 I am Elizabeth Sackler, and it is a pleasure for me to welcome you today to the Brooklyn Museum. And this, our first extension out of the Center for Feminist Art, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, into this beautiful glass pavilion for today's programming. And for those of you who've just arrived and haven't had a chance to go to the center on the fourth floor to see the dinner party by Judy Chicago and seductive versions women pop artists, I invite you to do so after this afternoon's programming. In addition to being an exhibition space dedicated to feminist art, the center's mission is to raise awareness of women's contributions in all fields, in all ways, in our culture and political and social landscape. Over the past four years, we have hosted hundreds of wonderful guest speakers and organized very important programming. This afternoon, we will hear a panel historic in magnitude. Our panelists are editors who have come to talk about the women who were on the front lines of the most important movement in the last 50 years, the Civil Rights Movement. Hands on the freedom plow, personal accounts by women in SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Do you have a book? It's 2010, it's just come out. So, it contains stories written by 52 women who participated in that movement, who they were and why they did what they did. One author, Constance Currie, in her chapter, an official observer, wrote the following. Early SNCC demonstrations were highly structured and strategically tuned. People had designated roles, including captains, monitors and observers. Captains kept the demonstrators organized. Monitors, usually physically larger students or members of the community, provided a measure of security. In addition to watching and following each protest, observers alerted the SNCC office, the US Justice Department and the press when the demonstrators were arrested. The effectiveness and need for extraordinary organizational discipline and training is echoed in Malcolm Gladwell's recent article in the October 4th New Yorker in the Annals of Innovation entitled Small Change, Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. Gladwell's opening paragraph describes the well-remembered the revered moment on February 1, 1960, when four black college students sat down at a lunch counter in Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina and who, when they were told they would not be served because we don't serve Negroes here, did not leave. By Wednesday, by Gladwell's account, the protesters swelled to 80. By Thursday to 300. By Saturday, 600. By the following Monday, February 3, there were sit-ins in Winston-Salem, Durham, after that, Charlotte and then Raleigh. By the end of that week, 10 days later, there were protests in Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee and as far as Texas. Gladwell continues some 70,000 students eventually took part, thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. Michael Walzer wrote in Descent Magazine that he was told over and over it was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go. But Gladwell reminds us the civil rights movement was more like a military campaign than a contagion. Locations for activism were scouted, plans were drawn up, movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had pre-existing movement centers, a core of dedicated and trained activists read to turn the fever into action. It was this world that contextualized my upbringing and my life. It was this world that radicalized me, picketing the FBI for Roaming Rights in Selma, Alabama and sleeping in front of the White House. And it is this world that time that the editors, the women behind me, of hands on the freedom plow, remind us, and I quote, the issue of the day is always how to make social, political change, how to press forward, how to keep going, in short, how to make a movement. It was this that informed all I did and all I continued to do. I was in my mid-teens then, and I remember it all very well. But what I don't remember is hearing about the women and girls, the mothers and grandmothers who were on the front lines of organization, protesting, and infrastructure. So this is a joy, finally, after all these years to move toward that world where the editors cry, freedom and justice are real, solid, intangible. Freedom and justice are the reasons for being and doing and reasons for dying. Those words are not unlike the Center for Feminist Arts, Mantra. And today, we get to join the center and the women of SNCC, whom without, we might not be here at all. This is a major piece of justice hearing the other half of the story. The women nearly erased from the history. I prefer, of course, to say, Hurston. It is a personally thrilling thing for me to welcome our guests, five of the six editors of Hands on the Freedom Plow, Faith Hulsart, Martha Prescott, Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Robinson, and Dorothy Zellner. And I would like very much now to introduce our moderator, my good friend, writer, and scholar, Deborah Schultz. Dr. Deborah Schultz is a historian and the author of Going South, Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement, which was published by NYU Press. She is a founder of the Soros Foundation's International Women's Program and served for 10 years as its director of programs. She has taught history and women's studies at the New School, Rutgers University, and LaGuardia Community College, and was a CUNY Graduate Center writing fellow this past academic year. She is working on a book about European Roma, or Gypsy, women activists, part of her longstanding interest in anti-racist activism and intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and memory. Going South, Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement was published in 2001 and is organized around a rich blend of oral histories following a group of Jewish women who came of age in the shadow of the Holocaust and were deeply committed to social justice, who put their bodies and lives on the line to fight racism, representing a bridge between the sensibilities of the early civil rights era and contemporary efforts to move beyond the limits of identity politics. The book provides a resource for all who are interested in anti-racism, the Civil Rights Movement, social justice, Jewish activism, and radical women's traditions. That's quite a lot that has been accomplished. Marion Wright Edelman, president of Courses, we know the Children's Defense Fund wrote, only recently are scholars beginning to pay full attention to the key role women played during the Civil Rights Movement. Going South is an important portrait of an often overlooked group whose work, both behind the scenes and on the front, helped transform our nation. So now we have two books about women in the Civil Rights Movement. Please join me in welcoming today's panel and Deborah Schultz, the art of activism women, civil rights veterans, tell their story. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's great to see all of you here. It's an enormous honor and joy for me to moderate this panel sponsored by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which feels like my home museum. I'd like to thank Elizabeth Sackler for having the audacity to create the center and the Brooklyn Museum for hosting it as a space of public feminist inquiry. I also want to give special thanks to Rebecca Tafel and the museum staff who helped make this happen in such a beautiful part of the museum. And if you have the opportunity after the panel, there'll be a book signing, but also hope that you'll go up to the fourth floor and see the dinner party and the women in pop exhibit, which is really fantastic at the Sackler Center. The panel's title, The Art of Activism, celebrates the creativity and tenacity of women civil rights activists who never stopped tilling the soil of a just society. We're very lucky, as Elizabeth said, to have five of the six editors of Hands on the Freedom Plow here today. Hands on the Freedom Plow, which has been available for five weeks, has already sold out its first printing and may have already sold out our book sale here, but we're working on getting some more copies. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge the diversity of the audience. I know that there are some SNCC people here. So would you raise your hand? We can recognize you. Any other contributors to Hands on the Freedom Plow who are with us today? Thank you. So our plan for this afternoon is to have readings interspersed with a couple of my questions for the panelists. And then time permitting, we'll have some audience questions, and we'll also have, if not a book signing, which collectively, I hope that we will all be praying for. The opportunity to speak with the panelists, the museum has given us the space until 5.30, which was really very generous. So the program will continue on even after four. I'm really glad that the museum and some of us reached out to students. I'm happy to see some students here. Many of us of subsequent generations did learn about the four young men who ignited the sit-in movement in Greensboro, as Elizabeth mentioned. But even in my own education, I never learned about the pivotal role of organizers like Ella Baker, a labor activist and longtime leader in the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When those sit-ins started to gain momentum among Southern college students, Baker insisted that the students have their own space to discuss strategy. She was skeptical of charismatic leaders in the big civil rights organization and encouraged the students to form their own organization. Her vision and mentorship helps Nick build a grassroots movement based on participatory democracy. And by the way, Malcolm Gladwell's article did not really do justice to the women of the movement. So I'm really glad that we have the panel here today. Nick, change this country. And when you hear and read these women's stories, you will understand why. Let me introduce the panelists. Faith Hulsart is a Durham, North Carolina fiction writer who shares four children and seven grandchildren with her partner, Vicki Smith. Since her SNCC work in Southwest Georgia, she's been active in the women's and lesbian communities and has worked against war and racism, with organizations including Durham's Harm Free Zone and Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. My personal favorite. Martha Prescott Norman Noonan, a student and teacher of history, was a fundraiser and field secretary for SNCC in Albany, Georgia, Greenwood, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama from 1962 to 1966. She remained a community organizer and developed programs, including an anti-hunger project, a large inner city food buying co-op, and many other works as well as teaching. Judy Richardson, I'm sorry to be blocking her work, was on SNCC staff from 1963 to 1966. In Cambridge, Maryland, in the National Office in Atlanta and Greenwood, Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer in Southwest Georgia and in Lowndes County, Alabama. Her experiences continue to influence her work as a documentary filmmaker, and she's been involved in the extremely important Eyes on the Prize series and with teacher workshops, social justice organizations, and as a movement writer and lecturer. After her two years on the SNCC staff, Betty Garmin Robinson remained actively involved in social justice work. She's currently a member of the Charmed City Labor Chorus, a volunteer with the Baltimore Algebra Project and active with local social justice organizing campaigns. The mother of two daughters, she also has two grandchildren. After her five-year stint on the SNCC staff, Dottie Zellner spent 17 years in New Orleans and returning to New York with her two daughters in 1983, worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights and then at the City University of New York Law School. She lectures frequently about SNCC, about blacks and Jews in the civil rights movement, and is a board member of the Friends of the Jeanine Freedom Theater in Palestine. The book's sixth editor, who's not here with us today, is with us in spirit, and you will hear more of her story later. Jean Smith Young was a SNCC field secretary from 1964 to 1967 and went on to medical school to become a board-certified child psychiatrist. She's taught at several universities, published articles and stories, and is the proud grandmother of seven. That is our gang. Before we begin, I just want to make a couple of contextualizing remarks for some of the people who are less familiar with this history than many of you. When Barack Obama was elected the country's first African American president, he noted specifically to John Lewis, but often on many occasions, that he was standing on the shoulders of the civil rights movement. But to be more specific, he and we, in my opinion, are standing on the shoulders of the local Southern black women who are the backbone of their communities of SNCC and of the civil rights movement. In a 2005 interview, former SNCC activist and NAACP chair Julian Bond said, there's a Chinese saying, women hold up half the sky. In the case of the civil rights movement, it's probably three quarters. This is the story that needs to change, and thanks to our contributors, it is changing. The women that Bond referred to were the mentors and heroes who inspired the women who sit before you today. However, these women on the panel are among my heroes, even though we've had arguments about the use of that term. At a time of real danger, they left the relative comfort of the North to put their bodies on the line to fight racism. And more recently, and perhaps more heroically, they've spent 15 years creating hands on the freedom plow so that the real role of women in the civil rights movement can never be forgotten. They worked as a collective of three African-American women and three white women to locate, nurture, contextualize, and publish the stories of 52 women who work with SNCC. Finally, the women of SNCC get to speak to history on their own terms and in their own voices. This book is miraculous, a very, very important historical document, and a gift to future generations. In the interest of time, I am going to move on to the panel so that we can have time for audience questions. So we're going to start with two readings from Martha and Betty about their decision to join the movement and family reactions. Thank you. Enjoy the panel. I've been asked to talk about the parts of my contribution that relate to my parents' responses to my decision to go south and work on the Mississippi project. To better understand their reactions, I shared a bit about their lives before I went south. And in the book, it's mostly about my mother. But today, I'm going to say a little bit about my dad, and you'll see why. Although we lived, I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. And although we lived in all-white neighborhoods and I attended all-white schools for all but two years, my parents' community of identification was black. Family members in Newport, Cambridge, and Detroit, church associates, members of the Winstry AME Zion Church, friends in the tiny black community of Providence and thereabouts, and a host of my father's friends, family, and associates in the St. Vincentian community here in Brooklyn. When I was growing up, I understood that there were as many St. Vincentians in Brooklyn as lived on the tiny 11-by-22-mile island. We came to Brooklyn where my father had lived for almost two decades, four to 10 times a year, staying with my parents' friends and family. When in Brooklyn, we attended Ebenezer Wesleyan Church, which I understood my father helped to found, served as a trustee, and lay minister among other roles. And where my parents were married in 1937 by Reverend Arno, who still pastored the church in the 50s. On a number of occasions, we celebrated New Year's at a cabaret sponsored by the St. Vincentian Benevolent Association after attending watch night services at the church. I remember my father, the last of 19 children, several times meeting first cousins he had not known or previously met while riding on the Brooklyn subway. Until my mother took me to see some of the sites in Manhattan when I was 12, I thought New York was populated only by West Indians and only by West Indians from St. Vincent. My mother experienced a lot of discrimination growing up, and particularly in her pursuit of education. She graduated from high school with a stellar record. She was 14 years old. And when she applied to University of Michigan, they told her she was too young and she needed to work first. She did get in through a back door arrangement and went on to go to law school along with five other black students, which the university figured out they didn't intend to admit. And so within a year and a half, they managed to find a way to flunk them all out. In spite of her experience, my mother wanted me to follow in her footsteps and attend Michigan. And ideally, I guess by way of indication, graduate from U of M's law school. With this plan in mind at the start of my junior year in high school, she found a job in Michigan and moved there by herself. Her father had been a barber in Ann Arbor and died when she was nine. And she had put herself through college while helping to support her family. Determined to make my educational road easier than hers, she figured she might be able to pay all my college expenses if she could meet the two-year qualification period for lower in-state tuition. By this time, my father, ironically in optometrists, had completely lost his sight. And my mother was the family's main breadwinner. I might add that my family had already made great financial sacrifices to augment the partial scholarship I won to an all-girls Quaker Prep School in Providence. So you can imagine, with all these plans, they were none too happy when I came home talking about how school wasn't relevant, how I would become an organizer for life, and that I was going to Mississippi. Usually when I got on this attack with them, they would roll their eyes, put their heads down in their hands, and they would tell me that, you know, I could probably go to professional school and racism would still be alive and well when I graduated. They also developed a routine which they used to dismiss this Mississippi idea. Every so often, when they knew I was listening, my mother would turn to my father and say, Taffy, did you hear that Martha Susan wants to go to Mississippi? Yes, Alice, my father would say, I heard that, but who in their right mind wants to go there? But that isn't all my mother would continue. She thinks she can help get Negroes registered to vote. What, my father would explain? His slight West Indian accent becoming more pronounced as his emotions deepen. Negroes can't vote in Mississippi. They can barely walk down the street and live to tell about it. Delivering the crowning blow, my mother would state, what's more, she thinks she can do the civil rights work non-violently. Oh, they would both moan, shaking their heads at the total absurdity of such a plan. She just doesn't know those white folks down there. Hoping that someone else could convince me I could be of greater service to the movement with a professional degree, my mother even made arrangements for me to meet Constance Baker Motley. None of this worked. And when I went south in the spring of 1963, my parents made it clear that I would no longer be welcomed home. My experiences in the civil rights movement, as well as my studies of what we're now calling the long civil rights movement and other social change movements in American history. And my work on this book has convinced me that we never know when such a historical moment will come along when it's possible to make great social change. I've been impressed that in these years, I've been impressed that in these movements, and in our movement in particular, there were so many people who had years of preparation and study behind them when the movement came. People like Rosa Parks, who had been in Montgomery NAACP for decades before giving up her seat, or like James Farmer, who had been a war resistor and a student of gondias and before becoming head of corps. So my advice to young people today comes from the title of Maria Varela's piece in our book, to always think of these years as time to get ready. Thank you. Thanks, Martha. Betty? Okay. So it's interesting that we get to places by very different paths. And about the only thing that's similar between my story and Martha's story is that at one point, my parents said I wasn't welcome to come home either. But you'll see there's like this incredible, huge difference. So one summer night in 1958, when I was 19 years old, I couldn't find my mother anywhere in the house. Where was she? I finally found her sobbing uncontrollably in the basement. What could be wrong? My brother and I had just finished cleaning up from a party we held for the counselors at a local YMCA day camp where we were both working that summer. You brought a dirty nigger into the house. She screamed through her tears. She was crying, right? I'm not crying, but I'll never live this down. How could you be so evil? What will the neighbors think? My feelings went from concern for my mother, and it's hard for me to even say that word. I have to say, I mean, I wrote it in the book because that's what she said, but it's hard to. My feelings went from concern for my mother to anger and disgust. She often made disparaging remarks about other people, but with the most derogatory reserve for people of other races and ethnicities. Both my parents were from working class backgrounds and the first in their families to go to college. They were anxious to meet what they saw as the expectations of their new middle class status. My mother received an undergraduate degree and my father earned a PhD in physics from New York University. They were conservative Republicans and both quite prejudiced. I loved going to the country to visit my dad's parents on their small farm, but my mother hated going there. She viewed my father's family as backward, foreign, and beneath her. She hated that her Pennsylvania German in-laws did not speak English and bluntly criticized my dad's country habits. My mother's prejudices included just about anyone different, especially people of another color. Still, she selected Lucy, the wife of my father's Mexican co-worker as my godmother. During my early childhood, I enjoyed wonderful times with Lucy, who had no children of her own. She cooked good-smelling, spicy food, gave me huge hugs and hellos, paid me lots of attention, and brought me little gifts from her native Mexico. My mother sometimes referred to Lucy as a dirty wetback and complained about her broken English. Puzzled, I would ask, well, if you don't like Lucy, why did you make her my godmother? My mother responded that when I was born, Lucy was the only Catholic she knew. Contradictions, right? These battles were confusing to me as a child and an adolescent. Because my experiences ran counter to what my parents told me, I was frequently in turmoil. And if the movement hadn't come along, I don't know where I would have ended up. But anyway, in college, my rebellion took a significant turn and became political. So I went to Skidmore College upstate New York. And at school in February 1960, we watched and read the news with great interest. We were shocked to see black college students demonstrating and being beaten for sitting in at lunch counters. Students across the country began to demonstrate and support and we said, okay, well, you know, here's our chance. So with leaflets titled The Right to Eat, I still have the original leaflet. And let your voice be heard, we invited all Skidmore students to participate in the decision about whether to support the Southern Siddin students. Between 60 and 200 students attended a half dozen long, heated, collective discussions. And my first, that was my first experience with grassroots democracy and action. We discussed, debated, shouted, cried and finally evolved a plan. And the plan was we picketed the downtown Woolworths and then the local police challenged our right to do so. That's another story because it doesn't have to do with my parents, but somehow word of these Siddin support activities reached my family. I remember a scene in the kitchen of my parents' house during spring break. I'm standing against the wall by the table. The light is kind of eerie. My mother is screaming at the top of her lungs. If you love them so much, go back to Africa. My father is pacing and silent, but definitely not supporting me. I am scrunching myself closer and closer to the wall, trying to be as small as possible, terrified that one or both of them will begin hitting me. What were they so afraid of? So then four years pass, I went to Berkeley to graduate school. I continued my Northern support activities for SNCC. I worked for National Student Association and Interim as well. And then I was convinced to come south by all of the wonderful SNCC people that I met through this process. And I came to Atlanta in March of 1964. And I went to Greenwood in the summer of 1964. And here's another little section from my story. My parents voiced their objections to my working with SNCC by calling me every few days to say I had been duped by communists and insisting that I leave the south. They were definitely influenced by Fulton Lewis Jr., Fulton Lewis III, and Evans and Novak, right-wing columnists who repeatedly accused the civil rights movement of being under communist control. My parents threatened to bring me home with a deprogramming organization. And my father insinuated that if I did not come home, I would make my mother have a heart attack. You'll be the cause of her death, he would bellow through the phone. Though I knew this was a scare tactic, sometimes I believed it could really happen. Paradoxically, my mother sent care packages throughout this period and even included an air conditioner for the Greenwood office. On the one hand, I was sure that my parents knew we were sweltering and sent the air conditioner out of genuine concern, but I couldn't help wondering if they thought that such gifts would bring me home or undo the imagined brainwashing. So basically, just in conclusion, the struggle with my parents continued, although in the 80s, I have to say, my mother voted for Jesse Jackson, wonder of wonders. So there was some movement there. But I do believe, definitely believe that all young people, people in general need a movement. And a movement is a place where you're forced to really question your values, you deepen your values, you learn about how our democracy works and the importance of that as a way to live and in large measure, a movement like this sets the course of your life. Now, we're gonna take a couple of panel questions and I will beg the panelists to limit your answers to two minutes. The first question is, what is your understanding of the beloved community and when did you feel you first experienced it? We're actually gonna start on this end. Well, to tell you the truth, I don't really remember those words. I think I was in one, but I don't think we called it that. The community that I was in when I joined SNCC, which was from the fall of 1961 till 65, was probably one of the first recent examples of interracial cooperation that we had had in this country. And the experience of being in this community marked me for life, so that I've always looked for this again. And it was a community that was not free of strife and not free of tension, but as I've said several times, this was a community where the context was different. And the context was everyone in this community is going to have to, if necessary, give up his or her life for others in this community. And while people could fight and argue about who was doing more work than other people and who was bossy and who was, you know, personal characteristics, the atmosphere was we are going to protect each other and we are going to stand firm against racism. And so that context made everything, made all our relationships different. And I often say to people, to white people, especially, that white people have no idea of the burden that they carry of racism. And they don't think about it and it's there. But when you're in an environment when it's gone, you feel this tremendous weight lifting off your shoulders and you're almost ready to fly because we are carrying a different burden from African-Americans, of course, and they carry the burden of slavery and we carry the burden that our people participated in this. So when that can be lifted, that is what I would call the beloved community. See, I thought that I would actually think of something but then I got so immersed in, that was gorgeous. I would agree with Dottie. By the time I come in at 63, the beloved community, per se, as a title was not really talked about. And that was really something that came out of the Nashville Movement and most of them had kind of, except for John Lewis, had left. But what was interesting for me, I guess, is that I always felt nurtured and that was nurtured as much by the men as by the women. That I never felt that if I said something really stupid and I've said some really stupid things in SNCC, that somebody would say, oh, Richardson, that's really stupid. Nobody ever said that. Now, it didn't mean, it's what Dottie said. It didn't mean that you wouldn't be mad because maybe somebody was going out with your boyfriend. We were 16, 17, 18 years old at that point. We're not like we are now. And so there were all the petty stuff but if the bottom line is, how do you get black folks registered to vote without getting them killed? And how do you protect each other, not just physically, but in a nurturing way? And I'm not sure when that first occurred to me. I know that I felt like I was in the most amazing thing in my life. I never wanted to leave. There were these people who were passionately fighting for this greater thing that I hadn't even thought about growing up in Tarrytown, New York. And so I don't know, it was like amazing. It was just all amazing to me. I never said anything in staff meetings but not because anybody said to me, you shouldn't say anything because you don't know anything. It was because I was so in awe of everybody around me. Women, men, local folk who had come in who knew how to organize, I knew nothing. And so for me it was like you were suddenly in this absolutely incredible community that is nurturing you and moving you to be something that you never thought you could do to be. And so I guess for me that was that beloved community. Yeah. My first direct involvement with SNCC was when I went to jail at the end of 1961 at Christmas time. And I within a year had gone south to register voters in Southwest Georgia. I was 19. We never used the term as I remember it, beloved community. The term that I use in my piece once and it's actually part of what I will read is redemptive community, which I think has a slightly different feel. And actually given the young activist I know now, I would use the expression transformative community. And what I mean by that and what I experienced as a field worker with SNCC is that when you are part of a transformative community, you understand in the context of the people you are with that another way of doing things is possible. And I think that right now some of the problems that we face as well as the juggernaut of segregation, it took a transformative imagination and an act of community imagination to say that we weren't going to do things in the old way anymore. Thanks. Well, I too really never thought of the word as something that applied to me, not because there wasn't a community of people that I joined as I entered. I think the most significant event that I can think of is I went to the November 1963 SNCC conference at Howard University and it was there, I came east, I came east, went to the conference and went back to school, but it was there at that November 1963 conference that I made my decision to go south. So the singing, the camaraderie, the incredible belief in the mission, the work of SNCC and the work of the civil rights movement kind of became part of my blood. And I went back to California and I packed my bags and went south. I think the other aspect of it is that you're in a community of people who are caring, loving, not that there aren't rough edges, of course there are, but where you feel that you're accepted for who you are, you're unequal, you're not ridiculed, as Judy said, you're not put down, you share values with people, but also we had a community of incredible ideas, conversation, debate, discussion. I met people who had studied history, who knew about social movements through history, which was something that I had no knowledge of because of the way I was raised and where I went to school. So, and I think it was transformative personally as it was transformative for the country, but at the same time then the country was able to slip back and this is something that we talk about a lot today in my hometown, Baltimore, anyway. The country was able to slip back into the old ways of doing things with a few changes and so we need to reclaim that transformative moment, whether it's a transformative social movement and hopefully it will be permanently transformative as opposed to temporarily transformative. Somebody's shaking my back. Oh, correct. Well, I guess I was around early enough to hear the term beloved community and for me it was less an individual sense and it was more political, it was a community and it really had very little to do with race as I understood it. It was a community of like-minded activists, activists who loved justice and believed in freedom for all people and that the idea was that there was this core beloved community that could expand and grow and so it meant something in terms of the way that you organized that you organized really with love in your heart and with the understanding that there was a potential to expand this love of justice and freedom that even your oppressors could become part of this beloved community and so it had a lot to do with the way that you organized and the strategies that you used in organizing. The second question I'd like to ask is if you had the opportunity to choose just one story and you only get to choose one story from hands on the freedom plow that would be a permanent part of the K through 12 history curriculum in this country, which would you choose and why? And you have two minutes to answer. Judy, oh, okay. I think Joanne Christian. Joanne Christian was part of a really strong movement family and at one point she comes in at 14, 15 years old and at one point there were three generations of Christians in jail at the same time. Her little sister herself and her mother and as a matter of fact, Faith did what started as an oral history with her. That's how it got into the book. She has a story in there. It's very short where she is in the Camilla jail. She is in the county jail and she is by herself. She's been put into solitary. She's been split from her other family members and they put a German shepherd dog in there and they unleash him. And so she turns her face to the wall and she just prays and the dog comes over. He sniffs her. She's very, very quiet. And then the dog goes over and he growls a little bit and then he goes over and he sits down by the door that has been closed on him and her. And she just lays there very quietly for some time. But she never, it's like they were trying to break her and you see all the way through here. And then she gets out and she finally gets out after two weeks in jail and she's so excited because she thinks she's going to a mass meeting and she goes past where the mass meeting is being held in the church and she sees her father and her uncle and they're seated under a spotlight of the church and she's ready to get out of the car and her father says, no baby, you can't come in here because the clan had said that they were gonna attack the church and her father and uncle are seated under the spotlight with guns across their legs to defend the church as often happened with the movement. So, and she says, you know, land of the free and home of the brave, these were the free, these were the brave, my uncle and my father. And so she's the story I would probably think about. Dear Deborah, I love you so much but I am so much deep into this book that I cannot pick one. And really that is how the project began. That one story wasn't enough, one view wasn't enough. So I think maybe people outside me can do that but I can't. Well, I also like Joanne Christian's story and that would be one because it's on the short side and it's a young person so high school students can relate to her. There's another story that I like especially and that Zohara Simmons story because her grandmother raised her for the most part but her and her grandmother's grandmother had raised the grandmother and she had been a slave. So there's this incredible passing down of knowledge and story and passion and feeling about what it was like to be an African-American person in this country. And then she Zohara is very nurtured by the black community that she lives in in Memphis, Tennessee. And there's one incident where she says, she wasn't very aware of racism and its impact. She went, there were a lot of questions about what summer job would you get and she goes to, she says, her grandmother says, well you're not picking cotton because enough of us have picked cotton or I've picked enough cotton for the whole family so Zohara goes downtown to get a white person's job and a storm comes up and she's in the middle of this storm, the wind is racing and there are all these white folks looking out of the windows of whatever buildings she was passing and she feels alone and in turmoil and dealing with the world. And then just to make again, I don't wanna go over my two minutes but she goes to college, she goes to Spelman and that's again her parents' hopes and dreams and vision for her future. She goes to Spelman and the movement is at Spelman and she gets involved. So you have this incredible family history in her story, what she feels as a young person and then what she does as a college student and then she ends up of course as one of the women leaders in the movement. Thanks Betty. Well, I of course have been very firm throughout this project that every one of these stories had merit and value. So my answer would be if I had to pick, I would pick four. 30 seconds to describe each of them. But I think very quickly, I would pick Diane Nash who's the title is they are the ones who got scared describing the early days in Mississippi and her decision to go to jail when she was pregnant with her first child. I would pick Bernice Reagan whose title is unsheltered and uncovered. I entered this movement for freedom where she talks about an attempt to snare a sexual predator in the South and what the relationships were between white men and black women in the South and how that inspired her to understand that as a woman and as a black person if her life, the conditions, the social conditions of her life were gonna change, she would have to change them. I would pick Gloria Richardson who lives here in New York who was head of the Cambridge Movement and her description of how she went from being really a shy person to one of the most militant people in the country and of course there's a picture which I actually don't think is in her, there's this wonderful picture where she's facing off a tank and pushing away the rifle of the man in the National Guard and finally, and I'm thinking of three more, but finally I would pick Prathia Hall. So I would agitate for a greater inclusion first of all and Prathia Hall's description of the significance of the freedom struggle in the South and how Southern black people learned to struggle for years way before the civil rights movement and brought those skills of struggle and belief in a freedom faith and that fueled and kept the civil rights movement going. So I think I might be able to settle with those for at least 10 minutes. Thanks Martha. Well, other than my own, no, that's a joke. There's nothing dull in this book and everybody has talked about their own experience in such a moving way. So I would say the book is the thing, but if you had to ask me for a special moment, I did the first oral interview with Annie Pearl Avery, which was then later edited and Annie Pearl is legendary in our community because while everybody was talking about being nonviolent, Annie Pearl was decidedly not nonviolent and she writes very movingly about how she'd go to a demonstration and the minister would ask her to stand on the side. You know, no, Annie Pearl, you're not ready, you've got a gun, you've got, so she would get rid of the gun and she'd say, well, there's a knife, okay. And that didn't go over too well. Anyway, she was really wanted to be in the movement. She controlled herself, she used discipline. That's what we all have to do, use discipline. And she, I forget even where she was going, she was going to a meeting and she took the wrong bus and she ended up in the bus station of in Aniston, Alabama. Now Aniston was the spot where the bus carrying the freedom riders had been burned, okay. And so here is Annie Pearl, African-American young woman. She had two children at the time, but she couldn't have been more than maybe 22 years old. Sitting in this waiting room, in the white waiting room, all alone, all night. And when she told me that, I had to turn off the tape and I broke down and cried. I couldn't, this was something that no New York Times reporter would ever report. But it was this moment of incredible courage from a woman, a working class woman, there were many, many, many, many people like this. And we don't even know to this day, probably, who all of them are. So that, for me, as one of the editors on this book, would have to be one of those moments that was really phenomenal. I wanna thank you for bearing with my question, which I fully understood was completely against the ethos of SNCC and Hands on the Freedom Plow. But I think we are all in agreement that what gets into the curriculum is a very, very political question. So, having been involved in gender mainstreaming projects myself, I know it was a very difficult choice, but I appreciate that you honed in on it. And I was not planning to answer the question myself, but I appreciate that Martha mentioned Gloria Richardson and Diane Nash, who I was going to mention, and also just the vision of Aniston, Alabama. So I just wanna share a little more detail about Diane Nash. After those buses were burned in 1961 and the freedom riders were attacked, it was Diane Nash, who was a very young, very petite, very beautiful woman leader among all the older male civil rights leaders who insisted on continuing the freedom rides. And that helped end segregation in interstate travel. And I think we would all agree was a turning point in the civil rights movement. And I feel like, even to this day, she doesn't get the credit for that, that she deeply deserves. And I would also like to read the quote that about her choosing to go to jail when she was four months pregnant. She said, this will be a black baby born in Mississippi, and thus wherever he is born, he will be in prison. If I go to jail now, it may hasten the day when my child and all children will be free. And that's the kind of leadership that we need to know more about. So Hands on the Freedom Plow gives us an incredible resource for redefining leadership, group-centered leadership, women's leadership, and this is really a celebration. I'm just really excited to be here and to have you share your thoughts and read, and we will continue with the reading now. The second set of readings are about experiences of encountering activism in the South, and we're gonna have faith first. Okay. And it will be a good segue with Deborah's remarks about leadership. I didn't want to say that there, in this audience, there's a woman I met when I was four years old. We went to elementary schools together, Kathy Sarah Child, and also Amina Rahman, who's mentioned in my piece in the book, we were active before I went South in Harlem. So, and I wanted to use that to say that although this is a book of, in some ways, extraordinary accounts, we are women like those of you in the audience, and our lives have continuity going back sometimes to when we were four years old, and we're not exotic. We are real people. So, oh, well, Marilyn Lohan is here. I was talking about people. Yeah, she's on her own. From childhood. But yes, there are other SNCC people who are in the audience as well. So I wanted to say SNCC, as this book makes clear, went from the Siddhans and the Freedom Rides. One of the ways that it developed its program in the South was to establish grassroots projects. And I worked in Southwest Georgia in one of them. And I don't have time to discuss all of it, but I thought it would be interesting to read a little bit about the leadership of Charles Sherrod, who was probably 23 or 24 years old at the time. I was 19. Okay, Sherrod believed women must participate fully in the struggle. He said, all movement soldiers must drive. A New Yorker, I did not know how to drive and thought there were better ways to spend my time as a freedom fighter than in learning. Sherrod, however, sent me for my learner's permit. Inside the squat cinder block bureau of motor vehicles, twine was strung down the middle of the room. Paper signs clipped to the sign red, colored, and white. I meant to walk down the white side, but it made me sick. So I walked down the other side and got a colored learner's permit. Sherrod felt it was not safe for me to use this ill-gotten colored permit. So I never did drive in Albany. He was not amused. I had withheld the potential movement resource. I didn't appreciate it then, but Sherrod was as exceptional in his way as the family in which I had grown up. A man raised in a sexist society, trained in the even more sexist Baptist ministry, and holding some chauvinist ideas about social relationships, he nevertheless believed that in the fight for freedom, women were his equals. He was successful when he insisted I pull my weight in the movement pulpit, and I grew to like public speaking. I still enjoy it. He selected a female staff member, Prathia Hall, the daughter of a minister, to preach at the Albany Movement's first anniversary program, a night when Dr. King spoke from the same pulpit. And by the way, that meant that Sherrod himself chose not to hold that place. He gave it to her. I was bowled over by Prathia. I had not imagined a young woman my age could possess such oratorical power or ambition. Okay, now I'm just gonna talk a little bit about the emotional reality of the work down there. And in some ways, the system of separation of races, which was so unnatural in essence, was maintained not only by brutality and force, but also by the force of myths. Mr. Marion Page, an Albany Movement officer, told me the story of James Brazier. Years before in Bad Baker County, which is the county Shirley Sherrod is from by the way, Brazier had been beaten to death in jail. Mr. Page went to pick up the body for the funeral home. When Mr. Page lifted the body, Brazier's broken bones clicked like dice, and that's Mr. Page's words. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights listed Brazier's death as the last recorded lynching in the U.S., sadly, that was true in 1962, but no more. There were other Southwest Georgia cautionary tales. There was a lynching tree in Lee County where four men and one woman had been lynched in one day. In Baker County, black people weren't supposed to drive through town after sunset. White merchants in Bad Baker would sell only RC Cola, not Coke or Pepsi, to black customers. One night, Penny Patch and I were alone in the dark Freedom House. From outside, an intruder smashed the window beside our bed. We crouched on the floor while, through the curtain, he ran his hand over the bed, groping through the litter of shattered glass. We called the police, but that man, like many who attacked the movement, was never arrested. Everywhere, the rural crossroads of Southwest Georgia were points of power. White men owned the land adjacent to major crossroads, and at nights, they guarded those intersections, but we drove past the lynching tree and eased through the intersections on our way to mass meetings in Terrell, Lee, and Sumter counties. Intent on the sights of the burned churches in the charred rubble of segregation, the next generation is drowning me out a little here, the Black South sheltered a movement that was participatory, black led, and integrated, a redemptive community. The movement lived the future in the peanut fields of the past, opposing racism, sexism, and elitism. In those tents, I understood two things, that I would become a teacher, and that, as Bayard Rustin said at a planning meeting for the 63 March on Washington, demanding racial justice in the United States in 1962, and today as well, sadly, was inherently revolutionary. Thank you. My father helped organize the United Auto Workers Local at the plant, where all of everybody's father worked, so my father was part of that. He was treasure of the local when he died on the assembly line when I was seven, and so my mother became a single parent for me and for my sister, Carita. I get a four-year scholarship, full-paid to Swarthmore College, and had to be four years because otherwise I couldn't have gone, my mother had no money, so I come in to the movement through Swarthmore, and the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society chapter that is on that campus. At some point, I come to the Atlanta office. I saw the National Office of SNCC for the first time in November 1963. It was a teeny rundown office at 8 1 1⁄2 Raymond Street, a one-block side street off Hunter, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, near the Atlanta University Center. The office was located on the second floor above a beauty shop. It definitely did not fit my image of a national office because I'm thinking, you know, National Urban League maybe, at least I rug on the floor. I was 19 and had gone to Atlanta with Reggie Robinson, SNCC's field secretary in Cambridge, Maryland, where I had been working full-time since leaving Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and Cambridge was on the eastern shore of Maryland. From the downstairs glass door of the National Office, I saw this large man at the top of the stairs, dressed in overalls, and sweeping the stairs. Now, Reggie saw him too, then ran up the stairs, and with broad smiles and much hollering, they hugged each other like long-lost brothers, and I thought, whoa, this is truly an egalitarian office, since I assumed the man to be the janitor. It was only after Reggie called the man's name that I realized this was Jim Forman, SNCC's larger-than-life executive secretary. There was such joy, warmth, and affection in this moment that I thought, Judy, you haven't just joined an organization, you've joined a family. SNCC really is a band of brothers, and later we would add sisters, and a circle of trust, and I assumed I'd be in it the rest of my life. Now, I later found out that Forman often swept up, and not so much to clean the perpetually dirty office, which was good, since he wasn't all that good at it. Rather, he was showing us that, as he often said, no job was too lowly for anyone in SNCC to do, and every job was important to sustaining the organization. Now, Reggie introduced us, and through questioning, Forman found out that I had taken a semester off from Swarthmore, that would have been the first semester of my sophomore year, and that I could take shorthand, which was kind of like texting but with symbols, okay. And I know you all don't know, yeah. And that I could type 90 words a minute. So I never made it back to Swarthmore. I then become Forman's secretary. I had no problem with that then, have no problem with it now. It gave me a bird's eye view of the organization, so as soon as I come in, I found about the nationwide network of friends of SNCC, of campus friends of SNCC, of the research department, of the pro bono lawyers, of the, I mean this was a grand organization, and we were doing it as teenagers. Okay, second part is, very short, Dropkick, okay, is entitled Dropkick. The Atlanta office was involved in demonstrations to integrate Grady Memorial Hospital. It was the municipal hospital in Atlanta. And as I was being carried off to the police van on one such protest, I saw John Lewis, then SNCC's chair, being roughly handled as they arrested him too. So I angrily started kicking to get out of the officer's grip so I could go help John. In the process, I evidently kicked the policeman who was carrying me in a very vulnerable spot. And after I was, and in some ways, looking back, it's amazing that the other arresting officers did not retaliate. So after I was bailed out of jail, Forman summoned me to his office. He showed me a New York Times article, which I actually have a copy of here. And in which they said that Judy Richardson from Barretown, that was the first thing, they didn't have the tea. Barretown, New York had kicked a cop in the stomach. Actually, it was a little lower. And asked me, so he asked me, Forman asked me whether this report was accurate. And I said, I didn't remember, which was true. He scolded me, reminding me that we were supposed to be nonviolent and that this kind of negative publicity could hurt the fundraising efforts. I left his office feeling very hurt by his anger and very guilty that I had some way or jeopardized this incredible organization. Because understand that, you know, I had just come in. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven coming into SNCC. Very quick, fast forward. I was working on the second series, The 14 Hours of Eyes on the Prize. As many of you know, Julian Bond was the narrator. And so at some point I said, you know, Julian, do you remember that time when, you know, the cop, you know, and I kind of, the foot landed, you know. And he said, yeah, because see, Julian actually does know everybody in Atlanta. I mean, black, white, Latino, he knows all these people. So he said, yeah, as a matter of fact, I saw him at this old local restaurant. He said, and he talks like this now. So I though, being still gullible, I said, oh, no, Julian, no. He said, no, he's fine, he's fine. He's now retired. He has six kids, you know, it's all of that. But he actually remembered it, because he remembers all the stuff. So that's it. Thank you, Judy. And now we will have another story featuring Jim Foreman from Daddy. Foreman was always very keen on history and told us at the slightest opportunity, in fact, in tedious detail over and over, you must keep everything. You must file everything. You must write it down. You must keep copies, because this is history, capital H. He decided that we needed to write and produce pamphlets about SNCC's work, pamphlets that could be distributed in the North and elsewhere for educational and fundraising purposes for the sake of history. In June 1963, Foreman assigned me to write a pamphlet on the big movement battle that SNCC had recently joined in Danville, Virginia. This pamphlet was later edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez and illustrated with brilliant photographs by Danny Lyon, a woody Chicagoan whom Foreman had put to work as a SNCC photographer. In Danville, I participated in a nighttime demonstration of black community people led by ministers at the back of the police station where several movement people were being held. After we began to kneel and pray for the release of the prisoners, we were hit from the side by high pressure water hoses. The water from the hoses could knock you over in a second. At the time, I weighed 106 pounds because I had been mistakenly diagnosed as being diabetic and was afraid to eat anything. Almost immediately, I found myself lying flat on the ground minus my shoes, which had been washed away by the water. When I tried to get up on my hands and knees, I felt a sharp crack on the side of my head and I saw starbursts of different colors like a brilliant fireworks display inside my skull. Until then, I had thought that, quote, seeing stars was just a literary expression. The cop who hit me loomed over me like a white mountain, wielding his night stick and staring at me blankly, not registering either satisfaction or hatred as I staggered to my feet. Many of the other demonstrators were beaten much more savagely. The next day, Danny took photographs of the walking wounded with their bandaged heads and bodies. These photos went into the pamphlet. After this, Foreman and other SNCC personnel arrived. About 40 local people decided to hold a protest demonstration in front of City Hall, an imposing granite building with broad stairs sweeping from the street to the main entrance. Vowing to stay all night if necessary, we sat all day on the City Hall stairs. Foreman captured the attention of this involuntary audience by conducting an impromptu black history lesson at the top of his voice. Telling us about Harriet Tubman and other great black figures of the past. When darkness came, the police drove the water cannons to City Hall and parked them directly across the street, unraveling huge hoses. Several white men grabbed the hoses. The city had deputized practically every white male in sight and pointed them at us. Those of us on the stairs, now down to about 20, prepared for the worst. I held a railing with both hands as tightly as I could, my heart pounding, dreading the moment when they turned the hoses on us. We had heard that some people had been blinded by the blast of water in their faces. Just then, Foreman, seeing the hopelessness of the situation, lumbered to his feet and approached the police chief saying, do you want all these people to get hurt? In the momentary confusion, Foreman motioned us to leave and we slowly got up from our positions and left City Hall, heads held high. I felt that Foreman had saved our lives. The state of Virginia was preparing to use against the Danville Civil Rights Movement, the John Brown Law, passed after the insurrection at Harper's Ferry. This law made it a felony to, quote, incite colored people to acts of war and violence against the white population. Foreman told Danny and me that defending us against felony charges, if we were indicted, would be a needless expense. In other words, we had to leave. As directed, Danny and I took our luggage to a black church on a hillside. When it was time to go, we climbed out of the black window and into a pink Cadillac, where we lay on the floor of the back seat covered with newspapers. Out of fear and tension, I began to laugh uncontrollably. At the airport, I switched from laughter to tears, thinking of all the people I had left behind. Danny went up to the airline ticket counter and in a burst of invention, registered me under a numb daguerre, Joanne Woodward. It could not have been possible for me to look more different from actress Joanne Woodward standing there in bedraggle clothes and I began to laugh maniacally again. Along with several other SNCC people, including Bob Zellner, Danny and I were, in fact, indicted under the John Brown Law. Later, Bob and I then married and with our two children in tow drove through Virginia many times until the statute of limitations was up in the 1970s. We never stopped for anything, not even gas. I'm going to ask one more question and then we'll have the final reading of Geed's story and then we're going to open it up to you guys. As I think certainly the panelists know and many of you know, civil rights historiography and feminist historiography has portrayed the experiences of black and white women in very dualistic ways. White women complained of sexism, black women didn't understand the complaint because they had the opportunity to be leaders and also racism seemed the primary issue because people were risking their lives on this issue. So now that you've had the experience, not your own experience but has the experience of putting together hands changed or given you a more nuanced view of this controversy. I'm going to volunteer on that hard question. Martha, do you want to start? Two minutes are left. Yes, exactly. I think it, for me, it made me again rethink what I understood from my own experience to be true and to have to look at it through the eyes of a number of different women. So yes, it did involve a rethinking and a nuancing, particularly since I was mainly responsible for writing the bridges. I had to think of something to go in there and I think that in the end the controversy remains. There are women who expressed or felt themselves to be in a situation where there was sexual repression and there were women who felt they were in a situation that where gender didn't matter, my own conclusion was that, of course, there was none of the kind of brutal sexism that can characterize gender relations in this country, physical violence, rape, denigration, but that there were assumptions about traditional women's roles that women would take notes, that kind of thing. That's where I ended up with it. My own personal experience, of course, was that I felt highly valued not because there was a potential for leadership or playing any kind of significant role, but just as a movement soldier, I was welcomed, valued and treasured for being things that were not stereotypically feminine. It didn't matter how I looked, it mattered what I did, it didn't matter well, it mattered that I was smart, it mattered that I could be brave, it mattered that I could do things that I think were traditionally thought of as more masculine within the context of the overall society. Thank you. Judy. For me, it wasn't only how it went against the usual kind of master narrative about women and the movement, it was what I learned about the women, I think. That's what most surprised me. I mean, I think what we knew about each other, we kept each other in time. You knew who they were when they came into this community and that's for me, that's all I really knew. I didn't know about Betty's parents, I didn't know about anything because we were in time, we were working together, we were in this amazing environment and so I didn't know before, I didn't know after in some ways. So it was to find out all the family history and going back way, way, way back, that was amazing to me. The other thing that was amazing, it was kind of like what I found when we were doing the first version of what became Eyes on the Prize and that was like 1978. And I remember interviewing Murley Evers, the murder of the assassinated Medgar Evers national NAACP leader. And I was asking her, can you recreate a mass meeting for me? Because at that point, it was 1978, I had been 10 years away and I was trying to figure out had I fantasized about how amazing this movement was. And so I said, if you don't have any photos, if we don't have anything in this film, how can you give me a picture of this, the sights, the sounds, so it will recreate for people what a mass meeting was like and she did it. And I started to cry thinking, now you shouldn't be doing that, you're supposed to be journalistic and da, da, da. But what was amazing is that I thought I have not made this up. She finds it as amazing as I did. And that's what I found in these women's stories, that I had not romanticized it. They felt the same way I did, that this was absolutely an incredible experience. So that was part of it, yeah. Thank you, thank you. Faith and then Betty. For one thing in this book, the default setting is not white male. The default setting is really black women and there are white women in the book as well, and there are men in the book. But this is a very different perspective. Where we stand as editors, whether we're white or black, we stand as editors of a book that is primarily the voices of not only black women, but southern black women. That said, I think what I learned very early in this project was that I sort of figured there was a unitary or unified SNCC experience and that for everyone else, as for me, it was being in a grassroots project, registering voters staying for an entire year and I was very quickly disabused of that. But there are some things that remain true. In February of 1995, I wrote a letter to people in the women's civil rights community about the context in which I would like my memories to appear and I copied it to Martha. I barely knew Betty at the time, Jean and Judy and Dotty. And a couple of the things that I said include, I would want the group in which my story appeared to represent my sisters in SNCC, those who are still alive. In terms of long-term ties and connections to my life, those women have been African-American women and then one other short quote. Our experiences only make sense in the context of a racially mixed struggle that received its deepest impetus and all of its leadership from the African-American experience and community. And I do want to say one other thing. As a literary writer, I'm often told, well, talking about civil rights from a black point of view, that's just so predictable. That's so old. The interesting literary thing is if, like, oh, what is his name? Saul Bellow would tell the story of the civil rights movement from the point of view of a blonde woman. And I think as a literary person, I have fought against that ethic ever since Styron's Nat Turner was issued. And I very much am proud of this book because I think it goes very much against that literary tradition. I don't have a whole lot to add. I mean, by the time I left the South and was being tugged at by the women's liberation activists in Washington where I was living at the time to join a women's consciousness raising group. And yes, you are oppressed as a woman. And I could say, no, no, no, no, I'm not oppressed as a woman. But I finally did join a consciousness raising group. And the most important aspect of that was understanding my own negative attitudes toward myself. So internalized oppression, if you will, undoing that internalized oppression that I was focusing on myself. But I think as an editor of this book and reading all the stories, the most significant thing is similar to what I think Judy said, that you learn one what, I mean, in other words, we knew that people were active in different parts of the South. We didn't really know people's histories that much. We didn't know about their communities that they grew up in unless we were in that community. But learning all of the accomplishments of women within just the SNCC context, the phenomenal roles that they played, the incredible dangers that they faced, the great risks that they took, as well as the later accomplishments of each of those women, what they did with their lives, post-SNCC and how they raised their children, all those kinds of things which we learned which were phenomenal to understand the totality of the strength of the women who had come through SNCC and dedicated a part of their lives to the movement. Thank you. Well, we spent 15 years working on this book, and when we were in this last phase, and I was doing some of the copy editing, which was like last June, and reading the book from cover to cover, I myself, who had been working with this material and with my five sister editors, I was surprised myself at how thrilling some of it actually is. And these are probably stories that women would have told to their families and their friends. It would never have gotten out of a tiny little circle. So now it belongs to everybody. Now there's one theme that was, it wasn't surprising to me in the sense that I knew about it, but I didn't realize the extent to which self-defense is a theme in this book. And there is virtually, I can't even think, well, there are most of the black women writing in this book talk about not the question of self-defense on a demonstration, which everybody was pretty rigorous about. I mean, you did not come to a demonstration with arms and you were not gonna use arms, use weapons. But inside the black community, I don't think I realized the extent of how many people were armed and were going to use those arms to protect us. And it had bothered me for a long time thinking of some of the people who are very not famously nonviolent and knowing that they were in situations where other people were protecting them. That's one of the contradictions that you'll see in this book. And it was the self-defense theme is sort of a throwaway line in a sense. I mean, it's not the main point of these stories. It's just a thread that's everywhere. When Janet Jamat Moses talks about a voter registration demonstration in Natchez and an elderly black man is sitting there with a paper bag in his lap and there are several of them, and they say, and he says, I'm paraphrasing, he says, little sister, we've been watching you and she looks in the bag and there's a pistol in the bag. And people's parents standing there sitting under the lights. And I began to realize that might have been the cause of preventing really what would have been 10 times worse violence when the white communities knew that there were people who were prepared. So this throws a little, you know, this is not the traditional violence, nonviolence paradigm and it isn't because I think what this book does is restore the concept of self-defense, not being aggressively violent but being prepared to defend yourself. And that was a surprise to me and I think that's one of the contributions of this book in addition to everything else that has been mentioned. Thank you, Donnie. There is incredible diversity in the book and I read it in one wrapped evening. I mean, it's just, the whole thing, I had a re-copy and I just could not put it down. So I just wanna share that with you and in the hopes that if you are not able to buy the book here that you will go out immediately and buy it from your local community bookstore. And I wanna just ask Judy to read Jean's story and then we'll open it up for your questions and comments. Jean, as you know, Jean Smith, Jean Smith Young is now a psychiatrist and works in the Maryland State Department of Psychiatry and is doing amazing work with young at-risk youth. She starts, she talks about in 1964, the Hattiesburg Freedom Day and it's again building the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Freedom Vote. And it's also the day of the precinct meeting. And she says this very hot day started under the watchful eye of Miss Woods, a black lady somewhere between 45 and 75 years old who allowed us to use her rooming house on Mobile Street, the colored business street of Hattiesburg as a meeting place. Sometimes we held special meetings upstairs in the parlor decorated with thick red curtains and velvet setees. But mostly we used her large kitchen as a regular meeting place. She lived upstairs in quarters that I imagined to be very elegant and to which we were never invited. Miss Woods was a business lady. Miss Woods was also a very proper lady. She was a thin, handsome, coffee colored woman who always wore a delicate white starch blouse adorned with an old ivory brooch with intricate metalwork or a lace collar. She always had on stockings no matter what time of the day or night you met her. She had been political since the 1940s when she and her husband had joined the Black and Tan, the Black Republican Party in the southeastern part of the state. They joined because of the blatant exclusion of blacks from the Democratic Party at that time. After the Black and Tan, Miss Woods had continued to work for black voting rights. She was willing to support any organization that was for voting, whether it was the NAACP or our younger Brescher organization, SNCC, as long as we followed her house rules. She didn't want any foolishness, any sexual liaisons in her boarding house. Miss Woods wanted you to know that she meant business, but after she thought you had gotten the message, she was a kind and nurturing woman. On the morning of the precinct elections, Miss Woods came downstairs into the kitchen to wish us good luck. Lately, when I had caught her unawares, I noticed that she was looking at me with a special concern. I think she felt sorry for me because I was going with a man from the movement who as far as she was concerned didn't mean me a bitter good. And I didn't have sense enough to figure this out. I'll call him Paul. That morning, Miss Woods looked at me with a sadness as I explained that I was waiting for Paul, who was one of the early and legendary Mississippi field organizers and his reputation stood ten feet tall. The two of us were supposed to lead the precinct meeting. I'd gotten it into my head that I couldn't start the precinct meeting without Paul. Eight o'clock a.m. and he still wasn't here. Where could he be? Finally, at nine o'clock, Miss Woods got disgusted and said, it's time for you to go, Jean. You got work to do. Don't wait on no man. With a pat on the back, Miss Woods basically pushed me out of her dark and supportive world and into the bright sunlight and mobile street. She pointed me toward the Masonic Hall, across the street and to the right upstairs above Mr. Fairleys TV Repair Shop. It was time for me to go. I had a precinct meeting to run. At 9.30 a.m., I walked up the stairs to the Masonic Hall and pushed open the door to the second story, which had been the meeting hall for the NAACP and a center of black resistance for 20 years. The door was not locked and I had a feeling that the room had been placed there just waiting for me. Our meeting was scheduled for 10 o'clock a.m. It was modeled on the white democratic precinct meetings being held that month, which excluded black people. This was a historic moment and I was very excited. By this time, I was pretty good organizer, but I had never led a mass meeting and neither I nor anybody I knew had ever led a precinct meeting to form a parallel political party. The task of the day was to explain in language the people would understand that the rationale for these meetings was such and such and then to conduct the vote. This was important and I didn't want to be the one to botch it, botch it. Worried, I looked around for Paul. Where was Paul? I wondered, could he be lying in a ditch somewhere beaten senseless? And being all wrapped up and worrying about Paul, I didn't take definitive steps to take charge of the meeting. Instead, I waited, hoping that either the meeting would take care of itself or Paul would miraculously appear. It wasn't long before Mr. Fairley came up from his TV repair shop on the first floor. He was a quiet and unassuming man in his fifties who had been the NAACP representative in Hattiesburg for many years. He said, beautiful day to be voting, isn't it, miss? As he came smiling into the room. How many chairs should I set out? This was his way of reminding me that it was time to start. For more than 30 minutes while the 20 or so black people who had come to form an independent party sat singing and waving fans with vivid pictures of a white suffering Jesus carrying his cross up a hill, I waited for Paul to come and run the meeting. I knew that Paul talked in such an intense, powerful way he could move people by brute force. I felt that my orating skills were nothing in comparison to his. My intellectual self sneered at this indecision. I thought, what are you standing around for, girl? It doesn't matter how good he is. He can't get votes if he's not here. You are gonna have to do this yourself. But my heart stood still staring at the door waiting. And while the farmers and city people started passing their fans down the aisle, it didn't look like any meeting was going to happen that day. I could feel the disappointment in the air and I felt ashamed. Then I felt the presence of Miss Woods in the room. I can't remember whether Miss Woods actually followed me from her boarding house and down the street or whether her spirit, her persona went with me. The thought of Miss Woods standing there in one of her best arched white blouses and an elegant gray suit from the 40s. And carrying her copy of the Mississippi Constitution, summoned up memories of all the strong women who had helped me to get to this point in my life. I remembered my quiet, thin anatomy teacher at Cass Technical High School, a science and art school in Detroit. She was a white woman bent over with age, but with a bright piercing glint in her eyes, she pulled me aside at the end of class one day and whispered, come to the lab before school opens tomorrow, Jean, for I've got something to show you. She never told me why she had chosen me for this tutorial and I never asked. The effect of it was to let me know that my dream of going to med school could become a reality. When I did go to med school, I think this teacher went with me. Right alongside my teacher came an image of Patricia Roberts Harris, the Dean of Women when I attended Howard University, who later became the first blackhead of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1963, Dean Harris gave me a gold chain for my Phi Beta Kappa Key from Howard University and told me that she expected that I would do great things for the race. Finally, standing there in the Masonic Hall was my mother, who had found herself a widow at the age of 21 with two children under the age of two. My father, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, was killed while strafing a train in Germany. My mother had taken care of us and went on to become a nurse and then a teacher of the death. She did whatever she had to do. In a remarkably short time, the images of my mother with her laughing eyes, my Dean of Women and my ancient anatomy teacher came to stand with me in the Masonic Hall alongside the ageless and no-nonsense Ms. Woods. In the presence of all these women who loved me and expected me to do well, my job became quite easy. I walked forward to the front with the Freedom of Democratic Party ballots. I took a deep breath and started talking. I forgot about my limited skills in comparison to Paul and my words took wings. I was excited with all these grand ideas that I had to stop and make sure that people were listening. Not only were they listening, but they were also rocking and nodding their heads and shouting, "'Amen, sister, the sweetest sound I had ever heard. "'Amen to me, with me.' I felt wonderful. Thirty minutes before I had been tongue-tied and helpless. Now here I was connected to all these people. I was them and they were me. We were sharing a grand vision. I felt a thrill of excitement each time a man or woman who had never voted in their lives before stuffed a carefully folded Freedom ballot into the homemade ballot box. I was so excited that I didn't even think about Paul anymore. By one o'clock I had certified about 50 ballots and by three o'clock I was on my way to carry them to the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi for the statewide MFTP, MFDP vote. And she ends, this was the day I became an organizer in my bones, as Jean Smith. I think that's the perfect story to end this portion of our afternoon. We do have a few minutes for your questions or comments. I feel like my question should come much later and because it's sort of a detail and what I really should be doing now is thanking all of you and Ms. Sackler for this wonderful opportunity. It's been fascinating and fabulous. My question specifically is about the intersection between the feminist movement and the civil rights movement. If you would comment on that, there's a story going around that it was a meeting of SNCC and some woman or women asked to put the feminist agenda, items on the agenda and they were left out of the meeting and that's sort of the story about how the women's movement got born. Is there anything to that story? The memo, who's gonna talk about the memo? And then I can talk about it. You wanna go first? Well, I'll just simply say yes, that's true and there was a memo written on the position of women in SNCC by a number of women in SNCC. It was followed up I think a year later by another position paper written by Mary King and Casey Hayden and those documents are taken to be the founding documents of the second wave of feminism. I think the other thing that's kind of the other piece of that that people keep talking about is Stokely Carmichael's supposed quote. And I got that, I was at the meeting by the way and I remember two things. I remember Ivan Ho, who's the guy I was going with at the time, Ivan Ho Donaldson very seriously giving me what has now become known as this feminist paper and very seriously asking me what I thought of it. He really wanted me to read it and for me when I read it, I didn't quite understand it and because for me still the issue of race was so much more important than the issue of feminism and also because I felt the most powerful as a black woman in this organization that I had ever felt in my life. So it did not resonate for me and I couldn't quite figure out why they were raising this question, okay? Now I go, so fast forward, I'm at Rutgers and a black male professor at Rutgers mentions the Stokely quote. Now the Stokely quote which I keep getting and I'm sure all of us get back as if this were a real thing. Stokely Carmichael becomes the chairman of SNCC in 1966 I guess, but he during this Waveland meeting which was 1964 when this paper comes out, it was the first time that I remembered that anybody was being asked to write position papers. I mean, as Dottie said, former was always about education but he was also about a lot of internal education and so one of the things he asked of this meeting was that people put forward position papers on things they cared about. So that was one of the position papers. So it's Waveland, it's gorgeous out, they're drinking by the dock of the bay and Mary King says a wonderful, in her book, Freedom Song, does a wonderful rendition, not rendition, she does what this story really was because she was there with Mary King, with Casey Hayden and they're drinking, Stokely was funny as hell. I mean, people do not realize how really funny he was. And so a lot of times people would preach, they would play preach. And so somebody asked, talked about the position papers and they said, yeah, what do you think the best position for a woman is? And Stokely starts preaching and in the middle of this says, yeah, I think the best position for a woman is prone. Now, everybody there left because of course Stokely also in the second CD, second congressional district in Mississippi which he was the kind of district leader of, he'd put Muriel Tillinghast in, in Greenville as the head of that project. He'd put Cynthia Washington up as the head of that one. You know, Stokely was working, used to working with strong women. So for me, that part of the feminist thing is in the context of what we also experienced within SNCC as women. I just wanted to add something else. I mean, I think it's very true that social movements stir up consciousness on the part of groups that are not part of that movement and or not, I don't mean not part of it, but which are not the focal point of that movement. So if you look at the abolitionists, you find many women find their voice within the abolitionist movement and begin to champion women's rights within SNCC and within the civil rights movement. Women again found their voice, began to champion women's liberation. And at the same time women who were Latino, Latina whose identities had been minimized because maybe one parent was Latin and the other was not. There are two women that write in the book about finding their Hispanic identity. There were two Japanese, young Japanese people within SNCC who discovered their Japanese heritage and identity. So as much as this country tries to wipe out the unique ethnic cultures that are brought to this country, that were brought through immigration and everything else, and as well as homogenize us, I think people find their voice within a social movement to think about the broader implications of people's roles. And I think for many women, this civil rights movement did this. Now later I participated in the women's movement, but it was very uncomfortable because it was a white middle class women's movement and it didn't often address the issues of women of color. And so I think that's a very critical lens to look at this whole question with is what is the intersection of race and gender and what does liberation mean in those contexts? Thank you. We could spend another three weeks here on that question. Let's have another one. Hi, first I wanted to say thank you so much for putting together this extraordinary book that collects so many amazing stories. I can't wait to get the book. So the first question is, are there any more books here for people to purchase? And then the second question, no? Oh, how sad. You'll take orders, that's great. Go to your independent bookstore. Terrific. And my second question, and I should preface it by saying, you all lived and did amazing work at a time that was so serious in our history and I could only imagine the struggle that you all faced and I admire you and commend you for the incredible work. And so my question is really about you all thinking about what lessons can we learn from your experience in today's society, considering that we have the first African American president of the United States who is under attack by right wing groups who are not interested in having an African American at the helm of our country. And second, we live in a time also where there is a great deal of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment, primarily known as Islamophobia. What lessons can we, as individuals sitting here, learn from your experience to combat these issues that exist in our society? Thank you. First, I should say that I don't know if people in the audience realize that the questioner is Debbie Almentasser, who was the subject herself of an incredible anti-Muslim episode here in the New York under our wonderful mayor and our equally wonderful ex-chancellor of school. Did you mention you're kidding? Yes, I'm kidding. And she herself is a heroine and also a standing survivor of this country. Now, as far as books are concerned, I'm deeply sorry that we don't have enough books. The next, we will have a book signing at the Schomburg on December 11th. We will have a full-scale book reading at Tamament Library at NYU on the 14th of December. And for those people who are upstate, we will be having an event in Ossening, New York. So if you would like to be informed about those events, please leave your name. Well, they can go on the calendar. Or you can go on the University of Illinois Press calendar. So this is not your only opportunity. And now, to answer the question that you asked Debbie, this is the question. And I think there are parallels. We are in a state of anti-Muslim hysteria, Islamophobia. It's dangerous. It's dangerous to anyone who is a Muslim. It is dangerous to all of us who want to live in some sort of decent civil society. And the lesson that I would take is that what it takes is what these women did, which was stand up, stand up, speak out, make your face in there, and remember that whatever happens to her happens to us. My perspective is we're in another period of time. Well, I mean, let me relate to the Obama question first. One of the, I think the important lessons for those of us who didn't learn it when he was, or didn't know it when he was running for office, it's that we're now knowing it now, is that no one person can really transform this country. There has to be a social movement to do it. And so that's number one. Now that doesn't mean that we don't defend the president's right to be there to make decisions, et cetera. But I also think that we are in another period of turmoil in this country where the question is who belongs? Who's part of America? It seems to be that we've maybe settled the problem of African-Americans belong, although probably not because we have an African-American president that's under attack. And there's a lot of subtle race-coded language that's coming. But in terms of, Muslims in terms of immigrants coming to this country, there is a critical cut. I think the a-critical cutting edge struggle is that around those issues. And the SB 1070 law in Arizona, for example, which really criminalizes Latinos, regardless of whether they have documents or not. The turmoil and controversy around the building of the mosque in New York. All of these point out that this racism, this Islamophobia, immigrant phobia, whatever you want to call it. It's something that we, and the other flip side of that is that there are phenomenal people, incredibly strong, wonderful people of every race and every color who will if given an opportunity and if pointed the way who will take a stand and be counted and take risks to defend freedom and democracy and to racism and oppression. I'm deeply sorry for what happened to you. And I think that's one of the things we can begin to do as a community, which Dottie helped us to do this afternoon which is to be compassionate with one another and those of us who are in this room for this afternoon are part of a community of compassion and caring. It doesn't necessarily make things better, but in 1964, 65, 66, 67, rather than Islam or Muslim being the devil words, the devil word was militant and that was us. We were the militants. And I guess, again, what Dorothy said is the important thing to stand up and to stand up in community. One of the reasons I love this book is that it is not, it's very deep in its levels. And so we actually have women, Annette Jones-White in 1959, I think in high school, registers to vote as a black woman in Albany, Georgia. So Hara Simmons, before the movement sits in the wrong place on a bus and actually lives to tell the tale. And there are some other stories. The movement that we think of as the 60s civil rights movement was part of a process that began when the first slave ship left Africa. And we all have to be part of that. And again, part of that is caring for one another and recognizing that what happens to her happens to us. Thanks. I wanna quickly respond, because you opened the door there with Obama and go back to my parents in a way. Racism is alive and well as the response to Obama has shown. But it seems to me that within the black community, racism is alive and well in a very murderous and dangerous form. And it's sort of kind of fallen out of view, out of concern. Oh, sorry, that we are in a situation where of course we are bearing the results of the economic downturn much harder than any other community. We are bearing the results of an unjust, justice system much harder than any other community. We are bearing the results of poor public education in a much harder way than the other communities in this country. Our communities aren't safe. Our communities aren't safe. It strikes me over and over again. I came from a small group of mothers in Detroit. And in that small circle, five of us have lost sons to guns, violence, and racism is the root cause of these things. And I actually think at this point the only political way to move to assuage some of these situations is not to address race directly because racism is so rampant right now that we have to go through another way to talk about a good public education system for everyone, to talk about jobs for everyone, to talk about justice for everyone, and that we need to campaign on that basis and that on that basis alone, I think we will be able to assuage some of the things that are going on now as a result of racism. I'm gonna do something really quick because I know we need to go. I think it's real difficult for social, people who are involved in social activism because for me, I'm just gonna talk personally. I cried when I voted for now President Obama and he has disappointed me, okay? Closeness to the Feds, to the Federal Reserve Board and Geithner and Sumner and, you know, propping up the banks while not worrying about as much about the foreclosures, not, you know, there are a lot of things. So the question is how do you support him in the way that you do it, but still keep up the social challenge? It's like what Howard Zinn said. He said, you know, he's a good man. Obama's a good man, but it would be a mistake to consider him to be a social activist. He is a politician. And let's remember that. And politicians respond to pressure. And what we've done is kind of thought, oh, great, we've got this great guy up there and we don't have to keep up the pressure. Well, yeah, we do, because you have to do that with any good person. But so there's some things and how we negotiate that, keep up the pressure, still march, still, you know, write those letters, keep the marchin' going. And at the same time, somehow protect him from this horrible right-wing onslaught. And it's a very difficult negotiation, but I think we got to do it. Last question. Sure, yeah. Thank you all so much for your contribution today. Really, really appreciate having this experience here. Just had one question for you all. I wanted to know what Ella Baker's impact was on women throughout the movement. We often hear about how Ella Baker impacted men in the movement and we usually get the response from men. So I wanted to hear what each of you have to think about Ella Baker and her impact in the movement. I'll just say something very quickly. It was Ella Baker who taught me about voice and honoring voices of people from the bottom or people who normally are not counted. You should mention who Ella Baker is. Oh, okay. Ms. Baker was, I think Dr. Sackler mentioned her. But anyway, Ms. Baker was a long-time activist organizer. She was an organizer for the NAACP branches in the South. She made a lot of connections across the South and then she supported the students, the sitting students, in forming SNCC in 1960 as opposed to aligning ourselves with SCLC or with NAACP or with CORE. But she believed in grassroots democracy and participatory democracy very firmly. And this is the lesson that she taught me was that it's critical for the people affected, the people impacted by a situation to be the ones who speak their truth to the power and who help craft the solutions to solve that. So that means that students organizing in the public schools for quality education are the people who take the lead and point the direction for the organizing. Just as Mississippi African-Americans who are disenfranchised were the ones who took the lead and whose voices were the most powerful within the movement. So that's kind of the impact she's had on me and all the organizing work I do now is in support of communities that are impacted and or places where I might be personally impacted myself or my family. But I think that's the critical thing. So it's a different between being an advocate or you advocate on behalf of, so a lawyer or a social worker or whatever and an organizer who actually organizes the people impacted and their voice are the voices that are lifted up. I just add one little thing. Until the past, let's say five years ago, five years and maybe 10 years ago, I mean, Miss Baker had disappeared. Miss Baker was one of the vanished women that Charlie Cobb talks about in a recent review on a blog. And it actually doesn't matter if you get a stamp if nobody talks about you and nobody shows what lessons have been learned. Paul Robeson has a stamp and now people are forgetting who Paul Robeson is. So the great success of this book will be how many young people read it, how many people read it, even if they're not young, who learned something about this distant age. I mean, now you say it happened 50 years ago and everybody's ready to fall down dead that we're still alive and don't we look fabulous? So we can't allow our history to disappear. We can't, and she disappeared. She, I think she is coming back, but there are lots of other people who disappeared like Charlie says. And if anything, this book will bring them back to life that is so desperately needed now. Thank you. That is the perfect note on which to end or actually consider this. Wait, but no, one more. I mean, I just wanted to say something about Miss Baker and I think it ties in to a couple of things that was said earlier. To me, Miss Baker represented, and it's kind of just what Betty just said, she represented a group of women who were longtime civil rights activists. She was a role model of how to live a life of struggle. And those women also tended to be left out of the history when people first asked me what it was like to be a woman in the movement and didn't you feel oppressed or whatever. There were these women before us and we knew them. And Mrs. Parks is an example, Septima Clark is an example, Daisy Bates is an example. And to me, Ella Baker fell within that category of being a role model already in existence when I came into the movie. I would say in addition to what everyone else has said, which I agree with, Miss Baker was quiet. And that's very important for an organizer because it did allow the voices to well up. Just to hook on, I wasn't gonna say anything, let me just say. What amazed me and I was looking through my notes all taken in shorthand so nobody else can understand them of what she would do in meetings. And I don't think Miss Baker would know me from Eve. But with all her incredible experience of coming out of doing milk co-ops in Harlem in the 30s, being field organizer as a lone woman going organizing the NAACP chapters in the South all the way through to Florida at a point when the NAACP card could get you killed, she never said to us as and the first temporary executive secretary of Dr. King's organization, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she never in these meetings said to us, y'all don't know, you young people don't know what you're talking about. You need to listen to me. You never got that from Miss Baker. She would sit in there in meetings that would go to four or five o'clock in the morning. She would have a mask over her face because she had a bronchial condition and a lot of the young people smoked at that point. And she would be sitting there until all hours of the day and night but unless she thought you were really going off the deep end, you were going really off into a wrong alley, then she would inject a question. And it was always about, well, if you do this now, what's gonna happen three months from now? What's gonna happen a year from now? Making us think as young people who are not even thinking till next week, because we're teenagers, what's gonna happen and what is your responsibility? If you can survive it though, is the community in which you're organizing, is it gonna be able to withstand whatever violence is needed against it because of what other action you might be thinking about or the community might be thinking about? But for me, it was always she never made us take low. She never said, you all don't know what you talk about. I've been in this since the 1940s. She never did that. And there's always an inclination as older activists to say, oh, look, you need to listen to me. She never did that to us. Now I will say that this is, I'm really happy that we're ending sort of with Ella Baker, with whom I started and also that the last story we read was about Jean's relationship with Miss Woods and really what this is about is a multi-generational passing on of women's wisdom and that is a key theme of the Sackler Center and frankly that was my motivation for writing my book and it's so wonderful that the center and the museum has given us this opportunity to begin what is a dialogue and it is an incredibly complex moment and I think this is a wonderful resource that I hold it up. For finding our own answers to this incredibly complex moment and I just wanna really express my gratitude to these women for passing it on. Please help me. And you are welcome to ask your own follow-up questions in person. Thanks for coming.