Interviews and Acknowledgments

INTERVIEWS

       Telephone Interview with Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr., 19 and 22 December 2020

            1. American Baptist Theological Seminary and American Baptist College

How did you hear about American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABT) and find your way there?

            This [answer] is going to be unique.  I grew up in Tampa, Florida, although I did spend three years in Philadelphia and graduated from elementary school there.   I was a high school journalist.  We were first place in Florida for journalism.  I was the editor of our paper.  I got a scholarship to Florida A & M, but grandmother [Rozelia Forrester, aka Ma Foster] said I would be a preacher because she saw a mark in my forehead, and in church they had me sit in a chair next to a preacher when I was a child.  I turned down a four-year scholarship to Florida A & M.  There was a vacation bible school sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention--segregated.  The black minister in charge of the school had instructions from my grandmother to get me a work fellowship at ABT.  This was the first time I had been in Nashville.  College opened later at the school than at others in Nashville.  I did not know this and arrived one week early and helped to prepare the school.  Because of this I was able to choose my own room.  I picked a nice room for myself, a large one on the second floor with a view of the Cumberland River.  People at my church had given me cans of food, which was the perfect gift because there was nothing available to eat when I got there.

John Lewis talked you into attending the classes about Gandhi and Tolstoy run by Rev. James Lawson, Jr., and Rev. C. T. Vivian, didn't he?

            I was not inclined to go to the classes about nonviolence at first.  I had jobs--as janitor and librarian.  John Lewis was my roommate but a year ahead of me.  He was not my roommate initially, not the first year.

You started at ABT in the fall of 1958, and later you returned to Nashville and attended Fisk, similar to John Lewis.  But your bachelor's degree was from ABT.  How did this come about?

            I went to Fisk because the Philosophy department would accept classes from ABT--not all of them.  Liberal Arts and Philosophy courses were accepted.  This was after the Freedom Rides.  John Lewis encouraged me to go on the Freedom Rides and afterward we got a scholarship to Fisk.  I was trying to see where I could get the most credits to get a bachelor's degree, and I could get most of my courses accepted at ABT.  After the Freedom Rides, I decided to go to law school.  I went to Boston University for law school but did not get a J.D.  I was editor of the Boston University law school newspaper, The Comment.

How do you account for the large number of ABT students who played major roles in the Civil Rights Movement?  Was it the time, the place--both ABT and Nashville--the people, or all of the above?

            It was all of the above.  Most specifically we had faculty members involved in the Movement.  Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, Sr., was the Homiletics professor and Rev. C. T. Vivian his assistant.  Reverend J. F. Grimmett was the Church History professor and state president for the NAACP.  It was these ABT faculty members, and Rev. James Lawson, Jr., then a graduate student at Vanderbilt, who conducted workshops on nonviolence.

During which years did you serve as the President of American Baptist College and how did this come about?

            I'm the one who got the college accredited.  I got my Ed.M. and then my Ed.D. degree--in 1974--from Harvard.  I was a professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota at the time.  A project required a minimum of 500 pages, a thesis 300 pages, so I decided on the thesis.  I was the Dean of Academic Affairs at American Baptist College [beginning in 1988], and the outgoing President [Odell McGlothian, Sr.] recommended me for the job [which I held from 1993 to 1999].

Your son Bernard Lafayette III attended American Baptist College, correct?

            Yes.

What thoughts do you have today when you look back on American Baptist College?

            When I was President, the Southern Baptist Convention decided to withdraw support from the college.  The National Baptist Convention initially provided the furniture and the Southern Baptist Convention the land.  The board of trustees was half and half--the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention, Incorporated, USA.  While I was there, the decision was made for the Southern Baptist Convention to pull out.  The only rationale for this I have is that they felt the National Baptist Convention had the resources to keep the college going.  Another was that Southern Baptist Convention seminaries were now open to black people.  It was done gradually.  They stopped funding faculty positions.  They stopped funding utilities.  "Let's end the relationship now.  Give me $3 million," I said.  They didn't agree.  I said, "Let's go ahead and you just turn your interest back to American Baptist College."  We got a contract together, which stated that if the college closed the land would return to the Southern Baptists.  I decided not to have that clause but to make it possible for the land to be given to another black entity that had the same purpose.  That was the advantage of going to law school;  I understand contracts.  [As a result, as President,] I had to cut down on a lot of things.  I had to be frugal.  I didn't make much money.  I was fortunate to be a pastor of [Progressive Baptist Church].  The whole idea was to do it peacefully and quietly and not have a lot of publicity about it.  I had learned this from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The main thing I did was to get the school accredited.  I was the first black person to be on the American Association of Colleges.  The seminary had not been accredited.   I was able to get American Baptist College and other undergraduate minority institutions accredited.  The college had great support from local churches, especially Baptist churches, because of the affiliations with them, and a strong alumni group.  There were also extensions in this country and abroad--Costa Rica and the Bahamas.

Education was something very important to your grandmother and your mother, wasn't it?

            Yes.  Even though I was the first one in the family to graduate from high school, from college, from graduate school, and to get a doctorate, my sister [Rozielia Kennedy] has one now.  She has an Ed.M. from Harvard--and was actually my student when I was a teaching fellow there--and a Ph.D. from the University of South Florida.  This will tickle you.  Do you know the subject of her thesis?  Bernard Lafayette, Jr.  We have several others in the family who have gotten a master's degree.  We value education.  With my mother [Verdell Lafayette], I had to prove that I could do it to her.  I had dropped out of a lot of schools, by the way.  When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in Memphis, I went back to school for his legacy and to fulfill my mother's aspiration for me. 

            2. Sutton E. Griggs and Griggs Hall

How aware were you and your fellow ABT students, living in Griggs Hall, of who Sutton Griggs, or his father Allen Griggs, Sr., was?

            We did not have a lot of information about that.

Have you read any of Sutton Griggs's novels, pamphlets, or book-length nonfiction works?

            No, maybe other students and pastors have.

Similar to other African American literary figures, such as George Schuyler and Zora Neale Hurston, Sutton Griggs became conservative in his later years.  At one time he was a critic of Booker T. Washington; however, he later came to be seen by some people as Washington's successor in his efforts to cooperate with white Southern leaders.  Is this at all surprising to you?

            It makes sense to me.  If you want support, you have to be open to and appreciative of those people who are amenable to what you are trying to do.  I am living in a house [in Tuskegee, Alabama] that is ninety-five years old.  It has 12 x 12 beams, if you know anything about building.  It is my wife's family home.  There is a whole lot of history here.  I studied a lot about Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and learned about such things as the syphilis experiments.  I did my studying--my research--for Selma at Tuskegee.

Can you talk about the relationship between black Baptist activism and nonviolence?  Was this stressed at ABT as well as in the sessions run by Rev. James Lawson, Jr., Rev. C. T. Vivian, and others that you attended?

There were some particular black Baptist preachers who were committed to nonviolence.  It was not automatic that you embraced nonviolence.  When I was a child, I experienced shoot outs in the church in Tampa.  Many ministers were former military people.  This was true in Tampa and Tuskegee.  So it was not as simple for them to embrace nonviolence.  Even when you had ministers who were not in the military, they presided over military funerals.  One of the things we talk about when we talk about the Movement is nonviolence.  Integration and nonviolence; economic, cultural, and political differences as well.  The whole idea of nonviolence was much more related to bringing about racial and cultural change. 

You organized Malcolm X's address in Selma shortly before his assassination, right?

            Yes.  My great grandfather was from France.  He came to Cuba to train the Cubans to fight the Spaniards.  My grandfather was born in Cuba.  I have relatives in France; I don't know them well.  I had to learn to appreciate different approaches.  I had to respect those who wanted to use force.  Stokely Carmichael was my cellmate on the Freedom Rides.  I have been told he mentioned my name in his last speech.  He couldn't bring his guns into the house in Chicago.

In the literary biography of Sutton Griggs I am working on, I characterize him as a "fighting peacemaker."  Is that how you see yourself and many of your ABT and Civil Rights Movement peers?

            I am a nonviolent advocate devoting myself to following in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. James Lawson, Jr.  It's a way of life for me.  I'll give you an example.  The Fellowship of Reconciliation took a group to Vietnam to learn more about what was happening there [in July 1970].  We learned that anti-war protesters had been prosecuted and persecuted and killed as we had been in the United States.  I was at Harvard at the time.  I went with Fellowship of Reconciliation members--Veterans against the War, draft card burners, Jewish rabbis, and a number of other groups.  Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore and Rabbi Balfour Brickner were two of the leaders of the whole thing.  It was for one week.  We interviewed a lot of people.  We had heard that Buddhist monks were setting themselves on fire.  Student protesters were water-boarded, imprisoned, had galvanized nails driven in their fingernails, were put in tiger cages--created by the French--in which they couldn't stand up.  There were private prison cells discovered behind the walls.  On the last day, in the last session, a march to the US Embassy was proposed.  I was against the idea.  We had plane tickets to leave that same day.  There was a long discussion.  I finally agreed to the march but wouldn't lead it.  Saigon troops were throwing tear-gas canisters and beating people.  The Vietnamese women had slices of lime under their skirts to rub over their eyes, so they knew what was coming.  I still have a spent tear-gas canister.  It says: Made in Indianapolis.  We planned to cross a wall of the university in Saigon.  Many of the Vietnamese were short so we had to lift them up with our hands.  A line of Molotov cocktails had been prepared.  We didn't know about this.  There were soldiers with their guns drawn.  That was a very controversial situation.  I took over and said, "Everybody hold hands."  The students resisted, saying, "In Vietnam, Vietnamese decide."  But we had to get away from the wall with the Molotov cocktails.  Holding hands showed the soldiers we had no weapons.  I shouted, "Three steps forward!"  We were holding hands, we stretched out, and the smoke began to clear.  We took three steps and stopped.  The soldiers started to back up.  It could have been disastrous.

            3. The Civil Rights Movement

My aunt was a Roman Catholic nun and an academic, the head of the Sociology department at a Catholic college in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I vividly recall her talking about being called to go to Selma when I was growing up.  In fact, her substantial obituary in the Milwaukee paper was entitled "Gruesser Never Forgot Meeting King," and, when I toured the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis ten or fifteen years ago, I saw a picture of her in the Selma section.  It was around that time that I came to realize that she is one of the reasons why so much of my scholarship has to do with African American literature and culture.  All of this is to say that what you and others accomplished at Selma and elsewhere--your bravery and your perfect moral compass--has had effects that have continued to ramify in large and small ways to the present day.  Do you have any thoughts about this?

            I remember nuns who came down to participate.  That is the thing that is very powerful that we can't forget when we talk about the Movement, and what made the change--that's the effect of nonviolence.  There were several people who made the difference.  Viola Liuzzo picked me up in Birmingham because I couldn't get a flight to Montgomery.  She was killed by the Klan in Selma.  Every night I get a call from her daughter Mary.  I had to think of a way to help her, to take the stress off her.  So I have her tell me a joke each night.

Are they funny?

            Some are crazy as hell.  Sometimes it's a riddle.  But the preoccupation--that's the point.  I had to find a way to achieve stress resolution for her.  She had a Klan member apologize to her.  I never met the people who attacked me in Selma.  I could have been killed in Selma the same night that Medgar Evers died.  Some of the marshals in Selma were actually gang members from Chicago.  I trained them in nonviolence.  One of them on the march to Montgomery, Lamar McCoy, who always wore a tam or a beret, was the head of the Vice Lords, from West Side Chicago.

Rev. C. T. Vivian, who died the same day as John Lewis earlier this year, attended ABT but was older, had previous Civil Rights experience, and was married.  Although he participated in the Freedom Rides and the activism at Selma and elsewhere, did you regard him as a peer or a mentor?

            Rev. C. T. Vivian was a mentor because of his experience and his age.  Our birthdays were one day apart.  There was one restaurant where we would go to celebrate.  He was my cellmate on the Freedom Rides.  We would play a punning word game, and one time a jailer came to take us out of the cell, and we told him to wait so that we could finish the game.  We continued to play that game for the rest of Rev. Vivian's life.  My birthday was July 29th; C. T.'s was July 30th.  I had already bought him his birthday card [before he died].  I talked to John Lewis on the phone five days before he died.  He said he just waited to hear my voice.  I don't get out to marches.  My job is training.  On the morning that Dr. King died he said to me that we had to nationalize and internationalize nonviolence.  That's why I went back to school.  My work reaches sixty countries around the world.  Recently there were 100,000 people on one of my Zoom calls.

I read that you were asked whether your current work is anti-climactic following the intensity of the Civil Rights Movement.  You said no, because you see the work being done now as part of a continuum.  Is it fair to regard Sutton Griggs as part of this larger continuum?

            Yes, absolutely.  I just got off a Zoom call for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in Connecticut.  A park there named after a white slaveholder is being renamed.   This is very current with the kinds of things that Griggs was trying to do, and this type of renaming is very much a part of what's being done today.

How does Black Lives Matter relate to this continuum?

            It was interesting because it began as a continuation of the NAACP.  That was an organization that was started by black folks to let white people know that black people have value.  It was an organization made up of black professionals but had many white members.  I joined the NAACP when I was eleven years old in Tampa. 

Most police forces are now integrated but in certain communities some of the white law enforcement officers embrace white supremacy.  How can this be counteracted?

            Well, one of things I do is train black and white policemen in nonviolence.  I just did this via Zoom in Connecticut.  The entire police force in Montgomery, Alabama, was trained by someone here in Tuskegee.  We have to be open and honest about the fact that we do have violence in the black community.  One thing I didn't mention is that at American Baptist College I taught or set up a course for women prisoners.  We offered them classes and had scholarships for them.  I do a lot of training on the inside of prisons.  This is the best way for the people there to use their time.  I established the Alternative to Violence Project, which is now in sixty countries.  Some of my top trainers are former police officers and former inmates as well.  When some of the white officers are racist, how do you expect the black police officers to work with them?  The training is for all police officers.  We do role reversal.  White policemen play the role of black victims.  There's not a lot of verbiage.  We give them instruction on what to act out.

What are some things that people do not know about the Civil Rights Movement and its major players?

            The first thing to be remembered is that you have to be a person of conscience.  You can't allow an unjust action to go unchallenged and an unjust situation to take place.  The Civil Rights Movement gave us that example.  We are complicit when we are silent.  During the sit-ins, a young white fellow came and lit the hair of a girl next to me on fire.  She was from Tennessee State or Fisk.  She sat there stoically.  But I couldn't just sit there.  I tried to put my hand there to put it out.  She said: "Don't interfere with my suffering."  This is a dilemma to me even now.  Did I do the right thing?

I think you did the right thing and believe that "Interfere with Somebody's Suffering" would be an excellent motto to live by.

            Yes.  To get back to Black Lives Matter: all lives deserve equality.  Why do all lives matter?  Black Lives Matter says because we are all equal, all one.  Don't separate black folks from everyone else.  

I read that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tapped you for the Poor People's Campaign.  Had Dr. King not been killed, do you think it could have been a success?

            I don't know.  It would have been different if he had lived.  We didn't fully discuss the planning for it.  He was called to Memphis to support the striking garbage workers before this could be done.  He called me in as program administrator.  Hosea Williams was in charge of Voter Registration, James Bevel Direct Action, and Dorothy Cotton the Citizen Education Program--literature and that kind of thing.  Operation Bread Basket was the first of its kind.  My job was to supervise all of the staff people.  Dr. King was planning to go to Memphis and come back the same day.  We had to imagine what was in his mind.  We tried to put it into effect.  The basic concept was to put a face on poverty.  The whole idea was to get elected officials to see poverty.  That's why we set up meetings with elected officials.

Did you regard LBJ as an ally or an adversary?  Had he not gotten bogged down in the Vietnam War, could and would he have been able to do more to improve race relations in the country?

            Yes, I do.  I think that took him away from what he was trying to do.  We got a permit to be on the Mall.  The Congress even held hearings and invited Poor People's Campaign members to testify.  There was a government official assigned to each of the mule trains.  Why?  The reason was to see whether we had the right kind of horseshoes!  Some people thought Mud City was caused by cloud seeding.

Is there anything that I didn't ask that I should have or anything else that you would like to say? 

            There are a number of things related to my international involvement in nonviolent education, but we do not have time for that now.  One thing we didn't talk about is why the Southern Baptists started supporting black Baptists.  At one time, Southerners didn't believe that black folks had souls.  [But when black Baptists began educating themselves] the Southern Baptists didn't want to be left out.  As a result, they played a significant role in educating black clergy. 

        Interview of Rev. Dr. Randolph Meade Walker, Pastor of Castalia Baptist Church, Memphis, TN, and author of The Metamorphosis of Sutton E. Griggs, at his Church, 11/21/19

When did you become interested in Griggs?  (Your thesis cites an interview in 1975 in which you discuss him.)

I don't know when I first heard of him, but what spurred me to investigate him was David Tucker, who said he was bought and became an Uncle Tom.  Same with Booker T. Washington, it's impossible to adequately appraise him.  You have to look at the time.  Washington had to carve out an existence for Tuskegee in the face of white opposition.  After his death, Griggs saw the importance of Washington--the institution he built.  You have to look at what Griggs did with Tabernacle, the most influential and largest church in Memphis.  Raymond Hooks (Benjamin Hooks's brother) knew Rev. Griggs and swam in his pool--the only one [available to blacks] in Memphis.  It likely had the first gym, too.  Castalia has a gymnasium one hundred years after Griggs’ Tabernacle. This shows how far ahead he was in providing African Americans facilities for recreation and exercise.  There were a lot of firsts that Griggs accomplished.  His downfall was that he was not a businessman, like [Marcus] Garvey.  Great dreams, great ideas.  Charles Dinkins was one of the pastors who followed Griggs, years later, at First Baptist East Nashville. He said people in the congregation complained that Griggs was never there.  I have been partially convinced of [the validity] of Griggs's and Washington's views.  Memphis is one of the poorest cities in the country, with the legacy of sharecropping in the area and migration to the city.  There was no compulsory education in Mississippi until the 1970s.  Many illiterate people came to Memphis from Mississippi and elsewhere.  That's why Griggs and Washington were against people going to the cities.  There is no place for uneducated people in urban society--computer illiterate people, too.

Do you think you know him even though there are no personal letters or papers?  As you read him, can you hear his voice?

My major professor [at the University of Memphis], Charles Crawford, said, "Who is better qualified to do this work than you?"  A lot of what Griggs faced as a scholarly preacher in Memphis still exists.  The Crump Machine forced him to speak with a different voice.  See my 1979 article "The Role of the Black Clergy in Memphis in the Crump Era."  Crump controlled everything.  Here's a prime example: Albert Long, pastor of the First Baptist Beale Church in the 1940s.  [Black labor leader] A. Philip Randolph was going to come to Memphis.  Because of Randolph's reputation, Crump said in the newspapers, "We don't need this outside trouble-maker coming to Memphis."  One pastor rescinded his invitation to Randolph.  Albert Long invited him to First Baptist Beale.  Crump had his spies in the audience.  Why wasn't Griggs lynched in his early years?  Whites didn't read his early works.

Have your ideas about Griggs changed in any way, and, if so, how?

Not at all.  I was greatly influenced by Rev. Griggs.  I went through a metamorphosis reading him.  I am a believer in social efficiency.  There are seeds of black nationalism in Griggs--building for yourself, doing for yourself, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.  Griggs changed when he came to Memphis.  He saw that Booker T. Washington was accepted.  Griggs was trying to get blacks to change their behavior.  He became a deep Washingtonian after this change.  We don't champion the victories today.  In Righteous Discontent, Evelyn Higginbotham shows how literacy made such a difference--the phenomenal increase from 1865 to 1900.  There was a book by a black man, G. P. Hamilton, called The Bright Side of Memphis that was published in 1908.  1908!  Griggs needed to hold up examples of the progress.  I have seen things happen in my life that I never thought would happen--[Douglas] Wilder's election in Virginia, Obama's.  It's been a journey of progress.  Griggs was one of those voices looking for the positive.

Why do you think there has been resistance to your "metamorphosis" thesis by people such as Finnie Coleman, Kenneth Warren, and Eric Curry?

A lot of people misread my thesis.  Griggs was a thinker.  This man moved from where he was in the beginning.  But he was reacting to Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page.  Reactionaries don't contribute anything.  You must make your own contributions.  Social efficiency was his. Griggs thought himself into his final position.  He was a complex man.  The last thing he was was confused, as one of the members of my dissertation committee claimed.  He changed his racial, social, and theological views.

Certainly his metamorphosis is "tragic," as you assert in your thesis, but does the legacy of the American Baptist Theological Seminary [now American Baptist College] and Griggs Hall there, the role they played in the Nashville sit-ins and the Civil Rights Movement, mitigate the "tragedy" of his life?

I suppose it does, but I think the participants in the Movement are unaware of the connection.  When I spoke to the President of American Baptist College [Forrest Harris], he didn't really know about Griggs.

You defend Griggs from Tucker's charge of selling out--rightly so, I think--but you fault him for egotism, asking why he kept producing books with large print runs.  But we really don't know how large the print runs were, although we can assume they were large or larger in the cases of The Hindered Hand and Wisdom's Call.  It also seems possible that even if Griggs had sold every copy he produced, he still would have lost money because of the costs of producing, marketing, promoting, and selling his books.

I still think it was egotism.  Not a vain egotism.  I think he thought he had the pulse of the negro problem.  Du Bois and Griggs were both frustrated intellectuals.  Had all of this education but didn't have anyone to share their deep thoughts with.  Du Bois goes from Harvard to Wilberforce, I believe, and then Atlanta.   

You were at LeMoyne-Owen College for many years as a faculty member.  Were you ever able to locate any of the books in Griggs's library that his widow Emma donated to LeMoyne (in an arrangement brokered by Hugh Gloster, who later became the President of Morehouse)?

I was there twenty-five years, fifteen as a full time professor.  I never came across these volumes.  Griggs was very redundant in the sources he cites.  I met Gloster.  He never understood Griggs.  Griggs raises his voice against the status quo--that's what is radical about him; that's radical thinking.

From around 1906 on, Griggs is often referred to as "Dr." Sutton E. Griggs.  Did he ever receive a Doctor of Divinity degree like his father, who was given an honorary one?

It is church culture.  In church circles, it is quite common to use "Dr." in connection with a preacher.  A local white preacher, Jimmy Latimer, was known as "Dr. Latimer."  Griggs's scholarship was way above the average preacher in Memphis or the nation.  Today there is a D.M., Doctor of Ministry--a practical not an academic degree, with a project, not a thesis.

Is there anything else you would like to say about Griggs?

In summary, I find him terribly, terribly fascinating, and I have been influenced by him.  He has shaped me.  He and T. O. Fuller were rare gems of the ministry in the eras they lived.  Griggs was more of a philosopher, Fuller more of a pragmatist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

(Under Construction)

Heartfelt thanks are due to:

--Longtime colleague and good friend Hanna Wallinger, co-editor of the scholarly edition of The Hindered Hand

--Alisha Knight

--Michael Winship

--Tess Chakkalakal

--Ken Warren

--John Ernest

--Joycelyn Moody

--Randall Burkett

--Michael Winship

--Giulia Fabi

--Andreá Williams

--Caroline Levander and Rachel Adams

--Bobby L. Lovett

--Adrian Greene

--Gabriel Briggs

--John C. Barton

--Obie Greenleaf, Sr.

--Donna Hunt

--Roy Cotton

--Sergio Saravia

--LaDonna Boyd

--Karin Riedler

--Rob Jones

--Robert Lee

--Everyone at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, especially Bill Sumners, Taffey Hall, and Albert Wardin

--Deborah May et al. at the Nashville Public Library

--Adam Zimmerli at the Virginia Union University Library

--Kyle Hovious at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Library

--Janet Winfield at the American Baptist Historical Society

--The Baptist History and Heritage Society, especially Bruce Gourley

--Liz Miraglia, Betty C. Bolden, and Gregory Simpson at Union Theological Seminary's Burke Library

--Robert Cruthirds et al. at the Memphis Public Library

--Thomas Roche and Courtney Chartier at the Emory University Library

--Aslaku Berhanu at Temple University's Charles L. Blockson Collection

--Chantel Clark at the Fisk University Library

--Librarians at Kean University

--Librarians at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

--Librarians at Princeton University

--Librarians at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, especially Darla Brock and Ed Byrne

--Wendy Cole and Dealey Campbell at the Dallas Historical Society

--Rev. Randolph Meade Walker

--Dr. Bernard Lafayette