- Sensitivity training. One of the reasons that when I get on the staff of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice and we're doing all those police brutality hearings in New York City. The reason I do a ten-page chronology of police brutality cases for the previous ten years is because I knew what to do from SNCC. That training came to me from SNCC. It's not because I dreamed it up, it's not because I knew it from knowing it myself. What happens is that you realize the necessity for always having a factual base for the information that you're giving out so people just don't think that you're making it up. 

- I'm going to go ahead. 

- Yeah. 

- Okay, I have been told we're down to about a minute and a half at this juncture, so we'll entertain your questions. Sir, go ahead. Or your comment. 

Student: My question is do you know as far as my generation, young black male and females, what is going on, and I just want to figure out how -- What would be the best way for them to see the past and take the past and bring it to the future? Because the struggle is not over and we still have a long way to go to get there. It feels as though they're being pacified in this time, that, 'Okay, we're done, we don't need to work hard, 'we don't need to struggle, we don't need 'to do this again, go through that.' What attitude did you all have at that age that made that conviction so strong that you all changed everything? That's what I'd say. 

- I walk around, okay? The answer to that question ... Are you in school now? 

Student: Yes, sir. 

- In college? 

Student: Yes, sir. 

- Get your degree, okay. Let's take 40 years ago. How many of you here are students at Shaw now in this room? Anybody? About 40 years ago, if you were a student at Shaw about to get your degree next month, you would've had to scramble to get a decent job if you were not a teacher or going into a government agency. Today, that is not true. The unemployment situation here in the Raleigh area is one of the lowest in the world. All you need to do is to get your education and you step immediately into the middle class. Everything you need to do, and this is one of the things that's causing so much poverty within the black community, is to stay with your family and take care of your family. A major cause of poverty in the black community today, young black males leaving their families and not taking care of them. So number one, get an education and you step immediately into the middle class. 

Dissenter: I protest. 

- Would you please? 

- Would you please, sir? 

- Poverty is a consequence of four hundred years of racism ... 

Muriel: Let him finish and then we'll hear from you. 

Dissenter: And those young black males are already in poverty. 

Woman On Panel: Well, so why don't you come next? 

Dissenter: Their behavior is a reaction to poverty and not being -- 

Muriel: Okay, let me say two things. One is -- (applause) 

- Hey, Thomas. Hello, Reverend -- (laughs) Might've expected a SNCC meeting. 

- I think that black people will join under the system and then proceed to do what George Will does and Pat Robinson does and say, 'It's only a few dysfunctional black people who cause a problem with America,' are doing nothing but putting on a year 2000 definition of racism of 1850. (applause) 

- Okay, first -- Excuse me. I'm the moderator. First, Hank. Would you finish your comment? Thank you. And then we'll hear from other people. We may have to take another couple of minutes to round this one out, okay? 

- Thank you very much. I stand by what I said. get your degree. Get your education. You step immediately into the middle class. (disagreement in audience) 

Woman On Panel: I'm sorry, who has the floor? 

Muriel: He hasn't finished, Reverend. They got to hear from you. 

Dissenter: I am continuously -- 

Muriel: Okay, but you are out of order, brother. (Dissenter continues) 
Brother. Brother. 

Dissenter: And they cannot find a stable home, neither in 

Muriel: Okay. I agree with you. 
(Dissenter continues) 

Dissenter: Or sales or in social service. 

Muriel: I would agree with you, but this is not the way we're gonna -- 
(Dissenter continues) (hits podium) this is not they way we're gonna proceed. This is not the way we're going to proceed, brother. No, you are out of order. 
(Dissenter continues) You are out of order, brother. You are out of order, and I am not gonna let you speak. Now, I'm the moderator. 

Woman On Panel: Thank you. 

Muriel: Okay? Go. 

- Just to sum it up, get your education, take care of your family and the last thing in living legacy as far as I'm concerned, and this is one man's opinion of what the civil rights movement has done, it has expanded and literally, if you will, created the black middle class. Without a middle class, no group of people -- Without a middle class, no group of people makes progress. This country has been a magnet for those who come here hoping to get into the middle class and that has happened. In the 1960s and prior to us getting involved and knocking down these laws, we were not allowed as a people to enter the middle class. You go to college so that you can become a part of that middle class. You get an education. I know the word middle class unfortunately has become a pejorative term for some folks. But folks, when you go to college, you don't get a degree so I can become a better poor person. You get a degree so that you can have a standard of living that is good, that you can support you family. Basically, this is what has happened today and this is the legacy, this is the fruit of what we have done. 

Muriel: I'm gonna -- Okay. Hank, I'm gonna cut you off. I'm gonna close this one out and I'm gonna lay something out for the group because we've been told we have to close. Let me say this to you. That's Hank's opinion. That's not all of our opinions and I want you to be clear about that. I work in prisons every day, okay? I work with brothers who are coming in with the college education, okay? Et cetera. So I want you to know that while Hank is providing his viewpoint -- And Hank was a part of us, and that's one of the things I wanted to say, that we always had room for everybody's opinions. (agreement in audience) 
This is a very big world. There are millions of people that you hope to move. You're not gonna channel everybody down the same highway. People are going down other highways. The point of the matter is, with the way that you are gonna proceed in life, do you see the minefields? Are you in the position to make a decision that is on behalf of people? Will you engage in things that are on the other side? Will you join the people who are enemies of the people? You understand what I'm saying? And these days are very problematic, and you can tell just from this brief entree, that there were differences and there continue to be differences. So I'm gonna yield to the conference coordinator here who's asked us to close this session. Hopefully, we can take some of this fire onto the next level and try to get some more into this discussion. Brother, did you want to say something? Okay. Sister, there you go. 

Coordinator: Thank you. 

Muriel: Thank you. 

- Let me just echo what was just stated, and let me tell you something as you take out your program pieces and take a look at them. There will be lots of wonderful opportunities for us to engage in these discussions both formally by means of the various workshop sessions that are planned, and also by means of the chatroom which we will have available. The chatroom is not the computer chatroom, it's a room where you can enter and there will be SNCC veterans who will be there, and they may or may not have similar opinions. In fact, they may have opposing opinions. And I think that would be a wonderful opportunity for young people to hear the varying opinions. We don't want anybody to leave angry with anybody because -- Well, I won't say what my former ex-husband used to say about opinions and parts of the body, but we all have them. Yes, Dr. Payne, you're trying to get my attention? [Dr. Payne] I was gonna suggest if other people want to view this discussion, so for those who really want to do that, you can use the first afternoon session in the chatroom to start off specifically around questions. 

- Exactly. 

Muriel: That's fine, that's good. 

- Let me then share with you some information that you don't have. If you have this piece of paper that says Thursday, April 13, please look down at the first thing is 11:30, lunch. Some of you signed up to go to the Peace Lunch Forum which will be over at NC State. It's there because that program is one that's been in place for many, many, many years. They do lots of wonderful things and bring various speakers. In being a part of this celebration, they asked that they do their traditional program there. So we're inviting those of you who've already signed up to go to go over there. What about your lunch? Well, it will be in the Talley Student Center and you can purchase your lunch in the Talley Student Center or if you happen to be on the second round of shuttles, you can get lunch from around here someplace, but be ready to get on the shuttle. We will have shuttles provided for you to go over to NC State, and we will bring you back from NC State. That will take place between 11:30 and 1 P.M. Then, starting at 1 P.M., when we come back, we will come back to the Raleigh Convention and Civic Center, which is across Wilmington Street, all right? It's right next door to the Sheraton hotel. It's a part of that complex that's on the Fayetteville Street Mall. That's where the afternoon concurrent sessions will be held. I'm going to read the sessions, I'm going to read the names of the persons who are going to be on those sessions so somebody doesn't come up to me later and say, 'Who's doing that?' But I will tell you that I'm a teacher and I only like to give instruction -- I'm also a grandmother, and that's what I tell my grandchildren all the time. I'm gonna tell you one time. 

- [Woman In Audience] Is this printed anywhere for the panelists, even? 

- Unfortunately, it isn't. Now, let me just try and explain what happens when you try and do something like this and you've got bits and pieces coming from all around the country. We don't all get it all when we need to have it all so that it can be concise, but we're gonna work with it, we're gonna help as much as we possibly can, we're gonna try and do something special for the panelists because I know they're gonna be concerned about it. For the benefit of everyone else right now, I'm gonna read out who's doing what and the room numbers that you can look for when you go to the Civic Center, okay? Starting -- Yes? 

Man In Audience: You don't have enough people for a variety of different panels. 

Muriel: Yes, that's right. (laughs) 

- Brother Payne, let's have a meeting. There's been a proposal we don't have enough people for a variety of sessions when we do the concurrent sessions. Given the number of people who have registered, they must be somewhere. What do you want to do? What do we want to do? [Payne] I just have a feeling going by the elevators, (audience chatter drowns out Payne) but what is also happening is people are just sort of trickling in, and that by the time 1 o'clock comes, I'm expecting to have a full theater. That's the way it appears. 

Muriel: So we go forward. 

- I hear motions to go forward. All right. 1 P.M. to 2:45 P.M. Emerging Scholarship on Miss Ella Baker and Grassroots Organizing, the moderator is Joanne Grant, the panelists are Hasan Jeffries, Abigail Lewis, and Barbara Ransby. That will be held in Room E2. There will be a film, Eyes on the Prize, a segment of Ain't Scared of Your Jails with discussion -- Actually -- Dr. Payne. 

- [Woman In Audience] Charles. 

- Charles Payne. Ain't Scared of Your Jails. The film. We're on the second panel. 

Muriel: He doesn't know what you're talking about. 

- The film Ain't Scared of Your Jails? 

Muriel: Where? 

- Is that gonna be shown today or just discussed today? 

Payne: It was gonna be both shown and discussed. 

- Today, right? Okay. Where are we showing the film? (microphone does not pick up Payne's answer) 

- All right, that'll be in Room E3. Something's a little bit different about that for me. The third one is SNCC Culture: What Held Us Together. Gosh, and it must have been a lot of talking and dialoguing and arguing and getting points across. All right. We're gonna stay together. Ivanhoe Donaldson, Jim Foreman, Judy Richardson, and Charles Sherrod are on that panel, and that will be in Room E4 in the Civic Center. The fourth session, Black and White, Together or Separate. Panelists are Joan Browning, Martha Norman if she gets here, she's driving down, Muriel Tillinghast, and Bob Zellner. That will be in Room E5. Organizing: The Mississippi Experience. Panelists are Sam Block, Laurence -- Is it Guyot or -- Guyot, Mary Lane and Wazir Peacock. That will be in Room D3. 

- [Person In Audience] If it is, it's in the room with Eyes on the Prize. 

Woman On Panel: No, you said D. 

Muriel: D as in David. 

- D for David, 3. The first one was E, as in elephant. Time now is 3 to 4:45. Telling Our Story: Women in the Movement, will be the Deep in Our Hearts book authors, we didn't get their names so I can't tell you who all those folks are, but that will be in room E2. Teaching the Movement: What Do Students Learn from It? John Ditmore, Martha Norman, Cleveland Sellers. That will be in Room E3. Teaching the Movement through Music: Song Leaders, Betty Feitz, that booming voice, Sam Block, Wazir Peacock, and Bill Pearlman. That will be in E4. Group-Centered Leadership: What Did We Learn in the 60s? Charlie Cobb, MacArthur Cotton, Casey Hayden. Room E5. Where Are We Today? Issues of Race, Justice, and Peace. James Lawson, Charles Sherrod. Room D, David, 2. Another film, Freedom on My Mind and the discussion following that is Victoria Gray. That will be in Room D3. D like David. The Research Committee Room will be announced because it'll have to be one of the rooms that you are exiting from. So find me and we'll have that taken care of for you by that time. I might as well continue with the rest of what's here for Thursday so that you can note that right now. Dinner break is on your own. Moore Square is right up the street, and other nearby restaurants. I'm coming back. At 7, here in Estey Hall, the showing of Fundy, with a discussion following that. Miss Ella Baker: Developing Grassroots Leadership. The moderator is Dr. Willie High and the panelists are Joanne Grant, Charles Sherrod. That will be here in this room. I see some hands, yes. 

Audience Member: Just a point of information, this weekend, it's the shutdown of the IMF World Bank WTO too in D.C. There are two buses going from North Carolina, one from Chapel Hill, two blocks up the street from UNC-Chapel Hill. One going from Durham with students from Central and Duke. We leave on Saturday morning at 6 A.M. and 8 A.M. respectively. So many of us will not be able to participate in the big day on Saturday. So I'm really taking issue with that, go to lunch now, kind of a rigid schedule, but people seem to want to continue discussion and I'd just like to say is it possible for us to continue discussion for those who want to do that? 

- Yes, and I was going to say that. 

Audience Member: There's great stories being told and I think it would be great to hear some of those other stories. I'd like to tell my share of the story too. From 1966. 

- I agree with that totally. And that was going to be my final statement, that if anybody was obliged to stay here and converse, you may continue to do so. Again, that's why we try to provide the chatrooms, so that these kinds of discussions could go on in those places and the rest of the program could continue. I see another hand. 

- [Woman In Audience] Yes, would you tell me the room that third chatroom is gonna be located in? 

- The Board Room. Yes. In the Civic Center. Please enter the Civic Center from the Wilmington Street side. There is some major conference going on where people are entering the South Street side and they have security, so you will not be allowed in that entrance. Please enter the Civic Center from the Wilmington Street side. 

- And I frankly was on the Albany Freedom Ride because (static) He bought all the tickets he said he had money to buy, which was nine tickets. One person had to be the observer, and of the eight people who were like me, who were to subject themselves to arrest, he wanted it to be four white and four black. So we had Bob who was white, and Tom Hayden, and a wonderful redheaded bearded Dane, on a brider from Denmark, and the -- 

Man On Panel: Pier Larson. 

- Pier Larson. My boyfriend at the time, Bill Humphries, wanted to be the fourth white person, but he was at the Georgia Institute of Technology on an Air Force ROTC scholarship, and he knew that life was gonna be really miserable for him if he went on a Freedom Ride and were arrested, so it's almost an accident of history that I had the right skin color to be an Albany Freedom Rider. I echo what you've heard from Charlie -- 

Man On Panel: And Casey was the observer. 

- She was the observer. 

- Hollis and Charlie have talked about regional issues having an influence almost as strongly as racial issues. I was a Southerner and I felt a little intimidated about 1963 when all these brilliant Northern people started coming down much more articulate than I ever could aspire to be. So I understand a little of that regional sensitivity. As a white person, I knew that I, particularly as a white woman, because understand now that white supremacy is based on the fact that the elite white men in the South wanted to be sure they passed on their property to their heirs. And the way that they could do that is they had to be sure that babies born to white women were their progeny. So white women were captured and dealt with -- There were a lot of ways of dealing with that, including becoming a white supremacist yourself. White women were a special target of the Klan from the 20s on. People don't generally know it, but some white women were lynched, particularly white women who crossed the racial lines. So I knew that being a white women brought a lot of new wrath, more wrath than might otherwise be in place in demonstrations and in the movement. And for that reason and others I was really anxious to be told what to do. I never aspired to be a leader. I didn't think I had the smarts to know the kinds of situations that my family and others in the South had created. I was delighted to be a part of SNCC and part of those times. Even today as I work for the kinds of things, and I'm a local person, I have a major case of local person-itis, I can only do it interracial. I live in a place that's only 5% minority, but I cannot work in a group that's not interracial. Even today. And I would really hope that you young people find it uncomfortable to do that too. We're going this way. 

- Well I was just getting ready to give it to Zellner. 

Joan: Well, you know I'm not a leader. 

- That's okay. Well, okay. With regard to what I thought we were going to talk about, I thought that we were in fact going to not just talk about what happened then, but that we would also try to project into the current situation. Perhaps you spent enough time visiting the past so I will speak to what I think young people ought to be thinking about doing and how. I work with, and I try to continue to work with young people. First of all, because as an aging, I'd like to say revolutionary, but sort of an aging angry progressive, I like to keep in with young people for several reasons. One, because they keep you young. Their ideas are fresh. They are new. They have a higher level of energy so that 18 to 20 hours a day is not an impossible day for them. In that regard, I work with a group in Boston that called Center for Campus Organizers, and I'd like to encourage you to be a part of that group if you've never heard of it before, and I'd be glad to talk to you later. I also work in prisons where I see a lot of young people. One of the things that occurred to me, and I've often thought about SNCC, because it was a life-transforming process, is that in some cases we did not recognize or appreciate our place in history. This morning I indicated that we did see ourselves moving the Earth. That's a lonely spot to be in and you have quite a bit of weight on you and it's singular. When I say that, most of us in SNCC use SNCC as the family base, because those other people had now divorced themselves for one reason or another. Either they thought we had lost our minds or that we would engage in something for which they would ultimately have to answer. So we clung to each other pretty tightly. The point, however, is that we did not -- What's the word. We did not transition well the next forces to come in. There were efforts on the part of SNCC to reach out laterally to the Panthers, and that's a whole other story. There was an effort to develop white organizing, but that went off half-cocked to my viewpoint because of what happened within SNCC. I don't think that it had a good transition. Then we also issued people in Palestine, which alienated most of the Jewish people, so then we were financially strapped. Basically right in a lot of ways and advanced in a lot of ways, but never having laid the groundwork. Of course, at the same time, COINTELPRO was wreaking havoc with us. 

Man On Panel: Does everyone know what COINTELPRO is? 

- You can't have it both ways. Oh, COINTELPRO was the government intelligence program which was an infiltration, it was really the equivalent of a buy-and-bust, only this time intellectually. Infiltrate and kill them. If you have to do it physically, okay, but if you just confuse them, we'll go with that. If you can -- What's the word. Yeah, it's a high-level disinformation issue, and I worked in the finance office. I have to tell you how I heard this story. I was in the finance office of SNCC and we used to hear a lot of stuff and one time Foreman got a phone call from somebody, because when you do good things there's always a little birdie. It may not be a big birdie, may not be the eagle you want, but you can find a canary every so often. We got a call from Washington from a source that was well-placed that essentially said that the joint chief of staff have now had a meeting and they have made a decision, and you're gonna have to go. Part of that was in terms of that internationalism that I began to talk to you briefly about this morning, that you're just getting too big for your britches. We can't fathom you, we can't control you, we don't know which way you're going, and you're asking some pretty fundamental questions along the way. A lot of what we were about was -- People talk about blacks and whites, we had Asians, we had all kinds of people in SNCC. We had gays, non-gays, we had a few heroin addicts. You know, we had a few people from every walk of life but one of the things that we were was a place where, whatever your past was, we tried to be able to transform you into something else, that we work together as a catalyst in that process. Having said all that, one of the things that I've spent some time thinking about is what happens when the intellectual head of a movement dies? Because that's what happened to SNCC in many ways. We spent a lot of time weeding and a lot of time trying to plow the land in front of us, but as I said, we had no back troops. Our own physical situation was one of exhaustion. I gave you an idea of eating once a week, that kind of extreme strain. I didn't tell you about people who could not stay in the same place for more than 12 hours because they were being looked for by dogs and anything else walking. It was open season on shooting them. This was not always the case, but it was enough of the case for people to understand that you could not really get settled wherever you were. If you were not in the middle of either a major cultural redefinition, I'll use that for the White Sisters Council and all other kinds of things, then you were gonna be the recipient of somebody who was coming out of that, and you had to be ready to move to be of assistance. SNCC, in many ways to me, was the intellectual leadership of the movement. It spawned a lot of thought and people were willing to go out and develop those ideas and make them happen. Having the intellectual leadership of this operation mark itself down in what I consider internal racialism was a real step to the rear as far as I was concerned. I wasn't a part of it, I always spoke against it to anyone who cared. There were times where our leadership was really not under a collectivity, if I could just say it that way, that it was more singular. So people set up the singular style and they went that in, as far as I'm concerned, a direction that did not have everybody on board with it. But be that as it may, that's history and that is what has happened. I believe too that the world has to be -- You live in the present, and so the organization that you work with ought to look like the group of people you want to live with. There's no such thing as moving it, 'I'm going to do it down the line.' You may not have down the line, all you have is today, you know? So the people that you work with, the people that you respect, the people that you cohabit with, the people that you swap lies with, et cetera, are all the people around which you should surround yourself and your current situation. I encourage people not to look at what we did historically, but to look at where you are in your classes, to make your classroom work serious, to start doing research where it counts. I mean, those silly little research projects on whatever, you can turn it, you can make it politically right. You can raise the questions in class. You should be -- Everything in the bibliography, ace out the professor, turn the class around on him or her and say, 'And what about so-and-so? 'And what about so-and-so?' So that you have dealt with the class. That's a basic. The leadership in the 21st century has got to be technologically ept. You just can't be angry and you just can't be cross-eyed. You've got to have technology, you've got to be able to finesse and work with people, you've got to be able to negotiate, and you need to be able to walk from a prison cell to a corporate boardroom in the same breath and be able to move both of those parallels together and come out with something that's common. You're constantly synthesizing. You're constantly raising the correct questions, not the questions that get pushed, necessarily, because you will find special interests is very apt at changing and massaging what you say. Responsibility. I find that Northerners, for example, when they organize, try to organize on a union kind of model. You have a particular interest with me, I'm trying to work this with you. The nature of human rights is much broader than that. Everybody, white people, ought to recognize that racialism and racism has worked to their detriment. And that's hard to explain to white people who feel like at this juncture, the world is their oyster. But spend some analysis, in terms of reversing what is considered and normative so that you can, in fact, have new information, new perspectives to bring. That's kind of it for me right now. (gospel music) 

- It's wonderful to hear such good sense, such good sense and so clear. To me, it's clear. I think we all know enough to know that what you're talking about is very good. I'm a little puzzled also about what was the slogan for today? Thanksgiving? (gospel music drowns out speech) (laughter) Are they scared of you in jails? Black and White? 

Audience: Together and Separate. 

- Together and Separate, okay, good. Well, they're all relevant. [Joan] Every seminar, every session is the same. (laughter) 

- You have different things to say at different ones. I did do a little bit of thinking beforehand, which I normally don't, I just bounce off of things that are going. I see some of my students here also. Natalie and Jeff for sure, anybody else? 

Natalie: No, it's just us. 

- If you've heard it all before, just say, 'Hey, you're going over the same stuff again.' I did a little thinking and I looked back at what Clayborne Carson said in one of the editions, maybe the last edition to In Struggle. He put it very simply. He said that around the middle 60s, sometime after '64, SNCC, and to a larger extent, the civil rights movement in the South, gave up three terrific weapons that they had used to very good effect. They gave up basically -- Come in. Join us. We are discussing today White and Black: Together or Separate. Glad I know that now. (laughter) Clayborne Carson in the introduction to his book posed the question, first a problem and then a question. He says that around the middle 60s, SNCC and the movement gave up three tremendously potent weapons that had gotten them a long distance. Grassroots community organizing, because basically we did a pullout of Mississippi and part of the rationale for that was we'd produced local leadership, we work ourselves out of the job and go. So we had a rationale for that, but basically it was a pullout. Secession, at least for a long time, on a nationally-organized level of doing grassroots community work where you burrow into the community, develop ties that Muriel was talking about. The other was that they gave up in a large measure nonviolent direct action. Nonviolent direct action was still used in some cases and so forth, but basically it was not one of the three strong arrows in the quiver anymore. Thirdly, basically gave up interracial work, which in terms of SNCC had been part of the keystone of what we had always talked about because we realized, I think very early on, maybe under the leadership of Ella Baker and others, that you're never gonna reach a time when everything is the way you want it and it's gonna stay that way from then on. We learned that struggle is a constant struggle, and therefore whatever society that you want in general, you should have that society for yourself. Part of that beloved community was that it would be interracial. One of the things that's happening to history and the telling of the story in the last 25 or 30 years is that a lot of times that has been overlooked or underplayed to such an extent -- Let me stand up here. It's been underplayed to such an extent that many people don't realize that the early movement was quite incredibly integrated. Some people are aware of a few of us who did certain things, but in a lot of ways, the movement was very integrated. Now, the question that Clayborne Carson asked after saying we gave up those three weapons. He said, "What took the place of those weapons in the movement?" And that is a question that I've heard him pose, I've never heard a thorough investigation of that question. If we're going into nationalism, if we're going into all of those elements that have, if you're a dialectician you believe that they had positive and negative aspects. Part of the reason for giving up the grassroots community and the nonviolent direct action and the interracial work together was the move for the nationalists' point of view. And that, to me, is the period that we're still in. We have not yet answered those questions, we have not yet really had a thorough going examination on it and say, 'Okay, if, in fact, we've given up those weapons, 'how do we -- Do we need to take them up, 'along with what other weapons?' Number one is we always talk about biracial, black and white, and now it's not a question of biracial black and white, it's multiracial, racial, it's multicultural. The kind of organizing that many of us are doing today -- For instance, last night, I conducted a nonviolent workshop in Southampton, New York. This was after five people had been arrested and injured, some of them quite severely. I was beaten up by the state troopers. My right arm, and I made a pledge to myself that I'm gonna do this, as hokey as it is, because the report from the New York State Police and everybody is no injuries. Black people were arrested. And if you'll look at my two arms, this arm right here is so severely dislocated, it'll never actually be the same again. This is after the arm has basically healed. Ripped open with tendons and everything. They trained these cops, by the way, to concentrate now on soft tissue and on joints. They don't break the major bones, that's gonna show up in an x-ray. They broke my left leg in the knee, broke my arm in the elbow. They also knocked my jaw out of place, which has been knocked out of place before a number of times, and now I have some kind of PMS. Or uh ... 

Joan: TMJ. 

- TMJ. (laughter) 

Muriel: Not close. 

- That too. I can have both of them, and I've got a .38 in my purse. (laughter) 

- What we're talking about basically is something that is still happening today. I mean this is a Shinnecock reservation. We have so many situations -- And when those cops started beating me, first of all, they dragged me over behind cars. Four or five of those cops beat me, working on my joints. They broke this arm twice, and then when they put me in the paddywagon, the slammed the door on that arm. I mean, I had never ever had such excruciating -- And nonviolent, you're supposed to be cool, right? The kid was screaming, you know? I said, I am -- I was 60 years old and since then I've had a birthday, I'm 61 years old. My bones are not that resilient anymore, okay? But what I'm saying is we're still doing the same thing. We're so trained that the situation develops, we just go there and do it, but y'all gonna have to do it now because we're getting too old. Used to be we would spring back right away. Going around, I have debated whether or not to bring my walking stick, because I remember Danny Lyon had something temporarily wrong with him, he brought his walking stick. Ever since then, I've been thinking about poor Danny Lyon walking around with a walking stick. And everybody says, 'Bob, you're really getting old. 'You've got a walking stick.' What I'm talking about is what it's gonna take -- How are we gonna get back together? And are we gonna say, can we get back together without really dealing with the time? And a lot of times we approach it, we don't really deal with it. Maybe there were some mistakes made. Obviously, SNCC went out of existence in terms of an organization. SNCC never died in terms of a spirit. In fact, they might've done us a favor in that we were gonna be like -- Who was it, they shot Big Bill? Bill Haywood? Yeah. He was always gonna be around wherever they were struggling. At least that's what we're doing. But what I want to tell you is that we need to tighten it up. We've got a lot of things right there in Southampton. Now they're less embarrassed about being racist and beating up people in Southampton now than there would be in Southampton, Virginia. Southampton, Virginia, that would be all over the news. But they can beat up Indian activists and Indian community people and poor old aging activists up in Southampton. And you know what they do? They do put it in the New York Times. In the Long Island Edition. They put it in Newsday in the Long Island Edition. If it gets in anything else other than the Long Island Edition, it gets in the Metro section of the New York Times. They don't even put it so that the Indian activists in the northern part of the states can do it. But Danny Lyons -- You know that Danny's working on a book now on American Indian activism? And he says that around the reservations and all the places, they're looking at what's happening in Shinnecock, and I'm wondering how is the information getting out? We do have a movement grapevine and everything. So I'm just telling you that what happened then is really basically the same things that we're faced with now. So we're having to go through a whole new process of organizing people, getting them together, and talking about that situation of jail, and also the situation of allies. In the situation with the Shinnecocks, there's a tradition of being very close, very dignified, very secretive and everything. Now, they're reaching out for allies not only among other native activists and everything, but also in the white community. I've been appointed the, what is it, Co-Chair of the Anti-Bias Task Force in Southampton. And they've made a mistake, I know that they didn't know this was gonna happen. Never appoint an old activist to some kind of town position, because they expect that you're gonna be respectable and deferential and everything like that. But we have a habit of calling things like they are. First of all, we did something that was symbolic. The town has a seal, and it's a big white pilgrim. Big white pilgrim with a rock over one shoulder and a big three-masted schooner over the other shoulder. We don't even have Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower in Southampton, but they're using all this imagery, right? So we made a modest proposal that we would change that, and the vitriol that came out in the papers and everything. 'Who is this guy? Where'd he come from? 'Where is this Jew Zellner? 'I bet he's only been in this country 20 years. 'Messing with our seal,' and everything like that. So then we said, 'Okay, we'll make a deal with you. 'You keep the white man, but let's have some hiring in the town.' Because now we have about one third of this town, Southampton, is minority, people of color, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans. In the 338 people hired by our town in Southampton, 19 are people of color. One is an American Indian. And in the school, which gets $8 to 12 million a year, there is one Native American hired in the school. That is incredible. They've had an affirmative action plan in place since 1979. So when we begin to find out those things, we had to tell the truth. And then pretty soon, we had people marching on Town Hall, we had people standing behind the town board with signs saying 'shame on the board,' and people taking pictures of the board and there's that white pilgrim up there. But we started joking about the pilgrim. We thought, 'Well, maybe we can demystify.' Do you know why a pilgrim's pants always fall down? Because he has his buckle on his hat. (laughter) But my point is, and this is the last thing I'm saying. My point is that if we transition the organizing that we're doing now, in Southampton College, in the town and everything, on the reservation. If we try to do that without having all races of people together and black and white working together, boy we'd be ridiculous. We could not do it. So especially getting ready for the world that we're in now, with the globalization and everything, the mechanization, learning all this stuff about computers and everything, we're old to learn that. That's so natural to you guys. We can't even talk about being -- We can talk about nationalism. We can talk about those feelings. We can talk about positive aspects of that, but in terms of working together and making a movement, we have to constantly change our ideas about doing it multi-culturally, multi-racially, multi-nationally, and all those ways. That means black and white have to work together. Thank you. (applause) 

Joan: We don't actually have a moderator, so Hollis, you're in the center. 

Male Panelist: Hollis is the one. 

Zellner: Did everybody see the movie, by the way? 

- Freedom Song. 

Zellner: Freedom Song? (laughter) Hollis is one of the main characters of the movie. 

Hollis: Thumbs down on Freedom Song. We don't talk about it. 

- I want to raise another aspect of it. I'm Teresa Del Pozzo and I worked with SNCC first in Wisconsin as a support person spreading the word in Wisconsin and in the student community, and then through a larger community about the summer project, about what was happening in the South. At that time, when I first started doing that, I was stunned to find out that most white people didn't know that black people couldn't vote in the South. There was a lot of educating to be done. Then there was the summer project came along. And I want to raise the question about -- We talked a lot about the community organizing of SNCC, but there was also another side of SNCC which was sometimes in conflict with this idea and sometimes not. And that was reaching the larger national community. The debate that has always gone on was that the recognition was that unless white people were also targeted the way black people were being targeted, there was not going to be any concern about what was happening to black people in Mississippi. I would call this the approach that was targeted at the national politics of the country, as opposed to the community organizing. In fact, it was true. Because when the summer project happened and all those people came from all over the country and their parents became interested, their churches became interested in what happened in Mississippi, the local television stations where they were were interested in what happened in Mississippi. For the first time, the community organizing that had been going on in the South was now getting a support from the national political scene. I, for one, don't think that the gains that were made by the movement would've ever been possible if it had not been for that pulling together of both the grassroots organizing and the national attention and the spread out of that that then had influence on the antiwar movement, the women's movement, and all the kinds of things that followed from that. This is a subject that I -- When the stuff started to happen in SNCC where the nationalism became a reality, to me it was just something I'd kind of expected to happen. I knew about it as a historical phenomenon and I had seen it in Northern situations and I kind of expected it. And I think that we have seen the results of it. We've seen 30 years of results of it, which is very splintered. We have people constantly duplicating their efforts. You've got the groups that are lobbying for the condition situations in prison. You've got people lobbying about the environment. You've got people lobbying about local political. You've got people arguing about the distribution of income for schooling and education. All those kinds of things. And what we've all been doing, what I feel for years, is like we're all spinning our wheels, the same wheel, where everybody's out there working over the same issue rather than working in a coordinated effort because somehow we lost that track at that point in the 60s, and I'm one who just accepts that that had to happen because somehow that is like the history that this country is saddled with. That's the outcome of slavery, that its impact was so deep and so divisive that people would, in fact, just as you say, give up the most successful weapons they had and go off on another track. I think also that we've seen from the FBI files that have been released and the COINTEL stuff and all of that, that there was a tremendous effort directed at SNCC to foster this kind of divisiveness and to set people against each other, et cetera. I think that what Bob says is absolutely right, as we go into this next century, for the people who are coming up now, I just don't see that there can be -- To me, it almost seems ludicrous that we're still discussing this subject. It's so self-apparent that unless people with the same interests, whether they're Native Americans, whether they're African-Americans, whether Italian-Americans or whatever, can be unified and work together in coalitions. I just don't see how there could be any success for anybody. 

- I would rather not, because I'm sure you've learned from this, never bring a bunch of us together or we do all the talking. Always bring one or two if you want to ask a question. He had a question. 

- Okay, wow. Hey, I'm Billy, and I'm a white kid in case you folks are wondering. (laughter) Let's just start from there. I'm having a hard time trying to frame what I'm trying to say. I'm understanding the stuff about, yeah, we gotta build multiracial coalitions and things like this, that makes sense to me. I'm really struggling with this, because another thing is for example, I work with a youth organization, defining young people as 18 and under. We're trying to build this organization where people 18 and under run their own organizations. So from that perspective, I understand this whole deal of racial separation as far as the work that we do, on some level. Not to say those young people shouldn't collaborate and coalition with other people, but they gotta run their own organization, I understand that. Also, I'm really, really curious because I haven't lived in the suburbs that I grew up in in a number of years. I'm not particularly excited to go back there, but I understand that -- Who's gonna organize white suburb folks but white suburban kids? So I'm really, really, really curious to see what that really looks like, you know what I mean? It's ideal if we can figure out a way to bring this all together, right? Most of the world's people are not benefiting from this system, so we should work together to overthrow it. But what does white organizing look like? 

Hollis: Overthrow. (laughter) 

- No, but really. I guess that's my main question. What does white organizing really look like and how does that work? Because this is an important question, because I do realize that a lot of this stuff of dismantling racism, you folks are coming from a really unique position. You're coming from a history of where the white folks that were involved were involved in a black-led organization. That's not the reality of most of the white organizations that exist today. Most of the organizations with white folks in it at this point were started by white people with a vision by white people dominated by a white racist culture and all this kind of thing. And that's just very different. So. I don't know. 

Hollis: First Jimmy and then you. 

- My name is Jimmy Rogers and I worked SNCC and led in Lowndes and Macon County, Alabama. I've worked previously in Alabama. I started working SNCC in 1965 and the thing that most people don't realize or they don't talk about, the only civil rights workers in Lowndes County to get killed were white, at least during the time that I was there. The first one was Viola Liuzzo, who was the wife of a union official from Detroit who came down to the Selma to Montgomery march, and she was transporting people back and forth from Montgomery to Selma and whatnot. And in the middle of the night, she was riding with a black man and the Klan just happened to be galloping behind and shot her. Okay, the next one was Jonathan Daniels, who worked with SNCC in Lowndes County. One Saturday, we decided that we would go to a town called Fort Deposit. It was me, Jonathan, a number of other people, and some of the local people, it was their idea. They were very disturbed, because when black people went to this one restaurant, they had to go through the back window to get served. You couldn't go inside, you know, they hand you stuff out of the window. We weren't allowed in the restaurant. That Saturday, we got arrested I think it was something like 15 of us or so, thirteen blacks and two whites. Well, two weeks before that time, I happened to be in Hayneville City Hall and this man walked up to Jonathan Daniels and he said, 'I could understand why he's here, 'but I don't understand why you carpetbagging Yankees 'coming down here stirring up all the good black folks. 'We're gonna get you.' And sure enough, two weeks later, we had a demonstration, we were arrested, we were put in jail, we stayed in jail for a week, we got out the next week. He walked to the store that we were all used to going to, the people in there were always very nice to us. But on this day, there was a guy standing inside the door with a shotgun, and when he walked up, he just blew him away. And I don't have any idea -- I mean, I don't have any doubt that the reason why he got shot was because he was white. To sum it up, what I'm trying to say is, during that time, I think that a white person working in Lowndes County or Macon County and whatnot for SNCC, had much more of an impact than black people going around and registering people to vote. 

- I want to speak to this young man's question to tell you how I'm using some of the best that SNCC developed, not that I did, but the best SNCC ideas to work with white young people. I'm part of a project called Education for Liberation, and my assignment is to take Charlie Cobb's concept of freedom schools and see if there's something there, a model there to use to teach white young people that in giving up what they perceive as white privilege, they won't actually be much enriched and gain from that. And that's a tough assignment, Charlie. If you have any ideas, I'm ready for them. I think it's my job to talk -- I thought it was always my job to talk to white people. I never thought that black people had anything to learn from me, except perhaps that all white people are not unified. My job is to try to figure out a way to explain to white people that white society, white culture, European culture's played its hand, it's done its thing. It's been dominant for a long time. There's nothing new or --