 This is St. Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, and this is the Ties that Bind. And today we are going to talk about the civil rights movement. And my dear friend, of course everybody knows I only talk to dear friends. So this is Reggie Robinson. And he is going to tell us all kinds of tales from the civil rights movement. And Reggie was, I quote, the advanced man, I'm about that, the advanced man for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And he's going to tell us what an advanced man is and does and did. Reggie, welcome. Hello there. Hi. Hello. Welcome, welcome. I'm so glad to talk to you. Well, always glad to talk to you. Now, Reggie and I go back, we were trying to decide how far back, but it's a long time. 1950s something, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. Right. In an organization called the Civic Interest Group, which was a precursor to SNCC. So SNCC is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And I'm not sure how it began, but Juanita Mitchell, which we'll talk about later, she was the adult in the group. And she was an attorney and had been fighting for desegregation in Baltimore all of her life. And so she was one of the creators of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And Reggie and I were students. And so, Reggie, tell us about the time that we spent with the CIG. Well, it was the late 50s. And I lived in East Baltimore, Marsha lived in West Baltimore. And I was attending at the time a small business college known as Cortez-Peters Business College. It was put together by a man, by a black man who could type 150 words a minute. Wow. And he got some money from one of the typing companies, either Royal or Underwood, and established three schools. Well, I had a cousin that graduated from Cortez. And being that I was on the streets doing a little bit of everything, she kind of convinced me that it was time to maybe pull the reins in and kind of convinced my dad that he'd give me another chance at it. So my father supported me and my cousin helped me. So I got into Cortez-Peters. There I met Walter Dixon, who is the dean of Cortez in Baltimore. And he was also the first black city councilman in Baltimore. And at the time he had a public accommodations bill going on in Baltimore. But let me go back a little bit. Before this, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four guys from E&T sat in at the Woolworth, which started to spread the word across the South to other colleges around to do the same thing. And then they began to sit in. And it was began to organize. It was not an organized situation at the time, but then it was cited by a lady by the name of Ella Baker, who was working for it at that time. Martin Luther King, he was, she was his executive secretary. And it was the efforts of Mrs. Baker and her contacts, such as Miss Mitchell in Baltimore, that pulled together other adults around the country to help the students to begin to pull together what is known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which the CIG became a part of the coordinating committee. Well, we got to be the first logistical coordinator where we would go and close down restaurants in Baltimore. We had two renalts. Marsha, one of them, and another guy named Tony Adana on nighttime, jumped out the Renault running at the counter. The police come in, read the remand, and we get up, run out, go close down another restaurant until we've done that enough times in the... Well, let's go back one step. Let me go back one step. Yeah. Now, the Protestant churches gave us room at four offices in the basement of the church. Right. And it was the women's job to do the typing, answer the phone, and do the mimeograph machine. That was it. And my job, because we knew where we were going, I would call the Baltimore Sun and say, you know those little colored children are going to have a demonstration at wherever it was, and then we'd make sure the press was there. So that was my job. Now, we get in the car and finish it. Reggie, back to you. All right. So then we would... So that was one of the logistical things that's putting together. How are you going to run into this precisely at lunchtime and get out and not get arrested? Well, you could get arrested if you wanted to and it would hold it over for 29 or 49 days for publicity reasons, but then we would bail you out. Yeah. But then the organization began to grow and then their money's become in because we had this group of adults that backed us up like a couple of ministers, a couple of other people in the neighborhood. Well, I can say a man by the name of Mr. Willie Adams, the people that gave us money, so that money had to be accounted for. So I was a game. A little bit about accounting. I was made the treasurer of the organization. The SNCC waiting was going to be in Kentucky in July. SNCC had to be chosen because Clarence Mitchell Jr. at that time, we did not know people was making money in this voter registration project until a man by... Oh, I remember Troy. who just happened to be a very good friend of Marsha's mama, Mr. Elizabeth Oliver, and he was involved in to get this person which happened to be Clarence Mitchell Jr. Yeah. Well, anyway... Let me pause right here. One of the things that doesn't get talked about is what is going on underneath. Now, people see all of the pictures of the marches and the demonstrations and all of this stuff, but underneath that, there was a major, major push to get everybody registered to vote because that is the only way you make change. So... They were true. True. So that people understand what you're talking about when you go talk about registering to vote. Well, that's about the same time that Nick was starting to think about moving away from direct action, which was the bus stops and the lunch counters and going directly into direct action and going into the deep south. Well, anyway, the meeting... We now have the meeting in Kentucky in 61 and I've been elected to represent the Baltimore group to the big snake. And I got an assignment to bring the next Nick meeting back to Baltimore and bring the next Nick meeting back to Baltimore and make sure the King was going to come with the group because nobody around Baltimore had seen any of these people that had been talked about in the student voice or in the Afro or anywhere else. So we were trying to boost what was happening in Baltimore. Well, before I left, I was the treasurer, as I said. I had to take care of the books. I had to buy the supplies. I had to make sure the telephone bill was paid. I had to make sure the folks ate gas. All those kinds of things. Game before the Hallelujah in Kentucky in 61 to the meeting, I wasn't on the line. But it helped when I sat down with all of these freedom riders who had been injured in the one who was familiar to me by name and then we went to, on Saturday evening, we went to Ann Braden, who was head of SCF, boosting what was happening in Kentucky at that time and supporting most of the meeting. But anyway, I met Ella Baker on that porch, even though I had met her in the meeting. But she said to somebody I know, she says, hey, who's your people? And I told her, she said, no, that's not it. She says, where's your mama from? I said, little to North Carolina. She says, aha. She says, where's your mama's maiden name? I said, Jenkins. And she says, ah, I said, no, you're McKinley. I said, McKinley? I said, no, I got an uncle McKinley in New York. She says, I know, and you look just like him. And I said, oh my God, who is this woman? And so then she introduced me to Chuck McDew and Charles and Tim Jenkins and everybody at the time. They came around and voted where the next meeting was. I had the next meeting coming to Baltimore. Oh, great. Meeting because we'd also convince King, well, King was trying to stop us from going in because he says that if we were going into these Black Belt counties, we were going to get killed and there was no question about it. And definitely we were going to do it. And we were telling him, in so many words, good things to happen to come into town. And we had the big, you remember the big Masonic Hall? Yes. Or Utah Place. And we had that place packed. So what I suggested was that most of the time these Baptist ministers like to get the collection in the middle of things. Why don't we collect it up at the beginning of things? So we got the money. So by the time Y.T. Walker got up in the middle of the program to make the collection, somebody pulled him on a coattail and told him we got the money and gone. He didn't like me too much, but he offered me a job when I met him in Atlanta. But anyway, I went on from there. He was, to talk about logistics, the man was really sharp. Yes, he was. So then I was asked, because we had registered so many people in Baltimore, that was the other thing I reported in Kentucky that we had registered this great number of people in Baltimore. So I became a voter registration expert, as they saw it. Doing that, yeah, I go. Now this was which summer? This is 61. 61, okay. This is now all the 61. What do you logistics do? And I get to Macomb, Mississippi. First thing he tells me is that we have to set up a freedom school. We have to set up people coming in. We got to make arrangements with the local groceries and the restaurant folk. And we've got to have some way to count the monies that's coming in and donations. Somebody's got to do all of that. And somebody's got to go down in the local stores and the bank and open up a bank account. We were doing business with the city and the city didn't even know who the hell we were. We had a hard part together. The rest, when we had a rally, folks would sing and shout. And then if we got somebody to go on recruitment to go to the school, first you had to go to school in order to register to vote. 61 in Mississippi, you had to interpret the constitution of the Mississippi in order to register to vote. And pay the poll tax, yes. And pay the poll tax. You had to interpret it and write it. So folks had to learn to read and write. So we had to teach people who had never learned to read and write to even have the courage to vote. And while this is happening, there's a man by the name of Herbert Lee, an NAACP representative, but he was working with us. That was a good thing about us in Mississippi and wherever we worked. We didn't pay no attention to who you were. If you were coming to help us out, we didn't care. Even if they were the FBI, if they wanted to. And they did. Well, they did and we didn't ask them. We didn't ask them their name, but they probably registered some votes. They did. Listen, sweetheart, we need to take a break. So we'll be in 30, 60 seconds. We will be right back and pick up the story right there. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here on Think Tech Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon on 5 to 5.30 Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of Contemporary Asian Affairs. There's so much to discuss and the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. The possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China, remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. Aloha, welcome to Hawaii. This is Prince Dykes, your host of The Prince of Investing. Coming to you guys each and every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Right here on Think Tech Hawaii. Don't forget to come by and check out some of the great information on stocks, investings, your money, all the other great stuff, and I'll be your host. See you Tuesday. Hi, I'm Marsha, and we are talking to Reggie Robinson. And he was the front man going into the south during the civil rights movement. And Reggie was telling us about Herbert Lee. Yeah, Herb? Go ahead. No, Reggie, you finish. No, I'm saying there's so many stories to tell, I don't even know where to begin. So continue. Well, Herbert Lee, as I was saying, was a representative of the NAACP, and he was working with us. And state representative Hurst, and he was a state representative, came in the cotton gin and shot him dead. Ooh. Just because he was registering to vote with us, helping us to get people to register to vote, and he was a registered voter himself. And we were told that we were not to leave, we were not to leave town, and not to even go to his funeral or anything. And Amsey Moore, who was one of the important people who brought us into Mississippi, told us that if we left then, we could never do anything again. So we held a rally in Aimee County at his funeral, and so that took care of that. And we stayed and did what we had to do. Well, other places that I've been was, like Selma, Alabama. I was on a mission for Ruby Daris, who was the boss at that time. She used to operate in Atlanta, telling us what to do and where to go, and keeping track of us on the watch lines. I was traveling back to Atlanta, getting ready for a conference. I was stopping at all of the black campuses, talking up the conference that was coming up to get as many participants as we could. I got back to Atlanta. We had a message from Selma, Alabama, that somebody wanted to talk to us on Selma University. So I was moved out to Selma, Alabama, to talk to, I think I remember his name, a young Reverend Johnson that was living on Selma campus. He was in school there, and I was smothered on campus, and I stayed on campus for about two weeks, putting together contacts in the neighborhood, looking at the town and trying to figure out what it was all about, who owned what, and who was the biggest employers, and where the money's come from, and places for people to stay. And then when I got, then I got discovered, so I had to leave town just at the conference, and after the conference, it was decided that they're not lost yet, would go into Selma and complete what I had started, because we had found a group of ministers there, but we dubbed them the 12 High, and so Bernie went in, Bernie went in to operate with them, and that's how the Selma project got started, which led on to whatever you wanted to see about Longstown County. Oh yeah, everybody knows, they heard of Stokely Carmichael. Stokely was a part of Snick. He was one of the chairs, right? Yes, he was. Yeah, and he went into Longstown County, just like you, to register people to vote, and what he ran into, of course, was the economy, that if these people went to vote, they were pushed off the plantation, and he helped to work the skills they had in creating quilting and other things, and he managed to figure out a way for them to sell in Chicago and other places. But the big thing was to get them registered to vote, and they were told that they couldn't be on the ballot without a symbol, like everybody's got a logo on the ballot. And what he told me is that he saw this high school football team with a black panther, and that was how he decided to use that black panther as the symbol on the ballot so that these black people could A have a candidate and could vote. So that's as fast as I can put it together real fast. But Longstown County was a horrible, nasty place, and even all these years later, you can feel the ghosts in Longstown County. You can feel it, you can see it, they're just there. It's an awful place. But Mississippi, Alabama, oh my God, how you survived Mississippi was a hellhole. Reggie? Yeah? So how long? What was the question? No, I'm saying how long were you in Mississippi? Well, let's put it this way. I was with Snake for six years. I was only in Mississippi that time, from July, maybe December. Then I came back to Mississippi some years back in, again, other times because I began to move around. The last time I was in Mississippi was from 66 to 67, number from 67 to 68. Yeah. Now you were in Cambridge. That's the last time. You were in Cambridge, Maryland also, right? Yes, I was. Yes, I was. Tell us about that. Cambridge, Maryland. It was an awful, awful time. Well, I had left, we had left Mississippi to regroup after the students had walked out of school in McComb. And we regrouped in Atlanta. And it was suggested that regrouping, that I go back to Route 40, which was up in Maryland, and coordinate with a guy by the name of Robert Carter who was working for CORE, who was working on a Route 40 project. And I was to coordinate that with him. And in the meantime, while I'm working there in Maryland, Christmas time, and I get a call from Ruby saying that five students from New York are sitting in the CORE office getting ready to go to Cambridge, Maryland, getting ready to go to Critchfield, Maryland. And they never had any nonviolent training or whatever, they were just going. And so she said, get over there and check it out. So by the time I finished talking to them and everything I was on a bus to Critchfield, Maryland, one of the first times I only got, the only time I got locked up the most six years I worked for SNCC, even though I was in and out of jail, sticking on other folks. I never, I never, this was the only time I really got an arrest. But we went to this restaurant that was owned by then Governor Tauss in Critchfield, Maryland. And we got out of it, we were in Princess Anne, Maryland, and Fred Sinclair from Cambridge, Maryland was our bail bargeman. Mitchell had found... Yeah, Reggie. Yeah. Hurry, get arrested because we had one minute left. Ha, ha, ha. Reggie became a hot spot and there again it was necessary almost a year before our folks could leave town and the local folks took over. That meant taking care of money again and finding places for folks to live, just a general upkeep and discipline of folks, a thing you can imagine other than... Well, listen sweetheart, you will have to come back and finish telling us all the six years of stories. And it's been a real pleasure talking to you as always. And you will come back. Promise me you will. Promise me you'll come back and finish telling this story. Thank you so much. Thank you. Aloha. Right now.