Oral History Interview with Howard E. Bailey

MAXINE RAY: This is Maxine Ray conducting an interview for the Civil Rights project sponsored by the Kentucky Oral History Commission of the Kentucky Historical Society. I am interviewing Mr. Howard Bailey here in his office on the campus of Western Kentucky University. Today’s date is October 23, 2000, and we will be talking about civil rights in the community, city where he was born and raised in.

RAY: Uh, Mr. Bailey, tell me your full name, please.

HOWARD BAILEY: My name is Howard Eugene Bailey.

RAY: Uh, can you give me your date of birth?

BAILEY: My date of birth—I was born March 4, 1949 in Middlesboro, Kentucky.

RAY: What’s your parents’ name?

BAILEY: My father’s name was Lawrence Leroy Bailey and my mom’s name is Willie Jean Bailey.

RAY: Do you have any sisters or brothers?

BAILEY: I have one sister who is Gwendolyn Lillie.

RAY: Are you married?

BAILEY: I’m married with, uh, to Kayla Ann Bailey with one son, Malcolm Donovey.

RAY: Now tell me about where--your schooling. Where did you go to school?

BAILEY: Okay. I went to school in southcen—southeastern Kentucky in Bell County and grew up in Middlesboro; which was the larger community in, in Bell County with Pineville, Kentucky being the county seat.

RAY: Uh, the community where you were born in, was it integrated or was it a segregated community?

BAILEY: Uh, Middlesboro was a, a unique community in that it was, uh, in some cases--one could say it was somewhat integrated in that, uh, as a community of, at that time, probably about twelve to thirteen thousand people with African Americans living in three different sections of the community. And I say that that was different because in most southern towns you had--all the African Americans lived in one section of the town. But in Middlesboro there were four different African American neighborhoods. And, of course, they all touched and were intertwined with, uh, with white neighborhoods.

RAY: After you finished your schooling there, where did you go to college?

BAILEY: I’m a graduate of West Kentucky University. I finished high school in Middlesboro in 1966, graduating from Middlesboro High. Actually, I spent my last two years at Middlesboro High. The previous years were spent at Lincoln High, which was the segregated, the--what was known then as the colored school.

RAY: What’s your occupation?

BAILEY: I’m Dean of Students and Associate Vice President for Student Affairs.

RAY: Now, when you were in high school and all, did you face any kind of racial tensions or prejudices while you were in school, uh, from any of your teachers or anything?

BAILEY: Well, I don’t—because—we had a very unique situation as a little coal-mining town in the, in the mountains in that because the kids knew one another; because

--I lived in the middle of a block in my neighborhood and directly across the street and two doors down from me were, were white families. You could go another block where my grandmother and aunt lived and they both had white families that lived on either side of them. So as kids we grew up knowing one another. Every now and then there would be a, uh, altercation or we might call each other a name or two; but the next day we’d be out in the street playing ball again with one another. So, yes, there were—we knew, we were racially conscious and realized that there was differences but not compared to what I’ve seen in other communities.

RAY: Well tell me a little bit about your textbooks in your school. Did you all have, uh . . .

BAILEY: Now from the educational standpoint, there was clearly a difference. The, the white kids, even though we lived intermingled and intertwined in the neighborhood, they went to one school; we going to another. White kids were picked up on the bus and bussed to school. We walked or your parents had to take you to school. So there was no bus system for black kids. As it was in our case, we walked past the white school to get a mile further down the road to get to the black school. So it would have been much more convenient for us to have walked three blocks to the white high school. [clears throat] From the textbooks and materials--we got the white schools’ hand-me-downs. We could always tell when they had gotten new books because the custodial staff at their school would bring pickup trucks with textbooks in them and, and drop them off at our school. And literally at times when I say drop them off; I can remember that occasionally they would shovel the books out of the pickup trucks with coal shovels and just literally dump them on the ground outside of the school building. So our teachers and principals would go out and gather them up and tape up the, the books that were in real bad shape and clean them up and they would—like I said, they would bring them over in pickup trucks that had had an assortment of things, including coal dust, in them sometime. So our material was always pretty suspect and limited.

RAY: Because of—what kind of teachers did you all have? Did you have teachers that were really interested in teaching and interested . . . ?

BAILEY: The dedication of the teachers is what, what caused us to be able to prosper. And they ranged in terms of, of backgrounds and skills. We had, uh, some teachers that had outstanding educational credentials from some outstanding schools around the country. That they had left Middlesboro or some—in a few cases, there was a husband and wife. Maybe the wife left Middlesboro and went away to school and married and she and the husband both returned as school teachers, or vice versa. And yet—and then there were some that were not well trained. We had a few teachers that had one, maybe two years of college and, and there’s a difference in those classrooms. Looking back on it, those are the teachers that had the most difficult time conveying the information to us, but they tried hard and they were respected in the community.

RAY: Do you feel that your education was limited because of the teachers with the two years of education?

BAILEY: Uh, we were led to believe that our education was limited. But looking back on it, knowing that the teachers would—uh, what we didn’t have in terms of textbooks; what we didn’t have in terms of lab equipment for biology or chemistry; being a small community we went out on the creek bank and, and had class right there in—we had our own biology lab at the edge of the school ground. And, and they—I remember the old mimeograph machines that they would run off material for us to subsidize the books. So when we were integrated, which actually meant we went into the white school--my junior year in high school--we as kids were very fearful that, that the white kids were smarter than we were. It didn’t take but a few days for us to realize that our teachers had prepared us to work. We were, we were quite capable and were quickly seen as some of the better students. Some of our kids, yes, they were not good students, but those were the ones who weren’t good students in the colored school. Those that were good students at the colored school were good students when integration came about. Were some of the teachers questionable and suspicious of us? Yes, they were.

RAY: Did, uh, did you have any—were the teachers—how did they treat you all? Were they anxious to call on you in class to do classwork, or . . .?

BAILEY: It, it varied. Some of the teachers had known—again, because of the, the way that the community was laid out—some of those teachers had known us as children; playing in the same neighborhood all of our lives. Our—we had an integrated—everything but football—we had an integrated, uh, parks and recreation system to where in baseball and basketball for boys, which—that was primarily for boys--we played on the same baseball teams and we traveled to the different towns. In fact, we had a team that went to the Little League World Series. I wasn’t on that team—it was a little bit ahead of my time—but that’s when the parents of black and white kids, they went to Pennsylvania, I think, for the, for the final. So we knew each other, we traveled together; we played on the ball field together. We just, when class time came, went to separate schools; which as kids we thought was rather foolish. So some of the teachers knew us. Some of the teachers were uncomfortable with our presence and we could detect that. So it varied.

RAY: How did the city officials handle integration? Did they try to fight it or were there sit-ins or marches?

BAILEY: I found out in later years that there were some city officials that were . . . it could have happened sooner. We integrated in 1964, which is a clear decade after the Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision. So that, some—along that decade, there was obviously some foot-dragging going on--some people that, that avoided it. Uh, the excuse that we were given was that the white school was overcrowded and it was. And during those, the early sixties, our—the black students were--black families in general were leaving Middlesboro and a lot of southcentral, southeastern Kentucky. And during the northern migration, many, many families--one member of the family would move into Gary or Fort Wayne or many of the midwestern factory towns and found employment. By the following year, school would be out; the dad would come home and move the family away. So the number of black kids was dwindling drastically. So by 1964 the actual integration of kids in the same classroom took place. Two years prior to that in sixty-two—and this is, has some racial greed, I guess I would call it—in 1962, Middlesboro integrated its athletic program. Well, not just athletic but school extracurricular activities were integrated to where--our school had, numbers had gotten so small that we couldn’t man a football team anymore. So that had stopped, I think, in about fifty-nine. But we had an outstanding basketball, baseball, track, uh, state choir . . . so in sixty-two the decision was made to integrate the extracurricular activities. So we were for the first time bussed--as student athletes--over to the white school to be on the then Middlesboro High athletic teams. And needless to say, Middlesboro High, which had been a very mediocre athletic program, flourished and boomed immediately. So that’s how it actually started was in sixty-two, the integrated extracurricular. So the bus then would show up at our school in the afternoons—you didn’t get a ride home, but if you were going to the white school to take part in some extracurricular activity; you got a bus ride over to the white school.

RAY: So you had to get back home the best way you could?

BAILEY: Still had to get home the best way you could.

RAY: What about movie theaters? Did you all have a movie theater? Was it . . .?

BAILEY: Uh, there were two movie theaters in the community at that time and, uh, I’m trying to remember when they were integrated. Uh, I know you’re aware of what was usually done with movie theaters; that the black people had to sit in the balcony. The most—uh, one of the, the largest of two theaters had two balconies. So we had to sit in the upper balcony, and the mid-balcony was only used if, if the theater got overcrowded. I really can’t remember the year that, uh, that the theater was integrated. Of course, we many times would go from one balcony to the other, as teenage boys; and purposely sit where we were not supposed to just to wait and watch--wait for the ushers to come and tell us to leave and cause commotion. And they’d call the police and then we’d leave, we’d go back to the upper balcony. But I’m, I’m going to say that integration of the, of the theaters probably came right around the same time as the school integration. The—and even years after—a couple of years after it was integrated, I can remember we as teenagers refused to go and sit in the white area. We preferred going up and sitting in the balcony and that was probably because we were being just a little bit deviant.

RAY: Did, uh--before integration, did your parents give you any kind of instructions, you know, before going to the high schools or going to the . . . ?

BAILEY: Yes. Let me go back and say something I do remember about the theater. Uh, my mother, uh, is not African American. My mother is a Melungeon and that’s a whole other story [chuckle]. Uh, so we, as what was then called mixed kids; would now be looked upon as biracial. I can remember as a small child when I couldn’t even see up to the ticket window, and my mother would carry my sister and I to the movies. Of course, the—our prices were cheaper but we had to go--we couldn’t go through the theater. The Negro balcony--you bought your ticket and went around the side of the building and went up a long flight of steps that was adjacent to the fire, uh, fire escape. We went up the steps to get to that upper balcony. And I can remember my mother walking up to the counter, the ticket window, and them say--and she would ask for one adult, two children’s tickets. And they would sell her tickets to the white section. And then the ticket-window person, when we would walk away, would then notice that she had brown children and would call her back and would be very short with her and make her give him the tickets back. And then they would charge us less, of course, but would issue us, uh, black tickets. And so they--when they saw the color of her kids, they would then make her give those tickets back, and make sure that we knew that we had to go outside the theater and around the back and up the stairwell.

RAY: Oh my goodness. Did you ever question your mom about that? Why . . . ?

BAILEY: Well, uh, at that time I didn’t. I just knew it was different and that was some of the early years of knowing that we were different and were treated differently. But we dealt with some of that in her family also, and, as I said, that’s a whole other story. But you, your question was about . . .

RAY: Did they, did your parents . . . ?

BAILEY: Prepare us for the integration? Uh, yes, I can remember my dad standing in the—my dad was custodian at the post office, and then later got into the mail aspect of it. And the post office was one block from the white high school, and undoubtedly there had been adult conversation in the communities as to what was going to happen when the kids go to school together. And my dad said, “I’ll be at work and if anything happens, you just get up and leave and come down to the post office. I don’t want you to get in any, any fights or say anything out of the way to anyone. You just get up out of the classroom. If something, you see something started, you leave and you come to the post office and ask for me and I’ll . . .” My dad had—the post office locker room was in the basement. He said, “You just go to the basement and stay down there, and then I’ll come and get you.” And we, as kids—and by this time I was on the football team and track team and we’d been playing on the same team for two years--we couldn’t figure out what the--what our parents were so worried and concerned about. These are the kids that we’d been on bus trips, and had even at times the white kids had fought the other teams. We went into some communities as an integrated team that we were not--we were treated in a very hostile way. But the white kids on our team had fought with us against other white kids that called us names; so we thought it was kind of amusing and comical that our parents were so worried on this first opening day. And, and you could see the black parents, some, I guess, looking back on it, might not have even--were late to work that day because they walked to the bus stops. In my case, I lived--I found out--inside the bus zone so I had to walk anyway. I was a half a block inside the bus zone. So, but parents walked up the street and went to school with kids that normally at teenage level--we just grabbed you some sandwiches and took off. But they, their parents were, our parents were obviously tense and concerned. There were no incidents.

RAY: Good. That’s interesting. What about the churches? Were there any kind of preparation meetings in the churches or anything for you all getting ready to . . . ?

BAILEY: There was one church, one of the large, black Baptist church--uh, there had been a meeting, I understand, in the basement the Sunday afternoon before the first day of, of school. But we as teenagers were pretty much oblivious to this. Now, we, we knew what racism was, we knew when we went into a department store and how we were treated. There were, there were hotels in our town. There was one black hotel so we knew that only black, black people had to stay in one black hotel. We couldn’t stay in the other hotels and restaurants. We felt racial discrimination from that standpoint. We knew that no--well, uh, my father and one other man were the only two black employees at the post office, as government employees. And schoolteachers were--well, of course, you had a segregated school and they got rid of most of the school, the black schoolteachers when they integrated. I guess that was the piece of it that drew our attention. The elementary school teachers, excuse me, were offered jobs. And I look back, they probably had the best credentials. Uh, some of the high school teachers—‘cause we got some teachers that only would stay one or two years and move on that were not from that area. They were always graduates of Kentucky State. They’d come, that’d be there first teaching job. They would live in the home of some black, usually an elderly female, because there were no apartments available for them to live in. And our principal, who had outstanding credentials both as, previously as a coach, and was principal at that time; he was probably on his latter years of his career, but we resented and felt it was wrong that he was made the Head Custodian of the Maintenance Department.

RAY: The principal?

BAILEY: Our principal was made one of the head maintenance department supervisors. That was the job that they offered him, because it was obvious they weren’t going to make a black man a principal at that time. So the racism was so, it was clearly there but so, but amongst the kids we didn’t, we didn’t feel much of it. We socialized where we wanted to and, again, I probably saw it from a pretty broad perspective as, on the football team, because we played with these kids everyday. We’d get down in the mud and fight and kick and we’d play football and we found out that you got to depend on that white kid and he’s got to depend on you, you get over that.

RAY: So then you all didn’t have any kind of marches or sit-ins or anything during .?

BAILEY: We went, uh--I remember one time we as a bunch of kids--there was a Woolworth’s, uh, what they call . . . a fountain . . .

RAY: Ten-cent store.

BAILEY: Yeah. Ten-cent store had a little restaurant--ten or twelve stools. You could go and buy a hamburger and whatever there. We decided--they had said, you know, that was always segregated. Well a bunch of us decided—we didn’t tell our parents—we decided we’re going to go up there and sit down and order a meal. And we did. Lady was very upset with us doing so but she waited on us. She made it clear she didn’t want us there but she waited on us. So we lost our, our [laughter] sit-in really. It didn’t work.

RAY: It flopped.

BAILEY: It kind of flopped because undoubtedly somebody had told her, “Go ahead and wait on them but don’t let any problem take place.” So our community was one where I think they, as I said, there was some racism, some of it pretty blatant; as I look back on it, but there were never any—we saw tense events. Every now and then there would be a group of white young adults, twenty and above, would get drunk and maybe ride through our neighborhood and blurt out some racial statements, slurs. And, uh, we would, uh—I would see the young black men in our neighborhood the next few nights would, would kind of wait and see if they’d come back. And they usually had their, uh, twenty-two rifles or pistols or whatever, and when somebody would come through our neighborhood maybe and shoot out the streetlight. And I know that some of the young men in the community would wait for them a night or two, and I even think that one time there was, uh—they shot out a streetlight in our neighborhood and some guys were waiting on them and they shot into the car. No one was injured . . .

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BAILEY: . . .uh, we saw, we saw racial discrimination among police officers. I guess my, my first couple of experiences with police officers--uh, were to see police officers pick up black women in the community. Our neighborhood had a couple of local drunks, both male and female. Uh, we saw once as kids pick up a white female that was staggering down the street, picked up and they arrested her. And we, as kids on our bicycles, followed for a few blocks to notice that they didn’t take her to jail. They took her down, uh, to a, behind an abandoned warehouse. We were afraid to get too close but, looking back on it now, we’re pretty sure they probably raped her before they took her to jail. In the sixth grade I was with a group of kids that—we come in contact with some, some white kids that lived in a section of town where there were no blacks. And as I said, blacks lived in four different sections of town, but they lived in the outskirts. We came--encountered with them on a railroad track one afternoon and somebody called--somebody called us a nigger; and it was four or five boys. And we started picking up the big limestone, what we called earth apples, and started--there ended up being a pretty good rock fight. It was one kid in our group whose name was Robert Bady and a lot of people in the community got the Bady family and the Bailey family confused. And we were close friends, and I guess even for a while kind of looked alike; about the same color. Robert was a good baseball player. Robert could throw twice as far as I could. He threw and hit one of the kids right smack in the nose. They were throwing at us; we were throwing at them; and he nailed one of them. He caught them right across the nose, and I guess broke the kid’s nose. Well, someone identified us as, “That was the Bailey boy.” Well the police came to the school--to our school the next day and came to the door of the sixth grade—I guess they’d probably gone to the principal first, I don’t know—but came to our classroom. And the teacher went out and came back and said, “Howard, you need to come out in the hallway.” When I went out into the hallway—I’m sixth grade—great big, robust police officer--name was Shelton--he reached and grabbed me and put his handcuffs on me. I--there I stand in the sixth grade handcuffed, and then he starts questioning me. He has these little, these two white kids with him to identify if I were the one that had thrown the rock. Well, they said, “No I wasn’t the one.” But in the meantime I’m in the hallway of the coatroom, handcuffed in the sixth grade for something I didn’t do. They, they said, “No, he’s not the one.” As it was, Robert Bady was absent that day. They opened the classroom door, and let them stand in the door and look to see if they saw the one that they were looking for that had hit them. I was there throwing, there wasn’t any doubt about that; I just wasn’t good enough to hit anybody. And only because the kids--the white kids said, “No, it’s not him”--that they took the cuffs off of me. And looking back—of course, I was frightened to death—I, I would question whether that police officer would have dealt with a white kid that way. They would have clearly, uh, tried to frighten me and they were successful; but I couldn’t admit doing something that I didn’t do.

RAY: How did your parents take this? Were there any . . . ?

BAILEY: Uh, the teacher told my parents, uh, and told them that I wasn’t a part of it. My dad scolded me for stealth, going around that railroad track and “leave those kids alone.” And that was pretty much the end of it. But I would say that since the teacher and my--went to the same church, I would guess there were conversations in private that I didn’t know about. But there wasn’t anything much anybody could do about it.

RAY: Did you all have a NAACP there in town?

BAILEY: Uh, no, no.

RAY: Were there any black elected office or city officials or anything . . .

BAILEY: Oh, no, no.

RAY: Police or anything like that?

BAILEY: None. None till many, many years afterwards. I think, uh, it was—our community was one that probably wasn’t even black-led by, by ministers much. My dad, by working for the postal service, his colleague there and a few of the school teachers were the only educated black people in town. Even though my dad, as I said, started out as a custodian, uh, with some, with college background. Those were kind of the people that spoke on behalf of our community. My aunt, who was a retired schoolteacher, ( ).

But there were never any people that held any political office. My dad I guess was the first black city commissioner but that was in, in the eighties. There have been some since then. But after he retired from the post office, he was then—you can’t run for political office as a government employee—but after he retired, he ran for office and won. So we were—I grew up members of one of the respected Negro families [chuckle]. And that has its pros and cons in that you are resented sometimes by other blacks, but we were schoolteachers and my aunt was a registered nurse at the hospital. We didn’t have much more than many others, but it took a while for me to realize—I primarily became aware of it from the resentment from some of the other black kids that we were considered of the good Negro families. But that was [chuckle] . . .

RAY: Okay. Did your aunt work at the hospital there in Bell County?

BAILEY: Yes, yes. Uh, she has for many years. In fact, my aunt delivered me. And that was probably due to racism in that when my mother went into labor there was a, a white female that went into labor at the same time. So the one doctor that was on call at the hospital that night went and delivered the white woman’s baby. So my aunt was the registered nurse on duty that night; she delivered me.

RAY: Did your mom work outside the home?

BAILEY: Uh, yes. My mom worked as a domestic, maid, whatever the proper term is for that. Once I reached the—once I went to school; and I went to school at age five and commuted across the—not only--the county line was also the state line when you went west. I went to a one-room school in, I guess that’s, uh, Claiborne County, Tennessee. It was a little mining-camp town called Fork Ridge, and it was one through eight grades. Had electricity but no plumbing; outhouses, uh, no running water; we got water from the well down at the settlement. And that’s where I started school because--there were segregated schools there, but my, my mom and dad socialized with this couple that, they taught in this little mining-camp town just across the state line. And I guess six or eight miles away from town. So we rode—they put me in the car and I rode with the teacher to that little school. And that—because Tennessee didn’t follow your birth certificates, and at age five if you could go to school, if you could keep up, they’d let you go. So that allowed my mother to go to work, to get a job. So she, she cleaned houses until, uh, probably I was in, in high school. And then she got a job as a custodial worker at J.C. Penney’s, and went from there to--after a couple of years, she stopped cleaning and they made her a clerk. So she retired as a sales clerk at Penney’s, but most of her life she was cleaning houses.

RAY: Well good. Did, did you all get any black history classes in your high school there?

BAILEY: Uh, there weren’t black history but our black teachers incorporated black accomplishments, black involvement. Uh, history and science, everything, every subject we had, those teachers that had come from those historical black schools, of course, to get their degrees, they incorporated that. When we, we took the literature book and studied Charles Dickens and several others—he stands out ‘cause I thought he was one of the most boring writers. I know he’s [laughter] one--considered a scholar and some of the greatest works known, but to me he was extremely boring—but when we had that, we would also have Langston Hughes and ( ) and many of those people. That was handed to us, their work was handed to us on mimeograph, or the teacher would stand before us and read from black publications that they owned themselves or a few that were in our library that had been donated over the years. Or you would be given the book and you would read X number of lines; then the book was handed to the kid behind you and it went, that book was carried throughout the classroom. But we got in science the same thing. My grandfather was a Tuskegee graduate and George Washington Carver was his chemistry teacher, so we got a lot of it at home also.

RAY: Okay. That’s great. Well, how do you think that race relations and integration and all is doing in your community now? Do you think it’s changed for the worse or the best or . . . ?

BAILEY: Uh, it’s—I don’t think—I think there’s, things are there in some senses, from a social aspect, are relatively positive. I don’t see professional opportunities for blacks there, but at the same time, because southeast Kentucky has so little to offer. There’s--it’s difficult to imagine that a black educated person would settle there and find that a place they want to live. Would I want—would I accept a job in Middlesboro, Kentucky now? Not short of, of starvation. I couldn’t—I just can’t imagine going back there to live. So, there are no black professionals except for four or five schoolteachers; they’re elementary school teachers. In fact, I drafted a letter, uh, in support of an ex-classmate, black female, that has gotten her degree over the years as a nontraditional student but did not get a degree in education. And there are some in the community that have taken issue with the superintendent and the school board that in the history of Middlesboro High School there has never been a high school black teacher, high school or junior high. There are four, five, six black female teachers in elementary level, but there’s never been one in high school or junior high. And they pressed the superintendent and school board last year to appoint that. The school board requested a, some kind of exception for this female, that she might be able to go—and I think she’s got a background in computers or something of that nature to where she could get a teaching certificate, an emergency or some kind of teaching certificate. But there’s just so—there are no black professionals in the community to press the point, because the kids-- opportunities are there for them. You know, you see a lot of interracial dating and marriages and from a social level, but economically it is, no.

RAY: Who were some of your all’s civil rights leaders, idols during that time?

BAILEY: On a national basis?

RAY: National or . . .

BAILEY: Local?

RAY: . . . which way.

BAILEY: I guess on a local level, uh, my aunt was one, Mary Lee Worthington, my mother’s sister; who, as I said, they’re Melungeons; but that made them different from whites and they, they identify with the black community. She worked in political parties and pressed for change and things of that nature. There was a couple of ministers but I guess my dad; some of the schoolteachers. On a national basis, uh, we, like all others, looked at Martin Luther King. I don’t know that I can remember a national figure before Martin Luther King until I came to college. People like Jesse Jackson and—Jesse, at that time, was still in college himself. I don’t—we looked at, uh, I guess athletes. I was a Cleveland Brown fan. Our--one of our TV stations—we watched professional football every Sunday, and seemed like we could always get a Cleveland Browns game, which meant we got to watch Jim Brown as a big-time athlete. Basketball, there was Bill Russell and, uh, Wilt the Stilt. [laughter-Ray] So Sunday afternoon was to sit in front of the TV and watch black professional sports. That was our outlet, that there was--there were—if you get great skills, that you could get there. Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald. I can remember James Brown, the Supremes and Jackie Wilson and people like that hitting the Ed Sullivan show. That was one of the few shows—that and American Bandstand—you would see black—Temptations were coming along. And people that didn’t have television would all go--adults and children alike would come and fill the living room of those that had a television when we heard that there was going to be a black person on TV.

RAY: Is there anything else you want to say that I haven’t asked you? How was, how was the segregation or integration when you got to college? Did you face any kind of racial tensions . . . ?

BAILEY: Uh, we, we saw some. I guess me coming to college was—while there were college graduates in my family; my sister was at Tennessee State, had already been there two years when I came to Western. I came kind of as a fluke. I’d never seen Bowling Green in my life till the day my parents pulled up and dropped me off at West Hall and then said, “We’re going to Nashville to see your sister before we go back home.” That, that was my college orientation right there, and I came, uh, in a, almost as a dare. There was a black kid on the football team with me that, outstanding athlete, ended up going to UK. We very much regret it because he died up there due to a football accident that we questioned whether it was an accident; but anyway was recruited by Western. He came here and told me about Western. And I had in the previous years seen Clem Haskins and the Dwight, and the Smith boys on TV at an NCAA game; so I knew there were black athletes here. So I came here. I remember going to the Guidance Counselor’s office asking for an admissions application for Western State College. And she looked at me and said, “I don’t know . . .” This was some of that subtle racism you saw. She said, “I don’t know whether you’re really the type material that you need to try to go to a school like that. You might want to consider Kentucky State.” Well, my dad had attended Kentucky State, had a cousin that was at Kentucky State then. Uh, we had tasted integration, we had, we were feeling civil rights. I said, “No, that’s where I want to go. If you can’t get me one, I’ll have to write out for it.” She eventually gave it to me, but she also recommended that I—she said, “If you’re wanting to go to that part of the state, you might ought to look at Western Kentucky Technical School in Paducah.” It was a black technical school, which you’re probably familiar with.

RAY: Yeah, but why ( ).

BAILEY: Because she was still trying to tell me I didn’t belong at a, at a white school. Well, that was just—I was hell-bent that I was going then; even though I’d never laid eyes on it; didn’t know where it was even, but I was going then. But when I got to Western, we saw discrimination here on campus, saw it in the community; uh, because—I came ironically in the first critical mass of black kids that hit Western’s campus. Before then there had been just the athletes and a few kids that lived in boarding houses along State Street; the Frank Moxleys and the Miss Mundays that commuted in here for graduate classes and left. But other than a few of the athletes that lived on campus, there hadn’t been any real mass of kids. We showed up—there were probably seventy-five, eighty freshmen. We outnumbered all the other black students twofold or more when we showed up that year. Like I said, Clem and Dwight and Greg had been seen on TV, so this was thought to be the promised land ‘cause there were no other black athletes being recruited on scholarship in the state of Kentucky.

RAY: Well, when you first came here, did you get to stay on campus or did you have to . . . ?

BAILEY: I did stay on campus, uh, applied late, uh, was first turned down. They didn’t have a room for me, and they sent back—of course at that time you had to put your race on everything. They sent me a listing of Negro boarding houses in Bowling Green, that I might want to contact one of those boarding houses and get a room. Well, my dad then said, “You’re just going to Tennessee State with your sister.” I look back on it and there was no way he was going to be able to pay out-of-state tuition for both of us on a janitor’s job. But that’s what he said. “They don’t want you down there, just go ahead.” And I said, “I don’t want to go down there.” I’d been to Tennessee State. I didn’t, didn’t want to be down there mainly because my sister was there. Uh, didn’t even know Bowling Green was that close to Nashville ‘cause we always went to Nashville by way of Knoxville. But Dad told some, a man in the community that was a fishing buddy with Dero Downing—this man owned a clothing store in town—that I, I wanted to go to Western. And he said, “Well, I know somebody down there.” So he went to see—he called Dero Downing, and I guess Dero got me a room ‘cause I not long after that got a notice that there was a room. I remember my dad made me take a shower one afternoon, clean up and put on clean clothes to go up and thank Mr. Campbell for helping me out. I didn’t want to go do it, but I didn’t have any choice; I knew I had to go do it. When I got here, I found out that what, what was going on was that Western said they only assigned black kids rooms if they had a pair, ‘cause they want to make sure that they put you in a room together. And I must have been the odd-man-out so they allowed my application to lay dormant until another black kid applied. So I probably would eventually have gotten a room but they weren’t going to give, weren’t going to assign me until they knew that they had another black kid coming ‘cause they weren’t going to have any odd, odd black kids. So, uh, they roomed us in certain sections of the halls, and they scattered us so that there wouldn’t be too many of us in any one building. It took us a while to figure that out. But as you got to know other black kids, you would notice that Beamus Lawrence, all the black kids were in the fifteen room: 215, 315, 415, 515; all of them were in the fifteen room. That meant that the staff knew where the black kids were all the time, and there were never too many of us together. I was in West Hall and in West Hall everyone was in, uh, 101 and 103, all the way up. And like I said, it didn’t take too long for us to realize all of us were lined up so if there was a problem—and I later had a hall director tell me that, “We did that, we were told to do it; if there was a problem, we could get to you all, we knew where all the black kids were. You didn’t have to go to a roster; you knew where they were supposed to be.

RAY: My goodness.

BAILEY: But we found it in the classroom. There are, there are people still teaching here that I had as instructors that were, uh, racially negative toward me. I can remember, uh, being, uh, being a moment or two--the bell was ringing as I was stepping into the classroom one day, and the instructor said, or professor--renown professor now--uh, said, “Well class, I guess we can start now that our black member is here.” Uh, to emphasize that I was late. You got comments like that from time to time. There were people that were very nice to us, but there were people that made it clear that they tolerated us. I can, I can remember studying for an exam with a black friend, I mean a white friend; and, uh, we got a hold of the test so actually we cheated. And I know we had the same answers ‘cause we, we worked at it together. He got an A; I got a D. And we could never—I could never challenge that teacher that I, my answers were right because we had done something we weren’t supposed to do. But I knew that it was racism that caused that to happen cause the white kid got credit for all the right answers and I didn’t. I know we both, we both went in there with the same cheat-sheet; we all had the same answers. So I knew it was going on.

RAY: Well, thank you for your time and thank you for letting me interview you.

BAILEY: Sure. I enjoyed it, as always.

RAY: Good, good. Thank you. [interruption]

BAILEY: Uh, we saw—Middlesboro was a little different in that we did have the interaction among the races; but when—as athletes, when we went out into other communities--we had the first integrated team in that part of the state. We went into places like Corbin, which is still the heart-bed of racism in the state of Kentucky, uh, still no . . .

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

BAILEY: . . . when we went into Corbin, we found out it was the first time that Middlesboro had beat Corbin in, in a decade. That’s when the Erd boys that went on to UK, and I think one of them went into the pros, were there. And we had to--we went--we dressed many times in the school gymnasium, and they carried our clothes and our duffel bags back and put them in a truck so that when the game was over, we literally ran, black and white, to the bus and got on the bus and would leave immediately. We never got to—or few, few times that we were in a town that we could stop and eat a meal. We—I can remember leaving places like Corbin and Lincamp and, uh, some of the parts of that area where ( ) uniforms and ( ) would take—no one takes your helmet off. We rode the bus in our uniforms, helmet included; because the adults would throw rocks at the school bus . . .

RAY: Adults?

BAILEY: Yeah. Would throw rocks at the school bus and break the windows out, and we had fights on the field. And I guess that was another reason that we had a relationship with our fellow white classmates. ‘Cause I can remember some of them—one of these kids, two Medley brothers from Notown--and that was a part of town black people didn’t go in in Middlesboro--who fought side by side with me when white kids from Corbin on the football field would call us niggers. And we’d end up in a brawl sometimes with some of them, some of those communities; and it was funny that one of the Medley boys would say, “You don’t call my black friend that,” and would tear into folks. Sometimes they would fight before we would, so we, we developed a camaraderie. But in some of the communities we went into—we went to Lincamp as a junior varsity team and the constables and the local sheriff stopped the game shortly after halftime, after the third quarter started. When we would go into a huddle to call the play, people in the stands and on the sidelines would throw rocks at us.

RAY: These are the adults?

BAILEY: These are the adults that went to the ballgames. We had an integrated team and we were good. We went to the--( ) Bowling Green High—we went to the state, I think three out of the four years that I played. And, uh, but we went into towns where we had to leave on the bus and--that went all the way to Fort Thomas Highlands, up, just below Cincinnati; because there were still very few black people in that part of the state. We beat them on their field in a game one night, and the people came out on the field and mobbed us; and it took the police to get us to our bus. And when we got to our bus, there were very few windows that had not been broken out. And we, we—I can never remember when we went to a white school that didn’t have black kids that we ever got to change clothes. We always rode back, no matter how far, if it was a hundred miles away--we still rode back in our uniform with our helmet on. ‘Cause we would go through, down the highway, and there was a, a, there was a mountainous area on 25E called Booger Mountain--and that’s where the adults would go up on the ledge, on the hillside. The bus would be in those low gears having to go up that mountain so the bus would be going relatively slow when it went through there. We would see when we would leave the parking lot adults get in their cars and take off and speed up the mountain. They’d get up there and wait for the bus that would be struggling gear-wise going through those hills and throw at us. They’d break the windows out and we’d sit with our helmets on. The bus would get egged and we’d get—we, we were treated very hostile as young kids when we went outside the community. So when we got home, our white kids knew what prejudice was; they experienced it there with us.

RAY: My goodness.

BAILEY: I just thought you might want to share that.

RAY: That’s good. Thank you again then for this interview.

BAILEY: Sure.

END OF INTERVIEW