 We're on a company called Bernard's Brothers, so I ran the National Voting Rights Museum, the institute for probably 20 years, the second one of the founder of the museum, because I felt it was necessary that our stories be told, and that we be the ones who tell our stories. We are still alive, there's no reason for you to get it wrong. I also love what I do. I get to touch thousands each year, particularly the young people who are serving. For God's sake, I can't tell you where to go. I can hear wrong or where to go most of the time. Who are you? Dirty man or you there? That's exactly what I do sometimes. But the young people have to understand that if we knew the path that they were supposed to take to get us where we're supposed to be, we'd already be there. They wouldn't have to do anything. We'd already be there to be a perfect world, and our children would not be searching for a way to get to somewhere we should have had them already. When I was growing up here in Seattle, my group was doing a time when segregation wasn't normal. Because of the color of my skin, I couldn't do a lot of things. In fact, my grandmother, Sylvia Johnson, came to live with us after my mom died. She came home to be with her only daughter, who had died in the halls of our White Hospital here. You see, my mother needed a blood transfusion, and they didn't have any black blood. I'm 60 now, and I haven't found out what black blood is yet. But grandmother was a little different from most of the women around here. She hadn't lived in Detroit. You know, people who live above the Mason-Dixon line seem to have what I call that Mason-Dixon mentality. They think that all the bad things happen inside. It doesn't happen in places above the Mason-Dixon line, like Connecticut. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we got called the Indian word in New York. Grandmother said, we talked to the women in our community about how nothing had changed in the 35 years she had lived. Same people in power, same on nasty, same segregationist laws. And grandmother said, that can't still be happening in the South. But it was. Somebody introduced her to a lady named Amelia Boynton. Y'all know me, Boynton. Excuse my shero, say shero. Shero. Added to your vocabulary. Anyway, somebody introduced her to Mrs. Boynton, and Mrs. Boynton had, and her husband Sam had formed the Dallas County Bonus League. And grandmother started going to the meetings. She would take us to the meetings, and we had to sit quiet at the feet of those history-makers while they started to have them. How they didn't go get this thing called freedom. Now, I thought I was the smallest person in the room. My teacher had already told me he gave her a hamling and free the slave. You don't know about that, but you know. I grew up during the generation of children who were supposed to be seen and not earned. Y'all don't know about that, don't play. We had to sit quietly at the feet of those history-makers while they started to have them. How they didn't help get this thing called freedom. Now, I wasn't about to say that at all. I just said that smug in my belief. One day we were right on Broad Street, and Carter's drug store was still here. Maybe somebody could go and see it. Well, Carter's had a lunch counter at that time. And I wanted to sit at that lunch counter, but grandmother said I couldn't. She said, color children can't sit at the counter. It didn't stop me from wanting to sit at that counter. Every time I pay everybody, see those white children sitting there looking at those ice cream cones, drinking those milkshakes out of those beautiful glasses, twirling around on that stool. I wish it was real. But one day grandmother was talking to one of her friends and father in the store. And I was doing what I always do. People never knew. Watching them write here, wishing it was me. Grandmother noticed that day when she leaned over my shoulder and she pointed at that one and she said, when we get our freedom, you can do that too. I became a freedom fighter that day. I understood instantly that the freedom that grandma and his boys and the rest of the old folks, as I called them, were fighting for was much different than the freedom that my teacher was talking about. The one Abraham Lincoln had given me. It was a big difference. Grandma had the good freedom. I started going down to the church, the First Baptist Church, where I'd seen it today. First Baptist was Snickhead Corpse. They tried to teach me the principles of non-violence. But I swung. I grew up in George Washington, Caldwell, home. It was a housing problem. And the side I grew up on had three bedrooms in each apartment. And you had to have at least four kids to get those three bedrooms. So every house over there had four children. And we would come outside. You, as parents, know that each child needs 100 feet each. Not to fight. They need 100 square feet. All their own, when nobody would invade it. You can't do that in a project with four kids at each time. If you didn't fight back when you came by that door, and you know the only principle I could really understand was the one when they turned the other cheek. If I had turned that other cheek, I'd been doing this all day long. Okay, what happened? And when they started training, I'd fight back. Reverend Beville, James Beville used to tell the story of me biting him on his knee. He had a sitting on the floor in the circle. As close as I could get, I was trying to bite him. I got nothing. But I did it. After that, my sister would say, you know, I was trying to start this, she would say, go outside and play. I'd go too. I'd go right outside and play. I'd like to march it. I'd like the spirit of the movement, the songs. Ain't gonna let nobody turn us around. Woke up this morning, being with my friends, not going to school. I liked all of that. When they lined up for the march, I'd go get in the march. That's what they're training all day. We would go down to our courthouse. You know, we weren't on enough to register. So they wouldn't let us in. They'd lock the doors. They'd lock the doors. And we would kneel on the steps of the church, and someone would say a prayer to the Creator, asking Him to lift the hearts of those evil men. So that our parents could vote for us, and we could vote for ourselves. You know, I got old quick with this judgment. They started rolling yellow school buses up in front of the courthouse and loading us up on those buses and taking us to jail. They would put us in cells that was supposed to hold two people at the most. I've never been in a cell that had less than 40 seats to default, man. If you were lucky, or unlucky enough to get the van, you ain't sitting there long. There were no mattresses there, just that metal frame with that lip right in front to keep the mattress from going off. It would cut into your thigh, you said, that long enough. Toilet, middle of the floor. No privacy. With that many people in the room, you don't want to be nowhere near a toilet. Trust me, I know. Food, dry beans. For those of you who cook beans, I've seen them being cooked, you know. You can't just open that pack and put it in that wall. You got to pick out the stuff you paid. The dirt, the rocks, the insects. Nobody did that for us. I think they took pride in bringing us plates with big ol' rocks sitting up on them. You wouldn't have eaten it with them. Girl, by the third day, you'd have been so hungry. You'd have pushed that rock aside and hoped you couldn't identify what you were crunching on. Those things were done to break our spirits. We were as low as we could go. They'd let us out. We'd go home, take a bath, get a good meal, be right back up in their faces. Oftentimes going back to jail the same day. By the time I was 11 years old, I had been in jail 13 documented times. Oh, and I was about far not the youngest. If you were there, you went to jail. In December 1964, a letter was written by Dr. Frederick Douglas Rees. F.D. Rees. He's the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. At that time, he was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was he was also he was also the president of the Dallas County Rotary League. He wrote a letter to a man named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asking him to sell him, asking him to come and help and speak on Emancipation Proclamation Day. Dr. King accepted. He already knew of the work that the league had been doing for 30-some odd years. He already knew of the work that SNCC had been doing here. Dr. King came and he brought in his lieutenants, and he stationed them in counters all around us. He sent Reverend James Harmon to marry. I understand you guys went to marry him today. Yes, we did. Reverend Harmon found it easier to organize students after all their parents worked for the people who were trying to keep us from getting right the road. They marched on their courthouse and they were arrested including Reverend Harmon. Reverend Harmon himself told me that about three o'clock that day a state trooper came into the area where he was housed with a rope. On the end of that rope was tied a noose. Reverend Harmon said he threw it over the top of his cell and that noose hung in his face all day long. He had to sit there knowing that maybe his last was the one that that evening they let the children out. A mass meeting was being held at the church or on the corner. They ran into the meeting and said, you have to do something now. They were going to kill him. The people in the church decided to march down to the courthouse. I'm sorry, to march down to the jail. In hopes that their real presence would save this man's life. When they left the church they were attacked and brutally beaten by law enforcement officers. A young man named Jimmy Lee Jackson he married from the church just in time to see a trooper beating his grandfather. His 82 year old grandfather. Jimmy's mother Jimmy's mother stopped him beating her father too when she ran over. As she approached that trooper and drew back his big club to hit her. Jimmy did what I would have done. He shot him. Jimmy died eight days later here in Salem at Goodson American Hospital. It was then that the leaders decided to walk to the cell until Monday. I remember one of the protesters, young man says to his dad, in order to demand the right to vote for my own men Governor George Wallace on March 7th, 1965. We left from the playground the area of George Washington Carver Homes and led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams came right down Broad Street and over this bridge and met a wall of policemen. At last stop, John Lewis asked permission to pay. The policeman said there would be no march between the cell and my brother. You have two minutes to disperse and go back to the church. In one minute and 15 seconds I was too far back in the line to hear or see what was happening. I didn't need to. I was a warrior. I knew the procedure. I knew when I crested that bridge and saw that line of policemen we were not going to Montgomery. I also knew that when John Lewis and Hosea Williams got as far as they could go one of them would ask permission to pay. It would be denied. John Lewis and Hosea Williams would go down on their knees and we would follow suit. I'm standing there waiting for the line to start to go down. When suddenly I heard gunshots and screams I thought they were killing the people down front. Before we could turn the run it was too late. They came in from both sides. The back and the front and they were just beating people. Old, young, black, white many are female but it didn't matter. They were just beating people. You know what I remember the most? The screams. People screaming and screaming and screaming. People everywhere not moving, bleeding as if they were dead. You couldn't stop to help them when you'd be beaten too. You could outrun those men on foot. You could not run the ones on horses. They would run their horses while people were being trampled. Bones were being broken. The gunshots I heard they were not gunshots. They were tear gas canisters being shot into the crowd. Tear gas burges your eyes, gets in your lungs. You can't breathe, you can't see, you can't. All the time you run right back to the same people you're running from it seemed like it lasted in eternity. The last thing that I remember on that bridge that day is seeing this horse dead. And I don't know what else. Did he run over here with the horse? Did he hit her and she fell? I don't remember. I do know. As I stand here 48 years later I can still hear the sound of my head made when I hit that thing. The next thing I remember is being right over here across the street by the interpretive center. Of course it wasn't the interpretive center. My head was in my sister Linda's lap and another was crying. I became fully awake. I realized what was falling on my face were not my sister's tears. It was her blood. My 14-year-old sister had been beaten on that bridge and had wounds in her head that required 26 stitches. Yet, on that Tuesday I held that same sister's hand as we followed Dr. King and Dr. Abernathy across that bridge again. When I crested that bridge and saw that same line of police I didn't want them on freedom. Whatever the cost of that freedom was it was too much for this year. I tried to go back. My sister and her friends held my hand and kept talking and talking. Finally somebody said they're not going to beat Dr. King. I didn't believe that but I went. This time Dr. King asked permission to pass. The original told him the same thing there would be no more between Selma and Montgomery but this time the front went down. Dr. Abernathy said a prayer and after prayer he and Dr. King stood up and led us back to Brown Chapel every church where he held a mass meeting and told us he had applied for a court order that would give us the legal right to be so wanted to but more importantly to be protected. It was signed by a judge in Montgomery named Frank Johnson on March 17, 1965. Four days later on March 21 we left Brown Chapel one more time and came down Broad Street and over that same bridge and no same police who beat us up on the 7th had to protect us all the way from Selma to Montgomery. Five days to get to that chapel there are no motels between Selma and Montgomery today. There was no end people slept on the ground started raining on the second day nobody turned around everything had to be brought to them yet nobody turned around they kept going and do you know all the six of that very same year the Voting Rights Act was signed and they removed those obstacles from the voting. Here in Dallas County we sell Mr. County seat we went from 250 African Americans on the voting rows to 9,600 almost immediately and it still took us 36 years to get rid of the same man Go Philly Wonder why it took us 36 years to get rid of the same man the same man that was on that bridge in 1965 was out there to the year 2000 he had real enjoy the African Americans when I did learn one thing it's just not good enough that the vote isn't it's just not good enough to have the right it's not just not good enough to go to the polls you gotta be involved in the whole process when you're deeper because who was counting those votes who was counting them the same people who didn't want to have the right to vote maybe they're one plus one it's not your one plus one we got rid of them in 2000 that very same year we elected the first African American man here in Salem a group was formed called the Friends of Fars Friends of Fars I don't know say it again Fars yeah I'm from the South it's Fars you know the one language all of this it must be Canadian no I'm from Mississippi oh you're in trouble you're in trouble yeah because I was talking to you I thought it was half the top of many I knew you were that's right you would take it up on the impulse I'm reading I'm trying to clear my name David of Nathan Bitt I live in Fars County uh oh you just tow up from the floor be quick