Transcript edited by Pierce Butler
This is the sixth in a continuing series of excerpts from transcripts in the collection of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.
Lifelong civil rights activist Margaret Block was interviewed by Paul Ortiz on September 18, 2008.
I got involved in the movement like in – when I was about 10 years old, I used to hang around with this man named Mr. Amzie Moore. They organized the Regional Council on Negro Leadership, and I was aware of something being wrong because listening to my parents and everybody talk about it. I wasn’t able to do anything until 1961 when I graduated from high school. Then I joined the movement. I didn’t join SNCC until ’62 because we didn’t have nothing in Cleveland [Mississippi] in 1961 but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and I joined it. That was we were teaching people how to read and write and how to take that test that you had to take from the state of Mississippi interpreting the Constitution.