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entering Montgomery and met them outside of Montgomery and marched with them. The VID chartered a plane, and I went with them. It was very exciting, very exciting, especially since the Alabama national guard was lining the streets, allegedly to provide us some protection, but they all had on their uniforms little Confederate flags. It was very scary, very scary, and they looked at us very stony-faced. And then your imagination works, you know, and there had been people killed. I think that was ‘65 or ‘64.

I also remember in 1963 when there was a VID rally to encourage people to go to Washington on the march that Martin Luther King had in ‘63. I stood on this platform and I said to this crowd -- there were several hundred, I think; it took place on Washington Place east of Washington Square -- and I think I'm an honest guy intellectually and philosophically and I said to this crowd in 1963 (I think I was 38 years old; I'm not very good at arithmetic, but I think that's what I was -- I'm 51 today), and on this platform, by the way, was Herbert Hill, a white guy who was an organizer for the NAACP and is one of the most racist people I've ever met (he's white but he thinks of himself as a black; he says, “We blacks”; that's the kind of language he would employ), but in any event when I got on the platform I said, “You know, we are all racists, all of us. How could we be otherwise? We are the product of our environment, and we all have our prejudices. The blacks have them and the whites have them and every group has them. And the real question is controlling them, understanding what's rational and what's irrational.”