>> So I think we'll go ahead and get started.
We do have a couple of classes and pool of students
who will be missing but who may be coming late.
And so just be aware that we're also having polls,
maybe streaming in,
and we also have a lot of
people who are connecting with us online.
So we'll go ahead and get started.
Do I need a microphone?
No. Good morning.
My name is [inaudible] from
[inaudible] And on behalf of the Rich Foundation,
the Department of English,
and our student researchers on
the Atlanta Student Movement Project,
I want to welcome you to the finale event of
KSU's 2018 Women's History Month Celebration.
Today, we have with us notable scholars who
will share their personal
and professional observations and
experiences regarding women and
the roles they have played and
continue to play in
civil rights movements in the US and worldwide.
We also have with us today, Professor Tony Grooms,
who will read from his new book, The Vain Conversation.
June Davis, our keynote speaker is,
among countless other distinctions,
one of the first freedom riders and a leader of
the sit-ins and economic boycotts conducted by
the Atlanta Student Movement in 1960 and '61.
Our Writing 3150 class,
these are our student scholars from that class,
have developed and created this program today with
innovative ideas for live streaming and tweeting and
social media promotion and with the event coordination.
Everything you experienced today is the result of
many hours of their hard work that they willingly put
in to make sure that you
our audience has the opportunity to
learn from the vital
primary source speakers we have with us today.
So if you want to learn more,
or you want to participate in this project,
let me give a shameless plug here.
So I'd like to invite you to enroll
in Writing 3150 this summer semester.
This is the course for all of
our work to recover the voices of the people,
places, and events of
the Atlanta Student Movement will continue.
We also have flyers on the table.
So if you're interested in
participating in this unique opportunity,
be sure to pick one up on your way out,
or you can enroll for the class.
It's the only Writing 3150 course offered this summer.
Please enroll because that's
what we're doing this summer.
We're continuing the work
of the Atlanta Student Movement Project.
So I would like to remind you also that at
the conclusion of the keynote
and perhaps during the keynote,
if our keynote speaker would like to,
we'll host a Q&A session where you can ask
our panelists more about their experiences
in civil and human rights.
We have no cards on the table,
if you want to write your question down and
our student researchers will ask
you and they will ask you to
hand it to them if you want to,
and they'll ask it for you.
We also have roving mics so that you can ask it yourself.
And please remember also to tweet
interesting things that you hear
today by tagging the project.
Well, we are live tweeting at Kennesaw English.
The project is @AtlantaMovement
and the Department of English Twitter handle.
So if you follow us at Twitter, @KennesawEnglish.
On Instagram, we're at ATL Student Movement,
and we're going to use the hashtag WHM 2018.
And so lastly, I want to give
a shout out to our event planners,
both of whom are downstairs,
getting people to come upstairs, I think.
Hannah and Allie, they have put this event together.
They work side by side with university events and UITS,
and I wanted to thank them and all
of our student researchers who put this thing
together for all of your work because this
is what you did.
So now I want to turn things over to
our student scholars who will
direct the rest of the panel.
>> My name is Tessa Hilton,
and I am going to introduce Anthony Grooms.
Anthony Grooms has won the Lilian Smith Prize for
Fiction for Trouble No More: Stories and Bombingham.
The Sokolov Scholarship of
the Breadloaf Writers Conference,
the Lamar lectureship of Wesleyan College,
and an Arts Administration Fellowship
by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Grooms teaches creative writing,
the short story,
and American literature at Kennesaw State University.
His novel, Bombingham,
tells untold stories of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
Grooms received the Hurston Wright Legacy Award
for his novel Bombingham in 2002.
His new novel, The Vain Conversation,
released in February 2018,
relates the journey of Lonnie Henson,
a white boy in Rural Bethany,
Georgia at the end of World War II.
Please join me in welcoming Anthony Grooms. [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you, Tess. Tess is
a wonderful poet among other things.
We enjoyed her poetry at
the Decatur Book Festival just last summer, wasn't it?
Yes. Thank you all for coming and especially,
I welcome the Davis family.
I appreciate you making the journey visit us at Kennesaw.
I was told by Dr. [inaudible]
that this program was organized like a church service.
So I guess I'm giving the opening an addiction here,
which reminds me of what the poet,
Anne Sexton, said of her poems.
She has a smoky,
raspy cigarette voice, and she says,
"My poems are my prayers."
[LAUGHTER] So I guess
this scene from The Vain Conversation is my prayer.
Here, through the observation
of her husband, Bertrand Johnson,
we meet Luellen Johnson,
a school teacher in Rural Bethany, Georgia in 1946.
Luellen has already suffered
a great deal of racial violence,
and as a result of it,
she is collecting articles for
her own American history book.
And this is through the lens of Bertrand.
Slowly, Luellen turned a page in her scrapbook.
The sound of the page turning
indicated that the paper was heavy and soft.
Bertrand had seen the book many times.
She called it her true book of American history.
She had been a history major when he met her and she said
she was collecting information for
her own history of the United States.
No happy slaves doing
master's bidding would be in her book,
no mammies wet nursing
the mistress's children. Enough of that.
She said this would be a book of
the naked nature of America as beastly as it was foul.
But Luellen, he occasionally argued,
all white people are bad and even if they were,
you can't think that way.
For one thing, it's not Christian.
And for another, it will eat you up.
Hating eats you up just as badly as being hated.
She often dismissed him with a wave of
her hand or countered
that hate hadn't eaten up the whites,
they seem to be doing well. He glimpsed at a page,
a picture of men hanging from a tree branch.
She was studying the picture.
It seemed rereading the caption
for how many times he couldn't imagine.
The article was from the Chicago Defender about
a lynching in Southern Indiana nearly 20 years before.
Two boys, just teenagers have been accused of
raping a white woman and murdering her boyfriend.
Without trial, they were
taken from their cells by a crowd,
were beaten and hanged.
Bertrand knew that reading
the scrapbook just before bedtime,
Lou Ellen wouldn't sleep.
The more she read,
the more upset she would become,
but he could do nothing about it.
"Lou Ellen, honey, come to bed now.
Let it go for now."
She looked more closely at
the photograph as if counting the details.
Bertrand knew she was going inside of it,
removing herself from the bedroom
and drawing herself into
the frame of the picture with all of
its anxiety and tension.
She would be one in the crowd,
perhaps even the photographer
examining the bodies of the boys that
swung from the tree like scarecrows, limp and tattered.
In her mind, she ran her hands over their bloodied heads,
their necks caught at odd angles.
She looked into their dull eyes
oddly peaceful and already drying out.
She was already becoming
an unseen guest among the onlookers,
or part of the crowd of whites, men, women, children.
There was a couple holding
lovingly to each other as
if they were on a date at a fair.
The people wore ordinary clothes,
casual suits, open-collared shirts,
straw hats, and calico dresses.
She saw no hoods or sheets,
no monstrous costumes with flaming crosses.
There were the typical people of a typical town.
She might have seen one of them
just last night at the county fair
or she might see them tomorrow,
strolling along Bethany's main street.
They were townspeople in
typical postures that would have been
at any typical gathering of such people.
They had not turned into monsters neither had
their veins emptied the blood and filled with gasoline.
They could have been witnessing anything,
a freak show, a wedding or pig roast.
"That it was a lynching,
wasn't so uncommon," she would have thought.
She had told him that
the Romans flock to see men
chop each other to pieces with swords.
In England, people jostle with one another to
watch the beheadings and drawings and quarterings.
Spectacles to watch someone's intestines being
drawn from his body and
his body being sawn into quarters.
What must go through people's minds to watch such things?
"She couldn't do it," she said,
"She could never do it."
And yet, something in her said she could kill
those whites in the picture if she had
to but that would be different.
She would kill them,
but it would be no spectacle.
And I'd like to finish
with just a short passage from my novel Bombingham.
In Bombingham a young soldier in
the Vietnam War is recounting
his time in the Bombingham movement.
And here he is remembering the funeral of
his mother in the small town in Coosada, Alabama.
There's also a mention of Pueblo
which is a village in Vietnam.
"The countryside had been baked by drought.
The crops were stunted and brown,
and the plowed areas had
a dead color as if
the red soil had been dusted with talc.
I had the sensation sitting in quiet numbness with
my family that we were moving through a dreamscape,
not nightmarish, but visionary.
Something about the place was also like something about
every place I'd ever been and would ever go.
The scientists tell us that
the entire universe was in one place at the beginning,
and so all of it was right here on the roadside,
on the way to my mother's funeral.
What was the difference, after all,
between a crossroads like
Coosada and a hamlet like Tubudo.
Between Birmingham and Danang?
Are they not just places full of
people and people full of hopes and struggles?
Here, a field, there a patty.
Here peanuts, their rice.
Here a church, there a temple?
We are always ready.
Are we not to point out the obvious differences,
but just below the surface or maybe
just on top of it visible to those who
would see it invisible to those who would
not is the incontrovertible truth
that the world is a tumultuous place
and every soul in it suffers. Thank you.
>> Good morning, everyone. My name is Kiahna Kuykendall,
and I am a student that has been
given the opportunity to work
on the Atlanta Student Movement project
along with Dr. Bohannon.
Today, I've been given the pleasure to
introduce to you our next speaker.
She earned her BA in
English from Albany State University,
her MA in African American and African Diaspora studies
from Indiana University,
and her PhD in African American literature
from Florida State University.
Her current book-length project,
Chronicling Stankonia: OutKast
and the Rise of the Hip Hop South,
explores how Atlanta,
Georgia hip hop duo Outkast influences
renderings of the Black American South
after the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, she will discuss with us the ways
hip hop bridges the American Black South
to the present and the role of women
throughout the Civil Rights Movement to present day.
And so, ladies and gentlemen,
please join me in welcoming Dr. Regina Bradley.
>> I'm sorry. Good morning.
[LAUGHTER] Thank you so much.
I never get used to doing these introductions.
It's almost like they're giving you your
flowers when you're dead.
You just have to sit there. I'm like,
just tell me about myself.
So thank you again for the wonderful introduction.
And thank you so much for coming.
I cannot wait to hear your story.
So I usually start these types of
conversations with a couple of receipts.
And what I mean by that is,
I'm going to tell you who Amile is,
and why I feel I can talk about this stuff.
So I'm from Albany, Georgia,
which is a nice little city about 3.5
hours if you go 75. In Southwest Georgia.
And a lot of folks who know
Albany as the crowning
failure of the civil rights movement.
And what I mean by that is,
when Dr. King came to Albany,
he wanted to share the dream,
and folks like Laurie Pritchett and others was like,
"No, we don't want that dream, get out.
So the street committee says that somebody
anonymously paid for Dr. King to be released from jail,
and that that impacted how he thought
about the other movement sections
that he participated in.
So there was that.
My grandmother, who I up lift today,
Sarah Barnett was an educator.
My late grandfather,
Eugene Barnett was also an educator,
and was one of the original down South Georgia Boys,
so to speak, if you're familiar
at all with Southern hip hop.
[LAUGHTER] And my grandmother was from Leary, Georgia.
And I learned about the civil rights movement,
not by sitting in class,
not by getting to college,
but my grandparents told me stories.
And what was interesting is that the stories
weren't what you normally see in a textbook.
Usually, when you hear about the civil
rights movement in a textbook,
you get the one paragraph,
you get the bolded terms such as
Dr. Martin Luther King is a bolded term,
not a natural activist.
And then a summer vacation.
And I was curious about why there was
this resistance to teach
us about the civil rights movement,
especially with me being from Albany.
And my grandparents filled in the gap for me,
and they would tell me these stories.
They would tell me stories about Bernice Johnson Reagon,
a Sweet Honey and the Rock,
and how they would sing
in the jails to keep each other uplifted,
and also when they were marching.
I actually got to meet and speak
with folks like Rutha Mae Harris,
who was also one of the freedom singers
that were trying to keep the spirits uplifted.
I was taught by Dr. Jani Rambo,
who was a student at Albany State,
my alma mata, and was suspended and expelled
because she decided to participate in the movement.
And when I actually got to Albany State as
a third generation Albany State graduate,
I had never heard
the stories about why these students were expelled,
and it wasn't until decades later that they actually
got a reprieved in an honorary degree from Albany State.
So I have always been
connected to at least the idea
of the civil rights movement.
Whether it's through a creative imagining,
which Prof. Grooms, I Love Bombingham.
I'm still spellbound by that book.
I also read Roll of Thunder, Here my Cry.
I listen to Melba Patillo Bill's Warriors Don't Cry.
So there was always an understanding
that black women were at the forefront of this movement.
It never crossed my mind
that they want a significant part of it,
until you get to graduate school.
And graduate school just destroys
all the little hopes, dreams, visions,
and what you think you know about particular topics.
And then there was conversations
about where do women fit?
It wasn't until I was
18 years old that I knew the name Fannie Lou Hamer,
and where the idea I'm sick and tired of
being sick and tired comes from.
So black women have always
held the yoke of the civil rights movement.
What's particularly challenging is,
we are still playing catch up to
record and honor these stories
that these women are telling,
and also the understanding that there is
one particular way to protest,
and that's where the idea of hip hop comes in.
Usually when we think about hip hop,
we automatically go to New York,
possibly the West Coast,
maybe a little bit of Chicago. Never South.
We never go South, and I'm in
my feelings as somebody who listens to Southern hip hop,
especially being from Georgia and Atlanta.
The significance of Atlanta,
you have OutKasts,
Gooody Mob, Pastor Troy,
Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz.
All of these folks who sound familiar to us now,
but once upon a time,
they were not considered to be legitimate hip hop acts.
And it wasn't until the 1995 Source Awards where OutKasts
was booed off stage
by New Yorkers, because they're haters.
[LAUGHTER] And there was
a reckoning that when Andre Benjamin,
AKA Andre 3,000,
says that the South got something to say,
it was a rallying cry for
not only Southern hip hop artists all the way
from Miami to Atlanta to Houston to New Orleans,
but also for young Southerners
to realize that they too could
contribute to the world
around them in unique and creative ways.
And that is what I feel part of my mission is.
Part of my research focuses on
the contemporary African American South.
And one of the challenges of doing that,
is because often when we have
conversation about black Southerners,
we often refer them to three major historical moments.
You think about the Antebellum era,
which is the slave era,
so the government fabulous idea, the plantations.
Then you go to reconstruction and Jim Crow,
because that is a visibly recognizable understanding
of what segregation looks like in the Jim Crow South.
And then you get to the civil rights movement,
where there's footage,
where there are stories,
and then after that, that's pretty much it.
They're like, civil rights movement,
that is the modernization of the South.
So for those of us who were born
way after the movement started,
there is no room for us to articulate, one,
how the movement has helped shape
our understandings of Southern identity, but two,
also how we can use it as
a departure point for thinking
about contemporary Southern blackness.
And hip hop is one of the ways to do that.
Where the hip hop movement in New York starts
with the 1970s and 1980s poverty,
crack epidemic, regenomics.
In the South, the genesis point for
Southern hip hop is the civil rights movement.
It has always been the civil rights movement.
When you listen to artists,
they talk about the challenges
of the civil rights movement,
and they also have an honest reckoning with
the understanding that the civil rights movement
wasn't the be all, end all.
It didn't completely change everything,
but it did give us a step in the right direction,
and hip hop in the South reckons with that,
whether it's Outkast, GGK, 8Ball and MJG.
So there are these interesting overlap dynamics
that improve that.
But I want to take a step back just a second
because I'm a storyteller,
and I often use myself at the mercy of my students.
[LAUGHTER] And there are
two stories that I want to tell before I sit down,
and the first story is actually about
my great grandmother, Mary Jones Barkley.
And I remember my grandmother
telling her story because in the South,
black women are the gatekeepers of memory.
They share stories.
They remind us about what happened,
what could happen, what did
happen, what did not happen.
And my grandmother was telling me about my mom, Mary,
and she was talking about her father who was
lynched when she was two years old.
And it was because he
was an owner or part owner of a lumber company,
because lumber was a big deal in
Georgia in the 1920s and 1930s.
And he worked in Ludowici, Georgia.
[LAUGHTER] So if you're at all familiar with Georgia,
Ludowici is on the way to like,
you're going towards Savannah.
And he was murdered because he had a car,
and the person who
murdered him basically slit his throat,
and they went to trial,
but he wasn't found guilty,
which sounds very familiar to
a particular moment that we're living in now.
And my great grandmother refused to
bring him up ever again, because it was too painful.
And she was saying that that was her form of resistance.
And I think one of the things that we need to understand,
especially if we think about
black women during these movements,
is that, black women's resistance
isn't necessarily the formula,
and doesn't follow a particular formula for
being counted as protest.
And what if you weren't on the front lines?
What if you were just making
sandwiches or bag lunches or making signs,
which is what my grandmother and my grandfather did,
because in Albany at the time,
if they were at all
recognized as being part of the movement,
they lost their jobs,
and they had children to take care of.
So they would put
a little something extra in the church plate.
They would make signs. They would make bag lunches.
They would participate on the margins of the movement in
order to make sure that the center was
still functioning and going strong.
And I think that that's important to think
about is the work that black women do,
both the visible labor like Ms. Davis and
the invisible labor that takes place behind the scenes,
and that we cannot discount
what the women behind the scenes were doing,
but yet when we have these conversations about movement,
that's exactly what happens.
So it's one of those things to think through,
not only where women's bodies roles
fit into the civil rights movement,
but also where there work as,
as [inaudible] would say, as memory workers.
They work the memory. They make sure
that we do not forget,
even if it's just a kernel.
The act of reclamation is particularly
important when thinking about Southern identities.
Because the south isn't linear.
We don't just have one thing happen,
and then we keep it moving.
You can look at how many civil rights
or civil war re-enactments we have,
for example, and they're like,
this is the year we're going to win
, something's going to change.
[LAUGHTER] But we are consistently revisiting the past.
And as we revisit the past,
we also need to revisit those who were part of the past,
and that includes black women.
So as I stand here,
I'd like to challenge you to not only
think about what the civil rights movement means for you,
especially as we're in this contemporary or
as I theorized the hip hop South, but also,
what are some of the ways that you are trying to
retain and reclaim some
of the narratives that have been lost along the way in
favor of this collected,
if not linear, understanding of
the movement that we have been taught to be the norm.
So I mean, in terms of hip hop,
we're not going to get away from it.
And hip hop is
a useful complicating tool to do those things.
So that's my little five minute spew.
But I thank you again for your time.
And I cannot wait to hear your story.
Thank you so much for your courage,
and we honor you today. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Hello, friends.
I'm Rachel Wilkinson, and I'm
an English major here at Kennesaw State.
And I've known and worked with
Dr. Bohannon for about a year now,
and I was lucky enough to take a class with
Prof. Smith McKoy last semester.
Sheila Smith McKoy is a professor and the chair of
the English Department here at Kennesaw State.
Her research focuses on the relationships among
African and African Diaspora countries and cultures.
She teaches African American,
AfriCaribbean, and
other African descent literatures and cultures.
And in addition, her focus areas
include health and biothics.
A poet, a literary critic,
and a fiction writer,
Smith McKoy is editor emeritus of
Obsidian Literature in the African Diaspora.
Her work has appeared in numerous publications,
including the critically acclaimed Schomberg series,
African American women writers, 1910-1940s,
Kalalou Contours, Journal of Ethnic American literature,
Mythian Obsidian Literature in the African Diaspora,
Research for African Literatures, Black Gold,
and Anthology and Valley Voices.
Her books include When Whites Riot: Writing Race
and Violence in American and South African Cultures,
The Elizabeth Keckley Reader:
Writing Self, Writing Nation,
The Elizabeth Keckley Reader: Artistry,
Culture & Commerce,
and One Window's Light: A Collection of Haiku.
So please join me in welcoming Sheila Smith McKoy.
>> Since I'm taller than Regina,
I'll make the adjustment on the mic.
So thank you for that lovely introduction.
Thank you all for being here.
Thank you, Tony, for the loveliness of your work.
Thank you, Gina Bradley for
continuing this tradition in such an awesome way,
and Ms. Davis,
we look forward to sharing your story as well.
Many people enjoined the civil rights movement
in this era through men's stories.
That's why this is a very important event,
and why the work that the students are doing
with Dr. Bohannon is critically important.
How many of you know the Sam Cooke song,
"I was born by river in a
little tent," and like that river,
I've been rolling in ever since.
Well, I wasn't born by river in a little tent.
I'm a product of strivers
who made the civil rights movement what it was.
I would like to take this moment
to complicate that history,
not only in salute to my mother
who continues to be a powerful force at the age of 88,
but in the lives of other people during
this era who weren't born just in the underclass,
who were strivers in making
a middle class who continued to
build this country and make it what it is today.
I actually was born, not near river,
but in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1958.
That places us squarely four years after what event?
[OVERLAPPING] Brown versus Board of Education,
which was designed to
desegregate schools in this country.
Now, pursuant to that,
the other part of my identity you need to understand,
is that, I not only lived
through one school desegregation, but two.
And it didn't happen in 1954.
I was born in 1958,
I started school at
a all black Catholic school in Raleigh, North Carolina,
named after one of
the few black patron saints
that the Catholic church recognize as St. Monica,
who was the mother of St. Augustine.
That church, the building continues to stand,
but it was all black because we were living in
a segregated society even
in the 1960s when I began school.
It wasn't until I was in the fourth grade
that the Catholic schools desegregated,
but they only desegregated one school,
which means they closed the black Catholic school,
and integrated us into Sacret Heart Cathedral.
We were not allowed to go to
the more prominent wealthy Catholic school,
which was just a few miles away.
l live through a second desegregation
when the public schools
desegregated in that space later on in the 1970s.
And yet another that I forgot to
mention when school systems finally
had to consolidate and address
those things when I was going into the ninth grade.
So it's a long way from
1954 to when I entered the ninth grade.
So I want you to be aware of those things.
The civil rights movement was
complicated just like the times in which you live.
The Vietnam War was ongoing.
And again, we had people who had to
continue to build their lives,
despite the limitations that
were day to day things for our lives.
I dare any of you to call me old,
but you can do so after the show. I'll take it well.
[LAUGHTER] But I recall going to Belks Department store,
which was much like Riche's Department stores,
when African Americans could only
shop on the basement level.
It was a three level store that became prominent.
You know now it's Belks now,
but it was Hudson Belk during the time
that it first opened in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The cafeteria was also segregated.
The restrooms were segregated.
There were two restrooms side by side, one for colored,
which is a term that we can
deconstruct later, one for whites.
My mother, as I said,
has always been amazing.
But one of my earliest memories of her is being in
Belks Department store when
the black restroom was filthy,
and she refused to let us use it.
She took us instead and we were
about to enter a white restroom,
and when the clerk came up and reminded us of
where we was supposed to be in our appropriate place,
and my mother said they can either use
this clean restroom or they can
go on the floor and you can clean it up later.
And she was serious. So we got to use the white restroom.
After that, she built
a very strong relationship with the management of Belks.
And at the time,
she was working at St. Agnes Hospital,
one of many hospitals in this country,
again, that served African Americans.
St. Agnes Hospital was on
the campus of St. Augustine's College.
It was the only black teaching hospital
between Philadelphia
and Florida during the time that it was open
from the late 1880s until it closed in 1960.
It closed because Raleigh,
North Carolina and the State of North Carolina
opened what was supposed to
be the Integrated Wake County Medical Center.
It was, however, not expressly integrated.
They were segregated wards,
and black doctors were prohibited from
working on white clients.
So part of what I'm going to do today is to
integrate my mother's story
with the civil rights movement,
and my own growth as a scholar and an intellectual,
and why programs like this are necessary, and indeed,
why the project that Dr. Bohannon has
undertaken with her students are also necessary.
My mother, Mary Booker Smith-Morrison,
don't let me leave out one of her names.
Came of age at a very interesting time.
Her parents were farmers.
They were able to break into the middle class,
not with their older children
but with their three youngest girls.
There were eight children,
the oldest of her siblings,
his pathway to middle class
was to be a Butler for a white family in Burlington.
Those were the possibilities for his time.
By the time the last three children were born,
my mother was the youngest.
They had the opportunity to go to college.
But they had that opportunity because
my grandfather's farm was stable and strong.
He had children who could work that farm who were in
the middle ages in that family.
But as soon as he died,
all of the two girls
who had not finished had to leave school.
My mother left school and
married and one of her first jobs
was working at San Agnes Hospital,
that Black hospital that became
the last space in which Black people could be born.
Could at that time and treated.
How many of you know the boxer Jack Johnson.
Aggravate Boxer, he's the one that the term
the Great White cop was built
around because of his reputation.
He died simply because
he had a car accident in Henderson,
North Carolina, which is near the Virginia border.
The White Hospital in Henderson did not admit him,
though he was famous and they knew who he was.
He had to go from Henderson,
the almost hour drive to Raleigh to be
admitted into St. Agnes Hospital,
and he got there too late to save him.
That hospital did not have electricity in its operator.
That meant that the operatory was run
because there were skylights on that third floor.
The remnants of that building
still exists on that campus.
If you want to know more about that,
please see my documentary,
St. Agnes, the Untold Story,
which, of course, features my mother as one of
the last living people who worked at that hospital.
Her next job, she
broke the color bar at the City of Raleigh.
She became the first non custodial employee
of the City of Raleigh.
For those of you who are familiar with that term,
that means she was the first black person
employed for the City of Raleigh
who was not working to clean.
Her job was to take money at the cashiers.
So it was an outside drive through cashier,
and she faced a lot of discrimination even at that time.
The fact that she was hired made the national news,
not just the local news.
It was picked up by the AP wire
and circulated around the country.
She got letters from everywhere,
some of them positive and some of them negative.
I have a poem about that experience,
and I'm not going to use the N word.
I'm going to use a modification
of a version of the N word
and you'll see it when it comes.
This is called third times the chart.
It made the first page of the newspaper,
City of Raleigh hires first Negro non custodial employee.
She sat in the drive through window of a municipal
building cashiering and representing the race.
She took them all, water bills,
tickets, checks, cash folding money.
Accustomed as she was to their surprised smiles,
she noted the slight hesitations and the averted eyes,
the wonder of her blackness in
the white spaces of their minds.
The day he came,
she saw his persona mimicked in
the wasteful roar of his truck,
of his largess one half ton more than
anyone needed to leave to drive to town to pay a bill.
She recognized him in
the die hard cracker look of the farmer,
whose lands her parents had shared
crop when she was a child and the look
of wild abandoned when he had
had when they picked up and left,
for after all he had done for them.
''I can take your payments here, sir'' she said,
with a voice that rivaled honey for its sweetness.
So when he put nothing in the drawer and said instead,
I don't give my money to no inwords.
She had already started to smile.
She directed him politely up to the second floor.
And when he left the truck in the no parking zone,
she quietly picked up the phone and informed
her favorite policeman that there was
a truck parked in that no parking zone.
[LAUGHTER] When he came back to the truck,
he cussed the ticket and walked back up and again, asked,
despite the word cashier
appeared in big black letters above her booth,
where he could pay that ticket.
I can take it right here, sir.
She said to his redy face.
[LAUGHTER] But then after taking
the time to remind her of the inward,
dumb again, he went back upstairs.
And having taken the lead in their little racial dance,
she called upstairs the second time and in
a smiling voice suggested
that the officer come right down.
That second ticket almost glowed in the afternoon sun.
[LAUGHTER] And she waited until the third time
when he walked up to the booth and gave her his money,
and she wasn't inward anymore.
The second time my mother broke the color bar was to
be the first Black employee for an insurance company,
Mutual of New York.
And the third and probably most important time that
she broke that color bar was to become
the first Black EEO officer for
the State of North Carolina where she
worked for the Department of Administration.
Her story and my father's story are
interweaved in the fact that they were US drivers.
My father owned his own business.
He knew not to drive his expensive cars to get the money.
He knew not to wear
his tailor made suits to pick up his money.
He knew to go in his old truck
and his work clothes to get his money.
And that is why he became
a successful businessman and gave us the opportunity to
go to that private school Catholic school even
though we were not Catholic
because they could afford to pay the money.
So part of what I want you to
understand is that the project that doctor
Bohan and students are undertaking are
part of a necessary reclamation.
I have a concept,
the theoretical concept that I refer to as limbo time.
And that is referenced when writers,
particularly African writers write
about the past or present and the future all at once,
that the spaces co exist together.
And that is what is necessary about us and
our long term American project
to move beyond the limitations of race.
History is not forgotten it is just
buried and not taught
and not pass from one generation to the next.
Until you have a moment where there's
a interruption in the funk of time and
you recognize for the first time
whether you're black African American,
Asian, yellow, purple orange that race exists and
it has weight and
that there's something that you can do about it.
And that is why most of us engage in the enterprise
of education and these reclamation projects
because unless the past,
the present and the future can exist in the history of
our ancestors in your lived experience and
the present and your intention to change this enterprise,
then we won't have done our jobs.
So I'm going to end by sharing
a poem about you and about me.
It's called their children's children.
And it is dedicated to Laura Davis
and the other women who died at
the hands of those unknown.
For those of you who have not studied
lynching history in this country.
Typically, after lynching victims were found or revealed,
the police report said that they died
quote at the hands of those unknown.
Laura Davis is one of a handful of
women who have been recognized in our history.
We know many names other than Laura Davis,
but she was memorialized in a project called without
sanctuary that reviewed lynching memorabilia postcards.
Wish you were here. Look at the com
we barbecued yesterday, Love,
XY&Z that has been
archived from the Southern memories of lynching.
So here we are, their children's children.
Before class, I placed the seven tissue boxes in the room.
I placed them carefully,
mindful of who sits where.
My students have been with me just long enough to
settle into habits of being in my class.
The silent ones, the talker,
the one who sits over there,
careful to say just enough.
Though I noticed that her perfectly preserved books
have never been opened.
In an e mail last night,
a reprise of the one last week,
I have warned them that this day could be triggering
and because America has not prepared them,
I must I start the loop
of Billy Holiday's version of Strange Fruit.
The perfect song for this awakening,
a song with its own miss idenations,
its own history gift wrapped in its singular,
bluesy, Jewish, white black rhythm.
The website they should have but have
not reviewed before class is already open.
I start the class precisely on time,
allow the lynching images to flash on
the projector screen on their consciousness.
Mindful that these millennials,
despite the bubbles in which
they have been raised and tenaciously
hold onto are here to save themselves to save us.
I watch as the fierce facades of their innocence fails.
When the last image fades,
I silence Billy Holiday on the last strange and wait.
I hear the silence of
my black students and I walk behind each one,
supporting them with my presence.
The other students work through
the textbook stages of their grief,
lingering a while on anger.
They didn't know, couldn't have known.
As I eviscerate their logic,
the one with the perfect books
raises her hand and quietly speaks.
I think my grandparents might have done some of
these things and her voice breaks.
For a heartbeat.
I watched the progress of just
one of her tears and wonder if
her grandparents could have conceived of
this awakening as they posed for the pictures,
the dead hanging limply behind them.
Not one of my students leaves
before I talk them through this moment,
offering them the balm of something akin to wisdom.
I exercise the lying lines of
race without leaving a scar.
Outside the world awaits them,
but the scent of honeysuckle hangs in the air,
a gift for them and for their children's children.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
>> Hello, again, my friends.
Now it's time for me to share a bit of
knowledge with you about our keynote speaker today.
Norma June, as she was known in her Spelman days,
was born a warrior.
As a child growing up in Jacksonville, Florida,
she was subject to the same
unjust public segregation laws
as her family and friends.
But as early as age 5,
she refused to drink from
the colored-only water fountains
and could hold her own against
even the older children in her grade school.
By the way, she was also smart.
She started school at just four-years-old.
She would often say of her early years,
"If you said the wrong thing to me,
who knows what I might do?"
I was known to fight and use four-letter words.
Norma June attended Spelman College where
her godmother was the chair of the French department.
While at Spelman, she and dozens of
her Spelman sisters sat in on October 19th,
1960 at the Magnolia tea room at
Richard's Department Store in
Downtown Atlanta to eat lunch.
More than 50 students were arrested that day,
along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
who joined the sit-in at the student's request.
Norma June represented a group of
15 students in front of
the county judge on a trespass law violation.
She listened politely as he informed her
that these students cases would be dismissed,
but if she tried a stunt like this again,
he would send her to jail.
He asked her if she understood.
"Yes, Your Honor," she replied.
The next day, Norma June Wilson led a group of
students in another sit-in
at the terminal railway station.
In fact, over the next few,
more than 2,000 protesters
effectively shut 16 Atlanta lunch counters down.
And Norma June's group was sent to
the Fulton County work farm,
which we know was located on
the West side of the county near
the county line with Cobb County in
what is now the Fulton Industrial District.
She will talk more about her leadership
during this struggle in her keynote,
but I wanted to set the stage for
you with a story that I think
is indicative of Jew's warrior spirit.
In an interview for the book Undaunted By the Fight,
Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement,
she describes the sit-in strategy as a hit quad,
when she notes that,
"We would create a nuisance by
sitting in at one restaurant,
leaving upon request, and hitting another target.
As other times, we stayed and waited to be arrested."
On December of 1960,
while other students tested
the recently passed Supreme Court law forbidding
public bus terminals to segregate
eating facilities by riding from Birmingham to Atlanta,
June, along with her Spelman sister,
Betty Williamson and Ben Brown from Clark College,
boarded a bus bound for Jacksonville via Megan.
It was during this first freedom ride that June
came face to face with armed white supremacists,
and for the first time
since she joined the fight for
civil rights, feared for her life.
What is most amazing to me as
a student is that amidst all of these courageous actions,
she graduated Spelman next year in 1961.
After pursuing graduate work
at Tennessee State University,
she raised two children with her husband,
Dr. Leo Davis, himself,
a noted chemistry professor and prolific researcher.
June served more than 20 years at the University of Iowa,
retiring as the university's assistant vice president
for finance and university services.
She has served on the Iowa Board Ad Hoc Commission
to study racism in public schools and with on the board
of directors at the Iowa Crisis Center and board of
trustees of the Iowa City Commission School District.
Her honors include, among many,
the Phoebe Sudlow Exceptional Woman Award
and the University of Iowa's
Distinguished Achievement Award.
In her retirement, she is also active in the friends
of Alvin Ailey Organization in Kansas City,
Missouri, helping more than 28,000 students attend
summer dance camps and bringing together
people of diverse backgrounds through the art of dance.
She is also the subject of a new book that describes
the extraordinary accomplishments of
extraordinary elders in the African American community.
So please join me in welcoming
our Women's History Month finale
keynote speaker, June Davis.
>> I feel a little out of place.
I'm in the midst of scholars.
We've heard three scholars,
and I'm by no means a scholar.
So you will have to put up with me. Good morning.
>> Morning.
>> Good morning.
>> I'm glad to be with you.
Thank you very much for
the more than gracious introduction.
Now I have problem of trying to
deliver to the things that you said.
I'm not sure I can do that.
Before I get started I have to say
that my sister here and I have
things in common and that
my grandmother grew up in Albany,
Georgia, and my great grandfather
founded a business there well
over 100 [inaudible] years ago.
And so we don't know how the families,
we haven't had time to talk about this yet,
may have crossed paths through the years.
Dr. Ohanian invited me here today
to talk about my experiences in the,
can you everybody hear me?
In the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement,
which automatically says I'm
a black woman. I don't have to say that.
But I cannot resist giving a shout-out to
some other things that are going on right now
in the country about women.
And that is the #MeToo movement and Time's Up.
And particularly the #MeToo movement,
because it was started by a black woman in 1996.
And someone came along later,
not knowing what had happened prior to that,
and put a hashtag in front of it and popularized it,
of course, it's on social media all over everywhere.
And it's become a rallying cry for women around
the areas of sexual assault and harassment.
And in the Time's Up movement,
they've been looking more at workplace and trying to
establish ground rules for
behavior by men toward women in the workplace.
And I have to mention that because of
the years that I spent in Iowa,
one of those years I spent
as an affirmative action director for the university.
And I kid you not,
but probably five or six of
my time was spent on sexual harassment cases.
Very difficult. Very insidious to the workplace.
And they weren't all men, some of them were
women who was sexually harassing too.
So it goes both ways.
Social movements represent
organization empowerment groups,
and those two are very much social movements.
And these groups, through these movements,
are able to mount
effective challenges against the power structure.
And I love them because they are
truly changed from the bottom.
They're not from the top.
The civil rights movement is recognized as one of
the most famous social movements of the 20th century.
I could go so far as to say that it
was a radical movement as well as a social movement,
because it demanded fundamental changes
to the value system,
and demanded civil rights and
equality to all without regard to race.
That's a difficult concept for some people to deal with.
Black women occupy a unique space in this society.
So we occupied a unique space
in the civil rights movement.
We are subject to both racism and sexism.
In the civil rights movement it wasn't
so much racism as it was sexism.
We learned early in our lives
as black women that we need to be
very proactive and take charge of our lives.
Some will say we got attitude.
As one who's been here
almost 78 years, we need attitude.
It is our arm it's our first line of defense.
And because of this attitude,
as Regina already said,
we played a very major role in the civil rights movement.
I'm going to try to give you a glimpse at
the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement
through the lens of black college female.
And we have to remember that I was only
19-years-old when we started that here in Atlanta.
I was a junior in Spelman, as someone said.
And Atlanta University students organized and formed
what we called the committee on appeal for human rights.
The original participants were
leaders on their six campuses.
And we were selected, believe it or not,
by the presidents of the school to do this.
But most of us had been selected by our student bodies to
be leaders on our respective campuses
so we had two anointments.
I believe that the presidents
did this because Greensboro had happened,
and the sit-ins had already occurred there,
and they were trying to get out front and ahead of this,
and probably from trying to deteriorate,
if possible, but they never really said that.
They were much more subtle about that than that.
We set up this manifesto,
which we call the appeal for human rights
and listed out the injustices and inequalities,
as we saw them, not only specifically Atlanta,
but across the world for African Americans.
We were able to get the manifesto put in the newspaper,
and what was then Atlanta Constitution,
and we took out a full page.
Senator Jacob Javits of New York was sent a copy of this,
and he included in the congressional record,
which we thought was fabulous at the time
to be recognized and validated in that way.
From the beginning of our movement,
I served as a member of the Executive Committee,
and chair of the subcommittee on
planning and executing our actions,
which we lovingly called the action committee.
I felt really prime for this task because things have
been building up with me a long time,
the color fountains in Jacksonville,
Florida, sitting at the back of the bus with things that
were not my favorite in the world to say the least.
And I was ready to fight for changes.
But it took me a little while to think about it
because a lot was on the line.
College was on the line.
My parents had two other children coming along behind me.
Money was a question,
so there were a lot of things.
Was I really going to do it or not?
After a couple of weeks and I
decided I really would do it.
Not just be around the edges,
but be in the middle of it.
I was going to hop from that point on.
I don't know how I managed to
get through college in that time period.
Our efforts here in Atlanta included marches, sit-ins,
pickets on businesses to discriminate against blacks,
both by refusing services,
but by refusing to hire blacks.
One of our major activities here was a jail without bail,
which I'll get to later.
We conducted kneel-ins in churches, we filed lawsuits.
So we hit Atlanta on all kinds of fronts.
They were not quite
prepared to say the least for what we had done.
The government at the time, I think was Van Drew,
he didn't believe we'd written the manifesto
and accused us of
having outsiders do this who
were either socialists or communists.
He didn't really use those words,
but it was very clear in
his language what he thought about it.
During our first march, Taylor Branch,
the historian quoted someone saying, "God,
I didn't know there were that many ins in college."
So they were just totally surprised by us.
One of the most significant things we did was
the boycott on Rich's and you talked about it.
And Rich's was a symbol of a lot of things.
It wasn't just a symbol in Atlanta,
but it was a symbol as one of
probably the biggest department store
in this part of the country.
And people would get in their cars,
and get on buses, and come to shop at Rich's.
And so that made it
particularly interesting target for
us to see what we could do about it.
So the first thing we did was plan a sit-in.
And not only did we plan a sit-in at Rich's that day,
but at 10 o'clock that day,
we also had eight other establishments that I
had organized to be hit at the same time.
So we were trying to disperse
the law enforcement across the downtown area of Atlanta.
We didn't want to give them just one place to focus on.
We wanted to give them several places to focus on.
There's always method and madness. There really is.
We asked Martin, I'm going to call a formal name once,
and after that, I'll just say Martin
because that's how I am.
But we asked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
to join us that day.
We had an arrangement with him
because he had just moved to Atlanta from Montgomery.
This was our thing, this was a student and we
did not want him to be involved out front with us,
but that didn't deter us from having
conversations with him on a regular basis,
seeking his advice,
and talking with him, seeking his counsel.
This was not our first sit-in,
this was our second big one.
We decided that we needed to protect our parents.
We talked about parents losing their jobs.
We were aware that our parents could lose their jobs.
So when people got arrested,
they were instructed to say
only their name and Spelman College,
or Morehouse College,
or Atlanta University,
wherever or give a street address and give your age.
If they wanted to know any more than that,
let them go find that information out
because a lot of us had parents who worked for cities,
not just Atlanta but other cities,
and for counties, and and for states in the South.
And their jobs could be on the line.
We felt we had very little to lose.
No one was depending upon
us to provide a living for them.
And so we could afford to take the chances.
But we didn't want our parents and our elders to
have to take those same chances.
We formulated our groups,
we were very structured here in Atlanta.
We've been criticized through
the years in history for being so structured.
And also, I think we took
a very intellectual approach to
it because Atlanta was different,
Atlanta was not Birmingham,
Atlanta wasn't Raleigh,
Atlanta was not like any other city in the South.
It still isn't. It is more so now than it was then.
And it was beginning to build what I call
this economic powerhouse they have built in Atlanta.
And blacks and whites
wanted that economic powerhouse to be built here.
They already had the beginnings of it going.
They had a very large black middle class
for a Southern city.
They had a very large black educated middle class,
and they were educating more every day with
the six HBCUs that were in town.
So there was a lot on the line for them,
for the black community, for
the elders in the black community,
and for the white community.
And Atlanta I like to say in
those days they were too busy to hate.
Well, that's not exactly true.
But they were too busy wanting
to keep this economic engine going for all races.
And it was going positively.
Everybody was mostly winning
as far as economics were concerned, they thought.
So the black community turned on us,
didn't like what we were doing,
but that was okay. They learned.
We ran the black newspaper out of business because they
refused to carry our ads or put anything about it.
So we started our own newspaper
which is still in existence today.
Atlanta Inquirer is still going.
Julian Bond was the first editor
of the Atlanta Inquirer when we started.
So we not only took on the white establishment,
we took on the black establishment as
well. We didn't know any better.
When we asked King to join us at Rich's,
he was very hesitant about that and rightfully so.
He'd been to jail before Montgomery,
but he had not purposely gone to jail.
This time was going to be
a purposeful act on his part to do that.
So like me trying to decide if I was going to
participate in this whole deal,
he had to think about what he had to lose as well.
We got arrested and some of us got arrested
by the City of Atlanta.
Others were arrested by Fulton County.
King got into Fulton County group.
And when they realized they had Martin King Jr with them,
they went back and looked and found out that he
had an outstanding traffic warrant.
So they saw this as an opportunity.
He and the students that were with him in
the Fulton County jail refused bail immediately.
You have to understand with Atlanta we had lots of money.
We had lots of resources
here so getting a lawyer was known,
we had lawyers on standby every
time we planned something, the lawyers knew it.
They were on standby and money was ready.
Nobody had to stay in jail.
You could always get out.
We had cars, we had two way radios.
Taylor Branch talks about how well-equipped we
were for anything that we wanted to do.
So King refused bail first night.
And then they decided
they weren't going to give him bail after that.
And a student stayed in there with
him for one or two nights.
They moved him to Reidsville,
which is a state prison.
They took him out of Fulton County jail with
shackles on his ankles.
Shack and handcuffs,
and put him in the back of the car
with a police dog next to him,
and drove him up to Reidsville.
When his lawyer decided they wanted bail,
they refused to give him bail.
So someone had the bright idea
that we should contact the Kennedy campaign.
This was in October.
Election was coming up in
November and see if we could get some help.
And so the initial contact was made
through the campaign which
Bobby Kennedy was running at the time.
And Bobby said, "This is illegal.
They can't hold him for
these reasons and not
give him bail." They have to let him out.
So he and some of his cohorts
called judges and whatever in
Atlanta and explained some of the facts of life.
And it took a while.
It didn't happen immediately.
And it finally dawned on them that they were going to be
in very big trouble
if they didn't get this black man out of Reidsville.
So they let him go.
Then the Democratic Party saw an opportunity there.
Well, in the meantime, John, who was running,
called Coretta Scott King, Martin's wife.
She was pregnant at the time
and didn't promise to get him out,
but sympathetically, saying,
We all with you."
He didn't make any promises.
He wasn't sure he was going to be able to pull that off.
Let's say it was not
his idea to do it in the first place.
It was Bobby's idea to do it.
So no one paid to get King out of Jail.
They let him out legally.
It didn't cost us a nickel to do that.
They did what was right. He got out of jail.
This action on the part of
the Kennedy campaign has been given credit
historically for playing a really large part
in JF Kennedy getting elected.
Those of you who are old enough to remember,
he got elected by a very small market.
What they did was the campaign decided,
how can we use this without looking blatant about it?
So they put together a sheet,
which they called the blue bomb,
because it was on the cheap blue paper,
so they called it the blue bomb and
distributed it at some of
the large metropolitan Black churches
on the east side of the Mississippi River,
Chicago, Detroit, New York,
Philadelphia, places like that.
They said to turn the tide.
You would have to know your history in
that Blacks during that time, were Republicans.
They were in the party of Lincoln.
When I came to college at Spelman,
most of all of my professors were Republicans.
So this had to make
the Blacks change more than just their vote.
They had to change the way they were thinking
about their political alliances.
In fact, Martin's father had
swore he would never vote for Republican,
during this particular time,
he was quoted as saying this.
And he said pretty little, not a Catholic.
In fact, John F Kennedy commented on that,
and he said something like just imagine
Martin Luther King's father making such a racist comment.
He was said to have laughed and
said but we all have fathers, don't we?
So you do what you got to do.
So the votes came in from
the Black community for Johnny F Kennedy.
So our little efforts here in
Atlanta to do something about riches and
about sitting in a comers and
eating may have helped [inaudible] a president,
whether you agree with his politics or not.
The fact that these small acts that
we were doing here would have
a national impact. It's pretty impressive.
I was arrested many times.
I have no idea how many.
In fact, a lot of that time period,
even while I was in the midst of it is a black.
Because of the rapidity of what I was doing,
the number of balls that I was trying to juggle.
It was tough. Being chair of the action committee meant,
I had to be committed to do what I was
asking and recruiting everybody else to do.
I couldn't sit in the office
or go to class every day and say,
you go to jail or put yourself in
a position where you could go to
jail unless I was willing to do the same thing.
So I felt I had to be an example and I had to be
a super example because that's
the way I think about myself.
If I'm going to do something,
then I do it and I really go after it.
Sometimes I was in jail for a few hours,
sometimes for days and once I spent about two weeks in.
A member of
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation once told me
that if I ever thought
about getting a job in the State of Georgia, forget it.
He said, your record is too long.
You will never work in Georgia.
I said, don't worry. I don't think too.
I've selected about three of
these instances of when I was
jailed to talk to describe to you.
In my introduction,
the young woman already selected two of them.
But I can give you more details.
As I go through these three things,
if there are questions that you have that you
just can't wait to ask to the end,
raise your hand and I don't mind being interrupted.
The first one I'll do three of these.
The first one when I was sentenced
to 10 days in Atlanta prier car,
which you mentioned, we only served three days.
This was in October of 1960.
It was the day after Ridgies.
And When the judge saw me that day that she recounted,
he wanted to arrest all of us.
But I was the leader of the group.
The thing I didn't tell you is
each one time we sent a group out there was someone
who was the leader slash spokesperson for the group.
So no one had to try to remember what was going on.
Only one person had to take care of that.
And therefore, that was going to take care
of everybody in the group.
So if you had to tell a lie,
you told it, but you only had to remember it.
Nobody else had to remember it.
So that day when we were arrested at the riches,
there was a young white man in the girl,
a student, and I
don't know who he was, or where he came from.
And the judge wanted him to disavow
himself from being involved with us. And he refused to.
And the Judge kept questioned him and kept
questioning me finally had him standing in front of him,
had me come up and stand in front of him.
I think he thought that was going to change
his mind in some way and the young man just wouldn't.
And he looked at me and he said, miss Wilson,
if I see you again, you go into jail.
And that's what I said. Yes, sir.
So I made sure he saw me again.
The next day, we went to
the terminal railway station and
about 22 of us were arrested for disorderly conduct,
distribution, I mean, disturbance unlawful,
you were disturbing the peace.
And all of these people had been
arrested the day before Richie's work had been released.
So it was just a two day thing for us.
All the women in the group were from Spelman.
They were only seven. So while the 22,
the rest were were men.
Martin's youngest son, a younger brother,
AD was a part of the male group,
but he was an untraditional student. He was in his 20s.
So he was like a grown up.
And we usually, we were
planning if we knew
what was going to happen ahead of time,
I would have planned it differently.
But he and I didn't have time to discuss what happened
if we got arrested and separated,
and therefore, I was
not going to be able to be in charge,
which is exactly what happened.
I ended up not being in charge.
We had never been to work camp before a prison farm,
no one knew what that was like.
We were held totally without communications.
We could not see our families.
We could not talk to our ministers,
no our lawyers, which we had
always been able to have contact with.
We were not allowed a phone call.
No one in Atlanta knew what a prison farm was like.
So no one knew what was happening to us.
So everybody was very nervous.
My mother was so taken aback by
this that she had to be hospitalized. When we got there,
walked in the building
and it was at least a two story building.
The women's quarters was on the left beyond the kitchen.
And as we walked through the kitchen,
we got to the end and there was
an eating area and there were
white female inmates there peeling potatoes,
and letting the peels drop on the floor.
That's just the first symptom of when I
realized how this place was going to operate.
So we had to walk through the peels.
Any black woman had to walk through
those potato peelings for
hours to get to the black woman's quarters.
It was the quarters were
a huge dorm room with double decker beds on either side,
high up windows, strings hanging from the ceiling,
which were probably waxed in some way,
because flies and other insects had been caught on them.
So that's what they were there for,
to catch the insects.
It was dirty to say the least.
The bathroom was dirty.
Everything was was dirty.
In my wisdom as a 19 year old,
and having these six other women with me,
some of which had never been in jail before,
and now I've got them in
a place that I'm unfamiliar with,
and not sure how to protect them,
I decided that since the beds were so close together,
that we would select
seven beds next to each other on the top bunk.
So if we needed to, we could walk
and touch each other again.
I didn't know what was going to happen,
but it just seemed like
the logical thing at the time for me to do, which it was.
That night when we went to bed,
we didn't need to know it was dark,
because they never turned the lights out.
The let's put it, a man,
and I didn't know at
the time there was going to be a guard,
but a man walked in with a rifle.
Zipped and dropped his pants,
and raped the prisoner underneath me.
I was very frightened.
I wasn't frightened of what was going to
happen that minute,
I was frightened of what was going to come next.
I saw this as
a clear message to
young college students. Girl, you're next.
I'm coming for you. So the next morning when I got up,
I asked for a meeting with the warden. Some nerve.
I got it. I went to see him,
I explained to him what had happened the night before.
And I had two other requests.
I didn't make a request about that.
I just said, this is what happened, just the facts.
I expressed no emotional feelings
about what had happened.
I'm assuming that he's a decent person
and he doesn't expect that
that's going to happen in this prison.
That's how I approached him under that assumption.
It was cold in there. It was October.
I brought in sweaters or something first,
because we had to wear uniforms and they were
pretty flimsy dresses that we bought,
and didn't fit us, and buttons were
all in the wrong places in the front.
So we needed we weren't really
covered up as women should be in the front.
It was just disgraceful, but anyway.
And the third thing was,
I found out the first night
that we had to work 12 hour shift.
Everybody worked a 12 hour shift.
It's a self sustaining firm, it was.
And so he worked 6:00-6:00.
And so my third request was that,
the women be permitted to work the same shift.
I said, I don't care which shift it is,
but just so we all work the same shift.
That's the method of protecting
us that we were all together.
I didn't want to be in bed to sleep worrying what
was happening to somebody who was
working the shift that I wasn't working.
So it was selfish on my part,
I guess, that I wanted to do that.
He adhered to everything I asked.
And when we went to bed that night,
and I hadn't asked about the guard.
There was no white male guard
with a gun at the door anymore.
There was a white female without a gun. Guns were gone.
So I had taken care of
that problem more easily than I could imagined.
My next problem was trying to communicate with
the men to see what was going on with them,
because no one in the male group had ever led a group.
And I was thinking that
AD was going to step up to that role,
since he was the oldest one in the group.
And he was Martin's brother.
And so he would automatically be given
a certain level of respect because of those two things.
So I found a trustee there
a black female who had known me
in one of my previous prison tenures.
So things do come in handy sometimes.
And she took a message to the men for me.
And she said if you want to write this down.
I said, no, because if you get caught,
they're going to throw you in a hole,
which is a very small little cell, dark, no windows.
You get bread and water,
and you're held without any communication with anybody.
I think they may slide some food under the bars,
but that's about it.
And I said we don't want that to happen to you.
So I gave her a verbal message.
And we worked out a deal that if everything
was okay on my side of the world,
he would see me when he came in from the fields,
because they the male work
from the fields during the day.
He would see me standing in the kitchen.
If he did not see me,
that means he was to know that something was wrong.
And if something was wrong on his side of the world,
he was to give me a high sign
some way with a hand or something,
shoulder, stumbled on the floor.
It didn't matter. Just do something
out of the ordinary so
that I would know something was wrong.
Now, what I could do about that I have not the fags idea.
Since we couldn't talk to anybody, had no communications.
I think I assumed that that could not last for 10 days,
that somehow Atlanta was going to find
a way for us to be able to communicate with people,
but I didn't expect to be let out.
And the work farm was not
a particularly dangerous place to
be except for that guard that night,
but because it was a rotating group of women,
and they did rotate in and out, I understand.
Were prostitutes, people with minor crimes.
And I think 10-15 days was probably
the maximum sentence that anyone had that was in there,
which was unlike what we
had later on in Fulton County Jail.
And I had told the warden when I went to see him
that the conditions at
the prison farm were going to be public knowledge.
And he said, "Well, why is that?
I said, "I'm editor of the student newspaper.
I'll give you one guess.
So is what's going to happen when I get out of here.
And I said, "I have a phone call relationship with Ralph
McGill," who was editor of
the Plan of Constitution at the time.
And I said, "So it will be known."
I got out, I did an interview,
I had one of my reporters
on the Spelman spot line interviewed me.
That was published.
I was in the hospital.
They had put me in the hospital because I
was so worn out.
I had also in low blood pressure
and I was a mess physically.
And so I was in
the hospital and so I missed the Constitution.
And so I don't know if anything ever
appeared in the Constitution,
but I do know about two weeks later
front page of the Constitution.
The Georgia Prison Farm system was being investigated.
So we got something else done.
Not something we had started out to do,
but something of value anyway was done.
The next thing I'm going to talk about is
my time with what we call the First freedom ride.
And she said to you, I went to Jacksonville.
The reason we did that is because in November of 1960,
the Supreme Court, made
a decision that outlawed racial segregation,
the restaurants, and waiting rooms,
and bus terminals that cross state lines.
And when I read that, I saw an opportunity.
I said, "Let's go. Let's see what we can do about this."
And they said, "How are we going to do this, Jone?"
I said, "Well, I don't know.
Let's put some of us on buses
and they got to be some food somewhere along the way.
Lunch campus we can sit in."
And I said, "What we'll do is,
we'll have one person in
each group who is going home for the weekend."
So if you're asked, you just taking your friends home.
So we sent a group to Geneva.
We sent a group to Birmingham.
I took a group to Jacksonville.
And Lion King, who was our leader here,
and I have discussed, didn't we
send a fourth group and we don't know where?
So I mean, all of us as we
age have lost of some of the particulars of things.
So I get on the busway to people here in Atlanta
and we head for Macon Georgia.
It's about lunchtime we get there didn't matter.
The lunch counter was open.
Three of us walked through the line,
and we just was so casual about it,
we took everybody by surprise.
I mean, nobody had time to be
angry or upset and I told the cashier,
I said, "I'm paying for everybody,
and she said, "Okay."
And so she let them go
through with their trays and they sat down.
All the tables were for two.
So they were ahead of me.
So they sat at a table.
So I sat at a table across the aisle from them.
And we're sitting there. They said,
"June, what's going to happen now?"
I said, "I don't know. Please probably show up."
By this time, a young white male walks in,
comes right over to my table,
sits down with me and he says, "Hello, Norma June."
He doesn't tell me who he is.
He knows who I am.
He knows why I'm there.
He's not from Macon,
Georgia. I have no idea.
But we had quite a few sympathizers who were
white kids and adults who participated with us.
But this was just so out of
the blue and here I am totally out of
my element in a whole another town and this man walks up.
So I said to him, I said,
"We're probably going to be arrested."
I wrote down a phone number.
I said, "If we are,
here's the phone number in Atlanta.
Call and tell them that we got arrested."
I momentarily had
forgotten, but it wouldn't have mattered.
I still would have given the phone number.
That part of my planning was that we had a car.
Someone was driving a car who was tailing our bus,
so that we were never totally alone,
plus I didn't want to go back on the bus,
and so we were going to ride back in
the car from Jacksonville to Atlanta.
This was a Friday. So we got arrested.
No one putting handcuffs on us,
don't wanting to do anything like that.
Took us to the police station and the sheriff said,
"I guess I'm going to have to put you in jail."
I said, "I guess you will."
I said, "But I think you better
talk with your lawyer first."
And he said, "Why do I have to talk with my lawyer?"
I said, "Because there's a
Supreme Court decision that is
in effect that says what we did was perfectly legal."
He said, "You joking at me.
No, not joking.
So he leaves me in his office and he goes
off and he comes back about 10-15 minutes later.
He said, "Young lady, you were right.
Did I not know that all the time?"
Sure, I know that all the time.
He said, "Now, what am I going to do with
you until I can get you to Jacksonville."
I think he got concerned.
And as right he should have been
concerned because he was going to be held responsible.
So he said, "Do you happen to know
anyone in Macon?" Well, I did.
A friend of mine had just
graduated from Spelman a year before,
had been an attendant to miss Maria White,
which is Morehouse Queen.
And she married a young man from Macon and I
happened to remember the last name and I
gave him the name and he said,
"A very prominent family in town."
I said, "Sure." So he found
a phone number for me and I called and asked her.
I told him what happened.
Can we come and stay at your house until the bus leaves.
And of course, she had to ask her mother in law.
She was staying with her in laws.
She was gone a while.
And I'm sure there was some consternation and
concern about taking in
these people as to what was going to happen.
The sheriff's office took us over to the house.
They had drawn the blinds,
pull all the drapes together.
The house was dark.
But we had been there more than 5-10
minutes before people started knocking on the door.
The Black community came in droves.
They were crying. They were happy.
They were scared. They wanted
to come in and touch us, basically.
They wanted to give us hugs and physically
just touch us to see if this was really happening.
It was one of the most humbling experiences I've ever
had in my life to see the looks.
And they were mostly old people.
See the looks on their faces
of being frightened but
being proud of us at the same time.
We stayed there until about dark.
I'm sure there was another bus before dark,
but I think the sheriff had decided that it would be
safer for all concerned
if we waited until that bus to leave.
And so they took us to the bus station and we got out of
this sort of hearse from the funeral home,
all windows were dark and everything,
so nobody could see us because they were
not only afraid for themselves,
they were afraid for our lives as well.
People would not have been happy I'm sure.
And I'm sure the word spread like
wildfire of what had happened.
We got there and there was all sorts of news
people, television channels,
flashlights going off, cameras going everywhere.
And I had already said to the other two to Betty and Ben,
we will give no interviews.
We have no comment.
We don't even say no comment.
You just don't say anything.
We got ready to get on the bus,
we found out that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had
sent three of their agents to go with us.
And so we got on the bus first,
sat in the front with them as directed.
Everybody else got on the bus.
It was a local, the bus was,
meaning it was going to have
several stops before it got to Jacksonville.
So whenever the bus stopped,
The GB people would
let anybody get off who wanted to get off.
And either one of the three of us wanted to get off
our official escort went with us.
If I had to go to the bathroom, he went with me,
checked the bathroom before he let me go
inside and stood at the door.
And they were armed of course.
So that's how we got to Jacksonville.
When we got there, we were on our own.
The Jacksonville bus station at that time had
a huge wall of windows out to the one of the streets.
It was a narrow terminal and this big huge wall window.
So when we came in from the bus,
I could see the Ku Klux Klan armed and totally in garb,
and walking up and down outside.
That was when I thought this might not turn out well.
I had never thought about death before in Atlanta.
As I said, "This was an economic engine here."
We didn't have to bother with dogs very much.
I think only once or twice early on.
No water hoses, no rough treatment of people.
Mayor Hartsville would not permit that.
And I can't think of the police chief's name,
but he was the same always.
We just don't want that trouble here in Atlanta.
One of the students said to me, "Are we going
to try to sit down here?"
I said, "you know, I
think we've had enough excitement for
the day [LAUGHTER] so let's pass on this one."
I called my father on the phone.
This was before cell phones.
I had to go find a pay phone,
make sure I had the right change,
called my dad on the phone
and said, "Okay, what's the plan?"
He knew what we were coming.
And he told me that he was sending someone to pick us up.
And so he told me where that person was going to be.
I was at the back of the bus station.
We didn't have any luggage.
All we had was [inaudible] carry with us.
We didn't want to be bulk with luggage.
I led the way, we walked to the back of the bus station.
They let us walk out.
Plan didn't seem to notice that
we had gone. They still marching.
We turned the corner and walked
about two blocks and got in the car and went home.
I don't know what Clan was thinking.
I said, "Probably somebody
turned around later and said hey,
what happened to those kids we were looking for?''
Well, those kids you were looking for have
just disappeared on you. On Sunday when we drove back to
Atlanta as we approached Macon,
I said to the driver Raven Bennett.
I said, let's stop and see
if by chance, we got in a newspaper.
He said, June they don't put
black folks on the newspaper.
I said, I don't know,
maybe. So we did.
We stopped. And lo and behold,
we weren't on the front page of
one newspaper in Macon, Georgia.
We were on the front page of
both papers in Macon, Georgia.
And I don't know.
We were happy about what happened in Macon.
Birmingham people were not as lucky.
They ran into if anybody
knows the civil rights history of Bullcona
who was the infamous sheriff in in Birmingham,
and so they got arrested and treated pretty badly.
But they were soon released
and they came back on a train.
I guess I didn't send a car with
them and I don't know why.
But supposedly they came back on the train.
The third thing is when I was sentenced to a year in
jail and spent two weeks of that year.
And that was the Fulton County jail.
And that was in February of 2061,
I am now a second semester senior.
So I've survived academically that
long but after a year long sentence,
I didn't expect to be able to survive to graduate.
So I wrote my parents a letter and I said,
if you've already paid tuition,
get back because I'm
not going to be in school this semester.
We'll have to look at another opportunity later on.
We were filling the full county jail without bail.
More than 76 or so people
were arrested in two or three day period.
We put a big strain on their housekeeping, so to speak.
They ran out of beds,
which was part of our strategy.
That's why we got criticized.
A lot of students in other places went at
things much more in your face,
and we were much more subtle about how we did things.
So I don't have any horror stories of
being shot at or anything.
Anything quite like that.
So we get into the Fulton County jail,
and I go about the second and third day.
We told Lonni Alameda and her [inaudible] who was
our poll leader had been
arrested immediately, but they took bail.
Because if we needed our leaders to be
out because when we made the decision,
we knew there was going to be some negotiations.
That was why we did it in the first place to have
negotiations with the city to
force them to come to the table,
yet again, we've had some before.
When I was in the prison farm,
there had been a negotiation that took place.
So we were always angling for
another negotiation for another time to talk about
something else that they could do
for us for the Black community that we
wanted that would make us a little happier.
So maybe next time we wouldn't put 70 some in jail,
maybe we only do 30. But anyway.
So we were there
and we discussed whether I should go or not.
And they said, but you run into action,
you're the one who's planning everything.
Don't you think we need you to stay out.
And so we talked about this for a couple of days.
And then we decided that the women in there,
a lot of them had never been in jail before and
they may need a calm head to be there with them,
somebody who had been in jail before.
And so I went in and so the negotiations,
I say were about two weeks.
And sure enough, they didn't leave me.
I knew some trustees again
from some other priv experiences in jail.
So we were given some leeway to
do things like keep on mirrors and our nail files
and stuff that were
contraband for as far as jails were concerned.
And it was another pair of eyes
to be on us to know what was happening with us.
In the Fulton County Jail everybody's in one jail cell.
So we had at least two women in the jail
with us in cell with us who were into murder.
That was a little non pulsing to think about.
And the first night,
second night which I think is the second night,
one of those women physically attacked me.
That mean we had to have a fight.
Literally, a rolling on the floor of fire.
Luckily, I won plus,
if I hadn't have one,
I had a lot of comrades there to help
me and she didn't have the numbers that I had.
I forgot I had also been
assaulted when I've been in the prison farm
by a white female prisoner with Brinkley.
And so that was another.
So I don't know I
attract the bad aspect of some people like her.
Maybe it's because of my attitude.
Those are the three things.
We were there for two weeks.
We sang songs. White women wanted to sing with us.
They started we started teaching them
the words to songs that we were singing and at night,
they said from their cell because they were
white women there they just segregated from us,
said let's whatever they
name a song and we would started off and they would sing.
They took our books away from us.
So NBC came when we first got there and someone from
the Huntley-Brinkley Report And
I talked to him like I was supposed to.
And he said, do you need anything?
I said he took out books.
How were those studied? Just in case
we get out of here we might want study.
That the NBC National news that night.
Well, we get outlooks. Surprise, surprise.
So I spent my time there, my personal time.
I spent sitting on the floor.
I had someone bring me a warm pair of wool pants,
which we could not wear pants on beans campus.
But I had a pair of slacks
that every once in a while that you were I
remembered snow in my freshman year
and I've never seen snow before.
But the word went out we could wear pants that day.
So I had someone go in my room
and bring me a sweater heavy sweater and some pants.
And I sat in the same spot every day.
Somehow in my mind,
it got softer as I sat there. Jail is a I decided
a state of mind as much as it is even maybe
more so than it is a physical place because you have to
learn to live in that space and in those conditions,
and you have to go inward in order to be able to do that.
And no one teaches you that
because you can't teach that to anybody.
It's something you have to find out for yourself.
So the other girls playing checkers
and and we had some other games,
but the check is only one I remember.
When I sat and I read.
Either it was reading novels or I was studying.
I had a double
major and I had a history major it was one of them,
and that required a lot of reading and a lot of writing.
And I was in the midst of writing a thesis,
which we have to do according to
the University Chicago guidelines
for writing a master's thesis.
I had to do one of those every semester.
So I was prepping for end of that particular semester.
Collegtively, I think we
accomplished a lot of things here at Atlanta.
A lot of very meaningful things,
I think things that lasted for generations.
I should tell you that I graduated in 61
and things were not desegregated by that time,
but on the way and by 63,
they had desegregated the lunch comes in Atlanta.
I was on the front end,
there were many more that came behind me after that.
I experienced though during
this movement women being treated differently,
not being given their due in a lot of instances.
Many of us were overlooked
and treated with less than respect.
This happened both locally here in
Atlanta and on the national level.
I'll give you an example.
By the time the march on Washington
occurred in 1963, I was married.
My daughter who was sitting over there was born.
She had just been born in January,
and my husband in all of his wisdom said
that I couldn't go to the march on work but he could go.
And he had never lifted his finger during
the civil rights movement peripherally nor any other way.
I have never forgiven him for that.
It's been 56 years and I'm still carrying a grudge.
But during the march on Washington,
no woman was permitted to give a major speech.
I think a couple of women had a few statements they made.
This was not a happenstance.
You just said, well, we just happened, no, it was not.
History shows us that there had been
an open discussion by the male organizers,
including B Ruston who thought known
considering that they decided
that essentially to admit women from the voting.
We're going to do anything.
Should go back and say
when Montgomery happened the bus boycott,
Rosa Parks, who was the Spark,
but had been working with the MWCP in Birmingham for
years on civil rights issues
in Birmingham, asked to speak.
By this time Martin had come into the Montgomery boycott.
Had she asked to speak at the first mass meeting
that they had, they told her no.
She hadn't done enough.
It was just I mean, there were Black women there
the day in the march on Washington that were prominent.
They made all the Black women, including Martin's wife,
Coretta, everybody,
and all the wives march down a different street.
The men marched down Pennsylvania Avenue,
which has a significance to it in DC.
Pennsylvania Avenue is the significant street in town.
And the women had to march down the side street.
So you can see that things were not perfect.
There were women there such as Elevator, you mentioned.
And she was one of the founders
of Student Automatic Cory Snake,
which was housed here in Atlanta,
of which I was a founding member of.
Dorothy Height was there.
And you young people wouldn't know her at all,
but she was a civil rights advocate back in the 40s.
And she was president of
the National Council of Negro Women from
1957-1997. She was present.
And with the women of that caliber
available to be able to speak,
I have to conclude that
sexism was the reason that they were excluded.
I can't call it racism.
I got to call it something,
so I'll call it it sexism.
So we found discrimination not only
without but women had
discrimination during the civil rights movement
from within as well.
In spite of the sexism that I saw in
the movement, and this Cardona, I mean,
we had a 30 year reunion here in Atlanta and
things and my husband
came with me and things had not changed.
The same sexist behaviors that I had dealt with here in
Atlanta and within the group were still here.
And they they they didn't live here anymore,
but they came back for the 30.
I got so incense that one activity,
I looked at my husband and I said, we out of here.
Ben here done that, don't
need to deal with that any more.
Before I dealt with it because I had a goal.
This time, I came to have fun and to rejoice with
old friends and old comrades
and they were going to misbehave. I didn't need it.
Two men that ran into,
I want to give you quotes from One was
supposed to be here with us today and
couldn't and it's Lion King,
who was the leader of our student group here in
Atlanta and has been active in
civil rights ever since
in a paper on women in the civil rights movement,
and that's the name of the paper,
The Library of Congress,
he was I'm not going to give you
all of the pot because he named
some people in there and I don't
want to repeat those names.
He said he was surprised that in Diane Nash had been
overlooked because she was
the sole of the Nashville movement.
And I happened to lived in Nashville during
her time because my husband and
I got married in Nashville,
and in 62, and I got to meet her.
And she was she was totally
overlooked by the men in Nashville.
And then he went on to name some other men who have
become very prominent who were in
Nashville at the time and she's never gotten
her her do anything close to them.
An old friend of mine from
my freshman year at Spelman
in his freshman year in Morehouse,
Julian Bond who was
a Georgia representative and
senator here in the State of
Georgia for 20 years or more.
Of course, is one time National President in
[inaudible] and National non activists in civil rights.
He's been quoted as one saying,
"There's a Chinese saying women hold up half the world."
In the case of the civil rights movement,
it's probably three quarters of
the world. Thank you very much.
>> So we have a team and that's for
Q&A with our panelists,
if you have anything you want to ask.
I don't think we need mics, I think we're pretty
good just to ask if you have
anything written down or if you want to
[inaudible] come around and
take the card then you can ask.
Anybody? Questions, thoughts?
I have one from a student written here.
One of our student researchers worked really hard to
make this event happen and she had to work today.
So her question on what [inaudible]. And just ask.
>> How does it feel to know that the plans incidents that
you and your colleagues just devise make a comic history?
>> It feels like all the other and
the sacrifice that we
made has come to fruition in some ways.
I hate to say this but I see us moving backwards now,
which is very disturbing to me,
particularly at my age,
to see that happening.
But I'm one of these people,
I don't take credit for any of the things that happened.
For me, it was a job
because I assigned it to myself to do.
And so everyday when I
got up and go and did the job that day,
and when you do a job,
you don't always expect,
particularly that kind of job,
for someone to say thank
you or to be appreciative in any way at all.
But I'm appreciative for what we were able to accomplish.
But so many more came out
so my group can't take very much credit at all.
We got the ball rolling.
>> This is from one of the students.
Do you have a memory or experience that inspires or
inspires you to keep fighting
in your writing when things got tough?
>> Oh me, I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I have two.
The first one is my first year
at Indiana University was
my first year, my master's program.
In the spring,
the Ku Klux Klan held a rally downtown Bloomington.
And I called my grandparents because if I don't call,
they'll put out a APP on
me everyday, they'll seriously do.
[LAUGHTER] And I called and usually
I'll talked to my grandmother and I was telling her like,
this but I don't have class today but there's
a clan rally and my grandfather
who never really said anything.
He would always come on just yell in the background like,
tell us [inaudible], stuff like that.
He took the phone and was like,
I need you to stay at home today.
I need you to stay at home, don't go anywhere.
You call me almost like more than usual.
And he wouldn't tell me until later
that his father was
chased out of their house by the clan.
And for me, that
wasn't going to be in the history book
but if my grandparents
could be that courageous then it
was up to me to also be courageous
enough to speak my truth and
also to speak their truths because
they had been told
so many times before that they didn't matter.
And I guess on the creative side,
I'm also a fiction writer.
So the short story collection that I wrote has plenty of
stories that I basically spoon
from memory by talking with my grandparents.
I'm a very strong advocate
of respecting and honoring your elders and speaking
to them because if
we don't remember them it up looking nobody else will.
And my family has
a very tense relationship with the University of Georgia.
And the reason we have a tense relationship
with the University of Georgia is because
my grandfather is from Athens
and he was a star football player in Clark County.
And University of Georgia
wouldn't let him try
out because they were still segregated.
So this is in the '40s and '50s.
If you go a couple of years later,
my grandmother, who is,
as I said earlier, is an educator,
she wanted to work on her master's
and she couldn't go to
the University of Georgia because, again, segregated.
So they paid for her to go to the NYU,
which wasn't a weird thing.
There are a lot of schools in the South
that in order to remain segregated,
they pay partial or all of students' tuition.
So they would go to Indiana University.
So I was even walking in
this journey that I didn't even realize.
So they went to Indiana University,
they went to New York University,
they went to UCLA, they went where they're like,
we'll take your segregated money.
[LAUGHTER] And just being able
to recognize that and share that
and remember it and use that in my classroom,
some of my students are here,
we talk about this all the time,
is being able to,
again, this idea of recovery.
Just because it's in a textbook doesn't
mean that's exactly what happened with it.
And oftentimes if you actually just
talk to the people who are there,
you have the privilege of talking to the people who
actually put themselves on the line.
That changes your outlook of what you could be doing.
So as a scholar, as a writer,
and just as a general granddaughter of the South,
I'm a hardcore Southerner.
But one of the reasons that I'm a hardcore Southerner is
because my grandparents were
hardcore Southerners because they had to
be and they wanted to be in the South.
So that's what I keep at the forefront as
I work through my writing
and pedagogy and that thing like that,
is that somebody paid
dues for me to be able to do what I'm doing today.
>> I want to add something to that.
You said they were going to Georgia.
During the time that we started
the civil rights movement here in Atlanta,
one of the things that brought ups,
said they wanted to do was
integrate the University of Georgia.
And I got to work with them to get Charlie Hunter and
Hamilton Holmes work on
a process of how we were going to do that.
And so I think it happened around '60,
'61. That's when it happened.
>> I have a question.
>> There we go.
>> And I just want to say thank you
so much for being here.
>> Thank you.
>> And I have a couple of question that I want to
leave with that I did want answers.
So after the height of the Civil Rights Movement,
what impact or relocations
did you see that the movement had on women.
You talked about sexism and drug movement,
but you've been able to have a successful career.
Do you find that
this was possible for other women who just came in?
>> Very difficult. I got lucky. It's what I did.
My husband took the job at
the University of Iowa and I went
there as a stay-at-home mom of two,
and that would have been in 1968.
We left Washington DC right after
Kennedy was assassinated and the city went out in flames.
It frightened my daughter to death.
She never wanted to go back to DC when she was little.
She was afraid. And I
went to the University of Iowa to work.
I was asked by
a vice president to come and
work on his staff for a while.
He had some problems, and even
more he thought I could help him identify them.
So I was just supposed to work part time,
and this was on a short-term basis.
Well, I ended up staying.
He left, I stayed
and I worked my way up to being
an Assistant Vice President,
and I said earlier that was in Affirmative Action.
But during those years in Iowa,
I had an opportunity to
be not so much involved with the Civil Rights Movement,
but in the women's movement.
They weren't enough minorities at
the University of Iowa that that was
something for me to be dealing with,
but they were very active on that campus.
Back in the early '70s,
I was on the committee to put
together a sexual harassment policy
on the campus that we stringently carried out.
And when I was Affirmative Action Director,
we got very stringently carried out if it
came to my knowledge to my desk to do that.
And so I got very much involved with women.
That's why I got a couple of awards back that
you read about because I was involved with women.
Most of them were not Black women because they were
not that many Black women there.
A lot of the Black women who were I
think mistreated during the Civil Rights Movement when
time came moved easily into the women's movement
because they saw that
in that movement that they were going
to only have one level of discrimination, not two.
And so a lot of the Black women,
particular graduate students at
the University of Iowa, of course,
they would be older than undergraduate student,
fought very hard within the women's movement there and
I was one of the people that they came to for support.
We also started in Iowa, during that time,
a Way Up Conference,
which was sort of like RISE.
So Way Up Conference for women in
higher education in the State of Iowa.
And the women's part of
the Department of Education
nationally recognized us as
being on the forefront of that.
So I moved from the civil rights movement
into to the women's movement during
those 20 years that I was on campus.
Did you have another question?
>> I did. I heard
that Spelman wasn't as
supportive of women being involved in the movement,
but there was a change with
this event that you experienced?
>> Same president during the whole time.
Yeah. Albert Manley. He is a physicist.
He did not openly object.
I think personally, he would
have preferred us not to do it.
You have to think about the time.
He was Black. You have to put him in
his time so that
you can't expect him to think like today's time.
He put it in his time and he was very
protective of us girls at Spelman.
He and I had a sort of love hate relationship.
I liked him very much.
I thought he was a very gentle
so he was easily manipulated.
I could easily manipulated him [LAUGHTER] but
it made me love him
even more like I could walk on campus.
I knew where he walked his dog every day,
and what time he came back
about he came back in the afternoon.
Those who don't know but Spelman
at that time, he had a fence all around them,
and we were not permitted to do anything
that normal young ladies were permitted to do,
and our hours we were awful.
We had to be on campus by six o'clock and unless you had
some ready permission to be somewhere, you could go.
And when I was involved was to m and I
always had somewhere I needed to go.
So I climbed the schedule and so I would make it a
point to be walking off
campus as he was walking on campus,
and I pat the dog on the head and say hello to the dog,
I forgotten the dog's name out.
And I passed a few words with him and he keep going.
He never even dawned on
him that I was breaking a very big rule
by walking in the direction that I was walking
[LAUGHTER] because I didn't have anything.
By the time I catch up with him,
there was nothing there but the road.
So there was no building that
I could have said I was going into.
The only place I was going was to the gate to get out.
None of the faculty at Spelman did
hear us from doing what we did.
I had no opposition from any of my faculty, my teachers.
They were very helpful.
When they saw me, giving me
assignments ahead of time or letting me know
what was coming up so I could
read it if I happened to miss an exam,
and I tried not to miss an exams.
But I think during those two weeks, I did.
They would always let me catch up with my exams.
I had one instructor at Morehouse,
who was from Austria.
She was adamantly against
the whole idea of what we were doing,
and I recognized that that
was partly because of her culture and her upbringing.
But when you throw a blue book in
my face to take an exam,
I take exception to that so
she was a little more than upset and told me,
the day of the final exam,
my senior year,
where I could take the course during the summer.
And I had already talked to her TA
about this but she had been marking my papers down,
I took them to another German instructor.
She said she's cheating to [inaudible].
And I said, yeah, but it was a fight.
I didn't have the energy to fight at the time.
All things being equal,
I would have gone to the president and take it and
posted an argument about
why she needed to be relieved of her job.
But I didn't do that this time.
I decided to let the chips fall where they may.
And if they didn't fall on my side,
I would indeed go to school sometime.
Because it was never a matter of
if I was going to get a college degree,
it was just a matter when.
And so that was
just a battle ground I didn't want to fight it with her.
A lot of what Manley did
was to legally protect the institution.
If I had been president,
I would have probably done some of
the same things like have parents sign
off on certain things because you don't want to get sued,
and he has a responsibility for the entire university and
for his economic well being
and its staying in the community.
So I understood that
administratively there were
certain things he had to do this.
Some people got angry with him for it.
I never got angry with him because he
never stopped us from doing what we wanted to do.
Years and years and years later,
my husband came to
Wyndham University Center on
a site visit from
National Institute of Health, my husband is a chemist.
And they had a biomedical program grants
to HBCUs and others from minority schools.
And so he came as a part of this site team.
I don't know if he was chairing the site team or not.
The team had lunch with
all the presidents from
the colleges and he happened to sit next to Manley.
So he said to Manley.
He said, "Oh, by the way, my wife,
she was a Spelman graduate."
And he said, "Oh, what's her name?"
And he said, " [inaudible]."
He said, "I was so glad when she graduated."
[LAUGHTER] I had done
several other things before
the Civil Rights Movement that had brought me to
his attention in a way that I was objecting to some of
his decisions. You're welcome.
>> And we just have for one more question.
>> This question is for all of you guys.
Do you think that the suppression of
women's voices was a result
of American culture at the time,
or Black culture which was leading the movement,
of course, or are the two interwoven in a way?
>> Probably that's what it used to be.
Clearly it was a result of policy and practice.
It wasn't just culture.
It was also policy and practice in place,
and it wasn't just America.
It was global at the time,
to the extent that when women were
put forward in leadership positions,
it was often questioned.
Why did the men allow that to happen?
So I think it was a global problem,
but it was made all the
more exasperating by the fact that
what was ongoing in this country at this time in
relation to race and rights and being.
One can't forget Stokely Carmichael's famous response
when he was asked about the position
of women in the movement.
I'll let you look that up
so that you can be amused by it later,
but it was a sexual reference,
but that doesn't mean that the women weren't
there and they weren't present.
And for me, what happened to
women during that time and during this time,
even as we are revisiting these traditional roles,
it just proves that these stories are about
sacrifice and sustaining that sacrifice,
but it's also about the
after life and what comes from that.
>> Again, will you give one more round or applause for
all of them? [APPLAUSE]