In Order To See Where We Are

I Think, To Be Honest, Sort Of Emanated From The Initial Work Of Somebody Else Instead Of Sclc. If You Take Albany; I Don't Know Whether You Recall How Albany Got Started. There Were Two Little Guys Who Went Up There First. One Was Cordell Hull Who Was Then In His Teens - Not Cordell Hull - Cordell Reagan, Who Came Out Of The Nashville Movement, And Charles Sherrod, Who Came Out Of The Richmond, Virginia, Movement.

Martin [luther King] Wasn't, Basically, The Kind Of Person - Certainly At The Stage That I Knew Him Closest - Wasn't The Kind Of Person You Could Engage In Dialogue With, Certainly, If The Dialogue Questioned The Almost Exclusive Rightness Of His Position.

Unless You Had Developed A Certain Independence Of Value, A Certain Independent System Of Value, A System Of Values That Was Independent From This Middle-class Drive For Recognition. This Has Been My Explanation Of Part Of [martin Luther King] General Role. So, He Accepted This Without Too Much Resistance. In Fact, None That I Could Ever See, And At Certain Points I Was Close Enough To See Something.

In '32 We Organized The Young Negroes' Cooperative League And Had Some Degree Of Success In Terms Of Establishing Stores And Certainly Buying Clubs In Various Sections Of The Country. I Was Designated As - I Don't Know What Exactly - I Believe It Was Director. I'm Not Sure What It Was, But It Had To Do With Getting Out The Necessary Mail And All Of That - Organization.

I Don't Know, Except That The Only Simple Answer, I Think, Is That Sclc [southern Christian Leadership Conference] Had Never Really Developed An Organizing Technique. I've Always Characterized The Difference In Saying That They Went In For Mobilization. And, To Be Honest, In Terms Of The Historical Facts, Their Mobilization Usually Was Predicated Upon Some Effort At Organizing By Someone Else. And, At This Stage, It Was Largely Sncc.