For Kim Woods

The Oral History Interviewing Project is designed to help you get a clearer understanding of the dramatic ways that the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement impacted individual Americas’ lives. To complete this 100-point assignment, you will have to personally conduct and record an extensive oral history interview with an individual who lived through the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. The individual you select to interview can be a parent, grandparent, neighbor, family friend, etc. as long as he or she was born prior to 1950 and lived through and was directly impacted by racial segregation and the movement to end it (this includes non-blacks). Before you conduct your interview, you will have to research the times and draft a number of potential interview questions. You will also need to secure a way to record the interview. Once your interviewee gives you permission to conduct the interview, spend about an hour interviewing him or her about his or her experiences living through segregation, his or her involvement in or impressions of the Civil Rights movement, and his or her views of various leaders and groups who supported or opposed the movement. Moreover, question your interviewee on his or her thoughts on how integration has impacted his or her personal life and, perhaps, the nation as a whole, etc.

After conducting the interview, you will have to type a precise transcript of the entire recorded interview session. Unless you have voice recognition software, transcribing a nearly hour-long interview verbatim from an audio- or videotape takes a long time. So, do not wait until the last minute to conduct and begin transcribing your interview. You will also have to draft a 2-paged report that summarizes what you learned about your interviewee’s experiences and explains how this knowledge affected your understanding of the African-American experience.

N/B: below is a sample of how the interview paper should be formatted.

Transcript of Peter Bailey Interview

BAILEY, PETER (1938- )

Interviewer: Korey Bowers Brown

Date: Thursday, May 31, 2006

Format: Transcript pages; tape available

Tape length: 1 hour, 17 minutes

Restrictions: Standard

Location: Washington, DC

BROWN: Hello, this is Korey Brown, sitting with A. Peter Bailey, on May 31, 2006, at 10:25 a.m. And, we are here to discuss Peter Bailey’s work with Ebony magazine. I wanted to go backtracking a little bit to get some information about your early employment with Ebony, and how you viewed Ebony in your early life.

BAILEY: Well, for me, I grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama. So, of course, my contact with the national black movement or my awareness of a national black movement came mostly from three publications: Ebony, Jet and the Pittsburg Courier. So, Ebony always played, you know, this typical role in my life. It was how I knew, and you know, this was old time Alabama, that there was a larger black community out there, and some of the things that they were doing in Ebony. So, Ebony, Jet and the Pittsburg Courier were my contact with the national black community.

And, I was always a voracious reader as a child. I was a voracious reader. I always read, read, read, read. But, in saying that, I was not what they call nowadays a nerd, because I played sports. I played basketball, football, baseball. But, I also read a lot when there was quiet time, like if it was raining and you could not go outside, I read. If I was getting punished for some reason, I read. When I went to bed, I read. So, my reading did not keep me from doing the other things I used to do. So, I was not what you would call nowadays a nerd. I was not a nerd. I was a voracious reader. And, I have always been so since I was little.

BROWN: You went to private Catholic school.

BAILEY: I went to a Catholic school from the middle of my…. I went from kindergarten and the first half of my first grade year to a public school. And, then they built a Catholic school…which the public school, you know, was about a thirty to thirty-five minute walk from my house. The Catholic school, when they built the Catholic school, at that time, which was about a fifteen minute walk from my house. So, my parents put me in the Catholic just because it was closer to my house. Not because they thought it was a better school…just because it was closer to my house. And, when I went the Catholic school in the middle of my first grade year, they put me (because again of my ability to read very well played a role) in the second grade. So, I went a half a year in first grade, a half a year in second grade, and the next year I went to the third grade. I went to Catholic school through the 8th grade. I graduate from Catholic school in the 8th grade, and then I went to the public high school in the 9th grade. And, then I went there for a year and a half. And, then my father, who was in the military, was stationed in Germany. So, in the middle of my sophomore year in high school, my family moved from Tuskegee and we went to Nuremburg, Germany. And, I spent my last two and a half years of high school in Germany…in an American high school in Germany.

BROWN: Now, was this a mixed school?

BAILEY: Yeah! I was totally… I’m talking totally under apartheid in Alabama. As a child, the only white that I had any kind of consistent report with were the nuns. We were taught by white Irish Catholic nuns and we had a white Irish Catholic priest. It was Alabama in the ‘50s. So, of course, the nuns the taught us, but they also tried to get us to think like Irish men. They did not teach us anything about black folks. They talked a lot about Irish history. We learned a lot about the Irish. I still can do an Irish jig. We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. But, as far as basic reading, writing and arithmetic, we learned that very well.

BROWN: So, there were not copies of Ebony in your school.

BAILEY: No, the only place I saw Ebony was at home.

BROWN: Well, you described yourself as what one would call a nerd.

BAILEY: I said I was not a nerd.

BROWN: Yes, not a nerd.

BAILEY: See a lot of people think if you read a lot you never do anything else. But I was very active I mean I played a lot of sports when I was kid.

BROWN: I mean in the reading sense, you liked read. Was this unique to your household or most of the people in Tuskegee would they have been reading Ebony and Jet?

BAILEY: Oh, I think most of the people got Ebony. I mean, that was their main magazine. You know, as children we talked about things we say in Ebony and Jet. And, to demonstrate, let me tell you that, at that time, Ebony was the national newspaper, for all practical purposes. We subscribed to it. And, practically all my friends got Ebony and Jet, or one of the two. Everyone I knew got Ebony and Jet, because it was our way of connecting to the larger black community. I was in Tuskegee during the Montgomery bus boycott. I still remember, I was a teenager then…I had come back to Tuskegee. I came back in September 1955 and it started in December 1955.

BROWN: So, Ebony, Jet and the Pittsburg Courier were read by the children also.

BAILEY: Yeah!

BROWN: When your family and you left for Germany, did your subscription or exposure to Ebony lapse during that time or did you get Ebony while you were in Germany?

BAILEY: Yeah, we would get it every now and then. My grandparents sent it to us. But…I’m trying to remember…I don’t think Ebony and Jet was on the army newsstands. I’m not sure. But, I remember we got them because they were sent to us. So, obviously that means they were sent because we could not get them in the PX.

BROWN: So, that means they had to be pretty important to you if you got them sent to you.

BAILEY: Yeah, but it was not like we got them every month for Ebony and every week for Jet. They would come every now and then. And, like I said, I went from total segregation in Tuskegee to Germany. And, at the age of about 15 there were about 300 kids in grades 7 through 12 and out of them there were about 15 who were black and I’m the oldest one. Everyone else was white. So, I went just from one extreme to the other. But, contrary to what they always say about segregated schools not only was I on time with the white students, I was ahead of probably about 95% of them.

BROWN: I assume that you made friends while you were over there.

BAILEY: Yeah, you know it helped that I was a jock in the sense that I played basketball and football. I think that always helps when you are athletic. But, again, I can remember practically nothing in the school that we talked about, read or studied dealt with black issues.

BROWN: So, your connection to the black world in Germany…?

BAILEY: Remained Ebony and Jet! And, letters, because the Stars & Stripes, when anything that went on that was kind of racial, would try to calm it down, because they felt it would cause problems between the soldiers.

BROWN: You returned to the states, and if I’m correct, you enlisted in the services?

BAILEY: Yeah, I returned the States in September 1955. I joined the Army in January 1956.

BROWN: And, you went back to Germany?

BAILEY: Yeah, July of ’56 I was right back in Germany. I tried to get sent somewhere else, but I was sent to Germany. And, I was there for another 2½ years. So, I’d say that between the ages of 15 and 21 I spent most of that time in Germany.

BROWN: You were around more black servicemen?

BAILEY: Oh yeah. I spent my time around other black soldiers. We would have our own bars. Black and white soldiers would not go to the same clubs. We did not go to the same hang out spots. They had their hang their hang out spots. We had ours.

BROWN: So, you were a serviceman in Germany. Did your fellow black servicemen read Ebony?

BAILEY: Yeah, when we got them. Again, I’m trying to remember if I say Ebony in our clubs. Probably so. I don’t know how we got them, but we definitely read them. And, again, they would mail them to us. Hometown newspapers, some of the guys would have their families mail their local hometown newspapers to use and their subscriptions.

BROWN: So, this was still your main source of information about Black America…