Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas

7. Excerpts from an Interview with Jim Jones

7. Excerpts from an Interview with Jim Jones ROBERT WRIGHT, CIVIL RIGHTS DOCUMENTATION PROJECT Jim Jones is a native Arkansan who became the second director of the SNCC Arkansas Project. After SNCC dissolved, he continued his activism as the training director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization created in 1967 to empower African American farmers. He later moved to Texas where he worked as the director of produce marketing for the state’s Department of Agriculture. WRIGHT. This is Robert Wright . . . The date is October 15, 1970. I am in Atlanta, Georgia, interviewing Mr. Jim Jones or James Jones . . . a former head of SNCC in Arkansas. Okay, Jimmie, I thought we could start off by getting some of your personal background like where you were born, where you are from, where you went to school, and how you first got involved with Arkansas SNCC . . . JONES. I was born there in Arkansas in a small town called Louisville, Arkansas, in south central Arkansas.1 Grew up there on a small farm that my father owned. Managed to finish high school and graduated from high school and had a scholarship to Arkansas A & M College . . . After beginning there and I had been in school not a full year, in February, I believe, there were a . . . series of meetings that was held by a few people on campus 101 Source: Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University there, talking about the discriminations that existed within the city and among black people . . . I said that I was interested in seeing such segregation brought to an end and there was also another six or seven students who also expressed a similar interest. WRIGHT. Do you remember many of the people? JONES. In that group of people there was Bob Wickfield from Little Rock . . .2 JONES. There was myself. There was a gentleman named Charles Wiggins from Texarkana, Arkansas, Leon Nash from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Ben Grenish, who is a student from Philander Smith College who would come and sit in on the meetings with us along with Bill Hansen, who at that time was a field worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . . .3 So we decided we were going to sit in at Woolworth lunch counter as our beginning approach, when we did, the morning of February 1, 1960, I believe was the day.4 WRIGHT. You mean you had these meetings before the sit-in movement started? JONES. Well, that was when—well, this was ’61, a year later. WRIGHT. Okay, right. JONES. So we all, we sat in and at that time there was some discussion between us and some students at Little Rock, at Philander Smith College . . . The Chamber of Commerce and all those people and they decided to open up public accommodation facilities. About a year later we came back and decided that Pine Bluff should be a second place and this was when we began. I believe this was February ’63, a little bit longer than a year and we decided that we were going to sit in at Pine Bluff . . . WRIGHT. What did you call yourselves during this time? JONES. We hadn’t named ourselves. We just was a group of students out there doing our thing kinda. When we did start in Pine Bluff with the exact same people involved we sat in for about five days and then we was given the ultimatum by the president of the college, A & M. We had the choice of either continue to sit in at our own expense meaning we would be suspended or we could voluntarily withdraw from college or voluntarily withdraw from the sit-in and come back to school . . . We decided . . . that for those who was not willing to take the risk of being suspended from school to withdraw from the group. We had about three people to withdraw from the group and we had about five I think left . . . We were suspended from school by the president the next week and I think a big turning point was when that became known a lot of political action took place in the state around the suspension of the students . . . When my mother came up she simply wanted to know if I was hurt and I told her 102 ROBERT WRIGHT everything was fine. That was all she wanted to know. Same thing with my father. Some of the students were reprimanded and...