The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

In 1957 a Federal Court ordered the public school, the main public high school and Little Rock, Arkansas Central High School to integrate. One hundred black kids applied to be the first of their race to go to this school. The school board narrowed the number down to nine, and those nine were admitted.

And over a week in September, there was this tremendous drama played out on television, at a time where there were three TV networks, not the multiplicity of outlets we have today but three TV networks, so it was inescapable. If you watched the five or six o'clock news, if you read any newspaper, the story of the Little Rock Nine was played out for you.

And over this week, we saw how these young people came to the school, were turned away; the governor called out the National Guard, they were turned away.

Their patron and advisor, a marvelous woman named Daisy Bates, challenged President Eisenhower and said if you don't provide protection for these young people, they are not coming back to school anymore.

And Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and called out units of the US Army, and under the protection of the soldiers, these students finally went to school.

But the one who made the biggest impression on me was a girl named Elizabeth Eckford, and if you saw the Eyes on the Prize video, then you saw Elizabeth. These kids used to go to school as a group, in an army station wagon with a jeep in front, with a mounted automatic rifle on it, and a jeep in back with a mounted automatic rifle on it. We now know there were no bullets in these rifles. But it was impressive looking to see them escorted by these soldiers to school everyday.

One day Elizabeth missed her ride, and so she came to school like every other or most other kids did in 1957, she came on a city bus. And on the Eyes on the Prize video, you see Elizabeth step off that bus. She is wearing dark glasses, she had light sensitive eyes, she had to wear dark glasses all the time, she is holding her books in her arm like this, she has got on a pinafore, and she steps off that bus into a crowd of yelling, screaming, shouting, cursing harpies.

People were saying ugly things to Elizabeth, and in the video you can't hear what they are saying, there is no sound accompanying it, but you know from the expression on their faces the ugly scowls and the angry stares that they are saying ugly things to her, things that you don't want anybody to ever say to you.

And Elizabeth makes her way through the crowd, and a white woman steps out of the crowd and puts her arm around Elizabeth and takes her to a park bench, another bus pulls up, Elizabeth gets on the bus, and she goes home.

And I remember seeing Elizabeth's mother on TV, she said when Elizabeth came home from school that day, her dress was so wet with spit I could wring it out. And I thought "Whoa, so wet with spit that you could wring it out?" And then I began to ask myself what has she done to these people to make them treat her in this despicable way. And how many times would how many people have to spit how much to make her dress wet enough to have her dress be wrung out? Why would they do this to this innocent person, she had not opened her mouth, she had not said anything, she had not menaced them in any way I could see. Why would they treat her in that way?

And then as typically we do when we are 17 years old, I began to think about me. If I was ever tested by the Elizabeth Eckford test, would I be equal to the test. Because Elizabeth came back to school the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and all the other days of the school year she came back, she stood up to that, she came back.

And I wondered if I ever found myself in a situation remotely like that, would I be able to withstand and to persevere the way Elizabeth Eckford did. Well probably lucky for me, this did not happen to me in '57,didn't happen in '58, didn't happen in '59, didn't happen until 1960.

And one day I am sitting at a café where students went before classes or sometimes instead of classes, and an older student whom I knew just barely, a young guy named Lonnie King, no relation to Martin Luther King, came up to me, and he held up a newspaper. The newspaper said Greensboro Students Sit In for Third Day.

And he said, "What do you think about this"?

And I said, "Hey, that's pretty good, that's great, that's fabulous. I'm so happy they're doing that?"

He said, "Don't you think somebody ought to do that here in Atlanta where we are?"

And I said, "Oh, somebody is going to do it, you know somebody is going to do that, somebody is going to do that."

And he of course asked the magic question, "Why don't we do it."

And so, he was a football player, her was a big guy, so I said sure, and we split up the café and he took one side and I took the other side and we gathered a group of young people together, and our group got larger and larger and larger.

I should tell you I was a student at Morehouse, Morehouse is part of a consortium: Morehouse, Clark, Spelman, Morris Brown Colleges, Atlanta University, and a theological school, six schools. At the time, the largest collection of college, black college students anywhere in the United States. Not true now, but it was true then.

And as our group got bigger, we decided we were going to do what these students had done in Greensboro, we were going to sit in at lunch counters in Atlanta. And so after a great deal of organizing and putting together groups, and no training in non-violence, not a single moment of training in non-violence, we separated into groups and we hit various targets in downtown Atlanta.

And my group went to the Atlanta City Hall Cafeteria, have you ever been to Atlanta? So I led this group along the steam table, with my colleagues standing behind me. The first thing we notice is that the only other black people in there were the black women on the other side of the steam table. And they were looking at us with a mixture of fear and admiration.

Fear because if we were there, the police were going to be there. They were sure to come within a few moments. Admiration because they had read in the newspapers about sit-ins happening in Greensboro on February 1, in Durham, in Raleigh, in Columbia, in Charleston moving on down, and finally they had come to Atlanta, Georgia. So they were happy this event had occurred, but frightened about what it might mean to them.

And I am first in line, so I come to the white woman who I later discover is the manager of the cashier, and she says, "Oh, I'm awfully sorry," she is polite, southerners are really polite you know, she said, "I'm awfully sorry, this is for city hall employees only."

I said, "You got a big sign outside saying City Hall Cafeteria, the public is welcome."

She said, "We don't mean it."

And I said, "Well, we'll stand here until you do."

She called the police, the police came, the police asked us to leave, we refused to leave, they arrested us and took us away.

Shortly after this occurred, we got a letter from a remarkable woman named Ella Baker, who then worked for Dr. Martin Luther King. So we got a letter signed by Ms. Baker and Dr. King inviting us to come to a meeting on Easter Weekend 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina to meet with other young people like ourselves who had been through the same adventure.

And we borrowed money from the adults in the community, we borrowed a car, we drove up to Raleigh, and we met these other young people. And it was literally like a flash of lightening. Because although we were going to this variety of black public and private colleges scattered around the south, and although we had different hopes and dreams and aspirations professionally, some did want to be lawyers, some wanted to be doctors, some wanted to be ministers, some wanted to be school teachers, we had so much in common.

We were all going to black public and private schools. We had all gone to black public high schools and grade schools. We had all lived through the announcement of Brown v. Board of Education. We had all seen the initial burst of optimism that the Brown Decision brought to black America. We had all seen Emmitt Till's murder in Mississippi. We had all felt, been made to feel particularly vulnerable, because if these white racists would kill a young kid like Emmitt Till, what might they do to us? So we lived through these experiences and shared a commonality. We had engaged in this common pursuit of lunch counter sit-ins, and we formed an organization named the temporary student non-violent coordinating committee.

And in January of 1967 or 6, these years are fuzzy in my memory now, I got sworn in, and I served there in the house and the senate for the next twenty years. Then I ran for congress in 1988, I lost the election, and as so many defeated candidates do, I moved to Washington and began a career as a university professor and have taught at a number of places, and now I am at Virginia and American University.

Now, prior to this, I had been on and off the NAACP Board of Directors for about fifteen years, and I had been during part of that time president of the Atlanta NAACP. In some ways this was a radical step for me, because when I was your age, to me the NAACP was all gray-haired people. And I thought why would I want to be associated with an organization made up of those old gray-haired people. But when I became one, and when I looked around at the host of other organizations that were so prominent in the 1960s, and saw that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was the only soldier left standing I knew there was a reason why this organization was standing, and a reason why I wanted to be a part of it.

The reason why the organization still is standing today, is because like all of the others, it had a grass roots base. It has a membership of more than 600,000 people in 2200 branches scattered across the country. They're old, they're young, they're black, there are more whites than we thought, we just had an internal survey done, more whites than we thought we had. It is an organization with real staying power. It has a marvelous history, it has a marvelous present, and it is going to have a marvelous future.

So five years ago, I ran for chairman of the board of the NAACP, chairs have one-year terms and I have been reelected every year since then so I am now on my fifth term.

So, I spend my professional life teaching at these two schools, and I spend a great deal of my private life working for the NAACP.