“If the hunchback didn’t shoot you, he had a VERY good reason.”

…Bartender to Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), For A Few Dollars More

Unfortunately, I kept no personal written record of school life during my sophomore year (1965-66).  At one time, I at least had all my memorabilia, but most of that was destroyed in March 1970 at home in Sunbury, PA (see the opening paragraphs of the Preface).  At the end of my freshman year, I had fulfilled my foreign language requirement by pulling a “C” in Second Year German II and had passed English Conference.  This gave me the confidence at the May pre-registration to sign up for a full slate of science and English classes for the fall semester.  The required Studies In Chemical Equilibrium, Calculus of One Variable, and General Physics I were tempered with Don Hope’s Contemporary Literature and Steve Barbash’s Introduction to the History and Criticism of Art.

For those unfamiliar with the Juniata curriculum in those days, there was no English course requirement to graduate.  However, you had two semesters to pass what was called English Conference.  Every freshman met once a week for an hour with a professor to review writing assignments either from other classes (as the semester ground on) or as assigned by the professor.   The papers from other classes were reviewed after they were turned back.  No using English Conference to bolster your grades.  Doesn’t sound like much, but it could be brutal depending upon who you drew from the pool and the quality of your writing.   For me, the sessions were like being a sparring partner for someone training for the Golden Gloves.  I was unprepared for someone to do an actual text analysis of my writing.  I had come to Juniata with the editorships of both my junior and senior high school newspapers under my belt, two completed “novels,” dozens of short stories.  I had drawn Mrs. Crosby, wife history professor Ken Crosby.  I can’t find her in the student handbook or the yearbook.  Perhaps she was officially an adjunct; but whatever her title, she knew writing and especially knew BAD writing.  I struggled and improved but not enough to earn a pass by the end of the first semester.  Second semester I drew Lillian Junas, Assistant Director of Public Relations, and things were embarrassingly smooth right up to knowing I had passed a couple of weeks before pre-registration.  My hubris and infatuation with Don Hope led to signing up for his Contemporary Literature, which was for junior English majors and was taught as if the class was made up of graduate students.

For a while, civil rights activities devolved to attending regular SCORE meetings in the old Students’ Hall.  The organization had taken on a different flavor because of the loss of so many activists from the year before.  Some, such as John Fike, had graduated, others, such as my roommate Doug Bowers, had transferred out, quite a few, such as John Garrett and Janet Kaufmann, were spending their junior years abroad, and others, such as Jim Lehman, got caught up in other campus concerns.  President Gary Rowe carried the torch and served as the organizer and chief motivator for the group.  There was a sense of desperation or even mild panic in the search for something, anything local or on campus to turn into the next cause célèbre.

I wasn’t any help, finding myself in the self-made hell of taking two lab classes, working as a laboratory assistant in two others, working in the dining hall, struggling in calculus, and drowning in Don Hope’s 14-novel reading list.  Yes, fourteen.  All my wide-eyed idealism and hero worship had crashed down on my head, and I quickly realized that no amount of dedication could or would add waking hours to the day.  Henry James, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austin, E.M. Forster, Joyce Cary, and a host of others were demoted to mid-list and crammed into the remains of the day.  In other words, I fell hopelessly behind in the very class in which I wanted to excel.  Plus, Don’s exams turned out to be impossible.  I agonized over writing papers, and the best I could do was a “C-.”  I felt horrible.  I was failing to impress one of the few professors I had come to admire.  My poor performance in this one class cast a pall over everything, including my work with SCORE.  A number of times Gary asked me to take the lead on small projects, and each time I made excuses and refused.  I’m sure he had no idea what was happening, and there was no way I was going to admit to anyone that I couldn’t carry my weight in Don’s class.  I finished out the semester with an anemic gpa of 2.61, which was below the 2.75 necessary to maintain my academic scholarship.  For whatever reason, the college overlooked this obvious excursion on their spc control charts, and my stipend continued into the spring semester.

Luckily, my academic schedule lightened up a bit.  Aside from all the usual science and math classes, I was signed up for Don Hope’s Prose Forms and Earl Kaylor’s Church History I.  Don had graciously told me at the end of the fall semester that he thought that Prose Forms would be more suitable for me (it was freshman level course), and I was somewhat of a wunderkind for Earl Kaylor, having risen from the dead to score an “A+” in his freshman Biblical History class. I finally had something that had been completely absent during my first three semesters:  time.  And it didn’t take long for things to start happening and take up what time I thought had, and a lot more.

Sometime between January and March, two black civil rights workers arrived on campus straight from the trench warfare in Alabama and Mississippi and turned the place upside down.  I can’t remember the name of the field worker from SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee).  Phil Gruber worked for SCLC out of the Selma, AL office.  The two couldn’t have been more different.  Phil always wore a coat and tie and talked of reconciliation, harmony, and non-violence.  The SNCC worker wore farmer’s overalls and talked of upsetting every apple cart from the ward healers’ precincts to Washington, DC.  There were general presentations in the big lecture hall in the new science building along the west side of Moore Street, smaller get-togethers at SCORE meetings and in the basement of the Stone Church.  Don Hope held a sort of reception at his house out on Cold Springs Road.  I don’t know where they were staying, but Elmer’s apartment became a focal point, and the constant parade of students tramping up and down the inside stairs led to numerous complaints to the building superintendent.  We finally had to resort to tiptoeing up and down the creaky stairway.

The visitors from the South started up again all the old criticisms that Juniata students should take care of their own business and not get involved in issues in Alabama and Mississippi.  The SNCC field worker’s in-your-face attitude didn’t help.  There were many on campus who resented his militancy and felt, ‘Well, if that’s the way it is, why did you even bother to show up?’  Even some SCORE members had trouble with his take-it-or-leave it attitude, which hinted that Northern whites were good for money but not much else.   He told a lot of stories up in Elmer’s apartment to a small group of us, including Jim Myers, Fred Bailey, and a newcomer, who seemed entranced by everything he said.  One evening, on some sort of urgent errand now lost to memory, I rang Elmer’s buzzer, charged up the stairs, and burst into Elmer’s apartment and caught the two of them in flagrante delicto, much to the embarrassment of all three of us.

One issue that the field workers took up was the near total “whiteness” of campus.  I remember my older brother Fred, who graduated in 1964, saying that each class had at least one black recruited via the Brethren missionary system, but that wasn’t entirely true.  There were a small number of blacks from both Huntingdon and Mt. Union, most of who attended as day students.  My recollection is that they all pretty much kept to themselves and were not involved in campus activities to any extent.  A quick scan through the 1966 Alfarata reveals fellow classmates Bill Williams in a sophomore class group photo and Nat Mitchell in a group photo of the football team.  And that’s it.

A previous college president had described Juniata as a “right little, tight little school” that catered to the “intelligent bumpkin.”  When resurrected in 1966, the words got a lot of laughs, but several faculty members pointed out that the college was founded for the purpose of educating children of church members, who for the most part lived in rural or small-town Pennsylvania.  The students tended to be smart but provincial, thus the unfortunate use of the word “bumpkin.”  The parents fully expected the college to keep their children safe from harm, sexual temptations, and unorthodoxy and to serve as their church away from home, thus the “right/tight” jingle.  There’s no doubt that the college always maintained a high admissions standard.  Art professor Steve Barbash loved to tell the story of his first year or two teaching his freshman Great Epochs course versus later after the college started casting a wider net for students.  In the beginning, when he asked who had ever heard of Michelangelo, he would get at the most one or two hands.  His first thoughts were, ‘what have I gotten myself into?’  Years later, half the class would respond.  The difference was that the earlier classes were very smart and picked up the subject matter like sponges.  The later students were also smart, but the ones who raised their hands had all read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy and knew that Michelangelo looked and talked like Charlton Heston.  The earlier students lacked the pseudo-sophistication and could be taught.  The later students thought they knew it all and were difficult if not impossible to teach.

Teachable or not, the student body in 1966 was not ready for SNCC rhetoric or for a small number of students claiming that the school had it all wrong as to what the college’s “real” constituency should be.  After the field workers had returned south and the student bombast had quieted down, a small number of us kept gravitating up to Elmer’s apartment and talking about Phil Gruber’s idea of traveling down to Alabama.  (No such suggestion was ever made by the SNCC field worker.)  While we argued the pros and cons, Galway Kinnell came on campus for a one-night poetry reading, with “commentary on Viet Nam.”  The people still on campus who had been down south the year before were ecstatic.  For the freshmen who were involved in SCORE, it was the chance to meet one of the original co-conspirators and the guy whose picture in Life Magazine had caused the uproar that was still reverberating through the administration.  The poetry reading was great, although there wasn’t much commentary on Viet Nam.  No one seemed to mind as the whole affair devolved into a sort of literary love fest and nostalgia party.  SCORE president Gary Rowe wrote a review for the Juniatian that appeared in the March 18, 1966 edition (Figure VIII-1).

Galway’s presence on campus seemed to galvanize Elmer.  Not long after, he agreed that we should go south once more.  Using Elmer’s phone and with him footing the long distance phone bill, I made the first calls to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta and finally got connected to the Selma field office.   I ended up talking with Shirley Mesher, who ran the office and agreed to let us help out and even offered to find us a place to stay, as long as we agreed to pay for our food and something extra for the hassle.

To avoid having to deal with the administration, we decided to go down over spring break during the first full week in April.  Elmer and others made all the final room and board arrangements and somehow collected the money.  (For whatever reason, all the activists on campus were perpetually broke.)  I told my parents that I wouldn’t be home and explained that I’d be helping out registering people to vote.  When I assured them that I wouldn’t be involved in any protests or demonstrations, they assumed that the only danger would be in driving all that distance and back.

We left on Saturday, April 2nd in two cars:  Phil Jones’ 1955 Chevy, already a veteran of the James Meredith march, and a red VW bug owned by Dick Snyder, a classmate who was much older than the rest of us and who was some sort of friend of Elmer’s.  Dick was a dark horse.  He hadn’t been involved in any of the civil rights activities the previous year, was not involved in SCORE, and had stayed away from all the recent excitements caused by the southern field workers.  Except for Elmer, nobody seemed to know who he was, and he was regarded by the rest of us with a certain degree of suspicion and distrust.  Other travelers whom I remember include Phil Jones, Jim Myers, Nat Mitchell, and Fred Bailey.  Dick and Elmer traveled together.  The rest of us piled in with Phil.

Phil was particularly upbeat because he had stayed in touch with several people in Selma with whom he had worked during the previous summer, and this would be a chance to renew old acquaintances.  He had bought a duckling as an Easter gift for a black girl he had met.  Every time we stopped for gas, he got the duck out of its box and let it eat, drink, and quack around for some time, which really annoyed Elmer.  We had agreed to stay together as if one car was towing the other, so when one car gassed up, so did the other.  The VW always filled up in half the time it took for Phil’s Chevy, and Elmer would get extremely nervous as Phil and the rest of us formed a circle to keep the constantly quacking duck from waddling away.  Elmer’s agitation grew worse after we turned south outside of Indianapolis and made our way down past Nashville.  It was then that we realized that Elmer was worried the duck would draw undue attention to us and might lead to hostile questions and perhaps a confrontation.  The interstate highway system was barely getting started back then, which meant that we were traveling on old US highways or state roads with locally owned and operated gas stations.  A good number of them served as late night hangouts for just the type of people Elmer wanted to avoid.  Phil didn’t share Elmer’s paranoia, perhaps because he felt as the Roman Polanski character did when he was quoted by Jerzy Kosinski in his novel Blind Date.

We finally arrived in Selma, duck and all, in the early afternoon of Sunday, April 4^th.  No one had gotten any sleep, and we were all punchy from the monotony and noise of the road.  Elmer and Dick drove off to find the house of the black woman with whom we’d be staying, and Phil went off to deliver the Easter duck.  The rest of us sat around Shirley Mesher’s desk in the SCLC office while she and a black co-worker listened to a tape recording of a recent speech by Selma mayor Joe Smitherman.  Of course, we had no idea what was going on, and we certainly didn’t want to interrupt with questions.  So we just sat there listening to both the tape and the commentary.  It didn’t take long to realize that the sociology of race had merged with the politics of power and money and that there was no solidarity among either whites or blacks.  We were greeted with a barrage of acronyms, none of which, except for national organizations SNCC, SCLC, and CORE, we understood.

When the tape was over, Shirley explained that the white power structure and the black grass roots organizations were competing for funds coming from the federal government.  The local white politicians had quickly thrown together a proposal that included the endorsements of a number of prominent blacks, including several ministers.  The fact that both whites and blacks were on board made everything look so wonderfully integrated.  The SCLC proposal had taken months to put together and still wasn’t finished when we arrived.  An initial outline and statement of work had been taken out into all the rural areas of the county and discussed and argued at length.  New ideas, deletions, and corrections were gathered, and the proposal revised.  The process was then repeated.  The proposal deadline had passed during one of these iterations, and SCLC was circulating a petition to be sent to Washington urging a time extension.  Our mission would be to accompany field workers out into rural Dallas County to first make sure people were registered to vote and then to get their signatures on the petition.

Because Shirley wanted the work done as quickly as possible, she was throwing every available person into the task.  We were to work in pairs, one JC student per SCLC staff.  There were two rules:  (1) let the SCLC staff person do the talking: (2) be back in the SCLC office before sundown.  Shirley was adamant about rule number two.  There would be no television crews or other media following us around, no watching ourselves on the evening news.  We would be driving out and then walking along dirt roads in the most remote sections of the county, and anything could happen.  We were also advised to stay in the black section of town in the evenings and were told that the boundaries were fairly obvious:  the black section ended where the sidewalks and street paving began.  None of us had any illusions about the dangers of being a white civil rights worker in the south, but being told about them in person and in advance added a sense of foreboding that was oddly missing in the demonstrations of the previous year.  Maybe it was the knowledge that the “whole world wasn’t watching”  (to twist a future phrase from the Democratic Party 1968 Chicago Convention) that made us swallow hard.

Shirley wanted to end her Sunday at the office, but Elmer and Phil hadn’t returned.  So the staff worker showed us around after she left.  There wasn’t much to see.  One of the rooms served as a sort of paper repository.  There were stacks of newspapers, handbills, magazines, books, and just plain junk.  We were told to take whatever we wanted of the handbills.  I picked up some, and four have survived and are shown in Figures VIII-1 through VIII-4.  I never did learn what they were used for, and I never saw any posted during our brief sojourn in Selma and out walking in the county.  While we thumbed through magazines, the staff worker tried to explain the local politics in more detail.  Sadly, it was so convoluted and intertwined that I can’t remember any of the details.  For those interested, I highly recommend Susan Youngblood Ashmore’s Carry It On, The War On Poverty And The Civil Rights Movement In Alabama 1964-1972.

After the cars returned, we left the downtown area and headed into the black section of town.  We met our host, got our room assignments, and cleaned up.  Bill Mitchell and I shared a downstairs bedroom that was right next to a small bathroom.  We lounged in the small living room and front porch while dinner was being prepared.  All offers to help were politely refused.  I truly wish I could remember the name of the black woman who put us up.  She was large, friendly, and treated us like she was our grandmother.  She was politically active and very well informed.  I don’t remember anything else about her.  If she had a family and told us about them, the memory is gone.  What I do remember is my introduction to black southern cooking, which took some getting used to.  I had a particularly hard time with greens and grits with red-eye gravy.  Most memorable was desert: double-decker sweet potato pie.  Because we ate no lunch while out in the field, it all really didn’t matter.  Whatever was on the table when we finally got back in the early evening went right down with no complaints.

The actual work in the field was difficult and awkward.  We would all meet at the SCLC office in the early morning, pair up with an experienced SCLC staffer, and take off into the hinterlands.  We would drive to a spot, then spend the day trudging up and down dirt roads, going up to every shack along the way.  And I do think that “shack” is the appropriate word.  Most were built on a sort of platform about two feet above the ground, and most had no electricity or indoor plumbing.  Old newspapers were used to insulate the inside of the walls and to fill in the gaps that otherwise would let in the cold and dust.  There would always be a picture of Jack Kennedy on the wall.  Those with electricity would have an illuminated frame.  Most showed Jack and Jackie together.  They were so prevalent that I started paying particular attention to see if any of the places we visited didn’t have one.  After a couple of days, I gave up the quest.

Because it was early April, we found no one on the rickety porches or out and about around the shacks.  Those we found at home were either very old of both sexes or younger women of indeterminate age with very young children.  At first, I said nothing, which was just as well because in many cases we were getting a rough reception.  The SCLC staffer explained while out walking that all of these people had been more or less hounded repeatedly over the past year or so.  The initial voter registration drive had entailed multiple visits to every rural house in the county, and the whole idea had pretty much split households along generational lines, with the younger people asking questions and being engaged and interested.  The grandparents were either not interested or hostile.  They mostly wanted to be left alone and saw no reason at this point in their lives to start any kind of a fight with “whitey.”  They also feared that members of their families would be somehow deprived of the means to provide for the youngest children.

I became more and more frustrated because it seemed as if most of what we were doing was at best busy work.  Everybody was already registered to vote, and nobody seemed to give a whoop about Mayor Smitherman and federal grants.  The concept seemed to be beyond most of the folks with whom we talked, and they didn’t see any connection between petitions and their daily lives.  Most were very suspicious of me.  You could read it on their faces:  “Who is this white kid from God-knows-where come down here to talk about what’s best for me?’  It was so strong that I couldn’t keep my ears from turning red.

After the first day, I was told to go ahead and take the lead at a couple of shacks.  It was a disaster.  Without a script, I couldn’t remember all the salient points I was supposed to stress “winning over” the people.  Most just stared at me like I was from the planet Mars, and responded only after the staffer took over.  I finally concluded that my presence was more than just a waste; it was working against the whole point of the canvassing.  The SCLC staffer was working off a list that apparently included “difficult” households, because on a number of occasions I was told to wait in the car while he went inside.  I would hunch down in the seat and watch the dirt roads for any signs of approaching cars, fearing I’d be shot by rednecks.

The latest draft proposal was still being debated, and on our third day Shirley told us she wanted as many of us as possible to attend an evening meeting way out in the county at a black church.  She was hoping that the participants would finally agree on the various sections in contention.  So after an early dinner, three of us (myself, Fred Bailey, and Jim Myers) and the SCLC staffer to whom I’d been paired piled into Dick Snyder’s VW and drove off into the night.  The staffer was riding shotgun and directed us out about twenty miles before getting lost.  We were retracing our steps when a very large pickup truck came roaring up to about a foot or so behind us with the high beams blinding the inside of the car.  Could we have been more obvious?  A red VW with a Pennsylvania license plate and filled with three young white males and a black, out in the middle of nowhere at night.  We may as well as had a neon sign on the roof.

Before any of us had a chance to think or say anything, the truck ran into us.  The VW careened off the dirt road and ran into the soft berm and ditch.  The truck sped off into the night.  For the first time in the days working with him, the SCLC staffer was sweating and trembling.  I had that brassy, adrenaline taste at the back of my tongue.  We just sat there without anybody saying a word.  Finally, three of us got out and pushed the car back onto the hard road.  Before we got back in, the staffer said, “I can’t believe they just drove on. I can’t believe they just drove on.”  His voice was shaking.  I realized I was shaking.  In later years, I marveled at the mystery of how something, whatever it might have been, made the truck occupants decide to continue on:  they didn’t have clubs?  they didn’t have a gun?  they thought they had wrecked the VW?  they were late for their bowling league?   The bartender’s line in For A Few Dollars More haunts me to this day.

The church was packed by the time we arrived, and we had to take seats all the way in the last row.  A large black man was talking with two others sitting behind him on either side.  He was taking comments from the audience, and people were being recognized and then were standing to speak.  Everything was conducted as if in slow motion, and the sanctuary was deadly quiet when people spoke.  Anyone in agreement with the speaker would exclaim when he or she was finished.  The SCLC worker leaned over and whispered something to the effect that for just about everybody in the audience, this was their first experience in doing anything like this.  The women present were all dressed up, and most of the men were wearing white shirts and overalls.  It didn’t take long before I started getting impatient.  I kept thinking, ‘why doesn’t one of the SCLC staffers just stand up, lay it all out, explain the options and the possible outcomes, and call for a vote?  We’re going in circles, very, very slowly.’  I couldn’t help fidgeting, and in the back of my mind I was going through scenarios in which the church was firebombed or we were all gunned down as we left.  It was hard to pay attention.

After what seemed hours, a compromise of sorts was struck, the new language was read to everyone, and the meeting broke up.  As we got up to leave, Jim Myers said, “Now we have to get back.”  I gave him a dirty look, “Did you have to say that?”  He really should’ve kept quiet.  We had no idea if the church was being watched.  If the people who ran us off the road were mulling over their apparent lapse in doing something to us, they certainly had had enough time to think it over and maybe come back to the church with some friends.  It was sweat and clammy skin all the way back to the SCLC office in Selma, and we tensed up at any sign of headlights in the distance in any direction.  Somebody asked, “We have enough gas, don’t we?”  As if we could do something about it if we didn’t.  After that, nobody said anything, and we settled into our own set of fantasized horrors.  But nothing happened, and we dropped off the staff worker, went “home,” and collapsed.  I managed to find the psychic energy to take a bath.  Later, Phil Gruber stopped by while some of us were sitting out on the porch.   Nobody was saying much of anything.  Jim Myers finally told him what had happened.  After more depressing and paranoid talk, he tried to lift us up by offering to take us to The Chicken Shack the next evening after dinner.

The next day, Thursday April 6^th, I discovered that the incident the previous night had brought back all the tension and paranoia I had just spent three days in the field overcoming.  Mentally, I was back at the beginning:  worrying about everything, every white person within sight, especially any behavior by anybody that seemed out of the ordinary.  I went back into the shell I had involuntarily created the first day out in the field.  The rural shacks and sad people blurred together in a smear of repetitive scenes that were so similar that at the end of the day someone could’ve told me that it was all a sick joke and we had just spent twelve hours revisiting the same shack over and over again, and I would’ve believed them.  I was miserable and just went through the motions, trudging alongside the SCLC staffer and keeping my mouth shut.  The one thought that kept popping up was that I’d be killed, and for what?  I wondered a couple of times how the SCLC staffer did it, spending all his waking hours seven days a week doing this kind of work.  I finally decided that I’d have to be black and from the Southern Black Belt to ever understand why.  I just couldn’t figure out how we were helping in any way at all.  The whole effort seemed futile, and our participation a useless afterthought.

It didn’t help that back “home” before dinner, Dick Snyder started pontificating to a few of us sitting in the living room.  He was condescending and talked at us as if we were children.  I in particular took great offense at his obvious attempts at creating some sort of intellectual pecking order.  I’ve been very clear in this narrative that I never considered myself to be an intellectual giant while at Juniata; but I didn’t think I was stupid, either.  When he started going on about poetry, I had enough, and I interrupted him with a torrent straight from all those verbatim notes I had taken and studied during the three Don Hope English literature classes.  Whether or not I understood all of Don’s subtleties or nuances, I had his verbiage down cold, and out it came in a sort of stream-of-conscience monologue.  It was fairly dim in that living room, but I swear Dick blanched.  I know he started stammering.  I also knew it would be a rough row to hoe if I had to start elaborating on what was really mostly a verbal recitation.  But Dick kept quiet, and I don’t think any of us had the energy to gloat or feel smug.  We ate dinner in silence, with Elmer reporting in on his usual big picture view of what was going on.

We were just finishing up with desert when Phil Gruber came in.  After conferring with Elmer and our host, he asked who was up for some relaxation.  Three of us immediately volunteered:  Jim Myers, Fred Bailey, and myself.  We went in Phil’s car, and when we arrived, he pulled a prank by having the three of us walk in first ahead of him.  I was in the middle behind Jim and in front of Fred.  In a scene right out of Animal House:  Jim stopped dead, and Fred and I ran right into him.  There were about eight or ten black males in the place, and I swear everybody stopped dead and stared.  It seemed as if the cocktail mixer froze and the jukebox went silent.  All I could see was about a dozen eyes wide open glaring right at us; everything else was black.  Phil pushed passed us and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, they’re with me.”  After all of this, four days of hell in the wilds of Alabama, we get turned into sliced white bread by the very blacks we’re supposed to be down here helping.  It fit right in with the epiphany I’d had earlier in the day somewhere down at the southern end of Dallas County.  But Phil kept insisting:  “They work with me in the SCLC office.  They’re okay, they’re okay.”

At last everybody relaxed, the jukebox started up again, and people began talking amongst themselves.  We sat down at a circular table, and Phil ordered short beers all around.  Later, Fred Bailey had just gotten up to go play pinball when in walks this tall, skinny guy wearing a Howard University sweatshirt and the very first afro I had ever seen.  He spotted Phil right away and walked right up and sat down in Fred’s empty chair.  Phil introduced us.  His name was Stokley Carmichael, and he was heading up something called the Lowdnes County Freedom Organization.  Phil explained that he had temporarily taken over a corner of a back room in the SNCC offices one floor above SCLC.  Stokely claimed it was in self defense because his offices in Lowndes County, one county to the east, kept getting destroyed, victims of mysterious, late night fires that could never be explained by the fire marshal.  He asked what we were doing, which really put us on the spot because even after four days, the politics hadn’t cleared up in our minds.  Phil graciously filled Stokely in, and he just laughed.  “You boys have to come on up and visit.”  We explained that we would be out only a half day tomorrow because the SCLC staff was getting ready for the March To Montgomery anniversary on Saturday.  “I’ll be there, working on my speech for the anniversary.  Just keep walking through the rooms until you find me.  I’m in the back.”

He pulled a quart mason jar out of a paper bag and sat it on the table.  “Ever drink silage drippins?”  We admitted that we hadn’t.  “Well, drain those shorts and let me fill you up.”

The stuff was clear with a slight green tinge, and there appeared to be flecks of grass clippings floating in it.  It also had the oddest smell, sort of like alcoholic compost.  As a chemist, I understood that natural fermentation can create only so much alcohol before the “bugs” kill themselves.  This didn’t seem to be the case with Stokley’s brew.  After half of my short glass, I was getting woozy, and I started taking small sips instead of gulps.  Before long, I realized I had drained my glass.  Stokely filled it right back up:  “Now, you’re drinkin’ Southern style.  Think of it as complementing your walking all over the county.  If you were black, you’d already have drunk gallons of this stuff.  Black folk would never offer this to a white, guest or otherwise.”  We admitted that we felt dutifully privileged.  I waited for Stokely to claim that we were now honorary “black folk,” but he dropped the subject in favor of a discourse on his ideas about black politics.  I somehow made it through the second short glass of drippin’s before I lost all train of thought.  Stokely was conjuring up images in which every elected office was held by a black person.  He used the phrase “black power” over and over again as he recited off the population demographics of the Black Belt counties.  I managed to stay conscious, but unfortunately was in no condition to remember any details.  He was very proud of the symbol he had chosen for his organization, a black panther.  He took a pencil from Phil and tried to sketch it on a bar napkin.  He admitted that it didn’t look right and again insisted that we come up to visit him the next day, and he’d show us what it was supposed to look like.

At one point, right before we left, Stokely stacked up about five beer cans (I have no idea by whom or when they were consumed).  He then raised his voice and said, “If we can take out the white power structure at the bottom, the rest will fall, all the way to Washington.”  Simultaneously, he swept his hand down in an arc and knocked the bottom can clear across the room.  The others fell all over the table.  He smiled at us in triumph, waited a few pregnant seconds, and in a dramatic flourish walked out the door.

We just stared. Nobody else in the place seemed to be bothered.  Phil let out a sigh, “that’s Stokely,” and gathered us up and took us “home.”  As I got up, I picked up the bar napkin.  It’s shown below in Figure VIII-6.  After all these years, I have to admit that it actually does sort of look like a panther.  Well, certainly something feline.  Given how much drippins we put down, we were all lucky enough to still be able to see, let alone draw anything.

Finally, a gallery of the participants whom I can remember.  Dick Snyder, Fred Bailey, and Phil Jones were juniors.  Nat Mitchell was in my class and was a football standout from Mt. Union.  I carefully searched through all four yearbooks for a picture of Jim Myers and found none.  There is another Jim Myers in the class ahead of me, but it’s not the same person.  I have no idea what happened to him.