On the recordMay 14, 1996
I was a young person also, like my colleague from California, working in Washington at the time. I was among many hundreds from Washington who chartered a train to go from Union Station to Montgomery. Some of my colleagues may remember that train was stopped in Atlanta, and the crew walked off when they discovered why it was we were headed to Alabama, and they were promptly ordered back on by the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, and for a young white man who had grown up in an overwhelmingly, almost totally, white environment in New England, it was, to put it mildly, an eye opener. For the first time in my life to feel safe only in the company of black people and to have spent two nights in a black church in the outskirts of Montgomery and to make the final 2 days of that walk into the city led by men such as Martin Luther King and our colleague from Georgia was an extraordinary experience.
Source
govinfo.gov
