Interview with GS, History 150 Spring 2021, Conducted by Jake Bowling, March 14th, 2021

Introduction to Interview: 

This interview was conducted by me with my grandmother on my mom’s side. She talks about growing up in Buffalo in the 1950s and 60s, and moving to Alabama in the late 1960s. Growing up in a relatively poor, white family, and moving to the heart of the south in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement was monumental in her life, especially because she never left the state after originally moving there. When they moved to Alabama, both JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated. Riots frequented the streets of Birmingham, and she moved in right as the wave was finally dying down, but white flight quickly emerged. Schools were forced to integrate, and white people quickly erected their own schools to keep their kids away from the newly ushered in blacks. My grandmother raised three kids in the south and her experiences are one of a kind.

Biography: SW was born and raised outside of Buffalo, NY by a relatively poor, white family. She attended Miami University of Oxford, Ohio where she met her husband from an even poorer family. Her husband went to medical school and began work in Birgmingham, Alabama, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement. The two moved there in 1969, just after JFK and MLK were assassinated. The two moved around a bit and had three children and eventually settled in Huntsville, where they have been ever since. 

Transcript: 

JB: Okay, cool. So, uh, Grandma, How’re you doing today? 

GS: I’m doing well. Thank you. 

JB: Um, so here, I’ll just jump right into it. So, um, I know you grew up kind of near Buffalo, in New York right in that area? 

GS: Correct. 20 miles east and East Aurora.

JB: Can you just kind of give me a brief description of what that was like, growing up, out there at East Aurora?

GS: Yeah, we were in a town of about 20,000 maybe, there was only one high school, one grade school, one Junior High High School. My graduating class was 200. So we had three tracks. We had college and general and then where you learn to trade. And so everybody knew everybody in town. That was just a nice small town. The weather was significant in that it would snow in November, and we wouldn’t see the green grass until May. And so our high school had a ski team, as well as an indoor pool. All the schools had indoor pools at the time. And so we walked to school every day, my brother and I walked to school every day. So it was just a very pleasant, ery, very good experience growing up there. 

JB: Awesome. And then so  your dad was, what did he do again? He uh, you guys were very like middle class working family right?

GS: Yeah, he worked for a  steel company. He was we had started he started out and I grew up until I was 14 in Pittsburgh. And he worked for a small family owned steel company then it was transferred to Buffalo. So yes, with what I grew up in a blue collar family, right. 

JB: And so do you remember anything specific about like in Pittsburgh? That’s like, you know, like the height? I think the rust belt, right. And there’s anything specifically about your time there?

GS:  Oh, yeah. No, I was 14 when I moved away? Absolutely.

Again,  Pittsburgh and Buffalo both for very industrial union cities. Steel was king in both those cities. Pittsburgh was very racially diverse, or ethnically diverse, I guess is the right way to put it because of all the Irish and Polish immigrants that came over to work in the steel mills. So it’s all about steel. And so then we moved to East Aurora. That was a much smaller town. 20 miles east of Buffalo. So it was a little bit of a different experience than growing up in the city of Pittsburgh.

JB:  Oh, yeah. I’m sure. And then you know, I know you. You went to Miami [Univeristy] of Ohio. Right? 

GS: Correct. 

JB: And you met your future husband there. And then then Cincinnati, correct? Maybe immediately after, but that’s where he did his…or no, he’s from Cincinnati, isn’t he? 

GS: He graduated from high school from Cincinnati. We married in 1968. In June, just as we graduated from college and spent the summer in Cincinnati. That’s what you’re thinking about, right? Because he had been working for Proctor and Gamble on toothpaste research for several summers, and I was able to get a job at the VA hospital. I graduated with dietetics. So I was lucky to be able to get that job. So we had three months in Cincinnati, and then we moved to Birmingham, Alabama in September of 1968. Labor Day weekend, as a matter of fact.

JB: Yeah. Nice. So and then, what was going on, did you remember? Obviously, you grew up, you know, kind of in the north, right, Pittsburgh Buffalo, right. So what were your initial thoughts when you moved when you learned that you were moving down basically into the deep south, especially at a time like that, where like the civil rights movement was like, at its height, and there was so much like civil unrest down there what we were like?

GS: Yeah. Well, I felt like I was I was ready to take it on. I felt like I was moving into the belly of the beast. Now your great grandfather, my father was not happy about it. When when your grandfather told my father, asked my father’s permission to marry, actually, he didn’t ask permission, just said we would like to get married. I remember my father said, Well, you know, we think you’re a great guy. But do you really have to go to medical school in Alabama? Couldn’t you go somewhere like Virginia? somewhere? Yeah. That’s not the deep south. And so that was just fear. And then I expected a change, but not as much as I saw when I got down there. So it was it was a culture shock for sure. 

JB: Oh, I’m sure yeah. And then you guys were in what part of Birmingham did you live in? 

GS: Oh, downtown, right. 15th Avenue South. It was maybe half a mile? No. 15th Avenue. South Birmingham, the streets were first to 15th. So we were 15 blocks from First Avenue, which was the center of Birmingham. Okay, and it’s that Sixth Avenue was the medical center. So we live close enough to be able to walk that’s why we lived there. 

JB: Okay, and you and you said you moved there in 1968. So is this before after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed? 

GS: The same summer. It was like, he was killed in April of 1968. And we moved there in September of 1968. And you remember, I don’t know if you remember, Robert Kennedy was killed in June 1968, the democratic national convention that was so famous, you know, the Chicago seven, that sort of stuff was in August of 1968. So it was in the middle of racial unrest, to say the least. 

JB: Right, so what do you remember? Like, What was like the overall feeling in Birmingham there? Was there like a lot of tension? 

GS: Yes, yes. There was a lot of tension. Yeah.

You got it? Well, you can remember or just to review, Bull Connor, the chief of police had set German shepherds and the fire hoses on demonstrators in 1963. And then 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed. And that was the first year that any of the schools were integrated in anywhere Alabama. [This story is told in No Easy Walk of the PBS Eyes on the Prize documentary]And then 1965 was the Edmund Pettus Bridge where John Lewis was almost killed. Yeah, if you call that that was 1965. And then 1968, Martin Luther King was killed. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. That summer was a summer when all the cities burned. And including Cincinnati, I mean, all over the country. There were riots, racial riots. So we moved to Birmingham in September of that year. 

JB: So yes, there was a lot of tension, right? And do you remember like, were there any specific like restaurants or places you would go that were just very clearly segregated?

GS: We did not go to restaurants because we couldn’t afford it. But what I do remember, was the cafeteria, at the hospital there at the Medical Center.

It was supposed to be integrated, of course, but no one had moved. I still very vividly remember this. When we went in first time I went in there, all the white people were sitting in one area of the cafeteria, and all the black people were sitting in the other area. And it was where they had been. During the Jim Crow years, no one had moved. They just hadn’t. Yeah, no one had moved. It wasn’t that they, I mean, it was legal for them to sit together. But no one had moved until what finally changed. It was the school and the hospital remodeled. And they were not remodeling for that reason, they remodeled the kitchen, because it had to be remodeled to come up to health code, requirements. And after it was remodeled, then people began to sit together. But that really hit me as a significant change from what I had witnessed, you know, in Pittsburgh and Buffalo.

JB: And that’s in the hospital, to see that scene that’s supposed to be the all like the great equalizer, right? Like everybody needs to go.

GS: Yeah. So that was that was a change. The other thing I noticed when we moved, there was the housing patterns. Patterns hadn’t changed yet. For the most part, the white families lived in close proximity to black families, because the kids didn’t go to school together. So the housing patterns were more integrated than then it became later with white flight.

That was interesting.

So those two things I remember pretty vividly for when I first moved there, now I went. The second year, we were there, I was able to work at the county health department from that for four years. And the county health department, that’s where you really did see integration. Nobody paid any attention to race, you know, everybody, everybody was beautifully in the county health department. We had an excellent County Health Department.

JB:  Right. And then, you know, you had your first kid, my mom was born in 1973. So I know, you know, by the time she was like going to school, it was, you know, least a little bit of time removed. But do you remember thinking to yourself, like when she was first born, first started having kids like, am I gonna have to deal with, you know, like the schools are integrating and  we might have to deal with what school are we going to send them to? Because some schools are staying very wide, while others are integrating? And like was that a big thought process you had?

GS: Yes, it was. We at that point moved out to Hoover, Alabama, which was not in the Birmingham public school system. And there was white flight at that point, white flight probably started probably in 1968-1969 because the Birmingham school system was within this Birmingham City Limits and then there began to be home what had its own school system suburbs had their own school systems and still do to this day. And we moved, when I was expecting your mother, because we had to get a bigger house and so we could afford it. And so I don’t remember thinking too much about it at that time, because it’s six years away. You know,

All right, so we were looking for a larger home that we could afford. And one that was within driving relatively decent commute to the hospital for your grandfather.

JB: Right? That makes sense. Um, and then yeah, and then I, you know, as we wrap up here, like so, obviously, you’ve lived in Alabama, basically ever since then.

GS: Except for two years in Kentucky. That’s correct.

JB:  Kentucky. Right. Right. Right. Um, and my mom was born in Kentucky right?

GS:  No, your uncle Rob was born in Kentucky, your brother. Your mother and your aunt Wendy were born in Alabama, in Birmingham. 

JB: Okay. And would you send it but what would you say? You know, what can you say about just the change you’ve seen? Like, you got down to Alabama, you know, kind of near the end, but in the middle of the civil rights movement, and now you know, we’re in 2021. Like, so much has changed, especially down there like, what, what, what can you say is the most profound thing that you have seen as you’ve been there for the last couple of decades?

GS: Oh, I have to think about that a minute. One profound change that comes to mind right away is Alabama football. We moved down there, it was segregated. It was all white. And we were there in 1970, when Bear Bryant invited the University of Southern California to come play at Legion field. And it was the first time that an integrated team, if you can believe that, football team had played right in the state of Alabama. So that certainly has that, you know, in some ways, I think sports has been a great equalizer. It has been a force, a force for racial equality, if that makes sense. So I’ve seen that that’s been a huge change. politics has not changed as much as I would like at all. And the 1960s and 70s. All of the politics. All of the political people that were elected were all Democrats, and that that was a big change. They were all what we used to call so Southern Democrats. Yeah. And so for instance, story when we first moved there, George Wallace and his wife was governor because he had made her run because he couldn’t run a second time. And then she died in office. And the Lieutenant Governor took over and he had a good chance of beating George Wallace. But he, but he barely did not meet him. So all of that was Southern Democrats, then we saw them all change to Republicans, sort of during the Reagan era. So that’s a big difference in terms of party affiliation. Yeah, but not in terms of political philosophy. They just changed the name, basic rate. Swiitch. So I am sorry to say that I don’t see a lot of difference. I see a lot of difference in the reality on the ground. Yeah, the schools are integrated. I mean, you don’t hear any problems in restaurant. I mean, none of that is a problem. Pports are not a problem. The schools are not, the schools are a problem there. I shouldn’t say that. There is certainly a lot of uproar now. And then within the school system, but they’re all integrated. Yes, sir. But they’re still like divide. Yeah, yeah. Right. Politics, though, I would say has not changed. 

JB: Yeah. It makes sense. All right. Well, thanks a lot. Thanks for just being open about that. And yeah, I hope you guys hope we can come see you soon. You guys have gotten vaccinated, right? 

GS: Yes, we have. We’re all we’re like Coming Out Day was last Thursday where I could go go places. So that’s a good thing. 

JB: Yeah. I’m excited about that. So thanks.

Bibliography: 

McWhorter, Diane. “Carry Me Home.” 

Madeleine Gregg, Gaea Leinhardt. “Learning From the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute: Documenting Teacher Development – Madeleine Gregg, Gaea Leinhardt, 2002.” SAGE Journals, 1 Mar. 1997, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/00028312039002553.