Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.The fastest way to print copies of the letter [calling for the bus boycott] was on the mimeograph machines at Alabama State (high-speed modern copy machines were still in the future). However, the college was funded by the state, and the teachers were state employees. If officials learned that they had used taxpayer-owned facilities to challenge the segregation laws, then funding for the all-black school might be cut back and the teachers might lose their jobs. The women swore each other to secrecy. They wrote and revised their letter, changing it repeatedly in the early hours of Friday morning. Then they stayed up the rest of the night cutting stencils and mimeographing 52,500 leaflets.