I really feel that when we had the marches in Birmingham and were able to
get the civil rights bill—in 1964 it came out, before we went to
Europe—and then when we did the Selma-to-Montgomery march in March of
'65. And in August of '65 we got the voting rights bill. I really felt
that that was a great turning point and that it had great effect on the
American people. And the reason why I say that: I went into Selma,
Alabama, and worked from May, '65, to August getting people to learn how
to write their names. I had opposition with five black preachers, who
didn't want me to teach them to write their names in cursive writing.
And when they wrote their names in cursive writing, they received a
number which said that they could register when the federal man came
down in August. All right, Dr. King sent us in there to get this done:
Ben Mack of Columbia; Bernice Robinson of Charleston; Asley Johnson, now
of Idlewild, Michigan, but then of Monroe, North Carolina. We went in
together. All of them left me; they couldn't take the foolishness from those preachers. And I stayed, and on the
fifth day I was able to get it done, and I got the teachers of Selma to
work in their kitchens and in various offices to teach these people to
write. And when they learned to write their names, they had to go uptown
to the courthouse and demonstrate that they could write their name. And
then they received a number. And in August of that year we had 7,002
persons ready to write their names, and we got that many voters. In 1966
on May the third, I went into Camden, Alabama, and down into Anamanee
and another little town down there, and it was election time. And the
federal examiner was with us, and he pulled a seat for a black girl to
sit down and a white girl to sit beside her. Both of them, hands shook.
And after their hands shook, they finally got to the place where they
could put the names on the books of the people who came to register to
vote. But here comes a white farmer. "Who ever heard tell of voting by
the ABC's?" Because over the top of those windows, they had you vote
according to the last name, whether it's A, B, or C. He was accustomed
to black people standing back until white people were served, and that
thing worried him, but he had to do it. And so they registered in that
fashion. One of the fellows we were teaching in Anamanee went up to the
bank in Camden, and the man took the pen and said, "I'll make the X." He
said, "You don't have to make the X for me, because I can write my own
name." He says, "My God, them niggers done learned to write their
names."