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            Robert Moses.  “Speech at Stanford,” April 24, 1964.

            Occasion: Speech given at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

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Speech at Stanford

                      1

When we first went to Mississippi, we didn’t know what we could do.  And we went there more or less with the attitude to try and find out what was possible, that is to see what could be done.  We didn’t have any resources really and we weren’t sure how we should go about or what it was that we should do.  The first, I guess, real sense of what we had to do came with some of the contact that we had, particularly with rural farmers because perhaps for the first time certainly in my life I met some people who were—seemed extremely simple in their conception of life but very direct in terms of what they wanted and what they needed and in terms of certain elemental ideas about justice and feelings about people.  And if we have any anchor at all—I mean if—if there’s any base from which we operate—if there’s any reasons why we don’t really go crazy—why we don’t have more problems than we do have—if there’s any reason why we can skip around from the bottom of Mississippi to the top of the skyscrapers in Manhattan and still maintain some kind of internal sense of balance, I think a lot of it has to do with those people and the fact that they have their own sense of balance which is somehow independent of what goes on around the rest of the country because they’re not affected by it.  Most of them say they don’t have telephones.  They don’t have newspapers.  They have very little contact with the outside world.  They do have radios.  They do have televisions, so they have some contact.  But yet, in many ways, they’ve managed to maintain something which is fundamental and which gives I think many a worker real strength when he’s working down in the rural areas of Mississippi.  Now, part of the problems our country is in is—is caused by the fact that there are no work for these people on these farms anymore.  So many, many, many of them are leaving those small farms and going to the small cities in the south and then going into the large urban areas of the north.  And certainly when I left New York City to go to Mississippi, I had no idea of what would happen to Harlem say.  I wasn’t teaching in Harlem.  I wasn’t qualified to teach in Harlem.  I was qualified to teach in a fancy prep school but the public school systems of our country are such that while you might be qualified to teach in the fancy prep schools of the country you’re not qualified to teach in some of the public schools of the country.

2

So I wasn’t really a part of what was going on in Harlem, but I certainly didn’t—I knew that there were tremendous problems there and that was not on the horizon anywhere an inkling of where the solutions would come from or even if anybody was seriously thinking about them and doing something about them.  But there was, in the South, with the kids who were acting in the sit-in movement, some idea that somebody was doing something about some key problem in the state, in the country.  And it was in direct response to that challenge that the kids, the sit-in people, gave that myself and other people began to move down south.  Now, when we first got into Mississippi we were really on our own and very much alone.

3

I just will recount one instance; I took two people down to Liberty to register about four weeks or more after I had been working in that county.  I met with a group of white people who proceeded to attack us and they singled myself out and I was—my head was tattooed to several stitches.  The Justice Department’s reaction to that was they didn’t have a really clear-cut case because we were walking through the streets on our way to the courthouse.  The news of that never got out and around the country and in many ways that’s just as well.  And we really realized in what was brought home to us is that for the time being we were out there fighting by ourselves.  There was help either from the federal government in any real sense.  The FBI agent who came around to do the investigation, although we called them that same night showed up four—two weeks later for the first time and then proceeded to try and convince me that I really hadn’t been beaten but had fell.  And he tried to convince me that I fell three times and that the wounds in three different places were from those three different falls.  And his concern and really the concern that we’ve had time and time again since then from southern FBI agents was at that time to—to try and picture, color the story to the tune of their concern so that the picture that went back to Washington was one which would in any case favor them.  Now, we operate that way for about a year in 1961 through 1962 more or less on our own—really a small band of people—four of five people—but we did discover several things—that it was possible to pick up in the Negro community young people and get them to work.  It was possible to find in most every community in which you worked one or two people who would be willing to take a stand—who would be willing to identify with you—who would provide some kind of foothold in that community and allow you a chance to work and to organize.  It was possible to move around the state and begin to get the feeling within the state of the dimensions of the problem, just how immense the problem was, just how deep it was rooted, just how long a struggle it would be, just how limited we were in our resources.

4

Now along about 1962 in the summer, we began to get the first bit of help from the outside.  And it came in the form of political help.  It was at this time that President Kennedy and the people in the White House decided to push voter registration and to help with the drive with the court cases of the Justice Department in terms of much needed funds which were to be used for people to help in organizing voter registration drives.  So then there began to develop a small fund of money based really out of New York City that was available for people to work in voter registration in the South.  So whereas up to then, we were really living in catch as catch can day by day in many cases off the community depending on whether we were able to find friends and people who would house us and feed us.

5

From the summer of 1962 on through the summer of 1963 we began to get a little more support.  And it was during that time that we began to develop what became known as the Council of Federated Organizations and really began to see that it was possible in Mississippi to locate in isolated rural communities and in some towns, groups of people who could be put in touch with each other—who would be able to work with each other who might form the basis for some kind of organization within the state and might form the basis ultimately for some kind of political organization to tackle Mississippi’s establishment.  Because by that time it was clear that the problems in Mississippi in terms of—were to be focused on political problems that what we had to do was somehow begin to tackle the political establishment in Mississippi—that the white citizens councils, the governor, the state legislature, the judiciary were all part of one monolithic system and that in order to find any kind of gaps in it we were gonna have to hit right at its heart.  Well now, that phase in there was marked by several types of incidents and probably for us and for the workers, and still for the workers the acts of what we call symbolic terror figure most sharply in coloring all of the work because for us, Mississippi we believe deals in symbolic acts of terror, of killing.

6

It was, you roll off the names in 1956, it was a Mr. Lee in Belzoni who was shot and killed.  The year after in that same city it was Gus Courts who was shot and ran out of the city.  In 1960 it was a man on Brookhaven’s Courthouse lawn who was shot and killed.  In 1961 it was Herbert Lee in Amite County who was shot and killed.  In 1963 it was Medger Evers in Jackson who was shot and killed.  In 1964 it was Lewis Allen and three people in Wilkinson County and just recently another person in Wilkinson County all shot and killed.  Always, the same type of people are found—they’ve been shot by white people.  Only in Medger Evers case was an indictment brought and an actual trial occurred.  This kind of act of terror forces several very deep question for the people who are working there because they have to in some sense or another come to grips with this.  Workers who are working in Natchez, in Macomb, in Amite County who have to ride those roads by themselves who have already been shot at once, who may be every time a headlight flashes up behind them, when they’re riding at night, wondering if this is another time when somebody might take another shot at them, have to come to grips within themselves and turn to some kind of internal balance about that problem of violence.

7

All of that had to happen in that year between 1961-62 and on into 1963.  But while that was happening what kept people going and what still keeps people going was that you were able to reach and make contact with the Negro farmers, with the people in the cities.  You were able to actually grab a hold of them.  There was some feeling that you had hit some rock bottom, that you had some base that you could work with and that you could build on and as long as you had that then maybe there was some hope for making some real changes someday.

8

Now, in 1963, after the summer and after the March on Washington, the Aaron Henry campaign issued in for us in Mississippi a new dimension.  It wasn’t a dimension devoid of problems.  There were real, very tough problems with the sudden appearance of a number of students from Stanford and from Yale.  But what they meant more than anything else was some type of involvement of the rest of the country on a different scale with a different kind of personal commitment and with a different possibility for organizing and working within the state.  And it’s the Summer Project which is the sequel to that and which is yet now being focused in a different way because if the Aaron Henry campaign had a bit about it, it was a big spontaneous thing and suddenly people rushed to join it.  People were there for a week or two and then they vanished.  The feelings of a lot of the kids who came down, perhaps, I ‘m not sure what their feelings were, because they were probably drawn up in a great big outburst of excitement on the campus and a very quick decision to move down and then down into something which maybe they really hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t have anticipated.  This time what’s at stake is something deeper.  It’s a question of whether in this country we can find people who are committed, who know, who care, who are willing to sacrifice, who are willing to say that they want to do their share, who are willing and able, perhaps, to look on this as somehow the country’s business, not just as the Negroes’ problems.  Who are willing to look on this not as something maybe that just has to be done in Mississippi but something that will be carried back and will have to be done in places all across this country if we’re really gonna get at the bottom of some of these problems.  Now while this development was going on in Mississippi, there’s been a parallel development across the country.  Because whereas when we first, say, returned to New York City after being down and working in Mississippi for four, five, or six months it was hard to tell anybody what you were doing.  They really didn’t know and they couldn’t understand what was going on.  But after a year and then finally after Birmingham, the country was alive.  There was some movement in the country; there was some focus on the problem.  The problem had all of the sudden become a national problem.  Now if the emergence of the civil rights problem as a national problem which is causing a lot of concern and a lot of anxiety, and rightly so, in different places up north.  The question that we think faces the country is questions that in on sense are much deeper than civil rights.  They’re questions which have repercussions in terms of a whole international affairs and relations.  They’re questions that go to the very root of our society.  What kind of a society will we be?  What kind of a people will we be?  It just happens that the civil rights question is at the spearhead of all of these.  That all the questions about automation, all the questions about our schools, all the questions about our cities.  What kind of cities will we have?  All of these find their focus in the public eye in terms of some kind of civil rights demonstration or another; at a construction site, a school boycott, a rent strike, a stall-in.  They’re all gaining national focus and beginning to bring to the attention of the American people a wider cross section of problems.  The problem is whether we will be able to really find solutions, whether we will be able if we find these solutions to take the steps that might be necessary in terms of the structure of our politics and economics to carry them through; whether if we’re willing to take those steps; whether those steps can be carried through peacefully and with some kind of minimum amount of real frustration for millions of people.

9

There’s an article in the Atlantic Monthly this month.  It pinpoints nine people who control Congress.  [They are] Senator Russell, Senator Eastland, Representative Vincent, Representative Mills, and I think there are three other senators and two other Congressmen.  To a man they come from the South.  They point out for one thing, for instance, that California does not have any senator who is the head of any major committee in the Senate.  And they don’t have it because they have a two-party system, because they send Republicans this time and maybe they change over and send Democrats next time.  But, on the other hand, in the South where you still have a one-party system by and large and you send the same people back every time, these people gain control.  Now, the situation in this country now is that the people who have control in Congress and are really at loggerheads with the rest of the country in terms of blocking legislation which is vitally needed can’t be reached in terms of their political base.  I mean we’ve tried.  I mean we’ve tried voter registration in Eastland’s state.  There are voter registration drives going on in Arkansas and Georgia and Alabama; in Virginia with Senator Byrd.  But these people have a political base which is for the moment secure and which we can’t reach.  The feeling that we have is that the vital changes which are needed cannot be gotten unless there are some political changes.  Just as in Mississippi, you have to have political changes to get any real change in that state.  In this country we’re gonna have to have political changes to get any real change across the board.  The question is whether the American people are willing to listen to that, willing to try and understand what it means, and willing to try and do what they have to do in order to change it.  Because if they don’t then we are in serious trouble.  And we will be in serious trouble.  The trouble will primarily be focused around civil rights perhaps.  The blame will perhaps go to dissident and extremist elements within the civil rights movement who take to arms, who blow up bridges, who arm themselves, who create acts of terror, just like the acts of terror which have gone on in Mississippi which nobody knows about and which people all over the country don’t have, can’t know about because the news media won’t tell them.  But when the Negroes take to acts of terror, they will know about it and the country will know about it.  But the pre-conditions for those things already exist.  They exist within the cities.  They will erupt within the cities.  There’s no question about it.  They will erupt unless some mechanism is found in this country to deal with those problems.  There just isn’t such a mechanism.  When Kennedy tried to get an urban affairs bill through the House, through the Senate, he couldn’t do it.  They people who were stopping him were exactly those same people that the Atlantic article named.  They are Republicans connected with Dixiecrats.  Those people have been blocking effective legislation in the Congress, which would be able to deal with some of the serious problems we have in our cities.  And it’s not until the country begins to come to grips with it that you’re gonna get any kind of solutions.

10

70% of the Negro youth in Philadelphia are unemployed, do not have jobs, may not get jobs.  Cause there aren’t jobs for them.  It’s a fantastic figure.  It affects white people when they organize gangs and start hitting and shooting and fighting each other and then maybe turn their violence into the streets and attack property, which probably belongs to white people.  And then the reaction of the white people, or the country, is to say and ask reasons why it is that Negroes do such and to call upon Negro leaders for control, for moderation to find some solution about juvenile delinquency.  But the fact remains that the economy of this country does not produce jobs for these people; that we don’t have jobs for them and that until they get jobs there’s gonna be trouble.  And the trouble is there because the pattern for demonstration has already been established and its been established around the right to eat at a lunch counter and it will most certainly, inevitably pick up and be followed around the right for jobs and other more basic things.

11

The stall-ins in New York, I think, have been completely misunderstood all over the country.  I mean I’ve been thinking more and more about those.  The whole idea of New York City spending millions and millions of dollars; the city spent thirty million dollars.  Ford spent millions of dollars.  U.S. Steel spent millions of dollars.  All the private industries spending millions of dollars to build a fair to show people how they will live in the year 2000 with beautiful glass buildings and moving sidewalks when people in that city are having rent strikes because there are rats running up and down their walls is fantastic when you really think of it.  I mean the deep irony of that really hasn’t reached out across the country.  All everyone was concerned with was ‘don’t mess up our World’s Fair.’  Whose World Fair?  The connection between the real significance of that stall-in and what the people were trying to do, I don’t think every got across to the country.  Because the principle around which you desegregated the lunch counters was you went in, sat in at those lunch counters and you said to the whole town either you serve me or nobody gets served.  Now that was the effective principle behind sit-ins at lunch counters.  Either you serve me or nobody gets served.  It was effective at lunch counters because you know what they were asking for and what they were doing were like there like that.  Now in effect, the people who were leading the stall-ins were saying to New York City either you pay attention to our very real crying problems or nobody can function in the city.  We’re gonna tie you up.  And they had already tried to address the problem individually.  You had rent strikes.  Right now they’re in the process of deciding whether the city blocks where Jessie Gray was organizing rent strikes should be an area for urban renewal.  Now, that’s one way to get rid of Jessie Gray, I guess.  I mean just clean him out and put some new public housing in its place. 

12

We’ve had school boycotts.  They tried to get at the problems of schools through focusing on the schools and drawing the kids out.  It raised an awful ruckus.  It split the civil rights leadership, sent New York City into a tipsy and rightly so because there are no solutions to that independently of other solutions.  You’ve had problems in attacking about housing but all those things are so inextricably tied together that it’s impossible to find solutions to them separately.  It’s impossible to find solutions to problems of the schools without finding solutions to problems of jobs and housing but who’s available to deal with them?  Nobody.  There isn’t any agency in our city in our state, in our federal government.  There isn’t any agency available to deal with those three problems conceived as a unit.  Housing and jobs and schools and to try and get an overall plan to attack them.  There will probably be more stall-ins.  There will be more attempts at probably tying up cities.  And there will have to be those until there comes in the country some sense of really what’s happening in coming to grips with those problems. 

13

Now the South poses a different problem, I think, for the country.  The problems are certainly so intertwined.  In the Delta area of the Mississippi the people who work the plantations are facing the fact that every year there are 10% fewer jobs for them, that in probably five years, the automation of the plantations will be completed.  The labor market on the plantation will be very well stabilized in at a very low point.  And the people who come off those plantations will be unemployed and unemployable in our society.  They will be permanently unemployed.  Because, first they don’t have the skills and there isn’t anywhere in our whole country a system for teaching them say how to read and write because that was nobody’s problem who had power, who had resources, who had money, who could tackle that problem.  It’s only since we’ve been down in Mississippi and since the civil rights movement has begun in the last few years that you’ve begun to get some concerted effort with very minimum resources.  We got a grant, an anonymous grant mind you, of $80,000 to tackle the problem of literacy at the fundamental bedrock level and the person who gave it had to give it anonymously.  Because the problem of literacy in the Delta and in Mississippi and the Deep South is a political problem.  Because if you teach people how to read and write then they’re gonna begin to want to govern themselves and they’re gonna begin to want to govern themselves in an area where they formed the predominance of the population over more articulate, economically controlling white group.  And that’s a political problem in our country.  The congressmen, the senators from those districts aren’t interested in sponsoring literary problems.  So there are no bills in Congress.  We don’t have a bill that has ever been introduced in Congress to deal with the problem of literacy for Negroes in the South.  They’re not interested. 

14

But where are those people gonna go?  The people when they leave the Delta gonna go to the cities in the north.  They’re gonna go to Chicago; they gonna go to St. Louis and Detroit; they’re gonna come to California and Los Angeles and San Francisco.  They’re here already.  And these are the basis for many of the problems of the cities around they country.  But there’s no overall command, no government agency, no private agency who’s able to look at that problem and have some kind of authority or a business to deal with it.

15

Now our feeling is that we have to be able to attack some of the specific structures which are visible, which we could see, which we may be able to move at.  Certainly, the people who are in Congress from the South who don’t belong there are such structures and part of that structure that need to be removed from office.  And certainly, the whole country will be better off and better equipped to deal with these problems if they are.  This does not beg the question of whether there will be Republican or Democrats or what will happen in terms of the political structure that will evolve; nobody knows.  And the question should not be raised in terms of people who are afraid of what the political structure will be like if we get rid of those Dixiecrats.  The problem is to get rid of them and begin to work on whatever evolves.

16

For our part this summer we’re gonna go to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and challenge the regular Mississippi delegation.  We’re gonna ask the National Democratic Party that they unseat that delegation; that they seat our people in its place and that they make a real structural change or the beginning of a structural change within their party.  Our basis for doing that are three or four fold—we’re carrying on within the state what we call a freedom registration.  Some of the people who’ve come down this summer who are interested in politics will be working on that.  We’re setting up our own registrars in every one of the 82 counties, to have deputy registrars.  We have our own forms.  We’re challenging the whole basis of the registration in Mississippi.  We don’t have any form or questions that will make people interpret some section of the Constitution.  And we’re making it simply as simple as we possibly can.  We want to register upwards of 300,000 or 400,000 Negroes around the state of Mississippi.  To dispel at least for once and for all the argument that the reason Negroes don’t register is because they’re apathetic.  Because there are these 400,00 people to be registered.  But for one thing people don’t even know that they’re there.  And if they are and they do know they say well if so many people are not registering part of the reason and probably a large part of the reason must be their apathy.

17

With the freedom registration, we also have freedom candidates.  We have three people who are running for Congress; one from the Second Congressional District, one from the Third and one from the Fifth, and then a person who’s running against Senator Stennis.  They have all filed, met all the qualifications and their names should appear on the Democratic primary on June 2^nd.  The idea is to begin to develop again within the people, the Negro people and some white people in the state, a different conception of their politics and to begin to see if we can’t evolve a political organization within Mississippi.  We also are gonna attend the precient meetings that the regular Democratic delegates will be holding around the state.  We figure that many of our people will be thrown out of these meetings because they’re segregated.  And we’re gonna use this as part of the documentation as to why that delegation should not be seated.  We also are gonna elect our own delegates, paralleling their procedures right from the start: precinct meetings, country conventions, district caucuses, a state convention, a total of 68 delegates representing 24 votes—2 whole votes and 22 half votes.  We’re gonna send them to Atlantic City.  We’re gonna ask that they be seated.  We’re gonna demand that they be seated.  There most certainly will be demonstrations as Atlantic City.  It seems inconceivable that the groups in New York City and Boston and Philadelphia which have been growing out of the rent strikes and the school boycotts will not focus on the Democratic Party to get some kind of justice about their grievances out of that party.  Now, for many of us this will be a real turning point in terms of whether it will be possible to get anything out of the political structures that is meaningful for this country.  I mean, we’re trying to work as closely and as assiduously and as hard as we can within the political structures of this country—trying to see if they will bend, if they have any flexibility, if they give at some points, if they can really accommodate themselves to the demands of the people.  The problem up to this point is that they haven’t bent.  They haven’t given; they haven’t been able to come up with real solutions.  Everything has been patchwork and every time you put a patch on here, pressure mounts here, and something explodes.  And you put a patch on it there and the pressure mounts here and something else explodes.

18

Now the questions that people keep asking are how long can this go on, how long are Negroes gonna maintain non-violence, how long are they gonna work in this fashion and the answer is I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  The problem now is that the call has really gone out to the rest of the country, not to Negroes now but the challenge now is to the rest of the country.  In the same way, really, the challenge in the South is to the white people in the South.  There’s a sit-in at a lunch counter downtown.  The question is how will the white people respond.  See?  What will they focus on?  Will they focus on the fact that the Negroes shouldn’t be down there and some of them are unruly and some of them approach violence and some of them do this and some of them do that or will they in turn focus on their just grievances and say o.k. this is what we’ve got to do.  We’ve got to move over here and begin to accommodate them.  That kind of call is going out across the country now.

19

And already the initial response is fearful because the initial response is not all in terms of re-examination of the country and its structures and how they can be changed and how they have to move and accommodate but rather focusing on the bad elements and using that as an excuse.  And it seems to me if you evaluate what’s going on in San Francisco with regards to the initiative as I understand it in these last few days, it’s the fact that most people want to focus on is not the initiative, but they want to focus on the demonstrations and say, see that’s the reason why we’ve got to have the initiative.  Well that’s the same kind of thing which the southerners did when the sit-ins first started.  It’s exactly the same thing they did.  They focused on the demonstrators and said ‘look at that!  People are trying to take over our cities.  That’s the reason we have to strengthen our laws, add to the police force, protect our citizens and our homes.’  I mean that’s exactly what their reaction was.  Theodore White wrote an article in Life magazine shortly after Kennedy was assassinated and he was describing the civil rights groups and picking out different facets of them and the one things that he focused on was some of the civil rights groups, singling out SNCC in particular, who were gonna challenge the Democrats at their convention and we’re gonna say to them if we can’t sit at the table with you then will just chop off the legs and everybody sits on the floor.  And he was saying that this is dangerous because he’s essentially a man who looks for solutions, who tries to find ways out of impasses, who looks for the mean between each stream. 

20

But the problem is, what are the real solutions?  And the danger is that the areas and the avenues that might be real solutions will simply be branded as acts of extremism.  And exactly the same sense in which the first acts of a sit-in geared to small Southern town were branded that way by southern politicians.

21

Well, I’d like to say just a little about the summer projects more concretely.  And I’d like to do it in terms of some of the history as it evolved and some of the problems which happened in the state as the conception of the summer project came about.  The staff in Mississippi were violently opposed to the Summer Project when it was first announced.  They were opposed to an invasion of white people coming in to do good and to work for a summer and to essentially run projects without having any experience and basis for doing that.  And we spent half of November and all of December and January and on into the very beginning of March in very heated, tough discussions about what the Summer Project could be, what it couldn’t be, what kinds of hopes it held out for people in Mississippi and the country and what it didn’t; essentially, what were its limits?  What were the things that really might happen in terms of it that would be significant?  And it was out of those discussions that we reached a very uneasy in many cases but at least tentative agreement among the majority of the staff to go ahead with concrete, specific programs and to try and channel people who are coming down into very specific jobs and tasks.  An it was out of that agreement that the idea and the conception of the freedom schools and doing something to try and break psychological holds that Negroes have evolved and the concept of working in the community centers and the concept of working in the white communities, the concept of trying to provide some cultural dimension to the program and the concept of trying to buttress and further the legal work grew.

22

Now, on the other hand, the people in Mississippi did not have the reaction of the staff at all.  The farmers and the people who lived and worked there welcomed the whole idea because they feel that anybody who comes down to help is good and that they need all the help that they can gain, since they’re isolated, that they’re alone, that they have no real tools, that they face an overwhelming enemy and any kind of help they can get is welcomed.  So that it was with the assurance any case that again and returning and it was this more than anything else I think that swayed a lot of us because again, in the end, I think in many cases the instincts of the people and particularly some of the rural farmers opinions about these things are truer, deeper, less cluttered and less bothered by personal problems and things like that than the instincts, of say, the staff and the people who are working.  So it was with this kind of background that we went into the project.  And more and more as we’ve gotten into it we’ve come to the consideration that the people who’ve come down should be under some very well established controls—that they should have some idea of some very significant things they can do but very limited and perhaps significant because they are limited.  And that some of the things that we would try to do would not be some of the things that we first envisioned doing.  So, for instance, in the freedom schools we have one track which is basically just a set of questions which is devised to draw out of the Negro youngsters some ideas about themselves and the lives they lead.  Questions which might ask them are is their house painted?  Does it have indoor toilets?  Do they have pictures on their walls?  How many kids live in a room?  What are their schools like?  Do they have libraries?  What kind of teaching facilities do they have?  Do they have laboratories?  Questions which take them cross town into white people’s homes and try to get them maybe to imagine what the homes and schools over there are like.  Questions which take them inside to their own minds which try and get at attitudes that they have about themselves, that they have about white people. Questions which can be handled by people who have some sensitivity to other people, who have some concern about them, who are not so interested in projecting themselves but are able to try and reach out and really cross what is a really very wide gap between white people from the middle class backgrounds in the north and the Negro youngsters who’ve grown up in slums, rural or urban, in the south.

23

So that is one of the things we hoped to do.  If we worked across the summer and if we touched in twenty freedom schools a thousand kids and began to draw some things like that out of them then we felt that maybe we would have another layer, another stage, another base that we would have to operate from and on.

24

On the question of voting we decided that we would like to try and establish across the summer the right to picket at the courthouses in the downtown urban areas.  We’ve had a picket line at Hattiesburg which started January 22^nd when some fifty ministers form the National Council of Churches came in and joining a lot of our staff and young people and which went everyday from 9 till 5 and on Saturdays from 9 till 12 all through the month of March and on into the month of April.  There were many significant things that came out of that picket line.  For one thing, there was no violent white reaction, even though 50 miles away the Ku Klux Klan was burning crosses at 15 farmhouses and shooting 5 Negroes—in Hattiesburg no one was bothering the picket line.  And even though the police the first day marched out in a platoon of 25 and stood up and down the streets and barricaded them, by the end of the week they were down to one or two policemen in shifts serving as observers.  And the fact was the white people of Hattiesburg were not that upset about a picket line at their courthouse.  Their attitudes about the rights of Negroes divulged did not reach that far.  So that they were willing to form were willing to form mobs in the street and conduct some kind of violence.  So that the whole focus of the people who were really stopping voter registration could be narrow with something that many people thought already but this corroborated it.  I mean that the political establishment in Mississippi are the people who are really holding on and not letting Negroes vote—that if the white people were able or freer and were able to move and had more dimensions for themselves to move in, then it might be possible for Negroes to vote.  We want to do this if we can in city after city around the state.

25

Now, we’ve already met obstacles to that.  The state legislature about a week and a half ago passed a bill making it illegal to picket any public building.  The governor signed it into law and the next day they arrested the whole picket line in Hattiesburg.  And 44 people are now out on $1,000 property bonds each from Hattiesburg.  But they are determined to start the picket line up again.  And we’re determined to gain that right this summer.  Now in many cases, in many ways it’s a very limited right but it’s crucial in Mississippi because if we gain the right to picket in integrated picket lines then labor unions will gain the right to picket in integrated picket lines in Mississippi and will gain the right to picket and possibly the trade unions and the UAW and the Teamsters and the labor unions will move into Mississippi and begin to organize working people. 

26

And if they move in then they just might begin to move in behind them a whole host of other organizations in terms of beginning to meet and get to the working people in Mississippi.  And that would be a bridgehead for the whole Deep South if that were established.

27

If it’s possible this summer to have interracial teams living and working in Mississippi and the Negro communities it might change the whole conception around the country of how it might be possible to get at some of these problems in the Deep South.  The federal government cannot have a real domestic peace corps.  It’s possible for our country to organize youth all over the country to give an elaborate training to spend millions and millions of dollars very worth while to train them and send them abroad to work in underdeveloped countries all across the world.  It would be impossible for them to mount anywhere near that kind of program in this country.  They could not send segregated teams into the south.  The country wouldn’t have it.  They couldn’t send integrated teams into the south.  They couldn’t guarantee their protection.  They couldn’t guarantee their protection!  The federal government of this country can send people to Africa and get guarantees from the states that they go to Africa they will have protection and that their lives will be safe.  They couldn’t get it from Alabama and they couldn’t get it from Mississippi.  They couldn’t get it from Louisiana.  They couldn’t mount a domestic peace corps in this country.  The country doesn’t have available yet the tools to really get at this problem.  It just doesn’t have them.  We don’t even know how to put money intelligently into a state like Mississippi.  The Ford Foundation, I bet, wouldn’t know how to put ten million dollars into Mississippi without buttressing the system that already exists.  I mean how would they do it?  How would you put money into the educational system of Mississippi without reinforcing what already exists there?  We don’t even have the beginnings of solutions.  One thing that might happen out of this summer which could be very significant would be some idea of how people could go about beginning to make some break in the situation down there in the deep south.  Professor Wasserstrom who spoke this morning or this afternoon, he was really talking not about the whole south; he was talking about the black belt south.  I mean the towns that he was describing are the towns which lie in that arc which stands all the way down the Eastern seaboard of Maryland and moves all the way down through south side Virginia into the South Carolinas and part of North Carolina, sweeps through southwest Georgia into middle Alabama, spills all over Mississippi and then goes into northern Louisiana and southeastern Arkansas.  And the town that he was describing is found through all of those areas which are the black belt of this country are because of the rich deep black soil and the black people who formed the predominance of the population in all of those areas.  And we don’t know what to do with that section of the country.  It’s a tiger.  The federal government is afraid we have it by the tail.  They don’t know what to do with it because it raises the question of Negroes getting the vote and having political control.  You watch how carefully, just how carefully they’re treating Tuskegee where Professor Wasserstrom is at, in Macon County Alabama.  This is not only where the Negroes have the majority of the populations, they are in every way in terms of the standards we use around the country to judge people superior to the white population because of the institutions there, because of the VA institution and the school and everything and yet we’ve been pussyfooting for years trying very carefully to give them the votes stage by stage so that there isn’t the sudden emergence of the Negro county where the Negroes grab political power.

28

Now if that’s the situation in a county like Bullock, wherever Macon County is, where the Negroes have the majority and also have the education and are in every way qualified to run that county and that town then you can imagine how it is in the counties were they don’t have the education, where they’ve been deprived the education, where they in many cases they can’t read and write.

29

The question comes up all the time about nonviolence and what it means.  They’re really deep moral problems which are connected already with the Summer Projects.  I realized one type of problem two and a half years ago when we first went down to Amid County.  Because Herbert Lee who was killed that summer was killed just as surely because we went in there to organize as rain comes because the clouds—if we hadn’t gone in there he wouldn’t have been killed.  The action that was started in that county wouldn’t have happened.  So in some sense if you’re concerned about people and concerned about these kinds of questions you have to dig into yourself to find out in what sense to you share responsibility, and what does it mean to be involved in that kind of action which might precipitate that kind of death.  And I’m just posing that question now.  I mean, Camus poses it on a historical scale in terms of whether people shall be victims or executioners; whether those people who are enslaved in order to get their freedom have to become executioners and participate in acts of terror and death and in what sense they do participate in it.  And it take place on maybe a very small scale down south in terms of that kind of activity which we carry on and perhaps no one justification is that you are no less exposed than they are.  So that at least you share that kind of exposure with them.  But then, that’s no equally so.  The people who are currently working in Amite and Wilkerson and Pike Counties are more expose than anybody.  The people who’ve been working in Jackson organizing the office which had to be done are not as exposed as they are.  And certainly the people who go down to Mississippi this summer—I mean that’s the whole question of what will happen rests very heavy because nobody really knows what might happen and we’re back in that same kind of dilemma which can be put maybe very nicely in terms of victims and executioners and philosophically but when you come to deal with it personally it still rests very heavy.