Oral History Interview with Ann Beard Grundy, February 7, 1999

BETSY BRINSON: This is an interview with Ann Beard B e a r d Grundy conducted at her residence, 1920 Cambridge Drive in Lexington. The interviewer is Betsy Brinson, and the date is February seventh.

BRINSON: May I call you Ann?

ANN BEARD GRUNDY:: Yes, everybody calls me Miss Ann . . .

BRINSON: Miss Ann.

GRUNDY: . . . including my mother.

BRINSON: Okay.

GRUNDY: But, that’s from birth. I was called Miss Ann, that’s ‘cause they said I was real bossy, which I tend to be and I own up to it. But being, later on I gave myself the name M-s-i-b-a, which is a name that means: Born During a Time of Great Calamity and Catastrophe. My father--I was born August 6, 1945, and according to my mother, I was coming through the birth canal at the same time period that the bomb was being dropped on Hiroshima. And it was a little black hospital in Birmingham, and my father had been sitting outside listening to the radio, and he came in--it was so informal that he literally walked into the delivery room. I’m like child number six, and my mother says-uh, no, I was number seven--excuse me, my mother said she--when daddy came in through the screen door--she kind of turned over and looked at him as I’m coming through. [laughter] She said daddy was crying, and she says, “Honey, what’s wrong?” And he said, “Wife, they just dropped a bomb on Hiroshima.” My daddy was just devastated by that. My father was a conscientious objector at a time when, for black men, that was seen as the way to move up in the world. So he really stood alone on that. So I wanted–my father died when I was fourteen–so I always wanted some kind of way to lock that in place so I, I searched for this name. So it turned out to be Msiba and, because it has an “ms” on the beginning, people just assume that means Miss Ann, too, and it works out real well.

BRINSON: I noticed that on your resume, and I thought that’s another part of your name, too.

GRUNDY: Yeah.

BRINSON: Well, we’ve started actually because the first question I was going to ask you was to talk a little bit about your early origins, when and where you were born, your parents and your siblings and maybe your early education, your religion.

GRUNDY: Yeah.

BRINSON: And some background about you.

GRUNDY: Stop me when you want to know something in particular. Just, you know, just . . . One of the most interesting things I know about my own birth is that, you know, uh--the Emancipation Proclamation was 1863, so slavery officially ended in 1865. My father was born in 1901, so we’re talking about forty-plus years after the end of slavery. I think about this in terms of how little time has passed and how it’s so easy to, in hindsight, be critical of people. My daughter’s doing a paper now, a comparative piece on Du Bois and Booker T., and it’s so easy--and we have to really chill her out. Sieda, you don’t know what those times were like. For Du Bois or Booker T. to do or say what they did in those times were very, very dangerous. But all of that is to say that my father was born forty-plus years after the end of slavery, which means I was born eighty-some years. And one of the things that history says about African people is that we’re the only people who ever endured the circumstances that we endured and were able to walk off plantations--many of us naked, certainly no money, no food, no other resources, just ourselves--and to go looking for family members who had not been seen or heard from in fifty, sixty, seventy years. People just walked everywhere, just looking for people. And the other thing we did that history says nobody else’s ever done: we walked off plantations with no money, no food, no clothes and built schools. I think that’s the most remarkable thing, and it really explains my parents to me, that here are my mother and father born in Brewer, Mississippi--they did not know each other until 1937. My mother knew of my father, but she didn’t know him personally. And for them to be in what many people consider to be the worst of circumstances and yet, for my parents, it was a very nurturing and caring environment.

My father was born in Lincoln County, Brookhaven, Mississippi. He was one--his father was legally married to my father’s mother and was common law married to two other women. So among these three women there were like thirty-six children, so my father was one of thirty-six. I’m kin to just about everybody on the planet, you know: Magic Johnson, Michael Jackson. It’s really amazing when we go down these trees; and when they come to the family reunions, we’re going, ‘Okay, let’s figure this out.’ But the thing that I really want to say about my father was that, unbeknownst to me as I was growing up and beginning to know his brothers and sisters and their children and their children and their children so on and so forth, I began to see the real value of family as if--it was as if my father was drawing a picture of “This is what a family should be like.” And even though my father was one of the youngest children in his family--and he ran away from home twice. Stories are legendary in the family that--they call my daddy Mississippi Red--he was very light skinned and had kind of sandy hair; his given name was Luke: uh, that daddy ran away when he was about thirteen or fourteen to go to what was then Jackson State College, and it had a high school attached. Many of these schools, like Berea, had residential high schools, you know. So he went there to go to school. His father didn’t understand that. I mean, he loved my father, but he, you know, he wanted field help. You know, he had a lot of land to work. So–but daddy had a sister, Auntie China, who lived in Jackson; and she went and pleaded with their daddy, If you let me just, let Luke stay here, I’ll take care of him. As soon as he’s finished, I’ll send him back to the farm. Big joke. Of course, my daddy did graduate, went back to the farm, stayed just long enough to get enough money together to work his way. This time he ran away to Pennsylvania to Lincoln University. My history indicates that my father was there when Cuney was there, Waring Cuney, Langston Hughes, people like that. I have another friend, Leonard Brown, whose father taught at Kentucky State. We now realize our fathers were at Lincoln University at the same time. So this whole sense of the value of education and the value of family. So then steps in my mother who was born in Covington County, Mississippi. She and daddy were born, oh, fifty, sixty, seventy miles apart from each other. Uh, my mother was one of five children. Her mother died, uh, when my mother was eight years old. It was the great, uh, the--I forget the year, like 1906 or 7--there was a huge plague, pneumonia and stuff. Lots of people died in this country, and my grandmother, Amanda, was one of the people. She had given birth to the youngest child, and then she died shortly afterwards. So my mother, being the first born, had to step up at the age of eight. And my mother remembers having to pull a crate up to the stove, up to the sink. So, early on, my mother had to learn all of these household skills until, finally, my grandfather remarried which, of course, was a necessity. But, uh, my mother died in ’96, and I had a chance to document some of her history for my children and for the grandkids involved. And the history says that my Grandpa Ison was a very bright man. That’s my mother’s father; and I even remember that Grandpa Ison had a thing about mathematics, that he was getting a daily newspaper, that he was subscribing to magazines, like, especially farmers journals and almanacs. You know, here you are talking about a little farmhouse in Covington, Mississippi, but he had information coming into the house. And I remember things, that, his choices in terms of radio shows, what he would listen to, news shows and international affairs. So my mother and father both were in environments where they were given permission to be intellectually, you know, what they could be given their circumstance. And so, uh, my father--my grandfather did a most amazing thing. My mother told me that the custom was that farmers--and this is how the school calendar was developed, of course. You take your children out of school cause they’re farm hands and stuff like that. She said her father would never do that. She said, That’s the first thing. He would never take us out of school. The second thing he would not do is he would never allow them to work for white farmers. He just--that was just too close in his memory, you know, to what reality had been. In fact, he hired white workers sometimes to work for him on his farm. So my mother was able to go all the way through school. The school that’s the most meaningful in her life, the one that she talked about until her death, was a little school that you may have never heard of. But I took my students down this past spring break, and they were just so . . . Piney Woods School in Piney Woods, Mississippi. You know about it?

BRINSON: I’ve heard of it.

GRUNDY: Yes. My mother went to Piney Woods in 1923; she graduated in 1929; and she was the class valedictorian. When I went into archives, they had her name up being number one in her class. She was the class–it just blew my mind. It was also the first time I saw a picture of my mother the age of fourteen. I’m going, “Wow, she looks just like me!” [laughing] I just, you know, photographs were not that common in those days. So, my mother and father met at Jackson State in 1937; and my father would talk quite often about their courtship which meant, of course, taking a train to Mt. Olive, to drive out into the country six miles to visit my mother--which really meant you were going to sit and talk with Grandpa Ison. I mean, it was that whole formal thing where they would sit and they would talk about scripture and they would talk about current events, and meanwhile my mother’s at the door just listening and in the kitchen cooking and stuff. And after a while my daddy asked my grandfather if he could marry my mother; and, uh, uh, my grandfather said, “yes,” But later on when I asked, as a, like a young adult, “Grandpa, did you really want your daughter to marry my daddy?” He said–my daddy by this time was dead –he said, “Liked your daddy a lot--man of few words, but didn’t want to give up Maxie.” And Maxie was the first born. He said, “All I wanted him to do was to respect her and to let her go.” He said, “Maxie’s got a good head on her shoulders.” So my grandfather reluctantly–they say during the ceremony–you know those houses were split and the hallway in the center? The wedding was on this side, and Grandpa, Grandpa’s room was on this side of the hallway. And when it came time to give mother away, he got up and went in and said, “I do,” and then went right back to his room. [laughing] He just couldn’t tolerate it. It was just too much for him.

BRINSON: I think that it’s hard for fathers. ( ) Especially the first time.

GRUNDY: The first–and she had been so instrumental in holding the family together. I think my grandfather came to depend upon her in ways far beyond just a daughter. He had to, you know. So my parents met in ’37. They married December 26, 1937; and they moved to Meridian, Mississippi where my father, uh, had just taken the pastorship of First Baptist Church in Meridian. And they had been there a little while–I had at that time several, three of my brothers–my father had been married before so I had another brother and a sister. But he had three children at that point; and when my parents left Meridian in the fall of 1944 to go to Birmingham to pastor the church there, my mother was already pregnant with me. So my father and mother came to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and uh–the story I like to tell about Sixteenth Street--you know, in the history of black churches--do you know the term la-di-da?

BRINSON: I know the term, but . . .

GRUNDY: La-di-da, sdiddy. Sdiddy is really a black word. It just means a little uppity, silk stocking deal, that whole thing. Sixteenth Street had this reputation for being very la-di-da even though my father was quite a regular man, very warm, loved to tell jokes, kept people in stitches all the time. Uh, but my father and mother really wanted to raise their children in Birmingham. When my mother was ill, I had quite a few opportunities to talk with her; and I would ask these kinds of questions. Well, mother, you know, why did you all–why didn’t you stay in Mississippi? She said, “No, Birmingham was up and coming and we saw that.” And she said, “The school system was real good.” And they were right. I mean, it was just like leaving home everyday, going to school and putting us in parents’ hands. I mean, that’s what the school system was like. You have to remember, of course, it’s under segregation, that black teachers had very few options. You either teach or preach or bury somebody; and, as a result, we had the best minds in the classroom. That’s the opposite of what is happening now. I mean, you can see the damage--the teaching profession just does not draw the brightest minds. It tends to draw those who are mediocre.

BRINSON: Right.

GRUNDY: And all you have to do is listen to their language skills, and [laughing] and it’s real telling, you know. So my parents made a conscious decision to move to Birmingham and to pastor Sixteenth Street, and we lived right next door to the church. Sixteenth Street, in terms of history, is best known, of course, as the church that was bombed in ’63, killing four girls. But its history predates that quite a bit. It was a church that was formed shortly after the Civil War. Birmingham was called the Magic City; and, uh, and lots of black people were flowing into Birmingham because of the industry, the coal industry, the mining industry, looking for work. At the same time, black colleges were–Alabama has the greatest number of black colleges in all the surrounding states, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee–so it was like a watering hole for black professionals, which is how a church like Sixteenth Street could come along the way it did. So it was a new church on the horizon. Uh, its members were primarily the black professional class, you know, the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers and so on and so forth, the entrepreneurs. And, uh, the reason I say the church predates the bombing is because when the church was first built– this, all this really explains me. It’s going to tie up. [laughing]

BRINSON: I’m sure it is.

GRUNDY: It’s going to make a complete quilt in a minute. [laughter] The church was initially built in what is downtown proper. Uh, and it was designed and built, and built debt-free, at a time when white churches had not done that in Birmingham. So there was this great human cry, this enormous jealousy: how dare they do it but they do it right in our faces! And so the city, the all-white government, did the classic thing. It did two things: it condemned the church building, which at this time the original building is only twenty-five or thirty years old, just had, you know, slammed to the ground. And then it forced the congregation to move to land to what was then on the outskirts of the city. Now, of course, it’s downtown; that city’s grown. So when the church went to its present site, the members said, “Okay, what can we do now?” You know, they kind of, you know, kind of thumbing their noses in their faces. So this time they decided they would build a church that they thought worthy of them and worthy of who, how they saw themselves, you know, on the world stage. There was a man named Rayfield--you know Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee was legendary for, uh, just getting the greatest minds, and in fact, I mean, that’s how he got George Washington Carver. It wasn’t the money. It was the whole thing of this is your chance to leave your name in history, to do something great for the race. It was that whole race pride, you know. And so Booker T. become–as an aside about George Washington Carver, when he died; and they were in his apartment–he lived on campus– they found all of his paychecks uncashed like under the bed or something like that. And his story on that, his spin on that was: As a scientist, if I can’t live completely off the land then I’m not worthy of my salt. So he never cashed his paychecks. Isn’t that amazing?

BRINSON: Amazing.

GRUNDY: And he taught–George Washington Carver taught a lot of my teachers. But the thing I was going to say about Booker T. was that one of the professors he got was a young man out of New York City. I believe the Pratt Institute–I’m not certain of that–named Rayfield who was teaching architecture at Tuskegee; and, of course, part of the teaching of architecture was that you were actually building the buildings that we now know as Tuskegee University. Well, the members of Sixteenth Street obviously knew about Rayfield; many of them were Tuskegee graduates, and they were saying, ‘Look, let’s go get Rayfield to come to Birmingham and design us a church.’ Well, Rayfield came up. Not only did he design a church, but he liked Birmingham so much that he decided to stay there; and then he went into business with several members of the church. They started like Birmingham’s first black bank, the Penny National Bank, I think it was called. Uh, the pastor at that time, he was in tight with him in terms of business. And he started a construction company, architectural company in conjunction with another member of the church who had, uh, a construction company. So they built this church, again debt-free, and it just–to build this church when they did it and for it to look the way–in other words, from the first moment it was a jewel. And there again it, it solicited this jealousy so Sixteenth Street Church was known throughout the Deep South as “Those damn niggers over there. How dare they?” kind of thing. So long before the bombing, the church had its place in history. And because it was so large, it could seat so many people, and because of its physical location, meaning downtown Birmingham, it was a natural gathering place, not just–and almost a civil rights movement was like, how do you say–all this other stuff was like just leading up to the civil rights movement. It was always known as the meeting place. Whenever you wanted to meet somebody or to hear somebody, you went to Sixteenth Street. So when my father went to Sixteenth Street in 1944, that tradition was in place. And that was one of the reasons he accepted the church, because he saw the church being involved in the community, not just praising Jesus, but that it actually was of service. You remember, this is a generation of black people believe that if you were fortunate enough to be of service to your people, you better do it. So Sixteenth Street was the place to be. So can you imagine me a little girl, and I’m the first baby born into that church? All the other ministers didn’t have children or they left and had children. My father came with children. Of course, my mother was pregnant with me. So in the history of the church they called me the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church baby, which my children just think is just absolutely hysterical, you know. And, uh, in any given night, especially Friday nights--for some reason, I remember Friday nights being the big night--cultural events, I mean, that drew regionally. So as a little kid right there in my father’s church, Friday nights we heard all the black college choirs. I mean, Tuskegee would come in, Talladega, Morehouse, Thelma on their spring tours and stuff. And you always–in fact, I met a man a few years ago, he said, “I was at Sixteenth Street in the late ‘50s and I sang a tenor solo”--and stuff because, you know, it was just a wide open space, acoustically correct and the piano was always tuned, you know. When musicians travel, they worry about the pianos. You didn’t have to worry at Sixteenth Street. These folks had the piano, you know, four/forty, that kind of thing. And then it was also a place to hear what we considered to be great men and women of the race. I took a friend home with me one time, and she was so shocked: I took her to the church, uh--when I was telling her about something, I walked up into the pulpit. She said, “You walk up into the pulpit? Women in the pulpit?” I said, I mean, I don’t go to church anymore; it just shocked me. I said, “What do you mean? Women in the pulpit.” It occurred to me that the few times I’ve seen on television women’s day programs that there are always men speakers, and I remember thinking, ‘Can’t they find any women?’ But, at any rate, that’s when I started to really know that Sixteenth Street was kind of stepping out there. All of my life I had seen women speak in my father’s church either on a Sunday or for lectures. And I can remember the lectures, you know, three, four, five thousand people being there. People standing outside, and they’d have the windows up and, you know–and another thing about the church that was so wonderful was this huge pipe organ, that you had to know what you were doing to play this pipe organ. And I can remember occasionally when it would, you know, uh, need repair; and my father would have to call New York and, you know, calling long distance in 1950 is a big deal. He would call New York or something. They would get him in touch with a German, you know, man who was going to be in the states pretty soon, was going to make his circuit, was going to make sure he stopped by Sixteenth Street to repair the organ, to take the pipes out, to do that whole thing. So when we had these great events at the church, one of the things that would happen, of course, is that all the stops would be opened up; and all the programs would begin with Lift Every Voice and Sing, which is the black national anthem. And I just remember, I tell you, sitting there as a little girl all of those years and going, ‘Wow. Are we a great, a mighty race or what are we?’ I mean, just no doubt whatsoever. And my mother and father, in case we missed the point, would say it: ‘You descend from great people.’ Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. So there was this great sense of, that we were here for a purpose; and that it was about, not just about doing personally for ourselves. And I also remember being very happy as a child. I want to say that. People say,” Oh, you’re from the Deep South.” Oh, I loved it. I loved it. Okay, I’m sorry.

BRINSON: Two questions that come to mind. One, I’m interested about your comment that your father was a conscientious objector and that that was where black men, professional black men were leading. Talk to me a little bit about that if you would.

GRUNDY: If you understand the history, you remember coming out of slavery: what shall we do? What shall we do? Uh, we have certain skills of a marketable well. As technology moved in, our skills were becoming less and less marketable you know. You know, machines were doing–you know, the industrial age was taking over. Black men oftentimes saw themselves becoming something in life by going the military route even though it was fraught, if you read Charles Young’s piece in the paper today, just fraught with hell. But it was almost seen as in lieu of a formal education, that if you went to World War I. I think the Harlem–what do they call them, the Harlem Wildcats? I forget. My husband was in ROTC until he found his mind, but he came from a family where every man in that family, his father, his uncles, his grandfather had all come the military route. So the point I’m trying to make about my father is that at the time that my father came along the military was seen as a way out. It was seen as a way to travel, as a way to see the world, to meet other people, to, how do you say, “get yourself out of segregation, out of harm’s way,” so to speak. And for my daddy to say, “No, I’m not going to go there.” And, of course, my father was looking at another, another level of it. He said, “I am not going to kill anybody. I don’t want that blood on my hands.” I’m not going to be involved in it. A lot of times, quite often, black men had to put aside natural instincts. You know, we’re often called disloyal to America. Well, the thread that runs in that is not only do we go off and fight wars and then we’re treated like hell when we get home, but the whole notion of killing other people who have caused us no harm. In fact, who, in many instances, treat us better–there are legendary stories about black soldiers during the Vietnam War, how even when they were taken prisoner, how they were treated by the Vietcong. They were treated differently. And black soldiers who had a little bit of consciousness knew why: they don’t see us as the enemy. They see us as victims of the circumstance. Uh huh.

BRINSON: Do you know where he was introduced to the whole principle of conscientious objection?

GRUNDY: I don’t know. I, I would venture to say though that--my father was an early reader. I mean, you know, just, just anything he could get his hands on. There was a man–and I believe I’ve asked my older brother–my oldest brother is dead, but I’ve asked my brother Gerald, and I think Gerald remembers. Two of my brothers went to Morehouse so this would have been the place where this would have happened. There’s a man named Howard Thurman who is considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest theologians. Well, for a while he was based out of Atlanta, and he’d been taught at Morehouse; and the story is that he either taught Martin Luther King, Jr., or he most certainly had influence on Martin Luther King in terms of worldviews and setting of values. I’m almost certain–and I can remember going to Atlanta with my father; we were there quite a bit–that my father knew Howard Thurman. Well, Howard Thurman was in the ‘20s and ‘30s already anti-war and was just verbal enough--and he was a great writer. He has lots–in fact, I own a lot of his books. He would write about why he thought these things. I think my father was taking that in. In other words, it was like, uh, the distant drummer, but my father certainly heard it.

BRINSON: Second, and I was wondering as you described the Sixteenth Street Church and all the wonderful things that were happening there, how did your mother see her role as the spouse to the pastor in all of that? What was she doing?

GRUNDY: Now you know there are rules of sexism in the western world, the woman’s place and all that. But those rules are less stringent among black people just given our circumstance. We can’t afford to, how do you say, uh, uh, limit people to ( ). I mean, it’s just too much of a luxury. My mother wanted to–and, as I say, she was ill long enough and I had access to her long enough to ask certain questions–my mother wanted more than anything else– she enjoyed teaching school. She taught a one-room school until she married in Mississippi. She taught her own brothers and sisters: she taught cousins. Just going back and forth to Mississippi the way we did, we would quite often meet her students; and her students were achievers. They would go on to high school, go on. . . . She sent some of them to Piney Woods. You know, once a teacher would get in the door they were very proud to say, “Oh, I have this student coming, and he’s very good in math, and you know, you’ll be glad to have him," and stuff like that. So my mother enjoyed her professional work. At the same time, my mother also looked forward to being a mother. In fact, my mother was thirty years old when she got married, so she was about thirty-one when she had–in fact, a year after she got married [laughing], she had her first child. I said, “Well, Mama, didn’t the doctors say something to you about that?” She said, “They did. They told me that I should really, since I had waited so long, be careful about having children.” My mother just went on and had seven. So why not? [laughing] So my mother will tell you that she enjoyed having children even though it was very, very hard work. I mean, we’re talking about work without conveniences and stuff. And because we had moved to Birmingham, it was a trade-off. We had also moved away from family which would be a natural kind of, you know, support system. Uh, my mother, um, even in the capacity . . .

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BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

GRUNDY: . . . really depended upon my mother in terms of her support, her feedback, her wisdom. I can remember, for example, being about eight or nine years old; and we had some real good friends, the Lucas family. They were members of the church, and they had five children. They were at the house and we were all sitting in the kitchen eating; and for some kind of way the discussion became, between my mother and father: if one of us should have to die first, which would we choose it to be if we had some say-so over that? And I remember sitting there and hearing my father say--he always called my mother “wife”; she called him “honey”--he said, “Wife, if one of us needs to go,” he said, “I want to be the one to die first.” And my mother said, “Well, honey, why would you say that?” He said, “Because your mind is better than mine, and you will know what to do with these children.” He said, “I don’t think I could pull that off.” And as circumstance would have it, of course, my father died first; and all of us honor my mother. I mean, every day I just cannot thank my mother and father in general, and my mother in particular, for rising to the occasion. When my father died, my mother had not worked outside of the home thirty-some years. She had lost her teaching certificate. All of those things, you know. Nonetheless, she was quite involved in, you know, in our lives and civic life and stuff like that. But it’s just as if my mother just stepped right up to the plate, and she did some things–you know how when you were a child--I don’t know what your memories are. You know, we’re always recording somewhere on this little computer back here or we’re kicking stuff in the things that are going on around us, so we never know what it is we’re going to use. One of the reasons I think I use the telephone so well--and it is a tool--is because I saw my mother, when my daddy died, get on that phone and begin to set up her network. When my father died, the car died at the same time [laughing] so we didn’t have transportation; and my mother had let her license lapse. She used to drive all the time but, you know, with big brothers and stuff there was no reason for her to drive. So we lost the car, the dog and she lost–I mean literally everybody just went: not going to go any further. Daddy has died. My daddy was like the figure in our household. Uh, but I saw my mother do things that even I do still to this day that are what I call low-tech, but they work. One of them is the telephone, the other was–when daddy died, I had a number of brother and sisters who were currently in college. Daddy died in March of 1960, and at that time I was fourteen years old. I remember that my mother came in one day and she said, “Ann”–this was like spring and the doctor had said, “If your husband can make it to spring, you know, he’ll be okay.” He died the first day of spring, of course. So my mother said, “Ann, why don’t you see if they’re offering, what classes they’re offering at Parker High this summer?” Parker High’s the high school everybody wants to go to the school where we were. “See what classes they’re offering, business classes.” So I went and checked, and I said, “Well, Mama, they’re teaching typing.” “That’s what I want you to take. Take the typing course, you know.” I said, “Okay.” She paid the little fee for me, and at this time there are like four or five of us still at home. I maybe had a couple of brothers and sisters that come home that summer and then to go back to school in the fall. But in the meantime, my mother said, “Take the typing class.” So I’m going to class, walking three blocks every day to Parker High, taking this little typing class a couple of hours a day. And I remember my mother saying to me like every two or three days, she would say, “Have you gotten to business letters yet?” I would go, “No ma’am, haven’t done that,” you know. She said, “Well, let me know when you do.” And then she would keep asking me about these business letters, and finally I’m getting wise, so when we got to business letters I said, “Mama, we at business letters.” “Good, sit down.” She had bought a typewriter and everything, a little blue zipper Royal typewriter. She said, “I’ve got some things I want you to write for me.” And my mother would walk around the house and dictate letters–I became my mother’s little assistant. And I remember that my brother Gerald was a sophomore at Morehouse College. Benjamin Mayes was the president, the Benjamin Mayes who was a friend of my father’s. “Dear Dr. Mayes: As you know, my husband died this past March of 1960, and I currently have my son Gerald, who will be entering his junior year this fall. Dr. Mayes, you know my circumstance. You know how many children I have; and you know how dearly my husband and I wanted this son, and all of our children, to attend school. I have no money. Please write me and tell me what I should do.” Here I am writing this letter. I know who Benjamin Mayes was. I pick up Jet and Ebony every month and go, Oooh, Benjamin Mayes, you know. So I’m watching for the mail. You know, like one week, two weeks, three weeks and, you know, at that time–I don’t know if schools still do this or not, maybe Berea does –they put out their little banner on the, you know, up there in the little return address. So I’m watching for Morehouse Maroon, the Crimson Tide kind of thing, on there. So finally it comes and Mrs. Luke Beard, you know. I said, “Mama, there’s a letter here from Morehouse. You know, you know, and here it is.” And she says, “You’re my corresponding secretary. You may open the mail”. Well, you know, gee whiz, 1960, you know--that was quite a privilege. So I open up this letter from Dr. Mayes. “ Dear Mrs. Beard: Just send the boy to school.” I learned then a very interesting thing. Just let people know what it is that you want. Let people know. No matter what you think the obstacle is, let people know what it is that you want. So I hope, I don’t know if that answers the question really about my mother’s role, but my mother was no shrinking violet. She was quietly a powerful woman, and I know in hindsight that that is why my father married her. In fact, the piece I didn’t tell you is that my father and mother met on a train--and my Auntie Jenora, looks just like my mother; she’s just lighter skinned but very pretty. Even to this day, Auntie Jenora is very pretty. And daddy was checking out Auntie Jenora; but Auntie Jenora stutters, has a hard time. My mother does not stutter. Half of my family stutters. Sieda almost stutters sometimes; it’s kind of a family tic. So daddy is like reading The Pittsburgh Courier, which is what up and coming black people read during those days, and he’s trying to talk to Auntie Jenora who cannot get the words out. “Hello, young ladies, how you doing?” “Well, fine, thank you,” my mother says. Auntie Jenora’s going, “He, he” . . . [laughing] and that’s the way the conversation ran until finally my daddy said--and he tells the story; Jenora says it’s true, you know, that he was trying to get Jenora to come sit next to him and read the paper. And my mother . . . [interruption] So my Auntie Jenora, uh, couldn’t quite get it together, and my mother did. So I’m asking my mother, you know, on her deathbed, What did you all talk about once you took the leap across the aisle? She said, “Very interesting.” Your father began to question me . . . We thought this was like a hoot. . . . “about the Louisiana Purchase.” I’m going, Hmm. Louisiana Purchase, okay. And then he would ask her other questions about the Emancipation Proclamation and all sorts of this and that. So I just knew that as a matter of fact. On my mother’s deathbed when I was talking with her, I said, “Mother, why do you think Daddy was doing that?” She said, “Well, I now know that your father was checking me out, trying to see if I would be intellectually fit to be the mother of his children.” She said, “I was being tested right there.” I went, Okay. Yeah. [laughing]

BRINSON: Tell me, did you go to Parker for the rest of your high school?

GRUNDY: Yes, I went to Parker, but I didn’t finish Parker High School. I went to Parker three and a half years--and you have to understand that not only in the context of the Deep South but in the context of Birmingham--Parker was the place to be. And I say that because there’s often a spin put on integration that is not a correct spin. And there again I’ve asked my teachers; I’ve asked my friends, asked their parents; I talk to people all the time: “Why did you want to integrate the public schools?” Birmingham public schools are still not integrated. [laughing] That’s another story. The reason was not that our parents valued, by any means, having us sit next to white students. That was not in their scheme of things at all. But it was very obvious to my parents living in downtown Birmingham, we lived six blocks from Phillips High School, the bastion of white high schools in Birmingham; and we lived roughly two miles from Parker High School, how do you say, the, the traditional school that has trained hundreds and hundreds of doctors and lawyers and teachers. It has trained literally the whole black middle class of Birmingham. Uh, my parents–so on one hand there was an issue of which school was closer, and we would always say, “We don’t care how close Phillips is, we still want to go to Parker.” And they understood that. Fred Shuttlesworth, by the way, who was, you know, quite involved in the Birmingham struggle tried--his children were at Parker with me, Pat, Ruth, Ruby and Fred Junior. We were all in the choir and everything--and he took his children up there one day to integrate Phillips High School, to enroll them there. They had holy hell beat out of them, and my father was so upset by that kind of thing. Fred Shuttlesworth was like--my father was like a mentor to him. He would go, “Fred, we must never let our children be used. Just cannot do that, you know, just, that’s our battle, not our children. So, but living in downtown Birmingham and seeing white high school kids get out of school–they got out of school the same time we did, three o’clock–and quite often they would go down town to Birmingham. And Parker kids would have to walk two miles to my house and then to downtown Birmingham to catch a public bus. So we had opportunities to see white kids as they were coming out of high school. It was obvious the textbooks were more updated. It was obvious that the band uniforms–we would have Armistice Day, old Veterans Day, parades--my daddy’s birthday--they would have all the white bands up front. Their band, their uniforms looked crisp, their instruments were new and shiny and stuff. And there was Parker, which could march the hell around them any day, I mean, but with, you know, the great purple and white, you know. We were just barely holding those threads together. And Parker’s choir, the uniforms were almost like something out of the medieval time period just in terms of–we had these long black under-gowns and these white robes. As I look back on them now, it’s like looking at black and white documentaries; they seem so elegant, so classy. But in the context of our time, they were very dull and very drab. My parents were very practical. If the same resources could be put at Parker High School, we wouldn’t give a damn about Phillips High School. We just want the school board to treat, you know, to apply equal resources, which is what Fayette County School System still doesn’t do, no matter what they say. It’s just real obvious. If you go to, uh, to Johnson or Russell, Booker T. and then go to Cassidy, it’s two different worlds. You’ll see that one day when you go around. So, I want to say that because my parents’ desire was not necessarily for us to be with white people. I also didn’t know anybody white in Birmingham; that was not part of my world either.

BRINSON: The three and a half years that you went to Parker, it was an all-black school?

GRUNDY: Uh hmm. Still is.

BRINSON: Okay. And then what happened after three and a half years for you?

GRUNDY: I found out that there was a man named Gene Angstad. Actually, I’ve had a chance to talk about him lately; and I wonder if he’s alive. But Gene Angstad had come to Birmingham when I was a senior at Lincoln, eighth grade. Schools in Birmingham went one through eight, nine through twelve. So I was a senior, and my brother Oscar was one year younger; he was seventh grade. And Gene Angstad worked for the American Friend Service Committee, AFSC; and, uh, at that time they had, uh, a program called the American Friend Service Committee Seven Negro Student Project. Remember, I was a Negro then. And the whole purpose of this program--I mean, as I look back on it now, you know, it was just racist in terms of its structure. Nonetheless, the experience opened up some doors for me. The premise was that being black and being in an all-black high school in Birmingham, I was somehow in an inferior situation. So what the program was trying to do in all of its liberal, you know, “We’re going to do this right” kind of thing was to take bright and upcoming Southern black students– and they not only went to Birmingham. Birmingham was the first place they went though. Birmingham—remember, you were starting to get this picture--Birmingham had this reputation really of being the Magic City, of producing some great scholars and musicians, and so on and so forth. Alabama has that reputation in fact. But they went to Florida, to Georgia, to Mississippi, but they did a lot of their groundwork in Birmingham. But Gene Engstad was the field secretary then. I found out later on that Gene Engstad had been to Birmingham in 1957-58, and he had come to see my father because he had been told by people who knew Birmingham–he was looking for very bright students–they said, Oh, you need to go talk to Reverend Beard. He has real smart children, and he has a couple of kids who are about to go into high school now, you know. In the Deep South, in cities like that, there was a lot of interconnectedness. As an aside, when I ask families now in Lexington or people who go to church, “Who are the smart children in your church?” People can’t tell me that. That’s how disconnected the whole thing is. We knew who–Birmingham had five black high schools. I knew from my high school who was the up and coming students. You just knew that. It was just part of the landscape. So my father–Gene Angstad went to see my father I was told--I never saw him in 1958--and had talked with my father about allowing me, twelve years old, to leave Birmingham to go to some northeastern city to live with a white family and to have the, uh, how do you say, privilege of not only living with a white family, interacting with white people, but attending white schools and all that other stuff. My father had the wisdom–it’s as if he almost foretold his own death–said, “Oh no, Ann is much too young. My daughter is only twelve years old and Oscar is eleven. But if you come back later, the situation might be different.” Second time Gene Engstad came back, my father was dead; I had four brothers and sisters in college. Had a brother at Meharry Medical School; Gerald was at Morehouse; Ison was at Knoxville; and Carolyn was at Tuskegee. My mother, you know, was struggling to hold on; and the guarantee was that if you went up, if you, you know, took part in this experience, that they would make sure you had a chance to go to college. Well, this was like Godsend for my mother except for the whole notion of our leaving Birmingham. You know, we were in a very protective environment and going to a place my mother herself had never been. And so she told Gene Engstad–and I met him--it was the first real face to face conversation I had ever had with a white person: I just remember feeling very strange about the whole thing. He had a thick mustache and, of course, later on I knew--I knew historically about the Quakers, but I didn’t know about their working on the AFSC–so I got to know that quite well. My mother did say to him, “Mr. Angstad, if I let Ann go”—‘cause he was saying, “I’ll come back and get Oscar”--uh, she said, “I will let Oscar go, too, because I don’t want them to be in that part of the country without family support.” But she said, and this was typically my mother, “Let me pray over this.” Even to this day, I say, Let me–do I really need this in this store? TJ Maxx usually is the store. I say, “Let me walk around and pray over this.” [laughing] And usually by the time I pray over it, I don’t need that extra top or something. So Gene Angstad came back to Birmingham after my mother had said “Give me time.” And by this time, we had started to hear of other students–we knew that other students had done this; we just didn’t know what their particular experiences were. The first person to go out of Birmingham was Angela Davis. Angela was two years ahead of me at Parker. Then her sister Thania, who was in my class, who is now her personal attorney, her brother Ben who played for Cleveland, Cleveland Browns for a while. So Angela was already in her senior year. This program was a two-year program so you had to do it junior year and senior year. Angela was at a high school, a private academy, in New York City; Thania was in Connecticut; and they were sending Benny to Fairlawn, New Jersey. So . . .

BRINSON: Were they sending all of you to Quaker schools? As I recall, Angela went to Friends Seminary and ( )

GRUNDY: That’s right. She was one of the few who attended an actual Quaker academy. Most of us were in public schools but living with Quaker families, so we were locked into the whole AFSC thing, so to speak. Uh, I’m trying to think. Maybe there was one other student because after we were all there, we got to know each other very well, even though I knew Angela and Thania and Benny very well. Not only were we in high school together, but our parents were friends and just walking. In fact, my mother used to walk--they had a little walking club; they would walk together. So we were Girl Scouts and all this stuff. So we weren’t strangers. I just didn’t know what the experience was. So my mother began talking to the Davis’s about, ‘Well, how’s Angela handling this,’ and so on and so forth. The word was: ‘Yeah, there’s some downsides, some real downsides, like isolation from black people.’ That wasn’t necessarily true for Angela. Being in New York, obviously she saw lots of black people. But for, uh, for Thania and for Benny, they were isolated. So we started to get this sense of, Yeah, there’s some downs to this; but the up is that college is on the horizon. And my mother valued that over, you know, whatever the downs might be. So after much praying and much thought, my mother gave permission, uh, to Gene Angstad to let me go to upstate New York. I went to Liberty to Sullivan County, the Catskills, the Bush Circuit; and my brother went to Princeton, New Jersey which, for him, was a real plus and a minus. On one hand, Oscar being the kind of scientist and musician that he was, left brain and right brain, was immediately involved in all of these things on Princeton’s campus. I mean, he was tall, good looking and brilliant, so he was playing oboe with the orchestra within a matter of minutes, you know. Things like that. The downside was that he ran right into drugs. We didn’t know what drugs were, you know. So he went through this period when we could not even identify what had happened to my brother. And, of course, when he left, uh, Princeton, when he graduated, he went to Antioch College which is like putting him right in the middle of all of it, you know. So he went through a long period where it took us a while to figure out what had happened to him. He’s doing fine now, but it was just like, “What is this that we are looking at?” My mother, of course, ‘What in the world have I done?’ On the one hand, it was a golden opportunity; and, on the other hand, we didn’t, we didn’t know anything about that. So, uh . . .

BRINSON: How did you feel about going up there?

GRUNDY: You know, when you . . .

BRINSON: It’s like you’re leaving high school, what, almost your last year . . .

GRUNDY: I had to go back. I still have two recurring nightmares. [laughing] One–no, three. One is that somebody is trying to hot-comb my hair–you know, what black women, girls do to their hair, press it and all? I’m going, [squealing] “My hair!” The other one is that I have to do my senior recital all over again, and it’s just like [squealing]–just constipated, you know. That’s the one feeling I remember. The other is that I haven’t finished high school yet. I’ve got to go back and get–I mean, it happens every now and thing. I go, “Oh God.” The reason is, I spent six years in high school. [laughing] Six years! But that was the trade-off. Now you’re getting the clue about what my parents thought about education. I would not have done it had not my mother thought it worthwhile. I would have said maybe, Mama, let me go and finish at Parker where I wanted to be. I was the choir, the accompanist for the choir, which was an honored tradition at that school to be able to play for William Henry. Everybody didn’t play for William Henry. So to leave him uprooted like that after he had trained me for three and a half years, groomed me. I mean, this man went looking all through the school system trying to find his pianist and stuff. So I had a lot of guilt. I was also valedictorian of my class; I was looking forward to being with my classmates and going off, you know, to Talladega or something with them. But had not my mother thought it was worth six years in high school, I would not have done it. But I also saw myself as helping my mother out, and in the tradition–I didn’t use these words then but now I do--making my daddy smile, wanting my daddy to be completely proud of me. So I was willing to make that personal sacrifice. In fact, I remember distinctly thinking: ‘Take it completely out of your mind; just do it.’ Well, as I say, there are ups and downs to everything, yin and yang. One of the things that I discovered almost immediately was that in, through my eyes, I did not see myself. Once I was at this high school in New York state–and the school was overwhelmingly Jewish. There were–I would say it was ninety-two, ninety-three percent Jewish; and the rest were Gentiles; and, of course, I was the only African there.

BRINSON: Had you ever had any interaction with Jews?

GRUNDY: None. I was aware there being entrepreneurs in Birmingham, but I didn’t know anybody personally. Just no clue. That was an experience unto itself. Take my word, it was quite an experience. But, uh, the first gut feeling I had after being in that environment for just a little while, arriving there early August, trying to get acclimated--it was already turning cold, so dealing with the weather. You know, you’re talking about where it snows way past Easter and, I mean, that whole thing. You know, I’m coming from the Deep South; I didn’t even own a coat. I mean, why did I need a coat? In my whole lifetime, it had snowed one inch in Birmingham. You know, just like, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ And the impact that weather and environment had on personality. People were shut in for long periods of time; they eat certain kinds of comfort foods. It was like a whole culture class for me, but what I want to say is this: I immediately knew that I was not inferior and that Parker High School, especially as I began to grow older and recognize what my teachers were able to do with nothing, I was from one of the best environments in the world I could possibly be from. So, unlike many African American people who maybe never have an opportunity to compare and always wonder, ‘Am I as smart as that white kid? Can I do this as well?’ I knew right away, ‘Oh, no problem. No problem here.’ And it was affirmed by my teachers themselves in New York State. There was one teacher in particular with whom I still write–he just retired from the University of Michigan, Dr. Sanders–and he was teaching English at Liberty Central High School where I attended in Parker, uh, in Liberty, New York. I also babysat for him occasionally, uh, Peter and Jean Sanders. And he taught advanced writing, composition; and these classes had ten-fifteen students in them. I was immediately put in the elitist class, you know, the fast trackers. But I’m supposed to be in an environment where other people are going to show me what, you know, intellect is really all about and all that stuff. So I remember–this is my first time being graded precisely with numbers–and every time Mr. Sanders would give us an assignment, you know, papers would come back. You know, you get an 88 or you get a 98 or something like that. Well, remember, I had gone to this school where students had been together since kindergarten. So here I am, new kid on the block; and I’m coming in and these kids were entrenched. They already knew who the valedictorian was going to be; they had their little places in their world. Interestingly enough, the valedictorian was a Gentile, Beverly Aryson, who became a very good friend of mine. And they never got over it. I mean, the Jewish students had a hard time. I mean, it took me a while to say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. This is not race maybe, but there’s some kind of class thing going on here.” Well, remember, I didn’t know Jews from anybody else, and I started to put pieces together; and as I did, I would ask Beverly questions, and she would go, “Well, let me tell you what you’re looking at,” kind of thing. But, at any rate, being in Mr. Sanders’ class I found very stimulating because he was really into, oh, just reading and creative writing. I mean, he just placed the highest value on creative writing; and when I, I was just, I wasn’t looking at anybody else’s papers. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know who was supposed to be all this or that until, you know, later on. And one day in class one of the students, a Jewish girl, got up–I’ll never forget because she wore high heels to school and lipstick, and I’m going, “Gee, the teachers don’t even dress like that at Parker.” I mean, it just blew my little mind, you know? How does she walk out of the house like that? But, anyway, “Mr. Sanders, I want to ask you a question. We had a meeting and we want to know why certain people in this class get 99s and 100s on their” . . . He said, “Well, who are you talking about?” She pointed to me, and it was just like, Oh, hell . . . you know. I mean, I wasn’t, you know . . . and he just kind of let her rattle on, earrings dangling down to here and all this mousse in the hair, whatever they did. And he just let her go on a while and finally he said, “Well, I tell you what, when you learn how to write, I’ll give you 99s and 100s, too.” Peter Sanders was already saying to me, “You’ve got something going on here, and I want you to know it.” And it just blew my mind. I mean, if ever I needed a boost to my ego or affirmation that, that, that my intellect was at least on the path of development, you know, he affirmed it. I knew it in Birmingham but had never been tested.

BRINSON: So you had had three and a half years but you had at least several years more . . .

GRUNDY: I did two more years. So I went back to–in, in Birmingham schools were–remember, we were the war babies.

BRINSON: Right.

GRUNDY: So you went to school 11th junior, 11th senior, 9th junior, 9th senior–the semesters were divided in junior/senior. So when I finished Parker, because of that I would have graduated in a January class, a mid-term class, much like the universities do now. I guess they still do that, rather than just a spring class. I would have been in the January class of 1963, something like that. Maybe I get confused on that. I went back all the way to the 11th grade and did the 11th grade all the way over and kind of went straight through after that.

BRINSON: Okay. I want to ask, because you made the observation in starting to tell me about AFSC, while you didn’t recognize it at the time, you later could see that it was a good case of institutional racism. Could you talk about that a little bit?

GRUNDY: If I were to do that program, had the resources to do it, I would do the exact opposite. I would take those white kids [laughing] from the northeast and say, “Come here. Let me show you culture. Let me show you people who can take nothing and do something with it.” My classmates–there was--remember, this was culture shock–there was a parking lot for students in my high school. Now in Birmingham, you didn’t drive a car to school. I mean you were lucky if your daddy and mother, if your neighbor had a car, you know. On Saturdays you went to the grocery store with your neighbor. After my father died, people would come by and take turns taking us to church or taking us to practice for here or that or what have you. These kids, and I only had ninety-some kids in my senior class at Liberty High, as opposed to four or five hundred at Parker. Of that ninety--some, almost all of them owned their own little sports little things; and if they didn’t own them, they had access to the family’s third or fourth cars. Um, their worldview was privileged. You know, uh, spring break they would fly to Israel; they would go sunbathing in Florida; they would go to Europe.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

GRUNDY: . . . that was a complete–I think it was, I know it was the first time she had ever been to the northeast, she had ever been to New York. Scared the devil out of my mother. You been to Port Authority? It’s just like [scream] Help me Jesus! [laughing] This little old woman out of Mississippi, you know. So she comes to upstate New York, and, uh, we go to graduation; and that night afterwards there are like graduation parties. And it’s like, okay, I’m the only black person in the class so I’m kind of invited to every little graduation, you know. And I take my mother with me, and my mother stood literally with her mouth open; and she watched in, on one hand, with, in complete awe, on the other hand, in total disgust as, just the lavishness of the food and the stuff and the stuff and the stuff. And to hear people just in normal conversations, and I reinforce this by saying this is what I have seen and I don’t know if it is always true, but that when they are finished with these parties, they just throw the food away. Coming from where my mother comes from, where when you kill a pig, you use everything including the toenails if you can. My mother was just absolutely--I’ve got to tell you something. I think it speaks to my mother’s character that she was disgusted with that as opposed to impressed. There are many people who come from circumstances that would be similar to my mother’s, or circumstances where they didn’t have many things, where in that situation they would draw another conclusion; and the conclusion would be: ‘Oh, I want to emulate that or one day I want to be able to just talk about how I didn’t need that money.’ My mother and father were never like that no matter what their circumstance. You use wisely what it is that you have and, if you can’t use it, you share it. So you don’t throw clothes away; you find somebody that can use them. You don’t throw textbooks away; you find somebody that can use these books, and things like that. So my mother was just shocked by, by just her experiences in New York; and she only came once. Well, when she came up, she went to Oscar’s graduation first in Princeton, then she came up to mine and then we had a big graduation party, AFSC, in New York City. We were all there. Then I stayed . . .

BRINSON: How many were there?

GRUNDY: I would say, because I later on met another student at Berea that I had known there, Mercedes Washington out of Florida, uh, eight maybe. Eight of us were AFSC students. Of that eight, four or five of us were from Birmingham. Genoa Montgomery is a doctor now in Boston. Uh, I don’t know what Benny Davis is doing. Thania is an attorney. Oscar is a writer and a teacher, and I’m here. There were at least five of us. Angela had since graduated and was at the Sorbonne then.

BRINSON: So AFSC would bring you together periodically?

GRUNDY: Periodically, in New York City.

BRINSON: For what purpose?

GRUNDY: Just to get together. You know, they knew, certainly the Birmingham crew, that we all knew each other so it was like homecoming. When we’d get together, mostly we would cry. [laughing] Did Parker beat ( )? What did you hear? You know, just kind of, you know, kind of catch up on all the little hometown gossip, you know. Interestingly enough, our teachers didn’t abandon us in Birmingham. By that I mean until the day he died, Mr. Henry, my music teacher, would send me little notes of encouragement and put a dollar or two in, you know. A dollar or two in 1963, that’s big money. I want you to know this.

BRINSON: Right.

GRUNDY: And our teachers in general kept in touch with us; and, uh, remember a lot of our teachers were our neighbors. They were church members. So they pretty much knew exactly what we were doing, where we were traveling, who we were seeing and meeting. Of course, this is the, the civil rights struggle is starting to kick off then. So the whole idea of wanting to be in New York was–in fact, I went one time just to meet Malcolm. I had read about Malcolm. I knew what I was programmed to think about him, but I wanted to see for myself. Went to Harlem, never met him or anything and it’s one of the great regrets of my life that I never had a chance to meet him.

BRINSON: You went to a program where he was to appear?

GRUNDY: He always spoke at 125th Street. I knew that. The grapevine . . .

BRINSON: And you thought if you just showed up . . .?

GRUNDY: If I’d just show up at Michelle’s Bookstore or something I would see Malcolm, which is kind of the way it happened actually, you know. But I missed him. [laughing] But I did meet other people: James Farmer from CORE. In fact, James Farmer–I don’t know what happened, but I understand when they were looking for families to place all these kids–remember, they had a lot of us out of Birmingham–he offered to take a student from Birmingham, and I think I was on his list. I don’t know what happened that it didn’t happen. But he was involved with AFSC at least enough to know what it is they were doing. I’m trying to see who else I met at that time. Uh, I don’t remember any great names in particular. I just remember thinking it was awfully wonderful to be–‘cause when we’d go to New York, we would do the obligatory AFSC thing, then we’d say, “See you white folks,” you know. And we would take off, and we would go to Harlem. By this time, Oscar, who was at Princeton, was in and out of New York a lot more than I was, so he was starting to know his way around. So between Oscar and Benny, who was at Fairlawn, we kind of mastered Harlem in the manner of just, you know, just a few minutes, so to speak. So it was a pleasure just culturally, you know, going to Harlem.

BRINSON: So you graduated in ’64 . . .

GRUNDY: From Liberty Central, uh huh.

BRINSON: . . . and the bombing at your church was in ’63?

GRUNDY: Sixty-three. I was in New York then, yeah. Yeah.

BRINSON: Do you remember–what do you remember about that from New York?

GRUNDY: That’s one of the strangest experiences of my life and, by that, I mean–the family I had originally gone to stay with in New York, the Matthews, it just didn’t work out too well. And that’s interesting, you know. Of course, I’ve grown up and lots of things have changed, but I don’t know what–I felt as if I was like the family slave or something. [laughing] I was having like flashbacks of slavery. It was just peculiar. A lot of it was just Quakerism. You know, they are very particular, certain kind of people. And here I was away from home, away from everything I knew. So it didn’t work out, and my mother encouraged Gene Engstad to find me a second placement. Uh, I think that’s interesting because the mother in that family, Marguerite Matthews, and I are now really good friends. In fact, she’s been here to visit with me, stayed with me. I’ve been several times back to Liberty to see her. You know, it’s just like, whatever it was–we tried one time to reconstruct that and couldn’t figure it out. Said, “Oh, what the hell; forget about it,” you know. It was just probably a lot of things. I was probably depressed. I know that’s when I started to gain weight. So that gives us a big clue, isn’t it? [laughing] At any rate, I lived with a second family, the Rhineschagens. Both of them are now dead, but they had four children and Jane Rhineschagen–you know, the mother really sets the tone in a household–was a less uptight woman than Marguerite Matthews was. So when the word got around the community that they were looking for a placement for me--I didn’t know the Rhineschagens. As it turned out, I recognized one of their sons at the high school; but I didn’t know who Richard was. Uh, they readily said, “Oh, we’ll take her,” you know. And that turned out to be a real good relationship. Well, uh–Mr. Rhineschagen, by profession, was–this was the early, I now know to be the early stages of cable TV. He was installing cable and things. He was an electrician, worked for a big company there in the area where they put in antenna; and, you know, he repaired TV’s and stuff. So they were kind of packrats. I mean, Jane collected everything while her husband just repaired everything. I mean, the house was like a veritable junkyard is all I can tell you, but I kind of liked that cause it was kind of interesting to me. Like they had an old pump organ in the house, you know, kind of interesting. All of that to say, the phenomenal thing was this: I was surrounded by televisions, quite unlike my experience in Birmingham where my parents didn’t own a TV. Someone gave us one once, and they wouldn’t even take it out of the box. So here I was in a house where there was literally a TV in every room; and normally, just being kind of, the kind of person I was that I will always catch a round of news somewhere, read the newspaper. For some reason, on this particular Sunday, and this Monday even, I had not listened to the news; nobody in the house had and there was like no discussion. And, interestingly enough, my mother hadn’t called or anything. I now know everybody was just in shock. When I got to school that morning, I went to see Mr. Sanders, had to stop by his classroom. He later told me he could just tell by the way I walked in--he knew enough about me to know what had happened and my relationship to it. We–this high school was so elitist that we received our individual copies of The New York Times. Can you imagine this? In front of each one of our lockers was a New York Times–every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Can you imagine that?

BRINSON: No, I can’t.

GRUNDY: But that’s what this high school was like. And I’m going, ‘Hey, we need choir uniforms.’ Anyway, uh, that’s what happened. Well, I hadn’t even gone to my locker. I had to see Mr. Sanders about something rather urgently, I thought. And when I ran in his classroom, he was sitting there reading the paper, and he said later, I knew you didn’t know just by the way you were acting. So I remember Mr. Sanders saying to me, “Ann, uh, have you read the newspaper today?” “No, sir, but I’m going to ask you about this composition,” and stuff. And I remember his urging me, just trying to coax me into sitting down. And finally I said, “You want me to sit down, Mr. Sanders?” I mean, I was kind of up for some reason. He said, “Yes, why don’t you just sit down.” And I kind of sat down in this chair right by his desk. He had a stack of books, and he kind of cleared away there; and he had this New York Times, and of course, it’s the classic one of, of, you know, four girls–and then I recognized my dad. It was just like–I just remember, just –I was too shocked to cry. I was just–I didn’t know what to feel. The one thing I didn’t feel was surprise because, even as a child growing up, we always got bomb threats. Birmingham is called, you know, Bombingham. I mean, that was rather common. And I wasn’t surprised that someone had finally been successful with the church. There were always attempts, in fact, there was a recent attempt. When I was in Birmingham in December, there was an attempt even then. Uh, I was just angry with myself for not knowing.

BRINSON: Did you say you recognized the photo of your dad?

GRUNDY: I recognized–I always called it my daddy’s church. That structure is so particular that just–and I remember The New York Times; it was kind of like this, and it was folded in half so we’re looking at this much of the paper. I remember the picture ( ), and I just remember seeing those dark brown bricks. It’s just like, etched into my memory, every detail of that church, and seeing those windows. These huge, priceless stained glass windows just . . . yeah, yeah. By the way, that’s one of the windows from the church, yeah.

BRINSON: That’s the window behind your daughter . . .

GRUNDY: Uh huh.

BRINSON: . . . in the newspaper article recently. Oh, that’s beautiful stained glass.

GRUNDY: It’s about 1871, I think. I tried to date it, and I want to make it a memorial for my parents; but this window is one-fourth of the original window, uh, that was in place. It was one of the windows that was not damaged. It was on the front of the church and, as a memorial to the church, the people of Wales built what is now called the Wales Window. ( ) I’ll show you a picture of it in a short while. And in the process of installing this beautiful Wales Window, they took these windows out; and my sister, my sisters at home still laugh. They said, “You know, they’re trying to figure out how you got this window to Kentucky.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Look, uh, everybody and his mama wanted this window, and the decision had been made.” My sisters don’t go to church anymore; they don’t do that, but, you know, everybody knows what’s going on, in terms of conversation, that the windows would be donated to the National Civil Rights Museum and to the National Archives in, you know, D.C. and stuff. In other words, these windows were already crated and ready to go; and I had been in Birmingham one time, and I was showing my children and some other students where I lived. I said, “This is my house. This is my little bedroom.” And as I went to what used to be my mother’s laundry room, the washroom, I saw these windows crated up for shipping. So I say to the minister and–Richard Charles was a friend of mine; he’s a janitor. His mother was my first grade teacher. I said, “What are you all doing with these?” They said–the minister didn’t know me that well at the time–he said, “Oh, we’re getting ready to ship these off to these national places and stuff, national archives and stuff.” Richard Charles looks at me, and he says, “Ann, don’t go there. Don’t start that up.” Richard Charles I’ve known since birth, you know. And so the minister says,

“What are you talking about?” He said, “You don’t know Ann like we know Ann.” So I say to the minister, I said, “uh, I really would like to have one of these windows” He said, “Oh no, these are priceless.” I mean, he goes through the whole thing. I said, “I know. I know.” I said, “But you don’t know why I want to have one of these.” He said, “Well, try me.” I said, “Well, first of all” . . . I had to remind him that in the history of the church, “I’m the church baby.” I said, “So in a sense, my name is written all over that.” He said, “Well, haven’t moved me yet.” I said, “Okay. Let me try my next shot: If my father were standing in the pulpit where you preach every Sunday, looking out at that window, the front of the church, you see the Wales Window now; but for sixteen years my father saw this window. This was the very pinnacle of that window.” I said, “In his mind’s eye, if he could quote Zora Neale Hurston, he would say, ‘His eyes were watching God.’” And the preacher looked at me, and he said, “Ann, take the window. [laughing] Just take it.” [laughter]

BRINSON: That’s wonderful.

GRUNDY: And actually that’s what I’m going to do up in that corner. I’m still trying to come up with–and I’ve talked with a couple of artists and stuff. I said, “I want my mother and father in this window.” To me, you know, had they not gone to Birmingham and all, I don’t think a lot of things would have happened for us, certainly after my father’s death.

BRINSON: How do you keep the light?

GRUNDY: I went into–this is the whole story–I went into SAM’S one day, and they had one shop light. That’s a two- or three-tiered fluorescent light. I really wanted to brace this window, encase it in some kind of Plexiglas or something, and suspend it from my cathedral ceilings. I mean, I’ve got–I’m living in a church almost. A church pew over here. [laughing] I got one--I love them. You know, I got the hymnbooks--everywhere I can put my hands on them and stuff. Uh, I really wanted to suspend it, and Chester kept saying if the house jars or something, we’re talking–it’s just such a chancy thing. So we kind of put it up there temporarily. A friend was over here one day, and he said, “Why don’t you put a shop light behind there?” And, uh, went out to SAM’S, and they had one left. They had it on sale for nine dollars and some kind of way, I don’t know how it happened, but I ended up walking out of the store without paying for it. Initially, you know, just being like, ‘Oh, wow, you know.’ And when I got home and put the light up, I said, “No, I don’t want that on my parents. And I went back, and I said to the woman, “I don’t know how much it cost, but, look, here’s $20, just keep it.” You know, I just didn’t want the whole thing tainted like that. But that’s just a shop light behind there, and I’m trying to figure out–a friend is trying to help me now to put more light farther up so you get the full, you know . . .

BRINSON: Great. Great.

GRUNDY: Uh huh. But sometimes at night in this house when it’s very dark, it’s just a very, um, it’s very—obviously, it’s sacred to me, not because it’s a church but because of its place in my life. It’s very special. If something happened in my house, I’m getting the window first.

BRINSON: The pew . . .?

GRUNDY: Basement of the church. Basement of the church.

BRINSON: That came from the church, too?

GRUNDY: Uh hmm. My kid–my daughter laughs when–her friends saw this picture in the paper. “What’s up with your mother?” Her friends, Your mother doesn’t go to church. She’s half heathen or something. I mean, I take pride now in not going, you know. What’s with the stained glass window? Well, you see, she didn’t really steal it, but . . . and we have these church pews. Sieda likes to mess with people like that, but, uh, anyway . . . [interruption]

BRINSON: Uh, did you know the girls?

GRUNDY: Oh yes. Oh yes. I don’t–you know, because I’m not a current church-goer, I can’t speak to how people interact. Of course, when I grew up church was more than church. It was a social gathering. In fact, I could compare church with my parents’ rural churches which were even more of social gatherings. It’s like the only show in town, kind of. And they had circuit preachers, so he would either come first or third or second and fourth Sundays of the month. So spending time in the summers in Mississippi with my grandparents, I started looking forward to church. [laughing] You know, if Grandpa’s at Point Pleasant and was first and third, then we’d go to Auntie Jenora’s, which is way down there, second and fourth. And it was a chance to see people; there’s young people. It was a chance to see other children, you know; we weren’t working the fields and slopping the hogs and stuff like that. So my experiences with church–they were like, not just social drop-ins, but they were like extended home environments to me. So there was no way in the world a person could be a member of that church, or involved in the church and not know virtually everybody in the church. When my mother died, people were teasing me about this, because in my–what I did was to do a historical account. I decided I would do the eulogy and stuff and take care of all of that; Chester and I did that. I did a historical kind of timeline of my parents’ time in Birmingham and one of them–and people were laughing, my friends, you know, because we all knew I was pointing out, just pointing to the people who were like parents to us in that church. I would just point to–and if you didn’t know, you didn’t know, but they all knew. I would say, Mrs. Murphy, that was her seat. Mr. Joe Brown, that was his seat. Mr. Charles Brown, that was his seat. Mr. Smart . . . and everybody went, God knows. You know, people almost had assigned seats. So, yes, I knew these children who were younger than I am, they were my sister’s age, except for Denise McNair who was younger than the rest. Denise was only eleven. Denise, I knew particularly well because her grandfather and his brother, the Pippin Brothers, owned a cleaners on the side of the church. In fact, part of the film footage that you see of that Sunday morning in ’63 is her great uncle, Mr. Pippin. They had been over in the cleaners doing some, you know, work that morning; and their cleaners was just damaged, I mean, almost wiped out by the bombing. That was the force of the dynamite that it just wiped out buildings on that side, too, and the cleaners was one of them. And it was Mr. Pippin, the brother, the uncle, who ran across the street; and you see him just kind of hysterical, like trying to dig cause he knew Denise was at church, because I think she had either stopped by the cleaners, “Hi, granddaddy,” or something like that. And because the cleaners was there, I saw the Pippin family a lot; and her mother, who was a Tuskegee graduate, Maxine, sometimes worked in the cleaners. So I would see Maxine, Mrs. McNair, on Sunday. She sang in the choir; she sang for my father’s funeral, beautiful soprano. Sang under William Dawson at Tuskegee. Uh, I would see her at the cleaners, and then her father had a studio. That’s one reason there’s so much film footage of Denise; she was an only child, and they took a lot of photos of her. So I knew them quite a bit, and Chris’ last name was McNair. That was my mother’s maiden name, and they would sometimes try to figure out how they were kin to each other ‘cause both of their families had come out of Mississippi. His had gone to Arkansas; my mother’s had stayed there. So I knew them quite well. But all of the families--there’s just no way we couldn’t know each other.

BRINSON: One of Angela Davis’ essays, she comments on the fact that we have forgotten the girls’ names, that the press doesn’t report the girls’ names . . .

GRUNDY: Just four little girls.

BRINSON: We remember the male students who were killed, uh, and it’s all part of–I’m putting words in her mouth here–but it’s all part of that culture in which we forget the names of the women and the girls; but we record from the male perspective. And I hadn’t really thought about that until I read that, and I thought, “She’s right. She’s right.”

GRUNDY: Uh huh. And in her case--Angela’s family house–by the way, Professor Parker, for whom Parker High School was named, adopted Angela’s mother, Sally; and those early years they lived right in the projects. The projects were considered middle-class housing when they were built, you know. You had indoor plumbing, you know. Professor Parker lived there and, of course, just walked across the street to Parker High School; but Angela’s mother and father lived right at the end of Center Street on Eleventh Court, big house. It’s still there right now. So she lived right there. Her neighbors were the Robertsons--Carol Robertson and her family lived like across the little viaduct on the other side closer to Lincoln, uh, Lincoln School and Parker. Uh, the Wesleys, Cynthia’s folks, uh--daddy was a school principal and mother was a teacher--you know, lived in the general vicinity. This whole area, by the way, was called Dynamite Hill. Of the four families, three of them were pretty much Angela’s neighbors. The Collins family lived closer to Lincoln School, like on the other end of town. You know–by the way, of all the four families, the family with the least, how do you say, resources, circumstances, you know? The Collins family clearly–in fact, I would go so far as to say probably retardation on one hand. The other part of that is that of all the families–you know, if you were looking from the outside, looking in, that has suffered the most, it has been them. One girl is in a mental hospital there in Tuscaloosa. My sister visits her periodically. Another girl– when I–she doesn’t live too far from my mother’s house; and I see her because if it’s a holiday or something, my sister always invites her by the house to eat. Junie. And Junie is just gone. She was interviewed and just gone. You know, in other words, the family was already shaky and unstable; and this just pushed them right on over the edge. They have suffered tremendously.

BRINSON: I want to go back to, uh, your high school graduation in New York. What happened after that? How did you get to Berea?

GRUNDY: In the family that I had lived with, the first family, the Matthews--I didn’t live with them the second year, but Paul Matthews was the guidance counselor in my high school. So–and I actually got along okay with him; it was Marguerite I was having–it was like mother and daughter stuff, I guess. Menopausal. But, uh, Paul was a guidance counselor in high school –he has since died–and he knew what my situation was more than anyone else. And he began to help me to get focused about the fact–you know, in a sense, going back in high school and adding two more years to a high school experience, you can actually see yourself as, ‘Oh, I’ve got time to figure this out.’ ‘Cause, you know, when you’re a senior in high school–I can sense it now in my seventeen-year-old–you know, this almost, [sigh] I’m getting to that point. I’ve got to step out here on my own. I’ve got a little safety net, but, you know . . . You’re reaching that point where you’ve got to take over your life a little bit more. So Paul began to talk with me very specifically about what I was going to do for school. And because I was with the ASFC, everybody was actually courting me, so to speak. I began to eliminate them one by one, meaning that–I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere else where it snowed like that. I mean, that just-- [laughing] I’m sorry, you know. I’m a Southern black woman; give me some heat, you know. So I ruled out the northeast; and, actually, I liked Ithaca because it had a great music school, and I was still studying music. I thought, ‘Ah, you know, you know, you know.’ University of Buffalo: I thought about that as an out-of-state college. You know, I was–so all the little state schools–( ) and all of them, I was going to visit. And then Vassar was up the road. I was kind of taking a peek, but I said, “No, no, I just don’t have what it takes to stay up here.” Plus, I just didn’t want to be isolated from black people. I still have an opinion, by the way, that those two years–I don’t know what was happening in the music world, black music. It was just like I was completely cut off. You know, when people say, “Don’t you remember this song?” I say, “It must have happened during those years.” I was upset--I had no way, you know. I would come home and try to take it all in, but I couldn’t get it. The Day Os and the O Jays, Stay in My Corner. So I was culturally–and I was aware of the fact that I didn’t like that part of it.

BRINSON: Did they encourage you to look at Quaker colleges, like Bryn Mawr or ( )?

GRUNDY: And the Quakers were looking at me, you know.

BRINSON: ( ) Greensboro?

GRUNDY: Swarthmore.

BRINSON: Right.

GRUNDY: In fact, that was one of the great, one of the great things in terms of what’s on the other side of the mountain. Because I was in that area, I had a chance to travel a lot, not because of the families, but because of the American Friends. They would say, Meet us in New York. We’re going to do this or that. My daughter just did a semester at Dartmouth, and she was trying to get us to come up and go see. I said, ( ), I’ve seen Dartmouth. When did you see Dartmouth? Girl, way back in . . . That kind of thing. I just–one of the things my parents would do when we were children, in terms of Sunday afternoon things, was they would just drive to a black college campus. Sometimes we would eat in the cafeteria, but most times we would go to a convocation or we would just, you know, visit dorms. It was just like I knew already that college campuses were places to be. They were like, had little lives of their own. So I did travel, and the American Friends were encouraging me to think about those schools. I went to Haverford–I’m thinking about this; it’s all kind of coming back to me, you know. But I had ruled them out. Well, in the process of doing that--believe it or not, Berea College is kind of on the Quaker circuit, meaning that when you look at its history and the professors who have been there, many of them have been Quakers or they have been Quaker associated. And Berea had at that time a small Friends meeting, but, uh, but all of this was rather independent of all this. I just, it was just something that struck me that I wanted to strike out on my own. So I stayed in New York that summer and worked. I played music someplace; I just, I accompanied music, I did something with music, stayed with the Rhineschagers. And I saved a little money, and I took the bus home like in early August. And I, you know–when my mother died, she saved every little letter any of her kids ever wrote. I’ve got all these letters. Who’s writing these letters to my mother? Who am I trying to convince of what? You know. But, uh, evidently during that time I was trying to convince my mother that I was a rather independent person, that she should not worry. In hindsight, I was trying to try to not have my mother worry about me, because I was sensing all of the issues . . .

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

GRUNDY: . . . of ’64 I realized after I’d gotten there that I had not said anything to my mother about what I was going to do, that I’m so busy just figuring it out. So my mother said, and I was trying to be independent of the Matthews, too, you know: you have run my life for two years, I’m going . . . You know. Of course, by this time I’m eighteen years old, you know, and already was an old person for my age. My daughter, Sieda, is an old person, you know. People say, “Ah, she’s just old.” You know, she’s just, thinks beyond her years or something. So when I got home, my mother said, “Well, what are you going to do?” When I think about this now--if my children did this to me--I understand child abuse--I would have to do something. How dare you make decisions independent–I mean, it’s just the very idea! This is a family decision and stuff. Wasn’t thinking that at all. I said, “Well, Mother” . . . Oscar, of course, and I had been talking; she knew Oscar was going to go to Antioch. I think we had informed her of that. And I said, “I’m going to a school called Berea College.” She said, “What? Where? What are you talking” . . .? I said, “Berea College.” “Where is it?” “Kentucky.” I mean, just like–we had a family friend, the Butlers, who had a grandson, Marvin, a nephew who would come down once a year from Louisville. That was my only clue to Kentucky. You know, there was somebody named Marvin Butler in Louisville. So my mother said, “Well, how are you going to pay for this?” And I’m just telling my mother, “Don’t worry, Mama, I’ve got it all covered.” Of course, I didn’t, you know. Didn’t have a clue but I had like a–I did have a clue. So my mother is just kind of, “”Okay, let’s get you ready for school.” So my mother goes out and buys me a trunk. She buys me a set of green luggage and puts my initials on it, ALB; and I’m thinking to myself, “Well, my mother can’t afford to do this.” By the way, when my mother died--Dr. Akbar talks about this, that when you are poor and black in this country, you have a different economic system. You have a different way of seeing money and using money. My mother was phenomenal. To this day, I just tip my hat in terms of what she thought to do and how to use her resources; and, of course, unconsciously she was teaching all of us those things. But, at any rate, my mother bought me a trunk, a set of luggage, three pieces, and she bought me a Royal typewriter, much like the one we’d had, the little zippered blue thing, and put my initials on it. And she had Mr. Jenkins, who used to work on the railroad--and when he worked on the railroad, my father was still alive so my father was a surrogate father for his children. They all went to Talladega; daddy would take them to school, pack their stuff in their room. So when my daddy died and Mr. Jenkins had retired--first cousin to Spike Lee; that’s the other piece. A lot of connections and relationships in and out of Birmingham. And his daughter played, accompanied Langston Hughes a lot; some of those late recordings with music, that’s Bay Jenkins playing. That’s Mr. Jenkins’ daughter. But at any rate, so Mr. Jenkins came by the house, cause he had a car and we didn’t, and took me to the bus station. And my mother’s going, “Where is this girl going?” I mean, I had no clue. I’d never been in Kentucky. Bus–we go all night, of course, and we get to Berea and go through a whole week, freshman orientation. Interestingly enough, there were four black girls in my dorm. One was a girl I knew from Birmingham; we were Girl Scouts. [interruption] When I got to Berea that morning, you know--we had been riding all night and they--my dorm was right–it was Kentucky Hall. And I ran into Sarah Wade right away, and that was like refreshing. I hadn’t seen Sarah– we were all Girl Scouts with Angela and Thania. I mean, there we go, this interlocking of this-- how paths crisscross in a Deep South, tight-knit community. So that helped me a lot just seeing someone I knew. I didn’t know anyone else, not a clue, you know. The, the decent thing about Berea, and the reason I had chosen it, was I knew it was academically a very good school. I didn’t need like--what’s the magazine? U.S. World Report to tell me that. I knew. And Paul Matthews had turned me on to Berea early on in terms of just one of the schools along with the Quaker schools. So I’m like–and I wanted, you know, to get far away from the northeast; but I wanted a little independence from my mother, too. So, uh, uh, I was aware of Berea as being academically a fine school; but the thing that intrigued me the most, of course, the same as it did for my brother Oscar, was the possibility of working our way through school. You know, Antioch is a work-study school also. Five years but Oscar did it in three. [laughing] Antioch was so glad to get rid of Oscar, they said, “Let’s figure this out son.” See if we can do this more quickly than five years. [laughing] So he finished in three. So that’s the truth; Oscar, my brother, is just another whole story. The northeast, the Quaker experience, made him crazy for quite a while; but now we can laugh at it and that’s okay. But, obviously, the reason I wanted to go to Berea was that I could be–my mother would not have to worry and that I would get, you know, a good education and all that.

So, uh, nonetheless, I didn’t have any money to begin school. You still need money to start school even if you’re going to work and stuff. So I went through the whole freshman orientation thing–and I tell this story to black students I try to interest in Berea–I say, “Look, just trust me on this. I don’t know if it still works this way, but the spirit is still there.” The last place you come, of course, is to the treasurer’s office to pay your fee; and at that time Berea was $303.52 a semester. Can you believe that? You know, when you read Langston Hughes and he would get paid for a poetry reading or something, $25 or something, he would down to a penny “and paid $2.26 for a ticket” or something like that. I remember thinking as I was doing this, Boy, this is right out of Langston Hughes: $303.52. So I got to the line, and the line was real long. And I had declared my major. I knew I wanted to be a piano major, you know. So I got there and, uh, got up to the line. They said, “Well . . .” They were stamping all my bills paid and stuff. Of course, I hadn’t paid. They said,” $303.52.” And I said, “I don’t have any money.” And the guy said, “What did you say?” I said, “I don’t have any money.” So he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I don’t have any money. I just, I just came . . . you know.” I couldn’t tell my mother that, you know. I mean I had enough money for a bus ticket and all that stuff, take care of some things. And he was going, “How did you get this far? You’ve been through a whole week of freshman orientation.” I said, “Well, if you remember, you print this little bulletin; and it says in here”--I had it all dog-eared--“Berea does not deny the Berea experience to any student because he or she does not have the necessary funds.” He just could not believe me, you know. So finally he said–it turned out he was the treasurer or whatever, the ombudsman or something; I forget which. Mr. Evans. He said, “Why don’t you just sit down over there?” Okay. There were like some seats along the side at Lincoln Hall. So I sat there, and I had stuff to do; and I think I remember sitting three or four hours cause I’d gotten there about noon, so about five or six o’clock, you know, I’m still sitting there. So the line has died down; people have paid their bills; and they’re gone, you know. And the door opens, uh, from back there where he is, and out walks the man I soon discovered was Francis Hutchins. So he came over to me. He said, “You’re Ann Beard, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “I’m Dr. Hutchins. I’m president of the school.” I said, “Pleasure to meet you. I’ve read about you, and stuff.” I said, “You have a brother, Robert Hutchins.” He liked that. I said, “Yes.” So he said, “You’re out of territory.” You know, Berea has a big thing about who’s selected. If you’re “in territory”--so on one hand Birmingham was “in territory,” but I was not a Birmingham student when I did it. I was selected “out of territory,” out in New York state. He said, “You’re out of territory.” It’s like that kind of stands out at Berea. I said, “Yes, I’m out of territory.” And he said, “You’re into music, too.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “You’re with the American Friends; you’re one of those students.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “You’re the first one we’ve gotten.” And I said, “Yes.” And he asked me a few questions about my experience, and I was telling him some things I had done and stuff. So he says, “Well, I’ll get back with you.” And he goes back in. And then, after a few minutes, he comes back out; and he said, “Welcome to Berea College. Everything is taken care of.” I paid, never paid another penny my four years at Berea College.

BRINSON: Well, let me ask you: If it’s a work-study program, why are they charging the three hundred and some dollars?

GRUNDY: That was like the initial, like–at that time, we were literally paid thirteen cents an hour, or nine cents an hour, so going into school you needed money for that first semester; and what you would hopefully do is to use your money in such a way after that–students, a lot of students had student accounts where any monies they earned, they just put into their accounts to pay for their school bills. In my case, I always had stuff to do. You know, remember now, this is the sixties; and I wasn’t particularly interested in clothes and in getting my hair done, which is what a lot of kids did. They’d come to Lexington; they’d go to Richmond–and drinking was a big deal, too, you know. They’d run up and down the road and get liquor. I pretty much used my money pretty wisely, but by the time I finished buying music books and–it just seems like-- and I was also helping my mother out. I just felt obligated to do that. So I never had quite enough money; but Berea never asked me for, you know--whatever it was I needed, I would pay what was in my account; and if it was deficient, they made it up.

BRINSON: Right.

GRUNDY: So, you know.

BRINSON: I’m, I’m also surprised that AFSC or--didn’t kind of do some advance work for you.

GRUNDY: I thought about that many times; and I wondered if it had to do as much with me as with them cause remember: the reason I went was because I was quote “guaranteed college.” But that link between high school–and I don’t know where Gene Angstad was at that point either. I don’t know if he became ill, if he died. I still to this day don’t know where he is. They played a greater role in Oscar’s situation than in mine. I think I may have been sending the signals . . . [laughing] I have a feeling that’s the way--I had become a difficult student in a way. Uh, you don’t understand me. You don’t know me. Just leave me alone. I’m pretty sure I was sending those signals, that I wasn’t tapping into–and remember the second family I lived with was not a Quaker family. So I was out of the loop just a little bit.

BRINSON: Okay.

GRUNDY: Uh huh. I thought about that.

BRINSON: When you came to Berea in 1963, what was happening with the civil rights movement in Kentucky at that point?

GRUNDY: I remember that King’s brother, A.D., was Pastoring in Louisville; and there was some activity around that. Uh, I don’t remember a whole lot more. Kentucky, to me, is a very, is a very different kind of place. For one thing, it has a small black population. I think it’s less than seven percent now, hovers around that. And, of course, other populations are growing: the Latino population is growing, the Asian population. But at the time I came to Kentucky in ’64, there were just pockets of black people: Louisville, northern Kentucky, Lexington. Then you would hear about some people in Owensboro or Hopkinsville. That’s where what’s-the-name is from. What’s the writer? That’s her turf.

BRINSON: Ellis ( ).

GRUNDY: Uh, I was thinking more modern. I’ll think of it in a minute; I just drew a blank. But she’s quite a writer. Belle Hooks.

BRINSON: Oh, right.

GRUNDY: Then I would hear about little pockets and, being at Berea, I heard about Hazard--and there was an Alabama connection there--or Jenkins. Just a few pockets of black people. And I really began to understand what isolation or small numbers will do for you. They frighten you is what they do. You, you, you learn to really know your place or you tread very carefully or you test the waters before you step off into something. And, in particular, the whole thing with eastern Kentucky I found very strange; because at Berea it was not uncommon for a black student to be named Olinger. A white student named Olinger. They’re both from the same place and guess what? They know they’re kin to each other, and all you have to do is look at the black student. He’s got those cat gray eyes or the little blue eyes or something. Same features the white–I’m going . . . I mean, that just blew my mind, you know. Remember, my relationships with whites in the Deep South was not anything like that. I, so, as a result, you might say on one hand the relationships were more intimate, or on paper they appeared more intimate, but I just didn’t have a sense of anything going on or happening. I mean, you know what I’m saying? I just–and I still think that about Kentucky; very complacent state. You know, there’s a joke in Lexington that the civil rights struggle never passed through here. That train did not stop here, you know. And, by that, I think people mean that struggle–there’s something about “struggle” that brings the best out of people. Not that people should want to lose their lives or shed blood or anything, but you ought to be willing to stand up and fight for something; and you’re not fighting just to integrate a lunch bar. You’re talking about sharing of power, sharing of resources. I don’t think in Kentucky that consciousness has come to that point; and when I came here in ’64, it was glaring to me. Uh, there are many more examples I could point out that underscore that.

BRINSON: Do you recall any student programs or activities at Berea or faculty who were involved in at least trying to present the whole civil rights struggle to students?

GRUNDY: I cannot recall any student groups. In fact, it was my generation of students who formed the BSU, and that’s a funny story about that. I forget–if I went in ’64, this happened either spring of ’64 or early ’65. Uh, Cleo Charles, who teaches history at Berea, has this pretty documented in terms of–and he’s blind so he has it all in Braille; and he just kind of zips right through it. But he has the history, and it’s a rather precise history. He went to the trouble of talking to a number of us so he’d have a sense of what had happened. But, essentially, what happened was that something had happened on campus once again that made us mad about something. You know, we were young; we were after stuff. And remember, we had no black faculty and staff. We didn’t even have parent figures. There was a man named Mr. Lonzo Ballard whose children were in Berea with us--Pat is now a state social worker’s daughter--and he worked in the kitchen. Mr. Ballard was the closest I came to seeing a black adult, a functioning black adult on a daily basis; and he washed pots and pans in the kitchen. There was another older man, Mr. Fee, who was a janitor in the music building; and he was a man of few words, even though he was quite a father figure to me. I mean, he would let me have my way in the music building any time. In fact, I’ve had a key. Just come on in, you know. And he would look after me, but he didn’t have a whole lot to offer me in terms of “You need to do this,” you know. That just was not his experience, and neither was it Mr. Ballard’s experience.

Uh, but I remember that something had happened on campus, and we wanted to have a meeting—remember, Berea is kind of a, it’s different from all other places on the planet, I think. It has as its motto: “God hath made it one blood all nations of men.” “In sic que patria,” or something, they say in Latin. In a sense, it was a little bit like what the really right wing Republicans say when they don’t want to do something like have a King holiday or do something in King’s name. Well, King wouldn’t want us to have the day off. King said, you know, “I one day want to be known by the content of my character.” All that old . . . So, in a sense, Berea, which had this profound history of being a school founded for freedmen, which means former slaves, really had a whole denial thing about how it came into its own being. At one point, I understand, Berea was overwhelmingly, the majority of the students were overwhelmingly African Americans. And then they passed the whole Day Law and all this stuff and sent away the majority of the students who were black and kept the minorities who were white because there was a president, I forget which–Fairchild, I think–who said, Oh no . . . --cause John G. Fee started the school coming out of–actually, he’s from Maysville I’ve since determined, but went to Oberlin and, uh, wanted to build this school at the foothills of Kentucky. And John G. Fee said God had spoken to him and said, “Go thee to the foothills of Kentucky.” Whenever we really wanted to get mad, get Berea mad at us, we would start speaking in John G. voices: “Go thee to the foothills of Kentucky! And build our school for freedmen!” Oooh, you know. And he’s buried in Berea. And there was one white student would actually go out to the cemetery late at night and come back and say, “You’re right, Ann. He said this.” [laughter – Brinson] You know, in small towns without technology and TV, you really do make up your own drama. [laughter] So, in that sense, Berea was wonderful for me in terms of just rediscovering or discovering aspects of myself I never knew about. I mean, whatever’s going to happen, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. So, uh, of course, President Fairchild said, Oh no, “John G. Fee heard that wrong. God didn’t say build a school for freedmen; he said build a school for Appalachians,” which was like 99.9 percent white. So they sent the students away to Lincoln Ridge, to Simpsonville, the institute there and kept white students there. Well, as time passed, and I’m thinking early ‘50s or something like that--Berea stayed for a long period lily white even though its history said this is what your school ought to be for--so in the ‘50s, black students started coming back. And after I was there, I realized the numbers of black kids from Birmingham–when I went to Berea, I’d never heard of it; but after I was there, I realized that my local librarian had gone to high school there. Her name was Vivian Fairchild Bell. She was named for President Fairchild. She’s Colin Powell’s aunt my marriage. Colin Powell’s daugh-, wife is my high school principal’s daughter. That’s another one of those weird connections. Big Red Johnson we all called him. Mr. Johnson. Not to his face. Big Red. Uh, so after I was there, I began to make a lot of connections; but going there, I had not a clue.

So, we wanted to start--we wanted black kids; we had no clue about a black student union. In fact, part of the aggravation was, when you said BSU, the local white kids would be upset because that was the Baptist Student Union. How dare we? So that was a struggle all the time, which we enjoyed, you know, just to keep stuff going, the BSU. So we put a sign up. I’ll never forget, there was a student who was out-of-territory from Louisville. Louisville was not in-territory then, neither was Lexington. Lexington’s only come on board in the last five year, I would say, as a part of the state that Berea would classically recruit from. It was considered another world, which it is, and, as a result, almost nobody knows about Berea in this town. It amazes me. Berea? What? Huh? I mean, they don’t know its history, anything like that or why you ought to consider going to school there. But, at any rate, there was a student, Kenny Miller, from Louisville who had come to Berea, had worked his way in because he knew the Bingham’s; and, of course, Barry Bingham was big on the board then. He had called up Hutchins and said, “Look I’ve got this student who used to work at the newspaper; I want him in.” Well, of course, he’s in. Well, so, Kenny was like big-city Negro as opposed to eastern Kentucky, Hazard and stuff like that. We wanted black students to get together for something; and one of us went up in the student union there, in Berea, we put up a sign: All blacks--and by this time we were using the word “black” when Malcolm was speaking to us, okay?--all black students need to meet in such and such a room at 6:30 this evening, where everybody walks right past that bulletin board going to the dining room so we knew everybody would see it. Well, one of the people who saw it was the dean of women, Ann Marshall, who came along, saw that sign, Oh, why God hath made of one blood all nations and men. We can’t have separate meetings and stuff like that. So she did what we say was the most profound thing she could do, she ripped our sign down. Thank you, Ann Marshall, ‘cause that just lit us up, you know. How dare you tell us that we can’t see ourselves as a community within a community! So, uh, Kenny went back and put another sign up; and it was so funny. I mean, like, you had to be--it was an “in” joke, and every black kid got it. It was coded language. “All ye who use Peach and Glo, Royal Crown Hair Grease”–and he went through all of this stuff, you know–“Press and Comb,” please meet in the Ballard Room; and, of course, at 6:30 we were all there, every black student on the planet.

BRINSON: Which were about how many?

GRUNDY: Uh, when I first went to Berea, forty-plus and that included students from Africa. By the time I graduated, the number may have been one hundred-plus; but my freshman year, forty-plus.

BRINSON: And the year of the founding of the BSU was what year for you?

GRUNDY: I’m thinking ’65.

BRINSON: Okay.

GRUNDY: ’65.

BRINSON: Your sophomore year.

GRUNDY: My sophomore year we had started, uh huh. Things had started to roll then. They really picked up shortly after we left, but that was, you know, yeah. Interestingly enough, that was about the year most BSUs, the time period most BSUs around the country--and I tell my kids this. There was a real strong grapevine. I don’t know how we did it because, for example, I didn’t know any students at UK; but we knew they were doing it at UK. And as it turned out, it was Chester. Chester was vice president of the BSU at UK at the same time we were forming ours at Berea. So all over the country there was this kind of network of communication. It’s a little bit –I would say the bigger picture is that, given the sixties movement, that even white students had kind of a network of what’s going on at Berkeley. ‘Cause the newspapers after a while–you remember there was almost this gentleman’s agreement, Don’t tell them, you know. They just want to . . . but we still knew. We knew what was happening at South Carolina State, what was going on at Fisk, you know. There was–uh huh–we weren’t using telephones cause to use the telephone–I tell my daughter, I say, “You have a telephone, a fax and call waiting.” I said, “We had one telephone on the first floor, a pay phone, at Kentucky Hall. If my mother wanted to talk to me, I had to set up, call me at 8:30 Saturday night; I’ll be standing by the phone. Hoping the line would not be yea long. So there was no such thing as using the telephone.” We didn’t do that.

BRINSON: Do you remember some of the first programs of the BSU? What were the issues?

GRUNDY: Let me back up a minute. You were asking what support did we have or encouragement. Among the faculty and staff, there were some old socialists. You know, I can think of, uh, uh, Dean All-, Julia Allen, who was retired when I went there; but she was in the Quaker meeting there and had been–what’s the other?--at the F.O.R. What’s that stand for?

BRINSON: Fellowship of . . .

GRUNDY: Reconciliation. Big old F.O.R.er, and because I was a Quaker student--remember, I was still making this connection kind of–I went to the Quaker meetings on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they were on campus, but a lot of times they were in faculty homes; and I don’t know how I figured out how to get to their houses. I mean, we didn’t have transportation. Sometimes I would walk and maybe somebody would come by my dorm and get me. But there was only one other student, uh, John Fleming, who knew about–I mean, I was kind of strange even for a black student in my own way, but John Fleming was involved. He’s now, he now runs the museum at Wilberforce, the African American museum, Dr. Fleming. But John and I would make our way to these Friends meeting. I look back on that in the sense that it really was my hook-up to whatever one might call, in the context of Berea, a radical kind of underground thing. These were little old white men and women who in their day were pretty feisty. So even though race was maybe a little tricky for them, the whole idea of upsetting the status quo did not bother them at all. So, in a way, I had the blessings of these old retired Berea workers; and they were not only there in terms of support and encouragement, but a lot of times we just needed money to go to this rally or that. They did it. They helped us out.

BRINSON: Helped you as an individual student or the BSU?

GRUNDY: BSU. Uh huh, they sure were. There was another professor who was really near and dear. When I got there, he was–it’s a little bit how black people talk like Bill Clinton: Well, he’s the only black person we’ve ever had. Well, we can say about Jim Holloway, he was the only black professor we had. In fact, he was not black. He was from Birmingham, graduated from Woodlawn High School. His daddy was literally a sheet-wearing Klansman. Jim Holloway, to this day, is, and you can ask anybody who knows him, one of the most unusual men you will ever meet. He taught philosophy and religion, and the word–as soon as I got there, I knew the word was, “Take Jim Holloway’s class,” not because I was going to major in philosophy and religion--in fact, I declared my major--but because, first of all, every black student took his class, or as many as who could, and secondly, it was our comfort zone. We had one place we could go where there would be more than five, six or seven students, black students, you know; and the white students who took those, his classes were kind of different, too. And you knew that Jim Holloway was not only an encouraging person but was thoughtful and a visionary. So, of course, he kept–Berea always gave him hell; that’s kind of my reading. Of course, when you’re a young student looking at it, you don’t know all the ins and outs; but I have a feeling he caught a fair amount of hell from Berea. But he was real unusual. To show you how unusual he was, I took every class I could fit into my schedule that Jim Holloway taught. I mean, it was a delight to go to class, and we worked hard; but I loved going because we could discuss ideas. In a sense, much of what we were thinking about in the struggle was being fueled by the information–you know, I think one of the great reasons to go to college is to have this four-year time where you just, the luxury of just thinking about stuff. Who am I going to be? What personality am I going to have on you? And that class, in particular, was like that. Um, and his family was very friendly to us. He has a son now who is, uh, he is a Trappist monk. His youngest son. So you get the idea of this family being a little bit different. Okay.

BRINSON: Do you remember the titles of courses that he taught that you took?

GRUNDY: He taught a course on Jacques Auel; I remember that. “Philosophy and Thought of Jacques Auel.”

BRINSON: I don’t even know who that is.

GRUNDY: Oh, he’s a French philosopher. And Hem-, I mean, Hemingway–uh, Jim Holloway knew him. I mean, this wasn’t just reading this man’s books. He knew him and was writing these letters. Jim Holloway was very close–he was one of the few outsiders who was allowed to visit and stay with Thomas Merton. Can you imagine? See, I knew who even Thomas Merton was at that time. And Dr. Holloway would go down to the, you know, to the monastery; and I believe he has some of Merton’s papers now. Dr. Holloway started a magazine called Catalogsite, to be reconciled It is a Greek word …

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

END OF INTERVIEW