Did you ever hear 'I'm gonna do what the s I'm gonna do what the spirit says do.

I'm gonna do what the spirit says do.

What do I'm gonna do, oh Lord, I'm gonna do what the Spirit says do.

Now, this is workshop time.

It goes like this.

<laugh>.

I'm gonna do what the spirit says do...

When the Spirit says, you got to move, you got to move.

You got to move.

You got to move.

You may be high, you may be low, you may be rich, you may be poor.

For when the Lord gets ready, you got to move.

And Dorothy moved when the Spirit said mov We never saw her as a civil rights activist or who she was.

We always saw her as our aunt.

I remember as a little girl, this big presence when she walked in the room.

To sit here now and to see her as the civil rights activist that she was.

I mean, it just took my mind to a whole other place.

There would've been no President Barack Obama without the citizenship schools of Dorothy Cotton.

Let's be clear.

Every black member of the United States Congress owes part of their being there to the studying and the teaching of those citizenship schools that laid the foundation for black political power and fusion political power between black folk and white folk and brown folk that have worked to change this country to where it is today.

And while we may not be where we ought to be, we would not be where we are if it was not for the sacrifice of those like Dorothy Cotton You might be interested in the earliest flicker of consciousness about the great wrong that I realized was being perpetrated against black people.

I was about 10 years old and a boy about my age was riding his bicycle down our dusty little street there in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the town where I was born.

You could tell where black folk lived because the pavement stopped when it got through the white neighborhood and the black folk lived where the streets were dusty.

As this boy was riding his bicycle and kicking up the dust down our street, he was singing a tune.

What is it deep in the heart of?

Is it Texas?

He was singing 'Deep in the heart of nigge I've never forgotten that, how upset I felt, how angry I felt, how helpless to do anything about it.

I've never forgotten that little boy.

Well, I never knew my mother.

Very vaguely I remember being in our house and being lifted up to peer in the casket to look at her body.

I was three years old.

Black folk couldn't go to the white hospital.

My dad neither had the money, nor the knowledge of how to work the system in a way where he could have gotten her to the hospital.

The father went in service and, uh, when he went in the service, he went to his sister, who is my mother, and asked, uh, my mother about taking in those four children.

During that time, there were some homes called shotgun homes with three rooms in it, front room, the middle room, & the kitchen.

Bathroom on the back porch.

And we stayed in that house together while he was gone.

I think about my father with a great deal of, um, sadness now, but also some anger.

His notion of how you teach children and punish them was to take a strap.

And they were not soft blows, but I had very mixed feelings about him because that's what was done to him.

My dad's oldest sister, aunt Penny, said this to me.

When mama would get home, she would find a reason to whip all of us with a switch.

And sometimes they had to go get the switch.

Most of my feeling about my dad revolves around the deprivation of his life, his treatment, my dad would, was really nervous in front of white folks, <laugh>.

And so that's, it's a real mixture of my feeling about him.

He said sometimes he made $9 a week.

He, he had no exposure to anything outside of that world where he was struggling to feed his four girls.

I always knew I had to go.

I always knew I had to leave that neighborhood.

I was called to do something else on the planet and to also do something to help my people.

The sense that I was in the wrong place was very, uh, just sort of pervasive in my being.

It was, uh, I still reflect on it.

I was supposed to be somewhere else.

When you are destined for greatness you're not ordinary, and Aunt Dorothy was never ever ordinary.

I knew one thing about Dorothy.

When the children came home, she would sit them in chairs in this little house and she would be the teacher.

And every day that they would do this, she would get up and teach them something.

You know, she was the teacher.

There was a teacher who took a very special interest in me.

One day I said a poem in her class.

I don't remember what the poem was, but I do remember that as I headed back to my seat, she said, very audibly, "There's your ready girl!"

It rings in my ear to this day when Ms. Rosa Gray said to the class, "There's your ready girl!"

That phrase, that description goes around and around in my consciousness.

Uh, there's your ready girl.

But I knew that...

I think I'm gonna cry <laugh>.

I knew that I never wanted to disappoint her.

Ms. Gray knew that college was not, not in the offering for me, but she called over to Shaw University when I was about to graduate from high school and talked to someone there at Shaw.

I ended up being accepted.

She pushed and she encouraged her.

And so with the seeing the injustices and then seeing somebody taking the interest in pushing her beyond the cotton field & the dirt road, she put those two things together and said, I don't wanna be here.

I ended up with my things in a cardboard box because I had no suitcase.

And I worked in the dining hall, serving meals, cleaning the teacher's dormitory.

And I also worked in the president's home.

'Bout killed myself!

Yes.

I know Granddaddy wasn't that happy about her going away cuz you know, he's been protecting these four girls.

But she knew even though he might not have cared for it or he was upset she needed to go.

Dr. Robert Prentiss Daniel, who was the president of the college then was offered the presidency of Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia.

They must have really liked me because I was a good cleaner.

They took me to Virginia.

Now I'm enrolling in Virginia State College.

And Mrs. Blanche Daniel, the president's wife, she would take me with her over to the next town, Richmond, Virginia, to go shopping.

I remember this enormous fur coat she wore, and this huge Buick, you know, very affluent.

But she would go to Thalhimers department store, buy all of this finery and couldn't sit in the Rich's, uh, dining room.

She was the president's wife.

But we took our lunch in a little bag.

In Petersburg, Virginia.

Black folk could not use the public library.

And Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, who was a pastor of my church, there was also the regional director of the NAACP.

I became very active in the church and ended up helping him put together this protest activity around the library.

So I'm in the church making picket signs to walk in front of the library to picket the stores downtown that would not hire black folk.

And where we could not sit at the lunch counter.

The minister at my church invited this little preacher he had met at a conference whose name was Martin Luther King, invited him to come up to speak for us.

When Martin Luther King came to Petersburg and asked Wyatt to become the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

He said, yes, I'll do it, but only if I co bring my chosen assistant.

And that was Dorothy Cotton.

At the time Dorothy Cotton was married, her husband did not wanna move to Atlanta.

I said to my husband, I think I'll go down to Atlanta and help them out for about six months.

Mm-hmm.

<affirmative> and I stayed 23 years.

Oh my goodness!

We moved from Petersburg, Virginia.

Mm-hmm.

<affirmative> to Atlanta, Georgia.

And, uh, were about five people initially working as staff members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

She knew that when Wyatt Walker invited her to Atlanta and she started doing the work.

And the more she worked, the more she knew that this was where she was supposed to be.

She wasn't leaving, period.

We started out in this little, little office, I'm thinking might have been, uh, maybe two rooms.

But I remember Dr. King came and sat in front of my desk when Dr. King pulled up his chair.

It was like he was just getting to know me and I'm new in town.

I'm gonna be a part of his staff now.

One of the reasons he was talking to me was just to see what my skills might have been, because they were in discussion about receiving a program called the Citizenship Education Program.

The idea that was the Citizenship Education Program, it's beginning, was back on Johns Island with a man named Esau Jenkins, who had, uh, a little transportation service bringing people back and forth to work from Johns Island to Charleston, back and forth.

Septima Clark was very key in getting this germ of this program sort of sprouting here.

She would catch the, uh, ferry with the longshoreman in the morning and teach them to read and write, to register to vote.

She told me an interesting story that a black young man had been killed by a white man on Johns Island.

And the people on the island predominantly functionally illiterate, certainly not participating in the political process at all, did not rise up in righteous indignation or anger at the shooting of this boy who had run over the white man's dog.

And this is what prompted Esau to really ask himself, why aren't these people rising up in anger and organizing and doing something?

He decided it was because they had no political power.

Esau Jenkins started teaching people about the registration process for voting.

He would put the application for voter registration on the front of the bus and would try to teach them how to answer those questions on the application form.

And on the bus ride, he would teach literacy because that was absolutely essential if you wanted to register to vote and you had to be able to sign your name in cursive.

Esau Jenkins connected with Septima Clark and also with Myles Horton, the founder of the Highlander Folk School.

Many people from Johns Island now started to go over to this folk school where Myles Horton had the idea that people could come together themselves and learn from each other, how to discover their own capacities to solve the problems that they face in the community.

The Citizenship School program was something that Highlander didn't start.

It came from the Sea Islands of South Carolina.

It came from the people there saying, we need to learn how to read so that we can vote.

And that turned into a whole thing that Highlander helped to incubate and grow.

So they were teaching people basic literacy and working with them from the things they how to write their names, how to fill out a form.

It was a wonderfu how to take whatever it is you have and meet people where they are.

It was simple, but it was brilliant.

If you don't know how to read, that was the starting place.

It was really early on in the organization's history where there's a recognition that we're not gonna be able to build the kind of social and economic and cultural conditions that really fundamentally transform everything for everybody.

If we're doing this in a racial silo where it's only white folks who were only working with white workers.

There were white and black folk coming together in this time when that was, uh, I say in quotes illegal.

It was really manifested at Highlander by ultimately the shutting down of this wonderful institution.

When the state of Tennessee shut down the Highlander Folk School, the funders that would pay for bringing people there for this training at the Highlander Folk School, they wanted to keep on funding the program.

And now, SCLC, Dr. King's organization was inheriting the funds, but the funds had to come through the National Office of the Congregational Church in New York.

I'm talking about the beginning of what became, as Andrew Young came to call it, the base upon which the Civil rights movement was built.

Ms Clark was on staff here at the Highland Center running this training program where folks could teach each other to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people before the internet, before cell phones.

And then when the state decided that that could not happen, when white supremacy said, Nope, y'all don't deserve, y'all can't do this, then this relationship allowed for Septima to be low ego and say, Hey Dorothy, I'm gonna slide this to you.

Keep it going.

Ms. Cotton could have been like, no, that's, that's not my stuff.

Um, and instead she's like, no, that's, it's a critical program.

So that their relationship allowed them to do work that would've been impossible if it had only been centered around individual egos.

Andy, uh, Septima and I would travel the south recruiting people.

We couldn't stay in hotels.

We stayed in people's homes as we travel across the south.

And what we were looking for was people with PhD minds who had never had an opportunity to get an education.

They're in every little town.

There's somebody that knows everything, remembers everything, can tell you everything about anybody you wanna know about.

People look up to them for their memory and their wisdom and their experience.

We would go into cities and tell people, we have this program here and we have funds.

We can take care of your travel.

We can take care of your food.

And they would stay five days.

We drove east across Mississippi and Alabama picking up people as we went along until we had a, a busload getting to Dorchester Center, which was 30 miles south of Savannah.

We'd go there once a month and stay for a week, bringing a different group of people along with us.

So this five day intensive would bring people from all over the southern states.

It was based in storytelling.

And as people begin to tell their stories, people begin to see, oh, this is happening in lots of places.

That's not just an incident or a history in my town.

And then Dorothy being Dorothy, would ask provoking questions.

She's saying, okay, if the county clerk treats you so disrespectfully and is so unhelpful, why aren't you the county clerk?

To get people to think like, yeah, why am I in this position?

How did those decisions get made?

Why is this system so exclusive?

They were getting them to talk about what it means to be a citizen, not telling people what to do, but asking questions or letting people meet one another.

And as they would bring in 30 people from one place who would go back to their community and share what they they knew and 30 people from another place.

This is really the basic foundation of the work that S C L C went on to do because you had these pools of people in the communities who already were starting to think about their rights.

And the way Dorothy talked about it is the importance of having people reflect deeply on questions.

Like, what is the role of a citizen in this time?

And do citizens have real power?

And if so, what's that power?

And what does that look like?

Those questions haven't changed in our time.

The people who came into those citizenship education workshops came in because there was a rumbling, there was a feeling that we have to change this evil system.

And it was spreading like wildfire, as the saying goes , all over the place.

The goal of that program was, uh, in one sense to un brainwash black folks.

And so there was a lot of unlearning that had to take place in the same process.

New learning, new awarenesses now emerging.

I've heard folks say, historians say, well, yeah, when people were fighting for the right to vote, that's not what people were fighting for.

People were literally standing around their humanity.

They wanted their families to have access to a quality of life.

They wanted to be treated with dignity and respect.

This wasn't about some magic vote outside of themselves.

I already had a master's degree from Boston University, but I learned more about citizenship, helping these people learn to function as I, uh, studied for the first time, really the Constitution of the United States.

So that word would go up on the chalkboard constitution.

C O N S T I T U T I O N spells constitution.

What's that?

And we'd talk about it as the supreme law of the land.

Well, this constitution has something called amendments.

It has amendments.

All right, we're gonna look now at the 14th Amendment.

These people in these workshops were able to say, all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the state.

wherein they reside.

And what does that mean for these people?

These folk now are gonna go back home and teach people what they learned and why are we doing this?

They would then organize their own training classes, teaching people about voter registration and to read and write enough so that they could function in the political process.

They were working to change their sorry state of affairs in their communities.

Cause.

Those were the people who made that struggle that rearranged the social order in this country.

Yes, they have a right to go to the seat of power march from Selma to Montgomery and say to the governor, uh, we have the right to vote.

We will have open public accommodations.

And so when you saw the big marches and demonstrations on the television, a lot of work had gone on.

That moved people to that point.

The program that Dorothy directed was quote from Andrew Young, the best kept secret of the Civil Rights Movement.

That program didn't get a lot of publicity as it should not have gotten because we couldn't have run it had it gotten a lot of publicity, but it was profoundly important to the work and the modus operandi of SCLC bringing in local grassroots leaders.

Fannie Lou Hamer lived on Mr. Marlo's Plantation in, uh, Ruleville, Mississippi.

She was one of our star pupils who finished the eighth grade, but she was up at the Democratic Convention saying, "Is this America?"

Mr. Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James Eastland, and Senator Stennis.

If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.

Is this America?

The land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily beca we want to live as decent human beings in America.

Fannie Lou Hame was a timekeeper on this plantation for something like 13, 'cuz she was smart and she was trusted.

When her boss found out that she had been to this conference.

All of her furnishings and everything else had just been taken outta the shack that she was livin' in and put on the high So we rounded up a truck, found a empty house, and we rented it for her.

That meant she became a part of our staff.

It wasn't hard for us to get people into our program with us and start organizing their neighbors to register to vote.

They were making just about as much working with us as they were making working in the field all day.

I feel better than I felt in a long time.

Cause all of these people here, we got to do something honey.

And we've been down so long, we ain't got no other way to go but up!

(Applause..Cheering) Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they understand themselves to be not alone and find their connectedness to other human beings.

SCLC was formed to save the soul of this country.

It wasn't to just gain entry into citizenship.

Civil rights never is sufficient.

It's just necessary.

I remember one of the few times that Dorothy cried in public when the Supreme Court had voted to let go of some of the protection around the voting rights.

She said, we fought so hard for this.

People fought and lost their lives.

I didn't know about citizenship education.

Now it seems so critical and important that I can't believe that I hadn't heard of it.

As a kid, I was brought to Dorchester Academy.

They told us simply that this was a building that had history with the Civil rights movement and that Dr. King came there.

It was the extent of my knowledge about the place.

It wasn't until later that I really understood the, the fact that, you know, this was a place where people traveled from all over the region, all over the south and the border states to really become equipped for the movement and for the struggle.

I do remember that a busload, it was mostly a group from the delta of Mississippi was going back.

And we stood there as the bus was rolling out and, and Andy and I started singing, this may be the last time I'm gonna cry, so I better stop.

This may be the last time children.

This may be the last time, it may be the last time.

I don't know, because it may be the last time.

And we both cried as the bus pulled off.

Dorothy was very much committed to the practice of non-violence.

She was practically as well as philosophically non-violent.

At first, I was angry on the stump saying things like, white America should apologize for what it had done to my people.

I was an angry black woman.

One day I realized that my white friends were being entertained by my anger, you know, sort of amening me.

And a little light came on.

And this support, quote unquote absolved them of any responsibility to work to change the oppressive system.

I realized I could just be angry.

Or I could work for change from the perspective of seeing myself as a healer.

This in no way is to suggest that anger is bad.

We all know if we don't feel a passion for or anger about something, we probably won't do anything to help correct it.

I know that many people have a wrong understanding of nonviolence.

It's like, you know, you kind of don't do anything.

I like to emphasize that if we have a clear goal, the end we seek is preexistent in the means we use to get there.

Dorothy didn't like the idea of nonviolence being seen as a tactic, a movement strategy.

She really believed that it needed to be something that you incorporated and you embodied in how you treat people.

Now on January 10th, there was a historic meeting in Birmingham.

And I want Dorothy Cotton to explain to us what was the objective of the Birmingham campaign?

There's one sentence from the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth that will summarize the whole reason we went into Birmingham.

Birmingham Segregationists made up a three-tiered society.

If the Klan didn't stop you, the police would stop you.

If the police didn't stop you, the courts would.

He therefore felt that Birmingham would be the ideal target for SCLC's next campai We could begin working a way that would so dramatize the plight of black folks all across the South that we indeed could push through a comprehensive civil rights bill.

It was perhaps, uh, one of the most crucial times ever.

And as you said, Dorothy, that was a time when people had stopped running, uh, from confrontation.

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth.

I draw the line in the dust and toss the g before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.

In Birmingham, Alabama, many young people were waiting for someone to say, here is something you can do.

Here's a way that you can contribute.

One of our colleagues in the struggle, James Bevel and I ran a citizenship education workshop in Birmingham, Alabama, in the basement of the 16th Street Church.

And our goal was to build a new Birmingham and ultimately to create a new country.

There were just a handful of students that had come after school.

The next day it was twice as many young people.

The next day there were more.

I was working in the church office and I heard the singing and the talking that was going on in the sanctuary, and it was so energizing.

I went to the door and I peeped out into the sanctuary.

We were being asked to be part of a movement.

We were told that policemen might have dogs, they might have billy clubs, they might hit you, but the only appropriate response ever was a nonviolent response.

The very next day, I walked out of school and I marched with students to this location.

Some climbed fences, some climbed out of windows, but we all made our way.

It was a revival in a real sense of a whole people becoming new people and transforming themselves.

Birmingham did that.

I don't know why, except the spirit was moving.

When there was brutality, it just made people, uh, work from a greater, uh, sense of resolve.

Until eventually we had thousands of young people filling the jails in Birmingham, Alabama.

Young people discovered that they could be a part of something important, that they could make a contribution, that they mattered.

People want to know, kind of in a package kind of way, you know how the civil rights movement happened.

When we say the civil rights struggle, that's exactly what it was.

A long ongoing struggle.

The deep kind of racism that we faced is a sickness.

And when people are sick, you work to heal them.

I still believe that.

One reason I don't hear as well in my left ear is I got beat up on the beach in St. Augustine, Florida.

We had been asked to come there to help them break down the walls of segregation.

And I took a group of, of young children with me.

The first group of little ones were running back to the road, saying Ms. Cotto there's some men out there said they were gonna beat us up if we come to that beach.

And I remember very clearly that I grabbed hands of the two of the children and headed straight to that beach with great resolve.

I didn't think about being afraid.

We were always making up new stanzas to we shall overcome, which everybody knows now around the globe, we shall overcome.

But people will even even sing.

We are not afraid.

We were afraid.

Occasionally.

If Lyndon Johnson does intervene here in Saint Augustine, we won't have the states to tell everybody that we do hate that traitor Lyndon Johnson.

And that goes for every other nigger lovin', low life scoundrel who's fighting us white people.

I am more in touch with a moment of fear.

When we did for the first time night marches, we had been advised that the police could not protect us if we did that.

We decided to march.

As we were marching on the sidewalk.

And these people were now rattling chains and throwing bricks.

And quite a large one came right across my face and smashed a plate glass window, but another inch it would've cracked my skull.

I remember being really afraid and CT Vivi holding hands and holding very tightly.

I, in my fear, said, uh, Reverend Vivian, let's pray.

Reverend Vivian turned around and faced the line and, and put up his hand and said, our father God.

And someone there, some of the folk there to attack us, said, niggers ain't got no God.

We were generally attacked then.

I remember seeing, um, Andy Young, down on the ground, somebody pounding on him.

I'm not even sure how that march ended.

The rest of it seems to be a blank.

But we ended up back in the church with, uh, some people hurt.

We went back in the church and, and, and sang some songs that occurs to me.

We always, um, somehow even in a moment like that could sing songs like, I Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.

And these were sort of, uh, songs affirming, um, the our resolve to continue the struggle.

The question about, um, low points.

What happened when we hit, um, low point?

This may sound flip, but you know what we would do?

We would sing.

The Civil Rights Movement was a singing movement.

Talk about moving from your head to your heart, talking about learning how to feel and experiencing feeling something as opposed to being on such a head trip about it.

If you're moving toward danger and you want to be sure that everybody is with you singing a song is is that kind of assurance they're going to stay with you as long as you keep singing.

Dorothy understood that power that comes from knowing the song.

What moved them forward was faith.

And that courage that comes from knowing that you are right.

They would sing to calm each other.

They would sing to be feel connected.

They would sing to even censor their humanity and feel a sense of their own power.

They would sing to really be able to connect to something greater than themselves when everything around them felt like they were being attacked.

As Dorothy would say, the music was the movement.

It was not a soundtrack.

Dorothy was a songbird.

Loved to sing.

Dorothy would break out in a song in the middle of a talk, right?

Which I love because she was so spontaneous.

We sang an old hymn from, uh, the churches of my childhood.

I love everybody.

I love everybody.

I love everybody in my heart.

And we would even call names.

I love everybody.

I love everybody.

I love everybody in my heart.

I love everybody.

I love everybody.

I love everybody in my... now folk didn't really believe it when they were singing it early on.

And when we'd say, I even love Bull Connor.

I, you all don't know who Bull Connor is, but except Tony <laugh>.

I even love Bull Connor, you know, the policemen and sheriff and who were beating us up and where you kind of choke on those names.

But you know, if you keep saying it, that loving everybody starts to take on new and deeper meaning.

Freedom Songs, as it were just became such a critical part of reminding folks that a better day is coming.

We believe here that singing is about collective voice, force and power.

It's not just about your entertainment all the time.

It's about how do we bring together our voices and our forces?

Cuz if we can sing together, we can organize together.

It's collective action.

May I read just a little verse from one of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes.

A long time ago, an enslaved people headin toward freedom made up a song.

Keep Your Hand on the plow.

Hold on.

That plow plowed a new furrow across the field of history.

Into that furrow, the freedom seed was dropped from that seed, A tree grew is growing will ever grow.

That tree is for everybody, for all America, for all the world.

May its branches spread and its shelter grow until all races and all peoples know its shade.

Keep your hand on the plow.

Hold on.

And we paraphrased it to say, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

The prize is democracy, justice, freedom.

Mm-hmm.

<affirmative>, Those songs still have power to remind us of who we are and how connected we really are.

We look at the shifts in the political environment.

People feel a sense of, oh my goodness, you know, what are we gonna do?

That's the moment that I think that real transformation can happen.

I do feel hopeful.

I'm also not confused that to make meaning of this moment means to be honest, that it's really bad and it's really scary.

It's only been three years since white supremacists burned down my office.

We are literally teeter tottering on the edge of whether or not we are actually gonna practice democracy or fascism.

One of the things that I think Dorothy would appreciate is a sense of awakening around one's responsibility to engage the political process.

Voting in itself can be very transactional, but when you're talking about doing the work like Dorothy Cotton did, helping people have a sense of their own power, that is what's transformative.

This is a time for us to draw deep from that space when it is nothing else that you can see around you.

Those folks in Selma, Alabama did not necessarily have the government on their side.

They didn't have a whole lot of resources.

They didn't have power in the traditional sense.

They had power within.

And they tapped into that power and they transformed not only their community, they transformed this country and they transformed the world.

People who hold power do not freely give up that power.

We had to take our freedom.

Indeed.

That's the only way to get it.

If someone gives it to you, it really isn't freedom, uh, anyway.

Because if someone confers your humanity or your freedom upon you, they can also take it away.

We had to claim it for ourselves.

Dorothy understood that freedom was never enough.

That the ultimate goal of the Freedom Movement was full citizenship.

Because if freedom was all that you needed, we didn't need the 14th Amendment equal protection under the law or the 15th amendment, the right to vote because the 13th Amendment in 1863 said, y'all, it's free.

But we said, freedom for people who spent 250 years of free labor is not enough.

You can't just hold us, use us, and then set us free.

We have to be free with full citizenship.

The 1960s when it was dangerous to teach a negro, to be caught teaching black people for a woman, and particularly teaching them what she was teaching could get you raped and killed, and yet she pushed forward.

One thing we know Ms. Dorothy did in the citizenship schools was educate people on the actual laws and then encourage them to think critically.

And when people start to understand that they are leaders themselves and that they don't have to wait for one person to give them instruction, being a teacher for liberation sake for real , threatens the setup.

So how are you preparing yourself and not just to adhere to what is popular?

After Alex Haley's popular saga roots.

I became very curious about the very concept of roots.

So I looked up that word and I discovered roots to mean that which nourishes I'm asking you, what are you absorbing?

You see, I know that what you surround yourself with, the music you listen to, the relationships that you hold onto are channels through which you absorb values.

What are the major influences in your life?

Spend some time thinking about that.

What is your mission in life?

I don't think she had a way of actually turning off the educator because she knew what we weren't getting.

And she was that voice and she had no children.

So we were her children.

We have a cousin named Sanina.

She wrote Aunt Dorothy a letter.

In this letter she wrote Aunt Dorothy.

She just wanted her aunt.

But Aunt Dorothy being, like I said, the educator that she is, she took a red pen and she corrected the entire letter.

And once she corrected it, she sent it back to Sanina!

As a kid, I used to always be like Aunt Dorothy strict, like, we can't have no fun, you know?

But in, in all actuality, we was having a lot of fun.

I almost drowned one time when we was at the beach.

I went way to the bottom.

This man brought me back up, but I was afraid to go back in the water.

And she was telling me I shouldn't be afraid.

That I should just keep trying it.

This hardness that one would see in her all plays into her life's work, things that seem impossible.

That became possible.

She got a phone call from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis telling her that she had received this award.

She was in the presidential suite of one of the most prestigious downtown hotels in uh, Memphis.

And as she walked through the door, she burst into tears and said, my poor daddy couldn't even have walked through the door of this hotel.

And there she is in the presidential suite.

Dorothy had this very welcoming and affirming persona, but was not afraid of conflict.

And so there's a rarity of people who are able to negotiate both those spaces who are not afraid of having difficult dialogues and still letting you know that they care about you.

The friendship that we had was so genuine.

She and my husband were on opposing sides in terms of politics.

<Laugh>.

I'm laughing because whenever she would debate my husband, they would fight for an hour or so, and then my husband would c Dorothy and I are going to a movie.

And they did that so man The more I talked to her, the more I learned about her and listened to her, the more I realized that she was just way ahead of her time.

Her approach to human relations, training and workshops and what needs to be dismantled was very intersectional and supportive of all people.

Dorothy Cotton embodied what young people talk about now, like low ego, high impact.

She always felt that no matter what we do as adults, we always should include young people.

And that our legacy is very important.

Ms. Dorothy and Ms. Faye would often invite me to these meetings and tell me to hold their bag, carry my stuff, but it wasn't really, they needed me to carry their things.

It was their way of making sure that I got into the room because I wasn't invited.

So they were leveraging their privilege in order to make space for a younger person.

And they'd pull a chair from somebody else's table.

And then Ms. Betty would give me her salad.

Ms. Dorothy would be like, I'm not going to eat this chicken.

You know, that kind of stuff.

I'm very grateful for the mentorship of Dorothy Cotton and other women from SNCC.

I don't think I would be the person that I am now.

She made you feel like you were the only one that mattered in that room.

That's a talent, that's a gift.

I feel completely privileged to have had exposure all those years to Dorothy Cotton.

Dorothy Cotton is an icon, is a SHE-ro for me.

There are these crucial women, people like Ella Baker and Dorothy Cotton, who by their influence affect a large number of other people.

They wanted to project other people forward.

Maybe it's called nu It's one of the aspects of being a, a parent, especially a mother.

A lot of her work where you listen to her philosophy was really around engaging people.

She was always teaching.

And my, uh, generation, whenever they say, was a teacher.

You always think of a woman she finished the third grade, but my grandmother started organizing circles.

They called it bible study.

When they finished their Bible study, they start talking about individual application to their own lives.

Coalitions were developed.

They worked together to achieve a common goal.

And that's the most powerful okay.

Structure and formation that you could put together.

When you have women, when you have black women in positions of power, you speak of that.

And I already feel listened to.

I already feel cared for and nurtured at a completely different level.

Black women sit at that intersection of sexism and racism, and it doesn't necessarily throw us off our game.

We've been creative and innovative to know how to navigate and work through it.

Patriarchy erases women from leadership.

And the way that people remember things is often by what faces they see who is documenting the history.

This was also a time in the black freedom struggle where there were some deliberate strategies about lifting up the leadership of men.

Because men were so often the target of the worst violence and devaluing.

That doesn't mean that it wasn't frustrating or unjust for the women, women who were providing just as much leadership.

This was a movement not just led by black men.

This was a movement led by black women.

Oftentimes they're marginalized in our own story.

They provided the materials, they organized the organizers.

Those women were often the people who went off and decided to do the citizenship education program in their community.

Dorothy helped to give voice to a lot of young women in the civil rights movement.

The women used to stay up all night typing up the press releases, and then they never let a woman read them.

A man always makes the presentation.

These men were programmed to function as though women were always supposed to serve.

We were programmed the same way.

The women's movement had not happened in those early years.

We have to appreciate the journey that all of this was.

Though.

Andrew Young says, I was one of the first feminists in the civil rights movement.

I think Diane Nash was, because I remember her being the first one who publicly challenged in a meeting the way women were treated within the organization.

They were feminists before feminism was cool.

Andy describes a scene where we got word that Annell Ponder and Fannie Lou Hamer had been arrested in Winona, Mississippi jail.

We were in Alabama at the time when we got word that they'd been arrested, coming from a citizenship class.

Dorothy was the only one that had a car.

We wanted to borrow a Dorothy's car.

We didn't wanna take Dorothy.

<Laugh>.

It was sort of, you loan us your car, but you know, you stay here a little girl.

You know, no, if it's my car, I can drive and I'm going.

And I was really caught up in it.

I'm gonna go get them out of jail.

Well, to hear Andy tell that story.

She jumped in the car.

She said, I don't need you all.

I can go get her by myself.

He said, I jumped in the car and uh, and I started driving 90 miles an hour.

And there came this 18 wheeler coming to meet us.

And as I was trying to pass somebody and I then pulled over in a field and then, and they incidentally had to jump in the car while it was moving.

The story gets better every time Andrew tells it <laugh> every time he tells it.

Before we could get in, she started pulling off.

I I'll go get her by myself.

And she was driving down the highway.

Anyway, it is greatly exaggerated, but I was angry that I couldn't go, but just give me the car.

And, uh, so, and he talks about my being an early feminist because I, I wouldn't let them do that to me, decide whether I could go or not.

And then he describes what happened once we got to the jail.

She had on a bright red dress and red high heeled shoes.

And she goes and she sits down in the sheriff's swing, which certainly wasn't for black people, and starts reading from her little book of poetry.

That I was sitting on the lawn reading a copy of Gibran's the Prophet.

Now what I know is that I was inside the jail.

So we go in the jail and fortunately Wiley Branton, as soon as we walked in, he called the Sheriff.

Wiley was black, but he was from Arkansas.

And he didn't talk like he was black, talked like an Arkansas hillbilly.

And I don't know what he said to this day, but I'm sure the sheriff thought that he was white and that he was working for the federal government or something like that.

Because the sheriff kept saying to him, yes sir, yes sir.

He probably said, you got a nigger there named Andy Young?

and the guy said, boy, you, Andy Young, who's Andy Young?

I said, I am sir.

And he gave me the phone.

Wiley said, "Now, shut the hell up and don't say anything.

I think I got the sheriff ready to let you all out of jail and just be very calm and polite and get the hell outta there as soon as you ca <Laugh>.

And there was a policeman there who had been greeting us, talking, you know, a small talk, being a real warm human being to us.

When Annell Ponder and Mrs. Hamer walked out, Mrs. Hamer pointed to that man and said, this is the man that abused us in the jail last night.

And so I was inside the jail.

I've never forgotten.

Meaning beat us up.

That's right.

Beat them physically in the jail.

I was so angry.

This man that would stand there and interact with us this way was the same man that Mrs. Hamer pointed out to me.

This is how I know very clearly.

I was not sitting outside reading the prophet.

It's a perfect story about Dorothy's independence and courage and her determination.

She was totally fearless.

If there was some things that I wanted to say to Martin or Ralph or Wyatt, and if I'd said it, it would've been an eagle battle, and I'd mention it to Dorothy and she'd deal with it.

I don't believe I thought about the gender issues initially.

I think that I evolved, I'm sure as many women did, and perhaps a few men.

We were all growing and evolving into new definitions of ourselves.

For example, I could be, and, and almost always was the only woman at the table in an executive staff meeting <laugh>.

And, um, if they needed coffee, guess who they would ask to get the coffee if they needed somebody to take notes.

You know, women were secretaries until a, a man on the staff.

Jack O'Dell, I'll never forget it was Jack O'Dell who said, "Dr. King, Dorothy needs to stay at this t because we are talking about" whatever we were talking about at that time.

But I felt I had power even though some of the men maybe saw me as a, you know, just the woman at the table.

I knew I had an important job, I had an important role to play, and I knew that I was smarter than some of those guys at the table.

But it's not something that you talk about.

You just sort of know it.

And somewhere along the way, I developed a real confidence in who I was and I just let them be who they thought they needed to be.

I remember we were in a meeting with Dr. King once.

He said, "Dorothy, would you mind getting me a cup Dorothy said, "Andy get your boss a cup of I don't think Martin Luther King, even in, in any of his gravitas, was confused about the important role that Dorothy Cotton had to have played for S C L C to have existed and to be sustained.

Smart and intelligent men who are leaders recognize the value of women in leadership positions.

Those are the smart men.

There's a fine balancing line between living and working respectfully with six men who all feel that they walk on water.

I think she understood a lot more than they wanted to acknowledge, but I also think she understood really well what a privileged position she had.

She told us, I, you know, "I didn't work for Dr. King, I worked with Dr. King" and I remember the first time she said that.

And just, and I remember sort of shifting my posture, <laugh> like, okay, clear.

Got it.

A lot of us are trained to be invisible.

Just do the work.

And sometimes when you're doing the work, you don't.

Have time.

Or a desire to be in, in the dominant news.

You can get a lot done if you don't care who gets the credit.

But then if you're not aware of the work that people have done, then you can't use them as incentive or as a mentor.

And especially you women and young girls.

People are writing about the civil rights movement and they think that Martin Luther King fell down from the sky somewhere and broke down segregation.

The more that I started learning about and sort of reclaiming the radical Martin Luther King, I found out that the story that I had been told about who he was was not the full story.

And so then of course you start reading about Martin Luther King and you can't not hear about this woman who was the team player that made S C L C, the powerhouse that it was.

S C L C would not have been what it was without Dorothy Cotton.

She was with him everywhere he went.

I think he depended a lot on her.

I'd love to have you reflect a little bit more about your relationship with Dr. King.

Just that, because you would be, you would be close professional associates across that whole span.

And I would imagine that there was far more spirit and connection among that group of persons who built and made S C L C obviously than just the, just, you know, coming to the office.

A movement is not like going into an official office on the 13th floor.

A movement had to be different.

Hey, I think he was my best friend and I, I felt such a rapport with him and I think he with me as well.

He didn't go anywhere without Andy either.

It was almost like he didn't wanna go anywhere without us.

We were friends and we were, um, we were like, we had to be a little family.

People don't know how much he trusted his staff.

Sometimes we would do all the talking and arguing and discussing the issue.

Mm-hmm.

<affirmative>, what should we do in Birmingham or Selma?

Which way should we go?

What approach should we take?

What should be the focus?

And he'd make the ultimate decision and we go forward with an action.

But he really, uh, was in consultation and dialogue with his staff.

Constantly.

The threats were coming fast and furiously the threats, um, on his life.

But they were not so overt that we would even consider stopping our work or, or creating a different plan.

I would step closer to him when somebody was running in an airport to shake his hand.

Then he's ready.

He is got his hand out and he's ready to, to shake hands with the person.

I have a sense that Dr. King had accepted that he might go out, uh, in a violent way because there was that kind of hatred abroad in, in the land.

There's some things that are so deep and have such an impact.

The right words don't seem to come easily to describe it.

We not only lost our leader, we lost our inspiration.

We lost our, um, best friend.

It's been stated through the years that part of the problem for African Americans is that we haven't had one dominant leader like Dr. King to provide that direction for us.

What about the statement that we need a leader?

Yeah.

You know, I think we are so blessed when we have a Martin Luther King, uh, to emerge in our midst.

There would not have been a Martin Luther King as we know him.

Mm-hmm.

<affirmative> had there not been a Rosa Parks.

Dr. King didn't tell Rosa Parks not to move to the back of the bus, but it was the action on the part of a citizen, a person whose awareness had been heightened.

And then this person was ready, Martin Luther King to fill this leadership void who became a spokesman who could articulate mm-hmm.

<affirmative> and say what people were feeling.

We do bad things to our leaders sometimes.

We let the talents and the fame of our leaders disempower us.

We let it make us feel that we can't do anything.

And I wanna challenge you as you think about not only Dr. King, but other leaders as well.

Learn what you can learn from what they did and how they did it, but don't let it make you think you can't do something.

Dorothy's voice, as singular as it may have been in that space, was probably the most powerful beyond Dr. King's himself.

Learning about what that space looks like, learning about, uh, if we're being honest, the sexism and the patriarchy that was involved in the anti-racist fight, it is an absolute necessary story to tell.

We can go down the line of classism, gender identity of sexuality, patriarchy, misogyny, and we can find some ways in which we would rightfully have some critique of Dr. King.

And you would expect, given the level of intellect and brilliance of the people around him, that there would've been growth through the time.

Part of that growth, we know from reading records came directly from Dorothy, who challenged Dr. King in very clear ways, would regularly be the person in the room who would challenge the approach, who would write speeches or rewrite parts of speeches that Dr. King gave.

In particular.

There's a great deal of research out there saying, wrote a good portion of the speech.

I've been to the mountaintop.

And so part of it is to be occupying in that space, which may not always give you a voice, but finding ways in which to then have your voice be heard.

It's not shocking to me when people know about Martin Luther King, but don't know about Dorothy Cotton cuz the state would set it up.

So to give you a whitewashed, watered down version of a dude named Martin Luther King and not how he rose to prominence in relationship with the work that Dorothy Cotton was holding and the advice that she was giving.

Martin Luther King didn't launch the voting rights movement in the South.

He didn't launch the movement in Selma.

Amelia Boynton, another woman who was leading the voting rights movement long before Martin Luther King came.

She had been involved with her husband since the 1940s.

Sometimes the charismatic leader can have the opposite effect.

I can't be like Martin Luther King, but maybe I could be one of the people who launched the voting rights campaigns in parts of the deep South.

That was Dorothy's contribution.

She was able to sometimes in the space of a week, inspire them to become active for a lifetime.

I wish that there was some way of bringing that to every place in the world where there's conflict and try to inspire the people to fight, to fight non-violently.

But to fight resolutely.

The last day I was with Martin Luther King in Memphis.

He told me his next movement was going to be to internationalize and institutionalize nonviolence.

I had to get myself prepared for that.

How do you institutionalize non violence?

How do you internationalize it?

Dorothy uh, Cotton was there.

She invited me to go to, uh, Vietnam.

It was a research project to learn why people were at war with each other.

She was the one that encouraged me.

I was very nervous about it, but she was courageous.

Nothing could stop her.

It was a dangerous situation.

The students who were leaders there from Vietnam wanted to have this march down to US embassy.

I didn't think that was a good idea.

I mainly went to be honest with you, because Dorothy was going and I didn't want her to be by herself over there.

And sure enough, we marched down there and we got attacked with tear gas.

We agreed we were gonna get on the other side of this wall and separate ourselves from these troops.

And the troops had gone around and went through the gates.

These Vietnamese students grabbed the, uh, and Dorothy was with us now.

Okay, Dorothy They started trying to throw these molotov cocktails at the troops and the troops had rifles that wasn't gonna work.

So I said, hold hands, hold hands.

Well, you can't throw, uh, molotov cocktails if you are holding hands.

Okay?

And they, uh, the assumption is they wouldn't shoot us if we weren't trying to, you know, hurt them.

And I kept saying, three steps forward, stop, three steps forward, stop.

As we moved forward, they backed up until they backed right on out of the gate.

So that was one of the experiences I had with Dorothy Cotton.

And one thing that's important to say about Dorothy is she was not only a teacher, but she was a learner, right until the end of her life.

She didn't approach struggles as these are the people on the right side, and these are the people on the wrong side.

She approached them on how does everybody move towards building justice in a beloved community?

I'm willing now to even explore with someone who is mean and wants to be violent and vicious.

I'm willing to explore with them what their goal is in life, and even though they hold to it, I would still like to be in dialogue with them.

The idea to go to the Middle East emerged out of our coming together as the Dorothy Cotton Institute in terms of what we would like this institute to do and to be.

We wanted to listen, talk with Palestinians and their Israeli allies, see what we could learn.

Can we compare approaches that we took that changed our system?

Being in Palestine felt a lot like being in Birmingham during the years that I remember, and I understood, even though they said it differently, I understood the feeling.

I knew what they were trying to say.

When we were together in the West Bank.

She would hear stories of suffering, and that was painful for her.

It was hard for her to hear.

-singing-Joshua fought the battle of Jeric Jericho, Jericho, Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, And the walls came tumbling down.

Gandhi had said that it may be through the American Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence would be transmitted to the world, and that's a part of the legacy that I think we as Americans inherit, but it's a part of the legacy that all of us in the country inherit.

We provided for the world.

This example of a movement.

For her, I think the movement was her life.

That was something that gave her her sense of identity.

Somehow she maintained that energy almost to the end.

singing- Well I never been to heaven but I She was exploring the spiritual component of the movement.

She was particularly interested in why us.

That was a theme we, I think, explored to the very last week of our life.

You kind of have to have a spiritual core.

That was Dorothy.

She brought that spiritual part.

If you don't have that renewing quality, you'll burn up and burn out.

How about I'm singing and praying.

One more.

I'm singing and.

Praying.

And praying.

I'm singing and praying.

Dorothy was really adamant that she did not want us to build a monument to the Civil Rights Movement and her history from the sixties and seventies.

What she wanted was an institute that would be relevant and contemporary and useful to people who are doing the work.

Now.

What.

Dorothy did then is so needed.

Now, my God, Americans need to come to understand what citizenship really is.

Dorothy Cotton wanted people to be prepared to carry on the struggle.

So much of what Ms. Cotton was able to contribute while she was here on this planet was building infrastructure that was going to teach us whatever we found her or found folks that continue to keep her memory alive.

We find ourselves at a time where people are using democracy to pass laws and legislation to make it difficult to vote, and so the Citizen Education Program becomes the most relevant.

It's been since 1960s.

Even if you are not able to fully exercise your rights, even if the government isn't protecting and supporting your rights, that doesn't mean you don't have those rights.

Those rights only exist when we take responsibility for practicing them and expressing them and protecting them for one another.

That's where the social change happens.

As others have said, the work of the Citizenship Education Program was called the Best Kept Secret of the Civil Rights Movement, and there were good, important reasons for that at that time.

But what it means is that we've lost the opportunity to fully know and understand the role that this kind of education plays in movement building.

That it's not just mobilizing people for marches and rallies, but transforming the ways they think about themselves to claim their own power and to work collectively.

We've gotta stop letting ourselves off the hook as we think about this political arena, because we have government by the people of the people and for the people, but only if we make it.

So.

Many of the people who marched with Martin Luther King recognize that the struggle was not over With the passage of the Voting Rights Act, that was the foundation for struggle, couldn't struggle for anything important unless you were truly citizens.

Once you are a citizen, that's your responsibility to shape the future of that nation.

She was always around to remind us of that.

There was a point to this and, and the point was to get power and use it to make a better world.

The conversation for her was, if we're talking about being true to non-violent struggle and the way that she knew it and understood it, then we have to do this painful and difficult work around understanding that this is an invitation to allow our opponents to be better.

How can we learn to live together, I think is a good question to really keep in mind.

Or do we want to, to just move towards a, a violent end?

I think not.

It is said that it is human nature for us to hurt and kill each other when things become scarce.

It actually is also the case that much, much, much more frequently.

We cooperate.

That is a much more common part of the human condition than our tendencies towards violence and aggression.

What underlies the notion of beloved community is reminding people that those are decisions.

When we decide that we are not going to have oppressive governments, those governments will fall down.

When we decide that people should be treated with dignity and respect, we will start seeing that reflected in policy.

When we decide that every single person has value, we will start seeing the elimination of racism and classism and homophobia and all those things that keep us separated and apart.

One thing we need to be very intentional about and clear about as we teach in this time, in these days, that things can change.

It doesn't mean it's easy, but things can change.

If 140 million people living in poverty before covid doesn't make you want to have a movement.

What's wrong with you?

Every now and then, there comes a time.

You got to just say, I'm gonna fight.

There's some people who.

Think, well, I've got to wait until I'm ready.

You're ready.

Now.

When the spirit says move, you gotta move even when you are afraid, even when you don't know what to do, even when you don't have the whole path cleared.

Dorothy Cotton, she mapped out a blueprint, right?

So what are we going to do with the methodologies that she left, with this blueprint, with these sort of strategies for nurturing humanity?

What I think Ms. Dorothy would say right now to me and everybody, if we were in this room like, don't get distracted.

You are powerful.

You are on the continuum.

You are never alone, and we're on the winning team.

I don't like to think of anything as impossible.

People told Mahatma Gandhi it was impossible.

People told Martin Luther King, it was impossible.

You will never have black folk and white folk in Mississippi, uh, uh, going to the same school.

But hey, <laugh>, look what we, look what we did.

I'm not saying it's easy, but look what we did.

Think of yourself as someone who can change a situation.