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AI: Well, just before our break, you were about to tell us about more of your activism in college, and in particular the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. So I'll ask you to start in there, please.

PI: Well, I had gotten involved in the Civil Rights movement on the Antioch campus with the Youth Branch of the NAACP, going to Washington for the Youth March on Washington for Integrated Schools. And I went back to Washington for another job at the National Institutes of Health, what's called the Clinical Center. And I was there, living in the hospital in Bethesda, right outside of Washington. I was part of a, an experiment. It was a very odd experiment they were doing to look at the relationship between your body's production of various hormones and your emotional states. So we had to do two things while we were living in this hospital. One was to keep a daily, very detailed diary and checklist of how you felt every day. And then at the same time, we had to collect all of our urine, and they would measure it and do various tests. And this was all part of a big experiment that never -- we never found out the results of because something happened while I was there, which was that the experiment got closed down. The funding was withdrawn, and the two doctors that ran it were both fired because all the Antioch students who were living in the hospital and a group of students from Howard University in Washington -- which is a, almost all-black, historically black college, university in Washington, and they were living on the ward with us. So there were about twenty us of us all together in this one ward, I think about a dozen or fifteen Antioch students and five or six Howard students. We all became active at the very beginning in the sit-in movement while we were living in the hospital. And the sit-ins started February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina. And they spread fairly quickly. There was a lot of publicity about it, the four young black men who sat down at the lunch counter in Woolworth's. And I remember the pictures in Life Magazine and the television. And so we became very active in that at the very beginning. And we started going out on sit-in demonstrations in the Washington area.

And I recall the first time I was arrested was at a bowling alley in Prince Georges County, Maryland, right across the district line. There was a segregated bowling alley. I don't know who picked it as a target, but we all went there. And we decided to go in in three separate groups. The first group was all white, and that was to make sure that it was open and they would serve us. And so they went in and started bowling. The second group was mixed. I was in that second group. And the third group, which actually never got inside, was all black. Well, as soon as the mixed group came in and the bowling alley staff were quite -- they didn't know what to do, but they decided first of all to let us start bowling and secondly to call the police. So we started bowling. And I have this vivid memory, pretty sure it's true, that I was on my way to a 300, perfect game when they closed down the bowling alley, about the fifth frame. And I remember I was so upset when they put the thing down in front of the pins to shut down the bowling alley, that I threw a ball down there anyway and broke it. So we were, the police came in. It was a very cordial arrest. Nobody was manhandled. We were taken to the county jail in Prince Georges County. And I recall there were several people with us who later became very famous in the Civil Rights movement, Stokely Carmichael for one, who was the national leader of SNCC, a man named H. Rap Brown. And we were put into segregated jail cells, white and black. And there were a small number of women also, and they were put in this separate -- they didn't have a women's section, so they just put them together in one cell. But I remember there was one person with us, and I forget his name, but he was a mixed-race person. And he looked sort of, well, he looked more Italian than anything else. And the jail staff couldn't figure out what to do with him. And so we decided, we gave them a hard time. They first started to put him in the white cell, and we all started yelling, "You can't put him in here. He's black." So they decided they'd put him in the black cell. And they said, "Well, we can't, you can't put him in here. He's not, he's white." And it was turning into a whole comedy. So they finally ended up -- and this is a true story -- they put him in the broom closet by himself until we got bailed out and left the jail.

So we started, and I remember picketing, we picketed movie theaters that were segregated, some of them in Washington, D.C. We picketed the White House. And then the, because of the publicity and the Washington Post had stories about us, this group of students from the National Institutes of Health, the two doctors who ran our project were fired, and they ended it. Now, because the chairman of the Senate Health Committee that appropriated all the money for the hospital was Senator Sparkman of Alabama, and so this was an affront to him. That's why they closed down this project. We stayed in the hospital until the end of our three-month period. I don't remember what project, there were a number of other projects after that.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.