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SRC 33
Day 1, Tape B
Conference
Leslie Dunbar: ....get away with saying such and such and that freed editors, too. It
freed business structures and I think is one of the crucial
developments in the post-1954 South. Patterson and I can claim to
have known Gene intimately. I knew him and worked with him. But I
know Patterson. If you read all of his things they just clearly
changed. They moved up a notch or two every year, that was
remarkable. He was a man of great decency. I know he called me
up, this was in 1964, I know this date, he called me up to say the
FBI showed me these tapes. They made me listen to this tape
about Martin King over in hotels. Well, I said, I don't want to listen
to them. But then I didn't. The good thing about Gene Patterson is
he never mentioned that. I don't think he ever mentioned that he
was one of the editors who heard this scandalous FBI tape. He was
a decent person. That was of great importance.
Paul Gaston: You used the wrong tense there, past tense. Present tense is a decent
person.
Brian Ward: Is a decent person. (Some laughter)
[Unintelligible]
John Dorsey Due: I was at the 1965 Conference of SNCC and I was not conscious of
some revolutionary things that was happening at that meeting.
Number one, I was in another room when Bob Moses said some of
SRC 33, Day 1, Page 2
us have been involved too long and we need to leave and he
walked out. We haven't seen him until just a few of years ago when
he came back to Mississippi in 1994. Also decisions and
discussions were made, and I was in another room, that whites no
longer be a part of SNCC. White folks need to go out and organize
white folks and this was the beginning of black power. Since
Ms.Curry was part of American Friends Service Committee, I
remember when I was interviewing for a job that you can burn out
by being involved in this kind of stress on a continued basis and
you need to recognize that and you can change. Connie, since you
were so intimately involved with SNCC at the beginning, can you
explain from your perspective as to what happened and what this
meant? And then Paul I'd like to know what did this mean to the
Southern Regional council when blackness became the thing in the
movement.
Connie Curry: Well, John, as you know, I had left SNCC and had gone to work for
the American Friends Service Committee by 1965 so I was not at
that meeting. There was sort of two generations of SNCC, the first
generation and then the second, and I was in the first one. Those of
us who were there in 1960 through Freedom Summer of 1964. In
that first group there was Cacey Hayden, (we're talking about white
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people) Penny Patch, Joan Browning, Sue Thrasher, Bob
Zelner, and a lot of other white people who were involved. For
them the decision that white people should go to work in white
communities was very painful. It's very interesting now because if
you ask Julian Bond, and other people they'll say that it was a
political more than a racial thing because it was the beginning of
the top down, the more hierarchical, business, then the grassroots
up, which is what Bob Moses and a lot of other people sort of
believed in. It was a political rather than a color decision in many
way. Julian, and a lot of other people who were in and out of that
meeting, say that they didn't believe in it. It was not a black power
thing. It was a philosophy of how things should be run. That's when
Bob changed his name and went to Africa because he was very
upset about it. It was complicated because in 1964, which is before
all this happened, there was the advent of the thousand people
coming from the North. A lot of the women and people that I know
from that era, the white women, they came down and worked only
in the summer of 1964. It was the beginning of a lot of grassroots
people saying we don't like these white Northerners coming down
and taking over our agenda and telling us what to do when we've
been used to being led by the people in the community. So you had
sort of the first and second generation, the beloved community,
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before the shift to what was called and, I don't think Stokely and
the people who were talking about it at that moment really saw it as
much of a black power thing as I say as they did the political thing.
The other crucial thing is the fact that you have to remember in
1964 there were 90-some church burnings in Mississippi. People
had been killed by Moses probably never got over the fact of
feeling responsible for Herbert Lee's murder. Schwener, Chaney,
and Goodman, I mean the murders, the violence. And then there
was Atlantic City which was the greatest set-back. Bus-loads going
up to Atlantic City with Fanny Lou Haymer and everybody singing
freedom songs. And what happens? They get to Atlantic City and
they're allowed two seats. It was great rejection. It was
disillusionment. It was heartbreak. A lot more than it was black
power. That's the way I see it. I want to say one thing about the
press real quick, about Claude Sitton. The other thing a lot of
people don't know is a lot of movement people used to say when
they were afraid they'd say God if we can only get the Cluade
Sitton's room.
Paul Gaston: One very quick answer. John asked me a question (and then you're
question Brian). Blackness did make a difference at the council
after Paul Anthony resigns about 1971, 1972. The executive
committee was determined that it was gonna hire a black executive
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director. There had always been that kind of, well that was the
beginning I think of that kind of that tension. It wasn't black power
but the executive committee was divided and they were determined
to find a black executive director. Andy Lewis said he wouldn't
take the job, and Harvey Gant said he wouldn't take the job. Then
George Esser appeared who, quite white, but with very good
contacts with the Ford Foundation and they said he'd be good.
(Laughter) So he would be good. One other personal thing. I was in
a university in Richmond, Virginian, a black university at about this
time and I had gone over to do some consulting. One of the
students said would you like to come to a rally? We're having a rally
tonight. I went to the rally and they were talking about what things
they were going to do: poison the water supply and so on. I said
well look I'm getting a little anxious. Yeah don't worry we got bottled
water for you. Question Brian?
Brian Ward: Yeah I've got a couple of questions. We've been working Les pretty hard
on this press theme and you've given us a long list of very distinguished
journalists who worked with or for the SRC quite intimately. Yourself and
David Chalmers given good testimony about the power of new South and
then of Southern changes as SRC publications, but it occurs to me this is
all print media. I'm just wondering how much effort the SRC actually made
to court radio and television, which, in many ways, were as important for a
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different constituency during the 1950's and 1960's. You could argue more
important than the print media.
Leslie Dunbar: Your question is what did we do with radio and television, and we
did darn little, partly because we didn't know how, mainly.
Television was just itself coming in and came in in a rush during the
later 1960's. I don't think we had on the staff or anybody who really
knew how to do radio and certainly nobody who knew how to do
television. So we didn't. There used to be a man named Ed
Friendly who had something called Friendly World Broadcasting
or something like that and Ed would make these tapes and ship
them around to the network radio stations that he had contacts
with. They were all race relations, brotherhood, peace kind of
things. Details are a little foggy in my head now, but at SRC we did
sort of subsidize him once, for a good purpose I hope, but
essentially we did not know how to do radio and we did not know
how to do television and we didn't do it. I appeared on radio several
times. There was one radio station over in Birmingham, Alabama,
which us. And our lawyers actually got me equal time.
It had never happened before, so I got equal time over at this
station over in Birmingham, Alabama. We're not Communists or
what not.
Brian Ward: Actually it's just anecdotally, Pacifica actually once read out the whole of
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one of Les's articles in the journal of politics which I'm sure was riveting
listening. They certainly gave you good air time there, but it was someone
else reading out one of your articles. So Pacifica may have been a radio
network that you had some success with. The second question is really for
all the folks up there and it's sort of something that's been gnawing away
at me as I've been listening to many of the papers today and the panel
session. By the 1950's and into the 1960's you've got an organization in
the Southern Regional Council that is in various ways pushing for
integration. And yet one of the stories that hasn't emerged from what's
been said today is what was going on within the Southern Regional
Council and the councils for human relations themselves. What was race
relations like within the body of the council and within the human relations
councils. And then, picking up actually on something Les has said again,
what were gender relations like within those organizations during the
1950's and 1960's and was there a discernable change over those
decades?
Paul Gaston: Brian has his schedule to end at three thirty and so there's thirty eight
seconds to answer that question. I'll take a part of those to
welcome the president of the Southern Regional Council who just
walked in. Greetings, Charles. Do you want us to take time to
answer that?
Charles: I want your best five minutes, Paul.
Paul Gaston: Well, I'll give it to someone else. John's ready to go.
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John Dorsey: I just want to say that, when I got active with the Unitarian Fellowship
which was kind of a sponsor of the Tallahassee council in human
relations, I was the first black who was not part of the academic
world at FAMU that wanted to be part and interact with whites.
Black folks really didn't want to interact with white folks in
Tallahassee. It was only through the movement
we saw white students who reached out form the University of
Florida and FSU to reach out to Patricia. Patricia was also a
different kind of person. You have to realize that you can't just
blame the white folks in the council of human relations not reaching
out to blacks. A lot of times the blacks didn't want to reach out to
whites. It was just that way. It was the mis-education of Negroes by
Woodson was the reality in the South. And fear. What do they
want? They must be Communists, you know, that kind of thing.
Leslie Dunbar: I don't know what I'm supposed to say. We had a wonderful staff at
SRC made up of a lot of accomplished and talented people.
Accomplished and talented people sometimes find ways to rub
each other. So we used to have, now and then, little flair ups of the
staff and we'd have to deal with them. We also had them with the
councils in human relations. I spent a lot of my time on that. I just
remembered one woman who worked running the memiograph
machines and, let's call her Jane Doe, for a moment. I can
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remember in frustration sometimes saying my god I wish we had
more Jane Doe's around here. I never have any problems with
her. She leaves precisely at five o'clock every night, she's gone.
She never works over time. She causes me no trouble. Right after I
left she led a black power movement at SRC, so you can't always
tell. I don't remember what else to say...
Connie Curry: Like I say, I really never worked at SRC, but my perception of it was
that it was mostly white male led, but there was some women like
Maggie Long and certainly Mrs. Tilly who had been there. There
were a lot of women who were deeply involved.
Paul Gaston: My staff experience was only one year from 1970 to 1971 and that may be
illustrative of some of the tensions it had. Vernon Jordan had just
left the staff. John Lewis had recently left the staff. One other
distinguished black leader had just left the staff. Almost over night
the staff had changed from being integrated at the top level with
project directors and so on. The year I came down as a visitor that
as not so. We were all a bunch of white boys. I was the research
director; Pat Watters was information director; Reese Cleghorn
edited South Today. So it was really illustrative of the problems the
council had. Those things came and went and one could find that
kind of example at other times and dwell on it a long time. It's a
very interesting topic. But there is another side of it and that is for
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the council membership itself. I thought of this this morning when
we were talking about how people change over time and what
opportunities were presented to them to change over time. Now
one of the cliche's about the Southern Regional Council is that it's a
family. We often talk about the Southern Regional Council family
and from almost the beginning it was a membership organization,
and then it became a hundred men and women of good will. So the
members would come together once a year, the executive
committee more often. It was a large family of people who felt a
certain kind of kinship because they belonged to this organization.
Like many families they had a lot of quarrels, and the quarrels they
had from 1944 to 1951 we've already discussed. Those were
significant quarrels, and some of the people left the family. We
talked about how Virginia Stabney couldn't stay in the family.
Others were strengthened by family ties and developed good family
values 'cause they learned. The point is that over time, and you
would meet these people all over the South or you'd meet them, oh
you're an SRC person, whether black or white. It was a bond, and
I think, for someone who might want to write a book about the
Southern Regional Council, I would suggest that he, well she if
there is somebody, but if a he was writing this book, I would
suggest that he explore that dimension of the council and how it
thought of itself as a family and how all over the region you could
SRC 33, Day 1, Page 11
drop in a town and meet somebody who was a member, black or
white, and learn from them and be educated because of that
advantage.
Connie Curry: I want to say something real quick. John Boone, I know you have to
leave and I was just wondering if you'd like to say a word about the
work that you did with SRC on the prison program 'cause I don't
think a lot of people know about that.
John Boone:
Yes Connie, I'll say a word or two. I think that after I was appointed at
Indiana, and encountering J. Edgar Hoover fighting what
me and Merlin Alexander director was doing. He said nothing like that
would ever happen. I had the authority to implement a furlow law. Of
course he said you can do that only over my dead body. We did get a
chance to do it though, but after he had died (Laughter) in the District of
Columbia. In the District of Columbia they had a four hundred long school
with only ten men enrolled. I got there and walked and walked and walked.
They had had a riot after Martin was assassinated. Every time they had a
riot in the District it would spill over into the prison. So we caught hell
trying to keep that stable. Anyway, to make a long, long story short, I sat
day and night telling the guys look, I'm going to invent a new law come
hell or high water. If you can assume the responsibility I'm gonna send
SRC 33, Day 1, Page 12
you in school after you get your GED to get an education. So we did. The
other day they inaugurated the Cleveland in Art College in Atlanta.
Cleveland had his first when he was at D.C. University basketball team,
predominately prisoners that went in. What happened, I was courting my
wife, and I went to visit her and there was a thunderstorm. My daughter
called me and said the superintendent wants you to come out there.
There's a riot here; all the lights are out. When I got out there the only
lights there were fire trucks and police trucks from all over the jurisdiction,
but I didn't see a riot; I didn't feel a riot. I said I'm going in to see what's
back here. Ken Hardy was the director back then and he said you better
stop that rioting. I walked in and told them to go get Ken Hardy to see if
the superintendent will give me that bull horn. So he did and I said I'm
going to walk in and see what's wrong alone. That's what I eventually
did, but I heard a prison guard in a powerful union said let
the son of a bitch go in there and he'll find out what's wrong when he gets
in there. So I slowly walked to that prison guard afraid under the bed
doing everything. Before I left Delbert Jackson, who later on became
the director, said John can I go in with you. I said yes Delbert you can go
in with me, but on the way in I remembered Delbert carried a .38 all the
time and I didn't want any firearms in there, so I slowly went in the back
door because I knew behind the front door was nothing but state police
and everything. So I went slow, went in the back door, the guy was
SRC 33, Day 1, Page 13
afraid. I said look, when I give the signal I want you to come up front,
that's where the light is. I went in by myself, but just as I was about to get
out of the prison compound seven white guards were coming toward me.
There were three guys who called themselves thugs vowed to support me
and they saw these white guys coming. They started throwing bricks. A
brick hit me in the back. I took it to Massachusets with me after that, but it
didn't hurt. Anyway, after that the prison was revolutionized, but I was too
much for them. They had to get rid of me, so they terminated me and I
was sent to in Indiana. In Massachusets the same thing
happened. They say they had a prison guard riot going on. I went there
and I didn't hear a riot, didn't see a riot. So I walked through that prison by
myself and nothing wrong. Those so and so and so don't
know what they talking' about. And so sure enough I told them I said look, I
don't feel no riot. I selected twenty five guards, I said go over there, get a
ball out of the dormitory, go on recreation field and stay there until it
stops raining and the lights go on. The prison guard union had destroyed
the auxiliary system so the prison was completely black, on reservation
otherwise. But to make a long story short, that morning the sun was rising
bright. One man had escaped. He got a guards union and walked out of
prison. He came back the next day though. He went to visit his wife and all
of that. He came back and that prison was revolutionized, but they had to
get rid of me 'cause they had to keep these jails and prisons. So I went
SRC 33, Day 1, Page 14
down the drainpipe in the prison guard union, but what we started thanks
to Leslie Dunbar, when I went to Massachusets he gave me a $250,000
grant I think to help us educate the public. And that's what it is, Bill
Farmer, who is now dead, was a deputy of the public corrections in
Massachusets. He was a prisoner, I got him out, but I made him my
associate in Massachusets. You know how they made that terrible
hard-hitting union system was. Bill Farmer died not very long ago.
Ninety-five percent of the men went out on furlows and came back so I
think the system is gone with the wind now. We do not need to pay all of
that money on jails and prison cells. And I think the Georgia governor, my
governor, realized that the other day. I was to him we gotta
shut down some prisons. So the time is right for some organizations to
focus on doing that. It's a waste of time. I mean you can do some other
things. Prisons eighty percent black. You know what that's second
Sunday plantation system and all of that. Well that's enough said. I'll have
to do it another time. Thank you very much.
Paul Gaston: Thank you, John. (Applause) Now we focused all day today
...[unitelligible]....this afternoon on the past of the SRC and we're
only up to 1960, or 1970. Tomorrow we're gonna do the 1970's and
1980's. After you get a little refreshment we're gonna hear about
the SRC of the future and Louis Berrarow is going to tell us about
her plans and how you can help her with it. But we're going to serve
SRC 33, Day 1, Page 15
refreshment now.
Brian Ward: We'll talk half an hour and we'll take Lou's after four fifteen. Thank you all
so much. Thank the panel. (Applause)
[End of Tape 4]
[End of Day 1, Tape 3.]]
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