Okay, when you're ready.
So we are here today talking with
Norma June Wilson Davis of the Atlanta student movement.
And we are talking today to collect her stories and
her experiences for the Democracy
Doesn't Run on cruise control oral history project.
Okay, hold on 1 second. They're getting out.
Next second, I love
the name of that. Say that again.
I can't take credit for it. I love it.
Log that someone else came up with.
I'm going to put it on T shirts for
every It's Democracy does not run on cruise,
does not run on Cruse.
They're all wrapping up and don't
have any more disturbances.
Okay. You got to start over or are we good?
No, we're good. Okay. Okay.
So we'll just start off asking to
starting at the beginning when
you were born and where you were born.
Okay. First of all, let's say just call me June.
It's much less formal.
When I met my husband in 1961,
he thought Norma was much too formal for me.
So he started calling me June,
and I'm named after both grandmothers.
One is Norma and the other one was June.
So I've been June Davis ever since then.
I was born in 1940 in Jacksonville,
Florida and it was an interesting time.
I don't remember a great deal of oppression,
a lot of segregation.
My mother and other family members tell stories of taking
me to downtown Jacksonville and I
refusing to drink at
the water fountains that they told me,
the ones I was supposed to drink at.
And I also refused to sit in the back of the bus.
Did not understand why I had
to pass open seats and sit in the back.
Let's just say I probably was a rebel,
or anti segregation, or
anti evilness or whatever you want to call
it from a very young age.
Where did you go to college? You came to Atlanta.
I came to Atlanta to school school.
I went to Spelman College, my godmother,
chair of the French department here,
and she encouraged me to come to Spelman.
My mother had gone to a girl school as well,
but it was in Greensboro, North Carolina.
I thought Atlanta would be much more exciting.
I didn't have any idea how
much excitement I was going to get myself into,
but it was good.
And you were at Spelman and
I was a spellman from 57 till 61.
We got started in February of 1960.
This was after Jesse Jackson and the Greensboro group,
Loni King and Julian Bond had
already been talking about what,
what we could do in Atlanta.
I wasn't privy to those conversations.
I did not know about that.
But what I knew first was that
the presidents of the Atlanta university system called
in the student body leaders at the HBCUs in Atlanta.
And I was a part of that group and that got us started.
We talked about Greensboro, of course.
The first thing we did was talk
about Greensboro, what had happened there.
We decided as a group that what we wanted
to do was to say,
why are we going
to do anything if we're going to do something?
Let's say why. Let's don't just
act without letting everybody know
ahead of time what it is we are
upset about and why we're doing what we're doing.
That's how we got started.
In a way, the presidents of the AU system
really organized the student
movement in Atlanta, Georgia.
They were supportive of, for the most part, I think.
So How did you first hear then
about the Atlanta student movement?
That was it. That was it. That was it.
There was no Atlanta student movement.
I was in the I was there.
We didn't even know what to call ourselves.
Back in those days, we hadn't even on that name.
I don't really remember. You might want to talk to
Lina King about that. I'm sure he remembers.
I don't know how we decided on a name.
It just evolved as far as I can remember,
I got it all involved in the what's and whys.
Then once we decided we were
going to do then it was how are we going to do it?
That maintained my focus
for the time until I graduated in May of 61.
It was how as one of the student leaders of the movement,
what were some of the roles that he played?
Well, we all played whatever role was
necessary at the time to be played.
There weren't very many of us.
Some of us stuck with it the whole time.
I don't think all of us did.
And we realized pretty quickly that if we were going to
do the activities that we had in mind to do,
such as picketing and anything else we wanted to do,
we were going to need volunteers.
We were recruiters. We were
trainers because you couldn't just bring students
in and ask them to
participate in what we had decided
was going to be a nonviolent movement.
That's a state of mind that requires
some training and thinking and talking about.
We had lots of meetings,
lots of training sessions.
I served as a trainer as well.
We all did. We all did what we had to do to
get it done when our activities were planned.
And there were different kinds of activities over
the time frame from 60 to May of 61,
and we needed differing numbers of people to be involved.
There never was any one set group
of people that was always there.
If there was that group that
was always there, it was a small group.
And when we decided we were going to pick it or
integrate the restaurant at Riches,
we had to go out and recruit again.
We were constantly recruiting
people to come and participate with us.
So were you at Riches in October of 1961?
Yeah, I helped plan. What happened at Riches in 1961?
I sort of served as the chair of
the action committee during all this time period.
And yeah, I was there.
Can you tell me just a little,
maybe a little bit about what was the sit in at
riches similar to other
sit in that you had planned? How is it different?
This was totally different. This was
a much larger sit in well,
in a way, I guess our very first ones
were probably bigger in numbers.
When that was when we did state and municipal.
I think we did municipal but we did
state buildings because we were part of the public.
And our rationale was that
the lunch rooms in those buildings belong
to us as much as they belonged to anyone
else. That's where we started.
We started off with what we thought was our home base,
that we had rights, where we had rights.
But Rich was a pivotal time for us.
In a lot of ways. It was different.
It was more complicated.
We wanted Martin to participate.
We had not asked him to participate
before in any of our activities.
In fact, we had told him at different times.
It's all I know. Well, it's all.
It's an interesting thing.
Let me just turn it completely off.
Let me just turn the whole thing off.
I have to tell you, I'm in
awe that you're just calling Martin.
I know. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Cut.
I'm sorry. Azores.
What I love about it, that's what I called him then.
We of course. Of course.
And I think what you talked about earlier too,
that's so important, is that it was
a student driven. It was a student driven.
It was a student driven.
And that you all invited him
to come and we invited him part of it.
But you didn't want him to lead it
because that's were leading it.
That's right. We were leading it.
There were probably more than one reason for that,
But one of the reasons for me personally,
was that I felt that
the students had the least amount to lose.
We did not have jobs and families,
and no one was economically dependent upon us.
And therefore, we could go out
and do things that our parents,
adults couldn't do because they may lose their jobs.
We kept ourselves in that way.
In my mind, for me, away from the adult community now,
it's not that we did not seek
advice because we did seek advice.
We just kept that advice.
Um, I won't say at a minimum,
but it was advice.
It was not leadership, it was advice.
So we would talk go back to Ritchie's.
We had to talk him into doing
this because he hadn't been active with us before.
Lonnie King and Herschel Sullivan
who are our Co chairs at that time got
the dubious honor of trying to
convince Martin to come and participate with us.
I don't know who asked the question,
but whoever did got the answer that we wanted.
And so he came Rich a symbol,
it was a symbol in the
white community and it was a symbol
in the black community and
it was a symbol in the Southeast.
And if we could make our point at Rich's,
then we felt that
was going to be very critical for our success.
Later on, we worked really hard to get that done.
We got a little, we got
some different results out of it than we had thought.
We became more influential than we had could have
possibly imagine with the fact of having king with us.
And that was the first time,
and I don't think I realized that then,
that was the first time he'd ever been arrested.
The first time that Martin Luther had been Right.
Arrested. Right? Is that Richard? Yes, it is.
Right. So that was, that was huge.
I hadn't thought about the impact of that at
the time with him being there.
Then he also became a target.
And he became the target when people were arrested.
Those people who were around him
were arrested and sent to one place.
And the rest of us were sent to another place.
Some of us went to the city jail
and some went to county jail.
Did they separate out the women and men?
No, it was not by gender.
It was really by who was around King.
And they wanted to make a focus a focal point of him.
And he became a focal point in
a in a negative kind of way
because they were I said they wanted to target him.
So I think he was arrested first.
And in the Can you hold on a second?
Sure. Mine got arrested at first in Montgomery.
Well, you know, I want to tell you that's what I thought.
Yeah. But when you read the history books, they're wrong.
That's what they tell you. He was
arrested in Montgomery. Okay.
But this is the first time he voluntarily
went to jail when? Was in Atlanta.
So that makes sense. I mean,
that makes sense to me if that's right.
Yeah. Okay. So he showed up at
the sit in that morning
knowing he was going to go? Oh, yeah.
Well oh, yeah, he knew. I mean, yeah,
yeah, he knew if he was going to be there,
they were going to arrest him.
I mean, we didn't we didn't
do sit ins not to be arrested.
Right. We expected to be arrested.
So, they they transferred him from
the county jail to the state prison.
Here was a little Reidsville.
Yes. They took him in the back of a car, I think,
if I remember correctly,
with a dog sitting next to him in chains.
And that was, I'm sure,
pretty frightening for him.
And it scared all of us when we when we heard about it.
And they wanted to make an example out of him,
but they went back and found
an old parking ticket or something like
that that he had and some traffic violation,
I mean, some very minor thing.
And the governor wanted to make a,
as I said, an example in an ugly way.
So at the riches sit in,
did the students have the opportunity
to bail out or were you guys,
were you all still in
jail when all this was happening with,
with Martin Luther King?
Okay. Our students always had a chance to ask for bail.
Okay? We always had money to bail students out.
So whenever students went to jail,
if they were uncomfortable,
for whatever reason, they
could always ask to be bailed out.
Some of us never got arrested at riches.
I did not get arrested at riches.
So everybody was not arrested, as I said.
They arrested those students who were physically
the closest to Martin in the restaurant.
We were in two different places there.
We were in the Magnolia Room on
the bridge that already
made a separation for us right there.
But all of us all of us did not go to jail.
In fact, I was reminding Loni today that
22 days after that
since I was chair of the committee and King was in jail,
I said we got to have another activity.
We got to go out and do something immediately.
We did we planned a brand
a brand new set of sit ins that nobody was
expecting to happen because
we were supposedly going to be
licking our wounds because
some people were still in jail.
Students were still in jail,
and I don't remember how long
that group of students stayed in jail,
and Martin was still at Reidsville.
They were very surprised that
two days later we were back on
the street in full force in
numbers and ready to go again with
an entirely different thing we were doing well,
I think we did dime stores.
I think we did like Woolworth
in places like that at that point.
But we hit several places at one time,
we clocked it and we all
hit at the same time in four or five different places.
Were they all in the five points Downtown? Yes.
Yes. Yes, they were all in the downtown area.
We go back to Martin a little bit and I'm sure you know,
because I'm sure you've talked to Loni about this,
that when they put him in jail then
everybody got frantic and
how are we going to get him out of jail?
Martin shouldn't shouldn't have been there.
We were afraid for his safety to be there.
Certain people then called Bobby Kennedy.
He was campaign manager for John F. Kennedy at the time.
This is 1960. This is October.
We're getting ready to vote in November through a lot of
Maneuverings the Kennedy family
got involved in and getting king out.
Just before, I think it
may have been the Sunday before that Tuesday,
they published what they call
the Blue Book and they gave it out to churches.
I don't know if any of the Atlanta
churches got them or not.
Detroit, Chicago, places like that. I think Philadelphia.
And put them in the black churches to have black support.
Kennedy's presidency during that period of time,
blacks in the South were Republicans,
they were not Democrats.
In fact, Martin's father himself had made a comment to
the fact that he would not vote for a Democrat.
And I think he said something about not a Catholic too,
that was a big deal for us.
If he got king out of jail,
then they decided to use that as leverage
in order to promote Kennedy's presidency.
Historically, they give some,
a lot of credit to them doing that and those blue books
for the margin of error because it was a small margin
of error by which he won, particularly in Chicago.
All of that happened.
Virgin Story, all of that happened
because we asked Martin to join us down at Richie's.
We played a much bigger role that we
had ever anticipated playing.
I'm not sure we realized it at the time.
I think most of us I know I was so busy
trying to go to school and
going to jail as often as I did.
I didn't have time to think about that.
The only newspapers, I didn't even read the newspapers.
I had a friend of mine at Spelman collect
all the news articles on the sit ins for me,
and she would just put them in my room.
I wasn't there very often.
I not on campus most of the time.
Wow, So would you say
that riches was your most memorable?
No. What was your most memorable?
I mean, the thing that, either good or bad,
the thing that hit you the most from,
from, from being a leader in the movement.
You mean by experiences?
Well, there were, there were three.
And if I had to pick one, it would be hard.
But I'll tell you about all
three of them would be wonderful.
Okay. The first one would,
would be that two days
after the riches and we planned this activity.
Well, I guess it was. No, it was one day after
because I took a group with me on a sit in.
There was a young man in the group,
in my group who was white.
I do not know who he is,
where he came from or whatever.
But he volunteered to go.
And let's say there were 20 of us,
something in that number and we get to jail.
Now, there were other groups that happened,
but this is just my particular group,
I should tell you this.
We organized our activities
so that there was a spokesperson for every group.
No one had to try to remember what had been said,
except that one person,
if anybody was going to lie,
that one person was going to be the one to
lie or to tell the truth or whatever.
And everybody else just had to follow along and give you
a name and your serial number
so to speak, and that was it.
In fact, I told the girls to
Spelman don't even give your home address.
Most of them gave the address at Spelman.
No need for your parents to get
involved before they have to get involved as far
as people trying to take their jobs
away from them or harass them in
some way in the communities in which you live. Okay.
We'll go back to this. I get this group and be in court.
Our lawyers are there. We always had lawyers who came.
And the lawyer was there. And I'm
standing there in front of the Judge.
And the Judge tried to get,
and I'm talking because I'm
the Spokesperson for the group.
And he's trying to get this young white man to disavow
himself of being involved with us, and he wouldn't do it.
And so the Judge looked at me and he said, Miss Wilson,
if I see you again after this fiasco today,
I'm going to throw you a jail And I said, yes, sir.
Well, he saw me again the next day and that
was the two days afterwards
where we planned these other activities.
So, he said, Miss Wilson,
what did I tell you yesterday I didn't say anything.
He repeated what he said.
He said, so because of
Miss Wilson's yesterday activities,
all of you are going to the work camp now?
We had never been in a work camp before.
We had always been in county city jail.
Mostly city jails.
We didn't even know what that was.
I don't know what that is. Can you explain that to me?
Well, I have no idea what that is.
It was physically set up as a farm,
and the men worked out in the fields all day,
and it was sort of like a chain gang situation.
And the women worked both in the fields and
in the kitchen where it was a self sustaining farm.
I have no idea physically,
it was around the Metro area.
Well, the metro, I don't think it
took us more than an hour to get there.
We were all just sort of in a state of panic about this.
And I'm the lead of the group and I've got let's say
six or seven females with me and maybe almost 20 males.
D. King was one of
the Martin's brother was
one of the ones that was with us.
We got to this farm,
we found out that we could not see lawyers.
We could not see ministers,
nor could we see family members.
We were sentenced to 15 days.
The farm is not a place for hardened criminals.
It was a place for petty thieves,
prostitutes, alcohol, small drugs.
They weren't giving big sentences
for marijuana back in those days.
People never stayed more than about 30 days in farm.
So it wasn't like it was hardened
criminals which I ran into later on.
But anyway, we got there we
go walked in the place and they separated us by gender,
Took the young men off some place.
I didn't know where we walked in.
And when you walked in the front door,
wide hallway, you made a left. And there was a kitchen.
And you walked through the kitchen
and there was an eating area.
Then behind that were the black women's quarters.
When the women came in,
there was a group of white women there peeling potatoes.
And they just, potato peels just fell on the floor.
When we walked through, we had to walk through
these potato pels to get to the room in the back.
A dormitory room, a big room with bunk beds.
I walked in and I knew we were in trouble.
There were fly strings hanging from the wall,
and this is in the fall, it's chilly,
did not feel like there was much heat,
it did not look very clean.
And I said to myself,
What am I going to do about this and how
am I going to take care of these girls?
There were no bars on the windows or the door.
It was just a regular door that opened.
So I looked around and I decided
that the best thing for me to
do was to put us all in top bunks.
The bunk beds were close
enough together that if you were on the top
but you really could walk if you took
a wide step to the next one.
That's how crowded it was. Yes.
Get some water to get.
Okay. I'm sorry. No, no.
You're going to drink. Can.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Okay.
He's probably allergic to something hot.
Oh, really? I got somebody.
Well, he's gonna miss my good story
because he's gonna like this one.
He's gonna like this story and he
hadn't heard it
out.
Okay, we want to go back and let's
go back and I'll start off with the bunk beds.
And I got us all in bunk beds in a row.
And what I wanted to ask one quick question.
So all this has happened to you in
your early '20s maybe? No, no, no.
I was 19, 1919.
And your first thought and being in
this incredibly obscene foreign play,
right, was to take care of the people who were with me.
I was in charge. So that's
what that's what you do when you're in charge.
You take care of everyone.
And none of the girls who were with
me had ever been to jail before.
And had I realized what was going to happen to us,
I never would have let that group of girls go.
I would have rather had had a group.
With me who had been in jail before and
therefore would be a little more hardened
about the idea of doing this because this got ugly.
I didn't know it was going to get ugly,
but the place was this was not like going and sitting in
a county or city jail that was
clean and somebody brought to
your meals and that sort of thing.
This was going to be a different matter.
We were in bed and I took
the top bunk on
the end with the door at my right and behind me,
the girls were lined up this
way, the middle of the night,
the door opened and the white male guard came
in and put it looked like a rifle to me,
I don't know, One gun from another and put it down on
the floor and proceeded to rape the inmate under me.
I did not move.
I hardly breathed.
He left of course,
when he left, my mind
said he didn't really want to rape her.
He was sending us young girls
a message that we were next on his list.
I knew that that was evil.
I asked for an audience with with the person in charge,
what would that be called,
the warden, and they
said prisons don't get to talk to the war.
I said, I want to talk to him somehow.
He let me talk to him.
By the time I talked to him,
I had made up some conditions,
and one of them was that that white male had to go.
I explained to him first that I
was editor of the student newspaper at Spelman College,
and that I had a telephone
acquaintanceship with Ralph Mcgill,
who was then editor of the Atlanta Constitution Journal.
I said, this will be in the paper,
It's just a matter of whether it's in the paper
tomorrow or when I get out
15 days from now or whenever I get out,
this will be in the paper.
I want. He needs to go. It's cold in here.
We need sweatshirts or something to keep us warm.
I said, I understand the men are working.
Going to be working outside. Everybody works.
They'd already told us 6-6 And I said,
I want the women to work six to six.
I don't care which shift,
but we all work at
the same time and we all sleep at the same time.
Those were the things I told him I wanted.
Well, they gave us sweatshirts.
He changed the guard to a female.
There were no guns anymore.
We worked to six in
the morning to six in the afternoon in the kitchen.
The women in the kitchen were all black.
They were so wonderful.
Fresh milk came in from the farm every
morning and they would shake up those huge,
big canisters to do what they did for us.
They skimmed the cream off
the top of the canvases and put it in
the refrigerator so we could have
cream with our breakfast
or cream without coffee if we wanted it.
And they made sure that we were fed and taken care of.
They weren't going to let us go hungry at all,
and then we cooked in the kitchen.
Then I had to figure out how to communicate with the oh,
the other thing was the woman who was the nurse for
the entire facility was
a black female who had graduated from Spelman.
She was staying outside of our quarters,
basically on the same floor with us.
When I saw this woman,
I went over to talk to her
and found out that she'd gone to Spelman and I said,
Are you here all the time And she said no.
She was going home. She goes home for some days.
I said, You think you could make a phone call for
me And she said,
I'd have to think about that because if I
get in trouble or if anybody finds out,
I could lose my job.
So I gave her a phone number
and I said if when you're home,
you feel that you can make a phone call to this number,
tell them who you are and that you met me.
And I wrote my name on the piece of
paper and to let them know
that we are doing okay and she did that.
Then my other job, I had these men.
I had all these boys over here from Morehouse and
Clark and wherever they were from, more than 20 of them.
How was I going to know what was happening with them?
I had no way of knowing.
So I realized that the men were coming in and
out of the same front door we had come
in that night and had to pass the kitchen.
I asked one of the trustees,
who happened to be a inmate that I had run across in
my jail times in previous places in Folk County,
and asked her if she could get
a message to the boys for me.
And she said, will you write something down?
And I said no, because if you get caught.
A written note, you're in trouble.
I said we have to do this verbally.
We worked out a signal system. I did that.
Tell them if I'm standing at the door
when they come in from the fields
that everything is okay.
If I'm not there, then something's wrong and ask AD King
to nod his head if everything is okay with the men.
That was a system that we used while we were there.
We didn't have any more trouble. Nobody bothered us.
We didn't couldn't see anybody.
But nobody bothered us after that.
I don't know what day of the week that would have been,
but on Sunday, I
guess they must have said we were going to have visit.
We could have visitors anyway.
My godmother had packed up
a picnic lunch French style to her.
She's chair of the French Department.
You know, cold, cold chicken, white wine.
I don't know where she thought she was going
and pate french crackers.
She was bringing them to the work camp,
which would have been hilarious if that had happened.
We got out, I think on that Friday,
I don't think we were there more than about three days.
We got out and she told me what she had done,
just so that was a real funny thing.
After I got out,
I did call Ralph Mcgill,
and I had to talk with him.
There was an investigation of the state,
county, the county farm system.
After that hit all the newspapers and round they went.
I don't know what they found.
I was too busy. See, every time I'm in jail I'm gone.
I got to come back to school, I got to catch up.
I'm still determined I'm going to graduate in May of 61.
I got to catch up.
I didn't pay attention to what it said,
but they exposed him and they were
all bad things I'm sure going on the work far.
Okay. So that was one of a different experience.
The other thing was when the Supreme Court
passed the law that opened
up restaurants for state travel and bus stations,
we said, let's go test this out.
Let's see what's going to happen.
We were from all over, everywhere.
So we put together four or five groups and had
at least one or two people in each group who
was going home to
Chattanooga to Birmingham, Jacksonville, Florida.
And there were at least one or two more.
Lone probably remembers what
those other places are, I don't.
I was taking a group to Jacksonville.
We get on the bus
and we head out first stop as Macon, Georgia.
We get off and it's lunchtime.
We go into the lunch room.
I'm walking in front,
I had two students with me.
I get my tray and I'm filling it up with food.
I get to the cashier and I said,
I'm paying for myself and for these other two.
Her mouth dropped open.
I I said okay to myself.
So, we got we sat down.
We were there about 10 minutes and
a young white man came in and sat with me.
They were sitting at a table for two,
and I was next to them across the aisle,
and by myself came and sat and talked to me.
I don't know where he came from or whatever.
He knew who I was, he knew my name.
And he said, What can I do?
This is my giving out a phone number again.
So I gave out a phone number and I said,
you can call them and tell them.
But we had someone trailing us.
Each group had a car with a minister in it from
the theological seminary who
was trailing us to go wherever we were going.
Because we weren't going to come back on the bus,
we were going to come back in in an automobile.
We didn't want to fight the battle, go in two ways.
We just wanted to do to do it one way,
he sat there with me,
and then he left in,
the cops came in and arrested us.
Well, they have tried to arrest the two.
They weren't going to arrest me.
I had to touch the cop on the shoulder and say,
I'm with them And he said,
Okay, you want to go too I said, oh, yeah,
I'm in charge So we went we went to the police station,
and the police chief and I talked and I said, you know,
we haven't broken any laws And he said,
but we don't serve you
And I said the Supreme Court just said you will.
So he left the office and went out.
Conversed with some people
and found out that I was right.
We were not really arrested, but they kept us there.
Now, what are they going to do with these
three black college students
until the next bus to Jacksonville,
which was going to be like
at five 06:00 in the afternoon.
Here it is, around noon.
Luckily, I knew someone in
town who had just graduated from Spelman.
I gave him her married name and that's
a very prominent black family
she'd married into in Macon, Georgia.
We spent the day at her in
law's home where she was living as well at the time.
And black from all over the city of Macon, just cave.
They came to touch us to see us.
And they didn't say much to give us a hug.
Did they come in? They paraded
in and then they would walk,
give us hugs and parade out,
and the parade went on a all day long.
I had never experienced anything like that before.
It was both scary and
very rewarding that we were
doing something that the black community in Macon,
Georgia thought was positive for them.
And we hadn't intended to impact Macon at all.
When the bus came, well,
the blacks arranged for a car from
the funeral home to come and get us,
because it was the only car, I guess
the black community that had tenant windows,
and the police were afraid
of what was going to happen to us.
They put us in this car and took us
to the bus station along with several men.
They didn't have guns, but they
were clearly there to protect us.
And we got to the bus station
and they were just newspaper people all over everywhere.
They were cameras clicking.
I mean, the New York Times was there every Time Magazine.
Everybody in the world that you would have
thought would have been only
in New York or Washington DC or
whatever it was there in Georgia.
But they had all data to get there because I'm sure
the word had spread around that we were there.
I have some newspaper clippings of us on
the front page of the two papers in Macon, Georgia.
We got on the bus and
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI,
put two agents on the bus with
us to ride to
protect us to get us to Jacksonville, Florida.
And it was a local bus,
and so it stopped and
they would let everybody get off the bus.
We had to stay on and then
we could get off at some places, other places.
We got off first, they escorted us,
stood outside the bathrooms or wherever we were,
and then we'd all get off.
We all went to Jacksonville, Florida together.
So we got there were no incidents.
We got to Jacksonville and the Kuk was there.
The Jacksonville bus station at that time had windows on,
huge windows on at least two sides of it,
and one was a really long, long wall.
When we got off and went into the bus station,
you could just see the Klan walking up and down.
That was not my first opportunity to meet the Klan.
I was not particularly afraid of that.
The Klan picketed with
beside us here in Atlanta many times.
Mostly they were a bunch of
bullies that weren't going to really do anything anyway.
We were supposed to be afraid once
they put their costumes on.
My father sent someone to pick us
up and we were just there and we came
back through making Xu.
But when we got back,
Lonnie King said that he,
of course it hit all the national newspapers,
that he got a call from James Farmer at core.
And you might want to check this out
with him to be sure this is accurate.
Because he and I haven't talked about
this in years. We have not talked.
And he said, I like the idea of the rides that you took.
And he said, I
think I'm going to call them freedom rides.
And so that's how the freedom rides were born.
Now, we didn't have any trouble in making,
the group in Birmingham had problems.
There was a very mean police chief there,
Bull Connor, who was notorious at the time.
And so they had problems there.
And I don't remember if anybody else had any problems,
but I don't think anyone was physically hurt.
The interesting thing about Atlanta
with all this and lining
that we're talking about this earlier,
Atlanta didn't receive a lot of publicity about this.
I contend that it was
because both the black community and
the white community who
say now that they were too busy to hate.
I really don't think that was it.
They had an economic machine going here.
They were developing into a major force in the Southeast.
Economically, everyone was doing
well on both sides of the color line.
No one was interested in rocking that boat.
They did not want to see publicity
about guns being pulled on students in Atlanta, Georgia.
Are fire hoses being
turned on students in Atlanta, Georgia?
That was bad for business.
They were determined to keep the business going.
Therefore, that kept us fairly safe physically.
Besides that, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
was on the case constantly.
They knew me. They knew my name.
When I left Spelman campus in the morning,
if you know Spellman campus,
the gates, when I walked out of the gate in the morning,
they were there in the car.
They followed me everywhere I went.
They found out in the newspaper did as well.
They found out that where I was
going was where the action was for that day.
It was of some peace of mind that there were
outside eyes and ears on our activities all the time.
That made me feel a little bit safe for other people.
Didn't know, I didn't even tell anybody.
I knew they were GBI.
I knew who was from
the newspaper because they say, Hi Norman, June,
How are you doing this morning We
knew each other by names,
but I didn't tell anybody else that.
So the GBI, they were there to protect you.
Did you feel protected or did you feel afraid of them?
Because I'm not I was assuming they were all white men.
I didn't I didn't feel afraid of them.
I didn't think they were going to do anything
to us, not physically.
That wasn't that's not
their job and that's not sort of their demeanor.
That's not the way they do business.
They would have other ways of hurting us.
So it wouldn't have to be a physical confrontation.
But if someone confronted us,
even if they did not want to step in
because they didn't feel it was FBI business,
they they could call a cop
easily and they they were always there.
They told me, don't ever apply
for a job in the state of Georgia,
you will never get hired in this state.
Your jail record is too long.
And so we did know them.
Okay. So that's two things out of the Macon situation.
The national FBI got
in touch with us to see if our civil rights
had been violated in any way.
And I have some letters back
and forth between me and them.
All of us got letters,
and they came to the campus and interviewed us,
and decided that our civil rights had
been had not been violated in Macon.
Okay. So I said there were three. That was two.
The third one was probably February of 61,
and I got arrested.
We we we decided that we were going to pack
the jails with as many people as we could
get in and hopefully
strain the financial resources of the county.
And we did so we did a jail without bail program,
and it was a deliberate,
so we just sent swarms of people in, went to jail.
They could stay if they wanted to.
As as I said earlier, they could always get bail.
I went in the first group and I stayed
there for two weeks in there.
And that was a different experience.
It was it was a county jail,
it was a big jail.
We slept in bunk beds,
in big open rooms.
There was no privacy for bathroom facilities at all.
The whites were with us as well,
and we were physically
attacked by white women a couple of times,
we had to physically fight back.
In those situations, you don't bother to
tell the warden, I mean,
nobody had a knife or nobody could kill
you because it wasn't worth it.
We felt we had to protect
ourselves and we had
to show that we could protect ourselves.
There were more of us than there were of them,
but we didn't gang up on.
If I was attacked, which I was,
then I'm the one that fought back,
physically fought back to look out for myself.
So that they know that there's
a code of survival in those kinds of situations.
And we had learned I had
learned by then what that code was.
And so somebody said, well,
let me normal June,
let me help you And I said, no,
I have to do this because she has to understand that she
can't do this to me
again or attempt to do this to me again.
And it worked. Yeah, it worked.
So in addition, so
daily life in county lock up without bail,
physical fights, verbal,
that assuming verbal assaults as well?
No, not really. In fact,
we only had probably
two physical fights and both of them involved
me and there were lesbian attacks.
It's basically what they what they came down to.
So that made it easier to to manage.
And I was the only target, nobody else was.
So we didn't have it was not chaos.
And they soon moved the white women out.
They realized that they were
put them in with us and they were totally outnumbered.
I mean, we had like 30 or more women
in there and there were 234,
sometimes five of them and
the county jail people were in
for these women were in for murder.
Were these were not petty criminals,
were these were serious serious women.
I had committed serious crimes
and I had been sentenced I guess we all had,
but I had been sentenced to a year,
so I was expecting to be there for that period of time.
I was expected to be transferred
to somewhere, but I didn't know.
But we were able to have lawyers and,
and I didn't have any family in town to come to see me,
but ministers could come.
Newspaper people, they took all
of our books from us when we
first got in because we
never went to jail without carrying our books.
First of all, it was a symbol of who we were.
And we always wanted to remind
people that we were students.
So it was a symbol. But otherwise
we were all trying to study.
To, to go to school as well.
I wrote my parents and said,
you don't pay the second semester tuition because
I'm not going to be be in school.
And you didn't have anywhere to sit during the day.
So we sat on the concrete floor for all of us.
There were there were some benches and things in there.
But I'm the leader of the group,
so I don't sit on the bench. I sit on the floor.
I make an example that that's possible to do.
And you leave the benches for
other people because girls were rotating in and out.
They would come in, they would get frightened,
and they would they would want to leave.
What was your parents reaction to that letter? You?
I don't know. I don't think they ever told
me When I went to
the work camp that I was talking about earlier,
they had to put my mother in the hospital.
She just she freaked out.
She was scared for your safety.
She thought maybe you would be killed plus no one.
No one knew what the work camp was
and no one had ever seen one and had ever been there,
and they wouldn't let anyone come to see us.
We were totally held without communication.
And so that frightened her,
but I think she did well with everything else.
I mean, they were not surprised that I was doing this.
I told you I sat in the bus in
the wrong place and drank out of
the wrong royal fountain when I was,
you know, not even school age yet.
They really weren't surprised by that.
When you got older, did you
talk with your parents about the stuff that you did?
Some of the things I told you today, no.
They would they would have freaked out,
you know, if they hadn't realized I was
in the kind of danger that I was ever.
Some of those times they would they would have been very
unhappy and I had I managed to
graduate on time and just just let you know.
Bygones be bygones so to speak,
like when you're a teenager and you do something wrong
and you really don't give all the details.
Well, I didn't give all the details all the time.
And I said earlier, I didn't
start talking about any of this
except to my husband until recently.
And still I haven't done it,
but maybe three or four times.
We appreciate. Is there
a reason why you haven't talked about it?
I just felt it was difficult.
Plus I had this probably,
I don't know, I want to say naive
but I'm not sure it was naive.
During the late '50s and early '60s,
there were a lot of hanger ons,
people who wanted to get involved because it was,
in a way, the cool thing to do.
And then later on they wanted to
brag about the fact that they had done
things and I did not want to be
seen as that kind of person.
I didn't want to talk about it.
But you were one of the leaders that didn't.
That didn't matter. People who
weren't there don't don't know that.
They didn't know that it's not written anywhere.
My name doesn't appear
anywhere When people would
try to do newspaper articles and
stuff and he'd come in and Lone
would say and other people in
the group, Normal junior one.
I said, no, no, no photographs pitch.
I just sort of refused to do that.
I I told you before,
it was it was a matter of pride with me.
I think that I did not need
that kind of attention and
that was not why I was doing it.
That there were very legitimate reasons,
very soul felt reasons as to why I was doing it.
And if my name never appeared anywhere, that was fine.
So all of these monumental things,
and I, I feel safe in saying
they were just what you did was monumental.
You changed the face of
our entire culture and
now they're trying to change it back again.
Yes. So I, how do I think so?
I guess, and I'm not sure if I'm phrasing this right,
How do you carry yourself day to day,
knowing the impact that you had,
not just on the Civil Rights movement,
but on American culture and were in American progress.
I don't have any problem with
that because no one knows I did that.
And so, it's sort of it's sort of
my secret that walks around with me.
And so it's fine.
I don't I don't have problems, you know, that.
And I thought it
was I gave a long talk
about this at the University of Iowa when we were
there once for a Martin Luther King birthday.
And so that's when everybody in Iowa city, Iowa,
got to know the University of Iowa
because I told all the stories.
But like, I don't
feel like it was a big thing to another.
I, I married this very brilliant scientist,
college professor type, stayed home.
I promised him I would not have any children in jail.
And I met him in the December
after I just graduated from college.
And he was teaching in Nashville, Tennessee at the time.
I promised I wouldn't have any children and I didn't.
And I did not do it any longer after that.
Because for me, you don't do things like that halfway.
That's something you either in
for all the way or you don't go in at all.
Then we were, we lived in Washington, DC.
For years. And in 1968 we moved to Iowa.
And so I was in a whole other world.
And when I got to Iowa City,
I found myself being bored because it was a small town.
I had never lived in a small college town before.
I started volunteering and doing things like sitting
on an advisory committee for
the public school system to study
racism in the public school system.
I did that very early.
Then I got involved in after childcare,
after school childcare, that wasn't my problem,
But women were just beginning to go to
work and leaving homes
and did not have care for kids after school.
Friends of ours got involved in that,
and through that, I became
a member of the City Parks and Recreation Commission.
In fact, I was vice Chair.
See, I do things full bore. That was a job.
I mean, I was there all the time.
We had our meetings,
but we always were lobbying
the City Council to mostly park land.
They were beginning to have a big building spree in Iowa.
City land was disappearing,
and they were putting up all these houses.
And there was no free space.
No green space. What we wanted to do was buy,
now what is green space?
Years later, you can develop,
but if you don't own the land,
you've got nothing to develop.
I did that for a long time,
and next thing I know I was
working at the University of Iowa.
I did several kinds of jobs there.
And then I became Assistant Vice President at
University of Iowa for Finance and University Services.
Which was very interesting because
I only have a Bachelor's degree
from Spelman I was in.
A hierarchy of administrators
that all you had advanced degrees. But I worked hard.
And I think I did a good job and
I earned what I what I got.
I just I took my energies and put them into
other sources that plus raising two children.
Did your children know?
Yes, my children knew.
Basically. They didn't know all the stories.
It's funny you tell
your grandchildren more than you tell your children at,
at an earlier age.
So, when we moved to, we retired
and moved to Kansas City 20 years ago.
We had two grandsons and Kansas City who were in
about 6.4 We started telling them all about stories,
about anything and everything.
The oldest one is now 25, and he probably knows,
he probably remembers more about
my civil rights activities than I remembered to tell
you today because he's got that memory.
The grandchildren were never frightened by it.
I don't think my children were never frightened by it.
But it was important for me to be involved in
the community because it was
a totally white community in Iowa City.
My children were an oddity in that community.
There may have been 12,
15 black families in town.
There were more black people in town there,
but most of them were students.
But for families who were actually living in
the city, there weren't very many.
It was my major job
during those years, those early years there,
was to help them to navigate that kind of world.
And I felt I needed to be a mom who was at
home and present and
alert as to what was going on
at school and on the playground,
and every place else where my children were.
So when I became 35
is when I went to work for the first time.
They were then my daughter was going
into junior high school seventh grade,
and my son was going into fifth grade.
So I was sort of a late bloomer for work.
Well, it sounds like you're superwoman because you
have these amazing leadership.
I mean, it just sounds like it's innate.
Your leadership is innate and who you are.
So wherever you find yourself over
the course of your own personal history,
you have become a leader.
I think that's probably true.
I'd have to admit that that's true.
Isn't it much more fun to
be able to tell people what to do?
Tell them which way to go.
To show them which way to go is better
than telling, telling them what to do,
and I try to show it is much more fun.
The last two or three years at the university,
I got involved in a total quality management program
and our division,
which was Finance and University Services had
about 1,500 employees in it.
And we were the structure of the university,
meaning we were the city,
the city runs the school and runs the city.
And the city council is the thinkers
and whatever my husband was,
faculty and that's a whole other matter.
But we ran the physical plant and took care of
all the personnel matters
and paying the bills and all that kind of stuff.
We decided to do, go Total Quality Management.
And they asked me if I would lead the program,
and I knew nothing about that.
But I said, what else is new?
I never know. Let me give me some money.
Let me go around the country and talk to people and
figure out what's going
on with this and how this operates.
So I got to show those last three years and
train our department heads in our unit,
how for them to be good leaders for their people,
and how to let the people's skills rise to the top.
And not always telling them what to do,
but to include everyone in the decision making process.
I did get to show a lot rather than tell what to do.
You are an amazing woman.
Thank you. Thank you.
You're an amazing woman and I thank you for taking time.
I knew you were in town for not so nice personal reason.
And so I'm very sorry for that,
but I'm glad that you took the
time to come and talk with us.
Thank you. And we had a very nice celebration of
life for my friend today, so that was nice.
Where do you live now? You're in Kansas City.
Kansas, Missouri. I'm in the Missouri side.
When we retired then I had to start,
I had to recreate myself again in Kansas City.
So, I picked out
the organizations I wanted to associate with and started,
you know, being a community volunteer.
And now I'm not doing much of that anymore.
I'm sort of tired, you should take a break.
I decided when I was
70 that I was going to going to take a break.
So I've taken a lot of breaks since since I was 70.
I decided it was June.
It was June's time. Yeah, that's right.
It's about. I agree.
I really do appreciate you being here.
You're welcome. Check I want you to
check with Loni about some of the dates and
stuff because he's the one that's
kept up really with I said
the time lines of things that happened and
the major details and I moved on.
But we do have a lot of records,
a lot of original newspapers.
We have the original newspapers from Making Joy.
And we have a lot of there's
no newspapers from a Lada Constitution.
I need to be preserving them.
And I had I want you may be interested in this Fiv.
What was his first name?
He was a professor at Spelman not when I
was there, but after I left,
he decided to write
a book about the women of Spelman involved in,
in the civil rights movement in the '60s.
It's called Undaunted by the Fight,
which are words from our, from Spellman song.
He sent me this and I've forgotten,
I had this until the other day.
This is a copy, he wrote this book.
So he was gathering information to write this book.
I think the Emery press printed it.
Not at the time he was doing his book.
But later someone found this handwritten note by
Martin to the young women
who had been arrested at Rich's with him.
Lafe sent me a copy of this, the handwritten one,
then he sent me
the transcript of this so you might be interested
in And it gives the names of the women who got arrested.
Yeah. In here.
And I don't think there I think I
think these names are only female names in here.
Because he wrote this letter to the King,
wrote this to the girls,
and I don't know what happened because he sort of stop,
It stops mid sentence.
Yes, it stops mid sentence.
So you might be interested in that.
It was found, the original was
found in Coretta Scott King's papers.
Wow, so that's kind of a big piece of history.
Yeah.
So Dr. Fever had
never saw the original and like you said,
he would have used it in his,
in his book had he had he found it.
The other thing is this is the Macon, Georgia,
when all the flash the the press was
popping pictures after we
when we were getting ready to leave town.
So that was that was in Macon.
And I kept sort of a diary
during the Fulton County Jail notes,
so I know I was there from February 9, 1961.
It's interesting, that's almost
exactly a year after we got started.
Well, it was yeah, February 1961
until my last I think I wrote every day. I'm not sure.
The last one was February 21, 1961.
So it's a little t,
was that two weeks? Is that two weeks?
You had a mathematician in the house, almost two weeks.
It's interesting that they called you college seniors.
So the idea that you were really wanting to build
on that of being college student, right?
These were not a we were,
I mean, I was 20 at the time.
I didn't make 21 until like
two weeks before I graduated from college.
So I never was a real adult
when I was doing doing any of that.
So yeah, the young man on the right hand side
was President of the Clark Student Body, Ben Brown.
And the woman, Betty Williamson,
was interesting, she's from Atlanta.
Her father owned a real estate company here in town.
And having her present sort of
represented the Atlanta structure in a way that she,
her family had given her permission to
go and do this with us.
Because, see, a lot of the black community
were against us when we started.
In fact, the black newspaper was totally against us.
And we set up our own newspaper
and shut the black newspaper down.
The newspaper that we started,
Atlanta choir, is still going on.
We started that as students.
Wow, Julia.
Julia, we used to write Carl.
Carl Holcombe, I think it was his first name,
was a professor at Clark.
He helped us as a faculty member to do this.
The summer after my junior year in college,
we were involved with this junior.
And I would go out at night to trolling town,
looking for stories for The Atlanta Inquirer,
the black newspaper was shut down.
We didn't shut it down,
but we did by working,
by putting, we took the money from them.
Basically, They could not survive anymore because
the elders in town finally came around to supporting us.
They weren't supportive at first,
but they finally came around.
So you said you thought some of it
might have been economic? Of course.
I think it was all a machine. You think?
So you don't think it was maybe.
Do you think they were afraid?
Well, the black community probably was.
I mean, I'd have to I'd
have to give them I'd have to give them that.
I think there was some fear.
Of course, there was some fear.
There always is some fear when you get police and guns,
and blacks and whites and blacks trying
to take things that they think they have a right to,
that other people are keeping them from having.
Of course, there would be some fear about it,
but they finally came around,
came around out our way of thinking.
They just didn't want us to rock their boat at first.
But people and I don't know who they were,
but people in this town put up their property for us.
That's how we had bond money for everybody.
You have to have real property in order for
the bondsman to loan
the money or whatever, however they do that.
But I know it's property behind it.
And there were a lot of people in
this town that put up property.
Now, they may have done it anonymously, I don't know.
I just know it was always there.
And I told you we always had
money and our money was coming from in town.
And I was telling you earlier,
we got money from Sydney Porter
and Harry Bellefonte and Shelley Winters would
call on Sundays to my office at
Spelman and give me an amount of money.
They just say, this is Shelley.
I said, this is normal, June.
And she'd say, how much money we are sending
you this week They didn't send it to me.
I don't know who they sent it to.
They know who they sent it to. I didn't ask.
That was not part of my job description. Know that.
And I'm glad I did not know.
I didn't want to know who
was actually handling the money and who was getting it.
I knew they were very supportive of everything that
Martin Luther King Junior wanted to do, Marley.
And financially, they were always there backing him.
And when we started here,
they backed us with their dollars.
They raised money for us in New York and in California,
and everywhere they raised money for us.
They just went around and asked people to write checks.
People did whenever we needed something.
As you heard Line say earlier,
there was never a day when we thought we couldn't do
something that we wanted to
do because we didn't have money.
And I never asked that. The Pascal brothers fed us.
Pascal's restaurant is still here.
They used to be over in Co, the colleges,
the HBCUs, we would meet
like we would do one time for Ma.
Maybe a week. I ran this picket line
downtown Atlanta and celebrities
and stuff would come and
ask to serve on the picket lines.
I went down to see how we're going to run this down here.
My idea, the idea was
that Norman June was going to do it.
But how is Norman Jun going to do it?
I told you I was always interested
in the how's how of everything.
So I decided to pick the Post Office.
And I don't know if it's still there or not,
but anyway, that was, I'm a US.
Citizen, I can use the US Post Office.
And it had this huge, big terrace outside.
Now the bad part about it,
it was up off the ground.
Is it still like that? Is it still
a post office here like that?
Oh, is it the post it
down The post office of Mitchell. Mitchell.
This was the big post off whatever it was.
But anyway, it sat up on you had to
walk up a lot of steps to get to the to the top of it.
And then we had where we had a huge,
big plaza around it. Yes.
And then you want to down near
the Herd Park That's on the Georgia State Campus now.
Okay. Building. It's on Georgia State Campus.
It's Walgreen. The Walgreens.
It's a Walgreens drugstore now.
So yes, I decided to set
up my position there because I was elevated.
I could sort of see around
and I thought I had
a right to be on the property
without anybody kicking me off.
And so we did, and we
put one of the shortwave radios with me,
the football players at Morehouse gave me there.
Those capes that they wear when
they sit around on the benches,
when it's cold outside because it was cold.
And I would go down in the morning at
07:00 and I'd be
there until the last till we got the last person out,
which is usually about 06:00
Somebody would compel me every
once in a while so I could go inside and
get warm, go to the bathroom.
But I was there and
I made sure and everybody who was down,
we had at least six to eight places
we were picketing all at once.
And so I kept records of who
everybody checked in with me and checked out with me,
so I know who was there and I would be sure
the last person was out before I left downtown.
And then we would go to Pascals and
meet until probably sometimes midnight.
Spellman students had to be on
the campus at 06:00 Anyway,
I was Pascals fed us. We could go in there.
They would take whoever
the leaders were that were meeting that night,
they would let us eat anything off the menu.
We wanted to eat steaks,
frog legs, whatever you wanted to eat.
That was their contribution and they made
a big financial contribution because they
fed us for a long period of time.
Everybody was the campus on at
06:00 Co you get off and on,
got a sensor on it in the garden.
Interesting about how I got.
It depended on what time of day I was leaving.
I I did know the
President's schedule for walking his dog.
And when he would walk his dog,
he would come back on campus at about a certain time.
And so I would arrange if it was that time
of day when I needed to leave, like five or so,
that I would be going out as he would
come in and we would stop and I'd said,
good evening, Dr. Manley,
and we would pass the time of day,
How was your day and whatever,
Pat the dog's head,
and he'd keep walking
in on the campus and I'd keep walking off.
Never dawned on him that I was
not supposed to be walking off that campus.
I don't think it dawned on him, but I had a rule.
And my rule I had was that there was an 11th commandment.
An 11th commandment for me was,
thou shalt not get caught So therefore,
you don't tell your right hand
what your left hand is doing.
So I never confided in anyone.
No one ever knew when I was leaving the campus,
when I was coming back, no one knew when to expect me.
My friends and my classmates got accustomed to
the fact Mother gave me
the key well, that was my senior year.
The dorm mother gave me a key to the building.
And she said to me, because I was having
these midnight meetings and I
was we didn't have cell phones in those days.
And I had to arrange early in the day to
have somebody check the phone at at
a certain time of night,
the pay phone on in the building.
And I would call from a pay phone
somewhere and said, you know, open the door.
I'll be there at 10:30 or whatever.
And I had to make sure I was there.
Somebody had to make getting me there.
And they would somebody would get
out of bed and come and open the door.
So I think she got wind of this.
And so she gave me this key and she said,
if someone catches you with this key,
I'm going to say you stole it She said, fair enough.
I said fair enough. I gave her, what did I say?
That shall I get caught?
I gave her the key as when I got ready to graduate,
I thanked her very much and
gave her her key back so I could just walk.
Now, we had a guard on the campus
who patrolled the campus.
And whether he saw me and ignored it, I don't know.
I was the only Spelman who was
out doing this kind of stuff at these hours.
It wasn't like there were two or three
of us and we were talking or anything.
I was always by myself and I don't know if he saw me and
decided I was doing the right thing or it was
okay somehow. I don't know.
He and I never discussed it. I knew him.
We would wave and talk,
but we never talked about it.
There was no need to talk about things that were
necessary to be talked about because,
I mean, he probably did see
me and if I had talked to him about it,
I would have put him in a awkward position
of how was he going to handle it the next time
he saw me come come on on the campus
late at night like that because
I didn't couldn't let anybody drive me on campus.
They'd have to drop me at the gate and I'd have to walk.
So he had plenty of time.
It was a very it was a much
smaller campus than it is now.
He had plenty of time to see me before I got to
the building and I never ever got caught.
You were supposed to?
No. And I, you know, I do believe
that things work out
the way they're supposed to work out.
And that was sort of my job during
that time to do what I was doing.
So I did my job then.
When I got done,
it was somebody else's turn to do the job.
This is a huge bad pitch.
This is a picture of Clyde Mcfadden
and you don't even know who he is,
but he was a famous doo wop.
Sing I guess I'll say he started during that time
and he came and asked to
be for me to be on the picket line.
So they came in, somebody came and got me and said,
Norma, June Clyde wants to be on the picket line.
Come on. The newspaper is going to
take a picture of this. Uh huh.
So that's Clyde Mcfadden getting him on the picket line.
He was in town appearing as
something that he wanted to show
his support and come and participate, so Wow.
This is the Atlanta paper.
Yeah. That's the Atlanta Constitution.
Wow, that's amazing, Y, that's amazing.
They were, they were interesting times,
they were important times.
I think we all felt
good that we were able to make some contributions.
You have such a unique perspective on it because,
which I think is going to be an important part
of the main audience for this project.
A students K through 12 students.
And I think they have no frame of
reference for the struggle for civil rights.
And I think that you have
such a unique perspective on it because you lived it.
And it didn't seem at the time.
I think I heard you say that it was
some sort of monumental.
Which for people who didn't live it,
it just seems to monumental.
It seems gigantic.
It seems like the top of the mountain.
It seemed like a natural thing to do.
And why hadn't we done it before?
It's what I was thinking.
Because something needed to be done.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, when I was
a little girl and playing out in my back in my yard,
white police would drive in front of my house.
And I lived in a Suburban kind of neighborhood,
but one without it wasn't,
it was no sidewalks.
I don't think the street tree even paved
moved in, had septic tanks.
So I mean, I'm out sort of in the country at that time.
That location is not in the country now.
And they would drive by and make
racial epitaphs at me on Saturdays
or when I was younger and just home
plane and weren't going to school as a child.
Yes. They just, you realize that this was
a little white girl growing up in a black community.
They thought I was
a little white girl growing up in a way
they thought you were misplaced.
So when the boys dated me,
they always knew they were going to get pulled over,
the cops were going to pull them over.
So they were very careful not to drink
anything because if I was
in a car with somebody, I was going to.
It happened to my husband and I in Iowa several times.
It's interesting because I can I tell
them I just had my DNA done twice.
One of my cousins is a professional genealogist.
In anyway, I'm 56% European, I guess.
I was surprised at the percentage there.
I was very surprised because I
don't look anything like anyone in my family.
Okay.
And so, I mean,
not not by color.
And so it was,
it was it was very interesting.
I was not expecting that.
So I guess I understand why the woman in
making thought I was not
part of the group or why the cop
didn't want to arrest me at the time,
I never thought about that.
I thought that when everybody saw me,
they knew I was black.
No matter what color my skin was,
they knew I was black.
And if I had because I had blond hair for years as
a child and but I just assumed that
everybody knew I was black because I knew I was black.
But then I realized now that they probably didn't assume
that that gave me another set of problems to deal with.
I think so. Did it ever were you ever able
to use passing to your advantage?
No, I never tried to. The Civil Rights movement?
I never tried to. No, it never
crossed my mind to do that.
Why would I be brave?
Why would I want to do that?
I was who I was and I never thought about that.
I knew other people did that who
actually subverted and used
passing as a subversion. Oh yeah, Yeah.
Okay. So I never did this really interesting.
So this is all new information for me,
like in the last 23 months.
I'm a geneticist. Oh, I didn't even know.
You know, we really a biochemist
but he has a minor in genetics in graduate school.
Explain the 26 formal sons separate reconnect,
what were the other percentages?
I was whatever's left is is African.
Okay. Yeah, the 40, 56%
European. The largest percentage is
British is Irish, like 24,
25% and the British,
and then there are a couple of percentages of Norwegian,
believe it or not, around Afghanistan.
Because one of my DNAs that I did do,
family DNA, which is National Geographic,
they get very much into the geography of where
you can show you somebody is from Afghanistan.
I got a little Asian, and that's Russia. Mm hm.
From the Caucasians where that word came from,
in the beginning mountains,
that area there. So, I've got some of that.
How far back have you traced your genealogy? Have I gone?
Six generation of 77, I think seven.
And have you found any of these people
that bring this to you? Great, yes.
My great my great, great grandmother
was Irish now on my mother's side,
she didn't she was
never married to my great great grandmother.
No name was ever passed down.
So I don't know who she is.
I did not even know she was Irish.
I knew she was white, but I did not
know she was Irish until I got
the DNA because he thought she was Italian.
Because she told him that I'm sure in Philadelphia,
nobody wanted to be Irish is right,
and this was Philadelphia.
And she told him that at one point in the census,
my grandmother happened to be visiting her father.
She was raised by his mother,
happened to be visiting her father,
and she said her mother was born in Philadelphia.
And there's a hash mark through that and it says Rome.
The only person that would have known anything about
this woman have been my great grandfather.
He thought she was Italian.
Okay. So that's one side of the family.
On the other side of the family,
I don't find my mother's family
were all out of slavery really early.
I don't know much about that because you
can't find us until after slavery, basically.
But my mother's family is eastern shore of
Maryland and we find them back in
the 1840s and they were all free.
And 1820s, they were all free during that period of time.
So I don't know what was going on there,
But on my father's side in
Florida, my father's grandmother,
my father's great grandmother was a slave,
and his grandmother was
fathered by the owner of the plantation.
And there were several children, I mean,
like five at least,
Who carried the Dilworth name?
Where the Dilworth are from?
I'm not absolutely sure.
I've been working on that within
the last six months somewhere.
I think I remember that they were from Ireland,
the British Isles, in that general area,
which could be any of that Scotland.
But I haven't been able to put a connector on that yet.
I I don't know for sure where my 56% came from.
But it surprised you?
It did surprise me. I knew there would be some,
but I didn't I was not expecting it to be that much.
But it is what it is?
It is what it is. And all of us are mixed.
Yes, absolutely. My family come from lungs in Kentucky.
Uh huh. Really?
So I've never done my DNA,
but I know there's a whole bunch of stuff going on there.
It's very interesting to do it.
I'm on Ancestry.com is where the family DNA thing,
but Ancestry.com is more user friendly.
Okay. And I went on,
I don't know, maybe a month ago, I'm on all the time,
but this one time I was on
and all of a sudden I went to my great,
great grandmother whose name last name was War,
where she was a What's the name what's Katherine's name?
Fontaine.
The Fontaine family had,
were French and they lived next
door to the Waters family
in the eastern shore of Maryland.
And I got a plat of the land and
all of that and the Waters family was British,
the Fontaine were French.
Well, somebody who carried
the waters name, male, married.
In fact two of them married.
Two of the fountain, two Blacks,
1-2 from the other.
I have a saying, people
can be blood related or they can be
plantation related because we carried names,
whether we were blood related to say that either one
of those were fathered by the slave owners,
I can't say that because I don't know that.
But anyway, I went
looking at my great, great grandmother.
Now all these years I've been paying
attention to her husband because he was
a very well known minister in
the Methodist church on the eastern shore of
Maryland whose last name was Waters.
Hadn't paid much attention to Henrietta.
I go in and all of a sudden
where there's a little space on
Ancestry.com for a photograph
and they put in their DNA match.
I went, I mean,
they really just I mean, there are
people I know I'm related to,
but to see that on
my computer where they
said that I was a DNA match with her,
and I know the woman who's been
doing the research on the Fountain family,
So I wrote her a note through Ancestry.com and said,
hey, look, this is what happens.
But she's the only one that
they've totally truly matched me with.
I have a list of people from both sites,
both the national geographic
site and ancestry that I have,
cousins that are no closer than about fourth cousins.
It's hard for me to find
any first and second cousins because at my age,
most of them are probably my age and older and dead.
The closest I'm going to get it is
probably about fourth cousins.
They have shown me some names and people and
there's one young man on ancestor that I know
I'm related to because he's related to
my mother's father from eastern shore of Maryland.
But I haven't gotten in touch with
him and he obviously hadn't
gotten in touch with me and I'm sure he can
see my tree because it's public and open,
and he knows I've done my DNA.
So anyway, that's so interesting.
It was really surprising when I had my DNA done.
Yeah. It was really, it's just really interesting.
I mean, just to kind of know,
I mean, how old. Yeah, whatever.
And you know so much more about this than I do,
but the H one that I am is incredibly old.
Because even though I'm
like 70 something percent British,
Irish, I have 0.5% Western African still in Y DNA.
Sure. Sure.
And it's because I think Because that tell about it.
No. No. He says tell him what happened,
what happened just last week in Philadelphia,
somewhere at his Don,
And he went into the precinct and said, hey,
guess what, I'm 10% African,
and he started getting noose.
People started being racist?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
So, don't tell nobody think
these people have been emboldened. They have been.
They have been. All of a sudden they feel that they can
be the people because they feel emboldened.
And I want to tell you with
the National Geographic one, when they said,
I belong to a hunters and gatherers group,
and with the African people, that's 100 game.
But this was not an African one.
This is my European side,
hunters and gathers group.
And they told me all lot of
their characteristics and they said they
were lactose intolerant. Yes.
Are you lactose intolerant?
I'm the only one in my family who is oh my gosh.
That that is just they
were talking about this group of people who
were just coming out of the cave man days, mother nature.
And so it is,
it is so things, I mean,
that's a weird, long time ago.
I mean, I don't know how many generations that
is going from. One.
Um, my hundreds and
gas on the European side were lactose intolerant.
Wow, it's amazing what we can do now.
We can find, yeah.
There you go.