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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.
Dublin Core
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uah_civr_000004
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Digitized VHS tape of "Early Years of the Movement" (Part II).
Description
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J.L. Chestnut, Jr. is the speaker in this lecture given at Alabama A&M.
Date
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2001-09-20
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1:38:28
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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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Alabama A & M University
University of Alabama in Huntsville
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University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections
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2000-2009
Subject
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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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Lectures
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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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http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/32/11351/uah_civr_000005_Box_2_Tape_4.mp4
087c422d0f49536387c05bd319cd3ba5
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
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The Montgomery Bus Boycott Speaker: Fred Gray, Charles Moore Thank you. 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. Those faculty include, 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 Honors Center, Sociology/Social Work Programs and the History and 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's give these people a show of appreciation. Now, let's welcome Charles Moore. Charles Moore: For those of you that saw or bought the special series of stamps of the different images from the sixties, it included a photograph of Martin Luther King's face from the sixties. It was from that picture. They purchased the rights to do that, to use his face for an artist to do a rendition of Dr. King in "I Have A Dream." This picture is after they told Dr. King to move from the court steps but he refused. One officer had his armed twisted, like in a hammerlock behind his back. I am sure that hurt. People began to gather around Dr. King, and I think he may have been afraid... he certainly didn't want any violence, so he may have been putting his hand out to the people as to say, "No, don't get involved. Just stay away." So I followed them photographing and there was no one around, there were no other journalists or writers. There were no photographers. I followed them down the street until they took him into the booking station, which may be in here. I'm not sure if we have that picture. I came into the door right behind the policeman and Dr. King and I'm over and behind them. I took one shot and I realize how ridiculous this was because I could only see the backs of the people. I knew there was a little floppy, folding door over on the side of the desk there. Without asking permission, I just ran around there and went in behind the jailer. don't know if he ever knew if l was even there or not but I went behind him to get the picture that would show their faces and the face of Dr. King while they were still twisting his arm behind his back. That was the other photograph. So, those two photographs of the arrest would be equivalent to the others. Some of you will remember the Baltimore postman, William Moore (no relation) who had decided to walk to Mississippi with a sign on his back that said, "Eat at Joe's, Mississippi, both black and white," or something like that. I only learned recently that he stopped in a little store in Georgia, I believe. My reporter and I had flown into Chattanooga and met these guys later that retraced this so I was not on the assignment when this man was killed. He stopped at a little country store and he went in, he was kind of a strange guy, but he believed that this thing going on in the south wasn't right, segregation was not right. Unfortunately, he was very naive and these guys got him into discussion, "Well, do you believe in this, do you believe in interracial marriage, do you believe in blacks and whites getting married." He responded, "Sure I do, if they love each other." They said, "What if they are marrying a Jew?" He said, "Sure there's nothing wrong with that?" The guy went on and on. He was not aware of the danger at all. I did not know this until recently. But he continued his walk, but what I have heard, is that when he started to leave, one of the men said to him, "Boy, you are going to die!" The guy just looked at him and said, "I don't know what you are talking about." The man said, "Like I said, you are going to die". He was shot. It was a cowardly thing. The man that did this is in prison. I do not remember his name. The man went off into the woods on the side of the road by the trees with a high-powered rifle and shot him in the head as he went by. It was a cowardly ambush and murder of a totally innocent, simple man. These things are terrible. On this next picture, I was on this march when my reporter heard on a car radio, he was driving along while I was walking with the marchers, of these guys that were retracing that hike that Bull Conner was going to meet Dr. King with some force. Dr. King was bringing his group into Birmingham and that it was going to happen that afternoon. We stopped right then and took off to Birmingham. We thought that it could be bad. This is the first shot I made. When we drove into Kelly Ingram Park, we looked at a map and found out where it was, Michael was driving a rental car, I saw these firemen, it was a little different from this when I first saw it, but I just made him let me jump out of the car so he could go park and join me later. This was the lead photograph in Life Magazine. It was in the Birmingham story. Life was a pretty big magazine. So, all the way across two pages was this strong black and white image. The firemen were on the left page and they are on the other page and underneath was the caption in big letters, 'THEY FIGHT A FIRE THAT WON'T GO OUT." Fred, do you remember that? It's very interesting, I have always liked this picture, and I'm not saying it because of things that have happened with it, but I have always liked this picture because I studied art for a little while and I always had a big thing on composition. I still believe, and I get a lot of questions from other photographers, and I teach it when I am talking about photography. I teach them that they have to think fast, even in violent action. Sometimes the photograph can have composition, whether it's a bat being hit over someone's head or whether it's this. I didn't want the firemen. I had pictures of the firemen. All I wanted to do was see that white, hot stream of water, which is hard, hitting somebody in the back. I had a 100-millimeter lens on the camera and I just wanted this composition. This has become an icon of the movement. I am happy to say that it is included in twenty-five photographs. A man came to see me recently who had just left Gordon Parks, and Gordon's a friend, not in very good health now, living in New York City. Gordon has one of the great pictures too. These twenty-five pictures will be on the USA cable network. I don't know when it will be. But anyway, it's the twenty-five most important pictures of the century, so I'm very happy that this one made it. Next. Why did I put a color photograph in there? This is in Kelly Ingram Park about two years ago. When Life decided that they were going to pick one the pictures of the century for their special issue, they sent me back to Birmingham. This is the fourteen-year-old woman, Carolyn Mclnstry, who is in the photograph in front of those two young men. This is Carolyn today. She is a good friend. She works for BellSouth in Birmingham and has been with them quite a long time, I think. It's been good for her. She has spent at least two times with Oprah on the Oprah show. She is very active. It is really nice to know that young, fourteen-year-old girl, Carolyn, who lost friends when those little girls were killed in the church. Those were her friends. She had been with them earlier. That was a real shock to Carolyn. This is one of the monuments for those of you who have been there. She was one of the children that were hit by the water at fourteen years of age. This is the one similar to the one Life ran. Next. These are the things that disturbed me so much in Birmingham. I didn't just want to stand in the distance and take a lot of safe shots of overall things happening. I was arrested too. It was during the water hoses that I was arrested. I was too active. My reporter was running around with me too so they grabbed us both. This woman had been hit and knocked down and at one point, this picture was just no good, because she is being rolled by that high-pressure hose and her purse was knocked away. Her clothing was folding up over her and what a terrible thing for her. This man came along and picked her up. I think this is important too. You don't grab a photograph and say, "Well, I got that shot. I am going to see what else I can find." You kind of stay with it and I'm glad I did because I did see this man come up and help her. You can see people running in the background. Next. This is the cover of the book. I think that I reversed all of these. I was in a hurry. This, to me, showed some of the anger. I did photographs of some of the young kids. It's natural for young kids in a situation like this to play in the water. Some people may make fun of that but those are children who are learning. Most of this was a horrible, horrible thing and very degrading and as in one of the photographs in the exhibit, it's one of my favorites because there is one man who is powerful. He's standing like this. He is being hit with this blast of water. It shows his back where he is hit and then he whirls around with this look on his face. He looks like he could destroy anyone of those policemen or firemen. He is standing there helpless as if to say, "How degrading this is to have this happen to you and can't do anything about it". By the way, it's a good time to say I don't know all about the firemen. I know that now firemen are really heroes and all, and I think they are. The firemen down there, I tell you, I was under the water and he had them down and holding them and just spraying them and I crawled under with a wide-angled lens, under the water, and photographed back at the firemen with the water going over me. They could have turned it down on me. I was just hoping they didn't. I overheard a fireman fussing and holding the hose and saying, because it's been quoted. This fireman said to another fireman, 'This is crazy! We are supposed to be fighting fires, not people." Now that is a good fireman. That man obviously did not want to do what he was doing, but sometimes we do it anyway. I work with a wide-angle lens. A lot of people ask me how close and all of this. I'm pretty close. I think I was using a twenty-eight millimeter lens, that's the reason you can tell from this perspective how large the policemen is that is closer to me than the people in the background. With a telephoto lens, a longer lens, if you shoot with that, it compresses your subjects. It compresses the scene, so it pushes them all together. In relation to the people in the background, to this man, they would appear to be closer. It is the way I work. It is the way I feel that there is more drama and more impact, which is what you need in these photographs. I wonder how close that dog was to me. I didn't see him. I didn't even pay any attention to him. I was focusing on the others, but there was a dog there. This is a pretty vicious thing, to allow it to go out and happen. Sure they're on a leash, but they're leading them in on a leash. It was pretty horrible. This man was bitten, not just his pants torn but his leg was badly bitten. On the next picture, again you see the same kind of thing thing. I work fast. If you are ever going to be a photojournalist, then you want to do photographs like this and you have to work really fast. You need to be really good with knowing your exposures. All of your professionalism has to come out so it just works automatically for you. These pictures were taken with manual cameras, nothing automatic, just simply manual, no exposure meters built in, no automatic focusing, or anything. Next. When I photographed this, I just heard that Dr. King had been arrested. I later found out this was not his hand. I don't know whose hand it was but I thought it was Dr. King's. !fit were his hand, this would be an even greater photograph. It's the fact that it is just an icon of what was happening there, which was that so many people, children and women were being arrested. I don't know if any of you all know a writer named Paul Hendrickson, but he wrote about a woman photographer named Marion Post Walcott. He wrote a book called Looking For the Light. He first wrote a piece for Life Magazine, and then he turned it into a major book. He also has another prize-winning book called Five Who Died. It's about Vietnam. He has come from Washington to see me twice. He also works and writes for the Washington Post, but he does books. He's an author. He was haunted, as he said, by this photograph so he has gone back to Mississippi on several occasions and he's been back to Alabama a couple of times and spent some time with me. I know there is someone here who knows Shannon Wells, who is a photographer from the University of Alabama, UNA. We had lunch together at a restaurant in Florence that is an African-American restaurant. It is popular, especially with the college, and it has incredible Southern food. Well, we took him there. He fell in love with Shannon. He wants to come back and visit again. He is a great man and he has gone into the lives of all of these men. He has interviewed their family members, they're all dead. This is on the campus at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, during the Meredith thing. The men with the clubs are deputy sheriffs and they're waiting for the marshals to bring in the and they're talking and he is kind of laughing and they're cutting up and they're saying, "This is what we are going to do. We'll show Bobby Kennedy and those marshals how we handle them down here." They are laughing and making a joke out of it. He found out through interviewing people who knew all of these men. He is writing a new book that will be coming out; I don't know what he's calling it right now. He said, "One thing you should know is that everyone I talked to that knew the man in the center, said a lot of things, but the one thing they all had in common about him is that he always had to be the center of attention. So it goes on, the interest in Civil Rights and coming together, making the world better, making our country better, understanding each other and understanding that we are all of the same God, understanding that we all must get along. Color? What is color? It doesn't matter. I am a color photographer. I love all the colors of the spectrum. This last picture is of one of the marshals that had been shot. He had been shot in the leg, I believe. There were twenty-eight marshals that were badly wounded. Two people died that night on the campus. One was a French journalist who was sort of hiding down low behind a piece of shrubbery. His killer got away because someone came up behind and put a bullet in the back of his head. Again, a cowardly thing to do to a man just witnessing as a journalist. How do you find this person? Anyway, another innocent bystander, I don't remember who he was, but somebody who worked in Oxford was hit and killed by a bullet. But twenty-eight of the marshals were wounded by gunfire. The next picture is one of the wounded. He happened to be standing next to me by an army jeep when shots came out of the crowd that night. There were shot gun blasts and all kinds of things being shot at the marshals. There was tear gas and bottles of gasoline being thrown. It was a terrible thing. There were cars being set on fire. It was a nightmare out there in front of that building all night. Some of the guys got a bulldozer and they were going to crash into the front of the building. The marshals had to get on it and take these guys off of it. They had to fight them to get them off. This picture is of an Associated Press writer, a reporter, out of the Memphis office. He was standing and a shot came out of the crowd. I ducked behind the jeep. He turned to run back into the building. The second shot came out. Fortunately it was buckshot, but it blasted his back. He was just patched up by the marshals inside, still bleeding a little bit but went on working. He was interviewing after being wounded. I'm glad I ducked. This is a picture of the next morning. Tear gas is still lingering out there. In some of the pictures, as they are bringing Meredith onto the campus, marshals and other people have their handkerchiefs over their face. John Durr and the top marshal are escorting him in the next morning. He was hidden overnight and they're escorting him the next morning after the riot into the campus to register. Next. These are some of the prisoners the next morning. They are some of the people that were rounded up and you can see that some of the people still have a gas mask on because as you walk around there was so much tears gas used out there that when you walked around the next morning, it would stir it up and it would still be drifting. This is Selma in this picture. Andy Young was praying in this picture. Andrew Young became a good friend and a wonderful man. He wrote the introduction to my book. This was just before the march. They are praying for the march and I think this is before Bloody Sunday. I covered Bloody Sunday and then I went back for the final march. Next. These are some of deputies or sub-deputies or whatever on the street in Selma as John Lewis, and I couldn't find that slide of John Lewis and all the people coming out toward the bridge, but these were people standing there on the streets of Selma. I shot this picture in color. It was a little different but it was the cover of Life. This was Bloody Sunday, the first march. Next. This is after they stopped. They were stopped on the other side by the police and then given two minutes to disburse, and they didn't, then Bloody Sunday happened. They charged these folks with billy clubs and started beating them and later used tear gas. Next. I found out this woman's name later. She was hurt badly. You can see the police have tear gas masks on. I had to cut out a lot of pictures for time and this is one of the marching pictures along the road. Next. Dr. King on the march. This is the final march, the victory march. I wanted to see the reaction of people along the way so I did a lot of photographs also of the people cheering them. This was Birmingham. Everyone knows him. I wanted to get a few faces. I only have a few of them, of the people that were important. Next. James Baldwin certainly was. Harry Bellefonte was one of the most wonderful friends I think I've ever met. He's a great guy. He was also very close to Dr. King. This is one of my favorites always. What a great singer. I have one of her songs on one of my audio/video presentation, which has songs and sounds of the movement on it. Two of his friends. Next. Two of his friends, remember I left my heart in San Francisco? Next. That's Myrlie Evers at the funeral in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Evers, I never really worked with him. I only got a chance to go and photograph the funeral. Next. I don't know if it's here, but there's another picture I have of Myrlie with her face bowed that I like better. She's really, really sad. In Montgomery, in between the first march, Bloody Sunday, and the next march, there were some students from different places that had come down to Montgomery. They were sitting in on the street because they were trying, as had been done a couple of time, to desegregate the capital cafeteria. They tried to go in as a mixed group into the cafeteria but it wasn't working so one day they sat down on the street and they weren't going to move. They were just protesting, but very peacefully. What happens all of a sudden, these people come riding up on horses and they said," We're all deputies." But, one person was in uniform. This man was beating some of these people with his cane. Others had clubs. Let's see if there's another one. I don't know if there are any others of the horses. Yeah, there's a man with a hard hat on, hitting this girl over the head with a club. You' II see her, I think in the next picture. Next. This guy, I have a whole sequence of this, I followed them all along. He had been hit, knocked on the ground, she ran. I've got a picture of her running over to pick him up and then picking him up and helping him. Next. He's bleeding very badly. His head had a bad gash in it. She's angry, and she points at his face and looks at me with a very angry look saying, "Look what they did to him." Next. This is a poet, I always forget his name, and I've got to write it down. This man is a well-known poet from the University of Pennsylvania or somewhere. Anyway, his face was busted here with a club. Next. A little tender care. So, folks it was violent. Other people here know a lot more about the violence than I do. I mean I've had violence committed and threatened on me. But I was a color that didn't get quite as much violence as people did of another color, a darker color. So much violence was directed at people. So much harm and harm to our country. I'm very happy and I still like to be positive sometimes and say, "Yes, things are better." I think Fred Gray is right in saying, "There's much to be done still." Always, we can't look back. We have to worry about our children today. What are they going to be like when they're adults? What do they feel about civil rights? Yes, I can be friends openly in Florence, Alabama with black people. I was really amazed. Every year, some of you may know, there is an Ebony Fashion Show. I went to the Ebony Fashion Show with a lady friend and a friend of hers, who's a fashion designer in Nashville, who happened to be down visiting. So, the three of us went and it was amazing. Everybody's all dressed up and there was a little jazz trio there and beautiful models. And I thought, this is Alabama, this incredible mix of black and white here? It was amazing. It was a wonderful, beautiful thing. Everybody had a great time, you know, and it's an annual thing. I think they collect the money for something, I don't remember what the charity is. Anyway, it was wonderful to see that. What happens now is that we must keep moving on, and you educators, especially. I'm happy to see you and hear more about what you're doing at the universities. I speak a lot at universities and I'm very happy to see the things that are happening. Next. This may be the last. Thank you. (Fred Gray) Q: What message do you think scholarships based upon race sends college students, instead of scholarships based on merit? A: Well, you have to understand the purpose for scholarships in the first place. For example, I was just in a conference earlier this week on a high education case here. For the purpose of integrating and encouraging people when they won't just voluntarily do things, the courts use various other means to do it. I think what you have to understand, because if you just take a scholarship out of the context of the whole history of the struggle, then you miss the purpose for it. I have another speech I make all the time and 1 didn't do it tonight because we didn't have time to do it. But, you have to understand how this whole business started. It didn't start today; it started really when African Americans were brought to this country as slaves. The only group that's here, brought against their will. The Constitution that we read about, when we say, "We the people of the United States... " The Constitution as originally written, that preamble did not include people who look like me. It only included white, almost males. Because, even females couldn't serve on the jury in this state, when I started practicing law. So, in order to correct mistakes that were made in the Constitution, you have the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. And many of those were designed originally just for the protection of African-Americans. But now the equal protection, the due process clause of the 14th Amendment protects white's rights much more than blacks rights when they originally started. So, the whole purpose of whether you call it affirmative action or whatever you want to call it, the whole idea, the court tried to come up with some derivatives to do away with the effects of past discrimination. And I think, if it takes scholarships like at Alabama State and at A&M, white students can obtain scholarships. And they did that because you won't voluntarily go over there. So, to encourage you to do it, they end up giving scholarships. I see nothing wrong with it. But the purpose of it is not to discriminate against anyone; it's trying to make the field level. I think there is a duty and a responsibility on all of us to come up with some ways and means of doing it. If you don't like that way, do something. But, the discrimination, which still exists in this country, needs to be done away with. Q: Civil rights, for example, took on a front of peace movement, the teachings of Gandhi, pacifism. Was it ever close to the leaders or a group going the other way to where there was ever a danger of being more violent? Not as far as the marches, but being violent from the movement itself. A: I think basically, the civil rights movement, particularly as it developed in Montgomery and as Dr. King led it, as you know, his whole philosophy was nonviolence and there really was a good reason for it. There was a good practical reason, too. Number one, if somebody comes up to you and does something to you and you don't fight back, it's hard to have a fight with one person doing all the beating. You might get a beating, but you don't get a fight. Secondly, if in the movement, during the early stages, if we had decided it was going to be a contest between who could arm themselves more and who could fight the most, that's a losing battle. So you don't even try to engage in it. But we did have some persons in the movement, on our side, even, who didn't believe in nonviolence. They wanted to use force when they got an opportunity. I think one of the reasons the early stage of the movement was successful is because it did take on a nonviolent aspect. Q: Earlier in the talks you talked about the fact that we still have problems. I want you to comment on in high schools in the south, you still see a lot of the social and economic segregation. It's very poignant, I was wondering if you could comment about that. A: I think you're perfectly right. There is still, and as one who has been in this fight for a long time, we are still, believe it or not, the case of Lee V. Mason which covers one hundred of one hundred and nineteen school systems in this state. We started out with overt segregation. I now see in some of those same school systems, a less amount of actual, if you count the numbers of whites and blacks who are in these schools. You have fewer now, than we had ten or fifteen years ago. What they're saying is not the result of segregation as it originally exists but it's the result of housing patterns and all of these other things. I think what people have to realize, the idea of and these school desegregation cases were never filed just for the purpose of putting a black child in a formerly white school. The purpose was they found that blacks were receiving an inferior education in those schools. And most of the resources were going to the white schools and not to the black schools. We are almost getting back to that same situation now. What we're concerned about is quality education. But, we have also found that there is a greater possibility of having quality education in a setting where both races are, because once they finish school, they get into the real world, they're going to have to be competing against each other. So, they need to be able to learn how to work together and there is something that each ethnic group can learn from the other. So, I think it's more than just numbers; it's a question of quality education. Closing: Thank you Mr. Gray. I hate to cut the questions off because I think this is a rare, historical opportunity for us to hear these individuals who have played such an important role in American history. But, the hour is getting late and we would like to invite you up for a reception. Just give us a moment to set everything up. And I want to express the appreciation of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama A&M University, the planning committee for your appearance tonight. This has been a wonderful occasion and we're thankful for all three of you.
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Digitized VHS tape of "The Montgomery Bus Boycott".
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Fred Gray, Charles Moore, and D'Linell Finley, Sr. are the speakers in this lecture given at University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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2001-09-27
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0:44:14
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en
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Alabama A & M University
University of Alabama in Huntsville
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University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections
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2000-2009
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Gray, Fred D., 1930-
Moore, Charles, 1931-2010
Finley, D'Linell, 1948-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Montgomery (Ala.)
Montgomery County
Montgomery Bus Boycott, Montgomery, Ala., 1955-1956
Segregation
Voter registration
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Lectures
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/386">The Montgomery Bus Boycott - Speakers: Fred Gray, Charles Moore, and D'Linell Finley - Transcription of Tape 4, 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/398">VHS Tape of: The Montgomery Bus Boycott - Speakers: Fred Gray, Charles Moore, and D'Linell Finley, Sr., 2001-09-27 Box 2, Tape 4</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/32/11354/Hulett_and_Frye.jpg
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http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/32/11354/uah_civr_000008_Box_2_Tape_8.mp4
1804b7426bb520dd0f1f36c8c39251b6
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
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UAH The University of Alabama in Huntsville
"Bloody Lowndes" and the Black Panther Party Speaker: John Hulett, Frye Gaillard
I am Sherry Marie Shuck, Assistant Professor of History at UAH. Welcome to the
ninth installment of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 14-week symposium
centered around a series of public lectures, panels and first-hand account of
significant events taking place in the state of Alabama. This series is held
alternately at UAH and Alabama A&M University. After three years of planning,
this unique intellectual project is a joint venture between Alabama A&M
University and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The members of the
Steering Committee in alphabetical order are: Mitch Berbrier of UAH, John
Dimrnock ofUAH, Jack Ellis of UAH, James Johnson of AAMU, Carolyn Parker of AAMU
and Lee Williams, II, of UAH. Throughout its work. the planning committee has
also been greatly assisted by the efforts of Joyce Maples of UAH's
University Relations.
We ask that you complete an evaluation form for this program and leave it here
on the stage or with an attendant at the exit.
This series on the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama would not have been possible
without the financial support of numerous sponsors whom the planning committee
wishes to acknowledge at this time. First and foremost is the Alabama Humanities
Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; The
Huntsville Times, DESE Research Incorporated, Mevatec Corporation, Alabama
Representative Laura Hall and Senator Hank Sanders.
Joining our efforts from Alabama A&M University is the Office of the President,
The Office of the Provost, the State Black Archives Research Center and Museum,
the Title III Telecommunications who are responsible for taping these sessions
and we give a special thanks to all of you and Distance Learning, the Office of
Student Development, the A&M Honors Center, Sociology/Social Work, Political
Science and History.
At the University of Alabama in Huntsville, we greatly acknowledge funding
assistance from the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the
Humanities Center, the Division of Continuing Education, the Department of
Sociology, its Social Issues Symposium, the Honors Program, the Office of
Multicultural Affairs, Student Affairs, The Copy Center and the UAH History
Forum Bankhead Foundation, which is serving as the local host for tonight's
activities; and with the kind help of Staff Assistant Beverly Robinson, who has
prepared a reception back stage immediately following tonight's lecture to
which you are all invited.
We would like to remind you that next Tuesday, November 6th, we have a special
guest lecturer, Dr. Hilliard Lackey, Professor of History at Jackson State
University who will speak on the Selma Voting Rights Campaign, which will be
held in Room 111 of the School of Business at Alabama A&M University at 7 p.m.
Next Thursday, our series will take place at the Ernest Knight Reception Center
at Alabama A&M University. Our focus will be the struggle for voting rights in
Selma, culminating in the event of March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday in
which state troopers in an armed posse led by local sheriff, Jim Clark, used
clubs an tear gas to beat back peaceful marches attempting to cross Edmund
Pettus Bridge on their way to
Montgomery. Our speaker will be Congressman John Lewis of Georgia's 5th
District, one of the towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement. A native of
Torre, Alabama, an author of Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,
published in 1998, Congressman Lewis was active in the national sit-ins, the
freedom rides, the Selma movement and was at the head of the marcher's
attack on Pettus Bridge. He will be joined by New York writer Mary Stanton, author of
the book From Selma to Sorrow: the Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo, published in 1998.
Tonight, we look at events that took place not far from Selma in a Blackbelt
County, whose tradition of violence against African-Americans and Civil Rights
workers earned it the unenviable nickname of Bloody Lowndes.
Two classic examples of Lowndes County terrorism are the Klan murder on March
25, 1965, of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, a white Civil Rights volunteer from Michigan
along US Highway 80, followed by the shotgun slaying of Jonathan Daniels, a
26-year old Divinity student from New Hampshire at Varner's Cash Store in
Hayneville. Such atrocities had prevented any black resident from being
registered to vote for over half a century, even though they outnumbered local
whites by more than 3 to I. Blacks who wished to register not only faced
expulsion from the farms where they lived and worked but also a constant threat
of physical violence.
In a county where only 800 white men resided, Mr. John Hulett observed in 1966,
that "there are 550 of them who walk around with guns on them. They are
deputies. It might sound like a fairy tale to most people, but this is true."
Mr. Hulett was at the center of the struggle to bring change to Lowndes County
and what he accomplished there had
repercussions far beyond the Blackbelt and state of Alabama. To introduce him
with our second distinguished guest on stage tonight, prize-winning journalist,
Frye Gaillard, a call upon Ms. Erin Reed, a history graduate student at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville and president of Phi Alpha Theta, the
history honorary society... Ms. Reed.
Introduction: In defending the cause of freedom over the past 5 decades, Mr.
John Hulett has served in many ways, from union activist and civil rights leader
to county sheriff and probate judge. In his book, Outside Agitator, John Daniels
and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, historian Charles W. Eagles, portrays
Mr. Hulett as the leader of the Civil Rights struggle in Lowndes County and as a
"tireless, determined worker with unusual intensity and powerful personality."
Born in a tiny community of Gordonsville, Mr. Hulett passed his formative years
in rural bonds. It was here, according to Professor Eagles, that his grandfather
born in slavery had managed during his life to acquire more than a hundred acres
in addition to a gristmill, a sawmill and a cotton gin. Finishing high school in
1946, Mr. Hulett soon left the family's farm to live in Birmingham. There,
he was hired as a foundry worker for the Birmingham Stove and Range Company.
This marked the beginning of his life as an activist, first as president of the
Foundry Worker's Union and then as a reformer seeking to improve the lives
of those in Pratt City where he lives.
By 1949, he had joined the NAACP and after it was banned he joined the Successor
Organization created by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, known as the Alabama
Christian Movement for Human Rights. In Birmingham, Mr. Hulett was also
successful in his attempts to register to vote.
Returning to Lowndes County in 1959, Mr. Hulett soon emerged as the leader of
local efforts to combat the poll tax and to gain the right to register for local
African Americans. This brought him into direct conflict with a white minority
that dominated that county and that for 50 years had ensured that no black
person could vote or serve on juries.
By March of 1965, only he and one other black resident had succeeded in being
registered, despite an appearance at the courthouse in Hayneville that month by
Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, who sought unsuccessfully to register 37 local
residents. In response, Mr. Hulett help organize the Lowndes County Christian
Movement for Human Rights and served as its first president.
Passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 along with presence of federal
registrars helped ensure that African-Americans would become a voting majority in
Lowndes County. In order to solidify the gains achieved by this and to prevent
the local democrat party from again disenfranchising blacks by raising fees for
office seekers, Mr. Hulett was instrumental in founding an alternative party,
the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. This party was organized on April 2,
1966, with Mr. Hulett and it took as its symbol the black panther. In Lowndes
County, he explained, we have been deprived of our rights to speak, to move and
to do whatever we want to do at all times and now we are going to start moving.
On November 8 of this year, we plan to take over the courthouse in Hayneville
and whatever it takes to do it, we're going to do it.
In 1969, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization became part of the National
Democratic Party of Alabama whose electoral victories the following year
included that of John Hulett as sheriff, the first African-American to be
elected to that office there.
Tonight, Mr. Hulett will share with us memories of his life and struggle m
Lowndes County from his youth and early involvement in the Voter Registration
Campaign to the founding of the Black Panther Party, to the Selma movement and
the murders of Viola Liuzzo and John Daniels and finally to the changes that has
witnessed over the past 40 years.
Along with Mr. Hulett, we are also privileged to have as our guest on stage
tonight journalist and author Frye Gaillard. Mr. Gaillard will be interviewing
Mr. Hulett. Mr. Gaillard lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a
free-lance writer with special interests in the culture, religion and social
history of the American south. He has written or edited 18 books touching on
various aspects of this southern experience from black and Native American
history to country music and Habitat for Humanity.
Mr. Gaillard is a native of Mobile and in 1994 described his own family's
history in a book entitled, Lessons from the Big House, One Family's
Passage through the History of the South. Between 1964 and 1968, Mr. Gaillard
studied at Vanderbilt University, graduating with a major in history. After a
brief stint with the Associated Press in 1972, he joined the Charlotte Observer,
serving first as a staff writer, then as editorial writer and columnist and
finally as southern editor. He remained with this newspaper until 1990 when he
decided to pursue free-lance writing. During those years, Mr. Gaillard won
numerous awards for excellence in reporting including awards
from the North Carolina Press Association and the Associated Press. Among Mr.
Gaillard's books are several that bear directly on the Civil Rights
Movement, The Greensboro Four Civil Rights Pioneers, The Way We See It,
documentary , photography by the Children of Charlotte which he published with
his daughter Rachel and the Dream Long Deferred which detailed the landmark
school desegregation struggle in Charlotte. This book won the Gustavus Myers
Award for writing on the subject of human rights.
At present, Mr. Gaillard is working on a book detailing the Civil Rights
Movement here in Alabama. It will be titled, Cradle of Freedom, The History of
the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama.. It is scheduled to be published by the
University of Alabama Press in 2002.
We are pleased to have both interviewer and interviewee with us this evening.
Please join me in a warm welcome.
Frye Gaillard: We are happy to be here tonight to participate in this program. I
was fortunate to be here for one of the other programs, with Diane Dash on
September 13th two days after some fairly significant events in the world.
My wife and I were driving down and we thought there would be us and Diane Nash
at the auditorium, but it was an amazing turnout. It is a testament to the kind
of interest that you have in this community, in this subject and also to the
really well planned nature of the program that you have been fortunate to be a
part of, I think. I have been asked and have worked for the last two years
researching what the University of Alabama Press is calling a popular history of
the Civil Rights Movement. By that, they mean they want a journalist and a
storyteller rather than a historian to write about it and to keep it short. One
of things that I
have had the privilege of doing is talking to a lot of people who were foot
shoulders in the movement, people that I have never in many cases ever heard of.
I grew up in those days in Alabama and sort of came of age with an awareness of
what was going on in the state. There are so many people who have such rich
stories and one of those people are obviously the guest of honor here tonight,
John Hulett. I knew that I wanted to meet John Hulett ever since the time in the
early 1970's. I was working for the newspaper in Charlotte and I was doing
a story on the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the south in general and
one of the places I visited was Lowndes County. I remember driving down one of
the back roads in Lowndes County and Lowndes County has a lot of back roads. I
was passing this farmhouse and there was kind of a rutted two-lane path that led
up to the farmhouse and there was a black man sitting on the porch of this
farmhouse. So, I drove up to just see what he might have to say about the Civil
Rights Movement and the impact that it had on his life. He was a little
skeptical at first of this white stranger who had driven up to his place, but we
sat on the porch in these flimsy old aluminum chairs and we talked for a while
and began to connect, I think. We started to talk about the movement and the
impact that it had and I said, can you tell me what it has meant to you that the
Civil Rights Movement occurred in the south and in the state of Alabama. He
said, oh, that's an easy question to answer; the biggest difference it has
made in my life is that John Hulett is sheriff of Lowndes County and I
didn't know exactly what he meant and I said, well talk about this a little
bit more. What do you mean by that? He said, let me tell you a story and he told
me the story of the night that he was on his way home; this was a man named
Ervin Henson. He told me the story of a night that he was on his way
home and his car broke down on the side of the road. So, he had to leave it and
walk and this was not something that you wanted to happen in the pre-Civil
Rights days in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was walking by himself on the road
and a car with two deputy sheriffs passed by him. They pulled to a stop,
demanded what to know what he was doing and he just told them that he was on his
way home. They got out of the car and one of them clubbed him over the head with
a nightstick. They handcuffed his hands behind his back and pitched him bleeding
and semiconscious into the trunk of the police car. They drove around with him
in the trunk of car until it was almost dawn and what Mr. Henson said is that it
does not happen any more because John Hulett is sheriff of Lowndes County,
Alabama. And the more I began to talk to people about this, the more clear it
became that there were these sort of stages that the Civil Rights Movement went
through. You had this kind of feeling of daybreak in Montgomery with the
Montgomery Bus Boycott and the sort of first time that black people in a kind of
mass way took a stand for freedom and justice and actually accomplished
something and accomplished very tangible results. Of course, you had the freedom
rides where young black people and activists served noticed that there was no
place too terrifying for the movement to go and that violence would not overcome
nonviolence no matter what. You had Birmingham with the police dogs, the fire
hoses and those images that seared the conscious of people all over the country.
You had Selma and the Montgomery March that led to the most revolutionary single
change that the movement accomplished which was the right to vote for black
people everywhere. You also had these other struggles that were taking place in
Huntsville, Gadsden, Mobile, Tuskegee, Tuscaloosa and all of these other places
and you
had the struggle in the Blackbelt that John Hulett knows so well, which I think
the final movement was the victory over fear. If you were black... and I am
going to ask Judge Hulett about this in a minute. But, if you were black in
Lowndes County, Alabama, you lived with fear every single day of your life because
you knew that white people, if they chose, could do anything to you that they
wanted to almost with impunity, but at least the legal system would offer you no
protection whatsoever and in fact, in most cases, was part of the problem and
this is what they changed. This is the final stage of the movement and so that
is what we will get to tonight. The format that we are going to use is one that
neither John Hulett nor I would have thought of; I think I am safe in saying. I
was doing an interview with him in Hayneville at the courthouse and there was a
professor from Auburn who happened to be with me who was so fascinated by the
answers that I was getting to these questions that she said, you know, you guys
need to do this publicly. We need to take you to some of the schools in Alabama.
So, we tried it out before a couple of high school audiences and survived and we
figured that was about as tough a crowd as we could have and then we did it at
Auburn one time too. So, we are going to try it again tonight. Hopefully, it
will work and if you have questions, feel free either to jump in or when I
finish getting us started then I will kind of open it up to the audience and you
guys can ask whatever you would like to know as well. So, I just want to say
before I start what a privilege it is for me to be here with one of the genuine
heroes of this movement that you guys have been talking about.
Q: Judge Hulett, you grew up in the Blackbelt in the 1930s and 1940s. Talk a little bit about what it was like for black people in those
days in that part of Alabama. What are
some of your memories growing up then and do you agree with Ervin Henson and
others that it was a dangerous place to be if you were black?
A: Certainly, I do. I was born in 1927 in Gordonsville, Alabama; that's
close to the County Seat of Haynesville,
and during that time the entire county was farming country. Most people who lived
in that county were sharecroppers. You had to work on other folks plantation, if
you know what a sharecropper is, and when you work on peoples plantations you
had to do what they say do or you had to go or get killed or a thing of that
time, but I lived in Lowndes County and grew up there. I went to school at an
all black school and finished grammar school and high school. I came out of high
school in 1946, but it was a lot filth that went on during that time. I can
remember many times, at night times, we had a sheriff in that county, a real
nice brother and he would drive by, and if you were walking the road at night,
especially a few black boys walking the road, he would catch you and beat you. I
know one friend of mine whose brother went to school with us that he beat one
night and finally he died from that beating, but nothing was done about it; I
can remember that. Plenty people he would beat. He would walk up to a place that
if you had
a music box playing, he would just walk up and take his Billy stick and tear it
up and start
shooting at it. He was that type of person. Oto Mural was our sheriff and he
stayed in it as long as he wanted to. When he got ready to run for probate
judge, the people denied him the opportunity to be the probate judge, but they
wanted a man like that for sheriff.
Q: Now, in the those days, back in the 1930s, the Tenant Farmers Unit,
came into Lowndes County and tried to organize sharecroppers who were living in
conditions not very far removed from slavery. I remember talking to one elderly
man, Mr. Charles
Smith, who remembered that as a young man in Lowndes County we were working for
almost nothing and he talked about how they struck to try to get paid a dollar a
day and they walked out of the fields and the person who organized the strike at
the Bell plantation that he was part of was shot down by the sheriff of the
overseer in cold blood. Did you hear of those kind of stories when you were
growing up? Did you hear about that kind of thing?
A: Yes, I did. I talked to Mr. Lemon Bogen whose one of the persons who was
involved that. The late Lemon Bogen, he's dead now, but he also talked about how
bad it was and how people would beat up people and shoot individuals. This was
the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement when he started telling more about
most of this type stuff. He always said when you go out on these plantations be
careful cause they will kill you.
Q: So, when the Civil Rights Movement really started in Lowndes County, Alabama,
it was part of the collective memory of the people there and what could happen
to people who stood up for themselves? I mean, you knew that you were laying
your life on the line to do that?
A: This is true. I did know that.
Q: What do you think gave you the courage to do it? Was it some of the
experiences that you had at other places? I know you left Lowndes County for
awhile, worked in Birmingham, both in the Labor Movement and in the Civil Rights
Movement there. Did you learn things there that were important to you later on?
A: Yes, I did. In Birmingham I worked with, under the Rev. Shuttersworth and the most important
thing happened was the bombing of church, Arthur Shores house and Autherine Lucy
was trying
to enter into the University of Alabama. So, a few of us got together and would
sit guard at Arthur Shores house that night.
Q: Now, he was an attorney?
A: He was an attorney who represented Autherine Lucy and I can remember one night
sitting there about 3 o' clock in the morning and a shout would come out,
there's a car driving up with no lights on it. It was a police car and see
most of this stuff that went on was done by law enforcement officers or people
who they allowed to do what needed to be done. So, when we came out with those
guns in our hands. The lights came on the car and then they said they were just
checking to see how everything was. That was the beginning of it, but when I
went back to Lowndes County it was a whole different ball game because Lowndes
County was predominantly black as far as population but such a dangerous place
to be in during that time and we got back into Lowndes County. We had a few
people that tried to register to vote but was denied. There was not a single
registered voter in Lowndes County and in 1965, the first week in March, the
voter registration would be opened 2 days, the first and third week of the
month. We got about 65 people to go and get registered to vote. Most of them
were afraid to get out of there car when it they got to the courthouse, but
somebody had to have the courage, so I took the leadership to walk in the
courthouse and find out where to register at. The first thing l was told by one
of the registrars was that we have not permitted you all here, go down to the
old jail; that's where we going to register the people 2 weeks from now. I
immediately went to that old jail, went all through it and looked at the gallows
to see where they had been hanging people for years. You had to have that kind
of nerve. Two
weeks later, we went back to that jail and I happen to take the leadership and
carry the blind man along with me, the late Reverend Jesse Lawson. They passed
two of us that day out of about 25 or 30 people that went through it. They
passed me and they passed Reverend Lawson and you had to do answer questions on
those older tests at that time. One of the questions that they asked me I can
remember, what hospital the president had been in during that time. Now, there
are no televisions, very few radios in the radio in the neighborhood, but I did
remember it was Walter Reed Hospital and I said that and they passed me. I do
not think I passed the test, seriously. They passed me to get rid of me, but
every time the voter's registration was open I was back there again until
we were able to get enough people registered to vote.
Q: You had registered to vote in Birmingham when you lived there. ls that correct?
A: This is true. I registered to vote in Birmingham.
Q: So, some of the experiences that you had in Birmingham were kind of things
that you imported back to Lowndes County?
A: That's right.
Q: I know one of the interviews that I did recently you mentioned Reverend
Shuttlesworth. He tells the story of Christmas night, 1956, right after the end
of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and he had announced that the next day, December
26th, he was going to ride in front of the bus in Birmingham. He was lying in his
bed and the parsonage of his house and 14 sticks of dynamite went off on the
comer of the house right under the bed where he was lying. The floor collapsed
and the ceiling collapsed but fell just short of where he was. He felt himself
falling through the floor to the ground,
landed on the bed and he said later that he felt like he was landing in the arms
of God and if he had ever been afraid until then, he was never afraid again. I
am guessing that kind of example of courage inspired you to look inside yourself
for the kind of courage that you have because you had to have it in Lowndes County.
A: Yes. You had to have it in Lowndes County. I lived about almost a mile and a
half off the main road. If you have ever lived in the country, you did not have
cattle gaps because the drive crossed the cattle gap. You would have to open
three gates before you get my house and that was the most fearful thing that
somebody might be lying out in the weeds waiting on you. When you open this
gate, they could ambush you, but it never happened to me. I kept God in the
front and I kept doing what I needed to do to make life better for the people in
our country.
Q: One of things that happened in a lot of places during the Civil Rights
Movements was that in every case there were local people who were there to take
a stand. They would stand up for what was right, what was just and what was
decent and fair, but there was also in many cases people who came in from the
outside to encourage people. I want to talk about two of the people who came
into Lowndes County. One of them was Stokeley Carmichael and the other was
Jonathan Daniels. Now, there were others too who were every important and we
have talked about them as well, but let's take those in order. Give us your
recollection of Stokely Carmichael, one of the toughest organizers in SNCC; I
think its fair to say. What was your impression of him as a person, a human
being, an organizer and a leader and how well did you get to know him?
A: Just like a brother because he had worked around me quite a bit. I think
Stokely was a great person. He had worked in Mississippi with the movement there
and when he came into Lowndes County he knew he had an uphill journey. We worked
close together and that is why we organized the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization. Every place they would go into they was looked at by state
troopers every were they went. I remember one incident that took place. One day,
there was a group of people that decided to picket in Fort Deposit, Alabama.
They arrested about 20 people in that area. Stokely was a passenger in a car and
during that same day was arrested and charged with reckless driving as a
passenger. So, you can see how bad they wanted Stokely Carmichael. He was a great
person. He was a great organizer. He stayed with the people in the community and
we worked together to try to make Lowndes County better. We had organized the
Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. If you can remember the
movement in Birmingham; it was the Alabama Christian Movement. So, the day we
went over to get registered and was denied that right, Dr. King came over, but
we didn't see him, we went down that night and organized the Lowndes County
Christian Movement of Human Rights. I was chosen temporary chairman of that
group until we was able to have a mass meeting and the people decided to go
ahead and keep me there, but this was the beginning of it.
Q: Now, there were people who later came to regard Stokely Carmichael as a
violent person. Did you think of him that way?
A: No sir. He was not a violent person. I never saw him do anything violent to
anybody. He would speak up, but he would not threaten anybody or talk about
killing or all that type stuff.
Q: And that was most emphatically your experience with him in Lowndes County.
A: This is true.
Q: Okay. Let's talk about Jonathan Daniels a little bit, a white, Episcopal
seminarian who came to Lowndes County and did not get out alive. What was your
view of Jonathan Daniels?
A: He was a great person. He was interested in what was going on. He did not try
to do anything wrong. The day that they had this picket in Fort Deposit, Alabama
(that's the largest town in the county) he joined that group without my
knowledge. I was in Fort Deposit, but I did not know he was going to be a part
of that group and it was dangerous for any white to join the black in Fort
Deposit. When got there that morning in town, they had every police officer they
could get and everything, just waiting. In a moment, if they made about 10
steps, they were arrested and out in a two-cell jail with 20 something people.
They had to get a dump truck. You know what a dump truck is. The one with the
side bars on it. They put them on that dump truck and put a black police officer
and brought them in. This was when Stokely was arrested. He was not in that picket. They wanted him so bad.
I am going to be honest with you. There were two pickup trucks and everywhere
they would go, one of the trucks would get in the front. If they would make a
right into them, the one behind would get in the front and just hit breaks all
of a sudden until it made them bump them. When they bumped them, the police
arrested them and put both of them in jail and
charged them with reckless driving. I have a record of that showing that 2
people got charged for reckless driving in the same automobile, but this was the
type of situation we lived in that day and time. There were white people that
walked around with shotguns. I can never forget that day. I went to the town
hall to try to make arrangements with the chief to try and get them out of jail.
I could not get anybody to go with me, but I finally took the same car they were
driving and drove it to the town hall and waited there while and carried another
fellow. There was 14 people and I am not going to lie to you sitting on the
sidewalk with shotguns, rifles and pistols.
Q: White people?
A: White people and they all came inside when the chief of police came in. He
wanted to know what I wanted and I told him that I wanted to try to make bond to
get Stokely out of jail because I believe they would kill him there. He said no
that I could not get him out of jail he is up in Lowndes County and I can never
forget the last man. A double barrel shotgun passed by and I rolled my pistol on
the floor and he almost ran over the next man. I can remember that just like
daylight today and I found out then it has to be a group of you doing it to do
it like it ought to be done. You know what I'm saying. They were afraid
themselves, but they were out there doing these types of things. Stokely stayed
in jail; that was on a Saturday. On Wednesday, I went by the jailhouse and
carried food to feed the people that they took to jail. Some of them we made
bond, except for Stokely and one or two more. On a Friday evening, I went to
Montgomery and when I came back the town was full of police officers and other
white people. Black folks were afraid to speak to me almost when I got out of
the car on the comer at the intersection. I asked
what was going on. Why were all of these people were in town? They said, they
killed those two white preachers. That's what they said. They had killed
Jonathan Daniels. They first shot and killed him and the second shot hit Father
Marshall from the back and it took 12 hours to operate on him at St. Jude
Hospital, but he finally lived from it. I have had seven meetings with him since
that time. This was the kind of conditions we had to live in during that time.
Q: How were you able to persuade the average person in Lowndes County that it
was possible to change a situation that went as deeply as this one went, where
white supremacy was defended as completely by violence and any means necessary?
How did you convince people that it was possible to make a change?
A: We were meeting together in groups. We were having mass meetings and we would
speak to them from those mass meetings. He gave a lot of courage to people that
they could overcome what was going on. We would talk about what was going on. We
would go on plantations on a daily basis. I quit my job and the movement paid
me. The Lowndes County Christian Movement gave me a salary to work.
Q: How much was that?
A: My salary was 25 dollars every first Sunday; that is a month. I did not work
long hours. I just worked about 9 or 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. When I went
on plantations, bosses were there. You had to have a lot of courage to stand up.
I would carry about one or two ladies around with me, most times just riding
with me. I would speak up and be straight with people. I was able to get a lot of
things done when I started doing that. People would go out and get registered.
They just believed that I was doing
the right thing. Not only me, but there were other people in the movement as
well, like the Jackson family, Mattie Lee Murrell; these were older people. They
were strong. They stood up and decided to go ahead and go out and register to
vote. They wanted to change life for their children and ourselves.
Q: One of the people that I interviewed in Lowndes County was a SNCC organizer
who came in there by the name of Bob Mantz and he still lives there. I was
asking him where he found the courage to do the things that he had to do. He
said it was so terrifying. There were times when he could barely make himself do
the things that he needed to do. He said it was so terrifying. _in Lowndes County that there were time he could barely make himself do what he needed to do. I said, where did you find the courage and he
said it came from the people of Lowndes County. He told me the story of going to
this house where an elderly black woman, almost 100 years old, was bedridden.
She was lying in a bedroom off from the living room where he was talking to
other people in the family. He heard this frail voice saying tell that boy to
come in here; I want to talk to him. So, he went in to talk to this old lady.
She looked up at him and she pointed this bony finger at him from her bed and
she said, I have been praying that you boys would come into Lowndes County ever
since I saw you march around Mr. Lincoln's grave. Of course, what she meant
was that she had seen the march on Washington on television and had been praying
that people would come into Lowndes County and trigger a movement in Lowndes
County. Bob Mantz said and what I have heard you say as well is that the courage
of average people became contagious after awhile. People just held each other
help. That is the example from you and other some other people.
A: This is true. At the same time, there were people who worked on the
plantations. If you were hoeing, you made 25 cents a day and if you were on you
got 50 cents a day. We started telling people to go to Montgomery and get jobs
and start making life better for them. So, that gave them a lot of courage to
come out and do what needed to be done. That made a difference. I want to say
one other thing. When Stokely got arrested in Prattville I was suppose to have
gone over with him, but I had another speaking engagement with a group of folks
in my county. He got arrested the next morning. A young lady called me, a school
teacher named Ms. Darby Henson. She said, come ride over to Prattville with me.
When I got over there, Stokely was in jail. I drove up to the chief of police
and asked him could I walk down the hill to one of the Civil Rights workers;
they are in a housing house. He said, go ahead but do not stay long. I walked
just a short distance and when I looked out of the window he had a carbine rifle
punching her in the car, and that was the most hurting thing I have ever seen in
my life. So, I came back out. They had the National Guards. State troopers were
over there. When I came back out, the punch did not hit me, but they punched
after me until I got to the car. I got in the back seat of the car on the
passenger's right side. The same person opened the car door and punched me
in the face. If l had not snatched by head, I would have broken my jawbone. I
made up my mind. I am going to say this because I am serious about it; I was
going to get him if I had to burn his house down, his wife and children. Let me
be serious with you. I went home that night and prayed about it. It looked like
the Lord just came to me like daylight and said do not do that; that is not the
way to do it. I did not do it. I prayed about it and things changed for us.
Sometimes, you cannot take on violence
because you believe you ought to do something. You cannot make a fast decision,
just pray about it, but I was punched in the face. A few months later I had a
gun in the shop.I went to Montgomery to get the gun out the shop. I had to go up to a
lawyer's office. I got on the elevator. Now, I do not even know the man
because I never seen him before who punched me in the face. So, when I got on
that elevator, he was on that elevator and he came off running like a . The
people over there were saying what is going on. I said, do not worry about
it' everything is okay. I am not going to bother him. When you treat people
wrong, it will come back to you. The next time I got a chance to see him was at
the University of Alabama. Everybody was introducing themselves. I was just
elected sheriff. When it got around to him, he was sitting across the big
conference table and he gave his name in front of me, but he never was able to
come back and say I am sorry and that is a bad thing. When you do wrong, you
ought to do it. While I am telling it, I want to tell this incident. In 1983, in
the line of duty, I got shot in the back by a black man who was on drugs.
Q: You were sheriff?
A: I was sheriff. One of my deputies reached to shoot him closer than this
gentleman over here. I told him not to shoot him. If he was shooting to kill
that man and made a mistake and killed somebody else, he would have done more
harm than it helped good. After he went to the penitentiary and stayed awhile, I
never signed papers to keep him in, I met him one morning after he had gotten
out and we out our arms around each one other and forgot about everything. A few
months later, I married him to a girl from Pratt, Alabama. I think this is the
type of life you have to do. I think about Jesus Christ, who
died on the cross for our sins. If we are going to hold things against one
another the rest of our lives, white or black, we are wrong. There was an elder
man who was part of our movement by the name of Mr. Calan Hayes. We would call
him CC Hayes. He always said, John whatever you all do, do not try to do evil
for evil to people, not even to us. He passed away a few months ago, but I thank
God for that type of thing. We have tried to live right.
Q: Let's talk about this whole idea of the changes in Lowndes County and
the whole idea of forgiveness and fairness once those changes happened, two
questions about that. First of all, in 1966, you ran for sheriff for the first
time under the banner of what some people called the Black Panther Party. Now,
that was not literally the name of the party, but the emblem of the party was
the black panther. Talk about the symbolism of that party, why you ran under
that banner and then we will move on to the next question which has to do with
when you were elected in 1970.
A: Let me say this, I did not run. I was head of the Lowndes County Christian
Movement and in 1966 when we got ready to run candidates the Democratic Party,
if you can remember, had over the banner white supremacy for the . There was a
50 dollar fee to qualify for sheriff. When we got ready to run, a black man
Sidney Logan, Jr., they went to 500 dollars. So, we immediately decided to
organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and we had to have a symbol,
like the rooster was for the Democratic Party or the elephant was for the
Republican Party. We organized the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and we
had to come up with a symbol. We kind of kicked names around and we came up with
the black panther. The reason why we did
this is because the black panther is not a violent animal but when you push it
to a corner, it will come out and do whatever it has to do. If you lived in
Lowndes County, you better had something to let folks know you were serious
about it. So, we chose that black panther for the party. We lost the election in
1966 and something happened to us. If you can remember, in California, there was
a group who was in Lowndes County doing the election in 1966.
Q: Huey Newton and some others?
A: Huey Newton. They went back to California and got their guns and things.
They would get in their cars and follow a policeman around and one of them
finally killed a police officer according the records. Because of that, we just
decided that the emblem of the black panther was not the best thing for Lowndes
County people. We did not want anyone to get hurt in Lowndes County because of
what they were doing in California. Dr. John Cashin, from Huntsville,
Alabama, came down to Lowndes County and Green County and we got together and
organized the NOPA and used the eagle for our symbol and nobody said a word
about that. Logan lost in 1966 and in 1970, I ran for sheriff under the National
Democratic Party. I won by 210 votes because a lot of our people were afraid to
vote for me because there was a thing out that they were going to kill John
Hulett if he wins within 3 days after I was elected. I had to go to a lot of
these old people that I had trusted in and that loved me because they did not
want to see me die. So, I said go ahead and vote for me. I will live if have to
stay in the woods 3 days. After that, I won 5 more elections without having any
problems whatsoever with white or black.
Q: That is right. It was not you that lost in 1966. It was Sidney Logan and then
you ran in 1970. In terms of the kind of spirit that you brought to the Office
of Sheriff after you were elected in 1970, the spirit of justice rather than
revenge, talk a little bit about your relationship. I think it is a great
illustration of this point with Tom Coleman. Tom Coleman was the man who killed
Jonathan Daniels, blew him away with a shotgun in cold blood at point blank
range in the summer of 1965. Can you tell the story about just before you were
running for sheriff that Tom Coleman drove up to you on the square in
Hayneville? Tell people about your story.
A: He drove over to the square in Hayneville and said John, would you mind
riding with me to Lonsborough. Here is the guy who just killed one person and
shot the other. I had to show him that I had enough courage to get in that car
without a gun or anything. I stepped in that car because I did not think that
anybody could do anything to me for driving the car and being up there with him.
We rode to Lonsborough and we talked about the incident and what took place. The
first thing that he said was that people pushed him in a corner to do this. You
know, there was people who encourage him to do this; that is what he was saying.
The next thing, which I would not have done to any black, he was trying to do
this to white people to keep them out of Lowndes County and from helping us and
to slow the process down. This is what this was all about. I told him then that
I was going to run for sheriff and I would appreciate it if he vote for me. He
said, well I cannot vote for you, but I know you are going to win it. After I
won the sheriff race in Lowndes County, he was one of people that kept a monitor
in his house. He would call me on a daily and nightly basis. He would let me
know that the troopers
were trying to get up with me and that I got some debris on the highway. He
would get on the road with me at 2 o'clock in the morning. He would clean
up the highways. He had done that for me. I think that sometimes you have to
live the kind of life that the Lord wants you to live and treat folks like human
beings. I never was afraid of him. I worked with his son as a state trooper and
an investigator, but this is the type of thing that I have done. I think the
best thing in the world to do is let people know that you are not afraid of
them, but you are going to do the right thing; black or white, it did not make a
difference.
Q: Would you say this man became a friend of yours?
A: Yes. He became one of the best friends I had as far as letting me know what
was going on and talking to me on a regular basis. He had done that.
Q: Why do you think he did that?
A: I think it could have been out of fear. He could have thought I was going to
try and pay him back. A lot of things could have happened. I can never forget. I
want to say this while I am talking. I went into Fort Deposit and I walked into
a drug store. There were 11 or 12 women in that store and one man who was
filling prescriptions. While I was in there, there was a guy who walked around
on the outside all the time with a 38 on him with a .Just as I started out of
the door, the main way to school, until I got almost to the door like this here,
he walked in and said who is your damn so and so and cussing on. Those women
were running out of that door. Two or three were trying to get out at the same
time. I looked around at the man who was filling the prescription and I would
not lie, he was shaking and trembling so the pee was falling on
the floor. Somebody has to have some courage. So, I turned around and walked
back in there with him wherever he went.
Q: The man with the gun?
A: Yes. You might shoot me, but you are not going to shoot me in the back. I am
going to take this gun from you or you are going to have to shoot me right. I
walked back in the store with him for about 5 minutes. He never said another
word; I just took his nerve. I finally picked up a bar of candy, paid for it and
walked out. He, the drugstore man and I were the only 3 people in there. I never
had another word from him. Later, he pulled a gun and said he would never let a
nigger arrest him. He pulled a gun on a black man in Fort Deposit and that next
morning I got to work after the warrant was signed, he came into the office with
Mr. Tom Coleman. That is smart. You understand what I am saying. He believed
that Tom Coleman could straighten out some things. I made him sign his bond. I
fingerprinted him and told him to make sure you show up in court when time to
come and I did not have anymore problems. I never heard another word from him,
but he did go to court. These were the types of situations you had to live in.
It did not make any difference whether you were right or wrong, white or black;
you had to do what was right. I stood my ground the whole time I was in the
sheriffs office. I did not care what color he was. If you committed a crime, you
went to jail. I would call you and if you did not come, I would go get you.
Q: Did you ever have any dealings with George Wallace when you were sheriff?
A: Truthfully, I had dealings with George Wallace. George Wallace turned out to
be one of my best friends. The first time I became sheriff he had a parade in
Greenville and I
was the only black sheriff in that parade. I can remember walking by him and he
gave me some of his material. Every time I would go to their captain for
anything, he would say, sheriff what you want. I had a small staff when I
started as sheriff. There was only 3 people. I went up one day and said I need a
larger staff and he said okay and tell your representative to come by. I told me
my representative, but he did not go by. Two weeks later, I got a check from him
to pay for another deputy. That was the kind of person he was and whenever I
would come around he would get up and take a picture with me. He would call my
house on the weekend and when I got shot, he would call my wife every weekend,
Friday night, and tell her how sorry he was, whatever he could do to help he would do it. This was
the kind of person George Wallace turned out to be with John Hulett. I was not
no Uncle Tom, but I was just doing the right thing.
Q: Before we open it up to everybody else's questions, as you look back on
the experiences that you had in Lowndes County and the impact that the movement
had in Lowndes County and other places in Alabama, what is your bottom line
summary of those days. What do you feel was accomplished? To what extent was the
movement successful and to what extent did it fall short of what you had hoped for?
A: Let me refer back to two things. If you all remember, in the state of
Alabama, the only people who served on jurors in the state of Alabama were men.
There were very few black men in places like Lowndes County. It was Lowndes
County who went to Montgomery and filed a suit, White versus Crooks to allow
women to serve as jurors in the state of Alabama.; that originated in Lowndes
County, Alabama. The first place they camped out in Lowndes County when they
came in was Rose Steel's property. Her
granddaughter was the individual who , Ardenia White. So, that is why women are
serving today in the state of Alabama. We also had the justice of peace system
in the state of Alabama. Most of you might remember the justice of peace. Every
county had a justice of peace. In Lowndes County, one day, I was arrested and
charged with reckless driving. I went straight to the justice of peace office
and said, what would it cost me for this ticket. He said, it was going to cost
you 100 dollars and 11 dollars court cost. Excuse me for the expression, but I
said I will die and go to hell before I pay it. He said, you can get ready. Next
week, I went to Montgomery, attorney Salman Say's office, and talked to him
about it cause every justice of peace fine you give them, they get 5 dollars out
it. I went to federal court and that is why they do not have any justice of
peace in the state of Alabama today. The judge ruled in our favor. That was
helpful to the state of Alabama and the woman serving on jury was helpful. There
was a number of other things that took place in that county. People were able to
hold public office who had never held public office. We got plenty of them now,
men and women, not only in Lowndes County but in surrounding counties because of
our courage and things that we have done. I have gone into other counties and
our joining county, Wilcox County has a black sheriff. When he got ready to run,
I encouraged him to run. I went down and spoke for him and he won that election
and he has been there ever since. It is a lot you can do to help other people if
you would do it. Today, we are still working hard trying to make life better for
the people in our county. Let me say this. I am retired now and I could not run
for probate judge because of my age, but each morning of my life I get up now
and go out and do something for somebody. I pick up aluminum cans off the street
and give to the
scholarship fund to help children to go to college. I have a group that takes
care of it. I plant gardens so there are plenty vegetables to give folks who
cannot afford to work. The older people who cannot cut there yards, I cut there
yards free. If you need a ramp built or a wheelchair or something, I go out and
do it free for people. This is the type of life I live today. God has blessed
and I reach out and try to help others. I want to advise all of you, let's
try to do the same thing.
Q: I think maybe this is a good time to open it up to questions that people out
there may have, things that they want to ask Judge Hulett.
A: Okay go ahead.
Q: If you want to ask them, I will repeat the questions just in case everyone
cannot hear you. Do you consider the adverse situations that you faced in
Lowndes County, the opposition that you faced when you tried to stand up for
what was right, to be state terrorism against the people of Lowndes County?
A: This is true as I have said it to a lot of young people lately because I go
out and talk to them. I am use to terrorism. We have had it in our county. We
have had it in Birmingham and we have had it in other places. When the people
crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge, there was terrorism. When I was punched in the
face in Prattville, there was terrorism. We did not have any killing. That was
the only difference; it was on a small scale. There was a time in Pratt City,
Alabama; I was living in Birmingham. One night, there was like 15 young people
who wanted to see the Klan walk up Highbuyon Avenue. I took them out there to
show them and they had their robes and everything on. They asked me who are
these people. I said, these are the same people that you are trading with in
stores on an
every day basis, most of them are, but they are Klan men. Do not be afraid
because you are with me. As we stood there, they drove by singing the Dixie song
or a thing of that type with the lights on in the car. These are the type things
I have gone through for years. I am not afraid and I try to be straight with my
people and say everybody was not wrong, but there were a few people who would do
anything. In terrorism, you are going to reap what you sow, so we need to work
together and try to save our people instead of trying to destroy them.
Q: How many people, African-American people in Lowndes County, did it take
before there was sort of a help factor where you felt you were going to succeed.
You started out with a little group. How big did the group get?
A: Each Sunday night, we would have our mass meeting in groups. We did not have
a church large enough to hold us after a few months when we would go in the
county. The question was some churches were afraid for us to go in because they
thought someone would burn their churches. There was not church burning in
Lowndes County, if you remember. There were 2 or 3 churches going in Lowndes
County. We had a poverty program burned and one day a white church burned. I was
at the University of Wisconsin at that time. This white church burned and no
more burning take place in Lowndes County. That is the sad thing, but that took place.
Q: In all of your trials of getting registered voters, where was the Federal
Government at this time. At one time, I read an article that you recruited a
bunch of
registered voters. (inaudible)
A: They came down, but let me be honest with you all. On the first election in
1966, they would be standing out there. I think they were scary and most black
folks were. I am
serious. I can remember in the area in 1966 when they had the election,
somebody cut the lights off in the building. Let me tell you, everybody just
froze. Stokely and them were there and they went out and turned the lights on
their cars, but those federal agents were just as afraid as anything else. They
would not say anything. Several white people that I know brought the people that
worked on their plantation in with them and went in and voted their ballots for
them. That is why we worked to get that law changed where you could not help
your boss man. Now, you can help anybody you want, but your phone cannot help
you. If you work for a company, your boss man cannot help you raise the vote in
the state of Alabama. We had to get that changed and it was Lowndes County who
played the biggest part in that. People were evicted off their plantation
because they registered to vote and we put tents out there on highway 80 and
tried to be fair to people. We did everything we could until there were able to
acquire land to move into. We filed a suit to stop the evictions. That is the
only suit that we lost. Q: Did you know Viola Liuzzo and what are your
recollections of her, of so?
A: I did not know here but shortly after she got killed, I go to meet her family
on several occasions. Her son came down and stayed in the county for awhile, but
I did not know her personally.
Q: If you ever have a chance to go to the National Voting Rights Museum in
Selma, there is a wall in the museum that I believe is called, I was there wall
or the we were there wall or something like that. The people who played some
role in the movement signed a
little sleep of paper and tacked it to the wall. One of the most touching things
on that wall is the daughter of Viola Liuzzo who about a year ago visited the
museum and said my mother was here and that is just on the wall there. It is
really interesting to see.
Q: Do you think that was a turning point in getting national attention to the
movement? A: It was a turning point to get lots of attention because people came
in. Even at that, Jonathan Daniels was killed after that but remember he got
acquitted in court and that is the hurting thing. You understand what I am
saying. The Klan killed her and did not anything come from that. The person that
was prosecuted in that case stood up in the court and said if she would have
stayed in Detroit, Michigan she would have been alive today. There were very few
blacks there because they were afraid to go in that court room at night time.
Now, if you are prosecuting somebody and get up and say that, what do suspect a
jury to do? This is the type of representation we had.
Q: Stokely Carmichael had started an organization called The All African Peoples
Revolutionary Party. It took a strong standing in the (inaudible).
A: He did do that, but he did not do that in our county. He never did that in
Lowndes County. He never had any confrontation with the police.
Q: Stokely Carmichael founded an organization. Say the name of the organization again.
A: The All African Peoples Revolutionary Party.
Q: With The All African Revolutionary Party, did that have an effect on your
relationship with Stokely?
A: No, it did not because he did not do any of that stuff in Lowndes County. He
respected the police officers and Arthur Stickwicker did as well.
Q: There years that you we re involved with the Bloody Lowndes in your county,
can you tell us a little bit about your personal life. Did you have a family and
how did this impact your family during the year. Then, I understand that there
was some type of sanitary land field plan underway within the last couple of
years that may effect or impact the tourism and trade in Lowndes County with
respect to the Edmund Pettis Bridge and the Selma March in November. Can you
talk a little bit about that?
A: Okay, let me be honest with you. I have some children who lived with me
during that time. My son is a probate judge now who lived in Lowndes County.
They were too young to vote, but it did not affect them because we did not have
any real decent jobs no way, we were just out there working. We were trying to
make life better for them to go to school. When they first integrated the school
in Hayneville, they sent 6 kids to school that year. One of my sons went to
school and he had some problems with some of the white kids stepping on his
heels. One night, I got in my car and drove to the father's house. I said
to him, your son is stepping on my son's heels and I do not want it to
happen again because I may have to stop that bus on the road and get him off
there and it never happened again. I was the sheriff. I being straight with you
all about it. This is a little incident that happened. Let me be honest about
this land field that we have. This land field is off the Civil Rights trail.
People are dumping trash on the highways. Lowndes County was not a pretty place
until I started cleaning it up when I retired from the sheriffs office. The
white people in Lonsborough did not want it and they had a few blacks with them
to help to keep it out. I do not think that land field would do anything wrong
to Lowndes County as long as it does its problem like it ought to be done. People
will be buried under the ground, like 40 feet deep, and within the next 200
years I do not think there will be problem whatsoever.
Q: Is that a divisive issue in Lowndes County? Do people disagree about that?
A: There are a few people that disagreed about it, just a few. It was mostly
people who lived right in Burksville. I remember one night I said to them, you
are not concerned about the Civil Rights trail. If you were concerned about the
Civil Rights trail, why did you not help us get registered to vote or a thing of
that type. You understand what I am saying. These are the same folks who guessed
everything now concerned about the Civil Rights trail. It is a money thing that
they are looking at now.
Q: Have you written or will you right about how the majority of the city of
Alabama was able to tolerate injustice in such a way that it brings up today
what they are willing to do now which is stand up against injustice.
A: I think that to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Civil Rights
Movement you have to understand that the majority of white citizens in the state
of Alabama were complicit, if not cutting-edge practitioners of the injustices
that were inflicted on black people. It was absolutely pervasive. I am very
aware of this because I grew up in Alabama in a family that was very much a part
of the status quo in Alabama. So, it is really easy to see that the system of
segregation that was in place in Alabama could not have survived without the
active support of the overwhelming majority of white people in the state of
Alabama. I think there is a sense in which white people were liberated by the
Civil Rights Movement as well because people of my generation were certainly
coming along and you had to decide what we thought about it. It was such a
powerful reality and it was inescapable. So, you had to ask yourself what is
really going on here. I remember when I was about 16 years old I was in
Birmingham on a high school trip and I happen to be walking along one afternoon
with no idea of anything that was going on. I was not paying attention to what
was going on in the world and I walked up upon the arrest of Martin Luther King,
the first time he was arrested in Birmingham. I remembered it actually
incorrectly. I remembered at first that he was wearing overalls. He was not. He
was wearing a denim work shirt and blue jeans. It was almost that way, but I do
remember, like I have a picture of it in my head, the look on his face as the
policeman bodily carried him pass where I was standing and it was a look of not
fear. His eyes seemed to me to be very sad but kind of stoic all at the same
time. There was a dignity about him on that occasion that stood in such
incredible contrast with the kind of bullying attitude that the policeman had on
that occasion. As a 16-year-old white kid, it was a jarring imaging to behold
and it was something that I never forgot. It made you ask in a very personal
way, what is going on here. It was easy to know who you wanted to identify with
in that particular situation. So, one of the things that I am very interested in
and this is a long answer to your question, but one of the things I am very
interested in is the impact that the Civil Rights Movement had on white people,
people of my generation and other people as well because I think that the white
citizenry in the state of Alabama had a long way to go. I think we were
compelled to move by events that happened by the example of courage that we saw,
so I think that is an important part of the story that I certainly want to try
to touch on. Now, did we go as far as we need to go? I mean obviously not. We
are still struggling with that issue. I was talking to some reporters
today at the paper. We were talking about why it is that we have not made as
much progress as we have maybe hoped we would. I think to me it is the cutting
edge of civilization. It is sort of the frontier of civilization. The people who
are not exactly alike are still trying to learn how to live in peace and
proximity with each other, if they are even trying at all. Amazingly enough, we
are probably doing a better job of it here than they are in most places because
you look at the Middle East, Northern Ireland or all these other places and
people struggle with that. We will continue to struggle with it here, but we
have more tools now because of the example of people in the Civil Rights
Movement. Q: I was a new comer to Alabama. We came here in 1965 and this whole
situation has really stressed me a lot and (inaudible) but nowhere else is it
quite so legal. So, I thought perfectly well that this is of people like you,
although I had a very culture when I came here. I also said to my brother who
called me and said (inaudible) how are you managing this and how will it turn
out. I said that I truly believe that we will solve our problems as soon as
everybody else, so do not worry. I mean it is a bad situation, but I know that
the people that I know so well will find a way to let this happen. I was feeling very
----- at some times during it, off and on. I also participated in the long line
that were lining up to vote after the federal government interceded and it was
kind of a
interesting mess. If you remember, you had to have a registered voter stand with
everybody that was going to vote and every body was getting curious because they
had 3 tests that were not hard but it took more time and we did not have anymore
time allotted to us. So, it was a pretty interesting time for me and I helped
the best way that I could to be helpful, the best way I knew how to. I am glad
that I was here to do it.
Q: Any response you want to make to that.
A: I am not sure. I could not hear everything that she was saying. It was pretty
rough, true enough. I could remember the times that we had to have a white to
vote for a black. You could not find a white to vote for a black. After they
started registering, we did not have to do that in Lowndes County. You did not
have to have anybody to vote for you. That was some our problems we were having.
The voter registrar did not assist on that. The federal came down and registered
most of our people in out county.
Q: Was lynching a part of your community also?
A: There were many people that were lynched or had things done to them. I do not
know much about that, but there were people that were lynched in Lowndes County
not during the Civil Rights Movement but before that time. Once we organized,
there were no blacks killed by whites except one person and that was before I
took office. He was killed because he was hunting rabbits. The dog went across
the county line. They shot and killed him and tried the case. That was the first
case tried when I got there and they found him guilty. They charged him 100
dollars and a year's probation. This is the kind of thing that happened.
This was a white guy who killed a black guy and they charged him 100 dollars
plus court cost and a year's probation.
Q: How much would it help if they rewrote the constitution in the state of
Alabama. Would that kind of blanket or help throughout out the state if the
constitution itself was dealt with?
A: I was in a meeting not long ago and the Alabama New South Coalition was
trying to put a committee together to start doing this with the state
legislatures, but it may help some. You can rewrite all you want to, but it has
to come from the inside of your heart.
Q: There are many of the young people today that do not seem to have the right
stuff? I would like to know what would be your message to them.
A: Those of us who understand what the Civil Rights mean we should go into our
communities sit down and talk to our young folks and try to encourage them to do
the right thing. Our churches ought to be a part of doing that.
Q: Was Lowndes County as violent as it was because black people outnumbered
white people by the margin that they did? We have come a long way, but we still
have a long way to go. What, in your opinion, do we still need to do or still
need to accomplish?
A: I am going to give you a number of incidents that people have just killed
people. There were a group of folks from Birmingham one time that came down to
move somebody off of a plantation. They killed a guy on a Saturday or Sunday
night and rode around in a truck and that Monday they were riding around that
courthouse on the back of the truck and nothing was done about it, but this is
the kind of thing that happened. If something happened in your family like, you
would get afraid. I knew other people that would go out and hunt. I had a cousin
that went out one night just hunting. The guys ran up on him hunting in the
woods and started shooting under his feet and made him dance all night long.
This is the kind of thing that went on in Lowndes County, but in order to change
this we are going to have to come together and let drugs go. That is one of the
things that is ending us now. Drugs are getting to most of our people. Stop committing
crimes, stay out of trouble, go to the polls and register to vote and start
treating one another like they are human beings. Black or white, we are going to
have to start doing that together or we will never move on.
Q: Is there still racial tension between blacks and whites in Lowndes County today.
A: There may be a few older people. It may not show up around me, but it may
show up around a few people. Most people, when you treat folks right, they do
not have any problems. I can go any place in Lowndes County in almost anybody
house and I do not have any problems.
Q: And when you have ran for office, you have gotten considerable white votes?
A: At this age, I am 73 years old. I will be 74, November 19th and I wish it was
this month. I have had more than 1800 people to call me already and talk to me.
I believe I could go back and run for sheriff again. I don't why, but this
is something. Let me say this. If someone burglarize a community, a house, a
church I get out and work on it night and day until that person has come to
justice just about. If somebody has shoot somebody or cut somebody, they are
going to jail and everybody knows that. I do not know what is happening to the
sheriff and bothering other folks now, but I try to do what is right for the
people in our county. I guess that is why they want me back. They are not trying
to get me back because I am going to let them do something wrong. If it is a
drug dealer in town, he better leave. He better get his stuff and go to some
other county. I believe that is what we out to do. They have a drug task force
and I want to be sure I get with that drug task force if I am successful in
winning and try to get them to do a much better than what they been doing and
get these drug dealers out of time.
Q: Will you run again?
A: If my health holds up, my name will be on the ballot.
Closing: Well, Sheriff Hulett thank you for sharing these stories with us
tonight. We really appreciate it.
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Digitized VHS tape of "Bloody Lowndes and the Black Panther Party".
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John Hulett and Frye Gaillard are the speakers in this lecture given at University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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2001-11-01
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1:21:21
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en
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Alabama A & M University
University of Alabama in Huntsville
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University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections
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2000-2009
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Hulett, John,1927-2006
Gaillard, Frye, 1946-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Hayneville (Ala.)
Lowndes County
Voter registration
Black power
African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.
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Lectures
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MP4
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/390">Bloody Lowndes and the Black Panther Party - Speakers: John Hulett and Frye Gaillard - Transcription of Tape 8, 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/402">VHS Tape of: Bloody Lowndes and the Black Panther Party - Speakers: John Hulett and Frye Gaillard, 2001-11-01. Box 2, Tape 8</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.
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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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University
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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Digitized transcription of 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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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>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama
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Text
The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
UAH The University of Alabama in Huntsville
"Bloody Lowndes" and the Black Panther Party
Speaker: John Hulett, Frye Gaillard
I am Sherry Marie Shuck, Assistant Professor of History at UAH. \Velcome to the
ninth installment of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 14-week symposium
centered around a series of public lectures, panels and first-hand account of significant
events taking place in the state of Alabama. This series is held alternately at UAH and
Alabama A&M University. After three years of planning, this unique intellectual project
is a joint venture between Alabama A&M University and the University of Alabama in
Huntsville. The members of the Steering Committee in alphabetical order are: Mitch
Berbrier ofUAH, John Dimrnock ofUAH, Jack Ellis ofUAH, James Johnson of AAMU,
Carolyn Parker of AAMU and Lee Williams, II, of UAH. Throughout its work. the
planning committee has also been greatly assisted by the efforts of Joyce Maples of
UAH's University Relations.
We ask that you complete an evaluation form for this program and leave it here
on the stage or with an attendant at the exit.
This series on the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama would not have been
possible without the financial support of numerous sponsors whom the planning
committee wishes to acknowledge at this time. First and foremost is the Alabama
Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities;
The Huntsville Times, DESE Research Incorporated, Mevatec Corporation, Alabama
Representative Laura Hall and Senator Hank Sanders.
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Joining our efforts from Alabama A&M University is the Office of the President,
The Office of the Provost, the State Black Archives Research Center and Museum, the
Title III Telecommunications who are responsible for taping these sessions and we give a
special thanks to all of you and Distance Learning, the Office of Student Development,
the A&M Honors Center, Sociology/Social Work, Political Science and History.
At the University of Alabama in Huntsville, we greatly acknowledge funding
assistance from the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the Humanities Center,
the Division of Continuing Education, the Department of Sociology, its Social Issues
Symposium, the Honors Program, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Student Affairs,
The Copy Center and the UAH History Forum Bankhead Foundation, which is serving as
the local host for tonight's activities; and with the kind help of Staff Assistant Beverly
Robinson, who has prepared a reception back stage immediately following tonight's
lecture to which you are all invited.
We would like to remind you that next Tuesday, November 6th , we have a special
guest lecturer, Dr. Hilliard Lackey, Professor of History at Jackson State University who
will speak on the Selma Voting Rights Campaign, which will be held in Room 111 of the
School of Business at Alabama A&M University at 7 p.m.
Next Thursday, our series will take place at the Ernest Knight Reception Center at
Alabama A&M University. Our focus will be the struggle for voting rights in Selma,
culminating in the event of March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday in which state
troopers in an armed posse led by local sheriff, Jim Clark, used clubs an tear gas to beat
back peaceful marches attempting to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to
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Montgomery. Our speaker will be Congressman John Lewis of Georgia's 5th District, one
of the towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement. A native of Torre, Alabama, an
author of Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, published in 1998,
Congressman Lewis was active in the national sit-ins, the freedom rides, the Selma
movement and was at the head of the marcher's attack on Pettus. He will be joined by
New York writer Mary Stanton, author of the book From Selma to Sorrow: the Life and
Death of Viola Liuzzo, published in 1998.
Tonight, we look at events that took place not far from Selma in a Blackbelt
County, whose tradition of violence against African-Americans and Civil Rights workers
earned it the unenviable nickname of Bloody Lowndes.
Two classic examples of Lowndes County terrorism are the Klan murders on
March 25, 1965, of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, a white Civil Rights volunteer from Michigan
along US Highway 80, followed by the shotgun slaying of Jonathan Daniels, a 26-yearold Divinity student from New Hampshire at Varner's Cash Store in Hayneville. Such
atrocities had prevented any black resident from being registered to vote for over half a
century, even though they outnumbered local whites by more than 3 to I. Blacks who
wished to register not only faced expulsion from the farms where they lived and worked
but also a constant threat of physical violence.
In a county where only 800 white men resided, Mr. John Hulett observed in 1966,
that "there are 550 of them who walk around with guns on them. They are deputies. It
might sound like a fairy tale to most people, but this is true." Mr. Hulett was at the center
of the struggle to bring change to Lowndes County and what he accomplished there had
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repercussions far beyond the Blackbelt and state of Alabama. To introduce him with our
second distinguished guest on stage tonight, prize-winning journalist, Frye Gaillard, a call
upon Ms. Erin Reed, a history graduate student at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville and president of Phi Alpha Theta, the history on a raring society ... Ms. Reed.
Introduction: In defending the cause of freedom over the past 5 decades, Mr. John
Hulett has served in many ways, from union activist and civil rights leader to county
sheriff and probate judge. In his book, Outside Agitator, John Daniel and the Civil Rights
Movement in Alabama, historian Charles W. Eagles, portrays Mr. Hulett as the leader of
the Civil Rights struggle in Lowndes County and as a "tireless, determined worker with
unusual intensity and powerful personality." Born in a tiny community of Gordonsville,
Mr. Hulett passed his formative years in rural bonds. It was here, according to Professor
Eagles, that his grandfather born in slavery had managed during his life to acquire more
than a hundred acres in addition to a gristmill, a sawmill and a cotton gin. Finishing high
school in 1946, Mr. Hulett soon left the family's farm to live in Birmingham. There, he
was hired as a foundry worker for the Birmingham Stove and Range Company. This
marked the beginning of his life as an activist, first as president of the Foundry Worker's
Union and then as a reformer seeking to improve the lives of those in Pratt City where he
lives.
By 1949, he had joined the NAACP and after it was banned he joined the
Successor Organization created by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, known as the Alabama
Christian Movement for Human Rights. In Birmingham, Mr. Hulett was also successful
in his attempt to register to vote.
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Returning to Lowndes County in 1959, Mr. Hulett soon emerged as the leader of
local efforts to combat the poll tax and to gain the right to register for local AfricanAmericans. This brought him into direct conflict with a white minority that dominated
that county and that for 50 years had ensured that no black person could vote or serve on
By March of 1965, only he and one other black resident had succeeded in being
registered, despite an appearance at the courthouse in Hayneville that month by Martin
Luther King, Jr., who sought unsuccessfully to register 37 local residents. In response,
Mr. Hulett help organize the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights
and served as its first president.
Passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 along with presence of federal
registrars helped ensure that African-Americans would become a voting majority in
Lowndes County. In order to solidify the gains achieved by this ___
and to prevent
the local democrat party from again disenfranchising blacks by raising fees for office
seekers, Mr. Hulett was instrumental in founding an alternative party, the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization. This party was organized on April 2, 1966, with Mr.
Hulett and it took as its symbol the black panther. In Lowndes County, he explained, we
have been deprived of our rights to speak, to move and to do whatever we want to do at
all times and now we are going to start moving. On November 8 of this year, we plan to
take over the courthouse in Hayneville and whatever it takes to do it, we're going to do it.
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In 1969, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization became part of the National
Democratic Party of Alabama whose electoral victories the following year included that
of John Hulett as sheriff, the first African-American to be elected to that office there.
Tonight, Mr. Hulett will share with us memories of his life and struggle m
Lowndes County from his youth and early involvement in the Voter Registration
Campaign to the founding of the Black Panther Party, to the Selma movement and the
murders of Viola Liuzzo and John Daniels and finally to the changes that has witnessed
over the past 40 years.
Along with Mr. Hulett, we are also privileged to have as our guest on stage
tonight journalist and author Frye Gaillard. Mr. Gaillard will be interviewing Mr. Hulett.
Mr. Gaillard lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a free-lance writer with
special interests in the culture, religion and social history of the American south. He has
written or edited 18 books touching on various aspects of this southern experience from
black and Native American history to country music and Habitat for Humanity.
Mr. Gaillard is a native of Mobile and in 1994 described his own family's history
in a book entitled, Lessons from the Big House, One Family's Passage through the
History of the South. Between 1964 and 1968, Mr. Gaillard studied at Vanderbilt
University, graduating with a major in history. After a brief ____
_ at the
Associated Press in 1972, he joined the Charlotte Observer, serving first as a staff writer,
then as editorial writer and columnist and finally as southern editor. He remained with
this newspaper until 1990 when he decided to pursue free-lance writing. During those
years, Mr. Gaillard won numerous awards for excellence in reporting including awards
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from the North Carolina Press Association and the Associated Press. Among Mr.
Gaillard's books are several that bear directly on the Civil Rights Movement, The
Greensboro for Civil Rights Pioneers, The Way We See It, documentary , photography
by the Children of Charlotte which he published with his daughter Rachel and the Dream
Long Deferred which detailed the landmark school desegregation struggle in Charlotte.
This book won the Gustavus Myers Award for writing on the subject of human rights.
At present, Mr. Gaillard is working on a book detailing the Civil Rights
Movement here in Alabama. It will be titled, Cradle of Freedom, The History of the Civil
Rights Movement in Alabama .. It is scheduled to be published by the University of
Alabama Press in 2002.
We are pleased to have both interviewer and interviewee with us this evening.
Please join me in a warm welcome.
Frye Gaillard: We are happy to be here tonight to participate in this program. I
was fortunate to be here for one of the other programs, with Diane Dash on September
13'\ two days after some fairly significant events in the world. My wife and I were
driving down and we thought there would be us and Diane Nash at the auditorium, but it
was an amazing turnout. It is a testament to the kind of interest that you have in this
community, in this subject and also to the really well planned nature of the program that
you have been fortunate to be a part of, I think. I have been asked and have worked for
the last two years researching what the University of Alabama Press is calling a popular
~
history of the Civil Rights Movement. By that, they mean they want a journalist and a
storyteller rather than a historian to write about it and to keep it short. One of things that I
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have had the privilege of doing is talking to a lot of people who were foot shoulders in
the movement, people that I have never in many cases ever heard of. I grew up in those
days in Alabama and sort of came of age with an awareness of what was going on in the
state. There are so many people who have such rich stories and one of those people are
obviously the guest of honor here tonight, John Hulett. I knew that I wanted to meet John
Hulett ever since the time in the early l 970's. I was working for the newspaper in
Charlotte and I was doing a story on the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the
south in general and one of the places I visited was Lowndes County. I remember driving
down one of the back roads in Lowndes County and Lowndes County has a lot of back
roads. I was passing this farmhouse and there was kind of a rutted two-lane path that led
up to the farmhouse and there was a black man sitting on the porch of this farmhouse. So,
I drove up to just see what he might have to say about the Civil Rights Movement and the
impact that it had on his life. He was a little skeptical at first of this white stranger who
had driven up to his place, but we sat on the porch in these flimsy old aluminum chairs
and we talked for a while and began to connect, I think. We started to talk about the
movement and the impact that it had and I said, can you tell me what it has meant to you
that the Civil Rights Movement occurred in the south and in the state of Alabama. He
said, oh, that's an easy question to answer; the biggest difference it has made in my life is
that John Hulett is sheriff of Lowndes County and I didn't know exactly what he meant
and I said, well talk about this a little bit more. What do you mean by that? He said, let
me tell you a story and he told me the story of the night that he was on his way home; this
was a man named Ervin Henson. He told me the story of a night that he was on his way
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home and his car broke down on the side of the road. So, he had to leave it and walk and
this was not something that you wanted to happen in the pre-Civil Rights days in
Lowndes County, Alabama. He was walking by himself on the road and a car with two
deputy sheriffs passed by him. They pulled to a stop, demanded what to know what he
was doing and he just told them that he was on his way home. They got out of the car and
one of them clubbed him over the head with a nightstick. They handcuffed his hands
behind his back and pitched him bleeding and semiconscious into the trunk of the police
car. They drove around with him in the trunk of car until it was almost dawn and what
Mr. Henson said is that it does not happen any more because John Hulett is sheriff of
Lowndes County, Alabama. And the more I began to talk to people about this, the more
clear it became that there were these sort of stages that the Civil Rights Movement went
through. You had this kind of feeling of daybreak in Montgomery with the Montgomery
Bus Boycott and the sort of first time that black people in a kind of mass way took a
stand for freedom and justice and actually accomplished something and accomplished
very tangible results. Of course, you had the freedom rides where young black people and
activists served noticed that there was no place too terrifying for the movement to go and
that violence would not overcome nonviolence no matter what. You had Birmingham
with the police dogs, the fire hoses and those images that seared the conscious of people
all over the country. You had Selma and the Montgomery March that led to the most
revolutionary single change that the movement accomplished which was the right to vote
for black people everywhere. You also had these other struggles that were taking place in
Huntsville, Gadsden, Mobile, Tuskegee, Tuscaloosa and all of these other places and you
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had the struggle in the Blackbelt that John Hulett knows so well, which I think the final
movement was the victory over fear. If you were black ... and I am going to ask Judge
Hulett about this in a minute. But, if you were black in Lowndes County, Alabama, you
lived with fear every single of your life because you knew that white people, if they
chose, could do anything to you that they wanted to almost with impunity, but at least the
legal system would offer you no protection whatsoever and in fact, in most cases, was
part of the problem and this is what they changed. This is the final stage of the movement
and so that is what we will get to tonight. The format that we are going to use is one that
neither John Hulett nor I would have thought of.; I think I am safe in saying. I was doing
an interview with him in Hayneville at the courthouse and there was a professor from
Auburn who happened to be with me who was so fascinated by the answers that I was
getting to these questions that she said, you know, you guys need to do this publicly. We
need to take you to some of the schools in Alabama. So, we tried it out before a couple of
high school audiences and survived and we figured that was about as tough a crowd as
we could have and then we did it at Auburn one time too. So, we are going to try it again
tonight. Hopefully, it will work and if you have questions, feel free either to jump in or
when I finish getting us started then I will kind of open it up to the audience and you guys
can ask whatever you would like to know as well. So, I just want to say before I start
what a privilege it is for me to be here with one of the genuine heroes of this movement
that you guys have been talking about.
Q: Judge Hulett, you grew up in the Blackbelt in the 1930's and l 940's. Talk a little bit
about what it was like for black people in those days in that part of Alabama. What are
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some of your memories growing up then and do you agree with Ervin Henson and others
that it was a dangerous place to be if you were black?
A: Certainly, I do. I was born in 1927 in Gordonsville, Alabama; that's close to
______
and doing that time the entire county was farming country. Most people
who lived in that county were sharecroppers. You had to work on other folks plantation,
if you know what a sharecropper is, and when you work on peoples plantations you had
to do what they say do or you had to go or get killed or a thing of that time, but I lived in
Lowndes County and grew up there. I went to school at an all black school and finished
grammar school and high school. I came out of high school in 1946, but it was a lot filth
that went on during that time. I can remember many times, at night times, we had a
sheriff in that county, a real nice brother and he would drive by, and if you were walking
the road at night, especially a few black boys walking the road, he would catch you and
beat you. I know one friend of mine whose brother went to school with us that he beat
one night and finally he died from that beating, but nothing was done about it; I can
remember that. Plenty people he would beat. He would walk up to a place that if you had
a music box playing, he would just walk up and take his Billy stick and tear it up and start
shooting at it. He was that type of person. Oto Mural was our sheriff and he stayed in it as
long as he wanted to. When he got ready to run for probate judge, the people denied him
the opportunity to be the probate judge, but they wanted a man like that for sheriff.
Q: Now, in the those days, back in the l 930's, the Tenant Farmers Unit, came into
Lowndes County and tried to organize sharecroppers who were living in conditions not
very far removed from slavery. I remember talking to one elderly man, Mr. Charles
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Smith, who remembered that as a young man in Lowndes County we were working for
almost nothing and he talked about how they struck to try to get paid a dollar a day and
they walked out of the fields and the person who organized the strike at the Bell
plantation that he was part of was shot down by the sheriff of the overseer in cold blood.
Did you hear of those kind of stories when you were growing up? Did you hear about that
kind of thing?
A: Yes, I did. I talked to Mr. Lemon Bogen whose one of the persons who was involved.
The late Lemon Bogen, he's dead now, but he also talked about how bad it was and how
people would beat up people and shoot individuals. This was the beginning of the Civil
Rights Movement when he started telling more about most of this type stuff. He always
said when you go out on these plantations be careful cause they will kill you.
Q: So, when the Civil Rights Movement really started in Lowndes County, Alabama, it
was part of the collective memory of the people there and what could happen to people
who stood up for themselves? I mean, you knew that you were laying your life on the
line to do that?
A: This is true. I did know that.
Q: What do you think gave you the courage to do it? Was it some of the experiences that
you had at other places? I know you left Lowndes County for awhile, worked in
Birmingham, both in the Labor Movement and in the Civil Rights Movement there. Did
you learn things there that were important to you later on?
A: Yes, I did. In Birmingham I worked in Shuttersworth and the most important thing
happened was the bombing of church, Author Shows house and Athrene Lucie was trying
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to enter into the University of Alabama. So, a few of us got together and would sit guard
at Author Shows house that night.
Q: Now, he was an attorney?
A: He was an attorney who represented Athrene Lucie and I can remember one night
sitting there about 3 o' clock in the morning and a shout would come out, there's a car
driving up with no lights on it. It was a police car and see most of this stuff that went on
was done by law enforcement officers or people who they allowed to do what needed to
be done. So, when we came out with those guns in our hands. The lights came on the car
and then they said they were just checking to see how everything was. That was the
beginning of it, but when I went back to Lowndes County it was a whole different ball
game because Lowndes County was predominantly black as far as population but such a
dangerous place to be in during that time and we got back into Lowndes County. We had
a few people that tried to register to vote but was denied. There was not a single
registered voter in Lowndes County and in 1965, the first week in March, the voter
registration would be opened 2 days, the first and third week of the month. We got about
65 people to go and get registered to vote. Most of them were afraid to get out of there
car when it they got to the courthouse, but somebody had to have the courage, so I took
the leadership to walk in the courthouse and find out where to register at. The first thing l
was told by one of the registrars was that we have not permitted you all here, go down to
the old jail; that's where we going to register the people 2 weeks from now. I
immediately went to that old jail, went all through it and looked at the gallows to see
where they had been hanging people for years. You had to have that kind of nerve. Two
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weeks later, we went back to that jail and I happen to take the leadership and carry the
blind man along with me, the late Reverend Jesse Lawson. They passed two of us that
day out of about 25 or 30 people that went through it. They passed me and they passed
Reverend Lawson and you had to do answer questions on those older tests at that time.
One of the questions that they asked me I can remember, what hospital the president had
been in during that time. Now, there are no televisions, very few radios in the radio in the
neighborhood, but I did remember it was Walter Reed Hospital and I said that and they
passed me. I do not think I passed the test, seriously. They passed me to get rid of me, but
every time the voter's registration was open I was back there again until we were able to
get enough people registered to vote.
Q: You had registered to vote in Birmingham when you lived there. ls that correct?
A: This is true. I registered to vote in Birmingham.
Q: So, some of the experiences that you had in Birmingham were kind of things that you
imported back to Lowndes County?
A: That's right.
Q: I know one of the interviews that I did recently you mentioned Reverend
Shuttlesworth. He tells the story of Christmas night, 1956, right after the end of the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, and he had announced that the next day, December 26, he was
going to ride in front of the bus in Birmingham. He was lying in his bed and the
parsonage of his house and 14 sticks of dynamite went off on the comer of the house
right under the bed where he was lying. The floor collapsed and the ceiling collapsed but
fell just short of where he was. He felt himself falling through the floor to the ground,
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landed on the bed and he said later that he felt like he was landing in the arms of God and
if he had ever been afraid until then, he was never afraid again. I am guessing that kind of
example of courage inspired you to look inside yourself for the kind of courage that you
have because you had to have it in Lowndes County.
A: Yes. You had to have it in Lowndes County. I lived about almost a mile and a half off
the main. If you have ever lived in the country, you did not have cattle gaps because the
drive crossed the cattle gap. You would have to open three gates before you get my house
and that was the most fearful thing that somebody might be lying out in the weeds
waiting on you. When you open this gate, they could ambush you, but it never happened
to me. I kept God in the front and I kept doing what I needed to do to make life better for
the people in our country.
Q: One of things that happened in a lot of places during the Civil Rights Movements was
that in every case there were local people who were there to take a stand. They would
stand up for what was right, what was just and what was decent and fair, but there was
also in many cases people who came in from the outside to encourage people. I want to
talk about two of the people who came into Lowndes County. One of them was Stokeley
Carmichael and the other was Jonathan Daniels. Now, there were others too who were
every important and we have talked about them as well, but let's take those in order. Give
us your recollection of Stokely Carmichael, one of the toughest organizers in SNCC; I
think its fair to say. What was your impression of him as a person, a human being, an
organizer and a leader and how well did you get to know him?
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A: Just like a brother because he had worked around me quite a bit. I think Stokely was a
great person. He had worked in Mississippi with the movement there and when he came
into Lowndes County he knew he had an uphill journey. We worked close together and
that is why we organized the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Every place they
would go into they was looked at by state troopers every were they went. I remember one
incident that took place. One day, there was a group of people that decided to picket in
Fort Deposit, Alabama. They arrested about 20 people in that area. Stokely was a
passenger in a car and during that same day was arrested and charged with reckless
driving as a passenger. So, you can see how bad they wanted Stokely Carmichael. He was
great person. He was a great organizer. He stayed with the people in the community and
we worked together to try to make Lowndes County better. We had organized the
Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. If you can remember the
movement in Birmingham; it was the Alabama Christian Movement. So, the day we went
over to get registered and was denied that right, Dr. King came over, but we didn't see
him, we went down that night and organized the Lowndes County Christian Movement of
Human Rights. I was chosen temporary chairman of that group until we was able to have
a mass meeting and the people decided to go ahead and keep me there, but this was the
beginning of it.
Q: Now, there were people who later came to regard Stokely Carmichael as a violent
person. Did you think of him that way?
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A: No sir. He was not a violent person. I never saw him do anything violent to anybody.
He would speak up, but he would not threaten anybody or talk about killing or all that
type stuff.
Q: And that was most emphatically your experience with him in Lowndes County.
A: This is true.
Q: Okay. Let's talk about Jonathan Daniels a little bit, a white, Episcopal seminarian who
came to Lowndes County and did not get out alive. What was your view of Jonathan
Daniels?
A: He was a great person. He was interested in what was going on. He did not try to do
anything wrong. The day that they had this picket in Fort Deposit, Alabama (that's the
largest town in the county) he joined that group without my knowledge. I was in Fort
Deposit, but I did not know he was going to be a part of that group and it was dangerous
for any white to join the black in Fort Deposit. When got there that morning in town, they
had every police officer they could get and everything, just waiting. In a moment, if they
made about IO steps, they were arrested and out in a two-cell jail with 20 something
people. They had to get a dump truck. You know what a dump truck is. The one with the
side bars on it. They put them on that dump truck and put a black police officer and
brought them in. This was when Stokely was arrested. They wanted him so bad. I am
going to be honest with you. There were two pickup trucks and everywhere they would
go, one of the trucks would get in the front. If they would make a right into them, the one
behind would get in the front and just hit breaks all of a sudden until it made them bump
them. When they bumped them, the police arrested them and put both of them in jail and
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charged them with reckless driving. I have a record of that showing that 2 people got
charged for reckless driving in the same automobile, but this was the type of situation we
lived in that day and time. There were white people that walked around with shotguns. I
can never forget that day. I went to the town hall to try to make arrangements with the
chief to try and get them out of jail. I could not get anybody to go with me, but I finally
took the same car they were driving and drove it to the town hall and waited there while
and carried another fellow. There was 14 people and I am not going to lie to you sitting
on the sidewalk with shotguns, rifles and pistols.
Q: White people?
A: White people and they all came inside when the chief of police came in. He wanted to
know what I wanted and I told him that I wanted to try to make bond to get Stokely out of
jail because I believe they would kill him there. He said no that I could not get him out of
jail he is up in Lowndes County and I can never forget the last man. A double barrel
shotgun passed by and I rolled my pistol on the floor and he almost ran over the next
man. I can remember that just like daylight today and I found out then it has to be a group
of you doing it to do it like it ought to be done. You know what I'm saying. They were
afraid themselves, but they were out there doing these types of things. Stokely stayed in
jail; that was on a Saturday. On Wednesday, I went by the jailhouse and carried food to
feed the people that they took to jail. Some of them we made bond, except for Stokely
and one or two more. On a Friday evening, I went to Montgomery and when I came back
the town was full of police officers and other white people. Black folks were afraid to
speak to me almost when I got out of the car on the comer at the intersection. I asked
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what was going on. Why were all of these people were in town? They said, they killed
those two white preachers. That's what they said. They had killed Jonathan Daniels. They
first shot and killed him and the second shot hit Father Marshall from the back and it took
12 hours to operate on him at St. Jude Hospital, but he finally lived from it. I have had
seven meetings with him since that time. This was the kind of conditions we had to live
in during that time.
Q: How were you able to persuade the average person in Lowndes County that it was
possible to change a situation that went as deeply as this one went, where white
supremacy was defended as completely by violence and any means necessary? How did
you convince people that it was possible to make a change?
A: We were meeting together in groups. We were having mass meetings and we would
speak to them from those mass meetings. He gave a lot of courage to people that they
could overcome what was going on. We would talk about what was going on. We would
go on plantations on a daily basis. I quit my job and the movement paid me. The
Lowndes County Christian Movement gave me a salary to work.
Q: How much was that?
A: My salary was 25 dollars every first Sunday; that is a month. I did not work long
hours. I just worked about 9 or IO hours a day, 6 days a week. When I went on
plantations, bosses were there. You had to have a lot of courage to stand up. I would
carry about one or two ladies around with me, most times just riding with me. I would
speak up and be straight to people. I was able to get a lot of things done when I started
doing that. People would go out and get registered. They just believed that I was doing
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the right thing. Not only me, but there were other people in the movement as well, like
the Jackson family, Mattie Lee Murrell; these were older people. They were strong. They
stood up and decided to go ahead and go out and register to vote. They wanted to change
life for their children and themselves.
Q: One of the people that I interviewed in Lowndes County was a SNCC organizer who
came in there by the name of Bob Mantz and he still lives there. I was asking him where
he found the courage to do the things that he had to do. He said it was so terrifying. There
were times when he could barely make himself do the things that he needed to do. I said,
where did you find the courage and he said it came from the people of Lowndes County.
He told me the story of going to this house where an elderly black woman, almost I 00
years old, was bedridden. She was lying in a bedroom off from the living room where he
was talking to other people in the family. He heard this frail voice saying tell that boy to
come in here; I want to talk to him. So, he went in to talk to this old lady. She looked up
at him and she pointed this bony finger at him from her bed and she said, I have been
praying that you boys would come into Lowndes County ever since I saw you march
around Mr. Lincoln's grave. Of course, what she meant was that she had seen the march
on Washington in television and had been praying that people would come into Lowndes
County and trigger a movement in Lowndes County. Bob Mantz said and what I have
heard you say as well is that the courage of average people became contagious after
awhile. People just held each other help. That is the example from you and other some
other people.
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A: This is true. At the same time, there were people who worked on the plantation. If you
were hoeing, you made 25 cents a day and if you were on ____
you got 50 cents a
day. We started telling people to go to Montgomery and get jobs and start making life
better for them. So, that gave them a lot of courage to come out and do what needed to be
done. That made a difference. I want to say one other thing. When Stokely got arrested in
Prattville I was suppose to have gone over with him, but I had another speaking
engagement with a group of folks in my county. He got arrested the next morning. A
young lady called me, a school teacher named Ms. Darby Henson. She said, come ride
over to Prattville with me. When I got over there, Stokely was in jail. I drove up to the
chief of police and asked him could I walk down the hill to one of the Civil Rights
workers; they are in a housing house. He said, go ahead but do not stay long. I walked
just a short distance and when I looked out of the window he had a carbine rifle punching
her in the car, and that was the most hurting thing I have ever seen in my life. So, I came
back out. They had the National Guards. State troopers were over there. When I came
back out, the punch did not hit me, but they punched after me until I got to the car. I got
in the back seat of the car on the passenger's right side. The same person opened the car
door and punched me in the face. Ifl had not snatched by head, I would have broken my
jawbone. I made up my mind. I am going to say this because I am serious about it; I was
going to get him if I had to burn his house down, his wife and children. Let me be serious
with you. I went home that night and prayed about it. It looked like the Lord just came to
me like daylight and said do not do that; that is not the way to do it. I did not do it. I
prayed about it and things changed for us. Sometimes, you cannot take on violence
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because you believe you ought to do something. You cannot make a fast decision, just
pray about it, but I was punched in the face. A few months later I had a gun in the
_____
. I went to Montgomery to get the gun out the shop. I had to go up to a
lawyer's office. I got on the elevator. Now, I do not even know the man because I never
seen him before who punched me in the face. So, when I got on that elevator, he was on
that elevator and he came off running like a ____
. The people over there were
saying what is going on. I said, do not worry about it' everything is okay. I am not going
to bother him. When you treat people wrong, it will come back to you. The next time I
got a chance to see him was at the University of Alabama. Everybody was introducing
themselves. I was just elected sheriff. When it got around to him, he was sitting across
the big conference table and he gave his name in front of me, but he never was able to
come back and say I am sorry and that is a bad thing. When you do wrong, you ought to
do it. While I am telling it, I want to tell this incident. In 1983, in the line of duty, I got
shot in the back by a black man who was on drugs.
Q: You were sheriff?
A: I was sheriff. One of my deputies reached to shoot him closer than this gentleman
over here. I told him not to shoot him. If he was shooting to kill that man and made a
mistake and killed somebody else, he would have done more harm than it helped good.
After he went to the penitentiary and stayed awhile, I never signed papers to keep him in,
I met him one morning after he had gotten out and we out our arms around each one other
and forgot about everything. A few months later, I married him to a girl from Pratt,
Alabama. I think this is the type of life you have to kill. I think about Jesus Christ, who
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died on the cross for our sins. If we are going to hold things against one another the rest
of our lives, white or black, we are wrong. There was an elder man who was part of our
movement by the name of Mr. Calan Hayes. We would call him CC Hayes. He always
said, John whatever you all do, do not try to do evil for evil to people, not even to us. He
passed away a few months ago, but I thank God for that type of thing. We have tried to
live right.
Q: Let's talk about this whole idea of the changes in Lowndes County and the whole idea
of forgiveness and fairness once those changes happened, two questions about that. First
of all, in 1966, you ran for sheriff for the first time under the banner of what some people
called the Black Panther Party. Now, that was not literally the name of the party, but the
emblem of the party was the black panther. Talk about the symbolism of that party, why
you ran under that banner and then we will move on to the next question which has to do
with when you were elected in 1970.
A: Let me say this, I did not run. I was head of the Lowndes County Christian Movement
and in 1966 when we got ready to run candidates the Democratic Party, if you can
remember, had over the banner white supremacy for the _____
. There was a 50
dollar fee to qualify for sheriff. When we got ready to run, a black man Sidney Logan, Jr.,
they went to 500 dollars. So, we immediately decided to organize the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization and we had to have a symbol, like the rooster was for the
Democratic Party or the elephant was for the Republican Party. We organized the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization and we had to come up with a symbol. We kind
of kicked names around and we came up with the black panther. The reason why we did
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this is because the black panther is not a violent animal but when you push it to a corner,
it will come out and do whatever it has to do. If you lived in Lowndes County, you better
had something to let folks know you were serious about it. So, we chose that black
panther for the party. We lost the election in 1966 and something happened to us. If you
can remember, in California, there was a group who was in Lowndes County doing the
election in 1966.
Q: Huey Newton and some others?
A: Huey Newton. They went back to California and got their guns and things.
They would get in their cars and follow a policeman around and one of them finally
killed a police officer according the records. Because of that, we just decided that the
emblem of the black panther was not the best thing for Lowndes County people. We did
not want anyone to get hurt in Lowndes County because of what they were doing in
California. Dr. Jordan Cassius, from Huntsville, Alabama, came down to Lowndes
County and Green County and we got together and organized the NOP A and used the
eagle for our symbol and nobody said a word about that. Logan lost in 1966 and in 1970,
I ran for sheriff under the National Democratic Party. I won by 210 votes because a lot of
our people were afraid to vote for me because there was a thing out that they were going
to kill John Hulett if he wins within 3 days after I was elected. I had to go to a lot of these
old people that I had trusted in and that loved me because they did not want to see me die.
So, I said go ahead and vote for me. I will live ifl have to stay in the woods 3 days. After
that, I won 5 more elections without having any problems whatsoever with white or
black.
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Q: That is right. It was not you that lost in 1966. It was Sidney Logan and then you ran
in 1970. In terms of the kind of spirit that you brought to the Office of Sheriff after you
were elected in 1970, the spirit of justice rather than revenge, talk a little bit about your
relationship. I think it is a great illustration of this point with Tom Coleman. Tom
Coleman was the man who killed Jonathan Daniels, blew him away with a shotgun in
cold blood at point blank range in the summer of 1965. Can you tell the story about just
before you were running for sheriff that Tom Coleman drove up to you on the square in
Hayneville? Tell people about your story.
A: He drove over to the square in Hayneville and said John, would you mind riding with
me to Lonsborough. Here is the guy who just killed one person and shot the other. I had
to show him that I had enough courage to get in that car without a gun or anything. I
stepped in that car because I did not think that anybody could do anything to me for
driving the car and being up there with him. We rode to Lonsborough and we talked
about the incident and what took place. The first thing that he said was that people
pushed him in a corner to do this. You know, there was people who encourage him to do
this; that is what he was saying. The next thing, which I would not have done to any
black, he was trying to do this to white people to keep them out of Lowndes County and
from helping us and to slow the process down. This is what this was all about. I told him
then that I was going to run for sheriff and I would appreciate it if he vote for me. He
said, well I cannot vote for you, but I know you are going to win it. After I won the
sheriff race in Lowndes County, he was one of people that kept a monitor in his house.
He would call me on a daily and nightly basis. He would let me know that the troopers
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were trying to get up with me and that I got some debris on the highway. He would get on
the road with me at 2 o'clock in the morning. He would clean up the highways. He had
done that for me. I think that sometimes you have to live the kind of life that the Lord
wants you to live and treat folks like human beings. I never was afraid of him. I worked
with his son as a state trooper and an investigator, but this is the type of thing that I have
done. I think the best thing in the world to do is let people know that you are not afraid of
them, but you are going to do the right thing; black or white, it did not make a difference.
Q: Would you say this man became a friend of yours?
A: Yes. He became one of the best friends I had as far as letting me know what was
going on and talking to me on a regular basis. He had done that.
Q: Why do you think he did that?
A: I think it could have been out of fear. He could have thought I was going to try and
pay him back. A lot of things could have happened. I can never forget. I want to say this
while I am talking. I went into Fort Deposit and I walked into a drug store. There were 11
or 12 women in that store and one man who was filling prescriptions. While I was in
there, there was a guy who walked around on the outside all the time with a 38 on him
with a ____
. Just as I started out of the door, the main way to ____
school,
until I got almost to the door like this here, he walked in and said who is your damn so
and so and cussing on. Those women were running out of that door. Two or three were
trying to get out at the same time. I looked around at the man who was filling the
prescription and I would not lie, he was shaking and trembling so the pee was falling on
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the floor. Somebody has to have some courage. So, I turned around and walked back in
there with him wherever he went.
Q: The man with the gun?
A: Yes. You might shoot me, but you are not going to shoot me in the back. I am going
to take this gun from you or you are going to have to shoot me right. I walked back in the
store with him for about 5 minutes. He never said another word; I just took his nerve. I
finally picked up a bar of candy, paid for it and walked out. He, the drugstore man and I
were the only 3 people in there. I never had another word from him. Later, he pulled a
gun and said he would never let a nigger arrest him. He pulled a gun on a black man in
Fort Deposit and that next morning I go to work after the warrant was signed, he came
into the office with Mr. Tom Coleman. That is smart. You understand what I am saying.
He believed that Tom Coleman could straighten out some things. I made him sign his
bond. I fingerprinted him and told him to make sure you show up in court when time to
come and I did not have anymore problems. I never heard another word from him, but he
did go to court. These were the types of situations you had to live in. It did not make any
difference whether you were right or wrong, white or black; you had to do what was
right. I stood my ground the whole time I was in the sheriffs office. I did not care what
color he was. If you committed a crime, you went to jail. I would call you and if you did
not come, I would go get you.
Q: Did you ever have any dealings with George Wallace when you were sheriff?
A: Truthfully, I had dealings with George Wallace. George Wallace turned out to be one
of my best friends. The first time I became sheriff he had a parade in Greenville and I
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was the only black sheriff in that parade. I can remember walking by him and he gave me
some of his material. Every time I would go to their captain for anything, he would say,
sheriff what you want. I had a small staff when I started as sheriff. There was only 3
people. I went up one day and said I need a larger staff and he said okay and tell your
representative to come by. I told me my representative, but he did not go by. Two weeks
ago, I got a check from him to pay for another deputy. That was the kind of person he
was and whenever I would come around he would get up and take a picture with me. He
would call my house on the weekend and when I got shot, he would call my wife every
weekend, Friday night, and tell her whatever he could do to help he would do it. This was
the kind of person George Wallace turned out to be with John Hulett. I was not no Uncle
Tom, but I was just doing the right thing.
Q: Before we open it up to everybody else's questions, as you look back on the
experiences that you had in Lowndes County and the impact that the movement had in
Lowndes County and other places in Alabama, what is your bottom line summary of
those days. What do you feel was accomplished? To what extent was the movement
successful and to what extent did it fall short of what you had hoped for?
A: Let me refer back to two things. If you all remember, in the state of Alabama, the only
people who served on jurors in the state of Alabama were men. There were very few
black men in places like Lowndes County. It was Lowndes County who went to
Montgomery and filed a snit, White versus Crooks to allow women to serve as jurors in
the state of Alabama.; that originated in Lowndes County, Alabama. The first place they
camped out in Lowndes County when they came in was Rose Steel's property. Her
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granddaughter was the individual who _____
, Ardenia White. So, that is why
women are serving today in the state of Alabama. We also had the justice of peace
system in the state of Alabama. Most of you might remember the justice of peace. Every
county had a justice of peace. In Lowndes County, one day, I was arrested and charged
with reckless driving. I went straight to the justice of peace office and said, what would it
cost me for this ticket. He said, it was going to cost you I 00 dollars and 11 dollars court
cost. Excuse me for the expression, but I said I will die and go to hell before I pay it. He
said, you can get ready. Next week, I went to Montgomery, attorney Salman Say's
office, and talked to him about it cause every justice of peace fine you give them, they get
5 dollars out it. I went to federal court and that is why they do not have any justice of
peace in the state of Alabama today. The judge ruled in our favor. That was helpful to the
state of Alabama and the woman serving on jury was helpful. There was a number of
other things that took place in that county. People were able to hold public office who
had never held public office. We got plenty of them now, men and women, not only in
Lowndes County but in surrounding counties because of our courage and things that we
have done. I have gone into other counties and our joining county, Wilcox County has a
black sheriff. When he got ready to run, I encouraged him to run. I went down and spoke
for him and he won that election and he has been there ever since. It is a lot you can do to
help other people if you would do it. Today, we are still working hard trying to make life
better for the people in our county. Let me say this. I am retired now and I could not run
for probate judge because of my age, but each morning of my life I get up now and go out
and do something for somebody. I pick up aluminum cans off the street and give to the
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scholarship fund to help children to go to college. I have a group that takes care of it. I
plant gardens so there are plenty vegetables to give folks who cannot afford to work. The
older people who cannot cut there yards, I cut there yards free. If you need a ramp built or
a wheelchair or something, I go out and do it free for people. This is the type of life I live
today. God has blessed and I reach out and try to help others. I want to advise all of you,
let's try to do the same thing.
Q: I think maybe this is a good time to open it up to questions that people out there may
have, things that they want to ask Judge Hulett.
A: Okay go ahead.
Q: If you want to ask them, I will repeat the questions just in case everyone cannot hear
you. Do you consider the adverse situations that you faced in Lowndes County, the
opposition that you faced when you tried to stand up for what was right, to be state
terrorism against the people of Lowndes County?
A: This is true as I have said it to a lot of young people lately because I go out and talk to
them. I am use to terrorism. We have had it in our county. We have had it in Birmingham
and we have had it in other places. When the people crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge,
there was terrorism. When I was punched in the face in Prattville, there was terrorism.
We did not have any killing. That was the only difference; it was on a small scale. There
was a time in Pratt City, Alabama; I was living in Birmingham. One night, there was like
15 young people who wanted to see the Klan walk up Highbuyon A venue. I took them
out there to show them and they had their robes and everything on. They asked me who
are these people. I said, these are the same people that you are trading with in stores on an
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every day basis, most of them are, but they are Klan men. Do not be afraid because you
are with me. As we stood there, they drove by singing the Dixie song or a thing of that
type with the lights on in the car. These are the type things I have gone through for years.
I am not afraid and I try to be straight with my people and say everybody was not wrong,
but there were a few people who would do anything. In terrorism, you are going to reap
what you sow, so we need to work together and try to save our people instead of trying to
destroy them.
Q: How many people, African-American people in Lowndes County, did it take before
there was sort of a help factor where you felt you were going to succeed. You started out
with a little group. How big did the group get?
A: Each Sunday night, we would have our mass meeting in groups. We did not have a
church large enough to hold us after a few months when we would go in the county. The
question was some churches were afraid for us to go in because they thought someone
would burn their churches. There was not church burning in Lowndes County, if you
remember. There were 2 or 3 churches going in Lowndes County. We had a poverty
program burned and one day a white church burned. I was at the University of Wisconsin
at that time. This white church burned and no more burning take place in Lowndes
County. That is the sad thing, but that took place.
Q: In all of your trials of getting registered voters, where was the Federal Government at
this time. At one time, I read an article that you recruited a bunch of
_________
registered voters. (inaudible)
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A: They came down, but let me be honest with you all. On the first election in 1966, they
would be standing out there. I think they were scary and most black folks were. I am
serious. I can remember in the ___
area in 1966 when they had the election,
somebody cut the lights off in the building. Let me tell you, everybody just froze. Stokely
and them were there and they went out and turned the lights on their cars, but those
federal agents were just as afraid as anything else. They would not say anything. Several
white people that I know brought the people that worked on their plantation in with them
and went in and voted their ballots for them. That is why we worked to get that law
changed where you could not help your boss man. Now, you can help anybody you want,
but your phone cannot help you. If you work for a company, your boss man cannot help
you raise the vote in the state of Alabama. We had to get that changed and it was
Lowndes County who played the biggest part in that. People were evicted off their
plantation because they registered to vote and we put tents out there on highway 80 and
tried to be fair to people. We did everything we could until there were able to acquire
land to move into. We filed a suit to stop the evictions. That is the only suit that we lost.
Q: Did you know Viola Liuzzo and what are your recollections of her, of so?
A: I did not know here but shortly after she got killed, I go to meet her family on several
occasions. Her son came down and stayed in the county for awhile, but I did not know
her personally.
Q: If you ever have a chance to go to the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, there
is a wall in the museum that I believe is called, I was there wall or the we were there
wall or something like that. The people who played some role in the movement signed a
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little sleep of paper and tacked it to the wall. One of the most touching things on that
wall is the daughter of Viola Liuzzo who about a year ago visited the museum and said
my mother was here and that is just on the wall there. It is really interesting to see.
Q: Do you think that was a turning point in getting national attention to the movement?
A: It was a turning point to get lots of attention because people came in. Even at that,
Jonathan Daniels was killed after that but remember he got acquitted in court and that is
the hurting thing. You understand what I am saying. The Klan killed her and did not
anything come from that. The person that was prosecuted in that case stood up in the
court and said if she would have stayed in Detroit, Michigan she would have been alive
today. There were very few blacks there because they were afraid to go in that court room
at night time. Now, if you are prosecuting somebody and get up and say that, what do
suspect a jury to do? This is the type ofrepresentation we had.
Q: Stokely Carmichael had started an organization called The All African Peoples
Revolutionary Party. It took a strong standing in the (inaudible).
A: He did do that, but he did not do that in our county. He never did that in Lowndes
County. He never had any confrontation with the police.
Q: Stokely Carmichael founded an organization. Say the name of the organization again.
A: The All African Peoples Revolutionary Party.
Q: With The All African Revolutionary Party, did that have an effect on your
relationship with Stokely?
A: No, it did not because he did not do any of that stuff in Lowndes County. He respected
the police officers and Arthur Stickwicker did as well.
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Q: There years that you we
re involved with the Bloody Lowndes in your county, can
you tell us a little bit about your personal life. Did you have a family and how did this
impact your family during the year. Then, I understand that there was some type of
sanitary land field plan underway within the last couple of years that may effect or impact
the tourism and trade in Lowndes County with respect to the Edmund Pettis Bridge and
the Selma March in November. Can you talk a little bit about that?
A: Okay, let me be honest with you. I have some children who lived with me during that
time. My son is a probate judge now who lived in Lowndes County. They were too young
to vote, but it did not affect them because we did not have any real decent jobs no way,
we were just out there working. We were trying to make life better for them to go to
school. When they first integrated the school in Hayneville, they sent 6 kids to school that
year. One of my sons went to school and he had some problems with some of the white
kids stepping on his heels. One night, I got in my car and drove to the father's house. I
said to him, your son is stepping on my son's heels and I do not want it to happen again
because I may have to stop that bus on the road and get him off there and it never
happened again. I was the sheriff. I being straight with you all about it. This is a little
incident that happened. Let me be honest about this land field that we have. This land
field is off the Civil Rights trail. People are dumping trash on the highways. Lowndes
County was not a pretty place until I started cleaning it up when I retired from the
sheriffs office. The white people in Lonsborough did not want it and they had a few
blacks with them to help to keep it out. I do not think that land field would do anything
wrong to Lowndes County as long as it does its problem like it ought to be done. People
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will be buried under the ground, like 40 feet deep, and within the next 200 years I do not
think there will be problem whatsoever.
Q: Is that a divisive issue in Lowndes County? Do people disagree about that?
A: There are a few people that disagreed about it, just a few. It was mostly people who
lived right in Burksville. I remember one night I said to them, you are not concerned
about the Civil Rights trail. If you were concerned about the Civil Rights trail, why did
you not help us get registered to vote or a thing of that type. You understand what I am
saying. These are the same folks who guessed everything now concerned about the Civil
Rights trail. It is a money thing that they are looking at now.
Q: Have you written or will you right about how the majority of the city of Alabama was
able to tolerate injustice in such a way that it brings up today what they are willing to do
now which is stand up against injustice.
A: I think that to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Civil Rights
Movement you have to understand that the majority of white citizens in the state of
Alabama were complicit, if not cutting-edge practitioners of the injustices that were
inflicted on black people. It was absolutely pervasive. I am very aware of this because I
grew up in Alabama in a family that was very much a part of the status quo in Alabama .
So, it is really easy to see that the system of segregation that was in place in Alabama
could not have survived without the active support of the overwhelming majority of
white people in the state of Alabama. I think there is a sense in which white people were
liberated by the Civil Rights Movement as well because people of my generation were
certainly coming along and you had to decide what we thought about it. It was such a
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powerful reality and it was inescapable. So, you had to ask yourself what is really going
on here. I remember when I was about 16 years old I was in Birmingham on a high
school trip and I happen to be walking along one afternoon with no idea of anything that
was going on. I was not paying attention to what was going on in the world and I walked
up upon the arrest of Martin Luther King, the first time he was arrested in Birmingham. I
remembered it actually incorrectly. I remembered at first that he was wearing overalls.
He was not. He was wearing a denim work shirt and blue jeans. It was almost that way,
but I do remember, like I have a picture of it in my head, the look on his face as the
policeman bodily carried him pass where I was standing and it was a look of not fear. His
eyes seemed to me to be very sad but kind of stoic all at the same time. There was a
dignity about him on that occasion that stood in such incredible contrast with the kind of
bullying attitude that the policeman had on that occasion. As a 16-year-old white kid, it
was a jarring imaging to behold and it was something that I never forgot. It made you ask
in a very personal way, what is going on here. It was easy to know who you wanted to
identify with in that particular situation. So, one of the things that I am very interested in
and this is a long answer to your question, but one of the things I am very interested in is
the impact that the Civil Rights Movement had on white people, people of my generation
and other people as well because I think that the white citizenry in the state of Alabama
had a long way to go. I think we were compelled to move by events that happened by the
example of courage that we saw, so I think that is an important part of the story that I
certainly want to try to touch on. Now, did we go as far as we need to go? I mean
obviously not. We are still struggling with that issue. I was talking to some reporters
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today at the paper. We were talking about why it is that we have not made as much
progress as we have maybe hoped we would. I think to me it is the cutting edge of
civilization. It is sort of the frontier of civilization. The people who are not exactly alike
are still trying to learn how to live in peace and proximity with each other, if they are
even trying at all. Amazingly enough, we are probably doing a better job of it here than
they are in most places because you look at the Middle East, Northern Ireland or all these
other places and people struggle with that. We will continue to struggle with it here, but
we have more tools now because of the example of people in the Civil Rights Movement.
Q: I was a new comer to Alabama. We came here in 1965 and this whole situation has
really stressed me a lot and (inaudible) but nowhere else is it quite so legal. So, I thought
perfectly well that this is of people like you, although I had a very culture when I came
here. I also said to my brother who called me and said (inaudible) how are you managing
this and how will it turn out. I said that I truly believe that we will solve our problems as
soon as everybody else, so do not worry. I mean it is a bad situation, but I know that the
people that I know so well will find a way to let this happen. I was feeling very
-----
at some times during it, off and on. I also participated in the long line that
were lining up to vote after the federal government interceded and it was kind of a
interesting mess. If you remember, you had to have a registered voter stand with
everybody that was going to vote and every body was getting curious because they had 3
tests that were not hard but it took more time and we did not have anymore time allotted
to us. So, it was a pretty interesting time for me and I helped the best way that I could to
be helpful, the best way I knew how to. I am glad that I was here to do it.
37
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
UAH - The University of Alabama in Huntsville
Q: Any response you want to make to that.
A: I am not sure. I could not hear everything that she was saying. It was pretty rough,
true enough. I could remember the times that we had to have a white to vote for a black.
You could not find a white to vote for a black. After they started registering, we did not
have to do that in Lowndes County. You did not have to have anybody to vote for you.
That was some our problems we were having. The voter registrar did not assist on that.
The federal came down and registered most of our people in out county.
Q: Was lynching a part of your community also?
A: There were many people that were lynched or had things done to them. I do not know
much about that, but there were people that were lynched in Lowndes County not during
the Civil Rights Movement but before that time. Once we organized, there were no blacks
killed by whites except one person and that was before I took office. He was killed
because he was hunting rabbits. The dog went across the county line. They shot and
killed him and tried the case. That was the first case tried when I got there and they found
him guilty. They charged him 100 dollars and a year's probation. This is the kind of thing
that happened. This was a white guy who killed a black guy and they charged him 100
dollars plus court cost and a year's probation.
Q: How much would it help if they rewrote the constitution in the state of Alabama.
Would that kind of blanket or help throughout out the state if the constitution itself was
dealt with?
38
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
UAH - The University of Alabama in Huntsville
A: I was in a meeting not long ago and the Alabama New South Coalition was trying to
put a committee together to start doing this with the state legislatures, but it may help
some. You can rewrite all you want to, but it has to come from the inside of your heart.
Q: There are many of the young people today that do not seem to have the right stuff? I
would like to know what would be your message to them.
A: Those of us who understand what the Civil Rights mean we should go into our
communities sit down and talk to our young folks and try to encourage them to do the
right thing. Our churches ought to be a part of doing that.
Q: Was Lowndes County as violent as it was because black people outnumbered white
people by the margin that they did? We have come a long way, but we still have a long
ay to go. What, in your opinion, do we still need to do or still need to accomplish?
A: I am going to give you a number of incidents that people have just killed people.
There were a group of folks from Birmingham one time that came down to move
somebody off of a plantation. They killed a guy on a Saturday or Sunday night and rode
around in a truck and that Monday they were riding around that courthouse on the back of
the truck and nothing was done about it, but this is the kind of thing that happened. If
something happened in your family like, you would get afraid. I knew other people that
would go out and hunt. I had a cousin that went out one night just hunting. The guys ran
up on him hunting in the woods and started shooting under his feet and made him dance
all night long. This is the kind of thing that went on in Lowndes County, but in order to
change this we are going to have to come together and let drugs go. That is one of the
things that is ending us now. Drugs are getting to most of our people. Stop committing
39
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
UAH - The University of Alabama in Huntsville
crimes, stay out of trouble, go to the polls and register to vote and start treating one
another like they are human beings. Black or white, we are going to have to start doing
that together or we will never move on.
Q: Is there still racial tension between blacks and whites in Lowndes County today.
A: There may be a few older people. It may not show up around me, but it may show up
around a few people. Most people, when you treat folks right, they do not have any
problems. I can go any place in Lowndes County in almost anybody house and I do not
have any problems.
Q: And when you have ran for office, you have gotten considerable white votes?
A: At this age, I am 73 years old. I will be 74, November 19th and I wish it was this
month. I have had more than 1800 people to call me already and talk to me. I believe I
could go back and run for sheriff again. I don't why, but this is something. Let me say
this. If someone burglarize a community, a house, a church I get out and work on it night
and day until that person has come to justice just about. If somebody has shoot somebody
or cut somebody, they are going to jail and everybody knows that. I do not know what is
happening to the sheriff and bothering other folks now, but I try to do what is right for the
people in our county. I guess that is why they want me back. They are not trying to get
me back because I am going to let them do something wrong. If it is a drug dealer in
town, he better leave. He better get his stuff and go to some other county. I believe that is
what we out to do. They have a drug task force and I want to be sure I get with that drug
task force if I am successful in winning and try to get them to do a much better than what
they been doing and get these drug dealers out of time.
40
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
UAH - The University of Alabama in Huntsville
Q: Will you run again?
A: If my health holds up, my name will be on the ballot.
Closing: Well, Sheriff Hulett thank you for sharing these stories with us tonight. We
really appreciate it.
41
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
Relation
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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
Dublin Core
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uah_civr_000023
Title
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Digitized transcription of VHS tape of "Bloody Lowndes and the Black Panther Party".
Description
An account of the resource
John Hulett and Frye Gaillard are the speakers in this lecture given at University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Creator
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Alabama A & M University
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Date
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2001-11-01
Temporal Coverage
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2000-2009
Subject
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Hulett, John,1927-2006
Gaillard, Frye, 1946-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Hayneville (Ala.)
Lowndes County
Voter registration
Black power
Type
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Lectures
Text
Transcript
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Print
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/402">VHS Tape of: Bloody Lowndes and the Black Panther Party - Speakers: John Hulett and Frye Gaillard, 2001-11-01. Box 2, Tape 8</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama
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.
Extent
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41
Source
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/390">Bloody Lowndes and the Black Panther Party - Speakers: John Hulett and Frye Gaillard - Transcription of Tape 8, 2003 Box 1, File 9</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama
-
http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/193/13796/Defense_Billboard_126_001.pdf
74bb228e0d2922e0d99c80e6146f423e
PDF Text
Text
B I L L B O A R D 126
See your voting officer
American Forces Information Service • Department of Defense
601N. FairfaxStreet Suite 312.• Alexandria. VA 22314-2007 • (703) 42*0283, DSN 328-0283
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Defense Billboard Posters
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Defense_Billboard_126
Title
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"Any way you cut it...you hold the winning hand (See your voting officer)"
Alternative Title
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D2.9:D36/2/No.126
Description
An account of the resource
Military uniform holding cards with words vote and register
Creator
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Department of Defense
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1998-07-23
Temporal Coverage
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1990-1999
Subject
The topic of the resource
Department of Defense poster
United States--Department of Defense
Voter registration
Playing cards
Puns
Type
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Posters
Still Image
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The University of Alabama in Huntsville M. Louis Salmon Library
Defense Billboards Posters
Case 1, Drawer 1
Language
A language of the resource
en
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
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.
Relation
A related resource
Defense Billboards
-
http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/193/13853/Defense_Billboard_56_001.pdf
f88a7fa032ee7631950db2b492d10509
PDF Text
Text
R REGISTRATION
ABSENTEE BALLG
BILLBOARD
56
Amerlcsn Fo,cot Informs/,on Scrlco. OrpJ'tmcnt of Dcfrnte
601 N fs,rtaa Stroet, Boom 312. Atcsnd,,*. VA 72314 2007
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Defense Billboard Posters
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Defense_Billboard_56
Title
A name given to the resource
"Register to Vote; Mail in your registration and vote by absentee ballot"
Alternative Title
An alternative name for the resource. The distinction between titles and alternative titles is application-specific.
D2.9:D36/2/No.56
Description
An account of the resource
Person made from ballot and stamps
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Department of Defense
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1992-09-13
Temporal Coverage
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1990-1999
Subject
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Department of Defense poster
United States--Department of Defense
Absentee voting
Voter registration
Ballot
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Posters
Still Image
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The University of Alabama in Huntsville M. Louis Salmon Library
Defense Billboards Posters
Case 1, Drawer 1
Language
A language of the resource
en
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
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.
Relation
A related resource
Defense Billboards