New York Chapter

Florida A & M University

Alumni Association

Samuel Thompson

Albert Johnson

Mrs. Sarah Heard

Mrs. Ruth Staley Wheaton

Mrs. Alyce Ayer Hamilton

Mrs. Joyce James Nelson

Mrs. Leedy Anderson

Louis A. Wheaton

Mrs. Lorraine Martin Harden

William Generette

Mrs. Ruth S. Wheaton, Recording Secretary

116-46 169th Street, Jamaica 34, N.Y.

April 14, 1960

Miss Priscilla [Stephens]

Leon County Jail

Tallahassee, Florida

Dear Miss [Stephens], 

You may now know that I have written letters to all of you wonderful youngsters tossed like so many vagrants or criminals into jail for daring to assert your rights and privileges as American citizens. Well, I thought it would be quite a chore to write each of you individually, but now I am on my third letter and find that I have much more to say than I believed at first. My real trouble is boiling it all down to one page.

Let me say at the outset that I respect and admire you and every one of the eight who have sacrificed so much for an ideal, an ideal which I firmly believe in. By your actions you have given an older man like myself much hope at a time when I and many others of my generation felt that Negroes would never break loose from the chains of segregation. For this I thank you and your sister, Patricia, and Barbara and John Broxton and all the others.

Through CORE headquarters here we are keeping in close touch with your plight and will do everything in our power to help you and all the other students in Southern colleges. I hope that you will appoint one of your number to keep in touch with us through correspondence and let us know what you would like most of all for us to try to do for you. We are grateful for the hope you have given us all. Every Floridian and, indeed, every American shall be eternally in your debt.

God bless you.

Sincerely, 

[Signature] Sam Thompson

Samuel Thompson