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Transcription below by: Elana Levin (2007). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

Reflections of the Movement

What kinds of things did they say about the Movement? Did they feel like it was successful, like it was accomplishing things? Or did they feel like there was failures involved?

SNCC was composed of young, radical, somewhat intellectual, mostly black kids quite often from northern colleges. Bob was teaching mathematics at a private school in Brooklyn, I think. Stokeley Carmichael came out of Howard. He was Jamaican. They were reading Camus, Francois Farnnan, and Che Guevara. They were very, very, much aware of radical movements in the world at that time, trying to figure out their place in it. SNCC meetings would go on until three in the morning with long political discussions. If there was a decision to be made it was usually made by a kind of consensus. This involved lots and lots and lots of talking.

In addition to people like Stokeley and Bob Moses, you had Hollis Watkins and Cleve Sellers, people who were born and bred in Mississippi and as teenagers got caught up in the Movement and joined it. These college educated intellectual radical black kids meeting with these high school radical uneducated black kids. It's a very interesting mesh of stuff going on and the women's movement grew out of SNCC. People like Mary King and Casey Hayden published a manifesto in the fall of '64 about the way women were treated in the Civil Rights Movement. This was really the first document of the women's movement. There was all this intellectual ferment and all of these discussions about how to work but the basic philosophy of SNCC was radically different from, say, Martin Luther King and SCLC, which was a minister's organization. The minister is the leader. Here is the flock. He leads to the flock to do things.

SNCC was facilitated and started by a really remarkable woman, who was working with the SCLC, named Ella Baker. Ella's philosophy was that local people have the strength and the determination to run the Movement. What you need to do is facilitate them. So we must work at the projects they want, and we must build the Movement piece by piece from the rural and create a kind of groundswell movement. Whereas King would go in with his leaderships, talk in churches and get people out in the streets. It is very, very different in basic philosophy, kind of approach, to movement organizing. The show I'm curating is going to, for the first time, lay out that whole philosophy. We're going to carry on seminars with the show, trying to get people who come to the show and college students in the area to talk about what their problems are, and how they could use SNCCs organizing techniques to bring social change around about today.

When Bob first came to Mississippi, he was alone. He came in '62. It was a very scary state. Nothing was going on. SNCC at this time thought that the way to do this was to organize demonstrations and try to integrate public facilities. Bob went to an indigenous leader, Amsey Moore, who lived in Cleveland, Mississippi. They told him, "Go to Amsey. He'll get you started. He'll give you a place to live." He was coming in penniless and alone to start a movement in Mississippi. Amsey said, "We don't need integrated facilities. We don't have the money to go to these hotels or eat in these restaurants. What we need is the vote. So you should be working to get people registered to vote." That meant complying with Mississippi laws which said that you had to interpret the Mississippi constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar. Teachers and university professors failed the literacy test for voting in Mississippi. Bob went to McComb, one of the scariest parts of the state, to start doing literacy and voter education.

There's a very good film by Phil Robinson, who did Field of Dreams, about that early movement in McComb. I'm trying to think of the name of it, Freedom Song. You should see that film. It was made in response to Mississippi Burning, a terrible film which distorts the whole Movement. Phil tells very accurately how the Movement grew in McComb and what it was up against and how Bob got it moving. Where was I? They talked about strategy and this idea of Ella Baker evolved into an approach.

Did you feel like it was successful? While you were there and listening to all this?

We were just trying to stay alive and keep it going. I don't think there was a sense that we might be successful until the Selma march. The Selma march was kind of a watershed. That was the first time that people from the North—housewives, mechanics, university professors, pastors—came south in large numbers and joined a civil rights demonstration. That was the first time we had the feeling that, "Yeah, there is a country here that will support us." Until then, it was "We gotta keep on with the struggle." People did it for different motivations. I hadn't grown up experiencing segregation directly. My father was a bit of a racist, probably. Although he never really acted or expressed that way, I think his attitudes were a bit racist. I was there because I thought it was a social cause and I thought we could move forward the movement of nonviolence in the country, by working in the South. The kids I was working with were direct victims of segregation and oppression. That gave them the courage to go into situations that sometimes made my blood run cold. They weren't afraid to die, because they had had enough. That is sort of how it was here.

You know, you talk about the demise of SNCC and black power. Black power didn't start in Oakland, with the Panthers. Black power started in Lowndes County directly following the Selma march with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party started by black people in Alabama using the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act had just been passed, partly as a result of the Selma march, to gain political majority and elect candidates in an all black county where no black person had been registered to vote. In Alabama at that time, you were required by law to create a symbol for your party because a lot of people were illiterate, in spite of the voting laws. The Democratic Party had a white rooster for their symbol, and the Lowndes County folks said, "Well, let's have a black panther." Then in Oakland they asked Lowndes County, "Could we use this?" So they were the second Black Panther Party. Black power changed its meaning. People had always talked about black power. Voting power meant black power. Black power was a phrase used by people who were not at all afraid of involving white folks in what they were doing. But they wanted power for black people. It really meant black empowerment. It was only at the very end, as SNCC was falling apart, that you got very angry people from Atlanta throwing the whites out of SNCC and the organization collapsed. That was at the very end.

Stokeley had a tendency to get carried away by his own rhetoric. I'll tell you a story about Stokeley. Stokeley is this big black power figure who "hates all whites". He had a white girlfriend. I came back to cover the Meredith march in 1966. I had a Post assignment to do a cover on Meredith and to cover the march. I had been a little bit out of movement activities for a little while and I was aware that it was getting more radical and more black oriented. The march had reached the outskirts of Canton. They were spending the night in erected large tents in fields outside Canton. I was coming back in. This tent had no electricity, the tent was totally dark. I strapped cameras on me like it was armor plate, and walked in to the outside part of the tent. It was totally dark. I could hear the speech going on, a very, very radical speech using very strong terms. They were really shouting at the crowd. Suddenly this large black man grabbed me like this and I thought, "Oh shit, here it comes." And then I was thrust back. "Goddamn, Matt Herron! How are you? How's Jeannine? How are the kids?" It was Stokeley.

Stokeley was never the figure that he was portrayed by the press. When Black Power became the slogan of the Meredith march, the people that were using it—Stokeley and Martin Luther King and other people—were astonished by the reaction of the press. They didn't think that this was an incendiary phrase. This is just what they've been trying to do all along. To see the northern press pick this up and say "Oh, the blacks are moving away from us. They hate white people." and so on. That was like, "Wow, where did that come from?" There needs to be some revisionist thinking about the whole black power thing.