"Me? Not me, boss. Me, I want thirty or forty."

He said it merely to infuriate them. I could see he was enjoying his psychological superiority. When they threatened to handcuff him to the bars and "whup his ass," he only shrugged.

There was just one time that I thought he might crack in jail: At breakfast one morning, one of the cops poured hot coffee over a fifteen year old girl who was in jail her seventeenth time for the Movement, and in the moment of her scream, Knight started forward. He checked himself though, gave the cop a you'll-never-touch-me smile, and turned his anger to brushing the coffee from the girl's hair and clothing. He had gone to jail understanding what the struggle demanded, and, strain though it was, that's how he stayed.

* * *

The weeks in jail were a struggle themselves, and our release seemed like a triumph. But right away we saw we were living in the same old Albany. As in every demonstration over the last two years, the Albany cops had swept us off the streets as fast as we had appeared (the charges: disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assault, attempted murder, parading without a permit, running a red-light), the one white newspaper had made no report, and thought it had legal sanction to act (the first amendment to the Constitution, section 242 of the U.S. Criminal Code), the Federal Government had made no move to protect the rights of its citizens to petition and assemble.

Tift Park pool was still segregated of course. The demonstrations had not made segregation of the pool an issue even. Most whites did not know the demonstration had occurred.

And we had anticipated it all. It will be a long hard battle, we had told ourselves. But in the dank, filthy, crowded (on the Negro side, fourteen and sixteen people in cells made for four) Albany jail, the struggle to stay merely human had obscured the social battle. Once free, a sense of the complete futility of our suffering settled down upon us like a heavy, enervating fog.

One day, Knight finally said it:

"Want to jump a fence?"

"Man, this thing's not going to be won in a day. But if we stick to it--"

"I got some dynamite."

"Look baby, we want victory. Whichever way you think we can--"

"I 'bout had it with that kind of victory." He said it slowly, sadly.

* * *

The demonstrations occurred in June. They were the last of any size that Albany has seen. There is a sense of failure in the city. ("Trouble with the Movement, we marched and we marched and we went to jail, we marched and we went to jail.--Now we done stopped marchin' an' all that's happened, we ain't goin' to jail for marchin' no more.") The number of committed Movement people is declining. The faith in the power of right that was intense enough to touch even guys like Knight has been shaken, and with it--though temporarily--faith in the idea of struggle itself.