Chuck McDew
From DefendDissent
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"The theory was, if we hadn't been there, they wouldn't be beating us."
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Chuck McDew
From an interview with Chuck McDew in We Will Be Heard:
- I was the spokesman and leader of the Orangeburg Movement for Civic Improvement in South Carolina. We would go to a restaurant, at Woolworth's or Kress's, sit down, and ask to be served. They'd say "We don't serve Negroes in here. You're invading our property." When we didn't leave, the police would come. Even before we were arrested, the whites would try to beat us up. Since we were practicing nonviolence, we did not strike back. But we were the ones who were charged with breach of peace. The theory was, if we hadn't been there, they wouldn't be beating us. Mass arrests were common in demonstrations where we'd be exercising our First Amendment rights. One time, several hundred students were herded together and put in a parking-lot compound because there were no jails large enough to hold everybody. Then SNCC was formed. We were at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement. People never voted in the areas where we were working. In Amite County, Mississippi, eighty-five percent of the people were black, and yet no black person had voted there since Reconstruction. When we tried to register them, we understood why. Herbert Lee attempted to register one Tuesday. By Saturday he had been murdered by a Mississippi state representative.
- Altogether, I must have been arrested thirty-six times, for charges ranging from breach of the peace and inciting to riot, to criminal anarchy in Louisiana, which was the last big one I had to deal with. It went something like this: "Because Charles McDew is chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and because that group has as one of its avowed purposes to overthrow the government of Louisiana, he is now charged with criminal anarchy and high treason against the sovereign state of Louisiana." I was put in solitary. It was a small cell with no mattress, no sink. I roasted in that metal cage for weeks. Finally a deal was struck: If SNCC didn't operate in Louisiana, they wouldn’t bring the case to trial. It was an effective sort of deterrent.
- --(Bud and Ruth Schultz, We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present, Merrell. Used by permission of the authors. Buy it at Powell's Books)
