"Revolution in Georgia" radio show hosted by Larry Rubin, part 1, tape 1 / Larry Rubin Papers / Duke Digital Repository

Freedom Singers: “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed on Freedom)”

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Woke up this morning/ With my mind Stayed on Freedom/ I woke up this morning/ with my mind, Lord, stayed on freedom/ I woke up this morning/ with my mind stayed on freedom/ Halle, Halle, Halle-lujah

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Radio host: [singing continues in background] Revolution in Georgia: The Negro Struggle for Franchise. This is the first in a series of four programs produced for radio by Larry Rubin, a white Antioch student who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Southwest Georgia’s voter registration movement. Tonight, Rubin discusses the organization and function of the movement. Parts of this program you are about to hear were recorded in the field.

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Unidentified woman 1: My mother, my grandmother, and they all of them died in slaves. Now I’m fighting for my rights. Give me my rights, please.

Larry Rubin: Southwest Georgia is peanuts, pecans, and cotton country. It’s in the blackbelt—so called either because the majority of people are Negro or because of the black earth. I’ve heard both reasons and both are true. Negroes outnumber whites more than two-to-one in Lee, Terrell, and Sumter counties. All political and economic power is firmly controlled by whites. Before the Civil War, this was slave plantation country. Today, a lot of the land is still owned by the grandchildren of slave ow—holders, and worked by the grandchildren of the slaves.

The special report published by the United States Civil Rights Commission in 1961 and entitled Voting deals at length with Lee County.

The average Negro in Lee county has gone to school only 3.2 years; the average White, almost 10 years. The average White person earns 1,571 dollars annually; the average Negro, only 478 dollars a year. When I worked in Lee, I found out for a fact that a Negro field hand in Lee is often paid only fifteen dollars a week during the crop picking season, and as automatic pickers are replacing human labor, jobs are becoming even scarcer. The Commission’s Report says that out of close to the 4,000 Negroes living in Lee County, less than 29 were registered to vote in 1960, although most of the 2,000 whites were registered. Reverend Charles Sherrod, the head of the Southwest Georgia registration project, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told me that there were only two kinds of classes in Southwest Georgia: the owners, and the sharecroppers and day laborers. In other words, wealthy Whites and poor Negroes. There used to be some poor Whites, but most of them migrated to the factories. The first day I came to Southwest Georgia to work with the S.N.C.C. [says each letter] or SNCC [pronounces “Snick”], Reverend Sherrod drove me though Lee County and Terrell County. He showed me piles of rubble that had once been churches. They had been burned down by irate Whites because Negroes were using them for voter registration meetings. He showed me a field where a Negro body had turned up last summer riddled with bullets and castrated. In Lee Country, Sherrod showed me the tree where several Negroes had been lynched by a White mob. That tree stands as a reminder to Negroes of the White man’s power.