OH+QandA

Q1: __What do you remember about the Memorial Day parade as a kid? What did you think when you saw Civil War veterans?__

"Well the Memorial Day parades that stand out in my memory started when I was in High school, that woulda been in 1946. It was right after the Second World War, I was in the school band, and of course we had a big Memorial Day parade. They usuall had a lot of the WWII veterans because they had just come back from the war, there would be a good number of the WWI veterans, they usually had... I remember one Civil War veteran for sure, and he was in a truck. The Second World War just having been over, we had a lot of respect for all the veterans for we had lived through the second World War, I had been a child. And you naturally respected and honored all of the things they had done for our country and our freedom."

Q2: __Give some backround on your teaching experiences. When did you become a teacher and how long did you teach?__

"Probably I started teaching in the early 50's and taught off and on up until 1994. Now there were times I didn't teach because you couldn't teach if you had a young family. So when you had a young family, you would stop teaching until your children were in school. If I put it all together I probably taught around 40 years. I always taught in the primary grade, kindergarden through 3rd."

__Q3: When you heard about struggles in court between black citizens and the school system of the south, what were your thoughts and opinions about these cases?__ "I first heard about them probably through the newspapers, and sometimes magazines, you would read things in the magazines about it. Personally I didn't think it was right, that children would be stopped from going to school because they were of one color or another. I know a lot of the people at the time say, well they have separate schools[and when we were first married and we moved to the state of virginia] there still was some of that in 1953 or so. But they were beginning to talk integration and some integrating of the schools. I hadn't had much experience with segregation before we moved to Virginia, and I didn't think it was right, everybody has a right not only to an education but to a //good// education. They had separate education, but they weren't the same in many cases, and they should be the same."

__Q4: When did you first hear about the laws that Congress was making about school segregation? From a teacher's perspective, what did you think about school integration?__ "I would of first heard about those laws when I was an at home mother, and I woulda heard about it through the media which was newspapers, magazines basically. I was not teaching at that time, but when I did teach, I did not personally experience the integration problem because I didn't live in an area where there was a problem with segregation. Schools were either integrated or segragated by geography, by where you lived and not so much by laws that were being passed. So I didn't experience that at that time."

__Q5: In 1957, when nine students in Little Rock, Arkansas integrated the public school there, what was the media coverage like for events like that?__ "I's see it on TV, you would see footage of what happened on TV. Then again, you would read about it in the newspaper, or even LIFE magazine you would have a lot of on the scene pictures, and thats actually where I got most of the news, reading magazines to see the visual part of it. You'd hear it on the radio too, but if you wanted to see the pictures, you would need to read it in a magazine or watch it on TV."

Q6: __Did you have any experiences as a teacher that were part of the Civil Rights Movement?__ I do remember one thing that happened, i think it was in the 60's or so. My husband was the Activities Director of one of Wisconsin State Universities, and when the students would take trips, like spring trips and such. Nowadays they would just go, but back then, chaperones would go along. My husband and I were chaperones for a group of university students travelling down to New Orleans for a spring trip. We were travelling in a caravan of station wagons and the drivers would communicate with eachother with either CB's or walkie talkies, thats how they would let eachother know where to stop for lunch or where to set up camp[it was a camping trip, camping along the way] and as we were travelling through Memphis, we noticed that as we talked to eachother, we could hear the police talking to eachother. They could hear the police say that a group of northern college students are passing through. And at that time, a lot of northern college students would travel down south to register black voters or help with charity or just to vacation. Anyway, the police were discussing where we were going and we could hear them say watch out where these students camp out and stuff. This was right around the time when MLK was killed so the police were very cautious about northern college students.