>> Rolling B. Move it down,
and then that way. That way a bit.
>> Lonnie King, 7/19, take one.
So as we discussed earlier,
tell me what started everything.
Where were you? What were the thoughts that you had?
Why did you do? Why did you start this whole movement?
>> I think I have to begin with
my grandfather who lead me from
the time I was two-and-a-half years old until I was 8.5.
He died at that point. And I came to Atlanta, Georgia.
My grandfather was a Baptist preacher. Was an evangelist.
He went around in different churches preaching revivals.
And he took his baby grandson
with him everywhere he went almost,
like a little mascot, I guess, you would say.
And so I heard my grandfather preaching, freedom,
liberty, justice, equality, within a segregated society.
But I was young, but I heard it.
I came to Atlanta, Georgia
and to be with my mother after he died.
And my mother was a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church,
pastor by Reverend King MR King Senior.
And when I came that February,
the spring revival was the very next few days.
And so I went to church with my mother
and when they opened up the doors of the church,
I went down and I joined.
My mother was a little shocked because I
didn't tell I was going to do it. She was in the choir.
So as we went our way home, she said,
you didn't tell me that you
were going to join the church tonight.
I said, well, I didn't know I had to,
she said, well, she didn't say anything else.
So that began, I guess,
she would say relationship between me and the kings
and the church and different activities at the church.
I'd say between 1945-1954,
every youth activity in that church,
they put me in charge of it.
Whether it was bringing in speakers or
designing the program or what have you.
We formed a group called the Ebenezer
Youth Organization and I was ahead of.
So I got a chance to practice
leadership skills or develop
leadership skills within the church.
Concurrently, Dr. Martin Luther King
junior had gone off
to Morehouse College and got his degree,
and he went on to other places and what have you.
But he would always come back to
the church and make preach a sermon.
So if I had to summing it up,
I'd have to say that I was
birthed into this idea of freedom,
justice and equality through
my grandfather and what he used to preach.
And it was added to by King Senior and,
of course, King junior,
I lived a companion life
in trying to push for these matters.
And it was because of my relationship
with Daddy King and Dr. King
junior that I was able to get
him to come and join us on October 19th,
1960 when we took on Richards Department Store downtown.
In some, I think you are what you grew up in.
And I grew up in an environment wherein most of
the folks that I was
around were preaching liberation theology.
Now, they were doing more preaching
than acting because if you acted out,
beyond the sermons, you were getting out of your place.
And almost any white person
had a license to put you back in your place.
That was the environment that we had,
and that environment was just as prevalent
in 1960 as it was in 1930.
>> So where does
the Atlanta Student Movement fall in
the general timeline of the lunch counter sit ins?
>> Well, let me give you a little bit more transition.
When I came back from the Navy in 1957,
I went back to Morehouse.
Now, in the Navy, I ran into some rank discrimination.
And I battled all the way
through the Navy, this discrimination.
And with the help of the Lord,
I won all my battles.
So I was able to become an E5 really within 24 months,
which was unusual, which was almost unheard of.
But at that time, if you could pass
the test, you could get advanced.
And so I passed the test and I moved up.
Now, I did find a lot of discrimination in the Navy.
But it was on ship with some of the crew people,
some of the officers, and
some of the non commissioned officers.
But I found a way to battle them through the system.
And I think that was a part of
preparation for what we did in 1960.
So therefore, I had a spiritual grounding
coming from my granddaddy,
through my mother, through the kings.
And then I also had the practical experience of
battling segregation type things in the US Navy.
So I guess when the young boy sat down in
Greensboro on 1st February 1960,
I was ready. Simple as that.
>> So did you start putting things in
motion when that first thing happened?
>> Yes. When I read in the newspaper that morning,
the Atlanta Constitution that the young fellows had
sat down in Greensboro a day or two earlier,
I said, the South is suffering from segregation.
It's ubiquitous. It exists everywhere,
not just in Greensboro.
And we need to get involved in Atlanta.
And we would have been involved within the next few days,
but for the fact that
the college presidents had
excellent intelligence and they learned
what we were doing and so they slowed us down.
So we really didn't get going until we
publicized a full page ad on March 9th,
1960, called an appeal for Human Rights,
which laid out a manifesto
that we followed over the next
two or three years in order to bring
about the changes in Atlanta
that we're finally brought about in the area of
theaters in the area of lunch counters,
restaurants, hospitals.
You name it. Voter registration,
we did all of that stuff to
try to make freedom ring for people
who had never had freedom ring for them in their lives or
in their grandchildren's lives
or in their grandfather's lives.
>> So the appeal for human rights,
was that a collaborative work?
>> It was supposed to be a collaborative work.
When the college presidents ask
us the student leaders to write
a manifesto to tell the public
why you're going to
take to the streets and what have you,
you need to have a philosophical foundation.
And so we agreed to do it because
we wanted to make sure that they not turn on us.
So they asked us to do it. So I
appointed Dr. Roslyn Pope.
She's a doctor now, but she was a student at Spelman,
president of the SGA, and was English major.
I appointed her to edit the appeal for human rights.
And I appointed Julian Bond,
an excellent writer to be on the commission,
beyond the Committee, along with Charles Black,
an excellent writer, Abbott Brenson.
They were the ones who form that committee.
So we had to get it back to the college presidents by
a certain time for them to see it and approve it.
Dr. Clement had raised
$12,000 from his sources to pay for it,
be put in the newspapers.
So Dr. Pope Roslyn called
me the night before it was due back to
the college presidents and
she said that she had not been able to
get anybody to help
her or the folks that I appointed to the committee.
I said, Roslyn, write the damn thing.
I've got too much to do to try to
organize for the first city
in which is going to be on the 15th,
a few days later after that was published.
And so she wrote it.
Julian Bond assisted her by typing it, I understand.
But it was her work on Dr. Roslyn Pope.
>> Who paid for it to go into the paper?
>> Dr. Clement raised
$12,000 and it cost
about 4,000 for it to go in the newspapers.
And so he kept the 8,000 there
for use if he wanted to use it later on.
We never did get back. We need the money.
But Clement did it, Dr. Rufus Clement.
>> Do you still have a copy of that newspaper?
>> Oh, I have a copy of the appeal.
I don't have a copy of the newspaper.
I have a copy of the appeal. I guess I could probably.
>> We're going to try and get a copy of the newspaper.
>> The newspaper. [OVERLAPPING]
>> March the 5th.
>> It was March the 9th, 1960.
>> 1960.
>> In all three papers.
The line of journal, a line of
Constitution, a line of world.
It also was reprinted in the New York Times,
a full page, which somebody paid for.
And then Senator Jacob Javits of New York,
read it into the congressional record,
and it's now part of
posterity in the records of the United States Congress.
It was also reproduced by the Harvard Crimson newspaper.
It was also reproduced by the Nation Magazine,
which was around at that time,
about 100 and something years old.
I think it was about April 2th,
1960 was when they ran the ad.
>> Is Roslyn one of the people
we're going to interview she still with?
>> Yes. I hope so.
>> Awesome. Let me think.
You think of a question for me to ask?
I'm going to rotate some other people through.
I have lots more questions for you,
so we're going to have to sit down another time
outside of this for us to do some more stuff.
So let me see if there's some you can cut.
I'm going to see if there's some,
Janie wants to come in or.
>> Rolling B.
>> Lonnie King, 719, take two.
So we stopped when
the appeal for human rights made it to New York.
What happened after that?
Where was there more planning?
>> Yes. We were on two tiers.
My good friend Joe Pierce,
who has been lost in the dustbins of history.
He was my major organizer with me.
And I had Julian and Roslyn
over there write in the appeal.
Roslyn wrote it, but Julian typed it.
So we had a division of labor.
We knew that we were going to move on 15th March,
beware the hides of March.
That's why we chose that date.
So we wanted the appeal to go out on the 9th and
a few days later before people got
accustomed to having read the appeal,
we wanted to shock them because here we are.
And I need to tell you that when that appeal appeared,
the governor Vander at that time,
said that this appeal was so well written until it
could not have been written by any
college student in Georgia.
It had to have been written in Moscow.
Because mind you now,
as late as 1960s,
we had this Russian scare.
We were allies, as you know,
with Russia during the Second World War,
but somehow or another,
very quickly after that war ended,
Stalin and the United States became somewhat enemies.
And that, as you know,
continued for a long period of time.
But we began on 15th March at 11:00 in the morning.
And we went to only public institutions at first.
If they were tax supported like
the Fulton County courthouse,
the City of Atlanta, cafeteria, all public institutions.
The reason for that is because
the college presidents wanted
us to go if you're going to do it,
you go to those places that are supported by
taxpayers and the law is such that you win
that battle eventually because
the Supreme Court had already ruled that you
couldn't do those things to taxpayers.
So that's why we chose all those public institutions.
And we had about 77 people arrested
on that first day with
those simultaneous city ins going on.
A pandemonium broke out in
the city because a lot of people
did not know you had that many students
who were African Americans who were going to
school because the white Atlanta didn't know
a thing about what was happening
over there on the south side of town.
And so they were in shock as to what happened.
Now, they'd heard about what happened in
Greensboro and what had happened in some other places.
But I think a lot of people felt.
In fact, there was some prominent person as I remember,
made a comment in the newspaper
that we won't have that in
Atlanta because the Atlanta students
are too intelligent to do that.
They were appealing to our egos
to go along with the segregation.
But once we had that city in,
it galvanized the other college students in town.
And it also was
a shock in
the African American community and the white community.
But they weren't too shocked, I guess,
that it happened because
it happened in Greensboro earlier and other places.
But when you have
a motto coming from
the mayor saying that this is a city too busy to hate,
and you have a history of of
Atlanta accommodating
people's rights give you a little bit,
so you don't ask for a lot.
A lot of that was going on. And so I think they
really wanted us to follow the courts,
let the federal courts make the decision.
And that's why we went to all public places.
And we ultimately won that case, by the way, later on.
But after we appeased
the college presidents and
we did what they asked us to do,
we then made it very clear that we needed
to go over the summer and take
on Richards Department Store
and downtown Atlanta, period.
And that came from the education that I
got in economics and Morehouse,
in terms of how you can leverage economic buying power.
>> So the Appeal for Human Rights came out in
the newspaper and you guys
started everything on March 15th.
You actually sat down on March 15th.
What happened in those days in between?
>> We were planning.
>> How are you planning?
>> Well, we
chose all the public
institutions that we wanted to go to.
I think that might have been 9 or 11.
I'm not sure. One of those two numbers.
And we chose teams.
Like Julian headed one team, they went to City Hall.
John Mack from AU headed another team.
John and Parm headed a team that went up to
the Peachtree seventh Street
building, the federal building.
So we had about 9-11 teams headed
by senior people who were all graduate students,
for that matter, who were a little bit more mature
and who had demonstrated
that they had leadership ability.
And it worked out. I worked out fine.
Now, what happened is that the police in
Atlanta did not treat us
the way they were treating people in those smaller towns.
The only persons that I've heard of who
were indirectly abused by
the police were the Whites, who were helping us.
And I did not know it was happening until when I read
some accounts of one of the policemen.
One of the Black policemen
wrote I guess you could say, an autobiography.
And in reading the autobiography,
he talked about the Syrians and what
they did to the white people who really sat in with us.
At that time, Whites
and Blacks didn't ride in the same paddy wagon.
We had segregation from birth to grave.
And so what I learned from
this gentleman's autobiography is
that these persons who would drive the Whites to jail,
they would speed up and stop,
hit the brakes, speed up, hit the brakes.
And I had never heard of something called
a rough ride until I started reading this.
I said, those kids had to go through that?
But that also tells you how people really felt when they
got behind closed doors like a police van to show,
we will show you, white folks.
I'm sure they called them
nigger lovers, and that was the expression.
>> So where did you guys come together to meet?
>> Well, we initially met in a place called
Sale Hall Annex at Morehouse Campers.
About 23, 24 people came to that meeting.
Not one lady, all guys.
And I was a little
stressed because I thought
we ought to have some ladies there.
So I called my mother that night and
I told her about the meeting and what have you.
I said I'm a little distressed
because we had no women there.
She said, well, go over to Spelman.
I said, mom, I don't know a soul at Spelman.
She said, but they know you. I said, wow.
She said, don't you run that touchdown
on Saturday afternoon?
I said, yeah. She said,
they know you by name.
And so I went to Spelman, and she was right.
We were able to get some people to join us.
But it's amazing how these things happen.
Just before I went over to Spelman,
I got this call from Dr. Manley,
who was the president of Spelman,
and who was a part of the council of College Presidents.
He wanted me to come over and have
a debate with Dr. Roy Wilkins,
who head the NAACP.
So I went over there around
the fifth of April,
I guess it was, to
speak to the ladies at Spelman in Sisters Chapel.
Mr. Wilkins was first and I was second.
And of course, Dr. Manley was the moderator.
Dr. Wilkins got up and spoke and I tell
you, he was magnificent.
About 6''3', 6''4',
well-dressed Brahman kind of person, highly educated.
And when he finished talking,
the young ladies were they were all excited
because he was he was just so great.
And I felt like I was
the lamb being led to the slaughter.
So when he sat down,
Dr. Manley, the president said,
Mr. King, it's your time.
And so I went to the guillotine and started talking.
>> Well, what was he saying?
>> Mr. Wilkins wanted us to go back to class,
let the NAACP and
the legal defense fund handle these matters.
And when you finish college,
come on and join us because this is a long struggle
and we need new troops
to keep replenishing and what have you.
It was an excellent speech.
It made a lot of sense.
But I was reminded before I went up there
for that slaughter of
what I had learned at Spelman, by the way,
when I took speech from them,
that if you're outclassed in a debate,
find a way to give great praise to
your opponent and agree with all of
the things that opponent might have said.
Then you find some scintilla if at
all of difference in your position and his position.
So when I got up and made my speech,
I praised the NAACP for what they had done since 1909,
long before I was born,
and how they had been on the case
when we couldn't get on the case because we might get
lynched and then at a certain point,
after praising Dr. Wilkins, I said,
but the time has
come when the class has to speak for itself.
Because if we continue doing it
the way you've been doing it,
the White South is prepared
for another century of litigation.
I said, we want freedom now.
And I went on to lay out
why we were doing what we were trying to do,
with all due respect to what you've done,
Mr. Wilkins and Dr. Manley.
And when I sat down in a storm,
young ladies were on their feet. They were on their feet.
And Dr. Wilkins looked at me and he did this.
And we were friends until he died.
>> I just lost all my questions in that story.
That was a really good story [LAUGHTER]
So let's talk about the day.
Was there just the one sitting at Richards or
did you do it over a few different times?
>> Let me explain that. We started out.
We didn't go to Richards on March 15.
They were all federal places;
state-supported or tax-supported places.
We realized that we had to really break down riches.
>> Why riches specifically?
>> Well, let me take you back.
John Foster Dulles was Secretary of
State during the Eisenhower days.
And the big discussion
within foreign policy at that time was what
are we going to do about
the Koreans and the people
in North Korea and South Korea, and what have you?
And what we're going to do about the Communists.
John Foster Dulles position was that if we allow
the Communists to get a foothold
in that part of the Pacific Basin,
then the rest of those countries over
there will fall like dominoes,
just one after the other.
We had to stop communism.
Well, from my perspective,
Richards was the style leader.
They sold over 58%
of all the merchandise in
the southeast of all the places.
It was the largest department store
outside of New York coming this way.
And if we could break Richards Department Store,
then the rest of the stores would fall like Domino's.
And that was our strategy.
So [NOISE] I explained to Dr. Mays,
President of Morehouse,
where we were going with this.
And he did not disagree with me.
He didn't say yes or no, he just listened.
So we began to organize for a boycott on
the Richards Department Store with
other stores being caught
up because they were down there.
And we began [NOISE] in June of 1960
when I went down to
Richards Department Store and
went to the Magnolia Room to be served.
And I took with me, Dr. Howard Zen and his wife
and daughter they didn't serve us.
They closed up. But then
they took me down to the police station.
And when we got there, they said,
the chief wants to see you in this conference room.
So when I got to the conference room,
Chief Jenkins is there, Dick Rich,
who had Richards is there,
and I was put on the other side.
Richards was over here, I was
here, the chief was in the middle.
He was like mediator.
So Dick Rich [NOISE] made it very clear
that he did not
like the fact that we were taking on his store.
He told me how much money he had
given to the Black colleges.
He talked about how they were the first ones to put Mrs
and Mr on people's accounts, and what have you.
He described a very paternalistic system,
but one wherein Richards had one eye,
and the rest of the people were blind.
And so [NOISE] he told me
that if I brought my black ass back into his store again,
that he was going to have the chief
put me under the jail.
And so that's all he had to say.
It was my time to speak.
And I said, Mr. Rich,
and I thanked him for the contributions that he had
made to the Black colleges and all that.
I said, we need to end this segregation.
And I'm coming back in the fall,
and I'm going to bring thousands of students with me,
and we're going to make sure
that we open up Richards Department Store.
Dick Rich turned red as a beat, jumped up,
said a few nasty things, and walked out.
I never saw him again.
So then they took me back to my office.
The police chief did.
[NOISE] And I then
began to plan for the October surprise.
I couldn't do it during the summer
because the students weren't here.
So we planned on October 19.
And while I was planning,
we also noticed that that was the first year of
the presidential debates between
Richard Nixon and John Kennedy.
It was a novelty because this had never happened before.
Roosevelt and Truman had talked about debates,
or what have you on radio,
but never on TV.
So I decided that
we needed to put on the debate calendar,
some discussion of civil and human rights.
But the Kennedy people
and the Nixon people never talked about.
Every town almost where they were college students,
they were raising sand about segregation.
So I decided that we needed to put
this issue of civil and human rights
on the burner and make the Kennedy,
Nixon people discuss it.
They were discussing foreign policy.
So I called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,
whom I've known since childhood,
and told him that I wanted him to
join me on October the 19th
at 10:00 at Richards Department Store on the bridge.
I said, we got to take
this thing out here all the way out.
He agreed that he would come.
And so then I started
planning all the different
places that we were going to go on
that date because the students were coming in
the last week of August and I needed
to orient the ones who are going to be new,
were taking other people's places who graduated and
get them to agree that
we were going to do this on the 19th.
And I made my presentation to the new body,
and my plans were objected to by Bernard Lee,
who had been a student at Alabama State,
but who had been kicked out by the governor.
And also, believe it or not,
AD King, Martin King's brother,
they joined a little group and they were saying,
we need to go down now,
not wait until October.
But thanks to the ladies from Spelman,
who joined with the guys from Morehouse,
I was able to prevail because the point I made
was that you just gotten back in school,
we need to organize this thing so that on the 19th,
we are ready to go.
I said, you ought to get your classes
all signed up and everything.
It makes no sense. Let's plan it.
I prevailed on that.
And so on 19th of October,
we hit a lot of different places
on that date simultaneously.
And of course, October the 19 was
the day that we took King to jail.
The idea of taking him to jail was to make it an
international issue because he built
a tremendous reputation from
Montgomery five years earlier.
But he hadn't done that much since then.
And so we were able to convince them to
go down there and join us.
And it went all over the world.
The Kennedys got involved
peripherally and Nixon was going to get involved.
But then the old man,
Ismahower suggested that he not get involved.
So it was just the Kennedys who
through Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford,
who was the special assistant,
they got involved and were able
to be a part of the group that got
King out of jail from down in Reidsville.
I really think they intended to kill him
down there because they took him
out in the middle of the night in a paddy wagon
with him and a German shepherd who was
not leased up in the back.
So I think they were going to do him in.
But thank God we had all that other stuff going on.
Richard Nixon was too timid.
Kennedy got involved.
And once we got King out of jail,
the Kennedys put out
11 million flyers on something called the Blue Bomb.
I can get you a copy of the
Blue Bomb if you'd like to see it.
>> Absolutely.
>> That blue bomb was sent out by
all the different denominations
in the African American community.
And mind you, two weeks before the election,
Nixon was leading John Kennedy by double digits.
Once we took King to jail and the Blue Bomb went
out and the votes were
held on that first Tuesday in November,
the African American community switched from
voting Republican to voting
Democrat and voting for Kennedy.
And that was the difference in that election.
And you've had some people say, Oh,
we had some dead people voting in Chicago.
I don't doubt that might have happened.
But it was live bodies in Los Angeles and San Francisco,
in Miami, in New York,
who had been voting Republican since Abraham Lincoln,
except for Roosevelt's time
and Truman's time who switched.
And the irony of it all is that the switching
of people of people's allegiance by race
in this country in the South
occurred after the 1960 election
because the whites in the South from Texas to Maryland,
from dogcatcher to senator and governor,
they were all Democrats at every level.
Once the 1960 thing happened,
the Whites in the South began to move
from being Democrats to Republicans.
They took over the Republican Party
in the South that was being run by Blacks.
They just came to a meeting and just took them over.
And so now every person from Dogcatcher
in Texas all the way up to at least maybe South Carolina,
if not some parts of North Carolina,
they're all now Republicans.
But they appropriated the name conservative
to replace segregationist because that's
what they were until William F. Buckley
in 1955 suggested that you
change your name from segregationist to
conservative in line with the political Party in England.
So that's why you see people talking about conservatism.
It meant race, all this stuff about fiscal trickle-down,
that's all added to it.
It's really about race.
And you see it today with Donald Trump,
who still supports him with all of his foibles,
who is still lined
up like in lockstep to support this man.
It's coming from the south and southwest.
Don't bother me, about what he said,
my mind is made up. He's our man.
>> So going all the way back to March 15th,
what did they do at the taxpayer?
They went to the different federal buildings
and city buildings.
What did they do while they were there?
>> Well, we sat in and they all got arrested.
I wasn't arrested on the March the 15th.
I was the commander-in-chief,
so I was at headquarters.
>> But when you say sitting,
not everybody understands what that means.
>> We went to a segregated lunch counter
that only served twice,
and we sat down and demanded service.
And in demanding service,
we were violating the anti-trespass laws
that were passed all over
the South to thwart the students from sitting in.
In other words, you could go to jail
for up to six months,
I think it was, if you were convicted.
It was designed to use
the legal system as a way of supporting segregation.
>> So this all happened on March 15th?
>> Right.
>> What were you doing while all this was going down?
>> I was at Command Central getting reports.
At that time, I was
in Dr. Rufus Clement's conference room,
the President of AU.
And so I was there and I had
spotters all over the town
letting me know what's going on,
and I kept track of it that way.
But later on by October the 19th,
Dr. Clement had kicked me out of
his office and I'd gone to Rush Memorial Church.
So I was at Command Central on that day, but I also.
No, I left Command Central on
that day to go to jail down at Richard's.
>> But you said there were 24, 25 men,
and then how many Spelman women
joined in on that first initial?
>> Well, the first meeting was about 23
persons, all men,
but the Spelman ladies,
the first time that they had a chance to really
participate with us was on May 17th, 1960.
We had a march on
downtown Atlanta ending at
Green Street Baptist Church to
commemorate the Brown decision of '54,
it had gone on six years earlier.
The Spelman women were there.
That's when they really showed up.
And it was after I had made
that speech over there asking them to join us.
So they were there and they
worked with us all during the summer,
those of them who were in town during
the summer worked with us as we planned for the fall.
>> Do you recall who were the key leaders of the group?
You mentioned Julian Bond and Roslyn Pope.
>> Well, let me go through. Let me see.
At Spelman, the first three representatives
from Spelman were Marian Wright Edelman,
who heads the Children's Defense Fund now,
you had Roslyn Pope who wrote the appeal,
and you had Josephine Jackson.
Josephine was the other representative,
but she never did anything.
She came to the meeting, but she wouldn't go to jail.
She was just there.
In September, the Spelman ladies
were Herchelle Sullivan Challenor.
She took over from Roslyn,
Norma June Wilson,
came in and took over to represent Spelman,
and so did Lenora Tate.
They were the three official
representatives from Spelman.
Now, other ladies from Spelman would come.
But when it came to voting,
those three people had the votes legally from Spelman.
Of course, you had Morehouse and the ITC,
and Clock, and AU.
The committee was made up of 19 members,
three from each college, plus the chairman.
There was six colleges,
which is 18, and then I was the 19th person.
>> So when you were at Rich's Department Store,
what was the scene like?
>> On the 19th?
>> Yes.
>> Well, Dr.
King and the two ladies and I went
to the Bridge Cafeteria.
The Bridge is still there,
but it's a federal building now.
But that building there, on Forsyth Street,
that bridge, that's where we went.
When we got there, they closed down
the cafeteria, snack bar, whatever.
So then I said, let's go to the sixth floor.
And so we turned around and went to
the sixth floor to the Magnolia Room.
Now, the Magnolia Room was the most prestigious,
I guess, restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia.
And they had these African American ladies
who wore picky minnie outfits.
By that I mean, they have all
these black outfits with a little trimming,
like antebellum things.
So when we got there,
I guess Dick Rich or somebody made
the decision to arrest us.
And so we got arrested and they took us on down to jail.
And when we were called for before the judge,
Dr. King made a great speech.
He had written out a speech
on the injustice of what was going on,
and he went on to say that if I have to stay in jail,
whatever, then I'll do that.
He was the only one who actually spoke.
The rest of us didn't have to speak because he said it,
it would be redundant for anybody else to talk.
And they put us in jail.
They took us out, it
was a new prison then on Jefferson Street.
And so Dr. King and I were in this one cell,
and then they had all the rest of the young folks.
We took up a great part of the jail out there.
In fact, they had to send for some mattresses from
some adjoining counties in order to accommodate us.
>> How many of you were there?
>> On the 19th, we must
have had over 100 and some people arrested that day.
I have to go back and look at the actual records,
but they had to go get
beds from other places in order to accommodate us.
And it was jail, no bail. Which really upset them.
>> So you all were on
The Bridge and headed up to the Magnolia Room.
What were the other 100-something people doing?
>> We were all over town.
>> Like where?
>> Davison's Department Store,
it's called Davison-Paxson, Woolworths,
W. T. Grant, H. L. Green,
every eating place downtown, we covered it.
>> Awesome.
>> And we were pushing the boycott, too.
I was in jail, so I didn't really see all.
That's what I read about it.
We had pickets during that campaign,
three feet apart with
picket signs that stretched
from Forsyth Street and Mitchell Street,
down to Whitehall, which is really Peachtree Street now,
all the way up to Ellis Street,
where Davison-Paxson was,
and then back down that street,
Forsyth Street, back down to where the line began.
There were over 2,000 students, three feet apart,
who were out there demonstrating on the 19th of October.
>> Which do you think was more effective,
the sit-ins or the picketing?
>> I think it's very difficult to say one was
superior to the other
because I think they all occurred simultaneously.
And I'd have to say that the shock was
the most effective thing
because it did two things: Number 1,
it aroused the aspirations and hopes and dreams of
African Americans whose grandparents
had been slaves and what have you,
and whose parents were most of them in menial jobs.
I think that was a very uplifting thing for them.
But it also served notice on the white community that
had been very vicious
in terms of race relations since 1619.
It served notice on them that
the young African Americans or
young Negroes were not going to sit
idly by and just watch
another century of this stuff
going on because it was very
clear that if it had not been for
the thousands of college kids
who got out here and raised holy heck,
the South would still be segregated.
They did not take down the signs voluntarily.
Of course, the Civil Rights Bill on '64 wiped them out,
but these young folks were making them take down
those signs all over
the south before the law was changed.
>> I have some after questions that you want to ask.
So after the smoke cleared [OVERLAPPING] [LAUGHTER].
>> There was a lot of smoke.
But after Martin Luther King Jr. got released from jail,
what did you do after?
What did you guys do to continue
to make sure that these things happened?
>> We started over the summer,
putting out something called the Student Movement
and You publication,
then we helped start the Atlanta Inquirer newspaper.
And so every Sunday,
when the paper came out,
we were able to use the paper as
our propaganda tool for the movement.
We also asked people
of goodwill to send
me their credit cards from Richards Department Store.
Two hundred and fifty-four people
sent me their credit cards.
And I ask you rhetorically,
would you send your credit card to
a college kid who spied the movement?
But the mere fact that they sent
the credit cards and we put them in
Citizens Trust Bank and Mr. Charles Black
gave them back when the boycott
was over because I'd gone by that time,
that told us that if people are willing to
trust a college kid
with their credit card that they don't know,
we had reached the [inaudible],
we had reached the soul of these people,
and they were prepared to
do what they had to do in order to make it work.
They trusted us and we didn't let them down.
Everybody got that credit card back.
But what I did not know until I went out to Richard's,
and I haven't seen all the files out there.
But there were a number of people who sent
their credit cards into Richard's,
they didn't trust these kids.
So they sent them into Richards Department Store.
I haven't counted up how many were sent out there,
but I do know that there were
some who went directly to Richard's,
and also wrote letters to Richard's,
indicating that they did not
like the segregation and what have you.
That was going on. Now, we also found out belatedly,
when I did go out there a few years ago to look at some
of the files, even before 1960,
there were some African Americans in town who
were petitioning in writing,
asking them to end the segregation.
And they were middle-class ladies.
They were doctors' wives, and dentists' wives,
and school teachers, and what have you.
But it's clear to me, though,
it never would have happened had there not been pressure.
And it was economic pressure that made the difference.
>> Well, I think that's a good question,
is these people that sent you their credit cards,
why didn't they do something sooner?
Why do you think it took for you to
ask them to boycott for them to do it?
>> Well, I
don't think anybody other than God can answer that.
And looking at the history of movements,
why is it that all of a sudden,
these folks have been
enduring this for centuries or years,
and what have you, all of a sudden,
Eureka, I'm going to take a stand.
So all I can say to you is that there must have
been an underbelly of
resentment for the treatment that
African Americans were receiving.
And I think that the folks did
not feel that there was any way to overcome,
this because the folks who
were mistreating the African Americans had the guns,
all of that, had all the opportunities.
The only thing African Americans had
were their bodies and their dollars.
And once you showed them how they
could use their dollars,
we became the bodies,
the young people became the bodies, the foot soldiers.
We didn't have any money. The folks who had the money,
although it was not that much money,
but collectively, it was a lot of money.
So when you influence
that group of folks with their nickels and
dimes to hold them and wore old clothes with new dignity.
It was a propaganda campaign,
and we sold with people on standing up for their rights,
and you could stand up for your rights
without risking yourself.
We'll take the risk.
We'll take the blows.
You just don't shop downtown.
Just stay at home.
Wear old clothes with new dignity.
One of my good friends who went to
elementary high school with me,
I was talking to her recently,
and she brought up the whole idea of the boycott.
So she introduced me to her children and
her grandchildren because I
had not seen them in a long time.
And so she told me what she did in 1960.
She had just gotten married and had a baby in 1960.
And so her husband was going to
go and buy the clothes
for the baby from Richards Department Store.
And so she said, "Oh, no, no, no.
I have a cousin who had a baby and the baby's grown up.
I'm going to get these old clothes,
and my baby is going to wear these old clothes."
And they did not buy, she told me,
any new clothes for
the baby until after the boycott was over.
So what am I saying?
You had people whose dreams had been deferred.
Maybe next year, things will be better.
Maybe next year, maybe next it was going to be
maybe it's going to be maybe
next century, it was going to get better.
Power gives up nothing without a struggle.
Never has and never will.
>> Wow.
Do you have anything you want to ask?
>> We talked about this before.
I know that you wanted
to say a little bit about Joe Pierce.
>> Oh, yes, yes.
>> And I think it's important since he's no longer with
us because he was your right hand man.
And he was one of
the tragedies instead of the successes of the movement.
>> Joe becomes not just a tragedy.
Joe becomes a metaphor of the system that
was in place at that time.
Joe and I were friends from high school,
all the way through, same homeroom.
And went in the navy together.
But he was older than me by about 18 months.
So he had to serve four years in the navy,
and I only served three because I was
younger and I got out on a kiddy cruise.
Well, by this time, I came back in '57,
he came back in '58 to Morehouse.
And we had breakfast, I guess,
almost every morning down at the drugstore.
So when the young people sat down in Greensboro on the
first I was reading the newspaper
and Joe came in and I said,
"Joe, read this." He did.
I said, "Joe, we should not let those folks in
Greensboro go out here by
themselves because segregation is ubiquitous.
It exists all over the South and Southwest."
And I said, "Joe,
remember the panty raids?"
He said, "Yeah, I remember them." I said,
"If we can start something.
Like the panty raids,
it'll catch on on all these campuses because they are
similarly situated in terms
of their being denied opportunities."
So he said," Well,
let's do it." I said, "Okay."
I said, "See that guy over there?
His name is Julian Bond."
I said, "I met him when I came back last year.
I was in the line registering and at that time,
you had to be in the line almost all
day in order to register.
And so I got to know him
after talking to him for about 12 hours."
I said, "He's a writer.
He wrote for Time Magazine,
as an intern when he was in high school."
I said, "We need someone who can tell the story.
That we're going to create, but we need to tell it."
And so we went over to talk to Julian
and I told him what we wanted him to do.
He was reluctant. He said,
"Well, somebody's going to do it."
I said, "No, we want you to do it."
And so he said, "Okay," we all
started organizing the three of us.
We planned it out for us
to have the first sit in on March 15.
AD King, Martin King's brother recommended that.
He talked about the Ides of March, March 15.
That's why we chose that because AD recommended it.
That's why we did that.
On March the 15th,
I got a telephone call at 6:30 in the morning.
It was from Joe Pierce.
He was crying. I said, "What's the matter, Joe?"
He said, "Lana, I got to let you down today.
I can't do it."
I said, "Why?"
He said, "Well, my aunt thinks she'll lose
her job if I get arrested." She was a schoolteacher.
Miss Alan Pierce, his name was Joseph Pierce.
And I trust you, they would have looked it up.
So he dropped out
because his aunt thought she might lose her job.
And Joe was never the same.
He dropped out of Morehouse.
He did odd jobs.
And I only got
a chance to see him twice after that before he died.
He died a couple of years ago.
He wouldn't return my telephone calls.
I saw him out once or twice.
So finally, when I came back to Atlanta in
2006, I called him.
Left message, no answer.
So finally, I called his sister
Ellen, and I said, "Ellen,
I've been trying to reach your brother for years,
just to sit down and talk to him."
She said, "Lana,
give me your phone number, where you are."
So I gave it to him.
She said, "He'll call you right back."
Sure enough, he called me back in less than a minute.
I said, "Man, why have you been
so difficult for me to talk all these years?
I've been trying." He never answered that question.
So we talked about what he'd
been doing, this, that and the other.
But he didn't tell me this, but I'm speculating.
That with all the accolades and
other things that have happened to
me and others in that movement,
in Atlanta, Georgia,
the second name would have been
Joseph Pierce along with me.
But for the system that his aunt was in,
he would have been there, but he had
to respect his aunt's wishes.
Not just because she was his aunt,
but Joe and his sister, Ellen,
their parents were killed in Athens,
Georgia in an automobile accident at the same time.
So Miss Ellen took
her brother's children and raised
them from little Perth kids to where they are.
So he had a double duty as he saw
it to not dishonor the wishes of his aunt.
But outstanding brilliant man,
much smarter than me, much smarter than I am.
But the sister cheer him up.
Cheer him up.
>> After that one time you talked,
did he ever call you back?
>> No. His sister called
me and told me he had died about a year later.
She said, "Can I get you to
come to the funeral?" I said, "I'll be there."
But that's one of the tragedies of the system.
But let me point out but it wasn't how should I put it.
It was an isolated thing.
It wasn't the boogie mad is coming.
Approximately 1955, the Attorney General
of Georgia trying to follow what happened in Alabama,
wanted to get rid of the NAACP in
Georgia and specifically in Atlanta.
And so they passed a law.
The Attorney General has a law on
the books where they could
fire somebody if they were
a member of the National
Association of Advancement of Color People.
And therefore, his aunt
was looking out for
how am I going to pay my bills if I'm fired?
That was the kind of system that
was going on at that time.
It sounds incredulous.
And most of that stuff is in writing.
Nobody talks about it, but it's in writing.
>> Right. It's a hard situation
to be in you want to march
so that you don't have to
possibly lose your job for marching.
>> Well, let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something.
When you look at this thing in retrospect,
white women made up
the bulk of the abolitionist movement.
About 100 and some thousand of them supported
Frederick Douglas and all the rest of
these people who were involved in that movement.
White women's position was that if we
can get some freedom for African Americans,
we'll get some freedom too.
Frederick Douglas made in my opinion,
a pivotal decision that slowed
down black women and
white women and other all working together.
When they were putting together the 15th Amendment,
when it came to voting rights,
Lincoln conferred with him.
And the way it was originally drafted was
for black men and for women and men of color,
just women and black folks could get their voting rights.
That's how Lincoln had it.
When Frederick Douglas took the position that
the black man is
a person who needs to have the right to vote.
He's a homemaker, this that and the other.
Women don't need this law.
And so Lincoln bought what he said.
So women got left out of the 15th Amendment
because Douglas didn't push for them.
So women got mad with Douglas,
they called him a bunch of names and what have you.
And then they went on their own
and they fought until 1920.
That's when they got the right to vote.
Wyoming, I think, might have let
a lady or two vote out there in the West.
>> There were only seven people
in the state at the time, so.
>> The bottom line is that that was a tragedy that
women had to go the other way because I
think if I'd have been around,
I would have said, "Mr. Douglas you're making a mistake."
>> Right.
>> Yeah. But the women came back to the movement in 1960.
White women did come back
and they started working with us.
And a lot of those laws that were
pushed through were pushed
through with the help of white women.
And I think white women
have done very well with these laws.
You can turn on TV everywhere.
Women are doing things that they were
not allowed to do early on.
They had the ability, but it's the sexual prejudice.
>> It's the opportunity.
>> They kept you out. They kept you out.
>> Yeah.
>> We have to stop.
>> Okay. Sorry. Stewart coming in.
>> Say that again.
>> I'm sorry. I'm so long.
>> No, no, no, no.
And we're going to sit down with you
again and we're going to get some more.
>> No, not yet.
>> This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I got a lot more questions to ask you.
>> But I know that today you really wanted to talk about
Joe before we got too far into this,
because he was in the beginning.
You guys were together your whole young life.
>> From eighth grade. Yeah. When we
became seniors at our old high,
Joe came in and said,
"Lana you ought to run for president of SGA."
And I said, "Oh, no."
He said, "You can win" I said Joe no, no, no, no."
Vernon Jordan was running.
I said, "Man, this guy has a suit for
every day of the week. No."
>> But you need to open up the door and step
out to shoot in to give you some more depth.
>> But then there was a penalty because
you beat him eight to one.
>> Well, actually, it was ten to one.
>> Ten to one.
>> Yeah.
>> So you beat Vernon Jordan,
but there was a penalty to be paid for that.
>> Let me just put it like this. I was
able to win the election.
The woman that Brennan was dating at the time,
ended up marrying me.
>> You just took him down all the places.
>> Yeah. I'm like his nemesis.
I didn't ask for it, but it ended up that way.
>> Awesome.
>> Yeah.
>> That he got the scholarship from Morehouse too.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> And you got the half one.
>> I got $150.
>> Because some folks
didn't like the fact that you beat him.
>> Yeah, what's the name,
the counselor. The counselor didn't like it.
>> Yeah.
>> The slate.