American Experience; 1964; Interview John H. Bracey, Historian, part 2 of 3

What happened in Harlem, that's something? It's not just Harlem. There's violence all across the North during this period. There's something in Jersey City, there's something in what Chester, Pennsylvania, when a black family moves into a white neighborhood. Harlem, again, is the same thing. At the moment, see, Malcolm X also is rising as a counter voice to the civil rights movement. Malcolm's great speech message to the grassroots was in 1963 after the March on Washington. And what Malcolm is saying is that, you know, this is not going to work. If you say, oh, he's just saying that. He said, no, no, this is not going to work. Why do you want to integrate with people that want to kill you? Why do you want to integrate with these people that are beating you? And people are saying, like, he got a point. His point is becoming more and more manifest. He says, they're beating up on you. Why do you want to be around them? What is the point of that? Do you want to integrate into a burning house? And that belief that this is that, well, maybe he's right. Or maybe he's right, or maybe he's right, you know, it's starting to build and build and build.

And Malcolm's notes in the self-defense is getting, it's like, why not defend yourself? This is a common sense. Like, do you really think it makes sense? Because he was very outraged about when the kids that got blown up in Birmingham and said, and nobody did anything about that. He says, like, what kind of people are you to allow for? You know, little girls will be blown up and just sit around and talk about it. You know, and that resonates. That really does resonate. Like, what kind of man are you to let little kids be killed in your community? And all you do is just sit around and sing a hymn about it and go to church about it. He says, no, no, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to protect yourself as a black man? And that begins to resonate and resonate and resonate. And it's the police that are seen as the occupying force. They're not, it's not law and order anymore. The police are steadily losing credibility because of what they're doing in the South and because of what they're doing in the North. You know, if something happens in New Jersey, or Jersey City, or Harlem, the police come and lock up black people, not white people. What happened to you? I think this is one way the little kid got shot.

The 15 year old got shot by a policeman. Now this happens very regularly. This is beginning to happen because police are losing the authority, which people haven't really looked at, you know, in that sense. But when I was growing up, policemen walked around communities, and white policemen, single white policemen could walk around a neighborhood and tell you to move off the corn and so forth. And you did. You know, you'd be standing there making noise, singing, do, off, or whatever, and be one white policeman. And we'd say, okay, it's, you know, it's too late, why don't you all go home? And you went home. It never occurred to you that you would question the authority of this policeman, that he represented superior force and power that you had no way to deal with. It's becoming increasingly clear that his job is not so much to protect you, but as to contain you. Because the policeman you see on TV, I'm not protecting black people. They're containing black people. They're hurting black people. They're coming in on the side of white people against black people. So that policeman coming around the corner and looked the same anymore. It's like, who are you to tell me what to do?

Why aren't you locking up these white people that are messing with these black people somewhere else? You know, and so when you shoot a black kid, it's like, wait a minute. I thought, you know, protect and serve. You're not protecting or serving. You're hurting us. You know, and so the police are beginning to lose credibility. Now, of course, the every sponsor is to up the violence to protect themselves. Because it's a horrible job. I mean, you know, you're the frontline trying to contain a population that's not happy. You're not getting paid enough. You're still okay going down there and keep order. And you look around and nobody likes you anymore. The guys that used to say, well, you know, he helps us play baseball and that's gone. That's all gone, right? Everybody's looking at you like there's office of friendly and somebody that throws something at you. For the calling of pigs. Yeah, yeah, or maybe before you get to that, it's just the lack of interaction, you know, or even before you get to the name calling, it's like, you're not my friend anymore. Like I thought you were my friend. You're not my friend. You're seen as alien occupying force. And once that ship takes place, then how do I maintain my authority?

Well, I've got to, I can't let him get out of control. So the first thing that happens, I've got to assert myself. And so you shoot a 15 year old kid. You don't know that he's not representing the thousand and 15 year old kids, you know. And what actually happened to her? Well, people came out in large numbers, you know, and they, in fact, confronted the police station. This is the one where Malcolm's still alive. And Malcolm says, this is not what you do. This is always the time. Why don't you go home? And they go home, right? Now, intelligent white people would have figured out, you should go talk to Malcolm X, right? That had been a logical thing. If you had any kind of political brain power in New York City, they would have called him in within a week and say, look, brother, Malcolm, how can we negotiate? How are we going to keep peace in New York City? Because clearly, you can do this a lot better than my policeman did, right? You don't do that. They go on and on and on about Muslims, hate people that said, now Malcolm saved them. He saved them, right? And he leaves the nation, so, in fact, he's going to have more influence. So they're more afraid, rather than less afraid of him. What's?

What is it about what happens in the North in 64 that represents a sort of a break, do you think? Yeah, well, you also have Chicago, too. I'm always kind of proud of Chicago, because we had a rat, like, four years running. It's the only city to have a rice four years running. That's good of bad. But we always, we didn't take a lot of stuff. It's a frustration. It's a belief that people are dying in the South because they can't defend themselves. We're in a situation where we can. So we should, you know. You also don't want to be in a situation where you end up with less power than your southern brothers and sisters. I mean, there is an internal kind of black competition about who's going to be the last person to be free. I mean, that's what drove the sit-in movement. Do you really want to be the last city in the South

to get a cup of coffee? No, no, no, no, no. So if you have a sit-in and a bus boy got in a gummy, like, my gummy, who's that my gummy? Sit-ins in North Carolina, North Carolina, they come on. No, no. You can get a cup of coffee and whoa, it's in North Carolina. I can't get one in DC. That's not going to happen. So if you know, young people move on that. It's like, no, we're not going to be the last town where you can get a cup of coffee, right? So there's a pride thing about, no, no, no, no. We're not going to be the last people to get free. So wait a minute, Mississippi's got more rice and I've got, you know, and that's what happens when snake kids will come up. Like, you know, I met LeVon Brown and Jimmy Travis when I was in undergrad. And they came up on the kind of, you know, resting recreation out of Mississippi. And I forget LeVon Brown was, you know, I was supposed to keep him out of trouble. So I was taking him around and showing him things. And he said, you know, Chicago ain't all that hot here, man, you know. He said, whoa, he said, hey, what are y'all doing? So I made a mistake of taking him to a demonstration at the school board. I spoke to keep my out of trouble because he had a brace on his neck

because he had been shot and so forth. And I suppose like kind of let him rest. We in the wagon in 10 minutes, you know. And I said, oh, everybody go kill him, man. I'm supposed to keep you out of trouble. He said, you know, he said he just wanted to see a northern demonstration. So I took him to the school board and he should call him, we'll pick it and segregate the schools. And of course, he come to police, check on you, gotta move out. We ain't moving nowhere. Next thing you know, we own the ground, lock the homes, we all pull him in the wagon. And we said, the last time we were going to have you look after anybody, you know. But this thing was like, you need some help up here, man. I'm glad that you're trying to help us down there, but you got work up here, you know. And you began to feel that. Like, wait a minute. If they get the right to vote and do all these things, like, where are we, you know. And so everything, the frustrations begin to move. And the riots become a political, upon the political campaign for Goldwater, too. They become an issue. Yeah, I mean, what the right, the fairly successfully

was to ignore white riots and focus only on, you know, things to start about black people and say the country's out of order. Now when white people had riots a little rock and so forth, nobody said the country's falling apart. White people have a right to have a riot if they want, right. For white mob, you know, tries to stop somebody from going to Mississippi, you know, Mississippi, you know, Mississippi, Alabama. Or we understand their frustrated, you know, they're upset and so forth. A black here, those are victor when all of a sudden civilization is lost, you know. And here come the police and here comes all this stuff. And so what they successfully, very successfully did, was to make law and order a black thing, you know. That it's black people that are out of sight. It's white people that are breaking the law. I mean, if white people had obeyed the laws that they passed, right, you know, brown decision civil rights act, wouldn't have any problems, right. That's the law breaking. But then a black person responds to that, we're the ones disrupting the society. And you said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

The reason I'm out here in the street is because you won't, you know, follow this desegregation order, right. How come you're not in jail? How come I'm the one going in jail and you don't want this breaking the law? I mean, that's the hypocrisy that people see. And that's the hypocrisy that people respond to. And of course, it becomes a political problem because the right seizes on that. I mean, you understand, full well, that what a lot of white Americans are afraid of is an unruly black population, a black population out of control. You know, and law and order is just code words, so we will figure out how to contain this population. You know, and it works. You know, it works for a fairly, and I think it's still working to a certain extent. I call them goldwater rallies, the right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what do you do? You can't be quiet just because the white people get up and say that if you're not quiet, you know, you just kind of stop. Working now, certainly if you agree, as I do with Michelle Alexander's point of view, it's working in a whole new Jim Crow that's based on mass incarceration. Yeah, Matthew, she's a bit exaggerated on it.

If you... Well, we shouldn't go there, because we're at business. Yes, a whole other program, yeah. Well, yeah. So... Atlantic City. What was the goal of the MFDP? And who were those delegates? These were the Black people. They were elected by the Black people in Mississippi. They got arrested, vote. This was what American democracy was supposed to be about. They risked their lives. They voted for their delegates. They weren't allowed to vote with the white people. So they set up the Freedom Democratic Party. And they elected their own delegates, and they were the democratically elected. They had more votes than the white delegates had. And they should have been seated as the democratically elected delegates from the state of Mississippi. It was very simple to fight people. They didn't say, what was the problem, you know? And but she thought their world was about to come to an end. It's like, well, you can't do that. Well, maybe you should only take one or two. No, no, no. We're the democratically elected delegates from the state of Mississippi. Period.

There's no alternative group. There's some white people that were not democratically elected. We're the ones that have... We have the numbers, right? We did everything you said to do. We followed every law you said followed. We registered, we had a primary, we voted. We're the delegates. Why can't we have the seats, right? And the watch people go around and bend themselves all out of shape to make like the law is not the law. And this is their law again. I mean, this is why you get annoyed. You sit there and people say, well, you have to follow these rules and regulations. So you said, okay, then you do. And they say, well, we didn't really mean it. They're like, make up your mind. Do you want us to have a democratically elected state all you don't? You say, well, yeah, but not quite yet. Well, when is this supposed to happen? You know, we suppose to wait another 50 years to get a democratic elected delegates. I mean, when they turn down Fannie New Hamer, at that point, he was like, forget it. I mean, a democratic party was like toast, you know. Do you remember the moment, did you see her on TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coming back, right? Yeah, yeah. She was, she was the best for it. This was a, you know, Fannie New Hamer

risk her life doing this stuff, right? Fannie New Hamer was almost beat to death in a prison doing this, right? Fannie New Hamer had office to go sit down and shut up all the time, right? There were people all over the country that said, look, Miss Hamer, we will pay you to come live in our town, city, state, and you can work in here, didn't it? Why don't you just leave this Mississippi thing alone? She never took them, she never took them, right? No, no, no. They had to buy her a dress to send her to the Atlantic city. She didn't have a new dress, she had like two dresses. They had to buy her a dress, right? And people are offering her stuff. I mean, she is the one that they want to buy off. And so they said, well, if you do this, you know, you're something to get a job over here. And so I don't get a job over here. And he can work in the post office over here, no, no, no. So when she shows up, this is a person that's impeccable integrity, right? The money was on the table. She didn't pick a nickel of it up, right? She could have been visiting teacher and political science at any black school in the country. You know, somebody would have paid for that.

They would say, no, once you have added a waiver to teach politics, it was, no, it didn't matter. We'll pay the salary. None of that, she didn't pick up none of that money. And when she found her testimony that was so surprising. But it wasn't surprising. If you knew her, she'd just strayed from Spain and New Haven never switched them out. Spain and New Haven was who she was all the time. That's what drove people crazy. Like, she meant what she said. She never, she's never kept switching them out but she meant her what she said. You know, whether you try to kill her or beat her to death or whatever, when she got herself back up off the ground, she would say, I'm a citizen, I have a right to vote. You know, I'm going to exercise that right, right? She followed all of us and people laid out. She showed up and said, here we are. We are seats. And they said, well, we're going to have this discussion. It's nothing to discuss. What would their discussion be? What was it about her testimony that was so shocking? Striking to white Americans and to the average TV or that day?

I don't know. I'm not sure they, for most white Americans, Spanish and New Haven were supposed to be the maid. I don't think they ever saw a black woman. There's no white women like that. Where in the white America would you have a white female that would stand up like that and say those things and have that authority within her community? No such person. She doesn't fit. I mean, she's like, who is this? I can't imagine how white people see her. It's kind of like white people can't figure out Michelle Obama. She's not the maid. And she's not wearing hot pants. So like, who is she? I mean, she just did not used to black women who are powerful and intelligent, politically savvy figures who are equal to the men and their communities. So they don't know what they do with them. So they just got a look and said like, what? She didn't even go to school. No, no, you don't have to go to school to have a brain. That's something that you believe. That's not something back people know better. Nobody picked her because of her credentials. And so she doesn't fit.

And so like kind of like a natuerny figure, you're just kind of scary or a hairy tubman. Like, wait a minute, are there more people out there like this than this is trouble? She's also talking about an experience that most people couldn't really imagine. Right, that's right. And she's not running from it. And she's not saying what I'm up here, save me, save me. She's not saying help, help. I'm up here for you now. I'm not going back. No, no, they're very few people. I mean, they terrify you. They're figures I get in black history that they pop up from time to time that they're scared everybody because they don't compromise. Hairy tubman was like that. Out of you else was like that. I mean, hairy tubman, if you escape with her, she carried a gun and she thought she might get caught and said, I'm going to have to shoot you. So you won't be able to vote. She said, whoa, wait a minute. You're going to die three, one way to other. And you think about it. Do I really want to try to escape with her and your tubman and do I wait for something else a little bit easier?

Well, I had to be well. So I'm like, I've got a lens. She said, we're going to go down a deal with this. And so I wasn't really wanting to go that way. I was going to go the other way. No, no, we're going this way. It's a bit of a new hammer. It's like, I'm not looking for the easy way to do anything. This is the injustice we're going to straight at it. And you say, well, let me save it. Didn't they just shoot at you? Yeah, but don't worry about that. I said, you know, worry about that. Almost beat you. Your eyes are all swollen up. Your back doesn't, your back hurts all the time. It's like, don't worry about that. I'll be OK. And then you say, what are you going to say to her? I'm afraid. And she's not afraid. So she compels you to act. And that's against people. I mean, she's putting the nation's conscience on the table in a way that you have to confront it. Like, can't we buy us something and give us a house or something and buy a nice car? No, no. That kind of integrity terrifies people because a political system is based on wheeling and dealing. And there's no moral, of course, fine. Yep. Yep.

She's right. It ain't no doubt about it. There's no, you can't say, well, Ms. Hamer, you ought to rethink this because you might be wrong. No, no, no. I'm right. No, you're rethinking this because you're afraid to admit I'm right. And that means that I'm the one that's morally deficient, not her. And what country wants to admit that? So she obsets people. So you come in and compromise. It looks petty. I mean, it's absolutely petty. Like, you want two seats? It's like, oh, no, two seats. I mean, she just, it's like, continue. It's just like flicked it off the table like it was a flat. Here's the leading brains in the Democratic party. This is the best they could come up with. Like, we thought about it. Well, why don't we offer it two seats? I mean, it's like, you think she'll go for it? It's the best we can do. And she just, thank you. Leg, can we touch up one more time? Everybody ready to settle? Coffee machine finished making its noises. Describe them the delegates.

What kind of professions do they come up with? They're an inspiring group just by the very nature of who they are. They're basically working people. They're working class. I think this, I'm trying to remember them specifically. I'm just thinking hairdressers. Yeah, farmers. I mean, it's the heart of the black working class. I mean, they're farmers, they're day laborers. Yeah, the women of beauticians and what you call it, domestics, those kind of people. That's what family of him was a sharecropper. You know, when she chopped cotton. You know, when she worked with overwalls. I mean, she could harness up a mule. They were the kind of people that don't usually show up at democratic conventions. They're not lawyers. They're not the local lawyer. They're not the local small business man who gets himself elected so he can go to the parties. This is the population of people that South fear it. Because if these people have power, political power,

their agenda is not going to be the agenda of big corporations. It's not going to be the agenda of how can I make a deal to get a damn built that will mess up the lake I've been fishing in for 100 years. These are people that will speak to the needs of that part of the population. And so who they were, again, was a kind of rebuke to the way the delegate system for the most part. Which is that you pick people who have already picked themselves and who go there to make deals. So what happened in that black city? What were they offered and did they accept it? I mean, behind the scenes, they were offered a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, everybody was off. I mean, there was job offers. I mean, the amount of kind of graft that was being banded about was pretty widespread. And they didn't accept it. The Fannie Lou Hamer held everybody together. I mean, if you're behind her, how do you go around here to get an offer?

I mean, how do you come back to her and say, well, say me, they offered me this job, and I took it. No, no, no. Now, eventually that the Mississippi gets, they do get kind of contained in a certain way. I mean, everybody's not Fannie Lou Hamer forever. But at that moment, there is a high point kind of in American politics. And the high point was that it demonstrated what American politics could be if it was really democratic. That this is what the democratic convention all of look like. It should be people like this all across the country, with issues like this all across the country, would leadership that stands for the people that they represent and not who sent them the last big check, and who have integrity. Any country with any brains would have said, this is a wonderful opportunity to move the system forward. We're going to seat them and at the devil take the high animals. But there was no white political courage to do that. So what was the impact of being offered these two seats, and was it a sense of immense sense of betrayal?

How did the hell get to feel? It's a little bit more than betrayal. It's a sense of kind of a disappointment, again, that people don't mean what they say to me. You set up some rules and regulations. People say, OK, we know you're putting us to hoops. We're going to jump to the hoops anyway. And they did that. It's not the first time they did that. Again, you do it. Brown is always in the back of everybody's head. This was the first promise that you promised it. This is what you said. And so at the back of that is the commitment it hasn't been met. And you say, here we go again. You say, what if we do this? Well, if you can get the delegates, then you can get seated. Well, we got the delegates. So it builds into that sense of despair that, again, when Malcolm and his sad saying, I told you you can't trust him, I told you you can't trust him. They lie all the time. Whatever you try to do, they're going to change the game on you. And the cynicism is immense.

It just spreads throughout the back population. It's like, if you don't get fan of the Hema, what she's entitled to, what am I going to get? I'm not fan of the Hema. How can I trust somebody walking into a situation where I'm in promise something? And I'm not fan of the Hema. If they can turn her down, and God knows they're going to turn me down. So it's more than just betrayal, because there wasn't a sense that there was a strong enough commitment in the first place. But what you want, it was just a lack of blatant hypocrisy. Like, we understand the system is based on some hypocrisy. But this is like an obvious win. So we suppose to get the obvious win. Like, we don't get all the wins. But this is like a slam dunk. Like, we don't get this, then what are we supposed to get? We can't do any better than this. What's Johnson for it? What's his nightmare scenario? And why is he playing such a tough game? He's still balancing. Johnson's agenda is not to help black people.

Johnson's agenda is to put the country back together, the whole of the country from flying off the part. If you really, if you look at the amount of violence coming down in the South only part of the white South, I think there's a much greater potential for white armed uprising, which they were, than black people burning in our cities. And I think Johnson's just as a way of that. So he said, look, I can't go but so far. It's like, I got you on one side. You might be mad at me, but you're not going to shoot at me. I mean, he just killed a president. I mean, I didn't remember that. The bridge has just got shot. I mean, and you're the next president. I mean, that's not an easy thing to be walking into. I mean, you sit down in the chair. Well, happened to the last guy. What did he put a building in his head? Well, OK, let me figure out how not to have that happen to me. I mean, you can't throw that. I mean, it's a very, very important political fact. I mean, we don't just shoot presidents randomly. I mean, this is a president guy shot. And you the next guy that moved into the seats, you say, OK, how do I calm that group down? Because if they increase enough to shoot JFK, they might be crazy enough to shoot me too. And they came out of Texas.

And I'm from Texas, so I know they're crazy enough. Because I'm one of them. So I don't want to stir them up that much. So he's balanced. He has to balance. His job is to bring the answer balance. He wants the system back together again. He wants it more just than it was before, because he knows he has to do that. But he doesn't know. And nobody knows what exactly the mix will be. And I think that's what the political skills come in. How much do we get to black people to get them to get enough? So they'll slow down and calm down a bit. Without giving up too much to why people say they don't get upset. And that's what he's juggling. Is there a silver lining at all from what happens in Atlantic City? I mean, they do make a commitment, which they stick to, which is that they'll never be another segregated delegation. They won't be another one anyway. I mean, that's when he gave me something I already won. Like, why is that? It's not a victory. Like, next time, we're going to show up with twice the delegates. What are you going to do then? Like, of course, we're going to get more delegates, you know? I mean, that's, again, it's this strange kind of thing

where people, they lock you out and you bust through the door and they say, wow, we're going to let you stay. Wait a minute, I'm not going to knock the door. No, you're not doing me any favors. Well, that's what this is. You know, nobody invited Fannie Lou Hamer to Atlantic City. I mean, she fought her way to Atlantic City. And I said, well, now you're here. You all can come back again. It's like, thanks a lot, you know? We were coming back anyway. Look at what you wanted us to. I mean, that's politics versus morality, you know, and integrity. And I think that's what the, I don't think there's a silver lining in that sense. I think there's a reality in the part of the heads of the Democratic Party, you know, the Democratic National Committee and all the haunches, that you got to keep the liberal labor thing together and that black people have to have a bigger role. I think that's there. You know, and I think just to fix black people all across the North and South, they say, look, okay, we gave them like 10%, but we don't have to up this thing. And everybody, you know, you start thinking about it right now and start seeing what you can do to start to make just a commendation because clearly the old way

is not going to work anymore. What's the impact of Atlantic City do you think on the black car movement and on the sort of schism that's developing within the civil rights movement as a whole? You know, for my point of view, it was, again, it's just another sense that they didn't mean what they said anyway. Like, why do you believe them? I think the bigger impact was the increasing kind of urban kind of unrest. You got moving through the spring into the summer. And also important was Malcolm X breaking with the nation of Islam. So that now he was now free to move around on his own. Because what you were looking for was a counter figure to King, in fact, articulate, you know, a strong kind of black self-development position. And inside the nation of Islam, you couldn't do that because it was, you know, I mean, you know, I was in Chicago when, you know, at the headquarters of the whole thing and all that. And it was, they would drive you crazy. You know, I mean, they had no politics at all.

You know, it was all, you know, I mean, it was, you know, time of getting the headache. You know, religion, I mean, it's still around, you know. But the goal was making money in all kinds of stuff and all kinds of internal squabbles and whatnot. And what you wanted was to get Malcolm out of there. So he was free to do, you know, to act on what you knew he believed. Because he talked, I talked to him all the time when he said in Chicago. And he said he worked inside. He worked where he was because that's where he was. But he never, like, you know, he asked me to join, I never joined, he said, I can't deal with all this stuff. And he said, he understood. I mean, he wasn't, he didn't push you on that. And you wanted him out rather than you going in. I mean, this thing was to get more people inside, to help him from the inside. And I'm saying, I ain't way no bow time, man. I ain't way no bow time. I'm not selling no newspapers. Like, you know, I mean, you know, I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I just took off my time, not putting it back on. Like, I'm not wearing no one next to us, you know. And so he'd laugh about it, but you wanted him out. And I think him moving out was a bigger boost

to the possibility that you could have with different kind of politics, you know, as an alternative to King. See, King, King peace. Now, we saw the Nobel Prize as the way to kind of validate King to kind of hold him up. And it's like, no, no, this really is your leader. We just gave him a Nobel Prize. It's too late. You have to give him a lot more than that. You know, you should have given him, you know, it'd take a whole lot more than the Nobel Prize to keep King on top at this point. I mean, King is scrambling. Is that shift happening in 1964? Is that the kind of critical moment when the coalition, however afraid and loose it was that it held the civil rights movement together is actually beginning to sort of really split? No, I mean, there are two things going on. Part of the problem is you've got the young people that are pushing King. And King is saying, like, you know, King is trying to keep a certain amount of order, too. I mean, King is not an anarchist. I mean, King is a fairly conservative guy. Courageous, I mean, very courageous man, but King did not like a lot of confusion.

You know, he caused confusion, he didn't like confused. So you got snake in his people pushing, they're pushing, they're pushing, they're pushing it, right? You got anybody see peace saying, like, where are you going? I thought you were with us. So he's got, like, hang with us, hang with us. We can get this thing done. And you got white Americans who are trying to kill him all the time. King gets a death threat like every day. Like, if you keep doing anything, we're going to blow your brain on you. So like, who am I supposed to be pleasing here? You know, you have, you have that split going on. And then you have the whole question. Once you move to the North, then you have a problem with the liberal labor coalition because it's not a sudden thing anymore. You know, if you're talking about sending people to Mississippi, George, many of you do that in the heartbeat. George, many sent money to the South, right? He didn't mind integrating, you know, union halls in Virginia. Can we integrate the plumbers union in New York? No, I don't know. I don't know. That's a whole different ballgame. And wait a minute, wait a minute. That's when the fight breaks out. You said, OK, how about construction sites? OK, if I can't do the plumbers, can we do the copters? Can we do the mason's, the glaciers, right?

How about just a little hard carriers here and there? You said, whoa, wait a minute. You mess it with your money. Now it's one thing to talk about abstract civil rights somewhere else. It's another thing to walk into my union hall and say there's no black workers in here and they weren't. And so the concrete demands, northern demands, are not symbolic demands. We got to write the vote in the north, right? Well, we went to write and said, OK, cannot I get a job? Can I get a bigger piece of the machine that I'm a part of? Like I know I'm a part of the coalition in New York, Chicago, Cleveland. How come we don't have no mayor? How come we don't have the head of the city council? Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We're getting behind our southern brothers. That's when the coalition begins to free. This is the, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh.