Letter from Joseph and Nancy Ellin to Susan and Diane; June 12, 1964

              June 12 [1964], [Brooklyn, New York]  [typescript page 1]


Dear Susan and Diane,


            Here are some stamps in the booklet.  Please put them in the appropriate books.


            Here are some dry cleaning tickets.  Please put them in an envelope so labeled and put the envelope in the top left-hand drawer of the green desk.


            Soon you will receive five boxes of books. Please stack the boxes in a convenient place.  (You may open them if you feel like it; they are Joe’s library from home.)


            We called on the Miss. Summer Project in New Haven and were unable to get any of the concrete information we so avidly seek, such as – is it OK if we go to a training session on June 21 instead of June 14.  Joe is presently dealing with SNCC in New York and may soon have an answer.  If COFO is an arm of the Communist Party, we need fear no revolution.  There are 20 students going from Yale, 27 from Harvard.  Nobody seems to know much about anything.


            Everyone in Brooklyn is very hysterical.  It is like a state of siege.  Fortress Brooklyn.  It is not easy to listen to them.


            New Haven is God’s chosen place.


                    Love,


                    [Nancy]


OK – all set, courtesy National Council of Churches.  We will be in Oxford, Ohio, on June 21.  I guess you can concoct an address for forwarding things to there.


              c/o Mississippi Summer Project

                    Western Women’s College

                    Oxford, Ohio.


            While we were in New Haven we learned that the person we stayed with, an economist, is going with a group of his colleagues to Miss. for a week.  They are going to help the Negroes collect information in order to apply for a federally chartered bank for Negroes.  They have planned that if they are arrested the junior economists will put up bail but the great men of the dept. will languish in jail – James Tobin, Willy Feldner, etc.  Lots of other Yale faculty types [probably only 4, Joe’s note] are going down for this and that.


            [Joe’s handwritten note]:


            “Go Tell it on the Mt.” is excellent.  We’re reading James Silver: “Miss. the Closed Society”.  Also excellent (he’s a history prof. at Ole Miss).


            I talked to Dick Bernstein, the new editor of The Review of Metaphysics (my copy must have come by now, no?) on the phone – he’s going down for a few days as an “observer”.  He had no idea what he’s supposed to do, where, or with whom – he had what he called a “contact man” in Jackson.  He more or less said you have to roll with events.  [illegible]