"Let My People Go: Cairo, Illinois, 1967-1973,"
is 100 pages, $49.95 cloth/$19.95 paper. The book publisher,
Southern Illinois University Press, is based on the SIU Carbondale
campus.
ISBN 0-8093-2085-1 (cloth), ISBN 0-8093-2086-X (paper).
Quotes from "Let My People Go"
Below are excerpts from the new book "Let My People Go," a documentary on the civil rights movement in Cairo, Ill. The quotes, collected by students and faculty at Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus, come from blacks who participated in civil rights marches and rallies from 1967 to 1973. The SIU Press will release the book this month. (Prices: $49.95 clothbound, $19.95 paperback).
"We were marching for something we thought was right. It was a great feeling. To march through town and let the white folks know we were somebody. I was...right there every step of the way," remembers Floretta Simelton, who before moving to Cairo with her family worked Arkansas cotton fields.
"...We wanted not only...jobs; we wanted jobs with some kind of substance. You know...where you could see somebody moving up ahead, trying to do something better, where everybody was proud," recalled the late Anne Winters, a Cairo mother and member of the NAACP.
"...We couldn't go to the Laundromats to wash our clothes! We had to wash them at home. That was the strangest thing-some of the (white) people would bring their clothes to (black) people out here to wash them and iron them...If I was washing for you...you wouldn't know if I put some of mine in the tub with yours, would you?" recalled now deceased Anne Winters, a Cairo mother of six who worked as a housekeeper and belonged to a school integration committee.
"...They hung my first cousin (Robert Hunt) here, in jail. They say he hung his self with a T-shirt, which we knew wasn't so. We went and viewed the body at the funeral home, and you could see where he had been beaten, seriously beaten, and we know he didn't hang his self with a T-shirt," remembers Floretta Simelton, who now directs family and youth activities at Cairo public housing centers.
"It was songs...which kept us motivated, especially when we would have them marches through downtown. Then you see the White Hats; they'd be on top of the roofs with guns. You just can't imagine how beautiful it was, to know that black people did come together," said Clarence Dossie, a Cairo native and parade marshal during black marches.
