I've lived most of my life. What I would like to see happen in this country in my lifetime is the next generation get ready to launch the next lurch … - Robert Parris Moses

What happened, I think, was Ella Baker was really sort of the godmother for SNCC. I met Ella in the summer of 1960. And in the spring of 1960, she had taken the initiative to get the student sit-in energy at Shaw, her alma mater, and held off on the big civil rights leaders, to say, “Look, the kids ought to have the opportunity to manage their own insurgency,” right? And so, SNCC was the encapsulation of the sit-in movement, the energy of the sit-in movement, right? And so, that — and SNCC took that energy into the Freedom Rides, because it was the SNCC energy which said to the president of the United States and the attorney general, “It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, that, you know, there’s some danger here. Our lives are in danger, but we’ve decided that, with our lives, this is what we want to do.” Right? And so, SNCC, really, and those students became the example for students all over the country — right? — the idea that students should draw a line in the sand and say, “Look, that’s it. That’s enough. We don’t want to live in this country unless we can change it.”

But then the networks decided that this was really an authentic moment, and they replayed what she said that night. And they did flood the credentials committee. And so, I think it was David Lawrence, who was governor of Pennsylvania, who was the chair of the credentials committee. And so, he then postponed the decision, and they went after the delegates on the credentials committee. Johnson went after them, because the issue was whether there would be eleven delegates on the credentials committee who would vote to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and thus enable a floor discussion, in other words, that the issue — we’re talking about democracy, right? So the question is, are we going to be able to get a full discussion and debate by the whole convention around this really critical issue? And, of course, Johnson didn’t want that. He did not want this to go to the floor, because once it went to the floor and everybody had to get up in public and state their views, then the Democratic Party would have had to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And, of course, what Johnson was afraid of was that the whole South would then walk out of the Democratic Party. So this was really high drama. Barack Obama could not be running for president if he had not been able to secure a party to run for. And the Democratic Party, from the time of after the Civil War right until 1964, there were no black delegates to the Democratic Party from the South, and it was that action, more than anything else, which opened up the national party structure and allowed eventually what is happening today to happen.

In our country, I think we run sharecropper education. That is, an education that you can trace, when the judge asked me that question, because in the Delta of Mississippi, sharecroppers were assigned to do a certain kind of work, and so the idea was you only needed a certain kind of education. So, if we carry that forward into the Information Age, then we will have serfs in our cities, just like we had serfs in the Delta of Mississippi in the Industrial Era. And this is the huge challenge facing our country. I think what we need is a movement for our constitutional rights. We need a constitutional amendment, something which simply says every child in the country is a child of the country and is entitled to a quality public school education.