Transcript for Monte Wasch Student Phone Interivew Interviewer: Before we get started with the questions, I want

to make sure it is alright for us to record this interview. Wasch: Sure. Interviewer: How were you involved in the Civil Rights Movement? Wasch: When I was a freshman in college, which was at CCNY (City College of NY), a friend of mine said, Were organizing a march for integrated school in the fall of 1958, and Im going down to volunteer, come along. So I said sure because I was politically aware and interested in Civil Rights, although Ive never done anything. I went down to his office which was about ten blocks off my college campus in Harlem and I met a guy who turned out to be a very famous man in the Civil Rights Movement. He helped to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott when Rosa Parks became famous for refusing to move her seat on the bus. He began a march for integrated schools, which Martin Luther King Jr. was going to lead and that march was on October 25 of 1958. I was a volunteer, and you know, I handed out leaflets and did things like that. These were the days before e-mail, kids. We organized maybe ten or twelve thousand people. It was the first demonstration of its kind. Then I stayed with that organization, I continued to go to school of course, and I volunteered after school. We organized a second march in April of 1959, which was twice as big. At that time, we sent a petition to Congress asking them to pass a Civil Rights Bill that would guarantee that schools would be integrated. At that time I was going to schools and speaking and was travelling in the south in 1960. In 1960, this movement continued, we were going to raise money for Dr. King and his movement and the students sit-ins broke out. I was deeply involved in the movement at this point. We began to picket stores to let the companies know we did not like what they were doing in the south. That activity took me all the way through 1961 and 1962. The same type of people volunteered, white and black, who began to organize the famous March on Washington. By that time, I was in my early twenties, newly married to wife number one. I was the assistant transportation coordinator; what I was doing was organizing the bus companies. I also travelled around in the south and I was arrested on a few occasions. Interviewer: Do you believe the media greatly influenced the dynamic of the movement? If so, why? Wasch: Oh yeah, the media certainly influenced the movement. Firstly, the major television stations highlighted what was going on in the south. When you had pictures on nightly news of innocent children being hosed by water cannons and police beating people who were just trying to get a sandwich, that certainly helped ot mobilize public opinion. I suppose that there were Southern newspapers and editorials that were trying to incite hatred against demonstrators. The

media influenced both sides but much more strongly, it influenced millions of middle-of-theroad Americans to say this is wrong and needs to be stopped. Interviewer: Why was the Childrens March of 1963 such a pivotal part of the movement? Wasch: Well because it organized a group of volunteers who could do so much. We all came together behind those youth marches. We built an organization of people who were trained in non-violence and we all learned how to do it with those two youth marches. There were hundreds of people. Out of those youth marches came the organization of the Civil Rights Movement. Interviewer: Thank you so much for your time. We will update you and speak to you soon! Wasch: Yes of course.