Oral History Interview with Richard Clay

ETHEL WHITE: This is a conversation with Richard Clay. We are in his office at 2500 National City Tower, in Louisville, Kentucky. It is May 15, 2001. My name is Ethel White. First of all, could we start with a brief biographical sketch of you?

RICHARD CLAY: Sure. I will be fifty in July of this year. I was born in Huntington, West Virginia. My father worked for Ashland Oil all of his working life, and we were transferred around the state in the early years of his employment. We ended up, when I was in the fifth grade, in Hopkinsville. I stayed there from fifth grade through high school, and then 1:00graduated from Hopkinsville High School in 1969; and went on to Davidson College in North Carolina. I graduated from there in 1973. I spent a year after college at Yale University Divinity School on a Rockefeller Fellowship. It was a free ride for an entire year from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation: designed for someone who ordinarily wouldn’t think of becoming a minister, but for whom the experience of being in a Seminary would be very useful. And it was for me. I came back, though, after that year, to the University of Kentucky Law School, and graduated from there in 1977. 2:00And then came with the firm of Woodward, Hobson and Fulton, where I’ve been ever since, here in Louisville. I am a former President of the Kentucky Bar Association, having served in that capacity from July 1, ‘98 through June 30, 1999. I am married to Elizabeth Clay. We have four children, Mary, who is thirteen, John, who is eleven, Beau, who is nine and Collier, who will be seven in September.

WHITE: I would like to focus on your years in Hopkinsville.

CLAY: Okay.

WHITE: If you can remember, you said you moved there in the fifth grade.

CLAY: That would have been 1960.

WHITE: Nineteen sixty, okay.

CLAY: I’m sorry, 3:00 1961.

WHITE: One. What are your earliest memories of the racial situation there? I realize you’re going to put an adult spin on it, but that’s okay.

CLAY: Right. But I’m trying to think back as a child. When we first moved there, we lived in a house on South Main Street, 2007 South Main. It was an old, bungalow style house on what was then, and in many ways still is, Hopkinsville’s Main Street. A street of really pretty old houses. Although this place, 4:00if you looked at it now, you would think, boy it needs a lot of work. And it does. And when we lived there, I think my parents kept it up pretty well; but my mental impression of it is a place that was just covered with bicycles, because there were five children in our family. All of our toys were constantly out front. My grade school, Virginia Street Elementary has been torn down. But it was one of those marvelous old schools that ought to be preserved. There were two of them in Hopkinsville that looked exactly alike, Virginia Street and I believe it was called Westside Elementary. They were brick schools with wonderful fire escapes on the outside, where you could slide down in the summertime or during the school year as well. But we would go over 5:00a lot in the summer and just slide down them. One twisted down, it was winding. The other one was a straight shoot. And you would, since you couldn’t get into the schoolhouse in the summer, literally we’d crawl up these things on our knees and then slide down. Virginia Street was all white. And it was from my house, oh, a three minute walk, which was probably the main reason that my parents bought this particular house when we first moved to Hopkinsville. We stayed in that house until I was a sophomore in high school. So, that would have been, six years. 6:00My parents then built a house out in a neighborhood called Deep Wood, where my mother still lives. My father died, exactly two years ago yesterday. I think, as I remember back and reflect back on those really early years, Virginia Street was all white. There was economic diversity and you saw that....There were kids, who I would remember would come to school without, you know, really nice clothes and who needed a lot of help. In some ways, what Kentucky is during with KERA now, where you combine 7:00grades, and you have the more experienced students helping the teachers with the younger students. It was exactly what was being done back then, although the grades weren’t combined. But they would have our teacher, both in fifth and sixth grades in that school, would have the faster of us academically, helping her coach or groom, or help the kids in the class who maybe were slower or didn’t have so many advantages. But still it was lily white. And yeah, in a very racially mixed area. Behind our house was a neighborhood of very small 8:00houses. I don’t know if it is politically correct to call them shacks or shanties, but that is indeed what they were. I haven’t been back there in years. I don’t even know if they’re still there. But it was an exclusively African-American neighborhood, and I imagine that when the big houses fronting Main Street were constructed, in many of the houses, behind them you will see a smaller frame house, sort of a shack. Which is where, I guess, people who worked in the larger houses could live. I can’t tell you the date of construction of those. 9:00I rather imagine the house we lived in was constructed late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, from the architectural style. And I think most of the houses on that street are of that vintage. Definitely post-Civil War. There are some that are kind of river boat Gothic types. It’s a beautiful old street and a lot of the houses have been fixed up and it’s more gentrified now then it was when we lived there. Many of the original families were still living on that street when I was growing up there. They no longer are. Anyway, behind us lived a man and this may be instructive of the times. I can’t tell you his last name. I knew him as Uncle George. 10:00He was elderly, black, and I was scared to death of him. Everyone sort of stayed clear of him, because he was old and he had a bad temper, or so I thought. But every Christmas, my mother would send me back with food, gloves. I can distinctly remember taking gloves to him. I vaguely, yeah, I can remember taking a flannel shirt and maybe some pajamas. I never got inside the house. I would always go to the front porch and knock on the door and he would come. I also remember 11:00and this may also, in this day and age, sound quite unpolitically correct or politically incorrect. But the legend was, and our next-door neighbor, a lady named Miss Mildred Sue Hancock, who’s long since dead. I remember her telling me this, that every month, when Uncle George’s welfare check arrived, a blue cab would appear, and he would get in the blue cab and go and pick up his girlfriend and take her for a ride. I’m embarrassed to be saying that now and yet, I saw that blue cab and I always did wonder why it came about once a month. 12:00(laughing) Maybe it’s instructive of the times as well for me to say, sadly, that as a young fifth grade child, ten or eleven, he was a very mysterious, scary figure to me. And I need--my mother’s in Europe right now--but this prompts me when she gets back, to sit her down and ask her, what happened to him: because for the life of me, I don’t know. I also can think back to, there were a lot of African-American kids my age in that neighborhood, but 13:00I had limited contact with them. They didn’t know my name. I didn’t know theirs. They went to a different school, and I went to a different school. Where we would meet, occasionally, was out on the playground of Virginia Street School, where there was a basketball goal. And I would shoot hoops, as would they. And that really was, kind of the extent of it for me in grade school. I also remember my mother telling me, and kind of laughing about it, in a very loving way, 14:00that one of....I have four younger sisters. One of them and I can’t tell you who it was, was coming back from Virginia Street. And this was after, I guess I had gone to junior high. And also, it must have been after the school system integrated, because there was--as my mother described him--just a nice looking, young black kid with her; and he was just walking along the street. And some lady telephoned my mother and inquired as to whether that was appropriate for my sister to be doing. And was my sister all right? And she felt my mother needed to know that. And my mother’s reaction was just one of rolling 15:00her eyes and shaking her head and thinking, how absurd. But back then, things were really quite separate, and I’m sure quite unequal. I do have distinct memories of going to the moving picture show. There were two of them in downtown Hopkinsville. The buildings are still there. The Alhambra Theater, which is this marvelous old place inside that’s built like a Moorish castle. And I think now the city uses it for theater productions. And then the Princess Theater, which was not quite as nice: but they both had balconies and they both had separate water fountains. And I guess they both had separate 16:00bathroom facilities. And yes, I have a horrifying memory of African-American people in a separate line, both for water and to enter the theater, where they had to sit in the balcony. That, gosh, that is an astonishing recollection, now that I think about it. I think that really takes us through grade school. I do remember the movie, To Kill A Mockingbird, and I saw that with a bunch of my friends, in the Alhambra Theater, in Hopkinsville. And that must have been around 17:00sixty-two, yeah, I would say when I was probably in the sixth grade, there abouts.

WHITE: Do you remember any reactions to it?

CLAY: I remember thinking at the time that it was the most powerful movie I’d ever seen. I teach a Middle school, Sunday school class at Second Presbyterian Church, on and off. I’ve done it....I’ll do it for a year and then take off for a year or two and then come back. But I’ve done that, really for about the last twenty years. And I’m doing it this year; my daughter is in it. And I plan before this Sunday school year is out, to show them, To Kill A Mockingbird, because I don’t think that it’s a movie that young middle schoolers 18:00watch now. Their version of To Kill A Mockingbird, is probably, Remember the Titans, which is an excellent movie, dealing with racial themes.

WHITE: How, how do you remember things developing as you moved out of elementary school? You said you went to junior high, separate from high school?

CLAY: I went to Koffman, K O F F M A N, I think, gosh, I think that’s how it was spelled, Junior High School. It was the former Hopkinsville High School. And then when Hopkinsville High School had a new building, they moved the junior high into Koffman. And it was for seventh, eighth and ninth grades, and that was not integrated either, at that time, as strange as that might sound. 19:00There was a totally African-American high school, called Crispus Attucks, A T T U C K S, named after the great black, Revolutionary War hero. I know that was a high school. I don’t know if the African-American junior high kids were in that school or not. I suspect that they were. In any event, it was about that same time that I acquired a paper route. And I had, gosh, from seventh, eighth, ninth 20:00and tenth grades, I had a paper route. The first three years of that route were on Main Street. And then the last year of the route was out in Deep Wood, because by that time, my parents had built their house, we’d moved, and so during my tenth grade year, I had that. That really didn’t change my racial perspectives, the paper route. But I can remember carrying the papers and reading articles about the Civil Rights movement in other parts 21:00of the country. I honestly can’t say, and I think I would have remembered this, but I can’t say that I recall anything about how, what was going on in the outer world impacted Hopkinsville. And Hopkinsville really did seem to me, in some ways like the Deep South and it still does. But in junior high school I wasn’t aware of any racial tensions within the city. I’m sure now looking back, they were there. But in my relatively affluent, relatively 22:00removed from reality type home, where the parents were highly educated and the kids were never hurting for a bicycle or a meal, it didn’t seem....It just wasn’t part of my experience, other than on occasion....I had to go weekly to the newspaper, I believe it was on Saturday mornings to pay their share of the collections. I take that back, it was monthly that I would go. I collected frequently from my paper route clients, weekly 23:00in cash or change. I think the paper at that time, it seems to me like it was thirty-five cents a week, if you can imagine. Because I remember one of the people, Miss Bertha Casey....I tried to get all of my customers up and running on a monthly, because it was easier for me, but Miss Bertha wouldn’t do it. So I had to collect change from her, weekly and it was thirty-five cents. And she was one of the wealthier ladies in Hopkinsville, so that’s probably an example of how she hung onto her wealth. But anyway (laughing) the, I do remember there being, when I would go to pay my money to the paper, there would be a couple of African-American paperboys in there, too, probably my age, maybe older, but covering different routes from different parts of time--of town. 24:00Now, what I did realize in junior high, was the huge disparities of wealth and education in Hopkinsville. It had a very pronounced upper class and a small one, and then a large underclass, and it was all economically based. At Koffman, I quickly knew, you know, that there were a limited number of kids in advanced classes, 25:00who did a lot of the same things together, church youth groups, boy scouts. And I was in a scout troop. I was an Eagle, but my scout troop was never integrated. My church was never integrated. We went to First Presbyterian Church in Hopkinsville. It’s not that African-Americans would have been excluded. It was more a combination of, I don’t think it occurred to anybody in either race, at that time, that they should come to “our” church or “our” scout troop. Am I being clear?

WHITE: Uh huh. Wait, let me just ask you about servants. Did you have 26:00any black servants or did you know any black servants?

CLAY: Yes, we had black servants.

WHITE: And was that, once again, just sort of the way it was?

CLAY: That was the way it was. My mother had a lady, who came, well, we lived in Owensboro from first through fourth grade. And the lady, who worked for my mother, was Nancy Smith. She was so bossy and so full of love. And I just, I adored her. My mother was not one of these ladies who wanted help day in and day out. She had someone come once a week. I mean there were five kids in our family and it was important to conserve resources. But she did have a lady come one day a week to clean and iron, and 27:00that continued, of course, in Hopkinsville. And then I guess by the time I was in ninth grade, we had Mamie. I can’t tell you Mamie’s last name, but Mamie came twice a week, because we were all getting older and messier. And that was a great help to my mother. I know that, I can remember she, they paid Mamie’s social security, handled all of the Federal ID forms and tax things that you have to do. That was long before the days of Kimble Wood or Zoe Beard. So, I guess my parents ought to be applauded 28:00for doing what was right. And Mamie was a big part of our lives. I do remember a couple of things that strike me as funny now, in hindsight. I am scared to death of snakes. I hate snakes. But I came back from college one summer, and I happened to be at home one day and Mamie was in the house and she looked, she was cleaning a window, and she looked out the window and saw a snake in the front yard. And I bravely sallied forth to kill the thing and I did. Ugh. I also can remember driving Mamie home from work, picking her up some days. She lived in a housing project. And that housing project 29:00was on the north part of the city. At that time it was relatively new. And my mother and father moved heaven and earth to get Mamie in there, by calling authorities constantly and hounding them, until finally a place came open for her. It’s now, you know, I pass it when I come in to visit my mother, that project is still up there, off the, you can see it from the Pennyrile Parkway, as you’re coming in. And it doesn’t appear to me now to be quite so nice. That seems to me an antiquated way of dealing with housing for poor people.

WHITE: At what point did your safe, cozy, happy 30:00world being to be a little bit upended?

CLAY: When I was a sophomore at Hopkinsville High School, some of this is from memory, Ethel, so I think I was a sophomore. It may have been announced when I was in the ninth grade, that Attucks High School would be closed down and that the high school and all the schools would become thoroughly integrated.

WHITE: And this year was what? Early, where are we now? Early seventies, late sixties?

CLAY: Let’s see this would have been....I graduated from high school in ‘69, so this would have been around ‘66. Maybe the announcement was made ‘65. 31:00And I don’t remember full integration taking place until my junior year in high school, which would have been ‘sixty-eight. So I have a feeling that Hopkinsville was perhaps slower in coming to full integration than many parts of the Deep South. But that probably, I don’t think that’s an unkind reflection on the city, so much, as it’s a statement of reality, in that Kentucky was not the focus, as were places like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia. It was a time of great upheaval. We were going 32:00to look at colleges in Virginia the summer of my junior year. And the most exciting part of the trip for me, the part that I had looked forward to the most, was we were going to be in Washington for a few days at the end of the trip. But halfway through the trip, news of--this was the summer of ‘sixty-eight--it could have been the summer of the non-violent protest in D.C., led by Martin Luther King. I’m not sure of that and my memory is fuzzy. I believe ‘sixty-eight was the summer that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And then Martin Luther King would have been assassinated, what, my senior year, ‘69? 33:00WHITE: Same year.

CLAY: Same year. Okay, then he would have been later in ‘68. That’s right.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO CLAY: You’ve corrected me and it could be right. It could be that Martin Luther King died first and then Bobby Kennedy in 1968. But it was simply a horrible, scary year. And Dad announced--we had rented this huge camper bus--the interstate system was not completed. We had gotten stuck on top of some mountain, as we were going through Eastern Kentucky from I think, Middlesboro. My mother wanted to go to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, because she was doing a paper 34:00for some literary club on John Fox, Junior. And his sister, at the time, was still alive and living in Big Stone Gap. And Mama wanted to go meet her and interview her, much as you are doing here today. (Laughter) So anyway, I think it was about in Big Stone Gap that the plumbing went out on this camper bus. I was at my sisters’ throats. It was becoming the vacation from Hell. And during it, at some point, Dad announced that we weren’t going to go to Washington, because it simply wasn’t safe. Whether that in actuality was true, or whether he was just tired of the vacation and wanted to come home earlier, I’ll never know. (Laughing) But anyway, my exposure 35:00was from reading those newspapers. My exposure to the world was through The Kentucky New Era, the Hopkinsville paper, and The Courier Journal, which we received in the morning. Every once in a while, my father, who was relatively conservative, would get upset with The Courier and threaten to switch over to The Nashville Tennessean. And you have to remember that for a person in Hopkinsville, Louisville is remote and in many ways, not where our action is. Hopkinsville rotates or tilts towards Nashville. So that much as someone in Shelbyville or Bardstown 36:00would come to Louisville for a specialist’s care in medicine or perhaps legal matters, in many, many ways people in Hopkinsville look towards Nashville in that same light. We down there got Nashville radio, Nashville television, Nashville, weather. And Nashville, perhaps, was our link to the outer world much more so than Louisville. But anyhow, what that has to do with all of this, was that we still though, despite the proximity to Nashville, thought of ourselves 37:00as Kentuckians. Now Hopkinsville, demographically, is quite different and also geographically from the rest of the state or most of it. In Christian County, where Hopkinsville is the county seat, you’ve got the northern part of the county, which is very hilly, rugged. The farms there are small. In the southern part of the county, and downtown sits on, kind of, I’d say the fault line. The northern part of the city is on a hill and then it’s flat, the downtown area, which is rather interesting to me how that developed. Anyway, the farms in the southern part of the county were much, much larger and the soil 38:00is some of the richest and most beautiful, black, loamy soil in the state. It is the place of large tobacco farms, large corn farms, they raise a lot of soy beans, a lot of hay. Because of the richness of that soil and it stretches over into Warren County, Logan County, Todd County, where Elkin is the county seat, Christian County and over into Trigg, where Cadiz is. All of those counties have this incredibly rich soil. In Hopkinsville it meant, unfortunately, 39:00prior to the Civil War, for a slave based economy. And there were marvelous historical examples, there are, of what this meant for the city. In the Civil War, for example, at that time there were two Presbyterian churches. We went to one of them. The other one had become, by the point I was growing up, I think, a Salvation Army church. One was the Northern church, one was the Southern church. One kept Union soldiers, one served 40:00as a Civil War hospital for Confederate soldiers. The one I went to, First Presbyterian though, was this old beautiful, and it was the Northern sympathisizing church. The Night Riders came through at a later date. They were small farmers, who were being victimized, some large ones, too, by the Duke tobacco interests. And I can’t tell you I’ve ever seen them, but I’ve been told in the First Presbyterian Church of Hopkinsville, that there are bullet holes in some of the stained glass windows where the Night Riders shot them through one night. 41:00But that was their way of protesting the low prices that the tobacco trusts were insisting upon. It’s also a region of literary value. Robert Penn Warren grew up in Guthrie, which is over in, I think it is Todd County. It’s not more than fifteen or twenty miles from Hopkinsville. I can say with some degree of confidence that a marvelous old lawyer in Hopkinsville, Seldon Trimble, who’s dead now, has a connection with Robert Penn Warren. The Mr. Trimble I knew, 42:00was Seldon Trimble the Fourth. And when I knew him I was in high school and college. He was a friend of my parents, older than they were. I think he died right after Elizabeth and I got married, because I remember there was a party for us; and he and Mrs. Trimble came. He was kind of a hero of mine. He had gone to Swarthmore and then Yale Law School, met Mrs. Trimble, fell in love with her, didn’t stay in Yale. And I think his father, old Mr. Trimble the Third, mandated that he return home. And Mr. Trimble finished law school at the University of Louisville Law School. Anyhow, the family had a rich history of contributing to the Arts in Hopkinsville, 43:00Literature. Anything that was noble and good and true, the Trimbles were behind, I thought. And many there think so and still do. His legend is great. He was the trainer of a Circuit Judge, Tom Sawyers. Judge Sawyers’ dad was Mr. Trimble’s first law partner. And then Tom, who also went to Swarthmore, was Mr. Trimble’s law partner until he became a Circuit Judge. He was the kind of Circuit judge that was so good, that the Supreme Court of Kentucky would simply lift his opinions and adopt them en toto. I can think of one instance where that was done. The lawyers loved him down there, because he would try 44:00cases and do a great job. He died young, I think in his mid-fifties or late fifties, perhaps. But anyway, Mister....That’s a frolic and a detour. Mr. Trimble’s dad, the Mr. Trimble the Third, I’d always heard, I have no way of verifying it, paid to put Robert Penn Warren through college, Yale. Warren in his writing certainly understands the area as well as anybody. We would have, I’m rambling a bit here and you can help me get back on track in a minute. But we would have as a high school, 45:00our church picnics would be over a county away, again in Todd County in the little town of Fairview, which is where the Jefferson Davis Memorial is. As you will recall, he was born there, meaning that Kentucky was the mother of two presidents, Lincoln and then the president of the Confederacy, Davis. We quit having church picnics there, as I became a junior or a senior, because the times had changed. And the Presbyterian church was such that our ministers I see as great heroes and leaders 46:00at that time, who almost uniformly throughout the South encouraged racial understanding. We were blessed at First Church with a minister named George Cooley, C O O L E Y. He is still alive and lives in Florida, at least the last I heard he was. Reverend Cooley was quiet. His sons were my age. He had moved to Hopkinsville, right as Hopkinsville High School had fully integrated. And I think that Christian County High School did as well. A person you ought to talk to if you haven’t already is Ray Burse. 47:00Ray grew up in Hopkinsville. He went to Christian County. He and I are the same age. When he was a senior there, I was a senior at Hop-town. He went to Centre. I went to Davidson. He became a Rhodes scholar. I didn’t. Interestingly, I think you would see growing up in Hopkinsville through his perspective as a very bright, engaging lawyer, who happens to be African-American. I think that could be very interesting. Ahead of me by one year, was Darryl Banks. Darryl was also black. Darryl graduated from Hop-town 48:00in ‘68. So he was at the city high school, Hopkinsville High. Ray was at the county high school. Those two high schools and that dichotomy still exists and there is an intense sports rivalry between the two in every way. Darryl went on to Coe College in Iowa, C O E. Darryl Banks also became a Rhodes Scholar. So Hopkinsville had back-to-back, African-American Rhodes scholars. That is not a small feat for a town of twenty-five thousand people, at the time. I think now we’re up to around....And I keep saying we’re, and I haven’t lived there in 49:00twenty-four years, but it is still home to me. And I haven’t resolved in my own mind, what I’ll do when my mother dies. She’s seventy-seven now, I mean we don’t live forever. And how I’ll maintain my sense of connection with it. And it’s very important to me that I do so. Anyhow, something good must have been happening to have produced a Darryl Banks, a Ray Burse. In my school, behind me a year was Linda McHenry, whose father was an African-American lawyer. I think the only 50:00African-American lawyer in town. So along with the things that were not pretty and nice, there were some wonderful things that were happening. I think integration hit fully, as I’ve said earlier in this interview, my junior year in high school. And as I look back, it is totally understandable to me why we had racial trouble in our high school. Because “they” were being brought to “our” high school. 51:00As opposed to closing both high schools down and building a brand new one where everyone came together. Of course, we were already in the new high school with totally up-to-date facilities, including an Olympic size swimming pool.

WHITE: Do you remember any of the commentary about that? “They” coming to “your” high school and why?

CLAY: Yeah, well, the explanation was that it had been forced on the city by whom I couldn’t tell you now. And that Attucks had to be closed down. My understanding 52:00was that the kids who went to Attucks, didn’t want to leave it, that they loved it, that it was a very important part of their community’s life: but it was a vestige of separate and exceedingly unequal and it had to go.

WHITE: Well now are you, are you essentially saying that the perception on the part at least of whites, well....The perception at least on the part of whites was that everything was basically okay and so why were they being forced to do this? And the blacks did not want to leave their high school, and so did they feel the same way? I mean, what do you think their feelings were?

CLAY: Yeah, I think there was a feeling, Ethel, I think there was a feeling to some extent, 53:00“Why won’t the outside world leave us alone?” Why is this being forced on us? Now again, keep in mind I am speaking through the perspective of a junior in high school or sophomore in high school.

WHITE: What was the press saying?

CLAY: That is interesting.

WHITE: Or the media.

CLAY: I don’t recall the press saying a lot of anything. I do remember in my junior year I was vice president of my high school student body. I became president my senior year. 54:00When I was president, I wrote an article and the editor of the paper, a gentleman by the name of Joe Dorris was kind enough to print it. I don’t...

WHITE: This is the student newspaper?

CLAY: Yeah, no, no. This was the town newspaper.

WHITE: Oh, the town newspaper, okay.

CLAY: I think Mr. Dorris was wise enough to realize that there were some problems, but the newspaper was and is owned by the Wood family. They are friends of my parents and of mine. They are wonderful people. At the time, Mrs. Thomas Wood and Mrs. Walker Wood, I believe they were the ladies who owned the paper. Their husbands 55:00were brothers, if I am not mistaken. And I think by that time both Mister Woods were dead and the widows owned the paper, but Mr. Dorris clearly was in charge of the day-to-day operation and perhaps even the editorial content. I don’t know what kind of editorial modus operandi they had. It’s a small town newspaper. It was a daily, except it was not published on Sundays. It’s certainly not like The Courier Journal or The Atlanta Constitution at the time, where you had huge editorial boards, unlimited funds from the Bingham family, 56:00in the case of The Courier Journal, going into the editorial content, and debates and discussions as you do in editorial meetings. That paper in Hopkinsville didn’t have that luxury. But Mr. Dorris was kind enough to print an article, and I don’t have a copy of it anymore; my mother may. But it was, I think I called it The Sounds of Silence, and it was taken from that Simon and Garfunkel song. And it dealt with the racial problems we were having in our high school: and there were problems, and I’ll go into those. But how it, people needed to talk about it. 57:00It probably was a fairly naive little piece as I look back on it: but how we needed to be open and talk about our problems, rather than cover them up with silence. Anyway, what happened was the kids from Attucks arrived. They, there were some wonderful athletes for the football and basketball teams, but none of them were on Student Council, none of them, initially, were cheerleaders; and it was still a 58:00very lily white environment, as far as leadership was concerned, and what resentment that must have triggered.

WHITE: Were there any manifestations?

CLAY: Yeah, my senior year they had to call in the police one day. I think there had been a fight in a bathroom. I don’t know if it was white on black, black on white, white on white, black on black, but somehow or another, word immediately leaked out, some kid must have called a parent, that we were having a riot in the high school. And in my yearbook, which is at my mother’s house in Hopkinsville (Laughing) there 59:00is a page, I think it’s a picture of me sitting on the steps in the lobby of the high school....Maybe not. This is some from memory. (Laughing) You can tell I don’t get out my yearbook a lot and look at it. But it’s called--one of my friends wrote, “the riot page”; and it was just a code word referring back to the day that Hop-town High had a riot. It wasn’t much of a riot, indeed I don’t think it was a riot at all. But the police were called in. The principal was a wonderful guy named Cletus Hubbs. And Mr. Hubbs was the right man for this particular job. He was a very healing influence. And I don’t think I, 60:00I’m sure as a kid I didn’t sense now about him what I do now. If it hadn’t been for him, the situation could have been much, much worse. Quickly, and how he did this, I’m not positive. The cheerleading squad was integrated. Elections were held and people of color were on Student Council, not many, but some. Most of that was my senior year, but some happened my junior year.

WHITE: Now, how did he get those results? Do you think? 61:00CLAY: I don’t know what went behind the scenes with the School Board. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes with his own faculty.

WHITE: But to get...

CLAY: I know also, the faculty was integrated my junior year, thoroughly.

WHITE: But, but, to hold elections that resulted in African-Americans on Student Council is interesting. I mean, you can’t really manipulate that.

CLAY: No, you can’t.

WHITE: He must have created some sort of an atmosphere.

CLAY: It would be interesting to know if we ended up having a quota system or just how that was engineered. And for the life of me, I can’t remember. People you might ask, who would have....There is a lawyer in Hopkinsville, named David Arvin. David was teaching at Hop-town High 62:00at the time. I think I had him either for Social Studies or Biology. I can’t remember. I think Biology. Ray Burse could tell you what was going on over at County, and I expect the same things. There is a guy here in Louisville, named Bobby Thurmond, T H U R M O N D, who was a year ahead of me in high school and was president of the student body, when I was a junior, and I was his vice president. Bobby’s family was extremely, uniquely instrumental as being white....A 63:00Caucasian family who were very, very, very instrumental in the civil rights movement in that city. His father, I believe, was president or manager of Blue Lake Block Company, which was a large concrete and stone company, and so had some economic clout.

WHITE: What was the civil rights movement in Hopkinsville?

CLAY: In Hopkinsville? That’s a good question.

WHITE: Was this a quiet behind the scenes kind of thing?

CLAY: Yeah, at first, then in sixty-eight, as it was erupting all over the nation, it erupted in Hopkinsville, particularly in the high schools. 64:00A Human Relations Commission was created and George Cooley at our church was very instrumental and I think served as chair of it. The Thurmonds were Catholic and I think that whoever the priest was at the time, undoubtedly was instrumental. And you had the marvelous example, and I told you earlier about Mr. Trimble training Tom Sawyers as Circuit Judge. But a little known fact is that Mr. Trimble also trained 65:00one of Kentucky’s great Statesmen, Ned Breathitt. Governor Breathitt practiced law in Hopkinsville with Mr. Trimble and the firm was Trimble, Sawyers and Breathitt for a number of years. And all of this was going on while, well had been percolating while Breathitt was Governor. They moved back to Hopkinsville my junior year. I know that because his daughter, Linda, is my age.

WHITE: They the Breathitts?

CLAY: Yeah. And they stayed through her senior year, and then he moved to D.C. and became Vice President of Public Affairs for Southern Railway. 66:00This Human Relations Commission, don’t ask me what they did. I don’t know. I know that they probably did a lot of talking. But that was what was important at the time, that people talked.

END OF SIDE TWO TAPE ONE BEGIN SIDE ONE TAPE TWO CLAY: The demographics of the community are different from the rest of Kentucky. I can’t tell you exactly what the population of the African-American community in Hopkinsville currently is, but I’ve heard estimates of it being right at forty percent. At the time, 67:00there was little industry in Hopkinsville. It was still predominantly an agrarian economy, however, that has changed dramatically. It began changing dramatically when Governor Breathitt was in office and Catherine Peden was his Commerce Commissioner and suddenly new businesses started coming into Hopkinsville and bringing fresh thinking with them. Now, the seeds that Governor Breathitt planted have really taken off. There are a number of Industrial Parks that have come in, Phelps, Dodge, Magnet Wire Corporation was maybe the 68:00first big one. Evanite, Boeing, Phillips products, those came in when I was in high school or college.

WHITE: Let me interrupt you and make sure I understand. This was deliberate policy on the part of the Breathitt Administration?

CLAY: Absolutely.

WHITE: Okay.

CLAY: The other deliberate policy on the part of the Breathitt Administration that affected Hopkinsville was the Pennyrile Parkway, stretching from Henderson, Evansville in the North to Hopkinsville in the South and going through Madisonville. That made it vastly easier for us to get out of town and come up to Lexington and Louisville or go to Henderson or Evansville. It opened up Hopkinsville in some ways more to the outside world. 69:00And anytime you get new plants coming into a town, you get new managers with families, who want to make sure the schools are good and who want to be part of the community, if they are worth keeping. And my sense, and keep in mind I’ve been gone twenty-four years, if you count Law school, leaving Law school or maybe over thirty, if you count not being there during college and Law school. It has changed in that the economy nationwide has caught up, or Hopkinsville has caught up with the economy. And it is a more transient 70:00community. Another thing that is probably good for the city, is the presence of Fort Campbell, between Hopkinsville and Clarksville, Tennessee. I think Clarksville has benefited more economically from Fort Campbell, probably because the city fathers and mothers of Clarksville were more aggressive about doing business with the people of Fort Campbell. Now, everywhere you go in Hopkinsville, it is racially diverse, in the workplace, in the schools, to some extent, I think, in government. 71:00And there are also migratory workers from Mexico in the tobacco season. And there is an enormous racial, ethnic mix from all over the United States, shopping in the Hopkinsville Walmart, for example or buying cars from automobile dealerships, one of whom I know for sure, has a Spanish speaking person on staff. So that, when dealing with Spanish speaking people, who want to come in and buy a car, there is someone there to deal with them.

WHITE: Let me ask you something, 72:00that just occurred to me. You said Ned Breathitt was from the area.

CLAY: Oh, he’s from Hopkinsville.

WHITE: Yeah.

CLAY: And you ought to talk to him before this is over.

WHITE: He, it was under him...Somebody is doing that. Under him, the Kentucky Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

CLAY: That’s right.

WHITE: Nineteen sixty-six, excuse me.

CLAY: Sixty-six?

WHITE: Two years after the federal legislation. And he, I mean many people have said that he wanted it all along and it was a matter of Legislature catching up and etcetera. Do you think it’s a coincidence that he apparently had the views that he had and has and that he was from the area? Do you think there were some lessons he learned from living in the area? You know him a little bit, but not well? Is that right?

CLAY: I don’t think...Oh no, I know him very well.

WHITE: Very well.

CLAY: His wife was, I guess, my mother’s 73:00best friend.

WHITE: Well, I know you can’t speak for him.

CLAY: I can’t speak for him.

WHITE: Do you see any connection between Breathitt and the area and events the way they developed?

CLAY: Yes, absolutely. You cannot practice law with somebody like Seldon Trimble and not have a brain and a heart and a soul. And Governor Breathitt has all of those things. He wanted a new constitution for this state and he wanted that civil rights legislation put through. He got the Civil Rights Act. He did not get the new constitution. But I think history will look back 74:00on him and I think already does, in combination with Governor Coombs and Governor Wetherby and Earl Clements as the great Kentucky governors of the twentieth century.

WHITE: All relatively close together.

CLAY: All relatively close together and that had something to do with it, too. They were all part of a faction of the Democratic party in power, that was more progressive and more enlightened, that was informed by Barry Bingham, Sr., and the local Courier Journal. And that was playing, they were politicians, 75:00but they were also smart enough, I think, to be aware that history looks up to people and looks back on people who tried to do the right thing.

WHITE: Do you remember any, with a native son in the Governor’s mansion in the mid to late sixties, sorry, early, mid sixties, did The New Era, did The Kentucky New Era begin to cover these issues to a greater degree? Do you remember?

CLAY: I don’t recall that it did. And I think when the Breathitts came back from being governor, it must have been frustrating. 76:00He’s too much of a gentleman to say this, and now in Hopkinsville there is, every year, Ned Breathitt Day and he comes back and he loves the town. But I think there, maybe for a while, when he came back and had to practice law after being the most important man in the state of Kentucky for four years, and I’m not sure whether a lot of people received them with open arms when he came back.

WHITE: Because of his civil rights stance?

CLAY: Possibly, yes. And then possibly because if someone goes away and makes good, so to speak, there are always going to be people who resent or detract. 77:00But I’ve always wondered, was it hard on them, were they lonely when they came back? Did they feel still a part of the community? And I don’t want to be invasive of his privacy and these are questions really that he should be asked. But probably for him and for their family, the wisest thing was to leave and move to Washington and make a good living there and kind of get away from Kentucky for a while. You know, as I look back, 78:00those were tumultuous times, years that he served as governor. I know that my little tiny experience of being president of my student body that year, was a very lonely experience for me. Because there wasn’t a lot as a high school kid I could do to enhance racial relations, other than try to be kind and polite and look for ways to involve the African-American students in what was going on in the high school, as far as, student government was concerned.

WHITE: Now were you part of that, of that attempt to....?

CLAY: Oh definitely yes.

WHITE: Now, what form did it take for you...

CLAY: For me?

WHITE: ...as a student leader 79:00and did you have any support from your fellow students or faculty or whatever?

CLAY: Well, these are all anecdotal, what I’m beginning to talk about now. The loneliest, most bitter experience of my high school life was being perceived as someone--being perceived by people, who I guess were my peers--white, high school kids, who looked at me as someone betraying the cause, so to speak. And wanting to reach out and have a totally 80:00unified student body.

WHITE: What cause? The lily white cause, was that the cause you betrayed?

CLAY: It was fueled by parents. I mean, we were kids.

WHITE: But betraying the cause means specifically the racial cause?

CLAY: Yes. I, to this day, will think that the day we had that alleged riot, was nothing more than fueled by some redneck parents, who called in the police. People, either uneducated, or educated but threatened and scared of integration; what it meant to their way of life, or just flat out racist. 81:00One night, and I saw this in my own home. Both of my parents have Master’s Degrees and were by their, the standards at the time, very well educated and very, relatively open minded, my mother much more so than my dad. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I think I ought to. One night, I went on a high school trip. I don’t know for what. I can’t even remember where. I think it was Lexington. We left early that morning and came back. A teacher drove us. 82:00It was me, probably another white kid; and then a black kid named Upshaw Briggs, who was in my class. Upshaw was a marvelous trumpet player, trumpet or trombone in the Hopkinsville High School Band, and a close friend of mine. I’ve lost contact with him. I’d love to know where he is and what he’s doing. The high school teacher brought us all back. Upshaw lived out in the country. I said, “Take us to my house, I’ll drive Upshaw home.” My parents were having a dinner party. I bring Upshaw in the house 83:00and there is some dessert in the kitchen, and we sit down and I fix him a piece of pie or whatever it was my mother was serving for the party. (Laughing) And we ate it. My father came in and was cordial and greeted him. I then took Upshaw home. It was to my certain knowledge, the first time an African-American had ever been treated as a guest in my home, my parents’ home. I came back from taking Upshaw home and my father let me have it. Now this is the same father, who had come out to the high school on the day of the alleged riot, to make 84:00sure I was all right and to tell me I was doing a good job as president of my student body and that he was proud of me. So you can see how conflicted he was.

WHITE: Now when he let you have it, he said, “You do not bring African or blacks or whatever he called them, into your home?” CLAY: That’s right.

WHITE: Into our home as guests?

CLAY: As guests. That was a very formative experience for me in my dealings with my father. And helped me separate, if you will, and become independent from him, which is part of what growing up is all about. I hope all four of my children do that with me, but maybe not in quite so starkly racist ways. 85:00But Dad changed, and it was the softening influence of my four sisters that did it for him, and my mother. And here is the story of that. I went to Davidson, and I have to tell you, in some ways, Davidson was a welcome relief to me. At that time, it was all male, a thousand students, of whom maybe at most ten were African-American. 86:00It was a place where people, ‘gladly learned and gladly teached,’ to paraphrase Chaucer. It was idyllic. All of the, my Freshman year, it was idyllic, because all of the turmoil of the sixties didn’t really filtrate into Davidson. Now I came back my Sophomore year, nineteen seventy and suddenly there was marijuana in the dormitories, bell bottom pants replaced khakis, everybody’s hair was longer. And the 87:00late sixties, early seventies had caught up with an impact. The college went co-ed, the college beefed up, dramatically, the number of African-American students that it had. And by the time I left, Davidson had, was becoming the stellar academic institution it is today. It is a huge part of my life and my formative experience. But I came back after my Freshman year. Dad got me a job as a roustabout for Ashland Oil, on an oil field outside of Henderson. I lived with our cousin, Candace Priest, who was a widow. And dug holes up to my shoulder, fixed leaky underground 88:00pipe in corn fields, that must have been an environmental nightmare. And I’m probably a walking, toxic torte now. But that aside, I came home, it was on a Sunday, we were having Sunday dinner. My sister, Mary, was a cheerleader at Hopkinsville High School. In fact, all four of my sisters were cheerleaders. Being a cheerleader in Hopkinsville is a major accomplishment, something to be prized more than rubies, at least at the time. On her squad was an African-American girl and they were practicing in my parents’ backyard. Our family....They 89:00were going to practice in our backyard. Our family was seated at the dinner table for Sunday dinner. And we had the traditional, Hopkinsville Sunday dinner after church, every Sunday of my life. And in walked this African-American friend of my sister, Mary’s. I don’t know her name now, can’t remember. My father rose from the table and proudly introduced her to me. My junior year, I’ve told you about Mamie. Well, Mamie was still with us, working with my parents. My junior year, I came home and I was doing a sort 90:00of....My major was Economics and I had a concentration in South Asian studies. And we had a very, very dark skinned, Indian, ( ) professor, who taught Indian Art. His name was Job Thomas, at Davidson and he was there that year. And he brought his wife, with her beautiful sari and their little daughter and they stayed overnight with us. Now George Adkins, who you may have heard of, he was our State Auditor for a while and was at Humana for a while. At that time, George was Mayor of Hopkinsville. And he was a Rotarian, as was Dad. Dad had George over for dinner to meet the family. And 91:00it would have been unthinkable, I don’t know, not unthinkable, but I think my father would have thought once, twice and a hundred times about even entertaining Job and his wife, a few years earlier. Then Dad did something that I thought was truly wonderful, he wanted to make a difference; 92:00but he wanted to do it in his own way. He was not about to be dictated to by people who he would cynically refer to as do-gooders. And what he did was found the Hopkinsville Junior Achievement. He raised the money for it, single-handedly, by going merchant to merchant, business to business and saw to it that it was put together. I don’t know what’s become of it now. I don’t know if it is still there. But he started it and it was all inclusive, 93:00black and white. And he had the foresight to realize that where truly effective integration was going to take place, was not only in the schools, but in the workplace. And that as people learned from each other in school and at work, gradually over time, this huge ball and chain of racism that we carry, would be broken. And that really to me, seems an appropriate place to stop this interview, 94:00but for one other thing. And that is, my mother. Now, Mom is a graduate of Randolph Macon Women’s College and then University of Kentucky with a Master’s in Education. She has a very soft heart, but a very strong mind. The five of us, at some point, and Dad was a manager for Ashland. He was the manager of the Western District of Kentucky. I guess he made an okay salary, but I can’t imagine that he made a whole lot back then. 95:00To supplement the income as all of us were beginning college, she went back and started teaching school. And she taught, initially at Westside, but then moved over to Belmont. Belmont is up at the top of a hill, overlooking downtown Hopkinsville. Both Westside and Belmont would be categorized as poor schools. Westside has since been closed down and torn down. She became, and I’ve described her in writing in an article I wrote for the Bar Association, kind of a one woman mission. Because she saw, better than any of us, 96:00and in a more up close and personal way, the truly staggering economic and educational disparities in Hopkinsville.

WHITE: Racially?

CLAY: Racially, and not just racially. There are, there are disparities that transcend racial lines.

WHITE: Okay, all kinds.

CLAY: ...in Hopkinsville, just as there are all over the state of Kentucky, but especially racially, there. And every Christmas that I would come home, from my Freshman year in college, really until she retired in the early years 97:00of my law practice. I guess that spanned probably, ‘sixty-nine through ‘eighty. She was wrapping up gloves, stocking hats, warm winter coats. And we were delivering them to the houses of children that she was teaching. And I am still astonished and touched, when I run into someone, be they black, white, poor or rich, that she’s taught 98:00and they tell me how as a first grader....She taught first grade. They remember. And you do remember your first grade teacher. I’m sure you remember yours. I remember mine. So that is the story of my family and Hopkinsville and race. I look back with horror at some of it, you know, those separate lines for drinking fountains and balconies. I didn’t at the time. I didn’t know any better. But now I just am in a state of utter disbelief that, that ever was part of me, but it was. I look back 99:00with a sense of forgiveness and understanding at my father, and also a sense of pride that he evolved. I look at my mother as a genuine paragon of virtue in that town, who still at seventy-seven sets an example for everybody who knows her. And I wish for my children, who live in the East end of Louisville, right off Mockingbird Valley Road, in an area that is as lily white as it comes, 100:00and as privileged. In a way I wonder if Elizabeth and I are making a terrible mistake.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO CLAY: Keep in mind, three of my children go to Kentucky Country Day and one goes to Chance. We go to Second Presbyterian Church. We go to a country club nearby, that has no African-American members. There is absolutely, positively no economic diversity, much less racial diversity in the part of Louisville in which we live. Given all that, am I doing my children a disservice? 101:00Would they be better off living in a small town, be it Shelbyville or Bardstown, where despite economic and racial diversity, there is more of a sense of community and closeness, because of this knowledge, we’re a small town and we’re all in it together? And I did have a sense of that in Hopkinsville growing up. That like it or not, the African-American and the white races are joined at the hip, and that if 102:00the town is to survive and prosper, the races must get along. The educational standards must be equal for everybody. The economic opportunities must be available, and to a large extent they are. They have improved dramatically. And this state can take pride in that. But I go back to the question that haunts me, are my children missing out, that there is not a mysterious, dark, scary Uncle George in their lives? That they haven’t 103:00felt that their white friends were excluding them or talking about them behind their back, because they had African-American friends. Two of them, Mary and John, went to Brandeis, Mary through fifth grade, John through third, here in Louisville, which is in the West end. They’ve had that experience, but not hardly to the extent I did. I don’t know. It’s something that’s going to plague me, and that Elizabeth and I are alert to and are always interested and delighted, every time they go on a church mission trip. But that doesn’t cut the mustard. Their experience is going to be different from mine. 104:00END TAPE TWO SIDE TWO END OF INTERVIEW