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PI: But at any rate, so I became active in the Civil Rights movement. And I went back to Washington that fall in 1960. And we, a group of us went down to Atlanta, I think in late September or early October of 1960. We drove in a car together. There were about six of us, three black and three white, as I remember. There were several carloads going down to Atlanta from Washington, mostly from Howard University. And it was my first trip to the deep South. I'd never been farther south than Virginia. And I had worked on a co-op job, an Antioch job in Virginia between those other two jobs. And this was in rural Virginia, Loudoun County, Virginia, very segregated area. So I recall, in fact I remember in the small town of Leesburg, Virginia where I worked, going to the movie theater there and discovering that they had a separate balcony section for blacks. And you could only get there by an outside stairway, so that you wouldn't be with the white people in the theater. And I remember going to the public library in Leesburg and discovering that it was segregated, too. Blacks could come and check out books, but they couldn't sit down at the tables.

AI: Well, now, excuse me, at the time that you were planning with your friends and colleagues to drive down together, did you have an explicit discussion about potential dangers of being a mixed-race group in a car together going down to the deep South?

PI: I think what we discussed was that we were just going to drive straight through. If we stopped, if we had to stop at a gas station or restroom -- I don't think we even went into restaurants together, we brought food with us -- that we were not going to cause any trouble. We wanted to get to Atlanta. We didn't want to get arrested. So we went to Atlanta, and the conference was at Morehouse College, which is a black college in Atlanta. And the things I remember most distinctly about that were two speeches. There were probably 150 of us at this conference. It was the first National SNCC Conference. And all of the sit-in movements around the country which were fairly uncoordinated before then, sent people from Nashville and North Carolina, and a lot of different places. And there were three people I remember vividly from that conference. One was a woman named Ella Baker. Ella Baker was probably the most influential civil rights activist who never got recognized, partly because she was a woman, I think. She was a very, she was the best organizer in the whole Civil Rights movement. And a lot of people say that Martin Luther King would never have been able to develop the Southern Christian Leadership Conference without Ella Baker. She also helped organize SNCC. She was then I don't know how old. In your early twenties, you think everybody is old. But she was the one who taught us in these workshop sessions how to organize, how to have committees, how to raise funds, how to deal with the media, how to get lawyers to help us when we were arrested.

Another person I remember was Martin Luther King, Jr. And what I remember about him, he, of course, was already famous from the Birmingham bus boycott and all of that, was that he came in, gave a very dynamic speech, and left. Now, I'm sure it was because he had many other obligations, but he did not sit around and spend time with us. He just came in to deliver a message from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had a very nervous relationship with the sit-in students. For one thing, we were all getting arrested, and it cost a lot of money to bail us out of jail. And we were very autonomous and didn't take direction from older people. And they viewed us basically as young upstarts. And this is true, I think, in a lot of mass movements. The younger people, the more active, the more risky kinds of things. But Dr. King gave in -- came in, gave a very good speech about nonviolence.

And then the person who affected me the most was a young Baptist seminarian -- wasn't really a minister yet. He'd been expelled from a seminary in Nashville, Tennessee for leading sit-ins, named James Lawson. James Lawson reminded me a lot of John Lewis, who was another SNCC leader who's now a member of Congress from Georgia, of being at the same time a very down-to-earth, practical kind of person and, and also being very charismatic and inspirational. James Lawson gave a speech -- he's now a Baptist minister in Los Angeles and in his, I guess, mid- to late sixties. But at that time, he was probably the most respected civil -- sit-in leader, probably because he was somewhat older than the rest of us, in his mid-twenties as opposed to teens or early twenties. And a lot of the sit-in students and leaders were high school students, still teenagers. But James Lawson gave an incredibly powerful speech, the theme of which was, in fact I think his title was "Jail, Not Bail" -- that those of us who had been going around having demonstrations, getting bailed out, organizing new ones, were not really making the system hurt. We were not shutting down the system. They could process us pretty quickly. One group would move into jail, another group would replace us. His theme was you have to clog the system. You have to shut it down. If thousands and thousands of people get arrested and stay in jail and don't get bailed off, out, the system will have to either shut down or respond in some way. This will keep up the pressure. And he also said that we have to cut our ties to the system. And it struck me -- and I don't remember, it's not like I have an instant where the thought suddenly came into my mind, and it probably wasn't until I'd gotten back to Washington from Atlanta. I do recall that when we left Atlanta to drive back, well, I remember two things -- excuse me. One is that a group of us was walking around downtown Atlanta, a mixed group -- and it was the first and I think only time I've been in downtown Atlanta. And there was a construction site, building going up, and construction workers who were all white up on the construction, the upper stories, were throwing things at us, nuts and bolts, throwing them down at us. And I also remember driving back to Washington, stopping in one small town for gas I think, and restrooms in South Carolina, and being verbally threatened. And it was a very scary situation until we all piled in the car and left. Nobody got hurt, but I do remember that.

AI: Excuse me. Before that time, had you had any sense of personal danger to yourself or to your friends before that incident where you were threatened?

PI: No. I had never felt personally in danger. I'm not sure why. There were times when I was afraid or nervous. There were some demonstrations, in fact, in Washington where the American Nazi Party would show up and counter-demonstrate, and things would get very tense. But I don't recall feeling that my life was in danger. I think I felt the worst thing that could happen was I'd go to jail. Now, I didn't, that didn't scare me. In fact, I sort of liked the idea that this is a way of putting your beliefs on the line. And you have to remember in the sit-in movement, that going to jail was considered a good thing. Now, a lot of people whose parents -- and of course, my father had died by then -- were very nervous. They didn't want their kids to go to jail or perhaps lose the chance to go to a good school or get a job later in life, but that never bothered me.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.