Jay Dickey: “the thing that I wanted to point out has a lot to do with the age of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) at the time…”

“the thing that I wanted to point out has a lot to do with the age of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) at the time and my age at the time. He was in the fourth grade. I was 17 years of age when in Arkansas we had the tragedy of Little Rock Central, or the Little Rock High School crisis. I know that I was going to college during that time and had to pass back and forward through Little Rock exactly during that time. I had a profound lesson that I learned on this trip because of my insensitivity back then. I just started playing it through. I watched as everything happened there and how many brave and heroic young people were leading the attack against bigotry and against hatred, and I thought about my own self. I was not but about three, two years younger than the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), and there he was. He cared enough to sacrifice. I thought about this as we were going from church to church and where they had their meetings in preparation for the walks, how they never did know, they did not know enough about the society or about the opposition to know whether they were going to survive or not. They were not interested whether or not they would be successful. They were only interested in proposing and pushing the issue of fairness and civil rights. I thought that was a significant, a significant message that I learned. I also sat across the street on the bus and looked at the spot that Rosa Parks got on the bus, the very point.…”