Historic Films Stock Footage Archive: F-6030

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01:00:00 0.71	INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE GORDON, FIELD SECRETARY, STUDENT NON-VIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC, OFTEN PRONOUNCED SNIK) 10/10/63, IN SELMA, ALABAMA. REEL BEGINS
01:00:13 13.95	SLIDE: "IN DALLAS COUNTY, ALABAMA, THERE ARE 14,400 WHITE PEOPLE OF VOTING AGE. 9,344 ARE REGISTERED TO VOTE"
01:00:25 25.57	SLIDE: "IN DALLAS COUNTY, ALABAMA, THERE ARE 15,115 NEGRO PEOPLE OF VOTING AGE. 282 ARE REGISTERED TO VOTE."
01:00:36 36.58	Bruce Gordon 0:37 I'm sort of this easy going fun loving sort of guy. big blades. 22 years old February 9 1941. Got out of high school. I've been a rebel about as long as I can remember. It just seems like something basic in this life source thinks there's something in it, it just doesn't go. Well, my anyway, when I was born, my father wanted to call me Allouicious but the mother had the upper hand and they just call me Bruce. And throw on Gordon says that was the family name. And after getting out of high school I went to college for a semester, CCNY and before I completed that quit and joined the army, I was 17. Young and wild. and join the army spent three years there. Managed to make a year in Korea. In the 60 to 61, I kicked Syngman Rhee from Korea came back to the states, Fort Gordon Georgia, that's when I really got very good tast of the South down there and really got out of town and made all the mistakes sat on the front of the bus and walking in the wrong restaurants and asked for movie tickets and really started to find out what the segregation really meant. And it was sort of pretty new to me. I mean, I'd experienced it once or twice in New York, but I've been in the form of you know, you're a nigger, I'm not a nigger, you punch him in the nose, you know, anytime they use the magic word, but I didn't really know anybody because they call me a nigger. I know this was supposed to be wrong, because I was totally wrong to be called a nigger call boy, I'm supposed to react violently with this. But it got to be a burden being a negro. So anytime I was called a nigger I just you know, pass it off. Soldier, oh man or something like that. Is after getting discharged, I spent about a year in Atlanta, Georgia, where I met the Julian Bond, James Forman, John Lewis, I have an old and a bunch of the other guys that were with the movement. More or less talk to them, you know, don't buy black buy guns and things like that. But finally, I came around as this non violent aspect of movement. And I got more and more interested in so I quit school I was going to Morris I just transfer out of Morris brown Clark and quit school and quit the job I had out at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and became a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. To tell you the truth, I could care less about this time of summer I don't tend to live there is very little here that interests me. I'm not that much interested in the people. But I'm going to become someone, somebody else must be something I can only find me through finding someone else. So seekers seldom find themselves. human beings to be able to relate to another human being to be able to think with another human being to be able to enter into some sort of relationship with another human being to be able to see the tree if he sees it. No two men ever see the same tree? I mean, all right, we recognize that it's got a bark.a woody substance it must have roots must stand up straight has leaves and there's the oxygen carbon, the carbon dioxide cycle and gives up moisture in this, that and the other but the tree no two men really ever see the same tree. And if I can possibly understand how someone else sees the tree, maybe my own vision becomes a bit clearer. If and if I can understand how another man thinks even though his thinking is counter to mind, even though he doesn't quite agree with me. Maybe I can come to a better understanding of how I think and more importantly, why I think the way I do
01:04:12 252.76	Bruce Gordon 4:13 So hence this movement and hence, Selma Alabama. If I'm to be free in New York, these people must be free down here. I'm tied to the one I want to announce it not just by color, by the mere fact that we were all created in this great beings image. He does exist. I mean, you know, not to get on the reality kick of whether God exists or whether he doesn't exist, but for all this orderly chaos, the result by pure accident is a little too fantastic to conceive. For all these feelings and emotion, these things that just don't quite fit that dissatisfaction that that sex and Food and drink just doesn't satisfy this thing that still lurks there. And it's in charge. And it nudges you every so often. It pushes you and keeps trying to struggle over To you, I believe that something that lies way outside the being. Far far outside the being. All right, you know sounds like straight mellow drama but it't there. and let's face it, this is what causes the whites to react as they do down here. Something else is tugging at something else is trying to get in there something else is trying to communicate it's way through and it's a little bit too terrible to recognize, you know, it's a little bit too, too much to bite off and chew. I'd much rather believe this way. I don't know to accept this. It's, it's easy for you to go along the way we've been going. Something else is rattling around in their minds some other thing that they can't really put their finger on they can't really articulate it. It's, it's the ghost that always lies in the peripheral vision. Every time I try to swing my vision around the focus on it always moves behind a boulder or a Stump disappears just over the horizon, but it's there and it's maddeningly there. And either I must get it or remove it one or the other. I must have it or wipe it out. Destroy it in me with my black skin. And my wooly hair personifies this thing that keeps dodging ducking out of the way but the only trouble is I don't dodge and duck. I stand right there. And the only thing they can do now is either close their eyes and ignore the problem. The negros here happy. We got happy race relations, the state in the city for more than 100 years. Or either reach out and try to violently try to crush it down. Throw a bomb on a church. Throw poison candy at children. Use cattle prods on demonstrators. Pack them in the filthy jails. But it just doesn't work. No matter how happy they say I am. I'm not no slave can be really happy except if the slave just becomes utterly lost. And this is a vial thing. I'm not going to go back to that place. And I don't want to take over what the whites have here. I don't want all those ulsers and pains. all I wanted to do was just exemplify me just be me. It me wants to kick off the shoes and run through woods. Let me do if me wants to start poetry at the moon let me do it man was to go over here and just sit down and look at the four walls and not bother any body. Let me do it. And don't tell me I can't because boy you're black. Don't tell me I can't because your hair is wooly or your eyes are slanted, or your lips are too thick or your nose is too big. That's all I want. I don't necessarily want to sit next to a white person on the bus or not, you know, whites smell a little bit too sometimes when you don't bathe. I don't necessarily want to work next decide whites cause to tell you the truth whites are lazier than we are. we got to work to make that little bit of money we're going to have people don't have we got this big union to take care of you and everthing, you know, you got Social Security to pay you off. We're not really making enough to make ends meet. And so we really got to salve hard of the morning, get out of this splow house and shine house, you know to get a little drink and then run around the other houses to have fun here and there. Also, we got to really works and we can't afford to be lazy. The only reason we're moving slowly is because at the end of the day, if you've worked a 16 hour day out here on some of these cotton fields I've seen out here or putting garbage on some of these trucks, you move a bit slow too at the end of a 16 hour day. At least I know I would.
01:08:31 511.51	Bruce Gordon 8:32 So the whites are now confronted with this and this is a general thing throughout the entire movement, whether you take it from from Danville, Virginia all the way down to Little Rock, Arkansas, the human being is still say the human being that's caught up in these situations, though is his method of expression might be different. But what motivates him to this expression is still the same. The thing inside is still the same whether it's Govenor Orval closing the schools and having the National Guard have to open them again or whether it's Prince Edward County, just shutting the schools down entirely. So we give up the public school system. Method of expression is different. Granted. But what motivates this expression is the same. We don't want them niggers around us. Because to face that black man, I've got to face myself. To face what I've inflicted on him. To face the castrations the lynchings, the beatings, the Klan writings. To face coming in and taking his women and just treating them like dirt. To face this. Not that he's gonna react and do the same thing to me, but that I could do this to a human being. That I could actually call myself a Christian, a civilized man and be like this to a fellow man. This is a little bit too much for anybody to swallow. And it's no excuse to fall back on. We didn't have any was or fight with you to cause you to put us down like this. We didn't have any big Rebellions are uprisings and want to change your way of life so radically, to make you do this. It was your own greed, cheap labor that made you want to do this, it was you selling yourself up for a buck and King Cotton that made you take a human being and mutilat him. that this is just the plain simple fact I can't see anything else for it. I don't see why else you need slaves except to work. I don't think he just wants slaves just standing around just to say I got slightly because I mean, it's a bit impractical, you got to feed them, You've stick them on the house someplace. So you must want something out of a slave. You want his labor. He is the the object upon which you vent your anger and your lust. He provides psychological crutches to you in that way. And he provides economic crutches to you in the other way. He provides military crutches to you if you can brainwash him enough to fight for you. This is the real reason. You've done this to human beings. You violate the law of God by doing it. You violated the law of man by doing it and now you must pay. But you even then you're getting off the light in that you don't have to pay physically you're getting light, but you're getting really heavy. And that you have to pay by a spiritual awakening. You have to pay by a mental or weekend. And this is sometimes very hard price to pay. Now how is all this applicable here in Selma Alabama. Well, we tried street demonstration. Street demonstrations were put down quickly and harshly. Al Lingo moved in with his cattle prods. The sherrif deputized 300 Men. A great big posse now. They fill the county jails, they fill the city jails, the trials naturally were all miscarriages of justice.
01:11:49 708.9	Bruce Gordon 11:50 So now we're leaning away from the street demonstrations. Now we're starting to reach out and grasp the vote. He actually did us a favor the white power structure here. This is a term that's been misused, I realize that, but it's the best term I can think of at the moment, the white power structure actually did us a favor by forcing us out of the streets, back into our homes and back into our churches, thinking that we go back to this place, we can't go back. But we've had to use our minds. How else can we bring about the change, to vote, the vote, the prime thing and in this American life of the people, by the people for the people that vote. And we're doing it without demonstrating. We're doing it without mass arrests or head beating. We're doing it slowly day by day. Tryingto vote has also forced us to raise the intellectual standard to raise the literacy standard here because many of the people are illiterate, they haven't had the opportunities of good schools. And so we've been forced to educate them and train them so that they can get past the voter registration tests. And just a little taste of knowledge is so sweet to them that they want more They hunger and thirst for they want to know how to read and write. They want to know how to spell correctly. They want to know how to add and subtract. And so we're beginning to set up schools for them here. The white man is acting reacted very badly to all of this. So far, the people, the townspeople themselves, haven't reacted violently because they place the competence and trust in the police department. The police can hold them niggers in line. But we're slowly showing them that they can't hold us in line and we're going to come forward no matter what happens no matter what you do. This is going to come about. But most of them actually believe that the majority of the people here really want to see this come about. Inside way down inside they realize this is right. But they get to a conflict up here. This filter. This filter that reacts between the senses that bring in the world from the outside and it filters it down to the soul filters the soul reaction back up into the to the outside world again, this this little filter that's conditioned to environment, the eyes aren't conditioned to environment, they'll just see. I mean, all right, if you live in a cave and see you in the dark a little bit better, but the eyes still just see, then the soul is not conditioned to environment. The heart is not conditioned to environment. Only the mind that little thing in between that. The id I guess you'd call it. I'm not much of a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but it seems like this, this interpretive device sort of blocks them for too long. They've been taught and they know that well negros are lazy. Negros don't bathe too often. I'm one to talk about haircuts. I wish I got a magiacal moment for my nose I'd go after and get a haircut more than the other. But at any rate, these things are suddenly just proven. The intellect just doesn't quite know how to react, nothing has been really put in its place that they can accept all of a sudden they must accept this person as a, as an individual that is just as good and sometimes better than I am. And they really can't do that it's really not a human reaction, it takes a lot more, to love to hate. It takes so much more to react with kindness than to react with violence. It really calls are an exercise in the mind, the heart and the soul and the unison, and some biases, that gives rise to actual individual instead of just to a violent beef, that really doesn't mean much one way or the other.
01:15:39 939.21	Bruce Gordon 15:40 So, so far, things have been more or less feeling their way here in Selma this particular point. They didn't really know how to react. Will the negros come back again to register the vote. And they we have. Would they continue coming in such a great number. And we have and now it's more or less we're waiting for the white reaction. Will they react violently? Will they try to counter our moves in one way or another we know they're gonna counter we know they're gonna have something but we really don't know what. If I may predict and project, they're going to react violently for a while. And then they finally going to accept it. Somebody's going to call a halt to the violence and they're going to look around at the wreckage. Begin to begin to rebuild again, begin to piece it back together again. This is ultimately what we're working for this coming together. And we're trying to do it politically, trying to do it socially. We're trying to do without violence, but it's the whites that are actually pushing to violence. It's the whites that are actually suddenly reacting because they're also afraid that we're going to inflict on them what they know they have inflicted on us and we're not going to I don't want revenge. Revenge is silly. The solution to this entire problem is so maddeningly simple
01:17:04 1023.93	INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE GORDON, FIELD SECRETARY, STUDENT NON-VIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC, OFTEN PRONOUNCED SNIK) 10/10/63, IN SELMA, ALABAMA. REEL ENDS