a few days after September ll
th
,
that people
may bomb our buildings, kill some of our fellow citizens, but they will never ever kill our
love for freedom, our love for democratic ideas, our love for the good society and to the
open society. Many ofus in the 1960's would be walking across that bridge, through the
sit-ins and when we went on the Freedom Ride, accepting nonviolence not as a simple
average technique or as a tactic but as a way of life and as a way of living. Selma was not
a struggle against a people; it was against custom and tradition, a system we wanted to
build and not tear down. We wanted to reconcile and not separate. We wanted to create
the beloved community, the good society. I will tell this story and I will be finished. I tell
this story in my book, Walking with the Wind. It's a true story. When I was growing up
outside of Troy, Alabama, I had an aunt by the name of Seneva and my aunt Seneva lived
in what we called a shotgun house. She didn't have a green, manicured lawn. She had a
simple, plain dirt yard and sometime at night, you could look up through the ceiling,
through the wholes in the tin roof and count the stars. When it would rain, she would get
a pail of what we called a bucket and catch the rainwater. She lived in a shotgun house.
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From time to time, she would go out into the woods and get branches from a dogwood
tree and she would make a broom. She called that broom the branch broom and she
would sweep the dirt yard clean, sometimes two and three times a week. For those who
are so young, who might not know what a shotgun house is and never seen one, was not
born in one and never lived in one, (in a nonviolent sense) a shotgun house is a old house
with a tin roof where you can bounce a ball through the front door and the ball would go
straight out the back door. In the military sense, a shotgun house would be an old house
with a tin roof where you can fire a gun through the front door and the bullet would go
straight out the back door. My aunt Seneva lived in a shotgun house. One Sunday
afternoon, a group of my sisters, brothers and a few if my first cousins, about twelve of us
young children while playing my aunt Seneva' s dirt yard, an unbelievable storm came up.
The wind started blowing. The thunder started rolling. The lightning started flashing and
the rain started beating on the tin roof of this old shotgun house. My aunt became
terrified. She thought this old house was going to blow away. She started crying. She got
us all in the inside and told us to hold hands. As little children, we did as we were told,
but we all started crying. The wind continued to blow. The thunder continued to roll. The
lightning continued to blast. In one comer of the house, it appeared to be lifting from its
foundation and my aunt had us walk to that side to try and hold the house down with our
little bodies. When the other comer appeared to be lifting, she had us walk to that corner
to try and hold down this house with our little bodies. We were little children walking
with the wind, but we never left the house. As citizens of Alabama, as citizens of the
world, as students and young people and as faculty members, the wind may blow; the
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thunder may roll; the lightning may flash and the rain might beat on our old house. Call it
the house of Huntsville. Call it the house of Alabama. Call it the house of America. Call
it the world house. We must never ever leave the house. We must become one house, one
family and one people. Just maybe, our foremothers and our forefathers all came to this
great land in different ships. We're all in the same boat now. It doesn't matter whether we
are black or white, Asian, American, Hispanic or Native American; we are one people.
As we think about Selma to Montgomery, let us continue to walk with the wind and let
the spirit of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 be our guide. Thank you very
much.
Douglas Turner: Alright, one again, how about another round of applause for Ms. Mary
Stanton as well. We want to take a short period here for answer and questions. I want to
mention that any of you who might have any commendations or other certificates of
recognition that you would like to present to the congressman that you can do that after
the symposium is over. We do want to open the program now for questions for either Ms.
Stanton or Congressman Lewis.
Q:
The
question
and
comment
for
both
Congressman
Lewis
and
Ms.
Stanton ... Congressman Lewis, you've spoke about the struggles that you had in the
march from Selma to Montgomery, the pain that you and others suffered. Ms. Stanton
you talked about Plato's reflection on government and participation. The suffering that
has occurred so that people, all people, have the right to participate in this democracy, yet
today eighty percent of young people and more than fifty percent of all adults, do not
bother to vote. We have moved a great deal forward, but ifwe do not exercise, all ofus,
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the right to vote and if we do not take part in our responsibilities to participate in this
democracy, we are going to move backward. How do we get pass this? How do we
reverse this at present? How do we tell people, you have to participate if you want to
keep moving forward? I sincerely believe that. I guess the question is two parts. Do you
agree with that and if so, how do we win that battle?
A: That's a good response. Mary, would you like?
A: I would prefer you.
A: I agree with you, sir. I think the greatest threat to our democratic way of life and the
greatest threat to our democracy and to whatever you want to call it is the lack of
participation and the lack of involvement. I think the day will soon come in America, if
we are not mindful, that we will no longer count the people that are voting, we will count
those who did not vote. I think it is a very dangerous trend. First of all, I think we have to
do something called campaign finance reform. We have to get.. .In the congress, there is
a group of us on both sides, both Democrats and Republicans, and the Independents that
we have among us in the house, trying to get campaign finance reform. There is too much
money. I have been in congress for my fifteenth year, serving my eighth tenth, but I have
young colleagues that come and they spend all of their time dialing for dollars. That's not
the way. When you have some one in New York spending fifty or sixty million (I don't
know how much money was spent all together) ... but to get elected. We have people
running for congress and we have someone running for mayor for Atlanta. We have to
make the airways free. It cost too much to be on television. The people have the right to
know. We have to take money out of it. It is too much money in American politics.
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Whether someone is a millionaire or whether someone is a dogcatcher, they have only
one vote. We have to change it. It is not the way to go. We have to say to our young
people and those of us not so young, if you do not vote, you really do not count. You
have to participate. We have to encourage more people to run, more women, more young
people, more minorities. Get out there and run. Don't leave it up to people. Everybody
has something to offer. Run for school board. Run for city council. Run for mayor. Run
for congress. Get out there. The more people we have participating, the better our
democracy is. It helps strengthen our democracy. We have a young lady who was just
elected mayor of the city of Atlanta. She came out of nowhere almost. She raised a lot or
money also, but she came out of nowhere.
Douglas Turner: Let me also mention that both Ms. Stanton and Congressman Lewis
have books for sale back here in the back. They will be available to sign if you have
already purchased one and you ·vant them to sign it or if you will be purchasing one.
Next question, I saw your hand back there.
Q: Congressman Lewis and Ms. Stanton, I am trying to find the difference really between
the nonviolent revolution that you were talking about because I have looked at most of
the countries who practice nonviolent revolution and they do not seem to be making any
progress. They are stagnated like we are, but Americans came with a more traditional
type of revolution and now we are the number one power in the world. It seems we all
•
will be ambulating to number one or something in that area.
Douglas Turner: So, is your question or statement is that there is a need for violence or
some kind ofrevolution.
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Q: Mary, you want to deal with that?
A: I'm not sure that I understand the question. Are you asking the value of a nonviolent
revolution?
A: Yes.
A: Well, I happen to believe in the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence and I
happen to believe also that in the long run, violence tends to create more problems than it
solves. As Americans, we've said, well Americans proceed in violence when we talk
about the American Revolution. A few days ago, I was in (inaudible) and visited those
historic places. I think humankind must evolve to a much higher level, not just Americans
but people all over this planet and all over this world. We lay down the tools and the
instruments of violence and some people would say and maybe you would say that is too
idealistic. As Dr. King would say, it is nonviolent and nonexistent. No one in the long run
wins in a war. A war is messy. It is bloody. It kills; it harms; it divides and it destroys.
We have to find a way to say no more war.
Q: Do you know who killed Dr. King? (inaudible)
A: I don't know who killed Dr. King. A colleague of mine from one of our southern
states came to me on the floor just yesterday and wanted me to meet with him and come
and visit a family who says they had some information about someone who participated
in the assassination or knew something about the assassination of Dr. King. He doesn't
know if this is legitimate or whether this is valid. I don't know. I believe until the day that
I die that it was a conspiracy to remove Dr. King from America. I do not think that any
one person acted alone. Some of the things that happened during the 1960's and what
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Mary said about the FBI, it is unbelievable. It is to think the unthinkable. We had this
whole thing going on in America during the Cold War that there was _____
_
members coming inside and we were under the Dukes of Marksville. If you saw a sign
saying white waiting and colored waiting, you did not need anyone from Marksville,
New York, Philadelphia or Washington to tell you that sign had to go. So, somehow and
some way, this mentality is creeping back into this segment of America. There has been
an attempt on the part of some of us to remove Mr. Hoover's name and have another
respected American's name put on there.
Q: Brother Lewis, it is so good to see you again. My name is James Steele. I remember
the situation quite well. I was a young student here at the college when you were beaten
on the Selma Bridge; 1954 just would not make it to Selma. Right down the street, a
young man was pastoring a church by the name of Reverend Ezekiel Bell in the l 960's. I
was with the first steering committee that launched the movement here in Huntsville.
Some of the student nonviolent coordinating persons and the Congress of Racial Equality
along with a young lawyer here at Alabama A&M by the name of Randolph Blackwell
that some of you may know of. There had not been much talk about Reverend Bell and
Blackwell, but they were spark plugs in the movement here. I started with the movement
about 1954. I don't want to tell how old, I mean how young I am Dr. Lewis, but what has
concerned me is that was a great movement. People were together. I must admit that we
had a number of people shucking and jiving in the movement back then. My question is
about 1980. What I believe is going to go down in history is the saddest part of our
history, one who kept his eye on the Civil Rights Movement and the Human Rights
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Movement in Huntsville, Alabama. I believe that I have seen more shucking and jiving
starting in the l 980's to the present time. My question is from your vanish point, do you
see that and what we may do to overcome this go with the flow, flip-flopping type
leadership that we see now across the nation. Somebody ought to stand up and tell the
truth where it relates to real freedom, justice and equality. I won't share that scripture
with you now, but it is in Isaiah 56: 10.
Douglas Turner: What is the question?
A: I am getting to that. Go ahead and answer my question. They called time on me.
A: Only thing I would say my friend is that during the days of the height of the
movement, it was my philosophy not to engage in name calling, not to put anyone down
because it was keeping with the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. There are
roles for people to play. Everybody can go in a sit-in. Everybody can go on the Freedom
Ride. When I was a student in Nashville, there were guys who played football and they
said, "Oh, John. I can't go. If I go down, I may fight and I can do something else. Maybe,
they just did not have the courage to sit-in unless someone put a lighted cigarette out in
their hair or down their back. So, I just do not think it is in keeping with the philosophy
of nonviolence to sit in judgment on the role and the function of anyone. So, I don't want
to call anyone shucking and jiving or put someone down because they may be marching
to a different beat.
Q: I would like to know was it pure luck that Ramsey Clark with feds monitored the
Selma to Montgomery march or was that a request.
A: Was it pure luck that Ramsey Clark?
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A: Monitored the Selma to Montgomery march.
A: I do not know. I really do not. It could have been his role and maybe there was
something that he wanted to do. I have said in the past that there are such individuals in
the Kennedy/Johnson administration. There was a young man by the name of John Door
who was a Republican. He was held over from either house administration. He was a tall,
lanky guy from the Midwest. He played a major, major role and I consider some of these
individuals as sympathetic referees in the struggle for civil rights. I think you had in the
department of justice that said Edgar Hoover was this and that. There were certain
individuals. It did not matter what time of night or what time of morning. You could pick
up the telephone and call them at home instead of Ramsey, Burke or Marshall or whoever
saying this is our problem; there is a problem in Alabama or there is a problem in
Mississippi. Some of these guys would say today. Some of you may not know this. On
the Freedom Ride, there was this brave, courageous man representative by the name of
Floyd Mann, who was the public safety director for the state of Alabama during the
freedom ride. When we were being beaten by this angry mob in Montgomery, it was
Floyd Mann. This white gentleman, native of this state and from this part of Alabama,
had to leave. I think he took a job as a security person maybe for the Goodyear plant. He
stood up with a gun and he said, "There would be no killing here today. There would be
no killing here today." It was Saturday morning, May 20, I 961, at the greyhound bus
station in Montgomery and the mob dispersed. If it had not been for this man, I probably
would not be here today and others probably would not be here. I saw him for the first
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time later, in all these years, at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial m
Montgomery. He came up to me and I think by this time I was on the city council or
maybe in congress and he said, "John Lewis, do you remember me?" I said, "Mr. Mann, I
do remember you. Thank you for saving my life." We both started to cry. So, you had
people there.
Q: Congressman Lewis, you mentioned about the woman in Atlanta who came out of
nowhere and won governor.
A: The mayor's office.
Q: Okay, the mayor's office. Don't you think it is about time for a dark horse to come out
and run for president? When are you going to run for president?
A: Who me? No, I'm happy being the congressperson from Atlanta, Georgia.
Q: It was a pleasure hearing you speak and I had the pleasure of being in Selma at the
last election for the run off and some of the same things are going on as far as getting
people the patient register to vote. My question is this. With the incident that took place
down at Auburn University, do you think that is an isolated incident? Or is there
something that should be addressed to the governor, to the people of Alabama and to the
nation as to that incident? The other thing is that there are young people that need to take
up the struggle. Do you think that it would be befitting? In the state of Alabama and in
the United States of America, they teach history. They teach so-called American history.
Do you think they should teach civil rights and the Civil Rights Movement in the state of
Alabama and all the other states so that they will know the history of this movement
because this movement is what gave life to the whole constitution?
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A: Well, I think it is important that we tell the story. To me, I am so gratified and so
pleased to see what these two institutions are doing. I wish other institutions, not just in
Alabama, all across the south and all across the nation, would do this. It is to help
educate, to synthesize all of our people about the contribution that people made and the
changes that have occurred. I think it is a must. I think we need to be teaching the
philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence, not just when people get to college, but we
need to start teaching it in daycare, in Head Start and in first grade. We need to teach
people the way of love and it may sound strange for a politician or for people to talk
about love. We need to teach that the way of love and the way of peace is a much better
way and much more excellent way. Maybe, we would not have some of the problems that
we have. Maybe at Auburn, a group of students could start conducting nonviolent
workshops saying we just don't do this; we live in a different time; we live in a different
period. We respect diversity. We respect people. We respect the worth and dignity of
every human being. I think too many young people in our society today are growing up,
and too many of us, because of something that is happening that we have this almost
disdain for just common decency and respecting the worth of a fellow human being.
People bump into you and do not even want to say excuse me; I'm sorry. So, to be
nonviolent is not not hitting some, but it is also attitude. Words can be very violent.
Words can be very destructive. So, it is a way of love and the way of nonviolence that we
have to get over to our people. Maybe, during this time of sort of national healing, we can
sort of tum towards each other as a national community and talk about love and
nonviolence and peace in the sense of community and in the sense family. Don't be afraid
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to say it to somebody. It's nothing weak about saying to somebody, "I'm sorry I said that.
I'm sorry I did that." A lot of times, I call my colleagues and they say, "Hello, brother.
How are you?" It's not just a black brother; it's the white brother and the brown brother
who happen to be Hispanic or an Asian American brother or sister. In the congress, you
see us on the floor. We argue like cats and dogs, but I bet you one thing, when something
happens to us, we are there for each other. We are family. The same people that get up
and arguing on C-span or arguing on the floor, the next moment they are working out
together in the gym or having a meal together in the member's dining room. I wish
sometimes that the larger community could see the sense of family that we try to exercise
even in Washington even among politicians. Can I go for one other moment? We have a
group in Washington, and I am the co-chair, called Faith and Politics. I am the Democrat
co-chair. There is a young man by the name of Amo Houghton who is the Republican cochair. I am one of the poorest members of congress. This guy is one of the richest
members of congress. He is very, very ... You know Steuben Glass, CorningWare. That's
the family in upstate New York. We get together, members from Alabama, white
members from Alabama, white members from Mississippi, black members from
Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia, Hispanic members from Texas, California or Florida or
Asian American members from California. We get together in our offices, in our little
hideaways and in our homes and we have what we call a ---
on race and we talk
about it. We debate it. During the past four years, we have been taking (some of you
probably read about it) we have been taking groups of members from Washington,
starting in Birmingham to Montgomery and to Selma, over a weekend during the
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anmversary of the march across the bridge. It has been unbelievable. Some of the
members walked through Sixteenth Street Baptist Church or went to the site where Rosa
Parks was arrested or might go to the museum there or go to Birmingham and walk
through the park. They would walk across the bridge and breakdown and cry. It helps to
educate and helps to synthesize. It is making us better. We always need to reach out to
each other.
Q: Good evening, Ms. Stanton and Mr. Lewis. I would just like to thank you all on behalf
of the student body for making your appearance and sharing with us your experiences this
evening. Mr. Lewis, I would just like you to, if you could for just a moment, speak about
your current struggles with historic preservation in the African-American museums,
which we did a lot of work on this past summer. Ms. Stanton, my question was there is
no doubt to anybody in here that Viola Liuzzo was a remarkable woman and a
remarkable individual and what happened to her was disgusting and reprehensible to say
the least, but we hear about a movie, books and all these types of things. I have seen
documentaries on her and her existence. Do you believe that if Viola Liuzzo was an
African-American woman that she would be remembered today?
A: That's a good question. It's a hard one to answer because in many ways Viola Liuzzo
was not remembered. If she was an African-American woman, the obvious answer is
probably no.
A: In Washington, for the past twelve or thirteen years, I've been leading in an effort to
create a national African-American museum on the mall. As a matter of fact, I had a
meeting today with J.C. Watts, my Republican colleague from Oklahoma, who is the
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chair of the Republican conference. We had more than one hundred and thirty-five
members, cosponsors, Republicans and Democrats in the house, and thirty-two members
of the senate of cosponsor. All of the leadership on the house side and the senate side are
cosponsoring this legislation and I think one day, we will have in Washington a national
African-American museum that tells the whole story of the struggle of AfricanAmericans from the days of slavery to the present. It will happen.
Douglas Turner: I have been instructed to allow a few more questions, although time is
running out and I know our guests would like to, you know, get away and rest tonight.
Two more questions. Go ahead.
Q: (Inaudible)
Q: I am the president of 2000 Freedom Fighters out of Decatur and my question is that
we have had a hard time getting the ministers involved. I know way back when the
church was the foundation and the ministers was the backbone. So, what would you have
to say today that would encourage the ministers and the churches to get involved with the
civil rights because certainly there are so many injustices in the state of Alabama and all
over the country?
A: Well, it is a very interesting question. I do not know about how strong the AfricanAmerican churches are in the African-American community, but there was no institution
that ran parallel in the poor white communities when people were trying to organize. I
think that strength moved the movement, the incredible thrust and the power that the
church has, not only through faith but also through organizing skills training people and
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bringing people together. Maybe, you can speak to that Congressman Lewis. Is it as
strong as it was or are we losing ground?
A: I would like to think that the church in the African-American community is still
strong. From what we gather, more people in both the African-American community and
the white community are going to church. You must keep in mind that during the 1960's
and during the height of the movement, all of the ministers were not involved. All of the
churches were not involved. There were certain churches even in the city like Atlanta did
not even want Dr. King, when he left Montgomery, to come back to Atlanta. There were
churches in other parts of the south. There were certain places where the ministers were
afraid to speak out or speak up. So, you do not give up because some group is saying,
well, I cannot do this. You just keep going, four year and five there, ten there, fifty here
and one hundred there, but you be consistent, be persistent and just hang in there and do
what you can do. You are never going to have everybody. During the original Freedom
Ride, the original Freedom Ride group that left Washington, DC, on May 4, 1961, it was
only thirteen ofus, seven white and six blacks that left Washington, DC, on May 4, 1961.
Later, three hundred people got arrested and went to jail over the summer of 1961. So,
you do not have to have the whole nation or the entire community. Sometimes, there are
only a few that come together in one accord committed, dedicated, believing in an idea
and they change things. So, do not be discouraged.
Q: (inaudible)
A: Well, I would encourage people, especially young people. There is a young man who
is a history teacher out in the bay area of California and he (inaudible). He was able to get
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the state legislature of California and others to get the necessary money, but he started off
just having a fundraiser, bringing one hundred students to Washington. They go to the
Lincoln Memorial. They listen to Dr. King's speech on an old boombox, "I have a
Dream." Then, they fly to Atlanta. Then, they travel by bus to Montgomery,
Birmingham, Selma, Little Rock and to Memphis. They go to Central High and they meet
with some of the former students of Central High. During the past four or five years, he
has brought over eleven hundred students. In some cases, there were superintendents,
parents and members of the board of education, but a whole generation of high school
students. They are black; they are white. They are Asian American. They are Hispanic
and Native American. In this state, there is so much history; it is unbelievable. I say to the
young people in Atlanta, to the students there sometimes, go and visit the King Center.
Go and visit Dr. King's grave. Go and visit Ebenezer Church. There are kids growing up
in Atlanta that have never been in the home of where Dr. King was born. So, we
encourage young people and people not so young to take advantage of this history here.
There is a lot of rich history here in this state dealing with the whole question of race and
civil rights.
Closing: We have gone over our usual time, but I think that most of you would agree that
it has been a productive and memorable evening. Once again, how about a round of
applause for Ms. Mary Stanton and Congressman Lewis. Do not forget too that next
week, the lecture series continues at UAH in Roberts Recital Hall at 7 p.m. The topic will
be "Turmoil in Tuskegee." The lecturer will be Frank Toland of the History Department
at Tuskegee University. Thanks for coming out and see you next week.
46
�
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Title
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
Relation
A related resource
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/resources/21" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">View the Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965 finding aid in ArchivesSpace</a>
Identifier
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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uah_civr_000024
Title
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Digitized transcription of VHS tape of "Selma to Montgomery, 1965".
Description
An account of the resource
U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Mary Stanton are the speakers in this lecture given at Alabama A&M University.
Creator
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Alabama A & M University
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Publisher
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University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama
Date
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2001-11-08
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
2000-2009
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lewis, John, 1940-2020
Stanton, Mary, 1946-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Selma (Ala.)
Dallas County (Ala.)
Freedom Rides, 1961
African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.
Type
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Lectures
Text
Transcript
Format
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Print
Has Format
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/403"> VHS Tape of: Selma to Montgomery, 1965 - Speakers: John Lewis and Mary Stanton, 2001-11-08. Box 2, Tape 9</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama
Language
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en
Rights
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This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.
Extent
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46
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/391">Selma to Montgomery, 1965 - Speakers: John Lewis and Mary Stanton - Transcription of Tape 9, 2003 Box 1, File 10</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama