Oral History Interview with Jessie Zander

BETSY BRINSON: …1999, this is an unrehearsed interview with Jessie Zander. We are doing it at my residence in Lexington, Kentucky and the interviewer is Betsy Brinson. Well, thank you very much for agreeing to do this interview with me. May I call you Jessie?

JESSIE ZANDER: Please do.

BRINSON: What I want to do, Jessie, is focus primarily on some of your early origins in Virginia but then also your time at Berea, your work time in Kentucky. Because this project really focuses on Kentucky I’m probably not going to ask you too much about your years in Arizona but you live now in Tucson, Arizona.

ZANDER: Yes, I do.

BRINSON: Okay. Why don’t we begin, could you tell me a little bit about where and when you were born, and your early family, your parents?

ZANDER: I was born in a small coal mining town called Inman, Virginia.

BRINSON: Inland?

ZANDER: Inman, I N M A N and it’s located, of course, in southwest Virginia. The nearest towns are Appalachia, Virginia and Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My family comes from two parts of the country. My father’s family comes from Alabama. In the migration of many blacks to southwest Virginia in the nineteen, late 1920’s and thirties to work in the coal mines and on the railroad; groups of blacks were brought to southwest Virginia for that purpose. And my grandfather came with his wife and three children to work in the mines. And our first, my mother’s people come from Morristown, Tennessee. My mother met my father when members of her family were in Virginia working the mines. That’s how they met. I have one sister who is two years younger than I am. And we grew up, the family moved from Inman to Derby and then from Derby…

BRINSON: Derby, Virginia.

ZANDER: Derby, Virginia to Appalachia, Virginia where there settled and my grandfather died there when my grandmother, who was my step-grandmother, was about forty-two years old. My mother contracted TB and was placed in a sanatorium as they did with people of that time. It would have been Richburg, Virginia. Uhmm…

BRINSON: Let me stop for just a minute. I’ve got to close this door because I’m concerned that the street traffic is… Okay.

ZANDER: My father was not a miner. He was not a man who loved mining. So in order to make a living he moved to New York and became a taxi driver there. And so my sister and I were reared by my step-grandmother and an aunt, Aunt Polly Davis. And they lived, I think, the story that was told to me that was that during the depression, in the thirties, my aunt would go to work in the cities like New York or Chicago places like that where she could find--make more money. And my uncle, Manuel, her brother, became a member of the CC Camp. I think it was called the CCC camps. My father was in New York working. And my aunt and uncle pooled their money with my grandmother who worked, who did domestic work in local homes. And they pooled their money and bought a little piece of land on Oak Street in Appalachia, Virginia big enough to build three little houses on. And that’s where I grew up in the home that they collaborated to buy.

BRINSON: Could you tell me what year you were born?

ZANDER: I was born in 1932.

BRINSON: 1932.

ZANDER: July of 1932 and went to school in the local schools there. My first school was in the church and the church was located at the end of the street where there were, oh, seven or eight families that lived on the street. And at the end of the street was the church, Macedonia Baptist Church. And I grew up in that church. I say we were grown up by the neighborhood because my grandmother would be out working, and my sister and I had the chores we knew we needed to do and that, and I went to the local church for my first few years of education. And then a school was built, no, then I transferred from there to riding a bus to Big Stone Gap for the rest of my elementary education. And by this time they had built a small school in Appalachia, Virginia for black children. And so I was then able to walk, I think we walked two to three miles to go to that school and graduated in 1949.

BRINSON: Tell me about your graduating class. How big was it?

ZANDER: My graduating class had sixteen students. I remember a story about that the principal was Professor C. H. Shorter. He was quite a wonderful man who took his job very serious. And when we were graduating a scout came to talk with him about his students, his graduating class. And he said, “How many students do you have?” And Professor Shorter, “I have sixteen.” And he said, “How many of them are handicapped?” I think he was someone interested in placing handicap students. He said, “They all are.” “All of your students are handicapped? That’s unusual. Why do you say that?” And he said, “They’re all black students. So they’re all handicapped.” Which is an interesting… And the guy didn’t know quite what to do when he made that response.

BRINSON: That wasn’t his definition of handicapped.

ZANDER: No, of handicapped. So in 1949 I graduated and we weren’t going to twelfth grade yet. So that meant I was a senior in the eleventh grade and that’s probably how I happened to get out at sixteen years of age. Uhmm, I then when, there was a young family in town very interested in getting students to go to college, ‘cause not very many black students at that time when to college. They would either finish and leave and go to the cities or they would join the mines, marry and stay right there. So there was a woman named Mrs. Morris who was Presbyterian because I went to the Macedonian Baptist Church. But she would round up students to say “Where are you going to school?” And if you didn’t have no idea where you were going she would let you know there was a scholarship to Swift Memorial Junior College in Rogersville, Tennessee.

BRINSON: Swift Memorial?

ZANDER: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: In Rogersville.

ZANDER: Junior college in Rogersville, Tennessee. It was a junior college for black students. And her counterpart was a women who did the same thing for Methodist, the Methodist School in Morristown. Morristown College in Morristown, Tennessee. So either one of those women you were going to be challenged to go to school. So I, I did go to Swift Memorial Junior College for two years after high school. And it was in my second year that Berea College, that I had never heard of, had a scout that was looking for black students. And I learned the story that the school’s inception it had been integrated but that in 1904 the Day Law had changed that and now the school, I understood, had petitioned for many years to have black students returned. And in 1950, slightly before the `54 Decision that decision had been made. So they were scouting for students. And so I was recommended by the president that I might be a student who would be interested. And out of that class I was the only who accepted that invitation to go to Berea College. I was and so I did go to Berea in 1951.

BRINSON: Fifty-one.

ZANDER: I…

BRINSON: And did you come in, as part of what class?

ZANDER: I came in as a junior. I had to do a little finagling to get me to junior status because in church schools you do a lot of Bible and a lot of classes that don’t carry any credit. And too, from my high school work, I seemed to have had dangling participles and wasn’t real strong in math. So I did some remedial kinds of things which meant that I graduated from Berea, instead of two years later, I graduated two and a half years later in December of 1954.

BRINSON: Right. Okay, let me stop here and take you back to Appalachia. Talk to me about your school, and particularly your school in terms of what you might have known or how you would have compared it to the white school.

ZANDER: Okay. Really there was, okay, I’ll start the comparison with appearance. It was a four room white clapboard house, house-looking school, located on the outskirts of the city between a couple of railroad tracks and beside a river. Uhmm, I’m surprised I ever was able to get through college because it’s offerings were very meager. Example, uhmm, we did not have a physical education program for particularly, well, for anyone except for football. Football was the biggy. So there was plenty of football but no physical education program as you would expect in a high school for students otherwise. We did not have home economics, for instance. I did not, we did not have a suitable library. We had a place where books that had been discarded from other schools were brought there. So it wasn’t, we didn’t have a librarian even. Schools that had trips to see places and do things, this was not part of our, our curriculum. But we had solid math and reading and English and science.

BRINSON: You did have science.

ZANDER: We had science and it was taught by the principal. So the principal was a teaching principal. And I can recall, we had four major teachers in those four areas. But they were--it was interesting that our teachers were--I learned later after integration came along that our teachers were very well trained teachers. They were, most of them were master’s degree people. And how they happened to come to southwest Virginia to teach, they would come from the northern end of the state, you know, like Richmond or some of the places that were more fully developed than our coal mining areas were. And I remember one teacher who was very excellent, considered very excellent in the field of English had come because she married a miner. And so, but she was very well degreed. So teachers were fully trained when they came.

BRINSON: Did you have any foreign languages?

ZANDER: We had, believe it or not we had French. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Okay.

ZANDER: I don’t know why we were taught French. But I had two years of French. So we did have a foreign language. Extra curricula kinds of things we just didn’t have. We had real basic, uhmm, reading, writing and arithmetic, math, geography, those kinds of things.

BRINSON: Did you have any student government, student council?

ZANDER: No, no, we didn’t have that experience at all.

BRINSON: So you came to Berea and Berea was an integrated school which I assume was your first integrated school?

ZANDER: My first experience.

BRINSON: And what was that like?

ZANDER: My first experience, it was a, now I must say that the community in which I lived, there were what do you call them? Section workers, I guess? You would have, those seven or eight homes with the church at the end were all black and in back of them would be section homes. That’s the only name I can give to them. The homes were very much alike but there were whites who lived in them. And the interaction was very positive although you were very, it was very clear that when students, when children reached the age of about twelve, eleven or twelve where they might be interested in each other, you wanted, you didn’t want that to happen. So it wasn’t done, uhmm, openly and talked about. It was just like an aura of you knew that those interactions weren’t to go on although you could borrow a cup of sugar or a cup of flour, talk over the back fence, those kinds of things. But you were totally separate in terms of church or school or social interaction outside of the neighborhood interaction that you did by virtue of living next door.

BRINSON: Now this was in Berea or Appalachia?

ZANDER: This is Appalachia.

BRINSON: Okay.

ZANDER: I’m talking about Appalachia. My experience and I’m leading up to that’s the experience I took to Berea with me. I did, when I, I didn’t know what to expect but I, my grandmother had always said, “Now when you go to school.” She kind of planted that seed in our heads, my sister and me, and nobody before us that we knew had been to college. But we knew of a member, some members of her family who still lived in Alabama, who had gone on like to Wilberforce in Wilberforce, Ohio. And we’d heard those stories but we had never met people that had been to college. But she always said, interesting woman with a fifth grade education, who would plant this seed, “Now when you go to college.” Nobody knew how she was going to get money to send us to college and I don’t think she knew. I think it was a faith that she had and something that she wanted very badly for us. So when the opportunity to go to Berea, there was no question whether I would go or not go. It was the only opening I saw to go. And she could pay whatever she was able to pay and I could work, and so it could happen that way. When I got to Berea I learned that Dean Allen, who was Dean of Women at the time, and a very beloved lady, uhmm, had selected a roommate for me in anticipation of my coming. I think they were concerned about how I would be treated. So they had found someone who did not mind rooming with a black student. She was a wonderful young woman but just like being married, you can’t pick somebody for somebody’s roommate.

So we at mid-year decided we like each other but not as roommates, and we parted as friends and selected our own roommates. I think maybe she didn’t room with anyone else. But I did find another roommate. Uhmm, I, I must have been real protective of myself, I think when I was there being careful. Probably I wasn’t my true self maybe the whole two and a half years because it was a strange situation. And I can only look back and say that was probably true, the cordiality was there. I can not say I was not treated well. But I could, looking back on it, gauge that I chose things to be part of that were safe and regretted not being a member of the singing group for instance. And probably what kept me from doing that was I knew I didn’t read music. And even though I know now that wasn’t important to be able to read music to be part of the musical group; being told all your life you have to be three times as good in order to make it , meant I wasn’t going to chance, uhmm, probably being embarrassed. So I didn’t join the music group even though I would have liked to. I did not join the players, the acting group, because I observed that if a black person became a part of the acting group they were doing servant roles. But there was one young woman who had a lot more nerve than I did and she protested that those weren’t the only roles. There were other roles to be played and she became a, a vital part of the acting group. But she had a little more guts than I did in challenging that.

BRINSON: So if people spoke up about unfair practices they were heard.

ZANDER: They were heard. Now students did go to Union Church but all students went to Union Church.

BRINSON: Is that off of campus?

ZANDER: No, that’s on campus. Union Church at that time was on campus. There were students who ventured out to off-campus churches. I did not because I was safe at Union Church, and I observed an African student who was there; he had attempted to join the Baptist Church in town and had been told he could attend but could not join. And he, he raised holy hell about it because he said, “I was converted by Baptist missionaries in Africa and you’re going to tell me I’m an American and I can not join?” And so that became a newspaper item and following that the practice changed. Not all at once, not with all churches but I don’t think you would find now that a student would be told they could not attend.

BRINSON: Now at the time that you went to Berea how many other black students were there were there would you guess?

ZANDER: Of course Berea has fifteen hundred students. That is it’s number it will allow and I think there were about five to six African Americans. This did not count the several African students because a certain number could come from Africa. But for African Americans there were about five or six of us.

BRINSON: Can you tell me about the roommate you chose your first year? Who was that?

ZANDER: My roommate’s name was Louise Rudy. She had carrot-top hair [laughing] and she was always after me to go sunning on the roof. [Laughter] Not realizing that she herself was going to blister with that red hair because she didn’t tan too well. And I myself didn’t need the extra tan. So we tried it for a few times and decided we didn’t need to do this. Louise was, I think she was the daughter of a Methodist minister as I can remember and made a very fine roommate. Other roommates I had, one came from Okinawa. She came from Okinawa who was a wonderful roommate. And my second year I was going to be, oh, what they call you when you work in a freshman dorm as a--you work as a dorm …

BRINSON: Dorm monitor.

ZANDER: Monitor, yes, you’re working with freshmen. And I met a young woman and we decided in my senior year, it was both our senior years, but she was getting out on time and I was getting out a half year later. But we made a decision to room together, and before the end of summer. And she went home on vacation and shared with her family that she would be rooming with me the following year and her mother didn’t think that was a good idea for her to room with a black student. And protested her doing it. She wanted to defy that but she was in a hard spot to do that against her mother’s wishes. So she had to write and tell me that she could not room with me the coming year. And when she got back, but before that she was, she wanted her father to come to campus and meet me. Her mother did not come but her father came to pick her up. And she asked me ‘if I’d stay over and meet her father’, and I did. And we sat and talked and it did not change the decision of rooming with her. But we talked with Dean Allen about it when we both came back to campus, and Dean Allen did not, since we were in a freshman dorm, we each had our own room. She did not insist that we find other roommates. So what her mother didn’t know is that we spent all the time together anyway. [Laughing] We just weren’t rooming in the same room. But that was an interesting year being a dorm monitor for freshman students in my senior year. So what it was like for me, I think I probably, if I had been in a black school, I would have probably been part of more things, more involvements.

BRINSON: Were you involved in any…

ZANDER: I wasn’t. I think my interactions were largely with, what was the organization? Oh, I can’t even think of the name of it anymore but it had to do with conversation across race lines, I believe.

BRINSON: Is it the YM, YWCA ( )

ZANDER: I think it was a Y group because Dean Allen always promoted--there were several groups you were supposed to belong to in your life and the Y was one of them. I took part in the speech contest. Speech, I think I went with the teacher to my, my--I have a copy of that, it’s called “A Heap of Jewels Unpolished” was the name of it. And the teacher took the class to Kentucky State to give the speeches. And I think mine came in second or something. And then, of course, when the speech was over all I wanted to do was eat, because they wouldn’t allow us to eat before we could give the speech. But once it was over there was a conversation about winning, and the feeling that my speech should have won first place. But I was real happy to have second place, [laughing] but there was that conversation and some, and some wonderment about why that was so that I had not gotten it.

BRINSON: But you didn’t, other than the questioning, did you have any reason to believe that maybe you hadn’t been given first place because of your color?

ZANDER: No. I had no reason to believe that. I think that was what was being said but it was all very new to me and I was excited just to be there. So I didn’t question it further.

BRINSON: You told me a story when we talked on the phone about, uhmm, your hair.

ZANDER: Oh, my hair, yes.

BRINSON: Can you tell me that again?

ZANDER: Yes. Uhmm, when I went to Berea I was straightening my hair because, well, the real standard of beauty was as straight as you could make your hair. And you were concerned about whether your kitchen was going back--we called it the kitchen at the back of your hair. We didn’t go swimming. That’s another thing. We didn’t learn swimming. A lot of black young women never took swimming because it meant your hair would go back. So at Berea there wasn’t, and I understand there is no provision still for black students who are interested in hair care, that there is anything in the college life that provides for hair care. Anyway I would wash my hair in the dorm and go out, there was a family, a Fee. I understand Mr. Fee who was the custodian at the school was named after John G. Fee which was interesting. And they lived right down under the college. His name was Fee Moran. His last name was Moran.

BRINSON: M O R A N?

ZANDER: A N, and they befriended many, many students, many, there weren’t that many but all black students ended up at that house. They had about four or five kids of their own. They were different grade levels. None of them were students at Berea. I don’t think they went on to college, but we ended up there. I don’t know how they took care of all of us.

BRINSON: Now were they affiliated with the college in any way?

ZANDER: The husband was a custodial there.

BRINSON: Okay, okay.

ZANDER: That was his connection and very well loved by, by students and staff there. So it was through them I learned of where I could go to get my hair done. And so I would wash my hair in the dorm and then get out before my roommate would come in because I think I was embarrassed of my own hair. I didn’t want her to see it washed. And then I would walk to where, the home where someone would do my hair in their kitchen, you know, with the hot combs on the stove or in the, paraphernalia they used to do hair. And then I’d come back all…

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE

BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

ZANDER: …beautiful. And I had an aunt who used to say, if she didn’t believe you, she’d call you, “lying haint,” you know. I didn’t say that but in my mind I was repeating lying haint.

BRINSON: Say…

ZANDER: Lying haint.

BRINSON: Lie and hate, okay.

ZANDER: Haint, haint a derivative of the word hant, haint. Uhmm, how do I describe that word?

BRINSON: How do you spell that?

ZANDER: I don’t know. Haint, H A N T, I guess. It comes from, lying hant, couldn’t be telling the truth, it means. I don’t know how to tell you better but it was a word we used in the community if we didn’t believe you. And so in my mind, I was saying that because there was no idea that my hair could be beautiful. Even though I have very soft hair and I ruined it all those years straightening it when it shouldn’t have been. And I’m glad to have gotten to the point where I wear it natural. But uhmm, I didn’t believe that my hair was beautiful, and it was only during the sixties when students and it was young people who began to say, this is who I am and you know, accept that because I’m struggling to accept it myself. Uhmm, and it was a real sense of freedom when I realized the versatility that I had with my hair. Not that it had to be straight but it could be if I wanted it that way; or not that it had to be curled. It could be or it could be natural, but either way was okay and I was okay either way, but it took me many years to come to terms with hair. And I would say that it was in my older years probably just a few years ago that I would wear, wash and wear. Last night I washed my hair and I wore it just the way it was today. And that feels good but it was a long time in coming.

BRINSON: Okay. Tell me about what you recall about the other African American students who were there when you were.

ZANDER: There were, there were three young men there from Richmond, now names I’m going…

BRINSON: Richmond, Virginia?

ZANDER: No, Richmond, Kentucky.

BRINSON: Richmond, Kentucky.

ZANDER: There were three young men there from Richmond, Kentucky and they, they were my dancing partners if we would go to a dance. Uhmm, but they didn’t hang, they didn’t stay in school. I think maybe they had been recruited to come, it was a new idea. One of them came back and he may have retired now but I saw him when I was visiting once and he was working at Boone Tavern at the desk. And he, he said to me, “You know, I regret not having stayed but I could make money in Indiana, and so I left to go to Indiana to make money not realizing that the education would have been better for me.” All three of those guys dropped out. There was a young woman, two young women, the one I mentioned who became one of the Players, Berea Players in the acting group and she was younger than I and finished, I learned, later. There was one from West Virginia who came in after I did as a freshman and completed her two years, her four years and went on for her doctorates. Connie Willard was her name. You may have run into that name in seeking names because she has been back to speak at occasions at Berea. There was a student that I honor who was really the very first student before me who was a student at Berea when they really wanted somebody to come in after the decision had been made that black students could come back. And she was a local person who lived, who still lives right there in Berea. I’ve got to remember her name. Elizabeth, Elizabeth White. And when I came back to speak at Berea once I invited her to the session and honored her as the first black student to enter after the Day Law was rescinded. Although I carry the honor of being, the dubious honor I say, of being the first African American student to graduate after the Day Law was rescinded. She was really the first student.

BRINSON: She attended.

ZANDER: She attended and she had been out of school for awhile. So I think she was talked into coming back and she really wasn’t interested in being a student. I think she stayed maybe one year or half year. I don’t know how long she stayed. But she was really the first student to come back and brave that experience.

BRINSON: Right. I’m assuming that there were no African American faculty at that point in time. Am I correct?

ZANDER: No, you are correct, there were no African American faculty. The persons I most related to, of course, I was in education, elementary education, so I had a couple of major teachers. Dr. Charles Graham was one of them; I do remember his name. And there was one other whose name I should remember but it’s escaped me. I remember Dr. Graham because in education he used to always say to all the students, he was a very stiff man but he was good at what he did. And he would say, “Plan your work and work your plan.” [Laughter]

BRINSON: Good advice.

ZANDER: I remember that quote [laughter] from him. Another person--I was taking classes--I think I was taking a political science class and some other class closely related to political science. Those weren’t my strong suits and I was having an exam on the same day for these two classes. And I’d done very poor studying. My study habits were to stay up all night and cram and agitate and be tense. So I was a wreck the next day for these tests and I did labor under ‘you have to be good’. That was, you know, something over your head. You really can’t afford to fail. You have to be more than good. And so I was really worried about these tests both on the same day, and had crammed and stayed up all night. So I was in the post office, I had taken one of the tests, and I was not feeling good about it, and I was crying, and Dr. Menifee who is still at the co… retired, but still living in Berea. In fact he called me when he found out I was coming this time to say, I want to take you to lunch on Sunday after church if you don’t have other plans.

Dr. Menifee was not one of my major teachers and I don’t think I had a class under him. But he was aware of my being there and he saw me crying and he talked with me about what the problem was. And I was afraid I was not going to pass my. “What makes you think that? Haven’t you passed tests before?” Well, yes I was going on and on. So he talked me through and quieted me and said that, “You know if you don’t pass one of them its not the end of the world, you can take another test.” So whatever he did it calmed me. I passed both exams, I didn’t have a problem with them, but I was really perturbed. And I remember him as being someone I really needed to talk to at that time. So he was a good friend afterwards. Even when I came back to work at Berea. After my husband died I did work at Berea for I filled in, in the education department for a teacher.

BRINSON: That was in what year?

ZANDER: 1990 I think it was. My husband died in ‘89, I think I did this in `90, `91.

BRINSON: Did you see… have you been back before then for alumni…?

ZANDER: Yes. I didn’t come back for thirty years. And I had was receiving the, the magazine, and I thought thirty years that is some kind of milestone maybe I ought to go back, and I made the decision to come back. I did bring the article about that or maybe you’ve seen that one already. And when I came back…I’m trying remember how I became connected again, and for the next ten years I was fully involved with the alumni, on the Board of the Alumni Association, the President’s Council. I used to fly back and forth a couple of times a year to be part of those. And I was, I was in line to become--I took myself off the board because I felt like Tucson, Arizona was two thousand miles away and when you came in you were really perfunctory. It felt like to me that you weren’t involved in doing anything that benefited the college other than flying in for a meeting and flying back; and I didn’t feel truly involved, connected but not involved. So I, and I knew where that was going to lead from being on the Alumni Council to, to the Trustee level, and you and the college did not provide your payment, you paid your on way back and forth, and I didn’t feel like I could continue doing that.

BRINSON: That’s most unusual, isn’t it?

ZANDER: Yeah, we paid our own way. Once you were here and your lodging was cared for, but twice a year every year was a lot for me. And so and for me if I had felt it was real, I made a real difference then I, then I probably would have managed to continue, but I did come back and work. I was concerned about the, the Black Student Union and the Black Cultural Center and all of that of course was a new thing. It wasn’t part of it when I was here, and I was real interested to come back. When I came back thirty years later I was honored by the black students who where currently there for paving the way kind of for them. And I had real concerns and still do, for the interactions across race lines. I felt like the division, that there was still a kind of division that had not been meshed. Not that people weren’t interested in meshing it, but there didn’t seemed to be programs in place and activities in place that cause students to interact in the kind of way I was forced to interact. Not that it should be forced, but some programming that highlighted here’s what Berea’s about and we want that interaction. We want it so much we’re talking about it, and I felt talking about it wasn’t happening. And I could, I could sense that in coming back to work here, ‘cause when I came to work for a three month period I really was here for more like six months because there was a program on campus underwritten by which foundation? Some foundation where I worked in the summer program; they brought black students from Appalachia all around into the college in the summertime. I didn’t work in the program in the winter. They had someone who did that but this person I met while I was here wanted to know if I would come back and be part of the summer program, the educational program in the summertime. So I did that which meant the year I came to work for three months I really was here for six months. Because I flew back and forth while I was teaching. I did that summer program for three years until the program folded, I think. They are talking about bringing it back, I think.

BRINSON: Why did it fold? Do you know?

ZANDER: I’m not real sure. Okay, why did it fold? I think I do know. The person who, who really engineered with the president to have the program here was not himself on campus, and there was a person put in as the campus person. So he was kind of directing the program from another spot, and that didn’t keep it as cohesive as if might have been. And then I think out of that view of what the program should be it, it became embroiled kind of, and, and then the funding ran out. See it was suppose to run and then the college was to pick it up and take it on, and I think the college made a choice not to pick it up and take it on.

BRINSON: This was during President Stevenson’s tenure?

ZANDER: Right.

BRINSON: An approximately how many African Americans students were in the program?

ZANDER: Of this program in the summertime?

BRINSON: Right.

ZANDER: Oh, I have wonderful pictures of that and I didn’t bring any of that. There would have been about, I think we worked with about forty-five to fifty students.

BRINSON: Good size.

ZANDER: It was a nice size and it was a science program and math. My job was to give the young students a work experience on campus. So I was the person coordinating with all the departments that these, these kids worked with. Troubleshooting, making sure they were doing well, they were getting to work and the work… people in those jobs had to be leaning over a little to allow high school students to be doing the work experience, but they did and so forth. Three summers I worked with that.

BRINSON: I want to go back to 1954 when you graduated from Berea and you said you graduated in the middle of the year.

ZANDER: Mid-year.

BRINSON: That was a pretty important year in terms of the Supreme Court decision which came down a little bit later--Brown.

ZANDER: Right.

BRINSON What happened to you? What did you do when you graduated?

ZANDER: You mean what work did I do?

BRINSON: What did you do next?

ZANDER: I had, I had, I had been searching for a job of course, and, and the college had attempted to help me there. I’m not sure when I sent out my applications. I was accepted at one job. You know I am real sorry I didn’t keep that letter, and I’m a keeper. I keep lots of things, but this one must of upset me a lot. I applied for a job, I don’t remember where. It was in the Appalachian area though, and I was still on campus, I had been accepted for the job. I thought I had a job, and it was in a very small community, and I was to live in with a family. And hearing the name of the place and knowing the congregation of black people I could say, “I bet that’s, I bet the family I am to stay with is not a black family,” which wasn’t a problem for me. But by this time of fighting that battle a little bit I was a little weary, because my way of normal being would be to appear, but I was tired, I guess. So I chose to call the family and say, “I’m to stay at your home I need to know if it makes any difference to you that I’m black.” It made both a difference to them and the people hiring me, because they had assumed that all students were white, so they didn’t ( )

So I always regretted telling them that. I wish I had appeared without having said that, but was told to bother, not to bother to appear. And there again Dr. Menifee traveled to that town and talked to the powers that be in the school to say you missed a very fine teacher. And then he traveled to my home and sat on the front porch and talked with my grandmother and me about that, which I thought was, was really good. So I, my high school principal in Virginia Mr. Shorter, whom I have mentioned, found out I was looking for a job. And I had been home. When I finished I worked as a short order cook in the local hotel. I had an aunt who had been working there and she was going to take vacation, and I was to fill in for her. This is an interesting story. But while I was there he found out I was looking for a job, and his friend is J. A. Matthews in Benham, and so he called his friend to say I have a person just graduated from Berea. What kind of needs do you have? Let’s see if her credential will fit. And they needed an elementary teacher. I think my first job then was a third-forth combination in Benham, Kentucky, and I was able to get it through my former principal who contacted his, his friend. And I stayed in the home of woman and her niece. I remember the phones were on the front porch. You couldn’t talk to your boyfriend without the whole neighborhood [laughter].

But anyway the story of the short order cook is interesting because I could make rolls. I had learned to make rolls as a twelve-year-old, couldn't make biscuits, but I can make wonderful rolls. My grandmother taught me how. And I could do this on Saturday night and I made all the rolls for Sunday morning. So I thought I was pretty good cook. All I could do was hamburgers and rolls and stuff. Well, they through me a loop because someone came in to the place and asked for a filet mignon. I had never seen one let alone eat one, or cooked one. And they gave it to me frozen for me to prepare for this couple, and the filet mignon was really raw inside, it had not cooked well. [Laughing] And I think it was that filet mignon that got me fired. [Laughter] Prior to that I had done very well, had been complimented on my good work. And I remember one day the old guy who owned the place--wore overalls and he just looked like any old farmer--and he came in one day to the kitchen to ask, order a sandwich. And I looked at him with all of my king’s English, and I said, “Sir, if you would wish to order, you need to order up front just like everyone else.” And he was the owner of the place. [Laughter] He didn’t say anything. He wheeled on his heels and went back and told his wife, “She takes her job seriously, doesn’t she?” [Laughter] He never did say anything to me about it but they did fire me over that filet mignon, over which I cried because I had been fired. Nobody in my family has been fired. [Laughter] Even though I knew I wasn’t going to stay there and it was just for the summer.

BRINSON: Well, tell me, Benham is one of those communities in eastern Kentucky that again had a large black migration that came in from out of the area because of the mines.

ZANDER: Right.

BRINSON: And at the point that you went there do you have any sense of how large the black community was at that point in time? Were people beginning to leave or was it still kind of at its high capacity?

ZANDER: This would have been `55 or end of `54, `55, `56, it was still pretty large black community. Uhmm, and pretty contained, uhmm, with churches and of course everybody shopped at the--what do we call it? I want to call it the PX but that’s an Army term.

BRINSON: Right.

ZANDER: Commis…, not it’s not the commissary. That’s an Army term. Everybody shopped at the same place.

BRINSON: Was that an African American store?

ZANDER: No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t an African American store. I remember that in Lynch which was right next to Benham. I have family that lived in Lynch and I used to go there to visit, and when I compare. When I come back about four years ago Berea had a study of ethnics in Appalachia. It was done by Helen Lewis from a place we used to go for workshops, and the, the community, the community had grown up; all of those areas where black people lived had gone back to woods and there were very, very few. I don’t know the numbers of blacks who were there, but I just, it was a whole black community and, and your interaction across lines. If there had been fewer it would have been more, and there weren’t any. I remember one of my first students was--could not hear. She could not hear, and she could not speak, and she was in my class. She was a big girl. And I remember agonizing I don’t know what ever happened to her, but I remember agonizing. I even called Berea about where she could go to get training ‘cause I knew what I was doing for her wasn’t educating her. And she wasn’t a problem in the class, she was sweet as could be, but I was told right up to the state, you know, level that there was no place for her. No place to send her.

BRINSON: She needed special education.

ZANDER: She needed special education and there was no place to send her for that special education.

BRINSON: We weren’t even thinking much about special education.

ZANDER: Yeah, about special ed. I often wonder what happened to her.

BRINSON: I am assuming, tell me, that you where in an all black school?

ZANDER: Yes. The school was not only all black it was black elementary and high school in the same building. The high school was upstairs; the elementary school was in the bottom. I remember, you know what they do to new teachers when they come in, now I was working in the elementary level, I had third/forth combination, but teachers didn’t like chaperoning the cheerleaders [laughing] so guess who they gave that job to. Even though I was in elementary I became the chaperone for the cheerleaders at the [laughing] high school level. She is new, she doesn’t know; give it to her. [Laughter]

BRINSON: So you traveled to games with the cheerleaders?

ZANDER: With the cheerleaders, yes, that was fun. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Was there any discussion that you recall during the time you were there about integrating the school system in the community?

ZANDER: At Benham, no. There was no discussion about that.

BRINSON: So even though the Supreme Court decision had been handed down there were just no movement about that?

ZANDER: No, no, not in `54 or `55, about `55, `56 and then I left. And then I, my husband by that time he was working for that same school the Swift Memorial Junior College in Rogersville, Tennessee. He was a coach there in the high school department, and the church had schools across the country for Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Black Americans before integration, and they began closing those schools after integration. So that school closed and we were looking for jobs. Could not, he could not find a job in the area because usually in small places, that’s not true now, but it may be partly true, you kept your job your whole life until you died out of it. And so new people, young people, unless someone was retiring had a hard time finding work. So that’s when we applied through the Presbyterian Church for work in church schools and that’s how we went to Arizona.

BRINSON: How did you meet your husband? Tell me his name.

ZANDER: Johnny Zander, and we grew up in the same home town, ‘cause dating at Berea you see was problematic for me. [Laughing] I did not have dates at Berea. I think once I went to a movie. A young man had enough nerve to ask me to go to the movie, a white student to ask me to go to the movie, but we both were so nervous. We went to that movie, [laughing] and we never invited each other to do anything again. I think I remember that. I don’t even remember that guy’s name. [Laughter] And then there was a young man in the community, he was a relative of this Elizabeth White, I mentioned as the first student. In fact I think he was her half-brother had been to the service and come back and I remember dating him once, but that didn’t pan. So I really, my social life was really curtailed at Berea because…

BRINSON: Were you in communication with your husband-to-be during that time?

ZANDER: I had dated, I had begun dating him in when at the end of my…

END OF SIDE TWO TAPE ONE

BEGIN SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO

ZANDER: He had finished at Bloomfield State in Bloomfield, West Virginia. And had worked in schools in Kentucky and then worked at his old alma mater at Centralized School in Appalachia, Virginia. But he was in the same field of work as another tenured teacher. So they couldn’t, really couldn’t keep him.

BRINSON: Which schools in Kentucky? Do you remember?

ZANDER: McRoberts, there is a little place in Kentucky called McRoberts, Kentucky near Jenkins, Jenkins, Kentucky. And he worked there for a year and was excited that he was going to work in his old school in Appalachia, Virginia not realizing that was going to be a one-year thing. And that’s when he went on to Swift, and I think he worked there a couple of years, several years. But the answer to your question, yes, I was dating him while I was at Berea. I told him if there had been more students there for me to date we probably wouldn’t have gotten married. [Laughter – Brinson] But I didn’t have many choices. [Laughter] He loved that, of course. [Laughing]

BRINSON: One of the things I have found very interesting as I interview people who either attended or taught in all black schools in Kentucky, and I want you to tell me, respond to this both from your Kentucky experience but also from your Virginia experience growing up. Is that the school clearly was more than a school. It was the community center and there were all kinds of activities that went on there and even after, uhmm, integration came along many of these students and teachers still stay in touch through annual or biannual reunions even today.

ZANDER: In fact that’s what I’m on my way to do.

BRINSON: Is it really?

ZANDER: The Southwest Museum, I worked with a small cultural center in Pennington Gap, Virginia. A young man had a relative before him who had donated the land for a school for black children in Pennington Gap way back. Then he went away to the city to work and when he came back the little school was still there and he turned it into a cultural center. Well, the Black Cultural Center in Pennington Gap, Virginia is an oddity. And the, and so I collected a lot of material and put together an exhibit for that museum, that cultural center. The young family with whom I worked, the money for doing that had come from the Julia Allen Fund, Dean Julia Allen. The people who conducted her estate, Dr. Menifee was one of them and Dr. Tredennick who had been her roommate all these years, Dr. Tredennick.

BRINSON: How do you spell that?

ZANDER: T R E D E N N I C K.

BRINSON: Okay.

ZANDER: And the two of them when they learned of the project that I had talked about for several years, the notion had been given to me by the minister’s wife in Appalachia, Virginia. The wife of the man who was the minister at the little church at the end of the street that I mentioned to you. He had died. Her home was right next door, and she had the notion when she died she wanted to give the home to the church and wanted to make a center out of it. Well, it wasn’t feasible to do it there; she was still living even though she was in her eighties. So she and I thought well this cultural center in Pennington Gap might be the place to do it. So I came home, put out the letters, did the work and did an exhibit.

BRINSON: This is all fairly recently?

ZANDER: Yes this would have been in the nineties. I was disappointed when my work was finished there was no recognition or no--nothing was said that it was underwritten by some money from Berea--that it had been done. It was taken, it was taken, and the communication between myself and the people who were there ceased. They, they took my work. And I had, uhmm, duplicates of everything that I had done. And the tone of it there was churches. The tone--I showed the work to the Southwest Museum in Big Stone Gap and she said, “You know, we’ve always wanted a black exhibit here but we’ve had, when we’ve interviewed people, we can’t get interviews with African Americans. We don’t seem to be to get it off the ground. I’ll be interested in your work.” And I connected it to the reunion because they have a reunion every two years, and this year is my fiftieth year and I’m coming back for that in August. It’s the forty fifth year here at Berea but it’s the fiftieth year for that. And so I had lots of material on schools. And did a few panels two years ago at the reunion out in the hallway of the Holiday Hotel in Norton with the notion that the museum wanted that expanded. And so letters went out to everyone to send in pictures, paraphernalia of pre-integration, the school’s pre-integration. Uhmm and some of the material that I used in the Pennington Gap work will be in this one as it pertains to schools. I left out the church stuff. And then it will be expanded. And so that exhibit is going to go up July 1 and my trip to Virginia now is to consult with the museum on it. It will be up until October. So it will be up when the reunion is going on in August.

An interesting sideline to that though you can be away too long and not be considered integral even though I’m a graduate of the school my doing this has not been embraced whole heartedly as I thought it would be. And I talked to the museum lady about things not coming in and she said “Jessie, you’ve left many things with us. It will make a small exhibit. It will make a nice small exhibit. I’d like the exhibit to go on and five years from now we’ll do that again and you can bet it will come in.”

BRINSON: I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly. You’re saying because you’ve been out of the area for so long…

ZANDER: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: That some of the people that you might have asked to contribute to the exhibit have not really done that.

ZANDER: Okay. I did a blanket, I did a blanket invitation to the reunion group to contribute, and then followed that with a letter; and I have a copy of the letter here for that to come in. And not much has come in. It may not have come in because it seemed like an unwieldy thing that might not happen. Uhmm, I’m not sure of all the reasons it might not have, and I was ready to drop it but was encouraged by a friend to say, “You know, that was your vision. It wasn’t everybody’s vision and you’re treating it as if, as if without the reunion you can’t do that. And that’s erroneous because it can be done without that and you need to pursue and do that anyway.”

BRINSON: I’m digressing a little bit but I’m very interested in this. I would guess, Jessie, if you’re doing an exhibit about the early school, with photos and people and what not that you’re going to provoke a lot of reminiscence from people.

ZANDER: Yes.

BRINSON: And I wonder if you’re going to capture any of those reminiscences in any way. Are you going to have anybody there with a tape recorder?

ZANDER: Well, you know, I’m so busy getting the stuff that I haven’t, I haven’t thought through to doing that. But you know that is a very good idea.

BRINSON: Well, maybe on the way to Berea we can brainstorm.

ZANDER: Yeah, how to do that.

BRINSON: Because that would be…

ZANDER: Wonderful, it would be wonderful.

BRINSON: … such another important piece of the history.

ZANDER: Where is the place where they keep a lot of history here in Kentucky, ‘cause I have a film of the woman I used to ride, she worked in Lynch. I worked in Benham. She lived in Big Stone Gap. And she drove Black Mountain to her work everyday, wind, rain, storm, snow, back and forth. She had several accidents, too. Uhmm, trying to think of her name, Mabel Hardison, Mabel Hardison Miller.

BRINSON: Uh-hmm.

ZANDER: Have you heard of her?

BRINSON: Uh-hmm, I have.

ZANDER: I have that tape of her. Well, she’s the lady who was my driver across the mountain. She worked in Lynch. I worked in Benham and I wasn’t a driving person then and I used to ride with her.

BRINSON: [Sound of bird in background.] I really don’t have a bird. It’s one of those clocks that on the hour you get a different bird.

ZANDER: Oh, okay. [Laughing] Anyway, where is that tape housed? Can you remember? It’s escaping me. It’s a place in Kentucky that is a central housing place for a lot of history of the area.

BRINSON: Well, it might be, oh, of eastern Kentucky. I don’t know. Now if there’s a tape it may be that the Oral History Commission has it and I can check that.

ZANDER: I did get the tape and I think I got it from them, and I’m going to remember that name. I hope it comes back to my computer.

BRINSON: You and your husband moved to Arizona and then you were a teacher and principal.

ZANDER: Yes and a counselor. And I didn’t work my first couple of years and nearly went nuts [laughing] not working.

BRINSON: Why not?

ZANDER: Because I was, we used to tease the people in charge of working at Presbyterian Church office places because we said that they hired two for the price of one. The husband was hired and I came automatic. So I did work free and all the wives used to say that’s what happened to them. But I worked on cam--it was a self-contained boarding school for Native American youngsters and they came from all over the country. And my husband was coach and teacher. And the first year I did not work because I did not know the area. And he had gone there a year ahead of me, and I worked in Benham without him because I needed to work ‘cause my sister was in school and she was counting on some of my money to get out of school. So I felt when she was out I could go. So he went and checked it out for a year and came back to get me. And so the first year I did not work. The second year because I had a credential and there was a teacher who had an accident and couldn’t come I filled in. I substituted. In the meantime I began substituting in the city and so in 1959…

BRINSON: The city being Tucson.

ZANDER: The city of Tucson. In 1959 out of that substituting I was hired as a teacher of third graders which was my field. So I worked one year for the school as a substitute. I was a substitute for the whole year and then in 1959 I began working with the city of Tucson Unified School District. So I worked as an elementary school teacher in different settings for twenty of my thirty, for eighteen of my thirty years. And I did a full thirty years. And then I began thinking there was a better way to deal with kids in the classroom. And not going for a counseling degree but taking counseling to assist me in handling behavior problems in the classroom, because I said, “If I’m going to stay in this, I’ve got to handle it better.” And I inched my way to a counseling degree. I was about six units and I was going to lose them because, I think, over a ten year period I had taken all these classes. Somebody said if you just bone up you can get a degree in counseling.

So in 1979 I did that and I wanted a job in counseling elementary children, and at that time the district was not hiring counselors for elementary children unless it was federally connected and there were over five or six hundred, and you were kind of an assistant to the principal. And that wasn’t the kind of counseling job I wanted. So, uhmm, and I didn’t want middle school. So then I went on and got an Administrative Certificate and became a principal but I was a principal the last ten years of my thirty years and three of those years I did counseling with special education students before I became a principal. But it was a good thirty years with Tucson Unified.

BRINSON: I’m interested, uhmm, about when you and your husband who proceeded you, going into an all Native American school community. What was that like for you?

ZANDER: Well, all of the teaching staff was white. There was a white teaching staff except for one family that was Native American and he was the math teacher. His wife was a nurse. And they lived on campus and had befriended my husband a lot when he was there. And we were the first, I think he was the first black teaching family on that staff. So we were new in that way being, they had had other people, African Americans there but not in a teaching capacity in other capacities. Uhmm, but you know, it, working with the students was not a whole lot different working with black students. They, they loved my husband as a coach. Uhmm, they, funny, this solemn humor, the thing that I remember about them is being quieter than African American students. [Laughing] But also lots of humor they loved to tease him. When you come, came as a new family you didn’t get the best housing first time. That happened to all families who came in there. So we lived in the basement of the boys’ dorm. They had a nice apartment down there, but it was low on the ground where little critters could walk in. Centipedes, there were big roaches. No matter how you cleaned it, you could see them. And I’m going, “I’m a good housekeeper.” [Laughing] One day we opened the bottom shelf and there was what looked like a snake in there. So Johnny calls the boys from upstairs to come down to help him get rid of this snake. And so these kids look under there, these are the boys who live upstairs. They go under there and actually the snake is gone; it’s just a snakeskin. And here’s this big robust Mr. Zander, he’s the coach and he’s scared of a snakeskin. [Laughter] Of course I was worried about where is this snake in this apartment.

BRINSON: Right, did you find the snake?

ZANDER: No, we never, did but it was my first experience with a centipede. I was in dressing one Sunday morning for church and I feel these legs going across my feet. And I don’t know how I jumped backwards into the bed from that sitting position. It was a centipede and I’d never seen one. Scared me to death. [Laughing] So we were accepted quite well in the community of Native Americans and had, in fact, look how long that school has been closed 1960, 1960. And just the past three years they have put together a reunion and every year they’ve invited me. Now I wasn’t the teacher. My husband was. But they’ve invited me to be speaker or to sing or to do something at the reunion. And they’re real bothered if I don’t make it. [Laughing]

BRINSON: That’s great.

ZANDER: Yeah, it was a very good…

BRINSON: I’ve heard you mention church any number of times just references here and there. The church is pretty important to you?

ZANDER: Yes, it is. Yes. In fact since retirement my total work now is volunteer with the church. Now I did work with a group called Puma County Interfaith Counsel, which was a church based organization of churches from all over the city working together to improve working conditions and to improve interaction across race lines. And I had gotten so immersed in that, that I was, it was like I didn’t mind being like I had a job but I did mind that my time was usurped all the time. And I had lost myself and I think that’s the tendency when you are first widowed. You just, you either are not in anything or you are in everything. And you don’t build any kind of life for yourself outside of being busy. So I pulled back from that. I liked it and I stay on the edges of it but I had also been a member since going to the Presbyterian schools I have been Presbyterian even though I grew up to about sixteen being Baptist. And I’ve always stayed connected to the church. Uhmm, but my work this past year has been very focused on a committee under social action in the church called Race and the Church. And I have been a member, well, three churches in Tucson. One they had one right on campus where we were and that closed in 1960. And prior to its closing we joined, uhmm, what had been a mission church, a Native American mission church but at the time we were there, it’s the only church I’ve attended that was evenly divided practically white, black, Native American and Mexican American. And at the time there was an African American minister and following him was--are you Presbyterian?

BRINSON: I grew up Presbyterian.

ZANDER: Because I wondered if you heard the name John Fife out of Tucson who did when they were working with Central Americans bringing them into this country. He, he was highly in that work. I used to be a member of that church. I’m now a member for twenty-three years of St. Marks Presbyterian Church. And it’s largely white with very few African Americans, or I think there are a few Central Americans because they’ve been close to working--but Central Americans were largely Catholic. So once they were here and working they really went on to Catholic churches. And, uhmm, I guess my expression to twenty-three years, I’ve been a Session member, I’ve been some of everything that there was to be; and I still felt like the way I said about visiting Berea the interaction and the conversation was still very cautious and very guarded and very, not socially interactive. Even though people were nice and kind and sweet and good to each other. And I was on the Session and we had done a statement. A statement called, oh, it’s a statement that says what the church is about. And the statement was beautiful. And it was put together at the time when all of the hullabaloo in the church was around homosexuality. And so the statement while it was pointed toward showing the liberality of the church toward homosexuality it threw in all of the other liberalities as well, racism, sexism, all of those. And I was the only African American on Session, and we were to sit in front of the community and have them accept this statement that had been written and I couldn’t do it. And I said to my minister, “You know, I’m going to sit in the audience because I can’t go up front with everyone else because I love the statement and it’s beautiful. But you’ve written it as if you’ve accomplished everything accept the homosexuality thing, and I’m here to tell you, you haven’t accomplished it.”

Uhmm, and she said, “Okay.” Our minister was, a man and a woman. And then in the ah, and I was going to sit and be quiet. But one woman in the audience had had her background, her background was from Arkansas. And she was the only one in the audience, and this is a middle to upper grouping of people, and she was the only one in that audience who made the connection between this deal with homosexuality and the same arguments that were used in race were being used, the same ones. And she stood and made that connection, and then my floodgates opened, you know, I wasn’t going to say anything. But there I was on my feet, you know, and having been there for twenty-two years, people listened to what I had to say but they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand my upset. And so at the end of it, it was like “What did we do to Jessie? Aren’t we good to her?”, that kind of a thing. And but there was one woman who I think did, did get it.

And so following that outburst we formed a group of people to look at conversation in the church across race lines. And having the church partnership even though it would not likely get members, uhmm, the idea was to have the interaction that went on. If it resulted in members, fine. If it didn’t, fine. But the partnershipping angle was important because people weren’t comfortable. I said, “I crossed the lines and I’m comfortable in your setting and my setting, and you’re only comfortable in your setting. And you’re still using all European music just as if there is no other music, or poetry or anything else. And I guess I feel like,” I said to them, “that I’ve hit some kind of glass ceiling [sound of hands hitting together] beyond which we aren’t going. And I need to either say that and do something about it or do something about myself. And I’m not meaning you need to change but I need to change.” And so out of that--and I won’t give you all the gory details--but out of that came this past year--and it took it three or four years to fruition--but this past year of a focus on race in the church, and that’s the church’s focus for a two year period. And, uhmm, and lots of things have gone on this year in connection with that as the partnerships are being sought. I don’t know how the next year will go because as I said, you know, I’ve been very centered in this. And if this is going to go it means it’s going to go with or without me. And I need to move off of dead center, and the acceptance of that if it is going to work it has to be wider. So the Session is, has set another year and that came about after the beginning of the first part of the year. So the church is real important to me, and I guess I figure if something like that doesn’t happen in church settings it’s--and the climate is right for it now. All over the country, you know, and Clinton and his, I don’t know what happened to it.

BRINSON: His commission on race?

ZANDER: His commission on race, all of that, lots on TV about it but locally people, it’s still possible to be in the same setting and not really be socially interactive. And I learned that when I came back to work at Berea. My social interaction was largely with the retired people that I knew when I was a student and they were teaching. Now they were retired. So if I went to lunch, or went to dinner, or went to things like that, and if I interacted with black faculty or people who were there they were doing it by themselves. And I thought that was interesting that we’ve jumped from there to now but I didn’t see, uhmm, the interaction being natural and stronger.

BRINSON: Right. We’re talking about the church but I hear us also talking a little bit about your role as an advocate within the church. And I want to take that back a little bit and talk again about the fifties in Kentucky, which was a very segregated society legally.

ZANDER: Right.

BRINSON: And uhmm, and I just wonder if you, in those early days, were involved in any activity? Was there a student NAACP anywhere in your life or?

ZANDER: In Virginia before I came to Berea we had the local NAACP. I think it was not--I didn’t push any boundaries but it brought people together and was sort of like an extension of the church. ‘Cause when you said the church was the center of our lives, growing up the church was the center of my life. Uhmm, not only on Sundays all day [laughing] but Wednesdays and in the summertime when they had summer school or anything like that it happened in the church. It was the place where we were able to meet our teachers who taught us or people in any strata of your life. You didn’t have that division of the low income and the middle and the high because we were all thrown into the same pot regardless of what you owned or had or anything. So we worshipped out of the same church and all across the community, black community. There was a kind of equality that is not the same as I run into in other places. You’ve got this strata of, ummm.

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO

BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE TWO

ZANDER: …and beyond to speak to those issues, because I have a godchild who tells me, “You don’t realize the uniqueness of your experience and you don’t do anything about writing about it, or telling about it, or, or and you don’t realize not everyone has had an experience like the Berea experience”; which put me on the road to feeling comfortable in all situations, in most situations. And being able to be back and forth, you know, black community, white community, mixed communities. And even though we are in 1999 and near 2000 it is still pretty awkward for a lot of people. And there was one of the women in our church who is very active in the church and she said, “Jessie, I’ve never thought of many of the things that have occurred this year. It didn’t dawn on me we had a problem, or that there was anything we needed to do. We see our selves as being very accepting but then we haven’t thrown ourselves into situations where we needed to question that.”

BRINSON: So you recall a youth NAACP in Virginia?

ZANDER: In Virginia.

BRINSON: When you were in Benham, though, Jessie, was there a NAACP that you were aware of?

ZANDER: You know I think there may have been but I was not part of it. Number one, I migrated back and forth to Virginia and was only there short periods of time, and so I didn’t, in the two years that I was there, I didn’t get highly involved in anything.

BRINSON: And then you really moved to Arizona.

ZANDER: And then I moved.

BRINSON: For a period of the late fifties and the sixties where we began to see…

ZANDER: That’s right.

BRINSON: …so much activity in the south.

ZANDER: Yes, from `56.

BRINSON: But during that time though were you in contact with any family, or friends in Kentucky and in Virginia, that you had a sense of what was going on?

ZANDER: There was only one of the Moran daughters lives here in Lexington and I was in touch with her but they weren’t in touch with what was going on. So at a real basic level I’d have to say, no, my knowledge of what was occurring here--I wasn’t in touch with anyone that kept me in tune with that.

BRINSON: Okay.

ZANDER: And you know, that whole period of the fifties and sixties even in Tucson when you were busy building career and doing all of that, uhmm, and while they had NAACP there, it was, it was, it was weak. And in Tucson your black community is very scattered. I mean we live in and among all other people. You have a couple of areas that are largely black but your church affiliation scatters. It’s really no cohesive black community as such in Tucson. And the biggest we have is around the largest black Baptist Church. And if you want to be part of really what’s going on in black Tucson you are part of one of those two churches and no, and see, I’m not. I’m here stuck in this Presbyterian Church. [Laughing] But we’ve made some connections to those churches. One of them this year is one of our partners to work with, and we get an African American read-in together. And so I expect some of that will continue to go on.

BRINSON: But even during the late fifties and the sixties while you weren’t here you, I’m sure you knew from, how did you know about what was happening in the south generally in those periods? From newspapers…?

ZANDER: I only knew from newspapers. I did receive the Crisis, which is the NAACP instrument, a newsmagazine. So from newspapers and television and, and the Crisis, what other publication? I didn’t get, uhmm, I used to get, subscribe to the Big Stone Gap Post which was from here but not a lot of information is in those papers. There was very little in there about African American life in those papers. So I don’t get much of that now.

BRINSON: Who were your heroes and heroines in that whole civil rights era?

ZANDER: Well, of course, Martin Luther King. I learned to appreciate Malcolm X only later. Uhmm, because I think of the vitriolic pronouncements of the Muslim group meant you didn’t always understand that vitriolic hate because you were doing the same thing that you were asking people not to do. And I think those of us who grew up in southwest Virginia or in Appalachia have, and maybe that’s played out when I hear people talking about the kids who come to Berea from the urban south like Alabama some of the places where there was very great activity in the civil rights movement. You had a different temperament among those students than you do among students from southwest Virginia or from Appalachia who, let’s face it, I’ve been a minority all my life. Like in Appalachia I didn’t live where there is a huge black population and our interaction across lines were usually cordial although economically it didn’t benefit African Americans, nor did it educationally or otherwise. But your, your sense of outrage was not as great. And in Tucson that’s played out again with us being three percent of a million people and then scattered throughout the community. Your sense of outrage isn’t as great there either as it would be in Detroit, Michigan or Chicago or Alabama or Louisiana, or some places where you have high black populations. So in a sense a lot of that passed me by.

BRINSON: You mentioned Martin Luther King and Malcolm, what about Muhammad Ali?

ZANDER: Oh, I love Muhammad. Loved to watch him fight. Didn’t think of his, you know, his, his service stance is remarkable. But it was kind of like hindsight that came to me more than knowing it as I went along.

BRINSON: At least one of his biographers, and you may know this, he’s from Louisville.

ZANDER: Yeah, I know, I know.

BRINSON: One of his biographers says that while he wasn’t actually, you know, himself that involved in the fifties and the sixties because he had his own career.

ZANDER: Right.

BRINSON: That he, he served as a catalyst for many people because he was willing to speak out.

ZANDER: Yes, yes. And as you said he could speak out, and he was so good looking, too. [Laughter]

BRINSON: Well, he was.

ZANDER: Some of the women I’m trying to think of, and there’s a woman that I really like, a couple of them. She was the one--help me with the names. She ran for president; the black woman that ran for president.

BRINSON: Shirley.

ZANDER: Chism, Shirley Chism. I just think is, and the other one is, now these are all women-- I met one of them in Washington. I was there--so enamored of her. She’s still serving in the senate. She’s in congress. Where is she?

BRINSON: Eleanor Holmes Norton.

ZANDER: That’s her. I have a picture with her.

BRINSON: Do you really?

ZANDER: Yes.

BRINSON: How did that come about then?

ZANDER: I was visiting my godchild who lives in Washington. I didn’t have children of my own, but there’s a family in Tucson that their mother died early with cancer, and I’ve kind of been close to the girls. And one of them moved to Washington and I visited her once. And she saw to it that I got over to a meeting where Eleanor Holmes Norton was speaking, and afterwards we went up to speak with her and we got, I got a picture with her. So that’s how I got that picture.

BRINSON: Do you know the name Bernice Johnson Reagan?

ZANDER: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: And of course she was one of the original Freedom Singers and has retired now from the Smithsonian.

ZANDER: Yes.

BRINSON: But we have her coming back to keynote a conference next February.

ZANDER: Oh, you do.

BRINSON: A Civil Rights Symposium and she’s real, she’s going to focus on the role of music in the movement but…

ZANDER: Oh, that’s important.

BRINSON: …also talk about some of her personal experiences.

ZANDER: And who’s the woman that works for children.

BRINSON: Children’s Defense Fund.

ZANDER: That one. I have her books and everything but my mind is leaving me. I see her face in front of me. She’s a real spokeswoman for all children and for African American children in particular.

BRINSON: Yes. I can’t think of it either but we will think of it when we finish.

ZANDER: Yeah, we’ll think of her. Yeah, those are wonderful women. Uhmm, and of course, Martin’s wife continues to keep him alive, Martin Luther King’s wife continues to keep him alive. One of the women that was my role model before this came along was Mary McLeod Bethune. Do you know that name?

BRINSON: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm, how did you get interested in her?

ZANDER: In high school, in high school one of the things this principal, this C. H. Shorter would do, he would get films for us so that we could watch films of other, of African Americans. And one of these films was on Mary McLeod Bethune and I remember she was a rough looking woman. And I remember when it came on these kids went, “Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee” just laughed, “ugly” we were sitting around doing childlike things about her. And I remember him stopping that film and really, really talking to us. And following that I read everything I could find out about her and thought, “What a woman, yeah.”

BRINSON: Do you think they laughed because she was a woman?

ZANDER: No. They laughed because they thought she was not good looking. The superficial kind of thing that we, you know, like your hair is ugly and all of that kind of thing. Yeah, that was it, yeah. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Is there anything else you would like to add about all of this before we wrap it up? We may continue it another time. [Laughter]

ZANDER: What I’d like to do is show you what I brought.

BRINSON: Okay, all right.

ZANDER: That may trigger you in some way.

BRINSON: We’ll just leave the tape recorder on, if that’s okay. And I’ll move around here.

ZANDER: Let’s see, I need to get the key. This I found for five dollars. The Arizona/Berea Alumni group, they’ve been meeting for ten years now.

BRINSON: How big of a group is that?

ZANDER: Actually in Arizona when I did a, when we started ten years ago there were eighty-six graduates in the state of Arizona. The largest number of them being of course in Phoenix area. Some in Sun City because people come to retire and in Tucson. We average, uhmm, thirty or forty people but they’re not all graduates. Because we cater to friends and people who give to the college or just want to know about it.

BRINSON: Oh, I see.

ZANDER: This guy came to speak at our last meeting.

BRINSON: O now I’ve heard him recently.

ZANDER: Well, they flew him out for us.

BRINSON: Well, he’s really good, isn’t he?

ZANDER: Isn’t he something? And this is the letter we sent out back to our people after they had, that was our listing who came to our meeting. And then we let them, we thanked them. We tried to encourage them to come the next year. But this was the tenth anniversary celebration, and so we said to the college, we’d like something special.

BRINSON: And that’s this year 1999.

ZANDER: Yeah, that’s this year. So they sent us ( ) and that was nice.

BRINSON: Yes, he’s good. I wonder if you have ever met Ann Beard Grundy who was at Berea but she was there about ten years after you.

ZANDER: Ann Beard Grundy, Grundy is, but that’s a common name, isn’t it?

BRINSON: Right. That’s her husband’s name so her name was Ann Beard.

ZANDER: Ann Beard.

BRINSON: And she lives here in Lexington now. But her father had been, she’s from Birmingham. Her father had been the minister of the Baptist Church there where the bombing occurred. Although he was not, he had died shortly and stepped down, and there was a new minister there. You haven’t met her through any of the Berea reunions?

ZANDER: No, I haven’t. This is our committee, right here. I brought this for the alumni association. That’s, these, this woman and her husband graduated in `49, and she and I both taught in the system. She planned to come with her husband but he had a heart attack just before we left and so--it was their fiftieth year. He’s a trustee who winters in Arizona. So when he’s there we call him our consultant. I think he really helped us get Hosan there. This, this woman lives in Sun Lakes where we hold our meeting, because she is retired and they have those places you can have meetings and it is centrally located. And Barbara was a development person for the college. She just retired a few years ago and lives in Sun City. And Terry works for the newspaper office. And her husband is a minister, and I’m putting his name to receive an award as a non-Berean who gives his time to Berea. So we’re going to submit his name. And then this young man lives in Mesa and was graduate of the school. That’s our committee. And these pictures, I just love this because when I did come back for that thirty year reunion, no, I think this is later than that. That’s, this was the president and his wife when I was there, Hutchins, President Hutchins. And when I came back to receive an award there…

BRINSON: Now is that you?

ZANDER: That’s me. [Laughing]

BRINSON: My goodness, you’ve lost some weight since then, wow.

ZANDER: I was rollie-pollie. [Laughter] I had more hair, too. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Yeah, you do, you do.

ZANDER: And this is when I came back for an award. He had died by then.

BRINSON: Oh, that’s nice, yeah.

ZANDER: That’s just a copy of that, of her. When I, that same, yeah because I’m wearing the same dress. You remember I told you about the minister’s wife at the end of the street who was going to give her house?

BRINSON: Right.

ZANDER: And encouraged me to do the exhibit. That’s her. So when I was here receiving my award these people came to be with me. She was one of them who was with me when I graduated.

BRINSON: Oh, that’s nice.

ZANDER: In 1954, so she’s been with me all through. And this was my sister-in-law who has since died and her husband. And that’s my sister. That’s my sister and my Aunt Polly that I’m going to see. She is now an Alzheimer patient in Duffield, Virginia. So, I’m going to be seeing her. And this was at that same, where in the alumni building they have a picture of my aunt and my grandmother.

BRINSON: Yeah, you told me about that, right.

ZANDER: And so while I was here working they took a more recent picture. So this picture was with both pictures. But this is me at graduation time.

BRINSON: Oh, look at that.

ZANDER: I have one with my family here somewhere. I’ll show you that one.

BRINSON: That’s nice. I’d like to get a copy of that.

ZANDER: You’d like that one.

BRINSON: Yeah. I’m also looking for materials that I can put into an exhibit, a statewide exhibit. And that would be nice because it is earlier.

ZANDER: Yeah, this is the early one and I’ve got one of her with my grandma and one with somebody else. Dean Allen, I believe it is. That would be a really good one with Dean Allen because she was the beloved dean of women.

BRINSON: Do you have that? [Sound of audio going off and then back on.]

ZANDER: That was not opened up and dealt with. And that may be because people didn’t know how to do that, or feel comfortable doing that. And I think that same lid on it which means you can just accept, we’re open, look at our history. But it, it, it doesn’t give people the opportunity to really talk about what they need to talk about it. And I think that may be true. This is, this tells about who these people are and why I was receiving the award. I was recommended by Pros, Lou Pros and this was her recommendation piece for me to receive that award. And I thought that may be something you’d be interested in.

BRINSON: I would actually. Maybe we can get a copy of it.

ZANDER: Her name is Mary Lou Pros and she wrote this as the reason for me to get that award.

BRINSON: And again, is this something that I can borrow and mail back to you /

ZANDER: Sure, sure. I guess it was the service award is what that was.

BRINSON: Okay.

ZANDER: This was from John Stevenson that tells about the award. I don’t know how important that is. And this is just the announcement of it, so, it tells the same thing that this one.

BRINSON: Okay. This is going to be the most helpful, I think.

ZANDER: About repeal of the Day Law. She taught two years in segregated school, I think that may be in there.

BRINSON: Yes.

ZANDER: What else have I got here? This is that same speaking time. This is a picture of that first student I told you about that I thought.

BRINSON: Elizabeth.

ZANDER: Elizabeth White, that’s not her married name. That’s her original name. This is back stage when we were talking after the speaking was over. But that’s a side view of her. And these were just people attending. My aunt [laughing] with her hat on, and this couple, this is a couple here and their daughter teaches at Berea in the Home Economics Department.

BRINSON: Oh, really?

ZANDER: And the husband died and the daughter and mom live together. Now her name, her name, her name.

BRINSON: I wonder. Do you have any idea since she is African American how many African American faculty there are at Berea?

ZANDER: Now?

BRINSON: Today.

ZANDER: Okay, there’s a guy who goes out and brings in students, works with them. His family and they’ve been there several years. They were there when I was working there in 1990. I can get those names. They are not coming to me right now.

BRINSON: Well, I’m just curious.

ZANDER: Let’s see that’s one, that’s two, they both teach there because she has her doctorate. He was working on his.

BRINSON: I know there is a historian, a blind gentleman.

ZANDER: Yeah.

BRINSON: Dr. Charles?

ZANDER: Charles…

BRINSON: Cleo.

ZANDER: Cleo Charles, Charles is his last name. Cleo Charles, he’s still there. His wife died. He’s still there. In fact he did a little interview with me once, you know, kind of like this. But I don’t know if he ever did anything with it.

BRINSON: I think it’s in the library.

ZANDER: Is it? And then there is one of the girls left, Betty, and she’s receiving an award. She left and went to the University of Kentucky and I saw on here where she’s receiving an award. I want to try to go to that award presentation. Betty Hyatt Olean, `69, she’s a graduate of the school. Came back and worked there and then went on to the University of Kentucky. And now they’re giving her the Alumni Award of Special Merit.

BRINSON: Do you know what her area of expertise was?

ZANDER: I think she was in science. I believe she was in science.

BRINSON: Okay.

ZANDER: There’s Dr. Menafee. After the speaking was over we had a little talk time with my family. The people I knew best came and met my family. And that’s Dr. Tredennick. This one has died since. Oh, here’s one with my, that’s Dr. Tredennick. That’s a good one of her. And then that’s John. This one of my mother, my grandmother you have to have, have to do that one.

BRINSON: This is your grandmother?

ZANDER: My grandmother the one who totally reared me.

BRINSON: Right.

ZANDER: And when I graduated, she was the one who said, “Now when you go to school”; this is the proudest picture, not because of me but because of her. She’s a…

BRINSON: I’d love to get one made of that.

ZANDER: Yeah.

BRINSON: What happened to your mother? Did she die?

ZANDER: She died at thirty-five.

BRINSON: From tuberculosis?

ZANDER: Uh-hmm, at thirty-five and I went--it was the strangest feeling at her service--I mean I looked kind of like this woman, but I don’t know who she is because I don’t remember her at all. I was three years old when she left. And so she reared us both my sister and me. Uhmm, she lived long enough to visit me in Arizona. She died in her eighties. She did domestic work her whole life. She was just an angel.

BRINSON: I’m sure she was very proud of you.

ZANDER: Oh, this is a famous picture of that graduation. Here’s Sadie Jones, the same gal, here she is later when I did the speech, that’s her. Mama, I called her Mama. My husband’s mother and Mrs. Edna Moore, who lived on the street. I have a story about Edna Moore. We’re standing in front of Anna…

BRINSON: She lived on your street where?

ZANDER: In Appalachia, Virginia.

BRINSON: Okay. Okay.

ZANDER: And I have a story about her because she didn’t ever have any children, and the whole community--Jessie’s in college, she needs this and that and the other. So I remember writing back to her and telling her I needed a girdle. [Laughter – Brinson] She’s sending me money for a girdle. So she sends me money for a girdle, and I must have forgotten I’d asked for a girdle because a few months later I was asking for a girdle. She said, “Honey, your butt got teeth in it?” [Laughter] “Your butt got teeth in it?” [Laughter] This is a famous picture of a real important woman in my life, Edna Moore was her name. Priscilla Zander, she just died last year in her nineties.

BRINSON: And so she lived in Virginia.

ZANDER: In Virginia, too, see, John and I grew up in the same hometown.

BRINSON: Right.

ZANDER: His dad, we called him a jack-leg preacher. You don’t have that on tape do you? [Laughing]

BRINSON: Actually it’s going.

ZANDER: [Laughter] That is he just preached on the side. He worked on the railroad and then, and then, ( ). And this is grandma earlier.

BRINSON: I was going to say that looks like her.

ZANDER: But she was an angelic woman. I tell you nobody would have done what she did. Few people would have done that. But she did. Uh-hmm, yeah. So you say what you’d like to have.

BRINSON: All right.

ZANDER: Otherwise I’ll just keep going.

BRINSON: Well, actually I want either you or me and I’ll do it if you like. I’d like to take this and get a duplicate made of it.

ZANDER: Okay.

BRINSON: If you, let me turn this…

END OF INTERVIEW