Barry Saunders in today's N&O reflects on 1963 as the year of the Speaker Ban law (and the protests that followed passage of the law). That, plus Joan McAllister's ode to getting arrested on Sunday, plus a conversation with Judy Kiel during fellowship after church about the change in protocol between arrests in 1963 vs. arrests today prompts me to share with you a piece that has been in the CUCC archive since 2006.
My own "premeditated" arrest did occur in 1963 (in Chapel Hill), although in those days arrests weren't scripted as they are nowadays. But the more interesting arrests during the period that Barry Saunders writes about were the "accidental" ones. While civil disobedience as a tactic may be just as applicable now as it was 50 years ago, the details of arrests as they occurred 50 years ago have been lost in the fog of time. Or to put it another way, times have changed. For a trip down memory lane, my reflection in 2006 on an arrest in Birmingham AL in 1965 provides an interesting reminder of that.
Birmingham Summer (18 minute audio)
My own "premeditated" arrest did occur in 1963 (in Chapel Hill), although in those days arrests weren't scripted as they are nowadays. But the more interesting arrests during the period that Barry Saunders writes about were the "accidental" ones. While civil disobedience as a tactic may be just as applicable now as it was 50 years ago, the details of arrests as they occurred 50 years ago have been lost in the fog of time. Or to put it another way, times have changed. For a trip down memory lane, my reflection in 2006 on an arrest in Birmingham AL in 1965 provides an interesting reminder of that.
Birmingham Summer (18 minute audio)