>> So I have the privilege of
greeting you this morning and
welcoming you to this momentous occasion
at Kennesaw State University.
This occasion, of course, would not have been possible
without the pioneers that you're going to meet,
these living legends who are on stage now.
And so I want to take just a moment for
you to welcome them with a round of applause.
[APPLAUSE] Without their stories,
your story might not have been possible.
Without their willingness to stand and fight,
your space might not have been
guaranteed in many of the places that you go.
And because this is dedicated to women,
I wanted to call your attention
to something that I think is very important in
terms of how people stand and become recognized
as people who are participating
in literally changing the world.
I'm going to talk to you a little
bit about a poet called June Jordan.
How many of you have heard of June Jordan?
So all the English faculty have raised their hands.
[LAUGHTER] Yay English.
And part of what I want you to remember about her is that
her profound words are
perfect for what we're going to do today.
In 1978, she presented
a poem called For South African Women,
and it was focused on the uprisings in South Africa,
many of which over decades and decades led to
the first all-race elections in South Africa in 1984.
She called this poem For the South African Women.
And part of what she did was to catalogue how
as mothers and freedom fighters, they changed the world.
There's an important quote
that this poem ends with and it says,
we are the ones that we've been waiting for.
In this wonderful exchange that you're about to have
with the living legends
and the legends that you are becoming,
we are the ones that we've been waiting for.
This moment is a moment
of change for you so that you can understand
how to articulate your voice in powerful times of change.
In celebration of June Jordan's work,
I wrote a poem called For Those
Who Came. This is for you.
Because I'm so young,
I can't use bifocals,
I'm taking these off.
We agreed to come here in that space before time.
We agreed to meet here in this now
at this gathering sisters and allies.
We have come to reclaim this Earth,
blessing her and her inhabitants
in the mommy waters of peace.
We who have overcome the fallacies of Eden,
refuse to be offered again as virginal gifts.
We who have been hunted and
witched join our individual and collective power.
We who were renamed and outcast,
reclaim ours and our sisters' voices.
We who have been raped and
taken no longer gather to mourn for
we have recognized ourselves and each
other and we have remembered our stories.
We agreed to come here in that space before time.
We agreed to meet here in this now sisters and allies.
In your sweet company,
we take the breaths of a new day.
Welcome to those who came. [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you so much Dr. Smith McCoy.
I am grateful for you and
for your support of this Digital Communities project.
And every time I come into
your office with my shoulders down,
you say to me, put your shoulders
back and keep moving forward.
And that's what I take back to my students.
So thank you soo much.
And I would be remiss today if I didn't say
a special thankfulness to our university partners
who made this event possible.
President Olens and his office,
University Events who put
the logistics together and made everything so so easy.
The Leven School of
Culinary Sustainability and Hospitality,
who will be hosting several of us after this event,
our deans, Dean Dorf,
Dr. Lejay, and especially Dr. Carmen Skaggs,
who has created opportunities to connect
us with research partners like the University Archives.
We are indebted also to
our friends at UITS who are recording
this event and partnering with us
to document the oral histories of the people,
places, and events of the Atlanta Student Movement.
And most importantly, I want to
thank our students whose work on
this project has transformed it from a seed
of an idea to social justice in action.
These students, my students,
you, all of you who are sitting in here,
have created digital content and
semester long workflow environments
based on IRB approved research
in physical and digital collections,
interviews, and by cultivating
relationships with alums of the movement.
These students have already done
a lot of really good works.
That seed, which was the genesis of this project,
was planted by someone
who is also close to my heart today,
ny grandmother, Mary Gladys Dixon.
One afternoon in 2009 during one of our weekly visits,
our talk turned to her youth.
Mary was a single mother who
raised two daughters and supported
a multigenerational family working for almost 40 years
as the head cashier at
the Rich's Department Stores employees' cafeteria.
She was 33 in 1960 and remembered the sit-in at Rich's.
She told me in passing
that day about a small act of kindness that
she and her fellow employees did for
the students in October of 1960.
I was surprised that she
glossed over this part of her story.
But she said to me that sometimes
ordinary women are called on to
do extraordinary things to help their neighbors.
And that was the kind of person she was,
the kind of person who thought of her acts of
kindness as simply a way of living,
as just what an ordinary person should do.
And while I agree with her on those points,
I disagree that women who affect
social change are ordinary. They are anything, but.
I would argue today that we
are celebrating extraordinary women who
have done equally extraordinary things
in extraordinary times.
So when we began to put this event together,
I knew that I wanted to link it to
this sustained civil rights DH project.
So doctor Sarah Holiday,
who is this year's Women's
History Month coordinator and myself,
brainstormed about what we wanted
our audience to take away from
a panel presentation describing
women's experiences during the sit ins at Richards,
Woolworths, and other lunch counters throughout the city.
Richards, by the way, was the first retailer in
the South to desegregate its lunch counters.
Which is compelling because it was also the largest and
indeed central to the economic and popular culture
of not just Atlanta but the entire South.
And so we had this seedling ready to blossom,
ready to grow and I thought to myself,
there's only one person I can turn
to in order to make this project happen.
To make this event happen,
only one person who would be able to serve as
the foundational voice of
a rhetorical recovery of
all of these marginalized voices,
someone who could tie it all together
and that person is Dr. Lonnie King.
Over the past several months, Dr. King,
who is the leader of the Atlanta Student movement
has mentored and inspired my students,
my colleagues and me,
giving freely of his time day or night,
always a cell phone call
away for even the most obvious of
questions we had as we started to
dig into the stories of the people,
places and events surrounding the movement.
Dr. King has driven up to campus on
so many occasions to meet and speak with students,
to guest lecture for us in
the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
And sometimes with fellow movement alum, Charles Black,
just to talk about plans for
the growth of this project in the future.
As my students can attest,
he has a memory better than any of us.
He can tell you when and where movement activities
happen right down to the day and often the time of day.
And not just monumental events
like the sit ins and economic boycotts,
but also the mundane activities, the negotiations,
the day to day processes,
which are also so vital to
the success of social movements.
Dr. King was also the chair of
the committee on Appeal for Human Rights,
which was formed on March 16th,
1960 and included representatives
from all six Atlanta area HBCUs.
Now, I want to take just a moment
before we get started with
our panel and tell you some information
about Dr. King that you may not know.
He served in the United States Navy.
He was the first African American elected to serve as
the president of the Washington DC Young Democrats Club.
While in DC, he worked with Youth Organizations United,
which was a coalition between young Democrats
and young Republicans in Washington in the mid 1960s.
In that role, he was
the moving force who convinced Senator Morse of Oregon
to get President Johnson to grant
Washington DC home rule through executive action,
while Morse sponsored legislation to make
home rule permanent for DC through an act of Congress.
In our conversations,
Dr. King has often related to me
that this was one of his finest moments
in his lifelong battle to let
freedom ring wherever he was living.
After DC, Dr. King returned to Atlanta
and waged a successful suit against the FCC,
which resulted in the integration of
Atlanta's television broadcast media.
He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in
economics and public administration,
an honorary doctorate from Piedmont College for
his lifetime of work in civil and human rights.
And now he is currently dissertating
at my Alamter Gora State University,
writing his book on
the Movement's three stage strategy of political,
economic and legal resistance.
There are so many more things I could tell you
about this living civil rights legend,
but you're going to have to wait for
our DH project to
progress to hear the rest of the story and
the multitude of other narratives that tell
a forgotten and misrepresented history
because we are putting it right.
I do want to share one of
my favorite quotes from Dr. King,
one which my students and I use as
motivation in our work.
And it's up there on the big screen.
Democracy does not run on cruise control.
And with that, let's welcome Dr. Lonnie King,
who will frame the movement for us and provide
us some context of the central role that
women played in the fight for civil rights
as we begin our Women's History Month panel today.
Doctor King [APPLAUSE].
>> Thank you very much, Dr. Bohannon.
Good morning to all of you.
May I have a good morning back.
>> Good morning.
>> Thank you. I'm somewhat demanding sometimes,
so bear with me.
I want to thank you Dr. Bohannon
and President Olens and others at
the administration here at the school
for this wonderful idea, this wonderful project.
It's been a long time
since things were going on in the 1960s.
And I don't think enough has been written or said about
the vital role that Atlanta
played and Richard's department
store played in desegregating the South.
When you have 58% of all of the merchandise
that sold in eight southeastern states being sold
in Atlanta Georgia through your store, that's power.
And it's interesting because
the Richard's department store and
Atlanta Student movement are inextricably tied
for the rest of our lives and maybe for eternity.
And the longer we get away
from what happened in the 1960,
it seems as if there's more appreciation for
how Atlanta did it that way.
And what I mean by that is this.
The more ways of Atlanta at
that time was separate and unequal.
If you wanted to make things equal,
you would get yourself in deep trouble in Atlanta,
Georgia, almost the same trouble
that you would get into if you were in Mississippi.
And I'm want to going into this
because our history books,
young people have been whitewashed.
And you don't see too much in
there about protests, non violent protests.
So the generations that are coming along,
do not know what a terrible time
previous generations had in
this great democracy of ours
and in this great city of ours.
However, Atlanta though,
even before the Civil War has
always been this unusual city.
Now, they didn't really cotton
up to the whole idea of desegregation until the 60s.
But still, you had an intellectual elite here,
White and Black unequal
that worked together for the overall good.
And it is that particular element in
Atlanta's character that is going to make it
continue to be the greatest city
in the world, not just in America.
When it comes to trying to
bring people of different persuasions
together to ask them to work out difficult problems,
Minion Fritcho tied into race.
And we seem to be able to
come together in Atlanta and do that,
and for that, I'm very
happy that I spent most of my life in this city.
I wasn't born here, but I grew up here and I was nurtured
by white and black people in this city.
Young people, let me just briefly
state that what we had to
change in Atlanta in 1960 was a culture.
Now, I won't go into all of
the other stuff that I know you know
because many of you probably have had your history,
but there were no rights that anyone who looked like
me were respected of or
should I say no white person was bound to
respect any rights that we had.
So as some of the famous people
who were scholars said,
there's nothing on Earth so powerful that
an idea of whose time has come.
So when those four young boys sat
down in Greensboro, North Carolina,
on the 1st February 1960,
that act alone was a catalyst.
It was a match that
struck young folks like me in the right way.
And we pretty much decided that if not now
when? If not us who?
Now wars historically are fought by the young.
They're planned by the older people,
but they're fought by the young soldiers.
But this was the first time that
the young soldiers men and women plan and fought the war.
Today, we're here to try and honor some of
those young ladies who helped us fight that battle.
Not enough has been written about their contributions.
Sixty percent of all the folks
who got arrested in Atlanta,
Georgia, during the movement were women.
But it's ironic because when I first called
the meeting of people at Morehouse College at Sale Hall,
about 25 people showed up.
Mr. Charles Black was one of them,
and he can tell you we
didn't have any ladies in that hall.
None. Place was full of football players because I was
a football player and other few people
like Charles Black that I accosted on the campus.
But I was perplexed.
I said, we need to have some women in this movement.
So I called my major advisor that night, my mother.
And I said, mama, we
need to have some women in this movement,
but they wouldn't come to the meeting.
She said, "You go over to the Spelman
and talk to those ladies and they will come.
And if you get the ladies to come,
the men will come to."
And so I said,
mama, I don't know a soul in Spelman.
She said, "But they know you." Why do you say that?
Because you run most touchdowns on Saturday,
and those girls are there and they know your name.
So I went over there and sure enough, she was right.
Mama is right folks,
the ladies came in and they did it.
Every time we wanted to students to
march 4 or 5,000 would march downtown.
The preponderance of those were ladies.
Look at the pictures. They were there.
Whenever it was time to possibly to
self beaten, they were there.
So one woman,
when I got the word, a person had put
a cigarette out on her shoulder.
Can you imagine that? Putting a cigarette
out on young lady shoulder because she had
the audacity to want to ask
for a hamburger at this particular restaurant.
These were bad times.
I'm hoping that they'll never come back.
But I don't know after what happened in November.
There are people who do want to turn the clock back.
But I'm convinced, though,
that the same folks who saved us in the 1960s,
the ladies, by being
the ones who went to jail more than anybody else.
Who got cigarettes put on their backs?
Who did other things?
Who made the picket signs?
Who marched the picket lines?
Who put 2,000 pickets from
Richard's departments store up to
Davidson's Paxton and then back down to Richards?
Most of those were ladies
and they have not been given that credit.
So I want to commend those of you here at this college,
at this university for thinking about the young ladies.
Their appearance on the scene to help America,
to help Atlanta was forecast by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Dr. Du Bois in his book that he wrote in 1903,
called the Souls of Black Folks, said,
there will come a time when the
oppressed will rise up and those people will say,
10 million strong that
we're going to work irresistibly toward
the goal out of the valley of the shadow of
death for all that makes life worth living liberty,
justice and right is marked for white people only.
He said that in 1903.
It was true in 1960 when we started this movement.
I want to say to the ladies who are here that I
humbly appreciate all the efforts
and all the sacrifices that you put in.
And I think the college needs to be commended for
honoring the ladies who were the nameless,
faceless persons who were banded picket lines,
who cooked the sandwiches,
who kept us going,
who kept us propped up.
Thank you so much Greensboro State University for
during the right thing and honoring these unsung heroes
especially during Women's History Month.
Thank you very much.
>> Hello, and good morning.
I'm going to try a Dr. King.
Good morning, everyone.
>> Good morning.
>> Good morning. My name is Shiloh Gill,
and I'm the President of the Georgia Student Movement.
I have the distinct honor
of introducing today Dr. Roslyn Pope.
Dr. Pope is a notable figure within
the Atlanta Student Movement and served as president of
the student body at Spelman and was one
of the original members of the Atlanta Student Movement.
With all of her many accomplishments,
her contribution on an appeal for
human rights is one of her most notable achievements.
As a founding document for
the fight of civil and human rights,
Roslyn Pope helped to create
an invaluable piece of history that will forever live on.
Ladies and gentlemen, again,
I am so geeked to introduce Dr. Roslyn Pope.
>> Good morning, and thank you so
much for that lovely introduction.
I appreciate it. And I'm very glad to be here with you.
I'm grateful to Kennesaw State for making this possible.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the appeal
for human rights and how it came to
be and what it contains.
Are the copies distributed?
Does everybody have a copy? Thank you.
I never know where the microphone is
supposed to be for the best effect.
I wanted to start by giving you
a little bit of what we now call the backstory,
I hear that a lot.
The backstory, where did this originate?
I wanted to let you know that I was born in Atlanta.
My siblings and I were born at home on Ashby Street,
which is now Joseph Lowery, Boulevard.
And I grew up in the Atlanta Public Schools,
E. R. Carter Elementary, and Washington High.
These schools were segregated
, everything was segregated.
We lived in the middle of the Jim Crow system.
We were not allowed to eat with whites,
or worship with whites,
or become educated with whites.
It was a horrible system,
which probably on many of us has resulted in damage
to our image, to our self-esteem.
But this is how we grew up.
We knew that we were using
old books because in the textbooks in the schools,
you could see that they had been at
another school before they came to us,
and so we got the hand-me-downs.
And we realized that we were somehow not as,
I don't want to say good as,
we were not valued,
we had no value.
We were hand-me-down kinds of people.
The thing that we did have during
those days were excellent teachers.
We had teachers who had
grown up before we had grown up and therefore
their experiences living in
the South were worse than ours.
They were so determined that
we would become well-educated,
that we would move on from school to school and receive
higher degrees and that we
raise families the way they should be raised.
We had wonderful educators,
we had wonderful pastors.
I lived close to the University Center,
Spelman and Morehouse,
Clark Atlanta University, the theological seminary,
and the graduate school.
And so we had our share of concerts and lectures
and activities built to
help our spirits grow.
So that was the fortunate part.
The harmful part, of course,
was the system itself.
So when we left our homes and our schools and
our churches and we went to department stores,
for example, we had to confront the water fountains,
the ones for whites and then the ones for colors.
They were actually labeled color and white.
And we weren't able to shop like other people.
We couldn't actually try on clothes and shoes and hats,
we just had to buy them and hope for the best.
So there were a lot of
very demeaning characteristics in the segregated society.
Until somehow the idea
that this is enough came among the students,
and Mani mentioned the Greensboro Four who sat in at
Woolworth's and actually inspired
us to start our movement.
So sitting near Spelman's campus in
what was called Yates and Milton's Drugstore,
one day I was confronted by Lonnie King and Julian Bond,
and they said, in Greensboro,
they started a sit-in movement,
and we agreed that we needed to start one in Atlanta.
Well, part of the backstory is that as you heard,
Lonnie had been in the Navy.
I had been what was called a Merrill scholar,
which had allowed me to spend a year and
two summers in Europe studying and traveling.
There were grants that had been
initiated by Charles Merrill.
And one year before I was selected,
one student from Spelman had gone and studied abroad.
The second year of the program,
I was selected along with Marian Wright,
and the two of us were able to go to Europe
and study and travel.
So the thing is,
that being outside of Atlanta,
outside of the country,
and seeing that I was treated no
differently from anybody else,
I could get on any bus
and sit in the front if I wanted to,
I could go in any restaurant.
I didn't have to worry about climbing
the stairs to go to see a movie,
I didn't have to worry about having my fill
of concerts and those activities.
So it was a different life.
And when I came back for my senior year at Spelman,
it was almost unbearable,
because for a year,
I had been just a human being,
and then coming back,
I was going to be subject to
the same treatment that
I had endured for 20 years already.
When Lonnie and Julian Bond said we need to do this,
and I was just sitting there in
the drug store wishing
a movement would come and present itself to me,
because I felt so alone,
I couldn't start it on my own.
The reason there weren't any women at
that first meeting was we didn't know about it.
Once we found out,
there was no getting rid of us.
So what had happened was
that the six college presidents had gotten
wind of the fact that there had been a meeting
and that the plans were being made to demonstrate,
to picket, to sit in and all of those things,
and they became very worried.
And they called together
three people from each of the six schools;
the president and vice president of
the student bodies and one other person.
So the 19 of us met with the college presidents.
And to make a long story short,
Dr. Rufus Clement,
who was the President of Atlanta University said,
"We don't want you to do this,
we object to you making these plans.
But if you insist,
you have to let
the citizens of Atlanta know why you're doing it,
what your plans are,
and you need to draw up a manifesto to state your case."
Lonnie had formed a committee which didn't work,
we couldn't write it by committee.
He ended up saying to me what?
>> [inaudible]
>> So we had to run out of days by that time,
it should have already been done.
But when I put pen to paper,
it began to unfold on its own because
the thoughts had already been concretized inside me,
and so they came out.
One of the questions that people ask about is,
why was it called an appeal for
human rights and not an appeal for civil rights?
And I've had to explain
that it was our humanity that was threatened.
If we were full human beings
as that felt like when I was in Europe,
I wouldn't be blocked from
every entry that other people were allowed to pursue.
So it was called an appeal for human rights.
And if you want to look at it just for a second,
you will, of course,
read it on your own.
But the first little paragraph simply states who
who is presenting this manifesto,
mentioning all of the colleges and so forth.
And also expressing our unity that we were all together,
that we were not this college or that college,
but all of us were joining together in hearts,
minds and bodies in the cause
of gaining those rights which are inherently
ours as members of
the human race and the citizens of the United States.
They even went on to talk about
the misconception that people seem to
assume that everything was fine
and that black people wanted to live like that,
they didn't want to aspire for anything more.
And the last sentence of that makes
clear that every human being,
every normal human being
wants to walk the earth with dignity and
abhors any and all prescriptions
placed upon him because of race for color.
And the next one,
we talk about, we can't wait any longer,
400 years of slavery,
and then Jim Crow for another hundred years,
it was too much.
And we said that we didn't want gradualism,
we had already been patient,
we had been gradual but we wanted it now,
and we were going to
aim for full status as human beings in the United States.
And then there's a section where
we talk about those things
that human beings should have.
It just follows that if you're a human being,
you're going to need education and jobs, good housing,
being able to vote, hospitals,
recreational businesses like movies
and concerts and restaurants.
There were about 800 White policemen in the city of
Atlanta at that time and 35 were Black people.
There were all of these discrepancies in the way that we
lived compared to the way
that White people lived in the city of Atlanta.
So we had become tired and anxious and ready for change.
And this is the document that was printed in
the Atlanta Journal and Constitution on March 2nd, 1960.
It then went on to the New York Times and
other papers around the country and across the world.
Senator Jacob Javits of New York made sure
that it was placed in the library of Congress.
And so it has had a lot of exposure, but not enough.
Because our own children,
our own offspring don't understand their history,
they don't know the history,
they don't know the cost
that was paid for them to
enjoy the benefits that they have today.
Let me ask if you have any questions about that.
Be sure that you read the summary
because that's very important.
In the last paragraph,
we say we therefore call upon people in authority,
state, county and city officials,
all leaders in civic life,
ministers, teachers, and businessmen,
and all people of goodwill to
assert themselves and abolish these injustices,
we must say in all candor that we
plan to use every legal and non violent means at
our disposal to secure
full citizenship rights as
members of this great democracy of ours.
And it was well intended, it was heartfelt.
It did arouse quite a bit of
interest and fear and some people,
our wonderful governor at that time wrote that he
didn't think this could have been written by
any student in the State of Georgia.
So I said, well, he doesn't think very
much of Georgia's educational systems.
He accused us of being communist,
so people in high places said terrible things about it.
But I hope that more and more people,
especially young people will
somehow get to know and appeal
to human rights in this area,
in the State of Georgia and should be part of history.
Anything from anybody?
Yes.
>> [inaudible]
>> Well, when it was presented to the college campuses,
it had to be voted on.
This was not a unilateral presentation.
The student body presidents and
the college presidents presented
it to each of the campuses,
and they voted that yes,
this is what we want to say.
And so it was originally signed by
the president of each of
the six institutions except for one.
One of our college student body presidents was fearful,
and so the secretary
signed for that particular person
I won't mention the school.
But I don't think I understood your question exactly.
Well, thank you so much for your attention.
>> Hello. I'm Joseph Kimsey.
I was one of
the members of the first class that worked on
covering the people places and
events of the Atlanta Student Movement.
Originally, I was supposed to introduce Mrs. Poler,
but unfortunately, she could not make it
due to the I-85 bridge collapse.
But I do have the incredible honor
of introducing Mr. Charles Black today,
who's an alum of the movement,
as well as a member of the 1962 graduating class
of Morehouse College.
Today, he's going to talk with us about
his experience fighting hard won battles,
the struggle for civil rights in the American South.
Not only was Mr. Black a member of the movement,
but he would also succeed Dr.
Lonnie King as the chairman
of the Atlanta Students Movement.
Now, he is actually an actor who could be seen in
movies and films such as
Selma and currently running Saint and Sinners.
So students, faculty, staff,
and friends could you
please join in welcoming Mr. Charles Black.
>> Thank you very much.
I've always wanted to be one of the girls.
My desire was to matriculate at Spelman College.
But because of some sexual bias,
I had to go to Morehouse as close as I can.
But I assure you that I took every class that I
could on Spelman's campus.
As Lonnie indicated,
the success of our movement was largely
predicated upon the presence
and the activism of the women.
And not only were they participants,
but they were leaders at every level.
Lonnie had a co chair who was from Spelman College,
and the latest made all of the difference.
Now, if you want somebody just
talk and pontificate, you can call us.
But if you want some work to get
done, got to have some women.
I tell you that. Is that right?
I tell you the thing that
made the difference in our movement and makes
a difference in every movement
is that you've got to understand
that a movement is by its nature multidimensional,
which means that it involves a deep commitment to
lobty principles on the part of a lot of
different people doing a lot of
different things over a long period of time.
And this means that some folks will be out front,
some folk will be willing to go to
jail to pick it or to sit
in and the like but others won't be prepared to do that.
But their involvement,
I'm having a problem with pollen.
Sorry about that, is a
significant if they are making phone calls,
providing transportation, making sandwiches,
boycotting those places that you have a problem
with putting their homes off as
collateral to bail folks out of jail as happened here.
All of those things matter.
And if you don't have
that diverse multiplicity of involvements.
You don't have movement. You might have a slogan,
you might have an action,
but you don't have a movement.
You've got to have all of that.
And there's one young lady who stands out in my mind,
who was biggest inspiration for me,
Ruby Doris Smith was her name, Belmont Student,
who was as determined
and committed as anybody you can imagine.
If there were going to be two or three people
going to do something,
Ruby Doris is going to be one of those folk.
One of the things that she did which was comical.
She met with Grady Hospital one day
and went into the white section,
and she told the folk that she was very
sick and she needed some attention and they say,
well, we can't serve you here.
You got to go to the color area
because you don't look sick to me.
So she threw up on the desk and said,
is that sick enough for you? That was Ruby Doris.
Ruby Doris was also one of
the original freedom writers and she also
committed herself to
long term voter registration activities
in the Deep South.
And Ruby Doris ended up dying at
the age of 25 because she needed to be
in the hospital for her various self conditions,
but chose instead to
be out doing voter registration and the like.
So she didn't get the care that she needed,
ended up dying at a very early age.
But she was one of those folks who had that level of
commitment and there were many others.
And as long as indicated,
the overwhelming majority was usually
women who made the difference.
And many of us came because of women are
going to be there as indicated.
We weren't no dummies. But I
want you to recognize that people
like Roslyn and Dr.
Gwen over there who you'll hear
from brought others with them.
And whenever we were going to have
a large march or anything downtown.
We would assemble on what's called the quadrangle,
in the center of the Atlanta University campus.
And the first people who would
come would always be the latest from Spelman,
and we would march together through
the other campuses and
others would join us as we went through.
And in every instance,
the women outnumbered the men.
Many of the men with a lot of bluster and swag,
say things like, well,
I can't go down there because I
don't know what I might do to those folks.
I don't know what you're going to do.
You're going to do what the rest of us are going to do.
Get yourself hurt or go to jail or whatever.
But they were really in fact
a freak and wouldn't admit that,
would refuse to participate with that guise.
But the ladies had the nerve, they had the commitment,
they have the polish,
they had everything that it took to make the difference.
And I thank you for honoring and recognizing
their contribution today. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is [inaudible].
I am the current Vice President of
the Georgia Student Movement here at Kennesaw State.
And I'm just really pleased
to have the opportunity to introduce
our next guest speaker, Dr. Gwendolyn Middlebrooks.
She is also one of the original members
of the Atlanta sit-in movement of the 1960s,
who was arrested twice for
picketing the Georgia State
Capitol and also the courthouse.
We're honored to have her here today because
she's continued to fight for
equal human rights for people
of color and minorities all across the world.
Her courage, selflessness, and
remarkable vision has inspired
many other women and people of all race and
creed to join in the fight for fighting for human rights.
But before she became known
as Dr. Gwendolyn Middlebrooks,
she used to be Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr's and Dr.
Coretta Scott King's babysitter.
So without further ado,
please join me in welcoming Dr. Gwendolyn Middlebrooks.
>> Good morning. Thank you so much.
Thank you for that introduction.
I wish I knew what I was going to say,
but I really don't.
I plan to say one thing,
and as I listened to everybody,
I changed my mind. That's okay, isn't it?
I've known all of the previous speakers a long time,
but Lonnie is the longest.
Lonnie and I attend the same church,
we went to the same high school, he is older.
I really became aware of
his leadership ability when I was in the eighth grade.
And what I want to say to you is that,
and I don't know how I'm going to back into this,
but your feeling for being a change agent,
an activist starts early.
If you listen to what
the introduction told you about Lonnie,
keeps doing things early.
It's something in you that
calls you to serve others and to do for others
that prevents you from walking past children that you
see during school hours who are begging on the street.
You scan the environment and you see things.
There's something about it.
You just don't wake up at 40 and say, wow,
I'm an activist, I'm an advocate,
I'm going to do something.
There is something in you.
When my mother answered
the phone when I called from the jail, she said, oh,
you didn't have to call,
I knew you were in there.
And I was not a rebellious child,
but like Roslyn, for years,
I was not comfortable with what was going on,
and somehow that manifested
itself in the behaviors that my mother saw,
and she knew if something was going
on to overthrow the racism,
the segregation that was insidiously
ingrained in our community and throughout the South,
she knew I was somewhere doing something.
But I met Lonnie and
saw him as a leader when I was in eighth grade because he
competed against Vernon Jordan for
the president of our student body
at Howard High School, and beat him.
He's always a strategist planning,
he just smoothed up
to all the eighth graders, we were in eighth grade.
Eighth graders outnumber the upper classmen,
and so he could get more votes that way.
We didn't realize it.
Lollipops, whatever.
But he had a good platform,
he had a good plan,
improving food in the cafeteria, wonderful idea.
So when I got to college,
and you have to watch who you rub
persons with whom you rub elbows.
When I got to college,
and he approached me about
the idea of helping out by recruiting students,
because when I was in college,
the guys couldn't be on campus after
five o'clock in the evening,
I was at a girls' school Spelman female institution.
The guys couldn't be on campus.
So he was recruiting different people, planner,
organizer, get people to do what he couldn't do.
Good leaders delegate responsibilities.
So he had experience
in leadership that he really demonstrated.
So anyway, it was my role initially to talk to
the students on Spelman's campus
throughout the night knocking on room doors,
would you go with us?
We're going to sit in tomorrow.
And Lonnie had not indicated what time,
we were just supposed to meet on
the Atlanta University campus at a certain time.
They told us what to wear,
we were to be business casual.
If you look at photos of people picketing,
you will not see people in denim,
blue jeans, tennis shoes, never.
The idea was if you dressed a certain way
people would give you just a little more respect.
We didn't know for that initial sit-in if people might
act violently toward us and we didn't want
to do anything that might encourage that.
One of the things I thought about when I saw the topic
of transforming activism into sustainable social change,
one of the things I think exists in the minds of
people that we demonstrated was
that an act of activism can be peaceful.
Now, acts that were
designed to desegregate facilities
sometimes were met with violence,
but the activists were always peaceful.
If there's anything that exists in
the minds of people is that
you can be an advocate for
change in a very peaceful manner.
That's very important.
Because one of the things you hope when you try to
sustain a social change
is that you can change the people,
the core values, the behaviors of
the people who will
support the social change and keep it going.
I was arrested at the State Capitol with Otis Moss.
You meet some wonderful people when you're advocates.
We were arrested, we stayed in jail together.
One of the most powerful feelings I've ever had or
probably the second most powerful feeling
was when we were walking off
campus to meet on
the AU center so that we could get together.
We didn't know where we were going to be sitting in,
it was an accident that I was at the State Capitol.
I just got with that group because it was
important for information not to get out.
We didn't even know the time.
I just happened to be there.
But to look back and see the people
behind you when you are
doing what's right and you unite for specific cause,
it was a very powerful feeling.
And I tell this story and I
know I'm jumping around a little bit.
But I have so much to say,
I can stay up here a long time.
When I was a little girl, teenager,
younger than I was when I was in college,
we would ride the bus down
Prior Road to downtown Atlanta.
And we always had to stand,
because you couldn't sit next to a person who was white.
You couldn't sit in front of them.
And they would get on the bus.
The end of the bus line,
the Prior Road bus still exists,
it runs north south to downtown Atlanta.
The end of the line was in the village apartments,
and only white people lived in the village apartments.
So they boarded the bus first
when it came down the hill to Carver homes,
which was a housing project where I lived.
White people already occupied each of the seats,
and they would place themselves
in the seat next to the window.
And I thought that was so mean,
why are you sitting next to the window?
Why don't you all sit together?
But they sat next to the window.
And they really did that because if if they sat double,
that meant one of the white persons
would have been in next
to the aisle near colored people,
and we were supposed to be undesirable.
So they would seat themselves next to the window.
You know how teenagers are.
We started talking about that.
We talked about it for weeks,
what we were going to do about it.
We thought it was so mean for them to do that.
We could sit in the back of the bus,
but we couldn't sit in the back behind
them because they were back there too.
So we talked about wow,
the law says we can't sit next to them,
but it doesn't say we can't put something next to them.
So we talked about,
it was during the days when you didn't have book bags,
we carried our books in our arms,
sometimes we put a belt
around them to hold them together.
So we decided we could
put our books in the seats next to them.
And we were talking about it at
Baptist Training Union, BTU at Ebenezer.
One Sunday and Reverend King heard us and he said, well,
be careful now that you don't touch them
because if you touch them or something,
then they can say you're being violent, you hit them.
Our parents and our ministers told us things as we
were growing up to keep us safe around white people.
Things like if you're walking on
the street and a white person is walking towards you,
you've got to step out of
the way because if you bump them,
you'll get arrested and accused of a violent act.
So it didn't matter, you had to get out of the way.
We were taught that there were
certain things we were supposed to do.
So we had talked about
what we were going to do about putting our books in
those seats for weeks and weeks and no real plan,
but I was on the bus one day and somebody
bumped me and gave me a stack of books.
I was toward the back of the bus.
And I knew the plan,
so I put them in a seat.
We started from the back,
the books would go all the way to
the back of the bus to the last seat.
And we had no plan for when it was going to
start when we were really really surprised.
I don't know who in the front of
the bus started passing the books,
but we put them in the seat and the
when the stack would get very high,
the bus would move,
we hold in the stack of books,
finally the person sitting next to the window,
white person would get up
and move and we would say, thank you.
And then we could sit down.
We did that one entire week and I never shall forget,
this was my first wonderful feeling of
understanding what a peaceful unified effort could do.
When we boarded that bus on
Prior Road that came out of the village apartment,
all those white people were seated to the front.
I could not believe it when I got on the bus.
Yes, we did it.
And it was wonderful and we took our seats,
and then when older Black people got on
the bus who were working
in various places throughout the city,
we get up and let them sit down.
But it's a powerful feeling when you can see something
just that small that you've
done in a very peaceful manner.
My husband tells me sometimes,
do you have to always be on the battlefield?
I've been married 56 years to the same person.
And although I accuse
him of being about 15 different people,
he's changed over time.
He says, you've been about 30.
But I marched for Troy Davis,
though that was an unsuccessful effort,
and he was electrocuted.
But I can't close my eyes
because being an advocate, well,
during that period of time for what was unjust changed me
fortified in me of belief that
whenever things are wrong in this world,
if I know about it,
I'm always going to try to do something about it.
And to me, if you change people, you change institutions.
We were engaged in a revolution type of activism.
As I said, change in segregation is a bit job.
There are some people we know if we are realists who
still retain feelings of racism and bias.
But we prove that if you unite around
the right ideas, the right values,
the right beliefs, you can
peacefully change not only a system,
but a lot of people who support that system.
I could say more,
thank you so much for listening.
>> And so now we'd like to open the floor up so
that you can interact with our amazing panelists.
And so we invite you to ask questions
and interact and let's all just share together.
And before we do that,
I do want to get in one plug.
And that is for the Writing 3150 summer course,
which is going to continue
the digital humanities work that we are now doing with
collecting oral histories and working with
university partners to create this project,
and to continue this project on.
So if you are a student sitting in the audience
and you feel called to work
on a digital humanities project for
sustained civil rights and to
recover the voices of the Atlanta student movement,
I encourage you to register for that class Writing 3150.
So now we'll start the Q&A.
>> I want to say one more thing.
And I you have so much to say.
When I was a little girl
and I was a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church,
if you were a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue,
that was where Martin Luther King Junior's
father was a pastor.
After every sermon, there was a social justice lesson.
And I knew when I was 10 years old, I was going to vote.
He talked about the power of the vote,
the importance of voting.
I wanted to be 18,
not so I could drink beer or smoke a cigarette,
but I wanted to vote.
He said, that is your voice.
That's what you do.
I remember when there
were lynching and they would show pictures in
the paper of people who had been lynched
hanging from trees or whatever they were hanging from.
And there would be crowds around them with children
looking people smoking like it was a social event.
And he said and I remembered it,
you talk about how bad it was that those people did that.
You talked about how horrible the people were who did it,
but look at the people who stood around and
watched and did nothing and said nothing.
That if you see something going
wrong in this world and you do nothing,
you are just as bad as the people who did it.
And so it's interesting when you have
experiences as a young person that you remember.
And so those were the motivating forces,
the things that were in me.
I didn't know what I could do.
I didn't know how I could do something,
but I knew when things were wrong,
I was supposed to do something.
And that's what you're supposed to feel if you see
things that are wrong in this world and you want
to do something about it.
>> May I just interrupt for just one moment.
I mentioned when I started that
the Atlanta Student movement is intricate retired for
all humanity with the Richard's department store.
I want you to meet the man who's here
representing the Richards Foundation.
That's one of the big foundations here in Atlanta.
He's here and he's given us present.
Mr. Tom Asher, would you please stand up.
[APPLAUSE] Mr. Asher is
the chairman of the board and he's the one who runs it.
>> I want to say one quick thing.
I am not Dr. Genie Bohannan.
But I think that we need to recognize
Dr. Genie Bohannan's wonderful work today.
[APPLAUSE] And the last impact
that it will have for not only her students,
but anyone who is able to use
those archives once they are completed.
So my hats off.
I also want to
set a context for many of you young people.
Time is a funny thing.
So the sitting movement started in the
1960 in North Carolina, where I'm from.
But that was just five years
after Emmett Till was killed.
It was just four years before
the 1964 Act was passed for accommodations.
So just to put this in context,
even if you traveled as a person of near African descent,
you could not stay at a hotel that was
designated for whites only.
So I want you to absorb that for just a second.
Of the things that these people on the stage did,
opened the door for desegregation of the schools.
And I want you to know just how long it
took though it started in the 1960s.
There were still school systems that were
court ordered mandated to
desegregate in the 1970s and now too.
My parents were not well known for their advocacy,
but they were advocates.
They were everyday advocates.
My mother was the first non custodial Black employee
of the City of Roland.
That meant that she took payments
from people and it made the news it was picked
up by the associated press because people
were dehumanized to the extent
that Black people weren't supposed
to be able to do things that,
of course, that we could do.
And that set the stage, I think,
for though we were part of the same generation.
I was bringing up the back end of that generation.
I went to segregated schools.
I remember the first time we were able to go into
a restaurant that we frequented every Friday.
But before the law passed,
we had to eat outside.
And I remember the first day that we were
able to sit in the restaurant.
And let me tell you it took some preparation.
We were prepared for people to spit on us,
to spit in our food,
but it all worked out well.
I was a part of
segregated schools where we had hand me down curricula,
we went to Catholic schools
because that was the only school in
North Carolina in my district
that had the same curriculum,
though the physical plants were vastly, vastly different.
One of the reasons why I'm
an English professor today is because
at the Catholic school where I
attended the Black Catholic school,
the library was a closet and you had to
have a pass and good behavior to go in,
and I'm a little bit talkative,
so I didn't get to go in there very often.
So there's an African proverb that
says we are ants on
the shoulders of those who came before us.
So many of the things that you were doing as women,
no matter how close you are to your African ancestry.
And I'll remind you if you're human,
your ancestry started on the African continent.
Many of the things that happened in
the women's movement also took
place because people like the panelists on stage,
did the things that they did.
So I want to take a moment to thank them and
just to provide that context for you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> I promise this will be my last statement.
[LAUGHTER] One of the things I
felt so strongly and I look at you,
and I'm not advocating that you
overthrow the authority of this institution.
But this movement taught us how powerful students are.
The most powerful people
at an institution are the students.
You asked, who's the most important person at
your school or the president or the provost of, no.
You can't have a school without students.
When we worried about
the presidents if the truth be told,
could not tell us, oh yes,
go sit in because
their job was to keep us in school and educate us,
not to tell us to go out on
the street and put ourselves in danger.
So they weren't that encouraging.
But when we got all the students to go.
They had no choice. But to be supported.
And you have to understand that students.
The only way you can have a school you have students.
If the students walk out, you have no school.
I'm not saying overthrow the government.
[LAUGHTER] But I'm saying
if you truly believe in something,
if you want to support things that are going on that are
unjust in society and you mobilize as a student group,
it's such a wonderful feeling
you get so many wonderful things done.
>> So now we'll take some questions that
folks wrote from the audience,
and I'm going to share this with my students,
and so we'll just take turns.
And if you have a question that you would like to ask,
we'll bring the mic over to you.
So someone in the audience wanted to know
what should we students be fighting for now?
And can we use the same three prong strategy
that you all used in the movement?
>> I'd like to respond first to that.
When you wake up in the morning,
whatever upsets you the
most is what you ought to be fighting about.
I've often said to students that if you're not mad as
hell about something, you ain't paying attention.
Far be it from us of
our generation to tell you of your generation what
your causes should be because there are so
many there's so much to be fixed in our society.
You just take on anything.
That makes you mad that you know is wrong.
And organizing begins with one person.
You get one other person to join
you and that person gets somebody
else before you know it you have
a group and you have the beginning of a movement.
But don't let old folks
tell you what you ought to be doing.
We can share with you our experiences.
But we didn't let the old folks tell us what to do.
A lot of your generation
has said to us when we've been speaking.
Well, you guys didn't really pass the torch to us.
And after a while, I got tired of hearing that.
I said, light your own damn torch.
[LAUGHTER] Point is that nobody passed a touch to us.
Maybe they should have, but they didn't.
We did our own touch and before you knew it,
the darkness was being misspelled.
And that's what you should do as well.
Now, you remember King's speech
a year before he was
assassinated at Riverside Church in New York.
He talked about the triple evils of racism,
militarism, and economic exploitation.
We still are dealing with those three.
But as doctor Gunn was just saying,
voting is so extremely important. It's like reading.
You've heard the expression that one who does not
read is no better off than he who cannot read,
the same applies to voting.
One who does not vote
is no better off than one who cannot vote.
And you should never allow any election to come
your way where you don't have your voice
heard for dog catch or whatever it is.
Voting is your voice,
be heard, always be heard.
>> Let me just add to that
the Student Government Association and
all the other groups on this campus
the campus and get
every person on this campus registered to vote.
Every person 37,000 students here.
I would imagine that all of them are probably over 18,
maybe one of you might be younger,
but but we need to try to get
everybody registered and also voting.
So that's a second step.
Registration is the first step.
That's not enough you haven't voted yet.
You just got on the rolls.
That ought to be a goal of
the student government Association that
every student at this university
is a registered voter period.
I promise you you have thousands of
students here who are not registered.
So how can you complain about
the government if you not registered and voted?
And the reason why the South is red
politically is because millions of people who are
eligible to register and vote have not done that.
Now, we don't have the pool taxing.
We don't have people taking people out of houses
and mentioning them and all those things.
So what's your excuse nowadays?
There's no reason why we continue we continue to have
these right wing people running us in the ground.
And that's a part of what's going on.
The other thing I want to suggest to you at
this college is maybe you ought to take
a good look at the educational level of your community.
And see can we find some way as students to go out and
encourage people to go back to
school to go to school or what have you.
If you look at the latest data
on the education levels in this country,
you find out that 70%
of Americans high school education and below?
That's terrible 70% and then when you overlay that 70%,
you find out in the south southeast and Southwest,
it goes to about 85%.
Education, as you well know because you here is power,
and a lot of people respond based on the emotions,
particularly those who are not
as educated as other people.
So as an institution,
it seems to me that our goal ought to be
to have everybody in this school.
And by the way some of the people who are not registered
in this campus are going to be administrators,
teachers, believe it or not. Case in point.
When I was going I was one of
these strange kind of students.
I was always getting into trouble, I guess.
So I put together
an economics plan for doctor EV Williams,
and I decided to go out and knock on all the doors
around the college campus because that's where
the teachers were living at that time.
I'm knocking on doors and I'm doing a survey.
And one of the first questions that I would ask is,
are you a registered voter?
And I happened to go to the first place
I went was I won't call the lady's name,
but she taught me English.
So I'm knocking on her door and she comes to the door.
Hey, Mr. King, how are you doing? I said, I'm fine.
How are you doing, Doctor? I said,
I'm doing this survey.
I said, my first question.
I have to explained it.
Are you a registered voter?
She said no. Now, this lady
her dad was a college president.
She had a uncle who was a dean.
She had a PhD, but she hadn't taken
the time to go down and actually register.
So don't assume that because you have
a doctor they all registered,
that might not be true.
So it would seem to me that if you get all
36,000 and 34,000 making
sure they all registered and voting,
that would be an important step to try to find
a way to democratize Cobb County.
>> Hey y'all, I'm Shatla.
Let me take this moment just to
piggyback off of what he said.
I'm going to put a plug out.
If you want to be a part of a group
that is making social change.
You're seeing some of the surroundings.
You don't like it.
There are things that you would like to change,
or even if you just want to be
a part of voter registration,
the Georgia student movement at
this university is actually doing those type of things.
So if you want some more information about that,
you can talk to myself or Eddie,
you can go out to the tables out in the front,
and we can link up.
That was a plug. Let's get to the question.
[LAUGHTER] Someone in the audience
asked at what age did you start to
realize how wrong society was for the unfair segregation?
>> I was 10.
I knew I was restricted to a certain community.
In Atlanta, you could
be identified by the street on which you live.
It was against the law, am I right?
For colored people and white people to live on
the same street. It was just so clear.
If you go to Atlanta and you drive on certain streets,
before they changed the name
Martin Luther King Jr Drive,
the street was Mitchell Street Downtown, Atlanta.
When you got to North Side Drive,
where colored people live,
it changed to Hunter Street.
It's absolutely straight,
and street still exists
today and tourists sometimes come around, they say,
wow, you get lost around here because you're going
straight and the name of the streets just change.
That's because of that.
So you lived in
an environment and your parents told you,
don't go that so far,
you don't walk over in the math bass high
school district and you don't even drive
your car through there because
white people live over there
and you drive around those neighborhoods.
So I was very young.
I was in Atlanta when I
realized there was something people felt,
it was different about me.
People regarded me in a different way.
But my mother and our teachers ministers spent
a lot of time assuring us that we were okay.
We were just as good as anybody else.
But it was a parent.
Once you left your household
and your mother didn't take you somewhere,
you know when your mother had you put your foot on
a sheet of paper and your father and
they traced the shape of
your foot so they could take that
cutout downtown and measure
a shoe that you were supposed to wear.
Now, I wasn't aware of it then.
But when I realized there were other people,
I didn't understand why I
never went shopping without my mother.
You just, there were no malls,
but you weren't just free to go shop.
And that was why because they didn't
want you to get in any trouble.
But they would take that piece of paper to measure
your shoe and if they brought
it home if you couldn't wear, they'd take it back.
So I was about 10.
>> It's almost as if you
know just intuitively. Oh, I'm sorry.
I can't remember a time when I didn't know,
a time when I wasn't aware of segregation.
So it's almost as if it's in your genes,
it's in your DNA because your parents
have also suffered in their parents before them.
And it may also be the same with racism.
I sometimes think that
it's handed down from generation to generation.
But you know pretty quickly.
>> Let me just add if I might.
I still because I guess I
have lived longer than most of the people up here,
all of the people to think of.
I've got to put a plug in for Atlanta in this sense.
I've seen Atlanta operate the same way Jackson,
Mississippi as Mo bases operate.
But I've also seen Atlanta white and black.
After the 1960s,
come together, they would fight.
But then they would come out of it United as Atlantans,
or Ivan Alan the Famous mayor
wrote [inaudible] well, we called him.
He wrote his biography.
And he he listed six things that
had to be straightened in Atlanta before we
could move beyond being
considered to be the capital of the South,
but in reality, we were not necessarily.
The first thing on the list that he put in
his book was that we had to get the race thing right.
Now, you might have
a different difference of view of what he meant by that.
But what he was talking about was the fact
that you could not get Major League baseball,
Major League football, all those other kind of things.
Until we got right on the issue of race.
Now, right may not maybe in
the eyes of the beholder because we still have
an awful lot of people who should be doing a whole
lot better but who have been
kept back because of their race.
But there are also a lot of people who
have done very well in Atlanta.
That's one reason why you have a lot of people here.
Let me tell you I teach a class out of
Emory for a couple of quarters.
And when I first went out there,
35 people in the class and I said,
how many of you are from Atlanta?
I'm born in Atlanta. Only three people.
And so I quizzed them a little bit.
Found out that many of them have
been brought to Atlanta by
their parents when they were very young.
I said, well, why did you decide to come to Atlanta?
I said, well, I understand that Atlanta was really
a great international city and people
could aspire and they could do this that the other.
So recognize that yes,
we have a lot of problems that we still have to solve.
But one of the things that has
pleased me about my hometown is that people can
sit down of different persuasions
and they can fight in the room,
but when they finish,
they can come out together as Atlanta.
Now that's not perfect.
But you want to live in some other places.
There's a reason why you have
a big traffic jam around Atlanta Georgia.
Because a lot of people have bought into
the image, this is a city.
I think what was the Hospital set a city to visit Hagen,
that's not quite true.
That's a little bit of Hagen around here.
But by and large,
people working together, accepting
one another as equals and what have you.
That's hard work. And it means that
people in this room when you have children,
young people on those who already have children.
It's important for you to instill into
them some of the principles that
are in the Bible and some of
the precepts upon which this country was founded,
namely, we hold these twos to be self evident.
But they left out women,
but it should be all men and women are
created equal and endowed by that creator et cetera.
>> Let me respond to that question that was asked.
You have to understand that,
we've been black all our lives.
Now you may not believe that,
but all of us have been black all our lives.
But when we grew up,
we lived in an insular environment.
Everybody in your day to day life where
folks who look like you because this assembly,
for example, would be illegal.
Black and white folks sitting together,
you couldn't have that kind of thing.
So that you knew that when you left
that environment where you went to
school, and everybody was black.
You went to church, everybody was black.
You went to the stores in
your neighborhood, everybody's black.
And when you went downtown, things were different.
And those folks who were not black.
Had privileges that you did not have.
And it was obvious.
We were also the generation that succeeded
what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation.
We had uncles and fathers and the like who went
overseas to fight to make the world safe for democracy,
and they sacrificed their health and their lives.
And when they came back home, they were called niggers.
So we even lynched while wearing their uniforms.
So we were born pissed off.
The generation before us
shared these experiences with us.
That when they were in these foreign lands,
they were treated with much more dignity
than in their own homeland.
So seeing all of
the clear distinctions in our society as kids growing up.
You knew we had to ride the bus in the back,
couldn't go to the restrooms,
except in a couple of places in
the basement downtown, all that stuff.
And one telling thing,
which was quite interesting. I grew up in Miami.
Now, if you were as dark as
his microphone but spoke another language.
You spoke Spanish, you can go to
the hotels and you can go to
the movie houses and all that.
As long as you were not in American guy. [inaudible]
But that's where it was. And I
would hope that you take some time to
learn more about what
the environment was in the 50s and 60s.
Some of the things we've mentioned, but,
you know, there were segregated taxicabs.
White folks didn't use the same taxicabs.
You had separate ambulances.
Grady Hospital had twice as many ambulances
for white people as for blacks.
And if all of
the white ambulances were parked in the driveway.
But the two cord ambulances were in use,
and a kid got hit by a car a block from our office,
our student movement office.
You had to wait for 45 minutes until
a cord ambulance was available.
I witness that. I mean, sick.
All the stuff is very sick, but it was real.
And it was palatable.
You saw it everywhere.
So you didn't have to be too old to
realize that you were being discriminated against.
>> Again, I think my role here,
do doctor Bohannon is to provide context.
I was born in 1958 in Raleigh, North Carolina,
in an all Black hospital,
the operatory was on
the third floor and there were skylights.
And the reason for that was is they did not
budget for electricity in the operatory.
Even in the operating room in this all Black hospital,
there was no electricity.
When you think about that for a minute.
I was born in that hospital in 1958.
In 1960, the North Carolina opened
its first integrated and quotation marks hospital.
That meant though that black doctors only saw
black patients and white doctors
did not see black patients.
But it just so happens
that this was revealed in a documentary I did
about that hospital that the very first people to
occupy that hospital the weekend before it was
opened was a Black mother
and her child who just happened to go
into labor when they had
closed the doors on the Black hospital.
Jack Johnson, the famous heavyweight fighter
died at St. Agnes Hospital.
Why? Because he could not be admitted in Henderson,
North Carolina, where he had an accident.
He had to come 45 minutes to St. Agnes to be
assisted and he died in
that operating room where there was no electricity.
So just to provide that context,
you didn't have to figure out that you
were being discriminated against.
Not only did you have to know
where you could and could not go,
but it was for your own safety to recognize these things.
Otherwise, you might not actually step out.
The store that was
equivalent to riches in North Carolina was Belts.
And at Belts department store,
we could only shop in
the basement and the bathrooms were segregated.
So my mother was quite the character.
She decided that we weren't going to use
the colored bathroom anymore
because they never cleaned it.
And so we went into
the white restroom and the clerk followed us.
I must have been about five.
And the clerk was saying you can't come here.
She said, well, they can either use the restroom in
here in the white restroom
or I'll have them going in the hallway,
which one would you like for us to do.
And so we broke those boundaries.
Eventually, she became a partner with
belts to provide clothing
and assistance for underprivileged children
in that hospital where she used to work.
So it paid to know that you could
get out of your racial place and make change.
But it also was necessary for you to know that
it was dangerous and it could have threatened your life.
>> Hello. My name is Samira,
and there's a student in the audience who
asked if your movement had begun in 2016,
do you see any ways that you all would have used
social media to move the movement efforts forward?
>> Yes. Let me just [inaudible].
In order to have a movement,
you've got to have a plan and you
have to have a way to execute the plan.
You have to also inform other people that you
want them as to what your plan is all about.
We started out in the summer of 1960.
I assigned Julian Bond
to write something called the student movement in you.
And we put out 20,000 copies of that document 8.5
by 14 every Sunday at the Churches.
A man named as [inaudible] Hill who
own Hill office supplies,
came by my office on Auburn Avenue,
I guess we've been business about a month
down there and this had gone out maybe four weeks.
He came by and I was a little
stunned when he came in
because I had never seen him before.
And the secretary had let
this tall white guy in
there and my life was shaky at that time.
Somebody might have assassinated
me to be very honest with you.
So when I looked up, he was this tall white guy.
Who had gotten back there where I was,
and I didn't know what he was going to do.
And I guess I must have it must have shown on
my face because he quickly said,
my name is Kasus Hill.
I own Hill office supply up the Street.
I knew then that he was a white guy
I'm a black guy who looked white.
He sat down and he said to me.
He had the lane of data world with him.
Mr. CA Scott, the editor of the paper,
and the owner had written the editorial against us.
And he said, It's a shame what Mr. Scott is doing.
We need to get another newspaper going here.
I have a one called Atlanta Inquiry,
that I've gotten permission from the State to start.
But I don't have anybody to write it.
He said I have an editor, but I need
some reporters and what have you.
So he said you can,
if you stop publishing that Student movement and you.
Use Atlanta Inquiry.
Give me the staff to write it
and you can write everything you want to write
to carry forward the same message
that you were carrying out
in the student movement and you.
I'm happy to tell you that that newspaper
Atlanta Inquirer is still
running today 50 some years later.
I was started by the students.
You can start it and you can do it and it can last,
especially if it's a good idea.
>> We ought to contrast, you know,
social media of that day with social media of today.
What we had were telephone booths,
every now and then on street corners.
In the dormitory where I lived on campus,
there was one phone on the first floor.
Nobody had anything called a cell phone.
These things did not exist.
We communicated by bullhorns.
If we didn't have beepers,
what do you think of beepers,
any of that stuff. Pagers none of that.
And we had to do flyers and get them
out by hand to people and all that.
So you're talking about
a significantly different capability of
communication where you can pick up
this little phone and
communicate all around the world in an instant.
Nobody can dream of such a thing during our time.
So we were able to succeed with
our movement with the limited communication capabilities
that we had. Only got no excuse.
>> And the next question from the audience is how can
white students best be allies for
the project that is currently going on
here and also in general?
How can white students be allies for the project?
>> Well, let me just
tell you that the best way to be an ally
is to contact the people who are
doing the work and volunteer to get involved.
We had white students
almost from the beginning and throughout our movement.
A lot of them came in from
Harvard and Yale and Dortmund,
you name it, Columbia, Major.
>> Shorter colleges.
>> Short colleges, that's right.
They came in and they worked
many of the white students got
beaten like the black students did.
So it's possible to make it happen.
Our model is simply this.
If you want to come and help us change the world,
change Atlanta, change the South, come on.
And we don't want to
guarantee you that you wont get hurt,
that you wont get beaten, but come on.
But I learned something here recently in the last two,
three years that I was writing my dissertation.
I was reading a book that was written by one of
the black policemen who
was there during the time of the movement.
I did not know, Charlie,
that they put the whites in different vans from us.
Are you aware of that? So they
put the whites in a different van.
And what I understand is that to
show the policeman's disdain
for the whites who joined us,
they would speed up and shut on the brakes.
Speed up, shut on the brakes.
Now, they weren't laced down or tied down.
So they were literally carrying those children.
They were knocking them up against the wall.
That was their way of showing from
the police department they are disdained.
Now, what you had in Atlanta was this,
Mayor Hartsfield, sent out the order.
I'm not going to abuse these children.
William B. Hartsfield.
Chief Jenkins who worked for him carried that out.
But Chief Jenkins was not in every patrol car,
and not in every paddy wagon.
And what I'm learning here,
ex post facto is that some of
these white kids got treated worse than some of
the black kids because I never
heard any black students tell
me that they got bumped around and pushed around.
But some of the white paddy wagon drivers show that
disdain by punishing the white kids
who came down from the North.
Some came from the [inaudible] too, by
the way to help us.
So this I maintain
that the biggest problem that we
have with racism is ignorance.
And also I want to say heredity,
but certainly social conditioning.
Where the Bible say train up a child in the way
he should go and when he's old he would not depart,
there's just too much of that going on.
And our children are being told the wrong thing,
the wrong stuff being painted on
their slate at an early age.
So it just keeps on growing.
But the question becomes more of how can
we find a way to erase some of
this stuff that is causing this country to
be split right down the middle based on race.
>> And as Rozon said from the beginning,
the appeal was an appeal for human rights,
not just for a certain race of people.
And so if you keep that uppermost in your mind,
that when you do something to
help other people, you help yourself.
We're here it's about helping everybody.
That's so important.
>> Just speak to someone of
a different race if you've never done that before.
I can guarantee you that there are
some black students on this campus who don't feel
welcomed and who feel
neglected and discriminated against
because it hasn't gone away.
And so just a welcoming attitude,
a smile can go a long way to helping
to ease any tension that may exist on either side.
>> Tell you a quick story.
And I won't name the county.
And the end of the story is,
things are better now.
I was called by National Office in January to take over
an organization in a county and some of my friends said,
do you know where you are?
It's just 19 miles from my house.
And I didn't think very much about it.
The man who was running the recreational activity,
leisure time activity was
ill. And I got a call from the National Office,
when will you go out there?
You're the closest certified person in
Atlanta and take it over until the person gets well.
When I walked in,
they were all white and all over the age of 60,
you could hear a pin drop.
And as the lady was introducing me,
one man who's the oldest one in
the group just stood up and started
talking to go on with what they were doing.
And one week after I got there,
the man who was running the activity died.
And so the National asked me to stay.
And so I was staying and smiling and smiling
and so one day fast forward,
I was gritting my teeth and staying there in September.
The older gentleman who had interrupted me
the first day walked
up to me as I was picking up something off the floor.
He says, you know, Gwen,
they wanted to use one system and I had elevated
them to use a higher standard than what they were doing.
And I said, this is what's done across the country.
You've been using something that's no longer appropriate.
And so he says to me,
we've been talking behind your back while you were gone.
And we decided we'd rather use, in other words,
system Number 2 and we outnumber you.
And when he turn to walk away, I said,
that may be true,
but I'm the manager,
I'm in charge, and this is what we're going to do.
But when I got home, I was bothered all the way
home and I called the National Office,
and I said, I want to
discontinue this particular organization.
And the lady said to me,
well, wait till next year,
she said, because you
won't be able to open it somewhere else.
And then I sat and I thought
for a while and I said, you know what?
I'm not going anywhere
because they have a lot to learn from me.
And so I've been there, I've continued.
He's one of my closest supporters now.
For a moment and it was something
I've never done, I almost left.
This is a small community outside of Atlanta,
they've been in the newspaper recently.
If you really think about
some racist things that have been going
on there. And I said, you know what?
I need to stay because my presence will help them change.
They probably have never been around anybody with
my kind of hair and my color skin.
And they can learn from me.
So sometimes just by being in the mix with somebody,
you can affect a change.
>> I think it's also helpful to remember that race
is a social construction. It's not real.
There's no biological difference between me or
you that defines me as somehow
being differently human than you are.
I think James Baldwin might
have put it best when he says,
"As long as you think you're white,
I'm going to have to be black."
And somewhere along the line,
we have to recognize that
all humanity began in the same space.
And if you are a human,
then race should matter.
You should be able to contribute where you can
bring your heart and soul to make social change.
>> This is so awesome, guys.
The next question is, in your opinion,
what else could have been done to improve this movement?
So I'm supposing there are partner who ask you.
>> Our movement? [NOISE]
>> Yes. Well,
I think we made some
tactical and perhaps strategic errors.
One of which was that we didn't make
a point of ensuring that
successive generations would be as
imbued with the same knowledge and passion that we were.
We had assumed to
a great extent that once barriers came down,
people would interact, get to know each other
as human beings, and all would be well.
Well, what we neglected
to realize was that bigots had babies.
And those babies were taught to be bigots too.
And so there was a continual effort throughout
the past 50 years of undoing
all the good that we attempted to do at that time.
And I think the other thing that we
might have done differently was we should
have focused more on
economic empowerment in addition to voter involvement.
So the people understood that this country moves
capitalistic society and so much is determined by dalla.
The thing that made the difference
with Richard's department store,
and coming around was they lost
$10 million of Christmas holiday because of our boycott.
So all of a sudden,
they understood what we were talking about.
So I think that if we had focused more on
economic empowerment and opportunities for
training and knowledge of
management and business and that
thing as an important entry
into a more equitable society,
I think things would have been a little bit better.
>> Let me just add to that what Mr. Black is saying.
Doctor Bohannon has brought forward
a comment that you heard me made once where I
said democracy does not run on cruise control.
You got to keep your hands on
the steering wheel in order for it to work.
If you put it automatic,
it just won't work, as I understand it.
But we need to look at what has been successful.
Thanks to doctor EV Williams,
who taught economics at Morehouse.
I was able to devise a strategy that
was voted on by the students and they embraced it.
The idea was an economic boycott of
downtown Atlanta with Richard's department store
being the principle target.
And I learned that we cost
Rich's Department Store $20 million
in the Christmas holidays of 1960.
Now, did Rich told me in
Chief Jenkins office in June before we
started the boycott because we had announced it.
Chief Jenkins told me in front of Chief Jenkins
that if I brought my black ass back into his store again,
that he she got him put under the jail, basically.
And so with that he had no more to say as said, Mr. Rich,
I'm coming back in the fall on October 19th,
and I'm going to bring thousands with me.
So Chief get the jail sales ready.
So Dick Rich got up
and walked out of the meeting, turned real.
I never spoke to him again in life.
However, once they lost that $20 million,
and then we called the boycott to be
extended because they didn't give
up it over the Christmas holidays.
Extended through Easter within 30 days,
the Sam ridges department store and
the Virgin Downtown signed an agreement.
The only time it's ever been signed in
the South to the second date.
Most of the time, the Southerners would wait for
the federal courts to order them to do certain things.
That didn't happen and I promise you that
Richard's department store had
a lot to do with the signing of that agreement.
What I didn't know was
the impact of the economic boycott
because I didn't know at that time how much.
And Mr. Tom Asher, I happened to come in when he was
making a speech down at Georgia State a few weeks ago.
And I was stunned when Tom
spoke just tell me
he must have done that for you in fact.
But anyway, when I came into the room,
Tom was saying that we lost the 20 million.
He said, guess how much money that is in today's dollars,
$553 million. I was stunned.
That was the case.
Economics can bring about a lot of change.
Stop worrying about whether or not people
love you you just have to be treated fairly.
And if you prove the doctors out, somehow or another,
the most reactionary people become far
more receptive of some
of the ideas that you're trying to bring forward.
And the ideas that you're bringing forward are
not ideas of hate.
It's ideas of equality,
it's ideas of justice,
it's ideas of fairness.
>> Let me say this about Rich,
two things about Mr. Rich.
Rich was everybody's favorite store,
which is why they were our main target.
And the reason that they were everybody's
favorite store is that they had
a stated policy that no sale
is ever complete until the customer is satisfied.
And what that meant was that if you bought something
from Rich today and10,
15 years later, didn't work anymore, they take it back.
They'd give you a refund or in exchange for that product.
Everybody knew that. So they loved riches.
Everybody loved riches so we knew if Richard's know,
fell, then everybody else would fall in line.
Now, about Richard Rich's redemption.
Now, I had the occasion
to negotiate the desegregation of
movie houses and Hartsfield
was still the mayor at the time.
And he we had been picketing and carrying on for a while.
And he brought with him to
this meeting of my little team
and the owners of the theaters,
the Chief of Police and Richard Rich.
So when the theater owners
were saying all this stuff about, well,
we're afraid there'll be somebody yelling fire,
there'll be stink bombs and, like that.
And my response was that I'm sure
that chief Jenkins could
maintain law and order in Atlanta,
can't you chief which,
of course, he responded in the affirmative.
But Mr. Rich chimed in and
said that all of those fears that you
have I had to and none of that stuff happened,
and I'm sorry, I lost all that money with that boycott.
So his input was very pivotal and my being able to
negotiate within four hours
of the deviation of all the movie houses in that.
>> I was trying to write the names of
them before I forgot.
Two books and Charles was right.
I guess that was no plan laid to
sustain and assuring the future generations
would not only know what we did but know how to use
it to moved to move forward.
Thank you. And now I thought about
it when I read Michelle Alexander's book,
the new Jim Crow.
Where she asserts that slavery was replaced
by Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow is the war on drugs,
that there's a systematic effort among
the white population to
make sure they are never going to be on the bottom.
That when you erase one and just system,
they're going to put another one in to
assure that they will always be supreme.
And you have to read I think
his name I said I wasn't going to forget it because I
met him Ivvy Condi and you Condi can
look him up on your book who
wrote stamp from the beginning.
He's been promoting that book
at American Historic Society,
the history of racist ideas in America.
Very interesting how generations
of people have a system for keeping things going.
And so as we were so busy being advocates
for removing segregation until
we just assume the ball would keep rolling.
And those of us who believe that that is wrong just did
not have a plan in place to
assure that future generations removed.
But read those two books they're very interesting.
The new Jim Crow is
very interesting and Condi's book is very interesting.
You met it? You know the book? Very good.
>> Which one, the new Jim Crow?
>> No, Condi is it Ibram?
Did I get his name rate?
Ibram?Ibram, I-B- R-A-M Condi from Florida.
>> And what is it called?
>> Stamped from the beginning, colon.
The history of racist ideas in America, is that right?
You got it on your iPhone?
[LAUGHTER]
>> Thank you. We only have time for two more questions.
This next question is going to count as one of those two.
And the question is directed towards
those who have been jailed. It goes.
Could you please talk about some of
your experiences you had while you were
in jail during the movement of
the 1960s Atlanta Student movement sit ins of the 1960s.
>> Well, I was too young to be frightened.
And all of my friends were there.
And so I don't have any really bad experiences to
report except the good ones.
The prisoners loved us.
They were so happy to see us.
They were patting us on the back,
congratulating us,
thanking us for doing what they couldn't do.
Jail was wonderful.
It was really wonderful.
And we were young people and they were so glad,
they were hugging us and it wasn't
a scary moment that we experienced.
It was really and you just felt like a million dollars.
And I remember I was poor and I had lived in
the housing project and you think about doing something,
you never know what you're going to do
and you don't know they're putting you in jail,
that's the last place you ever want to go.
And when you walk in the jails that people are grabbing
you and hugging you and saying, thank you.
And I'm so and so and I'm in for this, they loved us.
That was, I think,
in a nutshell that I can say.
>> Let me just comment on this.
When I was arrested in February of 1961,
one Dr. Bennerbz was also
arrested with several other ladies, Ms. Spelman.
So when I got to the court house
that day for my arraignment and what have you,
I walked in and
Atlanta had a policy were in Fulton County.
The first person who was white or black,
whatever to sit on that side and everybody else who came
in knew it was custom to follow that pattern.
In other words, if Tom Asher came in and he was white and
everybody else who was white would have to come
in and sit behind Tom Asher.
And Tom might decide
the next day he's in court to sit on that side.
And everybody who came in would sit on that side.
That was the understanding of how
Atlanta operated with these courthouses.
So I came in with
Gwendolyn Middlebrooks and a couple
of other ladies from Spelman.
For my appearance before the court.
And so when I walked in, I said,
I'm not going to go sit over there.
Why am I coming to a court house of justice,
and I'm going to go here and sit in the segregated.
So I went over to the white side to sit down.
Gwendolyn Middlebrooks and two other ladies said,
well, we're going to go with you.
So the four of us sat
on the white side of the court room,
Judge Webb, James Webb I think it was his name.
He told the Bailiff to go
and get those folks
back there who were breaking the law basically.
So the Bailiff came back and
asked me and Gwendolyn and
other two ladies to come up because he wanted to see us.
So I got up,
Gwen and others got up,
but he said, no, leave the ladies back there.
They're just following that boy.
And I came down there he put me in jail
for contempt of court for five hours.
This took me downstairs right
then and I had to stay up for five hours.
Another time that I was in jail was when Dr. King,
I went to jail on October 19.
So he and I were in the same jail
cell on Jefferson Street,
may be in a different location now.
And we were there for several days.
So when we finally got out to Mayor Hospel negotiating
a settlement where they could try to get
with riches and others to try to sell this.
Dr. King was then,
when they came to let us out,
they said, well, you have to stay.
And the Cobb County police were were there
handcuffed him and take him out to
the Cobb County to go before Judge Mitchell,
and I'm sure you know
a lot about what happened out there.
They were considering they took him to request place.
What reasonable I think it
was at two o'clock in the morning with
the German shepherd back that it was
not on the leash with him.
So that was the other time.
And then I guess I went to jail.
Two or three other times, it gets,
I guess foggy now,
but I think the most harrowin time I
had was when I went to jail in Athens, Georgia.
I spoke at Pain College.
And during that time when you trill around Georgia,
it was like being in a milk truck or something.
I got in Augusta and then
ended up taking me around Athens.
And so when I got to Athens,
I had to go to the restroom. I mind you.
I'm just speaking of pain about
desegregation and all that stuff.
So when I got off in Athens,
I went into the white bathroom,
not the colored bathroom.
And of course with up a few minutes,
he comes to the police to grab me and arrest me.
They took me to not to the city jail,
but to the county jail.
And they put me in there.
I asked to call my lawyer and they said,
we'll let you do that later on.
So about three o'clock in the morning,
they finally came and say, you can call your lawyer.
And so I said, his name is Donald Holwell,
and so they called Mr. Howell and Mr.
Holwell answered the phone and I said, Mr.
Hollow this is Lonnie King,
what kind of trouble are you in now?
And so I said I got to talk to Mr. Howell.
I'm in jail up here in at Athen,
Georgia and they won't let me out here.
So she put him on the phone and he came up with this.
Hello, young man.
What are you up to now?
So he proceeded Let me speak to the jail.
I don't know what he said to the jailer.
But when he finished talking,
the jailer went from yeah to Yes, sir.
And they hung up the phone.
They let me out and took me
back to the Greyhound bus station.
Now, mind you, now I'm out here at four o'clock in
the morning and they closed the station. At midnight.
So I'm out here sitting until
six when the next bus is going to come.
I wasn't sure what not I was going to make
those two hours because
those folks to talk to one another.
And so somebody could have been told that I'm
sitting out here and come and get him.
But Howell got me out with a phone call now.
What he said to them, I don't know,
but he got me out of jail.
So those are the things that I'm going to tell you about
the having when I went to jail in Atlanta.
I went to jail some other places too,
but we're going to talk about Atlanta right now.
>> And our last question,
which is so fitting,
is what was the most memorable event during
the Civil Rights Movement that still affects you today?
>> Well, I guess the most memorably event was when we
tried to settle this whole case.
And I got this telephone call from
Jesse Hill who the head of learn
life later telling me
to come to the most important meeting in my life.
And when I got there,
here were all the powers that be included Mr. Neely,
Frank Neely, who was the chairman of
the board of Richard Department store.
And that was one of
the most traumatic meetings I've ever been in in my life.
First of all, the
leadership of the Black community and Negro community.
They were on the other side.
The White community was on the
same they were all on the same page
because Daddy King said, boy,
you reckon this town,
I baptized you that was true,
but I wasn't reckon that time.
I was trying to save the town that as it may.
That meeting ended up with them agreeing to
sign for the desegregation of downtown Atlanta.
And I said I'll be willing to do that
on one condition that is in writing
and that I didn't have to go back and tell
my committee my recommendation is that we accept it.
When Herschel Sullivan who was
with me and as my co chairman,
she and I got into to the car to go back.
Mayor.
Sorry. Ivan Alan,
who was the President of Chamber of Commerce,
had the press outside of
his office at the Chamber of Commerce.
And he went on and he had a press conference,
and he began by saying that
the Negro students have agreed to end the boycott.
And the lunch counters will open tomorrow,
re-open, segregated. And that's all he said.
That created pandemonium in
the African American community.
Pandemonium. They had a big meeting,
2,000 people were there, a few nights later.
They raised Holy Heck.
The only thing that changed that saved us
that night was because Martin Luther King Junior came,
at my request, to quell that crowd.
And the greatest speech he ever made,
and you heard a lot of his speeches,
I contended the speech he made that night
because they booed his daddy several times.
Daddy King got up and was trying to
say the agreement was fine,
so forth and so on.
And one lady up in the back end said,
and that's what's wrong because he
said he'd been pushing for civil rights for 30 years.
And she said, and that's what's wrong.
And the place went up.
They roared.
So then I said to Mr. Carl Holden,
I said, I better try to get him out on the phone.
I said, this thing is about to get out of hand.
So Dr. King had just come back from
someplace that he was living on Sunset at the time.
So I called him, and he said LC,
they called me LC,
he said, I'm having a little cold.
And I said, I think we need you down here tonight.
And so he said, well,
I heard about the agreement,
and have you, while he was out of town.
I said, well, they just booed your daddy.
I said he's getting out of hand.
Please come down here. So he came down there.
When he came in, I told
Reverend doctor Borders that he's here.
Doctor King at that meeting
took the citizens up the mountain,
down into the valley,
up the mountain and down into
the valley, quelled everybody.
And I never forget him saying
that I would not have done this the way,
the Chamber of Commerce and the Black community,
I would have done it this way.
But we gave the people our word.
And we need to keep on word.
And if they're going to do this at
a time certain that they signed,
I suggest that we go along with it.
We cannot afford to have
the cancerous disease of the unity infect this community.
Greatest speech he ever made.
If you ever get a chance to hear it,
it knocks out the march on
Washington speech because he did it in Atlanta,
Georgia to Number 1,
he was crying, tears be coming out of
his eyes because they had booed his daddy.
But he also, this is his home time that he
had been involved at [inaudible]
A Richard being others earlier.
So those are the kinds of things I wanted to say to you.
I hate to have to say all of this on
women's history day,
but were not for
the 60 some percent of the participants who were female,
I don't know where we would have been.
And I want to say, thank you,
Gwen and Roslyn and all the other ladies.
You all part of a group that
brought me here as a woman brought me here,
nurtured me, kept me going to school,
kicked my butt, we love you,
and thank you all for saving us men.
>> I noticed that the president arrived at some point,
and I think it's appropriate for us to express
our thanks for your support of these efforts.
We're happy that you're doing that.
>> I want to tell about one event.
The day we picketed Riches and the clans also picket.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> I tell you they did a better job of
helping us close Riches
down than we could have ever done.
People were so afraid for us to be there.
They begged us not to go.
We said, we're not going to break the plan,
we plan to be there.
We were marching,
was it clockwise,
and they were marching counterclockwise.
And since they had gotten such bad press,
they did everything they could
to prove they were not violent.
And so we changed them.
But because the clansmen were in town,
nobody came that day.
So they finally realized they
helped us by come and not hurting us,
and they stayed away.
>> Let me make this observation by the Klan.
When the Klan folks first start coming down there,
they had on overalls and under their robes,
and they were walking
around looking like they normally would look.
And after a couple of days,
they came back with shirts and ties on.
So a reporter from the paper asked him, why the change.
And he quoted this guy say saying,
we wanted to show these tutors, we dignified too.
We kind of have fun with these guys.
The the normal robe was all white,
the [inaudible] cap but
they had different colors for different rank.
There were some that were green,
some I think were red and
yellow, all these different colors.
So I went up to one of the guys and said,
that shows a pretty rob. We got to get one of those.
You didn't know what to say, but we welcome
their participation because they helped
us to effect the boycott.
>> We are out of time for the panel,
but I did want to just for me and for my students say,
thank you because you have transformed us,
and I look forward to continuing to do
this digital humanities work with you so
we can transform everybody else.
Thank you so much. We're also
grateful that President Olens was able
to fit us into his schedule today,
and I would like for him to say just a couple of words
about Kennesaw and our commitment to digital humanities.
>> Thank you. So it's great
to be here. Thank you very much.
God, what a great panel.
Thank you very much for all that you said.
The panel demonstrates the need and
value in public digital humanities
better than anything I could say.
And the efforts that doctor Bohannon and many others at KS
you are involved in to promote public digital humanities.
About two years ago,
I had the honor to be at a panel at Emory Law School.
And John Lewis was there with Freddie Gray.
Most of you probably have never heard of Freddie Gray,
but the panel knows Freddie Gray.
I want to get him to campus.
He's got to be 82, 83.
And that's part of the importance of
getting him here while he's still in great help.
Freddie Gray was a young lawyer from Montgomery.
He went to Case Western to go to law school,
and he immediately had on his mission to end segregation.
And he ended up representing doctor King numerous times,
along with Congressman Lewis,
the Selma, Battle Montgomery Battles, et cetera.
And it's so important that you have
the visual story that
these individuals presented and that
other individuals can present because,
there's that day in the future where you can't
meet with any of us in person.
And I thought one of the funniest moments that night,
other than the great apparition I
now have for Freddie Gray,
was when John Lewis started
talking about the great value of lawyers.
And as a lawyer, anytime someone wants to talk
about the great values of lawyers. I'm going to listen.
And of course, he was the lawyers that got y'all out of
jail as you were talking about what Donald Holwell.
And then I got to know when I came to
Atlanta about Herman Russell and how he was head
of the pact that would put up the money to get folks out
of out of jail to pay
the bail that was needed all the time.
But it is so so important to be
active in this digital humanities
work to hear from
ordinary people doing extradinary things.
The public pays attention to those extraordinary things,
but they don't comprehend that they're ordinary people,
that 99.9% of the time are leading those efforts.
What a great panel.
Thank you very much.
Anything KSU can do to
stimulate public digital humanities work,
to provide these opportunities is time, very well spent.
God bless all and Thank you.
>> And so we'd like to thank you all for joining us here.
And again, I do have one more plug before we leave.
Dr. Seneca vat wanted to talk about just real briefly
a class that we're offering in the fall out of ISD.
So remember, writing 3150 in the summer,
and then we've got another class about
the 1960s coming up in the fall.
>> We're very grateful to the panel today and
we learned so much from your dialogue.
Thank you so much.
We would like to continue
this discussion this fall with the course
being offered in the Department
of Interdisciplinary Studies
by Dr. Robbie Lieberman.
Over there. The course is the US in
the 1960s and certainly many of these questions,
these discussions,
and this comrader will be part of that class.
So please take that up in your schedule and join us.
>> Thank you all for joining us.
Again, thank you to everyone who's here.