>> I played full back and ended up being a linebacker.
>> You were outside.
>> I was a linebacker on the left side,
because I didn't want to play on the right side.
I played on the left side as a linebacker.
So I played full back,
half back and linebacker.
Yeah. I was mean, brother.
I guess that's One thing about athletics,
at least from my perspective,
it's a very good thing
for young people to play
athletics because you learned teamwork.
You learn disappointment, highs and lows,
all those things are good to get
exposed to that when you're young
because I think it makes you in my opinion,
a better citizen later on.
Those guys and those ladies who
just bookworm all the time,
they are brilliant people make all as,
but they are somewhat they're not as balanced
as young ladies and
young men who become more athletically inclined.
I was glad to see Title nine passed
because I remember my daughter,
she and I used to play basketball together when
she was young and She was very good.
But she couldn't play after she got
to high school because that's how it was at that time.
Yeah. But anyway, my little son was pretty good..
I was just thinking yesterday,
I guess it was because he called me from up in Kentucky.
I was thinking about it when he was five years old.
I used to take my five year old and my
ten year old to
play three person basketball
with the folks in the neighborhood.
And so when we
went down and play one day at the school yard,
a pickup game three a piece.
So these three guys, teenagers said, Well, I'll play you.
I said, fine. And so
where's that little run going to play?
I said, he'll be all right. That's my five year old.
So my daughter and I could shoot.
So they had us covered.
It was a 16 point game.
And so I said,
Kim, I said, they don't know the chip can shoot.
I said, so we're going to play this you and me.
I said, but when we get down to 12 or whatever.
I said, we're going to flip that ball to chip.
And so we flipped the ball to chip
when we got to about ten, I guess.
And he hit nothing but net.
And but they but they thought it was luck.
So we were playing again.
We we flipped the ball to chip. He hit t.
>> They said, hit that little He's going to shoot us out.
>> He was five.
>> He was five. Five. Yeah. Well, but
it helps but I bought him a basketball.
Yeah. Court should I say,
basket and put it in the back yard.
Yeah. So so they played all the time.
Anyway, I'm very happy to be here.
I don't know how we're going to start this.
I'm sure you're going to be there.
Let you either moderator, tell me.
Tell me what am I supposed to do?
>> Well, this summer, I
convinced you, and this is the thing.
Doctor King and we've talked about this already
when he is not a leader of the land student movement.
He is an innate leader.
And as the titan leader he
is he pushes everyone out forward ahead of him.
So he is one he is really
serious about getting all the stories,
all the surviving alums told at the expense of his own.
And so this summer, I convinced him
to let our class and let our documentary
focus on some of
his top five life experiences that he wants for
sure to be documented in the oral histories and
also for work in the production in the documentaries.
You all have researched his Wikipedia page,
several videos of speeches that he's
given you all have developed questions.
We worked on our interviewing techniques.
And so what I'd like to do is turn
things over to you all as student researchers.
So just introduce yourself,
and we'll start the conversation going and
it'll stay really organic and
just jump in when you've got a question or
a thought and we'll go from there.
Are we good to that? Candice, would you like to start?
>> Of course. I'm Candice.
>> Where are you from?.
>> Originally? New York
>> Yeah. Which part of New York?
>> I was born in Ohio.
>> Manhattan.
>> But you decide to come to ans.
Yes. Fantastic. Okay.
>> Welcome South.
>> Thank you.
>> She was in the military as well.
>> I got you. Are you in the Navy Army?
>> Navy?
>> Yes, navy.
>> What's your billet?
>> Not any more. High school.
What was your billet?
>> Made. What kind Machine? Oh, yeah.
>> Yeah. I was a dispersion clerk.
Yeah. Ask me a question about the Navy
because I'm sure it's a lot
different when you went in there when I was in.
>> I hear.
>> I'm ready.
>> You have any questions?
>> Oh. Yes. I am think about it.
So how was it back then?
How was boot camp for you? Was it a great lakes?
>> It was a great lakes. Was that where
you went? Yeah. Oh, okay.
We have a yeah. Yes. I went in 1954.
At the time I guess when your grandparents were around.
And there were about 75 people in my boot camp.
The Navy had less African Americans
than anybody at that time.
Might still be the case, I don't know.
But I decided to go to the Navy
because My mother was
killing himself trying to send me to Morehouse.
As I reflect back on that time,
I'm just amazed at the sacrifices that mothers
make even before you were born until after you come,
you're still the baby.
So I went to Masa in
a partial scholarship and I went over there.
I should have had a full scholarship,
but that was a little hassle at the school and I was
successful in beating a person for president of
the Student Government Association that
the chief counselor didn't like.
She didn't she didn't want me to win
the campaign, and I wanted.
You may have heard of Vernon Jordan
Vernon Jordan and I ran against one
another for president of the SGA
and I beat him ten to one.
Well, she really got upset
about that because she was a friend of his mother.
So Moha sent five full scholarships over there.
So I should have gotten one of them because of my GPA,
plus I was a leader.
By the time my homeroom teacher,
doctor Beavers heard about
what was going on behind the scene.
He called me to the front and said,
Have they offered you a scholarship from Mohs yet?
I says, No. He said, come on.
He took me down to miss Floss Jones's office.
And he said, miss Jones,
how many more those scholarships for Mohas do you have?
Were they all gone except for a half scholarship.
And so he said some unkind things to her.
But they gave me a half scholarship.
My mother made up the difference.
As we were getting ready for
my second year after
the first semester people start working hard?
My mother was making $5 a day in car fare.
So she took a job at the American Red Cross
down on Spring Street.
So she'd leave home in the mornings
at about 05:00 oclock.
She worked for misses Elizabeth Mitchell at
her house as a maid until about 04: 30.
She then had to ride the bus to get
downtown to the American Red Cross by 06:00,
and then we get off at 10:00.
We didn't have a car, so she rode the bus again.
So she was killing herself.
She got sick and I knew what was happening.
She she wasn't getting any sleep.
Now, I had been a person who had
told the guys on the corner that
I hung out with from time to
time because a lot of them were being drafted.
And I said, well, let me tell you
when when they come to draft me,
there'll be two people missing.
The guy who's looking for me and
I will because I am not going to
go and die with
all the segregation and discrimination that's going on.
There's something wrong with this picture.
But when your mother gets sick,
you begin to re-examine.
So I told her, Mama.
I think I need to go into the military,
if I intend to finish college.
I said, because at the rate we're going,
you won't even be around to see me finish.
You're killing yourself. I said,
I know you love me,
but we need to do something.
She said, well, you might not make it back.
I said, that's the chance I'm going to make.
I said, I tell you what I'm going to do, Mama.
I'm going to go to the library,
and I'm going to look up the casualty rates
so I can figure out which one of these branches of
service would give me
the best chance of getting back to go to college.
I knew the Army was out because
that was a high casualty rate.
The Marines they were out.
So I went to the library and down on
Auburn Avenue and asked the librarian to help me.
So she brought back the casual the stuff on for
services and the Air Force Academy. Not the Air Force.
Coast guard?
>> It was a Coast Guard. So make a long short.
The best chance of coming back alive without being
killed in action was the Air Force,
but they wanted four years.
The next one was the Navy.
Had very few people get killed in the Navy.
And they had something called the Kitty cruise.
Did it happen when you were in there?
The Kitty cruise is one where you go
in and the day before you're,
18, you get out just before you're 21.
So it was a three year enlistment. I said that's for me.
Casual low casual rate?
Three year of commitment. And so I went in.
When I got to Great Lakes,
you take an aptitude test.
So I was picked as the educational petty officer,
which I'm sure you know about that.
My job was to teach reading, writing,
and arithmetic to other 77 guys who were there.
That also meant that I didn't have as much of
a load as other people because my job
was to make sure I could teach those young folks.
And that went well and I got a chance
to meet a lot of people.
I never would have met maybe otherwise.
But I must tell you how bad racism is.
How much it works on your mind.
When I found out that I was only 70, some 74 people,
I think it was there were
three African Americans in my company.
That first night, I had never slept
with the white person in the room before.
And I was wondering whether or not these guys,
most of them were from the south,
just like me, are they going to
gang up on me and try to kill me tonight?
That was the psychological thing that was going on.
So I said, I hate to do this.
But I went out and I found me
a broomstick and I chopped it
off and put it under
my pillow so that if they came to hurt me,
I would at least get one or
two of them before they killed me.
Of course, that was wild,
but that was what was in my mind at 18.
Well, I taught the young folks
how to read and write some of
them during that period of time.
But I had another thing going from me, Madam.
I was a champion table tennis player.
And I don't know where they
had it when you were in there,
but every Saturday that there was
a tournament and I won,
so I was 11 weeks and I won 11 tournaments.
Well, the prize was
two codons of cigarettes. I didn't smoke.
So what happened is that
my entire company would come to watch me win.
And then they knew I was
going to give them the cigarettes.
They didn't have to buy any.
Because Olin is going to do it for us on Saturday.
So that was my indoctrination into the Navy.
Now, I ran into
rank discrimination when I was in the Navy.
Not in boot camp so much as when I got to my ship.
When I got to the ship, the USS CVA 34,
first of all, we were supposed to catch
it in Alameda, California.
When we got there, there were about 30 of us together.
And because I had this high score,
I was in charge of everybody and their records.
We missed him in Alameda.
Then we ran to San Diego.
Missed him in San Diego.
See, all this modern stuff that you
know it wasn't there then.
So I finally caught him in Long Beach, California.
So I saluted the officer of the day.
That's the person who was on [inaudible] the officer of
the day is the person that's in charge
on a particular day.
Saluted that person and gave him the,
I guess you would say personnel photos.
They put us in the X1 division.
I'm sure you have that.
In Doctrination division for two weeks.
At the end of two weeks,
they then got us in a room and they gave us a billet.
Billet means job, folks, if you haven't been in.
So I was the only black person.
The other 29 folks were white.
They got personnel man,
air control man for all the good jobs.
I was put into the deck force, chipping pain.
Now, my mother had complained when she first signed for
me that if you if you put my son in as a seg busboy,
I'm going to revoke my signature,
and that's in my personnel folder where my mother said,
no, you can't do that.
He can wait on white people here in Atlanta.
We don't need to send him to send
out to see to do all this stuff.
Well, they didn't put me in that in that force.
They put me in the deck force chipping pain.
Well, the other guy got him lamb was,
he had the lowest SAT score or lowest GCT score.
But I knew them all because I had all the records.
Mine was the highest, his was the lowest,
but we both got sent to the deck force, shipping pain.
So that wasn't good enough.
I guess I was down there for about three months.
And then they told me
that they had another job for me. I said, what is it?
They wanted me to clean up the head.
Now, you know what the head is.
You all don't. That's the restroom,
okay. For 200 men.
I said, okay. I went on there and I started.
It was mind blowing to come in and see
all how messed up that place was.
I remember something Dr. Benjamin Mayes,
my president of Morehouse,
said when I was a freshman over there.
I think I was a freshman.
He said, "Morehouse
shies to be the best in a particular field."
He said, "If you doctor be the best doctor,
if you're a lawyer be the best lawyer."
He went on down the line.
And then he said, "And if it falls
your fate to be a ditch digger,
be the best ditch digger God ever made."
I said, well, this is not ditch digging,
but at least it's in the same category.
So I decided to be the best restroom cleaner ever known.
So I went out and I got brass polish,
got paint, all that stuff.
And and and I cleaned it up. It was sparkling.
Everybody was talking about it on the ship.
Folks who come from other places use our restroom.
Ladies, I'm an apartment for being sexist,
but you may know more about cleaning up than most men do.
So you know that once you get a house cleaned,
you don't have to kill yourself every day.
You just have to keep it going.
So I went down and got books to read.
So I would clean up the restroom
after the men would go out to work.
It would take me about 30 minutes.
Then I didn't have to do do anything until the afternoon.
So I read books,
all kinds of books.
Well, after doing this for
about three or four months, all of a sudden,
I was called in by my non
commissioned officer who was in charge.
He said, someone is taking your job.
I said, okay.
Third class petty officer an E5.
I was a E3.
He had put in a sheet.
He put in a request to bump me out of
that job because I turned it into a gravy job.
So they bumped me out, put me back in the deck force.
I said, Jesus.
I went back down chipping paint.
So I looked in the plan of the day one day.
Plan of the day folks is a schedule of
events for a particular day.
And there was an announcement
for a dispersion clerk striker.
Dispersion clerks are those folks who count
the money and keep track of the money and hold
onto the money and decide on whether or not you can get
paid and advance pay and all that stuff.
So I went down to apply.
Ensign JC Claren who was in charge was very candid.
He said, "We don't want any negroes down here."
He said, "All of my folks are from
the South and none of us want any negroes down here."
I said, Well, my folks pay taxes just like your folks.
Why is it that I, if I have the aptitude,
why can't I do this?
No.
So they put me out. I went to see Commander Karl,
KOCH from the same town as the Koch Brothers,
who financed all this right wing stuff.
He's one of their relatives.
I went to see him and all he said to me was,
well, they didn't do that,
did they? I said, they did.
He had nothing else to say.
So I got up and I left.
Went back to the deck force
because he taken me out and
put me back in the deck force.
And Eureka, something said, well,
why don't I ask Lieutenant JG Holman
from Louisiana. What does he think?
I didn't expect much to be
honest with you because he was a Southerner.
But I was shocked when I told him that I
wanted to apply for that job and what had happened to me.
He said, Mr. King,
first white man ever called me mister was
Lieutenant Horn. He said, come with me.
He took me down there to
Dispersion office and he asked Ensign Claren,
he said, Mr. King has told me his side of the story.
Now, you give me your side as to why you turned him down.
And the man was candid, he said,
well, we don't want any negroes down here.
So Lieutenant JG Holman said stop right there.
If his name is not in the plan of
the day tomorrow morning,
I'm going to get your commission.
Come on, Mr. King, let's go.
Next day, my name is in the panel today.
And I went down to this pressing office.
About 12 people were in the office.
Nobody would speak to me.
I had to find a chair.
It was silent treatment.
So I guess after about two weeks of the silent treatment,
Gunny Walti Wolf from Seattle, Washington,
came over to me and he said,
we really shouldn't do you like this.
He said, I went to
Dispersion Click school and I'll help you.
He said, do you see all those books up there?
I said, yeah. He said,
you got to read all of those books.
He said, are you willing to do that?
I said, sure, I'll do it.
He said, also type 30 words a minute, can you type?
I said, no, but I'll learn how to do it.
So he started teaching me must
have been late July of 1954.
I guess after a couple of weeks a guy
named John Bloom from Tempe,
Arizona, decided that he help.
So between those two guys, both of whom were white,
I read all those things
and I learned how to type and what have you.
So we took their classic exam in,
must have been late September.
And there maybe five
of us in that room who took the exam.
I was the only one who passed.
So all of a sudden now,
the Black guy that they didn't want in
there just a few months earlier is now one of
the leadership and have to make a decision
on their grades and the whole bit.
Everybody's attitude changed once I got some power.
Moral of all the story is that,
I guess I was born looking up at the bottom,
not on the bottom, but looking up at the bottom.
The bottom is up there. But I can't blame my mother or
my stepfather because they
were in a system
that was designed to keep you at the bottom.
And therefore, all they could really do, in my opinion,
was try to instill into the progeny into
their children that you've got to get you
some education and you've got to push.
Nobody is going to give you a done thing,
you have to work for it,
you have to sacrifice for it.
Work two jobs if you have to,
but you will never change this system without getting you
some education and also having
some fortitude and stick to it in this.
I went around a long way around the bond
to give you that response.
Is that your only question about the Navy?
>> Pretty much just took it off. I didn't know.
>> Well, you and I have an affinity
because we've been there.
What was the name of your ship?
Kith. I was on the USS Ask CVA 34.
The Kith was a successor to the Ask aircraft carrier.
In fact, I remember we had to
put a candid flight deck on while I was there.
Similar experience. Do you have any more questions?
Who else? Yes, sir.
>> I'm John.
>> Where are you from, John?
>> Yes, sir.
>> Where are you from? Which town?
>> [inaudible].
>> I passed by, but I didn't stop.
[LAUGHTER]
>> [inaudible]
>> Well,
I think
the only thing I
can pick from that was that I learned teamwork,
back blocking and tackling and counting on
this guy to knock that guy down so I
could run on by teamwork.
That I did learn in football or in sports I learned
that that later helped me put together a team.
We could not have won
the struggles that we were
battling in without having a team.
And what I think I learned was that you need
different talent on a team
if you're trying to go forward in an objective.
You got to have a good quarterback.
You got to have good linemen who can block and tackle.
You have to have good ends, who can catch the ball.
But there's a division of labor that you learn in
the military and that you learn playing
athletics if you're a half back,
you got to count on somebody
blocking and somebody for you to run that touchdown.
So you learn, though I meshed what I learned in
the military with what I also learned in playing
football. I think you're right on point.
>> What did your mom tell you about
using football to get folks in the movement?
>> Well, when I called
the first meeting in
February of 1960 in Sal Hall Annex over at Morehouse,
about 23 people came to that meeting.
Most of the folks who were there were my teammates from
the football team. They were all men.
So I called my mother who was
my major advisor and I said,
Mama, I had told her about the meeting already.
I called her a tell how it went.
I said, but Mama, not a single lady showed up.
I said, we need some ladies.
So she said, well,
go over to Spelman,
and you get some ladies.
Just go over the Spelman and ask the ladies to join you.
I said, Mama, those girls don't know me.
I didn't have a girlfriend at Spelman,
so I didn't go over that often.
She said, but they know you. Why do you say that?
She said, don't you run those touchdowns on
Saturdays? I said, yes.
She said, they know you.
Trust me, they know you. Just go over there.
So sure enough, she was right.
I got a telephone call.
It's amazing how things happen.
I got a telephone call from
doctor Manley who was
the president of Spelman at the time,
asking me to come over to
to Sisters Chapel at
Spelman to have a debate with Roy Wilkins,
who held NWACP nationally.
Going to debate Roy Wilkins.
Anyway, I accepted it
and went over there and the chapel was
packed with the Spelman ladies.
Dr. Wilkins knocked it out the Park,
traced the history of NACP and civil rights in America,
and it was fought by the NWACP from 1909.
And his argument was,
you need to go back to class and let us do this.
And when you finish school,
take our place and keep it going.
So when he sat down,
they gave him a standing ovation.
I felt like I was lamb going to the slaughter.
So doctor Manley, the president of Spelman
, Mr. King is your time.
Well, I had learned when I took
my debating course that
if you feel you've been outclassed by your opponent,
find a way to agree with
your opponent on most of
the things that you can agree on,
but then search for something that you can
switch on to make your argument.
And so I basically made Mr. Wilkins' same
argument that he made with a few different words,
but praising the NWACP
for standing in the brief since 1909.
But then I made a turn that I said,
Mr. Wilkins, and I'm paraphrasing now,
war is fought primarily by young people
and we need to
recognize that if you continue doing it your way,
we'll be at more 100 years or more
just trying to get rights one
at a time and then every 10,
15 years, we get another one.
And I went on to talk
about how I thought we were ready for leadership.
And the point I made to him was that since 1619,
we've been asking for freedom, it has not come.
And so now it's time for us to demand it.
And it means putting our bodies in
the movement, we're going to do that.
And when I sat down, those girls went
wild, they went wild.
Dr. Wilkins looked at me and saluted me.
And he and I were friends until he passed all because
of that one incident. Don't be shy.
>> They are.
>> Yes.
>> Jordan.
>> Where are you from, Jordan?
>> Stone Mountain.
>> Stone Mountain, okay.
>> [inaudible].
>> Hold on. Were you born in Stone Mountain?
>> I was born in Atlanta around the area.
>> Did you know the history of Stone Mountain
and the Klan and all that stuff?
>> A little bit.
>> 1915?
>> No. [inaudible]
>> I'll find a way to talk about it.
>> My question to you is being college students in 1966,
how did being college students or how did
the idea of college students sitting in at
the riches affect the outcome
of instead of say the NAACP?
>> That's a good question. As background, Atlanta,
Georgia has always been
viewed as a major city in the South.
Even when it was a small town,
that you still had
transportation coming through here as artery.
Delta Airlines is just the latest reincarnation of
Atlanta's historic role in terms of transportation.
It was railroads first.
I guess the stage courts and
then railroads and now, of course, airplanes.
Ask me that question again because there's
something I want to make sure that I get in.
So let me hear you again.
>> So how did the idea of students sitting in riches?
>> I got you, because
I want to make sure that I cover some of this stuff here.
Because Atlanta was a unique place
the white abolitionists in
the North chose Atlanta as an ideal place to
provide a college education
privately funded by people from the East.
There was a battle going on after slavery over whether or
not the White South
was going to educate the newly freed slaves.
And I guess you would say the compromise was
that we'll give them
education up to the fourth grade all over the South.
And in Atlanta, they decided to give
them give the education up to the seventh grade,
again because of the influence
of some of the folks in the North.
So people like Rockefeller and some others in that york,
decided that they would
fund these historical Black colleges in Atlanta.
So they funded Spelman, Morehouse, Clark,
the church came in to fund Clark Methodist Church.
Mars Brown was funded by the Black Methodist.
That's the only one that the Black Methodists
ever funded in Georgia at least.
And in order to get a master's degree,
a lot of folks went to these
agricultural and mechanical schools
around the south because they finally did in fact,
start allowing people to move beyond the menial grades.
And in order to get a master's degree,
if you were in the South,
really happened until most recently, the 60s, I guess.
That doesn't mean that people didn't go outside
of to go to school at Princeton and Yale and places.
But that was one, maybe two,
no more than 10 or 15 people.
So the bulk of people who tried to get
an advanced degree beyond college,
beyond the state schools that they finally set up,
which were agricultural and mechanical schools,
by the way, they had to come to Atlanta.
And a lot of those people who came to Atlanta did
not go back home. They stayed here.
Well, you had some of the best minds,
Black and White who
were teaching at these private Black colleges.
They're just a litany of
brilliant people who wrote
all kinds of books while they were here,
some of them are still being used today.
So we ended up in a situation here
wherein you got an educated elite.
And by elite, I mean,
they had a college degree or a master's degree.
Not the masters, but about 10%.
Those persons laid the foundation
for the NAACP for moving high education?
No, moving K through 12 beyond the fourth grade
or the eighth grade to
high school started here in Atlanta,
started with David T. Howard High Schools,
was the junior high school,
Booker T Washington, which is a senior high school,
came out of that same movement.
So you had some folks here
who knew the value of education.
And so as the people came in from the country
to get education in Atlanta, they stayed.
So therefore, they formed
the underbelly of the civil rights movement
that was yet to come. It was necessary.
It was them and maybe if some of them had died,
some of that progeny was still
around. Did I leave out anything?
>> I guess because of that, how did that?
>> Go on and ask it.
>> Just how did that affect,
I think you actually really answered
it. I had to think about this.
>> Well, let me add to that,
I think, because I think it goes
back to one reason why I'm here.
My mother left me because my granddad took
me when I was
two-and-a-half years old down in Arlington, Georgia.
My mother had a acrimonious divorce from my father.
And so my grandfather divorced
them by saying, ''This is over.
And I'm going to keep this boy until I die.
Here's $5. Go to Atlanta and get you a job.
But I'm going to keep him until I die.''
Well, during that time,
if daddy said that, you did it,
I don't care how old you were.
So my mother came here and I came when my granddad died.
Now, let me give
you an unsolicited response to something.
Whatever I've been able to do in
my lifetime and I've done a few things,
I really have to pin it on my granddaddy and my mother.
Father's education in America said that,
what you put on a child's slate,
between the first and six years of age
will go with them for the rest of their lives.
I think it was John Locke who said that what you do
between the birth and 12 years of age will follow them.
Well, whichever one of
those is accurate or that you want to follow,
children do what they have been taught to do.
And if you have not taught them, then they won't do it.
And we see so many people
today who you can put on the news
at 6:30 and you see
all these young toughs being shot and chased,
and what have you, somewhere along the line,
this teaching got thrown off into waste basket somewhere.
And so these children are raising themselves.
And if you're raising yourself as a child,
you're raising a fool because you haven't had
the opportunity to learn how to live in this society.
Now, I'm not telling you that the society
is perfect because it is not.
But, you go a
whole lot further if you learn the rules of society.
I don't mean the racist rules,
I'm just talking about how you move forward,
how you help your children,
how you help your family,
how you help your community.
Those kind of things are missing.
I promise you in almost every last one of those kids
that we see at 6:30 on the news.
And then when you go and check that parents out,
they missed it for whatever the reasons,
and the grandparents missed it,
and the great grandparents missed it.
And the other great grads were in slavery.
So young folks, as you go forward,
try to look at this racial question in America in
some a holistic way that it just didn't begin yesterday.
It's been around a long, long time.
And we did make some changes,
but I said to Dr. Bohannon,
I think one a few times I first met her and I said,
not necessarily to her, but she was there.
But democracy does not work on cruise control.
We have the truth control in the car,
you just flip it on and
hold onto the steering wheel
because the car is going to drive itself,
democracy will not do that,
at least not in America.
You're going to have to engage and steer it,
and make sure sometimes you go fast,
sometimes you go slow based on what's out there.
And if we don't come to the point of recognizing that,
I think we're going to be in bad shape.
It's a shy class.
Why? Yes, ma'am.
>> I'm [inaudible]
>> Where are you from?
>> I'm from Savannah Georgia. I have a question.
I want to know what
motivated you to keep going throughout your
[inaudible] But what was
the key things that the major keep
going throughout those hard times.
>> This sounds self-serving.
But I did it because of you.
I didn't even know you weren't even around the spirit.
You wasn't even a trinkle
in somebody's eye when I was doing this.
But I've always been a student of history.
And when you read the history,
when you read America's history unvarnished,
you realize that permeated throughout the layers of
America is absolute unvonished racism,
based on color, not necessarily class but based on color.
And you're not going to change that
until people come together,
white, black, blue, green,
you name it and say,
we're going to make America live up to its creed,
and you see millions of people now,
which you didn't see 50 years ago,
but millions of people are now saying,
wait a minute, there's nothing wrong with this picture.
We're not supposed to be that country.
This was supposed to be a different country from
the European countries in
terms of people having opportunity.
But you're not going to change that until
you do something else in my opinion.
You've got to get the minorities
that would include the Hispanics and
the African Americans to
exercise their voting rights that they don't exercise.
Let me give you a little data here.
In Georgia alone there are over 500,000
African Americans who can register,
but who have not registered.
There were 400 and some thousand Hispanics.
Same situation.
But you also have another thing going on here.
Let me give you the last election in November.
I had Eddie person
who is a computer guru out
here to put some data together for me.
And I knew what the totals were,
but I wanted him and the other students to see it.
And these were the totals for
the last presidential election in November in Georgia.
And of course, it showed that Trump had it by
28,000 and whatever votes the state.
But over 57,000 African Americans
who were registered did not vote.
Had they voted, even at 80%,
the election would have been different.
That's true all over the South.
So the challenge, I say to young people is that
we've got to get the maximum number of
people participating in the electoral process.
That includes Asians, that includes Hispanics,
and that includes Blacks,
and that includes poor Whites too.
Folks who are running in America are only concerned about
the 1% making the 1% richer.
I don't know why these folks, they're
already multi-billionaires.
Why they want to make more money at
the expense of the masses makes no sense to me.
But they are very susceptible to
propaganda and especially in the South and the Southwest.
The Republican machine.
And by the way, the Republican Party.
I don't know. You all may know this
because you educated people.
The Republican Party was the party
that led African Americans out of slavery.
You all knew that. How many didn't know that?
Well, that's okay.
Let me just say that to you. Rather have
you put up your hands.
The Republican Party led
African Americans out of slavery. They did it.
They paid a penalty
because all the Southerners were Democrats.
Well, it's ironic now the whole thing is switched.
The Democrats in the South took over
the Republican Party in
the South from the Blacks who were there.
And then they made a coalition with the folks in
the Southwest and in the far West.
And in the small towns
around Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin.
So they now and they were employing what you see,
they were employing a tactic that was
designed in 1791, the Electoral College,
where they could keep
America's positions on the conservative side.
And they've spent hundreds of years
trying to keep this thing going.
And they can keep it going because a lot of
folks had never heard of electoral college.
A lot of folks don't realize that their reason
for being is tied up in their voting or not voting.
And it's amazing when you open up
people's eyes and show them the connection
between their participation in
the political system and
the impact of the non-participation.
It's shocking to people.
And when we talked to some college kids
from the time before you were on the phone with us.
Skype with us, they were shocked at
the data that Eddie brought in.
They couldn't believe it.
But I knew the stuff already.
But if I lecture to you and tell you about it,
you don't get it as much as you get it if it's visually
presented to you with
the numbers and then have a discussion.
But when you look at what's happening in America,
it's absolutely attrocious So we've got to find
a way to register thousands and thousands of
voters and turn the South from red to blue.
Nobody's going to die.
It just means that we need to make real,
we hold these troops to be self-evident, etc.
It's not going to happen until you get
the maximum number of people
within under this umbrella to participate in the system.
If you register vote.
And most of the time,
you're going to vote your personal interest.
And that means someone who is enlightened,
that's the person that will get that will get the vote.
What we're having up here now in the sixth district.
I don't know how that's going to go down,
but it looks like it's going to be real tight.
But I'm pleased that a highly Republican district,
a Democrat can make a great race and he might even win.
But that was what that's telling me, though,
is an awful lot of white people that have
finally realized that they've been
pimped as simple as that.
They've been pimped by these politicians who
bander and subtly push
the racial issue for personal gain.
That's all it is.
But all of a sudden now,
people are beginning to see it.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.
For seven years,
the South railed against something called Obamacare.
Oh, it's so bad.
We got to get rid of it.
People were joining all over
the country all of the South we have to do that.
I never forget that I saw an interview on one
of the national news about 13,
14 months ago during the campaign.
The reporter asked this woman not in Georgia,
but in Los Angeles.
What do you think of Obamacare?
This is a white woman. She says, I hate it.
This is terrible.
And she had an exposition that she gave.
He said, what do you think about the Affordable Care Act.
She oh, I like that.
He said it is one and the same.
She says, but she had been sold on opposing
the healthcare that she said when you change
the name that she said she was in favor of.
When the Republicans took over
both the houses and the presidency,
one of the first things they did as you know,
was try to bring down Obamacare.
But all of a sudden,
when people realize that 20 million people
and they were probably included in that
27 are going to lose their healthcare.
All of a sudden, it was a whole different ball game.
You all saw that.
Now, where do it go from here?
You won't change some
of these people on this side of the dirt.
But what you can do is change the overt behavior.
And you change the overt behavior by number one,
trying to enlighten them,
but at the same time,
use the tools that are
available to make sure that every entity
within this representative democracy
gets a chance to participate.
Now, if the folks
who don't participate decide they want to join
later on and register and vote and vote for
these racist people, that's democracy.
But it's funny when it's
just a small segment or let's say
three fourths of the population as voting.
The other one quarter is just sitting on the sidelines.
Democracy will not work on the sidelines.
You got to as I said earlier on,
hold your hands on it on the steering wheel.
Apply the gas, if necessary,
slow down if necessary.
More questions. Yes. Oh, for sure.
>> So this seems like now, as far as participation
is part and used to be during your time.
So I just wanted to know what is the things that you
did to enable last participation as
far as things like
the richest economic side of
proceedings like given credit cards and stuff like that.
>> Well, I don't really know the answer to that.
I can give you my response.
I don't know how religious you are,
but after 300 and some years,
I think God instilled
into a lot of people that needs to be a change here.
And a lot of people took
up the banner and brought about a change.
Now, the change that they brought about upset
a lot of other people who didn't want to see the change,
but America is a much better place for the change.
There's some invisible force, in my opinion,
that affected 70,000 college kids.
I don't know whether you all know how many
college kids got involved,
but from the time
those four young boys sat down in Greensboro,
by July 30th,
70,000 plus African American
students and about another 5,000 White students
were really changing the South
but that went into laws on your side.
It was civil disobedience.
We went to jail.
When we went to jail, we filled the jails,
and the people who were oppressing us,
the police, didn't quite know how to deal with
that because we were well dressed.
Some of them saying,
I can't sing, but some of those sang.
And we couched our drive in a universal humanity of man.
And it was very difficult for people to
battle what we were talking
about because it was a battle of ideas.
Not with guns but with ideas,
and we put our bodies in the movement,
sometimes with great peril
in order to bring them out to change.
At some point, maybe in the far distant future,
the contribution of these thousands of Black kids and the
5,000 roughly White kids who joined
them may be adequately documented,
but they were nameless,
faceless people who were very unselfish
and a few folks lost their lives,
a lot of them lost their education.
We're still impacting some of those folks today,
but in every battle, in every war,
there are going to be some tragedies, some casualties.
But in order to have
a better outcome at the end of the war,
sometimes people have to be hurt.
Now, let me just talk to you about
the richest boycott for a moment.
I'm not sure how much you've read about this,
but when we called that boycott,
I announced it in June of 1960 when
they arrested me and Dr. Zen and
his daughter and took me to jail and let them go home.
That was the beginning of the drive for the boycott.
Now, what was the thinking behind the boycott?
My great professor in economics,
my major was economics when I was in
college, Dr. E.B Williams.
Dr. Williams taught me
that if we ever
want to get our freedom as African Americans,
we need to come together economically.
He talked about the fast die versus the slow dollar.
His point was that ninety something percent of
African Americans make nickels and the dimes,
but a few who are professional people who make big money.
He said, but if you could ever find a way to
harness the energies and the resources,
the money of the masses,
you can change policy.
You don't have to wait for laws.
If you take the money out of these people's pocket,
they will change their overt behavior.
Now, they may not love you,
but they would change their overt behavior.
So he then had me to go and do a market analysis to
bring him a report back on
the margin of profit for various industries,
department stores, grocery stores,
five and dimes stores.
So when it came to department stores,
Richard's department store had
a margin of profit of 5-10%.
Well, we were 33% of the population in Atlanta.
Every home in Atlanta had a Richard charge card almost.
They just sent them to you.
And on top of that, Richards was
the first company in the South that I'm aware
of to ever use
courtesy titles on African Americans names.
In other words, if you're from Savannah, Georgia,
and you went to the major store in Savannah in the 1960s,
your name was Lily May John,
not misses or Mr. if you were black.
In Atlanta, Richard started in
the '40s addressing African Americans
as Mr. That they gave
courtesy titles that they
were given to the same two whites.
So to make a boycott work against what appears to be
an enlightened department store
when it comes to issues of courtesy,
what have you, that was going to be difficult.
But I decided after
having that course from Dr. E.B Williams that if we
could find a way to get
at least 25 or 30% from
the African Americans to stop
shopping at Richard's department store,
we probably could bring them to their heels.
We weren't going to win a lawsuit,
so may as well forget about that.
If we were going to win it would be
10 or 15 years down the road.
So I called this boycott in June and I
asked the Atlanta Citizens to send me their charge cards.
254 of them did send me the charge cards,
and I put them in the bank.
Now, that was designed by me to see how
deeply felt African Americans
in fighting for their freedom.
If they willing to risk
that credit card in
the hands of a college student who they did not know.
That told me that we had already struck something then.
Moving a little forward on this point,
I went out to look at the Richards department store files
at Emory University.
And I found there were hundreds of
other people who sent that cards back to Richard's,
not to me, but to Richard's.
The end result of that boycott according
to the Federal Reserve,
during the Christmas holidays,
it cost them $20 million in profits, that Richard's.
We don't know how much Woolworth
lost and all the other places,
but Richards lost 20 million.
A man named Mr. Thomas Asher,
who is the president of the Richards Foundation
now because Richard is gone,
but the foundation is year, he was a lot of money.
He and I spoke down at Georgia State
about six or eight weeks ago.
And when I got there,
he was finishing up his speech.
And he said something that was just astounding.
He acknowledged, I had just come in and he said,
and I'm ready to talk about the impact of that boycott.
And he said that he's a finance man.
That's how he made this money at
Robinson Humphrey downtown Atlanta
big stock broker brokerage company.
He said the impact of that $20 million in
today's money is $553 million. I was shocked.
I was in it, but I was still shocked at
how much money that was in today's dollars.
So the young folks who were working with me,
we did a lot of stuff and nobody in Atlanta got killed.
Now we get now ladies got
cigarettes put out on their shoulders
and I got acid
on me and got beaten up and all that kind of stuff.
But I'd say 99% of what we did in Atlanta,
nobody was permanently maimed
by it and nobody was killed.
I think a lot of that was because of
the attitude of the White community.
The White community in Atlanta is just as
racist as the White community in Mississippi.
But the difference was that they didn't want to be viewed
as a racist town to that
would throw these kids in
jail and beat them up and shoot in.
They didn't that was not good for business.
And so they didn't do it. It wasn't
that they loved the kids.
It's just that they weren't going to
do that because that was
going to hurt that bottom line image because
they've been trying to get Northern capital
to come into Atlanta ever since the days of Henry Grady,
back in the latter part of the previous century.
So therefore, they weren't
going to run the risk of being in
Birmingham later or in Montgomery or some other place.
So they wanted to be known as a place that had
a peaceful transition to
another level of involvement on the part of
African Americans in the City of
Atlanta. Did I answer your question?
>> Yeah. [inaudible]
>> Ask it and then we'll go to them.
While you have the floor, keep talking.
>> I just wanted to know,
you know how your movement started from the gentleman in
Greensboro and do you know of
some other movies that came when you started?
As far as from what you guys did as far as the stuff,
do you know of other moves that was in [inaudible]?
>> Yeah. Well, first of all,
nobody had challenged the City of Atlanta power
structure until we did it, directly.
They've gone to federal court
and they were in a case every 10 or 15
years but the actual in your face,
putting me in jail.
We want you to integrate this place or else,
we're going to shut it down by boycotts or what have you.
That didn't happen until we did it in 1960.
I'm not sure you've seen the appeal for human rights.
Have they seen the appeal for human rights?
>> That's one of the documents [inaudible].
>> The idea of the appeal came from Dr. Rufus Clement,
President of Atlanta University.
What they were trying to do was to
dissuade us from following Greensboro.
Now, they were concerned
about whether or not they were going to lose
their tax exempt status
with this racist South that we were in.
And so I could understand the president's
taking kind of a cautious position.
But Dr. Clement,
when he saw that we weren't going to back down,
he then said, well, why don't you write a manifesto,
articulating why you are
going to do what you say you're going to do?
And so I accepted that challenge.
And I appointed Roslyn Pope,
who later on became doctor Dr.
Pope to write it
because she was known as a brilliant writer.
And I appointed Julian Bond to help her,
Mars Dillard, Albert Brinson and Charles Black.
Well, the night before we had to turn it
into the presidents for them to look at it,
Roslyn called me and said, Lonnie,
nobody's been willing to help me. I said, what?
She said, no. I said,
Roslyn write the damn thing.
I have to keep organizing
these people for the sit-in next week.
And so she wrote it.
My understanding that Julian typed it,
but she actually wrote it in Dr. Zinn's kitchen.
That document has been copied all over the world.
And more specifically to answer your question directly,
I was looking at a replay of
the Birmingham movement about a month or so ago,
maybe six weeks ago.
And as I looked at it,
they were reading a manifesto.
The students at Miles College.
And it was basically a paraphrase of the appeal for
human rights. I said, wait a minute.
They ought to give some attribution to the Atlanta folks
for copying their stuff.
No, that didn't happen.
And they were running an economic boycott,
which also followed what we had
done because we got success.
I finally got the question answered for me at
the end of that documentary that was on the PBS.
Dr. Rufus Pitts was
in Atlanta when the movement was going on.
He was the head of
the Georgia Teachers Education Association.
And so he literally took what
he saw in Atlanta and took it to Birmingham.
And so they ran
a four page ad that they paraphrased all the that we did,
but did not give the Atlanta people
any credit for anything,
but they borrowed our whole hook line and sinker.
They took it. There's nothing wrong with that,
but I think you ought at least give some attribution
to what Pope did and some other people did.
I think I asked you a question, didn't
I? Any other questions?
Yes, sir. Wait. Let me
take him first and then you because
you've asked one already.
>> I'm Tyler.
An education major here.
>> Hi Tyler. Where are you from Tyler?
>> I'm from. [inaudible]
>> Okay.
>> At what point in all of
these sit-ins and boycotts and all
that did the light switch
turn on for you and you said this worked?
All my jail time and time boycotting, when did it work?
When did you realize that everything worked?
>> On 1st February,
1961, I call for
an extension on the boycott to go through Easter.
Newspapers, it was run.
Within two weeks I was tricked into
a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce
by a man named Jesse Hill,
who was working for Atlanta Life.
He called me and said,
can you come to the Chamber of Commerce?
There's a very important meeting there
today and we need you in the meeting.
I said, what's the meeting about?
Come on, come on. I said,
okay, well, he'd been one of my little advisors.
So I took Dr. Herchelle Sullivan with me to the meeting.
When we got there, It was full
of old line African American businessmen and preachers
and the white power structure
headed by the Head of Chamber of Commerce
and the chairman of
Richards board was sitting across from me.
Dick Richard didn't come because he and
I fell out a few months earlier.
But Frank Neely was there. He was the chairman.
So when we sat down,
we wanted to talk about integrating the restaurants.
And what they proposed was to integrate
the restaurants downtown after
the schools desegregated in the fall,
which would have been five months later.
And they also wanted me
to accept their word that they were going to do it.
I said, under no circumstances,
am I going to accept your word.
If it's written and signed,
then I still have to take it back to
the group that I represent to have them ratified.
Martin King's daddy,
Reven King Senior jumped up and said,
boy, I'm tired of you.
You're going to wreck this town.
I baptized you, which is true.
And he just berated me in front of all these people.
But I had to be courteous and kind to him because
he was my mama's pastor as well as mine.
And if I had jumped on his behind,
my mama would have disowned me.
So I was non violent.
I took the abuse but I wouldn't change.
Ironically, the person in
that room that sided with me was Frank Neely,
the guy from Richards who by the way,
had been hitting me with his cane.
He was sitting directly across from me.
He was hitting me with his cane the entire meeting.
I never understood that.
Maybe you all can tell me 50 years later.
What the heck was that all about?
The man kept hitting me with his cane the entire meeting.
The only thing he ever said was that I was right.
When Neely said that,
they called for a recess,
I guess to get me straight, whatever.
So Dr. Clement of more of AU came by and he said,
you're between a rock and a hard place.
If you agree to this,
they're going to get you condemned.
If you don't agree to it,
you're going to still get condemned.
He said, they then got you in a box.
So finally, after they went through all of that,
Mr. John Calhoun who was the head
of the, no, he wasn't head then.
He had been the head of the NAACP.
He came to me and he said, Lonnie,
I was born in 1899,
and I have been segregated all of my life.
And for me to wait from
March 1st to September, is a short time.
And since I've been one of your advisors,
I advised you to go along with it.
I thought about it and I finally said,
okay, I will do it on one condition.
It has to be in writing.
If you don't put it in writing,
then there's no deal so they put it in writing.
They signed that they're going to do it in September.
So then I said, now I got to go
back and sell it to the students.
And that's where Neely agreed with me.
And so I left the meeting going back,
I called the secretary,
said called the panel together
and tell them that there's an emergency meeting,
I need to come and talk to them about
this negotiations that I've just left.
When I got in the car
Ivan Allen had just
held a press conference at the Chamber of Commerce.
I guess the reporters were in
the next room or whatever while we were there.
And he began his press conference
by saying that the nigra,
N-I-G-R-A student leadership has
agreed to end the boycott.
And the lunch counters will reopen tomorrow segregated.
That went out little bit like a bomb.
And so by the time I had my meeting with the students,
everybody observe upset about it because
it looked like I had sold out.
So I had taken Herchelle Sullivan with me.
So I resigned.
I said, look, maybe you all need to take this or you
can disavow this thing if I'm out of the way.
Well, they wouldn't let me resign they said,
no, we're not going to get anybody else.
We're just going to fight this through.
And so they wouldn't accept my resignation.
And I decided to stay.
We had to call a mass meeting
a few days later at church on Ashker Street.
Over 2,000 people were in
that meeting raising holy heck over the agreement.
About another 1,000 or so were outside.
They had to string up on not only lights
but sound speakers out there.
So they wanted me to preside over the meeting,
but Dr. Karl Home and said,
no, you all screwed this up to the Black leadership.
So you all got to solve it.
So I sat there and it was getting more and more unruly.
So I knew Dr. King Junior had been out of town speaking.
But he was but he was back that day. So I called him.
And I said, Mel
I got to have it going to call this crowd down.
I said, they're getting ready to tap this time.
He said, I heard about it.
He says, on the news.
He said, but LC, they called me LC.
He said, but I'm not doing well,
I'm under the weather with the cold
that I caught on this tool.
I said, but I need you here.
And I think the key tools when I said,
they just booed your daddy.
And I think that's what got him.
And so he said, I'll be there in a few minutes.
He lived on Sunset, so that was
just a matter of coming around the corner almost.
When he got there, he had tears in his eyes because
he knew how they had treated his daddy. So I got Dr.
Borders to let him to quiet this crowd down,
let him take the stand
immediately. Put a pin right there.
Daddy King, Martin's father was a dictatorial guy.
If I said that you do it.
He was talking to this mass of people out there.
And he was taking a very paternalistic.
I'm in charge of you attitude.
And he made them and so the crowd was very unruly.
They were very disrespectful to him.
So he got angry.
He has a short temper.
And so he made the mistake of
saying to this crowd as they were booing him.
I've been a civil rights leader in
Atlanta for over 30 years.
And before he could say anything else,
a woman in a nursing uniform up in the back and said,
and that's what's wrong.
And when she said that man,
the place just erupted.
In other words, you've been a part
of the problem that we have.
So he had to sit down.
And that's when I called
ML and asked him to come and pray the crowd.
People make you think that the greatest speech that he
ever made was the one at the march on Washington.
No, that's anti climatical.
The greatest speech was
that night at Rush Memorial Church when
he was speaking to uphold
his dad's honor and also save the agreement.
He took that crowd up the hill, down the valley.
It was a masterful speech that he made.
But by the time he finished,
everybody had calmed down.
I literally saw the force of what
amatory can do to quell a crowd. And that guy did it.
I have ever seen anybody who could do it like him.
Did I hit your points? Now,
you wanted to ask me another point about that, sir.
>> How would this movement affect your family life?
>> My wife at the time
was nervous because her parents were nervous.
We hadn't been married that long and they
were conservative people who thought that she was
going to be without her husband
[LAUGHTER] soon and they
gave her hell because of what I was doing.
Even though they were giving her hell,
she didn't. How should I put it?
She loved her parents,
but I think she loved her husband.
And so she was like in the middle.
I was concerned about
how my family was going to be treated.
One night, I was speaking somewhere out of town.
And I learned when I came home,
where she didn't tell me while I was out of
town that two men had come to try to
break in the apartment
at about two o'clock in the morning.
So she grabbed our daughter,
was a young baby,
and took her into the closet and hid among the clothes,
just in case they broke in.
But we had a double boat locked,
so they knocked and knocked and pushed and pushed,
but they came up against the double,
I guess they didn't want to
break the whole neighborhood up.
So they left. That impacted on her and me.
Another time I was in Cleveland Ohio making a speech,
and four white men in a convertible,
were drinking beer, liquor or whatever downstairs.
I lived in this garden type apartment.
I was on the second floor.
There are about four units down there.
And so what I did not
know was that there were four Korean war veterans who
were there and they had already decided and I didn't
know it that if anybody came to ambush me,
they were going to shoot them.
So that night, as I understand it from Charles,
they observed these four guys
in this convertible drinking beer or whatever.
So on a pre arrangement,
three other guys plus Charles got their guns,
and they surrounded the car.
And Charles told the guy who was in the driver's seat,
what are you boys doing here?
Well, now, that was deliberate to insult the guy.
And they said, well, we just wait for
that old boy upstairs to come home.
And so at that point,
I understand that the guys clicked their guns on
them and said if you don't leave
here, we're going to kill you.
And of course, they got out of
there and they never came back.
So I never had to worry, I guess about being
waylaid at my house like Mega Evans was.
They were there to lay me,
but these guys had
decided that they were going to protect
me and they did that night.
Although I was in Cleveland,
they still did not know I was in
Cleveland and those folks who
were away me didn't know I was in Cleveland.
I know you have some questions, folks.
Yes, the lady who takes the pictures.
Yes. Give me your name.
>> I am Samiyah.
>> How do you spell that?
>> S-A-M-I-Y-A-H.
>> And what's your classification out here?
What are you,
a freshman, junior or senior?
>> I am a senior.
>> Proceed.
>> My question for you is given the state of
things and being aware of what the consequences would be,
what was the one thing that was
the trigger for you that made
you jump off the cliff and start this?
>> The Greensboro. The Greensboro were four.
When those young boys sat down on 1st February 1960,
that was the catalyst.
That was the enzyme that caused me to spring into action.
When you look at it in retrospect,
all the stuff that I was going through
in the Navy where I was
battling discrimination in order to get go forward.
I learned that you could win the battle if you do
your research and if you kick back legally.
So I won every battle I ever had in the Navy.
So you get a little
sure of yourself when
you go into battles and you always knock out the guy.
You say, I'm all right.
So I won the battles in the Navy,
and the navy was certainly about as
difficult as Atlanta was.
And I knew that I was a little bit
older than the other students,
a little more mature and I had
more experience at fighting racism.
That's really all it was.
I was a little older, more experienced,
and I can't leave out the fact that I
was well trained by my professors.
Anything else? Where are you from?
>> I was born in Pakistan and I grew up in New York.
>> How do you like Dr. Trump?
[LAUGHTER] I either don't know. By the way you laugh.
>> It's just a follow up on what Sony was saying.
You mentioned the catalyst for movement started.
Were there any childhood experiences that you had that
made you really understand what was the stake?
>> Well, yeah.
First of all, segregation was ubiquitous.
It existed everywhere.
In every aspect of life,
buses, the trains,
restaurants,
housing patterns,
everything was segregated period by race.
Give me that. I'm missing
a point because I want to be sure that I fully
answered your question and
I'm missing one part of what you
asked me. Fill in the blanks for me.
>> Say something, an experience that you had in
your childhood that really
made you start to think when you found those flyers.
>> Well, I think the thing that I thought about
was what happened to me when I
was at the job when I came through the White Gas field.
Let me explain to you what that was.
Down on Alban Avenue
at the corner of Alban Avenue and Boulevard,
you see the King
Nursing Home or something down there now.
That used to be the White Motor company.
White Motor company was a trucking company
, long distance trucking.
And they had behind them
all these trucks on that field out there.
And we used to walk through the field as a shortcut.
Rather than come all the way down
Boulevard to Alban Avenue,
you went diagonal across the field.
And so we all did that.
So I was playing table tennis at
John Hope elementary school one day when I was about 13.
And as I was walking across the field,
out comes this big dog
barking and coming towards
me like he was going to bite me.
And so I kicked at the dog,
but I didn't kick him because the dog when I
kicked, he jumped back.
Well, this big guy,
he must have been 6'2'' or 3'' maybe 250,
whatever, it was a big dude.
He was the owner of the dog and so he told me,
"Nigger, don't you kick my dog. Stand there."
And so I stood there.
During that time, folks,
if a white person told you to stand still,
you stood still, because they might shoot you, whatever.
It's like the police telling you stand
still during that time.
So I stood still and the guy came over and he slapped me
down because I kicked at his dog.
I didn't kick the dog.
And so I got up.
He took the dog back inside and I went on down to
the Battle field YMCA to play table tennis.
I came back that night after dark.
I brought a bucket of bricks with me and I broke
every window in that warehouse. Every window.
It must haven't had a burglar alarm
because the burglar alarm would have gone off,
but I was so pissed.
Because here is a situation
where his dog was attacking me.
And he's going to slap me down,
call me a bunch of names. That was too much.
And so I came
back and I broke all the windows in the place that night.
The statute of limitations has
passed, so I don't worry about that anyway.
[LAUGHTER] But I did it.
So I must have had this whatever you call it,
this desire to fight back from a very young age.
Quite guy, but don't cross me too far because I
will take you on to degree and if you can get your PhD.
Then you can be like doctor Bohannon here.
>> Doctor King is dissertaning at Georgia State right
now for another PhD.
>> Yes, sir.
>> So name is Aaron Williams.
>> Where are you from, Mr. Williams?
>> I'm from Atlanta.
>> Talk to me.
>> Well my question is, in your opinion,
who was your greatest supporter
during the movement that you can think of?
>> Well,
the greatest adult supporter was Mr. John Calhoun,
who used to be the head of the NWACP.
He had breakfast with
me down at the corner of Alban Avenue in Butler Street,
which is now Alban Avenue in Jesse Hill.
That was a little restaurant
there that a man named BB Beeman used to own.
That's a second off the corner there.
So we had breakfast down there,
two or three times a week.
The man was a master organizer,
and he took me under his wing
to make sure that I knew the rudiments of organization.
And he also was a part of the Black Pole structure too.
So he was in
with all these folks who made major decisions.
So he was the number one person.
Next person that I would have to point
out would be doctor Samuel Williams,
who was the head of the NACP at that time.
He's gone now, but he was a very strong supporter.
I remember going to a black attorney when we first
started the movement to get him to represent
us and he wanted a $3,000 retainer.
Can you imagine asking a college student
for a $3,000 retainer?
That was basically saying,
I don't want to represent your case.
So I went to see doctor Williams who headed
the NACP and he said,
let me make a phone call.
He called attorney Donald Hollowell.
Hollowell said, I'd be glad to represent him.
So we went to see
doctor Hollowell and the rest his history.
He and AT Walton and several other attorneys came
together to become the legal arm
for what we were trying to do.
And they won a lot of court cases for us also. Yes.
>> So how did you
organize the movement back then without
the large amount of technology that we have today?
>> Well, that's a good point.
I asked Julian because he was an excellent writer.
That was what I wanted him to do is to write.
Julian Bond, became the editor of a publication called,
The Student Movement And You.
Have you seen any of those publications?
That was his job to write that for us.
And we put out 20,000 copies of
that document every Sunday at the churches.
Again, pushing the boycott,
why there's a need for a boycott,
so forth and so on.
You have to educate the population to
get them going in the direction
that you want them to go in.
A man by the name of Kasut Hill,
came by my office one day.
I was down on Alban Avenue.
We must have been publishing
The Student Movement And You for about six eight issues.
Mr. Hill came in and suggested
that we start a newspaper called The Atlanta Inquirer,
because he he owned the rights of
The Atlanta Inquirer name from the State of Georgia.
And he says, if you will,
if you get your folks to write it, I'll start the paper.
He said, because what Mr. Scott who headed
Atlanta Daily World is doing is outrageous.
So as of July 31st, 1960,
that was when the first issue was printed.
[NOISE]
That paper became my voice.
They put out in the beginning about
10,000 copies every weekend.
They finally went to about 25 or 30,000 copies.
That paper is still running as of this day.
But it was the students who
started that newspaper with Mr. Kasut Hill.
It was his money and his paper,
but he had no writers.
And so our job was to write and put it all together.
And he then got Dr. Carl Holman,
Chairman of the Department of English at
Clark College to become the editor.
And so I think I think Dr. Holman came in
around in the middle of August
to take over as the editor.
He had a guy named Bill Strong,
who was the editor on the first issue.
But he and Strong cross cross one another.
And since it was Mr. Hill's paper,
Mr. Strong had to go.
And so they hired Dr. Carl Holman
to write for us as the editor.
But you had Julian on working with Mr. Holman,
you had John Gibson,
who was the crime reporter,
John Dale Johnson, who was a social reporter.
Joy Thompson was the young people's reporter.
She had a column called Jumping With Joy.
She was going to high school, but she voted every week.
So we covered and we had someone else handing
the religious dudes I forgot who that was now.
But that paper has stayed in business and Mr. Smith died
about a month or so ago after moving from
being an advertising sales person
to finally becoming publisher years later.
He died and we
don't know what's going to happen with that paper.
His son is now in charge,
and they're still publishing,
but my understanding is that it's not on as sound of
ground as it was earlier. Anything else?
>> But in terms of organizing.
So Candice, I know you asked this question
the other day and we had this really
neat discussion about it.
How did you organize those incidence without cell phones?
>> Oh, yeah, well,
we had three representatives.
The committee on appeal of
Human Rights was made up of 19 members.
There were three from each one of
the six schools plus the chairman.
The responsibility of the each committee member was to
bring students from
their respective schools to the demonstrators.
For instance, if you were going to Spellman,
and you were on the committee,
you and the other two ladies that were working with
you would take the policies that we had put in place.
For example, if we said that we're going to
have a march on May 17th,
1960, which would commemorate the Brown decision,
and we wanted thousands of students to get involved.
Well, once we voted that in,
then the representatives from
the respective schools would then post
it in their dormitories all over the place,
and then they were able to then
recruit from the dorms and everywhere.
And all we had to do was tell the meters in
front of the library.
That's where we assembling that
major place space out there and
thousands of people would show up because we had
tentacles into all six schools.
And those folks did a heck of a job,
they went back to the domes, for instance,
in the whole meetings just explaining to them
what we're trying to do and why we are trying to do it.
We also learned something else too.
One of the major successes of the movement was
the fact that a lot of
the students were not from Atlanta.
So therefore, the regular and traditional ways
of suppressing Black opposition to
segregation was not able to apply
here because the students came from
all over the world, all over America.
So you couldn't very well get
on the phone and call your butter say
five students of Jones because
her child is picketing downtown.
If Susie Jones is from Buffalo, New York,
Los Angeles, California,
how are you going to figure out how to get to.
So this whole reprisal thing
upon which the South had operated
for centuries couldn't work.
And if you look at the movement
and look at the number of people who went to jail,
you will find out that I'd say
no more than about 20%
of the folks who went to jail were from Atlanta.
About 80% were from other places a lot of them never
told our parents that they were doing
it because they didn't want to
go through all of the hustles.
And so they just did it. They were grown by this time.
If we just relied on Atlanta Students alone,
it wouldn't have worked because you had a system in place
that would be oppressive if you got out of your lane.
And to be to be talking
about going to integrated lunch counters
and been able to try on clothes and
dresses like anybody else in the public,
that was a no during that time.
And so if you
tried to push that and you lived in Atlanta,
then they'll try to contact your parents and if
you're still depending upon
your parents for some support,
then that's another ballgame.
Let me give you
an illustration of what I'm talking about.
The whites weren't involved in it necessarily,
but there's a lady that you may meet later on.
If not, you'll see on whatever Dr. Bohanna puts together.
Her name is Eva Kendrick Wollot.
She went to Clark College.
She was one of the most loyal,
committed supporters that we had.
Her daddy ordered her to drop out of the movement,
and they had a debate about it but she wouldn't give in.
He said, well, I'm not going to pay for your education.
I sent you over there to get an education,
not to go downtown and challenge segregation.
So he withdrew his money.
Well, he didn't put out the house.
She still had some place to live.
She was at the she was that she dropped
out of school and was there
every day doing something in the movement.
Well, if you take what her dad did to
her and magnified on a broader universe in Atlanta,
people who had Atlanta connections,
you probably would have had the same thing.
The key to our success in my view in terms of
numbers was the fact that
the folks who participated were not from Atlanta.
They were here to go to school.
Does that make sense to you all?
If your name appeared
in the newspaper as one of those arrested.
You run the risk if you lived
in Atlanta and your folks are in Atlanta,
your folks might get fired if they could ever identify.
The way you get around that is that
you have people from Miami in California,
other places. What can you do?
It's too difficult to find a way to reprise,
and even if you could reprise,
how can you do it if the person is in California?
You may find the name out,
but so you found the name out, what can you really do?
You can't really bring any pressure on those folks.
Anything else? Yes, ma'am.
My Pakistani friend.
>> How did the students themselves function?
What happened during there,
was there some rotation between students?
>> Good question. We outlined a battle plan.
We're going to go to Woolworth,
Kresky, Riches, Davidson Paxton,
which became Macy's,
to the jug stores that were involved,
WT Grant, all those little stores, that downtown.
And Once we targeted those places,
we then apportioned who was going to be
the lead person at that particular location.
And how many students that we need in order
to fill that billet, wherever it is.
And so we then were able
to assemble the folks that we needed.
Now, how did it work?
We transportation pool.
A lot of cab drivers were willing to drive
us to the respective places
that we were going and pick us up.
We also had Mr.
Ira Jackson who owned the gas service station.
So he provided free the gas that we needed.
So the cars could go and fill up at his service station.
I'm sure he got a lot of tanks that were not used.
[LAUGHTER] But nevertheless, that's what happened.
So initially, we would go in to sit down.
And after a while, the merchants
developed a close up technique.
Once we showed up,
they would close down.
No more food being served today.
And so we'd go back to the campus,
and then they'd re-open.
So we said, aha.
So I asked the guys who
were technicians who were in the movement,
and I said, can you design a communication system?
So a guy named Ronald Yancey
said, "Yeah, we can do that."
I said, let's get some two or three cars to carry people.
We'll have a communications center
in our headquarters here.
And when we do the sit-ins,
if they close,
we'll leave out spot there just standing around.
So that when they re-opened the lunch counters,
we would then tell the people by radio.
They re-opened the lunch counter
at such and such a place,
and they would sent them right back.
And so we did that all over town.
They never knew how we knew to send somebody back.
So finally, they just closed them all.
But the idea was to close them when we first showed up.
Then time we leave, open them back up.
Well, we said no,
we're going to make you lose this money.
And so that's when we put
together this communication system
with the young fellow named
Yancey being the major person to make it happen.
These are folks who went on
to Georgia Tech, for instance,
after they finished in Morehouse to get
some more advanced engineering degrees,
and all that stuff.
But they were into this technical stuff,
and they knew how to do all of this.
But we had a communication system,
which they never knew that we had.
>> I think you can handle one more question that somebody
has asked to [OVERLAPPING].
>> How about you in the cat back there?
Do you have anything to ask me?
>> I have nothing.
>> Nothing. Yes, sir.
>> Can you tell us about the rough rides?
Who was going through the mob while you
were going through that?
>> When you said rough ride?
>> By the police.
>> Well, I never really had a rough ride.
But I learned later that when the whites were with us,
they put the whites in a white paddy wagon,
the blacks were in a black paddy wagon.
And I know all that sounds crazy,
but that's what was going on.
So I learned later that
some of the drivers of the paddy wagons,
when the whites were there,
they would just speed up and then put on brakes,
speed up, put on brakes,
which was throwing these kids all over the place.
I have not heard of anybody doing that to the black kids,
but that's what they did to the white kids.
When you reflect back on some of this stuff,
you begin to realize how silly all that stuff really was.
But there was a lot of crap
that went on that didn't get in
the newspapers that happened.
It's very difficult to tell you
today how vicious the stuff was during that time.
I mean, the most unimaginable
thing you can think of they did it.
[LAUGHTER] That's just the way it was.
And I hate to say it to you,
but we're not that far from that stuff right now.
Look at what happened to those three foreign people
who got slashed up and killed out there in Oregon.
Just because of what they looked like.
So we've come a long way in the future,
but we're still in the past in the minds of some people,
because they had been taught
that crap from the time they were born.
America is at a crossroads in my opinion.
Donald Trump and his supporters
are going to force America to
really decide who are we really.
And I must tell you
that it's going to take a little while,
but I think that the early votes
are beginning to come in,
even on the Republican side,
there are people who begin to say,
there's something wrong with this picture.
So I would think that in a backhanded way,
Trump is going to advance
the cause of progress in America.
That's not what he has in mind.
All he has in mind is making money, folks.
How can he make money?
That's all it's about,
and he's going to exploit the population that he can.
One reason he can exploit this population, is that,
only 30% of Americans
have college degrees. Are you aware of that?
>> [inaudible].
>> Which means that there's 70% that don't have them?
But when you overlay that
data on the South and the Southwest,
then that bumps up to about 85,
almost 90% depending upon the neighborhood.
There is a value in education.
That's why you're here.
When you read the great works,
when you read the Platos, the Aristotles,
when you read all these different things and
different philosophies about life,
it makes you a different person.
That doesn't mean that you
necessarily become more liberal per se,
but I think you become more perceptive.
You become more accommodating to differences in people.
>> There are more than to know what is.
>> Yes.
And what we've got to do, in my opinion,
is to do a better job of
educating the African American community,
some parts of the White community,
and the Hispanic community.
A better job of educating.
It's going to be a long distance thing,
because you've got $100 million, for instance,
that goes into the Heritage Foundation in Washington,
DC, designed to primarily
build a conservative agenda in America.
One hundred million dollars.
You don't even have $1 million in
any movement to push
forward the idea of let freedom reign.
None of that. So you've got a playing field that is
unleveled where the money is on the side of
the right wingers who want to
take us back to something akin to slavery.
That's what you have. And the folks
on the other side who are being oppressed,
they don't have any support.
They haven't found a way to
harness their support so they can
begin to balance some of
the other stuff that that's going on.
Slowly, but surely, if we don't watch out,
you're going to let the Donald Trump type people,
not just Donald Trump,
make America second rated power.
And one of the problems that I found,
is that, a lot of people really don't read.
If you read anything at all, especially in economics,
you would know that the Chinese led
the world economic agenda until the 18th century.
It was the Chinese.
Once Nixon and others put together that big tank thing,
and we started working with the Chinese,
China is now Number 2,
moving to Number 1.
They used to be way down
as a result of the communist situation,
but now they're Number 2, almost Number 1.
And I think when America looks and say, "Oh,
my God, the Chinese have overtaken us."
That's when they're going to begin, and say, now,
wait a minute, are we going to keep doing this?
I mean, we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot.
But that's what's been going on.
I predict to you that if we don't watch ourselves,
the Chinese will be
Number 1 again within the next 5-7 years,
and that's really going to be
a traumatic shock to America.
Now the question in my mind is going to be,
how many Americans are willing to admit that it was
these conservative right wingers
who want to get rid of healthcare,
I mean, just all this crap that they talk
about to hurt the little people.
That's what's killing them.
And the question is going to be,
are we going to keep electing
the same myopic people who don't care about anything,
but racism and the
other that they don't want to be a part of.
As I go through the file out of my years,
it's sad to see what I see going on,
and to see how people are being manipulated.