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Introduction Through the hazy blue light of the Mt. Konocti Blues Club, one night in De­ cem­ ber 2005, Bettie Mae Fikes’s deep contralto sang out “This Little Light of Mine” with as much passion as she had when she was a teenager with the SNCC Freedom Singers. As we sat around the table, my friends Charles “Chuck” Bonner and Luke (Bob) Block and I swapped tales about our arrests and close calls with Klansmen in the backwoods of Wilcox County, Ala­ bama. Luke, Charles, and I hadn’t seen each other in forty years. Later that night, Charles exclaimed, “We are so lucky that we all survived!” And Luke declared, “That’s the truth! You know Maria, we should go back and find out what happened to those folks—Ethel Brooks, Dan and Juanita Harrell , the Crawfords, all of ’em.” Luke Block (then called Bob Block) and I (then called Joyce Brians) were among hundreds of white student civil rights workers who joined the voter registration movement during the Freedom Summer of 1965. When I met him, Luke had been working with Charles Bonner of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Daniel Harrell of South­ ern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for several months. Charles Bonner, a Selma native, had been demonstrating for equal rights since he was a child. That spring, as a nineteen-­ year-­ old San Francisco State College freshman, I responded to Dr. King’s call for voter registration volunteers by signing up for the SCLC Summer Community Organization and Po­ liti­ cal Education (SCOPE) project, which conducted the last large integrated voter registration drive prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in August. Luke and Charles befriended me soon after I arrived at my assignment in Wilcox County. For over ten years before our reunion at Clear Lake, I had been working on a memoir based on letters I wrote home to my supporters and family in 1965, trying to recapture the emotional truth of that time. 2 / Introduction After our forty-­ year reunion, I knew it couldn’t be just my story—not even just our story. I had to rediscover and include the incredible free­ dom fighters of Wilcox County who invited us to share their struggle. In 2008, three years after our first reunion, Luke and I returned to Wilcox County together. One of our first stops was the site of the old Camden, Ala­ bama, jail where we had been briefly incarcerated. As we stared at the empty red dirt lot, being there in safety felt almost surreal. A sheriff’s deputy smiled as he drove by without questioning us. Luke said, “I guess all the officers are black now, so we likely won’t be arrested today.” Luke came for healing; I came with questions. What difference did the movement make? Did we cause more harm than good? What did the community hold dear from those days and what part of the dream was still unfulfilled? As I sought out people we had known, I rediscovered an extended family of those who risked their lives for the right to vote, a right that had been denied black citizens in the South for nearly one hundred years after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Few recalled me by name; more recalled Luke. I was but a flicker through their lives and a brief partner in their struggle, welcome but temporary extra help in the long free­ dom fight. Nearly everyone I contacted was generous with their time, their stories, and their acceptance of my small role in their historic battle for the right to vote. This book has three primary aims. Foremost is to honor the courageous civil rights activists of Wilcox County, Ala­ bama, by creating a venue in which they can tell their own stories, in their own words. Second is to document that local black activists were both the leaders and the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. SCLC and SNCC recruited volunteers to add arms and legs to their ongoing free­ dom fight, not to take charge of local organizing efforts. Third, by describing in detail my youthful civil rights experience, I hope to inspire others to consider their role in ending poverty and prejudice. This memoir and work of creative nonfiction is written from the cheerfully biased point of view of a civil rights activist. Unlike purely sociological or his­ tori­ cal accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, these participant-­ witness accounts are...

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