Free A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo Page B

Delancey Street for Peter Schumann, master puppet maker and artist, who’d just started his Bread and Puppet Theater. A very sincere and committed man, Schumann was a true visionary. At that time he was using a product called celastic to make the heads and hands for his oversized puppets. Similar to papier-mâché, celastic was mixed with an acetone solvent and layered in strips over a mold until it hardened. When it dried, it was lightweight and very durable—perfect for theatrical use. The smell was intoxicating and probably toxic.
    We worked hard but happily. The pay was nothing much, but living in New York City in those years was very cheap and working with Peter and other artists was certainly worthwhile. Unfortunately the work ended when the puppets and props project was completed. Not long after, Peter moved the Bread and Puppet Theater to Vermont.
    Sometime in the spring I began working at the New York City office of CORE. It was a markedly different time from two or three years earlier, when we were picketing the Woolworth stores around the city, protesting their policy of segregated lunch counters in the South, and collecting money and signatures door to door for the marches on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Integration of Schools.
    It was 1961, the year of the first Freedom Rides and the expansion of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Pure, unadulterated white racism was soon to be splattered all over the media as the violence against civil rights workers escalated. White people were looking at themselves and what their history had wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved into its own urine.
    Exposed for all to see was the ugly and misshapen reality of two societies, separate and unequal. Voices coming to the fore to speak out on these things were many and emanated from everywhere. Cases were being brought before the Supreme Court that would change the laws of the land and the culture of the country.
    The New York CORE office was at 38 Park Row in downtown Manhattan, across from City Hall Park. Facing the park from the opposite side on Broadway, always in view as I crossed the park on my way to work, stood one of New York City’s architectural beauties, the Woolworth Building, built in 1913.
    My recollection of the office itself was of a not very big main room at the end of a dark corridor with a few dusty windows on the far wall that looked out on the narrow street below. Desks and chairs were set up wherever there was a need for them. I think there might have been only one room with a door, which was used as a private space separate from the main office.
    Meetings and consultations took place spontaneously. It was a heady time. It was necessary to keep track of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides in order to get information to the news media. Staff made fund-raising calls and organized fund-raising events. I worked with a few others sending out mailings and cataloging the donations that were coming in. Those cumbersome old black telephones rang off the hook, lights flashing on the row of buttons below the round rotary dial. CORE field-workers were calling in from all over, reporting on the latest beating or the latest actions. The violence in the South was terrifying; all of us working in the New York office were in a constant state of tension. The media weren’t that interested initially in the random acts of violence aimed at civil rights workers, but when the Greyhound bus carrying the first group of black and white Freedom Riders was firebombed in Anniston, Alabama, a rest stop on the way to Birmingham, the press came to full attention.
    Jim Peck, a committed pacifist who had worked since the 1940s with James Farmer, the founder of CORE, was on another Freedom Ride bus when it arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, May 14, 1961. Peck was a tall, thin, middle-aged white man. When he and the others sat down at the Trailways lunch counter in the bus station, all hell broke loose. A