>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [silence] ^M00:00:20 >> Peter Bartis: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to start the program. Welcome to the Library of Congress, and welcome to the American Folklife Center's Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. I'm Peter Bartis. I'm with the American Folklife Center and I'm honored today to introduce my friend Tracy Sugarman. Tracy's a nationally recognized illustrator whose art has appeared in numerous magazines, album covers, children's books. His collection of World War II illustrations is here at the Library of Congress in the Prints and Photos Division and his 240 plus letters, World War II letters, are in the collections of the Veterans History Project. Tracy is the author of several books with long titles... [laughter] ...including the one we'll be discussing today, "We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought For Civil Rights in Mississippi." Now when I met Tracy, I interviewed him for the Veterans History Project in June 2003 where he spoke about maneuvering his landing craft on D-Day at Utah Beach and he talked of the atrocity of war. Six years later, I'm introducing him again, and little did I know that we'd be talking about atrocity again and today he'll be talking about the atrocities of segregation. He was a World War II veteran to me then and after hearing his interview with Josephus Nelson who's here today that was done yesterday, he's not just a World War II veteran, he's a veteran of the 20th Century. I'm proud to know him and I'm proud to introduce him. Tracy would you come up please? [applause] ^M00:02:14 [silence] ^M00:02:22 >> Tracy Sugarman: Thank you, Peter. Good morning. If I saw better, I'd recognize a lot of old friends in the audience. Coming here, you know, it's like coming home. They have more of my children in my drawings than I have children and you worry about your books or your drawings when they leave you, they're like your kids. You hope they don't embarrass you. Well, the Library of Congress has been a generous and wonderful friend and I'm so honored to have my work here. I was just delighted when I was invited to speak with you about my new book. This is the book that I wanted to write all these years. I wanted to write a celebration of the kids that I got to know quite well, and some I got to know very well, and many of whom I loved and love today, kids that put themselves in harm's way, self-selected, remarkable Americans. America should know about their lives. I have been gifted with a long life and, as an observer – that was not what I majored in at Syracuse University. I was an illustration and painting major and my greatest intention was to become a magazine illustrator like Norman Rockwell. Those were the days when magazines were as important to American's lives as television is now. People anticipated their magazines and there was a good living to be made as a magazine illustrator if one could break into that field. It didn't work out that way. Life gets in the way of choreography. You can't design what's going to happen. In my Junior year, Pearl Harbor happened. And two days after Pearl Harbor, I joined the Navy Reserve, and by 1944 I was leading my men as an amphibious officer for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. In 1944 at the age of 23, I spent six months on that battered Normandy beach head with the men in my charge. It was then that I discovered that through drawings and the writing of letters to my new wife at that point, that I was able to come to terms with some of the tragic landscape that I was in. When I returned to civilian life, I started my work as an illustrator, and, soon after, drawing pictures and making paintings for the fantasy world of "The Ladies Home Journal" and "Saturday Evening Post," I started to deal with the reality of American life as I found it doing reporting for "Fortune Magazine," and for some of the major corporations at that point like IBM and AT&T. And I was going out in the field with my drawing pads and trying to capture the reality of American life. ^M00:06:31 [pause] ^M00:06:42 >> So, in 1964, I decided to go on my second invasion. The second invasion was to go to Mississippi with the thousand students who had volunteered to go to try to register Blacks for American elections -- to try to teach Blacks something of their own history, something of their American history and something that would move this totally locked-down, totally apartheid part of America. I'd like to read a little of the introduction to "We Had Sneakers." "In 1964, all hell seemed to be breaking loose in the American South. The non-violent challenge to a centuries-old racial apartheid was being answered by state-sponsored violence, the unabridged violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the apparent collusion of the White establishment.” Like so many veterans of World War II, I believed I had vanquished the myths of racial superiority when we broke the German back in Normandy and elsewhere. Twenty years before that, I thought we had buried that beast. I'd been making drawings and paintings celebrating the wonderful, vibrant American society that I found after World War II. But how could such a good and diverse people permit the kinds of things that I discovered, and we all discovered, when we went to Mississippi? When we went to Mississippi, few White businessmen, Congressmen, clergy, journalists or professionals across Dixie were raising their voices in protest against the lynchings, against the harassing, against the burning of Black churches, were responding to the poignant pleas of ministers like Martin Luther King. When I learned that nearly a thousand students from across the North were being invited by young Blacks to come join with them in their desperate attempt to register Black voters, I decided to go with them, to take my skills as a reportorial artist. The effort was being organized by SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the meeting of the students with the SNCC leaders was to take place in Oxford, Ohio in June of 1964. The invitation of SNCC to the Northern students was a bold and calculated move, but one whose success could not be guaranteed. Their lonely, painful struggle for equality had largely been ignored by the national press. And their pleas for equal protection under the law had fallen on deaf ears in a Congress dominated by Southern Senators like Mississippi's Eastland, Stennis or by a Justice Department headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was never persuaded that we were not part of -- as the Civil Rights Movement -- a part of the Communist conspiracy. SNCC knew in their bones that Blacks in the South had no recourse when the Night Riders came to their homes, burned their churches or lynched their leaders. In order to gain the attention to these terrible inequities by those of conscience and power in the North, they had issued their invitations for volunteers on campuses across the country. Now those students had come, but would they stay when the Night Riders came again? Would they be able to share the impoverished life of the Mississippi Blacks who they had come to help, a life so distanced from anything they had ever known? And would the weary, battered SNCC workers who had been sneaking on to plantations to try to register Black voters, so they could vote in an American election, be able to work with the idealistic kids from the North? For two days and nights, the lectures and workshops mounted an unrelenting assault on the volunteers. I wondered, uneasily, if this, perhaps was the real screening process. We were being frightened and I sensed that this was a calculated strategy, a sharp, scalpeled insertion of reality intended to kill or cure. The terror and violence of Mississippi was detailed and dissected. The extense of public brutality were catalogued and the unreal world of the barbarous newsreel and the tabloid spread was suddenly becoming these students' world. There seemed to be a muffled drum beat in those first days of that curious week: “They've got to know. They've got to know.” The volunteers were now moving into the same battle as these quick, knowing field workers and I watched the kids listening and I knew what they were wondering because I was wondering the same. Am I good enough? Can I really take it? At the end of the orientation week, we left for the Mississippi Delta. I'd like, parenthetically, to mention that I was in the first week of the orientation. There were two weeks. The second week was essentially, for a whole other part of the group that were going into Mississippi, ostensibly to set up just freedom schools. Martha Honey who was with us was one of those who came that second week and during that second week, three of the students I had been with disappeared in Mississippi and the kids like Martha were told that, and some of them decided to go home. And some of them, thank God, like Martha Honey, came down. So the three boys that disappeared were names you may have rememberd: Andy Goodman from Westchester, Michael Schwerner from New York, James Cheney from Meridian, Mississippi. The fact that two of the kids that were murdered by a mob led by a deputy sheriff from Mississippi, the fact that two of them were White, caught the attention of the people in the North. There was suddenly an outcry, why wasn't the FBI opening up an office in Mississippi? As if nobody had been ever troubled before. As if Blacks had not been systematically beaten, lynched, and buried. But the fact said so much about the racist fabric that existed and somewhat exists now in American society where some are equal and some are not quite equal. As I drove into Mississippi, I learned how different this invasion would be; no friendly bombers overheard, no artillery at our rear, no thousands of ships on the flank. No, in this invasion we were unarmed, with no possible protection from the local police, the local press, the local clergy, the local Congressman, or the local leaders of the business community. We would have to face down the guns and hostility of a totally closed society. If there was to be any help offered, it would have to come from the Black citizens of the Delta, among the poorest and least literate in all American life. It was a sobering, frightening, and daunting odyssey to think about. I wanted to tell the story in my drawings and words of these young people -- mostly Whites -- who could steal a summer. We had Black volunteers but not too many Black kids could steal away from Howard and get away. They had to make money if they were going back to school. So we had some Blacks. But the great preponderance of the thousand students that went were Whites. And I mention this because they were putting themselves in harm's way for Black citizens that they had never met, might never know otherwise, and putting themselves in harm's way knowing that they were going to be scared to death. And I must say that the kids I worked with in '64 and then '65, when I went back, woke up scared in the morning, went to bed scared and night, worked all day scared, and then they got up the next day and they did everything they had to do all over again. And the next day, they did it all over again. ^M00:18:06 [pause] ^M00:18:14 >> I wanted the country to know about the young Black Americans like Charles McLaurin who had served in the Army, and on his return, refused to accept Jim Crow segregation and joined SNCC to help Blacks gain the vote. In all of the arrests, the endless days and nights of outlasting time, in Ruleville, Greenville, Greenwood, Drew, Charles had never been hit. The afternoon I met him, when he visited in Connecticut in 1963, McLaurin had joked about it. "Not me. I'm lucky, man." But now, in the Spring of 1964, the highway patrol had beaten him. The SNCC staff workers had been forced off the road by the patrol as they headed for SNCC headquarters in Atlanta. They had beaten the driver and then herded the five young men into cells at the jail in Indianola. One by one, the five Negroes were summoned from the cell. McLaurin was the last. From his cell he could hear the murmur of the interrogations, the angry shouting, the numbing sound of flesh striking flesh and the surprised gasps of pain. In an agony of terror, this 22-year old young McLaurin watched his body, unbidden, move from the open cell. "I watched myself go," he said. "It was like it was happening to somebody else. I watched my feet move, one after the other, 'til I reached the top of the iron stairs." "Down here, boy." He remembers looking down, the two policemen looking ridiculously tiny, their white faces turned up to McLaurin and suddenly he was standing at the bottom of the stairs and the two police faces filled the room. "Boy," said the patrolman in a conversational voice, "Are you a Negro or a Nigger?" McLaurin swallowed, his throat tight and parched, he said, "I'm a Negro." And the patrolman slammed the back of his fist into McLaurin's mouth, splitting his lip. Tears betrayed his pain and his mouth was full of blood. "Boy," repeated the patrolman, his voice level and quiet, "Are you a Negro or a Nigger?" And McLaurin looked straight at him and he said, "I'm a Negro." The patrolman at his side jolted him with a straight punch that exploded on the side of his jaw and pitched him in a sprawl on the concrete. "I felt no pain," Mac said. "But my teeth felt loose and my mouth was a mess. As I lay there at the bottom of the stairs, I knew they would keep hitting me until they killed me if I didn't say "Nigger." That man had to hear me say it. He just had to. I got up and he said, "Boy, are you a Negro or a Nigger?" And I said, "I'm a Nigger" and I was thrown out of the jail and went back home." McLaurin ran the voting rights effort in Senator Eastland's home town of Ruleville and registered hundreds of Black voters. None of the student volunteers he guided in 1964 and 1965, when I worked with him, were beaten or killed, and some have since run and made political office. When the Voting Rights bill was passed, he went on to finish college, married, and is now the father of two sons who have graduated college and a granddaughter who just enrolled in Jackson State University. Parenthetically, I called Mac when President Obama got elected, the next morning, and he answered the phone and I said, "Mac, are you alright?" He said, "Yeah." He said, "I had trouble turning on the television set this morning." I said, "Why?" He said, "I was afraid I had dreamt it." I met Linda Davis when she arrived in Ruleville to teach Black kids in the freedom school about American history and something about Black history. A gentle, very attractive and dedicated young woman, the daughter of a successful White lawyer in Winnetka, Illinois, she seemed to be very vulnerable and very young to be in Mississippi (as I thought about Martha Honey). Little did I know of the steel and courage that was inside this slight woman. When the summer was over, she alone among the volunteers in Ruleville, decided to stay on and continue the work of teaching and trying to register voters. Alone and the only White in a Black community, she was a target of every racist and vigilante in the Delta. When I met her on my return to Ruleville in 1965, I began to see the real woman she was. Reflecting on that dreadful winter when she was alone, Linda's eyes grew wide and troubled. "All hell had broken loose in Indianola," she said wonderingly. "There were a lot of arrests in Indianola and a lot of burning. We had conducted statewide demonstrations to build support for passage of the Voting Rights bill and they were hugely successful turnouts. We had hundreds of people circling the Indianola court house. Imagine, hundreds of people in the very home of the White Citizens Council. I almost always felt safe when I was in the Black community. I knew there were people there who would lay down their lives to protect me. But on the night the freedom school in Indianola was bombed, it was just awful and very frightening. There were four separate fire attacks on the school, all orchestrated to hit about nine in the evening. There was nobody there, and the building was burned and gutted. At the same time, the arsonists attacked the home where all of us civil rights workers were living. I literally saw the Molotov cocktail sail in the window and land in our front bedroom and burst into flame. The house burned very quickly." She blinked hard and the room was silent. She cleared her throat and quietly resumed speaking. "We all had to flee for our lives." Linda's eyes became misty as she resurrected those excruciating nights in the Delta. She said, "To witness the courage of those folks in Indianola was so remarkable. Remembering how they kept going forward even when there was no assurance that there was ever going to be a good result, to just keep on going and they did it and they did it again." Linda Davis is now a judge in Washington, D.C., married to another judge, mother of three college graduates. I found these kind of inspiring American stories often in the people I worked with in Mississippi. It's why I've written "We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns." If you'll permit me, I'd like to read a passage from the chapter called "Indianola" because I think in so many ways it summed up for me that summer in Mississippi, Freedom Summer. [Pause] >> Excuse me. ^M00:27:51 [Pause] ^M00:28:02 [Begins reading] >> "For weeks, the volunteers had been walking the dusty roads of Ruleville, Shaw and Drew, building support for the voter registration drive. It was tedious and dangerous work but it slowly built understanding and momentum. For Chuck McLaurin, the ultimate prize would be to carry this activity into the heart of Indianola, the very birth place of the hated White Citizens Councils. It was his dream to find a safe building that could be both a freedom school and a community center for organizing. The day he found the empty Negro Baptist school, only one mile from the courthouse, he was ecstatic. ‘It's great, man.’ He gazed at the prize with a smile and opened his arms wide. ‘It's not only great,’ he exalted, ‘they can't burn it down. It's brick.’ He was wrong. They burned it down. Only two weeks later, when McLaurin's leaflets announcing ‘Mass meeting at the Baptist school tonight,’ when those leaflets hit the streets, every Black and every White in Indianola got the word. Worried about the safety of the women and children who might show up, our Ruleville chaplain of the week, Rabbi Al Levine, our third cleric that summer, decided to pay a clerical visit to Sheriff Hollowell to ask police protection. When Hollowell surprisingly agreed to the request, Levine thanked him and asked that the police not come in to the meeting, but have them stay outside to discourage any intruders. Hallowell agreed and he replied, ‘They will be outside. I don't expect any trouble.’ Levine looked skeptically at the sheriff. He knew that all of us expected trouble, that we were certain the Indianola Whites would not sit still for such outside agitation. By seven thirty, the entire hall was packed with an exuberant crowd of 250. The walls were lined with people who could not find seats, and clusters of children leaned in every window. The elderly sat scattered through the crowd, their eyes bright with excitement and wonder. John Harris, a volunteer from Howard University, leaned against the wall at the front of the room. ‘McLaurin's on the way down from Ruleville,’ he said, ‘probably driving like mad.’ The high Delta sky was lavender with dusk when McLaurin came across the porch and made his way slowly through the noisy congregation at the door. His dark glasses swept the crowd. He was shaking his head as he made his way around the packed benches to stand next to me against the wall. Harris had seen him and with a wide grin, led the crowd into song. They responded with a rush of sound and the exultant voices lifted in unison, ‘Black and White together, we shall not be moved.’ McLaurin's eyes were wet and he grinned like a Buddha. As the song swept the hall, his voice sounded harsh and shaken in my ear. ‘Man. This is Indianola. Do you realize that? Indianola.’ His voice broke and his face shown with pleasure. ‘I thought there'd be ten people here tonight. In Indianola.’ For Mac, this was happiest, most incredible moment since he entered the movement. Five times he had been jailed in this town, beaten in this jail. Now was the reality of every fantasy he had dreamed during the lonely, frightened nights in the Delta. His tough, compact body moved with the powerful urgency of his words. And they all sang it, ‘Just like a tree that's planted in the waters, we shall not be moved.’ John Harris let the song finally subside. He seemed to sense that the familiar music had eased the strangeness that always accompanied a first meeting. His boyish face was smiling and he nodded approval to the eager faces. ‘I'm going to introduce you to one of the persons who's been leading in this freedom fight here in Mississippi for...’ The voice stopped abruptly. An angry murmur had started near the door. Harris resumed, his voice uncertain. ‘Well,’ he said. "We've got an unwanted guest in here.’ People rose from their seats and benches scraped surely on the wooden floors as the crowd strained to hear and to see. A woman next to me whispered along the row, ‘It's Slim’ and a loud cry sounded and was repeated around the hall. ‘Slim. It's Slim.’ McLaurin moved swiftly along the wall to the huge Black policeman who had shouldered his way into the center of the room. I touched the arm of the woman who had first passed the word. Her frightened eyes swung toward me. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘Fast. Who is Slim?’ Her chin rose and her eyes were angry and black. ‘He's a killer. He's killed two Blacks in Indianola.’ An ox of a man with enormous hands, Slim stood like an animal at bay. His jaw was lowered and his eyes stared furiously at Al Levine who blocked his path. The noise was shrill in the hall and Levine's quiet voice was drowned in the surging sound. McLaurin reached the rabbi's side as he was repeating slowly what he had already said. As if to a slow child, Levine patiently explained that police were not needed or wanted. ‘Don't you understand? The sheriff promised us that the police would stay outside.’ The policeman's eyes seemed not to comprehend and the great hulk stood as if rooted to the floor. McLaurin's voice rasped through the excited babble. ‘This is church property. You have no right to be here.’ Slim's yellow eyes shifted from the rabbi to McLaurin and they narrowed in recognition. His thick neck strained at the blue collar and one heavy hand moved slowly to rest on his holster. The oxen slab of face was shining from the steamy heat of the room. The small eyes studied McLaurin. Silence had suddenly descended on the two men. Slim's voice could be heard clearly. ‘I'm staying right here.’ McLaurin turned, pushed his way through the agitated crowd to the front of the heaving room. The nervous whispering ceased as he raised his hand for attention. The chunky body balanced on the balls of his feet and his whole attitude was taut and controlled. Ignoring the policeman, he addressed the Black seats and benches of the room. ‘Before we start here, I'd like for you to know that this is church property. We've got an agreement with the sheriff that says we don't have to put up with any policemen inside. Now, it's up to you whether you want him here or not.’ Feet scraped on the floor as everyone stood and a wave of noise roared through the room, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ The children had frightened, half-smiles on their faces but they screamed the words louder and louder. "Go!" It seemed that every throat in the crowd was unleashed and it was accompanying this barrage of sound that assaulted the policeman. I watched the fury on the faces of the old men and women in the room. They were yelling ‘Go!’ to a Mississippi policeman for the first time. They cut the air with the words they had never said aloud. ‘Go! Go! Go! Go!’ McLaurin fought his way through the stamping, chanting crowd to the side of Levine. Slim's eyes were wide and staring as the crescendo of noise broke about him. McLaurin pointed to the door and his vibrant face scissored through the din, ‘You got to go.’ The policeman's great head rolled and his tongue licked the heavy lower lip. He stared at McLaurin. ‘I could kill you,’ he growled and heaved the heavy service revolver from his holster. As the crowd eddied about the tableau, someone saw the dull glint of the .45 that was leveled at the rabbi and McLaurin and screamed. Slim stood traumatized and transfixed. His eyes were wide and frightened now as the shouting, lurching crowd pushed from the rear. Only then did white-helmeted policemen elbow their way past the entrance and into the tense and throbbing room. A moment later, they had wrestled the sweating, humiliated Slim through the crowd and on to the porch. The cries from the crowd in the room followed them. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ And now there was derisive laughter as well. Tomorrow, every Black child in Indianola would know that a bully cop had been faced down. McLaurin edged to the front of the hall. As he made his way clear of the milling people, he was greeted by applause and relieved laughter. He stood, face alight with excitement, waiting for silence. Slowly the aroused crowd settled back on the benches. Slim stood just beyond the open door on the porch. The light spilled across the enraged face and touched the white helmets of the Indianola police as they clustered in the dark behind him. The metallic chatter of the police car radio sounded lifeless and lonely. In the long, hushed room, McLaurin's voice sounded almost conversational. ‘I'm not unmindful tonight that many of you are here against the will of your folk. Kids are here against the will of their parents. Women are here against the will of their husbands and many men are here against the will of their wives, and I understand why they're all against your coming. People have been killed in Mississippi for coming to a freedom meeting. But I know something's happening. Something's changing. For better than two years, we've been trying to get a meeting in this town so people of Indianola could say out loud, in public, what they said over the years as they crouched under their beds. Praying, saying out loud that they were tired of being pushed in corners, tired of the way they were living, tired of having Mr. Charlie tell them where to move, when to move, how to move. But now, something's changing. You're not asking Mr. Charlie when and where and how, you're here, tonight, attending a freedom movement meeting in Indianola.’ He swallowed hard and there was a timbre in the voice as it rang out. ‘To me, it's a great thing, a great thing.’ His eyes were shining with a pride in these people. He gestured toward the door where the huge policeman paced restlessly. His voice was ripe with scorn and he hurled his words at the glowering man who stopped his pacing back and forth to listen. ‘I'm not unmindful of the fact that right here in your city we have a policeman who should be pickin' cotton.’ The silent tension was torn with hooting shouts and screams of laughter. The faces were full of contempt and mocking. ‘Not unmindful,’ he cried, ‘that right here in your city you have a policeman who's not qualified to be a policeman.’ Two police mounted the porch and stood with Slim, staring at McLaurin. McLaurin's voice fell, inviting the confidence of the rapt crowd. They strained forward to hear. ‘You know,’ he said almost casually, ‘once when I was arrested up in LaFleur County, a White official told me something. He said, ‘If a White policeman shoots a Negro, you have a racial crisis. But if a Negro policeman shoots a Negro, you don't have a racial crisis.’ He stopped and every eye turned to the door. For a long moment there was a complete silence in the room. Then McLaurin's throaty voice spat out the words, ‘And that's why they hired Slim.’ A single breath seemed to suck through the audience and was expelled in a sighing "Yes. Oh, yes, yes." And a roar seemed to fill the room, a wild mixture of relief, laughter, scorn and admiration. Tears stood in the faces of the oldsters. Unbelieving half-smiles on their lined faces, they watched this boy, this David, come to battle, and they cried. When the room quieted again, McLaurin shifted his tack. Never again did he as much as glance at the policeman at the door. His voice was full and he spoke with confidence. "For years I've known that we aren't the scarey type of people. Our ancestors killed lions. They ate the meat of animals. They would tear them apart. We're the same people that fought on foreign soil in two wars and in Korea. We're not afraid. We weren't afraid to go over there and shoot people who never did the things to us that these White people in Mississippi have done to us here. We weren't afraid." He stood motionless, searching the wide-eyed faces of the youngsters who bunched along the walls. Softly he asked the question, "Then why don't we shoot the White folk here?’ The voice stopped again and he took a half step closer to the teenagers. His voice spoke softly this time and their heads nodded gently. ‘Because in this movement, we don't hate, we love. Because even in Mississippi, we're Americans, born here, raised here, that in this movement we are going to win by being non-violent, because soil out there is enriched with the tears, the blood, the bones and the sweat of our ancestors. We own this country as much as anybody else. America is sacred to us. America is a land that we want to live in.’ His voice was vibrant with hope and full of the wonder of the moment. He leaned toward the children and his young voice was joyous. ‘What's happening today is real, not something you're reading about. It's happening right here. You are doing things that people before you could not have dreamed of doing. You are here. You won't say I heard about it or somebody told me. You'll say, ‘I was right there. I saw it all. My feet were in that place when history was made.’ " [end reading] ^M00:46:24 >> 1964 was a summer that never ended for me. It was the very beginning of a journey of discovery. It's a journey that has continued to unfold for more than four decades. A place I had only once imagined has become a reality of flesh, and bone, and blood, of anguish and exhilaration, of courage I had never before witnessed, of hopes kindled, of hopes extinguished, of hopes, incredibly, reborn. It is the place that brought into my life some of the most memorable men and women, black and white, whose hearts and brains and dedication transformed Mississippi forever, leaving behind a legacy of love, courage and faith for the whole nation. When President Obama declared that he was standing on the shoulders of those who had gone before him, he was speaking of the countless anonymous men and women, blacks and whites, whom I had witnessed, who had bet their lives on the promise of America. I first learned in Normandy that my art could be much more than a way to make a living. It could guide me to the truth if I trusted it. Of all the destinations I have journeyed to, none has been more daunting, more frustrating, more important, more life-affirming and more memorable than the state of Mississippi. As an artist and a citizen, I have been most challenged by this most southern of the Southern states. Often Mississippi has seemed like an extraordinary petri dish, a microcosm of Southern sensibilities and racial conflict. In six decades of travel and reportage, nowhere in America have I found the riveting personalities and thrilling canvas that have brought me ever back to Mississippi. All the unfinished racial business of America is writ large here. All of the moral promise of America can be perceived here. All the tragic flaws that bedevil America can be catalogued here. And much of the nobility, courage and sacrifice that grace America have been demonstrated here, helping to change the whole nation. In a larger sense, Mississippi has provided a candid mirror for much of America far beyond Dixie. As the great Civil Rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer wisely noted, "The sickness in Mississippi is not a Mississippi sickness. It's an American sickness, and America is on the critical list." For more than forty years, I have been a stranger at the gate, seeking always to peer inside, to hear the conversation, to understand the truth of the place. For more than forty years, it has been a work in progress, a mission, I know in my heart, will never be fulfilled. The portrait will never be finished by this artist. But hopefully my Mississippi sketches can speak to those who will follow. Thank you. ^M00:50:30 [applause] ^M00:50:42 >> Thank you. >> Peter Bartis: Tracy, are you willing to take a few questions? >> Tracy Sugarman: Sure. If you have the time, sure. [background noise] >> Peter Bartis: We can take a few questions, if you like. >> Tracy Sugarman: Don't be shy. Yeah, over there. ^M00:50:55 >> Male Speaker: How did your experience as a veteran in the war serve you? >> Tracy Sugarman: It's a good question. I think psychologically, it served me well. Having been a veteran and having been a junior officer at 23, I was working with kids who hit the beach who were 17, 18, 19 years old. Kids who had never been 20 miles from their home before. Kids who I found were capable of so much more than I ever would have imagined. It built a kind of faith in me in young peoples' capacities that served me well in Mississippi. 'Cause, once again, I was witnessing 19, 20, 21 year old kids facing down sheriffs and doing remarkable things. Going to work scared, but doing it and making it successful. Turning America around. So I think, for me, Normandy and my navy experience and the war experience made me trust young people and, it's interesting – The resonance of the last election confirmed so much of that. This "Me" generation that everybody had been writing off? It was not all about me, it was all about more than that. And they rallied because they thought they had somebody who spoke for them. That was exciting to me. I think it was riveting for the nation and I think you have a new generation now who wants to be heard and maybe will be encouraged to speak up, to stand up as a handful of people like Martha Honey did when most young people did not stand up. Most young people, most middle-aged people, most old people do not stand up. But there will be a fraction who will bite the bullet, who will stand up and their having done it changes everything. I think the country sensed that with Obama and we pray that that's so. But for me, other than making me dedicated to never see another war, to see the futility of war, to see the waste of war that ruined lives, unless it's a war you have to fight, that was the one I was in, I tell my young audiences whenever I'm invited, “think hard about what wars you're going to fight”. And so, nobody goes through a war and is not changed by it and that confirmed to me that there have to be alternatives to that. ^M00:54:24 Somebody else have a question? [pause] ^M00:54:30 If not, you can go have your lunch. Thank you very much. [laughter and applause] >> Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us loc.gov. [end of transcription]