Recent Events

The fortieth anniversary reunion in March 2005 was the brainchild of Sylvia Kurtz (a 1994 Juniata graduate who had been teaching in the Huntingdon, PA school system and who had chosen the Juniata civil rights activities as her masters thesis at Penn State) and Provost James Tuten.

Sylvia wrote a piece for Juniata Magazine that appeared in the fall 2004 issue that featured one of my hyperbolic quotes from my journal and some of the more famous photographs of the first action in Montgomery.  The story also formally announced the reunion, complete with firm dates of March 20 & 21, 2005 (Figures XV-1a through XV-1d).  It also mentioned that I would “donate to Juniata [my] collection of memorabilia.”  The die seemed to be cast.

I found out via email from Sylvia Kurtz that the documentarian Ken Love would be filming the entire event.  He had just finished doing a documentary on Charles Moore, the photographer who had taken the pictures of the Juniata contingent in Montgomery that were featured in Life Magazine.  Love felt that the reunion would be a perfect follow-up.  The program for the two-day event follows:

Race Talks was an extremely popular series of lectures and colloquia produced by Portland Oregon activist Donna Maxey.  I participated in an evening devoted to local whites who had been active in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.  There were three of us, and I was in exceptional company.  Jake Tanzer was an attorney in the Justice Department and was Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbaum’s point man on site in Mississippi for the entire “Mississippi Burning” church bombings investigations that were later made into a movie of the same name starring Gene Hackman.  He later became a supreme court justice for the state of Oregon.  On the same bill was Karen Trusty-Haberman who was so involved in the radical segment of the movement that she was an early worker in the just-formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, an astonishing achievement for a white female.  The event was attended by about 300 people.  Our short talks were followed by break-out sessions in which small groups discussed the problems of bringing whites into the ongoing civil rights struggle.  The event poster follows:

The Roosevelt Rough Writers Project is an ongoing effort by the teachers and administration of Roosevelt High School in Portland Oregon to engage people in the community who in the present and in the past who “have taken a stand for social justice.”  I along with sixteen others, spoke and were interviewed on the topics of education, civil rights, refugees and immigration, the African American experience, the environment, women’s health, and social justice.

We were interviewed in pairs, with a small subgroup of students listening to our stories and asking questions.  I was lucky to have as my presentation partner Jake Tanzer, a retired Oregon Supreme Court justice and the main Federal Justice Department field worker on site during the Mississippi church bombings episode made famous by the Jean Hackman movie “Mississippi Burning.”  History could not be more “alive” than when listening to Justice Tanzer describe the harrowing events so seminal to the 1950s-1960s civil rights movement.  The students were engaged, thoughtful, and asked tough questions.

The end product was a publication, shown in Figures 1-4 below.  There was also a public event held in the evening at the Oregon Historical Society for which large displays were constructed explaining the work of all seventeen of us.  One of the participants, Donna Maxey, later invited Justice Tanzer and myself to participate in here ongoing “Race Talks” lectures.  See the “Race Talks” entry for details.