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>> Hi. My name is Gabriel Luke and I have the privilege
of serving as the chairperson
for the MLK Celebration Planning Committee.
And so the first thing that I'd like to do is invite folks.
Please feel free to move up closer to the stage.
It's the joys of higher education.
We always have the back rows filled first so no one wants
to get too close but do feel free to move up if you'd
like to get a little closer to our panel.
In introducing I really want to--
I'm just going to be kicking it off and handing it off
to our esteemed team but as folks get a bit organized,
I want to thank everyone for joining us today
and there are a few people that we really do want to point
out in terms of our gratitude.
One is a special thanks to Kim Hanchette of the Dickey Center
and Ellis Smith, Class of '13 which serves
as an intern in our office.
Both of them did a lot of the research over at Rauner
that enabled us to assemble this fine panel of speakers
which we're very excited to hear about.
I also want to thank Lauren Frank
from Compton Special Events who did a lot of the logistics
for this event along with other members
of our logistics committee.
As we begin the MLK Celebration each year,
this year is particularly pointed in that we are going
to be celebrating the spring Doctor King's 50th anniversary
of his visit here to Dartmouth
and there is a lovely plaque commemorating
that over in Dartmouth Hall.
And his speech towards freedom was a very powerful,
moving piece for our community.
And we are very honored here to have a group of folks
who actually took steps to help move our country towards greater
freedom for our community and so with that being said,
I would like to turn it over to Professor Anthony.
>> Hello and welcome and I would encourage people
as you finish eating, if you want to come up,
we're going to be telling stories up here.
Our guests are going to be telling stories
and you're going to want to hear them.
I'm Denise Anthony.
I'm in the Sociology Department and I'm also the Director
of the Institute for Security Technology and Society here
at Dartmouth and I am really thrilled to have been asked
to moderate the panel today.
As a sociologist, sociologists study social movements quite a
lot and so I have read many books about freedom summer
and the Civil Rights Movement and the role
of not only the leaders like Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Diane Nash who was here and visited Dartmouth last year
and many others, but if you don't mind,
ordinary people [laughter] and the message for that is that we,
in some ways, we're all ordinary people and so you know,
we're going to hear from people who were ordinary people
who did something extraordinary themselves and for our country
and it's-- so I'm thrilled to be here.
I'm so glad you're here.
At the MLK keynote the other night, what Coach Boone's talk
which was very fun and inspiring, but before that talk,
the President of the African-American Society,
Joan Leslie-- I don't know Joan,
so I want to make sure I have her name right.
She gave a great speech talking about talking to students here
to say right, reminding us of something
that has now become common, you know,
how to get out of your comfort zone, right.
How to think about interacting with people who may be different
from you and what-- why that might change who you are
and your experience and why that's important to do.
These 4 gentlemen are going to tell us about how they got
out of their comfort zone of Hanover, New Hampshire
and Dartmouth College and so what we're going to do today,
I'm going to briefly introduce each of them.
They're going to take about 5 minutes each
to tell us how they got from Hanover to Mississippi
or Alabama during Freedom Summer and then they're going
to spend a few minutes asking each other questions
because remarkably, they didn't know each other before this even
though they were all here at the same time and experience all--
went to the south during Freedom Summer and then we're going
to open it up to you and I'm sure you'll have lots
of questions so we'll want to have an interactive session.
So with that, I'm going to start on the far left
where we have Paul Stetzer who is a Dartmouth '67
and Paul was involved in the Civil Rights Movement
and then also movements since then, anti-poverty movement,
anti-war movement, environmental movement, gay rights movements.
He's worked primarily in education,
the pre-school anti-poverty program called "Get Set."
He has been organizer of labor and environmental educator
at the Schuykill Valley Nature Center and teacher
of Environmental Science at the Germantown Friends School,
I believe both in Philadelphia or in the Philadelphia area
and he's now becoming a documentary photographer
and is working on a project entitled, Democracy is Coming.
Next, we have William Burton, who's Dartmouth '65,
who participated in the voter rights registration work
in the Mississippi Summer Project
and has been actively involved in politics since that time.
He was town supervisor of Ossining--
is that how you say it?
Ossining, New York from-- in the '90s much of the '90s,
'91 to '97 and in 2005, he was elected
to the Westchester County Legislature.
Outside of politics, he has had a career working
and owning businesses in publishing
and printing in New York City.
Next, we have Roger Daly, Darmouth 1967,
who is an ordained minister at-- in the United Church of Christ
and has been a pastoral minister for 41 years.
He received his Master of Divinity
from Gordon Conwell Theological School and his Master
of Education in Clinical Psychology
from the University of New Hampshire.
Father Daly joined the Civil Rights Movement
as a volunteer worker in the SNCC,
into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
in Mississippi and Alabama and has a lot of great stories
about that and then to my left--
immediate left is Dirk de Roos who's a Dartmouth '68.
He-- what was I going to say there?
I'm sorry.
He spent much of his time in the freshman year--
that's what I think I was thinking it was your sophomore
year before he even came to Hanover.
So he didn't go directly from Hanover, in Mississippi,
working on voter registration.
After graduating from Dartmouth, he earned his JD
at Indiana University and he went
on to active duty in the army.
He was a ROTC-- ROTC here at Dartmouth during this time.
He is currently a partner in the Denver Office
of the International Law Form of Faegre, Baker and Daniels
and has extensive courtroom experience
at the state and federal level.
So a really interesting and diverse group of alumni,
so I think we're going to start by asking Paul
if you would begin and give us a little bit about that point
in time and how you got to the work you did in Mississippi.
>> In Mississippi, yes.
Can you hear me?
>> Yes.
>> Good. It's interesting that you said that we got
out of our comfort zone because for me,
going to Mississippi was getting into my comfort zone.
One of the ways that we got assembled was somebody
discovered a 1965-article by the head
of the Dartmouth Christian Union saying--
naming some of us and talking a little bit about what we've done
and they said that even one--
one even came from the very wealthy suburbs
of Philadelphia called the Main Line.
That was me.
And I had been raised in a very privileged and narrow background
and with parents who were fairly racist and at some point,
a love interest, how often does that happen?
A love interest persuaded me that ha, it's okay to think
about Civil Rights and then there was the Martin Luther
King, We Have a Dream speech.
The march on Washington in 1963 and I think the assassination
of Kennedy in that fall and then later, doing some tutoring
of poor intercity kids in Philadelphia in the summer
of '64 began to change my mind considerably and then--
and here's a real difference in time,
then came out a mimeograph sheet
with a misspelled word inviting Dartmouth students to go
to Mississippi to help Nagoos register to vote.
What mimeograph sheets were pretty--
you couldn't change them and they were expensive
so they went out that way.
And we showed up, a bunch of us volunteer and we showed
up at the Dartmouth Christian Union
and we were told a little bit about what to expect
and we were given nonviolent training
and this was really important.
What I didn't remember what I got from the article was
that we were selected based on how well we did
with our nonviolent training.
Who knew that there was a selection process but then 4
of us though reminded me of this--
4 of us traveled in a station wagon to Mississippi.
And the first day that we got there,
we landed in Jackson, Mississippi.
There was a counsel of federated organizations housed there,
a bunch of people were all sleeping on the floor
and there's the bed and I said, "Can I have the bed?'
And they said, "Sure.
See those holes there?"
"Yeah." "That's where the shot gun came through last week."
I said, "That's not going to happen tonight.'
And then we weren't sent to Philadelphia, Mississippi coming
from Philadelphia, I thought this is cool but that's the town
from which Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney had been taken
and lynched and that happened only a few--
their bodies were discovered only a few weeks before we
got there.
The lynching happened I think in June of '64
and we're now talking about October of '64.
What was amazing was being able to go out day after day and talk
to people on the streets.
What was amazing was being-- was being--
was going with several people to rural black churches to try
to organize people to register to vote but not really
to register to vote because people were not--
black people were not allowed to register to vote
so we were registering them for a fictitious group called the--
not quite fictitious,
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
What was amazing was hearing people who'd been Civil Rights
workers and black people who've been trying to register
to vote singing in the jail.
There were some-- and I realized I was home.
So I left the uncomfortable place of Hanover, New Hampshire
to go to the comfort of Mississippi
for a fairly short time but I think that's enough for me.
>> Thank you.
Okay.
>>There's been some reference made
to Mississippi Freedom Summer
and perhaps we should tell you what this was.
This was an organizing tactic of SNCC and several
of the other organizations at the time.
To try to find some relevant way to get people--
and Mississippi was selected 'cause a lot of leadership came
from Mississippi, to get them involved in a process
which would lead to the ability to actually register
and actually to vote in real elections and why this happened
in 1964 was because the previous year, the Civil Rights Act
of 1963, had been signed by President Johnson as in effect
to Memorial to John F. Kennedy.
So having this tool and having the willingness
of a federal adminstration to go out and enforce it,
meant that people like the leadership in SNCC and COFO
and other groups could say, alright, here's an opportunity
to go and do something.
You may be up there in New Hampshire but if you'd
like to take the summer off and come and help us,
I didn't because I had a summer job and I needed
to make the money, and my parents were as Paul was
so kind enough to put it about his, quiet racist.
Well, mine weren't particularly quiet about it.
Their idea of Jews and blacks was not something that we--
any point discussing here but it wasn't particularly nice
and I was in substantial rebellion about that
and had been since I was in elementary school.
And so when the opportunity came up to go up to Washington
in 1963 on a March, I didn't go.
I had a summer job.
When things came along in 1964, I mean the winter, I didn't go.
But when this came up, after Schwerner,
Chaney and Goodman had been dug out of
that dam something just clicked and I had to do something
so I was the manager of the soccer team at that point.
I went to the coach, *** Burnham and said, "***,
I'm going to leave for 3 weeks."
And he said, "We're going to drive
to become IV League champions and if we do that,
we can go to the MCAAs, you've gotta stay on."
And I said, "No, thank you," and I left.
Figuring that I simply burned every possible bridge I
would have.
And we went out, George [inaudible] who was the head
of the DCU, had got us a college car so 4 white kids--
3 white kids and 1 black kid, Richard Joseph who used
to teach, I think here for a while, went to Mississippi
with New Hampshire license plate on a car.
This was probably not the smartest thing we've ever done
but we were in fact surrounded as it turned
out by a large number of federal agents.
We didn't know it at that time, but because of the lynching
of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman,
they were all over the place.
The feds were all over the place.
But our job, as Paul said, was going door to door trying
to register people for a fictitious election,
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Election
because you couldn't really get in to the real electoral process
and the opportunity to do that just took me
out of my comfort zone which was this place and put me
into a place I'd never been to before with people I had no idea
that they lived the way they lived
and discovered not only the music in the churches
but the camaraderie of working with people
on an organized political level to make something happen.
That wasn't a legitimate election.
It wasn't any of those things but it was a start
and if there's anything that any of the 4 of us,
have in common is at that first time,
when we started was the most exciting, the most scary
and the most impactful thing in our lives.
I'm speaking for myself but I think we found
at dinner the other night that there was always a place
when you start and if you take anything away from here today,
it's the realization that it's not what you do,
it's that you start doing it.
That was everything to me and I was there for--
very grateful to have this opportunity and I think Roger
and Dirk are going to expand on this as well.
>> My-- I concur with Paul.
Dartmouth was not a comfort-- comfortable place for me.
I had experienced the death of my father the year before I came
as a freshman and actually the beginning of my sophomore year,
I also discovered beer [laughter]
and had avoided it up until that point.
Anyway, but a number of things at that particular point
in my life conspired to create a lot of confusion for me
and so I actually approached the beginning of October
of my sophomore year with a determination
to somehow find meaning in my life
that I couldn't find on campus.
It was here but I couldn't find it
and so what I did basically was to make a choice to withdraw
from Dartmouth which I did in the middle of October.
And there are a number of things that were sort of seeds for me.
This is the 50th anniversary
of Martin Luther King's presence here on this campus.
It's also the 50th anniversary of a week
that Martin Luther King spent at the boarding school I went
to in Massachusetts in which he basically finished my sentences.
I learned from him in those brief moments
that there was a way to act in a loving way on the basis
of the things that outraged you
or that were intuitively wrong, hurtful, destructive.
And I had sort of become known as a person who stood up next
to a small person when a bigger person was picking on him,
and so I left here and part of that was consulting with a man
who would become really my mentor in a replacement
in many ways of, you know, important ways of my father
and he reminded me of some things that he knew about me
that led-- that moved me towards the Civil Rights Movement.
It certainly was conspicuous to me.
Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney had been murdered,
I was aware of that.
The shenanigans of the trial, the mock--
mockery of the trials and the process
and Mississippi was taking place, that was all outrageous
to me and this headmaster of the school I went to said,
"On your way from Hanover to New Jersey where you grew up,
where you're going home, stop at Yale University and speak
with William Sloane Coffin who was the chaplain of Yale.
William Sloane Coffin was arch-radical of the day
and died the arch radical of his day
when he died years and years later.
And between New Haven and Gladstone,
New Jersey where I grew up, I basically made a commitment
to the civil rights movement and I also was equipped with a name
and contact at Princeton, New Jersey which is near
where I live, and became connected then to the system
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
At the beginning of the year, right after Christmas,
I got on a bus from 4:30 in New York and ended up in Jackson,
Mississippi, was taken from Jackson to--
I can't remember the name of the town, for 5 days of orientation
and training in nonviolent protest.
I should have learned then that my--
the training meant my experience was going
to be a little different.
But I went from there to a place I'd never heard
of which was Selma, Alabama at the beginning of January
where I was for 2 years-- I mean excuse me, for 2 months
and the whole focus was very different there.
The goal was for us to be arrested, to be beaten,
to be abused so that the media could make it possible
for the country to be as outraged as many others were
and I sort of had used the term sort
of like cannon fire [laughter].
In many ways I was because I and another white student actually
from Dartmouth also, named Johannes [inaudible] Lutkus,
we're generally the first to be arrested and thrown into jail
and that happened 4 different times.
I was really an observer and 1 day,
I was observing a registration on a court house--
county courthouse across the street and I was cold-clocked
by a man and beaten and after that,
I became an angry participant in the movement and basically
at that particular point, I became very much involved
and wholehearted about it.
There are so many elements to me that are significant
about my experience there that have been instructive
in the journey as [inaudible] has been.
>> When you discovered beer,
that was the year it was invented, wasn't it actually?
[Laughter]
>> That was the year it was imported most [inaudible] coming
in across the border in Hanover.
>> In the summer in 1964, I was working
in the Standing Rock Zoo Indian Reservation
in a real remote area.
No roads or anything.
It was cool and we used to go sometimes if I was lucky
on Saturdays into the agency headquarters,
a place called Fort Gates [phonetic]
and we would get supplies for the camp and one Saturday,
I was in this Fort Gates and there was some Indian kids--
some guys that I knew a little bit and so I was talking to them
about going down to the Joe D Bar in McLaughlin, South Dakota
and kind of, you know, also discovering beer and we had done
that in the past and these Indian kids were talking
about Mississippi Freedom Summer.
They were talking about events in the south
where people were deprived of their rights and their dignity
and their ability to vote and I was--
no, I wasn't embarrassed-- I was ashamed.
And, you know, pardon me if I'm a little--
if there's a little emotion and passion in this
but it was a very emotional and passionate time.
And I haven't really thought about it for a long time.
I think of these 2 indian guys whose family
and ancestors had been imprisoned on this reservation
and starved and their famous leader [inaudible] is murdered
there and they're talking to me about America.
[ Pause ]
So I thought about it a little bit
and told them the next time I saw them,
I'm going to go down south.
What that involved I didn't really know
but I knew I was going.
And I thought, "Well I have to work this out with the college."
Hey that was no problem by the way, they were--
they were working with SNCC, called them from one
of those phone booths where on one part
of the phone booth you can make a call and the other part
of you close it off and for a quarter you could take
your picture.
It was like the only phone in the reservation.
Anyway, so I called them up and they said, great you know,
with SNCC and everything.
I didn't even, you know, registered yet.
This was the summer of 1964 and then of course I had to talk
to my dad and I thought, "Well, in this the best
of all possible worlds, that won't really be a problem,"
and he's pretty direct and he said, "Well,
you'll be going to college young man.
You're not going to Mississippi or down south,"
so I gave his opinion as most 18-year-olds would do the way
to which it was entitled and the next thing I knew I was on a bus
to Burmingham, Alabama.
[Laughter] And see I thought this was all
like a misunderstanding that if you could just sit
down and talk to people.
I thought that's what we were supposed to do.
You'd explain to people why this--
you know, you can't-- people get to vote.
Come on. You can't take rights away so it's some kind
of misunderstanding and then I got to Burmingham and we went
through this nonviolence training where you lie
down on the floor and protect anything you think is important
and people kick the hell out of you or they'll--
you sat in chairs like this around the table
and you'd be pushed on the floor and insulted and I thought,
you know, this isn't going
to be quite what I thought it was going to be.
They told us like, you know, when you're there, don't go out
and get into a police car at night.
Be careful about this, be careful about that.
Some areas of the south, you'll be a little freer
to do certain things, other areas are really bad.
And of course, the worst place is in the Neshoba County,
Mississippi and the county seed of Philadelphia
and the next thing I knew I was on a bus to Neshoba County,
Mississippi to Philadelphia.
What we were to do was to go basically--
there were just 4 or 5 of us--
I don't know, it was just like July something.
Neshoba, I expected it being monstrous.
I mean if you don't know, they were-- if they--
they were killing people there.
I mean they killed people who came down just to talk
about these issues and they killed blacks and whites
when they were looking for the bodies
of the 3 murdered Civil Rights workers in that town.
They found 8 other bodies of blacks who had just disappeared.
And so I expected monsters when I got there
because we were supposed to go door to door and try
to register people to vote.
Well, the first shock that I got is I did not meet monsters.
This is a little dirt road, red dust, you know,
out of the boondocks country town, not a lot different
than the ones that I knew from Iowa and Nebraska
and these people reminded me of the people,
the farmers that I'd grown up with.
They talked a little bit different,
I did meet a monster eventually, maybe we'll come to that,
but what I did is walked door to door by myself, everyday,
trying to talk to people and convince them
that they should exercise their rights, that they should vote
and it was-- say, there was just 4
or 5 of us in this little shack.
The FBI was there just down the street like some cheesy motel,
the Wagon Wheel Motel and or something like that
and it was very interesting that I didn't meet
that initial hostility.
The town was divided.
It was tense.
And if you want to get a sense of what it was like,
go dig up an old Gene Hackman movie called Mississippi Burning
and watch that movie.
It's of course a movie and it's fictionalized
but it's basically true and when I last watched it,
my wife gave it to me for Christmas,
it raised my blood pressure and my heart rate
and I think it will yours too
if you can imagine yourself in that setting.
First things were good and I tried to do what I was supposed
to do and say luck is always possible but trouble is
for certain and trouble came
and when eventually came, it came big time.
>> Thank you all.
What we talked about doing now was giving you the opportunity
to ask each other a few questions about that time,
your experience, how it affected you
over the coming years of your life.
And so I'm going to give you an opportunity to do
that a little bit and then we're going to open it up to you
to ask questions and for you to share--
to ask these incredible speakers to share.
Would any of you?
To start.
>> You start.
You were the last speaker, right.
>> No. Let's go back.
Let's just run down, I mean,
my question's a pretty straightforward one
at which we all have asked ourselves a lot.
>> Well, go ahead and ask it then.
>> Well here it is.
Why did this make any difference?
Did it make any difference?
What the hell were we doing there?
[Laughter]
>> If those are sample questions.
[Laughter]
>> Yup. Lawyers get to ask compound questions.
You're the witness so answer the question.
[Laughter]
>> If it made a difference,
it certainly wasn't in the near term.
I don't know how many people that I spoke to ultimately went
out and voted in this Mississippi Freedom Election.
I have no idea because 2 weeks after we're there,
I was back in Hanover.
The soccer team had won all 3 games.
We were 2 days away from the Yale game which we then won
and all of the sudden we were the team to beat
for the IV League Championship which we won and we went
to the NCAAs and *** Burnham got me to go to the Rotary Club
and talk about my experience.
I thought he would have me lynched
but I thought he would lynch me for leaving but no,
I actually had a good assistant manager and everything worked
out well but there was no direct impact and there never is.
But it's the longer term impact on 3 groups.
Yourself personally, because you've suddenly had the
opportunity to do this and you see the larger scene.
The people who you work with had some sense
that there was somebody from the outside world who'd came
and came in there.
And the third group that it impacted
on was the larger immediate family that you have.
Not only my parents who were in the one hand scandalized
but on the other hand, in church they were amazingly pleased
and they talked about what I had done in a positive way.
Not saying this crazy son of ours went of and did something
but they would talk about it in a positive way.
And the same thing with the friends I had back
in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
They-- there was a buzz somehow that he go on and done something
that was worthwhile and that develops.
It's like tossing the stone in the pond.
So there is a-- there is an impact that you have,
you just don't see it but you have to-- but-- what--
when you've lived it and then you go on further
to whatever you're going to do, it's the opportunity you've had
to learn something and whatever you're going
to whether you become an investment banker or a teacher
or a lawyer or God help you a politician,
it's there in you and-- unless you bury it so deeply
that it never comes out again.
It always informs who you are.
And that's why I'm so grateful I've had this opportunity that--
when-- George put this flyer out.
I forgot about the misspelling which you were right.
That was-- that was pretty dgracious [phonetic].
Well, that-- if I hadn't seen that--
if I hadn't been drawn in to this,
I think my life would have been very different
and I'm not all the other sure it would have been a better one.
>> But I think there's a slightly different answer
to that too and that is it resulted
in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
There was a concrete and direct result of what we did.
And the part of the reason why I feel very confident in saying
that is that we had the wonderful opportunity
and took it of participating in a movement,
a very well-developed movement.
We were tiny, tiny participants in that.
I-- I'm glad you-- Denise called us ordinary rather
than normal people.
[Laughter] But we're very ordinary people
who made small contributions.
The people who were there-- the people to whose houses we went
and with whom we spoke and who lived there day after day
and year after year, we were just sort of the grease
and the machine only that's too cold an analogy
but it really did result in something very specific
and we were a part of a huge movement.
>> My experience was perhaps a little bit different
because there was a direct--
my purpose which I really wasn't aware of when I first went
to Mississippi for the training was actually
to create the public outcry that really escalated the movement
into injunctions, legislation, judicial action,
legislative action and so while I was in Selma, there were--
there was a very intentionality to every--
almost everything we did but while I was there,
2 injunctions were handed down that, you know,
that curbed the behavior or made more visible the behavior
of Sheriff Jim Clark and-- you know, the dogs and the herding
of children into penned yards, arresting them and--
so I'm all sorts of outrageous.
So that there was a-- I had a sense anyway
of a more direct relationship between what we were doing day
by day and the momentum and the gathering of public outcry
which was really the-- well mahanda [phonetic]--
Mahatma Gandhi, I mean that was the--
that was the goal to out it.
>> Too bearable.
>> Yup. Yeah, I didn't know that going in.
I thought-- like, I had no idea what I was doing.
So--
>> And I think that it is important to give--
to recognize that movement like Paul said, you know,
sociologists, when they study this
and my colleague Marc Dixon is here
who studies social movements that in--
it was clear in all of your stories, right?
You got in to it through your-- through an organization
or a social network contact or--
and you went to a place that was already built up.
You know, the fact that you all had the nonviolent training,
you know, Diane Nash when she was here and I'm pointing
to Richard Crocker who the Tucker Foundation brought her
last year talked about the building of the infrastructure
to provide that training to the black students
who came together, to the white students who came down,
the regular people who came together
and so it's the individual who can make a contribution
but it is when they're collected,
when they are coordinated through this activity
that I think is the-- comes through in each of your stories.
>> There was a continuum here that I think we weren't aware
of because like Roger, I had no idea what I was getting in to.
I did not intend to go somewhere to be kicked and beaten.
That was not my plan.
But like Roger, then it became obvious to me
that that was the plan of the people who were organizing.
This wasn't intended to be a part.
If you went back a little more than a year--
see, nobody remembers this.
We were talking about-- this is as--
you know, you're talking to the 1960's.
This is as remote to you students as World War I
or the Hundred Year's War or us.
I mean it's so far back.
You cannot now as you sit here
and as you lead your daily lives,
envision how different the world was in every possible way.
And one of the things was that issues about race and gender,
issues about fairness and rights were--
well, that's their problem-- their.
You know, we weren't-- we were sort of indifferent to that.
It was accepted that things could be different
in different places.
And then there were a series
of events largely I think either sometimes orchestrated,
sometimes just taken advantage of by organizations
like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committees--
SNCC, to organize, to create a momentum
and that momentum was part of a continuum and what I mean
by that is what struck me as the year before--
barely a year before, there was Burmingham Sunday which seems
to be little remembered but it was the bombing of a church
in which 4 little girls were murdered and it's a--
think of this, imagine if the church
down your street was blown up and 4 local--
you know, girls are dead.
And then was--
>> They all had blue eyes.
>> Yeah. That's right.
Well that--
>>Yeah.
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> Med Grevers [phonetic] who was in many ways,
I think the most powerful and down
on the ground courageous Civil Rights leader at that point
in time including Martin Luther King-- Med Grevers was shot down
and murdered on the street.
In Mississippi, in this little town where several of us where,
3 civil rights workers just like us were dragged out 1 night
in to a police car and taken out and brutally murdered--
brutally murdered because they were just there
to do what we were doing.
And after this came Selma and in the course
of all these was this voter registration stuff.
Well, I'll tell you how many voters I registered, zero,
and all the time I was there,
not one because there was terror-- an amounting terror.
The people were afraid.
They weren't going to be-- you know, they were polite enough
to talk to me but they sure as hell weren't going to go try
to vote because they'd be dead too.
When they were digging up the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner
and Chaney they found the bodies of 87 other people as well
who had spoken up about something,
who they didn't even know they-- who they were.
And that continuum meant that there came a point
where you couldn't be indifferent anymore.
You couldn't say, "Well that's Mississippi's issue"
or "That's New Hampshire's issue, that's not my issue."
There came a point where you either accepted it
or you rejected it.
Now, we rejected it.
You know, maybe you can't change what's in people's hearts
but you can change the way government has to deal
with people and that's probably what this accomplished is
that government had to--
could no longer oppress on any level, federal or state.
It had to allow these rights to be exercised.
And I think that was-- you know,
I've read that this had no impact on history.
It had a huge impact
on the individuals involved and none on history.
But I don't buy that at all.
This was all part of a tremendous movement,
a great sort of surge of momentum that we always have.
And sometimes, you're lucky to be in the generation that gets
to catch it and maybe sometimes you aren't.
But America always has this momentum.
>> I hadn't thought of this before, just now
but I'm really grateful for the people who became a part
of the-- you know, the freedom rights and all of the movement
up until that point because when I entered it,
the conversation had been long going
and the work hadn't been done and it was much easier
for people because of the visibility,
because of the press, because of all of that work
that was done it was very-- it like felt safer.
It felt-- people felt more able to take the risk
because the witness was so strong and so visible,
there was still a lot of outrageous things happening
and beatings taking place but it was so much easier for people
to stand up together on any given day.
The teachers of the elementary schools of Selma,
Alabama would meet at Brown's Chapel Church and walk
through the town, through the black community and down
to the county courthouse and at one particular day about 5
or 600 elementary students joined them.
80 UPI, don't exist anymore.
The media were constantly around from the very beginning
of the march to the very end of the march
and the arrest took place, the children were herded a mile
out of town by horseback by the Sheriffs.
That was all recorded.
It made it not only more necessary
but easier the next time to stand up.
And incrementally became--
that to me was what it meant by movement.
Just-- it grew.
And I hadn't really thought of that before.
But there's a great legacy that I experienced when I entered it.
>> Yeah.
>> That you did too.
>> Yeah.
>> There was a system.
>> And for me it was-- it started with the [inaudible],
let's talk about something that's not here anymore
in Greensboro, North Carolina.
>> Yeah.
>> The students from the local college sat there
at the white's only and were--
I'm sorry and were refused service and they were told
to leave which they didn't so they were arrested.
And the next day, either they have been gotten out on bail
or some others came and they came again and again and again.
If you see other people doing courageous things--
>> Join them.
>> You can save yourself,
maybe I could generate the courage to do that.
You then had the people who rode in the buses--
the interstate buses from Washington DC or the--
or New York City or wherever
to wherever the bus was going in the south.
>> The Freedom Riders.
>> And they were called the Freedom Riders.
And they were stopped on the road
and they were taken off the buses and they were arrested.
Why? Because they were violating a law--
an interstate commerce law did not protect them but the laws
of Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia or whatever did say
that the-- that you have to ride at the back of the bus
so you couldn't ride in a whites only bus,
I'm not all the other sure what it was.
It's an extraordinary thing to think now
that those laws actually existed and that worst,
people were arrested for that and they were taken away.
But what's so exciting was that the next day or the next week,
there were more of them and they got on different buses
and they rode differently.
Well, for somebody like me,
I didn't necessarily have the courage to be in the first wave
or maybe even the second wave but by the time '64 came around
and the opportunity presented itself here, I took it.
And maybe it was naive of me to think that well, it'll work out,
nothing's really going to happen.
As it turned out, nothing personal really did happen.
I didn't get beaten, I wasn't arrested
but it certainly informed my mind about this.
And I guess I've never really fought in terms
of the larger movement.
I understand it intellectually but for--
and the personal impact that it had on me was when I took away
with it-- with me and carried it.
I'm not unaware that it was a larger sense
that I think I tried to live that life.
But the-- but thinking about from on high level,
I've not really thought of being part of a--
being a cog and a machine so much as I was a cog on an ocean,
just a little bounding cog on tossing waters
and I think you've-- you guys have given me a good deal
to think about it and I appreciate that.
[Laughter]
>> I really didn't feel that we were a part of a movement.
That-- it was like being floatsome on the ocean
and the tide's coming in and boy, I thought that we'd be
in a brand new society by the end of the '60s.
Being the optimist that I am, I still think that's true.
[Laughter]
>> let me give the audience a chance to--
or people here to ask questions or make comments.
We have a few mic and we're going to ask if you wait
for a moment till it gets to you and just a few reminders to--
you know, ask a question and not make a statement.
And we have a question and there's another one up here.
[Noise]
>> I guess the first thing that I would
like to do is give you the welcome
that you should have received when you crossed the border.
I was born in 1959 in Alabama.
So I was a young child when you were there.
So, I'll give you my welcome.
First of all, welcome gentlemen to our beautiful States
of Alabama and Mississippi.
We are honored that you'd chosen to join us and we do hope
that you enjoy your work here.
[Laughter] You didn't get that welcome but you have it now.
And second, my name is Evelynn Ellis.
I'm a Vice President here at Dartmouth College.
So I guess I would like to ask you, given where I growed up--
grow up-- grew up and where I am now,
I guess my question is do you feel
as though your work had direct impact.
>> Sure.
>> Direct impact.
>> On our own lives or on other--
>> On the lives of people like me
who were there when you were there.
>> Well, I would-- I'd answer that a little bit.
I actually got to go again to Mississippi once again in 1967
and I made several friends who were part
of the great migration and went to Boston.
And in part, they went because some of us were there
and we changed the level of the horizon.
We talked about other kinds of possibilities
and that was personally very moving.
>> It was hard for me to--
it's hard for me to sense that I had an impact on any--
on anyone there other than the--
that very tight group with whom I lived and worked.
Tight primarily in large measure because of the--
that being surrounded by fear and the sense of the terror,
the dread of having no control whatsoever.
And I remember one experience was actually the last remarkable
experience I had right before I left of meeting
with a white student at the high school in Selma and our--
my hope of having a conversation with him
which was a conversation and actually what it turned
out to be a setup in which I was held a gunpoint
and beaten by 2 men.
So I never had that opportunity to do it.
I think the only people I may have affected directly were
people with whom I communicated after I returned.
When I actually began to sort
of integrate what my experience had been
because of this just very other worldly for me.
Not-- I had no frame of reference
within which to understand.
And so I had sort of piece it together but I think
that since then, they have to really form the core
of what message I have had in the role I've had
as a family therapist or a pastor.
But not then-- no, it was a movement then.
I knew that I was there not to convince anybody of anything
but to be on [inaudible] being thrown into jail or whatever.
>> I don't know if this answers your question
but what I know is that-- you know, like Roger,
I eventually was arrested and you're held at gunpoint
and you're pretty sure these guys are going
to kill you 'cause that's what they say they're going to do
and nobody knows where you are and they beat you up badly,
broken nose-- you know, blood everywhere
and then they drag you out and say, "Get in this patrol car--
you know, we're going to take you across the state line,"
and of course we've been told not to do that.
And when they took me out, there were--
you know, police lights flashing out of the courthouse jail
in Philadelphia, Mississippi and it's quite a big crowd
of people I was surprised and it was dark and I was panicked
and I was not get in that cop car.
And 4 of these black kids
that I knew a little bit 'cause I had met them.
It wasn't sneak or anybody else.
These 4 kids in front of the Sheriff and the Deputy Sheriff
and these highway patrolmen, and a very angry crowd
of clan members grabbed me and took me to their car instead
of the patrol car and so that was the way different
than when I'd first got in there and people were afraid
to even really talk very much.
And these kids knew that they were--
everybody recognized who they were and they stood
up and so, I don't know.
I sort of felt huge regret that I left
because I never knew what happened to them.
I've-- didn't feel very good about myself for a long time
that I should never have left but I-- the truth is I had to go
and they're the ones who got me out.
I think that they had the courage to do that.
Maybe that partly came from me being there.
>> In the Peace Corps, when you were being recruited,
one of the things they said was that you will be set somewhere
and you will work on a project.
You'll help to build a well so that a village can have water
or perhaps lay sewer pipes so that you can have sanitation.
That was a project and it was a finite project you would go
over a year or 2.
You would have something at the end of it that would be--
would exist because there was
such a large infrastructure behind it, the USA Department--
whatever it was, would have built something.
We didn't have that or at least I didn't have it.
So there was nothing left from my 2 weeks that I could point to
and say I did that, I was part of that.
We made something happen.
So I don't see that I had that kind of impact.
The impact I had was a second part of the recruitment
for the Peace Corps which is to say, "You will get more
out of it than you give," and that's what happened to me
so that I came back a very different person.
A lot more confident frankly that I can make a contribution
than when I left but, also believing that it was--
that I was able to do that.
It wouldn't just be theoretical.
I would be [inaudible] the kind of education that I was going
to get here but also because it was going to be--
I was going to be-- it was going to be available to me,
if I-learn things and then went on and applied them
in whatever area I was going to be and I would have the ability
to make that contribution
and so I think that's what it-- was the approach.
No, I don't think I was a great contributor in Philadelphia
and Mississippi but I think I was a good--
great contributor to me and to the world that I wound
up inhabiting for the next 40 years.
>> Don't you think that always happens when people are involved
with other people to do something that's important--
>> Sure, but who knew at the time.
That's the-- the problem with it is you gotta take
that first step and until you take the first step,
until you make the commitment, until you take the chance,
you are never going to know that, you'll never realize it.
You maybe something you read about, somebody will tell you
about but it's not in your guts until you do.
>> Right, right.
>> We have another question here.
>> It's very moving to hear all of you speak
and I have just all kinds of questions about the present
but I think that I'm a little embarrassed to ask this
and you can feel free to say no.
I didn't-- I-- confused of the names, the gentleman on the left
because I wasn't sure where you were starting.
You had referred to a monster
and if you would not mind telling us that story,
I would be very interested in hearing it
and hearing people's reactions to that.
>> I can tell-- show you a picture of him.
>> Thank you.
>> Between the time that I left campus and the time I got
on the bus to Mississippi, I encountered something
that some of you may recognize.
It was on a-- that-- has been become an iconic photograph
on the cover of Life Magazine and that's the picture
of Sheriff Price and the deputies at the arraignment
for their *** of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney.
>> Hold it up to the camera so we can see it.
>> And the photograph shows incredible arrogance,
[inaudible], mockery and this is the monster.
I'm not talking about Sheriff Price necessarily,
but I know that this was in my mind when I went down
and you had mentioned the stories that you heard.
I can't remember the name of the woman who was murdered in--
across the river in Mississippi while I was in Selma
but the stories were about the monster, so to speak.
The dread that came from the wariness that we all had
that there was absolutely no control
that we have over our own lives.
Somebody else could take it away, any of it,
all of it very easily, bore themselves out constantly
in the affect and the language and the posture
and the actions of-- and people from Sheriff Jim Clark
and the posse in Selma, Alabama
to Bill Connor [phonetic] in Birmingham.
It was all very real and to me the monster was not just the
person but the system.
>> Yes.
>> And, you know, the therapists, the family system
that encourage and authorized and made laudable that kind
of way of relating to self and culture and world,
that to me is the monster and the evil, you know,
the system that doesn't hear, it doesn't process information
from the outside, it doesn't reflect.
>> [Inaudible], yeah, that's right.
>> And I think that one of the things that I felt purposeful
about would-- and quite excited about in the midst of a lot
of confusion after I left because I too felt very guilty.
I left because I could and I felt like ***, excuse me.
And I can still get there from my own thinking.
But it was the notion of both confronting
and helping people identify the monster, so to speak.
That was the issue.
It wasn't this person or that person per se.
>> So here's the thing, these are all just excluded.
>> You got me right to the front of my seat here.
>> Yeah, but it's a very-- it does really--
it's a very powerful thing to think about than
to have participated in.
The deputy sheriff that I-- that he showed you a picture of,
well see surprises us little kind of round face pudgy guy
with a-- you know, a balding former milkman who got elected
to be the deputy sheriff.
First time I met, he's this real smiley,
joke telling kind of character.
And these jokes about rabbits and these rabbits are coming
down here from up north, you know,
and then the fox is going to them.
They better be careful and he would laugh
and he was a very kind of ordinary sort of person and--
but in him was this-- there was a monster.
The monster was the hatred and the anger
and the unbelievable theory that the threat
of change could unleash on these people.
There was a monster there and it was in this little guy,
Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff who was one of the people
that it brutally murdered 3 Civil Rights workers.
And he's the guy that arrested me
and scared the hell out of me.
I'll tell you what.
And to see this-- you know, I remember one day and I'm walking
around and this white lady and in houses--
"Son, come on, it's hot.
It's a hot day.
Come up here and have some sweet tea."
And she wanted me to sit on the porch and I did, and she said,
"Son, does your mom-- do your mom know that you're down here?
You know, you shouldn't be down here.
What if we came to your town and told how you should run things?
This isn't right.
It isn't right and you know,
you need to go home 'cause your mom is worried about you.
And if you stay too long, there are people here
that won't let you leave.
It's time for you to go home."
And you know, she said it in a sweet way but I started
to feel afraid when this grandmother was threatening me.
[Laughter] 'Cause that's what she was doing.
And then it started to build, you know.
And that was the monster that very ordinary people,
people that you could like and identify with.
I say I-- my family came from farming communities and I--
they looked just like these guys.
I mean really.
And just these ordinary people, you're--
other Americans could have
in their heart the hate they would want
that make them kill you because you were challenging something
that was so fundamental and that--
you know, that momentum that allow that hate to be revealed
and then reviled and rejected was so important
in a pivotal part of our recent history and I'm so honored
to sit with 3 of these 3 guys.
>> I think it was a fear too.
They were afraid and that was the--
>> Oh yeah, yeah.
>> Everybody was afraid.
>> And had a lot to do with fear of the other.
[Inaudible Discussions]
>> I think I shared this with somebody yesterday
that for a while in I got a left back here at Dartmouth and had
to go for an extra summer and one of the things I did was
to drive a laundry truck delivering shirts here and there
and I went to a very wealthy house in Vermont.
We kept doing that weekend to weekend
and finally somebody was there and he said,
"You can never come back here again."
I said, "Why?, He said, "'Cause you have a beard."
[Laughter]
>> And I thought, wait, you know, this is a real--
this is all about being the other.
He had an idea of that.
When my-- when I was 12, my father sat me down after I went
out on a date with the daughter of his-- of their--
of my parent's friends.
He said, "You know, you can't marry this girl."
I said, "Yeah, I'm 12."
[Laughter]
>> But maybe you have another reason.
He said she's Catholic.
It's a fear of the other and that there was a system
so entrenched in place.
In fact, it was in law because of the Jim Crow Laws
that was a system that made the other,
for white people are black people,
and what we were challenging and especially with the people
who lived there that we were challenging was
that sense of otherness.
And then this movement-- this movement begun to grow
and we begun to see that there were other others win it.
>> Yeah.
>> In 1965, the slogan was, women should say yes
to the men who say no.
People-- the men were resisting the draft and then by 1970
where people were going, "Well,
maybe that doesn't sound quite right."
[Laughter]
>> And then there was another other, they were gay.
And the guy actually who organized us to go
down to Mississippi and Alabama, George [inaudible]
of the DCU was an early out gay person
which was truly amazing on his part.
Then there was another other and that's people with disabilities
and then there was another other and those are the Islams
and they were unfortunately always be others.
And I think one of the things that we stood for in those days
and probably all of us continue to stand for is
to see an umbrella that includes everybody and I think
that if any of you know anything about the history
of folk singing-- Pete Seeger,
that's what his life has been all about.
>> Right, and I think it's the last question was to--
I think, you all wanted to talk about some of the implications
for today, now, where we are.
I mean I think one of the most important things is hearing
from you about this history.
It's real.
It matters for us to know [inaudible]-- I'm sorry.
But now also so-- not that we can just learn and remember
but what does it mean for us today,
where do you see the implications now.
We-- you know, we'd like to think, well, that's done.
We've moved on and then, it's not.
>> It's never done.
I'm sorry.
I'm--
>> Yeah, it's okay, jump in.
>> It's never done and it will-- we will always be struggling
to make the world a better place for more people.
But the others now just the 1 percent
and I think the manifestation of our movement is clearly
as Zuccotti Park in New York City, where I'm from.
And the whole occupant movement, it's really going
to be interesting to see how that develops and where it goes.
But now, 99 percent of the people are included in--
under the umbrella supposedly, supposedly.
And one of the interesting things about Zuccotti Park is
that the police-- the local police precinct was dumping
in the park crazy people.
And literally, I mean I'm using the term clinically, I supposed,
to try to be disruptive, to try to create problems
for the people in Zuccotti Park and what they--
what the people in Zuccotti Park did was solve this
as psychologist, solve this
as social workers, let's deal with this.
Yes, an opportunity.
So I do see that all of this is a anti-war movement
and everything are part of this movement to get rid
of the notion of the other.
>> Oh, I better raise my answer to your question.
There were about 6 people that I was-- and this was the great--
one of the greatest surprises that have also sort of informed
and awful lot of who I am and what I have done since then.
The first time I was thrown in jail, I was arrested as a white
and thrown into the Dallas County jails cells
with 7 white prisoners.
Now, I had in my mind-- and by the way I pitched in, thrown in
and said, here's one of Martin Luther King *** lovers
and thrown into the cell and you know, I mean I was--
I wasn't preppy [inaudible] frame of height.
[Laughter] -- scared to death, that cleaned that up some
and there was a litany.
I was encountered by a litany of-- I'm in for a manslaughter.
I'm in for colonel knowledge of a minor.
I'm-- and my sense of dread group just--
and I was shaking and I was scared to death.
And what happened then was absolutely incredible.
Every single one of them begun to turn to me and relate to me
in a way that was empathetic because they assumed
that I hated the same system that had treated them in the way
that they thought was unfair.
And it was all centered around Sheriff Jim Clark and the posse.
But you know, they taught me how to roll cigarettes
with newspapers saying help me have a light--
heat coffee in a toilet by-- hey, you know I mean I--
>> By what?
[Laughter]
>> Rolled toilet paper.
>> I can do it today.
[Laughter] I since an intimacy of, [inaudible] or whatever,
I was just absolutely overwhelmed by it.
And so what happened to me was the incredible--
and that relates to all of this.
It-- the incredible power and dynamic element to life
for good, for whatever we're talking about here
that comes just for listening.
Listening, to the other maybe or the one, it don't matter
but that's always been sort of what opened the door
for the next step for me whether it was a system
that I was listening to or about a church in trouble or a family
in trouble or a child in trouble or whatever or not in trouble
but delighting and then that illuminate the next step.
But it was always from listening and I was incredibly surprised
to that and it illuminates the other [laughter].
>> It is the responsibility of the society when you come back
into it, at least in my view that you want to be part
of the society that's taking you hold of the whole society
and shaking it by the strap of the neck
and saying we can do better and that we have to do better
and that you can push a social system to retrain itself,
to better itself and what I've done
and where I've taken this is going into government,
into elected office to say that we're not going to--
in politics to elect gay, men and women to public office.
Not a big deal anymore but it was 10 years ago
when we got started in my community,
to stand up against the other politicians
who are demonizing Hispanic human rights is a means
of getting elected to office,
to stand against those predominantly men
but by no means exclusively.
So, in each instance where you have the opportunity to go out
and stand or to oppose and sometimes you win
and sometimes you lose, but to have that role and to take
that role self-consciously for expanding the circle
of those people who are under the umbrella so that you can,
when you're done with it, say,
this is where I made a difference.
This is how in the little-- in the county in which I live
or the community in which I live, you built something
that everyone will take for granted for here on then.
Nobody will care, nobody will remember
because it now just seems like it's a perfectly reasonable part
of the fabric but if you're hearing our stories,
you're hearing where the circle was really quite small
and how it's been expanded and can be expanded further
and probably will be fewer and fewer vast opportunity
such as perhaps we could see that we had.
But there will always be the opportunities and you have
to take them and if you don't, that's the part
of your regret when you [inaudible].
>> And even if you think it's not making any difference,
you get to being with the best of book.
[Laughter]
>> In terms of-- oh, sorry.
In terms of-- just a very quick statement and that is that--
and this was a statement that came from a seminar,
a professor of my wife Sandy's of--
as a response to a question of hers about, okay, what do I do?
What do I do-- what do I do with this stuff that's in me
and her advice, her word was, "Try to figure out
and keep them-- keep in mind
where your bliss meets the worlds need."
Where are you-- what do you love?
That to me was that so powerful message from Martin Luther King.
He was-- we're aware of anger.
He knew what anger was but he never ever lost sight
of what it was that he loved.
And he was very clear about that
and he understood then the things that interfered with it,
that diminished it, that broke it, that ruptured it
and betrayed it and that's where he pushed,
that's where he touched, that's where he lived.
Sorry, good.
>> No, your additions are very helpful.
I admire all 4 of you for willing to go
to Mississippi in 1964.
The year after that, I was involved
in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Program
and sneaked out in Mississippi and the SCLC,
pretty much Virginia through Alabama and I was very happy
that I went to Virginia and not to Mississippi or Alabama
and we-- I was at-- just very briefly, Surry County,
directly across the river from Williamsburg
and two thirds black but the economic issues were not severe.
There was plenty of work there and it was hard to get people,
you know, really interested so it was a different challenge.
A difference which I appreciated
at that time [laughter] not being
down where the action really was.
My question was even-- going further back,
this is a little older than you are so-- but not too much.
I remember reading in the summer the fact
of Emmett Till being taken out and murdered in 1955,
and as a youngster living in New Hampshire
and not having much contact with things--
this stuck with me 'cause Emmett Till was the same age I was
and then of course that was one year after Brown
versus Board of Education.
And then of course come 1960, the seat-ins, the Woolworth.
I have one small little bean yet on that.
I was down at a mock democratic convention in Cambridge
and there was a Woolworth in Harvard's Square and at
that time, no more, and there were counterpicketers in May,
counter pickets they're saying, you know, sort of blacks there
which I said to myself, this is very nice but you're not
in Greensboro, North Carolina.
[Laughter] But just-- I just-- the whole black-white existence
in the south goes back from-- before the--
you know, Before the Mayflower, you know,
Bennett's journalistic account of the black-- and-- I just--
I didn't hear you all having a sense
of how far back these really-- the real horrors went.
Maybe you were kind of young
and I was pretty young at that time too.
I didn't know if you had a sense
of the long term social structure that had been in place
for over 300 years and-- or if you didn't know that,
maybe you wouldn't have gone, Any comments on that.
>> No. [Laughter]
>> Yes, I was-- personally, I've-- have a sense of history
but what I don't have is a personal sense of history
that as we said earlier, the World War I is as far back
from us in the '60s as what we're talking about now is
to most students here in Dartmouth today.
We have a visceral sense of that past.
Our grandparents had this visceral sense of WWI.
Lord knows I have no sense at all what it was like in Virginia
in the 1980s because I wasn't there.
I only know what I knew and that's--
I mean, part of it is that that's the purpose
of education is to widen our horizons but absent that,
you just basically know what you know
and the thought is act them where you were.
Do what you can do now and the rest
of it will either come or it won't.
But to make a career of trying to know everything and not act,
I would say, that would be very unwise way to live your life.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> And I grew up in a bubble, a horse farm in the country
of New Jersey and my source of human warmth
for the first 5 years of my life was a black woman
and her husband named Wissy [phonetic] who was my nanny.
I will give you an idea of a picture back there
and I can remember a conversation
with her husband Joe when I was about 10 or 11
in which I discovered a-- in a chest in their apartment
of an Army uniform and a bayonet which was fascinating to me
at the time and I asked Joe to tell me about it and his wife--
and Wissy-- Melissa said,
I don't think Joe can talk about that.
Well, about a year later, he did talk about it
and it was his painful experience
in the Korean War in-- and part of which was his sense
of isolation and the sense of loneliness and the sense
of being cannon father so to speak.
That was really the only sense I had at all other
than in history books and we did read a lot
that was not necessarily the party line in terms of history
in those days, at least the school I went to.
So I had a-- I had some sense of the context in which his--
their lives were and that was back
in the late '40s and early '50s.
But that was all.
No sense of it at all.
I had a sense of ironically what has become very popular now
through the publishing of the--
and the distribution of the movie, The Help.
[Laughter] I was aware of that culture from a critical point
of view from my family, and conversations
around the dinner table and things of that sort
which had nothing to do with what we experienced
in this little bucolic farm in New Jersey.
But-- and I think that probably played a role--
you know, a role in my experience.
>> Dirk.
>> To react to that question or--
>> I don't know.
>> Or to the implications I thing in some ways.
>> I don't know.
Maybe I'm not sure about it.
I don't what-- I came away understanding
that life is full of contradictions.
You know, on the one hand, you--
nobody's got the right
and nobody has all of the right answers.
Nobody knows everything, not--
no one person is right about everything.
You have to listen, even people that you are--
that you dislike or you're afraid or you know?
You have to listen to them.
You better understand where the other side is coming from.
I learned that as a lawyer.
[Laughter] I learned it first in Mississippi.
[Laughter] You know, you just better be careful
about being too sure of anything.
God protect us from true believers is my--
where I come out frankly.
But on the other hand, there are some things that are
so fundamental, some things that are so important
that you just can't be objective I think.
There are-- you know, there-- you come to points in your life
where there's stuff that is so significant to you that seems
so wrong that you let yourself down not--
at least speaking out against it.
You cannot, certainly in this country with everything we have
to be thankful for, and I don't mean to sound like I'm running
for Congress but I mean, you know, with everything we have,
you cannot be indifferent to people in this country,
to Americans that don't--
aren't offering the same opportunities, you know?
So, there is the contradiction that don't be too sure
of what you think and yet,
you need to be sure of what you think.
I don't know how to resolve any of that
and I've never really sorted it out.
And I don't-- I've never talked to anybody really as much
as I've talked to you today about this.
You know, when I came back from this,
my mother never said a word to me
about it ever in her whole life.
And my dad spoke to me about it once
and I can see I'm getting choked up even telling you the story.
He was lived to be 93 and when he was 92 years old,
we were talking about something else
and he said just started to blue.
[Laughter]
>> He said, "You remember that time you went down south?"
I said, "Yeah."
He said, "Your mother was worried sick.
Well, she was more worried about you then when you were
in the Army, and we're so glad that you came back.'
And he said, "We're really proud of you."
[Silence]
>> And we are.
>> Yeah.
>> And I'm going to take my-- and now I'm all choked up.
[Laughter] [Inaudible Remarks]
>> Opportunity to-- you know, there are a number
of really important things I think indifference is
not tolerable.
Bearing witness is important.
Acting through all kinds of ways, sometimes speaking,
sometimes direct action is important for all of us to do
in the ways that we can and to be aware of that,
how can you make that difference.
But you heard all of that too
and so the most important thing I would like us
to do is thank these 4 gentlemen.
[ Applause ]
[ Silence ]