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MN: And then I later worked with what was called the Production Department. And one of the things that they did, SNCC had organized the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi, and they conducted, essentially, a political campaign for governor and senator, I mean, to underscore the point that most Blacks in the state were forbidden to vote, functionally forbidden to vote, practically forbidden to vote. And one purpose of the campaign was to expose the lie that it was because of apathy or indifference to the business of voting, which was absolutely not true. So, the Production office would produce leaflets, posters, written materials for that campaign. They also produced written materials for everything else, including brochures, which I wish I had kept one of, Freedom Summer, which was, which developed later that year. So that I was involved in that. And the Production Department also produced the Student Voice, which was the newsletter at SNCC that was edited by Julian Bond. And then later in SNCC I was, I became a member of the research staff. And one of the things that, one of the things that the research department did was to look into the concept of power structures within, say, particular areas of the south, cities, but also entire states, and what the links were between people who owned the local ruling classes, you called it the white power structure, and the connections between their wealth, their companies, their influences, their economic life, their relationship to the political structure and links even socially. So one of the tasks that I had, and other people on the staff, I tell people, so I wound up reading some of the worst newspapers in the English-speaking world. I yield to no one, in thinking the Jackson Daily News, the Jackson Clarion Ledger and the Greenwood Commonwealth. And I don't know how terrible the tabloids are in England, but it couldn't have been worse than those papers, I mean just for sheer disinformation and racism, which was kind of absolute. But we soldiered on. And it was revealing in a broad context. So that was what I did. There were lots of other things, there were demonstrations, they got arrested, had an inadvertent sit-in.

We went to, a number of staff, SNCC staff went to a reception for the vice president of a newly independent government of Kenya. And we went to what was then the only integrated hotel in all of Atlanta. Atlanta had a better reputation than the reality in that sense. And afterwards, after we left, some bright person from our group said, "Hey, let's go get a cup of coffee and something to eat." I guess they hadn't fed us at the reception. So we got down to this Toddle House, which was a chain of diners in the area. And we went to sit down, and we sat down and we waited and we waited and we waited. It was pretty clear they weren't gonna serve us. So the manger calls the cops and I can't remember now, maybe we had twelve or fifteen people total, maybe about half of that total was female and the other half were male. And there was then a moment which I think of as one of the, kind of underscores the total absurdity of racism as well as its cruelty, I suppose, in certain ways. A guy looks at me, I mean, everybody else in the male group was Black, and there was me. And they were going to put all of them in the same jail, obviously. But then they were going to put me elsewhere, and I said, "Look, why don't you put me in jail with those guys? I mean, I came in with them, I might as well go out with them." And the jailer looks at me and he says, "Well, you're not colored, meaning Black, though, of course, by some definitions now, I would be "colored," but that's another issue. So you're Black, I mean, you're white. And believe me, at no point did that seem more of an insult than it did at that particular moment. [Laughs] So I wound up in the Atlanta City Jail for two nights, and that was a fascinating experience. I was there with a group of students from Oglethorpe University who had apparently had too rowdy a party, and then a cluster of drunks, and they sort of basically swept the streets and put 'em in jail. So in the morning, the Oglethorpe students, I guess, got bail and went out. I mean, our policy for SNCC was "no jail, no bail." This was also just before Christmas, this was about two or three days before Christmas, which was not the greatest time to be in jail and certainly not the greatest time to call your parents. And then we got transferred after two nights to the Fulton County Jail. And it certainly was an upgrade. Not by much, but it was an upgrade. The floors were warm, you had a bed, and I was keeping company with an interesting range of felons, including a wife-beater and bad check passer and who knows? One of the things is you don't ask, "What are you in here for?" At least I didn't ask. And after five days total, turns out that the company that owned Toddle House basically surrendered there, and then a whole series of mass demonstrations in Atlanta, calling on them to desegregate, and they decided to do that. So at that point, I was released. There was a colleague of mine from SNCC, a white guy, who had gotten, also gotten imprisoned after about two or three days, and so we left together, his name was Sam Shira, he was a white southerner. It's a very interesting side story, I mean, he and John Lewis grew up in the same town, but obviously not in the same neighborhood, nor did they ever grow up together. Anyway, so we got out and that was my life as a jailbird, essentially. My character was strengthened immeasurably from that experience. [Laughs] So that was one of the... I've actually written this up somewhere else, but I was very, it was an important experience, I mean, on all kinds of levels, not the least of which was the absolute stupidity, the notions of race. I mean, why not be Black in the context that they had?

But anyway, I flew home, I mean, I got a free, as a staffperson, I got a flight back here. There were obvious questions about what happened and what was that all about? And then I flew back. At some point, I think within the next month, we went to the same Toddle House, and then we were greeted by the manager, the same guy that called the cops, like a long-lost friend. I mean, one of the people we had jailed, by the way, was John Lewis, who was part of one group.

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