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Interview: Harriet Tanzman
Harriet Tanzman spent a year working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Selma, Alabama where she was completely devoted to her literacy work. So much of myself was put into the work that…it was enormously emotionally satisfying. It was incredibly satisfying. I mean I've never met people quite like some of the people I met in Selma and in the South, and at a certain point there were hundreds of people involved. And you're talking about mass meetings every night of the week. And enormously courageous people of all ages-very little ones to elderly. So for me, I was just always learning… I really had a lot to learn. Tanzman further describes her experiences as an SCLC worker and the impact it had on her: Teaching people who knew an enormous amount about survival, about caring, about giving, about seeing old people as neighbors and family, but who didn't have some of the basic skills at all. So I taught but I also taught them to teach. You know, neither of these things did I know how to do beforehand. And I was able to do things that I never knew I could do. I mean it took the best of us, the movement, whether we were eighteen or twenty-five. It empowered our lives. We felt that we could do many things that none of us knew we could do before. And we were always surrounded by many role models.
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