Well, we're in the group now that are becoming the mayors. We did the
demonstration things, too, believe me, in the King philosophy. We saw
what happened to the black power movement and probably never thought it
was reasonable. Many of the people who led those movements, Stokely and
Rap and others came from the North, really, they were not Southerners.
We Southerners growing up under the shadow of King really did see change
occur, dramatic change, and so there was a certain believability about
pushing direct action and then ultimately evolving that into politics
that made some sense to us. Jesse really is still a civil rights
activist, he and I really have taken two slightly different roads. I'm
more a believer in taking the benefits that were brought about by Martin
and Jesse and all the other direct action kinds of things and molding
them
Page 29 into long-term, institutional changes that
would occur, systemic changes that have occurred in our society. I read
about the
Observer's report yesterday on the
increasing amount of blacks that are registering. That is significant to
me and its been significant enough in this community that I've been
elected to public office and it's been in no small part due to the
increased amount of participation by black voters in the electoral
process. We see that now as the vehicle for change: to assume and to aim
higher in local and state and other places to bring about, carry on that
revolution that started back there when the Supreme Court made that
decision. And so for us, it was the civil rights movement had its
purpose; black power, those people were slightly younger than we are
(well, I guess, we're really about the same age) that was an offshoot of
the student non-violent coordinating committee, the shock troops of the
civil rights movement that got disillusioned with the lack of more rapid
progress, the falling away and the more tension beginning with the
Vietnam war that got into totally different things. Again, you know,
you've got to remember folks that came from the South, many of us were
very much attuned to the changes that we saw occurring that were in our
eyesight dramatic and many of us came from those middle-class type
environments that said, you know, the way to do things is not to destroy
them but to try to negotiate power.