Melvin Watt: “I want to put a slightly different spin on this this evening, because I was wondering, when they write the history of…”

“I want to put a slightly different spin on this this evening, because I was wondering, when they write the history of the 20th Century, what will they write? When they write the history of the Civil Rights movement, what will they write? They, obviously, will write about Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer and the tremendous sit-ins and the movement. But I submit to my colleagues that if they write an accurate history of that period, they will write about Thurgood Marshall and Jim Nabrit at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; they will write about Julius Chambers and James Ferguson in Charlotte, North Carolina; they will write about Matthew Perry and Ernest Finney in South Carolina; they will write about Avon Williams in Nashville, Tennessee; they will write about Don Hollowell and Howard Moore in Atlanta, Georgia; and Jack Young in Mississippi, and Arthur Shores and Fred Gray in Alabama; and, of course, they will write about C.B. King in Albany, Georgia. Everybody that I have named, almost one black lawyer per State, maybe two in some instances, were the people who were not always participating in the sit-in demonstrations because somebody had to be out there available to go and make the legal arrangements to get those people out of jail after they got locked up. They had to represent the demonstrators.…”