>> Hey,
I'm here today for
the Atlanta Student Movement Oral History Project,
funded by the Rich Foundation,
and I'm interviewing Mr. Charles Black,
who was part of the movement when it began
and was at one time chairperson of the movement.
So we'll start out with just
telling me a little bit about you,
where you were born, where you went to
school and how you came to Atlanta.
>> I was born in Miami, Florida.
I was delivered by a midwife at home.
So that's that was my actual beginning.
And I attended school there.
There was no college in Miami that I could
attend because of race at the time.
So I had to leave Miami to go to college.
There were colleges in the state,
historically black colleges but not in Miami.
I was offered an early admission
scholarship to Morehouse College,
but I've been elected student
body president for the next year,
so I declined that and I came in 58 to Morehouse.
Interestingly, there was a young man who had been
elected vice president of the student body,
who was in 10th grade when I was at 11.
He was also often an early
admission scholarship to Morehouse.
He accepted his,
so when I got to Morehouse instead of his
being a year behind me, he was ahead of me.
Very regular man named by Donald Hopkins.
Doctor Donald Hopkins, who was largely credited with
eliminating smallpot the guinea worm in the world.
So maybe if I'd come on earlier,
I would have been smarter and accompany something.
>> So I always ask this question because it seems to
me that the universe has a way of
bringing all of these people
together in this one place in 1960,
the brain trust of
the civil rights movement and all of you.
And so I always wanted to
ask something about your childhood or
early adolescence that gave you that sense of activism.
>> Well, I guess the most important thing about
my upbringing was we had an intact family.
But most families were
at that time when I was growing up.
If you heard somebody being from
a broken home, say if we call it.
That was an oddity and you looked at him
does that person look
different because his broken home or something.
It was that odd.
So we had a dad and a mom and there were four kids
and we had dinner at 6:00 every day around the table,
beginning with a grace, of course.
And daddy got his pick of whatever first.
But my folk were also very religious.
So we went to church all the time all day on Sunday,
almost and then on Tuesday nights,
we had a Bible study and Thursday
night we had song and practice.
So I was very much steeped
in what was good and bad and right and wrong.
I got that at church and I got that at home.
And it was reinforced in
the community at large because at that time,
any adult would chastise any kid.
And if you had done
something that required some serious attention,
they reported to your parents and they would
chastise you on the work of that other adult.
So the community really did work together as a villages,
is it to raise
the children and everybody lived in the same community.
So if you were a doctor,
a lawyer, a pharmacist, a teacher or whatever,
you lived with all those folks that you taught at school,
who bought your products and went to you for care.
So it was a homogeneous community in that respect.
So you were influenced by people like
that and you had role models to look at.
So you end up with a pretty strong sense of
self and because they're
were no other people living in the community,
you had nobody trying to load
over you as being better because of race.
And and for some reason,
I reached a conclusion early on that people
who had superiority complexes because of race,
it didn't make sense to me
because if I took the same set of facts,
here's somebody born into great privilege.
And here's somebody born with no privilege,
and they both compete against each other.
And the person with no privilege competes,
sometimes equals the accomplishment, sometimes excels.
That suggests that this person has a superiority,
not the one that was born with the privilege.
So I had to fight against having
a superiority complex growing up.
But so that's where my sense of self came from.
I was exposed to discrimination,
segregation in the light because you have
the buses that were segregated and
I never forget the words on the signs.
You have a sign that said colors seat from rear,
whites seat from front.
And what that meant was that, of course,
if there were enough white people on there to
take up all the seats, you had to stand.
And I always made a point of sitting
as far front as I could.
That was just my little thing
I'm going to sit as far toward the front as I could.
And of course the stores,
restaurants, and all that were strictly segregated.
And there were only two places in
downtown Miami that a black person would go to rest room.
One was in the basement of the courthouse
and the other was in the basement of
a department store called Rich's.
So you had to plan your activities
so if you could get to one of those places.
>> Two in the whole city?
>> And the whole downtown.
Yes. So it was that kind of thing.
But one thing that I found out later was,
if you were as black as your shoes,
but you spoke a different language.
Then you could go to the hotels and the restaurants.
So it was only American blacks who were not good
enough to take advantage of the American facilities.
>> I wonder why that was.
Was that particular to Miami?
>> Well, I don't know if it may have existed elsewhere,
but there were a lot of Cubans in
Miami and they came in all complexions as you might know.
And a lot of folk from
the Caribbean and from all over the country down there,
which is why you had a different vibe
for one thing generally in Miami.
You didn't have so much ugly overt racism.
As a matter of fact,
the first time I ever saw a confederate flag on
this play was when I arrived in Atlanta,
Georgia on the train and
saw a flag displayed on the side of the building.
It was a shock to me because I knew that was illegal.
Because they were outdoor after the Civil War.
And I was wondering why would
that thing be on display like that.
But that's the first time I've ever seen one.
So you didn't see that in Miami.
And you were less likely to be
called the ugly words down there.
There's a large Jewish community that was
sustly concentrated almost entirely in Miami Beach.
But there were a lot of what they call
snowbirds who were whites from the Northeast who
had second homes in the winter in South Florida.
And many of the Blacks had come
from Georgia and Alabama and places like that.
And so you have less of the Dixie,
ingrained kind of white people
around that you had
in some of the other places in the South.
>> So you came to Morehouse in 58.
>> Long before your grandparents were born.
>> So when you got to Morehouse and 58,
what was happening there in terms of civil rights?
>> Well, It's hard to say what was happening in terms of
civil rights because that was not
a concept that I was conscious of.
But what we did have was we had
strong intelligent people around us all the time.
He had doctor Benjamini Mayes
who was president of the school at the time.
It was an elegant gentleman
was very bright and had a strong sense
of doing things to shape make society better.
He wrote a book called Born to rebel.
And we heard from him once a week and in assembly.
But we also have people coming in
from around the country who would speak to us,
folks who were along more house
like Howard Thurman and the like but
also a lot of salt vaccine,
people like that, Masters and Johnson,
the sex expert people
and the guy that wrote
the book Proud Of Beloved Country about South Africa.
Name missing at the moment.
But so we have people come we had assembly every day.
If you lived on campus that mean six days a week
because you had to go on Sunday for Vespers.
But all students were required to be
there at assembly every morning.
So you would have all these great speakers there,
and student leaders doing
presentations of various kinds and the like.
So you had that influence around you all the time.
But also you came to learn of some of the things that had
happened in Atlanta by the generations preceding us.
Of course, WEB Du Bois was in Atlanta University,
and other folks of his generation. I haven't been there.
But the NAACP,
John Calhoun was the secretary of the branch at the time.
And he refused to give
the state government the membership roles of the NAACP.
They wanted that so they could persecute people.
And he had to go to jail for that.
But also that generation before us had had
some bus protests on that we had known about.
Also they had organized what they
called the Atlanta Negro Voters League in
Atlanta and they had a Republican and Democrat co-chair.
And they had organized all of
the black communities down to the block level.
So they had block captains and they had ward leaders.
And so that at election time,
they would have mass meetings
and people would come by the hundreds,
and they were here from
all the candidates who were running for office.
And during this time,
it was all white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants only.
No females, no Jews,
no Hispanics, no women.
That's what it was. So they talked about
choosing from the lesser of the evils.
So you would have all these folks to
come in and make their presentations.
And the day before the election,
the Atlanta Negro Voters League
would put out what they called a ticket.
And it was an endorsement slate for those people,
for all the different offices.
And they were distributed throughout
the whole community down to the block level.
And people pretty much voted in a block,
[inaudible] for the candidates
recommended by the Atlanta Negro Voters League.
So you had that thing going on.
So we were conscious of that.
But we didn't have a real sense, I didn't,
of the shoulders on which we
stood at the time our movement began.
A lot of things I just told you about,
I was not aware of them,
I came to know later.
So it was like we were the
first to ever do this in the minds of some of us.
But we had support from a lot of people who
were of the generation
between us and what was called the Black Establishment.
And were given various names,
the Old Guard, the Young Turks,
and the Middle Turks, we were called.
Why militants, I don't know, we have no guns.
But in any event, the generation between us and
the older folks were more
in support of us than most of the older people.
And it was partly because we were actually an instrument
for them to unseat those guys with leadership and power.
That occurred to me at the time,
but that's largely what that was all about.
>> Leroy Johnson was one of the Young Turks, right?
>> Yes, he was. Leroy Johnson became the first black
elected to a state legislature
in the South since Reconstruction.
He, Jesse Hills,
became head of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company,
a guy named Johnny Johnson, Donald Hollowell,
was our attorney, and Carl Holman.
Young Carl Holman, one marvelous gentleman who
was a professor at Clark College,
just before it was Clark Atlanta University.
Now, I had the highest regard for him because he had
the capacity for making
the best argument on both sides of any question.
He would totally convince you of this position.
And then he would say, but
on the other hand, see what I'm saying?
And then he would totally convince you on the other side.
I've never seen anybody
before or since who could do that as well.
So I'm very much impressed with Carl Holman.
He later became head of
a national organization called national,
it wasn't national really,
but something with a similar name.
But a very, very bright gentleman.
So he was among the advisors of Q. V.
Williamson who was the first black elected to
the Board of Aldermen which later
became the City Council of the City of Atlanta.
And as a matter of fact, when he was running for office,
I took over his responsibility as a captain of that ward,
the third ward, for organizing purposes and the like.
But he was one of our advisors.
An emphasizing sidebar about Q. V. was,
he'd been in the army,
and he taught typing in the army
because he could type 100 and some words per minute.
And I don't know why that came to mind,
but he was a real estate broker
and he was successful with that.
But was one of our advisors that we trusted.
So that again, was
the generational voting atmosphere that we were living.
>> And I know that Carl Holman
was a particular mentor to Lonnie King.
And so I wanted you to tell
us about when you met Lonnie and how that happened.
I know that everything popped in March of 1960,
but certainly there was a back story before then.
>> Yes. Well, of course,
it was in in February that the four guys
in Greensboro did the sit in there.
And of course, we were all pretty frustrated
about the circumstances as
related to race and segregation and all that.
But you need to remember too that we were
the children of the generation
that went to war to make the world a safer democracy.
The generation that Tom Brokaw
called the greatest generation.
We were their children and
their nephews and nieces and the like.
And we knew that many of those folks who had
sacrificed their lives and possible lives
they come back to be mistreated
badly to be called niggas by wearing their uniforms.
Some have even been lynched.
>> And murdered while wearing their uniforms.
>> Murdered while in uniform and all that.
So we weren't all too happy about that.
And of course, we came from
a generation that was just imbued
with lynchings and which
have a lot to do with the beginning of
the NAACP in the first place.
They would post the number of people who had been lynched
that week on big signs
outside of the headquarters in New York.
So we were that next generation.
So we were ready for doing
something to make things different.
And we were not
interested in continued evolutionary change,
which was being achieved through the courts,
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, called the Inc. Fund.
And so when this example came along from North Carolina,
there was a light bulb going on,
hey, this is a way to do it.
And so Lonnie King was the first one
to see that flashlight burning.
And so he rounded up some of us on campus.
And I remember specifically,
the moment and spot where it happened with me.
I was walking past
Sale Hall Annex going
toward the quadrangle where
the clock tower is and all that.
And he was coming the other direction,
and he stopped me and talked to me about the spit.
He knew who I was because I was on
the newspaper staff and
I was on the debate team and all that.
And I knew who he was because he
was an outstanding football player.
So that was our connection there.
And he asked that those of us that he
contacted come to this meeting
at Sale Hall Annex that night.
It was a little one story building on campus.
Now it all be began with him and Julian Bond and
Joe Pierce having a conversation at what was
Yates & Milton Drug Store in the corner
of what was Fair and Chestnut,
now Atlanta Student Movement
Pillow Boulevard, and Brawley.
And Lonnie had known Joe Pierce forever.
And they had a little chat
first and and Lonnie mentioned Julian Bond across
the room who he knew to be a bright guy because he
had met him waiting in
a registration line and they
talked for a long, long time.
And so he suggested they go and talk to Julian.
So the three of them talked about
this business and what had happened in
Greensboro and Lonnie was saying
that same thing needs to happen here,
and Julian's response was I'm sure somebody
would do it here and Lonnie said, no, how about us?
And Julian's response was
like what do you mean [inaudible]?
But anyhow, that was the beginning of it
all and they agreed to talk to
all the people who were there
in the Yates & Milton Drug Store.
They had little boots, the soda fountain thing.
You could do milkshakes and donuts, whatever.
So it began with that and they spread out
apparently and went to various people around campuses.
So the group of us had met that evening
was somewhere between 18 and 24,
maybe, mostly Morehouse guys.
And I think there may have been
a couple of ladies from from Spellman,
maybe somebody from Clark,
but it was mostly Morehouse guys.
And so Lonnie laid out
this whole scheme about doing this thing
here and asked that anybody who was not for doing this,
that's fine, just going
about your business, but don't tell anybody.
Don't tell anybody about that. Well, of course,
somebody did tell somebody.
And the presidents of
the colleges heard about
this thing we were talking about doing.
So they called a bunch of us in. Talked to us about that.
I remember being in that meeting.
And most of the presidents were opposed to our doing it.
And their reasoning of
course was that we were there to learn and all that.
And they were concerned about our safety
and their obligation
to their donors for for the schools and to our parents.
And so they felt it
was incumbent upon them to dissuade us from
doing this thing and they let
the NAACP handle that since they had in the past.
One of the one of the presidents finally spoke up,
but I think it was President Cunningham for Morris Brown,
who said that he agreed with the students.
And so things begin to change a little bit,
they caged us a little bit.
And then President of
Atlanta University President Clement
suggested that, well, if you're going to do this thing,
you got to let the city
know what you're doing and why you're doing it,
why you're doing what you're going to
do and suggested that
we produce a document that
spell that stuff out and that we get it published for us.
So that was the birth of the appeal for
human rights and committee was appointed to do it.
It was Rosyln Pope, myself,
Julian Bond, Marsh Stile,
and I think Albert Prinson
and maybe one of two other people.
Well, our cell phones weren't working very
well in those days. There was no such thing.
So apparently, Roslyn had
difficulty reaching people or
whatever but she called Lonnie and told him,
nobody's vetting what I'm saying.
So Lonnie says, "Write the damn thing."
So she did write the document.
And there was a document that
been published by the Young Turks.
In our decision they had called ACA,
which was Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action,
and they published a document called a Second Look.
And it spelled out statistically,
some of the differentials in Atlanta racial
that existed and she was able to draw
upon that for some factual information.
But she produced this manifesto,
which spelled out all the areas
of dissatisfaction that we had,
including law enforcement, education,
public accommodations, transfer,
everything, and it became a blueprint for our movement.
And this document was published
in the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution,
which were separate papers,
the Constitution in the morning and journal in
the evening as full page ads.
The presidents round up the money to pay for.
And it was published also in the Atlanta Daily World,
but that was a black newspaper
run by a very conservative black guy named C.A.
Scott who insisted on being paid in advance for that.
He was a post star. So it
appeared in all these newspapers.
It was picked up by the New York Times
and published free of charge as a full page there.
It was also published in California,
I think the LA Times or some such thing.
And it was read into the congressional record
by Senator Jacob Javits of New York.
So it is in fact
a historical document that is there for all times.
The governor of Georgia Ernest Vandiver
responded to this document by saying that
there's no way that any student
in the State of Georgia could have
written this document and as a matter of
fact and most likely written in Moscow.
And it was an indictment
of education in the State of Georgia.
He didn't say any black student.
Any student in the state
could have written this document.
And that exists on tape He was TV on TV saying that.
So in any event,
we put this out a week before we had
our first sit-ins which
took place at 11:00 on March 15th,
1960 at 11 different locations.
And it was very strategically planned down to
the minutest detail as Gwen
had attested in her interview with you.
Everybody knew what was expected
of them and also knew what
to expect as possibilities.
You might be, you might be killed,
you might be arrested, and
a number of things could happen.
And we suggested that if we had three options that
everybody had that if you were given the opportunity to
leave and you want to leave and not be arrested.
You can take that opportunity and leave.
If you are arrested,
but don't want to stay in jail,
want to be bonded out as soon as possible.
That's another option available to you.
If you're willing to go to jail and stay in jail,
that's the third option that you had.
So everybody understood that and
we were on our best behavior.
We had our decorum in place.
And there were I guess maybe a couple of hundred of
us that were involved in that effort that day.
The thing that was significant, of course,
is that in addition to the people who
actually went into these facilities and sat down.
There were others who were stationed
nearby at a thing called
a phone booth that doesn't exist anymore,
who could see what was happening and
call to the officer to report there was a problem.
There were also people who provided transportation for
these people down there.
But we also had thanks to the Young Turks,
we had people who were standing by
to provide bail to get us out of jail.
So all of this was planned very carefully.
And so when the moment came,
it was a total surprise to the general public,
including to the powers that
be the mayor's office, the police and all that.
So the police didn't know what to
do because they kept getting calls.
We got over here, we got over here and all that.
So they're waiting for orders
from on high as to what to do.
And the decision had been made that
they would tell us that we were trespassing.
They would give us five minutes to
leave and if we would not leave, they would arrest us.
So they would read that out to everybody.
The place that I went was the terminal train station,
which is my very first stop in Atlanta.
Thus I came from Miami on
the train and I came to the terminal train station.
And A. D. Williams Kings, Martin King's brother,
and I led separate groups into
two different entrances into
the white waiting room of the train station.
And we were arrested and put in the dirty jail downtown.
We were sentenced to 10 days
in the city farm for this terrible deed that we had done.
And so we were transported out to the city farm,
and that included ladies and guys who were arrested.
>> It was a work farm?
>> It was a work farm. We were awaken
at 4:30 in the mornings and
we had to shot weeds
from collard greens growing out in the field,
and the girls had to peel potatoes
and we would see them sitting on the ground,
whatever outside the place
we were leaving to go to the fields.
So that was the fun thing we had.
We were only in for four days
because there was a great outcry in
the city and they let us out of jail.
One of the funny things I
remember when we were being arrested.
There was a guy who is a very fair skin in our group.
His last name is Ashmore and I can't
remember his first name.
He had a sister Mcman.
And so the sergeant who was fingerprinting us,
processing us in would ask us,
your name and where you're from,
address and all that sort of thing, and what's your race.
And he's looking at
this guy's fingers and he says, Negro.
So the sergeant stopped and looked
at his fingers and looked up at him.
He had blue eyes and blonde hair and very fair skin.
He said you're a Negro? He said I'm Negro.
So he stopped and he said, "Lieutenant,
we got this boy here, got blue eyes and blonde hair,
says he's a Negro. What should I put on here?"
And lieutenant thought for a minute and he said,
well, put blue eyes blonde hair, Negro.
That's where they put him,
A. D. King and I and we're all in.
So you had to find some levity
in these situations where you could.
>> Of course. Absolutely. So 1960,
so after the first big sit-in in March.
There was also right before the presidential election,
the sit-in at Rich's.
And a lot of people know about that sit-in,
but they don't know how it changed
the trajectory of our entire country.
>> That's a little known story as a matter of fact.
They give you some backstory.
Dr. Martin Luther King Junior
had an agreement with his family,
and the established by community,
the old guard that he would
not get involved in civil rights in Atlanta.
Paul Benning, Montgomery and all others, that's fine.
But we got this was their attitude and he agreed to that.
Well, it happened that on one day he
was driving an automobile that
had a Georgia license plate on it,
but he still had Alabama driver's
license and he was stopped.
And that was not the reason because
they didn't know what license he had.
There was a white female
riding in the front seat with him,
Lillian Smith, forbidden fruit.
So in any event, he was arrested and taken to trial.
I was in the court at the time.
He was tried in
the Old DeKalb County Courthouse in downside Decatur.
And the judge sat sideways on the bench.
We're going to pause for a refresher here?
[NOISE] That's what happened to
talk too much, I guess.
[LAUGHTER] But the judge sat
sideways on the bench while
the defense was presenting its case.
Again, it was Attorney Donald Hollowell.
[NOISE] He was a big guy
with big hands and big feet and a big voice.
And he would always say, "But your Honor,
I submit to you as such and such a case."
Well, the judge was sitting
sideways on the bench with a comic book,
[NOISE] totally ignoring Holwell,
until Holwell was finished with
his presentation and the judge
turned and said you have finished?
Holwell said, yes. With this
gave he said [NOISE] four months in jail.
[NOISE] Four months in prison.
But he probated the sentence.
Come October of 1960,
Lonnie King convinces Martin
to come down to Rich's and be arrested.
That was because our boycott that it'd be back in
March was lagging a
little bit and some people wanted to
go back to the stores and all.
Martin objected, of course,
and finally used one
of King's father's quotes on him from a sermon.
Now, Lonnie was a member of Eben
======he was not related to the Kings.
But he was a member of
that Church he was eight years old.
So he knew Martin as ML and Martin knew
him as LC when he sees him.
So he said to him, Martin,
you can't leave from behind.
And that got ML's attention
and he agreed to go ahead and to be arrested.
Many tells me that he had
a proviso that if he was going to be arrested,
that should be some pretty ladies from spell arrested.
So you'll see a photograph that has Marilyn Price,
and another lady in the photo with
him when they are arrested.
Interestingly, when you see them in that photo,
there are no handcuffs on.
You can't tell really what is happening.
They're just walking down the sidewalk.
But they were at that point already under arrest.
So this arrest violated King's probation.
So he was sentenced to
serve the four months at
the State prison, because of that.
So he was arrested and was sent in the dark of
night to Marysville penitentiary.
And he was transported in the back of a paddy wagon with
a German shepherd dog and
Martin said that that was the most
afraid he had ever been in his life.
So this event made international news.
King was already extremely well known.
And this was in the midst of presidential election in
1960 of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Like two weeks before the election,
Nixon was leading by double digits all over the country.
And so this bat came to
his campaign's attention and to
the attention of the campaign of Kennedy.
And while the Nixon people were trying to decide what,
if anything, they should do.
Bobby, I think, convinced his brother, along with,
there was a black guy whose name I don't remember who
was part of their campaign was
a part of that decision
that they should have aced in some way.
And so Bobby ends up calling the judge down here,
which was probably not technically appropriate I know,
but the judge that let King out of jail.
Now, Daddy King had said prior to this time,
I don't know if I could support a Catholic for
president, he's Baptist.
So in any event, when
this happened and King was let out of jail,
it was a big deal and the Kennedy
campaign took full advantage of
it and they published something called the Blue Bomb,
a copy of which we have here.
And it was called the blue bomb,
because it was printed on blue paper.
And it was distributed in all major cities across
the country that had large Black populations.
And this document tells
about the case of Martin Luther King,
about that arrest and
the Kennedy's intervention to get him out of jail.
And it has cots in here from Mrs. King,
from Daddy King, from Ralph Abernathy,
from Martin King Junior from Dr. Garner Taylor,
all are praising this decision.
And so this document was
distributed in Black communities everywhere.
And as a result,
the Black vote changed from Republican to
Democrat for the first time since FDR
perhaps and Kennedy won
the election by less than one vote
per precinct nationwide.
So anybody who said my vote doesn't count,
one vote [OVERLAPPING] brought a difference nationwide.
[LAUGHTER] And this document
is credited with making that difference.
Little factor history.
>> And so when you take that back to that day,
the sit in led by the students from
Mayville Center is what caused
this entire thing to be in motion.
>> That's correct.
>> It changed the history [OVERLAPPING] of the world.
>> Absolutely. Now, there is
a huge mosaic in
the sound un building commemorating that moment.
It has a picture of Lonnie King,
Marilyn Price and ML walking down the sidewalk
no rest and it's
a huge mural like a couple of stories tall.
[OVERLAPPING] It is very impactful.
>> It really is.
>> It is the mural actually
of the photograph that appeared in the newspapers.
>> That's right. You mentioned to me earlier
that you took over chair
of the movement when Lonnie graduated.
And you had several experiences in
your role as the chairman of the student movement.
And I wanted if you would just talk about some of those,
particularly the Atlanta Inquirer
and the broadcast coalition.
>> Those things came after our movement.
But while I was chairman of the movement,
one interesting thing that happened,
somebody decided to give
Martin King Junior a job at
Morehouse College teaching a class.
The civil rights activism doesn't really pay.
[LAUGHTER] So Martin needed money.
So they hired him to teach his class at Morehouse.
It was a seminar in a modern social philosophy.
And they rounded up some students for this class.
I was one of them.
There were only eight students in this class.
It was the only class that Martin King ever taught.
So this was while I was chairman of the movement.
Now, during the time that Mani was chairman,
one of the things that we had started was
a protest of the theaters,
movie houses and all around town.
Mani sent ultimatum to them,
we'd already begun picketing,
and like we had White people buying tickets and give
the Black folk to try to go in
and we had a circular ticket line.
So one refused the back of line and just frustrated him.
And so LI said this to
mad letter that if you have a D get by x point in time,
we're going to close you down thing.
So I couldn't find that letter anywhere.
We didn't have our computers
and we had memo graph machines.
Nobody knows what that is anymore and
things putting folders and file cabinets.
Well, I couldn't find that letter, but anyhow,
we continued the protests and all,
and we were getting into a rainy period for some reason.
So we had our signs laminated.
And so by the time I had established
a relationship with a
delightful lady named Helen Bullock.
Helen Bullock was Executive Secretary
for Mayor Hartsfield,
Mayor Ivan Allen, and Sam Marcell.
And she was very mainly
a ladies sale in
cigarettes with the ash hanging in the little.
And so I called Helen and told her that
we were getting set to
Lonnie hall with his protest of the theaters.
And as so she could
see if she could get the mayor get these guys
into negotiating session. And she said give me a week.
So I reported back to the students they said, a week?
I said, yeah, a week.
So the mayor does get these people to come to a meeting.
There were eight of them who owned all the theaters,
not together but individually
owned all the theaters in Metro Atlanta,
movie houses and everything and
every person who was in charge of the Fox.
So they came to this meeting. We were in
the board room of the downtown library.
And at the meeting,
I had two or three
of students with me and a couple of adults,
Sam Williams was one of them.
Eliza Pacell, white female supporter was one another.
And then all the guys from
the theaters were on that side of the table.
And at the head of the table, we had three people.
There was a mayor Hartsfield in the center.
To his right was a guy named Richard Rich,
to his left was the chief of police, Herbert Jenkins.
Now Richard Rich, Rich's department store.
Back up a little bit, Rich's department store
had become our main target during my movement,
you remember we sit in 11 different places,
which were in state facilities,
county facilities, city facilities,
and five and dine locations and department stores.
And when we were showing on manpower,
we have resolved that if we had
only enough people to do one place, it would be Rich's.
And that's because Rich's was
everybody's favorite department store.
And for good reason, they have stated policy that
no sale is ever complete until the customer is satisfied,
which literally meant that if you bought something today
from Rich's and 10 years from now,
15 years from now,
it didn't work anymore,
you didn't like it anymore,
you didn't want it anymore,
you could bring it back and they would
either exchange it or refund your money.
So everybody loved Rich's.
Rich's also had the big Christmas tree at
the top of the bridges and all of that is great concert
every Christmas and they had
the pink was a little train thing
on Monorail at the top of Rich's,
you went around the tree at Christmas time.
They had live reindeer and cases up there.
They had a secret shop where you could
take your kids and leave them for a couple of hours
with a list of who they buys for and
how much money they can spend
when you go shop for the kids.
I love the secret shop.
So any for all these good reasons,
everybody loved Rich's.
So the boycott lasted for a year.
And Rich's lost $10 million
over the Christmas holidays
alone. That got their attention.
And so it was really at that impetus that they
agreed to negotiate the segregation
of facilities down time.
So come theater time,
there's Rich at the table.
So when these guys were saying over there,
all these terms is going to happen,
somebody's going to yell fire and in the theater,
somebody's going to throw
a stink bomb and bit out of eye,
that's going to be riding and
Mr. Richard was able to say,
none of that stuff happened in my store.
And I wish I had not lost all that money out of fear
or I wish I had desegregated at
the beginning. So we had that going for.
And then I'm saying,
I'm sure that Chief Jenkinson
maintained law and order in Atlanta.
Can't you chief responds in the affirmative.
So that defuses but what it really
defused the Mary at the beginning of the meeting.
They're complaining about this ultimatum letter that got.
And so I responded with forget about the ultimatum.
So you don't ever want to desegregate your theaters.
That's right. And we
think they should have been desegregated all along.
So we've got a lot room to negotiate.
So that was the beginning of the meeting.
And they had said they had some pairs to
go and stay with 15 minutes, 20 minutes in light.
Kept them for four hours,
and we actually desegregated
the theaters in that meeting.
And the desegregation started at the Fox theater.
And you heard Green talk
about how the Fox was blacks could go to the Fox.
But they had to sit in the balcony and you bought
your tickets at the same box office on the front,
but come out from there and walk up like
four or five flights of steps on
the outside of the building to get into the balcony.
And so it was segregated.
Other theaters, you couldn't go at all
except for Black theaters and black community.
So anyhow, the agreement was that the segregation would
begin with the Fox and
the coming of the metropolitan opera chorus.
And there were no tickets available because they had
been grandfathered for years
and years in the white community.
So we had to get some whites to give up
their tickets to Black supervor.
So maybe eight or 10 or 12 blacks couples,
maybe five or six couples and nothing happened.
The world didn't come to an end
Pop fall down to the ground, all that stuff.
And so upon that we had a date after
that at a certain hour of the day on a particular day.
We have X number of students to
go to each of these theaters.
And so when that time and they came.
It may have been around exam time. I'm not sure.
But we were having some trouble lining up with
students to go and transportation
was also an issue because
I think there were two cars on the Morehouse campus.
So I'm getting phone calls from owners say,
where are my people,
the theater owners want to where are they people?
So support of Levity but we
did get enough people
to all these theaters and things that well,
didn't have any press conference or anything about it.
It just happened and people just started going,
and that's how the theater deviation took place.
But also during that summer,
with the upcoming presidential
election and all that sort of thing,
we had a massive voter registration campaign that
was an organization put together called
the All Citizens Voter Registration Committee,
headed by Jesse Hill, and
the students provided a lot of
the manpower for that effort.
So we went door to door all over
town and putting out flyers at churches and everything.
And according to Jessi's figures,
B is like 20,000 people, that's something,
which was a very significant number
because only like 100,000 people voted during those days.
And in the City of Atlanta. So that
was a big deal that we had.
>> So you mentioned during this time too,
you mentioned the Atlanta Daily World being pretty
much the only black newspaper in
the city and was very conservative.
And then part of the outgrowth, as I understand it,
the student movement was
a new newspaper which was the Atlanta Enquirer.
And that started as part of the movement.
>> Yes, absolutely. Now, the Atlanta Daily world,
which was part of a little chain.
They were like, I think,
maybe four different world papers
in the South of the Birmingham World.
The one here was very conservative.
CA Scotts died in a world conservative.
It was the only black paper in the country
who endorsed Nixon and
Gold War. It was incredible.
So in any event, he editorialized against our movement.
And so what we were doing to get our word out,
we have a little flyer that we distributed
churches called the student movement and you.
And we went around the churches and put them on
car windshields and all that thing.
And a guy named something Hill, not Jesse Hill.
[inaudible] Hill officer fly business.
And he was very fair skin black guy.
And this has been we had office over on Obama Avenue,
and he came into the office to see line and
whatever student lady was serving as secretary
came back and told on there was a guy see him.
And when this guy came back,
one was striking because he won
who's this white man coming in here see me.
And he put line at saying I'm [inaudible] office supply.
So he realized well he must be black.
So he offered to use
his printing press to print a newspaper for us
and we already have the name Atlanta quire So
we began publishing the Atlanta quire.
Jay Lowa ended up printing
the newspaper after his garage for a good long while.
And he later formed the land I mean, the Atlanta voice,
which is still in existence today as is the inquirer.
The inquirer became quite a powerful organ in this town.
I became editor of the inquirer sometime
later when I was for about three years.
And during the mayor's race
that involved Ivan Allen and
Esto Matos and four other guys. The black community was
really scattered on support of the different candidates.
They were supporting all of
the candidates except [inaudible].
Most of the old guard were supporting Ivan Allen,
but some of them were supporting Jim Aldrich,
Milton Farris, Charlie Brown.
But the students, for the most part,
and their young church
were supporting a guy named M. M. Mosey Smith.
Now, Mosey Smith was a guy in the state legislature who
in 1948 had introduced legislation to unmask the clan.
So in our minds,
he was the most liberal of all these
white male Anglo-Saxon protestants
that were available to go for.
So the students lined up behind him.
He took a lot of
votes away from these other guys because of it.
And what happened was being up with a run off
between Ivan Allen and [inaudible].
But during the campaign,
the Atlanta Inquirer ran
editorials in support of Mosey Smith and all that.
We had an editorial cartoonist named Morris Pennington.
He was superb.
He had also done our picket signs for us.
He worked at the Atlanta Life Insurance Company
and ran their print shop and all that.
But he is a great editorial cartoonist and he had done
one cartoon that showed Ivan Allen and
[inaudible] sharing a single suit clothing.
And the cut line said cut from the same cloth.
So the message was, there's
no difference between these two guys.
That was why we were trying to support somebody else.
So when they kept going to a runoff in
the minds of a lot of black people because
of the newspaper and all,
there's no difference between them, why should I bother.
So [inaudible] convinces Ivan
that he needs to come and talk to me.
So he comes my side of town.
We meet in the den of Ralph Long,
Carolyn Long Banks father.
And he says, I've known
[inaudible] me and two or three other students.
And Ivan came in very self assured,
that of course, I'm going to win
this selection because black people
vote for lesser matters.
So he says that's why we win.
And I suggested to him that we had a third option.
And he said, what is that? I said we could go fishing.
And so Helen says, I'm not.
Maybe I'll listen to what he's saying.
I remember her exact words.
And so I reminded him of
that cartoon that was in
the Atlanta Inquirer and in fact,
a lot of people saw
no difference between the two of them,
and a lot of Black wouldn't bother to vote in which case,
you're going to lose,
because Lester Manx had a sure 30% of the vote
without a doubt and
his people are going to turn out in large numbers.
So if Blacks don't vote in large numbers
for you, you lose election.
So he began to listen and I requested
that he publicly commit to about half a dozen things.
And it was like desegregation of the city hall
and all city facilities
and employment of Blacks in all additional positions.
I don't know what the list was exactly.
But he objected for a while and had him
convinced him that he should listen
and he agreed to do this and actually did.
He publicly committed to all these things.
And the payoff would be that
we would encourage Black people go back to
the polls based on
his distinguishing itself from the other guy,
but we would not endorse him.
Narvani had endorsed Mosey Smith that I thought that was
inappropriate to for our movement
to be endorsing partisan candidates.
So I said, we don't endorse you,
but we will encourage Blacks
to go back to the polls and we know
how they will vote based
on you making these total commitments.
And that's what happened and that's how he got elected.
So that's one of the key things that the Inquirer did.
In other words, we got
a Black policeman fired for police brutality.
It happened over in Southwest Atlanta.
There was a 42 year old I remember Black guy that
this policeman had beaten with
a police club thing or something like that,
and bruising him all over and all that.
And so we made a crusade in the paper.
I wrote the editorials about it and John Dale Johnson,
who later became famous as an ACP person,
and we have a stretcher wrote name for,
wrote the news articles for it and we made
a big campaign about it so that Herbert Jenkins,
my friend, not really.
The police chief invited
us to come down and meet with him about this.
And so we went down to meet him
and so he asked that this guy's file be brought in.
And in the file,
the guy had three letters of reference.
He was from North Georgia.
He had a letter from the mayor of the little town,
from the police chief and from the sheriff.
Two of them said he's from a very bad family,
would not hire him under any circumstance.
The third one said he's from a very bad family,
but maybe he's different.
And so the chief says,
how did this guy get hired.
I said, that's a very good question, Chief.
So they fired the guy.
But that was campaign by the Inquirer.
Ivan Allen said to me,
well, I'd say, White said it first.
When Blacks had begun to move into
housing a little too far to the south
where Whites were living and there was
a big protesting outcry
about white folks and
Blacks were trying to move in there.
The [inaudible] solution was to put a barricade
across the streets that led from one town to the other.
And I sent a photographer out to take a picture of it.
I had it across the front page of the Inquirer.
I called it the Payton Wall as this was on Payton Road
and it became national news.
It was all over the news all over
everywhere and a great embarrassment to Ivan Allen.
So he thought finally he had to take this thing down.
Hartsfield later said to him,
never make a mistake that can be
photographed. I love that.
So he had to take this thing down and because we
were really a crusading newspaper,
there was always some cause or something to do with.
And so [inaudible] sometime later said to me, he said,
the first thing I do every Thursday
morning is read the Inquirer to see if I'm in trouble.
But another thing that I would say about our movement.
He said the three greatest things
for the making of the Atlanta that we have today,
it was one, the plan for progress,
the Forward Atlanta campaign
and the Atlanta Student Movement.
Now, the plan for progress
was an agreement between the city
and the county as to who would
provide with what services.
The County had the Health and
the city had police, that kind of thing.
The Forward Atlanta campaign was a campaign by
the Chamber of Commerce to sell
the city as a place to be.
You know what I'm saying that they tried to
[inaudible] major corporations here and the movement.
And I would say those are the
three most important things in
the making of the new Atlanta. How about that?
>> That's amazing. So you also wanted to talk about
the broadcast coalition and things that came out
of all the struggle and
all the work that the movement accomplished.
>> Well, before that,
you know of the freedom riots that took place.
A little long story is that that concept started with us.
That Lonnie King guy, you know he's always on song.
>> December of 1960.
>> Yes. And the Supreme Court had ruled
against segregation and interstate transportation.
So Lonnie had this right idea that we all protest
that ruling and what we did
was to have students and some adults,
I guess, to travel to
all the connecting states of Georgia,
so it would be interstate transportation.
Otis Morris Junior and
I went to Aiken, South Carolina.
We sat directly behind the bus driver.
No problem on that.
We get to Athens where it was
our first stop there and Athens,
Georgia where the University of Georgia is.
Well, we had a 20-minute stop there supposedly.
After about five minutes
we were in the white waiting room.
Somebody made a phone call with
somebody and our bus was called early to leave.
So we were hustled back onto the bus
and as soon as we were on the bus and the door closes,
we see three car loads of
college aged guys with baseball bats
and sticks and all that sort of thing rushing
into the waiting room, looking for us.
And we were on bus, so the bus driver
pulls out and somebody tells him that we were on
that bus and so follows for some unknown distance.
One car going in front of the bus and slowing
up and the bus would go around,
and they kept doing that for a good long while.
And we arrived in Aiken South Carolina.
It was at dust to dark.
And they had one of these little side
filling station type bus
deposed. It was just closed.
So Otis and I are
standing on the side of the road waiting for
our car was trailing to come back.
And it seemed like it was two years
before that got there.
[LAUGHTER] But it was probably maybe 15 minutes.
And we didn't know if those other cars were
still following us and all that or not.
So we were a bit afraid,
but nothing happened to us again.
But in other places, some students
were arrested, some students were beaten.
Well, it made the National News
and the guy who was the head of
the Congress of Racial Equality Core James Farmer,
call Lonnie to ask him about
this and so Lonnie
explained to him what he had done and all that.
And it was he who came up with the idea of
the freedom rides based on what he had done.
And that was the story lived on.
Yeah. But after we were out of school,
Lonnie and I and
some others took over the Amata branch ACP.
We packed with new members and got Mani named
a President and Mars Dill became executive secretary.
Now, Mars Sacher French at Morehouse,
we got him out of the classroom into that job.
And I told him at the time, I said, no,
Mars, you got on this is a one way street.
You're probably never going back to the classroom.
You're always going to be doing some something like this.
And shot he never went back to the classroom.
We did a lot of other great things.
So while we had the NACP we formed
a broadcast coalition which included
some other civil rights organizations and the NACP.
And again, we were challenging
the licenses of the television stations in
particular because there was a requirement that they have
community input for their license renewal
and all the license renewals were coming up.
And I don't know if it was every five years,
three years, or whatever, but they were coming up.
So we challenged the licenses with the MC sitting.
And so this required them to sit
down with us and talk to us.
Mars and I had Channel 5, I remember.
And they brought in like a dozen lawyers from Miami.
There was a store broadcasting system, a company,
whatever that owned Channel 5
at the time. I know they still do.
So they brought us battery of lawyers in
there and the leaders of the station and
my little team were there and we were
assisting that they had to
hire Blacks in non-traditional positions,
promote folk, put folk on the air and all that.
And they kept us there for a long long time.
And we were hungry and thirsty and they
didn't offer us any food or water.
And later on it occurred to us that
every one of them had left
the room one at a time and came back licking their lips.
So they had gone out to
eat and left us in there starving and thirsty.
But we were there like five hours or so,
but we did, in fact go.
And that's how you got Monica Kaufman on the Josh
and Josh and Emanuel Hall,
some other people like that.
So that's one of the things we did at that time.
>> Wow. That's amazing.
>> So probably you should have been here.
>> [LAUGHTER] I wasn't born yet.
>> Well, that's not an excuse.
>> So I wanted to ask you because you do a lot of
work with students now in 2018.
And so I wanted to ask you,
for me, for my students,
for the students you interact with,
what advice would you give students as a veteran of
the civil rights struggle to
make civil rights movements continue to work?
>> [inaudible] [LAUGHTER] I've heard that somewhere.
Well, I have continued to meet with students
and group with them a few years ago,
put together a new appeal
for human rights as a matter of fact,
which was topical for the des.
And if they were or
other students were doing such a thing today,
obviously there will be some additional concerns or
some magnification of old concerns
that still need to be addressed.
One of the things I always say to students about
a movement is that a movement is
by its nature multidimensional.
Which to me means that it involves deep commitment to
lofty ideals on the part of a lot of people
doing a lot of different things
over a long period of time.
And I chat about
our moment you saw there were a lot of people
doing a lot of different things
including putting their houses office,
callable to sit to jail and sitting on
Sir Richard credit cards and put it in
a vault to close
your accounts with segregation in capital freedom.
So people made sales,
they provide transportation they
made phone calls and all that.
Not everybody was sitting in and walking picking lines.
So that's a message I always try to get
across that don't expect everybody to do the same thing.
They don't take the same level of risk
or have the same commitment or want necessarily
do the same thing that you're prepared to do but
don't send them away
if they support what you're trying to do.
So that's one of the messages.
And another is that
citizens don't allow their friends
to avoid registering and voting.
And I suggested to some students a long
time ago in the Data University Center,
you want to make sure that the presidents and
the boards of these institutions should
make sure that everybody on their campus,
whether it's an administrator, faculty member,
student, janitor, or whatever,
is a registered voter.
And they should have that peach on
the election time to show that they voted.
And you can demand that. These are private institutions.
It's not a state institution,
but they're private institutions.
If I were president in one of these schools,
there would be nobody on my campus who
was not registered to vote and voted.
It just wouldn't be, that
would be a qualifying factor for a student,
for a teacher, for everybody.
Because if you don't vote,
you don't count and you don't have a voice.
So that's extremely important.
But it's also important to
not wait to see who's going to run for office,
but find people who deserve to be in office,
help to groom them and get them elected and watch
them while they're in office to
make sure they're doing
what they're supposed to be doing.
That's what democracy is all about.
That's what a society does if it prospers.
So among the things that I would say.
The other thing is that I think is
extremely important and we've made some reference to it.
You got to realize that
not just your problems should be important to you.
But we are a total society of human beings.
And you notice our document was called
an appeal for human rights.
Civil rights can be legislated in and out of existence,
but human rights are inherent.
And you're being born as a human
and some German philosopher
a long time ago wrote
something and I can't remember exactly,
but they came from the Jews and
I wasn't Jews, so I didn't do anything.
They came for the workers. And you
can say the same thing today.
They came for the undocumented folks
that I wasn't undocumented, so I didn't do anything.
They came for the gays and
I wasn't gay, so I didn't do anything.
They came for the immigrants at the border,
fleeing oppression and starvation
and I wasn't one of them, so I didn't do anything.
Then they came for me, there
was nobody left to do anything.
Because we're all bound together as Martin King said in
a mutual bond of some mutuality.
And what affects one affects the whole.
And if you ever lose sight of that,
you're going to be very selfish.
The thing that I like most about our efforts were that
was selfless for the most part,
hardly any of us were expecting
anything out of it personally.
Some folk ran for office later and
some folk profiteer in various ways.
But as a movement,
it was a selfless movement.
We were trying to do good for
the whole and any movement should be that.
Any person should be like that.
I got to be concerned about
you because you're bound to me.
>> Thank you very much for spending time with us
today and sharing your experiences and your wisdom.
>> Well, it has been a pleasure and it's
important that you guys are doing this.
So hurray for [inaudible] State.
>> Hurray.