I did not like working in the fields; I was raised on a farm. And this was my parents' farm; it was the family's farm. But, I wanted to explore, I wanted to see what else I could do. I knew by the time I was eight years old that I must become a teacher; I wanted to be a teacher. And I had to find out how I could do it. And there is much to say as to how I got even to the twelfth grade, because there was no high school close to me. So what I had to do, what my parents had to do, was allow me to live in the home of other people, away from our home, in order to go to high school, and they paid for it. But at that time, a dollar was worth an awful lot of money. It was worth an awful lot of goods or whatever, services, goods and services. So they paid four dollars a month for me to stay in this home. And they supplied my food, my food was supplied from home, we bought very little food because we grew almost everything we ate, we grew or raised almost everything we ate. Peas and usually different parts of pork, yams, sweet potatoes, and whatever. Less source

Your father was running the farm?

He was operating his own farm.

Where did he learn to farm?

Well from his parents, they farmed. I guess he be farming his whole life.

How big was the farm?

He had about eighty acres. But that is about much as he farmed. But the farm was about two hundred acres. But he didn’t farm it all. Some he had as pastures, some a lot of timber in it.

So what about your mother? What type of thing was she doing?

Well she helped too. She wasn't out there plowing or nothing... He would go with his plow to the fields and throw the dirt back on it. While we are pulling the grass out. And then we would do that for about, I'd say May and June and July. We getting ready to stop now. The cotton is getting ready to make, its gonna bloom and its going to have big balls on it. And them balls are gonna pop open like great big white cotton balls. Then we gotta get our sacks and go and pick the cotton out of those balls and then we do that for about, we start in first August, September. At about the last of September we almost done.

So when winter comes, we were ready to sit down. We resting in the winter time. Until he start back for his spring cropping in, uh, February. See the corn stocks, you got to chop those down. And the cotton stocks he got to chop those down. And when he chop them down he takes his plow, he gots something like a, I called it a grater, a fork on his plow. He would drag all that out, on the side. Less source

This horse my father called a single-footed horse, but what he really meant was it was a trotter. You know, like Dan Patch. You've heard of the famous Dan Patch trotter? Dan Patch was a famous historical horse that was a trotter. Owning a fine horse in the South in those days was a very important part of the culture. That's why the early jockeys in this country were Black men, you know. The first Kentucky Derby winners were Black people. Isaac Murphy, Earl Sande - they're all Black people. Because the plantation owners would pit this horse against other plantation horses, and then their slaves would ride the horse. Of course, when that all became the sport of the kings, all that changed.

This man wanted to buy this horse from my father. Of course, my father didn't want to sell the horse. So since the man couldn't buy the horse, he took out his gun and shot the horse. He killed him. And they said for weeks and weeks and weeks my grandfather mourned over this. But my father said in his mourning, though, he was always getting this wagon ready, you know, putting in the goods and stuff. He was going to take a trip. Then he came home and told his family that he'd be home late that evening, and at about ten, eleven o'clock they were going to leave Louisiana and I think go into Arkansas first. And in those days, women didn't question their husbands; they just did what they said. So she got her children together, which was three boys and one daughter. And when my grandfather returned to leave Louisiana, he was soaking in blood. Of course, no one questioned him. They just got in the wagon and headed for Arkansas, and they stayed in Arkansas for a while. Then they went into Texas, you know, and my grandfather kept moving 'till finally they ended up in Oklahoma.

For a long time they didn't find out what had happened. But as the story goes, my grandfather went into the stockyard of this White man's plantation and slit the throats of most of his livestock real quietly, you know, his cows, his pigs. He killed them up and came back and split. Less source

So I looked. I went out on Jefferson Avenue [St. Louis] where the train was under the Compton Bridge. And I looked at those guys catching those trains, and I said, "Why, I can do that. That's the way to get to California." So then I was trying to get some money together and I couldn't get nothing. I just found a penny, that's all I could get. I couldn't ask my grandmother for nothing. So I told my grandmother, "Grandmother, I think I'll go to California."

She says, "Oh, you don't know what you're talking about. California's too far. You can't get there. That old automobile won't take you there."

"Oh, yes, it'll take us there. That car it just don't run too fast. It'll take you anywhere."

"Well, okay, son. I'm praying for you, but you gonna go on a dangerous trip."

"Well, alright, I'm gonna see what my friends got to say, Harry and Eddie Foster. I'm gonna see what they gonna say."

I went over to Harry and he was always comical you know, he was a funny guy. He said, "Well, come on in champ."

I said, "Yeah, Harry, you know you want to be my trainer?"

"Yeah, sure. Why, what are you talking about?"

"Well, I'm going to California."

"Oh, turn around. Have you sprouted wings? Look, all I got is 50 cents. That ain't gonna get me just a cup of coffee and a donut."

"Well, I'm gonna tell you. Now, if you want to go, I've decided to go tomorrow night. You can go with me, but if not I'm going by myself."

"How we gonna get there?"

"I've been all day looking at how they hop those trains out there, those hoboes. If those hoboes can make it, I can make it, too."

"You talking about hoboing? Why didn't you tell me about that. I'm a master at that stuff. I didn't know you had the guts. I been hoboing for 10 years already. I know all about that. Let's go."

"Okay. Well, what we got to do, get Foster to come over with his car and you guys pack like we're, I'll have a little bag, much as I got, and take me from the house to let my grandmother think I'm going in the car, because she thinks I'm going in the car."

"Okay, well, we'll be there. We'll be here at 6 o'clock and pick you up and we'll be all dressed and we'll have the dog like we had before and all like that. Give her the impression."

They come over like they said, and Grandma she kissed me goodbye and prayed for me... And so we went on out and he took us on down to the railroad tracks and that's where he left us. We went on out to, Carondolet, not downtown because we were known down there because we lived right on the railroads. We went way out South, and sure enough we hopped this train and we just didn't know, we were just going West.

We finally ended up in Freeport, Louisiana. Boy, we was down there and we ran into a lot of trouble. I'll never forget that night in Freeport. We got in there and it was awfully cold. It was that penetrating cold, it was sort of raining and drizzling. We had got into what we call a hobo jungle, and so we went over there and we saw a lot of these men smoking and, well, no, they was sleeping and a few was just drowsing. They had a fire going and the fire was just about dying out, the drizzle was putting it out. And I got there and I was a little cold and when I looked around, I said, "Well, jimminy, why don't you fellows put some wood on the fire? Will they run us out of here?"

And one old fellow says, "No, they won't." And he's sitting right by the wood, he said, "No, they don't bother us. You want to put wood on the fire, put it on the fire."

So I got those logs, you know. Some was cut off and everything like that. So I threw it over there and it just like spread right up and burst like a furnace. So when it started to burning, it got so good, so warm and comfortable, it started waking the guys up. And there was one large man who looked like Laughton, the big movie actor. Big White fellow, and he had a mustache and beard and he was just as dirty as he could be. And he woke up.

• • •

We'd beg then, you know. So we got to a little place, and it was Mexican people, a lady. So I told him, "Now you're the bread winner, why don't you get some bread?"

"Okay."

So he went up and knocked on the lady's door and he says, "Lady, miss, would you help us? We've been traveling, we're on our way to California, we're poor boys."

And the lady said, "Oh, no sabe, senor, no sabe."

I said, "we ain't gonna get no food here. We gonna starve to death. We better hurry up and get out of here. Is it all that way in California?"

"No, they call them Mexicans, and that's Spanish."

"Well, now, what you gonna do?"

"You just wait and see. I'll show you how to get something."

So he went up to another Mexican and he knocked on the door, and the lady said, "Oh, no, no, no, no comprende, senor."...

He said, "Pan, pan."

She said "You want some bread, que pan."

So she gave him some hot rolls and everything. Boy, hard, they was real hard, and no meat at all. But even that was good. So finally we got out of that town, Phoenix. We got the next train going west. Less source

Did he stop in Kansas City first?

Yes. He called it Wyandotte then. And he worked in the state militia, he joined the state militia and guarded soldiers and after the war he worked as a stevedore on the Missouri River.

Why did he come to Lawrence after Wyandotte?

I think he wanted to farm. He wanted to get some land.

Was Douglas County a good place to farm?

Yes. He had rented some land and he bought an acre and a half. My mother said there were no sidewalks or anything, just paths, and she used to carry a small pistol in her pocket. Dogs, some of them same as wild, they would attack you sometimes.

How did he acquire his land? Who did he buy it from?

I don't know.

Have you ever heard of the story of Chief Big Nigger, the Indian that many of the Blacks in north Lawrence supposedly bought their land from? Did your father ever tell you anything about that?

No.

I talked to Mr. Shepard, John Wesley Shepard, and he was telling me about Chief Big Nigger. He lived in north Lawrence too.

I know Shepard. Less source

It was in the 1900's yes. When I came back here to visit, they had the new Bowersock [theater] and it was jammed full, but when I was... you couldn't go. There's been some separation when I was a young woman. Used to go in the ice cream parlor, some of them, there was one that you couldn't go.

How did you feel when you found out at that time the United States was going to war and they were taking Black men, all men, and sending them across the sea?

At first they said they weren't going to have any, didn't want any.

They didn't want any Blacks to fight?

No. But afterwards they did and some of the men went in, they thought they would never go overseas, and some came to Des Moines in the training camp. They did finally, one time they let everybody resign that wanted to. They thought they weren't going to commission them, and they said everybody could, I think they let them stay three more months and then said they could resign if they wanted to but some of them stuck it out and got their commissions.

Why did they want them to resign?

They didn't want to commission them officers.

Did most of the soldiers in Douglas County serve in all-Black units?

Yes. I heard my husband did.

Was he enthusiastic to go and fight?

No.

He wasn't. How did you feel? Did you try to encourage him? Were you married at that time?

Yes.

Did you kind of encourage him to go fight, or did you try to maybe have him not go?

I can't put it on tape. Less source

Now, you can just about judge how cold it was, and it would snow, then it would sleet and then they would have a cold icy rain and that just kept freezing and building up and men could drive a team of horses across the river.

Did you have a refrigerator in your home? How did you keep your food cold?

And lot of people had cellars. Some had them under the house, and then others had caves. I think that's what they called them. They had caves, and then they would hang it in the well. They had two buckets on a rope and a pulley wheel. I don't know whether you have ever saw that or not, but now they had also an extra rope that they would drop down in this well that had a big bucket and you set the milk and your butter in this bucket and let it lower down to the top of the water level in the well and that was how it was kept, but the other, now, if you want to know about the vegetables and different things like that, they buried that, cabbage, they buried cabbage, rhudabakers, apples.

Did you ever use ice to cool anything like they do now? Where did you get your ice from?

They cut the ice from the river, men drove their teams across that river on the ice and then they would build a fire and work all day cutting ice and then they made a... I don't know whether you call it like a cave in the wall on the other side of the river bank, that's on the south side of the riverbank, and they would make this cave and then they lined this with straw or hay and they cut ice from the river and store it in there. That's where you got it. Less source

Then there was an old gentleman, he was a shoe cobbler. He half soled your shoes. Looked like it was for the same foot, but he got it done... he was a White fellow... he was awfully crippled and his name was Snap. It was the same thing. He got them half soled. You could wear them on either foot because you couldn't tell the difference.

Can you remember the Depression?

Oh, do I? I always hate that.

Okay. Was your husband still employed during the Depression? Was he able to keep the same job he had?

Yes, he worked at it, but it took him away from home so much. He still worked at it, but he was away from home and you see when you are away from home, it's just like almost supporting two families, because he had to have a place to stay and his food and everything and then what he would send home. I had to manage with that, so it was pretty tough.

A lot of Black people were out of work?

Wasn't very much. Now, like my boys when they came along big enough to work, there wasn't anything for them to do except in the summer when the people that raised gardens, the gardeners would hire young kids to pick up potatoes and onions and tie vegetables for the market and like that. Riley Rodgers, he had the best garden of anybody in north Lawrence because he irrigated and he could hire more help because he raises stuff fast as he would get one crop moved off, he was ready to plant another and he could hire more help than any of the other people that raised gardens. But after that was done, there was just nothing for the children to do. Children had nothing to do and I don't know how they stayed out of trouble as well as they did, but they didn't do anything.

How did you feel when Franklin Roosevelt was elected?

I don't know. I am really not much of a politician. I will just be truthful. I guess maybe I am not as interested as I ought to be, but I never was much of a politician and because I have always felt that politics was for men, and we women's places were in the homes. That's the way it used to be. Women used to never work out too much. They stayed at home and managed what the husband earned. Less source

I got a certificate on finishing a hundred and twenty hours on September 22, 1942. My instructor told me to, he advised me as a woman to go to the cleaner ship yards and that would be the Kaiser ship yards in Richmond [California]. Moore was a nice ship yard, but it was an older ship yard and quite cluttered. Women would have to walk over a lot of beams and irons to get where they work. So, I first went to Moore's and passed the test at Moore's and they instructed me to come back the following Monday and go to work.

The following Monday, the officer there said, I'd better not come out today because he didn't think that he could get me on. And I asked him, Why, and, he was very reluctant and I said, Well, now is it the unions? And, he said, Yes. He said, You have to go through the unions and the unions are not employing Negro women as burners or welders. Then, I went out to the ship yards and went to the Kaiser office. The secretary there, I told her that I wanted to see the director. And, she said, What for? And, I said, Because you are going against President Roosevelt's Order.

So, the director said, I'll send you to a public relations officer in ship yard and you go there and he will take care of you. So, I met the public relations officer and he gave me a slip of paper. And on the paper it said: Hire Mrs. Albrier. And he said, Go and give this to Mr. Patton of the Boilermaker's Union in Richmond. And I said to him, Now you call him because I have been there and they said that they were not hiring Negro women.

I went and stood in line behind a great many women: Italian women. All White, and all classes. When I got to the window, the clerk said to me, You don't have any representation in the union, so you can't work in the ship yard. At the same time, there were two soldiers, two White university men who had just gone into the service, and they said to her, You mean you are not going to hire this lady? Is that what we're going to fight for? We're supposed to be fighting for democracy. And, she said, nothing has been made for her representation. They didn't take colored in the union. So, she said, I would suggest that you go to Moore's. And I said, I don't want to work at Moore's; I want to work at Kaiser. Then I went back to the Ship Yard No. 1 and talked to the director of the yard there. He sent me over to Kaiser Yard No. 2 to see the public relations man. And, he gives me this note to send to Mr. Patton.

I then went back to the union and Mr. Patton wasn't in and I waited for him and handed him the note. Then, he said, Okay. And, he okayed the note and said, Go to window No. 7. Well, I had seen these other women with $15, so I thought that I had to have $15. So, she made out the registration slip, the regular requirements and questions that you answer. And I handed her the $15 and she said, "You don't have to pay; you're working on a permit."

By that she meant that you were not being admitted into the union; you were working on a "special" temporary work permit without union membership?

That's right.

Then, it was then that I went on into the Kaiser Ship Yard No. 1 as a welder. I was quite a figure in the yards with the welding suit on because there had been no Negro women welding. I worked in Kaiser Ship Yard for 4 months... In the meantime the Boilermaker's Union had set up an auxiliary for Negro employees in Richmond.

That was a Jim Crow, segregated auxiliary?

Yes, the same as they had in Oakland. Because at that time a lot of pressure was put on and they needed people so bad to weld. And people were even coming from the southern states. Less source

And in Mannheim — it was about 18, 20 miles or something from Heidelberg — when I was first in the ninth grade, I had to take the school bus into, and then we would stay in Heidelberg and do things. I'm 14 years old. But we would go to the American teenage club and the American snack bar and you know, you did your stuff and then, you came home.

Then we moved to Heidelberg and we lived in what would be a kind of suburb... Freudenheim. And you'd take a, the bus was a huge part of military transport, you know, back and forth. It wasn't like, folks picking you up in cars and stuff, and you had to know the schedules because they stopped running at a certain time. There were times when we missed the last bus. And one time in particular was really, really bad and, you know, I'm like 15 or 16, and walking in — because we totally missed the bus, we tried to take the Autobahn, which is the tram, the trolley, and stuff. We didn't know where we were going. We ended literally in Mannheim from Heidelberg but it was in an area, we didn't know it. Someone comes up to us and he says, "What are you girls" — there are, like, five or six of us, American teenagers. The bobby socks, the crinolines, the whole thing, you know, but that was a safe time. It's 1954, 55. He says, "What are you girls doing here?" and it was, like, 1 o'clock in the morning. He says, "Do you know where you are?" and we go, "No." He goes, "You're on black market square." The black market was a big thing, you know, with selling goods and stuff. And he says, "Where do you live?" So we told him where we lived and he showed us how to get home. I can't even remember. But whatever we took, we ended up having to get off of it and walk, because I remember we were walking a whole long way along this side road and we didn't know it. And finally we see the big sign, you know, actually you get a load of where I lived. This is to tell you about the American ghetto. You're riding along the German Autobahn and you see a big sign that says Patrick Henry Village. So, we see the sign, we're so happy, and I lived on Lexington and Bunker Hill.

Anyhow, I'm sneaking in because, oh, god, I know that I'm going to be killed. And so I come into the living room and I see my father sleeping on the couch, so I duck down low, you know, you're doing something and you're going past the couch. My father said, "Jeannie." My name was Betty Jean and he called me Jeannie or Jean. "Yes, dad." And so I was grounded, I don't know for how long... But that kind of trust, and yet responsibility, etc., if you say, in terms of living in my dad's home, it was, like, I think, a marker, if you get a sense of me, who I was, and then the relationship to my father. It was a very special thing, relating to a father. Less source

Thank God, we were so serious about this thing. We have to do more than just this speak thing. So we started meeting at each other's homes. We'd meet at a White kid's home, then we'd meet at a Black kid's home. And then, and we decided that one of the things we were going to do, we were going to volunteer together to "man," we'd call it, the mobile blood units and so forth that were downtown, but we were going to do that together as, you know, White-and-Black-kids, integration things. And we went and we made out the application and so forth, and the people laughed at us. They said, "What are you trying to do? This is a joke." And I remember them saying, "Those Jews put you up to this?" We kept meeting and kept trying to figure out. We were all, by this time, everybody's comparing, who's applying to what colleges for what and for SAT and what, we should all try to go to an integrated college and all this stuff.

We get a message, I'll never forget, comes over the PA system, the names of all the kids in our Booker T. Washington High School, the names of all the kids who were part of NCCJ. Our names were called and it was said, "Would you report immediately to the guidance counselor's office?" And I didn't know. I thought, what, are they going to let us? They've heard that we've been trying to do this thing and maybe they're going to help us or something. No, the word was, to us, we've gotten word from the Board of Ed that some of you kids have been meeting together outside of NCCJ in each other's homes, and you know that White and Black are not to meet together. It's illegal, they said to us. And I thought there was something wrong with that. It couldn't be illegal to gather in somebody's home. But for them, this was public space because we were children, they owned us in a sense. I mean, you owned where, how, children go and come. So a private home became a public space you could not meet.

I remember the principal, I remember us being so disappointed, but not because I was already disappointed in the principal. I thought, he's not really standing up for, you know, for our rights, because he always sort of kowtowed to the White folks that would come from the Board of Ed when they would come for special assemblies and so forth. And I used to really pity him and think, what a compromise. So I was just really disappointed and then angered, but I was more angry than disappointed, and all of us were angry when he said they, you know, the Board of Ed has learned that you've been meeting and it's illegal and you will not be able to do that anymore.

We thought, well, they could say that but we will do, I remember that running through my head and all of us later, we were comparing notes, like, we thought, OK, so they say, but we'll do what we want. But then, it was followed by, "And if you continue to do this, none of you will graduate from high school. You will not get a diploma from the State of Florida that you graduated." And all of us, these smart serious kids, well you have to go to college, your life. And so, it was like, whoa, got you by the, gotcha, gotcha. And I, and they were saying we were not to talk to these kids, we were not to see them at any time, except in NCCJ. The White kids were called in and they were told the same thing. And I remember there being like a sock hop or something like that we were going to, something we could do or not do, it was after a basketball game, and all of us who were a part of this NCCJ thing knew that that was a time, and we had to plot. I mean, this seems like so nothing compared to people being beaten over the head and hosed and jailed and so forth. But for us, in '56, it was, like, that was the universe of trying to figure out some way to buck this system, to stand for justice. That was simply my experience that took me on to more engaged stuff. Less source

Did women get together to make quilts or did they make them alone?

B: No, they got together and they made quilts. My mother made her quilts. My mother made on the bed. Can you imagine sitting there and making that, and rolling it up... she'd let it out and then make another roll. And she made us a king size quilt. She also made every one of the grandchildren I think has a quilt that she hand made.

Where would your mother get the cloth do you know?

B: Oh, sometimes she's just use the scraps. Oh my grandmother sewed. Yeah. My grandmother made all the clothes for everybody. So that was the quilt scraps.

P: Quilt scraps. They'd have sewing making dresses and things like that. They'd take that scrap right now and sew them together. Scraps. They'd line it up just like it come off that top and they got that top big enough to go on a bed, twin bed... They just quilt it up. Take shucks and put in there or get cotton batting.

B: Yeah, cotton batting.

P: That stuff. When you wash it or put it on the bed it wouldn't roll up on either side. It stayed just where it is. Stayed right flat down just like that. It wouldn't roll up there when you quilted it.

B: Double edged.

P: And sew it up all around. Like that.

B: And we had a feather tick. [Linen or cotton bag filled with feathers and sewn shut]. You ever seen a feather tick?

Yes I have.

B: Yeah, because where you laid.

D: You laid right in there. I know they'd get in that when it was cold. Used to get in there, wrap up real tight.

T: If I had that, I wouldn't let you get near it.

D: You and me's already got one. You said you had one.

B: No, we don't have it any more. It disappeared.

T: Couldn't nothing beat them good old nice quilts, lined and everything. Then you got some frames to put ‘em in and quilt. I'm telling you, you got something or another. When you put that on your bed, you got something up there. I'm telling you. I done quilted many a night.

Who taught you to make quilts, Mrs. Thorne?

T: My mother. She showed me how to put the needle in there and all. You put the needle in there, under there, and pull it up and then you take it and push it down. Just like you sewing something or another. And then you pull that needle up and that ticking is just as nice and small. That's right. I learned that from her. And then my oldest sister learned me how to cook some... I stayed up many a night until 1:00 quilting.

Till 1:00?

T: Uh huh. Sometimes we'd just quilt all night. You'd have a nice light and everything.

P: Yeah, I've did some of everything like sewing. Made shirts.

Who taught you to sew, Mr. Powell?

P: My mother. Everything. I can do it.

Did other boys learn how to sew also?

P: No. My mother showed me everything. How to cook, wash, sew, pack. Less source

We got up early and everybody got dressed and had breakfast at the same time. And you either played or went to school. My mother sewed. She made a lot of our clothes. And when we were able, we were taught how to sew. I remember one thing. Of course, we always, Margaret, my middle sister, and I, would lose the needles, but not the long ones. Sewing needles, you know. But the little short ones, they were about two inches long, an inch and three quarters or two inches long. We would put them down or forget where they were, just drop them. So we were always asking Mama for a new needle. She would give us longer ones and longer ones. Well, longer needles were fine as long as we didn't lose them. But, on the other hand, you can't do very fine sewing with a coarse needle, taking big stitches. You have to take small stitches to do fine sewing, small holes in the material.

• • •

If I wanted some leather handbag, tooled handbag, of course I couldn't buy it, so I learned how to work with leather. I made a pair of sandals for my daughter that she liked so much. I couldn't make another, second pair because she didn't need them, you know, as badly as she did that first pair. At least, I thought so. I used to make all of her clothes. I sewed, too. In fact, one of her teachers at a parent-teachers meeting told me that I made her clothes. That was the very thing I was trying not to show, that they were homemade. I said, "Yes, I did. How do you know?" She said, "You couldn't afford to buy them. Not clothes like that, you couldn't afford it." Anyway, my question was answered, which is, "Did they look store-bought?" And the answer was yes. That's all I wanted to know. I didn't really think about, "How do you know I couldn't afford it?" I didn't think about that. [laughter]

• • •

In riveting, the rivets had to be absolutely flat to match against the skin of the wing or part of the wing because of the wind. Men were easier to work with than women because, I think, they had handled tools and they listened. There were certain sounds that certain tools make, and they were aware of them. A riveting gun and a bucking bar. I've forgotten what the square was we used. It was a long wire that you put against the long piece of steel, and it had a flexible steel oblong between two and three inches long and one inch wide. And it had to be pushed against the rivet a certain way so that the rivet would be flat, you know, flatten out.

The men could tell from the sound whether or not they had it in the right position. The women didn't pay any attention, and so, of course, we had to dig the rivet out, which made a big hole and it made it worse. That's why I preferred to work with men. But I never will forget two incidents. Once a White guy, very, very tall and slender from Georgia, which made me think at that time of, I don't remember if it was a saying or a song "as tall as a Georgia pine." Well, when he found that I was his partner, he looked at me and kind of curled his lip a little bit. I did the same thing. The manager or instructor, the head boss, explained to him what was the operation, so he said okay, you know, because he wanted a job. So he went along bucking properly. Both of us, when we started, looked at each other with distaste. Distaste is how we looked at each other. But at the end we smiled, because he knew how to buck the rivet, and, of course, I knew how to use the gun. I knew how to use a bucking bar. We just changed sides. We'd work one side, I would be using the gun, and to do the other side I'd be using the bucking bar and he the gun. We smiled at each other.

Another time, I think this man was an islander, but I don't know what island. But he was half my size. He wasn't as tall as I, and he was very much smaller. And again, both of us looked at each other with distaste, great distaste. At the end, we both smiled, because he knew how to use the tool, and I did, too. We had a good partnership. You know, we didn't have to correct it, dig the rivet out or anything like that. Less source

I asked Danny [Daniel LaRue Johnson] if he knew, I told him that I'd like to have names of some artists. I'd like to have a juried art show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of Black artists. There had never been any. He said that there weren't that many Black artists at museum quality. I said, "Well, who do you think is?" I asked him if he thought he was. He said, "Well, of course." I said, "Well, who do you think is as good as you are?" He said, well, Mel Edwards was as good as he was. So I said, "Okay, what's his telephone number?" He gave it to me. I called Mel and told him the same thing, that I wanted a juried art show at the L.A. County Museum. Who did he think was as good as he was? He gave me the name of George Clack. So it went until I had quite a few names, you know, like thirty or so.

At that time, there was a Black bank called Safety Savings and Loan Company in L.A. They had a community room in the back of the bank which they rented out to various organizations. Marjorie Green was in charge of it. I told her I'd like to use it for a meeting of these artists. She said okay. So we didn't have to pay any fee, and we met there. I told them about it, and they liked the idea, but then I didn't know anything about art. I knew I liked it all right, and I knew that it had an important social value, but I wasn't an artist.

Art to me has a social value the same as, say, religion has a social value, in the same sense, as a spiritual thing. And it does the same thing, some of the things anyway - I'm not very religious - that religion is supposed to do. It inspires one. It lends you courage. It makes a pleasant atmosphere, so that you have pleasant thoughts. And it makes you think. A lot of people don't think. They react all right, and they have a thinking apparatus, but they don't use it very much. That's what I meant by a social value. The first one is obvious - that it makes a pleasant surroundings. Everybody enjoys that. When one enjoys anything, that means that one is happy and is apt to bring out the best in themselves when they're happy. That's good. That makes a good world. That's what I mean by art being spiritual or being of social value. It's also gives you, it's another way of expressing yourself, because many people are artists and not aware of it. I'm one of them, [laughter] The artists thought I was an artist, because they couldn't conceive of a person, just a lay person, being that interested. Of course, I didn't tell them that my ultimate aim was civic and social. I didn't mention that to them.

• • •

They were good artists and it was going to be a juried show, it would have to be at the L.A. County. So I'd have to ask the curator of the county. He was, Brown. I think it was Brown at the time. I can't remember his first name, whoever it is who sets up shows. I'm not, well, anyway, I decided that I'd ask Mr. Houston, Norman Houston at the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company. I told him. And I would invite Charles White, because he was an artist and I wasn't an artist. So the three of us went there. I'll use the name Brown, although I'm not certain. He said we could have a show if we could find him a [Henry] Tanner. And years later, Oh, dear, who's that man that we were talking about earlier today who has a collection? Cecil Fergerson. He was working there at the county, and years later Cecil told me that there was a Tanner already there down in the basement in the storage. But he didn't know it, I guess.

I think he wanted one for the museum. But he didn't know it was there. The museum did have a Tanner. Because having a Tanner would be quite a feather in his cap, you know, because Tanner is a good artist and what we call in books "a collector's item," you know. It's why they're having this Tanner show going around the country now.

If I had known as much about art as I know now, I could have gotten a Tanner. You know, I could have borrowed it for a while to get the show done. Because in the art world they have the same kind of shenanigans going on as they do in business. You know, it's a business, and you do the same kind of tricks. [laughter] But I didn't know that then.

So we never had the show. I came back and told the artists the condition of having the show, and none of them knew where to get a Tanner. So we didn't have the show. That was the end of it. But the artists were so happy to be sitting so close together. There were about fifteen or twenty, we'll say. Maybe there were more. There weren't any less than that, but maybe there were more than that. They were so happy to be together, they said, "No, we'll form a group." Not "We'll form a group," but "We want to stay together." So it was all right with me. Then we decided on a name and made up the rules of membership. That's how Art West Associated was born, just because they wanted to stay together. They wanted to be in touch with each other, and we took in new members. Less source

Including how it manifested itself with organizations like The Gathering and Dr. Ligon that had Black Gnostic classes on teaching secret thoughts and processes about Egypt, and just all these different kinds of things were happening, concurrent, together in this place, you know, even when I first came. And these were the seventies when I first came, so in '71 when I first came to Los Angeles, they had places... that was a collective of all the artists doing hair, braiding, leather, just creating all different types of things with an African mood, you know, African feel to it. And they were 20-somethings, you know, all of us were around our 20s, doing this. And then, they also had drum classes with master drum teachers from Nigeria that were teaching drum and dance classes. They had coops for food, growing environments, also collective living environments, where they all lived with, you know, like the hippie movement type thing, the Gathering. All of that was taking place here when I came here, and this neighborhood had all the top performers. You know, so like you could have the Miracles, the Temptations, Richard Pryor, the rhythm and blues performers. This place was just reeking with that type of stuff. And that's the L.A. that I came here for.

At first when I moved to Los Angeles, I lived close to the school. So, I lived at Westwood first, and then I lived in Santa Monica. And when I was editing my films at night, I would drive up the freeway and get off on Crenshaw and drive up and down this street. Because, again, I'm from New Mexico, so just the smell of barbecue and these big beautiful-butt women and just the brown skins and just the smiles, just the whole thing that I wasn't used to, but to see it when I would come here was just really a blessing. Less source

I came back and just started shooting my family and the Arizona environment and the Black people that were in it. And so, I thought that I would make that my job is to really see, because I was noticing the tonalities and the sense of color in the skin - this is a self-portrait - of our skin was similar to the earth that was in the desert, and our skin rolled up like the bushes. So, there was a kind of an interesting look that our skin had in relationship, especially in Black and White. So, I started playing around with the images in that manner... This is right after Vietnam.

Did Vietnam influence you to think in the way that, in terms of looking at the world, how you look at the world?

It made me not look at the world with a veil. You know, that veil was pulled off. And my religiousness disappeared, too, because at that time, um, um, they asked us to kill people, you know, the preachers. They were like, and I asked them, straight ahead, like, "It's alright to kill?" And they were like, "Yeah." I was like, "Damn!" [Laughs] You know? I was like, "I don't know if I like you guys anymore," you know, "because you're not saying what we were taught." You know, do unto Caesar the things that are Caesar, and this is Caesar shit, you know. And the things to God is positive things. And I got to also see in a war zone that there were real humans there, you know, and we were only able to kill them because we made them "the other," and I saw a lot of similarities with "the other" in me, you know. And I was "the other" in the United States, and they're having me chase down "others" over here.

I was going to ask you, I saw some images there of Vietnamese people.

Yeah. And those Vietnamese ladies, young women, they kind of were following me. It was weird, because I would see them in a lot of different places. And, as you notice, there were like two of them in each picture. And it tripped me out how, each place. And then, they would say, "Ben, I know you." [Laughs] You know? So, they fucked with me as a 21-year-old. "I don't know what in the world you guys, how can you know me? I just met you." But they were like, "I know you." They were fun. They were Montagnards, and Montagnards are the Black people of that world. So, it was kind of interesting to see that. The other thing politically, I got to see, I read Malcolm X there and I saw a lot of similarities between his life and mine, because he was raised in the Southwest and he had that Klan thing around him. And all the kinds of strifes and tribulations, like even his dad, my dad was that kind of a person, even though he wasn't a Garveyite, but he was really a definite revolutionary, you know, in the sense of fighting for his life. And that always has bothered me when you're proud of yourself that that's considered revolutionary, you know. Less source

If we grew up to be professionals or even academics we didn't want to be those kind of people. Because we thought that a university with all of its research and all of its resources should be benefiting people who are hurting, people who are suffering, in its communities certainly. So what we did, is we assigned people to various campus activities and departments as well as assigning people to communities to work.

Now some of that I think kind of came out because we were also at those times studying things like the Cultural Revolution of China and quite frankly, there was a lot of that that we liked. We thought there was a problem with culture that was manufactured but had no connection with the people. As I've gotten older I think there may be some place for experimentation, certainly.

• • •

I had worked in South Park. I don't know if any of you know where South Park is, but it's a really beautiful little community. It circles a little park down around Second off of Bryant, between Bryant and maybe Brannan. On Second street, but from Second to Third or something like that. Second to First, rather. When I was at state college in sixty-eight, sixty-nine, it was Black. It was for many years, it was an African-American community. Some Samoans, but predominantly African-American. Like most places in San Francisco that were once African-American, it no longer is. One of my friends who is deceased now said: "You know what? One day White people are going to come through here. They are going to buy these places up and rehab them and they are ultimately going to put in some gates and some gaslights and they may even put some horse drawn carriages through there, because it's just a beautiful little place."

One summer, I taught there. They would have summer programs and we would go from BSU into these programs and teach and work with the kids during the summer. And so I did that for one summer and I think I worked in maybe what they call Dogpatch, which used to be in Little Hollywood. Dogpatch, that used to be an African-American community too, by the way. So many. So many there used to be. Then I ended up in the Fillmore community. I was invited to a meeting one night, a WACO [Western Addition Community Organization] meeting and I started going to Western Addition community organizations. All the organizations in the Fillmore coming together. I started going to those meetings. They did a lot of things. They worked with every issue in the community. But the big issue that overwhelmed them and everything that they were doing at that time was redevelopment.

I got interested in that and then WAPAC [Western Addition Project Area Committee] was formed and I went to the first big meeting to vote on who would be on the board. I didn't go back for a while and then I went back a few years later and ended up on the board and everything else is history, which we can get into. Less source

You know, when I look back had it not been for us, it would have been worse. But as far as I am concerned, a lot of what I did wasn't enough. It wasn't good enough. Because it didn't work. The community is gone, so no matter how hard I worked, no matter how many good things — and I worked very hard, and still am — and no matter how many good things that I think I did, and when I say me, me and the people I worked with, I think we did a lot, but it wasn't enough. Because it was really too late, and when you are involved in a situation like that, trying to make something wrong better, just doesn't work. Wrong is just wrong. You might try to make the bullets softer, but they are still hard enough to kill when they come out of a gun.

And that was the problem that I believe we had with redevelopment. And it's a tragedy. It's a real, real tragedy. In retrospect, it probably would have been better to just stand up and say no. And just let the fight go down like that. Because what we didn't realize, what we lost, what I lost personally, is the dynamic, healthy African-American community — I didn't say perfect, I said healthy — that has never existed. And I think nowadays probably exists nowhere but in the South. Some places in the South, not everywhere.

We had, I mean, it was just so hip. Everybody in the world deserves to grow up in the kind of community I grew up in. It was in LA, but it's the same thing here. One, it was still here when I got here. And then when I talk to my partners who grew up here, it's the same thing. Just the life. There were children on the street. I told you, I grew up in an integrated community but the Black community was all around us. And our life even though — and see, this one thing that you have to keep in mind — even though we had moved to an integrated community, we went to church, we went back to the Black community. When we wanted something to put on our hair that would work, we had to go back. When my mommy wanted to go to the beauty shop, when me and my daddy wanted to go to the barber shop, see, White barbers didn't have to learn how to cut Black people's hair in those days. Black barbers had to learn how to cut White people's hair to graduate the barber school, but White barbers didn't have to learn how to cut our hair. So you had to go. They'd mess your head up, even if they would cut it. So you had to go back to the hood. The kind of food we liked to eat, Black restaurants, for everything we needed and then for the feeling of life. Less source

And then, as the bus stopped at these little small towns, and this was in 1960 and 1961, Whites would get on, and they would refuse to take the seats behind me, and so, they'd be standing in the aisles. And I would just be there in the seat, and pretend that I was sleeping, and just turn and go on about my business.

They would have signs in the bus stations that said "Whites," "White Women" and "White Men," and "Colored." The "White" sign would actually say, "Whites and Interstate Passengers," but they would also have signs that said "Colored," and of course they didn't differentiate between colored men and colored women. Even though by law, since I was traveling from one state to the other, they couldn't segregate me, but in reality, you were in quite some danger if you had been. And I would even go on the buses from Baton Rouge to Atlanta, sometimes alone. And why I did that, and where I had the courage to do that, because I could have easily ended up missing. But maybe I was just crazy like that, I don't know, but I just felt that I was not born to lead my life letting fear overcome my dignity. It wasn't that I wasn't afraid, but it was the question of which would win out. As I would go into these places, I was shaking in my boots, as it goes.

• • •

When I was growing up, my mother was, the earliest work that I remember her doing was as a housekeeper at a medical clinic, at a doctor's office. And they treated her very well. I mean, they treated her with respect. She would even double as a receptionist at the clinic, although these were White doctors and their clientele was White. But she was basically a maid, but she was respected and she carried herself with dignity when she was there at the clinic. And she worked with Dr. Segerson, E.C. Segerson was the physician. And I remember that following her work at the clinic, and we would go visit, my brother and I, sometimes, and we were, again, we were treated with respect. And my grandfather, in addition to the work that he did with his own business, pardon me. My grandfather, Papa, as we called him, would work for two White women, sisters, who were wealthy, and they let him plant cotton on the back field of their yard, as well as peanuts. Again, they treated Papa with a great deal of respect.

• • •

Mother was - she went back to school and got her GED and then she got licensed as a barber. She was one of the first Black female barbers in Memphis. And then, she did that for a short while - well, a short while, it was probably four or five years - at a barbershop in the center of the Black neighborhood in South Memphis, Mississippi and Walker, where we grew up. And after four or five years of cutting hair, she went back and got her license as a nurse and became a licensed practical nurse and worked first at - well, she was one of the first Black nurses at St. Joseph's Hospital here in Memphis, and worked for many years, ultimately retiring in nursing. My father, in addition to being a train porter, he liked to play checkers and pool, so he had a lot of friends and he was outgoing, very proud of his two sons. But he was probably a bit more cautious or savvy, I should say, and therefore, he didn't particularly urge us to be shaking at trees or rocking the boat. I remember that when we would go down to the train station to get on the train to go down to Baton Rouge, when you got to go up onto the train, the conductor would ask you where were you going. And you'd say Baton Rouge or Hammond, and they'd say, "To the left." Well, actually, "to the left" was where the Blacks were being sent, and "to the right" was where the Whites were being sent, so it didn't really matter where you were going... But I would - sometimes if my father wasn't there, I'd go to the right into the White section and sit down. But typically if he was with me, or my mother and I, then I wouldn't get them too upset about doing that. Less source

I don't remember Mississippi. The only way I remember Mississippi is that we went back there every year where we had to go and drink from the colored water faucet, sit upstairs in the movie theater, and couldn't sit on the bottom floor. My grandparents worked at the sawmill in Forest, Mississippi, and my great-grandmother, Carrie Ann, was a schoolmaster in Forest, Mississippi. My great-grandfather was a Methodist preacher who had a funeral home in Memphis and in Forest, Mississippi. Most of my family was in education, and they owned businesses. The Lamb family-owned businesses in Forest, Mississippi, which is eighty miles from Jackson.

• • •

Do you remember the riot of 1969?

Yes, I do, I'll never forget I was working for the City of Las Vegas, and like I said, Oran Gragson and I were very close. He came over here during the riot one night, and they told me and Oran Gragson, "Get out of here. Go back across town." I remember, the rioters, the kids, the rioters at H and Owens. I'll never forget that. Then they set the fire at the gas station that is now called Bell's Market. They looted the whole shopping center, broke windows out. Larry's Sight and Sound was on Owens, also, at that particular time. I remember that.

How did the city respond?

The city came back to me and the community to try to resolve issues or problems that...

During the riot, how did the city respond?

They used necessary force, I guess.

What was that?

Police came in and did their job.

Tell me what that is?

The job is go and retain order.

Did they block off the streets?

Oh yes, they blocked off streets there. I remember they brought tanks so you couldn't go downtown at that station on Bonanza so you couldn't go up under the underpass and go by Snyder's Malt Shop on Bonanza to go downtown.

Did they have tanks anyplace else?

I can't remember, but I know they had armored cars that the police department had. I remember I was police liaison officer, too, that we tried to talk to the kids and talk to the people, try to maintain order.

How long did the riot last?

I can't remember, maybe three or four days on and off.

Do you remember how it started?

I can't remember exactly how it started, no. That was such a long time ago. Less source

So he looked at me and he said, "I'll give you thirty days." And I was seventeen at that time. I said, "Okay." I went and joined the Marine Corps. At that time, thank God, you could join like that with your mother's permission. She was in court with me and she knew I had to go somewhere.

So I got into the Marine Corps with some help. Academically, my academics was very short because I didn't go to school. And then when I did go, I was messing around. So I go to the Marine Corps. The drill instructor helped me with the test and everything. He gets me to go through all the preliminaries and gets my mother to sign. So I go the Marine Corps.

In the Marine Corps they have different companies. The drill instructor is always bragging that their company is the best. So one company said, "Well, I got a guy, he's a real good boxer. We want to box your company. And who do you have to represent your company?" So the drill instructor turns to all of us and said, "Who wants to box for us?" And nobody raised their hand. [Laughing] Nobody raised their hand, so I did. I said, "Okay, I'll do it." And so I went and I boxed for our company. Of course, I knew a little bit, not much, but a little bit, and I was very strong and very young. So I ended up winning the match. And the drill instructor said, "Wow, man, you are pretty good." So every time a company would challenge our company, he would always put me in there.

So eventually, I'm beating everybody up. And so we have, the Marine Corps - every part of the service has a special service where they do football or track or boxing. We had a very good company in the Marine Corps athletic. In the Olympics, we even had one of the guys; his name was Mills, he won the mile. He was a mile runner and he won a gold medal. So they really pushed athletes and really pushed sports. So they asked me to join the boxing team and that's how I really got into boxing. I'd rather box instead of march. It was much more fun. Less source

So we had Freedom School. Remember my son grew up in the ‘70s, the late ‘60s, ‘70s period. So this was the civil rights movement and everybody was Black, including his parents and his friends. So Freedom School was not a burden to them. They knew that they had to go, and they sort of enjoyed knowing about it.

Was this held in the church?

It was held, I've forgotten where we had it. It may have been in the church, but it was not sponsored by the church. This was done by friends, this group, to provide the experience to the kids.

• • •

My son went to Morehouse College. The agreement was, growing up in Boulder does not provide the kind of coping experiences that you need for later life. So we said to him that we would like for you to go at least one year. After that year you can go wherever you want to go. This was our agreement. Well, when my son came home at Christmas [chuckles], he had already reapplied to the schools that had accepted him. He hated his roommate. We told him, "You're not supposed to like your roommate! Whoever heard of liking a roommate?" [laughs] Anyway, he said, " Well, I'll finish the year." And he went back and he finished the year. "Well, I'll go one more year." And this went on and he graduated from Morehouse. He discovered that we can be as cool and interesting to each other as anybody else. You do discover this. He graduated from Morehouse and he never went, in my view, and having grown up in the South and having known Morehouse always, he never was the typical Morehouse person. I think his background was different, number one, and they sort of dressed and always looked real sharp. My son looks like - today - he ought to be down on the mall with the homeless. [laughs] And when I say something, "You always told me it's whatever's up here that counts." So what can you say? [laughs] Less source

I got the chance to teach at CU [University of Colorado] for a couple years... I taught survey of African American literature and I taught a course on Baldwin some time later. But that was the ‘70s. And of course, there was a lot of interest in that in the ‘70s. I had a huge class. I can remember there were a lot of African American students, a few Hispanic students, and fewer still White students who were in the class. I can remember being really nervous, because I really wasn't an experienced teacher. But I had the chance to do this. And I can remember, the classroom was huge. I can't even remember where it was. There was a platform, and I would stand on it and I looked out at these kids. When I first went there, all the Black kids would sit together, and all the White kids would sit together. I was thinking, what is the world is this?

As we went through the semester, because the teacher sees, and you don't know this until you teach, the teacher sees what the class doesn't see, because your perspective is different. Unless you're in a seminar setting, you're kind of apart from them. It's not good, but it's true. So I got to see the classroom. When people came in, they weren't really seeing any more after a while Black and Hispanic and White in the class. I saw that repeated over and over in several semesters. It was a good experience, a good feeling.

I can remember one time one of my students rode his bicycle in the dismount zone on campus. I don't even know if they have them any more. The policeman grabbed him by the arm, which wasn't really smart. He pulled away from him and came into the class. The policeman followed him into the classroom. So I went down to see what the problem was. The policeman seemed, I can't remember now, it seems to me he was willing to wait, I don't know why he was willing to wait, but he was willing to wait until we were done with class. Then he wanted to get to that kid. I told the kid, I said, "I'll go with you to the police station. We'll go together." But the class was so phenomenal, because as we got up to go out, they got in between us and the policeman. It was kind of a marvelous thing. They just kept there, so the kid wouldn't feel alone or frustrated as we went to the police station. We got there, and it was OK. He wasn't rowdy or anything. And I certainly didn't expect that. They just - that was my first class at CU - they just kind of bonded in that sense. It was the bonding and the unity that they felt came from the literature, it came from what we studied and what we understood together, the ideas of what people wrote before us that we read and discussed and understood. The bonding, I think, was a natural thing to happen. Less source

They spent about five years in Cincinnati, which was a good experience. My husband worked for IBM and had the opportunity to come here, and we really thought that being here would be wonderful for them, would give them some advantages they wouldn't have had if we had stayed back in Cincinnati or in some other large urban community.

What kind of advantages?

We thought they'd be free of influences that weren't good. Such as street culture, drug culture. We thought that here they would have the advantages of being close to ski areas, the outdoors, the mountains, climbing, if they chose to do those kind of things. All those things we thought were good. If we could do it again, we wouldn't.

Really? Why not?

Because I don't think Boulder is a good place to raise Black children.

What makes you think that? What kind of experiences have shaped your opinion?

Well, just watching them struggle growing up, not only my children, but watching other children at school, trying to find an identity, trying to perhaps act out in ways that maybe they wouldn't normally. It's the need for acceptance.

• • •

When they were little children, there was not a problem. As they got older, and it's not as critical for the fellows as it is for the women, the question of dating comes up. You know, everybody can play baseball, basketball or whatever, but when it's time to take someone to go out, then that becomes a problem. And the truth is - and of course, I think we've been criticized by friends who don't live here and family that don't understand, because our children would date White girls or Latino girls, or Latinas, I guess, whatever. There just really weren't any Black girls in Boulder, not the numbers, and certainly none that we knew. There weren't any in this neighborhood.

At their schools, I can remember the first time my son, Jay - we call the oldest one Jay — they had a party at school, but they, he was supposed to take a girl. He felt comfortable because you grow up thinking that all of these people who are your friends really have accepted you as a friend. Then of course when he asked this young woman out, I can't remember now, it's been years, if she said yes and then went home and her parents said she couldn't go out with him. It was not even a real date. How old are you in eighth grade, twelve, thirteen? It would be a date where the parents would drive you to the school, to the party, and they'd pick you up and take you home. He was so crushed by that. We were more crushed than he was. It was pretty dismal around here. That might have been the first time he really realized that there were things he couldn't accomplish. Or he couldn't do, I shouldn't say "accomplish," but he couldn't participate in, because he looked different.

One time, Mark, the younger one, met a little girl in the park and wanted to play with her. I think they were flying kites or something. She said, "I can't play with you, because I can't play with Chinese." She was confused, too. He said, "Well, that's OK, because I'm not Chinese." [laughs] He didn't feel any of the pain of it. It develops more as you get older. But that perhaps could have been some of the first experiences.

When Jay wasn't able to date this young woman, that was a turning point for us. Why did we move to Boulder? What in the world? Here we've got this good-looking young man, he's a nice boy, we think he's nice. Now, he did get someone to go out with him. That's because he was persistent, and that was good. On the other hand, I don't think the pain of that rejection, it did not go away easily, if it ever went away. Because here I am, what? Twenty years later, thirty years later, remembering it. Just things like that. It's hard enough to bring up your children in a community, in any community, if you want them to behave in a certain manner or to have certain kinds of exposures, want them to live a certain kind of life. Then you add to that this fact that even in this community, they don't have full range of movement, and that becomes kind of a problem. So we wouldn't do it again if we could do it over. Although our children say to us, "This has been great." I think, that's because they don't know what great is. They've lived in Boulder all their life. [laughs] Less source

I'm now ninety-three years old. And I was born in 1910 in Tuskegee, Alabama. My parents were both members of the staff of Tuskegee, my father having just gone to Tuskegee to work in the business office. He was a graduate of Hampton University. And my mother was a graduate of Miner Teachers College in Washington, D.C. And her field was in what they called and I put it in quotes now, "Domestic Science." But later, it was changed to Home Economics. So, my mother and father met there, married and had two children.

My mother also had Indian heritage. And there is a, a very brief note about that. You could tell it from, in a way, her appearance. My grandmother did not have pure African features. And she had very long black hair, which is, of course, not something that you would find in a pure African. My grandmother had been a slave up until she was seven years old, when her father, who had been freed from the Lee plantation, believe it or not; came to Washington.

• • •

While my father was at Tuskegee, they heard, news came about this all-Black town that was being formed in Mississippi. A place called Mound Bayou. And his friend C.C. Dove, who was the one who had given my father the idea of coming to Tuskegee said to him, "Claude, I'll go to Mound Bayou and see if it's worth it. And if so, I'll call you." He did and my father was given the job of the superintendent of the Post Office. And so, gleefully, he left Tuskegee and went to Mound Bayou. But it didn't last very long. It was a town operated and run by Blacks at that time, not skilled in operating cities, towns. And the town soon went bust. And the town was called Mound Bayou, Mississippi. It's still in existence. My sorority in recent years has had a summer project there helping in the rural areas. Mound Bayou is still a place that is very rural.

It's miraculous to me that Mound Bayou still exists. When the town, as I said, in quotes, "went bust," my father in the meantime had bought a house and a small farm. And he was very successful on that. But being in Mississippi in the early part of the twentieth century, malaria was still a plague. And my sister and I both came down seriously with malaria. And my father knew that our lives would not be good lives there and that he should move from Mississippi... So, his friend C.C. Dove who had brought him said "Well, look, Claude, I hear there is a Black insurance company that has opened up in Denver, Colorado. And they're going to need an expert like you to help in the financing and establishment of that." He said, "Let me go to Denver and if it's a really good idea, I'll call you and then you can bring your family." As it turned out, C.C. Dove went to Denver. He found out all he could about this insurance company. He felt that it was the thing for my father and called my father and said, "Claude, come to Denver. There's a job for you." So, that's how we got to Denver. I was just four years old. And I grew up in Denver... Denver, to me, is home.

Did you live in a segregated community in Denver?

Yes, and no. Denver was a very interesting community. The school's population was integrated. There were no Black teachers. There was no discrimination on public transportation. Now, in stores, you could go in but you couldn't try on shoes or clothes. You could go in and look at them and take a chance that the size would fit.

You had to learn how to live in two worlds. You had to learn how to live in the Black world and you had to learn how to live in the White world. And the two at that time, from the time, we'll say, 1914 on until the civil rights movement came into existence, there was this accepted, no one disagreed with the idea at that time. Less source

He said, "I know."

I said "I'll go out there with you."

"You going to go out there?"

"I'll go out there with you."

"Val, that's not your job."

"I know it is not my job, but they need to see someone of color that is glad to see them get off the bus and come into school."

So, we did that every day, me, him and John Connolly who was the assistant headmaster and we did that every day, we would greet the kids. I'll never forget it, the first week we had two kids on the bus, two kids on the bus. There was a little White girl, her name was Andrea, I can't remember her last name, she clung to me, clung to me. So, I talked to her and she ended up bringing her girlfriend so the next week there were five kids on the bus so now we are increasing and then we got to almost a full bus it was twenty kids on the bus. And because there were twenty kids on the bus, when those kids got home, they [other people in Southie] slashed their parents tires, broke their windows. That is why, they stopped the buses from Southie to Roxbury.

The next year it ended up being the kids were bused from Charlestown to Roxbury High. And I don't know where the kids from Southie, I guess they stayed in South Boston, but they never came back. But that girl, Andrea, she called me constantly, "I don't like this building, I don't like these people." I said "honey there is nothing I can do." You know her mother moved to Charlestown so she could come to Roxbury High. She found I was working there, when I ended up working there and sent her kids to Charlestown High 'cause I was there. But that's a whole other story.

The sad part about busing was the kids didn't have a choice. If they had and I kept saying it, if they had done that differently it would have worked. If they started with the elementary school and then let those kids come up together. It wouldn't have been a problem. But what they did they pulled kids out of there, we had some high school seniors, who lost their seniority at their high school to come to a school across the city. So, this was all, it was a mess, they created chaos. Less source

And when I end up working for the campus security it really came out because kids were bused from all over the city [Boston] into Madison. Kids were fighting. You would have the race fights. Then you would also have the White fights. You would have the North End kids fighting with the Charlestown kids and the Southie kids fighting with the Charlestown kids. It was like, the only people who didn't fight was White kids from Roslindale and West Roxbury, they got along with everybody. But the kids from South Boston and Charlestown and the North End. I'm going to tell you, the North End and Charlestown were my biggest problems. Those kids, I'm telling you, they were worse than the White and Black fights. And I couldn't understand it. Then when I went to Charlestown, worked in Charlestown, and I understood that, 'cause kids from the North End used to come into Charlestown to go to school, and the kids used to tell me the stories about they couldn't cross the bridge after 5 o'clock.

"What are you talking about?"

"I got to go home."

Then when I tried to get them jobs.

"My mother is not going to let me go downtown."

These kids never left Charlestown, lived and worked in Charlestown. And when I, when Liberty Mutual, and all these places, CVS and all these stores offered our kids jobs, I would have to take the kids to them so they could see them. When the kids started going and the parents found they were making money. It really was, like pulling teeth getting those kids to cross the bridge. It was so hard for me to understand but that is how I got I think my respect from the folks in Charlestown and from South Boston, because I didn't care who it was, you want a job you got a job.

You'd have kids that would cut school. I'll never forget, me and this White girl who used to be school police, and we would go through the projects and we knew what time the kids try to cut out. They didn't know I knew how cross the roof, cause that is how I was raised. We used to cut through come down the other side. The kids who would hide, didn't know, I was coming, I was on the other side, the girls would be coming up one way and I would be on the other side waiting for them to come down. Until they found out. Then what happened was, the parents and the residents in Charlestown and the parents realized I was pulling the kids into the building and not out of the building and they used to see me coming and say Val you want some coffee? No, I don't drink coffee, so then they started making hot chocolate for me 'cause they knew I like hot chocolate. That is how the neighborhood got to know me 'cause I go in the projects looking for my kids. I go up Bunker Hill Street they be in the store. Get your butt in the building. I didn't care who was in there. Get your butt in the building. I'll never forget, these two old ladies lived next door to the corner store. They said the best thing they ever did was hire you. My house has been so quiet I don't have the kids swearing, sitting on the steps. They said I’ll call Ms. Shelley and they’d take off [clap hands]. Less source

So we got in a argument, he was standing around there cursing and I can't stand that. So I grabbed him and I hit him and knocked him down, hit him and knocked his glasses off. And then he got up again and I was after him again so there was another Irish lady and she was real nice, so she grabbed me and tried to hold me, and she called another guy named Freddy, and she told him "take him out of here, take him out of here (whispering)". So I calmed down and the big boss came down and said I have to fire you, I hate to lose you cause your a good worker but I have to fire you because we don't allow that, there is no fighting in here. He asked me why I hit him and I told him because he cursed me, called me you damn so-an-so, get this work done. Which he was wrong and so uh, I hit him and knocked him down, and they fired me, and then two days later they sent me a letter to come back, they let him go. They didn't fire him they just sent him to another store... But in the mean time I had been down to the railroad and I said naw this is a better job. It's more money than working in the five and ten cents store that only pay you $13.50 a week. And I went on the railroad and they was paying I think $22.50 a week, so that was a big difference.

Could describe what was your typical work day like?

Well, the routine of my working was you get your linen, you know your White uniform and everything. You get your linen, then you make the fire... It was coal, it was all coal, you chopped up your coal. So you make your fire and took the ashes out... And when you get that started then you start to preparing your food. If your a dishwasher, you know 4th cook, then you have to start peeling potatoes and stringing beans or whatever they have there you have to get prepared... Some of the things you can cook in the yard and a lot of the things you have to cook as the train is going along, you know because a lot of things were cook to order. So you know just routine cooking, but you cook all the way, you worked all the way.

• • •

What were the passengers like?

They were pretty nice, you would find some pretty rough but uh, being in the kitchen I didn't face to much of that you know. But when I was working out there on the coaches you would find some of those sailors were rough, they wanted to get nasty, some of them especially if they were from the South. They don't want a Black man to tell them anything or give any order. Several of the waiters you know, had a little trouble with the sailors but they wouldn't, the waiters wouldn't take nothing off 'em though. They had one guy, I don't remember his name, but I remember they called him Butch and uh, he wouldn't take nothing, and he grabbed one of them sailors, a big guy and knocked him out, but I think he got fired though. But the sailor called him an N--- you know the N word and he didn't like that. Man he grabbed that sailor, he was a small guy but he getting next to him like the devil and then the other guys had to pull the little guy off that big sailor. He was from down south and he didn't want, I don't know, he said something, he called him and N and he didn't like that. Man he went off. Less source

There was three of them so I gave each one of them what they want and they went on back and sit down. So they came back and I gave it too them again. So they came back up again and started getting loud and then I told them, you know when they get too loud you have to cut them off, so I told them you can't get any more, you wait until that liquor die down and then if you want some more I get it.

So she went back and got the conductor and the conductor came up there and said what's wrong, and I said she's getting loud, and I had to cut her off. So he said I'm sorry, and she said Conductor, said you going to let him, and he said he runs that bar, now I can shut the bar down, if he don't run the bar right I can shut the bar down. The conductor don't run the bar, I run the train but that bar is his, if anything is short he has to pay for it I don't have to pay for it. But if you are getting to unruly or getting to loud that's up to him I can't, I don't have anything to say about the bar.

So she didn't like it, and I think she called me sunshine, old Sunshine N----. So she came back and she said I've been quite now, let me have some liquor. I said if you go back and sit down maybe, she was going all the way to Washington see, and we hadn't even got to New York yet (laughs). So she went in her purse and took $5 dollars and laid it on the counter, that $5 dollars looked pretty good (laughs) so I told her no, no, you can't buy me. So the other ones, there was three of them, the other ones they put a dollar a piece up there so I said well if you be good you're on. So I fixed them up and they was pretty good from them on. But some of them get loud and get nasty and call you sunshine or whatever the case might. I don't know, I guess when you work with them they are nice sometimes, then sometime they want to show or let you know that they are White and you are Black. Less source

My dad started his business jointly with one brother. Then he moved his shop downtown next to City Hall. Part of my early racial memories relate to that because there was a desire for him not to be where he was, and it led to changes in his life, and in his business.

....

He decided, I will own my own building, I will do other different things. He moved his business closer to home into another district, and, then, finally he was able to build his own building. His building was a shoe repair, a different change. Rather than serving the elite Whites from downtown, his business needed to do other things, now. So, he would repair old boots and stuff that came out of surplus from the war. There was a bargain store and all of those things were there. Then, when we were all in school sometime later, my mother set up her business, a dry cleaning business. A mother who was a presser worked for her. So, those buildings were on the same lot.

I'll probably be asking you some dumb questions, but they're the kinds of things we want to talk about. I am assuming that this was a highly segregated town [Waycross, Georgia]?

It was. That's not a dumb question. Yes, you know the answer. It was very highly segregated. As a matter of fact, even though I lived close to where I could get, a sewer wasn't allowed. The man who picked up the waste and came through an alley nearby, used a pump early on. Things are very different, now. But, all of it had a lot to do with how my Dad performed. He was one of the original organizers 80 years ago of the NAACP. He was a founding organizer of Keystone Voters League. There were loads of people there who understood the need for change. They were positive in their approaches to how to bring it about, and the political changes there now are just great.

I went to school with all-Black children, but when I was downtown at my Dad's business there was Central High School there and there was a playground. I could go to the playground and play. The interactions, you know, between young Blacks and Whites were not unusual. The South was noted for backyard segregation. As long as people were young and prior to puberty, you might play together, though you might also encounter some horrible things. When the school was overcrowded in my elementary school, fifth grade, I had to walk across town past the White schools into another district for schools. Sometimes, fights would break out just because Whites would want you to get off of the sidewalk to let them past, or some other kinds of insults, which young persons like myself resisted, and did not really tolerate well.

• • •

Tell me a little bit about your home. Did you have books, magazines, newspapers, radio?

Yes. Home to the radio, like white on rice, when Joe Louis was fighting, or when there was something else of significance, especially as it related to racial progress. Waycross was a very progressive town. My mother was very keen on education. She was in state PTA's and in all of those kinds of things. When all of us were in school, she ran her own business. My sister was very bright and became a Fulbright Fellow. All of those kinds of things were the kinds of goals that sort of perambulated in the family. As a result, my family stayed in school longer than expected. So, five of us were in college at once.

Did the Depression hit your family much?

Yes, but who knew about it?... We were already poor. It was not a sharp change for us. I would say it was Depression because of what was going on. I know about it historically. But, how I knew about then was not to know about it. Of course, it is why there was such a great love for the compassion of the president at the time... I wouldn't call them compassionate conservatives, just compassionate men. But, he had a wife who was even more compassionate from the points of view of my colleagues and associates down in Georgia.

So, you became quite conscious of the fact that Roosevelt was president, and that we had the New Deal?

Definitely. It affected politics because even though we in the South ran the Republican party, we ran it defensively because we could not be in the Democratic primary, so we were all supporters of the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, until a president came out of Kansas and had followers who sort of rejected Black leadership in the Republican party. Then, came the Democratic troubles, the walkout of the Democratic party and it led to a total shift in the orientation of southern Blacks, although they ran the Republican party and put up the Republican candidates, except for president. The national election for president, they were all voting for Roosevelt. Less source

There are many stories like that that were published in the Atlanta Daily World. I covered police, politics and everything in Atlanta. The courts, and in covering the courts I would cover cases, the predecessor cases, to those that Hunter-Gault and Holmes got into. See, they were not the first cases. The NAACP's lawyer, a female attorney who became the first Black federal judge, was there. Constance Baker Motley was trying some of the cases down there, and a Wichita person, Donald Hollowell, got involved in some of those cases, whose name was on the tip of my tongue yesterday because he ought to be in the Black Hall of Fame in Wichita, Holloway was the name, and he was there with a firm and they did a lot of marvelous things. So, covering the courts was a very prominent part of my activity. But, in covering them the key thing was that a crime Black against White quickly became a capital offense, especially if rape were suggested, or if someone robbed and it was a forceful robbery. That was capital and it could mean the electric chair.

• • •

How were you treated by the White reporters down there?

Gosh, very well, even by White officers. The chief liked me so much, and it helped me a lot. I was sued for a million dollars down there for some coverage, and his liking me was very helpful because whatever I was sued for was something that the police, I was reporting from police information and they had identified a red-haired White woman as the cause of some house bombings in the Black neighborhood. They were trying to control the spread of the Black community. In addition to putting barriers where they had highway removals and those kinds of things at the borders, there were the attacks on certain homes. I said that the police were investigating a red-haired White woman for this, and this they were doing. But, she sued, saying her neighbors knew it was she, whatever, so it made it difficult for me and my employer at that time.

Did you go from there to St. Petersburg?

No, I went from there to what I consider to be the sister paper to the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. I went to the Des Moines Register... My brother-in-law and sister were pastoring there and on a holiday I went there. I went in and visited with the editor, and he wanted to hire me. He wanted to make sure that I was streamed away from reporting. He wanted me to work a desk, so I went there to work a desk. He prepared them well. So, I desegregated news coverage in that town because, eventually, I was chaffing at the bit to go out and report. Little Rock was breaking in 1957, and I wanted to be out. Yet, I'm at a desk saying, "Oh, boy, this down to eight inches," and other things like that. Rewrite. I became very, very upset. I eventually did go out and do police work for them or whatever, but I wanted to get out of there and get into the South where things were going on. So, it was from there in 1958 that I went to St. Petersburg, Florida.

• • •

I didn't go there to work at the St. Petersburg Times. I went there to work at the junior college as head of public relations and as communication; I taught English and handled their communications. But, when I began working there, they had a Black page. They had somebody there they were firing, and they were trying hard to get me and talked to my boss, the head of the junior college, asking if I could work. And, he, because he thought he would get more ink if I worked, he thought I could do both. They gave me the job to be editor of the Black page. I said, "No, I don't want any such thing." They insisted, you can change it if you wish. So, I went and edited the Black page and reported generally for the newspaper.

I discovered that that page was a Godsend. It was there that I started a column called, "Sam's Song," and I argued that a community or a group that's behind would be eternally behind unless they either run faster or run longer, or unless they were smarter. Since Blacks are no smarter than Whites, no race is smarter than the other, I thought, they could only close that gap, educational and otherwise, by putting in more time because the speed of our race would be impeded by the lack of materials and other things in junior college. So, it caught fire. I organized an after-school, summer and Saturday enrichment program called "CACEP," continuing academic cultural enrichment program. We got national awards for that. The federal government caught wind of it and thought it should be an example for their efforts to set up the VISTA, volunteers in services to America, the VISTA program, as Lyndon Johnson is now trying to take over what had been on the drawing boards from John Kennedy. Less source

Now, I'm thinking in terms of the Jewish people. They only admitted two Jewish people to take medicine at med school a year at Penn during my time, see. And they only let one colored get into med school.

There was a fellow who went to Lincoln, who was in med school at Penn during my time. And I knew him very well. His daddy was a doctor. His daddy finished Penn. His boy went to Penn. And he messed up. Instead of him studying the way he should study, the papers would come out, the Black papers, of which I sort of held responsible for this boy's downfall. Every week, they would feature in the society page, have this young man, this young Pennsylvania student, visiting friends in New York one week. Next week in Jersey City. Another week in Baltimore. And another week in Washington D.C., and sometime a week in Richmond, Virginia. I read about this when I had time to read the paper. And I got an inkling of what he was doing through a professor of mine whose son was in med school at Penn, who was his classmate. I spoke to him one day... I said to him, "Do you know Charlie Lewis? Is he in your class?

"He said, "Yes, do you know him?"

"Yeah... How is he doing?"

"Do you know him well enough to talk to him?"

"Yeah."

"Well, he's not doing too well."

So I made my business to call him that night and ask him how was he doing? And he told me, "Fine." I told him I heard he wasn't doing so fine. He said, "Well, I'm having a little trouble, but I'll do all right," he said, "I got it, I'll get it." Well, I thought he would. But in two or three weeks, I heard on the radio that he'd committed suicide. And he committed suicide because he was failing. And he was in his sophomore or junior year. But he was just playing, playing too hard and not studying.

In my class, they asked me, every day, I guess, when I first went to school, to keep me on the ball, questions. And I found out that they were going to ride my butt, or they were riding it, so I studied every night. And after I got to the point when I would answer the questions every time, they let me alone and go to somebody else. And that could have been that they were trying to measure each student. But I knew I had one professor, in particular, who questioned me the whole week, every day. And one of the fellows asked me, he said, "He loves you, doesn't he?" (Chuckles) I said, "Well, I hope that love affair will soon be over, but I guess that's his privilege."

And then I had some that were very fatherly to me, that took an interest in me. But I knew where I stood at Penn the first year I went there, because in my class, maybe I mentioned to you before... I mention about my dean, who was telling the group that he didn't particularly care about foreigners, or Jews, Catholics, or colored people. And some of the fellows didn't like it and they challenged him and I never opened my mouth. When I got on the outside, two or three of them asked me what was wrong with me? That I didn't say anything? This man said he didn't like me. So I just looked at him for a minute and then I answered him. And my answer was, "I don't give a damn whether you like me or not. I'm not here to be liked. I'm here to get a degree." So I don't care anything about conflict of personalities, people liking me. 'cause I'm certain that in the game of life, I've ran across people that I didn't like. But all I wanted was a degree in veterinary medicine. Less source

And then I enjoyed another place at a revival I went where the White people had called this Negro in because he could sing and pray to preach. And they turned the sermon over to him after a period of time, and he got up. So when he got up, he said that, "I'm taking my text tonight from the tenth chapter of Clover, and the sixth verse." And the people began to look at each other and he began to talk about Clover [a type of hay]. So finally, a little, small, red-looking White man got up and walked down the aisle and whispered to him. And told him that, "What do you mean? Do you mean Clover?" He said, "I never heard of Clover, do you mean Timothy?" "Oh," he said, "yes, Timothy." He said, "I knew it was one of those hays," he said, "but I just forgot it because you gave me too much of that mountain moonshine," and it was a fact.

This church where I went to, it was a pretty good church. You had everything in there. There was a lot of charisma. There was a lot of good preaching. And of course, the preachers had their particular sermons that they would like to bring the people down to their knees on.

Let me tell you about a peculiar thing. When, if you were Black and you died in Richmond, Virginia, the White people would call you and let you know there would be fifty or a hundred coming to the funeral. And they would set aside so many aisles for them. And when a White man would die, if you worked for him for years, it was in his will that he would want his colored help there and on the front seat with him. 'Cause my daddy went to the funeral of all of the three men I mentioned in the beginning. He and another man, they were right there with the family when he died. And vice versa when my daddy died, I was overseas, but they had five or six aisles there for the White people. So there was a genuine understanding, and you had cooperation among the Black churches and your White churches. And you did not have the hatred. And we didn't have the idea and the spirit that everyone owed you something. That the White churches down there owe me something, see, or the Black churches owed you something. We didn't have that. You were brought up with the idea that every man should have a roof over his head, that he can call his own, number one. And that you are responsible for every child you brought into the world. You owed that to the family of man when you bring him here. They didn't ask to come here, you brought him here. So, you must feed them, clothe them, and take care of them until they become mature. Less source

I used to work with her in the yard and help her rake the yard and stuff. And a plane would fly over, and she would talk about the plane. I mean, she'd never been on a plane, but she'd talk about it. And she'd be like, you know, you could be on of those... And then she'd go on to say, you know, you could be flying one. You could be the one who's flying that. I mean, and was just part of the ongoing conversation. So it wasn't like, I'm going to especially point this out to you and make a big deal out of it. It's just letting you know that, don't limit yourself. And don't limit your thinking. Don't limit your possibility.

She was a woman who was married three times. Her first husband died with appendicitis. Her second husband was killed in a logging accident. Her third husband was not aggressive enough and work hard enough, so she divorced him. So her total married life was, like, 20 years or so. But she was just a very independent woman.

She built a house in 1947, '46, '47, as a Black woman in central Kentucky. That was kind of unheard of. She had a new house built. Everybody did not have electricity back in those days in the rural areas. She was, like, the first person around to have electricity, the first person to have a TV. At her house on Sunday afternoon, it was like a movie theater, because nobody else had TV. And so everybody collected in my grandmother's house to watch TV.

I just remember her being in rural area and on a farm, and she rented out her farmland to someone else, but she bought the seed and the fertilizer and all of that stuff. And she would go to the bank to get a loan, which was sort of the normal thing that farmers would do, go get a loan in the spring and pay it back in the harvest time. But she always walked in with that expectation that she was going to get it. It wasn't like, I'm here to see if I can. It was, here's what I need, and here's when you're going to get paid back. And I went with her a few times, and it was like, wow, you know? They didn't ask her a lot of questions or anything. It was like, I mean, she did pay it back, didn't she? But it was just that air of expectation, I think, that made her be treated the way she was treated. Less source

The interaction, you know, was OK between, between the students. Some of us dated. Some, but I mean, everybody was friendly toward each other, but not, not really. There was never a Black activity, you know, I mean, something that we got together and said, OK, we, this is, we were Black and White people, Black students. I think we hadn't reached a critical mass yet. And I'm a little bit surprised. When I think back, I'm a little bit surprised. At that point, there was a lot going on in the country. I mean, it was tumultuous. There was, you know, I had mentioned the Selma march. There was also the Vietnam War escalated during that time. Martin Luther King was killed my senior year. Robert Kennedy was killed my senior year. Just a lot of stuff was happening in the country and all of the, the racial riots and what not, not all, but a lot of race riots were happening. So I'm, I'm a bit surprised that we didn't sort of organize to some degree, although I think we were also focused on making sure that, you know, that we got out, that we made it through, that we didn't fail our race, for lack of a better term, you know? Show, we wanted to show that we could be successful in this environment. I think that may have been a big part of it, but it, neither here nor there, we didn't do anything collectively as a, you know, a group of Black students.

We did some things like, for example, there was four of us at a concert where they played Dixie, and we wouldn't stand. We didn't stand, I mean, some of us. And nobody from the administration ever said anything, but there were a couple of students who came to me and said, stand for Dixie... They played Dixie at every football game and everything. And everybody stood back then. It was like normal stuff. And so, and you got things of that nature that, you know, what we did, but it wasn't, I mean, there was informal interactions. Less source

The public housing projects are an interesting and unique experience. Number one, there was hundreds and hundreds of children and that was kind of ideal. The downside of it is everybody was on top of each other like flies. You knew all of your neighbors. Privacy was at a premium because you couldn't get any, but it was kind of surreal, blues music playing every day, church music playing on Sunday, kids doing everything under the sun, partying, fun, fights, you name it.

• • •

My mother was a domestic worker. She was also a seamstress. She was a midwife, and she was cook. And my father was a maintenance man for the University of Michigan. And to augment his income, he dug graves. Both mother and father were penultimate fisher people and gardeners for survival. That's the short of it.

• • •

Most special days and family events were mostly around holidays. And the reason being, since we were so poor, the holidays were when we got to eat. That was pretty special. We'd save our money and have a feast. And my mother was the neighborly kind of person. So any child who didn't have anything to eat, she would feed them on holidays. And the only other special thing, my mother was a little bit of a tomboy. And especially, she would gather us and the neighborhood children and go to a park two miles away with our baseball equipment, play baseball. She could throw and pitch and catch just like any guy. Less source

I decided in my life that I was not going to follow my dream to be an electrical engineer but that I was going to fight. And then, when we got to high school, formed the Black Student Union. I was the vice president. We did a series of walk outs in the school. We protested against not having Black teachers, not having Black history read in the schools.

During that time, I was threatened. And the most shameful thing is there were some Black parents in the community that told us that we were too uppity and we should stop doing that. And since this is history, I'm not going to name names, but they know, a lot of them are gone. But that was hard to have your Black elders tell you to get in your place.

The final big event was the Vietnam War. That changed my life because, once again, I did my research, finding all of my friends, and figuring out from Time magazine... And some other research that all they were doing was sending young Black men in the front line. And I thought it was just wrong, just absolutely wrong. Seeing my friends come back, I said this is crazy.

And so, from then on, I decided I'm a conscientious objector. I spent four years of my life fighting the federal government because they were trying to send me to jail. And I had people who lied to me, told me to lie. They told me to, go to this church and go to this church and tell them you have strongly religious held beliefs and you can get out of the war. I said, so you want me to lie. You people of the cloth, I'm not lying... I don't believe in the war, and I think it's unjust until. The federal government was on my back for four years. It changed my life. And during that time, I became a Black Panther.

• • •

I'm a believer in self-defense, which is the reason why I was a Black Panther. I don't agree with violence against anyone. But Martin Luther King's nonviolence philosophy, when I saw those dogs, and my mother was still alive. I said H-no, ain't doing that. My mother had those deep Southern roots and said, and I guess she persuaded me, no, I'm not taking a beating, and I'm not going to have dogs beat me.

It started for me reading Malcolm X, and my consciousness was arisen. But then I saw these folks from Oakland, California, and I started reading about what they believed in. And I said, oh, these are my kind of folks. And besides, they look kind of sharp with their berets on and leather. I said, mm, I believe in what they're doing, and it's kind of sharp. But little did I know about what the real insiders were doing in the Black Panther Party, which is doing a lot of political research and a lot of reading. Other than in high school, which they forced me to read every great book in the world, Black Panther Party, I read more books in that time than most anybody I knew, about economics, about the African diaspora. I was just a library rat. Everything I could get my hands on, I read.

The Black Panther Party had an interesting technique. First of all, it was what I call the first Black man's book club because you were assigned books every week and you had to read them and you had to come to discuss them every week. And this was outside of the classroom, and they were hard books. I mean, they were books about economics and the whole nine yards. So that really attracted me. And going back to Black Lives Matter, when you see people who stand up to the police, not fighting them, but says we're here, and let me give you an example of that, how it happened in this community. Wiley Brownless, who later was the principal at Community High, the White folks in the Ypsilanti township, they tarred and feathered him because they said he was trying to integrate schools, big incident. My Panther brothers and I drove down there in Ypsilanti township with our cars and said we are protecting his family. And if any of you all want to come up here and do something, we got something for you. Those are the kinds of things that excited me, and we were not afraid to go to the police and say, sure enough, we are armed. We're not going to hurt anybody, but you're not going to hurt us. Less source

I felt very fortunate to be sent to Europe. I got to know Paris and Stockholm and Copenhagen. I visited all those places and met different people, and to me it was a revelation and eye-opening to meet people of other cultures, and realize that even though the people were Caucasian or White, if you want to give it a color, they were very different than the Whites that I had a great fear of in the South, that I grew up with.

It had its little nuances of segregation and even in France, which is a different environment, you had the Blacks hanging together because, I don't know, our cultural similarities, or whatever. And you got along with the Whites, but again, when it comes to stuff like economics, when it comes to promotions, you were looked over or screwed over and so you just let it go by, and enjoy yourself, you know? And learn what you wanted to learn, and survive. To a great extent, be happy without having to look over your shoulder all the time.

So that was a revelation and a learning experience, and to immerse myself and learn about their cultures, learn how to drink wine and go to art museums and be taught stuff, and you know, that was a good part of maturity, maturing, to me. Less source

So when I got my discharge, I decided to take it here in northern California, and hang out in Oakland. And not really having any focus as to what I really wanted to do, I looked for a job and at that time they were very hard to come by, pretty much as they are today. I had a resource and educational benefits from the air force, so I decided to enter into City College in Oakland, and draw on my GI Bill. Use that to sustain me until I found some type of employment and all that. And in the meantime, well, I began to study Black history, and I didn't have any real academic ambitions, but I always thought that I wanted to be able to write, and express myself clearly, so I took some courses in writing in school to try to develop writing skills. Nothing professional, just my own, when I wanted to convey something, to be able to do it.

Enrolling in Merritt College, I began to associate with other students who had similar interests, and that’s where I met Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. We used to, after our classes, we’d have rap sessions and talk about these things, and talk about ways of dealing with them, because we had repression going on in Oakland. Police repression. People getting killed by cops every week, and we would kick around ways of dealing with that. Try to figure out a different way of approaching it as opposed to the civil rights and the non-violence, and all that sort of stuff, because we knew what that was about, but we were trying to develop a new approach. Something progressive and revolutionary, if you will. Bobby Seale said, “I want you to meet Huey, and we’re thinking of starting a new organization,” and they started to develop the Ten Point Platform and Program, which was the mandate, or if you will, that would differentiate us from other organizations, because they had other organizations that dealt with culture, Swahili camps, learning the language, and stuff like that. We were more interested in trying to deal with combatting the ills in the community, on a progressive and a revolutionary level. Less source

Marvin McGraw?

Marvin McGraw's quite a character. Hmm. Marvin. What can I say about him? Marvin was a [laughs] firebrand. What do I want to say about that? I'm kind of at a loss to describe Marvin McGraw. He was, I mean, a good dedicated soldier in the cause. Strong leadership ability. Marvin and I had our moments sometimes. I think sometimes Marvin didn't want to deal with women. That's what I'm trying not to say. [Laughter] He saw the leadership role as one for men.

That's interesting since women play such an important role in the movement.

Exactly. And he has definitely changed over time, and my perception may be wrong. But that was definitely the perception I had at the time.

Harrison Snell?

Harrison Snell was a little quiet, thoughtful, intelligent. What can I say about Harrison? That's a difficult question. Those are my comments on Harrison.

Richard Roper?

Dynamic, motivating, challenging, always trying to create a role for someone to play so that they feel as though they are part of the game plan. I would have to describe Richard as like the dean of the delegation sometimes.

Anything about his [George Hampton] role?

George Hampton. A barrel of laughs - we all need someone who helps us keep our sanity in a time of very serious deliberations. Strong leadership ability. Always willing to make a situation work. I think the nicest thing I can say about him - there are many nice things I can say about him - the fact that he can always bring laughter to a very serious kind of situation. You know, Look, it's just one more thing to do. That's kind of George's attitude.

Douglas Morgan?

Douglas Morgan. Always very serious-minded. Good negotiating skills. A good friend. That's not really the question that you're asking, but... What else can I say about Doug? Just a strong individual, you know. As with all groups and all organization, you have some people who are "the charismatic people" and you have others that while not charismatic are really the people, who along with the charismatic people, are doing the real work. Doug is definitely one of those people.

Peter Jackson?

Peter Jackson. Another dynamic individual. Strong presence. When he speaks people stop and listen.

Anything else that you recollect?

Sue Perry and Ivy Davis. Both students who were involved in the negotiations and in the drafting of the demands from its inception, from their inception. Again, hard workers. Put in a lot of long, long hours. Less source

What program then were you and your fellow students looking for? What didn't CORE and the NAACP and the SCLC... What weren't these organizations offering?

Well, they weren't offering any immediacy. If I can probably put it in a nutshell, there was no immediacy to any political action agendas of SCLC, even to a lesser extent CORE, the NAACP. Because this is a time when we were beginning to listen to Malcolm X. The SNCC leadership folk were very visible and theoretically principled in line with what we were thinking. And there were at least half of the students at Rutgers who were very satisfied with the status quo, who didn't raise legitimately the NAACP. And that difference in agenda preferences led us all the way through the student movement. It never left. There were conciliations, there were coalitions, there were alliances, there were compromises. But I would say that there was no one mind, if you will, of the Black students at Rutgers in 1967. There were some students from Newark, in particular, who felt just grateful to be at Rutgers. They felt that this was an achievement. And there were those of us who perceived that it was not such an honor to be in the middle of Newark after the riots in a sea of Whiteness without any ability of the community that surrounded it, to influence it, to pierce those White walls.

In fact, those buildings, as we perceived them physically, were structured to be anti-riot buildings. That perception panned out to some degree because when the Conklin takeover took place approximately two years after I got there, we discovered underground tunnels. There was a connectedness that really went to security within the university's existing facilities and those that it had planned. Some of us were astute enough to consider that. But Rutgers in Newark was in the heart of the Black community. And the Black community had no presence. Less source

C: No, ma'am. No. Not me. Elsie. I didn't. I never did anything like that. I did mostly domestic work. Elsie worked at Day's. I didn't work at Day's. I didn't like it. I wouldn't work up there anyway. I don't like that kind of people.

H: Do you remember when the 5 & 10 was on the corner of Bank Street?

C: Bank Street?

H: Yeah. Woolworths.

C: No. Where was it before?

H: When I was small, I know-we lived on Bank Street, and my mother used to send me up there.

C: After you moved from Morris Street?

H: No, we lived on Bank Street when I was little. She used to send me to the 5 & 10 there on the corner.

C: We didn't come to town too much. When we came up, we had to come up to go to the school. We came right across, through the park and down Market Street and we weren't allowed to do nothing. And all those stores around there we never went into them, never bothered.

H: Well, as I can remember, most of the stores at that time were pretty expensive stores, weren't they?

C: I remember a French Millinery, yes. That was on Speedwell Avenue.

H: A lot of rich people lived in Morristown way back then.

C: Oh, down Madison Avenue was nothing but millionaires.

H: And we couldn't hardly shop in Morristown because the stores were too exclusive.

C: You better believe it. They didn't allow you in them. We didn't go in those stores. We didn't hardly know much about them.

H: What do you remember about the Depression?

C: What Depression? We've always been depressed. So what? We didn't have one. (laughter)

H: You know back in '29. What do you remember about that?

C: Well, all I know, Depression. I don't know anything different. What am I supposed to remember, Helen?

H: Well, you know, it was such lean times.

C: Well, for colored folks around, it's always been lean. It's gotten fatter now because we demand it. Well, I ain't never seen no different. I have never yet. You can laugh, but I'm wondering what they're talking about this Depression. It was always hard. (Laughter) Lean times. Less source

C: You'd go up there at the top of the hill and they talked to you. We never came down Spring Street or Water Street. We'd go directly to the corner and Mama could sit on the porch and watch us and we'd go up to Dietz.

H: That was a department store?

C: No. That was a vegetable store.

H: Oh, vegetable store. Yes. And where did Mama get meat?

C: Well, I don't know. Maybe she had meat in there. I know she had vegetables, potatoes and apples and things like that. Across the street was Malloy's, was a colored man had, now that's on Speedwell facing Spring Street. I want to get you the right place. You know where that liquor store is on the corner there, on Morris Street. Pauline Peterson lived up in there, then right there was, Mr. Malloy had a small place. A little bit of store, you could accommodate about three people in there in that store. And we got groceries from him. Of course, he was colored. And then the Dietz place. I don't know where, whether she got meat.

H: I don't remember the Dietz.

C: Well, I don't know why you didn't. Maybe you'd gone.

H: There used to be a butcher called Boniface a long time ago.

C: Oh, Boniface was no butcher, he was a fish man.

H: Oh, he didn't have meat, too? Fish?

C: He lived down on Market Street. Fish. Near the fire house. Papa used to go get fish there for Saturday and Friday. We always had fresh fish.

H: Do you remember any of the prominent individuals in Morristown at that time?

C: Do you, Helen? For crying out loud, they just commenced to know they're prominent now.

H: There was a couple of Black doctors a long time ago.

C: Dr. Williams was the first one. He was beautiful. He was one. And we had colored dentists. And we had Dr. Scott.

H: Well I remember Dr. Scott and Dr. Graddick. But, I mean before that.

C: Dr. Williams.

H: See, I don't remember, heard my mother talk about Dr. Williams.

C: Yeah. Big, heavy-set man.

H: And do you remember Dr. Stanfield?

C: Oh, sure, they lived down on Water Street.

H: Oh, they did?

C: Stanfields? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Stanfield. We never had him. I guess we weren't the sick type. We didn't have to have much of that. Never had him. And there was a Black dentist. Dr., I just told you. I forgot his name. Who was the Black dentist?

H: Did you mention a Dr. Thompson? Was he the dentist?

C: Dr. Thompson, yes. That's him. They were all very nice-looking people. All our doctors were.

H: What were your favorite foods?

C: What were my favorite foods? I think that's a simple thing for poor people. I don't blame you for asking. You ate what you got. What did you eat? What you got, what your mother put down. Favorite? All of them were favorites but you didn't get 'em. You couldn't afford it. (laughter) I think this is ridiculous. Favorite food? Chocolate cake. And ice cream. We always loved custards. Sure, a lot of things were favorites. But we never got inclined to be longing for anything because we always got a little of it. See, my father and mother cooked. And so we always got a little bit of everything. I got a little taste of everything they, I don't think there's anything much I haven't eaten. I really mean it. Venison and all. Maybe only bear. I tried to cook some bear meat and the more I cooked it, the Blacker it got. Somebody killed a bear and gave my brother a piece, and my brother gave me a big piece. He gave me a piece like that. I'm telling you, the more I cooked it the smaller it got and blacker it got and the blacker it got and the smaller it got. It set my oven on fire. I said it must have been a black bear anyway, so I threw it out. The dog wouldn't eat it even. I have eaten venison. Oh, I love it. That's very good. Very good.

C: I know if it wasn't for that interview Helen would have never been here.

H: You don't know that.

C: All these many years? Get out of my face. I'm always so glad to see you because I've been knowing you so long. Less source

And then the bus driver said, "He died." And I didn't know who they were talking about. But I just knew they were adults on the bus who were crying, and so finally I turned and said, "Well who they talking about?" And they said, "Martin Luther King." And I just, oh my goodness. [takes deep breath]

I remember going to school the next day, because if I'm not mistaken he got killed on a Thursday, might have been a Thursday, went to school the next day and by second period all hell was breaking loose in my high school. The few White kids who were there were being attacked. And, I know one kid got knocked down the stairs. So the administration decided that we gotta get these kids outta here. And most of the White kids, the Jewish kids, they would take a bus to where, they all pretty much lived in the same area. I just remember seeing them trying to get on the bus and there were kids throwing bottles and bricks, whatever they could find, at the bus. And so once they got the White kids out of the building, at least most of them, then they let school out.

Then a couple months after that Robert Kennedy was assassinated, I remember, because I've always been pretty independent, I was seventeen at the time. I got up that morning and I told my mother, I said, "I'm getting ready to go in the City." And so she said, "Okay." She thought I was going shopping. I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral and stood in line for three hours so that I could walk past Robert Kennedy's casket. Less source

And my father had arranged through his connections with the mob, that owned the Cotton Club, to get an apartment right next door to the Cotton Club. The Cotton Club was 642 Lenox and we lived in 646. So I could hear Cab Calloway shouting "Hi-de, hi-de-ho" in my bedroom. So if you want to talk about what was the family life like, it was continuous excitement.

For chorus girls it was also a color standard. What my sister laughingly used to refer to as paperbag brown. And once in a while, they would have a girl who was darker than that in the chorus line if she was an exceptional dancer, like Billie Yarborough or Lucille Wilson, who later married Louis Armstrong. But most of the Cotton Club girls were light colored. I think perhaps, well, that was a reflection of the racism at that time. I was amazed in looking at the 1920 census to see that three populations were listed in the census: White, mulatto, and Black. So that being mulatto in those days was considered an advantage, rather than Black.

And it was this sort of color prejudice that explained the color of the chorus girls. They tried to get them all to be about the same color. But they couldn't be Black or very dark, with exceptions. Brilliant dancer or do comedy, tagging the line as it's called. That didn't apply to the principals so that Bojangles who was dark brown was acceptable and Louis Armstrong. They didn't draw the color line on the males. But the emphasis was on light colored. I've come to think that it probably represented on the subconscious level the implication that here, you were witnessing products of previously existing interracial sex relations. So that added a kind of subconscious atmosphere to the sensuosity that was the stock and trade of Cotton Club shows. And the White folks used to come from all over the world to see this display of Black sensuality, as well as the great talent in tap dancing and the music itself. But that was the big appeal: the exotic quality of the show. There was always a jungle number in the show, you know. And of course, the White tourist who came up to Harlem would get that frisson from being so close to primitive nature (chuckles) in its rawest.

Your sister would dance every night?

There was a show, two shows a night, every night of the week, except Sunday. On Sunday nights, they would have a guest show comprised of top stars from Hollywood, Broadway, White stars, who would be guests of the Cotton Club and they would get up and do a turn. It was probably the only place where you had both White artists and Black artists performing on the stage, same stage, at different times, of course. Blacks were not permitted to be audience. So it was Black entertainers, White audience, until the March 19th riot in Harlem in 1935 when there was just an explosion of anger against the unemployment and the high prices and the high rents. People were in a squeeze and they just exploded.

So there was an incident to set it off?

It was reported, the rumor was that the police had killed a twelve-year-old boy for shoplifting in Woolworth's. And it hadn't happened, but that rumor went all through Harlem, and by four o'clock that afternoon, crowds of people were just roaming the streets. And by early evening, it had started to get violent and people were throwing bricks through windows and just looting the stores left and right.

And where were you?

Well I was at the Cotton Club the night of the riot and the show went on. The Duesenbergs and Cadillacs were pulling up. But after the show, we went out in the street and went down to 125th Street. Some of the rioting was still going on. You could hear police shooting at people on 8th Avenue under the elevated train. And there were still mobs roaming. The police were at bay. They couldn't control it. And it didn't die down until, oh, I would say, the next morning.

I don't know of any killings. There was some shooting. People wounded. A lot of arrests. But the city was not prepared for this. And the police were just caught off balance. At that time, there were maybe one or two Black cops. Most police were White so it was like colonial troops in a colony situation where they were totally overwhelmed.

Mayor LaGuardia issued a statement which was utterly wrong, that it was directed against Whites and it would be dangerous for Whites to go to Harlem. It was not a race riot as some of the press tried to make it. It was an economic riot. And White tourism dropped off 75 percent in Harlem, after that. And that, of course, undermined the Cotton Club trade which was mostly White. They tried to do a couple of shows in late 1935, '36, but by June '36, the management decided to move the Cotton Club downtown. And at the same time, ironically, that they moved downtown, they ended the segregation policy. So the Cotton Club downtown was integrated, as far as audience was concerned. That was one of the positives. Less source

A couple of my friends said, "Join the party." They had started talking to me. Asked me to come to meetings. And I respected them as thinkers. They were analytical and critical of the society... These guys were thinking about capitalism, socialism, trade unions, that sort of thing. And I had already done a lot of reading as early as my high school days about socialism. I was very much influenced by Jack London's book, Martin Eden. My great-uncle, who was the founder of the Amsterdam News, had some socialists on his paper: Harry Haywood and Cyril Briggs, who formed the African Brotherhood.

A part of me that had sort of lain fallow during the show business days emerged. And I sort of got back to my kind of serious, intellectual outlook which I would characterize myself as having been when I entered high school. I was a thinker, president of the NAACP in Orange, New Jersey, junior NAACP, in 1930 before I came to New York. So when I saw the Communists in action in Harlem, it seemed to me that they were the only organization that meant business and accompanied their words with action. They were organizing the picket lines. They were organizing the demonstrations, fighting the police, putting people back in the houses after they were evicted for nonpayment of rent. And I liked that because I did not believe that the system was going to change itself. And once I joined the Communist party with the name recognition that I had as a performer, knowing everybody in show business and in Harlem, the Communist party saw me as a potential leader and they grabbed me up, sent me to a leadership training school, and I became a full-time functionary after I was in the Communist party six months.

I remained a Communist from 1938 until 1956. My party organizational experiences were only interrupted by my service in World War II in the 92nd Division. But even then, I was actively trying to organize the Black enlisted men in the 92nd to struggle against Jim Crow and segregation both at Fort Huachuca [Arizona] as well as when I got to Italy. And as a result of my organizing efforts, it was just before, well, White officers were being fragged [killed or wounded by a member of their own unit] in the 92nd because they had generated so much hostility among the enlisted men before we went overseas. When we got overseas, where we were dealing with live ammo, a lot of White officers got popped by our side. And they had a shortage of officers, and Mark Clark, Fifth Army commander, decided that they needed some Black officers. So they sent out a ruling that any enlisted man, any Black enlisted man with an IQ over 105, could apply for Officer's Candidate School. I applied. Two weeks before I was to go to OCS, I was promoted to sergeant and assigned to leadership of a liaison section which I knew nothing about. I had been a scout corporal. My business was reconnaissance and scouting. And I was promoted to sergeant over the head of a corporal in that section and other trained men in that section who knew the job and they were instructed to teach me. So I was in a completely untenable position, because I had their anger. Less source

The prior captain was Elvie Whitlock from Texas. He was scared to go up front. So I used to go up and do his missions. So I would come back. They'd [the Black enlisted men] call me Captain Johnson. That was a Black way of getting back at his Texan White racism. He was removed and Jack Hayes was brought in. Jack Hayes gave me the promotion and sent me behind the lines on what was essentially a suicide mission with the 442nd outfit.

Behind the German lines?

Behind the German lines.

You spent how much time actually in the service?

Two and a half years. I went in September '43, got wounded April 5, 1945, and was hospitalized and finally released as rehabilitated January 1946.

And while you were in, did you have anybody you could share the Communist ideology with?

I was an open Communist. They knew I was a Communist. There was a lot of respect for the Russians, Soviet Union. So that my being a Communist did not operate against me among the men. I had their respect.

I very much believed that Black people in the United States were a nation, were an oppressed nation. In fact, in later research, I checked out editorials written by my great-uncle in the Amsterdam News. And they were talking about the Negro nation back in 1915 before there was ever a Communist party. So that the idea that national consciousness was Communist-inspired is a complete misreading of history. Blacks knew that they were a nation long before there were Communists and didn't need the Communists to come and tell them so. However, what I liked about the Communists was that they elaborated that position into a whole theoretical structure and related it to imperialism on a world scale, so that I saw Black nationhood in the context of it being a part of the entire world system and that, therefore, there was an identification between Blacks in the United States, Blacks in South America, browns in South America, Chinese in China, and I saw it as a worldwide system so it strengthened my appreciation and understanding of the African colonial situation prior to World War II.

When the United Nations was formed in 1947 and you had one colony after another liberating itself or being liberated as a result of World War II, my fondest dreams were realized and I thought that shortly after World War II, just as Kenya and Ghana and these countries achieved liberation, that we Blacks in the United States would achieve an equivalent liberation as Black people in what had been a White racist society. And I thought that by 1950 or 1955, that we'd have a completely integrated United States. Little did I realize (chuckles) that the Cold War would reverse all of that forward movement. Less source

What was life for Negroes in Detroit about 1910? What were the conditions of living?

Well, the conditions at that time were, there was not the police brutality of the present time. Your rights were broader if you wanted to take advantage of it. What I mean is, there was no discrimination in hotels, and so on. But for jobs, just labor work and porter work was the most work you could find.

Were there any labor activities - any trade unions that interested Negroes, or that Negroes joined?

No, there weren't any trade unions at the time. If you were known as a unionist you were kicked out. Negroes didn't get into the unions until the CIO started organizing. I got into the IWW - the Industrial Workers of the World in Detroit.

How large was the Wobbly organization around Detroit in 1910?

Just a few, two or three hundred. And out of these, just a few Negroes, maybe 10 or 15, working on the docks, loading and unloading ships.

How did you become interested in the Wobblies, and radical ideas in the beginning?

Well, I went out West, and my method of traveling was on freight trains, and there you would meet them. I was hoboing. And I soon learned that if I got with some of them I would be protected. That is, if they showed a red card, the brakeman would say, Go ahead. So I wanted to get one myself. So I wanted some way that I could travel, and the method of traveling was hoboing. And you traveled some place and went to work on a section gang. But if you didn't have that red card, you didn't work there.

The red card was the IWW card. Did you ever participate in any strikes of the Wobblies while you were traveling?

Well, I always stayed shy of strikes because I didn't want to break up a strike, and I didn't want to get beat up. Because at that time the corporations used to go South and bring a lot of people in to break a strike. Especially Negroes. That's what they used Negroes for. Less source

There was no union. There were mainly Negroes in the foundry. There were Whites in the foundry. They were molders. Molding, big castings they were making, pit castings in the ground, you would have to dig down there in the ground and make the mold in the ground. Oh, I worked on the boats, on the docks, and foundry work, and railroad work.

My next job was at Ford. The first time I went to work at Ford was in the Highland Park Plant, in the foundry, the same year they went to $5.00.

When did union activity begin?

I don't remember. I was told it was in 1928. It didn't belong to the AFL. The Autoworkers Union.

You say there was no attempt to organize Ford. But what about the other plants, like Hudson, or Briggs, or Murray?

There was no organization there, but we attempted to organize. We attempted to organize at Briggs, and Chalmers.

Were you successful?

Well, to some extent, but they were able to break them up. I went up to the lake and stayed there a couple of months, and tried to organize there. Muskegon, it was a tight place.

You organized for the Autoworkers Union? You were the only Negro organizer?

Yes. We wasn't paid a salary, just expenses.

Were Negro workers responsive more than the White workers?

No. Well, it was because they were right off the farm, they didn't know. They probably had heard about it. But they didn't know. They were just farmers.

So they would not know very much about trade unions? Well, how far did the Autoworkers Union get? Did it get very far?

Well, there were times that they would, and times that they would go down. I remember one time we had Murray Body organized, and was going to have a strike the next day, and we had Ferry Hall. And it would hold, it would seat about 4 or 500 people, it was jammed. And they got wind we were going to have a strike the next day. And they backed a patrol wagon up there the next day, and they took out 90 patrol-loads, by the count. But where I missed it, I got up on the stage and went up among the drops. And I hung onto the ropes and stayed there until they got the load out. Less source

And that's when he got discharged, that's when he didn't want to go back South. And my mother came up here to work. She came up here, they lived in-- what turned out to be Long Island, Queens.

Oh, my mother, the first job, the first job I remember her telling me about, it was a beading factory. That was a trade she took in school in Wilmington, North Carolina; you made beading on clothing and mostly on bags. And she got a job way downtown.

I remember I used to hear them talking about it all the time. It wasn't enough money; my mother said her hands were always sore. And then from then on she did domestic work.

When you think back on it, it wasn't that they didn't have education, they did, that's all they could get. Because later on in years when my father went to the post office, he was in the post office you know until he retired, some of your brainiest men worked in the post office. My brother-in-law, who was a lawyer, studying to be a lawyer, went to Hunt College - post office was loaded with brilliant men, but they couldn't get any other jobs. Less source

In the meantime, we had to get an education the best way we could. And now I feel personally that I'm not an educated person, that I'm a semi-educated person. And that's because I never had the advantages, I never had a library during the whole time I went to school in the South. I couldn't go to a public library even though as I just stated my parents had their own farm. Because it was our own farm and our own land, we had to pay taxes. So, they owed because they took the money for the taxes. It had to be paid. But we were not given an equal, adequate education. We weren't given adequate educational advantages; we didn't even have access to a typewriter, to learn to type. So there were many things we did not get.

I ended up in North Adams, Massachusetts. A place where I saw maybe five African Americans while I was there and I lived there for a month. But I knew I couldn't stay there; I wasn't comfortable there. But I had seen the New York Times, and I had seen the want ads in the New York Times. So I went to the want ads in the New York Times, called people there, and actually was employed over the phone. I came; I was told exactly how to come to New York. I was told to take the White Plains train to Grand Central Station. Less source

In any case, they — my father and my mother — met because my father had been a wonderful baseball player and then he had gotten an offer to go to Cuba and come back and say he was a Cuban, so that he could play baseball. He was also offered a four-year scholarship to Syracuse University. Well, the story that always went around our family was, he said, "No, if you can't take me as an American Negro, then forget it." And of course we were very proud of that. But, you know, my mother died just this past year, about a year ago, and shortly before she did die, I was relating this story to my own grandchild. And she said, "You know that's not the real story." (laughs). I said, Well, what's the real story? She said, "Well, you didn't know your grandmother, but she was a very rigid woman. And she ran that family like no one else ever could. Her children had to listen to her. And she said to your father, ‘Go play baseball when you can get a college education? No. Never, never, never.' And so he went off to get it." Now unfortunately, in the town of Binghamton [New York] Blacks, or Negroes as they were called at the time, had very limited access to the types of jobs that could support a family. And my father, even though he had a college education, he was not able to get a job commensurate with that education. He majored, I understand he was a civil engineer. That was his field. So when he got out of college, his brother, who had never even finished high school, got him a job driving a truck. And my father essentially was a truck driver for the rest of his life.

My father was going to Syracuse University, a lot of things were segregated up there, and there were very few places where my father could go on the weekends, so he used to tell us stories about hanging out with his cousins on the Mohawk reservation and playing lacrosse to quote "keep in shape." Although how much out of shape he was going to get — he was just playing on the weekend, I don't know. But in any case, I had told you the story about how his mother had interfered and made him go to college and not to go off and play baseball. But what was interesting, I thought, about that story as it kind of came down, was that even though we believed this kind of great picture of our father standing up to racism and doing that, in my heart, after my mother told me this story, I really believed that that's exactly what happened, and that it was (laughs) his mother, because my father was a 17-year-old guy, a very good baseball player. He used to change his religion every week or every season to play on the different baseball teams around Binghamton, New York.

In any case, like I said, he ended up as a truck driver, and that's how he came to meet my mother. My mother's family had emigrated from Russia. And it was part of the days where there were programs and things like that going on there. And my grandfather was a radical. Oh, I don't know if he was a Bolshevik or a Menshevik, but he was in some kind of, you know, radical, we-need-to-get-rid-of-the-Czar movement, type of thing. And he used to work in a print shop, and he got arrested because he was stealing paper from the print shop for this underground newspaper. So I thought — in my later years when I sort of really began to be a journalist, I thought, Oh, well, there is that seed in my background. And as a matter of fact, he had to get out of Russia because the Czar's police were looking for him and coming after him. So he and my grandmother left and went to Denmark, because at that time — which was in what, like, 1904, something like that — and that was the time when Denmark sort of had its arms open for, you know, Jewish immigrants to come there. And it was from there — my mother had an older brother and a sister who were born in Denmark.

And then my grandmother had a brother, or a sister, who lived in Binghamton. And so they were able to come over because of that relationship. But my grandmother — her name is Sarah Berman, and my grandfather's name was Isaac Berman — was pregnant with my mother on the boat. And then my mother was born in New Haven, so she was the first child born in the United States, the first one who had automatic citizenship.

Interesting story I heard is that my grandfather was working then for Sarah's brother in some kind of a shop that he had. And at a certain point, maybe it was a year later, Isaac just said to him, "I'm not working for you any more, because I've worked enough to more than pay for the passage, and you're exploiting me." And therefore he sort of rounded up his wife, rounded up his children, and then moved out and went to get himself a job where he didn't have to.

So you were getting ready to tell us how your mother and father met.

Right. So my grandfather became an egg man. He bought a little cart and he went around, and he would be selling eggs and all the kids would, like, help with the chickens and things like that. So then from the eggs he went into buying another truck, and another truck. So he ended up going into a trucking business.

• • •

My parents met, actually, because my mother was working in the office of Berman's Motor Express. My father was working for Canny's... And they actually did a lot of shipping between Binghamton and New York City, whereas Berman's used to be between Boston and Binghamton, or the triple cities, Binghamton, Endicott, and Johnson City, three cities that abutted one up against the other. And one day Ernie came into the office and started making a pass at Charlotte... It was just about time for her to go home, so she left the office, she was on her way to the bus, and here comes this guy whistling out the window, "Hey, babe," you know (laughs). Less source

Both my parents would teach us. My mother, there were three of us, of which I was the youngest. My mother or my father virtually every evening before I went to bed would read poetry, excerpts from history, and events to my sisters. I would be sitting on my mother's lap. Often times, in reading poetry, she would quote to them saying that this is a piece by Langston Hughes, which was published in The Crisis Magazine. Of course, I wanted to know what The Crisis was after having heard her say that so often. She said, "You'll see it. It's here on the desk," That's how I learned about The Crisis.

How'd you come to sell subscriptions?

Well, I noticed they had in some ad in the paper indicating that subscriptions were available. I said one day, "Can I write to Roy Wilkins," who was the editor of The Crisis, "and ask him if I can sell The Crisis?" After all, if you're going to have a chapter of the NAACP, then - my language wasn't as it is today, as you can appreciate - they said, "By all means, but you must write the letter yourself." I said I'll do that, so I did.

I heard - I don't know if it was from him - saying we will be glad to have you sell The Crisis Magazine. In any event, it was typed, but it had his signature on it and under his name it said editor. I was so proud to get that letter from the editor of The Crisis. I was beside myself. Less source

Her husband, who was a private steward on a railroad car, did not believe that that was, what she was supposed to do. He thought that she was supposed to take care of the children - they had three children - and keep the house clean, and cook meals, and just generally be a good person in charge of making everything in the home go.

She wasn't an indifferent mother, I think they all three were loved. But she definitely was not interested in housekeeping. That was just something that she didn't like to do and didn't want to do and I think probably didn't do very well.

But she wrote poetry and she wrote stories. And she conspired to take money out of her household allowance to get her stories published, you know, self-published, and then she would go door to door and sell them. So she had a lot of chutzpah... I never heard any stories of anybody encouraging her, her having a support group of any sort. She was just by herself with this idea that she wanted to write... She must have gotten some reinforcement at church because they would allow her to read poems at church.

I didn't ever hear of any support for it. And she had to hide her stuff, because her husband didn't approve of it. she hid it under the chair in the living room. I think that must have made a strong impression on my mother, because she saw her pushing toward her own goals. And probably suffering some consequences for it.

I think my mother was very similar in her attitude and sense of herself. She wrote, she didn't write poetry or stories, but she, she wrote. I have a vision of her at her desk just always writing. She wrote beautiful letters. She wrote letters to the editor. She participated in the League of Women Voters. She had an empathy for the poor, which was unusual in, among middle-class, upwardly-mobile Black families in Washington at this time. She was interested in what was happening to young girls who were pregnant. She was interested in, she wanted to be of service to them. And she always believed in the superiority of women... Somebody named Morgenthal, I don't know who that was, but she was always quoting to us that women were the superior sex. And I think there was a lot of tension between her and my father on that issue, because he didn't support that view of women. He thought that men were the leaders, the natural leaders, and women had a role at home, very much like her father felt. And she had gone to school. She had gotten a job teaching at Spelman College. She had certain talents. So for her to come out of sort of the peak of her young achievement into just being a straight homemaker, where she had really very little interest in homemaking, and he really wanted her to be a homemaker and a good homemaker, I think it was very hard for her. So, I think having, then, three daughters, she had an audience, and she had all the control, because after his death, we were, ten, nine, and six. So she was the one imparting the philosophy. Less source

Peace Corps go to the national NAACP, asked them if they would ask the branches, you know, to stimulate interest. So they picked on me. So I talk around and talk to kids, they just laughed at me. What Miss. Young? Go there free? This government wants us to go there free? I said, yes, yes, that'd be a marvelous experience, oh, and I'd talk and talk – so I just I talked myself into it. So I went. I didn't get one, not one volunteer.

I had applied, my applications were made for Africa, just any part – any part of Africa, I would love to go into. But they are so long and of course with the Peace Corps, it's the country that invites you, let's the Peace Corps know what kind of work they want and how many, what fields and so forth. So it looked like nobody wanted a librarian in Africa or didn't want me, I don't know which it was. So I got a little irritated, I said, here I'm offering my service and nobody wants me. So finally Peace Corps from Washington wrote and asked me if I want to go to Jamaica? I said, no, that's too close, but I'll go. So we had two months of training, nice group of 48 of us too, from all over the country, even a little girl from Hawaii. We had plumbers, carpenters, masons, nurses, everything you can think of and four librarians. Now, they had – they knew library science in Jamaica but they just wanted enough of them. And their pay was so small, they couldn't, you know, entice enough people to take it up. So they had about 80,000 books that were un-catalogued, that was our job, that's why they needed so many of us, four of us. But I liked it very much. People were lovely. It was awfully hot at first. I didn't think I could take it. But two or three weeks, I got a accustomed to it.

• • •

I've been to Europe two or three times. I've been to Egypt; I did get to that much of Africa. I found people lovely. I was there; I haven't given any of my personal dates. So will – you can judge from this. I was there in 1936 in Berlin when Jesse Owens came over. And I – that's where I met him. I was going over there; There were three of us. I went over with two principles; they had money because when I came back I owed them more money than anything. I was, you know, just teaching. But they weren't interested in going out to the Olympics, to the Olympic village. So I went on out, I liked that. I could talk to people over on the train. And they talked and so many of them knew English, you know.

You're talking about the Germans?

The Germans.

Who knew English, and you could travel freely in Germany without things segregated?

Oh, yes, Hitler was on his good behavior... I went out there asked them about where is – I saw a colored fellow - where is Jessie? So of course I didn't even mean to hurt his feelings because he's an athlete too, right over here, so we all got together. Then a crowd came around... I had seen Jesse just a day before from our hotel. When he arrived, they took him in an open car and the crowd was just following and yelling, "Jesse. Jesse". Less source

When I got big enough to go to work, Lester took me into St. Georges to the creamery one morning and a man named Stuart Reynolds asked him was I any good. He says, "I don't know, you can take the boy and try him." And I went out there and stayed with him three years. Then I come back to St. Georges and went with his brother-in-law, Mr. Albert Gray. And I stayed with Mr. Albert Gray, oh about 15 years 'til all his children were grown. And then he moved to McDonough and I come down to McDonough and farmed there for a man named McCurdy on a little farm there for two or three years.

Then I got to going with my wife in 1910 and I went back to St. Georges, 1910 I got married on the 26th of September, that's right, 26th of September, and I went back to St. Georges and stayed until March. Then I come to Middletown and worked for a man named Fred Beatty and stayed with him until practically all his family was grown. And then I went to Wilmington and worked at the Police Department about seven years. Then I come back, then I heard of a school and stayed out there about 15 years. Hell, when I was 80 years of age I was going from boiler room to the third floor until I retired. I retired in, I just don't know what year it was. But practically all my life I ain't been out of a day's work if I wanted to. So I've walked from St. Georges to Delaware City lots of times and go up and set around in the old fort and go over on the Delaware River, and boys and girls and backwards and forwards.

• • •

When I come along we didn't have any way of gettin' around. Of course the first thing to have was a dog cart and a horse. And when it got the coming of the cars, why of course a few of them got cars here... then there were more. But I remember the first car ever come through. A man name of, he worked for, Davison, worked for DuPonts. I remember the first car come through one Sunday morning with, he come through town with many of the people starting out going to church. They couldn't get nobody in church until the car went through town. That was the first car I ever saw. It was one of them old rubber tire cars, like a bookend.

• • •

In the wintertime they used to do a lot of fox hunting. I'd see 'em fox hunting. they'd get a fox and turn him loose and let him run for a long then come down to the canal and he'd swim overboard and some of them would grab up a hound and throw one of them over, it used to be quite a sport. Then in that locks I saw one time bring a whale, took two barges to bring him through there. He was big enough to have a little dining room in his mouth. We used to go down there and look at that old big whale.

Did they stuff the whale?

Oh, yes, they had the furniture, they furnished his mouth with furniture same as a house. Yes indeedy. People come from everywhere to see that whale. It took two barges to hold him and there was quite an excitement.

Then in the wintertime, the big sport was, people from Chesapeake City, Summit Bridge, St. Georges and Delaware City, on that ice pond there they had taken, drive a great big pole down in the ice and let it freeze, and put some ropes on it for swings for the children to swing around over the sleds. And they'd sleigh on there with horses and sleighs. And then there'd be from two to three hundred people from everywhere skating on there. Of course I never learned to skate. I'd stand on the wharf and keep a great big fire for them to get warm by, but it certainly was, I was always afraid of the ice. Then that ice finally would be so thick when the people filled their ice houses, we'd go down there early in the mornings and cut up ice and haul ice to fill up people's ice houses. Less source

You'd never be without wood, but the coal would be our biggest problem. In fact you didn't have the money to buy it 'cause pea coal would be $1:50, nut coal $3.00 a ton, but you didn't have, we wasn't makin' much money to buy coal so people would buy and burn plenty of wood.

• • •

During the Depression I got along about as good as most, in fact if anything else, I worked right along. People here in town that had jobs, they'd give me a little something to do. So I never did suffer for nothing during the Depression. They didn't have to give me and my children anything at all. Of course farmer folks who I used to work for named Mr. Brady, you know, they used to give my children plenty of clothes so they had plenty of clothes and kept warm. So as far as we being in need for anything, I didn't need anything at all.

• • •

Let me tell you. The first bridge that I saw was in St. Georges. It used to be a bridge you turned off by hand. You turned the bridge off then there'd be a big wicket, oh, four or five foot wide, maybe more, then the boats come from Chesapeake City, going to Delaware City, they'd lower it, then when the boats got in there, before they went out, they'd lower it again, and the boats would be so far down you couldn't see 'em, barges. Then later they built another one. But it went up and the boats went under it. It collapsed and one or two fellows got killed by it. But that's all, this bridge there now is the third bridge that's been up there since I can remember.

One time they was loading a horse on a day boat, getting ready to take him to Delaware City. Well, it got filled up. It got one horse on and they was putting the other one on and he wouldn't go on. And he fell down in the water between the boat and the bridge. And they had to take him and swim him clear around the water and bring him back and back him on the boat, 'cause they couldn't lead him on there. But that was the greatest excitement I ever saw with a horse. Puttin' it on the boat. But he fell right down in, but they got him out. Now nobody might believe it, but a horse can swim a long while as long as you hold his head up. Less source

And she had lived in several different countries and spoke several different languages... Her husband got a I think it was a two year contract at Ball State... She had come in my office very, very disturbed because of the discrimination that she as a White woman had witnessed in this community. She said, "You know, Phyllis" she said, "I have traveled all over the world with my family." She said, "I even lived in South Africa for eight years, during apartheid part of my schooling was there". She said, "I have never in my life seen any place as racist as this town." She said, "And I told my husband I'm going to stay until till this contract is up, but when that contract is up you've got a choice. You can leave with me or you can stay here and continue to teach, but I am not raising my children in this environment."

Indiana is basically rural with some pockets of metro areas like South Bend, up around Northwest Indiana, Indianapolis, certainly Fort Wayne, the vast portion of our state is rural, ain't no Black folks. And very few other cultures, other ethnic groups other than Whites. And that's who you go to school with, that's who you work with, that's who you are friends with... They don't have any knowledge of other ethnic groups. They're not getting it in the classroom. They don't have an opportunity in their neighborhoods or their communities to interact or to work with, so they're vulnerable to what comes through that media and those depictions that they see of other ethnic groups.

You hear so much about the South. First time I went down there I was scared to death. Isn't that crazy? `Cause all I had ever hear about Georgia was they lynch Black folk. [laughter] You know, and I'm just as naive as the next person. Until I went down there and it was like, wow. Look at those young Black men and women, professionals with stature, with grace, with province. You know, with their briefcases and assistants strutting. And the gentlemen, long strides, proud. Oh, it made me feel so good I could have jumped off the roof top. I had never seen that. I had never seen Black professionals, quote, unquote. I had never seen, certainly not that number of Black professionals as I did that lunch hour... They're coming out on lunch break, going about their business. It's like, yes, thank you Jesus! Because we're always taught, Blacks don't do nothing. They're lazy, they're trifling, they're singers and dancers and basketball players. That's what the TV taught me. My classroom didn't do any better. So until I had that experience, it was an eye opener for me, you know. Now if I felt that way as a Black person, what would the average White person with no experience think? So we have to do a better job in educating. Less source

CR: So we headed out to California.

DR: Stayed all winter.

CR: Stayed all winter. That was too far away from home.

DR: That was in '53 so we came back and in '54. My Dad went around and asked different people that had shops, barber shops if he could get a job and they didn't, made excuses you know.

CR: Couldn't rent a place so he-.

DR: Built him a barbershop... There wasn't that many shops here, a Black shop. You got to remember that Black people went to Black shops to get their hair cut, shampooed and the reason there, I think mostly, is White people weren't trained to cut Black people's hair. So that was the reason why if my Dad hadn't built the shop, probably, we would've had to do something different. But, my father was a mechanic, see so I have always known business... I was a little girl six or seven, I, here's a picture of me when I was twelve and here's my Dad, he was in the service. This was a picture of me at twelve, you see how poor we was? This was a dress, I remember this dress, the collar was dingy and I turned it inside and had a pin, this is a safety pin right here to pin it and this dress was given to me by somebody else. My hair was cut short because I didn't like to comb my hair and so he just, my dad just cut it off. Less source

They then came over into Ohio and then to Indiana and settled close to Portland, Indiana - in Liber, Indiana, a Black community right outside of Portland - they came from Portland to Muncie.

They settled in one of the three Black settlements in Jay County. I know that my uncle was a cook in a hotel over there before he went into the Army during World War I. There were twin brothers, Hurley and Burley - that's how I got my name... They came to Muncie and married sisters. From there they worked at the [Muncie] Malleable - my father and my uncle. My father died when he was in his early 30s, and my mother was left with three sons. My youngest brother came down with Polio and that was during the Great Depression, and at that time I realized how difficult that situation was with a kid growing up like that. One of the things that I always tell people that I remember is when I was a child and we were on the welfare system and my youngest brother came down with Polio, my mother got a chance to poll the precincts and she made $30. We also received $30 a month from welfare. And somebody reported it to the welfare caseworker and the caseworker came to the house and said, "You don't need the $30 from welfare this month," and I've hated that system ever since then. I'd never see my family on the system. I'd rather pick dandelions than to subject my family to that kind of situation. Less source

We all left and said we didn't care and that we'd go and find work somewhere else. Some of the guys went to Marhoefer and I said, "I ain't going in there," and I went to the Malleable. My uncle Burl worked there when he was living, and so I went in there and they hired me right on the spot, and they were taking me down in the foundry part, and he said where are you taking the boy, and they said we are taking him down into the foundry, and he said no you're not taking him around the hot iron, take him over in the core room and let him work over there. I worked over there the whole time I was in high school.

So you'd go there in the afternoon after school or the weekends?

I would get up at 2:00 in the morning and go down there and work, get off at 10:00 a.m. and be over at Central High School at 10:30 a.m. I was just lucky that I had teachers that understood that I was helping my mother. My younger brother had Polio, my older brother was in the Navy - he quit school and went into the Navy - he helped land troops on Normandy on D-day. When he got out he got to running around and got into trouble, he called my mother one night and said that he was in jail in Anderson and could she come and get him out, and he rejoined and went into the Army when the Korean War started, and he was lost in the Korean War.

Talk some about what the work life was like at Muncie Malleable? What did people do there?

They made castings for Chrysler - the cases for the transmission and differentials... I imagine there was at least a dozen different departments there - shipping, core room, foundry part, milling part - there were about 500 employees.

Was there a union at that time?

It was the UAW.

Was it unionized before World War II?

Before that, the AFL came in there and that was really a bad situation for the Black workers because they wanted them to join the union, but they wouldn't let them have any of the skilled jobs. I hated them, before I even started working there, my uncle worked and he hated to go to the union hall because those guys were so racist that he would give us a dime to go the Wysor Grand Theatre to go up there and pay his union dues - I think it was .35 cents a month - he said I don't want to go up there with them.

The AFL were the skilled workers, the mold makers, core makers, mostly skilled. The other guys didn't have any union in the early years, but after about 1940 they organized the CIO which was the workers, the laborers and all of those guys.

Slauson was away from the Black community as was Tappan at that point in time, so they had very few Black students. But there were some in each school.

Did you have both Black and White teachers?

No, they were all White.

Were there restaurants or eating places for Blacks where you lived?

Ann Arbor had an area, Ann Street area, that was a Black business area there, Black owned restaurants there. They were small, but, Black-owned bars that also served food. So that was really about it. I don't remember eating in restaurants in Ann Arbor. I don't know if Blacks were not allowed in restaurants or just discouraged from going to the White-owned restaurants in Ann Arbor. I can't remember. I thought about that a lot in the past. There was a restaurant called The Sugar Bowl. I kind of remember eating there, but I was a bit older when I did that. As a kid coming up, of course, we didn't go to restaurants. We didn't have money.

I've heard several people that we've interviewed talk about that area as being the Black business district.

One small restaurant, there were two bars, the Derby and a place owned by David Keaton. There were two pool rooms there. There was a leather shop on the corner, but that was White-owned. One or two barber shops there, a barber shop around the corner. A Black-owned gas station repair station. That was pretty much the Black businesses at that time in Ann Arbor.

• • •

I was a paper boy as a kid coming up, and I had, as customers, most of the Black families in Ann Arbor. You had Black families living on Beakes Street between Main and the bridge. Summit Street from Beakes up to Hiscock and a little bit beyond had Black families. On Wall Street you had Black families. On Glen Ave and Catherine. So Black families were scattered around Ann Arbor. I'd say I knew most of them simply because I was a paper boy, and I grew up in Ann Arbor... I started out with a few papers, and Black families discovered they had a Black paper boy. And they made sure that I brought their paper to them. And I, like I say, I started on Kingsley and Ashley, and I'd go all the way down Catherine to Glen, Glen over to Wall Street, down Fuller, come back across the bridge up Summit to Hiscock. So I covered a lot of areas pulling my little wagon as a paper boy... I had a family up on Summit about at the end of my route, they'd have breakfast for me. Less source

I was a bookworm until the eighth grade. I spent some time living with my aunt, and she said that, you will get out of the house. You're not going to stay in the house and read books, so I actually went out and participated in every sport that Jones School had available. I was still a bookworm. I still read a lot. Reading was a prime joy in life.

What are you reading right now?

Some science fiction stuff.

Does anything come to mind that you read as a child that sticks with you?

I read a lot of different kinds of things. I enjoyed Greek mythology and mythology. I ran into science fiction when I got into high school, and I enjoyed it. I went to college as a English lit major, so I've read a lot... I like books. I have a lot of books. They just sit there, and I should find a way to recycle a lot of them.

Did you often do things with others because you're an only child?

The summertime we spent swimming in the Huron River. There used to be a beach on Argo Drive, and a canoe livery, and we would swim in that area from the time school let out until the time school started again. It kept us out of mischief... you just took off in the morning. No matter where you was, when the street lights come on, you better be back home. Less source

The Tribune was our competition. It was friendly competition. If they needed something from us, we would give it to them. If we needed something, we would hear back and forth like mostly pictures or something of that nature. I was the go-for... The runner, go-for or whatever you want to. I had to walk around the corner on Park Avenue to there, and by then you'd walk past most of the Black businesses, the fish market, Mr. McLaughlins you would call it confectionery-type thing but more than that went on in there. Across the street you had Robins Department Store. They had all those type of businesses there. The Sims Fish Store and all those. It was a whole cavalry of businesses that catered to the Black folk who lived in Currytown and all those behind West Broad Street. They provided the income base for most of those businesses, and we didn't have the transportation that we do now. Everybody didn't have two cars in the garage and a driveway. Everyone walked and so convenience stores now, the M and M supermarkets, the Foodtown supermarkets, all those Krogers have bought them out now. But those grocery stores, people like the Sadlers, the Malavers, they had grocery stores on the bottom floor, and they lived upstairs on the second floor. That's how my father got to know a lot of those people because he eventually, we had a printing company as well. We would print their flyers for them.

Urban renewal as I say tore out Currytown, they tore out the businesses, but that enabled the White or Jewish businesses, the money that they received from that to expand into other aspects of real estate development and everything else. But on the other part, it destroyed quite a few of the Black businesses because they didn't relocate. Some of them relocated, but they didn't have the clientele to deal with it like they do today.

By many accounts Currytown was falling down, and the effort to revitalize the housing doesn't seem bad in and of itself. Did anyone foresee the dramatic negative consequences that it would have on the long-term health of the street?

I don't think they did. If they did back in those days, they didn't give a damn about it, excuse the expression. There was an excess of gathering land. They saw an opportunity for federal grants and what have you and improve the situation. But what, the people who owned the land made the money, and they took the money and reinvested it because most of it came to be federal property of the housing authority. Unfortunately there were quite a few people who regardless of the fact that... I guess the city fathers saw it was an opportunity to make some improvements, but also you have to understand that the urban renewal project extended not necessarily in Currytown, but extended all the way through the whole quote historic district itself. That gave them the opportunity to get low interest money to refurbish those houses. Less source

Some of the people moved out into various other areas of the community, and you replaced them with different individuals, and when you get the process of public housing, you lump people together. You put enough stories or whatever. You increase the density of the area, and yet you don't have the same, people with the same mindset. Although people lived in Currytown, they lived on dirt streets and what have you. They kept their surroundings clean, and everybody was manageable and everything else. Everybody looked out for each other and did things for each other and that type thing. It was a community within a community if you want to call it that. So we lost that type of significance of that area. We've learned, I think we've learned quite a bit about that when we should have gone back to single family homes or a couple of duplexes rather than build the way we did presently. I think you will have a much better community from an aesthetic point of view and maybe a cultural diverse community than you have right now. In essence what you did was replace Blacks with Blacks but poor Blacks... You drew from a different pool of people although they were, most of these people were scattered throughout the city. They sort of brought them in and lumped them all together.

Currytown, Frogtown, parts of old Yamacraw, all that was dispersed. The only church that they were able to save was First African Baptist Church, not First, First Bryan Baptist Church down in the heart. We lost the mother church of the AME church, Saint Phillip Monumental. We lost Saint Paul CME Church. We lost quite a few major facilities, and I mean buildings, historical buildings, and that has always been my argument with the historic Savannah people. Where were you at when you're talking about saving all of these buildings? Where were you, you didn't save the original Black churches and some of the architectural treasures that we had then. So where were you then? Less source

We would spend, we spent months and months just reading every single thing, every single book that came out, and sit around in JL's kitchen talking and dreaming. And it was there that we started dreaming about opening up an abortion clinic in Gainesville [Florida], and we had to think back and be very careful of how we did it, because we knew that the Alachua County Medical Society had refused Planned Parenthood when they tried to open up a clinic... We got our facility that was owned by a woman who was a psychiatrist over at the Alachua Teaching Hospital... We were able to get that building, and we then needed to raise money to open up the clinic. And so, what we did is we got some people who gave donations, like a couple of thousand dollars. I think it only took us about eight or nine thousand dollars to get this whole thing started. But when we got ready to furnish it, we each then had to look among ourselves to see what resources we had. And so, I remember I had an account at Sears, and so my job was to get the furniture. This was 1974, and so the furniture we got was the denim low-slung furniture that we had. That was good. I remember getting the couches, two couches and two chairs and then two recliners for the recovery room. So that's what I went and put on my charge account. And I remember Judy borrowed money from the credit union to help pay for the machines that we bought from Clergy Consultation that came, the aspirators. I remember Joan Edelman got the shag carpet. She said we just had to have shag carpet. She got the shag carpet for the room.

And we opened in May of 1974, and the Alachua County Medical Society learned about it when everybody else did in Gainesville. And our business started. It was just incredible. It was such an eye opener for me to really understand how important the ability to make reproductive health decisions, how that ability is so important in the life of families. And I really didn't think that many Black women got abortions until we opened the clinic, where they would be more than 50 percent of the patients coming in, or the clients coming in for abortion, while we were only like 20 percent of the general population. And it was amazing to see parents bringing their daughters in, to see husbands and wives coming in, wearing their crosses around their neck and coming in, people from all walks of life coming in.

It was a very interesting procedure. Of course, we taught the women everything in the world they wanted to know or didn't want to know about their bodies. We were not passing up this opportunity to educate. We did wonderful education. We took care of them exquisitely. And we also did the well-woman GYN Clinic. We ran that at nights. And I was very disappointed because I really wanted to see more Black women coming in for that service and I really didn't know how to reach Black women to get them to come in. And we did the regular things, like leaflets and put that information and stuff in church bulletins and all of that. We still didn't get the population coming in. What happened is the young White women from the University of Florida used it as an alternative to their health center. And they were coming and getting all the information. It was fine for them to get it, but we also wanted other folks to get it, too. Another thing that happened while we were there, we ran these educational workshops. We ran body sex workshops. We wanted women to learn about sexuality. Less source

And I'd have to walk around with the key in my pocket because they would come in and help they self. We all ate fish and seafood every day, at least every day. Because if I didn't have fish in the morning and grits, I'll have crab or either oysters stew. Then in the daytime, you know, later on I'll make deviled crab. I tell you though, the gang would always come here. I always kept a houseful. People don't know my regular family because they think everybody calls me Auntie. "She's your auntie?" "Yeah that's my auntie." "I didn't know that!" The neighborhood ask me, "Is so and so your nephew?" Yes! "Your niece?" Yes! "Well how ya'll get to be that?" Less source

What was shad fishing?

Oh, that's fish! That was the name of the fish, shad. And they would go and put these nets. They didn't have a boat. They would just go out in the ocean.

And just stand out there?

No, they would go out in the ocean and put the nets out and then they would let the nets stay out about a day or two. And then they would go and pick ‘em up and the fish would be in there... All the whole ones they'd take to market and all the other ones would come to us. We used to go down there to the beach and watch them sometime pulling the nets in and whatever.

My daddy used to cook and we would be up at night when everybody was home. He'd be down there to open up for everybody, nine o'clock in the morning and closed 10 at night... And every night he's gonna bring this box home for us, the French fries, fish, chicken, and shrimp hot rolls. And all children around in our community down there, they would be to our house waiting on him to come. We would be there playing cards; he didn't allow us to play card but we would sneak and play (laughing). When we know it was getting on time for him to come home, we would do away with the cards. When we'd hear that truck come up here if we'd be playing cards, you ought to see the scrambling to get those cards.

One time he come and caught us playing cards and just as I was, I always used to tell ‘em. I say, “Here come daddy y’all”. They'd jumped up and throw the cards in the stove. We had one of those wooden stoves, you know, but there wasn’t no fire in it. So, when he come in and saw all us around the table, he know something was wrong. He say, “Where's the cards?” We say, “Daddy, we wasn’t playing cards!” “Why all ya’ll around a table?” Waiting on you to come with the food!” (laughing) He put the box on the table and everybody start to eating, he went right to the stove (laughing). Less source

The farmer next to the park, which was Tiller Park [Waterloo, Iowa], which is still there, they had a son named Fred Sharper. And Fred and I were good friend and I would go over to help him. Do chores like milking cows... Putting up hay and picking vegetables and stuff. His dad would give me, "Oh take those eggs home" or "go get you some apples or pick some beans to take home with you."... And my mother started making dinners for ten and fifteen cents a plate out of the things that Fred Sharper would give us. And that is where the restaurant started. And I started to learn to cook from that because she started to get busy and said, "Help me do so and so, so and so is coming." And if you can believe this, those dinners were twenty-five cents a plate... That’s where I learned to cook, in that restaurant.

As a young man you would go to CC camp. Can you explain to me what is CC camp?

CC camp was started by Roosevelt. There were so many kids out of work and the depression was full blown. A lot of gangs would get on railroad tracks, get on railroad cars and go from one place to another. So Roosevelt thought about a way to keep the kids off the street, off the road. So they started a conservation core. They called it CCC because Civilian Conservation Core was the name of the organization run by the government and they gave the boys a dollar a day.

In those days everybody was getting in. Because they would feed you and cloth you and you would get a place to stay and you did conservation work such as refurbish parks... Like Backbone park over here in Iowa... and Redrock in Colorado... Then in Illinois they had limestone quarries and they'd beat this limestone, put it through mills, they'd put this limestone on farmer's field because it would sweeten the soil. Less source

They would hire Black people and hire them in the foundry and that's all. They didn't hire them in any other place. And when those people on the streets were looking for more employees when they started making more tractors, where they get people off the street and get them in those jobs and they were cleaner jobs, they weren't, your lungs weren't full of graphite and all that stuff like it was in the foundry and the mill room. And those jobs paid more.

• • •

Let's talk about your rug business.

Well, I saw it in a magazine that this was good for a person to have. I always wanted to have my own business, independent. So I went to Chicago to this company and they showed me how to use it, how to use the machines. They kept me there about four days. Showed me how to clean rugs and upholstery like this and normally it took about two thousand dollars for the machinery and the hoses and all that. And I said well that's pretty cheap I think I'll try this. And I started cleaning rugs at home and putting them in the basement, carrying the rugs down in the basement. Scrubbing them with the machines, rinsing them off in the drain. I did that for seven or eight months. Then I got my buddy to come up from Freeport, Illinois. And he started working with me. And we had enough for us to live off of but it wasn't advancing enough for me to see I was making a lot of extra money. So I started a janitorial service with it... When that started we built a building. The building is still here on Ash Street [Waterloo, Iowa].

We did Cedar Falls, Hudson, Oelwein, Fairbanks, Hampton, New Hampton... I started that business because of a man by the name of Reed in Cedar Rapid... I knew him well... So I followed his lead and did the same thing. But my partner didn't want to put his hands in a commode. There was a lot of taverns that were cleaned and we could do that early in the morning... We did a lot of filling stations. A lot of people in those days had filling stations with toilets in them but they were dirty. So we'd go by and charge them 25 dollars a month or something like that. You'd go in there sweep the floor, clean the floor every morning, it would take you ten minutes and go. And you'd get 25 bucks a month out of twenty places that's two hundred and fifty bucks.

It lasted until we decided to expand and do other businesses. So we bought a grocery store... I owned a grocery store because we split the business. Because he wouldn't put his hands in the commode. We decided I'd go one way and he'd go another. Some other things involved like drinking, but we won't go into that.

And he took the rug cleaning service and I took the grocery store. And cleaned it up and worked on it and hired people to work and clean up the roaches and mice. And made a decent looking grocery store out of it and had good business. But the squeeze came when the AMP and National T and all those stores came in. Less source

And from then on, where the Black people lived, we didn't have any. So while we were in the service, we started fighting for what we felt we should have. And we went to the state health department. We jumped over the city, the county, and everybody else. And said, we need water on our street. We need electric. And we need everything else that everybody else got.

And as a boy, we used to get our water from these springs, you know, and we'd haul it. In big cans called a milk can. And we'd get these cans of water. Then we had a cistern where the water ran off the roof into the cistern. And we used that to wash clothes in. But we didn't drink it, or use it for consumption. We used this other water.

We went through economic segregation. Whenever they wanted somebody to do menial tasks, they'd come over on our street and get 'em. Dig ditches, clean toilets. Anything like that, okay? The town was primarily Republican. And there was one or two people around there that ran everything. Now this is an interesting thing, this is gonna slay you. You could not get a loan, a Black person when I grew up. You could not get a loan from a bank in Mount Holly Springs, unless, you were signed for by a White person. Okay? Even though we were property owners. I think our property wasn't worth much. Property that nobody would buy, I don't know. We owned our land where we lived. We actually owned, we had three acres, three and a half acres, and we owned it. Had titles to it, had deeds to it, everything.

Listen to this. Mama was such a friendly person, that I don't know anybody in town that did not like her. At least nobody I'd never heard of. They would come and consult her on different things that happened in the community, things like that. And she would sit and talk to 'em and all this kind of thing. And when any, the other Black boys in town got in trouble or something like that, they would come over to Miss Gumby and say, well so and so and so and so and so and so. And she said, well, you know, he's alright, he's just like any other boy, you know, he's mischievous. You know, and gets into this and in that, and said, long as he hasn't done anything illegal or harmful, you know, let him go. Less source

I don't know what it meant, Stevensburg normally was a teaching school I think it was. So they went to the school and she come out of this normal school, and became a nurse, whatever professional you were considered to be in tall cotton with a short hose, they used to say. It's way up there, you know what I mean? And so my sister, Mary Evelyn, she went through all of this. Smart as a whip. Raymond, the next oldest, only went through the ninth. And he did well when he got out of school. Somehow he missed the service, I don't know how he missed it. But he became sheriff of one of the counties there [Pennsylvania]. Then I had a brother George, who was next. He was a, he could run. And back during those days, years ago, they had a Black guy named Jessie Owens. And if you know the history of Jessie Owens, he stood before, you know, he beat the Germans in the relay. And Hitler never forgot that. So from then he didn't like Black soldiers, so that got, traced itself into the army, and so, when the Black soldiers went to Germany. Well they gave the Germans a tough time. Tough time, because of the Jessie Owens thing. And you know those things where, you know, somebody tells a tale and it carries on and on and on. And gets into the culture and never gets out. But George was a runner. Oh he could move, I tell you true. I saw him myself. Back in those days, during the Fourth of July, we used to light firecrackers, it was fun. And we had a firecracker, like four or five inches long. And they'd light that firecracker. And George would see how far he could run before that thing went off. And I'm telling you they clocked him as being way away from that thing. He could get down and move. Well, we think that the running, you know, he died young. We think the running is what killed him. And then my brother John, who went in the army. A year or so before I did. Did well, but he came back out, then went to government, worked for 43 years. For the government. And he retired. And then my other brother Ed was an educator in New Jersey, and William, who is the industrial chemist, worked for an outfit called Bausch and Lomb in New York. And he was in on the, he was on the very first, what do you call them little rings you used to put in your eyes?

Right, I know what you’re—

Yeah, yeah, with that. Yeah, he was one of the guys that helped make the first ones of those things. Now I’m telling you that’s really getting down.

Yeah, contacts.

Yeah, yeah, contact lens. And then Bausch & Lomb made a lot of other stuff, laboratory stuff and high tech equipment and all that kind of mess. And so he worked for them for years. Less source

26.

How long have you been working for CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]?

About a year and a half.

Why did you first start working with them?

Well, because I realized there was a problem, and it had to be solved, and it couldn't be solved by people sitting at home on their asses.

What kind of things were you doing with CORE back in San Francisco?

Working on discriminatory hiring practices of the Restaurant Assoc, East Bay Restaurant Association, worked on that for quite some time, in fact, I worked on that for all the time I was there, up until the time I came down here.

What are you doing down here?

Project Director and trouble-shooter for St. Tammany Parish and Washington Parish. Community organization, setting up direct action programs. It, you know, running a project is, you know, getting the necessary information for filing lawsuits, trying to keep the police in check, so they don't go around beating people without reason, getting information for injunctions, making the people in the community know, know their self, that they are in a position to do good things. Making the people interested, making the people in town, you know, not making them, but getting them interested enough to take an active part in the movement.

What does your staff do? What do you have them do?

They sit around and eat watermelon! No, it's, I don't know, they have certain jobs, they set up committees, and they work with the people in the community. They hold voter registration clinics, setting up Freedom Schools, helping welfare committees, recreation committees, things like that.

And how valuable do you think that the people that just come down for one summer are?

Well, it depends on the people. Sometimes you get some good people come down just for a summer. There's only two staff members here; the rest of them are summer volunteers.

What do you think is the major problem with these people, who just come down for one summer?

They feel they can come down and solve the problems of the South in 3 months.

Well, do you think the summer projects are valuable?

Yes, I think they're valuable. If nothing else, they make the Negro communities in the South a little more aware of what's going on around them, even if they don't accomplish very much community organization during that time. They start the people thinking along the right lines, anyway.

Is it something they use at all outside of the South?

I think it's something that we're trying to encourage in the North. It's not always easy for people in the CORE chapter to go out and work with community organization. Community organization isn't something that you can accomplish in a month or two. It takes constant work for, you know, God knows how long.

Can you make any comparisons between the situation in the south and the, say, San Francisco, here in Bogalusa [Louisiana] and in San Francisco?

Well, community organization is much easier in the South than it is in the North, for one reason, the community in the South is, you know, their problems are out in the open where they can be seen by everybody. And in the North you have to uncover the problem first, and then make the people aware of it, and then try to organize it. Less source

Are you a believer in non-violence?

To a degree.

To a degree. Okay. When you were back in San Francisco were you involved in any other political activities?

Yeah, FSM [Free Speech Movement] over in Berkeley, and things like that.

Are you registered with any political party?

No, not at the present time. I haven't been registered since the Kennedy-Nixon election. I wasn't about to vote in the last election.

Are you a member of any church?

I don't know, how long does a membership stand in a church? Am I an active member?

I don't care, whether you still believe in it?

Yeah, I still believe in church.

Well, unless there's something else you want to, you know, comment on.

No, this is alright, I mean, you're doing quite well.

I don't think so! I'm feeling all thumbs, verbally.

You're just nervous.

Yeah, Well, what, I've asked people this question before and sometimes I get some good answers. What do you think the aims of the civil rights movement are?

I can't speak for the whole movement, but...

What are your aims personally?

Equality, first, and then integration.

Is there anything else you want to say about the movement? Do you want to criticize any of, maybe any of the tactics used by this organization or other organizations?

No, I ain't in any position to criticize anybody's tactics.

Do you want to praise anybody's?

Nope. Less source

They had some of these garbage trucks they carried people to jail in, and they had some kind of trucks that had top pulled on it and it was so hot in there that some people just had taken their hands and torn the top off of it.

When we got out to the fairground they'd taken everybody's name and their address. They'd sit them down on the floor. They sat on the floor until about 7:00 o'clock that night. This cop came by and said "Get up." So most of us refused to get up off the floor and I figured that if I didn't do something to them they was going to try to do something to me pretty bad. So these two cops came up there and they decided they couldn't get me up; they couldn't pull me up their selves so four more come. And then this big old cop come up there. He's says, "get back, I'll handle her." So they stood back there and he come up there. And he couldn't grab me cause I was nearly as big as he was. So he decided that he would hit me. And when he hit me and when he drew that blackjack back that's when I kicked him between his legs and he laid there until they got him and carried him to the hospital. And after they carried him to the hospital, they put me in this garbage truck and they locked me up back there and carried me to the county jail. And when they carried me down to the county jail I threw food in this man's face. And they carried me from there to the city jail and when I did the same thing they put me back in the sweat box, and I stayed in there for about twenty minutes and then they gave me a little air. And they left and I stayed in there for about two days.

And when these people come back - I guess they was planning on letting me out. They brought some food and I wouldn't accept the food even though I was hungry. But I was going to play hard at it; I wouldn't accept the food. So they finally let me out and put me on a cell. And there was a couple of people down there like Alma Louise. She was beat up. She was beat in the stomach. And there were four cops and one day a lady was laying on one of those matresses there. Well, how they began, they wanted to pick at her because that night there was a doctor there to see us. And when that doctor came to see us everybody that wanted to see the doctor got in line so she got in line and this cop knew her and he came up there and he said "Lady, you don't want to see no doctor." That's what this colored cop told her. He said, "What do you want to see the doctor for? She said that's my own personal business and I don't have to tell you or any other of you cops what I want to see a doctor for. I'll tell the doctor... And them two cops grabbed that woman and she got lose from them. And when she got... well, they didn't mess with her no more. They talked about what they could do to her. They didn't mess with her until the next morning. She was laying beside this sick lady over there had had a miscarriage. Well, the cops had beat around her, and she was laying over there with her. And these cops were going to make her get up and go back where she was. And she told them that she wanted to stay there with the sick lady. So two of them got at her legs and started dragging her and two of them was on each side beaten her with that blackjack. And then just threw her on out the door and everybody out there started cursing these cops. And they carried her and had to put her in the hospital. Less source

So, some of the things that you would hear about the South, I really didn't experience because of that protection that he put up for us.

And by protection, how did he do that?

Well, for one thing, if we went anyplace, our mother had to go. For instance, if we worked during the summers, he only, we could only work if she worked in the same place we worked. So, he made sure that we were always looked after. I never had the opportunity to work for Whites in the yard, cutting grass or cutting hedges or things like that, because he didn't allow us to do that because he, you know, wasn't there to look after us. So, he made sure we stayed home unless my mother could actually be there. So, I never really had any really confrontations, per se, as a child, in that respect.

What was the community like that you were exposed to, that you were growing up in?

Well, basically, we lived in an all-Black community, of course. There were dirt streets. And the houses that didn't have paint and most of them were three-room houses. And, of course, there were varied numbers of family members living in, in our case, there were extended family members there. So, the community itself was basically Black and, we didn't have any real control of what went on. So, if you learned how to live within that setting, you avoided trouble by, for lack of a better way of putting it, staying in your place, so to speak... I mean, we were, if we went outside there, we knew there were ways we were supposed to carry ourselves, you know, in front of Whites. It was, "Yes sir, no sir. Yes ma'am, no ma'am," whenever we were spoken to. Less source

But we're still separate. So, on the surface, we look as if we, it looks as if, it appears that we have really gained a lot, but sometimes I wonder really how much of it we really have gained. Because behind the scenes, things still haven't changed much. I can remember a guy asking me when I worked in Flint what difference did I see between the South and the North. And I asked him, I said, "You really want my answer?" He said, "Yeah, I want your answer." I said, "You sure?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Well, it's like this. Here, I'm able to visit you at your house, maybe have a meal with you. And then, when I leave, you probably break the plate or the glass that I use. There, I already know I'm not going to be invited, so I understand more about where my position is, so I don't have to..."

This is a White guy.

White guy, yeah. "So I don't have to question whether you like me or not. I know you don't. You know. So, I don't have to expose myself to you." Well, he got mad at me and, [laughs] he didn't speak to me for a week. But that's the difference I see between the North and the South. There's a perceived freedom, but it really is not there sometimes. It's perceived. But underneath, it's really a lie. In a lot of ways, I like the South better, because I don't have to question, I don't have to expose myself. I already know where I'm accepted, pretty much, and it's up to me whether or not I want to venture past that or not. Less source

And she said, Listen, I was looking at this, this paper the other day, and it said that based on the DNA knowledge that we have today, African Americans, not Africans who came here after slavery but African Americans, on average have 20% European blood. And she said you know what that means no. I said yeah, that means there had to be massive rape on an enormous scale to produce that distribution in this country, and it was not Black man raping White women guarantee that.

I mean this is, this is a massive indictment of a nation. And what happened to Black woman and a lesser degree what happened to like Black men to. They were not immune from being raped. But this is a massive indictment of this society, and our history. There is no other reasonable explanation for what happened. But you do not see this taught in school. And if you want to hold up a picture of rapists, in America, it will be a White male. And it is incredible. And it's evidence irrefutable. It is immensely powerful numbers, but the historians are not taking those numbers and say, hey, look at this. This is a story here. This is a great story, this is a national story. This is a historical story. This is impossible. This is incredible, even while we criticize other nations, for using rape for a tool of war, here is our history. And I don't see that. I don't see the historians doing that. I think historians are not going to do that. Why, because history is like anything else. It's a profession you make money at... This will not bring you a lot of recognition... hey get that guy and he wrote about rape... let's give the guy some more money so he can talk about the rape, the enormous history of rape and sexual perversion and exploitation, that is at the heart of this nation, and that makes us look like we do... It's true, it's true, but it's not something we want to write about. Less source

It had to end, and I think most Black people agreed with that. We didn't necessarily have a really solid consensus on that we had to integrate, because I think a lot of the small businesses and schools, said if you integrate it will be the end of us, we won't have a school that we control anymore. We will have little businesses that are ours because they will be wiped out.

But there was this general feeling, especially I think it started intensifying afterwards World War Two. Where we just weren't going to take it anymore, and it especially flourished when the GIs came back and they had a wider view of the world, they had seen other places and other perspectives and saw how they were treated.

It was like a fever across the country especially with the young people. We really wanted to be part of this movement, and we applauded everything that King was trying to do. A lot of people didn't agree with him. But everybody understood his bravery, his courage, and his tenacity, and that he thought beyond the normal scheme of things where we want this, we want that. He connected the whole world of injustices and how we were part of, and how we could not separate ourselves from the injustice of the war in Vietnam and the injustice in Alabama.

I think there were millions of us on the campuses and in the jobs and it was just a feeling that we're not necessarily going to win, but just by struggling, really, we define our humanity in our struggles. Less source

Oh well, Malcolm X for one... He clearly said, you turn the other cheek all they're going to do is break the other cheek with the other fist and it's not going to work... You really have to stand up and you have to show him that you are willing to fight... They see we're willing to fight when we're in the street, they see the children in the street and the old people in the street. They understand that we will not be defeated. But we cannot win a battle with guns... and it will just reinforce the kind of situation that power makes right.

So, it was a wonderful dialogue going on at all levels of the community, the Black Panther Party in the Black Student Union and all the other organizations, the NAACP, they had to take a position on this perspective, and they had to be somewhere on that line about, how do we challenge effectively. And do we actually draw down on our military experience grab our guns take to the streets. And so, and then there were a lot of people, young students who didn't agree with King, because they thought he wasn't aggressive enough... saying that our path to progress depended on the willingness of White people to give us things, and that we were offending White people with these activities, and therefore they weren't going to give us things, they're going to take things away from us. So, even within our community, even with our movement, was everybody believing that we want to end a racial discrimination, there are still these divisions about, how do we get there. Less source

They were particularly interested in trying to support what they considered to be new faces. People with new ways of thinking. And so was contacted one night while sitting here in my office working. Just received phone call from friend of mine and asked if I'd come to meeting. And was asked if would agree to run for... Frankly, was asked to agree to run for mayor that year and said no and then was asked if I'd run for city council. So did and ran and that was in '71.

I got what I thought was good financial support, contributions, mainly from the White community. About $7-8,000 I raised in soliciting campaign funds. $6,000 of that came from people in the White community. In the general election, in a field of about nearly thirty candidates, I ran third in that field. Behind two of the incumbents. I failed by about... somewhere less than 3,000 votes of winning without going into a runoff. I still feel that I would have won except about 6,000 votes were obviously invalidated because you had, in our system... for the city council you must vote for five people or the machine doesn't register your vote. And it has been projected, based on comparisons made in the mayor's race and in the council race that possibly some 16,000 votes were invalidated. And the differences showed up mainly in predominantly Black boxes. I, of course, got my strongest support in predominantly Black boxes so I felt that I lost quite a few votes in that race. Less source

I began to find out that there are two different John Lees listed. One is named Benson and another is named White. I think White or Brown, I can't ident, I heard from older people, something about they remember when I was brought to this lady who I lived with who I thought was my grandmother, and this is very intricate beginning. So I got a little discouraged and never followed through with my beginnings, so if somebody would like to research that, it will be quite an interesting.

I never knew anything until at graduation. I was always called White. And in high school, of course, my high school diploma is White, and when I, lady who said was my mother never had the name White. Her name was Brown, so I have no idea how, mixed family's got all kind of mixed up. The lady I lived with was named White. Her name was Martha White, and everybody in the neighborhood called her Mother White.

So do you remember how old you were when you went to live with her?

No, oh no. I was just a child, just a baby. It was Maxine Waters' mother. She, I think, is 98, 99 or something, and she says "I remember when they brought you to Mother White's house," you know. But she's way up in her nineties. But I don't know anything. My first recollection of existence was whenever the earthquake was in Los Angeles. That was, what, '32 or '33, I remember... standing up in the crib and so forth, and everybody running out of the house and all. Less source

She was interested, I don't know that I told her I wanted to learn piano... I remember she used to come back to John Adams on Saturdays and I used to have lessons at the school with her on Saturdays and a couple of times she took me out to her house. It was just a marvelous relationship and experience. I guess, and I have to go back, I guess I started, I guess I had an interest in the piano. I started piano, and I don't remember playing, while I was on the east side, on Hooper Avenue [Los Angeles], because on 52nd Street and Hooper was a music studio, and a woman, Black woman from Canada taught most of the students at Hooper Avenue, and I remember going there, taking a few lessons with Mrs. Brooks. Did I tell you her name? Her name was Brooks. I can't remember her first name. But most of the time, she taught, I remember I was involved with theory, but I don't remember actually playing, because by the time I got to high school, I had theory but I didn't know what it was.

She was teaching you to read music?

To read music, to write music. I could analyze chords and all that stuff, but I didn't, I didn't know it at the time until I took a theory class in high school and all of a sudden I said, well, I know that! That's so simple, that's so easy! I thought everybody did, you know. Doesn't everybody do this? Less source

I heard music almost every day, because practically every day there was parades and stuff. There was also, a form of advertising was music. They had a float, they had floats to advertise different events, like fish fries that were coming up the weekend... On the float was a group of musicians. They'd have a bass player, which was on the end, a trombone player, a trumpet player, and usually a clarinet player. That was your sound. That was where you got your sound to bring the people out. They'd be playing music as they came along. They'd be playing all kinds of popular music. You could run out and see what's happening and follow, I would follow them down the block, not past that corner, coming right back after that.

Also if there was a funeral on the way to the cemetery, the band would be playing, and the family followed behind this parade. Here again, I'd follow that to the corner. Then when they came back through the same street, they'd come back after the funeral, then they'd be swinging. I'd go out and watch them, check up on the floats.

It was called "dixieland." It wasn't really, it wasn't called jazz at that time... I was fascinated by the bass player, because he was on the rear end of this float with a bow. He would hit his thing and play it. And the trombone player was on the rear end. That's why they call the trombone player ["tailgate"], on the end, so he can have room for the slide, the trombone. Less source

And so my brothers, cousins and all the kids in the neighborhood, they kind of like what I had did and so they wanted a haircut so I ended up that weekend cutting about three or four heads of hair and the next weekend they came back and so they started coming on a regular basis and I said well fifty cents.

And then some of the dads started coming around and they were sending the kids regularly. This was in 1954. By 1956 I had such a regular clientele that I literally went into business. In one of the side rooms, my mom allowed me to go in and set up a barbershop. An I did that for the next three or four years, and in 1960 I has worked enough that I saved enough to go to barber school.

You were cutting hair as a youngster, a young teenager. Fifty cents a head?

Yes, fifty cents a head, yes. Did quite well at that rate. It was a way of supplementing my school money, but also I enjoyed doing the service you know cutting the peoples hair. You would see the joy on their face, they would really enjoy the haircut and so that was a motivating factor for me.

• • •

I went to Molar Barber College in Chicago; it was in fact the first barber college in the nation. It was on the downtown section, what they call the "tramp section" or where, the homeless people I should say they used to call them that, but the homeless. And we would cut the homeless hair, because the school would charge them very little money, if any sometimes. In addition to that, we would go to the hospitals, the school would send the students to the hospitals and cut they peoples hair there that needed it. And so I progress pretty fast, out of the nineteen or twenty students that were there and I was the only Black one and I had about half the clientele. Less source

I was a communication specialist, a field communication specialist. I very seldom worked that when we were in the barracks, but if we went out on field trips of course, then I did my communications job, but other than that I cut hair in the barbershop.

I was charging two dollars a head. I had access to so many hundred of people, that in the run of a month, I was making more than a captain. And so the army didn't really like for me to do that and they set it up so that I could work, during working hours under this program. They limited my take to about sixty cents a head and so that reduced what I was able to make. But being a licensed barber of course, they couldn't really legally restrict me from cutting hair in the evenings in my own free time because electricians would do things or people with other professions like photographer would take pictures, and so I had the right also and I fought for that.

So then once you would leave the service would you go to Chicago? Would you return to Chicago?

I returned back to the job. By law if you were drafted, were ever you were drafted from; that company had to then give you that exact same job back. So of course, I went back to managing, stayed there a year then bought my own shop.

What events would develop or transpire to cause you to leave Chicago and come to Waterloo [Iowa]?

Yes, interesting. The natural came into vogue and Jackson 5 had the big natural so every body wanted one. People didn't want there hair cut, they wanted more hair. This is five or six years later, decided that it's time now to maybe go somewhere else while there a lull in this business and my wife had, at that time I had gotten married. My wife had a friend in Waterloo. We got here Friday afternoon and I was going to go back Sunday morning but I like the place, it had a charm about it, it not the best looking place. I kind of like the people and the surroundings. Less source

I was encouraged to run for an office in student government, and I did. I won and sat on the council, student council. And on that council I was asked to chair a certain committee. It was called the Constitutions Committee. And that committee was responsible for reviewing the constitutions and charters of all the on-campus organizations, all the sororities, all the fraternities, and so on. So when I started reviewing these, I saw, in the charters of the fraternities and, White fraternities and sororities, that it was for White male or White female. And, you know, in good conscience, I couldn't approve that. And so I didn't approve them. And, of course, my recommendation was to be made to the council, and then the council would vote on it. Well, of course, when I didn't approve them, that meant they would not get, not receive on campus status and all the privileges thereof. And so, of course, I was called in by the Dean of Students, and we had a chat about it, and so forth. And I never find out what actually happened, whether or not, you know, these people really... these organizations really received on-campus status or probationary status, for some reason. And I didn't push it beyond that.

That was my experience that really stood out at San Diego State, along with the friendship and the real guidance and love that I received from some of the faculty members at that time. So, again, there was a sort of a balancing of the... I think there were about twenty-five Black students in the whole university at that time. And out of an enrollment, I think it must've been around 11,000, something like that. And here again, you know, you're, you sit in the classrooms. You're the only Black student. And it's the same thing over again. I mean, you didn't run into any. It wasn't that there were some great incidence, but still, I mean, that's... You know, the Black studies program was created in this country, in part, to provide some companionship for those of that ethnicity. And although there was a lot of pushback on that. But, you know, it's... you're young. You want companionship, and friendship, and you need that to grow, and so on. And all students need that. But when you sit there in a land of what you know to be racist towards you, and when you walk down a street and you're called nigger, right there in San Diego, I mean, that's your life. And you end up, I guess, with some feelings. What those feelings happen to be depends on the individual. For me, it was anger. I mean, I was angry, and I knew that I had to do something about it. I was maturing. I wasn't in junior high school and I wasn't high school age. I had been around a little bit and I matured. And the further I went, the more angry I got. And so that's how I decided, when I graduated from San Diego State, to join the Civil Rights Movement. Less source

If we had a problem with a burglary, all the community people in that area would get together and they knew the police. And they didn't mind busting a person. Even if he was African American, if you burglarized somebody's house you had to pay. And that kind of mentality is what kept us level with the police.

Now, you always have some outlaw policemen who like beating up on Black folk and Latinos. That mentality is never going to go away because they're going to keep hiring them. But we had policemen who would tell them, "Hey, you can't do that!" I've heard them do it, they would stop them. And they would let you know that there was nothing else that they could do, but they would ream them out. They just didn't do the things they do today and get away with. There are some good policemen who would like it to go back to those days. But as long as there are policemen who are afraid to speak up and call it out, its not going to go away.

In the past, it wasn't as volatile. Nowadays, we have more contact with law enforcement leadership. We didn't have as much then as we have today. But my point is we didn't have the volatility back then. Even though we had some relationships, there are lines that weren't crossed as blatantly as they are today. Now many of us know the police chief, we know the DA, we know him personally. Back then the average community person didn't have that relationship. The pastors did, they were smart. Whenever a congregant went to jail or they got beat up, they would get on the phone, and they would call the DA's office, they would call the chief, they would call some of the judge friends they knew, they would call some of the Black attorneys. Today, we have more communication than we did back then, but it wasn't as blatant and volatile. Nowadays, the murders, shooting people and saying the gun went off and all of that, that never happened to the extent that it is today. Less source

Can you describe the relationship between different racial groups in your community when you were growing up?

Well, it was much different then, than it is today. Especially given some of the things that happened today on the news, the exoneration of a White kid murdering some Black people. Back in those days, White people would have been just as upset as Black people. Everyone would have been upset at that type of event. We were still race conscious, but not to the point of open discrimination... White kids, Black kids, Asian kids, Mexican kids, we all played together. We were a melting pot of friends. And no one could come and threaten or as we used to say beat up on any of our crew because we didn't play that. We were all for one and one for all, unlike today, so the diversity was really different. I'm not saying there wasn't prejudice, there wasn't discrimination. I'm saying the kids are the ones who kind of taught the old folks. Because even when you went home, some of the parents didn't like the kids hanging out with some of the other kids. You could tell when they got in the car and you'd say "Bye, so and so." And they would look and the parents would ask, "Who is that?" You could almost read their lips, but it never prevented them from being our friends and we were their friends.

• • •

We were considered kind of like middle class. My mother owned a home, we had a car, houses. So, people thought we were kind of a class above them. But we weren't and we didn't want to be and didn't try to be. We were just fortunate. We always looked at ourselves as being poor, or low income. We weren't even close. Because our parents, although they were separated, my dad was always around in our life. He stayed in the Bay Area, but my mother raised three kids by herself.

What was your first job? Did you have a job as a teenager?

We used to do summer jobs. Out on American River Drive and Watt Avenue, on the north side of Watt Avenue there used to be hop fields. Hops is what you make great beer out of. And they were on this long, nine-foot wooden structure with string, and the hops would grow on a vine. And the hops would itch you to death. We used to go get work permits so we could work in the hop fields, you had to be eighteen. We would do summer jobs, we would go pick tomatoes... Getting up early in the morning, you go down to Old Sacramento, and a bus would take you out to the grape fields, the tomato fields. Many of the migrants would be down there because they followed the work. Less source

You went to the basketball games and you knew that the coach did not want to put three Black players on the floor at the same time. You knew that there were excellent African-American athletes on the bench, but that coach would not play them because he did not want to credit more than so many African-Americans. So would put in a player who was inferior because they were a different color and I think the African-American students were very cognoscente of that and spoke about it among themselves.

I think the other thing that hit me at UNM [University of New Mexico] was towards the end. I mean, there was a lot of things, but was when the Africans started coming to UNM and I felt that when the Africans started to come to UNM that our collective knowledge of ourselves and our connection was so poor, and that on both sides, the Africans thought they were superior to African-Americans because we had endured slavery, which I guess is different than colonialism. The African-Americans, on the other hand, felt superior because here were these people with these accents and these Black, Black skin trying to fit in. And felt superior because here we have been in this country, under whatever circumstances, but we have been here and we're citizens of this country and you're not. So I felt that disregard between two groups of people who definitely have a strong connection with one another. Less source

She's passionate about history and she belonged to all this, so it was that connection that you're with somebody that's really what we define as the community historian. She knows the history of her community.

The other thing that was unique about New Mexico is when marriage between groups started, and it started very early in the history in the state. So the first Africans who came into this state with the Spaniards literally blended with the population. They literally married the Hispanics, they married Native Americans, and they became part of pueblos, they became Candelarias and Naranjos. So it was the second wave of African-Americans who came here after slavery who started to develop their own communities and different ways of survival.

The unique thing with Brenda was she was here since 1870, so her grandmother was a Candelaria. So she was a product of that fluidity of mixture that was New Mexico in the midst of the segregation that is still upheld. Less source

My mother died with TB, but before she died she was recommended to go west, southwest, and the furthest we could get was Phoenix, Arizona, my dad moved Milwaukee to Phoenix, Arizona because of the climate, it was dry and for people with TB it was very acclimated to that end.

So my dad, we moved there and there's, according to what I can remember of living there, my dad worked, I guess, I don't know when he started working, but he started working with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, maintenance, and I say maintenance, he was a little bit of everything. Whenever the train come in and the porter got sick and they would pull him in to do it... My dad either go west, they go as far as Yuma, or east he goes as far as Tucson. Like I said, he was, might as well call him a jack of all trades because he was you know any time anyone was missing, particular porters, he would fill in and that was nice for me because sometimes I'd go to work with him... I'd get a chance to ride and that was very delightful for me. Less source

In September of '48, went to University of Arizona. That's where I met Bobbie. She was from Yuma, Arizona. She had gotten a scholarship through, what was the NAACP's branch there, had given her a scholarship. And of course I was on the GI Bill. We both graduated from there.

• • •

I was teaching in the all Black school and the students there, Marana was a farming area [about 20 miles west of Tucson] and the students were, the parents were migrant farmers, you know they followed the crops. There was a two room school, the campus was large, the Anglo, the Anglo school was on the side, Black schools on the same campus, but in the back of the school. And I had first to third grade and the other teacher had from fourth to sixth grade.

• • •

We had gotten married and Bobbie was working for, working at the department store in Tucson. And she had gone to the Post Office and she saw a poster on the board, and they were looking for teachers in the Indian School. That was how I got hooked up with that. So she told me, you know she said you ought to put an application in and I did. And at that time application was going to Brigham City, Utah, and I got a letter back from them saying we need teachers in the Albuquerque area, are you interested? And I said I sure am. And they were just beginning here, just beginning, the Navajo students were coming in and they were adolescents, so we come up with, we called it Special Navajo Program. In fact, many of the teachers that they had came from the big Navajo. When I say big Navajo I mean Utah. Less source

And as I grew up, I started to help him with, just with the work we were doing. We used to cut a lot of hay and plow gardens for half of the people in the valley. And we done that for years until I became 18 and then I left and got married and left home. So, other than that, it wasn't a bad place out there. We got along pretty good with the Mormons. And of course, the Mormons are like any people. If you treat them right, they'll try to treat you right. As far as having any real trouble with them, no.

What did you know about your father's and mother's background growing up?

Well, my father. His mother was a full blooded Cherokee indian and his father was a Black man.

What's the kind of things that they told you about their own lives?

Well, my Dad's life was just, pretty rough deal in his way, see, because he had no parents to carry him along. So he tied up with some people by the name of Watsons. Out there in Kansas. I guess, down around Missouri. And they went on one of these land drives. Opened up land. Free government land.

You mean homesteading?

Ahuh. But he was with those people, some people by the name of Watsons, and I think he lived with them for quite a while. Until he was about 16 or 17. And after that, he went into the Spanish American War. Or he was drafted. No, I guess he enlisted. And when he came out, he got some kind of lung trouble. So they told him to go to Arizona somewhere for his health. Well, he came through here and he got a job at the smelters. So he stayed. Less source

How would this stuff come in?

It came to us from Omaha [by rail], in ten-ton blocks of lead.

What did it look like. The working places? Did you ever go in there when you were a kid?

Well, all smelters look alike. You've got a hell of a lot of heat around you. It's like where I was, we had 16 open placed kettles on the floor which would hold 60 tons of boiling lead at a time. And, of course, there was space so you could work around them and in between them without any trouble. And as they would get up to a certain temperature, then you'd cool it down and skim the gold and silver out of the lead.

How would you do that?

Well, after it comes to a boil, and you started letting it cool off and as it cools off, the gold and copper would come to the top and the silver. And it would leave the lead because the lead was the heaviest... After we got all that off, it would be put into another kettle and you'd put different stuff in it to separate the other three minerals, which would be gold and silver and copper. So, it's quite a process on down the line. At the end, we'd have nothing but solid gold. And I don't know, of course, all of that goes into a blast furnace, that gold and silver, and it's cooked again to separate them and as it comes off fast, and cools fast, that's when they separate the gold from the silver. Less source

I remember us moving on Alexander. It was a home. It was part of one of the first sets of homes for the Black neighborhoods... We had our own house. When I grew up, the neighborhood was quite different. We were a community then. When there was an issue, everybody helped each other. It wasn't what church you went to. I think I must have been about sixteen, our neighbors across the street were in a domestic violence situation. Ms. Velma shot Mr. Charlie. I remember seeing it, and we all jumped. He had went in the house and apparently had jumped on her. He beat her and she came out. I think she said she was trying to scare him. But the gun jumped. They came and got Dad. Daddy went down to the police station with her. Ms. Velma spent about seven hours at the police station. They sent her home.

When I grew up, it was about community. Now it's what church you go to. Everybody acted together. I remember they were building streets in Vegas Heights and there was an activist named Albert Dunn. Everybody hated Albert Dunn because Albert Dunn says we need sidewalks like everybody else did. Albert Dunn got about thirty people and they locked arms. They wouldn't let them build the streets. He told them that we need curbs; we need neighborhoods like the White folks got. But they put streetlights in the sidewalks because they were just going to pave the streets. Albert Dunn said, "We pay taxes. We want sidewalks and we want lights." That was not what they were going to do, but they did it. They did put those streets in. Daddy came home and said, "Reverend Dunn is right." But Albert Dunn had about 20 people that could not tolerate him. Less source

My daddy said God told him to, God said go to Vegas. He told God that he didn't know anybody in Vegas and he wouldn't do that. But he came to Vegas. He had never been to Vegas. In fact, we originally moved to L.A. My father had a heart attack coming down the steps of my aunt's apartment. My mother told me that after the paramedics got there, he got up and said that we had to go to Vegas. The first three nights we lived in Vegas, we slept in a car.

• • •

My father was a laborer and Momma was home. I don't remember her working, but they say she did. Daddy worked construction. He tells us that when he went to work for Pardee Construction, who at the time did not hire Blacks, Daddy just went and started doing stuff until they hired him. I remember before he started working construction, there was scarce food. Momma would call us in. Daddy would tell us to eat. He'd tell Momma to feed us kids first and let us eat all we wanted - get all you want, but eat all you take. He would never eat until we were through.

When Daddy started working for Pardee, we moved to a house on Alexander. I used to think everybody went in for dinner at five thirty, because that's what we did. Five thirty, dinner was on the table. We sat down at the table and ate. Then one of us had to run Daddy a bath. I thought everybody was in their houses at five thirty, because we were in our house at five thirty. Daddy would come home, so it was time to eat. We set the table, and then the food was ready. Daddy had a bath afterwards. Then we were in for the night. We had to be in by dark. Momma didn't care what we were doing. I thought that was everybody's routine. Less source

The teachers were very motivated to help us learn because they knew how important an education was. They had gone to college; they had gotten their degrees. And the only jobs, of course, they had would be to be a teacher. And so they wanted us to have bigger and better lives and careers.

As you were speaking, I was thinking that the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision came down when you were in high school, perhaps?... any recollections of conversations in your community or in your family about what people thought that was going to mean.

A little concern I heard from teachers, who were saying that they would be discriminated against and that they would not be given jobs in the schools if there was desegregation. It was just something that nobody, I mean, the White people didn't want it, and Black people wanted better text books and better facilities for their children, but it would be at a price.

And any thoughts about how that decision has played out in our educational system between then and now?

I just think that the idea that a Black child is going to have a better education by sitting next to a White child in a school, I think, has been debunked. I think that it has to do with the teachers; it has to do with the facilities; it has to do with the curriculum. It has to do with a lot of things. So, in those times, in my school, we had the throw-away books from the White schools. When we walked to my school we passed the big, huge White school with the big football fields and baseball fields and school bands and all kinds of things like that. So we knew that we were being deprived, that we just didn't have the things that those kids had, and that it would be good for us to be able to have access to that. Less source

Black folk didn't get to this part of the country at all. Matter of fact, the majority of Black folks came here during the war in 1942 and they came here through Kaiser Shipyard. Kaiser Shipyard just actually went into different parts of the county and shipped people up here and put them in what I would say would be substandard housing. My folks were here before that but that was the biggest influx of Black people in the Pacific Northwest.

• • •

My mother was very visionary and so she got the idea, my dad was a common laborer. He worked as a custodian in the theaters, cleaned up theaters right down here on Broadway. And she got the idea that we should move to the country. It would be better to raise her family in the country than it would have been in the city so in about 1936, '37, we moved to Oregon City, which was really in the country. That was twenty miles from the city.

They bought a piece of property that some fellow had lost for taxes and they only paid thirty-six hundred dollars for forty acres... My folks, slowly as dad kind of got on his feet, started raising some things and one time they had four or five acres of Black caps [Black raspberries]. They did what was called share-cropping. They rented like twenty-six acres of their land to a guy who would farm it, do the wheat grain, plow it, fertilize it, and everything, and then he'd give him a portion of the money that he got from it every year. Less source

I don't remember bananas when I was a kid, at all, until my mother went to work for the shipyard and her income increased, or the family's income increased, overall. And she bought some of those things.

My mother had a very entrepreneurial spirit. She would sit by the window and read these farm magazines and say, "Well you know Donald, if we buy ten calves for five bucks a piece and we raise them this long, we can sell them for a hundred dollars apiece." And my dad didn't quite see it but he went along with her and at some point, even while he was working in the city, we were raising calves in Oregon City... Every time we would have a real big need - and I can remember one time when they blew the engine out on the 1935 Chrysler - they would haul off three or four cows to the stockyard, sell those cows and in turn that would pay for the getting the engine rebuilt. Less source

The special went down to Florida. If it had somebody that had to get off at North they would stop the train and let you off, if you had to get off. Or if somebody was getting on then they would stop the train. Black people, Negroes couldn't get on and off that train in North at that time. They couldn't do it. The White folks would stop you. You could not... Like my daddy, when he caught the train for up here he had to leave North in the night. He had to get somebody with a horse and buggy to drive him from North to Columbia, South Carolina. And they had to be back to North that next morning time enough so the man don't know what they did that night... Just like he hadn't even been no place. That's what my daddy had to do when he left us down there... He had the foresight enough to prepare and leave enough money for my mother to bring us up here. Cause if he didn't we wouldn't have never got up here. Because many families, they never go out of the South. Men got up here but they couldn't send back for their families because the crackers would open their mail and sent it back.

They would open the mail?

They would open that mail and send it back. Send that mail back. And tell you if you were up here to come home where you belonged. Because with them you belonged to them. Otherwise, it's like my name is Arnold and I had this place and people working, sharecropping on my land. And say, this is the Arnold's place. A colored family over here, one over here and one over here. These was Arnold niggers. All of them. Do you understand what I mean?

You stayed there. You had children, your children worked for me. It was this kind of a thing. You went no place.

From generation to generation. This went on. When my daddy, he did come up here, he went to work. He worked about a month, he sent the money back for my mother. He sent the tickets. And crackers took them tickets and sent them back up here and came down to the village we was living at and told my mother to write Eddie and tell him to come home where he belonged.

These things actually happened. This is not nothing that I'm fabricating or anything. This is, I was about 8 years old when we come up here. So, I was old enough to know these kind of things. That's what they told her. "You write Ed and tell Ed to come on back home where he belongs. Cause this is where he belongs." Other words, they take a man's family and keep them there to bring him back.

Since my mother had the money already for us to leave, she knew what had happened. She knew what had went down. So, what she did, got us all ready. Come out on a Saturday morning, was like the Fourth of July was the holiday coming up. And there had been a lady, she was like you hear about the underground railroad. You see, people talk about these things. But this lady was a stopping off place. She used to live there at North. Cause we were living in her house when we left. North station. We were living in her house. Her name was Minnie Durant. You went to North, when you went to Columbia, that's where you went. She was famous for her ice cream. She had a ice cream parlor up there. And everybody was, if they went to Columbia, they had to go get some Miss Durant's ice cream. That's the way she made her living. One of them kind of things. But she also, when you come out of the South and you could get to Columbia, you could lay over there until you, with her, she would put you up until you could get out. Less source

And this is, "Yeah, we hire colored, White and colored. We hire men and women in here." One of them kind of things. But then, this I remember. When the government sent General Arnold to inspect these plants that was getting government contracts - saying they were hiring these people and wasn't hiring the Blacks like, you know - I know when they did that because I met General Arnold down there in Celanese. In Newark. Now, I'm the first Black woman to work for Celanese anyplace in the world. The man that owned that company come from England when they hired me. To see what I looked like. This I know.

What sort of business was this?

Plastic business. Just like DuPont.

What did you do there?

What they had me doing? Cleaning the toilets... Wash up the toilets and clean up behind the women. But, see, I always was a stinker for education. And before the war broke out, they had a program over here, the College of Engineering. College of Engineering started, they built it right beside Central. I know when the building went up and I went there. And when I went down to Celanese to work I could cut you any kind of tools you want cut. I could read blue prints and I could use a lathe. But them jobs, you know, they didn't want us on them kind of jobs. Until the government sent somebody in there to investigate... The man asked me where was the rest of the colored women?... We done went through the whole plant. You the first one we come up with. Now, where's the rest of them?" I told them, I said, "I don't know. I ain't seen nobody but me. Of course, it's a big place." But you see, you had to use this... I'm keeping my job. So, now I got to play the dumb part. I can't just jump up and tell the man, "Look ain't nobody over there but me." Like I could today. You understand what I mean?

• • •

And after that they started to hire colored women on them jobs. And then I started to looking at the machines. And I'll never forget, this foreman, Mr. Miller was looking at me one lunch hour watching the machine... And he asked me, he say - this is when they start to find out what I knew. He said, "Would you like to run that machine?" I said, "I don't know." Don't want to be too anxious, glad to get on the machine; you can make more money. I said, "I don't know."... He said, "Did you ever try it?" I said, "Now, you know ain't nobody going to let me work on their machine. They trying to make the piece work, as you all call it."... He said, "I think you can run it. I'll tell you what I'll do. Would you like to give it a try?" I said, "I'll try. I'll try." I know how to run the machine... I could run the machine better than the man that was running the machine. Making screwdriver handles. And I always was fast with my hands. I got little hands but I was fast with my hands. He let me try the machine... And he's the one that took me out of the bathroom. Put me on the machine... I went on a man's job. That was a man's job... Then they started to move me from one machine to the other. Honey, I could operate them machines. I was the best operator they had down there. Because I knew what I was doing with them machines. And if my machine broke down, I could fix it. I didn't need the man to come and fix it... I could keep them machines going. And they made bomb busters... In the bombs that you drop. We made the little bit of a thing, about as big as your tip of your finger there. And that's what the explosive went in. That went in them bombs. Less source

One thing about him that I noticed, he owned us as his grandchildren and many people knew that, you know, that my father was his son, but there wasn't much they could do about it because he was one of the richest man there. So you just face it you know. The old man has a nigger for a son or something like that. And that was just about it. Most areas where you find the maids and the cooks had their child from their boss or something like that, then it was just that's your nigger baby, you keep him, you know. He has nothing else to do with it.

He's just a strong headed person and he had everything. He did not have to go to anyone and say give me this or will you lend me so much money or things like that. He was, well people would always be coming to him and he knew that he had a hold on these people, you see. And he could get them to do anything he wanted them to do be they White or Black. Less source

I'm sure there were people that felt like they wish she would just shut up, but she had an opinion about everything, but she had a love and a care for the community. My mom felt like the house should be an open door. There was always somebody extra living at our house. I remember there was a lady, Solange, that lived with us for a long time. She was from Haiti, and she lived in what was called the pa's room. The pa's room was called the pa's room because it was the room that my father's father had lived in when he came to live with us. It was a room that had floor to ceiling books. There were bookshelves and every wall in that room had books in it. We always have books. Our house always had books. My mom tutored really until she died. I don't know if she ever charged anybody any money for tutoring.

My mom was not somebody, you know how sometimes as people get older, they don't want anybody in their house. Well, that was not my mother. The more the merrier my mother would accept all the help that she could get. I don't know what people were helping her do half the time. I think half the time they would just sit there with her having a cup of coffee. But it didn't matter. She wanted people around and people were always welcome in our home. It didn't matter race, it didn't matter the age. I can remember people coming with kids and I remember being upset because they might break my toys, and my mother was like, we can buy more toys, don't worry about it. Everybody was welcomed. Everybody could come in. Everybody could open the refrigerator, go in and get whatever they wanted. Everybody could order food. It was a place that people were welcomed to.

Most of my childhood was spent at 738 Harriet. Kitty corner from L.C. Perry. Across on one side, I remember was the Evans and then the Stovers, Donna Johnson, and then the Williams lived on the other side in a big, big house. Williams was a big family. I loved to go spend the night at the Williams house. Then the Markses lived down the street Sharon and Timur. Then Yvonne Taylor lived on one side of me. Aunt Fanny lived up the street, the Whites lived up the street. The Dogers lived up the street. The projects were up the street, Parkridge. At that time you can leave your doors open. It was one big family. There were always people coming to see my dad, the family doctor. There were a lot of people that came and he just didn't feel like you should ever turn anybody away. Some people paid with chicken, some people paid with checks. It was an interesting household. You didn't have to call ahead to say I'm coming over. There were people who would just come. They would just show up. Oh, Mrs. Bass, I wanted to share so and so. Oh, Mrs. Bass, I came to bring you some barbecue. Oh, Dr. Bass, I caught some fish. I came to bring you some fish. For me it was a great household. I hated moving from Harriet Street. Less source

It was dedicated to slaves, Indians and paupers. It's on the National Historic Sites Registry... Chief Joseph Two Bears was one of the Native Americans who are buried there. We have three Osage Indian mounds there. And one of the relatives of the people who occupy those Osage mounds is Chief Joseph Two Bears, from the Osage nation.

• • •

There are 37 tombstones there, that are marked tombstones. And if I had a chance, I would show you. Perhaps you can see it this morning. I'll have that young man who was just in here, I'll have him go to our house and bring one of those tombstones that was just recovered. And everybody in the Springfield Museum and all around have been looking for this tombstone. This tombstone is titled Mahalia. Mahalia, the consort of a man. The consort of William Prunty, physician. The great-great-granddaughter of Nathan Boone. And the great-greatgranddaughter of Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Boone. And it was lost.

At that time, people thought that, this was during the influenza epidemic. And people thought that you could spread influenza through inanimate objects. And they unearthed many tombstones in the area because they thought they were the source of, of course this is uninformed, they were the source of the outbreak. And so it ended up back here with other stones, which are behind a fence. We could only go so far in rescuing that cemetery from the wilderness. You know, it had been overgrown for a long time.

• • •

And beyond the fence, there's another wooded area that goes all the way down to 160, where our property ends. And you know, there's tombstones in there. Tombstones of Native Americans who are about 10 miles from the Trail of Tears. So as we know, we look at history and sometimes in a flat way. But as I like to say, history is not flat. It has dimension. And when we, we look at the Trail of Tears, we see these people marching. We imagine they're marching in some sort of line from route point one to their destination. In fact, they were, people left the trail... They were left on the side of the road at the trail. And so some of those people settled in this area. As a matter of fact, there's a little-known story. Right down in a little town called Sand Mountain, Missouri. Sand Mountain, Missouri was an African American settlement near Greenfield, Missouri. And it's off Highway CC. As a matter of fact, my family owns property. I inherited that property on CC. It goes right down to the Army Corps of Engineers lake on Stockton. And there was a settlement there of Native Americans. That one night, one of my older relatives who has passed away most recently, her name is Elizabeth of Blessed Memory recalls being a little girl and hearing the screams of those people being driven from there, from their warm beds.

So when we look at history, we have to color it in sometimes. And often we don't have the hard data, which I'm sure you look for as a librarian. Less source

And we went down to the famous Route 66 and stuck our fingers out and went to San Francisco. And we lived in a place called Big Sur, California, in a place called Salmon Creek Commune. And we lived, we had basically dropped out. And I have no regrets about that. There's some things that I wish I had known. As Eubie Blake, the great jazz pianist used to say, "Youth is wasted on the young." (laughter) It was thoroughly wasted on me. But you know, it was a time where we were trying to find out about our place in the world. And I took this quite literally... I mean, really. As far as, the world had held nothing for me. So that's why I left this area. So I left Missouri. So I left home.

There are certain places that I go down Interstate 44 right now and I have what they call recovered memories. (laughter) Oh, this is a joke. I shouldn't be making fun, because some people actually do suffer from that particular kind of, you know, malady.

• • •

We used to refer to ourselves as the Cosmic Coloreds. (laughter)... Robert and I had so much fun together. Robert was a musician. Robert went to, and actually at one point, Robert decided that he was really going to pursue his musical career. And he went to Berklee School of Music in Boston... And then Robert started teaching at UCLA, Berkeley, taught music there. And one night I got a call from an officer in Berkeley, California. A police officer. And he said, you know, we just found your card in the pocket of a man who'd been murdered. It was Robert. He had been killed by those little gang bangers, you know. Those little people who didn't know what to do. They were lost children. With no direction and no ideals. And they killed Robert and they took his credit cards and they went out and immediately started using them. They were caught the first day.

• • •

Robert is so bound up with me and the Route 66 experience, which was hitchhiking across this country. That's what we did... 1967, 1968.

We were young. God only knows what else... And there were places along the way that I remember. And there's songs, there's songs that sort of like trigger a certain emotion that have to do with being on the road and traveling down Route 66... And the Young Bloods have a song that says... "Come on, people, smile on your brothers. Everybody get together and try to love one another right now." And we thought we could do that. We actually thought we could do that. I still think that. But I think it in a different way. I thought that you could do it just by your will alone. And it, of course, we know it takes more than that. Because there's other people involved in that view of the world.

There's a place that, I can’t think of, you know Carl’s Tuxedoes, is it Carl’s Tuxedoes on Glenstone, there was a restaurant beside there. It's like a diner or something like this. I don't know the name of it. But that was on Route 66. And I remember going in there one time. And we must have been a sight, my friend and I. Because you know, we're flower children. With complete outfits. And it wasn't that we were trying to scandalize anyone. It's just how we were. And we were seeing these old guys in there, these old local guys in there. And they were talking about us. And of course talking about our hair, we had afro hair and all this stuff. Not only afro, but unkempt afro hair. If you say afro, that would suggest a certain style. But you know, this was no style. (laughs) So anyway, I remember this person, these people talking about us. And I thought to myself, they're so uninformed. And the music was playing on the radio or somewhere. And every time I'd go by that place on Route 66, not every time, but often, you know, you feel a certain memory of the high ideals of loving one another. Right now.

• • •

I was in a 1959, we hitchhiked from somewhere, in Bakersfield, California, on Route 66, famous Route 66. Bakersfield, California was known for being a somewhat prejudiced town. As a matter of fact, it really was. And we were sort of unenthusiastic hitchhikers that day. We were lounging on the road and hitchhiking. And a man said, some so called local in a pickup truck, White person, said, "Get up." We thought he meant get up off the ground. He goes, "No, I mean entirely. Off the ground."... Then we knew he was threatening us... Some other people came down and they picked us up. Because they saw what was happening. And they drove us down the road for a long ways. And we drove too, it became dark. And it was a 1959 Ford Galaxie 500... So we roll down the windows. And the next point I remember, this mist was coming in my face. And I didn't understand what it was. But I was near the ocean. I was on Highway 1. It was right down, Big Sur, on the coastal highway. And I remember smelling that, you know, feeling that mist on my face and telling that guy, "We've got to get out." And we did. And we walked down the road. And we walked down to this place. And there were all these people who were young children on the road, as they say. And we just joined up with them and went up to Big Sur and lived there. So there it is. That's a little bit about Route 66. Less source

She was aggressive, ambitious, determined, and, probably because she had a child so early, she came to realize how unfortunate it was not to have continued in school. Because, I think she was about the sixth grade when she married my father. But that's all I heard all of my life, as far back as I can remember, "You've got to go to school; you've got to stay in school." "You've got to be a school teacher." That was all I heard. "Go to school. Stay in school. Be a school teacher."... Nobody had a dearer father than I had. He gave me lots of attention, both of them did. I had a lovely childhood. Poor - I didn't know it, however — but very lovely. My father, I'm quite sure, he didn't see the point in all that education my mother was talking about. It was O.K. If she wanted me to go to school it was O.K.

Do you think he would have felt the same way about a male child?

Probably not. Probably he would have had a little different feeling because there was certainly this sort of feeling in the family. But the mother chastized. The father didn't touch. You could speak to the child, but you could not whip the child, not the girl. But if you have any boys, then you can whip them. That was the law in the house, and it seemed to happen because at a very young age — something like three — my mother had stepped out somewhere and she came in just in time to see my father whip me, because I had been making noise outdoors and he was not feeling well, and he was in bed. She got up and came in just in time to see him evidently about to slay me, I don't know what, and the law was laid down then. So I grew up knowing that my father would not strike me, because a man did not strike a girl. But if there was a boy, a brother — that I always hoped I'd have — that dad would whip him.

Interestingly enough, my mother whipped me just about every day of my life. [laughter] And my father only had to look at me and I didn't give him any trouble at all, knowing full well that he wasn't going to whip me. Only once in my span of living did he almost whip me and I liked to die for it. My mother was not as large as I am. She was always hoping to weight a hundred and ten pounds. Oh boy, that little lady was tough [laughter]. But she whipped me every day of my life about something. Less source

I remember my father, being a railway postal clerk, had a gun as part of his standard equipment. I really don't know what they did in the race riots, but he did something in it; I was too young, I suppose, to remember anything about that, I really don't know when they took place, but I heard him talk about it. One day my mother had a younger sister who was visiting or staying with them, and a White man followed her down the street in his horse and buggy. He had, I guess, harassed her all the way in. By this time, she was weeping, coming down the street, and she ran up the steps, and he stopped - he had a horse and buggy - and ran up the steps after her. And my father came out, and that's the time he had his gun, and he told him if he didn't get off his front porch, he was going to blast his head off. Less source

We went to this ladies house because we didn't have room to stay at the dorm, they didn't have African Americans in the dorm at the time. But there was a lady who had a house for African Americans; she had a contract with the University. But her rooms were filled. And I found out later that it was not so much filled, it was a colored thing, we were too dark to stay there. So they gave us another lady to stay. So we stayed at this other lady's house. Mrs. Pew. But we were there four days getting registered for school. And her husband owned a garage. And something happened and it blew up. And after it blew up we didn't have housing and I had to come back home because I couldn't get housing while I was going to school.

• • •

I was trying to figure out why is it that we are so segregated, what causes us to be segregated and what are the issues. The issues that I saw as a teenager it was employment, it was education. I thought of employment we couldn't work anyplace but a stockperson or a janitor. We didn't have an education. We didn't have any Black teachers. And there weren't any jobs there for councilors or anything like that in the school system and so we had to take the lesser job. And I think our protest was to bring it to the attention of the public, these kinds of problem that we are having. The African American people didn't understand why we were protesting. And we would try to get their support. About 40% of the people with us were White. And they understood, they very much understood. And we kind of researched why they weren't with us. And they said, I got a job. They see me down here and I lose my job. And we understood that. And so the few of us, the few of us continued to bring it to the forefront of the community. Less source

I went back to Louisiana and told my parents we needed to move to this big city of Muncie, Indiana, and it was really big compared to where we had come from.

What was it like moving from the Deep South to the North?

Very scary, because we had not, we didn't know people, and we didn't know how to really get to know people, and we had not gone to church in the South. But we started going to church in Muncie. Someone invited, well where my mother worked at, it was Green Hills Country Club in Muncie. And she was invited to come to church by one of the, in fact the minister was who invited us to church was working there also. That was the beginning of a very wonderful experience just because it was a small church, and we were able to meet people, and that, then life began to be much more exciting for us.

My family didn't go to church, but I did. I went to church, and I got to know the minister and his wife, and he, they had a son and no daughters at home. And they really encouraged the young people there to do things in the church, and to go on outings and things like that. So it was very exciting to me when you didn't have that in your life.

Do you think there were any important values or lessons that were instilled in you from the church?

Absolutely. Absolutely. They taught us honesty, caring, integrity. And the very important things. There were some things that I didn't like or appreciate, but I understand why. With dress, you know, very strict. You couldn't wear pants, and you couldn't wear shoes with toes out, and a lot of things that I didn't understand. You couldn't wear makeup, and those kinds of things. But you know, I learned to just be modest, and do what I felt for myself. I did not wear pants... when my parents were living, or my husband's mother. It was something I wanted to do, but I respected them very much, and I didn't do that. I didn't believe it was wrong, still don't believe it was wrong, but I respected the fact that they thought it was. Less source

It was where Blacks lived but they had to ride the school bus because they were so far away. And they were closer to the White school but they couldn't go. So they had to ride the school bus to where we were, where we live. You know, that sort of thing.

You had siblings in your family?

I have a younger sister who's four years younger than myself. OK. And I did have a brother who was six years older than me but he died a few years ago. So it was just the three of us.

Did you get along well with your brother and sister?

I did with my brother, I'll put it to you like that, my sister no, because she was a tattletale. She told everything. No I did not get along with my sister... You know my brother, he was 6 years older than me so my brother was a sports enthusiast. So whatever he did I did, I copied everything. And he loved that you know. And he would always take me, because in our family it's always being, the oldest is always taking care of the younger. You know I don't know how it is in other families but for a lot of people that I know, that is, that's it. The oldest always takes care of the young. And so my brother did and this is at the time also that we roller skate and we were only, Blacks were only allowed to roller skate one day a week and that was on Monday.

Oh my God, who made these laws?

That's the laws, honey.

The laws of like the state of Ohio?

White folks made them laws.

That's a ridiculous law.

You can call it ridiculous if you want to, but that's the way it was. Less source

What did they do for a living?

Well several things, daddy did. He was a cook and a chef. He worked on the railroad. So he was a cook on the railroad train. Well that's what I mean. I know he worked in the Ohio State School. I want to say for the Deaf if I'm not mistaken; he was a cook there. I don't know all the jobs he had, I really don't. He had several of them. Mother was a maid, yeah. At the Broadway Hotel so that was for the rich, is where she was a maid at this hotel, Whites only.

What was it like growing up in Columbus, Ohio?

It wasn't as nice as it is for you to grow up here in Duluth, Minnesota or wherever, I'll put it to you like that. Because it was segregation. When I grew up.

Deeply segregated?

Pardon?

Deeply segregated? Deeply, Yes like...

I know what you're saying, I know exactly what you're saying. Yes it was, it was really. Yeah. We lived in the projects. Poindexter Village is the name of the projects. And it was built in 1940 so the same year as myself. But, oh Lord, how can I say this? I don't know. We couldn't, Blacks could not go to school with the Whites. We could not ride the school bus. And luckily for me or those of us who lived in the Poindexter Village, we could walk to elementary school. What you would call middle school is junior high, Champion Junior High. It was only a five minute walk. So we walked through the playground into the junior high school, you know but when it came to high school that's a different story. It was a longer walk. I'm thinking it took about a half an hour. And our winters were like they were here in Duluth. That's how it was when I was growing up. And like I say Blacks still couldn't ride the school bus. We had to walk and that was a time when girls did not wear pants. That was the law.

The law?

That was the law, yes it was, little girls... So what we had to do was wear snow pants or jeans and stuff like that. And then take them off when you get to school. But you had to wear dresses or skirts, that kind of thing, that was it. Less source

And I bought some shoes. It was in the fall. Came a rain. And many times, we liked to hunt squirrels and rabbits, and ducks, or what ever. Going out hunting one day and it rained. And those shoes... I paid a dollar, ninety-eight cents for. They got wet and the bottom come out. And that tickled my brother. Now this was hard livin', but it's better times than what we're livin' in now.

Better times?

Better times.

Why?

Because. You did not have to be afraid to go out doors. You could leave your house open. Neighbors wouldn't bother you. Wouldn't do anything. If they was hungry, you would get them some food and leave it at that. So, I think that's better times than what we're living in now. But nevertheless, I thought I had bought me some real good shoes. And I had some money on me. And I went out and tried to catch me a rabbit to eat, to have some meat, which we really didn't have to do. But, it was just that I liked rabbit meat, cotton tails especially.

You said your grandfather acquired land?

Well I was grown. And he purchased that. And my father purchased two hundred and twenty acres adjacent to it. And we raised all kinds of potatoes, fruits, vegetables and what not. And we didn't have to buy too much, maybe a little flour, raised our own, what not. So nevertheless, I never did know anything about depression too much. Less source

Somewheres in the shuffle... no one adopted me. So I lived in my parents' home for about like six years by myself. From 'bout eleven year old, cooking for myself. Whatever to be did, I did it by myself. I would go to bed about sundown 'cause I was afraid of the dark.

I cooked in three different doctors' homes. That's how I learned to cook. I'm a chef cook by trade. I like the trade. Now. I cooked for Dr. Nifong, Raymond Thomas, and MC Knight, Dr. Mc Knight. And their wives taught me to cook, clean house and yards, just for my food. And then I, when I turned about fourteen year old, one of my cousins saw that I was really having crisis. Carried me to Fort Worth. I got a job at Winn Dixie... Been working for them forty-eight years.

I never had to get up Monday morning and go look for a job 'cause I've always had a job. And of course, I did other little things. I worked for Blessing-Mc Kinley funeral home. I used to clean it up. And course, it was meanness going on then. But, Blacks was just as mean to the Whites as Whites were them, just different kinds of mean. We all had our little tricks we could pull. And as I cleaned up the funeral home, once I can remember very clearly that they would scare me at night with sheets and what ever. And at the time, I didn't know. I thought they might be some of the bodies that was laying there on the tables. So, the guy owned the funeral home put a sheet on and was going to scare me. And I broke that up. Nobody ever scared me again. I broke the broom across his back. And I found out right then there weren't any ghosts or haunts, 'cause he hollered louder than I did. Made him holler. He told everybody not to bother me.

I can remember. Oh, when I was just a kid. We didn't have a funeral home for Blacks here. We had two different, separate cemeteries. There was just a fence row right down the side of 'em. They had a funeral once, a White guy, Blessing's had to take care of the body. And he got a van. And over half, well, about half of the casket was sticking out in the rain, you know. I forget where about it was, but I can remember for real back then. Was muddy roads, wasn't any streets, muddy roads. And they put the body in the grave and just barely covered it up. Less source

I can remember my parents talking about how they attended school down by The Bottoms, that's the creek down by Mr. Mac's home. And they would walk. And they would tell me how they would fix their lunches of, maybe, fatback, biscuits and syrup. And they would carry it in a bucket, and that would be lunch for them when they went to school.

My mother moved back to the homestead around 1976. She is still on the old estate now. She's still living there. She is suffering from Alzheimer's now. She's eighty-one years old. And she does recognize that she's back on the farm, because every now and then she'll look out the rear mirror and she'll say "oh we're on the farm, because I see the pecan tree." That just lights me up then when she says, "oh I know I'm back on the farm now." Less source

We fished, the neighbors would bring their horses and cattle. The weather was very dry, if you remember the dust bowls. They would bring their cattle to drink, and we got to see all kinds of horses, cows, and sometimes, people would bring their ducks and let them float around in the water.

My mother had a beautiful fruit orchard, we had lots of peas, pears, apples, a great big grape arbor where we had grapes to eat, grape jelly, grape juice. We had a wonderful life. At this point in life, someone might think we were in poverty, but I think poverty is a state of mind. My parents were very, as you would say now, uneducated. But they had lots of skills that caused us to have a happy home.

My father would be considered a shoe cobbler. He could always sew our shoes, they never looked that way. And where he got all of this leather from I never knew, but I remember him putting them in a big pan and setting it behind the stove where the leather would get soft, so he could use it.

My mother was a very good seamstress, she made our clothes, we were well-dressed. I think, if I remember back, she always had a tape measure around her neck, and a needle in her dress. So they both worked together. We had very little, if any, arguments. We were never allowed to be violent to anyone, and especially our household family, which was our brothers and sisters. We had family members, my mother's father lived there, not in our home, but he had his home. My aunt lived down the street where I spent lots of times. She had no children, so I was considered her daughter, and I thought, I hope there never comes a time when I have to make a decision between my aunt and my mother, because she was very, very nice to me, and taught me lots of things.

And there was neighbors and friends who lived in the little village. We finally got a church, it was used as a school in the weekdays, and Sundays we had Sunday school and church. Church wasn't every Sunday, I think we shared a minister with three other churches, so you can see that we didn't have church services every Sunday, but we did have Sunday school, and we had lots of fellowship and lots of fun with the other children. When the church was like going on, the pews were piled up and they would set the desks down so we could have school.

There was a stove, it kept the building very warm and very comfortable. There was a piano there that was played whenever someone would come by that could play. So I have a fond memory of my childhood life, and as I said, I am proud to say that, I am proud to be the daughter of my parents, as they would be considered now maybe illiterate, but whatever that means, I have never known to cause it to be offensive to me, because they were honest people, well respected, and had good credit, and good morals. And to me, that is what I have always tried to maintain, to be an asset to our family. Less source

So that was the vehicle that kept us, you know, marching in a straight line. And you know, I'm very fortunate none of my brothers or sisters ever went to jail or prison, because, if you look at what's going on today, having raised 10 kids and with that kind of record, you know, I think that's amazing.

Shortly after I graduated from high school, and this is obviously the heart of the civil rights movement, there was a lot of activity in my hometown, in Natchez. A lot of demonstrations, a lot of breaking the rules, if you will. A lot of arrests.

My cousin said they got arrested, because they were planning a march and they took about, I don't know, 150 or so people, locked them up. And some of them they sent to the state prison. And so what they experienced was, they were given a laxative and then stripped of their clothes, and then you know what the story is after that. Obviously there wasn't enough washrooms for all of them, and so it was a mess. It was like an untold story. I mean, the civil rights movement didn't, I mean all of the history, and they had not picked up that story. Then there was people who, one of the men who worked at the same plant my dad worked at, a Black man, his last name was Jackson, he had gotten a promotion and he worked the evening shift and when he got in his truck to come home, the truck exploded and killed him. Because they figured he got a White man's job. There was other Blacks that were killed in the area. FBI later found, some of that. Less source

Even though there are people qualified, they are just leaving this town and getting the same jobs elsewhere because this town doesn't want them. The people think they are satisfied. They think we are satisfied, which we are not, but nobody's afraid to speak up and say this. And if they have a little meeting it's infiltrated by the Whites and they come over and they argue the point and then they appease us and they think we are happy again and we are complacent.

• • •

I think the Black history of Douglas County [Kansas] has been suppressed and I think that I don't know what it is because I am not like you. I am not a searcher for facts. I don't have the patience for that. But I think there is a history for Blacks in Douglas County and I think it is relevant, but like when I was going to school no one was willing to bring it out, then it's going to remain dormant, but I would like to read something one of these days, something like you are trying to do, what Blacks have accomplished, from time of inception to Lawrence right now, but I don't know. I hope your compilations are accurate and detailed so it will be worth while. Regardless of how small it is, every community has a history, a very interesting history... Like now I am going out taking pictures and I am trying to find gravestones that match different cemeteries and around here, I found one name that's in all the cemeteries, and that's Mears. Less source

From the induction station I went to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. Stayed there for eight weeks, in infantry training, then from there with no pause, no break, I got on the bus, went down to Ft. Polk, Louisiana, for eight weeks. Then I had eighteen days when most guys got thirty to report to Vietnam from Ft. Lewis, Washington. I was in Vietnam October 7, 1967.

What intrigued you about Southeast Asia?

I don't know. Something about, once I stepped off that plane in Hawaii there was something I liked, just the smell of the air. Then when I got to the Philippines the air was smelling a little bit better, and when I got to Vietnam, the air was beautiful, and just got into me. I will never forget the smell, that tropical, I just loved it, and once I stepped off the plane I said, I will never leave here. Not that I was going to be killed, but I just wanted to stay there. Still would like to go back over there.

I looked at it like this: I said that I wasn't going to fire my rifle over there because I didn't want to hurt anybody, didn't want to kill anybody. I said these people haven't done nothing to me and vice versa yet. And I didn't fire my rifle for three months, and then after that third month period, never ceased; for eighteen months it never ceased.

The thought never really occurred to me that I was going to be killed, wounded, shot, or anything over there, because once I got on the train to leave Ft. Lewis, Washington, I told my parents I was coming back the way I was stepping on this train, because I had tremendous survival instincts, even before I went to the army... I mean fear over there, you didn't have any fear if you were on the line, but once you got into a fire fight, you weren't afraid of anything. Only thing you were afraid of is you couldn't see them and that was the main fear. You never saw where the shots were coming from. Less source

You went down the hall, if you were in a group talking, a teacher would run up and ask you what was going on or would you please move on down the hall. They didn't want you talking, because they didn't know what was going on.

Do you think these news events made them afraid of what Blacks may do?

To an extent, yes, because they would ask us, you would walk in a classroom they would ask you what are they going to do today or this week? What's going on? All I could tell them is I don't know any more than you do. I know when the news breaks. They figured since you were Black and you were talking to another Black that you guys were passing information on, or all Blacks were supposed to know what was going to happen and we didn't.

What were some of your fears when you were leaving Lawrence High School for the last time and enroll in KU [University of Kansas]?

Yeah, I was afraid all right. I didn't know what to expect, what kind of people I was going to run into for sure. I knew it was a lot larger than Lawrence High and my mother and my uncle and my aunt had told me some of the things that happened to them racially when they were up there, how they had been treated, so I wasn't sure how I was going to fare up there.

What effect did national news have on the Blacks at KU? Did they all have a sudden start to get more assertive and try to help themselves more so than before the civil rights movement was taking place?

Yes, I think so. I can't remember. It was something to do about having more Blacks up in the dean of women's office. They wanted a Black woman up there and one for the dean of men. I remember there was about fifty students that went up and sat down by the chancellor's office and wanted to talk to him and he wouldn't talk to them. They wouldn't move, so eventually they all got arrested and brought down here to the county jail and booked. Less source

And of course, Muskogee had a Black district of businessmen. Muskogee was kind of different perhaps from any other place in America as far as Black people were concerned because they were economically sufficient. You probably had more millionaires per thousand in Muskogee than you had anywhere else in the United States and that was due to the connection with the tribes and oil. I knew several of them who were quite wealthy from oil. Then there were with others who were quite wealthy from other things.

I knew, personally knew, about five doctors in Muskogee of African descent. I knew about five attorneys of African descent and a large number of teachers. These folks were well educated and so that made Muskogee a bit of a different place. You had businesses that were totally operated by Black people. You had tailor shops, you had a department store, T.J. Elliot's and as I said, you had the other professions. You had grocery stores, a number of grocery stores - not just one, a number of grocery stores. There was a hotel and a restaurant that was African American owned and was a popular spot to have dinner or lunch and that kind of stuff. And there were several restaurants all on 2nd Street and, of course, there were recreational parlors as we call them, pool halls. (Laughs)

A movie theater?

Yeah, a movie theater and various other things. But your life, more or less, revolved around the school. The church happened to be the gathering place for Black people and you'd be surprised how people could divide themselves according to education and according to income, economic division within the races. It didn't create any problems, but there were some churches where the elite attended and then there were some where the rest of us went. (Laughs) But this was quite a place to grow up in at that time.

• • •

In the early days of Muskogee, you also had the Native Americans mixed in.

Yes. At one time, I would say they were the biggest population because this was Creek Territory. It was probably African American and Native American. And of course, the Native Americans at that time, more than likely, were slaves of the Indians because that's how my mother's folks got here, over the Trail of Tears. She was Creek.

From where?

From Alabama or Georgia, one of the two. Don't know exactly where they came from. But my grandmother - my mother's mother's folks were Native American and she was probably born shortly after they got to Oklahoma. I tried to figure out the time that they were married, she and my grandpa, my mother's dad - and I've forgotten what calculations I put on that trying to figure out the time frame and what have you. The Dawes Commission [negotiated agreements with the Five Civilized Tribes that would end tribal land ownership and give each member individual possession of a portion of the tribal lands] and meeting in Muskogee, when they registered her, they put some of her family on the blood role and they put some on the Freedmen Role. She's on the Freedmen Role rather than the Blood Role. Well what that did was affect some of your benefits. I never really went after the benefits, anyway. I have some cousins who do carry cards and they get the benefits but I figured, especially at this stage of the game, I can do just as well without it. Less source

Had it changed much?

Not much, no. The population has changed. When I was there you had a little United Nations as I called it. You had Black kids, Japanese kids were returning, parents were returning from the concentration camps that they were put in during World War II. They were returning to Los Angeles. You had Jewish people. You had a mixture of races. Well, now the school is predominantly Hispanic and Black and low income and that's the way Los Angeles has changed. Some Asians also. That's the way it has changed.

• • •

I guess everybody was abandoning farms because the war had been over about five years and many of those folks had gone to work in some defense capacity or the other. They never came back to Oklahoma and they worked in packing houses in Kansas City and all of those areas. So I went there and one of my relatives got me a job where he was working at a bakery. I could work there and attend classes during the day, but I also couldn't stay off 18th and Vine and that created a problem. (Laughs)

And what was that?

That was the swinging jazz district. The most famous district - perhaps, one of the most famous in the nation. 18th and Vine in Kansas City, Missouri and it's a Jazz Museum, Negro Baseball Hall of Fame is there at this point. So it is still quite historical. It was the place to be and the place to be seen. So I'm young and the bright lights can go to your head in a hurry (laughs) and get you in trouble. So, I had to leave there in '53 - didn't have to, but you had to keep a certain grade point average. I didn't keep the grade point average; got drafted. Which wasn't bad.

And went where?

Went to Great Britain for about a year and a half, in which I seriously thought about staying, taking a British citizenship because for the first time, as a Black person, you got some freedom. You're totally free. Less source

I had the quarter, and although I was a teenager, about fifteen years of age, as short as I am they did not know that I was not just a child. I took my quarter, I went, and I had this long hair that was down to my waist cut off. It took her just about three minutes, just to take the scissors and cut it all around, just straight, no style or anything, and then she handed me this hair in a sack. I left there, and of course friends wanted to know, where did you get your hair cut? I told them, "At the dime store." And they said, "Don't you know they don't cut colored folks' hair at the dime store?" So that was one occasion when they did not recognize; I passed inadvertently. Because the one thing that I have never been ashamed of is the fact that I am of African descent. I've always been proud of that.

• • •

The one thing that I remember our principal saying in assemblies, "This is not a Negro high school. This is a high school. We're as good or better than any other high school in the United States." Our motto was "Be Prepared," and we had teachers who saw to it that you got what you should get. In literature, we offered all of the courses that they are now talking about here in California in order to enter the University of California. We had Latin; Caesar and Virgil were taught in our high school. We had French, and, I don't believe we had Spanish, but we did have French, and we had Latin. And those were required subjects. For those students who were what we call college-preparatory students, there was civics and government, there was history, literature, English literature, American literature. You were allowed to take one or two electives a year. Among those were typing and shorthand, which I think should have been a required subject for anybody who wants to go to college. You could have clothing, cooking, gym. For the fellows, because at that time we didn't think, like we do today, that men and women are one and the same, we had woodwork classes for the men, manual arts.

• • •

Another thing that we noticed in the papers: if a crime was committed they would call a person's name once, and then in the article, "The Negro did this and the Negro did that" and "They caught the Negro at such and such a place," just like they were talking about the dog, the dog, the dog, you know. And with a small n.

And, of course, there was that thrust there. See, NAACP was started in 1910, and there was a thrust there to have people capitalize Negro. Now, of course, I could see no real percentage in capitalizing Negro. I see no point in capitalizing Black. In fact, I see no point in you calling me by a color. Call me Afro-American, because that is what I am, you see. If you want to describe me you might describe me by my color, but don't treat me as a person without an origin. When you identify me by a color. And that's all Negro is, Black. When you identify me by a color and that's the only way you identify me, you take away a part of my citizenship and a part of my birth-right. And it is true I do not know and haven't studied to search to find the city or the country in Africa from which I came, but I do know that my ancestors, at least a part of my ancestors, were brought over here on the ship as slaves. And if you wanted to say what you actually, for me to give my identity by birth, I would be an African-American-Indian. Because that's what is there. Less source

None, no. There was no social interaction. Actually, none until you got into the YWCA. We were among the first to really work toward integration. Now, there was a Black branch of the main YWCA. And, of course, all of the girl reserves, the business and professional girls, the industrial girls, Blacks were in this setting and the Whites were in another setting. I was perhaps the liaison, or the go-between, or the one to begin to bring about some kind of cooperation, some kind of togetherness.

I was a member of the business-professional club. We began to meet together and to do things together, and it was out of this setting in the Y that we started the sit-ins in 1930. You see, the sit-ins were not a product or original in the sixties; we had sit-ins in the thirties, when Whites and Blacks would go together to the theaters and the restaurants, and I was a part of that, and sit down to be fed. And would sit and sit and wait and wait and sometimes finally be waited on and sometimes never waited on. To go to a meeting in hotels, Blacks had to ride the freight elevators; they couldn't ride the regular elevators. Yet they're going to the same meeting with Whites and Blacks in this hotel. I can recall on one occasion when I went to the Baltimore Hotel there when they wanted us to go around and come in another door. It happened we refused to do that and we did get in.

How would the appropriate city authorities react to these sit-ins going on? Do you recall?

I do not recall any arrests at that time. You see, we were in the throes of the Depression, following the crash of 1929, and as I recall, at the same time that we were doing these things there were voter-registration drives, there were thrusts to have representatives in government. It was, oh, in the late thirties or early forties that we elected a commissioner to the city of Kansas City, Kansas. There was this thrust to break down the barriers in department stores that would allow people to try on hats and to be fitted for gloves. We were breaking down, taking those signs down, "For White Only," that appeared in the department stores in the rest rooms. And fighting for the lunch counters too, and hotels and theaters and all to be desegregated. I left Kansas City in 1948, and it was really not until the late forties and in the fifties that the theaters began to allow Blacks to come in and sit anyplace that they wanted to sit. Less source

My parents were sharecroppers. We lived on farms and they cared for the farms, grew food, took care of the farm. We were farmers mainly. We farmed acres and acres of food. Cabbage, okra, you name it, we grew It. Potatoes, watermelons, peaches. It was just a variety of everything. The only thing I can remember buying at a store when I was growing up was a two pound bag of sugar. We got that once a month. That was it. We never bought candy. We always ate the licorice. We made that from sugar cane. We never got candy. We never had toothaches because we didn't get candy. We got candy on Christmas Day and that was your orange slices with the sugar on it.

We moved to Charlotte in 1963 or '64, I believe. '63 or '64. Charlotte was segregated. You had your White bathrooms, your Black bathrooms. Was it Black or Negro bathrooms? It was just segregated. Everything was detached up. Everybody was separate. The school that I attended which was Second Ward was all Black. We never went to any other schools. That's our junior high schools.

Had you been less aware of racial segregation in Union County?

Yes, because we never... It was only the one to two class school. It wasn't like you had a bunch of racial people running around. We never went into town because it was only one street. We had everything at home. We didn't have a TV at that time so we didn't see anything. We had a radio. We really didn't know about it. We could read about it and hear about it but it never affected us personally until we moved to Charlotte. Less source