Oral History Interview with Charles Whitehead, November 18, 2000

BETSY BRINSON: …conducted by Betsy Brinson in Covington, Kentucky the Corporation where Mr. Whitehead is employed. Okay offices of Ashland, George Washington.

CHARLES WHITEHEAD: George Washington as part of his compensation of the Revolutionary War was given [loud sound obscures audio] Ohio territory. And it’s been well documented that he had slaves from his plantation at Fort Wilhelm, that he set some of these slaves free in this territory that he was given, in the new Ohio territory. And that may have been part of the early settlement in that area. Now, but I have not been able to document that. I don’t know how much truth there is to that but it is worth following up on. But I do know about this Providence Association because they still meet. The churches are there. The graveyards are there and I have a, a written record of that. It’s places like Proctorville, as forward north as , Black Fork, Ironton, , these areas. So there is a lot of history in that area and Catlettsburg, Kentucky had at one point in time a large settlement of African Americans, the Catlettsburg, Ironton area. I don’t know what that did. But you didn’t come… Did you enjoy the tapes that I sent you?

BRINSON: Thank you for talking with me today. Could we begin, may I call you Charles?

WHITEHEAD: Certainly, that’s fine with me.

BRINSON: Or Chuck, do you have a preference?

WHITEHEAD: No, I answer to both Chuck and Charles. And it’s kind of, it’s an interesting story, when I was here when I grew up everybody called me Charles. And when I moved to Ashland, Kentucky people started calling me Chuck. So for thirty-five years I have been called Chuck. When I moved back to , people wanted to know when did you become Chuck. We always knew you as Charles. So, I’ve become Charles again. So I answer to Chuck and Charles. So people know me in the Cincinnati community as Charles.

BRINSON: Okay. I want to go back to some of your early days if you would. Can you begin by just talking a little bit about where you were born and when and your early family life and education for me?

WHITEHEAD: Okay. I was born on in a piney woods of just south of the major city called . But we were born, I was born out on a plantation called Sharrod Plantation in Sharrod.

BRINSON: How do you spell that?

WHITEHEAD: S H A R R O D, Sharrod, Mississippi and we lived there until I was about five years old. I have three other siblings that’s living. It is my understanding that there were several other male siblings that died at birth. But my early…

BRINSON: Where do you fall in the range of all your siblings?

WHITEHEAD: Well, there is, now there is, we are sort of close to the end younger. My brother and I, my family, my two older sisters, my older sister is twelve years older than I. Then my youngest sister is ten years older than I. Then there is four years between the boys. So it is almost like two families. I’ve got two older sisters. The two girls were right together. Then these two boys that are right together and there’s this gap. But it’s my understanding there were several boys born between me and my sisters that did not live.

BRINSON: What do you know about your early ancestors?

WHITEHEAD: What do I know about my early ancestors? I know that my great grandfather migrated as a baby from to . And they were at up close to around up the northwestern part of . And I know that they came to as I’ve been told on an oxcart. It’s kind of interesting that I have been able to document, through several sources, how they came and one of the things that they do very well in the Sharrod Plantation that they raised pecans and they also raised cotton. But one of the things that I have, when you buy pecans from the Sharrod Plantation they always come with in one pound or five pound bags; and along with that on the tag is a kind of a history of the Sharrod Plantation with some recipes on how you use these pecans. Well, it talks about the Sharrod family coming from and how, coming from and how they got to . But it makes no mention in how they cleared the land, and how they came into what was the delta probably swampy, jungle like area, cleared that and started these plantations and planted these trees as an alternative crop.

But then I have a documentation from my uncle that talked about how our family came along with the Sharrod’s and probably did most of the work at that time in helping them clear the land, etc., as slaves. And the other thing that I, I gather that there was some intermarriage that went on that somehow all the people that came or ended up at some point in time are related to each other. There’s a--it’s documented that there were two plantations. There was the Sharrod’s on which we lived and next door to the Sharrod’s there was a plantation that was owned by an African American by the name of Reed.

BRINSON: Reed?

WHITEHEAD: R E E D, the Reed’s and the Sharrod’s are the two owners, recognize each other as first cousins but we were kin to the Reed’s also. But I later found out that we may have had some relationships to the Sharrod’s also.

BRINSON: What do you know about the origin of your last name? Whitehead..

WHITEHEAD: The Whitehead name is, it’s my understanding, is Scotch and that we inherited the name. Of course, the Whiteheads came off the, we came off the plantation that was the Whitehead Plantation and by being part of that holding that name was a Scotch name. The Sharrods, I don’t know, was related to the Whiteheads somehow, and so when they divided up the property, etc. that some of the family of my great, great grandfather’s brothers, etc. stayed in and some migrated to . But it’s also kind of interesting, I’ve got a picture of my great, great grandfather, my great grandfather, my grandmother and they were well dressed. They did not look like they had worked very hard, and it always made me curious as to what they did. But then I have pictures of my grandparents and they were, they looked hard. Looked like they had worked in the fields and had been part of, had to work very, very hard all their life in contrast to what this what my great grandparents looked like in appearance.

BRINSON: How did your, your immediate family make their living while you were growing up?

WHITEHEAD: My father was a sharecropper, but also he was also an entrepreneur of a sort. I hear all these stories about he sold insurance; he played baseball for a while: in addition to that he probably helped sell spirits, had boxing matches, wrestling matches, many things of this nature. So he, he understood the business world and the free enterprise system from the standpoint, understood how to make a living. My mother in addition to sharecropping was also a seamstress, raised vegetables, you know, a nice vegetable garden. One of the things that they understood that you did not want to borrow, or as you know the sharecropping arrangements was that during the times that if you didn’t have a crop that the--you borrowed against your crop. That never worked out well as far as everybody always in debt, never get out of debt. So they sort of, to stay away from the borrowing so they found other things to do in order to make money. My mother would make clothing for the women in the community, you know, raised animals. So there was not a lot of borrowing on their part.

But I was very, you know, as I can remember those were happy days. They were happy days because I had a loving family. My brother, my two sisters and my dog, and my mother and father; and we lived quite a distance from my grandparents and from any other relatives. And I, I know that we lived so far back in the country that if we would go off and stay any time, my father would leave us at a big huge tree about a half mile from the house, and he would go check the house out prior to us going to the house because it was that isolated. And I always enjoyed my grandfather coming on Sunday or Saturday when they had somewhere to go getting me, and stopping at all his relatives and visiting with everyone; and spending the night with him and his wife.

BRINSON: What did your father think he needed to check out at the house before…?

WHITEHEAD: Well, as a, there, apparently there were animals, I mean this was rural . Number two but there was the levee. I don’t know if you--they built levees there to control the water, and this was done by convict labor; and somehow, sometimes the convicts would escape and they would have bounties out; and they would be looking for places to hide and stay, and of course by being, this being such an isolated place. So these were the kinds of things, you know, you’d go off way, there was no way, no neighbors or anybody that you could expect anything could be there. Apparently there had been some history of people doing these kinds of things. But the levee, from what I gather, there were still lots of land to be cleared because I knew that--my dad would tell me about when in the wintertime people would go from the plantation to go to Arkansas, go down the river and cut trees and work on these levees, still clearing the land in those areas.

BRINSON: Of course you were also living in an area of the country where there was a good bit of racial violence for a long time. Do you think your father was ever concerned about that in terms of the checking out the house before he let you come?

WHITEHEAD: Well, ah…

BRINSON: Was that an issue in your community that you recall?

WHITEHEAD: Well, I think that, I was probably too young if it was an issue I was probably too young to know it was an issue. But I knew that it was a pretty racist place. But where we lived was Sharrod’s Plantation, the gentleman that owned the plantation was such a powerful individual who controlled a--or sat on the board of one of the largest banks in Memphis, Tennessee--was such a powerful individual that nobody dared do much without--or even came on his land without his permission. Nothing happened on his plantation without his permission, he had that kind of power.

I’ll tell you about a story about my father. My father in his days when he was selling insurance, apparently a Caucasian gentleman asked him to make change for a twenty-dollar bill, and he did. After he made change he found out that the twenty-dollar bill was a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and he had gone back and asked to get his money back. An argument started and apparently he was called, you know, a lot of racial names, and he ended up shooting this individual. It’s my understanding from stories that my older sisters tell me that the Klu Klux Klan, etc. came to the house, and the owner of the plantation’s son ran them off and told them to get the hell off his land. That if my daddy had done something that they would bring him to trial. Also I understand that--and I haven’t been able to document this—my sister said that, that the owners of the plantation flew my father out of to on a crop duster to make sure that anything, nothing did happen to him. And that when they did bring him back to trial that the Sharrod who owned the plantation had the trial on his front porch. So that can tell you what kind of power this individual had. My dad was let go free but he chose not to remain in . But I don’t think the Sharrods really wanted him to go. So he moved, that’s how we got to .

BRINSON: You were how old when you moved to ?

WHITEHEAD: Four, four years old, I had not started school. But one of the things that after we got to Ohio, because they did not want him to leave, but he thought it was best that he leave; that, and it’s been documented that those who left the plantation--you had--there was always that deferment if you stayed and worked the plantations, worked the land. Once both as a deterrent to getting people to stay on the land, once you got out they would take the deferment away from you and see that you were eligible for the draft. So soon after we got to my dad became eligible for the draft, but he secured a job at the Curtis Wright Airplane factory and it was determined that the job that he was doing was just as important as being a soldier.

BRINSON: And this would have been wartime.

WHITEHEAD: This was back during World War II. The interesting thing--I was--I never forget being around the house and my mother crying and my sisters, “Oh, my dad’s going away to the military.” But I thought it was great, you know, my dad’s going to be a soldier. He’s going to be in the Army. I’ll never forget that. I went away to school one day and came back, and my dad had left early that morning. When I got back he was back home. Apparently they brought him to to which was a staging area at that particular time and they had some military camp there, but ah, he was allowed to come back and go back to work on his military related job with the old Curtis Wright plant. And that was kind of an interesting situation as far as I was concerned. I was--wanted to see my dad--see what he looked like in uniform, wanted him to be a soldier. So I was a little bit disappointed.

But anyway, my parents both had eighth grade education but eighth grade educations were probably equivalent to, in some cases, post graduate work now. Because I, I, it was amazing that my father from a business standpoint he, I mean if he had had some money and more education he could identify a business situation about as well as anybody I’ve ever met, bar none. My mother, she could add and subtract, count as well, do numbers as well as any math teacher. I never forget going in a grocery store and seeing her, figuring in her head as fast as the cashier could figure on the adding machine on the cash register to the penny.

BRINSON: Tell me a little bit about your education.

WHITEHEAD: A little bit about my education? Well, I started off being from, moving from the country--my education started probably with my mother even before I got into school reading to me. I remember my mother reading and reciting poetry, etc. And one of the favorite books that she had was a little black book of poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and she loved to read that book of poems. And I would, me and my sisters loved to listen to those poems. But as a young person, because of where we were, because, maybe because it was preschool--when people worked in the field I mean--what better babysitters you found than being in school. So we went to, I would go to school with my sisters, and they would be taught there; and I’m sure that it was somewhere between the age of three and five that we did this. And I remember my father riding me on the back of a mule to school and dropping me off at school along with my sisters: my sisters walking. And it was kind of interesting that people who opposed busing and I said, you know, I grew up in an environment where people were bused all the time. We had a different situation, busing sure beat walking.

BRINSON: But now this was , so…?

WHITEHEAD: No, this was . Let me get you from to .

BRINSON: Oh, okay.

WHITEHEAD: So I was in school in prior to coming here, to . So when I get to I found that, you know, being from the south we talked different. I knew a lot of things that children in the city did not know. And so school was sort boring when I first started school. It was boring. We didn’t dress like anybody. We didn’t talk like anybody. You know, was that a form of discrimination? It probably was. Not by race but by being different, and so therefore when people are different somehow people have a tendency to treat you differently. I recall getting in a lot of fights during that period of time. Didn’t get along well with the teachers. But we stayed in Lockland for a couple of years and my dad--as soon as my mother and father could buy a house we moved to a little town called .

This is where I really started to take on, become interested in education. And I became interested because we had a principal--here I had been to , and he had been educated at ; but he did some things that really instilled pride, really created an environment for learning. As you may, as I can recall this community was the largest incorporated black community in . It was about ten thousand individuals that lived in this community but all had recently migrated from the south. And I think at that particular point in time, and right before the end of the war and right after the war cotton was no longer king then; and I think some people may have been forced off the land. But people came from and lived in this community, they were from primarily , , , etc. and came with various stages of…

BRINSON: I’m going to stop here a minute.

WHITEHEAD: Okay.

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BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

WHITEHEAD: They were in various stages of formal training, so you may have had--one of the things that they did at the school is that they placed individuals based upon where they found them from a learning standpoint. It had nothing to do with age or size or any other thing. So you may have been eighteen, but if you couldn’t read you may have started in second or third grade where you learn those things necessary to read. I was in a class, I will never forget I was in a class with eighteen year olds.

BRINSON: And you were how old?

WHITEHEAD: Eight, seven, eight, nine years old but they made it work. It worked because teachers were caring. The individuals knew why they were there, and they created roles for these individuals. When the teacher would leave then we had, you know, adults watched over the class. These students would help out with when we had projects, monitor halls, or you know we weren’t very good at using scissors or pasting things, so you’d have somebody there that could help you do these things. And so in my opinion that’s--you know it’s--it’s kind of, ah, sort of like a one room, one room school kind of approach to education and it worked. It worked from the standpoint that people got what they needed.

If it was only necessary for them to learn how to read and write--one of the things that I don’t think happened--there was very few as I recall, and when I graduated from the eighth grade finished elementary school, that there were very few of these individuals that graduated--was in my graduating class. There may have been one or two that stayed during all this period of time because you know if they were seventeen or eighteen when they started they would have been in their early twenties or mid-twenties. So I don’t recall--so they must have gotten what it was that they needed during this period of time. But one of the things that we learned how to do at this school was to compete. We understood what the--and I don’t think a lot of people today--we understood what the free enterprise system meant. We understood that, what democracy meant, and we understood that if you remove, if race was not an issue then people still had to compete. So we were trained to compete, and we, because it was an all black school, I mean we did not have all of the hang-ups that we may have had if we were in another school.

I’ll never forget that… And every Friday we would have an assembly where all the students would come together, and each class would put on plays or do black history. Black History Month was very important to us. During that period of time we would have concerts. Music was very important to us. Poetry was very important to us. So in my opinion we had a, we got a very, very good education. It was very rounded. But we had good teachers, and I think good teachers are so important; and they were important at this point in time because segregation still existed. And so therefore people didn’t have the opportunity to teach at a lot of different places, so most of the African American teachers ended up teaching in schools like or Lockland or schools that were designated for black children.

BRINSON: Lockland is that the…?

WHITEHEAD: That was where I first started.

BRINSON: Spell that for me if you please and I’m doing that so the transcriptionist…

WHITEHEAD: Okay. Lockland, L O C K L A N D, . But Lockland had--went from kindergarten through twelfth grade, but they still had a white school that went through kindergarten to twelfth grade so it was a segregated school system in the forties, the fifties, the sixties.

BRINSON: Okay. Now when you finished the eighth grade though where did you go from there?

WHITEHEAD: I went to .

BRINSON: Hughes.

WHITEHEAD: Hughes, H U G H E S in the city of because we lived in the county we did not have a high school. And so the children from my area could attend school at any school in the county we so desired. So I decided that, most of the kids went to the all black school which was . I decided that I wanted to go to the city to one of the city schools, to . And I’ll never forget the first day I went out to apply to get into the school. The assistant principal at Hughes High School told me that the children from my area had been having so much problems, or so many problems that he suggested that I go back to Lockland Way.

BRINSON: Now this was an integrated school?

WHITEHEAD: This was an integrated school. The school was about forty-five hundred. It went from like seventh grade, seventh grade through senior high school, forty-five hundred children in the school, of which about fifty were African Americans. And, uhmm, we were as I said before, most of the kids in our, my area were, you know, from the rural south. But, ah, very anxious to learn, I mean we wanted to learn. And I never forget this, and the reason I remember this—it’s just as clear as day—when I got back home my mother asked me, “Did you get registered for school?” And I told her the story about what the principal said. Back in those days women usually had what they call housedresses and street dresses. And my mother went back in her bedroom and she came out in her street dress, and so I knew that she meant we were going somewhere; and she meant business. So we got in the car and we went back to the school, and I don’t know to this day what she said to the principal but when we came out of the class, when she came out of the principal’s office--oh, they called me into the principal’s office there was a schedule for me with all my classes. I had been enrolled and everybody else that after that got enrolled also who came from my community.

And I’ll never forget—and she asked me to look over the classes that they were offering me. And there was one class there--I wanted to take a math class--there was some other class which I don’t know if it was woodworking or doing something, and I said, “Well, I don’t want to take this. I want to take the algebra course.” And she said, “Well, take this course off and give him the algebra course.” And the principal said, “Well, I’m only offering this course to make it easier for him. He’s got, you know, he’ll have a tough time.” And she just looked at him and she said, “Well, it’s your job to give it to him, and it’s my job to see that he gets it. So if that’s what he wants you put it on there, and I’ll see that he gets it.” Uh-huh, and that was kind of a, you know that stuck with me, you know all my life remembering how I got into .

Then I went out for the football team. And I go out for the football team, and I was almost the same size that I am now. And I stand out there two or three days without getting anything. They gave me no uniform, no nothing. So my mother again said to me, “How is football coming?” And I said, “Mom, I don’t even have my uniform freshman football team.. I haven’t even gotten to the window.” She said, “You stay there until they give you a uniform. You show up every day when that equipment room opens, you stand and be there in line until they give you something.” So finally they gave me a uniform. You would have thought that I was a replica of Jim Thorpe. This stuff was so old, so beaten up. I mean it looked like something out of another world. But by the time that we played our first football game I was captain of the football team. I was captain of the

BRINSON: So they weren’t going to make it easy for you were they?

WHITEHEAD: Nobody made it easy for you. I recall that the first day of school that the--we had a substitute teacher, and she came in, she didn’t know what to do with us so, she divided the class into two sections and had a contest. Well, by my name being Whitehead that meant you always was at the back, at the end of the alphabet and in the back of the room. And I never forget this--this was an English class--that when they got to me the score was tied, and I heard this big, oh, this sigh go over this room. From, not from the other side but from the folk who were on my side saying, “Hey, look, I mean, this guy, we’re probably going to lose this contest.” And I don’t know if I answered the question right or not but at least the teacher said I gave a great answer. Either I did a good job or the teacher recognized what was happening and, and said I did a good job. I don’t know which one but I know that it made all the difference in the world as to my relationship with that class for the rest of the year as long as I was in that class. It changed what people thought about me because my side won. And I had given a proper response. And it just goes to show that you know that if people do certain kinds of things, it’s how you, you know, whatever the perception might be.

BRINSON: What year did you graduate and how many were in your high school graduating class?

WHITEHEAD: I graduated in 1956. There were four hundred and fifty in my graduating class.

BRINSON: Oh, that’s a big school.

WHITEHEAD: It was a big school, big graduating class. It was so big that we didn’t have the privilege of marching across the stage and throwing your tassel back, and doing all of these things like most high school. Our diploma, we had so many, is that when they declared us as graduates we, felt up under our chair and got our diploma which meant that you had graduated. So it was, ah, did I miss that? I don’t know if I missed it.

But Hughes was, it’s interesting. I got a call the other day from somebody asking me to come back. They wanted me to do some things with the school and wanted to show me around the school. And I’m going to do that. But one of the interesting things, I ended up being a good athlete at that school--the next year I will just tell you--the next year, I told you I ended up being the captain of the freshman football team. But my sophomore year I came back, I had been captain of the freshman football team; and I ended at the back end, you know, like number 50, guard. I was so far in the back that I couldn’t hear what plays were going on. So, ah, and that was the story of my life and. And taking advantages--you’ve got to understand the taking advantages of opportunities--understanding what the opportunities are.

And I never forget that at the end of the season they have—at the end of the training sessions they had what they call a red and white game. And this meant this was our last game before the regular season started. I never forget to this day the coaches had the first string scrimmaging against the second string, and they weren’t doing that well. And so he said, “Well, send me some scrubs.” So right away somebody grabbed my arm and gave me a red pullover shirt, and put me in the practice. Well, I recognized that this was if I ever was going to make this team here was my opportunity. And I, I don’t think that--they must have run about ten or fifteen plays and I tackled--I made tackles, I tackled everybody, every down that I was there. And the coach, and it got to the point that the whole team had given up their assignments and they were all trying to block me. So the coach said it looks like nobody on this team can block you so you can come over and play on this side. And so that’s how I got to play on the varsity team as a sophomore.

BRINSON: I wonder up until the time, well, you were growing up until you graduated from high school when you, were you aware of the NAACP at all? Was there a chapter or a youth council in your area? Did you have family that belonged?

WHITEHEAD: We were, people from the south while they were aware in the north—but most folks were like my mother that they dealt with their own situations and they dealt, you know, just like a one--one on one. I grew up on a street that as far to the north was , it was all black; and as far to the south was Lockland. It was basically white. And the dividing line, that Lockland put up was like a ten foot metal chain-link fence all along the divided line that divided Lockland between. You know you talk about the Berlin Wall. This was kind of like the Berlin Wall. I never forget that the kids wanted to play with each other, and we kept digging places for us to crawl up under the fence. And they would keep coming back putting rocks in these holes. And the holes turned up because kids didn’t know any difference at that particular point and time. We played, had some good friends that lived on the other side of the fence. A story that I told somebody about going to… the stores that we went to were all in Lockland, going to a grocery store and drugstore combination with a white friend of mine. And I always used to laugh at him because, ah, his--we’d buy ice cream cones, and my cone always came with wax paper on it, his never had any wax paper on it. I always thought was, that I was getting better because it had the wax paper on it, it kept the dust and everything out of my ice cream flying off. I didn’t know or didn’t realize until I tried to sit down and eat at the counter that mine already came ready to go. His was, he had a choice as to take it out or eat it there and that was…

BRINSON: So even though it was not a southern state still had separate facilities and separate accommodations.

WHITEHEAD: Well, yeah, the city in itself--and this was back in the forties--the city in itself, there were the schools were integrated, but out in the county where we lived it was pretty much, pretty segregated to a certain extent. I know that they had a little diner that people just said, as a young man we just said, “We can’t sit here. We can’t eat.” This was long before the sit-ins. “That we just won’t eat your hamburger anymore.”

BRINSON: What about movie and swimming pools?

WHITEHEAD: Segregated out in the county.

BRINSON: Parks.

WHITEHEAD: We swam in the creek or we had to go to the city of --in , the closest pool was Hartville. I think that they let us swim a couple of days a week. If not, we went all the way to which was quite a drive to go to a swimming pool; and had a segregated swimming pool. But there was no swimming pool in . You learned how to swim in the creek or--I really didn’t learn how to swim until I got to high school when I went to the city. But it was, ah, well, the other thing that I will remind you of is that when I was a senior in high school, I had been probably played more football and had been a starter on the football team; and nobody else on the team as a junior had been any more than a substitute. And I never forget that being a captain of this football team never dawned on me--that I wanted to be captain or that I could become captain--except I heard two guys talking about what one would be captain, they would be co-captains because they had gotten to play more than anybody else except me: which they just totally overlooked me. I was totally overlooked. No matter what I had done they just felt that this school was not ready to do anything for me except for the fact that the seniors came by and said, “You deserve to be captain of the football team.” And they voted me captain of the football team, which was another interesting situation whereby at the beginning of the season they had what they call a pigskin preview. All the teams would come together and they would play a quarter, or they’d play against all the teams. They wouldn’t play long and they would introduce the captains of the various teams and the queens of the court, etc. In the past the captains would always escort the queens from your high school. This year they changed the procedure. The procedure was they introduced the captains we all lined up; the queens all came by in cars, never got out of the cars this year. You know, my dad would, laughed, I was wondering how they were going to do this. But they just kept around through the stadium which was an interesting situation.

But all in all I did have some--this was--when I was in high school the Emmett Till situation took place. You know there was some tension over the Emmett Till situation. And I never forget that the NAACP, or somebody, said that at that certain hour that everybody in the high school--all the African American high school--should stand up and look south. And we did, and it infuriated the principal, you know--who, you know.

BRINSON: You stood how long?

WHITEHEAD: Oh, ten or fifteen minutes.

BRINSON: In each classroom or were you together?

WHITEHEAD: No, in each classroom, wherever you were you just stood up. And threatened to expel--put some kids out of school. And there was an incident, another incident, whereby somebody started a fight or did something on the bus or did something; and the principal called all of the African American students to the auditorium and read the riot act; and that he wasn’t going to have this but created a furor with the parents. Kids, when I first started to Hughes High School, Hughes High School was, most of the kids there were female, they were the… END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

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WHITEHEAD: …and the country bumpkin that lived in those days out in the country. Of course we didn’t have any sidewalks. They didn’t talk about suburbs or being a suburbanite at that time, you know, it was country, and people laughed and teased me because we didn’t have any sidewalks and see if I had any mud on my shoes. But it…

BRINSON: Let me ask you about standing up and facing south for Emmett Till. Was that something that you all just thought of to do at your school or was it part of a national…?

WHITEHEAD: No, that was part of a national edict that the NAACP, ah, and how did I find out about it? One of my classmates told me because we were in, you know, we were in the neighborhood; and the kids were infuriated about what had happened there. The other thing that was interesting that in the school while it was integrated that blacks sat on one side. In the morning before classes started blacks sat on one side of the hallway and the whites sat on the other side of the hallway.

BRINSON: Was that required?

WHITEHEAD: No, that was no requirement but it was just from an interest standpoint. I’m assuming it was self-segregation. But then there was a group--it was always interesting--there was a group that, there was always in the middle of this mixed group there was always in the middle and they were mostly athletes who were, you know, people on the football team. They would mix with each other, and so therefore, but you know, if you weren’t part of some group then you would end up sitting on one side and the whites would sit on the other side. And I just remember that that was kind of an interesting kind of, ah, phenomena and blacks and whites usually ate together. And I think at that time, they may have even had, you know, some kids would have free lunches. They had a free lunch program. I wasn’t part of this free lunch but I knew it, and I knew that some of the kids were in the free lunch program.

But it was kind of interesting that this was about the time that urban renewal was taking place in . And when I started to the high school, as I told you, there were about fifty African Americans. When I graduated the, the--it was about fifty-fifty. Yeah, because most blacks--because they were tearing down the houses in the west end moved into the Avendale, in that school district which changed the complexion of the school very quickly, very rapidly. Before it had been a school that was primarily, ah, German and Jewish; and almost forty, say forty, sixty percent Jewish, large Jewish population. I had the privilege of celebrating lots and lots of holidays because we had these large numbers of people that would be out on Jewish holidays; a large number so would be out. So they kind of reached some kind of compromise as to what the holidays were, and you know what you had to do during that period of time.

BRINSON: When you graduated in 1956 which was a pretty important period in terms of the race relations with the Brown decision in fifty-four and Rosa Parks and the bus boycott in . How much of that were you aware of do you think while you were in high school?

WHITEHEAD: While I was in high school? We were aware of, you know, quite a bit what was going on. And things were slowly changing in the city of during that period of time. I can recall, uhmm, about jobs, and one of the things--that’s about the same time that Proctor and Gamble started to hire African Americans. My sophomore year I had looked for a job in fifty-seven. I believe fifty-seven, fifty-eight I went to work for Proctor and Gamble, and was the first African American to work for Proctor and Gamble in modern times at the plant. They had hired a woman who had worked in one of the downtown offices but I was, I went to work the year Proctor and Gamble brought on Duncan Hines cake mix. And sometimes I think that it was an act of .

I never forget going and looking for a summer job, and been on the bus all day. It was about this time in the afternoon coming home and had not secured a job, taken lots of tests and going through the interviewing process several times. And I was asleep on the bus. The bus had crossed this railroad track and hit a bump, and I woke up and low and behold I look out this window; and there was this little red building that said, “Employment Office, Proctor and Gamble”. And something told me to get off at the next stop. I got off the next stop, walked back to the employment office and walked in. There was a young lady sitting there and she asked me, “What did I want?” I told her I wanted, “That I was looking for a job”; and she said that, “They didn’t have any jobs.” And by that time the employment manager came through, and he was very nice and he asked me what was I doing there; and I told him I was looking for a job. And he said, “Come on back and let me test you.” And I went back, and he tested me and then he said, “Well, if I find something, I’ll let you know.” I didn’t expect to get a job so I got back on the bus and before I could get home the… when I got home my mother said that, “The employment office had called”--[coughs], excuse me—“from Proctor and Gamble and wanted me to go take a physical and wanted me to start on the shift.” So I got the job and started to work, within twelve hours I was on the job.

BRINSON: This was a summer job?

WHITEHEAD: This was a summer job.

BRINSON: While you were in college.

WHITEHEAD: Right.

BRINSON: And what were your responsibilities?

WHITEHEAD: Well I started off as the, cleaning up the machinery. That’s what they had most of the summer kids doing. As things got messed up, well, we kept things straight. But I worked so hard on that job, I worked, I was working for the day shift and the evening shift manager because if you worked more than a certain number of hours they paid what they called supper pay. So I always wanted to stay long enough to get the supper money. But I made sure that, that before any flour or anything got on the floor I had gotten it up. And so I got almost to the point where I could--I was an hourly employee--but I could work as long as I wanted to. Nobody told me when to come in and when to leave. And I would normally work for twelve hours a day.

In fact I worked so hard on that job that the day shift foreman came in and gave me a raise and the night shift foreman came by and called me in his office and he gave me a raise. I said, “I already got a raise.” And he said, “Yeah, I know you got a raise from the day shift but I want you to have a raise.” And I felt pretty good about that.

Uhmm, the other thing too that happened on there, of course, there were a lot of college kids working in this job. I got made a little supervisor. They gave me the job of supervising some of the college students and some of the regular employees, too. But nobody really told me that I was supervising. They had a gentleman that had been with Proctor and Gamble for twenty some years, and they sent him back there to work for me. But I had no idea. And he came in and sort of took over you know, and I thought they sent him back there to be the boss. You know I, as a summer student, hadn’t been there that long, and here comes this gentleman. He had all kinds of diamonds on his collar from the years of service, etc. And I noticed about two days after he started on the job the foreman came on, he said, “I don’t understand, you’re not keeping this place as clean as you used to. What’s going on?” He said, “You know, I make you, I give you a job as supervisor and you’re not handling it very well.” So I told him, I said, “Mr. Bean said that he was in charge.” And he said, I said, “I haven’t been supervising anybody. Bean has been giving orders.” He said, he called this gentleman in and he sat him down, the three of us, he said, “Now, this guy, Charles is in charge. If, ah, you can’t work with Charles then you have to go find yourself another job.” But, you know, I had not gotten the message. I just couldn’t believe that that was, you know, it was beyond… You know, he didn’t make it that clear to me and I did not, this other guy just came over. I didn’t have the wildest idea. But that was kind of… I, I, Proctor and Gamble did some things that from a racial standpoint that I really appreciated what they did.

The first night, remember I told you about the first, the first night on the job, well, where this location that they had me working in was--Proctor and Gamble had its own cafeteria. But it was so far off to the cafeteria that people who were employees there went out into the community to eat. And there was a little cafeteria that--oh, a couple blocks down the street--that most of the employees ate at. Well, the supervisor told me where everybody went to eat so I, I go down to get my dinner at the same time with all the rest of these Proctor and Gamble employees. And I go in this restaurant, and there was this young kid that was help serving. And all of a sudden I noticed that an older gentleman had taken his place and he started serving me, and rather than putting mine on a plate, everything I ordered was being boxed up. So when I got to the end of the counter and I’m saying, “I didn’t, why is this stuff boxed up?” He just said, “You can’t eat in here. You have to take this with you.” I said, “If I can’t eat it, I don’t want it.” And I left the restaurant.

BRINSON: Was this in ?

WHITEHEAD: Yes, yes. And before I could get back to the plant the plant manager met me at the door and he says, “I already know what happened to you. You go back and I will have told the people there that if they don’t serve you then we will make arrangements for all of our employees that they don’t serve anybody.” And that made me feel pretty good as to in those days that they took that position. But I was so angry I wasn’t about to go back so I ended up bringing my lunch from that point on. It really made me angry that I didn’t see any reason that I needed to go back there and spend my money with somebody who didn’t really want me to eat there. And the other thing that they did, they allowed me to go out and hire one of my buddies to come to work there. That made it a lot more palatable to have somebody who was a good friend of mine working on the same job.

It paid very well. I made, I was making more money as a part-time summer student than my dad made on his regular job. And sometime it was embarrassing to me when he would ask me how much money did I make that to keep from embarrassing him, I used to lie to him. And I would tell him that I made something less than what he made. I did not want to, to have him to experience here it is somebody right out of high school with a year of college is making so much more. And it was not a little gap. It was a big gap. It was a lot of money.

And I never forget that one Fourth of July I worked, they called me in to work for the Fourth of July. I worked about an hour or two hours and they, we did the first time they made this applesauce raisin cake that they were so famous for. And they made us do samples, and after that they told us not to tell anybody it was a new product. And they were just testing it, and we knew that and they paid me a hundred dollars for a half a days work.

BRINSON: Well that’s pretty good.

WHITEHEAD: It was good but my dad wanted to ask me, I wasn’t about to tell him that I had gotten a hundred dollars for a half days work. I mean, I just know how, you know, I did not want to belittle him or take anything from him being who he was. I loved him dearly, and he was the head of the household which was interesting. It was interesting those days, as being the man of the household that, ah, you talk about family structure; we had a family structure that nobody ate until my father came home, washed up and came to the dinner table. But at that particular time everybody came to the dinner table wouldn’t none of this… I always tell everybody my mother was a great cook. She never cooked a meal that we didn’t like ‘cause that was all you were going to get to eat. And so we’d all sit, my brother, myself and my sisters would sit down with my dad and we’d all have an opportunity to talk at the dinner table. That’s how he kept informed as to what was going on, how was your day?

BRINSON: I’m going to move you ahead.

WHITEHEAD: Okay.

BRINSON: Because you now sit on the National Board of the NAACP.

WHITEHEAD: Uh-hmm.

BRINSON: And I wonder at what point did you become involved with that, with the NAACP?

WHITEHEAD: When did I become involved with the NAACP? I became involved with the NAACP, uhmm, in the area. One of the jobs that I had was being the first African American hired as a professional with . I sort of became a spokesperson from the standpoint of what was being done, what was not being done, the housing, these kinds of things. So.

BRINSON:You came to in 19…

WHITEHEAD: Sixty-three.

BRINSON: Sixty-three, okay.

WHITEHEAD: Uh-hmm, before the Civil Rights laws were enacted and so therefore, you know--it was kind of--, eastern --it was a kind of interesting situation that I found myself in. But it was a situation whereby I assumed that I was well-prepared to take. I had been in the military, had been an officer there, and served in the south and run into all kinds of problems. Knew about how to get things done in those kinds of environments. All kinds of military stories that I can tell you about the south, it was, as being an officer and having to learn riot controls and all of these things when Governor Wallace stood in the door at the University of Alabama, all of those kind of things. All of those turmoils took place…

BRINSON: Now where were you actually stationed?

WHITEHEAD: .

BRINSON: My father was there when I was a little girl.

WHITEHEAD: Okay, and was a racially segregated town.

BRINSON: .

WHITEHEAD: Columbus, , racially segregated to the extent that everything is black and white. In those days the posts were integrated, but outside of that, ah, having problems being in a military unit that was attached to lots of units, so we had to travel quite a bit. Trying to, once again, one of these stories, each year we would go from down to , right outside of . We would go in, we would go in a caravan or in a convoy, and each unit commander would have to take his own unit there, keep them tied up in traffic. And I was always teasing people because I was always having a military convoy escort with me from the MP’s. What I found out later was that, that it would have been very, very difficult for me to negotiate say a passage through all of those little towns that we had to go through and all the sheriffs. It would not have been very pleasant because I had already had one incident that people knew about. Not that I was a hothead or anything, I just, certain kinds of things I didn’t stand for and…

BRINSON: Can you describe that?

WHITEHEAD: Well, yes, earlier I had gone as from to ; and I had gone in a private car with other African American officers. We had gone over there for some training, and on the way back we came through a little town. I believe it was, we came through . But when we got to , there was this big, this big sign that said, “Fried Chicken”. And these guys said, “Let’s stop here and get this fried chicken.” And I kind of knew what was going to happen, I said, “I don’t want any chicken.” So I stayed in the car, and they go over to go through the front door of this place. They were all from up north. And this lady that must have been about a hundred years old, she was holding the screen door to keep from letting them in the place. She said, “If you boys want some chicken, go around to the back.” And so they all, they came back, and I had saw what happened. They said…

BRINSON: These were African American soldiers you were with?

WHITEHEAD: Yes.

BRINSON: But not a mixed.

WHITEHEAD: No it was not a mixed group. So they came back to the car and I said, “Where’s the chicken?” “Oh,” they said, “We didn’t want any chicken.” Said, “Come on let’s go, we didn’t want any chicken.” Then they got around the road and they later told me what had happened. And about six months later I was taking my unit to, ah, and we were all dressed in our full battle regalia, and we were all on different Greyhound buses. So my bus, I guess we left about in the morning from . The first stop would have been about , so I woke up and low and behold there was this chicken standing there.

BRINSON: The same place?

WHITEHEAD: Same place and I had made up my mind and so--this was an integrated unit--I emptied the bus, and we all go into this chicken place. I had made up my mind that if we didn’t get served I was going to tell these guys to tear it down. I was that bold. And we go in and no incident, the people were so nervous. Here were all these guys with rifles on their backs and steel helmets, and they forgot to charge us. I mean they never bothered about asking to pay even. I mean we just kind of ate up everything in the store and I wasn’t about to pay them anything. So you know that story kind of got around that, ah, what had happened, so you kind of get the reputation of being kind of a hothead. So that led to these other kinds of things.

But got along well with the people that I had to deal with on the base who were basically some of those who I thought, you know, long term military people who kind of respected the rank that I had. Got along fine with my commanding officer who by the way was the son of a senator from , a graduate; and had been married and sort of had, had an integrated marriage. He had married into a Hawaiian family that was very well to do. So very much enjoyed, I did, that kind of relationship, very caring, very dedicated individual.

BRINSON: I took you off track but it’s okay because I actually wanted to ask you about those years in the military in which you had shared a little bit with me before earlier.

WHITEHEAD: Well, the other thing too is that, ah, ah, ah, and I’ll just tell you about, ah, there were some people that weren’t very pleased in the military.

BRINSON: That were not very pleased?

WHITEHEAD: With what was going on with in the south, southerners that, ah, while they didn’t say it because, you know, soldiers take orders, are supposed to take orders. But I knew that they were very, very unhappy with the black officers. They were very, very unhappy with what was going on across the south. Ah, but then there were some who went out of their way to try to make things work. I, my first sergeant was a gentleman from Alabama, ah, came out of a very, very segregated background; but I heard him say to some people one time--we were in a jeep--we were, he and I and two others were going, once again back to Fort Stewart, and we stopped at this, ah, this restaurant, this little bitty country place. Ah, I had to stop him from hitting a guy with a rifle because I was outside doing something, and somebody asked him, “What are you guys doing with this nigger officer?” And, ah, he said to…

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO

SIDE TWO, TAPE TWO

WHITEHEAD: He became outraged because of our relationship, and the lack of respect for an officer in the United States Army irregardless what the color was. And I thought, you know, he was a southerner that was a long-term soldier, understood rank, etc., and was willing to do his job irregardless of who he had to do the job for.

BRINSON: Let’s go back to in 1963, and you were beginning to tell me before I sidetracked you a little bit about your early involvement with the NAACP.

WHITEHEAD: Well, being in a city like is ….

BRINSON: Which is how big in 1963?

WHITEHEAD: in 1963, twenty-eight thousand but part of the , , Ironton, ( ), ( ) probably made it about the size of . But just had started integration, had taken place a couple of years earlier not very much in the way of that but sixties. You know, sixties, fifty-nine, sixty, that they had integrated all the schools, etc. So there is still a little tension from all of that, but things were being driven by, at that time, the founder of was alive and pretty much dominated the financial and political arena of that area. One of the things that he did that made it, made people understand that integration of was his decision. He told me, I never forget we were at a picnic. He was a tall gentleman.

BRINSON: What was his name?

WHITEHEAD: Paul Blazer, Sr.

BRINSON: B L A …

WHITEHEAD: Z E R, and he would go to these picnics. He was sat out in an area where everybody could pay homage and see him, get a chance to see Mr. Blazer and shake hands, all the employees. All of his eastern employees would go to this amusement park. Well, this one day when Barbara and I first went to one of these picnics, my wife and I. He invited us, he said, “Come here and sit down.” He sat Barbara on one side and me on the other side. He put his arms around her, around us and asked us to sit with him. And I’ll never forget him telling me, asking me, “How was things going?” I said, “Oh, things were going great.” I didn’t want to tell him about the little problems that I had. He said, “Chuck, now don’t forget that you are south of the Mason Line”. He says to me, he says, “There were some people who didn’t want me to hire you. But I thought that it was the right thing to do and I did it anyway.” But later on some of my co-workers told me, said that when they saw me sitting on that bench with Mr. Blazer’s arm around us that the word went around that, “Don’t mess with Chuck”. [Laughter]

BRINSON: Of course, you’ve moved up in the company though.

WHITEHEAD: Yes.

BRINSON: What was your first position?

WHITEHEAD: Well, it was a clerk in the credit department. I worked in the credit department which was interesting. It was the kind of job whereby you did a lot phone work, kind of a lot of contact with the outside world. And being a small town like Ashland which was a lot different than being, you know, you talk about three percent of the population, ah, not much of a threat so therefore housing ( ) were still segregated. But people just act different, not a whole lot of tension, you know, not a whole lot of racial tension, ah, but some. But not the kind you would have in say or in or in . Even to the point whereby, you know, most blacks there made good money. Of course, they all had any number of jobs. They probably, not so many worked for , but they worked for ( )and other places and they did other domestic kind of work.

BRINSON: Was there a NAACP chapter in ?

WHITEHEAD: No.

BRINSON: Was there ever?

WHITEHEAD: Not until nineteen, the first NAACP chapter as I can recall started in 1972, seventy-one, seventy-two, somewhere along those lines. But one of the things that happened is, it’s kind of like the plantation we came off, is people wanted things to ( ). The minister tells me about a group of his parishioners came to him and formed a committee and wanted to integrate the theaters, etc. And they go down and talk to the mayor, and the mayor said he’d think about it. You know, he’d see what the council said. But anyway what happened is, the minister tells me about two o’clock in the morning or maybe not quite two but late, that he gets this call, long distance call from Arizona. And, ah, he picks up the phone and it is Mr. Blazer on the other end. He was on vacation. And Mr. Blazer says to him, “Reverend Childs, I understand you are trying to cause trouble in .’ And he says, “No, I’m not trying to cause trouble. You know--I was--my parishioners asked me to go down and talk to the city fathers about changing some things, and here is some of the kinds of things we had asked them about doing.” And so, he said Mr. Blazer said, “Well, I understand what it is, and just don’t do anything else until I get back.” Well, when he got back, he says, Mr. Blazer was back a couple of days and everything was integrated.

BRINSON: Was this before or after the `64 Civil Rights Act?

WHITEHEAD: This was before. See when I got there the theaters, etc. were integrated. This was before.

BRINSON: So you got to .

WHITEHEAD: Sixty-three. So it must have been the year before or a year or two before I got there. Sixty-one, I think it was in sixty-one.

BRINSON: Did you ever hear were there ever any demonstrations or sit-ins in for public accommodations? Or was the process really just this one of going to the mayor and using…?

WHITEHEAD: Using… well, the only thing that I heard that young people used to tell me, some of the younger guys would tell me that Martin Luther King was supposed to come, that he was demonstrating throughout . In they had some marches.

BRINSON: And .

WHITEHEAD: And had some marches, that somebody put the word out that Martin Luther King was coming to . And that several African Americans saying this was such a great town they were at the city limits to meet him, to turn him around if he came. I don’t know if he came or not. But that was the word that I had gotten when I got here. That the principal, the principal of the elementary school there said that he was saying that was the best kept secret in . He said it was close to heaven as far as African Americans were concerned. As I said ( ) it was like being, it was kind of like a plantation to some degree. Most of the kids from if they wanted to, or were able to go to college. But that meant that the town always was behind you.

Then when I got there as far as a portion of the adult population because most folks got educated and there was nothing for them to do in . So therefore they all moved to or and . A lot of them settled outside the area, and probably that accounts for the small number of African Americans that you have here today. So there was no growth, because after the educated children, except for those who finally decided that they could get jobs like everybody else, ah, and go into the plants where , the refinery and places like Armco Steel with just a high school diploma. So therefore the number of African Americans who were being educated sort of dropped off because they found that education was not as important as it had been earlier.

BRINSON: I still haven’t heard though how you became involved originally in the NAACP.

WHITEHEAD: You want to hear how I became originally involved with the NAACP. I really didn’t get involved with the NAACP in until after I returned from ah--I did a stint--in 1967 I was transferred to . I did a lot of work in with model cities, etc. And when I came back to , I came back as the Director of Equal Opportunity Affairs for , which put me right at the cutting edge of racial employment kind of issues. Being doing that for large corporations which took me all around the country to see what was going on. So I had a great deal of knowledge of how things work, who it worked for; and knew that there were major, major changes that had to be made. And had a chapter of the NAACP, and they had some very, very bright people in their chapter, some people who had served at the national level. One gentleman by the name of Rev. Charles Smith ended up being Deputy Director of the NAACP under Ben Hooks. An attorney by the name of Howard, not Howard Henderson, but Herbert Henderson had served as interim general counsel of the NAACP. And another young man by the name of Howard Henderson ended up being Chief of Staff for the NAACP.

BRINSON: And they were all out of the …?

WHITEHEAD: They were all out of area. And so therefore, they got me kind of interested in the NAACP. But then I already had the interest at that point in time because my position had allowed me to see some things; and I had to--housing patterns, making things happen, getting a company to do things. When I got back one of the things that I inherited were some records from the personnel manager that talked about, you know, getting to build houses. Because I had raised the question about where was I going to live when I got to the point where I got ready to buy a house. I rented first. I got ready to buy a house there was no place for me to buy a house in that I thought that was what I would want to buy. And somebody told me about going over to this little town in where they had some nice houses. And I politely said, “But I don’t live in . I don’t work in . I want to live, I want a house in where I work, where I live now.” And so that got thinking about what should we do in the housing area.

Then that was right before I moved to . When I came back from we had a young attorney, and this young attorney goes in and he applies for an apartment in , the largest housing complex in , and was turned down primarily because he was an African American. We thought that there were some fair skinned, there were a couple of guys who were, I know lived there; and they were African American but they were so fair skinned that this guy never knew that they were African Americans. And by being the Director of Equal Opportunity Affairs this guy came to me, and so I go up to the chairman and told the chairman what had happened; and the chairman tells his boss to find them some housing. And we found out that the utility, the Kentucky Electric Power Company, was the one who financed the whole project. You know they were interested in selling electric, you know, electrical appliances, electricity and they were financing projects at that time. Well, once we found out that it wasn’t very difficult for us to integrate. We just called the Power Company and said, “Tell this guy that he needs to do these kinds of things.” So that happened.

In addition to that the chairman, on his own—ran--took out a full page ad in the Ashland Daily Independent; and this add said that things were changing, that we were wanting to bring in professional African Americans to the Ashland area, and that we would pay for lawyers whatever were needed to pursue their rights. We would involve our attorneys, and he went on to say that even if somebody didn’t work for us that we would use whatever resource we could to help tear down the vestige of discrimination in housing. He bought a full page ad in the Daily Independent had a lot to do with integrating housing.

And so when I moved back I never forget that I went to look for a house, and a gentleman who had been an employee for Ashland Oil was running a Real Estate Agency. And, ah, he told this agent to show me an area where no blacks had ever lived. The guy who was standing there with us was flabbergasted that the agent had told him to take me to this area to look for a house. And he just said, “Well, don’t stand there, either you’re going to work for me or you’re going to go to something else”. So he goes and shows me a house.

But then we had another agency that was, because he did a lot of work with employees, he was showing around. Then after he would show me a house, he’d go back and call up the families and say, “Now, you know, I’ll fix it so you don’t have to sell the house if you don’t want to sell it to him”-- to maintain his status in the community. Well, he goes to one family, and this family called me up. They were so incensed that he had come back and was kind of leading me around by a string. And they called me up and said, “Do you know what your real estate agent is doing to you?” I had no idea that this gentleman was calling people up at night and saying you don’t have to sell to me unless you wanted to but he had to bring me around because of their relationship with the company.

So once I found out that this was happening, well I called up the owner of the agency, called him in and said this is what was going on. “I will see to it that you never get another dimes worth of business with .” And he apologized and said, “He wasn’t aware of what was going on.”. It was kind of interesting from that standpoint on this guy, he was one of the best, I mean he, I got a Christmas card from him every year.

Those were interesting days. I traveled the South, and we were buying companies in the south at that particular time. One of the things I first noticed that in the North--the South was not unionized--in the North it was unionized, and we would have white drivers that made eleven, twelve, thirteen dollars an hour. All of our drivers in the North were white. All of our drivers in the South were African Americans, un-union, making two to three dollars an hour, traveling all over, staying at houses. So you saw the pattern. They had something they called… It was a big job trying to clear up all of these patterns and practices of segregation and discrimination that had taken place over the years.

BRINSON: Did you ever use the NAACP to sort of help work with you on some of these issues?

WHITEHEAD: Did I ever use the NAACP at that particular point and time? No, I did not. One of the things I did use was the Office of Federal Contract Compliance; the EEOC were very aggressive at that particular point and time. And from time to time the NAACP would take up the cause of various employees, etc. But, yes, I used the NAACP, well I did, on several occasions because I would go in some place like , rural . And the only people that you had to talk to about these issues were the NAACP. I’m talking about, we owned Carver Black plants, and they were out in very, very rural . And so generally in , towns like that.

I never forget going in, a lot of things I just did on my own. I was bold enough I guess and aggressive enough. I never forget, I’m going into a plant in and while we had told, you know, everybody that this was an integrated plant people still had a tendency to know where they belonged. And they still had segregated restrooms in the plant. And so I went out to the hardware store and bought two by fours and nailed it over the door and put a “Out of Order”; “Out of Use” sign on there to keep people from using it.

BRINSON: This would have been about what period?

WHITEHEAD: This was, ah, this was seventy-four, seventy-five, you see, there were all kinds of things. I went to . had a lot of problems. We had a plant manager, the way we operated plants in those days the plant manager, ah, …

END OF INTERVIEW