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segregation and the legalized oppression of black people was a continuation by the White South of the Civil War.
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That's exactly what it waas it was taking out on black people, their venom against white northerners, Um, and say You may think that you took our way of life away from us.
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But you're wrong and you're fully social.
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Theories are wrong, too.
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So it was a continuation.
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So war is no question about it.
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In the early fifties, America Waas horribly segregated country it was.
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It was as if the whole South was a rotten fruit.
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Everybody everybody could smell.
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They're a couple of notorious lynchings in Mississippi.
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Black kid named Emmett Till was holding a white woman killed him.
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Black guy named Mac Charles Parker, who was accused of having raped a white woman taken out of jail, killed thrown in the river.
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I think both those guys were thrown, Um, blacks were routinely put on the cars and beaten up by state troopers all throughout South Black.
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Poverty was just horrible, being shown in magazines, and then Supreme Court decided that, too it was unconstitutional for states to run segregated school system and little cute, clean, starched black kids began toe show up on people's television screens being walked to school by their parents and screamed at by white people.
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The contrast could not have been more stark.
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Um, it white people were screaming.
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Were with caricature.
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Is two people working class people, you know, not terribly clean?
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Um, some of them hold bees, um, faces distorted with anger, screaming obscenities.
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67 year old Children, Well, televisions knew everybody was glued to it.
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Um, that was 12 The country had fought this fight for democracy.
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Blacks felt it.
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Whites felt it and blacks were restless.
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They just It's sitting on the back of the bus, being relegated to the upper floor of a theater and sometimes to only one row of the theater, uh, going to a gas station when your bladder was full and not knowing whether you'd be permitted to use the bathroom.
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Um, having white people be just is rude to you as they chose to be giving you absolutely no respect.
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Um, not being able to try on clothes that you bought in stores.
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All of that stuff and worse was was going on, and northerners knew it, and they had tried to avoid it.
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But when blacks started taking their Children to school, the North can no longer avoid the stinking rotting fruit.
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And the South was represented by some of most unattractive people in the Congress.
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Sander Theodore G.
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Bilbo, Mississippi was just an awful human being, and there are a lot of Southerners in the house who dispute bile.
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And, uh so the North couldn't see it anymore, and blacks began to get hope from the fact that the Supreme Court had finally said on blacks interpreted this 54 decision.
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To me, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution include us, Justus.
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We've always said all God's Children are equal, and so we start to move and white people.
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But that's right and a lot of weight.
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People joined it.
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You couldn't say that.
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She wanted integrations to be all mixed up because the white Southerners kept on saying, Well, all I wanna do is sleep with white women if they know.
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No, we don't wanna sleep with white women.
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Keep your darn women.
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They're not that cute.
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Anyway, we don't want them.
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What we want is good educations for our Children.
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Um, and I think that integration for us meant freedom from oppression.
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I don't think that black people really thought of joining the country cover this, that they thought they could get rid of this humiliation.
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First of all, get some equal education for our Children that everybody knew that was a go get equal education.
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Because that's our future.
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Um, but don't tell me I can't go the bathroom anymore.
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Don't tell me I can't sit anywhere on the bus or in the theater.
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Don't tell me that I don't.
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I don't.
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It's just too terrible.
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Um, I don't I don't think it was a positive thing.
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I just think it was Get rid of all of this oppression.
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The main concrete thing that we hoped would happen would be that, um our kids really would get equal education.
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That was enormously important.
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The second thing that people wanted very much waas was public accommodations.
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You cannot understand how horrible it waas tohave to contemplate a trip south.
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And the third thing was was was freedom from fear of being injured in the south.
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But a trip to the south for a northerner was fraught with peril because you were worried that she would run a car run out of gas, and some person would be violent to you have no recourse to the law because the law was totally unfair.
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And that and then once you got to the town where you be if you had usually if you're wise, you had made arrangements to stay with friends because you couldn't stay at the local hotel.
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And it was often no public place to eat.
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What we want to be rid of all of that stuff.
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Um and, uh, beyond that, um, I don't I don't think many people had a vision.
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I think people, I think if I thought about it, I would have thought the quite people's band views of black people are based on, uh, a grins.
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And when we get together, they will cease to be ignorant about us, and they will.
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Scales will fall from their eyes, and they will begin to they decent.
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That's what I thought.
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I was pretty naive, but that's what I thought.
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People are always super Americans.
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We had to believe in America more than other people did in order to have any hope in order to live and are not to go crazy.
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We had to believe that the 13th 14th and 15th Amendments meant something and that the Declaration of Independence written by a slave owner did mean the full scope of the words.
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Um, so once we had the opportunity to make it work, we went full bore at it and decided we were I had this terrible itch of the humiliation in our daily lives that we want to get rid of.
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Um, but we also had something else, and that was a very powerful faith in the decency of white people.
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I no longer have that faith, but we had it then.
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And that was if we can on Lee demonstrate to white people how rotten this system is.
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Most of them well, uh, most of them room will change in the country will change very rapidly.
