You Came Here to Die, Didn't You

by Sherie Labedis

Overview

Burnings, beatings, and ballots are what I remember about the Civil Rights Movement during the summer of 1965. I was a blond, white, eighteen-year-old student at the University of California, Berkeley, who volunteered for a voter registration project in Pineville, South Carolina because I believed in freedom and equality. Most books about the Movement are written by African-Americans or academics. This one is different. It's written by a white woman who helped make it happen.
Martin Luther King's compelling oratory lured me south, but reality struck the day I arrived when a barefoot black teenager clad in sweaty bib overalls challenged, "You came here to die, didn't you," and it wasn't a question.
The rotting flesh of a woman dying without medical care ended my innocence. My reliance on safety shattered when two black passengers were beaten when the car I drove was forced off the highway. Grits and hog-head stew, mosquitoes, debilitating heat and a restricted life style tested my composure. Conviction wavered as I watched the church we attended reduced to ashes.
Middle-class and spoiled, I was my own biggest challenge - not the southern bigots, the white-hooded Klansmen or a regional culture much more restrictive than California’s. This book explains how I adapted and flourished.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012848369
Publisher:	Smokey Hill Books
Publication date:	01/06/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	187
File size:	431 KB

About the Author

Sherie Labedis grew up in Shingle Springs, California, where her passion for civil rights was ignited when her high school English teacher, Bruce Harvey, asked his students what they were willing to die for.
When Labedis entered the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, the campus swirled with causes, but it was the Civil Rights Movement that captured her attention with nightly news about marches for the right to vote, sit-ins, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four little girls perished in Sunday school. The summer of 1964 was called Freedom Summer and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, three volunteers registering black voters in Mississippi, were murdered.
“An address by Martin Luther King, Jr. galvanized me to act,” she says today. “Meeting him was the most influential event of my life.” She was only eighteen when she participated in 1965’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education project registering black voters for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
After a week’s training in Atlanta, Labedis and three other volunteers were sent to the South Carolina community of Pineville. Here subsistence farmers still used mules instead of tractors, schools were segregated and folks had a desire to make their lives better.
Far from her sheltered California white middle-class life, she found herself in a rural black community defined by racism, poverty, illiteracy, hopelessness and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. She subsisted on honey buns, rice and an occasional hogshead stew. She felt the heat of the flames when one of the town’s black churches was burned to the ground. Fellow volunteers were dragged from cars, beaten and thrown through glass doors.
It was that life-changing summer in Pineville that compelled Labedis to become a high school teacher and a public speaker passionate about righting wrongs.
“I find that people today don’t know about the Civil Rights Movement,” she says. “They don’t know whites were involved on the front lines. They don’t know people died to get the vote back then and today they don’t bother to vote at all.”
Frustration that the Civil Rights Movement seemed like “old business” to so many people led Labedis to pull out her journal from 1965 write the book she hopes will make a difference.

Editorial Reviews

An innocent young 18 year old who believes in doing the right thing signs up for a summer program sponsored by Martin Luther King That bold decision changes her life and the lives of those around her.

"He appealed to my sense of righteous indignation. How could Negroes be refused the right to vote?"

Sherie Holbrook Labedis had the courage to leave the comfort of her life in California to travel to South Carolina to really make a difference, to help make things right. This was d

Amazon.com - Sherilyn S. Helberg

Sherie Labedis tells it as she saw it- firsthand- as a naive 18 year old white Californian being exposed to black culture for the very first time. Literally, the first time.
Put yourself- or your daughter- in her shoes or her parents' shoes during the turbulent civil rights battles of the '60s. Imagine the struggles & hardships Sherie Labedis endured. Or, more accurately, TRY to imagine.....Was it Life or Death every single moment? No. But Life or Death COULD have come at any moment for sure

Amazon.com - Mike Lynch

This is important book. Until now, most of the books about The Movement were by African-Americans or academics. During the summer of 1965, Labedis (who had never spoken socially with a Negro which was the preferred word at the time) went to the rural South to register black voters -- many of whom couldn't even write their names. She shows truly shocking living conditions, was driving a car forced off the road by the KKK and one of the young black men was dragged from the car and beaten. The loca

Amazon.com - M. Pribus Pribus

It was like going to a foreign country. Local blacks spoke a Gullah dialect — a patois of English and West African languages handed down over time — which she didn’t understand. She hadn’t known any black people in the rural California town she was raised in and had never seen the poverty and sheer neglect of people’s needs that she saw in South Carolina.

There were lots of new experiences she had to adjust to: sharing a bed, eating fatback, being star

seniorwomen.com - Jo Freeman

Because of Sherie’s book I better understand the relationships in Pineville between blacks and whites, outside agitators and Klan sympathizers, professionals and residents, old families and newcomers, and most importantly, that which has been whispered in private but never spoken in public. The Civil War, Reconstruction, Santee- Cooper, and Desegregation all damaged Pineville, the historic refuge between the Santee River and Lake Moultrie, yet the people, black and white, young and old, s

Columbia Star newspaper, Columbia, S.C. - Warner M. Montgomery