Oral History Interview with Charles Neblett

BETSY BRINSON: ...June twenty-sixth, the year two thousand two. This is an interview with Charles Neblett. The interview takes place at the History Center in Frankfort, Kentucky. And the interviewers are Genie Potter and Betsy Brinson. Mr. Neblett, would you give me your full name, please? So I can get a voice level.

CHARLES NEBLETT: Charles Neblett.

BRINSON: No middle name?

NEBLETT: “D” as in diligent, Delbert. It’s Charles Delbert Neblett.

BRINSON: Okay, D E L B E R T?

NEBLETT: Right.

BRINSON: Are you a junior at all?

NEBLETT: No, my grandfather--it skipped. My grandfather was named Charles, on my mother’s side. So, she let it come down the line. One of my uncles is named Charles, so she named me Charles.

BRINSON: Shall we call you Mr. Neblett?

NEBLETT: You just call me Charles. It will be fine.

BRINSON: And I have one more question before I turn it over to Genie, please. Can you tell us, the date of your birth? The date and place of your birth.

NEBLETT: I was born February the twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-one in Robinson County, Tennessee. And later on that year, we moved to Kentucky.

BRINSON: Okay, thank you. Genie?

GENIE POTTER: Charles, tell us a little bit about your ancestors, maybe your people before even your grandparents.

NEBLETT: My....I grew up around some very old people. In fact, my father was born in eighteen eighty-seven. And my grandfather was born a slave. And on my mother’s side, there were very old people, in fact my great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a slave. In fact, one of my grandmothers, my great-grandmother, she lived to be--they estimated her age to be about a hundred and thirty when she died. They said they didn’t know what happened to her. She just wore out. The doctor said, “He didn’t see anything physically wrong with her, she just wore out.” And she died in the fifties and I can remember a lot of my people talking about stories of slavery. And it is amazing, because you know, you don’t see people that deemed to be that close to it. But they talked about it a lot. Even at that time you had a lot of black people, who weren’t comfortable about talking about slavery. It was something that they just wanted to just, don’t even talk about it. It was just so dehumanizing, they just didn’t want to mention it, all of the things that happened. But they talked about it a lot, all the things that happened in slavery. In fact, she was telling us when the Civil War started, she thought she was a teenager, she knew she was a teenager during the war between the states. And that she was saying, “That she didn’t see that much difference between the Union and the Southern troops, in terms of their treatment.” But anyway, when the Union troops would come through, she’d have Union flags. They’d raise Union flags. And when Confederate troops came through, they’d have Confederate flags. And that’s one of the ways, I guess they survived, doing that. But anyway, they would tell all of these stories.

POTTER: Was this your mother’s mother?

NEBLETT: This was my mother’s, my mother’s grandmother.

POTTER: And where were they living?

NEBLETT: Tennessee. And they would tell us all these stories and we would sit and listen. I was always a good listener. I’ve always been a sucker for a good story. And they had a lot of them. And in the, I guess in the eighteen, the late eighteen, about eighteen eighties and nineties, the early part of the century, a lot of my uncles went West. A lot of my great-uncles, they went West with the Western movement. They were in with the land rushes, and all that kind of thing out in Oklahoma. A lot of them settled in Texas. And a lot of those same guys’ parents and grandparents escaped slavery and some how they came up on a log down the Mississippi River. They was floating with logs. How they made it in the river. We just heard all of these stories and how they had overcome a lot of things and how they survived, which I found very interesting.

POTTER: How old were you when you moved to Kentucky? And where did you move?

NEBLETT: You see my brother....In Simpson County. My brother, Secou, he was born there. He was born when we were living in Kentucky, in Simpson County.

POTTER: What town in Simpson County?

NEBLETT: Near Franklin. It was on a farm near Franklin, Kentucky.

POTTER: Tell me a little bit about your family and the way that they might have influenced your values, in what you did in your future life.

NEBLETT: Well, my great-grandfather, he bought a farm. He’d managed to buy a farm. And one of the things that he didn’t want....He wanted to have it so his daughters or his grand-daughters wouldn’t have to work in white people’s houses, because of the things that happened to those daughters--those black women in those homes. And he was determined he was not going to have that; so that’s one of the things that motivated him to buy his own land. To find a way to get land and put his family on the land--his land. He would take his sons, he would force him to go to the courthouses to learn the law. He said, “You’re going to have to know the law.” And where he taught him the law, you got to go to the courthouse and listen. So he made him go to the courthouse and listen to cases and how things would work. He was very protective of his family. And then like I say, I heard all of the stories and a lot of my people who went West with the Western movement to get away from the South, and to start some things of their own. And I think one of the things that I find that happened, is that they were fighting for their humanity. They just were not going to be de-humanized, or allow themselves to be de-humanized. Because I think about that sometimes. In fact, I wrote a piece on this, about how people, how slaves maintained their humanity in an inhumane situation. And I did a piece called, The Song, The Dance and The Drum. Those things that you do that can take you away from your physical situation, put you in a whole other plane, where you can deal with your humanity on a whole other level, which I think is the pure kind of thing. You can deal with that humanity in that sphere and that space. And that’s one of the things that I think would help people to survive. And another thing, they were very religious. And I think those two things, in terms of their religion, helped them go above the inhumane kind of world that they were surrounded and subjected to, in order to maintain their humanity. And I think right now that the worst thing about slavery was the dehumanization part, other than the lynching, other than....But the main thing was that dehumanization process--de-humanizing process that people went through. And today I can see the effects of that, even today, in terms of people being dehumanized, getting over that whole thing of being de-humanized. Even forcing oneself to look at themselves as less than a human being and having the rights of any human being and looking at themselves in that way. So, I think the worst thing that can happen to a person, is that you dehumanize that person. And one of the things that I think my people fought against was that whole process, that whole system of dehumanization.

POTTER: Do you now have brothers and sisters?

NEBLETT: Oh yes, yes, yes. I had three brothers and two sisters. My older brother, he died, I guess about ten years ago. And I have another brother, Secou, he and myself were very involved in the Movement in the South. I’ll never forget in the fifties....I know when I was a little boy and I was really small, when I realized what this world was all about; and the conditions that I found myself in, the condition that black folk were in. And that I didn’t have the courts. I couldn’t go to the courts for anything. That the law enforcement agencies were not on my side, right or wrong. And that what in the world....just all these questions. I had all of these questions.

POTTER: How old were you?

NEBLETT: Oh, about seven or eight. When I was nine years old, we....that was in the fifties, in the early fifties. We staged a sit-in in the little town. The lady, we were determined that we were going to sit and drink this soda.

POTTER: Was this in Simpson?

NEBLETT: Yeah. And she said, “You’re not going to do it, you’re not going to stay and do it.” She said, “Boy, we’re going to tell your daddy on you.” And I was more afraid of my father, what he might do to me than anybody else or anything. Because he was the kind of person--he was a great guy--he had a lot of fun, he did a lot of things for humor, but when he said something, he meant it. He meant every word he said, and you knew that.

POTTER: He would not have liked you...?

NEBLETT: Well, whether he liked it or not, he wasn’t involved in that. We got into a situation that he didn’t necessarily approve....And he had a thing for children, too. I mean, children had a place. And I never will forget. He had a lot of humor, too. I remember when black men got to be old, because my father was old when I was born. And they would call them “Uncle”. And we were about the same age, nine, ten years old--went in this little store with a pot belly in it and everything. And some of these guys--they knew him--said, “Hey there Uncle”. He wouldn’t say anything. And he called him again, “Hey “Uncle”. He still didn’t say anything. And then they got up and got kind of indignant, “Uncle, you hear us calling you?” And he walked over to them very deliberate and said, “Now which one of my brothers is your daddy?” (Laughing) He was the kind of guy and before you knew it, he had them all laughing at themselves. But you know, he was talented like that, he was very smart. He could play anything that he heard on a guitar. He was a great musician.

POTTER: Tell us your mother and father’s names.

NEBLETT: My father’s name was Pleasant Neblett. And my mother was named Bernice.

BRINSON: Pleasant, P L E A S A N T?

NEBLETT: Yes, that’s right. Pleasant.

POTTER: When you said...

BRINSON: I wanted to ask you....Excuse me. When you did the sit-in and she threatened to tell your father, did that stop you?

NEBLETT: That stopped us.

BRINSON: That stopped it. So that was the end of that.

NEBLETT: That was the end of that. (laughing)

BRINSON: Wanted to be clear.

POTTER: And you said you had, I think four brothers and sisters?

NEBLETT: Three, three brothers, three brothers and two sisters.

POTTER: And two sisters.

NEBLETT: Right.

POTTER: And are they here today?

NEBLETT: Yes, they’re still alive. Secou, he lives in Nebraska, now. He’s been all over the world. I have two sisters, one living in Omaha, Nebraska, the other one’s in Carbondale, Illinois. And I have another brother, a younger brother, who lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

POTTER: Tell us a little bit about your education, where you went to school.

NEBLETT: I went to some one-room, country schools. Some of those Rosenwald schools, and it is amazing. And in fact, I promised somebody some pictures of some of those Rosenwald schools. I have a picture of some of those schools and I took a picture of the one that I attended before they tore it down. And I remember going to school. We got there before the teacher got there. We had buses. The thing about the buses--we got buses after the white people got new buses--we got the old buses. You know, it was written all in and things of that sort. We got the books after the white kids had new books, and they were all written in. I never will forget on certain days when school began, we would just have a clean-up party; where people would come and clean up the books and get out all the dirty words and the derogatory remarks that were put in the books, because they knew we were going to get them. So we would clean up the books, and they would have paper and paste over--like the front of the pages, like the front and back of the book. Not the whole process. And I can also remember getting there before the teacher got there. And we would actually go down in the woods and get kindling. We would actually make the fire. We’d have a stove in this school. And when I tell my children that now, they look at me like I’m crazy. They say, “Now listen, you’re not that ancient, I mean, my God.” But anyway, went to this one room school. There’s one thing about what I remember about when I was in first, second. But I started school when I was like, four years old.

POTTER: And how long were you in this one room school?

NEBLETT: I went to a one room school until I was in the seventh grade.

POTTER: And then?

NEBLETT: Then went to a, eighth and ninth grade was in a high school. They had that in a high school.

POTTER: Still in Simpson County?

NEBLETT: I was in Robertson County then. And they had one school for the whole county; and I think the same thing in Simpson, one high school for the whole county.

POTTER: Was it segregated?

NEBLETT: Oh yes. And we would ride buses. We’d ride like two hours one way to get to school, because the bus had to go out and pick up everybody; and we had just a few buses pick up every black kid in the whole county. And we’d have to get up....I remember going before day. I mean it would be dark when I would catch the bus in the morning, in order to get to school.

POTTER: Did you ever have any teachers or other role models in high school that might have developed values that lead you in your direction later on? That they stand out?

NEBLETT: Yes, I think we had quite a few. In fact, those teachers would tell you--the ones that I had--from the beginning they would tell you that you could make it. They would really encourage you. That no matter what the situation is, you can make it. You know, there is a way to do it. You can make it. They left no doubt in your mind that you could make it. That it didn’t have to be like this, that you could make it. And you need to get your work and that kind of thing. And you can make it. We got a lot of encouragement from a lot of men in that community around Simpson County. You had some old men, old, black men in that community, who were really connected with the churches, who really took a lot of time with young people, with children. They supported those little schools. The PTA was very strong. At that time you had black teachers, who your parents went to church with; so that kind of narrowed it down. They had contact with you. Most of the time, if you acted up in school, you wound up begging the teacher, “Please don’t tell my parents.” I mean, whatever you do, I will be good for the rest of the year, I mean, just don’t tell my parents about it. So, you had that kind of thing. You had that kind of community. You had that school as a pure, a good, a vital institution.

POTTER: Did you play sports?

NEBLETT: I played in high school. I played a little football. I played a little basketball, but I played football. I played more football when I went to college at SIU, but I was in music. So what happened, I got hit...

POTTER: Tell me what SIU stands for.

NEBLETT: Southern Illinois University. And when I got hit one time, pretty hard, my band director told me I was going to make a decision whether I was going to play football, or I was going to play my trumpet. Because somebody was going to tear my mouth out, and I’d never play that trumpet again. And I wasn’t looking to play professional football anyway. I was out there, because the girls liked football players and I got a chance to play.

POTTER: Did you sing in a church choir?

NEBLETT: Yes.

POTTER: Did you, were you in the band in high school?

NEBLETT: Yes, I was.

POTTER: So music, how early do you remember music becoming part of your life?

NEBLETT: I really don’t remember when, because it’s always been a part of my life. My mother sang. She had a beautiful soprano voice. My father played guitar and everybody sang. Music was just a part of the whole community...my family.

POTTER: Not just your church.

NEBLETT: You know, it was just....Then you had people. You had quartets at that time. You had people singing gospel, four or five guys getting together and singing. And you had very good ones. And in high school, you had a lot of groups singing gospel; then you had rock and roll. You had that doo-wop. You had all of that music going on. You had the blues. You had all of that fusion of music when I came up, because the biggest thing you had was a radio, where you got a lot of this from. And we all just sang. Everybody would sing. I’ll never forget when I was really small, I was singing. And my sister--she’s two years older than I am--and she would sing soprano. And I would sing. Whatever she would sing, that’s what I would sing. We’d always have an argument. I should sing bass or something. “How come you don’t sing bass or something. Why you singing soprano?” But I didn’t know. I was singing. I was just singing. People just sing. So, it was just becoming a part of the whole thing. And at family reunions we’d sing and when families would all get together, we’d sing. We still do it. So...

POTTER: When you got to college, was the education system different? Was it still segregated?

NEBLETT: You were there. You were ignored.

POTTER: How did that play out?

NEBLETT: I went to school there. In fact, they had a housing situation on campus. In fact, the only place we could live was in the black community. Well there was a couple dorms you could live in, in the black community; and it was a good ways from campus. They didn’t have good transportation. Other whites in the community kept students. They didn’t keep black or foreign students. And that was a problem. Another thing, too, you would just get ignored. It was just like you just weren’t there.

POTTER: In the class room?

NEBLETT: In the class room or on campus. There was a couple of guys who played football, and really good in basketball, got a little recognition. I mean, people would talk to them. But as far as blacks on campus, you were just kind of ignored. I’ll never will forget, when I first got there, I wrote a paper--I think it was an English paper. And I got it back, and it was just red. I said, “My God!” I was really angry. In fact, I think I was about the only black kid in the class. I was really angry. This white girl, next door, she got an A. I said, “You’re going to tell me how you got that A”. She said, “All right, meet me at the library.” (laughing) So, I went to the library and I worked out a lot of the problems I had in writing at the time. But they would, you would just like get ignored, you know. Like they didn’t know what to do with you and....you know.

POTTER: Do you think that was a fair grade?

NEBLETT: Probably was. It probably was. I learned later; but I got good. By the end of the semester, I worked out all of those--but I had a bigger problem in my Sociology class. I just knew I was going to flunk it. I just knew I was going to flunk the class. They started talking about minorities and black people; and I just had to fight him all the way. I fought this professor all the way. I said, “I’m going to flunk anyway, so I might as well go out good.” (laughing)

POTTER: Did you flunk it?

NEBLETT: No, I didn’t flunk it. Anyway, how are you going to tell me about....Here I am, black as I can be and you are going to tell me about me?

POTTER: What percent....Do you remember how many blacks were at SIU?

NEBLETT: Well--got to be--at that time, it was in fifty-eight, fifty-nine. It was darn near eight to ten percent. It was amazing how many blacks were in that school. I look at it now, the percentage. It’s not that percentage anymore.

POTTER: Do you think your education in Kentucky prepared you for college?

NEBLETT: I think that, yes to an extent, yes it did, to an extent. It prepared me to be determined. I think it gave me a determination. As far as a lot of the academic kind of skills that you would really need; I think I was lacking in those. But I think I made up for them in other ways, that I could do it. And I found a way to do it.

BRINSON: I just want to ask the name of your high school, how many in your graduating class? Because we jumped. We didn’t really talk about your high school at all.

NEBLETT: Okay. I went to two high schools. I went to Lincoln in Simpson. I went to Branford in Springfield. In my graduating class there was about seventy-five, seventy-five children, seventy-five seniors.

BRINSON: And that was Branford?

NEBLETT: Branford.

BRINSON: Springfield, Kentucky?

NEBLETT: Springfield, Tennessee.

BRINSON: Tennessee, okay. I’m curious, because so many of the previously all black schools still have reunions today.

NEBLETT: They do.

BRINSON: Does your school do that?

NEBLETT: Yes.

BRINSON: Can you tell us about that?

NEBLETT: Well, you have people coming in from all over. In fact, in Branford, they do it more in Branford than they do at Lincoln. At Branford they have a reunion every year. In fact, they have gotten the school and gotten it restored. It’s in use now as a youth center. And they have a mascot, it’s the Branford lion, is still there. They got it standing up there in gold. And it’s a lot of pride that goes along with that school, especially Branford, because you had some really strong, black, male role models there in that school. One of the, I think the assets that we had, we had all those blacks in authority. I mean, we saw blacks in authority. You don’t see that now. You don’t see. In our schools we saw blacks in authority. In our churches we had blacks in authority. We had a different type of community set up. In fact--we had--if you had doctors, they were in your community also. You had teachers in your community. You had everybody in your community, because they couldn’t go nowhere else. But what you had, you had everybody there in your community. And you had all these role models. And I think that made a difference. I can just think about the guy who taught trial trig, Mr. Cleveland. You talk about our Principal, in fact, he was a cousin of mine, Mr. Patterson. And you had a lady there, what was her name? You know, certain teachers you never forget. Mrs. Anthony. I mean, she wasn’t a counselor, but she was a pure counselor. You had all of that in that whole school system. She could just look through you, sit you down and just chill you out and encourage you. And you had people just breaking down. Some of the worst people in the world, that I would say, “My God.” She could walk up to any student in that building and she could just get their attention and really counsel and help people. Help people through their problems. Young ladies, young ladies, who might get pregnant. I mean, it was a whole system there, that was really--they really cared about the kids; and you got the feeling that somebody cared about you. And that’s the contrast from leaving a high school like that and going to an all white college, where it’s a whole different setup all together. I mean, you’re on your own and you’re being ignored. So it was like a....You talk about a culture shock. It was like that.

POTTER: Did a lot of the students in your high school go to college?

NEBLETT: Quite a few. Quite a few, and at that time, you had--you had a lot of them going to a lot black colleges, also. In fact, you had a lot of them going to a lot of black colleges. At that time....I just suspected....it’s funny when they found out that most of your black leadership in the Movement came out of black colleges. You know, black colleges started having a lot of problems, because that’s where you got your leadership from. You look around in the Movement and most of those--your leadership came right out of black colleges, especially in the youth movement. I mean, those were college kids.

POTTER: How did you chose SIU?

NEBLETT: How did I chose SIU? I had an opportunity--my parents--we was leaving this area, and my parents moved there to Carbondale. And the school was there, my senior, I just enrolled. I knew I was going to go to school. My mother insisted that I go to school. I mean, she said, “I don’t know how you’re going to do it. Don’t even ask me how, but if you want to do it, you can do it.”

POTTER: And you wanted to go to college?

NEBLETT: Right. And I went there and I played my horn and I got a music scholarship.

BRINSON: I’m going to stop just a minute and turn the tape over.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

POTTER: Tell me a little bit from high school. Do you remember any incidents of racism in either Springfield or in Kentucky, that influenced you in a particular way?

NEBLETT: Well, I know we was playing ball and we stopped at.....I don’t know what they call it now. I forget the name of those little burger places they had there. But anyway, you pull up to them, and they put trays on your car. And we were playing, and they wouldn’t put a tray on our car. And we told them, “We want a tray.” “You’re not going to get it.” So, we threw the hamburgers in their faces. And we couldn’t figure out why in the world we did it. (laughing) We got chased off of there with shot guns. I never will forget again....We played football and we went to Union City, Tennessee to play football. They were just testing this thing out, mixing these schools and testing out who was playing football.

BRINSON: Testing out in terms of integrating?

NEBLETT: Integration.

POTTER: Was it an all white...

NEBLETT: All white school. I’ll never forget, a guy down in the end zone with a shot gun said, “None of you niggers better not come across this line.” And we looked at the coach and everybody, and they said, “Ah, he’s just--don’t pay him no mind.” Well, this man got a gun. (laughing) And they zipped him away. And we had some clashes, like when they tried to really put together some basketball teams. What happened when we moved up there to.....What they would have, they’d have separate schools, black school and the white school. But what they would do, they would make the principal in the white school, the principal; and make the black principal, the assistant principal and claim that they were just one school system. They had all kinds of tricks that they played to get around the whole thing of mixing up the schools. (laughing)

POTTER: Where was that?

NEBLETT: This was in, this was here in Tennessee. It was in Illinois. They would do that. They had all kinds of tricks you could name, to keep from desegregating the whole school. And in fact, in Kentucky and in Tennessee, when they found out they were really going to have to do that because the black school was so inferior. They started building little black schools, you know, and trying to do a little better in terms of the physical structure of the buildings and the educational materials and so forth.

POTTER: Did your parents talk about wanting you to be in an integrated school? Do you remember any kinds of conversations where you would talk about the white schools being better or what could be better about your schools?

NEBLETT: What we really wanted was better black schools. You know, I thought about that later. I never, it never came to me that what I wanted to do, was go to a white school. I wanted to go to that school if I had a choice.....I wanted a choice to go if I wanted to; but as far as my efforts to just get into that school, it just was not there. The thing was, is that a lot of people did not believe that they would ever--the only way you’re going to ever get a kind of an equal education, was to get into white schools. And I thought about it, because I wasn’t fighting for integration, because you can’t--I firmly don’t believe you can make people integrate. We were fighting for desegregation. You see. To desegregate these places. And that was what I’m talking about, really trying to dehumanize people, when you force people that you have to be over here and you got inferior stuff and that kind of thing. And that’s the way it’s going to be. And you can’t be as good. You can’t have as good as stuff. You can’t have as good an education, you know, because you are black. And all of that came into play. But as far as, just per se wanting to go to school with white children and have white teachers, you know, it just wasn’t there. And as far as, moving into white communities, my thing was we needed a better black community.

POTTER: When you went to SIU, how long did you stay?

NEBLETT: About two and a half years, about two years.

POTTER: And then where did it take you?

NEBLETT: Well, that was a ride. One of the things that we did when we got to SIU, we got a lot of black students together and we were going to deal with desegregation on campus; especially around the housing. Some of the dorms wouldn’t keep blacks. You couldn’t get into those dorms. And all those Frats, and all the subtle stuff that was going on there. So, we had meetings. We’d call together, in fact, John O’Neill, a good friend of mine, who works with Free Southern Theater. You might know him. He’s still doing a lot of good work. We went to school together, and we decided something had to be done. So we had meetings and we had quite a few black students--two or three hundred black students--to plan some strategy on what we were going to do. We had support with some black ministers in the community. And we met and we were going to plan some actions. And when the day--as the days grew closer, a lot of them just backed off. They said, “No, no, no, I’d get kicked out of school. My parents would kill me.” And some of us were the first ones--I wasn’t though, some of my—a lot of people were the first ones who had gone to college, and determined they were going to finish. And they didn’t know what would happen if they, you know, would do anything. So, it came down to about five of us. So, we wanted to know what we were going to do. So what we did, we said, “We’re just going to create some hell.” What we did, we put out a newsletter. In fact, we had one of those mimeograph machines with the stencils. ( ) And we ran off some leaflets telling the people about the Dean of Men, who was going out with this black lady in the community. And the allegations about how much money the president had stolen. And in fact, some of the white kids gave us some information on who was having abortions and the whole nine yards. It was a scandal. It was a scandal sheet. So what we did, we got up about two o’clock in the morning and I guess we had a couple of thousand of them. Scattered them all over the campus. Soon as we hit campus, the campus police picked all of us up, every one of us up, just exactly. So, we went to the president’s office and he was telling us--he just wanted to know who wrote that paper. And one of the guys, he cracked me up. I’ll never forget, his name was Gene Baker from Chicago. I wish I knew where he was. He told him, he was a very hip guy, he said, “Listen, here I am flunking English. Now how in the world am I going to write a paper?” He said, “I’ve already flunked every paper.” (laughing) But anyway, it was really funny. And I just told him, I said, “We’re not interested in who wrote it. We’re not interested in it. What we’re interested in is the segregation of this campus, the housing situation you have.” And I just went down a whole list of things that was wrong on campus and at school. And he listened. His name was Mars. He listened. And all he said was, “If you guys will hold off, I will take care of it next semester, the beginning of next semester.” And we said, “All right.” So, we got out of there. At least we got out. We didn’t get kicked out of school. But he did--the next semester, one of the things he did in housing, he set up a whole--he did all the housing, all the students had to go through the Department of Housing, that he set up on campus. And in order for any student to get housing, you had to come through--whether is was community, in the community or not. And if you couldn’t keep black or foreign students, then you couldn’t keep any of those students. Couldn’t keep students at all. And he did that. And you know, I really respected him for that. I really appreciated that, because he really stuck to his word and, when I stepped out there on that limb and he did it. From there, we were working down in Cairo, Illinois.

BRINSON: Is that C A I R O?

NEBLETT: Uh huh, Cairo.

BRINSON: I ask you this, because the transcriber will want to know how to spell some of these words.

NEBLETT: Right, right. Ki-row, Kay-row. We were down there, going to organize around public accommodations, because everything is segregated. John O’Neal again, he’s the one that got me off down in Cairo, Illinois. Everything was segregated. It was a mean place. I mean, everybody was mean. You had mean black folk, you had mean white folk. It was a riverfront town, I guess used to be a riverfront town. And you had some mean people down there. I mean, mean. So, we were down there organizing around desegregation, we called it direct action, in terms of desegregating the places of food, restaurants, so forth, hotels, motels, swimming pools. They had swimming pools down there, public pools that you couldn’t swim in. They had libraries there, public libraries that you weren’t allowed to go to. And it was just out and out segregated. So we started a protest movement, we organized a protest movement there. And we--that’s one of the first times I got thrown in jail. And they threw us in jail down there. And it really got rough. It got so rough down there, they had me in jail one time and they gave me a choice--well, it happened a few times--if you promise to leave town, you can get out of here. But if you don’t leave town, we are going to keep you in here forever.

POTTER: Did you leave?

NEBLETT: No, I stayed in jail. Told them, “I’m going to stay here.” What would happen, we was waiting on the people to get us out. And then we’d fill up the jail. You don’t let me out. We’d fill up the jail. We didn’t have no bail money. You had no bail. You had to use other strategies to deal with that. And one of the strategies that we used, if you put somebody in jail, then everybody go to jail. Fill up the jail. You had people coming, who hadn’t done a thing, saying, “Hey, I want to be put in jail.” You fill it up. And when you leave no room. You fill up that jail. You run it over. And we just have a big party in jail. And you had a lot of people singing. You had a lot of people praying. You had a lot of people preaching. You had a lot of people organizing and so forth. And they’d want you to shut up. They couldn’t stand it. They’d wanted you to shut up. And they would do things. They’d do crazy things, like if you don’t shut up, we’re going to take your mattress. So, we’d just throw them the mattress. You got it and keep on. We just didn’t cooperate. When you go to jail, no matter where you were, you just didn’t cooperate. No cooperation whatsoever. You take the mattress. Next thing they’d want. They would take your cigarettes if you smoked. And that was kind of rough, but you had to give it to them. But the thing that would really get you, believe or not, was your toothbrush. When they threatened to take your toothbrush, you say, “Oh my God.” I don’t know what it is about a toothbrush in jail, but that toothbrush is important. (laughing)

POTTER: Did you feel like you made any, were able to make any changes in Cairo as a result of your...?

NEBLETT: I think we made a lot of changes in Cairo. I think we made a lot of changes in the people in Cairo. I think Cairo was sinking then, and I think it’s gone now. But I think the biggest progress--the progress was made in Cairo was among the people, itself. They were given a whole new lease of life, in terms of their grievances. They could air their grievances. They got a whole new look on themselves. A whole new thing about their own humanity. They could fight for that and there was a way to do that and it wasn’t an impossible kind of thing. You had old people, laying back and talking about, you know; they prayed to see a day like this come.

POTTER: Did you go back to college from there, or you didn’t finish?

NEBLETT: No, I went straight from there to Missouri, Southeast Missouri, where I met some people, some SNCC. And we had been in the Movement for a while before I met people from SNCC and they came through and they’d heard about what we were doing.

POTTER: And this is the Student Non-Violent...

NEBLETT: Right, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. And because they were set up to co-ordinate student protest all over the South.

POTTER: And you joined them there?

NEBLETT: Yes, I went to a Gospel for Freedom thing that they had--a fund-raiser in Chicago. They came through. We were singing down there at the time; we had our own freedom songs. And we were singing up a breeze down there. In fact, we used music. That’s when I found out how powerful music could be. Because we had taken it for granted; you know, we just took it for granted.

POTTER: Had you formed the Freedom Singers...?

NEBLETT: Not at that time.

POTTER: So, this was just another group.

NEBLETT: Is wasn’t a group. It was just people singing. We just had, what we had, had things like song leaders. You know you had people who lead the songs. And you had song leaders. And you had quite a few--we had a few people who would just lead the music, to really get it going. I was one of the song leaders down there. We had music--we had written some. That’s when, like I say, when I found out how powerful music was. You can use it as an organizing tool. How you can change words to a song to fit your situation and how powerful that medium can be. How powerful it was when you were in jail. How powerful it was when someone come up to you to really kill, to attack you, you know, how it can dispel fear. And they were going to Chicago for fund raising. They found out we were singing down there, too. So, they wanted me to come up and sing with a group of field secretaries; going to sing some of these songs that came out of the Movement. And I learned those songs that came out of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. And they was learning some of the songs that we had there in Cairo and down in Southeast Missouri. And I went to Chicago. It was in McCormick Place. They got a big fund raiser there. And when I got there and had...

POTTER: Did you say fund raiser for...?

NEBLETT: SNCC. And all I did, I met some great singers before. What I did when I got there--I heard them--then I went and put together the base line, because I can sing bass or baritone. So I put together a bass line for them, you know, for the music to ride on, and made it a driving bass because that’s what is needed in there; especially in gospel and in those freedom songs. That’s where I met Bernice Regan. Bernice Regan was there, Cordell Regan was there. Bertha Goba, Luther Harris. All those great singers from Southwest Georgia, they were there. Some of the singingnest people I ever heard in my life, came out of Albany, in Southwest Georgia. Those girls were just too much. And I was really impressed. I really enjoyed the whole thing. And after that, I was in Mississippi. They wanted me to go to Mississippi.

POTTER: What year? Can you remember what year this was?

NEBLETT: This was in sixty-two, sixty-one, sixty-two. They wanted me to go to Mississippi to organize in the Delta with Bob Moses. He was directing the whole campaign in Mississippi. So, I never forget riding down there. You had guys like Frank Smith and those guys who had been in Mississippi. They would look at me and say, “You think he going to make it?” Oh man, they rode me all the way from....

POTTER: Did they scare you?

NEBLETT: Nah. I wasn’t going to let anybody scare me. At that time, the onliest thing I was afraid of was, that I might be afraid. (laughing) So, I was concerned, now. But I wasn’t paying them, any attention too much. It was a lot of fun. I know how guys do that kind of thing. But when I got down there and got in Mrs. Hamer’s house and saw those bullet holes.

POTTER: What town is this?

NEBLETT: Louisville. When I looked around and saw those bullet holes in people’s houses, then I said, “My God.” I said, “My God, these guys are telling the truth.”

BRINSON: This is Fannie Lou...?

NEBLETT: Fannie Lou Hamer.

BRINSON: Sunflower?

NEBLETT: Sunflower County. And I said, “My goodness.” That’s when I really realized....I was in Illinois, Southern Illinois and in Missouri, but in Mississippi, it’s a whole new ball game down there. Then I remembered one of the things that really turned me on and caused me to want to really get in the Movement, was I always wanted to do something. I knew I was going to do something, didn’t know what it was. And really what got me was the death of Emmett Till, because he was about my age when he was lynched in Mississippi. And that was me. I could see that as being me, you know, being lynched like that. And it was like a stunning--it was just--I don’t know how to describe it. Just thinking about that. And know that nothing was going to be done about it. If anything those guys would be heroes, who did that to that kid. Then the next thing when I saw...

BRINSON: I want to ask you some things about that. You knew about Emmett Till at the time that he was murdered?

NEBLETT: Right.

BRINSON: And they brought his body back to Chicago.

NEBLETT: Right, uh huh.

BRINSON: You were in Illinois. You didn’t go...?

NEBLETT: No, I was still in Tennessee.

BRINSON: You were in still in Tennessee, that’s right. You would have been.....Okay. How did you know about Emmett Till?

NEBLETT: Jet Magazine.

BRINSON: Talk about that, please.

NEBLETT: Jet Magazine. What happened was, it was a reporter from Jet Magazine, who looked white. Very fair skinned, black guy, who could pass for white. So, he went down and took all those pictures. They took all those pictures. Horrible pictures of what they did to that kid. And they published it in Jet Magazine. So, people got that all over the country. Black people got that story all over the country. And he wrote the story. All over the country. And you could sit there, and I was his age. I was about his age, and that could happen to you. And you could see it right there. That was something that was.....It just shook me, I mean, it just really took you to a whole nother place in terms of where you were at. I mean knowing that, that same thing could happen to you and nothing would be done about it. And I think it really settled in me that I was going to do something. Something could be done. I think the next thing that happened. I think it was in fifty-six, fifty-seven, I think, when the Montgomery boycott thing started down there. And I looked at TV and saw all those black men standing up against racism. I said, “Uh oh, that’s it.” When I saw all those black men standing up, the first time I’ve ever seen that in my life in a mass, saying “We not going to take it anymore.” Those are my guys. It was like I had been born again. Just like I had been to Pentecostal church and got the Holy Ghost. I mean just like a born again experience for me.

POTTER: Did they show pictures of the women in Montgomery, too?

NEBLETT: Yeah.

POTTER: You’re talking about the bus boycott.

NEBLETT: Right, the boycott. Yeah, we knew about Rosa Parks and the women.....And I tell you it was a whole new--it just opened me up. It was just like a whole--like a ton of brick had been lifted off me I didn’t even realize I was under. It just lifted off when I saw that, saw that happening.

BRINSON: I’m curious, do you remember where you saw that on TV? Because not everybody owned TV’s during that time.

NEBLETT: Yeah, that’s right. I saw that on a TV, a man--he was a black--one of our black neighbors. His name was L. Swann. He had bought a TV, and everybody would go to his house and watch this TV. (laughing)

BRINSON: Thank you.

NEBLETT: I was watching this TV, and like I say, it’s like a ton of brick. I never, I was just, I was light, like I had lost forty pounds, you know, when I saw that.

POTTER: When you were in Mississippi did you begin to do voter registration or were you singing? Tell us what you were doing.

NEBLETT: No, no, we were doing voter registration, strictly organizing voter registration.

POTTER: And tell us a little bit about why that was important and why you couldn’t vote. Why people were not registered?

NEBLETT: Well, number one, it was intimidation, pure cold-blooded intimidation. They didn’t want blacks registering to vote. In fact, they were disenfranchised right after Reconstruction, voting, because a lot of those counties had a majority black population. You had forty percent, some fifty and sixty percent, black population and they were not going to let blacks take over political power down there. And they were not going to do that. And they were not going to let black people vote. There was a guy named Steptoe and a lot of...

POTTER: John Steptoe?

NEBLETT: Who?

POTTER: John Steptoe?

NEBLETT: I think his name was John, Steptoe, you had Harmon Turnbow, you had people all over that Delta, black men, who really were really good organizers. And you cannot discount the effect and the power of a Fannie Lou Hamer in that whole Mississippi voter registration project; in terms of what she brought to that movement. In terms of spirit, in terms of determination, in terms of her own.....just herself, you know. What she brought to that as a person, as a woman and as a leader, as a pure leader. She was one of those kinds of people. Because at that time, in the sixties, I mean, you know, we were affected by it like anybody else; that whole chauvinist kind of thing, that whole male chauvinist kind of thing. But it’s one thing when you met a person like Fannie Lou Hamer. It just wasn’t there for us. And it’s the same thing about a lot of more people, I mean women who were in that movement. I mean they were such powerful leaders, they broke through that whole barrier, whatever, that whole chauvinistic barrier, whatever it was. They were just leaders.

POTTER: Were there leaders, were there woman leaders in SNCC?

NEBLETT: Yes, there were. Some of the toughest women I’ve ever met in my life were in SNCC.

POTTER: And SNCC was organizing in Mississippi?

NEBLETT: Organizing in Mississippi. See, SNCC went into Mississippi. Bob Moses really opening up for voter registration; knowing that if you crack Mississippi, that a lot more of the South would fall. And.....I forget who it.....Amsie Moore, was it Amsie Moore? I think it was. He said, I think he told a story, “That what he did, he met Amsie Moore and Amsie Moore was a World War Two veteran, who also dreamed of what in the world could happen to, for his people in Mississippi.” After he done fought the Germans and all of that, and here you are back in the same situation. And he was the one who came up with, of how to come up with a plan to register people to vote. Bob Moses said, “He told us one time, that he listened his way through the world. Don’t look upon me as a genius or anything,” he said, “I listened my way through the world.” Said, “All I did was wrote down this man’s plan, who had dreamed it, who had meditated, who had gone through it. He had lived it. He had, he bled it, he ate it. And I just wrote it down on paper and we put it into action.”

POTTER: Did you actually go door to door registering people?

NEBLETT: Yes, we went door to door. We were organizers. In fact, we stayed with people. See we were organizers and when you organize in a community, they drop you off in there and you had to survive. So, one of the ways you survived, you had to stay with the people. So, when the people got up to milk cows, you got up and you milked cows with the folk. Whatever the people did, that’s what you did; then you went on and took care of business. And you come home, you come back, you sit down with the children, help them with their homework, take a part in the chores. And you started talking and you preaching and you teaching and you go out and you keep organizing. And getting people ready to register to vote. You get some interesting things. I know an old man told me one time. He said, “Look.” He said, “Charles,” he says, “You guys, you bringing light.” He said, “Now you got to understand that something about light. We know that light is good. We know it’s good for us. We know we need to be in the light. But when a man has been in darkness for so long, then you shine a light in his eyes, it’s painful.” He said, “It’s very painful.” He said, “And you have to be careful with that light.” He said, “Because he’ll get the pain from you. He might turn on you, the source of that pain, instead of dealing with what he needs to be dealing with.” ( ) And I sat down and listened to this guy, who probably never went to the third grade.

POTTER: Did you ever run into black people, though, who didn’t think what you were doing was a very good idea?

NEBLETT: Of course, you ran into them. You ran into preachers, who didn’t think it was a good idea. You ran into people, who were threatened if they would even be associated with you, that things would happen. And that’s one of the things...

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

NEBLETT: And my question was, “If you’ve got God on your side, what are you scared of?”

POTTER: And what would they say?

NEBLETT: Ah, I mean, they’d come at you. But I said, “Nah, if you’ve got God on your side, what are you afraid of?”

POTTER: What was your impression that they were afraid of?

NEBLETT: Well, they could get tarred and feathered and drug down those streets on fire. Their churches can be blown up and blown to bits. Their families....They didn’t discriminate against who they got, as long as they made an example. In fact, a lot of black ministers got killed, who stood up, you see. But I guess we were a little unf--no, we weren’t unfair. I mean we just didn’t compromise with it. We said, “You got to stand. You got to take a stand. There’s no way around it. If you got God on your side, man look, you got to take a stand.” And we just forced that issue that you had to take a stand.

POTTER: When did the churches become sort of a center of organizing?

NEBLETT: Well, you had the church and then you had church, okay? The Church was always a center of organizing. But you had these other peripheries. You have a very few people who are going to get in there and do it. You had a lot of people who are afraid. We did a lot of things to make ministers come in. We’d go in the churches....I remember a time we went in a church and took his whole youth choir. Now that’s the power in some of those churches. You take his choir--all those young girls. We’d go in there, take those young girls out. You have a meeting, we’re going to have one. They’re going to have a church, we’d have church. We’d have that young choir member sing. We’d be teaching them Freedom songs.

BRINSON: When you say take them out. Take them out to sing?

NEBLETT: Take them out to sing. Take them out to our meetings. If he don’t want to look out for your benefit. If he’s satisfied with you going to these inferior schools. If he’s satisfied with you being humiliated. If he’s satisfied and don’t take a stand against all these things that happen to you and this community. No, you don’t go there. You come over here with us and we’ll take them out of there. One time we took a--his population, his church population was down to almost nil. We almost closed him down. (laughing) I mean, those are the things that we did. We almost closed him down until he came to his senses. And he had to make a choice. He had to make a choice. And we didn’t lighten up off of him. He had to make a choice. And a lot of....That’s all a part of it, I suppose. But you run into our kind of opposition. But the thing is, is that the people....You run across people who are ready, who’ve been ready. Who sat there for years, always ready. And what was so really refreshing, is some of those people were eighty years old; seventy, eighty and ninety years old, would try to go down and register to vote. Take the lead to go down and try and register to vote. And another thing that was so powerful--as far as I’m concerned--you had people who were fighting for people to have jobs that they never could get themselves, never could get themselves. They were fighting for young people to have rights that they never even expected to really deal with or enjoy. And it just reminded me in later years, when I could hear some of the things that my mother and them would say; and some of the prayers that the people would pray in slavery. They would tell God that I know I’ll never be free, but you’re going to have to promise me that my children will.

POTTER: When was it....Were you there the summers when white students from the North came down to Mississippi?

NEBLETT: We recruited most of them.

POTTER: And how were they welcomed into the communities? How were they treated?

NEBLETT: That was interesting. See at that time, The Freedom Singers, we were singing. See we always considered ourselves as organizers. We would sing, but we used music as a motivator and as an organizing tool. We’d use it to organize. We traveled throughout the North. At that time people didn’t realize what was happening in Mississippi, or they played dumb or something, because it wasn’t coming out in the newspapers, like it was happening there. So what we did, we got on the road, singing. And we would tell the story of the whole movement through the music that came out of the Movement. And we did commentary there. Again what we would do, we would organize friends of SNCC, and support groups, for financial support and help to get out, set up house parties or whatever they could do, you know, to support the Movement in the South. So, we set up things like Friends of SNCC. We had a newspaper that was sent to all of these groups and anybody. So, we would study organizing. And during this time we had met, we sang at all the colleges. We’d sing....Sometime we’d do....We did like, three concerts a day. We was young and really didn’t....We sang so much one time, we just passed out, almost passed out. We just didn’t realize....Because we were organizing. We had to do this. So, most of the students--a lot of the students who came South--we had sang and told them about the project. We were recruiting them to go there.

POTTER: Do you think they knew what they were getting into?

NEBLETT: Nah, they didn’t know what they was getting into. They didn’t believe it. They still....It’s hard to believe. It was hard to tell whites in the North, especially young whites--the whites in the North, what was going on in the South. I mean, they just didn’t believe it. This is America. They just didn’t believe it. So, when they came down for a workshop. I’ll never forget, I think it was in Ohio we had those workshops. I think it was in Ohio. And one of the strange--it was strange that we couldn’t get them to realize this thing is serious, what you getting into.

POTTER: Were these workshops run by SNCC?

NEBLETT: Right. This thing is serious that you getting into. You can get killed down there. I think some of them thought it was something like a little missionary service or something. They’d go down there and do their missionary service, something like that. It wasn’t that bad. They’d go down and get these people registered to vote or whatever. And they didn’t realize really what Mississippi was all about.

BRINSON: I want to ask and this may be hard to remember, but as you were moving around singing and organizing, did you come through Kentucky? Did you sing at any of the Kentucky colleges? Did you recruit any people for Mississippi from Kentucky that you remember?

NEBLETT: It’s interesting. I don’t ever remember, the closest we got to Kentucky was Indiana. I don’t ever remember that whole time.....I came to Louisville. We came to Louisville. We sang in Louisville. It wasn’t the whole group. It was Cordele, myself and Bernice. We did a thing in Louisville for a lot of the ruckus going on in Louisville at the time. (laughing) And that was it, as far as, Kentucky was concerned.

BRINSON: Do you remember...

NEBLETT: I knew Ann Braden. We knew Ann and Carl Braden. I mean, they were fantastic people. We knew Carol Wyatt, Pete Seeger and all of those, who were.....I just admire Ann and Carl, you know. The stands that they took. And up in eastern Tennessee, at Highlander.

POTTER: Did you go to workshops at Highlander?

NEBLETT: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

POTTER: Did a lot of SNCC...?

NEBLETT: Most, a lot of SNCC people went to workshops in Highlander. And that’s when we got into the whole non-violent thing, because when I first.....only way you could get into the Movement was you had to be non-violent. And I had a lot of problems with that. I never was a violent person; but I had a problem with that whole philosophy; non-violence as a philosophy of life. Which you had people like John Lewis and ( ), they weren’t non-violent. I mean it was a way of life for them. And they just dwelt into that thing. Then you had people like, for that Nashville Movement. What was his name? He was a minister that got expelled from Vanderbilt. Jim Lawson. Jim Lawson was just phenomenal. I went to some workshops under him in the early day, Jim Lawson. And uh, there’s a Kelly Smith, a minister in Nashville. You had these ministers. I was challenged with this whole thing of non-violence. Because I’ve always felt these two people I can’t lie to, that’s to myself and God. I got to be true to myself. I can’t lie about it. I got to be true to myself and I got to be true to God. And I was worried about this thing with non-violence. I said, “Look I can use it as a philosophy, no, as a political tactic, you know. I’m not a violent person. But I cannot sit here and tell you that I won’t get in a situation where I won’t fight back, you know. I’ll use it a political tactic.” I’ll never forget the first time I was beaten. Now, these guys mobbed the scene. It was in Mississippi. And I looked up at this guy and I looked at his face. And I said to myself, God, I don’t want to be like that. It really came to me that this man was possessed. It wasn’t really him. It was like a possession. Something had possessed this man, and he actually didn’t have any control. He was possessed. And I can look and say, “This guy needs help.” And that’s when I really started thinking about that whole, the in-depth meaning of non-violence; really what it really meant. And really what it would do for you, I mean, how it would open you up from a whole spiritual point of view, to let you see through a situation. To let you see it for what it is and so forth.

POTTER: Did young people talk about this with each other?

NEBLETT: Yes, yes, we talked about that.

POTTER: Did other people feel the same way you did?

NEBLETT: Yeah, yeah, a lot of people, yeah. And you sit there and look at that person. That’s how.....Who do you hate then? You look at.....That person needed help. Now how could I hate a person that needed help, you know? And you see that, and it was like a demon. It was like a demonic spirit, you know, that grips people. That whole thing of hatred. That whole thing of racism and hatred. And I explained it one time to a guy, one time on the radio. I said, “I think it’s a demon. You can see it’s not the person. It’s a possession, you see, to want to do somebody like that. I mean, how do you do that. How do you sit around and lynch somebody and have a party?”

POTTER: But at the same time was it hard to be calm in the face of that?

NEBLETT: I don’t know. It’s a whole thing about fear. We dealt with that a lot, the thing about fear. Something you don’t get rid of, you learn how to deal with or how to live with it. And you have to find ways to make fear serve you, instead of you serving fear. We would do a lot of things in order to dispel fear. And in turn it would help you. I’ll never forget, we had some kids on a picket line, and the Klan came up. There were kids on one corner and Klan on the other. And the kids were shook up, I mean, they were there. So I happened to walk behind the Klan. I was behind them. So I just touched them on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me.” And I walked all the way through that crowd, just saying, “Excuse me.” They just moved out of the way. And I heard a lot of these “Niggers” behind me; but I walked all the way through that crowd and never got touched. And when the kids saw me come through that crowd, they were just relaxed. Then another time we would dispel a lot of fear. We were in Atlanta one time, we had about, ( ) restaurant, you know; I think it was Lester Maddox’s restaurant. He was the governor there for a while. But he had his ax handles out, going to kill everybody. But anyway we had about a hundred young people out on the line, and the Klan came with about two hundred. So, what we had to do was run down on Albany Avenue and go in those black nightclubs; snatch those juke boxes, those plugs out of the juke box; jump up on the bar and tell them we had all these women and children down there. And you got the Klan down there and you got to come on down and help. Get on down there. And they were drunk, half of them were drunk. But the women in the bars, get out and go help them kids! (laughs) So, we went all the way down Albany Avenue. When we came back up Albany, we had all these guys out there, who had been in service, by the way. A lot of them had been in service. They had formed these lines up. They fit to march. And here we go downtown. Anyway, when we get down there--the kids were relieved--they said they could hear us about five or six blocks away because of they doing some construction and how they put planks down. They hear those guys tromping over that. We got down there, and in fact the Klan had nerve. We lined them up on the east side of the street. It was about as wide as this room, so we lined them up the east side of the street; off the sidewalk, so people could walk down. And the Klan had nerve enough to come down through there. And they was hitting people. And that’s one time the line just collapsed. Those guys just wasn’t going to deal with that, and the lines collapsed. And so we tried to get everybody out of there. But another time.....We had a lot of encounter with the Klan. Another time they were there and had people afraid, and it was marching. And so I sent down to Richard’s Department Store--there was a department store called Richard’s--and got me a sheet. So they got a sheet. And the kids are really scared. So, I just wrapped the sheet around my shoulders and everything and got in the Klan line. And they told me, “You better get out of this line. Cops, police ran up there.” I told them, “I had a right to walk the street like they did.”

POTTER: Dressed like they did?

NEBLETT: Yeah. Said, “I got a right to walk this street just like anybody else and I’m walking the street.” And it was really funny because, they said--and one guy kicked me--and so I turned around and looked at him dead in his eyes, and I said a very sharp, choice of words. And I said to him, “Stop the line.” And I knew he would be in shock, because he never heard a black person talk to him like that before. So, he didn’t know what was going on. So they said, “I bet this nigger won’t follow us in this alley.” And I said, “Oh God, why did I get in this line?” You know. And so as you go into the alley, I got to go. I mean, I have to go. So, the first time I’ve ever appreciated a whole bunch of cops in my life. Found out the alley was full of police. They were hid back there. So we came back around again, I’m still in the line. The kids say, what? Then they start singing, “Oh, KKK, they ain’t what they used to be, ain’t what they used to be.” But you had a lot of encounters like that. In fact, we had encounters, if you look at some of the archives in nineteen sixty-four, July Fourth; we went to a Klan rally in Atlanta, where there was like ten thousand of them. And they had everybody in Atlanta really shook up. They had the black community kind of shook up, because you had Lester Maddox and all those known top racists in the South there, on Patriot’s Day or something they had. And we were in our office and we were saying to ourselves--how these guys--I mean, we just, thinking about that, the kind of the fear that they had spread over the place with being in town. So, we discussed it and we discussed it. It was a public meeting in the public park, and we had a right to go like anyone else. So, about five of us guys, who decided we were going, and see what these guys are talking about. So, the stadium is built on a hillside, you know, like down the hillside and you walk up the top of it. So, we got there. I went up and bought me a rebel hat and a rebel flag. And we were all very sharp, very clean, very sharp. I had a rebel hat on, a rebel flag like everybody else. And when we got inside.....It was so crowded that on top of the hill, I had forgotten, they had a lot of folding chairs--people sitting around in folding chairs. And they had all this paraphernalia and stuff. So when we walked in, we noticed things started getting quiet. And then this lady said, “Niggers, Niggers! You just got to kill them Niggers!” And they started picking up those folding chairs and trying to kill us with those folding chairs. We’d been trained you don’t get down in a crowd like that, because they’ll kill you. You stay on your feet, and you protect your vital organs. You protect your head. And ways you had to do that. And I was down, a few steps down, so I couldn’t get back. So, my next objective was getting down there to the fence. And one of the guys panicked and grabbed me by the arm. And I asked him to, “Let me have my arm.” Don’t wrestle with him, because he’s panicked. Give him your arm. And I got hit, right over here with a chair. He finally turned me lose and grabbed a police man, who was sitting there laughing at him, egging it on. He ran and grabbed that police man around the waist. And those people down there beat him to death. They just beat the police man.

BRINSON: I’m curious. It’s one thing, I understand to defend yourself, like that story. But some of the earlier stories, that you just shared. I’m thinking where you’re initiating a situation, that takes a lot of courage. And I wonder, where do you get that?

NEBLETT: I think that.....I can remember people in my community and my relatives, insist on boys being men, even down to driving tractors at a very early age. You know, learn those things, do them, just being men. A lot of things that you just have to do, that you should do. And you just don’t rationalize your way out of it. You find a way to do it. It’s like my mother said when I went to school, “You find a way to do it.” You know, you have to find a way to do it.

POTTER: Do you think being young helped?

NEBLETT: I think it helped a whole lot. I think again, too, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, they talk about the narrow way and the broad way. You can go down the broad way, you’ll be excepted. You’re in your place and everything is going okay. But you look down the narrow way, which you know is the right way to go. There’s no doubt in your mind, it’s the right way to go. But when you look down there, you see a cross laying down there. Now, you got to make a decision. Are you willing to take up the cross? Are you willing to go through somebody humiliating you, telling you that you are wrong? Going through all the opposition? And all that. Are you willing to do that? Can you take up that cross, knowing what the end is going to be, beyond that cross is okay. Are you willing to go through that? And another thing, too, is about the word saying without a vision a people perish. Are you willing to deal with a vision that you have, that you know is right and just?

POTTER: Did it ever, were you ever curious about how white people were doing what they were doing, when they professed to be the same kind of Christian you were?

NEBLETT: I didn’t think they were Christians, you know. I came to the conclusion that they weren’t. I came to the conclusion that it was a game. I believed in God, I believed in Christianity. But I said, you know, “That Christianity was a trick.” You see it was a trick. In fact, we went to a white church one time. Got dressed, had on suits and ties. Had our hair groomed and everything else. (laughs) They arrested us and the charge--I was in Cairo, Illinois—they arrested us and the charge was disturbing divine worship by our presence. The preacher stopped preaching, the people went off, by us being in the church. They charged us with disturbing divine worship. So, no doubt in my mind--I could not understand how white people became Christians. What kind of brand of Christians they were? What is this? It’s nothing but a game, because it doesn’t relate to anything that, you know. How does this thing relate? I just came to the conclusion that it was just a game. Until finally I started meeting some white Christians. I mean some people who were.....who really sat down and said, “This whole thing is wrong. It’s not like that.” Because it’s very few times that you could meet somebody white that you could have that kind of conversation with. You see, you didn’t come in contact with that. And I think that’s the reason why, it’s ( ) in the black community, because of the contradictions in this whole thing about Christianity and what it represented and what it supported. And the church supported the whole system of slavery. The church supported the whole system of segregation. The church supported the whole system of de-humanization. And that you just weren’t quite--I had a white lady tell me, one time say, “You all might go to, well it’s a different kind of heaven. You all won’t go where we go.” You see. And that kind of thing. But, see black people been doing this for a long time. They had it in the music. Like I said, there’s a church, and there’s a church in the black community. But the real church knew that they had songs and everybody talking about heaven ain’t going there, you see. (laughs)

POTTER: When you talk about the singing, go back a little bit to where the Freedom Singers formed and how they formed. Where were you?

NEBLETT: I was in Mississippi when they wanted to form, when they formed the Freedom Singers.

POTTER: Who was in the original group?

NEBLETT: Well, there was Bertha Goldberg, there was Bernice, she was Johnson then, Cordell Regan, myself and Luther Harris.

POTTER: You were the original group who began going all over the country?

NEBLETT: Original group, right, right.

BRINSON: Was there an audition? Was it just happened that the five of you kind of got together?

NEBLETT: Well, see the five....I had met Cordell. I had met him before. So what they did. They wanted to call together song leaders, young song leaders who could do this and they knew Cordell was a tenor. And he was out there going all over the place singing. From Albany, they knew that Bernice and Luther was powerful song leaders down there. And they heard me in Illinois and in Missouri and in Chicago. So they called us up and formed a.....First of all, they really wanted to get the story out. And Pete Seeger was involved in this and a whole lot of people. Foreman, Jim Foreman was pulling this together and saying, “How, what can we do? How can we get this message out?” So they said, “Why don’t you put together a group to do the same thing that the Fisk Jubilee Singers did, to get their message out?” So, well you pull you some song leaders together, see if they fit, merge and all that kind of thing. And put them on the road, so that they can tell, not only tell the story of the Movement, they can raise money. And they can organize. They organize well, let them organize through music. And so they called us together, and it took some time to really come out in the field. Because they gotten to be too interested in the field, you know, organizing in the field. So, they wanted to put us on the road. And to be honest with you, at that time, I’d rather work in the South, than travel around in the North. Because you run across some things and oh, it was so hypocritical. And the kind of questions they would ask. And the kind of subtle racism. Dick Gregory called it, “Up South”, you know, at the time. And...

POTTER: Give us an example of the subtle.

NEBLETT: Well, the subtlety, they were just as segregated in the North as they was in the South. They just headed different. In the South, at least they tell you up front. They put a sign on the door.

POTTER: Did it surprise you?

NEBLETT: Not really, not really.

BRINSON: Need to stop you a minute and...

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

POTTER: You were talking about the early days of the Freedom Singers. And as you all began to sing all over, you really went to some interesting festivals. I know you sang at Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. What other kinds of things were kind of the highlights for you, that you remember?

NEBLETT: I think the highlight for me was at Carnegie Hall. I had heard about it all my life, you know. And to be there...

POTTER: Describe the night.

NEBLETT: Well, it was like.....First of all, we were staying in East Harlem. The East Harlem Protestant Parish. And we had gone all over Harlem. They knew we were going to be there. And it was the first time that black people, a large number of black people were in Carnegie Hall.

POTTER: Do you remember what year this was?

NEBLETT: Oh God, that was sixty-two. A large amount of black people in Carnegie Hall. And you had people like Mahalia Jackson, and all those people had been my, just been icons. I mean, they just been bigger than life. You had people like that and Belafonte, Harry Belafonte was very much involved. You had people like Dick Gregory, very much involved.

POTTER: Did they perform?

NEBLETT: Yeah, they did some things in it, too. But we, I never will forget--when the five as us walked out on that stage. We went out as organizers. It wasn’t Carnegie Hall anymore, you know. We were organizers and we were going out there to deal with the story. And to get people involved in the Movement. And we sang there. I never will forget, the final song we sang was always “ We Shall Overcome”. We always crossed our hands right over left. And Mahalia Jackson was over here to my left. She had my right hand. She darn near broke it. Now that was--not only was she a powerful spiritual, or powerful singer--that woman was powerful. I mean she meant, she meant every word that came out of her mouth. I never will forget it. I mean, she was just.....I never will forget that woman. She was just a powerful person. And what’s amazing is that someone like that is so powerful; you can sit down and they are so humble and spiritual and human, you know, just so human. But that was some experience. And after that, after the concert was over, you just look around the place. That’s when I looked at the place. And we looked around the place and we realized.....And somebody asked us, did you realize that you just sang at Carnegie Hall? And we said, “All right so we sang at Carnegie Hall, so hey, what’s next?” But we had a lot, we had a lot of good experiences in terms of meeting a lot of people. In fact, Bob Dylan was down there. You had people like Bob Dylan, you had Pete Seeger, you had a whole lot of more people down there. Even Joan Baez was in and out of there. You had those kind of folk singers, who were singing songs that I wasn’t used to. You had the whites down there, singing the songs, that hey they’re all right, but I hadn’t got tuned into that.

POTTER: Did their folk singing kind of style every affect your style of singing?

NEBLETT: Yeah, how do I put this? We changed a lot of that around. I think there’s a lot of swapping and stuff going on there, you know. What happens when you merge things like that, our style of singing plus their style of singing. But the meaning of the songs is so good, you know what I’m saying? That people will get together and just do it. But anytime you get together with different groups of people--even if they’re black--I mean, you know--different regions; like from Alabama and Mississippi had different styles when people get together they change. It has to change.

POTTER: There was a song called, “We’ll Never Turn Back”, that became sort of like a theme song for you, didn’t it?

NEBLETT: Right.

POTTER: Who thought of that?

NEBLETT: Bertha Goldberg did that. That was one of the first girls, one of the original Freedom Singers. She wrote that song, “We’ll Never Turn Back”. In fact, thinking about all those people who had died, or gotten killed, and nobody even knew about it, nobody ever hear about you. You won’t hear it on TV. You won’t see it in the newspapers, but these were real heroes. I mean people who put their lives on the line, like Herbert Lee. And all of those people....

POTTER: Did you feel a little like a historian? I mean, you really were putting history into words. I mean that was one of the ways that you...

NEBLETT: Yeah, we knew that, technically, but I think we were so wrapped up into doing it. We was wrapped up into doing it. So wrapped up into getting out, getting the word out, dealing with the logistics of travel. Dealing with people.

POTTER: How long did the Freedom Singers sing together? How many years? And did you disband?

NEBLETT: For about five years we sang constant. For about five years, I mean we were out there. The group changed. It started with a couple of girls, with Bernice; well three girls really. Bernice at one time, Bernice wrote and Bertha Goldberg, who wrote “We’ll Never Turn Back”. Bertha sang for about, I think about eight months. And Bernice and Rufus, we all sang together for about a year. I think it was about a year. And it was rugged. It was rugged, because we didn’t know how to pace ourselves, and we were just too young to do that. We were just out there doing it. And then after that we put together a group of guys who sang, who went out there on the road. And my brother was involved in that. Had Jones boys, Matthew and Marshall Jones, had Emory Harris, who was Rufus’ brother and Cordell and we went out and we continued to organize. And all the way to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was organized and went to the convention. We were there...

POTTER: At the convention?

NEBLETT: Yeah. We were there.

POTTER: What was that like?

NEBLETT: Oh, that was a mess. It was, it was....I think it’s when we really found out Power Politics.

POTTER: Talk a little bit more about that.

NEBLETT: We did everything in Mississippi. We set up the Democratic Party, with blacks and whites involved. We challenged the regular Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi, who would not let black people vote. We challenged them at the convention. And we found out how Johnson put pressure on Hubert Humphrey, who was the great Liberal of the time, to stop that. And how important and how they were not, from a political point of view, for Johnson to get elected; he was not going to unseat, have anything to do with unseating the white Democratic Party. He was not going to do that. He told Johnson, he told Hubert Humphrey if he didn’t break that stuff up, then he wasn’t going to be vice-president, just that simple. They had organized....See to understand this, SNCC organized from the bottom up. We believed that it’s going to have to be the local leadership that’s going have to do it. We’re here to organize local leadership and give them support. And one of those local leaders that we came across was Mrs. Hamer, people like Mrs. Hamer. You know local leadership, powerful leadership, because it is there, you see and these people are going to be there. So what we’re going to do, we organize, we organize from the bottom up, not this...

POTTER: Was that different then the way the NAACP organized?

NEBLETT: Well it was different, yeah. They dealt from the top down. But you see, and you had people like the NAACP, even King’s organization did that to a large extent. And we were those wild and wooly students, who believed that you had to organize from the bottom up. And there was nothing more powerful than local leadership, you see, giving power to the people. And that, people like Mrs. Hamer, and they did not want--after they found out, all the organizations found out that, that Mississippi Summer project was coming off so strong, and that there was so much power to that, and it got so much publicity and especially after all those white kids who had been down there; who was writing home to their parents about what was going on in Mississippi. And you had senators and congressmen’s kids who was writing home. That’s when you got newspaper reporters coming down there to really find out what was happening in Mississippi, because you had those kids down there. Especially after Chaney, Goodman and Swaner were murdered down there. That place was covered with newspaper reporters. And the point is a lot of pressure was put on Washington at the time--you’re going to have to do something about this. There was a lot of pressure in Mississippi. They had the Simon Commission down there, who were spying on everything and causing a lot of havoc--paying black people and everybody they can to get into these organizations and disrupt them. To disrupt projects and the whole disrupted thing. But even at that, it was so powerful with the local leadership, with people like Mrs. Hamer. No matter who they sent in there, you had these people on a grass roots level, who went to Atlantic City and challenged the regular, white Mississippi Democratic Party. And went there to take the seats. And I never will forget, we was looking at TV, and Mrs. Hamer came on. That woman had such a powerful speech, Johnson had it cut off. Get that woman off of there. Get her off of there. Then you had other organizations talking about compromise.

POTTER: And how did that play out? Did you unseat them?

NEBLETT: No, we didn’t unseat them. They promised, they tried to compromise with a seat-at-large or something.

POTTER: Was that discouraging?

NEBLETT: Well, it just wasn’t going to happen. But you see, you had other organizations, like NAACP, even King’s organizations and the Urban League and all of them; and some kind of civil rights organization the government done set up, to come together to pressure everybody into--don’t raise--you know--we got to get Johnson, we got to get Johnson elected as president. And we can’t have all of this and what we’re going to do is compromise. And when Mrs. Hamer got up and telling about all the beatings that she’s been through, and the people that have died, and the strength of the people and we didn’t come here for no compromise. What is compromise? Compromise? We didn’t come here to compromise. When she stood up and started speaking and then lot of them didn’t want me to say, “Who was this woman who came off a plantation, going to set up here and head this thing up?” She don’t have any degrees. Off of a plantation!

BRINSON: Did the Freedom Singers actually sing in the convention?

NEBLETT: Uh huh, not in the convention, but we were there, singing

BRINSON: Outside?

NEBLETT: Oh we had rallies, we had our own rallies.

BRINSON: Talk about the rallies.

NEBLETT: Yeah, what we would have was rallies. I mean, people to find information come...

POTTER: Describe one.

NEBLETT: Well, you have a rally, where Mrs. Hamer would get up and come out there and explain what was going on...

POTTER: Inside.

NEBLETT: ...inside. And we’d all.....And she was singer, ah, she was a good singer. She’d sing, “This Little Light of Mine” was hers. “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine.” She’d get up there and we’d all sing. In fact, if you see Our Eyes on the Prize, you see a thing of all of us up there singing. So we’d always sing. The thing is about singing, the spirit comes through the singing. You can get up and speak all day long, but the thing is, the spirit comes through the music. And we’d sing all kinds of songs. The spirit would always come through the music. And we’d have songs--the thing we would say is, “You got some I songs, and you got some We songs.” We never did like those We songs, because you can escape. You got to make a commitment. I’m going to sit at the welcome table. You say we, you might wiggle around that, but we want commitments out of it. You want a commitment, what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit at the welcome table. I ain’t going to study war no more.

POTTER: This little light of mine.

NEBLETT: This little light of mine, you see.

BRINSON: Who made that decision to distinguish between I and We? That’s a political strategy in and of itself, you know. How did that come about?

NEBLETT: Well, I tell. We was there talking about it one time, as a group, we were talking about music. It was a long drawn out thing that we was talking about, because a lot of the songs that our fore-parents were singing, we thought was old stuff. We didn’t want to hear about it.

POTTER: Spirituals and...?

NEBLETT: Those spirituals--a lot of the spirituals and some of the gospels, and that kind of thing. And got involved in the Movement--our ears opened up and we heard them again, and we found out those are some powerful stuff. And I said, “My God.” So we started talking about music and how powerful and where our fore-parents heads were at; and you can hear it coming through the music and how powerful those songs are. And we started singing those songs, ourselves, (laughs) because it is the same process. It’s the same thing. We were going through the same thing. It was just a steady beat. And we said, “These are cold-blooded freedom songs.” I mean, “My God.” And so we come to recognize it and we started talking about things like that. And then we went into the “I” songs, talk about the songs that said “I” and the “We” songs. And we started discussing that and how powerful that the “I” songs are. And how one has to make a personal commitment, talking about what, “I’m going to do”, not what “We going to do”; but what “I’m” going to do. And you got all of those I’s. And we even got down to the most powerful thing in the world. The most powerful number in the world is one. The most powerful thing in the world is one, is not millions, it’s one. You see, that’s powerful. It was a lot went into those songs, in terms of...

POTTER: Who thought up changing some of the words to fit the moment? Like you had a song that you changed to make it fit George Wallace one time. Who...

NEBLETT: Governor Wallace?

POTTER: Yeah. Who was able to, who thought those things up? And did you do it on the spur.....In the heat of the moment?

NEBLETT: A lot of it was done in the heat of the moment. On the heat of the moment. You’d have a song.....In church.....You’d have to understand that church, and the music, and the part that the music played in the black church; and song leaders in that church. You had several song leaders in a church; but it would wind up being the most powerful song leaders, who were going to be running it after a while. You let the song go on and as the spirit rises, you get more and more powerful song leaders. And sometimes you get like four or five song leaders, and it just passes around among them, the music. And they will change the words, they’ll change the verses. And as for what happened, we would sing, like Governor Wallace.....Well I read, and people would go around and before you know it the song is formed. You formed it. And a lot of people getting around, and write some of them. And some hear them and write it down, and get a song out of that. But most the music, they way they change the songs was in the spur of the moment. If you’re on a picket line, if you’re in jail.....One guy will sing, saying, “I’ve never been to Heaven, but I know I’m right. Been down into the South.” Then another guy said, “If people up there are black and white. Been down into the South.” And the bass say, “Been down high, hallelujah! Been down high, hallelujah!” And people just start going like that. And you’d be in jail, and you’d be doing stuff like that, and come on, we’d have bands there in jail. People be playing the trumpet and the guys be playing the drums. Bomp, bomp, pchee, chee, bomp, bebomp, bedum, dow, bum, bee, doing it all with sounds and stuff.

POTTER: Did the police in the jails ever try to stop you?

NEBLETT: Oh yeah, a lot of times. Then a lot of times they’d listen. A lot of times what they would do, they would sit there and listen. And sometimes they’d come up and ask you to sing.

BRINSON: Would you say that some of the best music that you put together came out of the jail experience?

NEBLETT: I would say some came out of the jail experience, come of out picket lines, come out of personal experiences. I know one song, the guy started singing, and when you have police men coming into your church with dogs.....And somebody would sing, “I ain’t scared of your dogs, because I want my freedom. I want my freedom. I want my freedom.” And everybody would join in. “I ain’t scared of your dog, because I want my freedom. I want my freedom, now.” Then another guy--somebody’d say, “I ain’t scared of your gun, because I want my freedom.” Then somebody would say, “I ain’t scared of your jail, because I want my freedom.” Before you know it, the whole song is set. You got the background to the song. You got the leadership of the song. And the song started building, and building and as the song builds it dispels fear.

POTTER: Did you ever see music as a common denominator, too, between blacks and whites?

NEBLETT: Music has always been some kind of common denom.....Some kind of denominator between blacks and whites; because it’s one thing, they come together on the music, but they couldn’t come together themselves. You see what I’m saying. That’s one of the ironic things about it. They could adapt the music, that’s fine. But as far as personally, it was a whole different thing. You had people, you had whites coming to hear blacks sing and doing all that stuff, forever.

BRINSON: Want to go back to putting the music together in the sit ins and the jails. And as you know there were also a lot of meetings in the churches before the demonstrations and whatnot. And I’m wondering how you would compare the music as a good product coming out of singing in the churches compared to singing in the jail. Did you get a better song, a richer song in one place as opposed to the other? Am I asking this so it makes sense?

NEBLETT: I think that the songs, whatever came out of jail, fit the moment of you being in jail. And a lot of it was based on those songs that came out of the church. You see they just changed, you change some words and you change the meaning of it, to fit, but the spirit, the same spirit was there, you know. The spirit was there.

BRINSON: But in the church meetings, for example, did the words ever get changed there?

NEBLETT: No, no.

BRINSON: They were changed more in jail.

NEBLETT: No, no, you don’t change in the church. Right, right, you don’t change in the church. But we had, we did, finally start changing them in the church, especially at rallies and so forth in the church.

POTTER: Before a demonstration?

NEBLETT: Before a demonstration. But as far as the church--the meeting is concerned at the church, no. But as far as rallies and mass meetings are concerned, oh, we had the music going wild. And one of the reasons why the people could join in so easily and sing the songs--the freedom songs--was because it was based on some of those songs that they’d learned in the church. So, it really became a big thing. But it’s one of the things that common meter hymn that was powerful. I don’t know whether you heard one or not, a common meter hymn, where they say...

POTTER: Say it again.

NEBLETT: A common meter hymn, a long meter hymn.

BRINSON: I don’t know what that is. What is that?

NEBLETT: Wild.

BRINSON: A musical term?

NEBLETT: Well, it was a call and response, but it would line it out. One of them say, “I know the Lord, he heard my cry, then everybody say, I------ I------ heeaarrd the uh Lord.” And then somebody, “Heard my cry, heard my cry, heeaard my- cry.” And it would just be, somebody would come up and say, “Long as I live and trouble rise,” they would go out again and stretch it out. ‘Long--- long--- as--- I---- live.” And it would just go and everybody would find a part. And you have all kinds of sounds and all kinds of dissonance.

POTTER: From all over.

NEBLETT: Yeah. You’d have all kinds of dissonance and you’d have it and it would just rise. And then you have everybody singing. And then after it’s gone, the church would be so full of sound. The church would just be full of sound and it would just be moving. The whole thing would just move. And I’d heard my parents sing that a long time ago and I didn’t like it. “What is this, old folks singing this stuff?” But when I got involved in the Movement, got out and I heard it again. And heard how powerful it was, and what these people would be saying. And you could see it, you could feel it. And especially in Georgia. The church would be packed, and everybody would be singing, and everybody would be hitting all kinds of notes when everything worked. It would work. And it would be so powerful, like the church would just swell and contract. And it was some powerful stuff. And that’s when I found out how powerful the music really is and how little that our young people know about these things and it’s going to be our responsibility to maintain it.

POTTER: Did the Freedom Singers, were they at, where you all at Medgar Evers funeral?

NEBLETT: No, we weren’t at his funeral.

POTTER: Were you in that area when he...?

NEBLETT: I was in, I think I was in Georgia, Georgia at that time. But we knew Medgar Evers. Medgar Evers was a good organizer. In fact--the fact of the matter is, he was kind of on the outs with following instructions; because SNCC believed in making decisions....if you were out in the field, you make decisions. You didn’t have time to go up the ladder to get to national and all this kind of stuff. That it just took too long when you had people on the ground who could make decisions. Because things happening too fast.

BRINSON: I have to stop you and turn the tape over.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE THREE SIDE ONE

NEBLETT: And Medgar Evers was like that also. He was making decisions on the ground. He wasn’t necessarily going all the way up the ladder. And a little conflict there. But he was a heck of an organizer. Medgar Evers was a darn good organizer. And he was a good Mississippi organizer, and all of us respected him very much. Because he was in the field, he was there. He was a grass roots person. And it was just a devastating thing, you know, when he was murdered like that. But again, he wasn’t the only one. You got a lot of Medgar Evers. A lot of Medgar Evers. And I think that’s one of the things that was learned by all those students coming out in sixty-four. And telling the story of Mississippi and people getting to know what was happening down there, especially when someone stood up for their rights. You were going against the whole system. And they didn’t believe that it was like that. These young people didn’t believe that, until they got down there and found out. And it was devastating to a lot of people. And another thing that happened too, you had young whites, who were staying in the homes of blacks; which was a whole different thing for both of them. You had, whites who were working with blacks in that movement and you had a system just go crazy. Just the idea, it was like a betrayal, like a traitor kind of thing. The idea of a white person helping out these niggers, trying to get them registered to vote. It was worse than a communist. And this kind of thing. And I have to admire a lot of the white kids who came down, because they went through a lot, too. A lot of times they got beat worse than we did; some of them just went crazy on them.

POTTER: And there were different religions.

NEBLETT: Oh yeah, you had all kinds of different, you had Quakers down there, you had Catholics, you had some Methodists, Jewish.

POTTER: And that was a new experience.

NEBLETT: That was a new experience for a whole lot of everybody. I think that was a new experience for black kids, as well as, all of the rest of these different.....Not only, they were white, but they were different faiths and different everything. I mean, everybody was there. It made for a very interesting situation. I was still leery. I mean I got called on the carpet for not taking some white kids to a meeting. And they got.....and I said, “Hold it now.” They were going to say I was prejudice. “I’m not prejudiced.” I said, “If I load my car up with a white girl in Mississippi and I’m going to go from this town to that town; the chances of me getting us there are nil to none.” (laughs) “The thing is, how are we going to get from this point to that point. We ain’t got nothing to prove now, we just got to get from one point to the next.” And so things like that. Just plain, to me, I say, “No, I’m not going to risk my life to prove that I can ride in Mississippi with white people.”

BRINSON: Who called you on the carpet?

NEBLETT: Ahh, the local, well, they did. They calling me. I wouldn’t take them. “You all crazy, you out of your mind.” I said, “My only objective it to get from one point to the next.”

BRINSON: So the women themselves...?

NEBLETT: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: ...did that?

NEBLETT: I said, “No, no, no.” (laughs) That’s not even the point. I said, “Listen, you stay down here long enough, you’ll find out.” But anyway it was interesting.

POTTER: Have the Freedom Singers ever had a reunion?

NEBLETT: Oh yeah. In fact, we still sing. We just did a whole four concert at Stanford and we’ve done things in Saint Louis at the Historical Society there. In fact, I spoke there, sang and spoke there to the Historical Society and what is that...? The Missouri...?

POTTER: Historical Society.

NEBLETT: Historical Society, yeah. And we’re going to do a thing in Nashville that’s being planned now around that whole Nashville Movement. They’ve got pictures down there with...

POTTER: When will that be?

NEBLETT: Probably next year about March.

BRINSON: I wonder what happened to the Freedom Singers when the growing Black Nationalism, Black Power Movement began to come into SNCC.

NEBLETT: I was there that night when it was....I was at the meeting when they were voting on whether it was going to be Stokely Carmichael or John Lewis. I was there. We were sleeping in shifts. We had a meeting that would go on two days. I mean if you got weak—(laugh) if you got weak and your people weren’t there to vote; well then you were in trouble. Everybody would have their surrogates in there. And it was a whole growing thing. The argument was is that, have things really changing? What good is non-violence?

POTTER: How did you feel personally?

NEBLETT: Personally, I was torn between the two of them. Not torn. How did I feel about it? One of the things that I felt, I felt.....I liked John Lewis. I felt like that SNCC should stay in the South. It wasn’t necessarily about violence or non-violence. My opinion was SNCC should stay in the South and keep organizing in the South. I felt at the time that the South was going to be the place where blacks could make more advancements than they could in the North. And that you had the population in the South. We could deal with the political forces of the South, with the vote and you could build, you know, you could really build in the South. But you had two different kinds of things. You had the North, you had the South and you had--earlier, I had met Huey Newton and Bobby Seals and the Panthers when they--well eventually they were the Panthers. They came to Lyons County and they was talking about the tactics that you use in the South just won’t work in the urban areas. You see that the whole philosophy of non-violence and all that kind of thing, it’s not going to work in the urban areas.

POTTER: How did you feel about this?

NEBLETT: It might have been true, but it would work in the South. One of the things about the South, the South is church based. You know, it’s church based. You see. As far as, it’s the Bible Belt. The whole thing of non-violence and certain kind of thing of people getting together. Another thing too about the South, is that people knew each other. They knew each other. And as far as integration was concerned--as far as integration concerned--as far as that’s concerned, would have a better chance in the South than it would in the North. It was there, the ingredients were there. It wasn’t in the North. Dick Gregory had a thing he said, he said, “The difference between the South and the North, in the North they don’t care how big you get as long as you don’t get too close.” He said, “In the South, they don’t care how close you get long as you don’t get too big, you see.” And you know, I just think that with the people in the South, we should have stay, we should stay in the South and organize and develop, right there, where the people were. And that yeah, you might use different tactics in the North in terms with dealing with the complexities of the problems here. But my thing, I was with John Lewis. We stay right in the South. Stokely, he was a good friend of mine. I liked Stokely. He used to come to my house and take my clothes, (laughs) because we wore the same clothes. H. Rap Brown, one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met in my life. I mean, he used to tell stories. He could have been a heck of a comedian. And he was very bright. But the fact of the matter is, that my position was that we should stay in the South. And the fact is, I can understand it, but, you know, going to the Black Power route, I can understand all of the positive things about the whole Black Power route. I could understand the whole thing about Black is Beautiful, you see, all of that. But I still felt like we should have stayed in the South. And that picking up an armed struggle, wasn’t going to work. That armed struggle thing wasn’t going to work.

POTTER: Do you think that switch kept the South from moving on?

NEBLETT: I think that South could have moved farther and faster if that organization had stayed there. I think if it had stayed there.....I think the South would have been better off economically, socially, politically and everything else, if people had stayed in the South and started organizing the South. I think by now the South would have been a place that would make the North look.....Because the spirit of the thing was big. The spirit was in the South. And people were willing to work. The background was there. I mean, the struggle was there.

BRINSON: With that decision though, what happened to the Freedom Singers?

NEBLETT: Well, we were torn in a dilemma, how you going to sing about.....non-violence? What are you going to do? So, we sat and we talked about it. Saying, “Wow.” And then we didn’t do anything for a while. We had a few concerts. We didn’t do anything for a while. And then we started doing periodic concerts, because people wanted to hear us sing. We started doing periodic concerts. And we would do concerts. We’d do folk festivals. We’d do festivals again. And we’d do things like the Washington.....what was that? The Folk Life Festival in Washington.

POTTER: The Smithsonian.

NEBLETT: Smithsonian. And we did things like that. And then what year was that, we decided to put them back together and then and do a tour. So we did a tour of Kentucky junior colleges.

POTTER: When was that?

NEBLETT: That was in.....

MARVINIA NEBLETT: Nineteen ninety-three.

NEBLETT: Ninety-three, we did a whole tour.

MARVINIA: We came through Russellville in ninety-one, ninety-two...

NEBLETT: Ninety-one. We started like in ninety.

MARVINIA: And Hopkinsville.

NEBLETT: We just did some tours.

BRINSON: But going back, you said, you talked about it and then you did some concerts, but you did the concerts, I’m assuming, of the same kind of music that you had been doing?

NEBLETT: Oh yes, oh yes.

BRINSON: You didn’t change words or...?

NEBLETT: No, no.

BRINSON: ...to meet the sort of new thrust?

NEBLETT: No, no. See the thing is that, you look at all movements, whether it is music.....You look at that Israeli-Arab conflict, where is the music? You see? The thing is, you don’t have music in a violent conflict.

BRINSON: You don’t think the civil rights struggle was, in part, a violent conflict?

NEBLETT: Oh, it was violent, but what I’m saying is, is that people who were depending on spiritual forces is the one that brought out the music. Believe that the spiritual forces are more powerful than physical forces, and you bring out yourself in a spiritual way. Your spirit, the spirit. And you come out and use that. You can sing it. You can feel it. But if you go out and going to be shooting somebody. How do you sing about that? I mean, what do you feel? How do you sing about what you really feeling. What is that down there? I think that’s why We Shall Overcome is all over the world. You have those people in these movements, these marches and stuff like this and then you look up and you have We Shall Overcome, say in Dutch or something, I don’t know. I mean it really blew my mind, when you hear people singing “We Shall Overcome” in a non-violent movement. And even in South Africa, a lot of that music came out of there, you know, in protest. In armed conflict, I think it’s a whole different story.

BRINSON: I see your point.

POTTER: Let’s move forward to Kentucky, and tell us how you happened to come back to Kentucky; when you did and where you came. What brought you back?

NEBLETT: What brought me back to Kentucky? I met a woman, one of your Kentucky women and I wound up in Kentucky. (laughs) Basically that was it. I mean, I was living in New York and I came back. I was ready to leave New York, anyway.

POTTER: What year was this?

NEBLETT: This was in seventy-three, seventy-two, seventy-three.

BRINSON: How did you two meet? And tell us her name.

NEBLETT: Well, her name is, used to be Marvinia Benton. But I came back home. I came back to Tennessee. My uncle died. I came back to my uncle’s funeral. And my father was old at the time. He was in his nineties, if he wasn’t close to a hundred. So, we all flew in and we was going to take care of our father. He was in church and was taking care of him, making sure he was taken care of. This young lady saw me. I saw her, you know, but I was taking care of business. And she made it a point of.....I knew her aunt. I knew all of her people. I knew all of her people, except her mother. I never met her mother before. But I knew all of her aunts. I knew her grandfather. I knew her cousins and things. So, she got her aunt, who knew me to introduce us. So she introduced us. And let’s see, what happened. She something about, if you don’t have anything to do, call up or come by, come to Russellville, something like that. And she gave me her phone number. So, we got in Springfield after everything was over with and nothing to do. I said, “Hey what is Russellville.” We had heard about it, because it used to be kind of rough, years ago. So, my brother-in-law, myself and my brother, we headed to Russellville. And so we met and she...

BRINSON: How far is that?

NEBLETT: From where?

BRINSON: From Springfield.

NEBLETT: Oh, about twenty-five miles. So we got there and found out she was in college and everything, and we talked and we went out and just talked. And we told them to stay in school and that kind of thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Gave her a kiss on the forehead and we left. (laughs) And that was in seventy-one. That was in seventy-one. That was in seventy-one. But we didn’t really talk to each other too much until around seventy-three. We’d call each other or something like that. It was in seventy-three that I decided I was leaving New York. And we got together again and started talking. We’d been talking all along about every six months, every three months or something like that on the phone. And decided to come down. I think she laid a trap for me. I don’t know about these Kentucky women. I tell everybody you have to beware. Anytime you get somebody from New York to Russellville, that is kind of powerful. So, they need to be organizers.

BRINSON: What took you to New York?

NEBLETT: New York City. Well, right after that meeting, that, with the whole Black Power Movement taking over with Stokely becoming Chairman of SNCC; I decided.....We had some concerts in New York, what it was. We had some meetings and concerts around New York, so I was.....so I had to be there. And what I did, I just stayed there. I never went back South to organize. We stayed there. And I was contemplating on going back to school, really what we were going to do. What in the world are we going to do at this point? And going back to school, getting involved in some things in New York. We had, still an organization there. You had the Free Southern Theater. You had a lot of things going on. So I decided I would just stay in New York for a while until I found out that I was sick of New York. I looked around and I said, “I don’t want to live in New York.” In fact, I got a job. I worked for the city of New York. I was making a lot of money. I was moving on, you get into that pace of that thing. You get into that pace and you get to like it, you get to like that pace. That hard driving pace and wits and skills and so forth. And I got to the point where I looked around and said “This is not me.” Because you find out how rotten things are. I said, “This is not me.” And I brought property and I had done a lot of things and I looked around and said, “It’s not me. This is not where I want to live. This is not where I want to raise kids. I’m not going to be a part of this.” Because I saw what it was pulling me into. And I left. Got rid of property thing and left. And I came back South.

BRINSON: To Russellville?

NEBLETT: Well, one of the places, (laughs) to Russellville.

BRINSON: But to Kentucky?

NEBLETT: To Kentucky, came back to Kentucky. But it’s good because I like it, in a sense, because you can always get out of here. It’s a good central point. Small enough, you can get in and out of here anywhere in the world you want to go. And I think I would prefer a small place rather than the big hustle and bustle of that kind of life in the city.

POTTER: Tell us your impressions of when you came back to Logan County or to Russellville. What was it like?

NEBLETT: Russellville, you have to understand, it’s a traditional political system there.

POTTER: Meaning?

NEBLETT: Meaning the same people who ran that place right after the Civil War, who took power right after the Civil War, they’re still running it now. Those same families are running it today. (laughs) You have those same connections, whether they are black or white; you have those same connections, in terms of, I don’t know how unequal they are, but those same connections are there today. And it was a hard thing to really break through. I know when I first came to Russellville, they thought I was some wild character. Where did this character come from? It was almost like going back, organizing again in Alabama and Mississippi, in terms of people’s attitudes and the way they thought. And really you come in and you disturb their comfort zone, even though they know that you are right. Like the guy with the light, you disturb their comfort zone and you’ll have a problem. So, you have a problem with blacks, as well as, whites. And you have whites, who can fester that kind of thing with blacks, who they know and so forth. So, knowing this, what happened was, they set me up as this wild, radical, crazy guy here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what I did, I said, “To dispel this, I’m going to run for political office.” And the only reason I ran was to get a chance to knock on everybody’s door and introduce myself. So, I got a legitimate chance to knock on everybody’s door in the town. Knock on their door and introduce myself, so you don’t have to hear what somebody said and all this kind of thing. You can meet me. And it surprised a lot of people met me and we sat and we talked.

POTTER: You were running for what?

NEBLETT: City Council. We sat and we talked and you see some strange looks on people’s faces--this is not the guy I’ve heard about. And we talked. I told them what position that I was taking and what I thought that needed to be done to help out, you know, to help the community.

BRINSON: This would have been what year?

NEBLETT: Well, seventy-five?

BRINSON: Okay.

NEBLETT: I just got there.

BRINSON: Okay.

NEBLETT: Seventy-five. And I almost won a seat and that blew everybody’s mind. Then again, I ran again for City Council and I almost won. But then I ran for Magistrate. When was that? Nineteen and ninety...?

MARVINIA NEBLETT: Eighty-nine, nineteen eighty-nine.

NEBLETT: Eighty-nine. And I won. So the thing is--one of things that it did--it convinced blacks that they could run for political office. Because the only people who had run for political office there before, is the people that the powers that be said, “Hey, we want you to be here.” And in fact, no one had been initially elected. What they’d done, they’d been appointed to a position and they kept them there. They re-elect them.

POTTER: Were you the first black elected?

NEBLETT: I’m the first.....Elected. I was the first black, who initially ran for office and was elected to that office. In reality, there’s no black from Logan County has ever been elected to political office there. So, the thing is that what we wanted to show that you could run for office. We’re going to have to get some political strength here. And really what it is today, we have six blacks, five blacks running for six seats on the City Council in Russellville, now.

POTTER: Today?

NEBLETT: Today, and all of them from Russellville.

MARVINIA: ( ) is not.

NEBLETT: Well, four out of five of them are from Russellville.

MARVINIA: ( )

NEBLETT: Okay, but you got people from Russellville, blacks, running for political office, determined that they are going to get into this process. But the thing is, these were the young people, who were there when I first came to Russellville. You see those young people were there, who worked with us; they are now running for political office, dealing with School Boards. They are getting involved in a positive way in the community. And they got a concerned citizen they’re dealing with restoring; it’s the same people that one is dealing in the Historical Society there. Where Michael ( ) is gathering up all that information, you know. All of those young people, either they’re gone and if they’re there, they’re working. And those are the young people that were there, they’re like eighteen, fourteen, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, when I got there in seventy-three, seventy-four.

BRINSON: Wonder if you can tell me what a magistrate does? And were there kinds of issues, were there specific issues that you ran on, that you wanted to see accomplished in that role?

NEBLETT: Well, some of the things I wanted to see accomplished in that role.....Really what they do, they take care of the fiscal responsibility of the county, fiscal responsibility of the county. They deal with health departments, roads and all of that; but there are other things that they can do, you see, in terms of economic development, in terms of.....especially economic development. And like zoning, I was in on the zoning thing. Like land use planning and things of that sort. Waste disposal. And one of the things you do, make sure that those things don’t go on to poor communities. And whatever that is, you can make sure that the black community has a voice in that, that they don’t take it for granted and roll over it. And another one of my goals, were to get more blacks involved into the political process. Involve them in that. Let people know that if you are in office, you are going to have a constituency, you see. So, how did the thing play back and forth. And then it’s a whole political education process that I feel you have to go through, being black in politics with the kind of communities that have been kind of disenfranchised and have not been a part of that whole political set up. But it sort of ( ), but how do you get involved inside that whole political process, that the interest of your community is served? And not going begging, but get into that process so you can guarantee that your community is served, and that you are able to do that. You can do that. You have to organize to do that. And that we have to dispel that fear, because it’s still fear about bucking, just the idea of you running for political office, if nobody told you to do it.

POTTER: How did the white community react to your winning?

NEBLETT: Some of them accused me of buying votes, electioneering, what was it? What else was it? A whole list of things that I was charged with it. And they had an investigation by the State Police. Had an investigation, was going to have a Grand Jury, whole thing about me winning. I had--one of my opponents--one of the people that I beat, he acted like, one time he really wanted to get physical. And it was kind of humorous on my part. And I just went on radio and told them that, the guy asked me, Don Nagel, you might know him. Said, “Well what happened out there Charles?” I said, “I won.” “And,” I said, “Well look, I’ve run twice before and I lost. What did I do? I called the people who won and congratulated them. I went home and licked my wounds and prepared myself to fight another day.”

BRINSON: So you served a term, ran again and lost that term? Is that what happened?

NEBLETT: Right.

BRINSON: Okay.

NEBLETT: And I said, “I licked my wounds and lived, you lived to run another day.” I said, “It is ridiculous.” I just told him, “I knocked on too many doors and there’s too many people in Logan County to really even deal with this kind of nonsense. And whatever evidence they had.....They said they had some pictures. ( ) Very good, because what I wanted them to do, I wanted to be very clear.” And then, they just came up with any number of things. But I went to the D.A., and I was, no it wasn’t, County Attorney. Was he County Attorney, I think? Nooo.

MARVINIA: Commonwealth.

NEBLETT: Commonwealth Attorney. I was kind of worried about him, because he used to work with J. Edgar Hoover. And I’m, knowing J. Edgar Hoover, the experiences I had with J. Edgar Hoover and his boys. And I told one of his little lawyer friends, who was a good guy. He said, “Charles you have nothing to worry about.” I said, “I’m not so sure about that.” I said, “This guy worked for J. Edgar Hoover and you know what kind of person Hoover was.” And apparently he went back and told him. And this is the first time this guy ever even spoke to me. And he told me that he felt like everything would be all right.

POTTER: And was it?

NEBLETT: Yeah.

BRINSON: How long of a term did you serve?

NEBLETT: Four.

BRINSON: Four years?

NEBLETT: Yeah.

END OF TAPE THREE SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE THREE SIDE TWO

NEBLETT: Okay now the first--when I ran--after I won, they conceded I won. What one of the ladies did, who ran against me; she turned around and ran again as a write in vote, as a write in candidate. I said, “Now wait a minute”, because how it works in Kentucky; everybody was a Democrat, right? So, if you win the primary, you’ve won the general election. But the thing is, she turned around and she ran as a write-in candidate for the general election. I said, “What is this? This is the first time in the history of Kentucky that anybody’s ever had to run for the same seat twice. Had to beat the same person twice.” I said, “I’m running against the same person.”

POTTER: And that was legal?

NEBLETT: Yeah! I’ve got to run against the same person twice? I’ve got to beat them twice? I said, “Something about this doesn’t seem fair to me.” And I said, “It’s unfair. I don’t know whether it’s legal or not. It’s not a point whether it is legal or not. It is unfair.” And I just told people that. And I won by a landslide next time. People said “This is wrong. The guy won fair and square. If he won, he won. He won fair and square.” But I think that did a lot, in terms of the black community to see me go through that whole process and see the things that can be thrown against you and you keep on; and the way you handle it and you go ahead on and you win. I think it did a lot for the community. And that’s what it was all about, is really to, to help try to break off those shackles that people have that they don’t realize they have, that bind you. There were those discomforts and you have to disturb a lot of those comfort zones and slowly but surely things happen.

POTTER: Are you involved in the community, in your church? Are you singing?

NEBLETT: Yeah, I sing a bit.

POTTER: Is the church still a part of your life?

NEBLETT: Yeah, the church is a part of my life.

BRINSON: Which church?

NEBLETT: Jesus Church, it’s called Jesus Church at Russellville. You let them youngsters sing now. You let the youngsters sing. They are the power. Let them sing. That junior choir in any black church is the power. You let them sing. We have a male group, we sing. In fact, I just did a.....I spoke at a church in Nashville, when was it? The Sunday before last?

MARVINIA: On the sixteenth of June.

NEBLETT: And they had a male group there, had to sing and speak there. But the thing is getting other people to do it. I tell them all...

POTTER: Another generation.

NEBLETT: Right. Young men are for war. Old men are for counsel. (laughing) And let them sing. Yeah, I enjoy singing. I still sing. Sing with the Freedom Singers. I still sing. And we, hopefully we will have another tour going on in a year. And we thought about really doing again in Kentucky, because it was really powerful. It really--did any--I don’t guess anybody got a chance to hear it? It was on KET. KET taped it.

BRINSON: Well, we’ve looked at it.

POTTER: That’s the, we’ve seen that tape.

BRINSON: We ordered a copy from KET and looked at it.

NEBLETT: Yeah.

BRINSON: Just as part of our research before we talked to you.

NEBLETT: Oh you did, huh? Okay. (laughing)

POTTER: And it was good. It was good. I mean, it’s a good tape.

BRINSON: I wonder though, Charles, that reminds me to ask you.....Have you done an interview like we’re doing today with any other University in Kentucky that you recall?

NEBLETT: No, I don’t think so.

BRINSON: Okay. We were wondering whether there might be a copy in their archives. Okay.

POTTER: Like at the Western Kentucky...?

NEBLETT: Oh Western, yes. I’ve done some interviews with Western.

POTTER: At the university radio station?

NEBLETT: Well at the public radio station there, yeah. At the radio station.

POTTER: Okay.

NEBLETT: I’ve done a couple there.

POTTER: But not for an institution or archives?

NEBLETT: Not that I know of.

POTTER: Has there been any kind of migration out of Russellville? Have young people, have young blacks, young people left Russellville in any...?

NEBLETT: Well, a lot of them leave, yes. Yes, they leave. A lot of them go to Louisville, not that far away. A lot of times they are not that far away.

POTTER: For? Better jobs?

NEBLETT: For better jobs or just to get out of there, you know, just to get out of there. To go to somewhere larger.

POTTER: To a bigger city.

NEBLETT: To a bigger city. And mainly to get jobs and so forth.

BRINSON: Is that both black and white?

NEBLETT: Both black and white. That is a problem, both of them. They have a problem now with these kids go to college and they don’t come back. They don’t come back. It’s a whole drain. And you have the school systems run by the same people. And you have a lot of progressive people, both white and black, who really want to foster some change. And instead of dealing with it, they just go.

POTTER: How do you feel about the school system today, though?

NEBLETT: School system, I think that it is kind of traditional of most school systems. I don’t think you understand. I think you understand. I don’t think they want to deal with the complexities of poor children--of educating poor children. And I think that’s a problem, they don’t want to deal with it from one spectrum to the other, from the top to the bottom. Is that if you don’t fit into that little mold that they have, that you’re going to find students, a certain percentage are going to do it anyway. You see, whatever you do, they’re going to make it. But how you deal with this other segment of child, of children? And I don’t think they want to deal with that, whether these kids are white or black. Because you got a bunch of white kids in that same situation. That they don’t want to deal with those kids.

POTTER: Are you involved in the school system?

NEBLETT: Yeah, I was on the Site-Based Council this year, one of the Site-Based Councils. And I’m thinking about running for the School Board this year.

POTTER: Was the Site-Based Council, elementary, middle or high school?

NEBLETT: High school.

BRINSON: And also, you have how many children?

NEBLETT: Oh, I have six in all.

BRINSON: Okay, but are they all living in Russellville?

NEBLETT: No, I have a thirty-seven year old. I have a thirty-three year old. I have a thirty-seven year old son. I have a thirty-three year old daughter. She’s a journalist. She went to NYU School of Journalism. My son, he went to University of Houston. He just got his Master’s. And I have a eighteen, sixteen, a ten and a seven. (laughing)

BRINSON: I wonder if any of them are musically inclined?

NEBLETT: Yes, I have, I have, quite a few of them are, especially these last four. They’re very much, they’re very much--they deal with music quite a bit.

BRINSON: They sing?

NEBLETT: They sing and the other one, I’m getting him--he’s playing piano now. And I’m going to get my daughter, I think I’ll get her a flute to play or whatever she really wants to play. I’ll get her on keyboard, she’s--time for her to do that now. They like that. They like to hear me sing. They keep me singing all the time. They sing the Freedom songs, in fact, they were singing them coming down today. They were singing “Demonstrating G.I.” (laughing)

POTTER: Well, was the experience on the Site-Based Council encouraging? I mean, was it an interesting experience?

NEBLETT: Yes it was, to the extent that it just really let me know that the only changes that are going to be made in any kind of system, is going to be made on the grass roots level. It’s going to come from the bottom up. It’s going to take parents and people in the community getting together to set down goals in terms of how to deal with the educational process of their children. It’s going to have to come from that level. When you institutionalize, even a Site-Based Council, School Boards and those kinds of things, is that, progress is slow. Change becomes--it’s slow. You got to have a spokesman and spokes-people from the grass roots level. I mean you got to have the community rise up and demand certain things happen in that school. And bring the expertise to put it in the kind of language that it has to be dealt with. And that’s the only way the school system is going to change. It’s not going to change itself. It’s insulated. It’s too institutionalized within itself. You look at the whole structure of a school, the bottom thing on the school is the student. The thing is upside down, you know. What is the school there for? How are we going to deal with that student? How are we going to bring that kid who’s never had--who’s never read a book? How are we going to deal with these kids? That’s the way to do it. And they are not going to do it. They talking more and more about it, talking more and more about it and blah, blah, blah, blah. But are they going to do it? Who’s going to bite the bullet?

POTTER: Do you think your experience in the Civil Rights movement has affected the way your children see things? Do you tell them stories about it? Do they know about...?

NEBLETT: Yeah, it’s interesting. They’re interested. They know all about my experiences in the Movement. And I wouldn’t go to the Army and all that kind of thing. I’ve got a kid now, want to go--he’s in ROTC. (laughing) He wants to be something in the Army, so what do you say? I mean, look.

BRINSON: I was going to go back to that, because I realized that we hadn’t asked you if you’d ever been in the military. Talk about that. (tape pause)

BRINSON: Back and ask you about the military.

NEBLETT: First of all, I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be a pilot. That was in the fifties. I felt like I would be like Doctor J or Michael Jordan in the air. That you just can’t touch me. I’m just that good, you know, with all this machine, all this power machine. Just can’t touch me. That was when I was, that was when I was in high school. When I got to college and I started looking and seeing what this thing was all about and I started getting more and more politicized, especially with the Viet Nam War was going on. And you start learning more and more about what this whole thing was all about. You say, “Wow.” And you start analyzing why you should be fighting in the first place. What is this thing all about? It’s not a John Wayne kind of thing. This thing is real. And why are you fighting? And then out of my high school class, four of my friends, from nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty-three, four of them came back in body bags. And we began to hear stories about Viet Nam, and one of the things is, the closer you got to the fight the blacker the war got. And all the conflict over there about that war and the idea of, why in the world would I go over there and fight for somebody else to have the right to vote; risk my life for somebody else to get the right to vote and I can’t even vote myself. Now that just didn’t make sense and a lot of us, we weren’t.....We just wasn’t going to go, no matter what happened, we wasn’t going to go in the Army. But nobody had a foolproof plan, how you get out of the Army. All I knew at the time, my mother would call me, I would call my mother, she’d say, “You got something, you got a draft notice.” I said, “I’m taking care of it, I’m taking care of it. No problem, I’m taking care of it.” I just ignored it for a while. In the meantime, a lot of the guys who got out of the service, they went to Alabama. Now, in Alabama if you wasn’t eligible for the National Guard, you wasn’t eligible for military service. So what they would do, they’d go down and set up residence in Alabama. And after they set up residence, they’d go down try to join the Alabama National Guard. They’d raise all kind of havoc trying to join the Guard. They’d throw them out of there. So they would--they finally caught on to that. (laughing) Finally they caught up with me. I was in California singing. I think it was in sixty-three, sixty-three I think it was. They finally caught up with me. I knew the police were walking in this club. I hadn’t jumped bail or anything. I knew it was the police. They came up and they told me--they was going--they charged me with three counts of Draft evasion. But they gave me a choice of going to East Saint Louis or going to jail that next Thursday or something like that. And I said, “Wow, they’re giving me a choice. Why are they giving me a choice?” Anyway, okay. Instead of me going where I was supposed to go, I went to Atlanta where my main office was. I went to Atlanta the day I was supposed to be inducted. And I went to the Draft station in Atlanta. I said, “Here I am. I’m supposed to be inducted today and I can’t get home. And blah, blah, blah. I don’t have any money, so here I am.” The guy looked at me and he fussed around with some papers and talked to some people or something. He came back, he said, “That’s all right, you come by here tomorrow. We’ll drop your black, you know what, right down here.” All right. I left, came back the next day. And everybody, they would tease you, there you go. Nobody knew how you were going to get out, but expected you to do it. It was the kind of thing, expected you to perform, you know, you find a way. So on Wednesday, went to the Draft station, went there and I took my written test, but I wouldn’t take my physical. I wouldn’t take off my clothes. They said, “Take off.” I’m not taking off my clothes. And I said, “My daddy told me, all you white boys are a bunch of faggots and I ain’t taking off my clothes in front of no faggot.” And I said, “That ought to work, that ought to work. That ought to really get them going.” And man, it did. It got a whole bunch of stuff going. I don’t know why, but I’ll just say anything. So, I’m smoking a cigarette, and a big guy Sergeant came in there and said, “Put out that God damn cigarette.” He had one. I said, “That sign up there means some fool might burn up this joint. I figure I’m just as intelligent as you.” I said, “When you put out yours, I’ll put out mine.” He came over there. I said, “Don’t put your hands on me. I’m still under civilian law. I’m not under military rule.” I didn’t know whether I was right or not, but I had to talk. But anyway, they wound up sending me to a psychiatrist. They wound up sending me to a psychiatrist. And he was asking me questions like, “If you were going through a park with your sister and somebody.....You see where you say you’re non-violent. If you were going through a park with your sister and someone come up to attack her what will you do?” I said, “It would depend on what frame of mind I was in.” He said, “What do you...?” I said, “Man you just spent all those years studying about minds, you ought to know for yourself.” And he kept on talking until I really got ticked. I said, “Look, I’m going to be honest with you. I ain’t never had no intentions of going into the Army; to carry your first class automatic weapon; wear your first class uniform; go over there and kill somebody or get killed for them to have a right. And I come back here and go in your backdoor and can’t even register to vote.” I said, “What kind of a fool do you think I am?” He looked at me and said, “Don’t you know you can get up to ten years in federal.....” “Man, I’ve been to jail before. Look at my record. Ain’t no big thing. I’ve been to jail.” He kept on, man. He went out there and got somebody. I kicked the desk. I said, “I changed my mind. I’m ready to go. Give me my gun. I’m going to kill my enemies right now.” And I kicked his desk and said, “Give me my gun right now.” He went off and got somebody. He came back. I kicked his desk. “Give me my gun.” I insisted I wouldn’t listen to nothing, but give me my gun. I’m ready to kill my enemies. I was afraid. I was scared, but I had to talk. I don’t know where it came from. I knew I had to do something to get out of there. So, they looked at me and brought some more people. I kicked that desk again. And number one, at that time they never heard no black folk talk to them like that before. They had to think I was crazy. So what they did (laughing) they looked at me and said, “Get out of here.” The longest walk I’ve ever made in my life was going down those big federal steps. I said, “Lord, they’re going to shoot me in my back.” (laughing) But you can’t run, you can’t, you just have, you have to just walk on. And I finally got down those steps and I got in the car, went back to my office, they wrote me out a ticket. I flew back to California. And then they classified me 1-Y, which is mentally unfit. Then they classified me again as 4-F and I never heard anything else from them.

BRINSON: And the 4-F?

NEBLETT: That means, 4-F means physically and mentally, they got me on both of them. They didn’t even examine me.

POTTER: But you never heard from them again?

NEBLETT: I never.....And the point is, those were kids in there. Those guys in there were being drafted. You should have seen the horror on their faces. I was in there performing, and they were just horrified. I mean the whole place was just in an uproar. I didn’t know how I was going to get out, but I knew I wasn’t going.

BRINSON: Have you ever applied for a job or a loan or something where they ask you about that Draft status?

NEBLETT: No.

BRINSON: So it has never come up.

NEBLETT: It’s never come up. But one of the things that used to really upset me, you know, because they were taking about this communist thing. The communist inspired, all of that communist, communist, communist, and I never met a communist before. Didn’t know what a communist was. Didn’t know what a communist was. And I finally went to New York and saw my first communist. And I said, “My Lord, is this what these communists are supposed to be?” (laughing) It really sickened me, because I told a lot of people--why in the world, you know--what kind of--how they playing us? How they playing us, to say that black people need somebody, a communist or somebody us that tells him....

POTTER: Did the Freedom Singers ever sing at other places like either labor unions or for peace or for coal mining?

NEBLETT: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

POTTER: You did?

NEBLETT: In fact, I don’t know about the coal mining, but for peace and labor unions. In fact, that’s when I learned a lot. I learned a lot, though on the road like. I learned about labor. I didn’t know that much about the Labor Movement, you know. I didn’t know that much about movements before us, the things that went on before us. The power of that Labor Movement and the music that came out of the Labor Movement. And one of those songs that came from spirituals, Which Side Are You On Boy?, that came out of that Labor Movement. And some more music that came out of there and dealing with people like Pete Seeger, Ledbetter and all those guys and the things that they were involved in, during that period of time. And it’s a wealth of music. And like I say, how music comes about, what it comes through, that whole struggle with Labor. And all these different struggles where music comes out of that, is quite different from this hot armed conflict.

POTTER: As you look back over your long involvement, what would you like young people today to know about the Civil Rights Movement? Because a lot of the history books that our children today have, don’t have a lot about the Civil Rights Movement. And they’re very curious about it.

NEBLETT: One of the things that young people are going to be confronted with, the struggle. It’s the same thing, it might be different band, but it’s the same old tune. There’s a struggle in this country that they are going to have to get involved with, and it’s getting broader and broader. When you can suspend the rights of people for the sake of some terrorist, you see; when you can do that and seventy to eighty percent of the people agree? When your rights have been eroded just that quickly?

BRINSON: You’re talking now about September 11 and...

NEBLETT: I’m talking about September 11...!

BRINSON: ...he created ( )

NEBLETT: That’s right.

BRINSON: I’m just adding that for the transcript. Okay.

NEBLETT: They’re going to have to watch it. They going to have, there’s a struggle coming. They going to be a part of it, whether they like it or not. Whether they like it or not. It’s coming. So, the only thing that I see to do, is really, is the need for people to come out here and be prepare and prepare young people. And the way you do that, you learn from the past. Like we learned, whether we knew it or not, from the Labor Movement. We learned from, from the struggles of the Reconstruction. We learned that. And it so happened that some of us learned that and those things are here. And it’s best to learn it. Another thing too, they better learn how to sing. (laughing) Sing some of these songs, they better turn these Raps around. I’m telling you, it’s coming. And the thing is, is that it opens the door for racism to head and just prevail again. You got all of this stuff that is popping up. You got all these right wing Christian groups with all of their nonsense. And you still under the hammer, women, minorities and this whole thing of sexual orientation, I don’t know where that’s--you know, all of that. The fight is still on. They’re going to have to face it. They’re going to have to deal with it. We as a people, who are aware are going to have to deal with it. Because when I see those people out there in Guantanamo Bay, locked up, no lawyer. You can’t do nothing. Just grab you and put you someplace like that. You don’t have a recourse for anything. You can’t even get a lawyer. And you can do that? You know ? Something’s wrong. And you get people agreeing to that.

POTTER: Maybe you better write some more songs. (laughs) And start singing louder.

NEBLETT: You see, I think that if you learn from the past, you can see more clearly, you know, where you at and what’s coming up in the future. I think that’s going to be the importance of, not only us getting back out here and singing these songs again; not only the importance of telling the stories of this movement, but really getting it into class rooms. Are they ready for it? Or will the system do that? Will they put that pure kind of thing in these class rooms? Who’s going to teach it, you see? And I think another thing too, we need to start teaching the power of non-violence. It’s beautiful.

POTTER: I’m interested in, a second ago you said, and turn Rap around.

NEBLETT: Yeah, Rap is nothing but a form. It’s been around for...

POTTER: So use it for other...?

NEBLETT: Right. It’s a form. It’s been around for a long time. These kids just didn’t come up with Rap. I remember a long time ago, an old gospel tune. It’s called Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho. Those guys were rapping that tune. You know, you had the last ( ) in the sixties? You had a lot. It’s just a form. This music form has been around for a long time. These kids picked it up and did their thing with it. It’s a beautiful form. It’s just them lyrics, you know, they come up with. I mean, my God. And they’ve got some guys, who does Christian things. We got a couple of guys, Fred Hammond, who’s out here. And you have Kirk Franklin, who’s doing Christian stuff in that Rap style and kids are going for it, too. It’s just the form. It’s just those words and how they use that. But it’s got to turn it around. And in the early days of Rap, in the seventies Rap, they did that. In the early days of Rap, they were thinking about those communities, how to deal with our community, what we find in our community, from a positive point of view, really to turn it around. But when they found out money could be made, those record companies got in there and turned it into.....It’s nothing but pornography. They turned it around where they could make money off of it. How do you make money off of this thing? And the whole thing is lead by record companies. Those big label record companies. And you got Rap all over the place and it is pornographic, phonographic or whatever, you know. And it’s selling. And the thing about it is, all these kids are buying it. Eighty percent, shoot, over half of the Rap tunes that are bought are white kids. So, it’s got all these kids involved in that thing. That’s how powerful that medium can be. That’s why I say it’s got to be turned around. And if we can turn things, look at it and understand, and turn that thing around for something positive, you know. It can be powerful.

POTTER: Can you think of any questions?

BRINSON: I have one final question. Do you have any more? Okay. I wonder if there’s anything that we haven’t asked you, that you would like to include in this before we stop?

NEBLETT: Hmm.

BRINSON: I’m going to lose my tape, too, so just a minute.

NEBLETT: Okay, just hold on.

END OF TAPE THREE SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE FOUR SIDE ONE

NEBLETT: This might not relate, but I know ( ) Admiral, he retired, I think, when he was in his seventies. I don’t know when it was. I remembering seeing him on TV, and he had his retirement party or whatever it was. And he made a statement. He said, “The biggest enemy to this country wasn’t communism.” He said, “The biggest enemy to this country was big business had become a part of government.” And this is in the seventies. And you look around and you see the media right now. Who owns the media? Big business owns the media. And how, it’s shrinking. You look at the stocks. Who owns the stock? And the media. So, they get shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And that type of control that big business has in terms of the way you think, the way you move, everything about you. And the less power that people have, how it shapes laws to it’s own benefit. How it builds up and it tears down. You got all these mergers and acquisitions. And how it fits in. How they bought our politicians. And then you wonder talking about power of people. We used to say, Power to the People. And one of the ways that you can get your message out is through the media. And you getting it more and more closed, more and more closed. And you wonder about this country, not only in terms of blacks and poor people, but people period.

POTTER: Especially with the way you told us about how the media was used to such good advantage during the Civil Rights Movement.

NEBLETT: That’s right. That’s right.

POTTER: Which you would say was more open.

NEBLETT: It’s more open. And it bothers me. Really what do we have to do? Like I said, this thing is on. The struggle is on.

BRINSON: Thank you very much.

END OF INTERVIEW