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Transcription: [00:10:06]
{SPEAKER name="John Lewis"}
goes up in Chicago, they singing we shall overcome.

[00:10:08]
And two hundred and fifty thousand of your relatives stayed out of school in Chicago because of the segregated schools up there.

[00:10:17]
And it's a glorious sight indeed.

[00:10:20]
And now where are we? We've come a long way from the shores of Africa three hundred and fifty years ago.

[00:10:27]
Down through Virginia, through the slavery boats, the cotton fields, the building of the delta.

[00:10:36]
All for the slave blocks. Down through all of the wars. And we wind up in Greenwood, Mississippi tonight talking about a freedom ballad.

[00:10:47]
And it's ironical people. Can you understand how sad it is that we have been struggling all of these years?

[00:10:58]
Your parents before us. Our parents before them. And our grandparents and our great grandparents all have been suffering.

[00:11:07]
You see?

[00:11:08]
And you wonder to what avail is it? What does it all mean?

[00:11:13]
Well it means the more that we struggle, the less our children will have to struggle.

[00:11:20]
You see? And even as a certain amount of joy and a certain amount of goodness in what we're doing

[00:11:26]
because I'd rather be out here in the freedom fight than sitting up in some five and ten cents movie watching some White folks on the screen so called making love.

[00:11:34]
You see what I mean? Or at home with my television set watching some gangsters shooting them up. Boom boom boom. That's all.

[00:11:42]
It's a corrupt society and it's gonna be the Black man that's gonna help you liberate this country.

[00:11:48]
Let me tell you what I'm talking about. You got all these Yale students. Well where were they five years ago?

[00:11:54]
They weren't dying here in the South.

[00:11:56]
But they came down because the Black students, the Negro students, of the South and here in Mississippi were doing something.

[00:12:03]
And they themselves are getting a new concept of living.

[00:12:07]
All across this country, people are beginning to learn that there's something else in life besides