Oral History Interview with Betty Gabehart

BETSY BRINSON: This is April 26, 1999. This is an unrehearsed interview with Betty Gabehart in the conference room adjacent to her office in Miller Hall at the University of Kentucky. The interviewer is Betsy Brinson. Thank you for meeting with me today, Betty. I want to begin please by having you tell me first off when and where you were born and what happened to get you to be a student at the University of Kentucky during the fifties?

BETTY GABEHART: I was born in Campbellsville Kentucky in Taylor County in 1935, July of 1935 and we moved from there to Jamestown Kentucky when they were building Wolf Creek Dam and lived there for a while. But my father was eager for us to be somewhere that my sister and I could continue our education after high school. So we ended up in Lexington. And it was just kind of a natural thing to go on to the University of Kentucky after I finished at Henry Clay.

BRINSON: And at what point did you move to Lexington?

GABEHART When I was in the eighth grade, 1949. So I graduated from high school in `53 and that fall I started at the University of Kentucky and graduated from UK in 1957.

BRINSON: Okay. So you really moved around some while you were growing up. And as a newcomer to Kentucky you have to tell me what part of the state those earlier places are.

GABEHART: Okay. Campbellsville in Taylor County is south and west of, a little bit west of Lexington, and Jamestown is east from there. So that’s pretty much directly south from here in Russell County.

BRINSON: Okay. Tell me about your family growing up. Are you the only sibling, the only child?

GABEHART: I have one sister who is five years younger than I am.

BRINSON: Okay. And your parents?

GABEHART: Yes, my parents both came from the Taylor County area and most of our family lived around in that general area. Had a few relatives who went off to Illinois and California, but mostly my family was in that area.

BRINSON: Your grandparents were they from Kentucky?

GABEHART: Right. Well, I think my, both sets of ancestors came in from the state from Virginia like in the early 1800’s. Well, some of them went to North Carolina or Tennessee and then into Kentucky. You know that was the pattern as far as I know it.

BRINSON: Okay. In any event a long family history involved with Kentucky.

GABEHART: Right.

BRINSON: I’m interested to know at what point in your life you became aware of race relations.

GABEHART: Well, it’s interesting. During the, I don’t know, sometime I guess in the sixties and so forth, I began to reflect about that and realize that I can remember sometime preschool like around five, maybe when we lived in Campbellsville. I remember trying to sort out this black/white thing and asking my mother were all black people republicans and all white people democrats because we were democrats. And I was, just kind of the one thing that calls to mind, I must have been trying to make sense of this on some level. And at that point I, my contact with African American people had been people working in homes, someone who helped Mother with laundry. When I went to visit some of my relatives they had, what they called their colored help. And I guess that seemed a little strange to me although I couldn’t have voiced it for a long time.

Probably beginning to, increased awareness came, you know, when I moved to Lexington and began to attend the university somewhere in that period.

BRINSON: Of course, actually even in the late forties and early fifties there were efforts within the black community to sort of deal with legal segregation through litigation and what-not. Were you, did you have any awareness of that as a young child?

GABEHART: I don’t think I did probably until Lima Johnson was suing the university to be admitted to the graduate school. I think I was aware, you know, when that was in the newspapers here in Lexington, and I would have been in high school at that point.

BRINSON: Your high school was an all white school?

GABEHART: White, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: Okay. You came to the University of Kentucky and I know, how did you get involved with the YWCA program?

GABEHART: Well, I got involved right away as it turned out. The YWCA sponsored a luncheon group for town girls (and I lived at home) called the Dutch Lunch Club. And had different speakers in each week and somehow they needed a chair of that and as a freshman I became the chair of it that year. And from there continued to be involved with the YWCA in various leadership positions. And I think my own Christian traditions and the YWCA and the focus on justice and what that meant, you know, it kind of seeped in from all the programs that we had. We had religious emphasis week, where we brought in about six different faculty staff, folks who would participate by going around to visit classrooms during that week and would visit residence halls and sororities and fraternities. And there were a lot of activities. So I think that exposed me to some ideas that I wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of. I remember once telling the dean of women I wasn’t sure I would have developed any intellectual curiosity if it hadn’t been for programs like that. And interesting enough, related to that program when I spoke recently with Joyce Laase Peacock who was the director of the YWCA.

BRINSON: Spell her name for me please, Laase.

GABEHART: Yes, it’s Laase, L A A S E and that was her name at that time. And she later married Joe Peacock and their relationship, involvement because he was at Berea is interesting. I’ll tell you more about that if we want to pursue that. But she went to an institute on race relations at Fisk University about 1955-56 right around the time the first black students came here to UK. And they were trying to develop strategies for how work could be done through the Y’s on campuses. And one of the things she did when she came back from that as I understand it was to invite a sociologist, a black woman named something like Benita Vellum. I’m not exactly sure what her name was.

BRINSON: Vellum?

GABEHART: Vellum.

BRINSON: V E L L U M?

GABEHART: See, I don’t know. I just heard the name. And so she came and participated in the religious emphasis week at some point. I don’t specifically have an awareness of meeting her but chances are I did. And interesting enough the dean of women was very supportive, Dean Sara Bennett Holmes. Joyce, the YW positions was paid by the university and so that came under the auspices of the Dean of Women office. So Dean Holme’s support was important to Joyce, I think, at that point. And then around that same time Joyce worked with the southern regional staff which included a black staff member named Doris Wilson. And on one occasion Doris came to visit the campus and Joyce arranged for her to stay in the residence hall which was a big thing at that point and to eat in the dining room. And I remember when Joyce was telling me this, I then recalled that we took Doris Wilson with us to Second Presbyterian Church here in Lexington, I do remember; and I’m sure it was a part of that same visit. And so Doris was one of the first professional black women I ever met. And there were several others from the National YW who visited from time to time and they were really my role models in many ways.

BRINSON: When you took them to Second Presbyterian and off campus how were these black women received?

GABEHART: Cordially. I think, you know, there was a general climate among many people there that would have been quite accepting. I don’t remember any particular--we were very aware of being there, I guess, you know, with her, but it was quite cordial.

BRINSON: I want to ask you about the YWCA during that period. Do you have any recollection of how many students were members just approximately?

GABEHART: At the YWCA at that point, I don’t know. My guess would be a hundred or something in that vicinity. We had offices in the student center and shared a lounge with the student YMCA and did a lot of our programming together. The YM, Joyce’s YM colleague wasn’t always so supportive of the racial activities that we wanted to pursue.

BRINSON: You and I both have YWCA backgrounds to have this conversation and I wonder if you can tell me what the mission of the national board of the YWCA is in terms of race relations.

GABEHART: Oh, yes, I was part of passing the one imperative in 1970 in Houston to eliminate racism wherever it existed by any means necessary.

BRINSON: I didn’t know when that actually came about.

GABEHART: Yes.

BRINSON: During the fifties though was there an emphasis at the national level on racism?

GABEHART: Oh, very much so. Actually the interracial charter was adopted by the national YWCA in 1946. And I think one of the kinds of patterns of activity was exhibited by this institute that I spoke of, that Joyce attended, because it was possible on a regional level to have some integrated activities and do some things that it wasn’t always possible to do on a local campus. And then that put some pressure on and support for activity on local campuses. But there were a lot of YWCA, student YWCA’s, on black college campuses in the south particularly. So when we had regional conferences they were interracial conferences. I, as a student, I didn’t participate in those but I heard a lot about them. And on one occasion Joyce was telling me, when she was taking a group to a conference--I’m not sure that surely was an interracial group, and I don’t know how that came out of UK since I wasn’t a part of the group--but anyway she had made arrangements for them to have lunch at a restaurant in Berea; and when they got there they were kicked out. It happened that there was some men’s civic group that was meeting and they hadn’t left yet and the proprietors, I guess, were uncomfortable about that. So Joyce then called Joe Peacock the person she eventually married who was an, a campus minister at the Community Church in Berea. And they made some arrangement, and so the restaurant ended up serving them after all and didn’t charge them because they were embarrassed by what had happened since they had agreed to it.

BRINSON: And this was during the fifties at your best recollection?

GABEHART: Right. That was probably, that very well may have been right after I graduated. It was right after that period. But I think that, the interracial conference kind of pattern was a common thing in the south and I’ve heard. Let’s see, Lois Trimble, I think I mentioned her to you at one point. She was a board member and spoke about an interracial conference that was held here in Lexington. And the stu… I guess they must have been able to meet on campus but they couldn’t stay here and so--the university wouldn’t allow that--and so the, they stayed in the homes of some of the board members, a number of whom are faculty wives.

BRINSON: Tell me where Joyce Peacock is today.

GABEHART: She’s in Champagne-Urbana Illinois. She and Joe have retired there, and she’s off to Washington for a national conference on race relations in a couple of weeks as a matter of fact. So she’s still very involved.

BRINSON: And she herself is white?

GABEHART: Yes, yes.

BRINSON: And how about Lois Trimble? T R I

GABEHART: Right. I M B L E, she lives here in Lexington in a home that used to be run by the YWCA, the Ardett Prichard Home over on Duke Road. A delightful ninety-six year old, as energetic as you can imagine at that age.

BRINSON: And she was on the board?

GABEHART She was on the board.

BRINSON: Of the local.

GABEHART: Local YWCA, both at different times. She was very involved in the community YWCA and campus.

BRINSON: Ok. Ok. Is there, do you have any recollection of your time here as a student and your involvement in the Y of other members’ reactions to some of the discussion about integration, race relations.

GABEHART: One of my earliest memories is meeting with a group of the girls in the YWCA, I think it was a committee meeting at my house. When we were either anticipating or the so-called Negro students had just arrived. And I remember us talking in language of this will be the first opportunity we’ve had to meet our equals, little classes in there. We didn’t think of peers but we thought of our equals, because as I said most of us had grown up with folks who worked in what we thought of as menial tasks you know, or waiters and people in hotel operators or bell hops or nurses’ aides, orderlies, that kind of a thing. So this was going to be a new experience for us.

BRINSON: So you had a meeting to actually think about that and plan for it.

GABEHART: Yes, I think that was the purpose of it and why we were having this discussion.

BRINSON: And then what happened? Do you remember actually meeting the students?

GABEHART: I don’t have much memory of that. I have a vague memory of a meeting where one black student attended. And that may have been a one-time thing because black students weren’t very involved in student organizations, as I understand from some of the black women who were recently at a conference here talking about that. I looked back through the yearbook and I found pictures of three black students each in different organizations very much the token kind of situation. It was common if anything was happening at that point.

BRINSON: Okay. What was your major?

GABEHART: Well, I started out in home economics and then I changed to a major in the College of Arts and Science under the topical major program where you could put together your own program. And my major was called religious aspects of culture. So that was what I graduated in.

BRINSON: And what does that mean religious aspects of culture?

GABEHART Well, what it really, the title, I think for all the courses that were offered at that point which included things like sociology of religion and philosophy of religion, the Old and New Testament taught in the English department. And incidentally that, those classes in the English department were taught by a church historian from the Episcopal Seminary here in town who came to teach on campus. I got to know her very well and she supervised my topical paper, which was one of the requirements of that degree. And I did that in a church history field so I got exposed to several different areas that way. And at that point my advisor suggested I might look into requirements for seminaries while I was putting this program together. I had no intention of going to seminary so I never bothered to follow that up. But two years later I was off to Yale Divinity School.

BRINSON: With the intention of going to Seminary, Divinity School is Seminary.

GABEHART: Right, I had worked for two years in the YWCA at the University of Illinois before going and I knew I wanted to prepare to work in campus ministry with the YWCA. And many YW and YM staff had backgrounds in seminaries and Yale had a program in religion and higher education which attracted me.

BRINSON: Okay. We’ll talk about that but I don’t want to leave your time here as a student yet. Do you have any recollection of other student organizations or community organizations that were working in the area of race relations during this period?

GABEHART: No I really don’t. I really don’t. The only other very concrete memory I have about the climate on campus was I was in a sorority. And Panhellenic must have asked the sororities to talk about the idea of having a black sorority come on campus. I think that’s what precipitated this discussion. And I remember in the discussion about that the reaction wasn’t as strong in some ways as you might have expected it to be. However one comment I remember being made, what will we do about the dances? Because there was a Panhellenic and IFC dances with all the sororities and fraternities.

BRINSON: There was a, say that again.

GABEHART: The Inter-Fraternity Council and the Panhellenic Organization sponsored dances. So that was a concern then, what would you do if you had both black and white students attending a dance?

BRINSON: Ok. Did that happen that you know of?

GABEHART: No, it was a number of years later before black sororities came on campus. I don’t know. That happened while I was away.

BRINSON: So you went to Yale and what happened there for you?

GABEHART: Well, that was really preparing to work in the YWCA on college campuses, as I say that was an important part of changing my thinking. It broadened my thinking and so forth and especially being exposed to H. Richard Neeber and the Christian Ethics class. I think it really enlarged my view of life and of theology, and probably did more to transform me than anything else.

BRINSON: Well, even beyond the intellectual aspects, I wonder having grown up in Kentucky this was probably your first move outside of Kentucky.

GABEHART: Well, no, I was, when I left here I first went to the University of Illinois to work with the YWCA for two years before I went to Yale. So there were a number of things I suppose also in my experience in Illinois that were important. That was a very diverse campus in the sense that there were lots of international students. I think we had more international students than any other campus in the country at that time or certainly one of the most. There were not a lot of black students there that I recall, some. And during that period the National Student YMCA and YWCA had its assembly there. And one of the things that always happened during that period was resolutions were passed. And I got a copy of the inter-collegiate magazine, it was a YM and YW magazine at that time, that outlines the resolutions that were passed about race and the commitments that we were going to make. And so that was another vehicle that encouraged local associations to go back home and continue to work in this area; and it was changing every time there was a meeting, you know, to sharpen the focus. That was my first exposure to the student movement and civil rights really. The Freedom Singers were one of the groups that were there for that particular assembly. So that’s a vivid memory for me.

BRINSON: Talk about that.

GABEHART: Well, I, one of the things that really stands out in my mind was my reaction to, I think, Bernice Reagan who later became part, or formed the Sweet Honey and the Rock, looking at her and thinking that she was not at all beautiful by my traditional standards but thinking, my word, what a beautiful person she is, you know. It was a real transformation.

BRINSON: Did I tell you we are bringing her here next February?

GABEHART: Yes, I’m excited about that. I’ve heard them when they’ve been, well, the whole group when they’ve been here.

BRINSON: Well, she’s actually coming to speak, to keynote on the conference on civil rights.

GABEHART: Yes, I’m delighted. I look forward to that.

BRINSON: But maybe we’ll get her to sing a little bit, too. Well, good. So you had a chance to see her. Do you remember the size of the crowd that participated?

GABEHART: Oh, that would have been a thousand or so.

BRINSON: Okay. And they would have come from student chapters?

GABEHART: Student YM and YWCAs all over the country. Those meetings occurred every three years. So when I was a student here at UK, although I didn’t attend those meetings, I would hear students who went to meetings like that come back and report. And I think there were human relations and race relations’ workshops and activities like that going on at the national and regional level. So it was all that awareness that was affecting me, too.

BRINSON: So you were in Illinois for two years.

GABEHART: For two years.

BRINSON: And then you went to Yale.

GABEHART: Yeah, I went to Yale.

BRINSON: And you were at the divinity school for how long?

GABEHART: For two years.

BRINSON: For two years.

GABEHART: And so I was there during the period of the sit-ins and actually, well, wait a minute, let’s see, the freedom rides--the sit-ins had already occurred because there were students there who had been involved in the sit-ins as I recall. But during that period I remember a march on the green. I’ve got some photographs of that, and I remember the discussions around the divinity school about that. To me there was no question but what I’d go participate, but for some students it was a hard decision to figure out whether to do something like that or not.

BRINSON: Were there students that you remember there at the time who actually went south to participate?

GABEHART: One of the people I remember, John McGuire who later became active in higher education; he was president of a college, things like that. He was in a very important leadership role in the divinity school. I think he may have been a graduate student at that point but he went with Bill Coffin, the Chaplain at Yale, and some of the other folks from there on the freedom ride, one of the freedom rides.

BRINSON: Did you ever yourself think about going south?

GABEHART: Not in that period. I later went and did voter registration projects. Took college students from Nebraska and was involved in that way.

BRINSON: And where was that? Where was the voter registration project?

GABEHART: The voter registration projects, the first one I took a group of students, we drove all night, cross-country to North Carolina and stayed in, let’s see we were in Greensboro. Bennett College, I can’t think of the full name, and that was a very important experience to realize what it was like to be a part of the black community and to kind of look at the activity there from that perspective.

BRINSON: And Bennett is an all women’s black private college.

GABEHART: Yeah, at least at that point it was.

BRINSON: Is it not now?

GABEHART: I’m not sure, it may be. So that was the first one.

BRINSON: This would have been what period for you?

GABEHART: That would have been, let’s see, I went to Nebraska right after I graduated from Yale in `61. So that would have been, I don’t know, `62, something like that.

BRINSON: Voter registration drives in the Greensboro area?

GABEHART: Right. Right. So we had students from several different campuses who came together there and kind of the typical pattern with these Y events. You had some orientation; and you had connections with local people; and then you went out to help with the project as they designed it. And we knocked on doors and encouraged people to vote.

BRINSON: Okay. You couldn’t actually register them to vote at that point but it was more to encourage them to go down and to vote.

GABEHART: To register.

BRINSON: To register.

GABEHART: And then let’s see I took a group also from Nebraska to Charlottesville Virginia, and we stayed in the Carver Inn there in the black community. And it was the same kind of pattern.

BRINSON: So, you’re out of Kentucky at this point but you are working on important issues. Were you in communication with family or friends here in Kentucky to have a sense of what might have been happening here?

GABEHART: Well, when I would come home for a visit sometimes I would be. I remember visiting a friend’s mother and discovering that she was just very upset about what Martin Luther King was doing. And you know, I found this very strange at that point although in a way I did; in another way I understood. It was kind of functioning on these two levels, I guess. [Sound of tape going off and then back on again.] About related to Berea. Earlier I mentioned Berea and something that happened there: when Wilderness Road was the outdoor drama that they were preparing to start offering that in the community, and Joe Peacock who was the minister at the Community Church there, and a group of people decided they needed to figure out where Negro people could stay if they came to town. So they went around investigating. I think they had a plan where they all went to different places at the same time to see if they could get commitments from people in the community to allow black people to stay there. I’m not sure whether these were all businesses or private homes or what they were doing. Anyway, that was not well received by, as I understand it, the president of the college at that time. But Joe had some relationship there but he said he couldn’t do anything about it. This was a group effort and he couldn’t just stop doing it, you know. So they eventually did get some cooperation in the community. So they published a list, I think is what they did; a list where people could be free to stay.

BRINSON: I see.

GABEHART: I don’t know all the details but that’s the story as I understand it.

BRINSON: So you finished your Masters of Arts in Religion and Higher Ed at Yale in 1961 and then went to University of Nebraska?

GABEHART: Right.

BRINSON: And what was your purpose…?

GABEHART: I was the Director of the Student YWCA there and was there four years, I guess it was.

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

GABEHART: Projects, voters registration projects to occur during spring breaks. So there were several different ones going on in different communities. And I took the Nebraska group to North Carolina and then another group later to Virginia.

BRINSON: Okay. Can you sort of summarize for me some of your experiences out of the state and then how it came to be that you came back to Kentucky?

GABEHART: Well, I spent about twenty-five years working as a professional staff member in the YWCA in various places on the national staff eventually, and back to the University of Illinois as the Executive Director. And during that period the YW had come to make the focus on fighting racism a major, major emphasis. And that was a very stressful time for everybody. For those of us on the national staff after we’d adopted the one imperative to eliminate racism wherever it exists and by any means necessary and trying to figure out what that meant. And so I think, by the end several years of working in that intensive way, I was really ready not to be on the national staff and to be in the local scene. And then I worked back in New Haven with the Community YWCA for a couple of years and then to Illinois as the Executive Director. And I was committed to stay with them until they celebrated their hundredth anniversary. They are the oldest Student YW still in existence. And then I wanted to change in some way what I was doing and so decided to come back to Kentucky. And became employed here in University Extension as Director of Continuing Education for Women.

BRINSON: And this was what year?

GABEHART: This was in 1985. And shortly before I had come back I had heard that there was a black women’s writers conference going on here at UK which it wasn’t, that’s not quite an accurate description, but indeed there were always a number of black writers participating in this conference. And that interested me and I was very pleased then when I learned that the commencement speaker that year just before I came back was going to be Bishop Tutu. His daughter was in graduate school here and was graduating that year. And through the YWCA again, we’ve been very involved in the South African, supporting the efforts for overthrowing apartheid in South Africa. So these were signs that things had really changed since my day here and indeed I found many changes. But in many other ways it seemed like nothing had changed. There were very few black students and practically no black faculty when I came here in `85. Doris Wilson in the sociology department came that year, I think. And it was several years after that before there was really a critical mass of black students.

BRINSON: Okay. I want to go back to the comment you just made about the tensions within the national YWCA when the elimination of racism became the primary mission.

GABEHART: Yes.

BRINSON: Can you talk about that a little bit?

GABEHART: Well, yes, actually even before that imperative was voted on in 1970 I was on the national staff based in Chicago at that time; we used to go in to New York for two weeks every January for a series of staff meetings. All the regional staffs were brought in to meet with the headquarter based staff and there were speakers, and usually there was a theme and a focus. And during one of those occasions right around sometime in the last, it must have been `67, `68 somewhere along in there, the discussion was going to focus on women’s liberation because we had also been very active in the issues around the women’s liberation movement. But some of us who had been through a summer project that the Y sponsored in Chicago the summer Martin Luther King was there had come to feel very strongly that racism was institutionalized and that this was something that the YW was in a position to work on. So we wrote letters, said we think the theme should be changed this year and indeed it was. I mean we were not the only ones, I’m sure but, so a lot of the tensions that persisted was, you know, what’s more important racism or sexism? So we had great battles and discussions among all of us in Houston about that kind of thing because the proposal that had been made at that time as it often was had a whole series of priorities that we were going to work on during the next triennium, the three year period between meetings. But ultimately the convention came out making one, the big priority. So after that it was very hard to figure out, you know, exactly what you needed to be doing to implement this kind of idea. And we were beginning to function in a way where we often in meetings would have different racial/ethnic caucuses. One of my responsibilities out of that meeting after Houston was to be responsible for an institute that we did out in Portland, Oregon on the web of racism in women. There were other institutes on the web of racism in higher education and the web of racism in the court system, so on. But I had the one on women. And we knew we wanted to be able to have the racial/ethnic caucuses spend some time together but this was quite a fiasco in many, many ways because the women’s liberation forces that wanted to participate were very strong and obviously the majority of people attending were white. So that was a very, very difficult time for all of us, I think, to know how to function in that environment. But I think some good things came out of that for the racial/ethnic minorities and I hope some learning experiences for the white women that couldn’t figure out how to talk to each other. That was what we often found when we were together as an all white group. We didn’t know what to do except to feel guilty so it was very hard to be productive.

BRINSON: You mentioned earlier a black woman who was staffed for the YWCA. At what point did more black women begin to move into staff positions?

GABEHART: Oh, there were already quite a few at that time.

BRINSON: And does that go back to the fact that there were segregated YWCA programs in many communities?

GABEHART: I think so.

BRINSON: Most of them were called the Phyllis Wheatley YWCAs.

GABEHART: Yes, there were Phyllis Wheatley Ys and after the charter was adopted in `46 I think a lot of them--I don’t know exactly the time period—then became integrated into the total organizations. And then there were tensions about that during the seventies because some of those groups wanted their independence. They had a greater degree, the black groups had a greater degree of independence, but anyway I’m digressing here. Well, I’m sure a lot of this goes back to Dorothy Hite because she was on the national YWCA staff for a very, very long time. I don’t know was one of the people who was certainly, the major mover in getting this commission or charter adopted in 1946. I don’t, I was trying to recall when I first met Dorothy. I, probably the orientation session that I had before I went for my first job because she was always in training meetings. And she came to student conferences and she was overseeing all of these institutes that I talked about.

BRINSON: So she had a powerful role.

GABEHART: Very, very.

BRINSON: At the Y and probably influenced it.

GABEHART: And nationally and she was the only woman in the civil rights movement called to meet with the president, you know, when the men came.

BRINSON: And as I recall when she left the Y she went to the National Council of Negro Women.

GABEHART: Oh, she was always involved in that, too, as a volunteer. That was her volunteer job, and heading up racial justice at the YWCA was her professional job.

BRINSON: And then she was also president for a long time with one of the black women sororities, Delta Sigma Theta.

GABEHART: Maybe, I don’t know as much about that.

BRINSON: Did the student YWCAs or even the adult YWCA programs on race relations interact with any other community groups or women’s organizations in any way to accomplish the elimination of racism?

GABEHART: They did in a variety of ways at local levels.

BRINSON: Do you remember any particular organizations or examples of how that?

GABEHART: Well, let’s see, during part of that time I was on the national staff so it’s hard for me to remember. And I know that there was a lot of that activity out of the New York office, the coordination of national organizations and so on. But in, I’m trying to think, well, like at the University of Illinois, I mean this was later but you mentioned the black sororities. We had Black Women of Achievement luncheon program and black women’s groups like that in the community because there was no community YWCA. We sort of functioned in that role some of the time. Were very active and that was a source of board members and we had a board when I left there half third world women. That was a commitment that particular YW had made. So by virtue of a lot of the people who were on that board they were connected to various organizations in the community. And Urban League and through United Way, there were a number of ways; so you found people in each of those organizations with similar concerns.

BRINSON: I want to go back to the voters’ registration programs a minute. Were there other specific programs or projects that the student YWCA were involved in during this period that did something toward or about race relations?

GABEHART: Well, let’s see …

BRINSON: Were there letter writing campaigns for example or any legislative lobbying?

GABEHART: Oh, yeah, all those kinds of activities were happening in different places. I don’t, don’t know exactly of a specific project. I spoke with a human relations workshops and then during the sit-ins our national YW president who was a black woman student in Texas was arrested. I remember the national director of the student YWCA going to Texas to bail her out. And then some, during the period of the summer of the voter registration projects I remember participating in one in Cincinnati that was focused on voter education. It really wasn’t on registration at all. Then I spoke of the summer project in Chicago and that was, again, I’m talking about student events. And here students had jobs in the city in a variety of ways and came together for seminars and the project I was working on was called the Urban Field Study Aides. And so we had some intensive seminars with our students there in the beginning of the summer. And then George Pickering who worked for the council of churches in the city trained these students and they got involved with community organizations all around the city. And they, the group, they might stuff letters if that’s what needed to be done. If that group was out protesting they would go out and protest whatever was going on. And through that a lot of information was collected about what the climate was in the city and what was useful and it became part of his dissertation at the University of Chicago. He and a person who is on the faculty at Western wrote this book about civil rights in the summer of sixty, what was that `64 in Chicago, or `67 I guess it was.

BRINSON: And what is his name?

GABEHART: George Pickering. He’s on the faculty at the University of Detroit and it’s, the title is something like, it’s Crossing the Color Line, the Failed Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago. That’s not the exact title but …

BRINSON: I want to go back to when you were a student again in the fifties with the YWCA program. Were there other student YWCAs in Kentucky at that point?

GABEHART: There was one in Berea and I think they probably, I think they had black students at the college at that time because of its early history but the community was not very integrated; and so I remember people going over there for conferences, and people coming from there here but somehow I never went to one. I think I was working or something.

BRINSON: Okay. So Berea and the University of Kentucky were the only two during this period in the state.

GABEHART: They were the only ones I’m aware of.

BRINSON: Ok. And there seemed to have been good interaction between the two chapters.

GABEHART: Right, uh-hmm, I think so. I think some of our students went to the regional and national events every year. We were quite hooked in with the national activities.

BRINSON: Okay. I want to tell you about a theory, if you would, of an historian named Belinda Robnet who published a book a few years ago about the role of African American women in the civil rights movement. And she argues that first off women were not necessarily the out front leaders.

GABEHART: Right.

BRINSON: At least they weren’t recognized that way. They were what she calls the bridge builders. And she argues that they did most of the grassroots community work that went on and that when a national incident came about it was the women by and large and their spontaneity and their feeling for what was going on that sort of gave them the incentive to jump out there and do whatever needed to be done at the moment.

GABEHART: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: And I just wonder if you think about your experiences and your history how would you react to her theory?

GABEHART: Well, I guess, that makes sense to me. I guess so much of what I was doing was in the YWCA context you know, primarily women even if it was joint activity with the YM, it was more working with women where women’s leadership was strong and where the black women’s leadership was very strong. So I don’t think, I don’t think of them as behind the scenes, you know, from my experience.

BRINSON: I think the YWCA must have been fairly unique …

GABEHART: Probably.

BRINSON: …with their mission in all of this. I wonder again back to your student days and your early involvement working with this issue how did your family and your friends respond to you?

GABEHART: Well, most of my friends were, my closest friends during college were people in the YWCA. A number of them were Lexington girls that I hadn’t necessarily known in high school that I had gotten to know here. My family was supportive. I, I think they always kind of supported me when I ventured out ‘cause I didn’t take very radical steps at one time. And so they were pretty accepting.

BRINSON: Was there ever any sort of negative response from anyone or an incident?

GABEHART: Well, I would have arguments sometimes when I would be with some of my family, you know, cousins or relatives like that about kind of what was happening with the civil rights movement in general. And found them often much more conservative than I.

BRINSON: Were there any risks, any sacrifices either for you or for other women that you knew who were active at the time because of their involvement in civil rights?

GABEHART: I don’t, I don’t recall right off. I guess some of the things we were doing were a little frightening sometimes. Not, just kind of the unknown and not quite knowing but feeling very deeply about being committed to doing something and so you just kept at it. Uhmm, it’s, I haven’t really thought enough about that. One of the things that comes back to my mind is a conference I went to at Lake Juno Lunsco with the Methodist Church as a high school student and having some discussions with a girl from Danville, Virginia talking about race and our parents’ attitudes. And so you know, some of us, I guess, were evolving our thinking on this in little steps along the way. I’m sure there were real risks for a lot of people that I can’t quite recall right at the moment.

BRINSON: Can you think of any long range sacrifices that maybe women might have made because of their involvement?

GABEHART: It’s really hard for me to recall. I haven’t thought much in those terms for a while.

BRINSON: I’m thinking in terms of maybe potential job loss for some or opportunities at employment because of their involvement. There are women I’ve interviewed who were very involved and who look back and say, you know, they kind of resent the fact that as women they’re not being recognized for their role publicly now with awards and this recognition. That didn’t matter to them so much at the time.

GABEHART: At the time, yeah.

BRINSON: But now they kind of regret that and it’s not regret, they resent the fact that men who maybe made fewer contributions have gotten more recognition for it.

GABEHART: Well, I just, yeah, I know what you are talking about because I think about when I read things, where people are reflecting back often the voices of women are not very visible and audible in that situation. But I’m not thinking of particular people or particular instances, I’m afraid.

BRINSON: Is there anything else about this topic, this period that you’d like to add?

GABEHART: Well, let’s see, let me just round out one thing related to the YWCA on this campus. In, as I say, I wasn’t, I really didn’t have very much contact with it after I graduated. However people, I would meet sometimes people from this YWCA at UK at national meetings. The last person that I remember meeting was Anna Bowling who is in the Dean of Students Office here now. And I think she may have been the first black YWCA director. Her name then was Ann Nichols I believe, and when she came here, either right before or right after she came the YWCA was going through some changes so that the university could no longer support, financially support a Christian organization. And so whatever existed at that time was transformed into a Human Relations Committee and Center of some sort. And I was reading something in the Kernel the newspaper here that was written in `92 reflecting back on that period and speaks of that time when she came and was working with that program. And Jerry Stevens in the office next to me was one of the first black staff members here that helped set up the Minority Affairs office and begin to provide programs and services for the black students who were here at UK. And I think that Human Relations Center played into that somehow. And then Jerry and I discovered that we had both been at the institute that the YW sponsored on web of racism in higher education in Cleveland. And so he and some of the folks from here came to learn from that experience to bring it back to UK, so that pattern continued.

BRINSON: So the work that the student YWCA was involved in even though eventually the chapter shut down is that?

GABEHART: Well, no, it was still active, it just wasn’t. There was a group active but not under the name of the YWCA.

BRINSON: Right, right, but the early work and the philosophy.

GABEHART: Right.

BRINSON: And mission continued in other ways.

GABEHART: Evolved in a different form. Uh-hmm. [Sound of audio going off and then back on.] And how my consciousness evolved and changed over a period related to some of the things we have mentioned but some differently. I think about the summer after I finished at the university, in my first two years at the University of Illinois. The summer after that I went to Washington, D C to direct the Washington Student Citizenship Seminar which the student YM and YW sponsored and students had jobs in government agencies; lived together in a hotel on Capitol Hill; had seminars together. We had, I directed this more than one summer and I’m not sure which summer it was, but we had one young black woman named Eugertha Birdsong, I remember. And in that same group there was a white woman from Mississippi but as a white woman I was always identified with the white woman and thinking how hard this must be for her to make this adjustment. It really didn’t occur to me to think about this poor, single, young black student how she was surviving in that environment. I learned later--fortunately I think it was somebody from the planning committee that was, as I say there was always a local group connected to the YWCA who supported these projects. There was some black woman on that committee who worked at the Methodist headquarters whatever it was called on Capitol Hill which was right down the street from where we lived. And so she kind of looked after Eugertha.

BRINSON: Did you have any interaction with her that you remember?

GABEHART: With the student, nothing in particular. I just remember that my basic concern was for the white woman and what she was going through because I understood some of that dynamic, and at that point hadn’t a clue what it was really like for the black student.

BRINSON: That’s obviously very painful for you even now to think about.

GABEHART: Uh-hmm, it is, yeah.

BRINSON: Why do you think that is?

GABEHART: I guess I just, I feel bad, probably it’s part of that guilt that I spoke of earlier that you have to work your way through if you are going to work in this area. And then part of the transformation in my consciousness is also related to being on the campus at Bennett that I spoke of and again having the opportunity to really see what life might be like from the black perspective as much as any white person can.

BRINSON: Because in that setting you were the minority.

GABEHART: That’s right. That’s right.

BRINSON: What do you remember about that? You lived on the campus for, how long were you there?

GABEHART: We were there for a week. And I remember, you know, we went to see the Woolworth’s where the sit-ins had occurred and heard stories from these students about some of them who participated and all that kind of a thing. I don’t know I guess there were a series of these sorts of experiences that I was exposed to at various points along the way in the YWCA. And then I remember another vivid one when I was on the national YW staff in the region that included Wilberforce College and that was one of the areas, one of the schools I was suppose to visit. There was a student YW there or kind of the remnants of one, I think not anything really active at that point. And I remember my unease about going there. I mean this was several years after what I’m telling you about. And I, you know, I wasn’t quite sure how to approach that. And I remember some of my black colleagues sort of working through this with me about what was any different about going there than going to any other little college that I had never been to before because I did it all the time.

BRINSON: Because Wilberforce is all black?

GABEHART: It was all black at that point. And then I’ll hop to another experience which I really began to see how my thinking had changed. In 1976 when Alex Haley’s program on Roots and so forth was on TV I began to see how my, I no longer identified with the white southern belles and the old tradition in the way I had always identified growing up. So my sympathies were with the African American people in that program.

BRINSON: Do you think that was your own consciousness that was developed over those years?

GABEHART: Exactly.

BRINSON: What interests me, Betty, is that even though you might have identified with the white southern belles as you call them, you know, you are unusual to the degree that early on you also understood that these were important social issues and that you needed to be involved in that. What was there about that and about you that made that?

GABEHART: Well, I guess, I attribute this to my own Christian understanding; and it didn’t make sense, the contradiction between people who claimed their Christianity and lived a different way just didn’t make sense to me. And so I had to figure out some way to work through that and express my own views and commitments.

BRINSON: What happened when the Black Power movement sort of came into being in the late sixties? How did that affect the programs and the activities that you were involved with at that point?

GABEHART Well, I was in Chicago during that period on the national YW staff and that was the time of the Spectrum Project that I spoke of. So I think, you know, we benefited from having black leaders in involvement who could help us understand why this was happening. And we had a great deal of sympathy with it. One of the things I think …

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE

GABEHART: Had such a long commitment to integration and doing everything together and all this involvement and so forth it was very hard to try to help people understand that we needed to take seriously the Black Power Movement and the concerns for black people to define their own terms for doing things. Because integration, you know, in most of our minds had meant, you know, come in and join us in our house, do things our way; and to try to learn how to have a reciprocal kind of relationship. And Dorothy Hite began talking as this evolved about how we move from integration to pluralism was the phrase I think she used. So it was kind of living through the background of some of these things that transformations that occurred within the organization, nationally as well as personally.

BRINSON: With the advent of Black Power though were there tensions that arose out of that movement that you could see operating in the context that you were working?

GABEHART: I remember one meeting in Chicago. I think it was a regional meeting of some kind where we were working on race. And we met at the Ecumenical Institute on the west side of Chicago, and I don’t remember the particular discussion now but it was pretty difficult in terms of whites seeing things one way and blacks seeing it another. And I can remember so well when we finished up that evening how we went our separate ways. The black participants went one way and the whites went another to kind of heal our wounded selves and then came back together the next day. But I think that was the kind of thing, we were committed to coming back together.

BRINSON: That’s wonderful. In other organizations where those efforts were made, for example, some of the CORE chapter participants it just…

GABEHART: Fell apart.

BRINSON: Fell apart, uh-hmm.

GABEHART: Uh-hmm, and I think about things like that. Then some years later at the University of Illinois there was a very important community project called the Community Pal Project. When I came there as executive director it had been going for a while. But it had originated because some of the black parents in the community had asked the student YM and YW to work with them. They had taken the initiative to set up this organization. So it was always seen as kind of a three-part relationship. I mean what they wanted was students to serve as friends more than tutors. There was a student, the child, the student and the parent and whatever happened in the program on an individual relationship kind of basis or the total program all those voices were equally important, you know.

BRINSON: So the national YWCA and its local chapters have been involved with the issues of race relations for a long time. Where was the YMCA in all of this?

GABEHART: Well, I’m not sure, you know, what the dynamics were within and I certainly, the YM in this community has a very strong black achievers program and I don’t know how that all came about and so forth. But from my experience, I was on the national staff in Chicago in `68, `67-68 when the national student YWCA and the national student YMCA ceased meeting together. We had always had are national meetings together up until that time, and that year …

BRINSON: Tell me the years again.

GABEHART: This was `67, I think it was `68. We decided in the YWCA that we needed to go to Atlanta for our national meeting because we wanted our black, the bulk of our black participants were there, you know, from the black colleges. And that it was important to be there and the YM wanted to go to Cleveland, I’ve forgotten, they wanted to go to another city and weren’t willing to change, and at that point we had to decide. So we went south to Atlanta.

BRINSON: And you went without the YMCA.

GABEHART: Yeah, so we never did things together in the same way after that.

BRINSON: Do you think the split really was totally about the choice of a meeting site.

GABEHART: No, I mean we had great tensions between the two organizations always and around the women’s way of doing things and the men’s way of doing things. Those were historically difficult. There was a major study done about that in 1960 by a sociologist named Dan Donson.

BRINSON: And what did he find?

GABEHART: He found that a whole different pattern by which decisions were made in the YWCA, a much more collective kind of style; for example with membership they had different philosophies. The YM would set a high membership fee and then you could come there and do anything. But the YWA the membership fee was low and then you paid as you went on whatever you wanted to do. And there were just all kinds of, in themselves seemingly really small things, but …

BRINSON: Did, was there a difference in style, organizational leadership and structure between the two, between the YWCA and YMCA that would have contributed to that split?

GABEHART: Thinking now about the student YWCA at that point. I don’t recall that the structures were so terribly different because the student YM and YW had really grown up together and done almost every conference and that kind of thing together. And some of those interracial conferences and things I talk about were, you know, both student YM and YW. It varied, I think at that point at least the national YM didn’t have the major commitment to race that the YW did.

BRINSON: And so the split might have come because of the site first off. It could have come, it was probably enhanced as I hear you describe this by differences of gender.

GABEHART: Yes, I think that gender was a big part of it, too.

BRINSON: But also differences about race and involvement in it.

GABEHART: Uh-hmm. Commitment because I think at that time they had some other issues they felt very strongly about working on. I don’t remember exactly what it was. I think it was a more complex issue than that.

BRINSON: Is there anything else?

GABEHART: I can go on and on. We better stop.

BRINSON: That’s okay.

GABEHART: In 1959, or `58-59 while I was at the University of Illinois I attended the first national YW convention. That was all of the community YWCA delegates and student YW delegates. This was in St. Louis. And again we had some kind of resolution on the floor of the body and the debate came down to were we going to work on racial justice or however it was stated then with all deliberate speed or not. I mean, I think that was the phrase; I don’t know, It was a similar phrase. But that was really the heart of the matter. You know, how active were we really going to be at that point? That was one of my early…

BRINSON: Do you remember the vote?

GABEHART: Yeah we finally said, made the stronger statement as I recall it. But I can’t remember exact language.

BRINSON: Tell me about Mary Carpenter, please.

GABEHART: Mary was a board member, a faculty wife on the board of the student YWCA, the advisory board when I was a student. And I’ve seen her since I’ve returned. She was a student at Yale at some point. I don’t know if she graduated from the divinity school or exactly what but I ran across a picture of several of us who were part of a group of Yale alumni women that was being formed at an earlier stage. I had forgotten that she had that connection, also.

BRINSON: Was she very interested in the issue of race relations?

GABEHART: I’m sure she was. I don’t know. But she might be somebody to talk to and see what she recalls of this period.

BRINSON: And she lives here in Lexington?

GABEHART: Uh-hmm, she lives here in town. I can help you find her.

BRINSON: I also want to ask you to tell me a little bit more about Lois Trimble.

GABEHART: Oh, Lois is such a gem. Her father was on the faculty at Berea and I think the family comes out of Mississippi as I recall. Lois has been almost blind since she was thirty-nine. And she was just one of those saintly women around here always and still is. She lived in a big, old house over on Ashland by herself up until just a few years ago when she went into the Arnett Prichard Home. She served as ombudsperson for the nursing homes here in town for a while. And she walked all over town. She still, you know, gets out and walks and gardens regularly. But she really enjoys good stimulating conversation because she doesn’t have as many opportunities as she used to.

BRINSON: Was she, how was she active with the YWCA?

GABEHART: Again she was on the board here.

BRINSON: As a student.

GABEHART: No, she was on the advisory board, and then I don’t know about her involvement with the community YWCA; but she chaired the board there at some point. My friend, Sue Maggert that I spoke of who worked with an international student that we sponsored was the Executive Director of that YWCA downtown right around 1960, I think and worked very closely with Lois.

BRINSON: What kind of interactions were there with the Lexington YWCA and the student YWCA while you were here?

GABEHART: Very little, I think, you know, for certain occasions we’d have a joint meeting or something like that but really very little. That was fairly common around the country actually with some exceptions.

BRINSON: Was the Lexington Y, to your knowledge, working with some of these race relation issues also?

GABEHART: Uhmm, they had a Phyllis Wheatley branch that’s been around for a long time. I know that.

BRINSON: Which was a black YWCA.

GABEHART: A black YWCA, uh-hmm, and that is still has its traditions in the East, the center on East Chestnut. But I think those two groups formally joined around the time my friend, Sue was here as director. I don’t know the exact dates of that.

BRINSON: What is the Arnow Prichard home?

GABEHART: It’s Arnett Prichard.

BRINSON: Arnett.

GABEHART: It was a home that, where the YWCA could take in folks who contributed their whatever their resources were and promise to take care of them for life. I think that came to a point where they could no longer operate on that basis a few years ago. Now Lois was on the advisory board helping to see that that operated in that fashion for a long time. That was under the community YWCA.

BRINSON: Do you know anything about Arnett Prichard why they named it that?

GABEHART: No, I don’t. I don’t know.

END OF INTERVIEW