In a political campaign last year, Hampton threw his support behind Ernest Morial, a black man who was running for mayor of New Orleans. Before Hampton stepped in, Morial was sixth in the polls. "I sent my P.R. man Chuck Jones down there to put some life into his campaign. Chuck put a thousand placards all over town and went on all the radio stations, and I played at a Morial for Mayor music festival. He came in first in the primary and then he won the election." My questions are finished. I get up and shake Lionel's hand, telling him that I've always loved his music. He dashes into his bedroom, bringing out four records for me to take home. He shakes my hand twice more. On my way to the door, I ask him one last question: Does he still have time to read the Bible every day? "Yes," he replies, grinning, "That's what I was doing when you came here and that's what I'm going to do after you leave." ******** WESTSIDER DAVID HAWK Executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. 3-11-78 During the final days of World War II, a captured resistance member sat alone in a black prison cell, tired, hungry, tortured, and convinced of approaching death. After weeks of torment, the prisoner was sure that there was no hope, that no one knew or cared. But in the middle of the night, the door of the cell opened, and the jailer, shouting abuse into the darkness, threw a loaf of bread onto the dirt floor. The prisoner, by this time ravenous, tore open the loaf. Inside was a matchbox. Inside the matchbox were matches and a scrap of paper. The prisoner lit a match. On the paper was a single word: "Coraggio!" Courage. Take courage. Don't give up, don't give in. We are trying to help you. "Coraggio!" The prisoner never did find out who wrote the one-word message, but the spark of hope it provided may well have saved his life. The story is told in _Matchbox_, the newspaper of Amnesty International U.S.A., one of the largest branches of the worldwide human rights organization that received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1977. David Hawk, executive director of Amnesty international U.S.A., sits behind his desk on a weekday morning talking about how the group originated and what it has done to earn the prize. "It was started in Britain in 1961 by a lawyer named Peter Benenson," says Hawk, whose name belies the fact that he has been involved in civil rights for nearly half of his 34 years. "It started over a trial that was going on in Portugal." Benenson launched a one-year campaign to call attention to the Portuguese prisoners.