Oral history interview with Ada Fisher, 2010 [text/print transcript]

              1
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Dr. Ada M. Fisher
INTERVIEWER: Hermann J. Trojanowski
DATE: February 18, 2010
HT: Today is Thursday, February 18, 2010, and I’m in Jackson Library with Dr. Ada M.
Fisher, class of 1970, and we’re here to conduct an oral history interview for UNCG [The
University of North Carolina at Greensboro] Institutional Memory Collection. Dr. Fisher,
welcome. Thank you so much for coming all the way from Salisbury, [North Carolina]
this morning.
AF: My pleasure.
HT: Let’s start the interview by my asking you something about your background, about
where you were born, when you were born, and that sort of thing.
AF: Well, I was born October 21, 1947 [in] Durham, North Carolina [at] the [White Rock
Baptist Church] parsonage. My mother didn’t have me in the hospital. I was born at home
on the second floor in the main [upstairs] bedroom. And I was the sixth baby born at
home, probably on the same mattress, but not in the same house. I told them I thought
they should have thrown the mattress away. But they covered it with—it wasn’t plastic, it
was oil cloth like they used to make tablecloths in restaurants. They covered it with an oil
cloth. And she had me at home. You know, I don’t remember all this. I was told that.
I was the sixth child. There is a gap of sixteen years [between the oldest and the
youngest]. My sister is sixteen years older than I am. My first brother is fifteen years
older than I am. The second [brother] is fourteen years older than I am. The third one is
nine years older than I am, and my last brother is a year and a half older than I am. I call
us the accidents of menopause babies, because she was about thirty-nine or forty when I
was born. What else do you want me to tell you?
HT: Well, what did your parents do?
AF: My father was a Baptist minister, [who] also taught theology at Shaw University from
1932 to—I think, he taught [until] 1965. And my mother, initially, when they got married
was—they got married in Richmond, Virginia. My mother was a student at Virginia
Union when she first laid eyes on him, and he pursued her like crazy because he wanted a
wife. And she was—let’s see. I think she finished Virginia Union at twenty where she
taught Latin, Greek and French and was quite gifted with languages. And he was teaching
something in theology at Virginia Union. [He also] taught English and German.
2
After she got married, all she did was be a preacher’s wife. [He] was full-time
pastor, because they had a church when they came to Durham. They had about 1,500
members. It expanded to [a high of] about 2,500 during his pastorate. [My mother]
actually was crucial to everything he wanted to do. In their funeral programs it will tell
all the stuff that both of them used to do. But they did some unique things. They started a
church basketball league. And before the Chinese came up with traveling a ping pong
league, the church had a traveling ping pong league in the forties. And out of the church
league, the city was so impressed with it that they took it over. The city recreation league
came out of [my father’s leadership inspiration at] White Rock Baptist Church.
White Rock Baptist Church was a very unique church because many of the Who’s
Who in [black] Durham belonged to that church such as C. C. Spaulding; Dr. [James]
Shephard who founded North Carolina College, [which is now North Carolina Central
University]; W. J. [William Jesse] Kennedy and his family; Asa [T.] Spaulding, Sr. and
his family. But the thing I guess we liked the most about the church was that there were a
lot of factory workers and people like that. And my father was a friend of the powerful
and the lowly.
[My father] had an interesting ministry, which had many dimensions. I’m writing
a book right now about my mother and the role of a preacher’s wife to talk about how she
was crucial to what he had to do. For example, with the basketball team she used to make
sure the uniforms were washed, and kept the statistics for the teams. And my [younger]
brother [Christopher] later assumed [the role of statistician] that and got interested in
sports, [which reflected as he was to become] a sports information director [and later
athletic director]. So, out of that experience in the parsonage came many things.
HT: Absolutely amazing. Well, where did you go to high school?
AF: I went to the one and only best school in the state of North Carolina: Hillside
High School, which is now one of the [only] two black high schools remaining. All the
black schools were closed with integration. And Hillside is the only one—I think West
Charlotte is the other one.
HT: Is that in Durham?
AF: It’s in Durham. And all of my siblings finished Hillside. We all went to W. G. Pearson
Elementary School, and we had the same first grade teacher, Mrs. M. Ora Sneed Lee,
which is in the sibling memory books that I gave you about my siblings. And we all
finished Hillside High School.
HT: And do you recall what your favorite subject was in high school?
AF: I didn’t really like school. The only thing I ever liked about school was the first grade. I
thought that Mrs. [M. Ora Sneed] Lee was just the neatest person in the world and gave
us a great sense of paying attention to the needs of others and showing us—developing
leadership skills. For example, if you could read and somebody in the class was slow,
then your job was to go over there and work with the kid that was slow.
3
I find all this stuff about special education interesting, because we didn’t have
special ed. And, yet, all the kids graduated. All the kids did fine, and our goal was to look
after one another. By having a diverse classroom, you could pair up kids with other kids
who didn’t quite get it with somebody who did, and you helped each other.
In high school I took a lot of classes, and I had some good teachers. And back
then black students didn’t have an excuse for not being successful because [good] black
teachers didn’t have a lot of [other career] options. They couldn’t work at IBM
[International Business Machines Corporation], et cetera. So, we always got the best and
brightest teachers in our high schools. And then when integration came along, people had
other options. So, we lost a lot of good teachers during that time.
But I remember when I came back to North Carolina [in 1996] to stay at the time;
I got interested in the school board, particularly in Salisbury. I was blown away when
they were talking about making a 2.0 a [graduation] standard. Telling that people had to
have so much math, et cetera, because I had that when I was in high school. When I was
in high school, I took biology I, advanced biology, physics, chemistry. I took algebra I. I
took trigonometry, geometry, calculus, and advanced calculus. And when I got to UNCG,
I was still behind.
So, I keep thinking, if I took all that then, and these kids [today] are not required
to take but three years of math or four years of math, what kind of students are we really
preparing to deal with the future? And we had a lot of interesting courses. But I think
biology [of all these sciences] was probably my favorite, and that’s why I majored in
biology.
HT: So, why did you choose to attend UNCG?
AF: Oh, that was easy. It was the cheapest school I could find, and they, my parents had
retired in [1965]. I was going to have to pay for this education myself. I applied to many
black schools. And, I think, UNCG was the only white school that I applied to. I might
have applied to Duke [University] or Carolina [University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill], but I’m not sure. But when I came to UNCG, women couldn’t go to Carolina and
State [North Carolina State University] without first coming here. So, you had to do two
years here.
I actually was looking at the black schools. And the problem they had was white
schools required that the application be in by a certain time. I think I got accepted like in
February of ’66. And you had to let UNCG know by April whether you were coming. By
that time I hadn’t even heard from the black schools whether I had been accepted. So, it
was to—was to my advantage to go ahead and accept. And, then, it was [that] matter of
money.
At that time the state school was cheaper. And UNCG was actually cheaper than
[North Carolina] Central [University], Howard [University] and some of the other
schools that I looked at. And since I was having to pay for it, I’m a very practical person,
[it was UNCG]. In coming here the Herbert Lehman [Education] Fund out of New York,
which was part of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People] Legal Defense Fund, was granting money to students to help integrate schools in
the South. And so, I think I got $400 or $500 a semester in coming here. And it only cost
like $1,600 a year to come to school here. Then, I worked.
4
But as an aside, which people may not know, because my parents had moved, I
got caught in the middle of something that I hadn’t anticipated. When my parents moved
to Richmond, the school wanted to make me an out-of-state student, which would have
raised my tuition. Henry Frye, Sr., who was [then a lawyer who later became a] judge,
took me on. I said, “It doesn’t make sense. I was born in North Carolina. I’ve lived in
North Carolina. I’ve never lived in Virginia. [I have a driver’s license here.]” So we
challenged the university system. When I look at what the rule is now, it was because of
me and Henry Frye that the rule on what establishes one as an in-state or out-of-state
student was established. You had to have—you had to vote in the state, have a driver’s
license in the state and had to have residence. Well, at the time I applied and was
accepted, all of that was in place. By the time school started in September, my parents
were gone. And they wanted to change the rules on me.
HT: Why did your parents decide to move to Richmond?
AF: My father retired, and they didn’t own a house. When you leave the parsonage, you’ve
got to give up the parsonage. And, then, he bought a house. What he got in retirement
was not enough money to support the cost of running a house. He never had to pay a light
bill, a heating bill, or anything like that [in the parsonage]. Then all of a sudden he got
out there and found out he didn’t have the money.
HT: There’s no retirement plan either probably?
AF: Well, he did get—what he got was $100 a month from the church. And then he got [$109
from] Social Security. But it came to less than $300 to $400 a month. [But] the fortunate
thing was at that time Social Security would pay people’s children to go to school until
they were twenty-three. So, my youngest brother and I were both in school. And we gave
our checks to the parents. It was $75 a piece. So, we gave them another $150 which
brought their income to what he had been making when he retired.
My father taught at Shaw [University] for thirty-three years, and he never got
paid. [This was] because they needed someone with credentials to get the school
certified. And he was the only black man with a PhD in religion or theology [from the
University of Chicago]. So he lent his credentials to Shaw. And then he never made more
than $500 a month [from] the church in thirty-three years. He never asked for a raise.
And they never offered to give him one.
So, that’s why I’m all deaf on churches right now. And I tell the preachers, get a
contract. Don’t let them buy you a parsonage, et cetera. I can tell you what it was like
growing up as a preacher’s child. It wasn’t very pleasant.
HT: Well, back to UNCG—well, when you were here, what was your favorite subject, do you
recall?
AF: Actually, my favorite course—I can’t say subject—my favorite course was terrestrial
ecology taught by Hollis Rogers. That man was a trip. And it was Hollis Rogers that
spurred my interest and [was the reason] I always wanted to come back to North
Carolina. He took us all over the state, from the mountains to the coast, and showed us
5
the topography of the land and how beautiful this state was. I can’t remember exactly
where it was, but we were somewhere, and you could see the trees from the colonial
times, the rows that they had planted. And I thought, “This is really a great state.” And
people really don’t know a lot about it. And I want to do whatever I can to save this
state.”
HT: Well, you mentioned earlier that you worked while you were here.
AF: Yes.
HT: Did you work on campus?
AF: I worked on campus. I did everything imaginable. Occasionally, I picked up a little
money on the side also. I was the receptionist in the dorms. I lived in Shaw Hall the first
year I was here. And, then, I lived in Cone Hall when it first opened, which is a whole
different story and a lot of fun. Then we had a chance to make Shaw Hall into the
International House. And, so, I moved back to Shaw Hall [on the German Floor]. So I
lived three years in Shaw Hall [total]. I liked the old buildings, the large rooms. It wasn’t
air conditioned. But it was a lot of fun.
I answered the phones [there]. And then, in the summer I don’t really remember
exactly what I did. But I went to summer school at Carolina and a couple of other places.
HT: Down at Chapel Hill?
AF: Yes. So, I didn’t have that much time off, because I didn’t have a place to go live. My
parents [lived] in Virginia with my mother’s [father]. I didn’t like living there. So I tried
to find something to do. I went to school all year ’round.
I actually finished the degree requirements in three and a half years and spent the
other half year taking education courses and got a teaching certificate in secondary
education. I think I liked the education courses. But I thought they were a bunch of junk
most of the time. I liked Elizabeth Bowles, who was one of my favorite teachers. [This
was my last semester during which I made the Dean’s List. I think I had a 4.0.]
I had a couple of other teachers I loved—Dr. Anna F. Baecker, who taught
German. And I loved Dr. [Anna Joyce] Reardon who taught physics. My advisor was Dr.
[Ralph Michael] Morrison. I can’t think of what his name is, but he had that purple
splotch on his face.
As a rule I didn’t like [most professors] in the biology department, and that’s what
I majored in. I thought they were racists and unfair. We had a lot of issues when I was
here in school. In my class we had fifty-two black students and only seventeen of us
graduated, or as [I] said, “Made it out alive.” And there were a lot of things that were
going on here that were just unfair, unjust, and a lot of it was racially motivated.
But a lot of it was [also] sexist. Women who came here were protected, and this
was a woman’s college still. But they had changed the name [in 1963]. In [1956] the first
blacks [JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman] came. And I think you all always honor
Yvonne. I can’t think what her last name is, but there was another black student here
6
named Dorothy Amey from Durham, North Carolina. Dorothy was killed in a car
accident. And so she did not get to finish UNCG. And—
HT: She was an early student?
AF: [I thought] she was the first student. She—not Yvonne, but she—think she came before
Yvonne. [Not true, I’ve since learned.]
HT: The first students that I’m aware of where JoAnne Smart Drane, who is in Raleigh.
AF: Yeah, JoAnne.
HT: And Bettye Tillman, who died—
AF: [response removed by Ada Fisher later]
HT: I’ve never heard of her.
AF: Well, Dorothy Amey finished Hillside, very smart girl. She may have been here either the
same time or the year before [or after]. And then, when the next class—let’s see, they
finished in ’64, right?
HT: No, Bettye Tillman and JoAnne Smart Drane graduated in 1960. They came in 1956 and
graduated in ’60.
AF: Well, find Dorothy Amey. She came from Durham.
HT: That’s A-M-U?
AF: A-M-E-Y. Dorothy Amey. And I remember she got—I think she got killed in a car
accident. But she was one of the [early] students here. And as I said in my class, there
were fifty-two.
Well, the first thing that struck me when I came here was the application blank. I
remember [Tommie] Lou Smith, I believe it was, was the dean. And I told her, I said,
“You know, your applications are racist.” And she said, “Why do you say that?” I said,
“Though you say you don’t discriminate, you require a picture of students. Therefore,
you can look at the picture and tell who’s black as a rule and who’s not.” In our class we
had a couple of young ladies that you couldn’t tell whether they were black or not by
looking at them. Marian White, Deborah Watts and there was another student, very fair-skinned.
But they were very black.
The other thing that the school did, which was very racist, was all the blacks had
to have black roommates. So they paired us together. And whoever the girl was who was
supposed to be my roommate didn’t show. They wanted me to move in with another
black girl. And we refused. So we had single rooms, and we just enjoyed it.
We refused to make it easy for them. So, I had a single room for—actually for a
long time here—because they brought another young girl in to be my roommate named
7
[Mary] Best. I can’t think of what her first name was. But she was quiet and stuck to
herself, and I was in everything I could think of.
But that was the first hint that things were bad. Then we got into the classes, there
were teachers that were just a pain in the ass. And I tell people all the time now,
sometimes when I come here, I get real mad. Because they’ve named buildings after
people that I know were racists. And I just get angry, because I know what they did to
students when we were in class.
One of the things that [we] used to do, we kept a list of teachers who were fair
and those who weren’t. We circulated this among the students. And [we’d say], “Don’t
get this teacher, et cetera.” Because we sort of figured out who wasn’t going to give us a
fair break.
Martha White, I believe her name was, a physical ed teacher. And that woman
was as biased as anybody I had ever seen. I think they named something after her. Bruce
Eberhart was the head of the department. He was biased. And they named a building [for
him as well]. So I sit here, and I’m going, “Okay, whatever turns y’all on.” But I know
them from way back when. And they were not very fair people who helped us.
I think the thing that helped black students most was Chancellor [James S.]
Ferguson. I got to know Chancellor Ferguson fairly well when I got involved with
student government. And I was getting tired of the racism of these people. And finally, he
just asked me at some point in time, I don’t remember when, if I would be a part of the
chancellor’s cabinet. And that was the most amazing experience I had ever had.
[Chancellor Ferguson] was very open and honest and accepting of ideas from
whomever and would flesh through them. So one day we had a talk. And I was talking
about Mr. Casey. Mr. Casey taught Social Studies. Mr. Casey was a fool. And he did not
like black folks in my opinion. A dog bit off his ear or something. That’s what I
remember about Mr. Casey.
And he would sit up there, and he would make all kinds of racist remarks in class
about [how] black people weren’t qualified because they weren’t intellectually
competent. Sounds almost like [William] Shockley stuff. I used to get tired of it. So I
finally took a seat on the front row and brought my switchblade and cleaned my
fingernails. And he quit making those remarks then [and didn’t come to the last few
classes]. [Mr. Casey] could take [my actions] for whatever he wanted to take it for.
HT: That was a brave thing to do.
AF: I didn’t care. I mean after awhile you get to the point where you’ve had enough. And I
got to the point very early where I had had enough. When I moved from Shaw Hall to
Cone Hall, I can’t remember what floor I moved on. But Cone Hall they ran out of
money to paint it. So they gave the students paint and said you could paint your room,
which was a lot of fun. And they had those concrete floors which were just dusty. You
just couldn’t get around the dust. So I went down to the corner grocery store, uh, oh,
what’s the street that runs beside Aycock?
HT: Tate Street.
8
AF: I went down to the Tate Street corner grocery store, and they had some bowling alley
wax in there. I bought bowling alley wax and put it on the floor, and it cut all the dust and
made the floor shine like a bowling alley. [Then], everybody in the dorm on my floor
[started] buying bowling alley wax.
Oh, we had some interesting experiences. [Also early on, a dumpster was painted
with a sign “Nigger Go Home.”] So, we had the best floor up there, because we didn’t
have all the dust from the concrete that everybody else had.
It was there that Alyce Davis and Sybil Ray and Janice Brewer decided that they
didn’t like my hair because it was curly. And they were going to straighten my hair. So
they got a “Curl-free” kit and straightened my hair. I had long hair, but it was really
straight and long then. And we got to talking amongst us about all the professors and all
the racism, etc., that existed. Out of the discontent grew the desire to do something
collectively, which ultimately led to the Neo-Black Society.
HT: We were wondering how that got started.
AF: Well, it got started pretty much, you know…one of the things you asked—I have all the
papers at home. I have every document that [we] used to put it together. And it got
started—I’m trying to think whether it officially was recognized after [Martin Luther]
King, [Jr.] got killed or not.
But you asked [on your sheet of questions] about King and whatever. But really,
the man that most of us identified with was Malcolm X. And I don’t remember what year
he got killed, whether it was ’64 or whatever. But Malcolm X [was the man.] Most
people had posters of Malcolm X in the dorm rooms.
We envisioned ourselves, I guess, as somewhat radical. And we were just tired of
it. People didn’t treat us fairly. This was a hard place for black students. [And to think
I’m going to donate all my papers to the school for their archives. This includes those
from UNCG, poems, books, and political campaigns.]
When I came in ’66, I told you what our numbers were. But part of the problem
was black folks didn’t like each other. And that’s part of the story that is never told
honestly [and still isn’t]. There is a divide among black people based on color just as it [is
with] hair texture—just as there have been whites to blacks.
I remember when I walked into the cafeteria the first day I thought, “Wow,” you
could—I could see it. Nobody else might have noticed it. But I could tell that all the
black kids who looked a certain way were on one side, and all the black kids who were
not in that vernacular were isolated. So I decided I would speak to all of them. I didn’t
care. It didn’t mean anything to me.
And, then, when—before you had King getting killed, we had issues with the
cafeteria. You asked a question about the food. The food was excellent. I gained more
dang weight that first year. I ate my fool head off here, because it was free, and [there]
was lots of it. [Besides I paid for it, so I was going to eat it.]
UNCG has some things that I thought were unique and helpful. One of the things
they used to have was tea. You’d have tea on Tuesdays with the chancellor. It was really
nice, because you could go into the tea and sometimes you might have something to talk
about with the chancellor. But they had petit fours and all kinds of little finger
sandwiches. They had great [sweet] tea.
9
My second year, I think it was, they let you have refrigerators in the rooms. So, I
used to carry my hat and fill them up with sandwiches and bring it back to fill up my
refrigerator. And that was another opportunity when I first observed Chancellor
Ferguson. I thought [to myself], “I really like this guy.”
We used to have compulsory Sunday—it wasn’t mass, but we had to go in
Aycock Auditorium every Sunday. And you had to wear stockings and hats and gloves.
And I said, “This crap’s got to go.” And that’s when I got in [Student Government
Association] and said, “We’re going to change the dress code,” and that’s when I got—
that was one of my first goals in student government was to get rid of that stupid dress
code.
HT: So, you were an officer in student government?
AF: I ended up being an officer my junior year. I was speaker pro tem. Kids from [North
Carolina] A&T [State University] were coming over to get hits on the meal tickets and
realized that the food we had was better than the food they had. And they were supposed
to be a state school. And so, they wanted to protest that.
The other thing that people wanted to protest was how we treated the maids here.
And we treated these women abysmally. One of the things I learned [was that many]
white folks are [just plain, pure] nasty. And that’s a generic statement, but it was true.
You know, for years you had black and whites [with] separate bathrooms. When I got
here I wished they had, because the girls in that dorm were nasty. They would leave
sanitary napkins in the middle of the floor. And I’m going, “This stuff is uncalled for.”
They wouldn’t clean the tub out after they’d taken a bath. And those poor maids had to
put up with all of that stuff—just beyond what you would ask somebody to put up with.
But [the maids] were always nice about it. [The maids] weren’t paid [much] money. So
[we] wanted to have a protest. And the black students got together and said, “We want to
protest.”
I never forget one of the first things you learn when you want to protest
something is before you go take on an issue, you’d better ask the people involved with
the issue [if you’re on the same page].
HT: Do you want to—
AF: No, I’m fine.
HT: Okay.
AF: I’m fine. And so, Thelma [McCoy]—I can’t remember what her [last] name was— but
Thelma in the dorm said, “Listen, don’t y’all come in here starting no mess and mess up
what we got. It might not be good [to you], but it’s better than what anybody else got.
And leave us alone.” And I thought, “bingo.” That was a great learning lesson for the
students in their vim, vigor and whatever to go out there and start a revolution—that
before you start a revolution, you better make sure you understand what the people in the
revolution [want]. What [we] wanted them to do was they wanted them to call them Mrs.
McCoy or Mrs. that. And Thelma said, “I don’t give a damn what they call me as long as
10
they pay me.” And she said, “Give me more money and equal pay, and they can call me
anything they want.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s great. That’s a good lesson for people
to learn.”
Then after that I think Martin Luther King, [Jr.] got killed, and all over America
people were trying to burn and tear down and pillage. The students were just upset. And
the black students said, “We’re going to protest, and we’re going to burn down”
something in Forney Hall or wherever they kept the transcripts.
I said, “If you touch that building, I’ll beat your butt. I worked too hard [for these
grades. Don’t] y’all to go over there and mess up my transcript. [If you don’t like it here],
you can go somewhere else, but don’t mess with my records, because I plan to get out of
here. I don’t want to have to repeat a course. I don’t want anybody telling me [just to
protest].” So, we had a big discussion in terms of what we should do.
There was some people who wanted to burn stuff down. And the kids from A&T,
[along with] Nelson Johnson and Howard Fuller were adding fuel to the fire. And I said,
“Hell, they don’t live here. They don’t go to school here. Why are y’all listening to these
people?” So, I said, “Why don’t we arrange to go sit and talk with Chancellor Ferguson?
Let’s go now.” And, so they all jumped up, and they went over to Chancellor Ferguson’s
house and banged on the door.
I remember his wife, first wife, came to the door. She had on a [beautiful] white
silk nightgown, very lovely lady. And he was walking along the rafter upstairs. He had on
a pair of boxer shorts, [and] a T-shirt. He said, “Will you give me a minute to get [a robe
on] to come down?” So he put his robe on, and he came down the steps. We must have
had about thirty of us sitting in his living room. And that was a second instance where I
learned something about him.
You know, [Dr. Ferguson] was able to diffuse the situation by sitting down and
calmly talking. He said, “Okay, what is it you want? Do you want the day off from
classes tomorrow? You can take it. No big deal.” And they were all prepared to kick
somebody’s ass. And just knew that he wasn’t going to do anything to appease whatever
it was. And his thing was, all of us feel this pain. Don’t take it upon yourself to feel like
it’s just about you. This was a tragedy. It affects all of us.
I think part of the reason he took it [appropriately] was he was a historian. And he
was able to stand back and take a historical perspective of what was happening. And [as
we prepared to leave] there, in his graciousness he said, “Look, let’s set up a series of
meetings. And you come to me and tell me what your issues are. And let’s discuss them.”
And that was the first time, I think, collectively people felt that they had been heard.
Well as a result of that, people also knew they’d better get their self together and
have an agenda. And that is partly what led also to the Neo-Black Society.
At that time Betty Cheek was the first president of the Neo-Black Society. Her
sister, Yvonne Cheek, was in the graduate School of Music. She was here. The other
people who were behind [the group] were Alyce Davis, I think it’s A-L-Y-C-E, you had
Janice Brewer, Sybil Ray—
HT: What’s that last name?
AF: Sybil Ray, R-A-Y. Sybil S-Y-B-I-L, Marie Darr. Myrtle Goore. And I’ve got a list of
who else was there. I’ve got a whole [history]—and, so, in order to [select] the name [for
11
the organization, it] got to be really interesting. We tried to figure out what to call
ourselves. And Neo-Black [Society] came about because we didn’t want to be African-
American this, that, or the other. We wanted to be typified as a group of new black
thinkers. And so, Neo, means new, Black Society. And that’s the name that stuck. The
next challenge with the Neo-Black Society [was] to get the organization recognized on
campus so that you had all the rights and privileges of any other organization, which
included funding, office space, meeting rooms and that kind of stuff. The people in the
student union didn’t want the black students to get any of that. So I said, “Let’s do it
differently. Let’s work it from the student legislature.”
I wrote the charter. And all of the things that came about, I wrote it and figured
out how to—let’s put it like this, I wrote the final draft that I presented [to the black
students] because I understood the political ramifications of what they were trying to do.
[I knew SGA. I had a coalition of votes in SGA I could count on including Lindsay
Lamson and Erskine Walthers]. The [black students] wanted it to be an all-black society.
I said, “You can’t do that with state money. If you’re going to take state money, you
don’t want to set it up so that it may ultimately [be challenged. It may] end up being all
black, but you don’t want it set up so it’s a discriminatory society.”
One of the things that whites don’t understand, even to this day, who talk about
historical black universities and whether they have a role, is that in the history of black
existence black folks have always had institutions. And they weren’t segregated. They
were separated. And there’s a big difference in thinking in those kinds of things.
What we wanted is to be able to sit among ourselves and talk without being
inhibited or whatever. And we felt that having white students in the organization would
counter that. But the people in the student government said that if you did that, then you
couldn’t be part of the campus. And we knew that was bullshit, because they had all these
white organizations that didn’t have black folks in them. So, we felt that that was non-valid
[or bogus claim].
We had a lot of people from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI
[Federal Bureau of Investigation] on campus then. And—
HT: For what purpose?
AF: Oh, people [were] spying on protestors all over the campus. It wasn’t just here. It was
UNCG. It was A&T, et cetera. They would come to meetings and take pictures of folks.
And it wasn’t just paranoia. They were here.
And, so, the way we wrote the charter it required that you had to do a certain
amount of service, and you had to attend meetings. Now, we knew white students weren’t
going to do that. Hell, we had trouble getting black students to do that too. But anyway,
we had enough of us involved. Because some of the kids were involved in tutoring and
stuff like that; they had a history of service. And that’s how it got passed.
HT: Was this in the spring semester of 1968 when all this got started, the Neo-Black Society?
AF: I don’t know. I’d have to go back and look at the records for accuracy. But as I said, I
have all the stuff in my boxes at home. It’s just a matter of trying to unpack some of the
stuff and figure out where it was. And I have all the SGA notes and all that stuff because
12
I knew that [we] were [making history]. [This information was historical.] One of the
things that the students wanted to do is have black courses like African-American history,
et cetera, on campus. And they wanted a separate department. And I said, “No, we’re not
going to have a separate department.” I was the—I was the—I don’t know what I was. I
gave black folks hell, and I gave white folks hell. So, I guess I don’t know what I was.
HT: You were an equal-opportunity—
AF: Yeah, equal-opportunity hellion. And so, my thought was [do] a survey of 110 colleges
and universities that had African-American history departments. I have all those papers
too. And I left a copy up there, and I don’t know what happen to them over the years.
Because I gave a copy—the Neo-Black Society and its files had copies of all the papers.
And I think I have the originals.
But the survey was really interesting. When you look at the history of the black
history departments, many of them didn’t [survive] past five years. And the reason they
didn’t live past five years was that they were always elective[s]. Nobody was going to
elect to go to an African-American history department, if it wasn’t vital to their degree.
[Folks didn’t have that much time to waste.] So I told the students, “if you’re going to do
it, you have to make the courses an essential substitution or elective to getting a degree.”
I said if you have an African-American history [course], for example, you want to
keep it in the history department. Because the students can, then, use it as an elective in
history. Whereas, if you have it in the African-American Department, you don’t have to
do anything with that African-American Department to get out of here. And, so, then they
wanted a course in black economics. I said, “Hell, I don’t. We know we[’re] po’. What
we need to figure out is how to get rich like white folks. So why would you want a course
in black economics?” So they didn’t like me for saying that, but that’s how I felt. Still
feel that way.
Then they had—the other one they wanted was music. And I was a big pusher of
the music. I had gone to a conference that talked about musical forms in the United
States. And of the great musical forms in this country, all of them came from black
society [except one]. Rock n roll, gospel [jazz and country]. The only thing that didn’t
come from [us was classical music]. There were two other things. The only thing that
[many think] didn’t come from black society was country music. [But] it has its roots in
some of it. [Remember the banjo came from Africa.] Classical music [doesn’t register us
before the 1800s]. Other than that, if you go through the history, most of the music [in
this nation] comes from Africa and African-American experience.
[recorder turned off for break]
AF: Okay, where was I?
HT: You were talking about the various types of music.
AF: Oh, and I went to—and I can’t remember where I was. But I was struck.
13
And I cannot think of what the man’s name that played the cello—Crutchfield. He
came, and we brought—three [other] people. The African-American history course
started first. And Dr. [Richard] Bardolph wanted to teach it. He thought he was the world
expert on black folks. And we said, “This ain’t going to work.” And so, they brought—I
mean [Bardolph] was a nice man, but the black part of it was they wanted black faculty.
And we didn’t have any black faculty anywhere [other than in labs]. We had a lady down
in the science lab. But she didn’t have the same level of recognition that some of them
would have.
And, so, they brought a guy in history. I cannot think of what his name was. But I
[co-]wrote the first course that they taught. I wrote the outline for it.
My father was a historian, [as was] my mother. So I knew what I was doing. And
I said, “These are the things we want to cover.” The [other] students had input. And they
didn’t really have too much different to add. We wanted—and that was the first course. I
can’t think who the first teacher was, but I’m sure I have it in the papers that I have. And
then we wanted something with music. And then we wanted—there was one other
discipline—oh, social studies, social work or something like that.
[They] then brought in Dr. Joseph Himes. I [had known] Dr. Himes well. He used
to live right across from Hillside High School where I went to high school. His wife,
Estelle Himes, taught French at [North Carolina Central [University]. And he taught
history [there as well]. In many ways I thought that [bringing them to UNCG] was a
tragedy because the other thing you saw when you have black faculty come to white
schools, you deprive black schools of faculty. You don’t want to limit people’s
opportunities, but Dr. Himes was such a presence at Central that he left a void at Central
when he came here. He added immensely. His wife, Estelle, was a very nice lady. I knew
her well. And I don’t know whether she taught French here or not. But she was very good
at what she did. But these were all friends of my family for a long time.
And Dr. [Elaine] Burgess taught social something here. I think she taught social
studies. And she wrote a book about black folks. And in her book and Dr. Bardolph’s
book they talked about my father [and his historical meaning to African-American life
and history. Bardolph talked] about black bourgeoisie. My father definitely wasn’t black
bourgeoisie. He was [a] very prominent black man, but he never held himself separate. In
the black community bourgeois, those people who don’t have anything to do with the
common, ordinary people. And that definitely wasn’t my father. [In] Dr. Bardolph’s
book, I think, he talked about my father because when [many black] people talk today,
they talk in terms of their fifth, sixth generation descendants of slaves. My grandfather
was a slave. So my father was a son of a slave. And I am the granddaughter of a slave. So
that’s a tremendous difference.
That pretty much [summed up] the coursework with what the Neo-Black Society
was trying to do. It was good for the black students, because when you come to a white
institution, unless you are the exception, you don’t get—and there’s this concept of black
exceptionality, where people say, “You’re not like every other black person.” I get so
damn tired of hearing it, I don’t know what to do. “Well, you’re different.” “I’m no
different than anybody else. I just happen to be born into a family that allowed me some
opportunities that other people might not have had.”
14
When you have your own organizations, you get to be president of an
organization. You get to be secretary. You get to be treasurer. And you learn some skills
that you might not get otherwise.
When I was here, I was trying to think if we had any other blacks in student
government but me initially. And I don’t think we did. So getting elected in these
organizations [was a coup. People claw their way for this], people are really born for,
and [knew it looked] good on a resume. We [don’t] have most black people
understanding resume [enhancement] and joining stuff for the resume. [It is one way we
fail to understand networking and some of the unwritten rules of the game. (Another
book I’ve written.)]
[recording stopped, then started again]
AF: And so it was a little bit different in terms of what you got to see. I got to play in an arena
that many of the students did not get to play. Some of it was the force of my personality.
But a lot of it had to do with my friendships. I got the people that I really, genuinely
liked. And I think they liked me. They made an important difference in my life.
When I came here I wanted to be a doctor. I always knew from a little kid that I
was going to be a doctor. And I just didn’t know how I was going to get there and how I
was going to pay for it.
UNCG had a pre-med committee. And that pre-med committee had to write
letters of recommendation for you, or at least that’s what they thought. And there was a
lady, [Dr. Hilda Harper with her] white hair. She taught biology. And she—and I’ll never
forget. She asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, “I want to be a doctor.” She said,
“I’m not going to approve you to be a doctor. And you’ve got to come through the
committee to get a letter of recommendation.” And so I knew then from my freshman
year that my path to getting what I wanted couldn’t be the same because she’s already
laid out for me that she was not going to allow me to do this. [I also learned not to
broadcast what you plan to do to prevent detractors from having the upper hand.]
I was very fortunate to have some professors who looked beyond some things and
said, “Okay, we’re going to do something different.” But that lady was a pain in my ass
the whole [time I was here for. Dr. Harper] taught vertebrate morphogenesis. And she
was a pain in my ass the whole time.
When I got ready to go to med school, I applied to schools [side stepping the pre-med
committee]. I asked four people to write letters of recommendation. And those were
the four most important letters that were ever written in terms of my being able to get into
med school.
One of the letters came from Dr. [Anna Joyce] Reardon, who taught physics. The
other one came from Elizabeth Bowles, who had been my education advisor. The third
one came from Hollis Rogers. And the fourth one came from Dr. [Anne F.] Baecker. And
let me tell you why they were important.
I didn’t know that Dr. Reardon was probably the first woman with a PhD in
physics [in the South]. So everybody in the country knew her. When she wrote a letter of
recommendation, people paid attention to it because of who she was. I got a C in physics.
15
Might have gotten a B and a C. But I wasn’t an outstanding student, [just] a hard
working, [dedicated one]. [I’ll] never forget one of the things we did in her class and Dr.
Harper’s was something that we did in med school. We took the muscles of a frog, and
they had those old black drums. You were looking for the action potential of the muscles.
Well, that’s one of the first things we did in med school. I just laughed. I said, “Boy, this
is Doctor Reardon all over again.”
The second letter came from Dr. Bowles. Dr. Bowles used to get upset with me
for cussing all the time. And I said, “If you had been through what I’ve been through,
hell, you’d have to cuss.” And she—I think I tended to say “crap.” And I said, “Well, it’s
better than shit.” So she says she just decided, “Okay, I’ll take the crap, then.” And she
reminded me of that every time I saw her.
The third person was Hollis Rogers. And as I told you, he taught the terrestrial
ecology course, which was probably one of the two best courses I’ve had. Remind me to
tell you about the second best one. And Dr. Rogers had written the BSCS [Biological
Sciences Curriculum Study] Green book in Biology, which was used all over the country.
So again, I had another professor write a letter of recommendation who had connections
all over the country. And people were impressed.
And the fourth letter I got was from Dr. Anne Baecker, [my German professor]. I
just liked Dr. Baecker.
My family are linguistic experts. [It was] all I could do to speak English. And I
used to stutter a little bit so that I have no skills or faculty for foreign languages at all.
And when I came here, UNCG had a requirement that you had to have three years of a
foreign language or you had to take three years [before] you came here. Well, I had three
years of French. But I took them in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades, and I didn’t
have a language in the twelfth grade. And, again, they wanted to read me the riot act and
say I had to take three years of foreign language.
Well, I knew if I had to take three years of foreign language, I would never get
out of here, because I can’t do foreign languages. And I knew I couldn’t do French. I
couldn’t get the plusa perfect, the plusa [par perfect] and all that crap straight. That just
wasn’t my thing.
So I decided I was going to take German because somebody told me that German
is something that you need in med school. Biggest lie ever told. But I took it the first
year.
Dr. Baecker taught it the first year. I got a B. No, I got a C and a D. And one of
the things that she realized right off the bat was that I had one of the highest scores ever
made on a [German] standardized test. I could read German. I could interpret it. But I
could not speak it.
The second year I took German under her, and I think I got a D. And then the
second semester she wasn’t teaching it. And I had to take it under this crazy guy [this
blonde with black rimmed glasses who looked like a stereotype for Nazis]. And, anyway,
it was my junior year. And this German professor [found out] I was going to run for
president of the SGA, and I was [likely] going to win. I was very well known [as well as
a relatively] popular student. And this guy told me if I ran for president—I would have
been the first black president of SGA. He said, “If you run, you’re going to win. And
we’re not going to have any niggers up there as president of SGA. And if you run and if
you win, you will flunk my course.”
16
I said, “Damn. Whoa.” And so I went in and I talked to Dr. Baecker. And I told
her what happened. And I said, “You know, I’m going to drop this course, because I’m
not going to deal with this guy.” She said, “Well, I’m teaching it next year, your senior
year. You sign up for it.” And so I took it my senior year under her. I [ended up with] a C
and three Ds [in German], and that’s all I had to have to pass the course. I got the hell out
of here with that.
I [had] to have the lowest averages that’[ve] ever been achieved to get into med
school. But I also happen to have the best letters of recommendation that probably were
ever written. I’m very verbal. So, I asked for an interview [for] I knew I could talk my
way into it.
[After] I went to UNCG—I went from here to the [University of] Wisconsin at
Madison. I remember one of the people on their admissions committee asked me, “Where
did I get these people who wrote the letters of recommendation?” They said the
committee was so impressed [and my essay was great]. I never saw the letters of
recommendation. Never asked [to see] them. And they said, “You were so impressive.”
They asked me why should I be admitted to med school. And I said, “Because if
you don’t admit me, you’ll miss the best doctor out there. Nobody else will serve people
like I will. They’ll talk the crap, but I will get there and work for people and serve
people.”
HT: What made you choose to apply to the University of Wisconsin?
AF: Well, there was several things. It was as far away from home as I could get.
HT: And very cold.
AF: I didn’t realize how cold it was. And they were looking for black students. And I wanted
to be a doctor. So they got their black student, and I got my doctorate. [We] made a trade
off. And—
HT: Did you apply for a scholarship and get it?
AF: No, they told me if I came there—with my grades—I graduated with a 2.2 or maybe a 2.3
from UNCG. And I had a 2.0 in my major. So—and I don’t hesitate to tell kids that,
because they think that because they don’t have the grades they can’t do it. If you believe
it, stick with it. You keep fighting for it until you find somebody that will take you.
Wisconsin was a different kind of school. Had I not gone to UNCG, I would not have
been able to go to Wisconsin. Wisconsin was a school [which] gave short answer and
essay tests. And that’s what I’m good at, talking. And UNCG is a school—was a
school—it probably isn’t now, but when I came through there were a lot of short answer
and essay. I can talk, and I can write. And so that allowed me to do some things that I
would not have been able to do otherwise.
Wisconsin’s [med school] was very racist [as well]. I mean, you know, being a—I
was the first black woman there. Being a pioneer ain’t easy. And we were—I don’t think
today’s young people could have done or withstood what we did. Because, number one,
these kids won’t put up with it. For you to have bombings and whatever I had left and
17
right. If they had to put up with some of the stuff that we had to put up with. But, you
know, Wisconsin was great [in retrospect]. And the interesting thing was the patients in
Wisconsin came from a lot of the rural areas where they spoke German. So, German
came in very handy, because I could often understand what people were saying from the
hinterlands is what I used to call that.
HT: What was the University of Wisconsin, Madison?
AF: Madison, the radical campus.
HT: Even in those days it was a very big school.
AF: It was—well, when I went, there were 36,000 students. And in the med school we had a
class size was about 100, and the second year I was there they upped it to 114. So it was
always a big school. They had more students than many small cities in North Carolina
have. So, it was a huge school.
People used to say, “Do you know so and so and so? They go to the University of
Wisconsin.” I’m going, “Do you know how many students are in the University of
Wisconsin?” The thing about Wisconsin was if you were in medicine, most of your
buildings were right there together. So you didn’t really have contact with the rest of the
campus. And when I was here, the beauty of UNCG was it was small. It was intimate.
You get to know a lot of people here. Now there were too many students for my taste.
When I came here in ’67, I believe they allowed the first males in. And they—
many of the men were gay. And still are probably. But the men and black students had a
common enemy: white women. Because we weren’t treated well by—they didn’t treat the
men well, and they didn’t treat the black students well. So, we got along well.
HT: The ratio, I think, is about 30 percent male on campus now and 70 percent women
thereabout.
AF: And, you know, it’s interesting to me that the biggest jump in minorities on campus was
with Ferguson. The percentage hasn’t changed that much. He did a lot to make it so that
it was a comfortable campus. In one of the USA Today’s they did an article, and it says
that UNCG had the best graduation rate for black women. It was 84 percent. But black
men it was like 27 percent. They used to eat them up alive around here.
HT: What do you think caused that?
AF: Well, there’s still a lot of the Woman’s College tradition. The prim and proper [female]—
I go to places as a Republican all over the state. And I’ll meet women and I say, “You
went to UNCG.” And they say, “How do you know?” I say, “Because you have that
UNCG look. There’s not a hair out of place. You got your pearls and whatever.” And
women prior to 1960, they [are] always impeccably groomed, and I admired that. That
just [ain’t] me. But I admired it.
18
I mean, you know, I see them all the time. And they just laugh. I say, “I went to
UNCG. I was [in] the rebellious group that came through there.” But I can always tell
UNCG women. They were very classy, very classy.
HT: I have a quick question for you. It’s a little bit off of topic. Ever heard something called
the black stocking girls on campus?
AF: No.
HT: We’ve heard that expression. I think it must have been in the late fifties and early sixties,
and they usually were the artsy group that lived in Guilford or New Guilford.
AF: Well, when I was here, most of the women, they were gay in the physical ed department.
And so, they all had that very mannish look with the short hair cuts, very stereotypical
designation of gay women. They called them butch, dikes or whatever. And they were in
their own world; they didn’t care. And then they had —but they were very [smart]—
physical ed was no joke here. It was one of the hardest majors, because of the science
requirements and things that they had there. [Faculty] in that department [were weird].
And, you know, I let them do their thing, and I didn’t pay them any mind. I just went
ahead and did my thing. That was a big divide.
Then you had a bunch of—the other person who—the other thing that used to get
on my nerves at UNCG were the honors classes. Because we didn’t get many blacks into
the honors program. And when I looked at the curriculum they had, they didn’t work as
hard as we did. They had these fun soirees and poetic discussions and discourse. And we
were busting our butts up in the library.
Fred Chappell was banging every girl he could on campus. And when I saw all
the stuff that goes on. I remember all these kids coming back. They used to be at his
house until eleven, twelve o’clock at night coming in late to the dorm, out drinking and
whatever. And black students didn’t have that luxury. We didn’t get the same kind of
inclusion in some of the things that were going on to the same degree.
Now Betty Cheek was an art major, and Yvonne Cheek was a music education
major. There was another young lady who sang. I can’t think of what her name is. And
she was in her own world, too. Wilsonia Cherry [in my class] was a trip. Wilsonia Cherry
probably was one of the most intellectual, gifted young women here. She majored in
romantic English literature or Chaucer or some esoteric thing to the nth degree. And she
just did her thing. Now, Wilsonia Cherry was included in a lot of stuff. But stuff didn’t
stick to Wilsonia like it did to some other folk. She made a niche, and she went at it. And
the rest of the world could pass her by, and she didn’t care. And so she adapted quite
well.
A lot of kids did not adapt well. Miriam White was one of the most gorgeous
young women. In my junior year she ran for the beauty queen for the class. She didn’t get
it because the black students didn’t vote for her. And again, it goes back to that color
thing even among black folks. They just thought that she thought she was white. Deborah
Watts, who came here with me from Hillside High School, [was very fair skinned]. There
were four of us [from my high school class]: Deborah Watts, Kathy Jordan, Noma
Bennett, N-O-M-A, and myself, who came from Hillside. I introduced [Deborah] to my
19
English teaching assistant, who was Robert Hill, a white boy from the mountains of
Walnut Cove, [North Carolina]. They fell in love and got married. And Deborah was
pregnant and dropped out of school. I stayed on Deborah‘s case for years. And she
eventually came back to school and got her degree, then got her master’s degree from
Bryn Mawr [College], I think. And Bob taught here, and I think he got a PhD from
somewhere.
But that was the talk of the town in Durham, North Carolina, when she married a
white boy. And I told them, “He’s a good guy.” He was my English assistant, and he did
a good job. He was a nice guy. And he made her a good husband.
But, then, there was—the guys that we had here. The first SGA president, if you
haven’t brought him in to talk to him, you need to. That’s Lindsay Lamson.
HT: I’ve heard the name, but I think you mentioned—?
AF: What?
HT: —you mentioned a lot of these names to Betty [Carter].
AF: Well, Lindsay Lamson was the first male UNCG president. He was the president in 1970-
71. And I was in love with Lindsay Lamson, [which] was quite interesting, because I had
never dealt with white folks on the intimate level much less an intellectual level until I
got here. And he and I are still good friends to this day.
I almost married him. He wanted to marry me. But there was something about
Lindsay that drove me crazy. And my concerns proved true over time. He’s just as gay as
he can be. I told him, I said, “Lindsay, as much as I love you if I ever found you with a
man I would make a eunuch out of you. I don’t play that crap. And so we need to just be
friends. And let’s let it stay at that.”
But he was a very gifted and talented man. I said, “Why would you want to marry
me? You could be”—that guy could have been governor of North Carolina. And I told
him, “You can’t be governor of North Carolina with a black wife. [There] ain’t [sic] no
ifs, ands and buts about it. I think that your gifts and talents are such that it’s more
important that you pursue them rather than to pursue me.” But he’s a good guy [and I
miss his friendship dearly]. There’s no doubt about it.
HT: Where does he live now?
AF: He lives in two places. He has a real estate business in Denver, Colorado. as well
as in San Francisco, [California]. And he[’s] got plenty money. [If] he ain’t giving
you no money, you ought to go find him and ask him for it. He’s got plenty of it.
HT: I’ll let the development officer worry about that. Oh, gosh.
AF: Well, I’m surprised in all of its doing that they have never asked him, because he’s an
important part of the history of the school. I was his campaign manager and got him
elected [SGA president]. When he found out that I wasn’t running for SGA president [in
my junior year], he started a write-in campaign. He said I only lost by three votes. And I
20
said, “Thank God. If you had done that I would have never gotten out of this school.”
But, you know, we were dear friends and still are.
He’s a great guy, and he was one of the loves of my life. He still is a good friend.
And he’s somebody you ought to interview. Lindsay’s experiences as one of the early
males was different. Lindsay was a town student and didn’t live on campus. And so you
had a different group of students; many of the town students were married or in from the
surrounding areas. The men who lived on campus lived in Phillips Dorm.
One of my good friends, I haven’t seen him in a long time, would love to see him,
was Raphael Rivera, who was from Puerto Rico. He was one of the early [male] students,
too. He would be an interesting guy [to speak with] because he has to be probably one of
the first Spanish-speaking students to come to the university. But he was a nice young
man.
HT: Do you know—does he live in California?
AF: You know, I saw something in the alumni thing that says he lived in High Point, [North
Carolina].
HT: Okay.
AF: But I thought I remembered that his daddy owned a couple of the Ron Rico plantations—
rum plantations—down in Puerto Rico. But he was a great guy. I liked Raphael. All the
women were hot to trot on Ralph. They were after him. He had more women chasing him
than Carter’s got liver pills.
HT: Oh, let me see. Well, I know you were voted an Outstanding Senior during your senior
year. I saw that in the yearbook.
AF: Yeah.
HT: Can you tell me about that experience?
AF: There’s nothing to tell. That’s what I [was] voted, so I took a picture [among the trees. I
was a biology major and loved nature]. The senior year was probably one of my most fun
years. I had pretty much wrapped up all of my requirements, and that was when I finally
knew I was going to graduate. The first three years it was in doubt. But the senior year I
had most of the stuff in place that I needed to do. And I was just having fun.
[I] finished my basic degree requirements in three and a half years. So the second
semester, I did education. It’s the only time I ever made Dean’s List. I got a 4.0 in
Education. [I was an excellent] teacher [and still am]. I volunteered to teach, and all the
kids like my style. It’s more of an [Aristotelian] and Socratic method where I like to ask
people questions and get them to think and use the information that they have at hand to
come to some understanding of what’s being asked. [I’m good at teaching critical
thinking.] One of the first things I began to understand here is how you think about things
in terms of testing, [synthesizing academic information], etcetera. And that is the thing
21
that kills black students and other minority students. [Many] really don’t understand the
whole process. Now, if you understand the process, then education is not difficult.
When I got to Wisconsin I had a lot of trouble in med school because I didn’t
understand the process [at that level]. It took me almost two years to figure out the
process of testing and how people ask questions and what they’re trying to ask. I
remember the first year at med school, I flunked just about everything they offered. And
one of my friends [who taught microbiology, Dr.] June Osborne, who was one of the
developers of Interferon, said, “You can’t be that stupid. I’ve had you [in my class], and
I’ve talked to you. I [know] that you understand the subject matter. So, what is the
difficulty?”
They looked at it and found that when I did multiple-choice tests, I flunked. But if
you asked me an essay or a written test, I did quite well. And it’s like if you ask me a
question about the grass is green, why is it green? My response would be, “Are you
talking about the color green? Is it the chlorophyll?” I read too much into the
possibilities. I’m always [thinking subconsciously,] “This is a trick question. They’re
trying to trick me.” In [so] doing, I misread what [was] being asked in the question. [Dr.
June Osborne] suggested that the medical school give me [an oral] exam. And I aced
them.
[In thinking back on it], one of the values of that is had I not come to UNCG I
might not have finished [medical] school, because we had a lot of short answer and essay
tests [here]. If I had been in a school where it was all multiple-choice tests, I would have
had a hell of a problem. I always worried that when it came time to doing the [medical]
board exams, I was going to get screwed because the board exams are pretty much
multiple choice.
I did get through the board exams for New York. I [first] got [a medical] license
in New York. Then I got a license in six other states by reciprocity. But, you know, as I
said, I hated UNCG when I was here. But looking back on it, it was good training for
what came after, as was being born in a parsonage. I hated being a preacher’s kid. But
you learn a lot, and you see a lot that lends itself to other experiences if you’re flexible
and adaptable.
HT: Well, if we go back to the Neo-Black Society—
AF: Right.
HT: Can you tell me a little bit more about Betty and Yvonne Cheek and how they fit in, all
the Neo-Black Society?
AF: Betty and Yvonne Cheek were sisters. And Betty Cheek was—I think she [was] an art
major. She is a curator at the North Carolina Art Museum in Raleigh. And she’s been
there for—I don’t know, for years. Betty has been there a long time. [Yvonne was the
older, but didn’t get her undergraduate degree here.]
And they just wanted to kick butt. [As awful as] everybody was—everybody
[black] who came to UNCG was angry with how they were treated at UNCG.
[It was an angry time. Blacks were still being persecuted. Our education didn’t
shelter us, but made us more aware of our mistreatment and made our anger often turn to
22
outrage. I tried never to let folks see me sweat.] And that may account for why the
students in the early years don’t participate in alumni affairs, et cetera, because we
remember it as being so unfair.
And I think that Betsy Culbertson is the—she was the secretary of the Department
of Interior. She finished after Betty. But [I think] Betty was better qualified than she was
[though probably not as politically connected]. Now, I don’t know if Betty applied for
that job and didn’t get it or what. But all through our lives those people who were in the
early protests [or stood against wrong] realized they didn’t reap any benefits from having
been pioneer trailblazers [against injustice]. Some of the kids after us got the benefits.
Many of the kids who were early protestors got prison records. And because they
had prison records, they couldn’t get the jobs they fought for—for everybody else.
Yvonne, as I told you, majored in music. And she married a guy named Johnson. He was
a student at A&T—good looking dude, ooh, Lord, everybody was hot on him. But she
got him first. And they were married for awhile. They are divorced. And I just got a card
from her. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And she was at the Hubert Humphrey
Institute. And as you can see by knowing where all these people were, we were friends.
And we kept in touch.
Myrtle Gore finished med school. She was a doctor in Alabama last time I heard.
Marie Darr is right here in Greensboro. And Marie and I were roommates on the German
floor of Shaw Hall for awhile. Noma Bennett, who came here with me from Hillside
High School—she stayed two years, and she couldn’t deal with it, so she left. [Noma]
went to Hampton [University], finished Hampton and got a PhD from the University of
Pittsburgh, I think in speech pathology. And she is now the dean of allied health
[sciences] for Florida International University. [She just accepted the same position at the
University of Tennessee at Memphis.]
HT: Did you ever think about leaving during your four years here?
AF: Yes, wanted to leave all the time, but because my grades were so bad I wasn’t going
anywhere. [And I couldn’t transfer without losing my credits. I couldn’t afford another
school.] And [so] I called my mother and my father; they weren’t going to support me
going anywhere else. You know, money was an issue because I was paying for this. I
realized if I had pulled out and gone elsewhere, I need[ed] the money that they were
getting from me [for Social Security]. They needed the money to live on.
The reason I stayed [and endured] was because of Chancellor Ferguson. He told
me in one of our conversations that if I could prove that people were racist that he would
have them removed or would not grant them tenure. And he told me the criteria by which
you judge faculty. He also taught me how to play the game. And that was probably the
most useful lesson I got from him.
[Dr. Ferguson] said, “If you want to fight injustice, you have to do it smartly.”
And so he gave me some hints and guidelines that were very helpful, like documenting
your case. [We had an instructor], Mr. Casey, the guy that I took the switchblade to class
[sitting there cleaning my nails], I documented him left and right and sideways. And I
don’t think he came back after that year. There were several other faculty members
[whose case I was on]. I’m sure that may be in the pile of papers I will donate. I just
documented incidences of how—not through their direct actions, but [with a racial
23
impact]. For example, if you gave a test and that followed in med school, too. What we
found is that some people graded on the curve. If all the black students were in the top of
the curve, everybody passed the test. But if the black students were in the bottom of the
curve, they drew the line [above] the black students. You saw things like that. And you
know what that is.
Of course, they say, “Well, they didn’t pass.” But that’s just not what it is. If
everybody passes when we are in the top of the curve, and only [blacks] not pass when
we’re in the bottom of the curve, that’s an example of how racism impinges [in obviously
subtle ways]. And in the community of Durham, and even Salisbury, I was talking to
somebody about UNCG. They said, “Girl, you had to be tough, because everybody who
was black knew that UNCG was tough on black folks. A lot of kids didn’t even bother to
apply because they knew its reputation of being so tough on black folks. But as I said,
Chancellor Ferguson helped me work through a lot of things.
When Lindsay got to be president of student government, they gave that boy hell.
And I had to come back one time [for] a meeting with him and Ferguson and some other
people about some of the [campus “BS”].
Lindsay was a nice guy. He didn’t know how to kick ass, and you had to kick ass,
[which] I’m good at it. He [had a] sweet disposition [and was a non-confrontational] kind
of person.
You had to sit down and lay out some of the strategies. And I’m good at
strategically figuring out what the question is that you need to ask to get to the heart of
the issue. Many people, you know, they used to tell us in class there is no such thing as a
dumb question. No, but there is a wrong question. And many people ask the wrong
question. You’ve got to figure out how to ask the [right] question that is the heart and the
crux of the issue. Most folks don’t know how to do that, because they don’t have the
ability to see the broader picture. [My parents came at this in a different way and also had
taught us to think for ourselves. She’d say if every fool jumped off a bridge, will you
jump too?]
I think that’s what Dr. Ferguson helped with. Having had that historical
perspective, he could stand back and say, “If you look at history, X, Y, Z happens, and
this is why.” And he’s right. I mean, you know, now I’m surprised at how much of the
book that I’m working on—I went back in history and looked at some of the presidents.
In fifty years Richard Nixon will go down as one of the greatest presidents the United
States has ever had. As crazy as he was, he did all the right things. Doesn’t matter why he
did them. He opened the doors to China. He did a lot of other things that people are now
going, “Whoa, this man had some insight into what was going on.”
And Betty and Yvonne Cheek were two of the power players. I mean Betty was
willing to put herself out there as the president of the Neo-Black Society. It wasn’t really
the president. It was the chairman. We didn’t have a president.
HT: Was she the first chair?
AF: [We used chairs and had four of them to take the pressure and focus off of one person.
We didn’t want a HNIC [Head Negro In Charge]. Betty was the first chair. And the
reason we did that, I wanted to get away from the concept of presidency and insisted that
we have chairmen, and then we have each person [in charge of a major concern like]
24
curriculum, students, [welfare]—the focus that we had was to retain people and make
sure they got a degree. It wasn’t the choir [and] all that stuff. We didn’t even have a choir
[or band] when I was here. We were trying to figure out how to help students negotiate
this system [and get the hell out without losing themselves].
HT: Where did you meet?
AF: We had, you know, we had privileges. So, we meet somewhere in Elliott [Hall].
HT: In Elliott?
AF: [The student union] building. We had meeting rooms throughout. We posted the
meetings, and we had some office space. Most of us kept the records in a file [in our
room]. And I guess I kept most of the records for the two years I was here. And then,
when I left, I left them [in the bottom drawer] in a file.
And then Linda Kelly was the next president. Linda Kelly is in Connecticut. She
used to be the general counsel for a life insurance company [there]. I don’t know what
Linda Kelly is doing now. But she’s still in Connecticut. And her parents lived in
Salisbury. I saw her in Salisbury.
Linda Kelly thought I was an “Uncle Tom.” And I guess the worst thing that
happened to me is when I graduated, she sent me anonymously—but I knew from the
post office—this [news article] with half my face colored black and the other half of it
was white. [That hurt but I’ve never said this until now.]
One of the things I guess that having grown up in the parsonage taught is whether
you want something to have a sustaining impact—I designed the Neo-Black Society to
have a sustaining impact, not just to be there for the kids [of my cohort group], but to be a
way for kids to come here and succeed [into the future]. Based on my experience looking
at what kept us from succeeding, for those who went home [or were having problems],
[we tried] to build [solutions] in to the Neo-Black Society.
The fact that [the Neo-Black Society is] still here suggests that we had the right
idea. It wasn’t a popular thing [then] because people wanted to go kick somebody’s ass
and do something. And I’m not—I ain’t [sic] got time for that. You know? All I want[ed]
to do is get my degree and get the hell out of here. My brother told me all the time, “My
daddy never lost a fight,” but he picked his fights very carefully. So, what I was trying to
teach kids is, pick your fights carefully. There are some things that though you may get
incensed about them, they ain’t [sic] worth it. I guess the same thing goes for [some
aspects of] Civil Rights [efforts].
Martin Luther King was never my hero. My heroes were Malcolm X and Whitney
Young. Whitney Young used to say, “What good is it to sit in the cafeteria when you
don’t have the money to buy the food?” And that’s where we are now. People have all
these rights, but they don’t have the money to enjoy it. Economic security is the most
important thing that you can do.
I tell people all the time there used to be a sign going into the Elliott University
Center that says, “If you educate a woman, you educate a family.” People don’t
understand that. [Particularly traditional] families are disintegrating. Miss [Harriet] Elliott
understood that the basis of the society has always been the family. The family is coming
25
under attack right now. Girls don’t want to get married. Boys don’t want to get married.
Gay folks want to be married. But the traditional sense of family is being lost. And that is
[an attack on] the underpinnings of society.
HT: Do you recall a big moment or several big moments why you remember the Neo-Black
Society?
AF: In terms of?
HT: Well—
AF: Well, there are lots of things. I mean I talked about the maid issue where people wanted
to protest them calling maids by their first names, and the maids—told you what the
maids said. The cafeteria mess was a big moment. I have a jilted view of the Civil Rights
struggle [from being here]. There was the Communist thing where people got killed in
Greensboro.
HT: That was 1979, yes.
AF: No, there was some other mess before then that happened on campus, because I know
Nelson Johnson—
HT: Is that the ARA strike, maybe?
AF: I don’t know. But I remember some stuff getting started then. And my biggest disgust
with it is that the men in the Civil Rights protest, black men, seemed to believe that the
only place for women was prone. And that [we] were supposed to succumb to their
whatevers. And I just thought, “This is a bunch of crap. They just want a piece of tail and
forget it.” In terms of UNCG, [we were] so advantaged compared to any other school in
this state. And they really were, because women who finished [here had] a surprising
number of them marrying the guys who [were] at State and Carolina who would be in the
state legislature. Women really did have the power and advantage.
I think [Richard L.] “Skip” Moore was probably the first to recognize that when
he was the director of development. When we started the first annual giving, I was on the
alumni board then. And they said, “Women won’t give any money because it’s just a
bunch of housewives and women.” And so Skip set about doing surveys and stuff. And
they told him that the school could only raise $20 million. And in the first capital
fundraiser, they raised $55 million in a little bit under [three] years. They extended [the
drive five years in which they raised] $65 million. Over 90 percent of the money came
from women from [what was termed] pin money. And he understood the power that these
women had because they were in control of their families and really the family money. I
guess that was—that was one of the views of women that changed.
The men in the Civil Rights group back then did not have that group [of women
helping. The dilettantes enjoyed “the movement.”]
I’m sure if I look through the notes I’ll have other thoughts about it. But right
now [I’ve] got [a book] and all that stuff intervening, [which] sort of blocks out some of
26
that stuff. I’m a good compartmentalizer. I had to think coming out here, and that’s why I
was late. I missed a turn because I was thinking about something and wasn’t paying
attention to the streets.
I do also know that they used to have “mixers.” And the mixers were designed,
because we had “no men” on campus. They would import the guys from Carolina and
State over here to be escorts, [dates, husband material] for women. And so one of the
other things that hit you as a black woman is that there were no black men being
imported over here. And I guess they figured we all had access to A&T. What we found,
unfortunately, is that “Tiger Woods” wasn’t alone. The black men came over here, and
the white women took them before we even got a chance to look at them. That was a little
bit disheartening. But such is life.
You did not come if you were black to a white school looking for a husband
because you weren’t going to get them. That was a rare commodity. You either had to
bring him before you got here, or you had to have a bus or [transportation] to go to A&T.
I had neither a bus nor a car.
I made [just] enough money to come out of UNCG in debt to the tune of $400
because I just worked all the time. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I [wasn’t] what you call
a beauty queen. I wasn’t ugly, but I didn’t seem to attract men’s fancy way back then.
And probably not now either. [I wasn’t sexually engaged while here because I didn’t
want a pregnancy. But, thankfully, there have been interesting men in my life.] I’m sixty-two.
So I ain’t [sic] too fancy [and may be past being] attractive.
HT: Well, did you have any—what was the relationship between Bennett College and UNCG
back in those days?
AF: They really didn’t have a relationship that was perceptible. I mean I saw downstairs that
y’all had some [acknowledgement] of Bennett College in the Civil Rights thing. UNCG
was the women’s school. And we were the premier school. And they used to always tell
us we were the Vassar [College] of the South. And even Duke [University] when they
had the women’s campus could not hold a candle to this institution. Bennett could not
hold a candle to this institution. [To some we were seen as thoroughbred competition.]
HT: It was quite small even in those days.
AF: It was small, but I mean the women who went there, I don’t even remember anybody who
went to Bennett when I was here. I’m sure they were there, and I know many people who
have gone to Bennett because I’ve talked to them and got lots of friends that I met who I
later found out they went to Bennett, but they are all older than I am.
If you are going to school—integration caused a hardship on many of the
historically-black schools because it pulled a pool of students that would have normally
gone to these schools. And for some of us, it was to the detriment [of the school as us].
For others of us, it was to our advantage.
It’s, you know, Bennett was not pivotal to my time in Greensboro, nor was A&T.
The only reason that I had a lot of interaction with A&T was that my sister and her
husband came back to the United States from China in 1963. He was their professor of
military science at A&T, and I was the chief babysitter. And so I got to go to a couple of
27
things with them at A&T. But when I went there, it was like I was—when I told
somebody I went to UNCG, they didn’t really respect me. And they didn’t respect us.
And I—
HT: Did they feel that you should have gone to A&T or Bennett perhaps?
AF: Yeah [sarcastically]! And then I remember that [their] guys would come over the first
thing they would ask was a punch on your meal ticket because the food was good. ARA
Slater was better than that junk y’all got over there now. The food was excellent when we
came here. And I can remember, I think it was my second year, they did an experiment in
the cafeteria where the students in home economics prepared the food as part of their
learning process. [That] food was marvelous.
The kids who majored in home economics manned—I think there were four
cafeterias there. And the students manned one of them, and they were always full. The
food was excellent. The variety was good. Nobody could really complain about the food.
It was probably better than most people had at home. It was—that was one of the draws.
The other thing you would ask me was about the courses. I’m still trying to
think—Sarah Sands was my microbiology [lab] teacher. She was probably one of the
most talented people here. And her course was a pivotal course in med school. Because
the stuff that she did on cultures and all that—that was stuff we used in med school [and I
did get micro in med school]. Walter Puterbaugh, who was my chemistry professor, tried
his damnest [sic] to get me to understand organic chemistry. It didn’t work. And it didn’t
work much in med school either. I struggled with chemistry. [I still don’t know why I had
to learn the Krebs Cycle.]
HT: Oh, gosh.
AF: But Walter Puterbaugh was one of the best teachers I had. I cannot think of the man who
taught economics, but he was the little short guy with blond hair. [Was it a Mr. Carter in
economics?] And, then, Dr. Warren Ashby taught philosophy.
HT: Ashby.
AF: Warren Ashby, I thought his course was very good. [James] Jim Allen was in charge of
the campus ministry, and he was a nice guy. He didn’t teach anything. He was always—
he was one of those kind, ingratiating white folks that could at times get on my nerves.
You know, they had so much compassion. Sometimes you just had to tell people, “Look,
wake up. Stand on your own two feet and do [what you need to do! Deal with life].” And
he wouldn’t do that. He used to get on my nerves. He was patronizing [and always
making excuses for people who wouldn’t take responsibility for their lives]. But he was a
nice guy, and I always liked him. [Thomas] Tom Martin was one of the first white males.
Tom [seems to have] made a career out of being [one] the first white males here at
UNCG.
HT: He was a student?
28
AF: He was a student when I was here. And I think his wife was a student also. But as a rule
the men were not really outstanding that you remember other than being gay. That was all
we remember [many] of them for. As a rule, unless somebody was in student
government, I didn’t know who they were.
When I was here, we didn’t have sororities. It was interesting—my niece, [Lisa,]
came here, and she was one of the founders of the Deltas [Delta Sigma Theta Sorority,
Inc.] on campus, which was the first black female sorority. And so that was another
reason that the Neo-Black Society was a group that gained traction—we didn’t have
many outlet of things that we could join.
You had your own departmental clubs, and you had the Carolinian and I worked
on the Carolinian staff. [I was their first entertainment editor as well as sports editor.]
That was always a bone of contention with somebody about something. And, then, you
had the Coraddi. [It was] very cliquish. Only certain people were allowed to write for the
Coraddi. But there weren’t many outlets to express your talents along different [venues].
We didn’t have women’s basketball [like now]. When I started, it was the five-five court
kind of thing—but it was the half-court game. And it expanded.
They had swimming. I remember taking swimming. And I thought I wasn’t going
to pass [to graduate] because [of] the foreign language and the physical education
requirement. And to this day I can’t swim. The only reason I passed swimming is because
I could do the length of the pool holding my breath. I still can’t get my head in water and
swim. I took body mechanics, tennis, and I don’t remember what the other one was. But
[I was looking for something easy. Physical education was hard on people].
HT: Let me ask you a couple of questions about some of the administrators. Do you recall
anything about Vice Chancellor Mereb Mossman?
AF: Oh, Lord, I loved Mereb Mossman. [She] was truly fascinating. She was one of those
liberal white folks who was into social work, social studies and all that kind of stuff. Dr.
Mossman was crippled.
I remember the day that she parked her car up there in front of the Foust Building
and didn’t have it in gear. It rolled over her leg and broke it. And that’s why she had the
cane and walked with a limp. She was always—she was one of the people that really
treated black folks very fairly. I respected her and what she had to say.
You didn’t deal with her unless you took a course under her. But I think— I don’t
think she was vice chancellor when I was here. I think she became vice chancellor after I
left.
HT: It might have been.
AF: She was a dean maybe.
HT: Her title changed over the years.
AF: Yeah.
HT: She started back in the thirties teaching sociology.
29
AF: Right.
HT: Then she became an administrator later on. And her title—
AF: Right. But she was a class act. I remember she always drove a white New Yorker. And
she was always “ragged to the nines.” She always—I mean she could have been a typical
UNCG grad. She [was] always impeccably groomed. She was always very nice, very
forward thinking in terms of the kinds of things [that work for people]. The thing I hadn’t
said anything about—one of the best things about UNCG—was its lyceum series. And
we would have [great presentations]—though I hated going to Aycock [Auditorium] on
Sundays. Some of the stuff they had when I look at it today compared to what goes on
was just unbelievable. Eric Sevareid came. Charles Kuralt. I remember seeing the
Bolshoi Ballet in Aycock Auditorium. I remember seeing Alvin Ailey Dancers in
Aycock. There were just all kinds of cultural things that they weren’t getting anywhere
[else]. A&T, nowhere else. And then in the entertainment, Dionne Warwick came. I did
an interview with her. Stevie Wonder came. I did an interview with him which was in the
paper. The Impressions were here [as were the 5th Dimension]. I mean, so they mixed it
up so black folks got more than their share of thrills out of it. Because there were a lot of
things that were relevant to us in there. And then, they would have various poets and
authors come through. So the lyceum series was second to none. And those were the
things that I really did enjoy about UNCG. But Mereb Mossman was a class act and a
good friend. She and I were good friends.
HT: Did you keep up with her after you graduated?
AF: Yes. I used to come see her. I went to see Dr. Rogers. I actually went to see all of my
favorites. Whenever I would come to town, I’d make sure that I would stop [in]. [Dr.
Mossman] lived on Sunset Drive or some[where] down there, down there off of Friendly.
And Dr. Rogers lived on Radiance Drive. [I saw Dr. Elizabeth Bowles also.] So, I
remember—they weren’t that far apart.
[Dr. Mossman] always made time to sit and talk. And we’d talk. And I’d run
some things by her and get her perspective because I appreciated her view. I may not
agree with it, but I listened to their perspective because it helped me decide on some
things.
[I saw Dr. Baecker after many years at the Greater Greensboro Republican
Women’s Luncheon. I hugged her with joy, for without her I would not have graduated.]
HT: What about Katherine Taylor, do you have any recollection of her?
AF: Katherine Taylor, she was, I guess the word to describe her was enigmatic. She was
moody. She was what we used to peg a “chicken shit liberal.” You never knew which
way she was going to come down. She tried to make you think that she was all for this.
But she didn’t always do things [to back it up]. She reminded me a lot of Katherine
Hepburn in the sense that she always wore pants.
30
Then she came up with this stupid garden. It’s a rock garden. She paid all that
money for [it when we needed other things]. That’s when the students really turned
against her. They liked her before, but she had her select folks. [Miss Taylor] got them
good jobs over there at the Elliott Center, and they had good money. But there weren’t
any black students included in this [that I recall]. So people would pick and choose to
help people. She never did anything per se against anybody [black]. But she never did
anything [that I remember] for us [either]. And she—you know maybe somebody had a
good experience, but I didn’t. She was irrelevant to me. But I knew that she had a lot to
say.
Now when we were trying to get the Neo-Black Society office space, that’s when
she and I knocked heads a couple of times. But logic always prevails. And I’d say, “Well,
you did this for X, Y, Z. If they can have space, why can’t we?” And, again, Ferguson
taught me. Document and know what you’re talking about. And she could not argue with
the logic and the information. Because I knew who got what, where, when. And so we
got what we needed in terms of space.
I think she liked Betty Cheek. Betty Cheek may be able to give you a better report
than I did. You will find that with [many] white folks in general they like certain ones of
us, but they don’t like all of us. So, they—well, I know the one thing that always gets me
is when you’re talking with people, they’ll say, “Some of my best friends are black.” I’m
going, “Hell, I never say some of my best friends are white.” I mean why is it that people
have to clarify when it comes to us? That tells me you ain’t got no good friends [of
color]. But that was sort of how I felt with Miss Taylor.
I thought Miss Taylor did a good job in Elliott Hall. But she did stuff that my
generation also was losing interest in. You know, [I’ve] got a picture in one of the books
of my brother and me at a dance at Elliott Hall. Well, kids about that time weren’t
interested in formal dances. And yet she insisted that we continue to do that. When we
had the three—when we had the Impressions and the rest of it—the place was jam
packed. Couldn’t get a seat. And that’s what kids were interested in. So the things of our
generation, we did not have as many of those cultural things.
Same thing with art. I used to like Weatherspoon [Art] Gallery, but I didn’t find
art that was interesting. I acquired in my training a Salvador Dali picture. And [I’ll] never
forget I offered it to Dr. Gilbert Carpenter, and he didn’t want it because [in my opinion]
he didn’t believe that somebody black could own a Salvador Dali. And I still have the
picture. And I brought it when—
HT: It must be worth a fortune.
AF: It’s worth a little money. [I’ve] got about $100,000 worth of art in my house.
HT: How did you acquire a Salvador Dali?
AF: One of my—one of the doctors who taught me in residency had a collection of
impressionists’ lithographs and paintings. He had this Salvador Dali that’s called Adam
and Eve. It’s from a collection of six, I think it was of great lovers that Dali did. Anthony
and Cleopatra, Adam and Eve, and a couple of other people. He wanted to get rid of his
31
collection. So he sold me the lithograph for $250 as his interest turned to cloisonné,
pottery, and stuff like that. And he sold me that one.
Since then I have quite—I have an eclectic taste in art. And so I have some
French impressionists and others that I acquired. You know, again, I got all this stuff.
And they didn’t want it. And so—again that has to do with why we don’t participate as
much in UNCG. When we wanted to do stuff, UNCG wasn’t interested. And Dr.
[Chancellor Patricia] Sullivan said, “Well, I’ll take it.” I said, “No, you can’t have it.
When [I] wanted to give it to the school, it didn’t want it. So, I’m going to give it to
North Carolina Central since y’all wouldn’t take it when I offered it to you.”
HT: That’s Dr. Patricia Sullivan, I guess?
AF: Yeah, Pat Sullivan.
HT: How about Barbara Parrish, who was the alumni secretary?
AF: She was a pain in the ass. Barbara Parrish was interested in—there’s a movie I’m trying
to think that Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made. And in it Katherine Hepburn
plays the librarian who knows where everything is and doesn’t want to automate. And
that’s what I think about when I think about Barbara Parrish. [Miss Parrish] liked to keep
the alumni thing close [to her chest] and small so she could control every aspect of it. But
when the numbers got above 5,000 [alumni], it became difficult to do.
I was on the Alumni Association Board three times. Every time they got in
trouble, they’d call me to be on it because they wanted to fire somebody or get rid of
somebody [or change something]. The first time I was on the board I can’t remember
[what the gig was]. [Another] time they were trying to get rid of Chancellor [William]
Moran. And so they asked me to be on the board. Maybe that was the third time. But I’ve
done three shifts. I suggested to them that the way they were approaching it would neither
bring black alumni in nor would it reach younger alumni. They had to do some things
differently. And it wouldn’t be to the advantage of the school in capturing some of the
older alumni.
I don’t think I’ve missed but one reunion of my class, and that was when one of
my sons graduated. What I saw is that it’s big stuff for these people to come back for
alumni reunions. And I was always amazed at the fifty year [class] reunions [there]
would have more than [other classes]. I guess [they’re] so glad to be alive at fifty years.
But they were in good shape. And if you look at some of the younger class of five and ten
years out, and you see people who [have had] strokes, were on canes, and you’d go,
“Heck, what was it that those people back in the thirties and forties were made out of that
my generation is missing?”
[For Miss Parrish] the big thing was the Alumni House. She had the Virginia Dare
Room and all that stuff. And I think when the [the editor for the Alumni News from my
class—tall, skinny and]. Brenda Cooper came on [board, some forward progress was
begun].
HT: Yes.
32
AF: [Mrs. Cooper] sort of opened it up a little bit better. [She’s probably one of the few who
could tolerate Miss Parrish’s peculiarities.] Miss Parrish had her favorites. And she
played favorites [without shame]. She and I got along because I can get along with the
devil if he walked in here. But I just don’t think—before I got on the Alumni Board and
stuff—I don’t think they were receptive to a lot of stuff. And I’d just go out [and say
what I felt. I also gave money]. I had more fun going out. And I [probably] pissed off
more alumni than Carter’s got liver pills.
The alumnae that I ended up liking a whole lot was the lady down on the coast, [a
Mrs. Silas Vaughn], and Sam Ervin’s daughter-in-law, Betty—Betty Ervin. [We] got to
be friends as a result of that. I suggested, and they now do it, the One-in-a-Million Club,
the Lifetime Membership, and there was something else I suggested that they do. It’s a
little brochure, recruitment brochure. And those are things that I [did] on the Alumni
Board. Ask Brenda Cooper. she knows more about what I [did then I do]—I was always
coming in there with ideas. And I was always coming in there with things [that shocked]
them.
I remember one of—when AIDS [awareness] first came out, I brought some
condoms in there that I had seen down at student health. I thought it was a great idea to
pass out condoms. Well, you would have thought I had brought a nuclear bomb in there.
Those ladies just about had a cow. And I was just enjoying every [second of it]. I mean,
you know, I just thought [their hypocrisy] was funny.
HT: Were you on the board by any chance when there was a big controversy, I think it was
probably the nineties, between Bill Moran, who was the chancellor at the time—
AF: Yes.
HT: —and the Alumni Board—
AF: Yes, about the—
HT: —about the monies and that sort of thing?
AF: About using the [Alumni] House, and I told [Moran], I said, “You keep screwing with
these ladies, and you ain’t going to be here long.” I told Chancellor Moran, “One thing
you don’t realize [is that] these women are married to the state legislators. And they will
get you one way or the other.” And sure enough [he was toast soon afterward].
Then when they brought Pat Sullivan in here, I sat down and I told her, “There are
several ways you can go. You can piss people off [without trying, so] there are some
things you don’t need to share, and you need to keep to yourself.” I watched her be
successful [though the deal with the Chancellor’s House ticked off a lot of folks]. [On
balance,] I liked to think part of the reason she was successful is because of some of the
stuff I told her. Now she was headstrong. She was going to do it her way too. And so she
ticked off a few folks too.
Any time you’re trying to do something, you’re going to offend somebody. On
balance you have to look at what people do on a [tally sheet].
33
Moran was a hard nut to crack because you couldn’t tell him anything. He knew it
all. And one of the things that I tell folks, “Southerners are different than Northerners and
Midwesterners.” It’s a whole difference in approach. That was [also] one of the things I
saw in Wisconsin. And the East to Northeast is something else.
You know, they used to talk about, “Well, how can you stand those racist people
in the South?” They were more racist than anything I ever got down here in the South.
It’s just that here folks didn’t cover it up. There they tried to cover it up and hide it. Here
if they don’t like you, they don’t like you, and you know it straight up front. In the North,
hell, they will cover it up and make you think that you’re liked, and then you don’t get a
chance for promotions and opportunity. So, I always liked the South, because it’s much
more direct, and you know where you stand. You don’t know where you stand in the
Northeast.
I didn’t like my time in Rochester, New York, and the Northeast. Wisconsin, I
didn’t care for when I was there, but as I look back on it, it was a wonderful experience.
And part of it is, [as] I tell people all the time (and I tell young people that’s what I was
trying to tell that guy in the cafeteria.) You have to go to the best educational experience
you can afford. And I think that too many kids don’t want to leave home, so they go to
community college, or they stay right at home or they don’t want to expand their world.
As a result, we don’t have the talent pool that can talk broadly as statesmen and
diplomats because they ain’t [sic] been nowhere. They’ve [only] been around the block
where they live. They don’t understand the world doesn’t work like that everywhere.
For me, the broader the experience, the better I was. UNCG prepared me well for
all the other racism I’ve had to deal with. But it also prepared me well for academic
insights in terms of other things. When I went to Wisconsin, I tell people all the time, we
had at least twelve, and I think [maybe] there were seventeen Nobel Prize winners [or
other high-award winners] on campus. You’re not going to get that in every school that
you go to.
One of my favorite professors was Howard Temin, who came up with the
research that defined RNA, DNA, and RNA polymerase. I have some letters at home that
he and I wrote. Because I had a theory about something, I wrote him. I said, “Dr. Temin,
I want to ask you about this.” He said, “You’re exactly right. Many people don’t think
like that.” And it was at UNCG, I like to think, that some of that insight came from Dr.
Reardon and Dr. Morrison, who was my advisor, about asking questions that got to the
essence of why things worked the way they do and not just to get an answer for a test. So
that held me in good stead.
HT: I want to ask you a couple of things about the 1960s, which were such a turbulent time, of
course. What do you recall about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.?
AF: I remember a lot about it, but for me the most tragic assassination was the assassination
of Malcolm X. As I said, I liked Malcolm. He taught more stuff [of use for blacks so] I
liked him. I think Martin Luther King has been given more than his [fair] share of
recognition. Had it not been for Malcolm X, King would not have been as good and great
as he is [perceived]. They were perfect foils in a match [for the souls of black folks]. I
remember the Black Panthers and all that [happened] in that era. And it was the militants
34
versus the pacifists. It was that tension that allowed things to happen. It was almost as if
it was good cop and bad cop.
Martin Luther King was the good cop to a certain degree, and Malcolm X and the
Panthers were the bad cops. You needed both of them to bring you to where [we] are
[today]. And there were people who were important to the movement who didn’t get the
recognition that they deserved because the media concentrated on those two. One of the
most interesting [aspects], just like y’all have all this stuff about the Greensboro Sit-ins,
that was not the first sit in. [It was at the Royal Ice Cream Co. in the 1950s on Roxboro
Street, Durham, North Carolina. At the corner of David Street and Roxboro the state has
placed a marker noting such.] And yet people are made to believe that [the Greensboro
Sit-ins] were the first one. And it wasn’t. There [were] others.
HT: That was somewhere in the Midwest, wasn’t it?
AF: I can’t [say. It would] take my [oldest] brother to tell you who it was, and its historical
perspective. So people are blowing this stuff up when there were other people who were
doing it [all over], and their contributions are in the background. [King was] in the
foreground.
Martin Luther King was a guy I never respected. And I did not respect him
because there used to be a thing called [Black] Classic Comic Books. The Classic Comic
Books told the story of people like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Martin Luther King, Frederick
Douglas [and others] in comic book form. And I still have [them]. But I remember the
one I read on the Rosa Parks story. In the Rosa Parks story, it was fascinating. Rosa Parks
was not appreciated for what she did. They talk about she was the first woman to get on a
bus. But they [didn’t tell how it came about. The committee] went to Martin Luther King
and said, “We would like you to lead the bus boycott.” And he said, “No.” And so no
man would step forward to lead that boycott, so she did. [Rosa Parks] was the NAACP
secretary. [King also had affairs during the Civil Rights Movement. As a preacher, I had
trouble with his personal behavior. When they open his FBI files in twenty or more years,
we may be embarrassed by his peculiarities, which wouldn’t have made him deserving of
some of the honors, which may have been given prematurely.]
HT: Oh, I did not know that.
AF: Yeah, most people didn’t. And I never forget [these things]. I’m going to try to find that
comic book. I’ll give you that comic book too. And I sat there, and I’m going, “Why is it
that a woman always has to lead?” [And her due credit is lost.] And, so, I lost respect for
him on that.
When I was a kid, Martin Luther King came to my daddy’s church to preach. And
when I was a kid I remember Malcolm X going through my driveway. In the movie Spike
Lee has on Malcolm X, there’s a scene where he’s running from the FBI, scared they are
going to assassinate him. Well I remember that time because Floyd McKissick and
Malcolm X were trying to get from one building on Linwood Avenue over to the Majid,
which was on Roxboro Street. They cut through our driveway, because everybody knew
the parsonage was a safe haven. The police were not going to bother you if you came
through our yard. My daddy had a fairly decent reputation, and people weren’t just [going
35
to violate the parsonage without overwhelming data. The community outrage would be
great, so he wasn’t interfered with.] I remember [thinking], “Who is this red-headed guy
going through the yard?” And, so, they said, “That’s Malcolm X and Floyd McKissick.”
HT: That was the 1950s [or 1960s]?
AF: I don’t remember when it was, but I remember seeing a scene in Spike Lee’s movie, and I
thought, “Oh, yeah, I remember when that happen.” And, as I told you, my guy was
Whitney Young. I thought Whitney was right on the money when he said, “It doesn’t do
you any good to be able to go to restaurants, if you don’t have the money.” And what we
need to be talking about is jobs and economics, which is right where we are today, talking
about the same thing.
Then, I resented the fact that people are so—[doing everything for the memory of
King, while forgetting the sacrifice of so many others.] I think that for me if I was going
to have named a holiday, I would have preferred a holiday be named after Frederick
Douglas. I thought that he was a much greater man in terms of his impact [in helping]
abolish slavery than King was in the civil rights things. I’m not a pacifist. So, that whole
thing of pacifism always bothered me.
I tell people all the time when they ask me to come to civil rights thing. I say,
“You know I never marched in any civil rights protests, because my daddy knew that the
first man to spit on me, I was going to kick his ass. And so he wouldn’t let me go out
there because I’ve got a violent streak in me that is not to be believed. And so people will
laugh, but if you knew my daddy, you knew [he was] exactly right. He’d tell me, “Don’t
go out there, because you’re going to get ticked off, and you’re going to go at
somebody.” There is just some stuff I [won’t] tolerate.
I do remember that probably the person who has the most emotional attachment to
that [period] would be Marie Darr. She got all caught up in it when we were in school. I
just didn’t. Kathy Jordan [Pierce] is another person. She lives in Durham. Her name is
Katherine Jordan Pierce, P-I-E-R-C-E. She lives in Durham now.
[recorder turned off and back on]
AF: Kathy Jordan Pierce, she was one of the original Neo-Black Society [members]. And if
you go in my yearbook, they are all featured in there in the year book of 1967 or ’68. The
officers are all in there.
HT: Let me ask you, where there any males in the Neo-Black Society?
AF: Yes, we had a guy named Bobby Roberts. He was one of the first black males on the
Spartan Basketball team. He was a member. Larry—what was—Larry McAdoo was here
[and probably one of the first black male graduates]. McAdoo didn’t bother nobody. He
didn’t hang with us when he was here, and he is very famous. He’s somebody you should
interview also.
36
HT: Is that Larry McAdoo?
AF: Larry McAdoo.
HT: Betty [Carter] mentioned that you had mentioned him.
AF: Larry was—he was probably one of the early—he could have been the first black male.
And he is a banker.
HT: He was the first black male undergraduate?
AF: Right, and he was a bank president in New York or somewhere. I haven’t seen Larry
since college. Good looking man. I tried to talk to him. He [didn’t pay] me no mind. But
he’s a good looking dude. But there just weren’t that many of them here. [Charles
Edinger was in the Neo-Black Society.]
HT: I think you said earlier there were only about fifty-some odd black students on campus
about that time?
AF: Well, in my class there were fifty-two.
HT: Oh, just your class?
AF: In my class there were fifty-two. But only seventeen of them got out of here, and I can’t
tell you at what juncture they dropped out. So we didn’t see that many early on. If you
saw a black man in the cafeteria, he was going to be bum rushed by all the women. It was
a man’s paradise, if he was straight. If he wasn’t straight, still his paradise [was] here.
HT: Well, you mentioned a little bit earlier about Richard Nixon. Give me some more
thoughts about him.
AF: Well, Richard Nixon in history will go down to be quite an interesting guy. It was
Richard Nixon—
HT: In spite of Watergate?
AF: Yes, in spite of Watergate. If you take Watergate out and look at his accomplishments on
balance, Richard Nixon opened the gates to China. He was the first president to put an
Environmental Protection Agency in under [William] Ruckelshaus. And, you know,
when Republicans are given a bad press about not being green, this was a man [who in
essence] said, “Hey, we need to conserve the environment.” He also was the guy who put
the Title IX Program in there to allow women to have equal access to sports with men.
People have criticized this whole concept of affirmative action. But it was Arthur
Fletcher, who was black [and the] assistant secretary of labor under Nixon, who brought
forth the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which is really what the Affirmative Act
was. If you read that act, it was not about quotas or anything [like that]. What it says is
37
when companies and people have shown a past history of discrimination and you have
two people who are equal in stature, if that group has been discriminated against, then
they get first choice for the position. And that is not preference or whatever. [Nixon also
signed Pell Grants into being. Despite his German Jew Kissinger’s objections to helping
Israel, Nixon, who was perceived as being anti-Semitic from the tapes, this president
gave Golda Meier what was needed to save the Jewish State. For these acts, he made
amends for whatever demons and paranoia hatched.] It just says right is right, and wrong
is wrong. So, I thought that Nixon was very forward thinking in that.
Now, when Nixon was with [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower, it was
Eisenhower who appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and Earl Warren was the
governor of California. And it was the Supreme Court of ’54 who struck down Brown v.
Topeka, Kansas. So, when people give my party a lot of hell, I’m going, again, they don’t
know history. To look a— in North Carolina there was a thing called Wilmington Riots,
[which were] riots in response to the fact that all these blacks got elected on the
Republican ticket down in Wilmington, and the whites down there said, “No, this won’t
stand.” And so they rioted to remove blacks.
The Dixiecrats and the Democrats, who were racists, crossed over into the party
and used the Republican Party for cow fodder, and it just gripes me. Poll taxes and Jim
Crow laws came under the Democratic Party. The Republicans struck down these things.
And yet, for some reason we have allowed the Republicans to be labeled as racists.
Hell, we’ve got racists in the Republican Party, but they’ve got plenty of them in
the Democrats too. So that I guess it goes back to Ferguson and a lot of other people.
You’ve got to understand history before you jump—if you understand history, you don’t
leap and make the same assumptions that you do in not—
[President Barack] Obama is blaming [President George W.] Bush for the
[present] depression. But if you go back, [I’m not] sure that we ever got out of the
depression with Roosevelt. We have still been trying to work ourselves out of some of the
economic devastation of the ’30s. And what we are seeing now is the same thing.
This time we are faced with the loss of a manufacturing base. And that’s going to
be far more devastating than anything that occurred in the ’30s.
I think that that is something that we really need to look carefully at as we plot
where we go from here. One of my big concerns as a nation is we’re putting a lot of
emphasis on education. And I’m going—I don’t disagree with the emphasis on education.
[But] we’re educating people for jobs, which don’t exist. You [don’t] know, and none of
us knows, what the jobs are of the future. And, again, it goes back to UNCG.
One of the values of UNCG is when you came out of here, you had a solid, good
liberal arts education. You could take it anywhere and use it as a jumping off point. I was
at Amoco [American Oil Company] I used to sit and read these manuals. It was evident
that whoever wrote this stuff had never had an English course. The grammar was terrible.
There was no subject-verb agreement. And you’d sit there and go, “Dag gone, where did
they go to school?”
At UNCG, though, I hated the foreign language requirement and a couple of other
things, I realized as I got older it was that quality of a rounded education that allows you
to adapt to any change that you see out here. And when you don’t have those
fundamental groundings, you miss it.
38
When I talk to kids—I tutor four days a week from nine o’clock to two o’clock—
people who dropped out of school, we deal with reading, et cetera. The biggest problem
for all [of] these kids is reading and English. [If] you can’t do math because the math on
the GED test is word problems, if you can’t read, you don’t understand how to approach
the word problems.
I tell the kid, put the book down. Forget the book. Let’s talk. I want to know what
you know. And I try to get them to draw analogies from what they know and use that in
solving problems. I had a boy read a passage. He was stumbling over [everything]. I said,
“What does the word mean?” He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Write it down.” So every
word you come across you don’t know, write it down.” Well, at the end of the page we
had forty to fifty words from one paragraph that he didn’t understand. We looked up the
words.
Say, for example, you had a word like error. I said, “Okay, what does that mean?”
He [said], “Well, it means to make an error.” I said, “You cannot use a word to define a
word.” And sure enough I get the new dictionaries [where] they’re [now] using words to
help define the word that they’re trying to look up. We learned in [grade school,] high
school, and college that you can’t use the same word. And I’m going, “Ugh, this
education that we’re sending these kids out to get, they still are not prepared.”
I listened to Obama speak. And sometimes—now George Bush was terrible, I
swear he had dyslexia and nobody picked it up. But Obama for a man that’s supposed to
be educated, lapses into Ebonics occasionally. And I’m going, “I don’t want that in my
president—I’d like my president to be a little bit above the fray.” Though, [people] like
Michelle Obama, I don’t like [the stuff] she wears. I [would] like the president’s wife to
be a little bit more elegant like the women at UNCG. And that’s one of the things that
[I’d love]. The women here could be first lady anywhere prior to 1950, because they
knew how to dress—what was appropriate, and how to act.
[This definition of you as a person]—that was one of the things I really liked
about this school. There is no place where people go [to] get this [today]. And we don’t
require participation in things like teas. I mean if she had been to a tea, [Michelle Obama
would] know damn well you don’t put your hand on the Queen. But you would have
picked that up here. I’m going, “Where in the hell did these people go to school?”
There are some things you should know that we got out of here that no longer are
taught. And there’s no place for people to learn it. So when they get into [unfamiliar
places, they can’t cope]. I was telling your librarian—when I was in Russia I went to a
dance. And it was good. One of the classes I took [here] was dance. And they like to
polka. Well, polka is not in the black experience unless your name is “Steve Urkel.” I had
to do a polka with this guy [who was head of the Naydeem Gazprom, the largest oil
company in Russia]. And I knew how to do [the polka], because that was one of the
things I learned in elementary school and at UNCG in the dance class. So these kind [of
things], you know, as I said, I hated it, but when I got out, and the more distance I get
from this school, the more I learned [the value of] the things you learn in a good liberal
arts education are things that you can take anywhere and translate them into meaningful
[experiences]. And I think that’s some of the stuff that kids [can] learn.
I [went] somewhere to a Young Republican Club [at Wake Forest University],
and I was at a debate the other day that they were sponsoring. Finally, I just said, “Time.”
Because this man was up there for fifteen minutes. And I told the guy who was leading.
39
“Son, you can’t let people take over. You have to put time limits on your speakers.” And
that’s something we did here. I mean we’d have forums, debates, et cetera, and you learn
how to conduct business. They don’t get that everywhere. And that was one of the values
of UNCG also. Sorry, [I] digressed.
HT: That’s all right. Well, back to your life after you left UNCG. I know you went to medical
school in Wisconsin, and you must have gone to New York for your residency?
AF: I did my residency at The University of Rochester, Highland Hospital in Family
Medicine. And it was probably one of the first family medicine programs in the country.
HT: So, you went from one cold climate to another?
AF: Yes, it wasn’t intentional.
HT: Was that on purpose? [said simultaneous with above]
AF: No, I went to—you remember I told you that people need to go to the best education they
could afford.
HT: Yes.
AF: At that time, the University of Rochester Family Medicine Program was [the] number
one program in the country. And when I went to [the University of] Wisconsin [at
Madison],Wisconsin was one of the top ten medical schools in the country.
So my thing is if I’m going to be prepared, I need [the] preparation with the best
people there are out there. And I’m very blessed. I have had the chance to do that. And
then when I came back, I worked for the Public Health Service for two years. And then I
went to Johns Hopkins [University] And in public health the top three schools are
Hopkins, Harvard [University], and Stanford [University]. Columbia [University] is good
[also]. And I got accepted into Harvard. My son says, “You ought to tell people you
turned Harvard down.” I turned Harvard down.
HT: Why?
AF: What?
HT: Why did you turn Harvard down?
AF: For two reasons. One, my mother was dying and to be in Boston [with her] in North
Carolina was a long way away. The second reason, the Harvard program was a bit over a
year. It was heavily laden with biostatistics and statistics. [Those were] not my forte.
Hopkins you could get a degree in nine months. And so I went to Hopkins.
I almost dropped out of Hopkins because my mother got [sicker] in December [of
1980, which was Christmas] break. So I was not going back. As a matter of fact, I was
40
going back to school to tell them I wouldn’t be back for the second semester. And she
died in that interim.
That’s why I went to Hopkins. One of the things I learned about good programs
and good schools—[they let me teach coursework based on my experiences.] I
volunteered to be on the faculty here, but they wouldn’t accept me. And I’ve got better
credentials than anybody on the faculty here. And—
HT: In the nursing school?
AF: No, no, the School of Public Health.
HT: Oh, public health.
AF: I mean, and it goes back to this whole thing that what they’re looking at, and what the
reality is for people’s lives are two different things. People want to make public health, et
cetera, an academic exercise. But it’s more than an academic exercise.
I will put my credentials against anybody’s. When I was in Hopkins I ended up
teaching [in] three courses, because I have more practical experience than the people who
had the academic training. And so I talked about rural health development and all that,
because I had helped put together a health center down in Greenevers, North Carolina. I
could talk about environmental concerns, because I was on [their] economic development
panel. We put a water system in and a sewer system [was proposed, but I couldn’t
convince them to spend the extra money]. And so one of the things I’m proudest of in my
life is that most of my stuff has been oriented to helping make people’s lives better. And
forget all the rigmarole of academics. I think sometimes we hide behind academia to
avoid doing what we need to do.
There’s a book out called Super Freakanomics. And the Freakanomics book was
interesting. But I heard a guy on Tavis Smiley Show last night talking about they don’t
make policy, they just look at data. And he was talking about patriotic prostitutes. His
rationale was quite interesting. The data does not say the same thing that people said.
Like he was talking about abortion. Of course, you know, my party is opposed to
abortion. I won’t commit one way or the other. I just tell people that we shouldn’t be
paying for [elective] abortions as a government. If people want them, they’re legal, let
them pay for it. Why should I have to use my tax dollars to pay for somebody else’s
choices?
But what he said, and I never looked at it that way, is not about destroying babies.
[His study found] people were better off because they terminated unwanted children. And
he said that people can get over [not having] children. And children can get over genetic
disparities and handicaps. But children don’t ever get over being unwanted. And I
thought, “Wow, that’s an issue that very few people have considered.”
Being the mother of two adopted children, he’s right. I mean, you know, as good
as I am, and I was a good mother, and still am, my son, my youngest son, just met his
natural mother on his birthday this year. And he said, “Mom, Mom, I met my real
mother.” [So] I was going, “And what does that make me?” And he said, “No, you know
what I meant.” I said, yeah, I understand what he said.
41
HT: Birth mother.
AF: Yes. And as he was talking [and visiting, he saw a side of his possible life]. She has tried
to get more and more in his life. But he calls me and he says, “Thank you for adopting
me.” Because it’s not what he thought [on the other side]. For a long time he has lived
with the pain of [the thought of] why did they reject me, or why did they give me away?
People don’t talk about that.
I mean this thing with these kids in Haiti bothers me. These people are taking
people’s children away, and the children are not being given up. There is some question
about paperwork. Well, I sat on a panel in [Illinois] about that. And what you find out is
this stuff ain’t [sic] what people think it is. These kids have some long-term issues
involved in [being given up for adoption]. We use data in ways to get us [away] from [the
reality of dealing] with the issue.
Public health is the same way. I’m a big believer that we need to put the money
into the public health departments and change the whole paradigm of healthcare in this
country. Last night somebody on television said that—there was a guy talking about
Super Freakonomics. He said, “The way the insurance system works, if you have
insurance you can get more healthcare [than] you need. But if you don’t have any
insurance, you can’t get [anything].” I thought about that, and he’s right. You get
everything you want and then some. So, we suffer from excess rather than just neglect.
And how do you balance that out?
The Democrats want everybody to have access, but they don’t want to pay for it.
And then you’ve got these people over here that [have] too much access, and they’re
getting stuff they don’t need. You know, and we don’t—they’re not going to have a
conversation about that. That would be the biggest bunch of mess you’ve ever seen.
Because they’re not—they’re making a decision, and there are no doctors at the table.
There are no nurses at the table. And they all have health insurance beyond anything you
would ever believe. I’m sorry, digression again.
HT: Well, how did you end up in Salisbury?
AF: I came to Salisbury because I have two boys, and we lived in Chicago [where] my oldest
son [became] interested in gangs. I’m sure he [probably] belonged to one. I think he was
interested in the Blackstone Rangers and the Gangster Disciples. He has a Star of David
tattooed on his left deltoid. So I think that’s a Gangster Disciples. I thought if he’s going
to have any chance, I’ve got to get him out of Chicago.
HT: When was this, the seventies?
AF: We came—no, no. We came here in 1996. At that time Amoco was also undergoing
transitions where they were preparing themselves to be acquired by BP [British
Petroleum]. I sensed that. So, I took a buyout in 1995.
I wanted [my children] to get to know my family. And I was—at that time [in
Chicago] my blood pressure was going up. I was having headaches. I was stressed to the
max. And there was an ad for—and [mind you] I liked what I did. I was an occupational
health doctor. I loved that job. And there was an ad for an opening at the VA [Veterans
42
Administration] in Salisbury. So, I told my brother, “Pookey, you know, if they [offer me
the job], I’m coming [home and moving to Salisbury],” because when I came home, I
could feel my blood pressure lowering. So we came here. I remember [in] moving here I
had hurt myself [before I came]. My thigh muscles detached from my knee cap. And my
nephew came from [Missouri to] drive me down. My son was in the car. He says, “You
know the air smells different.” He was talking about the pine trees. We ended up in this
house, a huge house, reminds me of the [parsonage] that I grew up in with eleven rooms.
He was riding his bike one day [my eldest] left it in the yard. He said, “Mom, I’ve got to
go out there and get my bike.” [Realizing had we been] in Chicago the bike would have
been gone. In Salisbury the bike was still there. Today in Salisbury the bike would be
gone. But when we moved here, [the city] was still reasonably small and reasonably safe.
I enjoyed the job at the VA. They wanted to change the job, and I had a chance to
go out on disability. So, I took it. And I have spent ten years in retirement. Now, I’m
ready to go back to work. I’m bored. And I need something to do, [besides] Obama is
taxing the hell out of whatever I had coming in. So, I’ve got to get some money coming
in. But that was part of why