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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview U-0020, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Willie Mae Lee Crews was born into a sharecropping family in Marion, Alabama, during the 1930s. She describes her childhood as impoverished, but stresses that she was instilled with a strong work ethic by her close-knit family. During the 1950s, Crews attended Dillard University in New Orleans on scholarship and then continued her education at the graduate level at Fisk University in Nashville. As a graduate student in sociology, Crews was sent to Montgomery, Alabama, to interview participants in the bus boycott. By the early 1960s, Crews had become a teacher. She describes her work at Hayes High School, an African American school in Birmingham, during the 1960s and 1970s. Crews first started teaching at Hayes in 1963; she describes it as an excellent segregated school with strong leadership and high standards for its students. Crews was still teaching at Hayes in 1970-1971 when Birmingham schools were desegregated. Here, she focuses more on efforts to integrate faculty rather than on efforts to integrate students. She describes how the school district transferred teachers in a way that favored white teachers and schools to the detriment of students at schools like Hayes. Crews also discusses the role of segregated housing in creating what she calls a "projects mentality." Social trends such as this, along with ineffective policies and the influx of poorly trained teachers, were to blame for the deterioration of integrated schools. In particular, she laments the disappearance of teaching philosophies that had stressed teaching students integrity, social responsibility, and self-confidence that had characterized Hayes High School prior to desegregation.
Willie Mae Crews, the daughter of a sharecropper, was a teacher at Hayes High School, an African American school in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s and 1970s. Crews describes Hayes as an excellent segregated school that did not benefit from the desegregation that began during the 1970-1971 school year.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Kimberly Hill and I am talking with Mrs. Willie Mae Crews at her home in Birmingham, Alabama on Thursday June 16, 2005. Thank you for having me and thank you for the lemonade.
You're welcome.
We are going to start by talking about how you first became interested in becoming a teacher and about your childhood.
Where do I start with that, because I was not interested in becoming a
teacher until later in life? My childhood was interesting now that I
look back on it. There was much hard work as a child of a share cropper,
so I never had the opportunity of attending school for the full nine
months. Usually seven, sometimes six and a half months because the crops
had to be planted, tended and reaped. I was interested early on in the
printed word in books. We had very few books. There was always a Bible.
We did something in our home that I see designers doing now; we papered
our walls with the pages from magazines. I learned later that the pages
were not only for a pleasing appearance, but they served as insulation
because these were share cropper's tenant houses. I read what was on the
walls, and sometimes I would do something you would find amusing; if I
found a page with part of a story I'd read that part again and again and
again hoping and wishing that somehow I would find the other part of
that story. Of course it was plastered against the wall, so there was no
way of ever doing that. That was my interest in reading, so I find it
very difficult to get rid of anything that has print on it no matter
what, magazines, papers, college books I have every book I think that I
have ever read all over my
My grandfather said there was nothing to that, but at about age seventy five he had a wonderful experience. We didn't know he could sing until it happened, and he would sing.
Did he start singing in church?
No. He would just sit on his porch and sing. I just learned from him not to fear. He said "your body can be destroyed, but not your mind." Oddly enough, the last words to me was not to be careful as I was leaving home to go to college, I had one foot on the step on the bus and he touched me on the shoulder and I turned thinking he was going to tell me to be careful, and he said, "Don't go down there to that school and come back here no fool." I eventually learned what he meant, and yet he was a man who never attended school one day in his life – nor my grandmother. He was born as he said, the year the country surrendered, which is probably 1865. That's my background of approaching things, being disciplined and not being afraid, learning how to measure real fear or danger. One does not have to be afraid of a rattlesnake, but you recognize that he is a snake and he is poisonous and you act accordingly. I learned much of that from my grandfather. He was a great farmer, he could grow anything. It was his profound belief that land could not be owned, and I still do not understand all of that, you can buy a car and own a car but not land. Someone told me that this was also a philosophy of some Indian tribes, that the land was there, it's God's land and it belongs to everybody.
That's when I first heard of that philosophy. He sounds like a deep man.
I didn't realize how deep until years later, just looking at his life
and trying to work out just what there was about him. He loved my
grandmother deeply, and I thought all men did
High standards.
I had to teach my husband.
Sure, that can be enough.
What made you decide to go to college?
I knew I would not pick cotton all of my life. I knew I was not going to
be a maid all of my life. So my first option since we were very poor was
that I join the armed forces, and use that to go to college. However,
that year Dillard University gave tuition scholarships to valedictorians
and salutatorians, I know from around the Southeast. I was the
valedictorian of my class, so I got that scholarship. That was for
tuition. That was a time before grants and loans, so I would work for a
white family on the weekends and in the winter when we didn't have crop
work to do. They knew a family in New Orleans, and the husband of that
family was a Colonel at Marion Military Institute. I told them that I
had a tuition scholarship, so they wrote to that family and asked if I
could live in their home and work for room and board. They did not need
anyone, but looked for a friend of theirs and that's what happened. I
had my tuition scholarship and I got off the bus in New Orleans and
someone picked me up and I went to a private home to work for room and
board so that I could go to college. So I never lived in a dormitory and
I worked for three different families during that time. That was my
focus, I am not going to be a maid, or a cook, or a dishwasher or a
share cropper for all the time that I had
Sounds like that was your family heritage, being very driven and knowing what you wanted.
Just working, having a sense of ethics about working. Work hard for what
you want and be honest. Have integrity. When I was a maid, I was a good
one. I knew what to do, so no one could say this is sloppy or this is
not what we want. I did not go to college to teach, that was something
that I was not going to do. I was fascinated with Dr. Thompson and Joe
Taylor, who were the Sociology professors. I was fascinated with
language, with Dr. Swurdlow, and we had names for them. One teacher we
called "Zeus" because he just reminded us of the Greek God Zeus. We had
others that had interesting names. We had someone we called "Elevated
Boogie" because he wore shoes with lifts in them and it caused him to
sway when he walked. They were research people and they talked about
Kenneth Cole and they talked about A Phillip Randolph, who was just
beginning his prime work. They talked about Gunnar Myrdal and those
things were fascinating to me, so I decided I wanted to be a sociologist
and I wanted to do research. So I graduated from Dillard and went to
Fisk, and I was there for a year. In January, Professor Vallian was the
head of the department then and sent a team of three of us to Montgomery
because he felt that based on the criteria for social movements that the
bus boycott
About the boycott? Wow.
Yeah. I think we were there for three weeks. I interviewed Mrs. Parks in her home. I rode in a cab with her. I went to mass meetings and recorded the songs and what was said; I only kept three of them. The one with her, the one with the mass movement and what happened the first time the Kings' home was bombed. I don't know why Preston Vallian never wrote his book. The white girl Ann Holden, from Georgia interviewed white folks. She had the southern drawl, so she—
Did she publish her book?
No this was all for Fisk. We had to send our interviews back to our
professors, because we were students. There were three students in the
department at the time, two blacks and one white, in the graduate
Sociology Department at Fisk. Those were interesting days. As we stood
outside the King home after everyone arrived there from the church after
the news came that his home had been bombed, the singing, the refusal to
listen to the mayor or the city commissioner and then to have him come
out and wave his hand in absolute silence. I talked my way into going
in. I told them, "Mrs. King is from my hometown and she needs me, and
they let me go in." She didn't know me because she graduated a few years
before me, in fact she wasn't even at Lincoln while I was there. She was
in school with my husband, but he wasn't my husband at that time and I
didn't know him. I knew him and didn't know him at that time. I came in
and said "I'm Willie Mae Lee and I'm from Marion, Alabama and I'm here
to do whatever it is that I can do to help get through this night." So,
I was there for the remainder of the night and into the next day. I took
care of the baby; they had a new baby that they called
Some good memories.
Not even realizing how that was all going to play out. One writer said, do we ever realize life, why we live it? What is it, "Our Town?" I think it's "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder, I don't know since I have been out of the classroom for so long. Basically, it's that we don't fully realize it as we live it, it's looking back that we see. I knew it was important, but the historical role was something I did not fully fathom at that time. I came home the end of that year and went to Marion with my cousin and met my husband. So there were two jobs in Marion, Alabama, I would either work at the Laundromat or teach. Now remember, I did not go to school to do that, but I said I'll teach. I had a double major, because I loved literature and English. The superintendent there discovered that I had been in Montgomery doing the bus boycott and didn't hire me, so I got a job in Tuscaloosa working at Turrett High School. What I recognize is that life has a way of getting from you what you are here to do, and nothing in my life could have been any more glorious than teaching. Not instructing, there is a big difference between being a professor, an instructor and being a teacher. That to me is the highest calling, because you teach them all.
What do you mean you teach them all?
All children, it's biblical. Who so ever will, let him come. Especially
in a public school, he will not look at a child and make the decision
about that child's life that he can or cannot learn or that he should be
denied certain opportunities because of his color or his ability. Well,
you don't need this course or that course because of some superficial
reason. If for
So he's —
He met the standards of whatever they said about being gifted, but the one who is a math whiz did not test at that level. Whatever test they are using won't dictate what they are going to do in life or how well they are going to do. If that were the case, I don't think any of us would ever move beyond or would have moved much beyond slavery. Surely Dubois would not have worked and, what's his name, Douglass. Definitely Frederick would not have done what he did if that was the case.
That's true.
So, we are saying just give them the opportunity.
So, after you got married and became a teacher in Tuscaloosa then eventually you ended up teaching in Birmingham.
I taught for a year and a half at Tuscaloosa. I taught EMR children the
first year and I think I loved them so much that it bothered me
sometimes that I couldn't get them where I wanted them to be in short
periods of time. So again, I had to learn patience with them. We did
Yup, and you raised them all together?
Yes, and that's what we said in his obituary, together we reared three children. That is what we did. She attended Birmingham Southern and worked for Bellsouth after she graduated and did very well. I guess the greatest compliment my husband ever paid me was to say to me 'if I just didn't know better, I would swear that you had her.' So, she was that much like me, which is more like me than the ones biological I guess. That was the best compliment that he could have paid me, to say that about Jean.
That's a fine compliment.
We have been doing a lot of crying this year because John, her baby was
twelve when she died and he has been in the different bowls or
something. He graduated from high school and L just look at my daughter
and say I'm not going to cry and she says she's not going to cry either.
Then the tears just roll. We think of her and what she meant to all of
us. I'm rambling, am I not?
That's okay. What school were you at just before you went to Hayes?
Tuscaloosa. Hayes was the only high school I worked at in Birmingham. I started at Hayes in 1963.
Can you tell us just a bit about Hayes' history? How it started I mean.
Yes, Hayes and Carver were built to keep children from attending, to protect Phillips High School and Woodlawn High School, which were all white. If we put these schools in strategic positions and then zone the kids, they would not attend Woodlawn or Phillips. Phillips was downtown. That was the reasoning behind building those schools where they were, and to do it quickly. The first Principal of Hayes, A.C. Dickenson, who died not so long ago, wanted the school to be named Pacesetters. He didn't want any names of animals, he said, "We're going to be Pacesetters." So Hayes High Pacesetters is what they are called.
I heard that he wanted Hayes to have the best black teachers in the district and the best programs for students.
He accomplished that. Andrew Abercrombie did class day activities that would rival something from Broadway. Once he redecorated the gym into a Hawaiian paradise and momentarily you thought you were in Hawaii. He was just that good.
Was he one of the teachers?
He was a teacher; he was head of the English department. Marion Rogers
produced plays for "Raisin in the Sun"—
You could suspend [imagination] and think that you were actually viewing these. Laverne Cromer had a choir that would rival just about any college choir. We sent students to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George Ritzer was a member of my church who went to M.I.T. We were Pacesetters with state troopers; we had the first female state trooper in Alabama. It was the first female, not the first black female, but the first female state trooper, Clarisse England. A picture of her was in the New York Times. I had asked her repeatedly to write her story in a little booklet and get it published.
She should.
Our Band Director was superb, Mechanical Drawing teachers, Physics,
History, Florence Terrell in Art. They called us Little University
sometimes.
There is still a lot of pride in the school?
Still a lot of pride in the school. They had given scholarships now because it was changed to a middle school and now it's a high school again. We had wonderful coaches. You couldn't go and play basketball or football like run-of-the-mill folks did, you had to have your hair cut and you had to be clean and people had to know you were Pacesetters. We had wonderful bulletin boards. For me it was a good place to work. We had good math teachers.
Were you teaching English?
I taught English the entire time. I would rotate up and down; I always
wanted to teach all levels. Especially when I became department chair,
so that I would know what was going on at the other levels. If I had
twelve I would take a nine, or a ten and an eleven. I would go back and
forth, to keep up with students. They would tell you there were only two
excuses
They didn't care for that?
They'd talk about it, but they did well anyway. Now they tell me they
understand why. If you are assigned to me from eight until nine, then
you belong to me. You do not belong to your coach, and you are
responsible for this class. I have met students who barely made it and
some who have come to me in tears to say 'I'm glad to see you because I
wanted to let you know how important you were to me'. That is what makes
teaching worthwhile. I think we taught more about integrity and honesty
than anything else. You need to be good men and women. I remember
teaching something in eleventh grade about character and something else,
and the paper that they were to write said 'when I am thirty.' The
teachers who got together for this assignment gave them a house, a bank
account and a car, so when they wrote the paper they couldn't write
about a five bedroom mansion or this kind of car because that was
already a given. One young man wrote that when he was thirty he would
have made an honorable man of himself, and I remember that because that
is what he did. He became an honorable man. If they made a million
dollars that was fine, but please become honorable men and women. That
was a thrust of
Did you also see students outside of school at church or other functions?
At church especially. My church is in the neighborhood of the church, in fact one block from the school. So, I had one student say to me as a young woman, not too many years ago in a Bible study class, ' if Mrs. Crews said it' and I thought well I'm a church member and I can—and she then said 'she changed me, I realized I have to get Shakespeare. It doesn't matter that she's a member of my church.' One young man said he discovered something when Mrs. Crews taught her own daughter, 'we thought since the teacher was her mother she would know everything. Well, we learned differently.' So, but I won't do that if I ever had the opportunity to do that again, because that was hard. It was hard for my daughter because she was smart and sometimes you need to be with someone else, as a teacher. But I enjoyed teaching.
As far as you could tell at the time, do you think the administrators at Hayes had special relationships with the board considering that the school was established just to keep black students out of another school?
I worked under two Principals-
The principals' as well as the teachers' abilities and knowledge was underestimated. Even though the people in charge might not have said it, it was the prevailing attitude that you cannot have the knowledge that white teachers or white administrators had. There is that line. Warner, I think did a diagram that was a square with a diagonal and everybody white above, so even the highest black underneath is still below, that's part of my sociology from way back. That was the thinking; they just didn't realize how truly bright many of our teachers were. There was not as many fields open to us, so many teachers had double majors Math and Science or English and Social Studies or English and Science. We had trained teachers in Physics and Biology. There was a woman at Parker named Mabel Phillips who went all the way to the national with students doing well. I dare say that if Mabel were in school now, and graduated, she would not be a teacher. She is retired but I'm thinking in Biology at that time —
She would be a Researcher or Scientist.
Exactly. That was the thinking. The second principal, John Norman, was a
mathematician who could look at boards and arrange curriculums and
arrange and balance schedules. He was just a fantastic mind, who
believed in writing. If I tell you something, I'll write it down and I
have dates and times. I think that is what caused some dislike for him,
because he said what he needed to say about teaching. He knew
instruction and he knew good instruction, and he asked questions about
measurement. 'You tell me these are your goals, but how will we know the
students have this knowledge? By what means will you determine this, so
that you can be fair with your grades?' He did not buy into—and I can't
say about others because I did not work with them—any belief that white
is right or that white teachers knew more than black teachers, that was
not part of his philosophical stance. He read lesson plans.
Was that just to check on the quality of the work?
Quality, quality work. He'd enter classrooms for a few moments to get an idea as to what was going on, or he would come in and sit for a while. It was not about personalities, he needed to see the issues and know what was being taught. He could support the teachers if a child made a failing grade and the parents came in, if he knew what the teacher had done. If the teacher had not done anything, then he couldn't support them. He was very objective with that. I appreciated working with someone with that kind of objectivity.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[interview in process] . . .with girls and boys advisor problems with boys, and I was just sort of across the board with all of them. I said, "I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this." He said to apply and I was thinking I love the classroom and I love teaching. I applied and went for the interview and I was hired. So, I was the first black English Supervisor. Some people were concerned about that.
What were the concerns they raised?
That there was somebody else that was white who was perhaps better prepared or should have gotten the job.
There were other people who were white that applied for the job and didn't get it?
Yes. That too was a good experience; I worked with all of the schools
and had foreign languages and the English program and eventually the
advanced placement program. I never stopped teaching. I would go into
the classrooms. I learned to work well with the teachers
Were you thinking of Hayes when you came up with the name?
No, they came up with the name Pacesetters and I said that's the right
name. Pacesetter English, and then they were going to do a Math. I think
they did the Math, but did not
When you were traveling as a supervisor, did you sometimes compare other schools to Hayes?
Yes. I compared the attitudes toward learning because I guess things were shifting, and they were always good teachers. There were good teachers in all the schools, but not all of the teachers were good teachers. So sometimes after observing a teacher who was not qualified or did not know how to teach, I would work with that person and then sit in on a class where people knew what they were doing. That would lift my spirits. Some teachers were open to learning and some were resentful.
Resentful of learning?
Resentful of my position and my saying what they did not know how to do. For example, when someone said that a student had written a paper on someone named Langston Hughes, and I was thinking, where did you go to college? What do you mean you have never heard of Langston Hughes?
Someone didn't know Langston Hughes?
Yes, someone did that.
Have you seen any changes in students in your years traveling as a supervisor or in your time at Hayes?
We kept Hayes pretty much where we wanted it to be. The students learned the school song and what it meant and that it was named for Carroll W. Hayes. They learned who he was, what he did and what he thought about education. That was the forefront and we want this for you, and things didn't change much because there was still a core of teachers at Hayes when I left. The head of the History department came to the [School] Board as Supervisor of Social Studies and the head of the Science Department for Hayes came to the Board as Supervisor of Science. The Math Department head became an Assistant Principal and went to a different school, but this was after Mr. Norman retired.
In 1970-1971, when we were going to integrate faculties, the board set up
conferences and meetings to talk about how this was to be done. Each
school sent maybe four or maybe five representatives. I was greatly
disturbed by what I heard in some of the meetings. There was an attitude
or a belief system again that black kids cannot learn
Were they saying this over and over again because they thought that would keep them from going to a black school?
No, they thought that they would have to lower their standards and they just wanted us to know that the kids would flunk because they couldn't come up to these standards that God had given them on these tablets. Then the board hired teachers they would not have hired, just for white schools. Some came to Hayes and John Norman said you can't work here.
Did he really send them away?
Yes, yes he did. Indeed he did. One lady came on a motorcycle and we
thought she got lost in the woods with this man who was on the
motorcycle with her. They were dirty. And then the board would send
white teachers to two or three black schools to make a decision to see
if they wanted to teach at any one of them or not.
So, they chose the schools?
Right, and we didn't have that opportunity. A counselor came with her mother and father to look the school over and see if their daughter would be safe.
Really? They went through a tour of Hayes to see if it was safe for her?
Some were poor teachers and they didn't understand that children will try their teachers if you are new. It has nothing to do with color. You are a new teacher and we need to know whether you know what you are doing, so we will ask you questions and we will try your patience. We will ask to be excused to see if you will allow us to be excused. That's the way kids are. Some came with the impression from their background that I am white and blacks will respond to me in a designated way or a learned way, and that's not the case.
Which ways did they expect?
That was what they expected, that kids would—if I see you on the street, if you work in my home or if your mother works for me then you acquiesce to superiority. That was an attitude, and some didn't know that they had the attitude, but it was there. Now we did get some excellent teachers. We had one teacher I remember in particular that the kids liked. When she left, another teacher came who was white and the kids said to her, "You come in here acting like you are Ms. Strawbridge and you are not Ms. Strawbridge." These were smart kids, when she'd turn to write on the blackboard they would clap, stamp their feet or make noises; and when she'd turn around they were perfect. She finally said she couldn't take it. I told her I was glad that she was able to admit that and maybe with more training and more knowledge perhaps she could come back or become a teacher at another school. We had one teacher who had not been out of a mental institution very long. He walked around with one shoe in his hand.
He was a teacher?
The principal called the board and said you have to come get him, and they did. We had one teacher who was floating, and he said he took forty Bufferin for his hay fever. John Norman was not tolerant of strange behavior; you could be eccentric and know what you are doing, but that he was not accepting of. He believed in having every teacher read the rules and regulations in a meeting and signing that you have a copy and that you have read them, so you could not say you didn't know about this or you did not know about that. The board promised in those meetings that every school would be allowed to keep a core of teachers that the principal's designated, and they'd be in a position to help everyone else work into that school's philosophy and system. That did not happen. Also in one of those meetings I said, "Please do not transfer the best black teachers to schools that are white and leave the black kids with what you deem the poorest black teachers and the poorest white teachers, that's totally unfair."
Did you see that happening?
It did happen. Carver had wonderful teachers, and I think all four of
their department chairs were moved to other schools and they were part
of the core for that school. They moved our Art teacher to a white
school. She was there for one week and our Principal said to the
Superintendent—and Cody would listen – "You cannot leave my students
without an Art teacher to give an Art teacher to schools that have one,
so I want my Art teacher back." So, in one week our Art teacher was
back. On my first visit to the Board, I went and the personnel person
did not offer me a seat, did not attempt to rise to indicate that I had
come into his office, and he wanted to know when I entered the door if I
minded teaching children of the opposite race. Well, you know in my head
I was thinking, "Opposite race of what?" I didn't say that, I just said,
"No, I do not." He said we will let you know about your assignment. I
said, "Please send them to Hayes High School. That is where I will teach
them." Then he dismissed me, and
So the board sent a replacement for you without actually —
Without saying anything to me—without transferring me. But, like I said, that was the end of that.
Why do you think the Superintendent was so responsive to the Principal?
I think Dr. Cody wanted to do what was right. He was from Mobile, he had graduated from Harvard and he had some insights, but was quiet. John [Norman] on the other hand was vocal, and he could back up what he said. When the personnel people would send him a list and say you need to lose two teachers, he had his curriculum boards with his numbers of students and he would go directly to the Superintendent and there were people who didn't like that. He would put his boards out and asked the Superintendent to show him how he could lose two teachers and then asked him to balance the classes for him. As a Mathematician himself, he knew that it could not be done. So, they would see what he was talking about, and he would keep his teachers. So, he kept his core and did not allow the board to move his core of teachers.
So, generally in this process, the board wasn't paying much attention to actually leaving schools adequately staffed.
Right, just pulling the best ones. All Supervisors were white at that
time, and they were the ones who were asked who the best teachers were,
and those were the teachers that were transferred to the white schools.
The white kids who were transferred did not attend the black
Which is a good position.
Exactly, exactly. The seamstress did not just have you making an apron. The spring of each year the teacher had a fashion show and the kids talked about their garments. I am heavy set, so these kinds of garments would look good on me. She taught them design and then they bought wonderful fabric and made their clothing and then modeled them. Young men made some things and modeled them. It was not a sewing class for making aprons and other things.
Doilies or whatever.
Exactly. Design, what looks nice on someone who is five foot ten and
weighs one hundred pounds will not necessarily look like what you want
if you weigh two hundred pounds and you are five foot five inches. They
learned how to change patterns, how to take basic patterns and make
other kinds of patterns from them. The choir naturally did a concert.
The art students had their exposition. As these teachers left and
retired the school changed, some of these things changed too. For
example, one lady came and said she was a drama major and did a script
from [the t.v. show] "Good Times." John Norman hit the ceiling. "Anybody
can imitate and walk up and down the halls and say 'Dyn-o-mite!'—you
have not taught them one thing." She was just in tears, and that was not
what we were used to. We were used to kids learning the fundamentals of
acting and then making a production, but not an imitation. Because
that's all it was. You take a script and imitate J.J., but that was it.
The new art teacher did a bulletin board that was so terrible that the
teachers came and asked me if I had seen the new bulletin board.
The newer teachers weren't really doing that?
They were not trained to do that. The whole system of teaching teachers, not all of them, because as I said we had some wonderful white teachers, was not Alabama State, Miles, Stillman, Talladega, or Tuskegee. Their stance about teaching was just different. A student can only bring to the table what he has.
And you don't expect more of him?
You have to expect more, you have to say, "No, he doesn't know how to do
this but we have this child for twelve years between the hours of eight
and three, and there are things we can teach this child." When we did
our career ladder training, I was paired with a white man from Mountain
Brook and we went to Talladega and Tuscaloosa. He told me about a case
of a firm inviting a young man who had applied for a job out to dinner.
He was told that the man's eating habits were not what they had expected
and they didn't hire him because of it. I told him
If you had to put a time span on when that change happened, when would you say?
During the 1970's. Maybe not the first five years, but then gradually
you could see it coming. We could see people releasing students from
certain responsibilities, saying that it was not their job. Others, new
teachers coming in—blacks as well as whites—started to buy in to that
philosophical stance. Then rules, rules, rules and more rules were
created to control students. The zero tolerance business. Hitler
practiced zero tolerance; how far do you want to take that? The
principals that I worked under said that if you failed to plan then you
planned to fail. You have to know your content. The students are not
solely responsible for what we find in
Involving the teachers of that mother and maybe the grandmother too?
Yes, and having students believe that you want the best for them and not for you and every behavior that is listed on the book is not a behavior to send a child home or to expel him. If he is out of the classroom then he is not learning. There are ways of reaching children, not all of them but the majority of them. By just stepping outside of the door to ask if you have done something to offend them, because then you are putting the ball in the child's court. When they answer, no, it opens the door for a discussion. You can let them know that you know something is going on and that they may not want to talk about it, but you see that something is going on that is interfering with learning. "I will not tell anyone what we discussed if you don't," and then the child feels there is a bond that encourages them not to act out anymore. You will have that child that takes a special teacher to meet their needs.
So you'd say nowadays discipline is firmer but there are also more discipline problems?
I'm not sure that we understand discipline the way we did when I was in the classroom. I think now there's a set of rules, violations one, two, and three and if you do any of these it's automatic. It's more automatic than the court system that allows reasonable doubt. This is act two and this is the punishment for act two, there is no gray area or any discussion about it. You did this, so this happens. Life sometimes allows us space to correct, or space to recuperate and when you get the zero tolerance—now, some things we need zero tolerance, but if every behavior is zero tolerance—what if that maxim was applied to all of us?
We'd be in trouble.
I could not manage with zero tolerance. That kept some teachers from having to be responsible for their classrooms. "I have a list of rules and if you do this you are out the door, you do this and you will answer to me." That was what teachers used to do, I'll go home and I'll call your mom and your dad and we'll talk. Nobody wanted their parents to be called.
Other teachers I have talked to say that the students don't really care about calling parents anymore, and that the parents don't bother to address problems.
Some don't. Again, sometimes that has to do with the approach. If I
called you and you are already stressed out, feeling like you have
already done all that you can for this child, don't call me. I think
we'll get more if we say, "If you have some time, I'd like to talk with
you. You see I know what you want for your child and I want the same
thing." So you are helping the parent take a position or a stance.
Whereas, if you call and tell them their child did a, b, c and d and we
want you to come to the school. Or if we call with a stance that I am
right and I have some things to tell you about your child, sometimes
they have heard so many negative things about themselves or their child
that they just don't want to hear anything that's negative. If you
phrase it more like, "I know you want him to do well, do you think maybe
the two of us together can get him to see or understand." You may not
get them all, but you get more. I remember my grandmother saying, "The
one thing I can do is die easy if I know my children will work." You
find a way to get to that parent. Put yourselves on equal footing, you
are not the parent's teacher; you are their child's teacher. As a
supervisor, case in point, I had a parent to bring Native Son, Black
Boy, and something else-those are Richard Wright's, but another book
too. She took the bottom of the bag and eased it up to allow the books
to slide out onto the desk, because she couldn't touch those books. She
then took her pencil and moved pages to show me
That's a good way to address it.
Right, and she took them back. You must be on your toes for that person
and how that person will respond, and not reject that person. You can't
reject parents; you can't be mean to parents. Some will come angry and
attack once they see the teacher without talking, they are just that
angry. There are ways of approaching it, and I think I still have that
hope for our children. For that matter all children. I taught a class of
white students for a black teacher that was in another program for a day
and she told me what they were supposed to do. One young
You called his bluff.
He said, "I just didn't think you knew." I said, "Why, because I'm
black?," and he said, "I don't know, I just didn't think you knew."
Was that mother in your last story objecting partly because those were black literature books?
I think it was more the language, she didn't like the profanity. I never thought of it as that, she was a black parent, but sometimes black parents object to what you are doing. I told her about the experiences that Richard Wright had in his own life and why he wrote Native Son and Black Boy, and why he left the country and went to France.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Was there a lot of neighborhood transition in the area of Hayes in the 1970's?
No, the transition happened prior to the 1970's. The majority of the
people in the Hayes zone either rented private homes or owned their own
homes. There were numerous
The projects were also —
Set up to do that, if we can get the poor ones and the limited incomes
here, they won't go to Woodlawn. Yet there is this downtown project
where whites live that were students at Woodlawn, that was your city
center, but the projects were segregated. There was Elyton over here,
and those kids would have gone to Parker. There was not what we perceive
now to be a project mentality. You were students and we expected you to
learn, and we will do everything we can to see that you learn. We'd even
scare you into learning.
The project mentality is that they can't learn?
Right, and that you are not as good as somebody else, whatever "good"
means. You don't have the abilities, you are less than. Almost as old
George Fitzhugh said. Was he from South Carolina? He said, "Show me one
of them who can speak a word in Greek or utter a phrase in Latin"—I'm
paraphrasing now – "and I will be forced to believe that he at least has
human potentialities." I should use that and ask them to write a paper
and refute it. See, those are the kinds of things that get kids going,
it gets their juices flowing. What can you say to this man? Are we going
to call him a
And there is more pressure to follow in what they have done.
Yes, indeed. So, that is a mentality that I don't like, and did not like. One of my students who lived with a grandmother in a housing project, who was very poor, turned around a Coca Cola bottling plant. They were going to close it and Harrison sent me the booklet from the Communications something, something, not magazines that you find on the regular news stands, but specific trade magazines that detail what people are doing in that particular market place. There was a wonderful write up that he said 'give me a chance' and he turned it around. David Jackson did not graduate from Hayes, in fact he is from Marion, but he turned around one Wal-Mart. They then gave him three, then five, then ten and then the entire West Coast. He was in the February Black Enterprise as one of the top seventy five African Americans in corporate America.
Of course David has just retired, he must be fifty five maybe.
He must be pretty wealthy too.
He is, he is. His dad had the opportunity to take him to the bank in
Marion, where the old banker had said maybe he could let him have the
money. When he went to get it for his third or final year in college,
there was a young man that said, 'Why don't you just let that boy come
on out and get a job? He's been down there for three years or whatever."
And he said, "No, your dad has said I can have the money." So, after
David made it really big, he went down and said, "I want you to see
David. David is over so and so and so and so. . .and he rides in a plane
with Sam Walton."
Do you think that the attitude is still a problem now?
Of speaking out?
Do people have a problem speaking out?
Some do, but some do not. I noticed in my very small hometown, I know at least one black member of the Kiwanis Club and there might be others. It just happens that I know this person, and that just would not have happened. In my school there were white teachers until 1943 and they were given twenty four hours to leave Marion. They were not teaching us I suppose about farming and being good servants.
Oh, yeah.
That's a story that I am working on, because that's a school Mrs. King graduated from. Also, Andrew Young's late wife, Jean, graduated in 1950 and I graduated in 1951. It was her mother who taught me in that one room with the six grades in one classroom.
If you had to sum it up, what changes do you think need to happen for schools to be better than what they are now?
We need well prepared teachers, and that does not mean that some are not well prepared. We need a tough curriculum and we need to change our stance on who deserves the best, and recognize that all children deserve the best. We get pockets of it, the kids who did well on the calculus test for the ACT or the SAT in California, that's a pocket. Just last week a group from Texas made some kind of motorized something and they won over the kids from Harvard. What that says is that there is a teacher in the midst of poverty and a lack of standard language skills who has the motivational techniques and the knowledge to pull out of students what they themselves don't yet know is in them. Benjamin Mays who was a President of Morehouse at one time, I understand he had that. He could go to an assembly and speak, and a student who was failing would become so inspired that they would pass. One of his students wrote that "I was making a failing grade and I went to see Benny Mays" and the student went back and aced the course.
Wow.
I think we need faith in kids, and let them know that. We need assembly programs and session room programs, those were the things we had that we no longer have. Session room meant that—were you ever in a session room program, do you know what that is?
No.
You are assigned to a teacher, you report to that teacher and that gives
you admission to the school for that day. You report to your session
room teacher, you are nine A, or nine B, or nine one, whatever, you have
ten ninth grade classes that you have to designate a number or a letter
to. You report to that teacher for check in. If something is going on,
you may be with that teacher for fifteen minutes or you may be with them
for thirty minutes. If during activity periods, your auditorium is not
large enough for all students to attend, maybe ninth and tenth graders
or tenth and twelfth graders will go to assembly today and the others
are with that session room teacher. That teacher also had your schedule
because your schedule was also in the office. If a parent came and
needed to know something, they could also check with that session room
teacher. Your grades went to that session room teacher, now it's all on
computers, but I had a grade book for my session room students. So I
knew what Mary made in Math, Science, History and P.E. and I could talk
with her about that. During that twenty or thirty minutes, issues were
discussed. Most of us had a little box on our desk, what do we want to
talk about today? We elected session room officers, so you knew what it
was like to be a President, Secretary or Treasurer, you learned that. We
would have discussions about whatever was in the newspapers and we had
good questioning skills. I remember sitting outside of Josette Collins's
room when I didn't have a session room, just in awe of the kinds of
questions she could ask. We did not tell them to think one way or
another, but we wanted them to question what the evidence was. I
If changes were made to schools so that everybody was getting equal resources and they had quality prepared teachers who expected them to do their very best, what difference would it make in that situation if there was racial diversity within the school?
In one sense it would not make any difference and in another it would.
That would take us back to Thurgood Marshall. As long as students know
in their hearts that one is not better because of race, because our
schools in Birmingham now are segregated, we have very few white
students. You must be prepared for what you want to do and present
yourself as best you can. Then remember what Bishop Vashti McKenzie
said, 'the fault is not always in the stone', and what she said that you
may be rejected, but it's how you look at rejection. She gave several
examples, and one was that Nelson Mandela was rejected but there was no
fault in him. Adam Clayton Powell was rejected and removed from the
government structure, but the fault was not in him. He knew too much and
he knew what others were doing so let's get rid of him. So, if our
students know that rejection does not equate with fault then you have a
foundation to
. . .know that they are worth something, they have value. If we don't
help them see that then somebody else will, and perhaps it's the wrong
value that they will see. Teach them
And they don't know.
Right, or they want a job but they don't want to work for this and don't want to work for that. Then the ball is in their court to tell us what they can do, and who knows that you can do it. You tell them when you leave that they need to live their life so that at least three people who are not related to you can recommend you for a job. They are not getting those kinds of things now. If you are going to apply for a job, you are going to say to those people by how you dress and how you present yourself that you can be a part of their establishment. You don't dress for your friends; you look at what's there. You explore the company, you go with knowledge about the company-we used to tell kids that, and I'm not sure they are being told that now, or taught that. I can't say because I'm not in the classroom, but I know we did that. When you're with your friends and you dress a certain way, but if you go into a business and you want them to employ you, there are ways of presenting yourself. If kids are never told how to present themselves, how will they know? If they are from a home where the parents don't know, and we have to assume that some don't know because they have not had those experiences.
It's interesting that you have so many specific ideas about improvements that could be done for the school, but you don't sound as pessimistic about the Birmingham schools as most of the people I have interviewed. So many say that the public school system is just too far gone, that kids are too rowdy or violent, or don't listen and that the parents don't help with anything.
Well, there are children in the system who are members of my church and
I still have contact with several teachers, one at Parker who will call
me and tell me what her students
Now that's the essence of community involvement.
Yes. Why call the police, they'll just run them off for a day. Tell them
that this is what we need you to do. So, I have hope. I cannot throw
away our children. I have hope. I think we have to listen to them, to
what's going on in their heads. I would not want to be a teenager today
because there are too many things out there. I don't know that I would
climb through all of that, I don't know that I would swim across all of
that or through all of that, I don't know. I did have strong people
standing, saying you can do this. My grandfather counted on me. When he
would take his cotton to gin when I was in fifth grade, that cotton was
twenty one and three fourths cents a pound and the bale was five hundred
and whatever and he would look at me and say figure that, because if you
go to school you were supposed to learn something. The man with the
machine hitting and pulling the leaf off the side would say it's so and
so and so and so, but my grandfather would say she will figure it, so I
had to be right. I had to know how to change fractions to decimals and
multiply, put the decimals in the right place and say it's this. If I
could do that, and if teachers who taught me could have faith in me, who
came to school not speaking standard English, not even knowing what that
was . . . who knew that I was not in school in September unless it
rained, for most of October, who knew that in April we were going to sow
these seeds and in May we were going to chop cotton and I'd get to come
to schools two or three days, who knew that! Still had sufficient faith
to say this is what you need to know. If
Community tutors.
Right. If you are good with language than you need to do that, too. If
you are a business man, go in and have conversations with them about
business. Tell them that the way they are presenting themselves, you
would not hire them. The business world will not tell them that, they
will never know why they didn't get hired, but you can tell them that.
If you are good
Get them curious.
Right, and then you ask them what they are reading. Sometimes they are
reading stuff that they say you can't read.
Did he explain it?
He explained some of it. I asked what you have to do to become that, he wasn't sure. Now, you should go online and look up the required courses for three colleges for becoming a computer engineer and when you get that come back. The first semester Calculus 1 and he said he didn't know it would require Calculus. I said see, it sounds good, but then you get here and it says electronics. You didn't say technician, you said Computer Engineer. Do you know what Engineering means? He looked at the courses, he's going to try it and if he puts his mind to it he will do it, but he had no idea of the course load. Physics and Calculus, two of the heaviest courses one can take, in his first year. Kids need to know that. It's not, "Oh, I'm going to be" and you wiggle your nose or you clap your hands and you become that, so they need to know. So, I'm not pessimistic about students and what they can do and what they will become. Too many of them are doing well, not enough, but enough for me to see that as evidence that we are not losing all of our children. One is too many, but we are not losing them all.
Thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW