Save Our History: Voices of Civil RightsTranscript
Speakers:Mekhi Phifer, Woman 1, Woman 2, Man 1, Patricia Stephens Due, Man 2, Gretchen Weber, Woman 3, Woman 3, Man 3, Bettie Dahmer, Man 4, Gene Young, Frankie Rogers, Man 5, Man 6, Man 7, Grace Booth, Kenneth Mullinax, Doxie Whitfield, Man 8, Woman 9, Man 9, Man 10, Adrian Dove, Man 13, Imogene Player, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Michael Dizaar, George Wallace, Man 12, Woman 5, Hugo Owens, Woman 6, Man 13,Woman 7, Betty Bunce, Jacqueline Dash Ziglar, Morris Thompson, Hazel LeBlanc Whitney, Billy Roy Pitts, Ellie Dahmer, Man 14,Jean Desmond, Angie Buck
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MEKHI PHIFER: I’m Mekhi Phifer. As an actor, I know the power of the human voice, and the program you’re about to see contains some of the most powerful voices I’ve ever heard. In the summer of 2004, a group of journalists traveled for seventy days by bus around the country, on a mission to record stories from people who lived through the civil rights era, an era marked by intense emotion, turmoil, and change. The mission, called Voices of Civil Rights, is a project of the AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Library of Congress. Today we are proud to let you hear the words and see the faces of the people who lived through this difficult period in our history. Some of them have been waiting a lifetime to share their stories.
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WOMAN 1: I remember being born in the segregated south of Memphis,Tennessee.
WOMAN 2: We lived back in Arkansas at this time.
MAN 1: In Hattiesburg, Mississippi –
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: Tallahassee, Florida –
MAN 2: Masonville, Kentucky –
GRETCHEN WEBER: This takes place in 1963 when I was eleven years old.
WOMAN 3: 1959 or 1960, it’s been a long time.
WOMAN 3: I consider myself a witness, living witness, for the civil rights movement. A lot of people talk about what they hear or what someone has told them, but I am talking about what I went through as an individual.
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MAN 3: In elementary and high school I kind of felt that there were two Americas, Black America and White America, and I just belonged to Black America.
BETTIE DAHMER: I had grown up in a segregated society.
MAN 4: So you realized very early that you just lived different lives.
WOMAN 1: It didn’t faze me when I young because I thought that was just the way it was supposed to be.
GENE YOUNG: We lived in our Black society and there was the White society.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: No mingling of the races.
FRANKIE ROGERS: When I was a little girl, I used to walk along Madison Avenue holding my daddy’s hand and he’d always take his baby shopping and there was a restaurant called Piccadilly’s. You could always see White people sitting in a restaurant eating and the food looked absolutely scrumptious and it smelled good, like they had the neighborhood almost lit up. I know it had the street lit up. But I was like, why can they eat in there and I can’t? And dad would kind of snatch my hand and say stop staring in there. Daddy was a very proud man, you know, and he just didn’t want me staring and wishing. He used to say those things. Don’t stare and wish you could do things.
MAN 5: The only thing I knew was the Blacks would live right down the road that they were worse off than I was.
MAN 6: We lived on the top of the hill. The Blacks lived down at the bottom of the hill.
MAN 7: We had a wonderful Black woman who was our cook and maid.
GRACE BOOTH: A lady that my mother hired to come and clean –
KENNETH MULLINAX: And it was a wonderful lady by the name of Rosie and Rosie was like my mother. She played with me; she read to me; she cooked. I loved her. I loved Rosie. I still love Rosie. The city bus would take Rosie back home and as the bus got Rosie, I would kiss her on the cheek and she’d kiss me, and one day, right as the bus was leaving and Rosie had kissed me and I had kissed her, all of a sudden I saw my grandfather pounding on that glass window and he told me that I was not supposed to be kissing, to use his term, Negroes, that that’s not something that good White boys did and that it was wrong. And he grabbed me hard by the arm and spanked me and I cried and I ran out. My whole world was turned upside down because what I thought was right was now wrong and I was very, very angry.
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DOXIE WHITFIELD: We were taught at home that we were just as good as anybody else but in what we called the real world, we always knew that it was different.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE:Basically, I think that I was just protected by my parents.
MAN 8: We were kept in sort of a controlled environment.
BETTIE DAHMER: When we went to town, we didn’t eat in restaurants so therefore we didn’t go through the back door.
MAN 9: Our parents in the community tried to insulate us from those kinds of things.
WOMAN 9: We never knew that we were living really in a form of slavery for all of the things we were not allowed to do.
FRANKIE ROGERS: We were only allowed to go to places like the zoo on Thursdays – Thursdays was colored day – to the fairgrounds amusement park on Tuesday because that was colored day.
MAN 10: I remember asking my dad, I said “Dad, let’s go and see this movie at the Strand or let’s go see this movie at the – at the Malco.” He said “Son we can’t go down there.” I said “Why not?” He said, “That’s just for White people.”
ADRIAN DOVE: There was a separate theater and there was only one day a week that you could go.
MAN 10: “Just for White people?”
MAN 4: I loved to read and I couldn’t go downtown to the library.
MAN 10: And I said “What about the fairgrounds?” Same thing.
MAN 4: Why can’t I go there?
MAN 10: And I felt like if they’re advertising it on television, why can’t I go out?
ADRIAN DOVE: We were not allowed. It didn’t mean us.
MAN 2: Once you grew up and you began to read, you start seeing the White only and colored only signs.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: Something so simple as a Dairy Queen and it had a White sign and colored. The colored had to go in the back.
WOMAN 5: The White water fountain was big and tall and then on the side there was this little attachment that looked like a toilet bowl.
MAN 13: You were getting all of these messages all of the time.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: Everything was separate. It wasn’t really equal, it was just separate.
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IMOGENE PLAYER: Santa would come to town on Christmas Eve and I remember our parents would always take us down to see Santa and he would come through downtown but downtown was roped off. Where we had the viewing area – the viewing area for Black people was different from where the White people could be. They could be lined up on both sides of the sidewalk for blocks down the street and we were all herded off in one little area.
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MICHAEL DIZAAR: Growing up for me, I had rules. We had do’s and don’ts. First of all, you don’t look a White man in the face. You hold your head down because the first thing he’s going to say “Are you eyeballing me boy?” You don’t say no to any request, even if it’s wrong. The best thing to do is do what they tell you to do and try to get away from them.
GENE YOUNG: Being disrespectful or letting’ someone to have been disrespectful for a White person could result in death. Your elders, your parents, told just to be careful around White people because this is what they would do to you if you got out of line.
MAN 2: I could walk into a room full of White people and within seconds, I could spot the ones that I needed to keep my eyes on.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: You know we couldn’t look at a White man and say, “Man, I don’t want to hear that. I mean, you lying.” “What did you say nigger?”
I used to see people just coming from church and the police pulled up behind them and stop. They get out. “Yes sir. Yes sir.”
MAN 1: A youngWhite kid called my dad boy.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: I’m talking about my big muscle-bound, you know, my uncles and stuff, you know?
MAN 1: I wondered why, you know, he didn’t call him sir.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: “I’m sorry sir.” “Yeah you ought to be sorry. You’re a sorry nigger aren’t you?” “Yes sir.” Stuff like that.
MAN 1: And I asked my dad, “Why did he call you boy?” He said – and he said “That’s the way it is down here, son.”
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GRACE BOOTH: I remember distinctly seeing the little wooden clip-on sign that said for colored only and those were always placed toward the back of the bus.
ADRIAN DOVE: It was something you just sort of lived with. You saw it every day.
MAN 6: Blacks had to pay money in the front and then walk around to the back door.
MAN 12: And the bus may pull off while you’re going from one door to the other.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: And a lot of times when there were no more seats up front, the White passengers would come to the back and we’d have to still get up and give them our seats.
ADRIAN DOVE: I was about ten years old in 1944. Riding the streetcar home every day, we sat in the back and sat behind the sign. On this one particular day this White kid took the sign and he moved it all of the way to the back row and there was a door at the back on these streetcars so when I got to my stop, I pulled the sign off and stuffed it in my mackinaw and took off running. The kid yelled, “That nigger stole the sign.” And the driver came out, fired a couple of shots. I didn’t know if they were in the air or at me but I’m a sort of a pack rat and I still have the sign. I’ve held onto it. When I got home, my mother said, “You shouldn’t break the law. That’s not right.” And my father said, “If the law is saying that you’re something less than equal, that’s a bad law. Some laws need to be broken.”
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FRANKIE ROGERS: One day my mom and dad told me, said, “Frankie, one of these days it’s going to be better.”
MAN 4: You didn’t know how, you didn’t know when, but you knew that it had to change.
WOMAN 5: It just wasn’t right, so I just longed for the day that things would change.
WOMAN 6: It was about 1957, and my father took my sister and my brother and I down to the Portsmouth Public Library.
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HUGO OWENS: We had plenty of books in the house but there were special kinds of books in the children’s area of the library, I’m sure.
WOMAN 6: Dad went over and got a children’s book and put the book up on the desk to get checked out and the librarian said we couldn’t check it out.
HUGO OWENS: And when they told us that I wanted to know why. She said,“Well, colored folks can’t use this library because we have a little library,” the colored library they called it. I said, “Well now, I have been to that library and there we’re limited.” I said, “I look in here and you have books everywhere.”
WOMAN 6: They don’t have these kinds of books down there.
HUGO OWENS: I felt strongly.
WOMAN 6: He stared her down and then finally said “Come on. Let’s go.”
HUGO OWENS: So I took my children home and immediately got in touch with a law firm.
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WOMAN 6: And we didn’t really pay that much more attention to it until later when he told us that he had filed a suit against the city.
HUGO OWENS: We took it to court. The judge said, “You mean to tell me that some of the taxes that Dr. Owens pays goes to help your library and he can’t use it and his children can’t use it? I’ll tell you what, you have two choices. Lock the library up lock, stock, and barrel or open the library to any tax-paying citizens,Black or White.”
WOMAN 6: It was a feeling of triumph, you know. Like, yes, we can – we can make them do that.
HUGO OWENS: My, my, my.
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MAN 13: The school year for Blacks when I was a kid in the county school system was just four months a year, because Black kids had to be out to chop cotton and pick cotton.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: At our school, we had outdoor toilets, no cafeteria.
MICHAEL DIZAAR: They would send us way out to a schoolyard in the wood somewhere.
WOMAN 1: They had to pass by three White schools to get to one Black one.
WOMAN 7: Our schoolbooks were always outdated. When we got a textbook, it always had used on it because they were bringing the books from the White schools down to our schools.
DOXIE WHITFIELD: We had to pay a book fee for those books and I remember we didn’t have transportation to get us to school. Everybody walked to school and we would have to walk on the railroad tracks to keep the kids that were in the White bus, because they rode buses, from throwing spitballs out at us. I – we knew it was different.
GRACE BOOTH: When we first moved to New Orleans, I was nine years old and my mother wanted to register my sister and myself for school. We were told that we had to go to a notary to state that we were Caucasian. Now that was an odd experience. My mother actually had to pay a notary and had to parade us into this office. I remember standing there wondering, “Am I really White?” I assumed I was. I always felt that I was but I had never really had to think of myself in that context before. I was a little bit scared that perhaps somehow I wouldn’t make the cut. Maybe I would not be perceived as a White little girl. Evidently, I would end up in a different school away from my friends.
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE: I thought it was wrong for us to be relegated to older books, old science equipment, and separate schools, but then in 1954 on May seventeenth, a naive ninth grader, I was very excited in Bilby. I was so excited that I thought in September 1954 it would all be over.
CROWD: Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.
(Crowd chanting)
JACQUELINE DASH ZIGLAR: I knew that there was segregation that existed. I knew that the Whites did not want to associate with theBlacks, but I had no idea that White people hated Blacks as much as they did until we integrated the schools. I recall the very first day of school. A special bus had been designated for us and we were petrified. We were like little tin soldiers. I didn’t say anything to anyone. None of us talked. There were state troopers and policemen to escort us and to make certain that we would arrive to school safely.
BETTY BUNCE: I had been substituting for a year in the New Orleans public schools. So on a Friday afternoon in early November, I received a call to come to school, McDonogh nineteen, on the following Monday morning to teach a first grade class.
(Crowd chanting)
As we approached the school, police were blocking the intersections. Three little Black girls came up the front steps into the school escorted by three federal marshals. They really didn’t fully understand, I believe, first graders, what was going on.
GRACE BOOTH: I was very confused and actually a little scared about what I was seeing, that things would escalate to this degree with students, some of them whom I knew. I wrote in my diary “I’m so upset I can barely write. Today when I got to school at eight thirty, this is what I saw. Half of the school were across the street, wearing confederate hats, waving confederate flags, and singing. The principal and assistant principal were just standing on the steps, looking across the street at them. All during the day, kids came straggling in in a herd, all sorts of reports that the kids all went downtown to the city hall and beat up Negroes, had a regular riot, exclamation point.”
(Crowd chanting)
BETTY BUNCE: The parents and neighborhood people stood across the street and they jeered and hooted at these children and the federal marshals. This went on the entire school year.
JACQUELINE DASH ZIGLAR: I was placed on the very front row in the class and none of the students in the class would sit next to me. I could hear the students making comments about me and calling me nigger, and I sat there and I trembled.
BETTY BUNCE: One by one, two by two, and in groups, mothers came and claimed their children and proudly marched out the door.
MORRIS THOMSPON: I recall vividly walking the halls of Hall High School and to me, these huge White students standing at their lockers as we walked by, they would press themselves up against the locker and call “Here come the niggers. Here come the niggers.” And move out of the way so we wouldn’t touch them or brush against them. We’d go to our lockers together as a group so when you turned your back to look into your locker, someone else was watching you to make sure that no one hit you with a book.