S7E5: From ’64 Freedom Summer to the ’24 Election: Three Antiochians on the Long Fight for Social Justice

[00:00] Jasper Nighthawk: This is the Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories and come together to win victories for humanity. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk, and today I am grateful to be able to share with you this conversation. We’re going to hear from three civil rights activists and Antioch alumni, Judy Richardson, David Goodman and Janet Dewart Bell. This talk was first held as a virtual panel on Zoom as part of our Antioch Works for Democracy speaker series. Here on the podcast, we want to capture some of the highlights of this conversation and especially how they talk about democracy, activism and the long, often difficult, sometimes heartbreaking work of trying to build a true multiracial democracy here in the United States of America. We’re releasing this episode just over a week after the 2024 US presidential election. And in my opinion, there is no better time to turn to the wisdom and stories of these activists who got their starts in the 1960s and have kept working and organizing for decade after decade. What lessons can we take and use in our own work? That’s what I’m thinking about as I listen to this. Okay, before we get to the tape, let me quickly introduce the panelists. We’ll first hear from Judy Richardson. Today, Judy is a filmmaker and educator. But back from 1963 to 1966, Judy was a key figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This was a civil rights organization led by young people. And as part of that, she moved to Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer. And this connects her to the second panelist, David Goodman. David wasn’t himself part of the Freedom Summer, but his brother Andrew Goodman was part of that historic voter registration drive. And Andrew was murdered in Mississippi along with two fellow activists, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. These murders, carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, became national news. And David has done so much in the intervening decades to keep his brother’s memory alive and keep pushing for the cause he died for. David is today the president of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which works to increase voter registration, particularly among youth. The last person to introduce is the panel’s moderator, Janet Dewart Bell. Janet is a social justice advocate, an activist, an executive coach, an Emmy-winning broadcaster, and also a current member of Antioch’s Board of Governors. 

Alright, let’s jump right into this panel. Here’s Judy Richardson talking about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The initials are SNCC, or for short, SNCC. 

[02:59] Judy Richardson: SNCC was the only organization in the Southern Movement of the 1960s that was founded and led by young people, 18, 19, 20 years old, right? SNCC was founded in April 1960. Now, I was not at that founding conference. I come in at 63, but it was founded in April 1960 by activists from the Student Sit-In Movement, a movement that mushroomed throughout the South after that Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in in February 1960, one month before the SNCC conference that gathers all these sit-in leaders together. And the movement was grounded in the activism of Black students at HBCUs. Now, these students were then brought together by the legendary strategist and organizer Ella Baker. The first organizing meeting was done at her alma mater, the HBCU Shaw University. Miss Baker cautioned the students to think beyond integration. And I should just mention just a thing. Miss Baker, by the way, was this legendary organizer who had been director of branches for the NAACP. She was in support of the Montgomery Broth Boycott in ’55, ’56. She’s organizing local NAACP branches as a lone Black woman traveling the trains going back and forth between New York City and Florida. And she stays with Rosa Parks, for example, during the bus boycott. So Miss Baker gives us, the young people, not only her organizing grassroots philosophy, but also her network of organizers, local organizers. In any event, at that first meeting in 1960, she calls all these young students together. So Julian Bond comes in from Atlanta, and John Lewis comes in from the Nashville Movement. And all these people are coming in. Ruby Doris Robinson comes in from the Atlanta Student Movement. And at that first meeting that she called, Miss Baker cautioned the students to think beyond integration, that the struggle had to be bigger than a hamburger. And that’s what she says. It’s got to be bigger than a hamburger. In other words, she said, you have to deal with whether people can afford the hamburger. And so she’s SNCC’s mentor. She’s grounding the organization in the concept of building bottom-up grassroots leadership, moving away from demonstrations to effective long-term organizing. So SNCC soon becomes an organization of full-time youth organizers. And we lived in the communities where we organized, often guided and guarded by local, strong adult leaders. And the primary issues were voting rights. Basically, how do you get Black people registered to vote without getting them killed? And the second major piece was economic justice. SNCC was the driving force behind the continuation of the 1961 Freedom Rides through Diane Nash’s leadership. She’s coming out of the Nashville Movement. She’s part of that first organizing meeting. As well as 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, which included establishment of freedom schools and free health clinics, and a voting rights campaign that is propelled by the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the MFDP. And that’s a locally based grassroots organization that is at the core of 1964 Freedom Summer. So many remember the speech by the MFDP’s Miss Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, at the Democratic Party Convention that year in 1964, where she says, I question America. Now SNCC chairs have included Marion Barry, five-time mayor of Washington, DC, John Lewis, we all know John, Stokely Carmichael, issues the cry for Black power. And in 1966, Stokely and other SNCC organizers, and I’m part of this, go into Lowndes County, Alabama, to organize an independent Black political party with the Black Panther as its logo. And it had that logo because the official Democratic Party of Alabama had as its logo, a white rooster with the words, “White supremacy for the right,” emblazoned on its logo. When we proposed a logo for the folks in Lowndes County, and that logo is the Panther, the folks in Lowndes County say, “Oh yeah, we like the Panther,” because a Panther can beat a rooster any day in the week. So Stokely is selected SNCC chair in ’66. And that cry for Black power, that demand for Black power, is a slogan that was reflecting a concept that had long grounded SNCC’s organizing. SNCC was always guided by the concepts Miss Baker spoke about at a 1964 Mississippi meeting. And she said, “Even if segregation is gone, we will still have to see that everyone has a job.” And it’s important to understand, she’s saying everyone, not just Black people, not just brown people, everyone, poor white people, everyone has got to have a job. She says, “Even if we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we, the larger, we will not be free.” Singing alone, she says, is not enough. We need schools and we need learning. And that’s what Miss Baker’s saying in ’64. So how do I get into SNCC? And I’m going to make this very quick. I’m on a full four-year scholarship at Swarthmore College, the Quaker College in Pennsylvania. And I find that there is an SDS chapter on campus. SDS was the Students for a Democratic Society, the national organization of progressive, primarily white college students who very much supported the 1960 burgeoning student movement coming out of these Black campuses, very much supportive of SNCC. So I find out that this SDS chapter is organizing busloads of students to go down on weekends to help desegregate public facilities in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Now in Cambridge, Black folks had had the vote for years, but they had no real power and they couldn’t sit down at white restaurants or use the roller rink. And that made the young Black people really upset. And it’s they who say, “We’re not going to take this anymore.” It’s they, young people, get their parents and the adults involved. And the adults say, “We need some help organizing these people.” They come to SNCC. But I didn’t know all that. At this point, I’m just going to my first meeting of this SDS chapter on Swarthmore’s campus, right? I have no major commitment to any struggle. It’s just that my mother’s not there to stop me. And I’m trying to figure out what is this all about? Let me see what this is going on. And I end up joining a busload of students headed to Cambridge, Maryland, to join the protests. I sometimes get arrested. I started being in jail more on the weekends than on Swarthmore’s campus. Sometimes that spilled over to Mondays. So it was suggested that I take off a semester and it’s only going to be six months. Now it turns out to be three years, but who knew, right? So one day after working a while in the Cambridge movement, Reggie Robinson, the SNCC organizer who was early on, kind of legendary SNCC organizer, came out of Baltimore. And he was the SNCC organizer in Cambridge. He says, look, I’m going down to the national office. Come go with me and we’ll come on back. I said, fine. I go in and I’m thinking, whoa, national office, this is amazing. This is going to be like the urban league, right? It’s going to have rugs on the floor, Ritzy. And we started this little small place near a barber shop and there’s a plate glass window and Reggie opens the door and there’s this big man sweeping the stairs. And Reggie looks so happy to see him, right? And he hollers up and they hug like they’re long lost brothers. And I’m thinking, boy, this is an egalitarian place, boy. This SNCC is egalitarian cause Reggie must be hugging the janitor. But then he calls the man’s name and it turns out it’s Jim Forman. And I realized, oh my gosh, this is Jim Forman, SNCC’s larger than life executive secretary. He’s the head of SNCC, right? And it turned out that Forman often swept the stairs, even though he wasn’t that good at it. He was sending two messages to everybody who saw him doing this, which was all the staff in the national office. And that was, no job is too lowly for anyone in SNCC to do. And every job is important to sustaining the organization. This is the community that I come into. I mean, at this point, SNCC had field offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Southwest Georgia, and Arkansas. And they’re all working with local grassroots leadership, primarily around the vote. And so when I come into SNCC, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven, which is why the six months becomes three years. But now we have the SNCC Legacy Project and I won’t go into what we’re doing, but they are still moving and we’re still doing all this stuff. So thank you. 

[11:27] Janet Dewart Bell: That is fascinating. And there are a couple of things I wanted to point out of what you said, and that’s the youth led leadership. And one thing that you did not dwell on, cause you don’t ever dwell on it to my knowledge, the dangers that you and others faced going down South. When you talk about even Ms. Baker going to Florida and things like that, these were not easy and safe trips. So I want us to keep that in mind about what the times were. So thank you, Judy. David Goodman, I know that when you came to Antioch College, it was at a very difficult time. Will you tell us about that and tell us a little bit about your background and how you’ve gotten involved and continue to stay involved in the civil rights, the freedom movement?

[12:17] David Goodman: All of our stories are so interesting. Until I was 17, I believed, simplistically speaking, that all people are created equal. I never questioned it. No one told me to, and I didn’t know any better. And it took me decades to comprehend what that clause meant, which was written by a young 33-year-old guy, Thomas Jefferson. There was no Rosetta Stone embedded that I could see in the Declaration of Independence. So there was no, you know, context or footnotes and no one told me about it. I’m still learning about it. So my brothers murdered along with James Cheney and Michael Schwerner. And I had no clue why that would happen. Why would God-fearing Christian men murder three innocent kids that were just trying to uphold our democracy? I can tell an intellectual explanation for why, but I mean, I just don’t understand it. And I don’t understand how people go to church and learn, “Thou shall not kill for 18 grown men to murder three innocent guys who just want to vote.” Now I’m putting it obviously in simplistic terms, but here I am, a white kid. I come from fortunate circumstances, but I heard a lot about what went on in the world, except nobody really explained to me what racism was. I didn’t understand what slavery was, really. It was terrible and bad, but I didn’t really get that it was a business proposition. So I learned about this in a way I wouldn’t wish on anybody, and I’m still learning. And it seemed to me that as a business, I was particularly interested in what you call business economics or the economics of sort of macro business economics, that the more suppression there is of minority groups and Jewish groups, the more antisemitism, the more racism, the more isms and homophobia and poor treatment of women, the worse the economy does. Now I’m looking at this in kind of a cold steel angles from every, like life is like a hologram. You got to look at it from every angle, or I do. And I looked at the economic growth of the country in terms of the former Confederate states and Northeastern states, the Western states, and I was stunned and still am that the most backward states economically are Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, all the states where the view of marginalizing groups of people, whether it’s black, white, or antisemitism, all of these are bad for people’s well-being, national security, and economic well-being. That racism, hatred, antisemitism, which I’m more attuned to maybe than non-Jews is bad for our country in every single respect. It’s bad economically. And I talk about this because a lot of people can relate to what’s in my pocket and how am I getting a good job? Where are the good jobs? By the way, what I’ve read in the history books, and again, I’m not a historian, it seemed to me as I metabolized my personal experience that the structure that allowed a relatively small group of white male heterosexual privileged people to run the country, which is still the case, 1% of the population owns 33% of the assets, 1%. The next 9% own the next 33% of the assets. That’s 10% owning 7 out of 10 of the assets of this country, and the 90% get very little. And it’s the structure that started before Thomas Jefferson was born, and it’s ingrained now. So this is how I said, “This just seems really dumb,” besides being unfair. And that’s how I got involved in saying, “We can do this better.” 

[16:24] Janet: Yes. And I just want to point out two things. One, I think you came to Antioch the year that your brother was assassinated. Is that correct? And then also you and your family with your mother, Carolyn, have really not only done the legacy, but have done a lot of work for voting rights, which we’ll get into in just a moment. 

[16:43] David: Yeah. So my brother was murdered on June 21st, 1964, along with Cheney and Schwerner. They were actually not after my brother. They didn’t even know who he was. He was a volunteer in SNCC. Judy was one of the people running it. My brother was just a volunteer. He was kind of like one of a thousand. They were being trained in Ohio, of all places. Cheney and Schwerner had been down in Mississippi as organizers and were up there for the training. And a church got burned down where they were trying to put together a school, one of the many freedom schools. And they wanted a volunteer to drive with them down to Mississippi. This is on Friday, June 19th, 1964. And there was a coin flip because a lot of the volunteers wanted to go and my brother won the coin flip. Anyway, he was apprehended. They were stopped for so-called speeding. They actually weren’t moving. It was a very slow high speed situation. And they got put in jail. And then the sheriff, who had been tipped off about their presence in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near Meridian, Mississippi, let them out in the middle of the night. No phone calls, nothing. And the Klan was ready for them. They nabbed them and killed them. But they buried their bodies in a dam under construction. So nobody knew about it. It took 44 days for the FBI to find them. There’s hundreds of books about this. But the big picture is that the Ku Klux Klan hated three groups of people, African-Americans, Catholics, white or black, and Jews. 

[18:19] Janet: Yes. So I’m going to turn it back over for a second so that Judy can talk about voting rights. And that will lead into our conversation that we have. 

[18:28] Judy: Well, what I’m going to do is talk about how SNCC gets into voting rights, because people usually think that it’s we and SNCC who decided to focus on voting rights and voter registration. And in fact, it was the local people who we worked with who were already focused on voting rights. Very specifically, Amzie Moore, who was a local NAACP leader in Mississippi. Bob Moses, who was SNCC’s Mississippi project director. Bob said he’d gone to Mississippi in ’62 to organize a SNCC project there. And it was Ms. Baker who had told him to check Amzie, that he was the one that Bob needed to talk to. And as a matter of fact, he’s not even thinking about that at that point. He just knows he wants to go to organize in Mississippi. And actually, he’s trying to bring more young people to the next conference of SNCC. So it’s really, he’s not thinking about voting rights at that point. And then early on, he said, Amzie takes out a precinct map and spreads it on the kitchen table, looks at Bob and says, look, you young people can do sit-ins if you want to. But I know, says Amzie, that our power as black people will come through organizing around the right to vote. And then he shows Bob the areas in Mississippi where black people were in the majority or had significant populations. And then he says to Bob, look, I’m not ready for you here in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the Delta, meaning I don’t yet have that local organizing, local organization that you can build on. But C.C. Bryant has it. He’s ready for you in Macomb, in Southwest Mississippi. And that becomes SNCC’s first voter registration project in Mississippi. Bob Moses, he said, there was a joining of a young generation of people with an older generation that nurtured and sustained them. He said we could go any place in Mississippi and down some road there was family and we could show up there unannounced with no money and no nothing. And someone was going to let me in, give me a bed to sleep, feed me and watch my back. They were going to sit up at night with a with the shotguns across their knees and make sure that we were protected. Those were the first folks who grounded us, those local local movement organizers. 

[20:39] Janet: Thank you for sharing that. That is very important and a great quote. David, can you tell us a little bit what the Andrew Goodman Foundation has been doing in terms of democracy issues and voting rights? 

[20:50] David: We took a page out of SNCC’s book, which was highly documented, and the mission of the Andrew Goodman Foundation is making young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy. And the Andrew Goodman Foundation organizes students at between 70 and 100 colleges, depending on which year it is. And they have the simplistic job, it’s not so simple, of registering their peers to vote and getting them out to vote. Now, in that process, they uncover the barriers to not just registering, which is step one, but step two, to suppress the vote of this demographic, which is 20 million people in colleges and 40 million in population for that age cohort, to keep them from voting. And that’s a long story. We’ve all heard about it. But the granularity is stunning, and it’s very effective. So we’re working to make it more democratic. 

[21:52] Janet: But I wanted to say what part of the process of what the foundation does in terms of training young people to register, other young people to vote, is that I assume it’s still the case where you give stipends so people are not limited by their own personal circumstances, because we all know we didn’t get reparations and there’s very little intergenerational wealth. So in order to have a diverse group working on these issues, you really have to reach out and understand that people need to be paid for their work. So I think that that’s a very wonderful..

[22:22] David: Right. Well, we didn’t start out with that. We were… To show you how ignorant I was. 

[22:29] Janet: But we learned. 

[22:30] David: We figured it out. And we shared that information. The kids came out to us and said, “Oh, this is a great plan. We educate them about SNCC and what happened 60 years ago, or it was 50 years ago, and then advocate for equal access to the ballot box, and when necessary, litigate. We’re not lawyers, we’re plaintiffs.” And the students at various schools have been plaintiffs with us. So they learn how to do all this. And they said, “You know what? We don’t have any money.” And we said, “Well, we’re a foundation. We’ll give you a stipend.” That’s what you were saying. And it was an economic justice issue. The program, sort of soup to nuts, is conscious of the otherwise structures that we have in this country.

[23:18] Janet: And I think you’ve raised a lot of issues there in terms of economic justice and what have you. We only have a few more minutes. So what I’d like to do is to ask two of you, if you have… I mean, these are very deep issues and we can talk about it, but in terms of voting rights, what keeps you motivated? Why do you keep going? And what is your hope for the future? So give us the words of wisdom that you would like to share.

[23:44] Judy: Part of it is that I love to dance. And so if Tito Puente comes on or Fania All Stars, I get up. I’ve been known to get up out my bed when Fania All Stars come on with Tito Puente and start to do a salsa. Or Marvin Gaye, could be anything. So the music keeps me. But the other thing is that I surround myself with people who really do think you really can change stuff. They may not change overnight. It may be what a lot of the older people said to us. We may not see the change that we’re working for, but if you do nothing, nothing changes. So some of them were figuring they would never see black people vote, but again, they had to do something because otherwise the folks coming behind them would have to go through the same stuff. That’s what they were trying to do. Okay. So, but Ms. Baker, and I’ll leave you with these words. Ms. Baker, she says, “I’m part of the human family. What the human family will accomplish, I can’t control. But somewhere down the line, the numbers increase. The tribe increases.” So she says, “How do I keep on?” She said, “I can’t help it. I believe that the struggle is eternal. Somebody else carries on.” And it’s the young people and the people I surround myself with who keep me going. 

[24:53] David: You got to get back up when you get knocked down. It’s just instinct if you got the right instincts. And it’s not a matter of logic. It’s you got to keep going. It’s almost sounds Pollyannish in a way. But I got to tell you that John Lewis kind of fixed in my mind the model, which is he got whacked over the head over and over and over again. There’s no reason why he lived through that stuff, but he did. And he said he just got up and he kept going because he believed that democracy should work. As simplistic as that sounds, that ain’t the case. So you got to make it. The law ain’t the law until you make it the law. I mean, et cetera. And democracy is an ideal, a notion. And it’s not in the real world. We got to make it in the real world. And that’s the only way that it’s going to work. 

[25:46] Janet: Thank you, David Goodman and Judy Richardson for continuing to win victories for humanity. 

[25:55] Jasper: You can learn more about this event and the entire Antioch Works for Democracy initiative on the Antioch Works for Democracy website. We’ll include a link in our show notes. We’ll also include a link to the YouTube recording of the full unedited video of the event. We post these show notes on our website, the seedfield.org, where you’ll also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes and more. The Seed Field podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor is Nastassja Green. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. Jen Mont is our web content coordinator. Stephanie Perrettes, Lauren Arianzale, Grace Kurfman, Danny LaPointe, Lisa Wisner, Tawana Shambly, Natalie Obando and Diana Dinerman are our work study assistants. We received additional production help from Karen Hamilton, Amelia Bryan, Adrian Applegate, Jamila Gaskin, Harold Hale, Margaret Morgan, Lorian Alexandre and Melinda Garland. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. And don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, this has been the Seed Field podcast.