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>>PRINCELLA W. H. DIXON: Today at the
40-year reunion of the Southern Courier --
Montgomery-based newspaper,
blaring to you the news
of the up-and-rising
African-American community --
who do we have here?
All of the people who participated
in that next emancipation --
not after slavery, but after the vote.
These are white people who
committed themselves from the heart
to come into an
indigenous community.
Oh, yeah, this is not just
an international term.
It was a community where white people
did not have any kind of contact with us.
And you made a decision to
put aside the prejudice --
perhaps of your mother and
daddy, sisters, and brothers --
and get on the freedom train,
and come and make a difference.
>>GEOFF COWAN:
The idea for the Courier
really came from Ellen Lake
and Peter Cummings,
who were two students who were at
Harvard on the Harvard Crimson,
and who had been in Mississippi
in the summer of 1964.
>>ELLEN LAKE:
We thought about combining
our journalism experience and training
at the Crimson with the passion and the
commitment that we had developed
that summer before, the summer of '64.
And the idea of the Courier was born.
>>STEVE COTTON: It's been said that
journalism is the first draft of history,
and that history belongs
to those who write it.
Without the Courier, there was a
stream of human events going on
in that period of the South that
simply would not constitute history.
It's true in journalism and in life,
what you focus on is what it's all about.
And the Courier's focus
for that 175 occasions
really defined, created, and
perhaps, on 175 occasions,
minutely changed history.
>>MIKE LOTTMAN:
And I remember I came down here,
I think I came down during the
primary season in 1966, which was
the first election that measurable
numbers of black people could vote.
And I just said, ''this is it''.
This was the best job I ever had,
it was the most fun I ever had,
and it really changed my life.
>>MARY ELLEN GALE: I came because
I wanted to be part of what seemed to me
to be the most extraordinary
social movement of my time.
And I also came for the lesser reasons,
that I thought it would be -- and it was --
the most extraordinary
reporting job I think possible.
In a sense, one of the reasons I didn't
go back to journalism, I sometimes think
it's because I thought nothing could
ever be better than this experience,
the opportunity to share the lives of
people who were really doing something
to change the world.
>>GEOFF COWAN: I think that I had
gone into it believing in journalism,
and that journalism could make
a difference. At a moment in time,
I think that it was something that was
important to me to believe in:
that you could maintain the
highest standards of journalism --
the fairness, the balance, the accuracy --
at the same time that you felt
actually personally passionate
about the movement, about the people
and the episodes you were covering,
but you could still do it
with the kind of standards
that would make us all
proud as journalists.
>>BOB SMITH: To me,
it was all encapsulated
by a little encounter had with a
young kid, couldn't have been 6 or 7,
over in Selma when I went to the
projects to work on a story.
And this kid ran up to me and said,
''Are you a demonstrator?''
And I thought for a minute --
what I wanted to say was, no,
I'm a professional journalist, and I'm
trying to compile an objective newspaper
that's going to reach both sides
of the Civil Rights Movement,
and it's going to get
reporters in the South
reporting on the stories
that they're missing.
But I just looked back at him, I said,
''Uh, yeah, I'm a demonstrator.''
[laughter]
>>JOHN DIAMANTE: The aspect
I take away from the Courier is
how simple it is to make a newspaper.
And I think of a lot of places in this
country, how badly a newspaper is needed.
And it's such a simple thing to do,
just to go in and put together a crew
who talk to both sides,
get both sides' stories,
write a straight piece,
have it well-edited,
and put it in circulation, and put it in
people's hands is an incredible thing.
>>ARLAM CARR: I can remember growing
up, as a kid, in the Montgomery Advertiser,
they had what was called the
Negro page, or the Negro column.
The column would be about this size,
of this column right here, on one page,
of all the Negro news in Montgomery.
>>STEPHEN COTTON: The gentleman
referred, I think sort of charitably,
to the ''Negro Page''.
That's not what they called
it on the mainstream newspapers
that had that page. They used
another ''N'' word to describe it.
And the way we know that
is that one typesetter
inadvertently left the slug line
in one day, and the paper printed
with ''The 'N' Page''
at the top of that page,
spawning a bit of a demonstration,
but also revealing just what the
attitude was on the mainstream press.
>>ARLAM CARR: And so when I
had the chance to see a paper that was
not just devoted to Montgomery,
but for black people,
it really made me feel good.
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>>ARLAM CARR: I sort of came
full circle with the Southern Courier.
I started out as a carrier.
I saw the Southern Courier
as sort of a way that black people
had a voice in the community
and got some of the news out.
So it made me feel good to be
a part of the Southern Courier,
to be able to get the newspaper
out into the community.
And then, again, when I said
I came full circle, I mean --
I think it was you, Michael, who
came to me one day and said,
''Do you want to be a reporter,
a reporter for the newspaper?''
I thought, sure!
My senior year in high school.
And I had one true experience with this,
and I think I told Michael about it.
But that experience
gave me a chance to
see some of the things
that were happening
not only just in the civil
rights in Montgomery,
but also experiencing it for myself,
to see what people
went through to cover news.
>>GLORIA BRADFORD BRADLEY: I am
Gloria Bradford Bradley, formerly
the photography lab technician
for the Southern Courier,
under the direction of
Mr. James Jim Peppler.
I joined the Southern Courier
about a month before graduating
from high school in 1966.
I had had a photography course at
George Washington Carver High School
on Fairview Ave.
And that afforded me the opportunity
to have a job with Southern Courier,
about a month before
graduating from high school.
And I'm grateful for having been employed
with the Southern Courier until it closed.
I was functioning in the lab, and I
knew the Southern Courier newspaper
was getting the word out to the people,
whereas the regular
newspapers may not have been.
I noticed how much news we did give out,
and what an impact it would have had,
getting the word to the masses
where the other newspapers
may not have been doing that.
>>BARBARA HOWARD:
When they first came south,
I was actually in the 12th grade,
and had had typing skills and training,
worked in the office, private lessons.
And they needed a typist coming
from Atlanta for the newspaper.
And I was working for the NAACP
in the position that Rosa Parks
had served, as secretary.
And then the Courier came along,
so in September of 1965,
I started working for the Courier,
and worked for the Courier until we
became defunct, December of 1968,
and what an experience.
>>MIKE LOTTMAN: Viola Bradford, she
was just amazing, one of the local people
who came to work for us when
she was still in high school.
She was the best writer, the most
naturally gifted writer I have ever known.
She could cover anything
and make it make sense,
and everybody related
to the things she wrote.
We did find a printer in Montgomery.
It was a guy named Paul Woolley,
who was a wonderful guy, and
it was still pretty much an all-white
operation at the print shop.
And those guys used to stand
around, reading the paper,
reading Viola's stuff, the stuff
she wrote, and talking about it.
Mertis Rubin was one of
my favorite Courier people.
She was very young, too,
I think probably 19 or so.
She lived in Mendenhall, Mississippi,
which is a very small town in Mississippi.
I don't know how she
found her way to the Courier,
but she used to cover a lot
of Mississippi politics,
and no-one knew more about
Mississippi politics than Mertis Rubin.
I mean, she had the
inside poop on everything.
>>JIM WILLSE: I was in
Tuscaloosa, in west Alabama,
from the fall of '65
into the spring of '66.
And in Greene County, as in a lot
of the other black belt counties,
that was a seismic time
for voter registration.
And the two local movement leaders
were a guy named Thomas E. Gilmore,
and a Rev. Branch, William Branch.
And I found Gilmore, and
I called him this week.
He's now a pastor, a full-time pastor
in a church near Birmingham,
and I introduced myself, I said,
''There's no reason why you should
remember me, Rev. Gilmore,
but my name is Jim Willse, and 40 years
ago I was with the Southern Courier,
and I wrote about you.''
And he said,
''The Southern Courier. Our newspaper.''
>>MIKE LOTTMAN: And
it kind of all came together
in a guy named John Hulett
from Lowndes County.
He was one of the first people
we met in Lowndes County.
Mr. Hulett sold the paper for us for
a long time, we used to send it to him,
even when he started forming the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization,
and even when he started working with
SNCC and the Black Panther Party.
I know his picture was in the
Courier a number of times,
we wrote stories about him
a number of times.
And I guess you could
call it black power,
but his goal was to register voters
in probably the toughest, scariest county
in Alabama, and he did it very well.
After we left he ended up as the High
Sheriff of Lowndes County for a long time,
and really the man to see
in Lowndes County
if you wanted to get anything done.
And so it all kind of came together
in somebody like that. I mean,
that was about integration,
that was about black power,
it was about telling truth to power.
He was an amazing man, and he
did a lot of remarkable things.
>>BOB SMITH: A turning point for me,
in the Courier's life, was in January of '66,
when Stokely Carmichael
called us from Selma.
and he was then challenging SCLC
and Dr. King with regard to his --
he had a shout of ''Black Power'' that
was just beginning just about that time.
SCLC was regarded as the
integrationist wing of the movement,
and SNCC was regarded
as the more assertive,
black-empowerment
part of the movement.
And he summoned us over there.
And he said, ''Look, you're running
all these stories about black people
getting their heads bashed in trying
to integrate into the white world.
Every Courier article is about blacks
trying to get into the white world.''
And I learned a lot about racism
from what he said then, and
the tone of the Courier changed
for me that day, when he said,
''The black movement
is gonna be different,
at least this part of it
is going to be different,
and we're gonna stress self-
empowerment and the fact that
black people can
achieve on their own
without being part
of the white world.''
Some members were offended by it,
but it made an effect on me,
taught me a lot about racism, and I think
the paper, at least while I was around,
changed quite a bit because of that.
>>MIKE LOTTMAN: And really, I thought
it was a good paper right to the end.
And it kind of evolved a little bit.
It wasn't so much the
heroes from the north,
it was a lot more local involvement,
and a lot of really good people
working for the paper, and kind of
what we had in mind when we started.
It was a paper, you know,
of the people, for the people,
and it was getting to be
a paper by the people.
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>>GEOFF COWAN: So we
tried to get into these communities,
to meet people, and try to make them,
encourage them to take over this paper,
become an important part of the paper.
But one of the things we found
was that there was a danger level.
Not that we had fear -- I think probably
none of us felt personal physical fear --
but we were aware, prudently,
of what could happen.
>>MARTHA HONEY: When the
first issue came out, we all celebrated
by gathering together and
going to a Ku Klux Klan rally.
Up on the stage, this guy in a robe
pulls out from under his robe
this issue of the Courier, and starts
saying, ''this has just come out,
and we've got to hunt out these
people, find out who's doing this.''
>>JOHN DIAMANTE: But I loved the
back roads of southern Alabama,
and to drive them.
Once on a story, after talking
to a sheriff or a policeman,
there were some good old boys
and they came around me.
They said, ''You were over here
yesterday in such and such.''
And they cited, chapter and verse, where
I'd been yesterday and the day before,
and almost where I was going.
And that's how I became aware
of the white citizens' network
of CB radios and intelligence
that tracked a lot of the civil
rights workers, and a lot of us.
But there's really no time to be scared.
I mean, who could be scared
when people were dying,
who really were putting
their lives on the line?
>>JACK KRAMER: I was scared
all the time, with no good reason.
If somebody in a pickup truck
was following me closely,
maybe he was just angry that
I was driving too slow,
but I was sure he was after me.
And I've covered six wars
since I left the Courier, and
I've never been as scared
then as I was here.
Part of the reason, I think, is I didn't
come here looking like a civil rights worker.
So, I was able to listen to the
good old boys, and get really scared.
>>KENNETH LUMPKIN: I know the
question has been asked, were you scared.
And, of course I was. Quite scared.
I got connected with SNCC, and I was
on the fringe of being a little radical,
and so my sense when I got involved
with the Courier, it was more paranoia.
You know, these white guys and
ladies that have come from the north,
Ken, do you really trust 'em?
>>GEOFF COWAN: A group of rich
Harvard kids coming to the South,
all white -- which is true of the group
of us who came down from the Crimson --
who somehow think that they are
going to, in this patronizing way,
make a difference in the South, leave --
and by the way, why aren't they
changing the white community?
What are they doing, going
into the black community?
>>BARBARA HOWARD: That was one thing
that bothered me the most, you all,
is I could see visible
signs of love and caring,
and whites wanting to seek out
freedom and equality and justice,
and to be color-blind.
But here I am,
living in Montgomery,
with people who are killing and shooting
and, you know, calling you nigger.
>>KENNETH LUMPKIN: I remember
going to Lowndes County with Jim,
and bless him, he
made me feel at ease,
because I was scared to death.
And, you know, here I am,
in Lowndes County, and
you have to live in that era to
understand what was going on.
You could be killed.
>>JIM PEPPLER: This was
my night of darkness,
and it occurred in Lowndes County,
the night of the day that the Black 
Panther Party had been on the ballot.
We were all gathered at a
little church, I think it was,
Stokely and the SNCC people,
and John Hulett, and all the
movement people were there.
And somebody came in,
and a message had come in
that a man had been
shot dead in Fort Deposit.
>>SCOTT B. SMITH, JR.: Stokely
and I, and all of us, began to carry guns.
The battle of Fort Deposit
was based on the very fact
that we were hoping
the Klan would attack.
We had planned for a shootout.
We wanted the Klan to attack,
and go in after us,
because we were going to take them out.
>>JIM PEPPLER: Within moments,
every man in the room had a shotgun.
Stokely went wild and got a gun.
And a pickup truck was just
filled with men with guns that,
I don't know where the guns came from.
But obviously, people who
live in Lowndes County
didn't get too far from their guns.
And they rolled off down the road.
Something made me feel
I could die that night.
And there was something empowering
about making the decision that
I'm going to do this because I
feel that my place is to be there.
And if I die or live, I have made
the choice and I have accepted it.
And I drove on in.
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>>BOB SMITH: When it
occurred to me that it was
the 10th anniversary of the bus boycott,
I just picked up the phone and called
Martin Luther King in Atlanta,
and said would you write a piece for us
on the 10th anniversary, and he said yes.
But the week went by, and
our deadline was approaching,
and I think whatever it was, was it
Tuesday night we put it together?
And Tuesday morning arrived
a Western Union telegram,
which was then the equivalent of email,
and it was from Martin Luther King, Jr.,
with a wonderful, beautiful
article on what the bus boycott
not only meant to Montgomery,
but to American history.
He quoted Thucydides in
the very first paragraph,
which most editors
probably would edit out,
but he could translate
all of that into lay terms,
and reach the common person,
and it was just a wonderful article.
I called Rosa Parks at about
the same time during that fall.
She truly did not think anything she did
was extraordinary, or a part of history.
She couldn't understand why I was
asking, and she didn't want to do it.
And I kept asking, and really had to
persuade her that people in Montgomery
cared about her memory after ten years.
And I said, could I write
it up from what I know,
and I would ghost-write it,
and get your approval?
And that's the arrangement we had.
And in the end I read it
to her over the telephone,
and she said, that's fine, and
you can put my byline on it.
It was an extraordinary time for me.
>>MARTHA HONEY: The big
issue in Tuskegee that summer
was the integration of the churches.
And it was just, I mean, I
actually was in a way scared,
but I was mostly scared,
partly personally,
because every Sunday we all got
attacked, and we had cameras broken.
And it was just, really, it was
raw violence in a way that,
I had seen some in Mississippi
in the summer before,
but this was just relentless.
And the students were so incredibly
persistent and courageous,
and, at a certain level I thought,
foolhardy to take on the white churches
with the sort of tenacity
that they did every Sunday.
And Sammy Younge was the leader of it,
and the final story I did, as I recall,
was on this movement
to integrate the churches.
And shortly after I left,
he was assassinated.
I just had a question all summer
long of, did they really have to,
did this movement in Tuskegee
really have to take on sort of
the most difficult
part of the struggle,
which was the churches,
and yet, in a way,
the most logical part.
But the violence that we
experienced every Sunday
was just really quite shocking.
>>MARY ELLEN GRAHAM:
I also covered a very big trial
in which the person who killed
Sammy Younge in January of 1966 --
this was a student who was there
or who had just graduated, and
who had been leading demonstrations,
among them to white churches.
And he was killed.
He was killed by
a gas station operator.
And there were demonstrations
all over Tuskegee,
they painted a yellow stripe down
the back of the Confederate statue,
and there were guns,
mostly kept out of sight,
on the side of the demonstrators
as well as on the police,
but no-one else got shot.
>>SCOTT B. SMITH, JR.:
We took that campus over.
I helped paint the statue black,
trying to provoke the Klan for a fight.
We wanted a fight.
>>MARY ELLEN GRAHAM: When the man
who had shot Sammy Younge was tried,
I covered that trial.
There was no formal transcript taken,
so that my notes became the basis
for any further writings about that trial,
my notes and my coverage in the paper.
>>JOAN TORNOW: Not many
white people had crossed the threshold
into this black funeral home
in Birmingham. Not in 1967.
But here we were, investigating
what we believed to be a murder.
The proprietor knew why we were here.
We needed to ascertain the location
of the bullet that killed James Small,
son of a black political activist.
The day before, I had
read a one-inch report
buried in the back pages
of the Birmingham News.
A black man had been
spotted running near a school
where, in the past, break-ins
had been reported.
The police yelled stop, and then
fired a warning shot into the air.
Later they found his body.
That was how the
Birmingham News reported it.
The proprietor pulled down
the sheet so we could see that
the bullet had not entered his chest.
He tipped James over on his side
and we could see that the
bullet had entered his back.
The warning shot.
The one that had allegedly
been fired into the air.
I had seen a corpse
for the first time,
and it was the corpse of a young
person whose death made no sense.
A few evenings later,
I went to a meeting of the
Alabama Christian Movement
at a black Baptist church.
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth,
head of the city chapter of the
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, was there.
He said, ''Every time you turn
around, some Negro's being killed
by some trigger-happy
policeman in Birmingham.''
>>ROBIN REISIG: But there are a lot
of other murders we reported on.
Some were just trigger-happy cops,
scared or dumb or careless
with black people's lives.
But others were
pre-meditated murder.
A police officer from Prattville
shot a black man in the back,
after, according to the
man's dying statement,
telling him he was free to go.
And the policeman said,
''Oh, he was trying to escape.''
Now, the reason the police officer
would have had a good motive
for pre-meditated murder
is the black man had just shot and
killed a prominent white landowner,
because that landowner
was shooting into his house.
And what ensued, just for the
sake of you who don't know,
were lots of demonstrations.
The white people in town would
demonstrate in Ku Klux Klan robes,
and then walk into the
little town hall to disrobe,
because they were
the establishment.
The black people had many
other kinds of demonstrations,
that culminated in a
really horrific night,
where they were in a house which
had been shot into a few times,
by the brother of the
policeman who killed the man.
Someone in a white car
had been shooting in,
so the next time a
white car came back,
the civil rights workers
in the house shot back
and managed to shoot a policeman,
injuring him only slightly.
So all hell broke loose,
and there was a standoff,
and eventually the
police went into the house
and beat the crap out of
a lot of people I knew,
nearly blinding the head of the
local civil rights movement.
>>STEVE COTTON:
My first story for the Courier
when I came down from Boston,
of course through Atlanta,
Mike asked me to go out to the
little town of Crawfordville, Georgia,
which was then getting some
attention in the national news
because they had been under a court
order to de-segregate the schools.
And during the summer when the
school system was supposed to be
preparing for desegregation,
what they in fact did was
quietly enroll all the white kids in
schools outside of Taliaferro County.
And they would provide buses every day
to the white kids with police lined up,
because what would happen in
the form of a demonstration
was that the black kids
would make a run for the bus,
and be tackled by the white policemen
so that they could not get on the bus
to go to what then would
have been integrated schools.
And on the day that I came into town,
there was a rally that was being held
that night in the black church,
and Dr. King was actually going to
come in from Atlanta to address the rally.
And he did so, on a very, very dark
night in very tense circumstances,
and gave a very moving speech
to a crowd that was both angry
and afraid of what was going on.
And there was a large crowd of
whites outside, gathering menacingly,
but because King was
in town, and to protect him,
there was a state trooper presence there.
And under the moonlight a phalanx of
state troopers kept the white toughs,
a couple hundred of them across the
street, from getting to the church.
And at the end of his speech, King
was really hustled out of the church
through a side door.
They got him into a car,
leaving behind Rev. Andy Young,
who stayed with the parishioners.
And partly to kind of quiet both sides,
as the parishioners walked out of
the church, Andy had a prayer session.
And at one point,
he said something like,
''Father, teach us to be nonviolent
in the face of violence, and pray for
our white brothers and sisters, because
we cannot be free unless we are all free.''
And from the white crowd came a yell,
''You'll never be free, nigger.''
>>BOB SMITH: I once wrote
an obituary about a tree.
I think it was Greeneville, Alabama.
It was a chinaberry tree.
And the young people used to
meet under the chinaberry tree --
that was the code for a
civil rights get-together.
That's the only way they could do it,
''we're going to meet
under the chinaberry tree.''
It not only provided shade
in a very god-forsaken place,
but this was their code, and
they would meet there regularly,
to plan their demonstrations
and what they were going to do.
And one time, in the
full view of the police,
somebody chopped down the
damn tree and carted it away.
And this had a devastating effect on
the young people in the community.
And we ran a picture of the stump,
and that's the obituary of the tree
that explains to me how
nasty racism can be.
The only intent of that
was to discourage people,
to dehumanize them,
to put them in disarray,
and also to send the message
who is in charge in that community.
>>JIM PEPPLER: I went
down in May of '65,
and I left in May of '68
because I had. . .
I covered the funeral
of Martin Luther King.
And I just didn't feel like
I wanted to keep on doing --
I couldn't feel like I could carry
my weight with the Courier
without knowing that he was alive.
[typewriter sounds]
>>JIM WILLSE: when you look at the
papers, I was pleased to see one of the
things I thought I remembered
about the Southern Courier --
it was not just the big
stories that we covered,
the demonstrations and the trials,
and the sort of big earthquake events,
but the little things.
And I think that was one of the goals
that we brought into the adventure,
was to try and write about
the sort of stuff-of-life stories
that would not make their way
into the mainstream white press.
You think back about the big events that,
the ones that had a lot of thunder
and lightning to them,
but that was, I felt at the time and
looking back I guess I still feel,
kind of an important thing to do.
GOEFF COWAN: One of the
conversations I remember us having
as we thought about the
newspaper was about formatting.
One of the decisions that we made was
that this should have lots of pictures.
That pictures could tell a story
in a way that words couldn't.
And Jim Peppler, who is here, and
Ken Lumpkin, are among those
who became photographers
and who brought to life
so much that's enduring about the paper,
a decision that was made at that time
about what the paper should be like.
>>JIM PEPPLER: I have to say
that the golden, uplifting,
underpinning excitement and joy of
my life with the Courier was the music.
I got to experience,
in live performance,
music in places like Tom's Place,
and the Laicos Club,
and I couldn't get enough of it.
It was because the music,
like photography,
it talks to and comes from places
that are deeper than just words.
It gets right into you.
And if you put pictures and
music and words together,
you've got a package that can
come close to communicating truth.
>>KENNETH LUMPKIN: They would
love the paper with the pictures,
and I'm glad that came up, because
it gave me the opportunity to
put people in the paper that normally
everyday folks wouldn't see.
And I think that's what made the
Courier, here in Montgomery at the time,
so important.
It was people,
ordinary people,
people that didn't have the
opportunity to fame and glory.
They got the opportunity to be
seen, and it made them feel good.
It made me feel tremendously
good to be a part of it.
>>SCOTT B. SMITH:
People in their homes
have old papers that
you have over there,
and look upon those papers as
almost their family Bible,
pleased with the very fact that
you have written about them.
And I'm very happy to be old enough
and still alive enough to tell you
''thank you.''
[applause]
[typewriter sounds]
>>MIKE LOTTMAN: We were
only here like three and a half years.
And it was a big time out of our
lives, and a big time in our lives,
that most of us, all of us,
will never forget.
But, you know, things got tough,
we ran out of money.
I and the people
who were still around
couldn't think of any
way to keep it going.
>>MARY ELLEN GRAHAM:
The Southern Courier
was something that I could
feel proud of in my life,
that I had had the will
and the energy to do it.
And it opened up a world to me.
I always was incredibly grateful
for the way in which so many of
the people I met in the South
would share their lives, the
intimate details of their lives,
without being afraid that they
were going to be disrespected.
They came to trust the Courier.
>>KENNETH LUMPKIN: I have had some
things that happened, real bad, in my life.
But I have always been able to reach back
and bring the memories of the Courier,
and make it work for me.
I was homeless,
and had a drug problem.
But the Courier was there,
the thought of it,
and it gave me a
sense of determination.
>>BARBARA HOWARD:
I thought that Tuskegee, Alabama
was all of that and then some,
because black folks lived there,
and because of the work of the citizens
there, they were able to make strides
when Lucius Amerson was elected the
first black Sheriff in the United States
since reconstruction.
We covered that article.
And imagine me moving to Tuskegee
in 1975, and I could go up to the Sheriff
and say, ''I know you!''
I'd never met him,
but because of the
articles in the Courier,
I knew all about him.
It set the tone.
Coming from Montgomery, having
worked in the newspaper
and actually typing the
articles, seeing the pictures,
we were civil rights movement people.
Because of my work
on the Southern Courier,
it connected me to the civil and
human rights movement,
not just in the south,
but I met all of these folks
who have worked so through the years.
>>JIM WILLSE: and I look back, and
I've said this to people, and I mean it:
the time I spent at the Southern Courier
was the best job I ever had.
It was all real. You were there.
There was no--
there was nothing filtering it.
And that summer ratified a feeling
that I had, or thought I had,
which was that journalism
could be a great adventure,
and it could be, in its way,
a way to change, to fix
something that needed fixing.
[typewriter sounds]
>>JOHN DIAMANTE:
Don't you feel,
in this country, since
the civil rights movement,
there is just this suppression
of idealism in America?
This great, generous nation that does
such good work at home and overseas,
there has been no channel
for this idealism.
I just feel that the
country is so bottled up.
It's so ready to heal itself,
and do a lot for the world.
I don't know how that's
going to break loose,
but this paper is, really, it's
kind of a beacon in that respect.
>>KENNETH LUMPKIN:
We have to bring value back
to the way we feel about people.
I think we have lost that.
Then, we really cared about
making a difference for people.
I just don't think people have that
passion, that love for one another.
And the media have to be the
institution to make the difference.
The word and the message
have to get out there.
And we need a new breed of
journalist like we had back then.
[applause]
And, until we have that, we're
gonna see a new destruction
of a whole generation of people.
>>STEVE COTTON: The commitment,
the courage, the skill, the integrity
that they brought to the craft of
journalism was a model then
for what journalism should be,
and stands as a model, I think, today.
And if you really read some of
these back issues, you will see
that there were some great reporters
who, as very young people,
really did an excellent job of
reporting on a rich tapestry of events
that no-one else was
committing to writing.
>>KENNETH LUMPKIN: I look back
and I look at the Southern Courier
as being raw journalism.
I think all of us, to some degree,
we didn't know it all, and we learned.
But I think the results is great,
that this is a part of history that
will go on long after we are gone.
And I'm just glad I've been a part of it.
[music]
