tv Book TV CSPAN March 21, 2010 12:30am-1:00am EDT
12:30 am
badly one was hospitalized and his back bothered him all of his life and he died a couple of years ago. he became a good friend as did william. parenthesis, i later learned this is hard for me to believe, a newspaper reporter, who just died he told me to a long time ago that i was the first person ever to be beaten in a civil rights demonstration in virginia. that was hard to believe. , but i queried a number of historians and civil-rights activist and they're too young to ask about that in 1963 and it appeared to be true enfilade and william were just after me.
12:31 am
to wind this up we have a big trial on the advice of counsel i assume accuse the three of us of assault and battery and then their lawyer said we will drop our churches if you will drop yours. the difference is they were guilty and we weren't part of course, we did not drop card charges. there ensued a day to day trial on the big courthouse in charlottesville we had to move their to fit into the small core house. now during the stand out or sit-in all of the community attention focused on this
12:32 am
event that arm bands were there and one student who we found out later who it was k mount to my house and slashed all of my tires. and the telephone rang and i answered it. are you going now tonight? after while rediscovered the telephone. these other kinds of things that happen to ordinary people. in may 19633 years after they had begun. they were fined $10 in a given 30 day suspended
12:33 am
sentences. but the sit in had hardly begun before floyd and other of leaders began getting telephone calls. don't come here. we integrated. don't come bother us we have changed. and in fact,, virtually all of a formerly segregated restaurants in charlottesville nearly all of the segregated motels and hotels two of the three theaters the one that we had boycotted two years earlier changed overnight. you have heard the expression many times you cannot change things overnight but you can. if the time is right and the time was right for all of the work a and finally what
12:34 am
was appearing to the people at charlottesville that day could not go live in the longer. >> sells it ended overnight. and the city council which had been very conservative and at the suggestion end try a technique to postpone from doing anything but eventually did do something. this was a small turning point* this is more than a hamburger or having a place to sleep or having a place to go to the bathroom but the city changed as a consequence of the city. the time was right, the people involved were right.
12:35 am
what this book is about, it has eight pages and we have a lot of pitchers in the book but i didn't have a picture of us that the stand out. sorry it was the excerpt from by a fbi file. the theme that runs through this book is that there are many ways to struggle for social justice. one of my conclusion is that i describe in my 40 years teaching, the years i spent in south africa where i got to know the leaders there
12:36 am
12:37 am
podium. you have it. questions? comments? who will guests started? >> i would like to ask paul to answer on a personal level and you for the people in your book. >> a personal level? >> not for very long. [laughter] >> negatively and positively, how would affected me negatively, the winter of 1963/64 i had gone
12:38 am
to hopkins to be a visiting professor but i got an invitation to come to mississippi in the summer of 1964, some of you may know that as the great mississippi summer, the summer of 64 when freedom strugglers came from all over the country to promote voter registration, freedom schools and a variety of other things. there were murders that summer and you know, about that. i was asked to come down and the director of the freedom schools. and talking about a progressive child centered school and somebody must have known about that so they asked me to come down
12:39 am
in the the director of the freedom schools with citizens young and old and let them learn about things that were barred from the schools in mississippi. i was flattered. i said no. i said no because my wife was pregnant, i was broke, and i promised to teach summer school. but the truth is that i was frightened. i knew about alabama and mississippi and it had made a difference to have been beaten up so that made me aware of the fact that violence can have its effect. a new think about people like and he has talked about and moses and they talked about you have more respect
12:40 am
for them. that is the negative things that i've learned. the positive thing is that people interments' fell did not have many heroes and i became a great hero and it was all an accident of history. suppose i had been able to get somebody to take flow aids place? than somebody else would have got to be an up and i would have gone to court and supported them but people still to this day say you are the man? that gave me the on train to do things i might not of the race have been able to do. it also made it possible for me to work constructively with the students to bring about changes in the university to buy 1968, 69 had created a movement
12:41 am
strong enough to bring about momentous changes. that is what they got with the protest the 68/69. active recruitment of black students and active recruitment of black professors and the installation of a black studies program. it is shameful it took all of this time. but of these to i developed many close friends doing that. those are the things i have both won positive and one negative. >> when i think about students at snic when i think their lives we also dream of the full glory but also think only of the benefits and not the burdens and sometimes don't see a achieving great success can be a burden as well as a
12:42 am
benefit that it can be really hard to recreate that kind of success to capture lightning in a bottle to be at the right place at the right time and one of the burdens snic carried with the expectation to have great change in the '60s why can you help us solve racial problems in the '80s and '90s with the same success and of the problems that change and the tactics needed and expectations are that people can reproduce youthful success over and over and that is not always true sense in some ways it is both the burden as well as a benefit and one of the things i was struck by yen some ways is the way so many held on to the youthful idealism even as they struggled to reproduce that
12:43 am
success many entered politics and became the chair of the naacp and john lewis became a congressman the person who stayed closest to the ideals is bob moses organized in the '80s the algebra project to teach students in rural mississippi and in the inner city of baltimore and your can boston to call mass literacy to civil-rights of the 21st century. the lives of the civil-rights generation is the people themselves but as a cautionary tale the expectations that people who help to bring about change in the '60s can all hope solve racial problems and today are not even the cents that the story has shifted
12:44 am
in some ways and the things that were successful than may not be successful today with the assumption that if you are at the forefront then you could be at the forefront now is a broad and one we should avoid. >> >> you made reference to the civil-rights movement and it is easy to see from now back the cents birmingham and a little rock and a "time" magazine cover that that was the staal i am curious as to whether there was say sense of them being in a movement as they did it to the
12:45 am
expense -- extend from the back? >> it is a great question and i think it took them a couple of years if we talk about snic to see they were part of a movement in the way we think about it now that is why i said they named it temporary student nonviolence because one of the things i am struck by is how it took a couple years for them to go from the sit-in's to think of a full-time activist but which happens to them their growth violence in jail and it is not really until 1961 the freedom riots a really think of themselves as an activist. if we think of the history of snic by 65 that energy had burned itself out did little bit so it was one of the reasons i say full-time
12:46 am
activism is all consuming and the expectations i am os stock not buy it so much the people that burn out but can't sustain that activist momentum for their whole lives somebody like bob moses and i think if we and heard that it gives us met -- more empathy for the burdens civil-rights activist face and the difficulties they have later in their lives. i think of being part of the movement of the domestic equivalent of the vietnam war i think a lot of activists suffer from a type of ptsd. no. it took them a while to see that there are really part of the movement but one thing that happened right away which i was struck if i was the extent to which they
12:47 am
had a sense of camaraderie with each other and us a sense of group identity partially generational almost from the beginning even after they went back to being students they realize they were connected together in it some way said that sense of cohesion helped produce a tighter snic as the movement went on and that kind of happened very quickly even coming out of the conference as they went back they still felt themselves connected in a way that had not happened before. there is the embryonic cents they were part of a movement >> i would just add to that, excuse me. i was too old to bn snic there was a sense of
12:48 am
movement at least as i saw it and i saw it particularly 1963/64 when a group of non-white people inspired by snic for disorganization called the southern state and organizing committee and they had a culture and a vision and thought of themselves at of a movement inspired by snic a neighbor the white diversion and whites were having more difficulty at that time. so they would organize on white campuses and had an an organization. i knew all of them at that time. yes, i think they have that feeling. there was another side that is mentioned that amongst
12:49 am
the several civil rights movement organizations the naacp all this time they all came together. >> this presentation is focused primarily as the active resistance rich and a large part came after the passive resistance after the boycotts do believe the efforts was a complete chance of timing to make them as effective? >> i am sorry i did not hear the last part. >> was of the confined -- combined parts of the active and inactive or just the timing of when it came to make it so
12:50 am
effective? >> i am sorry i am deaf in one year. >> do you think it was the combined efforts of both efforts or what was just the chance timing that made them as effective as they were? >> yes. [laughter] who is combined? bill. >> such as the boycotts as well as the active resistance of the sit in. >> i got you. well, the boycott could be active but it did make a place -- a point* in some places and the 2010 the
12:51 am
direct action would make a difference than the other part but they made difference is to. i would say and he has written a great book and it is a wonderful page turner and he can answer the question for you. [laughter] >> i think paul mentioned something earlier about the privilege of how hard it is to change that you hear he went to university to teach to hold up the mirror to young southern whites to show how distorted it was and how resistant there were two looking at that. one of the reasons why i wrote the book i thought snic contribution was undervalued and my a friend said your purpose is to write martin luther king and you cannot do that there is a small degree of truth that i think that ingrained
12:52 am
privilege could only be a challenge from the bottom of by breaking the law vocationally you actually have to confront this problem with an active challenge and part of the problem of both legal challenge and a dairy bus boycotts which serve very useful things i don't mean to dismiss them but only to contrast them but part of the problem is they try to work within the bounds of the law and try to change the and just system and the greatness of the sit-in was a step outside of that injustice so we will no longer participate in any way in that system. that was a radical break with what had gone on before. one of the myths that i would like to correct that in part to comment king he
12:53 am
was shot in the fifties but snic has a much more ghandi non violent approach and king has to catch up with that and we also read him back of the boycott when in fact, he was much more timid and cautious in 1957 than he would become in 1962. he is pushed forward by snic which has embraced a much more robust idea of nonviolence and direct action then king none of this to dismiss king contribution but we mythologize him so much we have lost since of the tempo and the timing of the movement and in part to write this book was to restore snic to that.
12:54 am
i say jokingly that this book was written as an angry response to taylor branch america that king years whose title drives me insane because it diminishes almost every other person who participated and snic goal was not to reproduce an organization 1,008 snic but produce 1,000 local movements and in some way king goal was to produce a large movement. so to talk about snic is the extent at which change happened aggressively from the bottom up and in many ways as paul said, that is really the only way you can get white southerners to show an to see how terrible this system was. to all of white americans. >> as another aspect, to answer the question that had
12:55 am
not been asked, king life after 1965 was very different from his life before 1965. and it has been airbrushed from history largely by the right wing. people from george to rush limbaugh. in the last years he argued that the civil rights act of 64, the boat team rights act the 65, close were building blocks. those were the first ups to clear away the debris of segregation. they should make it possible now to move on to other things. what other things? he talked about the wide gap between rich emcor and said
12:56 am
we cannot solve our problems unless we remake what he called the architecture of american society. people like bill buckley called this like keying this kindergarten socialism. it was not that but it was a deep attack on the materialism which is associated with american capitalism. it was a deep attack on the military's them which had characterized their country and lead to death after death after death of people that never should have been in harm's way. two leann once wrote a peace i have quoted in here somewhere but i cannot remember which page that said king "i have a dream" speech had been so misinterpreted because king
12:57 am
said might dream is deeply rooted in the american dream. after 1965, he made it pretty clear that the american dream had so many flaws that we are not really going to solve all of our problems until we confronted much more radical points of view and actions. and that to is the antiseptic hero that we earned every january on his birthday. i wrote a piece, and op-ed piece on this for the fredericksburg paper that the mcclatchy people got it all over from to know alaska to the caribbean. and every response i got says word you get such a crazy idea? that is an idea people will
12:58 am
not accept. young people or old people as an american ballet to think that is part of the real legacy. >> i would just add one thing with the history of snic will we often think about it is it collapsing 1958 or turned radical as a bridge rail of the earlier ideals and one reason why i talk about snic how they'll learn their civics lessons to will we often talk about that as an internal change as if they became more radical for some internal reason and i would say that african-americans became more radical as a result of the external problems which is to say they believed men and women will change, they believe the federal government would stick up for them and johnson wanted justice over expedient see in those turned out not to
12:59 am
be true there adopted more aggressive to get the attention of the nation. and many ways to rethink of the civil-rights movement becoming more radical that is a result of an external forces not some internal change. in many ways black power is a response to the inability of whites to live up to the hope and optimism of snic and they don't lose that. it also sums up that we did not beecher eight liberalism, it the train us that it did not live up to see a deals of justice and equality would be and they adopted a more radical techniques and we should be aware of that instead we think of that coming in turn away.
154 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN2 Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on