Afro-Puerto Rican folksinger, songwriter, actor, and story-teller Jack Landron, remembers his journey from Boston to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Landron worked in the Freedom Schools once served as personal assistant to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr . With family roots in Puerto Rico and years growing up in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, Landron studied theater at Emerson College. Hear his unique perspective on the Civil Rights Movement in a discussion with folklorist Millie Rahn, hosted by the Cambridge Forum. Learn what moved him to travel south that summer and how did his journey affect him then, and over the course of his career.
Actor and musician Juan Candido Washington Landron was born in 1938 in Puerto Rico but grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Roxbury. While attending Boston's Emerson College (as a theater arts major), he began singing in the local coffeehouses under the name Jackie Washington, quickly establishing himself as one of the most charismatic performers on the Cambridge folk scene during the advent of the folk revival in the early '60s.