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said that the senator was interested, and that I should keep in constant touch with him as to what was happening, like four or five times a day. It shouldn't be a total loss.

He didn't know when he told you to keep in constant touch--

Jean also became interested and that became a very, very important thing. Then the question became of how to get Coretta involved, and Stanley said that, “Coretta will become involved but you've got to prepare the groundwork. There were certain problems also.” The problems, as I learned, were that there were personality clashes, really more than personality, between Coretta and Abernathy, in terms of the leadership. Coretta was beginning to develop a leadership. She was becoming a leader in the media, and the more she became a leader in the media, the less Ralph liked that idea and felt that she might be planning to spin off another organization. So that we had to be very, very cautious of how we operated on that.

Then I talked with John Lewis in Atlanta, because he was going that weekend to a meeting at the John F. Kennedy Memorial, and he was supposed to speak to Ethel [Kennedy] and to the other people around there on the thing. He was going with Julian Bond. The question was how to get the material to him.

He said, “If you give the material to Bill Vanden Heuvel, he'll take it.” He said, “You're supposed to give me an envelope. You give me a package. I can't carry this.” I put everything in there. It included statements that had been issued on the strike and things that were going on. Anyway, it was discussed there. Another person who was there was Peter Edelman, who was on the staff of the Kennedy Memorial thing. He became interested in it. By this time, most people knew about it.

Most liberals.

Liberals. Because Jack Bass' stories began to appear like once a week or once in ten days, by a special correspondent. Then I got to reach a guy on the Washington Post, Ben Gilbert. I think he was an editor of the Washington Post. He was interested, so the Washington Post dispatched their Atlanta reporter to cover it in and out. Then Bruce Galphin. Ben was the editor of the Washington Post editorial page. I began to talk with the Times in terms of getting a reporter there, and they finally decided that Jim Wooten, their southern guy, would be stepping by. You know, he would drop by to see what was happening and occasionally file. By this time I was able to reach someone on Time and Newsweek. The guy from Time is now a