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Charlie Cobb, October 16, 2015 1 TRANSCRIPT: Charlie Cobb Interviewee: Charlie Cobb Interviewer: Joshua Clark Davis Interview Date: October 16, 2015 Location: Length: One audio file, 52:01 START OF INTERVIEW Josh Davis: Okay. So, just to start over, I’m Josh Davis. I’m meeting here with Mr. Charlie Cobb. We’re going to be talking about Drum & Spear, Africa News Service. I started off the interview—it’s October fifteenth, excuse me, sixteenth, 2015—and I started off by saying Mr. Cobb is probably best known for journalism that he did later in his career. He’s known for books he’s written. He’s known for SNCC and for activism. But I wanted to ask him about poetry and writing he was doing already, I believe, at the time you were in SNCC. Charlie Cobb: Yeah. Well, see, in SNCC, like almost all of us were field secretaries, firstly. We were all writing field reports. [Laughs] JD: Right. CC: Every month. That’s Jim Forman’s influence. He was a trained historian, so he was always on us to write field reports. So, there was a whole body of written reports: mine, not just mine, but a number of people that were in SNCC and in the field in southwest Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. So, there’s that. Then there’s a whole strain of poetry in SNCC: Jane Stembridge, Worth Long, myself, others. Now, my first poetry was published by Maria Varela. Charlie Cobb, October 16, 2015 2 JD: Um-hmm? CC: And she had—she was living in Jackson, well, Tougaloo, then. And she had first published a book by Jane Stembridge, I Play Flute, which gave the name Flute Publications. Then she asked if she could publish a collection of my poetry, which she published as Furrows. This is in 1966, ’65, something like that. JD: Maria was the publisher? CC: Maria was the publisher. JD: Okay. CC: Maria, well—yeah, publisher, editor. Henry Kirksey, who had a print shop, Henry J. Kirksey, who would later become a state senator in Mississippi—maybe the first black state senator, I don’t remember now—but then he had a small print shop. JD: Hmm. CC: And he actually printed the books. So, that was my first published work. And I know that’s early because it’s like ’66, ’65, something like that. And I never really, aside from the poetry, don’t really get back into writing in any kind of regular way until I enter journalism. Then it’s the seventies. JD: Um-hmm. Okay. Now, you also wrote for the SNCC newspaper some, didn’t you? CC: Well, there was a SNCC—the Student Voice was the name of it. JD: That’s what I meant, yeah. CC: Clay Carson published all of the editions, I think, through Greenwood Press, [a] reprint company. I didn’t write for it. I mean, it was like anybody could write [laughs]—it was like saying any SNCC person that had anything in it. It was not a reported—it was not a Charlie Cobb, October 16, 2015 3 reported—nothing in there was reported except excerpts from field reports and maybe some poetry. But I didn’t write for it. Julian Bond was the editor. JD: Um-hmm. But as someone who was writing, and I assume from what I know people in SNCC read a lot when—I mean. CC: Yeah, we read a lot. We read a lot because people sent us books. [Laughs] JD: Right. CC: [Laughs] And part of the reason people sent us books was to help facilitate the work we were doing. And we read the books, too. JD: Right. And you had, I think, a key role in organizing or kind of developing the idea of the Freedom Schools? CC: Yeah, I proposed the idea and wrote the first proposal, which was essentially a proposal to SNCC: “This is what we should do in the summer of 1964. This is why we should do it.” I think it’s available somewhere. JD: Yeah. CC: But I had the—you know, that proposal emerges because you’re faced with the question: “Okay, if you’re going to have a thousand students or so students, what are you going to do with them? Because they don’t have any experience organizing.” JD: Right. CC: And the logical thing to do with them, it seemed to me, since they were coming off college campuses, was to begin to use them to fill some of these huge gaps that existed in young people in Mississippi, both gaps in the sense of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and gaps of consciousness, because obviously Mississippi public schools [laughs] were not giving a great deal of emphasis to black history or black struggle. Charlie Cobb, October 16, 2015 4 JD: Um-hmm. CC: So, the Freedom Schools—we had always been concerned about education. What the summer volunteers enabled us to do [05:00] was actually approach in a meaningful way addressing some of the education issues that we had long been aware of. JD: Um-hmm. CC: So, that’s where that idea—it’s an organizer’s idea, that’s all. I was an organizer. And everybody [laughs] had ideas. JD: “Gaps of consciousness.” That’s a great phrase for me. I just think that speaks to a lot of what we’ll be talking about today. So, we’re obviously speeding through the years—. CC: Yeah. JD: 1960 through 1967, but—I’ve heard this, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. You went on a trip through Paris at one point and went to Présence Africaine? CC: Yeah. I went to—I didn’t—the trip wasn’t to Paris. The trip was to Vietnam. JD: Right. CC: Bertrand Russell financed that trip, because he wanted to know what—he was a philosopher and he had a philosophical question, I mean, “What would people doing what we were doing in the deep South, organizing, find was similar and what would they find dissimilar from a group like the Viet Cong?” And the initial idea was to travel with the Viet Cong and see what they did. Julius Lester and I agreed to go on that trip. But the war kept us from going across the border from Cambodia into South Vietnam. So, the Viet Cong people said it was just too dangerous and they didn’t want to be responsible for anything happening. So, Plan B was to go to North Vietnam, and we spent—this was ’67—what, maybe two or three weeks in North Vietnam. And then, coming back to the States, I went to Paris and I Charlie Cobb, October 16, 2015 5 visited—and I was aware of Présence Africaine, the magazine. My mother was chair of Romance Languages at Howard University. JD: Right. CC: So, French and—. JD: Yeah. CC: I was aware of Présence Africaine for both linguistic reasons and political reasons. I mean, it was a kind of a PanAfrican journal not only around art and literature but around technology, politics, and all of that. So, it was an obvious place to visit [laughs] if you were young and black, and it’s 1967. And then Courtland Cox and I decided, because Courtland was the SNCC representative at Bertrand Russell’s war crimes tribunal in Stockholm—. JD: Um-hmm, okay. CC: And decided before going to the States we would visit Africa. And we wound up drifting down the whole west coast of Africa. JD: On the same trip? CC: Same trip. JD: Ah, okay. CC: This is the summer of ’67, and I’m now thinking about Africa. I’m thinking about African struggle in sort of the same mission that Russell had sent me on to, and Julius Lester on to, Vietnam. I mean, what in the context of African struggle and African independence, because all of these countries are now independent [ ], what would be similar and what would be dissimilar to black struggle? And then, my visit to Présence Africaine is somewhere in that consciousness. Charlie Cobb, October 16, 2015 6 Anyway, at the end of that trip, which took all summer—we went to Guinea and, I forget, Ivory Coast, and Liberia, fourth class on a boat. And when I came back to the States—and remember now the movement in the States in the wake of Black Power’s [shout-out] by Stokely Carmichael is very much involved with issues of black consciousness, black thought, and I’m no less affected than anybody else. And in that framework, the Présence Africaine visit pushed to the forefront of my mind. I said, “Well, we could do something,” and that seemed doable. JD: Um-hmm. CC: You know? I’m not a person of enormous [ ] because I want to know what can you actually do? [Laughs] And in doing something like the Présence Africaine, what I had seen in Paris, with artists coming in and out of a place, political people coming in and out of a place, and books to inform struggle, it kind of seemed doable in a city like Washington, DC, my hometown. [Laughs] JD: Right. CC: And so, that’s where the Drum & Spear idea begins to emerge as a body of work. And I’m sort of on the tail end of my involvement with SNCC, although I’m having this discussion with SNCC people. [10:00] All the people I’m talking to about this—Judy Richardson, Courtland Cox, and others—either have been directly involved in SNCC or represent kind of the second—generation is not the right word, but they’re engaged in student activism.

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