JR: What were the greatest challenges for you in doing this kind of work?

VG: (laughter) You know, I hesitate because there was such – I was so impelled and compelled to do this work. The drive was so strong and it was a drive that came from inside of me. It wasn’t like someone said, “Oh, you should do this.” It wasn’t about Bob saying, “Oh, we have to do this,” and being man ahead about it. That is in some ways so different from how I feel about almost anything today that in a way on some level there was nothing difficult about it. Because I felt held in some way in a national – and around civil rights stuff in sort of a national energy, a national movement of which I felt part, which just made all the work in every difficult moment possible.

And I don’t think I’m romanticizing it as I look back on it. I remember there were just the most extraordinary moments in that work. I remember times being at a mass meeting inside a church and singing “We Shall Overcome” and knowing that there were white people outside in their cars, in their trucks, probably with guns, and feeling as though the roof were just going to lift off the church because the energy of the people with whom we were working was so intense. You know, the struggle – they were so involved in the struggle that it was palpable. It was palpable…