 Yeah, Strider Arkansas-Venston. Albert Camus wrote my birth announcement to the world, and it's a little bit wordy, but let me read it to you. I didn't discover this until 54 years later, but on the day I was born, which is the day of the liberation of Paris, Albert Camus, who, you know, Nobel Prize for Literature, so he was one of the founders of the Civil Rights Movement, but he died the day after the movement began. But reading his work, we got a handle on justice. He writes on the day I was born, August 21, 1944, nothing is given to men, and the little that they can conquer is paid for with unjust deaths. But man's greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition, but if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself. Well, Camus. It's kind of what I looked like back then. So what position is that? Head-back, corner-back. You know, it's nice, Michael Jordan had to borrow my number and LeBron James, too. So that's cool. That's funny, that's funny. So have you ever, have you seen her since? A few times. She married the preacher of the biggest right-wing mega-church in Arkansas, in Van Buren next to Fort Smith. But she was a good person. I mean, ideology and cultural conditioning, but we have a mutual friend that's seen her more recently. But anyway, those things happen. People who knew what I was, well, they knew. They knew what I was doing. Typical high school life, and then just a few years later, you're in jail. And it's so funny that a lot of people just don't have... You can't look that far ahead, right, in your life. But was there anything in that period of time, like from your high school experience that informed what you were doing just a few years later? There were, I mean, multiple things, but they were bullet points. I think I've told you when I was five, my mother, she couldn't deal with housework she had made, which wasn't hard at that time. Two and a half dollars a week for full-time. She, one time, apparently, the mother or grandmother of the lady who was made came over one day with her grandson, or younger. He was littler than me. He was four. And they came in the front door, which normally like people didn't do, but that was, my mother wasn't bad, so it wasn't a problem. And she was showing off her grandson and tells him to spell the books of the Bible. Well, I was five years old, and I was a good speller, and I read and all this stuff, and I thought I was pretty sharp. And here's this kid a year younger than me, and he's going out trying to exit. Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy is like, I couldn't spell Deuteronomy. So instantly that gave me a perspective that could never be shaken, that there could not be a racial hierarchy of intelligence. So at five years old, I knew that for a certain, just from one experience. But I assume your high school experience was segregated, right? I mean, you're in Arkansas. So it was segregated, completely segregated. All that couldn't be anything more segregated. You see what they did in Little Rock. I was south of Little Rock. Well, maybe you don't. That was the most notable thing in the world at that time. They had to call in the U.S. Army to protect the black kids that went to Central High. Several of them are friends of mine, the Little Rock Nine. Little Rock City Council, to sign the school board, decided they would obey the law. They would integrate Central High. So there were nine kids selected. And when they came to go to school, there was a mob of thousands of local white folks who assaulted them. And father's called out the National Guard to attack the kids, not the mob. And so President Eisenhower had to send in the 101st Airborne to allow the school Little Rock Central to be integrated. So that was kind of the first local thing that gave me a picture of what was going on. John Meachin, great historian, wrote recently just a couple of weeks ago published this book on John Lewis. His truth is marching home. I'm in this picture, but I've never found where I'm about there. But there were 600 people coming down, but we didn't get very far past this point. The tear gas, the billy clubs, and the horses. They horse trompled us and stuff. It was major. I had just gotten out of jail because Malcolm X came to town. I think it was on February the 4th. And the first time I'd ever been in a courtroom in my life, friends asked me to come down and just check it out. And I was there, and it's too long a story to go into, but four of us, two white and two black, got convicted and thrown in jail for sitting on the white folks' side of the courtroom. And the FBI came and slapped me around and they beat up me and my buddy one at a time while the FBI was interrogating the other one. They put us in the white cell and the KKK prisoners were in there and the sheriff gave them weapons to attack us with. But anyway, I had just gotten out on about February 11th, and then a couple of days later, C.T. Vivian was leading the march down to the county courthouse and that was the day that he got slugged by Sheriff Clark. Well, two days after that, we were going to have a night demonstration in Marion, 30 miles away. I'm just going to go out and walk around the courthouse and come back. There wasn't any destination except back in the church. Well, the state troopers and Jim Clark's 400-man waterpussy private deputies like Ku Klux Klan armed and they all came up there to attack us. And we knew it was C.T. They wouldn't let me go up there because they said they would kill me because they knew what was happening. So I spent the night at an infirmary back in Selma and we took care of the wounded when they came in all night. But C.T. preached that night, C.T. Vivian. And that was the night they killed Jimmy Lee Jackson. So then we got together, what are we going to do now? And we were going to carry Jimmy's body to Montgomery and put it on the steps of the state capital in front of Governor Wallace. And that was what was the inception of the march on Montgomery. And so then 10 days after that or a week after that was Bloody Sunday. So 600 of us are marching out of the church and to Edmund Pettus Bridge. And I was pretty close to the front. We were walking two or at most three abreast and there were white folks attacking people with their trucks and so we had no police protection, of course. So I stopped back to direct traffic on Franklin Street, Franklin and Water Street. And it worked pretty good for two or three minutes but then a white lady in a pickup truck ran me down and hit me and bounced off and I decided, well, let me get back in the march and go back up to where I was. So I hadn't gotten as far as I had started but I was over the bridge and a lot of people never made it up to the bridge. But I was there and heard major clouds say, you know, there will be no demonstration. You have two minutes to disperse and exactly one minute and five seconds later he said troopers advance and that's when they came with the clobbering. I got knocked out just for maybe 20 seconds. I mean, I got a glancing blow and I played football. That's pretty good. But I woke up and I was starting to get up and here's the trooper right in front of me and he shoots off a tear gas grenade point blank right into my face. And so that knocked me out again for maybe a minute. I woke up and all the gas and the smoke and here comes the horse charge. So I had to get up and make it back over the bridge and it's a big bridge. Alabama River is a pretty good sized river and so I was bobbing and waving all the way back over the bridge and into the church and which is half a mile away and that night in the church people were moaning and blood and tear gas and broken arms and stuff all over and about 10.30 that night and this I got the memory from the eight-year-old girl Cheyenne Webb. I saw her again this year. She was there on the bridge and in the church and in her book Selma Lord Selma. She describes there was this smonin and then it just turned into a humming and then I ain't gonna let no tear gas turn me round turn me round turn me round I ain't gonna let no tear gas turn me round I'm gonna keep on walking keep on talking marching up to freedom land. So then everybody in the church started singing and then people from the neighborhood for projects came in and filled up the church and we were singing and she says absolutely perfect. They thought they had put us in their place by good weapon but at that moment we realized we had not lost, we had won. Here they just called us foot soldier you know that was 50 years now it's 55 years but foot soldier you know but whatever I mean most people played multiple roles organizer, demonstrator moralist you know just philosopher it's the first time I learned about philosophy was you know all night discussions with movement people usually a year or two older than me sometimes elderly farmers but whatever we never they never allowed any serious discussion or history or anything all of my years in school I mean it wasn't tolerated there's a wealth here she was 86 when she died a month ago and a southern girl the first two snake workers were southern white girls she's also southern John Brown but I have lots more like that let me talk about Connie Curry she died on I think June 20th she was 87 I think born in 33 and she grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina in the south white lady Irish and she was working with National Students Association went to Agnes Scott College which was one of the few white colleges in the south that would sneakily have any contact with black people there were very few that would allow any contact so she started building her consciousness and relations and stuff worked with the NSA for a number of years was back at home in Greensboro and as history might have it that very day was the day the movement started at Woolworths when four black students from AT&T sat in and then she went back to Atlanta and she already knew Miss Ella Baker who was the executive secretary of SCLC well within two months there were 70,000 black students and some white probably four or five percent white students all over the south that were demonstrating against segregation and so she called a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina I can't find my thing but I have a program at that conference where she and Jim Lawson and Ralph Abernatch and Martin Luther King all spoke at that conference and that was the beginning of SNCC the student nonviolent co-ordinating committee so when they got back to Atlanta Connie Curry was working as an adult advisor along with Ella Baker and they created some space for SNCC to begin happening and the first staff member they had was also a white southern girl named Jane Stenbridge her father was a Baptist minister she was going to Union Seminary in New York and she came in and then Bob Moses came down to work with the SCLC and they had no work for him so Miss Baker and Miss Ella we called her they sent Bob down to Mississippi and he got the the contacts that Ella Baker had created back in 1941 and 42 and that was the core of where the movement started so anyway Connie Curry worked with SNCC for four years and then had been with the American Friends Service Committee and many others Mayor Maynard Jackson appointed her the head of a commission in Atlanta she just an incredible amount of work she did and another little connection she went to Payne College in South Carolina and right in the beginning and they were attacked by a mob of flights almost everywhere this happened and she met Silas Norman who joined the movement at that point well his sister was the world renowned opera singer I see Norman well his parents were providing funds for him to go to school for opera training and he was there well he dropped out and his little sister got the school stipend which turned out pretty cool Silas joined the movement at that point and he saved my life along with other people and Jimmy Collier got me out of jail in Meringo County, Alabama on my 21st birthday going up to midnight that night and when I got out of jail and came into the Freedom House at two o'clock in the morning and I hadn't been there for several months so I didn't know who was there and they didn't know me they didn't recognize my voice or my name and they were going to shoot me on the front porch two o'clock in the morning there have been night riders coming through and shooting but anyway and they were shooting back they brought me back to the back and Silas Norman turns on the ladder and says oh put the guns down we got a brother here that was Silas Norman and he was leaving town the next day it was a miracle and I've had a lot of miracles so that's how I made it through that night I became 21 that night and registered to vote in Selma, Alabama Silas eventually went back north and became a brain surgeon a real one, not a fake one like Ben Carson and so anyway it was Connie Curry that brought him into the movement I only met her in 04 and 05 well no in 1995 or 2000 I went to a SNCC conference in Raleigh and I had driven there and I didn't have any money for entrance fee and she funded me the 75 bucks so that was cool but anyway she had a whole lot to do with people being involved and getting the movement going and she wrote several books and she helped Bob Selner write his book The Wrong Side of Murder Creek he was the only white southern male more major in the movement than myself and he was five years ahead of me so CT Vivian he was my best friend among the top leadership in the movement he died last week at age 95 the only book I know written about him is Challenge and Change by Lydia Walker and there needs to be a fuller development but this is really well done when he was a little kid in Missouri Boone Slick Country his grandmother Annie Wood's Tendall was basically ran the household and CT was six years old and there was a neighbor that burned down their house and they lost everything so he was all mad and everything and his grandmother says don't worry about it God will take care of him you don't have to retaliate and then he soon thereafter got thrown on jail and got killed in prison one of his prison people killed him so that was his first spiritual lesson he grew up in Missouri and Illinois and challenged segregation then as a kid but mostly just doing what he did and dealing with the consequences and learning one story of him when he was, I think, twelve years old he was the marble champion in the school almost everybody else was white maybe one percent black and he had a appendicitis so he had to go to the hospital for appendicitis when they finished the operation he was supposed to go home and stay in bed for two weeks well his buddies came and got him out the window the next morning to take him in a wagon to the county marble championship and he won the championship for the school and for himself well, fifteen years later when he signed up for the army he had gotten a hernia from too much stress at that time so he didn't get in the army and his life had ensued he worked many different kinds of jobs and on one job he had after he had been he'd been working for many years in different fields labor, grocery store, clerk greeting card service whatever even in Denver he was in Denver for a while working at a cafe I think he didn't start up in the church he did various jobs and was director of a service center and stuff and he wound up getting inspiration to go into the church and went to Nashville in 1955 and became minister of a Methodist church there and then met with Kelly Miller and Jim Lawson and they began the Nashville movement in 1958 and Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis and Diane Nash and Jim Bevel and Mary and Barry and Angeline Butler were students there at Baptist Seminary or FISC or AT&T and they CT and Jim Lawson basically organized, trained and mobilized these students for a year then they marched and sat in at the lunch counters for a year getting beat up a whole lot John Lewis for not life yet the rest of them and then they heard about the movement they sit in Greensboro, North Carolina so they went there when Ella Baker called the conference in Raleigh at Shaw University or college at that time and so students all over the country mostly in the south got to get to know each other and they went back to Nashville the ones I had mentioned to you and a couple of days after they got back the Ku Klux Klan tried to blow up the attorney's home and blew out 175 windows in the medical college across the street I mean it was major and so CT heard about it at 5 o'clock in the morning called many people and got them together by 9 o'clock in the morning they were all meeting and making plans for what's called the Silent March and they'd been demonstrating for an entire year more than a year in Nashville to end segregation so they planned the march and they did the Silent March all the way through Nashville 4,000 black students might have been a couple of whites I don't know and CT was leading it with Diane Nash so the two of them go up and they confront the mayor they'd had a boycott for several months it was Easter weekend right after and they'd been being beat up by sitting in at lunch counters and stuff and CT makes an opening speech and then Diane Nash confronts the mayor and she says how do you feel as a man that some people have the right to eat and other people do not have that right? as a man, how do you feel? not policy and stuff and he had to think about it and six days later Nashville desegregated in April of 1960 first city in the whole south so CT was one of the founders of that movement at that point and later on went down to Birmingham and helped organize the children's march and then he went to Martin Luther King made him director of affiliates of SCLC and then when we were in Selma CT was my best friend among the top leadership in the movement and I never got to really talk at length or really get to know many people because every few days I would be beat up and thrown in jail I was targeted many times I got thrown in jail in court for desegregating the Selma courtroom the day Malcolm X came to town so I did not get to meet Malcolm X and then they murdered him a week later 10 days later and as soon as I got out of jail we had a march down to the courthouse and the one where Jim Clark slugged CT in the face and knocked him back on the steps I was there I was about 10 feet away when that occurred but I did not really know him I was certainly highly aware and respectful of him well a week later no four days later we were having a protest march up in Marion that is where the town where Coretta Scott King and Jean Young grew up in Marion and the leader of the movement was Cajer Lee an 83-year-old farmer and Albert Haskins who was a bricklayer but anyway I was going to go up there but they told me get out the car we need you at the infirmary when the wounded come in back to Selma they knew they were going to get attacked well CT Vivian gave the sermon that night and then they went out and then the whole state trooper force and Jim Clark's water posse was there sheriffs didn't have any boundaries in those days he had a 400 man posse that he took him up to Tuscaloosa to attack the integration at the university and he brought them up to Birmingham to join Bull Connor and beat up the kids there and all over well anyway so they were all up there and they turned out the street lights and then they smashed all the TV cameras and then they attacked inside their church and some people escaped out the back and Cajer Lee got into Max Cafe with his daughter and his grandson Jimmy Lee Jackson and the troopers broke into the cafe and they shot Jimmy and he died a week later and that was we were going to carry his body to Montgomery and place it on the steps of the state capitol that's why, when and how the march on Montgomery was organized as a protest against state troopers shooting him to death which had been a nonviolent demonstration we only got attacked by hundreds of armed state troopers and possemen so anyway, I wound up being the leader of the internal security force for the march on Montgomery apparently there were two there was an inner perimeter and there was outer perimeter and I organized the outer perimeter and the second night of the march in pouring rain, two o'clock in the morning my guys caught this one tall white man and they bring him up and I said let's see some identification he pulls out his wallet of general United States Army general general Graham was Henry Graham was his name he was in charge of the Alabama National Guard not the US Army like they had claimed he told us that he had sneaked through his own lines and my guys caught him and he praised us for being so assiduous and brought us over to his compound called in the whole regiment said you men do not seem to know who you are and of course they were all white and they wore confederate flags on their uniforms Alabama National Guard he said at this moment you are soldiers in the United States Army and if any man breaches these lines again the soldiers responsible for it will never see the light of day do you understand yes sir when you see in eyes on the prize the last two days of the march they're doing their job and they're watching the swamps where the snipers were tell you one thing about John in the key point the beginning of the mass movement becoming notice was the freedom rights matter of fact four years later when I was in Selma they still called us freedom riders that was the word that the white folks would use to attack us with y'all freedom riders so that's how significant the freedom rights were and if you watch TV all last week or this week you'll learn about John's role in that which was really significant well CT was in Nashville or Chattanooga at the time and he heard about blowing up the bus in Aniston and so he immediately went down to Montgomery and finished up the freedom rights and got thrown in jail in Parchman Penitentiary and so they were together again John and Bernard and Bevel and CT and so anyway even at that moment in jail and in the freedom houses there were very pointed discussions between non-violence or violence or how do you react to this kind of severe stuff and John was always on the non-violent side and more aggressive people like Stokely Carmichael were lean the other way and this dynamic kept building over the years Medgar Evers was the leader of the NAACP in Mississippi and they mostly didn't do activist work they mostly did legal work but Medgar Evers was absolutely as great a man as ever lived and when President Kennedy first made his first speech for civil rights on television they murdered Medgar Evers the same night in Jackson as soon as he got home they shot him in his carport and they tried to kill Bernard Lafayette that same night in Selma the FBI was connected and they knew about it and another man in Louisiana they tried to kill that night but he wasn't home so anyway John gets a call to go to Atlanta and then he gets appointed national chairman of SNCC like couple of days after they killed Medgar Evers and he was just just turned 25 years old and then they get the word that they're organizing a speech on Washington Bayard Rustin who was the main person who created the movement he saved my life one time too when they were trying to kill me in person Stokely Carmichael and Bayard Rustin both were involved in getting me out but he goes to national chairman and they go to Washington and John is the youngest man to speak and I've got part of his speech from his original draft listen Mr. Kennedy listen Mr. Congressman listen fellow citizens the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom we must say to the politicians there won't be a cooling off period all of us must get in the revolution get in and stay in the streets of every city and every village and every hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes we won't stop now and I say to you wake up America we will not stop wake up America we cannot start and we will not be patient that's part of his original draft and they made him tone some of it down but it's hard to find they made a record of the speeches but the first one got out with John's speech in it and then they cut it and then the main distribution he's cut out of it from the record so it's hard to find that anyway then two weeks later they blew up the church in Birmingham and killed four little girls so that was right at that time they passed the no a year later they passed the freedom summer in Mississippi and all the violence and killing people and the bombs there finally the civil rights act banning discrimination but it didn't include the right to vote so then we started up the movement in Selma Bernard Lafayette who was John's roommate at Atlanta I mean at Nashville American Baptist Seminary he was the one that began the movement in Selma two and a half years of hardcore organizing getting beat down getting more people and then Martin Luther King came in and all of a sudden it's mass movement Martin didn't create the mass movement Byrd Russell one time said Martin couldn't organize his way out of a paper bag but God could he preach and so everyone had different roles to play and different ways to do it I barely met John because I got thrown in jail almost every day no matter where I was they targeted me so I barely knew him until the march itself and I've told you about what happened on that day John Lewis grew up in Troy, Alabama and his parents had been sharecroppers but they bought a farm maybe during his very young childhood I'm not quite sure when but anyway severely segregated right near the town where to kill a mockingbird was written about one county over from there and so he heard on the radio about the Montgomery bus boycott so he went there to learn something and he wrote a letter and then he came and Martin Luther King saw him and he said are you the boy from Troy said yeah that's me so anyway he had a connection at that time and then he with his parents help or whatever he got away to get to American Baptist Seminary in Nashville and he was Bernard Lafayette's Bernard is currently the national chairman and CEO of Southern Christian Leadership Conference and he's the one who began the movement in Selma Alabama back in 1963 and then bigger in 64 and I spoke with him a couple of months ago and and Bernard and John were roommates and were involved in all of these struggles in Nashville that C.T. had sort of and Jim Lawson had sort of pulled the students and educated them and then when SNCC started in Atlanta in 1960 you had the Nashville kids and the Atlanta kids and they basically created Student Unviolent Coordinating Committee and Chuck McDew was the first chairman but then after the movement in Birmingham had taken place they had a conference and they elected John Lewis chairman well maybe after the freedom rides 1961 SNCC had only barely begun and didn't have any real organizing projects going yet and John Lewis volunteered to go join the freedom rides as SNCC represented was organized by CORE Jim Farmer was national head of CORE and they had two buses from Washington and they were going to go to New Orleans and today there were I think 10 maybe more than that but at least 10 white and black and they got to Rock Hill, South Carolina and John Lewis and a white man I can't think of his name now got severely beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina and then they got back on the bus and went to Atlanta and then to Aniston, Alabama where a mob of 1500 whites armed mob attacked the bus they caught one of the buses right out of town and they they shot out the tires and they bombed the bus and burned it and beat the people when they were coming out of the bus the other bus made it to Birmingham and another bomb a mob attacked them in Birmingham and so Diane Nash was the head of the movement in Nashville and she gets a call about the attacks and they have an all night meeting in Nashville and they decide we cannot allow violence to destroy the movement we're going to go down and finish the freedom rights so they sent a load on the train down to to Birmingham and then Bull Connor learned about it and captured them and instead of putting them in jail he drove them back up to the Tennessee line in the middle of the night and dumped them on the highway in the middle of the night well they got lucky they found a black farmer and reconnected and went back and continued the march I mean the freedom right and they filled in the places of the people who had left well John Lewis got on the bus again go down to Birmingham and he almost got killed and John Siggenthaler who was Robert Kennedy's top man got severely beaten that day and John dedicated to his one of his books John Siggenthaler well it was another mob attack them all of the police disappeared for about 20 minutes to allow the attack to happen and then there was a meeting in the church about a thousand or 1500 black people in the church all night Martin Luther King was speaking and the black taxi drivers union came to send word to Martin that we're going to liberate you and we're armed and we got all the black taxi drivers here and Martin gets the message just like 10 30 11 o'clock at night and there's mob throwing bricks in the windows and maybe some fire bombs and he says I want to see how many men are absolutely committed to non-violence show of hams and out of a thousand people in the church about eight hands went up come up here so then Martin Luther King with two or three staff members probably Ralph Abernethy was one of them and about six or eight men from the congregation go marching through the mob the mob parted just like the Red Sea they go to the head and the taxi drivers they said you can't do it this way it won't work you got to go home and then they came back and they marched back through the mob into the church and went on and continued until the mobilized federal marshals came about dawn about four hours later and then things mellowed out a bit and then they got back in Montgomery and they took the bus through Selma into Jackson Mississippi and then they didn't get beat in Mississippi they got all thrown in jail and put out on the prison farm apartment, state penitentiary but CT who was older and one of the leaders he was on that and got arrested in Jackson so the threads keep pulling back together and John Lewis soon after that, I don't know exactly when was selected national chairman of SNCC and some people were asked why well he's young, he's only 23 and he's the bravest among us you know what happened after freedom summer in Mississippi and being betrayed by the Democratic Party in Atlantic City and that's where I joined the movement and I met Stokely Carmichael and Fannie Lou Hamer and I came to Mississippi three months later to join up but nobody was there so I rode my thumb and eventually wound up in Selma and that's where my new life began in Selma in January of 1965 and like I said I never met Malcolm X because I got thrown in jail the day he came to town because I integrated the courthouse in Selma that morning and anyway things got so severe and there was some major struggle about black power nonviolence organizing around the country as opposed to just in the South whether or not to deal with the Democratic Party because we've been betrayed so many times against the war in Vietnam everything was happening right at that time so there was a SNCC conference outside of Nashville in 1966 I was out of town for a month when my father died and then back working with SNCC and then I went up north for a month and then I came back and I was late there and the black power coup really was taking over and we had an election I spoke at one of the meetings but didn't go over too well and we had like a 20-hour plenary session and we took a vote and we've elected, re-elected John Lewis as national chairman he had about people were warned out, not many were there it had maybe 120 votes and Stokely had about 70 and I think Charles Charade had 10 votes I think I voted for Charles Charade I can't remember anyway the meeting didn't end they kept the meeting going until about one o'clock in the morning there was disputes over the election and about 15 guys came in from Atlanta that we didn't know, I didn't know and they demanded a new election so it's two o'clock in the morning there was another election and they elected Stokely as chairman Snick took the Black Power emblem and they'd been doing great work in Lowndes County, Alabama created what was we called the Black Panther Party Lowndes County Freedom Organization and there weren't any whites in leadership there were a few whites on the board or stuff and organizers but some people wanted it to be only blacks and there was a dispute over that that went on for about a year and a half and finally at a meeting in Atlanta Fannie Lou Hamer who was the heroine of the whole movement she spoke at that meeting in Atlanta when they were going to expel the last few whites Bob Zelder and his wife and maybe one or two others I'd already been pushed out I didn't join no organization against racism to become no damn racist and so she left and sadly she died in poverty but everything got changed and then you had all kinds of dynamic speakers but not much real organizing going on so there was always this tension between the Stokely Wing and John Lewis Wing and many of us were right in the middle hearing both sides and trying to figure out how do we pull the pieces together and I voted for John at that second election at two in the morning but Stokely's group had already taken over but Stokely saved my life when the government was trying to kill me in Mobile in 1965 so there's everything gets complex and that's why we need to understand history because if you don't know what happened you don't know what direction you're going then you make a turn you don't know if you're going back to where you had been unless you understand the foundations of what the movement is about and it's the struggle for justice and humanity now some folks take a peek and say I've done right well for walking 40 years in this downright hell some say my voice sounded mighty strong for a set the ruler shaking on the golden throne some say I sang a loud powerful song for a set the people's crying for an enter wrong but a wish to could have did just a little bit more so we never have to worry about no damn war and the little children playing in the evening breeze will never have to go big and on their knees while their sister and their brother just got to say I'm sorry can't help you gotta earn my pay because the master got to have another condo on the beach so we keep the things we need just a bit out of reach we sweat and we strain and we slave all day ain't got no time to think a better better way and afraid about the ones too afraid to cry or to see the sun shining in the noonday sky to keep tapping out the numbers and punching out the keys to keep the money grubbers grubbin' out the poll folks needs they talk so loud and long about the land of the free till we can't believe our souls is bound in slavery so we try to tell the line and to follow all the rules we even take instruction to schools they flip us and they trick us but the biggest sin is when the condo sender wantin' to be just like them so if we study and we practice and we make the grade then they'll give us a position say we're highly paid and as we rake in all the dollars from the games we gotta play we gotta keep on justifying till the judge won't take it