Oral history interview with Karen Lynn Parker, 2012 [text/print transcript]

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THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Karen Lynn Parker
INTERVIEWER: Sarah McNulty Turner
DATE: December 9, 2012
ST: Today is Sunday, December 9, 2012. My name is Sarah Turner. I am the oral history interviewer for the African American Institutional Memory Project. I‟m at the home of—
KP: Karen Parker.
ST: Thank you, Ms. Parker, for letting me come over today. We really like to start the interviews by just framing your life, so can you start, maybe, with when you were born and where, and a little bit about your family.
KP: I was born December 21, 1943 in Salisbury, North Carolina. My parents were from Rowan County [North Carolina]. My mom was from Salisbury proper and dad was from Spencer. It was the city people and the country people, and my mom frequently let us know [that] the Parkers were country. [laughter] And my parents were teachers. They taught here and there in little schools in little jurisdictions and places you never heard of. Dad would be this way a hundred miles, and mom would be that way a hundred miles, and so usually I was staying with somebody close to where my mom was. Then finally dad got a job in Winston-Salem, and he stayed there at the [Simon G.] Atkins High School in Winston-Salem, which was, of course, all-black then, and he stayed there until when the schools desegregated. Of course he went to whatever school was in—I can‟t remember what schools my dad and mom were in, but both of them ended up at desegregated schools before they retired. So I was the child of two teachers, and that was very fortunate in that appreciation for education was there. Mom had a master‟s from University of Michigan, and Dad, from Columbia [University], so there was quite an emphasis on education. Now my brother went to Phillips Exeter Academy.
ST: Phillips what?
KP: Phillips Exeter, E-X-E-T-E-R. One of his classmates was David Eisenhower, and then he went to Harvard [University], then he got his master‟s at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and he got his doctorate at Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley]. Then he went to Duke [University] Medical School and got his MD there. I think my brother was a perpetual student, frankly.
ST: Quite the achiever. 2
KP: Yes, he was good at being a student. I don‟t about anything else, but he was good at being a student.
ST: And was it just the two of you?
KP: Just the two of us.
ST: And were you older or younger?
KP: I‟m the older by four years and eight months.
ST: And your parents, their master‟s degrees were in education or were they in—
KP: Dad‟s was in education, and mom‟s was in French.
ST: So what—Did your mother obviously teach French?
KP: Yes.
ST: What about your father?
KP: He taught various—biology. He taught physics. I think he didn‟t teach chemistry, but he did biology and physics. It changed from year to year. I suppose, you know, did they need a physics teacher this year, or did they need a biology teacher this year; so it varied.
ST: And how old were you when you moved to Winston-Salem?
KP: Probably—I think about five. I‟m sure it was about five; I was five years old.
ST: Can you tell me about your life before you went to college: about high school, things you were interested in, what you liked to study?
KP: I was—We, of course, went to an all-black high school, and that‟s the way it was then. The blacks lived pretty much on one side of Winston-Salem.
ST: Did you go to Atkins High School?
KP: Yes, I went to Atkins. I was valedictorian in 1961. There was the county school for blacks, Carver High School. Those were the people that lived out in the sticks (rural areas), more or less, which are no longer the sticks, of course. And that‟s the way life was. You accepted it for what it was. Now, I didn‟t accept it in the sense that it was not right, and my parents had backed that up for years and years. I remember when I first learned about segregation. I think I was about five or six, about six, and I could read. I had a mother who was a teacher; of course I could read. There was an ad in the paper for some Disney thing at the Carolina Theater—Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck—and I said, “Mom, I want to go to this.” She said, “You can‟t go.” And I said, “Why not?” And she 3
said, “Because we‟re Negro.” And I went, “And what does that have to do with it?” And she explained that‟s just the way it is. I protested. That‟s not right, and I was quite angry about it. And I stayed pissed off about it so that by the time I was in college, I had an opportunity to do something about it, of course I was going to participate in whatever there was to do something about it. So that was my first realization, and that‟s just the way life was. The other part of segregation is [that] a lot of what you learned was survival, because basically you had no rights under the law. They might have been on the books, you know, but if a white person came up against a black person, the white person always won. We all knew that, so the thing was not to get into that situation. Try not to get the cop‟s attention so if he‟s having a bad day, he won‟t give you a ticket because he always wins. So that was what growing up was like.
I was interested in a lot of things. I was very interested in travel, very early on. I know that—I remember that I probably had an aptitude for English and literature, and I was terrible in math, absolutely awful. I don‟t know how I managed to get out of high school.
ST: [laughs] You couldn‟t have been that terrible if you were valedictorian.
KP: Everything else balanced out. And then in college, at the time, we didn‟t have to—If you didn‟t take math, you could take Greek, Latin, logic, or statistics, and I took Homeric Greek over at Woman‟s College. It was one of my favorite classes. Cool—a great professor by the name of Francis Lane. He was very funny.
ST: Francis Lane. [pause] And why did you choose Woman‟s College, initially.
KP: Well, basically a couple of things were going on. It was just at the time—It was after the Greensboro Sit-Ins—the Greensboro Four. It was just about the time things were starting to open up with the [President John F.] Kennedy administration. People started looking at life a little bit differently at that time, and there were more people enrolling—When I say “more people,” it was usually one person in every university in the South, maybe two. But there was more of that going on, and there was a sense that more of it was welcome. Plus, by the time I came through, there were already black women at UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. My parents kind of wanted me to go into an all-female environment, because they would keep a lid on me. They didn‟t keep as much of a lid as my parents wanted them to, but that was their thing. And if I didn‟t go there, they wanted me to go to Bennett [College], which was also all women, all females—black, but all female. I certainly didn‟t want to go there, but we were under the impression that we would get a better education at the predominantly white universities because more money had been put into the education programs and into schools, so we would have more opportunities and certainly more opportunities when you graduated with that on your resume as opposed to an HBCU [Historical Black Colleges and Universities].
ST: Did you apply to any other schools besides Woman‟s College and Bennett?
KP: No. 4
ST: That was it.
KP: Yes. If I did, I certainly don‟t remember.
ST: Well, can you tell me about your first day when you moved into Woman‟s College?
KP: I can tell you. I don‟t know whether it was the first day or what, but the horror of—First of all—you‟ve heard this from other people—the blacks were moved into Coit Hall on the first floor next to the house mother, who was Frances Falk, and I guess she had been used to previous black girls moving in, so she was the expert, I guess. And the second thing was, there were five of us, and they put three of us in one room and two in another. I was—I guess their reasoning was—I was put in a room with two girls from Charlotte [North Carolina]—that we were both big-city, and the other two were from Lenoir [North Carolina] and Mocksville [North Carolina], so that I was probably more suited to be in with the two girls from Charlotte. However, it was the other way around is the way it should have been. I was more akin to the two girls from Lenoir and Mocksville. Those two girls from Charlotte, of course, ganged up on me because they were both from Charlotte, and I was—I mean they were tough. They were some tough girls, and I had no background; I had no preparation for dealing with people like that, none whatsoever. I got so freaked out about it—and it wasn‟t the school; it was them—that I wanted to drop out. I wanted to go home, and my parents went and found somebody—a minister in Greensboro [North Carolina] that we knew in common—to talk me into staying, which obviously I did stay. But the tough part was just dealing with those two girls because they had me at any point. And, of course, they thought I was simple-minded and Lord knows what else. You know, very naïve compared to them.
ST: Did you ever try to get like a room switch or—
KP: No, I never did. I don‟t know whether we—I‟m sure it occurred to me; I don‟t know whether I thought it was possible so I don‟t think I ever made the effort.
ST: Do you remember moving into campus—like moving into your dorm room? Did your parents come with you?
KP: Yes, they were with me, and we all moved in there together. There were three beds; one was bunk beds, and I got the top bunk, which was alright with me because I liked the top bunk. I don‟t know how I managed to get the top bunk, but I did. I think it was because they didn‟t want the top bunk. [laughter] And it was something. You know, the space in the closet was an issue, and all of that. But I remember my parents were with me, of course, and other than that, I remember very little about it. All I know is I was there.
ST: Had you visited campus before you actually showed up there on the first day?
KP: I don‟t think so. I have no recall of that, and I always—When I say I have no recall, there are a lot of things that went on in my life that I don‟t remember fine details of, because a 5
whole lot of stuff happened. Especially in a certain period, a lot of stuff happened, so no, I don‟t recall ever having done that before.
ST: And did you transfer to UNC [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] as a junior?
KP: As a junior.
ST: So where did you live your sophomore year?
KP: Mendenhall [Residence Hall].
ST: And who did you live with at that point?
KP: Her name was Linda Lee—of course, she was black—and we had—She had been a day student, what was called a “day student,” as a freshman and decided she wanted to live on campus, and she—We had met up before, and pretty much decided freshman year that we would be roommates. Her sister was Myrna [Colley] Lee, who is—Everybody knows who Myrna Lee is: the famous Myrna Lee.
ST: And was that a better living situation?
KP: Oh, yes.
ST: And were you still separated in Mendenhall, or were you mixed?
KP: No, we were mixed. We could live—We were on various floors and stuff, so we were not restricted to—
ST: So it was just as a freshman.
KP: Just as a freshman. And then, you know, the next year, the next freshmen came in, and they all went to—The blacks all were in Coit [Hall] on the first floor, next to Frances Falk. I do remember one thing about her though: She was very proper, because all women in those days were very proper and very Southern-belleish, you know. A lady does this. We have all these rules. And of course the housemother had to exemplify all of that, and we had lights out at ten o‟clock, or ten-thirty or something for freshmen. And of course, we were wide awake, and so we would get out our flashlights and play Bid Whist [card game].
ST: And is that a—
KP: It‟s a card game. And somewhere I guess, it‟s in the black culture of the time. It probably still is. Bid Whist was a very commonly played game, along with Hearts and Pinochle. But Bid Whist was big, but it was very akin to Bridge. And we would get out the flashlights and play cards, and finally one night she caught us, and she stood in the door and said, “I just don‟t understand you people.” I don‟t think she said, “You people” 6
because that‟s fighting words. She might have said “you folks” or something, because we didn‟t zero in on it. “I don‟t understand you and that game.” “That game,” apparently they had trouble with that before, because we were playing “that game.” So that‟s probably one of my key memories of Frances Falk.
ST: Do you know how you spell her name?
KP: She was, of course, Frances, E-S, and F-A-L-K.
ST: Yes, because we like to know for our transcripts. Do you have any more memories of living in the dorm?
KP: Yes, I remember what a nice—Of course there were more than the two rooms with the blacks on the hall. There were white girls on the hall, and I remember at one point, all of us sitting in the middle of the hall, white and black. Of course people smoked then; it was very common.
ST: And you could smoke in your room?
KP: In your room, yes.
ST: Wow, talk about being proper.
KP: And we were sitting out in the hall, smoking; we were sitting in a circle, sort of. I guess, we were supposed to be having a pow-wow or something in Indian fashion—Indians forgive me, but we were ignorant back then—and we‟re sitting around, and we were passing around a cigarette like it was a peace pipe. And I was amazed that the white girls were sharing the same cigarette, which was, you know—Generally with the whole segregation thing, if you touched a black person, something terrible was going to happen to you. And oh, my God, you know. We‟re swapping germs here. And that just stood out. I don‟t know exactly why we did that; it was not that we didn‟t get along with them or anything. Probably in most cases, it was not a case of not getting along with, but they—We were foreign to them, so therefore they avoided us. But some of the girls, if you ended up in the bathroom and stuff, you know, you had to get to know them. You were in relatively close quarters, and I only remember one name. Her name was Paula, and she got married at the end of freshman year, and we gave a shower for her. All of us came to the shower, and all of us participated in that. Getting a ring and getting married was a big deal then. As a matter of fact, you were kind of a failure if you didn‟t have one by the time you graduated. [laughter] And by sophomore year, I figured out I had to have one, too, which I managed to do. I didn‟t marry him, but—Oh, I married him thirty-five years later, but at the time I did not marry him. [noise in the background] I don‟t want to yell at the cat, but she—
ST: She‟s so lively; I love it. My cat‟s lazy. I mean, did you enjoy going to UNCG?
KP: It was challenging. 7
ST: Do you mean socially or academically?
KP: Socially, no; academically, I didn‟t have any problems. Strangely enough, I made the Dean‟s List first semester; I was in freshman honors. I remember a world history class; we had an exam—the first exam, first written exam, the one for the semester grade—and we came in and the results [unclear] so I got an A and a C, and everybody else gets an F. And I was the A, and I do remember what the question was, and it was something like: “Martin Luther succeeded where others failed because of his religious fervor and dedication. And it just said comment on that.”
And, of course, most people wrote the obvious—agreed with it—and I said, “No, Martin Luther was lucky because the German princes at the time happened to side with him. He had events on his side. Where others had failed, he happened to be in the right time period.” Which was what the professor was looking for. And the very next semester, he had a similar type question; it was the same thing: I got an A. I don‟t know whether anybody else did. I don‟t think there were any others at that time either. So I decided, sort of, that history was my thing, more or less.
ST: Do you remember any of your history professors or any of your professors, in general?
KP: I think his name was [Lenoir] Wright. His last name was Wright, W-R-I-G-H-T. He looked like he was ancient to me, but he was out on the tennis court playing tennis. “He‟s awfully old to be playing tennis.” Of course, when you‟re nineteen or twenty years old, anybody who is forty years old is ancient. Anybody with gray hair is truly ancient, so I don‟t know how old he was, but he seemed ancient to me.
ST: Well, it‟s interesting that you were okay in school. We‟ve heard a lot of stories of the African American students really struggling to adjust from the schools that they had gone to. You know, they were the valedictorians; or they had always made As—to the rigorous—I mean a lot of students struggle in general, going to college—and that change—but the black students really said that they struggled probably more than the average student did, because, you know, they went to biology class, and their biology class in high school didn‟t have a microscope, and then they automatically assumed they knew how to use one, or things like that. Do you have any thoughts on why you didn‟t have that problem, or why you seemed to have an easier adjustment into college?
KP: I think maybe our high school preparation might have been a little better, being in a city. Also I had two teachers for parents. That was definitely—You know, we had books and encyclopedias and stuff around the house, where interest in things—the opportunity for interest in things—was there, while a lot of kids just didn‟t have that at home. Schools didn‟t have it, and they didn‟t have it either, you know, so you were going from—You‟re starting down here and trying to get way up there, and it takes some time. Some things I had an aptitude for. I had taken Advanced Placement in English, and so I went into sophomore English. A lot of the black students from other schools had no opportunity for Advanced Placement. And we had to go from Atkins over to Reynolds High—the white high school—to take advanced placement, and there were only—There were three blacks, and maybe three or four whites in that advanced placement class, but it was not available 8
at our school. We were able to go over there and take it. Of course, a lot of Negro students (as we were at the time) just didn‟t have that opportunity.
ST: And you went just for that one class and then came back to your school.
KP: Yes.
ST: What was it like, going over to Reynolds?
KP: There was some resentment in that we couldn‟t go to the same restroom as everybody else.
ST: Were there separate restrooms?
KP: There were separate restrooms.
ST: They had—
KP: They had to designate something, and we went over on the school bus—the three of us, all by our lonesome—and we got along with the teacher. Her name was Mozelle Stephenson, S-T-E-P-H-E-N—
ST: How do you spell Mozelle, M-O-Z?
KP: M-O-Z-E-L-L-E. And she was reasonable. I didn‟t get the feeling that she was identified with us in any way, but she was reasonable. And we got along with the white students okay. We chatted and talked and stuff, there was no problem there. One time she took us all down to Chapel Hill to see an Archibald MacLeish play. It was a play or a program on Archibald MacLeish, the playwright, and we all went in the car together, all of us, and—No, wait a minute. I take that back. There were the three blacks in the same car, because I just remembered where everybody was sitting. There was one male—he was sitting in the front—and I and another of the black girls were in the back. That might have been just us who went to that.
ST: Who drove?
KP: The teacher.
ST: So the teacher was—
KP: Yes, she took us down there.
ST: Wow.
KP: And we sat in the balcony. I don‟t know whether that was deliberate or what, but we sat in the balcony, probably deliberate. And what else do I remember about campus? I 9
remember a lot of the little silly things they did for freshmen, you know Hats Off Day and—
ST: This was back at Woman‟s College? Hats Off Day?
KP: Yes, it used to be Rat Day, and that‟s when sophomores could pick on freshmen, and they decided that “Rat Day” was very negative; calling people rats was very negative, so they made it “Hats Off Day” which was even sillier. And the sophomores could still pick on the freshmen, but they couldn‟t pick on them as severely as they had in previous years. It was, you know—Before it had been akin to hazing. I‟m just trying to think: generally speaking, the year that I got on the Dean‟s List—this is what I could not understand—the white girls couldn‟t figure out how I got on the Dean‟s List. I remember when they went out to the bulletin board—it was right outside our room—and I mean, there were the squeals of disbelief. “Karen Parker, how did she manage to get on the Dean‟s List?” Well, I obviously paid more attention to my class than you did. We had a biology teacher named Virginia Gangstad, G-A-N-G, and I think it was S-T-A-D, and not S-T-E-A-D. She taught class like kindergarten.
“This is a what, class? This is a larynx. Spell it. Now pronounce after me; it‟s not a „laRNyx,‟ it‟s a laRYnx.” And you know: “What is this, class? This is a snail. Pronounce after me: snail.” She taught everything just like that. But the thing was, she told you everything she wanted you to know. It was as simple as it could be; all you had to do was follow it. Write it down. And the other students resented it so much that most of them blocked it out. It was as simple as all you had to do was pay attention. She was telling you, and it couldn‟t have been more simple. So I remember I had one biology teacher by the name of [Martin] Roeder—I forget what his first name was. Biology seminar. I remember taking the M.M., the Minnesota Multiphasic [Personality Inventory], whatever it is—psychology, psychological test—and doing poorly on it. Of course, I knew that before I took it. And I guess I was neurotic, and I agreed with that, that I was. And thinking of—Oh, yes, we had a health teacher—I forgot what her name was—she had a strange presentation like [imitates teacher] saying, “Men(t)al health is vi(t)ally important.” She had a thing with “nt,” and we used to laugh about her. She would do sort of racial—she would have to amend her speech every now and then. She‟d get into some near-racial things, you know, or if there‟s a black student in the class, she might be insulting somebody if she said the wrong thing, and she‟d have to bite her tongue every now and then. Of problem teachers, I think that‟s the closest I can remember to it. Nobody—No teacher got up and said, “I‟ve declared I‟m against you.” Some of the blacks down at Chapel Hill got that, absolutely got a declaration—Somebody was told, “No nigger is going to get an A in my class.” It was announced in front of the whole class. Things like that happened, and there were no repercussions for a professor saying things like that. I didn‟t get any of that, but there were students who did. I don‟t remember—As a matter of fact, most of the teachers in both places were very reasonable people. They treated you like anybody else, and they had the same expectations of you. There was an American history teacher by the name of Converse Close; I remember him. Close was spelled C-L-O-S-E, and Converse, like Converse sneakers. There was an English literature teacher named—JoAnne was her first name, and I cannot remember her last name right now, but I had her class at eight in the 10
morning and that was terrible. I am no good at eight in the morning; I‟m a night owl anyway, and I was awful and I did poorly. Okay, poorly is relative. Let‟s say, if I got a B, I should have gotten an A; if I got a C, I should have gotten a B; if it had not been at eight o‟clock in the morning. So I didn‟t function well at eight o‟clock in the morning. That was very difficult.
ST: Did you get to the point at Woman‟s College where you picked a major?
KP: No, I had no idea. Now, see, this is one thing: at that time the number of opportunities for Negroes in the South were very few. There were no businesses to speak of; very few people going into medicine, hardly anybody into law, and you had to go out of state somewhere to do it. And after you got it, you probably didn‟t want to practice in some two-bit hometown, which is the way our towns were back then. There were just no opportunities, and about the best thing I could think of doing—the only thing I could think of doing—was becoming a teacher. There was room for black teachers, and teachers made a little bit more money than everybody else. And I didn‟t want to be an English teacher. I was going to be an English teacher probably; I did not want to be an English teacher. I didn‟t want to teach anything. I got saved by—on the Winston-Salem paper there was a black reporter by the name of Luix—and he spelled it L-U-I-X—Overbea, O-V-E-R-B-E-A, and he had gotten me to sub for him one summer when he was on vacation. He told me I had the talent for it, and then he got me into the newspaper‟s intern program.
ST: And this was at the Winston-Salem Journal?
KP: Yes. And then he said, “You know, you should apply for journalism school in Chapel Hill.” And I went, “Great idea” because I certainly didn‟t have any focus at UNCG. So I was pleased to go down there because I was—at least there was something I knew about that already. By the time I got down there, there were a lot of things I knew already from having worked in the newspaper business, more so than other students applying and entering. And you could transfer down as a junior, and that‟s what I did. And thank God for Luix Overbea because I don‟t know what would have become of me. Everything that has happened positive in my life, everything I‟ve become, came from the fact that I went to UNC Journalism School. I don‟t know what my life would have been like otherwise, but I know that everything has stemmed from the fact that I went to school there, and, of course, being on that campus, period, with its opportunities and its focus.
ST: How did you know—I guess Mr.—Luix is a man—How did you know Mr. Overbea?
KP: Everybody knew Mr. Overbea. He covered the black community, so he was over at our high school; he was over at people‟s churches. Everybody knew Mr. Overbea, and he really covered the community. He covered all of the community, so we all knew who he was. And you had to have a black person to sub for him when he went on vacation. There was an English teacher he had had previously and, for some reason, she couldn‟t do it that year, and he was desperate so he gave me a two-day, two-night crash course and left 11
for two weeks. And my first pages and things I did looked awful, but at least I was on my way.
ST: And was this during the summer?
KP: Yes.
ST: Between freshman and sophomore year?
KP: Between freshman and sophomore.
ST: So you prepared to—You probably applied sophomore year to go your junior year. And what did your parents think about this change?
KP: They thought it was wonderful because they respected him. Some previous things—I had wanted to be a fashion designer at one point—and they didn‟t want me to do that. I think they were probably fearful of the challenge or whatever; that I would have to go to New York City and go to Pratt Institute or someplace like that. Maybe they didn‟t think I had the aptitude for it—or whatever—but they weren‟t much into that. But when Overbea suggested I go to journalism school, they thought that was cool.
ST: And what did you classmates think about you transferring? Did you ever speak about it with them?
KP: I‟m sure I did. I don‟t recall anything about it, one way or the other, as it being any kind of an issue or a big deal.
ST: And during this time, you couldn‟t go to Carolina, or you couldn‟t go to UNC as a freshman woman anyway. That‟s why Woman‟s College existed. Could you go as a sophomore?
KP: No, you couldn‟t go unless you were a junior. The only women that went at that time were women who lived in Chapel Hill, or if you had a major that started freshman year, and that was very few things. Other than that, you went there in junior year. And I do remember the male-female ratio was twelve males to one female. If you didn‟t have a date, it was because you didn‟t want one. A little different now.
ST: Yes. Very much so. And so were you the first—I‟ve read a little bit about your bio [biography]. You were the first African American to graduate.
KP: Undergrad.
ST: Undergrad. Were you the first enrolled?
KP: I don‟t know. I don‟t know of anyone else, but I don‟t know.
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ST: And you were the first male or female.
KP: No.
ST: Just female.
KP: The first black male to go through undergrad, graduated in 1961. His name was David Dansby. He lives here in Greensboro. He‟s an attorney. You spell it D-A-N-S-B-Y. I‟m a newspaper person so I spell things.
ST: Oh, I love it.
KP: And my graduating class was five guys and me—one of them was my cousin—so there were very few of us on campus, but after that each class behind us got increasingly larger in the number of blacks.
ST: Did you have a room with another black student? Was there another girl that you lived with?
KP: I was in a room by myself down there, and a white girl I knew up at UNCG—She was majoring in journalism, too, and we had known each other. We picketed together or something up there, and she was in a room with three, and she said, “Oh, what the heck. Why don‟t I move in with you. We get along fine.”
And I said, “Yeah, we do.” And so she did. And that was cool until her parents found out about it, and—boy—holy hell broke out. Oh, my goodness. And it became a campus incident, and it affected policy for the next year. I‟m serious. Up until then there were blacks and whites, black males and white males rooming together. The next year they re-segregated everybody, and if you were, by agreement, living—had a roommate who was black or white, your parents had to sign a permission slip. You know, “My daughter, Karen, Negro, to room with Louise Ambrosiana who is white.” And her parents had to do the same thing. And when I discovered that this had happened, that they had re-segregated everybody, I went to the Daily Tar Heel and they exposed it. At the time that was absolutely against the law; you couldn‟t do that. That was their reaction to the incident with me and Joanne [Johnston], and they punished her for moving without permission, but we became very good friends. I just talked to her a couple of days—We talk all the time. We go visit each other. She lives in Tacoma, [Washington]. We visit each other, we talk no more than every three weeks apart, and we‟ve been friends all these years.
ST: She went to Woman‟s College. And what was her last name?
KP: Johnston, J-O-A-N-N-E, Johnston. She hated all the silly rules like I did. We were two of a kind that way; we were not much for rules. She went to Honor Court in her prom dress and long gloves.
ST: And was she from the South? 13
KP: I think she had been born in Jersey or something, but her parents had been living in Winston, and they had moved back to New Jersey by the time we got down to Chapel Hill, but basically she was a Southerner. She went all through high school in Winston-Salem. But she didn‟t think like the typical white Southerner, by any means.
ST: What dorm did you live in at UNC?
KP: Cobb [Residence Hall]. Well, first year I was at West Cobb and second year I was at East Cobb. And the Cobb—We have the Cobb reunion there, eight of us. We have a Cobb reunion every few years. All of us are still—in that group of eight—are still close friends. We talk frequently and visit. Some of the best, coolest people and the most honorable people I‟ve ever met. And, of course, we‟re on the same wave length now. It‟s cool. Mostly from Chapel Hill. Of course I knew Joanne from before. I don‟t have any really close friends out of Woman‟s College as I did in Chapel Hill. I don‟t think there was as much the opportunity. You know, freshmen pretty much stayed with freshmen; sophomores stayed with—You know, you really didn‟t associate with the other classes that much. It didn‟t seem to happen.
ST: Do you stay in touch with anyone from Woman‟s College?
KP: Alice [Garrett Brown], of course; she‟s the only one. I don‟t know what ever happened to those two girls that terrorized me. They terrorized me—I‟m not kidding—my freshman year. I‟ve heard that they‟ve since gone on and finished and are alive and fine, last I heard, but I don‟t know anything about them. Alice‟s roommate—I have seen her since we graduated, of course, and she and Alice—
ST: And what was her name?
KP: Sina McGimpsey [Reid]. She spelled it S-I-N-A, and you‟ve heard of her.
ST: Yes.
KP: And I hear about her through Alice, but that‟s the extent of my—Oh, and Poinsettia [Galloway Peterson]—I don‟t know what her maiden name was. She was a year behind me. I didn‟t know her in school so much as she married one of my Chapel Hill classmates, and we keep running into each other at events.
ST: Okay, Poinsettia Galloway Peterson.
KP: Yes.
ST: She lives in Maryland.
KP: Yes. I just saw her recently. I see her at least once a year, sometimes twice a year, at UNC events. She comes with her husband.
ST: I guess you transferred before Woman‟s College became UNCG. 14
KP: Yes.
ST: So there were never any men on campus when you went there.
KP: No, heaven forbid!
ST: Can you tell me about your experience in the dining halls? Do you have any memories about Woman‟s College dining halls?
KP: No, nothing in particular. I liked to have breakfast with Linner Ward, because she didn‟t like bacon and I loved bacon. [laughter] I‟d get her bacon. You‟ve probably heard of Linner Ward. Her sister was one of those—Minnie Ward—who terrorized me freshman year. Minnie Ward and Mamie Davis; those were the Charlotte terrorists. I don‟t mind calling them that either, because they were—to me anyway. I don‟t remember anything in particular about people sitting there. Usually you were with another black person, just sort of out of habit. I was with my roommate most of the time. Sometimes a white girl was sitting with us, you know, all depending on what was going on. There were white girls who—people like Joanne Johnston—who had no problem with mingling with anybody who happened to be around. No names in particular stick with me as anybody in particular I was very, very close to—none whatsoever—but, sure, there were the ones who didn‟t like us, ignored us. We didn‟t have any harassment from anybody or anything like that. There was none of “You guys sit over here” or “This is the black section.” There was none of that. Sit anywhere you wanted to; they wouldn‟t necessarily join you. That was not a problem.
ST: Nothing overt.
KP: No. And then there was a guy—I can‟t remember his name—He worked in the—They had subveyors. It wasn‟t a conveyor. It went up and down, and that‟s where you put your tray when you were done, and they went down and the workers in the staff cleaned up down there. There was a guy—it was a black guy—who worked down there who was very, very cute and, you know. The white girls thought he was very, very cute, so everybody loved to watch him. I remember him, associated with the cafeteria, that anybody who could watch him, watched him.
ST: Did you get involved with any of the newspapers, either at Woman‟s College or at Carolina?
KP: At Carolina, but not at Woman‟s College. I don‟t remember doing anything, writing anything. Maybe I did; I don‟t remember writing anything. I wrote a few articles for the Daily Tarheel but I became editor of the UNC Journalist [UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism laboratory newspaper] which was the Journalism School laboratory newspaper. So I did that, that was senior year, and we published quarterly. There was a campus literary magazine called Quo Vadimus, I believe, and I published something in there, but—
15
ST: How would you spell that? Quo—
KP: V-A-D-I-M-U-S. A Latin—
ST: I was going to say, that is not phonetic at all.
KP: No. That‟s the way the Latin goes.
ST: Were you involved in any extracurricular activities at Woman‟s College?
KP: No, again I definitely didn‟t sign up for anything to begin with because the whole problem was—the whole thing was, I figured I would need all my attention on the academic. So, no, I didn‟t sign up for any campus activities. Of course, in that period, there was a protest, picketing, down on Tate Street, and were some bigger ones in Greensboro as a whole. I can remember being in a huge march in downtown Greensboro with students from A&T [North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University], Bennett [College], and there was a handful of white students from Guilford [College] and some from Woman‟s College and some from Greensboro College. It was a huge civil rights march.
ST: Are you referring to the Jesse Jackson march that happened in 1963?
KP: It could have been then.
ST: Because there was a—I did a project, actually, in graduate school about it.
KP: Yes. It could have been. It was a big march.
ST: In the downtown at the corner of—It was called Market Square, I think. It was where Lincoln Financial [Group] building is now.
KP: Yes, and I don‟t remember what the reasoning behind it was, what made it so big. I remember having to be—We had to be very quiet [unclear] I think there was some threat from the Ku Klux Klan.
ST: I think the issue was—It was the integration of the Mayfair Cafeteria and maybe one other store, and, I think, the Carolina Theater downtown. Woolworth‟s had already integrated, and Kress and other stores had, but there were a couple of the cafeterias downtown.
KP: It was, probably. That makes sense that it would be something like that. And I remember—
ST: Were you arrested in that?
16
KP: No. I wasn‟t arrested in anything while I was at UNCG. I remember picketing in front of a place on Tate Street called the Apple [House]; I think that was the name of it. Apple was in there anyway, and one of the—We took shifts, you know, for the picketing. I remember one night—It was a Saturday night, I believe—and some white guys were heckling us, and there was a bunch of guys sitting on a little hill across the street. They were sitting there watching, and then, at some point, one of them walked over and said to one of the white girls, “Don‟t you worry. We‟re the 82nd Airborne [Division]. Don‟t worry about those guys. They‟re not going to bother you. They‟re not going to bother you. We‟re from the 82nd Airborne. We‟ll take care of it.” And that was touching; that was very touching.
ST: So you had—The Tate Street movements were both white and black students were getting involved. And was it really just the Woman‟s College students or were there students coming over from other schools?
KP: I don‟t remember any students from other schools. I think it was all Woman‟s College.
ST: And what was the kind of—I mean obviously it was about integrating—
KP: There was a theater down there, too.
ST: And did you just—What was it like? What did you guys do? Obviously you said you did some sitting and protesting and picketing.
KP: Well, picketing. I don‟t know if there was a sit-in or anything, but we were picketing.
ST: Picketing. How did your parents feel about you being involved in this?
KP: They didn‟t like it.
ST: They didn‟t like it. Did you tell them or did they—
KP: Yes, some of it I told them; some of it they found out anyway because it was on the news, but they didn‟t want me participating on either campus, because they felt it jeopardized their job. So we had quite a go-around about that because, hey, you‟re the one who told me that segregation is wrong and I‟m going to do something about it, and you‟re trying to tell me not to do it, or let somebody else do it, and if everybody said, “Let somebody else do it,” nobody would do anything. And I‟m sorry, I cannot buy that. And I still remember Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and how pissed off I was way back then. So I‟m going to do something about it. And it finally got so that my mother concluded that whenever some demonstration from over there was on the news, she says okay, I accept it. You‟ll be right in the middle of it. And, you know, she just sort of gave up at one point. Of course when I went to jail in Chapel Hill and all later, they were extremely upset about it. Very upset.
ST: I‟m sure they were worried about you, too. 17
KP: Yes. But the prospect of their losing their jobs was a real prospect.
ST: Right, because they were already at integrated schools by that point?
KP: No, they weren‟t.
ST: So their jobs were even threatened at segregated schools.
KP: Yes, because the people who ran the school board and all the hierarchy from the teachers were white, and I guess my parents were expected to keep their child under control and not rock the boat. That was the whole segregation thing was the “toe the line, don‟t rock the boat” thing, and if they had lost their jobs, it was not like they could run out and get a new one somewhere, because the people who control that probably controlled it for the whole—had the connections to control it for the whole state. So it was not feasible for them to look elsewhere. So, of course, they didn‟t want to lose their jobs, but they finally accepted that since they didn‟t lose their jobs—I didn‟t think they would; they thought they would; I didn‟t think they would, so I proceeded to do what I was doing, and after awhile they just sort of gave up on trying to get me to stop doing things.
ST: And was Woman‟s College your first time being involved in Civil Rights Movements or had you done any prior to that?
KP: No, but I remember in high school, the day after the Greensboro Four incident [Editor‟s note: in February 1960, four North Carolina A&T State College students started the Greensboro Sit-ins at the downtown Woolworth‟s Five and Dime Store]. When it happened nobody could believe that somebody had the guts to stand down or stand up against the forces, the powers that be, and sit-in at that restaurant. I remember the very next day, somebody—I heard people say, Well, let‟s go downtown (to downtown Winston-Salem) to the cafeteria, and a whole bunch of kids walked out of school. I remember the principal saying, “Get back here right now.” And a bunch of them took off downtown, and, of course I wasn‟t going anywhere, [because] the time both my parents were on the faculty, and there was just no way. I knew better, but that was really significant. The spirit was there, and once the Greensboro Four got it started, it just snowballed from that point on.
ST: And how did other students feel about you being politically-minded at Woman‟s College? Were other African American students as involved, or were they more—
KP: They were about as involved on their own level, as I was. I think we all picketed, as I recall. I think we did. Now I don‟t remember anyone being singled out as not doing so. It‟s possible, but I don‟t remember it.
ST: Did these pickets look like the Apple Pan or whatever that Apple place was called? Was that during your freshman year or your sophomore year, or do you remember?
KP: That was sophomore year, I believe. And I do remember one of the people who crossed in front of me in line was one of the girls who had been in my Advanced Placement 18
English at Reynolds High. I was very surprised. We‟d also been interns together in Winston-Salem at the paper. And I was rather appalled that she had the nerve to cross right in front of me. Basically she—It was clear she didn‟t give a damn but, you know, I do remember that. Her name was Carol Miller, I believe was her name.
ST: And did you get involved in any kind of activities in civil rights your freshman year?
KP: No, I don‟t recall anything going on.
ST: Did the administration ever interact with you about your involvement in the civil rights protests?
KP: I‟m sure there was something about the picketing down on Tate Street, you know. It‟s in the back of my mind, but I could not specifically—I don‟t specifically recall anything.
ST: And obviously we‟ve talked about your activities on Tate Street which is, for all intents and purposes, campus. Obviously the world was still mostly segregated. Woolworth‟s is probably the one exception. So what was it like leaving the integrated campus and going into the segregated, maybe, downtown area? Did you ever have any experiences going downtown?
KP: Well, it was the same thing we would have to deal with when we were in our hometowns going to the segregated downtown, exactly the same thing. You watched where you went; you watched what you said; and there were some places you could go into; there were some places you couldn‟t go into, and that was it.
ST: Did you ever go downtown?
KP: Oh, yes.
ST: Would you go shopping? Can you tell me about some things you would do there?
KP: Oh, yes. We would go shopping. You didn‟t go down to eat in restaurants though. [laughter] No, it was for shopping.
ST: What kind of stores would you go to?
KP: The department stores.
ST: But, the names of the stores.
KP: When you had to buy clothes. I can‟t remember: there was a Belk [Department Store]. I remember the ones in Winston very particularly. I remember there was a Belk in Greensboro, too, as well as in Winston. And in Winston there was Belk; there was an Arcade; Mother and Daughter, Thalheimers [Department Store]; Bocock-Stroud, and I can remember the stores in downtown Winston, because that was my hometown. I‟m 19
trying to think if any others were chains that were also in Greensboro, but I do remember Belk was there.
ST: Would you guys walk or would you take a bus?
KP: We walked.
ST: Walked. And we‟ve talked about how you guys would play cards for fun. Can you tell me any other things you would do for fun while you were at Woman‟s College?
KP: Together?
ST: Or just any that you remember. I mean, shopping is one thing, and playing cards. Anything else that you would do?
KP: Minnie and Mamie taught me solitaire; it was the first time I learned how to play solitaire. No, freshman year I don‟t remember anything in particular. We went to events on campus. I can remember them playing Dixie at a concert, and people standing up for Dixie, and I refused to stand up.
ST: And would the concert be somewhere like Aycock Auditorium?
KP: Yes, it wasn‟t Aycock Auditorium; it was at the student center or something.
ST: Oh, Elliott Hall.
KP: Yes, and I can remember I took advantage of the things I could go to. They would have movies on the weekend nights, and I would go to those, which was eye-opening. They were not things I would be able to see at home, but, you know, it was a campus thing; shown on campus. I could see them. That was very important. I would go to practically every last one of them.
ST: So at segregated movie theaters, the black theaters [Editor‟s note: there were no black theaters] wouldn‟t get the same kinds of movies the white theaters would.
KP: [I was referring to the campus films.] No, especially the ones like the foreign movies, but you‟re not going to get that. There were no arts theaters or alternative theaters in any of the cities then. [bird chirping] Forgive the bird clock. Somebody gave it to me.
ST: Oh, my mom has one of those things.
KP: I‟m trying to think what else we had. They had concerts and plays and things. I remember going to plays. I remember concerts more in Chapel Hill, but I tried to take advantage of as many things as I could that tweaked my interest. As to what we did together, I don‟t recall anything. You know, you went home with some people. You know, the blacks that you went home with somebody for the weekend or the day or went out with somebody‟s 20
parents or whatever, but I don‟t remember anything specific that we did. Now my sophomore year was different because my roommate and I were dating two guys from A&T who were also roommates, so we were frequently over there or we were over on campus.
ST: That was my next question: What was your relationship with students at other places like A&T and Bennett?
KP: It was okay. Some of them thought that—You know, you had that usual thing about you were being different, you were being uppity, whatever. There was some resentment from some people; others, it didn‟t make any difference to them one way or the other. And then when we all joined together for some cause of course, the more the merrier. No stigma of any kind for being from there.
ST: How would you meet guys from A&T?
KP: Always eventually somebody would either—Often a bunch of guys would come over. They knew everyone who was a freshman. A bunch of black guys who had gone to high school with me; they knew I was there and one day they didn‟t have anything to do so they drove over to say “Hi.” I do recall that, and periodically we would go over there for some reason. We would walk over there, and you‟d hear of somebody; somebody would hear of you; somebody would suggest somebody in a blind date and that kind of thing. And then they were also taking the busloads of women down to Carolina. And I had a boyfriend at that time—freshman year—I had a boyfriend from high school, but he was going to North Carolina State [University], so I remember meeting up with him one time down there for a football game and an evening. But sophomore year I dumped him and went out with a student from A&T.
ST: A local guy.
KP: Yes, whom I married thirty-five years later, and subsequently divorced. As he said, “You know people do change in thirty-five years.” I said, “You‟re right.”
ST: What was your favorite experience or aspect of Woman‟s College?
KP: I would have to say the education itself stands out more than anything. I didn‟t like the ice cream. What‟s the name of that place with the ice cream? It‟s still there.
ST: Yum-Yum‟s [Better Hot Dogs and Ice Cream].
KP: Yes. Yum-Yum‟s ice cream sucked back then. You know, it really did. The thing is, it was cheap, like a nickel, but it really was not good ice cream. I hear they‟ve gotten a lot better.
ST: That‟s funny. Most people that I‟ve talked to haven‟t talked about the ice cream so much as their hot dogs. 21
KP: Somehow hot dogs don‟t—I‟m sure we had the hot dogs, too, but they don‟t stand out like the ice cream did, because we sort of got—I got it in desperation because I could afford it, but that was all. That‟s all. It would have to be the academics because there was nothing else going on there that I related to. There were no movements going on or any great eye-opening things; there were no relationships in particular that went on there. Things at Chapel Hill were far more dynamic and far more explosive, so—
ST: Did you ever wish, when you were at Woman‟s College, that you had gone to a historically black college?
KP: No. A couple of things—I knew I was a good candidate. First of all, I believed that somebody had to go to these schools; you had to break the ice. You had to start somewhere, and I believed I was a good candidate for it pretty much academically and otherwise, and I wanted to be there. I wanted the opportunity for a better education. Same thing when I got down to Chapel Hill. Well, by the time I got down there, not only that—I had a bit of arrogance and anger and I had something to prove. I had something to prove in Greensboro, too, so I—Don‟t stereotype me. I am not the stereotype. Actually, none of us are. If you got to know us, you would see that we are human just like you are, and there‟s probably very little difference between us, except you can go places I can‟t go. And a couple of my colleagues from Chapel Hill, at the time of the Civil Rights Movement there, who knew me and they would go, “Let‟s all go to the beach.”
And I‟d go, “I can‟t go.” And they would be appalled that I couldn‟t, you know. They knew why, but they—some of them were from the North—they were appalled because I couldn‟t go to the beach with them. They didn‟t think that was right, so when sit-ins and the civil rights started, they were right there. They stuck to their principles. They were right there; they went to jail, the whole thing. My white roommate went to jail more than I did.
ST: What did your parents think about you going to jail? I mean, that upped the ante a little bit to them.
KP: Very unhappy, extremely unhappy. You know, “Get out of there; come out now.” No, the point was to stay in there. I stayed in there overnight, and I think by the next day they had my parents—the dean was calling—The dean of women and the dean of men and my parents were calling. So finally to get them all to shut up, I agreed to come out at that point. And the next time—I don‟t know how long I stayed in—but of course they were upset about that, too. I remember in one of the court appearances, my dad came down and went to court with me.
ST: Did you ever get—I mean, a lot of time, at least with my experience with my grandfather‟s restaurants, and they never pressed charges. I think they tried, and it ended up being thrown out. Did you actually have charges?
KP: Let me see, we were arrested for—What was the charge? It wasn‟t loitering; it was something in resisting arrest was the other part of it. The whole thing—The technique 22
was when they came to arrest you, you dropped to the ground and went limp, and they had to carry you away. That charge was—For years I knew what that the charge was. I used to put it on applications when they were able to ask you, “Do you have an arrest record,” and I proudly put down what I was arrested for.
ST: So you were being charged and convicted of these things, or did it just—
KP: No, we never got convicted. We were arrested, yes, but we were never convicted. And when we went to school, a whole bunch of us—The whole thing was to fill the jails, and we had spilled out of Chapel Hill into Hillsborough, so it was whole bunch of us, a hundred of us. I went over to Hillsborough to court, and they dismissed the charges against everyone except the leaders. They convicted them of what, I don‟t know, because they weren‟t breaking any law. It was peaceable assembly. And they sent them to the chain gang, and [Governor] Terry Sanford ended up commuting their sentences. He didn‟t pardon them; he commuted the sentences. There were three of them: two black and one white—I mean, two white and one black.
ST: I know a little bit about the movement in Chapel Hill, but what specifically were you targeting?
KP: The restaurants downtown on Franklin Street.
ST: Do you remember which restaurants they were?
KP: Colonial Drugstore was one of them. One of the places that‟s right out toward the edge of town, called the Rock Pile was one of them. I do remember there were two restaurants on Franklin Street that had desegregated of their own accord: the Carolina Coffee Shop and Harry‟s Bar and Grill. Harry‟s no longer exists but Carolina Coffee Shop is still there. Harry‟s was next door to the post office on Franklin Street, and, as a matter of fact, that was sort of the secondary headquarters for the civil rights people because they‟d all—Everybody could go into Harry‟s and meet. But oh jeez, specific names, I got arrested in Carrboro. I cannot remember the name of the restaurant. I do have—[moves away from the microphone] I might be able to tell you exactly what [unclear, speaking from a distance] This is the guy from Chapel Hill who called me not too long ago. I happened to pull out my UNC [unclear]. This is one of the things I wrote about. [sound of pages being turned] Kennedy assassination. Jail Day. This is my first time—[reads] “Saturday, the fourteenth, I decided to go to jail. It was no fun at all.” [sound of shuffling pages] Let‟s see if it says what restaurant it was—[reading] “Jail—police—police were nice.” [pause] Leo‟s was the name of it. [pause] And this goes on about what they thought, and stuff, and what I thought about some of my classmates and stuff like that. And then there is some stuff about going to jail on December 19. [sound of page turning] Then, oh, and they threatened to expel us. And general campus opinion about it. This is—I‟ve written about this at length in this piece. This is all available online. It‟s amazing, of this, some of the stuff I remember, and even though I wrote about it, I don‟t remember. Somebody would read something—I‟d be at some event—and says, “And she wrote, blah, blah—” I‟d go, “I wrote that? That‟s pretty good for a student.” [laughter] 23
ST: “I‟m proud of myself.”
KP: This is my notebook or a various copy—thirty-six cents.
ST: Wow. I love that cover.
KP: Well, the original is down—is in the library, but I colored the cover. But that‟s what it was called, Thoughts, One. And the story behind that was there was a reporter, a white reporter, over at the Winston-Salem paper. He was a mentor, too, and I would complain about this going on, on campus. He said, “You know, you should write that down. It might come in handy one day.”
I didn‟t think that, but I started doing it out of frustration, with getting things out of my system. And he was right: a whole lot has come of it, quite a lot. It‟s amazing. He was right on about that one. It did come in handy.
ST: We have some questions about specific people, and if you have memories of them, that‟s great. If you don‟t—We just ask to make sure, but while you were at Woman‟s College, there was a—changes a lot in leadership. Chancellors—Usually chancellors were there for a very long time, but there was a lot of change during this time. And do you remember Dr. Gordon Blackwell? Or Dr. W.W. Pierson, or Dr. Otis Singletary?
KP: The names are familiar, but that‟s all.
ST: Okay. So you never had any interactions with them.
KP: No, if I did, I certainly don‟t remember it.
ST: What about the Dean of College, Mereb Mossman?
KP: No, I couldn‟t—If you asked me to name anybody in the administration in those two years I was there, I could not tell you.
ST: I‟m not anxious to make sure because we just ask, just in case. Dean of Students Katherine Taylor?
KP: No, I recall nothing.
ST: Or the Alumni Secretary, Barbara Parrish? And you said you—You‟ve actually remembered a lot of professors. A lot of people don‟t remember as many professors. Can you recall a favorite teacher?
KP: I loved my Greek teacher, my Homeric Greek teacher Francis Lane. I thought he was cute, too. I think he was probably the only one who was a favorite. The rest of them were generally okay; I mean, no problem.
ST: Right. Did any of the professors know about plans to transfer? 24
KP: No.
ST: Do you recall any more professors that we haven‟t talked about?
KP: Oh, yes, the health teacher. Her name was [Madeleine] McCain; that was her name. There was a French teacher, French literature—I can‟t remember her name. There was another English teacher; I can‟t remember her name. The ones who were teaching freshman honors; I can‟t remember them. I guess the ones I‟ve mentioned are the ones that, you know, something about them made an impact, whereas the other ones did not. I couldn‟t tell you about the PE [physical education] teacher. I heard a very funny incident, PE-related. We went in our crisp white gym suits, perfectly ironed and everything, so they were having a—They were doing pictures—spinal x-rays—for some reason, to tell if your spine was straight. That was the whole point. And we were required to do it, so Alice Garrett Brown [Class of 1965] and I showed up at the same time to get ours done, and the women who were doing this had been putting a black greased pencil mark at the top, right at the base of the cervical spine, and at the base of the lumbar spine, and, of course, it showed up as reversed. And they got to us, and they realized that the black grease mark wasn‟t going to show up on us, and I remember one of them saying “Now, what are we going to do about this? Just what are we going to do about it. Oh, Jeez.” And one of them gets really smart, and says—She gets some white adhesive tape, and she cuts strips, and they put an adhesive “X” on us so that it would show up on the x-ray. That was really funny. And then Linda Lee [Class of 1965] and I would go down to tanning court. Did you ever hear about tanning court?
ST: No.
KP: Of course, we couldn‟t expose—We couldn‟t even walk across campus and expose our legs, but they had tanning court. You could go to this particular fenced-in area over by the gym, the white girls—Well, anybody could; they just didn‟t expect us to go—And they could strip down to their underwear and tan. And, you know, it was walled in from the rest of the world. And for the hell of it, Linda Lee and I decided we‟d go down to tanning court, so we walked down, and we stripped down to our underwear just like they did. And they said, “What are you doing here? You‟re not going to tan.” And after about half an hour, we could [unclear] and say, “See, already.”
ST: It‟s working.
KP: It‟s working, because the melanin in our skin, you get an impact after awhile. It takes them a lot longer to get enough of a tan to make a difference. It took us no time at all to change colors, so that was fun.
ST: I hadn‟t heard about tanning court.
KP: Yes, tanning court, and they had it in Chapel Hill, too. And they had it on the side of Cobb Dormitory. I had a funny story about that, too. I had these friends I palled around with all the time, and it was the first day of tanning court, and they were all in somebody‟s room, and they were all looking at each other and seeing who had the best 25
tan, and I walked in the door, and somebody said: “Where did you get that ta…?” And then they realized who they were talking to, and I thought that was one of the most touching things because, actually, I was just another person. I was not a black person. I was just somebody, one of them. I thought that was really very touching. I always remembered that incident.
ST: Do you remember where the tanning court was at Woman‟s College?
KP: It was over by the gym and that‟s all I remember. It was beyond the Quad. It was over by the gym, very close to the gym. That‟s all I can tell you, and there were trees all around it. I remember that. And it was fenced in, and very private.
ST: One thing we like to do is kind—We‟ve done this a little bit—is frame your time in college with what was going on in the world. So, like memories. You talked in your journal about your memories of JFK [President John F. Kennedy] being assassinated. Do you remember anything about the first time you saw the march on Washington, the Martin Luther King, [Jr.] “I Have a Dream” speech.
KP: I remember those; where I was exactly when I heard about it, I don‟t know. But one thing I do [know] in terms of the news: that was when they had the stand-down with the Russians; Kennedy and [Nikita] Khrushchev and missiles.
ST: The Cuban Missile Crisis.
KP: Yes, and the administration told us—I think it hadn‟t dawned on us how serious this was—and they told us that if things progressed negatively, that we could go to be with our families. And, you know, by that time: “Hey, this is serious stuff. They‟re going to let you go home and die with your family.” [laughter] If you‟re going to die, you know, die with your family. And, of course, we didn‟t have to go, but I remember that. That was a pretty big deal. Civil rights-related during the time I was at UNCG, nothing registers. As a matter of fact, I‟ve forgotten—Alice straightened me out—I had forgotten that the picketing on Tate Street worked; and it did while we were there. My focus got so beyond those two years that I had absolutely erased it.
ST: And that was your first success.
KP: Yes.
ST: [unclear]
KP: I think I‟ve got the—It might be a success, but it was something—It was not—I didn‟t consider it a major success. I don‟t know why, but it was not that. There‟s a term for it; it‟s not coming to me right now, but I saw it as a faint success. There were some extenuating circumstances around it. I‟m just going on the basis of what I felt, and I didn‟t see it as a truly big deal.
26
ST: Do you have any memories about the growing concern over the Vietnam War?
KP: Not at that point; only by the time I got to Chapel Hill. It was there—I was not there yet in terms [unclear].
ST: And we‟ve touched on this a little bit. Obviously you graduated from UNC in 1965. Is that correct?
KP: Yes.
ST: What did you do after you graduated?
KP: I went on to my first job, which was in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
ST: And can you tell me—I know what your history is, but can you tell a little bit about what—You obviously got into journalism and newspapers—like what you did at the newspapers?
KP: I was a copy editor—a full-time copy editor and part-time feature writer at the Grand Rapids paper. I was on the night staff, which I thought was cool because I didn‟t have to go to work until 12:30, and, being a night owl, that was really super to me. And still I got off work at 8:30; time enough to still go out in the evening and have the evening left.
[End CD 1—Begin CD 2]
ST: So you went in at 12:30—
KP: 12:30, noon, and got off at 8:30 at night. And, let‟s see, I was there two years.
ST: And why did you go to Grand Rapids? Was that the first place you got a job or—
KP: They offered more money than anybody else. It was one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, and Winston-Salem was offering me fifty dollars a week, so it was far more than anybody else had offered. I applied to several places; I can‟t remember all of them, but that one was the money, and I took that one. Also I wanted to get as far away from the South as I could, and I figured that was far enough.
ST: What did your parents think about you going so far away?
KP: I think they knew that it was necessary for me to do what I had to do to go into the newspaper business because at the time most of the newspapers in the state were not hiring blacks under any circumstances. You know, Winston-Salem offered me a job because they knew me. And Winston-Salem was—And the fact that they had a black reporter covering that community was unusual right then and there. 27
ST: Because most newspapers—During that time there were white newspapers and there were black newspapers. But Winston-Salem just had one, or was there also a black newspaper?
KP: There was not a black newspaper in Winston-Salem. A lot of the black newspapers were regional as they are now. The Carolina Peacemaker up here, Triangle News in the Triangle. They covered an area. I think the big newspaper was the Afro-American. I think it was out of Baltimore, [Maryland], and it got circulated, of course, all through the South, and that was one of the big ones.
ST: Yes, I found—I told you about my grandfather‟s sit-in—I was doing a search when I was writing the paper, and I found that it was a little tiny article in the Baltimore newspaper, and I thought that was so crazy that it made it up that far. But I guess they were talking about the South. His sit-in happened in 1964 so it was in the later scale, even though it was Asheboro—a mere thirty miles from Greensboro—it took a lot longer for the movement to make it to a small town.
KP: Right, and that book—It was Blood Done Sign My Name. It was on the reading list for—
ST: I read that; I read that in grad school.
KP: Yes, and it was just amazing what happened in the seventies, and the attitude there in Oxford [North Carolina] in the seventies. It was like the civil rights law was never passed, and—
ST: And it wasn‟t in some places. I mean—
KP: And other places totally ignored it; it didn‟t happen. And I got halfway through that book, and I had to stop reading it. I have a problem still today with recalling some of the things. [telephone rings] Let me tell them I‟ll call them back. Hi, Larry, can I call you back? I‟ve got some company. Okay.
KP: Long-time buddy from the LA Times [Los Angeles Times]. He was just here for Thanksgiving. As a matter of fact, I just got rid of him last Sunday. Another long-time friendship. Let‟s see, what were we talking about?
ST: How you still have trouble with those memories.
KP: And that special they did on Eyes on the Prize; excellent series. I saw it once; I could not look at it again. A lot of things I saw or read once, I couldn‟t look at it again. It was like I was forced to relive it, and once I wrote a piece for a book, 27 Views of Chapel Hill—was that last year, or the year before—and it started off about I was in a panel discussion—well, at the “I Raised My Hand to Volunteer,” [program and exhibit at UNC-Chapel Hill] and they were having a panel discussion about the first part of it, which was the Chapel Hill civil rights thing, and they were reading out of my diary, and people in the audience asked questions related to it, and it forced me to put myself back in that time-period. I 28
didn‟t want to be in that time period. I started feeling the same things I felt then: the anger, the resentment, the hurt, how dare you think I‟m inferior to you. That all started coming out and it threw me off, and I got so upset toward the beginning of the discussion that later on, when people asked me questions and, I was totally—You know, I could not put myself where I could give them an intelligent answer anymore. I just was kind of out of it. I was really upset with myself; I couldn‟t believe after all these years that would still bother me that much. And then I went over to the library a few months later to look at the exhibit, and there were examples of the freedom songs we sang before we went out to protest, and next to that were some letters from some whites, saying things like, “You can‟t let blacks go into restaurants. Next thing you know, they‟re going to be raping our women.” And things like, “They‟re all a bunch of Northerners and commies [communist] and stuff, and you can‟t let them—” Urging the Chapel Hill Merchant‟s Association not to desegregate. That you know, you can‟t give them, you know, and all those outside agitators. Almost all the time, it was outside agitators, and, of course, they had to be communists because everybody was a communist. Communists were the fault of just everything that went on back in that time. They were poisoning the water supply, and Lord knows what else. Anybody who had the nerve to protest, had to be communist, of course.
So I read those, and that brought back a lot of that anger and I started crying, and the facts—the juxtaposition of those—The one thing which I saw very positive and uplifting and noble [next] to these terrible, terrible racist letters, just blew me away, and I started crying. I left the library; I left the room because I was about to really break out in tears and I was, again, surprised that it hit me that much. And now I accept the fact that it does. And the piece I wrote for 27 Views of Chapel Hill, I concluded that the negative things, I put them back in a jar and tightened the lid, because I see no advantage in reliving it, none. And it bothers me, it‟s no advantage to me now in talking to other people about, you know, and what was it like then. Yes, it was just a different thing. Don‟t force me to go through it myself. I don‟t want to for any—Things on TV; I will turn shows off, if there is a program on it. I will not watch them. I‟ve lived through it; I don‟t have to watch it. I certainly don‟t feel like I need to relive it so—
ST: Did you ever have any urge to write about it; like other than a diary, but for other people to read?
KP: Yes and no. Well, in 27 Views of Chapel Hill, I wrote about how in Chapel Hill, one of the things we did and we say it was cool or foolish, we blocked every intersection in Chapel Hill after a Wake Forest-UNC game, basketball game, and traffic couldn‟t go anywhere and the cops—I was sitting at Franklin and Columbia [Street] and the cops, of course, had to drag us out of the intersection, and they arrested us. That was pretty crazy; that was a real crazy day. Looking at the faces of the people in the cars who couldn‟t go anywhere, oh, whoa. But before we went out that day, they told us “We‟re not going to tell you where we‟re going, but we will tell you that it could be life-threatening,” and we were given the opportunity of deciding whether you were going to go or not. I went because I felt that anytime we went and sat-in anywhere or protested anywhere, it was life-threatening because of the attitude about whites in the South was, you know, our lives weren‟t worth two cents. “Shoot a nigger, so what.” No big deal; nobody was going 29
to punish them for it; they knew that, so the chances of us getting beaten up or even killed were not necessarily unlikely things.
And one time we had a party down there. It was the fall of ‟64. The old civil rights gang got together, and I think there were two black people there, maybe three, and we were standing out behind this house and bullets start ricocheting off the trees, and someone yelled, “Get down. It‟s the Ku Klux Klan” and they had shot up the house. They shot out all the windows in the house, and apparently all the people there hit the floor. Nobody got shot, but I remember the people I was with then, they took me and the one other black person staying there, and they put us on the floor in the back of a Volkswagen bug and they all piled in on top of us, and they were protecting us from the Klan, which is very, very touching, too. Whatever it was, they weren‟t going to let the Klan get us. They were going to have to get through that pile of people before—And it wasn‟t fun on the bottom of that pile, but—And this still is very, very touching gesture from the kind of people that we associated with.
ST: Do you remember how many times you were arrested?
KP: Twice, I know for sure. I don‟t think beyond that; I cannot remember but one beyond that, but I know the two times: the one at Franklin and Columbia, and the one at Leo‟s.
ST: Speaking of reliving it, have you been to the International Civil Rights Museum at Woolworth‟s?
KP: I was there for a function, but I haven‟t gone through the museum, and I‟m going to correct that. I want to take my step grandson; he‟s eleven. I want to take him down, because he doesn‟t realize that his grandfather, to whom I was married—the guy from thirty-five years ago, that I married thirty-five years later is his grandfather—and I think all of us said that it would be good to take him and his parents down there, because they had heard about a lot of the stuff, but could not imagine what it was like. My stepson said, “Nobody would tell me what restaurant I can go in.”
We just laughed, you know. “Yes, they could, and if you didn‟t want to comply, your options were to get beaten up, put in jail, or killed; those were your options.” And of course, kids today cannot even imagine that. They just—My stepdaughter-in-law says she grew up in Martinsville, Virginia. She couldn‟t remember but one racial incident in the whole time she lived there, where some friend wanted her to go over to her house, and her parents wouldn‟t let her come over because she was black. She says that was the only racial incident she went through in her upbringing, which is amazing. Well, which is good, you know. I mean we wanted that stuff to go away, but the younger generations really don‟t—It‟s so crazy, they just can‟t—it‟s so ridiculous, they can‟t even [put themselves there?] One of the professors at UNC who is teaching—his name is Porter—teaches African American studies, invited me to come down and talk to—
ST: I think I had him. Sorry, I just remembered that name.
KP: White guy named Porter—
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ST: Oh, I remember what it was; we had a joint class. I was in a class about—Oh, my gosh, I can‟t even remember now—but it was an AFAM [African-American Studies] and an American Studies class, and we met three times a semester, and his class was the African American Studies class.
KP: Well, he had a bunch of—I don‟t know whether there were all of his classes together or people from other classes—but it was a big group of people, and I think I talked to them for two hours. I was telling them what segregation was like, on a gut level. I said, “You had no rights under the law. Keep that straight, okay. You want to drive down to Florida to see Aunt Tilley: You want to go to the restroom, you got the woods. You‟re hungry, if you didn‟t bring any food with you, or couldn‟t find it in the grocery store, you would be hungry. You wanted to go to sleep, you slept in your car. And a lot of people got big cars so they had room to sleep in them. And that was just accepted, because there was nowhere you were going to stop and do anything else.”
ST: There were no black hotels or—
KP: Very few, very few. I remember in North Carolina there was—In Sanford, there was a black-owned service station. I mean, you couldn‟t go to the service station bathrooms, of course; any more than you could go anywhere else, and—
ST: But you could get gas. You could give money.
KP: Oh, yes. You could give money, but like anything else; like the barbecue places where you could go around to the back door and get your barbecue, but you couldn‟t sit in the restaurant. Well, I was trying to explain that‟s exactly the way it was then, and the other thing that you had to put up with is speed traps. You know, law enforcement people picking on you, and a lot of times, that‟s exactly what they were doing. You weren‟t doing anything, and you ended up having to pay money and to get out of town and all kinds of stuff. There were a lot of disadvantages to going anywhere, and for years, my parents wouldn‟t go anywhere (it was long after the civil rights law) where there was not another black person on the other end. You didn‟t go unless somebody could see you through it. I forced them to go to Hawaii by themselves. Of course, they were fine once they went but—
ST: And it‟s Hawaii, so the end product is—
KP: At first—But their upbringing was still there, that fear, that uncertainty. What am I getting into? Sure, we were years later, but still you were black, and there are still people who don‟t like black people, so what am I getting into? I‟m going over there; it‟s almost—Sure we own it, but it‟s a foreign environment in ways, in the culture and everything. What am I going to get over there; what are they going to do to me? That fear was still with them, and I understood that, but it was time I forced them to do something else. And it was all paid for, so they really had to go.
ST: You paid for their trip. 31
KP: Yes.
ST: Wow. You are a good daughter.
KP: They hadn‟t paid for anything.
ST: I just got married in October, and we went to Hawaii for our honeymoon.
KP: Where.
ST: We went to three nights in Oahu [Island]; stayed in Honolulu, and Waikiki. We did three nights in Maui [Island] and three nights in Kauai [Island]
KP: Where, in Maui?
ST: We stayed in Makena, the south part of the island.
KP: I don‟t know if that existed when I was there because I was at Kihei when we were in Maui, which was down from Kaanapali, and we were almost down to the very tip on one side.
ST: Okay. We were in southern—kind of like southwest.
KP: Were you over in Hana?
ST: No, we were on like the opposite side.
KP: Okay, because I think Makena was new from the time that we were over there, which was the early eighties.
ST: Oh, okay. Yes, we had a tsunami warning when we were there and a shark attack, on our beach. I was like “I feel like a local here, I‟m just living the local life.” Yes, the tsunami happened from an earthquake that happened in Alaska, and it came down. It didn‟t cause a tsunami but there were some scares, and we didn‟t know what was going on.
KP: You didn‟t have any high wave activity on the beaches?
ST: Right, it was like a three-foot surge, but they—Our hotel evacuated from the bottom floors, and they told us to fill up our bathtubs. I‟m sitting there and I‟m like “Oh my gosh, thank God we got an ocean-front room.”
KP: That‟s not what I came on my honeymoon for.
ST: And the next day we went and the beach was closed and I was like, “Oh, is that something to do with the tsunami warning?” And the guy was like, “No.” And I was like “What?” And he‟s like, “We had someone attacked by a shark yesterday.” I was like, 32
“Oh, like a four-foot shark.” He was like, “No, we think it was ten to twelve, tiger sharks.” Oh, my gosh.
KP: Hey, four-foot sharks can bite your hands—
ST: This woman was actually—She was from California and she was a tourist, and she actually beat it away with her hand. She had a hundred stitches on her hand where she was hitting it in the face. I was a little intimidated by the water. I don‟t think I got in the ocean a single time after that because then we went to Kauai [Island] and our hotel didn‟t have a great beach. It was a real, kind of like rocky beach. They had these awesome pools that looked like lagoons so I was like, I‟m good. No sharks over here. I‟m not much for the beach anyway.
KP: Play it safe. I‟ve just started life. Don‟t get me sharks. Did you go down to Hana?
ST: No, we didn‟t go there.
KP: Oh, that‟s cool.
ST: We didn‟t have time. We just—between our luau—We went to the Mount Haleakala and saw the sunrise, but we didn‟t get to do Hana. I know it‟s like a whole day so we—
KP: Yes, it was this terrible drive because the—It rained so much on that side of the island.
ST: That‟s what my sister said; she said it rained the whole time.
KP: On the Kihei side, the side where you were, it rained very few times, very little compared to the other side. It rained on the other side all the time. The roads were washed out. Every time the state would fix them, they would wash again, so they just gave up on fixing them. And you would be going around these curves where it was just one lane, and you might be meeting someone else. You‟d have to honk your horn, you know, try to warn people that you were coming around the curve. And then potholes and all kinds of stuff, and I remember: I was driving going down there and it was—You talk about white-knuckle driving. No guard rails, cliffs. But it was beautiful; it was just beautiful. Black sand beaches and beautiful waterfalls and stuff, so it was absolutely worth it.
ST: And you were there just on a trip?
KP: Yes, vacation.
ST: Because you said you lived in Grand Rapids, and you also mentioned the LA Times. Tell me where else you‟ve kind of been, your trajectory?
KP: Let‟s see, I went from Grand Rapids to Rochester, New York, and from there to LA [Los Angeles, California]. I went to LA because I had met my then husband and the father of my only child, and I didn‟t go back to work there until he was about eight years old. And 33
I worked for the Times [Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, California] for fifteen years, and then I remarried and my husband was from Salt Lake City [Utah], and we used to have such a good time visiting his parents in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was kind of a mini-LA in its own right. People don‟t realize that Salt Lake City is not the rest of Utah, and oh, my God, the Mormon influence, but Salt Lake City is seventy-thirty Mormon. As a matter of fact, that‟s where I‟m going for Christmas.
ST: How fun.
KP: I love it out there, so I moved there—we moved there—and after a couple of years there, the old boyfriend from thirty-five years ago pursued me in Salt Lake. I was divorced again by the time, of course. And pursued me in Salt Lake City and that‟s how I ended up back here.
ST: Okay, and that‟s when you went back to the Winston-Salem Journal?
KP: Yes, and of course I worked two years on the Salt Lake paper.
ST: And how long did you work at the Winston-Salem Journal?
KP: Until we were laid off in 2010, fourteen years.
ST: And did you just retire at that point?
KP: Yes, I took retirement as opposed to unemployment. I was better off taking retirement.
ST: And had you been already living in Greensboro or did you—
KP: Yes, I was already here.
ST: You worked in Winston but you but you lived in Greensboro that whole time?
KP: Yes, as a matter of fact, I know more people in Winston than I know here, way more people. My social life is really in Winston, because I was working at nights, you know. I‟d go to work at four in the afternoon and then come home at one or two o‟clock in the morning, and I didn‟t see people. The only people I knew were related to my husband, and after he and I broke up, there was no more—And, I slept here. I used to joke and say, “I sleep in Greensboro.” Basically that was it. I was here at night and I was here on my weekends. The rest of the time I was in Winston.
ST: Did you ever want to move back to Winston?
KP: I thought about it, but my childhood memories of Winston aren‟t that great, anyway, so that sort of puts the kibosh on that notion. I even planned to do it at one point since I retired, you know, and get a nice condo [condominium] or something. I was driving around there for two days in a row, and I went, “Oh, no. I don‟t want to be over here.” So 34
I was wanting to go back to Salt Lake, but our severance pay—We thought it would be a lot more than it was—and that was the end of that plan, because I didn‟t have the money to get there, plus the cost of living out there is high. And when I go out this time, I‟m going to look at it again in terms of whether it‟s feasible to move out there, but I just love mountains and I just loved all that. It‟s just such beautiful country around there with the red rocks, and you go this way and you‟ve got the desert, and that way and you‟ve got the red rock desert, and you go here and you‟ve got the aspen forests, and here you‟ve got these mountains and all kinds of canyons and all kinds of beautiful stuff and waterfalls, and whatever. And on the weekends, if I was feeling in the dumps, I‟d just hop in my SUV [sports utility vehicle] and take off in any direction—north, south, east, west; it didn‟t matter—there was something beautiful to be seen.
ST: Right. Does any of your family still live out there?
KP: No. My in-laws, whom I was very close to, they have all died. My ex and his brother are all dead; they were both dead in their early fifties. You know, just one of those things. And their parents are gone, but I have friends out there still. But they were cool; I mean, they were like a cool family. To this day, he‟s got cousins; he‟s got one that lives up here in Bryson City, and so they still consider me family, you know. Whenever, they have family things, I still get the family invitation, and stuff.
ST: Do you ever do any free-lance writing, other than you said the 27 Views of Chapel Hill?
KP: Nothing lately, nothing lately. I‟ve got a project in my head that I promise I‟m going to get to as soon as the holidays are over. I don‟t want to talk about it yet, but I‟ve got something in mind that I want to do, but, no, I have not done any freelance writing. I love travel writing; travel writing is my thing. I‟ll show you something. [moves away from the microphone] We had a very good artist—Let‟s see, I put my—I like these—These are my stories, but I like these displays [unclear]. I had a whole bunch of them in here, too.
ST: Wow. [unclear, laughter]
KP: Well no, nobody was paying me. These were my own vacations, but I figured I could make some money off my own vacations. Even [unclear] the best story I ever wrote for the Times [unclear] bringing in the bucks. I think the Winston paper [unclear] two hundred fifty dollars, which is not much as freelancing goes, but I loved traveling and I guess the only time, I could—I can write anything, but I don‟t like to write anything. That‟s the only thing I truly enjoy writing about, you know. I feel good when I write about it.
ST: Did you ever tell people you worked with about your experiences in college? I mean, did they know?
KP: Some of the ones I was close to, like people in LA—I think a lot of people in LA had no idea about me and UNC. They didn‟t have a clue, and when I got into the North Carolina Hall of Fame, I‟m sure that a lot of them were going, “What?” It‟s just, you know—It 35
was such a huge environment, a big staff, big staff; nothing close to the size papers around here. [It was] a mammoth staff at the time I was there. It was like twelve hundred people on the editorial staff, and they‟ve got maybe—maybe they have six hundred now. It‟s been cut back so much. But it was a big staff. The building we were in had its own ZIP code, there was so much going on.
ST: Wow, that‟s crazy. Do you ever do anything with UNCG now? Have you been involved at all since you transferred?
KP: No, Alice has gotten me interested in things more. I don‟t know who it was or why or how, I have gotten on the mailing list and the e-mail list, and I get these e-mail things from UNCG. And I get magazines and stuff in the mail, and I‟m going, “Gee, how did they find me?”
ST: I‟ve been trying to hide.
KP: And I asked Alice if she was behind it, and she said she didn‟t remember whether she was or wasn‟t. But I don‟t know, but now I get these things from UNCG. And I guess Chapel Hill insists upon putting UNCG on my profile, so it‟s not like it doesn‟t exist. Everybody sees it as I transferred from another institution to there. That‟s the way they look at it, that‟s my alumni profile. So I guess if UNCG wants me to be an alumna, I guess I am.
ST: I don‟t know if you technically count as an alumni, since you transferred, but I don‟t know how that works.
KP: Now see, Chapel Hill says if you were there a semester, we don‟t care where you went after there, you‟re still an alumnus.
ST: That‟s interesting. We talked about [the fact that] you stay in touch with Alice.
KP: Yes.
ST: Is that pretty regularly? Have you always stayed in touch with her?
KP: We went to Niagara Falls together in September.
ST: Wow. Fun.
KP: Her husband didn‟t want to go, and I went, “I want to go.” We had a great time.
ST: She‟s so sweet. I don‟t know if she told you she was interviewed, and I stayed and had lunch with them at the church one day, and I met her husband. They were very welcoming.
36
KP: They were just here last Saturday. I had a party last Saturday over here. Yes, I stay pretty much in touch with Alice.
ST: Is there anybody else? You said you stayed in touch with your old roommate, Joanne.
KP: Yes, and with several people out of Chapel Hill.
ST: But you knew her at Woman‟s College, too. Is there anybody else from Woman‟s College that you stayed in touch with?
KP: No.
ST: Well, one thing we like to do as we wrap up is—Obviously this is going in the library. It‟s going to be open to research, and we want to know what you would want future students and scholars to know about your experience at Woman‟s College, as one of the first trailblazing students?
KP: It was frustrating; it was very frustrating. That whole thing—being there at the time of segregation—that whole thing that you were somehow inferior, and that angered me tremendously. I always felt I had—I really had something to prove as far as that was concerned, because I really believed that if white people got to know us as human beings, they would really see that we were human beings, and there really wasn‟t much difference between us. You know, what little bit I could do on that level. I didn‟t have any resentment toward them; I grew up hearing resentment toward them, of course, in the black community. It‟s—That‟s the big factor in your life and everything else sort of works around it, and that was difficult. And the other thing was [that] just about everything you did was a fight. It was a fight going to class; it was a fight walking across campus. When I say “fight,” in quotes, that the atmosphere was not easy because there are people who don‟t want you to be here, and it‟s very obvious that they aren‟t going to hurt you, but they don‟t want you to be here. Jobs: the first jobs were a fight, even in the North.
Just about everything in my career has been a fight, because there was somebody trying to block the way. Somebody didn‟t want me to do that. Somebody didn‟t want you to advance. Somebody didn‟t want you there at all, and after the civil rights laws, people got subtle about it, you know. If you do anything overt, you‟re going to lose your job so they don‟t do anything overt. There are the subtleties, and that went on all the way through the Winston-Salem Journal through my entire newspaper career, there was always somebody. I was so used to fighting, it was no big—I mean, you know, that was part of the scene. But looking on all those years—forty-eight years about—it didn‟t change that much. There were still people who just could not let it be. When I first started working as an intern in the Winston-Salem paper, the white reporters kicked me off the copy desk because they weren‟t going to have a black person edit their copy. And of course that‟s laughable now.
You have those changes, but there are some racists that are still there. I could name three or four of them on the Journal staff. I won‟t—not name them now, but they were there, and there are probably still going to be people like that for awhile in the 37
South. My hope is that when my generation dies out—Of course, my parents‟ generation has pretty much died out [unclear] because those people are in their nineties, and when my generation is gone, I think there will be a lot better picture overall because a lot of these kids now have gone to school with black kids and stuff. Now some of them will be racist, too, because they grew up hearing it from their folks and all, but you could see the vote—the Obama vote in the South. You look at it and where it was and the percentages in each state, you can see it‟s very strongly there in the South, but I am hopeful that things will change. I really do think things will change after the older generations die out. Mississippi being an exception, because I don‟t think that much has happened in Mississippi all these years. There‟s been very little progress. As a matter of fact, I wanted to drive to Baton Rouge, to see my friend who just called, and I said, “But I have to go through Mississippi.” He said, “Yeah.”And I said, “Can I get there without going through Mississippi?” He said, “Well, you‟d have to go way out of your way up here and come back down, stay—” And I said, “To this day, I cannot make myself go through Mississippi, because back then Mississippi was the worst state, followed by Alabama. Everybody else you could deal with, but I don‟t think Mississippi is too much different from the way it was then.”
ST: Right, especially in rural areas.
KP: I‟d be in the same trouble I was back then. Such is life. But I do have hope for the future. It‟s just like with the same-sex rights, gay marriage and stuff, the younger kids—The generation‟s parents are all against it, the younger kids come, no big deal. As somebody said, “We‟re the Will and Grace generation. It‟s no big deal to us, you know. We see them on TV all the time, so what.” The parents, of course, are stuck in their ways, and see that‟s changing now, bit by bits. There‟s hope. I used to think that with miscegenation we would all get so mixed that nobody could tell anybody‟s heritage that much, and that would end discrimination. And then it finally dawned on me: No, it wouldn‟t. They‟d find something else. It wouldn‟t be skin color; it would be hair, eyes, height, kneecaps, I don‟t know. It‟s something in the human condition that some people have to feel superior to other people to justify their own existence.
ST: And to harbor hate.
KP: Yes. You‟ve got to put these people down and I think that‟s very human. It‟s everywhere and maybe we have less of it than we used to have. I don‟t think it‟s ever going away, so that‟s it.
ST: Do you think that UNCG or Woman‟s College—your time there impacted your life?
KP: Sure it did.
ST: Can you tell me in what ways it impacted your life?
KP: Mainly in education, the level of education, what I learned—absolutely—and I don‟t think I would have learned it in an HBCU. The atmosphere would have been different. 38
For one thing, at an HBCU you would have had the social life, too. I didn‟t have a social life there, as such, so there was nothing else to detract from what I was doing, which I think was probably a positive for me, you know. Other kids could have handled it, but I don‟t think I—with the challenges we already had coming into there—having to study and put our nose to the grindstone in the way we did, social life—having an active social life would not have worked very well anyway. But I think those conditions made it good for me in that I got to concentrate on what I was learning, and those things have served me well. Lot of things I still remember, but they‟ve been good.
ST: And did it set you up academically to succeed at UNC?
KP: Absolutely, and when I went to UNCG, I didn‟t have any—I knew I was graduating from UNC; there was no question about it. There was no way anybody was going to stop me from doing so, but academically, I knew I had it made. Maybe I had it made—Well, I had it made more than a lot of white students academically. And I knew—By the time I got down there, I knew that. And a lot of the white girls at Woman‟s College, I assumed that all of them had a better education than we had at our black high school in Winston-Salem, but that was not the case. Some of them from some of the small towns and rural areas absolutely did not have a better education than we did. In Chapel Hill I graduated in the top ten percent of my class, and I could have done even better I hadn‟t spent so much time in Harry‟s [Grill, on Franklin Street].
ST: Did you find the two schools similar, academically challenging at the same amount or was one—
KP: It was like night and day because we had a much bigger campus with much more going on. I would have to say, Chapel Hill was dynamic by comparison. There was just so much going on; it was so alive, and there were so many things that just sort of contributed to my whole experience—from the people I met and knew, to the things I learned, to campus events. I mean, it did some good at UNCG, too, but there was so much more of everything and it was—Everything was bigger and bolder, and so Chapel Hill is like night and day. I mean, it was just another world down there.
ST: I think it kind of still is. Well, I don‟t have any more formal questions, unless there is anything else you would like to add.
KP: That‟s about it. I mean, you‟ve gotten more out of me than I would if you had asked me to start off talking on my own about that—I‟m going, “I know what she‟s going to ask me” because, you know, generally I‟ve wiped out a lot of it, you know. I‟ve had no particular reason to remember it, but, you know, some things I do, like Frances Falk, and Hats Off Day, and silly rules, and picketing, and some of the professors; but other than that, there‟s so many—Look, your brain‟s like a memory bank; you only have so much room in there; something‟s got to get pushed to the back, you know. For everything that comes up here, something‟s got to go back, so that‟s back there, you know, and the only reason I remember some of this is somebody‟s always frequently bringing it up, and making me remember it. 39
ST: Right. Well, I think you‟ve done great. I think you‟ve remembered a lot. I mean, more than I could ever—
[End of Interview]