I first heard about Highlander Folk School in the spring of my senior year at Huntingdon College, from Anne Braden of the Southern Patriot newspaper. Anne was also affiliated with the Southern Conference Education Fund, or SCEF. During a telephone conversation with her about the “Huntingdon Five” being restricted to campus “for our own safety,” I told her that my dad was willing to go with me to an integrated meeting to test the college’s policies, and she told me about an upcoming meeting at Highlander in Monteagle, Tennessee.
“You and your father might want to come,” she said. “Dr. King and Rosa Parks have both been to Highlander.”
When Dad and I decided to go to Highlander that spring before I graduated, I wanted to learn as much as possible about the folk school. In 1932, seven years before I was born, Myles Horton and Don West founded Highlander School near Monteagle, in west Tennessee. I learned that over the years, Highlander had sparked or assisted a number of important social movements. In college, I had learned a little about one of them—the labor movement. Books on race and civil rights had touched on the importance of labor organizing, especially the difficulty of getting white and black workers in the South to unite.
I thought of Tut Edwards in East Brewton and my early indoctrination in the efficacy of populism. Malcolm “Tut” Edwards used to say with wonderment, “There are so many poor white and colored people, and so few rich people—how can the few rule the many?” Would Highlander help me understand how populism could be successful after so many failed attempts? I was already beginning to wonder how blacks could trust populist leaders who could, if they chose, double cross their black allies and go back to being “good white people.”
Highlander Folk School had worked at the Southern grassroots in the mines, the cotton mills, in the forests with timber and lumber workers, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was taking on segregation. You had to admire their guts and determination to believe that education could provide the necessary cutting edge for social change in the South.
During that period, the school was one of the rare places that black and white Southerners could even meet together. Realizing that I had learned more at Huntingdon through participation and “getting into trouble,” I was intensely interested in the Highlander theory of education, “experiential learning.” The folk school featured learning in the round, with everyone literally sitting in a circle. There were no teachers and no students. All in the circle were both teachers and learners. Director Horton was fond of chortling, “There are no experts here.” Highlander had a reputation of being passionately committed to social justice and racial and gender equality, and its analysis of the South and the nation demanded economic and political justice. An earnest young reporter once asked Myles how he got black and white Southerners to sit down together to eat. Myles told him that the famous adult educational center had a very scientific approach that had worked wonderfully over the years.
“What’s that?” the reporter asked.
“Well,” said Myles, “We use the two-step process, especially on the first day. First, we prepare really delicious food for our hungry folk, and second, we ring the dinner bell. It never fails to work.”
At that spring 1961 gathering of movement folk, I was introduced to more of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee freedom fighters. And I learned from Myles Horton that the school was planning a summer program for Southern high school students who would be entering integrated classrooms that fall. Horton asked if I’d be interested in working at Highlander for the summer as a counselor and lifeguard. I had not had time to think much about what I would do for the summer. Heretofore I had worked summers to earn enough money for the next year’s college expenses. But now, with luck, I’d be a college graduate—grown! I’d be “free, white, and twenty-one.” The world would be my oyster and I was ready to wail. What better way to prepare myself for a life of crime than a summer at Highlander—a hothouse of subversion, known all over the South as a “Communist Training School.” A common billboard seen in the South that summer, besides the one that said “See Rock City,” was one with a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr., Aubrey Williams, and Myles Horton in a Highlander workshop. The caption was simply “communist training school.” I still wasn’t sure what a communist was but it was clear they weren’t segregationists, and they seemed to be a hell of a lot more exciting than the folks I’d grown up with. Besides, any enemy of George Wallace and MacDonald Gallion couldn’t be all bad.
That summer on the Cumberland Plateau was the most exciting in my young life. It was the perfect bridge between two major sections of my existence—before SNCC and after SNCC. Part of the transition from Alabama life to political life was the fact that my little brother, Malcolm, was among the campers. More importantly, SNCC was looking for a white Southerner to join its staff as a campus traveler to interpret the student movement to other young Southerners.
It is ironic that my first extended up-close look at gracious living should be at Highlander, a place that took pride in its identification with the plain people—the poor and the working class. The whole Horton entourage—Myles Horton; his wife Aimee; Charis and Thorsten, Myles’s children with his first wife, Zilphia—was glamorous to my south Alabama eyes. The family lived in a rambling old red split-level farm house they had renovated some years before. Along one side of the large house a spacious patio nestled under an ancient wisteria vine, its trunk as large as a small tree. Next to it a pair of sliding glass doors and a row of picture windows revealed a cool interior where a huge living room was centered around an old-fashioned fieldstone fireplace. The patio, with comfortable wooden lounge chairs covered with brightly colored cushions, was surrounded by a low moss-covered stone wall. A desk and straight-backed chair occupied the back corner of the patio under the eaves of the house. There Aimee was writing a dissertation for the University of Chicago, and I was told that Myles sometimes did some of his writing there.
The patio and the living room, dining room, and den area were serviced by a large country kitchen. Guest rooms ranged down a series of halls fanning out from the patio, the den, and the nearby dining room, which held a table matched in size only by the one I had seen and admired at Virginia Durr’s house in Montgomery. Family rooms were upstairs. Myles and family held court in this gracious “mansion.” At least in my mind it was quite grand.
The house was in shouting distance of the main meeting hall, kitchen, and dining hall but it was isolated enough to give the family some privacy, which they needed because of the constant flood of people who came through Highlander. Having met Clifford and Virginia Durr in Montgomery before coming to Highlander, I was a recent initiate to the Southern salon, the point of which seemed to be to get interesting people together in comfortable surroundings, fortified with food and drink, for the purpose of talking. That’s what happened on the Hortons’ patio and in their dining room all that spring and summer of 1961. It was a wonderful time to be alive. The Highlander family made me feel part of something special—in a place where I belonged. Virginia Durr had once asked me if I was kin to “anybody.” I said no but she accepted me anyway. Highlander people only wanted to know what you had done and what you planned to do about the condition of the world. Talking, apparently, was how these things were discovered. I had thought that preachers, their wives, families, and friends could talk. That was before I met the radicals—the political people. Now, they could talk.
It took a while for me to realize that when Highlander people mentioned Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mary McLeod Bethune, or Jane Addams they actually knew these people—they were friends or colleagues! Myles and Aimee talked about the visit of John Dewey and the merits of Hull House and the Danish folk schools. I learned that Myles had been there and knew whereof he spoke. By example, Myles and the folk school staff taught the value of Mao’s admonition, “no investigation, no right to speak.”
The Hortons’ summer soirees introduced me to activists of the exploding Southern civil rights movement. I met Septima Clark, who would run, with the help of Highlander, the citizenship schools with Andrew Young, Dorothy Cotton, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I met Ella Baker, once acting executive director of SCLC, who became very influential in my life. Mrs. Baker, as the SNCC kids called her, had assured the formation of an independent youth movement inside the civil rights struggle—SNCC. She had become one of the adult advisors of SNCC along with Spelman College professor Howard Zinn and Connie Curry of the U.S. National Student Association in the spring of 1960.
I also met important unsung heroes, like Esau Jenkins, a black bus driver from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, a pioneer in the teaching of literacy and promoting black voter registration. He was continuing the work begun by New England schoolmarms who came South during Reconstruction to address the hunger for education among the newly freed men, women, and children of the former slave states. Jenkins required riders on his bus to learn to read, using the transit time between their island homes and Charleston, where they worked. First, large individual letters were posted in the front of the bus. When everyone mastered the letter, another was added until the alphabet was learned. Then words and later simple sentences were posted, leading to the first “book.” The book consisted of requirements and instructions on how to register to vote. The payment each student owed for learning to read was to recruit another person for the literacy class, and everyone had to become a registered voter.
At Myles and Aimee’s house I met Modjeska Simpkins, who became the board president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, and I met Candy and Guy Carawan, bards and troubadours of the movement—as of 2008 still singing and living at Highlander. Guy taught us an old Southern hymn that Zilphia Horton had first heard sung by tobacco workers on a picket line. The workers had sung, “I shall overcome,” but Zilphia changed it to “we shall overcome.” And for that song, as they say, the rest is certainly history.
Candy and Guy were busy spreading the news and wearing big holes in the bottom of their shoes. Along with Pete Seeger, Guy and Candy helped develop the powerful movement culture sweeping the South and later the nation. Candy, a close friend of freedom rider Susan Wilbur, was a student at Fisk, a white “exchange student” from California, and an earlier sit-inner and freedom rider. Guy was from Pomona, California, and they both talked a little funny with hard r’s and clipped speech. Candy, a blond, blue-eyed comedienne, had written a very funny song about going to jail called, “The Judge, He Went Wild Over Me.” Guy, tall and thin with his banjo, could be mistaken for a slack-jawed mountaineer right out of the Hatfields and McCoys. They were the first full-time movement people I met from the younger generation.
The 1961 summer program was the last act in the existence of Highlander at its Monteagle, Tennessee, location. During the fall and winter the state of Tennessee confiscated Highlander and systematically destroyed the facility, eventually razing the buildings and bulldozing the site. It is not recorded whether salt was sown in the torn-up ground. Myles Horton had always told anyone willing to listen that no organization or institution should last beyond twenty-five years. His theory was that if you can’t do what you set out to do in that time, you’re not doing something right. At one workshop that summer, billed as how to organize for the long haul, Horton described how in the early days he urged the Folk School board—which included Reinhold Niebuhr, Jane Addams, and Eleanor Roosevelt—to amend the charter to require Highlander to go out of business after twenty-five years. Myles could be very persuasive, but the board refused to go along. “That was all right,” Horton laughed, “because every twenty-five years or so the state comes along and destroys us anyway.” That was when he told us that our summer camp at Monteagle would be the last for the Highlander Folk School.
As we sat in the traditional Highlander circle, Myles told the life story of his institution. Then he said a new organization, the Highlander Center, would open in a big house on the river in Knoxville. If you’re a big overripe seed pod like Highlander Folk School and reactionary powers smash you, then seeds fly everywhere.
Listening to him, it was hard to be sad, but later in the bunk house, talking to my little brother Malcolm and the other boys in my charge, I realized that Myles, his wife Aimee, Guy and Candy Carawan, the staff, and board members had every right to feel flattened, but here they were—grinning, rubbing their hands together—looking forward to the next chapter in an exhilarating life. I tried to find out if Malcolm and his new friends in the bunkhouse were getting the lessons, but they only wanted to talk about girls. Malcolm asked what I thought about Tony Helstein and I said I thought she was pretty.
“Yeah, she’s bad,” he said. I thought, how extraordinary that my brother, who until now had never been outside of south Alabama, could have a crush on the daughter of Ralph Helstein, the president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union from Chicago, Illinois, a man pilloried as a communist labor leader. Even more remarkable was the new vocabulary Malcolm was picking up from his black bunk mates.
Malcolm and I also learned that violence is never far beneath the surface in the South, especially when social change is occurring. Highlander was near the cliffs marking the eastern edge of the Cumberland Plateau. The achingly beautiful campus included a lake which sparkled in the clear mountain air. Swimming, however, was an adventure. The first time strangers appeared across the lake, I thought they were waving to us and maybe skipping stones on the water towards us. It occurred to me soon, however, that the puffs of smoke and the popping sounds meant that they were shooting at the black and white kids in the water. As the Red Cross-certified head life guard, I thought it best to order the campers out of the water till the shooting stopped. At dinner that evening, the summer staff announced amended swimming rules. “When shooting starts, everybody out.” In addition we recommended that each swimmer and his/her buddy find a suitable tree or rock to get behind. Snipers became another summer hazard like high wind or sudden electrical storms.
If even the isolated and relatively insulated campus was unsafe, then venturing into town was a trip. Myles and Aimee decided that the entire summer army—campers and staff—needed a break, so they planned a field trip to see Rock City. Many of the campers from the South, black and white, had spent their lives reading the giant slogan painted on the tops or sides of barns, urging that they “SEE ROCK CITY.” Some Southern mothers swear the first words their child ever read were, “thee wok thity.”
Aimee and Myles loaded up their little red English Ford convertible and the rest piled into an assortment of vehicles for the mountain ride to Chattanooga. Somebody shouted, “I want to see the choo-choo.” Another asked if he’d be able to see the shoe shine boy. Another wit asked in a loud voice, “The shoe-shine what?” “Sorry, the shoe-shine man.”
When our group ascended the mountain, it was clear that we were the first integrated gaggle of tourists to see these wonders. It was not long before some yahoo commandeered the public address system asking what the world was coming to when niggers could barge in where only white people belonged. We took the abuse stoically but when the whites began to organize into fighting groups, we thought it wise to group together for a strategic retreat, the adults forming a circle around the smallest children. Safely in the cars, headed out of Chattanooga, someone thought our feelings would be helped by an infusion of ice cream so we all pulled into a Dairy Queen. Since we were served standing up, the counter people didn’t seem upset with our group’s salt-and-pepper complexion. The rowdies, however, had other plans and some began harassing us. What we didn’t realize was that the more serious Klan types were preparing an ambush for us on the road back to Monteagle.
Just as the last camper grasped her ice cream cone an oily-haired local with rolled up tee-shirt sleeves slammed the child against the ice cream shed and pushed the cone into her face. As Susan Wilbur, another of the counselors, and I took the tearful camper by each arm, the crowd began chanting, “Kill the nigger-lovers, kill the son’s a bitches . . .” Beating a second retreat, everyone loaded up in the nearest car. I remember being somewhat torn between wanting to protect my little brother Malcolm and a strange urge to keep a safe eye on my comely new friend Susan.
As our little caravan pulled out slowly from the Dairy Queen, we were careful not to lose any of our cars, even though we were followed by some of the hoodlums who hung out their car windows shouting insults, “Good riddance and don’t ever come back. Go back to New York.” When one shouted over the noise of the hurrying cars, “No, go back to RUSSIA!” we could hear cackling laughter echoing up the mountain road.
Then, without warning, rounding a curve, we were startled to see pickups and cars partially blocking the road, bright headlights pointed at us. In the lead car, Myles could see there was enough room for one car to get through. He waved us ahead at high speed. I remember shouting, “Roll up the windows and duck.” As the right rear window in our car was being raised, a Coke bottle whizzed through and shattered against the left window inside the car. Luckily we were in and out of the gauntlet in seconds. Everybody had their heads down and eyes closed, so, in our car, we were merely drenched with glass particles.
Those country boys proved to be good shots with rocks and bottles so the nurse back at Highlander was up late cleaning glass from eyes and fixing cuts and bruises. Every car in the caravan looked like it had been the loser in a demolition derby. I learned a couple of valuable movement lessons that night. Be cool under fire and make good decisions. Movement cars take a lot of punishment and being in a storm of violence and emotions binds people together—the foxhole effect. If you are being shot at together, you tend to become brothers and sisters quickly.
Another lesson, somewhat more complicated, was repeated frequently in my movement experience. A person with little familiarity with civil rights history might ask, “If you want to make good decisions, why go in an integrated group to see segregated Rock City to begin with?” What is difficult to understand is that the radicals, and especially the young people on the cutting edge of the struggle, made a decision to try to live as if the “beloved community” already existed. In other words we would take great risks to do ordinary things. What, after all, could be more normal than taking a group of young people to the top of Lookout Mountain, where one could see seven states? The only way our group differed from thousands of other pilgrimages to Chattanooga was that we were black and white together. Today, I am sure, not a head turns when tourist buses unload thousands of multicolored travelers to see Rock City.
The most exciting event of the summer was falling in love with Susan Wilbur. Already a movement hero, she was a member of the incredible Nashville student group which had such a stunning impact on black and white young Southerners. Nashville kick-started and energized the entire movement, ending the lull which followed the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I had seen but not met Susan earlier in the spring of 1961 when she and the other Susan, Susan Hermann, committing an act of revolutionary near-suicide, were on the first bus of freedom riders to reach Montgomery and the waiting Klan terrorists. The two Susans and Jim Zwerg were the only whites on the bus as the KKK thugs began methodically brutalizing the black, white, male, and female riders. John Seigenthaler Sr., the personal representative of the attorney general of the United States, tried to help some of the women escape. A group of white women with bricks in their purses were pummeling Susan and the other women while chasing them down the street away from the bus station when Seigenthaler pulled his car alongside. Leaping out, he ordered the women to get into his car. “I’m a federal officer,” he shouted.
Hesitating a moment, Susan pulled away, “Mister, this isn’t your fight—we’ll be all right.”
In that split second, they could have gotten away. As it was, Robert Kennedy’s personal representative was felled from behind by a pipe-wielding citizen of the rebel state of Alabama. Susan and her friends managed to achieve sanctuary of sorts by fleeing into the nearby post office/federal courthouse. Their would-be rescuer, bleeding and unconscious from the nearly fatal blow behind his ear, lay for more than an hour in the bloody, wreckage-strewn street, while the mob tossed broken news cameras, clothes, toothbrushes, suitcases, and college school books into garish mid-street bonfires. When Susan told me this story I thought that Seigenthaler, attorney general’s representative or not, was lucky to survive his trip to the Cradle of the Confederacy. I knew Susan and the others were also lucky to be alive and I marveled at her calm assertion that she would do the same tomorrow if it became necessary.
I told Susan my own story from the point of view of a non-terrorist member of the crowd at the bus station that day. This shared adventure got us introduced, but it was hormones and Susan’s beauty which took us the rest of the way. I was captivated by her red hair, and her healthy, outdoor complexion spoke of days on horseback in the Tennessee back country. She was ruddy and rosy red and her slightly up-turned pudgy nose with little freckles fit perfectly over her pouty and, I thought, extremely kissable lips. Lithe and shapely, Susan was less self-conscious about her body than any woman I had ever met. She was the first example I’d personally experienced of many women within the civil rights movement who were challenging both gender and racial boundaries. Maybe she came by it naturally; her mother, a working single mom, had obviously instilled in Susan an appreciation of female liberation even before that’s what it was called.
Susan had brought her jumping horse to Highlander to augment the folk school’s small herd. Soon after we met she invited me to saddle one of the Highlander horses and ride out to the cliffs with her. Deep into the farther pasture, we jumped the fence and rode along the precipice looking into the blue distance of the Cumberland Mountains. With an intense feeling of euphoria, I rode along behind this beautiful woman. That day and over that summer at Highlander, Susan introduced me to a level of relationships and intimacy that was new to me—natural and free from repressed guilt. I could not help comparing the experience of loving Susan with that of my high school and college romance with a girl I had assumed I would eventually marry, because that’s how it was supposed to work in those days. My earlier girl friend and I had been inhibited and frustrated, and as our college years ended it became clear that the security of marriage was really more significant to her than the mutual giving of a relationship.
Susan was nothing like that. Guilt and repression were not a part of her love equation. I was even more astounded and delighted when, on our first visit to her home in Nashville, her mother obviously was accepting of our affection for each other. Breathing a silent prayer of thanks for the people of the upper South, I was amazed at how different they were from the ones I’d grown up with in Alabama. The people of the Bible Belt participated in a lot of sex—but they always had to pay. Anything that much fun must be a sin and the wages of sin is death—and don’t you forget it. I could barely keep up with the changes occurring in my naive, country, and church-encrusted life. The atmosphere of freedom at Highlander, which placed a premium on respect for young people and respect for privacy, was unlike anything I had experienced before. That summer with Susan gave me the first inkling of what it was like to be grown up and free.
Trips to Nashville that summer began a pattern that was to last through my first period as a SNCC staff member. Between organizing trips and jail stays I always found an excuse to go to Nashville for a few idyllic days with Susan, my first mature love. It helped that Nashville had the most active local movement in the South in those days. Many of the early SNCC stalwarts were still attending college at one of the myriad institutions in the Athens of the South. Susan’s sister and her mother seemed to take it on as part of their duty to the movement to patch me up for the next round of action in the deep South. Nashville became a reliable and relatively safe “rear” area, specializing in R&R and spiritual renewal. The colleges and universities of Nashville served the purpose during the early days of the student movement that New Orleans later served when the action moved from the border areas of the upper South to the Deep South arena of SNCC’s middle period—when Mississippi burned.
The greatest favor Susan did for me was to introduce her trench mates—the black and white brothers and sisters with whom she had shared jail cells and death-defying freedom rides. Her sister was a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where Marion Barry was also a graduate student in chemistry. At the founding meeting in 1960 of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Marion had been elected temporary chairman. One weekend during the summer, Susan and I drove from Monteagle to UT to visit her sister, who suggested that we call Marion. The summer session of the university was almost over and I knew by then that I was going to work for SNCC in the fall. I was excited about the opportunity to talk to a SNCCer who had been there from the beginning. Marion Barry and other black activists had high respect for Susan and her sister who had made their bones in the struggle while most young white Southerners were either too timid or too reactionary to even dream of sitting in, much less courting death on a freedom ride to Montgomery, Alabama. Marion, the two Wilburs, and I found a restaurant near campus where we could talk and drink coffee. We were so high on freedom that we didn’t anticipate what was about to happen.
The four of us sat in a booth next to the front plate glass window, where we ordered coffee and doughnuts from a rather sullen waitress. As soon as she disappeared through swinging doors, an older man approached us and stated as though it was a clear matter of fact that we would have to leave. Identifying himself as the manager, he said that it was time to mop up around the booths as it was near closing time. We had chosen the diner because it had a sign out front which read, “We Never Close.”
While the manager frantically motioned to a younger man who approached with a pail of water and a mop, we quietly but firmly offered to move to the tables, out of harm’s and mops’ way. The young man, either slow or vaguely sympathetic, protested to the manager that, “We never mop before midnight . . .” The manager’s face flooded red, shouting that we were conducting an illegal sit-in (I wondered if there was any other kind). He promised to have us all arrested. Susan put her face in his and said through clenched teeth that we had not intended to have a demonstration. She told him, further, that we only wanted coffee but he had now embarrassed us and everybody else in the restaurant.
“You’ve made it an issue so now we don’t intend to leave. Besides,” she said, “we thought you were already integrated, that’s why we came here.”
All this time Marion Barry was trying to calm Susan and her sister. Thoroughly up in arms now with the bit in their teeth, the two of them were threatening to organize a twenty-four hour picket around the diner.
“Be cool, be cool. There’s no real need to get arrested over this—let’s just leave now and we’ll deal with this backwardness later.”
While Marion was trying to calm everyone, the unexpected happened. A man wearing a brown tweed jacket slowly rose from his seat and reached for the shoulder of the manager. We were moving towards the door when the manager slapped the stranger’s hand away and shouted to the cooks and waitresses, all of whom were peering from between the swinging doors, to call the police. “This man has assaulted me and I intend to see that he is taken to jail.”
At first I thought he was talking about Marion, but I soon realized that Barry was trying to control this the tweed-jacketed man who was trying to grasp the lapels of the manager’s rumpled suit.
“I most certainly did not assault you, sir, but I consider it an outrage the way you are treating this black man and his friends. I will not stand by and let you insult them in this manner.”
It made Marion nervous for white people to be arguing; he gave me a pleading look as if to say, what should we do now? I must have looked pretty useless but I managed to whisper that whatever we were going to do we should do it quickly. I nodded towards four policemen leaping from their cars, heading our way. We wound up following the police down to central lockup to arrange bail for our protector who, it turned out, was a new professor at UT and unused to blatant racism. We told him that he would soon get used to it, or he could look forward to spending a lot of time in jail. The professor laughed and said he’d never done anything like this before. “Something snapped,” he said. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. I just took my PhD exams today.”
We gave statements that the teacher had not assaulted the restaurant manager, but they charged him anyway. Years later, when Marion was mayor of Washington, D.C., I asked him if he remembered the stranger who got so upset when we were thrown out of the restaurant in Knoxville. Marion mused, “That happened in 1961, I wonder whatever happened to that guy?”
Highlander was also the scene of my first face-to-face meeting with Anne Braden. I had only talked to her on the phone up to then, and I don’t know exactly what I expected. I remember being mildly surprised at her easy Southern manners. Anne was passionate and intense without being overpowering. My little group at Huntingdon had become accustomed to feeling at total odds with “the Southern way of life.” It was comforting to recognize Mrs. Braden as being truly Southern (from Alabama) while holding such apparent non-Southern beliefs and opinions.
When Anne had first called us at college (and I did consider it “us” and not just me), we were titillated with the idea that these “communists” we had so forcefully been warned against, would, of course, hold unorthodox views. Now here she was all soft Southern comfort, with a somewhat old-fashioned beauty that might grace an ad for the Clairol look.
She played a role for generations of young Southerners that made us comfortable in opposing segregation and racial hatred. She did, in person, what Professor C. Vann Woodward, in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, did in print. They held that one could be both a good white Southerner and an active opponent of segregation.
If Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. had convinced me to join the struggle, it was Anne Braden who showed me how to do it. In retrospect, Anne, more than any other person, can claim credit or accept blame for guiding me into the century’s most titanic clash.
In the meantime, I had been accepted as one of the eighteen Southern participants in a program called the Southern Student Human Relations Seminar. It was sponsored by the U.S. National Student Association, and held on the campus of the University of Wisconsin for three weeks in August. The director was Constance Curry, and the advisor was the Reverend Will D. Campbell. Connie and Will built on the foundation already put in place for me by Myles Horton, Anne Braden, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and the students. The seminar provided much education on Southern history, movement issues, and I carefully read C. Vann Woodward’s book, wishing I had read it for sociology at Huntingdon.
The human relations seminar was a watershed event for me, even though Connie told me later that she and Will were concerned that I might be “too advanced” for the other participants. This might seem strange since this was very early in my human relations “career.” About the only things I had done up to this time was the student activism at Huntingdon, observing the freedom ride in Montgomery, and working for the summer at Highlander. The idea that I might be too movement-savvy for the seminar, then, says more about the level of most of the participants than about me. The NSA, the YWCA, and the various church organizations were doing a fairly good job of providing entry-level experiences to young grassroots white and black Southerners. In my opinion the seminars run by Connie and Will were the best of these efforts.
Having successfully scared all of us into reading the required materials and books, Connie and Will had the perfect opening for the seminar. We were all familiar with ice-breakers, but the Curry/Campbell dog-and-pony show was nothing short of a glacier-breaker. While Will plucked his guitar and sang along, Connie led out with a lusty version of the country classic made famous by Burl Ives, “Little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown, had it made up not to make a frown but a little bitty tear let me down . . .”
After that performance we had nothing to worry about. We could not say or think of anything more hokey. If we had worried about making fools of ourselves, it was now clear sailing. Will would shift his chew of tobacco from one cheek to the other and start another verse. Soon we were all singing along with the two of them like we had grown up together, which I suppose was the point. Will was always laid back with a mysterious air like he knew all about the night of the hunter. His black slouch hat and the old black preacher suit he wore spoke volumes about his attitude toward life, race, and everything else.
Connie and Will were obviously having the time of their lives at the seminar, mentoring us youngsters and it was clear that they delighted in introducing us to the curriculum subjects and the writers, historians and others we met that late summer in Wisconsin. Madison itself was a major player in our education, many of us having never been out of the Deep South. I remember eating in the university dining hall. The food was exquisite. I had never had vegetables that still looked like their fresh selves. The peas were still green and the carrots still yellow, and even though they were cooked, they still had a snap and a crunch. At first I thought they were a mistake. Maybe the fire went out and the cook did not notice.
During our down times when not in seminar, Will and Connie were nowhere to be found, so we explored the campus and the surrounding area on our own. I remember a Sunday afternoon when a group of us strolled the length of a long peninsula far out in one of the beautiful lakes surrounding Madison.
Families and their friends were gathered around endless grills laden with the most delicious-looking and -smelling sausages. Everybody was turning up glistening cans and bottles of Milwaukee’s finest beers. I remember D’Army Bailey whispering to me not to stare so hard at the people’s food. That admonition was followed by the sotto voce observation that there were not many black people out on the peninsula that day. “Maybe they are all still in church,” he speculated. Bailey was from Louisiana and would become a respected judge in his adopted state of Tennessee. Memphis was more like Mississippi and Louisiana than the rest of the state. I like to think that Connie’s seminar gave him a giant boost up a tall ladder. D’Army may have learned from me and other white students that not all white Southern males are gothic throwbacks.
Eventually our seminar group approached the end of the walkway where we discovered a racially mixed group tending several grills. A few folks, black and white, with cane poles, stared intently at bobbing corks in the peaceful lake water. As we arrived, an older black women sang out, “I got one,” hauling in a decent-sized yellow perch.
A black man hollered back, “Hold her, I’ll be right there.”
Brushing corn meal off his hands, with the red apron around his waist, the old man reached for the wiggling fish. He took it to a folding table and began scaling.
We were fascinated and I remember saying to D’Army, “Say, brother, who’s staring now?”
A couple of young black fellows looked at us as if to say, “These old folk will never change.” I noticed that the younger men had rods and reels. Using the opening, I asked, “What y’all fishing for?”
“Walleye,” he said, “or muskie. You can get a really big one here—if you have the right bait and equipment and know how to use it.”
“And what’s that?” D’Army asked.
“Live minnows, and this,” the other young fisherman answered, pointing to his shiny rod and reel. “Course the bait and the rod does no good if you don’t set the drag real light. One of these big ones hits, he can take thirty feet in two seconds. Set her light, let him run, and reel him in slow with your tip way up.”
One of the white boys in our group said, “Keep yo’ tip up so you don’t give him no slack. Cut him any slack and you got no fish.”
D’Army displayed his sense of humor when he fake-punched the young white Southerner and whispered for everybody to hear, “Y’all got a lot of experience in not cutting anything no slack.”
Our laughing was interrupted by the sound of heaven when the old folks took pity on the six of us. “Y’all had dinner?” It was the older man who was scaling and frying the fresh fish. “Everybody here done ate much as they can hold. Plenty more fish, brats, beer, and potato salad Momma made. Want some?”
A more rhetorical question was never asked. We descended on the table making the old folks happy. The young fishermen stuck their rods in holders and ambled over, intrigued with our obvious Southernness and being together. We described the seminar and they turned out to be university students from the South. They said to check out a meeting that week of the Socialist Club. I almost fell over: “You mean they won’t get arrested?
“Not in Madison,” one of the students said.
Back at the seminar Monday morning, we learned a little more about our hosts, Will and Connie. Will was born in Amite County, Mississippi, and had experienced a lot more than most coming from a born-again Southern Baptist background. I identified bone-deep. I had no idea where he was going, but I was willing to go with him. I was responding to something in Will that resonated with lots of young white Southerners. In the same way that historian Vann Woodward taught, through the writings we were studying at the seminar, that one could be a good Southerner and still oppose racial oppression and segregation—Campbell taught by example and his presence. I observed later that Will Campbell became a respected mentor of several generations of young Southern churchmen, through his writings, his witness, and his pulpitless ministry. I discovered that he refused to reject Klansmen and their families, pastoring them in sickness and at their times of death, performing their marriages, and baptizing their offspring. He also became a mentor, guru and sage to the Nashville music crowd who lived near where he settled in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. This, I think, is particularly important because a right-wing, quasi-racist attitude was almost required if one was to succeed as a country music performer. A recent example of dissension which was severely punished by the industry was the treatment of the Dixie Chicks when they criticized President Bush.
Connie, who had grown up in the South but was the daughter of Irish immigrants, seemed like a Southern magnolia at one moment and a stateless, regionless sage the next. She would be enormously important in my future life, already serving, along with Ella Baker and Howard Zinn, as an “adult advisor” to my organization of choice, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It didn’t occur to us youngsters that Connie was just three or four years older. In the fall of 1961, James Rufus Forman would become the dynamo we called the SNCC executive secretary. Funny that we didn’t think of him as an adult, even though he must have been older than Curry.
Being accepted for the seminar gave me a strange sense of peace and at the same time it quickened my pulse. The old saw about graduation throwing one out into the cold cruel world would not apply to me.
When I was first talking to Anne Braden in the early spring of 1961, I didn’t know she and the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) were on the lookout for someone to work on the SNCC staff. Anne mentioned the “white student project” to me during the first meeting at Highlander and gave me some history of the idea. SCEF people had been excited about the student movement when the first sit-in occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Anne started thinking of getting Southern whites to see that civil rights was their fight, too. At the October 1960 SNCC conference in Atlanta, Anne had the chance to meet many of the new young SNCC leaders and realized that the group was firmly under the leadership of young Southern black men and women. The gathering also included over a dozen white Southern students. Anne realized that young black and white Southerners had an opportunity, through joint struggle, to forge more intimate and stronger bonds than any of their elders had ever had through “talk” meetings and socials.
She initially hoped to convince Jane Stembridge, the first white Southerner to serve on the SNCC staff, to take on the job of “campus traveler” to white schools. Stembridge told Anne that she didn’t plan to remain on staff. SNCC could afford only one full-time worker and she thought it should be a black person that replaced her.
Jane’s decision to leave was also prompted by the shabby treatment afforded veteran organizer Bayard Rustin, who was dis-invited to be the keynote speaker at the October 1960 SNCC meeting in Atlanta following complaints from several foundations threatening to withdraw grants.
Though Bayard was close to Martin Luther King Jr. and had advised King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he was a socialist and had once been in the Communist Party. Worst of all, in some minds, Rustin was a homosexual. Looking back, it is strange how communism and homosexuality were given so much power by those who feared them and how they could be raised to taint the work of the civil rights movement.
Anne also learned that debate had, in fact, roiled all summer about SNCC being associated with SCEF because of the “communist question.” SNCC decided to have her at the conference as an invited “observer.” Braden thought the best way to take the weapon of red-baiting and homophobia away from our enemies was to simply refuse to play the game. If liberals and movement people refused to red-bait themselves, the tactic could not possibly tear the left apart.
Anne continued to look for a white person to be the campus traveler to white campuses, and I was thrilled when I was chosen in the summer of 1961. SCEF agreed to send SNCC a $5,000 grant to pay me a stipend and expenses, and after leaving the NSA Seminar and Congress in August, I returned to Alabama to get ready for a murky future.