Classroom Interview #2 Page 1 of 34

[classroom activity until 06:07.4]

Danielle: If we could just have everyone’s attention, we’re going to go ahead and get started. I think – that’s what this is, is I think – I’m Danielle, and my job is to give a brief overview of why we’re here. And so, this course is “Documentary Theatre, Supervised Education.” It was started last year, and it’s a five-year project that looks at civil rights and education in Richmond, and so last year’s project was primarily about bussing and integration and just a broad overview of things surrounding those issues. And this year, we decided to be more focused, which is why we are using George Wythe as a case study and we wanted to just gain that same information, just looking at the one school. So, what we’re planning to do is put on a production, and at the end of the semester, using the information that we gather from these interviews as well as a couple other things that Amanda’s going to tell you about, so that is our ultimate goal, to put on a production.

Amanda: So, what we’ve done in the class so far, is we started the semester reading off a comparison. We compared Douglas Freeman High School and Thomas Jefferson High School. It’s called Five Miles Away, World Apart. And just talking about the urban-suburban divide in education and especially in Richmond and all the history that’s entrenched in that. And in the process – following the historical process of segregation to desegregation and integration to basically economic re-segregation. So, after that – we’ve also been working with One Voice, which is a choir in Richmond, and we’re hoping to have some sort of musical piece in the play that we’re going to make from this, and to integrate them in that. They’re a cultural choir, and their whole focus is on bridging gaps between among diversity through music. And we’re trying to do something similar through theatre. So, they’re going to be a great group that we get to work with. We’re also making a digital archive, taking pictures from the Valentine History Center and from Special Collections at VCU of just race relations and the process of segregation to de-segregation in Richmond, and we’re going to put those up on the website that we can probably provide you guys with a link to so you can see and explore that. And then we’re going to take, do these interviews with you guys, and thank you all for coming and being a part of this and we will hopefully write a play from that, so that your experiences get put out to the community. So we can grow from that. Thanks.

Browder: And I will just say one little thing, which is to put in a plug. First of all, we all need to get all of your information and consent forms, among other things so that we can keep in touch with you about the performance. We have already busted out of our planned performance venue, because I think we’re going to have a bigger audience than we anticipated. So, we are looking right now at either doing it at the Library of Virginia, which has a beautiful auditorium, or at VCU. And we will keep in touch and let you know. The performance is going to be on April 16 at 6 o’clock, and that much we do know. But the other thing I wanted to say before we got started is we’ve been teaming up with VCU Library of Special Collections, and we’re very, very excited that they are going to be starting a George Wythe collection, because one of the things that we discovered when we started in on this project, Salvatore Barajas, who is our digital archivist back there who is recording all of this, went to George Wythe, went to the Richmond Public Library, went to Library of Virginia, looking for old yearbooks and newspapers and everything else, and found that, in fact, no one had saved them. There was no one place where you could find them – not even at Wythe. So, one of the things that we’re really excited about is Classroom Interview #2 Page 2 of 34 starting a Wythe collection at VCU Libraries, and we brought along some information about that collection, and how your materials would be cared for and how accessible they would be, and we’ve also brought temporary custody forms if you want to leave anything with us for the rest of the semester or if you want to consider making a permanent donation. The head of Special Collections at VCU would be really happy to talk with you further if you have any questions about this or if you’re considering it. Because we think it’s really important history. It could be lost if the materials are not cared for. We’ve already been amazed looking at some of these old yearbooks and newspapers at the things that we’ve seen that we all had no idea of. And I think there are a lot of people now and in the future who are going to feel the same way, so we would really be honored if you would consider it, and we would be very, very happy to follow up and have the VCU librarians answer any questions you have. And thank you. And now I’ll turn it back over to you guys.

Danielle: We can also start by just quickly saying our names. There’s a lot of people in this room. I know we won’t remember our names, but I think it’s a good way to sort of start off the process. I also wanted to add that there are many different ways of telling history, of narrating history. And one way we’re approaching to narrate history is by performing it. What that means is it means we’re asking students to embody your stories to narrate a specific history. So, for us, it’s really important for you to share those stories that we don’t necessarily read or hear about in books, in textbooks, on the Web, right? So, they have the opportunity to meet you in person to tell your stories and your experiences during a very specific period in time, that’s very historical, and to them it seems very foreign – to us that didn’t live that time, it’s foreign to us, but the stories that you tell us are treasures, they’re gems, right? And that’s what you leave for the future. Future leaders, right? The stories that you tell – they can then place it back into the textbooks that they read, right, because these are your words and your stories. And with that, we’re going to kind of compile everything together and kind of tell a story and share with the entire community. So, it’s something to keep in mind. With that in mind, my name is Patricia Herrera, and I’m one of the instructors in the class. And I’m going to pass it this way.

Browder: I’m Laura Browder, and I’m the other instructor in the class.

Rydell: And my name is David Rydell, but when I was in high school, a lot of people called me by my first name Tom, and Rydell is like the football helmets, which I’m related to, and I’m sure anybody knows sports, they’ve heard of Rydell football helmets. And then I went to U of R, so I’m alumni of this school, and I have a great feeling about this school, so I love what you’re doing. It’s wonderful.

Female: Did you go to Wythe?

Rydell: Yep.

Female: What class …

Female: Play piano –

Rydell: And I’ve played piano since I was five years old, and I – I was one of the three senior superlatives, you know, with that – I guess you guys remember Most Talented, but I didn’t get it Classroom Interview #2 Page 3 of 34 because this guy named Richard – I don’t remember his name – but he was a phenomenal artist. Richard Jenkins. Richard Jenkins got it.

Female: Class of ’70.

Female: Class of ’70, that’s what I was trying to figure out.

Rydell: And then there was Ann, who was – I knew her father, her father was a doctor – she was another pianist and singer, but we all three were voted for that, and I was really honored to do that, because I think we almost had like 400 people in the class. It was a huge class, graduating class, and I don’t recognize you all, but I’m sure I –

Female: Well, I was in eighth grade, so –

Rydell: Anyway, it was a great school. And when I was in school, there was just a handful of black Americans in our class, and I remember Walter Cook was in our class, who was good at track and football. And I was in his phys ed class, and I was like a real klutz. And there weren’t many Jewish kids in the school either. There was Diane Erenberg [sp?] and a few. Most people just – they didn’t even think about that, but I do remember that when Martin Luther King died, I was in the tenth grade, and there just weren’t that many African-American, black students in our class. And so, there was not a whole lot to relate to, and we didn’t study that much about him. And so, when some of the teachers were there, we went to the auditorium – I mean, the gym – to watch it on television, and we all empathized, but I saw people crying and I wasn’t crying and it kind of bothered me, and I didn’t understand completely why, and now of course I do, and I’m a very liberal Democrat. And I always have been. It was part of the way I was brought up. But I’m glad that things changed – thank God, finally – in this county, and whatever but – it was just weird, this, you know, that I was right in that transition period because next year, bussing started after I graduated, and there were a lot of – there were a lot of mixed feelings, because I felt like when I was older that you don’t take people that have never met each other in the twelfth grade that have prejudices and all kinds of animosities. You start when they’re younger, so they haven’t learned all this crap, and they grow up together. To me, that’s the way to do it. And I think they kind of made a big mistake by doing it. That was my own opinion then, but I guess all that’s over and done with, and we do the best we can, but that’s my own opinion.

Browder: Thank you.

Rydell: Yep. Sorry. You let the Jewish people talk …

[laughing]

Antoine: I’m Sandra Antoine. Class of 1974. I was Sandra Moss. And yes, David, I also – I was there when you were graduating. I was one of those few blacks that was in the eighth grade at George Wythe. But yeah, I do remember the transition as well.

Rydell: Sorry I didn’t remember you.

Antoine: That’s okay because you’re right. My bussing was initially forced. It was forced by my parents, who decided to move to the district, because I had a brother that wanted diversity, Classroom Interview #2 Page 4 of 34 and we moved from the Church Hill of Richmond. And I was in the seventh grade, East End, and going into the eighth grade when my parents decided that they were afraid, because my brother decided that he would run from George Wythe all the way through because he would spend his bus money on lunch and other things, so he would run from George Wythe to Church Hill, and because he had to run through predominately white districts, my mom was frightened, and she decided that we must move over, so the rest of us were force-bussed over to George Wythe prior to the actual integration.

Browder: You know, I just have this wonderful and horrible feeling that you all have so many incredible stories that by the time we get through the introductions, we have not have gotten to a single question.

Robinson: I will promptly stay to the introduction.

[laughter]

Browder: So, stay with just the introduction please for just a moment. We learned this lesson this week. Last week, everyone had so much incredible stuff to share that we had lots of questions that we didn’t ask. This week, the students have four questions for you, and we think that is going to keep you going for a long, long time. But with that, Royal, I will turn it over to you.

Robinson: Thank you. Royal Robinson, Class of ’74.

Person: Art Person, Class of ’74.

Morris: Charlene Morris, and I am a student in this class.

Kentwell: Ken Kentwell, Native Richmonder, student in this class.

Cowan: Catherine Cowen. I’m a student in the class.

Mines: Hello, I’m Robin Mines, Class of ’76.

Catherine: I’m Catherine. This is my second year working with this project.

Russell: Phillip Russell, III, Class of ’74.

York: Elwood York, Class of ’74.

Kelsey: I’m Kelsey. I’m also a student in the class. This is my second time through. And I’m taking pictures, so that’s why I’m moving around.

Jackson: I’m Cheleah Jackson. I’m a senior and a student in this class.

Verna: I’m Cheyenne Verna. I’m a junior and a student in this class. Classroom Interview #2 Page 5 of 34

Wineberry: I’m Amanda Wineberry. I’m from Mechanicsville, Virginia, and I’m a sophomore, and I’m in this class.

Stokes: My name is Danielle Stokes, and I’m a student here at Richmond, and I’m in this class.

Andes: I’m Keith Andes. I am Class of ’74.

Hasell: I’m Janice Hasell. My maiden name is Rossi. Class of ’75.

Celine: I’m Elizabeth Celine. My maiden name was Bowles, and Class of ’75.

LaPrade: I’m Jim LaPrade, Class of ’62.

Hawkins: I’m Claire Hawkins Spicer, Class of ’74.

Wilbert: June Wilbert. I was – Dobb was my maiden name. Class of ’70, and I now live in PA and have since 1972, so – all your roads are different now. [laughter]

Martin: I’m Laura Somers Martin. I was Class of ’74.

Thompson: Gary Thompson, Class of ’72.

Browder: Thank you so much, and now I am going to turn it over to the students with questions.

Male: Can we just give a shout out. Liz – wassup? How you doing?

Rossi: I told Charles Bradshaw – everybody just pitch in, okay? I know it by heart. As soon as he started it, I knew it by heart. Ready?

All: We are proudly hailing [20:09.2]/Whose fame and honor will never die/Within her halls proud Chancellors we became/keeping our [20:19.5] is our only aim/To win or lose, our spirits stay the same/Our first respect, the way we play the game/And so we pledge our loyalty to you/Yes, we do/Red, white and blue.

[Applause]

Male: We were the only school in Richmond with red, white and blue. TJ was red and white, and John Marshall was blue and white, and we had the whole American flag.

Rossi: And he made the point that we were Chancellors, not Bulldogs. We were Bulldogs on the playing field, but Chancellors as students, and somehow the Chancellors somehow got dropped off, and we just became Bulldogs.

Danielle: Well, alright everybody. It’s great. We just have so much to talk about. So, I know some people, we’ve had you here before, but there are a lot of people that are new to us, and it’s great to have you all here. And so, one of the first questions that we wanted to ask everybody is how you ended up at George Wythe High School. Classroom Interview #2 Page 6 of 34

Female: It was my neighborhood school. I lived in the three-mile walking distance when they force-bussed.

Male: Right. Same here.

Browder: Was that the criteria? Three miles?

Male: Yeah, and the bus wouldn’t stop if you lived less than 17 blocks. So, with people like Phillip, they would have to walk away from school to catch the bus, to get to George Wythe.

Russell: Yeah, as a matter of fact we had to catch the City bus. We had to buy the little pink tickets at the supermarket, walk up to Midlothian Pike and catch the bus up.

Female: The school was – I guess in the 70s, there was not the bussing, and so I lived in Swansboro, and I had quite a hike to get to the City bus, but I took the City bus, so when I played sports, it was very difficult. I had to walk home. There was no bus coming that way after sports. So, but that’s how I ended up at George Wythe. It was, I guess, just the districting at the time.

Female: We had freedom of choice. They filled out a form every year.

Female: Oh really, so my parents made this choice? I mean, for us, we had to ride the City bus to Westover – when Laura and I went to Westover, rode the City bus.

Rossi: I have a question about that freedom of choice thing. I was talking to David Bowles the other night, Elizabeth’s brother, and he was telling me that where Milton lived, Milton and Billy Caudle and another guy, whose name I can’t remember, all lived in the same neighborhood. Milton was black and the other two were white. So, when it came time for elementary school, Billy went to Patrick Henry, the other guy went to Westover and Milton went to …

Female: Franklin.

Male: Franklin.

Rossi: Franklin, because he was black.

Male: Right. That’s true.

Rossi: So, then that begs the question, ‘cause my sister asked me this – back then that was probably in the early 60s – were blacks not allowed to go to their neighborhood school then?

Female: That was late 60s.

Male: It was like you had to go where there were black people, the experiment was separate but equal. So, you went to – we all grew up going to go to Armstrong or Walker –

Rossi: But this was before that. Classroom Interview #2 Page 7 of 34

Male: Yeah, but remember now, being the 60s, they had just started letting people go to school at all in Virginia, because they closed the school system down because they didn’t want to [23:54.9] the government money. So we were freaked out – ‘cause do you really – thinking about it as a parent – would you really want to send your four- or five-year-old to school with people who said, “I’d rather just not have education before I go to school with you.”

Rossi: Tony Glover and his sister – their parents were educated parents, and so they started bucking the system and insisted that their children go to Patrick Henry, and they fought and fought and fought until it was allowed to happen.

Male: That’s actually right, ‘cause my cousin is Charles Story. So, that’s like the Class of ’70, something like that. That’s probably your class –

Male: Now see when I went to school – I lived in Forest Hills. And it was only ten blocks from where I lived, so either – if you were lucky enough to have a car, which I worked to get one, but to buy one – but I either drove or I, you couldn’t drive until you were a junior or senior or something like that. I can’t remember now. But I walked. It was only ten blocks away from my house, so I was lucky. I just walked down the street, and there was the school. So, it just – it wasn’t an issue. You just went to the neighborhood school.

Male: You went to the neighborhood school.

Female: Wythe was my neighborhood school, to answer your question. Sorry we got off- topic.

Mines: My family had moved to the Swansboro further, close to George Wythe; however, we hadn’t planned to go to George Wythe. We were forced to go to George Wythe. We grew up thinking we were going to go to Armstrong or Walker. I had my mind set on Maggie Walker. We were going to catch the bus, no problem. But then it was really freaky because after my experience at Elkhardt, which was like ’70 to ’72, we all know how things were then. It was rough. And so, I had a fear of going to George Wythe.

Browder: Can you all talk a little bit more about Elkhardt and how things were then, because those of us who were not there, you know, we don’t know. Tell us.

Mines: Oh my God. It was horrible. We were packed on two City busses, from what I remember – all the black kids. We had to pay for our bus ride as well. We had to have bus tickets at the Express. We got to Elkhardt, and there was like I imagine maybe 30 yellow busses, all white kids, and we were hearing it when we first pulled in. And that’s where it all began. There were fights. It was just horrible. And the worst of it all, there were several of the teachers who were just as bad. That really stung. You could get past the kids and you know the fighting. But when you have teachers with that look in their eyes, that’s something that really stung.

Browder: Was that sixth, seventh and eighth? Classroom Interview #2 Page 8 of 34

Mines: Yeah, it was seventh, eighth, ninth, when we first got there, because there were some – because a lot of people went ninth grade at Elkhardt before – and then they switched George Wythe, took the eighth grade and did all those changes. But 1970 to 1972.

Rossi: Because ’74 was the last, was the last class that had an eighth grade there, according to –

Mines: Right, right. But some of that – you class was at Elkhardt and some of your –

Antoine: It was only a few blacks in our class in ’69. In the majority of my classes, I was the only black, so I was subjected to basically what you guys were, but it was just me coming from Church Hill trying to be strong with a grandmother that had this saying “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words …” and finally I said, “words do hurt.” I’m hearing it. I’m hearing it. And then finally I decided that I would stand up for myself, and then that’s when administration decided that they would step in. Only then. And I said enough is enough. These words are hurting me.

Rydell: My brother graduated. He’s three years younger than me, and he had the same situation that I did where we lived, and he went to George Wythe, and things changed so much that – this is when I realized that what he told me, he was on the football team. He wasn’t like a klutz like me. He could defend himself. There were all these fights all the time, and it was like – I think a lot of damage was done, and people, the hatred, it was taught by the parents, not the children.

Mines: Oh yeah. It was.

Rydell: It was a white and black thing, which was really sad. I mean, of course white people started it, but it ended up – it’s like Israel and the Palestinians, is what it reminds me of. But the point is is that my brother almost got knifed because someone wanted some money who happened to be black, and my parents said, “we’re going to have to take him out of the school, because we can’t do this.” And [name? Settian? 28:20.4] was the principal at the time. And nothing was getting done. All this crap was going on, and the students can’t change all that stuff. And so that’s when I – by then, I was at the University of Richmond, and he would tell me all this stuff, so my parents had to take him out of school because he was, strangely enough, I don’t know what happened to the education system, but he was making straight As and doing nothing, literally no homework at all, and I don’t know whether it’s because – unfortunately in a lot of the black schools, I know they didn’t have the quality of education that a lot of the white schools had. And we know that now, but I didn’t know that at the time, because I was just a kid. But I’m talking about the quality of education. So, he ended up going to Huguenot Academy, because all the private, white schools were taken up. This is the truth. And they – he went to Huguenot Academy because Collegiate, St. Christophers, all the wealthy, white people, they all left the City. They moved out of the City. It was all about prejudice. It makes me sick, the whole thing. And they practically left the City alone. And you see what’s happened to the City now. All the taxes – there’s hardly anybody left in the City that can – for except a few people. And it did – it was a huge thing, and we still haven’t recovered from it. My mom was on City Council, by the way. And so she saw a lot of stuff, and so I was telling her, ‘cause she lived right next door to the district that Claudette McDaniels – you all remember her. She was a good friend of my mom. And we just weren’t brought up that way. So, I didn’t understand all this, but I didn’t realize it was going on, because you’re just in your own little world, but as I got older, I Classroom Interview #2 Page 9 of 34 appreciate it. And that’s why I said you just don’t take children at that age and put them through all that hell, because you don’t forget it. It’s like being abused and you have like almost – like the guys and women that come back from the war. You have like battle fatigue or whatever the word – what is it called?

Mines: PTSD.

Rydell: Yeah. And I think people had it.

Mines: Prior to me entering Elkhardt, like I said, we had moved into the new neighborhood, who let us know quickly that they didn’t want us there. Crossing burned in my yard. My home was shot up.

Rydell: That’s disgusting.

Mines: All kinds of problems. So, I’m having nightmares from that, and then you’re telling me I’ve gotta go to Chesterfield County to Elkhardt School, so I’m freaking out inside, but you let – our parents telling us “sticks and stones…” and “you gotta be three times, four times better than the next person” and “you gotta be this,” and then you get to school and you’ve got all this hate. So, it was quite the battle.

Rossi: Something occurred to me after we left last week, and I don’t know why this never occurred to me over the, you know, 40 years since I left high school or something like that. Obviously, it was all some sort of – I don’t want to say it was an experiment because I think the point of it was quality education. I think there were two problems that didn’t occur to me until just recently. You know, it was hard to forge those bonds, because we came from one-car families, working parents. You know we were friends at school, and then after school, we never saw each other again, because I didn’t travel to Church Hill to see the friends I had made. They didn’t travel to, you know, to Semmes Avenue to see me, so we only had what we had at school for six hours and then we were – so then we were apart again. Not like now – you go home, you call a friend, you get together, you go play ball, you get something to eat. Number one, number two, you know, if the problem was helping the blacks get better education, what purpose was served in their turning around and sending whites to those very same schools. Why didn’t we fix the teachers?

York: But –

Mines: First of all, the misconception wasn’t the education. Like you said, we were getting a quality education. That was just an excuse that was made.

York: We just didn’t have nothing to work with.

Mines: Oh yeah, we weren’t – the money was cut off. When white kids were at Patrick Henry, we got textbooks at Franklin that had been used ten to twelve years that had a new label stuck on top of it, so we could start using it. This is what it was. It wasn’t the teachers, and it wasn’t the quality… we got a quality education. Classroom Interview #2 Page 10 of 34

York: Right, but you got the notes in the book that said “this one is for you, niggers.” And we’d be in school going, “damn, I gotta carry this around?” So –

Rydell: So, by the time the kids got to George Wythe, like I was saying when my brother was there –

York: We got a bad attitude, right.

Rydell: They had had to deal with that kind of education, and so it filtered down into their academics and whatever –

Mines: Well, the tension is what took my grades –

York: Look, when we first got to Wythe – I played football – we were freaked out, because they gave away shoes. When you go to George Wythe, if you made varsity, they give you the shoes.

Female: That never happened in women’s sports. [laughing]

York: Alright. But the guys – we were like freaked out, because all of our life, we had to buy – if you went to school, you had to buy your pants. You had to buy your jersey. Your parents actually had to make an investment ‘cause there was no money for you in athletics. So, we were like “damn, they’re giving away shoes?” You start, “come on, mom, they gave me the cleats,” and she’s like, “take them back. I didn’t pay for them.” I mean, because – that’s how our parents raised us. You know, she’s talking about your feelings hurt. I would come home and tell my mother what happened. I’d say I got my feelings hurt. She’d say, “show me where that feeling is.” She said, “point to it. Point to it.” And I couldn’t. So, she said, “well, you can’t touch it. Get over it. And get with it.” And you couldn’t figure out how you could touch your feeling that was hurt, but like she said, you knew you were hurt, but … You gotta realize our parents grew up really believing in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They believed in Booker T. Washington. They – my mother wanted to be a doctor. They told her, “black women can’t be doctors. You could be a nurse.” She said, “that’s alright. I’m going to be a schoolteacher, and I’m going to train some people to have the academic credentials so black women will be doctors, but you’re not going to make me a nurse.” That’s the revolution as they talk about came from the little old ladies with hats sitting in church making you speak … I speak three versions of Ebonics and the King’s English. Right. And you could get slapped in my house or pay a quarter for mis-enunciating a word. My aunt made me learn how to spell the alphabet. Why? Because now you know why you put “an” before “f” because “f” is spelled “e-f-e.” Okay, it is not a vowel, so you say “an f.” That’s why that rule is there, but I mean, my mother’s a schoolteacher. Her sister is a phoneticist, but they went to Virginia Union, and they were raising us for if the revolution really came, somebody had to be in charge. I mean, really. That’s how they looked at us. They said – “you need to be better than everybody else, and you need to shut up, don’t say much, do your thing, and try not to get killed on the way home.” And –

Minor: That’s right. Deal with it. And you’d better not call me with no trouble.

York: That was kind of – when I went out the house to go somewhere, my mamma made me read Desiderata – “go placidly amid the noise and haste.” Oh yeah, yeah, we had to read that. Classroom Interview #2 Page 11 of 34

Rydell: But you know the sad thing is that people at the time, like we needed – those stories that needed to be told then, and they weren’t being reported – not one knew what was going on. Everything – so only you guys really knew what was going on, and that’s where the whole dilemma, was the problem – awareness.

Minor: But you know what the real problem that caused all of this mass confusion and all this heartache was the need for them to hold on ‘til the last minute to do the integration. They held on ‘til they couldn’t hold on no more, and then they were forced to do it. It was not organized. Nobody was prepared. Teachers weren’t trained. There was nothing in order.

Rydell: I agree.

Minor: Who suffered? We did. Just like today, with the same educational crap that they’re putting out there now. The kids are suffering.

Wilbert: I grew up in the 60s and graduated in ’70, the oldest of five, and I have a couple of siblings that would have participated, the younger ones, but the middle ones don’t want to participate because of some of the scars not created by any of the people that were also victims. But the story I’m going to tell – and I’m going to make it as quick as I can, and you can ask me about it later if you want more detail – is what I heard from my mother and my sister and my father when I’m in Pennsylvania and my sisters, I think – I don’t know the years. Robin, you can probably help. I think my sister graduated in ’74. But both her and my brother were on that bus at Elkhardt with all those fighting and carrying on, and my sister got hurt, and it could have caused a riff. We were raised in a Christian family. I don’t feel that there was prejudice at all. Was there a difference? Yeah. We didn’t meet folks like you. We didn’t have that opportunity. We didn’t go to school with many at all. And as someone mentioned, no matter where you lived, you weren’t in the neighborhood, so you couldn’t extend those relationships beyond school or sports. So, the incident that happened – the bus driver handled it the best they could and let my brother and sister off the bus in the middle of nowhere so she wouldn’t be hurt any more. The good point to the story is when it went to court and the two mothers came together, my mother and this other black, Christian woman, they both said, “we could have fixed this if they’d have left it to us instead of letting the powers that be make it happen this way.” Because my mother would tell you that she saw this black woman, who was a nurse, who loved her kids as much as my mother loved us, and only wanted them to have God in their heart and a good education and love for one another. I still remember her calling me and telling me that. My sister was scarred from that, and it affected her the rest of her life and still does. She’s gone on – they’re in the ministry. She’s doing good things with it, but I think the important thing is that our family was hurt by it, but at the end of the day, they formed a bond with the lady they were so angry with through that incident. And I would hope that other people have stories that ended that way, but as you can tell, this story is my family story of our first exposure to the bussing. And I was so glad that I was out of high school and out of Virginia, ‘cause to me it was a Virginia thing. But my family is still affected by it, and I don’t want to digress any more. But you know, I just wanted to let you know that there was – I hate saying it now because I have so many friends from different backgrounds – but it’s like, it was then and now, and I didn’t go through that, so I didn’t know how to act any more than – you guys said you were fearful. We were, if anything, we were taught – respect, but if anything, we were taught fear of you, if I can say that without offending you. Classroom Interview #2 Page 12 of 34

Black male: No. Trust me. We know.

Black female: We know what you were taught.

York: She taught me to fear you, too. She was like, “don’t really go nowhere with them.”

Wilbert: They were like, “they’re different, but in a Christian way.” As I became an adult woman, I struggled with the Christian part – how can this be Christianity.

Black female: Exactly.

Wilbert: You know. And I don’t want to get into the church thing, but being a Sunday School teacher and being raised in the faith, I’ve always struggled with the way that things were and what we said on Sunday, so I had to put that out there.

Antoine: As a little kid, I would question: why is that church all white, and why – we believe in the same God and we read from the same Bible.

Wilbert: And you sing to the children “red, yellow, black and white,” and if somebody walked into your church or my church, we’d all freak out. Right? Did you have that happen? We did – looking around like, you know, who do you think you are? You may live in the neighborhood, but you don’t belong. I’m like, wait a minute – “red and yellow, black and white” – I’m thinking I can’t be a Sunday School teacher if they’ve changed the song.

[laughing]

Wilbert: I’m sorry. This is a real emotional button for me.

Antoine: I understand.

Black male: I don’t want to get away from a point that you made. Do you remember people like Carol Estes?

Black female: Yes.

Browder: Who is Carol Estes?

Black male: Okay. Carol –

Person: Bob Estes’ sister.

Black male: They actually opened their house to everybody.

Black female: Yeah, she was a really nice girl.

Black male: Okay, so you talking – somebody had to kind of take the chance. Okay, so she was an athlete, and she was very well-liked. And her family, give them credit, invited us to the house, said, “c’mon, play ping pong down in the basement like everybody else.” And at first, Classroom Interview #2 Page 13 of 34 we’d all sit around and say, “man, you going?” “I don’t know, man. You know, I’ll tell you what – you go in there and see what it’s like, and I’ll sit out here. If it get bad, I’ll stay in the car, and we can get away.” ‘Cause really, you don’t know. You – she’s nice and everything was cool at school, but we had made our peace amongst ourselves, but our parents still hadn’t made their peace. And so there were times when we had to teach our parents how to get along. And it was kind of a weird reversal of how you’re gonna make it because there were people, especially in athletics, you know. There were times when the fight broke out, and it wasn’t about a black- white thing.

Black female: It was the team.

Black male: We are trying to solve our own social issues in the house.

Rossi: We talked about that a lot last week. We had good times at school. You know, there were bad times. There were good times. For me, they were mostly good. I mean, my daughter goes to Godwin, and there was a fight in the parking lot between the two teams last week, so that’s high school.

Black male: That’s high school.

Minor: I used to think you and your sister were the coolest. The Rossi cheerleaders.

Rossi: Thank you very much.

Minor: No, a couple years behind you guys, and kids that were older, hey – and Scotty played ball. I remember all those – I remember all the nice kids. I don’t remember –

Rossi: I was telling them last week – I grew up on the other side of Fonticello Park, but I went to Fonticello Park. So, I did grow up with black children in my life. Sorry –

Browder: I’m sorry. I feel like the police here. I hate to feel that way, but I need to be the police. I know Sandra, you had another comment to make, and then I would also love to hear from some of the people we haven’t heard from yet about how they got to Wythe. Because we can tell, everyone has a lot, a lot to bring to the table with this conversation. You all have so many memories and so many things that you’ve been thinking about for a really long time, and when you get a group of 15 people together with a lot on their mind, it is like herding cats, and I mean that in the best possible sense. We just want to make sure that everybody has a chance to tell their story because we still have several questions left to ask you, and I can already tell that when our students contact you after today, they are going to know exactly what to talk to you about, because everybody has been telling incredible stories already and we’re just scratching the surface. So, Sandra, what were you going to say?

Antoine: I was going sort of chime in here, because for us it was the faith also, because we grew up Catholic. So, we had the white priest and the nuns, so that started in a predominately black church in Church Hill, Holy Rosary. So, when we transitioned to – and like I said, my parents forced us to the George Wythe district, which was predominately white, I can remember moving in the block and seeing For Sale signs go up all around us. And then some of the kids Classroom Interview #2 Page 14 of 34 that we were saying hi to, and they were saying hi back, we were seeing the parents pack up the trucks, the moving trucks and move away. But there were a few that did remain, and they became our sisters and brothers on the block. Church – nearest church was a church in Southside Richmond that was predominately black, but see my mom, who also worked in the Catholic daycare facility with the nuns, her sisters, marched us into this predominately white church in the Southside district, and all eyes were on us. Some of the same kids I went to school with that I could hear all these comments around me, I was now worshipping with them, or pretending to worship, because we knew beyond that place that we still had school on Monday.

White female: Let me just go back to the original question. I was supposed to attend George Wythe. I lived in the district. I went to Patrick Henry Elementary, went to Westover for the transition period there, and gradually started attending school with blacks. My first year at George Wythe, there were blacks at George Wythe. Is there anybody in this room that wasn’t bussed to George Wythe? But, now and I didn’t know the number, but I didn’t think it was so horrible if anybody can remember back – 1970 was a pretty daggon good year. We all started to learn how to go to school together. And then come 1971, and that’s when it all started, and I saw things I never thought I would see as a young, impressionable 14-year-old. I saw, I remember seeing a black girl push a white girl down a flight of stairs. I sat through – we sat through the Jeroyd Greene speech that pretty much almost turned into a brawl.

Black male: That was crazy. Ah man.

Student: What was the speech?

Female: Sa’ad El-Amin, previously known as Jeroyd Greene.

Black male: Sa’ad El-Amin.

Female: And it could have been a black history week thing.

York: It was black history week.

White female: And he pretty much incited a riot in the auditorium, and you know what, I don’t even know what the premise of his talk was, but all of a sudden, every white kid in that auditorium walked out of that auditorium. And I walked out, too, ‘cause I didn’t like what I was hearing. And it just was inciting, fueling a situation that did not need to be fueled.

Browder: What was he doing back then that he would have been invited? I only know him from City Council.

Black male: He was a black lawyer.

Female male: He was a good black lawyer.

Person: He was also pretty young.

York: He was young. He was up and rising. He was involved in a couple of black movements at the time. Classroom Interview #2 Page 15 of 34

Person: He was involved in the Nation of Islam.

York: Yeah, he was in Nation of Islam, and so it was really – as she said, it was really unsubtle, ‘cause I was sitting by Leigh Outten at the time. And y’all know Leigh. Leigh is cool. And she was sitting there with me, and we’re going, “did you hear that?” We don’t know how to deal with that. And she’s going, “I don’t feel comfortable. I think I’m going to leave.” And I’m like, “well, okay. We’ll make sure you get out alright.” I mean, ‘cause it was really inciteful, because we really weren’t at each other’s throat. It was really kind of a weird situation where none of the people, well most of the people that were black – we didn’t want to go to George Wythe anyway, so we kind of had to figure we were stuck. And we were stuck with y’all, but y’all were cool.

Rossi: But Elwood, you didn’t want to go to George Wythe?

York: No.

Rossi: Even though you lived in the district?

York: No, I grew up – you gotta remember the cultural context. We had to Armstrong or Maggie Walker. All my life, I grew up wanting to play football in the Armstrong-Walker Classic on the day after Thanksgiving – my whole life. My whole life.

Rossi: After all these years, that’s just news to me.

York: Yeah.

Rossi: I would have thought that those blacks and whites that lived in that district would love the fact that they can go to their neighborhood schools.

Black female: Nope.

York: You gotta realize the separate but equal had culturally been indoctrinating into our whole culture. So, we wanted to be like – I have an uncle, who – his claim is he caught a touchdown pass in the Armstrong-Walker game of 1964. And the whole family, when he gets old and drunk, he tells that story. And everybody sits there and relives it, and we all pat him on the back – the people who went to Armstrong. The people who went to Walker give him the finger and tell him to shut up.

Black female: But it was our history.

York: It was our history. So, to go to George Wythe was like, “ah man, then I’ll have to go with people like Royal?” [laughing] It was like, he was from Church Hill. We didn’t really get along. And –

Rossi: I felt sorry for the white kids from Huguenot, which was annexed. That was a totally white school. And they were sent – “you’re going to go to George Wythe.” Then, you brought the ones from John F. Kennedy, the blacks – was it Kennedy?

Female: It was Kennedy. Classroom Interview #2 Page 16 of 34

Rossi: And brought them to George Wythe. They were just bringing kids from all over the place. I really believe that this whole thing would have, at some point, just worked its way out.

Male: It would have.

Wilbert: That’s what my mother said.

Rossi: I don’t think anything was solved by forced bussing. That’s just my opinion.

White male: It was the United States government that did it.

Female: Exactly.

White male: It wasn’t Virginia. I went to George Wythe when it was white. And talking about the different schools – Armstrong, Walker, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall. They were traditions in those days. I mean, traditions. And I mean, the fights between Armstrong and Walker and TJ and John Marshall, it was outrageous. I mean, it just was crazy. But the interesting thing is I live next door to an elderly lady who was Chairman of the School Board when the bussing hit. And she was the tie-breaker for the bussing. People ask her, “why did you do this?” She said, “because it was going to happen anyway. We had no choice.” Years later, still talking over the back fence, back and forth, okay and I asked her what she thought of education today, and she said it was just terrible. And she said bussing was the worst thing that ever happened. And the reason it happened was because it pulled children out of the neighborhoods and then you no longer had the community action coming into the school from – parents stopped being involved in a lot of the school activities because of the bussing, because it wasn’t in their neighborhood.

Rossi: They couldn’t be.

White male: I know. I know. But that’s why she said the quality of education has gone down. Somebody said earlier – I mean, I’m here to say that the black schools before integration were really good. I mean, they could go with Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall. Years later, I happened to run a factory down in Shockoe Bottom. A couple of guys my age were working down there, and one of them went to Armstrong, and one of them went to Walker. There was nothing wrong with their Trigonometry and Calculus and English. It was all – it was just like where I was. But I went one year to TJ, and there was racism, and there was bigotry, and it was prejudice there, and it wasn’t with blacks. I’ll never forget when one guy, who was Jewish, made the basketball team, and a lot of the guys were saying, “well, he’ll never do anything as far as playing basketball. ‘Cause Jews don’t have any stamina.”

White male: WASPS – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Black female: Where’d that come from?

Rossi: Well, they pulled from Windsor Farms, and they also pulled from the Methodist Children’s –

White male: You couldn’t live in Windsor Farms if you were Jewish. Did you know that? Classroom Interview #2 Page 17 of 34

LaPrade: One of the things I wanted to mention when Dobbs mentioned – there’s two things, which he mentioned about religion. Religion was very important in people’s lives. Most people who are African-American or black – or whatever you want to call it. I call it black because most people, they’re not African. They’re Americans. The point is –

Black female: Thank you.

Black male: I can’t go home. I can’t go home.

Rossi: Well, you could -

LaPrade: But the point is that most people in the area were Southern Baptist. They were not black Muslims, and that’s what you – what Sa’ad El-Amin, he got involved like Angela Davis almost, at that level, not quite like that, but that kind of stuff didn’t serve any purpose. But I lived in Westover Hills, Forest Hills, and I lived in Westhampton, and I hated to move to Southside. But I didn’t realize that Westhampton was the most snobbish area of white Richmond you could possibly live in until I grew up. Libbie and Grove is like the – this is the stereotype of what it was. And if you lived, like where you lived – there were white students. Like, if you lived – didn’t live in Westover Hills, forget it. They were like snob white people that lived – so you know, even among black people, they had cotillions and you had to do all this stuff, and you know, it existed. I know the whole history of Richmond, ‘cause I was a reporter, and by the way, you all should get this. PBS has a wonderful thing about Richmond, and it talks about the Green Dragons and the black community and Jackson Ward and Second Street and when it was a phenomenal business community and it’s a wonderful thing for this class for the film. If you haven’t seen it, you need to see it. It’s the PBS series about the history of Richmond. And so I was just going to say don’t apologize for religion because in this City, this was a very religious city in every aspect of the word. And like I was telling you, Jewish people couldn’t even live in Windsor Farms. They couldn’t be a member of the Country Club of Virginia. They were some of the first people in the South to actually help the black Americans, particularly not just Jews, but a lot of people who were white helped in the Midwest, for example, because they didn’t know that many black people, so they’d never been exposed to prejudice and they went down – remember the three that were killed at the Mississippi? Remember the time that they were killed and lynched. One was from the Midwest, one was Jewish, and the other one was black. And that’s kind of the history of the whole picture and the whole – and then the whole thing just went around in circles.

Mines: I have just a quick comment, just to piggy-back on she was surprised that we didn’t want to go to George Wythe. Well, when I was at Franklin, the kids from George Wythe on their way home on the busses used to throw things at me and call me all kinds of names, especially when Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater. It was awful. I would run and fall and hurt myself, ‘cause I was scared of these kids. And the thing, I mean, I had a coat burned. It could have been my skin but luckily it was my clothes. So, just to let you know, not only were we trying to stick to our tradition from our families, ‘cause that’s the schools we thought we were supposed to go to. You know, we were primed for that. And then the things that happened in between time. I didn’t want to go anywhere near. Classroom Interview #2 Page 18 of 34

Rossi: So, if those things hadn’t occurred, then you would have chosen to go to those other schools.

Minor: Walker. I would have chosen Walker.

York: But now to chime on – ‘cause you hit a really, really pointed point – to us, we thought bussing was the set-up. And that’s what really made us bond more with you all. ‘Cause we thought we were being set up for the fall. I mean, Royal’s been quiet, but he’ll tell you his neighborhood in Southside, downtown where I grew up, if he came over there at night, if he showed up the next day in one piece, it’d be a miracle, prior to the bussing. Because you didn’t go to Church Hill. I can remember – Southside? What are you doing in Church Hill. Fulton Bottom. So, if they had done bussing like neighborhood schools, then I might have said, “okay. Pick me up. I’ll go to Wythe, if you’re going let me get on a bus, but there was no bus. I had to walk because I lived outside of the range. Yet, they sent a bus all the way across town to pick him up.

Robinson: No, they didn’t.

York: Y’all had to buy the bus tickets, too?

Robinson: Yes. I had to ride the City bus. I had to catch two busses from Church Hill to get to George Wythe.

Andes: That was your first year, right?

Robinson: First and second because they didn’t have City busses – I mean, school busses. So, it was like a two-hour trip both ways. But I know everybody, quite a few people are saying how bad bussing was, but I sit here today and say, bussing was the best thing that could have happened to my life. Because again, it all depends on, I mean, I’m blessed to be able to say that I was able to retire a year ago. And it was nothing but the education, the friends, the support, the relationships that I made at George Wythe. I was destined to go to Armstrong. I lived about ten blocks from Armstrong. And it’s almost like parents today want their children to go to the college that they went to, and so there was a lot of tradition, a lot of – it was almost like it was your only choice. I mean, and so it was bigger than just tradition. And then to be bussed. And I think I walked out of that Sa’ad El-Amin speech.

Andes: A lot of us did.

Robinson: Because I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.

Rossi: Were you?

Andes: Yeah.

Minor: Of course. Classroom Interview #2 Page 19 of 34

Robinson: Because as some of the other people have said, again, adults are not always right. Okay? And when you know right from wrong. If you stay there and say nothing and do nothing, you’re supporting it.

Minor: Exactly.

Robinson: But by that time, I had too much respect for myself and my classmates that to stay there was saying that I agreed with it. So I walked out.

Browder: It sounds like a real watershed moment in the history of the school.

Andes: The thing about the students at that age, I mean, we all gelled together, but now I don’t know if you remember me or not, but I was destined to go to Armstrong. My mother and father went to Armstrong. My dad went to college. He was the financial aid director at Virginia Union. My mom was a nurse, retired a nurse. So, we were going to the local school, and our school was Armstrong. But dad was really into education, and he and mom saw what we weren’t getting in Southside. So, I think some of you remember when RCAP started up?

All: Yes.

Andes: To try to help the neighborhoods. And he was president of the civic association. Trying to help things, help the blacks in the area. And we had no recreation in the area for blacks. They tried to get the YMCA over there. Well, they finally did get the YMCA in Southside, but it was in Chesterfield, and we still couldn’t get to it. So, whatever they tried to do, they kind of screwed us another way. But my interaction at George Wythe was pleasant because living in the Bainbridge, Porter Street area, I carried the newspapers in the afternoons, and my route was Semmes Avenue, Riverside Drive, your house –

Rossi: And my brothers delivered in Fonticello Park.

Andes: So, I got to interact with a lot of the white kids and parents. But going to George Wythe was a traumatic experience for the first year. You didn’t go to the bathroom by yourself. There was a fight. You got beat up. You know, that first year –

York: Right. ‘Cause it wasn’t a racist thing in the bathroom. You just – really – that’s what a lot of people keep saying. It really wasn’t for us a racist thing, and I don’t want to say anything bad, but we as men were actually intimated by a lot of the women. [1:01:41.0] will tell you. The women were far more violent. You could easily get punched, kicked or run off by – I’ll give you an example. Y’all remember Karen Smith.

All: Oh yeah.

York: Lovely girl. Homecoming Queen.

Minor: Yes.

Rossi: I talked about her last week. Classroom Interview #2 Page 20 of 34

York: Dark as my shoes. Sweet as sugar. Could not get a date. Her brother escorted her. We were scared of Karen. Okay? I’m serious.

Female: Everybody was scared of Karen.

York: But she was nice. You have to realize, I was telling some of your students, you realize this was the women’s lib era, too. So we had multiple problems.

[laughing]

Antoine: I will defend my sister. Karen wanted to come tonight. She did want to come, but she wasn’t feeling well, so she couldn’t come. So, she’s hoping to add to the project with some things that she has also – pictures and what have you, so I’ll get your information to pass along to her. But we were – I mean, that was my sister. That was one of my sisters that – but also, we have to realize that we, too, were finding our place. And see, but – the one thing, I want to chime back over here, because when you were talking about the bussing and what have you – I remember this governor that we had – Linwood Holton. But he said, “wait a minute, I’m not doing this to disrupt anything. I have a choice where my kids could go to school, but I choose to send them to your schools.” And his daughters – JFK, John F. Kennedy.

White female: He chose to send them to an integrated school –

Antoine: He could have sent them anywhere else, but he chose to send them there.

Female: I actually learned it in my Rethinking American Education class that he is a professor here at this university.

Browder: He’s down the hall.

Antoine: You did, and I had to put that in there, because he thought outside –

Black male: The box.

Antoine: He was thinking of us also – we weren’t thinking that way. He was thinking.

Black female: Like you said, bussing was a good thing. It’s the way it was done that was messed up.

Rossi: I was treated badly.

[talking over one another]

Browder: Keith and Gary, we’ve still – everyone has a lot on their minds, and we’d also love to hear –

White male: It was the same right there in there school, I can tell you that.

[laughter] Classroom Interview #2 Page 21 of 34

Browder: So, this is just, you know, history repeating itself.

Andes [?]: To go back to the Jeroyd Greene thing. At that time, a lot of the students, we had already made bonds with each other, right? And when he out there and talked, it would make – we were friends – it would make us uncomfortable with each other. The names that he was calling the white kids and white people. It made the blacks feel uncomfortable as well. But then other things were going on in the area. You had the riots – Hull Street, Broad Street. You had the [1:04:49.8]. It was a whole lot going on during these times.

Herrera: Is this the Banditos?

Black male: No, the Pagans or the –

Black male: The Pagans and –

[talking over one another]

Black male: … Hull Street when they had the race riots. I was out on the street corner, and the bikers were actually beating people with chains. I had to run. I was actually out on Bainbridge Street.

Minor: We actually saw police officers beat –

Black male: Wasn’t too long after that, the police did a raid on the headquarters, got bombs and stuff from the old Manchester Bridge, before they built the new one.

White male: I remember that.

Rossi: But you had your factions of people who didn’t, you know – Greene incited the blacks who wanted to be incited and pissed off the whites who wanted to be pissed off. And those were the two factions of people who didn’t want to get along no matter what people did to try to make it work. You had those pockets of people.

York: Yeah, ‘cause you’re right. There were people looking for an excuse really, not to get along. And so – and the problem really for us in this is, as he described Westover and Forest Hill, we lived close enough to each other that we had interface. Like, his folks had a store downtown Hull Street, so it’s not like I hadn’t seen him before. Okay? Or when you go to Fonticello Park or you go to Westover Hills down to the pond. It’s not like we hadn’t seen each other. It’s just that we didn’t interface with each other. I was with Phillip. I’m on my bike. We didn’t hang out with them. So, it wasn’t that hard for us to make that leap. You know, people we talking about – Walter Cook, Charles Story – they kind of said, look y’all, it ain’t that bad. You know. If you be your own self, you’ll be okay. And we kind of had to follow them and because they were like the stalwarts of the community. Walter Cook was like a great athlete and a scholar. And Tom Taylor, Linwood, um [1:07:04.1] Charlie Cook. And so, we – it wasn’t bad, but we felt like it was a set-up. You couldn’t explain it to me. If you looked back at the kids who came to George Wythe, I mean, did somebody take a hit of acid and make that decision. I mean, look at where we came from. You rode past five schools. You gotta ride two hours to get to school. Classroom Interview #2 Page 22 of 34

Browder: Yeah, that’s crazy.

York: And then I lived almost 30 blocks from the school, but I gotta walk with him six blocks away from the school to get a bus to get to school. Um, my friend Freddy German, the – what is it, the Pagans or something – they were shooting at the busses and what-not, he stopped riding the bus. We all stopped riding. We figured it was safer to walk, ‘cause you’re a target. You’re riding a yellow bus –

Browder: So, were these City busses or school busses that they were shooting at?

York: School busses. See, Southside, we got lucky. Southside had school busses that would pick you up at certain points and take you up to Wythe, but when you lived over near Royal and them, they had to catch the City bus and ride all the way across town. So, it was almost like a separate but unequal unequal. You know? And we were looking at them like “man, what did you come over here for anyway, man? Why don’t you drop out?” Really, because think about it. When you get to high school, your social pecking order is kind of already set. You know who’s the athlete of the neighborhood. You know who’s going to be – like the Rossis, I mean, classic cheerleaders. [laughing] Tell the truth. Tell the truth. You know, they had their little spunk. They were like, “okay.”

Rossi: I did a cheer last week for them. They were impressed.

York: So, you knew who were going to be the cheerleaders, who was going to be on the basketball team. You kind of had your pecking order. Then you get thrown into this. So, there is no pecking order. So, everybody’s fighting for their place. And that’s causing conflict on three or four different levels, which may play out in adolescence in a fight in the bathroom.

Browder: Absolutely.

Rossi: I had 11 siblings, and we graduated from Huguenot, Wythe, TJ and Kennedy. From the 12 of us, we graduated from four different high schools.

York: That’s crazy.

Rossi: It’s crazy.

York: Living in the same house.

Rossi: Living in the same house.

Browder: Gary, Keith, I’m going to make a stalwart attempt to get you to share.

Gary [?]: I don’t know what I can add to it. Other than, in addition to all this, the faculty was – 50 percent of the faculty was new in 1970 from the previous year.

Browder: See that’s big. That’s something we have not heard before and didn’t know. Classroom Interview #2 Page 23 of 34

Gary [?]: I didn’t have but one black teacher in my first – eighth, ninth and tenth grade. And that all changed, and that of course added to the general situation.

Rossi: So, where were the black teachers coming from? Were they coming from Armstrong and Walker?

[talking over each other]

Male: Actually, some came from middle school. Bainbridge Middle School.

Minor: But I can’t remember if it was the Richmond Times-Dispatch back then, the News Leader or whatever it was, my younger sister, who was a year younger than I was, and that’s when we knew she was going to have [1:10:38.5]. She’s now deceased, but Robin wrote this article that sent a wave through George Wythe High School because she wrote it to the editor. And she described what she saw as this black student that – she described the teachers. And in this article – I mean, I wish I could get a copy of it. I’m going to try to research it, because I thought of it today. She described them as off the bus and standing outside the windows, peeping in, and she said almost the image, and I think she described it as we were on display. And that they were staring at us to see what our next move was. And that article caused a wave from the administration because they published it.

York: But he brought up a good point, because a lot of the teachers really didn’t care for us either.

Minor: Exactly.

York: Okay. And they had their own stigmas and stereotypes. I was telling – I had a physics instructor send me and four of my classmates with a note. And we went back down – when a teacher gives you a note, you go down to the office. You don’t even read it. And we’re sitting outside waiting, were glad not to be in physics, and so the counselor comes out and says, takes us individually in the room, and she pulled me in the room and said, “okay Elwood, this teacher said that blacks don’t do well in physics and you don’t want to ruin your career. So, he was sending you out. So, this is the deal. You better go back in there, and you’d better get an A, and I don’t want to hear it.” And that’s how I was dismissed back to my physics class. Now, I got a minor degree in physics in college, but it’s not what I was interested in. It was done out of spite. Every time I’d come home from Howard, I’d bring my A in physics, and I’d go visit my physics instructor, and say, “look, I got another A.” And it was kind of a personal thing – we never really talked about the note, because I didn’t ever tell him I knew what was in the note. But it was one of those things where we wanted to succeed because, in spite of it all. And I wanted to be able to come home and like I saw Mark today – like, I see them. I mean, your brother David, that’s [1:13:04.6]. We wanted them to be as proud of us as we were of them, because they were civil at times when civility didn’t necessarily have to occur.

Black female: That’s right.

York: And so some of it was in spite of, and some of it was Richmond was still very small. And so, I’m gonna have to see her in the grocery store, and I want to get my hug, but I can’t, you Classroom Interview #2 Page 24 of 34 know, I can’t have that, you know, “he cussed me” or “he threw a rock at me” because when they were cheerleaders and we were at Armstrong and Kennedy, if they picked on her, we got off the bus.

Female: That’s right.

York: One day, [1:13:48.9] scuffle. It was like, oh, she came with us. We’re not gonna have that. And so, those bonds – talking about the Jeroyd – this thing really tested our friendship, because you knew who truly was on your side, and who was just grinning because it was fashionable or politically expedient.

Antoine: If I threw out the name Ronald Gis [sp?] –

Female: Oh yeah, the Professor.

Antoine: Those of us that –

York: When I went to school, we used to call him the Professor.

Antoine: The – the first – probably at that age, and I’m this eighth grader that’s hearing this name Ronald Gis from the whites, from the few blacks, and yet when I met him, just his [1:14:42.1] – one of the smartest. I think he was number one in his class. And everybody looked up to him. That was the name that you heard. And so, I know I did. I thought – that’s something. I want to be like Ronald Gis. Everyone moved – gravitated towards Ronald.

Female: Can I ask a question? I came in – I went to Bainbridge for two days in eighth grade, and it was similar to your experience for me. It was very scary for me, and then I ended up going to a private school for two years and then coming into George Wythe, and by then it was tenth grade. And by then it was, I think, 80 percent black, 20 percent white. But I’m hearing from you is when you came in in eighth grade –

Black male: In the ninth grade. I was there in the ninth. She was there –

Antoine: 95 percent white.

Black male: My cousin is Charles Story. And Chuckie was at Wythe. And it was like I had to live up to him. Teachers would be like, well – he ended up being student council president. He was a great guy, very smart, but it was the – he told me. He said, “Wythe is not too bad. You gotta deal with a couple things, but it’s okay. You know, I did okay.” But I mean, Chuckie used to read the encyclopedia for fun. You know? You – Wythe changed complexions between my ninth grade and my eleventh grade that you wouldn’t have recognized the ninth grade.

Browder: So, which years are we talking about then?

Male: ’70 to ’72.

Black male: Yeah, ’70 to ’72. Classroom Interview #2 Page 25 of 34

Female: ’70, well, it started in ’71.

[talking over each other]

Black female: ’70, ’71, yeah.

Male: The fall of 1970 is when …

Black female: … is what we’re referring to when we’re talking about eighth grade.

[talking over each other]

Female: … ’69. I graduated June of ’70, and I don’t remember any of this.

Black female: Yeah. It didn’t start until fall of ’70. Fall of ’70.

York: Did either one of y’all go to Blackwell?

Black female: No, I went from East End, seventh grade, eighth grade, George Wythe.

York: See, I went to Blackwell. Okay? We had seven periods. Everybody had six classes? Okay then we had a divisional arts class, when we had the education and what it was. Back then, my mother used to laugh and say, “if you can graduate a black kid from the eighth grade from a segregated system, they have the equivalent to a freshman college education.” I learned drafting. I learned construction. I learned electrical. We had a rotating period that every six weeks, we took another skill. So, we were being prepared to be independent entrepreneurs.

Rossi: They do that in Henrico County now.

York: Yeah, and so when I got – I mean, it really weird because as Royal said, graduating from Wythe was like okay. I’m a lawyer. So, my colleagues were sitting there going, “oh, if I don’t pass the bar, I’m going to kill myself.” I said, “if I don’t pass the bar, I’m gonna hang sheetrock and do something else.” I’m not stressed about this. And but the things that I learned from Wythe. I mean, teachers like Ms. Epperson.

Male: English. Brenda Epperson.

York: Yeah. Ms. Epperson kind of kept the middle kind of the middle. You could kind of go to her and get the real deal, you know. Like, why is it I didn’t make, you know, the team. She said, “try harder,” but she explained to me that they had probably already picked the team for this year. And it was stuff like the chess club – things like that. She took us to the plays, things like that. We were like …

Male: Ms. Logan and Ms. Weimer [sp?]. Ms. Weimer was the head of the English Department.

York: Those people – Mr. Mark Bowlis [sp?].

Male: Coach Souci and … Classroom Interview #2 Page 26 of 34

[others throwing names out. Hard to distinguish/spell them.]

Gary [?]: What I can add to this, and I love hearing all these stories, but I think we’re – if we’re studying, we really need to talk to the parents of the people in this room, because I think that’s where – they had to make choices.

Browder: Absolutely.

Gary [?]: And whether choices were made where I’m going to send my child to George Wythe High School or I’m going to send them or move out to Chesterfield or Henrico or private schools or whatever. Because that’s – I had close friends – Mark and I grew up together in the same neighborhood and everything else, but we had, actually had tight friends that didn’t have the opportunity to choose. It was their parents who made the decision. And so I think if we’re doing this, we need to maybe bring some of those parents in here and ask them or maybe just talk to them over the phone and ask them why they did make the decision either (a) to send them to George Wythe or (b) somewhere else.

Rossi: I did invite my mother. I invited my mother to come tonight, and she said she didn’t want to come unless the professor said it was okay.

Female: Do you need a note? [laughing]

Rossi: I put it on the webpage and I never heard anything, other than from Laura.

Browder: Oh, I’m so sorry. We were so excited to hear that she might come.

Rossi: Well, and then she called me today and said, “you know what? I don’t know – they don’t want to hear from me. They really want to hear from the students. And I don’t know what I would have to add.” But like you said, I think she has a lot to add.

Browder: I think –

Female: Well, if her mother came, I had invited my oldest daughter to come, who’s 23 years old and graduated from West Virginia University in 2009, and who is a product of the Richmond Public School System. So, I stayed, and I kept my children in Richmond Public School System.

Rossi: Now, I did ask my sister this – the one that graduated from TJ. And then my baby brother graduated from Huguenot. So, I asked her the other day. I said, “when bussing was over” – they reversed it in ’81, ‘cause I couldn’t remember the date, and I think that’s what I came up with – ’81. She said, “I went to Jefferson.” We lived in Stratford Hills. We moved when I was a senior to Stratford Hills, she went to Jefferson because they had classes that she wanted to take that Huguenot didn’t have. So it just made more sense for her, blah blah blah. So, I said, “was it mostly black, and was Huguenot mostly black?” And she said, “yes.” And I said, “but if bussing was over, and everybody was allowed to go to their neighborhood school, why were those schools heavily black?” And she said she just assumed that in that ten year span, that more blacks had moved to that area. Because kind of crept down Semmes Avenue to Forest Classroom Interview #2 Page 27 of 34

Hill – there were no blacks in Westover. There were certainly no blacks in Stratford Hills, and then eventually –

York: You gotta realize in especially Southside, as people left in flight from their houses, that that made places available. The house I grew up in on Midlothian Pike is still there. It’s been in my family since the 1800s, right there where Hull and Midlothian come together. It didn’t have central heat. I thought I was living in high cotton when I moved up on Moody Avenue. We had a big old furnace in the middle of the floor. And when I moved out on Ironbridge, I thought I was living like the guy – what’s the guy um, in the movie, that was living on an island. I was like, this is da bomb, you know. Hauling coal and sitting –

Female: County line –

York: The County line kept moving. They changed the address on the Midlothian Pike, so I didn’t go to Patrick Henry. I mean, there was a lot going on, so getting to Wythe was like, “whew, okay I’m here. I’m stuck here. Y’all ain’t that bad.” Really. I mean, that’s really the decision you had to make, because for a black kid coming to Wythe, especially living in the Southside, we had our own social issues we had to deal with internally that were far more traumatic than dealing with a white racist thing. I mean, I been black all my life, so calling me nigger – I don’t care. I mean, what you gonna do? But dealing with my colleagues who I grew up as a rival against and now I’m stuck in school with them – y’all weren’t the problem. I was happy to sit in class. Like, shew – I ain’t gotta fight in the bathroom, you know. I won’t get shot playing basketball.

Male: Was it between Armstrong and Walker?

York: Armstrong and Walker.

Male: That’s what I ran into coming from TJ over to George Wythe.

York: Right. And so imagine all the kids who, as he said, all their life grew up wanting to be an Armstrong Wildcat – we wanted to be Maggie Walker Dragons – now you stick me in the same school? So, we didn’t look at our colleagues as if you all were the problem. We looked at the system that set everybody up. And why don’t we get along to try to progress. I mean, really if you think about it, most of us after we got past kind of the wonky teenaged stuff, we really didn’t have problems.

Browder: Amanda. And Danielle.

Amanda: I brought this up with Royal earlier before we got this discussion started, but I feel like because of the presentation, this opportunity we have a little bit of a sampling error, in that we got everyone in the middle of like the whole racism spectrum, I guess, and that most of the people here dealt with it in a very positive way. So, I’m curious as to how, like, white people that dealt with it, how you dealt with your white friends that were more racist, and how black people dealt with their black friends who were more racist towards white people. And how those discussions went. And what would you say to someone who was like, “I don’t like you hanging out with those people because they’re a different race.” How did you deal with that? Classroom Interview #2 Page 28 of 34

Female: That’s a good question.

Rossi: My sister was told by a white, male friend of hers that she, they couldn’t be friends, or he wouldn’t consider dating her if she was going to hang out with Tony Cunningham, Milton Ruffin – Milton Ruffin got a lot of heat hanging out with us. He was the black quarterback, and he hung out with a bunch of us white kids. He took a lot of crap. And she said, “well, then I guess we won’t ever go out.”

Female: … kids, too, you know, good guys that he’s talking about.

Black male: See a lot of black friends – a lot of my black friends at that time were listening to Jeroyd Greene and also during that time, they were having Black Panther meetings in secret locations. And, you know, they would invite me to the meeting, and I’d say, “nah, you go to the meetings.” So, we kind of stayed friends but parted our ways in a sense. They went to those meetings; I didn’t go to those meetings. And –

York: And one thing – athletics for me made me divorce myself of those individuals who carried that hatchet. Because I’m playing football, I’m running, I’m laying down in the dirt with Mark and the group. We’re getting up trying to breathe. Coach Booker pouring water out on the ground. We die from thirst together.

Male: That’s true.

York: I don’t have time to be racist right now. I need you to help me to get up the field. And so, athletics, and then like we were saying going to the bus, going to the games, like at Armstrong, it’s a couple of cheerleaders, the little twins. Demure – I mean, you would think she was like the Queen of England, prim and proper, but if there was a fight out here, I’d pick her. ‘Cause they had to fight. Sometimes the cheerleaders had to fight to get back onto the busses. So, we had to help – it wasn’t about a racist thing at some point. And the friends had to get over it. And he said, go on then. Because you couldn’t get caught up in that. There were things that would happen to you that were clearly racist, and you were just like “ah man, I gotta go through this again.” And you just dealt with it. And our parents just told us, “well, you know, y’all might make friends, but when you get out there, you still gotta be careful.” And that’s kind of how it worked, because – like he said, we had friends who were Black Panthers, radical relatives –

Black female: Relatives.

York: Relatives. And they would tell you, “ah man, you can’t be friends with the devil?” And I’m like, “the devil just loaned me 25 cents for lunch. What are you saying?” So, you kind of just had to deal with them. And try to take a higher power, which –

Celine [? maybe Wilbert?]: You know, I never experienced that, Janice, and I know it went on –

Rossi: Experienced what? Classroom Interview #2 Page 29 of 34

Celine [? maybe Wilbert?]: Parents or any one of your peers saying, if you’re gonna hang with them, we’re not gonna – I don’t remember that. But I have to admit that I was – I had fallen in love with my high school sweetheart, and he got an opportunity to go to Collegiate on an athletic scholarship. Do you remember Larry Shaw?

York: Yeah.

Celine [? maybe Wilbert?]: Larry and I were married for 20 years.

York: Quite an athlete.

Celine [? maybe Wilbert?]: He – his parents – I don’t – I can’t speak for her or Mr. Shaw, bless his heart. But I don’t think they took him out of George Wythe because of the bussing. It was because they saw he had an opportunity to go out there. He excelled in three sports. He got a full scholarship to University of Richmond. And my life kind of morphed into Larry’s life at Collegiate. I admit I spent more time in that environment out there than I probably did in my own group here. It’s so good to see all these folks here. Claire, I grew up with Claire. We went to Kindergarten all the way up, and you know, the one difference that I see between Claire and I – she chose to send her children to Richmond Public Schools, and I sent mine to private schools, because I lived in the City of Richmond. It was strictly an educational reason for why we did it. I just thought I’d throw that out there.

Spicer: … much difference between Laura’s kids and my children. And we had the opportunity – and a lot of it was done to keep us minorities in the Richmond Public School System were the model schools, the alternative schools and the Governors schools. She didn’t have that choice. It was either Westover or private schools.

Browder: Elizabeth, did you want to add something in?

Celine: I did. I feel like I did lose some friends – not completely lost friends, but they really didn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore. But I remember catching it on both sides. I remember standing in the hall talking to a black guy, friend of mine, one day. We were just hanging out talking, and in the middle of the hall – it was very crowded – a girl, a black girl, pointed at us and said, “look at them. White as she is, and black as he is. What are they doing talking to each other?” And I remember, you know, just feeling like there were all these people that were going to be – there were all these factions. You know, people that wanted to get along. People that were determined not to get along. And we did have to get to that point where I just have to do what I feel is right, and I’m not gonna listen to them. And you know, I’m not going to take it too hard, you know, what I hear about myself from all of these different sides. Because you were going to hear about yourself from somebody, no matter what you did. You just had to walk.

Danielle: My question – and you led perfectly into it was how do you feel looking at the Richmond Public School System now, especially being subjected to bussing or pre-bussing, to look at the system now and see, I guess, re-segregation. Does that change your perception or does that – just how does that make you feel to see the system now? Classroom Interview #2 Page 30 of 34

Black female: Sad.

York: Sad.

Rossi: What is the – you know, there’s so much money pumped into – what’s wrong with the schools? Why don’t they work?

York: Pride.

Rossi: I don’t know. I’m out of touch, folks.

York: Pride.

Rossi: I live in New Kent County.

York: I understand. It’s really pride. We were proud to say – and that’s why we’re here. We went to George Wythe. We’re Bulldogs. All the banners up on the wall. We are proud – we helped put them there. And when I had the, I guess, the privilege of speaking at our high school graduation at Wythe, and the kids looked at me. At the time, I was the Attorney General in the Virgin Islands, and they were like, “you really went to Wythe?” And I’m like, “yeah, and I’m by far not the best of the graduates. Cathy Parker and James McCollum, I can’t hold a candle to them. Doug Whiting.” You know, I was trying to name my classmates who I used to be intimidated, ‘cause we’d have spelling bees and test grades – you know, everybody’s gonna show their test grade. And I used to be intimidated – I’m “Y.” Used to sit in alphabetical order. I sat behind Doug Whiting. So –

Male: We all did. [laughing]

York: Yeah, so it’s like, if he’s gonna get an A, I can’t raise my hand and say I got a D. I’ve gotta get an A, too. So, it was a competition, but it was a friendly rivalry, and you all don’t know that Doug as nice as the other side of a cool [pole? 1:33:32.4], but he really but – he’s flat out the smartest human being I’ve run into just innate intelligence. I don’t know how he worked in the evenings, but he got all the answers right in class.

Male: He’s off the charts.

York: Right. And so, you had to respect his intelligence. He didn’t play any sports. He didn’t even attempt to play a sport. So, you couldn’t call him a nerd. He probably would wear that title proudly. You know, but I still aced calculus, so how ‘bout you? And so I didn’t see that mush up. I think for me, I had a different experience – I think because some of the other people who came ahead of me kind of guided me, and the athletics, I think, changed my impression, because as I’m teasing her, the theory that white men can’t jump. Larry Shaw is proof that isn’t true.

White female: Well, my brother, Tommy Somers –

Female: It was Tommy. Classroom Interview #2 Page 31 of 34

York: And you had to respect them. They gave you the cross-over. They gave you the elbow like everybody else, and look at you and say are you man enough? And we went on. And that, I guess, changed why I have a different impression of the whole [1:34:52.1].

Antoine: We all agree – those of us that participated in some type of activity, whether it was sports or other – that it was also that integration among those individual groups that actually made us appreciate each other, just like you’re talking about sports. We remember – I remember what the team looked like, and I remember Coach Souci and his baseball team, and I was in love with two brothers – the Wynn [sp?] Brothers.

Female: Oh yeah.

Antoine: Todd and Kevin. Yes, I was, and I would sit there by the fence – I think the only black out there, peeping through, looking at these two young men, as they played baseball. But it was the coaches, I think, also, that demanded it. That demanded that we respected each other.

Female: Exactly. I totally agree with that.

Female: This dialog has me thinking…

York: But we’re not losing your question. I know you asked a question. That’s why we think it’s sad. Okay, because we don’t see the pride. If you go up to Wythe sometime, it look like desolate. We didn’t have graffiti on the walls. You know. We marked the football field ourselves before we played the games.

Female: We even had respect for [1:36:16.7].

York: Right. When the most, I guess, pointed thing – remember when y’all had the secret pals, and you would go to the players’ homes to decorate their rooms. That was freak. ‘Cause you know, Z was my secret pal. And so, back then, you didn’t have cell phones. You know, so she goes to my house to decorate my room, and my mother says, “you know, there’s a cheerleader sitting in my room.” Yeah – a white, Polish girl. She wants to go in your room and decorate it. [laughing] You want to explain this to me? And we were kind of like, okay. And you were explaining it, and she said, “oh, okay, I get it.” And then it went on. So, you’re right. The interface – the things that they took for granted, because at a black school, the cheerleader’s not coming to your house to decorate the room. Okay, that’s not gonna happen.

Black male: That’s not gonna happen.

York: But if they were decorating everybody else’s house, somebody came to my house. And it wasn’t like the us-and-them, and you hid a privilege. If they were giving a privilege to anybody, everybody got the privilege. And that’s what we got.

Browder: Let’s let June have the last comment. I hate to have it be the last comment. We had this Utopian fantasy that we would all be – all the students would be asking the questions which were mapped out in advance. Clearly, this was not destined to happen today, because everyone had so many incredible, incredible things to say. Classroom Interview #2 Page 32 of 34

Female: An egg timer next time.

Browder: Hm?

Female: An egg timer.

Browder: An egg timer. There you go. June, why don’t you have the last comment, and then I want to make sure that every single person here, make sure to fill out the consent form, the biographical form, and there is a third form if you are considering donating your materials to VCU Special Collections in the library – the George Wythe High School collection that they are starting as a result of this class. And I hope that some of you will consider it, so three forms to fill out, and one of our students is going to be stalking you after today to get in touch for a one- on-one interview, because clearly there is so much that we couldn’t get to today. And we want to make sure that we hear their stories. But, June –

Wilbert: Mine was really more of a question. After hearing all the dialog, I feel a little left out, because I graduated in ’70 and then moved away, during my four or five years, sorority and fraternity life, which was unheard of in Pennsylvania as being a high school thing, existed in our school, and you were either in or you were out. I mean, it was clicky as it was. We didn’t have people of color – am I allowed to say that? I don’t know – they’re all my friends now, so I don’t know what to say without offending.

Black male: You can call us anything you –

Black female: Don’t even worry about it.

Wilbert: I’m sorry. But anyway, I never heard of this up in Pennsylvania but I always wondered what happened to my sorority, and I’m working on that. But I’m wondering did that continue or did it help to do any healing and bonding, like say sports and the choir and the band would do? What happened to sororities?

Male: What sorority were you in?

[talking over one another]

Wilbert: KKK.

[laughing, talking over one another]

York: And y’all are laughing, but we had to get over that. ‘Cause that made you a suspect from the beginning. And then somebody would explain it, and then the word would get out – it ain’t like that. Okay? She’s laughing because I knew about KKK. But it was kind of funny –

Wilbert: … my mother came up to visit from Virginia. My daughter’s six years old. She’s in – well, no, she’s like four. She’s in daycare. And, you know, my mom’s the Christian one, the one that taught us all, everybody’s you know the same and all that red, white and blue and all that stuff. And so we drive over to drop my daughter at this birthday party, and one of my best friends comes out and says, “you know, you’re welcome to come in. They’re all here. It’s Classroom Interview #2 Page 33 of 34 crazy. Stay.” And I said, “no, mom’s here, we’re going to go somewhere,” And my mom’s standing here like this. And we drive off. And I said, “don’t you feel good.” She goes, “she’s black.” And I was like, “yeah.” Because after we left, I didn’t get it while I was here. And I guess that’s my parents. I led a sheltered life. I don’t know. We either were together or we weren’t together. So, my mom was like, “well, I didn’t know you had black friends,” and I’m like, “well, yeah.” She was like, “that’s Saundra that you talk about on the phone?” Isn’t it amazing what happens when you’re talking names on the phone and then – and that was a real revelation for me that my family haven’t come as far as I thought they had.

Browder: Which is another reason why it would be so great to follow your suggestion and talk to some of the parents. And if you would allow us, again, when our students contact you, it would be so great if you have parents who you think might be up for being interviewed, I think that would be such a fabulous, fabulous addition to the play, to hear some of their stories, too, about why they made the decisions that they did, because it really is a generation –

York: Well, y’all better hurry up, because you’re gonna lose –

Antoine: Just want to answer your question about the sororities. We didn’t know about it. So, maybe that’s when – all I can remember any time the cluster of us were together was when we transformed into a pep squad. And I can remember Mary Gaskins, [1:42:28.0] and myself as we, you know, the president role – and the pep squad became the big – the large group of females, and I think when the year that I was president, there was almost 100 girls. That became our – I don’t know. It wasn’t a sorority, but we stood together.

Wilbert: You found your own –

Antoine: Well, someone else found it. We just, you know, tapped into it. But also, historic – and I shared this with a group a couple of weeks ago when I was at a ROTC, Junior ROTC, program that we were fortunate at George Wythe to be selected to be the pilot program for ROTC for females in this country. And I was one of the ones that was in that program. And for some of us – well, Phillip – Phillip and I, well Phillip certainly because it was always male, it was the male program. But they decided to pilot it. So, they chose us. I don’t know. But we passed the pilot and thus it became historic as we know the ROTC program around the country. So, and that was a group – it wasn’t a club, but it was a soldier, young soldiers program.

Mines: One quick comment in reference to her about education today and the sad situation that’s going on in the schools and how when we were in the schools, you had to go out for teams. Now, they’re in the hallways, dragging them in – can you please come out for the team. It wasn’t like that. We used to have to run down to the gym and check the list and hope we made it. Now, there is no list. You know, so – to say all that, we started alumni association for George Wythe. And it’s supposed to include all the classes. It’s basically to support the kids in extracurricular activities, scholarships, and also to improve the network between alumni, among other things. And my hope was other high schools would jump on the bandwagon of forming an association and we would be an RPS, because our kids need the support. So, that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do to turn things around, trying to help, trying to be supportive and make things better. Classroom Interview #2 Page 34 of 34

Female: Could we just hear for a minute from the two that came in – introductions.

Ware: Annelisa Ware [sp? 1:44:52.8] I graduated in the Class of ’74.

Browder: Class of ’74.

Ware: Class of 74.

Williams: Maurice Williams. Class of ’89.

[All laughing about his graduation year … young, etc.]

Herrera: At this point, I know our students, our class officially ends at 5:20 p.m. although I think this is more than a class for us, but I know that our students have other arrangements to make. But know that they will be getting in contact with you. We are so thankful for you for sharing your stories.

Browder: And please remember to fill out at least two and possibly three forms. Eat the cookies, so – I mean, I know my kids are secretly hoping that they’ll be dozens left over, but I’m hoping that you will all finish them. My daughter and I made them last night. So, help yourselves …

[classroom activity]

[END RECORDING 1:46:45.5]