On the wide front porch, we sat talking, laughing, and eating, paper plates on our laps, small white plastic forks in our hands. On this particular July evening in 1966, one week after my twenty-first birthday, Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council members Nathaniel Harwell, Pamela MacGregor, Anne Evers, Andrew Tyler, and I enjoyed BBQ pork shoulder sandwiches from Speed Queen, then located about a mile south of the Freedom House, our office on Fifth and Brown Streets.
Nathaniel and I had become friends a year earlier when we and six other students from Milwaukee-area colleges all volunteered to work on a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) summer voter registration drive. Spending three months in Bullock County, Alabama, showed me poverty I hadn’t known existed and a hostility to voting rights that shook the implicit conviction I had that all Americans shared a commitment to democracy and justice. Before volunteering, I hadn’t known even one person who lived on the north side of Milwaukee, but the largely African American area north of the downtown was now where my best friends lived, Nathaniel being one of them.
Pam MacGregor had shown up at the Freedom House one afternoon and introduced herself as a cousin of Tim Mullins, who had also been among the Milwaukee voting rights volunteers but moved to New York after finishing his degree at Marquette University. Pam and Anne Evers, whose family belonged to Saint Boniface Church, became best friends and later roommates in a
