Many people have heard of the Freedom Rides of 1961, when civil rights activists rode buses through the South to protest segregation. But most people have never heard of what happened the very next summer, when Southern segregationists decided to strike back.
While at Syracuse he helped form a local chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and actively fought housing segregation in the school dorms and surrounding community. In 1963, just before taking his oral exams for his PhD, he dropped out and went to work for CORE In Louisiana. Michael stayed with CORE for four years, eventually becoming the Mid-West Regional Field Secretary. He was jailed 11 times, the last time for three weeks under a charge of criminal anarchy, a capital offense. He left CORE when the white staff were asked to leave and moved to San Francisco during the summer of love.
Here is a letter that Jim Garrison wrote Jonathan Blackmer of the HSCA in July of 1977:
Here is my transcription of Garrison s letter: Dear Jonathan:
Enclosed herewith are the random Morgan City and Lafayette materials I mentioned. You will at once perceive an absence of depth of inquiry and a lack of follow-up, with regard to these two statements which I am now marking A + B ) but that was because we didn t know what to with these, except put them on a shelf off to the side, while we headed down the little road we had stumbled across. Perhaps your people will be able to do more with these two random statements than we were able to do.