Community changes and lingering obstacles to progress
Dunford describes some of the changes, both positive and negative, that she had seen as the program director at the Edgemont Community Center in Durham, North Carolina, during the 1990s. In so doing, she stresses the role of cultural differences in some of the obstacles the African American community continued to face in achieving equality of opportunity.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Martina Dunford, February 18, 1999. Interview K-0142. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ALICIA ROUVEROL:
-
So maybe you could talk to me a little bit about how the constituents
that you have served have changed over the nine years. That's
really the time period that you've been here and kind of
watching that.
- MARTINA DUNFORD:
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There's a positive and a negative to that, and I've
watched it happen. That transgenerational thing—that system
is what has happened that is scary. And that's the negative
part of that, because people are coming and staying longer. At one point
in time they were staying longer. It seems like an easy
way—it takes away that self-independence that people need and
that push forward for strength and survival to do better. That type of
thing is what's the negative side to this whole thing,
because they seem to think that. It's not a think,
it's the way they feel. Because God knows, if you grow up in
a certain environment that's what your accustomed to; you
think that's okay. Again, like we were speaking earlier, for
those people in the African American community that's fine if
you grew up with the same things, not having this or not having that and
this. That's just the way life is. But when you have to take
on a culture of someone else's and see that there is a
difference, then you have to—if you choose to meet those
criterias, then you have to take another step up. Those are steps that
you've not been taught how to do. So all in all, society
looks at the African American community as if it's lazy and
demeaning and don't do anything—or it's
all about trouble—when in actuality it's not that
as much as providing equal opportunities at the same time. If
you've already established and
given—it's almost like a game when someone else
has been given the rules before you have, so you've played
that game and you know how it works. It's almost like an
amateur playing a professional in a game. He's been playing
for twenty years, so he knows the ins and outs of everything. The
amateur is coming in and having to learn it. But
they put them in the same arena. And society has done that with the
African American culture. They expect them to deliver and live up to the
expectations without giving them the game—the rules of the
game to play with. Until now—then we still have a partial set
of rules. It's like, take this and you make out of it what
you can get out of it. Then you are expected to be on that same level.
And that's ridiculous; that's impossible to do. So
in essence, they will always be behind the gun to a certain degree,
because the more advanced things get, we're just for some of
us are just—yes, there have been opportunities, and people
will say that we're better educated now than we have ever
been. But God knows you should've accomplished something over
the last fifty, twenty, one hundred years. So that's
expected. But are we there? No. We could not possibly be there, because
they started fifty years before we did. Now we've got to play
catch up and then get to where they were while they continue to advance.
So it bothers me that society expects us as an African American to be
there. Not that we're not there and we don't feel
good about ourselves, because within our own culture we're
fantastic. It's fine. But it's what society
requires under that sort of governing rules called the constitution.
They require everybody to be this, that and the other, but they
don't want to provide that same law or those same things for
us to be there. It's blatant. It's there. You
cannot take a person out of the United States and set them in China and
say function, because you don't have the tools to function
with. So why can you not understand that about a culture that has not
had the same things that the other cultures have had? When we ask to be
on the same page, we did not say I needed to sit beside you to know
these things. I just ask for the same equivalency that your going to
give them, and quality. Give it to me and we'll figure it
out. But it didn't work that way. So we're busy
fighting, trying to help the people in the
90's—in this last decade in the 21st
century—to understand that this is what is expected of you by
society. So we're trying to change the attitudes and
behaviors and perspectives, because that's not acceptable. In
our community there are some things that are, and we can deal with it
and don't have a problem with it. But society as a whole does
not accept this and that and the other things.