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RB: So can you talk about how you went from working for SNCC then to the American Friends Service Committee? What did you do in between and what was that transition like for you?

MN: Well, it's actually pretty much of a straight line. I left SNCC just as the war in Vietnam was beginning to, as they say, escalate, and there were more troops being called up, bombing was commenced in Vietnam, and I went back to school. At that point, this is late '64, early '65, being a college student at that point was enough to keep you out of the draft. And that summer, there was, I saw a story about the American Friends Service Committee doing a project in South Jersey. This was just as the War on Poverty began. Congress had passed the legislation establishing the Office of Economic Opportunity, and what was being developed in New Jersey. New Jersey then had a contract with the American Friends Service Committee to do organizing work in South Jersey. And in SNCC, the premise, one of the major premises was that local people should do organizing because once all the cameras go and the mics are gone, the big names are gone, people still had to live there, and then you've got to make those changes, so I thought, well, that sounds right. And there was this opportunity. It was also... so I was hired as an organizer, whatever that meant at that point. And I think the operational model, if I can digress here just a little bit, was a model established or probably affirmed might be the better word, by Robert Moses, who worked in the Mississippi Delta. And there are at least a couple of competing notions of organizing, and they're not conflicting necessarily, but one is kind of focusing on the particular ills and oppressions in our community, and to develop maximum visibility, challenge, this is the kind of model I think we associated with, say, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, maximize visibility. There was another approach, and here again, I said it wasn't necessarily, I didn't see them as being in conflict, but that it was also the work of seeing what people needed, and to have them talk through what they needed and what they were willing to do to get those things. It's a model that, I think, was particularly important in the South among Black people because for hundreds of years, these were people that were told that they were nothing, they were nobodies, incapable of self-governing, incapable of any number of things. And the beauty of the model that Moses was putting forth was, well, everybody is somebody, and let's hear what you have to say about your conditions. It's a very, very slow benefit, and it operates, I think, against a lot of middle class, college-educated notions, you put yourself out there and put yourself forward. It works in the opposite direction. You put yourself back, you hear people out, and it became, essentially, a kind of operational model with SNCC. And so I thought, well, let me give it a shot. So I worked around the area where I lived, these rural areas in Cumberland County, and there was certainly poverty, to say nothing of extended sense of oppression and a feeling of being nothing.

So I worked there for the American Friends Service Committee for that summer, then I went back to college after... and then after one semester back in college, basically it was a... the hell with it. I went back, dropped out again, and then the Service Committee still had an office, it was then shifting gears, working on school desegregation in Bridgeton. We got involved in that issue, also got involved in opposition to police brutality, which I think for non-Black people, didn't exist. Police did what they had to do, for that notion, to protect the "community," which actually meant white people.

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