>> I'm not sure.
Well, don't let me forget where I put them.
>> I would do that and I would sit right on them.
[LAUGHTER] I forget they're on my head half the time.
So what we'll do is we'll just start at the beginning,
and then you just free flow and tell me what
you want to know and what you think is important.
Because that's the focus of this whole project is to tell
the story through the eyes
of the people who have not told that story.
So it's to me, to the heroes,
and the herons of the movement because you all
just did it not for fame or
glory or for financial gain or
any type of fame but because you
described yourself as a foot soldier and undaunted.
>> Yeah, that's what I am to this date.
>> Are you rolling? So let's start back at
the beginning and talk to us about where you
were born and where you grew up and
how that might have influenced
how you ended up at Spelman.
>> I was born in Los Angeles, California,
and my parents moved to Springfield, Ohio,
when I was two years old,
but I still claimed California as my birthplace.
But I spent my formative years in Springfield and
my grandmother had a kindergarten in
her home and she taught me to read by the age of four.
So I've been reading ever since.
And in the second grade,
my parents took a position at Tuskegee Institute,
and we moved to Alabama.
And I went to
elementary school and high school here in Tuskegee.
And when I finished high school,
I went to Spelman College.
I had a scholarship to Fisk and went to Spelman.
But the recruiters,
Mrs. Henderson and Ms.
Brazil came from Spelman and they showed a film.
And on this film, there was
a pretty girl who was on a ladder.
She was in a play on the stage,
and I said, that's where I want to go.
And so my parents took me to Spelman to visit and
the campus was very small compared to Tuskegee Institute,
which is 5,500 acres.
Spelman was just a little oval.
But I liked the atmosphere,
I liked the young ladies who were there,
and I especially liked the theater,
which was about half the size of this room.
But still, they produced wonderful plays.
And once I got to Spelman,
I made three very close friends,
Blondean Orbert, Betty Darden,
and Phyllis Umpstead,
and we remained friends throughout our years at Spelman.
And they called us the Four Queens.
Why? I don't know, but hey, we accepted that.
And on this particular day, we were sophomores.
It was in October and I had just turned 19.
And we were sitting in the cafeteria,
and we were having one of these meals.
We called it mystery meat. We didn't know what it was.
And then we had one of these pink chiffon pies.
We called that air pie.
And we were just laughing and
talking about our day in class.
And through the door comes Herschelle Sullivan.
I'm pretty sure it was Herschelle.
But she was tall and elegant.
She had just come back from Paris
and we just thought the world of her.
I can to this day remember her fingernail polish.
It was just beautiful.
So she came in and she made this announcement.
She said there's a campus-wide meeting this evening,
all university centers,
in Giles Auditorium, six o'clock.
Be there. And so we looked at one another.
And immediately, now this
is just to show you how silly we were,
we immediately thought,
university-wide, that means cute guys.
So we said we are going to this meeting.
We went back to our dormitory.
We had a suite in
Packard Hall with two bedrooms and our own bath.
We were just living a life that year.
And so we got all dressed up.
We would say all gussied up.
We put on our makeup and earrings and everything.
We exchanged clothes. Let me wear this.
No, I'm going to wear that. And we went to this meeting.
But I think we were late because,
by the time we got there,
there were no seats, so
everybody was just standing around.
And in my book,
I say that we saw some cute guys.
But before we could get to them,
the meeting started so there we were.
And they said we have
assembled you here and these are the student leaders.
This was Lonnie King, Herschelle,
Rosalyn, and probably I guess Amos Brown.
I don't remember who the other guys were,
but I do remember Lonnie King.
And they were serious.
They just had these expressions on their faces,
and so we were thinking,
what is this about? And they told us.
And there had been a sit-in
in April the previous semester,
but the people were hand-picked
and it was not very successful.
So when they told us that this was
going to be a sit-in the following day
and it was open to anyone who wanted to
participate, that's good.
So they said, now, if you want to
go to jail for six months,
go to the right side of the room.
And the library in Giles Hall was not very large,
but there were not
that many students in our schools in those days.
And if you want to help,
but you're not willing to go to jail,
you go to the left side.
So two of my roommates and myself,
we went to the right side.
And we looked around and our other roommate
was over there on the left,
and we just filed that in our brains for later.
And so they explained to us what was going to
happen and told us to go back to the dorm and pack.
We had very big purses
back in those days like what we have today.
And they said you pack everything you're
going to need in your purse,
put your books together,
we'll come and get them later because
you will be in jail for six months.
And you will still be responsible for your coursework.
And so that night in my book,
I tell about how we had
a marathon hair-doing session because we
didn't know when we were going to the hairdresser again.
And so we got our hair washed and fried and curled up
and laid our clothes out for
the next day and packed our little bags.
And we were excited,
but I think we all said
our prayers before we went to sleep
because we didn't know what the next day
was going to involve.
So we got up early that morning,
got dressed and primped and made up and combed our hair,
went to breakfast, and then went over to
the AU Center and we assembled in
front of Trevor Arnette Library.
And they told us to join hands in the form of big circle,
I think, and must have been
Amos Brown who prayed and then we sang We Shall Overcome.
And Lonnie told us said Marilyn,
you and Blondean go and to get in that car,
and we got in the car in the back seat.
And the next thing, I remember,
I don't remember riding to Rich's,
I don't remember getting out of the car,
I don't remember that we went to snack bar,
all I remember is when we went up to the sixth floor,
the Magnolia Tea Room and
stood in front of that place that I had passed by
numerous times when my dear mother
and my Great Aunt Cora would take me to
Rich's because that's where you bought
your evening gowns if you were
a queen and I was always some kind of a queen.
And we passed by this Magnolia Tea Room,
and there are these little ladies
with their hats and gloves.
Now, we wore our hats and gloves too,
but that day, we did not.
I think we've decided that no,
we're not going to be ladies today.
We're going to be women.
We're not wearing hats and gloves.
But we would see them sitting there
with the tablecloths and the shine.
It may not have even been real, but to us,
it just seemed like a fantasy,
and we wanted to be in there too.
So we passed, stood at the door,
and one of the waitresses,
I imagine came to
the door and she said, what do y'all want?
I remember this very well.
And one of us,
I don't know if it were me or someone else said,
we just want to be served.
Well, you know we can't serve y'all.
We don't serve negroes in here.
And somebody later on made a joke and said,
well, I don't want a nigger.
I just want a meal. But we didn't say that.
We were not comedians.
We didn't say that. And she said, well,
I'm going to have to call the police. And she did.
And in the twinkling of an eye, the policeman was there,
the Chief of Police and a uniformed cop.
And they told us to go to the elevator.
They escorted us to the elevator.
I do remember the ride down because
we were cramped in the elevator.
And then the doors opened to the street.
And I saw the camera.
Now, I will admit I saw the camera.
And I'm a theater student,
and Dr. Burroughs always said,
when you see the light, go to the light.
If you see a camera, Marilyn, go to the camera.
So I saw the camera.
>> You did?
>> I did. But the look on my face,
that was not acting. That was real.
And Blondean was short and she was behind Reverend King,
but her purse is still
a testimony to her having been there.
And there are other pictures of Blondean in the car.
I don't remember the ride.
But I do remember
it was the city jail that they took us to first.
And we were packed into a little room
and everybody had a dime,
and you had to call your parent.
And so I called home,
and it must have been lunchtime because
my dad would come home for lunch 12:00 every day.
Let's eat. So he was at home.
And I said, Daddy, guess what?
He said, What is it, Patty?
I said, I'm in jail. He said in jail for what?
I said, well, I've been arrested in the sit-in movement.
That's okay. Then he called.
He said, talk to your mama.
I said, oh. [LAUGHTER]
And of course, she burst out into tears,
but that was my one phone call.
>> Why do you think she burst out into tears?
>> Because in those days when a black girl went to jail,
you were exposed to any and everything.
You could be raped, you could
be beaten, you could be tortured.
They had no idea what to expect.
And that was, I think,
what was going through her mind.
And her best friend later told me
that she went over to her house,
they lived two doors apart,
and she had to be consoled by her friend who said,
I don't know what to say about Patty.
She just has a mind of her own.
She's in jail.
What am I going to do? So her friend,
Aunt Bill consoled her and she did survive.
>> So that very famous photo of
Lonnie King and then you
and Dr. Martin Luther King
and then Blondean [phonetic] behind him,
you mentioned the look on your face?
>> Yes.
>> And some of my students have
interpreted that look as just determinism?
And some of my students have interpreted that look
as just righteous indignation?
>> Both.
>> And that is because of my background and my book that.
I think my working title is Daughter of the Revolution.
I come from a long line of
revolutionaries and black activists in their own realm.
And having grown up in Tuskegee during
the civil rights days that people don't know
that much about the fact that
we fought against [inaudible].
And because of the legal battles that were fought with
the Tuskegee Civic Association and
the mass meetings that I used to attend as a child,
and Martin Luther King was one of our speakers,
the legal documentation led to
the Supreme Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act.
It was not just the march across the bridge in Selma,
it was the leg work and
the brains and skill of Tuskegee people.
So that was in my background.
The Montgomery boycott was going
on pretty much at the same time.
And my parents would
take my sister and me to Springfield, Ohio,
in the summer and we spend
the whole summer with our grandparents,
Reverend Mrs. Smith,
and my granddaddy was a choir director and a minister.
So we had activities
all summer long and had a good time,
but on the trip, well,
if we took the train,
it was segregated,
but if my parents drove,
there were no facilities for
black people until you got
maybe up to Cincinnati, if then.
It was a long trip
and it was quite embarrassing and humiliating.
And I'm just going to say this,
to have to open both doors and
squat down and relieve yourself.
And inevitably, you get a drop on
your socks or your tennis shoes
or whatever you were wearing,
but that's what we had to endure.
And I just didn't like that.
And then the idea of these signs that said whites only.
And I remember the
Montgomery train station because we did
take the train sometimes
going to Springfield or coming back.
And the train station just appeared to be so beautiful.
I look at it now, it was not,
but it appeared that way.
There were marble floors and
chandeliers and gold looking trimmings,
but we couldn't go in there and it was
a spacious facility,
but on the other side,
there was a very little place where people were cramped
in because it seemed like they were
more black folks on the train than white.
And the benches were hard,
the water fountains were dirty,
the toilets were nasty and it just left you with
an impression that this is good and you're bad,
and I would not accept that.
And our teachers, our parents, our churches,
all instilled in us that you are as
good or probably better
than anyone else and don't you forget it.
And so we had that spirit here in Tuskegee.
And when the opportunity came to do something,
and being in jail for six months seemed like
a small price to pay if it was
going to move us toward freedom.
And so that was the look on my face
and I mean that to this date.
I would not change that for anything.
>> So you were in jail through I think the 24th.
So you weren't at Sisters Chapel
the night they had that big prayer service for you-all.
Do you remember anything about that or
hearing about that at all?
I know that there were several ministers and
Spelman students who had not gone to the sit-in.
And at Sisters Chapel,
they gathered and had
this big prayer service and sang
songs and called out your names.
And you weren't there
because you were one of the last ones released,
I think on the 24th.
Do you have any thoughts or experiences of
friends who supported you in that way who maybe
didn't go to jail,
but supported you in other ways?
>> Well, my friend Blondean,
she was in jail with me,
but Betty told me recently,
because I've just started asking
people about where were you?
What did you do? And I thought
everybody was like me, but they were not.
And so Betty, well,
she came down the next day.
She had volunteered,
but she was not arrested until the following day.
And of course, Phyllis
stayed at the school and she helped.
She worked. And I
spoke with some classmates at our 55th reunion,
and I said, well, what did you-all do during the sit-ins?
And one girl said, I prayed for y'all.
I said, you did what?
She said, I prayed for y'all because my daddy told me
that he would lose his job
if I went down there and got arrested.
And these were girls from the city.
Evidently, the group that I was with,
that was what they did.
They were very supportive,
but they were not going to jail.
>> And Herschelle said something very
similar when she was talking with us
because she said it was
harder for the Spelman students who
were from the City of Atlanta to openly
participate because their parents would lose their jobs.
>> That's right.
>> And those who did I think they were braver than we
were because they had to fight
their parents and do what they felt was right,
but now, when we got to jail,
we were moved from the city to the Fulton County jail,
that is an experience I will never forget.
>> Why is that?
>> Oh, my goodness.
I can still hear the clanging of those doors.
I can still hear that.
They were just clang shut with such a loud brutal noise.
They let you know you're
not getting out of here until we say so.
And they would clang shut and
then there were bells that would ring,
but the most humiliating thing was the toilets.
There were no partitions.
The showers, no partitions.
So you had to do everything in front of everybody.
And in my book,
I tweaked things to say that Blondean just freaked out.
She could not take a shower
with everybody looking at her.
And so my roommate and I,
we formed a barrier around her so that she could,
but for a Spelman girl,
you're standing there totally
nude in front of other people.
And we were just sophomores.
We were very pure and dainty.
We were virgins, so we had
never shown our bodies to anybody,
much less to another woman.
>> And it wasn't just the Spelmans who were in that.
>> No.
>> You and regular inmates.
So you were in with people who who were
in for violent crimes, I would imagine.
>> The lady whose bed
was next to me had killed her husband.
And she had become friends with one of the trustees,
which was nice to know because
the trustee would come and get her up
in the middle of the night and
I guess they would go to wherever.
And she could get anything she wanted.
There was a wagon that would come around with snacks,
but you had to have money.
That's why when you said Norma had a receipt,
I said, well, she had money.
The rest of us we didn't have much money to buy snacks.
We had to eat the food.
>> What was that like?
>> It was horrible. I think it was like oatmeal for
breakfast and beans for lunch.
It was not good food,
but the inmates had a nice attitude.
They wanted to know why were we in jail?
What's you nice college girls doing in here with us.
And we explained to them what we were
doing and they said, oh.
I know they were thinking that doesn't make much sense,
but if that's what you want to do,
and that's why you're in here, okay.
And there was one magazine in the day room,
they had some tables and chairs,
one magazine with no cover.
I think it was a true romance magazine and
it had been read so many times that it was quite ragged.
And there was a jigsaw puzzle
with two or three pieces left.
And that was it for their entertainment.
They had absolutely nothing.
And by this time, our books had been
brought to us and so some of
us tried to help inmates learn how to read better,
they they had rudimentary reading skills.
And others of us taught them how to dance the Madison.
And we passed away the time.
And then we talked and asked them about
their lives and got to know them a little better.
And there was one woman in particular
that I remember because she
had on some house shoes that were obviously not hers.
She had a small foot and
a large shoe and she just shuffled along.
And I thought that was like a metaphor for her life.
She was a small person in a big mess,
but we were there for three nights and four days,
and we thought we would be there much longer.
And then the call came.
They asked the leaders to go out
and to another room. And they had a meeting.
We didn't know what the meeting was about.
But of course, we were interested.
And when they came back,
they said, well, they're going to let us out of jail.
And they were very disappointed.
They were very sorry about this. We were not.
[LAUGHTER] So they told us to pack up our things
and they opened the clanging doors
and there were buses waiting for us.
We got on the buses and they took
us to Paschal's Restaurant.
Now, if you know what Paschal's Restaurant used to be.
I don't know what it is today,
but that's where my parents would
take me when they'd come to pick
me up at the end of the school or
they come to see me in a play,
and you'd have that shrimp cocktail
and then you'd have a steak and oh boy.
So we got to Paschal's Restaurant and they had us in
a big dining room and the fried chicken,
the best in the world was already on the table.
[LAUGHTER] We were so excited.
But the leaders, they said,
you see there, they tricked us.
They knew that we were going to accept to leave jail,
and they already had this prepared for us,
and they were very upset.
And that's why I say I was a foot soldier
because I was happy to see that fried chicken.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Well, so what was that like?
I mean, it's hard for people in my generation,
especially to understand what that had to have been like.
So to do what you did that one day at
Rich's and then that night in jail and then jail,
jail, jail, and then expected them just to
go back to being a college student.
>> We didn't think about it like that.
In fact, we didn't really
start thinking about this until later.
I think it was a traumatic event that
we pushed to the side of our minds.
And then the more we thought about it,
the more we thought, you know what?
We were young and very foolish.
But if we had to do it again, I think we would.
>> Did you realize at the time how that one day at
Rich's and what you did changed
the entire presidential election
and changed the course of history?
>> No. We did not realize that until we went to
that reunion and Lanny showed
a video of one of the gentlemen who
had worked with President Kennedy.
And he explained how
that process brought about the election of JFK.
We had no idea.
I already had great respect for Dr. King.
But when I realized that he
knowingly put himself in jeopardy
because he had some ticket and this was
two strikes against him and they
sent him to Reidsville Work Farm,
where they probably planned to
work him to death or kill him.
And his wife called Robert Kennedy and
he convinced his brother
to speak out and let Martin out of jail.
And as a result, the Black folks
voted for him and he became the president.
But no. We never knew that until quite recently.
>> And that's one of the things it's
so interesting to me how
that one pivotal act of
non-violence just to feel included,
just to say we just want to be
served just like every human being,
we just want to be here, how
that one act changed history.
And you were so young and that one act [OVERLAPPING]
>> We were young, but we were old souls and we
carried the struggles of our parents.
We had seen them humiliated.
I had seen my mother stopped by
a policeman for really nothing.
Usually on the trip to Montgomery,
a state trooper would stop her and ask for her license.
And on her license, she had to have her full name.
And so her name was Woodia.
And he would look at the license
and call her by her first name.
Now, Woodia, don't you know you ran
that red light or you ran that stop sign?
And he continued to call her by her first name,
which back in those days was very humiliating.
And on her cards that she used when
she shopped at Rich's or at Montgomery Fair,
which is now Dillard's,
she would use the initials
of my daddy and Mrs. E. L. Pryce,
so they could not call her by her first name.
And so we had experienced that and we had
a kind of rage that was controlled.
And then at Spelman,
we sang songs in Chapel that I realize now,
and I use excerpts from some of these songs,
that they gave us the spiritual courage to
take this action once to every man and
nation comes the moment to decide.
And we sang those songs and they became a part of us.
But like I said,
I did not realize the significance until well,
I noticed that my father kept that picture
on the baby grand piano in his living room.
And every time someone would come to visit
him or come to buy a piece of his art,
he would point to that picture
and brag about his daughter
who was arrested in the Atlanta student sit-ins.
So I said, well, that must have been important to him.
Let me do more research about what really happened.
And that's when I started writing my book because I
remember some things very
vividly and other things I forgot,
but then Blondean would fill me
in or Betty would tell me about.
Blondean told me about going first to the snack bar.
I blanked that out.
But there are so few of us left
now that what you're doing is very important.
I really appreciate this
because I would tell my students and they would be
amazed because they thought that
the world as it was prior to 2016,
they thought that it had always been that way.
And they wondered why our generation hadn't done more.
>> Then they didn't know.
>> They didn't know.
>> They didn't know what you did.
>> And we didn't validate what we had
done because we didn't know how important it was.
And being in Tuskegee,
we know about Tuskegee's history and contributions,
but not too much about
Atlanta and the student sit ins there.
>> So tell me a little bit more about your book.
I'm interested. And what is what are you writing?
>> I'm writing a story of
my life and making connections between the lives of
my grandparents and my parents and my Great Aunt Cora and
I'm trying to show how of what some
of their actions led to my action.
And on the cover,
I hope to use that iconic photograph
because they told stories.
I'm I'm from a family of storytellers and
all of their experiences were transferred to me.
My grandmother would tell me about
her father and his history.
And I didn't know much about
my paternal grandparents until
my father was pretty much on
his death bed and he began to talk.
And all of this information
came forth and I knew nothing about it.
And still I knew very little
about my paternal grandmother.
I knew that she was a creole
from Burtondale, Louisiana,
and that his father had
started a pharmacy in Lake Charles,
and we still had family in Lake Charles.
And then he moved his family from Lake Charles,
his younger children,
to Los Angeles and opened up
two pharmacies in South Central LA,
which at that time was a very nice place to live.
So there were three Pryce's pharmacies
and that's quite a heritage.
I took my grandson back to
Lake Charles a couple of weeks ago,
we visited our cousin,
Dr. Frank Pryce,
and he and his organizations and
his friends were instrumental in
getting a street named Pryce.
And it goes from where the drug store used to be, well,
the facility, the building is still there,
all the way down to the lake.
So when you go to Lake Charles,
you can drive up a street named for my family,
and it's a wonderful feeling.
I love Lake Charles.
I've only been there three times in life.
So that is part of the research,
and I told you about my grandfather who was considered
white but chose to be black.
So I decided to reconstruct the history
of why he would make such a decision.
And I'm happy that he did
because I wouldn't be here otherwise.
But then on my grandmother's side,
in those backwoods of Louisiana,
there was a lot of race mixing.
So I had DNA,
and my daughter who's an epidemiologist,
she said, Mama, you should never
have given them your DNA.
I said, Well, now you tell me she said,
because now they can tailor-make a disease just for you.
I said okay.
But in my DNA,
I'm 50-51% African and
a few points Native Americans.
And the rest is Caucasian.
So I said, wait a minute.
Shoot me. You mean I'm half white?
[LAUGHTER] I told my physician that, he just laughed.
He's Nigerian.
He said, Ms. Hoyt,
are you kidding me? I said, no.
>> No. That's funny.
>> It is very funny.
And the way I had to tell him,
I would not have said that,
but I'm a cancer survivor.
And I'm going into my third year.
And so I shared that with him.
And he said, yes,
but he said you have whatever it is.
Said this is not the form that Black women get.
I said, Well, that's because I'm half white.
But you know what? I think about things.
Well, I've always been a religious person ever
since I was a child because my grandmother,
Miss Joseph Fant Smith would speaking in Springfield.
She was educated and people would call on her as
a speaker in their organizations.
And she would take me with her.
And I would open up.
I'm four or five years old.
I would recite a poem or a Bible verses.
And so they taught my grandfather
and mother taught me the books of
the Bible and Bible verses,
I grew up in the Sunday school up there.
So I've been searching for God for all my life.
And I've been through various religions
and denominations and now I'm back in the Baptist Church.
So I guess you could say I've been looking for
God in all the wrong places,
but he always had me.
And one time my mother was driving in
Springfield and her car stopped at a red light.
And the light turned green and car would not start.
Now people were honking their arms
and I was still four years old.
And I said, Mama, let us pray.
And I said, I will lift up eyes unto
the hills from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord who made Heaven and Earth.
And I said, now start your car.
And she did, and of course,
the car took off.
>> And you were how old?
>> Four.
>> Four. So what you said earlier,
you were born an old soul?
>> Yes.
>> That's interesting.
>> And we're having a family reunion
two weeks from today.
And I'm very excited when I go,
they asked me to tell the stories of the old folks.
And now, of course, I'm one of them.
But these are the ancestors.
And their stories were transmitted to
me by my maternal grandmother.
And those stories are very dear to
me because they go all the
way back to the time of our enslavement.
Although neither of my great grandfathers was enslaved.
And I just put that together recently.
And that makes a difference.
And especially in Louisiana,
they had the Jean de Cola people free people of color.
And there was some of those in my family.
And that gives them a certain spirit of
independence and a continued thirst for freedom.
And that's in to this day.
I've tried to transmit that to my children and they say,
"Mama, yes, you did."
>> Wonderful. So I think too,
that the importance of your book
is the research that you're doing is
keeping those stories alive for your great grandmother,
for your grandmother, for your mother.
For all the women who transmitted
those stories to you and you're
keeping those alive through this book,
that's going to be wonderful.
>> And I have a cousin,
I call them my baby cousin in Los Angeles.
We share our grandmother.
It's my grandmother. It's her great grandmother.
And she's on the same mission.
So we met in Lake Charles.
We never met before I just communicated
online and we just had a wonderful time.
We went to Franklin where our grandfather started
a drug store and where he
met my grandmother and her great grandmother.
And we were looking for the block of buildings
that they used to own and they've been demolished.
But I took pictures of
some old buildings that looked
like what they might have been.
And she has the same spirit that I have.
And she's more of an ancestry.com person than I am.
And I have other relatives who are very,
they are the kind that go to the records rooms.
We went in Franklin looking for property transactions.
She could have stayed there all day.
But it was lunchtime.
I said, no, we got to go my grandson is hungry.
I think it is important and
then all the work that my father has done.
The fact that he taught us from
an early age that Egypt was
African and that we should never forget
the grandeur that our people once
had and when you travel over there,
you can still see what they did and don't let
anyone think that you are
inferior and that you have no history.
And I remember coming back from
Paris the first time at Spelman,
and we had a philosophy teacher who was brand
new and she was scared of us.
She would go into the classroom when she pulled
her desk all the way up to the chalkboard.
>> No.
>> Yes. And so she stood there and
she was quite fatigued, as we would say.
And she just looked at us and she said,
"What's wrong with you, negroes?
You haven't contributed anything to society."
Well, she said that to the wrong person.
The other girls just hung their heads in agreement.
That's what we were taught.
I had left Paris and had met the great Cheikh Anta Diop.
And I didn't know who he was.
He was in this little cafe
and African students were just all around him.
Professor Diop you sign this?
I said, "Who is that old man?"
And they told me that is Cheikh Anta.
Now if you don't know who that is.
You never heard of him? You need to look him up.
His research was designed to prove
that the ancient Egyptians
migrated from Egypt and went to other parts of Africa.
And they brought with them some of their language,
some of their skills.
And so we are all
descended from the ancient Egyptians and therefore,
we can claim all the marvels that they
constructed and their science and literature.
So he was trying to get his doctorate
at the at the Saban in 1941,
I believe, and he was denied.
They said, we can't support this.
You are not about to tell us and we are the French and
we got the colonies there Egyptian.
No, Egyptians are white.
That's the end of it. So they
did not give him his degree.
He went back and it must have been in '61 or '62,
when I was there the first time.
He went back and they did accept his dissertation,
but they did not give him
a high enough grade so
that he could become a college professor.
But his works,
my father had one of his books and he believed that.
And so in his paintings,
he's got the symbolism from Egypt.
He visited Egypt at least twice in
his lifetime and all of that was put into us.
So you did not have a sense of inferiority,
even though it was enforced upon you,
you knew within yourself the problem.
And other classmates didn't know all of that,
but still they had the same feeling of worth.
>> And just to talk about your father for a second,
the artwork that I see in your home really draws
on that Egyptian iconography,
but also Ethiopian iconography,
which I noticed in that the beautiful copper plate
where it had St. Mark's, I think?
>> Yes. And you saw that?
>> Yes. And so that was inspired
by the Orthodox church you visited.
>> That's right. When he saw
the icons and the paintings on
the walls where all of the apostles
and I'm not sure that they would
make pictures of Jesus himself,
but everybody had an afro and everybody was brown skin.
So he said, "Oh, okay, I like that."
And it doesn't really matter,
but in some cases, it does.
>> Yes. And that was an inspiration for
his art and then in
especially with the Egyptian iconography,
even as a child, you were inspired by that.
>> And to my detriment because I was not good in math.
And so I go to my dad.
I said, "Dad, I don't understand,
can you help me solve this problem?"
He wasn't good in math, either.
So he would start going back talking about
the ancient Egyptians who
invented this and who did that in mathematics.
I still didn't learn too much in math.
I tell my grandchildren to
this day I can multiply up to five, and that's it.
I said, but now you are going to
learn how to multiply all the way up
to your fifteens and they just say grandma.
But I'm serious about that.
You need to have a good background in Math,
science, and the arts.
>> And you taught French though,
you were French professor, yes?
>> Until a few years ago.
>> Let's give the age?
>> Thirteen years at the university,
two years at the high school.
And the amazing thing is,
I still don't understand how I
remembered the French that I was speaking
in Paris because there was
a long hiatus where I was a stay
at home mom and I was
blessed to be able to raise my children.
I home schooled some of them.
And then when we moved to Tuskegee,
it was a situation in which I had to get a job.
And so I found a job on the campus.
And then I heard about a program where they were teaching
French to faculty and staff who were going overseas.
So I volunteered. I said,
hey, I can do this.
And they gave me a job at lunchtime.
I would go and teach French.
And I just continued.
Now I have French stations on my television,
so I can watch the movies and just listen,
I let them play while I'm asleep and I
absorbed the French and I just have a good time at that.
And what I really did that,
I think it's amazing,
I got one Masters from
Nova Southeastern and it was a distance program.
It was an MBA and I'm not really an MBA,
but it did turn out to be
beneficial because when I married David,
he had this business and I had sense enough to keep
good records so that
he was able to do well when he came to Tuskegee.
And one day in August of 2005,
this is what happened, I
had been a consultant with headstart.
I've done all kinds of jobs.
But I was in between jobs and I had my own school.
I had an after school program for 60 years where
I taught students how to pass the Alabama exit exam.
Without that, you didn't get a high school diploma,
you couldn't go to the military,
you couldn't get a job,
you couldn't go to college.
And I thought that was unfair.
And so I organized a school
with students on the campus to
teach young people to pass this exam,
to do the ACT, the SAT to read, write,
compute and I'd had to close that down because I wasn't
able to make enough money to pay the rent on
the building that my husband owned.
[LAUGHTER] But in August of 2005, the phone rang.
I'm unemployed now, I'm quite depressed.
You're about as depressed as I'm going to
get because I'm an optimist.
And I'm in the optimists club too.
Phone rank said miss Hoyt,
can you come up here and teach French on the campus?
Said our teacher just left and school opens in two weeks.
Scared to death, I said, sure.
And I took the job and I loved it.
I'm like, wow,
four classes and you teach two a day.
You got office hours, and then you can
go home. I love this.
So I took it and it was just temporary.
And I asked the department head,
what do I need to do to stay in this job?
She said, well, miss Hoyt you at least need to have
a Master's in French or French education.
So I went to Auburn University.
I was 65 years old when we had to go to Paris.
I needed 18 hours in French.
I took all the undergrad courses that I needed.
I worked on my master's degree. Went to Paris.
I remember standing at the consulate in Atlanta
and the clerk said [FOREIGN]
because they put your birth date on everything over.
So she saw my birth date and wanted to know why
I'm going over there as a student because at 65,
you have already retired several years ago.
And so she was not going to give me a Visa.
So I looked her in the eye.
I said, Madam, do you speak English?
[FOREIGN] I said, I'm going to keep my job.
I got my visa.
We went to Catholic Institute.
I took three classes and one independent study.
I got my 18 hours and made very high grades,
which are 16, 17, 18.
Those are high grades in France.
You don't get those but I did.
And so that was a great achievement for me.
>> Absolutely. And it allowed you to have
this amazing job where you're teaching French.
>> And my research was on
the General Thomas-Alexander Dumas,
who was the father of Alexander Dumas,
whom I had admired for a long time.
But I didn't know that his father had been
a general along with Napoleon.
And in the books, they will tell you that
he served under Napoleon,
but not at first.
He was of Haitian origin.
And in my research,
I learned a lot about the general and about
the contribution of Black soldiers
to the French Revolution.
And that is part of what I do.
And of course, in my father's library,
there are these books by JA Rogers.
You know who that is? The historian?
>> Yes.
>> And I asked my sister,
why don't they consider him a historian?
She said Patty because everybody couldn't be Black.
But he gave you the story of all of
these people who are
Europeans and who were Black who made contributions.
And I just began to dig and find out about General Duma.
And the Chevalier de Saint-George.
And I call both of them
my boyfriends and my students laugh.
>> That's amazing.
>> So that's a part of being an old soul, I guess.
>> Absolutely. So I wanted to ask you one final question.
And feel free to share anything you
want and if you don't want to share, that's okay too.
But I wanted really to know
your thoughts since you were in your own words,
a foot soldier of this important movement.
And it really was a civil rights movement,
but it was a human rights movement as well.
I wanted to know your thoughts like on
the progress of civil rights in America since 1960.
If you just have any general
emotional or thoughts or feelings about it,
I would love to hear them.
>> Well, as I said,
I was an expatriate until 1966.
My daughter was born in Ethiopia.
I came back here in 68 in October.
And so many things that happened.
Malcolm had been killed,
Martin, both of the Kennedys.
And I said things are happening back home.
It's time for me to go.
So I said I'm going back
to get a master's degree at Howard
and my husband provided the funds for my ticket.
And I'm sitting in the airplane,
Ethiopian Airlines, and my daughter
was two years old and her seat was here,
but she wanted to sit in my lap.
So the plane waited on the tarmac for
about an hour and they just packed people in there.
And so the stewards said,
can I put someone in the seat?
She's speaking in Amharic.
I speak a little Amharic, kitchen Amharic.
I said, no, that's my daughter's seat,
you can't put anyone in there.
I was angry by that time.
I had had enough of being
a foreigner and I realized what it meant
to be an American and I was going home and we flew back
and I spent time with my sister in law in New York City.
In fact, she sent a limousine.
She worked at the organization of African Unity.
And she sent a limousine to pick us up.
And then I flew to Montgomery
and my parents met us at the airport.
And coming from the airport,
there was a Jack's restaurant and they said,
we're going to stop here and have
a sandwich. I said, what?
We can go in there.
And they said, yes, where have you been?
So that's when it dawned on
me that everything had changed over here.
And you know once you've been overseas
for even a short time and you come
back and you try to explain what you have
experienced to other people, they don't care.
But what you realize is that you have
missed things that happened
while you were away and you've
got to reconstruct those six years.
And so it was a new experience for me to be
in an integrated society and it was wonderful.
I didn't know how much
Atlanta had contributed at that time.
I just knew that I had done a little bit.
But for everything to be integrated
and even the schools in Tuskegee,
it was and it still is a good thing.
The problem is that we have allowed society
to continue to impose
the spirit of inferiority on our young people.
Inferiority in one sense and superiority for others,
and we've got to overcome that.
And I think that with people like you and people like
me and others, we will eventually.
But it's an uphill climb now
because the tables have turned.
But they've turned before.
And people my age look at these times and say,
well, we've been through
tough times before we can get through this.
But for the young people, it's different.
They don't know hardship.
And they think that everything is going to
be all right, but not necessarily.
We know that things can change.
A Supreme Court can make one decision
that will change your entire life. We've been there.
And it may happen again
and we have to be strong enough to help
this young generation get through this
and bring about another change in this nation.
And I think we have to do it.
So I'm very optimistic.
>> Those are wonderful words.
>> Really?
>> Yes.
>> And I watch television.
>> You're still watching.
>> MSNBC watch in the morning I wake up.
And I'm a little bit
upset because now they seem like they
have to have a Fox News person on the MSNBC.
And I'm like, look, if I wanted to watch them,
I can flip to Fox News too.
And then the other thing that
infuriates me is take a listen.
No, I don't want to take a listen.
So I flip the channel when it's
time to hear our beloved president.
But we will survive. We're going to get through this.
And I want to say that you all are really impressive.
I love you guys.
And I don't want you never think about White,
Black anymore because we are human beings.
We are in the human race,
and that's what counts.
So don't you feel bad about anything any more
than I would feel bad about anything.
So I just want to thank you.
I'm exhilarated to have met you.
>> I'm blessed and honored to have met
you and I thank you so much for
sitting with us and just talking and
telling the world because this is
going on case to Archive,
the HBCU are partnering with us on this.
They need to be told.
So I'm exhilarated about your book.
I'm excited about your book.
And I hope that when you come back,
when you come to Atlanta for homecoming,
that you will be a speaker on a panel for us and that you
will be able to tell the stories again.
Thank you so much.
>> Let's see if I've got a little children's book.