Mounted on the wall of SNCC’s Atlanta office was a poster that read “NO VIETNAMESE EVER CALLED ME NIGGER.” Lewis mocked “middle-class Negroes and whites who engaged in a ‘tea and cookie’ approach to the issues: The white people drink all the tea, and the Negroes eat all the cookies.” Of integration, he uttered heretically:
“Too many of us are too busy telling white people that we are now ready to be integrated into their society…I am convinced that this country is a racist country. The majority of the population is white, and most whites still hold a master-slave mentality.
When Lewis was to be a featured speaker at the “I Have a Dream” March on Washington in 1963, the first draft of his speech warned whites that Blacks would
“take matters into our own hands and create a source of power outside of any national structure….Patience is a dirty and nasty word.…We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own “scorched earth” policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.”
When a white clergyman threatened to pull out of the march if the speech was not toned down, Lewis expunged the offending Black language and replacing it with the inoffensive:
“we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back together in the image of God and Democracy.”