April 16, 1960

Miss Priscilla Stephens

Leon County Jail, 

Tallahassee, Florida

Dear Miss Stephens,

Although this letter is addressed to you, please feel free to show it to all your friends. I am a student at the College of the City of New York and intensely interested in the civil rights struggle. I have marched with many of my friends on many of the sympathy picket lines in front of Woolworth's here in New York. I am also doing part-time work at the offices of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South.

Your courage and devotion to the cause of equal rights has evoked much admiration up here. There are many of you who fervently wish that we had the opportunity to do what you and your friends are doing (this last may sound very foolish to you in light of your current mailing address, but it is quite true). We, however, in our own small way are doing our best to support you and to show our appreciation for what you are doing.

Critics of our movement tell us that we in the North should be doing something about discrimination here instead of bothering the South; but we feel that segregation in the North is a social nature rather than a political one and can not be fought as effectively as the political and economic segregation which exists in the South. We feel that the solution of this problem lies in individual love for ones fellow man and that this will come in time here only if the practical problems are solved in a manner commiserative with the principles of non-violence. The obvious morality of such a solution in the South would do a lot to advance the situation which exists in the North.

Again, thank you for what you are doing. We here are with you all the way. 

Sincerely yours, 

[Signature] Monroe S. Wasch

336 W. 95th St., 

New York 25, New York