Transcripts For CSPAN3 Junius Williams Interview Part 1 20140616

Virginia for schools. So they had a big musical impact on my life. Were your parents virginians. My parents are virginians. My father is from danville, my mother is from suffolk. How old were you when you moved from suffolk to richmond. I was 5. I dont have too much independent recollection of growing up in suffolk although we went to suffolk quite often in the summer when my parents were off from Summer School working on their degrees. Where did they get their musical training. My mother went to howard university. She got a degree in Music Education and my father got the same degree from West Virginia state. He was a violinist and a singer. She was a pianist and a singer. A house full of music. House full of music. Siblings. I have several siblings. My most immediate is my brother john. I have other half brothers and sisters. So you would have been if you moved at 5 you would have done your schooling in richmond. Die. Can you talk a little bit about the community, the neighborhood, the Public School experience . Ahha. We started school a little early because my brother, both my brother and i turned 5 in the latter part of the year. So my mother talked the officials into letting us start when we were 4. So we were always a little younger than our peers. We already knew,000 read and count so that wasnt tisshe iss. The issue was should she have done it. The school was segregated. She was a music teacher in the Elementary Schools and my father was a teacher in the high school level. School for us it was fun. We had a good time. There were challenging moments, but nothing to do with race because we were we were insulat the impact that race partially because of our class standing. Partially because of the way they negotiate the system to keep us safe. So we grew up on the north side of town, which was the middle class area. My parents bought a house, and i remember high school in particular there was a moment in which i had to decide whether i was going to go to high School Across high school in the northwestern side, more west. Trying to think exactly it was in. Thats where most of my friends were going to maggie walker. But my father wanted me to come to armstrong. He said that was a better school. I didnt want to go, but e he purr sueded me to come. In richmond there were two high schools for black people. You either went to walker or you went to armstrong. Just to let you know how that rivalry played out, every thanksgiving we had a football classic. It wasnt just a game, it was a classic. Maggie Walker Armstrong classic. It was so big they had to have it in the stadium. There were 30,000 people who came to that game every year. You either are for armstrong or walker. If you associated with one or the other, you were for that team. That was one of the benefits of segregation. It kind of ordered our lives socially. We knew who we were and where we stood. The Football Players didnt consider that a sport. Not until arthur ash became a champion. He went out of town to play tennis. So when arthur began to get National Prominence as the first black in tennis, a lot of the athletes had to change their mind about that. We wasnt got three giames out f two sets. Oh, yes. Baptists. My father was a music director at one church and my mother had several choirs at Ebenezer Baptist church. Thats where my brother and i went. Music was a part of our life wherever we turned. So you were born in 43 so by middecade in the 50s, youre 12, 13 years old. Were the events of im thinking about the brown decision about montgomery, little rock, was your household atentative in an active conversation way . Yes because of ebony magazine. The picture sticks in my mind now that that open casket picture in chicago when it was 50,000 people filed by to see his bloated, misfigured body. I was a a year younger and i picture myself in that same situation. So we got mad, mad, mad. That was one of the sparks that really lit the Civil Rights Movement in a lot of peoples hearts whether we did anything or not. And then there was some victories we had also along the civil rights front of our own making. At a certain point, there was a festival called the tobacco festival parade because richmond was a big tobacco town. They processed tobacco there. So it was usually segregated. The white bands were supposed to be in the front, the black in the back. My father said were not going to march in the back. The other music teacher at walker said the same thing. Joe kennedy, very prominent musician in his own right. And so we didnt. But at some point they said were going to integrate it. So there was this moment when we had four high schools, two white, two black, meeting at the gathering point in the west end of town getting ready to march in the parade. There was armstrong and walker on two corners and then across the street on the other were john marshal and thomas jefferson, those were the two main white schools. So of course, the whites presumed to practice first and they did it with the drummers. The drummers were very sophisticated and polished, rudiment l drummers, but we laughed because we knew armstrongs drummers were precise, but we had soul. And we kicked their butt. There lay dead one of the great rules of White Supremacy that we could do it better than we could. That was our first civil rights victory in my family because we talked about that forever. And of course, we marched gloriously. We marched like we had never marched before and there were black and white people cheering us along broad street. I get teary eyed just thinking about that moment. That was in richmond. So that would have been your high school years. Yeah, you want me to say that again. You had mentioned to me earlier that you thought very seriously about taking music making music your life and going to school to study music in college. How did you resolve path the upon upon the path . My father was a professional muse si musician. He knew what the life of a musician was playing in bands. So he did not let me play in a pickup band in richmond. I was good on al to sax phone and people asked me to play, but he said, nope, im not going to let you do that. And they discouraged me from becoming a musician because they didnt want me to have that kind of life of performance on the road, nor did they want me to be a music teacher in school because that was too precarous in the money. But i wanted to be a musician. So i applied to northwestern because i saw that band on television at some big ten football game. I said thats where i want to go to school. Because . I was pretty good on all of them. So i knew i would have a chance at least to get into that band. So i got accepted at northwestern because i had good grades. I was valedictorian in my class. I had a 3. 9, but they department give me any money. A. M. Ers college that was recommend recommended by a friend in the family, who had gone there and was just graduating the year before said thats the best Small College in the country. I didnt know ammers from edison. But they gave me a full scholarship. So of course, there was no doubt i was going there. And ironically the Music Program was so bad that i put my sax phone down and didnt pick it up for most of the four years i was there until one day this guy came up from the movement one day because my place was always available for people who needed rest and relaxation. It was a guy from mississippi. I wont mention his name because of what im going to say about him. He had a harmonica and he thought it was a blues man but he couldnt play that. So the next day, it was a monday. I went over to the music studio, which was next door to where i was staying in the Fraternity House and i got a harmonica and took to it, it took to me and i have been playing it ever since. Whats the cross tune . You could play blues in g . I could play it mostly in g because thats where you get the full blues effect. If you play it in c, youre on a limited basis. So most of us play a fourth above the piano. Most blues are playing onefourth above the piano player. Whoever has the concert seat. Even before you departed for college in fall of 61, the active phase, the movement had come to had come into your world. Im interested in your recollections about events around Virginia Union in 1960. Virginia union 1960, the head of the black students up at Virginia Union University Led a series of demonstrations that the Department Store downtown richmond. Im not so sure where it was because i never got that close. I told my parents i wanted to join and they said, oh, no. The College Students said they dont want any High School Students involved. When i met charles, i asked him, was that true, did you guys say you didnt want High School Students because we couldnt be nonviolent . He said no. So that was my father and mothers way of keeping me out of harms way. So they whisked me off to college in 1961, but the fire was still burning because i knew i had to do something because i couldnt just let everybody else do it and i wasnt going to do it. So eventually i was a part of this group there. We were in support of civil rights, but at some point it was time for me to go south. So thats what happened. Its always interesting i want to move with some care and a little more slowly. Im interest ed in youve mentioned this incident with your folks where they are looking out for their child and wanting to make sure youre clear of the tensions and perspective dangers of the early sitins in richmond. What was the relationship that prevailed between you and your parents on those kinds of questions and how were your views and perspectives developing in these years around the civil rights question . Well, first it was in mattel. Then there was news about the busboy cot and the rise of this man called Martin Luther king. And so we talked about all those things. It was clear things were changing. We all knew about the brown case. But other than those small victori victories, the dual, we didnt see much change. So there was talk about it until the students demonstrated. And of course, my parents were in favor of that, but they thought that was dangerous. There was another moment at some point after the montgomery b bus boycott said you got to integrate bus transportation throughout the south. So richmond complcomplied. So one day the word went out the buss are now desegregated. But my parents got hold of the news and told us because they knew we were going to try it. They said, now when you get on that bus, i want you to be careful, dont do this, dont do that. Im sure that was the conversation held in many homes around richmond that day with black parents trying to protect us. So we got on the bus and there was nobody seated in the front seats at all. And most of the older black people were still sitting in the back of the cuss. So we sat down and we were close enough to the driver so i could see his neck which was red at that point. The people on the bus, they smiled. Because we had done i get a little emotional about that. We had done something they had wanted to do for a long time. So after the novelty which was a couple days, we all trooped back to the bus where we could like kids do, but it was a new relationship between us and the older people by that point. But probably after time went on, they still told us to be quiet when they were too noisy, but just for that magic moment in time, we did something they couldnt do for themselves. And then they gradually stole its way on to the Public Transportation system in richmond. A couple more questions about richmond. Did you or any family members or folks you knew well have experiences of violence around race . E we lived when we bought the house there was a steep wooded ravine and on the other side white people still live. So white boys use d o to shoot t us with bb guns. We in turn made weapons. We had bamboo growing in the yard and there was slate growing from the roof so we made spears and arrows, but we couldnt get within range to use them. There was another street, and that was kind of comical. One point there was a breach. The guys came over and i ended up getting shot in the hand with a bb gun trying to make friends with some of them because i was holding up something for one of them to shoot at and he ended up shooting me. So i think that was a lesson learned. So that was our moment, if you will. Because that shooting was unintentional. Skbli dont think he wanted to shoot me. At other points he probably would have. I went in the house and got something to put on my hand. There was a street called Brooklyn Park boulevard where whites live totally on the other side. We didnt dare go across that street. E we went on the avenue to buy ice cream, but that was it. So that was about it. We went to buy ice cream and my mother loved to do that. But other than. To go up there to participate as consumers in these stores, thats about the only interaction we had. I had no white friends. I had no white friends in richmond of my own age. We were there was one professor at school at armstrong, but all of my other teachers were black. In church, black. I had to go to an as ma specialist and he was black. Except for the doctors we saw, that was pretty much it. The one white member of the faculty at the. I didnt take russian. Just before heading off to college in fall of 61, that period is pretty busy with greensboro and Virginia Union and rock hill and freedom rides, did it relate at all to the civil rights question . It kind of stole into any conscientious that that might be something i could do. I was at college, but my major thought was that i was going to go south and be in the movement. I wanted to be a secretary, i wanted to organize people to do whatever needed to be done at that time. So my parents put that ideas in my head. I remember they didnt want me to be a musician, but lawyers were fine. Doctor, too. Clearly i was not on the science math trip. So they said why dont you become a lawyer. They kept pushing that program. They saw where i was going with the civil rights thing. I was telling them about things i was doing on campus. When i came home during spring break i was doing Voter Registration in richmond. I did Voter Registration in springfield, massachusetts, which was right around the corner from college. I had this conference called the Civil Rights Movement revelation and a group of others carried that conference out in the winter of 1965 about a thousand people came from all over the east coast to that conference. So they saw where i was going. So why dont you be a lawyer. So i thought about it and said maybe so but not now. I could see being a civil rights lawyer because i knew of the great civil rights lawyers in the brown tradition. As a matter of fact, oliver hill was a neighbor. Is that right . Yes. Became better friend after my mother passed, but he and she wept at the same time. She was an undergraduate at the same time. So living in richmond, we went to the same church. So it was kind of like there was a little story there because one time we were talking and he said he was driving through on the way to argue a case for equal pay r for the teachers. And he got stopped by the police. And so he said the first person he called was my grandfather. Because he had to get somebody to vouch for him to get out of jail. And my grandfather was well respected as a businessman, church man in the town, so the white people in charge said if junius white says he was okay, were going to let him out. They had no idea he was going to try that case. So thats the way that went. I wanted to be a lawyer because they wanted me to be a lawyer more than anything else. So this is what i said. I will apply to two law schools. If i get in one of those two, ill go. If not, im going south. So they said, okay. But they didnt understand the high stakes poker i was playing because i only applied to columbia and yale. I was not going to spend all my time filling out forms for seven law schools and i didnt want to go to any of them any way. And i got in. But by this time tom hayden had approached me, but we might be getting a little ahead of the story. Let me ask you, its really interesting. Oliver hill, thats a pretty substantial role model. And the firm of hill, tucker and marsh. They were all my family friends. Amazing. When you think about folks like mr. Hill and your folks and others in the community, as you think back, who would you say probably that question about who shaped you most, who most influenced the way you came up and began to think about yourself as a young adult man . My father. He was i guess he was my role model. I liked the way he talked to people. I liked the popularity that he had. The kids called him pop williams. He would sit on the front porch and talk to anybody that passed. I just like to speak to people. I speak to people now. I would say he was probably my closest role model. What was the experience like coming out of segregated richmond and landing as a College Freshman in massachusetts . Well, these are the best of times and these are the worst of times. My mothers plan was get him out of the clutches of segregation and to do that you need to go to the best schools. Now she had gone to howard and she had gone to the university of pennsylvania. So she had some credentials to speak about both. My father had gone to West Virginia state, which was the land grant black college out there. He didnt have too much to say about this. As far as he was concerned, black colleges were fine, but she didnt want to go to black colleges. Got to go to a bhiet school and in the north. So she engineered that and got us ready. We went to summer courses at various places. My brother and i wept to those. And we went to camp in new jersey and somewhere else. So we were accustomed to white people. Not through richmond, but because of our summers away from richmond. So there was no Culture Shock in that respect. What was a Culture Shock was the fact that we were there and couldnt retreat and go anywhere else back to our own little enclave as we could after the summer was over with the other programs. So there i was. I wore a yellow sweater and had a big smile on. And thats what my image was most of the time. E people would come up and say, youre not like most of the colored people that we know. Or most of the colored people we know and they would go on and tell some anecdotal that was irrelevant and hurting and i would just smile and keep going. And social life was absolutely horrible because the way it was structured at all those other colleges, you have to understand, a. M. Ers was all men at that point. So there were four black people in one class and had been that way forever more. So theres a little mixed reaction that i have. And there was a quo toe for those who speak against quota, there have been quotas for a long time. And at Smith College they were four. There was a whole class barrier but they didnt have very much it wasnt very much different down there either. I say that because most of the dating by amherst guys were done by smith. I didnt care about going to umass, it was just very few people there. I didnt know any other people in my class who were black that were there. I wasnt going to be the one who was going to try to do the interracial dating thing. I look at the interracial couples that i see now, its very casual. But at that time, it just wasnt done. So whenever i was put in a situation where i had to seek out and be friends with a person of the other sex, it was always iffy. You ask somebody to dance at one of those god awful mixes, i got told no more times than i got told yes. And on those yes occasions, it was always not always, but most of the time, it was just, well, i dont want to embarrass you and i dont want to appear to be other than what i am so ill go ahead and do you a favor. Thats basically the way it was. But the guys were good. I had roommates other than those people who questioned me about various things, but the people that i was associated with in my first year were basically good guys. I participated in the rush in my freshman year for fraternities because amherst at that time was 95 fraternity because thats the only place you could go to have girls in the room and throughout the house, so to speak. The social life in the dorms was really, really, really slim. So thats the bay they encouraged fraternities. At that time, that was part of the social fabric. That was part of the culture. Rushing in your freshman year. So i was approached by several houses. One of which was alpha delta pi, which was one of the most exclusive fraternities on the campus. They had no black people in their history and the other one i narrowed it down was theta dealt and they were saying they dont want you for any other reason other than youre black. Im going to go where i feel most comfortable and my friends, all the things guys usually do. So thats where i went. So i had that reputation of being the first. And i would say that was probably the mix of what i was involved in at most times. The mix being those people who are genuinely could get along with and generally like me versus the opportunities to be the first wherein you really dont know whats going to happen to you because you dont know what folks motives are underneath all that. Its kind of like going i imagine what it was like going to school in arkansas for the first time. The little rock nine, except that there was a more pleasant face to the racism in some cases. But it was great. The guys were wonderful. They welcomed me. Except for two people, maybe three, that i kind of stayed away from. If they had any ill feelings, they didnt show it. I fit in with them and they fit in with me. How about the Academic Experience . Academics was rough. I found out later that the schools in the south in general, not just the black schools, but the schools in the south in general just didnt have what was on the plates of the schools in the north. For example, i didnt have any calculous. The most i had was trig normal try. The guys i was in school with already had it. I still dont know what it is now. But i made it through with a c. Now that to me was a major hurdle in my life. I had never made a c in my life before. And mostly what i made in that first year because of calculous and physics, that pulled away my time to study the english and the french and the history and all that. I didnt have time to do it because i was scrambling trying to get that math. So i ended up with a c average, by didnt get below a c. I never had a d on my transcript. But that kind of ruined the possibilities of me getting really, really, really high u grade average because for two semesters, i had two courses, four credits each, 16 credits of a c of one kind of another. I dont know if it was a solid c, but a c. So my grades suffered and my egosuffered because i thought i was dumb. I thought i wasnt able to learn because i just couldnt catch on to some of that stuff that was done. At one point in my second semest semester, i had a math professor named bailey brown. And professor brown gave a midterm exam in calculous and i had written the answer and i looked at it and i just xed it out and put Something Else down. So he went over my paper and looked at it and said you had the right answer and gave me an a. Because i had it. I just didnt have the confidence in myself to know i had understood it to put on the paper. So i told everybody i got an a in calculous. So we celebrated that for a minute until it was time to go on to Something Else. But then in the final exam, i had three exams in two days. Physics, calculous and history. I think two in one day and one was on the third. And i fell asleep and couldnt study for the calculous. So i ended up failing the exam. So an a plus an f gives you, what, a c. I couldnt get away from that c. I ended up falling down. But finally when i got out of my freshman year, in my sophomore year, i got some bs. Until my senior year i got bs and as because i was into some areas where i had more confidence. I got into political science, for example. I took economics from a professor who, the first course i took i got a c plus. But then i heard about this man named professor warren. Because of my work in the movement in 1964, i worked in harlem, and i was there with julian houston and some other peoples name who is will come back to me. Norman cousins daughter. I cant think of anything else right now but pigeon, that was her nickname. So we were always discussing the Civil Rights Movement, but these young people knew the whole context, which was up to that point to me. It was something you were automatically against. You didnt think about carl marks as genuine or good. But they understood the analysis. So they were applying that to the Civil Rights Movement. So i went and took the course and he explained a lot of things i didnt know. So i got an a in that course and it was the first time i read anything by carl marks, by read all the great other economic that i hadnt read in economics one which was just about supply and demand. So i knew about capitalism, markism, socialism, that was probably the best course that i had in terms of opening my eyes to see the world as other people see it and in turn how they valued and judged what we were doing here and it it introduced me to another class. I had only been dealing with race. Things were wrong because of race. But these kids introduced me, you got to do the class analysis too. Once i had that the tool, i was able to e see the whole situation in another set of glasses. How did you first get form formally connected with amherst . We were friends of all Civil Rights Groups, but especially because they were our age, so i was in charge of sre, another story there. Somebody wrote an article in the Amherst Student paper and didnt sign his name to it. He was decrying the civil rights tactics. So i took him on in an editorial. And not only did i shut him up, but i got praise from my english teacher who at one time thought everything i wrote was crap. When he wrote it was a great example of understated emotion, youre a credit to your race and you know how to write, that was the best thing i have ever gotten from a teacher up to that point. I lost that letter, but thats what he said. So after that, my name became synonymous with civil rights. So they made me president of the Civil Rights Group called the students for racial equality. So the students for racial equality did demonstrations. We had silent vigils on campus. And we raised money for snick and other people who were in jail. I remember one time the freedom singers came over and sang at Smith College. So i went over to hear them. I met them. Merable hairington, they were eventually married. That was cordells second wife because of i guess it was the same day. So we all stayed in touch with each other that way. People were coming up from the south with the stories about what was happening and we let them stay in the house. I stayed in the Fraternity House at this time. Who thats how i got familiar with snick. So your pFraternity House wa okay with it . Stayed in my room, they didnt care. So when did you first i want to ask about the conference. That was a major undertaking. When did you first come south to do some work . You mentioned harlem in 64. The first work i did was in richmond in 1962, i guess it was. Or was it 1963 . I was in a demonstration with one of my childhood friends who was in charge of the naacp youth group. That was a hip name for young people at that time. So i was on a picket line in front of the state house in richmond. There was this guy sitting in the for the record. This fat guy got out and with a camera deliberately took everybodys picture on that picket line. We knew who he was. He was the man from some level of government that was meant to intimidate us, which it did. He made his point. Then the next summer i did Voter Registration. Maybe it wasnt the next summer. I came home from amherst, i did Voter Registration. I did Voter Registration in springfield, massachusetts, during another break or maybe just on the weekends. And that was the extent of my direct action up to that point. No trip to atlanta. No. Hadnt gone to atlanta. I just knew who the snick people were through the snick folklore. Yep. You attended the march on washington . Yes. I had met Mary Ann Wright edelman. And she was a vibrant, young black woman lawyer who had worked in mississippi, been in the movement and thats what she was there to talk about. But afterwards me being one of the only blacks on campus, they asked me to go to the president s house to meet her. So i went and met her. We started talking. She had mentioned something about cross roads, africa. I said whats that all about . So we talked a little bit about that. Sending people over to Different Countries in africa to engage in some kind of civil project usually constructing something. So she asked me if i was instructed. I said i dont have any money. So within days i heard from cross roads africa and had a scholarship. They sent me to uganda, where i stayed ten weeks in a tent. Lots of adventures. We built a hospital, an extension to an already existing hospital. We did it with bricks. So we helped them make the bricks. We carried the bricks. We couldnt do the corners. And so coming back from that stay, i landed in new york unbeknownst to me on the day of the march on washington. Early in the morning, my mother drove to washington to be with her friend charlotte gnash who grew up together. To attend the march . No, charlotte lived in washington. She was bringing charlotte back. Maybe they drove up together, they were together as they often times were at that time. So she said, theres a march on washington. I said, what . I said, i want to go. So she dropped us off on some corner and told us to meet us somewhere later on in the evening, which we did. So for the whole day, we were there and we saw and we learned and i wanted to be a part of it. I dont think johnny wanted to be a part of it as much as i did, but i certainly u did. And the snick kids were the ones that blew my minds. They were seeing all the most recent songs from danville. I had seen an Old Newspaper while i was in the district in uganda. It was many the Old Newspaper, maybe the london times or New York Times or something. It had a picture of what was happening, the violence in 1963 earlier that summer and this was maybe a month later. I said, man, i should have been there. If i had been home i would have been there. So thats how i that was my introduction to snick. All those little pieces, and of course, charles people became a part of snick. Thats when snick formed in raleigh that same year. So thats what that was all about. I wouldnt guess that day, you would not have already been attentive to these tensions emerging in the movement between say kings faction and the younger folks who were getting john lewis and snick and getting pretty frustrated. Not at that time. I read about it and talked about it and people have told me things about it since then. Tell me a little more about midfebruary of 1965 you convened and organized a very, very large conference. Can you talk about how it all came into being . Well, i guess we were tired of doing vigils on the campus. This is a big upgrade from a campus vigil. We knew from the buzz around the civil rights College Circuit that there was disagreement about the directions in civil rights. There was black nationalism as identified and promoted by malcolm x, which had not really come into most students. Certainly not in mine. But there was something terribly thrilling about malcolm x and what i had seen and heard. I hadnt met any of the people who really knew him well as i was subsequent to meet percy who was a friend of mine who was malcolm xs lawyer. I hadnt talked to any of the people who vilified him, but there must be some reason this man was getting vilified on television on a daily basis. The hate that hate produced. I wanted to see for myself and the rest of us did too. Ozzie davis we chose because someone who had a great civil rights record. He was not just an ordinary actor. And Michael Herington because he was the man who discovered poverty. He was a prolific writer. So this little e committee of ours knew these people or knew of these people and so we said were going to really have this opening session thats going to set the tone for the rest of the convention. Civil rights movement, reform or revolution. So i got malcolm xs home number from somebody else i knew. Again, it was the network. So i called him up. He answered the phone. Youre 22 years old . I wasnt 22. We were planning for this thing, so i was 20. I was probably 20 years old when this thing was being planned. Maybe 20 no, i dont know. 20 or 21. One of those. Does it matter . I was a young kid. So i called him up. He answered the phone. I said, wow, im talking to malcolm x. And i explained what i wanted. And he said, well, what kind do you have . I think i told him 1,000. And he thought for a minute, thats not very much money. And he thought for some more and i think i may have explained that this was important because we wanted to explain just what these emerging ideas that were coming out of the american culture, especially from black folks, Something Like that, i must have said something because he said, okay, ill do it. So i said, wow, and i put the phone down and it was a public phone somewhere on campus. We didnt have phones in our rooms. This was all done at a Bell Telephone with me standing there at the wall not even in a booth talking to malcolm x. I hadnt even thought about that before because i had another strange experience like that. But any way, involving trying to get a date with guys just looking over your shoulder. Youre standing there with this big phone on the wall and youre sitting there talking, well, you dont know me but my name is so and so and i was wondering if youd like to go out with me. That whole experience several notch and im speaking to malcolm x and he says hes going to come. I went back and told the group. And he had similar experiences with whoever called ozzie davis, whoever called herington, i didnt do those two. They all said they would come. So then we had to fill in for our ordinary little Breakout Sessions for our ordinary little Breakout Sessions we had all the civil rights luminaries ha we could find. The people who were in the trenches. Mostly in the south but some in the north as well. I still have that poster. We had people who were in core, people who were in snick, people who were the northern student movement, all of the groups that were doing anything on the cutting edge anywhere and they all said they would come. And they all did come except malcolm x was in france an extra day trying to get into england or out of england. So he lost a day. So i got a call from one of his people saying, im sorry, mr. Williams, but hes not going to be able to be there. He really wanted to come and i believed he did. So i was down to two. So the day of the conference, which was a friday, i think february 12th, 1965, i got word from Michael Herington he couldnt make it because of an ice storm in new york. So im saying, oh, my god, were going to have a thousand people hanging from the rafters and they are not going to come there to see me. I was chairing it, i was mcing it, but ozzie davis came through because he had left a day earlier, got ahead of the storm some kind of way. So he came and i explained the situation to him. I said malcolm cant come, Michael Herington cant come. E he said thats okay. Ill talk about what they would have talked about and then i want to talk about what i want to talk about. Because he was the consummate actor that he was, he put himself into each role and because he was very knowledgeable about who they were, he pulled it off. Got a standing ovation, we got a standing o ovation, we got the legitimacy we needed because these colleges had put some money into this thing and they didnt want to see me up on the stage. And the conference just flowed from there. It was just a big success. I met a lot of people that day that i hadnt met before. People who were just folks i had heard about but hadnt really met. Got more sbenls about what was going on in the south. But also in places like harlem. So it was really good. What was your perspective around that weekend of that conference on the question of reform versus revolution. I was becoming a revolutionary. I was listening to all of those other pieces. I didnt know that much about it. I didnt i told you i didnt know the class aspect of what was going on. But this was no reform process. I could see this was going to change peoples lives forever and it was going to change America Forever if we got what we demanded and we were intent. This was going to change the institutions in America Forever. To a certain extent, it did. Malcolm x was killed a week later. Yes, that sunday, the 21st. And i always wonder, would somebody have tried to kill him in massachusetts because he certainly had enough room to escape in all those woods and the hills. Just coming up the hills winding your way to south hadley as mountains, not mountains like out west, certainly steep hills and very lonely and twolane highways and stuff like that. I say to myself, i wonder if somebody would have tried to get him there as opposed to when they actually did get him in the ballroom a week later. Thats a chilling thought. Yeah. Do you remember your reaction . To malcolms death . Absolute anger, sadness, grief, regret that i hadnt had a chance to meet him, just the one conversation. Because i knew i would have liked him. Just from the conversation, i liked the sound of his voice and the intenty and the honesty that was there. He really cared about me and this conference. Thats why he agreed to come for so little money. Not many weeks later, you went to alabama. Right, that was february and in march the same little group decided we were going to go to the selma to montgomery march. We have done this, we went from vigils to a magnificent conference. Where can we go next . We have to go south. We had been beating around the bush, and i had been to harlem to some before to work with my childhood friend juliette houston, who is now a retired judge in massachusetts, but he was on one of those projects called the harlem education program, which was associated with the northern student movement. So i had had that experience, but i hadnt had the front line experience that only the south could bring. And none of us had pause wed all been in college. We all decided to stay in college. We were committed to the revolution, but you cant really be a revolutionary until you go to the front line. So thats what we did. We piled into a bus about seven of us from umass, from smith and from amherst, so we stopped in richmond just to stop in and get 45 along the way. We just located drivers. And my father took a look at that bus that i think we were having some trouble. He said, no, no, take my Station Wagon. So he gave us his Station Wagon, which was a big buick station wayon full of people, seven, and we piled the luggage in the back and we went on our way. Now that was fortuitous because in South Carolina and by that night we were in South Carolina, and a guy named fred was driving the car and he was apparently because the rest of us were asleep, he must have fallen asleep at the wheel that he was going over the highway and a cop stopped him. So the five whites stayed in the middle of the car wherever they were and the two of us who were black got in the backseat underneath some clothes and hid. So fred who was quick on his feet told the cop we were on our way to florida pr the spring break fling that they had down there every year where thousands of white kids get together, get drunk, get laid and go on back to school. So he took at school, said be careful, youre a little sleepy, but go ahead. And later on we heard that other integrated cars got stopped and they never made it to the march because they were arrested on some trumped up charge in places like South Carolina, wherever we had to go. So but for freds quickness afoot saying, he could have said were on our way to the march, selfrighteous, no, were on our way to Fort Lauderdale where they have these spring flings. So we got away and we went on down. Later on we had an accident. This big semi trailer truck plows into my fathers car. I was driving at that point. Just caved in the front fender against the wheel. We were in one lane, he was the filling station was right there. The gas station was right there. We pulled into it as much as we could. But the bumper was on the wheel. You couldnt drive. I dont know why this guy the young guys in the gas station didnt seem to mind that this was an integrated group. He didnt ware consider we were going. He fixed the car. He just pulled it off. We got the gas and got the hell out there have. Because it was in some little town in georgia. So we kept going and finally got to montgomery. They had told us to check in with the snic office before going to selma because you want to find out if the klan had been operating along route whatever that was at that particular time. They were always operating but you wanted to find out if there was a heightened watch or not. And we went upstairs on the second floor, the corner of jackson and high street in montgome montgomery, which is where the snic office was. And there were snic operatives there. I dont know who they all were. The only one i recognized was stokely carmichael. And he said what the hell you going to selma for . We need you here in montgomery. And then he explained they were doing a parallel operation because they didnt trust king and lclc. We didnt want to get sold out on the voter rights. So they were running a separate operation in montgomery. As i look back into how the march unfolded, i didnt know at the time this was a snic idea to begin with because Jimmy Lee Jackson had been killed in some little town on the other side of the bridge. Days before. And so the people were mad and they wanted to march. And john lewis led that march and theres a famous picture of him being beat down. That was before sclc and king were involved. King i also found out didnt want to get involved but his people were telling him youve got to get in front of this march. He didnt want to do it because the law, quote unquote, was not on our side at that point. There was an injunction, no marches. But then the people in the United States got involved and pressured johnson to lift the state. So johnson got in touch with the judge and the judge lifted the stay sought march could go on. Thats when it became an sclc march as opposed to a sncc march. Im putting two and two together. Nobody told me. But sncc was probably mad anyway because this thing had been taken away. The third thing i learned just from listening to stokely was there was competition from the good guys, from within the ranks of the good guys and so montgomery was set up just like that. Sncc was able to do that because sncc was sncc. They had the power to do that. They could come in and virtually take over the city, command the attention of the Police Powers so much so that they could just shut us down. They had to use all those forces to shut us down at the corner of jackson and high street. They didnt let anybody out. They were letting people in, though, which was a tactical mistake because more and more were gathering. They had hired maybe they were volunteers. But they had guys from the country coming in on horses with great big long sticks. Not your ordinary police billy clubs. They were there too. Long sticks. Maybe three feet wide. I understand they used them to herd the cattle, beat the cattle along when they were moving, i guess. So they were given permission to knock the hell out of us whenever they wanted to. Every time we tried to march out of that corner of jackson and high street these guys on horses and the police on motorcycles would beat us down. I understand these guys were the klan, they had just deputized them for the moment. I have no confirmation whatsoever, but that was the rumor rampant in the street. We didnt care who they were. They were trying to knock the hell out of us. So i was quick enough to stay away from it, from the beating. There was one time when we were on there was a Little Church in the middle of the block or the beginning of the block. That never opened its doors to help us. Never, never, never did that church open. And there were three steps going up to the door. And we were running from the cops, running from the police, that was the only place to go. And they had us surrounded. And they were about to charge. And somebody started singing this may be the last time it may be the last time, i dont know and that song sticks with me to this day because everybody starts singing that and we were all prepared for whatever might happen. But the horses stopped. The motorcycle people stopped. They looked at us, turned around and let us go. That was the first time i had any evidence there was really a god because there was no way we could have stopped them. There was five, six seven of us that could escape the inevitable. Here it was. But it didnt come. I had to change my mind about god at that point. I was a member of the church. And i had been baptized. I hadnt paid much attention to that. From that point forward i had to really revise my thinking about who was in charge on that street. I escaped. A lot of people didnt. I escaped unharmed in terms of physical damage. Another time i ran from horses into somebodys house. And their door was open. But the door was so the door was a regular height door, and the horse couldnt get in there. Thats the only thing that saved me at that particular time. And on the television i saw Lyndon Johnson in front of the congress when he said we shall overcome, talking about the voter rights of people. And he made that famous comment about we shall overcome. And im standing there looking at him, and im watching whats going on on that street and i plunge back out into the darkness. And that was in my mind, that this man was a hypocrite. How long were you when did you arrive . You arrived in front of the john lewis march, obviously, march 7. No. It was after that. Oh, after that. All of this is after that. Okay. And also after the kneel and turn around on the 9th . Yes. So you arrive for the march that is scheduled then. All right. So you were there when the marchers arrived . Never made it to selma. No. But when they came to montgomery. Oh, yeah. I was and i wasnt. I was in kilby state prison at that time. You had been arrested by then . Yeah, i had been arrest bid then. What were the circumstances of your arrest . Well, let me tell you this one thing first about the guy with puerto rican guy. Im sorry, right. He the cops came zooming through on their motorcycle, one cop did, drove down to the end of the street, and he kneeled down in front just as a protest. The guy came and hit him with the motorcycle. But he was able, nimble enough to take the blow on his left thigh. And he kind of rolled away. The motorcycle fell. The cop was scattered all over the ground. And there were no cops around. The rest of us moved forward to get that cop. Me included. He jumped up. This was the most brave thing ive ever seen. He jumped up and stopped us because we were supposed to be nonviolent. He reminded us, this was nonviolence. We cant do that. That cop would probably have been severely hurt that day. And then it would have been a whole different kind of situation because they would have brought in all the police power in the state and would have snuffed us out because then we would have been terrorists instead of nonviolent protesters. And he was smart enough to do it. So i always remember him for that. And he was on one leg because he couldnt move the other leg. And he stopped that crowd. You cant do it. So we all backed off. The cop jumped up, got that big heavy motorcycle, shoom, and drove on back the way he came from. Now, how did i get arrested . Several times we tried to march and each time they drove us b k back. At one point king came over because the march had already started. Somebody told king this things getting out of hand, youd better go to montgomery because now more and more press was coming. More and more media was coming. So he came over, and amazingly, the doors opened, and we would go i say the doors, i mean the barricades were removed, and we marched. But he only marched us for about two blocks. And then he turned us back arou around and we went back toward the barricades. And during that time the cops were throwing peanuts at us. With this grin on their face as if they knew what was going on, this thing had been planned. This was supposed to take the edge off our desire to march. Of course we werent going to be satisfied with that. We were young people. We werent going to be satisfied with that. So that same day or the next day the sncc organizers led us through the back door, so to speak, because they didnt have cops at the other end of the avenue. We went out the back way very quickly, went around the side of Alabama State university, went in the school, emptied the school, singing freedom songs. Emptied everybody in that school. Some professors tried to stop the kids. Some of them just stood aside and smiled. By that time we had doubled in size. And now it was a mostly black group as opposed to integrated heavily with whites. Now it was mostly black with all of the energy that that conveys. Young black men and women. So then we went back to march aga again. They clubbed us as we were trying to go downtown. And at one point this young man at one point this young woman was run over by one of the horses. So there was a guy near me who picked up a brick. I found out later that was his sister. Not just his his sister in terms of being a fellow black person but his real biological sister. He had a brick. And so i jumped on his back. I told him you cant do that. Youre going to be killed. Were going to be killed if you throw that brick. He ran with me for about a block. This guy was about a linebacker size, and i was about 140 pounds. But im talking to him all the time. And he put the brick down, came to shis senses, turned around. The young lady got up and she was unhurt. I wrote a rap about that as a matter of fact that my Singing Group used in some of my concerts. I said so thats the way i commemorated what happened at that particular time. I jumped on his back. I said brother, dont do that. They got too many guns, and thats a real fact. As he turned and looked around, well, i dont remember all of it right now. But anyway. So we went back and licked our wounds. But then the third day we marched down again. By this time we were 500, 600 people and they just couldnt stop us. So they decided they werent going to bother us anymore until we got downtown. And all along we were picking up people. Picking up people, picking up people. Until we got downtown to the state house where they had the Confederate Flag and american flag. And the cops wouldnt let us the city cops didnt let us march on the sidewalk. And the state cops told us they couldnt march in the street. So we saw what the game was. We just sat down and they arrested us. There were too many people for the jail. So they put many of us in kilby state prison and thats where we stayed for about a week. Do you remember the experience in prison . Yeah. Work long. Another famous, not so famous outside of sncc but in sncc very famous. We were in a big bullpen, 75 men, and about an equal amount of women on the other side. And so they just had mattresses with no blankets, and it was cold in that particular time. In march in alabama. So they just threw in a handful of dusty blankets. And of course the bigger guys went for them, and they were just taking their blankets. I was standing on the side. Because as i said, im 140 pounds. I wasnt about to get into that fray. So worth long stood up on a table. Worth long is about 56, 57, i guess. Maybe 58. But not a big guy. And hes got on glasses. He looks like an organizer in the whole european context. And he says, hey, hey. Hey. He had to holler a few times. He said i dont know about you, but if i was a man i wouldnt take a blanket unless everybody had a blanket. And theyre still fighting. I wouldnt take a blanket unless everybody got a blanket. So by this time people were looking around at themselves and one by one those guys just came. P. O. W. Threw those blankets down. Another moving moment in my life because from that point forward we were organized. And the cops outside, the jailers said we dont have no more blankets. Well, worth told them, then well all be cold. And everybody said, yeah, thats right. So miraculously they went and found some more blankets. Brought it in. And immediately we saw the value of organization. Thats the first time i had ever seen it so quickly. Its one thing to think good of yourself because you didnt do what they expect you to do. Its another thing to actually see some material results. So that was the lowhanging fruit. Eventually worth got taken us from and put in solitary confinement because he was trying into the grait the Church Service or something. So that left us leaderless. So me and a guy named stu house became the leaders. Stu house was a young man from detroit in sncc, but he was in sncc fulltime. This was my fulltime. So people listened to me. And i was very happy with that because we werent talking about College Folks now. We were talking about folks who were in college some of us, but some of us who were not, who were sncc brothers. That was my First Leadership role in the movement, was to hold sl together for those next seven days along with stu. What were some of the issues you had to deal with in the cell . People wanting to get out. People who got swept up in it at the spur of the moment and wanted to leave. So we just had to keep up their morale. We sang, we talked. We sang, we talked. We refereed fights over food. One guy i remember wanted to keep his food. He hid tunder the mattress. Someone went over and took it. He wanted to fight. So we had to stop that. The freedom songs were very helpful. So we made a pact that we were going to all get out together. But because i came from massachusetts and because we were good at what we did, remember i told you we raised money for people who were in jail. Well, then it came back to me because we very quickly in massachusetts raised money to get me out of jail. So i didnt want to go. So the lawyers told me if you dont use this money somebody else is going to use it and we dont know when youre going to get out. Weve got to take you when you come. Soon as we get our money attached to a person were going to bail people out. Its not going to be all or nothing. So reluctantly i left. Me and a few others at that time. Said goodbye. And by that time the march had reached town. So we went out to the big corn field or fairground or whatever that place was, where they had the final massing before going into town the next morning. And thats where you had all the stars. Harry belafonte. Nina simone. Who else was there . Whoever was there i saw because i was me and a few other people had been bailed out by that time. We were known as the ones who were just released from kilby state prison. That was our title. So it was like the waters were parted. And we were most welcome. It was a rainy day. I remembered that. I didnt care because i was sad about the guys who were still there. I had said i wasnt going to leave, but circumstances wouldnt allow me to stay. So we helped. We did what we could to make what we could to accommodate what was going on. The person in charge at that point was another guy i was very impressed with, ivanhoe donaldson. He was one of the few people i found out later who agreed to work with selc from the sncc side to make this thing happened. Along with john lewis. He was his own man. He decided i dont want to do that. So he was doing logistics as he often did and did it very well. My impression of him was a very calm but focused young man with a walkietalkie wearing a yellow rain slicker. That was ivanhoe. I wanted to be just like him when i grew up. Although he wasnt that much older than me. That was my idol for a long time because i saw him take charge kind of guy in a very hostile situation. And thats what he did very well. My last memory was people marching in. I really was tired physically and mentally. So there was a first aid jeep that was the last vehicle, the very last vehicle, the last set of people in the march i got in that jeep. I was the last person because i could look out and see the road from which we came, which at that point was devoid of anybody because all the police by that time had cleared away the races. But it was my thought somebody was going to come up and shoot us on the back and if that had been done id have been the one that was shot. But it didnt happen, fortunately. Later on going back violaet yut got shot. She was the person who was shot last i think in this demonstration. Taking people back along the highway to selma. When you think back to the moment when you and stu house are chosen to kind of be the two leaders of the 75 folks in the big enclosure. Nobody told us. We just evolved. What was it about you that made you ready and an attractive candidate for that leadership role in that context . Thats a good question. I saw things were going wrong, and i spoke up. And people listened to me. And the same thing with stu. Stu had a little more experience. I had had the experience of running the Civil Rights Group at a college. He at least had had the experience of being with sncc somewhere. So i had no experience in dealing with folks other than college types. But i just decided that it was something that had to be done. So i just stepped up. How long were you in alabama before going back up to amherst . Oh, right after that we got back in our cars and we started going back. Just, you know, i guess it was the same day that the march was over. That night we were headed north. Any further thoughts about the culmination of the march . Yeah. Posey was driving my fathers Station Wagon when i heard on the radio that viola yutu was killed. Just kicked me in my stomach. Everybody there. We had a moment. And there was a screwdriver in my fathers car. And i just picked it up and i said, if th