Excerpt from CRADLE of FREEDOM, by Frye Gaillard

“J.D. Cammeron remembered the pain of the first cattle prod – that first burning surge that was so intense, so unlike anything he had known, that it nearly made him cry.  In the summer of 1963, he was part of a march of a thousand people, or nearly that many, an enormous number by the standards of Gadsden, Alabama.  Cammeron was a tough and hard-working man – a full-time laborer at a local pipe foundry and a part-time preacher at Mount Zion Baptist Church.  Like many of the others that day, he had never been in a civil rights march, but he was tired of segregation and ready to fight it, and he discovered that it only stiffened his resolve when the demonstrators were arrested and tortured with prods.” Cammeron was a soldier, a veteran of World War II and the American civil rights movement.