Render, Arlene

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ARLENE RENDER Interviewed by: Stu Kennedy Initial interview date: February 10, 2006 Copyright 2017 ADST Q: Today is February 10th, 2006. This is an interview with Arlene Render. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I am Stuart Kennedy. And you go by Arlene, is that it? RENDER: That is correct. Q: Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? RENDER: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1943. Q: Let’s talk a bit about your family. What can you tell me about them? Let’s start on your father’s side. RENDER: My father’s family migrated from Tennessee to the Cleveland area when he was very young. He is one of five sons and four daughters. A poor working class family, they valued education and considered graduating from high school a major step. All of his brothers and sisters graduated from high school and several served in the military. My father also wanted to serve in the military but was rejected due to a heart murmur. He compensated for his wish by keeping a scrapbook of World War II. One of his great joys was sharing his scrapbook with us. My mother’s family migrated to Cleveland from Georgia. Many previous generations also resided in Georgia. Q: What sort of jobs did your father do? RENDER: My father was a blue-collar worker. He worked in a steel mill for many years until the steel plant closed. He continued to work at various business and organizations as part of the maintenance staff. Q: How about your mother? RENDER: My mother worked as a medical assistant for a private physician and later the Kaiser Foundation. Q: Brothers and sisters? 1 RENDER: My brothers and sisters are all in Cleveland, Ohio. They are all high school graduates. None of them attended university but received some advance training in areas of their choice, for example, medical records training, tailoring, etc. but their children are beginning to go to university. I am the eldest and the first to extend my education beyond high school. Q: Let’s talk about growing up in Cleveland. What was Cleveland like? As an African American family, was there sort of an African American section, or was it mixed, or how was it? RENDER: Looking in the rear view mirror, it was a very segregated town, like most were in America during that time. Although we resided in a predominately black area, we had a lot of contact with individuals of other races through individuals my parents knew. We didn’t encounter a great deal of direct racism and prejudice, because our families protected us from it. Q: In your family, as the oldest kid, I take it you got stuck with an awful lot of … the oldest kid always gets stuck with taking care of the younger siblings. RENDER: No, we were fortunate. If you asked my parents, they would say we were an extremely poor family, and I would suspect we were. But no, I never got stuck with taking care of my sisters and brothers. We always had a person who took care of them in our house. We even had some live-in help for many years. This was the way it was done. We even had other families residing with us for periods of time. My parents were givers, always assisting other people. I can recall a period of time when we had two complete families living in our home along with us for quite some time. They remained friends with my parents. Q: Although obviously there wasn’t a lot of money, you didn’t feel you were growing up poor, did you? RENDER: No I never felt that I was growing up poor. We traveled mainly throughout our state during my childhood. I recall going to the ballet. I went to a YWCA camp. We played in the neighborhood. We were among the first in our neighborhood to have television. I remember we lived next to a fire station and the firemen were friendly. They were from other races of course, because there were no black firemen. Q: It was one of the more segregated elements at one point, the firefighters. RENDER: Right. Q: What sort of role did the church play? What church was it and what role did it play? 2 RENDER: Like in most black lives, church played a central role in our social lives. Even in the north, black families knew where they were welcomed. Given the ethnicity division of neighborhoods, we even learned which neighborhoods not to walk in to avoid being attacked. Q: How about politics? Did you family fit into any…? RENDER: Politics were never discussed in front of us, the children. They voted when they were able to and I knew they cared about the lack of opportunities for minorities. They always tried to insulate us from the larger issues of the world. Q: In your family, were you the bookish kid? RENDER: Yes, I was the bookish kid. Today, we would say nerd. Books took me too far away places and helped me to dream large. My family, however, even now, is a family of readers. Both my mother and sister read several books a week. Q: In reading, what sort of things or genre attracted you? RENDER: As a child, I was attracted to the Little Women series, the Hardy Boys. Q: Carolyn Keene and all the detective stories? RENDER: Later, I was attracted to mystery novels, histories of other countries, Q: Did you have a library? RENDER: We went to the public library in our community. It was not too far from our home. I cherished the fact that you received a gold star for every book you read. As a child, I loved getting the gold stars. Q: The public library system is great, isn’t it? RENDER: Yes. It allows those of us that cannot purchase a lot of books to enjoy books as well. Q: What about as a kid playing in your neighborhood. What sort of neighborhood would you call it? RENDER: I would call it a homogeneous, very friendly neighborhood. The children all played together in the dead-end street. We played jacks, hopscotch, and rode bicycles, skipped rope. The parents spoke to one another. I cannot say that they were all friends but neighborly. Q: Was it almost all African American where you were? 3 RENDER: Yes. Neighborhoods were segregated. Therefore, the schools followed the same pattern. Our neighborhood bordered some eastern European neighborhoods and in my high school, we had a few children in attendance from those communities. Q: Where did you go to elementary school? RENDER: I attended Wooldridge Elementary School, which no longer exists. I had a wonderful experience and good teachers. The teachers were not all African American in those days. So we did have contact with people from other races. I remember my favorite teacher at that time was a Mrs. Glukov. Q: I can see a Russian background. RENDER: She was a very stimulating elderly teacher. She spent a great deal of time exposing us to material beyond the normal text. Q: Looking back on it, although your school was predominantly African American, would you say the books, the supplies, the teaching, were on a par with the other schools? RENDER: No. I would say in looking back that the larger issues that affected our society also affected our school. Neighborhood schools meant segregated schools. Therefore, we had to cope with used textbooks, old desks, uninterested teachers that demonstrated their biases against blacks daily. Few schools trips and the tendency to try and make us feel relegated to manual labor jobs throughout our lives. Q: Were you getting from your family to keep away from white people? RENDER: No. My family always taught us that people were basically good. They had friends from other races. People from other races came to our home. I do not recall them ever talking against a specific group. They did tell us not to venture far from home. We knew, for example, that some areas you just didn’t go to. As I said, we were insulated. We didn’t experience as children in my family, many things that other children experienced perhaps in the south and elsewhere. They didn’t put us in situations where we would have to confront racism, or have it affect us. Q: Were you feeling the effects of the Great Migration from the south? The African American coming from the south was almost a different breed of cat. Your family though was up in Ohio. I was wondering whether you felt this at all. RENDER: No. I would hear stories about life in the south but I also witness a strength in those that came from the south unlike those of us who grew up in our area. The 1960s began to open up a new political realism in our thoughts and lives. There was a sense that things had to change. I do recall being affected by the air of change when I traveled to Savannah, Georgia, with a family friend. Q: How old were you? 4 RENDER: I think I was about twelve or thirteen, I don’t recall my exact age. I do recall going to the grocery store. Coming from Ohio, of course, I wasn’t aware of stores for specific people. I went in the store and I was the only black person in the store.

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