Coordinating committee and taking part in the 1963 march on washington. Mister courtland also served in the second terri general of 1974 six pan african congress. I was born in new york in harlem in 1941 and my mother moved me and my sister to the west indies to trinidad where my grandmother and our family lived. Four years later, 1945, i stayed in trinidad from 1945 to 1952 and then i came back to new york after my grandmother died in 1952 and lived in harlem for a couple of years and then moved to the bronx. I intended Catholic School, st. Helenas and then, you know, went from well actually Grammar School which was actually an interesting thing because it was african all African American nuns and then i went to st. Helenas and then went to Howard University. My mother sent me to Catholic School because, you know, at that point it cost a ten dollars a month, which was, you know, serious money in 1952 and 1954, but also she wanted to make sure that i had the best education that she could get. At that point, she was not too well sold on public schools. I grew up in the projects mostly in new york and at that time, you could see a lot of the issues that we see today in the fifties. You know a lot of people were doing drugs, mostly marijuana and heroin. Of all the people that i grew up with, my peer group, probably only three of us graduated from high school, my sister, myself and one other. The reason i was not impacted, i think, was because at that time i spent in trinidad where education was stressed in my family. I can look back and see all my cousins and the numerous, i mean women have paid phds, the men have been accomplished in education and it was a strong presence. I mean there was no assumption that you would not go to college, it was assumed that you did. Your mother, my mother said that your cousins are doing x, why enzi and we expect to see you. Meaning the expectation was deep in internal. When i left st. Helenas, whats interesting is when i got to st. Helenas, there are only for African Americans in the school. By the second, here i was by myself. So that was quite an interesting thing and during that time in the bronx because there was a sense of isolation. One of the things that i felt in that time was i will go to school but as i was coming home, i would hide my books because i would try to i kind of lived in both worlds. The world of going to school and the world of being with people i mean it was very interesting. Young people i grew up with, my peer group, because i had an accent, because i had a different history, they had a lot of respect for me. They respected i was different in the sense that i would go to school and i was and trying to do different things. They just thought i was different and that is fine. I had some space because of that one. Can you say what about your sister . My sisters lorraine cox and she, as i said, she is the youngest sister by two and a half years. That said, you know, my father, i think the last time i saw him, i might have been ten years old. I did not see him he was not a major character in my life. You know, but my sister is still working in the health. She became a registered nurse. Went to medical school for a while, but had some issues. How did you get your attention pointed towards howard . My cousin went to howard. My house was the stop for all my relatives coming to the United States. My mother was the head of the Family Branch here, so everybody came here. So, my cousin, erskine, who was a little older, but he came to go to howard. And he was, maybe in his late 20s, maybe early 30s. He came here. He spent maybe two and a half years and went to medical school, became a doctor, ob gyn. My view is, okay if he is doing it, i might as well do it. At that time, you could go. I have not figured out what i was going to do. At that time you could take a test. You didnt have to take the sats, stuff like that you could just go take the test. I got on the bus, and came down to washington by myself, took the test, went back to new york and i passed the exam and they said, hey, why dont you come on down . At that time, tuition at Howard University was 7. 50 a basic credit. Basically you could save a little over 100, get your room, board was 40. I worked at the post office and save money to go to school. Were you a political adolescent at all . In your High School Years . Not political, but i was aware. I was part of two or three discussions. The segregation of race was much more pervasive in terms of peoples assumptions of what you could do, the barriers that existed, and so forth. So there was always discussion of that, kids who were 14 and 15. I think black people were very aware at 14 and 15 of what is going on in society. And we had a group of older guys at that point, it was maybe in the 20s. They would talk about the music. They will talk about culture. They would talk about there was a sense of culture in history that was delivered by these older guys that gave me some sense of that. In terms of politics, no, i was aware of what was going on but also of other kinds of things but no organized kinds of political political discussions, no. Tell me what you encountered what you gotta howard . What the campus was like . What was your sense of what you were going to do was . How did you settle in . I didnt have a clear sense of what i was going to do. I did have a sense of right and wrong and kind of was impacted by what was going on, beginning to go on in the south, particularly with emmett till. Back to the political question, i was very much of where of what was going on with emmett till. I was very much aware of what was going on in montgomery. I was just aware of it and i had a sense of it but not, you know, any great depth in terms of understanding. When i got to howard fair, was places all over the place. I mean washington was a very segregated city at the time, whether you are talking about housing, whether you were talking about black and white heads in the Washington Post, whether you were talking about the police department, whether you were talking about trying close on in the various department stores, all those things existed. I was faced with it in a way i was not faced with it in new york. Also, at that point, there were citizens. Father was a small group of people that decided to do things in washington and we formed the nonviolent action group. Some were the people who later went on to really be were all part of that. We did two things. We did sympathetic actions for the things going on in the south, but we did we went out to the Eastern Shore of maryland and demonstrated their. s michael, who was in school with me at the time, was famous for helping organize these demonstrations because he would promise, okay, we are going to go demonstrate but we got a great party after the demonstrations. Young people wanted to do that. Some other things that we did at howard, i mean rfk stadium when the red skins where here, we picketed because there were no African American football players. Wrote 40, which was segregated, the root from washington to new york, we were involved in those demonstrations. We worked with Julius Hobson who was a core senior we were his shock troops. I mean julius was older than we were about when he wanted a demonstration, he will call on us to be the shock troops. We did other things at howard. We had the outside things that we did in attempt to demonstrations but we also created a project of awareness. Project awareness the first three things that we did and i will never forget them. The first was a debate between reston and malcolm x on the question of segregation versus integration. The second was a debate with Norman Thomas and herman khan on the question of thermal nuclear warfare. The third was a symposium with jim, ill see davis, moderated by sterling brown and for the after party, sydney points yay flew in just to see what the boys were doing. For people our age at that time, we were whatever we were. The other thing that was also clear, we were also on student council. Four he was a treasure the student council, carmichael was in the student council, student government. The other thing who was a member ran the newspaper and got great awards for the quality of the newspaper. So we function at, you know, externally in terms of demonstrations but in terms of howard, in terms of people who could organize and do things, we were there. We were in the leadership of it. We were also encouraged by a lot of professors because they thought they adopted us as their children, particularly sterling brown. He would invite us to his house. He would have discussions. He would talk to us about the voice. He would talk to us about other people we have heard about. He would talk he would not only play at his house, the jazz music, or the blues, he would come to our dormitory and talk about the history, he would talk about the poetry. We had others. We had comrade snowden, we had other professors. We had others who just thought we were doing what they would like to do and they try to give us all the encouragement that they could. Tell me about about this group in your role to all these other folks you mentioned. It was really run by three people, three large egos. Ed brown, stokely carmichael, and myself, and i think, you know, people looked to us in terms of theyou know, in terms of leadership issues. I did a lot of stuff on the project awareness stuff in terms of organization and pulling it together. Also a lot of stuff on the demonstrations and so forth. I did not do so much with the student council, did not do too much on the student newspaper. Tell me about how so many of you, deep in your engagement with sncc . At that point, sncc nearly days was a student non violating coordinating committee. It was really a coordination of student groups across the country. Nag was one of the student groups across the country. Nashville was another. Atlanta was another. So, we sat in. I sat on the coordinating counsel for sncc. I was on the executive committee at some point to help pull the organization together. Did you travel to atlanta . Yes. It used to be going down on highway 29. I remember gas was . 29 a gallon. I could not drive, but i would drive down there. Gas was 29 cents a gallon, cigarettes were . 20 a pack. Did you smoke . I used to smoke until 1971 and i was on my way to africa. And i saw i was at Laguardia Airport and i saw that cigarettes had gotten to 70 cents a pack in the machine. In i said, i know where this is going. Its time for me to end this conversation. So i stopped smoking. Are there things that stand out vividly from your memory in those early trips . The sncc meetings or the trips . Both would be very interesting but i think the sncc meetings. Interesting. The meetings and the destruction discussions were interminable. And we talked about everything. I think probably the thing that is most important as i think about i just thought about this lately you know, most of the young people were asking why, and been given the basis, given the kinds of things they faced, they were asking why. At the sncc meetings, you thought about change and you are asking why not . It seems to me the difference and the real genius of the young people we are talking 17 to 22 of that group was that we move from asking why the situation existed the way it did to talking about why not change it in a way that we should be living . And once you cross that barrier and dont feel you have to ask those who created the situation to make the change for you then you are free. I think those conversations, the 17, the 22yearold, the intellectual thought was broken. The discussion about where we should be going, what we should be doing, and so forth, were limitless. It did not strike me then, but it strikes me now. Also looking back in that context you mentioned that your peer group in the bronx saw you could except you as someone who is somehow a little bit different. Yes. Was there any parallel then to your experience inside the group of young activists inside sncc . Did you feel that your personal history distinguished you in some way that would matter to the conversations, perspectives, your philosophies . I didnt think so but there was always this west indian discussion. And even appeared in time renews week magazine where people considered people like still coolly or myself, you know, to be quote, have a different view because we came from environments that might have been a little less restrictive. I never bought into that. Tell me about the malcolm x debate. It was amazing. It was amazing. They had just built the auditorium at Howard University. The capacity was 1500. Leading up to it, we tried to get the professor who was the head of the government to moderate the debate. I am not going to say his name. He thought it was beneath him to have malcolm x at Howard University. We went to emmett dorsey, a big bear of a man who would say that racism in america is architectonic to the constitution of the United States and he would point to the 3 5 clause. He agreed to moderate the debate. We had a dinner before the debate with malcolm and professor dorsey was talking and malcolm said, professor, i think we better let you speak tonight because you have much more information than anybody in this room, which was really true. We got to the debate, malcolm had maybe about 300 of his followers in front. Byron gets up and he speaks first. Each participant has 30 minutes. He takes 15 minutes and he said, you always hear my point of view through the press, through everything, i now want to give malcolm 15 of my minutes to help to give him to present. And malcolm was a dynamite speaker. The thing that struck me, if you listen to the grassroots message, the speech that he gave i had not heard this is 1961. I had heard it. He would tell a joke or Something Like that and when he did that, it was the discipline was phenomenal. What is this . I will tell you from that debate, people at howard saw us different. That we could bring malcolm x and rustin, 50 people were pounding on the door the whole night trying to get in. Because that was a big auditorium. We broguht a kind of pizzazz. People look at us totally different after that. Hey, these guys have something we dont have. That gave us a little cachet that we probably would not have had ordinarily. We took a short break. Early on, what was your how did you gauge the prospects of substantial, true kind of structural change through the non violent protest strategies that were emerging through sncc . We had big debate about that. We had the National Group had one view. The howard group had another. The National Group believed in nonviolence as a philosophy and a way of life. John is probably the poster child for that. Diane nash. Jim lawson. Those guys. People at howard, we viewed nonviolence as a tactic. One of the things that the nonviolent peoples philosophy, those people, they feel that you can appeal to mens hearts. My view, which i said to them, you might as well appeal to their livers because they are both organs of the body. There was nothing to that. You did not engage in nonviolence because the otherside had overwhelming force. There was not a sense that the other side would do the right thing if you told them because at the end of the day, the other side knew what it was doing to you better than you did. So its not that they did not know what they were doing. They wanted to do it. So, we had huge, huge i mean, that was a source of early tension. I mean early, 1961, 1962. We did not believe in nonviolence as a philosophy. A parallel question, in the early years especially when things heat up in the south, what was your involving in the sense of what you might be able to expect from the federal government . Slim and none. I think there were individuals, particularly john doerr, particularly Burke Marshall with these civil rights division, who were very helpful, but there was a story. The house was bombed in macomb. I think this was 1963, 1964. Maybe 1964. We went down there. You were in mississippi. We were in mississippi. I am sorry. The fbi was there. They said to us, look, dont make any mistake about it. We are here to protect the evidence. We are not here to guard you or protect you. Ok, that is first. Then the guy said to us, look how many guns do you have . And we said, we dont have any guns. He said, well, ive got two and im scared to death. He had two issues. First, their mandate was limited because of both the local political issues, which affected the federal political issues, and at the end of the day, most of these guys as individuals that they would be overwhelmed. So, you know, we tried to communicate to the federal government as much as we could communicate and tried to, in certain circumstances, try to do that, but many people in sncc, including myself, felt that most of those agents who came from the south were of the south and therefore sympathetic, not to us, but the communities they lived in. A few sat in at Robert Kennedys office. Oh yes. Khan and tom. You really done your research. Can you recall that . Yes. It was funny. We went there and we went to kennedys office and i think they do know what to do. Basically they just said, okay, just leave him there. Later in the afternoon, they were going to come and move us to the side of the building. So, butch khan called the press from kennedys office and included the soviet press. Then they came at the end of the day and they were, you know, we went limping and they were dragging us out. As they were dragging us out, they probably got maybe 50, 60 feet down the hall, stokely says, wait a minute, wait a minute. I forgot something in the office. So, he gets up, goes and gets the stuff in the office. Goes back to exactly where he was and said ok. So they took us out of the office and they say, goodbye, see you. So thats what i remember about it. Its interesting one of the things about doing these interviews in 2011 is the emotional mood about all this has shifted so much. When you recall these teams with a smile and yet you were there for what were deadly serious reasons . We were very serious. We thought that the Kennedy Administration first of all we thought the Kennedy Administration, particularly the way they dealt with Martin Luther