Victoria Davis Narrator

Mica Lee Anders Interviewer

September 30, 2015 Saint Paul, Minnesota

Victoria Davis -VD Mica Lee Anders -MA

MA: This is Mica Anders-Turner. I’m conducting an interview today with Mrs. Vicky [Victoria] Davis. Today is Wednesday, September 30, 2015. We’re at Mrs. Davis’s home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. This interview is for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Ebony Fair Oral History Project. Thank you very much for meeting with me today.

VD: Thank you for asking me.

MA: Absolutely. I appreciate the time that you’re giving to this project.

VD: Yes.

MA: Can you start with just telling us how to spell your entire name, stating your name and spelling it?

VD: Victoria, V-i-c-t-o-r-i-a. Davis, D-a-v-i-s.

MA: Thank you. And what is your date of birth?

VD: June 3, 1943.

MA: Nice! And what was your occupation?

VD: Well, I was in business for myself for forty years. Prior to that, I was the chief of the loan management branch at HUD [US Department of Housing and Urban Development], and before that, I managed property for Shelter Development Corporation. I was their subsidized property manager, and we managed 4,400 units in the Twin Cities area.

MA: Wow.

VD: Yes.

MA: Wow. And are you married?

1

VD: I am.

MA: What’s your husband’s name?

VD: Nathaniel Khaliq. For years he was president of the Saint Paul NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. He retired two years ago. Then we sold the business, and he’s a happy camper. He’s happy that we sold it. He said he was tired of going up and down the steps at the apartments for various things. So we are spending our time going to our cabin. We’re getting ready to go to the house in Atlanta, and now he’s trying to figure out where else we’re going to go. We’re going to go to Jamaica in February, and we’re trying to plan the year out with what we’re going to do. Being retired is new and unfamiliar to us. We are trying to figure it out.

MA: Nice, nice.

VD: Yes.

MA: Very nice.

VD: Yes.

MA: Do you guys have any children?

VD: We have four children, three that I gave birth to. When I married him, he had a son that was five, and I raised him. So together we raised four children. Three of them live here. They’re all boys. One of them lives in Atlanta. She’s a girl. God has blessed us because they’re all doing well, and they all have been married to people who have been good to them. Our oldest son was married and divorced. His wife is now the principal at Obama [Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary School]. They were married for maybe seven or eight years. They have a daughter that just graduated from Hampton University last year.

MA: Wow. Very nice.

VD: Yes.

MA: And so I know you have a lot of grandchildren running around.

VD: We have twenty grandchildren.

MA: [laughs] Nice.

VD: Yes. So it’s a big family.

MA: That’s wonderful. How long have you lived here in Saint Paul?

2

VD: I came here in 1968 to go to graduate school. I went to the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and got a master’s in public administration. I did an internship here at the Urban League in Saint Paul. Then I went to Washington, DC, to do an internship as a Ford Fellow. That was financed, and we were on campus at a university in the DC area. Then I did two internships. One was at a housing consulting firm in Atlanta, and, as stated, one was at the Saint Paul Urban League.

The firm that I did the internship with in Atlanta had the special connection with Saint Paul that brought me back here to stay. In fact, I flew from Atlanta to the Minneapolis area to do the closing on the project on Plymouth, which my son now manages. It’s really weird. Once I came this way, the financer for that project was Cornell Moore. He was working with Northwestern Bank at the time. Joyce Hughes Smith was the attorney for that project.

I just kind of laced myself into the community. What I did was try to find a way to become involved after my first marriage. I was married for three years to Philip Borom, whose brother was the director of the Saint Paul Urban League. After our marriage ended, I married my current husband, and we’ve been married forty years.

MA: Congratulations!

VD: He’s a very Saint Paul-oriented person, because he was born here. His grandfather is on exhibit at the [Minnesota] History Center. They have a Rondo exhibit there, and they have the diagram on the floor that has all the addresses for the Ronda area.

MA: Yes.

VD: His grandfather’s street address is there, and they have extracted and lifted out a picture of the house he was born in. That’s a very good history. I don’t know if you heard this story, but there was this one man, they call him Reverend Davis, who said he was not giving up his property, and they had to bring the sheriff and move him out from the home. They moved him from there to a place—I think it was in Mount Airy—and they never went back to that house again. In fact, at the place they moved him to, the steps were so high that neither he nor his wife, who was blind, could go up and down. So as a result, he died soon after the move.

[pause in the recording]

VD: Where was I?

MA: We were talking about Mr. Davis and Rondo.

VD: Okay.

MA: But I would love to go back even farther and talk a little bit about your childhood.

VD: Oh, okay!

3

MA: I would love to start all the way at the beginning. Where were you born?

VD: I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, 1943. I went to Hamilton High School. About five years ago we had our fiftieth reunion there.

MA: Congratulations!

VD: We had about two-thirds of our class there. I have a book from that reunion. It’s an amazing story that a high percentage of our graduates who graduated from there went on to college and went on even to get other degrees post-college. It’s an amazing story. We had a principal who was very caring, and he really got involved in the lives of the students. He lived one block from me in Memphis, and he and my brother had been prizefighters together. So he had an interest in me because of my brother. He had a hook in students for very different reasons, and the hook made you be your better self.

When I graduated, I scored very high on the ACT [college entrance exam] and I was able to get a full scholarship to go to Spelman College. At the time, I didn’t know Spelman was as big a deal as it has turned out to be. It’s quite known for its alumni, as is Morehouse College, and we do have a great affection for our classmates. It was very evident at our fiftieth reunion. I went back for the fiftieth reunion at Spelman this past May, and my husband and my son and his wife went, because his wife also graduated from Spelman. She was reuning, too. It was only her fifteenth.

MA: Fifteenth. [chuckles]

VD: Her fifteenth and my fiftieth.

MA: Fiftieth.

VD: Yes, so she’s got a ways to go to catch up. But we had a great time.

After I went to Spelman, I went back to Memphis and worked in the Social Security Administration. I took the exam with the federal government, and I was placed there. I went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to train. That was quite frightening because the hotel I stayed in had a big sign in the lobby as headquarters for the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

MA: Oh my gosh!

VD: So I called my mother when I checked in. I said, “Mom, this is the headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan! So I’m going to leave the phone off the hook.” Back then, they didn’t have the call plans where you just call and talk. They charged you for every minute. I said, “I’m leaving the phone off the hook, and I’m going to get through this first night. If you hear anything, you make sure you call the authorities.”

MA: Absolutely.

4

VD: But I got through that night and the next few days. There were two other black girls in the class, and the three of us rented rooms at one of the homes of a local black family there. The father of the family would drive us to training every day and back. But that was quite frightening.

Given the fact that I had gone to Spelman, I had participated in many of the civil rights marches. I had the opportunity to see an actual discussion between and Martin Luther King on the campus of Morehouse. I rode in a car with when he first ran to become legislator for the state of Georgia. At the time, I was vice president of the Spelman Student Council, and so I was there representing the student body, supporting his effort. We supported his campaign with voter registration and such.

We just had so many harrowing experiences as well. I remember integrating lunch counters there, at the Magnolia Room in Atlanta, and standing on picketing lines. I had a girlfriend who was one of the original organizers of SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. We were just going from one thing to the other, always. When you have a place like the Atlanta University Center, where you have Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, Clark College, and then you have the theological seminary, you just had people available to you always to go and march. And that’s what we did. We did a lot of marching, and we did a lot of sitting in.

I think that experience helped punctuate my direction in life because I was convinced that I was so blessed, one, to be alive and to live through the experiences that I had lived through, that when I came here and saw the experiences that were so different, I wanted to apply myself in a solution category. So when I was doing my graduate work at the university, I was doing a lot of research. One of the things that I researched was education systems around the world, and Minnesota was one of them. In Minnesota, we were just at the very bottom, and we still are for .

MA: Yes.

VD: So what I wanted to do was to bring my experiences to bear on issues related to academic achievement. So I started a tutoring program called the Summit-University Education Consortium, which I ran for twenty-seven years. I have something upstairs—I didn’t bring that down—to show you about that. We would do tutoring every Monday and Thursday night.

MA: Where did you do it?

VD: We started out at Pilgrim.

MA: Okay, Pilgrim Baptist Church.

VD: Yes. We did it at Pilgrim for the grades K [kindergarten] through six, then at Mount Olivet Baptist Church we did it from grades seven through twelve, and then at Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church we created what we called a writing center. We got donations from the community of computers. We had two computers that were donated, and they were there for any

5 kid who needed to write a paper and didn’t have access to a computer. They could go there and do papers. Art Sydner helped me write the proposal for the tutoring program and ran the center at Camphor, where the kids went to do their papers. We did that for a while, and then the numbers just grew.

Once the numbers grew so that we couldn’t contain them at Pilgrim and at Mount Olivet, then we petitioned the school district to let us have space. The first school that we went to was Maxfield Elementary School. Then we went to Webster Elementary School. Then we were operating out of Central High School because not only did we have tutoring, but we would do summer school, too. Our summer school program was six weeks. Then we did college prep. I think our first college prep class had 103 kids in it. It was a six-week program helping to prepare kids to pass the college entrance exam.

Later, the Rondo Center came into play. It was good, because they had grades K through eight there, so some of the seats there were large enough to hold the larger kids. So we would bring our whole program there. At one point, we had part of the program at Maxfield and part of it at Central. We had the elementary at one school, but the high school students at another school. Once Rondo came on line, we were able to put it all there.

The last six or seven years, we ran the summer program out of J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School. We were able to do all grades there as well. So we’ve been to Maxfield, J.J. Hill, Rondo, Webster, Central—we’ve been to a number of the schools. But the main thing is that for twenty- seven years we were able to tutor.

MA: Wow.

VD: A lot of the kids that we tutored came back to tutor. My son that lives next door and his wife both tutored. In fact, his wife was our coordinator one year, and both my sons were summer camp coordinators at different times. My daughter tutored. At one point, Melvin Carter was in our program. They have a good friend, Jabari Barner, who is now an attorney, who was in our tutoring program. His sister, who was a Spelman graduate and got her PhD, was in our tutoring program. Micah Lewis, who is a deputy sheriff, was in our tutoring program. He came back after he graduated, and he tutored along with my son. So a lot of the kids who came through the program came back and tutored. They came back and tutored as volunteers because the program had been so helpful to them.

I tell you, we were so blessed. There is a young man who was from Ghana, who was just an excellent mind. He developed a math program for us that we could use for K through twelve. He has his PhD now, and he’s working somewhere in Wisconsin. We had great people. We had PhDs in biology, in physics, from the university who came and tutored. There was a period of time we had a partnership with the black medical association. So in addition to our regular tutoring, on Tuesdays we would go to Maxfield, and they would arrange to tutor the kids in sciences, just to have that connection between the black kids and the black professionals. So we’ve had, over the twenty-seven years, a lot of great cooperation between people who went to school and came back and said, “I want to help.”

6

MA: That’s wonderful.

VD: It was great. I really do miss doing that. I think three years ago was the last year we did it. We stopped doing it because the school district now wanted to charge us for the space. In the past, the space was always free. Then I got a bill, maybe four years ago, for $10,000. I said, “Well, we’re not going to be able to pay this.” So I got them to agree to forgive that, but we didn’t proceed past that year with the tutoring because it was just too expensive. I think they did that because they had decided they wanted to put the money for tutoring in their coffers. So now they’re tutoring. When we did it, nobody was doing it. But we showed them the way, and we showed them if kids have access to tutoring, they can make it.

Our kids went to Central. My daughter went through algebra I and II, geometry, trigonometry, and physics. My boys did the same. But they were able to do it because we had these excellent tutors from the university who were PhDs in those subjects. The gentleman who taught chemistry was a chemist from 3M. He tutored with us for about ten years, and he was very dedicated. We didn’t have to pay him a thing. He just wanted to use his gifts to help, and he was very helpful. The guy who did our physics was so animated. He knew physics so well that when he would be in the class, he talked to kids about cars and about airplanes, and he talked through physics principles using those very familiar things with the kids. It was really a great learning experience.

It was just wonderful to see the light turn on in the eyes that had been so dull. Our goal was always to just try to keep children in the game as long as possible because as long as they’re in the game, you have a chance to help them be successful. Once they decide, “I can no longer do this,” they’re out of the game.

In fact, I have a grandson now who’s just so outstanding. He graduated from high school, but he has not gone to college, and I don’t know if he ever will. But he’s so talented, he’s so driven, and he’s an excellent writer. He went to Webster, and when he was in fifth grade, he could barely read. So I organized a volunteer group from the community. I got twenty-seven people from the community to go up to Webster, and every Tuesday and Wednesday we would have volunteers to teach kids to read. So after he graduated he said, “Grandma, thank you for teaching me how to read.” It’s embarrassing when you get older and you cannot read, and fortunately, God blessed him with a great gift. But most of his friends have had some very tough times. Most of them have. So many of them have been locked up or didn’t graduate high school.

Not only was my grandson talented, he was a very gifted athlete as well. So when he graduated, he had an arrangement made where he’d go to college at someplace not far from here. It’s about an hour and a half drive. He had picked out his room and everything. He had a roommate. But then, a week before he was supposed to go, he said he wasn’t going to go. He was going to go to Houston because that’s where he had a cousin who was like a brother to him. That’s where he is today. He’s pursuing a career in the spoken word, and he entered a contest just last week. There were two dozen entries, and he won. Number one. He won $500. He’s selling clothes as an employee of Men’s Wearhouse down there, and he’s made such good friends, so many good contacts, because he presents himself so well. Somebody that he sold a suit to is getting married,

7 and so he sold a suit to him and all his wedding party, and they invited him to go to Puerto Rico to the wedding. So he’s excited about that.

MA: Wow, wow.

VD: We’ve had just so many wonderful experiences here in the neighborhood, just working with what we had. So many of the teachers volunteered. I remember the one lady who taught my children at Benjamin Mays Elementary, Sheila Odewumi. She is retired. She would teach our students, and every summer we’d do a skit that she would write and they would perform. It would be a black-oriented skit.

[pause in the recording]

MA: All right. So we were talking a bit about your work with the tutoring and the elementary and high school students, but I’d love to segue that, if you don’t mind, into your work with the United Negro College Fund [UNCF].

VD: Okay.

MA: I know before we started, you were talking about sort of how they started and some of the development that happened here.

VD: Right.

MA: I’d love to hear that again.

VD: The reason I got involved with the United Negro College Fund was because, as I said, Matt Johnson, who was the director, reached out to Pilgrim and the pastor there, because at that time, Pilgrim was really the number one . It was the first black church in Minnesota. He wanted to get some help to try to organize involvement of the black community with the United Negro College Fund.

MA: Because you said, before, who was really involved?

VD: Almost all white. So that was the charge that we accepted, and we really accomplished a lot. At that time, there were no kids from Saint Paul—from Minnesota actually—in the UNCF schools in Atlanta. But now you can’t even count the numbers of those that are in those schools from Minnesota today.

MA: What year was that, that you started?

VD: That was in about ’75.

MA: Okay.

VD: Yes, so it was way long ago. [both laugh]

8

MA: A couple of years. [both laugh]

VD: But it was a labor of love, because I believe so in developing the potential of people, and I know what a school can do for you when it wants to. Even in our tutoring program, I have had kids in there whose mothers told me that they had kids who were in kindergarten and they had been in school for a whole year and had not learned to write their names. The teachers had told them, “Your child will not be able to learn to read.” In our summer program, in six weeks they were able to read. When you want to teach someone, there’s so much you can do in a short amount of time. It’s almost like a miracle happens when you connect desire with a will to do. You know?

MA: Absolutely.

VD: I’m just so grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had to contribute to the development of so many young people in this community.

MA: What was your role with the UNCF? So they asked you guys at Pilgrim, “Can you help?” Help with what?

VD: We formed the Intra-Alumni Council. There were three of us who were the organizers, and we got volunteers from around the Twin Cities. We would have monthly meetings.

MA: Who were the three of you?

VD: It was myself, Barbara Cyrus, and Sue Williams. I’ve mentioned that those two are already deceased. If they were alive, they probably would be in their nineties. They were older than me at the time. Now I’ll be seventy-three on my next birthday. We had a great time. We made fun out of doing good work. We would meet in each other’s homes or at the United Negro College Fund office. Whenever we met in each other’s homes, that person was responsible for preparing a meal. We’d have a meal, and then we’d meet, and then we decided what we were going to do.

Before we even brought the Ebony Fashion Fair here, we did local fashion shows. We got guys from the Minnesota Vikings or from the Minnesota Twins to be in the fashion shows. We used local black models. So we started there. We started local with what we had.

Then one year Matt Johnson, Louise Gooden, and myself drove to and met with the people at Johnson Publishing Company about bringing Ebony to Minnesota. We made a good case that we could be very lucrative, and the next year they were here.

MA: And what year was that? Do you remember?

VD: I believe that was in 1978. We did it for probably the next ten or fifteen years, and then we stopped. I’m not sure why we stopped. I think it just got to be a bit much for Matt and his staff. By this time, though, the proceeds had been so good, because each time we’d do it we would

9 have maybe $40,000 that we would make in gross sales. It wouldn’t be the net by the time we paid Ebony. They’d take about half of it. But it built up our local coffers.

Then Matt went to one of the foundations to start a matching fund so that we could do local scholarships, and we used the proceeds from that to be our share of the local match. They still have that now. That local fund ensures that any kid from Minnesota who wants to go to a UNCF school can go. All three of my children that I gave birth to went to a UNCF school, and they all received UNCF scholarships. Way back then, a UNCF scholarship was enough to pay about half of your one semester’s tuition. It’s way different today.

MA: Absolutely.

VD: I mean, these schools have just gone from where you could go for like $5,000 or $6,000 per year to the point where now they’re like $30,000 or $40,000 at the black colleges. I couldn't believe it.

MA: Yes.

VD: So on the one hand, it’s good because it tells you that they’re able to stay in the hunt for students with the dollars that other schools are getting. But on the other hand, it’s tougher for kids to be able to afford to go. But, you know, God is good because those same kids’ parents are better able to send them now.

MA: Exactly, exactly.

VD: So with that, plus the Pell Grant, plus the student aid that they can get, more kids are able to go.

MA: Yes.

VD: It’s really been a labor of love, trying to get kids from here to go in those schools. I never shall forget, when we first started talking to people in this area about the United Negro College Fund schools, they said, “Oh, I’m not sending my kids to those schools. Those schools are inferior.”

MA: They’re inferior?

VD: Yes. They would say, “They have newspaper on the walls for wallpaper. They have tin roofs. They have bugs, and they have insects, and they have this, that, and the other.” They obviously had never set foot on the campus, because our campus at Spelman was beautiful. The campuses that I’ve seen—I haven’t seen them all—were beautiful, because if there’s one thing the black community did pride themselves in, it is education. They made a lot of sacrifices to send kids to school. A lot of it was with money that they got from others. I know the Rockefellers were key in helping to fund Spelman’s starting. But the people who solicited and were responsible for the Rockefeller dollars were women who believe in the need to educate black women. Each school had their own story of people who were their angels and who made it

10 possible for them to provide education to just hundreds of kids. That’s a story that I won’t try to go into now, but every school has their own history of how it got started and who believed in them.

MA: So Ebony Fashion Fair, when they came here, that was fundraising for you guys, correct?

VD: Yes, yes.

MA: And so I heard you say that money then went into sort of a pot to get distributed as scholarship money primarily. Or how did that all come together?

VD: Initially it just went to the United Negro College Fund. They sent it to the national office. Then the national office had some formula that they used to send funds to all the UNCF member schools. What Matt decided was that we weren’t going to just work to send money to national. We were going to work to keep some money here so that for any kid from here who wanted to go, we knew that our efforts would help send them to school.

MA: Okay.

VD: So he approached the foundation community and got a grant that we matched with our fundraising. That grant still is in existence, and kids are still getting scholarships from that today.

MA: Tell me more about what Ebony Fashion Fair was like here during those years, those 1970s years. Where did you guys hold it?

VD: Well, we had it at the Civic Center, downtown the first year.

MA: Downtown Saint Paul?

VD: Downtown Saint Paul, and then there was a place that was out in Chanhassen. It was a big place. But it was where they used to bring shows, theater shows and things like that, and we had it out there. Then we had it at the Orpheum Theatre once, in downtown Minneapolis. It was at big places like that. We never did have it in the community at a center or a church or anything like that. A lot of the venues that you would see when they would list the places were at churches at some of the larger cities. They’ve had some larger churches. But ours were always at big venues.

MA: How was it received by people?

VD: Very well. When we had the Ebony Fashion Fair, it was like a glam night. The people who would come came dressed to the nines.

The show was always entertaining. They had this one emcee who was very charismatic, and she made the show seem like it was here, but at the same time it wasn’t here. She just made it seem like it could be anywhere—like she had come from a special place and the show had come from some special place.

11

They were great about bringing wonderful props. When they set the stage up, they’d have a place where the models would walk out, and they seemed like they were coming out of a little city or something. It was not that they were just walking the runway like most fashion shows. They’d come out of a place. I was just looking to see if there was a picture of a stage here, but it doesn’t look like it. But they’d come out of a place, and then they’d have props on the runway. They’d have little trees or little chairs.

Sometimes they’d have other people. After they had been coming here for a while they introduced men into the show, and then after they introduced men, then one year they started with the concept of twins. They had twin guys. They were always so handsome. They, themselves, were also models, and they made the ladies swoon.

MA: [chuckles]

VD: So not only did we have beautiful girl models, we had handsome guy models. In the last years that I was involved with the Ebony Fashion Fair with the Limited 30 Black Women’s Network, we also added announcing Mother of the Year. There was always an intermission at the Ebony Fashion Fair where they’d change up props. During that intermission is when we would introduce our Mother of the Year. I started to look to see who was the Mother of the Year this year. Oh, Evelyn Lewis.

MA: There’s a note here in the program. Yes, it says Evelyn Lewis was the Mother of the Year in 2005.

VD: Yes. So every year we would do that.

MA: That was when you did it with Limited 30?

VD: Yes.

MA: Okay.

VD: Yes. Every year we wanted to do a Mother of the Year during that intermission because we already had a nice crowd gathered, and it was such an honor for the people to be recognized there. So we did that.

Also, not only did we do the Mother of the Year then, but we announced scholarships. We usually would give from five to six scholarships of $1,500 each to kids. One year, we gave scholarships, and there was a guy there who rose to his feet, and he said, “I’m going to match that.” He gave an additional $1,500 to everybody that won scholarships that year. So that was great.

MA: How did you end up doing it again with Limited 30? So tell me more first, I guess, about Limited 30, the women’s group.

12

VD: Limited 30 is a black women’s network that was founded by myself; Maxine Gaines, who was married to Curman Gaines, who was superintendent of schools here for years; Ora Lee Patterson, who is now still here and she’s at Pilgrim; Patti Hickman, who is now deceased; and Katie McWatt, who is now deceased.

MA: What’s Katie’s last name?

VD: McWatt.

MA: Thank you.

VD: Yes. She was the first black woman who ran for public office in the state of Minnesota. She ran citywide and almost won. When you look at the train hubs down on University Avenue, there are going to be some pictures of her in there because she’s kind of like a local hero. She worked at the Urban League in Saint Paul. I remember just hearing her tell stories of how they would jump in the ditches to stop construction on certain things that they thought were unfair. When I was doing my graduate work at the U [University of Minnesota] and I came to the Urban League for my internship, I worked on one of her campaigns and I would go door knocking with her. She’d have meetings at her house, and she’d maybe make a pot of chili or something. People would come there and have chili and work on her campaign. It was just really a great experience for me. I had come from another place, and I didn’t want to come to this place and always be a stranger here, so I said, “Well, I want to just let down my oar where I am and do what I can do to make it a better place.”

Like I said, I had those kids, and I wanted to make sure that they got a good education. We had so many battles with the school district. Oh my God! So many battles! When my daughter started going to Central, they had so many things that blacks couldn’t do there, at that time.

MA: What year would that have been?

VD: She graduated in ’93, so it was probably around 1990 or 1989, something like that. She graduated as a Presidential Scholar, but when she wanted to go to Spanish III they wouldn’t let her. They had this thing that if you were going to go past Spanish II or other languages in the second year, you had to have the teacher sign that you could do that. That was a good way to keep you out, because then the teachers had to decide, “Yeah, you can do that.” So I told them, “Well, she wants to take Spanish III. She made good grades in Spanish I and II, so we’re signing her up for Spanish III.” They were so resentful that the teacher would not even acknowledge her in the class.

It turns out that there was a guy from South America who was over here as an exchange student, and he was very kind to my daughter. So whenever the teacher wouldn’t respond, he would respond. The teacher was so angry, she made him come sit at her desk so he couldn’t help my daughter. But she made it through because the tutoring program that I started had people who were good in Spanish and French. So what she couldn’t get in school, she could come to tutoring and get. That was a very good plus.

13

But they had so many things that we had to break through there. At the time that they went to Central High School, the white kids went to school on the fourth floor, and the black students went on all the other floors. On the fourth floor, where the white kids went, they would have, like, collegial meetings. They’d have, like, group meetings. They’d have tea and stuff like this. We just had to break through so many of those walls that it felt like my whole time was just involved with fighting, just involved with fighting.

Once we got involved with the school district, then it was really hard, because they had these practices where your name would be pulled from a hat for you to go to school. But we said, “But if you have families, that doesn’t make sense to pull names from a hat and have families who have several kids have to go to several different schools. Now they’ve got to go to several PTA [Parent-Teacher Association] meetings. Now the kids have got to be on different buses. Now the kids don’t have their siblings in school with them.

[pause in the recording]

VD: So where did we end up?

MA: We were talking about the schools, but I want to focus a little bit more on Limited 30.

VD: Okay. I was telling you about how we started. We started with those five, and each of us recruited six people.

MA: What year would that have been?

VD: That was probably around 1973, because I think we celebrated twenty-five years as a group. But I told you that of those people who started it, only Ora Lee Patterson and myself still live here in the Cities. Maxine Gaines moved back to Florida, where both she and her husband are from. A lot of the members are older and just aren’t well enough to continue.

MA: What made you guys bring Ebony Fashion Fair back again with that organization, and what year did that start?

VD: It may have been about ten years ago, because it hadn’t been done for a while. After we stopped doing it with the United Negro College Fund, then a fraternity did it, and they didn’t have a good turnout. So we just decided to do it again. The first show we did after we got back involved, we had four hundred in the audience. Then the next year we had seven hundred, and the final year we did it we had eight hundred.

MA: Wow. And that was like 2005-ish?

VD: Yes. Then after we did it, I think it was the AKAs [Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.] who began to do it. One of the ladies who worked for Ebony, for Johnson in Chicago, was an AKA, and so she was reaching out to our AKA sisters here.

14

We started to do it [with Limited 30] because we were doing local fundraisers. We were doing it for scholarships as well, and so it was a way for us to increase the income and give more scholarships. In fact, the group no longer exists as Limited 30 Black Women’s Network, but we have started a Black Women’s Foundation. This year we did give a $2,000 scholarship to a young lady that goes to Hampton University, and we’ll probably gear up to do some more because I will be meeting with the president of the bank over at Western to try to get them to donate. We started out with a fund of $13,000 that we had extracted from our work with the Black Women’s Network to start the foundation. We gave $2,000 away, so we have $11,000 now. We want to build it up so we can, for the next school year, give at least one or two scholarships a year.

MA: That would be nice.

VD: Yes.

MA: What did you notice were the big differences when you hosted it in the seventies versus when Ebony Fashion Fair was hosted in the 2000s? In terms of the difference in the audience and maybe the differences in the show itself.

VD: Well, one thing I can say is that the show was pretty consistent. They always had wonderful , because Mrs. Eunice Johnson toured the fashion houses in Europe and got the most fabulous fashions. She always had a good eye for models. Her models weren’t always the beauty queens, but they had such stature and they presented themselves so well. When she dressed them up for her clothes, they looked fabulous.

So I would say the biggest difference was that when they wrote the script for the show, they just made it more current to the times. The one change, as I mentioned earlier, is that they brought men into the show. Then toward the end, they brought a full-sized woman into the show, because in the past, all the models had been your size. Almost your height, your size. But then they brought a full-figured woman into the show and said, “Well, we’ve got to have somebody in there that’s going to be like the people in the audience.” [laughs]

MA: Yeah, absolutely.

VD: That, I thought, was a very good thing. When they brought that full-sized figure into the show, people loved that because now they can see themselves in the fashions. Because a lot of people that see those fashions say, “Yeah, that’s beautiful, but I’m not getting into that.” But she was so good with the full-figured models. She looked just as fabulous as the other models. So people can see themselves, that fashion was not a size. That was a good thing. Those were the biggest changes I saw. They added the full-figured woman, and they updated. They used things like maybe cell phones in the script, in the writing of the dialog that the emcee would use.

[pause in the recording]

MA: So you were talking about how the fashion fair had changed, or not changed as much, during this time.

15

VD: Yes.

MA: So how do you think the audience changed?

VD: Well, the audience pretty much stayed the same as well. It was pretty much a consistent demographic. Almost all black people came to the show. Some women who were married to whites brought their husbands, and vice versa men who were married to whites might bring their wives.

Way back in the day, when we first started, we had a lot of stores come. Dayton’s and all those stores would send their designers so that they could get tips. In fact, way back in the day when we were doing it with the United Negro College Fund, the stores would have competitions when the Ebony Fashion Fair would come to town. Dayton’s and other stores, we’d have them enter into a competition to dress up a window to welcome the Ebony Fashion Fair to town. Of course their buyers would buy tables so they could come and see the fashion fair. Then they’d go back to their jobs and shop for stuff like that. So it was really a big thing. Once we got away from the United Negro College Fund-sponsored fashion fair and we started with Limited 30, we didn’t have the dimension of the competition of the stores. But that was a big part of it in the past. It was a lot of fun. Whatever the theme that Ebony would come up with for their show—let’s see, does this [fashion fair program] have the theme listed? It doesn’t say. But whatever the theme was would be the theme that we’d give the stores. They would try to do a window to represent that theme, and then we would select a winner. Whichever store won would get to come in and bring a table full of people, free.

So that was really pretty much the biggest thing that changed over time. We didn’t have the competition between the local stores, and we added the component of giving scholarships and added, towards the end, the Mother of the Year.

MA: Nice.

VD: Yes.

MA: So you talked a lot about how the community has changed over time, and a lot of the ways that schools have changed over time, some of the involvement you’ve had that’s changed over time. What would you say, through all the different community things you’ve done and all the ways you’ve given back, was really the highlight? If you had to pick one thing that was really the highlight of your time here in Saint Paul, what would be your highlight?

VD: Well, I think the tutoring program was really it for me, because the largest number of kids we had enrolled was like 250 kids.

[pause in the recording]

MA: So we were just talking about sort of the thing that’s had the biggest impact, and you were saying your tutoring program.

16

VD: Well, that program just had the biggest impact in my life here because I can’t even tell you what it means to take a child…

[Mrs. Davis’s husband, Nathaniel Khaliq, enters the room.]

VD: Hi.

Nathaniel Khaliq: Hello.

VD: This is my husband, Nathaniel Khaliq.

MA: Hi. I’ve met him before. Good to see you.

NK: Oh yes. Good to see you.

VD: You may have met her before.

MA: I have.

NK: You were at Rondo, helping with Rondo.

VD: In Rondo, yes.

NK: Okay, good to see you again.

MA: Good to see you, too.

NK: All right.

VD: So it’s just been amazing to see how many lives have changed. You know, just my grandson who said, “Grandma, thank you for teaching me to read.” He’d read books, and I had his bus drop him off down at the apartment complex every day after school, and I’d work with him on reading. I’d go up there with the twenty-seven people I’d recruited to volunteer.

NK: You have to excuse our house.

MA: Oh, that’s okay.

VD: I explained to her we had just come back from the cabin yesterday.

NK: Oh, good.

MA: [chuckles] No problem.

17

VD: Yes. It’s just so many people who learned to read. Parents would come, and they said, “My child can’t read.” I said, “Well, you bring them to us. We’ll teach them to read.” Our concept was that if the child couldn’t manage with the tutoring that we had, then we’d go to the home and visit and have a talk with them and find out what it took to get through to them. Our goal was to make sure that the child learned to read, that they learned to be successful and have success in school, and learned that there’s a way to learn. You know, it’s not whether you get it. You just need to know the way to learn.

MA: Exactly, exactly.

VD: That’s what we were teaching—what’s the way to learn? That’s been the biggest thing that I can say has impacted my life here, is how many dozens of children have learned to learn, learned how to learn. I can’t tell you how many that we’ve tutored who have gone on to college and who sent their children to us. I just know that we let our oars down here in Saint Paul, and we lifted a bunch of people up.

MA: Yes, yes, absolutely.

VD: As we lift a neighborhood up, then they can lift their children up. The Ford Foundation said that the greatest thing you can do is to teach a mother and to educate a mother, because then she can educate all of her children. We have educated a lot of girls, and now the foundation that we started seeks to lift up girls. So we’ll be doing a number of things in the years coming to really work with young girls because we believe that that’s how you lift a family up. You lift the mother up, who then can nurture the children.

MA: Yes.

VD: It’s not that fathers can’t. But mothers are the nurturers. Not only do they nurture at home, but then they can go to the school and work in the PTAs and volunteer to tutor reading or volunteer to go on field trips. We just encourage people to do those kinds of things.

I know when my husband went to school here in Saint Paul, he was saying they had pretty much given up on the black kids. He might go to one class at Mechanic Arts High School and he’d be there one hour, and two or three hours later he’d be in the same class asleep, and they didn’t even bother to wake him up. But he’s learned. He’s learned since school, but it limited what he could do. When I met him, he was in his thirties, approaching forty, and he had a construction company. He later went on and joined the fire department, and then we started buying property. But if he had had the opportunities earlier, he could have done things earlier than he did. But God has his time, we have our time. God’s time worked out just fine for us.

MA: Absolutely.

VD: It worked out just fine for us.

MA: Absolutely.

18

VD: Yes. So I would say that just being able to create an opportunity for children to learn to read has been the greatest thing that I have had happen to me here.

MA: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time.

VD: Yes!

MA: I really appreciate it. You’ve had some great stories to tell. I feel like I learned a lot just getting to hear all the things from you today.

VD: Well, wonderful.

MA: Yes, thank you so much.

VD: Good, good, good. I just think if in a community people would say, “I may not have much, but what I have I’m bringing it to the table,” we can just get so far.

MA: Absolutely.

VD: I know when we bought that apartment complex down there, there was a whole different spirit there. During the years we were there, we just transformed that spirit. I know the first three years, we had to resod the yards because people were so used to just walking on the grass that we couldn’t keep grass and we’d have to resod. Then I came up with this idea where I would keep treats in my office, and so any time the kids came home from school, they could come to the office and get chips or little juice pouches or gum or something like that. That’s what I would use to get them to pick up. I said, “Well, would you take this bag and pick up in this area, pick up in that area?” So they started picking up. Once they took a chance on that service, then they didn’t want to see other people come right around and just throw stuff down. They said, “I just picked up there. Don’t throw that there.”

MA: Exactly, exactly.

VD: So they began to internalize the spirit of a clean environment. When you go down by that complex now, the yard looks so good. The grass looks so green. About twenty years ago, I planted flowers there. I planted them myself all along the buildings, and they still are growing. Because when you humanize an area, then people feel a little more inclined to think of it as home. So that was the concept that I had.

When we came down here, there were a lot of drugs. There was a lot of prostitution going on down there. We got rid of all that. There was gang activity down there. We got rid of all that. When we bought that place from HUD, they had two armed guards there, working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. After we bought the place, in a couple of years we got rid of those, and we never had to make any more. That was a big expense, to have guards twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That’s a big bite out of your budget, and people have to pay a big price for that in their rent.

19

So the tutoring program and then being able to provide that decent housing for people. The people really started to feel like it was a family down there. They really did. I am kind of sad that we have gone, because they don’t have that sense anymore. But those are two things that we were able to do. We took that apartment complex and turned it into a family atmosphere down there. A lot of the kids who were there came to the tutoring program. We had them in the summer programs. Often we took them to our cabin. We’ve had as many as eleven kids up at our cabin, and we’d take them for the weekend. So our investment in children from the neighborhood has just been really big.

MA: Nice, nice. Well, thank you.

VD: Yes. Thank you!

20