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Transcription below by: Mae Lee (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

From Mississippi to New Orleans

I then moved into a small community in the Mississippi Delta, called Mileston, and that became sort of my headquarters for the summer. I photographed Freedom Schools there. I went out in the countryside and photographed a wonderful rural church meeting in a little sharecropper community called Valley View. And I ran the project. You know, I dispersed money. I talked to editors in New York. I was on the phone with SNCC headquarters in Atlanta. I tried to keep everything moving. My photographers were out in all corners of the state doing all kinds of interesting things. You wanted a story, that's a story.

So what came of that, all of their work?

Good question. We saw the eight weeks as a pilot for a two or three year university sponsored documentary project. I spent the next two years trying to make that happen and it never happened. I had a dean at Harvard who was very interested in pursuing it. There were people at the Annenberg School who were intrigued. John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was considering doing a show. And one by one all this stuff happened. You have to understand that the Civil Rights Movement is history now. Why am I here? Because people consider it important. At that time, for a lot of people it was just this trouble going on in the South which they wished wasn't happening. Today I could raise money for a project like that instantly. In those days, it was very hard and stuff happened. Also I was busy, I was trying to earn a living. The next summer, the summer of '65, my wife Jeannine was one of three founders of the Child Development Group of Mississippi [CDGM], which was the first Head Start programs in the country—the first and the largest. So I was back in Mississippi, living at the headquarters of CDGM and shooting around the state. It was a very busy active time.

In the fall of '64, SNCC and other civil rights organizations had organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. It was an alternate to the Mississippi Democratic Party which was segregated and racist. They had documented their inability to take part in the political affairs of Mississippi. They had been turned away from precinct meetings and all this stuff. So they had paralleled the political process to bring a delegation to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, which they did. They challenged the seating of the Mississippi Democrats there. Lyndon Johnson, who was afraid of the Dixiecrats and thought that Goldwater might win the election, moved heaven and earth to see that Freedom Democrats were not seated at the convention.

Following that, there was a major re-evaluation of Movement strategy. Up until that point, most civil rights organizations thought that if they could create enough fuss and demonstrate strongly what they were up against, that the northern establishment, particularly the liberal establishment, and also the federal government, which had dug its heals in, could be dragged kicking and screaming into the civil rights struggle. Following the Democratic Convention, we learned that northern liberals would desert us when the chips were down and that we had to do it on our own.

The other thing that happened was that most of those little rural Movement offices around the state were now being run by white people. It wasn't that whites had taken over the Movement. It was that these kids from Yale and Vassar knew how to file and they could type and they had office skills. So they were running the offices. They weren't running the Movement in these places but they were in the offices. The Movement people started looking at this and said, "We don't want this. We've got to learn how to do this for ourselves or we are going to lose control of our movement." So there was a parting of the ways in the fall of '64. It wasn't like Black Power raised its head. That was later. It was like people said, "We're going to have to do this ourselves and you are going to have to leave." So we hugged each other and cried on each others' shoulders and said goodbye.

We had already determined that we were going to move to New Orleans because we did not want to put our kids in Mississippi schools. New Orleans schools were officially desegregated. They were not very integrated but it was a little haven of sanity. I thought that I could set up my documentary project and run it out of there. So a group of us moved to New Orleans. The Free Southern Theatre moved there. The Southern Documentary Project moved there. Jane Stembridge, who was a poet, moved there. A couple of writers moved there. We had the idea that we would form an arts movement out of our civil rights experience. But it was a crazy time. People were burned out. They were stressed. Everybody was very volatile and moving around.

So it ended up with my family and the Southern Documentary Project and the Southern Theatre Project being the only stable institutions that endured in New Orleans. We moved there. We put our kids in school and went back the next summer to help run the Head Start program. Jeannine was Program Director. I kept doing assignments around the South, going back into Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and shooting. But we took up residence in New Orleans in the fall of '64. We stayed there until the summer of 1970 when we climbed aboard our sailboat and sailed to Africa.

What changes did you see in the SNCC offices when there was a parting of the ways?

The winter of '64 was tough. The money dried up. People were living on peanut butter. I wasn't there but I know that it was hard and SNCC was struggling to maintain direction. Interestingly enough, the native Mississippi leadership and the folks that formed the backbone of the Movement were the people in Mississippi.

Transcription below by: Carolyn Kameya (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

These young organizers dropped out of college and provided energy and stimulus, but the real work was done by Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell and Annie Devine and a lot of the people who had grown up and lived in Mississippi. Notice I'm mentioning women. They, rather than being disillusioned by the failure of the challenge in Atlantic City, took the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and built on it and made a viable political organization out of it and carried on. So you had local people carrying on, doing as they could, and SNCC still trying to find its way. A lot of people were just really burned out by the summer. The summer had been so hard, so tough, so little sleep, so much danger, that a lot of people were just shell-shocked. They fell out. They did a lot of drinking. They did some drugs.

Can you recount one or two of these moments or these discussions that you were involved in? Can you think of a pivotal discussion that you were involved in?

I wasn't really involved in these discussions. This was going on within SNCC. I was not a SNCC member. I did not go to the conferences. So I know about them. They're history, they're reported, and I know about this, but I wasn't party to this. I was doing other things. I was caring for my family. I was doing picture assignments. I was building a darkroom and doing some teaching. Our house in New Orleans was kind of a way station. People came through and put their sleeping bags on the floor and printed in the darkroom. Danny Lyon was there a lot shooting and we talked photography late into the night. We were sort of a haven in a way, maybe a rest area for people coming out of the Movement in the South. But we were not, we were never SNCC. We were helpers, volunteers, and so on. I was never part of that inner core so I don't know about those discussions except second hand.