I don't want to give you the impression that I don't have faith in God in the air. It's simply that I have more experience with him on the ground.
(From a Subversive Unit tape recording of Martin Luther King speaking in Bessemer, Alabama, after a harrowing airplane flight during the Poor People's Campaign in March 1968.)
The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists is a compact but highly complex, multi-layered compilation of documents, sound recordings, and visual images. Some of its components, including copies of records of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and many hours of oral history of the renowned civil liberties lawyer Clifford Durr, complement major holdings in other American archives. Other components of the Rabin Collection are unique. These include an undated filmed interview of Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) in Montgomery; 450 black-and-white photographs created by the Subversive Unit of the Investigative and Identification Division of the Alabama Department of Public Safety in the course of sit-ins, demonstrations, and marches in several Alabama cities during the early to mid-1960s; and surveillance tapes preserving speeches made variously at an anniversary meeting of the MIA in 1963, at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965, and in Bessemer and
Birmingham, Alabama, in the course of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy are among many leading lights of the civil rights movement heard on these tapes.
Johnnie Carr and the Montgomery Improvement Association
This segment of the collection derives mainly from institutional records and personal papers filmed under Rabin's supervision in 1975. Johnnie Rebecca Carr (1911-2008) was a founding member of the MIA when it formed in 1955 in response to Rosa Parks's arrest and in support of the ensuing bus boycott. In 1967 Carr became the fifth president of the MIA, following the Reverends King, Abernathy, Solomon Seay, Sr., and Jesse L. Douglas, all of whom figure in these records. For a listing of contents, see Appendix I.1A in the Finding Aid; the microfilms, and printouts thereof, are available for researchers at the Special Collections Library.
Independent of materials obtained from Carr, and illustrated here within the website, are color slides of MIA anniversary programs of 1956-1958; an Alabama Department of Public Safety surveillance tape of speeches by Solomon Seay, Sr., and Ralph Abernathy at the MIA's 8th anniversary meeting on December 5, 1963, together with a transcription of these speeches; and color slides of many Montgomery churches associated with the MIA: Holt Street Baptist Church (July and October 1974), Bethel Baptist Church, Bryant Street Baptist Church, Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church, Day Street Baptist Church, Old Ship A.M.E. Zion Church, Oak Street A.M.E. Zion Church, The First C.M.E. Church, Hilliard Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church, The People's Baptist Church, Triumph Church, Clinton Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church, Beulah Baptist Church, Lilly Baptist Church, Hall Street Baptist Church, St. John A.M.E. Church, Maggie Street Baptist Church, and First Baptist Church (all October 1974).
Demonstrations, sit-ins, surveillance, and arrests
In these black-and-white photographs taken or collected by the Subversive Unit from 1960 to 1963, the events covered are as follows: unidentified African-American undergraduates from Alabama State College standing in a hallway of the Montgomery County Courthouse following an attempt to receive service at the snack bar in the courthouse basement on February 25, 1960; a lunch-counter sit-in, dated circa 1960, at Murphy's Parkway Center in an unidentified city, including a probable image of a young Stokely Carmichael; shots of a lunch-counter sit-in on January 31, 1962, at Woolworth's in Huntsville, Alabama, including, with certainty, Carmichael; subsequent arrest photos allegedly deriving from this incident at Woolworth's; surveillance photos of three white adults--James Dombrowksi, executive director of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), and his successors in that position, Ann Braden and Carl Braden, at the SCEF conference in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1962; an arrest photo of Bob [John Robert] Zellner, the first white field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in Montgomery in 1962; scenes from a demonstration in front of the Etowah County courthouse in Gadsden, Alabama, dated circa 1961 on the reverse of the photographs, but almost certainly situated within the series of protests that took place in Gadsden from June to September, 1963; a photograph of James Hood, an African-American young man from Gadsden who had enrolled at the University of Alabama and immediately thereafter was forced to withdraw on the basis of statements recorded by members of the Subversive Unit in the course of a speech that Hood made during the Gadsden protests; and an undated arrest photo of Ralph Abernathy.
Selma-to-Montgomery March
Audio-visual materials from the march consist of photographs taken in both Selma and Montgomery from March 6 to March 17, 1965, and surveillance audiotapes of the triumphant rally held on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery at the conclusion of the march on March 25, 1965. A substantial number of photographs of this event have been published in conventional sources and on the Internet. Dramatic documentary footage may be seen in part 6 of the film Eyes on the Prize. Recordings and transcriptions of Martin Luther King's famous speech of March 25, 1965, are readily available. Nonetheless, the 369 vivid black-and-white photos in the Rabin collection provide numerous unique images of the historic efforts to initiate the Selma-to-Montgomery March. Perhaps of still greater significance, the audiotapes in the Rabin collection preserve the last two hours of the event on the Capitol steps, with Ralph Abernathy serving as master of ceremonies. There are speeches by the following individuals: Reverend T.Y. Rogers from Tuscaloosa; the Birmingham civil rights leader, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth; Reverend James Bevel; Ralph Bunche, Undersecretary to the United Nations; James Forman of SNCC; Amelia Boynton, from Selma; Jim (Hicks? or Dix?), a freedom rider; John Lewis, the leader of SNCC; Whitney Young, director of the National Urban League; Don Slayman, from the civil rights department of the AFL-CIO; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Hosea Williams. The Subversive Unit audiotapes capture this event in jumbled order These reel-to-reel surveillance tapes have been transferred to digital files as literal copies and in an "artificial," edited reconstruction of the event in its original sequence. A transcription of the speeches is incomplete, owing to the poor audio quality in some segments, particularly during substantial portions of Shuttlesworth's speech, which is badly distorted, and portions of Park's speech, in which her soft-spoken voice is difficult to hear.
National Socialist White People's Party
The Subversive Unit's photographic collection included five undated images from a National Socialist White People's Party demonstration in front of the Alabama State Capitol, Montgomery. In the first photo, an American Nazi is holding a copy of the periodical White Power, first issued in September 1967, which thus would be the earliest possible date for these images.
Poor People's Campaign
This portion of the collection consists of further unique and historic police surveillance tapes made by the Subversive Unit in 1968 at an early stage of the Poor People's Campaign. At a mass meeting in Bessemer, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, and an unidentified fourth speaker discuss the campaign in relation to African-American history and current events (from audiotape 09 and audiotape 10, program 01). On the streets of Birmingham, an unidentified African-American speaker links a Vietnam War protest to civil rights issues (audiotape 10, program 02). Elsewhere, the location and date unknown, an unidentified African-American man gives a speech on black power and unity. These reel-to-reel surveillance tapes have been transferred to digital files. Owing to the poor quality of the recordings, there is no transcript of the last portion of audiotape 09 and its continuation on audiotape 10, program 01, and there is no transcript of audiotape 11.
John Beecher
John Beecher (1904-1980) was a radical poet and social reformer whom Rabin interviewed and photographed on November 16, 1974. One audiocassette is lost, but on the surviving recording Beecher tells the story of his most famous poem, "To Live and Die in Dixie." Beecher gave Rabin a signed and dedicated copy of the 12-inch long-playing record album of that poem; this LP is stored in the audio archives of the Special Collections Library.
Stokely Carmichael
In a ten-minute uncredited filmed interview, circa 1972, staged on the steps of the Montgomery State Capitol, Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) looks back on events of the 1960s and discusses his political and social philosophy. The unidentified interviewer mentions that the Montgomery bus company had gone out of business "a few months ago." J. Mills Thornton in Dividing Lines (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama, 2002), p.60, notes that National City Lines "ended its Montgomery operations in 1972." Hence the provisional date.
Clifford and Virginia Durr
The bulk of material in the Southern Activists series pertains to the Montgomery civil liberties lawyer Clifford Judkins Durr (1899-1975) and his wife, the social activist Virginia Foster Durr (1903-1999). There are substantial oral histories of the Durrs, including reel-to-reel tapes of unknown origin. In a 26-minute interview, Virginia Durr discusses her teenage years and young adulthood, contemporary economic and political power, and Southern society with an unidentified interviewer (probably John Imhoff); the opening segment provides a brief but telling account of Virginia's upbringing in relation to expectations for Southern women in the early twentieth century. There are approximately nine hours of Clifford's discussion of his papers, of his reading from the beginning of an autobiographical manuscript, of his involvement in the Defense Plant Corporation in preparation for World War II, of civil liberties and public broadcasting issues stemming from his subsequent appointment to the Federal Communications Commission, and of civil rights and un-American activities legal battles in which he was deeply involved in the 1950s, including Rosa Parks's defense during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. All of these audiotapes have been converted to digital files, and transcripts accompany each file.
Charles Gomillion
In January 1975 Rabin took color slides of the African-American civil rights leader Charles Gomillion (1900-1995). The oral history associated with these slides is lost.
Lester Hankerson
The half-hour documentary color film
Right Now!
traces the efforts of the lesser-known civil rights activist Lester Hankerson to register voters in Savannah, Georgia. Robert Newman made the film for the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries in cooperation with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Southern Regional Council Voter Education Project, and the Committee for Racial Justice Now. In a letter of August 14, 1964, in the records of the SCLC, Newman discusses an agreement with Brandon Films to achieve national distribution (microfilm reel 1, series 1, sub-series 1, box 138:8, frame 0703), but a widespread search in 2005 suggested that surviving copies of the film are rare. One such copy appears in OCLCs WorldCat as being 29 minutes in duration, but Rabin's copy, transferred to digital form, played slightly shorter, at 27:38, with an abrupt beginning; possibly the opening minute of the reel is lost.
Myles Horton
On November 16, 1974, Rabin interviewed and photographed Myles Horton (1905-1990), who founded the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932, and for many years taught integrated courses there in defiance of Southern segregation laws. Topics in this interview include the involvement of the Highlander school in efforts to integrate the labor movement in the 1930s, and Horton's combative testimony, alongside that of Clifford Durr, in the course of Mississippi Senator James Eastland's Internal Security hearings in 1954.
E. D. Nixon
Color slides, color photographs, and black-and-white photographs involving the African-American civil rights activist E.D. Nixon (1899-1987) were taken in 1974 with Rabin and Danny Crapps in front of and inside the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, of which there are also numerous exterior and interior shots, and in front of the Alabama State Capitol. The oral history associated with these images is lost.
"By any means necessary" means, whichever tactic is applicable to bring about the best and most effective results, you use. If a non-violent demonstration can bring it, use it. If a violent demonstration can bring it, use it. Whatever means necessary.
(Stokely Carmichael, looking back on the civil rights movement in the course of an interview conducted on the steps of the Montgomery State Capitol around 1972.)