|
|
Tallahassean's focus on civil rights still sharp at age 80
By Hope Bastian
Tallahassean Jack Sisson is one of countless people who have worked behind the scenes to help realize the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently described in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
In 1963, Sisson, a Pensacola native who had once studied for the priesthood, worked at the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ). He accompanied his boss, Matthew Ahmann to meetings where the march's founder A. Phillip Randolph, King, NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins and other now legendary civil rights leaders organized the event. Ahmann, NCCIJ's executive director, was one of only four white men whose organizations were invited to join the heads of the five major civil rights organizations organizing the march.
When King delivered his famous speech, Sisson heard the speech on the small TV in his Washington hotel room, not from a place among the 200,000-500,000 people gathered before the Lincoln Memorial. For, as Sisson, 80, recently proudly said from his home office in Tallahassee, his job was to "put out fires" by watching the march on TV and being ready to leap into action if problems occurred.
The march became the largest demonstration that ever had been held in Washington, and its organizers had feared violence. Explained Sisson, "We had not had Kent State [a 1970 incident in which the National Guard shot and killed four youth demonstrators]. We hadn't had Watts [riots] by then, but we had other things where the police had overreacted or under-protected." So he watched the march on TV "to see what the hell was going to happen. Fortunately nothing happened so I didn't have to try to call the FBI."
The march - one of the first extensively covered by television - was peaceful. Shortly after, President Kennedy promised to support the Civil Rights Act.
Two years later in the voters' rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Sisson taught marchers about the finer points of survival in the South.
His primary instruction to them was "don't argue constitutional law with a highway patrolman with a gun and a sixth grade education. In other words, move on . . . The basic thing was don't get killed."
Sisson was quite the organizer on his own right. He got started in organizing in his hometown of Pensacola in 1960. There he used the influence that came with his family's name to organize his fellow whites to support lunch counter integration in the city. "My father was extremely prominent in Pensacola and because I had been to seminary, I guess they thought I was holy. And because he hadn't disowned me they must have thought that I was respectable enough."
As a result Sisson was able to organize local whites. "I got the city managers together and we sent the police into protect the blacks at the lunch counters, not to hit them on the head like they did in other places," he says.
In his office, Sisson picks up one of the many piles of documents to show a color photocopy of a Western Union Telegram that he received from Dr. King. It is dated March 6, 1968, sent just a month before King was murdered in Memphis, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers. The telegram is an invitation to Sisson to join a meeting in Atlanta later that month bringing together "representatives of all racial, religious and ethnic groups . . . in a special meeting so that the desired joint thinking can be brought to bear on the urgent needs of poor people." King wrote to Sisson, "Your leadership is known and well recognized."
Sisson says that the meeting did not take place as described in the telegram, but he participated in many calls with Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leaders about the subject of organizing with poor people, and he traveled to Memphis several times about the sanitation workers strike. "They wanted a contract, they wanted to be treated like people, they wanted a living wage and they wanted to be treated fairly and he [King] was behind all that."
Sisson says that King's shift from ethnic to class organizing was "too hot for the establishment to handle. . . . I say that it's all right with the establishment to push ethics or ethnicity but not money. And what they were doing [in 1968] with the wages was about money... That was not an issue that the establishment is going to allow."
|
