>> Thank you so much for joining us.
I have two quick announcements
before I introduce Shiloh
who will introduce us to Mr. King.
The first thing is,
when you're speaking and asking questions,
please speak loudly
so the mics can pick up what you're saying
because we're going to be recording this,
both for our students' digital document
that we're producing,
and it will also hopefully end up
as a borne digital collection in the KSU archive.
So please speak up,
and also don't stand in front of the camera.
Either of them, and they're right there in the back.
So I want to thank you all for joining us.
This is an exciting day for our student researchers
who have worked for two semesters
to develop this Wiki up here,
which is telling stories of the 1916 lunch counter sit-ins
at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta.
Since January of this year,
students have poured through archival material
at Emory, Georgia Tech, and the Atlanta University Center.
They have composed thoughtful blog posts
that curate other secondary materials
and then remixed them for public audiences.
And now due to the efforts of
one of our English majors, Shiloh Gill,
who is a senior and
who we hope to bring back into
the MAPW program next year, [inaudible] [LAUGHTER]
we have the honor of hosting one of the leaders
of the Atlanta Student Movement, Mr. Lonnie King.
Thank you for being here today.
>> My pleasure.
>> The members of the Atlanta Student Movement
put their lives on the line to take on [OVERLAPPING]
segregated eateries throughout the city,
not just at Rich's.
So I'm going to ask Shiloh to
introduce and tell you some more about Mr. King,
but first, I want to offer my thanks and my appreciation
to all of our students
who have conducted research on this project.
Because of you, this is why we're here today.
Your hard work has not only exemplified what
undergraduate research really is and aspires to be,
but you've shown that you're true writing scholars,
and you guys are going to do great things
when you leave this place.
So I'm going to turn this event over
to our students and to Shiloh Gill,
who will introduce us to Mr. King.
Shiloh.
>> Thank you, Dr. Bohannon.
That's very nice. [BACKGROUND]
And off of that,
I just want to take a moment to thank Dr. Bohannon
for her hard work and her dedication to us.
She is a truly amazing professor,
but she is an even more amazing person.
So thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
We would also like to thank
the Office of Diversity and Inclusion,
Sheila Smith McKoy and the Dean's office
providing us with the lunches today
that you guys are enjoying,
so I think we should give them a hand. [APPLAUSE]
It is such an honor to [inaudible] [BACKGROUND]
His accomplishments are endless,
and there are so many things that I
could say about his dedication and his work,
but I'm going to choose to tell you about the first time
that I talked to Mr. Lonnie King over [inaudible]
So when I realized
I was going to be able to talk with him,
I was completely a nervous wreck. [BACKGROUND]
I can't even tell you.
I was like, I don't know if I can do this.
I knew he was a living legend.
And what do you say to a living legend?
I don't have experience in that.
So I was just thinking, you know what,
I'm not going to come up with anything,
so I just proceeded to call him. [BACKGROUND]
And he didn't pick up the phone the first time.
And so it was, like, okay,
then I can just have more time to get myself together,
but I didn't have that much more time because
he called me back in two seconds [LAUGHTER]
which is awesome now.
And when he called me back,
the very first thing he said was,
this is your humble servant, Mr. Lonnie King.
And I knew at that time that he was [BACKGROUND]
way too awesome for [inaudible] .
So we proceeded to talk,
and as the conversation progressed,
I suggested doing an interview with him
maybe at his home, a coffee shop,
maybe on his front porch in his lawn.
Anywhere that he was okay meeting,
I was going to come there,
but what he suggested was that he come here.
I didn't ask him to do that.
I was completely surprised by that.
He volunteered to come here.
Out of his busy schedule,
he wanted to come and talk with us
and share with us his experiences.
It's the same spirit of willingness,
selflessness, and sacrifice
that makes Mr. Lonnie King great.
Throughout his life, he is giving too,
and for others, he has organized sit-ins.
He has stood fearlessly in
the face of some really important people,
and he would not take no for an answer.
He has fulfilled a tremendous call to the people,
one that cannot be measured.
And as a young African American
woman standing here today,
there is nothing that I can
express for his sacrifice to not only my people
but to make this whole world better,
so thank you to this that I owe all of my gratitude.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Lonnie King. [APPLAUSE]
And before he talks with us and shares his experiences,
which I know that's the meat of the goods itself,
[BACKGROUND] we're going to watch this 34-minute video
that he has provided for us.
It's about the Atlanta sit-ins,
and that's just going to give us
a scope and focus to forward.
>> We, the students of the affiliated institutions
forming the Atlanta University Center,
have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies
in the cause of gaining those rights,
which are inherently ours,
as leaders of the human race and
as citizens of the United States,.
>> We do not intend to [inaudible] for those rights
that are already [inaudible] and morally ours
to be meted out to us one at a time.
We want to [inaudible] and unequivocal [BACKGROUND]
what we cannot tolerate,
in a nation professing democracy and
people professing Christianity,
the discriminatory conditions under
which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia.
>> It's supposedly one of
the most progressive cities in the South.
We, therefore, [inaudible] authority to assert themselves
and abolish those injustices.
We must say in all candor that we plan to use
every legal and [inaudible] .
>> [MUSIC] The elder said
that in order for there to be a bridge to the other side,
someone must make a trek to the river's edge.
They may be swept away by the current and never heard of,
but it's because of their treks
that they are able to stand on the other side.
And so we stand on the other side today because
of the treks that were made to the river's edge
by this Atlanta [inaudible] .
>> Because I was sitting in Yates and Milton Drug Store,
killing time between classes,
and a student came up to me named Lonnie King,
whom I knew because he was
a football player at Morehouse,
And he held up a newspaper to me,
and he said, have you seen this?
I thought he meant, do you read a newspaper?
I thought every college student
read a newspaper every day,
and I was a little put off by the question.
He said, no, this story,
the story about students at
North Carolina A&T College sitting-in
for the third or fourth day.
He said, have you seen that?
I said, yeah, I've seen that.
He said, what do you think about it?
I said, I think it's great. It's wonderful.
He said, don't you think it ought to happen here?
And before I could say, what do you mean "we",
he said, you take this side of the drug store,
and I'll take this other side,
and we'll get something going.
And I should say there's a third person in this group,
Joe Pierce, who was part of
the founding of the Committee on Appeal of Human Rights.
So we went around to different tables and
talked to different people and asked them
if they thought it was worthwhile to do
something like that here in Atlanta.
>> I was extremely upset.
It was almost impossible to live in Atlanta, Georgia,
after having been in France and Switzerland and
Scotland and places where people had
the same skin color as the people here who mistreated us,
but there, we were normal human beings.
The difference was just palpable.
So I was sitting in Yates and Milton's,
just smoldering with anger and
wondering what I could do other than leave Atlanta.
And I was approached by Lonnie King and Julian Bond.
They came up and wanted to know if I
had heard about the Greensboro 4,
and I said, I had.
And they said,
We want to try to start a movement here in Atlanta.
I said, that's just what I was looking for.
>> I was returning to Spelman through the AU,
the Atlanta University campus. I ran into Lonnie.
He told me they were going to plan something
that would desegregate facilities,
there would be a meeting that night,
would I come?
And I was excited to go.
>> Walking across campus that morning,
I was studying Math and English and
trying to schedule as many classes as
[inaudible] as I could,
[BACKGROUND] like everyone else did.
And come Lonnie King, walking across the campus,
he approached me about this meeting.
[inaudible] I had that night,
and I think there were 18-20, 24 of us
in that section.
And I remember Lonnie specifically asking
anybody who was not committed
to doing what we were going to do,
don't tell anybody else about it.
Just keep quiet and go match your business.
And some of those kids we didn't see anymore.
That was last I remember their being involved.
And a lot of folks didn't get involved because
they were afraid.
All those were children of local parents
who might get fired,
and they were concerned about it.
>> I just became aware of discrimination
back in the day when [inaudible]
we had to go way to the back [inaudible] .
And I was aware that was not
the way it should be even as a young child.
And there was no doubt that I would be
actively involved in anything [LAUGHTER] that
went on on campus that had to do with discrimination.
>> I was secretary on the student body at
what was Clark College then.
Lonnie King called all of the three top officers
of each student body from the respective schools
in the AU Center.
We gathered. He told us of his dream mission.
And I said, You have got to be out of your mind.
>> I was actually away in Prince,
so it was only in 1960,1961, when I came back
and worked with Lonnie and
became the co-chair of the Atlanta Student Movement.
>> I came back from the Navy
after spending three years there
going all over the world on that ship.
And I got a chance to be out from under
the segregated prison that we were all in at that time.
I said, I'm going back because,
one day, we're going to get the chance
to end the segregation in this [inaudible] ,
and I want to be a part of it.
>> A couple of weeks after we began this planning,
we got a notice that Dr. Rufus Clement,
who was the president of Atlanta University
and, in effect, the president of this whole compound,
wanted to see us.
>> In that meeting that we had
with the college presidents,
Martin Luther King, Jr., was sitting back in a corner
being very quiet.
He had just come back from Montgomery,
and my sense was that
he did not want to appear to be
bigger than everybody
or taking over to have anything to say,
but he was there.
So the three of us from each campus
met with the presidents,
and we made it clear to them
that we were not backing down,
that we were going to start a movement
to desegregate Atlanta.
>> He said, I know what you're going to do.
I can't stop you from doing it, but before you do it,
you need to find some way to
let Atlanta know why you're doing it.
>> This was our moment,
and we had to seize it and that we were right.
You see, that's the whole thing. We knew we were right.
>> And so he suggests that we write a statement.
>> The students who instigate and participate
in the sit-down protests are dissatisfied
not only with the existing conditions
but with the snail-like speed
at which they are being ameliorated.
It was very much heartfelt,
and I was just
glad to have an opportunity to pour it all out.
I'm glad that they let us publish it.
It appeared in the morning in the Constitution
and in the evening in the Atlanta Journal.
The Atlanta World refused to publish it,
but the New York Times published it.
>> It was published in each of those papers
as a full page ad,
and it caused an enormous controversy
in white Atlanta.
>> I read the [inaudible] advertisement
purporting to come from students
of the six affiliated institutions
forming the Atlanta University Center.
Skillfully prepared, obviously,
it was not written by students
in any Georgia school or college.
>> Governor Vandiver saying this was not written
by our students. Students couldn't write this.
>> In the whole state,
that included all the Black students,
all the white students, everybody.
>> How, in fact, did it read
like it was written even in this country?
>> Yet it sounded as if it had been written by communists.
>> I just thought this was a typical example of
the racist element in the larger society around us,
but they didn't believe we were capable of doing this.
>> The whole response was like a compliment,
you see, and it was proof
that we really had something to fight against.
[BACKGROUND]
>> What she did was that she laid out
for us a battle plan,
and if you look at the different areas that she listed,
we followed everything that she had in the appeal.
>> This advertisement, referring to the appeal,
coupled with your courteous and peaceful demonstrations
at public lunch counters in the city seemed to me
to be acts of courage and wisdom
which, in the long, run must surely fall
with the cause of human dignity.
This was written in April 1960.
>> And that's the image we wanted to protect.
>> Syracuse University
Chapter of Students for Democratic Action.
And he said something he talked about.
It was an outstanding display of
unity of purpose and unity of action. [BACKGROUND]
That was always what Lonnie's leadership was about.
And when they brought us together as a group
to talk about our behavior and what we were going to do,
it was important that we present that picture,
and it's amazing that
this person got that from the written document.
That was a demonstration of our ability
to be unified in purpose and in action.
And that was what it was all about,
and you could feel that as a student.
>> And in droves, the students ran it.
The second thing, in addition to the methodology,
thousands upon thousands of students
who had come to a point in their lives
where they said,
enough is enough, we're not going to take it anymore.
>> I was a freshman, and like most freshmen,
I knew nothing.
And what brought me to the movement was
we had a big rally out in the quadrangle,
and here the students
outlined what was wrong
and basically what we're going to do about it.
We go to [inaudible] campaign,
[inaudible] the whole nine yards.
Everything was there. I was just so excited because
I wanted to become a part of this movement.
>> I and some of my friends went to the clinic,
and we heard our student government leader
as well as Lonnie King.
It was just a very passionate,
a very emotional call to arms, if you will,
except that it was a nonviolent protest
that they were soliciting students to participate in.
And it was the kind of thing that was just
slowly drawing me in because of the pain
that I and other members of my family and my friends,
and in fact, the entire race,
had suffered during segregation.
>> It was an extraordinarily hostile environment.
We knew fully well that
we were possibly placing our lives on the line.
There had clearly been examples made of
Black people who challenged the system,
and clearly we were prepared.
>> We also had classes about non-violence
so that we would know how to act,
how to really not fight back
if we were attacked in any way.
There were persons, like football players,
I remember specifically who said,
I cannot walk the picket line.
I cannot participate in that way because
I'm going to hit back if someone hits me.
So we said, fine, we understand that,
and we don't want you to walk [LAUGHTER]
the picket line because
we didn't want anybody to hit back.
It was said to us,
now, if you do not care to go to jail,
then when the police comes in
and reads those lines to you,
then you just get up and walk out.
Those who are going to jail will sit and be arrested.
We were highly organized.
>> To strategize and put together a statistic
with resources to attack the public accommodation,
it was lies.
>> I think Lonnie had the advantage of military service,
and because of that military service,
he had a organizational thinking about him,
ways to do things that would make
whatever it was you were trying to do
come out right.
He was sober, somber, and serious.
>> I was 18 years old.
>> I guess I must have been 18, 20 years old.
>> I was about 23, 24
>> I was 16 years old.
>> I was 22 years old.
>> I was 20.
>> Nineteen or twenty at that time
>> I was 19 years old at the time.
>> I was 20 years old.
>> Lonnie was very strategic in his thinking about
how we should organize the movement.
>> So we can't just jump up and run downtown and say,
let's sit at the lunch counters.
It's much more sophisticated than that.
>> One of the things that we did on
the night before we marched on the 15th,
we went to each site and [inaudible] reconnaissance.
We wanted to make certain that there was
a public telephone and had a full view of the site,
and a student would be assigned
the role of being in that telephone booth.
And should there be violence or arrest or whatever,
that student would call a particular number
to notify this was happening,
and that was in every single site on the night before.
On the morning of March 15th,
when we convened in front of [inaudible] Library.
Several of us were there at 7:30 that morning.
There was, of course, Marian Wright,
Julian, Lonnie, and myself,
and then a few other us came along,
but we began wondering,
suppose nobody else shows up, then what do we do?
So we began coming up with a Plan B.
Maybe we'll need to contract
the number of places that we go to,
but then all of a sudden approaching the campus
was Mary Ann Smith leading a group from Morris Brown,
and all of them were well-attired.
The men wore their suits,
the women wore their dresses,
and as soon as they approached,
students began arriving from throughout the campuses.
[inaudible] , the revolution had begun.
>> Someone called us the foot soldiers.
When the word went out, we showed up.
>> You could just feel the commitment within the crowd.
They all had found the same thing,
which was a method to get
the oppressor's foot off our necks.
>> And I can imagine what [inaudible] s
when he they saw all those kids coming over
the bridge heading towards downtown Atlanta.
I think they thought that, after the declaration,
the idea is that we could back it up with bodies
because they deliver that kind of presence
was [inaudible] .
>> This first sit-in, I led a group of students
from Spelman and Morehouse, most of them,
and I led this group into the cafeteria.
And the first thing we saw were the Black women
who were working at the steam tables.
We came to the steam table.
They gave us their food.
We came to the cashier, who was a white woman,
like many Southerners was very polite.
She said, I'm awfully sorry.
This is for city hall employees only.
I said, You got a big sign out front.
It says City Hall cafeteria. The public is welcome.
She said, we don't need that.
She said, if you don't leave now,
I'm going to call the police,
and you'll be arrested and taken away.
And so I said, we'll stay here until
you allow us to eat here.
And they called the police.
The police came very quickly,
and none of us had been in jail before. [BACKGROUND]
Of course, we're terrified of the idea being behind bars.
They separated the men from the women
and put us in separate cells.
And we're put in this big cell of I'd say about 100 men.
And of course, the first thing,
when I saw these other men,
I thought, why are they here? I know why I'm here.
[BACKGROUND] Why are they here. And I
thought it was not proper etiquette to say,
my good man, what brings you here? [BACKGROUND]
So I didn't say those things,
but they knew why we were here.
And they were happy to see us and
proud of what we had done.
And so this is the first reinforcement we got.
>> It took me three times to sit-in before I went to jail.
It's a mental thing.
You have to be prepared for it.
You have to be ready to lose your life. [BACKGROUND]
You don't know what to expect.
And [BACKGROUND] it took me three times
to get to that place.
>> [BACKGROUND] Many times [inaudible] try to get us
to speak to the mic to get information,
like [BACKGROUND] ,
but we always referred him
to whoever was in charge of the march.
>> I was a spokesperson that led
the group into Sprayberry.
He said, we're not going to serve y'all.
I said, we're simply asking to be served.
And then there was a man who came along and
said he was speaking for this Sprayberry.
So he suggested, Look why don't
you all just go and eat the food that you have
because we had already grabbed
the serving trays and placed food on there.
I said, no, we would not dare eat food
that's not paid for.
I said, [inaudible] Thank you very much,
but we insist upon paying for it.
Of course, the police immediately [inaudible]
and marched us outside.
They were supposed to have closed down the cafeteria.
So we then saw that there were
white people entering the cafeteria,
I announced to the cops who was taking
down my name that, if they're going in,
then we're going to go back into the restaurant.
It was at that point that he again ordered
that the restaurant be closed down.
>> The whites had a tactic of closing the lunch counters.
As soon as we arrived,
we then realized that they were going to
try and close the counters period rather
than get us arrested because it was bad publicity.
And then at the time we would leave,
they reopened the counter.
And so we got smart and said,
let's set up a communication system.
And so every time there was
someone who was sitting in a group,
there was someone else that they didn't see
that was around as a spotter for us.
So they closed the lunch counter.
People would leave and go get in their cars
and they were circling around town.
The spotters would tell us immediately.
They would call headquarters and say they just reopened.
Headquarters would then signal
the comp and said go right by.
And we get all over town.
It confounded those people.
>> There came a time when
the demonstrations had to give way to something
that was more impactful
from an economic point of view and
the well-clad Black community was
keeping some of those businesses
downtown in business by shopping.
One of campaigns is give up your Rich's card,
turn them over to us, and we'll protect them.
And many of them did just that.
>> And what happened is that Rich's Department Store,
I found out through research, lost $10 million
during that campaign.
And that's why they finally sat down with
Herschelle and me to try to pull off something
because once we announced at a press conference
on the 1st February 1961
that we're going to extend the Christmas boycott,
within six weeks, they had us on a meeting
to sign an agreement.
They said, in the fall of 1960,
we would never sit down with those two because
from [inaudible] , Lonnie King and Herschelle,
the same people who said that we're the ones
who signed the agreement later because
racism is one thing, but losing money is something else.
>> That's what was new about the movement.
We found a way to get the oppressor's foot off our necks.
We get it without shooting him and without cutting him.
We knew from our youth that the results
of that action would be our death.
>> Until we realized
that we cannot win this battle for freedom
through press conferences and press releases,
it will not work.
You got to get in the trenches and organize
and take money out of the oppressors' pocket.
They don't respond to morality.
They respond to money and the absence of it,
if they're going to lose some.
Whether it was boycotting,
picketing to prevent people from buying,
a large part of the impact was
to have been economic because
that's where we knew people would feel it,
if not in their hearts,
then certainly in their pocketbooks. [BACKGROUND]
Captain Little wrote a note to
Chief Jenkins in 1960 in the fall, [NOISE]
saying that their intelligence sources had
told them that they're going to come to Atlanta, Georgia,
because if Atlanta falls,
it's going to be like Sherman coming
through in 1864, I think it was.
And when we longed for the rest of the South falls,
and sure enough, when all those class people were around
here and were marching around here,
it was all organized.
And this document that I have from Little shows
the extent to which they were organized
to come in here to form a beachhead to stop it
because they felt that, if Atlanta falls,
the rest of the South would fall.
>> We heard within our grasp,
but we did not complete the revolution.
>> There is something that's powerful because
one can be committed to justice [BACKGROUND]
but not to love,
one can be committed to love and not to justice,
that you must understand that
love without justice is nothing but sentimentality.
And that justice without love in the words of my father
is naked brutality.
When love and justice merge together and
walk down the aisle and consummate their relationship,
they produce twins one by the name of liberation,
the other by the name of transformation.
And you took that love and justice and
put it together and reshaped the nation.
>> Once a human and civil rights worker,
always an advocate.
I never stopped marching.
I never stopped sitting-in.
>> The movement is still very much in me.
As long as we live,
we shall never resign from the struggle.
>> As Gwynn said, I'll always be fighting.
All of us will because as Dr. Mays put it,
we were born to rebel.
>> We considered our participation
in the movement a calling,
a moral imperative, a necessary path and commitment,
to borrow the words of Dr. Mays.
Some of us felt that we had been sent to the world
to fight for freedom and protest against injustice
wherever we found it.
And we took those teachings seriously.
>> There is an undercurrent of racism
that is [inaudible] ingrained and very dangerous.
>> We changed the laws,
but we didn't change the hearts of people
who are just steeped in this idea of their superiority.
>> Because this movement wasn't just about sitting at
lunch counters so we could eat hamburgers and milkshakes.
It was to remove racism from the American South,
and we did a wonderful job at that,
but as I say,
there's much more that can be done.
>> There are some whites who are beginning to buy
into this notion that we are
all here in this thing together.
There have always been
some white people who really did believe
in what appears to be
the founding principles of this country.
>> He had incredible imagination and
organizing skill rooted in an Africanized faith,
not an ideology, but a deep seated faith
in possibility and change and in hope.
>> Looking back at the Atlanta Student Movement,
there were hundreds of students
involved in one way or the other
from all these college campuses,
but there was a core, I'd say about 50 or maybe even 30,
who showed up every day,
could always be counted on, always came out,
came to the meetings, came to the marches,
came to the protests, went to jail,
went to jail again, went to jail again.
There's a small group who did that,
and that was the real core of this movement.
>> A movement is born when crisis meets conviction,
and the crisis met the conviction of your faith,
and as a result of that,
a movement was born.
>> The nature of the movement is multi-dimensional,
and it involves deep commitment to
higher ideals on the part of
a lot of people doing a lot of
different things over a long period of time.
And that was the nature of our movement.
>> What was it that someone said,
nothing [inaudible] an idea
whose time has come.
And we have enlightened college presidents,
we had enlightened students who were committed,
and some are willing to give their lives,
backed up, believe it or not, by the returning veterans.
The ingredients for change were here.
And therefore, it came together, something like that.
>> When we talk about the Atlanta Student Movement,
you gave birth to a Van Jones and a Cory Booker and
a Barack Obama, a Kasim Reed,
the defenders of the dream of
[inaudible] Lewis and others.
You made a trek to the river's edge because
you were deeply committed to love and justice.
[APPLAUSE]
It's about the recognition
that we stand on someone's shoulders.
Rabbi Poupko shared with me, he said,
one of the things, within the synagogue,
that we teach is that history is sacred.
Is that for a family?
For a rabbi not to share history is an act against God.
And is our responsibility, as here at this collection,
here at Woodruff Library,
that we will share history
for a generation that has not yet been born.
And they will say that there lived a people,
who only had a crust to [inaudible] bread,
aware of the people who only had a corner to sleep in,
but there was a crisis that had met their conviction
and would have met their conviction
when they reached down to the reservoir of their fate,
merged together love and justice,
and produced transformative moments
that had reshaped our country and reshaped our world.
And they will give thanks.
They will give thanks to this group that gathers here.
You will look on from eternity,
but you shall be the ancestors who shall smile
for what you have given to this world.
And we are thankful that, when a crisis came,
you did not shrink,
but you put forth your conviction that you shoot
up on the shoulders of others who went before you.
It is not a gaze of history
that we look back at and say,
that was then, and this is now.
It is time for us to recognize that it is a continuum.
It's a relay race that we pass on the baton,
cheer on those who go forward,
that they may continue to run this race [BACKGROUND]
and not get weary.
>> It was a revolutionary movement,
a part of a brilliant symphony
that was begun in Greensboro, North Carolina,
and it was largely influenced by
the phenomenal leadership provided
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So we were part of a symphony [inaudible]
to decompose the hypocrisy
of the United States of America.
>> Segregation had to end
in order for Atlanta to grow and prosper.
>> We did not know at the time
that we were laying the foundation for a new Atlanta.
It is the way it has unfolded.
Out of the movement, the student [inaudible]
as Atlanta became a different city, a new city.
Ivan Allen was elected mayor in 1961
and was the only Southern political leader
to testify before the Congress in support of
the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, the only one.
Out of that movement, the student [inaudible] ,
I believe, that some would say a new kind of militancy,
a new kind of spirit in Atlanta.
There was a development of
new leadership in both Black and white communities,
a leadership that understood
the legacy of the African American heritage,
particularly in Atlanta.
Ivan Allen was succeeded by Sam Massell,
the first Jewish mayor of Atlanta.
Sam Massell was succeeded by Maynard Jackson,
the first African American mayor
of a major Southern city.
A new dynamic was born in economics and politics.
This movement changed the whole climate
of race relations in Atlanta.
He laid the foundation for Maynard Jackson to become
the first African American mayor of the city of Atlanta,
and the leadership of Maynard Jackson and
Ambassador Andrew Young laid the foundation
for the 1996 Olympics in the city Atlanta.
So out of the movement,
Atlanta became the American great international city.
[MUSIC]
>> That's the [inaudible] stuff I have. All the
rest I have on that story of honor.
I went to jail. [APPLAUSE]
I'm on. [LAUGHTER]
Let me apologize for my voice,
but I'm a little hoarse because
I've been suffering from a little mold problem
that got into my chest,
and then I had another little problem
that I'm working with.
I came down with congestive heart failure
about two weeks ago,
so bear with me as we go forward.
Let me thank Dr. Bohannon.
>> Jeanie.
>> Jeanie. For letting us come.
I'll come back to you in a minute.
Ms. Gill, thank you all for inviting me
to come over to speak.
I'm coming back to her because,
was it your mother or grandmother?
>> My grandmother.
>> Her grandmother worked for Rich's Department Store,
and so I'm sure she got a little bit of the message
of what was going on or
what had gone on by that time.
I guess that had gone on by that time, yes. [NOISE]
I don't really know where to begin.
So I think I'm going to begin
in [inaudible] here with you.
When we started this movement, we weren't the first.
Greensboro was the first.
We might have been the second,
but we were slowed down by the college presidents.
They wanted to talk us out of it at first.
And so, finally,
when they saw that they couldn't talk us out of it,
they gave in, and we started moving on 9th of March,
but we really could have moved
almost right after Greensboro,
but we got slowed down by the presidents
and the position that I took was,
we can't afford to just openly defy these folks
who are the presidents.
They can kick you out of school. [LAUGHTER]
And I said, so let's run with the foxes
and chase with the hounds.
And so they got us in a meeting
around the 20th-something of February.
And we were in this big conference room,
and [NOISE] Dr. Clement was ahead of everything,
and then he started off by saying,
we want you to not join what's happening
in the student movement throughout the South.
Dr. Mays backed him up.
Your parents sent you here to get you
an education, not to break the law.
And that kind of thinking permeated everyone's speech,
the president from Spelman,
the president from Clark College,
but then they got to
the Interdenominational Theological Center president,
Dr. Harry Richardson.
Dr. Richardson was a preacher,
and preachers have a way of accentuating
what they're going to say
in a way by not saying anything in the beginning.
So when it was his time to speak [NOISE],
he waited about 10 seconds.
We were wondering, what is he going to say?
He began by saying,
I think the students are right.
We were shocked. [BACKGROUND]
We were shocked because they'd already met
before they met us.
He broke the circle and said that,
I have a PhD from Harvard,
masters from some other prestigious school,
president of a major university.
If I go downtown today,
I can buy everything I want to buy
in that store for my family,
but if I have to go to the restroom,
I got to go all the way downstairs to the basement,
off to a little corner.
Then opposite that corner is then
another little hovel over there where I have to eat.
He said, there's nothing wrong with that picture.
I think the students are right.
It shocked the other people,
but then before they could get their composure,
Dr. Frank Cunningham,
the president of Morris Brown College said,
I think Dr. Richardson is right.
And at that point, I knew we had him because
the presidents were split.
And so Dr. Clement [NOISE],
who was the head man, and Dr. Mays were conferring.
What happens after Dr. Richardson and
Dr. [NOISE] Cunningham spoke,
Clement looked at me, and he said,
I'm assuming that you're the leader
that you're going to speak [inaudible] .
And I said, yes, I will.
And so I started talking about
how we have to end this situation.
Mays and Clement were discussing something.
They were having a little conference.
I saw that as I was speaking.
So when I finished speaking, Clement said,
if you're going to do this,
you need to write a manifesto of
some kind and have it go all over the city
as to why you're doing it.
Now they really thought that they went on to talk about
how we would be like the prestigious universities,
private colleges over 100 years
and backed by the Ford Foundation
and the Rockefellers and all those.
In other words, they were appealing to our egos.
In other words, let those other students in
those other cities go out here and do those things.
You all write the manifesto for why you're doing it.
So we humored them and said, we'll do that.
We sat down,
and I asked Roslyn Pope to write the document,
and I appointed Julian and Charles Black
and Morris Dillard and Albert Brinson
to work with her,
but the night before,
we had to give it to the presidents for their approval
because they were the ones raising the money
to pay for it. [BACKGROUND]
Roslyn called me, and she said,
I can't get anybody to do any work, Lonnie.
I said, Roslyn, it's due tomorrow.
Write the damn thing. [LAUGHTER]
And so she wrote the document
that's still somewhat immortal.
What they didn't say here was that Senator Jacob Javits,
a Republican senator from New York at that time,
when he read in the New York Times,
he had it reprinted
in the Congressional Record for posterity,
read it on the floor of the Senate,
and then because he got involved in it,
on April 2, 1960,
the Nation magazine wrote a four-page ad.
The Harvard Crimson wrote it, four-page ad.
So it's all over the place.
And even to this day,
it's cited all over the world when you talk about
human rights and that's what these kids did
when they were going to college in Atlanta.
So listen, you don't have to wait
until you finish this university.
You can do some things right now
the other folks have not done.
It's just a question of figuring out
what it is that you can do.
Let me just say that I think the picture
is pretty explanatory.
That's why I told you that once you see it,
I think you will see a lot
about the mileu that we were dealing with.
And you saw a lot of us who were in our teens.
I was 22, I guess, at the time,
but most of them were 18, 19, 20.
I'd gone to the military for three years,
and so I came back to finish at Morehouse.
And it's ironic and somewhat corny,
I guess, but [NOISE] I was a boxing champion in the Navy.
And I had a scholarship to USF,
University of San Francisco,
and also one to Amherst, to box with them.
I was very lucky. I was undefeated,
and so they heard about me,
but I told my good friend, Everett Render,
who was from Atlanta and also Morehouse.
I told him on the front of a ship in Hong Kong, China.
I said, Render, Everett, I'm going back to Atlanta.
He said, why?
He said, you got these scholarships.
I said, yeah, but one of these days,
we're going to throw off the shackles
of segregation down there,
and I want to be a part of it.
I told him that in January of 1956.
I had a destiny, I guess you could say, for doing that,
but let me just tell you,
if you haven't found a cause
that you're willing to give your life for,
then you don't understand what [inaudible] .
America was founded.
I'm not talking about the 1492 and the 1619,
but when they got down to the Constitution,
as I'm sure there are some historians in here,
some historian students if not historians who are PhDs,
but as you got down to making this into a country,
the document that they called the US Constitution
is a segregationist document.
It's a slave document.
People who look like me were viewed as
three-fifths of a man
for the purpose of somebody else's vote.
In other words, we were things, we were articles,
we were like cattle to work in the farms,
in the plantations, or what have you.
So the irony of it all is that
when you had the federalist and anti-federalist debates,
you got an agreement between the South and the North
that you would put together a constitution
that could breathe,
that there would be amendments to the Constitution.
They would be allowed.
It's because of those amendments to the Constitution
that you now have a lot of rights in this country
that you could not have enjoyed
under the original document.
Now, flashing forward, you know there were
people who talked about original intent.
That really was pushed
after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s
by the Southerners and by Mr. Nixon,
who promised that in 1964,
when he lost the California race
to Pat Brown as the governor.
He said,
you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore,
but the Brown decision had been passed May 17, 1954.
And in 1956, you had something called
the Southern Manifesto.
If you get a chance, look up Southern Manifesto.
You all probably have it right here,
but the bottom line is, the Southern Manifesto,
signed by approximately 100 prominent politicians
from all over the South,
elected officials or what have you,
governors or whatever you,
basically saying something similar
to what George Wallace said.
They were opposed to the Brown decision,
segregation now, segregation forever.
And that was when you started seeing
all these folks,who decided
they couldn't overturn Brown,
but what they did do though was
they got Brown to be amended.
And they stuck in the language in '55
where before the Manifesto,
they stuck the language in saying that
you had to desegregate with all deliberate speed.
And what that really meant was that you take your time.
You don't have to worry about it because
here's so much emotions involved in this.
A lot of folks just did not want to ever have
their children sitting in the same classroom
with the people of color,
primarily because they had been taught
from the time they were born
that there was something wrong
with the people of color.
It was in their sinew.
It was embedded in the very fiber of America.
So those were the things that we had
to deal with at that time.
The other thing I want to say to you is that,
this country, it is the most powerful country
ever known to mankind economically
as well as politically and militarily.
This country, in 47 months,
beat the Germans, the fascists in Italy,
and the Japanese on another continent, really.
They beat them all in 47 months, all of them.
If you can pat all these people and
beat them all in 47 months,
don't you say you can do
a little better job about racism?
You definitely can, but the will is not there.
the thing that I'm going to mention next to you
that we have to deal with,
I want you to just look at this.
You're getting a chance to see through
crashbacks with the current presidential election,
something about the environment
that we had to fight in the 1960s and before.
What I mean by that is this. [NOISE]
Not all Americans, by the way,
but far too many Americans,
particularly in the South and Southwest,
do not want to live up to
the tenets of the Constitution as amended
when it comes to people of color.
They just don't want to do it,
but on the other hand,
I fully understand why we are in the Bible Belt.
We believe in what's in the Bible,
and so I do,
as well as many other people,
but the one part of the Bible that I
think that a lot of people are hooked up on,
and they teach their children, is that
you train up your child in the way he should go,
and when he's old, he would not depart.
And a lot of the young people come into
a white family.
They live next door to white people.
They go to white churches,
they go to white schools.
And so they are imbued with
this idea of "the other" out there.
Now don't feel upset. America has changed.
America's not where they were in the 1960s and '70s.
Although there were people who wanted to move it back,
it is not the same as it was,
because if it was,
Donald Trump would be leading Hillary Clinton
by 20 or 30 points,
but it's the combination.
It's the pluralistic part of America
that's keeping Hillary Clinton in the game.
They're constantly throwing out things,
I've never seen such falsehoods.
You don't even have to be for Hillary,
but at some point, you got to say,
now what is this all about?
And I maintain that it's about two things.
One, they think Hillary might do too much
for the underclass because that seems to be her history.
She's been doing that all her life.
And [inaudible] quiet as it's kept,
there are a lot of folks who don't want to see
a woman become president.
When you think about it,
we've had, I think it's 43,
all men presidents, all of them.
Now Hillary Clinton is the only woman
that I'm aware of,
who stayed with her husband
through thick and thin and
all the little indiscretions,
till death do us part,
and she has an approval rating,
because she's such a bad person, of about 40,
and her husband has won 60.
There's something wrong with that picture.
Something's wrong with it.
I'm not saying she's the best person.
She's better than Trump now,
[LAUGHTER] but my point is,
I watched this thing closely,
and Hillary, she's my candidate,
and I'm going to vote for her next week,
but I am disturbed that she doesn't know
how to answer questions sometimes.
Let me give you an example.
My candidate, Hillary,
she was not indicted by all those emails or
whatever they were talking about over there.
And I'm on Bernie Sanders side.
I'm tired of hearing about it. [LAUGHTER]
She's a lawyer from Yale.
She should have learned in law school
that once a case is over, if it's on your side,
you don't discuss it anymore.
You don't get trapped into
trying to re-litigate the case.
So Chris Wallace, the son of Mike Wallace,
an old television guy,
tricked her on TV when she gave
an interview to him
after that case had been decided in June.
He got her to discuss the case
after it had already been closed.
And she said something in her answer that was
at variance with what she said earlier.
Now, if you have a lawyer who's representing you,
you tell your client once we were in this case,
don't discuss it anymore.
She should have said, Wallace, that's over.
I don't want to talk about it anymore,
and it would have died,
but she was sucked into talking about it.
Now America, when they come together,
they can do anything,
but somehow or another,
we just have not been able to get a majority
of white Americans to agree
that they're going to live by
we hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men and women are created equal,
and we're just having a serious problem,
and particularly with white men.
I don't understand it.
It makes no sense at all,
but I don't want to just tell you that
the glass is half-empty, is half full.
And I think it's going to get more and more full
as we go forward.
Also I don't want you to despair about
what I'm saying or about
the state of things in America right now.
What we're trying to do in America
has only been tried one time before in history,
and that was by Alexander the Great.
When he was conquering the known world at that time,
his idea was to try to set up a model democracy thing.
Of course, he's going to take it over by military force
but then turn around and try to create some democracy.
He left in 33, I think.
He was gone, and so nobody tried it anymore.
And the founders of this country,
they really weren't trying to try it.
They really set up a constitution,
and the way it was designed in the beginning
for just white men who would own the property,
and they were the ones who could hold,
but the folks who are giving us most of the hell
because we are female or because we are not white,
have been white men, primarily in the South.
Let's follow what has happened with the white men.
The average white man couldn't vote
either back in the late 18th century.
They only got to vote with the help of Andrew Jackson,
the great hero out of the New Orleans campaign
around 1812 or '13 or whatever that was back there.
Andrew Jackson did it,
and he used that to beat John Adams' son
in the election of 1828.
I think they ran against one another in 1824,
and he won 1828.
The point I'm making to you is that
this idea of who's going to vote,
the [inaudible] got it in the beginning,
then the average white man got it in the 1820s.
And white women, primarily, were working with
African Americans to try and get liberation
from this thing that's going on called segregation,
really slavery and then later on segregation.
A hundred thousand white women joined
the abolitionist movement to try and get the slaves free.
Now they talk about
Frederick Douglass and all those folks,
but really the backbone was the
100,000 white women in the North,
who was raising holy hell about slavery.
And finally, when the Civil War was about to wind down,
Frederick Douglass was a good friend of Abraham Lincoln,
and so he was his Chief Advisor on racial matters.
So we got the 13th Amendment,
which gave us the right, as African Americans,
to be citizens,
the 14th Amendment gave us a due process,
but when we got to the 15th Amendment,
which give us the right to vote,
Douglass, in my view, made a serious mistake
because Lincoln proposed the 15th Amendment
to give everybody a right to vote.
That would include Blacks and women.
Douglass vetoed that.
And from my perspective,
that was a historical mistake because
they documented.
If you go and look it up,
the 15th Amendment talks about
men having the right to vote.
That was wrong.
And it took women from that point,
they cursed out Douglass and kicked his behind,
and then they went on to fight for the next year,
and in 1920, of course,
they got the amendment for the women to vote.
Now, thank God that you got
minorities and women and
fair-minded people who are white.
They have formed a coalition,
maybe not officially but unofficially,
and they're the ones that are going to save America
on the 8th of November
from becoming a laughing stock in the world
because they are in favor of us looking forward.
That group is in favor of a pluralistic society
because it was a pluralistic society that beat
all those fascists and what have you
back there in the Second World War.
Everybody was working.
You all weren't around at that time,
but I was. I was a child.
And I remember stamps.
You have to get stamps in order to
go and buy stuff in the grocery stores.
I remember when we had to worry about
whether or not they were going to bomb us in this country.
Everybody was working hard.
It was an all-out effort.
Now, why is it that we have
such a hard problem with the issue of race?
The hardest problem is that
a lot of people are fearful of one another.
They don't know one another,
and therefore, we're going against the grain
of what they have been taught,
either by the environment or by
their families or by their friends.
Now, let me give you [inaudible].
When I was in the Navy,
I was on a ship of 5,000 people, all men.
There were probably less than 50
African Americans on there.
My best friends were not African Americans.
My best friends were the white guys who hung around
with me because we had a commonality of interests.
Some of them like boxing,
some like ping-pong and what have you,
and I was a ping-pong person also.
And we ran around together,
we chased the ladies together and all that kind of stuff,
[LAUGHTER] but they got a chance to see
I was just like them.
The same kind of urges that they had, I had.
If I wanted to drink some beer and what have you,
we would go up to Sasebo, Japan,
and we had these beer drinking contests.
And I won the contest over there in Sasebo.
[BACKGROUND] I drank 23 bottles of
San Miguel beer and won the contest.
And I haven't had an drop of beer since then.
[BACKGROUND] because I gouged myself,
but I wanted to win that contest, and so I stuck with it.
[BACKGROUND] And I learned the secret to it.
The secret was getting your body
to have it come out almost
immediately. That was the key to it.
They didn't know that, and so I won the contest,
but at the same time,
I don't like beer anymore.
Where do we go from here, folks? [BACKGROUND]
Democracy, I can tell you
a lot more about this whole Democratic thing
and how the South is where it is today
and why a guy like Donald Trump,
who is interesting person is out here now
representing the worst of America.
We can talk about that some questions that you may ask,
but democracy,
young people will not run on cruise control.
You will not run on cruise control like your car.
You set it at 65,
but you just sit back and listen to the music.
That doesn't work
when it comes to this day and [inaudible] .
We hold these troops to be self-evident.
You got to keep your hand on the steering wheel.
And at the same time now,
the people who are opposed to
inclusionary society they have their effort
to stop things for people of color and minorities,
and their effort is an overdrive.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.
Once we got the reconstruction laws in place after 1865,
the South went wild because, all of a sudden,
the former slaves were now citizens.
So they wanted to make sure that they didn't vote
and all that kind of stuff.
By the way, that's still going on today,
but anyway, they worked hard and aggressively
to make sure that we didn't vote.
All the civil rights acts that were passed,
voting all that stuff was passed during reconstruction.
Every last one of those reconstruction acts
that were passed
were avoided by the South in some way or another.
And it came to a head with the election of 1876
when Rutherford B. Hayes,
the former governor of Ohio,
was running against Samuel Tilden from New York
for the presidency.
And South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida
held out their electors and said,
we're not going to cast a vote for anybody.
We're going to try to deadlock this thing
and make you negotiate with us
in order for you to win the presidency.
And so they made the proposition to Tilden,
Tilden said, no, I'm not going to do that.
They made the proposition to Hayes,
Hayes wanted to be president, so he did it.
What was the proposition?
Move the union troops out of the South, all of them,
allow the South to go back to business as usual
when it comes to the question of race,
and thirdly, to build upon some construction project
in Texas.
There were three things.
Tilden said no.
Hayes said, I want to be president.
And as soon as he cut that deal
and even before he actually was sworn in,
his troops started leaving the South, leaving Atlanta,
and they were redeploying them to
the West and the Midwest because
they were battling the Indian wars by that time.
Concurrent with that, you had something else going on.
In 1863, you had the Homestead Act that was passed.
The Homestead Act was designed to put into play
our manifest destiny to control America
from the Atlantic to the Pacific by any means necessary.
And so they had the Homestead Act of 1863,
which gave the land almost free
to a lot of people who wanted to go out there.
So when you look at your map going up to Tuesday,
and you see the red sections on the map,
those red sections are people who
are descendants of folks who came from the South.
Check it out, folks. They got in wagon trains,
you've seen all these movies,
and they went in wagon trains.
They came from the South,
and some of them came from possibly
Ohio and Pennsylvania,
but then countryside,
and they went out there,
and they carried some of these same prejudices
that they had in the South out there.
And because children do what their parents do,
we've got that same thing going on.
So now, where are we going from here?
The thing that bothers me a great deal is that
we are within a few million votes
of being the laughing stock of the world.
If the United States of America
decides that they're going to listen to
all this negative stuff about
these emails and vote for Donald Trump,
it's going to be hell in this country,
and you're going to be the laughing stock of the world
because you put a fool in charge of the government.
And also, he's unstable.
If he feels like you're slighting him,
he'll mash the button and bomb somebody.
And then you bomb people,
they can bomb us back.
So we got to go back to building.
You all don't know about this,
we used to have to go into bomb shelters in
this country because we were
afraid that we were going to get bombed.
Children had to learn in kindergarten
how to go and get into bomb shelters,
and that's where we're getting ready to go back.
Putin, they have enough weapons
to destroy all of us in this country,
and we got enough to destroy them,
so that's why we have this mutual deterrent here.
So why would you put a fool in office
who already lets you know that,
if you slight him, I'm going to get you back.
I've never seen such silliness,
but guess what he did.
For three years, he pushed this birth of thing.
And that made no sense to me.
I said, this guy, I've been watching him with
all these prizefighters and
all this stuff for a long time.
Why is it that this guy is pushing this stuff?
This makes no sense,
but then when I looked and saw that
40-some million people agree with him,
even though there was no evidence to
the contrary that Obama was not a US citizen,
but 40-some people bought into what he was saying.
And then when they announced him president,
I said, oh, okay.
The same 40-something million people
because when he announced, I told my buddies,
I said, he'll win the Republican nomination.
He said, why do you say that?
I said, because he's doing the cat whistle.
This thing has been going on since the '50s.
People have been convinced
that there's something wrong
with the slogan of America.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
They've been convinced that you should not include
African Americans and other minorities
under the umbrella of liberty, justice and equality,
and until America confronts
these folks who have been doing this,
we're going to always be going through this.
I'm hoping that on next Tuesday,
that the better angels of America
who really believe in looking forward,
not looking back,
would come up and say,
we're not going to do that.
We're not going there because I agree with Bill Clinton.
He said two days ago,
we all know what Donald Trump is talking about.
He's talking about taking us back
to the '50s and the '40s.
And those were not good times, folks.
I lived through it.
Those were not good times.
We're in the best time of our lives right now.
Finally, let me talk about Barack Obama or just Obama.
Barack Obama is president because
America is a more liberal country today,
but at the same time, there are people who have
vilified this man unjustifiably.
I'm not saying it's because he's Black.
I'm talking about the fact that he took over an economy,
and he had helped for the first two years,
but since then, they used his election as a Black man
in the white House to further solidify
the Republican right wing side of politics,
and they refused to give the man
any help in the Congress,
or if he can't do it by executive order,
it's not going to get done.
The only president that actually did more
than Obama was FDR,
but FDR had the Congress and the country behind him.
This man has nobody but himself and his wife.
And even the Democrats sometimes are a little quiet.
What would happen if you were behind this man,
where the Congress was for the first two years,
we'd be rolling,
but instead, this country has too many people
who have taken the position that the white House
mean white men only today, tomorrow, forever.
What's wrong with that? That's what
George Wallace said about segregation.
Segregation today, tomorrow, forever.
Young people, we're not there yet.
You're going to live here, highly qualified,
one of the largest universities in the world.
When you go out, don't forget to take
a second look when you see your family,
your neighbors, and others talking about
a time in history that we'd like to go back to.
And you ask them,
would you please go back and look at
what our times was like back during that time?
It wasn't all that beautiful for anybody,
except the 1%.
Final comments about the 1%,
and then I'm going to answer questions that you may have.
[NOISE] The masses of folks who are white
in the South and Southwest have been used unmercifully
by the 1%. [NOISE]
The person who started it
and gave it nationwide sanction,
this racism kind of stuff to change the Republican Party
that got Black folks out of slavery
almost like the slave party of the 21st century
was Richard Nixon,
that manifesto that I told you about in '56.
Also in '56, Richard Nixon, a student of history,
looked up and said, I might be able to become president,
which is what he wanted to do as a result of
him losing in 1960 to John Kennedy.
And by the way, we had something to do with that, too,
but I'll answer that question later on.
On the same year that
the manifesto was written and published,
Nixon came to Hurt Park in Downtown Atlanta,
and he got up and made a speech,
and then the title of his speech,
and I'm paraphrasing was,
I'm opposed to busing students to desegregate schools.
That was like throwing chopped liver
to a hungry animal out there.
They loved it because he was from California
saying the same thing
that the governor of Georgia was saying,
the governor of South Carolina, Alabama.
So therefore, they began then to really push
toward the Republican Party, the Southerners did.
And it was an easy thing because nobody who was
white was in the Republican Party in the '50s.
It was all black in the South and
had been Black since the 1860s.
So therefore, the Dixiecrats who
formed the Democratic Party
moved to the Republican Party.
All they had to do was go to
these conventions and take it over,
and they took it over.
Then Nixon came and campaigned,
and he won the election
with almost I think he threw
[inaudible] or something like that
the first time he ran.
He consolidated the South,
and he already had the West and a lot of the East.
And then along comes [NOISE] Ronald Reagan,
another man from California. [inaudible]
He was running a moderate campaign
until he went to North Carolina in 1976,
and he won the North Carolina primary because
he was shifting a little bit
right after having seen what Nixon had done.
Where do you think Ronald Reagan went
when he gave his first speech of the campaign?
He went to the State Fair in Mississippi,
where those three boys were killed.
And his theme was,
I believe in states' rights.
The following morning,
the headlines in the New Orleans Times-Picayune,
the Atlanta Journal,
the Atlanta Constitution, the Birmingham papers,
the Florida papers, all of the South,
he believes in state rights.
That's a cold word in the white community.
And he was pandering to whites.
And then the Republican Party
just kept moving and kept moving.
Now they forgot about getting rid of Brown
because they found a way to take over the entire system,
not just the Supreme Court.
Now I got a lot more I can tell you,
but I'm not going to do this.
Let me just conclude by saying that
we are still in a glass that's half-full.
And young people, when you live here,
wherever you go, you can have an impact on rural affairs.
You can do it in your church,
your schools, or what have you.
What do you lose by being fair to people?
What do you lose?
Do you lose your dignity? No.
Do you lose your jobs? No.
So what is it? What's that block to being fair?
The fairest people I've ever seen
in these issues is white women.
The white women seem to be more fair than the white men.
Why? I don't know. Maybe it's mothering.
I don't know what it is [BACKGROUND] ,
but the women are fair about this whole issue of race.
America will kill itself if we keep allowing
these demagogues to come out here
and ruin our good name.
And that's what's going on.
Do you think, if Donald Trump becomes president,
and he and Putin get into a little tiff,
Donald Trump will then you,
I mashed the button on him?
Do you think Putin and I are going to
mash the button over there, too?
So we have an enlightened self-interest,
not just for ourselves to survive,
but our progeny, our society.
As I said to you before,
this is the noblest experiment in human behavior
and people getting along and working together
that's ever been tried for a long period of time.
I mentioned Alexander,
but he couldn't do it for just a few years.
This is the longest.
I challenge you today to go back and look at
the founding documents beyond
the segregationist documents and
see what it is that we promised
that this was going to be,
and then see if we're living up to it.
Many people are.
And I just hope on the 8th of November
that America all over this place says
to Donald Trump and those right-wingers
who want us to go back to where things used to be,
hell, no, we're not going to do it.
I'll stop right here. [APPLAUSE]
>> I'd like to ask you a question.
>> By all means.
>> What was the most memorable moment
that you have when you think back
to the Atlanta incident, in particular?
What's the absolute biggest memory
that pops into your head when you think back?
>> The [inaudible] would be
when I got the telephone call to come down to
the Chamber of Commerce and sit down because
white merchants are willing to sign
an agreement to end the segregation.
You can imagine because I was on a tight rope.
And what I mean by that is this.
I had to battle Black leadership,
the older men had to battle the white leadership,
and I had to also try and get the masses
of African Americans to support.
You heard, I think it was Mr. [inaudible]
that we asked people to send in their charge card.
I asked in a press conference for these people in
Atlanta who had Rich's Department Store charge cards
to send them to me.
I said, close down your account with segregation,
open up your account with freedom.
I'll send your cards back
once Richs 'and the downtown
have agreed to desegregate.
Three hundred and fifty-four people
sent me their charge card.
Now I'm going to ask you a question rhetorically.
Would you send your credit card
to a 22-year-old college student? [BACKGROUND]
When I made that request, everybody laughed,
But 354 people didn't,
and we put them in the safe deposit box
and sent them back to them
once all the agreements have been signed.
what I didn't know was that hundreds of people
sent their charge cards back to Rich's.
And I didn't know that until I went out to Emory to
look at some of the files here in the last year or so,
and I was shocked to see how many people
actually closed their accounts with segregation
to open up the account with freedom.
I was shocked to see,
so the 354 was just a microcosm.
What happened?
Education is a dangerous thing,
especially if you're on the other side of
someone who is educated.
And we were educated quite well over there
at the AU Center.
I'm an economics major,
and I had a professor by the name of Dr. E.B. Williams,
who had gotten his PhD from Columbia University,
and he taught me the power of the dollar.
And one of the things I used to hear him say was that,
if we could ever find a way
to harness our fast dimes behind the cause,
we could buy our freedom.
He said, because we don't have that many people
who are making a lot of money,
but we have a lot of people who
making a little bit of money,
and you can figure out a way to make that happen,
and I got to thinking about it.
And then he said he had us go out and do an assignment.
And the assignment was to do the research to find out
the margin of profit for department stores, [LAUGHTER]
so all kind of industries.
What's the margin of profit?
The margin of profit at that time for
department stores was 8% and 10%.
I said, eureka.
We were 33% of the population, African Americans.
So I decided that if we asked them to close down
their account with segregation
to open up their account with freedom,
if we just get 20 or 30% of the African Americans
to stop shopping at Rich's,
they were going to give in.
That is exactly what happened.
That's when they lost $10 million.
They did a lot of things to try and overcome that.
They got unmarked trucks and all that stuff
to start delivering,
so you can order by phone.
That was a way of trying to break the boycott,
but that didn't happen.
So Ms. Gill asked me earlier.
She made a comment to me about Black Lives Matter.
You can ask me about it, Ms. Gill.
I met with about five different groups in Atlanta
who call themselves Black Lives Matter.
And I listened to them,
and they were talking about the same kind of things
that we were talking about,
only about the discrimination.
I said, you're in a war.
And if you're going to battle this war,
you got to have a war plan, a battle plan.
You don't win a battle or war without a battle plan.
I said, so a march is not going to get it.
Marches are designed to dramatize,
but you got to have some backup.
I said, it's hard work now to bring about
liberty, justice, and equality.
And if you're not willing to work hard,
it's not going to happen.
I said, it needs to be done nonviolently,
it needs to be done using your head,
but most of all,
what are the resources that are available to you?
You have to get somebody together,
economic campaign together.
I said, let me give you an example.
I said, The Koch Brothers, K-O-C-H,
you heard of them.
Most of them hadn't heard of the Koch Brothers.
I said, you got to do some research
and find out who's in the 1%.
I said, they own Brawny Paper Towels.
They own Georgia-Pacific.
A lot of other places they own.
I said, now, let's just take Georgia, for example.
The GNP in the state of Georgia for African Americans
is larger than the GNP of the country of Canada,
of [inaudible], of Switzerland,
but the difference, though,
is that the money comes into
the African American community on a Friday,
and it's gone by Monday or Tuesday.
Now, if you could figure out a way to find out
what is the marginal profit for Brawny
in the state of Georgia or throughout the South,
look at it.
It's published data, and then you analyze,
and you start a campaign to stop people
from buying from whoever that is out there.
I said, you can just go around
and run selective boycotts.
I promise you that the 1% who run the world,
they don't want to lose any money.
They want more yachts, they want more islands,
they want more planes, and they want more money.
I said, we're in a capitalistic system.
Learn the factors of production:
land, labor, capital, entrepreneurship.
The biggest one is capital.
And if you can impact the capital part
of the factors of production,
then you're cooking with gas.
I said, but if you impact where the money is coming from,
that keeps them going,
they will tell you to go to hell all day long.
They control the police,
they control the governors,
they control the newspapers,
but they cannot control an organized mass
that has designed a strategy
how the little persons can participate,
and they can do it with impunity by just withdrawal
as opposed to walking the picket lines.
I said, all can walk the picket lines,
but what do you want other people to do
who also feel that Black lives matter?
If you cannot find a way to bring forward
some other people who can be fellow travelers with you,
you're not going to make it just on public opinion.
You can change public opinion,
but that still doesn't change
people's votes or the regulations.
I think I answered you.
Yeah [inaudible]
Maybe I over-answered. I'm sorry. [BACKGROUND]
Yes, sir.
>> You've got to say at least the title paradigm
between where you have
the Dixiecrats basically becoming Republican title
over the course
of several election cycles.
Do you foresee another paradigm shift or
at least a shift in Party tactic,
considering there is an overwhelming amount
of disgust and in the Republican Party,
even [inaudible] they have
absolutely no faith or trust in Donald Trump.
You see something like that happening
because you see that friction,
or is that just one of them?
>> Let me tell you,
I'm glad Donald Trump ran because
he is exposing the underbelly
that we don't want to really talk about.
He's exposing dirty linen,
I mean, from the stuff that he does.
And we all want to have clean linen,
especially to the people coming from the outside.
What I see, sir, is this.
I don't think it's a prayer. I think
America is better than Donald Trump,
but I mean the collective America.
I don't just mean white America,
a coalition of Americans, in my opinion,
are going to resoundingly say on
8th of November that we're not prepared to go there.
Now that's what I think. I think it's more.
It's what I believe, and I hope I'm right.
That's another part of your question that I missed.
>> If you're seeing that,
it means that there is another shift coming?
>> Yeah. I was going to say this to you.
I shouldn't put it that way, let me see.
[BACKGROUND] Let me put it this way.
Even though people have died,
whites and Blacks for
the right for African Americans to vote,
in Georgia, we have 700,000 African Americans
who have not been to jail
but who are not registered,
therefore they can't vote, 700,000.
We have 600,000 Hispanic people
who are legal citizens, who are not registered.
That's 1.3 million.
You can run the governorship of Georgia
with 500,000 votes.
So to answer your question,
we've got to find a way to get more people
to participate in this thing called democracy
because if you don't do that,
you're going to keep having these demagogues coming up,
pimping people in a certain way,
and that's all that's been done.
Donald Trump's history has been mixed.
He used to be a liberal guy.
Then he became a racist guy.
Who is the real Donald Trump?
We don't really know because
he says what is expedient for him at the time.
If it's expedient for him
to call you a bad name, he'll do it.
Look at what he did with Carney.
Carney was a bad guy until he found these other emails,
and all of a sudden, he's a good guy.
Any guy who tells you the election is rigged
unless I win,
what kind of thinking is that,
but that's where we are.
Yes, sir.
>> I wanted to ask for [OVERLAPPING] .
>> Can you talk a louder, please?
I'm an old man, my hearing. [BACKGROUND]
Talk a little louder, please.
>> I wanted to ask if you had any commentary
regarding the intersection between systems of wealth,
especially with regards to business interests and
systems of racial inequality
because we see throughout history.
For example, in the several decades
preceding the application of the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendment,
over 180 lawsuits were
filed in the Supreme Court regarding these,
but of those, only about 17 were
regarding actual racial inequality
and the rest with regards to
business interests and theories.
Furthermore, with the work of such scholars
as Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander,
we see representations of
the interests of businesses and the perpetuation
of the more racialized prison system
of the prison industrial complex that we live in.
So I guess my question is,
with regards to your personal experience,
have you seen interests of business
with regards to perpetuation of systems
of racial inequality?
>> Business would only respond
positively to the issues of racial equality
when you hold that feet to the fire
or when you impact that money.
You've heard of supply-side economics.
When Ronald Reagan ran,
somebody told him to talk about
supply-side economics that had been advocated
by Dr. Milton Friedman from University of Chicago.
Reagan could hardly spell it,
much less understand it,
because if he understood it,
he would have known that they tried
supply-side economics in Argentina.
Some of his top aides went down there
to revise the economic system
to try supply-side economics,
tax breaks for the rich,
and the theory was that
you give tax breaks to the rich,
and through a trickle down effect,
they will then reinvest the money into
new manufacturing or refurbished and somehow or another,
through a trickle down effect,
the masses will get to benefit
because you made the rich richer.
When you think about it, that is a total fallacy,
but Milton Friedman sold that thing to America
and sold that to Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Alan Blinder, I think, his name is,
economist at Princeton wrote a book called
"Soft Head, Warm Hearts."
In that book, he argued that this is stupid
because, he said, what's going to happen is that
they're going to get the tax cuts.
They're going to buy more yachts, buy more islands,
and they're going to then close down the rust belt
and send all the manufacturing to Mexico,
to China, and to India and other third world countries.
They're going to leave the masses of people
who depend on this manufacturing stuff in the lurch.
That's exactly what they did.
The Republicans vilified the gentleman, but he was right.
The 1% is making more money behind the supply-side stuff
than they ever made when you had people in office,
like Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Truman,
but they changed the whole thing around,
and the Southerners bought into it because
they were trying to tie into
the Republican Party to slow down things
with social issues.
They were more concerned about stacking
the Supreme Court at that early point.
So they bought into this supply-side stuff,
and the one percenters,
who, by the way, you never see those people.
Do you know a one percenter?
Do you personally, or do you ever read about them?
>> Read about them? Yes.
>> You may have read about where they had gone, maybe,
but bottom line is that
the people who actually run America,
we don't know who they are.
We just know that they are part of the 1%,
and the 1% manipulates
the Democratic and Republican Parties for their benefit.
Now they will use the money to
finance campaigns for people
who will carry forward their financial interests,
and it is a crime against humanity
what we have allowed the 1% to do in
this country in the name of democracy.
There's no reason why your cousins or your children or
your parents should be
unemployed or not making a decent salary.
Like I said earlier,
if we say we're going to do things in
this country and forget about
all these racial stuff, we can do it,
but then we come back
after we kick the butt out of all these people,
we go back to business as usual.
So sir, I had hoped to
see America move more and more toward
believing this umbrella of freedom.
I think I may leave here wanting, not seeing it,
but the folks in this room,
I want to say to you that it's a relay.
It's not all Black folks. It's not all white folks.
It's not all Asians. It's not all Muslims.
It's folks who call themselves Americans.
We enjoy the best standard of living,
in my opinion, in the world,
and we're doing it with one hand tied behind our back.
Can you imagine what would happen
if everybody was on board,
we're all working hard trying to make this thing go?
But no, we got people who are saying,
we're Americans,
but then we have categories of Americans
that we're not going to give an opportunity.
Let me ask you something.
Sir, have you noticed how many African Americans
who are at the top of the game
when it comes to astronomy?
Have you noticed all these?
There are two Black men who
are these outstanding astronomers.
Have you all seen that on TV,
some of you? You can go.
You begin to see people doing things
that they never had a chance to do before.
Black women, Black men, Asians,
Indians, white people, and most white women,
now white women have done extremely well.
I remember I didn't mention this to you all earlier,
but I was a president of the NACP,
and I put together a plan to
challenge all the broadcast licenses in Atlanta,
all 25 of them,
and the idea was to use
the Federal Communications Commission laws
to force them to hire women,
Blacks and other minorities,
in front of the camera as well as behind the camera.
And they fought me,
but I beat them at the FCC,
and the FCC agreed with me.
So we changed everything in Atlanta.
It became the catalyst for changing
the broadcasting all over America.
You go back and look at
the civil rights laws, 1964,
Representative Smith from Virginia was the head
of the House Rules Committee,
and as they were marking up the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
Smith said, that's the man's name Smith.
He said, let's add as a protected basis, sex in here.
So these white congressmen are
not going to vote to give women equal rights.
And so they added sex in there
as one of the protected basis.
It rolled right through Congress.
Nobody even talked about it because
there was so much momentum that
had been built by the Civil Rights Movement,
but look who has gained the most
out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
It's been white women.
You can't turn on your TV without
seeing white women doing everything.
You got some Blacks in there, too,
but my point is America can do what it's forced to do.
And then what they're forced to do sometimes becomes
something that they want to promote
as something that they want to do.
The Fortune 500 companies,
you now have one or two Blacks.
A lot of women had Fortune 500 companies now.
That couldn't have happened without
the Civil Rights Bill of 1964,
where women were protected
and were given a chance to do it.
Women can do more than just have children
and cook and keep your house.
They can also think like hell.
Oftentimes, a whole lot smarter than we are because
they convinced us to marry them. [LAUGHTER]
I hope I answered your question. Roundabout.
>> So our students here doing research
on the sit-ins and your role on the sit-in [OVERLAPPING]
>> Sure. Are you one of those?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay, thanks. [BACKGROUND] I'm sorry.
>> I'm personally obsessed with Carolyn Long Banks and
certain members of the community that were involved.
And I wanted to ask you,
you appointed a woman to write an appeal for human rights.
And obviously, from the video you show,
there's a lot of female involvement,
but through the student movement and the sit-in process,
do you think women had the same equality as
the men that were participating in this sport,
or were they looked at as secondary citizens?
>> First of all, let me just mention to you
about Carolyn Long Banks.
Carolyn Long Banks was never a part of the leadership.
She went to jail on March 15 because
Jim Felder took her to jail.
That that was her boyfriend.
And he took her to jail on 19th of October. That was it.
So I don't know about ex-post facto stories
she's been telling,
but she was one of several thousand people
who were involved in the movement.
She was not one of the leaders,
although that's what I understand
she's been perpetrating,
and I hate to say that, but that's true.
There's no evidence that she did that,
but I do have all the arrest records of everybody,
269 people got arrested. I have all of them.
And I know she got arrested twice.
To run by me again, the other part,
the Long Banks thing upsets me
because I've seen too many people
give up their education,
get beaten and everything,
who are out there on the front line.
And I just have a problem with ex-post facto heroes.
Give me the other part.
>> I was more asking about the level
of equality that women had with [OVERLAPPING]
>> I got you. If you look at our group,
we had 19 members on the steering committee.
Spelman had three, of course, lady's school.
Clark of the three, Clark had one. That was four.
Morris Brown had one. That's five.
So there were 5/19 on on that planning committee,
but when it came down to who was going to jail,
who was going to march,
what have you, and be the foot soldiers,
as well as the thinkers in these meetings because
those five women they weren't pikers,
they were in-your-face kind of ladies.
They were highly represented, it seems to be.
Now, you may have seen Marian Wright Edelman,
she was one of the persons representing Spelman.
Almost all of those folks have done extremely
well in their chosen professions.
The women, 59% of all the people who were arrested
during the campaigns were females.
When we wanted to do a jail-no-bail,
we were going to stay in jail until they did something.
The women made up maybe
about half the people who were going to do it.
Now I think a part of that was
the fact that I think some of
the men were afraid they were going to
get beaten up or what have you.
Let me see.
One lady was at Woolworths,
and she got a cigarette put out on her shoulder.
That's the worst I know about the ladies.
Now the men, they pummeled some of us.
I got acid thrown in my face,
got beaten up by telephone driver.
They were awful on some of the men.
And they were gentlemen,
I guess, when it comes to the ladies.
That lady who got the cigarette put out,
that's the only one that I'm aware of where a woman
was actually maimed by what was going on.
They pretty much respected the women and
did not do to them the things
out there that they did to the men.
So women were very intricately involved,
and I think without
the backing of the women from Spelman,
I think we'd be in bad shape, but I got to tell you,
I called my mother before we had these meetings with
the college presidents because
when I looked at that first meeting
that Charles Black talked about,
there may not have been over two women in that meeting.
And I called my mother and
she said to me, go over the Spelman.
Get the women behind, and guys would come.
I said, Mama, they don't know me.
She said, don't you run touchdowns
on Saturday?
I said, Yeah.
She said, they know your name if they don't know you,
and she was right.
I went over there,
and the ladies were willing to follow me.
And I thank God that they
did because I didn't really know
the ladies at all over there.
I didn't have a girlfriend over there, anything,
but they decided that they would back
this crazy boy who was risking everybody's life
but you know what, though, if you haven't
found a cause that you're willing to give your life for,
you really haven't lived.
There's something about facing
an almost insurmountable challenge,
and then you challenge it, and you're successful,
it does a lot for you.
Let me also say something else to you all.
You're going to go out and do great things.
Many of you will.
Let me give you some advice that my mother gave me,
which really rings in my head even to this day.
I was in the newspapers on the front page constantly,
and my mother called me, and she said,
come over here,
your father and I want to have dinner with you.
I went over there.
So when we finished, she said,
I got something to tell you that I want you to remember
after I'm gone.
I said, what's that, Mama?
She said, don't get the big head.
She said, you are in the newspapers.
They [inaudible] about you at
national magazines and all this stuff.
I want you to wear the same size hat
when all this is over,
as you wore before it started.
She said, I'll come back from my grave,
if I ever hear that you got the big head.
And I think that's important.
Sometimes you're designated by history
or circumstances to do a certain job,
but don't get the big head.
We're all here trying to make it through
this journey that we call life,
and we should not be running around and say,
oh, I'm the great I am, I'm bigger than you.
I can talk better than you.
I can organize better than you.
That's not what it's about.
If you go back and read the history,
Jesus was a simple man, powerful but simple.
He also got mad, too.
Look at what he did to the money changers
who ran out of the temple.
He wasn't all no-violent.
He also could get mad,
but the point is, humility has its virtue in anything
that you try to do.
I'm saying all that to you because you're students.
I've been teaching for a long time.
Yes, sir. Here and then [inaudible] .
Yes.
>> So earlier you mentioned, during the sit-ins,
you were fighting not only the businesses segregationist,
but also there were numbers of African Americans
especially older generations who were
not in favor of the Atlanta Student Movement.
I guess they didn't want
people to rock the boat.
They probably have a good thing going there?
>> You're right. That's a good question.
Young people there's a book that's written
by a man named James Henry Hammond,
H-A-M-M-O-N-D.
He wrote a book on paternalism.
He owned a plantation in,
I think it's Aiken, South Carolina, I believe.
When he married into this family with a rich lady,
who inherited the money of my father,
who also had a plantation,
and he decided that the best way to
control the slaves was to pick out
a head slave and make him the voice that
you had to go to in order to get to him.
And he wrote a book on how you do this,
how you conquer the Black masses.
And he ended up creating a term called paternalism.
Now, that's what we had in Atlanta,
not before 1906, but in 1906.
That's when it really started.
You may have read about the riot of 1906 in Atlanta.
It's really the biggest riot we ever had around here.
It started down there by
Peachtree and Decatur Street all down in there.
And people got hurt.
There was a governor's race going on between
Clark Howell and Hoke Smith, I think it was.
Smith won the race,
but they used all the Donald Trump stuff
in that campaign in 1906.
So the riot broke out because it inflamed the people.
Atlanta took the first step
toward becoming a city too busy to hate.
Now they were hating all the time,
but they wanted to create this model
that was good for business.
And you had the editor
of Atlanta Constitution going out for several years,
Henry Grady, who was pushing Atlanta and
the New South to try to get business down here to
rebuild this great city on commerce.
You had a situation, sir,
wherein Atlanta's white leadership
picked on John Wesley Dobbs,
who was Mayor Jackson's granddaddy.
They picked the pastor of First Congregational Church.
I've forgotten his name now,
but he was a pastor there.
They picked Walter White,
who became the head of the NACP National Lake,
but that was about 10 or 12 Blacks that they picked.
It was like a kitchen cabinet.
So on the issue of race,
they would sound out these people
to figure out how they're going to do it.
Now the first test of this group came in about 1917.
The white school board was going to
close the seventh grade in
Atlanta in the Black schools
and have Blacks only go from
the first to the sixth grade.
They were going to save the money for
the seventh grade to build a white boys high school.
That upset this leadership group
that was the paternalistic guys.
So Walter White,
even though he was a part of that system,
he was also the executive of the Atlanta NACP.
So he organized a tremendous voter registration drive
because, at that time in Atlanta,
Blacks could register without problems.
That only changed a little bit later.
So they went out and registered these voters,
and they got the school board to
not only leave the seventh grade in,
but to also put in
a junior high school called David T. Howard,
which would be the eighth and ninth grades,
and they got them to build
Booker T Washington High School,
which was the first senior high school
for Blacks in the South.
So there was some advantages
to doing it through the paternalistic way.
One of the advantages is that a lot of folks got lynched,
shot, arrested, thrown in prison
if you got out of your place.
The whole idea behind paternalism
was for the African Americans,
the entire community,
but certainly the ones who were the leaders,
they had to put on a mask.
By that, I mean, a metaphysical mask,
not an actual mask.
And if you felt like crying about a situation,
you had to laugh,
if you were in the presence of white people.
So that paternalistic system is not entirely dead.
There are parts of it still going on today.
And it has not died a decent death.
It's still around.
And yes, and those,
Black leaders were very hard on me,
and the hardest one on me,
believe it or not, was Dr. King's daddy.
He and I didn't get along well
because he thought I was
a uppity young boy that he had baptized,
and he didn't make any bones
about preaching that out in public.
We battled constantly,
but his son and I got along well.
So we just have to go from there.
I was just telling Ms. Gill that,
when I came back home in '68,
I got a call from him
after I went to church because
I'm a member of that church also.
He wanted me to be the Youth Day speaker.
And I said okay. I made a speech,
then he handed me an envelope.
I was going to do it for free,
but he handed me an envelope.
I put it in my pocket.
I didn't look at it. I looked at it when I got home.
It was $1500 in 1968. [BACKGROUND]
And I said, Mama.
She said, that's his way of saying I'm sorry.
That was a lot of money, folks,
but that's some strange things
that happened during that movement.
The paternalistic movement was one
that is still here in a way.
There's just certain people that can get things
done for you in Atlanta.
That's how it started. And it's true all over
the South and Southwest.
Lady over here.
>> So earlier you had mentioned your mother,
and in our research, we didn't really see too much
about her. You talked more about your grandfather.
So my question was, she moved to Atlanta and left you
with your grandfather to try to
provide a better life for you.
So with her confidence,
did that at all inspire you
to start coordinating the sit-ins?
And do you think she had a large impact?
>> My mother, without a doubt,
had a large impact, but my grandfather, too.
She and my father divorced.
They separated when I was two-and-a-half,
and my grandfather gave her $5 and
told her to come to Atlanta and get her a job,
but I'm going to keep this boy until I die. So he did.
He kept me until he died in December '44.
And I I was sent to my mother in February of '45.
What was the other part of your question?
>> Did she have a large impact?
>> Yes. In addition
to the Spelman thing I told you about earlier,
my mother, I think, was proud of my activity,
and she escaped a lot of scrutiny because
her name, she's married again, her name was Tasha.
When I announced that boycott extension
on 1st February 1961,
I had it at a press conference.
I got a call from my mother that night.
She was hysterical.
I never seen my mother cry other than
when her mother died. I saw that.
She was extremely hysterical.
I said, Mama, what's the matter?
What's the old folks expression?
She was [inaudible] up or whatever.
She was just having trouble breathing.
So I said, calm down. Do I need to come over there?
No. So when she finally got her composure,
she said I was watching TV tonight
when you were having that press conference,
and I had to deny that you were my son
in order to save a $5 a day in coffee at job.
I said, what happened?
She said, she worked for Elizabeth Mitchell,
whose dad was one of the builders of the Hurt building
here in town, so multimillionaire people.
As I understand it from my mother,
I was talking, and I look a lot like my mother.
So according to my mother, Ms. Mitchell,
looked at the TV when I was talking,
looked at my mother, looked at the TV.
She did that three times. On the third time,
she said, Bertha, do you know that boy?
And my mother said, no, I don't,
and she was crying.
She said, I had to disown my only child
in order to save a $5 a day in coffee.
That's the mask I was telling you about.
If she had said that's my son,
she wouldn't have had a job the next day.
Did I answer your question?
>> You did, yes.
>> Any more questions?
Yes.
>> We've seen the wonderful things
you've been able to do years.
Today is a testament of your selflessness towards people
being here and being unwell at the same time.
You also know that you are a fighter? A champion.
[BACKGROUND]
>> I was lucky, yeah.
>> [inaudible]. So my question to you is this.
What has kept you grounded over the years?
What's your motivating factor?
You've heard about your mom.
What else has it been that has kept you going?
>> I think it's a combination of things.
It was my grandfather, I guess.
What is it John Locke said,
what you put on a child's slate
during the first six years of their life,
that will govern to a great extent
what they're going to do in life.
John Dewey, the Father of Education,
says something similar to that.
And, of course, the Bible talks
about training up a child.
Sir, all I can say is that my mother in concert with
my grandfather had a lot to do
with my outlook, all of that.
It's amazing what you can do with your child.
You literally can brainwash them
because they have faith in you,
and I was brainwashed,
I guess you could say, for leadership.
I didn't know it at the time,
but I was brainwashed.
I remember when I was six years old,
I was coming home on
that dirt road walking down the road.
And Eugene Talmadge, former governor,
was dropping flyers from a crop duster.
And the flyer had,
I could read it because he taught me how to
read before I went to school,
but I had never seen the word, N-I-G-G-E-R.
What's a nigger?
The rest of it I understood,
but keep the N-I-G-G-E-R in his place.
So I went in and I said, granddaddy.
I just saw a plane, and he dropped this.
What's a N-I-G-G-E-R?
And he said, come on,
sit on my knee, let me talk to you.
And he went on to tell me all about
slavery and what have you and segregation.
And he ended by saying, son,
Sonny was what he named me,
he said, we are still in the form of slavery.
The only difference is that we can go home at night.
When you consider that,
I would go around with him as his little mascot
when he was preaching.
My granddad was preaching liberation.
It was a risky business,
but he had on the preachers, whatever that.
And that saves a lot of people who may be
saying something that whites didn't like,
but they excuse them because they were creatures.
And I think my granddad took advantage of that.
You have to be careful what you tell a child because
that child might be listening. And that's what he did.
And then when I got to Atlanta, my mother,
we were living in an alley behind a fish market,
and the guy didn't change the fish all the time.
[inaudible] . So I had some smells like that.
And it was a very depressing situation,
but my mother used to always tell me,
it's not where you're from, it's where you're going.
And she said, I'm going to keep my foot in your butt.
[LAUGHTER]
And I knew that if I did not do well,
she would put her foot in my butt.
And I don't think we have enough parents
black and white and Jewish.
The Jews are probably doing it,
[LAUGHTER] come to think of it,
but not the Blacks and whites
who need to be putting the foot in the kids' butts
to make sure because we all could do a little bit better.
Anything else?
Yes, ma'am. Yes.
>> When you were talking about women in
the representation.
>> In the movement.
>> Yeah. I want to know, why did you appoint
a woman to write [inaudible]?
>> She had a tremendous reputation.
I really didn't know her,
but I had heard about how bright she was,
and she was an English major.
And I thought she could do it.
But the other reason why I did it,
so Julian Bond would have been the logical person
because he was the person who helped me
organize along with Joe Pierce,
but mind you now,
we had to try to keep all the schools' representatives
involved because I did not want ethnocentrism to set up.
That is Morehouse one day,
Spelman another day, Clark another day.
There's a common denominator.
We were all part of the underclass.
We're all Negroes. So therefore,
if we were to go down there one day Clark,
one day Morehouse, one day AU,
one day Morris Brown,
you're setting yourself up for a
divide and conquer situation.
So it's because of the desire to
have a balance that I asked Roslyn Pope to do it.
Julian was really my first choice,
but I chose not to do it because I went to Morehouse,
and he went to Morehouse.
And I knew that the ladies of Spelman,
after talking to my mother,
would probably follow me, and they did,
but had we left them out,
you've got this ethnocentrism thing.
Us versus them,
and I didn't want to have the sex thing coming out
where the men think the women can't do anything,
and so that's why I asked her to do it.
And without a doubt,
it was an excellent document that she did,
but it was all political.
You want to keep the forces together.
When you're the leader,
you got to think about your troops
as well as the program.
How are you going to get the program done
with the maximum number of people?
If that's the case, then you got to figure out,
how do you keep people from fighting
among themselves over the ethnocentrism, whatever.
They're wanting to have
their name in history or whatever.
People fight over the wrong thing sometimes.
So you want to minimize all of that,
so you can keep the common denominator in front of you.
That is, we want equal rights for everybody, period.
And let's not fight about
who's going to be fighting for this.
We all fight for it together,
and we're going to make sure that everybody has
equal representation as we go forward.
And I make sure that the women
got a chance to do whatever they wanted to do.
And therefore, the Spelman ladies were really behind us.
My mama, though, was right.
They saw me running touchdowns
and that helped out a great deal.
Someone over here. Go on and ask, yes.
>> You've been talking a lot about faith,
and I love we're talking about Jesus,
turning over your papers,
that's one of my favorite stories,
but did your faith inspire you at all
to join in on this movement?
Was there any influence on
the actions that you took
as a leader in this movement during this time?
>> I think a part of it, yes, because
Martin King's father,
even though he and I had fights
early on between the paternalistic things,
he preached liberation quite a bit.
And I heard him from the time I was eight
coming up talking,
but see, sometimes people talk a good game,
but they don't necessarily follow it up,
but I understand why they didn't.
You could have gotten killed in Atlanta, Georgia,
if you got out of your place. It's as simple as that.
And they gave preachers a pass in a way,
but they could always revoke that pass.
Just remember, every person of color, regardless of sex,
had to wear a metaphysical mask,
not an actual mask,
but you had to subsume your humanity
in order to survive.
It was so ridiculous.
Let me give you an example.
Dr. Mays wrote a book called "Born to Rebel."
And then he was talking about his father
driving down,
he was born in '81 or '80, whatever,
South Carolina.
And they were dirt roads,
but his father had bought a Model T.
Henry Ford had just brought out the Model T.
Mays writes that they were behind a white man
who also had a car on this dirt road.
His father pulled out because
they were late going somewhere,
and he was passing the white person.
He literally had to apologize.
He felt the obligation to apologize to the white driver
that he had to pass him.
That's how vicious this stuff was.
I don't think I can fully describe to you
the humiliation and what have you,
that people of color had to go through for centuries,
not just a few weeks, a few months,
a few years, but from 1619,
when the first 22, 23 came in here
on that hijacked ship into Virginia.
After that, because the white South
and the white North too,
especially in the countryside of New York
and Ohio and places like that, Pennsylvania,
they saw that they could build this country,
the agricultural economy, on the backs of slaves,
but they would have a permanent workforce because
they'd bring in slave women and men
who would then procreate and bring forward a workforce.
Now they thought about going to India
to get some Indians to do it,
but the Spanish priest who was
a part of that deciding group said, wait a minute.
The Indians are not immune from our diseases,
but the Africans are because
they've been going down to Africa earlier.
And so that's what caused them to go to Africa
and start buying the slaves to bring them over.
The idea was to minimize the expense
that they had to put into the agricultural economy
by having free labor.
That's what it was all about.
Exploiting the system for the benefit of a few
who could afford to buy these slaves
when they came in on these slave ships.
And one thing I haven't talked to you all about is
the role of the cotton gin.
Eli Whitney and some other folks down in
Southeast Georgia and South Carolina,
once they did that in 1793,
that kept slavery going because when they put
together the Constitution and those amendments,
if you go back and look at them,
they call for the ending of slavery,
bringing people in here as slaves
within 20 years after the adoption of the Constitution.
That was supposed to end in 1808.
But in 1793,
Eli Whitney and the cotton gin caused there to be
this influx of people who were
making money with cotton,
and these African men had figured out
a way to produce the best cotton in the world.
And therefore, the production of cotton,
cotton became king.
It was the oil of that time.
So you had a combination
of the Lords of the Lash, the cotton owners,
and the Lords of the Loom,
the people in the North,
who were manufacturing the cotton for export
as well as for internal consumption.
Did I hit this volume? Any more questions?
Yes.
>> You mentioned that you had the arrest records
for everyone that [OVERLAPPING]
>> Yes, I have them.
>> Could you give us a recount on
your experience with the police and how you were treated?
>> They never put handcuffs on me,
which was shocking because they handcuffed
most everybody else,
but they didn't handcuff me, Martin King,
and the two ladies that were with me.
And I didn't realize that they were handcuffing.
I thought they were doing that to everybody,
but lo and behold, when I talked to them,
they said, they handcuffed all of us.
Atlanta has always been a place
that was concerned about the image,
and they knew that if I got arrested,
it's going to be on the front page somewhere.
So they didn't want me going to jail with my hands
because that doesn't look good for Atlanta.
Now they didn't care whether the police beat on me
[LAUGHTER] once they closed the door.
Another time when I got the acid thrown on me [NOISE],
the police came.
Captain Little was the man. You may have read this.
Captain Little was the person who was in charge of
all the police forces
that were going to be dealing with us.
He came along with his lieutenant,
and they had heard about me,
having the acid thrown on me.
It happened on Gordon Street.
And instead of them taking me
straight to the Grady Hospital,
they took me all around by Simpson Road.
They could have gotten me to the hospital in 10 minutes,
12 minutes with their police siren on.
It took them about 35 or 40 minutes.
In the meantime, my face has been scarred,
my clothes are being eaten,
but that was like, that serves you right.
That's what that was.
In general, no, they did not arrest me
with handcuffs and stuff like that because
that wouldn't look good on the front page
of New York Times,
but if they got a chance to screw me a little bit around,
they did that. That's what happens.
People like to kill off the leader, if they can.
And I was just lucky enough to be stupid enough,
I guess, not to let them kill me off,
but people came to my house too.
Four guys came to my house.
I was in Cleveland making a speech, but they were there.
And they were downstairs, according to my neighbors,
four of them drinking beer.
I lived upstairs in this apartment building.
So there was some guys who had been in the Korean War,
and they thought maybe people might try
to come out and ambush me.
So they already were ready with their rifles and guns.
So Charles Johnson was the guy who told me about it.
He had organized these four guys, including himself.
So that night, when they saw these white guys down there,
I guess they waited for me to come home.
They all went into action, got their guns,
and approached the car from four different directions,
and laid their guns in there and said,
what are you boys doing here,
which I'm sure pissed the white guys off
to be called boys.
And they said,
we're just waiting for that old boy upstairs.
So Charles said, he told them,
he clicked his gun and said,
you better wait somewhere else because,
if you stay here, we're going to kill you.
They got out of there. Never came back.
I've had a lot of other things, too.
I was one of the few guys that had a car.
Most of the kids didn't have a car, so I had a car.
And I would come by what was now
Fair Street every morning.
That's where I was coming.
So this one policeman stopped me, this patrolman.
He gave me a ticket.
I wasn't speeding,
but he accused me of speeding.
And then I came by the next morning.
The same guy hit me again.
I said, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.
So he wasn't there the third day,
but the fourth day, he hit me again.
Three tickets now inside of one week [NOISE]
for speeding, and I wasn't speeding,
but nevertheless, that's what the charge was.
If you get arrested by police,
he's always right. You're always wrong.
That's just the way it is.
I want you to know I got a knock on my door
[NOISE] about three days later.
It was two Georgia State patrolmen.
They had come out to get my driver's license.
And so I handed it to them.
I had the car, so I'm transporting people at
the picket lines and what have you.
We're going to ground him.
He can't drive anymore.
So they gave me enough tickets
to void my driver's license, suspend it.
I've always been a little bit audacious, I guess.
I called down to the state patrol,
and I asked if I could come down
and talk to the officer-in-charge.
And so I went down there,
and so a Lieutenant Poole, P-O-O-L-E, came out,
and I said, may I talk to you?
He said, yes, and I told him.
I said, I'm coming out here to get
my driver's license back.
I said, I've been targeted by this patrolman in Atlanta.
I wasn't speeding at any time.
I said, look at it,
because he got my record.
I said, can you imagine I got three tickets
inside of a week from the same police officer
sitting in the same location?
He looked at me, and he said, hold on.
I'll be right back.
About 15 minutes later, he came back and
gave me my driver's license.
The idea was to cripple the movement because
my car was being used to transport a lot of these people.
So those are the kind of things
that happened behind the scenes,
but mind you now,
that white guy who was a lieutenant
in the Georgia State Patrol,
he grew up in the same society,
but he had some decency about him.
And when I laid it out,
all he did was go in to get my license because
he knew that that didn't make any sense,
but it was a thing that went on at that time.
>> I have a question.
My students have been working so hard,
thinking about the sit-ins
and doing lots of archival research.
They've been to Emory. They've been to the AU Center.
>> Y'all may know more about it than I do. [LAUGHTER]
>> And what I'm trying to impress upon them is that
here you are, an icon, but you were 22 years old,
and what I am trying to impart to my students
as researchers and activists is that
they're about the same age as you were [OVERLAPPING].
>> That's true.
>> And I wanted to know if you had any advice for them
on how they could make a difference,
even though they would say,
or some of them would say to me,
I'm only a college student.
>> I was only a college student, too,
but let me mention two things to answer your question.
When I went to the Navy for those three years,
I went on one purpose,
to get the money to go back to school.
Now when I got to boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois,
the Navy was predominantly white,
like 99% white when I went in.
When I got to Great Lakes,
we had two out of 74 people in my company,
there were two Blacks,
myself and the guy from Indiana.
We all took an aptitude test [NOISE],
and the way it was designed then,
whoever had the highest
what we call a GCT, general classification test,
but it's an aptitude test,
whoever had the highest aptitude test
became the educational petty officer.
So [NOISE] I was named the educational petty officer.
So my job was to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic
to all the other 80-some folks in my group
in order for all of us to graduate.
So [NOISE] when we finished,
I was also a ping-pong champion.
So I won 11 tournaments, and I didn't smoke.
So my guys would come down,
and they'd watch me every Saturday,
and I'd wipe out the people,
and I'd get two cartons of cigarettes.
I gave them to all the guys who were in my barrack.
So I became a very popular person on two fronts,
cigarettes and also helping them pass the test.
When we got on the train going back from Chicago,
coming South, about seven white guys
from the South with me,
when we started going across that bridge
leaving Cincinnati going into Kentucky,
the white conductor came back,
and he said,
you got to move up front.
And so I didn't say anything.
One of my white white buddy said,
why does he have to move up front?
He said, the colors have to sit up front.
And the Blacks and the whites have to sit back here.
And so those guys, in unison,
who had gotten to know me over 11 weeks,
said, if he has to go,
we're going to all go up there.
What do you guys say about that?
He said, oh, hell, [LAUGHTER] and he walked off.
I'd have to fight the battle because
they learned who I was in boot camp.
And even though they were from the South,
and we were going South,
when we get past that bridge, we're in Dixie.
And they didn't think it was right for their friend
that they had met for 11 weeks, and they saw who I was.
I went to the Navy [NOISE],
I caught my ship,
and I was supposed to catch it in Alameda, California,
but it was gone.
So we had to go down to San Diego. It was gone.
We finally caught it in Long Beach.
They didn't have all this rapid communication
that you all have now,
[LAUGHTER] so we had to keep running.
So when I got there, I had about 30 people with me,
and I was in charge of all of them because
I had the GCT tests again.
So I turned over all these records
to the officer of the day,
the commanding officer who was in
charge at the deck when you went in.
We went to something called the X1 division,
the indoctrination division for two weeks.
I'll tell you about the ship and all this.
At the end of that two weeks,
they then assigned billets.
They assigned jobs.
So all the white guys, with exception of one,
got jobs as personnelmen, air controlman,
all the better jobs.
When it got to me, I was given a job in
the deck force chipping paint,
along with a guy named Lam from Kentucky.
Now I had the highest academic record.
He had the lowest because I saw him all.
So you took the Black guy with the highest and
the white guy with the lowest,
and both of them go to the deck course.
So I went down there, and I started chipping paint,
upset, but I had a goal in mind,
get this money and go back to college.
Chipping the paint wasn't good enough.
They came to get me after about two weeks.
They wanted me to go down and come up
and take charge of the head.
Ladies, the head is the restroom.
That's where the men would
go for elimination and showers and what have you.
Now there were 200 men involved,
not one but 200 men.
So I went in there,
and I remember something that my mother said.
She said, you can make an owl house look good.
You got to paint it up and what have you.
So I went out and I requisitioned paint and everything
and brush polish.
And I polished up the stuff and turned it into
a sub job where I could work
a half-hour in the morning and a half-hour after lunch.
The rest of the time, I'm reading books.
That upset some folks because
I had the SS job on the ship,
but I turned it into a gravy train.
Remember now if you take the SS job
and so as your gravy train,
you create a demand for the gravy train
from other people.
So a third class petty officer
named Slaughter from Tennessee
put in a billet to knock me out of that job.
He took the job from me because
he was senior to me.
I was a seaman, he was third class,
so he wanted to then sit around and read books.
They put me back in the deck force.
That pissed me off to no end. [BACKGROUND]
So I then started looking around.
I applied for dental technician school,
and then while I was waiting for the answer on that,
the disbursing office put out an announcement
for a dispersing cluck striker.
That's somebody who can be a trainee.
So I went down there to apply.
So when I got there, the ensign, JC Claren,
who was in charge of the office said,
we don't want Negroes down here.
I said, my mother and father pay taxes
just like yours.
What do you mean?
Everybody out there is from the South,
and we don't want any Negroes in here.
So he put me out.
I went to see the Chaplain on the ship.
The Chaplain's name was Commander Koch, K-O-C-H.
Does that sound familiar?
From the same area out there.
He's obviously a cousin. I told him a story.
He said, they didn't say that, did they?
I said, yes, they did, Commander Koch. He did nothing.
I went back to the deck force,
and this I said to my commanding officer,
Lieutenant JJ Horn.
I said, may I talk to you a minute?
He said, sure.
And I told him the story about what had happened to me.
He said, come on, Mr. King.
The first white man who ever called me mister
was Lieutenant JJ Horn.
He took me down there, and he said,
Ensign Claren, Mr. King said,
that you did not want him down here
because the white folks in here
would not want him in here.
Is that true? Let me hear your side of it.
Claren, to his credit, he said,
no, we don't want any Negroes down here.
It would just upset everything,
and those guys from the South, we're not going to do it.
Lieutenant JJ Horn said [NOISE],
if you don't have his name
in the Plan of the Day tomorrow,
transfer him down here.
I'm going to get your momma get your commission
from the Chief of Naval Operations.
Come on, Mr. King. Let's go.
The next morning, my name was in the Plan of the Day.
And I went down there.
Nobody would speak to me.
I'm just sitting here like this water bottle [LAUGHTER],
but all these books around here,
and we're nine guys in the office.
They were just mad because I was there.
Finally, after about eight or nine days,
a guy named Walter Wolf from Seattle, Washington, said,
I want to talk to you a minute.
And I said, okay.
He said, I can help you. Are you willing to learn?
He said, all those books, you got to read them now,
and the exam is in November. This is August.
He said, but I can tell you
what to read and what to learn,
and you can pass the exam.
And so he started teaching me.
And then a guy named John Bloom
from Tampa, Arizona, joined in.
And so the two of them,
I had to learn how to type
and then pass that typing test
and then pass the academic path.
And I passed the exam.
There were about five of us who took that exam,
four white guys and me.
I was the only one that passed.
So all of a sudden now,
I go from then sitting by the door
to being one of the bosses.
And so now it had to come through me for
everything because I was
the next person next to the top guy.
So I got a chance to learn more about the system and
how it works and how I realized
that you can bring about a change,
but you got to do your homework,
and you got to be persistent,
but I also learned something else.
Some of the people who did the most to help me
during early days when I was trying to develop
didn't look like me.
They were white guys. And as a result,
you'll notice that most of
the stuff I've ever been involved in,
I've been involved in things
like equal opportunity basis,
women, men, whites, Blacks, Jews.
I really believe that people can
bring about a better product if you bring all kinds
of people together to work and get off
of these [inaudible] that we're on.
That's just who Lonnie King is.
And it goes back to my mother's admonition.
When all this is over,
I want you to wear the same size hat.
And that means that,
if you get a chance to lead, be humble about it
because most of the folks you're going to be
dealing with are going to be humble people.
Don't take advantage because
you might be a little smarter than somebody else.
Don't wash that in anybody's face.
Let's get the job done and
give everybody a chance to be whoever they are.
I'm telling you about my philosophy.
I came from a religious background with my mother,
but I'll tell you something.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd do the same thing.
I'd be living in that alley, broken family,
but I had a strong mother and a strong granddaddy.
And that's the key to this whole thing,
training up a child in the way he should go,
or she should go, ladies,
and they won't depart from it.
It's there.ti's been there since the dawn of time,
and it's going to be there for the rest of the time.
Get hold of your children, train them up.
And when you train them,
train them that we hold these truths to be self-evident
should mean something.
It should not just be a piece of paper
that you put out only when you're going
to look at Independence Day or something like that.
Yes, ma'am.
>> Thank you so much. And I think
we're just about out of time.
So Shiloh wanted to have a moment with you
to be able to ask some questions,
but thank you so much for sharing with us.
[APPLAUSE]