Dr. Martin Luther King jr. Said there's not anything more powerful than the marching feet of a determined people
As a kid there was not much I could aspire to
You were diminished in the way we thought we could access power and be part of the American family
And so this gigantic March we were saying to the world this
Land of great opportunity this land of liberty has an asterisk beside it
It is a land of freedom for everybody else except black people
Prior to Martin Luther King jr. The United States was like a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic had become addicted
To racial segregation
The end of the Second World War you're onto the belief if we were triumphant over fascism that the
men and women who returned from that conflict would be
celebrated and honored. When I was growing up in rural
Alabama and we'd see those signs that would say white waiting, colored waiting, white men, colored men
I asked my mother, my father, my grandparents "why?" They would say "That's the way it is!
Don't get in the way." I first knew of Dr. King the way everybody knew of Dr. King
all of a sudden one day in the midst of this
turmoil in some faraway place
called Montgomery. Dr. King
Was pressed into service and took over the leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott. We heard of him almost immediately
because not only did he
accept the leadership
But he pressed this idea that we should do it non-violently. I was deeply inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
To find a way to get in the way. So I used non-violence
I sit in on a lunch counter stool by going on a freedom ride to get in the way.
The Freedom Ride was an attempt to break the
Segregation laws on interstate transportation on buses and on trains. There were six whites on the Freedom Rides and seven blacks we would
sit together black and white. In Rock Hill, South Carolina was where we encountered the first violence with John Lewis being
pretty well, beaten up. Federal government finally intervened and
These early victories only encouraged us that we could do other things
They were very smart media wise because they dressed up and put the ties on, and put the jackets on. They
Were looking good and they are going up against the authority
They're going against the man. That was tremendously exciting to us as young white Southerners. As the nonviolent
Concept grew parallel to that was also the growth of an eye-for-an-eye
Violence and there were many who
were quite bright and quite gifted and honorable men and women who saw violence as an answer that
just did not quite sit comfortably with the code of others of us had saying that although racism was a
cruel experience we could not fight it by becoming
racists
Birmingham, Alabama
The nation was treated with television images of black and white boys and girls having high-pressure fire hoses
Slammed them up against the walls as they were peacefully demonstrating in segregation. Police dogs biting
These pictures were circulated all around the world
But those demonstrations were like a
Spark that ignited a prairie fire of black protests across the country. And Kennedy
On one hand he's trying to win Africans and people and say we are a better system than communism
And at the same time there was this harsh treatment of black people and I just didn't square in the final equation
And the more we were feisty
In our demands of government the more revealed the weaknesses in our own construct. What started out as
black
Negro protests
had developed
into a Negro revolution
There was a feeling that we would not be able to break the deep south so that March on Washington was
To be the culmination of all of this intense
Organizing it really has to be a moral crusade
for the country. The struggle for freedom
in the United States had to move to the center of power to where the President and the Congress were that no matter how many
Demonstrations took place in Montgomery and in Birmingham and places all around the south that until you could change
The central government significant things wouldn't happen. The march on Washington was an accumulation of all this course here would have been the biggest display
of America in his most democratic
Moment
Making a choice and it was something was emerging as a great demonstration as to the will of the people
is
That they erupted into violence and
our cause would be
seriously
reversed and
hard to come by
("This May Be the Last Time")