>> Roslyn Pope, scene 1,
take 1. One moment.
Get settled here. And whenever you're ready.
>> So as part of
our Democracy Doesn't Run on Cruise Control Project,
I'm talking today with Dr. Roslyn Pope,
who was one of the founding members of
the brain trust that is
the Atlanta Student Movement that
changed our history forever.
And thank you so
much for sitting with us and talking with us again.
>> Thank you.
>> I am transformed when we talk.
And so forgive me if
I'm not quite being as scholarly or academic as I should,
but your words always transform me.
>> I appreciate that.
>> So to start by
just telling me and just for the record,
just a little bit about yourself
where you were born and where
you went to school and how you ended up at Spelman.
>> Well, I'm a native Atlantan.
I was born on the southwest side of
Atlanta on a street that was named Ashby Street.
The number was 53 Ashby Street.
And I came to discover later in
life that my father had
bought our house from Howard Thurman.
And so it's so extraordinary to me that I grew
up and I have the transfer of
the deed from Howard Thurman to my dad.
And so that's very special.
I hope that the viewers will
know who Howard Thurman is or will find out.
Once I discovered it,
that was very meaningful for me.
But I lived on Ashby Street.
It's now named after Reverend Joseph Lowery.
And at first I was distressed that
the street name had been changed because
53 Ashby Street had been with me forever.
And then I discovered what a horrible
Civil War general that Ashby was.
>> Really? I did not know that.
>> All of the streets in that neighborhood,
there's a Lee Street that they want to
change very soon and
Beckwith and all of the streets in
our neighborhood were named after these Civil War people.
>> I did not know that.
>> Yeah, It's incredible.
So they're being changed one by one.
But I am one of three children,
and I'm the oldest.
My parents were wonderful.
My father was fortunate enough to work at the post office
and not many black people
worked as clerks in the post office,
but he was there for 40 years.
I attended the street that used to be called
Ashby Street School and then was named after E.R Carter.
E.R Carter had been
the pastor of Friendship Baptist Church where
I grew up and he was pastor there for 62 years.
So when my brother and I started,
I was four, and he was two,
E.R Carter was still there at Friendship,
but not very long after that.
I'll just digress a minute and talk about
Friendship Baptist Church because after E.R Carter,
who was also the name of our school,
the name of the pastor, the name of the school.
So that's an important name,
but the person who succeeded him was Maynard Jackson.
Maynard Jackson had moved with
his family from Dallas, Texas.
He came with his wife,
Irene Dobbs Jackson,
one of the daughters of John Wesley Dobbs.
They came with their six children
from late teens to little bitties.
And so I grew up with
the Maynard Jackson family including my friend Maynard,
who became mayor of Atlanta
and has done all kinds of marvelous things.
So I was baptized by Maynard Jackson Sr.
So anyway, that's just a little aside.
But back to 53 Ashby Street,
I was close to Washington High School,
which was the first high school for black citizens.
So I graduated from there.
My desire had been to attend Oberlin University
because I had started piano when I was
five years old and by
the time I was graduating from high school,
I was pretty accomplished and
in fact was accepted at Oberlin with a scholarship,
but my daddy put
his foot down and said you're going to Spelman.
And so I was upset initially,
but it turned out to be the best place that I
could have gone from high school to Spelman.
>> And then you studied abroad.
>> And then I studied abroad after my junior year.
I was thrown right into
the governance of the student body.
I was president of
the freshman class, the sophomore class,
the junior class, and then I was elected
president of the student body while I was abroad.
So when I came back ready to change the world,
I already was in a position where I would be on
the initial committee that turned out
to be named the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights.
>> I wanted to digress just a minute if I could,
because one of the things you and I had talked
about a few months ago when we
met was that experience of living
abroad and how equality was
normal and then having to come back to
an American South where there was
no equality and how that impacted you.
>> Well, it was a revelation back in 1958, maybe.
People didn't fly to Europe.
They went by ship.
And so I had sailed from Montreal on a wonderful line.
And the first experience I had
with people outside of my normal existence was
the people that I traveled with on
the ship who were actually
so cordial and so warm and my growing up in segregation,
this was not an experience that I had had prior to that,
except on certain little committees,
and then I had played on
a concert of the Atlanta Symphony.
So I had met, musicians
and people in the university system and all,
but these were strangers
and they just were excited about me.
And in fact, I had a chance to perform at
the captain's cocktail party, I think it was.
And so several of
the passengers took my mother's address.
They wanted to write her and tell
her that I was so special.
But I spent a year in Paris and throughout Europe
and never had to
move to the back of the bus and never was told,
well, you can't eat here.
And I was a normal human being for
the first time because in my
previous prior to Paris life,
I was fenced in.
I was not a free person.
I couldn't go where I wanted and do what I wanted.
And even now I think about those years
when we were using the white students' textbooks,
for example, and they were very old.
>> They were out of date.
>> They were out of date,
they were old and some of them even had
nasty notes in them
assuming that one of us would see them.
But anyway, Paris changed my life.
And then I traveled to England and
Scotland and to Germany and to,
I'm having a moment.
I don't call it a senior moment, it's just a moment.
And went to the Vatican
and at least went around the Vatican, not inside.
So it was a marvelous year
of really finding out who I am without being
transcribed and pinned in and looked down upon.
But by this time, I was 18, 20 years old,
which is a long time to live as a person who's less than.
In fact, well, less than human.
And it's a hard thing to overcome.
But the thing that happened was I came back ready to
fight and to change things,
but I didn't know how that was going to happen.
It was as if this had been
planned that I'd come back mad as hell and then
Lonnie King and Julian Bond would walk up to me while I'm
having coffee in the campus drugstore.
They were very excited
because they had just read the article about
the four gentlemen who
had sat down in Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina.
They became known as the Greensboro Four.
And so it had just come out in the paper,
I think on 22 February,
and Lonnie and Julian were already recruiting,
mostly Lonnie and Julian was coming along as well.
And I said, oh, my God,
yeah, they said, do you want to be involved?
And it was it was like an answer to a prayer.
I came back for
my senior year as president of
the student body and so I was
ready to join any movement that was going to
overhaul the system of
Jim Crow that I had grown up under.
Before we knew it,
the presidents of the colleges,
the six colleges that make up
the Atlanta University Center,
they had discovered that some of
the students were up to something
and they called together
three people from each of the six campuses.
And the people who were naturally going to
be on what turned out to be
the committee were the president of the student body,
the vice president of the student body,
and then one other person
that the president would choose.
So that put me right in line.
The fact that I had been elected president in absentia.
And it's kind of like a puzzle
that just started falling into place.
And so I was there at the initial meeting
with the presidents of the six colleges.
They wanted very much to
dissuade us from taking any sort of
movement to try to undo Jim Crow but we were determined.
It just turned out that way that the
19 of us were all of one mind, the students.
And one of the college presidents.
In fact, it was Dr. Rufus Clement,
who was president of Atlanta University.
There were five colleges and a graduate school.
So he suggested that if they were not able to stop us,
at least he thought that we owed it
to the city of Atlanta to explain
what we planned to do in terms of
demonstrating and why we planned to do it.
And it was like
you have to do this or we'll take harsher measures.
It was like paying the price of
being able to take to the streets.
And so we agreed that
a manifesto would be written and Lonnie King,
I think had named about four or five people to
a committee to work on a document that
would appear in the Atlanta Journal and
Atlanta Constitution and in
the morning and evening papers.
And a couple of days
went by and nothing happened and nobody
was in charge and it's hard to
do a document by committee and finally,
he asked me if I would write it.
People seemed to think I
was an English major when I was really a music major,
but in any case,
it fell to me to write it.
And as it turned out,
it created quite a storm.
There were many people who were,
not black people well,
black people as well,
who thought it was it was going to stir up trouble.
We were trying to
explain that we lived in a terrible system
and that it had to be changed and that we were going to
do everything that we possibly
could to see that it was changed.
And one of the really strange complaints
came from the governor of Georgia.
And I don't have that article with me,
but he accused the writers that first of all,
it couldn't have been written by any student.
By any student, by any college student.
In the State of Georgia.
It was just too good.
It was. And so that was the first thing
and whoever had written it must be
a communist and was someone who was trying to stir
up trouble and disagreement and evil, even.
He used the word evil in his letter that came
out the day after we
had published it within one or two days.
But we began to
look at it as a positive letter.
First of all, he said it was so good,
it couldn't have been written by a student.
And even though he
said it sounded as if it had come
from some communist country,
that kind of thing.
So he was way off the track,
and I think eventually said
he was sorry he had taken that tone.
But it stirred up
quite a commotion coming right after the appeal.
Let me stop for a second.
Is there anything else we need to say about that.
Let me say about the appeal
that the college presidents approved it,
but they also wanted all of the campuses,
all of the students at the six schools to approve it.
So the student body presidents from
the six Atlanta University schools
took a copy and read it to each of the student bodies.
And the document was approved by all six of the schools.
And then as Dr. Clements had said,
it appeared in the Atlanta Constitution
and journal as a full page advertisement.
>> And then it went to the New York Times.
>> It went to the New York Times.
>> Harvard Crimson.
[OVERLAPPING]
>> [BACKGROUND].
>> Exactly.
>> And it was read into the congressional record?
>> Yes. All of the above.
>> The Congressional record
United States of America from the well of that place,
it was read into the record.
>> Yeah. It's quite extraordinary.
>> Yeah it is.
>> And as I look back on writing it,
which I did rather quickly because we had
procrastinated trying to do what couldn't really be done.
I was still writing it at the time that Julian Bond began
to type it on the typewriter of Howard Zinn.
>> So you were still writing
[OVERLAPPING] part of it while.
>> While he's starting to type it. Yes, but.
>> What is it. That's a heavy deadline.
>> It was a heavy deadline.
But it had to be done.
And the more I wrote the more deeply
I felt about what I was
protesting that it really was an evil system,
and many people had fought and died to overthrow it.
And so it began to write itself.
And then we had
these several categories that we wanted to discuss,
and the categories that we're still discussing now
like education and housing.
>> Law enforcement.
>> Exactly.
>> All of those sections.
And it seems as someone who
has read it from a different generation.
What I can say too,
and my students would say the same thing to me,
I deserve a different generation to me.
The sections are intuitive.
They move from one to the other in
a way that makes you think about public institutions,
law enforcement and voting.
Private institutions like concerts
and churches and theaters.
And then moving forward into
education and involved all of those things.
It's written is almost like a tapestry.
It's woven through. It's beautiful.
Just to read it, it's beautiful.
And remind the importance of the content.
But the beauty of the words just woven through.
>> Well, thank you.
>> And it's just pivotal to me.
And I know I'm not supposed to
be doing much of this [OVERLAPPING]
>> No. I want to know.
>> Pivotal, I mean they're life changing.
If people believe them.
And so I did want to know what you thought
about that in terms of your process.
Because I can see the music in it.
And [OVERLAPPING] told me you were
an English major and I trusted him,
I didn't do my search
an English master student so that make sense to me.
So the music also make sense to me.
>> Really?
>> Because it and woven.
>> That's wonderful.
[OVERLAPPING]
>> So in your process,
you probably weren't thinking about
any of that in the process.
You were probably just writing.
>> I was just writing as fast as I could,
but in each section,
I felt a catch
in my heart that when you read about the amount of money
that's spent on white students in
public education and the little fraction
that's spent on Black students.
And the fact that Black students
couldn't go to the University of Georgia,
I have many friends who have degrees from
Northwestern and New York University and
Johns Hopkins and all wonderful schools that
Georgia paid for them to go to to keep
them from going to school in Georgia.
It's incredible, isn't it?
Some of it's so stupid, you wonder how.
>> You wonder how any person
of goodwill couldn't just say no,
we're not doing this and change immediately.
>> Exactly. But the fight goes on.
We still have many of the same issues
and that can be very discouraging.
At that point in time, however,
it got the ball rolling
and and got so many people, more people involved,
the educators and pastors and parents,
and the community joined in and they'd bring food
and drive us around and that sort of thing.
I was not there for the fall semester
because I graduated in May
this was my my last contribution to the college,
but it went on and more and more people joined in.
My parents were so proud.
My father sent copies at Christmas time to
his friends with little Holly things around
the paper edge of the paper,
he was so happy because you think
about what he must have gone through.
When I was born,
he was already in his 40s.
So is that right?
When my parents married,
she was 34. He was 44.
>> And to think of what he went through?
What he lived through?
>> Yes. The worst of it.
>> [BACKGROUND].
>> Yes. He did.
I remember being with him,
say we'd go in the eyeglass place or something like that,
and people would call him by his first name,
young kids, Rogers, how are you doing?
He was Rogers Pope.
And it just would kill me that they had
the nerve because he was a person of great dignity.
But even if he hadn't been.
>> But he was still elder.
>> He was still an elder.
>> That's right. You don't address elders
by name unless they give you permission to do so.
>> Exactly.
>> That is very much
something that having been even raised
and I don't think it's necessarily
a Southern thing that have been raised in the South.
That was exactly how we were raised.
You referred to them by your Honor.
>> Mr.
>> That's right.
>> Mrs.
>> Yes.
>> Miss.
>> Reverend? Doctor. That's what you say.
>> But no matter what the status of a black person was,
they'd be called by the first name. So horrible.
>> So you wrote another appeal in 2000?
>> Oh, yes, I did.
Well, I guess I did.
>> I was going to ask you if you felt like now
you need to be writing one for 2017?
>> I think so. I think now is the time
to pin something else because we are in dire straits.
I call it. And even the gains that we have made,
there were people who would take them away.
And we cursed with
a leader who has no integrity whatsoever.
And so maybe a time.
And there has been
written another appeal for human rights.
But mine wouldn't,
I don't know how this is just you,
just floated that in my little brain.
I don't know. It would be an addendum.
>> And the one that was just written for
the undocumented you and Lonnie were involved in that?
>> Yes.
>> That was that and the Atlanta journal covered that.
[inaudible].
But I think we need you.
Again, I think doctor your voice.
Thank you, Dr. Baughan,
and I will go back.
>> To back to the documents
and let's [inaudible]. You have to do it again?
>> I think it's time.
This is a good time.
So what else do we need to say?
>> Well, so I wanted to know too as a woman.
It's hard for me as a woman in
2017 to imagine what it was like for women
in 1960 and 1959 to take on
these leadership roles because that
wasn't a time where women,
I think we're kind of right at that crux in time where
women were taking on leadership roles, but still.
>> It was early on.
>> Extraordinary. For women to
take on leadership roles and movements
and I wondered if you could just take
it back to you during
that time period and what you felt and how was it.
>> See, I don't think that,
I don't feel that it was an issue
because our main issue was so overwhelming.
And you couldn't do anything that Jim Crow,
had said you couldn't do.
And so you're so caught
up in the fact that you were not a human being,
not being seen as a human being,
that the female, the woman thing was, it didn't come.
>> It had to be secondary.
We do feel that as history has progressed,
that the student movement
set the tone for the women's movement,
for the gay movement for many of the expressions of.
>> Absolutely. Because I know it
was the best organized, the best written.
The main document that came out of it,
the appeal is something that is still
used and still referred to in
its original form by people
seeking basic human rights. Why?
>> Well, that means a lot
and it's very gratifying to know that I sometimes,
I have a friend I've never seen,
but he teaches at New York University and he
teaches his class the appeal
and he calls and talks to me about it and
what caused you to say this, that and the other.
And I've had several teachers
that I didn't even know existed to call to find out more.
So I'm glad that
it's still alive or maybe it's come back to life.
There might have been two or three decades
where it didn't mean as much,
but now it really does.
And we have to keep fighting. It's not over.
There was another thing I wanted to say, it's gone away.
It's funny how at this stage in life,
you don't always have
control over whether the words will come.
You have to work on that.
But I have a cousin who's a psychiatrist and she says,
as long as you remember it by
the next day, it's not so bad.
>> I salute that. You're good.
I love that because that happens to me.
Something will be in my head or my tongue.
[OVERLAPPING]. It's just gone.
>> Well, I think we're overloaded.
>> I do too.
I think there's so much work to be done.
That I live this 24/7
because we get this done here right now.
>> It is, isn't it?
>> It is. I know Lonnie probably told you this,
he went to visit his cousin right after the election.
I believe it was in December
and he happened to see a newspaper at Albany, Georgia.
And the newspaper above the fold headline, nonetheless,
was someone that was excited about the fact
that now we're going to be able to get back.
>> And we are going back.
That's exactly what's happening.
>> For many of us, it has to be a 24/7.
Very stressful time. But you have to,
there's no way not to do it.
>> And it just,
well, I don't know what to say.
Except that there's something about humanity that,
unless it's kept in check can be influenced negatively.
Who thought anybody would be concerned about
the statue of Robert Lee other than to take it down.
But it brings all of that back, the history,
the Civil War and
slavery issue and all of
these things are back on the top of the table.
>> And the Jim Crow time that it was put up in.
The idea that many of
these emblems and statues
and memorials were put up at a time to intimidate.
>> That's true.
>> People like your father?
So that he would somehow know his place.
Every time he walked in?
>> Yes. Exactly.
>> And so I think that's not lost on
the people who often defend those statutes.
>> But you know, they had been dormant, though.
Nobody was talking about them.
And I think that, well,
I think the shooting in Charlotte, was it Charlotte?
>> Sorry. What happened in Charlottesville?
>> No. Not in Charlottesville,
the nine people who were killed in the in the church.
In Charleston. [inaudible] Mother?
>> In Charleston. I think that was a trigger.
I think the president is a trigger.
And I think it's okay now to just say
anything and not worry
about who it hurts or how it sounds or,
and then when you hear terms like Neo Nazi
and you think these things are dead and berried.
But they are alive and well.
They're alive and well.
>> So that's distressing?
>> Yes. It really is and that's why we have to keep.
That's what I tell my students is
that we can't just rest.
At all point.
>> And that's what you were saying that
Lonnie had said in the beginning, what is it?
We went on cruise control?
>> Yes. And democracy doesn't run on cruise control..
>> It does not. No.
>> And that's I think
the most really important thing to remember for sure.
>> That's right. We have to remember.
>> So thinking about that,
do you have any advice for young people today like
my students who are looking
to the leaders of the past to
figure out a way to organize and stay
organized and stay motivated
and not just take it to the streets and then go home.
>> Well, we need teachers like you to instill
values that we used
to hold dear which have just slid off the front page.
The students can't do it without the teachers who
have the right spirit to impart as you do.
And I think that we're in good hands as long as you're
here and people like you to
share the values that seem to be slipping away.
You have to keep bringing that back.
>> And what Dr. Mays and Howard Zinn rapport
to mentor to the students.
>> Exactly.
>> Because Dr. Mays,
he instilled a sense of responsibility.
>> Absolutely.
>> As a mentor to the student movement. Absolutely
>> And Howard Zinn instilled the idea that
we had to overcome
these barriers that we were worth fighting for,
that these ideals were worth fighting for.
And so he would take students to the public library,
for example, the downtown library.
Now, the city had installed
small libraries in certain neighborhoods,
but we couldn't go in the public library downtown.
So he and Irene Dobbs Jackson,
whom I mentioned earlier,
the mother of Maynard Jackson took a group of students
and walked in and demanded to be served.
Of course, they were sent out,
but it started the ball rolling that
eventually in a short length of time.
They were challenged and the library opened to everybody.
He would take students to the courthouse and to hear what
the Senate and what they were doing
and the students had to go sit in the balcony.
They couldn't sit on the first floor.
So he would go and sit in the balcony with them.
But they didn't want him to be in
the balcony with the students.
They were trying to protect Howard Zinn.
And so but just that idea of challenge,
you deserve to be able to sit on the on the main floor.
>> In a seat like everyone else.
>> In a seat. Exactly. I remember how as teenagers,
we'd go to the Fox Theater,
and we couldn't go in the front door.
We had to go up these long flights of
stairs to get in the balcony to see a movie.
The things that we had to go through just to
be like any other human being.
It's incredible.
>> Well, now all of the theaters were that way,
except the ones that were in
the African American community?
>> They were all that way.
>> So the Lowes was that way and Fox was that way?
>> But the Fox was the main one, I guess,
because it was the main theater,
and that's where all the good movies were.
And many parents would tell their students don't go.
You just can't see that if you have
to walk up 10 flights of
stairs to get up and to get in a seat to view a movie.
But it's so strange
that these things went on for years and years.
And of course, there were challenges.
But I think when the students came together and said,
no more, things really began to change.
Now there have been ways since then that
have been created to circumvent a lot of things.
And now with the economy like it is,
we can't go to
restaurants and expensive movies and all of that.
So there's so many things that have
militated against full participation in society.
I had a vision of Johnny Parm in a phone booth.
All of this was done without cell phones,
which is so unreal.
How? Because we can't
go anywhere without our cell phones.
>> No.
>> You take them to the bathroom in case somebody calls.
>> My students this summer were amazed when Lonnie,
he came in and he
was a partner teacher with me this summer.
And in that class we did a lot of this research
and he came in and was talking to students about that.
They didn't believe at first.
They said, how on Earth did you organize
without cell phones and send relays.
People driving the cars and when the lunch counters would
shut down when they saw us coming
and had people on the corners and the phone booths.
>> And then when they opened up again,
it was very creative.
>> Yes. And the organization of
that is what I think we should really
impart to our students today that you can do
this using whatever technology is available.
>> Exactly. And there's a lot of it now.
So there's no excuse.
>> No. Well, of course,
I would love to reserve
the right to come over to your house or wherever it is
you'd like to meet and just have you free form
talk whenever you want to say.
>> That would be nice. Let's plan for it.
>> We would love that. And I'm
going to call on you again to
come back because with this grant we've gotten in a week.
We're going to have many more
academic panels with mentor,
students who are going to come
here what needs to be heard.
>> I look forward to that.
Now how are your mother and your aunt?
>> They are wonderful. And I would love to bring
them with me because they always ask me.
They want to hook up with you on Facebook,
which is their thing now.
All the 60s,
all want to do Facebook and just like no,
please don't do Facebook.
>> No. Please don't.
I had a niece who's talked me
into getting on and I'm trying to get
off because I told
her I don't want to be on Facebook and she just
insisted and actually went through
the procedure of getting me on and I have to get off.
>> But they would love to come and
have tea with you because
they still and they ask me that all the time.
When are you going to see Dr. Coke.
Can we come along?
>> Aren't they sweet. Well, let's get together.
>> We'll see that.
>> We'll plan.
>> We're going to plan to get together next Wednesday.
I'm going to ask if they want to come.
>> Well, they might like to come.
>> I know they would like to come for sure.
>> Will it be too much trouble?
It's a long drive?
>> No. They're in Smyrna.
I can bring them and drive.
But let's definitely plan.
>> I definitely will be there on
Wednesday and then we'll go from there.
>> That'll be great because you're amazing.
>> Well, you're amazing. Let us not.
>> I love you. You're amazing.
>> Thank you so much.
And I'm sorry about the thank you card that I never sent.
>> I wanted to make sure that I sent you a thank
you card because people love to get cards.
Emails aren't the same thing.
I send people cards to say thank you.
>> Yes. You're a card sender.
And since then, I've gone to
the dollar store and
I've bought about five packs of thank you cards.
Just think but I haven't sent a single because I have
this program on the Internet called bluemountain.com,
and they have the most delightful cards
for all occasions, all people.
Check it out Blue Mountain.
>> Blue Mountain. I'll check that out.
>> But I do want to get back to
writing notes and all that stuff.
>> It's important because that's what survives as well.
The emails just go but the letters are staying.
>> I know. I feel guilty.
>> Don't feel guilty. I just wanted to make sure that
I sent one to you because I know that's important.
It's important to send those. Grad, you're good?