James Lee interview recording, 1994 June 09
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Gregory Hunter | Can you start by just telling us your name, and where you're from? | 0:12 |
James S. Lee | Okay. I'm Jim Lee. James S. Lee, I guess, if you want a more formal introduction. From Durham, North Carolina. | 0:17 |
Gregory Hunter | When were you born? | 0:36 |
James S. Lee | I was born June 20th, 1940. Here in— | 0:36 |
Michelle Mitchell | As we mentioned, we're very interested in finding out about your life history in context of Durham and growing up in the forties and fifties. And I think that Greg and I are most interested in starting off at a point that you think will be useful in terms of, not necessarily leading up to what led to your political involvement in the area, but just starting off at a useful point in terms of talking about growing up here in the area. | 0:48 |
James S. Lee | Okay. I mean, I don't know what a useful point is. It all seems useful in context, I guess. It all seems like it has some context in Jim Crow South, so. | 1:35 |
Gregory Hunter | What about your early childhood years? | 1:56 |
James S. Lee | Well, they were spent here in Durham, and I grew up in the area around NC Central. At that time it was called North Carolina College for Negroes, which itself was a Jim Crow designation. And my father was a biologist, head of the biology department at Central, which is what I call it now. And— | 1:58 |
Gregory Hunter | When did that school become Central, as opposed to North Carolina College? | 2:46 |
James S. Lee | I don't remember when that happened. It became North Carolina Central University when the entire state system was consolidated. So that's a fairly recent development. It had a couple of other incarnations between that. It was changed from North Carolina College for Negroes to just North Carolina College at Durham when it became unfashionable to make those designations, then it later became North Carolina Central, because the idea was to try and keep the NCC. | 2:50 |
Michelle Mitchell | [indistinct 00:03:42]? | 3:36 |
James S. Lee | Yeah, so people would keep the identity with it. But my earliest recollection was as a sign on the campus at the gate, calling it North Carolina College for Negros. So I grew up around that area on this side of Durham, which, in some sense it was across the tracks. It's like any other Southern town, it has as a set of tracks going through it. And Durham was not quite as cleanly divided as lots of Southern towns, in that there were Black neighborhoods scattered about the city. | 3:41 |
James S. Lee | So there were areas in East Durham and Walltown and North Durham and so forth that were also Black communities. So we all lived across the tracks, no matter where we were. There was this, I guess, designation, but it wasn't a common— That's something I came to understand as a designation not as a child, but as an adult, I just recognized what that represented. | 4:44 |
James S. Lee | The neighborhood that I actually grew up in was mainly middle class, upper middle class, and with a couple of residents who I think by most standards would qualify as fairly wealthy. But there was a lot of— I guess within the Black community, a fair amount of class integration. So those big demarcations weren't there within the professional class. And there's a wide range of incomes and so forth, but they were all middle class or whatever. | 5:13 |
James S. Lee | This community was at that time close to what was the outskirts of Durham, the end of Durham as a city. And a little bit beyond Central was a fairly rural area. It wasn't actually a farm area as I grew up, but it wasn't very far removed from that. It wasn't very well developed. So it wasn't a very long walk from where I lived into a fairly sparsely populated area. | 6:11 |
James S. Lee | I went to public schools here in Durham, went to Whitted School and Pearson School and Hillside School. And those things went through various incarnations. What was at one time Whitted School was changed to Hillside and so forth. But they were all within walking distance of where I lived. And it wasn't until I went to, I guess Hillside High School— No, that's not true. I guess it wasn't until I went to what was to become a junior high school that I personally had regular encounters with people who weren't immediately from my neighborhood, people who came to the only school in town from various other communities in the city. | 7:11 |
James S. Lee | So that was one artifact of, I guess, Jim Crow, is no matter where in the city you lived, if you went to high school, you wound up at Hillside, because that was it at the time. But prior to that, everybody had pretty much neighborhood schools that they went to. | 8:23 |
Gregory Hunter | What were those schools like? [crosstalk 00:09:01] the neighborhood? | 8:52 |
James S. Lee | Well, I think my school experiences were typical of just about everybody else's. You had mean teachers and nice teachers. You had the ones that you dreaded or the ones you didn't. They tended to be supportive. I always felt, I don't know whether it was just a perception or whether it was actually true, that I had some limits based on "I know your daddy" kind of stuff. And so in that sense, it was real, real personal. | 9:04 |
James S. Lee | It's the kind of things that you probably heard about being in segregated school systems, where the teachers, they were a part of the community. They lived in the community, and they did know most people's daddies and mommies, and they could say, "Look." It's a very direct kind of influence that they had, so a lot of what I think has become much more impersonal wasn't necessarily a part of the situation. | 9:49 |
James S. Lee | I don't think that was an unusual experience. I think that was pretty typical in Southern segregated school systems. And people just knew everybody. So in some sense it was very— and I use the word nurturing, not to imply pandering, but you did feel like somebody cared what happened to you, whether you made it or you didn't, or that sort of thing. So overall, I thought that was a pretty positive experience I had. There were a few teachers that stand out who I thought were, in retrospect, particularly talented and helpful as teachers, who pushed us to our limits in ways that other teachers maybe didn't do. So overall, I thought it was a pretty positive thing. | 10:27 |
James S. Lee | Just thinking back in terms of a racial context, we had racial things that went on in the school that were kind of routine, but we didn't pay much attention to them as racial things. We would sing the Negro national anthem, as we called it, as part of the devotional period sometimes, or as part of school things. But it was just that. It was not ever, as I can recall, put in any— no major effort was made to put it in context. It was just something, it was part of the repertoire that we sang. As unfortunate, it was Dixie and Old Black Joe and a whole bunch of other stuff that was— Well seriously, these things were also sung as part of devotion, or as some school exercises. | 11:50 |
James S. Lee | There were other kinds of things which were put forth as entertainment. I remember there's this fire chief used to come, this White fire chief used to come to the school during fire prevention days, and the firemen would come and show us how to jump out windows into fire nets and all that as part of fire drills and stuff like this. But there was also this fire chief who would entertain the children with his version of Mammy's Little Baby Loves Shortening Bread, which is also, it's all these things going on. | 13:17 |
James S. Lee | And they were things that if we see them happening now with today's consciousness, or last decade's consciousness or 1960s consciousness, mean certain kinds of teachings. But for us, they were not necessarily placed in any kind of context, or they were just part of the culture that was put out there. So you get on the one hand teachers who lead you in Lift Every Voice and Sing, but who on the other hand don't say anything when the fire chief is singing Mammy's Little Baby Has a Little Shortening Bread or whatever. | 14:09 |
James S. Lee | So in some sense, maybe the political context was allowed to evolve on its own. And I can remember very little real teaching about slavery as an experience. For example, it was certainly taught, it was not ignored as something that happened, but it was taught more as maybe the cause of the Civil War, or that it was taught as, something happened to us and we recognized it was part of our legacy, but it was certainly far from being taught as anything like Holocaust, or as a major kind of thing. | 15:08 |
James S. Lee | And then even what we really, I think, took out of that was maybe not so much recognition of what that experience was, but recognition of great people who rose out of those ashes. So that was the context in which you got to the Booker T. Washingtons and the Frederick Douglasses and Sojourner Truth, you know, those kinds of people. George Washington Carver was a major big time favorite to be talked about, because he was— | 16:29 |
James S. Lee | So I think a lot of the early childhood experiences were not particularly— I mean, they were consciousness raising experiences just because of the context that we existed in, but I don't remember the instructional processes moving us in any particular direction or fomenting struggle, let me put it that way. | 17:14 |
James S. Lee | Also, in the context of coming up, in retrospect, you can see where there were class and color divisions within the community. Those were very, very, very clear parts of what it was. And then those were things that were— I think children have a kind of honest consciousness about that. Adults, if they have a consciousness about it, tend to be a little bit more dishonest or not deal with it, not confront it for what it is. But I think children are a lot more honest about it, either in a aggressive way from insults and name calling and that kind of thing to a more analytical and thoughtful kind of way. | 17:54 |
James S. Lee | So that was a part of it as well. Challenges to— Well, I mean, Jim Crow was pretty thorough in this area. Buses were segregated, facilities were segregated. Lunch counters weren't segregated, you just couldn't go to them. It wasn't a matter of (laughs) a Black lunch counter and a White lunch counter, just no lunch counter. Theater was segregated. If you went at all, you had to sit in a balcony or go through a special entrance and that sort of thing. And at that time, there was a fairly thriving Black business district, and at one time there were actually two— | 19:06 |
Michelle Mitchell | Two districts? | 20:08 |
James S. Lee | No, two theaters. Two theaters. | 20:08 |
Gregory Hunter | You're talking about the nineteen— late fifties, or? | 20:11 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. Excuse me. Oh, okay, yeah, there was just the Hayti section, as we called it. | 20:13 |
Gregory Hunter | Hayti? | 20:26 |
James S. Lee | Hayti, yeah. Where it gets its name from, I still don't know, but I suppose it has some connection to Haiti maybe, or something like that. | 20:31 |
Gregory Hunter | It's spelled the same way? | 20:45 |
James S. Lee | No, it's H-A-Y-T-I. | 20:45 |
Gregory Hunter | Oh. | 20:47 |
Michelle Mitchell | Is that up where the Hayti Heritage Center is? | 20:48 |
James S. Lee | Well, where the Hayti Heritage Center is is actually where St. Joseph's Church used to be. What is Fayetteville Street now used to run— it didn't take the path that it now takes, but it took a path that took it in front of the Heritage Center, and a little further down, it intersected what was called Pettigrew Street. And that strip alongside the railroad tracks from Fayetteville Street down Pettigrew Street all the way to Roxboro Street was the Black business district, and then a little bit up Fayetteville Street coming back this way. | 20:52 |
James S. Lee | So in that area, there were a couple of drug stores and lots of barber shops and restaurants, and there was a printing establishment, there was a newspaper. There were a couple of theaters, a barber college, a number of other businesses, as well as offices for attorneys. It's just a whole district that was there. That was destroyed in the urban renewal process in the sixties, affectionately called as "Negro Removal" as it was in many other areas. And despite promises to the contrary, the district was never really rebuilt. It never really recovered from that. And now what you have is basically a freeway, and it's all gone. | 21:35 |
Michelle Mitchell | Were these businesses Black owned or Black run? | 22:44 |
James S. Lee | They were Black owned. | 22:45 |
Michelle Mitchell | Okay. | 22:45 |
James S. Lee | Yeah, they were Black owned. | 22:46 |
James S. Lee | So depending on how energetic one felt, from this area, you either walked down to that area to go to the movies or took the bus, the Fayetteville Street bus, and rode down there. And there were little stores along the way as well as residents up and down Fayetteville Street. But the businesses were all Black owned. | 22:49 |
James S. Lee | And Durham's had a fairly viable commercial sector for a long time. It I guess got started with the Mutual Insurance Company and the Mechanics and Farmers Bank and some other places. So there's been a pretty, I guess, viable Black business community here for a long time. And I certainly remember many, many Black professionals, business people, store owners, operators of various sorts, and some even have a few little shady characters around. (laughs) | 23:21 |
Gregory Hunter | Who were they? (laughs) | 24:14 |
James S. Lee | Oh no, see, I shouldn't be talking about people like that after they're dead. But they were people who operated— There were a few club operators around who would flirt with legalities as far as availability of liquor after hours and admissions of minors to their premises. And probably doing a little trafficking in women, actually, to take care of the soldiers from Fort Bragg. There was a little bit of that going on. And after hours, liquor joints, and most of the intoxicants that I was familiar with in those days, it was basically alcohol, but it was still illegal. And so that sort of stuff was going on. | 24:15 |
James S. Lee | Basically, the other thing I remember about the community is that it felt very safe to wander around in. And even though young people tended to be territorial, and if you happened to be interested in a girl from another community, you took your ass in your hands when you went to see her (laughs)— But that's all it was. Usually the worst that would happen would be some kind of confrontation, and a satisfactory outcome was often for you to admit you didn't belong there or something like that. It was never— Nobody got shot behind that kind of stuff, you know? Fights were not considered to be life threatening. | 25:28 |
James S. Lee | But my personal experience was not fraught with a lot of confrontation. I mean, I had to think hard to remember more than a couple fights I was in when I was a kid. Let's see, what else? Well, that sort of sets the stage. I don't think my personal situation was all that typical. It was probably very atypical in a way. | 26:38 |
James S. Lee | First of all, just being at NC Central— And I say being at NC Central, and I was not a student there, but I, like a few of my cohorts, basically had the run of the campus. And so aside from the just physical facilities provided by the community at large, we had access to stuff on the campus that just any old body couldn't come and deal with. So we had access to the swimming pool in a way that other people might not have, or the gymnasium, or, although I didn't take great advantage of it, the library. | 27:24 |
James S. Lee | But I think more important was just access to that fairly well developed intellectual community. And all of that implied, whether you appreciated it or not, or understood what it was, just a chance to encounter a wide variety of people who had a wide variety of interests and skills and talents and abilities. And so I grew up in a very rich personal environment in that sense. | 28:11 |
James S. Lee | These were also people who, I think many of them were maybe more politically conscious of what their environment was and what the whole environment was. And I'm sure some of that stuff rubbed off in ways that I didn't necessarily appreciate at the time, which I recognize now molded me. Personally I never really understood a lot of the stuff that I was exposed to that I thought was unjust. I personally could never understand why it was necessary to have a fight every time we went to play Ligon High School in Raleigh. That didn't make any sense to me. | 28:54 |
Gregory Hunter | Is that a White school? | 30:07 |
James S. Lee | No, no it was a Black school. And fact is, my mother worked in Raleigh, she was a librarian. I'll tell you a little bit more about her later. So Raleigh was a part of my world, and so it was not alien area, so it didn't make any sense to me that you define people by their geography. And so— | 30:08 |
James S. Lee | I remember very early on having problems with those kinds of divisions. In fact, being essentially a divisionless person in terms of that. I mean, I knew people from lots of different places in the United States and a few from outside the United States. There were not a lot of non-nationals at Central, but there were a few. So these barriers, I think part of this environment was to help me get more international in my perspective. | 30:35 |
James S. Lee | So I have very strong memories of being an early resistor to divisions. Most of them didn't make sense to me, including within our own community, class and color divisions. They just did not make sense. They were not part of what fit into my head. Resistance is something that I think came early to us. I remember we were old enough to be able to drive, but still in high school and going around to these places that we knew we were not welcome at and going to a drive up place and ordering food, knowing full well you're not going to be served and waiting for someone to say, "We're sorry, we don't serve Negroes here." And we'll say, "That's okay. We don't eat Negroes," and drive away. | 31:12 |
James S. Lee | And it was kind of the seeds of confrontation. And this was pre-sit-ins and pre-stuff, but the consciousness was there that just something like that, "I don't know how long we're going to be able to put up with it, but we're starting to confront stuff like that." I remember, oh, the other thing that we would often do is go to segregated places and order a whole bunch of food. | 32:47 |
James S. Lee | Again, this is prior to sit-ins. I graduated from high school in '57, so this was going on prior to '57. We'd go to segregated lunch counter, and those that you could stand at the end of the counter, you couldn't sit down, you could stand in at the counter and order something to take out. And we would order just a whole bunch of stuff and then leave it, (Mitchell laughs) just being spiteful. But again, it was that kind of consciousness, the initial forays of confrontation. And I've talked to other people from other parts of the South who engaged in similar kinds of things at the same time. So it's like the groundwork was being set for what was really to come just a few years later. | 33:21 |
James S. Lee | Other confrontational things that went on. There were no decent public tennis facilities in Durham. And here again, this is as much a class issue as a race issue, because everybody wasn't playing tennis, you know? Tennis was a game that people who hung around Central could play, or people who were picked up by people who hung around Central were taught to play. But I remember on several occasions, some of us would go over to Forest Hills Park, which was a nearby city park that had lighted tennis courts and so forth, and play tennis until the inevitable would come, and that is the police would come and chase us off. And so, "You can't play here or you can't be here." | 34:23 |
James S. Lee | And we would usually leave and not stay, and that went on until sometime in the late fifties. And I remember one time a guy named Gilbert Riley, who was a student at NC Central, and a man named Russell, Dr. Russell, who was a professor over here, for some reason decided to stay and ask the groundskeeper to go ahead and call the police. And that was the first real confrontation I can remember. People saying, "Okay, do your best. We're not going to leave." I don't even remember the outcome of it now. | 35:21 |
James S. Lee | So those were some things that went on in the context of racial confrontation that I think prepared me for whoever I was going to be. At home I had a fair amount of exposure to race issues. My mother had founded the first Black public library in Raleigh, called Richard B. Harrison Library. | 36:26 |
Michelle Mitchell | Harrison? | 37:13 |
James S. Lee | Harrison, Richard B. Harrison. And it still exists today. And in addition, she was a state Negro library coordinator or supervisor, and she traveled around the state to various counties helping found Black libraries in most counties in the state. So that was her work. And she would haul me around sometime to— The significance of it was way over my head at the time. She was a library lady and that was all I really understood. | 37:14 |
James S. Lee | She also was a collector of books by and about Negroes. That's the phrase I remember. And built a substantial collection, which still exists as a collection over in Raleigh. But in that context, she also was responsible for bringing people into this area. Well known authors and poets would come through and give lectures at our library, and they would often stay at our house. There were these people coming through there who were quite famous, although I was very young, and they didn't mean much to me. They were just— | 38:11 |
James S. Lee | So when Mr. Bontemps would show up or Mr. Hughes would show up, they're just folks, you know? But they were a part of my context. And I recognize that these were Black men mostly, although not entirely. There was Ellen Terry, and then some relationship with Zora Neale Hurston, but I never remember meeting her, although my mother had some correspondence with her. | 39:17 |
Michelle Mitchell | Did you say Ellen Terry, sir? | 40:02 |
James S. Lee | Yes. And so the presence of these folk in my environment, I'm sure had some molding impact as well. Let's see, where else do we go from here? It's probably time for a question or something, I don't know. | 40:04 |
Michelle Mitchell | I'm curious about where your parents were from. They were from North Carolina? | 40:51 |
James S. Lee | No, my mother was actually from Ohio, and she was born in Columbus, although I think her father came from Kentucky. Germantown, Kentucky. My dad was born in Lancaster, South Carolina, although he grew up primarily in Brooklyn. His father was an AME bishop. | 40:57 |
Michelle Mitchell | And do you remember, from what you told us, you mentioned that you developed an early consciousness in various ways. Do you remember any stories from your past that helped form that or shape that? | 41:49 |
James S. Lee | No, not really. No, that's a mystery to me. I think they were not open teachers. I guess of the two of them, my mother was certainly the most race conscious, just in terms of her work reflecting that. I guess I'm actually reluctant to say she was the most race conscious. She was the one whose work most reflected some kind of consciousness. But I would be hard pressed to point to specific teachings or instances that I thought were molding in any kind of way. | 42:02 |
James S. Lee | That would be hard to say. And in fact, I was thinking about when the sit-ins erupted, and she was very nervous about any potential involvement on my part in that, given that both she and my dad had state jobs and they were concerned that they were very vulnerable to reprisals. It was a nervousness. I never got any reflections of that from my father, but I certainly got it from her. | 43:16 |
James S. Lee | But on the other hand, they cooperated in sending me to NC State University in 1957. There were only six of us, six Black students at NC State at the time. The year I went there was the second year. I was I was in the second wave of Black students there. But on the one hand, it was a sort of timidity about involvement in sit-ins and that kind of thing. But there was no reluctance, at least I was aware of, to send me into that environment. | 44:07 |
James S. Lee | And even though the legal barrier had already been broken, there were other parts of being there that just spoke of confrontation, that spoke of dealing with a really odd situation. And it was very, very different from anything I had ever experienced. Even though the university system in general had been desegregated— Or, desegregated. Had been opened up to a few Black students. | 44:59 |
James S. Lee | All of us who lived on campus lived in one wing of a small dormitory, so that was segregated. And you'd still get the experience of going into a classroom, and there'd be one or two people who might literally get up and move rather than allow you to sit next to them, or who would in the cafeteria change the orientation of their seat so that their back was to you, and they'd make it very obvious that that's what they were doing, that sort of thing. | 45:51 |
James S. Lee | So behaviors of people at NC State ranged from that to, I think by far the overwhelming majority of students were simply accepting of whatever was going on. If you were there, you were there, no big thing. It was not a major campus upheaval, it was just those few people who were demonstrative about it. So unlike some other desegregation instances that happened elsewhere in the South, the general climate at NC State and at UNC was— I think tolerant is probably a good word. Not aggressively resistant of it. | 46:33 |
James S. Lee | So you have to tell me where you want this to go? | 0:00 |
Gregory Hunter | I think we'd definitely like you to talk more about maybe your family, but those college years. | 0:11 |
James S. Lee | Okay. | 0:19 |
Gregory Hunter | Like professors [indistinct 00:00:27]. | 0:19 |
James S. Lee | Okay. Well, college years were interesting. I guess some of my confrontational inclinations were taken into that situation as well. One of the things that I remember distinctly about NC State was a series of evening debates, or almost like seminars, that used to be widely advertised on the campus. And they were led by a guy named Padgett, P-A-D-G-E-T-T, I think. He was a professor there. I think he was in philosophy. And Padgett was running a series of seminars called "Is Segregation Dead?" | 0:28 |
James S. Lee | And I saw these things advertised and decided to go, I'll go check it out. And I assumed that it was a forum in which the injustices of segregation would be debated, and that it would be one place of helping to put more nails in the coffin of this institution. It turned out to be quite the opposite. It was Padgett himself was a devout segregationist and university professor, and he was really trying to develop a forum to promote the value of segregation, and he was really trying to find ways of turning the wheels back. | 1:33 |
James S. Lee | And so I remember going to a couple of these things and realizing it was not a forum, not the kind of forum I thought it was, and it was also not a forum in which I was going to make any headway because it was— But I did go and listen in, to me it was enlightening to hear where some of these folk were coming from. And it was also, there were occasions when I would hear from what I thought were enlightened people, allusions to the justifications for segregation and so forth. | 2:30 |
James S. Lee | I remember taking a religion class and we were talking about, at the time, we were talking about the Hindu religion, and there was a man from India in the class, an Indian student in the class, or maybe it was a guest, who knew a lot about it. And I remember the professor looking right at me and asking about the caste system and saying, "Well, isn't it generally true that even in Hindu religion, the darker people are inferior?" And he was looking right at me. And the caste system does have a color component, but it was clear that this guy was reminding me of my place. That's really what he was doing. He didn't come out and say that, but it was almost like, see our caste system isn't so bad after all, kind of thing. | 3:13 |
James S. Lee | So, you got those kind of little things that were a part of the environment. But this is still late fifties. This is still Jim Crow South. And outside the university things were still segregated. The sit-ins had not started yet. Lunch counters were still segregated. My first confrontation of an off-campus institution in which I played any kind of leadership role, I guess, was with the Varsity Theater. | 4:29 |
James S. Lee | Well, I guess, let me start with, there was a— Used to be a popular night spot, not night spot, but a fast food place across the street from the campus called Baxley's Grill, and it was also segregated and you couldn't sit down in Baxley's, but you'd go in there and order food late at night and take out. And so some of us would get into the habit of going to Baxley's with some of our White buddies, and the deal was as long as you were with one of your White buddies, you could go and sit down at Baxley's, but you couldn't go in there by yourself, because somebody would put you out. | 5:05 |
James S. Lee | And I would say that about, oh, maybe every other week or every three weeks or so, somebody would go over there by themselves just to push the envelope a little bit, and it was never really organized. It was, I'm going to drop in Baxley's and see what happens. | 5:59 |
Gregory Hunter | Sure. | 6:23 |
James S. Lee | So there was that kind of thing going on. So that was, again, that's pre-official sit-ins kind of stuff. But to me was an extension of this kind of, foray mentality that a lot of us had in our heads that, I guess even prior to that there were a few things related to segregated theaters in Downtown Durham where people would try and buy tickets in the downstairs sections. And just, again, nothing formed, nothing organized, nothing with locked down resistance such as the sit-ins. | 6:24 |
James S. Lee | But anyway, there was a campus radio station at NC State, WKNC, I think it was the call signs. And they used to have this jazz program on in the evening sometimes, and they would play music sometimes and ask if anybody could identify the artist or the song, you'd call up and win a free ticket to the Varsity Theater. Well, Varsity Theater was segregated. It didn't have an upstairs, it was only a downstairs and you just couldn't—(laughs) just meant it was nobody going, if you were Black, you weren't going to Varsity under any circumstances. | 7:13 |
James S. Lee | So one night when I probably should have been studying, as was often the case, my first attempt at NC State was a total disaster, but—academic disaster. But—one night I got a bunch of dimes, that's what phone calls cost in those days. I got a bunch of dimes, went to the phone booth and turned up my radio which was right down the hall from the phone booth and laid in the cut and waited for this jazz program. | 8:05 |
James S. Lee | And every time they would call up and say, "We're going to play this tune." And I would already have a dime in, I'd have the first few numbers of the station dialed and as soon as they played it, I usually knew what it was right away. Because I was a real jazz fan. So I'd dial the last number and ring them up and win a couple tickets to the Varsity Theater. But one night I won about 15 tickets to the Varsity Theater, and I went to the radio station next day and got them and decided, well, might as well try and use them. | 8:37 |
James S. Lee | So I got three or four of my White friends to, gave them some tickets, told them to go and see if they could get into the theater. Of course they walked right in. And I got five or six of my buddies go to the theater. And of course we went and got turned down. I said, "Well, we got tickets right here." So they wound up calling the police, getting the university involved in this confrontation where these Black students have tried to get into the Varsity Theater. Well, this thing blew up and wound up involving negotiations between the theater and the YMCA and got involved in— The chancellor, got involved and so forth. And the outcome was that the Varsity would let students in, as I recall, that they would let students in, but there was not a mass desegregation of the Varsity Theater. | 9:09 |
James S. Lee | So that was one of my earlier recollections of just going a little bit beyond the foray level and actually organizing or orchestrating some kind of confrontation. But here again, it was not something that any of us stuck with long enough to really put anybody's back to the wall. We didn't succeed in forcing any kind of massive open theater policy, but I put a few folk on notice that here was another— It's getting ready to happen. These folk aren't going to put up with this for much longer. | 10:22 |
Michelle Mitchell | Freshman year—your second or first? | 11:24 |
James S. Lee | Oh geez. I don't know. I went there in '57 and I don't know if it was the first year or second year, somewhere in that time, '58, '59, possibly | 11:24 |
Michelle Mitchell | Varsity was in Raleigh, or—? | 11:36 |
James S. Lee | In Raleigh, yeah. So, that's sort of the climate at NC State. | 11:36 |
Michelle Mitchell | I'm wondering , you mentioned this forum about segregation, "Is Segregation Dead?" | 11:40 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. | 12:14 |
Michelle Mitchell | How did they react to your [indistinct 00:12:20]? | 12:14 |
James S. Lee | They really didn't. I mean, Padgett, who was the leader of things, confronted me a couple times with challenging questions, which I handled as well as any freshman or sophomore could handle, but I think he figured that I was probably not somebody he could really walk over. I mean, he had some debating skills that I didn't have and that he might be able to handle me on that level, but that I just was comfortable in my opinions and he wasn't just going to walk over me. | 12:20 |
James S. Lee | And he was the only person who really engaged me personally. And he seemed to develop a real personal distaste for me, because I would see him on campus and he would really scowl and make it a point to be looking the other way and just really did not like me personally. And it was at a level beyond what I assumed to be his just normal dislike for anybody who wasn't White. But in my case, it was pretty personal. And I found him to be very interesting. He was one of these, an older man and an athlete, he was a hike, peak climber, walker, whatever like that for this, excellent shape for an old man in those days before it was fashion would be old and conditioned, he was old conditioned. So I thought he was an interesting person and very passionate about his segregation views. | 13:13 |
James S. Lee | And I immediately perceived this forum to be not any place I was going to have any headway in. It was a place that they were preaching to the converted or preaching to the choir, whichever is a thing. And it was fairly harmless. It wasn't going to generate very much, so I kind of drifted away from it that way. It didn't seem a confrontation worth pursuing. But I never felt in any way generally threatened by being in there. Because the other thing is there's a fair amount of naivety about stuff like that, in retrospect, I had probably been in some situations in which I maybe should have felt threatened and I should have felt in danger. I just kind of walked through it like, "Oh." What's the problem? | 14:32 |
Michelle Mitchell | [indistinct 00:15:43]? | 15:41 |
James S. Lee | Oh, that? Well, that actually may have been one. I mean that if I saw something like that today, I would recognize that there's a good chance they are drawing on people who are either part of or aspiring to be part of a new right or new fascist regime, or even Klansmen types being drawn into that kind of environment, looking for basically some reinforcement for their positions. | 15:44 |
James S. Lee | And at that time, being in the Klan, or being parts of those organizations, I guess even the John Burt Society then, those things were far more acceptable and things people did more openly then than they do now. So there may have been some people there that I should have felt threatened by, but my head wasn't in that space. I didn't feel personally threatened. And in retrospect, some of the confrontations that we did as younger children, young people have been killed, lynched for less, in some cases. | 16:32 |
James S. Lee | For much less than actual systemic confrontation, for even alluding to the possibility of systemic confrontation. And yet here we were as if there was no danger. It was almost like mischief. It wasn't never perceived as seriously endangering our lives. So maybe naivete is a blessing of some sort. | 17:44 |
Michelle Mitchell | Also want to hear about, when you were growing up, you were in [indistinct 00:18:38]? | 18:40 |
James S. Lee | Mm-hmm (affirmative). | 18:40 |
Michelle Mitchell | What sort of reasons, with White people, [indistinct 00:18:45] about you? | 18:40 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. | 18:43 |
Michelle Mitchell | What were those like? | 18:43 |
James S. Lee | Yeah, well, early— Oh you know, there was one thing I— Dealings with White people. Well, let's see, they came in various forms. I grew up in the— Well, I didn't actually grow up in, I went for a while until I just couldn't get enough questions answered, to the Episcopal Church here, and on several Christmases, the Black Episcopal Church and the White Episcopal Church would have a joint children's program. | 18:47 |
James S. Lee | So those were points in which people were trying to reach across barriers, I guess, and set up some things. I don't remember much about those except that they happened. Whatever barriers were reached across didn't result in any lasting impressions of individuals. I can't place a single face, or I have no name, or no individual I was particularly drawn to or part of in those days. But it did happen. | 19:47 |
James S. Lee | The other thing that I can remember was there was a woman in Durham— Well actually there are two people I can remember. One was a woman named, her name Van Sonbeck. I just remember Mrs. Van Sonbeck, I don't remember she had a husband or what, but Mrs. Van Sonbeck would have young people over to her house for picnics and frolicking and parties and so forth. And then always followed by a brief discussion about stuff. Well, Ms. Van Sonbeck was a Bahai. | 20:28 |
Michelle Mitchell | Bahai. | 21:25 |
James S. Lee | Yes. And so, well, you know what Bahai's all about. It's kind of universal stuff, and that I always found I just thought that was that very fascinating that people were thinking that way, kind of universality and finding room in whatever they thought for all the other religions, being able to incorporate them. Okay. | 21:28 |
James S. Lee | And so I'm sure that was some kind of influence. I never affiliated, never even considered affiliating, never, just it was just interesting. But it was there. It was part of the environment. So trying to think of other— Oh okay. | 22:09 |
James S. Lee | There were two women, Nell Hirschberg, who taught at NC Central, and her companion Gerry, who were real close friends of both my mother and father. And they just seemed to have a lot of respect for him, and through Nell, I guess, I got my first invitation to, and I made, I guess it was a Passover or some Jewish ritual. | 22:43 |
James S. Lee | So I guess that was another universalizing influence. But aside from that growing up, there weren't that many intimate contact with White people. Lots of incidental contacts, merchants and that sort of thing, but not much in the way of who would come through the house or who would be a part of the family circle. Although I would have to say that Hirchsburg and Gerry were there from time to time. | 23:49 |
James S. Lee | Trying to think of anybody else who was even a regular. Oh, the only other person I can think of was a woman named Sylvia Fen. Sylvia was married to an instructor at Central, and I don't know what Dr. Fen's nationality was, he was Asian, but I just don't know where he was from. But Sylvia, whose first name I do know and his first name I don't know. He was always, Dr. Fen. Lived next door for a while, but as I remember her, she was a very passive wife who raised the kids and stayed to herself pretty much. And so she was sort of there. I never got to know her. | 24:35 |
Michelle Mitchell | [indistinct 00:26:08]. | 26:04 |
James S. Lee | F-I-N-N. | 26:08 |
Michelle Mitchell | F-I-N-N. | 26:08 |
James S. Lee | Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Now, I did go to a Quaker boys camp one summer. It was in Pennsylvania, called Camp Pocono. I can't remember what year that it was, but it may have been somewhere around '54. '50, somewhere in that era. And in that summer I had a lot of contact with White kids, that was— Almost all of whom were Northern White kids, of course. | 26:10 |
Gregory Hunter | Were you the only Black person on that camp? | 27:26 |
James S. Lee | No, no. There were several of us Black campers and counselors as well, yeah, from different areas. And again, it was a Quaker camp and they had taken lead since the abolitionist days, I guess, with some of these issues. So that was not a surprise. | 27:28 |
James S. Lee | That actually was— I had a ball, I had an absolute ball at that camp. It wasn't about race or anything like that. Just all these woods and canoes and water and mountains and late night lying around the fire and, lying as in reclining and lying as in prevaricating too, but that was a ball. And I went back one other summer to that camp as a junior counselor I think, I guess the year before I went to college I went back as a paid employee for a summer job, teaching tennis. And I was teaching tennis and swimming. | 28:06 |
James S. Lee | That was about it. I can't pull up anything else that would reflect that. | 29:16 |
Gregory Hunter | If you don't mind, still talk about after college, and after that, where you've come since then? | 29:35 |
Gregory Hunter | Well, okay. Actually, where I've come from since then has to be embedded in the college experience. At least the second college experience. I consider myself having two college careers, one disaster and one success. My first one was a disaster. I finally dropped out and went to join the Air Force. | 29:44 |
Gregory Hunter | When was that? Did you stay a year? | 30:19 |
James S. Lee | I stayed three years. | 30:21 |
Gregory Hunter | Oh, and then left? | 30:22 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. | 30:24 |
Gregory Hunter | Oh yeah. | 30:24 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. And joined the Air Force feeling I was just the world's biggest failure. My grade sheet looked like just the worst possibles, a field of red. You can imagine. If I had a one point average, I was doing good. (laughs) It was terrible. But anyway, I joined the Air Force and went to their language school and wound up living in Turkey for three years working as a Russian linguist. | 30:26 |
James S. Lee | And had actually decided that I didn't want to live in the United States anymore. I had developed enough consciousness by that time to know I didn't want to live in the United States, so I really had determined that I was going to stay in Turkey. I had learned Turkish while I was there and liked the country and enjoyed the mobility that they afford foreigners. So it was very different from anything I ever experienced. I actually took my discharge from the service in Turkey, but I had in the meantime gotten married and somewhere in all this decided that I didn't have enough skills or experiences to do anybody any good, I couldn't do anything in Turkey. So I needed to come back home and finish my degree, so I came back to NC State, my wife and I came back. | 31:22 |
James S. Lee | She was in Turkey with me for most of the time I was there. And changed my major from engineering to psychology, experimental psychology. And got on with the business of being a student. And from that point on, I was a good student, made the dean's list and A's were just what I was supposed to get. So that's what I got. Very different experience. But one of the first things that happened once I got back to— And see, I guess it was the first year, first year back. | 32:46 |
Gregory Hunter | What year? | 33:34 |
James S. Lee | I'm trying to remember, maybe '60— What year did the Beatles come to? | 33:36 |
Michelle Mitchell | '65? | 33:46 |
James S. Lee | Maybe '65 or something, somewhere in that vicinity, '65. Anyway, the Ku Klux Klan was having a rally in Raleigh, that it was maybe in August or something like that, and I just couldn't believe it. A real life rally in the open. These folk were out there marching the street. And I really don't remember how all this stuff came about, but I remember talking to a bunch of people and saying, "We got to do something about this. And this is crazy." And the outcome of that dialogue was the formation of a group called Direct Action for Racial Equality, DARE. | 33:52 |
James S. Lee | And it was organized at NC State. I was its president and it was intended really as an organization to directly confront Klan presence in Raleigh. And part of what we did was stage some counter demonstrations on the occasion of another Klan rally, but we really decided that it was important to get involved in some other work. And so we started doing tutoring programs and started doing what we call community organizing and the very working in the blind kind of level of picking communities at random and just going in and talking to people and trying to get something going. | 34:54 |
James S. Lee | And of course dealing with campus issues as well. So it was the forerunner of what is now the Black Student Union at NC State. There however, was not an all Black organization, it was an integrated organization. And as for my part, I got a couple of speaking invitations to come around and talk about what DARE was doing and suddenly got to be kind of a public person. | 36:05 |
James S. Lee | I don't really know how all that happened. It just got to be somebody who was much more public than I had ever been, and I managed to keep doing that stuff and keep up with my work as well. I eventually finished up my degree and enrolled in graduate school at NC State in experimental psychology, I had with a physiology minor, interested in animal behavior, but kept doing organizing work. | 36:48 |
James S. Lee | And the main thrust of my personal work and work through there was with non-academic employees at campus. So we managed to create quite a powerful non-academic employees union there and led some pretty strong confrontations with the university, including some sit-ins at the chancellor's office, and marches to the chancellor's residence, torchlight parades. I think DARE is responsible for an ordinance on Raleigh City Council outlawing the carrying of lighted open flame in the streets or something like that. | 37:39 |
James S. Lee | But in retrospect, it was kind of funny because it was late at night, we all these angry Black youth, now, it wasn't all Black crowd, but most of us were standing in front of the chancellor's house yelling obscenities with these burning torches going. I'm sure he had visions of the Whites or something, I don't know what he was thinking. But, so we did some of that kind of stuff. | 38:41 |
James S. Lee | And I also got personally involved, and it's not so much through DARE, but just through my own personal branching out with the sanitation workers in Raleigh who were trying to organize and tried to do some bridge building between them and the non-academic employees, so I wound up playing some kind of role in that stuff as well. And started to get to be a fairly visible, almost agitational presence, in Raleigh as a activist, I guess. | 39:15 |
James S. Lee | In all these instances, I always saw myself as facilitating, maybe, I was never going be the leader of the non-academic employees, because I wasn't a non-academic employee and I was never going to be the leader of the sanitation worker. But still, it was clear that there was some influential presence there. Some aiding and abetting, In the case of sanitation workers I mean, it was just that, because I basically walked in to help out with a situation that had already been started and well underway and just was able to maybe be helpful in pulling in some student resources for extra bodies or that kind of thing. | 40:25 |
James S. Lee | Just doing that sort of support work. But it was very important to me. It got to be a central focus of my life with this activism stuff. It did not work to the detriment of my schoolwork. I continued to perform up to their standards, but eventually I got a call from the Foundation for Community Development in Durham, asking if I would consider taking a position with them as really started out as assistant director of training. And so I thought about it and wound up taking a position. So I basically dropped out school. I had actually completed all of my coursework, I was working on my thesis on dominance hierarchies in crayfish. | 41:35 |
James S. Lee | And so I even had a bunch of crayfish in the laboratory, it was at that stage. I just walked away from it, and never did finish the thesis. So I had this pile of coursework over at NC State that's on my transcript, but no thesis. I went to work for Foundation for Community Development as director of training. | 42:53 |
Gregory Hunter | That was based in— | 43:23 |
James S. Lee | That's based in Durham. At the time, there was the director of training was a guy named Howard Fuller and he is now the superintendent of Milwaukee schools. But at the time Howard was a really major visible front page type activist in Durham. Very, very strong leadership, strong oratory skills. And as director of training at the Foundation for Community Development, he was really head of a group of master organizers at various parts of the state, that worked either directly or indirectly for the foundation. Various local community owners. And Howard was about moving on, he wanted to do something else. And he was really looking for somebody to step in as director of training. | 43:25 |
James S. Lee | And he wasn't really— Well, he didn't really see anybody in the foundation he really either thought could do it or wanted to do it. So he was looking outside and they were aware of what I was doing in Raleigh. So that's why he said, "Well, let's see if we could get him." So they got me. And so I moved in to that position and I guess I worked there for maybe three years. | 44:42 |
Gregory Hunter | Can you remember when? | 45:31 |
James S. Lee | God, this was— That must have been '69 or '70. I'm terrible with dates, so you can't really rely on those years. The Foundation was really a spinoff in the old North Carolina Fund, which was one of the initial state-based poverty programs, anti-poverty program. It was an independent outfit funded largely by Ford Foundation. It had three branches, as I recall. It had an economic development branch, a training branch, which was essentially a community organizing branch, and then another group which was dealt with housing. | 45:39 |
James S. Lee | So the training outfit was the really activist part of it. That was those were the organizers, the agitators, and those were the ones who were responsible for many statewide confrontations, so in many cases when people would organize— | 46:57 |
James S. Lee | — got to take care of. Anyway, oftentimes, people would call the foundation for either speakers or somebody to come down and talk to a group of young people about organizing principles or help put things together. So, in some sense, we were viewed by the establishment as outside agitators, and in some sense, they were right in that we were oftentimes not directly from the communities that we were involved with, but in almost no instances, I mean, I will go ahead and say, in no instances did we start anything. | 0:01 |
James S. Lee | But the view was that these folk came in and stirred things up and so forth, but in almost all cases, we were actually called into something that was already brewing or going and asked for specific recommendations about organizing, about tactics, strategies, that sort of thing. So, that was our role in addition to providing ongoing training and consultation with the organizers that we had in the field, working with various freestanding community organizations. | 0:59 |
James S. Lee | I guess that kept me busy and maybe a little bit more out front than I had ever intended to be out front, visible than I had ever intended to be. I got personally involved in a couple of situations. One was over at UNC, and this is sort of an interesting irony here, but the non—academic employee, well, the cafeteria workers at UNC were involved in a strike against the university. Their primary non—employee support was from the Black Student Movement at UNC. The workers, however, called the Foundation for Community Development and asked us to come in, as well, and sort of give them some advice and talk to them and help them strategize. So, we did. I was one of people who went over and worked with them. | 1:48 |
James S. Lee | That particular situation resulted in several confrontations with the university. Black students took over a building and cleared the dining room and so forth and enforced a boycott of the campus dining facilities by just really running people out of the dining hall. One of the results of that strike, I mean, it's not the most important result, but the most interesting one, but an interesting one to me was that the state got an injunction, which banned several people by name, my name was among them, and 100 John Does from coming on the campus at— | 3:00 |
Gregory Hunter | Wow. | 3:59 |
James S. Lee | As far as I know, the injunction's still in effect. | 4:02 |
Michelle Mitchell | That's ironic. | 4:04 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. That's because I'm working there now. This guy, who was once banned from the campus, is now an assistant professor or something. Yeah. So, I thought it was kind of funny, but— | 4:07 |
Gregory Hunter | That's really [indistinct 00:04:24]. | 4:22 |
James S. Lee | I think the present administration is not even aware of it. I guess another situation I got involved in was in Sanford. I guess this was the one that came closest to getting me in some serious trouble. Had some students there were dealing with some of the typical issues of Black students at the time. They couldn't get to be homecoming queen, couldn't get to be elected to cheerleader squad. These things had happened as a result of desegregation, feeling disenfranchised, and became very restive and began to agitate. So, they call the foundation. I was the person who went to Sanford. That situation resulted in a number of rock—throwing incidents and stuff like that. In the course of it, I was arrested for inciting to riot and possession of automatic weapons. I eventually got cleared of all that stuff, but it was pretty touch and go kind of. | 4:26 |
James S. Lee | Was going on about the same time when the Wilmington 10 situation was happening in North Carolina, and the state had shown its willingness to be just blatantly conspiratorial in getting indictments people. So, I was a victim of one of those kinds of conspiracy things. Just by the luck of the draw, they couldn't make it stick. So, I managed to not wind up in jail for any period of time, but could have. | 5:53 |
James S. Lee | Well, maybe I should talk about that in a little detail because it was one of the situations that you really don't believe can actually happen, that this can't really happen, but I was arrested, and I was actually arrested twice. First time, I was arrested and charged with possession of an automatic weapon. I did have a gun, which I carried openly. In that situation, I felt very threatened, but one day, the police stopped me and arrested me for carrying an automatic weapon, which it was not an automatic weapon, but they claimed that I had a gun capable of firing extra bullets. In order to prove it, they counted the bullets. Of course, they found extra bullets [indistinct 00:07:50], kind of trumped up, but they couldn't make that one stick, but that was not the really serious one. | 6:52 |
James S. Lee | The serious one was inciting the riot, where they arrested me and claimed that, on a particular evening, I had driven up to a crowd of young men, opened the trunk of my car, pulled out a bunch of weapons, passed them around, and shortly thereafter, gunfire erupted and police were fired upon, and that I was responsible for that. | 7:59 |
James S. Lee | Well, on the particular evening, what had happened was some kids had been on a railroad trestle in our railroad bridge in Sanford throwing rocks, and they hit a police car. The police cars came to a screeching halt, and the cops got out, and the kids ran someplace into the community, and the cops started firing at them. While they were firing at them, somebody in the community started shooting back at the cops. So, the cops got down behind their car, at which time somebody from the other side started shooting at them. So, they were in a crossfire. So, they got in that car and drove off. | 8:38 |
James S. Lee | It turns out the car was hit with maybe some 22s and some buck shots and stuff like that, no real serious revolutionary armament. If I were going to pass out armament, it would've been — but, anyway, that was the incident that they tried to blame me on, blame me for. So, the story was that this incident had happened after I had driven up to this crowd of young men, passed out all these weapons, and then there was gunfire erupt. So, I was arrested for inciting to riot. | 9:40 |
James S. Lee | It turns out that they had three witnesses who were testifying to these facts. One of them, it turns out, had actually been in jail at the time of the alleged incident. The other one was out on parole for armed robbery and subject to do really hard time if he did anything else wrong, like not cooperate with the police. The third one was a known police informant in the Sanford area, in fact, whose personal automobile was a used police car. So, we know what kind of connection he had with the police. They haul me in court and pull this parade of witnesses to make this testimony. Fortunately, they couldn't really get it straight. I mean, one of them said that we all left on foot. The other one said, "We drove away." I mean, they just couldn't get— | 10:27 |
Gregory Hunter | The story straight. | 11:39 |
James S. Lee | — the story straight. The judge was helping and was coaching them from the bench with questions like, "Well, don't you mean —" so forth and so on. I'm sitting here saying, "I don't believe this. I mean, this is not taking facts that — I mean, it's not even like I drove up to a crowd of people on that evening and held a rally or said, 'Let's go.'" I mean, the whole thing— | 11:42 |
Michelle Mitchell | It's amazing. | 12:13 |
James S. Lee | — the whole thing was a fabrication, a total fabrication. | 12:13 |
Gregory Hunter | Which court was this? | 12:17 |
James S. Lee | It was in Sanford. It was a local court. I don't even remember what level it was, but, anyway, they managed to declare — Let's see. It was either a mistrial or something in that first instance. Something happened that resulted in the case having to be tried again or appealed maybe. | 12:20 |
James S. Lee | In the interim, the guy who was in jail came up and said, "Look, man, I know what I did was wrong. You don't have to worry about me. I'm leaving. I'm splitting, and I'm not —" He said, "I'm sorry. I didn't have any choice. They had me." So, I said, "I understand." So, he left town. The other guy, the one who was a police informant, was slipping in on somebody's wife, seeing this guy's wife. One night, the guy whose wife he was seeing stayed home and waited for him, and when he came in the house, the guy stepped out from behind the door and literally executed him, just shot him in the back of the head and killed him. So, that was two down. The third one was the one that was on parole at the time, and he was also the least intelligent of them. He just couldn't get the story straight. So, the state just could not bring itself to bring the case again. | 12:59 |
James S. Lee | So, that's how I got out of that one, but my attorneys in the case were — They were actually hired by the foundation. One of them is dead now. He eventually became a judge, William Pearson. The other one was Buddy Malone. It was a couple years after the case, I saw — I think it was Buddy, I can't remember if it was Buddy or Bill Pearson. I saw one of them at a Black Lawyers conference here in Durham, which I was covering as a reporter for a radio station I worked at, which is another phase of my life. | 14:21 |
James S. Lee | The feature of this conference was the Wilmington 10 because the governor had just released some of them and had made resolution of Wilmington 10 case. So, I walked up to, I think it was Buddy, and I said, "Buddy, do you realize that, if those guys had held their story together in Sanford, that I would have been in the same boat as the Wilmington 10. It's the same kind of thing. It was a total fabrication." Buddy looked at me, and what he did just scared the hell out of me because he looked at me and he said, "I hadn't thought about that." Then, I realized that these guys thought I was guilty. | 15:20 |
Michelle Mitchell | [indistinct 00:16:18] no. | 16:15 |
James S. Lee | They were defending me. They were defending me. | 16:18 |
Gregory Hunter | Were the two of them Black? | 16:23 |
James S. Lee | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. | 16:23 |
Gregory Hunter | Was it Pierce or Pearson? | 16:26 |
James S. Lee | Pearson. | 16:27 |
Gregory Hunter | Pearson? | 16:27 |
James S. Lee | Mm-hmm. That if they didn't think I was guilty, at least they didn't recognize a political implication, the full political implication of what was going on. That scared me even worse afterwards. I said, "Oh, Jesus, Bill Kunstler, where are you now that we need you?" or something— | 16:30 |
Michelle Mitchell | Yes. | 16:50 |
James S. Lee | — somebody who recognized what is going on, but that was a very focusing experience for me because I'd always understood state level conspiracy intellectually, but to realize that these people that you either elect or see elected in positions, as either prosecutors or judges or whatever, are really quite capable of dealing with total fabrication in order to achieve political ends. It was pretty scary. So, that one sort of stuck with me as a major kind of, say, when you hear somebody, I don't dismiss conspiracies quite as quickly as I used to. | 16:51 |
Michelle Mitchell | With good reason. | 18:08 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. | 18:08 |
Michelle Mitchell | This is— | 18:08 |
James S. Lee | I don't know. | 18:08 |
Michelle Mitchell | — [indistinct 00:18:19]. | 18:08 |
James S. Lee | Yeah. I've got to close this off. | 18:19 |
Michelle Mitchell | Thank you so much. | 18:26 |
James S. Lee | Okay. Well, this takes you up to maybe '69 or something like that, '70. I don't know. | 18:28 |
Michelle Mitchell | Thank you. | 18:37 |
James S. Lee | [indistinct 00:18:45] interesting. Okay. | 18:37 |
Gregory Hunter | Thanks a lot. | 18:37 |
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