Teachers March

Lawrence Huggins: "But the teachers just got together, the young ones, and just went to Reverend Reese, he was head of the teachers association at that time, and we just started going around and asking the other teachers at the other schools and, because many of the teachers weren't registered to vote and, out of 125 members, we did succeed in getting 105 to participate in that movement. For some reason, I ended up at the front of the line, about the fifth person. When we went up the courthouse steps, somehow I always got the baton in my stomach. After the third time, the chairman of the, no, it was the district judge came out and told them something like, “Don't arrest these people because what you going' do with the 7,000 students that we have running around here when they go back to school Monday?” See, this was on a Friday and they had carried out toothbrushes and whatever medications that the ones that were taking medicine needed so they could have it there in case we were arrested and with the idea that we would be out by Monday morning. So that changed the dynamics of the movement, gave the movement some impetus and it probably set the stage where the local authorities finally realized that we have a problem here and it's not going' away because most of that time, the teachers that did have some fear, they lost their fear and that is probably perhaps why the movement succeeded here. The people who participated in it had lost that fear."