OH+Questions

=Topic - Midwestern Viewpoint of the Civil Rights Movement in the 60's= =Subject - Joey's Grandma=

1. Can you describe yourself and your status in life in the 1960's? Where did you life and what was the general perspective that the community had on the civil rights movement? I graduated from college in June 1961 and Grandpa and I were married in August 1961. We had both grown up on farms, so we moved to the farm we still live on today. We were in a small farming community 25 miles from Cedar Rapids and 30 miles from Iowa City. I remember seeing my first black person about 1945. She had a job running the elevator between floors of Killians Department Store in downtown Cedar Rapids and always had a smile but seemed to be studying the floor a lot the rest of the time. Black men seemed to be cab drivers or at more menial jobs like sweeping out the bus station or doing street construction work. I had a good black friend in the music department at Drake University in Des Moines. She was in a white girls sorority and she was just one of the kids, she had grown up in Council Bluffs, Iowa. She had a marvelous singing voice and that perhaps paved the way for her acceptance at Drake University. There were many black basketball players that were on the Drake team. I had some education classes with them but they just blended in. They were very humble and no one caused any trouble and the white students were very accepting of them. There were many blacks in the entertainment field, as actors, singers, dancers, and musicians. In the 1960's the black music groups played only in black nightclubs. Where would the world be without Aretha Franklin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Satchmo, etc. America was shocked when Sammy Davis, Jr. married a white girl and had children. It just wasn't done and for a while slowed down his career as a singer and actor and I think it killed her career. 2. What was your earliest memory of segregation, discrimination, or the Civil Rights Movement in your life? In 1957, I was on a 4-H trip to Lexington, Ky with 35 other 4-Hers from Jones County. We stayed in the homes of white families. My host family was very average middle class, the father was a teacher in the local school system. The mother stayed at home BUT they had a black lady that cleaned their house and did all their washing, ironing, and drying. She lived down the road from the family. She was very nice. On Sunday, the Hailey family and I went to a small rural white church, the blacks went to a black church. There were very strong feelings of blacks dating blacks and no interracial dating especially in the rural areas we Jones County kids where we were living. 3. Where did you learn the majority of your knowledge on the issue of Civil Rights? Grandpa and I learned most of our knowledge of Civil Rights from TV. We saw the children of Selma or Montgomery Alabama, fight to go to school with white children and all the anger and violence that accompanied that. The white adults were very threatened by that concept and fought it long and hard. Martin Luther King Jr. "Had a Dream" and he preached non violence until his voice was stilled by a bullet. The country was probably more scarred than angry. The Klu Klux Klan made brief appearances. The book and later movie, "To Kill a Mockingbird" underscored the difference between "white justice" and "black justice". The killing of Medger Evans was on TV news for people to see. The story of Rosa Park sitting at the front of the bus scared many white people because they felt that black people were second rate citizens, they had been told that since they were children. The lynching of Emmett Till and his two friends for being black was like a bad movie. The book "Roots" by Alex Hailey was such a powerful book and showed how the black people had been ripped away from their homes in Africa and endured such awful things on the way to America and when they got here. They were treated like a sub-specie. When the serialization of "Roots" was on TV, our three kids were down in the family room on a Sunday night. I told them I wanted their lights to be out by 9:00 p.m. About 9:15, I hear that the tv was on and I yelled down that I thought I had told them to turn off the tv at 9:00. Our oldest daughter said, the lights were off at 9:00 and her sister and brother said they had been. I gave up and let them watch till that chapter was done. They learned a lot about the blacks in America. It was a good series and helped white people see what the blacks had gone through. It was scary!!! 4. Did you ever personally experience any Civil Rights protests where you grew up? No. Small town Iowa was too far away from the scene. I don't remember the University of Iowa having any race riots. We, as a people, were more understanding of the black people and weren't frightened of them. 5. How were African Americans treated in your community? In my larger community which included Cedar Rapids, there was a black Dr., Percy Harris, that was a well liked physician in Cedar Rapids. He bought a house next to the home of Robert Armstrong who was the head of the biggest department store in Cedar Rapids. Robert made sure that Dr. Harris and his family were accepted in the community and in the Bever Park vicinity were they all lived. Dr. Harris had a private practice and I know of many white people that went to him. He also was Medical Examiner for Cedar Rapids, Linn County in his later years. He was well thought of and held in high regard. African American's were kind of ignored in the schools unless they had musical talent and/or sports skills. Schools in Iowa were integrated long before it became nationally done. 6. How did the media publicize the Civil Rights Movement? With a good or bad connotation? It seems like in the 60's all the networks and the newspapers presented the Civil Rights Movement fairly and unbiased. In Iowa, we were horrified to think that African Americans, our fellow Americans, were being treated like that. 7. What was the communities reaction to some important events during the Civil Rights Movement (March on Washington, MLK Assassination, etc.)? I think we felt that the march on Washington was kind of overdone but it certainly did accentuate the rising of the blacks populations. MLK's assassination was a true horror. It came a little while after President Kennedy's assassination and was followed in several months by Robert Kennedy's assassination. It was a scary time to be in America. 8. What did you take away from growing up during the Civil Rights Movement? I was 21 in 1961 when I got married and three of my children were born in the 1960's, the other one born was born in 1971. I was busy being a farm wife and mother but kept abreast of the Civil Rights Movement on radio, TV, and newspapers. It didn't seem real because Iowans were so far away from the Deep South and Washington, DC.