Oral History Interview with George Wright

INTERVIEWER A: Uh I would like to start with a few personal questions about you if I may, um first off where and when were you born?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, I was born in Lexington, Kentucky in February, 1950.

INTERVIEWER A: So that makes you… 50 years old.

GEORGE WRIGHT: 50 years old exactly.

INTERVIEWER A: Ok, and what do you know about your ancestors?

GEORGE WRIGHT: I know some things about the grandparents on both my parents side, I know for example that my mothers family came from a place called Bennettsville, South Carolina and if fact she still has some uh cousins back there now, but my grandfather, her father uh came there, came from there that he arrived in Kentucky because of working with horses, that he was an exercise boy and he did that also back in Bennettsville, several of my mothers relatives attending Taskigy University in Alabama and I know that because when I was in Taskigy on one occasion I went through their student files and I saw there name Quick, my mothers maiden name from Bennettsville, South Carolina, so I know that about them, on my uh my grandmother, my mothers mother came from Cadentown outside of Lexington here, back then of course it was a rural area and so they they were already in Fayette County and I’m not quite sure how her parents met but never the less uh uh they met in the early 1900’s. On my fathers side, both his mother and father came from the Richmond Kentucky area, Madison County and at some point they came to Lexington uh looking for jobs and a like, my father was one of thirteen children and so as when I was a young person I had a lot of uncles and aunts on that side of the family, my mother also was from a relatively large family she was probably one of seven children, and so again on that side of the family I had a lot of uncles and aunts so I knew some things about them and in the last decade because I became much more interested in family history I’ve actually interviewed my uncles and aunts to find out about their background, their parents, what they did and a like and I also talked with my mother some before she passed away to try to have a sense of of what she knew about her background.

INTERVIEWER A: Its most unusual to have uh family who were college students in that particular point in time, do you know the connections in Taskigy?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Um other than these relatives of my mother having attended and graduated from there and then going back to South Carolina as teachers, I don’t know any other connections they have or continue to have with Taskigy, I do know that on both, from both my mother and father it was instilled in me very early on the importance of any education, now my father did not graduate from high school, he he dropped out of high school to join the military during the second world war, but he was always an abed reader, my mother attending Kentucky State College for three years and uh from what she tells me because of financial reason, her father could no longer afford for her to continue, she dropped out prior to her senior year and she never returned, but hey were interested in education and according to them other relatives were also very interested at least one of my fathers brothers would become a college graduate and I know would move to Florida and would be a high school teacher and a basketball coach , and so there’s always been some interest in education.

INTERVIEWER A: I wonder since you um have spent a good bit of you professional career being a historian, and more recently a higher education administrator, I wonder though when did you first get interested in history?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, when I was in elementary school, I can vividly remember the fourth grade we would go to the library one day each week, and at the library this was uh Douglas Elementary School there was a county school at that time, they would have biographies of famous people, and these biographies, lets say if the biography, the book was ten chapters long, nine of the ten chapters would be about this person as a young person, and only the tenth chapter would talk about him as president or scientist or whatever, so every week I would check out two books on famous people often it would be women as well and so I would read about young Thomas Jefferson, young George Washington, young Benjamin Franklin I was very fascinated by that but also at the same time I became interested in National Geographic uh and reading about far away places became something that really fascinated me, places all over the globe so much so I to this day I have never been on an airplane, including just yesterday that I don’t have a National Geographic with me to read whether a current one or an older one, but I became very interested in that and also I became interested in two other publications, Sports Illustrated because I had love of sports, come to find out some of the best writing is in Sports Illustrated because if you think about it when it comes out you already know the score, who won the game and so forth, so they need to do an analysis, they need to give you another perspective on that and Mad Magazine because I’ve always loved humor, uh and so consequently these would be things that I started reading in fourth and fifth grade that would remain apart of my life, I was very fascinated by history more than any one thing and back then explorers people like Magellan, Christopher Columbus and other people like that and the fact that they would go out in this small vessel from some where in Europe to far away places just seemed amazing in that regards, so I love reading about explorers and at some point I came to be very interested in war, though all the clashes that have occurred of people, interestingly I think very early on most of my interest was outside of the United States, it was a much broader prospective on world history in that sense.

INTERVIEWER A: I wonder at what point did you become interested in black history, and was that every offered to you in your own education growing up?

GEORGE WRIGHT: When I was in elementary school and I would also say up through the Eighth grade I attend all black schools through the eighth grade, every February there would be some emphasis on, and I don’t know whether maybe use the term nigro history week, or black history week or black history month those kinds of terms and I can remember complaining that I have to learn certain poems or something like that a poem about black this or that and so forth I put into the context I also complained about learning Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and so forth but that would be the primary exposure to that except I also recall at Douglas Elementary school being in the library on one occasion going to a section of historical books and I picked up a book on slavery and it had a lot of illustrations in it and that became my first exposure that really stayed with me, maybe teachers had mentioned it earlier about slavery and there were drawings of people on ships, there were drawings of people working in the fields, there were some horrible drawings of people being beaten and the like, that became my first exposure it would not be until I was a junior in college at the University of Kentucky that I took a course in Afro American history uh and not surprisingly for me um this being completely new I I was just captivated by it uh that it just seems so overwhelming to me and oh just wonderful, delightful, horrible I guess every kind of emotion imaginable but in some ways I think uh as I look back on it its to my benefit that I actually came to Afro American history late because by then I had a much broader prospective on history and I think that’s always stayed with me and so consequently while I may make a statement about black people I think I’m very quick to then say but you know in certain situations other minority people how ever they are defined, it could be a religious minority, ethnic minority so forth and then I think its made me always aware of native American people and clearly even though women may not be numerically a minority, its made me think about women as well, but clearly when people would say how awful these Africans would kill each other and slaughter each other and I said well what about these Europeans killing each other and so forth, and I said you know in Europe at one point they were not into white power they may be into Catholicism, prothidism, or or being a German or something else but its always helped me kind of put into a context and then if people said well then in Africa there are barbaric people, I said well first of all I don’t know if those terms are appropriate, but clearly what about native people in Poppa, New Guinea or into Brazil Amazon Forest or places like that and so I actually think it helped me in a prospective by coming to Afro American history late as opposed to assuming the first time around that everything was in black and white.

INTERVIEWER A: I wonder though George growing up yourself in segregated society, at what point did you realize that you were in a segregated society?

GEORGE WHITE: Ok, I have I given a lot of thought to this, and I think very early on I knew I was in a segregated society part of the time, the other part of the time I thought I was in a quote normal society in the sense that while my world was all black as a child, uh going to church, school, play so forth was all black at the same time if you went on the bus and then you went to the down town area or certain other place you then would encounter people who were white, uh I don’t think it dawned on me that there parts of the world that I could not venture into or that were uh uh I could were prohibited to going to and and I think its because it seemed as if our world provided me with all the things, now to be sure I now realize there were many things we just were excluded from that I didn’t know I was being deprived from, but I think more much of my childhood lets say up until eight, nine or ten the concept of race was really not that big of a deal, I think at some point obviously the more I read the newspaper and you would see about the civil rights agitated going on then you became aware that black people are protesting that fact that they can’t do certain things, but the idea of there not being a black representative, or a black this or that, or a black uh police chief was something that would not have been a part of my mind set at all as a young person.

INTERVIEWER A: You mentioned that after the eighth grade you moved from a segregated to an integrated school, would you talk a little bit about that.

GEORGE WRIGHT: That’s right. Ok, well I don’t have the complete facts in front of me in the sense of how the Lexington schools did their desegregation I want to believe that the early 1960’s black people were had the option of attending all black schools or if they chose to they could go to lets say a Henry Clay or a Lexington Junior in the city schools or Bryan Station or Lafayette and the county schools and obviously the elementary version of those city and county schools uh my mother opted for me and my sisters and brother to remain in the all black school so that we meant we were still going to Douglas School, when my sister started the 10th grade this would be 1964 I believe, Douglas had so few black students show up for high school that year, they decided lets say two weeks into the semester that they would transferred to Lafayette, now geographically uh we were probably in the Bryan Station High School district, but they’d sent my sister and those others to layette, but I guess the Lafayette had more space or something at any rate they had also made the decision then that that the eighth grade would be the last year of Douglas, so it meant that once you started the 9th grade you would have to attend a white school in my case that meant Leestown Junior High School and that meant my going there in the fall of 1965, that I go to Leestown since our teachers knew that we would be going to Leestown after that much of my eight grade year was spent with them telling us this is what you need to be prepared to do, uh and they not only talked about things academically uh but they talked about the way we needed to conduct our selves, the way we needed to dress and so worth, no one of the things I have decided in hind sight once I arrived at Leestown is that we were more concerned about those things then whites had been, cause those kids came with their shirt tales out and all the same other kinds of things and I think we came there trying to act on our best behavior and so forth, but I recall that and one of the first things that struck me about being at Leestown compared to my having been at Douglas is that were previously I had been involved in a wide range of activities at school, if there was a play or something’s uh to my (un audible) back then they would always assign me one of the lead parts in the play or something like I would rather not have done it, but you now how that is they would say no you can do it you’ll be involved in that and I was involved in a lot of things at Leestown and again I don’t want to say this was the case for every black student, but it seemed to me that my best opportunities were in sports, and it just so happen I was good enough, even though they merged together uh several schools to make the basketball team, but I was not involved as I had been previously uh also one of the things

INTERVIEWER A: Why do you think that was?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Uh, I just didn’t see many other black kids involved and I don’t know whether and again I want to be fair, I don’t want to just uh blame whites for something we failed to do it could have been we didn’t believe we were being welcomed, uh it may have been we didn’t take the initiative or it could be that the teachers didn’t encourage us, I was about to say that at Douglas they forced me more or less to be involved they made me learn certain poems and other kinds of things and in hind sight things that are very good for a young person to be involved in at Leestown they may have taken the attitude if you don’t want to be involved in it, then that’s your decision and the like, if I was if I were generalize and I have done this before I would say that a big difference in the black schools that I had attended up through the eighth grade and once I attended Leestown and then Lafayette, is that the black teachers were involved in you outside of the classroom this extended to the weekends it extended even to summer if they saw us doing us things that they thought were inappropriate they would discipline us even then, can you imagine them doing that now, right at any rate I think when I attended a white school I was much more of a number sort of speak then I had been at the black school uh the black teachers constantly talked about any behavior that we demonstrated would reflect on the total race and that you have to act appropriately, now I didn’t always act appropriately I guess I was constantly bringing the race down unfortunately, but I understood what they were saying about that and they also would look at people like me say you can make it, you can do better then you are, I never had white teachers early on say to me, it would only be in college that I would encounter white teachers like that but in the black schools they would not allow people like me to get away with things that I think once you got to Leestown and other schools they would allow for instance uh one of the things that I discovered at Leestown was that if I wanted to act inappropriately by wearing a hat at a place I shouldn’t or sun glasses or anything, not a problem at a black school they would not allow people like me to do that, that they were very concerned in that respect so I have great deal of admiration for the values that the instilled in the black schools and how they had a philosophy that everybody could learn and that everybody could act appropriately and so forth where I think once I was in another setting people did not believe that about us.

INTERVIEWER A: Uh uh, excuse me just a second please. I need to move this cable and (in audible)

GEORGE WRIGHT: Gosh I didn’t know we’d be talking about these things, these things are tuff, they have emotions to them, Oh Geese.

INTERVIEWER A: Uh what year did you graduate George from Lafayette? And at that point, how many were in your graduating class and how did it break down?

GEORGE WRIGHT: I graduated from Lafayette in 1968. Ok, um giving you a broad number, I would say my high school graduating class from Lafayette had roughly 630-40 people of that there were 12-14 black people in the class, and here’s what happened, uh I lived in what was the Bryan Station area where but because my sister had been transferred to Lafayette when it became time for me to go to the 10th grade, they said since my sister was there if I wanted to go to Lafayette or I could go to Lafayette or Bryan Station, and for some reasons I decided to go to Lafayette and in part because Lafayette basketball team back then was not very strong and I thought I would have a better chance of making the basketball team at Lafayette then Bryan Station, turned out to be a mistake my basketball game was not that good and so by the time I was in the 11th grade I was not playing, but never the less I was at Lafayette and also because of the courses I decided to take, uh which were the ones leading more toward college like for instance you could take business English if you wanted to what ever the heck that was, versus just regular English and so forth I opted for the regular English even though college was not something I was not 100% sure I would pursue but the results were at Lafayette I would say 75% of my classes over the three years I was there, I was the only black person in my class, now putting into context this is also during the time of the civil rights movement and there’s a lot of news on television about Martin Luther Kings, Malcolm X and other people and I’m the only black in my class and there were times I used to say I sure wished we you know this wasn’t a focal point of things, I’d just like to blend in but blending in was not something I could do in high school.

INTERVIEWER A: Were you often put on the spot to respond to questions or um to provide rational or examples about like life?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, I recall being put on the spot too often in that regard but I I realized then that race was an issue, for instance there were several young women who I had befriended when I was at Leestown that came over to Lafayette and I noticed something of a distance there with the guys there really wasn’t but one of the things that really struck me early on during my time at Lafayette was lets say if you were sharing a seat in science with someone, two to a table and I thought I was, well the male or female I thought we were friends what ever that meant, and then you’d come to find out on Monday they had a party or something like that and you had not been invited to their party uh that was pretty tough in that regard, the thing though that I still remember and it may have just oh I don’t know how things worked out like this in 10th grade at Lafayette you were assigned to a home room and had been in that home room for three years and thy assigned them alphabetically so everyone in my home room was wo, wr, wy, wz. At any rate the first day of 10th grade they assigned lockers, two people to a locker and so you start at the top and so they the first person said I’m going to share a locker with…. You know John and Jane, well I kept wondering as we moved down who was going to share a locker with me and we got down to the punch line was, I was going to have my own locker, now as a 50 year old man, even much earlier then this I think that’s ok, but when I was 14 or 15 I really wanted to share a locker with someone just since everyone else was doing it but I there’s a part of my personality that became very clear and this is the way I pretty much responded to much of things at Lafayette I adopted this sense or pravodo, and I said I don’t give a damn, I’m so glad no one will share a locker with me and all of that its that crying out thing that we see young people do when we know its really the opposite that they would like but uh that to me set the tone in some ways for how I felt about my experiences at Lafayette and I guess there were some other things as well by then my parents had divorced and so my mother was raising us and so from a financial stand point uh we were living in a modest means in that regard well I I took the sense very early on that now one at school would really now bout that and it really came home to me at Lafayette very early on because I qualified for free lunch and so upon inquiring into it I noticed that Lafayette had I don’t know six or seven lines that you would dgo through to get you lunch because you know a lot of students there and they had one free lunch line uh well given who I was and so forth I couldn’t go through the free lunch line I could not have other people knowing that I qualified for free lunch so I you know some how paid for my lunch or whatever the case may be maybe that was the best thing to do I don’t know but at any rate I just thought there were a lot of things that happened during that time period that I have labled in my own life my years in high school, maybe junior high through high school the worst years of my life and I and again that may be to put in a fairer context maybe most people can look back on having been fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and saying those were not good times but for instance I didn’t go to the proms at Lafayette or participate in any those, any of those were by choice, no one said I didn’t have to but I just felt like I was not a part of that and so consequently I stood out of it, many years later to jump a head in

INTERVIEWER A: Let me ask you before we leave that, do you think if you had attended an all black school that you would have had a better high school experience, you wouldn’t have looked back on that as the worst years of your life.

GEORGE WRIGHT: I think my families financial situation would have taken some of the fun of high school in that regard but I think given my personality I would have been involved in things other than athletics, I’ve always loved to speak uh I’ve always love to stand up in front of an audience and try to make people laugh and those kinds of things, I think those are things I did not demonstrate in high school and then again it may have just been my sense of of that, but in some ways I will say that I do hold the school responsible in part because I want to believe that as a professor the one thing I tried to do is bring out my students, to challenge my students if a student says to me there going to be this then I say well no you could really be that or other kinds of things and I don’t think I received the kind of encouragement that I think is a part of being a teacher.

INTERVIEWER A: University of Kentucky and then from there we’ll move a head to your some of your classes, ( in audible) but I’m interested about your years at the University of Kentucky because again it was the 60’s and there were not that many black students still, what was what was your experience and what was the experience of black students during that period after you (in audible)

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, I started at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 1968 and had it not been several months earlier for the tragic assassination of Dr. King I would have not been there, that Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 and I would say that two months later the University of Kentucky started a program in honor of the memory of Dr. King to try to bring more black students into U.K., I want to be clear on the fact there were already black students there but there numbers were relatively small uh they started this summer orientation program especially for only for black Lexington students from the four high schools, the four public high schools and they said if you would come out there that summer, probably for two months and take simulated classes in English, Foreign Languages and Mathematics and if you completed that they would then give you a Martin Luther King scholarship for that fall, for at least on semester maybe longer uh I did that and about thirty some other young people did as well and we enrolled in U.K. that fall so first off I found the people involved in this program to really be encouraging us, I don’t know if the professor s and staff were paid or not, I’ve never really looked into that, but but even if they were paid doesn’t take away from their commitment to the program and they really encouraged us there were also some black undergraduates working in the program who tried to tell us what college would be like and so forth , I enrolled in the University of Kentucky scared to death saying I know I’m in over my head uh um going into very large biology class that had hundreds of people in the lecture hall and a rotating professors many of whom were international with my I couldn’t hardly understand all of them and so forth but I realized the college was supposed to be sink or swim something that’s not today to our benefit but never the less I realized that I would be on me but low and behold I found that environment one to my liking in the sense that uh the freedom of college and the kinds of ideas and so forth but also I met in the history department primarily a number of professors who just like my black teachers many years earlier saw something in me to where they said you’re really good at this uh you can do this and that even if my ideas were a little bit off they would say lets work on this some, who gave me encouragement it would be these people who said to me that you can go beyond a bachelors degree it that area, so I found U.K. to just be an exciting place there were demonstrations going on back then, uh there were people protesting all sorts of things, the Vietnam war, but others things as well I discovered very early on I was not an activist in that sense, while on occasion was captivated by some demonstration and observed it I was never actively involved in that, uh but I had very strong feelings about all these things but I didn’t always think it was appropriate to share my view with everyone else at that time uh but I found college to just be a real exhilarating four year experience.

INTERVIEWER A: Did you have any interaction with the black student union enough that you can describe to me what there activity was about?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, as a during my first year I probably attended the black student union meetings to get a sense of what their issues were and so forth and also some of their social activities uh I can recall for instance um the leadership saying at the football games and I enjoyed going to football and so forth they would protest by not standing up when the national anthem was being played and especially when my old Kentucky home was being played because back then their were lyrics that said were quote where the darkies are gay un quote, well I realized that we were in a stalled field at the time uh right were the singletary center I believe today, and there was something about me that just said I don’t know if I can really take part in this kind of demonstrations, maybe it was cowardly on my part I don’t know what, but I always conveniently was not in the stands at that time I was at the concession area or something it’s the truth uh in that regard when the Star Spangle Banner and that type of thing was played, a number of instances they were going to picket the basketball games out on the outside because of the Coach Adolph Rupp at the time had not recruited any black players now I

End of Side One

cowardly on my part I don’t know what but I always conveniently in was not in the stands at that time I was at the concession area something that’s the truth uh in that regard when the Star Spangled Banner and that type of thing was played, a number of instances they said they were going to pick it the basketball games on the out on the outside because of Coal Adolph Rupp at the time had not recruited any black players now I said hey, people love their basketball so much that who knows whats going to happen there, I never picketed with them but here I am a person who had loved Kentucky basketball so much that I could tell you all of the players on the starting five from 1964 forward I did not attend any basketball games as an undergraduate at U.K. not one game, and that was my own way of doing it and I didn’t think I needed to make a public statement out of that or anything like that, so I can remember what students were doing but something else that really struck me was that we black students would often congregate in one part of the student union cafeteria and people would be there talking and interacting and that’s fine, playing cards and so forth uh well one day my sophomore year I looked around and said that’s a huge cafeteria here and we relegated ourselves to one area of it, and I said that one area’s ok, but what about other areas, and I decided that I would not relegate myself there, and so I just quietly got up and started sitting in some other places in the cafeteria, and I decided that while I would maintain and keep all of the black friends I had a U.K., that I wanted to meet some other people at U.K. as well and so from there I reached out and I met some other people as well and that was a very important step for me as a undergraduate at U.K.

INTERVIEWER A: Did that kinda action reaching out leave you with any resistance from either white or black students?

GEORGE WHITE: As far as I recall I don’t think that it did and and but in some ways going back to my experiences at Lafayette to were I was quote alone and had no friends at school and so forth my being alone if if that had been the case at college wouldn’t have been any different in essence so I as much as I wanted to black students to consider me as one of them, I had no problem with with going else where, for one thing I started working I was working while I was in college and eventually I was even married so the amount of time I had for social activities were very minimal anyway and and I also realized that if I stayed on a certain course in college I could graduate in four years and then go on from there so I felt highly motivated to uh to to concentrate on my act my academics so in that sense the social part of college was not that important to me I look back today and I say when people tell me they have good times in college and all I always say I miss mine, when am I going to get mine, I didn’t have any of those good times.

INTERVIEWER A: As you being to study more and more history and it became clear to you that history was your primary academic interest, I wonder what point in all of that you made the decision to focus your research on black history in Kentucky?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Right, right at some point um in learning about slavery and learning about the age of Jim Crow and things like that I realized that it helped explain to me why I didn’t see blacks in certain positions, why black people seemed not have the same uh financial security as white people and so forth and I thought history then would be a way to make sure everybody knew that, I really thought as any number of black historians people like Carter Jean Woodson had said that once people know that truth itta change them, it that they will be out raged by that number one, so for me also since I wanted to make a contribution as I already said I was not one who could stand up in a demonstration and so forth, I thought my history would give me an opportunity to make a difference, that I could inform people about the black experience I could challenge people uh I also thought that there were to many black people who didn’t know that black people had done a lot of wonderful things in that regard but I also thought it would bring black people and white people together and so at some point when I took a course in Kentucky history and from my prospective they seemed not to be focusing on what I thought was the true past of Kentucky I said I really have an opportunity here to do scholarship on Kentucky the other point was that I heard so many people white primarily say that race relations and the black experience, blacks had it better in Kentucky then they did for the south, and I used to say well that may be true it must be really bad for the south but secondly every time they would point out a prominent black Kentuckian, that person didn’t live in Kentucky and that person was somewhere else, California, New York, Michigan even in the south sometimes so I said boy that tells me something that everybody that’s made it as a black person in Kentucky, is not in the state, so for me it then set out a path for what I wanted to do scholarship on, and I thought race in Kentucky would be the subject.

INTERVIEWER A: Well that whole issue of migration out of Kentucky history to be one that is been going on for many, many years and I’ve been struck in my interviews by how many people felt that they had to leave the state uh some of them come back usually to aid (in audible) um and fall for a significant contribution, was that whole (would you like an drink of water or anything, um this is a long question but even in Eastern Kentucky I’ve interviewed some people recently who were teenagers it was understood that from their coal mining family that these children were not going to stay and be coal miners and they would go off in the summer with families in New York or Cincinnati but to see a bigger world, is that whole mind set of leaving to leave in order to be successful, how much is that there in black Kentucky experience?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Well from a statistical stand point, if you look at the end of the Civil War, probably down in 1950 and it may even go beyond 1950, the black percent in Kentucky’s population would decline they would become a smaller percentage and so forth and obviously that doesn’t always mean that from decade to the next that there were fewer black people in Kentucky, but for many years black Kentuckians were limited if they wanted to pursue certain forms of higher education that they would have to go out of the state for that and obviously they could go to Kentucky State College for Negro’s back then for bachelors degree, but if one wanted law, dental, medical not to mention um um Ph.D. in disciplines one would have to leave for that reason, but even if one was not pursuing higher education that they wanted jobs in industry and so forth it would be to Indianapolis, Cleveland, to Chicago to Detroit that people turned to uh and clearly people realized that segregated public schools existed in Kentucky and did not exist in these states to the north, Cincinnati being an exception but clearly in Cleveland the school were integrated and at the same time white Kentuckians as you mentioned from eastern Kentucky and from other rural areas also were part of that and so many Kentuckians saw the need to move else where so it was part of the black uh experiences as well to migrate elsewhere for opportunities again not only did they move northward but many people would move westward to places like Texas and then to California eventually to Oklahoma where there were some all black towns in the like so there were a lot of reasons that lead to blacks moving out of Kentucky.

INTERVIEWR A: How do you see that now in hindsight, is that good or bad or both for the individual, for the state?

GEORGE WRIGHT: I have met on a few occasions some black people who are native Kentuckians who have done very well uh in various professions outside and I think that has been good for them obviously, personally and in some instances they have found a way to come back to though they may not reside in Kentucky and in that sense they have been a source of inspiration for other people, at some point uh obviously its not good for a society when all of its quite best and brightest tend to leave that society and and then again I’m not trying to put myself in that same category but because I became aware of that um as I left Kentucky to start my Ph.D. degree at Duke University I told everyone that I would be coming back to teach at U.K. even though there was no job for me at U.K., but I I felt like very early on that that was something I wanted to do because I felt to many people were were not in the state who were educated and so forth and so I I thought that was important but undoubtedly some of that has changed and also given the was American society is now its not uncommon for people to move here from elsewhere uh since I’ve left just this part of Kentucky on my travels back I’ve met many people here in Lexington now black professionals who come from all over uh places like Lexington has been new opportunities for them, so in that regard Lexington has benefited now from some people moving into uh Kentucky.

INTERVIEWER A: (In audible) You want to go up there, I forgot I didn’t realize that phone (in audible) You ready, huh huh. George I want move now to ask some questions about this Civil Rights experience um both at the national level and in Kentucky, how how did blacks experience post Civil War America?

GEORGE WRIGHT: I agree. (noise) If you look at it nationally, we know we went into the reconstruction period where the Republican Party which was essentially the federal government at the time, mandated certain things be done in the south, that were designed to bring about black people being fully integrated into society, things like the fourteenth, fifteen amendments of the Constitution well clearly if you understand that there were problems that black people encountered in places where the federal government took a an active hand, there were things like the Freedman’s Bureau and so forth involved, in Kentucky the experience of blacks was some what different uh in Kentucky one of the fascinating stories is that Kentucky had remained loyal during the Civil War, meaning that all the war time measures that ultimately would free the slaves further south did not apply to Kentucky uh for instance Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation exempted Kentucky that it applies to the rebelling states not the loyal states, well after the Civil War ended there were white Kentuckians who have remained loyal to the government who are now very upset that their slave are gaining their freedom just like people in the confederate states, but in Kentucky white had a freer rain then they did further states to handle what they called quote the Negro problem unquote and so consequently its no coincidence that Kentucky’s legislatures voted against the thirteenth, fourteenth, Fifteenth amendment something that legislatures further south did not have the same opportunity to do that it was more mandated on them, in Kentucky black people would encounter after the Civil War a certain amount of hostility uh there were many instances of blacks who had somehow fought in the Union Army uh being subjected to violence upon returning home and clearly after the Civil War Kentucky whites were unwilling to start public schools and any number of other things that were designed to uplift black people, so the reconstruction time period would set the stage for black people in Kentucky encountering still opposition for every step they would take over the fifty, seventy-five years in Kentucky, I uh uh think so often when scholars have talked about race relations after the Civil War they’ve concentrated more on the deep south, but by and large most of the measures that were forms of discrimination that blacks faced further south were present in Kentucky as well, with the one major exception is that black people always maintained the legal right to vote in Kentucky but in many instances that vote was negated by candidates who were openly anti-black or with intimidation being used to keep black people away from the poles.

INTERVIEWER A: How did blacks resist this kind of treatment?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, they they responded in the ways that were typical of that day, main way was by migrating away from that situation again we’ve already mentioned how many blacks chose to live elsewhere they also consistently appealed to whites in a sense of living up to the America creed, there are numerous petitions from blacks all over Kentucky saying they have right to public education, or they have the right to freedom of expression and so forth uh very early on black Kentuckians uh would involve themselves in conventions of black leaders, various black church organizations would come together, other kinds of black organizations to to protest injustices and try to mount opposition interestingly as early as 1871 in Louisville a number of blacks come together and actually do a street car demonstration something that we think about happening 100 years later, they even resorted to that during that time period, again that was not always the way but the point is that black people found numerous ways to protest injustices even in the period right after slavery ended, by the early 1900’s of course as national organizations were being formed, Kentucky branches of those organizations would be formed, but in that thirty year period say roughly 1870 – 1900 they would find localized ways to express their injustices, if you look at in black newspapers you will see numerous letters to the editor of black people protesting their outrage at injustices there would be a few instances of black people arming themselves and resisting whites in that manner in Kentucky but people need to understand that that was not a real viable alternative in most instances because the entire legal apparatus was designed to oppress them so consequently blacks defending themselves would really have to be the step of last resort to them, but black people did not willing except the second class status that they found themselves in in Kentucky in the period after after the Civil War down to the 1900.

INTERVIEWER A: Berea College that’s a integrated college um after the war must have been real (in audible) experience not only for Kentucky but the country but what happened there with the (in audible) how much of that was in the mind of both white and black?

GEORGE WHITE: Ok, uh Berea admitted its first black students within two or three years after the Civil War and by 1890, a sizeable percentage of Berea students would be black in fact at one point there were more black than white students, and to put that in the context while there were some schools in the north uh the ivy league type of schools that admitted black students there numbers would be very small, Berea would be one of two black I’m sorry one of two white universities in the entire south that admitted black students, uh clearly Berea was existing during a time period when racial segregation and education was the norm and racial segregation in other areas of society were increasing, so the pressure was mounting on an institution like Berea, allegedly um a legislature by the name of Carl Day from Breathitt County toured Berea and was shocked to he said to see blacks as well, he would have already known there were black students there, everybody knew that and it would be Carl Day that uh uh who would go back to Frankfort and would come forward with legislation, now Berea’s board of trustees would fight this racial segregation law and this would go all the way to the supreme court, interestingly one of the justices of the supreme court was Harlan, a native Kentuckian, John Harlan who had been a slave owner but who had been appointed to the supreme court by Abraham Lincoln, he would vote against the Day Law, he would say um that we have no right to interfere with a private enterprise like Berea and if we segregate people here, what’s to stop from segregating people in virtually every area of society, again in some ways some of the same kind of thing they had said earlier, but by the time Berea uh is forced to segregate in Kentucky, virtually every institution, organization, society in the state of Kentucky was segregated by then as it was nationally, so in that sense it was almost a natural for that to have occurred, uh uh to give you an example during the same time period on one occasion a news paper editor in Charleston, South Carolina decided to do a spoof about South Carolina increasing its number of segregation laws and in doing this spoof he said you know we need to if we’re going to do it right, we need to segregated white people from black people uh when they go to pay their taxes, when they go to hospitals, when they do this and he said after a while lets just take a short cut and give black people certain counties in South Carolina making them exclusive for black people, well as historians have pointed out even though he thought he was creating a farce, all of those forms of segregation by 1910, would exist except turning over certain counties to black people and white people, but even in places like Louisville they tried as best they could with residential segregation laws that Louisville passed in 1912, segregating people saying black people cannot live on certain streets and white people can’t live on certain streets so what happened in Berea was part of a national movement of totally segregating the races.

INTERVIEWER A: Was it that national movement that uh culminating reflecting (in audible) the supreme court, did that send the signal to the society that this is the way its going to be in terms of separate but equal (in audible)

GEORGE WRIGHT: No question about it that that it in some instances you when Plisse Vs. Ferguson becomes the law of the land 1896, one could say that its only affirming what exists, you could say that on the one hand, but yet looking after that you still see a proliferation of segregation laws uh some scholars have said that as a result of decisions like Plisse, that people then used their imagination and tried to come up segregation laws everywhere, the bottom line was that they were designed to make black people know that that are inferior, because if you think about it at the very same time they are saying the races must be kept apart, it is ok for black people to move freely to move with white people to be in the midst of whites as long as its clear that they are the servant of a white person so for instance a black person cannot go to a public part that’s designated for whites, but a black nurse maid can go to that park, or a black person can go into any facility as long as its clearly designated that their working for a white person, so it was designed to make the point that black people are not the equals of white people.

INTERVIEWER A: Lets move a head to the, this is the twentieth century and in particular the 40, 50, 60’s and so forth, the 50’s and 60’s are sort of understood as a modern civil rights on the national level, um ( in audible) we were beginning to look back to the effects of World War II in our veterans, and how they came home and began to ask for a different kind of life, uh how looking at that in terms of all of the United States, how did at what point did Kentucky actually become involved in that national struggle?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, even though we its very easy to pinpoint certain break through advances or whatever in the 1950’s or 1960’s I think its fairer to say that the start of those activities were years earlier, nationally as well as Kentucky in Kentucky in the 1930’s the NAACP becomes very interested in the whole issue of school desegregation that you see the NAACP nationally as early as 1930 had said that the weakest link in the whole segregation chain was in higher education because of the exclusion of blacks from medical schools, dental schools, professional schools and a like, ok you could say even though most people would fairly agree, that the Kentucky State is equal to U.K. well we know that’s not the case but you would say never the less there is Kentucky State that provides a bachelors education for young people, the NAACP in Kentucky then tries to find cases to integrate the University of Kentucky in the n1930’s, this would be the same thing that’s happening nationally and just like nationally where it would take more than a decade to be successful, the same would be true in Kentucky, its up to 1949 in the Lanna Johnson case that the University of Kentucky is desegregated well that whole movement had started and involved several people in the 1930’s uh people like Governor Chandler was presented with petitions in the 1930’s saying that black students have a right to attend the University of Kentucky and Chandler said that one has to decide what he meant that the University of Kentucky will not be integrated in your life time or mine was he speaking that’s what society says or is he speaking that from his own view of things should not change, I don’t know in that sense but clearly those kinds of things happened at the same time in Kentucky in the 1940’s, black people started protesting their exclusion from municipal parks and things and other city facilities, it would be in the 1950’s before those became a reality in the 1940’s black Kentuckians started protesting the Day law, their exclusion from Berea College, even before the Brown decision of 1954, black Kentuckians would have that over turned in their state, so there were a number of things that Kentucky black just like their counter parts elsewhere were doing to their credit, Kentucky blacks also protested the uh absent of blacks from elective office and in 1936 I believe it was a man by the name of Charles Anderson in Louisville is elected to the Kentucky Legislature becoming the first black legislature in the south in you know in thirty years and so forth so there were a number of actions that Kentucky blacks were working on and I also mention another one that would be very important, they were protesting the exclusion of blacks from juries, this would be the 1940’s before this is overturned, in a case out of out of Paducah, Kentucky Hale Vs. Paducah, would be uh this case so consequently even though before the second World War, Kentucky blacks were involved in what I would call Civil Rights activities given the opposition that they encountered it would be ten years, fifteen years, twenty years before many of these measures are overturned.

INTERVIEWER A: You mentioned the NAACP uh during this period, were there other organization, other institutions like churches or uh sororities, the mason and other black institutions that were playing an advocacy role?

GEORGE WRIGHT: ok, in my research on Kentucky most often you will see that these other organizations be it fraternal, uh be it educational and so forth, they were around they were active but primarily if you take a black educational organizational that they could be limited because they work uh uh for the state or for the city and so their way of protesting as best as they could do is by writing letters and things like that uh most of these people would rally behind the NAACP, that so many of them would join the NAACP or they would join the urban league, the national urban league and then the Louisville Urban League, the Lexington Urban League and so forth, they were around as early as 1910, that they almost uh uh started during the same time as the NAACP in Louisville for a number of years there

INTERVIEWER A: (in audible)

End of Side Two

Tape Two

Side One

This is an unrehearsed interview with George Wright.

INTERVIEWER A: Lets go back and ask you that question again, which you mentioned the NAACP, but were there other black institutions and organizations that also played an advocacy role?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, from its beginning around 1912, the National Urban League was very active in Louisville and Lexington and by the 1960’s many people would view the Urban League as not as militant an organization as the NAACP but I think it would be fair to say that they were very active for decade in trying to find jobs for black people and demanding new employment opportunities, also demanding that black people have equal access to housing and things like that, and so I think a lot people would be surprised to how effective the Urban League was early on in Kentucky I uncovered an organized called the Negro Outlook Committee that predates the NAACP and it was an organization that denounced police brutality if Louisville and Lexington and other forms of violence against black people, so they were very they were very active there but clearly something like the NAACP that becomes the focal point for black activism and if you think about tit so many other organizations or teachers organizations even an organization uh of ministers and so forth could often by muted but I think the NAACP had a power uh connected to it and although in Kentucky by and large the NAACP was an all black organization that was not the case nationally as a number of prominent whites uh loaned their name and their resources to the NAACP but Kentucky always had some organizations around, again those were the main ones I’ll give you an example in Louisville around 1921, a group of black leaders decided that the republican party was not really addressing all of the concerns of black people so they came up with their own independent political party and it would be around for a number of years and it helped black people uh um protest certain injustices.

INTERVIEWER A: What about the role the black newspaper?

GEORGE WRIGHT: ok, if you look at Kentucky from the end of the Civil War to 1950, I guarantee you there were more than 100 different news papers at one time or another, to be sure that some of them were in existence for only a few weeks, some for months but their were some in existence for decades, black newspapers in Kentucky, especially the ones in Louisville perhaps more than any one place and that makes sense given the large larger population there, we’re constantly protesting the injustices, theres the Louisville News, uh and the Louisville Observer, these were two militant news papers in Louisville and these newspapers constantly challenged the status quote there, uh how effective they were always again uh their marginal existence was sometimes hurt them, but never the less black newspapers were always there, I should also say that in a place like Louisville and Lexington, there were some black attorneys that both Lexington and Louisville had a larger number than most cities their size did of black attorneys and these people when ever the uh discriminatory laws were enacted these people protested those, and those people were often involved in law suits against them and clearly by defending black people accused of certain crimes, these people were clearly making a stand against racial injustice in society.

INTERVIEWER A: Uh this is Joan’s question, what was the forgotten years of the movement.

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, for years, scholars called the the Wold War II years, the forgotten years of the Civil Rights movement that many people nationally said that during that time the uh black Americans had rallied around the flag and had put more of their own personal concerns on the back burner, well I’d say ten, fifteen years ago a number of scholars started questioning that and they said that one of the lessons coming out of the first World War where black people had in fact supported the government was that as we moved toward the second World War, black people talked about a double victory, victory in Europe and Asia yes but victory at home as well and they will point out the threaten march on Washington lead by A. Phillip Randolph, they will they will talk about the forming of the Fair Employment Practice Commission as examples of black protest then and they will talk about the movement being started that obviously gained ground swell after the second World War but clearly people say now that black people did not uh turn their backs on Civil Rights agitation even during the second World War.

INTERVIEWER A: This is not a question, just in the last eight months or so read Timothy (in audible) Robert Williams after the second World War and I had been struck (in audible) to ask people about whether they uh had guns in their homes for self defense purposes, you just wonder and I think both whites and blacks have done that for years and years and I just wonder if there’s anything there in Kentucky history that you’ve discovered that address that in terms of your work (in audible)

GEORGE WRIGHT: I must say I am not aware of of how many black would own guns, lets say historically uh whether early years of this century and its interesting I’m not so sure that I’ve ever really asked people about that, now you you can generalize and say in a rural setting there would be obvious reasons why people might have guns and so forth since they could use them to hunt but then you can still obviously have it there, but in urban areas like Louisville and Lexington I have no real clue of it and it could be that in the at least in the circle that I was familiar with people did not have guns or they were never mentioned in that sense, I I upon moving to Texas in 1980 to me was my first real exposure to people having a lot of guns, and I generalize and say boy Texas is a gun culture in a way that I didn’t know Kentucky as, you know it could have been the time period that the 1980’s may have been a time period when that becomes more of an issue than it had been in the 60’s and so forth uh uh again I don’t want ever want to portray black people as somehow passive or docile or cowardly but my understanding of what happens in the context of racial violence is that blacks defending themselves against whites is a very very uh risky proposition because the white legal system, well white gun power and all that would would greatly overwhelm black people so the the one thing that black people I would say can not do is try to to always fight whites in that content.

INTERVIEWER A: Lets go back uh since we’re talking about racial violence, and how how has effect reconstruction in Kentucky?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, I am clear on the fact that while I don’t have the exact number, black people all over Kentucky were victimized by violence in those in that first decade after the Civil War, that whites maintained or regained um their superiority in part through violence, that many black leaders in parts of Kentucky were were assassinated were were killed and so forth and my book on racial violence, I try to give examples on what happened to many blacks in the period after the Civil War and so racial violence becomes part of of the fabric of black life in that period, the concept of them unable to defend themselves against whites its something that again uh black people are very vulnerable to during that time period and uh and if you put it into a context from the south, the same thing is happening there, the difference is that blacks are not the threat to whites, that you can make then out to be in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia where there much greater percentage of blacks, but never the less it is a reality so much so that there are certain parts of Kentucky, certain communities that the black population would literally uh no longer exist, that all of the blacks would realize that its very vulnerable to remain in certain areas and they would then move out of this particular county, move into a Louisville or a Lexington or to a Madisonville or Henderson in those regards, so racial violence is defiantly prevalent for blacks in that time period, I might add that a person can get a real flavor for this by going to the national archives and just reading some of the reports that agents of the free bureau would submit, that they would talk about ten black people were killed or and they would go on and on and some of the brutality that was attached to during that time period uh professor Leon Litwack, University of California, Berkley wrote a book called BEEN in the storm so long and he’s talking about the after math of slavery and he talks about the violence that southern blacks were subjected to during reconstruction well Kentucky fits right in that context.

INTERVIEWER A: Are you familiar with this exhibit of post cards or specific lynching that uh being I believe the Smithsonian or Library of Congress is actually exhibiting it now, but these are historical post cards.

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, I have not seen their exhibit, but I have seen post cards in the past of lynching that happened.

INTERVIEWER A: What goes on in the mindset of a population that uses population that portrays such a trosity?

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, Joel Williamson professor University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill wrote a book called the Crucible of Race, Black, White Relations in the American South after the Civil War and Joel Williams says in his book that by the turn of the century, but actually you could go back to the 1880’s, 1890’s and this period of 1880 to roughly 1920 he said there are many white Americans who are by any definition intelligent, sensitive, human people but you interject the issue of race and all of that goes out the window I I guess in my mind it would have to make it a can to some of the atrocities that would happen during the second World War that would be perpetrated by the nazis uh again I am not saying the numbers are anywhere similar but the fact that people who if you were talking about abusing a child or even an animal they would say no way that could happen yet when it comes to doing something to another human being who they see as not being like them then they can justify it my study I talk about a lot of different lynching that occur, but one that happened in Maysville in I believe November, 1899 uh a young black man was accused the rape and murder of a women and lets just say hypothetically that that really happened, lets say he committed the crime, ok at any rate he is seized from the jail and everyone had let it be known in advance that Richard Coleman would be taken from the jail so state officials could have intervened had they chosen to and a fire and he is going to be burned and the husband of this women is the one who is going to lead this and he takes a hot poker and burns this person up well thousands of people are gathered and are watching this and in my book I talk about how some little children would contribute to the fire and I mention one older women in a wheel chair in excruciating pain going up there and contributing to that, well clearly to do those kinds of things people have to have a mind set that this person was not human and that his act as they saw it justified him being treated in that manner, well that could be duplicated many times and some scholars would talk about them you know the mob mentality that can over take people and so forth to make rational human beings do these kinds of things.

INTERVIEWER A: Can you describe some (in audible)

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, the term legal lynching and I’m going to say even though I use it in the title of my book its not original with me that uh its used to describe from the prospective of the scholar writing about it were a person has been convicted of a crime and sentenced either to prison or most often to death in a setting where you’d say was the person really guilty of the crime and then was the whole court proceedings fair, I try to give my readers numerous examples of where black people were accused of questionable offenses and then they were tried in very hostile environments where they had no chance to be exonerated, no exaggeration in numerous instances the mob dominated the whole proceedings, this would happen so often in Kentucky and in fact that a person was then executed immediately there after without any chance for appeal, that Kentucky came up with a thirty day cooling off law that said thirty days would have to lap from when a person was found guilty when they were executed but you then still read where some judges writing to the state attorney general would say we weight that because of the hostility of the mob which is an indictment of the fair trial, anyway or you see numerous instances where there immediately there after the person was executed I also questioned some of the cases of where uh uh blacks were accused of rape and sentenced to die that in at least of the instances I use uh a young man who was clearly retarded uh and had no conception of what he was accused in in my estimation he had been involved in consensual sex but never the less he had no conception of his crime and was sentenced to die uh in this one instance the attorney who had prosecuted him had reservations about it and went to the Governor of Kentucky and said I really don’t think its fair to put this individual to death, the governor looked into this and this would be a Governor Wilson in the early 1900’s who had actually prevented several lynching from here happening he asked for the entire file and it became clear to him that not only was this young man retarded but both of his parents were retarded and then the governor then ruled that he should be put to death in part he said because this person has no value as human being and when I read that I said we as scholars of course have got to be sensitive of the time period in which we are writing about and not forced our values on people who uh lived many years ago but I said I still have a hard time believing that people couldn’t understand the value of all human life even in 1915 and so forth so there are a number of instances of where I described uh incidence as legal lynching where my prospective I would say a person had acted in self defense but unfortunately he was black and the victim was white or that I even questioned whether or not a crime had occurred in that sense, the flip side to legal lynching I also talk about or instances of where all of the evidence suggest that a white person had committed a crime against the black person and nothing is done in that regards so that would be the other side to that whole scenario.

INTERVIEWER A: You mentioned earlier whole communities of blacks leaving an area for safety uh I wonder if you in your research if you see any differences in the kinds of violence across the state from region to region for example.

GEORGE WRIGHT: Ok, uh clearly and this is consistent with other states as well, that people living in rural, isolated environments are are much more vulnerable to a mob than people living in Lexington, Louisville, Frankfort and so forth, um there are parts of Eastern Kentucky were there were very few blacks and there were instances then when they were made to leave certain areas uh one of course one of the more famous or infamous if you will instances occurred in Corbin Kentucky in 1919 were some two hundred black and granted they were not long time residences of Corbin but hey had moved there to work on the railroad all of these people were forced to leave their community after an alleged incidence had happened, well you also go to Western Kentucky years earlier when some farming communities were black had been for decades and had done quite well but they were forced to to leave, this occurred during some tobacco wars of the early 1900’s that didn’t really involve blacks but the mob used it as the occasion to rid themselves of black as well, this would be in Marshall County, this would be in Trigg County so those kinds of incidence were far more prevalent in smaller areas I I don’t recall anything like that happening in a Lexington or a Louisville in fact in Kentucky uh I don’t know of any large racial violent mob episodes happening in the cities, like that had happened in some cities in the United States in the early 1900’s whether it was New Orleans or Wilmington, North Carolina or Tulsa, Oklahoma, Louisville, Lexington and Frankfort did not have race riots that some American cities did.

INTERVIEWER A: Were these act of violence George perpetuated by organizations like the KKK or the White Citizens Council or were they just individuals?

GEORGE WHITE: Ok, most of the acts of racial violence that I uncovered but I talked about primarily spontaneous acts of violence, uh primarily directed even though it sometimes it could be directed at an entire black community, but most often directed at a black who was accused of a certain crime or thought to be a habitual criminal in that sense, now I say that but also there are also a few episodes in Kentucky of where white groups often not necessarily the Klan, but there might be night riders or others who were involved in some episodes uh but again I I don’t encounter in Kentucky a lot of Klan activity of that type, now that’s not to say it didn’t happen further south, and obviously a lot of the Klan activity took place in the 1860’s and 70’s uh its I don’t have a lot of documented evidence of those organizations being the ones primarily being responsible for a lot of the deaths that occurred.

INTERVIEWER A: What is meant by the term polite racism?

GW: Ok, uh in my book on blacks in Louisville, I talk I use the term polite racism and I use it also not only to refer to Louisville but to Lexington as well and I contrast that to this brutal open racial violence and polite racism I would say its designed to excluded blacks from most of society, its designed to maintain the racial status quote but its absence much of the violence, here’s an example of polite racism, that black would be excluded from white public schools and you create black schools now the presence of a black school is better than no school and I can give you a lot of good things to say about black schools but at the end of the day they would perpetuate a system of anti-quality uh but you exclude blacks from most other areas of society uh and that its done in a manner that’s firm, yet it doesn’t have the brutal, overt hostility that is often that we often think of when we think of cities like Birmingham back during this time period, I would say that polite racism is in some ways the most effective form because if can make white people say well sure we are excluding them but they have their own, that we don’t hate them and all of those kinds of things they can have a lot of rationalization and it can lower black people into not being more aggressive and demanding because they can stand back and say well its true, we’re not under the hostile attacks of blacks in Birmingham, and so forth but make no mistake about it they can only work if it involves the entire white apparatus, the political system, the legal system and the like and it has to if necessary be backed up by force, and so polite racism existed I would argue in places like Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati and so forth to keep black people out, in my book on blacks in Louisville I open up and talking about a persons recollection of growing up in Louisville and he attended Central High School and he said Central was very good school and he goes on to describe his teachers and all these other things but he said but you know what in Louisville there was another whole world, the Padenis Club uh the country clubs um Male and Manual and Female high school with all sorts of other programs and he said it was as if we were living behind a veil, that we could not penetrate this larger society of Louisville that we were effectively cut off, was Louisville the worst place to live in the world as a black person I don’t think it was, but it perpetuated and kept them at the bottom of society, in Louisville they had one of the best all black public libraries in the country, yet it was not the equal of the Louisville free public library yet it in some ways could satisfy black people that they had their own library it definitely satisfied white people that black people had a library.

INTERVIEWER A: Although there are many people both black and white who would say we still operate today under a system of polite racism.

GW: Right, right well in in what I would say in response to that is that in some places people don’t openly talk about racial problems that exist and as we all know uh that means that if there are problems there its very difficult to resolve them if people won’t openly acknowledge that they in fact exist there, and you can lets lets say and and I am using this as a hypothetical without knowing, lets say if in some school district in Kentucky its clearly the case that of the students being suspended for inappropriate behavior seventy-five, eighty percent of them are black in a school district where there may only be ten percent, now maybe in every instance if you go case by case its all justified but it might mean there are some other things at work there that one should really investigate well it might be also that people yet there ones part of the population that’s ver frustrated, but polite racism might just keep this under the cover uh obviously you would hate for something really open and hostile to occur but unfortunately sometimes when something like that happens it brings the issue out in a way that people have to deal with it so uh in that sense you can see how some in some instances where cities or communities or states have had a more aggressive form of racial prejudice its often lead them the had no choice but to address the issue.

INTERVIEWER A: Lets move forward to the 50’s and 60’s in Kentucky again, and ask you to talk a little bit please bout the tactics, the strategies toward achieving long term change, uh and also some of the leadership there.

GW: Ok, in the late 1950’s uh in Kentucky just like the deep south, black leaders were determined to bring out certain changes uh one of the obvious targets became downtown accommodations uh uh having free right to go into any department store, to go into restaurants, to try on clothes and all of those things so if you look a city like Frankfort or Louisville or Lexington various organizations NAACP and then CORE, Congress On Racial Equality become active during that time period uh in a place like here in Lexington this would involve virtually all of the black churches that they would unite on a strategy what a Dr. Martin Luther King and people like that would do they would bring a certain amount of national attention to it but in reality there were people already active trying to desegregate their downtown’s, uh again depending on the city Lexington at one point Louisville at another point they would often use a boycotts of downtown I can recall probably when I was twelve or thirteen uh as a way of trying to bring about changes, they launched a nothing new for Easter campaign, that they said was some what effective, there was even a march on Frankfort at some point uh but there were any number of things that they did to try to make sure that black people had equal access to the downtown area at the same time the realized that employment opportunities were important and that was something that they would press government officials on especially that blacks would have a right to government jobs but also anything license by they by a state and so forth so that would be another push uh one of the anther push would be in the area of open housing and that one would often be very difficult because uh uh whites would use their common sense and say well if people can live where ever they can afford to live without realizing you can force people to live in certain areas if you excluded then from all of the other other areas, but in addition to the NAACP being active I would say that this organization of core would be very active um given my youth at the time twelve, thirteen, fourteen I don’t recall a lot of their specific names of the people here in either Lexington or Louisville in an organization like CORE, undoubtedly the newspaper would mention them on occasion but clearly that organization I would say was just as effective as the NAACP in in in a Kentucky cities um clearly there were people who were pushing even more in the whole area of school desegregation and and oh I would say in Kentucky it would be 1965-66 before they could really say that school desegregation was a fact everywhere and of course you could probably still find some small areas where very few blacks were in the schools, but the Civil Rights Movement was active on numerous on numerous fronts to where by 1964 as a young person here in Lexington I could go into the Walgreen’s and eat at their counter if I chose to by then I could go to the two or three white theaters downtown again if I chose to in the like and there was no question that as I said earlier we were going to integrate at schools by that time.

INTERVIEWER A: What about the role of the churches both white and black etc.

GW: I might not be able to do justice to the role of white churches because for me I have a difficult time really identifying many white church leaders and either Lexington or Louisville who and again its I want to catch it in the context it might be that I haven’t looked at that enough versus they were not active cause I don’t want to be unfair about it though of course Martin Luther King would often say these people were not as active as they should be they were more devoted to order than to justice and they constantly told black people to wait for a more convenient season to protest but again I don’t know if that’s the case I do know that here in Lexington most of the black leaders I’m sorry most of the black ministers excuse me were involved that if nothing else their congregations were demanding changes so it would either be a case that there either out in front or they’re trying to catch up with but as I recall uh numerous black ministers spoke out against injustices and would be one to go to city hall to make to bring changes to demand changes in alike.

INTERVIEWER A: I believe from my research there there were a few white churches who were involved but for the most part they were not,

End of Side One

INTERVIEWER A: We were talking about white allies through some of these churches and core and what not, were were the approaches and the tactics of the white allies any different, were they similar to those of the black community?

GW: When I think about the goals of black activist of the black community during the 1950’s and 1960’s I think it was simply stated full access to American society to the mainstream of American society and again the right to an education, a right to employment opportunities, the right to housing and I think the whites at that time did not see those any differently that they were that they found these goals to be consistent in that regard uh I think if if you look in the late 60’s and 70’s when there maybe a certain (in audible) that occurs among black that you can see more of a division or this issue of black power or something like that, but I can see how whites could very naturally work with black leaders then in the sense of of saying there’s no question about the injustice of blacks being excluded from certain facilities and things like that so uh uh in a place like Kentucky I just don’t recall that that black leaders being out of step with the whites the whites who were working obviously there were many people who were white who while they may say they were committed to equality would always question the tactics of blacks or question the how fast things can change and that’s not to take away their lack of sincerity but they being you can see how they would be at odds with blacks who would say we’ve already waited long enough for equality.

INTERVIEWER A: I’m also interested in the role of gender in the movement both nationally and with in Kentucky and uh I wonder if you see particularly with in Kentucky of the roles of men and women who were active being the same being different how do you see that?

GW: Ok, I must say that over the last decade or more I have read literature that really questions some of the the activities men versus women in the movement and how men in some instances while they may be pushing for civil rights on issue of gender equity and so forth the might not have pushed as hard, I must say that when I was doing my scholarship a lot of those questions were not being raised in the same way and I unfortunately did not look as deeply in that area uh I now realize of course its when I think about a lot of the changes that occurred, I can give numerous examples of saying my goodness, I’m not sure that women benefited to the same degree as men I mean one example would be in my own discipline of higher education that I often come to the conclusion that uh predominately white institutions were very had become very sensitive on the issue of racial exclusion they cannot deny the fact lets say in the states that once had segregation by law, the exclusion of blacks but at the same time many of these same places are in sensitive to the absence of women in certain positions, or or throughout their entire structure, that they would say well women always would have the right to to be professors and so they can find justification to explain why women are not in the leadership positions in the like, and so I but I must say that that I was less aware of that um many years ago and so its when people start talking about the women’s movement specifically uh I think that I became more aware of some of these injustices more so then some of the activities of women versus men within the civil rights organizations during the day of Martin Luther King.

INTERVIEWER A: Are there George any Kentucky women names that you recall who were active in Kentucky?

GW: Uh, I can recall and I want to believe her name is Georgia Powers who becomes a state representative and uh I can recall her name being mentioned in Louisville during the 1960’s and so forth and I want to believe that during the march on march on Frankfort excuse me that she was there along with Martin Luther King and others, here in Lexington there were actually several women in core who were very active, I cannot recall their specific names now, but I want to believe they played leadership roles when I attended college and there were people there who help mentor us who were older than myself uh that there were a number of these people who were female as well who had been very active at the University of Kentucky who had been there years earlier and so forth.

INTERVIEWER A: What can you tell us about the Frankfort rally?

GW: I’m not so sure I know much about it, what what I do recall of course was the presence of Dr. King being there, and I I would also say quickly that he’d been there uh earlier, I do know also at that time period that on the college there in Frankfort that there were students who again were questioning uh the racial status quote of Kentucky society that they, but given my youth at that time, I’m not all that aware but but again I actually point out at some point in my autobiographical writings that the very summer of the march on Washington and Frankfort 1963, I spent most of my time trying to make the all star baseball team which if you think about it might have been normal for a child, for a male child at that time so a most of my scholarship has not come back to that so in relying primarily on my own recollection about it I am not as familiar about that particular march for instance um um my mother did not take us to the the march so I was not there as an observer for instance.

INTERVIEWER A: Jackie Robinson was there.

GW: I probably knew that but yeh uh uh.

INTERVIEWER A: Uh over all was the movement effected in Kentucky?

GW: Ok, ok I think when people look at something like the civil rights movement its clearly the case that a person if what is their philosophy are they buying large, optimistic, do they tend to look upon things in a positive light or are they not in that regard, undoubtedly if you look at the world I was born into in 1950, uh could black people aspire to be a city council person anywhere, I would think most people would say no that was not case, could black people have lived wherever they could afford, even if you say today well there may still be some problems in neighborhoods occasionally you’d have to say no they could not in that regard, could black people work many of the jobs we see black people having now, uh what about educational opportunities from my prospective the civil rights movement did lead to numerous changes, positive changes for black people, I would have to say if Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today, he would have to acknowledge there have been numerous successes I mean you can take any number of things and make them symbolically just think about the desegregation of Athletic teams in the south, I mean clearly folk would not ever believe that there (in audible) Alabama would have black players or black quarterback and so forth or I mentioned earlier my fellow black students picketing U.K. basketball games, so you could just look at athletics and say there are changes, but I think you could look at so many other areas uh people can now aspire to many things, does that mean that the civil rights movement was successful for everybody on all fronts uh one of the things I as a uh observer, whenever I come back to Kentucky but the same would be true in any city in America, I see numerous areas that I often wonder were these places bypassed by the civil rights movement, I see instances of poverty that would suggest to me that for many people changes did not occur very much, also I see numerous people who people who don’t believe that all these things that I describe as possible are really possible for them, now who’s fault is that, why didn’t those changes happen those are things I guess politicians and others can argue and do argue over today but I would have to say as a scholar if you look at the world of my grandparents when they were adults and look at the world today that the world really has changed for black people, that does not mean that there are not problems in fact one could always argue using the concept of racial balance and polite racism that the more obvious brutal overt things have changed in this world, the more subtle things are always more difficult to change, if fact the fact a lot of the argument today can be over an issue of affirmative action is very different than arguing over racial valance, again affirmative action may be more difficult to confront and and change or or have implemented then some other things but undoubtedly I I’m of the belief that the civil rights movement was a success.

INTERVIEWER A: Are there any misconceptions in the public mind about the movement that are still present today? Are there some misconceptions about blacks in Kentucky January?

GW: (Pause) I’m trying to think of misconceptions about the civil rights movement uh I’m don’t know I guess I’m drawing a blank for a movement on misconceptions, yeah you know I don’t sometimes when people don’t know something, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a misconception, they might not be as aware or as informed or they may not know the contributions that blacks have, its different then saying they didn’t make a contribution I think the misconception would be if you said they never made a contribution versus I’m not as aware of their contribution, uh I don’t know yeah.

INTERVIEWER A: Uh, I was going to ask you also if you could talk a little bit about that the evolution of the terms colored and Negro’s and blacks and afro American, African Americans and blacks again.

GW: Ok, I guess I’ll try to talk about that but I put a (in audible) out there that I am not really studied this to were someone who’s a linguist of certain other discipline they may can speak of that better but I would dare say that on e of the challenging things that black Americans and I tend to use the term black Americans more than African American and so forth and it just maybe a comfort level there for me, but I have witnessed in my own life time how that has changed and also as a scholar I can see how that’s changed, I I think the one commonality is that we know the term that is derogatory that that people are pretty clear on that but if you look at the turn of the twentieth century most often they were called colored people uh they were often referred to as Negro and when the term Negro was used it was with lower case if it was written small hand, uh in that regard the term black was not used back then in the polite sense of the term, it was colored or Negro uh as a result of that for someone growing up who was around grandparents and older people like I were, I was I came into a world where colored was a very acceptable term, Negro or colored, but colored was probably used more than any one term, at some point in my life in the 1960’s I don’t know exactly which year people starting using the term black more than Negro and so forth and definitely colored was definitely fading out but I could still recall some people who I’m rather close to said to me they were not black in that regard and they were offended to a certain degree, but at some point it comes very acceptable almost immediately afro Americans started being used at least in my community along with black ok, uh I for some reason remained using the term black once I started there, its of course its been only in the last fifteen years I suspect where the term African American has been used uh I and sometimes they say a little bit of education can get in the way of things, and for me there have been times the term African American I would I would just try to really think that through and I wold say to people, that if you really think about the settling of America black people in general have been here longer than most people who we call white people and I say that because you look at the immigration the migration of whites to American and its always occurred in in from the time people started coming in the 1500’s most of the black people came before the American revolutionary war that was the hay day of the slaves trade would end by the mid 1700’s that’s not to say that other people didn’t come and there are numerous other way so if you went around a room of 100 people and we could trace them all back, most of the black people have been here longer than white people and I then also would let my other education get in the way and say Africa is a big continent, what part of Africa are you talking about and so forth so I just said I don’t know if I feel as comfortable over all using the term African American though I must say since it’s used so much, in that regard but my bottom line is we have a responsibility I think to call people what they choose to be called but I think at the same time if people are minorities or if they view themselves as minority almost any term they are called over time becomes something they want to move away from no matter what the term is and also uh people have to realize that if people who are opposed to them use that same term sometimes it cam almost be a term of derision I’ve seen some racist literature somewhere they refer to black as Africans and their not doing it in a polite sense in that regard but its clearly a case that the terms used for black people have evolved or has changed over the years to where I’m not so sure that most people except for scholars or people who give a lot of thought to this really know what is the correct term that most black people want to be called in any one period of time, and I would dare say today if someone said everyone wants to be called African American I say well that’s not true, if everyone want to be called black American I wouldn’t say that’s true either so but I’ve always been interested in that and especially the response black people will have to white people use a certain term because I have seen instances of where a white person has used the term I grew up hearing most colored for a white person use it I’ve seen black people look at them as if they had said them most derogatory term about them, so I find it all rather fascinating in that sense.

INTERVIEWER A: Thank you, we need to go back now and ask you to explain a few things like the (in audible) just because of the nature of our viewers can you explain what plessy was and what its purpose was?

GW: Ok, 1892 a man named Homer Adolph Plessy now that could be checked I could be right or wrong on that but I think that is his name in Louisiana was involved in a test case where he boarded a train uh and he was a light complexion afro American Negro and sat and purchased a ticket and sat in the white part of the train, white compartment at some point the conductor orders him to move to the colored or Negro section he refused the train is stopped, he’s put off the train ok well Plessy then sues its 1892 it works its way through 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court votes 7-2 says segregation in those kind of accommodations is legal and by implications in most other areas were the racist can come into contact, Plessy not the only segregation often called Jim Crobaugh back then, becomes the one that ushers in for many people this whole period, well there are many segregation activities or laws prior to then, but that’s Plessy Vs. Ferguson Kentucky would also pass such a law called the separate coach law in Kentucky in the early 1890’s ok, in Kentucky uh 1904-1906 a legislature named Carl Day introduces legislation saying that in any institution of public any educational institution the races must be segregated that it must be for one race or another meaning Berea could become an all black school, but it can’t be all black, both black and whites being admitted there uh the Kentucky courts uphold this this goes to the U.S. Supreme Court I believe in 1912, uh but at any rate in the Berea College case the U.S. Supreme Court says yes the state of Kentucky under the police powers granted it can designate you know can can make an institution be segregated even though it’s a private school not receiving any Kentucky tax payer dollars.

INTERVIEWER A: Thank you, uh George what was the justice system like for blacks in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s and when did positive changes begin to take place?

GW: Ok, I would say in my book on racial violence I talk about lynching, mob ruled and what I called legal lynching, and legal lynching I’d already described earlier, but it speaks to the justice system and I described the justice system as being very aware of the color of the people who come before it and while it may seem trite or ovary simplistic to some people that black people did not receive due and fair process in the legal system, not just in Kentucky but all over America number one from the end of the Civil War to the 1940’s Kentucky then name you other state, black people are systematically excluded from serving on juries uh and then if you look at the peoples sentence, if two people came before the court a black person committed a crime or white committed the same crime, the punishment needed out to the black person virtually in every instance would be harsher, especially if the black person was accused of a crime against the white person and if a white person was accused against a crime against a black person the chances are the wouldn’t even go to court for such a thing, this judicial system would exist for along time now you bring it down to the present in a case in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1980’s Bastion Vs. Kentucky uh the U.S. Supreme Court says something must be done for to prevent attorneys to use from using their preemptive challenges to keep black people from serving on juries in Kentucky, in other words the court was still saying as recently as 15 years ago that something’s wrong with the judicial system in Kentucky, the legal system in Kentucky were black people seem to be excluded, well the same thing was still be said by many people in other places in Ken in in our country in other words I conclude my book on racial violence by saying I think we could even though some people saying lynching still exists, I would say lynching don’t exist in the classical way that they did at the turn of this century and I would even say that while uh there may be some people who are not welcome in certain instances incidences like Corbin are no longer exist where you round up all the people and run then out of town, has our judicial system evolved to a place where everybody is treated equally before that, I will leave that up to other people to come up to their own conclusion on that.

INTERVIEWER A: Thank you very much, we can end it there, anyone is there is something you’d like to say that we really missed that’s important to this discussion?

GW: Ok, one of the things I have said on numerous occasions, and I’m not so sure I satisfy my audiences when I say this is that even though I speak I a historical context and I can show numerous instances of racial injustices or discrimination and so forth I don’t want to leave people with the belief especially young people, especially those who are still in school, that they can’t over come obstacles that are in their lives I really do believe that my life is an example that a person can set a goal and not through their own efforts alone but they can achieve an education and other things that in spite of our world not being perfect, I do believe that opportunities exist for folk and so the values that most of us heard as young people, hard work and all those other things, I really do believe that those things work for people in in that sense so they should not be defeated by instances of the past and something else that that’s very important to me is that we live in a world where at some point at some place some unfortunate racial incident will happen I mean, someone will call someone a name or something will happen and what I say to people they should not allow this incident which they should address which they should be honestly be offended by if its certain kind of things, set back the progress that has occurred, that people need to say yes that did happen but that doesn’t mean that we through out all of the other things, sometimes in a moment of dismay people will then say well as a result of this happening it proves that nothing has really happened well to say that nothing has happened is to do a disservice to all of the people who worked for decades and dedicated their lives to bring about changes.

INTERVIEWER A: Thank you. Good

GW: Thank You

End of Tape