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RB: All right. Let's pivot then to some of your own work as an activist. Can you start by telling us a little bit about how you became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and kind of the origins of your work with SNCC?

MN: Yeah, I think that was something that developed over time, I mean, I can probably track some of it to high school. For various reasons, not all of which I can explain or understand, I was just sort of drawn to the struggle of Black people. I mean, or I think I had some sense of being or sharing or supporting this notion of being an underdog. You know, I mean, when, well, just as a kind of a light example, when I was a ninth grader, the freshman basketball coach was a Japanese American named Kunishima. And Kunishima, bless his soul, was a classmate of Richard Nixon at Whittier College. And so he became a quite prominent supporter. Kunishima, though, also took a bunch of us to scout other teams, basketball teams, high school basketball teams, and I remember that was drawn, we would have this task of just checking where the shots were taken, marking where they were made, giving some indication of, you know, the overall percentages, but also where they shot, you know, where the other team shot. And we were, Bridgeton was in, Bridgeton High School, where I went to high school, was in group four, which was the biggest category of high schools, they were the largest population schools. And I remember watching Camden High School, which was, the team was all Black, or at least there might have been, might have been a white guy or two on the squad but never came in to the game. And the coach was white, of course, at that time, but I remember kind of instinctively rooting for them, always, I mean, and there was a game once that we were scouting, where Camden played Collingswood. And there, you know, writ small was kind of a racial struggle. [Laughs] Camden's all-Black, Collingswood's all white, and of course, I'm rooting for the Black guys. You know, he was like that. It was like that. I mean, plus, they were a fun team to watch. You know, they played clean, they played exciting, quick basketball. So I think that impulse was around all the time.

You know, when I read about Emmett Till, I read about the Montgomery bus boycott, my empathy was with them. I read about the sit-ins my junior year, I did a research paper in my English class about the sit-in movement. And then I went to college in '62. And then, you know, things were beginning to bubble up a bit. And then that spring, you have the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, you know, which was just incredibly important in my consciousness. You know, I felt that this is something I want to be a part of. I mean, I didn't stand on top of the mountain and say that and I just, this is something that's crucial. So it all seemed terribly exciting. In school, I wasn't displeased or anything, I just figured, I think I'll go where the excitement is. That's what I did, essentially. So I dropped out of Rutgers. And with an incredible degree of arrogance, or ignorance, or probably both, I just figured I'd go south, I'd go to Atlanta, I'd been attracted to a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from what I could read or see on TV. And that's all I did, I mean, in the sense that I had no local contacts. I didn't know anybody. So I took a bus, I went from Bridgeton to Atlanta, I wound up in Atlanta twenty-four hours later. I think I booked a room or two, I booked a room over at the Butler Street Y, which is the Black Y, and went over to the SNCC office. I mean, not knowing anybody, not written anybody, I hadn't been asked. I just figured, of course, they had lots of room for my hopes and dreams. I mean, on the face of it, it was crazy. I mean, I think about it, you know, twenty, thirty years later, I mean, there was no resume sent in, there was no letter of interest, no references. You know, it was just this movement in the sense that you could do something.

And so I went to the SNCC office, I spoke to two great staff people, a man named Worth Long, who later became a staffperson at the Smithsonian Institute. And Ruby Doris Robinson, was somebody who should be known more prominently than it is, but she was it. She was an early leader of SNCC, female, tough. And I had a great conversation with them. You know, so in other words, I go to this place, not only do I not know them, they don't know me either. And within about a month or so, I wind up being on the payroll. I mean, so I don't know what the lesson of that is precisely, but for me, you know, go where your heart is. And so I wound up being the person on the Watts line. The Watts line was the white area telephone service, which I think had just been initiated by AT&T, where you paid a flat fee and you can make unlimited long distance calls. And SNCC had an approach where people in the field offices, which ranged from Southern Virginia to the Mississippi Delta, would check in, and the process would be that they would they would call collect at the desk in Atlanta, you'd refuse the call, and when they'd call collect, that was a signal for getting back to them. And then you'd write up whatever happened during the day, on the night. And there was always something, you know, some petty harassment, some, you know, traffic charge, a broken window, maybe graffiti. It was like that, and sometimes worse. But it was all chronicled, and that was sort of my job at that point.

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