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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview F-0039, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Elizabeth Siceloff began working with the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen (FSC) in 1945. Courtney Siceloff joined the organization after the two were married in 1949. Elizabeth served as a secretary for the FSC, while Courtney served as a minister with the organization. Coming from the Presbyterian and Methodist faiths respectively, the FSC blurred denominational lines. The Siceloffs describe the FSC as concerned with promoting the social gospel through worker education and economic justice. In 1950, they were assigned to the Penn School on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, where they remained until 1969. During this time, civil rights leaders utilized the Penn School's interracial facilities. The Siceloffs discuss the shortcomings of the Fellowship and the problems with activist work. Despite the social purpose of the Fellowship, few females and blacks were appointed to executive positions. Elizabeth also acknowledges the difficulty of FSC work, as members had to weigh economic stability against following their consciences. Furthermore, much of the local press and several southern states opposed the work of the FSC. The Siceloffs discuss the theological divide within the organization and note that gender and generational tensions within the FSC were also a source of tension until Nelle Morton began working to eliminate cliques. The Siceloffs have high regard for Morton, who helped bolster the organizational strength of the FSC through a focus on strengthening its financial standing. After Morton's tenure, Howard "Buck" Kester took over. They describe Kester as a Christian renegade who focused more on promoting work camps than on bolstering the FSC organization. The Siceloffs describe how Kester and Myles Horton established Highlander Folk School but went different ways because of ideological differences. This separation was indicative of a larger, growing divide among FSC members, who debated whether the purpose and mission of the Fellowship was to continue field work or to focus on an organizational agenda.
Elizabeth and Courtney Siceloff recall their work with the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and with the Penn School. The interview centers largely on the internal problems and external mission of the Fellowship.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
In Alabama, when they announced, it was July 5th and he said . . . he is so quiet and modest. It was one of those experiences you don't have very often. "Oh they were so elated."
You said Alabama, but where in Alabama?
At the trial, Mobile.
Really?
Yeah, and he was so excited and I was telling you he had put a picture up
on the bulletin board in our mail room of a color picture. I guess it
was from the Montgomery paper. All of them rejoicing, Albert Turner and
all these people and couple of kids. It was a marvelous picture up
there. I said, "Al, I love that picture." Alan said, "I hope some of my
pictures turn out." He turned into quite a photographer. Right now
though he's going to go back home and take a nap. He's writing an
article for the Nation on this. He said, "I want to
see if they're still interested." He said, "They called me last week,
and I was just too busy." He was so caught up in this wonderful
surprise. He has stuff all over the library up there . . . piles of
clippings. I hope it will be a good one.
A sociologist in our department named Bernadette Grant is from Mobile. Her husband teaches at the University of South Alabama. She was used, or was waiting to be used by the defense in the jury selection as a consultant for them. But then, whoever the outside attorneys were from outside of Alabama, they brought in their own high powered consultants and so she didn't get involved. But she sat with them while they went through the process. I was amazed at the verdict. It seemed . . .
Oh yeah, Alan . . . Well the only other thing I would say before you turn on the machine . . .
Well, I've already turned it on. I hope that's all right with you, unless it's something you don't want revealed.
Oh, no, I was just going to say that, well my memory is sketchy. So it will be just be memories and images and anotations.
Well, that's expected. For the record, recapping, you were the secretary for the Fellowship in '45?
Perhaps. It was '45 or '46 until toward the end of probably '46. I was in Chapel Hill from February of '45 through December of '45, so in the middle of that period was . . . although I was associated with Nelle and we were friends from the time that I arrived.
You remained members from that time on?
Yes.
But you were actually the secretary in the office then.
I really don't have those dates down.
Do you remember the name Leslie Leal?
Could that have been a local Chapel Hill person?
There was someone who wrote, a minister, who wrote articles for each
issue of Prophetic Religion under the pseudonym of
Leslie Leal. Mostly the late 30's and the early 40's.
No, I don't remember him.
I suspect with the name Leal, which is the Scottish word for loyality that it was Scotty Cowan, but I haven't been able to . . . His wife's sisters got all of his papers and they won't release them.
Will Campbell?
Will came along much later.
Ask Charles Jones for them. I don't know if he would
Looking back on it, what do you think were the primary goals of the Fellowship? What was it really about?
I remember one time when Charles Jones characterized it as a bunch of lunatics and heretics. I think to me it was sort of bringing to action the social gospel which had become newly revealed to me at Chapel Hill. Coming out of a very traditional Presbyterian Church into a whole new setting.
Where was your home church?
Charlotte.
What did your father do?
My father worked in a cotton mill.
And your mother?
My mother worked there for a short period. Actually, my parents were separated when I was four.
Did you live with your mother?
Yes, I was the youngest of seven children.
Did she ever remarry?
Oh, no. She didn't get divorced.
Oh, just separated.
Yes, he was an alcoholic and she just couldn't take it anymore. Some of my older brothers and sisters dropped out of school to help the family.
Courtney . . . your father was a Methodist minister?
In Texas. I didn't know about the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen until we were married.
Which was '49. Were there any crises in the Fellowship at the time you were most active in it?
I'm trying to remember if I was still working for the Fellowship when, I think I must have been during one of the workcamps in eastern North Carolina.
Columbia?
Yes.
Okay. I've got some questions about that one. Was it you who wrote Nelle,
the secretary whoever it was, if I had known you were Elizabeth Taylor,
I would have made
Oh, well you could have helped me. We have more in your papers than you
will be able to
I could have brought a copy of the letter for you. Anyway, whoever it was wrote, the secretary was in the office alone, Nelle was out of town at some conference or somethins, I don't know, but anyway Columbia hit. Whoever it was had to handle all the crisis calls. The press, the parents, and everything, calling the office.
I don't think I was the person who did that or I would have remembered. I suppose it could be Cornelia Lively. I think the way I knew about it was through people, I can't remember if Hibbard Thatcher was in that one. I think Jack and Garland Anderson and, anyway I got the feedback through people who were.
Do you know where Cornelia Lively is?
She has died.
Oh.
Wait a minute, no, she is ill with cancer. Nelle told me when I saw her
in the airport about a year ago. She told me Cornelia had cancer and had
been and was very,
The letter to Nelle mentioned that she had bumped into J.C. Herrin in the post office the morning after it hit the national news. And J.C. ran out of the post office away from her like a scalded cat. He wanted to be disassociated from this. So, I'm trying to get some insight into that.
I remember him as being someone that was usually a supporter. I believe he was a Baptist student minister.
The reason I was interested in J.C. Herrin, whom I've talked to but he didn't shed any light on this, when Buck left in 1957 they were trying to get a grant from the Field Foundation and Buck wrote someone that he thought J.C. Herrin had undermined the Foundation grant by going behind their back and telling the Foundation not to give it.
Oh, well that's too bad.
J.C. admitted that he thought that what they were doing at the time was not that worthwhile an activity.
Did he have any relationship with the Fellowship?
J.C.?
Yes.
He helped them get other grants. Did you know J.C. Herrin?
Later on, because he went down to Penn when they were trying to dispose of that school and how to deal with that and turned it over to the state and so forth, but that was different. It may have been a little earlier than that.
Well, he was pastor of a church in the 50's at Scarsdale, New York and he was making contacts in the New York area with the Foundations. In fact, when the Fellowship printed Frank Graham's article from an historical journal or something, they got a grant from I think it was from Field Foundation. They used that to print 50,000 copies.
What's the guy's name who was the executive secretary of Field . . .
Leslie Stonewall?
The guy who preceeded him. The guy who down, who I told him it was 1/4 mile and he said it was a mile?
I've seen his name so many times in all that correspondence.
I could imagine that anyone if Scarsdale must have known him.
Anyway, J.C. suggested to him that Graham's article ought to be reprinted, and the guy said yes, it should be, now who should we get to do it? And J.C. said well how about the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen? So then J.C. got in touch with the Fellowship and asked them for $2,500 or something like that.
Some magnificent sum.
Yes, at that time it was. They got it and then they needed about that
much more and they got that. So J.C. was not . . . I wasn't wanting to
imply that he was trying to
But you know, there are so many complications in this thing. People trying to follow the leadings of their conscience and at the same time keep their jobs and everything.
But there were people who
Some of them were faculty who were close to the Doris Duke Foundation.
We got used to that
Yes, Max, Maxwell (Hahn).
But I think they had sometimes, I'm sure Harold was very influential. And
Less before him with
Do you remember the name Wallace Fridy? F-r-i-d-y?
Yes, I remember the name.
Methodist minister in South Carolina.
We got contacts from him.
Seems like he helped publish that South Carolina Speak.
I'm wondering if he was . . .
He probably would be.
There are four ministers that . . . Morris was the one who sort of . . .
He and Morris was
There was a Methodist minister named Jack something.
I think all four of them had to leave. I guess Morris stayed longer. Some of them had to leave very abruptly. Excellent little booklet they put out. Very moderate, all white. We had someone down in Beaufort and a very fine lady up in Gaffney, who was a doctor's wife. But they were all moderate folks. Bookstores wouldn't sell it. The bookstores in Beaufort even though a Beaufort author was on it.
Wallace Fridy wrote a letter to the office a week after the Columbia incident resigning from the Fellowship with no explanation.
He then had a church in —.
Pastor in South Carolina.
South Carolina.
I was just wondering if there was a connection that you would know about.
Well, I remember the name.
Well, maybe he's the same.
I don't know if he did, you said he did have to leave?
I thought you said he did.
Well, I can't tell you these four ministers names. I don't know. I know Morris. This was in the 50's wasn't it?
Yeah, well there was a Wallace Fridy. The name spelled the same way who was a minister in the Kentucky conference in the late 50's, 1956. He was the only minister I could find to marry me. He drove 60 miles to perform the wedding. Because I was marrying a woman who had been married previously.
Extremely dangerous.
Yes. I was just wondering if it were the same Wallace Fridy.
Well, the name is unusual enough, but . . .
Why don't I tell you about
We had 21 Methodist ministers in Mississippi at one time.
So this Fridy could likely not have been one of those four. I thought you
were thinking some liberal minister
Well, for him to be a member of the Fellowship to start with, he had to be a liberal. What I'm trying to find out is, did any of the controversial things that hit the press, like Columbia, or like the Journey of Reconciliation and the incident in Chapel Hill with Charles Jones, did those things have any effect on the membership? Did you lose members? Do you recall?
I really don't. I don't recall an incident like that that caused a large number of people resigning or even one or two.
Did you have annual membership dues?
Yes. A dollar a year.
Was that what it was? It was never enough.
The membership funds just wouldn't support it. Neither would the donations. Do you recall any internal dissentions in the leadership of the Fellowship?
I don't remember anything I can put my finger on. I can remember very
lively and spirited meetings of the executive committee and so forth. As
a matter of fact, I was probably not present at a lot of those meetings,
but I
Did you have the feeling that any of this carried over, that there were any internal hostilities or cliques over issues and such?
Within the membership and executive committee?
Right.
I don't know that, if you try to think through things that might have
caused dissention or that sort of thing, I seem to remember that, there
would be times when this was detectable, but Nelle Morton would be
trying to establish a somewhat independent course. She would have to
deal with these people who had been in the organization.
I know there were differences, but I have not been able to catch a lot of cliques forming or that sort of thing. At that time, not while Nelle was there.
If it was going on, I was not aware of it.
Okay. Of course, the big growth period was while Nelle was in charge of it.
I think Nelle was very strong on organization and she was coming in to a
different approach. Her type of orientation. She was all for the Prophetic Religion,
it was Profitless Religion.
Somebody wrote that it should be Pathetic Religion.
And there may even be unprintable things that it was called. I just happened to think about that.
I thought it was pretty good, myself. I've got copies
Have you? Oh my, that would be interesting to see sometime. I thought it was good, too. I couldn't always understand the articles.
Well, I had trouble with that, too.
It was full of zeal. I just remember, Scotty Cowan, to me, he was like an Old Testament prophet when he spoke. He was a strong prophet.
He had a way with words.
Oh, he did. He certainly did.
While we're talking about people, I had the impression that Buck Kester . . . I've seen copies of his sermons. They were the driest things I have ever read. It reminded me of John Wesley's sermons. I've never been so bored in my life as when reading Wesley's sermons.
You know, that's really interesting, because I don't have any memory of reading anything he wrote.
Did you hear him preach?
No, not as such. I remember him speaking eloquently in Fellowship
meetings and gatherings which was actually
Well, everyone else agrees with your image of him.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Where were y'all in 1960?
We were at Penn School and very much involved.
'50 to '69.
That long? That's a long time. Well then you were kind of isolated from the civil rights movement?
It came there.
In what way?
Well, there was a conference center. That was one of the first things we
did. Then, the boarding school. Hiram Read, a sociology professor,
headed a group that made a survey of Penn in '47, that in terms of
teacher certification, equipment, and everything, it would take a
million dollar endowment to make it a feasible operation and suggested
closing Penn School and getting into something else. They worked out an
agreement with the Board of Education of the county, the northern
do-gooders, that (1) the teachers would be hired by the county. They
would operate the school on Penn grounds but that Penn would be
responsible for the deficit up to $10,000 a year to subsidize our
Christian school; that there would be no director for at least a period
of two years. It closed in '48 and we came in '50. We began trying to
see first
The Charleston News had an editorial about the composition of the South
Carolina Advisory Committee, when it was announced. They could say
nothing good, of course, about the committee, or about the membership.
They started off with Courteny. They said he had been brought in from
I went to a Klan meeting one time with a Presbyterian minister up in Greenville, Alabama. One of the speakers gave the Biblical basis of segregation. He spent about 15 minutes, and then closed out by saying, "Of course, I'm not a religious person myself." The next speaker said, "Let us not substitute intelligence for ignorance."
Everybody else was wearing a sheet?
Well, yeah. Not really that large a gathering. About 100 feet from where the cross was being burned there was a black family cabin. All the kids were sitting out on the porch just watching the show. They weren't threatened the least. While we were sitting down, and I I was jotting down notes, someone walked up behind us and asked us if we were with the press. They were in their robes. They stayed behind us the rest of the night.
They kept an eye on you.
Yeah. But they were very interesting folks.
Do you
Yes.
Did the existence of Friends of the Soil create any problems for the Fellowship that you were aware of?
Francis Drake, wasn't it?
Right. Gene Smathers.
I talked to Francis by the way, he's retired . . .
That would have been a useful thing. Take that up with him again.
Were there any women who were strongly active in the Fellowship other than, of course, Nelle?
I don't particularly remember. There was a woman in Chapel Hill who was with the YMCA.
Ann Queen?
Well, I guess she was part of Charles Jones' orbit and was a person who was interested in all these things. I remember Ann being active. She would have been involved in anything which students were taking part.
But as far as the executive committee?
I don't remember any. My memory is that they were all men and they were all ministers.
All right. What about the role of blacks? Were there any blacks who were strong contributors to the decision making?
I can't remember. I have a very vivid memory of Branch.
Murray Branch?
Murray Branch to the conference at Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, and I think I may have driven with him part of the way. I remember him making quite an effort to come to that conference and participating in a very active way, but I don't suppose he was on the executive committee.
He was at one time.
Was he? Well, that name and face comes up right away. I can remember the name of Melvin Watson and I think I'm getting a picture. He was a young minister. I remember him coming to meetings.
He finished seminary in the mid 30's which would make him, well, about 75, I guess. But he's the youngest looking 75 I've ever seen. So he probably looked younger than he really was.
Have you come across the name of Mrs. Jernigan?
Yes.
She was a very lovely black woman.
Her husband was a school principal. And she was secretary of FSC.
Yes. She had a very strong connection with Shaw University. I remember
riding with her to the conference in Pleasant Hill. As I remember, I was
the only white person in this car of, I suppose there were six of us. We
were driving together from Chapel Hill to Pleasant Hill. We stopped, it
was one of the larger cities. We went to the train station so we could
go to the restroom and by this time I was so caught up in feeling part
of the group and . . .
Incidently, she came from Clinton, Tennessee, I believe.
She was working at the office at the same time you were, then.
It may be, but at the time she was the secretary. I don't know if I was asked to go and be in charge of the children's program, because that's what I ended up doing. I was back and forth between periods of working for the sociology department and working for the Fellowship. I think I was working for the Fellowship and maybe it was that we were both working part-time there.
Did she come over to Chapel Hill to work?
I think she did. I think that's where
Are you familiar with Will Campbell?
Well, I certainly know him and know about him and admire him.
What do you see as the difference between the Fellowship and the Committee?
I don't know that I'm close enough to the Committee to answer that.
Well, I'm just interested in impressions.
Did the Committee ever have membership meetings?
Last winter. I've been a member now of the committee for twenty years and last winter I got my second notice of a meeting. And I went to this one because I didn't think that I'd live the next twenty years.
Was this the executive committee?
No, it was the whole committee. They're limited to a maximum of a hundred members and last I heard we had 45.
Whereas the Fellowship had annual meetings open to everyone.
And the Fellowship had as many as 500 members by the time Nell left in '49. There were about 125 when she came in. The committee—new members are appointed by Will. By law, it's supposed to meet once a year. It could have lost it's charter if the state had gone after it.
But did Will ever do anything by the law?
Well, he's autonomian in many ways.
I guess in thinking of my impressions of the difference, I think of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen as being a vehicle for Will Campbell to do the things that he's called to do. I really don't have any vision of that as an organization. I think he's a prophet who's out there prophesying and crying in the wilderness and doing outrageous things.
This is a sideline. He's trying to put together, trying to get a national
grant to put together the people in the prolife movement and the folks
in the antinuclear movement and the folks in the environmental issues
and the anti-death penalty folks. To get those together at a national
level all over then try to organize some local coalitions of these
groups. And you talk about a wierd
Reconciliation! The way Will always liked to work with the Klan. Keep in communication.
What I remember as the Fellowship, it seemed to me to be more of a grassroots group in which you would try to have a well-integrated group get together periodically and have this idea and bought the property and had long-term plans for carrying out that. People were encouraged to build homes and buy lots from these slots or whatever it was. Once the changed its name, I got the impression that it was much more of an intellectual organization with publications with names I never could pronounce.
Even harder and more obscure than Prophetic Religion.
That was not exactly a catchy title for a magazine.
I never remember seeing notice of any meeting after that change.
No, there wasn't. Intentionally. Will didn't want to spend his time going out and drumming up members for a membership organization.
That's his style. A totally different style.
Actually, I think what happened was that he got this grant from the Field
Foundation to the National Council
I thought that he got cut off from the National Council. Did they finally cut off his grant? Weren't we encouraged to write letters to the National Council?
The grant came with him.
Maybe they tried to but . . .
It seems to me that they were . . . he was being dismissed and they rallied to get the National Council to keep him on.
I don't know whether that happened or not but at the split when he got canned by the National Council because he just wanted to be a preacher. That's the way he puts it. I haven't heard from the National Council side. But I have copies of the correspondence going back and forth. I haven't had time to dig into them. He had a grant from the Field Foundation to do what he was doing in the South with the National Council. So when the National Council fired him the grant stayed with him. So then he went to the Fellowship office and said, "I would like to house this grant with the Fellowship" and that's how it got restructured.
What year was that?
1963.
That's when he came to the organization?
Yes. Well, he was with the Fellowship as a member of the Fellowship back in the 1950's.
But I mean as an executive.
Yeah. He became the executive secretary at that time. Do you recall or do you know anything about Buck Kester's leaving his executive secretaryship in '57? Do you know anything about why he left?
I don't guess I do. I seems like I remember hearing about it from when we were at Penn.
You didn't pick up on any of the internal gossip?
No. I guess we weren't really in touch with it.
You say you only met him once in New York.
When he instructed for the refugee organization, I went to see him for parent problems at Penn.
Let me bounce something off you. It seems that the
That's a big order.
Yes.
That means they had more responsibility than just the camps?
Yes. He was doing the same job Nelle was doing. Essentially, that's what he was hired for in '52, plus to get the camps going.
So he was back in the circle. He was once again the executive secretary.
From '52 to '57. There were some people, like David Burgess, who were real gungho about getting the camp going. And there were other people, the Hughley's, Neal and Sadie, who really thought the camps were the wrong direction to go in, that they ought to concentrate their energies on building little local groups.
Putting more energy into the property and development and all that.
My impression is that they finally split top executive committee. Charles will probably be able to tell me more about it.
Yes. Charles can help.
Buck was asked to leave around '56. It took him about a year to find some place to go to.
Well, as we were saying earlier, being the sort of independent . . . Well, those prophets, it's hard for them to get along because they're each . . .
What surprised me was that he could have been the executive secretary during this period. I remember in '57 we went to some of the meetings and I remember very vividly when they laid this plan out.
See, we went down to Penn in '50 and our involvement was in that period and even remember Buck Kester there. I do remember later that once they were beginning to develop the property he had responsibility in terms of making contact with the Council of Churches and they put on a workcamp and the church community had a workcamp. He had the responsibility where you had to check with him.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
That gives me a lot of insight.
I remember a lot of mailings.
I think it would have rung a bell with us. The fact that we change SIDE with what's happening to Penn and so forth. I just don't remember that. I just remember that Ray ended up there in semi-retirement.
In fact, in that time around '55, he made a tour of the whole South as far as Texas. It was about the time that the Delta Farm in Mississippi ran into trouble and had to close that down. Gene Cox had to get out.
He was a white haired . . .
Oh, yes, I remember him.
He lives just down the street from Elvis Presley's Gracie Mansion. In fact, he was the first person I interviewed about this years ago.
He and Buck were in that together, the farm.
But anyway, Buck made a tour down through there and gave a report on the conditions of the South about '55.
This is news to me.
I think it is quite insightful that you picture him as primarily as camp director. I think it says something about where his primary energies were being directed, which did become an issue, and he writes about that.
We weren't active in the Fellowship either.
He would not have included Penn Center on his tour because I'm sure he found it real painful.
He was bitter about Penn center.
Penn school was bitter about him. He had a very rough time there.
One of my impressions was that Buck ran into trouble because of Buck in the 50's. Well, Buck was grate in the 30's with the Fellowship by getting it going with his charismatic personality but then comes Nelle Morton in the 40's who's the organizer par excellence. and the victor. Buck tended to give knee-jerk reactions and Alice steadied him a whole lot from what I've heard and kind of kept his feet on the ground.
She was the organizer of that team.
Yes. Buck comes back in '52.
What age would he have been? I'd say he was going into sort of a retirement.
No. He wasn't retired because in '52, Nancy would have been just 19 and going to college.
No time to retire is it.
He's in his forties at that time.
Pretty young.
But Buck was still operating back in the 30's in terms of the way he operated. The fellowship he's grown beyond that.
He was in an endangered situation in Mississippi farm-wise.
My description of Buck Kester is the Lone Ranger who would ride into town and the folks would ask, "Who was that masked man?" He'd go to Marianna, Florida then to investigate a lynching and almost get lynched himself. He'd go into some little town in Arkansas and try to organize the local tenant farmer's union then he was gone. He was from one hot spot to another . . .
He was drawn to hot spots.
Publicity may have been part of it. I don't know. But Nelle was a quite organizer of local community groups.
It was a totally different approach.
And getting them out there to stir up trouble and create change rather than react to it.
Is Buck dead now?
Yes. He died in '76.
What did he die of?
He died with his boots on.
The Lone Ranger died with his boots on. Say, do you remember Betty Kester who was Irene's good friend? She is his widow.
Only for a limited period of time. It was a short mariage for both of them.
His second wife was his wife's sister. After his first wife of many years
died then
Well, I'm leaving town at six.
A.M.?
A.M. But I can call from on the road.
Well, if you're going to call from the road you can just call me.
It's
They stay in touch with one another and visit back and forth.
Gosh. I had a list of names I wanted to ask you about but I think we've talked about everyone on here that's of importance. Did you know Jim Dombrowski?
I just may have been in a conference with him or something. He was just a name that Nelle talked to frequently.
Oh, really?
His name came up a lot. It was always a name to conjure with. I don't know that she talked to him a lot. We didn't do business so much by phone as we do now, but you know . . .
Well, the mail worked good back then. You could send out notices to people; "Don't forget that we've got a meeting" and it . . .
We don't do that these days.
Well, I wouldn't dare do that.
Well, I just remember him as one of a band of saints if you'd want to call it that.
It's interesting that he had some connection with the Fellowship. Did he ever leave it? I thought that he'd think that to be too conservative.
I think that he probably just drifted away but he maintained his membership, primarily I suspect, to get the literature, but he wasn't all that active in it. He wasn't on the board.
Was he head of the steps?
Yes he was. But you know, he began the Fellowship. It was his idea.
I think Nelle admired him a lot. That's my perception. It seems to me that his name came up frequently.
He was placed in the public image at that time, as I
Even more so I'd have thought.
And greatly admired. You know, Miles Horton was admired.
Hounded. And was much more radical than what I'd assume the Fellowship was.
I think so. Miles was, of course, also nonreligious.
Uh-huh. That's like saying he's not one for literature. I guess his involvement would be of a nonreligious nature. Social change.
Miles asked Buck to come help him to start Highlander.
Did he?
Yeah. Buck went ot the Fellowship instead in the early 30's and supported what was going on at Highlander around the late 30's. They had split over the communist issue. Miles was willing to work with anybody. Not to be taken in by them but work with them. Buck wouldn't. Miles was more active as an organizer. Buck wasn't. There was just a real difference in personalities.
I never knew that.
In fact, Buck wrote one letter in which he implies he thought Highlander
was his operation, but then decided not to
I think that both were such strong individuals that they couldn't have worked as a team very well, could they?
And Miles felt betrayed by Buck eventually. Buck agreed for the Fellowship to help sponsor a multigroup meeting and Buck backed out of it, and said that he had never agreed to do it according to Miles, then denounced. But that's Miles's version. I just wish Buck were aground so he could talk a little but about it.
Back to the matter of the conferencing center being the
The health department killed it. You had to have approved outhouses, and approved water supply, and kitchen and all that. That just could not be done.
We spent the weekend trying to meet those standards.
But you're right, there was an attempt to have a meeting there, but at the last minute they had to switch it to Warren Wilson.
I think, as I recall, there was a decision to be made, are we or aren't
we. Let's meet there and sho that we are going to go through with it, we
are going to make a go of it. There were others who were
The feedback I'm getting now from people like Sadie Hughley and some others is that the board itself is really divided but those who were for the camp by David Burgess were so strongly for it and the rest of us . . .
Kind of a passion . . .
Yeah and those who were against it weren't so strongly against it so they remained silent in the executive
But anyway, they just wanted to
They would have had everything all finished.
Somebody at Vanderbilt, he thought he could get a grant to buy it for $50,000 or something like that.
That would have changed the course of a lot of . . .
It's probably just as well that they didn't get it.
They probably would have . . . It would have been more like a church conference.
Do you know, just as a sidelight, what happened to the money that came
from
We had a . . . While we were at Penn Center, we got together a group of people to talk about problems in the rural south and think of ways that these problems could be dealt with. We had people from different . . .
Gene Cox was one of them.
Yeah. Gene Cox, Alice Spearman, Paul Willing of the Southern Regional
Councils; so Charles Jones was asked to be a member of that group, and
he was driving down to Page 43 is missing.
END OF INTERVIEW