When I was at Tambaza High School the plight of the Biafran war victims was a subject of a lot of discussion by the students, a few of whom were opposed to the secession of Biafra but mainly for the wrong reasons, accusing the Igbos of "arrogance" without caring to know about what really happened in Nigeria and why Eastern Nigerians decided to withdraw from the federation.

As we discussed the subject, we also got the chance to see a documentary film about the war. Students from other schools and other people also went to see it when it was shown in Dar es Salaam - not at our school - but somewhere in the city within walking distance from our student hostel, H.H. The Aga Khan Hostel in Upanga, a suburb where we lived.

It was disturbing, to say the least. It featured graphic images of the Biafran war victims, men, women and children with emaciated bodies. The children we saw were terribly malnourished, mere skeletons with protruding bellies. It was enough to bother the conscience of even some of the most hardened souls. It was gut-wrenching.

Also featured in the documentary film was Colonel Ojukwu, in sombre mood, his face drooping with weariness, explaining to the world the plight of his people. He was in such mental and emotional anguish that the pain and suffering of his people was written all over his face.

The documentary was specially relevant to us because our country had recognized Biafra as a sovereign entity just the year before, and many students who saw the graphic images of starving and wounded Biafrans were overcome with emotion. It was the most graphic film about war I had ever seen in my short life of 19 years, and it left an indelible mark on my mind and perhaps of some of the other students as well.

At that point, the Nigerian federal forces did not even have to wage war against the Biafrans. Hunger was already fighting the war for them. And they used it effectively as a weapon against the Biafrans to force them to surrender. Nobody, of course, knew for sure back then in 1969 that the war would be over in a few months in January 1970, especially considering the resilience and determination of the Igbos to be left alone since the fighting started.

Yet, to the war victims, those months must have been years. And it is a tragedy that could have been avoided had the Nigerian federal government taken into account the fears and concerns of the Biafrans who felt that they were no longer safe as an integral part of Nigeria.

As the sixties were coming to an end in Africa, another phenomenal event was taking place on the continent. It was a movement. And it gained momentum in the last years far more than it did in any of the years in that decade. It was the liberation movement.

So, while the war was still going on Nigeria in 1969, another war was also going on in another part of Africa. It was a different kind of war but not quite in terms of fighting for freedom just as the Biafrans did.

The other war was in southern Africa where the freedom fighters were waging guerilla warfare against the white minority regimes in one of the most protracted conflicts in the history of the continent since the advent of colonial rule. And the end of the sixties turned out to be some of the most critical years in this conflict, especially in terms of escalation.

It was mainly horizontal escalation covering a war front of more than 2,000 miles stretching from the east cost of southern Africa to the western part of the continent in Portuguese Guinea, now Guinea-Bissau. But there was also vertical escalation in this conflict in terms of weaponry and intensity of warfare as the freedom fighters gained more experience, and got more and more weapons from their allies especially countries in the Eastern bloc.

The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and other Eastern countries were willing to supply them with whatever weapons they needed to fight the white minority regimes which were being armed by the West. It was an ideological war between the two ideological camps - East and West - but one of freedom and survival for Africans who accepted weapons from whoever was willing to help them in times of need.

In 1968, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia warned the world many times of an impending confrontation between Black Africa and White Africa along the banks of the Zambesi River which served as a kind of demarcation line between the two in a substantial part of southern Africa. Other African leaders including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had issued similar warnings around the same time and even before then in the case of Nyerere as he did in his article, "Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa," published in the highly influential journal, Foreign Affairs, in April 1966 not long after the white minority regime in Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence on 11 November 1965 to the total exclusion of the black African majority in that country.

By the late 1960s, especially by 1969, the dangers these leaders had warned about - the war between Black Africa and White-dominated Africa - had not only materialized but got worse. The fighting was already taking place in the form of guerilla warfare, and it was escalating. The confrontation was costing hundreds of lives and millions of pounds (£) or dollars a year. And the war was being fought not just along the Zambesi. As John Parker stated in "Expanding Guerilla Warfare":

“Africans and fighting white men along a 'front' that stretches more than 2,000 miles from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

The battle has been going on for nearly seven years, ever since African nationalists took up arms against the Portuguese authorities in Angola; but in 1968, for the first time, a 'grand purpose' began to emerge and the issues started to crystallize into recognizable shape.

The 'battle areas' are fairly clearly defined....Active fighting is going on in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (in West Africa). Periodic battles are occurring along the northern border of Rhodesia. And on both ocean flanks persistent...attempts are being made to infiltrate armed insurgents into South and South-West Africa.

So far, the 'purified white tip' of Africa has not yet announced a defence treaty between South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese territories in Africa. Such a treaty has been urged by Afrikaner and Portuguese strategists from time to time, and there is no doubt that the South African Government has gone a good part of the way to taking the practical steps necessary to turn the idea into reality.

The reason for this reluctance is certainly political. While South Africa can maintain reasonable relations with her African neighbours she will do so, and there is no doubt that a 'White Defence Pact' would immediately focus strongly adverse world attention onto a situation which South Africa prefers brushed under the carpet.

But the military to-ing and fro-ing between Pretoria, Salisbury, Lourenco Marques and Luanda is hard to keep secret; and only recently South Africa admitted for the first time that 300 'police' are now on regular duty in Rhodesia.

There can be no doubt that a co-ordinated policy exists for the defence of South Africa; even if it exists only in the minds of the South Africans who...are pragmatically willing to use the territories to the north of her as buffer zones toward off any form of attack - military, political, economic and ideological.

South Africa is currently spending £147m. a year on her defence forces and a further £42m.on the para-military police force. Her armaments are the most sophisticated on the continent of Africa, and her forces the most highly trained.

Portugal maintains 115,000 troops in Africa - 55,000 in Angola, 40,000 in Mozambique and 20,000 in Guinea-Bissau according to the Institute of Strategic Studies in London. Military expenditure in Portugal absorbs nearly half the entire budget.

In Rhodesia, expenditure has just increased by 10 per cent on both defence and police forces to a total of nearly £14m. a year - a very heavy strain on a budget already stretched tight by sanctions.

On the African side, details of expenditure are very hazy and deliberately obscured by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). But there is increasing evidence now that the African liberation effort, more and more co-ordinated by the African Liberation Committee of the OAU, is finding direction, purpose, training - and funds.

Already the Organization itself is voting an annual sum - undisclosed, but running into several millions of pounds - for the support of the various liberation movements. This figure is probably doubled by the communist sources of arms and training, both of which seem to be provided without cost to the guerilla movements which avail themselves freely of the services offered to them.

Although the struggle has been going on for some years in the Portuguese territories, it is the sudden sharpening up of guerilla activities in Rhodesia which has brought the future into focus during 1968. Because of Mr. Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, the eyes and ears of the world press have been trained on Rhodesia, and in spite of every effort to minimize 'adverse' publicity, details of the battles fought along the Zambesi escarpment have managed to filter out.

The casualty figures speak for themselves. The Rhodesians claim to have killed 20 guerillas in 1966, 25 in 1967; and so far in 1968 more than 100 have been killed and nearly as many captured. Hardly a day passes without another African being tried and sentenced in Salisbury for subversion and terrorism.

With one lull for the rains in 1967 and another for the downpours in 1968, fighting has been going on sporadically for more than 18 months. It shows no sign of diminishing.

By early December (1968), news came from Rhodesia that the Salisbury authorities have word of up to 1,000 insurgents preparing to cross the Zambesi Valley from base camps in Zambia.

There is no knowing how correct the figures issued by the Rhodesians are; and indeed the rival African nationalist movements in Rhodesia - the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) - have from time to time claimed to have killed scores of white Rhodesians and South Africans. In some cases, they have "substantiated' their claims by quoting names and service numbers (of the soldiers killed).

At first, the little bands of men who tried to take on the trained professionals of the Rhodesian army and the para-military police forces were badly armed, ill-equipped and inexperienced.

Some were killed, some were captured and some escaped to Botswana. More still died of thirst and starvation in the bush, and others just gave themselves up.

But now things have changed. The rivals ZANU and ZAPU are reported to be considering coming together as the Zimbabwe African Liberation Army, financed by the African Liberation Committee of the OAU. The men who now cross the Zambesi by boat have had months - and sometimes years - of training in bush fighting, endurance and personal survival in China, Cuba, Russia, Algeria and even North Korea.

They are well-armed with weapons they know how to use, including the highly efficient Chinese Kalashinkov A.K. 47 automatic rifles. They carry 100-lb. packs of grenades, land mines, first aid kits and iron rations, and use short-wave radios to communicate with each other and their bases. Headquarters is in Dar es Salaam, where the former Rhodesian lawyer, Herber Chitepo - who was also Tanzania's first Solicitor-General - is responsible for much of the co-ordination work.

There are two main routes of entry across the Zambesi from the base camps (in Zambia)....

The first is to the West of Lake Kariba - in some cases using the smooth waters of the head of the lake itself. This is the route used by ZAPU, in conjunction with the African National Congress (ANC) men from South Africa. ZAPU and ANC have struck up a useful collaboration.

The second route, used mainly by ZANU forces, strikes across the river more than 250 miles to the east - below the Kariba Dam itself in the Chirundu area and as far east as Tete.

On the western front, the guerillas fan out west and south into the Wankie area - where Rhodesia's coal is mined - and towards the Kalahari and South West Africa. So intensive has been the fighting here that there are stories that the game has started to move from the Wankie National Park because it is continually disturbed by the firing and the air strikes.

On the Chirundu front, the guerillas form a potential threat to the rich farming areas of Karoi and Sinoia, while at the same time pointing a warning spearhead at Salisbury itself. Some of the farmers in the area have moved their families to Salisbury for safety....

The overall objective of the African nationalists is long term....Their achievements in the face of a well-armed, sophisticated army and police force should not be underestimated. As one senior ZANU official told me: 'For two years we have kept the Rhodesian army and police at full stretch. They've had to send for help to South Africa, and their losses are far higher that they admit (including helicopters shot down by the guerilla fighters).'

He agreed that guerilla losses had been heavy, and with Rhodesian claims that the security forces have captured large quantities of weapons and ammunition. 'There's plenty more where that came from,' he said. 'And it doesn't cost us anything.'” - (Africa Contemporary Record, op. cit., .pp. 53, 55 - 56).

The guerilla strategy employed by the freedom fighters enabled them, many times, to mingle with and melt into the local population in the rural areas without being detected by the Rhodesian security forces. They also won sympathy and support from the people in the villages, many of whom provided them with food and shelter and even joined the liberation movement.

And when some of the guerilla fighters were killed by the members of the Rhodesian army and the para-military police, the freedom fighters got even more support from the local population.

Also, the freedom fighters showed not only courage but competence on the battlefield when they fought the enemy.

Not too long ago, they had been dismissed as inept, inexperienced, no more than ragtag rebels incapable of engaging in battle even raw recruits of the white Rhodesian army; but not anymore by the end of the sixties.

They had become a credible fighting force and could no longer be dismissed as they had been before.

And the backbone of their support within was the local population, in addition to the help they were getting from their supporters and allies in other countries in Africa - such as Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria, Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Egypt, Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville, and others - and elsewhere especially in the Eastern bloc:

“The (ZANU) official claimed significant advances in winning support from the local population. The Rhodesians claim their security is among the best in the world, and they are adept and experienced in the use of informers in the kraals in the bush....

The Rhodesian Air Force has become expert in winkling out guerilla strongholds. Their obsolescent Hunters, Vampires and Canberras, plus the Alouette helicopters they have acquired from France, are ideally suited to this type of 'search and destroy' operation, although at least one Alouette has been shot down by the guerillas....

But 'even the loss of our men has helped us,' said the ZANU official. 'Relatives and friends soon get to know about someone being killed or captured. And their attitude changes from apathy to military overnight.'

As the bushcraft of the security forces has improved along with that of the invaders, so the white troops and police have reluctantly grown to respect the African guerillas for their fighting qualities. True, the pictures fed to the Press by the Rhodesian authorities show tough, Afrika-Korps-type whites interrogating at gunpoint a grovelling captive who, they say, has 'spilled the beans.'

But the image is not borne out by facts. When they have met the white troops on an equal footing the guerillas have stood their ground and fought bravely; and their spirit of defiance has shone through even in the courts where they have faced mandatory death sentences.” - (Ibid., pp. 57, and 56).

By the late sixties, the battle lines had not only been clearly drawn but also sometimes shifted because of the intensity of warfare and the increasing ability of the freedom fighters to win battles and hold the territory they had won or reclaimed from the whites.

In southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola provided the best example of this kind of success by the guerillas. And the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe were headed in the same direction; it would be only a matter of time before they also would claim major victories.

African journalists and others from elsewhere, were some of the people who witnessed the major advances made by the freedom fighters in Mozambique and in Angola by the late sixties.

By 1969, large parts of Angola and Mozambique were liberated zones, protected and administered by the liberation movements in both countries - the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), and FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique).

The liberation wars had not yet been won by 1968 or 1969, and it would be a few more years before those countries would be finally free. But by the end of the sixties, there was no question that the guerillas were not only competent fighters; they were also capable of defending the territories they had captured even when they were faced with massive attacks by the colonial forces which had been forced to depend on reinforcements from the mother country, Portugal, to continue fighting effectively.

Yet, even these reinforcements were not enough to neutralize let along dislodge the guerilla fighters from the liberated zones. Even in Zimbabwe, the guerillas were more than just a nuisance, in spite of the help the Rhodesian security forces got from apartheid South Africa, the country with the strongest army on the continent:

“The Zimbabwe freedom fighters have not yet matched the exploits of their brothers-in-arms in Mozambique and Angola, who claim effective control over large tracts of their respective countries in spite of the huge forces ranged against them. Recent accounts by journalists who have made hazardous and often uncomfortable trips into the territories confirm the claims.

One journalist, Basil Davidson, went with Frelimo (the Mozambique Liberation Front) across the Ruvuma River which is technically the border between Tanzania and Mozambique and marched in daylight without any hindrance from Portuguese troops, to an astonishing congress in the bush. He wrote:

'At a place where newly-built huts stood within the cover of a wood, about 150 political and military leaders were assembled. They had come from all parts of a colony that is one-and-a-half times as big as France.

They began fighting the Portuguese in 1964. Since then they have cleared the Portuguese out of most of the rural country of Cabo Delgado and Niassa, a region not much smaller than the British isles. In this liberated zone they have set up schools and clinics and introduced their own economic system.

The congress I attended was the first since the fighting started. It was called to discuss how they could push farther to the south and extend the war. Present were the whole central committee of the Liberation Front, including its president 48-year-old Eduardo Mondhlane, once a Doctor of Sociology at Syracuse University, New York State....'

Just as astonishing is an account of a young Zambian journalist Tommy Chibaye, who only recently returned from six weeks spent with the African nationalist forces in Angola.

He attended a similar congress, headed by the poet, Dr. Agostinho Neto (he was also a medical doctor by training), of the MPLA. He reports that the Africans claim considerable control in at least 10 of Angola's 15 provinces, with continuous fighting over the past seven years (since 1961):

'We passed many wrecked shops and villages razed to the ground by the Portuguese soldiers. Despite their having had their homes burned, the villagers had happily settled down in temporary camps under the supervision of the guerillas.

There they have established co-operative gardens to feed themselves and the guerilla forces, growing cassava, rice, tomatoes, onions and other vegetables.'

Not once in his six weeks, although he lived rough, did Tommy Chibaye go hungry. He found the MPLA providing schooling and instruction to Angolan Africans of all ages in a three-pronged drive. They set up a Post Command for military instruction, a Medical Assistance Service to look after health, particularly of war victims, and a Revolutionary Instruction Centre, where academic and political instruction is given.

From the centres, trained activists moved throughout the country raising more volunteers for the guerilla forces; in giving effect to a new policy for some time now all guerilla volunteers have been trained within Angola. Chibaye reports that the Portuguese have now taken to travelling everywhere in convoys of not less than 50 vehicles in the Moxico Province, covered by helicopters the whole time.

With the evidence at his fingertips, it is not surprising that Dr. Kaunda is apprehensive about the future. His country is already at the heart of the guerilla activity....

He has already complained that Zambian villages have been the subject of attack by Angolan Air Forces and commando raids; and he is worried by the constant threat the strong South African and Rhodesian Air Forces pose from the south.” - (Ibid., pp. 57 - 58).

Although Zambia was highly vulnerable to attack from two fronts, the Angolan-Zambian border and the Rhodesian-Zambian border, the longest attack came from Angola because the war in that Portuguese colony had been going on for a number of years, thus for a longer period than the conflict in Rhodesia.

The liberation war in Angola started in 1961. In January of that year there was a revolt on the cotton plantations in Malange. In February police stations and prisons in Luanda were attacked by the MPLA, and in March full-scale war broke out in the north of the country.

The MPLA was formed in December 1956 from a number of clandestine groups which first began to emerge in the capital, Luanda, in 1953. It underwent a series of initial crises between 1961 and 1965 when it began to consolidate itself behind the leadership of Dr. Agostinho Neto.

Although a number of Angolan nationalist organizations were based in neighbouring countries and had offices elsewhere, one group stood out among all those groups. And that was the MPLA. It was the best organized, and most nationalist-oriented, transcending racial and ethnic differences.

When the MPLA was first formed and launched guerilla attacks, it operated mainly from Congo-Brazzaville and Zambia. Shortly thereafter, it also had an office and training facilities in Tanzania which, in 1963, was chosen by the OAU as the headquarters of all the African liberation movements. The MPLA's launched guerilla operations in Cabinda, the Dembo region, and southeast Angola.

Another group was the UPA, which was later renamed the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola). The UPA was formed in 1954 principally with the support of the Bakongo and other ethnic groups in Northern Angola. It initially provided the main challenge to the Portuguese colonial rulers at the beginning of the insurrection in 1961 and was even recognized by the OAU. Under the leadership of Dr. Holden Roberto, the UPA and its affiliated groups formed the Government-in-Exile of Angola (GRAE) in 1963 with the blessings of the OAU but later lost its legitimacy.

In February 1968, OAU Secretary-General Diallo Telli announced that a recommendation by the OAU Liberation Committee based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had advised OAU member-states to re-examine and change their attitude towards GRAE. The report said investigations had shown that GRAE was more concerned with intrigue and personality conflicts than with the battle in Angola. GRAE, like its successor the FNLA under the same leadership of Roberto Holden, was also severely compromised by its ethnic base and bias.

Although other ethnic groups were involved in the formation of the FNLA as they were in GRAE's, the FNLA was still mainly Bakongo and was based in the Congo Democratic Republic (renamed Zaire). And its limited operations also had a strong ethnic base mainly in northern and northwestern Angola.

In 1964, another group emerged on the scene. It was UNITA (National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola) led by Dr. Jonas Savimbi and was based in eastern Angola. UNITA was formed as a breakaway from UPA. Until 1967 UNITA had its headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, but Savimbi was expelled by President Kaunda. After spending some time in Egypt and guinea, Savimbi and his cadres moved to eastern Angola.

But like the UPA and later the FNLA, UNITA was also limited in its membership and support because of ethnicity. It drew its strongest support from the Ovimbundu in eastern and central Angola. Savimbi himself was a member of this ethnic group.

There were a number of smaller groups, based mainly in the Congo Democratic Republic, pursuing a nationalist agenda in varying degrees. But none equaled the MPLA, the FNLA or UNITA - but especially the MPLA - in stature, influence and support.

They were the largest Angolan nationalist organizations and even fought during independence until the MPLA emerged victorious.

In fact, by the late sixties, the MPLA was the most effective nationalist organization in Angola and fought the most, enabling it to capture most of the territory before the decade came to an end.

Even the bastion of white rule on the continent, apartheid South Africa, was apprehensive about its future as it came under increasing threat from the African nationalist forces supported by the independent African countries and other allies. And the leaders of the apartheid regime made it clear that they took the threat seriously, as they clearly stated in the late sixties. As South African Defence Minister P.W. Botha, who later became one of the last two presidents of apartheid South Africa, warned in November 1968:

“We must realise once and for all that we will live in danger for many years to come, and we must realise that not only our soldiers, but all our people must be prepared to fight for all we hold dear.” - (Ibid., p. 287).

He was definitely addressing whites, not blacks and other non-whites. As victims of officially-sanctioned racial oppression and exploitation, apartheid was not something that was dear to their hearts.

It was also not supported let alone cherished by some whites who were opposed to apartheid and all other forms of racial discrimination, oppression and exploitation.

Yet, the clock was ticking, and time was running out for the architects and supporters of apartheid. Racial confrontation and violence was looming on the horizon, and prospects for guerilla warfare were real.

There was mounting concern - among all sectors of the white society - about threats to the country's security which had never been expressed before since apartheid was instituted in 1948.

The sixties, especially the late sixties, were a time of reckoning for many whites. Their future was uncertain. As one leading Afrikaner industrialist, Dr. Anton Rupert, told the Public Relations Institute in April 1968:

“Do we all realise that we nearly had a potential Cuba in our midst in Lesotho?

I have been studying the possible reply to this insidious revolutionary warfare for some years now. In the course of my travels I have spoken to many famous generals about this problem.

One of the most knowledgeable of them all warned me three years ago that within a decade at the utmost we would be faced with an Algerian-type situation in Southern Africa.

Yet, a revolutionary war is mainly a political action, for the final outcome depends on the support of the masses. it is, therefore, important to offer the masses hope for the future. It is essential that our own people of various races know that they are better off than the masses of Africa and Asia, and that this condition will improve even further.

It is essential that we work with our own and neighbouring peoples, who believe with us that terrorising, rioting and revolution is no way to improve the estate of man.” - (Ibid., p. 290).

The general who warned Dr. Rupert in 1965 that southern African would be faced with a situation similar to what happened in Algeria against the French in the fifties was right in his prediction. Within ten years, virtually the entire region of southern Africa was engulfed in guerilla warfare.

All the countries bordering apartheid South Africa were at war. The freedom fighters were busy fighting the colonialists forces. Even Botswana, which became independent in 1966, was involved because it supported the freedom fighters and its territory became a sanctuary for the guerillas, including those from South Africa who posed an increasing threat to the apartheid regime.

In fact, within that ten-year period from 1965 to 1975, two colonies, Mozambique and Angola, won independence after 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule in the oldest colonies on the entire continent together with Portuguese Guinea in West Africa which won independence as Guinea-Bissau in 1974. And within five years after Mozambique and Angola became independent, Rhodesia also became independent as Zimbabwe in 1980.

Only South Africa and South West Africa - both ruled by the same apartheid regime - remained under white rule.

And the dagger was now - as far back as the late sixties - pointed at the heart of the apartheid regime itself, the bastion of white supremacy on the African continent. In fact, the situation in South Africa had been deteriorating for quite some time.

The biggest change was caused by the regime itself as a repressive apparatus when it refused to negotiate with the African nationalist leaders and instead cracked down on them, forcing them to abandon non-violence and go underground and into exile to seek support for a violent confrontation with the racist rulers of that country.

But the transformation came slowly. It was not until the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 that African leaders and their supporters finally decided to embrace armed struggle as a complementary strategy - they did not entirely give up negotiations if the apartheid regime was willing to talk seriously - in their quest for freedom and racial equality.

Still, it was a turning point in the liberation struggle and in the history of South Africa when leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu decided to use violence to end apartheid.

Their decision formally marked the end of an era; an era of conciliatory African nationalist politics dominated by stalwarts like Chief Albert Luthuli who was the national chairman of the African National Congress (ANC), the largest liberation movement in South Africa. As Oliver Tambo stated in the official publication of the African National Congress in exile, Sechaba, 1968:

“For a long time the ANC has been conducting militant struggle relying on non-violent methods. This became particularly intense during the '50s nd gradually led to a stage at which the Movement switched over from nonviolence to the phase of armed struggle.

During 1967 the first armed clashes occured between, on the one hand, the combined forces of the Smith and Vorster regimes, and on the other, the united guerillas of the ANC (African National Congress) and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People's Union).

It can be said that for the ANC this is the beginning of the armed struggle for which we have been preparing since the early '60s.

It is a phase in which we can rightly claim to have scored victories by virtue of the superiority which our fighters demonstrated over the racist forces sending a wave of panic throughout the area dominated by the racist regimes and arousing the masses to a new revolutionary mood.

This is, however, only a small beginning in terms of the bitterness and magnitude of the revolution which is unfolding and which embraces the whole of Southern Africa. But it is an impressive and effective beginning providing what I consider a guarantee for the success of our armed struggle.” - (Oliver Tambo, Ibid.).

The African guerilla fighters first surfaced on South Africa's horizon in 1966. That was when they entered South West Africa which was virtually an integral part of South Africa administered by the apartheid regime.

It was also in the same year, in October 1966, that the United Nations passed a resolution to revoke South Africa's mandate over South West Africa (Namibia) but which the apartheid regime defied until 1988.

The guerillas who entered South West Africa were members of the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) led by Sam Nujoma.

They entered what the freedom fighters were already calling Namibia from Zambia and Botswana through the Caprivi Strip which is part of South West Africa and on the borders with those two countries.

Another guerilla threat which was so close to apartheid South Africa came in 1967 from the guerillas of the African National Congress (ANC) who forged links with the forces of ZAPU in Rhodesia. They were right across the border and ready to enter South Africa itself.

The citadel of white power on the continent was not as secure as it seemed to be. As Colin Legum, writing during that period, stated:

“By 1968 the potential threat of escalating guerilla attacks became elevated to a top priority of the South African regime, in stark contrast to its claims in 1948 that its policies would increase the country's state of security.

Late in 1967 the Government appointed an expert in counter-insurgency, Lieutenant-General C.A. Fraser, as General Officer Commanding Joint Combat Forces.

This threat was taken a stage further on April 24 (1968) by Commandant-General S.A. Melville, former head of the South African Defence Force, who said that South Africa already had sufficient justification and provocation for retaliation against countries which 'harboured' and encouraged terrorists whose only intention was to penetrate South Africa or South West Africa.

He supported the Minister of Defence's (P.W.Botha's) view that such countries should receive a 'sudden hard knock.'” - (Colin Legum, ibid., p. 291).

It was clear which countries they had in mind: Tanzania and Zambia. They were the only countries, together with Botswana, which were independent during that period in that region and close to South Africa.

They were also the only ones in that region which offered sanctuary to the people who fled from oppression and persecution under the apartheid regime and the colonial governments in Angola and Mozambique.

And unlike Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia also provided military training for the freedom fighters from South Africa, South West Africa, and Rhodesia. And in 1968, Tanzania also built a powerful radio transmitter for external service in Dar es Salaam, the capital, to help the freedom fighters propagate their message worldwide.

So, the two countries were clearly seen as enemies of South Africa, and the threat by South Africa's Defence Minister P.W. Botha that countries which harbour and support terrorists - freedom fighters in the lexicon of Africans - should receive a "sudden hard knock" was, without question, a pointed reference to Tanzania and Zambia.

I remember some of the first "sudden hard knocks" Tanzania received in the late sixties when I was a student at Songea Secondary School in Ruvuma Region in the southern part of the country. They came from the Portuguese forces across the border in Mozambique who were getting a lot of help from the South African Defence Force.

The South African white government also had its agents who infiltrated Tanzania and Zambia. Many of them came to Tanzania and went to Zambia ostensibly as political refugees or freedom fighters to undergo military training in guerilla camps in these two countries.

They were engaged in subversive activities and did everything they could to weaken and undermine the liberation movements. The infiltrators were also a great strain on the Tanzanian and Zambian intelligence services which had to track them down. And the liberation movements themselves did a very good job identifying those enemies.

All that was an integral part of a grand strategy by the apartheid regime to neutralize the nationalist forces and delay its day of reckoning when it would have to face the freedom fighters.

And although the Portuguese may have been capable of penetrating our air space during those years, the aerial bombing of southern Tanzania including the use of napalm bombs was facilitated by the assistance the colonial forces got from South Africa, the United States and other western allies of Portugal. In fact, some of the weapons including bombs which were used by the Portuguese in Mozambique came from the United States as they did in the case of Angola.

The United States collaborated with apartheid South Africa, the white minority government in Rhodesia, and with the Portuguese authorities in Angola and Mozambique to contain and neutralize what they perceived to be a threat to white and western interests in Africa.

And they had a number of people, including some leaders in tha liberation movements, on the CIA payroll. For example, in the case of Angola, the CIA and American leaders felt that the leader of the FNLA, Dr. Holden Roberto was someone they could easily buy and manipulate at will, and went on to put him on the CIA payroll around 1961 or 1962. Yet, at the same time, they continued to support the colonial regime while pretending to be sympathetic towards the freedom fighters, especially Holden Roberto his colleagues in the FNLA.

In the following years after the early sixties when Dr. Holden Roberto was put on the CIA payroll, the United States provided weapons and ammunition, and counter-insurgency training the Portuguese colonial rulers needed to contain and if possible neutralize the nationalist forces of the MPLA and the FNLA which were fighting for independence.

The devastation caused by American-supplied weapons used by the Portuguese against Africans including innocent civilians - women and children being among the biggest victims - was extensive. As John Marcum, an American scholar who walked 800 miles through Angola and visited FNLA training camps in the early sixties, wrote:

“By January 1962 outside observers could watch Portuguese planes bomb and strafe African villages, visit the charred remains of towns like Mbanza M’Pangu and M’Pangala, and copy the data from 750-point napalm bomb casings from which the Portuguese had not removed the labels marked ‘Property U.S. Air Force.’” - (John Marcum, quoted by William Blum, “Angola 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game,” in W. Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).

So it was with Mozambique, another Portuguese colony. American assistance to the colonial forces in Mozambique was just as critical in their war against the freedom fighters, as was the assistance they got from South Africa.

The apartheid regime in South Africa was also using the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique and the British colony of Rhodesia as buffer zones. But that was not enough to insulate white South Africa from the nationalist forces; a concession also made by the government itself:

“On April 25 (1968), the Deputy Minister of Police, Mr. S.L. Muller, informed parliament on information about fresh groups of 'terrorists' gathering in Zambia.

The Prime Minister said in the same debate that while conditions were quiet inside the Republic he did not want to give an assurance that everything would always be like that. The ANC, he added, was still active (although it had been outlawed in 1960); but the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) was finding things more difficult.

The figures he gave of ANC casualties in Rhodesia were: in 1967, 29 killed, 17 wounded and 34 fled to Botswana; in 1968, of 30 ANC guerillas who entered Rhodesia, 'a number' was killed. He added: 'The combatting of terrorism had advanced as well as could be expected under the circumstances.'

On May 17, Mr. Vorster, speaking at the National Party's 'twenty years of Nationalist rule festival,' said that slowly but surely an army would be built up in certain Central African States for an eventual 'now or never' attack on South Africa.” - (Colin Legum, Africa Contemporary Record, op. cit., p. 291).

He was not very far from the truth, as the independent African countries and other allies especially those in the Eastern bloc as well as the People's Republic of China, Cuba and North Korea kept on supporting the freedom fighters, providing them with material and military assistance in their struggle against the apartheid regime.

Two days before Prime Minister Vorster issued that warning, a summit meeting of 14 Central and East African leaders was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on 15 May 1968 and the leaders promised full support to the guerilla fighters in all the countries in southern Africa still under white minority rule.

A number of African countries, and not just those in East and Central Africa, were ready to mobilize forces to help the freedom fighters in their war against apartheid South Africa.

The independent countries close to or bordering white-ruled southern Africa as a whole - not just South Africa - were the frontline states in the struggle against the white minority regimes in that region; with the exception of Malawi under Dr. Kamuzu Banda who had cordial relations with the apartheid regime and the Portuguese colonial rulers in Mozambique and Angola.

And they were ready to support the freedom fighters in many different ways. For example, when President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was asked in interview on an American television programme ABC's "Issues and Answers" in July 1977 if he would commit troops to help the freedom fighters if they went to war against apartheid South Africa, he answered: "Yes, I will commit troops. We would rather hang together than hang separately."

The apartheid regime introduced several measures in the late sixties to counter the "terrorist" threat, as the freedom fighters continued to mobilize forces in their struggle against white minority rule. On 2 June 1968, the South African minister of justice, P.C. Pelser, introduced the Terrorism Bill and announced that there was every reason to believe that South Africa had not "seen the last of the terrorists."

The bill sought extensive powers to detain indefinitely anybody suspected of being engaged in activities, or of withholding information about terrorist threats or activities. it also demanded the death penalty for the crime of terrorism. As stated in parliament in Cape Town when elaborating on the "terrorist" threat:

“The Bill should be judged against the whole background of internal onslaughts on the legal order since 1960. The terrorists who are now returning are largely the harvest of the subversive activities of the ANC, PAC, SWAPO and the Communists. It is largely their trained, so-called freedom fighters who are now returning.” (Pelser, Africa Contemporary Record, p. 292).

But nothing the apartheid regime did was able to deter the freedom fighters from pursuing their goal. On 11 June 1968, the Portuguese colonial authorities in Mozambique announced that they had foiled an attempt by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) to establish a new route to South Africa through that country. They claimed that four guerillas were killed in a fight with the Portuguese forces near Vila Pery only 50 miles from the border with Rhodesia.

And in July the same year, SWAPO claimed to have inflicted heavy damage on strategic places maintained by the apartheid regime in South West Africa. They included the airfield at Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi Strip along the Botswana-South West African (Namibian) border. The guerilla fighters claimed the South Africans lost some lives in the fiery exchange. At first, the South African authorities denied reports of any guerilla activities in the Caprivi Strip but later confirmed the existence of considerable activity by the SWAPO freedom fighters in that area.

It was obvious that the threat to the apartheid regime was real; a point underscored by the Commandant-General of the South African Defence Force, General Hiemstra, on 8 August 1968 when he was answering a question as to whether or not guerilla fighting in neighbouring Rhodesia could one day develop into a full-scale war as in Vietnam. He said:

“Most certainly yes. This is the technique the communists used in Vietnam. This technique involves the gradual building up of terrorism until it eventually becomes conventional warfare.” - ( Hiemstra, Africa Contemporary Record, Ibid.).

Towards the end of the year in October 1968, South Africa's Commissioner of Police, Major-General J.P. Gouws, also admitted that there was increasing guerilla activity in South West Africa in the Caprivi Strip by the SWAPO freedom fighters whom he also called "terrorists," a term in the lexicon of the white minority rulers used to tarnish the image of the freedom fighters.

He said after the guerillas failed to penetrate by using force, they were now concentrating on slipping into South West Africa to recruit people from the local population for the insurgency. He knew the freedom fighters had adopted the right strategy since local support was critical to the success of any guerilla warfare. And that worried the apartheid regime.

He went on to say that "terrorists" were moving from village to village in an attempt to recruit chiefs, who would in turn mobilize local support for the liberation struggle, and conceded that they had had some success in this effort. He said five chiefs had recently been arrested in the Caprivi Strip for supporting the guerillas, and other people were also arrested in connection with the campaign to help SWAPO and recruit fighters. Although he said some arrests had been made, he still admitted that it was impossible to fully secure a border stretching 5,000 miles to protect South Africa:

“Some terrorists may have avoided security forces and be working much further inland. We have more than 0,000 illegal immigrants in this country, and some of them could well be Communist-trained guerillas.” - (J.P. Gouws, ibid., p. 293).

The Minister of the Interior, Mr. L. Muller, denied SWAPO reports that 63 Africans were "publicly slaughtered" after attacks in the Caprivi Strip on 13 October 1968. However, South African intelligence officers admitted that there were signs of fresh attacks from "across the Rhodesian frontier soon." They claimed that the guerilla offensive will be launched by 2,000 Africans who had left South Africa "under the pretence of studying abroad."

There was every indication that the end of the sixties, especially 1968 and 1969, was a time of intensified of guerilla activity in southern Africa, with the apartheid regime being one of the primary targets in the region, unlike before when the South African authorities felt more secure.

The warning of an impending attack by the African nationalist forces in the form of a guerilla insurgency was also issued by the Minister of Police and Interior, Mr. Muller, on October 13th who said, far from having receded, the danger of guerilla attacks had become much more serious. As he put it: "In actual fact the forces against South Africa are now stronger than ever before" (Africa Contemporary Record, p. 293).

He also admitted that in some of the areas where guerillas had been successful in getting support, not all Africans were well-disposed towards whites. That is something that should not have been difficult for him to understand. But, instead, he attributed that to illiteracy and poverty; implying that had those Africans not been poor, and had they been educated, they would not have been hostile towards or suspicious of whites - as if they did not suffer from racial oppression under apartheid.

The deteriorating situation in southern Africa also came into sharp focus when the apartheid regime sent its forces into Rhodesia to help neutralize guerillas whom white rulers and their supporters felt threatened the entire region and the well-being of the white minorities. In November 1968, the United Nations discussed a resolution condemning the presence of South Africa's military forces in Rhodesia.

The UN also said South Africa's military involvement in Rhodesia aggravated the situation and constituted a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the independent African states. The South African delegate to the UN, Carl von Hirschberg, was defiant and had this to say in response to that:

“The South African police are in Rhodesia exclusively for the purpose of dealing with terrorists en route to South Africa for the purpose of committing acts of terrorism and subversion, and they will remain there for as long as this threat to the security of South Africa persists, for it is the duty of the South African government, no less than any other government, to resist with all means at their disposal, any and every attempt to endanger the safety and security of South Africa and her peoples.

Thus, those States which object to the presence of South African Police in Rhodesia and who, at the same time, train, equip or harbour these terrorists, need only to stop these unjustified and illegitimate practices and the need to have South African Police in Rhodesia will fall away.” - (Hirschberg, ibid., pp. 293 - 294).

By the end of the sixties, the apartheid regime had more than enough warning about the perils it faced once sucked into guerilla warfare, fighting virtually an invisible enemy hardly distinguishable from the local population. It was an outcome the white minority government and its supporters wanted to avoid, but chose the wrong approach, confrontation, when they refused to make meaningful concessions to the black African majority and other non-whites.

Yet, in spite of such defiance, the white rulers of South Africa conceded that they were facing a new enemy in terms of strategy and tactics they had never fought before. At the end of August 1968, in the same month Defence Minister Pieter W. Botha made a threat against Tanzania and Zambia that the two countries should received a "sudden hard knock" for harbouring - and training - "terrorists," the South African General Officer Commanding Joint Combat Forces, General C.A. Fraser, gave a military appraisal of the nature of the guerilla threat to South Africa at a symposium held in Potchefstrom and, in an ominous warning, had this to say:

“For 50 years, the world has seen widespread and virtually continuous political revolution. Probably more governments have come into being, passed through drastic change, or ceased to exist, than in any comparable period of history.

These changes in regime have been brought about, in the main, by a new kind of warfare, now widely termed revolutionary warfare. It has cystalised rapidly since the end of the Second World War. It differs fundamentally from the wars of the past in that victory does not come from the clash of two armies on a field of battle. Revolutionary wars are conducted as a carefully co-ordinated system of actions, political, economic, administrative, psychological, police and military.

The insurgent will use any means to overthrow the established regime, including ruthless force. His primary task is to gain support of the population. Without the consent and active aid of the people, the guerilla would be merely a bandit and could not long survive.

From the point of view of the insurgents, perhaps the basic ingredients of successful revolution are a popular cause, trained, efficient and dedicated leadership, support of the population, outside support and a firm base or sanctuary. It has been said that a revolutionary war is 20 per cent military action and 80 per cent political. The failure to recognise this is bound to lead ultimately to failure in countering and defeating the insurgency.

The basic tenet of the exercise of political power is that there is always an active minority for the cause, an uncommitted majority and an active minority against the cause. For ultimate victory it is necessary to gain support of the neutral majority. The objective for both sides in a revolutionary war is thus the population itself.

The operations designed to win the population, either by the insurgents or by the government, are essentially of a political nature. It is important to realise that adequate support for a guerilla movement does not necessarily mean the enthusiastic, voluntary backing of a large majority of the population. The active participation of a small number of people, or the general apathy of the majority, often provide all the popular support necessary to make a successful revolution.

The support of the population for a government is gained through the favourable minority. Every operation, whether in the military field or in the political, social economic or psychological fields, must be geared to this end.

Staying power is an attribute that is vital for eventual government success. Operations in Malaya took 12 years, and in Algeria eight years to be concluded. Mao-Tse-tung took 35 years to get China. The communists think they have a monopoly on patience.

We made a study of all this. We know what to do. May I assure that we will win.” - (Fraser, ibid., p. 294).

History proved him wrong, although it was not until 26 years later - a time span almost equal to the number of years Nelson Mandela spent in prison - that the walls of that abominable institution, the edifice of apartheid, finally came tumbling down when the first multiracial democratic elections in the nation's history were held in 1994 and Mandela was elected president.

But even as far back as 1968 and 1969, the end f the sixties, it was clear to some people that mounting opposition to apartheid would finally prevail over racial oppression, ushering in a dawn of a new era when everybody would be free.

And by the end of the sixties, the apartheid regime showed every sign of a regime under siege, or one that felt it was in imminent danger of attack, as it increased expenditure on defence dramatically. The government was preoccupied with security more than anything else during that period.

Procurement of weapons for armed forces went up; expenditure on police forces and on the intelligence services also went up as never before. For example, expenditure on secret services was increased by R640,000 to R2,342,000 for 1968/69. And fortunately for the regime, the rand was still a very strong currency during those critical years.

South Africa also improved its capability to manufacture its own weapons to complement purchases from other countries such as Britain, France, the United States and Germany which were some of the biggest sources of arms for the apartheid regime. And in October 1968, the apartheid regime established its first missile base on the east coast of Natal Province. The first guided missile was launched from the site in December the same year.

The country was already building its own submarines, aircraft, a number of war ships, rifles, mortars, ammunition, grenades, bombs including napalm bombs, mines and other weapons. Its armaments industry was under the management of the Armaments Development and Production Corporation ARMSCOR) whose first chairman was Professor H.J. Samuels.

But all those weapons were useless against guerilla warfare and the strategy employed by the liberation movements to make the country ungovernable until apartheid was abolished.

Compounding the problem was the deteriorating situation in Rhodesia, a more vulnerable outpost of white tyranny over blacks where the freedom fighters from South Africa and Rhodesia itself coordinated their activities.

On 30 July - 31 July 1967, the Luthuli Combat Detachment - named in honour of Chief Albert Luthuli who was the president of the South African ANC - comprising ZAPU and ANC guerillas, crossed the Zambesi River into Rhodesia. That was the beginning of guerilla warfare in Rhodesia, South Africa's neighbour. And on 18 August 1967, ANC and ZAPU formally announced that they had formed a military alliance.

They clashed with Rhodesian and South African forces in Wankie and Sipolilo in Rhodesia and demonstrated their fighting ability in a way their enemies never expected. The conflict lasted until late 1968, sending a strong warning to the white minority government in Rhodesia and the apartheid regime in South Africa that guerilla warfare would soon engulf the region.

The apartheid regime was fully aware of the danger although it claimed it wuld be able to contain it. But to show that it took the danger seriously, it increased its military preparedness and passed a law to achieve that goal. On 4 August 1967, the Defence Amendment Act came into force. Under that law, every young white male would be liable for military service. The amendments were also intended to make all medically fit citizens, except for those who join the permanent force, the South African police, the railways or prison services, liable for military training. And expenditure on citizen forces and commando training was increase by almost R1m in 1968 to an estimated figure of about R30m.

In fact, many whites - ordinary citizens - felt that they were under siege. They already had a fortress mentality which was further fortified by their fear of what they perceived to be an impending guerilla attack by black freedom fighters trained in Tanzania and Zambia and other countries.

On 8 September 1967, it was officially disclosed by the apartheid regime that South African police were in Rhodesia actively helping Rhodesian armed forces in their fight against nationalist guerillas. The South African government claimed it had been forced to intervene in Rhodesia because of an attempt by several hundred guerillas to invade South and South West Africa from Zambia at the urging of the OAU Liberation Committee.

It was also during the same time that Prime Minister B.J. Vorster announced the arrest of what he said was a fully trained KGB agent, Yuri N. Loginov, in Johannesburg, while on a special mission to South Africa. His arrest aroused widespread interest among Western intelligence services.

But it was also deliberately timed to coincide with the announcement that African guerillas were getting ready to invade South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia) from Zambia. And since one of their biggest supporters was the Soviet Union, providing them with arms, the implication of Loginov's presence in South Africa around the same was obvious: he was sent there not only to spy on the apartheid regime but to coordinate guerilla activity or collect information that would help the freedom fighters and their supporters in the Soviet Union. That may have been the interpretation of the apartheid regime. And if it was, it did not resonate well in African nationalist circles.

Tensions between South Africa and the independent African countries were heightened just a few months later on 5 April 1968, when Defence Minister P. W. Botha issued his first warning to them when he told the House of Assembly (Parliament) that countries aiding and inciting terrorism and guerilla warfare against South Africa could provoke retaliation against them. It was interpreted as a warning to Zambia and Tanzania that guerilla bases in those two countries could be attacked by South Africa. He issued the same warning again in August the same year.

But the two countries - and the rest of independent Africa except for a few countries - continued to support the freedom fighters as did the other allies outside Africa, in spite of all the threats by the apartheid regime that it would launch retaliatory strikes and engage in hot pursuit of the guerillas all the way to their country or countries of "origin" where they were trained.

What this showed, however, was that in spite of the threats by the apartheid regime and its ability to defend South Africa, the situation was not getting any better - it was getting worse. And neither side was willing to compromise. Both sides remained steadfast to their principles they cherished so much. Their differences were irreconcilable and inexorably led to conflict involving guerilla warfare and other forms of confrontation including sustained strikes and total non-cooperation with the authorities to force the racist regime to capitulate and help pave the way towards multiracial democracy.

But the apartheid regime was still in a defiant mood even when the guerilla threat got worse and worse towards the end of the sixties. And some of the South African freedom fighters formed a new nationalist party in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, on 9 September 1968 to direct the freedom struggle inside South Africa. The party was named the National Liberation Front of South Africa (NALFSA) and applied for recognition by the OAU Liberation Committee.

As the apartheid regime continued to defy international opinion and the wishes of the non-white majority in its own country, Prime Minister Vorster announced in April 1969 that members of the South African Police Force would remain in Rhodesia as long as it was necessary to protect South Africa from "terrorist" attacks. And in the following month, the African National Congress (ANC) at its conference in Morogoro, Tanzania, called for a full-scale offensive against apartheid using a multi-pronged approach.

It also said both armed struggle and mass political struggle must be used to defeat the enemy. But the ANC also emphasized that the armed struggle and the involvement of the masses in the liberation struggle depended on building ANC underground structures within South Africa to mobilize the people, and ultimately weaken and end apartheid. It was a complementary strategy that was bound to succeed.

The Morogoro conference focused on bringing about a qualitative change in the organisational content of the liberation movement in keeping with the new situation to launch a revolutionary people's war. And it was one of the most successful conferences in the history of the ANC abroad.

As the year 1969 came to an end, marking the end of the decade, guerilla activity had intensified in southern Africa and the apartheid regime was deeply involved in the neighbouring countries of Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique where it had sent its armed forces and intelligence agents to help thwart guerilla advances.

On 21 November 1969, the UN General Assembly condemned South Africa for its apartheid policies and for its collaboration with Portugal and Rhodesia; and also for intervening in Angola and Mozambique to help the colonial authorities suppress Africans in their quest for freedom. But all that fell on deaf ears, as the regime defiantly continued to enforce apartheid and help the governments of Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique fight the guerillas.

In Rhodesia, the end of the sixties were some of the most critical years in the country's history. It was the first time that the Rhodesian army and security forces came face to face with the enemy on the battlefield. It was the first time that South Africans entered Rhodesia to launch preemptive strikes against the guerillas in an attempt to stop them from moving south across the border and into South Africa. It was also the first time that the white settlers in Rhodesia became aware of the danger they faced from guerilla war. It was also during that period that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) launched a concerted effort to support the freedom fighters in their military campaign against the white minority regime in Salisbury.

The Rhodesian government was fully aware of the danger it faced. It was fighting a new war: guerilla war. And it was fighting a new enemy, the guerilla soldier, who was as elusive as he was resilient, with an indispensable operational base in the local population of which he was an integral part.

But without external support in the form of military training and provision of weapons and other necessities, he would not have been as effective as he was. Underscoring the importance of such support, the rebel prime minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, was prompted to describe President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, whose country was the headquarters of all the African liberation movements, as "the evil genius on the Rhodesian scene" who was also behind all the guerilla wars in southern Africa.

As the decade came to an end, Rhodesia witnessed its first major conflict in March 1968 when guerillas who entered the British colony from Zambia clashed with the security forces. Clashes on this scale were unheard of before the white minority unilaterally declared independence from Britain in November 1965.

Before the March 1968 military engagement, there had been other clashes on a smaller scale. One of those clashes took place in April 1966 in which seven seven guerillas who were members of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) crossed the Zambesi River from Zambia and entered Rhodesia. They were shot in running battles with the security forces in the Sinoia area 85 miles north of the capital Salisbury.

by 1967, the guerilla fighters were better organized, mainly because of the cooperation between the forces of ZAPU and the ANC. In the first military engagement with the security forces in August that year in Matebeleland in southwestern Rhodesia, 31 guerillas were killed and the security forces lost seven members. So serious was this incursion that the Rhodeisn government immediately sought help from South Africa. The apartheid regime responded favourably ans sent in troops, so-called police, early in September.

But it was the fighting in March 1968 which marked a turning point in the history of armed conflict between the guerillas and the security forces in Rhodesia:

“The fighting in March continued intermittently for over a month; it was reported by Security Force headquarters in Salisbury on 25 April (1968) that the number of guerillas killed had reached 55. Two members of the Security Forces were also reported killed, and quantities of arms, ammunitions and equipment captured.

A view of the seriousness of the unrest can be formed from the fact that additional Territorial Force personnel had to be called up at the end of March for 'base duties'; while the South African Minister of Defence, Mr. P.W. Botha, warned on 5 April that countries aiding and inciting terrorism and guerilla warfare against South Africa could eventually provoke South Africa into 'hitting back hard.'” - (Africa Contemporary Record, pp. 373 - 374).

Another clash occurred in July 1968 when Rhodesia's of Law and Order Minister, Lardner Burke, announced that "terrorist" groups had crossed into Rhodesia from Zambia. It was also during the same time that it was announced that the first South African "policeman" had been killed when a South African-Rhodesian patrol was ambushed by the freedom fighters near the Zambesi River. Three other South Africans and two Rhodesians were wounded in the same incident. And 10 guerilla fighters were reported killed.

Fighting continued for another week during which, according to Radio Salisbury, at least two members of the Security Forces and 18 more guerillas were killed. The fighting was intensive enough to force the Rhodesians to resort to ther means to contain the guerillas. Jet fighters of the Rhodesian Air Force were brought in to support the ground forces.

A joint communique issued by ZAPU and the ANC in Lusaka, Zambia, on 25 July 1968 claimed that 33 members of the Rhodesian Security Forces were killed in the conflict in the Zambesi Valley. Confirmation of the improved capacity of the guerilla fighters came from the annual report of the Rhodesian Commissioner of Police published in July in which he said "It would be wrong to minimise the dangers which Rhodesia faces from terrorist infiltrators; these are now employing more sophisticated tactics and are well armed."

Rhodesia had been in a state of emergency for quite some time because of increasing guerilla activity and the government was compelled to extend it to cope with the crisis and assure the white minority that they would be protected by the security forces.

But there was also apprehension in official circles in Salisbury that the assistance the guerilla fighters were getting from other countries such as Tanzania and Zambia was a critical factor in the conflict and could even tip scales in their favour, even if not necessarily on long-term basis. But it was a problem the white minority government had to contend with; a concession that was made by the minister of law and order in the rebel colony:

“The Rhodesia rebel Minister of Law and Order, Mr. Lardner Burke, extending the state of emergency at the beginning of 1968, said that the number of 'terrorists' waiting in Zambia and Tanzania to cross the Rhodesian border continued to mount.

The South African Deputy-Minister of Police, Mr. S.L. Muller, said Tanzania posed 'the greatest potential threat to the Republic.' He claimed there were '40 camps in Tanzania for the training of terrorists and all the offices of subversive organisations.' In Zambia, he said, there were '19 training and transit camps.'

A new external service of Radio Tanzania was inaugurated in 1968 to assit in 'propagating the ideological principles of the liberation movements in Tanzana.'” - (Ibid., p. 220).

The guerilla camps in Tanzania and Zambia were not only for the freedom fighters from South Africa but also for those from Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola, and South West Africa. And among all the white minority regimes in southern Africa, the Portuguese were the most vulnerable and came under sustained attack. As President Nyerere said at the OAU summit in Cairo on 20 July 1964, African countries were strong enough to expel Portugal from her colonies. He was right, of course. The problem was the powers behind her. As he stated at the conference:

“I am convinced that the finer the words the greater the harm they do to the prestige of Africa if they are not followed by action …Africa is strong enough to drive Portugal from our Continent. Let us resolve at this conference to take the necessary action.” - (Nyerere, quoted by Ali A. Mazrui in his lecture "Nkrumahism and The Triple Heritage: Out of the Shadows" at the University of Ghana-Legon in 2002).

By 1969, the Portuguese had 130,000 troops tied down mostly in Angola and Mozambique, with a smaller number in Guinea-Bissau. And they were fighting a losing battle. Portugal was the poorest and weakest country in Western Europe. It could not have been able to maintain her colonies without Western support which was critical in fighting the guerillas. As Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of FRELIMO, said about the armed struggle in Mozambique - which started on 25 September 1964 - in an interview with the Tanzanian daily newspaper, The Nationalist, on 30 July 1968:

“The meaning of the protracted struggle is more clear now and the combatants have redoubled their determination to fight to the bitter end until they destroy the enemy.

The situation of the war now inside Mozambique is more favourable to us as the Portuguese are in a stalemate and the only active force of the enemy is the Air Force.

We have now moved from the phase of ambushes and we are concentrating on attacking the enemy in his own territory, that is in garrisons, bases, posts and isolating the towns where he is hiding.

The enemy is completely isolated and the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses is very high. We have actually more people ready in technical warfare training than we can provide the arms for fighting. All ages are involved and now we have formed the women's fighting detachment.

The prospects of crossing the Zambezi River and carrying the struggle farther south are very bright and no matter what the Portuguese do the war rages on and it is a fierce one.

We know that they are increasing their forces of white soldiers and they have intensified in Mozambique the forced conscription of Africans. They get a lot of technical aid from NATO countries, and the apartheid regime of South Africa is deeply involved - it has many of its military officers fighting in Mozambique.

Countries like West Germany, it is well-known to us, are training white Portuguese soldiers in Portugal in counter-insurgence techniques. In short, we are fighting Portugal and all her NATO allies.”

Six months later, they killed him.

But the assassination of Dr, Mondlane on 2 February 1969 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, did not stop the people of Mozambique from fighting for their independence. In fact, they expected such setbacks. They are part of the struggle.

And so the struggle continued even after Mondlane was killed. It was a big tragedy as the sixties came to an end, but it was also a moment of reflection on the liberation struggle and the problems that lay ahead, as the war got worse and worse as years went by. For example, on 25 September 1968, which was the fourth anniversary of the armed conflict, FRELIMO said that during the past year (1967), its forces had killed more than 1,000 Portuguese soldiers, shot down 20 aircraft, and destroyed more than a hundred military vehicles; a claim that was later confirmed by some journalists and other observers. And by September 1968, more than 100 Portuguese soldiers were killed and hundreds injured.

The sixties ended with the death toll mounting in all the liberation wars throughout southern Africa, as the freedom fighters intensified the struggle and scored bigger victories they never had won before. It was the dawn of a new era.

Thus, while the early and mid-sixties were years of celebration, as one African country after another won independence from colonial rule, the late sixties witnessed another phenomenon in the liberation struggle. And it had an equally profound impact on the destiny of the continent.

Africa entered a new phase. It was the phase of the armed struggle. And it proved to be the most difficult phase in the history of African liberation until the rest of the continent was finally free many years later.

The end of the sixties, or the year 1969 in particular, was also significant in another important respect. The bleeding heart of Africa, the Congo, had finally stopped bleeding; at least not as profusely as it did in the first years of the decade and even as late as 1965 and 1966, although the pro-Lumumbist nationalist forces never gave up entirely until Mobutu was finally ousted from power about 30 years later in May 1997.

But as the decade came to an end, so did the life of one man who wreaked so much havoc cross the Congo during the turbulent sixties. The man was Moise Tshombe.

In June 1967, his plane flying from Spain en route to the Congo where he intended to cause more mischief was hijacked and forced to land in Algiers, Algeria. After it landed, Tshombe was arrested and kept under house arrest until July 1969 when he died, reportedly of heart failure. He was 49, a few months from his 50th birthday on November 10th.

His death, in a way, also marked the end of an era.

Not long after Tshombe died, another personality emerged on the African political scene. That was Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. On 1 September 1969, he overthrew 79-year-old King Idris of Libya in a bloodless military coup. He was 28 and became one of the youngest heads f state in the world. He instituted a controversial regime which became one of the most highly visible in Africa and the rest of the Third World for decades.

So much for Africa, as the decade came to an end.

In the United States, which we have also focused on in this study, the end of the sixties was marked by a series of events including demonstrations against American involvement in the Vietnam war. It was also in the same year, on 8 June 1969, that President Richard Nixon announced that American troops would begin to withdraw from Vietnam.

The end of the decade also coincided with the end of the civil rights movement. One of the highlights was a decision by the US Supreme Court which ruled on 29 October 1969 that school districts throughout the country which were still segregated must end racial segregation at once.

But there was another event which marked the end of the sixties in the United States. It had to do with the counterculture movement. And that was Woodstock.

Held at Max Yasgur's 600 acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, from 15 August -18 August 1969, it is perhaps the most famous rock festival ever held anywhere and was probably the most prominent, and most forceful, expression of the counterculture movement and the hippie way of life in the sixties. It was youthful and hedonistic. And it was rebellious in terms of values, a departure from the norm exemplified by traditional society.

It was a celebration of an alternative life style and values of the flower children and had great symbolic significance - probably more than anything else - for the young people of that generation. And it was attended by about half-a-million people. As Max Yasgur, the owner of the property where the concert was held, said on 15 August 1969 when he addressed the flower children at Woodstock on his alfalfa farm:

“This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place and I think you people have proven something to the world: that a half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music and God Bless You for it!”

And as Mike Bederka reflected on what happened back then, in an era now gone but not forgotten, when he wrote "A (Head) Trip Back to Woodstock":

“It was a time to love, a time to hate. Vietnam. Protest. The Race Riots. Thirty years ago, our nation was in upheaval. But in the summer of '69, a dove perched itself at the tip of a guitar, and the perspective changed. A little festival called The Woodstock Music and Art Fair swept the nation. And all the world's problems faded - for 72 precious hours anyway.

Dubbed 'three days of peace and music,' its legacy spawned two sequels and launched the summer festival scene. But many question Woodstock's exact significance. Some people crowned it the pinnacle of the hippie movement, while others saw it as the fitting end to the era of free love.

At the time, most people weren't looking for any deep-seeded meaning. They just came to hear some rock'n' roll. More than 500,000 fans rushed upstate to hear the sounds of the time, in effect, shutting down the New York State Thruway. At 5:07 p.m. on Friday, August 15, 1969, Woodstock made its fabled entry into the history books. Richie Havens opened the musical portion with 'High Flyin' Bird,' and 26 bands later, on a mud-soaked Monday morning, Jimi Hendrix closed out with a stunning rendition of 'Hey Joe.' But what happened during those few days would be talked about for generations to come.

People from all walks of life united as hundreds of thousands crashed Max Yasgur's farm without a ticket. Drugs, alcohol and rain were in abundance; working sanitation facilities weren't. There were three deaths, but three children were brought into this world. Although food was a rare commodity, the folks in attendance probably didn't mind too much. They were there for something else - the music. Joe Cocker, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - the list goes on.

'The name Woodstock brings to mind a certain spirit - a certain ideology,' says Michael Lang, promoter for the original spectacle and its two sequels. 'The principle behind it is what everyone cherishes. You get to interact with people in a way that you never get to do in your everyday life. And that happens after the first day - after you live amongst the society. I think after it, you're less alone in the world. Woodstock always stays with you.'” - (Mike Bederka in NY Rock, July 1999).

Woodstock was the pinnacle of the counterculture movement - a nation within a nation - and the highest expression of its values. And it signalled the end of an era.

It was, indeed, the end of the sixties, a decade to remember....

Africa and America

in The Sixties

THE SIXTIES changed the destiny of the African continent and its people in many fundamental respects.

It was a period marked by the end of colonial rule as one country after another won independence. Coincidentally, it was during the same period that the civil rights movement in the United States gained momentum and reached its peak.

The victory of Africans in their struggle for independence in most countries on the African continent also inspired black Americans in their struggle for racial equality. They not only drew inspiration from this victory but felt proud because of the common African heritage they shared with their brethren on the continent.

And at no other time in American history did such pride among blacks manifest itself as it did in the sixties. Even without the victories in Africa, black Americans - galvanized by the civil rights movement - found a renewed sense of purpose in their lives as a distinct group proud of its identity and forcefully proclaimed their pride as black people. As Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information of the militant Black Panther Party, said: "They have seized on their blackness and rallied around it."

Stokely Carmichael, probably the most prominent advocate of Black Power, had this to say: "It is time to stop being ashamed of being black - time to stop trying to be white. When you see your daughter playing in the fields, with her nappy hair, her wide nose and her thick lips, tell her she is beautiful. Tell your daughter she is beautiful."

The preceding quotations come from Time/Life Books, This Fabulous Century: 1960 - 1970 (p. 32).

And as James Brown proudly said in one of his songs with the same title: "I'm black and I'm proud."

It was a pride they shared with Africans in Africa. And it was a pride that went beyond slavery all the way back to Africa's ancient kingdoms and to the newly independent nations. It was also a pride that embraced African culture as a way of life and bond of unity between Africa and the African diaspora.

Many black Americans took African names and began to learn African languages, especially Kiswahili (popularly known as Swahili), which got its biggest boost in 1966 when Maulana Karenga, one of the most prominent black militants in the sixties, started the Kwanzaa festival based on Nguzo Saba (a Swahili term meaning Seven Principles) and encouraged other blacks to learn this language which transcends ethnic identity as a Pan-African language.

No single African ethnic group can claim Kiswahili as its own like Yoruba, Zulu, Kikuyu or any of the other African languages. It evolved from many African languages and is older than modern English.

Not only did many black Americans - since 1988 known as African Americans - start learning Kiswahili in the sixties; they adopted African life styles, wearing African clothes, eating African foods, dancing to African music and singing African songs. They also embraced African traditional beliefs and religions; and started buying, promoting and producing African art, and decorating their homes with African carvings, paintings and other items.

And they proudly wore the Afro hair style and braids and called themselves Afro-Americans. They were no longer Negroes. As Malcolm X said in one of his speeches: "Where is Negroland?" He emphatically stated that black people in the United States were Africans: "You are nothing but Africans" born in America.

All that racial pride and identification with their ancestral motherland strengthened their ties to Africa.

The manifestation of black pride and admiration of the African heritage among black Americans was also expressed in another very significant way: demand for the establishment of Black or Afro-American studies departments in colleges and universities across the United States.

It was in the sixties, especially from the mid-sixties, that Afro-American and African studies became an integral part of the curriculum in institutions of higher learning across the nation. And the introduction of these studies, after persistent demands by black students and faculty members including some of their white supporters, had a profound impact in transforming education in the United States and in projecting a positive image of black Americans and the continent of Africa and its people.

The transformation coincided with, and was partly reinforced by, the emergence of African countries from colonial rule as independent nations.

It was in the sixties when, for the first time, Africans emerged on the international scene not only as a free people but as a people who spoke for themselves, and defined themselves, and were no longer defined and dominated by the imperial powers who had exploited them and muzzled them for so long when they were colonial subjects.

Before the sixties, no black African countries were represented in international forums as independent nations except Liberia and Ethiopia.

Tragically, the sixties were also years of conflict. It was a period that witnessed some of the most violent conflicts in the history of Africa, most notably in the Congo and Nigeria, two black nations which had the potential to be the best hope for Black Africa because of their wealth and size.

The Nigerian civil war from 1967 - 1970 was the bloodiest conflict in modern African history up to that time and remained one for decades until it was surpassed by the death toll in the Sudanese civil war and by the carnage in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa where the death toll from the nineties to the early part of the twentieth-first century reached 5 million or more.

About 4 million people perished since August 1998 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Almost 1 million people, mostly Tutsi, were massacred in Rwanda in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. More than 200,000 Hutus were killed in retaliatory violence at the hands of the Tutsi and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), avenging the massacre of the Tutsi by Hutu extremists during the genocide.

And at least 300,000 people, mostly Hutu, were killed in the civil war in Burundi in 10 years since October 1993 when Melchior Ndadaye, the country's first democratically elected president in the country's history since independence in 1962, was assassinated by Tutsi soldiers after being in office only for about three months.

All these conflicts had their genesis in the turbulent sixties and in the flawed nature of the institutions of authority Africans inherited at independence which did not reflect or accommodate African realities.

The conflicts also had their origin in the way power was transferred to the new African rulers without taking into account conflicting ethnoregional interests and the asymmetrical relationship between different ethnic and regional groups in the allocation of power and distribution of resources; and in the way the colonial rulers themselves exacerbated tensions and helped ignite and fuel conflicts by transferring power to members of some ethnic groups to the exclusion of others.

For example, in Nigeria the Hausa-Fulani assumed power at the expense of the Yoruba, the Igbo and other ethnic groups. This was one of the main causes of the Nigerian civil war. And in Burundi the Tutsi, although a very small minority, assumed power at the expense of the Hutu who constitute the vast majority of the population in both Rwanda and Burundi, two states in the Great Lakes region which are almost a mirror image of each other in terms of ethnic composition and inequity of power between the two ethnic groups.

Besides all these conflicts, the sixties were also the years which witnessed the consolidation of the nation-states across the continent and the emergence of authoritarian rule which in many cases amounted to dictatorship and tyranny as many African leaders justified curtailment of freedom and suffocation of dissent on grounds of national unity; contending that if the people were allowed "too much freedom" - a relative term depending on the context in which it is articulated - and the right to form opposition parties, the countries would break up since those parties would most likely be formed on ethnic and regional basis, fueling ethnoregional rivalries leading to conflict. And there were cases when this was a rational fear.

One of the most effective ways to avert this catastrophe, hence neutralize dissent, was by encouraging and sometimes forcing people to support or join the ruling party which usually was the party that led the struggle for independence. Thus, the emergence of authoritarian rule, therefore dictatorship - with the leaders invoking the spectre of national disintegration to mobilize the masses and rally support - led to the introduction and institutionalization of one-party rule which became one of the most prominent features of the political landscape and national life in most countries across the continent for decades. All this had its beginning in the sixties.

But as African leaders assumed more power and worked hard to strengthen the one-party system, another phenomenon came to affect national life and profoundly changed the way African countries were governed. This new phenomenon was military coups which led to the introduction of military rule in many parts of the continent.

After the first military coup took place in Togo in January 1963, many others followed in different parts of the continent through the sixties including the one in Nigeria in January 1966, a seminal event which led to the a series of catastrophes including the Nigerian civil war. Another major coup took place in Ghana with the help of the CIA and led to the ouster of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966.

In addition to military intervention in government, a phenomenal event in those years and in the following decades, there were other important events and developments which took place in the sixties and changed the course of African history. One of those events was the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963.

Although the OAU did not achieve many of its goals and became no more than a debating and social club for corrupt and despotic rulers - what Julius Nyerere called "a trade union of tyrants" - it did play a major role in supporting the liberation movements on the continent, especially in southern Africa and in the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. That was undoubtedly its biggest achievement and the OAU which had its genesis in the sixties, will always be remembered for that.

Another major event in the sixties was the unilateral declaration of independence by the white minority regime in Rhodesia under the leadership of Ian Smith in November 1965, two-and-a-half years after the OAU was formed.

It was an act of ultimate defiance by the white settlers and a major challenge to the black African majority in that country and the rest of Africa. African countries were too weak to bring down the Smith regime. But the unilateral declaration of independence - which came to be known as UDI - fueled and intensified the liberation struggle on the continent and was one of the main factors that led to the adoption of guerrilla tactics which became the main feature of the liberation wars not only in Rhodesia but throughout southern Africa.

In fact, the freedom fighters had already started waging guerrilla warfare in some of he colonies even before the white settlers in Rhodesia declared independence. In Angola, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) launched an armed struggle against the Portuguese colonial rulers in 1961. In Portuguese Guinea in West Africa, the independence struggle began even earlier, in 1959. And in Mozambique, another Portuguese colony, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) started waging guerilla warfare in 1964.

But the illegal seizure of power by the white minorities in Rhodesia gave impetus to all the struggles and in Rhodesia itself where guerilla warfare by the nationalist forces of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) started a few years later in 1974; coincidentally, in the same year Guinea-Bissau won independence after waging an armed struggle for 15 years against the Portuguese colonial forces, becoming the first Portuguese African colony to win independence after more than 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule.

While the liberation struggle was an African phenomenon, and an African initiative as well an indigenous military expression of political aspirations, it also entailed foreign involvement and became very much a part of the Cold War between the East and the West as the two ideological camps competed for control of the Third World of which Africa was an integral part and one of the main theatres of conflict.

Thus, as the liberation wars started in earnest, the Cold War also came to Africa in the sixties with a fury and had a profound effect on the course of many events in different countries across the continent and influenced the course of African history. As independent nations, Africans were no longer mere spectators as they once were during colonial rule but became active participants on the international scene sometimes in a way that offended big powers even though they played only a peripheral role because of their weakness.

But it was precisely their weakness that was also their strength as the world powers in the East and the West competed for ideological allies among these weak countries, hoping to turn them into what Dr.Nkrumah described as "client states." As Nyerere warned, "We are not going to allow our friends to choose our enemies for us." And some of them became client states of Western or Eastern powers, as Africa got caught between the two ideological camps contending for hegemonic control of the Third World.

It was not until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and her satellites in the late 1980s and early 1990s that African countries escaped the scourge of the Cold War, but only to come under domination of the industrial West, the driving force behind globalization in the post-Cold War era in this unipolar world dominated by the United States. And all this has echoes from the sixties when the United States was also the world's undisputed industrial and economic giant enjoying enormous prosperity despite the challenge to its military might from the Soviet Union.

But it was a prosperity marred by inequalities which found forceful expression in mass demonstrations and protests never witnessed before in the history of the United States.

While all these upheavals were going on in the turbulent sixties in the United States - the civil rights movement and black militancy articulated by the Black Panthers and other militants; protests against the Vietnam war, and the rise of the counterculture; demands by young white radicals and other disillusioned young people on many college campuses who formed the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and who issued the famous Port Huron Statement; the feminist movement as well as other protest groups; while all this was going on, the United States still continued to enjoy unprecedented economic prosperity it had enjoyed in the previous decade in the fifties and even before then. This was because of the economic boom Americans had been able to enjoy since the end of World War II, a boom fueled by the demands of the war. It was the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind and cost about 45 million lives.

Yet, in spite of all this progress, there were segments of the American society which had been bypassed, ignored or overlooked by the larger society while millions of Americans, mostly white, forged ahead. Blacks were the most disadvantaged, their plight compounded by racism.

Poor whites also suffered. But if you were poor and black, it was double jeopardy. You suffered twice as much. And even if you were economically successful but black, you still suffered in many ways because of racism in a predominantly white society where black people were not accepted by whites as equals.

So, there were some major contradictions in the American society which were highlighted in the sixties, with the civil rights movement bringing into sharp focus the glaring contradiction between rhetoric and reality in a country that boasted and had proclaimed to the whole world that it was founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality; yet denied those very same rights to millions of its citizens for no reason other than that they were black and therefore not equal to whites who constituted the vast majority of the population "in the land of the free and the home of the brave."

The plight of the poor - black and white, yellow and brown and others in between and beyond - was also highlighted in the sixties in many different ways, one of which was the publication of a book, The Other America, by Michael Harrington in 1963. President Kennedy read the book shortly before his death. It is said the book had a profound impact on him when he formulated his domestic policies based on what he had just read about the plight of the poor in Harrington's work.

But he faced stiff opposition from conservative southerners who resisted his plans to increase federal aid for education, health insurance for the elderly and other programmes. Therefore in spite of his inspiring rhetoric and compassionate understanding of the plight of the poor, his policies were often limited and did not achieve maximum results.

But they were still driven by a more redistributive ethic to share America's wealth with the poor. And they reached a new height under his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who declared the War on Poverty, a highly ambitious programme with mixed results, after Kennedy was gone, his life abruptly ended by an assassin's bullet on November 22, 1963.

When Kennedy won the presidential election in 1960, he was 43, the youngest man in American history ever to win the presidency.

One of the most important factors in his victory was the way he looked and conducted himself in the debates with the Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon in September and October 1960.

They were the first nationally televised presidential debates and they helped to change the course of American history and of the way presidential campaigns and politics would be conducted in the future.

The first presidential nominating conventions to be nationally televised were in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, and Adlai Stevenson as the Democratic party's standard bearer. But there were no debates until 1960.

The Kennedy-Nixon debates changed the course of American history because had the 1960 presidential campaign been conducted the old-fashioned way without the glare of national television cameras focusing on debates between the contenders and even on how the candidates looked on camera, Nixon would probably have won the election which Kennedy won by a very thin margin.

Therefore Kennedy, himself a larger-than-life figure on the American political scene who by his mere presence also influenced the course of events, would not have been president - at least not in the early sixties - and the liberal policies he supported, including civil rights, would not have been implemented the way they were in the sixties even after he was assassinated.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that the 1964 Civil Rights Bill would have been introduced let alone won support in Congress dominated by southern conservatives and Republicans and with a Republican president in office.

Also, had Kennedy not won the presidency, there probably would have been no Bay of Pigs invasion, no Berlin Wall crisis, and no Cuban missile crisis which pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe; not because Nixon would have been a dove in office had he won but because he might have pursued different policies and might dealt with some of those crises differently.

Therefore there is no doubt that Kennedy's victory changed not only American history but also had, for better or for worse, a profound impact on the conduct of foreign policy and on relations with the Soviet Union. And his policy towards Cuba - of isolation - remained official American policy for decades pursued by both parties. Democratic and Republican presidents have for decades pursued the same policy of isolating Cuba in an attempt to dislodge Castro from power. Had he lost the presidential debates in 1960, things would probably have been different under Nixon.

And there is no question that Nixon's poor performance in the debates - despite his wide knowledge and sharp grasp of facts comparable to if not better than Kennedy's in some respects - was a decisive factor in his defeat. As Ken Elder stated in his article "The Nixon-Kennedy Debates":

“The first Nixon-Kennedy debate and those following it helped to boost the Kennedy campaign due to the appearance of both politicians on the television screen.

The first debate was probably the most successful for Kennedy of the debates between Nixon and Kennedy which occurred in September and October of 1960.

The debates, when aired on television gave the public an image of the two candidates, Kennedy was poised and calm, whereas Nixon looked tired, haggard, and nervous.

Kennedy's knowledge and firm grasp on the questions that were posed for debate, completely wiped away any of the Republican feelings that Kennedy was too inexperienced for the presidency. Because of Kennedy's youth, the Republicans had felt that he was too young for office. They thought that an older, more experienced Republican candidate like Nixon was a safer choice.

One factor that should be considered when looking at the debates and deciding who was the true victor, is the amount of time that the two opponents had to study and review the topics that were to be discussed.

Kennedy had three days to relax and contemplate the debate questions. He was able to review the material and study it. Nixon, on the other hand, had been touring and campaigning until the moment of the debate.

It was because of this that Nixon looked tired, and it was because of this that Nixon was less prepared to confront the topics.

The success of the Kennedy debate was enormous and evident. It was so evident, in fact, that Senator Lausche, who refused to appear at the steer roast the night before with Kennedy, visited Kennedy at seven-thirty in the morning at his hotel to talk. The visit from senator Lausche removed any of the lingering doubts Kennedy may have felt about the success of the Kennedy/Nixon debates.

The first debate, in September, was compared by Kennedy to Jack Kennedy's previous debate with Henry Cabot Lodge in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In this debate Henry Lodge was the more experienced Republican statesman, whereas Kennedy was less experienced. Henry Lodge should have won the debate easily. However, it was Kennedy who showed more poise and knowledge of the material in the debate.

Before the Kennedy debates the Republican party was trying to use Kennedy's youth and " immaturity" against him, saying he did not have enough experience. The Nixon Kennedy debates showed that Kennedy's youth did not match up with his knowledge and that, even though he was very young on the outside, his knowledge was the same if not greater, than Nixon's.

Kennedy proved the Republicans wrong, and his youth and calmness helped him to win the debates with Nixon.

On television he came across well, he looked young, slim, well tanned, and clean cut. On the other hand, Nixon looked so strained, several Republican leaders asked him if he was really as sick as he looked. Nixon actually looked so terrible that his secretary had to issue a statement saying that he 'looked good in person.'

All of Kennedy's respect for his opponent disappeared during the debates. His attitude and disregard towards Nixon came across clearly in the televised debates. While Nixon would desperately fight for a point, Kennedy would look at him with a bored expression as though he found what Nixon was saying as humorous.

After the debates of 1960 Kennedy stated that he felt that it was his duty to win the election in order to keep Nixon out of office and protect the American nation.”

One of Nixon's biographers also says in his book about Nixon, as do other published reports, that Nixon's mother watched the debates and called her son soon after the debates and asked him if he was all right. She thought he was afflicted with some kind of illness she did not know about.

During the campaign, Kennedy spoke of moving aggressively into the new decade, the sixties, for, as he put it in his acceptance speech in 1960 as the Democratic presidential candidate, "the New Frontier is here whether we like it or not." he went on to say:

“We stand at the edge of a New Frontier - the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. It will deal with unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”

And in his inaugural address, he eloquently appealed to his fellow countrymen: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

But even with such exhortations, asking fellow Americans to do more for their country instead of waiting or expecting their country to do things for them, there was still a sense of compassion that Kennedy showed for the poor, as was clearly demonstrated by his proposals and the policies he formulated to tackle problems of poverty; and by the attention he paid to what Michael Harrington said in his book, The Other America. Harrington's message struck a responsive chord in Kennedy - it is said when he read the book, he was moved by it - and addressing the nation's problems of the poor became a main item on Kennedy's agenda.

The poor were "the other America," according to Michael Harrington; invisible, yet very much an integral part of the American society and way of life. He argued that the number of Americans living in poverty was much larger than what the statistics showed. They included working Americans whose poverty was hidden by the nice clothes they wore to work as if they were members of the middle class. Others were out of sight, hardly seen by the affluent. And they were trapped in poverty, yet living in a country with abundant wealth.

They were the focus of his study, one of the most influential books to come out of the sixties, including John Kenneth Galbraith's work, The Affluent Society, which, together with Harrington's The Other America, provided the intellectual rationale for the Great Society's economic and social programmes in the sixties funded by the federal government to fight poverty.

Much of this was being done because the federal government had been prodded into doing something about the plight of the poor as much as it was pushed by the civil rights movement to do something abut the racial injustices black people were suffering in the land of their birth and the only country they knew as home. And protest groups and movements in the sixties deserve credit for that. They may have had different agendas but they were all united in their desire to make their country a better place for all its citizens. And at no other time was this better demonstrated than in the sixties.

And no other American leader offered hope for a better future than President Kennedy. Young and articulate, energetic and intelligent, he embodied dreams and aspirations of millions of Americans for a better country and even for a better world. And his policy decisions had an impact far beyond American borders. And some of them had a direct impact on many us in Africa.

One of those decisions led to the establishment of the Peace Corps. President Kennedy issued an executive order on March 1, 1961, creating the Peace Corps. Even before he won the election, Kennedy had the Peace Corp idea on his mind. He first mentioned it in his speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on October 14, 1960, and challenged the crowd of more than 10,000 students to volunteer for two years after they graduate to work abroad and help developing nations meet their needs in different fields.

After Kennedy's speech, students from the organization "Americans Committed to World Responsibility" organized a petition drive asking the university administration to create a programme embodying or reflecting the ideals of the Peace Corps as articulated by the Democratic presidential aspirant on the campus of this leading American university. More than a thousand people, mostly students, signed the petion within a few weeks supporting the idea.

In his inaugural address on January 20^th Kennedy again spoke about the need for the Peace Corps. As he put it: "To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves."

The Peace Corps became a reality less than two months later when President-elect Kennedy issued an executive order establishing it.

Under this organization or agency, many young American men and women, mostly fresh out of college, were sent to many parts of the Third World to help the people in developing countries meet their own needs. One of those areas was education, and many Peace Corp volunteers went to teach in African countries and elsewhere in the developing parts of the world.

When I was a teenager in Tanzania in the sixties, some of my teachers were American Peace Corps.

I remember well what one of our first Peace Corp teacher said when he introduced himself to us in class at Mpuguso Middle School in Rungwe District in the Southern Highlands one morning in the early part of 1964 when I was in standard eight, what Americans call the eighth grade. He said: "My name is Leonard Levitt. I am a Jew from New York City."

I also remember that he followed the news very closely including the conflict in the Congo and pronounced African names well - he had quite a way of saying "Antoine Gizenga," Lumumba's vice premier, "Christophe Gbenye," and he pronounced them correctly.

More than 40 years later, Gizenga, an enduring political phenomenon, again emerged on the national political scene when he ran for president in 2006 and won a respectable 13 percent in the first round in August in a field of about 20 presidential candidates. The leading contender, President Joseph Kabila won 45 percent, and his most serious rival, Jean-Pierre Mbemba won 20 percent. Nzanga Mobutu, the son of former President Mobutu Sese Seko, won 5 percent, and another candidate Oscar Kashala won 4 percent. Both Gizenga and Nzanga Mobutu later endorsed Kabila against Mbemba in order to keep the country united.

Probably many people in the 1960s did not think Gizenga would still be on the political scene more than 40 years later. But there he was again, in 2006, as a serious contender for president. However, his political fortunes were greatest in the sixties when he was Lumumba's deputy and later one of the main leaders of the pro-Lumumbist nationalist forces fighting the Western-installed government in Leopoldville during those turbulent years.

The year 1964 when Leonard Levitt became our teacher was one of the worst in Congo's history. I remember the Simba rebellion and the battle for Stanleyville very well and Levitt liked to talk about that and other events in the Congo a lot in class.

The country was then still called Tanganyika but just a few months later, it united with Zanzibar on April 26 the same year to form Tanzania. The new country was simply known as the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar until October 29^th when it was renamed Tanzania.

I was 14 years old in 1964 at that boarding school for boys and Leonard Levitt taught us math and English with another Peace Corp teacher whom we simply called Mr. Wayne from Colorado. Little did I know that I myself would end up in the United States only eight years later.

And when Levitt returned to the United States in 1966, he wrote a book about his experiences at our school and in Tanzania in general entitled, An African Season, one of the most well-read books about the experiences of American Peace Corps around the world. And he later became a news reporter at Newsday in Long Island, New York, and was there in the 1990s.

After Mpuguso Middle School, I went to Songea Secondary School where I was also taught by some American Peace Corp teachers although most of our teachers were African and British.

But American Peace Corps did make a contribution to education and in other fields not only in Africa but in other parts f the world. And that is one of the most important legacies of the sixties and President Kennedy's policies.

Although he was preoccupied with foreign policy issues during his short term in office, especially the crisis in Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, he launched important initiatives on the domestic front which had a lasting impact long after he was gone.

In 1962, he sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi to ensure that a black student, James Meredith, was enrolled in order to end segregation. By 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated, Alabama was the only state with a segregated educational system. Finally, Alabama gave in, in the same year, and allowed integration of the schools.

Kennedy also increased the minimum wage; housing was improved, and unemployment benefits were increased during his presidency.

Throughout his brief presidency, Kennedy's charisma, and special combination of grace, wit and style, and a magnetic personality exuding confidence sustained his popularity and influenced generations of politicians of all ideological stripes. And he remains an iconic figure even today.

But although he wanted to provide strong leadership to extend economic benefits to all Americans and believed that the country had the ability to do so, his thin margin of victory in the 1960 presidential election limited his mandate. During his presidency, his party, the Democratic Party, controlled both houses of Congress - the House of Representatives and the Senate - but conservative southerners, although they were also members of the Democratic Party, were opposed to his policies, including civil rights for blacks.

Therefore many of his policies were not implemented during his presidency because of opposition in Congress. Republican opposed him. And even southerners within his own party also opposed him in Congress. Also many older, white politicians were annoyed by his appointments of young white and black advisers in his administration. Many also did not like his social programs and spending plans on education, poverty and the elderly and even equated that with communism.

Therefore the overall legislative record of the Kennedy administration was not very impressive, diminished even further by the fact that his presidency was cut short abruptly by assassination within three years of the first term.

Even in the area of civil rights in which many people, especially blacks and white liberals, thought the president would do much better than anybody else before him, he did not have much have success. He made some gestures towards civil rights leaders as if he would do something to fight racial injustices and inequalities. But he did not fully embrace the civil rights agenda as he probably should have until nearly the end of his presidency.

A lot of this has been attributed to strong southern opposition to racial equality for blacks and Kennedy's fear or concern that he would alienate the south and lose the election for a second term if he aggressively pursued the civil rights agenda. But there may have been other reasons as well why his administration was not very enthusiastic about civil rights for blacks. Whatever the case, all this was seen as a failure by his administration and it tarnished his image as a true liberal. However, he still charted the course and provided the initiative which led to passage of the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in American history not long after he died.

Kennedy also failed in his effort to secure more federal funding for public education because of stiff congressional opposition by Republicans and southern Democrats. He also failed to provide medical care for elderly, again because of congressional opposition ore than anything else. Yet, in spite of all this opposition, he still had planned a highly ambitious legislative programme for last year of his term.

But he did not live long enough to try and push it through the legislature. When he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans died with him, shattered by an assassin's bullet whose echo can still be heard today in the minds of those who were around in the sixties.

And he is still admired as a liberal by his supporters. But his liberal reputation is derived from his ideals and political style rather than successful implementation of a liberal agenda. However, the fact that the legislative programme he formulated in the last year of his presidency was implemented from 1964 to 1966 - as demonstrated by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill followed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other legislation in subsequent years including the 1968 Open Housing Act - shows that his liberal credentials were legitimate, even if only up to a degree, and rightly earned him a reputation as a liberal force for fundamental change to address social, political and economic problems plaguing the American society which had not yet lived up to the ideals upon which it was supposedly founded.

And many Americans of all races questioned or disputed that claim; as to whether or not America was indeed the land of the free founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality which were not only the solid foundation but also the pillars of this republic, the first since Rome. Racism and economic inequalities, among many other things, contradicted that claim. And at no other time was this glaring contradiction more exposed than it was in the sixties.

The sixties were years of hope and prosperity for America. But they were also years of alienation and despair. It was not enough that there was abundant wealth; nor was it enough that America's industrial might, which was also the basis of the country's formidable military arsenal including strategic rocket forces, made most Americans feel secure.

And although millions of Americans were making advances and joining the middle class in the s1960s, it was still obvious to many of them that there was something terribly wrong in a society which had such vast wealth and virtually unlimited freedom to have people in their midst who were deprived of that.

The fundamental question was why America, of all countries as the citadel of democracy, would tolerate such inequalities which went far beyond mere disparities in income.

Blacks, the poor, students, women, pacifists, radicals, professionals and people from all walks of life began to challenge the underlying assumptions of America's existence as a just society. And their perspectives which emerged from the sixties shaped the course of events and even changed the course of American history. They also redefined many values many people took for granted and which they cherished so much and which they felt could not be challenged. It was a cataclysmic change in outlook for millions of Americans and had an enormous impact on American culture.

When I landed on American soil for the first time towards the end of 1972, the aftershocks from the rumblings and tremors, and explosions, of the sixties were still being felt across the nation. And they continued to reverberate through the decades.

I went to live and attend school in Detroit and saw the scars from the wounds of the sixties, self-inflicted by a society that simply refused to recognize black people as full human beings. Burnt buildings, no more than empty shells, were not hard to see around the city, because of the 1967 riots which were some of the worst in the nation's history. In 1968 alone, more than 120 cities were rocked by riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

What was so disturbing to so many blacks including black militants was that whoever was behind the assassination killed a man of peace who preached non-violence and believed in turning the other cheek. And black militants as well as many other blacks who did not fully embrace non-violence were quick to say, "if they can do that to him, you can imagine what they will do to us!"

And the riots were a strong reaction to what "this country did to him," as the rioters and many other blacks believed. King was a victim of racism, and not just of a lone assassin's bullet. It was society, because of its tolerance of racism, which loaded the gun and pulled the trigger. Hence the riots in response to that, to punish and inflict pain on a society guilty of committing that crime.

Dr. King would have condemned the riots which erupted in his honour as a way of mourning his death, not only because he was opposed to violence for moral and philosophical reasons; he would have condemned the riots for pragmatic reasons as well, since he believed there were better ways - for example peaceful demonstrations and litigation - to address the problem of racism and dramatize the plight of black people as victims of racial injustice.

But he also would have understood the anger of the rioters as much as he understood the anger of Malcolm X and the black militants of the sixties because of the injustices perpetrated against blacks; and why they lost faith in America, if they had any in the first place as blacks and victims of racial oppression. As he stated in "Black Power," the second chapter of his his book Where Do We Go from here: Chaos or Community? published in 1967 when some of the worst riots in the nation's history erupted:

“Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement. The phrase had been used long before by Richard Wright and others, but never until that night had it been used as a slogan in the civil rights movement. For people who had been crushed so long by white power and who had been taught that black was degrading, it had a ready appeal....

It is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment. The Black Power slogan did not spring full-grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus. It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment. It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain.

For centuries the Negro has been caught in the tentacles of white power. Many Negroes have given up faith in the white majority because white power with total control has left them empty-handed. So in reality the call for Black Power is a reaction to the failure of white power.

It is no accident that the birth of this slogan in the civil rights movement took place in Mississippi - the state symbolizing the most blatant abuse of white power. In Mississippi the murder of civil rights workers is still a popular pastime.

In that state more than forty Negroes and whites have either been lynched or murdered over the last three years, and not a single man has been punished for these crimes. More than fifty Negro churches have been burned or bombed in Mississippi in the last two years, yet the bombers still walk the streets surrounded by the halo of adoration. This is white power in its most brutal, cold-blooded and vicious form.

Many of the young people proclaiming Black Power today were but yesterday the devotees of black-white cooperation and nonviolent direct action.

With great sacrifice and dedication and a radiant faith in the future they labored courageously in the rural areas of the South; with idealism they accepted blows without retaliating; with dignity they allowed themselves to be plunged into filthy, stinking jail cells; with a majestic scorn for risk and anger they nonviolently confronted the Jim Clarks and the Bull Connors of the South, and exposed the disease of racism in the body politic.

If they are America's angry children today, this anger is not congenital. It is a response to the feeling that a real solution is hopelessly distant because of the inconsistencies, resistance and faintheartedness of those in power.

If Stokely Carmichael now says that nonviolence is irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most brutal white violence against Negroes and white civil rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished.

Their frustration is further fed by the fact that even when blacks and whites die together in the cause of justice, the death of the white person gets more attention and concern than the death of the black person.

Stokely and his colleagues from SNCC were with us in Alabama when Jimmy Lee Jackson, a brave young Negro man, was killed and when James Reeb, a committed Unitarian white minister, was fatally clubbed to the ground. They remembered how President Johnson sent flowers to the gallant Mrs. Reeb, and in his eloquent 'We Shall Overcome' speech paused to mention that one person, James Reeb, had already died in the struggle.

Somehow the President forgot to mention Jimmy, who died first. The parents and sister of Jimmy received no flowers from the President. The students felt this keenly. Not that they felt that the death of James Reeb was less than tragic, but because they felt that the failure to mention Jimmy Jackson only reinforced the impression that to white America the life of a Negro is insignificant and meaningless.

There is also great disappointment with the federal government and its timidity in implementing the civil rights laws on its statute books. The gap between promise and fulfillment is distressingly wide.

Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made little more than a year ago are a mockery today.

When the 1965 Voting Rights Law was signed, it was proclaimed as the dawn of freedom and the open door to opportunity. What was minimally required under the law was the appointment of hundreds of registrars and thousands of federal marshals to inhibit Southern terror. Instead, fewer than sixty registrars were appointed and not a single federal law officer capable of making arrests was sent into the South.

As a consequence the old way of life - economic coercion, terrorism, murder and inhuman contempt - has continued unabated. This gulf between laws and their enforcement is one of the basic reasons why Black Power advocates express contempt for the legislative process.

The disappointment mounts as they turn their eyes to the North. In the Northern ghettos, unemployment, housing discrimination and slum schools mock the Negro who tries to hope. There have been accomplishments and some material gain, but these beginnings have revealed how far we have yet to go. The economic plight of the masses of Negroes has worsened. The gap between the wages of the Negro worker and those of the white worker has widened. Slums are worse and Negroes attend more thoroughly segregated schools today than in 1954.

The Black Power advocates are disenchanted with the inconsistencies in the militaristic posture of our government. Over the last decade they have seen America applauding nonviolence whenever the Negroes have practiced it. They have watched it being praised in the sit-in movements of 1960, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, in the Albany movement of 1962, in the Birmingham movement of 1963 and in the Selma movement of 1965.

But then these same black young men and women have watched as America sends black young men to burn Vietnamese with napalm, to slaughter men, women and children; and they wonder what kind of nation it is that applauds nonviolence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the field of Vietnam.

All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions. It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro's freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems to be more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home.

It is disappointment with white legislators who pass laws in behalf of Negro rights that they never intended to implement. It is disappointment with the Christian church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows....”

The disappointment among many young blacks and the Black Power advocates was over all those inconsistencies, as Dr. Martin Luther King pointed out, and over American hypocrisy with regard to racial equality which Dr. King and others in the civil rights movement also understood very well. And some of this disappointment exploded into riots across the nation.

It was the first time many whites paid attention to the presence of black people in America, even if they didn't care about their plight. But many young blacks from the ghettoes across the nation made their presence known in a very dramatic way, by rioting, sending a clear message to the larger society that America was their home, too, and that they were going nowhere; and if America continued to ignore them and other blacks, she was doing so at her own peril.

The black militants of the sixties and many other young blacks were not only sympathetic towards the rioters; the black militants, especially, openly defended them and justified their actions and tactics because no one in power was paying attention to blacks or was trying to address their grievances - until cities went up in flames.

The riots in the sixties were some of the worst the United States suffered in its history. And there is no question that riots are destructive. But for some people, they are cathartic, even if not necessarily redemptive.

Whatever the case, when the riots erupted in the sixties, it was a price America had to pay for not being truly American in terms of implementing the ideals which inspired her as a nation; and for not being what she had always professed to be.

And it was not just black people, or the other victims of social injustices even if they were not black, who noticed that. There were radicals of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) most of whom were white and probably the majority of whom came from a middle-class background, including a significant number who came from affluent families. You also had many professionals, the counterculture movement, the women's movement, the war protesters and many others.

They all saw the contradictions inherent in the American society. And they had their voices heard the loudest in the 1960s; a decade that will never be forgotten as a defining moment in American history.

And in spite of the progress that has been made through the decades since the civil rights movement more than 40 years ago, racism remain a major problem in the United States. As Professor Nathan Glazer, a liberal from the sixties who underwent an ideological conversion and became a neo-conservative within the same decade, stated in his book published in 1996, We Are All Multiculturalists Now:

“[Multiculturalism] is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups....The [multicultural] movement is given its force and vigor by our greatest domestic problem, the situation of African Americans....

Blacks...feel the issues most urgently, their problems are the most severe....Why have so many blacks moved against assimilation as an ideal...? The answer, I am convinced, is to be found in black experience in America, and in the fundamental refusal of other Americans to accept blacks...The apartness of blacks is real; for this one group, assimilation, by some measures, has certainly failed.”

And that is quite a confession for a neo-conservative to make. That is the kind of admission one would normally expect to hear from liberals. But Nathan Glazer was there back then in the sixties and he is honest enough to admit even as a neo-conservative how far America has come and how far she still has to go. She has long, long ways to go before she fully embraces blacks as equal citizens.

Many people who marched in the sixties in support of racial equality probably felt back then that racism would be conquered. Few thought it still would be an intractable problem almost 50 years later. Tragically, as the nation marches into the twentieth-first century, racism remains a perennial problem and im nay ways reminiscent of the sixties.

But the diverse groups of people and movements which fought for justice in the sixties had millions of Americans imbued with a sense of hope and optimism that things would get better no matter how long it took. And that is one of the most important legacies of the sixties. The spirit lives on.

They may have differed in their ideologies and in some of their agendas. And they may even have fought sometimes. But they were all united by one thing: their common identity as Americans in pursuit of justice for all Americans regardless of who and what they were.

Among all the groups and movements of the sixties, the civil rights movement was probably the most dominant and most influential on the nation's political scene with the exception of the demonstrators against the Vietnam war. And quite often it was difficult to draw a distinction between the two since the people who were opposed to the Vietnam war, including Dr. Martin Luther King and many black and white college students and others including many ministers, also supported the civil rights movement. Therefore both movements were broadly ecumenical.

Another movement in the sixties that caused tectonic shifts in the American political and socioeconomic strata was the student movement called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

While the civil rights movement was driven by a demand for racial equality for blacks across the spectrum, the SDS focused on inequalities in society in general, especially on the contradiction highlighted by the fact that America was an affluent society yet one which had millions of poor people who were being ignored and neglected by the rich and even by the government itself.

As a racial group, it is true that blacks were on the periphery of the mainstream - and still are in many respects more than 40 years after the civil rights movement. But there were other Americans who, although not victims of racial injustice, were victims of economic injustice, a plight they shared with black people. And leaders in the civil rights movement were fully aware of that although they were, at first, more focused on racial equality without which economic equality would be impossible. But they never ignored the fact that millions of whites were also victimized because of poverty. That is why before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King had plans to lead a major demonstration in Washington D.C. to dramatize the plight of the poor across racial lines.

And the Students for a Democratic Society was one of the movements in the sixties which played a major role in keeping this issue alive. It also played an important role in highlighting problems of inequalities - and conflict of values - in the American society in a way black groups would not have been able to.

Most of the SDS members were white. As members of the white segment of society, they were able to spread their message among whites in a way the Black Panthers, SNCC and other black or predominantly black groups would not have been able to. But they had other concerns as well, besides poverty in the midst of plenty. As Karen Wolff stated in her essay "What Do They Want? Critical Perspectives on the 1960s in the Unted States":

“The unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity might have spurred on the “underclasses” but what happened to push the “haves” to rebel as well?

In the early 60’s middle class white students on many college campuses across the country were reevaluating their ideas and life expectations.

This movement included many different types of criticisms of the society but they all did agree that new questions had to be asked about the quality of life in the richest country in the world.

Although they too were critical of the unequal distribution of wealth and the extremes of wealth and poverty, their major orientation, as children of economic privilege was their alienation from the values of the society which they felt even though they were economically secure.

The student movement grew together around a variety of protest issues that had been confronting the dominant priorities of America.

The testing of nuclear bombs and the acceptance of the idea of fallout shelters seemed to find many folks asking who would want to survive a nuclear holocaust? Why indeed are those the options? What are the real issues in the cold war? What does red mean other than a symbol for the enemy? Why is the world so divided?

If we have the answers why does the world feel so attracted to the enemy? What does socialism have to offer? How can we too change to meet the needs of more of our people and the peoples of the world?

These questions were intensified by the events around the Civil Rights Movement which said to some that racism was a necessary part of America’s social structure, not only a product of individual ignorance or prejudice.

We could watch racial violence on television as the nation debated whether the federal government had the right to force state and city governments to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court. Who had what power? By whose standards should justice be defined and enforced?

Student radicals decided that the American people had to begin by redefining their priorities from wealth and power for greatest good for the greatest number. What then would an ideal society look like? How would we get there? What were rights? What were privileges?”

The Port Huron Statement, one of the best documents to come out of the turbulent sixties and named after the city in which the students met - Port Huron, Michigan - in 1962 to issue this statement, best encapsulated those arguments.

It emphasized the need for a change in attitudes. People should not see wealth as an end itself but as a means to an end for the benefit of all in society. The Port Huron Statement also called for participatory democracy through which Americans would have to redefine their goals and priorities.

The Student for a Democratic Society SDS) was led by Tom Hayden, a student at the University of Michigan from Detroit, and he was credited for having written the Port Huron Statement, although there may have been some modifications by some of his colleagues before it was adopted an SDS official document.

It was a seminal document of the New Left completed on June 15, 1962, at the SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan, which started on June 11^th. The SDS manifesto was also partly a rebuttal to the Sharon Statement, the official document of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, written by M. Stanton Evans and adopted on September 11, 1960.

The Sharon Statement is named after the location of the inaugural meeting of Young Americans for Freedom. The meeting was held at the estate of William F. Buckley, Jr., a leading ideologue in the American conservative movement, in Sharon, Connecticut. Buckley was also the founder and for many years editor of National Review, probably the most influential publication of the conservative movement in the United States.

The Sharon Statement triggered a powerful response from Tom Hayden and his ideological compatriots who were more sympathetic to the struggle for racial equality and other social injustices in the American society than their counterparts on the ideological Right were.

Many students of what came to be known as the New Left, including Hayden, worked in the civil rights movement.

The Port Huron Statement explicitly condemned racism, unlike the Sharon Statement. It focused on poverty and civil rights for blacks and the complacency of the American society in the face of such injustices; the danger of nuclear war and other issues, and remains a reference point for the radicals of the sixties, many of whom were retired or near retirement at this writing.

Many of them also mellowed through the years. As the Port Huron Statement said among many other things:

“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.

First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism.

Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.

We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration 'all men are created equal' - rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness.

While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.

The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology -- these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present.

Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.

Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change.

The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity -- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply-felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government?

It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today.

On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.....

In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period. They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial bigotry.

The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success or failure in gaining objectives -- at least not yet. Nor does the significance lie in the intellectual "competence" or "maturity" of the students involved -- as some pedantic elders allege. The significance is in the fact the students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life....

Our America is still white....Some will say progress is being made. The facts bely it, however, unless it is assumed that America has another century to deal with its racial inequalities.

Others, more pompous, will blame the situation on 'those people's inability to pick themselves up,' not understanding the automatic way in which such a system can frustrate reform efforts and diminish the aspirations of the oppressed.

The one-party system in the South, attached to the Dixiecrat-Republican complex nationally, cuts off the Negro's independent powers as a citizen. Discrimination in employment, along with labor's accommodation to the 'lily-white' hiring practices, guarantees the lowest slot in the economic order to the 'nonwhite.'

North or South, these oppressed are conditioned by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more of the same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel, all their potential is circumscribed, thwarted and often extinguished. Automation grinds up job opportunities, and ineffective or non-existent retraining programs make the already-handicapped 'nonwhite' even less equipped to participate in 'technological progress.'

Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the 'nonwhites' are being 'accepted' and 'rising' gradually. They see more Negroes on television and so assume that Negroes are 'better off.' They hear the President talking about Negroes and so assume they are politically represented. They are aware of black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that the world is generally moving toward integration.

They don't drive through the South, or through the slum areas of the big cities, so they assume that squalor and naked exploitation are disappearing. They express generalities about 'time and gradualism' to hide the fact that they don't know what is happening.

The advancement of the Negro and other 'nonwhites' in America has not been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism, but rather through unavoidable changes in social structure.

The economic pressures of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility, new insights to Southern Negroes, who then began great migrations from the South to the bigger urban areas of the North where their absolute wage was greater, though unchanged in relation to the white man of the same stratum.

More important than the World War II openings was the colonial revolution. The world-wide upsurge of dark peoples against white colonial domination stirred the separation and created an urgency among American Negroes, while simultaneously it threatened the power structure of the United States enough to produce concessions to the Negro.

Produced by outer pressure from the newly-moving peoples rather than by the internal conscience of the Federal government, the gains were keyed to improving the American 'image' more than to reconstructing the society that prospered on top of its minorities. Thus the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954, theoretically desegregating Southern schools, was more a proclamation than a harbinger of social change -- and is reflected as such in the fraction of Southern school districts which have desegregated, with Federal officials doing little to spur the process.

It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence when positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy lept ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the racial problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public statement until his last month in office when he mentioned the 'blemish' of bigotry.

To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat-Republican alliance, President Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of "enforcement, not enactment", implying that existing statutory tools are sufficient to change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed executive power usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices, and seems interested in seeing the Southern Negro registered to vote.

On the other hand, he has appointed at least four segregationist judges in areas where voter registration is a desperate need. Only two civil rights bills, one to abolish the poll tax in five states and another to prevent unfair use of literacy tests in registration, have been proposed -- the President giving active support to neither. But even this legislation, lethargically supported, then defeated, was intended to extend only to Federal elections.

More important, the Kennedy interest in voter registration has not been supplemented with interest in giving the Southern Negro the economic protection that only trade unions can provide. It seems evident that the President is attempting to win the Negro permanently to the Democratic Party without basically disturbing the reactionary one-party oligarchy in the South.

Moreover, the administration is decidedly 'cool' (a phrase of Robert Kennedy's) toward mass nonviolent movements in the South, though by the support of racist Dixiecrats the Administration makes impossible gradual action through conventional channels.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South is composed of Southerners and their intervention in situations of racial tension is always after the incident, not before. Kennedy has refused to 'enforce' the legal prerogative to keep Federal marshals active in Southern areas before, during and after any 'situations' (this would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate the Southerners in Congress because of its 'insulting' features).

While corrupt politicians, together with business interests happy with the absence of organized labor in Southern states and with the $50 billion in profits that results from paying the Negro half a "white wage", stymie and slow fundamental progress, it remains to be appreciated that the ultimate wages of discrimination are paid by individuals and not by the state.

Indeed the other sides of the economic, political and sociological coins of racism represent their more profound implications in the private lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness of the citizen.

While hungry nonwhites the world around assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans fight to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs. While a fully interracial world becomes a biological probability, most Americans persist in opposing marriage between the races. While cultures generally interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America -- and perhaps glad of it.

The white lives almost completely within his immediate, close-up world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus corner going to and from work, and where it is important that daughter marry right.

White, like might, makes right in America today. Not knowing the 'nonwhite,' however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around 'different people,' he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield objective social freedoms to the 'nonwhite,' the white loses his personal subjective freedom by turning away 'from all these damn causes.'

White American ethnocentrism at home and abroad reflect most sharply the self-deprivation suffered by the majority of our country which effectively makes it an isolated minority in the world community of culture and fellowship. The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in American traditions.

The national heritage of racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus' advent on the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this hemisphere. And it is well that we keep this as a background when trying to understand why racism stands as such a steadfast pillar in the culture and custom of the country.

Racial-xenophobia is reflected in the admission of various racial stocks to the country. From the nineteenth century Oriental Exclusion Acts to the most recent up-dating of the Walter-McCarren Immigration Acts the nation has shown a continuous contemptuous regard for 'nonwhites.'

More recently, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Korematsu, and our cooperation with Western Europe in the United Nations add treatment to the thoroughness of racist overtones in national life.

But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved to the Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing place....

The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next election -- but that fact justifies neither giving up altogether nor a determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible problems. Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness of visions, refusal to hope, and tend to bring on the very conditions to be avoided. Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we reinforce despair.

The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried to do. The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible, is to evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial part of that vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that exist, or that must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?

1. In exploring the existing social forces, note must be taken of the Southern civil rights movement as the most heartening because of the justice it insists upon, exemplary because it indicates that there can be a passage out of apathy.

This movement, pushed into a brilliant new phase by the Montgomery bus boycott and the subsequent nonviolent action of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides has had three major results: first, a sense of self-determination has been instilled in millions of oppressed Negroes; second, the movement has challenged a few thousand liberals to new social idealism; third, a series of important concessions have been obtained, such as token school desegregation, increased Administration help, new laws, desegregation of some public facilities.

But fundamental social change -- that would break the props from under Jim Crown -- has not come. Negro employment opportunity, wage levels, housing conditions, educational privileges -- these remain deplorable and relatively constant, each deprivation reinforcing the impact of the others.

The Southern states, in the meantime, are strengthening the fortresses of the status quo, and are beginning to camouflage the fortresses by guile where open bigotry announced its defiance before. The white-controlled one-party system remains intact; and even where the Republicans are beginning under the pressures of industrialization in the towns and suburbs, to show initiative in fostering a two-party system, all Southern state Republican Committees (save Georgia) have adopted militant segregationist platforms to attract Dixiecrats.

Rural dominance remains a fact in nearly all the Southern states, although the reapportionment decision of the Supreme Court portends future power shifts to the cities. Southern politicians maintain a continuing aversion to the welfare legislation that would aid their people.

The reins of the Southern economy are held by conservative businessmen who view human rights as secondary to property rights. A violent anti-communism is rooting itself in the South, and threatening even moderate voices. Add the militaristic tradition of the South, and its irrational regional mystique and one must conclude that authoritarian and reactionary tendencies are a rising obstacle to the small, voiceless, poor, and isolated democratic movements.

The civil rights struggle thus has come to an impasse. To this impasse, the movement responded this year by entering the sphere of politics, insisting on citizenship rights, specifically the right to vote. The new voter registration stage of protest represents perhaps the first major attempt to exercise the conventional instruments of political democracy in the struggle for racial justice.

The vote, if used strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes theoretically eligible to vote, will be a decisive factor in changing the quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent statesmanship.

More important, the new emphasis on the vote heralds the use of political means to solve the problems of equality in America, and it signals the decline of the short-sighted view that 'discrimination' can be isolated from related social problems.

Since the moral clarity of the civil rights movement has not always been accompanied by precise political vision, and sometimes not even by a real political consciousness, the new phase is revolutionary in its implication. The intermediate goal of the program is to secure and insure a healthy respect and realization of Constitutional liberties.

This is important not only to terminate the civil and private abuses which currently characterize the region, but also to prevent the pendulum of oppression from simply swinging to an alternate extreme with a new unsophisticated electorate, after the unhappy example of the last Reconstruction.

It is the ultimate objectives of the strategy which promise profound change in the politics of the nation. An increased Negro voting race in and of itself is not going to dislodge racist controls of the Southern power structure; but an accelerating movement through the courts, the ballot boxes, and especially the jails is the most likely means of shattering the crust of political intransigency and creating a semblance of democratic order, on local and state levels.

Linked with pressure from Northern liberals to expunge the Dixiecrats from the ranks of the Democratic Party, massive Negro voting in the South could destroy the vice-like grip reactionary Southerners have on the Congressional legislative process....

There is the tremendous challenge of the Negro movement for support from organized labor: the alienation from and disgust with labor hypocrisy among Negroes ranging from the NAACP to the Black Muslims (crystallized in the formation of the Negro American Labor Council) indicates that labor must move more seriously in its attempts to organize on an interracial basis in the South and in large urban centers....

From 1960 to 1962, the campuses experienced a revival of idealism among an active few. Triggered by the impact of the sit-ins, students began to struggle for integration, civil liberties, student rights, peace, and against the fast-rising right wing 'revolt' as well. The liberal students, too, have felt their urgency thwarted by conventional channels: from student governments to Congressional committees.

Out of this alienation from existing channels has come the creation of new ones; the most characteristic forms of liberal-radical student organizations are the dozens of campus political parties, political journals, and peace marches and demonstrations.

In only a few cases have students built bridges to power: an occasional election campaign, the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration activities; in some relatively large Northern demonstrations for peace and civil rights, and infrequently, through the United States National Student Association whose notable work has not been focused on political change.

These contemporary social movements -- for peace, civil rights, civil liberties labor -- have in common certain values and goals. The fight for peace is one for a stable and racially integrated world; for an end to the inherently volatile exploitation of most of mankind by irresponsible elites; and for freedom of economic, political and cultural organization. The fight for civil rights is also one for social welfare for all Americans; for free speech and the right to protest; for the shield of economic independence and bargaining power; for a reduction of the arms race which takes national attention and resources away from the problems of domestic injustice.

Labor's fight for jobs and wages is also one labor; for the right to petition and strike; for world industrialization; for the stability of a peacetime economy instead of the insecurity of the war economy; for expansion of the Welfare State. The fight for a liberal Congress is a fight for a platform from which these concerns can issue. And the fight for students, for internal democracy in the university, is a fight to gain a forum for the issues.

But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their interests. That they have no political expression, no political channels, can be traced in large measure to the existence of a Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters, labor unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals.

Worse, the party stalemate prevents even the raising of controversy -- a full Congressional assault on racial discrimination, disengagement in Central Europe, sweeping urban reform, disarmament and inspection, public regulation of major industries; these and other issues are never heard in the body that is supposed to represent the best thoughts and interests of all Americans.

An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions).

Labor should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place in the Democratic Party.

Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the 'peace credentials' of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them....

If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.”

Tom Hayden and many others remained true to their convictions through the decades; Hayden still was, when I was writing this book in 2006, more than 40 years after the Port Huron Statement was issued.

Many of them also had a profound impact on American education which they made more inclusive than it was before when it was essentially Eurocentric in the Western intellectual tradition.

But some of the people who were members of the New Left underwent ideological conversion. David Horowitz, who later became a Republican and a conservative and an admirer of President Ronald Reagan, is a prime example. Also a former supporter of the Black Panther Party, he became one of the very same people - conservatives - he and other radicals criticized so much in the sixties and repudiated his past.

His repudiation included denunciation of the Black Panther Party which drew a sharp response from former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in an interview with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on American public television, PBS, in the late 1990s not long before Cleaver died.

But whatever their shortcomings, the sixties' radicals did, at the very least, raise some fundamental issues and jolted the conscience of the nation to start addressing and looking at the nation's problems from another perspective: that of the powerless and the dispossessed, the alienated, and even of the young and restless as they themselves were, in order to bring about fundamental social change for the benefit of all regardless of one's status.

Yet, it was not easy to change the attitudes of people brought up in a capitalist society driven by profit and accumulation of wealth and convince them that they should sacrifice for others who were less fortunate.

However, the SDS defined the role of students in the American society, criticized their passivity, and challenged them to get actively involved in transforming their country through participatory democracy to make America the best it could be. And they believed it had the means to achieve this goal.

Other influential movements of the sixties included the women's movement which demanded equal rights for women who had traditionally played a subordinate role in a society dominated by men. And because of their subordinate status, many women of all races identified with the victims of racial injustice and actively supported the civil rights movement.

Also known as the feminist movement, the women's movement got a boost in 1963 when Betty Friedan, a suburban housewife and mother of three, wrote one of the most influential books in the sixties, Feminine Mystique, in which she strongly criticized the American society for keeping women in domestic bondage, and even the women themselves for accepting or tolerating that.

The book helped to launch a new emancipation movement called Women's Liberation and it remained influential for many years. The women's response was powerful as well as dramatic. It included public burning of brassieres and successful lobbying efforts in the nation's capital for strict enforcement of the fair-employment laws and other legislation.

But the women's movement went beyond its quest for equal rights for women. Like the civil rights movement, it profoundly changed the nature of discourse regarding important issues and redefined the assumptions upon which America operated as a society. In studying the American social structure, women concluded - as they already knew - that American ideas, ideals and values were defined and articulated from a male, especially white male, perspective almost to the total exclusion of women and minorities.

So, the women's movement demanded a redefinition of all those values, ideas and ideals, and all the assumptions within which national and intellectual debates were framed concerning national and even individual issues. It sought to change, and in many ways succeeded in changing, the perceptions and attitudes of many people concerning women and their role in society.

It was a radical departure from the past that also entailed a redefinition of the sex roles and even of the family structure itself, the very foundation of any human society as an organic entity. From then on, women refused to be dominated by men in a society, and in a world, that had always been dominated by men whose chauvinism was synonymous with sexism.

And all this had profound implications for the future of the United States as a society. Many men may have seen the women who supported the women's movement as a rebels who wanted to disrupt the social fabric and destroy the traditional family structure. But from a higher perspective, one sees that what the women's movement did was no more than an assertion of the right of all Americans to be treated equal in a society supposedly founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality, and in which man's dominant role would be anachronistic.

Therefore there is no question that the women's movement in the sixties redefined America as a society that would no longer be dominated by men across the spectrum, and it helped change the course of American history.

Women wouldn't be where they are today in terms of education, employment and power had it not been for the women's movement which had its most dramatic impact on the national scene in one of the most turbulent decades in American history: the sixties.

But there was also another dimension of the women's movement that needs to be addressed.

The women's movement became radicalized as a feminist movement not only for the assertion of equal rights with men as equal members of society; it also demanded equal rights with men across-the-board, with many women demanding to do the same kind of work men do and had traditionally done, regardless of the amount of hard, physical labour required to accomplish the task; for example, doing construction work, digging trenches, climbing utility poles, and even jumping over barbed-wire fences, among others.

Some women even refused to let men open doors for them out of respect for them as women. They said that was not equal rights and took it as an offence, or as an insult, reinforcing stereotypes about women as members of the "weaker sex" even if some of the things they wanted to do were too much for them.

There are obvious differences between men and women in terms of physical strength; not that women are indeed members of the "weaker sex" in that context, but because of the fact that men are naturally physically stronger than women.

Yet, in spite of such demands for equality across-the-board, there were some - in fact many - women who differed with the radical feminists on their militancy and felt that they had gone too far. There were things men could do that women could not do, and vice versa.

And, although the feminist movement articulated legitimate demands, and had legitimate concerns, it did, in a way, play a somewhat a negative role with regard to the civil rights movement. While it brought attention to gender inequalities and sexist stereotypes about women, it drew some women out of the civil rights movement or made them less active in the civil rights struggle because they now had their own agenda and feminist cause to pursue.

But these were mostly white women. For most black women, it was a luxury they could not afford even though they also supported the feminist movement and its agenda. While many of them continued to support the feminist movement, they also knew that they could not secure and enjoy their rights as women on the basis of equality with men as long as they continued to suffer as black people. They were all denied equal rights in the American society because they were black, not because they were simply black women or black men.

Still, regardless of its shortcomings, the feminist movement played a major role in leveling the playing field and helped make America a more inclusive, and more tolerant society than it had been before.

Also, the feminist movement, like all the other movements in the sixties, highlighted another problem. Although all these movements projected an image of a unified response to inequalities and injustices in the American society as if Americans were indeed united against injustice, they did at the same time show that America was, in fact, fractured along many lines and was really not as united as it seemed to be.

The women's movement had its own cause to advance; the counterculture movement also had its own agenda and virtually established its own society divorced from the norms and lifestyles of mainstream America; the civil rights movement was essentially a black movement - fighting for the rights of black people - in spite of the large number of whites who participated in it; the New Left or Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) also had its own goals to pursue even if many of those goals, like those of the other movements, were not in conflict with and were in fact often the same as those pursued by the other movements. And there were others including the anti-war movement.

Yet, is spite of all that, and the differences between and among all these movements, there was unanimity among them that there was something seriously wrong with the American society; and that there was hope for change to make things better.

It was also a sentiment articulated by a young president of the United States during that period, John F. Kennedy, whose youthful exuberance and energy radiated hope and embodied the spirit of the times. He promised to lead the nation into a new era and meet the New Frontier of "uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus."

That was indeed the spirit of the times, also embodied by the various movements which became most active during the sixties.

Besides the feminist movement we have just looked at, there was another movement, the counterculture.

The counterculture movement with its glorification of drugs - marijuana, LSD and others - had its own internal dynamics which propelled it on to the national scene in the sixties. But it also entered the political arena as a grassroots movement to advocate and advance social causes such as racial equality. And since it defined man beyond race, sex and class, it justified the use of drugs to enable individuals to explore their inner selves - for internal reflection - in order to have a true understanding of the nature of man.

However, there was another aspect of the counterculture that may have given it another dimension. The youth, mostly white, were an integral part of this movement. They rejected the values of their society and sought expression of their feelings through music: rock and roll and sometimes folk music. Some of these songs, for example by Bob Dylan, talked about change or the need for change.

And a number of the artists supported the civil rights movement and the war against Vietnam as did their fans who bought, liked and sang this music; mostly folk music which came to be associated with the civil rights movement.

Yet, there is no question that the counterculture movement rejected mainstream values and did not fully address itself to issues of social justice the way it could have, or the way movements such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) did.

But regardless of its views which may have been an aberration from the norm, it played an important role in the sense that it increased an awareness of the diversity that existed in society, showing that there were some Americans who provided an intellectual justification for the use of drugs as did one famous professor of psychology at Harvard University, Timothy Leary, a proponent of the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. It also enlarged the arena of politics to include its agenda as an important issue for national dialogue. As Leary - in a phrase that defined the counterculture movement - put it: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!"

The counterculture movement changed the way some people looked at drugs, values and lifestyles which most older people considered to be morally repugnant and a threat to the traditional way of life. And it helped to make America more tolerant and inclusive when many people listened to what the advocates of drug use had to say to justify their lifestyle. Such tolerance had a multiplier effect throughout society, reinforcing the liberal view prevalent in the sixties that people had the right to be what they are or what they wanted to be, express their views and live as equals in a democratic society.

And for that reason, it had a positive influence on the struggle for racial equality led by the civil rights movement, however limited that influence may have been.

Also there is no question that a combination of factors contributed to the rise of the counterculture movement. They included social injustices, rampant materialism, fear of a nuclear holocaust, a rejection not only of mainstream values but of the conservative social norms prevalent in white, middle-class America in the 1950s. And the fact that most of these rebellious youths were white meant that they took a principled stand not only against the white middle-class society but also against their own parents who were an integral part of that society. America's imperialist arrogance and her involvement in the Vietnam war also contributed to the rise of the counterculture movement.

The counterculture movement also led to the adoption of alternative lifestyles including communal especially in the countryside; organic farming; yoga, meditation and chanting while rejecting the use of drugs; free sex or sexual freedom as demonstrated by the Woodstock Art and Music Festival in 1969; appreciation of mysticism and adoption of Eastern religions; establishment of the underground press; preference for long hair and unconventional attire and much more.

All those things were abhorred by many older people and by the Establishment as a repudiation of traditional values and the American way of life, except for things like protecting the environment which the counterculture movement strongly supported. Many of its members played a very important role in raising awareness among Americans about the need to protect the environment, an issue people of all ages were concerned about, some more deeply than others.

The impact of the counterculture movement was widely felt because of the nature of its origin and its participants. Whites youths who were the driving force behind this movement and who constituted the largest number of its members were a product of mainstream America and the predominantly white society. And a very large number of them were college students where the counterculture movement virtually started. The Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, was a strong manifestation of the counterculture and all that it entailed.

The students on that campus, the flagship of the University of California school system, were privileged members of society from the middle- and upper-classes - the affluent society - yet were at odds with the values of that society and the interests and practices of the university and its corporate sponsors, and identified themselves with the downtrodden members of the American society.

In fact, the Free Speech Movement had its roots in the civil rights movement which had its greatest impact in the southern states where blacks suffered brutal repression at the hands of racist authorities, groups and individuals espousing the doctrine of white supremacy and upholding white supremacist values.

Besides the civil rights movement, perhaps nowhere was the right to free expression better articulated than in the protest movement against the Vietnam war.

In fact, the anti-Vietnam war movement - fueled by the escalation of the war by President Johnson - was so effective and so successful that it discouraged and prevented Johnson from seeking a second term in 1968; the same year in which the civil rights movement also reached its peak with the passage of the Open Housing Act, the last of the three major pieces of civil rights legislation of the sixties, preceded by the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Tragically, it was also in the same year, 1968, that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and the civil rights movement began to fade.

Almost exactly one year before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Dr. King led one of the biggest demonstrations against the Vietnam war and was accused by the American authorities of undermining the war effort in Vietnam. The demonstration took place in New York City on April 15, 1967, and drew more than 400,000 people. Another major demonstration took place in San Francisco on the same day and attracted more than 75,000 participants.

A lot of pressure was exerted on Dr. King in an attempt to force him to disassociate himself from the anti-war movement , saying his involvement in such protests would jeopardize the civil rights movement. But he strongly disagreed with his critics and continued to support the anti-war effort.

The New York demonstration was a rainbow coalition. Its participants included blacks, whites, moderates and radicals, middle-class white students and working-class people of all races, Native Americans and women, war veterans and labour groups and many others. Many of them are also the same kind of people who supported the civil rights movement.

The movement suffered a terrible blow when Dr. King was assassinated and started going downhill for other reasons as well. It became virtually a spent force after the last civil rights legislation, the Open Housing Act, was passed in 1968. But when it was most dynamic earlier throughout the sixties, it had no better ally than the war protest movement opposed to American involvement in Vietnam.

In many cities across America, people were marching in the streets protesting against the Vietnam war. In addition to the big demonstrations which took place in New York and San Francisco in April 1968, was another huge demonstration more than a year later on November 15, 1969, in the nation's capital Washington, D.C., and again in San Francisco.

More than 750,000 demonstrators showed up in the nation's capital, and more than 250,000 people in San Francisco. The theme of these demonstrations was "March Against Death" and they were addressed by political leaders including two prominent Democratic senators, George McGovern who later in 1972 became the Democratic presidential candidate, and Eugene McCarthy, a perennial contender for the presidency.

And there were many other demonstrations and meetings against the Vietnam war across the country throughout the sixties and beyond, including those which took place in May 1970 involving more than 500 colleges and universities. The student protests against the war also involved strikes and takeover of campus buildings. The May protests were sparked by the killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970, during an anti-war demonstration.

The largest demonstration throughout the war took place in New York and San Francisco on April 24, 1971. Unlike the demonstrations on November 15, 1969, these ones received national coverage by the major television networks and had a profound impact on American involvement in the war. In addition to extensive coverage they got from the national media, the April 1971 demonstrations also had a lot more participants from the unions than previous ones did.

Altogether, more than 750,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., and more than 300,000 in San Francisco. They had the biggest impact of all the demonstrations and sent a clear message to the government that could no longer be ignored. The cumulative efect of all the other demonstrations could not be ignored either. They all had the same message: End the War.

There were many reasons why they were opposed to American involvement in the war. But probably the majority of them agreed on one thing: "We have no business being there." As Muhammad Ali, after being stripped of his heavyweight championship by the US Supreme Court for refusing to go to war in Vietnam, said, he had nothing against the Vietnamese.

He expressed that position more than once. As he stated on one of those occasions, quoted by Mike Marqusee in his book, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.

I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again: The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

Muhammad Ali articulated the sentiments of many blacks in the United States. But they were sentiments that were shared by many other people across the colour line in terms of opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam war.

The war divided and united the nation at the same time. There were those who may have sincerely believed that they were fighting communism in Vietnam and the spread of this "evil" ideology - as they saw it - around the world.

Paramount in this conflict was the domino theory. Those who supported the war believed that if one nation fell, another one would, as would the rest like a set of dominoes.

They had lost China to communism in 1949, they reasoned, and they were not going to allow communism to have another victory in Southeast Asia if they could take a stand. And by going into Vietnam, they believed their country, America, had taken a principled stand, no matter what the cost. And in terms of lives alone, it cost more than 57,000 American lives.

Opponents of the war were just as firm. Even the liberal ideology of many of the opponents or their membership in the Democratic party was not enough to convince them to support American involvement in the war which reached its peak under two liberal Democratic presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

They didn't care the two presidents were fellow liberals and fellow Democrats like they were; being that, alone, should have been enough for the two presidents to have sympathized with the Vietnamese victims of the savage bombings of this small country by the world's most powerful nation, some of them may have argued, as they probably did.

But opposition to the war cut across ideological lines and for reasons which united ideological foes. Many Americans believed the conflict was a civil war in which the United States should not be involved. There were those who believed that the Vietnam war was not a threat to national security.

And just as many Americans argued that America should not try to play the role of a world policeman. Other opponents of the war said the United States should not be involved in the conflict because it was supporting a corrupt, undemocratic government and betrayed the principles upon which American was founded.

Although people of different political beliefs were united in their opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, there is no question that the war was divisive on the domestic front and tore the country from within. It was also one of the most divisive foreign policy issues in American history and changed the way America would view her role in future conflicts in other parts of the world. It did not make America isolationist but more reluctant or less willing to directly intervene in other conflicts.

One of the best examples of this "non-interventionist" policy on the part of the United States was the conflict in Angola in the seventies where, despite her great interest in what was going on there, she did not send troops - as she did in Vietnam - but used surrogate forces and CIA agents to promote her interests and try to neutralize Soviet influence.

The Vietnam war became increasingly unpopular when casualties mounted, victory could not guaranteed, more and more money was being spent to try and win a war that could not won; and when brutalities against innocent civilians in Vietnam were exposed as happened in the case of the My Lai massacre, just one of the many atrocities perpetrated by American soldiers against innocent civilians.

Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians were killed in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968 by American troops. But the American authorities covered up the incident and reports of the massacre did not appear in the news papers until more than a year later in November 1969.

One was a report in The New York Times, November 20, 1969, headlined, "G.I. Says He Witnessed Massacre in South Vietnam Village." Another report was published on the same day in the New Haven Register, Connecticut, with the headline, "Soldier Claims He Saw Viets Slaughtered."

The reporter who first broke the story of the My Lai massacre was Seymor Hersh of The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for that and later documented the tragedy and its aftermath in his book, Cover-Up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai, published in 1972. It is one of the best accounts of American involvement in Vietnam and of some of the ugliest aspects of this conflict.

Even some supporters of the war began to change their minds after they saw what happened at My Lai and began to question the motives for American involvement in this conflict. They concluded that something was terribly wrong with their government.

Here you had a government trying to justify the war by saying America was fighting communism. Yet the same government was killing innocent civilians - bombing and burning their hamlets and villages - knowing full that the victims were nothing but simple peasants who may have known nothing about communism, were not interested in any kind of ideology, and had never even heard of Karl Marx or Lenin. They were only interested in their survival and in taking care of their children and families.

The war received extensive coverage in the media. Millions of Americans watched it on television where they also saw their fellow countrymen dying in Vietnam and dropping bombs, including napalm, on this small, poor country.

There were debates across the country and on college campuses. Was the war justified? Was it a waste of money which could be better spent to fight poverty at home? Was America an imperialist nation? Can the loss of American lives be justified? Was it right to go to war in another country which did not threaten American security?

People were opposed to the war for many, different reasons. And they asked just as many questions. They even wondered what kind of country America was. Was there something wrong with it as a nation for it to be involved and send its youth to fight and be killed in such a war?

So, they marched against the war itself, against the violence and loss of lives on both sides. They marched against what they perceived to be American imperialist arrogance which led their country's involvement in the war. And many of them marched against the draft because they did not want be conscripted into the army and then be sent to Vietnam. They also marched against America itself as a nation with the wrong national priorities.

The United States was also criticized in many countries around the world for her involvement in Vietnam. Demonstrations were also held in some of those countries against American involvement in this war. Even in countries which were American allies, it was easy to find many opponents to the war. And they demonstrated their opposition by going into the streets just like their American counterparts did.

The Vietnam war also had an impact on Africa where opposition to American involvement in this conflict was expressed by a number of African leaders. One of the tragic consequences of this conflict was the ouster of President Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966 in a coup engineered and masterminded by the CIA.

The American government wanted Dr. Nkrumah out of power and did a lot of things to undermine his government. But it also took advantage of his absence from the country to overthrow him.

The absence the United States exploited to oust him from power had to do with the Vietnam war. Dr. Nkrumah was in Peking, China, on his way to North Vietnam to meet with the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chin Minh with proposals to help end the Vietnam war when he was overthrown.

His ouster was one of the most tragic chapters in the history of post-colonial Africa and changed the course of events not only in Ghana but in other countries on the continent because of the kind of Pan-Africanist policies Nkrumah pursued and the kind of influence he had as a leader of continental and international stature especially in the Third World.

American involvement in Vietnam was also criticized by President Julius Nyerere who, like Nkrumah, also was targeted by the CIA in the sixties but survived all attempts through the years to oust him from power. As he stated in his statement, "Policy on Foreign Affairs," 16 October 1967, published in his book Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1965 - 1967:

“To stay silent on such issues as Vietnam because one or more powerful nations do not like what we say would be a disgrace.

It is, I think, difficult for us in Tanzania to comprehend the full sufferings of the people of Vietnam in what is probably the most vicious and all-enveloping war which has been known to mankind.

There is no security there - for anyone, anywhere in that country. Men, women and children, are all involved; peasants and workers, urban and rural dwellers - all of them live every hour of every day under the threat of death, or injury, or the destruction of their means of livelihood. It is said that more bombs have been dropped on the small country of Vietnam in the last two years than were used in the whole Pacific theatre of war from 1942 to 1945.

World-wide concern has been expressed about the dangers which would follow from bombs falling - accidentally or on purpose - on the territory of the People's Republic of China. We in Tanzania share that concern, for such an event could only lead to a world-wide conflagration.

But the fact that Vietnam is a small, and underdeveloped, nation does not mean that her people are immune from the effects of high explosive, or that other small nations can turn their heads away as if this conflict is at present unimportant.

We are told that great principles are involved, and that the richest nation on earth is defending those principles against attack. What are those principles?

There is the principle of self-determination for the people of Vietnam. For twenty years, with unparalleled courage and determination, the people of Vietnam have been fighting for a chance to implement this principle - first against the French, and now against the Americans. Certainly there are Vietnamese on both sides, some are conscripted, or try to find security with those who are strongest in their particular area. But if this is a civil war, what are outside nations doing in that conflict?

Again, we are told that democracy is being defended, and only last month (September 1967) there were some 'elections' in South Vietnam. But these elections only covered the 'pacified areas,' and no candidate could stand on a clear platform of opposition to the war! And in any case these were the first elections since 1956, when South Vietnam came into existence, and no one could possibly call the governments of Mr. Diem, or his military successors, democratic.

Or we are told that the outside power responded to a request for assistance from a legitimate government which was threatened by aggression. One can only look at the figures of soldiers operating in South Vietnam and ask whose aggression?

I believe that two things are essential: first, an immediate and unconditional end to the bombing of North Vietnam. And second: a settlement should be reached on the basis of the 1954 Geneva Agreements. Neither North Vietnam nor the Vietcong can be forced to the conference table; that should by now be clear.

The United States of America must recover from the delirium of power, and return to the principles upon which her nation was founded. Those millions of Americans who are now opposing their government's policies in this matter, and calling for peace, are working for the honour of their country. We pray that they triumph soon.”

Their opposition to the Vietnam war not only forced President Johnson not to seek a second term; it also had unintended consequences for liberals and Democrats opposed to American involvement in this conflict.

It paved the way for a Republican victory in the 1968 presidential election when Richard Nixon won the White House and therefore, unwittingly, helped fuel the rise of the modern conservative movement in American politics; a movement led and dominated by Republicans, which had its genesis in the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964 when in his speech at the Republican convention in San Francisco he appealed to white extremists, whipping up racist sentiments against civil rights and racial equality for blacks. As he stated: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Yet, In spite of such fiery rhetoric appealing to white racist sentiments, and in spite of the strong support he got from his loyalists and many hardcore conservatives especially in the southern states - he won six southern states - he went on to sustain one of the worst electoral defeats in presidential elections in American history.

But it was also a bittersweet victory for the Democratic party - especially for the liberal wing of the Democratic party - whose presidential candidate made civil rights a major campaign issue even in the battleground states in the south which upheld segregation.

After a bipartisan consensus was reached between the Democratic and Republican law makers in Congress and the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson who later campaigned on a civil rights platform - which further reduced support for him in the southern states - was reported to have told some of his aides, Bill Moyers who was his press secretary and Joseph Califano, that the party had lost the south for the rest of of their lives.

When Bill Moyers met President Johnson in his office after the ceremony following the signing of the bill, he was reported to have said: "Mr. President, you look very sad and you have just accomplished the greatest thing since the Emancipation Proclamation." And the president replied: "Bill, this is the greatest thing I may ever do. But I know that it means that our party will lose the south for the rest of my lifetime and probably yours as well."

A slightly different version of what was said was that President Johnson told Bill Moyers and other aides: "We've delivered the south to the Republican party for my lifetime and yours."

Already conservative, the south became solidly Republican through the years in terms of party support even if not necessarily in terms of membership. Many southern Democrats crossed party lines and voted for Republican candidates best exemplified by the overwhelming support Ronald Reagan got when he ran for president.

And probably the biggest victory for the conservative movement in modern times was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as president of the United States. Conservatism in American politics finally triumphed and America has never been the same again. And it all began in the sixties with opposition to racial equality compounded by the failure of the Democratic party to win the 1968 presidential election.

But although the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, lost to Nixon, it should be remembered that it was only by a very small margin that he lost this election. However, the impact of the anti-war movement cannot be ignored or discounted in the outcome of one of the most important presidential elections in American history. As Lyndon's vice president, Humphrey suffered and lost critical support which would have enabled him to win the presidency had American involvement in the Vietnam war not been an election issue. The war was unpopular among the voters; and it was being fought under a Democratic presidency that was also responsible for escalation of the conflict and American involvement in the war. And it contributed to Humphrey's defeat.

Even what happened in Vietnam itself had an impact on the United States in terms of her status as a military super power. America was indeed a super power and remained one regardless of what happened in Vietnam. But it was no longer invincible, if it indeed ever was, without being fully challenged by a powerful and uncompromising adversary.

Whatever the case, the Tet Offensive - a large-scale attack against 30 South Vietnamese cities by the Viet Cong guerilla fighters on 30 January 1968 - challenged the hegemony of the United States. And it highlighted the significance of guerilla warfare as an effective means to wage war against the United States in Third World countries she sought to dominate.

It happened in Vietnam, and it happened again almost 40 years later in Iraq where the insurgents were effectively using guerilla tactics to wage war against American troops occupying that country after it was invaded by the United States in 2002.

But much as the United States was torn within during the sixties, and even when her military might was being severely challenged in Vietnam by the Viet Cong using guerilla tactics - compounded by military assistance from the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union - she emerged virtually intact from those turbulent times as a political entity.

There may have been anarchists within, but the country did not dissolve in anarchy.

And that had a lot do with the strength of America itself as a nation, not in terms of military power but in terms of diversity, enabling it to accommodate different and conflicting interests true to its tradition as a country that is a product of many cultures and values fused to produce one nation and tolerant of dissent.

However, the contradictions which were highlighted in the sixties also showed America's weaknesses as a country that had failed to live up to its ideals as the land of liberty and equality. Not all Americans were free, and not all Americans had equal opportunity to succeed in life.

And all the movements we have looked at here - from the civil rights movement to the anti-war protest movement against the Vietnam war - did a very good job exposing those weaknesses and proposing some solutions to the problems America faced then and which still haunt the nation today in many fundamental respects.

The sixties challenged the nation, re-evaluated its identity, and shook some of the very foundations of the American society by questioning their validity when the critics noticed that there was a big difference between rhetoric and reality from the leaders and from the people themselves, especially those with power and influence. And they helped to bring about fundamental change in many areas.

America has come along way since then. But she still has a long way to go.

So does Africa whose destiny was also shaped by what happened in the sixties, a defining moment in the post-colonial history of this vast continent.

Those of us who were there in the sixties remember those days. They were the best of times. But they were also the worst of times, to paraphrase Charles Dickens.

They were also the beginning of one long journey for us in Africa as young nations.

Many amongst us may be nostalgic about those days. But it is a nostalgia that should be tempered with reality.

Were they really the good ol' days? In some respects they were. But not in all, especially when we remember the tragedies that befell our continent: the Congo crisis and the assassination of Lumumba and its impact; the ouster of Nkrumah in one of the first military coups in the sixties which ushered in a new era of military rule as a continental phenomenon for decades to come; the Nigerian civil war, until then the bloodiest conflict in post-colonial Africa; the unilateral declaration of independence by the white minority regime in Rhodesia about which African countries couldn't do anything; and much more.

But whatever the case, the sixties will always be with us because what happened then still has an impact on our lives today.

It was a decade that changed America. It was also a decade that changed the destiny of Africa. America has never been the same again. Africa also has never been the same again, because of what happened in the sixties.

Probably more than anything else in the case of Africa, the sixties was a decade of excitement as Africans celebrated the end of colonial rule in most countries across the continent.

But the excitement did not last very long. In every country, when Africans woke up the next day after independence, they knew that little had changed.

The people had indeed regained their dignity and the right to rule themselves after years of colonial rule. And they were highly optimistic of the future, riding on a wave of high expectations for the fruits of independence although they did not see any tangible benefits right away.

The only major change they witnessed, or were aware of, was the transfer of power from Europeans to Africans. And the most obvious difference was in the race and skin colour of the rulers. In most cases, white rulers relinquished power to blacks and in some cases also to other non-whites. They were the people who led the struggle for independence and were an integral part of the indigenous elite that assumed the leadership of the newly independent countries.

But in terms of power and institutional arrangements, and the relationship between the leaders and the led, things remained almost the same as they were under colonial rule. The power structure instituted by the colonialists remained intact; only that this time it had new masters: the indigenous elite. To the new rulers, one of the most attractive features of the colonial power structure was centralization, or concentration of power in the hands of a few people at the centre, under a unitary state.

And in a way, the departing colonial rulers found many comfortable allies among the indigenous elite who admired European ways of life and institutions. It was clear where they got this influence. Almost all the new African leaders were educated in schools which had been established by the missionaries or by the colonial governments. Like the colonial rulers, the missionaries themselves came from Western countries. The education they provided, as did the colonial authorities, was based on the Western intellectual tradition. And the values they instilled in their African students were also Western.

Many educated Africans became carbon copies of Europeans, although poor carbon copies. And they could never be the same as the original.

Yet, in spite of all that, they still and quite often tried to be more European than the Europeans themselves. Among them were dedicated "nationalists" who led the struggle for independence.

Some of the best examples of this abjectly servile and despicable imitation of the imperial masters were the leaders of Francophone Africa who after independence remained beholden to France and were unabashedly Francophile.

Another good example is Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi who was very British in his manners, values and attire. He even established a school in Malawi named after him, Kamuzu Academy, where he allowed only whites to teach in order to produce a generation of African Anglophiles who would follow in his steps to spread Western education and "civilization" in Malawi and, hopefully, in other African countries as well.

He also ended up being one of the worst dictators Africa has ever produced. Soon after independence, he turned against his colleagues such as Kanyama Chiume and Henry Chipembere, the very same people who had invited him back to Nyasaland from Britain to help lead the struggle for independence. By the time he was invited, he had lived in the United States and Britain for 40 years, mostly in Britain, and spent some time in Ghana after his friend Kwame Nkrumah became the leader of that country, only to become a tyrant soon after he led Nyasaland to independence.

His former colleagues were forced to flee their homeland and sought refuge in neighbouring countries, especially Tanzania and Zambia. And Banda was just one among many African leaders who went on to establish authoritarian or despotic regimes soon after independence.

Therefore, while independence was supposed to have ushered in a new era of freedom, the people soon learnt that the freedom they had been promised was more apparent than real. Yet, one of the most attractive slogans African leaders used in their campaign for independence was that they would establish democracy the people had been denied under colonial rule. But when independence came, it was an entirely different story.

In almost all African countries, the new African rulers had little respect for freedom. They justified curtailment of freedom on grounds of nation unity and security, contending that they could not afford the luxury of freedom which entails the establishment of opposition parties in pursuit of partisan interests to the detriment of national well-being.

Therefore multiparty democracy was out of the question, not only for the sake of national unity but for other reasons as well: nation building and consolidation of independence which could not be achieved without mass regimentation, according to this rationale.

Freedom of speech was curtailed and opposition parties were strongly discouraged or banned, ushering in what became a new era of one-party rule and dictatorship on a continent where the people had been promised freedom during the struggle for independence.

There were only a few exceptions, in countries such as Nigeria with its regionally entrenched parties dominated by the country's three main ethnic groups - the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the west and the Igbo in the east; Botswana, Gambia, and Senegal; also Zambia but where the ruling party (UNIP - United National Independence Party) remained dominant at the expense of two opposition parties which, unfortunately, thrived on ethnoregional loyalties in the western and southern regions.

But even in countries such as Tanganyika, where the opposition party, the African National Congress (ANC), was simply overwhelmed at the polls by the ruling party, TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), and thus died a natural death in the early sixtes, laws were passed to give legal status to one-party rule leading to the establishment of the one-party system. Tanganyika became a de jure one-party state in 1965, within five years since independence in December 1961 when it was a de facto one-party state like most were, across the continent.

One-party states became the dominant feature of the African political landscape at the expense of freedom soon after independence. And tolerance of dissent was equated with weakness and abdication of responsibility by the leaders.

Some people still spoke up, but at their own risk. They knew that criticism of government was tantamount to treason. And the authorities left no doubt in any one's mind how they would respond. They were ruthless in their suppression of dissent.

Thus, paradoxically, the new era of freedom led to denial of freedom. If the new nations could not be built into cohesive units because the people had the freedom to disagree on how to build those nations, then freedom had to go.

Therefore in most African countries, freedom became the first casualty under the new African leaders who felt that it was only they who knew what was best for the people and not the people themselves. It was a betrayal of trust and the people became increasingly distrustful of their own leaders who not too long ago had led them to independence.

But freedom was not the only casualty. Nation building, which the new leaders argued could not be achieved if opposition parties were allowed to exist and if criticism of government even by individuals was allowed as well, also suffered because the people - besides the leaders - were not given the opportunity to examine and challenge government decisions.

Had they been allowed to do so, and had opposition parties which were truly national in character been allowed to exist, African countries would have had the chance to pursue alternative policies which in some and may be even in many cases would have been better than those pursued by the government.

But the people were not allowed to do that. They couldn't even freely discuss government policies and offer constructive criticism even among themselves without fear of being arrested. They were muzzled.

And all that led to apathy with dire consequences for the new nations in terms of nation building and national development. For, without the people's involvement in decision making all the way down to the grassroots level, meaningful change including development is virtually impossible. It is the people themselves who know what is best for them. Yet the leaders turned a deaf ear to what they had to say except in a few cases. And the result was that the leaders pursued wrong policies leading to stunted economic growth.

This was compounded by a lack of high-level manpower and necessary skills needed in many areas to implement development projects and provide efficient administration throughout the country.

At independence, almost all African countries lacked a critical mass of educated people and professionals as well as administrative skills not only in technical fields but in almost all the other areas as well. For example, when my home country, Tanganyika, won independence from Britain in December 1961, it had only two engineers and 12 doctors.

The situation was the same in most countries across the continent, except in countries such as Ghana and Nigeria which had a significant number of educated people compared with other African countries.

Without trained workers and needed skills, it was obvious that the young African nations would not be able to develop. And the only place they could turn to for help to meet their needs was foreign countries including their former colonial rulers.

But foreign aid, which included financial and technical assistance, did not solve Africa's problems. In most cases, there were no trained people or well-established institutions to use this assistance effectively and on the right projects. In some cases, the wrong kind of aid was sought or provided, sadly demonstrated by rusted machinery which one could see in many countries on the continent. The equipment couldn't be used and was simply left out there to rust.

And in other cases, when the equipment arrived, there were no skilled people to use it. Or there were no spare parts or someone to fix it when it broke down. Sometimes it was the wrong kind of machinery that was sent; for example snow ploughs, instead of tractors, sent to Guinea from the Soviet Union.

Also, because the new governments lacked accountability since there was no organized or formal opposition to act as a watchdog over those in power, mismanagement of resources including outright theft became a major problem in the early days of independence.

Ethnic loyalties was also a major factor in the allocation of power and resources and, most of the time, those in power usually came from one or only a handful of ethnic groups, thus accentuating ethnic cleavages in multiethnic societies. People sought power to help themselves and "their people," members of their own "tribes," in many cases to the total exclusion of other ethnic groups.

Thus, while the leaders who led the struggle for independence also campaigned against tribalism, contending that the colonial rulers had used divide-and-rule tactics by keeping "tribes" separate from each other and sometimes even turning some against others, they did exactly the same thing when they assumed power.

They used ethnic and regional loyalties to perpetuate themselves in power by keeping their opponents divided. They also outlawed opposition parties even if there were some prospects that some of those parties could have become truly national parties in character, transcending ethnic loyalties, regionalism and other forms of partisanship militating against national unity.

Yet, there were some leaders who made genuine attempts to achieve national unity on the basis of equality for all regardless of race, class, ethnicity, national origin or religious affiliation: Nkrumah, Nyerere, Obote, and Kaunda among others. They were also some of the most prominent Pan-Africanists and among the strongest advocates of African unity on a continental scale and on regional basis.

Nkrumah stood out alone among them as an opponent of regional federations or formation of any regional blocs which he described as "balkanization on a grand scale" and an obstacle to continental unification.

But in spite of the genuine attempts by a number of African leaders to create a sense of national unity and identity among their citizens, ethnoregional loyalties remained strong and an intractable problem in most African countries and one of the most devastating. And it was only one among many of the major problems the new African nations faced in their early days of independence in spite of the optimism the leaders and the people had for their future free from colonial rule.

Therefore, in the initial euphoria after independence, even the leaders themselves did not realize the scope and magnitude of the task that lay ahead especially in terms of nation building. And in many cases, it is a task that has yet to be accomplished. A large number of countries across the continent remain fractured along ethnic and regional lines, and most of them are still trapped in poverty, more than forty years after independence.

The struggle for power among different ethnic and regional groups, mainly because many of them have been excluded from the decision-making process and allocation of resources, is a perennial problem. And it has been one of the major causes of conflict on the continent since independence.

But that and other subjects are the focus of another study exclusively devoted to the post-colonial era since the sixties.

It is, indeed, a decade to remember. For those of us who grew up in the sixties, and witnessed what happened in the sixties, ....

Appendix I:

Civil Rights Movement Memories

THEY were some of the people who witnessed one of the most important events in the history of the United States: the civil rights movement. They were also participants.

Some were killed during the struggle. And some survived; in fact the vast majority did. But even those who survived suffered a lot. And these are some of their stories:

My Story

Priscilla McLeod Robinson

October 2004

Priscilla McLeod Robinson

During my early years in Petersburg Virginia I was a silent observer of the details of my life.

There were stores that my parents did not shop in where, because of our race, we could not try on the clothes that we wanted to purchase. There were the hand-me-down textbooks that my school received from the white schools when they ordered new updated textbooks for their students. There were the stores that had lunch counters where we were not allowed to eat. There were water fountains that we could not drink from because they were for white people only.

Our race defined our world-where we could live, where we could work, what our salaries were, where we went to school, where we sat if we went to a white doctor's office, what day we could go to the fair, where we sat in the movie theatre, what interest rate my parents paid if they borrowed money from the bank, where we could shop, where we could swim, where we could worship.

Then, there were the annual trips my family took to Alabama, my father's home and to Texas, my mother's home.

We knew that the majority of the neighborhood grocery stores along our route would present us with some type of racial situation like having to enter through the back door, so to avoid a confrontation we always carried our own food and beverages with us on these trips. Bathroom stops were another story, however.

Most of the public bathrooms were in gas stations. There were usually 3 of them. The two clean bathrooms were designated "white women" and "white men". The third bathroom, always filthy for lack of daily cleaning, was designated "colored men and women". The white bathrooms were often locked. We usually avoided bathroom confrontations by pulling the car off the highway and going on the side of the road.

When a stop could not be avoided, however, we prayed that the white bathrooms would not be locked and sometimes they were not. In those instances, we just went in and hurriedly used them. When they were locked, however, my parents would bravely ask the gas station attendant for the keys to the bathrooms. This request was usually denied so we would drive on to other stations.

Once aa a gas station attendant in Alabama began to pump gas into our car, my Mother asked for the keys to the bathrooms. When this request was denied she angrily told the attendant not to put another drop of gas into the car and we drove off without paying.

Having heard many stories about the lynching of black people in the south, we were sure that these stories would now be told about us and we spent much of the remainder of that trip looking out the rear window for men wearing hoods or others who might want to harm us.

It was against this backdrop that I became a fighter for civil rights in 1959 at the age of 13. I lived in Petersburg, Virginia, a city that was like many others across the United States, - segregated.

Encouraged by the social activism of my mother and that of my pastor, both of whom were members of the Petersburg Improvement Association (PIA), I was one of its youngest participants. The PIA was an organization whose mission was the elimination of segregation.

My involvement included walking picket lines carrying signs that asked others not to shop in the segregated store that we were picketing in front of, sitting-in at whites only lunch counters where we could not be served, and participating in other forms of protests.

During my years in the movement my experiences also included receiving threats of physical violence, participation in the March on Washington in 1963, and in the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. I met many people involved in the movement including Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Septima Clark, Fred Suttlesworth, C.T. Vivian, Ralph Abernathy and I had the additional good fortune of speaking on the same program with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who was the disciple of peace.

After the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, two men who worked toward achieving an integrated society, I felt disheartened but I was still hopeful that America would one day accept me and give me all of the rights and privileges enjoyed by white America.

Following the murder of Dr. King in 1968 I attended his funeral march in Atlanta. Upon my return to my college campus I noticed that the mindset of those of us young civil rights fighters began to change. Along with the loss of Dr. King, we were faced with the large-scale drafting of black men into the military and their deployment to Viet Nam. Many of these promising young men, some high school graduates and some college graduates, returned to America severely injured or in body bags, images that we witnessed on television news on a daily basis.

During this time many of us also began to feel like we had been sold a bill of goods by white America. They had convinced us that our "lack of being qualified" was the reason we had systematically been kept out of certain employment arenas over the years.

So, we went to college in order to "qualify" ourselves, however, now, with diplomas in hand, we were being denied employment with the explanation that we were "overqualified." The rules changed but no one bothered to tell us.

After years of appealing to the conscience of America but still suffering from racism, we began to question our dedication to the use of nonviolent methods to achieve equality and we began to listen to the rhetoric of the Black Panther Party which advocated an armed revolutionary agenda as a means to achieve equality.

My quest for civil rights has taken me from nonviolent picket line walker, to believer in the ideology of the Black Panther Party, to board membership on some of the most prestigious nonprofit organizations in Charleston, SC, and there is nothing that I would trade for my journey.

Freedom Rider Diary

Forty Years Later

Stephen Green

THOSE of us who've been invited to participate in the first reunion on the fortieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides have been asked to write down our memories of the summer of 1961, as one part of an oral history project. Mine won't be typical, but that's alright.

None of them will be, for we were a remarkably diverse group, the 300 or so of us who were arrested in Jackson in May-June of that year, convicted of "disturbing the peace", detained at the Hinds County Jail, and transported upstate to the maximum security facility at Parchman State Penitentiary to serve our six month sentences.

South Carolina

My road to Jackson probably began in December, 1960. Benjy Rosen, my roommate at Middlebury College in Vermont, had agreed to join me on a non-stop run to Florida for the first week of Christmas break. With the savings from a job on an oil rig the previous summer and a great deal of help from my Dad, who was a corporate executive in New York, I'd bought a new Morgan+4, a British racing car. We thought it'd be cool to use it as an airplane - straight to Florida from Vermont in 30 hours, a week in the sun, and back home to New York for Christmas.

We got lost, of course, and found ourselves at a small filling station, surrounded by fields, on a back road in South Carolina. It was a two person operation - an older white man in overalls was the owner and watched us from the doorway of the station, and a young black man almost our age pumped the gas.

Groggy from the overnight drive, we staggered around in the sunlight, stretching our legs. We must have looked like something from a different planet. Several times I tried to strike up a conversation with the attendant while he filled the car. He'd grunt in response, embarrassed at the attention. His eyes were down-cast, and he kept glancing furtively at his boss in the doorway.

For some reason, that look in his eyes came back to me many times in the next months. I'd grown up, privileged, in Kentucky in the late 40's and early 50's, so it wasn't as if that look and the other effects of segregation were a new experience for me. But at 20, I'd finally started thinking seriously about where my life was going, and when that happened, sometimes, not always, I'd think of that young man at the filling station, and where he was headed. The system was all there, in that tableau on the dusty concrete pad in South Carolina, in the eyes of a man and a "boy.”

Vermont

In early May of 1961 the shock came that sent me to Jackson. I was chairman of the "conference committee" at my small, pleasant college in Vermont. We'd invited Rev. William Sloan Coffin, the Yale University Chaplain, to address the students. He was "in the news" at the time for attacking the smug, comfortable attitudes of students there in New Haven, while war loomed in Europe and the Far East, and demonstrations were occurring in the South. Someone had taken a shot at him with a gun on the Yale campus.

My job was to squire him around Middlebury, get him to the student union for the speech, and present him to the audience. He hardly spoke to me as I showed him around, and seemed amused at our pretty little campus. While I was introducing him to almost 500 students and faculty, he stood at the window and gazed out over the Green Mountains. There was a long and (for me) anxious pause, and then he turned around, walked to the podium, looked over the crowd, and said, "What a wonderful place to go to sleep for four years."

Two weeks later I was out of school for the summer and back home in Westchester County, New York. My Dad had arranged for me to crew on the sailboat of his friend Buss Mossbacher in the "Gold Cup," the world deep-sea racing championships to be held off the coast of Norway. The news was of sit-ins that were being organized at public transportation facilities in the deep south.

A bus had been attacked and burned in Anniston, Alabama, with civil rights leaders inside....and the Yale Chaplain, William Coffin. The group had continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, where arrests were made. Civil rights groups, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in New York, were training and organizing other groups on other busses to go to Jackson. It was starting; he was there; and I wasn't going sailing in Norway.

Thelma

My parents were divorced when I was 14. Soon after that my brothers and I moved with my Dad from Kentucky to Elmira, New York. After a year in public schooling there, I went away to preparatory school in New Jersey. We moved to Westchester outside New York City. Practically the only constants in my life during this period were Thelma and Wiley, an older black couple. They kept house and grounds, and pretty much did everything for my Dad, my brothers and I.

Wiley was from the hills of Tennessee, and Thelma was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was tall and angular, kind and disciplined, a Mason, and a Baptist church deacon. (Young Cassius Clay had been an active member of their congregation in Louisville). She was short and heavy, cheerful, and quietly managed the household, including Wiley and my Dad.

When I announced to the dinner table that I'd decided to go to jail in Mississippi instead of sailing in Norway, Dad took it well: I had explanations I ought to give to Buss Mossbacher, he said, but it was my life and it was time for me to begin deciding what I was going to do with it. Thelma was quiet about the matter, then and in the days that followed, as I traveled to the City to meet with people at CORE, and made preparations to depart.

On the morning I was to take the bus to Nashville for orientation and training, Thelma disappeared. I was late getting out the door, and in a rush to say good-bye to all, and she was not there. No one had seen her for hours. We fanned out to search the house, and someone finally found her in the basement, hiding behind the furnace. I ran downstairs to find her still standing there, glaring at me with tears in her eyes. "What are you doing! Why won't you say good-bye"? I said. She shook her head. "Because you don't know what you're getting into. I'm never going to see you again."

Nashville

My recollections of the few days in Nashville are sketchy. We stayed and were briefed at Mehharie (?) College. It was my first contact with Dianne Nash, who with a small staff was our organizer and "trainer." Not much older than me, she was far wiser about what comedian Flip Wilson used to call, "The Church of What's Happ'nin Now." I remember her as intense, stressed and over-worked, but focused at the same time.

Groups were formed as they arrived, and were given history lessons. We were briefed on the antecedents of non-violent protest and the civil rights movement, the structure of the current movement in the South, and the demonstrations and protests that had preceded that summer's bus station sit-ins and arrests. We were told what we could expect from the authorities in Jackson, both before arrest and in detention, and how we should react to particular situations. Simulations were conducted, which included realistic taunts and slaps and pushes.

Non-violence was more than a tactic to Dianne and her colleagues: it was a philosophy. It was also a way of understanding and dealing with the authorities and the entire system of racial segregation in the South in relatively non-judgmental terms. When it was time to move, however, I saw a different side of Dianne Nash. I believe I remember her more or less simultaneously alerting the Jackson mayor's (or State Governor's?) office, the New York Times and the local FBI that another bus, with another group of demonstrators, was on its way to the Jackson bus station. When she spoke with those folks, she took no interruptions....or prisoners.

The Bus Ride

For some reason that I don't now recall, I had decided that when we went into Jackson, I would be wearing my black suit and a tie. It may have saved my life, or at least a severe beating. As the bus proceeded down to Jackson, through Clarksdale, Greenwood and Yazoo City, passing cars would honk at the bus and pedestrians would glare and gesture angrily. Then one of our group noticed that, at mid-day, the bus's bright lights were on. In effect, the demonstration had begun.

At one of our stops for passengers - it may have been Greenwood - I decided to get off and relieve myself. The small station was nearly empty, except for one uniformed policeman, but when I entered the men's room, there were at least a half-dozen angry men standing around. A couple of them had small clubs. As I went on about my business at the urinal, they were agreeing with each other that if they could just isolate one of those sons-o-bitch'n carpet-baggers, they'd beat him until these people understood that they weren't wanted in Mississippi. I tried to zip up at something like normal speed and then walk calmly out of the men's room, but I may have neglected to wash my hands.

Jackson Bus Terminal

Dianne had told us where the cafeteria was, and drawn us a diagram of the Terminal. We were to go directly to the lunch counter, seat ourselves, and ask to be served coffee, pie, or whatever. From the moment we got off the bus, however, it was apparent that we were expected. Flashbulbs greeted the first departing passengers. Police and crowds were everywhere. Dianne's calls had of course assured an official reception by the authorities, and the maximum exposure.

We were by no means the first group to have come down, and it was clear from the early appearance of the police as soon as we seated ourselves at the counter, that a routine had been established for the arrests. It went quickly - we were warned severely that this was a "white's only" lunch counter and that we were disturbing the peace. I don't recall whether the "separate facilities" statute or ordinance was mentioned: the press were there recording the affair, and the officers may have preferred not to draw attention to laws that didn't play well in the rest of the country. Our role in this piece of theater was to explain that we merely wanted to be served a cup of coffee and politely refuse to depart. That done, we were hustled off to a waiting paddy wagon - I think it was - and on to Hinds County Jail for processing.

Not many years later when Mickey Schwerner and the others were killed during the voting rights drive in Mississippi, I could not help but remember and contrast the more or less scripted and very public nature of our lunch-counter sit-in with the sustained work and risks that were involved in the later phases of the civil rights movement in the Deep South. At the crucial, volatile time, we were surrounded by CBS, the New York Times, the FBI, etc., and it was highly unlikely that one or several of us would disappear.

Schwerner and the voting rights activists, by contrast, were all exposed for months, day and night, in little towns and on back roads of places that were full of good folks like those I almost met in that bus-station wash room. True, on the way in and the way out, many if not most Freedom Riders were exposed and took risks, but relatively speaking they were few. Even later in Parchman when some of us were beaten or slapped around for non-cooperation, it was unlikely that the Warden or Governor would have countenanced our emerging from prison with smashed teeth or broken legs, or worse.

I'm not questioning the courage of the Freedom Riders - none of us knew from moment to moment exactly how it would go, and I'm sure most would have faced it calmly and bravely if things had gone badly wrong. I also realize that some of the public facilities sit-ins were less scripted than others. But when I'm praised for my courage as a Freedom Rider, I try to imagine driving alone on a dusty road late at night from a voting registration center, after a day of house-to-house registration visits, and seeing those headlights suddenly loom in the rear-view mirror.

Hinds County Jail

In a brief court appearance, the individuals in my group were charged with "disturbing the peace", and remanded to the Hinds County Jail to await trial. The Judge sternly informed us that under the particular Mississippi statute we'd violated, the sentence would be six months of incarceration. Our CORE-provided attorney, William Kuntzler, relished the verbal combat with the judge, but warned us that he could not be sure how much "time" we would have to serve. I began to think about fall and my senior year in college, but only passingly - somehow this seemed more important.

Ours was, I believe, one of the first half-dozen groups to be arrested in Jackson, so both the hearing and the quick ride to the jail were media events. Once we were inside the jail, however, every effort was made by our keepers to treat us as common criminals - all the normal procedures were implemented: the photographs, the taking of clothing and "valuables" and issue of jail clothes, etc.

I vividly remember my first breakfast: Thelma had habituated me to hominy grits and even chicory, but fatback with the bristle I'd never seen before, and couldn't quite bring myself to eat. At night came horrible screams from the "tank" near our cell, where drunks and addicts were kept. Someone had to explain to me that the suffering was probably not torture or beatings (although we could sometimes hear that going on as well) but the agony of detoxification. My other, second, street education was beginning.

Parchman Maximum Security

About two weeks after we arrived in Jackson, we were transferred upstate to the Parchman State Penitentiary. Groups of Freedom Riders were beginning to arrive spontaneously from all over the country, and our numbers were burdening the Hinds County Court and jail system. We were more than a sit-in; we were becoming a movement!

Where we were going was the toughest prison farm in America: many of us knew that from the songs of "Leadbelly" - Huddy Ledbedder. All prisoners were formed into work gangs, and the produce from the farm and manufacturing there, guards and jailers proudly told us, made the place nearly pay for itself. Road gangs were worked so hard in the summer heat, that prisoners regularly broke their own shinbones with sledgehammers just to get into the prison infirmary.

The ride north on the prison bus, with sirens and outriders of course, and our processing and subsequent commitment to small cells on "death row", gave me a chance to meet some of the new protesters. In addition to the Southern black ministers there were communists from Haight- Ashbury in San Francisco, leftist journalists and Black Muslims from Chicago, radical university students and professors, professional activists like Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger and Stokely Carmichael, and just a lot of people who were unlike anyone I'd ever met in my life.

After processing, the Freedom Riders were segregated by sex and distributed to several wards in the "death row" section of the maximum security facility. We were told this was for our own protection, but wondered among ourselves if it were not done to prevent us from politically contaminating the regular prison population. Initially, we were put two prisoners each in a 6'x 9' cell, equipped with metal bunk beds and a toilet. The front of each cell was bars with a slot for meal trays, and faced a blank wall with one high window through which we could see the sky, but nothing else. A guard was posted at the heavy, sliding door at the end of the hall. We could faintly hear the other wards, especially at night when all was quiet.....but the acoustics were perfect for communication among the 50 or so prisoners on each ward.

In our first ward convocation, we introduced ourselves and spoke a bit about why we were there. When my turn came I was perhaps a bit exuberant, verbally imagining the many hundreds if not thousands of college students who would head to Jackson when the school year ended. A murmur of skepticism followed, until Stokely Carmichael, who was several cells down from me, yelled, "Hey, guys, did you hear that? We just need to hold on here until Harvard, Yale and Princeton let out, and then there's goin' to be an invasion of the Deep South by rich white kids!" The laughter died down in (what seemed to me like) two or three minutes. Stokely was a bit rough, but then as later, he was mostly right.

Many of the group on our ward were church pastors, priests, rabbis, etc., and so we all agreed that in addition to the impromptu "political" convocations each day, we'd have an afternoon religious service, led on a rotational basis by one of our number, and conducted in the manner of his particular denomination/religion. At first, in addition to the prayer and singing, some of these services evolved into discussions that were pretty secular, and included explanations of the rituals of a particular church. Interestingly, as the summer wore on, one form of service came to be used most frequently on the ward: the Quaker ritual of silence and informal, spontaneous reflections on thoughts or events of spiritual significance. A cross section of the group were just more comfortable with that.

In spite of the fact that Parchman was a work farm, we were not taken out in labor gangs as were the other, "normal" prisoners. In fact, we were not given any exercise or allowed out of our cells at all, except that once a week, in the evening, we were allowed to "shave" and shower. We were instructed to strip the sheet off of our beds and bring it with us. The cell doors were opened one by one, and naked, two of us at a time could proceed to the end of the hallway where we handed over our dirty sheet and were given a towel. In front the guard door, we could shower and shave with no mirror and, as the evening passed, an increasingly dull razor. We then returned our towel, were issued a clean sheet, and told to return to our cells.

This ritual was easily the highlight of each week. It was the only time we could actually see each other, but the trip down the hallway also became an occasion for rude comments, heard by all, and even a crude form of competitive theater. A bed sheet, we discovered, could become a judge's robe, or a hanging rope, or a cop's club, or a slave's head dress and pants, or a pasha's turban, or any number of costumes. The performances were more than entertainment - they also became a form of "communication" with the guards who gathered around the ward door at the end of the hallway, glaring at our depictions of the traditions of the South. Not surprisingly, later in the summer, just before we were transferred to the first offenders' unit, our sheets - and mattresses - were taken from us to reduce the props for our little productions.

But there were other forms of communication with our jailers. One discussion which we had constantly on the ward was whether, as political prisoners, we should refuse all cooperation with prison routines. Some of our number refused to leave their cells on shower night. We all refused to "quiet down" in the evening, and entertained the warders with protest songs. Others went on hunger strikes.

The response to this was sometimes physical beatings, but more often we received collective punishment. The food was periodically salted to the point that it was inedible. Those small, high windows on the hallway wall would be closed in the heat of the day and the air conditioning turned off. At night, the air conditioning would be turned up to maximum and, as previously mentioned, the sheets and mattresses removed from the cells.

Occasionally, a particularly non-cooperative prisoner was taken from his cell and sent to the "hole" for one or even several days. This was a 6'x 6' metal box in the ward's basement with no light, no food and an open hole in the floor for defecation.

Like many of the punishments in the prison's repertoire, this one proved to be spectacularly counter-productive. One of the Freedom Riders was a large black man who was a lead singer with the San Francisco Opera Company. For his sins one day, he was sent to the "hole", where he quickly discovered that the metal walls of his box made a perfect reverberator.

That evening, as we began our usual sing-along of protest songs, there rose from the bowels of the Parchman Prison maximum security unit the notes of a beautiful spiritual. The volume was incredible - his deep baritone could be clearly heard in every room of the building, by prisoners and guards alike. In silence, with tears of joy in some eyes and rage in others, we listened to the most moving concert I have ever heard, to this day.

With the publicity surrounding the Freedom Rides, the prison could not starve or beat him sufficiently to quiet him, so he was returned to his cell. Not long after that, we were moved out of maximum security.

Parchman First Offenders' Unit

After several weeks on "death row", with our numbers at Parchman growing each week, the authorities decided to move us to a facility for first- time offenders. While we were still segregated from the rest of the prison population, denied any exercise outdoors, and (of course) separated by sex, we were now in one large room with rows of cots for sleeping and, I think I remember, tables for eating. Actually, the unit was two large rooms divided by a center area, walled off from us by high bars, where the food was prepared and guards armed with shotguns and pistols roamed.

Both the cooks and the guards were themselves prisoners on good behaviour, or "trusties" in prison parlance. Culturally we had arrived, for in the evening after the pots and dishes were cleaned, the cooks would produce steel guitars and sing the prison songs for which Parchman was world famous.

Best of all, the Mississippi Freedom Riders were assembled face to face for the first time, including the recent arrivals in Jackson. The next few weeks were some of the most stimulating times of my life. Stokely and others continued my political education - for me, it was mostly listening. I learned to play chess.

Those of us who'd been shut in maximum security for some time could catch up on the news with those who'd just come down. And, we could now walk and jog and be physically active. I'd been a wrestler and runner for seven years, and had suffered from the inactivity and close confinement in maximum security. But that too had changed.

One fellow protester who'd newly arrived had been listening to his car radio while on vacation, and decided on the spur of the moment to drive to Jackson and get himself arrested. He was the coach of the Oklahoma State University wrestling team, perennial NCAA champions, and offered to show me dynamic tension exercises with a small face towel, to work virtually every major muscle.

About a week after we were switched to the first offenders' facility, we were informed that the coming Sunday, as was normal in the unit, we'd be visited by local pastor who would conduct a religious service. It was another attempt by the State prison authorities to attempt to treat us as regular prisoners. At the appointed time, we were assembled near the wall of bars, and an older, red-faced man in a robe and sash was led in by the trusties, who then locked the door and stood at the ready just on the other side.

The pastor seemed nervous, but launched into his "prison" sermon with gusto nevertheless. He was here, he said, because that was the place for a man of God, ...."with people who had lost their way....down in the in the muck and the mire of sin". As he plowed along, his words came faster and faster, his voice pitched higher, and his face became more flushed and covered with sweat. When he finished, he asked if any of us "boys" had questions. He had another congregation to get to, but he'd be happy to oblige.....

In the back of the group stood a tall, excruciatingly thin University of Chicago graduate student who'd been one of the hunger strikers. He wore only a sheet around his waist and wire-rimmed glasses, and had shaved his head. He raised his hand, and in a soft voice said that yes, he had a question. The pastor seemed pleased. The student thanked the pastor for making the effort to come today. "However", he said, "I've been wondering as you were speaking, if Jesus were in our midst today, would he be up there with you, or back here with us"?

The pastor looked as if he'd been smitten in the forehead. He stared at the group as if seeing us for the first time, stammered a bit, and turned suddenly to run for the door in the wall of bars. The trusties, unprepared, scrambled for their keys as the pastor shook the door to be let out.

For many of us, the first offenders' unit was also the first opportunity to talk about what was going on with white southerners, such as the trusties. One such was a young man in his late 20's who was serving the last year of a seven year sentence for having murdered a family of four, who were tenant workers on his farm. I saw him fiddling with his shotgun one day at the wall of bars, and approached him. We discussed the merits of pumps and automatics, and then got into hunting and fishing.

He was a little surprised that one of us Yankee 'wierdos' might be interested in such things, and over several days we had regular talks about baits for certain fish, shot sizes for doves, and the like. Eventually, we came to why he and his people were the way they were, and why we would presume to come down to tell him and them that their way of life was wrong, un-Christian, and un-American. It took a long time to get to that part of the dialogue, through the bars.

And then one day, nearly two months after our arrest, it was all over. We were informed that bail had been posted by CORE, and we would be leaving prison the following day. As we milled about, discussing the "arrangement" that might have been struck, my friend with the shotgun motioned for me to come up to the barrier. I remember that it was a very awkward moment, and that it was a long time before he spoke. He said he'd appreciated our talks, and that he was not sure any more that he knew how he felt about what was going on and what we were doing. Then he looked me in the eyes and said that I must understand that I should never come back, if there were further civil rights actions. He said, as I recall, something like this: "If I'm out of here, and this stuff continues, and it comes to my town, and you're involved....I'd have to kill you. That's the way we are down here, Steve."

The next day, male and female Freedom Riders alike were assembled in an exercise yard of the prison to await our release and bus transportation back to Jackson. We squatted, blinking in the bright sun, chatting happily. As I talked with a young woman from Chicago, a lit cigarette butt bounced off of her head. We both turned to see a young, blond guard sitting on a chair, a shotgun across his knees, smiling at us. I told him that some of us demonstrators occasionally had doubts about interfering, but when somebody did something like that, we didn't have any more doubts at all. The guard pulled a silvered pistol out of a holster on his hip, stuck it hard under my nose and, still smiling, said that, 'yeah, and you know what would happen if we weren't here and I didn't have this uniform on'. It was a conversation. Then the buses arrived.

We returned to Jackson to find a network of local supporters, black and white. Home cooked meals were served. Barbers came to homes of refuge to give haircuts. Prescriptions were filled. Used clothing was found for those who needed that. Assistance was provided to arrange rail, bus and flight schedules, and rides were provided to stations and the airport. We were overwhelmed by this kindness, often involving some risk to those who provided it, out of sight of the cameras and uniforms.

Each one of us understood that while we returned to homes, families, jobs, schools, etc. far away, the real struggle for desegregation of public facilities and for voting rights would be waged by those who were now thanking us in the only way they could. It was humbling beyond words, and at the moment of parting at the bus or rail station or whatever, we often could only express ourselves in glances or hugs.

The Arraignment

Most of us departed for home knowing that we might have to soon return to Jackson for an arraignment hearing. The Hinds County Court had set bail for our release from jail/prison at $600. per person. CORE had found these funds for over 300 of us, but would forfeit them if we failed to return for arraignment later in the summer. It was a legal version of the "conversation."

And so, some 3-4 weeks after our departure, CORE contacted us by phone. For many, the journey would again be by bus, and again via Nashville and Dianne Nash. The mood of the Deep South had shifted slightly though, in the months since the burning of the bus at Anniston and the first waves of national and international publicity.

President Kennedy had put the full force of the Administration behind the legal battles that had been joined on desegregation of public facilities. Congress was stirring. Moderate authorities and politicians in the South acknowledged that some change would have to come, even while denying that the lunch counter sit-ins and ugly publicity were causative factors in that change.

But in the back country of the South, a backlash was setting in, and as the Freedom Riders gathered in Nashville, we discussed this. Dianne Nash warned that care would have to be taken on the bus trips back down. We'd leave in the evening and travel at night to avoid attention, and the usual precautions would be taken: the FBI, and State and local police at stops along the way would be alerted that we were coming.

In Memphis at our first stop, sometime around midnight, it was clear that something had gone wrong. The police were there in force in the large cafeteria and waiting room, but so were groups of young men who sat at tables without ordering, or stood at the magazine rack without reading, or just leaned against the wall, glaring at us. We had a half hour until the bus left, so some of us ordered coffee or sodas, and sat down. Voices were low, and the tension was palpable.

At some point, for whatever reason, this scene seemed to me to be ridiculous, so I stood up with my coffee cup and walked over to a table of fellows, pulled up a chair, and sat down.....next to a young man my age with no sleeves and a Marine Corps tattoo. I can't remember now what was said at the beginning, but soon we were talking about why we were all sitting or standing in that stupid waiting room in the middle of the night. A few other Freedom Riders joined us, and the discussion for a while became intense.

I was particularly engaged with the young Marine, who'd just finished basic training and returned home a few days earlier. Neither of us noticed that most of his companions and all of mine had left the table and the waiting room, when the departure of our bus had been announced. The police were gone too. But somewhere in those few minutes we had connected, that fellow and I, and so when we realized that we were virtually alone, he looked at me and said, "Come on! We'd better hurry; I'll walk you to the bus."

The bus hadn't left, but it was boarded and ready. For a few seconds, we stood in front of the door and finished. He didn't agree with any of what had gone on that summer in Mississippi, he said, but he thought we had courage, and he understood better why people might do something like this. Then, he held out his hand, and we shook.

The bus was an old one with small, high windows, a narrow aisle, velour seats with wooden backs, and little if any interior light. As I stepped up next to the driver, it erupted in cheers. Making my way slowly to the back, people with tears streaming down their cheeks silently patted my shoulder or squeezed my forearm. I will carry that moment to my grave.

The arraignment in Hinds County Court was a bit of an anti-climax for many of us, but was interesting in its own way. William Kuntsler again appeared representing Freedom Riders who had, without a question of a doubt, disturbed the peace, the system, and a way of life in Mississippi.

An arrangement had been agreed, as I recall, whereby our sentences were reduced to time served in return for an altered pleading of nolo contendre. (Years later of course, the U.S. Supreme Court would reverse our convictions.) At one point in the hearing in Jackson, however, Kuntsler, who had a large, stentorian voice, rose to his feet and proclaimed that he would like the Court record to show that through most of the proceeding, the presiding Judge had been reading a comic book! The request was denied.

Last Thoughts

Even at the time, it was clear to most of us who were involved that the Freedom Rides were part of a long continuum stretching back to Greensboro and Birmingham, and forward to the struggles for school desegregation and voting rights, wherever they would occur. I personally felt that I would not be directly involved in that future - that the movement was and should be in the hands of people like Dianne Nash and other capable blacks whose commitment was sustained and community-based and total. Dianne might never reach Gov. Ross Barnett or that comic book-reading judge, but she was better equipped than I to carry on the dialogue with that young Marine, and maybe even the shotgun-toting trusty.

I had issues, though - with my father, my friends, my college mentors, and everyone who, I thought at the time, had ill prepared me to deal with or even comprehend the injustice and anger in the streets and back roads in America. Like many other returning Freedom Riders, I'm sure, I was greeted in my community with the accusation that the sit-ins were too much, too destructive, and that we had been playing with fire. My response was that if they thought integration was too much, wait until they had a whiff of black power. The cities were going to burn, I snarled, when I returned in the autumn of 1961. My father, understanding and supportive but puzzled, began referring to me as, "that thin-lipped son-of-a-bitch across the table."

Back at Middlebury College I went to the one black in my senior class, a fellow named Ron Brown. We were on the track team together. I asked him to join me on a speaking tour of New England colleges, and he turned me down flat. Wasn't interested. His contribution to the "movement", he said, would be to earn lots of money and exert a constructive influence that way.

Ron's reaction should be perhaps seen in the context of the times - this was the very early 60's, and most of our classmates were intently focused on getting the best offer they could from the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company. True to his word, Ron became very successful in business and later, Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration. What influence he exerted, others can decide. We did not speak again, until our 25th reunion.

I went on that speaking tour, though that was pretty much it for me, as far as involvement in civil-rights actions. But the Freedom Rides had changed my life and my direction, toward the Peace Corps and ultimately a career in writing/journalism and in the United Nations, in international emergency assistance. My politics drifted left. That summer effectively closed some worlds for me, and opened many others. But I would not trade that moment in the Memphis bus station for a medal in the Gold Cup sailing championship....AND the best offer from the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.

Narrative

Margaret Herring (a.k.a. Lauren or Laughrun McSurely)

Wilmington, North Carolina

November 14, 2004

I worked for COFO in late 1964 in Batesville MS and then worked for MFDP in the winter of '64, '65 in Jackson and Washington DC during the congressional challenge. After that I worked in the national SNCC office with Betty Garman (Robinson) in the Northern Support office. I also handled medical needs of the SNCC staff. It was in the spring and summer of 1964 that the concept of Black Power began to be enunciated, in the beginning by Willie Ricks and Stokely Carmichael.

Also, during this time the Lowdnes County Freedom Organization began in Alabama.

I spent many hours discussing and listening to discussions about Black Power in 1965. To me, it made sense. What it meant was that black liberation organizations, and SNCC was one, should be run by black people. They should lead and even those white folks who wanted to serve (i.e, me) should go back home, work with poor and working class white people, build a peoples' organization that was against racism and against the Vietnam war and in the future would/could form a coalition with the black liberation movement. This was a very challenging proposition for me because I was a southerner.

It meant that I would go into the "white" south I had come from and organize. These would be white working class people I had been leery (afraid) of while I worked for COFO and SNCC. I knew that these experiments had been tried before in Mississippi and had more or less failed. Nevertheless, I felt it was important to begin. Thus begins a chain of events that lasts even unto today.

I felt that I had no other choice since dropping out was not an option and I agreed with the concept of black power. It was never a matter of being "kicked out" the way some in the liberal press have portrayed it. It just made sense to me. I left in December of 1965.

I took a year off (1966) and worked in Washington DC for an anti poverty agency. During this time I met with a lot of people and also met a future husband, Al McSurely whom I married the next year. We stayed married for about 13 years. In January of 1967, we made a trip across the country and met with many old SNCC and movement folks including the Bradens in Louisville, Mike Miller in Kansas City, Clint Jencks in Colorado, Fred Jerome and Decca Truehaft in San Francisco/Oakland. I/we wanted to see what other organizers were doing.

In the spring of 1967 Al and I moved to Pikeville, Ky. I worked on the SCEF staff and Al had a job with the Appalachian Volunteers. We had in mind organizing a workers' party which would be anti-racist, anti-war and tax the coal companies, thereby returning resources to the community for schools, roads, etc. Al got fired in a few weeks and joined me on the SCEF staff.

Our project was called the "Mountain Project" and while there was a history of strong union organizing in the area, we ourselves had no base. There was already an indiginous movement against strip mining. When we got to Pike County there was one other SCEF organizer in Perry County. This organizer had rented a house outside Hazard, KY. and allowed his dog to run loose. The dog would defecate in other peoples' houses. Not their yards, their houses.

This was the "Mountain Project" we found ouselves in. Fortunately, Hazard was a ways away from Pike County. Nevertheless, the whole scenario bordered on the surreal.

Meanwhile we used contacts which were being developed by the Appalachian Volunteers and and some union contacts and made a few friends. But mostly local folks were wary of us because we were outsiders. It was difficult work. For instance, if you wanted to ask people to come to a meeting, you had to drive a long way up a swiss cheese type road and invite them. You couldn't call them on the phone-no phones. No electricity, usually. The poverty was oppressive and dis-heartening. It was very frustrating as you can imagine.

Meanwhile, other white civil rights workers came to SCEF as organizers in the south. They had the same idea (the response to Black Power) of organizing a people's organization which would be anti-racist, against the war, and change the economic system. Among them were Carol Hanish, Mary Britting, Esther Heifetz, Jack Minnis, Bob and Dottie Zellner, all ex-SNCC staffers. I am sure I am forgetting somebody.

But all this came to a screeching hall for us in August, 1967, when our home was raided by 17 armed men and we were arrested for sedition. We were in jail for about a week while civil rights lawyers (Kunstler and Stavis) came to Kentucky and have the case removed to federal court. The Bradens and SCEF gave wonderful support. The Bradens put their house up for our bond and when they came to sign papers at the Pike County Courthouse, they were also arrested for sedition.

The man who arrested us was running for Lt. Governor of Kentucky. His platform was to run the "commonists" out of the mountains. He lost the election and later said that we ruined his political career.

The arresting party seized almost all paper and paper products from our home. Books, papers and documents, address lists, a copy of Salt of the Earth (movie which we had shown several places), etc. They were particularly offended by SNCC literature and some of the pictures we had on the wall showing black and white people together. Also they didn't like the newspaper from Green Witch Village (The Village Voice).

While we were in jail a bus load of migrant workers from Detroit stopped at a convenience store outside town on their way south. The rumor quickly spread that a bus load of black people had come from Detroit to break us out of jail.

We had made some mistakes, of course. Probably it was not a good idea to hang a portrait of Che Guevara over the fireplace. Later on, our landlord testified that it was a picture of Nikita Khrushchev. Did I mention surreal?

In any event, our documents were sent to Washington, DC to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (the old McCarthy Committee) without our knowledge and we had to fight to get them back. They were eventually returned in December of 1968 along with a subpoena for 236 of the documents.

During the months between the sedition arrests and getting the documents back, we were very isolated. No one would speak to us. Even local people who were friends asked that we not come over because their house had been shot into and they didn't want to get themselves killed. I was very frustrated and sad because we were not able to make any progress. I also cried just about every day because by then we had a baby, Victor, and I didn't want him to die. It's one thing to be willing to die for what you believe in but quite another to jeopardize your child like that.

During the long days of isolation we were frequently visited by other organizers (had to cook and complained to the Bradens that I didn't want to be the Dolly Madison of the mountains. That was before the womens movement got aholt of me.) and we got wonderful letters from folks in the movement in other parts of the world which kept us going.

In December, 1968, our home was dynamited. I remember the blast and the implosion and explosion. In the darkness and swirling dust, I could make out a letter from Fred Jerome floating in mid air gently descending. The baby was crying and Al crawled around looking for his clothes. It was about 10 degrees outside. Al was sure a gas line had ruptured, but I had been expecting something like this. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

The Kentucky State Police came in response to our phone call. They said that it looked like six sticks of dynamite thrown against our bedroom window. "The next time this happens, call the city police." But I already knew there would be a next time.

We left Pikeville that night. A legal battle ensued that lasted for 18 years (McSurely v. McClellan, 753 F.2d 88 (D.C. Cir. 1985). The Bradens and movement people and our lawyers stuck by us and gave us unflagging support. If you want to read more about the legal battle, see In Our Defense by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy (Morrow), Freedom Spent by Richard Harris (Little, Brown), Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry Caudill, and It Did Happen Here, by Bud and Ruth Schultz (University of California Press).

So, all these events and many more follow, too long and convoluted to include in this little remembrance, come to mind when I am asked : What was the effect of Black Power upon your life.

If I had it to do over again, I would do the same thing.

Interview

Wazir (Willie B.) Peacock (SNCC, Mississippi and Alabama)

July, 2001

Origins

Hartford:

Where did you get the name Wazir?

Wazir:

My name was Willie B. Peacock, and I kind of modified that. So many Willie's in the world. [Laughter] Wazir - I came to Islam right after SNCC around 1966, and from that - after being there about 11 years, I was given the name.

Hartford:

In Arabic, the Wazir was the main advisor to the Sultan?

Wazir:

Yeah, but it has different meanings. That is one meaning. One is like the premier, but it means essentially one who shares with the people. One of the persons who interpreted or translated the Koran into English - he said that the best meaning was one who worked on behalf of the people for the God, for Allah. A servant of the people in its truest sense, rather than one like the Wazir that's mostly served. [Laughter]

Hartford:

So why don't we start with how and why you got active in the Civil Rights Movement?

Wazir:

Basically, my involvement in the movement came about as a result of my background. Living in Mississippi and under those oppressive conditions as a youth, it was always just a part of my upbringing. My father was actively involved - my mother did not know it - in the meetings that were going on in the little town of Mound Bayou where they - the Black soldiers from World War II - came together to meet. They formed a statewide organization.

I guess he was just kind of tutoring me all the time but I didn't realize it. And so it was in me to get involved. I was always trying to do something - in high school and before that. The experience that I had before I was in grade school - we ended up on the plantation somehow, and I got a chance to see what slavery was probably like and feel it.

It really made me want to do something at an early age, because I hadn't experienced that with living in a little town, not subjected to that kind of plantation treatment. It made me ready to do something really. So the first thing I did, I ran away from home when I was about 14, and when I finally came back I started school. I went to college. My motivation for going to college was to put myself in a position where I could do something.

Rust College, Mississippi

Wazir:

I went to Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. I was in college when the sit-ins started in North Carolina, so we started right there on the campus. The little theater we used to go to downtown, the movie theater, the first thing we did was boycott it, because we were sitting up there in the balcony. It was separate. The college students provided 90% of the income for that theater, but we had to sit up there in this balcony separated from the main floor. So we did that successfully. So rather than integrate it, the owner of it, he closed it. He closed it, because he wasn't going to step out there on his own and do something. Economically, he couldn't go on running the movie without us, so he closed it. That was our first action. We got our feet wet. That was the first thing we did.

In the first part of '62, Dion Diamond came over [to Rust], and he met with some of the students who were ready to do some action. We didn't see him anymore. I heard later what had happened to him. He and Chuck McDew had a case in Louisiana, and he went back for that, and they kept him.

Hartford:

A long time. [After meeting with students at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Dion Diamond was arrested for criminal anarchy and and trying to overthrow the state of Louisiana. He served a long sentence. When SNCC members Chuck McDew and Bob Zellner visited him in jail, they too were arrested for criminal anarchy.]

Down in the Delta

Wazir:

Around the spring of '61 I first met the guy that I was going to be working with mainly, because he came up with Jim Bevel to Holly Springs. Jim Bevel, Sam Block, and Joey Green Jr. came to the Rust College campus in the spring of '61. After that, around the fall of 1961, that's when I first met Bob Moses. He was dealing with people who had attempted to register to vote in Tallahatchie County, and so he came up to the campus to get a bunch of students to come down there to support - be a moral support for those people. They had white people coming out of the woodwork to intimidate all those people. So we did that.

Hartford:

Bevel was still with SNCC then?

Wazir:

Yeah, he was still with SNCC at that time. And I guess he was coming feeling things out. Yeah, it was SNCC. So a bunch of us students met with them, and then we didn't hear anything else until Bob Moses [in the Fall]. We had heard about it, because it was a big thing. We had heard about the big thing that went down in Amite County.

Hartford:

McComb?

Wazir:

McComb and all of that, and so he hadn't been out of jail too long when he came up there. And that was the first time that I met Amzie Moore, in Oxford, Mississippi up at the Federal Court. When I saw him, I had seen him before. I knew I had seen him before. Then I came to realize later on that summer of '62, about August, when he and Bob came to my house to get me, it clicked. I had seen him in association with my father.

Wazir:

And then later Frank Smith came over from Georgia, from Atlanta. We started working together. He went back for a little while, and then he came back and I worked with him the next spring.

Hartford:

When you say "worked with him," what were you doing?

Wazir:

We were doing voter registration. We started out organizing right there in Holly Springs. The first thing we organized, we got together with the Black civic leaders there. What they wanted to do first of all was they wanted us to help them organize a credit union. So we helped them to organize a credit union, and then Frank and I went around. We went around together to gather petitions from people who had attempted to register to vote. Together we went out into Marshall County, and we got them notarized.

Hartford:

You mean affidavits?

Wazir:

Yeah, that's what I mean. Affidavits. We got the affidavits notarized, and we sent them to the Civil Rights Division in Washington, DC. The guy who was head of that division, he was so impressed. He actually flew Frank Smith there to talk to him about the things that were going on, the atrocities, and the denials, and the level of education of the people who were being denied. Because actually the literacy rate of the Black people in Marshall County was higher than the whites, because there was two Black colleges there: Mississippi Industrial and Rust College.

So that made for a good case. And so we continued to work with other students. Frank started teaching them how to give spiels, you know at churches and all of that kind of thing. So we really got rolling hitting these churches on Sundays and going door to door knocking on these doors in Holly Springs and other places in Marshall County.

Joining SNCC

Hartford:

And by this time you were on SNCC's staff?

Wazir:

Uh, I would say I was working with SNCC, but I wasn't actually staff.

Hartford:

You were still going to school?

Wazir:

I was still going to school. Just in case I didn't get a chance to go to medical school that fall, I took some educational courses so I could teach if I needed to. So I was around that whole summer with Frank Smith, working with him, right on up until August when I finished all the course work. And then the time came for me to make the decision, what I was going to do. So I went home.

Hartford:

This is August of '62?

Wazir:

Right. August '62. I went home, and my father's sister was there visiting, so I was poised to leave with her and go to Detroit and maybe work about a month and then return to the south, go to Meharry Medical School in Nashville. I think I was home about a week, when Bob Moses and Amzie Moore said to me, "We need you, man." So I said, "OK." I went and talked to my mother. She was scared. She was definitely disappointed. My father was pretty happy about it because his old partner, his old buddy Amzie Moore was there. They were Master Masons and they were giving signs, and they were like just having a good time about it, you know. But my mother was really upset. So she gave me her blessings to go on, so we left.

We left that evening, and I was amazed at Amzie Moore. He knew all these people. All these people that I found out, about all these people who were involved, that I had no idea. And I grew up right there in Charleston, and I had no idea because he made his rounds and contacting all these people before we left Tallahatchie County.

Hartford:

Well, it's just like the Resistance. Everybody keeps secret.

Wazir:

That's right. Yeah, that's what happened.

Hartford:

If one person is captured, they can't tell who the others are.

Wazir:

That's right. That's right. That's what they did.

Hartford:

Where did you go from there? To McComb?

Greenwood

Wazir:

No, we left and went to Cleveland. Amzie Moore's home that night. I was destined to Ruleville. That's where I was supposed to go and work. But what happened that night is that Sam Block and Lawrence Guyot and the other guy, Lavaughn Brown, were about under a siege there in Greenwood by the Whites. The Ku Klux Klan branch, whatever you want to put it. They called, and at that moment, they said that there were a bunch of white men out here in white T-shirts, and they got bats and ax handles and stuff, and they're getting ready to come upstairs, what should be do? And Bob said that the first thing, you should get out of there. [Laughter]

Hartford:

Yeah, I heard that story. They came out off the roof.

Wazir:

They had to push them through the opening. And the TV antenna, that's what he slid down. He hurt his hand. It was just raw when we saw him the next morning. So Bob and I said, "Well, let's go to Greenwood." We went to Greenwood. I was wondering all along the way what we were going to do once we got there. So we arrived I guess about midnight, and papers were scattered everywhere.

Hartford:

They had trashed the office?

Wazir:

They had trashed the office. And so we got ready to go to bed. That was cool, but the thing is Bob turned on the thermostat. It was hot, and he turned on this noisy fan. I mean, it was a big old fan that sits like in a box, and it just made noise. I just kind of went along with it, but damn, he's going to let these people know that we're here. I said, "Well, if I'm still alive in the morning, I guess I might as well dedicate myself to staying here with this stuff the rest of the time." And I was alive the next morning.

Sam Block, Guyot, and Lavaughn Brown, they showed back up, and Sam was saying that he was burned out. He needed to get away. So Bob was talking seriously about just shutting this project down, because it had implications of the same kind of thing that happened down in McComb. You get hurt, get killed. They didn't want that. My argument was that we'd contacted too many people. Sam had already taken people down to attempt to register to vote. I said, "He's known. He's got an office here." I said, "We just can't leave." So we talked about it. I said, "Well, I'll stay." So he allowed me to stay.

Hartford:

Just you?

Wazir:

Yeah. I guess for about three weeks, I was there by myself. They made arrangements for me to stay at a dentist's, Dr. Cornwall, and nobody had any idea where I was staying. I would have to get out in the morning, before they would even leave, and I would call before I would call back at night. I would call and he would tell me what time I should come and what route. I never came back to his house the same way twice. I was relatively isolated, because I couldn't allow anybody to know where I lived. Nobody. Because he was such an upstanding guy in the community, and nobody had any idea he would do that kind of thing for us.

He had four boys, four little boys, and they made a punching bag out of me. Those boys would attack me every night, because I guess that was their way of saying, "What are you doing here?" So about three weeks, Dr. Cornwall got concerned that things were heating up a little bit, and that he couldn't stand the heat. So I had to get out of there, and by that time, we had been going every weekend over to Amzie's to learn how to write reports and write and all that kind of stuff.

I found my uncle. My uncle lived in Greenwood. I was on campus one day, and I ran up on him, and I hadn't seen him since I was about - I must have been about six years' old, but I recognized him because he looked a lot like my dad. So I asked him, "Are you Uncle Percy?" He said, "Yeah. Who are you? Are you Georgia's boy?" I said, "Yes." Just decided like that. So I started staying at his house at night. Sam and Guyot, they were working - they had started working back in Greenwood during the day time, and they would leave at night, and I would stay in Greenwood.

Ruleville

Wazir:

Then after awhile, Charlie Cobb, James Jones, and Jesse Harris, they all came to Ruleville. So we would leave Greenwood, Sam and I, and Guyot and all, and we would head over to Ruleville. We would help them work in that county, Sunflower County. We would go to Cleveland. We would go into Indianola, come back to Cleveland.

It was intense. All this was taking place in August. And after awhile, we got Ruleville moving, and we got to take a bunch of people over to Indianola to attempt to register to vote, and one of those people was Fannie Lou Hamer. And when we got back a particular night on a bus, we got stopped on that highway by the highway patrol saying the bus was the wrong color and all that kind of stuff. So when we got back, we had a mass meeting at the church. And we saw this lady back there sweating and singing. Her voice stood out way above everybody else's.

Hartford:

This is in Ruleville?

Wazir:

Yeah, Ruleville. And that was Mrs. Hamer, and she had gotten evicted from the plantation that very day. I think it was August 12th or something like that. But you see, during that time we're just moving, moving fast and intense. So we had to find - we found her a place. They knew her, so she stayed in Mr and Mrs [Seshulm's] house. We tried to keep it secret where she was. And then from that point, we started just hitting - We were working in Indianola, Greenwood, Ruleville. We did a little work in Cleveland. Cleveland wasn't such a challenge.

Tuskegee & TIAL

The early part of '63, in January, it demanded more of me and Sam's attention. We spent more time January to February really intensifying things in Greenwood, and then Greenwood broke in February. So a lot of big things happened in Greenwood. Most of the time I was in Greenwood. From that point, from the fall of 1964, I went back to school, at Tuskegee. Then I got involved with what was called on the campus, Tuskegee Institute Advancement League.

Hartford:

TIAL?

Wazir:

TIAL. I worked with Sammy Younge, who did a lot of work in Macon County, and then we made a big move when Martin was supposed to march, and he didn't. We went to Montgomery with about 1200 students sit-in at the church on Dexter. That was pretty successful. And then after the spring of '65 and school was out, I came back to Greenwood, and we did some folk festivals. This is '65 now. We did some folk festivals, which we thought - people were being, made ashamed of their culture, and that's where most of the blues and all that kind of stuff came from. So we thought it would be a good idea to do some cultural revival stuff, and we did that the whole summer, right on up to February of 1966. And then maybe in April or so, we left, me and Sam, and came to California.

Hartford:

I want to go through these kind of frequent questions, which will probably sound a little dull, but [Laughing] these are what kids ask.

Wazir:

Right. Exactly.

Violence

Hartford:

Was violence or repression ever directed against you personally?

Wazir:

Yes it was. Sam and I, we were working late one night in Greenwood. March 6th, we had been over to the church, because Dick Gregory had sent a bunch of clothes and food down [for the people who had been fired and evicted for trying to register to vote].

Hartford:

This is '63?

Wazir:

Yes, '63. So we went over there to sort it. We had names that we were supposed to issue food to the next day, and we went over there to break the food down and box it to make it convenient for the people. All they had to do was come and get their box. So we must have finished that up about 11 o'clock, and we were going to go home. Sam and I and his girlfriend and her sister, we were in the car together. Sam was having an asthma attack, and he wanted to go by the office and pick up his breathalyzer, atomizer, whatever. His girlfriend said, "You've got one at my house, so come on."

I had this bad feeling. I told Sam, "Don't go back." I did everything to keep Sam from going by the office, and I begged his girlfriend. I said, "Don't let him go by the office." And we went by. He drove on, and he stopped at the office. I rose up from the back seat, and I said, "Don't let him get out. Don't let him get out of the car." And she said, "Sam." As soon as she said that, we heard this thundering noise. Both of the front side windows went out. If she hadn't leaned over to say something to Sam, and he hadn't leaned back toward her, his head would've been blown off. She saved his life. If she had been sitting over there, sitting straight up, it would've gotten her too. Those big buckshots man.

Hartford:

From a shotgun.

Wazir:

Yeah, big shotgun. So the car drove off. It was a station wagon. There was about four people in it. They drove off very slowly, because they thought they had really done their work. And I was either crazy, angry, or one. I jumped out and ran down the street throwing bricks at the car. They sped up, but that was a close call. Came close to death at that particular point. So yeah, it was directly at us personally. That was announced.

And the second time, that was the spring of '64, when we were getting ready to go to Oxford, Ohio to do an orientation with the students that was going to come down [for the Freedom Summer project], we stopped outside of Columbus, Mississippi. They took us to jail, took us out, beat us up, and the next day they had a trial. And miraculously, a telephone call came while they were getting ready to start trying us, because they were going to send us to the county farm so they could kill us.

This judge - this call shook him up. He said, "Do any y'all know who [name]?" And we all said in unison, "Yes, that's our lawyer." They stopped proceedings right then and there. Went back in the back room, and when they came out, they let us out. They charged us - collectively, we had about $15 that they had taken, and that's what they charged us for the fine.

Hartford:

[Laughing] Yeah, I know those Mississippi courts -

Wazir:

Those are the main two times that we thought that it was over.

Making a Difference

Hartford:

Really. So as a Civil Rights worker and the work that you did, do you feel that you made a difference?

Wazir:

I think collectively we made a difference. We faced fears straight on that the population faced every day and just had a lot of fear. The workers, the people who came down later, began to realize the kind of fear that people lived under. Fear that most of the people who came down in '64 had never had to live under in their whole life. It was really unreal to most people, but this is the kind of stuff that the Mississippi staff had grown up under.

It was like a shock to the police and authorities to see. They knew we were Mississippians, and to see us facing up to them and standing up to them, they couldn't understand what had happened, what had gone wrong. So breaking through that fear and getting people to make the attempt to register to vote, that was a big, big step. And I know the students asking the questions, they cannot appreciate how big a step that was. But yes, we made a difference. We made a difference, because we put ourselves out there first. We had to do what we were asking the people to do.

Changes

Hartford:

Do you think the Civil Rights Movement changed race relations in the United States? Do you feel that there was progress made?

Wazir:

Yes, progress was made. It changed relationships. It brought to surface some of the racism that was in this country that people didn't really want to recognize. It ran all the way through our society, but it wasn't realized until we made the move that we made in the South. To make an example, the point I'm talking about, when Martin Luther King went to Cicero, Illinois, that's when people realized that it wasn't just in the South, that it was all over the country. Maybe even people who didn't think they were racists, when it came home to them, they had never been tested before.

The status quo affected different areas of the country in different ways. In some, the population of Black people wasn't that great. They never had to show and tell so to speak, so it brought things to the surface, and I think you have to bring things to the surface before they can be worked with. So in that way, it made a difference and for the better. The laws were made, but I think that it takes a little longer for the human fact to accept that which we thought idealistically would be better for human relationships. So I think that's ongoing.

Hartford:

Beyond just bringing it to the surface so everybody could see it, was there any other kind of progress or changes made?

Wazir:

Yes. The obvious example is that in Mississippi, when the 1965 Voting Rights Acts were passed, we were able to get great numbers of people registered to vote. That changed the politics in Mississippi. Actually, politics started changing in 1964 when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party went to Atlantic City to challenge the regular party for their seats. That had never been done before by Mississippians. Now, as far as politics, you have more Black elected officials in the state of Mississippi than you have anywhere in the country, and you have good and bad and in between.

You know, the schools were integrated in the state of Mississippi and Alabama where Wallace stood in the door and those schools were integrated. And the University of Mississippi was integrated where Paul Johnson stood in the door like the Governor of Alabama. In a lot of public places, like the swimming pools and places like that, the cities closed them rather than have Blacks and whites swimming together. One hotel closed. It still stands there empty doing nothing on the Capitol Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Instead of integrating, they closed, and it's just sitting there, an eyesore now. In many different ways, progress was made. But we lost some things too. The Black schools were reduced to middle schools or something like that. They would have had Black superintendents of the schools. We lost a lot of that.

Racism

Hartford:

Do you think there is still racism in the United States?

Wazir:

There was racism then in the United States, and there is racism in the United States now. The Voting Rights Act didn't change that. It didn't change the hearts and minds of people. Like I said earlier, the Civil Rights Movement brought to surface the amount of racism that is in this country. We can see now, that to a large degree, this country, this United States is divided along racial lines. The racism in this country is scary. It's dangerous, because it is so divisive. It makes it where it doesn't look like a United States. The politicians are doing the same things that Bilbo, Governor Barnett were doing. They're using race for their politics.

Hartford:

Strom Thurmond.

Wazir:

Strom Thurmond is still there. Right. So they feed it, so we don't expect change to come from politicians. There has to be a change of heart with the people.

Failures

Hartford:

What did the Civil Rights Movement fail to accomplish?

Wazir:

Let's see. What were the goals of the Civil Rights Movement? The goals of the Civil Rights Movement were, in my estimation, limited. To a large degree, those goals were achieved, on the surface: integrating public facilities. You can ride from one end of the country to the other now without worrying about being hassled too much.

But the bigger picture, I think the Civil Rights Movement could not achieve the changing of the hearts, because we were strictly using the law, the Constitution of the United States, that which was already legal but had not been enforced. Although they made new laws to bring some change about, but they already had good laws on the book. They just weren't being enforced. If I say we failed in any area, I'd say we might have failed in - how should I say this? Is articulating to the population of this country what our goals were. I never thought that what we were doing would achieve the complete picture of what needed to be. But it would be a start. So I can't say we failed in what were trying to achieve.

Direct Action

Hartford:

Do you think the marches, sit-ins, and other direct action demonstrations helped or hurt the movement?

Wazir:

They helped. Because they were part of mass education. At that time, we used the media. The media was showing to the country what was going on, and by the same token, they had to explain why we were out there demonstrating. At the time, some people who thought we shouldn't be doing that, like "How dare you?" Especially in the South, they weren't ready to see what we were doing, so it sure made them angry. It brought about a lot of Klan activity. Sure that hurt, but it was a part of the whole thing that was necessary. We couldn't avoid that. Those people had been oppressed by these forces all the time. It was a time for confrontation, to bring it all out to the surface, so in that sense, the sit-ins, the marches, and all of that was necessary, and it helped.

Hartford:

A lot of people say, "Well, all of that turmoil was just hurting your cause."

Wazir:

I heard a lot of that. I heard a lot of that during those days. It's hurting your cause. The cause, well, it was hurting that cause. In other words, it seems to me that they were saying, "You're going to cause me to act in a way that I don't want you to see me that way. But that's where my heart is. That's who I am. I am part of the same people that would come out in a mob and hang you. But at least I'll talk to you, and you hurting your cause, I can't, you know..." Some people said, "You're moving too fast."

Hartford:

And too far.

Wazir:

And too far. Too fast, too far. It needs to be more gradual. We weren't hearing that. We were young and all. We weren't about gradualness at all. We wanted it right then and now. And it was already too late as far as we were concerned.

Kennedy

Hartford:

Do you think that the President did everything in his power to better the situation at the time?

Wazir:

No, he didn't. He didn't do all that he could do. We should have gotten federal protection, because we were doing voter registration. The citizens had the right to vote. It's a right, not a privilege. In the South, they were treating it like it was some kind of privilege. It was in the law and the power of the President to order the Justice Department to give us protection, but we had a director of the FBI at the time [J. Edgar Hoover] who boldly said that he was not going to protect those Civil Rights workers. He had that kind of clout, he could say that. Of course, the President could have ordered him, but he never did. He never ordered it. He never did order it, and for good reason for himself. He was already getting himself ready to run for a second term. You had the [Senator] Eastlands and the [Senator] Strom Thurmonds and all those politicians. He had to play politics. He couldn't come out, just to be elected again, he couldn't come out like that. We didn't have, Blacks in the South, did not have the vote yet.

Hartford:

You're referring to both Kennedy and Johnson or just one?

Wazir:

I'm referring to Kennedy. Kennedy, at that time, he was crucial. For example, when Fannie Lou Hamer, in the fall of '62, was shot at [for trying to register], and there was those two girls that got hit - they thought that Ms. Hamer was in that house where they shot into. Kennedy spoke about it the next day, but that's all. At that time, he had the opportunity. He could have justified sending Federal marshals in to protect us wherever we said we wanted to work on a particular day. He didn't do that. He had the opportunity to do it if he was going to move on it.

Non-Violence

Hartford:

What are your thoughts on non-violence?

Wazir:

Non-violence was a philosophy, a way of life. Over the years, not during the 60's, but over the years, I have found that it works. It actually works. But we hadn't been schooled in real non-violence, real satyigraha. Passive resistance. We hadn't been schooled in that. Only people like Jim Lawson and people like that who really had the philosophy down, who really believed in it as a way of life.

We used it as a tactic, and it was the best thing to do because we sure couldn't outgun them and if we'd have walked out to march with guns, that would have been good as they wanted since they would have justification to just shoot us right down. Whether we pulled it out or not, they could. That would have been the end of the movement. It would have been over just like that [snaps fingers].

So non-violence as a tactic was good, it would have been even better if we had been more disciples of it because we would have lasted longer. We would have done more. We would have gone places that - we would have gone into areas that we're just now getting to. I think that's what should be used now. I think that worldwide where they're having conflicts, I think that's what should be used. Non-violence. Weapons haven't, war, it hasn't solved anything. I really believe in it.

Black Power

Hartford:

What are your thoughts on the Black Power movement?

Wazir:

Black empowerment, I think, was where we were coming from all the time because, at the time, in the South, Blacks had no power at all.

The form of Black Power that was being espoused, I don't know - that came later after me and Sam had left and come to California in '66. That was when Stokely Carmichael - Kwame Ture - had declared Black Power. That form of Black Power where you separate yourself from your allies, regardless of what color they are, I don't go for that. All the allies who saw the deficit, the need to bring about a balance in this country by helping to empower another people - we just happen to be Black and without any kind of power - I think that's good. I think it's good for the country, good for the whole world, because then you bring to the table the elements that's in the position that needs to demand justice.

Other people, speaking of white people, there were injustice going on along with them, but not to the same degree that would cause them to move. It was so blatant among us that we needed a mass movement to bring about a change. So we needed power, and we just happened to be Black and power. Real power has no color. Power's just power.

Hartford:

Except maybe green.

Wazir:

Green. [Laughter]

Assassinations

Hartford:

What are your thoughts on the assassination of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King?

Wazir:

My thoughts about it is from what I could see at the time. I was in New York in 1964. Because I didn't participate fully in the Freedom Summer project of '64 with all the students I knew. I was in New York getting myself together. I went to some of those meetings at the Audubon, and the kind of tension that I felt, that I'd never felt anywhere before then or since. I felt there were elements there that was - it was like a conspiracy brewing. As soon as they got this guard to stop having people check for weapons, that's when he got it. I think he was assassinated and they picked the right time to do it. It's when there was controversy between Malcolm and Elijah Mohammad. It was a good time to do it. I think they picked the time right.

Hartford:

Who's they?

Wazir:

I think it was the United States government that did it. I think they planted people there to take him out. Because when Malcolm went to Mecca and came back, he started talking about another kind of thing. Because he went to Mecca, and in Mecca he saw white people. He didn't know that there were white Muslims before that. That Islam was universal. He had been given - Malcolm had been, from that trip, he had been elevated in the Islamic world to a higher -

Hartford:

The Hajj?

Wazir:

He was a Hajji, but at the same time, he was, it was like a position - it's not talked about or written much. He had been given a position in the world of Islam. He never got a chance to exercise that. So the State Department had a lot of reasons to take him out.

The same goes with Martin Luther King. It was obvious that there was a conspiracy going to kill him. Starting with everything that happened in Memphis, housing, security forces were moved around and changed. They set it all up. The timing - that somebody had to get him out there on the veranda at the right time. Somebody among that, around him, which I don't know which one of them it is, I just know who all was around him. I know there were people who got elevated and got rewards after his death. I'm not saying that - but somebody had to get him out there at the right time. I feel that he was - I think Martin knew that there was no escape after seeing things that happened. He was going to get it.

Hartford:

And that's why he gave that speech that night?

Wazir:

Right. That's why he gave that speech. Right. I think the reason why is that they thought it would stop the movement, especially the way they thought it was going. He began to - his philosophy and all was getting to appeal to everybody. That wasn't good for the politicians.

Hartford:

He was also addressing economic issues.

Wazir:

That's right. Economic issues and the [Vietnam] war. And he was powerful. He was powerful enough to stop the clock. They had to stop him. I think they'll stop anybody if they can. I think they're watching it close to not let anybody, regardless what color, get that powerful again outside of their - without their permission. That they don't have control at all.

Hartford:

And they in this case?

Wazir:

The "they's" are the bureaus of our government that's gotten out of control and the CIA is one of them. The military industrial complex is out of control. I mean, they run the country. They basically just try to run the world and anybody that gets in their way, they - it's almost got to be a kind of a system that nobody can stop. It runs itself now. It runs itself. They talk about this artificial intelligence. The thing is running itself. It has to run amok before something can be brought about.

Interview

Jean Wiley

October 26, 2001

Origins

Wiley:

When I was growing up, there was a term called "Racemen" and "Racewomen" and that's what you wanted to be. You aspired to be a Raceman or Racewoman.

It meant that you were constantly and consciously doing things that furthered the race. That your personal success had to take a back step. In a way, it was probably a little like the Talented Tenth except that the Talented Tenth meant the intellectuals. This was across class and income lines. So you grew up knowing who the Racemen and Women were, in a city as big as Baltimore.

I should mention - I grew up in a family where my father and his two brothers tried for years to join the union. The only union available to workers was the Steelworkers. Bethlehem Steel, when steel was a big company in Baltimore. That was the only union that finally broke and began to open. Remember, the other unions stayed close. So in the sense of economic mobility, and that's inconceivable to younger people today that he couldn't get into other unions. My father was very bitter about it, and finally stopped, I mean there's only so long, but 15 years is a long time to try to break in....

The freedom of movement, that's what people don't understand, it's the freedom of movement. Not to be able to walk into the main library of any place. Not to be able to go to the museum, except on days when they might let a couple of Black people in and might not. Public accommodations never did it for me, having grown up in the border states. It was movement.

You were literally imprisoned in a system, and it wasn't - I mean, the Black community in many ways was thriving, but it couldn't provide everything that the society does, and as soon as you left it, you were in hostile territory. First of all, you couldn't leave, mostly. I mean, you couldn't go into other neighborhoods. So the freedom of movement and, therefore, the freedom of intellectual pursuit. What's happening beyond your own community and your own country was an enormous thing.

Freedom Rides

Wiley:

Another thing that stands, really comes to my mind a lot, is the Freedom Rides. I guess that's again because it was motion. I think people ought to study the Freedom Rides more than they do because it's inconceivable now, especially to young people, that you couldn't hop on a bus and go wherever the hell you want to go, and sit wherever you wanted to sit without fear of safety. You couldn't, and it's really striking that when that Supreme Court decision came down, it didn't have to be limited to schools. It didn't have to be limited to state by state. "Oh, okay, we'll send troops to Little Rock and maybe we'll send," - actually, they did send troops to Virginia. You know, they could have opened it all up, but they didn't, so you had to try the buses.

First of all, you had to test it and then you had to test it stop by stop by stop. Later on, years later, 20 years later, I would interview Bernice Regan and I asked her the same question, how she got involved in the movement, and she said she was a college student and they decided to test the train station because, okay, if you're going to open the buses, maybe the train stations will be open, but they weren't. They got arrested and that's how that Albany movement began by testing Freedom Rides again, but this time, on the train.

The other reason that I think the Freedom Rides are important, even though I didn't go on them, is because they radicalized a lot of people with those buses ending in jail and in Parchman prison at that, for people going into Mississippi, but for Bernice and her group of students, they were going to jail in Albany. So they radicalized an enormous number of people in a way that nothing else could have.

I was struck, too, by what, I realized that I had never heard somebody else talk about the Freedom Rides the way they are in my mind, but when Bob Bob Moses said that it was the Freedom Rides that literally moved the movement to the deepest of the Deep South and I thought, you know, that's it exactly because the sit-ins were mostly in the border-states.

Hartford:

What other successes?

Opening Minds

Wiley:

People - it opened up minds. That was a lot of what the organizing did, but I think that the demonstrations did, too. So that you start questioning "the why." Why things are this way. Why they have to stay this way. Segregation forever, you're told, and you're told you better damn well believe it, too. The organizing and the brilliant idea, I think, of the freedom schools, began to show people that in numbers, they can make a real difference, and where power was and why it was. So you had more of something to go on than it's white folks who are doing it this way. You had more of a critique of what the society's like and where the real power is and what's Washington doing.

Hartford:

And that there were alternatives and choices. It wasn't just, "this is the way nature is?"

Wiley:

Right. This is the way God made it. Right.

Mississippi Challenge

Wiley:

There's lots of things. I think COFO was a success. There are things I'm jumping over, but I think COFO was a huge - just to get from Sunflower County to Atlantic City and to Washington.

Hartford:

By COFO you mean the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] challenge?

Wiley:

Yeah. That's was COFO, Confederated Organizations. You know, SCLC, all of them.

Wiley:

So the physical movement itself was enormous and then you have the movement of people like Miss Devine and Fannie Lou Hamer and all of those other people making that leap. It's a huge leap from a plantation to challenging the halls of Congress. So I think there were a lot of successes, I should probably make a list, but there were a lot. There are things that I know because I was there. I don't think there are things that people are aware of. So, in my view, the Southern movement was a success. It didn't go far enough, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a success.

Hartford:

I think in some ways the evidence of its success is the fact that people, particularly young people today, have no idea of what it was like. That what is now the norm was our success.

Wiley:

Yeah, yeah. I think about that when I get depressed.

Hartford:

It's true. The whole Jim Crow system, the whole forced inferiority - all of that is just inconceivable today.

Wiley:

Yeah.

Failures

Hartford:

On the flip side, were there failures and, if so, what were they?

Wiley:

Well, we didn't finish. There was a solid movement base in the South. The organizations were under enormous pressure to move to the North, that's why King when to Cicero. Enormous pressure. Some of us like myself really just had to get out of the South, at least for a breather. I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna return to the South. But I didn't know that the movement wasn't gonna keep doing what it was doing, and really nestle in for the long haul.

By then, there were huge questions about the economics of oppression and so forth, and those had always been discussions, but that's where I thought the movement in the South would be heading. Very few people did stay for the long haul. While I understand it, I think, I thought then and I think now, that that was a mistake, because I think we could have had a really good base for continued organizing, continued critiquing of the society, a place to be.

Hartford:

There's still economic discrimination. There's still rich and poor that has a big racial aspect to it There's all kinds of class and race disparities, but there isn't this, "you're not even a human being anymore," in the sense that there was then.

Wiley:

Yeah.

Hartford:

It's just not conceivable, which is why Black people are moving back to the South. There's a net inflow instead of a net outflow.

Kennedy & Johnson

Hartford:

Talk about the role of the president, Kennedy and Johnson, in relationship to the Civil Rights movement.

Wiley:

Well, you know, I was so naive, especially about Kennedy. I wasn't fully aware of the kinds of games that Kennedy was playing. I got caught up, as everybody around me got caught up, in he's young, he's bright, he's not a racist, he's gonna do something. Enormous amount of optimism about Kennedy. I didn't really know until maybe my senior year when I started looking at the judgeships and, you know, what's this all about. He's saying one thing and he's appointing these judges in the Deep South. That's around '62 when the violence is taking place with the Civil Rights workers in Mississippi and he's appointing -

Hartford:

Carswell and people like that.

Wiley:

Right, right. Then, of course, he's assassinated and I'm in Ann Arbor at that point. By then, nobody in the White House would have satisfied me at all. Certainly Johnson didn't in any way. I was looking forward to my graduation from graduate school and I found out that they invited Johnson to speak. So I was on the train going back to Baltimore when the others were gathering for graduation because I just wasn't going to sit through Johnson. It was my personal protest.

Hartford:

Why?

Wiley:

Because by the time I'm now on my way to the South as a young teacher and an activist, everything coming from Washington is, at best, suspect. At worst (laughs), but at best, it's suspect. I simply didn't believe that Johnson, probably because of his pronounced Southern drawl. (Laughs) It's like, I just could not believe that he was going to be any better and probably a lot worse than his predecessors, all of them. By then, I had had no contact with the FBI, ever. So I didn't really know the worst of it, but I knew by then that nothing was going to happen unless you pushed it.

Non-Violence

Hartford:

What about non-violence. Talk about non-violence in relationship to the movement.

Wiley:

That's kind of a hard one for me. I was always ambivalent about it. I was very ambivalent about it. Even today when I read Martin's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and other things, but I think it's the letter that strikes me most, it's pathological.

Hartford:

Pathological in what way?

Wiley:

It's one thing to be non-violent because you have to, but - maybe it's in several of his writings, but it's somewhere that he talks about turning the other cheek and he talks about, we will love you anyway. That was the one that kept getting to me. And that stuck in me because I had never heard of any Black person anywhere who had anything even approaching love for white people. That was a totally foreign concept. Love.

Now it's one thing to like, it's one thing to work with, but this love thing and I will love you while you're whipping me, you know, and brutalizing - it really does sound pathological to me. I was aware of that when it was happening, when he was saying it, and so was everybody else around me. But on the other hand, there was something very noble about it and I liked the nobility of it.

Then when I get to the South, and by the way, I'd never been to the Deep South and nobody in my family, except for my father and uncles when they were in the service and they moved them from Southern base to Southern base, nobody in my family had been to the Deep South. It was not easy going to the Deep South because, well, because people had been saying, you know, Baltimore is hell, Philadelphia is hell, Wilmington is hell, New York is hell. Why do you need to go down there to do something meaningful? Good question, but I thought something noble was taking part down there. I knew something noble was, and I had to get down there to see it for myself. Once I get there and I'm really in the midst now of the terror, that's when I really don't understand it.

Hartford:

Didn't understand non-violence?

Wiley:

Non-violence. That's when I'm not getting it. So I'm tremendously relieved when I hear - I don't recall reading it, but I hear people going back and forth. When I'm in Tuskegee, they're going back and forth to Atlanta and Southwest Georgia, back and forth to Mississippi. So I know that people are arming. Families are armed. As it turned out, I never met a single Black family in the Deep South that didn't have arms, and the women knew how to use them. Everybody, I was the only one around who didn't have a clue about a gun. (Laughs) I still don't, by the way.

That was comforting. I found the fact that the Deacons for Justice were organizing, I thought that was very comforting. It was a noble idea, but with the massive violence that this country wreaks on everybody in the world, no. I would never say that I'm non-violent now, though I would never take a weapon on a demonstration. I can't say it, even though I'm not going to do violence to anybody, I don't intend to do any violence, it still doesn't sit well with me.

While I wasn't altogether with the non-violent part, I was together with the beloved community part. Somehow they weren't the same, as far as I was concerned. So while I might not be philosophically non-violent, I could work toward beloved community. I could do that. I could reach out knowing that another hand was going to be reaching out, too. So I always made that distinction.

Hartford:

But you did participate in non-violent direct action demonstrations.

Wiley:

Yeah, and I would do it again, I think. I wanted to be a part of the movement, so I would have done whatever. I wanted to be part of the movement and if the movement said that we need this, then this is what I was willing to do.

Black Power

Hartford:

Talk about Black Power.

Wiley:

I understood it. Very well. In the Southern context in those rural counties, it made absolute sense to go for a power base. It was really what we were trying to do anyway, we just didn't call it that. Get people registered, get the numbers in so that they can start changing the sheriff and the county government. Like in the case of Greenwood where you have people sitting on that county board saying, we won't take the free food. Families are starving on the plantations and they refuse to take it.

So you know, you have got to change that. That is power. So it made absolute sense to me. , As I'm on my way out of the South, I'm now seeing it, really seeing it, in the North. It's an interesting, very split perspective that I have about it. I was struck how one, the vehemence with which it was attacked, since it did make sense to me. So I did have to wonder, well, what did people think we were trying to do if that wasn't it? I was stunned by the vehemence, by the attacks, overnight it seemed to me. From "quote friends of the movement." I was also struck by how much of the older leadership of the movement hurried to denounce it.

I was also struck by the fact that we weren't, we couldn't quite define it in a way that captured what we were talking about, in the context that we were talking about it in, without succumbing. I wanted to defend it in a way that people would - you bring people along, you know, how we used to say in the South, you bring people along in their understanding. I was struck by how you couldn't do that on that term Black Power. So much else was happening, too. And yet I refuse to say that it was a mistake.

I wish that we'd been talking about power back in '62, you know, and bringing people along with us in that thinking. When I worked in Lowndes County, and Lowndes County comes immediately after the Mississippi Freedom Summer where people, where the organizers feel, okay, we're not going to make a lot of mistakes that we made in Mississippi, we're not going to make in Alabama.

Hartford:

Make new ones.

Wiley:

Make new ones, right. (Laughs) That's life.

New York

Wiley:

I left the South in the fall of '66. Heading to Washington, but made a stop in New York, actually I went there to meet somebody for lunch and I didn't leave New York for, until two years later, because New York was another hotbed. I was getting attracted to all these hotbeds. I was ready to leave the South, I mean, I knew I was leaving the South. I found the South excruciatingly intense. I very much needed a break.

Hartford:

When you were in New York, were you also doing Civil Rights movement work?

Wiley:

I got to New York for lunch. I went to New York and I remember that I met Dinky [Romilly] for lunch and a couple of other people. Maybe Betita [Martinez] was there, I don't remember. A colleague of mine, who had left, had only taught at Tuskegee one year and she and I had become very close, Leslie Shareover, and she was back in New York, she was from New York. I got immediately involved in that very tense Local Control of schools situation, and was drafted to teach in the freedom schools that were being set up in the various neighborhoods. That was in '66. I got there in September and they were quickly organizing them to open.

There's also the thing about North versus South. They were then, and probably in a way they still are, different universes. People in the North don't hear you when you talk about people in the South. One thing that used to drive people nuts when I was in New York was that I would get annoyed and I would say, because of all the criticisms about the Southern movement, and these are among Black people now I'm talking about because what also is happening is the nationalist movement is solidifying in New York as it is in other large Northern cities. I would sit for hours, and finally I would blurt out, you know, you people can't organize your own apartment building. Forget the block. You can't organize your own apartment building. Maybe your own floor you can't organize, or you won't organize. How dare you critique an experience you know nothing about.

Hartford:

They were probably jealous.

Wiley:

Very much so. Very much so. Also, while I'm on the North, it was that double perception of the hostility in the North, and especially in New York. So very different from the gentler welcoming of the South.

Hartford:

You mean the general free floating hostility to everybody.

Wiley:

To everybody.

Hartford:

As opposed to urban hostility against rural or something like that. You mean just general New York attitude.

Wiley:

Right. That I'm literally in an entirely different universe when I go to New York, because I'm in the North. I would later learn it was happening all over, including out here. I wasn't prepared for that.

Generations

Hartford:

What were you going to say about the generational -

One big issue that I've been thinking about over the years, is this split in the generations that I first saw in the South. It really became apparent from my vantage point in the North. I'm a newcomer to New York. I've never lived there before, just visited. The way I see people who were, that I had differences with, but I felt they were heroes of the movement. Like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph. People like that. Martin. I just, I couldn't get it. I couldn't get that, and that made me furious.

Wiley:

Oh. I just find it so striking that - this, I think, is a tragedy. That so little of, there was so little cross-fertilization between the generations. This past Saturday, a week ago, I went to meet people from the Federation of Southern Co-ops. The person who spoke the longest and the most eloquently was Mr. Chestnut from Selma. I remember him very well, but I'm getting confused when I'm listening to him. This is just this Saturday, because he is so clear in a way that you don't usually hear people being clear. But then, I'm also - I'm listening to him and I'm shaking my head and I'm saying, oh, God, it's good to hear this. But I'm thinking, we used to struggle with Chestnut. Chestnut was, oh, my God, Mr. Chestnut used to drive us all nuts.

Hartford:

So was Mrs. Boynton sometimes.

Wiley:

That's right, Mrs. Boynton, that's the name I was trying to remember. Afterward I went up, I realize now that I need to start doing that, I went up and I introduced myself and I told him we had met many, many years ago. He was very gracious and kept saying, "Please come down. We have these activities. I wish you'd come down."

I was struck by how, with the most notable exception of Ella Baker, which is why I love her so dearly, it's just crystallizing in my mind, and the special relationships that Bob had with Amzie Moore and other people in Mississippi. They were key people in various ways. That was rare. We should have been listening more instead of arguing. There was something to be learned and I know, I guess I should speak for me instead of the "we," I was really impatient with all of that and all of them. The only person - and maybe it was because she was a women, but she listened - and that was Ella. Even if she didn't agree, she listened and told you why she wasn't agreeing or what was wrong, what was weird in the analysis that you had just formulated.

So you saw that, I saw that really strikingly in New York around the whole Black Power, because how could you be now fighting A. Philip Randolph who called the first march on Washington? I mean, you know, we're not talking, like, the enemy. He had achieved an enormous amount. You know, he is listed as the most dangerous Black man in America in, what? The 1920's? Give me a break.

Hartford:

By J. Edgar Hoover.

Wiley:

Right, and I feel so sad about that. We should have been talking with each other and enriching each other and instead, we were constantly on opposite ends. I think that's a real tragedy for the movement. I don't know whether it happened in the white left, but I'm sure it did. I don't remember wanting to go to no elderly - but I think that is such a tragedy and it hits me now, I guess, because now I'm an elder. The fact that people today could just start out on their own and decide, based on my age that I'm totally irrelevant, it's like, what a waste.

Meaning

Hartford:

Talk about what it all meant to you. The Southern Freedom Movement. How did it affect you? What did it mean to you?

Wiley:

There's no aspect of my life that wasn't affected. I can't imagin who I would be. It wasn't an episode, it was a way of life and a way of viewing life and living life. Living my beliefs. It affects everything. I mean, from my being a parent, to my view of the larger world.

It's like I am not impressed with anything that is official in this government. I'm not impressed with the institutions. I'm not impressed with - I'm an outsider, essentially. It made me see that I will remain an outsider and that's okay.

I'll Never Forget Alabama Law

William "Meatball" Douthard (1947- 1981)

Originally published in The Liberal News, February-March 1965

The Summer of 1963 was very hot in the South, especially Gadsden, a northern Alabama city of 75,000 of which 28-30,000 are Negroes. It was there that local and state law enforcement officers waged their most vicious and brutal assault upon negroes protesting the inaccessibility of public facilities, voting rights and public accommodations in their city.

It was there the "cattle prod," a battery powered instrument used in most stockyards, capable of rendering a shock from 18-24 volts, was introduced as a weapon against civil rights demonstrators. It was there the theory of brutally beating Negroes in large numbers as a means of creating a blanket of fear in the community was initiated in the grandest of Southern style.

It was there that two CORE. field secretaries and three field representatives (myself and one of the latter) along with staff personnel of SNCC and SCLC learned the viciousness directed at Negroes seeking their rights.

I was relegated the task of directing the demonstrations which attempted to illustrate basic and constitutional rights denied Negroes in that city. From June 11-August 5, we demonstrated almost daily in an effort to bring the town to recognize the justice in our demands and the injustice of their denials. And in those weeks, I saw men, women, and children senselessly beaten without provocation, and then jailed for daring to ask for what was already theirs.

Vividly I remember the night of June 19, when over 500 Negroes, men, women, and children, assembled on the grounds of the County Courthouse and jail, to hold a vigil of prayer in protest of the arrest of some 600 students and adults the previous day. While watching from my top floor cell, I saw over 300 law officers of the city, county and state surround the protesters and begin their systematic beating of all. As the Negroes broke and ran they were chased on foot and in cars, overtaken and beaten again.

Leaving jail on bond, I resumed my job as director of demonstrations. By this time the pattern of resistance had formed and we were able to anticipate actions by the city and state authorities. What we didn't expect was the continuous beatings.

After sending out some 200 pickets, I left our workshop hall and started to walk two blocks to our office. Lined along 6th Street were scores of Highway Patrol (State Troopers) cars with two to four men. Not more than 3 feet in front of me, one driver, S. Trooper Brown, got out of his car and said, "Get in the car, boy." He then walked across the street and picked up CORE. Field Secretary Marvin Robinson, and placed him in the back seat with me.

Ironically, Marvin was walking to the Federal Building to protest to the FBI a merciless beating inflicted upon me the day before by State troopers while a crowd of about 200 whites watched. After placing us in the car, Brown, while the other trooper in the car watched us, called Col. Al Lingo, Director of Alabama State Highway Patrol, and said:

"I've got Robinson and Meatball here, what do I do with them?" "Bring them in," said Lingo, to which Brown replied, "On what charges?" "Disturbing the peace or anything," said Col. Lingo. We were then taken to the back of the Etowah County Courthouse, where awaiting us stood Col. Lingo and his driver, Maj. Allen.

From our first encounter, Col. Lingo set the pace for our trip from the basement to the fourth floor via elevator. Approaching the steps to the basement of the courthouse, I was prodded by Brown. As we walked inside I mistakenly walked by the door that Lingo apparently intended for us to go through. Lingo then reached out, turned me around and slapped me through the door.

Marvin then made his mistake, by walking up the stair instead of down the corridor toward the elevator as I did. He paid for his mistake. Allen ordered Marvin down, and then began punching him in the stomach. After Allen had punched Marvin about four times, Brown began prodding him toward the elevator.

Marvin and I were then herded into the alcove opposite the elevator. Brown then began to consistently alternate in prodding Marvin and me. While leaning against the wall under pressure of the prodding, Marvin's leg gave in and he slipped to the floor. Immediately they pounced on himAllen punching and kicking while Brown held the prodder to Marvin's chest. When Marvin started yelling in pain, Allen ordered a halt until we go in the elevator so as to minimize the chances of being heard. After entering the elevator, we were constantly punched and prodded until we reached the fourth floor.

This was Gadsden, July, 1963.

A Month of Infamy 38 Years Ago

Atlanta and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Heather Gray

2006

In 1968, the tragic events in the first week of April turned the world upside down. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis on Thursday, April 4. He was there to support sanitation workers who were on strike. In a recent interview with Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now," Harry Belafonte described the sequence of events that day. He was in Atlanta when Coretta King received the news of her husband s death. The grieving Mrs. King asked him to help select the clothes for her deceased husband s showing and funeral. She expressed her concern, like all the rest of us in America, about the aftermath of his assassination and what she could or should do. Belafonte recommended that she continue in the support of the Memphis workers. She did exactly that.

On Monday, April 8, the day before her husband's funeral, Mrs. King was in Memphis marching with the sanitation workers. This remarkably brave and determined woman, along with her three oldest children, marched in silence in the company of 15,000 supporters from all over the country. Mrs. King told the crowd, His work must go on&.We are concerned about not only the Negro poor but the poor all over America and all over the world. Every man deserves a right to a job and an income so that he can pursue liberty, life and happiness.

I was in Atlanta at that time as well. Earlier in the week a Chinese friend who taught at Spelman College in Atlanta had asked me to attend an event and spend the night in the campus dorms. That was my plan. Little did my friend or I know how events that week would dramatically affect us all. Dr. King was assassinated on Thursday and by the weekend his body was in state at Sister's Chapel on the Spelman campus.

In the introduction to his excellent book Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement 1957-1967 (2005) Harry Lefever provides a brief history of Spelman. It is the nation's oldest and best- known black liberal arts college for women, founded in 1881. In 1929, Spelman signed an Agreement of Affiliation with Morehouse College and Atlanta University, two black institutions located directly across the street from Spelman. Ultimately other black schools of higher learning in the adjoining location joined the agreement. Today, the total consortium of six institutions, known as the Atlanta University Center (AUC), represents the largest affiliation of predominantly black institutions in the United States. Dr. King received his undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in 1948.

That weekend a long line of mourners stood outside Sister's Chapel to honor the fallen leader. The silence was deafening. It was April, the onset of Spring, and I stood there shivering. All you could hear was the sound of feet slowly walking toward the chapel and people crying. As we walked into the Chapel toward the coffin, you saw men on either side of the coffin wiping away the tears that fell on the glass over Martin King's body. Only later did I learn that because so many people were crying, resulting in tears cascading into the coffin and over Dr. King, that a decision was made to cover it with glass. Once by the coffin I observed this physically small, yet great man of peace, and found it virtually impossible to believe that his resounding, powerful voice and message were no more. It was an incredibly sad moment to witness his still body and to even think of the contemptible violence that killed him. But I was also angry. I kept thinking What now? What on earth is now in store for America?

By Monday, April 8, people starting arriving into Atlanta for the funeral. I drove for the Student Non-Violent Committee (SNCC) to greet people arriving at the airport. My parents and hundreds of others were doing the same in their own cars. Along with two SNCC students from Atlanta University, the first person I escorted from the airport was Ralph Bunche. Dr. Bunche was the first black Nobel Peace Prize recipient. He had received the award in 1950 for his negotiations in the creation of the State of Israel after World War II. In 1968 he was an Undersecretary of the United Nations and was representing the UN at the King funeral. The City of Atlanta had sent its Vice Mayor Sam Massell to accompany Dr. Bunche, but he insisted on coming with us SNCC folks instead. Arrangements had been made for him at Atlanta's Regency Hyatt, but he insisted on staying at Paschals, Atlanta's renowned Black owned hotel and restaurant on Hunter Street, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. So here I was, driving Dr. Bunche, who sat in the passenger seat of my little car. His son was squeezed into the back with the other SNCC students. Bunche's son had brought his tennis racket. Life goes on I realized!

Lyndon Johnson was the U.S. President at the time. Johnson had decided to send his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, to the funeral. We were told that this decision was made because of Humphrey's renowned advocacy for civil rights. That being the case, protocol called for U Thant, the UN General Secretary at the time, to send someone under him of rank at the UN, such as Ralph Bunche, so as not to up-stage Johnson.

Interestingly, Bunche had been one of prominent Black leaders in 1967 encouraging the NAACP to write a statement criticizing King's opposition to the Vietnam War. Bunche said King should not be both a civil rights leader and an antiwar advocate and that he needed to be one or the other. He later called King to apologize for his public statement and that he agreed with King's position on the war. King complained that Bunche did not have the courage to state his views in public.

The next person I picked up at the airport was Allard Lowenstein, an attorney in the movement, and one of his colleagues. He first wanted to pay his respects to Mrs. King. I drove them to her house that was surrounded by at least a hundred or more people. Next, he wanted to greet Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, known as King's right hand man, who was to take over the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), now vacated by King. Lowenstein said that this time he was taking me into the house with him. We drove to Reverend Abernathy's house and what a dramatic experience this was.

To set the stage, King had just been assassinated. No one knew what this meant exactly. No one knew what other violence could be expected. It was not known how white and black communities across the country would respond or what challenges and threats where ahead in the movement. It was assumed, of course, that the work was to be increasingly more dangerous.

As we walked into the Abernathy house there were four men sitting in silence in the living room. The Reverend was resting at the time. Then we walked into the kitchen where Mrs. Abernathy was on the phone. Suddenly, here I was, a young white student who had never met Juanita Abernathy. Once off the phone she grabs my hand, holds on to it and recounts the events of the past few days. For some five minutes or so, she described her husband's frightening experience of being at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where King had been killed just five days ago, and how nervous and concerned she was about her husband taking over the leadership of SCLC. I stood there in awe and silently sympathized.

Then Reverend Abernathy appeared. He seemed rested and congenial. I was amazed at his composure but then thought what else could he do? Everyone knew the work had to continue. We all shook hands, spoke briefly, and I drove Lowenstein and his friend into town.

The funeral was on Tuesday, April 9 at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta - affectionately known as the King church. I joined the funeral march through the City of Atlanta. The Reverend James Orange, of Birmingham protest fame, had organized the mule drawn funeral cart to take Dr. King to his resting place. Thousands of us of all races followed the cart while holding hands and singing an abundance of chants. It was a movement funeral to be sure. One of the most memorable experiences that day was walking in front of the Georgia State Capitol. A wire fence barricade, along with the ominous presence of military sentries, surrounded it. As was intended, the whole area seemed bleak and foreboding. The arch segregationist and erratic Lester Maddox was Georgia's governor at the time. I fully expected him to run out of the building at any moment, stand on the Capitol steps, and shout all kinds of curses at us.

There has been and will continue to be speculation as to why J. Edgar Hoover's FBI under the Johnson administration intensified its surveillance and propaganda against King. It was known, for one, that Johnson was furious about King's outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, but it is also clear that King was shifting his emphasis to economic justice. While economic justice had always been a part of his message, the primary focus of civil rights and voting rights took precedence in the early movement work. By 1964 the Civil Rights Bill had passed in Congress and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was a reality. All of this took enormous energy and a death toll. But King and others acknowledged that if there was the right to go to a hotel, what was the point if you couldn t pay the bill?

At the end of his life King was advocating for the economic rights of sanitation workers in Memphis and this was just the beginning. SCLC was in the planning stages of the national Poor People's Campaign march to be held in Washington, DC on April 22. On April 3 in Memphis, in his last speech, King called for boycotts against Wonder Bread, Hart's Bread, Sealtest Milk and, importantly, Coca Cola, for their appalling and unfair hiring practices. He encouraged everyone to follow through on this and to put pressure where it hurts. He said if something isn t done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.

In relation to the loss of Dr. King, years later I have often thought about the insightful and powerful song by Sweet Honey and the Rock about Stephen Biko, the black leader who was killed by South African authorities in 1977 They sang, "You can kill one human body, I see ten thousand Bikos! It rings true. You can kill the messenger, but not the message." As Lefever states in his book on Spelman College activism, that while he focused on individuals in the movement it is clear he said, that their successes were much more than individual successes. The study reveals the significance of the group context in their actions. This has been true all over the U.S. and the world. A Filipino organizer once told me, You can't organize yourself, who have to organize yourselves....

Appendix III:

Army Mutiny in Tanganyika:

An Eyewitness Report

THE army mutinies in the three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika in January 1964 were some of the most significant events in the history of post-colonial Africa.

They demonstrated the power of the soldiers and the potential they had to influence the course of events in their respective countries even against the wishes of their civilian governments. They were also among the first manifestations of military power in the political arena and a demonstration of the military as the most powerful institution in the newly independent African countries. And they helped change and shape the course of African history by encouraging soldiers in other African countries to overthrow governments in the following years.

The army mutiny in Tanganyika took place one week after the Zanzibar revolution and about three months before Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania.

One of the people who was in Tanganyika during that time was John D. Gerthart from Harvard University who was teaching in Dar es Salaam under a programme called Project Tanganyika. He sent the following report which was published in The Harvard Crimson daily newspaper on March 10, 1964:

Tanganyika Embarrassed By Need for British Assistance – Calls for Pan-African Force To Aid Future Crises

The city of Dar es Salaam woke early on the morning of Saturday, January 25.

At about 6.15 a.m. citizens all over the sprawling capital were shaken out of bed by what some thought at first was an early onset of the monsoon season.

But the evenly-spaced rumblings in the distance were not thunder; they were a diversionary barrage from the anti-aircraft guns of the British aircraft carrier Centaur.

By 7 a.m., when government workers began leaving for their 7:30 jobs, Tanganyika's five-day-old army mutiny was over and East Africa's oldest independent government was back in control.

The short, well-timed action which put down the revolt was carried out by the Royal Marine Commandos with an efficiency that will probably win it a glowing place in British military history.

While the barrage went on, helicopters lifted some 60 commandos to a ravine behind the Tanganyika Rifles' barracks about six miles north of the city. As the Tanganyikan soldiers spilled out of their barracks, they were quickly captured from behind by the British troops.

One mortar shell broke up the resistance; only three Rifles members were killed; and though several hundred soldiers escaped in the bush, all but a handful were quickly recaptured.

The exercise was directed by the commanding officer of the Tanganyikan forces, a Britisher who had escaped the mutiny on Monday and had been hiding in European homes in Dar's fashionable Oyster Bay area during the week.

The Marines' performance was most remarkable because they accomplished it virtually unarmed.

According to an official in the British High Commission here, the British quartermaster in Aden had furnished the Marines with the wrong calibre of rifle ammunition, and the mistake was not discovered until shortly before the landing was to take place. The only effective weapons available were mortars and a few pistols.

When the troops landed they went immediately to the Tanganyikan armory to rearm themselves, which explains why so many of the Tanganyikan soldiers were initially able to escape. The quartermaster in Aden has since been returned to England for court-martial.

Though they had never been in danger during the revolt, Dar's British citizens were thrilled to have the "shocking do" over with, and "the boys" standing guard.

The New Africa Hotel did a landslide afternoon tea business. There was a band concert by the forces on the following afternoon. Smiling Scotsmen bought cases of beer and Fanta for the troops.

Our neighbors spoke to us for the second time in six months, the first time having been on Monday when the “do” began.

But in spite of the local European reaction, there were no neo-colonialist overtones. The British offered to withdraw immediately on the wishes of the Tanganyika government, and the President, Julius K. Nyerere' dispelled further doubts in a speech given Saturday afternoon. "Any independent country is able to ask for the help of another independent country," he said. "Talk that the British have come back to rule Tanganyika again is rubbish."

Request Difficult

"But," continued the President, "asking for help in this way is not something to be proud of. I do not want any person to think that I was happy in making this request."

The decision was undoubtedly a painful one for Nyerere, who had worked so long to gain Tanganyika's independence from the British, but in the end, it was the only choice he could make and be sure of his government's survival.

What had begun on Monday as simply an army revolt for higher pay was beginning to take on much more threatening tones. The story of this deterioration in the situation is the real story of the army revolt. The mutiny began shortly after midnight on January 20 when the troops of the Tanganyika (formerly King's African) Rifles First Battalion seized the arms at Colito Barracks and arrested their European officers and NCOs.

Soldiers then proceeded to surround the State House and to take over the radio station, airport, telegraph office, and other key points throughout the city. Several ministers were arrested before dawn, but President Nyerere and Vice President Rashidi Kawawa escaped.

Though Nyerere reappeared the next day, rumors circulated wildly that he had gone to Arusha in the north of the country, gone to Nairobi, been captured, or was hiding in the embassy of "a friendly country."

In actuality, Nyerere remained in Dar es Salaam, but he let his Defense Minister Oscar Kambona come to terms with the soldiers. This was probably because he felt that his first duty to the nation was to survive unharmed, and also because he did not want to demean his office by dealing with the mutineers.

Throughout the mutiny, troop movements were confined almost entirely to the town proper and to the African business quarters of Magomeni and Kariakoo (named for the German Carrier Corps stationed there in 1918). The large European and African suburbs to the north and south of the town were not entered.

The first indication I had of the trouble was about 8 a.m. when, upon reaching the Tanganyikan school where I teach, I found classes dismissed and the headmistress, a close friend of Nyerere's, in tears.

Cars Halted

With two other teachers, I headed toward the downtown area. We passed milling crowds of Africans and Arabs in the streets, but saw no signs of other vehicles or of soldiers. However, we soon reached a bridge leading to the town's center and ran directly into a roadblock of soldiers who, pointing guns at our tires and faces, quickly persuaded us to return the way we had come. Though not proficient in Swahili, we found that our comprehension was almost perfect.

About noon on Monday the road blocks were removed and another teacher and I, with a Tanganyikan friend, took the opportunity to drive through Kariakoo to the Muhimbili hospital, where my friend had a surgical appointment. This time cars were in sight, but most of them contained soldiers with large guns who had commandeered taxis and private vehicles for cruising the streets.

Looters Shot

Entering the first rotary intersection in the bazaar district, however, we saw a frightening sight. Looting had broken out during the mid-morning and the soldiers, aided by normal police forces, were firing at and beating looters in the street. On the opposite side of the intersection a hatless soldier was casually aiming his rifle, not at a looter, but at a family of Indians watching the scene from a fourth-story apartment nearby. The bullet smashed over their heads.

The soldier laughed, turned backdown the street and shouldered his weapon.

Proceeding down the main street about two blocks from the African market, we were soon stopped by a group of soldiers and forced to wait outside the car for about twenty minutes. Actually, this provided us with a relatively safe viewpoint from which to watch the soldiers in action.

They seemed content to let the more efficient police restore order; the streets cleared rapidly and occasional shots rang out, often fired into a trash can “for effect.”

Civilians Killed

We soon continued to the hospital where casualities were being brought in. One of the first was a soldier with a bullet fired clean through the chest. His agonized expression seemed to frame an ironic question about the value of his comrades' revolt.

On Monday, four soldiers, six Arabs, and about a dozen African civilians were killed, all in “non-military” action.

On Monday afternoon the government agreed to give "urgent consideration" to the troops' demands for a pay increase and the removal of all expatriate officers.

The soldiers returned to their barracks and Kambona announced he had "mediated a dispute between African and British soldiers in the Tanganyika Rifles" and that the troops were still "loyal to the government."

On Tuesday the capital returned to almost normal.

As the week continued, it became increasingly apparent that the government could not continue to operate with the army able to seize power at will merely by entering and occupying the city. Negotiations over pay increases were conducted with the mutiny's leaders, but by Friday they had become, as Nyerere later said, "analogous to the negotiations between a blackmailer and his victim."

One reliable source says that the mutineers were demanding the right to name three new ministers. Nevertheless, the government wanted, if at all possible, to avoid call in outside (namely) British help.

Strike Plotted

In the meantime, a group of politicians and trade union leaders including an Area Commissioner who had been a long-time TANU stalwart, had begun conspiring with the ringleaders of the mutiny to bring about a real overthrow of the government. They planned to initiate a general strike on Saturday, followed by a coup on the following Monday in which, it was rumoured, Nyerere and his ministers would be removed.

Nyerere got word of this on Friday afternoon and Friday evening he asked for British aid. Fortunately for the government, the British were close at hand and the more serious threat was stopped before it could materialize.

On Saturday night police detained about 200 persons, including officials of five major unions and the General Secretary of the Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL). Most of the officials are only now being released. The government has announced plans to disband the TFL and its eleven affiliated unions and to institute in their place a single, giant trade union representing all the workers in the country.

Though the trade unions have opposed the government in the past, they have paraded through Dar es Salaam almost daily for a week to demonstrate their present loyalty.

External Impact

In fact, the revolt may have more important implications for Tanganyika's external than its internal affairs. The 98 per cent of the nation's people who live outside the capital had little or no knowledge of the mutiny at all, and though the army is being disbanded and security measures increased, there are no sweeping changes in store for anyone outside the unions.

Nyerere is calling for a constitutional one-party state which will only make Tanganyika in name what it is in fact. The most widely felt "internal" result of the revolt so far has been the banning of the Nairobi-based Daily Nation for publishing an “exaggerated account” of the disturbances.

Conference Called

Externally, Tanganyika's reputation for stability was undoubtedly damaged. Foreign investors may lose confidence in the country, although such a loss would not be justified and should not be severe. And the fact remains that Tanganyika is embarrassed, though not apologetic, about having British troops in the country.

It was for this reason that Nyerere called for the emergency meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Organization of African Unity, which opened in Dar es Salaam on Feb. 12, and which makes a proper concluding chapter to an account of the revolt.

The conference, with Tanganyika's Oscar Kambona as chairman, held its opening session in the attentive view of the world press, the TANU political hierarchy, and the local diplomatic corps.

Although the ambassador of the Chinese People's Republic was tactfully seated some distance from his American counterpart, the reporters from the New China News Agency vied openly with those of the USIS for picture positions, while the representative of the Vatican press religiously took notes.

Though the Morrocans looked like French grocers and the Liberians like American businessmen, the assembly was an impressive one and Nyerere made an equally impressive opening address.

"The presence of troops from a country deeply involved in the world's cold war conflicts," he said, "has serious implications in the context of African nationalism and our common policies of non-alignment... The presence of British troops in Tanganyika is a fact which is too easily exploited by those who wish to...play upon natural fears of neo-colonialism in the hope of sowing seeds of suspicion between the different African states.”

In a matter minutes, Nyerere neatly converted the revolt from an internal to a pan-African affair. He also pointed out that the African liberation movements, with headquarters in Dar es Salaam, might be damaged by the existence of just such a state of affairs in Tanganyika, and that this was also “the concern of the whole of Africa.”

Nyerere then asked for an African armed force to help replace the British while Tanganyika trains its own forces. This proposal was accepted later in the week, though the practicalities of compiling an all-African force may be difficult....

Appendix IV:

The Nigerian Civil War:

Memories of Survivors

IT WAS the bloodiest conflict in the history of post-colonial Africa up to that time and one of the deadliest in the continent's history and in modern times.

More than 1 million people died during the war. Some estimates say up to 2 million perished, mostly from starvation. Countless also died from bombing raids by the Nigerian federal forces backed by Britain and the Soviet Union.

Those who survived never forgot what they went through. They lived to tell what happened. Here are two of those survivors:

Omekenyi Theresa Muotune

Before Port Harcourt Fell

In 1968 Port Harcourt fell. The bomb started falling in the early morning. It kept on falling, and falling, and falling and when I woke up, fear has taken a hold of everybody.

My father came back from work around 9pm and told us that we had to move because the country is falling. Soldiers we knew came to our house and told us to leave Port Harcourt. Within some hours to come, we left Port Harcourt and went straight to my hometown Oguta. We trekked miles and miles, until we came to Ungbudi. When we reached Ungbudi, it was nearer for us. Then we used canoes to cross the river to Oguta. When we reached Oguta, the town was quiet. There was no sign of war at all. Things were going normal.

When Ojukwu came to Oguta

We were there when Ojukwu came with his soldiers. Ojukwu addressed his soldiers and told them that if Oguta was not rescued, that it is finished and the vandals (the Nigerians) would have won the war. In Oguta, it is do or die. Many of the Oguta citizens were crying because they are homeless and fearful of the war. I stayed near the tower because I wanted to see how they were going to fight. I was there when Ojukwu ordered the shooting. Nigerian troops that were on the sea on the Oguta lake was shelling and shelling the town. So, Ojukwu climbed on top of the tank with his officers and began shelling Oguta, even shelling inside the water. The Biafran soldiers were shelling. I was there until the next morning. The Oguta lake completely sunk the ship that the Nigerian soldier came with.

At that time, Ojukwu and his soldiers has shelled Oguta, killing the foreigners and the Nigerian soldiers that were aboard the ship. At dawn, I was among the people that went to the waters because it was my town and I did not know where else to go. I went down to the lake. When I got there, I saw corpses of white people, of these white mercenaries. Their corpses were like sand. I also saw Nigerian soldiers that drowned in the Oguta lake and those that died in the ships.

But those white people that came out of the ship looked like they were trying to swim but was drowned because the waters of Oguta is a great deity. We don't joke with the lake. The water is a big deity. The towns of Oguta do not use the water to joke. The lake killed the white mercenaries. Each one that tried to swim drowned and their corpse lay there. The lake pushed the corpse to the shore because it does not carry any corpse. When the lake killed someone, it will push the person out. It does not touch it. So, the lake killed all the white people.

When you come in, and you look around, you will see a bags of rice, everything, beans, corned-beef were filled inside the ship. So, some of the Oguta boys went inside and were bring out cornbeef, taking out bags of rice, bringing out beans. Whatever they were able to get, they took back to their homes. But those that entered the ship were mostly men. The men were not afraid to enter the ship. You know that with men, fear did not stop them from entering the ship. The women were afraid to go because there were corpse lying in there.

Veronica Uwechia

When It All Started

My name is Veronica Uwechia. I am a Nigerian, and I was in Nigeria when the war broke out. Before the declaration of our own section of Nigeria as Biafra, I was at Onitsha. I was living in my house all through. I was a widow, with children, 5 children. My occupation was business and when the war broke out, there was a lot of running up and down and trying to save our necks from their stray bullets.

In the morning, by the month of July in 19…ninety (When was Jideofo born), 19 ninety (airplane noise), 1968 (fades out). In 1967, there was a coup by the military and that was what sparked off the war. We the ordinary people then can't even understand what was going on but we know there was trouble between the states and we are the Eastern states and the whole trouble was more on our own state.

Everything got so heated that when they declared the state of Biafra, whoa, there was trouble everywhere, people started running and coming home from other states where they were living, we started seeing soldiers, moving around, hearing the booming of guns, no lights in the night, and we can't get certain things from the other states but we were trying to manage our life, it continued and by 1968, it got so heated that we couldn't even stay in our houses during the day.

We keep running away into the bush to hide under thick clustered groves or we will run from our own area when the bullets started coming across the Niger. The other side of the Niger that is the western part, were coming into eastern states, we keep on running. We were running all the day.

There was no market any longer, people trade under shades of a tree, they bring what they can sell and you can buy. It started going like that and some people started going into the central part of the eastern states. Somebody like me didn't feel it right to keep running to other villages or towns because I have no relatives there and I can't manage five children outside Onitsha.

So we stayed in Onitsha hoping that it will be alright. We started killing our chickens for meat and share it. We have cassava, we had yams, we had rice, these…thing that at least will last at least six months to one year. We were not talking of eating bread because we cannot afford it. We don't talk of sugar because we can't afford it.

We started living on our own Nigerian food. I had a lot of plantain trees in my house, luckily about that time they were fruiting, when it got ripe we will go and cut it. We either roast it or boil it, no more frying because we cannot get oil so easily and we have our own native things like Egusi growing in my house. We can wash it, shell it, and use it to cook soup.

We have palm trees which we cut the nuts and make red oil and red soup out of it. We have cassava. We have different ways of eating cassava. There is one we soak, after it's soft, we wash it and make it into Akpu, we grind gari with a grater then we make abacha or Iwu Akpu. We dry that and soak it in the water, so at least we still have something to keep us going.

We didn't start running, and then what we heard is that the soldiers were advancing, and when the war started hitting was in 1968. Then people were moving out of Onitsha, evacuating the whole place because bullets have started to come into the town. We were hiding in our house, some of us slept in the wardrobe, some of us slept under the bed and when morning comes, we come out and do our daily job, until towards everyday.

The whole thing was coming up, everyday they were coming nearer and nearer and people started moving for their dear lives, abandoning their house, their goods. We were still doing our routine, we didn't bother to run until on that eventful march a bomb fell in Onitsha and there was chaos. Everybody was running, everybody was running, we hid in our house, later by the afternoon the whole town was so cool, no noise, no voice, we keep on hiding in our house, and we were using kerosene stove to cook our food.

Before I surrendered to Murtala Muhammad

We were in the house for five days and we don't hear voice. We don't hear people, we were hiding inside hoping for change, there was no change until that eventful Monday. The only thing we have to know what is happening is a little transistor, instead of buying food, I will buy battery so that we could hear what is happening. Then when you want to hear what is happening from other parts of Nigeria, you tune to radio Kaduna, it will tell you everything and the locations of where the army are and if you want to hear about Biafra, you tune to radio Biafra and it will tell you. Its from this transistor that we heard from that Onitsha has fallen and that the soldiers have occupied parts of the town.

We didn't know what to do, we were just staying. But everyday when we looked out the window, one of the windows that is facing the major road--the Expressway, we saw army trucks moving towards from the left side and moving to the right side and the right side of it is where we call the Fegge area. We see them moving, every evening, so we knew that Onitsha has fallen but we didn't come out until after five days. And what made us come out that eventful day was that the bombing was very near our house because of the grove near our house.

Then we were forced to run out and we surrendered ourselves, asking them what is their mission. Did they come to rescue or did they come to exterminate all of us? They said no, what they want is peace, and when I was talking I didn't know that it was the man commanding the Nigerian soldiers, the late Murtala that I was talking to.

And we asked for help that if they could give us some soldiers so that we can get one or two things out. They told us no but that they will stay here and wait for us for one hour, if we don't come out, they would move on. So we rushed back, my mother was with me and when we got home we told the children, okay, come out, come out, come out, everybody came out and then we started running towards them. And that is how they rescued us. We entered a van, all of us, and we were driven to this part of Onitsha called Fegge where we were stationed for the night.

And in the morning I was called out to face the press. I later knew that it was the World International Press that I was facing.

They asked me a lot of questions and I answered to my ability. And they asked me why I didn't run. Well, I said I did not feel like running because with my children I don't know what would happen to us. So I decided rather than leave Onitsha, let us die here. Luckily for us, we were rescued by the General commanding the two division and that we were very lucky.

Appendix V:

Nyerere: Reflections

YOU WANTED me to reflect. I told you I had very little time to reflect. I am not an engineer (reference to the vice-chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam who identified himself as an engineer in his introductory remarks) and therefore what I am going to say might sound messy, unstructured and possibly irrelevant to what you intend to do; but I thought that if by reflecting, you wanted me to go back and relive the political life that I have lived for the last 30, 40 years, that I cannot do.

And in any case, in spite of the fact that it’s useful to go back in history, what you are talking about is what might be of use to Africa in the 21st century. History’s important, obviously, but I think we should concentrate and see what might be of use to our continent in the coming century.

What I want to do is share with you some thoughts on two issues concerning Africa. One, an obvious one; when I speak, you will realise how obvious it is. Another one, less obvious, and I’ll spend a little more time on the less obvious one, because I think this will put Africa in what is going to be Africa’s context in the 21st century.

And the new leadership of Africa will have to concern itself with the situation in which it finds itself in the world tomorrow - in the world of the 21st century. And the Africa I’m going to be talking about, is Africa south of the Sahara, sub-Saharan Africa. I’ll explain later the reason why I chose to concentrate on Africa south of the Sahara. It is because of the point I want to emphasise.