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RD: Later, Walter Johnson asked me to fly back to Atlanta at my expense to participate in a school that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was setting up for the white volunteers who would go and register voters, and I helped to organize a group of students who went. And so I went there and talked and spoke and got to meet Dr. King and had two conversations with him. And then I went on, feeling rather guilty as I wasn't going where they were going, they went to Macon, Georgia, where some of them wound up in jail. But I had, again, through Walter Johnson, met some of the black political leaders. Because this was the time when Georgia was electing, for the first time, black legislators. And when I found out that the UCLA people would go to Macon, I asked one of Walter Johnson's black PhDs who taught somewhere down there, man named C.A. Bacote, B-A-C-O-T-E, about who I could talk to about putting in a word with the authorities in Macon about these students who were going down there. Bacote made a couple of phone calls, and he arranged for me to see a man who was fairly high, a white man, in the Democratic Party. And he grunted and he said, "Well, yes." And he got on the phone, and he said, "Well, you go and see Sheriff So-and-so in Macon." So I arranged to be driven down there and went and talked to him and said that some important people really cared about this, and that we hoped these students would take care of themselves. But if they didn't, which was probable, and if they got arrested, "Fine, you arrest them. But don't put the girls in the drunk tanks with the whores, and try and make sure that the boys don't get roughed up. Because if that does happen, I guarantee you that there'll be some high powered political pressure. But we're going to tell them, I've told them and other people will tell them, to obey the law, and if they break the law, you do what you have to do. But try to treat them in a decent way." And they did get arrested, and nobody complained of particularly bad treatment. I mean, no jail is nice to be in. Gordon Hirabayashi describes the jail that he was sent to here in Seattle as "cockroachy," which I guess is probably what most jails are like. I don't know, I've not been in them. But I then went on to do research at Hyde Park, and I remember I felt terribly guilty that I wasn't down there and doing that, but I had to do it. And the reason I could do that was I had a fellowship which included airfare, so I had just put Atlanta in as a way station on to New York, so it only cost me a few dollars more to go there. And the Southern Christian Leadership Conference paid for my hotel.

TI: And how concerned were you about either your safety or the safety of the UCLA students?

RD: I was terribly concerned about the UCLA students. I was not particularly concerned about my own safety; I don't know why I wasn't. My wife was terribly concerned.

TI: I was going to ask about Judith, because I know you really looked to her for her advice.

RD: She did not object. She later told me she was very... I hadn't realized how nervous she was about it, but she was quite nervous about it.

TI: And she was nervous about your safety or the students' safety?

RD: My safety. She was not concerned about my trip to Atlanta, that was not a problem. Well, she was concerned about anybody getting hurt, but going to Alabama was dangerous, but we were really very well-protected. I wasn't concerned about that. I've never have been particularly concerned about my own safety.

TI: But in looking at the situation, were there dangerous situations that you were placed in during this time?

RD: I don't think so. I didn't feel any dangers. If Lyndon Johnson's troops hadn't been there... well, I wouldn't have been there. No, I don't feel that was in any way dangerous. There were people who were going places, to deepest Mississippi, to Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, to certain counties in Alabama, that was dangerous. The people who marched that first march and gotten beaten so cruelly at the Pettus Bridge in Selma. That was dangerous. What I was doing wasn't dangerous. Atlanta was... well, the Atlanta cops at the airport. I mean, something bad can happen anywhere.

TI: How important was it for the professors at UCLA and students and other universities, other parts of the country, going to the South? How important was that to the movement?

RD: I think it was more important for the people who went, and for the society and to the places they went back to with their stories than it was bringing any particular change in the South. It was good for the morale of the civil rights people, some of them, that they had this support, but this was mostly a black struggle done by black people. Although there was this... when a couple of white young men were killed in Mississippi, that was something. When a white minister was killed in Alabama, that was something, but black people fell like, not in windrows, but large numbers were killed all sorts of places. The white kids killed at Kent State had a tremendous impact. Black students killed at Orange State in the South, very little impact. I don't know what the total casualties were, but they were mostly black casualties. It was black people who paid it, and black people who got it done. Everybody else was an auxiliary. And it was good, and certainly they had majority support, had congressional support, and white people going south, and a few of them getting hurt, did help focus support. But the movement was really a black movement.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.