Oral History Interview with Porter Peeples

PEEPLES: I was born and raised in a small coal mining town in eastern Kentucky--Harlan County--ah, Lynch, Kentucky name of the city. Father was a coal miner, mother, house wife; and that's because there were nine kids in the family. Large families were, were the, were the rule, rather than the exception in Eastern Kentucky. Educated in the, in the, in the independent school system, there in Lynch, prior to--well, I went eleven years in segregated schools; integrated my senior year. All, all of the, all of the adult males who worked in Eastern Kentucky were coal miners. So those guys had, had, had personal relationships and bondages that, that they built just based on the fact that they, they would, ah, spend their days and nights on the ground and often time had to depend on each other for, just for their survival. So, so there was, there was a lot of comradely. Now the neighborhoods were separated. African-American people lived on one side and the, the--but it is hard to talk about separation when the town only had about five or six streets in it, but it still, it still, it still was segregated.

PEEPLES: All of the adult males, who worked in Eastern Kentucky were coal miners. So those guys had personal relationships and bondages that they built just based on the fact that they would spend their days and nights underground and often times had to depend on each other just for their survival. So there was a lot of camaraderie. Now, the neighborhoods were separated, you know, African-American people lived on one side and… But it's hard to talk about separation, when the town, it only had about five or six streets in it, but it still was segregated.

PEEPLES: Yeah, that was kind of a migratory pattern. My father and his brother lived in this, came from Alabama. And that was the, kind of the pattern for most of the people who came to Eastern Kentucky to work in the coal mines. They came from the South like that. But during the, I guess you would call it kind of the Industrial Revolution or with the rise of the automobile industry in Detroit and Cleveland, with Ford, Chrysler and Chevrolet. Many of the people started to leave the coal mining area to go, to work in the automobile industry. So that was a major out migration during the forties and fifties into those areas. That's what put those folks there, so that we could go behind them and visit them as relatives later. And so that's kind of the trail, Deep South Alabama to Eastern Kentucky and then onto those major metropolitan areas. Today, what we do every, every Labor Day, we have a reunion of African-Americans who have gone through that migratory pattern. We have what we call Eastern Kentucky Social Clubs located now in thirteen different cities. And every year one of them is responsible for putting on the reunion. Last year we were in Dayton. This year we go to Milwaukee and the following year it will be, will be coming back to Kentucky. But that's a real fun event that goes on that weekend from like Friday through Monday. And everybody just comes back. Every Memorial Day when we go home to Lynch, there's a lot of people that come home. There's a lot of pride and strong, extraordinary strong tradition among African-American people from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.

PEEPLES: Well, the migration from Eastern Kentucky into--.I've spoken specifically about our experiences as African-Americans, but that was also a pattern from the Eastern Kentucky white population too, because many, many went to Ohio to work in the automobile and steel industries. I know Harlan County and Lynch where I grew up, most of the parents wanted their kids to leave, because they didn't want you to, they didn't want us to have to go into the coal mines. A better life was an opportunity to work for Ford, Chrysler, Chevrolet, in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago. That was a better life. And that was the desires and wishes of our parents. That you finish high school and then that you move onto that. And once the community colleges opened, then there was another option. And African-American kids from my section of Eastern Kentucky took advantage of that community college option a great deal. Because I remember one time, not long after I graduated from UK, we just kind of did, not a scientific survey, but a survey of African-American kids who were on UK's campus, kids who had come from Eastern Kentucky through the community college system, African-Americans. We were right up there with African-American students who had come from the Louisville and Lexington area.

PEEPLES: Segregated school for eleven years, integrated my senior year. One of the things that we were extremely proud about in our school system is that, the school system was subsidized by the United States Steel, who owned, who essentially owned the community, which made our schools have a little bit more, from the standpoint of resources, than the county schools. The African-American schools that I attended, we were extremely proud of the level of teachers, the educators who we had. All of them were definitely Bachelor's and most of them Master's degrees. Most of them came, were matriculated through the traditional black colleges like Kentucky State and Knoxville College, those schools back during that time. Education was a high priority. Most of the parents, who worked in the coal mines of Eastern Kentucky were like my father, he had not finished high school. But, I mean, see that was my father's strictest rule, was that everybody was going to finish high school. Of the nine kids, I was the fifth one and I came along at the time that the community college opened in Eastern Kentucky, which gave me an opportunity to come right out of high school and go to the community college for two years and get an Associate Degree and then come on to the University, come on to the University of Kentucky. And as I said, it was just a matter of fortunate timing for me, because either one of my sisters and brothers who came before me, if they had, had the opportunity, they probably would have gone on to college, too.

PEEPLES: Well, not really, because in a small town like that, the kids that I went to high school with, went to twelfth grade and we graduated; I played with them all my life. Football games, and baseball, softball. We just played together, so we knew each other real well. The only thing that we did separate was church and school. So then when we went to school, there was, really there was no shocking issues tied to that. Just some cultural differences from when we went to the schools. We had different--.There was differences in the way that we dressed versus them and some other kinds of things. And us adjusting to, when we integrated, Joan--.I mean my first year, they did not bring in any of the African-American teachers on , so that was a difference. Because all of the teachers were white. Athletics was a big deal. Lynch was kind of a powerhouse in Class A in football and when we integrated, that team had already been winning and then we had to blend into that. But we were State champs my senior year, also, when we integrated. All in all, it was a pretty smooth process. But just learning some of those kinds of things. I'll share with you one personal experience when I talk about just adjusting. It's kind of funny as I look back on it now. They had this, this, it wasn't a ritual, but this kind of thing that they did at the school, where they would, all of the seniors, they would make, the teachers would make certain kinds of prognostications as to what they predicted you'd be doing, you know, ten years from now, after you graduated. And I remember mine was that I would be a shoe salesman or something like that. And I took real offense at that. First of all, I didn't think those people knew me well enough to be making judgments about me, and secondly, and it's not--I'm not disrespecting that occupation, but it just bothered me that someone thought they could make those kind of judgments, those kind of judgments about me, which just challenged me to really work harder my senior year, than I had, probably the two years previously. Which was good, and I'm really glad that, that happened, because I got my grades back up and it made it okay for me to go on to college.

PEEPLES: That was one of the things, I think we missed, because when you have a voting process - we were few in numbers and so we didn't get to do that, probably we missed our opportunities for African Americans to be Valedictorian, Salutatorian of the classes, but as time went on that changed. But we probably were victims of that the first year. I do remember that we did not have a prom. I think there were, the school administrators were a little bit reluctant, because they didn't really know how that thing was going to play out. So I think what we ended up, we went on some kind of, a one day senior trip. But historically the kids at the white school had gone to like Washington and other places for several days. But I think they were still hesitant about trying it. Even though we had traveled together and gone everywhere to play sports and stayed over. But I think that was just some of those kinds of things that those people had to adjust to and grow up and learn how to handle.

PEEPLES: They worked the junior and the elementaries, they stayed at the junior high and elementaries.

BRINSON: So they still had jobs.

PEEPLES: Yeah, they did. The only person I know that lost a job out right during that time was the high school football/basketball coach. And I'm not so sure if he wasn't offered something. But I know him, he was a very proud man. He wasn't going to accept anything less than what he felt he desired.

BRINSON: And what happened to him?

PEEPLES: He left. He left. He moved to Virginia. But that happened across the state. When we had integration, most of the black coaches and all lost it. And we are still suffering from that, because we don't, there is an obvious absence of African American males in Education today. And what the end result is, we don't have enough role models in the institutions for kids to look at, look up to.

PEEPLES: Now that was very interesting. I came to UK at a time when there probably was about fifty African-Americans on campus in sixty-six. And it started out from day one, just very interesting, you know, moving into the dorms. But I transferred as a junior, so I had a level of maturity and also what prepared me for dealing with UK, was the New York experience. After doing that from the time I was fifteen, UK was a piece a cake. It was not intimidating to me to be, to be an African-American there with a predominantly white group, because I had, had those other kinds of experiences. During those years at UK, it was not the most welcoming climate for African-Americans. Now in the classes you had to get accustomed to the fact that you were going to be the only one in your classes. I probably had a class with another African-American maybe twice, but most of the times I was the only one, but that didn't bother me either. Socially you were very alienated, but what we did was, we socialized with our friends at Kentucky State or Eastern. Eastern, which had a larger African-American population. Being on campus during the time was sometimes kind of intimidating from the standpoint of, I mean, you got used to racial slurs, as you walked across the campus or you walked up and down Rose Street. It was not unusual. I used to joke that I thought cars could talk, because quite a few of them came by and you heard the "N" word coming out of them. But that's just one of those kinds of things you learn to deal with. Or you were walking past the fraternity houses, you would hear the "N" word quite a bit coming from the guys up in there. Sometimes, there were times, when they would kind of sic their dog, because fraternity houses they have mascots, dogs and so forth. Sometimes they would kind of let those dogs loose. But it was--.bah. It did not deter me, you know, because I was convinced that I was going to graduate. Because I was the first person in my family to have an opportunity to go to college. And I just owed that to my mother, my father, my sisters and brothers. Especially my sisters and brothers, who were older, who had allowed me to come and live with them in the summer and worked and saved money to go to school. So I was not going to be turned around by someone with some silly racist attitudes. I was convinced I was going to make, I was going to do that.