Peter deLissovoy, '64, a white Harvard student, has since June been working for SNCC in Albany. The story of "Knight" is true.

The story of the involvement and disinvolvement of a Southern Negro gang leader in integration work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

"C.M.E. bad all right, but it ain't nothin' like it was two years ago." Knight Collins emphasized his judgment with the tap of fist against cupped hands, and we walked.

(Dirt roads and sagging, patched, unpainted shacks. The inevitable railroad tracks. On summer mornings, cotton trucks rolling through the streets in search of pickers. Blood stench in the air on slaughter day at the meatpacking plant. A 29-year-old grandmother drunk--clinging to a tree. Children.)

"You know what the letters stand for, C.M.E.?" Knight did not wait for me to answer. "Used to be that C.M.E. Church over yonder, back when that church was a big thing. But it dosen't have anything to do with it any more. C.M.E., it stands for crime, murder, and the electric chair.--Shoot, I seen white folks run here just from fear of slowin' down. Seen it two years ago, anyhow."

Knight and I walked by a liquor store. The manager was replacing a cracked window pane with plywood, shaking his head, apparently done at last and forever with glass.

Knight lowered his voice: "Had a little trouble here last night--cop got shot." He grinned. "Same little raggedy-ass cop we kidnapped back in '61.--Hell, it ain't nothin' like it was back then. Them cops came right in here last night. We didn' use' to 'low no cops in C.M.E." Knight rubbed his chin. "I don't know what it is. Looks like the Movement got people kind of non-violent. Two years ago, they wouldn'a showed up for a Brinks robbery."

* * *

Knight was known around Albany as a "gang leader." In the South, this implied nothing about jackets, a "turf," organized warfare or a hierarchical command, but meant simply that he fought hard, drank a lot, carried influence among his male peers in C.M.E. as the best among equals, and weilded genuine authority only over the age-group that rides souped-up bicycles and smokes cigarettes with great flourish. Quick, wild-grinning, tall and made taller by the brush of his untended process, he was working when he could, hustling what he could, living round the circle of his relatives and women, and working out his own "race problem" by rolling white drunks and taking potshots at cops.

Our first conversations were necessarily political. Knight assumed my inferiority in his territory and wanted to prove it in mine: the white problem. He knew my line of course. He had heard it before. I was working for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, I was "the new Movement cat," and so I could be counted on to talk voter registration and non-violence, and to exonerate white drunks and poor-white cops of ultimate blame for the exploitation of Negroes in this country.

We talked most about the Tift Park swimming pool. It was early summer, hot, and the pool, which the City of Albany was keeping segregated despite court rulings by "selling" to a private party, was a prime symbol of discrimination. Knight wanted to blow it up--white swimmers and all. I argued for demonstrations, saying that these would involve more Negroes than a simple demolition job, and so lead to a longer, wider struggle. And I remarked the possibility of victory and suggested there should be something left to swim in.

"You don't know these crackers," Knight sneered. "They'll close it down before they'll let us swim in it. Then I'll have to blow it up anyway, and I won't get nobody."

But we talked again. Ultimately, my argument boiled down to something like, "Well, you don't know because you haven't tried." And then one day he was persuaded. One day be hailed me in the street:

"Hey man, gonna do me some integratin'."

"You're gonna what?"