Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 the convention in 1960 and there was a lady there named claire luper from i want to say Oklahoma City, and she spent all of her time talking about sitins that had been done by the naacp youth chapter in Oklahoma City and i remember going away from that saying, yeah, but no one knew about them other than claire luper and a couple other people. Thats again, that thing in history sometimes when you do something, when you have a context, that accords significance, rather than whether youve done it or not. I dont doubt that claire luper and her group had done sitins. But we know about the North Carolina people. They had an impact. We know about the friendship nine. I think they had an impact. Historically thats what we look for as we look at the social string that pushes this string that pushes that one that pushes that one. Thats the key point, i think i see it the way you do. You were able to set in motion very quickly, but turning the tension of rock hill and many things happened. Can you describe that . Youre on the chain gang, but you know that many of these but, you know, one of the things about being on the chain gang, we were coping with the situation of adjusting and being able to fit in and to do what we had to do to survive and to provide a witness on the chain gang. What we didnt realize and couldnt possibly realize was the impact that was going on out there. On sundays when there were 1,000 people coming to see us, the only people that we could see would be a line of perhaps 100 people that were coming straight into the dormitories where we were housed. We couldnt see all of those other people and we did not have Communications Network that enabled us to know that so that one of the things that has been tremendously gratifying to me is to read what was going on on the outside. You werent getting that information . Oh, no. We did not have an information flow that told us. I thought you would have gotten through no. If somebody told you i dont recall anybody saying im just one of about 1,000 people who are out here and it was deliberate on the part of the authorities to limit the number of people that we saw so as to not break us, but certainly not to encourage us. One of the times we wound up in solitary confinement was because they wanted us to erect a fence to sort of corral the people who were coming to see us, and so if youre looking only in a straight line, i see 25 people, i dont know how many people are along the laterals there. Again, i have to pull back just a bit. In december, probably, im guessing, just after the training at claflin was i think the 9th through the 11th, december 1960, very close on those dates, and then you were on a bus with gordon carey. Yes. You and he do some thinking and planning that will have just a very tremendous impact. So take me back to that ride and its purpose and what you talked about. Okay. We were going from South Carolina after a Training Session back to new york. I think gordon had a copy of louie fish achers book about gandhi and when they talked about gandhis famous march to the sea sort of thing, and i came up with the idea, broached the idea of a freedom ride and the freedom riders would copy some of the basic patterns of a 1947 journey that had been staged by the fellowship of reconciliation and corps jointly, thats the ride that joy was on the scout on. At some point in the journey, just chit chatting about one thing or another, the idea of a freedom ride comes up. What are we going to call this thing . I dont know if gordon said freedom rides ride or i said freedom ride. Its not critical to me in terms of who said what at the time. We went on to suggest that how are we going to do this thing in terms of the mechanics of the project. Were going to have to have people who are very well trained in nonviolence and were going to have to have somebody that will go down the route of the ride to send back very specific information about the town, the community, the bus schedules, the layout of the bus stations, the mass meetings and all of that sort of thing. Eventually i would become the person who would assume that particular function so that i could say that i was the scout for the freedom ride and the choice of places was determined by the location of historically black colleges and universities going southward that we had relationships with where we could house the riders and also where we could have meetings to inform the local community because we didnt want to just take a trip through a Community Without making some connections with the local people who would followup to make sure that whatever happened with us would be a springboard for them continuing to protest or taking advantage of any kinds of changes that would have occurred. This was, you just there described some of the close particulars, but this is audacious. Yeah. This is youre going to take you have this notion of pushing throughout deep south. Through the deep south. The original ride had not gone into the deep south because of the danger element, but we were going to go through mississippi we were going through alabama, mississippi and end up in louisiana and we knew that the resistance there would be considerable. In fact, i think my suggestion was that if we get through the state of alabama, were going to have to have federal protection because alabama was, along with mississippi, the most resistant places i thought we would encounter. The naacp had been outlawed in alabama, so thats how you got the southern christian Leadership Conference and dr. Kings Organizational Group going there because it was illegal to be a member of the naacp. Those three states we realized were going to be tough. We also realized there were places in South Carolina, like rock hill, where the possibility was imminent and, of course, in any of the small towns, in any one of those states, you could encounter all kinds of difficulties and you could lose your life. Tell me about the so you and carey communicate this idea to the folks at the National Office when you arrive . This is about the time that james farmer became the executive secretary of corps. Thats exactly right. And forgive me, let me add one more thing to contextualize the setup. This is in the late 1960, 61 when Jimmy Roberts tenure was in question. Thats right. Yeah. And so jim farmer was looking for a project and this is one that had the potential to be very successful and i dont think that we estimated how big it would become because i think it ultimately was one of the signature protests of the entire Civil Rights Movement. I mean it involved all kinds of people. There were all kinds of inputs and all kinds of positive things that were brought together to address an issue that got national attention, and i dont think that we had that in mind and evidence to the fact that we didnt have it in mind is that we had just a dozen or so very well trained, nonviolent soldiers who were going to do this thing and you know, youre not going to get a dozen people, no matter how well trained they are, through alabama, mississippi and louisiana. I dont think that we had estimated the potential and i think its difficult to do that anyway. Did you think dr. King might join . Was that something that you were it was not something that i was anticipating and its something that, given the magnitude of dr. Kings contributions, i do not hold one reserve in terms of my respect for dr. King that he didnt become a freedom rider. He was on the advisory board, National Advisory board, for corps. He had been perhaps the primary influence in flushing out nonviolence as a strategy for promoting social change, and to me, thats enough of a contribution. I dont care that he did not become a freedom rider. Maybe the question is too obvious, but i dont know the answer, why werent you a freedom rider . Why wasnt i a freedom rider. Okay. You did all the scouting. I did all the scouting. And then after setting the whole thing up i drew the assignment of being the person in jackson who would take care of all of the riders when they were released. I had an assignment before that, though. My assignment right after the bus was burned in aniston was in montgomery, alabama, and in montgomery, i lived in the home of Ralph Abernathy. This is when, after the event in the church, montgomery was under mashl law. The church was thousands of angry whites outside the rally at the abernathy church. Okay. So the town is under martial law and freedom riders start to trickle in and i was training riders there. I would have to go to the trailways or the greyhound stations to pick up riders. We would know how many riders were coming in, but we we would know their names, but we didnt match names with people so the question was, you know, how are you going to get down there. First of all, right outside of Ralph Abernathys house about a half a block up there was a jeep with a National Guardsman driving and another National Guardsman in the back seat with a rifle across, so these guys would give us an escort to within a block of the bus station, railways or greyhound. They disappeared. We got to get with a local guy who was my driver, we got to get from there, past all of the red necks, to pick up riders. We know there are five, but we dont know them. This is what i would do. I would stand in an area near a telephone booth. I would know the gender of the people. As soon as i saw them dial Ralph Abernathys number i would go over and come on, come on. That worked for a number of times. We would go back with those people, past the mob incidentally, past the mob, we would get in our vehicle, the jeep would intercept us again, take us back to abernathys house. This is the protection that we are getting when we needed the national guard, it wasnt there. We were on our own. When we got back to a safe neighborhood, Ralph Abernathy lived in a black neighborhood. There was not a lot of chance that was going to be somebody be that was going to come in and do us harm there. Its from there that i was assigned to jackson. Thinking back, as best you can, to watch this whole ride unfold, especially from rock hill forward, rock hill on down, your vision unfold in the spectacular really fashion that it did in all of the tumult and violence and the federal government is involved, i mean youre not a very youre a young man. Youre in your early 20s. Thats right. Im interested in the response and your sense of whats happening . It was a sense of gratification, it was also a sense of responsibility for people who would be injured, who might carry those injuries the rest of their lives. Its one thing to ask me to do that as a person. Its another thing but i also thought that we were in this together and what happened to any one of us could have happened to any others of us, and i would have been willing to do and i was gratified that there were brothers and sisters, white, black, who were similarly minded. I think we had grown up to the point here of the level of sacrifice that might be expected. Always hoping that that would not be the case, but realizing that it certainly could be the case. Obviously the experience of violence by that point was not entirely new to the movement but it was pretty ferocious. Yes. And i wonder about your reaction to that . Did that change any part of your perspective in any way . No because i think that the idea was that we cant let violence intimidate us into doing any less than what we think we should be doing and that be we insisted being treated like any other citizens. How about perspective about the federal government, Kennedy Administration in particular, after what happened . Well, the federal government was not our ally. I think that they were sort of annoyed that there were all these Critical International issues and then you have this bunch of black and whites who want to ride through the south challenging the culture of segregation. I would be particularly critical of the fbi because there was no community that i worked in where i could talk to an fbi agent. I did once think on a sort of intuitive perk, that there was an fbi guy i could Say Something to. This is when i was working in jackson. About two months later i wound up in federal court. The agent had hoped that he could implicate me on a conspiracy. Well, it turns out i had been tactful enough that when i testified it really didnt help their case, so the Justice Department presence with people like john door was often welcomed and was sincere. John door did a lot of very good work, i think, in mississippi and Voter Registration protections and so forth, but the sincere involvement and the by the federal bureaucracy in protecting rights and so forth was grossly negligent. I think to the kennedys this was all about politics. It wasnt about a moral commitment to protect citizens who were being disenfranchised by the local political culture. It must have been and you yourself would get on a bus later in the course of this, and it must have been very interesting to watch everything turn towards jackson towards parchman and it became really a national event. It did, yes. It did. Yeah, we had people coming in from various parts of the country. We had various religious groups. I remember the episcopalians, the church of latter day saints groups. Yeah, it was a good Cross Section of america, and thats the situation where the freedom rides started out as a specific protest involving a very small group and they wound up being a National Movement essentially. I dont think we could have predicted that. What was your broad sense of the prospects of the movement as that summer of 61 wound down and the Civil Rights Community is looking for the best choices about how to move forward . What was your sense of what the freedom rides at that point meant and what opportunities seemed ahead of you . Well, i saw nonviolent direct action as being a possible root to promoting some of the kinds of changes that we wanted to promote, but at the same time, i was aware of the impatience of people who had been tactically nonviolent who is starting to listen to what is a dominant cultural theme which is violence. There was a kind of innocence, kind of a moral focus to the early part of the movement, but to be a nonviolent movement, if you go back to gandhi, it requires a lot of discipline, a lot of training, and to ask people in a society that is predominantly violent through its core to continue to maintain that, i think that that is the sad thing about what happened with the death of dr. King. I think that dr. King, by the time he was assassinated, had really started to wane because the violent elements were so ever present until they were becoming considerable in terms of how we go about promoting the change that we want to promote. You would move from the freedom ride into the experience in mississippi . Yes. Now i didnt do a lot with the experience. I was there when it was founded. Exactly. Can you and it seemed to be a natural kind of thing. To the segregationists and the culture of segregation in mississippi, there would be no difference between core naacp, sncc, sclc. To the segregationists, those were all the same. We had different strengsz in terms of what organizations could contribute to the struggle, so i have always ascribed to the notion that there were some people who would be active in the naacp who would never be active in core, who would never be active in sclc, but we need their push as a thrust for this movement forward, and so i dont go back and belabor any negative points about the organizations that were involved because i think there were enough niches for all of us to put our shoulders to the plow to move this retched animal of segregation out of the way. Tell us about moses . You worked with him briefly. Bob moses was a brilliant guy, a visionary. When we were focused on taking care of freedom riders in jackson, which is when i first met bob moses, bob moses was involved in managing the campaigns of some of the local ministers who were running for congress. He was a looking ahead to the potential for political status, sew lid fig some of the gains that we were trying to get to happen or to occur. His book is on that the algebra project. He and dave dennis worked together. I have high respect for bob moses. One of the things i respect about bob moses is that there were people involved in this movement who in my opinion were quite a bit centered around themselves and their significance. I think bob moses saw the larger picture and i think his very lowkey manner is to push the issues and the important things, as opposed to pushing the individual. In 62 i guess you reached the point because of reasons related to your deferment status, you will certain choices are very stark in front of you. Can you talk about what they were and how you okay. After college i had received a number of deferments and i had gotten to the point of being classified, i think it was 1a, and so actually i received, when i was still right in the midst of working in jackson, i received a notice that i had to report to fort jackson for induction into the army. Now i had been negligent to make the argument that i would object to military service on the basis of conscience, because that philosophy of nonviolence had convinced me that i would not be a very good soldier, but i would be willing to serve my country in an ultimate capacity. Not being a c. O. , i get to fort jackson. We take all of these preliminary tests the first day. The sergeant says, looks good, the next day he says, well, i see you have an arrest record here. I said indeed i do. Youre not morally fit to serve in the military, except well think about this, and when he said that, he said were going to let you go for a few days, and i went very quickly to resurrect the interest that i had shown in a couple graduate schools. One was Atlanta University in atlanta, georgia. The other one that i had been admitted to was university of washington on the west coast, and university of illinois, champagne urbana. I checked to see when sessions were starting and the sessions were starting for Summer School at Atlanta University, so i found myself in graduate school rather quickly. That, of course, staved off the business of having to try to resurrect conscience shus objective status. You spent the final summer of 63 in mississippi. In mississippi. One year of work on my masters degree. Thats another interesting story. Right after the bus had been burned in an nis ston and i was doing some short assignments, i went to the university of wisconsin at madison to work for core and they were asking me questions about the freedom rides and so forth and so on the field secretary assignment . The field secretary assignment. I met a professor whose last name i think was rice, and he said you havent taken the Law School Aptitude Test but im going to recommend you for law school. Now, after claflin and being involved in the movement, i had actually thought how i could get into a profession that would enable me to continue be to contribute to the movement and i had decided that law would be that, rather than biology. But one year after i had worked on my masters degree in biology, i went home to great falls and im thumbing through this mail and i examine across this letter admitting me to law school at the university of wisconsin. She said you were admitted. You will have to take the Law School Aptitude Test as a matter of record. Thats how i wound up going into biology or continuing to work to biology, and i was successful in biology so i actually wound up getting a couple of graduate teaching assistantships and i chose the one at the university of iowa. Tell me about you didnt go to law school . I didnt go to law school. I was halfway through a masters degree in biology and i always liked biology. Rather than changing to something that was entirely different, even though it was close to the movement, i decided to keep going in biology. You mentioned earlier you met good lawyers. Bill consular and carl racklin, i met them. A variety of lawyers. Let me tell you about my couple lawyers that are not very well known. When the freedom riders were being tried in jackson, mississippi, there were perhaps five or six lawyers in jackson, mississippi, black lawyers. There was sydney thorpe who was the only lawyer who had been trained well, he had been trained at a big ten university, i think, but he would not take freedom rider cases. There was jack young who started out as a postal clerk and had taken law as a correspondent who was our chief legal contact. There was r. Jes brown who used to be a social studies teacher at one of the high schools who had graduated from Texas Southern and there was another man named carsy hall who was a mail clerk. Those were our core lawyers, r. Jes brown, jack young, and carsy hall. If it was a federal case we would get people like derrick bill and Constance Baker motley or bill counselor or carl racklin, we would get some other reinforcements, but it was always the nucleus of local guys that coordinated things and tried most of the freedom rider cases. Tell me about the summer of 63 going to mississippi. You did a final three months oh, yes. The final three months, i worked with aaron henry in clarkdale, mississippi, and aaron henry and the clarkdale naacp were involved in a selective buying program, actually a boycott, of downtown clarkdale and so being there for just three months, i was just fitting into and augmenting an existing program having to do with issues of police brutality, issues of discriminating against black people in the downtown area in the stores and so forth and so on, but the other thing i did there was to be the focus of a Freedom School that was just a block or so away from aaron henrys drug store and we would have coming into the center i would say 20, 25 young people every day and we would talk freedom songs, history of black in america, and so forth and so on, and it was there when the march on washington was to take place. My choice was to stay in clarksdale or to go to the march on washington, and i opted to stay in clarksdale. I remember, as i told you there, helping to put together the sign, march on washington for jobs and freedom and then with sclc, core naacp and the council of federal organization, pulling them all together on that sign, which the young people from clarksdale took to the march on washington. You went to atlanta for a second year at Atlanta University . And then to the university of iowa for the ph. D. Let me pause here and take a break. Just a few things, just for the tape record, john thought it would be good can you just say, recap, in simple descriptive way the member organizations inside cofo and say what that was. Cofo was the council of fed deteriorat deteriorated rated organization and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the southern christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the advancement of colored people or the naacp and core, the congress of racial equality. Those together constituted cofo. You had talked about from the perspective of the average white mississippi segregationist they would have all been one all one that is true. Im very interested in we cant do it justice, we just have time for a summary, but talk about first youre experiencing graduate school in iowa, and then move to the broader question of first year at iowa i was, of course, the only africanamerican student in the department. There were a couple of asian and Indian Students in the department. I did well academically. I was assigned to be a graduate teaching assistance in a very large course, it was called life science. It was an introductory level biology course. We had two responsibilities for the sections that we were assigned. We had the students for laboratory, for a couple hours a week, and we had them for an hour or so in a Discussion Group. The Discussion Group we could deal with points of information that students had questions about based on the lecture because of the very large number of people in the class, the lecturers were just givens the time to present the information, to embellish or clarify something, that was up to the t. A. As the only africanamerican student, there had been previously an africanamerican student from louisiana who had graduated and, indeed, my mentor or one of the persons that was influential to sending me to iowa actually compared me to his previous student that had been there and that was sort of an automatic niche for me to be in. There were, of course, the usual crosssection of people, some of whom became Close Friends until today, but there were also the people who just sort of tolerated you because you were there and to them they would have been just as happy if you werent there. The professors were across the spectrum. Some very conservative ones were particularly standoffish, but i found enough favor in professors and they respected me enough as a student and so i didnt any major problems with graduate work at iowa. I had decided to go to iowa because i felt that if not a neutral place to go, it might be at least a place where i could find some direction to do something that was a potential passion for me. The leader in the field at the time had left iowa and gone to austin, texas, and even though austin, texas, has a reputation of being a bit more enlightened than some other cities in texas, i did come out of a movement where i was fighting discrimination in its most blatant form day in and day out, want to take that same mantle to do graduate work at texas, even though the preeminent scholar in the field was at texas. That was sort of one of the things that compelled me to go to iowa. I had mentioned that i could have gone to washington, seattle, or champagne or ban na. Champagne urbana did not have the program i was primarily interested in and i wasnt sure i wanted to go way out on the west coast. I wound up going to iowa. Tell me about the things that have been most important to you as a scholar and a researcher over the years. Okay. As a researcher, eventually i got into an area of biology thats called electron my cross copy and my specific interest was to start with the very small structures that are inside of a living system and to see what happens when some of those structures transform into entities that are important for the reproduction of the orgism. There was something called kapalishum meaning a thread. I studied how the threads came to be and in the mature reproductive structure of the organisms that i studied the threads have a function because they prevent the organism from putting all of its reproductive structures out at once, so they are out over a longer time period, increasing the possibility some of those reproductive structures would then propagate the organism. The other interest that i had was using the electron microscope to answer certain questions that you couldnt answer given the limitations of a regular microscope. You can see things with a regular microscope that are so close to each other. With a electron microscope you can see them much closer and thats called resolution. With an improved resolution that might be subjective with a light microscope suddenly becomes objective with an electron microscope because you can see more clearly what is there. That was my interest in using the electron microscope to answer those kinds of questions which were then involved in the finding how one species of organisms was different from another species that was closely related. So it was speciesation to solve the questions. Let me turn forgive me, i know that is just a bare summary, but for our work i want to turn back to civil rights and then the struggle. Maybe to a few retrospective kinds of questions. I know that we just passed the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides and there are many different ways that people approach that memory and so im interested in the questions of different interpretations of the ride and its impact and how you see the significance of the freedom rides from this distance . I see them as being one of the most important, the most inclusive, the most integrated protests as a part of the total civil rights structure. We were talking about attribution of who did this and who did that. There is no question that the rides were conceived by and executed primarily by the congress of racial equality. After the bus was burned in aniston when the riders were no longer capable of continuing, we received a very nice contribution from the students at nashville and the nashville movement. Now that contribution is to be given a great deal of credit, but its credit should not extend to the suggestion that the core was incapable of continuing. In any kind of movement, there are strategic times that you move and obviously you cant move if you are if physically incapable at that moment. That does not mean that youre not in charge of the sequence of events that is part of an ongoing process. My disappointment was those who would rewrite the history as if the congress of racial equality, the people who originated and for the most part sponsored the rides, that these were sort of like rookies who didnt know what they were doing. We appreciate the contribution of the nashville people, but it was simply a contribution that was a part of an ongoing process, not a contribution that should consume the origin of the process and the propagation of the events that we label with the term freedom ride. Did you after you departed for iowa and then had your the long ride of your career as an academic in pennsylvania, did you ever live again in the south . No, with the exception of going back for visits. No question, the south has changed tremendously, but the fundamental infrastructure of racism and segregation that call the shots in the south in 1960 are still in place. They have slightly different labels. They accomplish their goals by slightly different means. But there has been no real fundamental shift in who really calls the signals. We can have black public officials, but sometimes the strength of what those people can do is actually called by shots from the same people who were calling the shots 50 years ago. There has been change, a lot of it is surface change, and theres still an awful lot of work to do. In this recent thing of a society that is color blind, much of the legal weight for making some meaningful changes is continually eroded and if youre talking about making changes in the southern context, that has to come down to the administrators of federal programs and so forth and very often these are very obviously discriminatory. Witness katrina, witness g. I. Bill availability and so forth. We go back to the 60s. We still havent pushed the bad guy out of the way yet. From the near distancing in terms of time, when you were say in iowa and beginning your work as an academic, did you ever have occasion to im sure that the question came to your mind, did you ever have occasion to doubt the nonviolence as a tactical means . Did you ever think that it wont work here in the american context . No. Ive always had faith that it would work. I think there is a residual moral conscience in a significant number of americans that makes it possible for nonviolent tactics to work. They must, however, be waged within a context of people who are well trained and who can articulate what it is that they are doing and why are they doing it. One is heartened by some of the nonviolent type things that have occurred in the middle east, so i think that, you know, theres still the possibility for nonviolent direct action being a positive social positively promoting change process. In having to hold the view for all of the many reasons that support it, that things have not changed so much, does it have the effect of well how what have been the what have been the implications for your sense of, you know, the american project over the longer term . Do you think this is a place that might find its way one day to a more just social order . I hope so. If one looks at, for example, the recent election of barack obama, i think what we had happening there and by the way i was immensely surprised that barack obama was elected because my mind was clicking back to what i know the situation to have been in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was the young people who went out and rallied for the first time for change. The unfortunate thing is that many of those young people have not persisted with insisting that the change was there, so what we see now in the inability of barack obama to govern is the kinds of factors that if they had been dominant would not have permitted him to be elected in the first place. Everything he decides to do, the idea is to obstruct him and to prevent positive change from occurring and taking place. If the young people were just as involved in making sure that we are sending to people people to congress who are going to cooperate and who are going to be collegial and who are going to be bipartisan, that the hope i have to think that the young people hold that hope. Looking back, the movement was your passion and your work and youve struggled in very difficult contexts for years there at the opening of the decade of the 60s. Are there ways in which as you think about that are there costs that were borne by you in an ongoing fashion . Was there a legacy of cost or complication in any way for you personally . Well, this is an interesting question because when i think back to the time, the energy and the passion that i put into a movement to be accepted as a citizen, as a human being, there are times when i wonder, what could i have done with that time to do Something Else that is automatically forthcoming if you happen to be born in this country and your skin happens to be white instead of brown. That gals me on occasion. I think we have lost as a nation a lot of potential, and we still lose that potential, when all you have to do is be born white you have all these privileges. If youre black you have to fight for them. We need all of us on the same page playing the same tune in order to be competitive internationally at this point. Ill ask one final question and then any further comments you want to make, what would great falls, South Carolina, look like if you went back today . Great falls, South Carolina, a fundamental disconnect with the mainstream of American Society in terms of almost every aspect of life. When i drive through great falls, i see a number of men my age sitting out under a tree just biding the time away, and but for the grace of god, there go i sitting there. These are people without hope h for whom the current century has passed. And quite honestly i dont know what will happen to them. But the tragedy even worse is that their children in many instances have been lost, too. And thats down right depressing. I cant think of any reason why an industry would go to great falls. You dont have a well trained labor force. You dont have the kinds of amenities that are necessary to run a business ethicily for profit, so forth and so on. So i really dont know. Its one of questions my parents would say ill leave it to god because i dont really have a solution for great falls except to say it hurts me that there is not hope for a future that is bright for great falls. And what im saying might be interpreted to be from a black perspective. Im a black man, but the south in its effort to keep black people down its also cheated white people, especially poor white people because theyre in the same boat. The white people should get together with the black people and move the monkey off the back. But many of them are holding onto the fact of, well, at least im white. Are there things we havent talked about you would like to spend some time on, things we havent touched on . I would mention one other thing. I think that scholars are frequently misunderstood. And i think they are especially misunderstood in the Africanamerican Community because weve had so few models of which to generate an idea as to their importance or to their significance. So when i tell people i have a phd in botany they could identify if i have a phd in agriculture or something that they have a Life Experience that they can connect to it. But to them my whole contribution to the total of my being and the being of my nation, my country and my race is not comprehendible at all. And couple that with the fact that even my parents, i couldnt explain to them exact what it is my passion i do. In the majority sfoi usually there is at least some way of making connection that rings clear. But thats a sort of lonely feeling. Being out there. But i see my contribution as being more to black people but being to the nation as a whole. Thank you for welcoming us here to prospect today. My pleasure. Its been a real honor and privilege. Thank you so much. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight a look at the Civil Rights Movement. On september 2, 1963 nbc news broadcast a three hour program on the status of the Civil Rights Movement called the American Revolution of 63. Reporting from 75 locations throughout the United States it includes appearances by wellknown activists, scenes from historic civil rights events and comments from integration opponents. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan 3. Up next on oral history interview with james oscar jones. He talks about growing up in rural arkansas, the influence of his parents and his work as the director of the arkansas project for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966. This is part of an oral history project initiated by congress in 2009 conducted by the Smithsonian Museum of africanamerican culture and the southern history programt
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