American History Tellers - Civil Rights - Interview with Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely | 7

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

We conclude our series on the American Civil Right Movement with an interview with a woman who was there, on the front lines of the fight.Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely is longtime civil rights activist and artist. She was a Freedom Rider, boarding busses to travel the south in a fight for desegregation, and member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, participating in sit-ins, marches, and voter registration campaigns. She marched on Washington, was arrested three times, was visited in jail by Martin Luther King Jr., and leads a life defined by her heritage, commitment to nonviolent activism, and the hope for continued change.You can read Peggy's poem here.Support this show by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. your story. Just last week, we as a nation witnessed, and I hope participated in, the 2018 midterm elections. Over 100 million Americans voted, making this turnout, at 47% of the voting-eligible population, the largest midterm participation since 1966, the first national election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By far, most of us who voted selected either a Democrat or a Republican,

the two political parties that have dominated American politics for over the last 150 years. But how did these two parties come to be? Why aren't we voting for the Whigs, or Bull Moose, or even the Know-Nothings? Next week, we begin a new six-part series on the history of political parties in America, with special attention on the rise of our two dominant modern parties, the Republicans and Democrats. George Washington warned against the rise of political parties, writing in his farewell address that

they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. Join us next week as we explore whether he was right. This week, though, we conclude our series on the American Civil Rights Movement with an interview with a woman who was there on the front lines of the fight. Peggy Trotter Dammon Priestley is a longtime civil rights activist and artist. She was a freedom writer,

boarding buses to travel the South in the fight for desegregation, and a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, participating in sit-ins, marches, and voter registration campaigns. She marched on Washington, was arrested three times, visited in jail by Martin Luther King Jr., and leads a life defined by her heritage, commitment to nonviolent activism, and the hope for continued change. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. You may have heard of it. It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with.

Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Peggy Trotter-Damond-Priestly, it's such a pleasure to have you on American History Tellers today. Thank you. I'm really pleased to be here. That is actually quite a name, and I know that each part of that name tells an important story for you. Could you tell us a little bit about where Trotter and Damon came from? I'd be happy to. My parents named my brother and myself after two parts of our family that had a wonderful African-American history. Trotter, my middle name, came from James Trotter, who was a soldier in the 55th Black Regiment in Massachusetts, and his son, William Monroe Trotter, that ran a newspaper in Boston. The Damond comes from my father's family, who was a Pittsburgh family where I was born.

And we carry on the tradition of loving English and loving God. So you come from a very long line, then, of abolition English and loving God. So you come from a very long line, then, of abolitionists and activists. So what were some of your earliest memories in your own family of activism as a young child? Well, my brother and I both learned to read from a book called Underground Railroad that was written by William Still, who collected slave narratives from around the country. And the story of my ancestors, William and Ellen Craft, who escaped from slavery in 1848 from Macon, Georgia, they have a chapter in that book. And my mom thought,

well, this is the best way to help them learn how to read. So on the porch in Pittsburgh where I was born, my brother and I would read this story and practice the words. It must be pretty spectacular to one of the first books you read, learn that your family was not only mentioned but had such an extraordinary story. Could you just tell us a little bit of the story of William and Ellen Craft? Sure. And actually, we were reading from the actual book, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, A Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft. They wrote this book after they learned to read and write and moved to England

to escape the slave catchers that came after them in 1850. So not only were we reading about the story in the Underground Railroad book, but we were also reading their actual words. And the interesting thing about it is the words were more of like the stilted English language, the way the English speak. So there were words in there that we were not familiar with. So we did read the actual story of their escape from December 21st, 1848, until they arrived in Philadelphia five days later. She passed as a white gentleman by dressing up like a man, and her husband, William, passed as her slave.

He was darker skinned. My great-great-grandmother was the product of her slave master and her mother that had been enslaved. And they fooled everybody. They weren't on the Underground Railroad. They actually escaped in plain view. So their story is one of the unique ones and has so many implications of how people survive happens to enslaved people during the 1800s, the 1700s, and until slavery ended in 1863. As you were reading this book in the stilted English language of another continent, were there any words or particular phrases that caught your eye or you remember distinctly? Well, William and Ellen were Christians,

and a lot of what he said was probably what we understand now in a kind of code, because he did not want to reveal too much during the time that they were in England because both of their families were still enslaved in Georgia. So a lot of the quotations are sort of from hymns and saying things like hitherto, and my brother and I, we would laugh and say, why didn't he just come out and say it, you know? Or what is he saying exactly? And that's why our mom wanted us to have that experience of what it was like to learn English and have it be more, I guess, I don't really know the words, but, you know, not a language that might have been spoken intimately between the two of them, but one that was definitely written for posterity. But they came back to America in 1870 with five children, all born in freedom. And they founded a school in Woodville, Georgia, not far from where they had both been enslaved. So they didn't have to come back. They could have stayed there and stayed free.

But their dedication to their people, to themselves, and to those others that were enslaved is one of the reasons that our parents named my brother Henry Kraft Damon and myself Peggy Trotter Damon. Well, let's continue with this lineage then. As you yourself moved into your teen and college years, you became an activist yourself, involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And then the Freedom Rides. What was the moment that got you involved, that propelled you into action? Partly being raised in the Episcopal Church and being told that he to whom much is given, of him much as required. My parents were both social workers and community, not activists so much, but were involved in the NAACP and other organizations in Harlem and in New York. But the real turning point in my life was when Emmett Till was murdered. I was around the same age as he was, and at that point, even though I had been a little bit active in my community, I knew I had to do something.

The murder of Emmett Till shocked the nation, but I was wondering, being the same age, how did it affect you? How did it motivate you? A lot of people might have just been frightened of that, but you took it up as a charge. Because we had learned from our parents, particularly my mom, the courageous things that our ancestors had done. My great uncle protested the first birth of a nation by D.W. Griffith by chaining himself to the movie theater so that the movie wouldn't be shown. So we always knew that we had to do something for other people and to take a stand when there was injustice. So among my friends were people I lived with in Harlem. I was privileged to go to a pretty much all-white private school

in downtown Manhattan. And as things were happening in the world, 1954 was the Supreme Court decision that integrated the schools, Brown versus Board of Education. There were lynchings still continuing in the South as well as in other parts of the country like Indiana. So we had African-American newspapers. We had a little bit of TV, not as much as we have today.

But the word got around of what was going on, and you just couldn't ignore it. And maybe coming from this activist family, I was more attuned to what to do. So my brother and I used to sweep the streets in Harlem. We would knock on doors of people and try to either bring food or get people to vote. And this was early on. So from about the age of 12, I think, my social justice conscience was pretty raised. So it really was a continuum, I would say, of kind of our family, what our church was doing, what was going on in the YMCA and the YWCA. So, you know, there were things that were happening

in the 50s and 60s that were wonderful. Things were changing. But there were also things that were just awful for those of us that were living in the North and we could see more vividly what was happening in the South. So seeing Emmett Till's picture in that coffin, that picture just seared in my mind. And I remember saying to my brother, this cannot go on. We have to do something. A show where aspiring entrepreneurs get the opportunity of a lifetime. I wouldn't be chasing it if I didn't believe that the world needs this product. In each episode, the entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. This is Matt's point, baby. If the audience liked the product, they'd pitch them in front of our panel of experts.

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Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were.

I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades.

Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit you in the North. You are galvanized by Till's murder in the picture in the paper. And then, kind of retracing steps of your ancestors, but backwards, you travel to the South. You were jailed twice as a result of these trips and your activism there. The first time, not so far south, in Maryland. Right. At a sit-in. Yes. We picketed in Harlem against Woolworths

in sympathy for the southern picketers that were picketing against Woolworths stores, which weren't allowing blacks to sit down at the counter regardless if they paid for food. So that happened on February 1, 1960, that four college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat in. And we kind of call that as the hallmark or the beginning of the student movement. Although back in the 20s and 30s in the South, there were many blacks and whites who were working together, who were farm workers and who knew that a lot of the laws were unjust.

But, you know, you look at various kinds of signature moments. When Rosa Parks sat down on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955, same year that Emmett Till was killed. All of this is swirling around at that point. So we were getting together, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, Ron Brown, who later became the Secretary of Economics, I believe, under Clinton. We were all kids together, and we were all looking to do something. In order for me to put my body where my heart was, to bear witness

with myself, when I got a call one night in 1961 to be a part of a sit-in in Cambridge, Maryland. My brother and I decided this was our moment to go into the South. I'd never been South. And as you say, Baltimore is not really that deep South, but it was my first time. And we agreed to join other black and white students to test the segregation laws in Crisfield, Maryland. And we chose Christmas Eve to do the sit-in to call attention to the fact that, you know, Joseph and Mary were denied, and that's why Jesus was born in a major. So we decided to sit in on Christmas Eve,

and if we were denied, we were doing a nonviolent direct action that we felt was the right thing to do as American students. So we were arrested. I was terrified. I'd never been anywhere near a sheriff car. It was cold. It was dark. We were away from our parents, but we sang, we prayed, and we felt we were doing the right thing to just bring America to look at the segregation and the hatred that was happening. If you don't mind, let me go through just your movie reel of memories for this one event. How did you get to Maryland in the first place? And also, did you go through any training before? Certainly you knew that arrest was a possibility.

Yes. There was a Cambridge nonviolent action movement that was started by Gloria Richardson in Baltimore and Cambridge. And we had to attend a training program there for nonviolent action. You had to agree, if you were going to be a soldier in the nonviolent army, that you would not strike back. Now, I'm a kid raised in Harlem. I was a basketball player. I was a very tough kid. I knew how to protect myself on the New York City subways, and I had been in some fights. But when I joined the movement, I knew that I was working with a higher cause and so were others. We prayed, we tested ourselves by being called names

and having water poured on us and pushed. We didn't do the cigarette burns or the cattle prods that happened to many of the other students. but we knew that we were entering into dangerous waters, and this was something that we had to take very seriously. So I made that commitment, and so did my brother. I was 18, I think, and my brother was 16, too young to go to jail. So he stayed outside and became kind of a lookout after we were arrested. It was another, I would say, signature turning point in my life to actually be arrested and to join with my brothers and sisters, black and white, who were trying to make America see what was happening and see if we could create change. How long were you in jail that first time in Maryland? Five days.

Five days. Five days. We slept on the floor. And some very interesting things happened. First of all, it was a very small jail. It was a little country jail way out in the woods in Princess Anne County Jail. So they had to integrate the jail because they couldn't put the white women in with white women murderers and thieves, and they couldn't put us black women in with the black women murderers and thieves,

and the same with the boys. So instead, they had to put all of us together, the black and white women together and the black and white guys together in separate cells from the hardened criminals. So that was the first victory. We integrated the jail. The second victory was wonderful. We decided to fast again because we were prayerful, and this was a very serious mission that we were on. And as we fasted, you know, you get kind of loopy in your brain. You're laying on the bed. We just allowed ourselves water and chewing gum. And we sang freedom songs, and we supported each other, and some of the community came and would sing underneath our window at night. Well, about three o'clock one morning, we heard this very faint singing coming from downstairs

where the office of the jail was. And what was happening is the jailers were singing our freedom songs. And this is what Gandhi and Dr. King and the nonviolent movement was about. You never know who's going to change, who's going to come forth and do the right thing. So it was a very inspiring moment for us that maybe we had touched some of the jailers who, prior to meeting us, might have thought of us as bad kids or what was the matter with us. But you never know what's in someone's heart. And that's part of why Dr. King and the nonviolent movement is so important today. Direct nonviolent action changes lives and changes hearts. Well, I want to stay there for a bit because in this series, we've heard about horrific violence

and just outrageous acts of indignity perpetrated against African Americans. And the courage that is required for a 16-year-old, a 19-year-old to leave home, travel to the South, prepare for the worst, and then just take it, not strike back. The moral courage, I think, is something that needs to be remembered. What was the moment in your training where you realized that you could do this, that you had the power within you? Were there moments in which you thought you didn't? You know, I don't remember exactly, but I wanted to say that it was still a continuum of my life. I was one of two African-American students in my all-white class. So I had to know when to speak out and when to be quiet. I had to know how to help people understand

what I had been told and taught about the enslavement of my people without alienating them. So I was used to being in confrontational situations as well as living in New York. You know, in New York, you're walking the streets, you're riding the subways, riding the buses. Sometimes my brother and I would, you know, be mistreated on some of the New York buses just because we were, you know, riding past 96th Street, which back in the 40s and 50s, most blacks lived above 96th Street, and people would look at us and wonder why we were getting off at the Dalton School. So I was used to navigating different waters. My parents taught me how to walk the streets, how to talk tough when I needed to so I could get home safely,

and then I could walk into a wealthy group of white students and hold my own. So that is something that we were taught from very early on by our parents. Both of our parents had been early integrationists in their colleges. And so you learn how to code switch. You learn how to do what is appropriate in various situations. So that part of being afraid was both unreal and real, I think. And to have the camaraderie of my peers who were also scared, we were not veterans yet. We became veterans after I went into the very deep south and the Klan was shooting at us and so forth and so on. So this was my first venture into bearing witness with my body in direct action.

And the thing that scared me most was having my hands put behind my back and the coldness. I remember the coldness of the handcuffs and the pushing of the sheriffs. And I was in a car in the back of the seat of the sheriff and realizing I couldn't get out. I couldn't say, okay, I'm ready to say this was all a game. No, it was very serious. So we were crying and we were shaking and we didn't know what to anticipate. But we knew that there were others of us doing this all over. So we had that feeling of being a part of something greater than ourselves. Dracula, the ancient vampire who terrorizes Victorian London.

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Well, it got even more serious for you. You went further south to Georgia and were jailed a second time. What happened then? Well, after I sat in in Maryland, I went back to college. I don't know how I got where I was going. We didn't have any money. We didn't have social media. Somehow, we just got different places. And I went back to Hunter College. I was a freshman there in New York. And then as a result of the sit-in, there were visits from some of the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recruiters, Reverend Charles Surratt and Charles Jones, who were already in the Deep South. And they felt that it would help the movement in

southwest Georgia if northern students came down and helped to register black voters. So they actively recruited some of us whose names had been given of actions that we had taken either in our own communities or through the publicity of our sit-ins. And at that point, I knew I had to leave school, and I knew I had to go. So my best friend, Kathy Collins, Kathy Conwell and I, she was at Skidmore College, I was at Hunter. We just said, this is what we're going to do. And we talked to our parents, and her parents were not very supportive, but mine were, and her parents were not very supportive, but mine were.

And so we went. We were recruited. We went to intense trainings for nonviolent behavior. And we attended school in Tennessee called the Highlander Folk School that Pete Seeger and others had been involved in, and progressive whites in the South had trained farm workers to protest being mistreated as shared croppers. So we were a part of this whole nonviolent army of black and whites who wanted to make America better. So we got on the plane, and again, I'd never been to Atlanta or anywhere in the South.

It was so hot. And we were called student field workers because we wanted to identify with the sharecroppers and the people that we would be registering to vote. Now, the real brave people were the people who took us in, because these sharecroppers and schoolteachers and others who were living and had jobs and had to survive in the South could be fired from their jobs for allowing black and whites to live in their home, for registering people to vote. And we were taken in in Lee County by a wonderful woman

named Mama Dolly Raines, who was kind of running what you would call a overground or underground railroad of her own. And she was receiving us. And Kathy and I were, you know, New Yorkers, and we weren't aware of how the heat was going to be, what it was going to be like to live without a telephone way out in the middle of nowhere. At that point, this is 1962, so Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner had not been murdered yet. So we were part of that early wave of Northern students, black and white, who were recruited to do voter registration for the most part and community organizing. It wasn't easy for you, though. You did eventually get arrested a second time. What was that for? The second time, we were marching in Albany, Georgia, to protest the beating of a pregnant woman. And I was with a group of marchers who were marching on City Hall. And I think we were

first put into the Albany County Jail there. Because Dr. King, Martin was all, and the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was working with SNCC in the Albany, Georgia movement. And at one point, we were behind bars, and one thing that we were told in our training is you always carry a toothbrush with you because you never know when you're going to be jailed and have to spend the night in jail, and it's terrible not to brush your teeth. And Martin heard, Dr. King heard about us, and he handed us toothbrushes through the bars of the jail so that we could at least brush our teeth. And then the second time after they burned the churches that I was arrested, they threw us in a stockade way out in Terrell County, Terrible Terrell, we used to call it. That was for two weeks, and that was really terrifying

because we were in the middle of nowhere, and the sheriffs would do target practice outside our window. And you knew that if they decided to turn those guns onto us, all we were in was one big room with a hole in the floor for the bathroom. And we were kept there for two weeks until we were bailed out. So those were the three times that I spent time in jail. And I guess you would say it was a badge of honor, a badge of courage, and it gave you a certain amount of credibility when we spoke at the different meetings and talked to other people who were asking us what we were doing. I got all kinds of telegrams sent to me in jail from my parents' friends and from some of my peers who were back in college, you know, going to sororities and parties and wondering, why was I doing this? I was a middle-class black

kid. I could have just stayed in college. But they didn't quite understand, I guess, what was going through my blood as a protester and as an activist and finding kindred spirits among the other students. You were also at the march on Washington. I was. That was amazing. John Lewis, who was a teenager with all of us, he was from Alabama, he was allowed to be on the speaker's dais there with Dr. King and others who were going to speak. But John's speech was not going to be approved necessarily by some of the other organizers. So we were there in support of him. And it was very hot.

And I remember sitting and putting my feet in the reflecting pool by the Washington Monument with thousands and thousands of others. It was a different kind of highlight of my life because I don't ever recall being in that large a gathering before. Our gatherings were more small. And to see thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and of course to hear Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech and to hear the other speakers. Dorothy Height was the only woman on the panel. This is the 60s, so there were a lot of males that were more prominent in the civil rights movement in those days from NAACP and from Urban League and

CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality that actually sponsored the Freedom Rides. And we were there. Yes, I was. Three days later, I got married. I flew up to New York and got married. Well, belated congratulations. You mentioned that John Lewis's speech at the March on Washington may not have been approved and you were there to support him. What was he speaking about that wouldn't get approval? I don't remember the exact language, but he was asked by some of the older ones not to say something in a certain way. And we felt that as students, we were all working together with Dr. King,

but we were a little more radical. We were a little more outspoken sometimes, and so our disagreements were not fundamental. It was mostly tactics and perhaps being more strident or calling things out differently. And I do remember that John was asked not to say something in a certain way, and that became a discussion. So we had to stand as SNCC members to be in solidarity with him. Remember, this is 1960, and black folks and folks getting together on a national scale, speaking out. We hadn't even heard from Malcolm so much yet.

So there was feelings like they didn't want incendiary speech. So we just remember that as young people, we had to fight, just like the Parkland students now are having to say, we got this. We appreciate help from adults, but this is our way. This is how we have to stand. And that was one of those moments. Since you were on the Freedom Rides, they were organized in part by CORE.

And I was just wondering if you met James Farmer. Oh, yes. I knew Jim and Jim Farmer, all of them, everybody. We were all together, yes. I ask that because I had the wonderful opportunity of taking a class with him when I was in college in the early 90s. Really? Yeah, he was a professor at, it was called Mary Washington College then in Virginia. It's the University of Mary Washington now.

And he was a remarkable man. Yes, he was a remarkable man. It was the most profound college course I think I ever took. There was no textbook. He would just come to the front of the class and just talk to us. By that time, he was blind and struggling. He died a few years after I graduated. But it was just the most wonderful, warm, gentle grandfather you could ever imagine telling the most horrible stories you never wanted to hear. It was something important to me. So I was just, I'm glad that you knew him as well. Yes. And to be touched in his presence, there were some very special people who came through at a time in my life that I am privileged to have associated with, and he was one of them. So you've lived through this history of America.

Your family name is in books, on archives, and in exhibits. But for most of us, even me, who was even able to take a class with James Farmer, for instance, it is still history and documents that all we have left to understand this time. So I was wondering, as we wrap up, for people who didn't live through the civil rights movement, is there something that we need to understand more about what was meant then? Yes. What I think I would say, and when I talk to students and to church groups and so on, is find your passion today. This is what we did then. It was wonderful. It was terrifying. Find your passion today. This is what we did then.

It was wonderful. It was terrifying. It was necessary. It created a road to what we hope is a better world, but that there is still work to be done. So if your passion is the environment, go for it. If your passion is to work against human sex trafficking, go for it. If your passion is to help the elderly, go for it. To find something that gives you meaning in your life, that you will be willing to lay down your life for, it's really what means something to me. When I see that light go on in the eyes of some of the young people that I speak to at the schools and in the community, it gives me hope. And I think that the civil rights movement is a special movement in the United States, and that we created a foundation and a pathway for how to do community organizing, how to respect people that were poorer than us, that were different than us, but that were human and that we saw the God within them.

And that keeps me going today. I have nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and I'm hoping that each one of them will find their passion and do something with their lives. Mrs. Priestley, thank you so much for talking with us today. It was an excellent conversation. I enjoyed it. Thank you, Lindsay, for giving me this honor and this privilege to share. From Wondery, this is Episode 7 of Civil Rights from American History Tellers. In our next series, in the earliest days of the United States, there was

no such thing as an organized political party. And George Washington had warned the new nation against the forming of political factions, writing that organized parties would become potent engines to subvert the power of the people. But immediately after Washington, factions did spring up, and bitter personal and political rivalries began to shape the nation. We'll see you next time. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This interview episode was facilitated by Jacqueline Kim, edited and produced by Jenny Lauer, produced by George Lavender. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by by Hernan Lopez for Wondery. This is the emergency broadcast system. A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next?

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