Title	Oral history interview with Yvonne Cheek, 2012 [full audio recording]
Date	2012-09-24
Creator	Cheek, Yvonne
Contributors	Trojanowski, Hermann J.
Subject headings	University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Place	Greensboro (N.C.)
Description	Yvonne Cheek (1945 - ) graduated in 1967 from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) with a degree in music education. She also holds a Master's from UNCG and a PhD from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Cheek talks about growing up in Kittrel, North Carolina; starting piano lessons at age six; teaching piano at age thirteen; and playing the piano and organ for local churches when she was in the fifth grade. She recalls being very involved with her local 4-H Club; becoming the first black 4-H member to attend the 4-H Camp in Washington, DC; being offered a college scholarship by 4-H if she would not attend the segregated 4-H Congress in Chicago, Illinois. Cheek discusses her shock when she transitioned from her all-black high school, Henderson Institute, to the all-white Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now UNCG) in the fall of 1963. She also talks about the pros and cons of having all ten black freshmen students assigned to Coit Residence Hall, being the only black student in all of her classes, and having three campus jobs to augment her scholarship. Cheek remembers music professors Richard Cox and Barbara Bair; the lack of social activities for black students at the school; being the first black student teacher at the university's Curry School; being the first black Residence Hall Assistant (RA) while she attended graduate school at UNCG; and becoming an advisor for the Neo-Black Society, which was organized by her sister Betty Emarita Cheek (Class of 1968). She recalls attending the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary, to study the Zoltan Kodaly method of teaching music to children; teaching the Kodaly method in Greensboro public schools after returning from her year in Hungary; being the first black faculty member at the UNCG School of Music; getting her PhD at the University of Michigan; and becoming a faculty member at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Cheek concludes the interview by discussing her reasons for changing her career field from music education to the corporate area and founding her own consulting firm in 1993. This item is a time-coded audio transcript. A full-text, printable transcript of this interview is available at http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/OralHisCo/id/7163
Related material	Print/text transcript: http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ui/id/59644
Type	Sound
Original format	Interviews
Original publisher	Greensboro, N.C. : The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. University Libraries
Contributing institution	Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries
Source collection	OH002 UNCG Institutional Memory Collection
Rights statement	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/
Additional rights information	NO COPYRIGHT - UNITED STATES. This item has been determined to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The user is responsible for determining actual copyright status for any reuse of the material.
Object ID	OH002.041.AUD
Digital publisher	The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University Libraries, PO Box 26170, Greensboro NC 27402-6170, 336.334.5304
OCLC number	905021686

Oral history interview with Yvonne Cheek, 2012 [full audio recording]

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