Oral History Interview with Anne Beard Grundy, February 17, 1999

BRINSON: I am with Ann Beard Grundy, the interview is taking place at her residence on Cambridge Drive, on February 17.. It is an unrehearsed interview and the interviewer is Betsy Brinson.

BETSY BRINSON:: Ann, when we finished our session last week, we were talking about the establishment of the Black Student Union at Berea in your second year, I believe. Uh, as I recall, there were about forty students who participated in that?

ANN BEARD GRUNDY: The black student enrollment, and that included, uh, students from the continent, was roughly about forty, forty-fifty students about that time.

BRINSON: How many would you say were international students?

GRUNDY: I would say at least ten.

BRINSON: Okay. Can you talk about the program of the BSU?

GRUNDY: Well . . .

BRINSON: Why did you come together, and what did you hope to accomplish?

GRUNDY: Um, I think we all had a sense of change; you know, change was pretty much in the air. And we were aware enough to know what was going on, on other campuses. Of course, the civil rights struggle in its larger form was going on; and I think most of us were of that generation of students, uh--for example, I know I was the only African student in my class, among the student body at Berea at that point, whose parents had gone beyond high school. Most of my friends’ parents, grade school, uh, maybe high school. My parents had gone on to college. So, in a sense, I was the–you know, the nickname for me was “Bourgie.” My name was Bourgie Beard, you know, that somehow I was considered bourgeois because my parents were able to pull this off. As an aside, among my classmates whose parents barely went beyond grade school and high school, they surpassed me in terms of their academic and professional careers. I mean, the motivation was just clearly there just to move on and upwards. There’s a whole thing, for example, about African students from eastern Kentucky, the numbers of them who just go on into the professional world, getting their masters or getting their doctors. I mean, it’s really a profound story. I think Bill Turner, who graduated from UK, has tried to tell that story. So I was in school with a lot of Bill Turner’s peers and his neighbors and so on and so forth. Uh, all of that to say that I think we all felt a great gratitude that we were able to get to college; and right beneath the surface was an understanding that service was at the heart of this, that we were supposed to do something. We were supposed to change something. Of course, when you’re seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, the essence of that, what that means in terms of putting one foot in front of the other, you know, can be quite baffling. And, remember, we did not have black faculty and staff; so we didn’t have that guidance. And in the context of the town of Berea, there were just a few black families. They had no clue, I mean, you know, they were just living from day to day so a lot of the burden, all of the burden, fell on us, mistakes and all, in terms of what we ended up doing. But, at the heart of it, was a sense of we wanted to have an organization that met our needs as African people, cultural needs, you know, not particularly social, but cultural needs. That was the first part. The second part was we wanted to change Berea College. We were very clear about that. And Berea had sent out this, uh, a mixed message. You know, Berea’s motto is: “God hath made of one blood all nations of men.” Now, having grown up in the Christian church, I clearly knew what that meant in terms of how the church interpreted that ;but when you take that statement and you put it in its broader human context, it became things that Berea didn’t want to talk about, you know. The fact that it had a lily-white faculty, the fact that it had denied its own African heritage and roots, you know, and so on and so forth. So we actually had, for want of a better term, legitimate grounds to struggle with Berea.

BRINSON: How did you go about trying to affect changes at Berea?

GRUNDY: Ah, I’m trying to remember . . .

BRINSON: This would have been about 1966?

GRUNDY: Uh hmm. That’s about right. We tried to raise consciousness to begin with. As I say, we were, what, eighteen years old? What do we know? We tried to raise consciousness. I can remember, and I still have clippings, that out of nowhere King was doing the Selma to Montgomery march; and we decided that we wanted to participate in that. We couldn’t do the whole march, which would have taken several days, you know, to walk that fifty, sixty, seventy miles from Selma to Montgomery; but we did manage to get the school–I’m not sure if Berea formally, because we kind of had them on a guilt trip in a sense, but that wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted Berea to do right, to say, “If you believe this and you are this wealthy school with all of this money that has come . . .” Well, Berea is--may I say this?--the wealthiest school in America. Its endowment is greater than that of Harvard, Yale, all of those schools. That money didn’t come to Berea accidentally; it came because of what Berea says it represents to the world. Uh, so we were able to get a chartered bus, and I remember we had this big rally at Union Church or somewhere around there. Mostly African students but a few what you would call white liberals at that point and a handful of professors who, uh, willingly got on board in terms of, ‘We’re taking our stand.’ And this, in the context of Berea, this was a big deal because it was not something the school saw itself as supporting. In other words, we were forcing it step by step. A number of the professors, I believe, had started to think about things on their own. I’m sure that their peers, their neighbors, their friends in other parts of the country were saying, Look, this is really important, you know, White people have really got to get on board with this. So we had this kind of quiet support from a handful of faculty members.

BRINSON: Do you remember any of those faculty specifically?

GRUNDY: Yes. I mentioned before Jim Holloway, Dr. Jim Holloway, who was a most, is –he’s still alive–a most fascinating person to me. Jim Holloway was from Birmingham and, uh, Mercer University and Yale School of Divinity. And, uh, he’s the one who formed the magazine, Catalogsite. Good friends of Will Campbell, that generation of white Southern men. And because of Jim Holloway, I met a lot of these men, these movers and shakers of the time. Because of Jim Holloway, I met Fannie Lou Hamer, uh, who was towards the end of her years, you know, ailing. She was suffering from her injuries, from her beatings at the Eastland Plantation. And she came to Berea to speak and, because we were like the BSU and very involved in what was going on, Dr. Holloway recognized that; so we were very involved in the kinds of things that he was doing. But Jim Holloway was, as the kids would say, very “hooked up.” And the thing that fascinated me about Dr. Holloway more than anything else was that here was a Southern white male out of Birmingham--my home town, so I knew the turf--had attended Woodlawn High School, the bastion of white supremacy; of course, in 1999 Woodlawn is a, almost all-black school. I have a lot of friends’ children who attend there. Uh, but Jim Holloway’s father was not only a Klansman, sympathizer, but he, from time to time, would wear the robe of the Klan. I mean, Jim Holloway would talk about this sometimes. And the thing that fascinated me about Dr. Holloway was that, unlike many white liberals, especially from other parts of the country, his experiences were real and they were grounded. I’ve always taken the position, by the way, that Southern white people, if they just step up to the plate, have so much more to offer than white people in other parts of the country. And it has to do with the nature of the culture and the interaction of African people with white people. There is a kind of intimacy that does not exist in New York and New Hampshire. There are no black people in New Hampshire, my daughter says. [laughing] Uh, so Jim Holloway fascinated me that he could come out of that experience . . .

BRINSON: Is he still on the faculty at all or . . .

GRUNDY: No, he’s retired. I do believe Dr. Holloway is living in Oxford, Mississippi right now. That’s how he can be reached, through the University of Mississippi at Oxford or, a lot of times, people–the last time I wrote him–I’m embarrassed; I haven’t written him in quite a while–write him in care of Berea College; and I think they forward his mail.

BRINSON: I also happened to meet a gentleman who, I believe was a minister in the campus ministry–and I’m blocking his name–but he’s now running one of the gift shops.

GRUNDY: ( ) stores. Oh, I’m looking right at him, uh hmm.

BRINSON: Do you remember . . .?

GRUNDY: Oh, yeah! In fact, I was his student assistant. See, you caught me on a blank. Just take me a minute. [laughing] He and his wife run the gift store.

BRINSON: Right. I can’t think of it either, but, uh . . .

GRUNDY: I’ll think of it in just a second.

BRINSON: I met him and I met a gentleman who also had been at Berea who came into the gift shop one day; and we had this conversation there with all the customers walking around. He later went with the Appalachian Regional Commission.

GRUNDY: Loyal Jones?

BRINSON: Yes. Right.

GRUNDY: Yeah.

BRINSON: Were they . . .?

GRUNDY: They were definitely involved. Uh, the campus minister, and I will think--I don’t know why I’m forgetting his name. I’m looking right at him. But, yes, but there again, you know, we were kind of hammering at the door. Another thing that was happening parallel to all of this was that, you know, Berea had required chapel--I think it still does--and I was in the chapel choir; I was a piano major so I was participating in ensemble. So even if I wanted to skip chapel Sunday night, I didn’t because I had to perform. And, uh, there were a number of speakers who were coming to campus; and quite often when a speaker would come, he or she would come on a, for a Sunday afternoon chapel, but they might be there all day. Now, remember, we’re talking about a small, relatively speaking, intimate student body so someone on campus, we would know about it. So I can remember, for example, William Sloane Coffin who came from Yale. Well, that was a real big deal, and what Berea would typically do was to make the speaker available to students, uh, on that Sunday. They could stay over till Monday and do some classes; and quite often they would be Jim Holloway’s classes that they would do. Uh, but after chapel there would be a lot of discussion, questions and answers, so we’re talking about an environment where consciousness was being forced to be raised. Of course, we, as African students--if you could say the general white student body was at this point, we were at this point, because we saw our needs as more intense, you know. I’m trying to think–Jim Holloway, um, psychology teacher, Dr. White, John White was very supportive and his wife, Glenda. Uh, Robert Lewis, who taught music, taught piano, lived next door to Jim Holloway; they were very good friends and, uh, he was quite supportive. Interestingly enough, Dr. Weatherford’s wife, Ann Weatherford, who was from north Alabama round Decatur. In a sense, a whole lot like Jim Holloway, a Southern white woman, you know, the genteel class and all that, but very grounded in her understanding of race. Ann Weatherford--I don’t believe a lot of things would have happened had Ann Weatherford not been married to Dr. Weatherford because he was not inclined, I mean, he was resistant . . .

BRINSON: And he was the president?

GRUNDY: He was the president. I was on the student committee that selected the new president for Berea after Dr. Hutchins left. Someone told me, and I didn’t realize this, I was the only person–there were faculty reps and some staff reps–I was the only person that voted against him. I just [laughing] I didn’t sense that he had this fire in him to move mountains. But his wife did. She was very interesting. Liked her a lot, very accessible. You know, that kind of thing. Uh huh.

BRINSON: Talk about the bus trip to Alabama.

GRUNDY: Very interesting. Buses typically seat fifty. I don’t know what brand of bus, I don’t know – it was a privately chartered bus – met us at Union Church. It was a big to-do in terms of a send-off. I mean, we’d had this service inside the church, those who couldn’t go, came out to rally for our support. Those who didn’t give two damns about what we were doing, you know – I’m sure they were having their little Klan parties in their dorm, is what we later on found out, you know. Uh, but there was a big send-off. The president, lot of faculty and staff, lot of students, uh, were all there. The newspaper at Berea is called The Pinnacle; I believe The Pinnacle, in fact I know The Pinnacle sent a staff member or two. Jim Abrams I believe was a student worker then. His labor, you know everybody at Berea works, and his labor was on the newspaper. I believe he went and covered the march on behalf of the newspaper, but it was a big send-off; and we left early evening. I’m thinking about seven o’clock and as I, as we went down the road–this was before seventy-five opened, of course–I remember thinking, Oh, my God, we’re going almost the exact track of the Freedom Rides. We went right through Gadsden, Alabama, and I remember Gadsden in particular because we had a student with us, uh, who was from Gadsden, Bob Johnson. And Bob had called his mother, a school teacher there, Mrs. Vaughn, and she was so gracious and--of course, we couldn’t be stopping in Alabama, this busload full of black and white folks--to do anything. So I remember that we stopped at Bob’s home and she fed us. I mean, she fed fifty-sixty people. There was a car that trailed us, I believe, also. And, uh, we all kind of freshened up and all that stuff to get ready for the last leg of the drive which was from Gadsden in to Montgomery itself. In the meantime, I did something–I’m a parent now, mother of two children–I say, Oh . . . My mother used to say when I was little--old people would say, when you would do something you wouldn’t understand, they’d say, “Just live long enough.” I’ve lived long enough; and I’m saying to myself, You, how could you do this to your mother? When we got to Birmingham, it was about two or three o’clock in the morning. Now you have to remember, my mother had been widowed, had been forced to leave the home to, you know, try to figure out how to take care of all these children and keep us in school and stuff like that; and I have the nerve to get into Birmingham, three o’clock in the morning, call my mother from the Birmingham, you know, Greyhound Bus Station and say, “Hi, Mom!” “Hi, Ann, where are you?” “Bus station.” “Where?” “Bus”--now remember, you know, what’s going on in the world--and I inform my mother that not only am I at the Birmingham bus station, but I’m there with a bunch of white folks; and I’m on my way [laughing] to Montgomery. [laughter] You know, later on, when my mother was very ill and we figured out that she had congenital heart failure, Dr. Cane told my mother, after examining her the first time, he said, “You, you’ve had a heart attack somewhere along the way.” I do believe [laughing] that I’m the one who–you know, just scarring, scar tissue. I think I did that. Wasn’t that awful? [laughter] But, there again, that’s the spirit of being eighteen, nineteen years old, you know. Of just seeing the world as yours and you’re going to change this. So we went on to Montgomery . . .

BRINSON: Once your mother got over the shock of your being there, how did she feel about that?

GRUNDY: My mother never had a problem with, with the principles of the movement. Her heart was in it, I mean, without question. Her money was in it. One of the things I remember, by the way, about my mother and father--remember, my father pastored Sixteenth Street church, which was the movement church in the state of Alabama; and so anything and everything that was going to happen in terms of the struggle had something to do with that church. In hindsight, that is probably the most important thing that ever happened in my whole life, that my parents made that decision to go to Birmingham. But I can remember Earl Lee with the Montgomery bus boycott; and King was, of course, a young man on the horizon, a virtual unknown, but a young man, you know, having returned from Boston to Montgomery to pastor. My father was considered maybe an elder at that point. You know, King was twenty-something; my father was fifty-something so we’re talking about a father-son kind of relationship. And my father knew his father in Atlanta. But, uh, I can remember that one of the things that my mother and father would do was that they would raise money in Birmingham. My mother would get on the phone and my daddy would like, especially in church, raise special offerings for the Montgomery bus boycott. And my brother Ison, who is two or three years older than I am, tells the story, especially in the summer when we were out of school, of getting in the car with daddy early Monday morning and driving to Montgomery, which at that time without the interstate was an hour and fifteen minutes away, going to Dr. King’s house and giving him the money, you know, to do, you know, they needed money for everything, you know. And then Ison tells the story of daddy hanging around and doing his share in terms of, you know, helping people. You know, there were certain stops you would go to give people rides. So I knew that my mother and father were–their spirits were in the middle of it; but, being parents, you can imagine what they were thinking about. And they already had a sense, I believe, by this time that they had children who were going to be in the thick of things. I mean, it’s just like, “Well, what do you think, Mama?” You know, kind of raised us this way. But, of course, looking back on it, I would do things a little differently. I wouldn’t tell her everything [laughing], just leave her to wonder what I’m doing, you know? But, at any rate, my mother was in total shock; and knowing my mother, I’m sure she fell to her knees and prayed all night long [laughing] that I would get through this, this whole thing.

BRINSON: So then you continued on . . .

GRUNDY: Went on to Montgomery and I remember meeting all of these people–there’s a little, is it a Jesuit school? I used to remember that there’s a little Catholic boarding school right on the outskirts of Montgomery, and that seemed to be the meeting place. Everybody kind of knew this is where things were going to happen. All the buses were parked there, and we organized with thousands of people; and we walked from that point all the way to the state capitol which, of course, is, you know--I forget the name of the street cause, uh, Dexter Avenue. I guess it’s Dexter Avenue; Dexter Avenue runs along the side. I’m not quite sure. But, at any rate, we walked from that school to the state capitol.

BRINSON: And what happened there?

GRUNDY: Lots of speeches, lots of singing. Lots of--to me, it was like a homecoming in the real sense I saw people from Birmingham; I saw classmates from Alabama State, which is only a mile away. And then, of course, you saw a lot of the real big people in the movement. You know, there was Jesse, there’s Abernathy, there, you know, Andrew Young. All these people were there. The thing that kind of stuck out visually, of course, were all of the, uh, uh, the white nuns and priests in their, you know, in their religious garb. That was a very visual picture. I just remember going all day long and just being on a high. It was definitely one of my great highs. Yeah.

BRINSON: And then did you get on the buses to return home after the rally?

GRUNDY: Uh, we walked back to the boarding school, and I think we got out of Dodge as fast as we could. [laughing] We turned around and drove right back. We were back in time for classes on Monday, as I remember, something like that.

BRINSON: What was the mood of people on the bus coming back to Berea?

GRUNDY: It was a very [interruption]. Uh, I remember going down, even with our youth--and remember I’m going to turf I know so it’s not like I have to imagine, and we knew about the Freedom Riders and so on and so forth--there was a certain kind of tenseness on the bus. But it was almost overshadowed by just the very glee of the whole idea of forcing the school to do this, that people who were sitting on the fence more or less had to make a decision about which side or the other. That was a big song of the struggle, by the way: “Which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on?” And that was almost our rallying song to Berea College. [singing] “Which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on?” We were just chanting: “Which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on?” And I could just see Weatherford’s face just getting red and sick and tired of us. But that’s what we said. If you said you’ll do these things, let’s do these things. So the bus had a certain kind of fear locked into it, but we were just ecstatic that we had pulled off what was for us a minor miracle, I’m sure.

BRINSON: When you got back to campus, did the–talk about the agenda of the BSU at that point after the rally. Was it changed any? Was it, uh, did the, uh, did the program increase any in terms of what you wanted to accomplish?

GRUNDY: I think we had certain things that we pushed for. We immediately pushed for– now, remember, we are young people without adult guidance; we knew right away we needed to have black faculty and staff. And they could not be milky-toasty, that these needed to be people who are grounded in who they are. So we began an immediate drive. Of course, all white schools say the same thing, “We can’t find anybody; we don’t know anybody.” We said, “Well, get some incompetent ones like you got the white ones; let’s have some equal opportunity here.” Uh, so we immediately started that drive, and that’s one way I think that some of the white faculty members began to find their niche in terms of the struggle. They began to work their networks, their old alma maters, you know, in terms of, you know, who’s graduating in history from you? Who do you have in math or English or so on and so forth? There’s some positions here. So we slowly–by the way, Berea still has not done a good job with that at all. None of these schools has; UK is losing ground. A few years ago when Hemingway was chancellor, uh, black faculty numbers were way up. When Hemingway left, there went the commitment.

BRINSON: That’s at the University of Kentucky?

GRUNDY: At the University of Kentucky and step by little by little these black faculty members just said, We’re not taking it. Because they found themselves without the leadership that offers some semblance of protection, and especially the School of Education; that’s a whole story that needs to be told unto itself. All of that to say that we pushed for black faculty. We certainly pushed for the black student enrollment to return to its original greatness. At one point, I think history documents that Berea was, uh, majority black. We said, you know, a school that is founded for Freedmen, that at one time was a majority black, has a greater commitment, you know, to the education of Africans in this country and worldwide than just some little old state university or something like that. So, now we have seen changes in that number. Uh, I think, relatively speaking, percentage-wise Berea probably has the largest black enrollment of any other school in this state; but it’s still not enough when you consider, you know, why this school came into being. It makes no sense at all. [interruption] Don Graham was the campus minister.

BRINSON: Uh huh and his wife Nancy . . .

GRUNDY: Nancy Graham. She’s the one who runs the shop in Berea. That’s who you probably saw.

BRINSON: Okay. Uh, talk about Fannie Lou Hamer coming to the Berea campus.

GRUNDY: Oh, I tell you. It’s because of Fannie Lou Hamer that as soon as I was able to have a little bit of money in my pocket, I bought a pocket camera. I realized that I missed so many little opportunities. You know, when you look at these documentaries, you say, Praise God to those people who had a little black and white camera on them. That’s all we had in those days. Where would we have these pictures of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance and stuff like that? But Fannie Lou Hamer came to lecture in Jim Holloway’s class. Remember, he taught philosophy and religion; and he saw all of this as religion, you know. The social struggle to him was religion, which is one reason he commanded such respect among African students. But Fannie Lou Hamer came--I don’t think she spoke on campus, I mean, officially. She was not a convo. I think she came specifically to just lecture Jim Holloway’s classes for several days, and I remember saying to Dr. Holloway--I remember offering myself as something of a student hostess or something, and I remember that she stayed in [interruption]. We were talking about what?

BRINSON: Buying the camera so you could take photos.

GRUNDY: I wish now that I had a camera because there were so many opportunities to take these informal pictures of a woman who, even then, I knew was a mover and shaker. And the, one of the things that impressed me so much about that time period was the utmost respect with which Dr. Holloway and some of the other faculty members treated this woman. I knew that quote “she was just a sharecropper out of Sunflower County, Mississippi” and that whole story. But you would have thought that this woman was the visiting professor, that she had a chaired position at Berea in terms of how she was received and accepted into homes and so on and so forth. Uh, I now know–I believe in hindsight that one of the things Dr. Holloway was doing was raising money for medical care for Mrs. Hamer. But, at any rate, I kind of offered myself, uh, as more or less of a student servant; and during some of that time period when Mrs. Hamer was on campus, she stayed in my room. I had a single room; I’d figured that one out: don’t have a roommate, live by yourself [laughing]. And I gave her my room in my dorm which--I wish I’d saved the mattress [laughing] to this day; and I stayed with a friend down the hall, Peggy Slone. And she ate in the dining room with us, you know; it was just that intimate. Can you imagine? You know, it’s almost as if we were casting pearls before swine. Did we really know in whose presence we were at that moment? But, yeah . . .

BRINSON: Who financed her trip?

GRUNDY: Dr. Holloway himself. That’s what I mean. It’s not something he went around announcing to the world, but we knew that he did it. Or he used the magazine, Catalogsite, to do whatever he needed to have done. Yeah.

BRINSON: Did the BSU have a budget that the school gave them?

GRUNDY: No, we were in spite of–you remember, Berea–I, I, I think I told the story of we put up a sign, you know: All black students please meet in Berea. The dean ripped that down, Ann Marshall, and so then we put up this other sign: All of you who use Peach and Glo or Royal Crown Hair Grease and so on and so forth. We were an embarrassment to Berea, which was wonderful. When you’re eighteen, that’s exactly what you want to do [laughing], you know. So, no, we were not getting official school support at all. We–all of us–everybody at Berea worked, so we had a few dollars between us; but we had little contributions from different faculty, you know, very quietly along the way.

BRINSON: Okay. I understand there was also a local sit-in, uh, at the lunch counter.

GRUNDY: Down–yes, that had happened–I believe some of that had started before I got to Berea. There was a theater there and a lunch counter. So I went to Berea in ’64. I do believe that already some students had started doing that. I can tell you who those students were. There was a woman named Carolyn Ivers–some of them out of Birmingham, which is how I know this. Henry Thompson. I’m sure it was Henry Thompson because Henry Thompson was a year or two ahead of me at Berea. Henry Thompson was well known in Birmingham because he had tried to integrate the Alabama theater, which is the big white theater downtown Birmingham. And Henry had had his head almost beaten in behind that, but Henry was at Berea before I got there. I didn’t know him because he . . .

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE

BEGIN SIDE TWO TAPE ONE

GRUNDY: . . . a real student activist who tried to integrate, uh, the, uh, Alabama theater downtown along with a couple of other students. I don’t know how he knew about Berea, but that’s where he ended up. Henry did not end up graduating from Berea. He got involved with VISTA Volunteers and Students for Appalachian and all this stuff, which is another organization that we were very involved in. He ended up going to some school in Maine or Vermont, I’m not quite sure, then going to law school. But now he’s back in Birmingham practicing law and fairly active, I understand. My brother sees him now and then.

BRINSON: Okay. So you finished in 196 . . .?

GRUNDY: Sixty-eight. June of ‘ 68.

BRINSON: Graduated with a Degree in Music?

GRUNDY: Piano.

BRINSON: Piano. And then what happened to you?

GRUNDY: Uh, I left Berea—you know, piano degree is one of those degrees, you know. [laughing]

BRINSON: Like history.

GRUNDY: That’s right. You can’t build houses with it; you can’t unstop toilets. By the way, one of the things—you know everybody has a student advisor? My advisor was John Chrisman, who was also my piano instructor; and he’s a very particular man. And I remember going to him and saying, “I really want to take auto mechanics.” [laughing] I mean, I knew even then the value of being able to do something with one’s hands. I remember black schools came out of that tradition, and my mother, in particular, that whole notion of: Don’t let the left hand know, don’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Meaning that, a competent person moves with the intellect but can do something, too. So my mother, I think I told you, comes of this tradition of: Yes, I’m a mathematician and stuff, but I can, can; I can smock a dress; I can do this. And my father, you know, being an old farm boy, could pull that stuff off. So I wanted to take auto mechanics which just drove him up a wall. I never did get auto mechanics because he didn’t sign off for it, but I graduated with a degree in piano--not having a clue as to what that meant I should do. The one thing I did know was that I could not go home and tell my mother I didn’t know what to do. You know, sometimes there are, there are forces that drive you that you can’t quite identify; but I knew that after all that I had been through with the whole experience in upstate New York, I could not suddenly go home expecting my mother to do anything for me more or to say, “I don’t know what to do after all of these years.” Which is a real issue of western education that doesn’t, you know, doesn’t really prepare us for anything. You know what I’m saying? Let me say this, too, about my experience in piano: I was a torn woman all those four years in undergrad. By that, I mean can you imagine the dilemma of, uh, of the world literally burning and blowing up around—we are talking about Watts, Detroit, King’s death, Malcolm’s death, all of these things going on. And I’m a child of the sixties, you know, growing up in this environment in Birmingham. You know, I’m really into it and yet I have to, because this is my spirit talking to me, I’ve got to go practice. It’s just like, you know, so, it’s just like . . . it was like, how do you say, uh, some kind of a Shakespearean kind of play. Here’s the stage out here; but you got to go over in this hole, and you’ve got to give it two, three, four hours a day. And I know, looking back on it, that I spent hours in, in, in the practice room; but I’m sure I was not a very effective student because my mind wasn’t in it. My heart was. The music gave me solace, you know; it grounded me. But I’m telling you, I wanted to be out organizing something. So it was always—it was kind of a little joke on campus, Okay, Ann, who are you? Are you going to be the rabble-rouser with the BSU or are you going to be this piano . . . so what have you? So it was not a very easy time in my life.

BRINSON: How did you feel about all of the freedom songs? Did you ever practice any of those?

GRUNDY: You know, the thing about . . .

BRINSON: I’m sure they were important to you, but . . .

GRUNDY: Oh, yeah. That was another thing in terms of where we waged our personal struggles. Since I was a music major, I immediately, you know, in terms of my student activism, just jumped all over the music department in terms of--of all the things in America, that even with racism just spewing out of your, you know, your veins, of all the things that happened in America that we can identify as African, music is at the top of the list. And yet the music department did not in any way reflect—and I won’t even say contributions, I would say white contributions—African music is the source of the music. It had impacted on everything, you know. And so one of the things I remember, um, doing right away was trying in class—our classes were very small; three, four, five kids, you know, five music majors and stuff like that—was trying to interject some of these experiences, my musical experiences growing up in Birmingham. My teachers had not a clue. They had come out of—I’m trying to remember where—you know, IU. I’m trying to think what the big music schools . . .

BRINSON: IU is . . .?

GRUNDY: Indiana University. Big, big in music. Maybe little bit of, uh, the New England Conservatory, things like that. They didn’t know. There again, these were white northerners who had not a clue in terms of what you would call common music. That was also, by the way, the time in my life when I really became serious--and I still consider myself a student of spirituals--that I’ve spent a lifetime since then trying to familiarize myself with this body of music that we know as spirituals. Berea, you know, every now and then the chapel choir might sing a spiritual or something, you know, but it was . . . But I think this music is worthy of complete study so, uh, I’m trying to answer your question. Uh, the songs that we know of as movement songs, the essence of them was spirituals. I was quite familiar with spirituals growing up in Birmingham. One of the reasons is that Alabama has so many black colleges and black colleges have become, or historically became, how do you say, uh, they began to, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for—they became the repository of spirituals. Meaning that, a choir—you know gospel music is real big now; gospel music, of course, has stepped outside. It comes out of spirituals. But at the time I grew up, there was nothing greater than to have Hampton or Tuskegee or Talladega--these were the big choirs on the map--to come through the city on their spring tours. And the body of their music would be what we would call arranged spirituals as opposed to informal spirituals. So the movement just took those songs. They were precisely the same songs, which is one of the great beauties of spirituals, that they’re so flexible. They are so remarkable. You change a word here, there. There’s a spiritual that says [singing]: “Oh, Mary. Oh Martha. Oh, Mary, ring them bells. I hear rock angels a rocking Jerusalem. I hear rock angels a ringing them bells.” Well, in the spirituals, in the context of the movement, you simply change the words, uh, to: “Oh, Bull Conner. Oh, Jim Plower. Oh, Bull Conner, ring them bells.” You’re sounding out to him; and in the struggle, of course, people stood outside the city hall in Birmingham and yelled this stuff at Bull Conner. Bull Conner, as tight-assed as he may have imagined himself to be, you can’t tell me that when you just kind of keep this stuff going that it doesn’t finally and ultimately get to you. So the music to me was, was, how do you say, it was a part of my nature; my parents loved music, and I was angry because Berea did not recognize it. And here I was graduating with a degree in piano, and I had not learned formally anything about my own music. I was pissed. Yeah.

BRINSON: Talking about the music makes me think of, of--I believe her name was Zelfia Horton . . .

GRUNDY: Uh huh.

BRINSON: Miles Horton and Highland Center.

GRUNDY: Highland Center, uh huh.

BRINSON: And I wonder if you ever had any interaction with Highlander?

GRUNDY: There was—Mike Clark, who was editor of The Pinnacle, that was his student job, left--when he graduated from Berea a year ahead of me went to work at the Highlander Center. Now, I believe that part of that for a tall white boy out of eastern Kentucky, wherever Mike Clark was from, that whole struggle—he went with us to Montgomery. I believe that was the, the fire in Mike’s life because he literally graduated from Berea and went to the Highlander Center. You know, I mean, can you think—that’s really quite a remarkable thing. I’ve seen, uh, Mike on TV lately. He’s in Wyoming or something doing pretty much the same kinds of things. But, yes, I didn’t know her. I, of course, knew who Miles Horton was and, somewhere along the line I think I met him or talked with him, but it’s not real big in my mind. I also had—my best friend, Gwendolyn Hale, who married one of the VISTA workers, Steve Daugherty--this was the first interracial marriage that I had been involved in—and they lived and worked at the Highlander Center for a while. So in my letters back and forth with Gwen, she would tell me about what Miles said or this, you know, that kind of thing. Uh huh.

BRINSON: Okay. So back to 1968 and your graduation from Berea. What happened then?

GRUNDY: Uh, didn’t quite know what to do. Um, there again struggling with, ‘Do I want to stay in the music world? Do I want to devote all the time’—you know, by definition, you know it’s going to take the rest of your life. You don’t just do music; music consumes you. And I was struggling with, had been struggling with a while, with whether or not I was quote “cut out for music.” I’m still in this dilemma, by the way. [laughing] So I ended up, um, partially I think because of the influence of Dr. Holloway’s classes, I went to work for a YWCA in Asheville, North Carolina. That was very interesting; I was fired within seven months. [laughing] It was like baptismal by fire. It’s just like, ‘Who do you think you are? Miss Young Thing Out of College going to come here and, uh’—but, there, there again, this was a Y that had only recently made its executive director this black woman. If you understand the nature of racism, you would know that this woman did not threaten the status quo. So even though she was over the Y in the city of Asheville, there were still two very separate worlds: one black and one white. And believe me, the white one was, relatively speaking, luxurious; and the black one was, you know, over there in the black neighborhood, you know, second class citizen, the whole deal. Well, that’s where I worked and, uh . . .

BRINSON: What were your responsibilities?

GRUNDY: I was—they called me Youth Director, and I think I was fired at the moment that, uh, students walked out. There was a student—the high school was literally—South French Broadwide was right down the street from the Y, and there was some student unrest in terms of--by the way, at Berea we also, we’re talking about the curriculum itself, you know. What does a liberal arts college have the responsibility to teach? Not just European worldview, but a worldview. Well, this was starting to happen in the high schools around the country, too; and at this particular high school, which was all black, students were pretty pissed because they had a curriculum that was designed to contain them. Well, here I was right up the street, young thing out of college, and here I’m talking about, you know, kind of transferring my experiences from college to high school. So I became known as an instigator, as an outside agitator, which--badges of honor, you know; don’t get me wrong. But I was soon fired which was real good for me, meaning that I had to learn how to balance, you know, to balance things, to balance my decisions, uh, to learn how to know what situations are appropriate. It was part of my growing up more or less. But during that time, I decided that I would just go to grad school. So I started applying to the University of Louisville, which I knew then had a very decent school of music. In fact, I had been involved with them a little bit when I was a student at Berea. So I applied to the University of Louisville and I was accepted; but I also needed to work, so I applied—I had some good friends, a white couple at Berea, Greg and Marie Clendenin. Greg was working with the state Human Rights Commission, and he called me and said, “There’s a position available here. Why don’t you come for an interview and stuff.” So that’s how I ended up in Louisville.

BRINSON: And you were working for the state Human Rights Commission?

GRUNDY: Human Right Commission. Uh, that’s where I met Chester, and I was fired from that job, too. [laughing] I have a string going on here.

BRINSON: You were a field representative in 1969-70. Talk about what your responsibilities were there and what was the Commission like at that time?

GRUNDY: I want to tell this story. The Commission had been headed up from Day One by a Berea graduate named Galen Martin, a crazy-ass white boy. I think I can say this on tape. So one of the reasons I know I got the job was because I had this Berea thing in my transcript, and he was aware of that. But Galen Martin, for want of a better term—and I’ll be nice when I say this—is really a gatekeeper, meaning that, you know, just enough to say that he’s with the—he didn’t have a great vision for the Human Rights Commission in terms of actually moving and changing anything. So when I went there--the office at that time was at Sixth and Walnut--there were a lot of things going on that really blew—remember, I’m fresh out of college; I’m still like wide-eyed and ready to move and shake the world.

BRINSON: And the Commission was about nine years old?

GRUNDY: About nine years old and he had been over it all of those years, it’s my understanding. The first thing I figured out was that nobody did anything. Remember, I met Chester about a month or two after I went to the Human Rights Commission. While I—my taste was correct enough that I didn’t court on the job--I could easily have done it. There was nothing else going on; there was no agenda. And, essentially, the reason I was fired—and we have talked about this a lot, those of us who were there then—was because I stood up on a Friday afternoon staff meeting one day and said, “Why don’t we do something?” [laughing] Because what was happening then was that we would go to work eight, nine o’clock in the morning and immediately the discussion was—I don’t know how many people in the office, fifteen or twenty; and there was a hierarchy, white people on top, black folks the field reps--uh, the hierarchy, uh, the conversation was, “What are we going to do for lunch today?” That was the major agenda. “Where are we going to go for lunch? What do we do?” Then, after lunch it was just kind of bullshit, you know, telling jokes. And then there was on the wall of the Human Rights Commission this big map outlining Louisville and Jefferson County and--I kid you not; I will not exaggerate--people like Greg Clendenin will tell you this is exactly what we did. Our job, as a field rep, and Chester was hired as a field rep also, was to, whenever we knew or heard or saw that somebody black was living in a white apartment complex or here, there, we were to take these little tacks, these little black push tacks, and go put a black pin, meaning—we were just documenting the fact, not, how do you say, not impacting on it at all, you know, documenting the fact that somebody black—and that’s exactly where Galen wanted it to be. Because what Galen was doing all of this time, was going to law school. He got his law degree on the job and so did a couple of other men. And that’s pretty much what they were doing. Uh, to let you know how loosely run it was, when I was fired, and I had had some minor surgery when I first got to Louisville and I was out from work—and I didn’t know anybody, was scared, couldn’t tell my mother—two or three weeks, uh, no sick time was ever taken off my time sheet. Nobody ever knew I wasn’t there. I mean, in terms of just—I mean, that’s how loosely run, you know.

BRINSON: Well, was the Commission at that point not handling complaints?

GRUNDY: They said they were, but they would only take complaints that were so minor or they were going to be sure wins. They were not complaints that dealt with substance, that got to the heart of the matter. I can’t even say the Commission is doing a whole lot better now; but I do know that under Galen, the point was just to keep it kind of—he was scared to death. Just a very frightened person.

BRINSON: What about groups like the Kentucky Alliance or the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union during that period?

GRUNDY: They were around. I can remember Delahanty and that whole bunch of folks. I can remember, oh, what’s the name, down on Broadway. Oh, the Braytons, you know. They were very active and around. And Galen caught his heat from them. I mean, they were all pretty disgusted with him and always trying to get rid of him. It was just like, you know, these are our tax monies . . . ought to be doing. We were all pretty naïve obviously. But they were around and putting the heat on Galen. There were also other groups, you know, the NAACP, Reverend Hodge. Eventually, the person who hired me, Morris Jeff, became head of the National Black Social Workers. At that time, he was head of, director of Plymouth Settlement House. There was a lot of resentment and anger directed towards Galen Martin, to the point that when I was fired--remember I was new to Louisville, didn’t really know anybody--but the word got out real quickly that this young woman, who had challenged Galen Martin, was fired. One day I was sitting somewhere reading a newspaper in downtown Louisville; and this man walked up to me and he said, “Are you Ann Beard?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “I understand you were fired from the Human Rights Commission.” [laughing] I went, “Yes, I was.” “Would you like to have a job?” I was going, “Yes.” It was Morris Jeff. The word had—I talked with him yesterday morning; he’s become like—he’s my children’s godfather; he’s my mentor. In other words, the firing worked for the best, but, but Morris Jeff and others knew that I had been fired because of the animosity directed towards Galen Martin and that Commission.

BRINSON: Um, Galen’s wife, um, I understand, helped at first Georgia Davis Powers to write her book.

GRUNDY: The one about King? Her relationship with King?

BRINSON: Well, and Georgia Davis Powers’ own work in the state and the legislature and whatnot.

GRUNDY: Uh huh. You know, we never saw Galen’s wife. I can’t tell you to this day what she looks like.

BRINSON: Okay.

GRUNDY: The kids, of course, were younger then, you know.

BRINSON: What about Georgia Davis at that point? Was she . . .?

GRUNDY: I knew who she was; she lived in the West End not too far from Plymouth Settlement House. I would see her from time to time when I would go to meetings. By the way, the BSU at U of L was really kicking in about this time, too; and I lived on Brook Street near the U of L campus, so I was very involved as a, as a graduate student in the BSU. Blaine Hudson, who is now head of Pan African Studies, was the student then. You know, just little, you know, nineteen-year-old Blaine Hudson. Brilliant, absolutely—weird, but brilliant! And Blaine is one of those people you could talk to for three days straight; and you won’t know where the time went, that kind of thing. But—he’s a poet and writer, too. But, uh, I was very involved in the student movement and, interestingly enough, found myself, because I’d already graduated from undergrad, being kind of—it was real funny all of a sudden finding myself being something of an advisor. But, in that capacity, we were able to do some things; and by this time, you know, white schools are reluctantly, “Okay, this is a student organization; we have to give them some monies.” So we were doing very interesting things like bringing in writers and speakers like Hokee Marabou. I remember—Don Lee, the poet—I remember distinctly Hokee’s coming to U of L because I was the only one who had a car; and I went to the airport to meet him, had a little, you know, little, uh, Volkswagon, a yellow Volkswagon. And I went to pick him up and brought him to school, then I took him back. Just a, just a marvelous experience just being in the position of just being just a little older that I had a little more credibility kind of thing. Yeah?

BRINSON: So in school you were studying music?

GRUNDY: I was studying, at this time I was studying—I decided I was going to go the music history route [laughing] since I was not going stay in the practice room and do what I needed to do. But, you know, there again, I was dabbling in that, just kind of . . .

BRINSON: How did you get to Africa?

GRUNDY: Oh, that is a story.

BRINSON: That was in 1972.

GRUNDY: Let me tell you first how I got to Asia which was my first experience. When I was at Berea—you know, Berea takes very seriously that whole notion of en loco parentus. Now that I’m a mother, I’m so happy [laughter]; but then it was like, Whoo! I’m a grown . . . You know, you think you know it all. But the dorm in which I lived, Hunter Hall, had--all the dorms had governing councils, and given the nature of the way things were—there was never anybody black on these councils. And I just thumb my nose at them; they tend to be little prayer meetings. Can you imagine me as a preacher’s kid coming out of church—and that’s what they would do. They would get together and they would pray; and then they would talk about who had broken a rule and left soap in the showers. You know, I just thought that was hysterical; and I enjoyed like really messing with them, which didn’t take a whole lot to do just to rattle them. Well, one of the rules, of course, was you had to check into the dorm at a certain time; but, remember, the stuff that’s going on, the struggle, you know, student meetings and stuff. So I found myself in a real dilemma meaning that when was I going to have time to practice? Now there’s nothing else to do in Berea; there’s no such thing called sex life or anything like that. We didn’t have cars. So anything I was involved in had to be righteous, meaning that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. But I was supposed to be in the dorm nine, nine-thirty. Well, nine, nine-thirty at night I hadn’t gotten around to practicing because I was at BSU meetings; I was at this, you know, messing with Weatherford or what have you. So there was an old black man, Old Man Fee, Fee Moran, who was the janitor at the music building, very handsome old man and kind of a father figure to me; and, uh, eventually he gave me the key to the building. Okay, Ann. You know, ‘cause I was bothering him so much, he gave me the key to the building. So what I could do, of course, was just have access to the building as I wished; so typically I wouldn’t start practicing until nine, ten or eleven o’clock at night. Well, I’m supposed to be in the dorm. So you can imagine my having to come to the dorm eleven, twelve, one o’clock, you know, in the morning. Having to ring the doorbell cause they locked all these females down, you know; and, uh, I’m coming in. Well, they got pretty tired of that, and they kept calling me before the hall council; and, you know, they were trying to figure out punishment, put me on rules. I just ignored that, you know, just like what are you going to really do to me, you know. So in exasperation one day—I think they tried to fine me; that didn’t work. I don’t have any money, you know. They sent me to, to Ann Marshall; she was the Dean of Women. We have had enough of this woman; we don’t know how to deal with her. You take her, you know. So the first time I went to see Ann Marshall, who was also a music major out of Texas, it was kind of like I had her wrapped around my finger in a sense. And, uh, that turned out to be a very good relationship because [laughing] she had money and I didn’t; and I had things I wanted to do. But, at any rate, on the very first occasion I was sent to see Ann Marshall—her office was over the post office—I had an appointment; and for some reason, she wasn’t there and her secretary, Gloria Van Winkle, was not there. So I’m sitting and I’m sitting and I’m sitting at the desk. You know, nobody’s there. Well, you know how bulletin boards—I’m sitting here and there’s a big bulletin board; and right in the middle of this bulletin board—you know, they also put things for graduate school, you know, classic kind of thing. There was a thing that had a thing, a little tear-off thing, “Would you like to live and study in Asia this summer?” This is 1967 and I’m saying out loud to myself, “I’m sick of this dorm council; if they pray one more prayer over me . . . Of course, I want to live and study in Asia,” you know. So I ripped off the thing and, of course, what it said was, “Please write us an essay,” you know, telling us why you and everything, gave the ramifications, I mean the parameters for that. There was nothing else to do. Ann Marshall and Gloria Van Winkle weren’t there, and there was a little IBM Select blue typewriter so I sat down. They never came. You know, I went in the drawer, sealed my little stuff. And the post office was downstairs so I just waited long enough, went downstairs, and mailed my stuff and sent it on off. About a week later, I got a notice. It was an HEW thing and, uh, Harvard University and I got a thing saying, We thank you so much for your application, but there were like twelve positions available and they’ve all—in other words, I had done it too late. I said, “Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. No big deal.” A week later got a knock at my dorm door, dorm director and she said, “Ann, you have a telegram.” And, uh, telegram: “We have read your essay; we have created position number thirteen for you. Please show up [laughing] in New York,” you know. Well, I was ecstatic. My dilemma, of course, was that I needed to stay at Berea that summer—this is going through my senior year—to practice for my recital. I mean, I had really bullshitted, you know. Secondly, I needed to work and earn money. Well, remember I told you when I first went to Berea there was kind of this undercurrent of these Quakers and the, the FOR and stuff like that? Well, Margaret Allen, Julia Allen, excuse me—Margaret’s another person—Julia Allen was the former dean of women who was very big with the American Friends Service Committee, and I would attend Quaker meetings sometimes. By the way, they were extremely supportive. One of the things that happens at Berea, we were talking about struggle, is that there’s always this community of retired people who, you know, it’s not just financial support, it’s a lot of moral and other kinds of support, clipping articles from The New York Times and, you know, keeping us hooked up, so to speak. Julia Allen was one of the instrumental people in getting us to that march in Montgomery. She challenged the administration. Here she was an administrator herself, or former administrator. Her roommate’s name was—she was head of the art department--Julia and, uh, I’ll think of it in just a minute. Julia is now dead, but uh, her roommate is still alive. But, at any rate, I thought of that because I was thinking how she stepped in to bail me out on this account. I’m so excited: Go to Asia! You know, I had barely been out of Alabama, New York State, you know. Wow, yes! But the practical thing of practice and what do you do for money? Well, Julia., on her own and unbeknownst to me, passed the word that I had this dilemma. Now Ann is going to need money when she comes back and stuff like that. And my post office box is like 187; and I started going to my mailbox, and it took me a long time to put the pieces together. I would find checks in my mailbox: $25, $100, $200. In other words, when I talk about my experiences at Berea, on one hand kind of raising hell; but part of it was really a profound love for the place and a desire on my part to know that I could stretch and be a better person, but the school has got to come along with me. People like Julia Allen really planted those seeds in us. And, uh, so I ended up leaving that summer with a bank account waiting for me when I got back. We did all of Asia, but India was the most profound experience for me because . . .

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE

GRUNDY: . . . and I don’t mean just black. I mean, you’re seeing Asians, Indians. I mean, of course, India runs the whole gamut in terms of the color spectrum. You go to the north, you know, you see the ( ), they’re like ( ). But in the south like dark, dark black only almost like blue/black or with overtones of purple. Blew my mind. And, of course, I didn’t speak any of the languages, uh, was definitely quote “a foreigner”; but I was well received. I was very aware of the caste system—by the way, the instructor for this whole study piece was a man I see now a lot on cable. He does a lot of the world religion classes, uh, Huston Smith. I don’t know if you are familiar with him. It was such a delight to meet Huston Smith and later on, of course, I found out that it was Huston Smith who read my essay and said, Make position number 13.

BRINSON: Was this a tour of Asia to look specifically at religious kinds of issues?

GRUNDY: His forte, of course, is comparative studies. I think he’s the son of a missionary. I’m trying to think—but he had lived in this part of the world most of his life. Uh, I think it was essentially a comparative religious and cultural piece; and my interest in music played right into it. Uh, India was the big piece where we were, but we spent a little time in Greece. We were in Israel for, you know, a few days, and then we were in Thailand and eventually in Hawaii. In other words, we circumnavigated the globe, so to speak, but the bulk of the time—if we were gone three months, eight of the weeks were spent in India alone. But there’s so much to do and to cover in India. By the way, when—as a student there, I was only—there was one other black student on the student, a student out of Hampton. Uh, Selecia was her name. And, uh, our experiences were really interesting because we didn’t know—by the—when we were there, Detroit burned. I remember picking up—that’s when I realized that Time and Newsweek had their Asian versions of their magazine they put out—but I remember picking up Time magazine and seeing Detroit just burning up. Of course, coming back to the U.S. at the end of ’67 going into ’68, everything just really just blew up, King’s death and everything. But, uh, I was interested, not knowing that I was interested, in how the rest of the world, especially people of color, were observing this thing. And in the circles in which I ran, and it was mostly an academic circle, uh, other Asian students, I found them—and this really was instructive to me—to be not only interested in and thoughtful about what was happening in the U.S., but they were looking for some kind of direction. For example, I knew then that Angela Davis was almost a goddess in the rest of the world and her stuff hadn’t at that point really climaxed. You know, she was just kind of coming into her being. And when it became known that I knew Angela, I mean, people would constantly ask me about Angela. They would ask me about King. But they were looking to--and this blew my mind--the black movement in America. They saw this as the elite almost like, What you do sets the tone, sets the standard. That really put a seriousness on me that heretofore I had not had, if that makes any sense at all. Uh huh.

BRINSON: India, of course, is the home of Mahatma Ghandi and the whole, uh, passive resistance, nonviolence thing. How did that play out for you in terms of actually visiting the country that this philosophy originated from?

GRUNDY: I remember feeling very honored and very moved but, like most African Americans, very doubtful about nonviolence; or, as we say in the Deep South, Mahatma Ghandi didn’t have Bull Conner to deal with. You know, it’s a whole different story, and yet I was respectful enough of my elders to know that I had a duty and responsibility to listen to King, to hear him through and to, as much as I could, to be supportive of that. Not to buy into the whole ‘divide and conquer’ that America loves so dearly. Here’s King; here’s Malcolm. Remember, being somewhat a student of history, I was quite aware of the Booker T. and the DuBois debate. I wanted a little to buy into that. To me, it wasn’t either/or; it was both, given whatever the circumstance. But I was very happy to be in India knowing that King had been there. You know, I had seen those snaps, the coverage of that. And to actually go to the seat of the government—I’m trying to remember—Indira Ghandi was prime minister then, and she had two sons. One has since died, Rasha, I think, died in a plane crash. But they were both around--they were both roughly my age, and there again, being an African with all of these white people in this environment, I really stood out. When the word got out, Oh, there’s this African American student from Alabama—and before I knew it, I was having tea with Mrs. Ghandi and her family. I really had some unique experiences; and I do remember talking, raising questions about Ghandi. There again, I wish I had a camera [laughter] and a tape recorder, you know. A lot of things passed me by, you know.

BRINSON: When you returned to Berea after that trip, were there any opportunities for you to talk about that experience?

GRUNDY: Oh yes. Just Julia Allen alone made sure because—I believe she had studied as a younger student in Asia, so she knew, you know, she could identify. And that, by the way, was not unusual. A lot of faculty members at Berea would travel during the summer. In fact, when I needed to go get all of my shots and stuff done--we had to come to Richmond or Lexington; I didn’t have a car--I just, you know, Julia Allen would just say, “Well, Dr. So-and-So’s going, Dr. Strickler,” what have you. “You can ride up with them” They were all studying and traveling for whatever the reason. So the whole idea of—when you watch, uh, uh, reruns of Mayberry—I love Mayberry [laughing] for other kinds of reasons—but one of them is that even though through white eyes, it’s almost like a snapshot of my whole life, meaning that kind of intimacy of community. But one of the things that they do on Mayberry that we did as children in Birmingham, and we did at Berea, is when somebody had an opportunity to travel, you would have a Sunday afternoon tea or something; and they would show their slides and show their—you know what I’m saying? That was, it was like a vicarious thrill, you know. Well, that’s what happened at Berea. I had a number of opportunities through Julia Allen, through the F.O.R., through the AFSC, what have you, to talk about what my experiences had been. Yeah. Yeah. And for a black student--and among my peers, the only one who had been outside the country at that point--it was a real eye-opening. My friends were going, “What did you say?” You know, none of us had traveled outside of the U.S. at that point so in terms of the hierarchy of the, of the BSU, I think I kind of moved up a little bit, you know.

BRINSON: Was AFSC or Fellowship of Reconciliation, were they active at Berea at all?

GRUNDY: They had chapters, uh huh. Mostly the retired community with a few students who would come from these different environments where, you know, they would participate. I can remember--I think I told you one man, John Fleming. John was the only other black student I know who participated with the F.O.R.. He was out of West Virginia, little Baptist what have you, but very interested in alternative religions and thoughts and things like that. Uh huh.

BRINSON: Okay. West Africa.

GRUNDY: Okay. When Chester and I, when we worked at the Human Rights Commission, we had pure time on our hands. We were not required to do anything, plus we had telephone cards to boot. Why did they do that, I don’t know.

BRINSON: You had telephones in the cars?

GRUNDY: We had telephone cards.

BRINSON: Telephone cards?

GRUNDY: Um huh. Um huh. This was before the Watts line thing. [sigh] Why did they do that? [laughing] So, you know, we were—having come, having come out of the student struggles, still in our relationships with our friends who were in grad school or living and working in other places. So, uh, and we were trying to do, remain active in Louisville in terms of, uh, commitment to the BSU at U of L then in terms of—by this time, we’re talking about lots of grassroots organizations; and, there again, Morris Jeff played a key role. Being a social worker, he saw Plymouth Settlement House as a hotbed for people, um, um, organizing themselves around issues of welfare, around issues of right-to-work. I mean, it was really—you know, as I look back on it, it’s just like I was really going to school in a way that I never really stopped to think about. But . . .

BRINSON: That, of course, was the theory that the whole national welfare . . .

GRUNDY: Yeah, oh yeah. And Jeff was literally training these people in Plymouth Settlement House. Of course, after Jeff left—he went to go, go back to get his doctor, grad school. Went back to New Orleans. They ( ). I think they figured out that that was what he was doing, not recognizing that he was doing them all a great favor. But we—Plymouth Settlement House was in the poorest area of Louisville; Russell area is what it’s called. So if there was ever a need for grassroots organization, it was right there. I later on found out that Jeff had come out of that experience himself. That’s precisely what his father did in New Orleans. His father was King of the Zulus, which is the big black social organization; but as King of the Zulus, old man Jeff organized grassroots, and his son simply repeated that. It was really quite a story to tell. Uh . . .

BRINSON: Ann, what were you doing at Plymouth House?

GRUNDY: I was youth director, children’s director, and it was—so we leading up to Africa because there’s a direct relationship. Uh, it was—it began to hit home to me how much in poverty so many people in America, so many people in America live with, especially black people. And the Settlement House was kind of the watering hole. One of the things that Jeff instituted shortly after we were there was—I’m sure it was a spin on the Panther piece, Black Panther piece—we started doing, serving hot meals after school. Uh, as a result, we could easily have three, four, five hundred children who would come into that center every day; and as youth director, my job was to kind of—I mean, I really had a yeoman’s job. I just didn’t know it, and I enjoyed it so much. You know, trying to work with the kitchen staff, all volunteers, to organize around this and then to do programming afterwards. First thing Jeff told me when I got to Plymouth Settlement House was, “Spend a little time just going and just sitting and talking.” He said, “You’re southern, you know what to do. Go sit on the porch and figure it out. And it hit me really hard, because what he wanted me to see was that in almost every home that I visited—and I came to know all these families: the Major family, the Queen family. These are all big families all over the Russell area. The Briscoe family. That these were people who lived in situations where the houses were so dark and so cold; and one day I said that to Jeff. He says, “Now you understand that when you are getting ready to close this center . . .” and we’re supposed to close like seven, eight o’clock. I couldn’t even push the kids out the door. I mean, it was just like—they called me Jello because my legs would shake; and sometimes they called me Weird Beard; and, otherwise, I was Mother Goose. They had—you know, black kids will lay a name on you. ‘Jello, don’t be cruel, don’t treat me . . . Girlfriend, sister . . .’ you know, ‘Take us home with you.’ Here I had this little yellow VW--I eventually moved from a bicycle; somebody stole my bicycle. Chester said, “No, we put out a contract for somebody to take that bicycle.” He calls it the Mary Poppins Bike; it was an embarrassment to the race. But that’s how I got to know Louisville, you know, just riding my bike. But black people didn’t do that. I’m a college graduate; see, I’m not living up to my class thing: you’re a black college graduate, you are at the head, you are supposed to have arrived! Then when I got one, I got a VW—all out of order. Just wacky as I could be. But I would have these kids in my Volkswagon, and all they wanted to do with me was just to go home with me. And so my job at Plymouth Settlement House wasn’t nine to five; it wasn’t five days a week. It was literally seven days a week; but, then, look, I’m twenty-three, I’m twenty-four years old. What else did I have to do with my time? It really filled a need in me to be of service, and little known to me, I was growing. I was growing. I was growing. Because Jeff was a mentor. Ten years older than me, you know, just a passionate reader, had a huge personal on the library. Drove an old beat-up station wagon; people would say, ‘You’ve got your masters degree. Why are you driving . . .?’ He said, “Look, the more stuff you have, the more time you got to spend money protecting it” and stuff. That was a rare instructive thing to me. But Jeff is like tutoring us: read this; check this out; come go with me to hear this, you know. It was during that time that we, uh—there was a company called The Negro Ensemble, and they were on the road doing To Be Young, Gifted and Black. And that’s where we met Felicia Rashad. She came to the Settlement House. I mean, everybody came because Jeff was just this cultural southern man, and this is going to be the watering hole for all of these things. Uh, one of the things we did in the summer, the big thing we did in the summer, and this is Jeff’s idea, was not to just have a regular summer camp, but to have an African Village Camp. Can you imagine? ’69--this was ’70, ’71, ’72, going to have this African Village Camp. Well, I’m just excited about this; and we had, uh, heads of the village, you know, families. I mean, everybody had to study their name, had to create a name. I mean, they were simple things that were so profound. Whenever we sat down to eat, and we used the city campground, Otter Creek Park, which was outside of Louisville; so we had to drive on this big hot bus everyday to get out there. We’d stay all day; we’d drag in. I mean, I really—this was no nine to five. But simple things like when we sat down to eat, no one could eat unless the person on both sides of them had everything that they needed for their meal: the utensils, the water, everything on their plate. Can you imagine the profound impact—we didn’t know that what we were doing was that, was that moving. I only know now—when Chester and I got married and we moved here, I began to get a sense of it. We’ve had more kids from that time period in our lives to come visit us, to come stay with us, to call us and let us know, ‘My mother is sick, she told me to tell you.’ I still have ties to that community, and that was just a three-year period. You know what I’m saying? And, of course, I was coat-tailing Jeff who had a profound impact upon that community.

BRINSON: And Chester was involved in this, too?

GRUNDY: Chester eventually—when I was fired, Chester was the good boy--he stayed at Human Rights Commission. But Jeff, being the kind of person he is, and Chester and I were friends; we were not girlfriend and boyfriend. I don’t know what we were. We were just kind of comrades, I guess. So Jeff would see Chester around all the time and eventually went to Chester and said, “Brother, don’t you want a real job where you can make a difference?” [laughing] You know, that’s the way—we call Jeff the voice of God; he talked way down at the bass clef like that. And, you know, Chester meanwhile was hanging on with me and he’s real excited; and he’s doing nothing at the Human Rights Commission. But his situation is different. He has to support his mother and his brother so eventually Chester leaves the Human Rights Commission—he’s sick of Galen Martin, too—and he comes to work at Plymouth Settlement House. He’s the communiversity director--that’s the adult education piece--which was like an open slate. And under Jeff’s guidance there were so many things—by the way, Jeff is doing a communiversity even now in New Orleans. The whole sense of the community has so many things it can learn and teach itself. There are also teachable moments kinds of things. So Chester did that; so we ended up once again being co-workers. It was during this time that I said to Chester, “My God, all my life I’ve always wanted to go to Africa.” That as a child growing up in Birmingham, there would be people who would come to the church; all be-they missionaries, they weren’t that distorted in terms of that whole, you know, western imperialism thing. They were black people. And I was excited about Africa and just really wanted to go. Chester had never essentially been out of Kentucky. He says, “What do you mean go to Africa?” I said, “Let’s go.” “How we going to do that?” “Let’s save our money.” “Ann, that’s a lot of money,” “Na, na, na” . . . I said, “Look, if we stop stupid holidays and we stop spending our money on lunches, we can have it.” Well, at that time, um, round trip out of Louisville to West Africa was--through Europe--was something like $790, plus you needed some spending money and stuff. We had that money within six months just by cutting the crap out, you know. That was another instructive thing that I learned from Jeff, how much money just runs right through your hands uncontrolled, you know. So it was through Jeff’s blessings and Jeff, uh . . . [laughing] We were audited by the IRS behind us because we claimed the job, claimed the trip as work-related. Here we were doing the African village. It made perfectly good sense and, of course, Jeff wrote a statement. But they didn’t believe us; they called us in—we weren’t married—for an audit the very same day. When the audits were over, I met Chester back at the Settlement House. I said, “Tell me about yours.” He said, “Was yours as bad as mine?” I said, “Well, I kind of, you know, talked my way around mine.” He said, “This is what this man said to me.” He said all he wanted to talk about was Africa. He said, “Well, tell me, boy, did they have rings in their noses and bones in their head?” And Chester sat there and he said, he said to himself that this is what Hockede calls a progressive compromise. Do I jump across this table and knock this sucker out or do I, for the greater good and the greater picture here, say, go along, because my job is to get out of this situation and go do some other stuff. He said, I leaned across the table and said, “You’re right about that. Bones everywhere.” Guy said, “Yeah, this was a real education, wasn’t it?” I mean, was just--there again, that was a profound experience, you know. But it was because of Jeff and our work at Plymouth Settlement House, that Chester saved our monies; we were given the time off from our job, and being a supervisor now, I know that Jeff did--that was a huge sacrifice for him. He didn’t have but five or six staff members, and he let two of us go.

BRINSON: You were gone how long?

GRUNDY: Like six weeks or something like that. You know, we went, we went through Europe; uh, that was a whole story. That was quite a piece. When we were--Chester even then was becoming known as a lover and supporter of jazz. It started kind of in college, uh, through a student who was a jazz musician. But he knew that the Actuel label, A-C-T-U-E-L, came out of France and that they did a lot of remakes and stuff, you know, from the bebop era and stuff like that. So I had a classmate—not a classmate--at Berea I had hooked up with the VISTA workers, and I had eventually done Connecticut and stuff like that and, uh [interruption]

BRINSON: You were talking about doing some VISTA work through Berea up in Connecticut and all that.

GRUNDY: And I met another student who was from Temple University who ended up going to medical school in France; so when Chester and I were going to go through France, we called up Arnie. I wrote Arnie, said, “Could you meet us?” Met at the airport and everything. Took off some time from school and was going to spend this week with us in France. Well, the one thing Chester wanted to do was to buy some albums; so we started on this big walking tour of the Left Bank and—I tell you this experience because we’re talking about the shaping of the mindset. Uh, so we were with Arnold who spoke fluent French; we did not. And we had bought several albums; and as we are like getting toward the end of the day, we come to another record store—the Left Bank was just full of these record stores, music stores. And Chester, “Oh there’s another one.” So we have armful of albums; we’ve been walking around with Chester all day. And we go in this store and we go in this store and Chester says, “Oh, can’t forget who I am. Going to do this right.” Takes our albums—we go up to the counter with him—and we, and Arnold says to the clerk, “Please hold these albums for us. We’ve been, you know, walking around all day, want to look some more, don’t want you to get confused about what’s going on here.” So we checked in our albums. We’re in the store there about an hour or so and Chester didn’t really see anything. We’re getting ready to come out; and when we get to the counter, there are like three or four policemen there. And they grab Chester, and uh, and we’re trying to figure out--of course, not speaking any French, you know, and Arnold was there with us. And Arnie tells us--this goes on for quite a while to the point that a crowd develops; and there were some black kids who were there from New York and New Jersey who were studying for the summer, so we could see them over there like really curious about what was going on. But they had the paddy wagon outside, going to arrest Chester because they said that they had been, uh--some negresses had been stealing all of these albums all month, and you know, in Paris. And Chester had been identified as the person; and when he checked in to the store, they identified him and they were coming to arrest him and stuff. I mean, it went on and on and on. They’re like handcuffing Chester, I mean, the whole deal. It’s like my worst nightmare, you know, right in front of my face. And Arnold is trying to be the good white kid, the Jewish kid that he is, trying to be respectful and diplomatic; and nothing is working. It’s just like they are literally dragging him off to jail. So, you know, I just kind of lose it at this point and I said—and unbeknownst to me, I said, ‘Well, the French got to understand this word: Motherfucker! [laughing] You got to know this word,’ you know. [laughter] And meanwhile the black kids over there going: motherfucker, motherfucker. They couldn’t figure out what was going on. They understand that real well and they kind of stopped; and all of a sudden I said, “Arnold, Arnold, passports, passports. Give them the passports. Show them.” It just occurred to me we just got in the country yesterday. ‘What do you mean?’ Well, you—it reminds me of what happens all the time with the New York piece, with the young brothers . . . well, you looked suspicious. You looked like . . . you know, but that was a very interesting experience.

Chester and I did Europe and then we went on to Africa. Now, because of my Berea experiences, I knew by this time a number of families and, and--Africans have this whole thing--what they call southern hospitality. Dr. Akbar reminds us is really African hospitality, that because of just the sheer numbers of African people during the enslavement in the southern part of the U.S. what we have was literally a transfer of African culture and ways to the new world. Everything from the foods to relationships and so on and so forth. So when we talk about hospitality, that word doesn’t begin to, to describe what our experiences were; and everybody who goes to Africa talks about this. How people with very, you know, meager means and circumstances will go out of their way--your house, their house becomes your abode. They will come up out of their rooms--you know, many times I got the sense that people themselves would not eat themselves so that you could eat. I mean, it was a very humbling kind of thing in its own way. One of the things--for example, when we were out and we went to Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Liberia.

BRINSON: And you knew people or you knew of people that you could contact?

GRUNDY: We knew people, we knew people only in Nigeria. But, interestingly enough—I have to tell you a couple of stories. Leaving Nigeria, flying to Ghana, we didn’t, we had a couple of names which turned out not to be—these people had gone on, were studying in Europe so we didn’t really end up with any contacts in Ghana. But on the plane flying from Nigeria to Ghana there was a woman on there, like a Ghanaian woman, and she was saying, ‘I’m not going home now. I’m on my way to the States, but if you should need some assistance . . .’ She gave us a couple of names, turned out to be godsends. All we had to do was say this woman’s name; it was just like, ‘Oh yes, come on in.’ But in terms of Nigeria itself, there were two major families that we knew: the Overare family and the Patois. Both of them were big families. I think they still--in fact, I’m certain that there is a Patois and an Overare at Berea thirty years after I’m there. I mean, that’s how long the line is; and now we’re talking about their children. And they all go into law and medicine. I mean it’s just amazing. When I met Mr. Overare, the father of eighteen children, I just couldn’t believe it. He looked younger than me, I mean, just this whole thing, you know. At any rate, uh, we were well taken care of in terms of Nigeria to the point that the Patois had a younger brother who was at home then; and they said, “We’ll have our brother Julius meet you at the airport.” And stuff like that. Well, you know, lots of experiences but the first one was that when we landed in Lagos, which is a profound experience in itself, meaning that all one had to do was look around and see faces that you knew. I mean, it blew our minds. Chester would say, “That’s my Uncle John over there.” Or, “That looks like Grandma Mary.” The physical connections were overwhelming, and I’ve heard so many writers talk about this. You know, just looking at people who are your own family. So you know that genetic connection is there, you know. Even though we know that Chester’s people came out of Ethiopia. We just look at him and you can tell. Just like, ‘Yeah . . . the big forehead, everything. You know, straight out of Ethiopia.’ But, uh, Julius Patois was to meet us, and his brothers had sent a pair of shoes as a gift to him. So while we were in the airport, uh, this young man comes up to us and, you know, ‘Hi, we’re Chester and Ann,’ you know. We weren’t married then, of course, da, da, da. Oh, you know, he was so nice to us; and we get in this taxi and we go on to the Overare’s home. We’re going to stay with them in Turulary, which is like a suburb of Lagos, and, uh, he stays with us. We give him the shoes and everything and da, da, da, you know. And he leaves and he’s going to come back the next day and so on and so forth. Well, that evening there’s a knock at the door and Mr. Overare said, “There’s someone here to see you.” And there’s this very handsome young man there. He said, “Hi, how you doing?” He said, “I’m Julius Patois” We said, [laughing] “Well, who was . . . [laughing] and to whom did we give his shoes?” So we were telling Mr. Overare, you know, “Oh, my God, what did we do?” Cause we knew his brothers had paid a lot for the shoes. “Oh, God, what are we going to do?” Mr. Overare said, “Don’t worry; you’ll see.” The next day this young man who we met at the airport—it turns out he was just hustling the airport, just giving rides to people, getting tips and stuff, came back to the house. He said, “These are not my shoes. I didn’t understand.” He says, “And besides they don’t fit!” [laughing] I mean, it was just one of those real strange experiences. But in Nigeria we stayed completely with families of our classmates at Berea, and it was the most overwhelming experience of, of maybe of my whole life. I have to say that

One experience. We met—we were in the marketplace one day. There was a woman whose name turned out to be Mrs. Babatunday, school teacher. She came up to us--this was fairly common, uh, “Where are you from?” “United States.” “Oh, where? California, Alabama, Kentucky?” I mean, can you imagine the average citizen [laughter-Brinson] in this country . . . [snapping finger] piece of cake, you know. “Kentucky.” “Oh, Owensboro? Lexington? Louisville?” We said, “Louisville.” “Oh, do you know Mohammed Ali?” I’m going, “Shoot, let’s talk about the educational system.” So conversation. She says, “Well, look . . .”’—and this is where we found out people meant what they said, you know. If you say you . . .

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO

GRUNDY: . . .sixth grade and I want my students to meet you. And she had said, “Oh, maybe tomorrow.” As it turned out, we just happened to be in that general vicinity; and I said, “Chester, Mrs. Babatunday wanted us to stop by.” “Oh, okay.” You know, it was just kind of casual to us. Uh, so we asked this young man how to get to this particular school—and this is something else we found out, that people typically don’t say, ‘Oh, you go down here, turn right, you do this.’ Oh, no. People stop what they’re doing and they walk you; it’s that southern hospitality thing, you know. Uh, so we went to Mrs. Overare’s school, went to her classroom. The kids—she must have had about fifty kids in her class, which was really fairly typical of my experience. Remember, I was a baby boomer. We went to half days at school when I was born cause the schools were so crowded. So that didn’t blow me away, the little khaki uniforms, the whole thing. And Chester and I were blown away because when we walked in the classroom—Mrs. Overare as it turned out had been down the hall, around the corner, doing whatever she was doing--and she wasn’t in the classroom and hadn’t been there for several minutes. When we walked in the classroom, every child, you know, just—and we’re looking around for the teacher. There is no teacher. But we opened that door and walked in, the children all looked up and immediately, “Good morning, Mama. Good morning, Baba.” We’re going, I mean, can you imagine, you know?

BRINSON: They all stood up.

GRUNDY: All stood up, only because we’re elders. We are clearly older than they are, and that’s the respect with which you give elders, you know. ‘Good morning. Would you by any chance be from America? Mrs. Babatunday told us about you.’ And, of course, we are and they begin—Mrs. Babatunday hasn’t come to class yet—and they begin to ask us all of these detailed questions, primarily about the black struggle in America. They wanted to know what we thought of Malcolm, what we thought of Angela, you know, what did we think would be the outcome of, of so-called riots and insurrections? I mean, a political class to the hilt. And we ended up staying there most of the day just with them, having lunch with them, that whole thing. But that was our experience primarily in Ghana, very family centered; and everywhere we went people were so receptive and so curious and just so warm, you know, that whole thing. Went to Ghana, didn’t know anyone there originally, but through our friend on the plane, who had said, “Well look, if you run into trouble, go to the university at Lagos.” Lagos is outside of ( ). We got to the campus there and we looked up this certain man; and it turned out that he had been Maya Angelou’s host when she taught there. Remember, Maya was in Ghana when Malcolm came through for the last time. There’s this famous picture of Malcolm sitting in the airport, this kind of green shirt with a stripe. Maya’s at the airport; you just don’t see her in the picture. But they are telling him, and he’s kind of sitting there like this, they are already telling him, Encruma and everybody that ‘You are a marked man.’ That, ‘When you go back to the states, we already have heard or we are sensing that you’re a marked man.’ And Malcolm has this look on his face, I mean, it’s one of those profound pictures. The woman who took a lot of those photos came to a holistic retreat once and told the story of her journeys with Malcolm through Mecca and everything. But, at any rate, this man, uh, taught there at the university; and we went to his house. ‘Oh, yes, come in. No problem.’ Took us over to the student center and summer kids are taking classes; and all sorts of kids are like streaming in and getting something cold to drink. And he knows everybody. They kind of come over, you know, and ‘These are my friends. This is Ann Beard; this is Chester Grundy.’ And, uh, the first group of students who came in—a lot of them were like U.S. students studying in Ghana, all black students. This one guy named Simmy said, he said—and Chester thought I had staged this—I said, “No, this is what happens when you have nine brothers and sisters, Chester, you’ll figure it out one day.” Simmy says to me, he says, “You related to Ison Beard? That’s my roommate at Berkeley.” I said, “Yeah, that’s my brother!” you know. He said, “Oh, I know. You play the piano.” So then this next wave—we sit there for a long time, and the next wave of these Ghanaian students come in. He introduces us all again. We all kind of chatting and sharing notes and stuff like that. I mean, it was really festive. And this Ghanaian student said, “Dear, dear, I have a good friend at Antioch College named Oscar Beard.” “That’s my baby brother!” [laughter] So Chester said, “I swear, Ann, you got this up.” I said, “No, I didn’t.” But you get the idea. That was what the whole experience was like, that without quote “knowing anybody” one did not meet a stranger. There were—the most profound experiences--I mean, there are a whole bunch of them, but one was in Senegal. Now, remember, this is coming on the heels of Roots and everything else, Alex Haley. Boy, [interruption] You know, people are Muslims so they are praying what? X number of times, three or four times a day, facing east. And we were noticing people would just stop what they’re doing, put down their prayer mats and face east. And especially if we happened to be in a park during the day. I mean it was just very, just a very calming experience. And then, of course, in West Africa all of these mosques. We went to one mosque. The man did not speak any English, but it was the most amazing experience because through just hand gestures or whatever, he let us know that Karem-[Abdul] Jabbar had just been there and visited and he had been honored. But he only did it with his hands and eyes. It was nothing he said. We would go, “Oh, Jabbar?” “Yes, Jabbar.” [laughing] ‘Basketball.’ That kind of thing. Uh, by the way, Ali was right. Maybe until O.J. the most famous man on the planet, I mean, you could not go anywhere unless people asked—and don’t be from Kentucky, too. Ali! Ali! And we met Ali eventually and we told him; and he said, “This is true.” He said, “The world loves me.” [laughter] He is such a clown, you know. “Oh, yes, that’s true everywhere I go.” You know. But has this almost an aura around him and all, most of it having nothing to do with the fact that he’s a boxer. It has to do with the fact that he stood up. Isn’t that amazing? On his moral principles. When Chester had him here, had a celebration for him, people brought all this stuff to autograph; and I was standing there with Ali who is not in the best of health now. And nobody came up to talk about boxing: “I just want to thank you. All these years, I’ve wanted to thank you for standing up.” White people, black people, for standing up and saying, “I’m not going to kill anybody.” So I think Ali really has this place in history. But, at any rate, one of the most common things that people, that would happen to us--other than, ‘You’re from the states. Do you know Ali?’ and that kind of thing--was, uh, people sometimes just out of nowhere would come up to us and they would say, “You’re from America?” “Yes.” I guess—I now know that everything about who you are you’re announcing to the world just as I couldn’t figure out how people in the marketplace could tell me this is a Eboe, this is a Houser, this is a Walla. Well, it has to do with a lot of things: dress, body language, body build, body type. There are all sorts of signs that tell someone else who you are and what you are and who your family is, which is a very southern thing, too. Who are your people? You know, we’re still very interested in that. But, at any rate, uh, people would come up to us and after, you know, deciding that we were from the states and asking, “Are you students?” you know, trying to figure all these things. ‘Oh, I have a friend who lives in Los Angeles.’ You know, you kind of get all these family relationships and so on and so forth. Eventually, especially in Senegal, the last thing people would ask us in one way or another was, “Why did it take you so long to come home?” And, to this day, that remains just a profound question because we clearly are not talking about just a physical homecoming but a spiritual trip. ‘Why did it take you so long to come home?’ So . . .

BRINSON: I want to ask one final question. I’m not sure I’m going to word this quite the way I want to, but—I mean, obviously, a trip like this had lots of profound influences on you. Can you identify, though, what about the trip that you brought back and used in your own work when you came back?

GRUNDY: Uh huh. I think, like Malcolm, what that trip did for us was to finally not make us feel alone in the struggle. You know, one of the ways that America contains the struggle is by defining people as a minority, that . . . Going to Africa and having gone through Asia, too, I’m saying, ‘’Scuse me, ‘scuse me. Most of the world looks like me in,’ you know, ‘in varying degrees.’ That was so reassuring. To know that most of the world to varying degrees shared my worldview, that the European worldview was by definition “the minority.” And it’s this whole thing, you know, that James Baldwin talks about, that white people do this mirror thing all the time. ‘You are thieves.’ ‘Well, who stole America?’ You know. ‘You are dirty.’ ‘Well, who takes few baths in Europe?’ Uh, ‘You are criminals.’ I mean, it goes on and on; this is projected behavior. Uh, ‘You’re a minority.’ ‘No, you’re the minority.’ And, and, and not in terms of saying, defining someone, meaning Europeans as less than, but in terms of something that we would call equity, that if you are less than ten percent of the world’s population, you should not be running. You know, one of the first things I ever heard when I heard Hockede speak many, many years ago—he had a picture in his hands of uh, who was, who was with Khrushchev when he was prime minister, premier of . . . I forget, whoever . . .

BRINSON: Eisenhower.

GRUNDY: Eisenhower. Khrushchev. He would say—I’m like eighteen years old—“What’s wrong with this picture?” And I’m trying to figure . . . and nobody in the room can. He said—of course, this is the picture of world leaders—“What’s wrong with this picture is that this cannot be the world leadership. These people represent a minority.” Where—you know, that is an unnatural act to have, to have the world distorted to such, to such a point that white people are setting the tone and setting the pace for the rest of the world to be mere followers or, more profound than that, to be just consumers. So going to African opened up my world. You know what I’m saying? It just--it opened door after door after door. The most immediate impact, though, was a, was a very personal one. About this time, I think Chester’s coming to his senses and figuring out maybe he ought to marry me. Of course, and I’m telling him, “You need to marry me.” “Okay,” you know. [laughing] “You can’t figure out I’m the one you have to marry,” you know. Uh, and we decided to get married, or by then I tell him we need to get married. I think that’s more the way it went. Meanwhile, though, of course, I’m a smart woman. I’ve taken him home. I’m doing lots of things with him that are pure, platonic, you know, just sister/friend, brother/friend--and I tell my girls to this day, I say, “Really, if there’s a model, I’m not saying I’m it, but don’t start off in sexual relationships. Sex will confusion you. It will make you think of ugly man is all that. I mean, it’ll just blow your world, you know, because you’re sexually involved.” So Chester and I were never that. We were intellectually involved and, because of that, we were allowed to actually be friends to each other. So by the time we got around to the marriage developing, the relationship developing into something else, you know, we had a foundation. Meantime, I was taking him home a lot, my parents, my mother, my brothers and sisters . . . I mean, it’s just like “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.” We—just—it wasn’t like they came to me and said, “Oh yeah, we checked off this list”’ It was a natural kind of thing. Chester naturally became a part of my family environment so the marriage was kind of a natural consequence, so to speak. But when we got married we knew, albeit that I’m a preacher’s kid and Chester come up out of the Catholic church—by the way, Chester stopped going to the Catholic Church in 1968, the day that King died. He said he was at UK; King was murdered; he was devastated. Came home—had to get off UK’s campus, I can’t stay at the plantation—went home to Louisville and decided, after all this time he and I had been to church, decided, ‘I need something here,’ went to church. He said, ‘Not even mentioned.’ He said, ‘That did it.’ He hasn’t been since—to a couple of funerals, you know, bury uncles, aunts or something. That’s it. Just refuses to go. He said, ‘Any church that doesn’t understand how important that is . . .’ I think church has lost a lot of people like Chester and me and still are, you know, because they just aren’t real. But at any rate, uh . . .

BRINSON: Well, specifically, though, Ann, the—how did the trip influence your work at Plymouth?

GRUNDY: Well, I immediately—now what happened--the, the—logistically, you need to know this. When we came back, Jeff only stayed at Plymouth Settlement House maybe another year is what I’m thinking. Then he left to go get his doctorate. When Jeff left, things fell apart; we just didn’t know how much Jeff was holding this stuff together with dental floss. Meaning, the whole idea of the African Village Camp irritated a lot of the bourgeois black people and the United Way—it eventually became a United Way organization. Just—how—you know, that that thing hadn’t trickled down yet; this Pan African movement hadn’t quite gotten to Louisville and hadn’t seeped into, into the, deep into the community, at least not at that level when you start talking about the black bourgeois. And Plymouth Settlement House was right next door to Plymouth Presbyterian Church which is the la-di-da church, you know, just, called the silk stocking church. So Jeff we found, even though he had protected us all these years, was something of an irritant in their eyes. So when he left, the place, I mean, piece by piece was being dismantled which was just a whole grieving thing unto itself. One of the first things that happened, they put in an acting director, someone who had no skills, no vision; acting was the right word. And, uh, and within a very short time two or three people had quit; I mean, it was a small staff anyway, just quit. And, uh, oh, I quit. This time I didn’t get fired. I quit before I was fired, but my best friend on the job, Mama Ya, the storyteller—she was Gloria Bivens then—Ya was fired. So I didn’t have a chance to act it out on that level, but in the context of the city of Lexington, of Louisville—you know about the Roots and Heritage Festival here?

BRINSON: No.

GRUNDY: It’s, uh--Chester and Catherine went to Frankfort last night to receive a state award for this. The Roots and Heritage Festival is the big cultural festival; and it really has its roots, pun intended, in Louisville for us. When Chester and I returned from Lexington, here we are kind of alumni, so to speak, of the BSU, still tied into U of L; U of L by this time has a national black family conference which had been inspired by Francis Wellesley. So we had real direct relations with students and faculty at U of L. Between all of us—Bob Douglas, in particular, who was head of the art department at U of L--we formed this big city festival in Louisville. And it’s a black arts festival, African Heritage Festival is what we called it. And, uh, it died out as—I mean, it must have stayed on the level—my brother was living with me then. He was very big in terms of the drama and the writing for this. He’s, uh, quite a . . .

BRINSON: Which brother?

GRUNDY: My brother Oscar who had been at Antioch. But we were all involved in the arts movement, and the African Heritage Festival was an offspring of that; and there were things happening internationally too. There was the first African Arts Festival in Senegal that year and there were just hundreds of people from the U.S. who were going for that. And we were fundraising, sending people from all over the country for that. So, having gone to Africa and coming back immediately, we feel a real kinship with raising this money and doing on this side of the water what we can’t do on that side of the water. So we began this African Heritage Festival in Louisville and, uh, except for Bob Douglas and maybe Chester, everybody else was an outsider; so as we moved on to different places, moved to Lexington or what have you, it died out. But for about five years there this Festival was quite a striking thing. But it didn’t completely die out because it ultimately was resurrected here in Lexington. There are people who come to Louisville, who are in Louisville now, they’re friends of ours, ‘Can’t you come back to Louisville and help us do this again?’ They realize—what happened was this, and I really have to just be honest about this: the city saw how wonderful it was and they said, ‘Oh, let’s make it multi-cultural.’ Well, that was the death.

BRINSON: Did Louisville …?

GRUNDY: The City of Louisville wanted to, ‘Oh, let’s do Greeks and Italians.’ The moment that happened, and people tell us this, and we kept saying, “Look, it has to maintain its integrity. That doesn’t mean you are leaving anybody else out, but there’s a certain—America has denied race so we’ve got to just dig it up all the time and put it right in front of us.” But the moment it became multi-cultural, it got watered down. It became so commercial. You know, it was just selling hot dogs and, you know, Greek food and stuff like that. Nobody came no more. It just literally went away. There’s a lot underfoot, by the way, lots of undercurrents in Lexington to undermine this festival, to take the very integrity of the festival. It’s called Roots and Heritage because it’s on Deweese Street which is the traditional black business district. The numbers of people who have come to one of us over the—started in 1989—over all these years to have the parade where there’s always a black college band. This last year was Auburn State and Kentucky State; the battle of the bands. And they start on Deweese Street and they march all the way up and down Ohio Street and Chestnut Street, Ray Street all the way up to Bluegrass Projects and all that stuff; and they come back to where they started right there at ( ) Theater. People will say, “Don’t you want to have the parade on Main Street?” Well, we know that’s coded language. What that really means is: let’s put it down here so white people are comfortable with it. And we’re saying, “No, the strength of this parade, the strength of this festival, is that it is in the heart of the black community. These are the people you ignore and write off all the time.” So, you know, we’re always conscious of these very subtle ways to undo something.

END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO

END OF INTERVIEW