In 1960, Willie Blue returned to his native Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, a twenty-one year old Navy veteran. From what he could tell, life for African Americans there had not improved much in his absence, and he didn’t like what he saw. Local whites didn’t like him much, either. “A lady from the NAACP,” he remembers, “she worked at the funeral home, she pulled me aside and she said, ‘I heard about some guys, some Freedom Riders, down in Greenwood. Things are getting rough for you and I keep hearing things. They’re going to get you. You might need to go down there and see what’s up with them.’ I went to Greenwood, I met Bob Moses, and the rest is history.”
Blue went on to become Mississippi Field Secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In April, he joined other movement veterans at SNCC’s 50th Anniversary Conference, where he sat down with an interviewer from the Southern Oral History Program-Duke University Oral History Project collaboration there to cover the event. Enjoy.
<p>Willie Blue from Southern Oral History Program on Vimeo.</p>
Willie Blue from Southern Oral History Program on Vimeo.
Chapel Hill NC
sohp.orgThe Southern Oral History Program, founded in 1973, documents the southern past by recording interviews with those who lived it. Our 4,500 interviews are freely available for listening and reading at the Southern Historical Collection on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, more and more, online. We are proud to be part of the Center for the Study of the American South.
