During the Depression years, I began to identify to some extent with the unemployed, the organization for the unemployed at that period.

I think you can find some rationales for that if we look at the background out of which he came. Martin [Luther King] had come out of a highly competitive, black, middle-class background.

In '32 we organized the Young Negroes' Cooperative League and had some degree of success in terms of establishing stores and certainly buying clubs in various sections of the country. I was designated as - I don't know what exactly - I believe it was director. I'm not sure what it was, but it had to do with getting out the necessary mail and all of that - organization.

I'm sure, out of the context here of Stanley Levison's relationship with the Jewish liberal forces, that had made contributions. I remember one such contribution before they moved from Montgomery. An associate in the real estate business with Stanley had lost a son in the war, and she wanted to do something in memory of him. So, she made available certain monies to be used by the emerging leadership there in Montgomery. I'm sure other individuals did.

I don't think that the leadership of Montgomery was prepared to capitalize, let's put it, on the projection that had come out of the Montgomery situation. Certainly, they had not reached the point of developing an organizational format for the expansion of it. So discussions emanated, to a large extent, from up this way.

One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

In order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.