University Place  Michael Edmonds Collecting Civil Rights Manuscripts During the 1960s

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>> Today, we are pleased to
introduce Michael Edmonds,
deputy director of the Wisconsin
Historical Society's library
archives division, as part of
the Wisconsin Historical
Museum's History Sandwiched In
lecture series.
The opinions today, I'm sorry,
the opinions expressed today are
those of the presenter and not
necessarily those of the
Wisconsin Historical Society or
the museum's employees.
The Wisconsin Historical Society
owns one of the nation's richest
archives on the Civil Rights
Movement, including tens of
thousands of letters, diaries,
phone logs, photographs, and
audiotapes.
Today, Michael will share with
us why this collection is in
Wisconsin rather than in
Washington, DC.
Please join me in welcoming
Michael Edmonds to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]

>> Thanks, Katie.
And thanks to the rest of you
for braving that brown slush out
there and coming out today.
I appreciate it.
Many of you know that one of the
nation's finest civil rights
collections is here in Madison
and was one of the first things
I heard when I joined the staff
more than 30 years ago.
But nobody really knew how it
got here.
They knew when and they knew
why, but exactly how did it
happen?
No one knew until recently.
About two years ago with the
anniversary of Freedom Summer
coming up, this is the 50th
anniversary of Freedom Summer,
we decided to digitize a lot of
our civil rights manuscripts and
share them on the web.
There's a postcard, a five by
eight card that Katie was going
to circulate that will take you
to that if you want to look at
the manuscripts I'll be talking
about today.
That piqued my interest, as the
person building that online
collection, to find out exactly
how did this happen.
Why is this collection in
Wisconsin instead of in
Washington, as Katie said in the
introduction?
And that's what I'll try to
explain to you today.
I have a terrible cold that I
bet some of you have.
So I'm going to apologize in
advance for the state of my
voice and then say nothing more
about it, okay?
Every serious researcher on the
Civil Rights Movement in the
last 50 years has come to
Madison to use these papers.
It's well known among scholars
and historians that the
collection is very deep and very
rich.
What is it exactly?
Well, we have, again, let me
apologize again.
I thought it was kind of tacky
to put my own picture up here on
the screen, but this really
conveys what the inside of an
archive looks like.
And most of you probably never
go there.
We have 315 different
collections.
A collection can be a folder or
a box or it can be enough boxes
to fill this room.
All together more than a
thousand boxes of papers about
civil rights.
Some of them we only have on
microfilm because the donors
didn't want to give them to us;
they just wanted to let us copy
them.
There are a thousand pages on
every reel.
So what's that, 300,000 pages?
And then, of course, many
thousands of photographs and
other images.
Geographically, the manuscript
collections heavily centered in
Mississippi, and you'll see why
in a few minutes.
There are large collections
about nationwide organizations
and then other states in the
south.
And of course civil rights in
Wisconsin is well represented
because we're the state archives
and that stuff was easy to
gather.
Now the people who built this
collection are here.
Anybody know any of these
people?
There's some '60s veterans
in the room I'm guessing.
Alicia Kaplow, in the upper
left, came as an undergraduate
as a freshman.
I can't see the cursor.
There we go.
Came as a freshman in 1963 from
New York.
And she was a history major.
She was very active in the Civil
Rights Movement locally, founded
the student chapter of SNCC, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee.
And she got a job pulling
staples out of manuscripts in
the archives as a freshman.
Bob and Vicki Gabriner came in
the fall of '64.
They too were from New York.
They met at Cornell and had been
active in the south in the Civil
Rights Movement.
Mimi Feingold came at the same
time, September '64.
She too was a history grad
student, and she had been
working as a volunteer for CORE.
And as you can tell from the
picture, she was arrested in
1961 when she was all of 19, she
looks about 12 though, on one of
the first Freedom Rides.
If you know the history of the
Civil Rights Movement, on the
early Freedom Rides one of the
first rides was firebombed, one
of the first buses was
firebombed in Anniston, Georgia,
and when that ride got going
again, she was one of the people
that came south to complete it,
and she was arrested in Jackson,
Mississippi, and spent that
summer in prison in Mississippi.
>> What was she arrested for?
>> Riding with black people on
the same bus.
Yeah.
Another grad student who came
early in '65, Russel Gilmore,
was one of the collectors.
And then in '66 and '67,
Leah Johnson came.
She had just graduated from UW
when she took the job.
And Gwen Gillen was an
undergraduate when she took the
job collecting papers for us.
Gwen is the only one who still
lives in Madison.
She lives on the south side.
She's a Madison school teacher.
The others have scattered around
the country long ago.
Now, before they came to
Madison, they had been working,
or in Gwen's case living in the
south.
Bob and Vicki helped black
voters register in southwest
Tennessee, Fayette County,
Tennessee.
And they came directly from
there to go to school here in
Madison.
Mimi had been working for CORE
for a year after she graduated
from college in order to
register voters and work on
desegregation issues.
Gwen had grown up here in
Anniston where that bus was
firebombed.
Although, she told me that she
was not in town the day that it
happened.
She would have been about 14-15
years old.
And she went to college
initially in Jackson,
Mississippi, but immediately
dropped out when SNCC recruiters
came through.
She became a full-time civil
rights worker.
She spent Freedom Summer, the
summer of 1964, working in the
delta, and she was one of a
handful of people who tried to
find the three who were murdered
on Freedom Summer's first day.
We'll talk some more about that
later.
So that's the cast of characters
and what they were doing before
they came to Madison.
Vicki Gabriner told me: "Our
minds were blown by this
experience we had had.
We were very full of it and
carried it with us when we came
to Madison.
Bob remembers that we didn't see
ourselves in academic careers.
We were always trying to figure
out ways to bring those two
pieces of our lives together."
Their political activism and
academia.
And at the end of their first
semester in town, they
approached the director of the
Historical Society and said the
records of the Civil Rights
Movement are going to vanish if
they're not preserved, and you
ought to be collecting them.
This was the director at the
time, Les Fishel.
Some of you if you've been in
Madison for a couple decades
will remember Les.
And here's Russ Gilmore.
"The thrust of what we
proposed," Bob said later, "was
to collect the stuff that wasn't
easily collectible, but we could
do it because we had cachet.
We had knowledge.
We had people we knew.
We were part of the movement.
And we believed that would be a
great way to ensure that all of
this stuff was kept and taken
care of.
Fishel didn't blink an eye.
He said this is great.
He said, we'll pay you for it,
we'll pay your way.
I was like, holy moly, this guy
really understands what we're
talking about.
Feingold told me, I think it was
amazingly forward thinking for
the director of a research
library to open his doors to a
bunch of upstart grad students.
Of course at the time, we didn't
stand on ceremony having just
come from leading protest
activities all across the
south."
Russ Gilmore was one of their
contemporaries.
He had just arrived in town too,
and as a student worker, he
joined the staff of the society
that collects things.
He was not politically active
like the others.
In fact, he did his PhD
dissertation on the National
Rifle Association and went on to
lead military museums for most
of his career.
"But during the mid-'60s, he was
our guy on the ground," Vicki
recalled.
"We'd be in some out-of-the-way
place in Mississippi or Alabama
or Georgia, and we could call
Russel and he'd be extremely
responsive to anything we
needed.
I mean, he got what we were
doing and he liked it and he
liked us and we liked him.
It was a nice synergy.
Fishel set it up that way.
Giving the okay on it was great,
but we couldn't have pulled it
off without Russ Gilmore."
So today the society takes great
pride in these collections, but
it wasn't the leadership of the
society, it wasn't the
professionals at the society who
made it happen.
It was part-time student workers
who made it happen.
Most of the society staff looked
like this.
That's the staff in 1965.
And they were a little skeptical
about this project.
Bob Gabriner says, "I never saw
anyone frown or think this was
not worth the effort, but the
older staff were just amazed at
the audacity."
Bob paraphrases their reaction
this way: "These maniacs are
actually willing to go to the
deep south to towns they've
never been to and introduce
themselves and collect material?
A white couple drives into a
small black community in the
south and says give me your
papers?
You've got to be out of your
mind to do that."
[LAUGHTER]
And today he says, "Looking at
it with the whole picture
in mind, it was a pretty bold
thing to do, not to say crazy."
Which is why I chose that as the
title.
At the time, this is 1964, early
1965, there were four major
civil rights organizations
active in the struggle.
The NAACP had been founded in
1909.
It was an integrated
organization headquartered in
New York.
It led most of the legal battles
to challenge segregation laws.
It was committed at the national
level to a slow and patient
process.
CORE was the Congress of
Rational Equality, had been
founded in the 1940s on pacifist
and nonviolent principles.
They had led some of the first
Freedom Rides in the 1950s.
The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference you've
heard of.
That was Martin Luther King's
organization, founded in 1956.
It was heavily male dominated,
run by male ministers for the
most part.
Very hierarchical.
And then there was SNCC, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, which has been called
the shock troops of the Civil
Rights Movement.
Made up mostly of young people.
Mostly blacks, some white staff
and volunteers.
Most of them the first people in
their family to go to college,
and yet they dropped out in
order to put their bodies on the
line, take it into the streets.
Not into courtrooms.
Not go slow and wait.
And Vicki and Bob had been
active in none of these, but
their sympathies were with SNCC.
Mimi had been CORE staff.
Gwen was a SNCC staff member.
And they shared this belief,
this is a quote from Vicki at
the bottom, "We did not believe
that people can really
understand the Civil Rights
Movement if they just look at
the papers of some national
air conditioned office."
And what she was getting at
there was that the struggle was
happening because ordinary
people in small towns all over
the south were putting their
bodies in front of Klan
firebombs and police shotguns.
It wasn't happening because of
Brown v. Board of Education,
and they wanted to make sure
the history got preserved.
Bob said, "The notion of history
from the bottom up was part in
parcel of the way I saw and the
way I wanted to study and write
it."
So what they wanted to do and
what they proposed to the
Historical Society was go out
there on the ground and collect
what really happens to real
people.
They started by contacting
everyone they knew and giving
their own papers whatever
records they had, and there were
two record-keeping forms they
used.
This is a five by eight card
called the lead card which has
the information about the
person, the contacts, and then a
record of all communications.
And then everybody who gave
papers was supposed to sign a
form that said here, you can
have my papers and the copyright
to them and everything else.
They didn't always get that.
Among the first people they
contacted were Carl and Anne
Braden, who had been active in
all sorts of liberal movements
in Tennessee since the 1940s,
labor as well as civil rights.
That's a picture of them with
Martin Luther King.
And when Bob and Vicki Gabriner
went south to work on the voter
rights program in Tennessee,
they stopped and called on the
Bradens to say what are we
getting ourselves into, what's
it going to be like.
So when they started collecting,
they called them up, and the
Bradens said not only you can
have all of our stuff, they gave
them their Rolodex and said
contact all these people and
tell them we think you're doing
a good thing.
This woman, Elizabeth Martinez,
worked in SNCC's New York
office, and she worked full-time
for a publisher in New York.
And she decided after Freedom
Summer that she would edit a
book of letters, the northern
volunteers' letters home.
And here's the book here.
She collected far more letters
than she could use.
So when our staff contacted her,
she said you can have all my
files which included 1600 names
and addresses.
All the volunteers plus all of
their parents and relatives.
In the months the followed, the
staff back in the office sent up
800 letters to volunteers saying
can we have you stuff and to
their parents as well.
So for a year they worked here
in Madison sort of working in
concentric circle.
The people they knew, the people
those people knew and so forth
and brought in a few dozen
collections, but after a year,
this is now April of '66, it was
clear that they weren't going to
get the good stuff if they
didn't go out into the field.
So they proposed, the Gabriners
and Mimi Feingold, proposed to
Les Fishel a road trip.
And after several meetings, this
is sort of the contract that
they agreed upon that they'd be
paid a lump sum of $2700 to be
divided among them as necessary,
cover all their expenses.
That Les would find out what the
liability was if they were hurt
or injured and how they could be
protected.
Of course there was nothing he
could do to protect them.
And he would explore the
possibilities of raising private
money for bail if they were
arrested.
And Alicia told me yesterday in
an email that he was prepared to
put up that money himself, that
$1500, if they didn't raise
enough for bail.
They received no training of any
kind.
Bob recalls that, "We were on
our own.
You basically had to talk your
way into a community.
All of our skill sets from what
we had done in Tennessee were
used again in Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas."
Vicki joked that the only
training she got was how to
change flat tires.
That was very important.
Fishel's concern about their
safety was well founded.
In the previous two years,
30 civil rights workers had been
killed in the south, three
years, more than 30 civil
rights.
Mickey Schwerner, does that name
mean anything to some of you?
One of the three killed on the
first day of Freedom Summer.
He had been at Cornell with the
Gabriners, had been in the same
fraternity as Bob, and they
heard about his disappearance
while they were driving south in
June of '64.
And they realized the same thing
could happen to them.
In fact, in Tennessee in '64 the
local Klan called for Bob's
murder, although no one acted on
it.
Vicki remembers today that guns
were everywhere.
"Every pickup truck had a rifle
rack in the cab, and you could
see them as they drove by.
We felt unsafe all the time,
constantly.
If we'd really thought about how
dangerous it was, if we had let
that rise to the surface and be
the first thing we thought
about, well that would not have
been a good strategy."
Bob added, "We were also very
aware that any black person we
talked to could be lynched
afterward just for talking to
us."
Nonetheless, they got themselves
together and went to the south
for a month in the summer of '66
to look for papers.
They rendezvoused in Memphis at
the airport, and then Bob and
Vicki were the red lines on that
map and Mimi is the green line.
In order to go solicit what they
could, they also carried tape
recorders.
1966 is really almost the
beginning of the first portable
tape recorder.
And they had these crude little
battery operated tape recorders
to interview people with.
Bob and Vicki first collected
the records of the project they
had worked on up in west
Tennessee.
Then they ducked down to Holly
Springs, Mississippi, to try to
get SNCC's records from Freedom
Summer, but SNCC gave them a
cold shoulder.
They were unknown, they didn't
have local credentials, and SNCC
said no, we're not going to give
you these papers at this time
anyway.
So then they headed west out to
Little Rock, Arkansas, where
they had much better success.
Mimi's route was to leave
Memphis and go down to New
Orleans, where she had contacts
in CORE, and then pick up as
many papers as she could all
through the state of Louisiana.
They agreed to meet in Jackson,
Mississippi, three weeks later,
although they didn't manage to
do that.
So Bob and Vicki headed off to
Little Rock, which you will know
as the source of the first test
of Brown v. Board in 1957
when nine students integrated
the high school there against
the wishes of the community and
got very little protection.
Daisy Bates had been the head of
the Little Rock NAACP and kept
all the records on that, as well
as records going back earlier,
and when they visited with Daisy
Bates and her husband, the
Bateses thought this was a great
idea.
This stuff should be preserved,
it's vulnerable to firebombing
or getting lost, and you can
have it up there in Wisconsin.
When Russ Gilmore went down to
pick it up afterward, it
included not just their files
but a rock which had been thrown
through her window, and the
little wrapper around the rocks
says, "Next time will be
dynamite. - KKK."
The cooperation of Daisy Bates
opened all doors in Arkansas.
Staff at the state central SNCC
office gave Bob and Vicki
everything.
All the local offices around the
state contributed, and by the
time they crossed the
Mississippi River they had
shipped five cartons of paper to
Madison.
Then they headed to Jackson
where they were again
cold-shouldered, before heading
up into the Mississippi Delta.
I went backwards.
Sorry about that.
The Delta is this area here on
the map that is lighter colored.
It's low, wet, well drained
swampland.
Mostly cotton at that time was
growing there.
Many of the communities,
people's lives had not really
changed since the 19th century.
The rest of Mississippi is more
upland.
You can see forest here.
So they headed off into towns
like Greenwood and Indianola and
Greenville, Cleveland,
Clarksdale, to try to pick up
papers.
Bob says, "You basically find
out from one person about
another person and so on and on.
If you have one name in one
county in the Mississippi Delta,
you try to make that name
multiply.
That's the task.
That's all you get."
"We turned off the paved
highways when we reached the
towns we were looking for,"
Vicki wrote in the staff
newsletter, "and traveled the
dirt roads which run through the
Negro communities.
In some instances, we had the
addresses to freedom houses to
look for.
In others, we would look for
Negroes, ask directions to the
homes of the civil rights
leaders, directions which
sometimes led us out into the
rural hinterlands.
Once having found the people for
whom we were searching, it
became necessary for us to prove
that we were not interlopers,
not FBI agents, but civil rights
workers doing work related to
the movement.
We met with people in wooden
shacks, under trees, and in cars
from early in the morning until
late at night."
"Really, this is one hell of a
way to make a living," they
wrote back to Gilmore from the
village of Marks in the Delta.
"Working 12 to 18 hours a day,
being greeted in a manner
ranging from frank hostility to
having papers thrust at us
without even a satisfactory
explanation, the ladder having
happened only once, not having
eaten before we get involved
somewhere, and unable to be nice
Historical Society people
because our stomachs are
convulsed."
In Clarksdale, Aaron Henry, who
was the head of the NAACP in
Mississippi, simply refused to
talk to them.
He had seen his friend Medgar
Evers killed just a couple years
before.
He knew there were informants
and infiltrators all through the
movement in Mississippi.
If you saw the PBS documentary
last week Spies of Mississippi
you understand about that.
And he simply refused to talk
to them.
In the newsletter again, when
they got back, Vicki wrote, "As
we traveled we usually were met
with indifference or open
hostility.
Unknown people springing up
suddenly in the middle of a
battlefield, which is what the
south is, are to be distrusted
and to be taken into confidence
only after having proved
themselves."
After three weeks on the road,
they headed north to Madison.
Now, from Memphis, Mimi had gone
straight to New Orleans where
she found that CORE's southern
regional office was shutting
down.
The organization was going to
open offices in each individual
state.
Until then, from '59 to '65,
this office in New Orleans had
coordinated all activities
across the south.
And she was told that she could
have all the records that were
more than a year old.
"Beginning with the filing
cabinets," she wrote, "I
systematically went through the
files leaving behind everything
after June 1, 1965, and taking
everything else.
I attacked a pile of file
folders gathering dust on a
shelf.
Then I took all the files from
cartons labeled "state office -
Baton Rouge."
Under a table in a small room in
front of the office, which was
filled mostly with garbage, I
found piles of loose papers and
cartons called Louisiana
reports.
And just as I thought I was
through, someone pointed out a
small file cabinet hiding in the
corner which contained material
from the research department."
She shipped eight boxes of CORE
materials back to Madison
covering the organization's
activities from '59 to '65.
For the next three weeks she
drove a Volkswagen Beetle around
Louisiana and southern
Mississippi, calling on people,
taping interviews, collecting
papers, and recording promises.
This is a pocket notebook that
she kept in the car.
It says, "When speed limit drops
to circa 30 miles per hour at
bridge, circa a mile from center
of town, cross bridge.
First street on left, first
building on left is McGee's
Cafe.
Across from cafe, second and
third house from corner, are
movement people.
They can direct us to MFDP
office."
So this is how she went person
to person, jotting directions
like that in her notebook.
She kept a steno notebook in
which she recorded what she
shipped back to Madison.
So if you've always wondered how
come archives and libraries fill
up with stuff, this is how it's
done.
It doesn't happen automatically.
Most paper gets put out with the
trash.
"I called on the people I knew
first," she recalls, "And then
on people whose names had been
given to me by my Louisiana
contacts.
Typically a local would tell me
you should go see so and so.
He's been trying to register
people to vote, he might have
some papers, and I'd go off and
visit so and so."
She was ticketed by the police
in one town for changing her
clothes on a beach.
She rescued records in another
from "a ramshackle hut which was
on the verge of collapsing in
which the CORE papers were
slowly rotting."
And she was guarded by shotguns
while staying with an African
American family in the town of
Ferriday.
"Driving around in rural black
Louisiana," she says today, "was
like going back in time a
century.
The roads were dirt or gravel
and wind would blow dust in your
face.
Most of my donors were ordinary
local black people in small
Louisiana towns like Clinton or
Plaquemine.
They had no idea that anything
they might still have hanging
around their homes, shacks
really, would be considered
valuable.
Their concern was not so much
any reluctance in parting with
the stuff but with why in the
world anyone might want it."
So, what did they bring back?
Well, they brought back
political fliers, like this one.
Of course lots of handwritten
letters and notes.
Memos of meetings and
organizational records.
Press releases, pamphlets,
newspaper clippings and
scrapbooks that people had kept.
Phone logs that people had kept
of incoming communications.

Meanwhile, back in Madison,
Alicia Kaplow had been trying to
get SNCC to donate its archives.
They had acquired the archives
of CORE, which are 150 boxes.
They would more than fill this
room.
And so Alicia then went after
SNCC.
The head of SNCC at the time was
Stokely Carmichael, and as you
can see from this note, "Tried
to get to speak to you in both
New York and Washington but it
seems I arrived in both places
just as you left."
She's running up and down the
east coast trying to get him to
say that Madison could have
SNCC's papers.
But SNCC made all decisions as a
group.
Everything had to be done by
consensus.
And many of its leaders felt
that the society was not to be
trusted.
It was a government agency.
Who knows who was behind it.
It could be the FBI or the CIA,
and the names and contact
information of hundreds of
movement supporters would fall
into the wrong hands.
Others felt that the archives
should either stay in the south
or at least be at an all-black
institution.
And in the end, they never did
give us their papers.
They went at the end of the '60s
to the King Center in Atlanta.
During the '66-'67 school year
there was a generational shift
in the project.
Mimi Feingold got her degree and
left town.
Vicki came into the office to do
that job.
She wrote home, "After going to
school for, egads, 18 years, I'm
earning $1.50 per hour.
Like I told my parents, it's a
good thing I got a BS and a
master's or else I could have
gotten a job as a plumber and
made $5 an hour."
[LAUGHTER]
In the staff newsletter at the
end of 1966 she wrote,
"This winter we are closing
leads we developed last summer,
writing to people we met
who indicated they might send us
their papers, and opening new
leads to people and
organizations in both the north
and the south."
By the end of January '67, the
list of donors ran 10 pages and
contained 131 individuals and
organizations.
In June, Alicia Kaplow left too.
And so Gilmore hired recent
history grad Leah Johnson, who's
in the middle here, to take her
place and work in the office.
That's really what the project
looked like.
We haven't figured out what room
that is at the Historical
Society, but you can see it was
energetic idealistic students
making this happen.
Leah had just graduated with a
degree in history, wasn't sure
what she wanted to do next.
She had gone to SNCC's annual
meeting and met its leaders in
the spring of '67.
And the idea was she would take
over the office work and then
coordinate another tour.
They needed someone with
Mississippi credentials because
the previous summer Bob and
Vicki Gabriner had just been
cold-shouldered everywhere they
went, like with Aaron Henry who
wouldn't talk to them.
And they were lucky to find Gwen
Gillen, who had come up to
Madison to finish her
undergraduate degree.
Gwen had grown up in Alabama
where she was pledged to marry a
local clergyman and to become a
maid like her mother and her
grandmother, but she instead won
a scholarship to Tupelo College
in Jackson.
And then instead of going there,
she became a full-time civil
rights worker.
She was only 17 at the time.
She was the youngest SNCC
worker, paid staff member.
That's her on the right.
They used to assign her to work
with high school because she
couldn't be arrested for
corrupting a minor because she
was herself a minor.
That didn't keep her, in June of
'64, from being among a handful
of people who went out to look
for the missing three civil
rights workers who were
chronicled in the movie
Mississippi Burning.
She and Stokely Carmichael and a
handful of others slept during
the day and then went out and
tried to sneak into bars and so
forth to find the murdered men.
They didn't know they were
murdered.
Stokely Carmichael remembered
her in his autobiography as a
"gutsy little sister."
Gwen came in Madison for the '66
school year and was the perfect
person to help get records from
Mississippi.
So in the summer of '67, the two
Gabriners and Leah and Gwen went
to Atlanta to start.
The idea being that Bob and
Vicki would try to, as they put
it, scour Georgia and Alabama
while Gwen and Leah concentrated
on Mississippi.
The first thing they did was
meet with SNCC, whose
headquarters were in Atlanta,
and work out a deal.
SNCC wouldn't give them their
archives, and they didn't want
them taking the archives that
might be scattered.
"We were not to take
organizational records under
this agreement, but personal
records of SNCC activists were
okay," was the deal.
So Johnson and Gillen headed
west in a rented car, arriving
in Jackson, Mississippi, about
July 15th, where they acquired
the papers of the legal staff of
Freedom Summer.
Several file cabinets worth of
immaculately maintained records.
Then they headed north into the
Delta hoping to gather papers
that were scattered across
multiple communities.
Their three-day Delta escapade,
sorry, here they are with SNCC.
I got a slide behind.
Their three-day Delta escapade
was led by their friend Hollis
Watkins, who had known Gwen from
Freedom Summer and before.
He had survived arrests,
assaults, and bombings and was
admired by everybody in the
Mississippi movement.
He was also a former boyfriend
of Gwen's and was happy to guide
her and Johnson around the
Delta.
Question, comment?
No?
Okay.
Leah did all the driving,
following Watkins' lead.
By day they discovered records
in boarded up storefronts,
abandoned farm buildings, and
vacant offices; at night they
slept on friends' floors or
couches.
Leah thinks Hollis Watkins was
never paid for his time doing
this for the society.
Here's a map of the Delta.
This red box shows approximately
where it is in the state of
Mississippi.
As you can see, it has a few
highways but mostly it's little
roads weaving between
plantations and farms into small
communities where people lived
as shown in those bottom photos
there.
But a lot of those people were
people that Gwen knew.
And so when they pulled up at
their house and explained what
they were doing, they had
credibility that the Gabriners
had not had the year before.
One of the people they called on
was Fannie Lou Hamer.
Anybody recognize that name?
Raise your hand if you recognize
that name.
Okay, Fannie Lou Hamer had
started out as a plantation
worker in Ruleville,
Mississippi, became politically
active, and rose to the head of
the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, was a
candidate for congress, appeared
on national television, became
an icon of the Civil Rights
Movement.
So when Gwen and Leah pulled up
in front of her house on July
19th, they assumed she would
have a great collection.
She knew everybody so she must
have a great cache of papers.
And as they pulled up in front
of her house, they found her
standing outside in the yard
burning all her old papers.
She said there were so many that
she didn't know what to do with
them all, Johnson recalled.
And she had no idea they might
interest anybody else.
So they came away with a single
folder, which she pulled
together when they came back the
next day.
Now there's an explanation for
that.
For generations in black
communities in the south no one
had been taught, few people had
been taught to read or write.
And it was reading and writing
and the filling out of forms
were part of the mechanism of
oppression.
That's how you were kept from
doing things was by written
records.
If there were written records,
they could incriminate you.
So in black communities in the
south the history was passed
along orally for generation
after generation.
People who could tell in great
detail reliably what had
happened generations ago might
have no records on paper that
they thought were worth keeping.
So we all, living up here, most
of us college educated, think,
oh, how could she do that?
But different values, different
culture, different priorities.

In Cleveland, Mississippi, also
in the Delta, they encountered
Reverend Bob Beech, who had run
the Hattiesburg office of the
Delta Ministry, which was how
most of the clergy from the
north came down.
They went to McComb, where this
building on the left was the
headquarters of the Delta
Ministry, and brought back 10
boxes of archives related to
clergy participating in the
Civil Rights Movement.
Then they made a side trip to
Canton where they met with Annie
Devine, another local activist
who was involved with CORE.
She ran for office with Fannie
Lou Hamer as well in '64 and
'65.
And she turned over all the
records of CORE in her area of
Mississippi.
Thousands of pages of papers.
Then they went to the town of
Cleveland where this photo you
may have seen before was taken.
This is kind of an iconic photo.
This is Bob Moses, Robert Moses,
who ran Freedom Summer, worked
for SNCC.
Julian Bond, come back cursor,
Julian Bond, who was the head of
the NAACP for the last 10 or 15
years and a political leader in
Georgia before that.
Three SNCC workers, field
secretaries named in the caption
there.
Here's Hollis Watkins.
And then these two older guys
who were like the godfathers of
Freedom Summer.
Amzie Moore, in the white
overcoat and hat, had been
fighting segregation in
Mississippi in the Delta since
World War II.
He came back from World War II,
started his own business.
He had a gas station and a
grocery store, so he was not as
vulnerable to intimidation as
his neighbors who all worked for
white plantation owners.
So he started a campaign in the
'50s that created bumper
stickers saying "Don't buy gas
where you can't use the
restroom."
Why he was not murdered like so
many others, he never
understood.
And next to him is a farmer from
southeastern Mississippi named
EW Steptoe.
Same deal.
He owned his own land,
independent, and helped register
voters long before SNCC came in
and the movement gained national
attention in Mississippi.
So they met with Amzie Moore,
whose papers went back into the
early '50s.
Very valuable collection.
He didn't quite trust them
though.
He was always a little
suspicious of SNCC, and he
didn't give them anything at the
time.
Three years later, he shipped up
to Madison a dozen boxes of
papers that are among the
richest collections we have on
the Civil Rights Movement.
As the sun set on July 20th,
they dropped Hollis Watkins back
home and decided not to make
anymore calls in the Delta.
"It was about 10:30 PM, and
since Hollis wasn't with us we
decided against it.
Ain't too safe to go driving
through the Delta at night, at
least not for us.
Pickup trucks with rifles hung
in the back window throughout
the area."
Meanwhile, Bob and Vicki had
been taking a different
itinerary.
They started by calling on
prospects in Atlanta and then
went down to Albany, Georgia,
where there had been an
aggressive desegregation
campaign in '61 and '62.
And then went to Montgomery to
see if there were any bus
boycott records.
They went to call on colleagues
at Tuskegee to see if the
leading black institution in the
south was collecting anything.
They went up to Birmingham to
see if there were records from
the great desegregation struggle
in '63, and then they headed
over to Mississippi.
They met with the guy in the
upper left there, Sam Shirah,
first.
He had been with SNCC since its
very beginning, and he kept
excellent records.
So they were able to ship to
Madison three boxes of his
papers which document the
founding of SNCC as an
organization.
So while the society didn't get
SNCC's official archives, they
got enough papers from people
who were present at the founding
and the early years that we may
as well have the official
archives.
The next day, Bob and Vicki
headed into southwest Georgia
where they met with Reverend
Charles Sherrod who had led the
Albany movement, and he was a
little suspicious but ended up
giving them two boxes, which
they shipped on July 14th.
Then they went to Birmingham,
where no one would really give
them anything.
The same was the case in
Montgomery, where the leaders of
the Montgomery bus boycott all
had their allegiance with the
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, and they wanted
those papers either to stay
there or to go up to Boston
where Martin Luther King had
just donated his personal
papers.
So they got over to Jackson
where they had much better
success.
They got many organizational
papers there, including the
papers of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party.
It had been led in '64 and '65
by Lawrence Guyot, who is
showing off the injuries from
being tortured by police in this
photo.
And those totaled thousands of
papers, thousands of pages of
papers for the society.
So they had a pretty good trip
in the end.
The last thing they did was run
over to Meridian, Mississippi,
which is where the three civil
rights workers who were murdered
disappeared from, and picked up
the office papers there.
They kept track of what they
were doing this way.
Here's a shipping receipt.
Fifty-six pounds of papers sent
from Albany, Georgia, a little
note back to Russel Gilmore
saying we sent three boxes from
Montgomery, Alabama, and so
forth.
So, what did they do?
Well, during this four-year
stretch that you see here on the
screen, they brought in 232
shipments of papers.
For the next several decades,
those people that they had
contacted continued to send in
papers.
About a dozen collections a year
came in until the 1990s.
But the heart of what the
society owns and that no one
else owns on the Civil Rights
Movement was from their work.
Here are some recent pictures of
them.
Vicki became very active in SDS
and managed to escape being
arrested along with other
people.
She said she was never
underground.
She went on to found one of the
pioneer women's and gay rights
organizations in Atlanta.
Bob went to San Francisco in
1969.
He's a professor
at San Francisco State.
Mimi worked as an archivist
doing oral histories at the
Bancroft Library in Berkeley for
10 or 15 years.
Today she's a high school
teacher in San Francisco.
Gwen, as I said before, is a
high school teacher here.
Alicia Kaplow became an
attorney.
She's still an attorney
in New York City,
lives in New York City.
All of these people are coming
in April, and you can meet them.
April 17th, Thursday night,
April 17th.
We're going to have a public
panel discussion with them down
at the society headquarters, and
they'll talk about this and
their other work in the legacy
of the movement and where civil
rights stands today.
Actually, I told them they can
talk about whatever they want to
talk about, but I think that's
what they'll do.
By 1969 the people who had
approached Les Fishel with their
crazy idea had scattered all
over the country.
Vicki speaks for them all when
she said recently, "For us, it
was the opportunity of a
lifetime, both the work we did
organizing and then being able
to go back to parts of the deep
south and do this collecting I
remember the work was just so
compelling and the possibilities
were just so exciting, some of
them unrealistic, but for us to
be given the opportunity and
have our breakfast paid for, I
can always remember pulling in
and having grits for breakfast
when we were doing this, that
was a great gift, a great gift."
It was a gift not just to her
but to all of us and the rest of
the country because without the
collecting that they did at the
grassroots level, all we would
know about the Civil Rights
Movement would be out of those
institutional papers
from air conditioned offices.
Okay, thank you.
That's all I have.
It's time for questions.
[APPLAUSE]