Oral History Interview with Ann Beard Grundy, June 23, 1999

BETSY BRINSON: This is a continuing interview with Ann Beard Grundy. The interviewer is Betsy Brinson and it takes place in Ann’s home in Lexington, Kentucky. Okay, Ann, thank you for meeting with me again today. What I want to do is go back to a couple of things that we talked about earlier just to sort of clarify a little bit in my mind.

ANN BEARD GRUNDY: Okay.

BRINSON: And then I want to talk a little bit about where we left off to the present, so.

GRUNDY: Okay.

BRINSON: Uhmm, one of the things that we talked about earlier was when you were at Berea and the Baptist, the Baptist Student Union [laughter because it is Black Student Union, not Baptist.].

GRUNDY: You know they resented that. Uh-huh, they went crazy. [Laughing]

BRINSON: I know. I was just reading the transcripts last night, and I was chuckling about that, well, anyway, the BSU organized the buses down to the rally in Montgomery. We talked about that. And that was the rally as I recall that was the end of the Selma March.

GRUNDY: The Selma to Montgomery March, uh-hmm, in front of the state capitol.

BRINSON: To Montgomery and then the passage of the `65 Voting Rights Act and what not. And as I recall also Viola…

GRUNDY: Louisel, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: Right, was killed in all of that. And I wanted to go back and just talk about the trip back from Montgomery to Berea. What was, what was the conversation like.? Were you all too exhausted from all of it or were you--you were aware, I’m sure of the violence that had gone on in the preceding weeks? Uhmm, did you know about Viola at that point?

GRUNDY: I’m not sure if we did, but we certainly knew going down to Montgomery to this rally was a major experience, and we knew that it was dangerous. Remember I told when we got to the bus station in Birmingham that I had the nerve to call my mother. You know, I think that even to this day that that took twenty years off my mother’s life. [Laughing] We certainly knew it was dangerous. So coming back, you know, I have to like go back in my mind and try to relive those moments. On one hand I know we felt a great sense of relief that we had made it thus far without, you know, any incident. The other thing was that I think we felt very proud of ourselves, because you know, we had to nudge and push. It was not like the whole student body and Berea College just said, “Oh, this is a wonderful idea. Go on.” It was against some odds. So we felt very proud that we had pushed that moment because I think that we recognized that symbolically it was about pushing something else. That if we could do this, that would encourage us to do some other things. Other things that pushed Berea College, you know. So coming back I can remember personally, I used to keep a journal. I remember writing in a journal. I remember being very quiet, and I remember sitting with my friends Gwen and, uhmm, and some of the other black students, those of us who were real tight with each other; and just sort of talking over things. Who did we see? Who was this person? Why was this person significant? You know everybody in the world was there at that rally. And just kind of reliving the day. I distinctly remember that, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: Well, and, of course, all of that really culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

GRUNDY: Right.

BRINSON: And it actually led me to think a little bit about asking you about whether your parents had ever voted?

GRUNDY: Oh, my parents had for, my parents voted in Mississippi.

BRINSON: In Mississippi.

GRUNDY: My parents went to Birmingham in 1944 but they voted in Mississippi, yes.

BRINSON: What barriers, if any, were there for them in voting? I mean they were well educated so literacy was not the issue.

GRUNDY: Literacy was not an issue.

BRINSON: There probably was a poll tax of some sort.

GRUNDY: I remember vaguely my father talking about having to pay a poll tax. My mother had less of a problem doing it, but her father voted. Grandpa Isam who was maybe born thirty years after the Emancipation voted. He owned his own land. I mean he was a very progressive man given his time. So those kinds of things as I grew up I knew that my parents always did. You know that’s right in line, by the way, with things like reading a daily newspaper, being on top of current events and stuff. So yes, my parents both voted. Interestingly enough, of course, they were early republicans, I know, that Eisenhower thing. But most black voters were then. I remember thinking, looking back on republicans but it was different. I understand. [Laughing]

BRINSON: But even though they voted they were in a minority in terms of the black community obviously?

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm, now when they moved to Birmingham remember I told you my parents were very conscious about moving to Birmingham. They saw that as a progressive step, that Birmingham had a more active black community and they liked that. They were very proud of that.

BRINSON: Okay. I want to talk about how you define resistance for yourself. And when I talk about resistance, I’m talking about resistance to authority, to governmental structure, to oppression. And as I went back and I reread the transcripts there were a number of occasions in which I would say that you defied authority, that you resisted. For example, when you all with the BSU used the coded language to send the message out to people. When you were fired at the YMCA for encouraging young people to challenge the school curriculum. When you were punished at Berea by the hall council for sort of violating the lateness rules in the dorm.

GRUNDY: And not being a good Christian [laughing], real proud of that one.

BRINSON: Right. When you were fired by Galen Martin for challenging the agenda of the Commission. Then you also mentioned you and Chester have phone cards issued by the Human Rights Commission.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: How did you and Chester use these cards?

GRUNDY: To stay in contact with, remember we were recent college graduates and in the context of college you’re kind of in an unreal world meaning that you look around and everyone is twenty-one. You know everyone is abreast of perky, you know that whole thing. And no one told me this but the moment you graduate from college unless you go on to grad school it’s like you find yourself in a real minority just in terms of age. I mean the work world, most people around you are not twenty-one years old. Most people around you haven’t attended college and have these similar experiences. So Chester and I used the phone cards to stay in touch with all of our classmates who by this time were literally all over the world. I remember John Fleming went to the Peace Corps in Malawi, you know. [Laughing] we were kind of keeping him up to speed, you know, we were conscious of something beyond just a personal agenda. You know, I’m sure Galen figured that out at some point.

BRINSON: So as a communication network but you, well, talk about that political agenda that might have been part of the network.

GRUNDY: Well, we knew that if we were serious about what we called the struggle that it couldn’t stop with graduation in June of 1968. That we had to figure out ways to be of value in whatever situations we found ourselves. So some of us were in grad school. Some of us were working. Some had moved back home. Some had moved away from home. And we talked about grassroots organizations, community groups. In particular in Louisville I kind of attached myself, kind of almost as an adult mentor, believe it or not, just because I was out of school, to the BSU at the University of Louisville. And it was in that capacity by the way that I began to meet as an adult, as a student, you know, you’re kind of one level. But I met as an adult people like Don Lee Haki Madhubuti, Mahalankarenga because they would come to campus. The BSU would invite them but nobody had a car. Well, I was a working adult by this time so I would do the airport runs, take care of the lodging, the food and stuff like that. So I saw myself in a real supportive, you know, kind of role doing that. Uhmm…

BRINSON: So the phone cards were used, really not for the purpose that they were issued.

GRUNDY: Oh, no, oh, no. Well, let me back up, if we were to get an honest here and ask a state government what was the purpose of these phone cards? I think we would be hard pressed to come up with, I mean really, you know, state government is notorious just for…

BRINSON: Right. But you used them for a bigger purpose here.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm, copy machines and everything else, [laughing] you know, whatever you could, you know we called it liberation in those days. Liberate something, oh, yeah, pencils, pens. I was saying that that was a rule of thumb and we didn’t have to in the sixties and seventies we didn’t have to say it too much. It was a tacit understanding that every black person, no matter what his or her state of life, whether or not you were janitor. In fact, quite often the janitors and the maids were the most useful because they had access to resources, you know. But at any rate we had a rule of thumb that said, no matter what your job was that you ought to every day figure out a way to do something for the cause. And that was kind of interesting. Sometimes we would encounter, I can remember, for example, coming to Lexington--which was like virgin territory for anything called movement other than bowels or something--[Laughing] and kind of suggesting that to people. And people, “Why, why, why that’s stealing. I couldn’t do that on my job.” So it’s been a real struggle to get people to say, “Look, you’re a little secretary over here and I know you sit in the middle of this floor and everybody comes in but they are not watching you that much. You can go in and run off a hundred sheets for this meeting we’re having next week, this rally. Or you, pencils, people throw away pencils, just pick them up.” So we, we understood that our jobs were just a means to a bigger end if you know what I’m saying so whatever it was phones, pencils, pens, paper, mimeographs, whatever it was, we tried to use them. I would, I would go a step further and say [laughing] and I don’t think my friend would mind my saying this, I worked, after I worked at the Commission on Human Rights I worked in a community agency and one of the things that we did was that we had a community kitchen much like the Black Panthers and was the first in Louisville and it doesn’t exist anymore. But we would sometimes have two or three hundred kids come there every day just for a hot meal and we were real conscious--in fact Haki came down one time to help us have this meal. I mean we were real conscious of whole foods, you know, broccoli, whole wheat bread. We baked our own bread and stuff like that. And, but the director of the center, a lot of time, we were an United Way agency and of course the black United Way agencies didn’t get anything like the white Y’s and stuff like that. We are definitely second class citizens through their eyes. But quite often we would go to these city and regional United Way meetings and our director, we were all sitting around the room, we might be there all day. So and they would get in his car to go back to the center, you know, to go home or something like that. And we would all sit there every time in just total amazement after we would get back in the car our director would take knives, forks, [laughter] peppers, salt shakers out of his pocket. We were going to go. He said, “Look, we need them more then they do at the center.” And he thought nothing about it. It was like, yeah, this is what I’m supposed to do.

BRINSON: Well, that’s clearly a great example of resistance. And I just finished reading a book recently called Race Rebel, which is actually, comes out of a look at the Montgomery bus boycott. And the historian gives examples of resistance there of people who sat in white seats anyway or moved the bus boards or would, you know, spit and holler sometimes at the bus driver, or whatever.

GRUNDY: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: And so what I’m looking and I’ve certainly found some good examples of resistance that you offered to me earlier, I’m wondering if there are others that either that you yourself have been involved in or you know of other examples. And I’m also looking to know whether women might resist differently from men.

GRUNDY: Yes and the reason is, it’s taken me a long time to come to terms with this, not that racism is any easier on black women than it is on black men. I mentioned to you once I think, the works of Francis Cress Welsing. Did I mention her name? W E L S I N G, she’s a psychologist, psychiatrist, Dr. Welsing, and she’s an older woman. But her major research has been why do white people act the way they act? And you can imagine, and as she said, “Asking this question out loud kicks into gear the original computer which is the brain.” Asking that question out loud what begins to happen, if you are sincere about asking that question, is that the brain begins to look for answers. You know, why, why, why? So as a young child she was born during the days of lynching or the end of lynching. Born in Chicago, went to Antioch College, and then when on to med. school. Her father was a doctor and her grandfather. So she said she grew up in an environment where asking questions was not out of the ordinary. You know a lot of time, especially Christianity you know, you’re not supposed to question. You’re supposed to have the faith of a mustard seed. So it’s very difficult to this day, I believe for many African Americans to really say, “Why is it that everywhere we go in the world, we’re on the bottom? We go to church more than anybody else. We give more money than anybody else.” [Phone rings]

But Dr. Welsing early on I heard her and in hindsight it helped me to understand a lot of things that I simply had never understood and I’m still struggling with. But Dr. Welsing raised the question to her father and grandfather, she said, “Look I can understand why if white people hate black people that they would lynch blacks.” See, I can understand that, you know, okay, I’m going to kill you. “But why would you also castrate?” She was saying that that’s symbolic behavior. That is about something, and she was a young child when she raised that question. And then her, when she graduated from high school her father said, “Well, Francis what would you like for a high school graduation gift?” And she knew that according to the debutante rules of the day she was suppose to say, “Oh, give me a car” or something like that. Instead she said, “Daddy, send me to Germany.” And she didn’t even know why then she was requesting that and she did go to Germany. In hindsight she could say, now I understand. I wanted to go to a place where relatively speaking I could have some objectivity and observe a people, meaning the people who identify themselves as Jews, who live in an oppressive environment. What does that, how does that impact on their behavior? And of course what she saw was a wide range of things just as she would see in African American people, denial.

BRINSON: So she would have been in Germany pre-World War II.

GRUNDY: Actually, post, I’m thinking. She would have been in Germany, maybe, right after the war, early fifties. I think Francis Welsing is almost seventy years old. So that gives you kind of a clue. But it had, it gave her a chance to study, kind of objectively, you can imagine being black in Germany during that time what she must have dealt with. But any rate to get back to response to your question, what Dr. Welsing suggests is that, she said once that, “If someone came to her and said,’ Francis we will give you all of the money that we could possibly come up with if you would exchange places on the planet with a black man ‘and she said, keep you money.”

She said, “The reason is that the forces of racism must attack the black male first. Must come down on the male and the woman to a lesser degree now.” Now I know black feminists can sometimes get out of control about that. That’s not to say that racism has a lesser affect upon us. But the point that she’s trying to make is that global white supremacy, racism is more threatened by the black male than the black female. And the reason is obvious. It has to do with the ability to force sex. And in her work, she reminds us that the white population is less than ten percent of the world’s population--less than ten percent. Sometimes with my students I’ll say, “Watch the parade of nations during the Olympics. It’s an eye opener. Everybody is colored.” You know you’ve the U.S., you’ve Germany, you’ve Canada, everybody is colored, you know. For kids that’s something because you get this feeling that white people are just huge in numbers and stuff like that.

“Well,” she says, “Once you understand that then you understand what the issue is. The issue is not to make money. The issue is not all of these other things that we used to think as children. The issue is genetic survival.” And if we listen to people like Bob Bar and Trent Lott and them, they say it.

BRINSON: But how does that, take that a step further if you would. How does that impact the difference in resistance between women and men?

GRUNDY: Without even that understanding, growing up as a child and as a college student, without even that kind of intellectual understanding of how racism operates, I was already aware of the fact that as a female I could do things and get by with things that my brothers--I have five brothers--could not possibly get by with. Even as a married woman there have been many occasions--because the natural response of a male in many situations--I mean the very definition of being the head of a household or being the father is to protect the household. But when you recognize that in the act of protecting the household that you are endangering your own life, well black women understand that. And many times, uhmm, in the BSU or what have you, the BSU presidents were early on almost all males but a lot of the dealings were done by black women. Because when we went to these white presidents, college presidents they weren’t as threatened by me. So I could say things. I could go off. I could lose it and they would almost discount it, oh, that’s just the woman. Well, that’s what you think. Of course we learned from people like Fannie Lou Hamer, don’t ever discount a black woman. The point I’m trying to make is that black women, even as students, we knew that we could push the envelope a lot more, a lot more. And we didn’t see ourselves as stepping in for black men, as defending black men. We saw ourselves carrying out tasks that we had to do and our men could not do. And you know to a larger extent, of course, that is precisely what is going on in 1999. And black men, I know, struggle with that; because there’s always the question of when do I take the stand that I know I ultimately I need to take the stand. You know, ultimately it is about black men and white men if you know what I’m saying kind of.

BRINSON: Okay. Good.

GRUNDY: Does that make any sense at all?

BRINSON: Yeah, that’s a good, good, that’s helpful. Uhmm, well, out of the Civil Rights Movement came the Women’s Movement, uhmm, certainly contributed to it.

GRUNDY: Came a whole lot of other things.

BRINSON: Right.

GRUNDY: Grey whites, everything. [Laughing]

BRINSON: I wondered how you felt about the Women’s Movement. Were you involved in any way?

GRUNDY: You know, [laughter] you know at some point, I remember hearing Haki speak very early on and hearing him talk about being into position and being mature enough to make progressive compromises. Don’t always just, you know, was it on Mayberry? Ernest T. Bass just chunks those rocks at things. Don’t always stand outside the house just chunking rocks, you know. All of that meaning, that I knew that for political reasons and even for issues of self-development, you know, whatever I thought about myself. That there are certain things with which I ought to always be, not so much in har… I should be supportive of certain things. Just like I was talking about the Hispanic Center. No matter what, even if I ever thought ugly thoughts about Latino men and women, I would never not support this center because I see that struggle as an aspect of my struggle. So it’s like, it’s like breathing, I can’t help but do it. Uhmm, the women’s movement early on, ‘cause we were there, I remember how, you know. I just had the distinct impression early on that it was not something that I wanted to personally involve myself in. In fact I will go a step further the very few black women I personally knew who were involved were women who at that time were flirting with lesbianism. I knew that, you know. I was quite often accused of being a lesbian. I mean look at me. My short haircut, you can imagine what goes on. Go into a store, “May I help you sir?” and stuff like that. And I can only remember, Chester and I talked about this once between UK and Berea maybe two or three black women all together, you know, that we ever knew participated in that. We knew that that was not a place for us, and the reason was obvious. The Women’s Movement then nor now has really dealt with race. So I, you know, I, you have to choose your battles. I was not going to go to a Women’s Movement meeting and sit there and explain to a bunch of white women, you know, why, yes, I understand you know this particular dilemma but yes, for me race is the overwhelming thing for me right. You know, it just got old. So I just didn’t burn up my energy unnecessarily. You know, that issue still has not been addressed?

BRINSON: No, you’re right.

GRUNDY: It’s still a huge gap.

BRINSON: I’ve certainly been part of groups, the National Women’s Study Association which tried unsuccessfully.

GRUNDY: I think white women just don’t get, have no way of understanding the realities of black women no matter what their status in life might be. It’s just another whole world. And that we don’t hate men, by the way. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Well, and I don’t think most white women hate men either.

GRUNDY: That early, that was those early stages, it got to be real ugly, oh, yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: I want to talk a little bit about some of your professional activities with the Lexington NIA Day Camp.

GRUNDY: NIA Day Camp, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: And Central Kentucky Re-Ed School, what does Re-Ed stand for?

GRUNDY: Re-education, uhmm, it started out as a program of the Bluegrass Mental Health, Mental Retardation Board. And then it hit money problems, and at that point it became daytime Fayette County Public School, and then evening it was a state facility, a residential facility for children who have been identified as emotionally disturbed.

BRINSON: Okay. And then more recently the Bluegrass Aspendale Teen Center.

GRUNDY: Teen Center, yes.

BRINSON: All of these sound like they involve working with children in some way?

GRUNDY: Yes, they do but I have to be very, very honest and say the NIA Day Camp piece is something that Chester and I developed after coming to Lexington. Well he had been here, you know, had left and come back, but when you come back as an adult sometimes you have more mature eyes. And it was just an astonishment as we began to see just to address issues of quality of life. And we knew that for many African American people in this community the issue of knowledge of personal history or one’s race history and the whole issue of travel.

I mean, I was just shocked when I first moved here. Chester and I were, you know, were newlyweds; and I’m from Alabama and stuff so it was routine for us to be on the road, go to Cincinnati, go to Louisville, go to Birmingham, go some place, you know. And you go to work on Monday or you see people and they’ll say, “Well, what did you do this weekend?” “Went to Cincinnati.” “You went to Cincinnati!” [Laughing] And it just really started to hit me in terms of, gee, people don’t get out of here. So this became kind of a personal passion on our part in terms of teaching history as we travel.

So NIA Day Camp has developed into an African history and culture study travel experience, and we do this once a year. One year we were foolish enough, not foolish enough, we were insane though to take about eighty-three students and we did a whole study. The unit that year was the Underground Railroad. So we studied at UK. We, you know, did all the stuff, did the narratives, did everything. And then before right at the end of that session we got Parks and Rec to lock us into, uhmm, the park out there on Richmond Road. I can’t think of it. Jacobson Park and uhmm, and we were there all day long and until about two or three o’clock in the morning. What we were doing was recreating the boundaries of slavery. And that was a little difficult to do so we had to do a lot of symbolic stuff.

For example the major activity that particular day and we thought this would go fairly quickly. It turned out to be the activity. There were two trees and we tied between that tree a very sturdy rope and we said to the students, these are the boundaries. This is the plantation system that you’re looking at here. We have eighty something students here, boys, girls. We have young--old. The youngest was five years old. The others were eighteen, some were eighteen. You know big, little, some two hundred pound girls, some fifty pound boys, you get like a spectrum of the community.

BRINSON: And what age range are these children?

GRUNDY: Five to eighteen, okay. And people have asked why do you do that? I say because that’s real. Given the nature of slavery there were no special conditions created for black children. Black children worked as hard as blacks, so we like that when we travel and study. And it forces responsibility on older students. Other things, I’m not crazy. I don’t want to go on the road with fifty sixteen year olds. Am I nuts? You know I have teenagers. I would be just asking for trouble. But at any rate…

BRINSON: So you’ve been doing this since 1984?

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: What does N I A stand for?

GRUNDY: Nia is a key Swahili word which means purpose.

BRINSON: Nia and it’s spelled?

GRUNDY: N I A.

BRINSON: Oh, okay.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, and it is also by the way when Karenga started Kwanza, and there are seven principles of Kwanza. That is one of the seven principles, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: I was looking at capital NIA thinking it must be …

GRUNDY: An acronym.

BRINSON: Ok. Ok.

GRUNDY: Somebody did, by the way, when they first saw that, I don’t know who it was. Somebody downtown because we did pour libations at Cheapside Street for all the ancestors who had been brought into slavery there. And somebody thought NIA stood for Niggers in Action. We were told that.

BRINSON: Someone, speaking of Cheapside, someone told me recently they heard that there actually was underground.

GRUNDY: Oh, yes, Chester and I have seen it.

BRINSON: Have you?

GRUNDY: Chester and I have been there. When we, you know how Main Street is one way?

BRINSON: Yeah.

GRUNDY: This was many years ago when students from Oberlin College walked--actually literally walked one of the paths of the Underground Railroad. So they started at southern Tennessee and they walked all the way back to Oberlin College. And one day I was at work, and somebody said, “Ann, there are a lot of black students out walking around.” And I ran out there and there they were and they were dressed in the ways that people would have dressed in that period, you know. And you know, so I said, and they were meeting at First Baptist Church which was then on Short Street, the first African Baptist. So I went down there; called my husband, we got some food together; we got, you know, rallied some support. At the time I was teaching at Re-Ed. We were going swimming that morning and I was, “Oh, come over and swim with us. They can use the showers, whatever you need to do.” Which, of course, in the tradition is precisely what one would do if one were, you know, a supporter of the Underground Railroad. But at the time that they were here we decided next day to walk the next few miles with them…

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE

BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

GRUNDY: …were there and we had Tulani, my sister and her daughter. And she said, “Chester,” said she knew who Chester was, said “Come here I want to show you something.” And she took us down from the floor of her beauty shop down to the basement, and I believe to a floor below that and they were like, how do you say, dirt rooms. You know they have dirt floors and, you know, clay walls and stuff. And we stood there under her shop and looked over, under the shop next door to her. She said, “Look these rooms go all the way down, and there is an exit right there on Cheapside Street.” And she told us that her understanding of it was that these were the holding stations for enslaved Africans who were eventually going to be sold on Cheapside. But we saw them. We really, really did.

BRINSON: When you say that when you teach, what do you teach?

GRUNDY: Well, at the time that I was at Re-Ed, uhmm, I was supposed to teach a number of things. But I want to go on record and say this. My experiences at Re-Ed were not very happy ones, and interestingly enough I stayed there over twenty years. But I considered that a progressive compromise on my part. Now, I would say different, like, Ann, get the hell out. You know, you paid your price, you know, you paid your dues. But I stayed because my children were young. It was not the most demanding job in the world and it gave me energy so that when I came home, you know, us mothers do this all day long. You don’t want to work at a factory all day and then have to come home and deal with children. So I saw my primary job as raising my children. The other thing is by working in a child center situation it allowed my brain to function and always be creative. It was during that time by the way that NIA Day Camp developed and literally, and you know, Re-Ed doesn’t like to hear this but I was so bored, you know, that I had time in my mind to develop this concept of NIA Day Camp and every summer to pull it off on my vacation time. But what I mean by those were not happy years and I know now, well, the school was not designed for black children. It was a state school. I mean it was a state facility for children who were emotionally disturbed.

My husband always said, and I think he’s quite accurate, he said, It’s for emotionally disturbed staff members.” I can think of, I cannot think of very many adults who work there, and I was there over twenty years, who were, didn’t have major baggage. You know, issues of sexual identity, issues of, it just went on, and on, and on. So it was kind of a crazy place. It had this hippie kind of connotation for the early years and then it quote tried to go straight at some point. And the straighter it got the more right-winged it got. So my last five years there were pure hell. I mean it was just horrible. All sorts of things were said about me. I know my reputation is not great there but, uhmm, but those are the politics and I just…

BRINSON: And what about Bluegrass Aspendale Teen Center?

GRUNDY: Well, I, in 1995 while I was still at Re-Ed, uhmm, uhmm, we had a kind of a change in administration. The director of the program had gotten married and had a child and she wanted to take a leave, you know, so she did that. While she was gone the state put in an acting director; and you know how leadership means everything? This man was just the right flavor for people who, to me, had the wrong agenda. For a long time I was the only black professional staff member there and as the years went by a few more came. But when this man came on board it’s like all the forces just kind of came up out of the ground. I found myself, for example, being spied on, my phone calls listened to. One of the little secretaries there called me in one day she says, “Ann, don’t have anything in your office.” I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Don’t ask me.” In other words she was overhearing what was going on.

All sorts of bizarre things began to happen, I mean. The final one being one day there was a staff meeting about whatever was supposed to be walkie-talkies or something, and it didn’t take me long--five minutes in the staff meeting--for me to know that that meeting was about me. [Phone rings] I’m trying to make some of this because a lot of this stuff is not important, the details. But at any rate at this particular meeting I was being verbally attacked by a whole bunch of white males. And the issue, the nature of the matter was that, I mean, in, in, in, in simple language, I just didn’t know my place. I didn’t smile at them. At this point it’s just like, Ann do you job and go on. I wasn’t cordial. I didn’t buck dance is what it amounted to. And interesting enough every evaluation I got was excellent or above. No one could ever say that I didn’t do my job. But this meeting was so awful. I called it the Klan meeting without the sheets.

This happened in March of 1995. Right then it’s just like I found my self-respect. I got up, I picked up my things, got in my car and never went back. And interesting enough I had enough sick time and vacation time and everything else that I was, like a whole year I was still drawing paychecks. But in the process of doing that my mother was very ill in Birmingham, it was like it was what I needed to do to be in her life to help her. I was up and down the road a lot. But in December of that year I received a phone call from the Health Department, which interestingly enough was just right across the fence. And they said, “We hear you are not working right now.” I said, “No. I’m kind of taking a leave” or something like that. And they said, “Well, we would like for you to consider applying for this position director of the Bluegrass Aspendale Teen Center.” Well, I knew about the teen center very much. I had volunteered there. NIA Day Camp, a lot of the students from the teen center because we would be at the Y. I mean so I knew a lot of the families and stuff like that. So it was while I was on leave from Re-Ed that I actually started working for the teen center. And if there’s, if there’s ever been a formal job that had my name written all over it, it was the teen center.

It’s another example of how things work out the way they’re supposed to work out. I had to leave the misery first, you know, to kind of open the door for this to happen. The teen center is a program of the Fayette County Health Department and most people don’t know that because you don’t think of an after-school program but when you think of it holistically it makes perfectly good sense. What does a health department do? It’s about the business of health. Well, what kinds of things impact on black children and families, you know, education, nutrition. So we, it’s like, I’m the mother of another household which is fine with me. It’s delight, you know, I’m delighted.

BRINSON: So tell me a little bit about the program there.

GRUNDY: They, when the teen center first began, uhmm, many years ago it was essentially an after-school study hall, which by the way with all of this study, all of this talk about school violence that is the one piece people have come to terms with that when I grew up my mother was home. When I hit that door three, three-thirty, it was no such things as a latch-key kid. But as times have changed, as women have had to leave the household and work here we have children literally by themselves between three and six in the afternoon. By the way as another aside, black people just kind of smirked a little bit, because when we were little, and things were changing, and black mothers had to work outside the home which was the norm after a certain point, nobody ever had a program. Nobody ever gave a damn about that but as soon as middle class white women were faced with these same dilemmas all of a sudden there are programs. They’re latch-key kids. You know this classic American kind of stuff. But at any rate so the teen center began as an after-school program and it expands from that meaning it does a summer thing. But it was an after-school study hall, but we tried to be essentially the way we put it in our minds is that we try to be good parents in, we have two apartments in two households for children who live in that community.

BRINSON: And how many children?

GRUNDY: Depending upon what we do, uhmm, during the school year, sometimes we can get fifty, sixty, seventy kids coming in and out at different shifts to get help on their homework. Summer program we just can’t accommodate that. We don’t have the transportation. We don’t have the resources. So summer program right now maybe forty kids right now are there during the day.

BRINSON: And it’s what ages?

GRUNDY: The teen center is six to eighteen.

BRINSON: Six to eighteen.

GRUNDY: Actually on paper it says eight or nine but…

BRINSON: How does it break down racially?

GRUNDY: Almost all black kids. It has to do with kids who live in Bluegrass Aspendale housing, or the surrounding community, which means that every now and then there’s a white kid or two because they live in the projects. But by and large it’s all black.

BRINSON: Uh-hmm. I want to go back to the Roots and Heritage Festival that we talked about a little bit.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: You mentioned that when we last talked that Chester had just the night before gone to Frankfort to receive an award for that. But tell me a little bit about your involvement in the festival.

GRUNDY: Everybody always teases me about that because most times when you look at the programs and the committees you don’t see my name anywhere. But the standing joke is, we really know who’s [laughing] planning this stuff on paper. And it’s true, Chester is co-chair, I mean, I don’t know if he’s co-chair. Chester’s actually co-founder. Let me tell you, I got to get this history straight too because at some point, I forget what happened to Urban County Government. As the festival began to be obviously successful then all sorts of forces stepped in to, you know, to rewrite the history. The history really began like this, we have a very good friend named Catherine Warner who I met while I was working at Re-Ed and we were organizing around black parents in education. She came to one of the meetings one night. She knew who we were but I didn’t know who she was. She participated in the program and after that she just kind of hung on. It turned out she lived around the corner from us for awhile. But Catherine was like an open door to me, meaning here was a local black person--up until that point I had just found the whole issue of being an outsider, just like, I just, black and white, Lexington to me is just like this. It’s very hard. You’re a newcomer. It’s real hard to just kind of come, you know, it’s just not a very receptive community. But meeting Catherine who is naturally a very warm person, very talkative, it began to explain some things to me. And she, in her own way, was a little grassroots operator. She never called herself that but this is a person who would always get things done in her own little way. So she became immediately part of our family and began to travel with us.

Now being in Lexington as a black person if I had to just stay here I would just lose my mind. So I know that I am very privileged to be able to get in the car, take my children, drive to New York, drive to California, drive to Birmingham where there are all sorts of festivals and conferences and other activities going on. Well, Catherine began to travel with us, Catherine and her family. And everywhere we’d go she would just be amazed. This is a woman that had never flown on a plane, who had never really been out of Lexington. She would go, wow, I didn’t know there were that many black people in the world. I didn’t know there were African festivals like the Arts Festival in Atlanta, stuff like that. And one day Catherine was sitting out here on the front yard in the summer, asked the classic question, “Why can’t we do that in Lexington?” And Chester and I being the outsiders, going, “Oh, God, Catherine” But she is like a bee up your butt. I mean it’s kind of like, eeeeee, I’m not going to let go. And she kept going at this, and Catherine is from a family of eleven children. “I can’t take my brothers and sisters everywhere with me, I got to bring it to them. You know, I know they would love what I’m doing and stuff like that.” So little by little it was Catherine who just pressed Chester. She said, “Come on Chester. We’ve got to do this.” Chester came in the house, got a yellow legal pad. Went back outside with Catherine and sat there on the front steps as Catherine said, “Look Old DeWeese Street is being revamped now. It’s now the Rose Street extension but that was the old black business district. Now Chester knew that because as a student and a lover of jazz he would go down DeWeese and see all these jazz men on their last legs and stuff like that.

BRINSON: Is Catherine the other co-chair?

GRUNDY: Yes, yes, uh-hmm, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: Her and Chester, okay.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, and there was, there was also a neighborhood organization that she pulled into it for political and financial reasons.

BRINSON: And how old is the festival?

GRUNDY: The festival just celebrated, uhmm, what do I want to say? I forget how many years.

BRINSON: Just estimate. Ten?

GRUNDY: Ten, fifteen years, uh-hmm. I forget because I confuse it sometimes with NIA but something like that. But Catherine got Chester to get this legal pad and she said, “Look, Chester, can’t you just see it?” And there was some debate ought it be put on in the middle of the black neighborhood over there on Shropshire which is a big, wide, a beautiful street. And the more they talked about that, no, no she said, “No, Chester,” she said, “Chester, this was the old black business district.” She said, “Come on, you’re good at this.” And he is, he conceptualizes very well. Lay out like something, the plans that we use to this day are precisely the plans that Chester drew up then because what he said was, this is how the city is redesigning this area. Here is the Lyric Theater, that’s an anchor, you know, here’s this intersection, here’s this, and based upon those sketches and his conceptualization of having two stages, one for young people and one for the general public that would go in later into the night. And all along the lines of the festival would be the African market place and of course once you lay that in place then you have just variations on a theme. But that idea began right here in this front yard because Catherine persisted and then she did the next step which given the history of Lexington just kind of surprises me. She went to the neighborhood youth organization, Ed Holmes was president then and Ed like was really supportive and a big part of this whole thing. But Catherine said, “Come on, Ed, we’ve got to go the next step.” She went straight to Baesler. Now nobody had ever done that. She said, “I need money from you.”

BRINSON: Scotty Baesler.

GRUNDY: Scotty Baesler. Baesler didn’t know who she was. He wasn’t even… But he had an assistant named John Townsend.

BRINSON: Now what was his role at the time?

GRUNDY: Baesler?

BRINSON: Was he in congress at that time?

GRUNDY: He was the mayor.

BRINSON: He was the mayor, all right, okay.

GRUNDY: Pam Miller succeeded him. He was the mayor not necessarily Mr. Progressive, Mr. Left-wing anything, but for Lexington kind of an okay white guy, you know. And wanted to see himself, I think, as not a redneck. You know if there’s a compliment in there someplace; he’s got it.

BRINSON: I want to know though what your role in all of this was?

GRUNDY: Oh, I’m getting around to that.

BRINSON: Okay.

GRUNDY: He had an assistant John Townsend who was a home boy from Alabama. John Townsend is the one who essentially sat down with Scotty and with Catherine and said, “Look, Scotty, this is all you need to know. It’s going to make you look good.” I mean that’s really kind of what it comes down to, that’s all, he’s a politician. And based upon that Catherine then said, “Okay, we’ve got some money. This is the beginning” and stuff. “Ann, you’ve got to do” well, I was actually involved in the conversations anyway. So I would say that almost every aspect of the programming especially stage one, Chester and I essentially do that between the two of us, getting the acts, lining them up, what comes here, why should we have this? Trying to track down because there are certain, part of what you are trying to do is educate a population. So the whole idea of jazz which is the classic black music, when DeWeese Street died so many black people no longer heard the music. And black people say, “I don’t like jazz.” You ain’t never heard jazz, you know, that kind of thing. So I would say that essentially I’m a behind the stage organizer. People stay at my house. People use my phone, you know.

BRINSON: Okay, okay. Tell me about your family today.

GRUNDY: My, my brothers and sisters, or my?

BRINSON: How do you define that?

GRUNDY: I have, I have, I consider myself a member of a very large family biological and otherwise. Uhmm, you know, times, times change, of my nine brothers and sisters, we’ve lost one brother. We lost a brother and a sister because I lost Lily. And then, of course, my mother and father have both died. But in, you know, in the black tradition you have more than, more than one mother and father anyway. So I have lots of adults, a lot of them old school teachers, neighbors, or what have you in Birmingham I consider my parent figures. And my children consider them, my daughter just finished Bellarmin College and she was a so surprised when she received monetary gifts from all these little neighbors up and down the street of my, she says, “But they don’t know me well.” But they know you are Ann Beard’s daughter. That’s all they need to know, you’re my child. It’s like the grandchild kind of thing.

Uhmm, I consider a lot of people, especially in Lexington, I’ve had to develop a family. When Chester and I first married his brother lived here for awhile after he finished Eastern, and my sister lived here after, while she was going to UK. And then Tony moved to California and my sister graduated from UK on a Saturday, this is kind of a family joke. Sunday she was back in Birmingham. And people say, “Well, Yolan,” you know people don’t travel, don’t know anything, “Why would you want to go back south like that?” She said, “Look, I want to go back to where white folks are just real.” [Laughing] She said, “I’m used to just regular white folks. They don’t particularly smile at me. They don’t like me, but I know what’s going on” you know.

So when that happened I wasn’t prepared for it. It was like a depression sat in because it was kind of a un… I didn’t even, it never occurred to me, especially with a newborn that I could call, “Yolan, could you keep Tulani while I go do this?” Or Yolan who was a student would call up and on a Friday, she’d say, “Hey, Ann, I cooked some greens, you got some fish or something?” An automatic meal, you know, those kinds of little things that my family still does in Birmingham. They eat together all the time from all over the city. You bring this. I’ll bring that, that kind of thing.

So when our biological family members left here I was really, I just didn’t know what to do. So through my relationship with Catherine and every, I found myself, my kids tease me about this. They’ve asked as they’ve gotten older. How did you, how did aunt so and so become our aunt? They know she’s not genetically kin but how did Aunt Phyllis become our aunt? Well, when Bank of Lexington was in, you know, I went in there to open up an account one day and she was a sister on the counter. Well, everybody I would meet, I’d say, I’m going to bring them into my circle. I mean that’s all I knew how to do. I met a lot of people on the bus. You know, I used to ride buses deliberately. I want to meet people and stuff like that. So I have a lot of what you would call extended family members in Lexington.

BRINSON: Talk a little bit about Chester and your daughters. What, what brought you to Lexington actually?

GRUNDY: You know when I, when Chester and I worked at the Commission on Human Rights and I only worked there a short while. He worked there a little bit longer. Then we both went to Plymouth Settlement House to work for Dr. Jeff who became, really a mentor to us and is our children’s godfather. But when Dr. Jeff left to go to grad school and moved back to New Orleans we knew that Plymouth Settlement House was not a place where we wanted to continue to work; it changed too radically. They were glad to get rid of Jeff, I mean United Way was. And so, uhmm, during this time Chester had known a man in Louisville who was a little older than he was but had come back, had come to Lexington to work as an administrator. Now by this time UK was getting some community flack to integrate it’s faculty and staff. It has not been very successful with this, with this venture at all. But Jerry Stevens was hired as Director of Minority Affairs. And Jerry knew Chester and he knew of Chester’s interest in culture and things like that. And he said to Chester, “Would you come and just work as my program director?” And Chester is going, “Hell, no, I graduated from UK in 1969. I’m off the plantation, no way.” You know, he’s telling us this, we all know each other and Jeff is kind of talking to him. And Jeff is going, “Well, you know, brother, I hear what you’re saying but have you thought about the black students who are there now that you are gone, the ones who are facing?” So that kind of really hit Chester and he said, “Okay, I’ll come back and work because I really don’t want another black kid to have to go through what I did at UK.”

The interesting thing is this; UK really didn’t have a job description or a plan in mind for Chester. It was so funny because Chester was raised a little Catholic boy. So he’s like real straight-laced in his own way. I am not. It’s like the Baptist Church lets it all out. And he was going, he was fretting one day, and my brother was living with him, my brother’s an artist too. And he was saying to us, “Oh, there’s no job description, blah, blah, blah, blah”. And Oscar said, “Man, don’t you know a gift when you see it? They don’t know what you’re supposed to do.” And Chester said, “Well, what am I suppose to do?” He said, “Chester, tell me everything you would like to do. If you’re not working with the Commission on Human Rights, or Plymouth Settlement House what do you enjoy doing? Reading, literature, jazz, drama, all this stuff.” Then Chester, Oscar said, “Name the artists you like.” He went through all of them, Baraga, Haki, Karenga, you know, Gwendolyn Brooks and all of them and Oscar said, “Man, go down there. Tell Jerry you need some program money.” And my brother actually sat with him in the floor of my house on Brook Street in Louisville and they kind of like drew up a little job description. He said, “Tell Jerry this is it.” Chester has essentially, with some modifications, you know, I mean, the university has to have structure and all this other bull shit. He’s doing now what he always did, what he wants to do. And it brings him enormous personal joy but he says the thing that really gratifies him most is to see students transformed.

You know there is a lot of damage that has happened to black students as a result of integrated schools. So even in simple things like Robert’s Rules of Order and things like that. You have kids who’ve been through twelve years of public integration who’ve never had opportunities for student leadership. So they come into a university setting, they don’t know how to conduct a meeting. So, you know, he does simple things like that. But mostly he provides, he calls it fuel for the mind. Let’s here Dr. Okbar, let’s read his books, let’s have some discussions. The cultural center itself has a very interesting history. It’s a spin-off of this whole thing, too, that black kids used to meet at a hole, what they called a hole in the wall at the Grill, just sit back in the corner over there and talk and play cards and listen to music. And the wider world just kind of swirled around them. For one summer someone got the great idea, and Chester thanks them to this day, of getting rid of that black hole back there. They just, so they just rearranged all of the seats and when they rearranged them they bolted them to the floor. So that you could not, you know. So when black kids came back that fall they were, “aaaaaah!”, and then they were going crazy and Chester said, “Hey, I think we have an opportunity here. If we can’t have our hole in the wall let’s create our own hole.” And out of that came a design for what you know is the King Cultural Center.

So I came to Lexington because Chester was working here. He had been working here two years when we got married and came here to work and uhmm, and things were different for him. So many of his student friends had left, especially those who were more progressive and uhmm, you know this is where I’ve been ever since. As an aside, as much as I complain about the quality of life for black people in general in Lexington, I realize that I am most fortunate. And by that I mean given what Chester does for a living my children have lived literally in a cultural center. They have lived a quality of life that I don’t know where else… Chester has had students to graduate and they’ll go to California and stuff and they’ll go, “I went to hear Sara Vaughn sing but it’s not the same thing as coming over to your house and eating beans and rice with her.” My children have grown up to the point that when Tulani went to Spelman, Spelman has two required courses because they recognize the damage of integration also. One is African in the Diaspora and the other is a jazz class. Tulani took this jazz class not knowing that the professor knew her father. He said, “Grundy? Where are you from?” “Kentucky.” “Are you kin to Chester Grundy?” “That’s my daddy.” So she’s going, I can’t go anywhere unless somebody… she looks just like him. So Dr. Jennings was teaching all this great music and Tulani said about a week or two into the class she, it hit her, ‘cause when you just grow up in it you don’t think about it. She said these are great men and women. She said this to Dr… He said, “Well, who did you think they were before?” “I just thought my daddy felt sorry for these people who couldn’t get a job any other place and he just had them do a concert at UK.”

What I’m trying to describe for you is the quality of life for my children that I could not have paid for. My hope and wish and they hear me say this all the time one way or another is that you carry on, you can not afford to have all these gifts come your way then you just go somewhere to be a major consumer somewhere on the planet. But I can see it already in their activities. Tulani even as a student at Spelman was doing little versions of NIA Day Camp. The little kids in the neighbor, you know, Spelman-Morehouse really in what you would call the old black areas of Atlanta. You know lots of poverty and stuff. They call them quarter monks ‘cause the little kids come up on campus, “Sister, you got a quarter.” A little six year old, “You got a quarter.” Well, you know she’d been there a month or two giving her quarters away, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, why don’t you come over here Saturday morning, ten o’clock and I’ll see if I’ll give you a quarter.” Well, what she would do is NIA Day Camp on Saturday mornings. Let’s do this art project. Let’s go here. Let’s learn this history. So I see that happening, yeah.

BRINSON: That’s great. Tell me her full name and maybe spell it also for the transcriptions.

GRUNDY: Tulani’s full name is Ayofemi, A Y O F E M I. Chester and I were married, we knew each other and we married several years before we had Tulani. It seemed like we were never going to get pregnant and do this thing. So her first name is a Yoruba name from around Nigeria and the Cameroons and it means joy likes me or sometimes ‘joy has come to me’. Ayo, joy, femi, has come to me. The second name, you know, African Americans have a real dilemma. We don’t know which part of the continent we come from, but the other side is it opens the door to say, I claim the whole continent. So we had a West African name, Yoruba name. Then we went to the key Swahili speaking people around Kenya and Ethiopia and we chose the name Rashida which means ‘a lover of righteousness’ R A S H I D A. That’s a very common name, by the way, among, as African people began to discover African names from the continent. Rasheed, R A S H E E D, a lot of guys, a lot of ball players have that name.

Interesting enough I always ask kids, what does your name mean? [Laughing] Besides I spend a lot of time telling people what their names mean or getting out naming books. And then her third name, we had three names because we like balance the whole thing of the pyramid of being grounded, of being based. So her third name is Tulani which is from South Africa T U L A N I which means ‘peace loving’. When Bishop Tutu came here the first time and Tulani introduced herself to him. He went, Zulu, that’s my name, you know, I’m a Zulu. I mean he was just really delighted to meet somebody named Tulani. Uhmm, for each of our children by the way we had name ceremonies. We’ve done a lot of things in our family to try to sustain ourselves culturally and at the same time to try to bring other people into the culture. You know a picture is worth a thousand words. Reading about it is wonderful. But when Tulani was born two weeks after she was born, relatives and friends came over. We had lots of food, lots of drink and stuff and we had this huge naming ceremony for her out in the back yard. And you know the whole purpose is that she has to know her name before anybody else. And it was very teachable--A friend of mine’s daughter just had a baby and she called and left me a message the other day saying, “My daughter is having a naming ceremony; I remember attending yours would you help me out?” So that’s part of the struggle you know.

BRINSON: And you have a second daughter.

GRUNDY: Second daughter who was born five years later. Dr. Welsing talks about the importance of spacing.

END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

BEGIN SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO

GRUNDY: … high school. She most recently, she was elected President of the Student Body. A very tall girl who did something real miraculous if you understand black culture at all; when she was about thirteen, almost fourteen, she came to me--we had a rule in the family that, you know, black women struggle with the issue of hair, you know--you know it’s got ( ), uhmm, anthropologically my hair is not supposed to do that. So we simply said no chemicals or no products, you know, no perms and things, and no heat, meaning no hot combs and stuff. So both girls live very well with that, but as Saida was getting older, getting taller and bigger you could tell she was thinking, okay, what do I do with my hair now. I’ve got to find my look. And she came in one day and she said, “I want to cut my hair.” And she had a lot of hair. I said, “Saida, you don’t have to cut it. I mean there are millions of styles.” We had hair books, you know, from the continent. You can do other things. “No, I thought about this a lot.” So I called my friend Kimya in Cincinnati and Kimya said, “Well, I have a brother friend who, you know, who really does hair well, let’s go see him.”

So we took her up there one Saturday, put her in the chair and the brother did not want to cut her hair because her hair was very long. He said, “What if you regret this? I’m going to feel guilty”, because he understands how black women feel about this hair thing. It’s profound, you know. So, she said, “Oh, no, no, no. I’ve thought of this a long time.” Well, she essentially cut her hair like mine except she cut it back and she has a grade of hair a whole lot like her father’s hair. It’s a little wavier and all that kind of stuff like that. It was like in an instant this child was transformed from a little girl to a woman. I mean I had never seen anything like it in my life. It was just like, little Saida, big Saida.

But Saida’s name, we had a naming ceremony for her also, and Chester really struggled with this name. I remember the night before we were to name her; in the tradition it’s the father who does the naming. My labor is to, you know, deliver. His labor is to name this child. And Chester was really struggling with it and part of the process you talk to people. You get naming books. You get on what you call, black kids call “the hook up”, you’re talking to African students. You’re asking them to ask their parents what names are important in your culture. Why do you have this name? What does your name mean? Because a lot of times African students come to this place and they’ll take on Christian names and white names because it’s just easier. “My name is Peter.” “No Peter, really tell me your real name.” They go, “Oh”, they’re so interested that you want to know, you now.

So when we were naming Saida the night before Chester had said to me. All my family was here, his family was here and everything. And Chester was saying, “Ann, would it be okay with you if we just have two names?” Why am I going to not, here I am like a week or two out of the hospital. I’m going, “Oh, no, no, no, no.” He said, “I know we want three but I just can’t come up with this third name. It’s not working. It’s not clicking, you know. It’s not feeling right for me.” Getting out of the hospital is a whole [laughing] that’s another whole story in itself. So at any rate, so, he said I’ve asked people. I’ve read. I’ve done my research. I just can’t come up with this name. I said, “Chester, hey, you know, it’s your problem.”

About two o’clock in the morning the phone rang. Later on I found out that was a woman from the Cameroons who was calling from Boston. She was a graduate student. And the African grapevine had gotten to her, and so when Chester answered the phone she said, “Mr. Grundy.” He said, “Yes.” Her name was Rose. And she said, “I understand you have a new baby girl.” “Yes, I do.” “And I understand you are looking for a certain name.” He said, “Yes, I’m struggling with it.” She said, “Tell me what do you want the flavor of this naming, what are your wishes and hopes for this child.” I could hear him talking a while, you know because I’m not supposed to know all this stuff. Talking about his hopes and wishes for her. Then he said, “But most of all I want a child, a young girl who, no matter which way popular culture goes, if America just goes nuts and goes off the deep end and does that and black folks just go completely crazy and go over there. I want a child who always is focused who knows who she is; has a sense of purpose and will not betray us.” She’s, “Oh, yeah, Mr. Grundy, in my tradition we have a name for you that means that”, you know, so I heard him over the phone go, “Yes! That’s it! Yes, that’s it!” He woke up the whole household.

So the next day about four o’clock in the afternoon everybody gathers, it was such a warm day in February that we could have done this outside. Instead we did it right here. Our friend sang “The Greatest Love of All” you know. We had the pouring of libations. We did all of this and we had the grandmother sitting there, the passing of the baby from generation and stuff like that. And finally Chester introduced this young lady to the community. And he held her and so excited, it was a chubby baby. You know Chester is kind of a small man, you know. So here he is holding up his baby, he said, “I present to you, my second, he was crying, you know, this baby girl. Saida, fortunate. She’s so fortunate.” This is so male. “She’s so fortunate to have me as a father.” [Laughter] And I’m sitting there about nine hundred pounds overweight and I thought, I’ll get you later. [Laughter] And then he gave the third name, last I think, Sala which is kind of an Arabic North African name which means blessed, a very blessed child, a child with lots of gifts. And then he gave the middle name, which is a name he had struggled with, and he said to the community, “I wanted a name that said this child will not betray us. She will always know who she is and that name is Uzoma, U Z O M A and it means her path is straight.” So that’s how we got our second child’s, Saida, S A I D A. Uzoma Sala.

BRINSON: Spell her first and third names just for the transcription.

GRUNDY: Saida is S A I D A, at that time Chester was very close to a number of the Iranian students. If you go back to some of the history in Lexington they were protesting the Shah and stuff and were arrested here, and some of the real redneck professors at UK did things like hold their grades hostage, stuff like that. Wouldn’t give them their grades because they had protested. I forget who came here from the state department to speak. They just had a quiet demonstration. They were arrested and held in jail; and the point was to hold them in jail through the finals so that they would flunk and be deported and have to go back. I mean that was kind of the tacit understanding here.

And that group of students Chester was real tight with them, the early group of Iranians to come to UK. And when they came out of jail, they let them out on the day of finals and they went in, took their finals, aced them, aced them. And what they said was, “Look, we did this in high school.” [Laughing] I mean nobody wanted to hear this. “This is a piece of cake; we didn’t have to study.” And they weren’t being arrogant, they were simply saying, “Hey, it’s just a reality.” But and they were all engineers. But at any rate one of the young men who was a real member of that group was a young brother named, Achmad. And Chester thought so much of Achmad that he wanted this child to some kind of way be tied into that relationship. There was no female version of the name Achmad but Achmad’s younger brother and his favorite brother was a young man named Said. So the feminine version of that is Saida, S A I D A, and then Uzoma, U Z O M A and then Sala, S A L A. Or Saida goes U. S. Grundy. [laughter]

BRINSON: And she is where right now?

GRUNDY: She’s a senior at Dunbar. She’s going into her senior year.

BRINSON: Ann, as I listen to you talk about your family and your community involvement it appears to me that they are all a form of teaching. How do you see this?

GRUNDY: You know, in reality, there were always people when I grew up who would say things to me, but the most profound lessons were the lessons that I observed, I would watch people do. I had someone ask me the other day, for example, they had read something about my father. And they were saying, uhmm, “When your father died it was a big funeral. It was almost like city funeral.” I said, “Yeah, I remember that.” But there was not like this big hoopla like when Dr. Jeff’s father died in New Orleans they named a building for him, stuff like that. I said, “No, I don’t remember that but in the thirty years after my father died, I talked with my mother a great deal. And one of the things my mother reminded me of was that immediately upon my father’s death she said from members of the church to just general members of the community, that people kind of took on one of Rev. Beard’s children as their own.” I can remember, for example, when I got ready to go to college that this teacher would get me luggage, you know, this teacher bought me a typewriter. The neighbor down here got me underwear, you know stuff like that. Everybody kind of took a part. That always impressed me in terms of, uhmm, those were like great, great what you call teachable moments, really and truly, you know. That ultimately it’s not so much what you say, even though thought is critical or thought begins the process. But finally it’s what you do, you know. So, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

You know my children, by the way, went through a period where that they saw themselves as being very vulnerable because of that. That they saw themselves as being so different in Lexington that anybody, and this is still true, could come into Lexington, a stranger could come in and say, uhmm, I want to know something about something black or something else. People just give our phone numbers out. We get the strangest calls all the time. People say, you know, sometimes you have to like work through it and stuff like that. But my children saw themselves as being very different, you know, in school as a result of that. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

BRINSON: Do you think teaching is a form of political activism?

GRUNDY: I know it is. I know it is. And there again we’re not just talking about people who identify themselves formally as teachers.

BRINSON: There are formal teachers then there are informal teachers.

GRUNDY: Then there are informal teachers. I don’t know who has had the greater influence on me because it’s been a combination. One of the stories that I used to tell all the time when my kids would ask me about who were important people when you were growing up. Well, everybody was in one way or another. But my father, having been from a large family, and my father being the pastor of what was then the largest black church in the state of Alabama, my daddy was very child centered. My father loved children and just about everything he did involved children in one way or another. So our church, you know, forty years ago, you know, we had tennis club for kids, you know; we had an orchestra. My parents are musicians; had a church orchestra. All sorts of things, people would say, well, Rev. Beard’s just doing that because he’s got all those children. Well, that’s good enough motivation. That’s fine, you know.

So, I can remember that one of the biggest events in the church was every, I think it was once or twice a semester we used to get report cards. And these were the big old report cards that looked like that, you know your teacher wrote stuff in them and all that. And we always got report cards--I don’t understand this school system today--nobody knows when reports come, and every school have a different. I’m going wait a minute. Parents have three and four children that need to know, don’t play games. But anyway, my parents always knew and everybody knew when report card day was. It was a big day; and it was usually on a Friday so you had a chance to show your mother and father, and they had to sign their names on them, you know. Then you’d bring them back on Mondays. Well, on the day that you got report cards that Friday it was understood at my father’s church you had to bring your report card to church. Now either that or you played real sick, you know what I’m saying? And the whole point was, not, nobody was ever embarrassed, I don’t think. It was to reinforce, to support and all those good things. A lot of, 16th Street had a lot of teachers in it but there again it was a very child centered church.

So I can remember taking my report card to church on those Sundays, and there was a ritual involved, you know. Towards the end of the service after the sermon and everything, all of you who have your report cards, stand up. You know, and everybody they’d stand up. And all the other members would look around and see which kids were there, and you know, who has a report card. And when church service was over the ritual at least for me and my sisters and brothers, say it was the same for them, and I talked to my little childhood friends, we knew which people to go around to in church to show our report cards to cause you’re looking at the first grade and period, second grade and third.

And whenever there was progress, now, remember my kids laugh when I say this. This was in 1950, you know, if you got like, you know, we got E’s. We didn’t get A’s; E’s for excellence, if you got a bunch of E’s you get a dime or something like that. My kids were like a dime? I said, yes, this was 1950. A dime meant a lot, you know. So I had this little, you know, ritual that I followed. I and I knew which people didn’t have children so they had discretionary income. I knew which ones had children but their children were grown had moved from the city and they just loved little children. In other words I was a little psychologist going on here. So I would make my way around. Go to Mr. Joe Davis. Joe Davis and his wife, Mrs. Sally Davis, oh, boy they just thought the world of me, and sometimes after church on Sunday—they were a real old couple--I would go home with them. Now when you are in a family of nine children and you go home after church with somebody Sunday dinner, ride in their car. You can sit where you want. You don’t have to fight over the window. You get your share of the chicken, you know, this was a big deal. You know you can sleep in their daughter’s bedroom because she’s gone, you know, she’s forty years old.

So I would go to Mr. Joe Davis, and he would look at my report card, and he always gave me a quarter or fifty cents. So I had already racked up then. Then I’d go to Mrs. Murphy who eventually became my math teacher, my high school guidance and she’d give me money and stuff like that. The last person I would always come to and I told my children I never knew why, but I’m fifty-three now and I know why. The last person I would come to would be a woman named Mrs. Elizabeth Collins who was the woman they called the mother of the church meaning she had been there probably since the first day and was just old as dirt. Her children were grown and out of the house. And I can remember seeing her grown grandchildren sometimes come back to the city and visit. But Mrs. Collins was so old that her--you know how old women would die their white hair blue, it had a little blue tinge. And she had cataracts and what black folks call little cinnamon stockings you know the kind, ( ). And I would always go to Mrs. Elizabeth Collins who usually waited for someone to come back into the church to help put her in the car. She was that old, you know, she wasn’t walking very well. So I had plenty of time to get to Mrs. Collins is the point I’m trying to make. So I would finally go to Mrs. Collins. I’d go, “Mrs. Collins.” She’d say, “Is that you girl?” I’d say, “Yes, Ma’am, I got my report card.” She’d say “Let me see your report card.”

Now I know now that she couldn’t read what she was looking at. She had cataracts. I mean I can see now, her eyes were covered with this blue and gray, you know. And she would take it anyway. Dr. Okbar says, “Pretend” says, “Don’t…, make them think you’re the brightest person.” Says there’s something to be said about fantasy. She’d take my report card and you know kind of do that. She’s say, “Uhmmmm.”

See now, I’m waiting for Mrs. Collins because she’s a good, old woman and I know what she’s going to do if she’s really impressed. Well, like little old ladies of her time, Mrs. Collins wore Avon perfume which just blew me away. It was like always too much. And even though she had a purse she always tied her money up in those little violet and white handkerchiefs, you know, in the corner you know. [Laughing] So here’s Mrs. Collins going down in her purse. Got a wallet in there! But the money is tied up in this handkerchief. She’s pulls this handkerchief out and I’m standing there, “Oh, God, Mrs. Collins, hurry up cause I’ve got to go. Everybody’s out there. I’ve got to go spend my money” stuff like that. And Mrs. Collins would take forever, this little old woman, to untie that knot. I’m looking at that knot and I say, “Oh, it looks like a quarter, maybe it’s a fifty cents piece.” I didn’t know what but it was at least a quarter which was a big deal. So she would finally untie this knot in her little hand and then she grabbed my hand like that [sound of hand slapping] you know, and she would have the money and she would be just like this [sound of hand slapping]. And I’m going Mrs. Collins, to myself, “Just give me the money so I can go.” Mrs. Collins always said this to me before she would give me the money, she would say, “Child,” I remember the money even hurting my hand she pressed it so hard. She says, “Now, you go and do our race proud. Do you hear me? You just do our race proud.”

I’ve told my children that when I was eight years old I thought the prize was the quarter or the fifty cents. Now that I’m fifty-three the prize is what Mrs. Collins said to me and what she was so consistent about. And it has been something that has literally ruled my life all my life and by that I mean the whole idea of bringing shame or embarrassment to your family to your race is just something that is beyond me. I just can not even imagine. You know what I’m saying? And that’s essentially what she was saying, don’t do anything to shame us. You just make us stand up real tall.

BRINSON: Ann, as I get to know you in all this, it sounds to me those kinds of legacies, you know you family, your father’s teaching, this woman, is your teaching. I mean you, you continue that legacy in the work that you do in the community today. You’re teaching young people and adults, anyone who is willing.

GRUNDY: I’m conscious of that, I’m real conscious of that even when it rubs people the wrong way. I’ve learned to be more diplomatic. But I can’t even help it, Betsy. You know that thing that they say, everything I ever needed to know in life I learned in the first grade. Really and truly the building blocks were in place about that time and everything else is just a variation on that theme. You know it just elaborates or it more enlightens. The bottom pieces are there, you know, which really frightens me in terms of the early years for children that certain things have to take place. You know you have to feel loved. You have to feel like I can get all the breast milk I possibly want.

That was something else too, my mother and father--and it wasn’t just generosity--they were older when they got married so they really wanted children and had prepared for this. But I realize now that my mother and father did not have money, were not wealthy, none of those things. But my mother and father always figured out food, food for us, food for anybody else who came home from school with us. I mean they just, they literally fed the community. But I can remember my father saying--my mother one time was complaining about, “Honey, the milk bill is real big.” He said, “Okay, just,” it was a black dairyman. “Just have Mr. Baker keep bringing the milk.” I mean he just said my children are never going to not have, you know, nutritious foods. You know, yeah.

BRINSON: Well, I certainly feel like I’ve learned as a white woman a lot from you, too and I come from a very different tradition.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: You know I come out of six generation white settlers from England up in the New England Colony, you know. And I’ve always thought that is so boring. [Laughter]

GRUNDY: You know when I was a student there I thought that too. I was how do people live this way?

BRINSON: About yourself?

GRUNDY: Yeah, oh, God, what do you do?

BRINSON: Right. Ann, let’s talk a little bit about leadership in particular your style of leadership. How do you lead?

GRUNDY: You know a lot of times I don’t define myself, or see myself as a leader ‘cause that carries a lot of baggage with it too. I have learned to trust my gut and trust my instinct; you know women are told--a lot of time don’t, you know--that’s not scientific and stuff. But I’ve had enough experiences to know that my gut is almost always right. So I just kind of do that, and with I say with age I tried to be more diplomatic not just rub things in people’s faces so much. You know I’ve learned to do it different ways including getting other people to say or do it. You know I’m smart enough to do that. I’ll write something, “Why don’t you read it for me?” You know pull people out, you know that works real well too. I don’t really define myself as a leader. I don’t know what that’s all about but I don’t. I just see myself as…

BRINSON: Okay. We’re getting there. I want to go back just a minute and talk about what you think the Civil Rights Movement in the fifties and the sixties accomplished. And also what were the failures? What do you tell children today about the fifties and the sixties?

GRUNDY: First thing I usually say is that if I could not have been born in Egypt. If I could not have lived in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, then I am eternally grateful that I came of age in the sixties. And the reason for that is that so many of the classic adolescent questions that are asked by adolescents were answered for me. You know I had to of course say amen to them or I agree or I accept. But the whole question of what do I do with my life? Why do I have an income? What should I use my car for? How should I use my spare time? Those questions were automatically answered for me. There was never a point where I didn’t think that all of my resources were to go to do something for a reason.

You know in that sense I have a sadness because you know, working in the university setting--and I see black kids who, who have just taken on the values of the larger white American consumerism and it’s very sad. It’s very sad. And Chester says that sometimes he spends--and I’ve been on campus I’ve seen him do this. He’s been with black kids who will walk, who will go into the Student Center, and they will pass Old Man James who is a janitor sweeping and mopping the floor, he might be fifty or sixty years old, and just walk right past him. And I’ve seen him go and get those students and say, “No, no, you come back here.” They know who Chester is. “How are you doing, Mr. G.” “Come back here. Don’t ever walk past this man. You don’t know what he has had to put up with, and guess what, when I was in school it was men like this. There was no Chester Grundy. There was no Jerry Stevens. These were the men and women who got me over when nobody else understood.” Chester talks about going to the broom closets and sitting there with them and just crying his eyes out. His mother and father didn’t understand college. These men and women didn’t either but they understood a little bit about that environment cause they worked there. And they would say, “Son, just keep on doing what you’re doing” or “when it gets too bad you just come back and see me” or “Why don’t you come over to the house today, my wife and I…”.

It defined for me without question what I was supposed to be doing. And you know that’s kind of a great relief. You know how many people of your generations are seventy, eighty, ninety years old before they figure out why they are on this earth. You know what I’m saying? Just kind of makes it easy. You asked me something else but that was the first thing that occurred to me.

BRINSON: Well, what have you told your children about that period? What do you tell children today about that period?

GRUNDY: Integration, you know, so much of what we thought what we wanted, our prayers have been answered only for us to find out we made some critical mistakes. The big one was--and this was not across the board but the affect was across the board--the death of black institutions meaning, you talk about DeWeese Street black businesses, black schools; that we made the critical mistake. We bought into the western notion that a school is, has something to do with the building and all of the equipment that goes with it, and only for us to find our children in the finest of buildings. I mean I think they say Dunbar is state of the art, the labs and all that other stuff, but it is not a school that is serving black children well. If there is a criticism at all that I make of the sixties struggle and I think in general more and more black people my age are coming to this conclusion. We made a terrible mistake in so willingly giving up our own institutions. Of course what that was about, and we can let up on ourselves a little bit, we knew that all white school boards were not going to equally fund and they weren’t going to do the same for Booker T that they were doing for Lafayette High School; there’s just no way in the world. So black parents rapidly came to the conclusion, well, if we put our black children in schools with white kids at Lafayette, at Henry Clay then our children will receive the quality education because they have good labs, good textbooks, up to date textbooks, good band uniforms, good instruments they have in Lafayette.

What we did not value or give measure to was the value of black school teachers who saw us as their children, and therefore they were willing to do whatever it took to teach us including spank your butt, talk to your mama, stay in your face; just not let you give up. So a lot went down the drain and we are suffering now, because what is happening now, is that we have about four generations of black parents, black adults who don’t remember what black schools did with no equipment. They literally pulled off miracles. Parker High School produced, and I know I’ve said this before, almost all of the black middle class in Birmingham, the teachers, the doctors, the lawyers. And you know, Parker High School, physically was not the greatest structure in the world at all. So we have about four generations of black adults who don’t remember and as a result have not even an image of what black children can do when our situations are maximized.

One of my great wishes when we talk about the things that happened, one of my great wishes is to still to develop an independent black school. And I don’t care if it is just five students and the reason I say this, is this Betsy; I really want to go on record with this. Chester and I did buy some property when we first came to Lexington with that in mind. We went around and we identified about twelve black couples who we thought had discretionary income who were if they didn’t have children, they were on their way to having children, stuff like that who would be supportive of this idea. Of the twelve we talked with only one couple immediately said yes. We had it all set up at the Bank of Lexington. We just owned the property. It ain’t our money, you know. It’s like tithing fifty dollars a month, whatever, so we could get some seed money going here. We wanted to be real independent. We only got one black family to step forth and to say, “Yes, we will do this.” Every other black family, and I can name some names but that’s not necessary, said things like, “Well, what about white children? Don’t we want our children…?” And when I kept saying you know…

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO

BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE TWO

GRUNDY: We could but the reason Chester and I wanted to do that was this. Sayre School the Lexington School, Community Montessori even if they have black students in them are essentially without question, I mean they didn’t even apologize. They’re all Eurocentric schools; of course they are. They’re started by white parents for white students. I’m not knocking them for that. But the function they serve in terms of other white parents who don’t have children in those schools is profound. When white parents go to school board meetings I can remember this at the very cutting edge of computers. White parents would go to school board meetings and they would stand up and they would say “We need computers in our schools”. And somebody on the board would say, “Why?” “Because over there at Sayre they have computers, and my neighbor said this is what her child is doing and they are doing this and they are going away to Harvard and they’re doing…” Sayre serves as how do you say a pressure point on the public schools so that white parents who don’t have the means or are not inclined for whatever the reasons to send their children to Sayre School can push the public school system to do for their children what Sayre is doing for kids who pay tuition out of pocket. And what we’ve seen really come out of this is the whole concept of magnet schools which is essentially a private school system. I mean that’s really where all this came from.

When black parents go before the school board we don’t even have a standard, an example to point to. No one can say but over there at Miss. Mary’s school there are only five kids, they don’t have fancy computers, they don’t have this but guess what, all of those kids went off to college. They’re doing well. He’s in med. school. She in law school. But the worst part is not so much the school board the worst part is that black people don’t have the example in front of us. And there’s a certain kind of respect that comes from a people that is serious enough to take education serious and say, “No, we educate our own.” You know, for whatever people think about Palestine and the Jews and stuff, Palestinians teach their own children.

BRINSON: I do remember a New York Times article last year about the black school in Durham, North Carolina that has been created under a voucher system.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, that’s the charter thing like.

BRINSON: And it was, at least according to the article, the article was very complimentary about what they have been able to do there. I’m sure there are other examples, too but that I have heard about.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, you know it’s culture. For, I was reading someplace the other day and they were talking about in the early days of integration where white teachers were just scared to death of black kids. Can you imagine going through that, I mean as a student. How white teachers just could not figure out, they were just, aahh, [holds breath] ‘cause black kids were holding their hands and all up. Well, in black culture, you know--in white culture we now know when to be told--you give a white child a book, an object they are going to deal with that all day. For a black child the book and the object is only a means to a relationship with the teacher. That was the reason our teachers could essentially say to us, before we took the California tests and stuff, “Don’t make me look bad, now.” [Laughing] You know and that was all they had to say, “Don’t let me look bad.” That means you get in there and you do your best because Mrs. Hartman is a sister who does not liked to be shamed in front of anybody. That worked. She had that relationship with us. Black children are now in schools where almost nobody gives a damn. They just--my own children will say that--they just show up.

BRINSON: I have one final question. What has it been like for you to do these three interviews?

GRUNDY: I wasn’t expecting that question.

BRINSON: Be honest.

GRUNDY: I’m going to be honest. You can ask Chester this later on. For a long time I used to say and nobody, “Oh, Ann get real.” I’m a shy person. [Laughing] And on one hand I, I, I recognize and finally my sister put the adjective in place that was missing. She said, “Ann, you are emotionally shy.” And by that I mean as much as I talk I don’t like talking about myself that much. And so that’s kind of hard for me to do. I’d much rather enjoy talking about people I’ve met, experiences that I’ve had, and things like that rather than talking about me. That’s awkward for me. At the same time it has served another kind of function with my daughter coming back into the house, it’s kind of like, okay, we’re now at another passage here, kind of a rites of passage. My daughter said to me the other day, she said, “Mama,” now remember she’s been through four years of black woman Spelman. So she’s really up on her black woman self. She says, “Mother, I know you have made sacrifices all these years.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “You really could have done a whole lot of other things in life and you chose to be our mother and work it out in different ways.” And I said, “Well, in some ways that’s true.” “I’m about to take the LSAT. Why don’t you study with me and take the LSAT and let’s go to law school?” See I said that about twenty years ago and it never occurred to me that she would remember. And I’m actually giving that serious thought in terms of my children are almost out, why don’t I do some of these things that I always kind of…

In my dreams the first version of my dream was Mrs. Murphy my teacher I told you about, who was my guidance counselor was also my first piano teacher. This was a classic black woman who had attended Spelman College, majored in math, got her Master’s in math from Columbia and got her Master’s in organ from Julliard. A little black teacher from Birmingham, so you can imagine just what it was like being around this woman growing up. And Mrs. Murphy said to me one day, we were practicing, I wasn’t doing real well and stuff. She said, “Ann, can’t you just see it now?” “What Mrs. Murphy?” You know she was old, I said, “What are you talking about, Mrs. Murphy?” “Can’t you just see yourself on the Ed Sullivan Show and the city of Birmingham said, ‘That’s our daughter [clapping hands], that’s our daughter’”. You know, in other words, get with it girl and work on this, you know, this piece here. But I really did envision myself early on doing what I would call great things and I don’t devalue what I do but I also know that there’s a lot more that I’m supposed to be doing. I’m kind of looking forward to.

BRINSON: So, so you got off the question a little bit.

GRUNDY: Okay, reign me back in, reign me back in.

BRINSON: The question…

GRUNDY: That I was avoiding it. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Maybe, maybe, what has it been like for you to do these three interviews and also does my being white affect the interviews?

GRUNDY: Oh, without question, without question. The short answer to the first part of your question is it has been a little awkward, and yet I’m smart enough to get from it what I need. It’s been time for reflection. So I’ve tried to use that, you know, in other kinds of ways. It’s always difficult for me as much ease as it seems sometimes with white people that I talk and, “Oh, you’re so frank”. Well, I just decided that there is no point, that time is much too short, to be tip-toeing around. You know and the whole thing with racism in spite of what white people do, I have to say to myself if I were white and everything is going my way would I give it up? And I’m going, “I don’t think so!” You know when psychologically everything is in your favor, when you walk in the door to apply for a job you have to prove yourself a complete idiot. In other words you have all sorts of advantages just walking into the door. Uhmm, I try to be as frank as I can in talking with white people because as a black person I have to own up to my responsibility in this little dance that we’ve been performing now for about four or five hundred years. And my responsibility along with other black people is that we don’t clearly draw the line. White people every day step over the line in terms of disrespect, of not acknowledging or what have you. And I’m not talking about ego-tripping. I’m talking about some simple--it’s like going to the History Museum, I was asking about that, “What’s the black presence in that?” And I’m not necessarily talking about having a big demonstration.

I’m talking about on a one to one level what if black teachers in faculty meetings said every time they had a faculty meeting, “But this curriculum doesn’t speak to black children.” This curriculum, what if we just consistently did that? Or what if in our interactions with our supervisors and this is what got me in trouble with Re-Ed, you don’t know what you are doing with black children. You are saying this is a residential setting. It’s not a black residential setting. It doesn’t meet the emotional needs of black children. Well, they didn’t want to hear that and of course, they eventually pushed me out. But the point I’m trying to make is that, uhmm, I don’t enjoy talking with white people and I made, I made a conscious decision about maybe ten years ago. I don’t know what happened but enough had happened for me to say, “I’m not going to get in any more discussions, arguments.” I try not to go to meetings. I just don’t do it. Other black people say, “Ann,” I say, “Why don’t you do it?” “Oh, Ann, how you know…” I say, “How do you think I learn? Here’s the stuff I read. This is the stuff, these are my routines. I listen to BET. I check this out.” You know, you do, I’m not going to do that anymore because the price is too great. I’m just not willing to do it. The other thing is it takes, it diverts my energies from other stuff.

So, I also say, it’s time for white people to do the homework. You know, I can not think of except for some rare exceptions--I mean Clinton tried to have this discussion on race. Whenever black people are in a situation with white people and the agenda is to talk about race it never really is. That’s what they say on paper but that’s… Talk about race, it’s almost that this is the timeline right here. This is the beginning of things and this is the end. Inevitably the best of white people would be somewhere along here, and because the shit has happened to black people, and depending upon our own experiences and how much time we’ve devoted to trying to see what it is we’re looking at, we’re somewhere along here. Which means that black people in these settings spend all of their time trying to bring white people up to speed. I’m not willing to do that. I say to white people, go do your homework. Be respectful, then we can come together when we have something to talk about. The easiest way to do that, of course, is to read like, to have assignments. Okay we’re going to read Dr. Welsing and we’re going to meet in two weeks and talk about it. That kind of gives you a frame of reference.

BRINSON: Ann, personally, I will tell you that even though I have my own experience with your culture which goes back a way and I try and do my homework, there’s no way. There’s no way.

GRUNDY: No, no, that’s the other thing, Betsy, and I’m going to tell you how that hits home. I was talking about my relationship to the Hispanic community. And of course, language is a serious barrier there if you don’t know Spanish and what have you. As much as I want to and I feel a, like a principled reason to do this, to be supportive, to be not in somebody’s culture but to support it or to buffer it or to play my role. It’s just like, I understand white folks a little bit better now. You know really and truly it is very, very hard.

BRINSON: And I also know that in looking at the transcripts of the interviews we’ve done, you know that there’s just a big gap there for me. There are things that there is no way that I’m going to really, fully understand.

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm. I mean there are nuances, even though we are all using the English language, the words are used in different ways they are stated. They are twisted.

BRINSON: Right, the language is different.

GRUNDY: Oh, yeah. And I consider myself bilingual. They talk about Arabonics. I consider myself bilingual meaning that my parents were smart enough to say and my teachers, when you’re in this classroom you speak Standard English. They knew that. Those same teachers because I’m real friends with a lot of them now, like grandmother figures, when I’m outside that school, they talking black language, you know. Arabonics all over, girl, did you--you know it kind of goes on and on and on. But yeah I consider myself.

BRINSON: Well, given all that why did you do the interviews with me?

GRUNDY: You said to me, I believe, I was thinking. Now you tell me if I was all wrong on this. That part of your purpose in doing this was to document a period of time that essentially has gone undocumented. I think that’s real important. Uhmm, sometimes I say to black people in Lexington in terms of doing interviews with family members, and keeping scrapbooks, and putting notations on the backs of photos and dates and stuff like that, that you don’t want anybody to ever come to Lexington two hundred years from now and dig, do an excavation over here and say black people didn’t live here. Because guess what, that’s what history is going to say. So documentation is real important to me.

BRINSON: Okay. Is there anything else you want to say?

GRUNDY: How did you feel talking to me? Let’s get that out. I know this is another purpose.

BRINSON: Well, probably much the same way. I mean, you know just as I said, you know, there, I try and do some of my homework. Obviously I don’t do it all. I mean I didn’t know Francis Welsing, for example.

GRUNDY: By the way let me say this after my first interview with you, Chester asked me, “Well, how did it go?” I said, “This is not your ordinary white girl.” That’s exactly what I said and by that I meant that I had quickly picked up on the fact that you haven’t lived fifty or sixty years walking around with blinders on, and that you entered this thing with a certain respect in place. I felt that immediately, Betsy. It’s just like, maybe that was my green light, okay, I’ll just go on and say some frank things to this white girl and see how far it goes. But I didn’t think I was on eggshells by any means. That has everything to do with you, by the way.

BRINSON: Well, thank you. I, I think I respect all of this and my own history is here because I was a student in Greensboro when the sit-ins started.

GRUNDY: Are you serious?

BRINSON: And I got into a little trouble at my own university for being part of that. And, and just my whole life interaction with blacks has been, uhmm, really important to the kinds of things that I’ve elected to do. I grew up in a segregate society…

GRUNDY: In some way in your being…

BRINSON: But I grew up in a military society so, uhmm, you know, I lived in Germany, for example, after the war where I had neighbors, he was black and she was German and they had two children. And they couldn’t come back here; because there was just no place to accept them. So, you know, even as a small child…

GRUNDY: You were observing.

BRINSON: I have some influences but, so, when I came to Kentucky and was offered the opportunity to work on this I just said, oh, yeah, that seems important to me to do.

GRUNDY: What, I…

BRINSON: But I can’t do it as a white the way…

GRUNDY: Yeah, I know. But I’m real curious as just a black person talking to a thoughtful white woman, uhmm, shortly after everything went down, Columbine High School, Colorado; I was somewhere in Frankfort at a meeting and there was only one other black person there. We were eating lunch and this had all happened and stuff. You know just kind of being the person I am I said, “Well,” we were all kind of sitting around eating lunch. I want to ask you something. I said, “When you’re in your quiet moments not a black person around, you’re at home with your family members or what have you, uhmm, and your guard is down. In other words you don’t have to worry about being politically correct or anything. How many of you ever say to yourselves or observed to your family and friends you know everyone of these school shootings has been committed by a white male who can be considered middle class, upper middle class? How many of you said that?” Do you know, Betsy how many people? Now they may, I don’t know, say it to me in this setting. First of all they were shocked. “Well, we never thought about it.” Please tell me, what, you know, you can’t speak for white people but I am puzzled by that, you know.

BRINSON: Well, I’m certainly aware of it. So is my husband. I’ve had conversations with white colleagues, you know, friends and what not. We’re all aware of it. That this is, these kids are white, privileged and you know, what’s going on here?

GRUNDY: Now you know what black people, I’m going to let you in on a little bit on black thought. It won’t be a surprise to you. The first response when all of this stuff started to happen what black people said to ourselves and to each other kind of quietly, not in an at.. kind of way that says, oh, black kids could never do this. I mean, you know, Maya Angelou says if human beings have done it, human beings can do it meaning we are all capable of certain kinds of things given the right circumstances. By the way she’s going to be here this spring, Maya Angelou and Angela Davis is going to be here in November.

BRINSON: I knew that and I knew the Bishop is…

GRUNDY: Come in August, yeah, yeah, yeah. But at any rate…

BRINSON: You were saying what blacks think…

GRUNDY: What black people say in our most sacred moments about not just Columbine but all the rest of these serial shootings and killings and everything, we say, “Chickens come home to roost”. And by that, of course, we mean that one can not dish it out to not just African people but worldwide just ‘cause, I mean dropping bombs on people. I mean the U.S. is the king and queen of violence, you know, and not think that it comes back at the level where you are most vulnerable, your children, you know.

The other part of that is that we say, the good life is killing white people. You look at that one household Klebold where it seemed to me that just physically looking at the house, this house was so big, they didn’t have to see their kid. And to hear white parents, “My kids went to TLS which is like the la-de-da school.” Parents talking about the children’s wing of the house. Well, why in the world even with money would you want to build a house where you don’t really have to see and interact with your own children. That as soon as the kids, and my children talk about this, reach fifteen and sixteen, they’ve got their own cars, their own telephones. They live completely separate lives with credit cards. You know, that we’re saying, “Ah, the good life is killing you.”

But the other side of that is, say, the black parents say to ourselves that is not what we mean when we talk about quality of life having all of this stuff. We’re talking about something else, you know. It’s a constant reminder because the glitter catches your attention. It speaks to you. It’s real enticing. We have to say, “No.” We have to remind--which is the value of history, of course--that when we talk about ancient Egypt and ancient civilizations, quality of life meant a certain spiritual development that you had gone to another level, gone to another level. We’re not talking about things here.

BRINSON: I have felt that you and I have, that we share in common sort of an appreciation and a reverence for cultural history.

GRUNDY: Oh, yeah.

BRINSON: Now, they’re different histories and I’ve learned some things from you that I didn’t know; and I haven’t been able to talk to you. This is not a conversation.

GRUNDY: Yeah, I know, this has not been a dialogue. [Laughter]

BRINSON: You’ll tell me things and I’ll think, oh, I want to stop and tell you something, you know. So I come at this a little differently in terms of the content. I think we both are cultural historians.

GRUNDY: And see the value in your present life. It’s not something that is put on a shelf. So many things that I think I know and understand I am unconsciously incorporating them, you know. All sorts of things if I had to stop and think about it, oh, that’s where I got that, yeah.

BRINSON: And most of my work and my interest has really been more late nineteenth, early twentieth century, kind of progressive, uhmm, history that’s labor and even more modern with the focus on women which included African American women. But that’s different from where you are starting from...

GRUNDY: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm.

BRINSON: …in all of this and what’s important to you to pass on in your teaching.

GRUNDY :You know, Arthur Ashe, I don’t know if you ever saw the film that was done, there was a piece in there, I don’t know if it was Arthur talking himself or the filmmaker talking about Arthur. I’m not sure because the guy that made the film was a friend of his; where they asked, they were asking Arthur about race and what did he think about race. And some kind of way, maybe it was there or in another interview he talked about how he laments and regrets that so much of his life has been spent having, been force to think about race and to say to himself what else could I have been had I not had to dealt with this mess? You know what I’m saying like that. Of course, that’s the dream-deferred thing, you know. But I think about that a lot how America is really not going to get off square one until it just looks this right in the face and the big piece before even dealing with African people was Native Americans. I mean it was like, we kind brush it, you know, I don’t care if there are just ten Native Americans left in this country, got to still deal with it, you know. And that’s real hard sometimes for African American people to come to terms with because sometimes our pain is so great that we don’t want to take on someone else’s pain. So I just say it’s the same pain. It just has a different face. It’s the same pain, same thing, yeah.

BRINSON: Well, thank you, Ann, for all your time and some wonderful stories.

GRUNDY: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW