SNCC 50th Anniversary Conference Volume 10 - Moving on Mississippi: "We Had to be Strong"
FEATURED SPEAKERS Owen Brooks (Delta Ministry Mississippi) Brenda Travis (Pike County Non-Violent Movement) Hollis Watkins (SNCC Field Secretary) Lawrence Guyot (Chair, MFDP) Willie Blue (SNCC Field Secretary) Michael Sistrom (Historian)
Not unexpectedly, some of the Southern Movement's most vivid stories are found in Mississippi. Panelist Lawrence Guyot, former Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), insists that Mississippi is the state that "made the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee." This panel features the first-personal accounts of some of the Movement's most unsung heroes and heroines: Hollis Watkins, one of the first two students to sit in and be arrested in McComb, Mississippi, a town that in the 1960s had more Klan bombings than any town in the state; Brenda Travis, also from McComb, a 17-year-old high school student who sat-in, was expelled from school, and served six months of a sentence that would have kept her incarcerated until she was 21 if she had not managed to flee; and Rev. Willie Blue, a 22-year-old Navy veteran who returned home to Tallahatchie County where Emmett Till was murdered, with "a serious bad attitude." The significance and impact of the MFDP forms an important part of the discussion.
Executive Producer: SNCC Legacy Project, Inc., Documentary Sub-Committee, Karen Spellman, Courtland Cox, Sharlene Kranz, Jennifer Lawson Gittens, Judy Richardson, Joyce Ladner, Charlie Cobb Producer: Natalie Bullock Brown/Ascension Productions Series Editor: Joseph Brandon Johnson Volume Editor: Darrell Pryor
