Talk to professional storyteller and retired social studies teacher Jim Gregory and he'll tell you about his experiences as a young white man who accidentally got involved in the civil rights movement.
Gregory, 75, who once taught in Tampa and now lives in Miami, will recall tooling around the South in a converted school bus on a mission to take used school books to African-American children who had few of their own.
He'll hint at the apparent lynching of an electrician he had been teaching to read and write so he could register to vote. And he might ponder about what he sees as the difference between the struggle for racial justice then and now.
Gregory, who will be in St. Petersburg Sunday to tell his story at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, gave a preview to the Tampa Bay Times.
How did you become involved in the civil rights movement?
It all started the year I graduated from high school and I had just acquired a motorcycle. I had heard about Florida and how beautiful it was, and like any 18-year-old boy, I decided to go see for myself. I was coming back and stopped in Mobile to get something to eat and at the time, I didn't realize what was going on and I got involved in a sit-in.
You didn't know that you were sitting next to protestors?
They actually walked in behind me and they sat down. I had no idea what they were doing or why they were there. In my school in California … the community I lived in was totally racially mixed. So when these people showed up, it didn't cross my mind that they were doing anything they shouldn't be doing.
You ended up in jail with about five or six other people, including a minister. What happened then?
He spent most of the rest of the evening talking to me and by morning, I was totally convinced that things weren't going to be able to keep going that way. We discussed bus stations and waiting rooms, movie theaters and schools.
How did you end up teaching black students in the South and becoming involved in Freedom Summer?
A roommate and I found an article in Popular Mechanics about how to turn a school bus into an RV. I bought the bus. We fixed up the bus. We started collecting textbooks and going from one black school to the other. This young lady that joined us had heard something about what was happening at Miami of Ohio in preparation for Freedom Summer.
What was Freedom Summer?
Freedom Summer was an effort to open Freedom schools in Mississippi and teach people how to pass voter registration tests.
How is the struggle for fair treatment different today?
I feel that the violence of today would have been counter-productive to Dr. King's message. He would never have agreed to burning down stores and shooting police. He was all about nonviolence. If you look at the nonviolent protests of the '60s, those protests were successful. I don't believe that the type of protests going on today are going to accomplish what minorities want them to accomplish.
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Explore all your optionsContact Waveney Ann Moore at wmoore@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2283. Follow @wmooretimes.