 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. I'm Marsha Rose Joyner, and this is the time. These are the times that bind. The ties that bind are sometimes impossible to explain. They connect us even after it seems like ties should be broken. Some bonds defy distance and time and logic because some ties are simply meant to be. The ties that bind is a brand new Stink Tech, Hawaii episode series of true personal stories from ordinary people interwoven with the familiar historic icons co-created by host Marsha Rose Joyner and Beatrice Contelmo. And host Marsha Joyner, whose family has owned an African American newspaper for 125 years, was born into the era of Jim Crow Law in the US that enforced racial segregation between the end of the construction in 1877 and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. They mandated racial segregation in all public facilities. And our co-host Beatrice Contelmo, whose father's family left Italy for Brazil to escape Mussolini, founder of the Fascist Party in Italy, eventually making himself dictator prior to World War II. His father was born and raised under authoritarian military dictatorship. I was. Great Beatrice, I'm sorry. In Brazil, her father moved from Italy to Brazil to get away from authoritarian. And then we have a coup in Brazil. Yes. In 1964. And then a coup that ushered in two decades of military rule. And if you can imagine her family running away and only to find the military shows up. For almost 500 people disappeared or killed and thousands more were unjustly detained and tortured. The Brazilian military dictatorship enacted new restrictive constitution and stifled freedom of speech and political opposition with support from the U.S. government. And we had the idea of opening this new platform to extraordinary ordinary people who have lived the horrors and challenges of repressive and challenging government regime because their individual and collective wisdom and resiliency must not be forgotten. And also in hopes that our viewers and community will feel inspired to embrace all aspects of civic engagement and to defend democracy and the Constitution of the United States of America. Given that President Trump and his administration's behavior over the past 14 months lines up well with studies of authoritarian... Authoritarian. Okay, he's the dictator. Authoritarian. He's a dictator. Time being the timing of the ties that bind could not be better. The pillars of democracy are deteriorating at a fast rate in the United States according to a new report from Freedom House, an independent watchdog group that has monitored democracy globally for decades. The past year brought further, faster erosion of America's own democratic standards than at any other time in our memory. For the first episode of the Ties that Bind, we are graced by the presence and wisdom of Miriam Glickman. She's visiting us from California, and she is and will always be the member of SNCC. Snick. Snick. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She's a Jewish woman, and we'll talk about being Jewish in the summer of 1964 in Mississippi with her. Welcome. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. Aloha, and welcome to Hawaii. Yeah. First, tell us for anyone that doesn't know. See, we tend to think that everybody knows about Snick. So tell us about what is Snick, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? Okay. In 1960, four football players at a black university in Greensboro, North Carolina sat down to eat at a lunch counter. Now, they had been allowed to buy food at the counter, but they weren't allowed to sit and eat there. The next day, and of course they weren't served, the next day more of the football team showed up, and by the third day they had over 20 football players trying to sit down and eat, and that spread across the south. The students in Atlanta, the students in Nashville took that up, and that was the start of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. And so they got together after a few months and formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And over the next few years it spread. I joined it in 63 in southwest Georgia, and then in the fall of 63 I moved into working in Mississippi, which was interesting. Where's your home originally? Indianapolis, Indiana. Miriam, I have a question for you. You've chosen to go to Mississippi to join SNCC. What was it like as a Jewish woman to sign up to do this in the 60s and in Mississippi? Okay, well let's backtrack, because I first worked in the south and southwest Georgia. Okay, so the leaders of the project were young black guys, and the idea of having a white woman on a project was rejected for several years. Why is that? They thought it would be more dangerous for a black man to be seen with a white woman than if she was not there. So it put my coworkers in a certain dangerous position and they didn't want us. But in the summer of 1963, Charles Sherard, who was the head of the southwest Georgia project, decided that everything he had done wasn't working. Martin Luther King had come down there. He had over 700 local folks from a small town go to jail. And that didn't change anything. So he decided to think outside the box. And here's the thinking he had, which he didn't share with us for about 50 years. He said he knew of no blacks whose grandparents or uncles had huge bank accounts. He knew of no blacks who, if they got arrested, beaten, killed in the south, would make national news. And he knew of no blacks who had ties and enough status in their community that they could call up the congressperson and the congressperson would listen, right? But he knew a lot of whites had that. So he decided to try an integrated project. That is brilliant and very telling of the timing, too, right? If a black man looked at a white woman, he'd get killed. So it was for her protection. It was for their protection that they didn't have this. For a while, yes. Oh, yes. You know, Emmett Till was killed for whistling at a white woman. And he was from Chicago, didn't know the rules of the south. And it was horrible murder, what they did to him. So that is, it was for everybody's protection. Right. So since you did not know about this strategy for 50 years, when you signed up to go as a young Jewish woman, what was your motivation to say, I'm going to do this? Well, I went to a large inner city high school in Indianapolis, Indiana, integrated. And the Jewish kids and the black kids in the high school were well integrated in some things. The black kids were in a lot of athletic things, music things, on and on. The Jewish kids were in the school newspaper, the French club and on and on. But when it came time for cheerleaders, they were all white. Not Jewish, but white. When it came time for junior prom queen and king, they were never Jewish or black. And the whole court that they nominated was not. So we were benefiting from being in the school, but excluded, within the school. Segregation, within the segregation. It's horrible, I'm so sorry. No, it wasn't horrible. I had a good high school education. Oh, okay, but not all the time. No, it wasn't as bad as you think. But it made us all aware of discrimination. And so in high school, I got interested. And my black friends in high school could not go to the, there was a park in town, I forget the name of it, with rides and all that stuff. They could not go. There was not even a day that was open to them. And they were bitter about that. So, I mean, we were high school kids. Those things counted. Yeah. So, and then when I was a freshman in college, the work in the south started. It was my freshman year that the four football players sat down. And so I was interested already from my high school. So, I went down and toured around the south my sophomore summer. They were not interested in letting me join their activities. But I applied anyway, never heard back. But by the time I was graduating, they were open. Sherard was open to that. Now you asked about Mississippi, so let me tell you how I got from Georgia to Mississippi. That's before we go there. Okay. Let's take a break. We have a minute break and then we'll come right back and tell us about Mississippi. The Mississippi of 64 is unlike anything ever. So, we'll take a break. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening guys? Aloha. I'm Marcia. And we are back. Our guest is Miriam Cohen Glickman. And we are in our maiden voyage, the Ties of Bind. And we were just talking about Miriam's experience as being a Jewish woman in Mississippi in 1964. Yes. Okay. So, it was actually the fall of 1963. I called Bob Moses and asked if I could come. And we used to tease that it was harder to get into the state than to get visas to some foreign countries. It was, incidentally. And Bob said I could come for two weeks. So, I went down there and someone stole my wallet. I didn't have money to get back. I walked into the Freedom House where I was staying and said, what are you doing here? I tell him what happened. He shrugs his shoulders and walks out. And then within a few days, somebody from, so Bob was SNCC. Right. Somebody from a core project asked me to come and work on his project. And that's how I got to stay as a white Jewish woman in Mississippi. So, I found out later that my leader, it was, we called him Fluke. And I worked in Meridian, Mississippi. I found out that he failed to mention to anybody that I was white. He let everybody assume that I was a light-skinned black person because there was no concept that a white woman would come and live in the black community and help them. Not in 1963. Right. So, that's how I got started. So, how was your welcoming as a white woman in a, you know, African-American? It was black. It was black. Black. Black. They didn't know I was white. So, what we did then, the project that we did was blacks technically could register to vote, but in fact, they couldn't. I mean, no. So, we did our own vote, not part of the real vote. We called it a mock ballot. And we had somewhere between 40 and 60,000 blacks register on that. And that was the beginning of the fight for the vote in Mississippi. So, you were really doing all of the civic engagement work as part of the project, with how many more people? That was the heart of the project. The heart of the project was registering to vote. Yeah, yeah. I get that. That was the whole, all across the country. Yes. That if only if you change that, do you change everything else? Only if you get the right people elected, as it is still today, do things change. So, that was the heart. I know you looked on all the pretty pictures of all the demonstrations in the sit-in, but the real heart of it underneath was voting and being registered. Yes. But I was wondering about how many individuals like yourself volunteered for being part of this project that's supporting blacks, you know, to get ready with both registration and being able to vote during that time? A thousand. At least. Yeah. They had in Mississippi for the summer of 64, they had white kids, college-age kids come into the state, and they taught in freedom schools. Mississippi schools used to close in the spring so that the kids could go out and weed the plants, and they would close in the late summer and fall so they could pick the cotton. And mostly the local black kids didn't go beyond sixth grade, so then of course they were told they couldn't vote because they weren't literate enough. So the state was not letting them be literate and then saying they couldn't do it because of that. Yeah. And Senator Eastland of Mississippi is the longest serving senator in the Congress, in the Senate, was a plantation owner, a die-hard racist, and he wasn't having it because he understood that the numbers of blacks in Mississippi far outweigh the numbers of white, and if they had to vote. There would be a change. There would be a change. So it's that simple. There's nothing else. Did you know Linda Moses from New York? No, that name doesn't ring a bell. She was summer of 64, and I called her the modern-day Harriet Tubman because all the people fleeing the South could stay at her home in New York, lovely home in Riverside, but everybody that went, and of course she went to summer, she was in Mississippi in 64. So I have a question for you about doing your project in rural area of Mississippi with regards to safety. Were there any provisions thought out ahead of time to keep you all safe or for communication that could be in place to help you get through this alive? Well, let's talk about nonviolence, okay? Yes. We were not necessarily personally nonviolent, nor were the families that hosted us. But we, as an organization said, we would not ever be armed on one of our activities, okay? We knew that the people who hosted us were all armed. In Mississippi, the stop signs have bullet holes, every one of the stop signs. In the 1960s. So let's talk about nonviolence with bullet holes. Okay, so one of our safety things is we thought we would have a better chance to survive if everyone knew that we were not armed, that we did not have guns. So that was one thing. We thought about it a lot because it was a dangerous situation. We tried not to provoke people by letting them see a white woman and a black man together. That is your safety, the distance between and the family you're staying with. Because that was really a danger was to the family. So one of our shows coming down, did you know Reggie, Reginald Robinson? Reggie. Yeah. Reggie's going to be on that show. Reggie's living in Baton Rouge now. Oh, wow. Yeah. So his job was the front man. Reggie went into these towns first to find places to stay and places to eat and all of this. That was his, so he's going to tell us about that. Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. And so at that time, I think for most people in 2018, they don't realize how expensive making phone calls were. Like, was there any services available for you to be able to communicate about activities with other organizers or even with your family? How was your family in all of this process? What do you support it? They said, get out of there. Okay. We had something called a Watts Line, W-A-T-S. We thought it was important to keep track of people. And we were really serious. If you were going somewhere, you had to check back. The way we knew that the three guys, the civil rights workers that were murdered, were in danger is they were not back where they were supposed to be. And they hadn't called back. So we were very serious about that. Now, the police, of course, tapped into our Watts Line. Did you know? Well, sure. We made some fun when we were young. We would set up a demonstration. We had no intention of going to. To be speaking Hebrew or made up stuff, you know, so that they would just... Mindy Samstein was on one end of the Watts Line, and Bill White was on another end. And so they're giving the report in Hebrew, which they figured the police probably did not know. So, yeah, we had some fun with that. Well, gosh, this is so exciting. And I'm sorry that we are out of time. We will call you when you get home, and we will do a Skype. How's that? Because your story is too good to end right here. Sure. But we are out of time. And I thank you so much for joining us. And we will see you again. Aloha. Thank you. Thank you.