TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm Betsy Herbin-Triant. I'm an associate professor in Black Studies and History, and as a deep admirer of his work and commitments, I'm delighted to introduce today's speaker, Junius Williams, a 1965 graduate of Amherst College, who will receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater tomorrow. Currently, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington D.C. and the official historian of Newark, New Jersey, where he spent the bulk of his career as an attorney activist and community organizer advocating for poor and working class Black residents. Williams has been a steadfast champion of civil and human rights in the US for over six decades. While at Amherst, Williams majored in political science, joined the National Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and traveled to the Selma to Montgomery March with fellow five college students.
After graduating from Amherst and Yale Law School, Williams achieved many remarkable milestones. He became the youngest elected president of the National Bar Association, spoke at the United Nations advocating for democracy on behalf of the people of Zimbabwe, and was listed by Ebony Magazine as one of the 100 most influential Blacks in America. His impressive career also includes a run for mayor of Newark and the founding of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers University Newark, where he taught leadership and community organization based on his book, Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power. Host of the podcast, Everything's Political, and ever the polymath, Williams is drawing on his deep commitment to the power of music by co-directing a documentary on Black music in Newark called Can't You Hear That sound? Please join me in welcoming genius Williams for a talk entitled The Art and Science of the Politics of Confrontation.
Thank you. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be back here at Amherst. I just went over to Johnson Chapel, to the back of Laureate, and I can assure you that the seats are just as hard now as they were then. We had to go to that chapel, we had to take so many chapels, they signed you in, blah-blah-blah. I didn't come to about that. I first want to do something that's very important to me. I want to introduce my family. I've got my wife, I always call her my long-suffering wife, Antoinette Ellis-Williams, Dr. Antoinette Ellis-Williams. I have to put all of that in. I have my two sons, Junius O. and Che Williams. They are my supporters. They do all things that they consider to be helpful to me. They give me advice whether I solicit it or not. They give me love, and most of all, we have fun together. Missing are my two daughters, my brother, my sister. For one reason or another, they could not make it, but I'm glad they came here.
And also you have here with me what I call my legacy slide. When you get to a certain position, you get age in your life, you got to start thinking about your legacy. Well, what is it that you're going to leave that people will remember you by? And I just felt comfortable and confident enough to list what I have right there. When I get to heaven, that will be in my pocket. There'll be two things. One, in my casket, there will be a harmonica, a B flat harmonica so that I can play the blues in F, and there will be a stick drive with these things so that when I get up to the pearly gates and Saint Peters asks for my qualifications, I can try to prove to the Lord that my time and my talents were in the hands of a good steward. So that's what I offer.
Now, those little... As my wife told me to call them, those little thingies, what do you call those black things? QR codes. But as I look around at the age of the audience, you don't know what those are either. You'll notice that there is none for the bottom. Jason, you see, this is my forthcoming. I haven't finished that yet. The good Lord willing, I will produce that. As a matter of fact, we are in fundraising stage, and if any of you want to join in with that, I'd be very, very happy to have you as a part of... We might even call you a producer if you come up with the money.
So the Art and Science of the Politics of Confrontation. Now, you would not have come here if I didn't have that kind of title. Y'all would probably not be if I just said Musings of a Graduate of Class of 1965. Nobody wants to come just to hear an old man talk, so I was advised not to have that kind of title. So I said, "What is this going on here?" And that's what I've been about, the art and science of the politics of confrontation.
When you have the word politics, that is in and of itself a draw. Let me just see if we can take a little poll in here. How many of you came... And you can check off all four of these boxes if you want. How many of you came because you're curious? Okay. How about seekers of knowledge and truth? Oh, okay. How about the committed to social justice? And finally, practitioners of power? Okay, okay. Very good. Well, that's an honest portrayal of who's here, and that's good to know. I wouldn't be here today if it hadn't been for that last one. Politics of confrontation. Politics. I learned quite often that politics was about the business of power, you either study it as we did here or you actually go out and do it, you try to be involved with it. Confrontation. Somebody tell me, confrontation, what does that bring to mind?
Oppositional silence.
Oppositional, yes, yes. Yes, anybody else? Conflict? Conflict. You got to have a conflict there. But do you associate politics and confrontation with science, anybody? Is there a science or is that just a title? I saw one lady nodding her head. Yes, yes, yes. See, for science, it ought to be something that ends an equation. This is Junius Williams' definition of science. You got to have an equation somewhere along the line. Here at Amherst, they tried to get me to understand about equations, and I just didn't understand what they were talking about. I got a C in the course when I was taking physics, which they made me take, and I was also involved in trying to get my other subjects, but I was spending so much time on physics, that also was a problem. I'm glad they don't do that anymore. So we have, for example, speed equals the distance divided by time. Now, that's a pretty easy one. The spirit of Arnie Aarons, Professor Arnie Aarons is still here with me coming on here. First time I've ever called on him.
Speed is... So you have S equals D divided by T. That's the equation. So can you really come up with an equation for politics? And I'm going to try to convince you that we can do that here today. But what about the art side, the artistic side? How many of you think of politics as being art? Art, okay. Yeah, the Art of War by Sun Tzu. That's what he said. But I submit to you that it's both, and if it is an art, it's kind of like jazz. You got to know how to improvise. There's another song that's not jazz that says, "You got to know when to hold them. You got to know when to fold them." So that's the kind of art that we're talking about, and I have been involved in certainly that aspect of holding and folding. Sometimes not holding them long enough, sometimes not folding them soon enough, but that's what it's all about.
So I submit to you that it is both, and I'm going to just tell you a little bit about some of my experiences, but first, since we're in the day of metrics, you can't have a baseball team anymore without having metrics. You can't just have a guy to go out there and pitch, a guy that can go out and bat, but he's got to do so on, and so on, and so on, and you got to be able to prove this, and if you write a proposal, you've got to have all your metrics set up before you can get the money from the foundations. So I suggest to you that success personally has been a question of whether somebody else wants to join with you, and depending upon what you're doing, whatever your political experience is, somebody who's going to respect you, love you, hate you, and in the end invite you to Amherst College to get an honorary degree. That's all about the art and science, in my case, of the politics of confrontation.
So of course if we're talking about politics, we're talking about power. Civil rights movement started out in a different direction. If you listen to Martin Luther King and the people in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, they were talking about wearing people down with their ability to suffer. Well, some of that's necessary, but that's not why I joined the movement, and that's not what SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was all about. We were about power, and any kind of organization that I developed later on, it was the power to change things to make life better for everybody. So I'm going to give you some of my thoughts on that subject and try to give you some idea of what the people at Amherst College must have known when they invited me to get this degree. I was surprised. I must admit.
My first experience with confrontation came because I was born a Black man in Virginia during the era of segregation. So when I came out... I would submit perhaps that we haven't changed very much as Black people growing up in the United States, but it is different. But so I grew up in segregated times. My brother and I, after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had done the heavy lifting down in Montgomery in the 1950s, it came a time when the court said, "Okay, you got to integrate all the buses all throughout America," but nobody had actually done it in Richmond. My brother and I and a lot of other of my little junior high school friends, we were the first to sit on the bus in the front of the bus in Richmond. It was easy by that time, all we got was a stern look from the bus driver who obviously had been schooled to go ahead and let them sit where they want her. He didn't want her, but they had to do it. Confrontation.
My mother suffered Virginia. Sometime also around that time we went to visit my grandparents. We went into this five and 10 cent store that's like a mall nowadays. You go in and we were in there to buy something, we could spend our money, but the colored water fountain didn't work. There was the white water fountain that did work. So my mother said, "Go ahead and drink from the white water." Out from the back, of course, comes the sales lady, and my mother took her on. Confrontation, "If you want to talk about my children, what they did, I told them to drink from that water. You deal with me." Confrontation. And we got away with it.
My father. My father was the band director at Armstrong High School in Richmond, Virginia. They said, "We want the band to be in the tobacco festival parade, but of course you're going to have to be in the back." My father said, "No." The other Black music teacher at the other high school, our rival high school, said, "No." So for a while, we didn't march in the parade, but in my senior year we did, and there's a whole section in my book I talk about the glory of why we performed.
But my same mother, that same mother when it came around 1960, when the students at Virginia Union University demonstrating and sitting in at the big stores in Richmond, Virginia, this same mother who took on the lady in the five and 10 cents store said, "No. Son, son, son, you can't be in that," and she told me, shall we say, a fib. She said, the college students don't want high school students because they're afraid you're not going to be nonviolent. I asked the leader of that group sometime later when I met him and he said, "No, we didn't say that. We had high school students. Your mother was just loving you." So she sent me and my brother... My brother went to Princeton, I went to Amherst, she sent us out of the town. That was kind of like a middle class solution for racism in the South, get them out of the way and send them to the north, which was supposed to be the promised land.
Amherst College was supposed to be my pathway to emancipation, but not without the necessity of confrontation first within me as a young Black man. Zora Neale Hurston. I'm going to read a little note here, a little poem from her, because she had the same kind of experience, I just found this out recently. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the foremost writers of the Harlem Renaissance, she said in a poem, "I feel my race." Oh, this is when she went to Barnard. She started off at Howard and then she went to Barnard. She had an interesting history because she didn't tell anybody how old she was when she went to high school, and then she went to college and she was able to finesse her way all the way through Barnard without people knowing too much about her. You need to study her. Brilliant writer. "I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, over-swept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and over-swept, but through it all, I remain myself."
So who was to myself in the case of Junius Williams coming to Amherst College in 1961? I want to read you a little bit from my book. I'm not going to do too much reading, don't worry, but you see, this book, the stuff that's in your book... When you write a book, any of you who've done that, you have to do your own editing. Every word of this has been edited at least 10 to 20 times before it goes to the outside editor. So the best language, the most precise language that I can use sometimes will come from my book, so I'm going to do that.
In my freshman year, I smiled and took it all in. I just wanted to be accepted, to fit in. I felt the best way to fit in was to be quiet and learn, and hopefully a little of me would rub off on them, but there was a perpetual fear of rejection. Also, most of the guys at Amherst were friendly and nice enough. Later, somebody told me they remembered me as a freshman, because I wore a yellow sweater and had a big smile on my face all the time. I was just a happy yellow sweater colored boy, and most of the guys accepted me as such. I wanted to show them that I was good, that I was a good guy, fun to be around, and just like them in every way. I ignored a lot of things in order to get along and gain some friends, and that's how I became the exception. That was about the highest status you could maintain at that point in the land of a place like Amherst.
I was told more on more than one occasion, "You're not like the other Negroes I know," or, "You're not like I thought colored guys were supposed to act," or, "We had this colored guy in my school who..." Oh, dear. You just stand there. You keep going and you keep smiling. But then there was a turning point, and here's where the confrontation comes because I had to decide what I was going to do. Somebody in The Amherst Student... They still have The Amherst Student? Somebody in The Amherst Student wrote a very unfavorable article about Black people, we were called Negroes then, and about the civil rights movement, and I had to decide what I was going to do. Remember, now up at this point, I was just trying to fit in, but I said, "I got to take this guy on," and he made the classical error of doing the wrong thing because he remained anonymous.
So I said, "On last Thursday, there appeared a second in a series of recent anti-civil rights, anti-Negro articles. In this letter, the anonymous somebody points out that all Negroes could become the 16th president and give the Gettysburg Address because everyone in the United States had been given as much opportunity as Abraham Lincoln did. The point of this cogent illustration is that lack of opportunity has not been the thing holding the Negro back, it is the Negro himself."
Now, I kept going in that fashion and in that form, and a lot of things happen. Here we go to the metrics, because thanks to that article, I shut him up. He didn't say anymore after that one, but I lost a lot of friends because I was outspoken, but I gained a lot of new friends. It earned me respect on campus, and it started people talking about the civil rights movement like they hadn't done before. And finally, perhaps best in my analysis anyway, my English teacher, Professor Cole, who had never liked anything I wrote before, wrote me a letter in praise of my controlled anger. He told me I had the touch and I had great skill. Wow. That was the best grade I ever got at Amherst College in English.
Now, let's talk about that in terms of my premise here. Let's review this situation in terms of art and science, control of temper, as Professor Cole pointed out. Instead of me letting it all hang out as I could have done in my Baptist church at home, control of my temper was in the Amherst style because we were taught to be aloof, objective. We had to hold it in, but we had to make our point. He saw that, plus the exploitation of the fact that he was not man enough... And it didn't have anything to do with women because there were no women here. That he was not man enough to put his name to it, because you see, there were probably a lot of my so-called friends who felt just like he did, but they couldn't abide by the fact that he was un-American enough to hide behind anonymity, that gave me the victory that I needed.
So if you want a formula, control of temper plus exploitation of an un-American behavior equals victory. What was the victory? I shut him up. I didn't care about his morality, I shut him up, and that's what my objective was. I shut him up and I became chairman of the Students for Racial Equality as a result of that. And young people especially, when you're going to be talking about social justice, justice for yourself, justice for anybody else, the most and the best way to do that is with organization. You can't do it all by yourself. So I had come to the realization that it was much for me to become a Junius Williams that spoke out. I took off that yellow sweater and never wore it again, and the smile came less frequently, only when deserved. I won both confrontations. I won all of those awards based on that one confrontation.
Now, as the chairperson of the Students for Racial Equality, the next step I did with those new friends, we were able to do certain things on campus that I hadn't done before. When President John F. Kennedy came to Amherst and spoke right over there in Johnson Chapel, I was outside picketing along with the Students for Racial Equality because we wanted a law passed, the Civil Rights Act, which he was never able to pass because he was killed, but Johnson did. And so that's what we were all about. I worked in Harlem with the organization called the Northern Student Movement, whose leader, Bill Strickland, just died not too long ago. He was up here in Amherst, as a matter of fact. I worked in Harlem in 1964 with the Northern Student Movement, while I was in college I was involved with voter registration in Springfield, also voter registration in Richmond with the NAACP.
And another thing I began to realize that when you get involved in organizations for change, you got to have some knowledge. You can't just be about the business of being right. You got to know what you're talking about. So when I got back from working in Harlem, I realized from talking to some of my friends who were much more well versed in matters of class as opposed to me, I took a course here at Amherst by a somewhat ridiculed and certainly pushed aside Professor called Colston Warne, W-A-R-N-E. Never forget him. There was kind of a hush, hush about him. Apparently, he had been involved in something called a left wing organization, i.e., he probably was a communist. Nobody ever said that. I'm just putting two and two together. I do know he had to go before the Un-American Activities Committee. He had tenure, so he continued to teach you, but he was not popular.
But I'll tell you the difference between him and what I had taken in economics before, this was called comparative economics, and I had something called baby economics. They were teaching me about supply and demand, and I knew when I went out there in the street that when I looked around, the prices didn't have anything do with the supply, it had to do with people getting together and setting the price, and when I took his course, I understood why. I got a C-plus in baby economics, I got an A with Professor Colston Warne, so I knew I was on the right track.
So I kept on learning, and that's something that I have always been... And as a result of always having a knowledge base so that you can keep up with the opposition, so that you can get that leg up, so that you can always be ahead of the game when you're... When you're involved in the politics of confrontation, somebody's always trying to get you. So that's something I learned, but now I do it because I like to learn. I'm 80 years old and I'm still learning. My wife and I went to Italy last year, so I decided I was going to take a course in Italian. It didn't work. All I remember is prego, prego, prego. Everybody was going around talking about prego, but I tried and I keep on doing that. So I digress. Let's get back. Let's go back to Amherst.
Another thing I was able to do is to have a three college, four college civil rights conference called Reform or Revolution, Civil Rights: Reform or Revolution, and our main speakers were to be Malcolm X, Ossie Davis and Michael Harrington. The college paid for this. Through SRE, I was able to get the college to pay for the whole conference. We had folks coming from all over the place, but anybody who was in civil rights, human rights, came to this campus or Holyoke, wherever we had the session. They came to this conference. One of my most exciting experiences was meeting Malcolm X on the telephone. Now, how do you meet Malcolm X on the telephone? Somebody had given me his phone number.
So I made the phone call to invite him, and to my surprise, he answered the phone, "Hello." So what do you say to a man and you're 19 years old and he's Malcolm X? Do you say, "Hello, Mr. X."? So it was a dilemma. It was a confrontation, but it was a dilemma. So I artfully said, "Hello, sir," and we went on to talk. We got to the point where he says, "How much are you paying?" I told him what the price we had, and he start for a minute and he said, "I'll come." Wow. Wow. But he never got here. He stayed in England trying to get into France in that particular time. This was in February of 1965, and he couldn't make it.
Michael Harrington at that time, very well-known economist, political thinker. He couldn't make it because he got into an ice storm in New York and he couldn't drive up here. Ossie Davis, the great actor and activist, he preached at Malcolm X's funeral. Ossie Davis came the day before, so he was here. The main part, the opening address was at Mount Holyoke College, whatever the big hall is over there. People hanging from the rafters. 1,000 folks had come up to hear these three people debate the topic, reform or revolution, and my two speakers were not there. Ossie Davis saved the day because he was familiar with both of them, and he was a great speaker. I did not have to go hang my head in shame. I was not going to be expelled and sent back to Richmond, Virginia. I will always be, and I told him, forever indebted to him. The conference was a great success. Preparation. Preparation for Junius Williams to move on.
But I had to get involved and do more than just give conferences, do voter registration, do teaching here in the campus. I knew that I had to go onto the front line of civil rights at that time, and that was in the South. I had to go further south than where I was from, much to my parents' chagrin, but they went along with it anyway. I said, "I'm going to go and be a part of the march from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965." So I went with some friends from the three other colleges. We piled into an old Volkswagen bus and went down to Richmond, stopped in there, and my father took a look at that thing and said, "No, no, no, no, no. Here, take my car." He had a station wagon, a Buick station wagon.
That in and of itself was a great offer for more than one because we got stopped in South Carolina by a car, and the two or three of us who were Black, we had to hide in the back under some covers, under the covers in the back of the station wagon, and it was a nice Jewish guy who was driving the car at that particular time, Fred Arino, never forget him, and he talked to the cop and told him, "Well, we're on way to Florida to go to spring break," and the guy looked around in the car, saw all these bags in the back, what he thought were bags in the back, saw that I had Virginia license plates, my father's car, as opposed to Massachusetts license plate, and we sailed on through. We sailed on to the power of confrontation. This was pure art. Fred knew what he was doing, the car spoke for itself. I guess that's the science part.
So we went down there, and I want to tell you a little bit about what it was like in Montgomery. I'm going to save enough time here for us to have some questions. We're supposed to have questions too, right? Is that part of it? Is that part of... Okay. Never made it to Selma at that time. They told us to stop in stop in at Montgomery at the SNCC office, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to see just how dangerous it is going from Montgomery to Selma, because the Klan flared up at times, and if you know anything about that particular period of time, Jimmie Lee Jackson had already been killed, Reverend Reeb had already been killed, and before it was all over Reverend Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo, a white union woman from Detroit was killed. So we had to take care of what was going on.
So we went upstairs at the corner of Jackson and High Street, and there was a man in there named Stokely Carmichael. Now, I of course knew who Stokely Carmichael was, and maybe some of you know who he was. He was my hero, and Stokely Carmichael, who was then a rising star within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he ended up... I think he probably was arrested 44 times they say. He told us at that time, "What are you going to Selma for? We need you right here," with his West Indian accent. So we went downstairs, put our bags or whatever we had in somebody's house and get prepared to sleep on the floor.
But this is what happened when we got out there on the corner of Jackson and High Street: on the day we arrived, white men on horses wearing cowboy hats and carrying long, heavy cattle sticks were there to keep us confined to that one tiny block. We were told that these were Klansmen brought in from the country and deputized for the special occasion to crack skulls. SNCC was determined to march on the state capitol, which was the distance away, for the right to vote. The cowboys were just as determined that we weren't going anywhere, and there was very little press coverage to protect us. To this day, everybody knows about Selma, but very few people know about Montgomery in 1965.
So dodging Klan, dodging the police on motorcycles, this is one thing that happened: I remember running through the front door of someone's house, a horse coming up on the front porch after us, to hear President Johnson droning on about the introduction of the voting rights bill. When horse and rider left the porch, and the only reason they left the porch is because the door was too short for the horse to get in, I caught my breath and went outside to see a white motorcycle policeman tearing down the block. The crowd parted and let him through. He roared to the end of the block and wheeled around for another pass. Some of the protestors knelt in the middle of the street, hoping to make him stop. He didn't, and going at about 40 miles an hour, he plowed into a Latino demonstrator who was able to roll and take the impact on his left thigh. All of us rushed forward, me included, to kick that cop's you know what, but this guy, I'll never forget it, he stood up and on one leg, said, "Stop. This is nonviolence," and we stopped.
Think about what would happened if that cop had been beaten, severely beaten, and at least that what was going to happen, and the whole front page would have been, "Cop assaulted in Montgomery, Alabama." Discipline is very much a part of what you do when you're involved in confrontation politics. This guy knew what was going on. He knew what he had to do. So it prepared the rest of us to understand just what the stakes were. So later on, we got arrested. I don't have time to tell you all the details. SNCC was excellent at what they were doing. We had three waves of people going to jail, three waves of people going to jail. The first wave I was in, so when it came time to bring in the second wave, they didn't have no room into jail, so they had to send us to Kilby State Prison, and that's where I met a guy named Worth Long, who will always be my guru. He's still alive. I call on him every now and then to talk, tell him what I'm doing, and he gives me advice.
This is what happened at that particular time: There were about 150 to 200 of us were transferred to Kilby. Half women, half men. They put us on one side. I guess it was about 75, all Black guys on the other side. Now, remember... I should tell you a little bit about the power of the music before I get to you this, because I'm going to tell you how we got the strength enough to even march down there when they were holding us back on the corner that they wouldn't let us go in further. Well, we went around the back and went into Alabama State College. Alabama State College was in session. We went in and we sang the song, the best recruitment song you can ever have in the movement. << Which side are you on boy? Which side are you on? Everybody say, which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on? >> Of course, with the clapping.
As only African-based folks know body do with the music, you got the call and response, you got all the movement kind of motion within the song itself. This song was guaranteed to increase your popularity, and bring in the people that you wanted to have. The songs, there was a song for every occasion, seemingly. You had << We shall not, we shall not be moved >> That's a song of steadfast, you're not going to be moved. That's when you standing in place. Then you had << I woke up this morning then with my mind stayed on freedom >> It used to be Jesus, but we converted it to freedom, and that's when you need to have some kind of courage to go out and face the Klan. They got the guns, you got nothing. But that recruitment song << Which side are you on? >> We emptied the school. Some of the teachers were standing in the way trying to stop those young people who were our age, 18, 19, but some of them had sense enough to get out of the way and they just smiled.
So from going from 250, we ended up with 500, and then as we marched along the street, we picked up more people singing that song. That was a scientific response. That was a formula. That song plus the movement, the way we carried it along, that's how we got more people. That's how we were able to mobilize the force that went downtown. That's how we got as many people as we did, as we needed, and that's how we got into the situation where we had the jails full and some had to go to Kilby State Prison. So at Kilby State Prison, the psychological war began. How much time do I have?
15 minutes.
15 minutes? Man, I knew this was going to happen, Dr. Ellis. Dr. Ellis-Williams, I knew this was going to happen. I'm going to run out of time, but I'm going to tell you about Worth Long. You got to know about this story. The psychological war began almost immediately. There were no beds, just mattresses on the floor with no sheets of blankets. The later it became, the colder it got. At some point in the early evening, some guards appeared and threw in some blankets. I had found a mattress away from the door and turned over to see a mad scramble for the few blankets that they threw in on the floor with dust flying all over the place. No way was I going to enter that fray, and so I resigned myself to being cold for the night. Then Worth Long took charge.
He stood up on the table that was in there, Worth was a short guy with glasses, and he said, "I don't know about you, but if I was a man, I wouldn't take a blanket unless everybody had a blanket," and he let that settle in for a minute. "I don't know about you, if I was a man, I wouldn't take a blanket unless everybody had a blanket." Now, these weren't just college guys, these were guys who were college guys, but also guys who we had recruited coming along in the street who were attracted to the fact that we were moving somewhere. So you can imagine that we had some fighters from amongst the college folks and the non-college folks, and that's what they had been taught to do. But when Worth said that, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," was a reply. In less than five minutes, Worth had organized the cell. He turned the pack of individuals who were following their individual instincts for survival into a group of men who were willing to stick together.
The art and science of confrontation politics, you can't learn this stuff except by doing it. So I learned a lot from my time in jail. I learned the fact that I could work with not just college students in a leadership capacity, but also in cell, because Worth went and got himself put in solitary confinement because he was the leader and they just waited for him to slip up, and he did in some kind of way. So me and another guy ended up holding that cell together, working the organization that Worth had supplied us. I want to leave some time for questions. I'm going to skip this. Let me just come to my summary.
Because all of this now occurred because I was a student here at Amherst College, and I want you to appreciate that. I appreciate it. I appreciate the fact that Amherst was a vital stop on my underground railroad to freedom. I was forced to take a stand and I learned who I was. I discovered who I was meant to be. I discovered that I could be a leader. I discovered the power of organization. I discovered the power of knowledge, and I have become a continuing learner, as I explained. Amherst financed my first leap beyond the campus with that civil rights conference, but also unbeknownst to me, when it came time to get bail out of state prison, I was one of the first names. Why? Because we had set up a network of people here at Amherst in the Amherst region who were putting together money for the cause of civil rights. I never thought I'd be the one to be beneficiary of it.
And Amherst provided me a fountain of youth, because I did learn and I was able to learn, and I'm still learning new things. I want to congratulate the seniors here at Amherst who decided to stay. Some of you who may be interested in social justice, I know I had a problem. I wanted to go. I wanted to get out. I wanted to do what I had to do. I even thought every weekend of going to Howard because I sure didn't have any kind of social life up here, boy. I tell you, up here with a bunch of guys? No.
So the secret to my success at Amherst was that I saw it as a place of opportunity rather than a target for the skills that I was gaining. It facilitated my learning, it facilitated me being able to go out. There's another story I wanted to tell you, except at one time, but I wouldn't have time to go into all of that, but basically I left Amherst alone and they left me alone except in the supporting positions that they kept for me and folks like me. Not all Black people, mostly white, as you can imagine. There weren't but four Black people in my class. Every year, there were four Black folks, four Black folks, four Blacks until the civil rights movement burst that whole thing open, and a whole lot of people started coming in, like these two guys sitting here, later on in the 1960s. '70s? Okay. I don't want to give you too much age, all right?
We're younger than you.
You are younger than me. I was trying to put you in my group, but you don't want to be in, it's all right. So I was playing the long game. I was playing the long game. Amherst was a way to help me get to that, and I am forever thankful. I do want to just let you hear this last statement. I didn't get a chance to do all of the things here that I want, but I need you to know about this little statement in terms of my whole feeling about where I have gone and what I have gone here. I got accepted to go to Yale Law School, which I did. The law school's acceptance in my decision to stay in the north, and I decided to work in Newark, New Jersey as opposed to going back to Alabama. The law school acception in my decision to stay north left me with a clear and rejuvenated spirit.
My last memory of Amherst College in that period of my life was not graduation, but packing my last few bags and heading down the highway with two of my best friends, Maribelle Harrington and Alice Gloucester. Maribelle graduated from Smith the same time that I did. Alice was a graduate student from Hampton who had been in the area for a year. Within a day or two of my graduation, I got a ride in Alice's car with Maribelle heading south eventually to work in Newark in a brand new life, and here's the key: it is hard to recreate that moment, riding in the car, windows down on a sunny day in May with two fine Black women radio blasting with the music of our choice << I'm in with the in crowd. I go where the end crowd goes >> you guys remember that? I looked out the window of Alice's car seeing the landmarks I had come to know for the last time as an Amherst student, passing by swiftly on Route 9 as we headed from Amherst to Northampton in the direction of Smith College and the great highways beyond.
There was Chi Psi fraternity where somebody white once threw beer on my date. Across the road, there was Phi Del, where I sat in on drums with Taj Mahal, then a student at UMass. Then Theta Del, the house I almost joined, and the Amherst football field where I had once walked into the field carrying my saxophone, which was now safely stored in my parents' home in Richmond. Last seen through the back windows of the car was the steeple of Johnson Chapel, the tallest point on campus, slowly receding into the distance, punctuating a sea of memories at Amherst.
The song continued just as it plays in my head at this moment of writing, I'm in with the crowd and I know what the in crowd knows. I had never felt so happy, so relieved, and so comfortable with my life as I did at that moment. I dwell on it because such a feeling of completion and perfection, and I don't know if I've ever felt that way before or after, at peace, at rest, just complete. Amherst College gave me so much and I gave so much in return. The contract had been completed, the quid pro quo fulfilled. We were both moving on, and I was going where the in crowd goes. I want to thank Amherst. I want to thank all of you for coming in here. I want to thank you for letting me be myself again with these memories. Thank you very much. Any time for questions, comments?
We have five minutes.
Okay, that's better than I thought.
I have a question with regard to confrontation and the current landscape of politics of confrontation. You talked about discipline and you mentioned some things. What would you offer us now as there are many places to confront given where we've come from?
The first thing I would... She said what can I offer now in terms about what we can do now and lessons about confrontation politics? The most important thing to understand is that there is a difference between mobilization and organization. Mobilization and organization. The most efficient way to mobilize people now is through the web, through telephones. Young people can call up and say, "Meet me at city hall tomorrow at 5:00." You have all kinds of people coming down. But when I was engaged, whenever we had a moment like that, we had a yellow pad and we took people's names, addresses, and telephone numbers. You don't have that anymore, and unless you get organized, you are always going to be coming on brand new. That's the biggest thing you don't want to have to do. You don't want to keep reinventing the wheel.
Stokely Carmichael said, "The most natural thing to do is to be mad," and we like people to be mad. People should get mad at injustice, but anger has to be channeled into something that's going to be progressive. Remember what I said, how to judge success? Who else is going to be with you? What kind of response are you going to get in terms of your own role? What are you going to learn about yourself as a result of this? What are you going to be able to do the next time? You have to be able to keep growing, and that's what I would say. Be involved in some kind of organization and let the confrontational spirit come from the context of organization and not just of your own imagination and where you want to be at one given time. That was not a paid political announcement, even though that is my wife. She wanted to do that. Anybody else? Somebody else?
This is not a question. Your hair is so beautiful, and as you spoke the eras of conflict, amalgamation, conflict, peace, conflict, panic, conflict, being rescued, I just saw a story in your hair telling every era. It is so beautiful. As you seek funding, I would go forward with the hair side of it. We want to see more.
And two, to piggyback from the answer you gave to the previous question, I have a concern about innovation, free spiritedness, when you see it in young people and they want to start their idea, when you enter the idea of science, I love this so much. It's very transformational for how I've been thinking about it, because science can be shared and then you might disprove part of the previous theory, but they don't just throw away all this. We're not going all the way back to getting rid of gravity and relativity. No, we're just talking about this part, the velocity of that plan. So I think you've transformed how maybe I can communicate. What would you say to the student who comes in and says, "I want to start a club for potters against violence," but how do... What is the language? I don't have a language for helping someone.
Read.
Read?
Read. Go back and read, because there's nothing new under the sun. It took me time to learn that too. That was a group that I was involved with called the Students for Democratic Society. Maybe some of you know about that, the SDS, and they always... They were a left wing progressive student, and they didn't want to have anything to do with what their parents had said, but eventually they learned you got to listen to what your parents went through, and that's what I say to my children, "You got to listen to what your parents went through," and they do, they read, they understand, they articulate, but the young people who don't have that organizational... And that family is organizing. Family is an organization. If you don't have that organizational basis, you can do all kinds of things.
For one thing, on the white side of things, if you don't have people who are your parents to get rid of the inherent racism as privilege within you, you got to start from scratch. You got to start from scratch. So you have to go back and do some history, you have to learn something, and if you've already got that foundation of doing that work and you understand that, "Hey, listen, these are some things I have to do to get rid of that privilege that has defined my life, whether I want it to be defined like that or not," then you got to start from scratch. You got to start right there, but learn what other people have said. So that's what I would tell them to do.
Now, if you're Black and you think you're out here and you reinventing the wheel and you're coming along with a time when you don't know who Stokely Carmichael is, you don't know who some of the other great leaders, Martin Luther King... Everybody of course knows about Martin Luther King, but he has been portrayed as a prince of peace and justice. Martin Luther King was one of the bravest people I've ever known. I had a problem with him one time down there in Montgomery, which you got to read in the book to find out, but Martin Luther King called for guaranteed minimum income. That's what he said, "We got to have guaranteed income." So what does that mean he was? You put a title to it, whoever he was. Bernie Sanders came from Martin Luther King.
Now, if you're Black or Latino or Asian, somebody, you still got to learn who the other people were, because you can't just pick up that telephone and make that call, send that text, have people come to city hall if you don't know what you're going to do next. Somebody else?
Oh, I think unfortunately-
Oh, that's it? Oh, I was just beginning to have fun. Thank you.
