Interview With Bruce Gordon, An (1964)

I'm sort of just easy going fun loving sort of guy big blazing 22 years old February the 9th 1941 I you know got out of high school man you know I've been re about as long as I can remember man it just seems like something basic in this life sort of something in that just doesn't go well my anyway when I was born my father wanted to call me Alo wishes but uh mother had the upper hands and they just call me Bruce and the threw on Gordon since that was the family name and after getting out of high school I went to college for a semester ccny and before I completed I quit and join the Army I was 17 you know Young and Wild and uh join the Army spent three years there manag to make a year in Korea in the 60 to 61 I kicked Sigman re out and from Korea I came back to the States Fort Gordon Georgia that's when I really got very good taste of the South down there you know really got out to town and made all the mistakes sat on the front of the bus and walked into the wrong restaurants and asked for movie tickets and really started to find out what the segregation really meant and it was sort of really new to me I mean I'd experienced it once or twice in New York but it been in the form of you know you're a [ __ ] and I'm not a [ __ ] you punch me in the nose you know anytime they use the magic word but I didn't you know really know didn't really dig this all right they called me a niggaer I know this was supposed to be wrong because I was told it was wrong [ __ ] and call a boy I'm supposed to react violently this but it got to be a burden being a negro so anytime I was called a [ __ ] I just you know pass it off or you know soldar old man or something like that this about a year in Atlanta Georgia where I met the Julian Bond and James foreman and John Lewis Ivan home and a bunch of the other guys that were with the movement and more or less talk to them you know don't buy black buy guns and things like that but finally I came around to this uh this nonviolent aspect of the movement and I got more and more interested in so I quit school I was going to Mars rather I just transferred out of Mars Brown to Clark and quit school and quit the job I had out at locket aircraft Corporation and became a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee I tell you the truth I could care less about this town of Sumer I don't tend to live here there's very little here that interests me I'm not that much interested in the people but if I'm to become someone somebody else must be something I can only find me through finding someone else self-seekers seldom find themselves human beings to be able to relate to another human being to be able to to think with another human being to be able to enter into some sort of relationship with another human being to be able to to see the tree as he sees it no two men ever see the same tree I mean all right we recognize he got a bar got of a Woody substance it must have Roots it must stand up straight it has leaves and there's the oxygen carbon carbon dioxide cycle it gives off moisture and this that and the other but the tree not to 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 I if I can understand how another man thinks even though his thinking is counter to mine even though he doesn't quite agree with me maybe I can come to a little better understanding of how I think and more important why I think the way I I do so hence this movement and hence s Alabama if I'm to be free in New York these people must be freed down here I'm tired to them whether I want to or not and 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 getting on morality kick of whether God exists or whether he doesn't exist but for all this orderly chaos to result by pure accident was a little too fantastic to conceive for these feelings and emotions these things that just don't quite fit that this dissatisfaction that that sex and and food and drink just doesn't satisfy this thing that still lurks there and it's charg and it nudges you every so often it pushes you keeps trying to struggle up into you I believe that's something that lies way outside the be far far outside be all right you know it sounds like straight Mel drama you know what I mean but it fair let's face it this is what causes the whites to react as they do down here something else is tugging at them something else is trying to get in there something else is trying to communicate its 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 The Chew I I'd much rather believe this way I I don't really want to accept this it's it's easier for me to go along the way we've been going something else is rattling around in their minds some other little thing that they can't really put their finger on they can't ly articulated it's it's the ghost that always lies in the peripheral vision every time I try to swing my vision around to focus on it it always moves behind a boulder or or or a stump or 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 either I must have it or or wipe it out destroy it and me with my black skin and my woolly hair person B ifies this little 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 Negro here are happy we got happier race relations yeah in this state and in this city for more than 100 years or either reach out and try to violently crush it down throw a bomb in the church throw poison candy children use cattle prods on demonstrators and packing in the filthy jails but it just doesn't work no matter how happy they say I am I'm not no slave can ever be really happy except if the slave just becomes utterly lost and this is a a a a vile thing I'm not going to go back to that place and I'm not don't want to take over what the the whites have I don't want all those ERS and pains all I want to do is just exemplify me just be me if me wants to kick off the shoes and run through Woods let me do it if me wants to spout poetry at the Moon let me do it if me wants to go in here and and and just sit down and look at the four walls and not bother anybody then 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 woolly 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 wh smell a little bit too sometimes when they don't pay you understand I mean I don't necessarily want to work next beside white because I'll tell you the truth white are lazier than we are we've got to work to make that little bit of money that we're going to have people don't have to you got this big Union to take care of you and everything you know you got Social Security to pay you off we're not really making enough to make ends meat as is so we really got to slave hard want to go down to the SPO house and a shine house you know to get a little drink and then run around to the other houses to have a little fun here and there also we got to really work so we can't afford to be lazy the only reason we moving slow because at the end of the day if you work a 16 hour day out here some of these Cotton Fields I've seen out here pulling garbage on some of these trucks you move a bit slow too at the end of the 16-hour day at least I know I would so the whites are are not confronted with this and this is a general thing throughout the entire moov whether you take it from from Danville Virginia all the way down the little Little Rock Arkansas the human being is still the same the human being that's caught up in these situations though his 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 Governor or for is closing the schools or and and having the National Guard have to open them again or whether it's uh Prince that with County just shutting the schools down entirely and say we give up the public school system the method of expression is different granted but what motivates this expression is the same we don't want them [ __ ] around us because to face that black man I've got to face myself to face what I've inflicted on to face the castrations the lynchings the beatings the clan ridings to face coming in there and taking his women and just treating them like dirt to face this not that he's going to react and do the same thing to me but that I could do this to a human being that I could act actually call myself a Christian a civilized man and be like this to a fellow man this is little bit too much for anybody to swallow and there's no excuse to fall back on we didn't have any war or fight with you to cause you to put us down like this we didn't have any big rebellions or uprisings or want to change your way of life so radically to make you do this what was your own greed and cheap labor that made you want to do this it was you selling yourself out for a buck and King Cotton that made you take a human being and mutilate him and this is just a 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 you just want slaves just standing around just to say I got slaves I mean it's a bit impractical you got to feed them you know you got to stick him in a house someplace so you must want something out of a slave you want his labor he he is the the object upon which you vent your your anger and your lust he provides Psych ological 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 so this is the real reason and you've done this to human beings you violated 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 light in that you don't have to pay physically you're getting off light but you're getting off really heavy and that you have to pay by a SP Spiritual Awakening you have to pay by a mental Awakening and this is a sometimes very hard price to pay now how is all this applicable here in Salma Alabama well we tried Street demonstration Street demonstrations were put down quickly and partially Al lingo moved into his cattle PRS the sheriff deputized the 300 men great big py now they filled the county jails they filled the city jails the trials naturally were all miscarriages of justice so now we're leaning away from these Street demonstrations now we're starting to reach out and grasp at 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 uh 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 and back into our homes and back into our churches thinking that we'd go back to this place we can't go back there now but we had to use our minds how else can we bring about the change the vote the vote the prime thing in 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 trying to vote has also forced us to to raise the intellectual standard to raise the the literacy standard here because many of the people are a literate 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 they thirst for it 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 subra tra and so we're beginning to set up schools for them here the white man is acting reacting very badly to all of this so far the the people the town's people themselves haven't uh reacted violently because they' placed their confidence and Trust in their Police Department the police can hold them [ __ ] in line but we're slowly showing them that they can't hold us in line that we're going to come forward no matter what happens no matter what you do this is going to come about for most of them I 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 the senses that bring in the world from the outside and it filters it down into the soul it filters the soul reaction back and up into the into the outside world again this this little filter that's condition to environment the eyes aren't conditioned to environment they'll just see I mean all right if you live in a cave you see in the dark is a bit better but the eyes still just see and the soul is not conditioned to environment the heart is not conditioned to environment only the mind that little thing in between that ID I guess you 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 Negroes are lazy Negroes don't bathe too often I'm going to talk about haircuts with the bush I got up here I need a bone through my nose really I to go African and get a haircut all you know one or the other but at any rate these things are suddenly disproved 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 they they really can't do that it's it's really not a human reaction it takes a lot more to love and to hate it Tak so much more to react with kindness than to react with violence it really calls for an exercising of the Mind the heart and the soul and the Unison in a symbiosis that gives rise to an actual individual instead of just to a violent Beast that really doesn't mean much one way or the other so so far things have been Bor us feeling their way here at some at this particular point they didn't really know how to react would the Negroes come back again to register to vote and they we have will they continue coming in such a greater number and we have and now it's more or less we're waiting for the fight reaction will they react violently will they try to counter our moves in one way or another we know they're going to counter our moves they know they're going to we know they're going to do something but really don't know what if I may predict and project a it they're going to react violently for a while and then they're finally going to accept it somebody's going to call a hold to the violence and they're going to look around at the wreckage and 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 is silly the solution to this entire problem is so maddeningly simple it's