Oral History Interview with Al Smith

AL SMITH: …matter of history lesson, history is, you know, we lived in Russellville until 1980 when we went to Washington. And then we moved to London and were there six years, and we're still publishing the Russellville paper and four or five others in our company. And now I am old enough where people come to (laughing) to see what we remember about life as it was in Logan County and Western Kentucky when you. . . . well, I confide to people is that the real story of comment on Kentucky is that it is based on what you and I learned in the Logan County Courthouse and the City Hall and the School Board offices, the hospital, uh, and covering the Chamber of Commerce in the 19. . . well, really in the fifties, sixties, seventies, you know. And I know there is nothing really more important than safety for our children, and so I don't want to divert but 1:00a minute or two, if I may, from the safety issue of--and I urge people not only to use those seatbelts but also to make sure they are doing the right thing with child restraint belts. I'm talking to a lady named Ethel White from Louisville who is an oral historian, and really a historian. And she's working on a project involving The History of Civil Rights and Change in Kentucky; and she's in my house because we're talking about change in rural Kentucky where the beginning of efforts to be fairer in employment and in civil rights practices involving public life, particularly employment and educational opportunities for African Americans. And the reason I call you, I was trying to get you to check your memory against mine as to when you 2:00and I began to see more participation in leadership, I mean in the. . . .integrated leadership of public affairs in Russellville in Logan County, the hiring of black policemen, of a deputy sheriff, the arrival on the School Board of Dr. Oakley; and I was trying to get the dates together and who else. . . .and Harvey Smith coming on the city council in Russellville. When I came to Russellville in 1958, I was just -- in January to edit the paper -- I was just a few weeks or months, wasn't I, ahead of you?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Didn't you come that fall?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: I came up from New Orleans, although I was raised in other parts of the South I spent ten years down there. The first integrated athletic event I ever saw in my life was a basketball game the first night I was in Logan County. And it was between Russellville High School and another team, and I went to the game with Harold Knox, 3:00who was the minister of the Presbyterian Church in Russellville. And I saw blacks and whites playing on the same team and I asked the minister where that team came from and he said, "Oh, that's our team." And I was thirty-one years old and I'm seventy-three now. That was the first black and white team I have ever seen in the south playing another team in a high school sport and it seemed so strange but that's the way it was. And at that time, Russellville was very proud of the fact that, and the Logan County people were, that they had managed to peacefully integrate the high schools, not the elementary schools at that time. And so they bragged about that. They said, “You know, we're the first school district outside”—districts--two of them”outside of Louisville, that just went in and voluntarily did this, I mean, opened the high schools.” But they still hadn't done these, the black, they were separate, segregated 4:00elementary schools in all the communities in the counties, as I recall; and you know there was a black school in Russellville. What was it, do you remember the name of it?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Me too. But it was there, and it went to the eight . . . Knob City, okay. Well of course, I think the great Alice Dunnigan, who later became the first African-American woman credited to the White House as a reporter; I believe she taught at that Knob City School. If not, she certainly went there and in her book, A Black Woman's Experience, she writes that there was a black dentist in Russellville who came to her family and said, “Why aren't you sending this girl to college?” And they fussed around about it. And he said, “Well, if you won't I will.” And that's how she got to Kentucky State University which was 5:00the only college that blacks could go to in Kentucky at that time. That was before your time and mine. But the point is, then you and I started covering Logan County and Russellville in '59 together. You know we'd divide up places to go, everybody thought since you had the radio station and I was in the paper business, we were fierce competitors. Well, we competed some but we were also good friends. It was too much, too many exciting things going on so we just kind of divided up and shared the news. Well . . . mid to late sixties is when the changes began as far as you can remember. Was the appointment of Harvey Smith who was a well known and very respected, as they used to say, African-American contractor?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Was it . . . he came on the city council in Russellville, I believe he was the first black official 6:00I remember in that time.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: No, I think Mayor Fuqua was still mayor. Now, Herndon became mayor around '64 or '65, so I believe Mr. Smith was on the city council in the Fuqua administration, you can check that maybe with Judge Fuqua, Mayor Taylor Fuqua's son, yeah. Mr. Smith was on the City Council in '72. I'm saying some of this again, out loud, because our recorder is on here; and Mrs. White, who's interviewing me here, is making notes of what you're saying and also she's taping our conversation: which is a part of a much bigger project all over the state to see how Kentucky changed to the point where we could get, let's say, to a historic moment right now in this state where 7:00we have a black basketball coach at the University of Kentucky. Say that's a big institutional change, and where we, this month, saw the appointment of the first African-American head of the State Police organization. And where, of course . . . now, you and I were working in western Kentucky when Glasgow elected a black mayor who was also a leader in the schools down there.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: I can't either, but I bet you Ms. White who's here in my office at home remembers the name of the black mayor in Glasgow.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Yeah.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Well, let's move back to Russellville a minute. I don't want to take up too much of your time, your program, but I think this is probably of interest to your listeners and probably to your guests, 8:00also. It's change and how we got from where we were to where we are now and the critical point. Dr. Ratha Yoakley became a member of the school board, the first time he was appointed. Now these were Affirmative Action things, the white power structure went out and got Mr. Smith, the black contractor, to be on the council in Russellville and he was later elected. Then Adairville began to have black officials because it had a heavier black population down there, is that right?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Yeah. Then Dr. Yoakley, who had a Ph.D. in sociology as I recall. Yeah, a professor at Western University had married a lady from Russellville, who was a Russellville school teacher, Mrs. Yoakley, and by that time they had integrated the schools all the way, down to kindergarten and first grade and so on. And Mrs. Yoakley was teaching in the elementary schools and there were other African-American teachers who came over from the segregated 9:00system and got into the public system. Okay, and then the first black policeman in Russellville, who was that?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Jerry English became the first black policeman in our city and he was appointed, too, I think when Mayor Fuqua was still mayor, but it may have been, that would have been somewhere right before 1964 or 1965 when they changed mayors. Then we got a deputy sheriff in the county police office, Mac Nobbin, became the . . . .and wasn't that Judge Brown who appointed Nobbin, arranged for him to become a deputy sheriff, or was it the sheriff?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Jim Johnson was the sheriff. And Nobbin survived several, yeah, Nobbin survived several changes of politics up there in the courthouse. Sometimes he was working with Johnson and sometimes he started working with Judge Brown, wasn't he?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Yeah. Okay, 10:00then did we . . . well, now tell me this--the radio station--did you all began to take note--now you never did back away from the idea that these changes and these were black people who were finally getting positions in the leadership of the community that involved a change from really what was an all-white city council and an all-white courthouse?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: You first would note the first black this, the first black that, and then you say you then began to quit noting it. There was a major issue from the point of view of Earl Davis, now deceased, who was very active in industrial development. The president of Citizens National Bank, when we got the Emerson Electric plant in 1960, Davis urged the Emerson people to go ahead and start hiring black people, and hire more men. In those days, 11:00there was a big problem all over the county of not getting more jobs for men: because we had a lot of--we had a number of jobs for women, cut and sew operations and like that; but we were lacking in what we used to call "male" jobs. You couldn't say that anymore. And when Emerson opened about 1960, they first declined to start hiring people and this was an issue. And I talked to them, too, and said, “this is the time to do it.” Mr. Stewart thought that, also. But they were very skittish about community mores, and it was very important to note that there were no blacks working in the highway garage in those days, the early sixties. And this was the--the highway garage was the center of our political activity. Blacks were voting in Logan County, they had been doing that a long time; but they just didn't have access to public jobs. And . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: You're right, 12:00Alex Kimbrough was the first . . . Yeah. Sure, sure, yeah, yeah.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: I know, I know that and I apologize for taking that time and . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: I'll do it. And I urge your listeners to continue to follow KET. And I believe eventually they will be made aware of some of the exciting stories about how Kentucky changed in the last half of the Twentieth Century, and how Logan County participated; and its neighboring counties in those changes. Thank you for the time. Great.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Okay, bye-bye.

ETHEL WHITE: This is Ethel White. It's September 19, 2000; and I have to put this on because Al Smith just got on the radio without a whole lot of notice, and here we are starting to talk. 13:00Can we just proceed now?

SMITH: Yes . . .

WHITE: ‘Cause I wanted to ask you, you mentioned working with Don Nagel, is it?

SMITH: Neagle.

WHITE: Neagle . . .working with Don Neagle and he was the radio person and you were the press person. And how did you go about really either working together, or competing when you were covering various civil rights changes; or if you wanted to bring in other changes, it's okay.

SMITH: We covered the local news everyday. Well, there was . . . I believe that good newspapers stimulate good broadcasting. Uh, that in the full strength of the . . . in the full glory days, you might say, of the Bingham ownership of the Courier-Journal; that broadcasting was better in the state because there was a strong statewide paper with an aggressive interest in the news. Even though the Bingham family certainly had strong interest in political 14:00parties and in the factions and always had, usually, had an enthusiastic involvement in the fortunes of mostly Democratic candidates for office. And I would say this sort of pattern of where you find the strong newspaper--a paper that gives extensive coverage to the community--you are going to find that the broadcast enterprises do likewise. The agenda, as you know, for the networks today--even to this day--is set by the agenda for the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street World, the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the New York Times in some way sets the agenda for the other major papers, national papers in the country. In Russellville, the political family, the Rheas, 15:00R-h-e-a, had owned the major newspaper--a weekly--which was called the News Democrat; when I came to Kentucky in 1958. The Rheas had owned that paper for 118 years. And it was a voice of their political faction, that was not question; editorially, that's what they were. But about 1940 or a little earlier, the Rhea family having some financial reverses, sold the paper to the Vern Evans family. It actually may have been earlier, it may have been in the early thirties. It was a result, I think, of hard times, and bank crashes, and that sort of thing and the Depression. But Vern Evans, who was a professional newspaper man and printer, bought the paper--and was married to a very strong-minded woman named Ilene Chambers Evans. He bought this paper, which was one of the--which traces its lineage to about 1807 and 1806, 16:00as the Russellville . . . as the Mirror. He bought the paper from his employers, the Rhea family, and it became somewhat more independent, a little bit; and it certainly was professional in its news coverage. And Mr. Evans died. And when I came on the scene in 1958, I was hired at the end of 1957 to edit the paper. They had had a succession of professional journalists as editors, professional in the sense, experienced journalists. And the widow of Mr. Evans and his two daughters and his son owned the paper. So when I was hired, I was thirty . . . just barely thirty-one and I had worked on the New Orleans papers for ten years, on far bigger papers than Russellville. And I had been involved in far bigger stories, I thought; but I was there because I had had a drinking problem that got bigger and bigger in New Orleans. And I was finally fired from the second 17:00of the two New Orleans dailies that I had worked on. And I came back home to Tennessee, to ( ) Tennessee, and spent a month drying out in the VA hospital; and figuring that I was at the end of my career; but wanting desperately to get away from my parents and their farm near Nashville. I just didn't want to be around my family, I was very disillusioned, very broke, very broken-spirited. And I came to Russellville as a stop-gap job for about a month, I thought; thinking I would go to the Nashville Tennessean, and who had promised me a job without much inquiry about my drinking problem. Anyway, they promised me a job, so they suggested at the Nashville paper that I go to Russellville and help this lady out. She was looking for an editor, and they would call me when they had an opening. So I went to Russellville and got the job, again without any, much inquiry into my background. I think she was pleased and thrilled that she was getting a reporter who had worked ten years 18:00on the dailies in New Orleans and was from middle Tennessee. Russellville is on the border, between Bowling Green and Hopkinsville; on the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. And she, you know, as I look back on it, I wasn't the first alcoholic editor she'd ever hired either. So I get there and--I don't know whether you recorded my story about the first integrated athletic event I ever saw was in Russellville. The night of the first day--I went to work in January of 1958--was a basketball game. And that prompted the minister there to tell me that Russellville's schools--the city schools--city high school and the five county high schools were all integrated. And they boasted that they were the first integrated peacefully, you know, without legal lawsuits, outside of Louisville, after Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the landmark 1954 case. And he had all of the . . . and 19:00I was still in Russellville when a year or so after they began to integrate--they did integrate the elementary and, yeah, the elementary schools in the county. There were, I think, five of them. And closed the black segregated schools, and they also, at the same time, almost integrated the elementary schools in Russellville. And I should say that one of my closest--a man who has become one of my closest friends in Russellville; a long-time attorney and very interesting and controversial but beloved, largely beloved, Russellville figure, Granville Clark. The City Attorney at Russellville, in 1958, and who died about 1986; and was one of the closest friends that I ever had. Granville told me that when the 1954 decision was handed down, and they begin to look at what they had to do with the school systems, he said he and a couple of other lawyers talked 20:00to the political leaders in the state, in the county, in the town, and he said, we told them, “it was the law and that we needed to support it.” This was the first . . . I mean, his account which was told to me maybe five to six years after I came to Russellville, maybe I first heard this around 'sixty-four, I don't know. But at any rate, Granville said that, “You know, we just went out there and said that we weren't going to fight the law.” I realized what he was describing to me was kind of a proactive, how do you say it today, a proactive effort by lawyers to tell rural politicians--some of whom are almost full-time politicians and some of them were farmers and merchants who held elective offices--that we are going to obey the Supreme Court decision. This is the law of the land, we are not Dixiecrats, in effect, we will obey the law and we are not going to stir this up as a political issue. Well, while this was going on in 21:00Russellville, New Orleans where I had worked for ten years and which I had begun to think of as my home, I went to New Orleans when I was twenty and got a job as a copy boy on the Times-Picayune. And I was a Vanderbilt dropout, and New Orleans had suddenly gone crazy over the integration issues. The politicians stirred it up, and the integration of the public schools was on television and it was a painful to see. White women screaming and jeering at black kids, a very familiar sight around the South. And sadly . . . well, not sadly in the sense that it helped people to know what was going on, we saw this scene in Little Rock on TV, in Birmingham and across the South. Okay, but in Russellville something else was going on. Gradualism was a work on the Tennessee-Kentucky border from 1954 on. And there were two media 22:00companies, little companies, in that town in 1958 when I got there. There was a radio station, WRUS as in Russellville, and which was independently owned by an Alabama entrepreneur, a white man named Roth Hook, H-o-o-k. Who started, I think, some of early radio stations, small radio stations in western Kentucky; and a partner he had acquired in Russellville named W. P. Sosh, S-o-s-h, Winkie Sosh, he was quite a leader and a popular figure in Russellville. Sosh had started out life as a bus driver for the Fuqua Busline. The Fuqua family were Russellville people who began to make money. The father came to town a very poor, and drove a cab in Russellville, a taxicab, that also served as a limousine carrying people from Russellville to Elkton, to Hopkinsville, to Springfield. And Mr. Fuqua was 23:00raised on a farm somewhere south of Russellville, his name was Taylor Fuqua. When I got to Russellville, he was the mayor and he used to tell me about a boy Billy, his son, who was in the army, in Intelligence in France. That son went on to come home, become the City Attorney, himself, a Circuit Judge, one of the youngest in the state, and eventually finish his career on the Supreme Court a few years ago. And Taylor Fuqua, his father, with no money came to Russellville in twenties or early, early thirties and had this one taxicab and converted it during wartime into a bus line. And this bus line hauled passengers and soldier boys, as they said, and girls looking for soldier boys, back and forth from Russellville to Fort Campbell, forty miles, forty-five miles away. One of these drivers was a man named Winkie Sosh. As times got better, he branched out, got into business for himself, not running a bus company, but opening up a radio station. 24:00And Sosh had a wonderful voice, a natural poise, and was just a natural leader. And he hired--if you are still with me--Don Neagle, a young man, to be his news director. And this goes back to my first point. Neagle was a smart . . . he's smart guy and he's still working in Russellville. And Sosh was smart. And they . . . I think Sosh viewed his competition as the Russellville paper. Neagle was not an entrepreneur. He was man who enjoyed reading books and he enjoyed talking to people about ideas, and he grew up on a farm in Glasgow, in that area; and he liked me and I liked him. And we both realized I was the one--the only writer, reporter, that the paper had. I was the reporter and the editor, circulation of about three thousand, the Weekly News Democrat. And he had . . . but his challenge was different. He had the only radio . . . he worked for the only radio station. He was the only newscaster in the town at that time. And his challenge was to get a newscast together for early in the morning, at noon, and 25:00in the late afternoon. And that man has been on the air in Russellville--I left after twenty years and went on to other things in journalism--Don Neagle has been on the air for forty-two years in that community. It's just astonishing. He's had two marriages, has one child of his own from his first marriage now working there. Married his second . . . marriage is to a woman and she's a retired school teacher now. And people in that county have been listening to him all those years—generations. And he is still doing the same kind of thing he did in Russellville, he is honest, fair, very intelligent, and amusing. And very kind, I mean very open, as you witnessed when I called him up on the air to talk to him (Laughing) and interrupted his program. Everybody thinks they own a piece of Don Neagle. (Interruption) WHITE: If you were viewed by . . . saw as competition, how did you and Neagle get together on things? 26:00SMITH: Well, I think Winkie had another problem. He was also aware of my alcoholism. It was still pretty much in evidence when I came to Russellville, and it wasn't until five years after I got there that I really stopped drinking. I would periodically dry out and work, you know, work without drinking four, five, six months at a time; and then I would have a spree, and they would have to put me--I was single in those days--and I would have to go to the hospital to dry out. I couldn't stop drinking. And I was pretty spectacular. I didn't get into any fights with anybody, it's just that everybody in the county knew that I was on a binge--bender. And I was . . . I got more tolerance than I deserved. And I think that Winkie, who has always been very kind to me and funny with me, I got the impression that he really deplored me basically. And then he had a problem 27:00after I sobered up in 1963 and really quit drinking. And then began an intense period of work for about five or six years and married again, I mean, you know, and got very active in everything. I think he was puzzled how somebody who was pretty much of a lost cause could--I don't think that my comeback--he was a cheerleader for that but Neagel was. And I mean . . . and Winkie may be very startled--he's now in his middle eighties--and I'm sure he might be startled to hear me say that. So, I don't know, but I got the impression that his Calvinist, Fundamentalist view of religion and ethics and behavior did not extend over; but I could be wrong because when I started my own newspaper in 1968, Winkie's son, who was the sports director of the radio station, came over and helped me and was my sports editor. He was still working for his dad's station, which 28:00he eventually acquired and he did the sports for me for about three months to help me launch my paper. So I want to be careful on what I say there now. Now Neagle realized that he needed help to get his coverage done and I did, too. And so, I don't want to make too much of this, but in essence when there was a lot going on, one of us would cover the Fiscal Court, the other one would cover City Council, and we rotated. But here's the point, we did cover it. This county was really covered. We two went out there and got the news, and he would call me and would say, “Could you tell me what happened at Fiscal Court?” And I would tell him. And I would say, “What happened at City Council?” And we would share the notes and then do our own thing. And kind of the understanding we had was if there was news break, he wasn't going to call me up and say, "I just by chance learned from Judge Doris, the county judge, that he's planning to appoint so and so as a rail foreman." He didn't, you know, if that was a private conversation he went on and put it on the air, and I found out like everybody else. On the other hand, if I wrote a story about . . . looked at contract that the city council was 29:00fixing to let about . . .it called for some change or something that I thought was really wrong or suspicious or questionable, I did sort of an enterprise story. I didn't call and say, “I'm carrying a story tonight in the paper that there's hanky-panky at the crossroads. I did my own thing, too. But the routine is, including meetings, public meetings--school boards, fiscal courts, city councils, hospital boards, that was big--we shared that information. Sometimes the two of us would be sitting in the same room, and sometimes one would be at one part of town and one at the other.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO SMITH: The Democratic Party had always considered, and the Republicans too, the Logan County Courthouse to be a stronghold of the party. It was dominated by a machine politics. The Rhea organization, again R-h-e-a, had controlled that courthouse for a hundred years or so. Different Rheas--brothers, sons, nephews--had been in Congress, 30:00had been sheriff. Tom Rhea in 1935--the former sheriff of that county and clerk and so on--Mr. Rhea, a former rural highway commissioner; Highway Commissioner Rhea was expected to be the Democratic nominee for governor and he ran against Happy Chandler who was the Lieutenant Governor. He ran with the support of the incumbent, Governor, Ruby Lafoon. In fact, Ruby Lafoon was actually elected as a protege of Mr. Rhea. Lafoon was the Governor, but Rhea called the shots in western Kentucky for all the courthouses and counties, I mean he was the leader. Even Earl Clements was . . . Clements owed some of his early successes to the support of Tom Rhea. And it was Tom Rhea who sold the Russellville paper to the Evans family, 31:00and that's the paper I eventually owned. But anyway, what needs to be said here in terms of this being a civil rights study is that after World War I, in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had a big . . . had a large, relatively wide following in Logan County. It was a newspaper in Russellville that was a rival paper for the Rhea paper that supported the Klan. And, I mean I knew--I had a great friend, an old man by the time I--well, in his seventies, sixties and seventies, Joe Couple, a Jewish guy who owned the Russellville Coca Cola Bottling Company. And I had friends in the Catholic 32:00. . . I mean some Catholic friends named Hite. The Hite family may have had the first Russellville service station. And Mr. Couple used to tell me funny stories about Mr. Hite owning a building--a store building--on the square across the street from his service station and next to the Masonic Hall, or next to some kind of meeting hall on the square. And the Ku Klux used to meet in this hall, and then Mr. Hite had buried--had put a hole through wall so he could listen to their schemings because they were anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish. And Mr. Couples' story was that he and Hite would go up there--I knew Mr. Hite, he was still around when I got there--and they would go upstairs and listen to the Klan plan to do in the destruction of the Jews. There were two Jewish families, I think, in the county; and the Catholic Church. 33:00And that story concluded with a tale about there being a big Klan rally being at the east side of Russellville where several roads come together. And Mr. Couples told me that they went out there, he and Hite and their friends; and they scattered nails all around the parking lot where the Klan's trucks were, and cars. And he said, “When they left the rally that night (laughing) there were flat tires all up and down these roads going back into the countryside.” Well, the Rhea organization had an alliance with the black people in that community. Now, you also understand that, remember in Hopkinsville . . . oh, well here's what happened. So in the twenties, there was a rape--a Klan paper in Russellville--and there was the Rhea organization basically 34:00had the, you know, had a pretty good extensive friendship with most of the black community. But there were black Republican . . . many people, blacks who voted Republican. And I want to point out to you that in Christian County in this same era, there were African-Americans in office in Christian County who were Republicans. You need to talk to Governor Breathitt . . .

WHITE: In the 1920s?

SMITH: Yes, ma'am. When Breathitt was a child, there were Republicans voting in Christian County; and most of the black community voted Republican. I believe Governor Breathitt told me this recently, this year, the year 2000, and reminded me of it. Breathitt said the way they held, diverted, tried to divert the black vote away from the Republican Party, when he was a kid--there were farmers who would give big barbeques on election day for their black friends. And then lure them to these barns and give them--on their farms--and 35:00give them liquor, and barbeque, and food and they would never get to the polls. Breathitt, that's exactly what he told me. And Hopkinsville had some City Council members who were black in the early part of the century. Now, on the other hand, Russellville had some racial, rural racial tensions; some lynchings in the early part of the Twentieth Century. I mean people being taken out of the jail, two or three black men being hung on a tree that used to be called the hanging tree that was on a road right out of Russellville. And it was on postcards, these guys hanging on this tree, postcards that we shipped all over the country. The post office quit sending those cards. It was an exhibit in Washington this year of those postcards and pictures and photographs of lynchings across the country, and one of those happened in Russellville. But in 1920, the Rhea machine was challenged by the Klan, by a faction of Democrat 36:00who were Klansmen; and the Rheas met the challenge head-on, and they smashed the Klan at the polls. I don't think the ticket was called the Klan Ticket but everybody knew it was. That's the story I've heard. And it's written about some in a county history of Logan County, written by a man by the name of Edward Coffman who is dead now; called The Story of Logan County, I think. And at any rate, from 'twenty-two on there was very little Klan activity in Russellville. But when the Democratic National Convention was held and nominated Franklin Roosevelt for the first time, Mr. Rhea, Tom Rhea, was a Democratic floor leader at the convention for Roosevelt. I once asked an old politician and political operator in Russellville, I said, "Why don't you help Mr. Rhea make a little." And he said, " Oh," he was squatting on his haunches sucking on a straw 37:00outside the office of the home of the sheriff of Todd County in 1958; the first year I was in the county. We were on our way back from a court hearing in Murray, a challenge to the election of a new congressman in that district, and Rayburn Smith had driven the car over there with the county attorney, the ex-county of Logan County, me--the county clerk had probably stolen the votes that elected the congressman--and the late Bill Scent, who died a few months ago and who later became commissioner of several cabinet jobs in the Burt Combs' Administration. We were standing, sitting in the yard and I said, "Rayburn, how”--Mr. Rhea was dead when I came to this county, a legendary figure, you know, in the history of that place. I said, "How did Mr. Rhea make a living?" And Rayburn--as 38:00Ed Pritchard once said about him—said, “He had a head like a skull.” He was a skinny man and he had driven Burt Combs all over western Kentucky in several of his campaigns and he worked for a highway garage as a bag man, collecting money at election time for the Democratic candidates, the ( ), the anti-Chandler people. Rayburn sucked on that straw and he looked kind of mournfully at me,, he was about sixty years old, and he said, "Oh, Mr. Roosevelt's sending money." (Laughter) Mr. Roosevelt sent him . . . well, actually Mr. Rhea had owned a bank and a newspaper and he had political jobs and . . . (Laughing) Dick Hite told me that when his father was on the City Council--the same Catholic Hite who put the tacks down on the road for the Ku Klux Klan (Laughter) derailing--I shouldn't tell this I guess, but you know he never got a water bill, never sent him any water bills, any of the city bills, he never got them,(Laughter), 39:00he just kind of existed. Well anyway, anyway, Rhea broke the back of the Klan and went on to run for Governor against Happy Chandler in what became the first and only primary, second primary in Kentucky history until we had a Constitutional Amendment and changed the Constitution in the Brereton Jones-Paul Patton Era. And so, the issue in 1958 was not whether the blacks could vote, the question was schools—schools, and then with the election of John Kennedy and, more importantly I would say, with the ascendancy of the White House of Lyndon Johnson. You noticed that things began to change. And this is what Don Neagle and I 40:00were talking about a few minutes ago when I called him at the radio station to verify some of my memory about that time that you are asking me about. We, in 1960, we asked Emerson to hire some black people and they didn't do it. And then they agreed to do it in a different way. They called me and said . . . the manager called me, Ed Johnson his name was--and he called Earl Davis, the banker who had urged him also to hire black people, and he said, "You've to help me." By this time, it's 1964 . . . or '65. He said they've been there four or five years, and he says we got to hire black people. And they said you know what happened was Lyndon Johnson got Buck Persons, who was the Chairman of Emerson Electric from St. Louis--the St. Louis headquarters--got him in the Rose Garden and he said, "Now you all got to hire more 41:00black people because you got defense contracts and you got to do it." And so Ed Johnson said to me, "I want you to support me now, you know. I'm going to start putting up the labor forces, it's going to be integrated." And my recollection is that this was 'sixty-four, it was Johnson, so it had to have been . . . Kennedy was assassinated in 'sixty-three, so it was 'sixty-four or 'sixty-five. And until that time the best policy, the best way to describe the policy that they had was what my friend, Jimmy Lee, a black guy who worked for the Fuqua family, he said, "You know, Al," he said, "I went over constructing the Emerson plant. I went out there and worked on construction but," he said, "When they opened it, they didn't want me. They didn't want any black folks in there." He said, "They didn't even so much as a black pencil." This is . . . he's talking '62 or '63. 42:00So when they did decide to change, they changed because Lyndon Johnson told them it was time to change. You see, it went all the way from the Rose Garden to Logan County, Kentucky. And the thing that's interesting is, the white people who brought the Emerson Electric plant to--and I'm not faulting Emerson--I'm telling you about, these were National conditions. They wouldn't do what we asked them to do in 'sixty because they were afraid to make a policy change in a southern city. They didn't, I mean, you know, I'm not kidding myself, they came because they didn't think we'd ever . . . we thought--they thought our people would work hard, and that they would be an honest, ethical workforce, and they wouldn't join the Unions; and that they thought the community would protect them, the leadership in community, all that's true. And so we were ready as white southerns to try to pry the door open, 43:00there was a . . .you know, we felt the pressure, I guess.

WHITE: All right, now when you say "we," do you mean Russellville . . .

SMITH: We. By that time . . .

WHITE: Do you mean Russellville or do you mean you, Al Smith . . .

SMITH: I mean . . .Russellville.

WHITE: As a newspaper?

SMITH: I mean the leadership in Russellville. The leadership in Russellville in that time was essentially centered around what was called an Industrial Committee. The Industrial Committee was really a couple of people from the Chamber of Commerce who were the real leaders. They had presence at the Chamber of Commerce, but the people who ran the whole program basically were two men who were co-chairs of the Chamber of Commerce Industrial Committee. They were out, they were smoke-stack chasers, they were on the big buffalo hunt in the South to get, to land the big buffalos, to bring the plants down and they would do anything to get jobs because these kids, the farms couldn't support them anymore. There were not enough--the farm life had changed, and we were having an immigration out to the North. It began an exodus that began with the young people 44:00going either into the military, or going into defense work in World War II and it didn't stop; and they were aware of it. So after the war, they began to talk among themselves, these businessmen, "What are we going to do?" You know the interesting thing is, the businessmen were on Main Street in little stores and the banks and their problem was not a problem that bothered the farmers. In fact, when you begin to look for factories, the farmers begin to worry about the wages that would be paid in factories. But Russellville had two really dynamic leaders: one was a banker named Earl Davis who had been a Colonel in the army and then went to college, decorated war hero; and a man named Marvin Stewart who had been a. . . had a country grocery in the North end of the county, came to Russellville looking for work. I mean, (Laughing) better work, and sold cars and eventually organized 45:00a little loan company, like a, you know, like a small town. And they had them, not chains like Benefit Finance; and so he had money, where he loaned money at usurious rates to poor people who couldn't--or thought they couldn't--get loans at banks. I might add that in 1958 the banks in Logan County did not pay any money for deposits and savings. No interest on savings deposits, and they didn't--I'm trying to remember if they had checking accounts--hell, I don't believe we had checking accounts. We might have but you could get a savings account but they didn't pay anything on passbook savings, I remember when that was put in. You know, they were doing you a favor to save your money, to hold it. Now the men had checkbooks but seems to me the first bank account was basically a savings account, I put the money in and then I took it out. But I don't feel like I wrote checks but maybe they did have checking but there was certainly no interest. 46:00Well at any rate, one of the two banks in Russellville was headed by Earl Davis, and he and Mr. Stewart really began to look for plants. And their argument was that we are going to get a plant that we can be proud of, we're going to turn down the cheap people and we are going to try to get jobs for our men. Now they had a garment plant that had been there since the war began, that made parachutes and then it made clothes. And it was women who worked there, so they realized they had to get a utility program together and change the waterlines and build a better sewer plant, water and sewer lines and utilities and they did that. And they got a City Council together that was compliant and friendly and understood what they needed to do so they really controlled the City Council. They said, “We need a bond issued or whatever, to run waterlines out that could service a factory.” And they finally got at. . . and they got some land saved. And it was in 1955, a Rockville Company 47:00came to town looking and the great line was that the man working for Rockville, a man named Dixon who would be the Executive Vice President of the whole company in those days, they were based in Pittsburgh. He said, "How much do you want for this land?" This site he looked at and Mr. Stewart said, "If you want it, you can have it for one dollar." By which he meant that we will--this is 1955--we, the town, will find a way to pass the hat to buy this farm on the edge of town, and you can have it for one dollar. It was one of the--I've written about this in other places--it was one of the great historic industrial development conversations in the history of that community. Mr. Dixon said, "Well, no, I won't let you give it to me for one dollar." It may have been Colonel Rockwell, ( ) Rockwell, it was either Rockwell or Dixon. "I won't let you do that, I'll pay you a fair price for the land and I'll tell you what, 48:00if you will give me time to build a workforce out here, we're going to make aluminum die castings and lamp shades and whatever you cast aluminum for, your other clients, typewriters, IBM typewriters. If you'll give me time to build a workforce, I'll help you get some more plants." And they did, they came and they became the great patriarch--what's the term for this, it was patriarchal kind of. . . .paternal, that's the word--paternalistic operation. They didn't want any unions, that's for sure. But they said 'We'll pay people and we'll treat them right,' and they really worked on their public relations and they did, they worked on them for years, and I became part of that PR machine. They were good to me, and I've been treasurer, secretary of the New Orleans newspaper deal; hell, I wasn't afraid of the unions as such but I bought their argument. And there were no blacks out there, 49:00that's the point, the theme of this interview, civil rights. But they got their workforce going and then they helped, they came in '55 and in 1960--I saw this--a plant manager in Russellville at this new, modern die casting plant urged the Emerson Electric people to locate, decide to locate this hermetic motors plant in Russellville and he did this for several other plants. And so all these companies were coming on line with no black people. Meanwhile--and this is important -- there were no black people working these highway garages, and this is an issue here that you need to think about. There were none on the State Police, there were none in the Transportation Departments, I don't know what, it would be interesting to see how many African-Americans who were employed outside of the school systems anywhere in Kentucky, in state government in, say, the beginning of the fifties decade, in the Eisenhower Administration. 50:00WHITE: Is this something that you as a reporter and editor noticed at the time or is this something that is hindsight, did you ever . . .

SMITH: That's the right question . . .

WHITE: Did you newspaper ever say, you know, what's going on here?

SMITH: No. No.

WHITE: You were part of the culture, right?

SMITH: We were part of the culture. The closest I can remember to define . . . well, two things that I can remember that were more positive were the affirmative view about the schools that dates back to 1955; and my friend's, Grandville Clark, story that the lawyers went around and told the politicians to cool it, you know, we're not going to jingo, we're not going to demagogue this issue. The other thing would be jumping forward, fast forward five more years, to the Emerson Electric location, and that this white business class, their representative, said, "Open this place, this is the time 51:00to start hiring black people and they need jobs." They wouldn’t do it. That story, don't let me forget to bring Jesse Jackson into this, because that's one, that a great follow up on that . . .

WHITE: We'll bring him in now.

SMTIH: Let's bring him in now, all right. Then we go back to the fact that the state was also segregated in terms of jobs in the highway department because those jobs in the highway department required very little education, you know, and the average black laborer could have done it.

WHITE: So when did Jesse Jackson enter the picture?

SMITH: I told you that Ed Johnson came to us and said, "Can you help me?" in '64. We got to do this in '65; so when Emerson would name foremen of their companies, on shifts, they would bring me a story of who they promoted. They were showing that the local people were taken--that's like Toyota in Lexington, they'd do things for local people and they would send, you know, the papers, 52:00they were more or less cooperative. But I was one of them people in Russellville, in that area were promoted, on the line, I ran their pictures in the paper and sweep the paper—they were named foreman, and we finally got a black . . .we first got a . . . my joke was they put the first blacks on the night line so people wouldn't seen them in the dark. I told that to some black people at the conference this week in Bowling Green, this higher education conference which was liberally filled with black trustees and so on, you know. And I said, "Yeah, I'll help you, I told you four years ago you ought to this, I'm glad you're doing it." And what Don Neagle just said on the radio, talking to me on the radio, was that he remembered the both of us announcing these were first blacks of this and first blacks of that. But at any rate, the promotions came . . .

WHITE: So you had stopped being a part of the culture at that point then?

SMITH: Oh, the culture was changing, it had integrated schools, it had integrated schools and they'd had . . . so we were into that 53:00. . .

WHITE: So in running the pictures you were . . .

SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we carried pictures of black people unlike the Times-Picayune wouldn't carry pictures of blacks. At that time, I wouldn't call black women "Mrs." in the paper. When I left there in 1958, in '57, they were still in that mode. No, I don't want to portray myself as urging, as urging much of anything that way. I think we were changing and I was encouraging or supporting black leaders, white leaders who were ready for change. The strain came in the '60 election when the people, the power, the political power group in Russellville, was rooting for Lyndon Johnson for President and Kennedy got it. And the connection with Johnson was through Earl Clements who was Johnson's close friend and was very closely aligned at the Logan County courthouse. 54:00Clements had been a U.S. Senator and Governor of the state, and that alliance had continued through the election of Burt Combs. So Combs goes out to California in 1960. So the Logan County politicos went out there and they were all for Johnson, along with Clements. Although Combs later told me that he was very, his real hero was Kennedy. But Kennedy wins, Johnson decides to take the second place; and Clements signs on to back the Kennedy/Johnson ticket. Clements is living in Washington by that time; and so he urges everybody in Kentucky to support Kennedy/Johnson and, of course, Burt Combs is Governor by that time and he does. Now you've got to understand that Combs had a lot of connection with Logan County. He was an eastern Kentucky Governor who was elected and a lot of support 55:00from western Kentucky including major support for the Rhea organization which by that time had become the Doc Beauchamp organization, B-e-a-u-c-h-a-m p, Emerson Beauchamp's nickname was Doc. Beauchamp took over that organization when Democratic leadership, when Mr. Rhea died in the early fifties. I'm going to finish the Emerson story. So we've got Emerson integrated and we're going to get jobs for black people at Emerson. The other plants followed. I think they begin to hire some blacks at Rockwell. Twenty some years, twenty-five years later, Kuwait is invaded by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi army--some Americans are trapped in Kuwait City. Jesse Jackson goes to Kuwait to try to negotiate their release, earning 56:00the censure and disapproval of the State Department as I recall but he went anyway. He scoops up these Americans, puts them on a plane, and brings them back. I think that plane landed in Chicago, and they're on national television. A triumphant Jesse Jackson emerges and behind him, waving an American Flag, is Ed Johnson, the former--by that time a high ranking official of Emerson Electric. But the former young plant manager of thirty years before that said, “You've got to help me, but you can't hire the black for us because the company policy is to stay with the mores of the community in the south, customs. Help me hire these blacks." And he is waving an American Flag. He was diabetic, he was running out of insulin in Kuwait City--he was over there selling parts or working as a consultant, you know, in his business, manufacturing. He said, "The Reverend Jackson saved my life." Had his arms around him. I told that story at a commencement or convocation at a little church college a few years ago. I think it was either Campbellsville or I believe it was 57:00the Methodist school, Lindsay Wilson, in Adair County in Columbia. There were a bunch of black kids who were there on scholarships, out of urban, out of Louisville, around the city, the state. The first members of their family to go to college, so there was a big sprinkling of blacks and whites in that group; and I told them that story.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE WHITE: We are about to get back on the phone with Don Nagel.

SMITH: This is Al Smith. May I speak to Don? Thank you.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Don, I apologize to you. I just, I just 58:00. . . I was going to tell you I couldn't image how you could speak, talk one hour about child restraint belts.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: I know it.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible.) SMITH: Yeah, yeah. What this project is, is basically, uh,--I've now got it clear in my head. Ethel is working on a--she's a professional historian--but she is working on, for the Kentucky Oral History Commission which in turn is creating these stories, you know, developing, finding these stories of civil rights change and hopes to have them converted to, eventually to, KET . . . and what's the other?

WHITE: The schools.

SMITH: The schools, the public schools of Kentucky. And she asked me 59:00. . . Ms. McGuire, got ready to call back and apologize to you and try to briefly finish this conversation if brief can be in my . . .if you can grant me any potential to be brief. Oh me, you know what, one time somebody urged Wendell Cherry to come to a dinner in western Kentucky, and Al Smith will be the speaker. And he said, "Al Smith?" Now this is the cofounder of Humana. He said, "That son-of-a-bitch will speak anywhere." (Laughter) "This is no prize and brief is not in his lexicon." Anyway, what I told her, I said, she said, "Well, what about the other papers you had? Do you have any stories about . . .?" I said, "No,” I said, "What you've got to understand is, what I finally learned was that Russellville was like the rest of the state. What you know about Russellville, you'll know it all." I said. “That's how I finally sobered up. I realized that I, instead of being at the end of the world and in the sticks in exile forever, I was in a microcosm 60:00of the United States of America.” NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah. Yeah. (Laughing) Uh-huh. Well, you know, Ethel, Don is laughing and saying, “You know, I'm not great on trends.” He said, "I guess when I said gee whiz, people don't come to the movies on Saturday night in the Square anymore, they'd quit coming for five years before I noticed." He's just being modest. I've already told her you were the greatest rural broadcaster in the state, and she's nodding her head because . . . When we got the--when they begin to hire these black people at Emerson, wasn't that the first plant that really, finally begin to put them in . . .?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: I may be right, 61:00uh-huh. Yeah. Do you know--I've told her now, and she's got it on tape--do you know that Ed Johnson was rescued in Kuwait City by Reverend Jesse Jackson; and he came down the ramp of that plane, and landed in Chicago. And Ed was waving an American flag and he said, on CNN, "Reverend Jackson saved my life." He was diabetic and needed insulin and, of course, the way I tell this story, and I told Ethel--the Commencement or Convocation of Lindsey Wilson College a few years ago; all of these black kids had been recruited as new students at this county Methodist school, you know, they're sitting there, listening, but couldn't believe it. I guess it was . . . when it happened, when Bush was still President. And I, you know, I said it began . . . this story goes back to 1960 when this young man comes down to run the plant and Earl Davis and I and others 62:00went but I was, you know, following their leadership. But Davis said, "You ( ) up again and, Mr. Stewart, you ought to hire black people as soon as this plant opens. They need jobs." And Ed said, "I, you know, I can't do that. We don't want to change the customs of any community we go into." What he meant was that, "We don't want any unions and we don't want any trouble." You know, and so four years later he came back and by that time, he and I--I kind of muscled my way into the--I was a little higher on the pecking order, and he came directly to me. He said, "I've seen Mr. Stewart and Mr. Dave ( ), you know, you've got to help me." He said, "Lyndon Johnson got Buck Parsons in the Rose Garden,” said, “you got to hire black people here to do defense work." And I said, "Well, we told you that four years ago, that it was the right thing to do." You know--or five years ago. And so he did, you know, and then begin to put the black people to work. So it is ironic that then thirty years later, twenty-five years later, it's Jesse Jackson that pulls him out of Kuwait. (Laughing) Isn't 63:00that a great story? Yeah.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah, yeah. Well, in another Methodist school just a few months ago, Jesse Jackson spoke at Union College, and Linda Deroucher, who's written a marvelous book called Creeker which--you saw her on my show, didn't you? I gave her the whole half-hour by herself. She had a scholarship to Wellsley and went to Pikeville College instead because she thought she had been ruined: she was seventeen and had never been married. And she goes to Pikeville College, you know, and them marries this guy, and he said, she trys to drop out; and he said, “No.” And she wound up getting a Ph.D. at UK, divorced this fellow, went to Johnson City; and married the guy who was President of the school. There was a scandal and they left. He has been president of two other schools since then. Well anyway, this book of hers, Creeker, has become the big word-of-mouth, smash hit of the University Press. Women are buying it, everywhere. Men are reading . . . Dr. Clark wrote her a fan letter at age ninety-seven. 64:00It is a fabulous book. Well, the reason I tell that is, she was like the Baccalaureate--one of the two Commencement speakers, and the other speaker was Jesse Jackson at Union College in Knox County just two or three months ago. And she told me that there were--as far as the eye could see--there were people who came to hear Jackson, not her, but she is a spellbinding speaker herself. And anyway, it was the hit, the two of them: the woman from Appalachia, the white woman; and the black man from, really from South Carolina, you might say, by way of Chicago and New York, the national. The highest, probably the most influential, black citizen in the United States in this little Methodist school in Appalachia where this woman with this incredible story. Linda got a Masters' at Harvard just a few summers ago after--and you know what, I've been talking about 65:00writing for fifty damn years, she wrote this book in three months. She told me, "The reason I got this done, Al, and you didn't, I knew I wasn't a writer and I had three months between classes." She's a professor of Psychology at Rocky Mountain State College where her husband is president, and she just sat down and wrote it. And she sent it, she said the editor's edit, so they took this massive stuff she did and made her rWHITEork it and created this wonderful book. But . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. Well, listen. Back to the black thing. All right. Mack Nobbin was the Deputy Sheriff, the first black Deputy Sheriff. Ratha Yoakley was the first black school board member. Did he ever become Chairman of the Board?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: And he was eventually elected to office, wasn't he? And Harvey Smith was elected to office. And when you wisely cut me off of your show where I rudely intruded, we were 66:00about to say that Willie Hampton became the second black city councilman. Is he dead now?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah. All right. Well, then we got this incredible fiscal court member. Was that the first black fiscal court member, this guy who sung with the Freedom Singers, Charles Neblett? Ethel, write this down.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah. Yeah, Charles Neblett came to Russellville and married a Russellville woman. He married a Juanita Benton? Marvena Benton, whose father, Jim Benton, was a bookmaker and had a nursing home in partnership with Bill Fuqua.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: ( ) is still alive? Did the close . . . did they ever get the nursing home where it passed the standards? I guess as long as Judge Fuqua was a silent partner, they didn't have to pass the standards. (Laughter) 67:00I'm just joking.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Oh yeah, so the nursing home is . . . the Benton Nursing Home, is now the Jesus, the Jesus Church of Russell. Does Charles Neblett sing in that church?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: He's a member. All right. Okay, what Ethel--who is recording this conversation and writing some notes and trying to keep up with us--what she needs to know is the first fiscal court member elected by the people of Logan County. Well, one district was a black district, was, and not too long ago, what, in the last ten years, twelve years, Charles Neblett who was with the original Freedom Singers. Isn't that right. The ones that . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: "Eyes on the Prize," isn't he in that?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: You see him standing by Fanny May Hammer, don't you?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Yeah, Hammer.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: Yeah, okay, you do, don't you?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: He's there. He 68:00was very, very young. And I saw him . . not only did I see him, he came to Lexington with a version of those original Freedom Singers. They were traveling.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMTH: The Smithsonian was sponsoring them. About, within the last ten years when I was doing my radio show. Came to Russellville and they came . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah, and they sang in Frankfort. And they . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: In Russellville? Don says that when Charles Neblett on the Logan County Fiscal Court--because he married a Russellville woman in his later years but he's still not anywhere as old as I am or Don. When he came back with his Freedom Singers, they were like a new version. What they do is, they get two or three of them together from the old days and they sing and they bring somebody with them and say she's so and so's sister niece or whatever, and they do a little of that. He said he saw him bring back 69:00that group to Russellville and he saw white people standing up in Logan County, swaying and singing "We Shall Overcome." What a great story that is. That couldn't have been too many years ago. Did he finally get beat on his Fiscal Court?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: He was beaten by a white man, wasn't it?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Well, the pun of it is that Willie Hampton gets beaten by a white man and Neblett gets beaten by a white guy but they probably got defeated on their own merits or their lack of merits or merits of the people who made the change.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: No black block left, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have . . . did you have a black mayor down in Adairville? Down in the south end of the county, eventually, a little town of nine hundred people?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Oh, Washington. The black Washingtons were on the city council for years.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: I don't believe they did but that's important. One of the dark black parts, patches, in Logan County demographically, 70:00was right on the Tennessee border, at Adairville, a community of maybe seven hundred people. And several black men . . . at least one black man named Washington, a mechanic I think, served many years on the City Council down there. He was elected, you know. And, now, all right, so we've got a black cop named Jerry English, we've got a black deputy sheriff in the courthouse named Matt Nobbin, he was very political, always out hustling votes and so on for his bosses. And then there was a black school board member who was a Ph.D. Sociologist, who eventually was elected and became Chairman of the Board of Russellville Independent. Was there any other black leaders that we should, or any other black moving events or media, things where you and I, the radio station or the paper, participated in at least covering it?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible). 71:00SMITH: You're right. You've got it. This is important. You are exactly right.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yes, Don Neagle remembers, Ethel, that--and this is really important because it has to do with the King Center--he would go to mixed-race meetings in the Catholic Church, they were Ecumenical meetings too--in Russellville. When Tom McGloshin, who was a young minister of the First Presbyterian Church--he's from Louisville and a graduate of Centre College and the Presbyterian Seminary, no the McCormick Seminary in Chicago. McGloshin and Reverend Ryan, who was a Catholic priest--what was his first name--Eugene Ryan, R-y-a-n. They were both young, very good friends. They would have interracial meetings at this church to discuss what needed to be done for better, for the community. And 72:00I . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: That's what you've just told me. You used to go and sit and listen to them talk. And there would be some black people there and maybe occasional white people there, always both. And so you saw that the first efforts at sort of interracial conversations and dialogue weren't any different, unlike where the city council people would come to you and me and say, "We're going to have to put a black on the city council so we're going to go get one." These were voluntary things you were attending at the church, talking over the issues.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's very good because I was telling her about the Hite family and the Ku Klux Klan stories that are . . . by the way I've had that story verified. Mr. Couples’ story about putting the nails--about he and Mr. Hite would listen through the walls of the meeting house where they--the meeting room where the Klan was. Hite owned a building right where the old News Democrat was, he had a hole in the wall so he could listen. And he put a hole in the wall so he could listen to the Klan. 73:00And he and--one of his grandchildren told me not long ago that she'd heard that story, heard him tell it. So I got it from Ccouples, the Jewish guy. And anyway, Mr. Joe's story was that the Klan had a rally out there where A. C. Smith's place was; and he and Hite and their friends went out and scattered nails out there. And when the Klansmen drove off in their flivers and so on--this was the twenties, you know--they all had flat tires. (Laughing) But anyway, you're saying that Mrs. Hite, his widow, would be sitting there in these interracial meetings at the Catholic Church in a maternalistic way saying, "Well, I've always liked black people and we've had good friends who were black folks . . ."

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah, yeah, and she would say, "I don't see any problem here, we've always gotten along well, but Father Ryan and Reverend McGloshin, both very young. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a different kind of relationship.” WHITE: Do you have a report on those meetings?

SMITH: Yeah. Ms. White wants to know did you ever report on any of those meetings?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible). 74:00SMITH: He doesn't remember. He went to them as an individual, not as a reporter. And she asked me if I'd reported on much of this and I told her,”no.” She asked me if I had ever urged, like editorially, ‘we've got to hire people or we should get more people in the highway garage,’ and I told her, “No, I don't think I did that.” She said, "So you were part of the culture?" I said, “That's exactly right. I supported anybody that . . . not only supported, I would say to anybody who sent in the papers we're going to open, we got to hire some black people;” and that what's Earl Johnson did. And I said, “Well, you should have done that.” And we talked about getting Harvey Smith on the city council. I mean I was just a fine little brave man but I never editorialized that that's what they should do, I don't think I did, I may underestimate myself but I don't think I did. You don't remember doing that either?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Okay. Present time. Do you belong to . . .

NEAGLE: (Inaudible). 75:00SMITH: Okay. At the present time, Don belongs to a small, white Baptist church out in the rural community where he lives; and his minister, a white Baptist preacher named Bob Barnes, exchanges pulpits with the Reverend J. O. McKinney of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Russellville, a black church. And they exchange pulpits and preach in each others' church. And he said, “This is present time church relations, at least one example, in Russellville, in Logan County, where of course the black population has diminished to almost nothing in the county.” But you've got a moderately black community in Russellville. I think Ms. White should know that I once asked Harvey Smith, the contractor, who was black, he was on the city council, why we couldn't get a black doctor to live in Russellville. 76:00What a dumb question that was. But I did. Why it was on my mind was there was some young black football player who was going to medical school. George Hill, did he ever make it to medical school?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible) SMITH: I have, too. George Hill. Boy, good for you. He was a wonderful player and he was real smart and he was black. And I said to -- you know, this would have been in the seventies, yeah, it had to have been in the seventies.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Sixties? Yeah, you're right, in the sixties. And I said, "Harvey, why don't we get George Hill to come back here as Dr. George Hill?" And he said, "He wouldn't do that, I wouldn't ask him." And I said, “Why?” And he said, "Social, social." He said that, “He couldn't bring a wife down here, there would be nobody for her to associate with. They'd be the only educated people in the black community.” And he said, “She couldn't go . . . there wouldn't be anybody to invite her out to do things with her class and everything.” You going on the air?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Thank you very much. All right.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible). 77:00SMITH: You going to buy WRUS?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Oh, wonderful. That's fantastic. Getting a long-term pay out. I hope that McGinnis will hold the mortgage.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: Yeah. Oh that's great. When's the deal going to close?

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: That's great. Yeah.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible.) SMITH: Oh that's wonderful, Don. That's wonderful. Great.

NEAGLE: (Inaudible).

SMITH: That's fine. Get on the air. Bye-bye. Martha, (Interruption -- Martha speaking) Don 78:00Neagle says that at sixty-two, he and Chris McGinnis, who is twenty-six, Bill's son, are buying WRUS. (Laughing) He said I've worked here forty years, all my friends are retiring; and I'm now buying the place when nobody wants it. (Interruption--Martha speaking) (Laughter) I don’t think so either.

WHITE: Let me break in here because we've committed to breaking for lunch in about ten minutes, and I just want to make sure I ask you if there is anything to be said about your connection with the Kentucky Press Association?

SMITH: Uh, yes, yes. I was on the Press Association when they were still segregated, and the big issue that came up frequently . . .

WHITE: Now when was that?

SMITH: I don't know, I guess I came here in '58; so in '58 they were segregated, because I started going to newspaper conventions then in '58, '59, and '60. The pressure to integrate the Press Association 79:00came from ( ) Mr. Stanley, A. O.--no not Stanley, he was Southern Kentucky.

WHITE: We better stop here ‘cause I think I need you to come closer.

SMITH: All right. .I was, you know--I began going to press meetings as soon as I got into Kentucky. And to the credit of Mrs. Evans, the lady who hired me, we always participated in newspaper meetings. She never went but she sent her son-in-law and she sent me. Her son-in-law was the ad manager. And the Press Association was segregated; I mean it had no black members. The pressure to open the Press Association to blacks came from, not surprisingly, the Louisville Defender; which was owned by a man named Stanley, a really fine guy, Frank Stanley, an urban, urbane man, always well-dressed and poised, composed. And this steady pressure 80:00from him—eventually he prevailed--and he was probably the first black member of the Press Association. And I remember when he came in but I don't remember the year. I am sure the Binghams … (Interruption – Martha) That's right, Martha and I married in '67, and he was there; so it would have happened probably in the early sixties. And he attended all of them as I recall. And on the other hand, I don't remember ever seeing any black editors, or ad salesmen, or reporters of any kind in the sixties and I was president -- other than from the Defender -- I was president of the Press Association in 1975. And I don't remember any black rural reporters or even . . . yes, but what I do remember 81:00is the first rural black TV reporter that I saw, or met, was a man from Paducah, who worked for the Paducah station. And he was . . . that station was owned by the Paxton family who owns the Paducah papers now; and created a large media company, I mean they are buying papers. They bought maybe twenty-five or thirty papers in the last four or five years and are probably going to buy the Owensboro paper this month or next month. And the Paxtons had a black TV reporter, which they damn well should have done, because the pressure was beginning to mount in the late sixties or early seventies. It was beginning to be felt in the TV networks to do—to get the same access for blacks in TV broadcasting that had been denied and in the print part, in print journalism. Sam, Sam, Sam, Burdge—Sam, 82:00Sam--I believe his name was Sam--he's still down there, I think--anyway, that's where that was. Another issue of the--other issues of the Press Association were to change the entertainment policy so that they -- this was largely from Barry Bingham, Jr. -- so that we did not depend on lobbyists for liquor, or the beverage industry for liquor that was served at the conventions. And of course, the big issues--professional issues we worked with besides--the integration issue was there, very early, I mean; and the pressure was there to open up this place specifically to Mr. Stanley. But then the next big issues we worked on, as I recall, were our own ethical behavior, and I worked with some other editors and publishers--we worked on the passage of the two existing open meetings and open records laws that you see now 83:00in the state that are cited all the time. We got those done in my time of leadership, I was not responsible for it, well, yeah, I was President when we passed the open records law, I believe. I was on the Board, and the Vice-President, or President when these things were done. I believe we are coming to the close, maybe the close of this interviewing in terms of civil rights. Oh, I—no--I must tell you that probably the most significant thing that happened to me as an editor in terms of civil rights in, two things, three things, in western Kentucky was that the—involved ( ) the interracial monastery at Auburn, and the the efforts we made, successfully, to attract the Illinois Tool Works Company to locate 84:00a big and really fine plant in Russellville. I'm taking them in reverse. The Illinois Tool Works Plant came looking in 1966 for a place to put a plant in the south. And we found out that they were really concerned -- they were based in Chicago, or Elgin, Illinois -- and they really wanted to get a place where they could employ black people because they were really heavily into defense work (interruption – coughing), government contracts elsewhere; and they were looking for a community that had good race relations. And by that time, I had more of a . . . more influence in the community. I might say that I had been sober for about ten years so, (Laughing) And I had a lot of fun telling the story about the integration of the schools in Logan County that was peaceful. And by that time we had begun to put these black people--we the whites had begun to recruit black people into the power, well, into the public offices. The power structure is something else. Sometimes a public official is in it, 85:00sometimes they represent it, you know. (Laughing) And so I was able to point, I believe, to a black policeman, a black city councilman, and a black school board member and to the integration of the schools. And we used this--I remember it vividly--we used this effectively and we concentrated on it because we realized that's what they wanted to hear. It was true. And we got the plant. That was one story. Martha Helen, my wife, knew some of these people better than I did but there was a Benedictine Monastery at Auburn, Kentucky, between Russellville and Bowling Green. Russellville is thirty-five miles west of Bowling Green on U.S. 6880. And in the sixties the Benedictines decided to build a monastery and a seminary, a training seminary, at Auburn as an experiment in interracial brotherhood, and they call it St. Maur's, M-a-u-r'-s, 86:00Seminary. And it was to train young seminarians to give them preliminary training, they would go on somewhere else to be ordained and to get their, their final theological training. And there was a black . . . they recruited black postulates for ordinance ( ), black and white; they lived together to show that this could be done. And the grounds were on the old Shaker colony at South Union. I said Auburn but it's really, technically, at South Union which was a community a mile or so from Auburn, east on the way to Bowling Green.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO SMITH: Eventually -- I wouldn't say this experiment failed -- , I think eventually they began to lose membership--just 87:00as all Catholic--as the whole interest in Catholic Monasticism and celibacy began to decline. And they sold the monastery grounds to maybe to the Shaker, to a Board trying to restore the Shaker group and to some farmers, a farmer perhaps; but at any rate during that time when it was still a Monastery. I met one of the--a Prior--the man, the Father Superior of the whole place. He was a young black man, and I think his name was Shaw. And he was from New Orleans, and he had gone to school in New Orleans as a kid; and I saw him one time, and we talked about what it was like to be in New Orleans after the war -- the period that I was there from 1947 to 1957 -- when it was totally--when it was segregated. And I had known the Archbishop 88:00in New Orleans, a man named Rummel; who to my great pleasure has excommunicated the evil, sinister Leander Perez who was a big political leader in Louisiana; and who had controlled a couple of parishes down below New Orleans on the river of St. Bernard, Palquemines Parish. And when Rummel excommunicated Perez who was a devout Catholic, or said he was, over integration issues, I just--I was in Kentucky--I thought it was the greatest news I had ever heard. And I had interviewed Rummel on another issue just before I came to Kentucky, before I got fired. And my last big story in New Orleans, I had had a great morning interview with Robert ( ). We sat up in the St. Charles Hotel and drinking Absinthe Cafes talking about--little did I know that I would be in Kentucky where he grew up in a few months. But anyway, Warren was going to see the Archbishop. He was writing an article for Life Magazine 89:00on segregation in the South—integration--and he was nervous about it. And I said, “Aw, he'll just ask you . . . he'll ask you about what church did you belong to." And I said, “I told him I was raised in the Church of Christ back in Tennessee.” And he'll say, When was the last time you went?” And I told him, “I hadn't set foot in one of those places since I was fourteen.” But he said, "Well, you ought to go back to church." And I said, “He asks you, Mr. Warren, about the Disciples and so on.” So anyway, I'm telling all of this to Shaw, I think that was his name. Fast forward ten or twelve years, and I remember he said to me, "Well, you know, you see the Archbishop as a hero." But he said that, "When he was a young seminarian—I believe he was a seminarian, not an ordained Priest--I remember walking in a picket line in front of--not the cathedral, a big church up on St. Charles Avenue, or Loyola University--I guess, Loyola is a Catholic school down there, a lot of Loyola University 90:00…trying to integrate Loyola, I believe that was what he was telling me. But his main point was you should have been young and in New Orleans and black and know what it was like to pressure this liberal, German Archbishop, who wasn't so liberal or progressive that he was ready for us to be in certain colleges and schools. And he said, "I was bitter." But he wasn't so bitter that he didn't go on and take orders and become a leader in that Monastery. All right now, the final story is that when Lyndon Johnson was elected, became Vice President. In maybe 'sixty-two, or 'sixty-three, he was coming to Louisville to make a speak at the Jefferson-Jackson 91:00Day or Night event banquet, that they used to have every year. And the Courier-Journal came out on it, on the cover of the Courier-Journal Magazine, there was a picture of Lyndon Johnson, Vice President of the United States, coming to Louisville; and an article called "Lyndon Johnson's Kentucky Ancestors." And lo and behold, when I opened the magazine there was an article about his ancestors from Logan County where I live. And the article was by Alice Allison Dunigan. Well, I knew who she was in this regard, that when Jack Kennedy became President and was inaugurated, the first press conference he had was on national TV. Eisenhower had been his predecessor. He had been nervous about press conferences and TV, pretty restrictive. But, Kennedy had a free-flowing press conference, and ( ) Lang and the newspaper office in Russellville--this 92:00was 1961 and this was the same week that Robert Frost had read poems; and papers blew away in the rain and snow storm and so on. And Kennedy said, “We'll dare any foe, pay any price for liberty,” etc. And ( ) Lang told my secretary--who was a longtime native of Russellville and I met her through the paper in 'sixty-two--and she said, "President Kennedy is on the TV and he's talking to Alice Allison Dunigan." And we jumped up; I said, “Who's that?” And she said, "She's from Russellville, she's Russellville." So we went next door to a hardware--the Logan Hardware Store--who had a TV set in the window. And we went in there, and there was a black woman I'd never heard of, never heard of talking to the President. And she was from Russellville. Raised as Alice Aligan and she had gone to school at Kentucky State, 93:00and came back and taught school in Logan County and in Todd County. And she recounts all of this in the book "A Black Woman's Experience," which to our utter shame, she had to pay to have published in her old age just before she was inducted into the University of Kentucky Journalism School Hall of Fame. Alice Allison, I’d never heard of her, and she's talking to the President and she's challenging him about something just as she challenged Eisenhower. It turned out that she had been a teacher, she wanted to get to Washington in war time, or at least get out of this area. She went to the Russellville Post Office and typed out -- she couldn't get a typewriter -- white women didn't loan their typewriters to black women, or whatever, but she sought the typewriter assistance of Reverend Edward Coffman--who wrote this history I cited a few minutes ago--this 94:00story of Logan County. He was the Postmaster, a Republican Postmaster of Russellville. And she typed up her application as a school teacher to get her Civil Service job in Washington. She went to Washington and never looked back; and began to write stories and write free-lancing, and eventually became affiliated with the Negro Press Association. She was the first African-American woman accredited to the White House, and accredited to the Congress. So she had been around some time. And had a son she raised, divorced, I think, from a man named Dunigan, and when this interview took place--okay, so we see that in 1961--well, for two more years--and here's the Courier-Journal Magazine and there's this article by her about Johnson. And they--she really got my attention because she said his ancestors on one side left Logan County to go to Texas, and he's here, she's interviewing him, and he's told her about his Logan County roots. So we went out and found the cemetery, 95:00the burial plots of some of his other relatives. Okay, so I reprinted the whole article in the Russellville paper with a big story about her. So eventually she comes to Russellville . . .now where was . . . oh, the next year Johnson is President of the United States and, guess what -- Alice Allison is appointed by him to serve as an Advisory Committee to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but it was a paid job; she was a real wheeler-dealer and deserved everything she ever got, patronage and everything else. She really became a, you know, he was her patron, he became her patron, let's put it that way. So she came to Russellville to see her brother, Richard Allison, who worked as a janitor at the post office, the only black employee at the post office and a janitor. Well, I really played her up 96:00and, you know, and talked, interviewed her again; and she was trying to get more jobs for black people. And she talked about it and she went to the trade school and we, you know, and this, that, and the other. So then in 'sixty-four, Johnson is running for reelection, and I went up to Louisville to hear him talk and I got into the Seelbach to a private meeting he had with all the former governors. And I gave him the pictures of his ancestral graveyard, grave tombs in Logan County. And then we drove back, several folks from Russellville in the car together, and we drove back while he was still in Louisville finishing his campaign swing through Louisville. We’d seen him and had breakfast with him and the former Democratic governors of Kentucky; so our group went back. I'd given him these pictures and I was listening on the radio to him making a speech in front of the Courthouse in Louisville, 97:00and suddenly he starts talking about his ancestors in Logan County; and it was really a thrilling thing. Well, at that point, somewhere in that year or so, there was Emerson "Doc" Beauchamp, still a political boss of Logan County. A man who took over the Rhea organization, former Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, former State Treasurer, Commissioner of Agriculture, a clerk of the Senate, and a close crony and confidant of Earle Clements, who was the most important lobbyist in Washington in the early days of the Johnson Administration; former governor and a king-maker who helped select Burt Combs and Ned Breathitt and so on. Doc Beauchamp went over to the post office and he managed to work out a promotion for Richard Allison, who became the first black man ever promoted over a white man in the Russellville post office. He got to be like the next to the bottom, and there was a white man finally under him, 98:00he got promoted. Twenty years later, I'm back from Washington and I went over to the new post office -- I believe it was the new post office there -- to get a letter mailed back. I think by that time I'm serving as Chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission, appointed by Jimmy Carter, whose campaign I had supported. And I was walking over to the post office and I'm living, I think, living in Washington, and it's a Saturday afternoon, it may be an early Saturday morning; and there was a young black guy in the post office. And I'm trying to get an express package sent back somewhere. And I talked to him and asked him who he was, and he told me his name and everything. And I said, “How long have you been here, working here?” And he said, “Oh, a couple of years.” I asked him, “Where he went to college?” And so he said, “He had been gone a little bit,” and so on. And I said, "You know, the first man of your color that I ever knew in this post office was named 99:00Richard Allison." And I told him a little of this story, but I didn't tell him all of it because he wasn't interested in me and I was showing my age; and he was certainly showing his youth. And he said, "Now let's see, that's what . . . what do you call that, Jim Crow?" I said, “Yeah, they called it Jim Crow.” WHITE: Do you want to go to lunch now?

SMITH: Yeah, that's it. I don't have any more to say.

WHITE: Thanks a lot.

SMITH: You're welcome.

END TAPE TWO SIDE TWO END OF INTERVIEW